So you want a mortgage, so how much do you really spend?

Though it's not officially confirmed that this will happen, a number of the newspapers are reporting the fact that the FSA want to push through new checks for mortgage applications. The main one is that applicants will be "forced" to prove their spending habits including such wonderful matters as childcare and drinking (not that the two are linked).

In the good old days anyone with an ounce of sense could cobble up a basic spreadsheet with their income and basic outgoings and that normally kept the bank manager happy.
I was thinking of taking it a little further. Opt in to carry a Tesco Clubcard or Nectar card with you from 3-6 months and prove your spending habits. Then let the bank mine your data prior to getting a decision. Yes it can be mildly fixed that everyone is on their best behaviour for those six months but you'd still get an idea of what the general basket size of the applicant is each week.

It won't be long before a quick mine of Twitter and Facebook data will also show predictive modelling. If you are posting up photos of yourself pee'd up to the nines on Facebook on a Sunday afternoon then there's a good chance you went on a bender Friday/Saturday night. Just check the timestamps of new activity in the photo stream and you can get an idea of the drinking patterns in no time.

Sweeping generalisations, yes. All in the realms of possiblilty? Yes.

Social Media Training: I don't see the need for it.

This might rattle some cages..... (here's hoping anyway).

I was approached a while ago about teaching Twitter to anyone who really wanted it.  The organisation wanted to target beginners and that was fine by me.  No one signed up.  No skin off my nose to be honest.  Then pondering it yesterday evening and today, there was no real need for it in the first place.

What does it really take to introduce someone to Twitter? Not a lot, that's what.

• Go to www.twitter.com
• Click on "Join Up"
• Create an account
• Type something in that big box at the top.

Congratulations, you are now on Twitter....  You'll eventually get the hang of all the retweets, replies and direct messages in very little time.  If you desperate to find your friends and follow them there's even a link called "find people" that will do some searching for you.

Do I need to pay a company to tell me all this? No I don't.  Nor does the rest of the population.

More to the point if you are a business

TWITTER DO THEIR OWN BUSINESS TWITTER GUIDE!

Facebook is just the same....

• Go to www.facebook.com
• Click Join Now
• Go through the process
• Wait for the email and then activate your account.
• Find your friends and start telling them stuff.

Easy.

Even using the for business there's not much to hinder your progress with a few hours will invested work, just see how everyone else is doing it.  If you feel the need to go and either buy a book or sign up for a hugely expensive course to explain the above then that's fine.  Go ahead and have a nice day, you're basically paying for lunch and the venue.  What the course providers often don't tell you is the case for NOT signing the company up to Twitter or Facebook so you become the easy information prey of your competitors.

If you want to ask me questions on Twitter/Facebook then fire away, I don't mind answering for free.  It only takes a few moments of my time, or collar me at an Open Coffee Coleraine meeting or something.  But this coughing up of £200+ quid just to be taught what someone spent an hour looking up on the net.... pull the other one.

The great Twitter user purge

I went on a Twitter purge today. It was all down to something I noticed last night, I'd reached a tipping point where it was becoming difficult to maintain a meaningful amount of data coming in.

I'm not on Twitter to data mine, I changed my mind about that a few weeks ago. But out of the 146 people I was following, how many was I having a contract of information with? About four all in all. To be fair I've made some new contacts in Northern Ireland, creatives that I didn't know existed etc. The rest was just turning into link bait, shameless advertising and pointless content. It's creating content for contents sake.

What got me thinking? Well I had about fifteen alerts from Twitter saying that folk had added me, why had then added me? No idea, more than likely to bump the numbers up and not based on anything I was actually saying. So why am I adding folk I don't really know, what value are they adding to my knowledge? Very little, so I went on a purge.

It's not just limited to Twitter, I found the same with Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Bebo. How many of these contacts are actually meaningful? How many will add value for me in the long turn?

Since the Facebook redesign I hardly log in, only to keep in touch with a handfull of folk that I'd normally talk to (ie, I have already had a face to face conversation with them BEFORE adding them on Facebook).

Back to a simple life I think. Try and reduce the paper in my office, get all the CD's on to some form of media player. Try and live a bit simpler.