Donato

What do i have in common with Barack Obama, George Clooney and Ricky Gervais?

donato — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 09:29:46 +0000

What could i possibly have in common with Barack Obama, George Clooney and Ricky Gervais?

Well, i know none of us look our age, but we will all be celebrating our 50th Birthdays during 2011.

Wonder what are the chances of all of us getting together for lunch or dinner to celebrate this little known fact?

2011, 100, 50 and 10

donato — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 11:29:05 +0000

This is often the time of year we reflect on the year that has passed and look forward to the new year.

Next year, 2011, brings for me two anniversaries.

As i was born in 1961, i will be celebrating my 50th birthday and it will also be the 10th Anniversary of when the Bostin idea was conceived.

Two major milestones in my life, both coming in the same year. So how should i celebrate?

I will hopefully be helping two major charities who also have major anniversaries.

British Heart Foundation will be celebrating their 50th anniversary and Macmillan Cancer Support with be celebrating their 100th anniversary.

Dave Heeley, aka “Blind Dave” will be doing his bit for Macmillan with his Top 2 Toe challenge and it would be great if i could join in with him in some way.

For the Heart Foundation, i may be tempted to do one of these World Challenges.

What do you think i should do?

See me on The Gadget Show

donato — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 19:51:23 +0000

As you may know, i do love my gadgets, so when i was initially contacted by The Gadget Show to appear in the new series, at first i thought it was some kind of wind-up!

They were looking to do a slot about how you can make money from using existing technology in your own home and one of the ideas is by starting your own online T-Shirt shop.

As with a lot of these shows, they look to have an established presenter and an expert in the field they are discussing. 2011 sees the Bostin idea coming to its 10th Anniversary, so i guess that qualifies me as an expert in starting a T-Shirt business from home, as after all, that is what i done.

This year saw the launch of our new service where you can create your own T-Shirt shop in a similar manner as Spreadshirt, Cafe Press and Zazzle to name but a few online services currently available.

Last Thursday saw Ortis Deley and The Gadget Show Crew descend on my house to do the recording for the show that will hopefully appear on Channel 5 in the coming months.

Business Press were so impressed, that i appeared in The Business Desk, The Birmingham Press and Midlands Business News.

As Ortis Deley is ex-CBBC presenter, i’m now in my children’s very cool book as i had “famous guy” round the house for coffee!

Pecha Kucha Nights, Birmingham, UK Vol.2

donato — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 18:57:21 +0000

You may be wondering, what the hell does Pecha Kucha mean? What’s it all about?In a nutshell it’s a presentation that consists of 20 slides and you have 20 seconds per slide and it lasts a total of, well you work out the maths!

Most of us have heard the phrase “death by powerpoint”, yes? Most presentations are dull, too long or both. So a couple of Architects came up with a new format, as in their own words “architects talk too much! Give a microphone and some images to an architect – or most creative people for that matter – and they’ll go on forever! Give powerpoint to anyone else and they have the same problem”

I was given the topic of PASSION by our Birmingham PKN organiser, Jo Hardy and thats all i had. A topic. What i would talk about and the content on my slides was entirely up to myself.

Aswell as myself presenting there was also, James Rock, Kerry Murdock, Marverine Cole, Stuart Garlick, John Kirriemuir, Simon Jesson and Ben Waddington. All of them had great presentations on their take on Passion and presented with passion.

If you are thinking of presenting at a Pecha Kucha there might be a few tips from a beginner as myself:

1. Keep content on each slide brief. You only have 20 seconds. Too much text, images, graphs may be too much to take in for your audience or for you to talk for just 20 seconds.

2. Use images. A picture is worth a 1,000 words. Need i say more?

3. Try and make the slides follow on from each other either by the images, text or words you use to present.

4. Practice, practice, practice. Did i say practice? If you can just turn up with no preparation and have a really good presentation, then maybe you should present on live TV?

5. While presenting, remain focused. Deviating from your notes or waffling will mean your presentation will overrun the 20 seconds as each slide automatically moves on.

6. Have notes on cards. For me it was easy to have 20 cards and move to new card as each slide changed. As with the slides, not too much notes as you don’t just want to read, they should be more as key point(s) to get you to talk on slide being shown. Having notes on one sheet of paper maybe harder to follow as each slide changes.

Going back to what is “death by powerpoint”, maybe if we applied these principles to all presentation, they could be more fun for the presenter and enjoyed more by the audience?

It was a great night and a BIG thank you to Jo Hardy and all the organisers and sponsors. I’m looking forward to the next PKN Birmingham.

Below is my presentation, which was recorded and produced by Jon Randle of Mind Riot Productions.

I hope you enjoy the presentation at least half as much as i enjoyed giving it!

Pecha Kucha Nights | Donato Esposito | Birmingham, UK Vol.2 from MINDRIOT PRODUCTIONS on Vimeo.

Rules of Social Engagement

donato — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 15:37:51 +0000

As we have more and more new tools allowing us to engage with many people using Social Media, i thought it would be an opportune time to share some of the old and trusted rules that, in my opinion, still apply irrespective of platform and medium you use to engage with people.

1. Engage and treat others how you want to be treated yourself

2. Be open, transparent and honest

3. Don’t gossip, make up things, lie or steal

4. Have evidence and be professional

5. Opinions are personal, be gracious, open and respectful and accepting of differences

What do you think? Do these rules of social engagement still apply?

Do you RAOR on Twitter?

donato — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 14:23:16 +0000

No, its not a typo, i do mean RAOR not ROAR.

What is RAOR? Well its quite simply, Random Acts Of Reply.

Following on from my post, How I Use Twitter, one of the ways i connect with people is quite literally randomly.

