Essential BlackBerry Apps

Clearly I love my BlackBerry but as I’ve said before, I can suffer from iPhone envy. Here are the apps I’ve used to customise my BlackBerry experience and stave off the green eyed monster:

• WordPress - being used to write this blog post
• The Score – the best sports news, scores and highlights app out there. Yes, it even streams highlights to your BlackBerry
• Foursquare – I’m not sure what to make of the location based game but I’m enjoying it and the native app helps me enjoy the experience that much more
• MaxMem – an app to free up space for all the other apps. This is essential if you are app-happy because the security settings on a BlackBerry require you to save apps to the local memory…so even if you have a micro-SD card, your memory for apps is limited.  MaxMem lets you delete all the bloated firmware that comes pre-installed on your BlackBerry
• Genicious - to save bookmarks to delicious on the go
• BlackBerry App World – I usually find myself downloading directly through the browser but this helps keep my apps up to date
• UberTwitter – my preferred Twitter app
• Facebook – I have to admit that the Facebook app is less than ideal, especially compared to the iPhone, but when hooked up with an email account, it works well enough
• Google maps – perfect for when you’re lost or when you don’t want to fire up the GPS in the car

Not apps per se but still indispensable for my mobile life:

• Berry Bloglines – synced with my Bloglines account and way better than the official mobile version
• A second email inbox – since Hotmail allowed pop/imap access, I asked our IT manager to add my personal account as an additional inbox and it has been quite awesome
• Just for the Olympics, I’ve been enjoying the Yahoo! mobile portal

How about you? What apps are essential for your BlackBerry?

Disclosure – I worked on a personal campaign for Jim Balsillie, co-CEO of RIM, maker of the BlackBerry.

I’m a Twitter snob too!

Twitter is a complete time-sink with very few business applications (that I can see) but it is a whole lot of fun.

As a result, I’m spending more and more of my time over on my Twitter account where I, in no particular order:

• Post interesting links
• Talk about pop culture
• Give some sort of commentary on how my beloved Liverpool are doing (including “breaking” the Twitter formatting with 140 character long celebrations. no spaces.)
• Banter with my online friends and colleagues
• Ask for (and sometimes even get) stats/research/examples/lunch suggestions

But I’m a snob. I follow people I find interesting and who I want to stay connected with. I try to keep the people I’m following to under 100 and I don’t follow other people just so they’ll follow me back.

For some reason, about 500 people have signed up to see what’s up in my life – which is a bit confusing/disconcerting. I’m not even interesting enough for my wife to want to know what’s going on with me, or even, and this is depressing, when Liverpool score.

I’m flattered by the attention and I do click through to every new follower’s profile to see who they are and whether I want to follow them. For me, following them is a completely arbitrary decision based on any number of utterly subjective factors most of which are probably too facile to even consider codifying.

However, if you really, really, really do want me to follow you, all’s not lost. Twitter means you can see what I’m doing and by inserting the simple “@edlee” you can direct your update/message/link to me. It’s a conversation, so let’s converse!

I’ve started following a good few people this way and uncovered some interesting people this way – it’s just that I won’t follow people just because they follow me. Sorry.

More on being a Twitter Snob

Mitch Joel is a Twitter snob.

This guy’s Twitter etiquette is absurd.

Does Twitter have business benefits?

Colin Carmichael can see the business benefits of Twitter. I can see the business benefit of having a “status” (a la Facebook) associated with your bio/contact details within your company’s intranet but,I can’t see the conversational nature of Twitter, specifically, scaling very well – especially in an organization as large as Fleishman-Hillard (c2,600 employees). For my money, all the “@s” would render such a system utterly useless – I’d look up what a colleague in London or Hong Kong was doing, to see whether I could call them and see them deep in a conversation with another colleague about whether, for example, Peep Show is better than Big Train or the Mighty Boosh.

[Disclosure, Super Channel, the TV network that carries Peep Show in Canada is a client][Double disclosure, Peep Show >>> Big Train]

Not so useful as seeing a Facebook style status update – Ed’s colleague is on vacation rather than getting an erstwhile Out Of Office notification.

However, as with all new social media, Twitter is worth following – or at least monitoring.

Tags: twitter snob social media

New BMBY Feed

I finally got around to exploring Feedburner a little more and, as part of my ongoing determination to make as many mistakes as possible on this blog (so my clients don’t have to), have burnt an additional feed.

If you so desire, you can sign up to this feed which will not make any improvements to your reading experience but it will provide a much needed distraction at work as I religiously check my stats!

It was pretty easy to tell the truth and I’ve even included some nice extras such as “Digg this” and “Save to del.icio.us” that will appear in the feed; once you subscribe.

If you do take the plunge and subscribe to BMBY, can I ask to use my feedreader of choice, Bloglines. Not only is it easier and quicker to use than Google Reader, but you’ll help me climb the Power 150 chart which depends on Bloglines readers for one of its scoring categories. I’m currently languishing at 108 so your assistance is very much appreciated.

More information on how to subscribe using bloglines.

Technorati tags: feedburner, rss, pr, ed lee, power 150

Doing it by the numbers

What a ride it’s been.  100 posts, 174 comments, 981 spam comments, 5598 visits, 119 links from 47 blogs, a Technorati ranking of 57,374, countless new friends, two podcast appearances, one new job and a wiki in a pear tree. 

All those numbers are in pursuit of one intangible goal – the better understanding of social media so I can better counsel my clients. 

