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There is a head­long stam­pede at moment for pub­lish­ers to do an app. All we hear is ‘must do an app’, ‘can we show you our app?’ Even my daugh­ter says she wants an app!

But whilst this appears to be a symp­tom of an all-consuming desire to go ‘dig­i­tal’, in most sec­tors print still has a major part to play.

There is no way that even a rich-media app can replace the “Tatler” expe­ri­ence, or really be read in the bath (or on the toi­let) with any form of dig­nity.

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They say the busier you are, the less you get done! Novem­ber has proved to be a busy month with loads of announce­ments from the likes of Sam­sung, Apple, Face­book, Sony, Google… the list goes on. This week’s DC is all about pro­duc­tiv­ity (at work and home), so don your specs, and read on.

F-mail

First a Hol­ly­wood block­buster, then the world! Face­book has stepped up to chal­lenge Google and Yahoo with it’s ‘not an email client’ email client. Face­book is giv­ing its 0.5 bil­lion users an ‘@facebook.com’ not-an-email-address address, and launched a sin­gle por­tal for SMS-ing, tweet­ing and email­ing through the Face­book frame­work.

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We’re con­stantly look­ing for ways to improve our vis­i­tors’ expe­ri­ence and have recently made a few small tweaks to the B1 Blog which we hope you’ll like.

First, we’ve added a ‘related posts’ sec­tion to the bot­tom of every post (using YARPP). It’s incred­i­bly easy to install and use and depend­ing on the weight­ings you choose, can tighten or widen the net as necessary.

Sec­ondly, we’ve added a ‘Tweet’ and ‘Like’ but­ton to the top of each post as we felt that the but­tons on the left-hand side­bar were per­haps not promi­nent enough. What do you think?

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The final pre­sen­ta­tion at last week’s Social Media Hud­dle was from Xabier Ormaz­a­bal. He’s Senior Man­ager, Prod­uct Mar­ket­ing over at Salesforce.com. His 25 minute slot was filled with a huge amount of insight and action­able advice. Here’s a quick sum­mary of the points I took from it.

Salesforce.com build their social media strat­egy around three pil­lars of online com­mu­nity. Seems like a pretty straight for­ward model:

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• First ensure that your cor­po­rate site and other owned web prop­er­ties are work­ing hard for you. Focus on build­ing engage­ment through knowl­edge shar­ing, user groups, blogs and ideas sharing.

So, in Part 1 I did a bit of a thought-experiment around the idea of Green IT out­side of the con­text of the Cli­mate Change Debate.

Hav­ing said that what­ever one’s views on cli­mate change*, being green is still good thing, what can we do in prac­tice to reduce waste and power consumption?

It’s not easy being green

Print double-sided, use recy­cled paper and use secure-printing. Since switch­ing to double-sided print­ing by default, we’ve saved roughly 25% on our paper costs. On one printer alone, we have avoided print­ing 38,000 sheets of A4 paper since it’s instal­la­tion.

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This week I’m off to the Green IT Expo at the QEII con­fer­ence cen­tre in Lon­don and have been giv­ing some thought to what I hope to get out of it. On one level, I think we’re doing a pretty good job here at Ban­ner — we’ve addressed many of the obvi­ous issues (waste, recy­cling, power con­sump­tion etc), but there is always room to take things a step fur­ther and make improvements.

This got me think­ing about the sub­ject of ‘green IT’ and more broadly, ‘green busi­ness’ and the back­drop against which we make deci­sions and for­mu­late pol­icy.

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This post con­cen­trates on Ioanna Stagia’s pre­sen­ta­tion at our Social Media Hud­dle. She’s Research Direc­tor over at CNN International.

CNN have cer­tainly pushed the bound­aries when it comes to explor­ing the power of rec­om­men­da­tion and the value of shared con­tent. Their global research ini­tia­tive Pow­nar, illus­trates why peo­ple share con­tent, how they share it and the type of con­tent they pre­fer to share. In the US and Europe, peo­ple tend to share con­tent for altru­is­tic rea­sons, whereas in Asia, shar­ing con­tent is more about broad­cast­ing your sta­tus. As you might sus­pect, arti­cles with embed­ded video and images are most likely to be shared. And, Face­book is the pri­mary plat­form used for shar­ing.

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LinkedIn is an unde­ni­able force when it comes to B2B social net­works. Henry Clifford-Jones showed us some fas­ci­nat­ing sta­tis­tics – over 80 mil­lion pro­fes­sion­als view­ing 1.5billion pages per month across 600,000 pro­fes­sional groups.

When you want to build a group on LinkedIn, it’s only going to be a suc­cess if you build it around a com­mon inter­est and pur­pose. An empty LinkedIn group can be a very lonely place…

So, the more focused and well-defined the group is, the higher the level of par­tic­i­pa­tion and engage­ment. Also, don’t get too dis­ap­pointed if most peo­ple aren’t con­tribut­ing. LinkedIn reckon that for every per­son that con­tributes on the site, nine will com­ment and inter­act, whilst 90 will just sit back and con­sume the con­tent.

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The impend­ing Tube Strike didn’t deter a record num­ber of tech­nol­ogy mar­keters com­ing to the Ban­ner offices to take part in this year’s Social Media Hud­dle. And, look­ing at the feed­back, the con­tent of the day was rated at 4.2 out of 5.

So first of all, a big thank you to our speak­ers and work­shop mod­er­a­tor for mak­ing the hud­dle such a suc­cess and pre­sent­ing such com­pelling con­tent — Ioanna Sta­gia (CNN Inter­na­tional), Henry Clifford-Jones (LinkedIn Europe), Jackie Hewitt (Autodesk), Xabier Ormaz­a­bal (Salesforce.com) and Zoe Sands (Juniper).

There were a num­ber of com­mon strands to the day:

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