Brynn Neilson's Blog

Updating your website

2011-06-01T09:00:00.000+12:00

A common complaint from website owners is that they are unable to update their website themselves. This is either because their content management system is too difficult to use, or it simply will not allow it. Updating a website is one of the most important aspects of having an online presence. Not only to clients like to see an organisation that is constantly keeping up to date and is interesting, but search engines such as Google like to know that a website is still active. Where large corporations may have the money to pay someone to continually update their website for them, most small to medium organisations do not. This is where it is important to know how to update your website yourself.

Not only does the ability to update your own website give you the power to make changes when and how you want, it also means that you are not having to rely on someone outside of your organisation to make crucial alterations. You know your clients and what their needs and wants are. If your website does not allow you to update web-pages yourself, try changing to a system that does. Different systems are available that are easy to use. This will save you and your company a lot of time, money and frustration.

Why use e-Newsletters instead of regular email?

2011-05-01T09:00:00.000+12:00

Not only do e-Newsletters look more impressive than a regular email, but using an e-Newsletter module you can send thousands of newsletters at the same time. Using regular email, many servers only allow you to send to up to 25 recipients at a time. This means that for organisations with a client base larger than 25, you will be wasting a lot of time sending emails out and making sure you haven't missed anyone on your list.

An e-Newsletter module allows you to create impressive and informative newsletters that are more exciting to read than a boring old email. Newsletters can also be scheduled so that they are sent on specific dates. This can be an excellent tool for times when your business may be too busy to type up a newsletter right then and there. If needed you can write a newsletter ahead of time and schedule it to be sent on a specific date.

Since online newsletters use commercial email providers, your newsletters will not be identified as spam. Regular email can often be identified in client's email as spam and automatically deleted. Also e-Newsletters adhire to the Unsolicited Electrontic Messages Act 2007, where some regular emailing systems may not.

E-Newsletters also provide a way of tracking how many people have read your newsletter and how many times links have been accessed. This can help you identify what interests your readers, and help you gain more!

Tips and tricks for updating your website

2011-04-01T09:00:00.000+13:00

One way to ensure your clients keep returning to your website is make sure you update it on a regular basis. Changing your website once a month is enough to intrigue your clients without frustrating them with too many changes. When making changes it is important to retain the essence of your brand and what your business is about. Updating your website also lets search engines know that your website is active.

When updating your website and making changes try not to change things so much that your regular clients can't find things any more. This can be frustrating to Internet users and you could even lose clients. Always ensure that your site is easily navigable. Make sure that it is always clear to your client that they are in your website. Keep your name and logo visible at all times so that clients know that your website can be trusted.

For information sites, keep your information as up to date as possible and get rid of old information or place it in archives for people that may still want to read it. Remember the more up to date your information is, the more regularly your clients will be clicking into your website.

Some fun ways you can update your website include:
- seasonal backgrounds
- updates to reflect special events or holidays (ie. FIFA World Cup, Halloween, Your organisation's birthday)
- updates that reflect changes in your industry (New technologies, new products, new trends)

Improving your digital strategy

2011-03-01T09:00:00.000+13:00

Many businesses want a website with all the bells and whistles so that customers will want to buy from them. However, what they really need is a digital strategy. For a website design company to create a website that is going to reel in customers they need to know about your business. A simple one hour Website Success Guide (WSG) meeting will improve your digital strategy by allowing you to:

Clearly and strategically describe your business to staff, suppliers and website visitors which will improve your ranking in search engines and improve your communication with customers.
Create profiles of your customers and identify what's important to them to increase your referrals, sales and customer satisfaction.
Create a founding strategic document for your website that you and the website design company can regularly use to ensure your success.

By knowing what your business is about, who your customers are and what they want, a website can be designed to specifically target the right audience. There is no point in spending thousands of dollars on a website that attracts the wrong kind of clientele. A digital strategy will give your business a guideline as to how you want to progress and what will be done to improve your success online.

How to increase sales via TXT!

2011-02-01T09:00:00.001+13:00

Do you find that your clients often don't have the time to talk to you on the phone and your emails get lost amongst the thousands of other emails they receive every day? Most clients own and use a mobile phone and keep it on them 24/7. Using a tool such as MySMS can save you time and increase your sales simply by sending a text message.

Modules such as MySMS allow you to send text messages from your computer to your client's mobile phones. There can be multiple recipients and TXT's can be scheduled for particular dates. This is useful for reminding clients about meetings, events, billing or sales promotions. Templates can also be set up to save you time when you need to send regular TXT's for the same purpose.

Here are 5 ways MySMS can increase your sales:

1.   Follow-up your sales: Customers like nothing more than to be assured they have made the right choice buying from you. TXT them a few days after the sale thanking them for their business and offering a number to call if they need any help or anything further. This will increase recall rates, increase repeat purchase and hugely increase positive word of mouth amongst peer groups - essentially free advertising!
2.   TXT lapsed customers: Try to get a list of customers from your database who haven’t bought for 6 months and TXT them out an offer to encourage them back to you. So long as they had a good experience last time, this is one of the fastest ways to gain new sales.
3.   Text enable your advertising: Allow people to respond by TXTing you. On average around half of respondents will choose to do so if you include a TXT response on your advertising and often those people would not have responded so you increase response rates.
4.   Keep a customer informed during the order process: TXT them when you have received the order, when payment has been taken & when it has been dispatched with a delivery time estimate. This has been proven to dramatically increase repeat orders and positive word of mouth.
5.   Keyword: Allow people to TXT in a keyword to receive special offers from you by text message (Keyword could be advertised on radio, website, poster or print advert).

Don't forget, TXT messages are like email and subject to the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007. This means that if requested by the recipient, you must remove them from your messaging list.

What does your company's prospective client look like?

2011-01-01T09:00:00.000+13:00

Would your employees be able to identify what your prospective client would look like? This is a good question to ask. If the answer is no, set up a meeting right now to discuss it!

Any company can benefit from creating a profile of their ideal client. What are their ideal demographics? What kind of products or services are they looking for? Why do they need you? By creating a profile, your company can then work from this "ideal client" to find new ways of marketing to them, find new innovations that will suit their needs, and target services to exceed their expectations.

It is important that you and your employees know who your prospective client is. By being able to identify this person, your employees should be able to give more efficient, professional and helpful service which will keep your clients coming back. Employees will know what your clients want and need, and be able to deliver this to them easily.

It is possible that there may be more than one ideal prospective client for your company. Try to identify each one, profile them, and even name them. You could even have these profiles posted in the office to remind employees who they are looking for. It is a great idea to have regular staff meetings to share ideas on improving products and services for these clients. Update regularly, and you will maintain a high level of service within your company.

Measuring Sponsorship

2010-12-01T09:00:00.000+13:00

A common fault with sponsorship is that many businesses fail to find ways of measuring its success. Try thinking of sponsorship as advertising, except instead of paying an advertising agency to produce an advertisement and broadcast it, you are sponsoring an organisation in exchange for them promoting your brand.

Here are some ways you can measure your sponsorship activities:

When sponsoring an event find out as much information as possible. How will the event be advertised? Will your brand/logo be featured within the advertising? How many people can be expected at the event? Who are the other sponsors? Who sponsored the event last year?
Sponsorship policies are also a tool that can be used as a standard way of measuring your sponsorship activities. Try to set policies that are measurable. For example, how many brochures have been taken from your sponsored organisation's site? How many business cards? How many clicks have you gotten from their website?
A simply way of measuring exposure is to survey your customers and find out how they found out about you. Did they see one of your posters in your sponsored organisation's office?
Encourage people from organisations that you sponsor to refer clients to you. Teach them about your ideal client and offer them incentives for making referrals.
For brochures, business cards or flyers that are available through your sponsored organisation you could offer discounts for people that bring them in when they come to see you. This way you will know where they found out about you and have an easy way of measuring numbers.
Be sure to take note of the number of clients you have before and after any sponsorship activities. This will not ensure exact numbers of increased customers but it will give an indication of whether or not your marketing activities are working.

Mobile Marketing

2010-11-03T16:23:00.000+13:00

Within this information era, consumers are constantly being bombarded with new means of marketing communication, challenging media effectiveness (Heinonen & Strandvik, 2003). Vast media availability has led to fierce competition for consumer attention. As consumer attention and time has become increasingly scarce a new form of marketing has emerged…Permission Marketing!

Permission marketing relies on the theory that since consumers are “opting in” to receive communications, they are more likely to pay attention to the communication they receive. This contradicts the traditional interruption based marketing where companies fight for the attention of consumers and must surpass thousands of uninterested consumers in order to source a few golden nuggets. New media such as SMS text messaging from mobile phones, have created powerful tools for direct and interactive permission marketing (Heinonen & Strandvik, 2003).

Mobile media creates an environment of almost instant communication, anywhere, anytime, that can support one-to-one, many-to-many, and mass communication (Scharl, Dickinger & Murphy, 2004). There are a number of benefits to integrating mobile marketing into the existing marketing mix such as:

1. Cost Effectiveness – SMS marketing is more cost effective than other forms of marketing. As long as a company is efficient in convincing customers to “opt-in” to the SMS service, the cost is very small as it only involves the cost of sending the SMS. If a company fails to convince customers to “opt-in”, they may need to purchase numbers. Although this can be a little more expensive than purchasing email addresses, experts agree that SMS’s ability to specifically target groups helps to justify the cost (Dickinger, Haghirian, Murphy & Scharl, 2004).

2. Response Rate – The consumer response rate for SMS marketing is somewhat higher than other media campaigns. European mobile marketing experts have confirmed the observed higher response rate, adding that consumers are also more likely to respond instantly to messages and use the full 160-character limit (Dickinger, Haghirian, Murphy & Scharl, 2004).

3. Integration with other media – SMS marketing campaigns can easily be used to complement other media in a campaign. Due to the 160-character limit SMS should not be used as the main media in a campaign (Dickinger, Haghirian, Murphy & Scharl, 2004). The limited characters can however be an advantage if utilized correctly, as they serve as a short, precise message to consumers which will not take up much of their time. In this sense, an SMS can have similar benefits to Twitter.

4. Mobile Coupons – Many companies can benefit from sending out mobile coupons. Not only is mobile couponing environmentally friendly, it also saves on the cost of design, print and mailing paper coupons to customers. The other advantage is that a mobile coupon is quick and easy for customers to present to shop/office staff, and it reduces the risk of customers losing or forgetting to bring in a paper coupon (Dickinger, Haghirian, Murphy & Scharl, 2004). Most people tend to have their mobile phones with them when they venture out, so unless they delete the text, they are likely to have the coupon with them at any given point of time.

5. Advertising – There are two methods of mobile advertising: Push and Pull. Push advertising sends out relevant, but not specifically requested information which may interest the consumer (eg. Promotions, coupons). Push advertising can be beneficial in that companies are sending more focused information to people they know are interested in it. This saves marketing resources trying to figure out how to get people to pay attention, and how to get the attention of the right people!

Pull advertising adds messages to information requested by the consumer, such as weather reports and daily horoscopes. As consumers often view pull advertising as requested content, the line between advertising and service becomes blurred (Scharl, Dickinger & Murphy, 2004). Since consumers are actually requesting this service, the likelihood of them paying attention to the advertisement is greatly increased.

6. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – Companies can utilize mobile marketing in their CRM practices. SMS can be linked to a customer loyalty programme whereby free newsletters, ringtones, or coupons are sent to those that sign up (Dickinger, Haghirian, Murphy & Scharl, 2004). Once again this is relatively cheap for the company, and easy for the consumer. Companies may also choose to use SMS for daily CRM functioning, for example meeting and appointment reminders, or billing/payment reminders.

7. Viral Branding – Mobile marketing is a branding tool, and as such can be used to give companies a competitive edge (Dickinger, Haghirian, Murphy & Scharl, 2004). By creating interesting, entertaining and innovative SMS messages, companies can potentially create a viral effect whereby customers like the SMS so much they forward it to all their friends. If this can be done, the company gains increased loyalty and trust, increased brand awareness and possibly new customers, and all at a very low cost as the original SMS were only sent to customers.

As illustrated above, mobile marketing can be very beneficial to an organization willing to implement it into their marketing mix. If done correctly, mobile marketing has the ability to effectively reach target groups quickly and efficiently, with very little cost to the company. It also benefits the consumer by providing relevant, personalized marketing that can be accessed whenever and wherever is convenient.

References

Dickinger, A., Haghirian, P., Murphy, J. & Scharl, A. (2004). An Investigation and Conceptual Model of SMS Marketing. Proceeding of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

Heinonen, K. & Strandvik, T. (2003). Consumer Responsiveness to Mobile Marketing. Paper presented at Stockholm Mobility Roundtable, Stockholm.

Scharl, A., Dickinger, A., & Murphy, J. (2005). Diffusion and success factors of mobile marketing. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, Vol. 4, pp. 159-173.

Sponsorship Policies

2010-11-01T09:00:00.000+13:00

Sponsorship is a form of advertising that has been increasing in popularity. Where the sponsorship of an event or organisation can be beneficial to both your business and the event or organisation, it is important to make sure that these benefits are balanced between you. If a business is participating in sponsorship activities it is a good idea to set up some sponsorship policies.

Sponsorship policies give a business some guidelines as to the minimum benefits required from the organisation or event that they sponsor. This makes decisions easier when sponsorship is requested from your business. Stick to the rules you set and do not go below them. Remember by sponsoring you are giving away products, services or money from your organisation that could otherwise have been sold or spent elsewhere. You need to make sure that you are getting a return on your investment. Sponsorship is about exchanging goods, services or money for brand exposure, so make sure your brand is gaining enough exposure to at least balance out what you are giving away.

Some ideas for policies include:

- ensure the sponsored organisation displays

- business cards
- brochures

- posters

- ensure your business is identified as a sponsor of the organisation on their website

- ensure your business has the right to promote that you sponsor these organisations

- set requirements for the size of your name and/or logo on promotional materials for events

Marketing through Social Networking Websites #4 - Communication

2010-10-01T09:00:00.000+13:00

Join groups and be active in commenting and giving out helpful advice. Make sure that you keep all communication positive. By offering advice people will start to recognise you as an expert in your field which then rubs off on your company image. By raising your profile, social networking will start to work more and more for you.

One of the benefits of being online is that people can view your profile and get to know you without you having to physically be there or even be online at the time! Also where word of mouth spreads from one person to ten other people, online social networks allow one person to spread the word to hundreds of people and in even less time.

Tip: Set a time limit to how much you are prepared to spend each week on social networking. This can always be altered depending on how well social networking works for your business. Try to measure your success so you can find out what works and what wastes time.

Marketing through Social Networking Websites #3 - Making Connections and Networking

2010-09-01T09:00:00.000+12:00

Once your profile is set up it's time to make connections and network. Find relevant connections with other businesses that you are connected to, organisations you support, information that you are interested in, and people who have an interest in your business. People within social networking sites do not want you to sell products to them. Remember these sites are about being social and networking. Here your marketing goal should be to create and foster a positive online image and make connections with people who you may otherwise have been unable to.

Tip: It can be easy to get carried away when making connections as there are a lot of interesting things on the internet! You may wish to set guidelines as to who and what you want to be associated with. Research people and organisations before becoming associated with them. Also try to set a time limit for how long you can spend doing this.

Marketing through Social Networking Websites #2 - Your Profile

2010-08-01T09:00:00.000+12:00

As everyone knows, first impressions count. Just like face-to-face networking, with social networking you only get a short amount of time to make a good first impression. This is why your profile must be dressed to impress!

Write your profile specifically for your audience. Social networking is more than just handing around your business cards, its like posting your resume for the world to see. Transparency for a business can really help with company image. It indicates that you are trustworthy and don't have anything to hide. Just like a celebrity gossip magazines, people like to read the profiles of people and organisations that they may be interested in dealing with. Regularly update your profile, and don't be afraid to show who you are and what your interested in. As with any kind of networking, people pay attention to those who show their personality. So be yourself!

Marketing through Social Networking Websites #1 - Creating a Presence

2010-07-07T09:02:00.000+12:00

Social networking sites have accelerated to the point that if your not part of them your missing out! The question is, how do you utilise these sites to bring about more business and ensure your not just wasting hours a day updating your profile and answering posts that are irrelevant. So how do you make the most of social networking for your business?

First thing is first, you must create a presence within these social networking sites. Don't just choose the ones that everybody is using, but choose sites that are relevant to you and your business. Different sites hold different audiences so don't just join all of them and duplicate your information. Research your audience and create information that will be useful for them. If it's not relevant they won't read it. It's also important to remember that the end user of your product or service (your target market) might not be the person who is making the purchase. Also, keep up to date with new and emerging social networking sites. A site that is popular today may not be popular next week.

Copyright and intellectual property in the digital age

2010-06-12T08:00:00.000+12:00

Copyright has only been around for about 300 years starting with England's Statute of Anne (1709). However it wasn't until the invention of the Printing Press which allowed for authors to reproduce their works cheaply and in copious amounts before it really flourished. How does this relate to copyright in modern times?

First we need to address the idea of ownership. Is that really what copyright is for? Do we really own something we create? All of the ideas that we used to create have come from previous people and if we're writing a book we might even directly quote them. Even with software many of the components have actually been developed by other people. When Microsoft released Windows 3.11 which was an Internet capable version of their OS they used Open Source software to make it Internet Capable. Should this reduce their ownership? When a band samples a riff from another band and use it in their song, should they have exclusive copyright to the song?

Next lets look at reproduction. Before the Printing Press copyright wasn't such an issue because most stories were presented orally. However when those stories or information could be commercially distributed and controlled copyright became the means to protect profit. In the Internet age we can reproduce a file such as a song millions of times and it never loses quality. If a song can be reproduced infinitum then what is a song worth?

Does copyright protect the artist or does it hinder our freedoms? In reality copyright laws are a means to push us into consumption whereas the new culture coming our of the Internet is more collaborative and sharing. This can be seen is the Open Source software movement whose technology powers most of the Internet and copyright free websites that openly share media and encourage users to share and transform that media.

What happens when the song doesn't even exist in normal time and space any more? If my copy of the song is stored on a server in Russia that streams to my computer does local copyright law apply?

New business models are starting to appear that may address copyright and compensation issues. In News media a new Freemium model exists that allows users limited access to content but if they use it regularly they are asked to pay a subscription. Online music outlets such as Grooveshark allows users to play the music online for free but if they want it for their car or iPod they have to pay a small fee. Both of these models contradict copyright law yet they are flourishing and will likely become the basis of new copyright laws that will develop in the next few years.

The power of news

2010-05-12T08:00:00.000+12:00

`The very construction of the news is designed to create the largest possible audience ...you're filling up the blank spaces between the commercials.' (Parenti, 1993)

Having worked for television news I can understand the above quote very well. A decade ago news wasn't so much about news but ratings. At one point TVNZ fired most of it's news staff and replaced them with better sets and created a more family styled news program - Mum and Dad read the news, Uncle Jim told us about the weather and our cousin the pretty Maori girl told us what was happening in sport. It hasn't changed much really. News was very commercially driven. Though that is still the case there are other factors influencing news now. Reporters are no longer our sole agents for news and have therefore lost some of their power. We can also check the validity of their claims which was difficult to do ten years ago. As shown on the www.asa.co.nz website, there has a massive decrease in advertising spend for newspapers which is forcing news media to reassess how it does news.

‘News appears to be the most real and transparent of television programs…it is [supposedly] the neutral observer’ (MCMahon & Quin, 1988)

We've also seen news transform online. there are micro news blogs like Twitter that give us news in near real-time from millions of non-journalists all over the world. This type of citizen journalism is also seen in user comments on websites, mailing lists and e-newsletters. Some of the differences with conventional mass media news that we're seeing include our ability to see multiple viewpoints, the news is decentralised, it can mobilize citizens (ie; Facebook, Greenpeace) and it's mediated and therefore more emotional.

The technological revolution has given the public more access to tools such as video cameras that we previously only available to companies with large budgets. Now a documentary can be produced with consumer video equipment and be broadcast to the world through the Internet at very little cost. These Independent Documentaries are being shared by users who lobby Governments for change because of them. This new type of activism is on a global scale which will make the 60s human rights movement look small by comparison.

This new news environment provides a place for people to assemble and to create dialogue. Mass Media news channels such as Television, Radio and Newspapers are trying to catch up with this trend by directing users to engage more with them on their websites which in turn is influencing what news they choose to show.

If anything, we're moving into a more liberating and news-worthy time but the one thing we need to watch out for is the large entertainment conglomerates who may try to sensor our freedom.

Bibliography
Parenti, M. 1993, Inventing Reality: The politics of news media. (Second Edition) St. Martins Press/ New York

MCMahon, B., & Quin, R., Real Images, Macmillan, London, 1988 pp 204-205.
Educational Media, 86.333 readings. Massey University, Palmerston North, 1995.

Why use e-Newsletters instead of regular email?

2010-05-01T09:00:00.001+12:00

Is anything real?

2010-04-12T08:00:00.000+12:00

How many times have parents complained that their children spend too much time on the Internet or in games? The statement is probably true because there needs to be a balance between our physical and digital worlds but first let's investigate what is happening in those digital worlds.

Though I'm not a gamer myself I can see how games give people fluidity of identity (you can be male, female, or not even human. They allow the user to explore new realities. It can be mindless entertainment used as an escape. It allows groups of people to interact so it's a participatory culture. Users can also explore Identity Tourism and try new identities which can be liberating. Does any of that not seem real? A recent study revealed groups such as the disabled find Virtual Communities like Second Life liberating because it allows them to interact on a more equal basis with other people. In these communities people aren't hindered by their sex, ethnicity or disability. Though they're in a virtual environment this gives them a very real ability to be empowered.

"The way we understand ourselves and define our identities depends very much on the attitudes derived from cultural experience. We see ourselves or who we want to be in others: friends, parents, popular figures, etc. This constitutes the process we call identification. In representation, this sense of image we have of 'self' is constructed through the feeling we have of becoming absorbed into a character's role or position in a narrative, understanding their thoughts, feelings, reactions, and taking on their point of view" (Swanson p. 125}.

Let's also compare previous media. Are they more real? Let me give you an example. Without doing any research, guess how big the painting of the Mona Lisa is. Because most of us have never been to the Louvre in Paris and have only seen it in magazines or on television we might think that it is the size of a typical painting that we see in local galleries. In reality it's only 77 cm × 53 cm. I was shocked the first time I saw it. I was also shocked when I saw Big Ben for the first time because it wasn't big it all - I started calling it medium sized Ben. What this reveals this reveals is that even in our real world with traditional media such as televisions and magazines our interpretation of reality is mediated. The idea of "real" is actually very subjective.

