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Back in the days before I was a Social Media Expert, and before that, a traditional journalist, I was an admin assistant for a bit. And I can state categorically, the words I dreaded more than any other were...

"I tried to do it myself... but..."

It inevitably meant that my boss, who had self-taught Word skills, had attempted to run a Macro on a table and ended up wiping the 523 page document, and that I would have to retype it all. By morning

Once, he added a text box and wiped the internet.

Actually, I lied about that last bit but my point remains...

If you want to change a fuse, great. Go ahead. They should teach that sort of thing in schools. In fact, I think they probably do.

But if you want to replace your boiler, get a qualified gas engineer or prepare to have no eyebrows.

It's the same with Social Media. One of the most popular responses when I ask brands about Social Media is "well... we do it in-house", "we have an intern", or

"I tried to do it myself... but..."

If you're keeping up your own Facebook and Twitter profiles. Brilliant. That's your fuse changing.

But developing a coherent social media strategy for your brand? Capitalising on new developments such as geo-caching? Aggregation of your feeds to maximise effectiveness? Conforming competitions to each sites rules? And most importantly of all, analysising your online reputation to capitalise on success and plug weaknesses?

Well, that's your boiler. And your singed eyebrows.

Digital Media is gaseous. It's difficult to quantify, you can tell it's there - you can smell it in the air, and hear it on the wind. But if you mess with it - it can blow up in your face.

Wickedweb are the CORGI engineers of Social Media - we work with you to ensure that your brand is enhanced by social media, and that as new developments come along, we upgrade your offer to suit. So when you really need it, it won't land you in hot water. So to speak.

If you don't want to know the score, look away now.

This is the first World Cup of the true Web 2.0 era. Back in 2006, we were only just cottoning on. So this year, a whole raft of innovative ways of watching have come about. Here's the best of them - from the sublime, to the ridiculous....

First off, a quick nod to the fact that you can watch this World Cup online in a multitude of ways. There's good old BBC iPlayer and the young upstart ITV Player - now with speeds fast enough to make online TV viable. If you prefer something a bit more, well, third party, then there's TV Catchup, or if you want a desktop app, there's Zattoo.

You can run your own world cup commentary on Twitter with the #worldcup hashtag, and then watch how the match unfolded online with The Guardian's, frankly amazing, Twitter Replays.

If you're enchanted by the haunting sound of Vuvuzelas, you can add them to any web page with Vuvuzela Time, or to any Youtube video by clicking the football icon.

If you've a mind to, you can even watch the coverage in Lego.

Do I win an award for the first Cliff Richard reference in a blog post? Well? Do I?

Don't worry. It's not an article about Cliff Richard. It's about mobile phones.

Do you remember your first mobile phone? I do. I've still got it. It looked like Fig 1:

It made calls. It sent text messages (but you could only keep 10 at a time). It was the size of my current iPod, mobile and camera put together, had a black and white screen, and dangled the promise of "forthcoming fax and data" in the manual - but no instructions.

Fast forward 15 years. What do you look for in a mobile phone?

Internet Browsing?

E-Mail?

Camera?

GPS?

E-Book reading?

Media Player?

Radio?

Office Suite?

Games Console?

Flash Drive?

Of course for many, the zenith for this is the iPhone - a device that actually is less powerful than many others on the market, but to which champions of so-called Smartphones can owe much, having finally brought the potential of the 3G networks, which (if you'll recall) the operators spent, literally, billions of pounds on, in terms of licensing and infrastructure, to the masses in an easy to use way.

It was a heavy gamble - especially as the initial reponse to grainy Wikipedia entries like Fig 2 (c.2002) was "hmmm, it's a bit fiddly.... there's not much to see... how slow?... seems a bit pointless" and other such burbles suggesting that it was all going to take a long time to take off.

And of course, clunky is what it was. My first internet enabled phone, back in 2001, had WAP, which could only handle especially designed pages, in black and white, and at a measly 35.6k (!). As an aside, it also had a free mp3 player - a tiny, but seperate add on, that could handle a mighty 32mb (that's about 1 album).

My first true Smartphone was 2 years later - the HTC Canary - AKA the Orange SPV E100 (the "SPV" stood for "sounds, pictures, video"):

As you can see (Fig 3), it boasted a mighty 64mb of data and.... gasp.... a VGA camera that clipped on the bottom.

Looking back now, it seems ridiculous, but at the time, the zenith of technology. Wish I still had it!

And here's where we come to the crunch. It's 7 years later, and the way we use our phones dramatically. Just as engineers who had a little feature in early phones to allow them to update it had not a clue what they were unleashing (it's called SMS and 4.1 Trillion of them were sent in 2008), the 3G network, despite its slow start has lead us to a world where we're using our phones for e-mail, music, navigation, high quality digital photos, movies... in fact almost everything except phone calls.

So what's my point? Well there's kind of two of them. I'm sure you were afraid of that. The social one is simply this - the way we communicate has changed dramatically, and even though we're talking more, we're talking less, existing instead in a virtual space of MSN, Facebook and e-mail, from the middle of the city to a top of a mountain.

From a commercial point of view, ask yourself this... if all my potential customers, clients and contacts are using mobile internet - then why aren't I? With mobile versions of your websites, dedicated mobile social media networks like Foursquare, and apps that leverage huge website traffic to download them, there's a definite potential for ROI on your investment in mobile platforms. And with 4G and WiMax round the corner, making it all more accessible than ever before, then it's time to start thinking about your presence on the mobile web.

