After about 30 minutes i came to update my details on Flipboard but couldn’t find where i did this. In the end i deleted the account and then recreated it again, this time with the new password.

As far as im aware this is the only way to do it but if anyone else knows of a better way please let me know.

One of the biggest pressures is for businesses to generate leads and hit projected lead volumes, which in most cases were signed off months previous.

At the moment most 2011-2012 communication plans I’m seeing have a large portion of spend on social media, with some really good ideas on using this channel. However a lot of the time, businesses are still having to measure and justify spend to finance teams in terms of lead volumes and targets. This obviously doesn’t sit comfortably with a long term social media strategy, which should be focused on value.

My advice to anyone in this situation is to hold your nerve, look at your social media objectives and let them dictate what the most effective way of measuring success. Don’t let finance dictate on how social media will be measured or you will find yourself bringing unnecessary pressure on your team if social media is being benchmarked against projected lead volumes. Worse still is if this then leads to social media being dismissed as an effective channel.

So be strong and rebel against using old measurements to gauge the effectiveness of social media. Instead look at educating the business, particularly finance departments on new methods of measurement. Show them that social media should be a seam running through the entire business with every area needed to be involved for it to be most effective.

Well this week before, the night before a big meeting I thought ’sod it’ and left it plugged into my Thinkpad. Next morning when I unplugged it, hey presto it was fully charged. I even tested it to make sure it wasn’t a false reading.

So anyone with a laptop ignore the ‘not charging’ message, it’s charging.

My faith in wave was rewarded with the good news that Google Wave is now available in their app. So why this important?

Today I have just been at an all agency meeting with one of our big clients. It was down in London and was the result of a few weeks of collaboration between the agencies, gathering our ideas and presenting back to the client.

The meetings leading up to this were the usual mixture of face-to-face and conference calls with contact reports from the various agencies. This is all tried and tested stuff which has always worked well but there are some things which fall between the cracks or you think of after the event waiting for the next opportunity to air them. Often the agenda moves on and your left trying to shoehorn the idea in.

Where we work with several agencies we have started to produce the contact reports in Google Wave and sharing these amongst the teams, allowing them to comment on any of the points raised after the meetings or following up on any outstanding actions.

Is it working?

Yes although its still probably too early to tell. We have found that the account managers/directors that like to adopt new practices have been the first to try. If nothing else it’s meant an increased awareness and downloading of Google Chrome because I think this is the most stable browser to run it. Secondly it’s demonstrated to the client the forward thinking nature of all of the agencies they work with.

Lastly and this is the biggest measure of it’s success, we have seen points raised at meetings that have an outstanding actions being followed up and documented better and more detailed than a traditional contact report. It’s also allowed people to read and visualise how the conversation has developed since the original meeting, something that usually happens offline.

So what next?

The next step for us is to keep using it and see how it performs further down the process. I’m keen to see how useful it will be after the planing has been done and the creative has been executed and we look back at those earlier discussions and ask did we nail it and if not cN we see where the gaps are? Time will tell.

Normally this would be done on my laptop using a wifi hotspot spot on my o2 dongle but not this time, all of the above was done on my iPad, including the meeting, which i managed without the need for power cable or print out. Not only this but the impact i had in the meeting and in the wider office after, simply by using this tool was more than any presentation on a laptop ever could.

Even when the hype dies down and everyone has one, simply put the iPad is a game changer for the way i do business. Never again will i see my laptop as the first option when presenting. If any more evidence is needed, last Friday, the day after i got it, The Raft won another project, simply by a client seeing a slide deck on-screen and him realising the potential for his sales force using this tool and the image it projected about the company.

Don’t get me wrong there are still a few niggles with iPad, the occasional freeze in the Wordpress app, Keynote not being quite as good as the full version on the Mac and one today of not being able to see a Flash banner on a clients site but these are vastly out wayed by the benefits and that’s coming from someone whom has never owned or even considered buying an apple computer!

So whats next?

More of the same, in fact i am due to receive the VGA lead tomorrow so i can route it through the plasmas etc. This is so im ready in time for a crucial client, all agency meeting on Monday. Im hoping no one else will be using an iPad to present and can still squeeze the last ounce of juice from the impact of using it. Maybe i will update this post on how it performed…