Category / Thinking & Musing

by Alexandra Roumbas Goldstein

Ten Days of Disney: Alan Menken & Howard Ashman

I’m on the countdown to my holiday  – well, belated honeymoon – to Walt Disney World and thus everything else has disappeared from my mind. Actually, that’s not at all true. I still intend to blog about a whole host of things since I’ve made a little progress on the Grown Up Monster Book and there are some exciting things happening in the world world of social media.

But, in the meantime, forgive me if pick a different thing every day for ten days that I love about Disney. It’ll take my mind off how much I freakin’ hate flying, to use some US terminology that seems appropriate.

So, day one, obviously: Alan Menken and Howard Ashman.

When I was a child, The Aristocats was my favourite film. It’s still one of my favourite films; I was walking down Shaftesbury Avenue the other day with Ashley and could be overheard explaining “no, it’s Abraham DeLacey…”. Still, despite that fondness and regular viewings of Snow White, 101 Dalmatians and The Fox and the Hound, I was still a middling fan of the films in my early youth. From my first visits at four and five years old, I was a major obsessive when it came to the parks but the films were a bit hit and miss for my liking.

And then there was The Little Mermaid. As it transpired in later life I would go on to love some of Alan Menken and the late Howard Ashman’s other work – namely Little Shop of Horrors – too. But somehow, coupled with a new Disney zeal for making not just pretty and child-friendly but once again groundbreaking animation (though in fairness I didn’t realise that as a nine-year-old), it made me into a Mouse evangelist overnight.

The Little Mermaid marked a post-Oliver and Company new dawn of Disney animation. The films became more complex and adult-friendly. They took on the feel of Broadway musicals again in a way that seemed to have been lost after complete joy that is The Jungle Book and the heyday of the simply magical Sherman brothers. The journey that would lead to the adoption of Pixar and animated movies that are now just good films that also raise the bar for hand-drawn and digital artistry had begun.

The music was a huge part of that. My friend Lizzie and I, giggling pre-teens, would sing the songs from The Little Mermaid all day long if we had the chance. She’s now throwing a Little Mermaid-themed hen do for another friend, and it’s definitely the theme of the film, not just the story. The lyrics were witty, the tunes relentlessly hummable and, occasionally, heartbreaking. At university, I attended an audition for a musical to support a friend and the first thing she pounced on in the whole list of possible audition songs was Part of Your World.

Things actually improved from there, impossible as it seemed. Beauty and the Beast was an extraodinary achievement, and the music was a huge and very prominent part of that. The powerhouse continued on to Aladdin before Ashman finally succumbed to illness, leaving Menken to complete the music with famous Lloyd-Webber lyricist Tim Rice. Ashman was, to me, a huge loss. When I heard what had happened I found myself crying over a man I’d never met and didn’t know simply because I was so impressed by his work – surely the way an artist wants to be mourned? Despite Rice’s immense talent and Menken’s continuing brilliance, it’s all too easy to tell which songs were primarily Ashman’s work (A Friend Like Me, Arabian Nights) and which mostly Rice (A Whole New World, which leaves me rather cold).

Since then, Disney’s taken a typically inventive attitude to soundtracks, with a combination of using old favourites like Menken and partnerships with pop stars like Phil Collins (Tarzan). No matter how good, I don’t believe they’ll ever sound as good as the glory days to me, but with my DVDs at my disposal, what does that matter?

by Alexandra Roumbas Goldstein

Reasons To Be ‘Social’: Part Three

I’ve been having a very interesting exchange on Twitter which – as usual with such exchanges – has enabled me to clarify what I think and raise questions in my own mind to chew over. That’s half the beauty of Twitter right there, really.

Here’s the exchange:

@bounder:”conversational media” a better term than “social media”?

@dogstrust: Is it all conversation? Arguably Flickr & YouTube isn’t. Social encompasses conversation but conversation leaves some out, I think.

@bounder: flickr is, youtube can be – i think leaving the bits out where people are using the same tools to broadcast is a good idea

@dogstrust: I’m still not sure why “conversational” is better. Conversation is a vital part, but is it all of it? What’s wrong with ‘social’?

