It looks okay and the navigation’s alright, but it just comes across like a corporate website. The information’s all there, but there’s nothing that brings me closer to the venue and they certainly don’t reflect the atmosphere when you go there. Above all it’s an entertainment venue and these values should be obvious online.

For example, I heard that they’ve put a beach in there and I wanted to find out more about it. They have a page about it but it’s all text and terms and conditions. Plus it doesn’t have the one thing that I want to see - pictures! Have they just dumped a bit of sand, or is there something more? I had to search on flickr to find out what it looks like. And it looks great.

The whole site really lacks dynamic imagery. The whole point of the place is liveliness and events which I think means there’s a great opportunity to use social media sites to enhance the brochure-like look of the site.  Many of the events run for multiple dates so why not link to visitor’s own media, all you need to do is search flickr or youtube for the Rolling Stones and there’s some great material that could really excite about people into buying some tickets are going to the venue.

Now, obviously, if you pay $280m for something, you want to give it some love, but that would put Last.FM, for the first time, front and centre of a very mainstream audience. It would also make it one of the first properly integrated acquisitions from the web2.0 world. Especially compared to Flickr which isn’t anywhere near Yahoo’s homepage…

It does somehow play to Boris’ main strength - bumbling. thelondonpaper reports the web incident as an error, but i’m not so sure. You only have to look at US politics and see how many pre-announcement stories candidates produce before they disappear to a TV show, New Orleans or medical-looking living room before revealing the (unsurprising) news.  Pre-announcements and slips provide the most important thing in any political campaign - momentum.

A ’slip’ like this on a Friday keeps the story in the news all over the weekend as ’speculation’ and then from Monday when he’ll probably announce officially, it’ll keep the story live for the next few days as well. The pre-treatment from the press will also give Boris’ campaign vital intelligence about the direction coverage is likely to go, and allows them to co-opt and respond to the stories around the real announcement.

“I would say you have experts at the age of 14 of fantastic value because those people are extremely intelligent, they have time and they produce a lot of very good counseling on technological issues.”

- Pierre Bellanger, chief executive and co-founder of Skyblog, Europe’s top social network site.

“The people coming into and out of college don’t look at things in terms of media or marketing. They look at what is cool.”

- James Hilton, co-founder and executive creative director of advertising consultancy Akqa.

It’s very easy to decry traditional e-communications, but a mailing list is a great way to keep people in touch with what you do. It’s also technology that’s easily trackable, giving you details about delivery and open rates as well as decent demographic data of your subscribers. Used well, it’s an excellent opportunity to develop a relationship with your consumers. Done badly, it becomes annoying spam.

Thankfully the World Service has the right idea, creating new and exclusive content for the subscribers as well as providing functional information about schedules and programmes. There’s also great focus on the content with a dedicated employee working on creating unique video and audio material.

Amongst other things, I spent some time with them looking at the entry points for subscriptions, how to describe the content to potential users as well as techniques for testing phraseology to increase open rates. We also spent some time looking at objectives for the network and exploring opportunities to give it a personal feel and make it more club-like. The special content for subscribers already provides real added value, but we also wanted to make the Email Network feel more connected to the World Service, rather than be just a weekly marketing push.

As well as looking at how we generate and respond to responses from the group we also wanted to experiment with some social network aspects to help build that relationship with the listeners. With producer Phil Smith and Editor Steve Martin already Facebook users we were keen to use that network to reinforce the value created by the Email Network.

Using some clever data management techniques we were able to identify Facebook users within a test section of the Email Network subscribers. We weren’t sure how many from our sample would be members of Facebook, but it turned out to be around 400 users. We then talked to one of the station’s presenters, Gareth Mitchell, who presents Digital Planet to see whether he would be willing to open up his own Facebook profile to Email Network subscribers and become an online public face of the World Service. He agreed and created a group for BBC Email Network Subscribers.

It was important that we persuaded someone who was already a Facebook user, as we wanted his profile (and updates) to be truthful and authentic and develop a relationship with his listener ‘friends’.

Gareth then invited the listeners we had identified as Facebook users to become his friend. Within 24 hours about a third of those requested had signed up, many also spontaneously joined the BBC Email Network group, the others will get a request to later in the week. It has also been nice to see the response he’s had on his ‘wall’ and also the emails he’s had directly from listeners.

The great thing about using a social network like Facebook is that your friends see some of your activity on the network. So the friends of Gareth’s friends (keep up at the back!) will see them joining and interacting with the World Service. This is a great reach builder for the station and likely to encourage people to trial the network. With Gareth as ‘host’ there’s also good encouragement for new people who stop by to join the Email Network and interact with other World Service content. Facebook was also a good choice, in this instance as the BBC World Service aims to attract well-educated internationalists in their 20s and 30s – a demographic served by Facebook well.

As the Editor, Steve Martin, said in an email to me: “in global broadcasting it’s very easy to be distracted by the immense reach figures, but every one of our 183 million listeners has made a separate personal decision to be with the BBC. That’s why I’m keen to nurture individual connections with listeners wherever we can.”

Using a social network in this way has been a great experiment for the World Service and is a great example of taking the conversation to listeners rather than merely hope they come to you. As an international broadcaster the World Service is used to taking content to new locations where there are listeners, and what’s Facebook really, than another location where listeners live.