"At its most basic, the term 'representation' refers to the way images and language actively construct meanings according to sets of 'conventions' shared by and familiar to makers and audience"(Swanson p 123).

Remember the television footage from the Gulf War where the embedded reporters were supposedly reporting from the front lines? This style of reporting was mimicking Vietnam war correspondence to promote the idea of valid reporting. In reality most of the reporters were many miles from any danger but they still wore bullet-proof vests and helmets to promote authenticity.

What new technology has done is it has provided more perspectives and counter arguments through blogs, YouTube, Facebook, TXTing, etc. This is making the world more transparent so people can make informed decisions. I think that is more real.

"A change has taken place in the human mind.... The conviction is already very far from being universal, that the times are pregnant with change; and that [our era]... will be known to posterity as the era of the greatest of revolutions... in the human mind, and in the whole constitution of human society.... The first of the leading peculiarities of the present age is, that it is an age of transition."
-John Stewart Mill, "The Spirit of the Age" (1831)
(Thornbum, David. p.1)

Bibliography

Thorburn, David. Jenkins, Henry. (2003) Rethinking media change: the aesthetics of transition. MIT Press. Massachusetts

Swanson, Gillian. The Media Studies Book, Edited by David Lusted. Comedia, London, 1991. From, The media studies book of readings, 1993

Gutch, R. Wollen, T. Learnig the Media, An Introduction to Media Teaching, Machmillan, London, 1987.

Wollen, Peter. Cinema/Americanism/The Robot. From Naremore, James. Brantlinger, Patrick (Ed.) (1991) Modernity and Mass Culture. Indiana University Press: Bloomington and Indianapolis.

The Internet Generation

2010-03-12T08:00:00.000+13:00

There's a a common presumption that the effects of the Internet such as globalisation and global marketing is creating an homogeneous youth culture. Examples of this might be Youth gangs in Auckland mimicking gangs in the United States or even the global marketing of Miley Cyrus. However, as shown by a recent United Nations study, this may not be the case:

"Young people use, adapt and interpret global products in unique ways based on their own local cultures and experiences; in the process they create 'hybrid' cultural forms whose meanings vary according to local and national circumstances." (United Nations p.88)

The study, World Youth Report, 2005: Young People today, and in 2015, reveals the many ways that modern technology empowers youth. They live in a more democratic and socially aware society than that of previous generations and this environment supplies them with powerful tools for research, analysis, expression and play. As a result this new generation has been measured to be smarter than previous generations when they were the same age and this generation is more mobilised to take action.

However the Internet generation is not only youth who have grown up in the technology. It is the elderly that mostly use the Internet for email and research or businesses expanding online to reach a wider audience. What these new businesses are finding is that the ethics and modalities in this new environment change the way they do business in the real world - the Cadbury palm oil issue mentioned in my "Virtual Communities" blog is a perfect example of this. On the Internet time and space are compressed so it's easy for a user to compare a business with another business whether it be their pricing or the policies. This has lead to a more transparent and honest business practices which weren't a necessity in before the Internet. This is creating more ethical and trustworthy global business community.

The same influence can be seen in politics. In a recent discussion I had with a Labour Political Party member we noted how the present National Government had changed the way it handled the media. My proposition was that at the start of their Government they were very much like the Cadbury palm oil debacle but in recent months had changed their media policy to get a politician to take immediate responsibility for an issue and identify how they would resolve it. This tactic diverts responsibility from the political party and also reduces any back-scatter from blogs, newsletters, virtual communities like Facebook Groups and Mass Media.

If you've read this far through my recent blogs then you might be at the point where you're asking yourself, "So what is real any more?" I've been told that I'm a Cyborg and that the Internet is using me to evolve. That Virtual Communities have more control over the real world than expected. And finally, and most hard to believe, that Politicians might be getting honest! It sounds like the treatment for a Science Fiction film or the ravings of the mentally disturbed but perhaps the truth is we might be becoming more real because the "vale" or the effects of our previous inventions is being lifted. In my next blog I'll address this ideal of "real" more closely.

Bibliography
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, (2005) World Youth Report, 2005: Young people today, and in 2015. From 154.311 New Media book of readings. Massey University, Palmerston North.

Is the Internet Safe?

2010-02-12T08:00:00.000+13:00

My previous blogs on the Internet have been optimistic, historical and even philosophical but we also need to challenge where this technology is leading us and how safe it is. Science Fiction writers are like our modern day oracles and reveal examples of how things could go wrong such as humans becoming Borg (Star Trek: The Next Generation) or being usurped by our machines (Terminator 3: Rise of the Machine) but I think it's more likely our abstract machines such as Corporations and Laws that don't benefit the community that could be of more threat to us. However, before I get into that I must first address the physical aspect of the Internet. Can the Internet die?

At it's present state, the answer is Yes. The Internet addressing system which is like a telephone number for each device connected to the Internet is managed by servers mainly hosted in the United States. If those servers were destroyed then the Internet would be largely limited to each country. However, the new Internet that is presently being created is more like a cloud where information such as your music archive is stored globally. For example, if my website is stored on Amazon's EC2 cloud network and the United States servers go down then the EC2 system would automatically route visitors to the version of my website that is stored on their United Kingdom servers and the website visitors wouldn't notice any difference. This technology is developing rapidly and will make the Internet 100% reliable which is important if it to hold all the recordable knowledge on the planet.

"Essentially, corporations could use the Net to market three commodities: their own goods, access to the network, and advertising." (Golding, P. 806)

If the Internet will become 100% reliable then the next question should be: What threats might arise on this new Internet? There are many and the world is grappling with them now. Here's some examples:

If we've learnt that Mass Media institutions such as Radio and Television shape the way we view events how will modern institutions shape our perceptions. For example, if Time Warner (the fourth largest entertainment conglomerate in the world) owns HBO, Warner Brothers, Bebo, MapQuest, Booksellers, Newscorp, MySpace, Sunday Star Times, 20th Century Fox, etc. Does this type of control create homogeneous content to benefit them? Are we seeing Geobel's Principles of Propaganda being applied across multiple media?
Present research shows that poorer people don't have the same access to Internet technology and that it is largely being taken on by the more affluent. Will this create an even greater divide within society?
How will this divide of Netizens and Non-netizens impact in the real world?
Will commercially driven institutions such as iTunes dominate our access to information. As shown by Apples recent ban of the Google Talk application from their iStore; they are controlling what information and services we can access for their own benefit.
Even if Prosumers own the the method of media production such as video cameras and computers. What control do they have to ensure their media is shown? Recent copyright infringements on YouTube have seen much of the content removed.
Though the Internet started like the "Wild West" and there was much freedom, these freedoms are now being restrained through Government policy and commercial restrictions which determines what content we have access to. The recent agreement by Google to block specific content to Chinese customers is a good example of this.

"it is still possible for people around the world to make sure this new sphere of vital human discourse remains open to the citizens of the planet before the political and economic big boys seize it, censor it, meter it, and sell it back to us." (Rheihgold 1994) (Golding, P. 804)

As shown above there are many aspects of the Internet that challenge our freedoms and could lead to a more controlled way of life but the opportunities for a far better world also exist. As part of the Internet Generation it's our role to ensure that this new machine improves the quality of life for further generations. In my next blog I'll discuss our new Internet Generation.

Bibliography

Golding, Peter. "Worldwide Wedge: Division and Contradiction in the Global Information Infrastructure". Media Studies. A Reader. Ed. Paul Marris and Sue Thornham. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. pp. 820-815. From 154.311 New Media book of readings. Massey University, Palmerston North.

Virtual Communities

2010-01-12T08:00:00.001+13:00

In my last two blogs I've shown you how we became Cyborgs by inventing machines to extend our capabilities and how our most advanced machine, the Internet, is almost evolving into it's own intelligent entity - note the word almost. It's more simple like a single cell organism at the moment.

In the next few blogs I want to examine how we're presently using the Internet and what new modes of communication have been created that are changing the World as we know it. What this will do is give a background to the more In Real Life (IRL) human aspects of the Internet and I'm hoping that what I discover by writing it will spurn multiple new blog subjects that I can think about for 2011.

"There is no such thing as a single, monolithic, online subculture; it's more like an ecosystem of subcultures, some frivolous, others serious. The cutting edge of scientific discourse is migrating to virtual communities, where you can read the electronic pre-preprinted reports of molecular biology and cognitive scientists. At the same time, activists and educational reformers are using the same medium as a political tool." (Rhiengold p.274)

There are many types of virtual communities on the Internet ranging from the congregation of 3D Avatars in Second Life to Prosumers creating video content for YouTube. Characteristics of a community are that they:

Share language and codes
Have repeated participation
Shared spaces
Have common relationships
Have webs of personal relationships

These new virtual communities are now combining with our real world communities which has caused some significant changes to society. If the invention of the Gutenberg Press spurned a knowledge revolution then the Internet knowledge revolution will dwarf it by comparison. Scientist's can now liaise with each other instantly on a global scale within their own specialist virtual communities and all known knowledge is being added to the Internet as quickly as possible. In our lifetime we'll see inventions that we can't even comprehend at this time because of this new environment.

"What makes social network sites unique is not that they allow individuals to meet strangers, but rather they enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks." (Boyd, D. p.69)

How does this new environment of virtual communities influence our off-line world? One aspect is the shift in political power from the private to the public. For example, previously Government's could shape the views of it's citizens because they controlled the mass media such as film, television and radio. One of the earliest examples of this can be seen in the Nazi movement when Joseph Goebbels Principles of Propaganda were used in the Leni Reifenstahl's propaganda film "Triumph Des Willens (1934)". More recent examples might be how the the Gulf War (the Nintedo war) was portrayed on television. However new virtual communities such as Facebook Groups or even Thin Media such as Greenpeace newsletters and blogs are now mobilising citizens to take action. This shift in power is now influencing the way corporations prepare media releases and is forcing Governments to be more transparent.

An example of this change in power can be seen in the recent Cadbury palm oil controversy. At the start of the controversy Cadbury took a very unconvincing stand-point that the Palm Oil was sustainable and the reason for it's addition was because it created a softer bite. 10 years ago they may have been able to propose such ideas because it was difficult for smaller organisations to challenge them through mass media but in the age of the Internet such behaviour comes under far closer scrutiny. Within days Facebook Groups, online petitions, and unflattering media articles revealed Cadbury's recent financial losses and the truth about their palm oil which were more likely the reasons they changed their recipe. Even Auckland Zoo and Orana Park in Christchurch banned Cadbury chocolate which were key factors for Cadbury to change it's position and bring back the old recipe.

These online communities such as Second Life also challenge our very identities because they allow people to shed their gender by choosing an alternate gender Avatar or even become animals. Within this virtual world we can experience what it's like to be schizophrenic or trial a new invention before it has been created in the real world. These online communities are providing new spaces for humanity to learn and experience which transforms our perceptions of the real world. If the invention of language transformed humans from simple animals to the most powerful animal on the planet then these new virtual spaces on the Internet may signal a new evolution for mankind.