@bounder: it doesn’t really mean anything is the problem (and it has the same odd connotations as “community” has picked up)

@dogstrust: It doesn’t? Doesn’t it just mean interacting with others? That’s all the definition I ever wanted… Open to alternatives, tho.

@bounder: i really don’t think the word “social” means anything at all – it doesn’t describe an action – conversation does.

@dogstrust: Does ‘social media’ need to describe an action? Isn’t it describing the platform for action? Not arguing, genuinely interested!

@bounder: i think the description of the platform is too fuzzy to understand, and nave never been happy with the term

@bounder: for example, i’m not a YouTube expert, but I think a lot about how people use it (the action rather than the platforms)

@dogstrust: So they’re using a particular medium in a conversational way. The umbrella platform is still a group of media that are social, no?

The conversation is still ongoing, so by the time I finish this post, it might well have changed what I’m thinking right now. Still, I’ll launch ahead.

I’m not a fan of jargon. I appreciate that there are some uses for it, particularly in scientific or philosophical contexts where there is the possibility of cutting through a whole load of unecessary explanation if you use a handy jargon shortcut. Sometimes the term appears as if by magic . Social media is just an evolution of the term “social networking”; an evolution that happened, in my opinion, because people generally aren’t actively networking in the professional sense but just having a conversation. This is of course @bounder’s point. But I still don’t see the need for a change of jargon.

There are two reasons:

1. Changing the way everyone thinks of something is near impossible – think how long it takes to reclaim a slang derogatory term. People are now thinking “social media”. We can call it whatever we want, but the wider world won’t catch on and it just makes us focus on correcting a linguistic point somewhat unnecessarily. This is the minor reason.

2. The major reason is that ‘social’ is a perfectly good and reasonable description. Conversation is a large part of how human beings -a social animal – communicate. It is the cornerstone of my professional social media approach. But where ‘conversation‘ still has a strongly implied sense of verbal communication (that’s not the entirety of it, of course, by a long shot but that is how it is still widely read), ‘social‘ includes lots of elements which I think apply particularly well to web 2.0. It’s about informal gatherings of groups with a common topic. If that’s not social media, what is?

As I see it, social media are not the activities but the platform for the interaction. If it’s an inaccurate term, by all means campaign to replace it. I’m not married to the term; if there’s a good reason to bin it I’ll help lead the charge for more accuracy and meaning. I’m just not convinced that that good reason is really there.

Yet.

by Alexandra Roumbas Goldstein

The necessary evil of automated emails

One of the many things we need to do for our new site is make sure that all the emails that are issued from it are updated and correct. This involves ditching some, merging others and creating yet more from scratch. It’s a tricky and very precise process.

Every email has to be informative, straight forward and jargon-free so that the person knows why they’re receiving it and understands any calls to action. It also has to have a good title (would you open an email with a dull subject line?), be engaging and represent the spirit of the organisation. We very deliberately have a friendly ethos – notice we never publish animal abuse pictures, for example.

I’ve drafted and redrafted this morning. I enjoy this because it’s the reason I got into a writing job in the first place, but if you’ll forgive the analogy I feel like a dog that just can’t let go of the damned tennis ball. I’ve mauled it, chewed it, slept on it and come back for another massacre but I still don’t feel 100% happy. I’m waiting for some feedback from others; when you can no longer proofread and edit yourself, turn to the outside world. Chances are their different perspective will be helpful to you even when you disagree with it. After all, sometimes you don’t know what you think until you react to someone else’s thoughts.

I call them evil, but of course they’re really not. They’re one of the most useful tools of confirmation and communication. Made a donation? Asked for more information? Interested in adopting a dog? The quickest way to respond to all of these is email.

I love and appreciate those emails, I really do. Even when they’re giving me a creative headache.

by Alexandra Roumbas Goldstein

Female Social Media Guru – second round!

Thanks to some Obama-standard campaigning from J, and a lovely, loyal community I have come to know well, I seem to be through to the next round of the Female Social Media Guru Award.

