Louise McGregor TV

App-rentice

I can’t believe it; Lord Sugar goes all modern and has the teams build apps.

The girls’ team, led by Edna, went with the concept of annoying noises. Their app gave the users a chance to play noises in three categories; annoying, animals, and celebrations. This idea came from Felicity, there may have been a more brilliant idea from Susan but no-one could understand it. Their design was appalling, the pitches were bad. Edna nominated herself to do the big live pitch and then did the weirdest presentation I have ever seen; complete with spooky voices, dramatic pauses and gloves. I can’t remember the app name and I’ve only just watched the programme.

The boys’ team came up with another sound based app – the opportunity to play a snippet of text in a local accent. The idea came from Glen, and the team was led by Leon. Their campaign was better, the show was better, their pitches were better. It was quirky and the name “Slangatang” was memorable.

They made a fatal mistake; it didn’t have global appeal. In the first six hours it outsold the girls’ app 3 to 1. But then, as Karren Brady said, “the world woke up”. It got another 900 or so downloads to a total of 3,900, while downloads of the girls’ one rocked up to 10,000.

The boardroom was high on the entertainment scale; Leon the project manager couldn’t decide who to take into the boardroom but ended up with Glen (the idea guy) and Alex who hadn’t shone in tonight’s task.

I did think Leon, in the boardroom for the second time, might be for the door. But Lord Sugar went for the wallflower and fired Alex.

Louise McGregor social media

Social Media Conference Corporate

It didn’t start well, there was a problem with the trains in the Netherlands this morning and when I arrived at the conference right on 9am (OK, 5 minutes past) they hadn’t started and were re-working the schedule as some speakers were a bit stuck in the transport chaos.

Where’s the “like” button?

I’d been looking forward to this – most social media conferences have only a tiny amount of content that  focuses on corporate communications (rather than marketing). So a day of it seemed a great idea. Sadly I’m disappointed. Why? Three reasons.

(1) The schedule was fully packed, too packed – 11 presentations or panel discussions in one day. I could feel my concentration waning by about the third presentation, by the afternoon my brain was fried. The pace was over the top, and at one point we were more than an hour and a half behind schedule.

(2) There was no apparent structure. To be fair the urgent need to shuffle presenters due to the transport issue may have exacerbated this but we jumped from mobile/apps to internal culture, from rumours to guidelines. I think the day could have benefited from a tough look at the structure of the day, and to edit the number of presentations. There are plenty of models out there that could have been used to “hang” the content on.

(3) I feel bizarrely irritated by being given the standard paper evaluation form at the end of the day. I did fill it in, but almost everyone in the room was tweeting the whole day – the conference organisers have an accurate record of sentiment during the day, if they choose to read it.

OK, that out of the way. The good stuff.

Three highlights for me;

(1) The presentations of the Social Media News Rooms, this is something we’ll have to look into this year so it was great to see some different examples; a variety of approaches, designs, features. Hugely useful.

(2) Cecilia Scolaro’s presentation of TNT’s social media guidelines. She explained the company, the problem, the approach very well, and has produced something deceptively simple – and published it under a creative commons licence.

(3) The App building, in one day TKGB built an App, using content partially pulled from the audience. This is another challenge for us to address and it’s cool to see that it can be done easily. The app will be online tomorrow (hopefully!) so I’ll add the link then.

For me the most valuable content was from other companies, and the whole day was a little unbalanced with a lot of consultants or social media expert companies getting a lot of air time. Perhaps that’s a function of the ‘newness’ of the territory, but I hope that future conferences can redress this balance.

Would I go again? I don’t know. I’d look harder at the speakers and the content before I signed up I think, it’s so rare to have a focus on communications that I’m sure I’ll be tempted.