Andrew Hennigan's Blog

Ten years ago when social media was far from mainstream it was not rare for usernames like "cocacola" and "apple" to be registered by users unconnected with these companies. Sometimes the names were registered by squatters, hoping to sell their name to the owner of the brand. In other cases the name was registered by either fans or adversaries of the brand, deliberately taking advantage of the confusion. Occasionally they were registered by private users who just liked the name and had no other intentions. Fast forward to today and you might expect that everyone in digital communication has learnt the lesson. Registering your company and brand names on new social media channels has become just a routine part of brand protection activity. Doing this when a new social site or app is created means that you are more likely to get there before someone else. This blocks potential squatters, but more importantly it avoids confusion when someone else is posting apparen...

Many conferences increase their pool of available speakers by using live video presentations from people who are unable to attend in person. With web-based video conferencing tools this is simple and essentially free, allowing anyone with a laptop or even a smartphone to speak at a conference on the other side of the world. There are many techniques that speakers can use so that they look their best in these video connections. Some of these were presented in  Ten ways to impress people in skype interviews and in  How to look better in video , but there are also some best practices that are specially important for speakers at conferences. Here are three that I have found the most useful: BRING THE CAMERA TO EYE LEVEL . One of the basic rules for framing video interview shots is to have the camera at the level of the speaker's eyes. Many people use the camera in their computer and when it is resting on a table the camera is too low, giving the typical Skype call look ...

One of the strongest critiques leveled against social networks like Facebook is that the users provide the content but the owners keep all the profit. To counter this social networking companies usually argue that they provide the service free of charge, so why should they share the revenue. But the revenue sharing idea still has appeal for many social networking users, especially the power users who contribute much of the content. This idea has driven Google to share revenues from YouTube videos and also to the creation of several blogging and networking sites that do share revenue. Back in 2012 Bubblews tried this approach with mixed results and others have followed with even less certain success. No revenue-sharing social network comes even remotely close to Facebook. Yet. Now a new social network called Tsu is trying to execute this concept and they have some interesting new ideas that make it more promising than other rivals. Tsu looks more or less like a typical social ne...