This is, in a word, fab. I have a hilariously English attitude towards self-promotion sometimes, feeling like I just shouldn’t say when good things like this happen. Off course this is at odds with good social communication, which is all about telling people things and listening in return. So online (and on paper) I am quite a different personality from offline, where I tend to downplay my achievements. Perhaps the reason I feel so comfortable in the online world is because it allows the confident side of my personality to show through.

Anyway, I’m through and I’m happy about it. I have a presentation to do next, which I have yet to hear many more details about, but I will update when I do. It will be filmed and used as the basis for a second vote. Jamie, who’s running the hastily-put-together competition is already, in the true spirit of such things, thinking ahead of ways to improve the situation next year. I just say well done for highlighting the area. As I’ve said before, it’ll be nice when we can stop dividing things by gender, but where one sex is under-represented, it’s great to be recognised.

On a personal note, it turns out that Helen Aspell, who is also in the top five, has an excellent Twitter handle and represents the only other non-profit (the Equality and Human Rights Commission) knew my sister at university and is still friends with her. Small world, much?

by Alexandra Roumbas Goldstein

Media Trust – Managing Social Media

I’ve been a wee bit cheeky and broken a rule of social media – being topical and timely – by only blogging about this even three days after it happened, but in my defence I did tweet throughout! We were unable to attend the whole event, which featured the following line-up:

Chair – Daren Forsyth, former Director of Innovation and New Media, Media Trust / BBC

Michael Waugaman (Consultant) – Seeding, growing and managing a community

Jasmine McGarr (Tempero) – Voice of moderation: safety and reputation management

Dean Russell (Precedent) – An overview of third sector social networking

As well as a case study from us, and the chance to be in the second Q&A session. J presented, overcoming her nerves, and I piped up in the Q&A since many of the questions were from people wanting to know about the everyday nuts and bolts. We were lucky enough to see Dean Russell’s presentation; lucky because he speaks an awful lot of common sense about how to start, which websites to consider, how to gain internal buy in and the ‘voice’ you should be trying to project. Luckily, he likes Dogs Trust – I beamed when he said he really enjoyed following us on Twitter because of our good professional / personal balance of tweets.

As is often the case with these events, the Q&A gets to the heart of the issues much more than the presentations, no matter how good they are. It is where the meat of the problem is finally chewed on, and I was asked one of the best questions I had been so far: “If you had to choose only two sites to focus on, which would they be?”. The woman in question had very little time or resource. I said Twitter and Facebook because you can achieve the most on these two with the least amount of time; we’ve just rehomed a second dog thanks to Twitter conversations, and in a year 40,000 people have amassed on Facebook, which makes it easy to send out updates to a lot of people quickly. But it was definitely an interesting question, and one that I hadn’t been asked before.

Then I was asked the other question – “do you think your job will be the same in 3-6 months time?”. The way it was asked, it was very clear that what was meant was “isn’t your job just a bit made up and a fad?”. Perhaps it would be if all I did was specialise in very specific community moderation, but I am involved in all aspects of digital marketing. Right now we’re looking into integrated online and offline campaigns, for example. I replied “probably not, but I’m alright with that,” and went on to explain how to me, social media is just another form of traditional, good old-fashioned customer service and marketing. I have found that my particular skills lend themselves to the online world more than the offline, but the end result is still the same.

I’m just a writer who has a knack for online customer service, and forming relationships. Nothing strange, shortlived or particularly new about that, is there?

by Alexandra Roumbas Goldstein

Building a new website the cheap & easy way….

If you don’t mind a few limitations, it really is preferably to let someone else take the strain. I can’t link to it yet because it’s not public, but I’ve been rebuilding a simple website using WordPress. That’s .com not .org. I was surprised how much I was able to improve on a custom website (made using Joomla! which I’m now not very keen on due to its general unfriendliness).

Both J (my manager) and I can write a little code, use FTP, stitch together simple websites from scratch and all that malarkey. So after three days of fighting with Joomla! (admission: we only had editing rights, not admin, which might have been a factor), we gave up and just recreated the site in WordPress, sorting out some URLs and simplifying the navigation as we went.

