In through the outfield

CiG – RIP

Irony is a tricky topic as Alanis Morriset discovered a few years ago.

And perhaps ‘tragic’ is a more appropriate term for hearing the news halfway through Wednesday night’s SLA Europe Summer Soiree to celebrate 100 years of the Association, that the City Information Group was no more.

As a member of the group for nearly 20 years, I was saddened to hear of its demise. As Tim Buckley Owen points out in detail, they had a distinguished past. I certainly found their educational sessions to be of great interest and relevance to my career development. And of course their summer and winter parties were legendary.

Melanie Goody (one of the founding committee members) also recalls its glory days when it boasted over 1,000 members, on the TFPL blog.

On her View from the Hill blog Sue Hill says it is ‘A time to weep for the departed and to celebrate the survivors.’

It will be interesting to see if the existing GiG membership decide to join one of the remaining information bodies and associations.

Complete our small business information survey and win an iPod Nano

I’m not normally one for offering inducements to read my blog… but, for a limited time only (July 17 2009)… you have the chance to win an iPod Nano courtesy of the British Library.

My colleague Nigel Spencer has created a 5 minute online survey giving participants an opportunity to help shape the future of information for small businesses.

The survey is part of a major study into how small businesses get the information they need to develop and grow. It is being carried out by the British Library on behalf of JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee).  The questions look at how and where you get information now, the problems you face and changes that you would like to see in the future.

The findings from this online survey will be published in the form of a statistical analysis and no responses will be attributed to individual businesses.

Survey Link:  http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=FNU3R5eZlMTE7KhpyzcdOQ_3d_3d

Start-ups who think big

On my way home the other evening I noticed an unusual poster advertising the Daily Telegraph newspaper. The poster consisted of three of the photos below, and was a salient reminder of the humble beginnings of what are now household names.

Some of the entrepreneurs I meet have no greater ambition than becoming their own boss and making enough money to be comfortable. However, some have global ambitions right from the beginning. Last week I saw a client who has patented an invention which if successful could be in every home in the world which uses electricity.

BM 1930: Before it became a computing power house, IBM used to manufacture and sell machinery ranging from commercial scales and industrial time recorders to meat and cheese slicers.

Lamborghini 1955: Lamborghini started out as a tractor-building company in the Italian village of Sant'Agata Bolognese.

IKEA started here. Ingvar Kamprad, aged 17, set up Ikea in a shed in Smaland, Southern Sweden. From here he distributed Christmas cards, packets of seeds and pens.

Google started here. Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up Google as a research project while they were Ph.D students at Stanford University. In 1998 they moved into Susan Wojcicki's garage at 232 Santa Margarita, Menlo Park.

It pays to think big, The Daily Telegraph, Britain’s Broadsheet
It pays to think big is the Telegraph’s major new advertising campaign to promote Britain’s best-selling quality daily paper. It pays to think big, proudly celebrates the fact that the Daily Telegraph is the only quality daily paper in the broadsheet format – giving readers more coverage of news, sports and business.

25,000 inventors a year scammed

One of my colleagues has pointed out an article in today’s edition of the Daily Mirror. In the regular Rogue Traders column, Andrew Penman reviews the sad fate of Terry Ferguson who lost $10,000 to American inventions agency Davison Design.

The online version of this article is followed by several posts from previous employees of Davison Design who testify to their dubious operating procedures.

According to one of the posts over 25,000 inventors are conned each year (just in the United States). The information comes from the Invention Statistics website at Inventor Scam Statistics.

My colleague Steve van Dulken has recently posted a blog story warning of UK Invention Promotion companies, and the UKIPO have produced a pdf Step by step guide to using invention promoters.

Another sensible piece of advice is to use Google to find out a range of views on any potential company you come across. For instance the third item in a search on Davidson Design is titled Ripoff Report Search Results: DAVISON DESIGN.

Marketing Maestros: Innovative Strategies for Small Businesses

Once again a great Inspiring Entrepreneurs panel this evening, with regular chair Matthew Rock (the founder-editor of Real Business) brining his inimitable enthusiasm to the event.

