media brands

Nice feedback on my ALPSP presentation…

August 6, 2009 By Dan Thornton

Always good to get some nice feedback…

‘Dan Thornton provided a particularly insightful introduction to online
communities at a recent ALPSP seminar. The detailed analysis of the
available options for publishing in its varied forms provided an exciting
launch pad for the day itself and provided food for thought for the many
academic publishers attending the event.’

Nick Evans, Chief Operating Officer, Association of Learned and Professional
Society Publishers (www.alpsp.org)

The slides in question are ‘Building online communities to support successful media brands’.

My presentation on building online communities

July 9, 2009 By Dan Thornton

I was invited to speak about ‘Building online communities to support successful media brands’ on Tuesday by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, as part of an event covering what Scholarly Publishing can learn from other industries.

As the opening act, and with a subject so huge, I opted to go for a fairly general overview to hopefully inspire more people to give it a go without worrying about the ‘correct’ way to do things – because I’ve found that beyond some simple principles, the most important thing is tailoring what you do to your specific community.

In retrospect I probably could have included some more specific case studies – for instance Absolute Radio on Twitter and Facebook! But that’s why I subtitled it ‘a work in progess’ because anything on online communities is going to need constant revision and updating, and I intend to create v2.0, v3.0 etc and hopefully involve some more people to create a more comprehensive guide.

Building Online Communities To Support Successful Media Brands – ALPSP July 2009 from Dan Thornton

Speaking to learned professionals…

June 10, 2009 By Dan Thornton

I’m not sure what the exact crossover might be between the wonderful people spending time reading this blog and the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, but just in case…

I’ll be speaking as part of a Seminar on July 7, 2009, Online Communities – What can scholarly publishing learn from other industries? The focus of my time is currently titled ‘Building successful communities to support successful media brands’, but that’s likely to be a starting point for showing how successful communities really are the brand.

It’s really interesting for a few reasons: –

Firstly it’s an industry I haven’t worked in, so I’m likely to learn as much from the people attending as they will from me.

Secondly, there’s a fun edge by allowing attendees to invest virtual money in investment opportunities presented by the speakers .

And thirdly, the other speakers are all people I’m going to be interested in meeting – Pam Sutherland from Oxford University Press (also the chair of the event), Alex Evans (CTO and Co-founder of Media Molecule – creators of LittleBigPlanet for the Playstation 3), Ros Lawler from Random House, Phil Archer from W3C Mobile Web Initiative, Steve Paxhia from Beacon Hill Strategic Solutions and Gail Robinson from TSL Education Ltd.

So it’s going to be quite a challenge to claim the virtual money, but it’s one I’m ready for!