Family, people, blogging, eating out, wine, the Polish seaside

Robin Hamman

  • Website: www.cybersoc.com
  • Robin is leading the Social Media team at Headshift. He has ten years experience of dreaming up, implementing and managing social media projects. Robin recently left the BBC after six years as Senior Community Producer, having taught his former colleagues how to use social media to engage with, and reach out to new audiences. Robin's role as the BBC's defacto social media guru sent him to all corners of the organisation and, most recently, he was the editorial and technical lead for the BBC's network of 50+ programme and presenter blogs.

    Robin has also gained experience working as an Executive Producer at Granada Television, where he spearheaded strategic social media consulting and new service launches for third party clients including the British Council, several premier league football clubs, the DfES and others. Prior to that, Robin was Community Evangelist for a wireless start-up with a penchant for creating trendy sounding roles.

    A regular speaker at industry and academic conferences, Robin has also written about social media for The Guardian and The Independent and has been interviewed on radio, television and in print in over a dozen countries.

    Robin is a strong believer in the concept of life-long learning. He holds a teaching degree, an MA in Sociology, an MPhil in Communication Studies and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Law. He's also a Non-Residential Fellow at Stanford University's Cyberlaw Department and a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Journalism at City University London where he's also been teaching part-time since Autumn 2008.

    Having two kids under the age of four (before you ask - yes, they have a blog), Robin doesn't have any spare time, but if he did, he reckons he'd spend it traveling, eating out, taking photographs and probably - if he's being dead honest about it - using his mobile to live blog it all as it happened.

