Throughout the two days Twitter's #cms2011 was buzzing, and the event's talking points of course included mobile delivery, Paywalls (FT and Wall Street Journal have successful payment models already in place, when and how will others follow suit?), and Google showcased its OnePass innovation. Speakers included surprise star guest Arianna Huffington (who, pop trivia fans, apparently my dad used to hang out with back when she was a Stassinopoulos), alongside The Undertones' Feargal Sharkey (now CEO of UK Music), The Guardian's brilliant Dan Catt, and BBC technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones.
For those of you who couldn't attend what was an expert-stuffed and soundbyte-heavy couple of days, I've summarised some of the most relevant talking points for our team, and some fun little tidbits as well:
- We should be doing more with foursquare. I can hear a few of you groaning right now, but Dennis Crowley, foursquare's puppydog-like CEO did an impressively energetic job of telling us why we really should stick with it. His vision for foursquare is to be the new Microsoft 'Clippy' - but instead of being an annoying pop-up that pesters you at all the wrong times, its services will instead assist you when you're out, to remind you of places you've noted that you'd like to visit, foods you can eat, friends you could see in the area etc. Macmillan has plenty of opportunities to take advantage of foursquare asap in loads of ways. Big Mix and World's Biggest Coffee Morning are obvious starting points...c'mon, what's stopping us?
- Ever heard of Stardoll? All the rage with fashion-conscious 9 year olds. I'd like to pick the brains of Stardoll's inspirational CEO Mattias Miksche for advice about how we can best manage our online youth forums, as he's been running an impressive show at Stardoll from the looks of it. He also had some fairly simple sounding solutions to some of the troublesome issues we often face on our online communities...
- Giftastranger.net - I loved this idea from Happiness Brussels agency. If you didn't spot this when the idea was originally released at the end of 2010, then take a look. Basically, they decided that instead of a company Christmas card they'd do something a little different: give people the chance to send a random gift to a random address anywhere in the world. What's more, the site itself is as simple as can be. Another one of Happiness's creations is the brilliant Talking Tree.
