As well as being on the panel, I have a lot of experience in creating social media newsrooms for our clients. In fact, two social media newsrooms that the Wolfstar team has implemented were presented for judging!

You only have to search for the #smcc10 hash tag on Twitter to see that the session went down very well. And, I was obviously very pleased at how popular our social media newsrooms for Sony Ericsson (presented by Merran Wrigley, Vice President Head of External Relations, Global Communications) and First Direct (presented by Amanda Brown, Head of Media Relations) were with the audience! The third social media newsroom presented was by Keith Childs for GM Europe.

@juliusduncan: Best Social Media Newsroom at#smcc10 X Factor? I think it’s @first_direct !

@lucynixon: Missed #smcc10 yesterday? I loved Social Media Newsrooms, X-Factor style: http://su.pr/2lhNdt

But, let’s go back to basics and forget all the X Factor related stuff.

To those who haven’t used or created a social media newsroom before, the two key questions are:

• What is a social media newsroom?
• And, why do I need one?

A social media newsroom (or SMNR) is essentially an online centre for all of your information. This can be information that anyone, from customers to the media would want to get hold of. In a typical SMNR you’d usually find news releases, photos, video content, contact details, links to social media assets and the list could go on and on.

You need one because it will completely change the way you and your organisation approach stakeholder engagement and media relations.

Although customers can access your social media newsroom, it’s mainly there for the media, whether this be journalists or ‘citizen journalists’ i.e. bloggers and other publishers of content on social media and social networks. It essentially gives them a way to quickly and easily access the information they need. You can also start being smarter about what you put up there, getting to know the media you want to be in a dialogue with will allow you to tailor your content to their needs making the resource much more worthwhile to you and valuable to journalists.

I’ve already touched upon some of the key functions of a social media newsroom, but here’s how one example of the final product looks:

As you can see, there are:

• Press releases and news articles
• Photo content – using social photo sites such as Flickr and Picassa to make it easier to share and embed photos
• Video content – using social video sites such as YouTube, Vimeo and Brightcove
• Audio content (podcasts) – including listing them on iTunes and other sites
• Social bookmarking and other sharing tools such as Delicious and Digg
• Contact details
• Tags and categories – to make it easier to find information and improve SEO
• Links to other corporate social media assets such as blogs, Twitter etc
• Instructions about how to use the site
• Corporate backgrounders, spokesperson biographies etc
• Search functionality

But, like every other form of activity online, there certainly isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ approach. We work with our clients to find out what they want, how it can work and how best it can be implemented. And it’s definitely not just a case of ‘build it and they will come’. A new social media news room also enables you to totally modernise the way that you do media relations and much of the consultancy we provide is helping in-house press and corporate communications team understand the new rapidly changing demands of journalists and how best to meet their needs.

And there are some stumbling blocks along the way, we have a list of the key components that make up (what we consider to be) a perfect social media newsroom. However, we can rarely achieve the perfect SMNR due to the constraints that most large corporates face. Challenges include getting ‘buy-in’ from other departments and functions, legal restrictions, for multi-nationals – language, geography and time-zones, and corporate IT infrastructures.

For Sony Ericsson we worked closely with its in-house IT department who actually built the social media newsroom for us based on our brief, project management and specifications. One of the challenges here was being able to incorporate all of the functionality we wanted within the constraints of the existing corporate content management system (CMS).

The third social media newsroom presented at the conference was meant to be GM Europe. This was the first social media newsroom in Europe and started in August 2007 as a ‘standalone’ site that wasn’t integrated with the traditional press room on the corporate website. Keith Childs explained that this has now been rectified and the old generic GM Europe social media newsroom no longer exists. Instead all of the social elements have now been added to GM’s various newsrooms for its brands.

As well as First Direct and Sony Ericsson we’ve also built a series of multi-language social media newsrooms for Philips in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland. As far as we’re aware the Philips social media news rooms were the world’s first attempt at creating a suite of multi-language newsrooms.

But, we’re not the only ones who have done this well, here’s a great social media news room from Cisco:

If you want to know more about how a social media newsroom might help your business or organisation then give me or one of the Wolfstar team a call on +44 (0)845 838 7282.

For the last few years I’ve been doing this this using FeedDemon as my desktop application. I was one of the people that bought/subscribed to the original version before it was acquired by NewsGator. It’s by far and away the most powerful RSS reader application there is and is a huge time saver. If you sync it before you leave the office or home you can also read all of your feeds offline (except for the annoying and selfish people who provide partial feeds). Alongside FeedDemon I also use NewsGatorGo!, a Windows mobile application for reading feeds. The real benefit is that you could sync all of your content between FeedDemon and NewsGatorGo! That mean’s if you read it on one, it would show up read on the other. The ability to sync and read off-line are both huge timesavers enabling you to catch-up on your RSS feeds in what would otherwise be dead time e.g. standing in queues, on the underground etc. It did this because both apps synced with NewsGator Online, which I have to say I very rarely used or visited. It was just a place to sync stuff.