(You can still watch a  webcast of the event at http://www.inspiringentrepreneurswebcast.co.uk/)

Ajaz Ahmed Chairman of AKQA, the world’s largest independent digital agency showed some impressive examples of innovation in advertising, illustrating his point about the importance of originality.

His key message was for his company to let their work do the talking’. In other words, don’t tell you customers how great you are, show them.

Not surprisingly Simon Calver the CEO of LOVEFILM (a £100 million turnover company) is a fan of films, and so used examples to illustrate his four P’s of business success.

P1 – ‘I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse’ (The Godfather).
Focus on the consumer proposition first and worry about building the brand later on. The three legs which hold up his company are choice, value and convenience.

P2 – ‘Self preservation society’ (The Italian Job) i.e. Preserve the cash in the business. Make sure you focus on the time it takes to get cash in and out. If you get it right it gives you a competitive advantage. Also analyse everything you do – where you spend your cash and how you do it.

P3 – Spin City (American sitcom)  Never under-estimate the importance of PR. In his case they have three targets, their investors, trading partners and of course their consumers. You have to be constantly creating new stories about your business the papers will want to publish.

P4 – Passion (a choice of seven films according to Wikipedia) Make sure you surround yourself with great people from the beginning. ‘Fiirst division people recruit first division people’, which makes the business great. Make sure you have fun too. Simon hosts a monthly BBQ for his colleagues. Also reward your people on a quarterly basis (in the case of LOVEFILM bonuses of between 10 and  20%. This allows for more flexibility in changing targets in a fast growing business.

In conclusion, starting a business is probably the most rewarding thing you can do in your life.

Tristram Mayhew the founder and ‘Chief Gorilla’ of Go Ape, the UK’s leading forest-based adventure company talked about Gorilla marketing.

Instead of focussing on their specific activities Go Ape are branding themselves as ‘creating adventures’, and are encouraging everyone to live life more adventurously.

Gorilla marketing means turning your customers into an effective free sales force. These are his tips:
1.    Wow them with what you do.
2.    Delight them – turn complainers into ambassadors.
3.    Build a trust and charm based relationship
4.    … and they will buy more, and more often – Tristram openly admitted that many of their ideas have been borrowed from the Innocent drinks company.
5.    Innovate, validate, cultivate.

Tristram strongly recommended The Brand Gap, it is very readable and nice and short too.

They are building a loyalty base using Tribe magazine (published every 6 weeks) to reinforce brand values.

They also make use of Social Media such as encouraging customers to post videos on YouTube, and have nearly 5,000 to date with hundreds of thousands of views.

By ‘making friends’ with existing adventure bloggers and giving them free Go Ape experiences they hope to generate positive reports online.

‘Doing good things.’ For example to help support gorillas in Rwanda 25 staff and 85 customers completed a fun run dressed as gorillas.

Will King is the ‘King of Shaves’, creator of the cult shaving brand that has overtaken Wilkinson Sword and Nivea to become number two to Gillette in the UK shaving market.

After 16 years of building the brand Will launched his own razor the Azor one year ago almost to the day. They already have up to 10% market share in the UK.

Lessons learnt:

The Harvard rule of 4
1.    No one has it
2.    Every one will have it
3.    Price for profit
4.    Price for sale

Take an existing product and make it better – eg iPhone, Innocent smoothies.

Change constantly, push boundaries – it also helps to generates news stories for PR coverage.

Will introduced his SPACE strategy, which stands for Satisfaction of Success, Passion and Persistence, Attitude of Action, Confidence and Communication and Enthusiasm and Enjoyment.

There is a great degree of satisfaction in succeeding. If you achieve great satisfaction, whatever that is, it may be having children or running a marathon, but you’ve got to work at that. There’s no substitute for hard work to get that satisfaction of success, which feeds on to the passion and persistence bit. Things don’t happen overnight, it takes years to become truly successful..

You’ve got to have a can-do attitude to get things done; if you can’t be bothered who else will? The confidence and common sense part relates to having confidence in yourself and what you’re doing but not being delusional; if you try to take on Apple with an iPhone it’s a big ask, but if you want to come up with a cover to protect the iPhone clearly that’s something you could do.

