Last week I spoke at the launch of Squiz’ new Open Source Social Networking Platform about the business and cultural implications of social networking for publishers.

The event was held at the Royal Society of Arts and it was interesting to see such a wide range of different types of publishers in the room.  There were conventional content publishers, both magazine and on-line, but there were also charities, universities, the RSA themselves and several companies who publish to employees via their intranets.

Social networks and publishing are converging

I believe we’re now seeing a big convergence of platform functionality between the social networking sites and traditional publishers.  After starting out as a pure social network, Facebook is introducing more and more ways for users to upload and share content.  It started out with the wall and now includes groups, photo uploads and many others.  LinkedIn is doing similar things with groups and discussions.

Social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn start from the premise that you already know the people and are therefore going to be interested in the content they are creating.  It’s like going to the pub with your mates and having a gossip.

Publishers understand their audiences

Publishers on the other hand come at social networking from a completely different perspective.  Publishers audiences are bound by a common interest.  Whether that’s the arts, technology, sewing or pregnancy, they consume the publishers content because they are interested in the subject matter.

Some groups are only interested in a transient way, pregnancy communities are, by definition, constantly changing.  Others are more permanent, if you are an Arsenal supporter then it’s for life!  The common theme though is that the community is drawn together by the content and consists of people that share a common interest but don’t necessarily know each other (at first).  It’s much more like a club than a pub.

CMS is evolving

The underlying concepts for social networking (and the requisite technology platform) though are the same.  It’s about connecting people to content and then back to people again to form connections and community.

Squiz along with some of the more enlightened CMS developers are now building this functionality into the CMS platforms and the launch was very well received.  Publishers seem finally to be getting to grips with the concepts and now have the tools to allow them to engage properly with their audiences.

Culture is the key

The biggest barrier is no longer the technology, it’s the culture and willingness to “let go” of the traditional one way broadcast model of publishing and start listening to what the audience have to say.

It takes time to create vibrant communities.  Publishers have to take responsibility for creating the right environment and nurturing the firestarters that will generate the user content.  You can’t just bolt community on to the side of your existing publishing business, culturally or technically.  You have to integrate it into the fabric of your organisation.

Content will always provide a “centre of gravity” for communities that pure social networks will find hard to replicate.  That gives publishers a big opportunity to provide the platform for their communities to engage with them and each other.

This years Byte Night was certainly the biggest and early indications are that it will be the most successful yet raising even more than last year’s £400K total. It was also the coldest I can remember with the temperature down to 2 degrees so everyone earned their sponsorship money although it did stay dry for the night.

Once the photographs start coming through I’ll be posting proof that we were all there, in the meantime, here’s what early morning in central London looks like to Byte Nighters.

It’s not too late to donate even though the event is over so if you’re still interested in boosting the total further then simply click through to the Compound Media justgiving page.

It’s that time of year again and October 3rd will see over 500 people sleeping out in locations around the country in aid of Byte Night. The largest event will be in London where we’ll once again be camping on the Mayor’s lawn on the banks of the Thames. This year, the Byte Night Local concept has spread to Reading, Edinburgh, Birmingham and Manchester where local teams will also be braving the elements.

It’s the IT industry coming together to help combat youth homelessness and we’re once again proud to be the largest single fundraising event for Action for Children who recently re-branded from NCH.

It’s still not too late to join us if you want to take part in a great evening, alternatively, you could just sponsor me to be cold and wet for one night of the year.

Hot on the heels of our gong for “Best Landing Page” at the APA Creative Awards, the Your family site has been nominated for an AOP award in the category of “Best launch”.

Great to be recognised at the digital awards, the one everyone wants to win.  We’re up against some prestigious competition in The Guardian, IPC, Channel 4 and Hearst digital but who knows after last years victory for ZDNet?

Whatever the outcome, it’s always a great night out and a chance to catch up with all the gossip in the on-line publishing world.

Well, how surprised were we last night when at the APA Creative Awards, the new Your family site beat the likes of Tesco and BA to the “Best landing page” award?

Very! that;s how…

Only a few weeks after launching the site, we’ve already won our first award which is great news and bodes well for the future.

The Redwood team were all very excited and much champagne was consumed with the added bonus that the NSPCC team were in attendance too to see the victory. The party went on until late and it’s fair to say that the office is quite subdued today although everyone is admiring the nice shiny trophy.

Today we signed off the final bugs on our biggest project to date, launching a new parenting advice site for the NSPCC to supplement their “Your Family” magazine. It’s been a labour of love for sure (see my silicon.com column) and over a year in gestation but it’s live and working and looking great.

