my online strategy for 2008

Well, it’s actually going to be my overall strategy for 2008, but anyway, here goes. 2007 has been an odd year for me, with the defining factor being that I haven’t had enough money to get by. That means all kinds of things I wanted to do I couldn’t, or had to cut back on. Like photography. I haven’t had a 35mm film developed since April. And the SX-70 has not been out of the cupboard all year. That is a crying shame. I had to drop my Flickr pro account. And this blog nearly went out the window, until I shuffled some stuff to keep it online. It is still costing me too much but it is such a central part of what I do know it would be almost impossible to give it up. So its stays. But even though the financial situation hasn’t improved, I am determined that it is not going to alter my ability to plan for the year ahead. With the above in mind, my strategies for next year will be:

1. More art. I let my creative side dry up a bit last year, mostly because of lack of cash for materials and lack of time to do stuff in. Not in 2008. I am going to find the money from somewhere. Art is part of how I define myself, its part of me. I find it hard to stop being creative and if I don’t make something, anything for a while I start to lose it a bit. So I am going to spend more time taking photos, drawing, making sculptures, looking at sunsets, daydreaming and generally doing all the things I haven’t been doing. I am now Chair of the South(bank) Bristol Arts, so I suppose I ought to be producing some art. I have started working on a sculpture. And I ought to do some more work on that book I started drawing for.
2. I want to develop this blog so that it is more personal. I think it need more of me and my life here, it seems a little impersonal sometimes. So it will get a makeover sometime soon, with a new focus, me, possibly a new name and a new identity. I want to blog more so expect more of a story here about what goes on in my life.
3. Social networking. 2007 saw me using Twitter and Jaiku and Pownce and Facebook and Ning, and, well, you get the message. Seemed to be a tidal wave of social networks. Some have fallen out of use somewhat, but Twitter and Facebook seem to be very important. So I will continue to use social network tools, although I feel that I ought to cut back a bit. And I need to concentrate again on Ning. Going to further develop my microbrand!
4. Technology. Going to continue working on SharePoint 2007 at work, and I expect that is going to grow even more in the next year to take up even more of my time. I don’t want the technology to take over so much next year, so I am going to play down the tech side in my life, although will still blog about it here to get it out of my system.

So that’s it. More talking, more art, more focus. Seems easy, but as a wise man once said "no plan survives contact with the enemy" so it might get watered down somewhat as the year progresses. Happy 2008 to you.

social networking – learning from shopkeepers

I took the day off today, but part of that deal is that I walk my son Connor to school. It’s a nice little stroll, so that’s OK. We take an amble down the little high street here on the way. On the way back I often pop into the bakers and buy some bread or if I’m feeling flush into the deli for something nice there. These are small, locally owned businesses, with nice people behind the counter who will chat with you about what they sell. They will tell you about new stuff they are selling, or things that are coming. Sometimes it’s just chit chat, nothing much of any depth, but it gives you a good feeling when you come out of the shop. It’s the same at the butchers, where unless it’s Saturday you can spend too long chatting. The queues on Saturday mean they don’t have time.

What these small businesses are all doing is something that comes naturally to small shopkeepers. We used to call it “passing the time of day” or even just being polite. But now of course we would call it social networking. Actually for a small shopkeeper it’s a crucial part of their business. The butcher has more time to talk in the week, fewer people come in, but he takes the time to chat even though I am sure he has a 101 things he could be doing. I wonder if that is why he is so busy on a Saturday? Everyone comes in on Saturday. You have to queue outside and up the street, even with three people serving. What this butcher knows, along with anyone who has run a shop, is that you might not sell a lot on that particular time to that person who comes in and then ends up chatting, but they will more than likely be back when they have got more money to spend.

It’s a different story down the road in the Aldi. Don’t get me wrong, they have a place in the retail market and thats OK. But their sales are mostly based on the low cost of the items they sell, and not the experience people have when they go into the store. If they based it on that they would be empty! It is a grim place really, and the staff are – well, busy. A security guard follows you around. It’s hard to believe we are at the end of the same road that I mentioned above. What Aldi have is a low cost business and that is reflected in the service. There is no conversation. Cheap food, yes.