That original objective was borne out of a real passion for social media, being able to see the potential in this new way of thinking and wanting to dive straight in.  I’ve been an enthusiastic poster, commenter and explorer all the time looking to document my exploration and your experience in social media – why else would I call this Blogging Me Blogging You? 

Everybody thinks they have something to say and that they can say it better than anybody else.  I was no different but now I’m humbled by the reception I got from my newly found peers.  Peers who can express themselves in better, funnier, more eloquent, more insightful and more grammatically correct prose than this flack.  

So what’s changed on the journey?  I certainly feel more comfortable in evangelizing social media and can even hold a conversation on it, to some extent, but I still haven’t got a case study to my name, so I still feel like a bit of a fraud.  At my new job, I get asked things as if I know the answers, but I’ve only got more questions. 

That’s the thing about social media – no one has the answers. 

No one knows what will work, only what might work, what might connect with the client’s audience and what their best guess is.  But with your help, I’ll keep learning, keep reading, keep listening and keep writing. 

One thing that I am certain of now is that PR is about experiences.  About creating the best possible experiences for our clients’ customers, for media, who put up with our constant pestering, for our clients, who actually pay our ridiculously high billing rates and for ourselves, who actually have to work in this madhouse.   

So thanks to everyone who’s commented, tracked-back, sent me emails complaining about the blog name or linked to me.  You’re too many to name all at once but for a good idea of who they are, check out my blogroll and check out my bloglines. 

I still haven’t got my laptop though! 

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Do you represent a laptop manufacturer or retailer?  Do you want your logo here?  If you do, please email me!  

Crack Cocaine for Social Media Junkies

My traffic of people searching for drug related hints and tips has been a little slow lately so here’s a contraversial title and some thoughts and links on marketing/PR/social media I’ve had today. As always, please help me crystallize my thoughts with insightful comments below.

Great sponsorship deal for Canadian golf gear producer, Element 21 – they’re paying for an astronaut to hit a gold plated golf ball, equipped with a tracking device, off the International Space Station.  He’ll be using an Element 21 six iron, which is a little different from my preferred 7…

Life After the 30 Second Spot – In his book, Jaffe predicts increased amounts of on-screen product placement and sponsorship but is there any evidence to say that this will work any better than the (mostly awful) adverts themselves.  Watching Rockstar Supernova last night I was physically appalled by the integration of Amp’d mobile into the program.  “I was having trouble getting into the song,” said Storm, “but then I downloaded it on my Amp’d mobile cellular phone and now I understand it a lot more” or something like that.  It was shameless.  I think that consumers are smart and media savvy enough to separate paid for and editorial by now.  Thoughts? 

Perspective on a Plane – Nice post from Michael Seaton: so SoaP didn’t make $300m this weekend.  Who cares?  It was a niche, and obviously B-quality, movie that was made with a small budget and was catapulted into the popular consciousness by some certified (certifiable) passionate consumers (Samuel L Jackson included).  The story was never the movie itself, but the CGC marketing which made the movie a cert to make money, even before they doubled their marketing budget 

How long before ‘social media’ becomes just ‘media’?  Not long according to Market Wire who now include the social bookmarking and rating websites (digg, del.icio.us etc) in their distribution 

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Do you represent a laptop manufacturer or retailer? Do you want your logo here? If you do, please email me!

New Blog Writing Software – Why?

Apparently some company called “Microsoft” has released a blog-writing tool (available in beta here).  My question is what do blog writing tools do? 

I write my posts in Word, add in the links using the fabled “ctrl+k” short cut, taught to me by the amazing Alex Livingstone at Weber Shandwick UK’s Public Affairs department, and then copy all and paste into the WordPress text box. 

Can anyone explain to me why I should download a blog writing tool like Windows Live Writing (Beta) and what the benefits are? 

That’d be awesome.  Thanks. 

While I’m blogging about blogging, why not talk about two new buttons that appeared in my WordPress dashboard.  Previously there were just three buttons in the dashboard pane – “Dashboard”, “Blog stats” and “Feed stats”.  All of which do exactly what they say on the tin. 

Now there are a couple of new ones – “Tag Surfer” and “My Comments”.  “My Comments” allows you to track all the comments you’ve left on other WordPress blogs.  So no need for co.mments. 

The other button, “Tag Surfer” allows you to search the WordPress community for other blogs that use the same tags as you do.  So less excuse for me to lapse into my battle against Technorati and a great way for WordPress to increase its community’s traffic. 

At the moment, I’m loving WordPress.  They’re pushing out some cool new features and really proivding some added value to their extremely passionate community of users.

Anyone reading this blog and wanting start their own blog, I’d definitely recommend WordPress, although I’m yet to see a blog on Blogger’s new Beta. 

If you have, leave a link in the comments section. 

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Do you represent a laptop manufacturer or retailer?  Do you want your logo here?  If you do, please email me!  

Naked Conversations on Up and Coming PRs Wiki

There’s a review of Naked Conversations over on the Up and Coming PRs Wiki.  Also awaiting reviews/additional commentary are Cluetrain Manifesto and Taking Heat: The President, The Press and My Years in the Whitehouse by Ari Fleischer. 

If you’ve read either of these books and would like to comment or would like to add in a book of your own for discussion, please email me and I’ll give you the password. 

I’ve also found, via Ramit Sethi, a great business book review site called Biz Book Talk.  Check it out, and take a look at Ramit’s site for personal finance advice. 

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Do you represent a laptop manufacturer or retailer?  Do you want your logo here?  If you do, please email me!