Broadband and Me

Stormhoek sample arrives

And following Hugh's promise of samples I can confirm today that I have a very exciting looking bottle sat besides me. I got bottle 24 of 75 - unfortunately not really a collectors item as the Stormhoek promise is about freshness and drinking the wine at the peak of its freshness (i.e. relatively soon!) The inserted leaflet from Hugh entitled "Wine Blogging as Marketing Disruption" however could well enter that category :)

Anyway thanks to Hugh, Orbital Wines and Stormhoek - will report back on how I found the wine, because I am of course a person whose wine recommendations you trust... aren't I? What do you mean, 'No!'?

stormhoek samples

This just arrived in my Inbox:

Dear Hugh,

We have an office-full of pre-release Stormhoek samples, so we hope to
finally send out the Bloggers' freebie samples at the beginning of next week.

Could you possibly forward me the names and addresses of the recipients?

I need to produce labels for said samples, is there any mileage do you think in making each one a personalised label?

Hope all is well at your end.

Andrew

Hopefully Geoff will let me supply free wine at the Our Social World conference in September.

I think marketing to bloggers is a no-brainer, although granted, it's still early days.

Business Experiment

Johnnie Moore's Weblog: The Business Experiment

Business Experiment is a great idea to explore the possibilities of new ideas in a business context - thanks as usual to Johnnie for pointing it out...

Social Software Seminar (September)

I am pleased to say that I shall be running an event on social software in Sunderland in September, in association with the Woodholmes Group and the Big Ideas Centre.

There are a few details to be confirmed however the agenda will be broadly looking at social software, including blogging, folksonomies, podcasting, vidcasting, wikis, social bookmarks and networking sites. The main focus will be on how these are affecting business from an external and internal perspective, together with some practical tips on how to get started making use of the technologies.

If you are interested or want further information please drop me an email. There will be further annoucnments nearer to the event.

Have to say I am looking forward to it immensely

And now for something completely different...

Suw links to this

So being geeky I generated this:

Drinking Tea

I've been drinking a lot of tea today - as Johnnie notes, its the British (English) thing to do in a crisis.

What I sincerely hope is that the bombing has the opposite effect as intended. People are united against the terrorism, the G8 ensure hope for Africa and the planet with accords on the environment. Let's hope we all can stand up against injustice, ignorance and misunderstanding wherever we come across it. And...

...lets drink more tea; it helps.

And to add to being British, its raining in mid summer - it all adds to the stoicism. Interestingly just read the entry at wikipedia, particularly the section on brotherhood

All people are manifestations of the one universal spirit and should, according to the Stoics, live in brotherly love and readily help one another. They held that external differences such as rank and wealth are of no importance in social relationships. Thus, before the rise of Christianity, Stoics recognized and advocated the brotherhood of humanity and the natural equality of all human beings

This was not...against the mighty...

From Ken Livingstone (via BBC):

This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty or the powerful, it was aimed at ordinary working-class Londoners.Black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindus and Jews, young and old. It was an indiscriminate attempt to slaughter, irrespective of any considerations for age, class, religion whatever.

Blair - 'people reacting with British Stoicism'

How on earth did they think they would influence the British public positively? Years of island mentality, two world wars, terrorism and sheer bloodymindedness. Truely mad.

London Terrorism

I can't believe we are seeing terrorism in London again.

Co-ordinated explosions at rush hour is despicable.

My condolances go out to those people who are effected.

My thoughts are with those people who are in London.

Lack of Authenticity - Costs dear?

Evelyn Rodriguez posts on a US dot com venture buying bloggers to praise their service. As she notes, a lack of imagination in play all around. At the recent BARC conference a lot was made of authenticity (not surprising given that was the conference theme, and also models for advertising / making money via blogs. One of the key points is that you can attempt to foll people some of the time but in the blogosphere you will get found out, as seems to have happened in this story.

So the opportunity to create a long lasting positive relationship with many people has ended up being a short term boost to sales, followed by negative publicity. In effect an interruption model plus negative PR. Not what blogging is about at all. Sabrina Dent was very frustrated with traitional marketing / promotion being applied to blogging and I can sympathise. I for one right now could really do with a few companies to come dump some money but then I know it would be a waste of time for the firm and wouldn't make me a sustainable income either, in fact for both of us it would leave a nasty taste. Instead it would be much more intersting to approach this from the whole PR perspective as identified in yesterday's post.

Most of all though, authenticity is about bias + transparency = credibility as Adriana so beautifully put it.

