Data & Stuff

It’s New Years eve, a year ago I was on a beach in Thailand at a Full Moon party. This year I’m in Birmingham and writing this – after all NYE is just another night,

That said, I’m really looking forward to what 2010 can bring, and have set myself some resolutions.

These are available for all to see at http://2010resolutions.tumblr.com – one of those resolutions is all about keeping track of the content I create.

After all we post up pictures, record audio and video, write blog posts and people write about us. It would be nice to take ‘control’ over it. Therefore I’ve setup : http://ThisIsMyContent.co.uk which is designed to pull in items from:

• TwitPic (and also tweets with a twitpic – to get the description)
• Delicious – Items I comment on, and things about me
• Qik (Videos)
• AudioBoo
• Last FM
• http://rasga.co.uk
• http://food.rasga.co.uk
• http://2010resolutions.tumblr.com
• http://yetanothergin.co.uk
• and anywhere else I start putting content.

I’m not pulling in my tweets, or facebook related items till I can find a good way to organise them.  Ideally for twitter a daily ‘post’ that is an archive of my tweets perhaps.

In a years time I’ll be able to have a rich archive of my online life.

Thats the plan anyway.

In Birmingham, we are fortunate enough to have a variety of nice coffee places. Such as Hudsons, Saint Caffe and Urban Coffee. The later is one of the more sociable companies I’ve come across.

Sociable, in the sense of user engagement and interaction.

From a historic perspective, I was only aware of them as they had followed me on Twitter – before they had actually opened the shop. The fact that they were to be located around the corner from my office made me interested, and I awaited their coffee and also how they would use their Twitter account.

What I’ve spotted @UrbanCoffeeCo get upto:

-When people ask where they are – they respond back with directions, and even a map now and again.
-When someone got a new job – they were congratuated.
-If people visit, they ask how it was

Through my circle of friends, I’ve only heard good things about it, but with the internet and their twitter account so have a lot of other people. The fact that people can say “I’m off to @urbancoffee” can lead to interest in their followers.

They also seem to ‘get’ how they can use twitter:

I can’t quite remember exactly when they opened, but you can see a consistant tweeting effort by the company, that said, when I’m on holiday in Oct they did go a bit quiet

Now their target market is going to be the people in and around the Colmore Business area, or living in the locale. Which ties in with the tweeting occurring mainly in and around their hours, and key ‘peak’ times – like lunches and late afternoons on the weekends.

Yet it’s not all one way traffic, the brand respond, and also alert followers to things of interest. Whether it be the latest filter on, the soup of the day etc:

What it shows is that by simply engaging with your users, and they will engage back.

Lately they are offering whoever is Mayor of the coffee shop a free coffee once a week. Which is encouraging people to ‘check in’ with Foursquare, and when they do – their friends know exactly where they are – helping spread the word about the coffee shop, and of course you can only be mayor by visiting the most in the last 60 days. . . so a lot of coffee will end up being drunk.

They are encouraging people to use Foursquare, and it will be interesting to see how other Birmingham Businesses start to use Foursquare, and whether they have similiar customer interactions.

What are your experiences of Urban Coffee Co, and other businesses that have a web presence?

Visualisations from:
Tweet Reach
Tweet Stats
Twitter Stream Graphs –May appear, server unresponsive.
Tweet Paste