There’s a certain amount when you’ve got to have confidence beyond the success that you don’t enjoy, especially when you’re starting out – people won’t give you credit, people don’t believe you’re going to do it, people think you’ll go bust, you’ll owe them money, and you’ve got to imbue them with confidence if you’re going to be successful.

And finally the enthusiasm and enjoyment piece; if you’re not enjoying it then nobody else is, especially if you’re leading a business. So have enthusiasm, have an edge about what you’re about to do because people do look to you, especially if you’re running a business or are involved in senior management. If you can’t get them motivated by transferring your enthusiasm to them, then how are they going to transfer their enthusiasm either to the products you sell or to the services you provide? They’re not.

Initial thoughts about SLA 2009 conference

Although I have yet to make it back home as planned, thanks to missing my Thursday evening flight, I have been mulling over the SLA 2009 Conference in Washington DC.

Here are some initial thoughts:

It was fascinating to hear Colin Powell talk about some of his experiences in his long and mainly distinguished career  (many of the American librarians I talked to have not yet forgiven him for failing to dissuade President Bush from invading Iraq). Although his support for the Barack Obama in October 08 has somewhat softening their criticism of him. He has become a big fan of Web 2.0 technologies, and tries hard to keep up with his grand children. He expressed concern that America may have over-reacted to the 9/11 atrocity by making it too hard for tourists and foreign students to get visa permits. He felt this was damaging the economy of the United States as well as limiting the opportunity to promote the benefits of democracy and freedom.

I think the highlight of the trip was a night-time visit to the Library of Congress on Capitol Hill. The round reading room was a thing of beauty. I was lucky enough to be allowed behind the counter and down (a tiny flight of stairs) into the space below.

The round reading room

Underneath the round reading room

Underneath the round reading room

For the initial views of a first timer to the event I suggest you look at woodsiegirl’s blog post.

Beginners Guide to Business Finance with Johnny Martin

From time to time I take time out to attend one of our partners workshops. This enables me to recommend them to clients and visitors to the Business & IP Centre from personal experience and hopefully to learn something new and useful.

I have been aware of my lack of understanding of business accounts (despite having spent 16 years working for an investment company in the City of London). So although familiar with the terms gross and net profit, cash versus accruals, assets versus liabilities and not forgetting the many and varied ratios such as: Liquidity, Asset turnover, Financial leverage and of course Profitability, I wasn’t confident about what they actually meant.

If you had watched the semi-final of the latest BBC Apprentice series, you would have seen the eventual winner get in something of a muddle about the difference between net and gross profit for the business she had been successfully running for six years.

Now, thanks to attending our Beginners Guide to Business Finance course run by Johnny Martin I am feeling much more confident about how to create a set of management accounts (both for before and after a business starts). And I am now more familiar with these important business concepts. I particularly liked the way he used live spreadsheets to show the impact of a change in price or order volume on the profit (or loss) for the year.

My favourite quote from Johnny after explaining the roles of various accounting jobs from Book keeper to Financial Director was, ‘you can delegate but DON’T abdicate’, financial responsibility for your business. The experiences of both Elton John and Leonard Cohen are salutary reminders of this point.

The courses cost just £18 and are run at regular intervals here in the British Library.

Visit to the new Guardian newspaper building in Kings Place

The same evening as the The Social Media Exchange – For the Cultural and Heritage Sectors event, I hobbled over to Kings Place to visit the shiny new Guardian (and Observer) newspaper offices.

As it was evening, we were able to see the journalists hard at work creating the next days newspaper. The building itself is amazing, with lots of glass and open spaces, making for a ‘transparent’ working environment. But as the building is also partially open to the public, the journalist are even more open to scrutiny.

Our guide Luke Dodd, the Guardian’s project manager for the building and former Director of the Newsroom, explained the background to the move. In particular the bringing together of several disparate offices into one space. But also merging the paper and digital activities so that content for both media is produced by one extended team instead of separately as before.