However, it may also have the opposite effect. It may imprison us within a reality that we can't escape. Unlike the film The Matrix (1999) where humans are unwittingly living in a virtual world whilst their physical bodies are harvested for electricity, we are already in a virtual world that we've created for ourselves that most people don't realise exists - refer to my previous "We are Cyborgs" blog. In the next few blogs I'll address some examples of how our machines may actually be controlling us.

Bibliography
Boyd, Danah M. “Social Network Sites: Definition, History and Scholarship”, Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 11. From 154.311 New Media book of readings. Massey University, Palmerston North.

Rhiengold, Howard. "The Virtual Community". Reading Digital Culture. Ed. David Trend. Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2001. pp. 272-280. From 154.311 New Media book of readings. Massey University, Palmerston North.

What is the Internet?

2009-12-12T08:00:00.003+13:00

"The size of the Internet... in it's complexity... is the size of your brain... your brain works kind of the same way the web works" (Kelly, K 2007)

When most people think of the Internet they're actually thinking about the World Wide Web. The Internet has always been far more than that. At one time, before it began, it was called the Intergalactic Network which indicates that it was destined to be the communications medium not just for our planet but our Galaxy.

"The technology we are concerned with is the transformation of information into digital form, where it can be manipulated by computers and transmitted by networks. The driving force behind this transformation is the remarkable science of semiconductors, which has shifted the world's economy from an industrial one to an information base in a little over a quarter of a century." (Downs and Mui p. 5)

The Internet is every digital device that can talk to other digital devices using an international network. When we use a GPS to find a location we're accessing the Internet. When you send a TXT to a friend you're accessing the Internet. When your heart monitor notifies your Doctor of your heart rate it is using the Internet. When you think of the Internet this way you start to see the "bigger picture". The Internet is not just web pages that are a little bit better than TV. It is the largest, most reliable and smartest machine that mankind has ever created and it's doubling in size every two years.

Kevin Kelly, whilst speaking at the 2007 Technology, Education and Design (TED) conference describes the Internet as a machine perfectly. Here's some key points:

The Internet is less than 5000 days old
We have more access to information than any other time in Human history
With the advent of the Internet the impossible happened such as the majority of information being free, global communities sharing and creating content together
It uses 5% of global electricity on the planet
By 2040 the Internet will exceed the total processing power of all humanity

If the television screen can be seen as an extension of our eyes (refer to my last Blog "We are Cyborgs") then the Internet can be seen as an extension of all our senses. We might even go so far as to say that the human race is now becoming extensions of it:

Websites like Photosynth (http://photosynth.net) use all of the photos on the net to create a 3D representation of a place. So the machine extends itself by using the information that humankind created (photos) to extend itself and create new online 3D worlds.
With over 6 billion humans searching and creating content on the web; we are the web. We become the Internet's "eyes and ears" of the World and continually store our experiences and knowledge in its memory.
Eventually all recordable knowledge will be stored on the Internet and we'll access it from all our Internet devices such as laptops, phones or even our fridge. Some of the first examples of this can be seen in Software as a Service (SaaS) and Cloud computing services such as Google Docs and Amazon's EC2 network.

"Convergence is taking place within the same appliances, within the same franchise, within the same company, within the brain of the consumer, within the same fandom. Convergence involves both a change in the way media is produced and a change in the way media is consumed. (Jenkins, H. p. 16)

So what does this mean for us? How will it effect Governments, privacy, equity, commerce? I'll address these issues in my following blogs.

Bibliography

Jenkins, Henry. (2006) Convergence Culture: Where old and new media collide. New York University Press, New York.

Kevin Kelly on the next 5,000 days of the web. Ted Conference. http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web.html

Larry Downs, Cunka Mui. (1998) Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance. Harvard Business School Press: Boston, Massachusetts.

We are Cyborgs

2009-11-12T20:11:00.005+13:00

In this blog I was going to posit what the future of the Internet is by comparing it to previous technological revolutions. No surprise really. Media History is my favourite topic because I like to find the syncronicities between old and new media. I'd even written drought versions of the next eight blogs that would investigate Internet and New Media development in even more depth. However, last night there was a re-run of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machine (1993) and whilst watching it I thought "Most people think that a Cyborg is something like the Terminator. Wouldn't it be interesting to show that we're actually the Cyborgs?" This would be a good foundation for understanding the importance of the Internet but it might even challenge the reader to a new worldview.

"Every cultural era is predisposed to a worldview that obsolesces other world views" (Jung, 1966, p.98)

Machine: "structure of any kind... apparatus, appliance" (Online Etymology Dictionary)

A Cyborg is a person whose physiological functioning is aided by or dependent upon a mechanical or electronic device. Simple examples of this are things like hearing aids which are mechanical devices that enhance hearing, spectacles which enhance vision, pace makers which keep hearts beating or even the most extreme version found in Sci-Fi movies like Terminator 3. However, humans began mechanically extending their capabilities a long time ago. Right back to the very start of humanity. So much so that we now see these mechanizations as natural.

The first language of Humans was mathematics. What happened when we discovered mathematics is that we created symbols for it so we could interpret and use it. When early humans scratched lines to represent quantity they were creating a tool, a machine, to store information for later retrieval or presentation. Marshall McLuhan is famous for illustrating how our inventions are actually extensions of our bodies. In the above example, the symbols we created for numbers are tools that we use to extend our brains memory capability. Something else happened when Humans created symbols. We created something totally new. We abstracted the natural world by presenting it in a new form and by doing so created a simple written language that was totally unique to Mankind.

Humans then evolved from simple grunts and gestures and created another mechanical device to extend memory and enhance communication. They created words. If you think about it, who first spoke the word "Cat". It has no direct link to the furry mammal we all know. The sound isn't onomatopoeic like the word "Boom" which mimics the actual thing. It is an abstract representation of the the small furry animal that we in the English speaking world have been taught means Cat. This creation of spoken language allowed Humans to transmit information faster to each other and therefore gain more knowledge.

Plato went even further by adding vowels to the Phonetician alphabet so we could spell out words like "Cat". The Alphabet is another mechanization that we created to extend our natural capabilities. These extensions of our bodies are evident in every artefact we've ever created. Here's some recent examples:

The engine of a car is an extension of our muscles and allows us to travel farther. The fuel tank is an extension of our stomach and provides the energy needed to travel long distances.
Telephones are an extension of our voice and allow us to speak around the World
The Television is an extension of our eyes and ears
Shoes are an extension of our feet
Clothes are an extension of our skin
Cups are an extension of our hands for holding liquid
Knives are an extension of our teeth
What is a computer an extension of?

Can you see how our "physiological functioning is aided by or dependent upon a mechanical or electronic device"? Though we may not be Terminators we can definitely be seen as Cyborgs.

These inventions we've made also reshaped reality as we know it such as Mass Media creating simplified representations of humans as mass markets to sell products to or Government's shaping the views of a Nation through the invention of Propaganda. What might be even more interesting is how our extensions are now evolving beyond us.

When Alan Turing (Turing, 1950) proposed that is was possible for machines to think it may very well be one of the defining moments of Human evolution because now our inventions were not just an extension of us; but could become our own abstraction of life itself. Turing's work can be seen as the basis of what we now know as Artificial Intelligence. I'll discuss these ideas in my next blogs.

Bibliography
Turing, A.M. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 59, 433-460

What is New Media?

2009-08-24T15:33:00.017+12:00

Remember when we used to tape songs off the radio? Where high-tech was something like a mirror ball and anyone with two phones in their house was rich? It's bizarre to see how much the World has changed in the last couple of decades so I thought I'd write about what I've experienced. This blog is based on a presentation I did at my New Media course at Massey University a few weeks ago.

First of all, before we can understand how media technology is influencing us we need to see what it's done in the past. I won't get into it in too much depth but I will give you a taste of what Media History teaches us:

Paradigm shifts
A quick look at how new technology in media has helped changed the World

Living and working with New Media
My personal view of how digital media has influenced the world

Conclusion
I'll talk a little bit about where I think new technology is taking us.

Paradigm shifts

"Thomas Kuhn... referred to... paradigm shifts, discoveries so fundamental that they knock out the basic pillars of universally held beliefs"
(Downs and Mui p. 30)

Some technologies are so entrenched in our every day lives that we forget that they were once new technologies. When vowels were added to the alphabet it was a huge technological leap. It made reading and writing a lot easier to learn but it also allowed the translation of other languages much easier which provided the Greeks with access to more knowledge. Thousands of years later the Gutenberg Printing press provided another media revolution that within the space of two years made 10,000 Scribes lose their jobs and new Universities spring up around the World. In recent times we can see how Broadcast media such as Radio and Television have shaped our world. Vietnam was the first "Television War", media coverage of events such as 1981 NZ Springbok Tour divided our Nation and advertising identified/created larger audiences such as Youth Culture so they could market to them.

What is New Media?
So how does this relate to New Media? There are some fundamental differences with the New Media revolution that have far reaching consequences. I'm going to use Lister's five New Media categories to show this: Digitality, Interactivity, Hypertext, Dispersal and Virtuality.

"... the emergence of 'new media' as some kind of epoch-making phenomena, is seen as part of a much larger landscape of social, technological and cultural change; in short, as part of the new technoculture"
(Lister p. 11)

Digitality
New Media is primarily Digital. Unlike previous media like vinyl records that are a direct representation of the actual sound or movie reels that are a direct representation of light, New Media products such as MP3's or DVDs are an abstraction of the the real thing which brings many benefits. It can be copied millions of times without losing quality. It can be transmitted globally in real-time and it can be sold at a fraction of the cost because it costs next to nothing to reproduce. Of course this poses many issues for the older industries such as the music and film industries because they now have to change their business model to suit the new digital environment. As an example, it took the US postal service over 100 years to become the primary business communication tool and in the space of two years mail was replaced with email. In my early years at University there used to be a Television production centre that was worth over a million dollars and within two years we had built our own digital video editing suite for under $5000 that was producing broadcast quality video. In fact the technology was moving so fast that the corporations couldn't keep up. My first Web Design company beat Telecom and Telstra for the EziBuy Clothing e-commerce website because corporates back then didn't understand what was happening on the Internet.

Interactivity
Recently Cadbury bowed to consumer pressure to remove Palm oil from its chocolate. The change can largely be attributed to the strong media coverage which referred to the customer backlash in social networking groups like those found on Facebook. Cadbury saw a huge fall in sales and was forced to change. If Cadbury had changed it's recipe twenty years ago there would have been very little chance for customers to change their decision but modern technology has moved the power of broadcasting to customers.

"... on-line networks has set in motion an unprecedented shift in power from vendors of goods and services to the customers who buy them."
(Hagel & Armstrong p. 2)

New Media such as the Internet has also allowed groups to share knowledge. Literally thousands of software developers share software on the Internet for free by making it Open Source and much of the Internet now runs on this free technology.

Because of digital media we now have a greater choice of products and we can also read other consumer's reviews of the product which makes our shopping experience safer and also making business more honest.

Hypertext
Remember those card drawers that used the Dewey system to find books? It took ages to find anything but now we all take it for granted that we'll search through something like KEA or Google. Hypertext has revolutionized the way we find and navigate information.