It’s a really clever mix of “Heat” styling but full of very high quality parenting advice all backed up by a team of experts at NSPCC. It’s a crowded market but the high level of trust endowed by the NSPCC brand should see us carve out a niche in the sector. We’ve got articles, videos, product reviews and loads of suggestions for family days out now that the summer is here.

Needless to say there are a large number of people to say thanks to for making my fist major site build a success. All the editorial and account management team at Redwood who write the content, NSPCC for the opportunity to do the project and the guys at Squiz who built the site on their open source MySource Matrix CMS.

In building the site we’ve invested heavily in the platform and hosting so that now we’re able to provide a fully hosted, enterprise level CMS. This is ideal for smaller publishers who want to get on-line without the expense of software licensing and hardware purchase. Look out for a further announcement about the launch of the “Compound Enterprise Platform” soon.

In the meantime, if your kids won’t eat their tea tonight or go to bed on time without a tantrum, take a look at www.yourfamily.org.uk and see where you’re going wrong…

This is the first in a series of posts reflecting on some of the key learnings from a recent project to take an established print publication on-line. I had originally started penning a long article about what we’d learned but quickly realised that it lends itself nicely to shorter, more focussed pieces so here is the first: -

Taking your print publication on-line is a scary business. I know, I’ve just been through the process, hence the lack of recent activity on the blogging front.

For the average print publisher, moving on-line is daunting. The digital community has created a brave new world, where the natives speak a different language. To the uninitiated, this makes almost impossible to determine who knows what they are talking about, and who are the equivalent of dodgy second hand car salesmen.

Should you embrace video? what about user generated content, social networking, widgets, Web 2.0 and all the other buzzwords that get bandied around in the press and amongst the knowledgeable bloggers?

One safe route for print publishers venturing on-line would be to look to one of the digital agencies to guide them through the maze. After all, the agencies are at the forefront of the on-line world and should be best placed to advise on design, architecture and strategy.

However, having worked on a number of projects now with the agency community, I think that far from them being able to provide all the answers, the publishers actually know a lot more than they realise. The best projects are those where the two sides listen to each other and respect their specialist knowledge.

Lesson 1 - It’s a combination of the digital marketers knowledge of the landscape combined with the publishers understanding of their content and audience that creates the “magic soup”

Now all the beans have been counted and totals added up, the great news is that we broke the £400,000 barrier for monies raised by the participants of this year’s Byte Night event.

The most amazing thing of all is that with the dedication of the board, sponsors and NCH, the costs of staging the event worked out at less than 10% of the total.

Byte Night Local contributed around £40,000 with satellite events in Reading and Essex and we’ll be pushing hard to expand on this next year.

A big thanks to all the teams involved and we’re already looking forward to next year’s event so be sure to put the 3rd October in your diary now

This year’s Byte Night was the most successful yet with over £340,000 pounds raised by around 270 people from the IT industry sleeping out for the charity NCH.

We were in good company with Martin Linton, MP for Battersea, Lib Dem MP Simon Hughes, actresses Lindsey Coulson and Jenny Agutter, Trinny Woodall critiqued our pyjamas and Sian Lloyd provided a weather report on the evening.

As predicted by Sian, the weather was kind to us with no rain and a pretty mild night for October and the Compound Media team managed to raise more than £4,000 with a last minute surge in donations meaning we beat our target.

I want to say a big thank you to the team and to all our sponsors who gave so generously, we’re already planning how to raise even more next year…

Sometimes, when you are months into a big project with a long time still to go to launch, you wonder if it’s all worth it. Will anyone notice? Was that big idea we had really the right one? What if somebody launches before you and steals your thunder?

Were you were mad to even set out on a path in the first place?

I’m sure we all have those doubts and there were plenty of times in the development of the new ZDNet site that I questioned my sanity.

I say new but in fact it’s been nearly a year since we launched (it’s one year old on 30th October) and last night at the AOP Awards, the publishing industry voted ZDNet.co.uk “Best Business Website 2007″

The judges said: -

“This site has displayed a fantastic use of web 2.0 and is in tune with the user. Really revolutionary, with a thinking behind the site that is streets ahead of its peers”

Amazing really that a site conceived nearly two years ago should be praised for being ahead of it’s time even now. When we started out on the project, some of what we were doing was completely unproven and we had no idea if it would work.

Last night proves that we weren’t mad (well not much) and that we had a vision that has become the benchmark for other publishers. It’s nice to know that somebody noticed as well.