One: I’ve signed up at goodreads.com. My first review is of Donald Sturrock’s Road Dahl bio Storyteller. I recommend it, and wrote a review over there.

Most interesting to me was Dahl’s view of himself as an outsider, never conforming to any individual’s or the literary establishment’s expectations, and the fact that he  came to writing later in life. His time as a pilot in the war and as a diplomat in Washington were facinating, and I got the feeling Sturrock could have added more gossip and scandal in this section – I’m intrigued!

Two: I totally made this for dinner last night, taking this fine recipe and adding chickpeas and sausages.

It all started with a tweet:

This got a few comments, TV3 changed theirs, a hashtag was born, and before long, it became a *thing*.

The retro avatars fell into three categories - corporates, who went through the brand crypt to find logos past, people who uploaded old pop culture references, and baby photos. By 3.30pm the next day, the internet had been expanded by:

335 tweets tagged #retroavatarfriday

96 photos in a Facebook album

127 @replies to @telecomnz

It even trended in Auckland and Wellington:

trendsmap.com screenshot from around 3.30pm Friday 18 February 2011

So – what did we learn?

It wouldn’t have been possibile without CateOwen, Mediawork’s savvy Social Media Strategist, who picked up on our challenge, and gave it a hashtag. Classy move.

This was a simple way to have some fun with a low barrier to entry (I WAS pretty amazed at the amount of people who had ready access to digital baby photos!). Everyone loves nostalgia, and tweeters seeing each other in bad knitwear and haircuts was a real hoot. Friday factor helped too, I reckon, everyone’s in a relaxed, optimistic mood on Friday, aren’t they?

Could you do this again? Probably. Would it work every time? I doubt it, and I think it’s easy to outstay your welcome on these, you run the risk of being seen to try too hard. The simplest ideas are the best ones, aren’t they?

Was it good for Telecom, and the other corporates involved? I think so. Spot, the face of our marketing in the early 90s got a lot of compliments – while brands are important and big business, it’s all about what people *feel* about you at the end of the day. Hopefully this shows we’re human, confident and don’t take ourselves *too* seriously.

Is this big, for this kind of thing? I don’t know.

Was it fun? Yes – the most important part of Social Media is the social, innit?

Selfishly, I’d like to have tried this on a day that Webstock wasn’t on – with Wellington’s digerati involved instead of sitting in a conference pecking away at their phones, it could have gained even more momentum.

So thanks for everything Spot – there’s life in the old dog yet.

I’ve been experimenting, trying to make the best thin base pizza I can at home. I’d heard that Italian pizza is about the crust, not the topping, the same way Italian pasta is about the pasta, not the sauce. I wanted on board. With much trial and error, using me Dad’s basic bread-in-a-breadmaker* recipe:

…I’ve been able to consistently produce a tasty, if slightly doughy-crusted pizza like this:

…in our oven at home in about 15 minutes, cranking the heat up as far as it’ll go and using a pizza stone.

What I REALLY want is a thinner, crispier pizza base, Italian / New York style, the kind of thing Tom Ripley would have in Napoli.

So, when I was entertaining at the beach, with access to a BBQ with a hood, it was time to try out my theory that a hooded BBQ would produce enough heat to really get a pizza cranking. I used friend-of-sportreview.net.nz Giovanni Tiso‘s fine pizza recipe to produce four adult size bases, and one for the bambina, using the trusty wine-bottle-as-rolling-pin method.

With hood down and all three burners cranked right up for about ten minutes, we were ready. Using one of those non-stick BBQ / baking sheets to cover the flames, the first couple of bases took five minutes each and were a little charred on the bottom – but still came out proper crispy and light. After turning the heat down, the last three came out just fine after six or seven minutes each, if a little under-done on top. A couple of minutes under the grill would have finished the job nicely, but everyone was too hungry for any of that carry-on.

I was pleased with the results, and feedback from the diners was encouraging. I’ll try this again, probably using a pizza stone.

Next experiments at home include using the fancy ’0′ type flour I picked up at Farro’s and the NY Times’ ‘fry it in a frypan and stick it under the grill’ recipe.

* minus the wholemeal

And ‘they’ ‘said’ it ‘couldn’t’ be ‘done’.

Popular goat farmer @vaughndavis wrote Tweet This Book, a book about social media.

I wanted to interview him for Telecom’s co. magazine, so I put new batteries in my dictaphone and suggested we meet up for a chat. Vaughn gently suggested I was clearly off my tits on printer’s ink, and that we should do the interview through social channels.

So we did. Here it is so far.

Clearing out my phone’s photo gallery.