PR and the blog

David Weinberger, a man very knowledgable about markets being conversations (see Cluetrain) refers to a client of his:

Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman PR, pegs his latest post to a description of G. Washington in McCullough's 1776. It's awkward for me to talk about this because I consult to Edelman PR (Richard has never even hinted that I should talk about his blog,...Nevertheless: at his blog you can see an established PR firm honestly wrestling with the big change in context the Web is bringing about. If you've worked in PR - I did inside corporations for 10 years - you know that the Web excites every inappropriate PR instinct. To traditional PR folks, the Web looks like an opportunity for doing near-zero-cost one-to-one marketing, abusing the Net's anonymity to manipulate market conversations. In that context, Richard's current post is all the more to be appreciated, since it acknowledges important limits and scouts for new directions that don't disrupt the Web's ecology.

From Richard's post itself:

First, we are having a conversation, not pitching a story to a reporter. Weinberger is adamant that bloggers "don't want content from PR people nor do we want you to give us access to your clients---unless you are willing to enter our space as a conversationalist."

Second, we need to act appropriately. "The blog world is ours--tread lightly," Weinberger says. He believes that the blogosphere is the great public space, where equality, transparency, and access are the rules of the game. It is just not acceptable to invent front organizations, to enter chat rooms anonymously or to pay for play.

Third, we ought to commit ourselves to continuous learning. The Web is about continuous change. I just heard from Weinberger about Delicious, a mechanism to see what other people have tagged to organize their bookmarks on-line. This type of social research could lead us to more informed conversations with bloggers.

Fourth, we should offer content with substance as well as humor. Let the ad agencies and internet firms post the riotous videos of grandmothers punching out teenagers for bad behavior. Our content should contain facts, links to other sites offering both sides of an issue for complete context and sources of our information.

Fifth, we can aim for an educated consumer. As my friend and colleague Mitch Markson observed last week, "What is a consumer's responsibility in this new world of consumer generated information?" The tendency at present among too many consumers is to be narrow and deep, incredibly smart about a few topics, reliant on others for expertise outside of core capabilities. We need to find the points of common interest, that draw a broad range of people into the conversation.

We are now in a time when we must counsel our clients to give up some measure of control to achieve credibility. We are moving beyond a model where some own the content and others read it. Social networks are deciding what is important. We have serious responsibilities as well as opportunities in this evolving world.

Give up control to achieve credibility - what a wonderful phrase. And its a wonderful opportunity to start a conversation with the world about your products.

That's what I want to help people to do; to conect in conversations via this new technology and enable engagement and learning. Who wants to play?

Product Development - Co-creation

More on Open Source marketing (see James' site) that I noticed from the UKTrainSim site. Kuju who produced the original Microsoft Train Sim are about to produce a new game in association with Electronic Arts(EA). It also seems that right from the start they involved members of the rail sim community to better improve their product and ensure (or attempt to ensure) that the product will meet the requirements of the current train sim community.

The interesting thing about the train sim community is that it already develops its own 'versions' of rail routes, engines, carriages and trucks, which creates additional aspect of the product and allows new and diverse scenarios for owners to play about with. One such community is going to be heavily involved with this new sim (together with other sims currently in development). Whilst none of this is cutting edge, new or particularly mainstream, it is another illustration of how brands and communities are working together and, I guess, being at worst influenced, and at best led by communities - communities dominating brands.

G8 Poem

I haven't chosen to write anything on the G8 summit or Live8. I have nothing to say that will move the debate on. However I came across this after reading Technorati's Live8 page, a beautiful example of why despite all the noise, blogging (and reading blogs) is worthwhile:

From the BBC NEWS | Magazine | Music blogs close ears to Live 8

And in a stark example of how the blogosphere can make voices louder, Black Looks posts a poem by Sena Anyomedie, a nine-year-old from Accra:

"G8 Leaders know nothing about Life
They live in a bubble created by their wealth
Come to Africa and learn of life to struggle
before the sun is up
To feel like life is not worth living
Poverty is the basis of the African struggle
When poverty is gone, Africa will become what it should be
The world's greatest continent."

South East Economic Forum

I attended a very different kind of event on Friday night in the South-East Economic Forum run by Hart Brown and SEEDA (South East Economic Development Agency). The main topic was prospering in the current climate and provided some insights into just that but not perhaps as much as I had hoped.

Three main speakers - HSBC's Chief UK Economist, Vice Chair of SEEDA and Communications Director of Philips.

Prospects for the UK economy - mixed some showers here, sunny spells there but on a sectoral rather than regional basis

Prospects for the South East - good-ish - need to improve basic and technician level education, more open to global environment than othe UK regions because of large service (read financial) sector.