As a bit of a techie, the most impressive sight was the literally hundreds of uniform 24 inch iMac computers on every desk. Each floor was filled with these very desirable pieces of kit as far as the eye could see. Again, the move gave an opportunity to equip all the staff with a same technology.

Many thanks to the Association of UK Media Librarians (AUKML) the organization for print and broadcast news librarians, news researchers and information workers in the media industry, and SLA Europe for organising such a fascinating visit.

The Social Media Exchange – For the Cultural and Heritage Sectors

It has already been a week since I attended the one day Social Media Exchange – For the Cultural and Heritage Sectors. Organised by the irrepressible Jude Habib, co-founder of Sound Delivery the communications and training company, it was a fun day learning about the uses of social media in museums and libraries.

I have included a selection of my notes from the day below, but most of the content plus updated comments are available through their dedicated website at http://socialmediaexchange.org.uk/

Using Web Content to Build and Engage Your Audience

Madeleine Sugden – KnowHow NonProfit – http://www.knowhownonprofit.org/
http://www.slideshare.net/sounddelivery/making-content-work-for-you-presentation

What is web content for:

• Proof of existence
• Help people to learn something – 24/7 learning
• Encourage action / change behaviour – find out more/shop etc

What is web content for? – 5 Questions to help you make the most of your web content

1. Audience – will they get beyond your home page?

Examples:

• Museum of Witchcraft – poor design, which doesn’t match the nature of the content i.e. it looks like it is designed for accountants – http://www.museumofwitchcraft.com/
• Walsal new museum – too much text, missing image – http://www.artatwalsall.org.uk/
• compare to Tyne & Wear museums page – http://www.twmuseums.org.uk/
• Porthcurno telegraph museum – sections for different visitors – http://www.porthcurno.org.uk/
• Pages for visitors or for creators eg about page from Museum of Brands and Packaging is too boring – http://www.museumofbrands.com/background.html
• Working with Men website one of very few asking for feedback to improve website – http://www.workingwithmen.org/
• Friends of the Earth website – what you said content following on from consolation exercise – e.g. local groups. – get into the mindset of audience
  http://www.foe.co.uk/community/local_groups/group_resources_index.html

2. Presentation

• Are you helping with skim reading?
• Use headings, blocks of text, links to more content
• Are you giving too much information?
• Placing text over images leads to accessibility issues
• Is content accessible
• Are you encouraging people to read on?
• Don’t use – “Click here to find out more about…” unnecessary text
• Bring in other content to improve experience e.g. weather forecasts from BBC

Examples:

• Samuel Johnson website – good layout – http://www.drjohnsonshouse.org/
• Shakespeare birthplace trust – more links to content – http://www.shakespeare.org.uk/
• British Heart Foundation – good example of design – http://www.bhf.org.uk/

3. Medium

• Content isn’t just printed words
• Are you using the best format?
• Are you using audio and video content?
• Is it interesting and fun?

Examples:

National Museums Liverpool – audio content is key part of page – subject integration – includes transcript alternative – http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/

Great Fire of London – interactive video game type experience for children – http://www.fireoflondon.org.uk/

Welcome to Yorkshire – help to build your day in … – dynamic itinerary building tool – http://www.yorkshire.com/inspire/inspire-me

Hackney Museum Virtual Tour – very boring – http://www.virtualtours360.net/hackney/virtual-tour.html

4. Marketing

• Help people find your site
  Search engines – work on Google Search Engine Optimisation, think about subject terms used to find your content. E.g. A search for Victorian homes does not find many of the relevant museums.
• Use all channels
• Integrate on and offline activities

Examples:

Eric Bloodaxe from York Museum has a Facebook page

Mediamuseum on Twitter with 1,700 followers

Eureka museum putting their images on flickr

Wellcome collection – medical London – videos of relevant walks around London – http://www.medicallondon.org/related_events.html

Imperial War Museum North – their page on the Big Picture Show does not come close to capturing the impact of the actual experience in the museum – http://north.iwm.org.uk/server/show/ConWebDoc.2141

