ICM - Leeds Design Agency

Guardian Local project launches with Leeds blog: a new experiment in local journalism and community coverage has launched today.

Several few weeks ago the Guardian introduced the beatbloggers for the Local project and wrote at the time that the Local project is a small-scale community approach to local news-gathering, and will focus on the three politically engaged cities of Edinburgh, Cardiff and Leeds.

This week they are launching the Leeds blog; the first in the series of local blogs which you’ll see appearing over the coming weeks. Run and curated by beatblogger John Baron, the Leeds blog will cover many aspects of the city in a fresh way; aiming to explore new models for journalism and social engagement through a mix of reporting, collaborative engagement with local communities, organisations and groups and aggregation.

I really hope this takes-off and becomes the success it deserves to be, and will be reading as often as possib…

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Lets face it, you can’t ignore Twitter – its everywhere these days. Rather than me banging-on about how Twitter works or why you should follow a pidgeon, Big Ben or Stephen Fry, I thought I would briefly show you some stats from our website.

There’s a few of us here at ICM that tweet regularly; some for gaining knowledge and information, some to network and some just to have a laugh.

In terms of driving traffic back to the ICM website in numbers, Twitter is fairly average, but as the graphic below shows, visitors from Twitter spend more time with us and view more pages (this is a snapshot from a single day):

I guess its because Twitter users are already in the process of ‘reading’ and taking in information.

Every day Twitter is starting to feel like less of a passing craze and is becoming more of a tool, I suppose only time will tell how powerful a tool it may become…

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I said to a friend of mine the other day ‘you’d really like Twitter’, he’s always on Facebook updating his status and interacting with others via status comments, effectively like a mini Twitter stream…

‘I’m no good at Twitter’ was his reply, ‘I’ve tried’.

No-one is good ‘at’ Twitter, but you can be good ‘on’ Twitter.

One of the big catchphrases of recent times when marketing anything is Return on Investment. When it comes to social media methods I much prefer the term Return on Engagement – what you get back from the time and effort you put in.

For me, Twitter really works when you interact, be it with a brand or an individual. Talking to a complete stranger is alien at first, but over time becomes quite natural within the medium of Twitter. Often its the time element that people, including my friend, struggle with. You wouldn’t walk into a room full of people and expect them to turn around and start having a meaningful conversation with you straight away.

Over the past year of Twitter use I have given feedback (positive and negative) to brands that I use, have found new friends within my industry, kept in touch with old friends and colleagues, won competitions, and have met new friends I wouldn’t have networked with in a more ‘normal’ situation.

All this shows (for me) a good Return on Engagement – taking time to interact; replying to questions, thanking people for retweets, asking questions, forwarding important news, and so on…

It’s not about how many followers you have, it’s not about what Stephen Fry says, its how you use it.

Have some fun, use it your way – there are no hard and fast rules. Oh, and as is usual at the end of these blog posts; you can follow (and interact with) me at twitter.com/richardpeacock or twitter.com/icmrichard...

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