If you want any information on leveraging mobile technology on iPhone, Android, Symbian, Blackberry or WinMo platforms... give us a call - 020 7183 4999

 “They” say that the forthcoming general election will be won or lost in the Blogsphere. Certainly, the evidence that Barack Obama’s victory was down to his tech awareness and tireless Tweeting is more than circumstantial. That’s not the purpose of this particular blog post, mind. The election is next month and I want to ensure that we (a) stay non-partisan and (b) can say “told you so” afterwards, rather than speculating.

This month, I find myself musing that familiar phrase that has entered our lexicon, namely the Facebook Campaign. It seems like rare these days that we can get through an entire news bulletin without the phrase “after a long fought Facebook campaign”, with all the authority of if William Shatner was asked to recite a paper by Professor Brian Cox.

I’ve always thought that Social Media is a “field leveller”. Suddenly the whole world has a voice. Whilst “the event” we’re not mentioning may be won or lost on blogs, the smaller battles, the ones that affect our every day lives, have moved to Facebook.

Whether it’s the Save BBC 6Music campaign, which so far, seems to have not only garnered nearly 200,000 fans, stemmed thousands to attend a protest and thousands more to complain to the BBC, or the inexplicable Can This Sausage Roll Get More Fans Than Cheryl Cole?, which seems to have captured  a Zeitgeist to the point where they are heading towards their second million followers, Facebook has become more than a Social Network. It’s a tool for democracy, of vox populi, of social change.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not expecting the future of democracy to be MPs posting their views and voting based on the number of “Likes” – though it has given me an idea for a novel – but more that the fight for minority to be heard has been taken to the biggest family in the world.

“Great”, I hear you say, with one eyebrow quizzically raised. “But millions of squawking voices – does anyone listen?”. Of course they do. Let’s start with something that seems trivial but with massive repercussions beyond itself.

Remember the Christmas Number One last year? Unlike the umpteen previous ones, the top spot was held by a 20 year old rock-rap record by Rage Against The Machine. And why? Because a couple – Tracy & Jon Morter – set up a Facebook group.

*thinks* “Hmmmm.... this has more of a smack of the Sausage Roll/Cole page”.

Not at all. This was a protest. This was about Facebook orchestrating a campaign for change. For 500 years* the Christmas Number 1 had been dominated by tracks from Simon Cowell’s various “Guess The Winner - £1 a go” fairground sideshows. And people were getting bored of it. It was obvious (baaaa) that the (baaaa) record buying public would (baaaa) always go for the song that (baaaa) had been fed to them through primetime television.

The choice of “Killing In The Name” was perfect. With its refrain of “(Ahem) you – I won’t do what you tell me”, it screamed a message that the Cowell-tel was unwelcome and that music fans wanted a chart that represented taste, rather than passing fad.

The campaign was launched in under a month, and yet, come the glorious day, Joe Flibblebridges (can you remember his name?) was denied his Christmas Number 1. And Simon Cowell, in between bouts of sell flagellation over his “niavity” in not taking the vox populi seriously, had the front to tell the group members that they had robbed a little boy of his dream, whilst simultaneously offering The Mortons a job. (they declined, he got over it).

The point is, whether you believe that Social Networking is a beacon for modern times, or simply a covert tool used by The Illuminati to track our every waking moment, what’s beyond doubt is that it has brought a new layer of government to the world. The big stuff gets decided in parliament. The little things are subject to instant referendum on Facebook – and if that’s not proof of the power and versatility of the age we live in, then I don’t know what is.

Since I started writing this piece, we’ve had the first of the leadership debates has taken place and seem to have done a pretty good job of changing the landscape of the forthcoming General Election. So perhaps the internet is about the big things too. But more on that next month.

*give or take - my time perception is very poor

Social Media is a once in a lifetime phenomenon. Remember how the telephone changed the world? Course you don’t. And that’s rather my point. For the first time in over a century, a new technology has come along which changes the way we communicate and do business.

As with the dotcom boom of the nineties, the internet is awash with start-ups who think that they have the ultimate platform – be it a social network, a video sharing site, or an all-singing all-dancing blog. Some, like Twitter, will change the world. Others will sink without trace. Wicked Web pride ourselves on knowing everything that’s out there and knowing what’s a flash in the plan and what’s the next big thing.

But what’s right for one organisation, isn’t necessarily right for another – and too much is as bad as too little. To get your message across you need to be talking to the right people in the right way. My role at Wicked Web is to do just that.

I’ve been working in Social Media for 6 years. In the early days, I was lucky enough to be working for a forward thinking company who let me get on with it. But as time went by, and as “socmed” began to form the bulk of my day-to-day business,  it became increasingly obvious to me that a lot of organisations still don’t “get” social media, despite its importance.

Since then, I’ve built Youtube channels, Facebook groups, marketed through Twitter, set up online radio stations, and then found ways to make them all talk to each other. My current projects include podcasting, Facebook applications, and creating a bespoke social network for a niche client.

The fact is... social media can do a lot, and if you’re just dipping your toe in the water, it can be a bit overwhelming. I will sit down with you, cut through the jargon, and create a bespoke social media package that’s right for you.