Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

I was recently asked to present on the topic of ‘Monetising Social Media’ at Magazine Week in Sydney.  The audience were experienced publishers who had moved into the digital world and looking to continue to evolve with the changing landscape.  I personally think the presentation title is a little misleading.  You cannot really monetise social media – but you can use it as a vehicle to drive traffic to your website to generate revenue.  This does work if done right as the Old Spice case study shows. In this case Old Spice was a dying brand but used new [...] Continue Reading…

A little while ago I was interviewed about the work I do at BodyinMind.org.  This is a website that writes about pain research.  We started it just over 2 years ago, and now have over 9,000 unique visitors every month from over 100 countries.  That’s great you might think, but there is still the ‘So What’ factor.  Is this actually making any difference?  The jury is still out and we are trying very hard to measure whether what we are doing makes any difference at all to pain research or clinical practice.

Slideshare are now offering a free facility to hold webinars, or web meetings. It’s free and allows synchronous slide advancing + chat + video (or audio). For additional features (no ads, private, password protected meetings) there is a paid version.

Zipcast = slides + chat + video
Here is their demo
Zipcast Quick Tour
View more presentations from Amit Ranjan

The Mayo Clinic has been very influential in its use of social media to educate patients.  It has lofty aims – to connect researchers with their network for example (no easy task).  In this short video Mayo Clinic CEO John Noseworthy, talks about Mayo Clinic’s Center for Social Media and the Social Media Health Network and what he views as the essential role of social media in the future of health care.

I share an office with James. It was James who alerted me to a fantastic piece of software that even I can understand. Drag the pdf of a paper into papers – it files, sorts, retrieves them with ease. I love it.

Papers Like You’ve Never Seen Before: Papers2.1

Papers – your personal library of research
Here is their blurby bit:
Papers revolutionizes the way you deal with your research documents. It allows you to search for them, download and organize them together with supplementary material, allows you to read them full screen, highlight and keep notes, sync them to your iPad or [...] Continue Reading…

There is some debate as to the necessity of the oxford comma in writing.  This comma happens just before ‘and’ in a list of words:  There were apples, oranges, and bananas (the last comma is the oxford comma). I for one am a fan. Some, however, would hotly contest its presence. Vampire Weekend are very clear on their preference: