Australian News Report

Hilarious, have to wait for a minute or so:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1m8a4Jl4ZI

Social Scenes

Today I read Stowe Boyd’s post on Social Scenes. I follow Stowe’s blog regularily although I have to admit I often don’t agree with everything he’s written. Well not that I don’t agree, just that it sometimes feels slightly ‘off’. Perhaps it’s his strong desire to control/influence the social space? Who knows.

Anyway…Social Scenes. A great post but not for Stowes obvious contributions, mainly for his quoting of Clive Thompson’s, ‘Are Your Friends Making You Fat?’. A fascinating insight into the Framingham Study, something of which I was previously unaware. Thanks for bringing this to light Stowe!

I would definitely recommend a read. http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/social-scenes-the-invisible-calculus-of-culture.html

Hunters and Farmers

Another great post by Seth Godin, gets you thinking:

See the original post here.

50,000 years ago, civilization forked. Farming was invented and the way many people spent their time was changed forever.

Clearly, farming is a very different activity from hunting. Farmers spend time sweating the details, worrying about the weather, making smart choices about seeds and breeding and working hard to avoid a bad crop. Hunters, on the other hand, have long periods of distracted noticing interrupted by brief moments of frenzied panic.

It’s not crazy to imagine that some people are better at one activity than another. There might even be a gulf between people who are good at each of the two skills. Thom Hartmann has written extensively on this. He points out that medicating kids who might be better at hunting so that they can sit quietly in a school designed to teach farming doesn’t make a lot of sense.

A kid who has innate hunting skills is easily distracted, because noticing small movements in the brush is exactly what you’d need to do if you were hunting. Scan and scan and pounce. That same kid is able to drop everything and focus like a laser–for a while–if it’s urgent. The farming kid, on the other hand, is particularly good at tilling the fields of endless homework problems, each a bit like the other. Just don’t ask him to change gears instantly.

Marketers confuse the two groups. Are you selling a product that helps farmers… and hoping that hunters will buy it? How do you expect that people will discover your product, or believe that it will help them? The woman who reads each issue of Vogue, hurrying through the pages then clicking over to Zappos to overnight order the latest styles–she’s hunting. Contrast this to the CTO who spends six months issuing RFPs to buy a PBX that was last updated three years ago… she’s farming.

Both groups are worthy, both groups are profitable. But each group is very different from the other, and I think we need to consider teaching, hiring and marketing to these groups in completely different ways. I’m not sure if there’s a genetic component or if this is merely a convenient grouping of people’s personas. All I know is that it often explains a lot about behavior (including mine).

Some ways to think about this:

• George Clooney (in  Up in the Air) and James Bond are both fictional hunters. Give them a desk job and they freak out.
• Farmers don’t dislike technology. They dislike failure. Technology that works is a boon.
• Hunters are in sync with Google, a hunting site, farmers like Facebook.
• When you promote a first-rate hunting salesperson to internal sales management, be prepared for failure.
• Farmers prefer productive meetings, hunters want to simply try stuff and see what happens.
• Warren Buffet is a farmer. So is Bill Gates. Mark Cuban is a hunter.
• Hunters want a high-stakes mission, farmers want to avoid epic failure.
• Trade shows are designed to entrance hunters, yet all too often, the booths are staffed with farmers.
• The last hundred years of our economy favored smart farmers. It seems as though the next hundred are going to belong to the persistent hunters able to stick with it for the long haul.
• A hunter will often buy something merely because it is difficult to acquire.
• One of the paradoxes of venture capital is that it takes a hunter to get the investment and a farmer to patiently make the business work.
• A farmer often relies on other farmers in her peer group to be sure a purchase is riskless.

Who are you hiring? Competing against? Teaching?

Web Development and Digital Marketing

First let me start by saying I’m no developer, programmer or techy. I’ve never been interested. In fact I kicked up quite a fuss when I was ‘forced’ to learn it at university as a compulsory module.

But now I’m certain and often amazed at just how much basic web development skills help in a modern digital marketing job. And I’m not talking about full blown expertise, nothing crazy, just basic html, css, and java and the knowledge of how to put it all together.