"The human mind operates by association. With one item in it's grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in association with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. (Bush in Mayer 1999: 34)"
(Lister p. 25)

Hypertext has also influenced politics. Previously Governments could control what was shown through mass media and probably Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph des Willens is the pinnacle film for this type of propaganda but the shear volume of content on the Internet now makes propaganda much more difficult. China may try to stop its people from viewing the Internet but the reality is that it is impossible. The Internet doubles in size every two years and soon it will be near impossible to track all the content being created.

Hypertext is also changing the way we think. Previous generations brought up with books and television generally have longer attention spans and are more linear in their thinking. Though this can be very beneficial in some respects it is also a reflection of the type of media they use. Modern research shows that younger people generally know more than we used to be at their age and they can also handle more bits of information simultaneously than we could at their age. This is largely because of the New Media environment they live in. I'm not saying they're more intelligent because intelligence is more than just information but what it does reveal is how modern media is influencing our evolution.

New Media has also allowed us to speak more. Now everyone can be their own TV station (YouTube) or Newspaper (Blogger) or even Author (Amazon). The challenge now is to organise that information.

Dispersal

“A company that is one year old acts like one that has been around for seven years.”
(Downs p. 32)

Another important aspect of New Media is that it no longer needs to be in one place. I purchased some glasses online the other day from a New Zealand site only to find out that I was actually dealing with A company based in China.

This dispersal and global capability also changes the way things are sold. For example when Amazon was first on the web they lost money every year and it was a bit of a joke. However, Amazon was learning and what they discovered was that people wanted more obscure types of books that they couldn't buy from their local bookseller. In a small city there might be a hand-full of people like this but when you're operating globally this literally becomes millions of people. In Internet Marketing this is called Long-tail economics and Amazon soon found out that it could reach a whole new market.

Virtuality
A lot of people see things like Facebook or World of Warcraft as not real. The truth is they are as real as the book you just read or the telephone conversation you just had with your power company. The question is, when will we be so used to them they will seem natural like books or writing?

"To admit the 'artificial' is to deny the 'real' which the artificial enables to appear so authentically" (Alverado p. 11)

Are we really that much different from when we used to exchange letters with Pen Pals or write in a diary? If anything I think we're actually doing it more but now we share it with everyone else. We're actually becoming more social because of it. New Media has allowed me to have more social interaction. Before the Internet I would have local friends who are still great friends now but the Internet has also permitted me to have friends in different countries all around the World which has given me many insights into things that I might not have discovered.

These online virtual communities are breaking down our Nation States. Mass Media such as Newspapers have been on the decline for the last five years and Television is quickly converging with the Internet. Those who have learnt how to use New Media are now prolific in their interaction with other people and their knowledge gives them higher E-citizenship status. Those who aren't doing it will feel like they operate in an alien world in the next five years.

Conclusion
So where is this all leading us? I think we're at the start of a revolution that will dwarf previous media revolutions. The Internet was only the start of the information flow. The repercussions to science, culture and human evolution will surpass our wildest dreams and in our own lifetimes. The other exciting component of this is that we're right in it. We can direct the new media revolution into making a better world for future generations. I'll discuss this in future blogs - I didn't realise this one was going to end up being this long.

Bibliography
Alverado, M. Gutch, R. and Wollen, T. 1987 Learning the Media: An Introduction to Media Teaching. MacMillan/ London.

Crowley, David & Heyer, Paul. (1995) Communication in History: Technology, Culture, Society. Second Edition. Longman Publishers: New York

Downs, Larry & Mui, Cunka. (1998) Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance. Harvard Business School Press: Boston, Massachusetts.

Hagel III, John. Armstrong, Arthur, G. (1997) net gain: expanding markets through virtual communities Harvard Business School Press: Boston , Massachusetts

Lister, Martin, et al. "New Media and New Technologies". New Media: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, 2003. pp. 9-37

Ortega, Jose. & Gasset, Y. (1932/1957) The Revolt of the Masses, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, London. From, 39.601, Communications & Culture, Study Guide, (pp. 14-56), Massey University, New Zealand, 1995.

How I learn stuff

2009-07-20T12:44:00.005+12:00

Most businesses know the 80/20 rule which states that 80% your income comes from 20% of your clients. However did you know that this rule can also be applied to learning? 20% of the students will get the most benefit from the class. Your success or failure could be due to a number of factors such as:

The teacher understanding adult learning styles
Your interest in a course
The amount of time you have
How well you structure your time
Or even how much stress you're under.

Recently a friend of mine noted that I seem to get a lot of value out of the courses I attend. I noted that it's not because I'm smarter but because I have a system that I learnt at University that works for me. He asked if I could share that system so here it is.

When I was at University I tried a multitude of ways to get smarter such as:

Played tapes at night to try and learn by osmosis (chuckle, chuckle - that doesn't work)
Hung around with smart people (helpful)
I took speed reading courses (helpful)
I scheduled weekly additional research at the library (became an expert in everything but my degree)
I recorded books I was reading and replayed them as I walked to Massey (brain switched off and day dreaming took over)

None of the above really helped me learn what I was supposed to be learning because I have since learnt that my learning style is more hands on. I need to actively take part for information to stay in my head. In one of the course I did they outlined a number of ways to take notes at a lecture and this one has worked really well for me:

Add the date and the name of the course to the top right of your page
Through-out the course actively listen to what the teacher is saying
Try to identify the main messages the teacher is trying to get across. This is normally really easy because a good teacher will identify them at the start of the course. For example, "In today's class we'll be examining A, B and C"
Write down these main points on the page and leave plenty of space under each to write more notes.
Here's the golden rule. Don't write a lot. Just points that you need to remind yourself of. The page should look more like a mind map than a written document.
After the course (preferably within 2 hours) go back to your notes and add more detail if you need to.

The only difference I use at business courses is:

Identify things I want to implement from the course
Prioritise the list from easiest/quickest to most difficult.
Schedule in the tasks for the soonest possible time - you should be able to schedule the short tasks for the next day. The secret is that the satisfaction of achieving the small tasks and seeing them grow will motivate you to act on the larger tasks.

Hope this helps. If you're like me and find it hard to remember peoples names unless you write them down then this system should work for you.

Why don't I need a Microsoft Exchange Server?

2009-07-14T11:30:00.003+12:00

Having your own mail server isn't such a great idea for a small office. Unfortunately maintaining servers for small businesses is how many Microsoft computer support businesses survive but the truth is you don't need the server. We've come across this issue so many times that we've actually written an outline of the problem to help you make a more informed decision. If you have any questions feel free to contact me.

brynn :-)

What's the problem?

Many of our clients have their own servers that may handle their emails, shared files and shared calendaring. In the old days this used to be the way to do things because that was the only way you could have those types of service but these days its actually a hindrance and here's why:

Hosting your own server has many downfalls:

You usually get more spam because you are not using Internet Service Provider (ISP) grade spam filtering
You can get identified as a spammer because your internet connection is not normally a dedicated IP address allocated to ISPs
It's harder to access your emails remotely such as webmail because the server may require an upgrade or additional security monitoring.
It costs a lot of money because you need your own server
It costs more because you have to upgrade the server hardware
It costs more because you need a computer support person to maintain the server.

What do you recommend?

Keep your business emails with your web host. For example we supply five free email accounts with our web hosting and another 10 email account only costs $100 per annum.
Buy an external drive for your file sharing. They cost less than $300 and you can also take them home at night for security and off-site backup.
Use Google Calendar for shared calendaring. Not only is it free but you can also share calendars with clients and friends and access your calendar using Outlook, the web or mobile device.

Efficient Email Folder Structure

2009-07-06T16:13:00.002+12:00

When archiving email it's important that you know exactly where everything should be and not where your email program wants to hide it. This blog describes how I archive my emails which may help you archive yours. I have over 10 years worth of emails so are happy to share the folder structure that works for me and my team

In my email program my folders look like this:

Inbox [Lots of messages come in daily and get replied to and moved into the folders below if they are important. Ideally the Inbox should have no more than 20 emails in it or you will lose track of things. Takes around 30 minutes to deal with 20 - 40 emails each morning and the rest at downtimes during the day such as after smoko or between set tasks]

Personal [My personal emails. Staff don't get personal emails to their SP accounts]
- band
- house
- Etc ...

SP Business [Private business stuff ]
- contracts
- invoices from suppliers
- standard operating procedures in dev
- accountant
- lawyer
- building
- Etc ...

SP People [This contains private staff information such as employment contracts and key people that I work with]
- Brynn
- Etc ...

SP Overdue Invoices [After the 20th of each month I follow-up overdue invoices and the emails are automatically copied to this folder because they have the subject "IMPORTANT NOTICE: Attached Spinning Planet invoices are overdue. My process is

Week 1: Nice email
Week 2: I need a reply from you email and I will call if you I don't hear from you (most pay here)
Week 3: Call
Week 4: TXT that services will be shut down if payment isn't made and they need to make contact immediately

- 2008-08 [Keep an eye on aging debtors by moving unpaid invoices into dated folders. Some clients are given more lee-way because we have long-term relationships with them adn it is better to get paid something than nothing]
- Etc ...

[All of the stuff below here is viewable by staff via our support@spinningplanet.co.nz IMAP email account]

SP Clients [All our important emails to clients.]
- DEF Company
- Etc ...

SP Clients (Sleeping) [Clients who left or didn't buy our service so we have a history and can follow-up long-term.]
- ABC Company
- Etc ...

SP Follow-ups [These have folders of client in negotiation and in process of which the majority are contacted every Monday which is a scheduled task for all of us. The email subject always contains "[SP Follow-up]" so it is automatically moved into this folder and can be sorted. Probably our most important folder because it keeps us all on track and ensures that we communicate with clients and keep on top of projects]
- Brynn
- Etc ...

SP Invoices [All invoices are CC'd here by our billing system]
- SP Invoices (NZ)
- SP Invoices (US)

SP Partners [Partners that resell our services and provide referrals. ]
- _Partner Resources
- Evolve Marketing
- Etc ...

SP Resources [Collections of relevant info such as sample emails, Quotes, blog feeds, new technologies, etc.]

SP Suppliers [Important emails with all our suppliers]
- InspireNet
- Etc ...

SP Wayback [Folders containing inactive clients, staff and partner emails. Shared with staff]
- SP Staff
- Paul Swain
- Etc ...

We use a similar folder structure to store client files as well. We've been trialling Customer Relationship Management systems for the last 12 months and will eventually move to one but for now the above system works well for us.

Hope this information was helpful.

brynn :-)

Free software is better for business

2009-06-29T23:51:00.004+12:00

This blog describes how Spinning Planet Limited migrated from proprietary software like Microsoft to free software like Linux. The funny thing is I didn't think anything of it until I was chatting with a friend who said it was quite an achievement and many businesses could benefit from our story

As a web design and hosting company we need lots of advanced software for creating great looking web pages, multimedia content and running our business. I went through our proprietary software archives last week and was shocked at the amount of software we used to use. Here's an example but it's less than a quarter of the complete list:

Operating Systems

Windows 98SE
Windows 2000
Windows XP

Office Software

Microsoft Office (Outlook/Calendar, Word, Excel, Power Point)
MYOB

Multimedia Software

Adobe CS3 (Flash, PhotoShop, etc)
Corel Graphics Suite (Photo Paint, Corel Draw, etc)
Lightwave3D animation and 3D graphics software
Maya animation and 3D graphics software
Nero CD authoring software
CoolEdit Pro Audio editing software
Adobe Premiere Pro video editing software
Windows Media Player
Windows Media Encoder

Utilities

NoteTab Pro advanced text editor
Partition Magic hard disk partition management software
Norton Ghost hard drive backup software
CyberDefender security suite
Real VNC remote desktop management
WinRar archive management

Internet

SecureCRT SSH software to securely connect to a shell on servers
SecureFTP SFTP software to securely transfer files to servers
Internet Explorer web browser

Step One: Do you need to change?