Now I am not advocating that Aldi closes it’s stores and open corner shops, but what if..IF.. they had some way of having some kind of conversation with their customers. Obviously the people on the checkout can’t chat to everyone, the queues would be terrible. But what if they could use social networking software to have that conversation? How would that change Aldi’s business? How would it affect the way that I think about them? Would it make me want to go in there more often? If there was a name, a face, a person who could listen to people, talk, explain their point of view, would that improve the experience? How about your business?

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Tags: business2.0, networking, social,

business 2.0

Having written about business 1.0 being an undesirable state of being for a company, I suppose the next thing to do is identify what makes a company business 1.0 and how you can transform your company into a business 2.0 organisation.

We all know business 1.0 organisations. We deal with them all the time. They are the ones who try to get your money off of you for as little effort on their part as possible.

Then there are the business 2.0 organisations. What is a business 2.0 company? Well, they aren’t necessarily new in the sense that they’ve just been formed. They could be quite an old or established company. No – a 2.0 company is one that thinks and acts in new ways. Just what does that entail?

So what companies are business 2.0?

• Google
• Innocent Smoothies Ltd
• Apple?
• Dyson
• Patagonia (clothing company)

What do they do? They give people what they want. Good service. That is the key. Without all of the ‘secret’ hidden stuff that others do – The ones who charge for all the hidden extras, or stuff you don’t want – who have employees who seem to have joined straight after the Ark – whose idea of customer service is to do the least amount possible just to get the money.

These new companies are happy places to work. business 2.0’s companies are nice to their employees as well as being nice to their customers. They don’t unnecessarily pollute the environment. They don’t produce stuff just for the quick buck. They provide a quality service product. This may sound utopian – and why not? It should serve to improve the human experience, and if it doesn’t – why then, it should not be done.

Innocent Smoothies are a business 2.0 company. They give the customer what they want – good smoothies – and they do it in a fun way (enhancing and improving the human experience) whilst also being nice to their employees (also enhancing the human experience). No company should devalue its employees.

Google is a company which values its employees, it looks after them, feeds them well, gets a doctor to check them out, gives them toys to play with – anything which will make them feel good. They work hard – often long hours – and I think that Google benefits from its hard work looking after its people with the respect and loyalty and hard work in return from its employees.

I have noticed that something which marks the business 2.0 is the fact that they tend to concentrate on one thing – and also do it well. They don’t tend to spread themselves too thinly. Once a company spreads too thin they seem to lose that excellent customer service.

The one defining thing about 2.0 companies is that after you have done business with them, you have a better feeling inside. You don’t feel ripped off, or as though you have been manipulated. The transaction has been an honest one on both sides. It’s as much about the conversation that happens between the customer and the company as it is about selling the thing or service to you. That conversation is what would have been called marketing in the past, but it would have stopped as soon as a purchase was made. Nowadays, you can’t afford to just do that. You have to carry that conversation through after purchase, right through until the next purchase and beyond. It doesn’t matter if your product costs less than a pound. Think about what Innocent do. They have a website that not only explains how they do what they do but why they do it. They tell a story about the drinks they sell. You buy into the story as well as the drink. You would probably buy an Innocent Smoothie a second time.

So how do you go about transforming your company? The main thing is to remember that it is as much about that story and the conversation as the product, although of course that has to be great anyway. That conversation is increasingly a one to one conversation. A couple of years ago people were saying that you had to use blogging to reach your customers. Thats is still the case. Talk. Explain. Get feedback. But things have now changed. Moved on.

Now you need to reach people where they are. That means that yes, you probably have to advertise in Facebook. But there’s more. You have to be in there too. You. Not your company, you, the director, the manager, the man on the production line. You have to be able to talk to the customer and they talk back to you. One to one marketing is key to the future survival of UK businesses. And to do that you need to get social.

