Women in business

My friend Claire just turned me on to this article by one of my favourite ever columnists, Charlie Brooker.

It's brilliant funny, incisive and pretty sweary, as I've come to expect from him. But beneath the jokey central premise that men are ruining the world and that women should take over *everything* lies a fundamental problem. And it gives me a chance to get something off my chest that I've been meaning to for ages.

Y'see, I agree in principle with Charlie. There aren't enough women in positions of real power, and the world would be a better place if it wasn't so patriarchal. But unfortunately the women that do get to power (or try to get to power) almost always seem to do it by emulating male traits. I honestly can't think of many women I know who have got to the top in their game without apparently resorting to being battleaxes, bullies or bitches. They put on a mask of aggression that makes them harsh and unapproachable. Take the two women who've been sat on the panel of Dragon's Den; Deborah Meaden and Rachel Elnaugh.

I'm not entirely sure I saw either of them crack a smile once in all the eipsodes I watched. And they seemed to be particularly unpleasant to female "contestants" who tried to appeal to them on a feminine level. I'm sure both of them are lovely in real life, but when in business mode they lose all the humour, warmth, and approachability that are their strengths. But because we live in a male dominated society they are probably seen as weaknesses, because us blokes have made aggression, suppression and bullying the de facto modes of business.

Of course, these are all generalisations, and maybe there's not a fundamental problem in Brooker's proposal - maybe we just need to change the way we see leaders & entrepreneurs. I'd just love to see a new generation of women leaders coming through who were brilliant, warm, friendly and aren't scared to lead as women, and not as "men in dresses".

Interesting facts from the future

Well, I say "the future"... that's based purely on Gerd Leonhard's title of "Media Futurist". I was recently lucky enough to spend a couple of days in the presence of him and Jeremy Silver at Future Music Labs, part of Creative Capital in Canary Wharf, London.

They both gave fascinating talks at the beginning of the first day, and I took lots of notes. I've just been looking back over them and thought there were a few snippits that are worth sharing. This will all appear in bullet-point form, as I can't remember the exact context of each fact and wouldn't want to misquote Jeremy or Gerd. Also, apologies if some of the facts don't make that much sense out of context. They obviously don't have the great slides that Gerd and Jeremy used to illustrate their points, too. You can see the slides for Jeremy's presentation here, and Gerd's here.

If they don't make sense then let me know - I'll improve my note taking technique!

Also, I'll be adding news links to back up as much of this information as i can, when I can.

Jeremy Silver

• The "value" in creative industries tends to be in digital media.
• In 9 years the music industry has lost 40 percent of its value.
• 20 - 25 percent of sales across the board are digital.
• Games companies are making money!
• Youtube's bandwidth costs $1m a day to maintain, and their daily loss exceeds $1m a day.
• In the UK £357 is spent on advertising per head of population (from memory, this is annually). 19 percent of this is online, the highest percentage in the world.
• The UK has the highest per capita spend on music. $82 a year.
• Consumers are very sophisticated and want to interact with music - e.g. see Rockband & Singstar, Radiohead allowing fans to remix tunes etc.

Gerd Leonhard

• 92 percent of Google's revenue is from Adwords.
• Total fragmentation of the market is certain. Very few models work for everyone anymore. We'll never see anyone having hits on the scale of The Beatles again. In TV Dallas used to get 70 percent of US viewers. Today the top show, American Idol, gets just 7 percent.
• Physical Media and productised content is the past.
• 1.7 million new mobile users in India every week.
• 6.8 billion minutes a day are spent on Facebook. It is a broadcaster, as are all social network.
• We're living in an age of "Attention Challenge". Distribution is now a default setting.
• Brand magnetism is everything. If you love them, you'll buy them.
• "Money is just a type of information" - www.kk.org

Life

A brief, but slightly sad, blog from me today.

In the last two years I've lost both a good friend and an uncle to cancer. I have another uncle who has terminal cancer.

And now my good friend Katherine has recently been diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 33. She found the lump while on honeymoon. She is married to the chief strategist for the Welsh rugby team, so you may have heard that they came onto the pitch on Saturday wearing pink ribbons to help raise awareness.

Anyway, while she's fighting the disease she has also set herself the target of raising a million pounds for Cancer Research UK. I'd be really grateful if you could pass this on to everyone you can think of, even if you can't donate.

The Million Pounds Challenge

If she can get just two pounds off everyone who donates she will cruise to her total. And also raise some much needed awareness of breast cancer in young women.

If you'd like to follow her "journey", then she is keeping a blog here.

Many, many thanks!

