Equity Punk & Crowdfunding
Posted on January 24, 2010
Filed Under Everything Else, Politechs, Social Media | Leave a Comment
I am now the proud owner of a share in Scotland’s hippest Brewery. BrewDog is a brewery located in the north of Scotland and they recently launched an online “crowdfunding” scheme selling shares to raise £250,000 of equity.
Crowdfunding is not a new concept but one that has flourished under the Internet and in particular, the rise of social media. It’s basically a way of getting money (funding) from a group of people (crowd). Recent high profile examples include the recent Obama election campaign. By harnessing the new powers of the Internet – essentially the ease of taking online payments and the access to millions of people through social networks such as Facebook – Obama’s team managed to secure nearly a billion dollars via small, online donations.
Another example is the more recent Haiti disaster appeal. By harnessing the same networks of Facebook and Twitter using a viral message, Red Cross launched a fundraising service allowing you to donate money by text. Within 48 hours they had raised $8 million.
From global to local, crowdfunding has really come into it’s own since the Internet took over the world. Watch out for many more examples coming up over the next few months.
East Lothian Coffee Morning – Update
Posted on January 24, 2010
Filed Under Biz Start-Up, Social Media | Leave a Comment
An update to my earlier post.
The first get-together of the East Lothian Coffee morning took place on Friday morning and seemed to be a great success. About 48 people turned up which was beyond my expectations but fantastic all the same. Still waiting to see the survey monkey feedback on the event but the anecdotal response seemed to be excellent. A lot of complete social media beginners were there which is actually exactly the target market we were aiming for.
Our ongoing challenge will probably be to try and pitch the events at a level that doesn’t go over the heads of the novices while doesn’t bore the experienced. Hopefully the general networking side of things will help stop the group splitting in two. The LinkedIn group currently stands at 45 and I know for a fact that some members have joined LinkedIn, the group and even twitter, since the meeting on Friday.
Can’t wait for the next get together already.
Blogging and tweeting to election victory
Posted on January 6, 2010
Filed Under Politechs | Leave a Comment
The next general election in the UK hasn’t been announced yet but we know it will be sometime before May this year and the various parties have begun the year in earnest. But what effect will the internet have on the election?
A recent post on one of my favourite blogs (BBC dot.life) was discussing the what the effect of YouTube might be on the forthcoming UK General Election, another article in the Guardian discusses how blogging and tweeting will be used by the parties themselves as well as their supporters (and presumably their detractors). It seems strange but YouTube was only about 3 months old at the time of the last election, and Twitter still a few years from development but some believe the forthcoming election (expected to be one of the closest of recent years) will be defined by the internet and social media in particular.
It certainly seemed to have an effect in the US Presidential election last year when Obama swept to power. The majority of his campaign funding ($500m) came from small online donations and people watched around 14 million hours of Obama related footage on YouTube. But (with no offence intended!) American’s are different creatures from the reserved British where many people still refuse to say who they vote for and certainly wouldn’t campaign to all their friends on Facebook would they? There can be no doubt that the people are there to be found on all the popular networks – Twitter, Facebook and YouTube etc but just because users can access this content so easily doesn’t mean they will (you can drag a horse to water but can’t make it drink…). That requires an attitude change which I can’t see having happened yet and I will be bold enough to go so far as to say that I don’t think we’ll see a massive change in the voting numbers at the next election.
That’s not to say that blogging, twittering and uploading video content aren’t worth the time it takes to do; people certainly use these networks and the cost is still relatively minimal. I personally can’t wait to see how the parties use these networks in the coming months and more importantly how people react to them.
Trying out search engine optimisation – update
Posted on December 14, 2009
Filed Under Biz Start-Up, Social Media | Leave a Comment
I recently wrote about my beginners attempt at search engine optimisation on my sister-in-laws website. It’s now been five weeks since I gave it a shot and needless to say it’s had varied success. Registering with Google Maps was great as her listing always comes up on a google search for ‘personal trainer aberdeen’ or ‘personal training aberdeen’, but the rest hasn’t really done much at all, so far. I think the next stage is trying to get as many incoming links to the website as possible – as well as trying to convince her that other social media options are worthwhile using too.
Social media at work
Posted on December 7, 2009
Filed Under Social Media | Leave a Comment
It’s become such an everyday term that it’s hard to imagine that ’social media’ only dates back to around July 2006. But here we are a little less than 4 years later and Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and many others have become an everyday activity for millions of people. And where you find millions of people, business will surely follow, as it has, with varying success. The transition to the stage where these on-line communities have become a significant part of many firms’ marketing mix has been so rapid, it’s no surprise that it has caught some firms on the back foot.