If you look at this photo while standing next to the oven on 230 degrees on fan bake, you’ll get an idea of how hot it was this day, but with less cooling breeze.

This thing made us move out of our fishing spot in the Tauranga harbour channel.

Mine charming lunch companion who granted a couple of fan bois an audience.

The wee fella tries to run away from his old man’s architecturally unsound creation.This took ages!

It was very tempting to just stay there for the day, let me tell you.

OK, so it turns out I’m a Social Media conference slag. Hot on the heels of the last one, I packed my little bag and headed to Sydney for iStragegy 2010. Travelling with work is still a novelty to me, I haven’t really got that whole, jaded “Oh GOD, not Sydney AGAIN!” thing down – I was very excited to go. We stayed in the lovely Sheraton On the Park, as part of the conference, and while it was a fabulously well appointed hotel, we didn’t see much of Sydney itself at all. Next time.

The speakers were slightly more international, as you’d expect, with representatives from Microsoft and Google, as well as Australian companies like Red Balloon, Fox Sports, Commonwealth Bank, Earth Hour and Contagious Communications, to name just a few. Topics were skewed toward marketing online, as well as using social in corporates, the bit I was interested in.

I learned heaps – main points were these (your views may vary, depending on your context, etc):

No one person ‘owns’ social media in a corporate – it sits across too many disciplines. You can have people there to guide it, but it’s a team effort

Facebook and Twitter are just tactics, your approach and strategy need to be broader than just having a presence in these channels

Often social values of openness and sharing are diametrically opposed to corporate values of intellectual property and retaining information to gain commercial advantage – it’s a big leap to make to be a truly social organisation

Agencies can be hard – they’re not there every day. We need to challenge agencies to think end to end, and long term, not just by campaign; customers need the same message from us no matter what channel, ie web, social, bus shelter, mobile, video game, tv, radio, print, PR

One of the most interesting presentations was from Myspace – yes, Myspace. If you haven’t had a look at their site lately, go have a look, it’s changed loads, going from 130 logos and 170 templates to one logo and seven templates, add their agreement with Facebook mean your profile can auto-populate with your Facebook likes.They’re attempting to become first social network to turn around a huge failure. Worth a look.

Other stuff:

Check out @kellynoble’s twitter updates to find out pretty much everything that happened at the conference. Good god, this woman can tweet.

Gatorade Replay was one of the case studies – this looks awesome.

Adam Burns MC’d the conference with style and a dry wit. Give him a TV show! Hang on – he has one!

I won a totally sweet Four Square apron, for leaving the best iStrategy tip. Ahem. I am now mayor of wherever I go, pretty much.

Thoughts from Social Media Junction.

I had my first experience at *talking* at a conference in my new role as Telecom’s Online Community Comms Manager – that’s community manager in less words. The theme was “Kiwi brands and social media – differing ways to achieve ROI”, along with folk from Hell, Tui, Bullet PR and the awesome @simonemccallum. I thought I went OK – I got to say most of the things I wanted to, and tell our Online Response Team story. I worry about the wild variation in the companies involved, ie two corporates, a PR agency and beer and pizza. Different perspectives I guess.

Non-attendees were tweeting they didn’t want updates from a conference they weren’t at – and taking the piss. That was funny, because I was, ah, taking the piss last time. Ah har. To me, the most value in conference tweets comes from people adding their own commentary to what’s going on, and even having conversations with each other, not parroting what the speakers are saying. I appreciate that non-contextual tweets are annoying if you’re not involved. I guess the options are to do some kind of clever blocking thing in tweet deck, or just, like, skim over the tagged ones – aren’t we web 2.0 types meant to be information scanning ninjas?

There was a projector displaying the hashtagged tweets up in the wall, in full view of us panelists. I tell you what, I was watching that thing like a hawk for ‘@telecomnz has fliez down lol’ or the like. Distracting. Luckily it went down only a few minutes into our preso…

My top three presenters were Louise Denver from Deloitte (check out their preso), Simon Wakeman from Medway council, who has similar issues with Facebook groups to us (“Medway Council are fuckin shit” was one that caught my eye) and Darren Whitelaw, who presented on Victorian bushfire crisis comms. For me, shit hitting fan usually means it’s going to be an exciting day at work, so Darren’s presentation was very valuable. In all three, it seems these organisations were experiencing similar issues to us.

No-one’s got measurement sorted out. Felt like people were waiting for a silver bullet, but you’d be better off with this. Drawing board.

I’m crap at networking. I like talking to people, I don’t like saying ‘excuse me, I want to stop talking to you and go talk to… those people over there’. Still, I didn’t get to talk to everyone I wanted to – next time.

You, too, can Mad Men yourself