Neil

That Enterprise Article

Here's an article I wrote which has just been published in the March issue of Enterprise Magazine. After the limitless joys of the web it's quite hard to whittle down your thoughts to a mere 550 words, so excuse the brevity. But hopefully it's a nice read! :)

Unless you've decided that you won't engage with the internet in any way, then it's almost certain that you have at least one profile online somewhere. Whether it's a personal profile like Myspace, or a more business oriented one like LinkedIn, you are using social media to project an image of yourself that, to one extent or another, will be viewable by any person on the planet with an internet connection and, here's the kicker, your great-great-grandchildren. Having an online identity is inevitable, and it will be available for anyone to view forever. How we engage with the social internet is something not to be taken lightly.

Firstly we must be aware of search results. What's going to come up when our name is entered into Google? What about the information that is always associated with our name – our biographies. Do they portray us as hyper-efficient, revenue-generating machines or a laid-back networker? What are the keywords that will attract attention, and do those keywords trigger the relevant searches on Google? What words do you want to be associated with on search engines?

Tom Critchlow, Head of Search Marketing with web-experts Distilled, had some great tips for using social media to improve your online identity. “Make sure you choose an online 'handle' which is both easy to remember, unique and short. Be consistent - make sure that you keep the same username across all the social media sites. Make sure you are contactable - If someone wants to get in touch with you make it easy for them. Never underestimate the power of email. Last but not least, engage! When someone emails you, email them back, when someone twitters you, twitter them back”.

With his final point, Tom hits on a crucial fact about social media and online branding - You can't just expect to just constantly promote yourself and your products. There's a certain amount of give and take. For every time you advertise your blog to your Twitter network, be prepared to make 20 other “tweets” that are relevant links to other people's works.

And this leads us neatly onto the social network of the moment. You've no doubt heard of Twitter by now and if you've read this far then, yes, you should be using it. For me, it's the network where the boundaries between social and professional are most blurred. But it's also the most powerful networking device I've ever come across. The micro-blogging format lends itself to sharing links to interesting articles and reports, using keywords to attract more followers and thus generating fantastic contacts with people you would never normally have found. However, it also lends itself to pithy asides, comments on the latest TV shows and occasionally a silly photo or a drunken joke. Keeping your discipline, and maintaining a professional (if informal) image is important.

I'll leave the final words to Carl Morris of social media strategists Native. “The term 'personal brand' is not to everyone's taste, but if you do anything on the web you need to understand it. Your prospective client, employer or advocate will take seconds to figure out who you are. Attention is scarce! So you need to represent yourself in a way that makes it as easy as possible for them”.

Passion, perseverance, and stuff

I saw the film Anvil a few nights ago. It's a documentary about a rock band who, thirty years on from being on the verge of greatness, are living in near-obscurity and decide to give it one last push before giving up for good. It's an absolutely brillant (and hilarious) film and I was incredibly touched by their perseverance, their passion and their lust for life. And it reminded me that perseverance is that rare quality that is usually the one factor that many people are missing out on when looking for success.

I often advise people on small business and creative industries, and tell them to look at the top DJs and producers in the world: Carl Cox, Pete Tong, Sasha, Roger Sanchez, Eric Morillo, The Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, The Prodigy etc - I'm fairly certain that not one of them is under 40, and I know that some of them are over 50. (edit - I'm reliably informed by Ian -see comments below- that Liam from the Prodigy is a spritely 37). The average age of the freshest, hottest 3 DJs in the world (Tiesto, Armin van Buuren and Paul van Dyk) is 37.2.

Being a DJ is usually considered to be a youngster's game. These guys are clear evidence that if you're good enough you might make it, BUT if you're good enough AND you're willing to stick at it long enough then you'll definitely improve your chances of making it. I suppose it's a case of having the talent, and using the perseverance to maximise the likelihood of getting your break...

"It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer". ~Albert Einstein

A few bits and pieces...
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We've recently announced details of Ignite Cardiff #2, and with that in mind I thought I'd link to this article explaining how to "Deliver a Presentation like Steve Jobs".

14 Tools Of Highly Effective Twitter Users - I particularly like the first tool. I'd be more inclined to find out how annoying I am though, rather than vet others before following....

This looks quite interesting if you're based near South Wales and are in the creative industries, innovation, enterprise etc. I'll probably be there.

This link is either the greatest link ever for a procrastinator, or a fascinating archive of the things that amused us over the early years of "the internet age".

Very interesting take on what's "killing" the music industry. Not illegal downloads, according to the author. Surprised to see that the value of music being shipped is more today than it was in 1993.

My Dad's been very ill recently, and I've been "hanging out" at an online forum where people exchange experiences and support about the illness that he's suffering from. One post struck me as absolute gold: A woman has become very housebound and insular in the last year, not wishing to leave the house. But in the recent snow her husband and kids persuaded her to go out and make a snowman with them. The phrase that convinced her to get out there? "Let's go make some memories".