    www.cybersoc.com
    www.stalbansblog.co.uk

    You can email robin at robin@headshift.com

  • Posted Conference and events I'm at during March to Blog
    The social media conference season is rapidly heating up and I'm lucky enough to be taking part in some great events this month.On Wednesday I was at CeBit, the World's largest computing tradeshow, in Hanover, Germany, where I participated in...
  • Posted Review of the BBC's New Social Networking Guidelines to Blog
    My former employer, the BBC, has issued new guidelines for the official use of third party social networking and micro-blogging services. The new guidelines should not be confused with the guidelines issued several years ago on the personal use of...
  • Posted Unlocking social media ROI through business transformation to Blog
    Last night I attended one of the Social Media Week events, Show Me the Money: Where's the ROI in Social Media?, a panel discussion organised by Chinwag and hosted by Sun. The discussion, chaired by Andrew Gerrard, included Robin Grant...
  • Posted Learning about social media through experimentation to Blog
    Yesterday, during lunch, I went out and took some photos of the area around Headshift's London headquarters in Shad Thames, just east of the south end of Tower Bridge. When I uploaded them to Flickr, I added notes to each...
  • Posted Aggregation is an opportunity for content providers to Blog
    The Daily Mirror has joined a growing number of newspapers who block a news aggregator, NewsNow, from crawling it's site. The Sun and Times Online had already made similar moves.Having worked in the media industry myself for nearly ten years,...
  • Posted Driving traffic to your blog with twitter to Blog
    Posting links to twitter can drive significant traffic to websites. I recently wrote a comprehensive post aimed at helping organisations and businesses get started blogging. I knew it would be of interest to a lot of people, so when I...
  • Posted How to get started blogging to Blog
    I'm frequently asked, by our clients as well as the MA Journalism students I occasionally teach as part of my role as a Visiting Journalism Fellow at City University, for tips on how to get started blogging. As someone who...
  • Posted Creating customer communities to Blog
    Anyone who follows my movements online will have noticed that I've been rather quiet recently. This is because I have, for the past month or so, been part of a Headshift team, which at various times drew upon the experience...
  • Commented on Your corporate website is irrelevant
    Hi Stephane. That's a good question, and you're probably right - in the B2B world, having a useful corporate website is bound to be more important than in B2C. That said, having a presence elsewhere, for example on Slideshare, certainly...
  • Commented on Curating, not moderating, the flow of content and participation
    Thank you all for your comments, some of which have been really interesting. Ed, looks like an interesting comment. Will get in touch to share some info, and learn from your experience. Kevin, most of the things you point out...
  • Posted Using behavioural data to create compelling content to Blog
    Most owners of social software systems use the data generated through usage in their reporting of metrics. So, alongside the standard metrics such as unique users, page impressions, time spent, etc, social tools often enable actions which can also be...
  • Posted User centred news to Blog
    Hot on the heels of my post yesterday about finding, aggregating and curating content from third party sources, including blogs and social media services, comes word of the Twitter Times which finds and delivers news that's highly relevant to me...
  • Posted Curating, not moderating, the flow of content and participation to Blog
    User generated content is, for many media companies and other organisations, more of a problem than a solution. Vague calls to action lead to waves of irrelevant content submitted by audiences who have taken time, effort, and in some instances...
  • Posted Transparency required to Blog
    Just about everyone I speak to in marketing and PR these days is talking about using blogs and social networking services to engage directly with consumers and other audiences, with many actually doing it - blogging or tweeting for the...
  • Posted What motivates news eyewitnesses to share? to Blog
    Yes, it's the second time The Telegraph has come knocking on our door this week - do these things come in threes?"People in the area affected by the Samoa tsunami', writes The Telegraph's Emma Barnett, 'have been documenting the event...
  • Posted Daily Telegraph asks Headshift: Is London World social media capital? to Blog
    London is, suggests an article by the Telegraph's Emma Barnett, the social media capital of the World. Here's her evidence:10% of traffic to Digg, the link recommendation service, comes from LondonLondon is the largest geographical network on FacebookTwitter has revealed...
  • Posted Social media monitoring - more first step than end game to Blog
    Prior to the rise of mass production and assembly line processes in the latter half of the 20th century, new products and services were often created in response to a direct conversation between consumers and businesses.If a consumer - they...
  • Posted Enabling the social shift from the centre of the flow to Blog
    Over the past couple of months, I've spent a lot of time speaking with, and running training courses for, people in the PR and marketing industries. Their roles are changing because customer expectations are shifting - consumers, constituents, audiences and...
  • Posted Headshift on Al Jazeera News to Blog
    On Monday I was interviewed by Al Jazeera about the use of social media tools, particularly twitter, by protesters in Iran. Here’s the clip:...
  • Posted Your corporate website is irrelevant to Blog
    The days of the monolithic corporate website are numbered. Twentieth century corporate structures, which, to borrow sentiment, if not words from Lee Bryant, put the World's window upon your organisation in the hands of the IT guys in the basement...
  • Posted BBC London mention to Blog
    I quite frequently give presentations and run workshops about blogging. For a taste of the sort I things I cover in those sessions, have a look at the series of 8 posts about using the whole web as your canvas...
  • Posted The impact of twitter on recruitment to Blog
    About six hours ago I used twitter to announce the availability of a paid internship opportunity, being offered through the Channel 4 Diversity Production Scheme, here at Headshift. It's one of a number of internships made available through the scheme.My...
  • Posted Children in virtual worlds study to Blog
    University of Westminster's Lizzie Jackson, an old friend who was my boss when I joined the BBC for the first time back in about 1998, and David Gauntlett have recently completed a wide ranging study on the use of virtual...
  • Posted Comprehensive study of user-generated content at the BBC to Blog
    Returning to more familiar territory following last week's Eurasian Media Conference in Kazakhstan - more on that coming soon - today I'm at an event organised by the BBC, my former employer, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)...
  • Posted Headshift hosting SOMESSO pre-event to Blog
    We are proud to announce our partnership with SOMESSO London, a must-attend event for industry leaders, brand managers, sales and marketing experts, new media specialists, internet marketers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and other financiers. Some excellent speakers are lined up for...
  • Posted Amongst other things, we're connectors to Blog
    Over the past few weeks two interesting things have surfaced time and time and time again in the client workshops, consulting engagements and pitches I've been involved in here at Headshift, namely that:the work we do behind firewall on the...
  • Posted The future of the media is social to Blog
    In addition to doing strategic social media consulting, workshops and training days for clients, I've recently had the pleasure of teaching on several of the postgraduate courses offered by the College of Journalism at City University London where I'm a...
  • Posted Social media training - an online guide to Blog
    One of the best things about my job here at Headshift is that I have various opportunities to inform and enthuse people about the benefits of using social media tools and services to support their existing processes. In order for...
  • Posted One conference, two conference, three conference... to Blog
    Over the past week, I've spent more time at conferences than at Headshift Towers. Last Tuesday was Social Media Influence where Headshift sponsored, and I moderated, a panel on "Having Difficult Conversations". On the panel were our friends Paolo Valdemarin...
  • Posted Twitter: fount of free drinks to Blog
    Over the years I reckon I've tried hundreds of social networking sites, blogging and micro-blogging tools, online participatory spaces, and content sharing services. In most instances I register, set up a profile, have a look around, and abandon all in...
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