The first thing you need to do is validate why you want to change. Here's some of our reasons:

To streamline business processes such as staff training, standard operating procedures, better security and maintenance.
Didn't want to pay thousands for extra licences that would have been outdated in 12 months.
Not happy with the way Windows was getting bloated and prone to viruses which had literally cost thousands in downtime.
We'd noticed that software was being moved to the Internet which offers many benefits.
We could see that the latest and best developments in software were coming out in Open Source or web based software first which provided far more opportunities for our company.

Step Two: Identify Essential Software

So for us it was a "no-brainer". All we had to do was identify the software we absolutely needed to run Spinning Planet and find replacements. For example I've used the Corel Graphics Suite, MS Office, Outlook and the Outlook Calendar for over 15 years. How was I going to do without them? Trickier still, the software had to work on Linux, Windows and Mac because that's what my team were using at the time.

Thunderbird email, Google Calendar and Google Contacts
If you don't have the thousands of dollars it costs to setup, secure and maintain a Microsoft Exchange server then you probably aren't sharing calendars or mail. We researched lots of Open Source Exchange type systems but ended up opting for a simpler solution:

Google Calendar allows me to share my Calendar with staff and clients and can sync with my Web 2.0 apps like Facebook, LinkdIn, etc.
Google Contacts allows me to sync all my devices (phone, laptop, work PC) and software (Thunderbird contacts, Facebook contacts, etc).
Thunderbird Email allows me to access all my emails via IMAP which means I can access my mail from anywhere in the World. We also have a shared Support email account that all staff can access.
Thunderbird also has Templates which allow me to create multiple templates such as client quotes, follow-ups, etc which has really streamlined and improved my communication with clients.
Thunderbird also has many free Addons that can extend its functionality such as the Stationary that makes it create business formatted emails like Outlook does.

Open Office and Google Docs
Presently we use Open Office for our Documents, Presentations and Spreadsheets because it can read multiple formats such as MS Word. I know some very advanced Excel users say that the Open Office Calc Spreadsheet software doesn't meet their needs but from my perspective there is very little difference.

Being great supporters of Web 2.0 we've also started moving a lot of our docs and data to Google Docs. Though it is nowhere as powerful as MS Word it does have many benefits which will eventually see us using it solely for our office publication needs such:

Staff can easily share docs with each other or even clients through the web
We can securely access our documents from any Internet capable computer, even an iPhone.
The documents have fantastic revision history. Since I've been writing this document it has created eleven revisions that I can easily revert to
Documents are stored on Google's servers which avoids the risk of a disaster.
Multiple staff can work on the same document at the same time.

Step Three: Migrate Slowly

I didn't want to shock myself or my team into using new software that they weren't used to so we gradually migrated over the last 24 months. Here's how we did it:

Choose the easy software to migrate first. We moved from SecureFTP to Filezilla because it worked nearly exactly the same way.
Let a staff member trial software before the rest move to it. This way you have a "go to" person who can answer any questions. For example, I was the last person to move from Outlook to Thunderbird and I would just ask our Sys Admin questions like "How do I change my Stationary?"
Try and migrate all the software before you migrate to a new operating system like Linux. That way, there will be less interruption to the team and your business. As an example, when my Windows XP finally died from a virus and I moved to Linux I was immediately productive because I knew how to use all the software and my mail and many other resources like passwords, docs, and mail were stored on the web.
Sugar coat the software and make things easy to find. One thing I noticed when my Linux guys would get on the Mac guys computer they didn't know how to navigate or what software to use so what I did is create a Windows style "Start Menu" on all computers with the same menu structure such as an Internet folder that had Mozilla web browser and Filezilla SFTP client. You can also skin apps like Firefox and Thunderbird to look like Internet Explorer and Outlook if you think that will help - it did with me ;-)

Conclusion

At the moment the majority of Spinning Planet is run on Open Source software. Our graphic design is still done on Mac using mostly Adobe CS3 but eventually that will be replaced by Open Source software but I will need to create training material for that to happen. Perhaps even introduce an "Open Source web design for the Internet" course to the local Uni.

I could go on for days about the differences between proprietary software but really what it boils down to is an actionable reason to move. To help your transition here's a list of the software we use. Most of it works on Linux, Windows and Mac:

Operating Systems Centos Linux (Servers) Fedora Linux (Desktops) Open Solaris (Xen Server) OpenQRM (Cloud Computing Platform)	Operating Systems Windows 98SE Windows 2000 Windows XP Windows 2008
Office Software Open Office Suite Xero Online Accounting System iPayroll Online Payrol System X-Lite VOIP phone Skype VOIP phone	Office Software Microsoft Office (Outlook/Calendar, Word, Excel, Power Point) MYOB Eyebeam VOIP phone Skype VOIP phone
Multimedia Software Inskcape vector graphics GIMP photo editor Blender 3D animation, 3D graphics and video editing software K3b CD authoring software Audacity Audio editing software Videolan Media Player Aviary Tools - The most awesome SaaS graphics tools. This company will be huge.	Multimedia Software Corel Graphics Suite (Photo Paint, Corel Draw) Lightwave and May 3D software Nero CD authoring software CoolEdit Pro Audio editing software Adobe Premiere Pro video editing software Windows Media Player
Utilities SciTE and Bluefish advanced text editors Firewall, partition management, VNC, archive and backup software is built into Linux and OSX. Archive Manager for linux	Utilities NoteTab Pro advanced text editor Partition Magic hard disk partition management software Norton Ghost hard drive backup software CyberDefender security suite Real VNC remote desktop management WinRar archive management
Internet Konsole software to securely connect to a shell on servers FileZilla SFTP software to securely transfer files to servers Mozilla Firefox web browser Thunderbird email software E107 Content Management System (website builder)	Internet SecureCRT SSH software to securely connect to a shell on servers SecureFTP SFTP software to securely transfer files to servers Internet Explorer web browser Microsoft Frontpage website builder

Strategic Planning Workshop

2009-06-23T21:45:00.000+12:00

I just completed the Vision Manawatu, NZ Trade and Enterprise "Strategic Planning" workshop presented by Lyn McCurdy from Third Bearing Limited.

I've done this type of development several times before and I have a 5 year plan but it's always good to refresh your plan and listen to someone else's perspective. Lyn's presentation was very logical and easy to follow so I thought I'd highlight the bits that caught my attention in my blog.

Why are we in business?
When asked the above question we all noted many reasons and some of mine included:

- It's exciting
- Fun
- Challenging
- profitable
- Supports my lifestyle
- Provides more opportunities
- Provides satisfactions
- Helps others
- Etc

All of the above reasons and more are valid but the underlying reason we're in business is 'Financial Security". If your business isn't making enough money then it stops being exciting, fun, helping others, etc. and you probably need to ask yourself "Am I in the right place, doing the right thing, with the right people?"

Financial Security
Most people grow their wealth between the ages of 40 - 65 for when they retire so it's important for us to visualise what we want when we retire. For example, if I want financial freedom and a house by the sea when I retire I might need two million dollars and $500,000 house. To get this I'd have to save $166,666 per year.

This long term analysis of why I'm in business really helps put my business plans in context because though I still want my business to be fun, challenging, helping others, etc it should ultimately meet my long-term goals so my business vision needs to reflect that.

Business Vision
On the work sheet supplied to me, for our Business Vision I put "Nationwide Web Design Business creating valuable websites for our customers". Our original vision that was posted on our website was "To create websites that improve business".

Business Mission
Below are our present mission guidelines but I will discuss these further with my team tomorrow morning to see what they think:

1. Web Services: Create valuable, measurable and modular web services that empower our customers
2. Professional: Be professional, creative, and innovative
3. Transparent: Be transparent, trustworthy and reliable
4. Open Source: Grow and share knowledge through Open Source principles
5. Community: Encourage growth and excellence in local and global communities

When making goals for our business we take the above guidelines into account. The goals are then added to our five year plan. Here's an example of goals completed last year:

1 MONTH GOALS (22 Aug, 2008)
* New staff job descriptions and contracts
2 MONTH GOALS (22 Sept, 2008)
* Reduce overall support by 20%

Some important things to note about goals is that they need to be SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely) and you could also add another A on the end for Accountable.

Key Stakeholders
Your goals need to take into account your key stakeholders needs. Frequently as business owners we may only view things from our own perspective but it's important that we step outside our comfort zone. I identified the following stakeholders for my business:

- Clients
- Staff
- Community
- Commercial Partners
- Community Partners
- Suppliers
- Family
- Business Networks

When planning my business I need to take into account the needs of the above stakeholders because they are key to me meeting my Business Vision.

Business Objectives
When you create business objectives put "because" in the sentence. Here's what I wrote on our work sheet:

- Launch our Green Host emissions free hosting service by November because it will corner the Green Host marketing in NZ, considerably reduce our costs and add value to our brand.
- Expand our MBIZ free Chamber member website scheme to central North Island Chambers by December because it will generate upsells to our professional websites in other regions and grow our brand.

We were then given another work sheet to help us assess the benefit of an opportunity. Below is what I wrote on mine:

STRATEGIC PLANNING SHEET
OPPORTUNITY: To become NZ's first Green Host
OUTCOMES/OBJECTIVES: NZ's first Green Host by November, corner green host market in NZ, build national brand trust, reduce costs
ISSUES/BARRIERS: New technology untested, new systems need new procedures and training for staff, high capital investment
OVERCOMING ISSUES/BARRIERS: Spread development over longer period and use savings and sales of redundant hardware to fund, create new procedures and train as we develop, test heavily before we launch and hire smart local companies to develop the advanced solar technology needed.


ACTIONS REQUIRED ---- BY ---- COMPLETED BY
1. Solar tech ---- DLT LTD -- Oct, 2009
2. New Billing Sys -SP LTD -- Sept, 2009
3. New Admin Sys -- SP LTD -- Oct, 2009

REVIEW: Assess completed goals

There was a lot more information but the above elements are what caught my attention. Finally, for your amusement, here's Tony's Tyre Service's Vision: "Have unfair market share in every major centre in New Zealand" (Steve Lang).

brynn :-)

2 day marketing boot camp

2009-06-22T17:09:00.000+12:00

Last weekend I attended a two day marketing boot camp run by The Marketing Company and I thought I'd share the experience with you. Our goal was to learn how to create a scheduled 12 month marketing plan in two days. We covered many topics including what marketing is, how much you should spend, and measuring your marketing to ensure success. The course was intense but we all succeeded and I'm quite sure that I'll double my sales over the next 12 months.

There was way too much information to include in this blog but I thought I'd give you some of the highlights:

First, you need to write what you are doing in the following marketing areas:

- Marketing strategy
- Marketing planning
- SWOT analysis
- Competitor analysis
- Direct marketing
- Indirect marketing
- Unique selling proposition
- Sales
- Advertising
- Sponsorship
- Public relations
- Market positioning

Once we'd identified the above we then started looking into the different ways to market in more depth. I liked the Direct Marketing steps.