Philips - nearly died in late 80's but pulled it around becuase someone actually went back to basics and applied marketing 101 - ask what your customers want, focus on your core competence, don't do things that lose you money, have a coherent brand.

I didn't pull as much information as I could have done becuase it was all very formal, all very serious and wearing a suit (yes, you read that correctly) in a lecture hall with no air conditioning, I am surprised I didn't pass out. Enough of the criticism though.

The three speakers were very engaging speakers in different ways and offered very different views on potentially the same topic. What it failed on though was actually being a forum. It ended up being a discussion from the great and good with little questioning.

A number of people there seemed to want a little more on how things are going to pan out in the next couple of years for small and medium sized businesses (myself included) but whilst getting interesting insight on the UK economy (or maybe it was crystal gazing by a fortune teller - with no offence intended to economists) and into how the south east does have poorly developed areas (there along the coast - Berkshire, Surrey and NE Hampshire need not apply) and lastly how Philips receovered from not being focused on the market (not sure how it appplies to the specifics of the current market other than you need to focus on your market). I came away feeling a little short changed - which is a shame because I thought it had a lot of potential.

I did manage to do some market research of my own with a few people before and after the speakers, but not enough. More work to do to convince organisers to change style and shift expectations.

Businesses can profit from being sustainable

From the Alternative Energy blog, who quote the BBC news-site

The company said it is now looking into placing the wind power micro-turbines on more of its 200 sites.Gary Thomas, head of property and facilities at CFS, said taking a greener approach to business also had financial benefits."Embedding renewable energy in buildings reduces the need to buy electricity and I anticipate a payback on the initial investment within around three years," he said.Ken Lewis, resources director added: "Forty per cent of Europe's energy use is associated with buildings and this project, along with the Solar Tower development, demonstrates that these piles of steel and concrete have tremendous potential for future energy generation."Councillor Neil Swannick, Manchester City Council executive member for planning and the environment, has applauded the move saying CFS have made a practical contribution to energy conservation."The Manchester Energy Strategy endorses the view that wind turbines are not just for rural sites," he said."A world-class city such as Manchester has a responsibility to use energy more efficiently and to generate it from renewable sources where we can."

If more companies started to take such steps then surely it would lead to a drop in production costs for renewable enrgey source generation equipment. If that happens then surely its a good thing for businesses and consumers if it helps to reduce their energy bills whilst also helping to improve the envirnoment (however small the step, its still a step).

Its becoming clear to me that if my business ever takes off then i intend to invest in micro generation of some sort - there are some good products out there that enable wind and solar power.

Unconferencing

Johnnie runs a marvellous podcast with Chris Corrigan and Rob Paterson.

Someexcellent ideas for running conferences within this quite short little gem. I made some bullet point headings (ignoring Johnnie's programme notes) in semi-chronological order:

• Connection- shouldn't just be about the speakers
• Introvertion - engage those people (like me) who find it difficult to speak (Funny but I never think of Johnnie as introvert at all, in fact quote the opposite)
• Facilitation - enable the group to participate
• Silence - 'silence is the fullness of possibility'>/li>
• Creation of dialogue - is what leads to the nugget of gold in the conference not just the outpourings of the great and the good.
• People are real - talking about their own experience is more powerful - storytelling allowing:
• Spontaneity - vulnerability
• You learn at the edge - teaching to learning model>/li>
• Ideas exchange - co-creation
• Open Space

The most powerful themes for me here are twofold, that of engagement and that of learning.

Engagment because the last thing you want to happen at a conference is people falling asleep, literally or figuratively. I certainly notice my levels of concentrating dropping and its important to be aware of these factors when implementing this type of thing, as well as making sure that individuals can participate in the action. this moves me neatly onto learning.

At the edge reminded me very forcefully of Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, that is the point at where your existing understanding ends and your potential for learning begins. Dialogue enables learning to take place and for speakers, experts, key note speakers to engage the audience by making sure you can take all the people with you facilitating learning as you move on (scaffolding?). I also think that having a variety of different activities in a conference is a good move. Whilst I think lecturing can have its strengths, as can discussion, we should not confine ourselves to thinking of conferences in such linear ways and look at multiple environments, activities, and personalities to assist in the process.

Perhaps I should set up some conferences / workshops myself?

Back to the podcast, to say that its well worth listening to, and got me thinking more about the subject. Eagerly awaiting the next episode.

Tagging test

Lloyd asks whether I am using the technorati plugin - the answer is yes. It seems to be generating the links okay but they don't show up. I am using exactly the same RSS template as Johnnie (I think) and he also has the plugin - his works mine does not - Aggghhhh!

Edit: Been round the block with Johnnie - may be it will work now - fingers crossed.