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Tags: company2.0, web, business,

Twittervision and the world-wide cake…

Twittervision and the world-wide cake meme

A few days ago I was witness to something quite unique. The spread of a meme across the world. It was the world wide spread of an idea, and it took less than a minute to go worldwide, and carried on for ten minutes before dying out. The meme? I want some cake. The medium? Twitter, or to be more exact, Twittervision. It was a simple statement by somebody, I can’t quite remember where, I think it was France, to the effect that they were hungry and would quite like some cake. That was replied to by someone in England, and it was then picked up in other countries by other people. Soon, practically everyone was talking about cake. I wanted cake myself. Now, imagine that idea is something like a real product that you want to publicize. Or an idea that you want to spread. You could have GLOBAL influence within a minute or so. Think about that, that’s something you couldn’t have had even a year ago, even with blogs. Instant global reach with instant global feedback. The global conversation has begun, in near realtime. Will an idea catch on? Try it in Twittervision, and see. If you are ignored, your idea was crap. If it sticks, you have a winner.

store made of containers

Via We Make Money Not Art

This 26 meter concept store was created in Zurich from 17 rusty freight containers. Freitag make bags out of recycled materials, such as used lorry (truck) tarpaulins, car seat belts, bicycle inner tubes etc. and wanted a store that reflected that re-use ethos. Despite being made from such an apparently uninviting material, the inside looks fairly bright due to the good use of glass. The shop is also fairly well insulated to make sure it doesnt get chilly on those Swiss winter days. The place is expected to have a life-span of about 5 years or so. Expect a run-down of their bag products fairly soon.

technorati tags:architecture, art, design, swiss, containers

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the nod

Creating Passionate Users

Sit in a cafe with a Mac PowerBook, and chances are you’ll get The Nod–that acknowledging, approving, knowing, we’re-special look. MINI Cooper owners give each other The Nod at intersections. Display GNOME on your ThinkPad and you’ll get The Nod. But run Windows on your Dell and you won’t. (Never confuse the “I feel your pain” look with The Nod.)

What is “The Nod?” In her blog Creating Passionate Users Kathy Sierra talks about THOSE products, we know which one’s they are, that will get you “the nod.” When I say we know which products they are, I mean they are the ones that say something about the person that’s using it. They say something about you. You and the other person share something, a sense of knowing, of shared coolness or nerdiness, of being the one’s who just “know.” Mac users get the nod, PC owners just dont.

technorati tags:nod, technology, design, cool

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one red paperclip

My name is Kyle MacDonald and I traded one red paperclip for a house. I started with one red paperclip on July 12 2005 and 14 trades later, on July 12, 2006 I will trade with the Town of Kipling Saskatchewan for a house located at 503 Main Street.

one red paperclip

That’s pretty good going considering he started with just a paperclip and at one point went back to a snow globe!

technorati tags:paperclip, one, red, trade, house

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condoms for mobile phones?

It weighs less than a candy bar and we either carry it with us or we keep it within easy reach, around the clock. Try getting through the day without your mobile phone! Your trusty companion is in constant danger. The threat of damage from dirt or moisture is one of the most serious threats to your mobile, but not only to your phone, to your social life as well! With Skins, you can now protect your mobile – and all the numbers it contains – against damage from water, dirt, mud, paint, moisture and much, much more!

With Skins, nothing will stop you from calling! Anytime and anyplace.

Condoms for mobile phones. OK.

technorati tags:skins, mobile, phone, condoms

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its hot outside…

And I’m indoors pondering what needs to be done on the SBA website over the next year. We had a great Arts Trail weekend, with over 4000 people coming through the Southville Centre doors. Plenty of people brave enough to weather the rain and wind. The SBA website held up well, and although there were areas that I felt were weaker than others, overall it worked. Now is the time to look at what was acheived and to make a decision on what we are going to do to improve the site over the next year or so.

The first questions is – are we going to carry on using the Drupal CMS for the main content engine, or are we going to use a different one, or develop our own from scratch? And if we do develop, are we going to keep on with a hosted website or are we going to make the jump to a hosted server/virtual server? There are many pro’s and con’s for each of these decisions.

Keeping with what we have now

If we keep what we have now, there is a good chance we will have a working website at the end of the process. That means that in one year we will have a working site, even if we still have the limitations that we presently have. Those are – bandwidth and the limitations of the Drupal CMS. The plus side is that will all the experience I have gained using Drupal over the last year, we could develop further and then write some modules that overcome the problems that we are having. And buying more bandwidth is not really a problem.

The other side to it is that we find it difficult to develop new solutions, e.g. voting for non-members has been a problem for me. If we had a completely hand-built soluton we could have overcome this by, well, building it.