DIRECT MARKETING

Direct Marketing Pieces:
1. Clarify your target market
2. Build your mailing list
3. Create a mailing piece
- 40-60% = right list
- 30-40% = offer
- 10-20% = design & writing
4. Code your marketing piece
5. Test run the campaign
6. Run the full campaign
7. Analyse the results of the campaign.

The above method is very similar to Landing Page optimisation for websites. Most people think you build a website and then try and get on search engines but you actually need to construct and test the web page success first much like the Direct Marketing steps above.

FIVE POINTS OF CONTACT

Another important fact is that 90% of sales happen the fifth time a sales person contacts a prospect. Below is an example of how we follow-up with our clients.


Times contacted...|____1____|____2____|____3____|____4____|____5____| --> 
Type of contact...|___Email_|_Meeting_|__Email__|__Email__|__Phone__| --> 
Sales people......|____10___|____7____|____4____|____2____|____1____| -->

Out of every 10 sales people only 7 will contact the client twice but only 1 will contact the client 5 times. I learnt "Five points of contact" last year and implemented the above sales procedure (email, meeting, email, email, phone) which has been a huge success.

PUBLIC RELATIONS

Public relations is more than just sponsoring a sport team. It's how you interact with customers, suppliers, local media, community, former employees, competition and neighbours. This is very much like Saatchi and Saatchi's idea of Brand and how Love Marks are created.

Here's some simple PR tips for PR planning:

1. Objectives (business goals or your PR)
2. Positioning (how you will be perceived by all)
3. Key messages (core features of your business)
4. Strategy (how to achieve your message - target certain groups)
5. Tactics (tools used: articles, speaking, community work, etc)

INCREASING PROFIT

The goal of marketing is to increase footfall, spend, profit, repeat buying and referrals. We were shown a simple example of how profit can be significantly increased by increasing each of the above goals in unison.

If I have 1000 customers, who spend $100 and my profit margin is 30% on each sale and that client visits my store 4 times a year then my profit for the year would be $144,000. However if I increase each of those goals slightly I can have a far higher profit:


...............Before | After
Customers........1000 | 1100
$Spend...........$100 | $110
Profit.......30%(0.3) | 33%(0.33)
Visits/year.........4 | 4.4
Referrals.........1.2 | 1.32
_________________________________
Profit       $144,000 | $231,913

Try it yourself:
customers x $spend x profit(0.3) x visits x referrals

CONCLUSION

I found the boot camp valuable and I know that it will increase my sales. If you'd like to know more about the course send me an email.

brynn :-)

The myth about Search Engine Optimization

2009-06-17T07:01:00.002+12:00

My friend Ambrose from www.themarketingcompany.co.nz asked me for my perspective on search engine optimization and strangely enough I got asked that same question several times that week so I decided to post my reply to my blog. Here the myth about SEO:

Direct Traffic and Linking strategies

The majority of good visits to a website are from people who are purposefully going there from things like a link off a business card, business sign, newspaper ad, radio ad, clicking on a link in a newsletter, clicking on a link on email stationary, clicking on a Google AdWords advertisement, clicking on a link from another website, etc. Google says that the average conversion rate for this type of direct traffic is 2% which means that out of every 100 visitors that purposely go to your site 2 of them should contact you, buy from you or take the desired action on your website. We've had conversion rates of up to 42% because of the way that we create persuasive content.

Landing Page Optimization

We call it Persuasive Content but it's technical name is landing page optimization which is all about creating content that is targeted toward the end user and can be tested and improved to create more sales or more of the desired action on a site such as sign-ups. If you miss this stage and go straight to SEO it can actually have a negative impact on your site because your competitors content was better. It's like someone not doing a course or sales and client management and then have them meet 10,000 prospective customers without a clue on how they should manage them in their sales process.

Content is King

I've followed SEO for over a decade and many of the experts are saying that if you have well written content that people actually want then you should do well on search engines because your pages will contain all the correct keywords and other sites will link to you. Search engines are almost Artificially Intelligent now and it is getting harder and harder to fool them which shouldn't be your goal anyway. What we've doing is just making our websites search engine friendly by default so they do get found by Google but you'll get far more conversions by creating great content.

I'm not saying don't do SEO because we do it. I'm saying it shouldn't come until you know that your website is converting customers.

brynn :-)

Understanding Business Drivers (KPIs)

2009-06-16T22:57:00.001+12:00

Went to an interesting Enterprise Training workshop last night about Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). To my surprise it was very much like the Lean Manufacturing workshops I attended because it focussed on measuring performance in all aspects of your business to succeed. For example:

Why do we need KPIs?
"You can't manage what you don't measure"
Without metrics [measurement]...
- Decisions are based solely on feeling, instinct
- Performance is subjective
- There are no standards for improvement

Every business needs to measure it's objectives or vision and the best way to do that is to clarify your business goals into the following categories:

Direction
KPI
Benchmark
Target
Timeline

For example if my objective is to "increase average revenue per customer from $100 to $150 by the end of 2009" then it can be classified like this:

Direction: increase
KPI: average revenue per customer
Benchmark: $100
Target: $150
Timeline: Now until the end of 2009

Over the next week I plan to go through our business goals and ensure that I can describe them within the above five categories which I think will clarify our business measurement somewhat.

An important thing to note, is not to confuse KPIs with Critical Success Factors (CSFs). A critical success factor is something that needs to be put in place to achieve your objectives. For example, if my objective is to "increase average revenue per customer from $100 to $150 by the end of 2009" then one of my CSFs might be to introduce a new product range, improve staff productivity or reduce costs but those are not the KPI which is "average spend per customer". I think this is an important distinction because as business owners we can get tied up in our products or not change our ways because that's how we always did it. Separating KPIs from the Critical Success Factors actually opens up space for new products and processes to be introduced to achieve the KPIs.

OK. So how do we implement a successful KPI program?

STEP 1. ESTABLISH STRATEGY, GOALS AND BUSINESS DRIVERS

Strategy examples: Be number 1 franchise, first to release new products, buy or develop new techniques
- Goals examples: increase average revenue per customer from $10 to $150 by the end of 2009, improve staff productivity by 100% in 2 months, decrease support by 10% by 2009.
- Business driver examples: You goals are your business drivers. Split them into four categories like this:

Customer Satisfaction Goals (what are the supporting KPIs?)
Employee Satisfaction Goals (what are the supporting KPIs?)
Cost/Productivity Goals (what are the supporting KPIs?)
Organisation/Maturity Goals (what are the supporting KPIs?)

STEP 2. DEFINE AND BUILD DETAIL BEHIND KPIS

Now that we can identify our goals we can create KPIs for them. Below are some examples:

Customer Satisfaction Goals: Accuracy, timeliness, courtesy, skills, overall satisfaction, transaction speed, ease of use/access
Employee Satisfaction Goals: Turnover, sick days, training days per year, time to proficiency
Cost/Productivity Goals: Cost per incident / product item, utilisation of plant and equipment, customer per employee ratios, jobs handled per employee.
Organisation/Maturity Goals: Time to produce / service proficiency, work force density, Problem / error elimination values, process formalisation

STEP 3. REPORT - SHOW KPIs TO THOSE WHO CAN BENEFIT FROM THE INFORMATION

Map out specific actions that can be taken to achieve or exceed targets.

Define alternate actions if KPIs aren't being reached.
Implement KPIs into daily operations
Reporting requires to identify what information needs to be measured, how often, how to be gathered and how to be presented. For example real-time reporting is useful for staff and supervisors whilst historical reporting is helpful to managers and business owners.

STEP 4. ACHIEVE AND MAINTAIN

Achieving and maintaining optimal performance is an ongoing process. For example:

Strategies and goals change so regularly revisit your KPIs to verify their validity
Adjust KPIs as necessary to keep efforts aligned with desired performance results.

So, as shown above, a lot of clarity can be gained using KPIs. I always thought of KPIs as staff KPIs meeting their job requirement but last night's workshop showed KPIs within the entire business model which makes a lot more sense and helps me understand Lean Manufacturing a bit better.

Some of the my notes from the workshop include:

Avoid measuring and monitoring too much stuff. Only monitor what needs to be monitored.
Be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Result Oriented, Time Bound).
KPIs are metrics but not all metrics are KPIs.
KPIs are critical, actionable measures.
KPIs are tightly linked to strategies and goals.

Organising your staff and business

2009-06-16T22:55:00.000+12:00

A friend of mine asked how we get our team more involved and responsible for their work and I told him that after I read many books, got lots of advice and attended many courses the following three steps made the most difference to my business. All he needs to do is get his team together and say something like this:

Staff Meeting

I've got three important things to discuss today.

Our plans to improve productivity and lessen workload,
New Daily Production Meetings
Introducing the Kaizen continuous improvement method used by Toyota

Improve productivity but lessen workload.

"We've had some really good advice on how to increase productivity and reduce workload. We'd like you to help us with this so we can improve this company and your work environment. The first thing we need to do is set clear achievable targets for everyone - including management. The first of these targets is what we call TSCs (Target Stage Completes). These are hours that you work that we can charge the client. As an example, 10 TSCs per week from a tech staff member would only just cover his wages so our first Target will be to ensure that Techies are doing at least 10 TSCs per week - we'll increase that target next month"

Daily Production Meetings.

Next we need a way of measuring these TSCs and also a way to keep everyone informed of what we're all doing so from tomorrow we will have a half hour production meeting at 8.30 in the morning and a 15 minute meeting at 5.15 to see if we completed all our tasks for the day. If we haven't completed our tasks lets find out why and see if other team members can help. Attendance to these meetings is compulsory. At the meeting you will need the following information:

[we put this on the big screen so all staff can see everyone's plan for the entire week]

Total TSCs last week: [hours many chargeable hours did you do last week?]
Total TSCs this week: [hours many chargeable hours did you do this week?]
TSCs received for this month:

Monday - 8 September

8.30 - 9am Production Meeting
9am - 10am: [example emails and client support]
10am - 12pm: [example: client meetings]
1pm - 2.30: [example: chargeable hours]
2.30 - 5.15: [example: chargeable hours]
5.15pm: Production Meeting- follow up on the days tasks

Holdups: [What holdups did you encounter that stopped you from achieving your goals?]
Improvements: [How could we improve your work environment stop these hold-ups?]

Tuesday - 9 September

...[continue with same format for the rest of the week.]

Kaizen Group

Every so often our Kaizen Group will go through all the Holdups and Improvements and submit the most important ones to management to be addressed. This task must be completed in 15 minutes and the Kaizen Group needs to have different members each week. It is at management's discretion to implement the changes.

Software as a Service (SaaS) rules!

2009-06-16T22:53:00.000+12:00

I take it for granted that my company should be moving toward offering Software as a Service (SaaS) but what I fail to do is show other people why I think this way. Here's some quotes to start converting people to think SaaS:

Gartner forecast that Software as a Service (SaaS) will reach $11.5 Billion 2011. 2007 projected at 5.1 billion which is a 21% increase from 2006. http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=511899

In 2006 SaaS was only about 3% of overall software sales. IDC forecast it will be from 10% - 20% by 2010.
http://www.crmlandmark.com/saasmarket.htm

Monkey Management

2009-06-16T22:51:00.000+12:00

I just finished an excellent book called "The One Minute Manager meets the Monkey" that has shown me how to easily reduce my workload. Read further to learn the secrets ;-)

What is a monkey?