5. Influence

• From passive users to active users to super active users…
• Make it easy to interact and take action
• Influence windows

Examples:

• Nation Museum of Wales – use e-cards – http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/en/ecards/?cat=all
• + make your own love spoon – http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/en/lovespoon/
• Barley Hall – oral history involvement – http://www.barleyhall.org.uk/content.asp?ID=35
• Kent Police Museum – donations page – call us, but no phone number – http://www.kent-police-museum.co.uk/core_pages/donations.shtml
• Sponsor a valve on Colossus web page – http://www.colossusonline.com/
• Museum of Childhood – page on Lego has no opportunity for interaction – http://www.vam.ac.uk/moc/collections/toys/construction_toys/lego/index.html
• Museum of London – e-newsletter ‘close this window’ page after completing request – http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/English/AboutUs/Newsroom/Enewsletter/EnewsletterForm.htm
• KnowHow NonProfit – good example of many points – http://www.knowhownonprofit.org/

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Group Tweeting or Finding your organisation’s voice on Twitter

Ali Holder – Westminster Libraries

@wcclibraries

Started in March 2009

Currently lone tweeter

First tweet: Planning to put all news and events in libraries here. Also additions to the 24/7 library of exclusive online resources for library members.

11:34 PM Mar 3rd from web

Why?

Instant

Getting started:

Buy-in from senior management important as speaking for Westminster

Get tweeting – once or twice a day, most days – not too much, not to little

Set up Business Continuity colleague so they can tweet library closures etc

Aims:

Mainly post news & events, but also draw attention to existing / regular / ‘hidden’ aspects of service.

Issues:

• Organisational voice
• Broadcasting, not conversing
• Access restrictions within the work setting
• Getting customers and potential customers to follow us.

Lessons:

• Aware of popularity of posts with existing and future followers – e.g. free wi-fi
• Use search tools to find out what people are saying about us.
• Proactive use allows us to build trust and demonstrate use to organisation
• Ditto for users –

Finding our voice – who is tweeting?

Me, us or them?

Future plans:

• Group tweeting – or groups of tweeters
• More feeds
• More use of hashtags
• Tweeting through events
• Feedback and conversation
• How do we measure success?

Tips:

• Never forget the biog section
• Work out who is speaking
• Provide links
• Don’t protect updates
• Watch how others do it
• Don’t exclude – have a feed

Twitter demographics – typical user – around 30 and urban

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Round up discussion

Patrick Forbes – Head of Documentaries at Oxford Film and Television

Nick Reynolds – Editor, BBC Internet Blog

Frances Croxford – Consultant and Account Manager at Jane Wentworth

Be aware of both huge opportunities and significant risks associated with adoption of  social media.

Inherent lack of control.

Before you start make sure you are aware of the external perception of the organisation.

• Clarity
• Confidence
• Transparency

Tell stories which come from both your staff and your audience.

Conclusions:

• Institutions are naturally resistant to social media as it leads to loss of control.
• Biggest resistors are curatorial staff
• Cultural change can take between 5 and 10 years

The kindness of strangers… and acquaintances

Although not in the same league as Lucy Kellaway’s recent trauma, and resulting life affirming experience (How a thief gave me 10 reasons to be grateful), my newly acquired torn calf muscle has led to unexpected kindness from strangers.

Not exactly how I sustained my injury - but a nice footy photo

As I have limped around a sometimes hostile (or frequently indifferent) London I have come across instance after instance of help and thoughtfulness. My first experience was a ticket inspector at the entrance to my train station, rushing forward to open the automatic gate for me, as I struggled to retrieve the ticket from my pocket. Later on, as I crept at snail’s pass a bus waiting to begin its journey I asked if they were going my way. The driver’s initial response was, ‘this isn’t a bus stop you know’, but after seeing my limping progress, they relented and invited me on board.

Friends and acquaintances at work have also expressed great concern as they see me leaning heavily on my walking stick. And even when they discover the injury was sustained during a veterans football match, and their initial laughter has died down, they still ask what they can do to help.

All in all a very positive feeling which has gone some way to ameliorating the stinging pain of the injury itself.