I remember when my Abuelo was running his restaurants in Spain he used to make everyone start by washing the dishes, to make you understand the business process from the bottom up. The same principle applies (…not being offensive to dishwashers or developers of course!)

You want to manage a seminar but don’t know how to set up seminar website pages? So what are your options? Find a techy? Contract a developer/designer? Or if you’re a small company use a very standard template or potentially blow a large chunk of your budget? In some cases yes, that’s exactly what you’re going to do.

But even then, with a lack of knowledge on the ins and outs are you really going create a good brief or make an effective negotiation on time and price? Or even manage your team members who are carrying it out effectively? ‘Yes boss, it will take me 2 weeks’. And how are you supposed to know they are lying through their teeth and are looking forward to a week and a half on facebook?

So if you’re in marketing and can find the time go and do a Dreamweaver course, go and learn PhotoShop for basic design work. All of a sudden you’re much more valuable, both on your CV and in a tight spot in the office.

Objectives

Always be clear on your key objectives before you approach any situation. This should be the first step of any train of thought/project/job/task…anything. Short, medium or long term. Job interview, key project or just sorting out some DIY.

If you can get into that habit every time you hit a problem everything will be much easier.

In my world, this especially applies to marketing and events where the key objectives can easily be lost when adapting to fast changing environments.

Reading this back it seems more like a ‘note to self’ than anything else!

“Mileuristas” or “Thousandists”

An interesting point over on Hugh MacLeod’s blog:

—–

“Thousandists”: My long-time Spanish blog buddy, Nia left an interesting comment below:

That con­ver­sa­tion about white-collar jobs is four years old in Spain.

This is the short ver­sion: The peo­ple who were in their 20-30s in the 1970s saw that a Uni­ver­sity degree made a big dif­fe­rence in your job and salary. They made their kids (anyone born 1970?–?1985) study, and that young gene­ra­tion belie­ved for a while that we could do the same trick as our parents. Get a degree. The job will follow.

We now have a word for peo­ple of my gene­ra­tion with a hand­ful of degrees: mileu­ris­tas. Thou­san­dists. As in, someone who makes around 1,000 euros a month. There’s so many of us, no one’s willing to pay us more than a (barely) living wage.

—–

For recent graduates like me it gets you thinking,  and I know a few people who graduated with me who are very much in this position. But then there are those of us who chose to differentiate ourselves, do something different and get a little passion. And all of a sudden the doors open. Yes a degree is good, and it’s a tick in the box, but it’s what you do around and during your degree that makes you stand out – the degree is just the new base line.

Sales Calls.

People hate sales calls. No-one can argue against that. Companies are receiving so so many (bloody recruiters) that when the phone does ring from an unknown number most either pick it up with a sense of dread or leave it to voicemail.

Even with the most interesting of products the words ‘who gave you my number?’ are too often the starter of a conversation.

At a first impression potential customers see your sales people as a chore. Does your sales team realise this? If they knew would they deal with things differently?

I would much rather speak to someone who I’ve heard of. And not in the context of a brand but a person, an individual. How much more likely are you to entertain a conversation with a twitter follower, LinkedIn connection or someone who has left a comment on your blog than a random Sales guy?

And yes I know that wouldn’t work for a lot of companies/products with huge target markets and where the numbers game comes into play, but if you’re after a small, focussed and intense network for your tribe then maybe your Sales team should sit with Marketing for a day, build up their online persona and learn how to communicate with something other than a phone and a handful of email templates?

The bull in a China shop approach may work for selling used cars but it doesn’t for much else.

Focussed and intense.

Another great post from Seth Godin. A focussed, intense network is exactly what we (and most) need, the right people, the right influencers and the right message. And so our evil plan continues…

“Almost every city that has hosted an Olympics regrets it financially. The TV networks spend billions. The advertisers pay for it. The hoopla is vast and loud.

For what?