A monkey is simply a task or project but the important factor is that every task requires ownership and supervision. Some monkeys are opportunities but many monkeys can make a manager a bottle-neck and immobilize and reduce opportunities for a company.

The monkey metaphor is a nice way to describe how tasks get pushed toward managers when they really need to be kept away to improve efficiency. For example, if a staff member comes to me and says "I can't find this" or "how should I do that", what do you think is happening? They are passing their Monkey to me:

They identify a problem and immediately pass it to me
I take the problem and offer a solution

What monkey management shows us is that it should happen this way:

Staff member identifies a problem and offers a solution
I approve solution or recommend alternative

By following some very simple processes I can easily optimize my time and also give staff more responsibility and motivation. Below are the main points I got from the book:

ONKEN'S RULES FOR MONKEY MANAGEMENT

These are the steps you should take when assessing a task with a team member. The dialogue between a boss and their team must not end until all tasks (monkeys) have:

RULE 1. DESCRIPTIONS: The "next moves" are specified

Example from the staff member:

"I will schedule the project and inform the client when it will be completed and notify you if there are any problems"
Examples from the Manager:

"Prepare a one page brief outlining the problems and possible solutions to this problem"

Benefits:

Everyone know that dialogue will not end until "next moves" have been specified
People get better prepared when they know that their next moves need to be specified
The rule assumes action by staff
The more clearly we understand what needs to be done the greater the energy and motivation that exists for doing it.

RULE 2. OWNERS: The monkey is assigned to a person

All monkeys must be handled at the lowest Organizational Level consistent with their welfare

Examples:

"This website project is now owned by John and Ken is setting up the web hosting"
"The server will be built by Ken who will also identify and collect all the resources he needs"
"Mr Avery is now John's client so his satisfaction with our service is John's responsibility"

Reasons:

Staff have more collective time, energy and in some cases knowledge
Staff are closer to the work so are better equipment to handle it
Creates more time for business management
Management should only handle tasks that only they can do

Benefits: Sometimes when you insist on the very best in your people's work, you may encounter resistance because doing their very best often requires hard work. On the other hand, if you permit your people to be less than their best, they sometimes don't actively resist. So it sometimes seems that they would rather do less than their best. The leaders we remember most in our lives are the ones that push us.

RULE 3. INSURABLE POLICIES: The risk is covered

When people have freedom, they will make mistakes. That's why monkeys need to be insured. At times staff may want to take more risk but the safety and needs of the business need to take precedence.

Monkey insurance policies

Recommend, and then act. If there is high risk the team member should recommend, get approval from the manager and then act.
Act, and then advise If there is little risk the team member can act and then advise the manager of the results. As team members get more proficient in their tasks this will happen more but the responsibility has to be delegated from the manager to ensure safety.

RULE 4. MONKEY FEEDING AND CHECKUP APPOINTMENTS: The time and place for follow-up is specified

Monkey health is vital so regular checkups are needed. Our business has a 30 minute meeting in the morning followed by a 15 minute catch-up meeting in the afternoon which really helps identify problems and successes. Monkeys sometimes develop unexpected problems and the process of discovering and correcting problems in meetings tends to:

Lower the boss's anxieties
Develop people's competence through coaching - which increases the boss's confidence in their competence and further decreases his or her anxieties
The coaching increases the odds that the boss will eventually be able to delegate to that person

DELEGATION

Managers should only delegate when they are confident that:

The project is on the right track and staff know what has to be done
Their people can successfully handle the project on their own
That costs, timing, quantity and quality are acceptable
That there is commitment from staff

THREE TYPES OF ORGANIZATION TIME

It's important that your team understand the three types of organisational time, so they can better manage their time such as:

Boss-imposed time
"Failing to meet your boss's needs soon results in more boss imposed time."
Examples of boss imposed time include doing chargeable work, preparing a brief report, or planning a job.
System-imposed time Administrative imposed time such as replying to emails, taking calls, meetings, etc. How much of your admin time is actually other people's admin time such as daily planning, client follow-ups or client support? Do your clients also give you their monkeys? Not supplying content on time means that you become their reminder system. Not being organised means that you have to do their organizing for them. It's important that you are clear as to what other people can expect from you and what you expect from them. Why do we always have our documents in order and on time for our Lawyers? Because we value their time.
Self-imposed time. This is probably the most important because it is the time that you actually choose your own monkeys. I know now that me managing my business such as long-term planning and implementing new software or processes is my most important tasks, but they regularly get interrupted by smaller monkeys trying to jump on my back because I'm good at problem solving. Self-imposed time comes in two forms: discretionary and subordinate imposed. The main idea for me in this book is to reduce subordinate imposed time.

QUOTES FROM THE BOOK

"It's tough to work for a nervous boss, especially if you're the one making your boss nervous"
"Why is it that some managers are typically running out of time while their staff are typically running out of work"
"For every monkey there are two parties involved: one to work it and one to supervise it"
"Things not worth doing are not worth doing well"
"Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you"
"The more you get rid of your people's monkeys, the more time you have for your people"
"The best way to develop responsibility in people is give them responsibility"
"Practice hands-off management as much as possible and hands-on management as much as necessary"
"Never let the company go down the drain simply for the sake of practicing good management"
"Assigning involves a simple monkey; delegation involves a family of monkeys"
"The purpose of coaching is to get into the position to delegate"
"Swift and obvious penalties pursue those who treat other people's requirements in a lighthearted, cavalier fashion"

Trademe Books
Click here to search for the "One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey" from Kenneth Blanchard.

Lean Manufacturing for a Web Design company?

2009-06-16T22:50:00.000+12:00

I recently attended a Vision Manawatu Trade and Enterprise course on Lean Manufacturing. Though the course was targeted at Manufacturing Companies the ideas were very relevant to my business such as measuring and streamlining tasks. In less than a month my business has doubled its productivity so I strongly recommend lean principles to other businesses. Below are some links to some Lean Manufacturing videos and the contact details of a local Lean specialist:

Let's Define Lean Manufacturing - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GcJBgQ71TM

Good overview of Lean Manufacturing

What Is 5S? - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lATmcTL7wgw

Simple explanation of the different sections and definitions of 5S.

The Advantages Of JIT - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkWIG12nfcI

6 reasons why you should implement a Just In Time (JIT) Inventory System.

What Is Kaizen - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTA7zoRm1_Q

Kaizan is an excellent way to identify problems in your business and fix them.

If you would like to contact someone in New Zealand regarding Lean Manufacturing I can highly recommend:

Barry Nolan
297 Cambridge Ave
Ashhurst, Manawatu 4810
New Zealand
Ph: 06 326 8907
Email: tql@inspire.net.nz

The One Minute Manager Review

2009-06-16T22:48:00.000+12:00

I attend weekly business workshops and today it's my turn to review a business book. Luckily, Mike Clark form Vision Manawatu knows nearly every good business book that exists so he recommended that I read Kenneth Blanchard's The One Minute Manager.

The nice thing about this book is you can easily read it in under an hour and even though it was written back in the early 80s its concepts are still very true today. I've been "melding" them in with other tools that I've picked which is really clarifying the way my business runs. Here's my synopses:

The One Minute Manager presents concepts such as developmental psychology, behavioural psychology, crisis intervention method, communication theory, goal-setting, and business transparency into a very easy to understand narrative about a young man in search of a good business manager that he can believe in and copy.

The book illustrates three main "secrets":

One Minute Goal Setting
One minute praisings
One minute reprimands

SECRET ONE: One Minute Goal Setting

Employee submits one-minute,
one-page set of goals

Agree on your goals
See what good behaviour looks like
Write out each of your goals on a single piece of paper using less
than 250 words
Read and re-read each goal, which requires only a minute or so each
time you do it.
Take a minute every once and a while out of your day to look at your
performance, and
See whether or not your behaviour matches you goal

SECRET TWO: One Minute Praisings

When an employee does something right
they are immediately praised for a minute.

Tell people right from the start that you are going to let them know
they are doing well.
Praise people immediately
Tell people what they did right, be specific.
Tell people how good you feel about what they did right, and how it
helps the organisation and other people that work there.
Stop for a moment of silence to let them feel how good you feel.
Encourage them to do more of the same
Shake hands or touch people in a way that makes it clear that you
support their success in the organisation

SECRET THREE: One minute reprimands

When an employee does something
wrong they are to be reprimanded for a minute.

Tell people beforehand that you are going to let them know what they are
doing and in no uncertain terms.
The first half of the reprimand: Reprimand people immediately
Tell people why they did wrong, be specific.
Tell people how you feel about what they did wrong - and in no
uncertain terms
Stop for a few seconds of uncomfortable silence and let them feel how
you feel.
The second half of the reprimand:
Shake hands, or touch them in a way that lets them know you are
honestly on their side
Remind them how much you value them
Reaffirm that you think well of them but not of their performance in
this situation
Realize that when the reprimand is over, it's over.

Quotes from the book:

"Help people reach their full potential, catch them doing something
right."

"The best minute spent is the one I invest in people"

"Everyone is a potential winner. Some people are disguised as losers,
don't let appearances fool you."

"Take a minute, look at your goals, look at your performance, see if
your behaviour matches your goals."

"We are not just our behaviour; we are the person managing our behaviour."

"Goals begin behaviours; consequences maintain behaviours"

Observations

Though I think this is a really valuable book; like all information (books, workshops, TV, what people say) it needs to be placed into context. For example, touching people is a common thing in the US but in NZ you need to gauge whether it is appropriate. Also, Developmental Psychology for NZers is different to Americans. For example, the kiwi teen"right of passage" is different to what American teen experience.
The thing I love about this book is that it not only applies to business, it can also improve your personal life.
It can also be read and understood by everyone - no degree needed.
Here is a link to the Game Plan.
The next book "Putting the One Minute Manager to Work" is more concise in showing you how to implement good processes in your business. I'll review that in a couple of weeks.

Blanchard, Kenneth. Johnson, Spencer. (1983) "The One Minute Manager."
Willow Books. Click here to search Trademe.

New Start-ups are revolutionizing business

2009-06-16T22:46:00.000+12:00

Remember the big DOT COM crash? It was because the Internet was growing exponentially and investors who knew nothing about it wanted a piece of the action so they invested in Internet business with poor business models. There was literally millions of dollars going into start-ups that just had a web page and an idea. It seems we're in another Internet revolution but this time Start-ups have well structured business models and are set to change the way people do business.

One of my favourite hang-outs is "StartUp City" at TechWebTV on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/TechWebTV

Check out these new Start-ups:

Advertising: Tumri

I think this is the future of Internet marketing. This company has built an Ad server that changes components of the advertisement based on the view. So, for example, if I am a car enthusiast it will show a cool car in a computer ad. -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_ebBLLEbyM&

Construction: Vela Systems

I can see this company's software and tablet PC hardware being a real benefit to companies like Higgins. They're designed a system for monitoring, scheduling, booking resources on projects. It's basically a project management tool on steroids - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxj1WfAK9Cw

Automation: Kiva Systems

These guys are using robots and software to automate their order fulfillment. This would be ideal for a company like Ezibuy - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAUGQ2hBNzM&feature=user

Do you know of any other companies that might be revolutionizing the internet?

brynn :-)