The purpose of they day was to let staff, across all disciplines, spend half a day hearing about new technologies and developments from both internal and external people. For my part I talked about the nature of ‘attention’ and how new platforms, specifically social networks, are taking greater shares of the audiences attention resulting in audience pressures for established broadcasters. I also covered the opportunities these new platforms provide broadcasters, especially public service broadcasters and how they can use them to get closer to listeners and users.

It was a great day, and a good opportunity to here more about the challenges and new possibilities facing the BBC. It was also an opportunity to play Dr Wesch’s great video and talk about the new iPhone.

One of the most popular areas was the Orange Chill and Charge tent, a place where visitors could re-charge their mobiles, go online and listen to special sets from artists. There were hundreds of different points for all the different phone types and it was jammed packed, all the time. Most of the people hooked up were those with the more feature-intensive phones that drained batteries quite quickly.

It was also interesting to see the websites that everyone was logged on to (well, you had to do something whilst you sat waiting for the juice to flow). I would say about 50% of the usage was to Facebook, with the rest a combination of MySpace, email sites and BBC articles on Glastonbury.

The whole Orange installation was managed by Cake and facilitated incredibly well. They managed to create a really great atmosphere for all mobile users (as they supported all networks) under intense pressure (and mud!).

I thought Glasto was also a good opportunity to practice what I preach and so recorded a video blog live to YouTube, and sent some pics to Flickr. Also popping up in my mobile feed reader were live blogs from friends David and Nick. No doubt something lots of people did. I think this kind of mobile access throws up lots of interesting questions about the nature of ‘access’ and worth a more thought out blog post when I’m not quite as tired.

The ease of which social network users can disseminate opinions online is a massive problem for new brands. The value of an expensive marketing campaign can be destroyed in hours if a bad write up flows through the users on sites like Facebook. The content for all of these sites are driven by friends, so a ringing endorsement or poor review instantly becomes the prevailing opinion for many users.

The new London Olympic logo has already incensed many Facebook users with hundreds of groups appearing demanding that the Organising Committee revert to their old version.

Big companies ignore social networks at their peril and need to ensure their marketing messages are authentic and inclusive to get on side a huge number of these influencing consumers.

Anyway in the segment it was revealled that Sally Traffic (the high priestess of travel) had a group. Now, it was quite a small one with just a few users, then by the end of the record loads more fans joined up. Now, that’s no great suprise as a drivetime on Radio 2 is a massive show with millions of listeners.

But for me it highlighted how when you engage with someone in an environment that they’re comfortable in (in this case users of Facebook), that you instantly reap the rewards. There were no web addresses given out, or links from Radio 2 online, just through informal discussion a load of people were activiated and they joined in.

Over the next 24 hours those people, through the newsfeed, will alert hundreds of other people (their friends) about Sally and Radio 2. They have endorsed it and told their friends about it.

Media is still often obsessed with control - it stems from the old relationship people had of ‘tuning in’. I think it’s actually more interesting to look at your objectives and think about how they can still be met (and targets beaten) if you cede away control and work to do interesting things within your audiences lives.

With the clients I’ve worked with, I always try and spend as much time as I can with the team in the place they actually work. That way you get a better idea about how they interact with their colleagues, what their workload is like and what kind of tools they have at their disposal. I also think you get a better idea of their attitude towards new ideas when you interrupt them in the middle of their day job.

BBC Radio Manchester’s a great station that’s been through some big changes over the past two years. It’s in a competitive market with a new launch last year - XFM Manchester - and a new launch this year - Rock Talk – a station demographically targeted at BBC Radio Manchester’s core audience.

Like many organisations they understand that their sector and the demands from their audiences are changing. This is something that’s a challenge to deal with when you still have to do the traditional day job and budgets that doesn’t see much of an increase.

John Ryan, the Editor there (pictured), was interested in how they can harness new web applications to enhance what they do, better serve their listeners and promote the station to listeners who might enjoy it if they tuned in.

Already though, the station is doing some interesting things to communicate with listeners on different platforms. The new music show, for instance, has a MySpace page with over 2000 friends. Now, if you’re on the leading edge, it’s quite easy to dismiss MySpace, but it’s still the place for music fans and bands and in this example it’s a great way to reach a non-traditional audience for the station. They also use it to its full by updating the bands using the bulletins each week with what’s on the show.

Promoting specific content to individual communities interested in part of what you do is very sensible for a radio station. If enacted properly it can help grow the hours of some of your lightest listeners. The MySpace site also acts as a reach builder by connecting to listeners through their interests and then encouraging them to trial something that you know they already like.

The BBC’s also in the process of trialling a blogging platform – the BBC Blog Network. BBC Manchester has taken a slightly different tack to the rest of the network and made the focus of their blog links to Manchester’s other bloggers. Again, it’s a great way to reach out to the community and also a good way to get links back to the BBC. I had a good talk with one of the organisers (and frequent blogger) Richard Fair, about opportunities for the development of the project.

I also had some good discussions with some of the programming teams about the nature of interaction, how it’s changing and what technology could do to help improvement the relationships between listener and the station. People often forget that radio stations are the old masters at communities and interaction, the insight that they have puts them in a strong position as new platforms develop.