Today NewsGator announced that it was discontinuing NewsGator Online and and a raft of its other consumer products. Instead FeedDemon will now sync with Google Reader. I’ve no real problem with that (so long as I don’t ever have to use it, NewsGator Online was never very good, my few visits to Google Reader show it to be even worse!). However, it’s a bit pointless syncing FeedDemon with Google Reader as Google Reader won’t then sync with anything I can use!

I’ve spent about an hour searching for an alternative Windows Mobile RSS reader. And there are lots available, some of them a lot better than NewsGatorGo!, but none of them sync properly with Google Reader. I can only find two that sync. SBSH GoNews looks great (better than NewsGatorGo!), but doesn’t sync folders (or labels as Google Reader uses). With 400+ feeds and 30+ folders this makes the subscriptions totally unusable. NewsGator recommend FreeNews, but I installed it and it looks hideous with a gigantic font so you hardly see anything on the screen. In a perfect world SPB News would sync with Google Reader(is anyone from SPB reading this?) as it is a fantastic application, but doesn’t work for me if it’s standalone.

I’ve got until August 31 when NewsGator finally turns off my tried and trusted system. Does anyone know of a solution to my problem?

I’ve just signed up for BarCamp Leeds on August 16 to 17 at the Old Broadcasting House. The planners include Imran Ali, Ross Brown and others. Still haven’t figured what my contribution might be, but I’m sure inspiration will strike before then.

My favourite of the two was Microsoft Live Maps. When Microsoft bought Multimap I assumed it was to roll Multimap’s advertisers and revenue generators into Live Maps, because Multimap was more than a bit dated, clunky and cluttered (useless, is the word I’m looking for).

So my question is what genius at Microsoft did it the wrong way round and decided to dump a brilliant product (Live Maps) and replace it with Multimap?

As dumb corporate moves go, this must be one of the dumbest.

Mike Butcher at Techcrunch has the full story all about Microsoft’s disgruntled users.

There’s even a Facebook group campaigning against it.

When I was managing UK PR for the Electronic Sports World Cup I had dealings with Dell and it was the type of company that suffered from ‘big corporate’ syndrome more that most.

It will be fascinating to see how long it takes for Andy’s presence to visibly impact on what’s happening at Dell. I’ll be watching with interest.

XP: Wolfstar pack blog

All I want to know is how much will it cost me to licence to Microsoft Word 2007, Excel 2007, PowerPoint 2007, Outlook 2007 and OneNote 2007 for five PCs.

The web site hints that an open licence might be the solution, but then directs me to find a local small business specialist. I don’t want to. We’ve already got a brilliant IT guy who does what we want. What “Speaking to a local small business specialist” really means is talking to a pushy salesman who’ll waste my time and try to sell me stuff and services I don’t want or need.

I just want to compare the cost of open licences to what it will cost me to upgrade the existing software, which is a bit of a mix:

 - a laptop with a legitimate Home and Student licence (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote), which is no longer being used at home so needs a business licence and licence for Outlook 2007

- a laptop with Office Professional 2003, which needs upgrading to 2007 but not Professional as we don’t need Access. It also needs OneNote. It has been running a 60 day trial of Professional 2007, which has just expired

- a laptop with an OEM trial version of Professional 2007 which will soon expire and need to become Standard plus OneNote and possibly Business Contact Manager

- a laptop running Office Small Business which just needs to be registered and OneNote added to it

- a desktop running an expired Office Standard 2007 trial and OneNote trial, both of which need to be registered

All I want to do is compare upgrade costs to an open licence. How hard can that be? Help, is anyone listening?

Not surprisingly Jim Louderback, PC Magazine’s editor in chief has taken exception to his magazine being treated as rubbish by a senior exec of a major PR firm. Unlike most PR bloggers, who write for peers and senior business leaders, Steve writes for a more general technology audience. And as a result it’s a big one. All of whom have just been told that PC Magazine is worthless.

My old college PR lecturer used to tell me “Don’t pick fights with people who ink by the barrel.”

Even in today’s online Web 2.0 social media world it’s still a worthwhile sentiment.

Softalk Share Server provides native support for Microsoft Outlook enabling folder sharing in a similar way to Exchange Server. The WorkgroupShare product does this via synchronisation, but Softalk Share Server actually has its own MAPI store so updates are instant. You can chose to either run the Softalk Share Server store alongside your existing Outlook personal folders store or to migrate the existing data into the new MAPI store. One benefit of migrating the data is you then have the option of choosing to share private folders as well. For example a chief executive might want to give his/her personal assistant access to his/her private folders.

As well as speed the other two main benefits are that it is far easier to administer than Exchange Server and is lower cost – to buy, run and maintain. It’s a much more manageable and practical solution for most small to medium size businesses that want to use Outlook for collaboration and improving teamwork.

See the Softalk Let’s talk business blog for more information and you can download the Softalk Share Server beta here.

If you’re a blogger or journalist who wants to review/talk about Softalk Share Server then let me know by email, Skype, or phone 0113 282 5321.