It took about five hours, which included finding and customising an appropriate theme, resizing some images, uploading various media snippets etc. I’ve never been more grateful for the speed at which ease of use has developed online. My eyes might be a little screen-sore, but I feel thoroughly accomplished, which is no bad feeling.

Have you done anything that made you feel properly useful recently? It’s a nice feeling, isn’t it?

Talking of productivity, I was going to write about a whole Media Trust social media thing, but I didn’t. So I’ll do that later.

by Alexandra Roumbas Goldstein

Disney is the model non-profits can learn from

Guru nominations aside, I make no secret of the fact that I think much of social media marketing resolves down to good old fashioned common sense plus good communication skills. Writing online is different to writing for print, but both are forms of storytelling. If you’re creative, polite and honest with a decent grasp of spelling and grammar, you’ll probably find the seeds of a good blogger inside yourself.

Of course, that’s breaking it down to its most simplistic form, but I do think that’s a useful thing to do. This is because when you look at the bare bones of how and what you’re communicating, you find inspiration and ideas come from rather unexpected sources.

I’m a huge Disney fan. Massive. Lifelong. Since my first visit as a four-year-old to my last visit as a twenty-four-year old. I’m going again in a month’s time, to spend two blissful weeks in the vicinity of what is undoubtedly one of the Happiest Places on Earth. But until recently I hadn’t joined up my love of the Mouse with what I do on a day-to-day business. After all, I work for a charity, not a commercial organisation. Sure, charities can (and should) learn from businesses, but what we do online is quite different, right?

In the case of Disney – wrong.

The main difference between the average charity and the average business is one of product. We’re selling the gift of a better existence to a person or animal, and in a way that is our online advantage, because it naturally lends itself to storytelling. Updates about dogs needing homes, Sponsor Dog information, guest blogs from dog owners, animal-related news… for us there’s a veritable fount of stories to be delivered and many ways to deliver them. We blog, Tweet and find a winning combination of inspiration, storytellers and audience online. Many companies would salivate over that kind of access to close interaction; we delight in the ability to be able to talk and – more crucially – listen to our supporters.

We’re not selling a product; we’re describing an ideal, and inviting people to become part of making it a reality, thanking them as we go.

But Disney has lots of products, right? It even has a paid for social media product. So what on Earth does it have in common with a charity that can help non-profits learn the rules of the game?

Stories.

Disney, unusually among commercial conglomerates, sells an experience as much as it sells actual products. It sells being part of the Disney dream. It has an army of dedicated advocates and fans, who take their evangelical love of the company and instill it in their children. It absolutely revels in stories from visitors – the Disney Moms Panel is sheer genius – and gives a platform to everyone it can to talk, talk, talk, interrupting as little as possible.

Human nature has not changed thanks to the Internet. People still, at heart, just want a voice. Charities have the privileged chance to give it to them, and they might not have Disney’s budget but they can share its passion. I will be watching carefully, and taking notes.

by Alexandra Roumbas Goldstein

UK’s Top Female Social Media Guru & Speaker 2009?

Well, goodness me, my manager must love me. She’s just nominated me for the above accolade here. What’s even lovelier is that there were people I don’t directly work with nominating me as well, and agreeing with the choice, which is really rather touching.

We’ve done a lot of talking in the past 12 months at various conferences and gatherings (just see the other posts under this category), and it’s really great to think that some of that has lead to people being impressed with what we do. Of course, we don’t do it to get people impressed with us as individuals, but I’d be lying if I said it isn’t very nice to be thought of in this way.

Just today, we heard that because of a retweet from a loyal and lovely follower, a second dog is on course to find a home through our Twitter feed (see right!). This is why we do what we do; that’s our ultimate professional validation. Appearing on a list like this just adds to that, and also has a personal dimension in that we the individuals are going about it the right way.

It’s also really great to see women in this line of work being singled out; I’m not usually one for gender-specific competition (it’s much better to just be good than to be good for a girl) but I know from experience that technology is an area in which women still have to fight their corner. It’s very pleasing to see BitchBuzz colleague Vikki Chowney on there as well.

I’m smiling brightly and in the mood for more cupcakes.