For the attention. It’s the attention that gets cities to put up with the ridiculous system for choosing host cities and gets the TV networks to ship camera crews half way around the world. It’s the attention that turns the Olympic committee into vigilant trademark and copyright police. It’s easy to cut countries or companies willing to bankrupt themselves for pride or attention a little slack. After all, the Olympics is a magical event.

Except it’s not. The same craving for attention happens every day in every organization in search of just one more pair of eyeballs. As marketers discover that more eyeballs does not equal better, the quixotic quest for attention will start to abate.

The formula is simple but depressing: marketers have been lousy at harvesting attention because there was just so much of it. So it was more like strip mining than careful, efficient use of a natural resource. Now that attention is harder to get, people are overpaying for it and the Olympics is just one example. The alternative is to create focused, intense networks that ignore the masses. For most marketers, that’s exactly what we need.”

Fear of Apples

Great post from Seth Godin on fear, for me those two big reasons are now bigger than ever. I encountered this quite openly recently on Twitter, Geva Perry tweeted out a link to our new animation an almost immediate response was an IT guy deciding to express his opinion, as is his right, as it being bullsh*t. Fair enough. Not your style, not your message, whatever.

But the real reason soon became apparent, surely the Cloud can’t do that? Surely its not that easy? And there was the fear and misunderstanding. Fear of change most likely as the principle of hosted IT can be seen as an all-out change of direction, scary for many less involved IT types, but think it through and you’ll see the evolution of existing practices. Geva soon set him straight ‘The purpose was to briefly explain high level concepts to the uninitiated’. Either way we are getting a healthy level of interest and some very positive feedback.

The lesson? Think it through, don’t let fear ruin your first response.

Let’s wait and see if we can get them over it (for the fear driven like him some hand holding may be required).

‘At the farmer’s market the other day, not one but three people (perfect strangers) asked me what sort of apple to buy. What do I look like, some sort of apple expert? Apparently.

In our industrialized world, people are now afraid of apples. Afraid of buying the wrong kind. Afraid of making a purchasing mistake or some sort of pie mistake.

And they’re afraid of your product and your service. Whatever you sell, there are two big reasons people aren’t buying it:

1. They don’t know about it.

2. They’re afraid of it.

If you can get over those two, then you get the chance to prove that they need it and it’s a good value. But as long as people are afraid of what you sell, you’re stuck.

People are afraid of tax accountants, iPods, chiropractors, non-profits, insurance brokers and fancy hotels. They’re afraid of anything with too many choices, too many opportunities to look foolish or to waste time or money.

Hey, they’re even afraid of apples.’

It’s been a while…

It’s been a while since my last post, due in part to a great new (and very busy) job, in part to moving to a new flat and in part to my own laziness and willingness to sit back and watch the feed as an impartial observer (that also partly comes under laziness).

So now it’s time to get back on the bandwagon and pass on interesting thoughts and info whilst also framing and clarifying my own direction.

So why now? A few projects are beginning to wind up, social, digital and events, so it seems a good idea to keep track and share.

Having moved into the Cloud Computing market (or if you actually understand what that means you’d probably be happier with the term ‘hosted IT’) my first real impression was of a lack of understanding and realisation for those that this might actually benefit, the potential customers.

Firstly everyone thinks it’s SaaS. It’s not. It’s more, oh so much more. People often don’t fully understand all the ways this evolved view of IT can help them.

As well as this there is a big trust issue in terms of security and reliability. This stems from the big boys making mistakes (see Microsoft, Google etc) and inexpert bloggers reporting on these and making the classic mistake of thinking there is only one cloud. Just because Microsoft screwed up their Cloud doesn’t mean we can’t do a good job of with ours, which reminds me of one of Hugh’s recent posts.

The overall problem is one of realisation, what actually is it? There is a huge amount of noise around this industry and everyone’s pitch is from a different angle meaning different thing.

So how to solve this. We need to clarify our message, what do we mean? What do we offer? What is Esselar’s message?

So that’s what we did (or are trying to do), our message is now live in animation form and hopefully does Esselar’s vision justice.

Will keep you posted on how it goes…