To some of you, this might sound scary or quite horrifying, but how else in business are you going to grow your network and effectively grow your business unless you speak to people on a random basis?

How do i RAOR?

When i switch Twitter on, there maybe a number of tweets showing on my feed, some are from people I follow and some are retweets (RTs) from people I follow. If a tweet catches my eye, i simply reply to them. The easiest one’s to reply to, is if they are asking a question.

What i find quite amazing, is the number of “well connected” people who only tweet amongst people they know or people they want to get to know.

Maybe they need to add a bit of RAOR to their daily Twitter use?

Is a Smartphone for you?

donato — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 18:33:09 +0000

Having worked with a number of major mobile phone companies and being a Geek at heart, i sent out a Tweet today asking who has any of these smart phones: iPhone4, Android or Blackberry.

I was pleasantly surprised by the speed of replies and can reveal the results from 14 replies:

iPhone4 – 4

Android – 3

Blackberry – 2

Other – 3

None – 2

Not highly conclusive i hear you say?

Well, one of the beauties of Twitter is one of the replies was from Paul Hadley who had conducted a much more thorough survey as part of his MA studies. You can see all the details here>>

If you don’t have a smartphone now, are you planning on getting one in near future?

Tipp-Ex and YouTube

donato — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:31:37 +0000

Every now and then i see something on www and think, WOW! So simple, yet so effective.

Thanks to Claire Ridgway, check out this amazing use of YouTube, A hunter shoots a Bear.

Once you have seen it, i don’t think you need any further explanation.

See how long it takes you to get the video to show Error #404 Request not found.

Share and enjoy!

Social Media lessons learnt

donato — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 18:16:51 +0000

The other week i was catching up with Dominic Sears, whom i met at a networking event in Birmingham organised via LinkedIn a while back.

Aswell as having a nice cup of tea and some cake, Dominic was telling me how grateful he was for some insights and guidance i gave him about Twitter and how he may be able to get some benefits from using Social Media more, even for his business Suttongate Consulting!

Below is an extract from his blog, where he shares with us how he now uses Twitter for his Suttongate business and finding it very useful.

Like most people, I had heard of Twitter long before I appreciated the benefits and started to tweet. I initially had a rather jaundiced and cynical view of it, thinking it was just for a ‘spotty faced’ minority who had ‘nothing better to do with their day’. How wrong I was! The person to whom I owe my eternal gratitude for educating me and showing me the error of my ways is Donato Esposito, a Social Media specialist, who many of you will know as @BostinBloke.

Before I move onto telling you about my experiences from a business perspective, I thought I would discuss the personal aspects of Twitter. Firstly, it is a genuinely useful communication tool; enabling the ‘real time’ conversational aspects of e-mail, but by restricting you to a maximum of 140 characters, none of the waffle or spamming!

It’s also extraordinary the number of famous people you can ‘follow’ on Twitter. I know this will be rather subjective, but personally, I really enjoy following the BBC F1 team; Chris Evans; Dom Joly; Victoria Coren; Caitlin Moran; Dara O’Briain; Professor Brian Cox and Ian Martin (writer on “The thick of it”. And of course, like everyone else I follow Stephen Fry. I also follow Jonathan Meades, but he rarely ‘tweets’ which is a terrible shame!

So what have been the benefits to Suttongate Consulting? In short it has helped to promote my company and generate a huge amount of traffic towards our website. When it was first up and running last year, the site was getting on average seven visits a day during the week and three visits a day of the weekend. Posting discussions on LinkedIn would increase the traffic to around forty to fifty visits a day; but for no more than four or five days in a row. It would then go back to around seven visits a day. By developing a planned marketing campaign on Twitter, my average visits per day, including weekends, is in the 130 visits a day area. Indeed, on several occasions this month, I have had in excess of 170 visits a day!

So how did I achieve this? Well I followed these simple steps:

I identified a social media dashboard which enabled me to schedule tweets, more on this later. I have found Hoote Suite to be the best.
I looked at my website, and identified which pages I wanted to direct visitors to the most. Within these pages, I identified key points, comments or phrases I wanted to draw potential clients’ attention to.
Using these key points, I developed a number of short but catchy strap lines, sound bites, whatever you want to call them, and developed them into a crib sheet on a Word document.
I shortened the URL’s for the relevant page, and attached it to the end of each strap line.
I ran various tests with these tweets, to determine the best times to send them.
Using Hoote Suite, and based on the results of my tests; I scheduled each strap line to be tweeted every twenty to thirty minutes during the day; typically between 7am and 7-9pm.
Each day, I mix up the order of these tweets in order to maintain variety. I do have a specific tweet for first thing in the morning, and three for the end of the day though.
I constantly look to update these tweets to keep them fresh and not bore the audience with the same tweets over a period of time.
I don’t forget to send non-scheduled tweets during the day, as and when the opportunity presents itself.

I am very pleased with the results. Why don’t you try it and tell me what results you get?

Want to find out how to get the best out of Social Media? Feel free to contact me about Kickstart?

7 signs of a Twaddict

donato — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 08:34:04 +0000

So you’ve been on Twitter for a few days, weeks, months or years and may already be a Twitter addict or fondly known as a “Twaddict”

Here are 7 signs that you may be a Twaddict:

1. Tweeted while walking

2. Tweeted while on the toilet

3. Tweeted your spouse when they are in same house

4. Twitpiced what you are about to eat

5. Gone to the pub with your friends and spend more time tweeting rather than talking to them

6. Gone to the pub with your friends and you are all tweeting rather than talking

7. You tweet “Good morning” before you get out of bed

Have you done any of these? All of them?

Do you have any other Twaddict signs?