Developing on a new platform

If we decide to build on a new platform or framework, we would get around the limitations issue. If we needed something, we could build it in. My reservation is that we might not have enough time to develop all the stuff we want in the 6-8 months we have available. I am looking specifically at Django, which I feel would give us the maximum flexibility whilst at the same time giving us enough hand-holding that we could get it up and running without too much trouble. The other framework I looked at was Seaside, but that is developed using Smalltalk and I dont feel confident enough in my Smalltalk skills to be able to say that I can develop a solution using it. That will have to wait for a later project.

If we used something like Django we would be able to make pretty much any functionality we might need, but might find that the task of actually coding might be too time intensive. We would also have to look at a hosted server solution, as we would need root access to the server to make it work. I am sure that it would be OK from a financial point of view, but it would only work from a technical point of view if I could split the work between myself and one or two other people.

What we learned

So did we learn anything from this year’s Arts Trail that could help us make a decision? Well, I learned one valuable lesson, and that it is important for you to make anything you develop as simple as you possibly can. Simple for yourself and your users. It doesnt matter how simple it is, the golden rule is..it could have been simpler! It really doesnt matter how much instruction you provide, it will never be enough or written in the right way for all of your users. And speed is of the essence. You will be asked to provide functionality then and there. Immediately available tonight. And simple. And “oh can it link back into the voting thingy?” Keep it simple at keep it really easy and fast to add stuff.

The other thing is that you may have all the best features in the world, but you might not be able to get the people to use it. Just because it is there doesn’t mean that they will come and use it. They wont. They really wont just come and use it. Why? Maybe they are scared, maybe they dont want to come and interact with your site. After all, what’s in it for them? They wont do anything unless there is either something in it for them or else there is something that will not be done for them unless they do interact. Like uploading their image for the trail. If you dont upload it by this or that date, then it wont be in the brochure or the map. Suddenly you have everyone trying to upload there image at the last minute of the deadline!

Bandwidth. This is a pain. You pay for every time you go over your bandwidth limit – that is, how much pictures and text you are allowed to have moving across the internet from or to your website. if you exceed your limit, you are simply cut off. Your website simply stops being there for your users. For us that happened twice, fortunately not on the Arts Trail weekend, but it did happen between the uploading of images and the weekend itself. This could be mitigated by several things. We over specified what size image we needed, on advice from the graphics team. We actually asked for images that were too big, consequently we went over bandwidth later that month. The images were printed at 2cmx2cm, in fact I think they were even smaller in print than that! The images we asked for were simply huge. We didnt need images of that size at all.

The other thing I learned is that you might think that our members would be the biggest users of bandwidth. No, they’re not. The biggest users of bandwidth are Google and MSN Search, the two biggest search engines. Between them I estimate that they took over half of the bandwidth in the early part of the problem month. This can be stopped by use of a special file called robots.txt which tells the search engines what parts of your website they can and cannot go in and therefore consume bandwidth.

Help desk, communications, getting information. Three bottlenecks for this year’s site. Without Janine Partington’s hard work it could have all gone horribly wrong. What we need is an easy way for our members and people to get access to information and log problems with us. Everything went via Janine and then onto myself. Whilst we were fairly pain free (thanks Janine) if we had got a major problem then would have been deluged. There needs to be a clearer communications channel between the website group and the members/users. Janine needs some king of way to be able to get at the database on the server, as that is now the most up-to-date version of the members list. She needs to be able to access it, add people, delete people and run mail merge’s etc against the list.

Content. There wasnt enough content being added to the site. Most posts were down to Janine, Dave Morgan-Davies and myself. This isnt enough, and if the site is to grow into a true community asset then we are going to need a way to drive content onto the site. That means we are going to need an editorial team/group to write articles, stories and come up with ideas for special items e.g. competitions, voting etc. And it needs to be easy enough so that the person adding this stuff doesnt need to know a thing about website design or programming ar anything like that.

Many lessons learned then, does it help us make a decision? Not really, but it is a starting point for discussion. If anything the motto has to be “keep it simple”, and get people involved with the process. So if you live in South Bristol and you are interested in being part of this process, then get in touch with me. You will be made very welcome!

buy a picture make your house look great!

All of my prints from the Arts Trail are now for sale. These limited edition prints are now available for a short time. With either vibrant colours or stunning contrast they will complement any room. Mounted on MDF and sealed with a high gloss finish they are easy to hang with two screws.