Life is short, and all we really have at the end of it is our memories, so go make some.

* The pic at the top is of my girlfriend and I, mid-jump, making some snowy memories a few weeks ago. That blurry shot is the best of about 15 attempts to get a shot of us mid air in the snow, using a self timer!

Twitter - What's the point?

I admit it. I'm a twitterfreak. In the space of a few months it has become the single most useful business tool I've ever used on the web, and has also been great at improving my social circle.

Its growth has been astonishing. Just look at this graph that shows it's percentage reach over the last 18 months:


Interestingly though, it's barely made the faintest dent in Facebook's dominance. And yes, Twitter does feature on the following graph. You just have to look *very* closely...


I can only assume that the majority of Twitter's users access it through clients such as Tweetdeck and Twhirl, which don't access the site directly, and therefore wouldn't contribute to those graphs.

And yet it's really difficult to explain to non-converts why they should be part of the movement. The following video gives an overview of the social aspect of Twitter. If I'm honest, I don't see much point in using Twitter if you don't have any particularly strong passions, or are "in business". I may be wrong, but I'm not entirely sure how Twitter would be of much benefit on a social level, above and beyond what Facebook and forums currently provide...



However, if you are self-employed, a freelancer, a passionate indulger, or just want to get more involved in your own industry, then you'd be amazed at how Twitter will change your online behaviour. As @biggreensheep says in this Guardian article about Twitter: "If Dave be "the home of witty banter" then Twitter has got to be the home of intelligent social networking. While other social networks rely heavily on gimmicks and apps, the Twitter platform holds community and content in high regard.

Another interesting take comes from @bbmorph: "One (of several) ways I use Twitter is to communicate with people who might otherwise ignore me. As a community of 'early adopters', people who have joined Twitter for business reasons want to be seen to be in touch with the technology and the community. This makes it easier to talk to people further up the (imagined or otherwise) rungs of business hierarchy than one would otherwise be able to do."

But the most succinct viewpoint comes from @digitalmaverick: "I use Twitter because it's broadened the range of people I can interact with instantly and I get authoritative responses."

But, if you haven't already, there's really only one way to truly grasp the point and scope of Twitter. And that's to sign up and get involved. But before you do, the most important thing it's vital to understand is that there are three methods of using Twitter for marketing, PR, and self-promotion.

1 - HowToUseTwitterForMarketingAndPR.com
2 - Just constantly write about yourself and don't "follow" anyone else.
3 - Somewhere in between. Twitter is a dialogue. A conversation. It's not about "broadcasting". It's about call and response, engagement, and genuine interest in a community. Like any self-regulating community, if you see it as an opportunity to self-promote and nothing else, you'll very quickly find that no-one is listening.

Insights into personal branding online

I've just finished writing my regular column for Enterprise Magazine. My topic this month was "personal branding on the web". I'll publish the full article here once it hits the streets, but I thought I'd share the unedited insights of two experts who shared their wisdom with me. I didn't have space for all their thoughts in the actual article, so here they are in their full glory:

Tom Critchlow, from Distilled:

• Make sure you choose an online 'handle' which is both easy to remember, unique and short
• Be consistent. Make sure that you keep the same username across all the social media sites you sign up to (twitter, digg, etc etc). This makes it easy for people to connect the dots and helps your existing 'friends' on one social media site find you on other sites.
• Make sure that you choose an online username which you can rank for in Google. People use search. A lot of people use search actually and being able to rank for your own name is valuable because it allows you to present searchers with a page of your choosing and importantly you can set up a contact form etc on the site which leads me onto the next point:
• Make sure you are contactable. If someone wants to get in touch with you make it easy for them, whether it's an email address in your twitter background, a contact form on a website or blog etc. Never underestimate the power of email!
• Monitor the conversation about you. Using a tool like google alerts (free) or Distilled's reputation monitor (cheap, few more features) allows you to monitor the interwebs for any mentions of your name. It's important to choose a unique, short name in point 1 above so people can find you but it also removes a lot of the headache associated with monitoring as well.
• Last but not least, engage! When someone emails you, email them back, when someone twitters you, twitter them back. If someone tweets something you can help them with don't be afraid to send them a note. Online networking is hugely powerful and has gained Distilled £100,000s of business. Be nice to people and be nice to people and you'll get it back in spades.

Carl Morris, from Native
The term "personal brand" is not to everyone's taste, but if you do anything on the web you need to understand it. Your prospective client, employer or advocate will take seconds to figure out who you are. Attention is scarce! So you need to represent yourself in a way that makes it as easy as possible for them.

Full article online in a few weeks when it goes to print.

:)