For small businesses, their size and subsequent ability to react quickly has allowed them to embrace these new technologies quicker and often better than many larger organisations. Small businesses have found creative opportunities to use these new technologies But this must surely be a temporary situation, and big businesses are already ploughing money into social media. But these same companies also have different issues to contend with. Whereas SMBs are often owner led and therefore owner responsible, big businesses have a number of issues to contend with:
- ensure that a consistent company message is communicated by all staff
- avoid employee inactivity – or how to ensure your staff aren’t skiving on Facebook all day
- ensure everything published is legal
- basically don’t do anything that will bring the company into disrepute
Big businesses weren’t all slow off the mark however, back in 2005 IBM wanted to issue a set of guidelines for staff (IBMers) that wanted to blog. Instead of senior management supplying a strict list of rules to be obeyed, they developed a wiki to allow IBMers to create there own social computing guidelines. Even though it was originally created to cover blogging, because they were implemented as a wiki it gave them, and still gives them, the flexibility to amend it as new technologies and social media emerge.
I’d be willing to bet that many businesses big and small are struggling to keep up with the pace of emerging technologies. But it’s at the stage where it’s almost becoming impossible to ignore. Even if you don’t make social media part of your marketing mix (and if you’re not, why not?) it’s almost a certainty that your employees will participating in one form or another, and is it not better to try and control your on-line signature than have it scrawled for you?
My media
Posted on December 4, 2009
Filed Under Everything Else | Leave a Comment
I like reading the weekly My Media column in the Guardian and because it’s unlikely that they’ll be asking me any time in the near future I thought I’d do it myself.
Newspapers On a week day I usually read through my office’s copy of the Scotsman or the Herald, depending on who’s got there before me. The only other paper I ever buy is the Sunday Times and only if I’ve got time on a Sunday, I can’t bring myself to read old newspapers even if it’s yesterdays.
Online BBC is where I get the vast majority of my news from and I can rarely fault them. If I’m looking for tech news then I tend to go somewhere like TechRadar. Apart from that my top 3 most visited sites are probably LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook but I’d be lying if I said I never went to the Daily Mail website to catch up on the world of celebrity gossip…
Magazines I love getting a magazine but I always feel that there’s less content and more adverts than there used to be. Each month I get DigitalCamera, Wired and Management Today (which I get sent free for some reason).
TV Embarrasingly, there are few soaps around that I don’t know the current storylines in but I’m not chained to them so it really all depends what I’ve got on. The only news I watch is the first 10 minutes or so of the Channel 4 7pm news but I also have BBC’s Question Time and Click on series link to give me my quota of current affairs. Apart from that it’s a complete mix of comedy (Gavin & Stacey), Sport (anything but cricket) and quiz shows (QI).
Radio I used to be all about Radio 1 but I must be getting old because I now flick between TalkSport, BBC Radio Scotland and Radio Five Live. Also try and catch some of the business shows on BBC iPlayer when I remember and have the time.
Books I read a lot but I often need to force myself to stop re-reading the same books again and again. I’ll read anything by P.G. Wodehouse but aside from fiction I enjoy business books, especially auto/biographies.
Music I sometimes feel my music tastes are stuck in the 60s/70s as I’ll listen to anything by the Beatles, the Doors or the later Pink Floyd stuff. Apart from that I’m quite eclectic in my tastes and just know what I like and what I don’t.
Film I enjoy watching films especially at the cinema where I think even an average film feels good. The choice of film is usually a compromise between me and my wife so it can often be pretty varied from gangster to rom-com.
New business ideas
Posted on December 3, 2009
Filed Under Biz Start-Up | Leave a Comment
One of my favourite websites is springwise an on-line database of the latest new business ideas from around the world. I don’t tend to visit the actual website because I’m registered for their fantastic weekly email which brings all the week’s latest ideas to my inbox. They source the ideas from a network of around 8,000 ’spotters’ from throughout the world and while I’ve never seen an idea on it that I’ve liked enough to do myself, I find it really helps getting you thinking creatively.
Some recent ideas include GPS collar tags for your pets in case they ever get lost, sleep suits for babies that change colour if babies get a fever and baked goods by subscription.
What is Social Bookmarking?
Posted on December 1, 2009
Filed Under Social Media | Leave a Comment
Social bookmarking is something that I’ve been aware of for ages now but haven’t really been interested enough to find out about and certainly not interested enough to use, until recently. According to Wikipedia, social bookmarking is a “method for Internet users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources.” Still not sure what it is? You’ve almost certainly seen evidence of it already, see the image below from the BBC website.
Common Use of Social Bookmarking
You probably use the ‘My Favourites’ in your web browser to store your favourite web links but have you ever been at work or at a meeting in someone’s office or even at a friends house and wanted to show them a great website / article / video you came across the other day. You can’t because it’s recorded on your home computer. Well social bookmarking is basically an online ‘My Favourites’ that you can access wherever you go rather than being restricted to where your computer goes.
It’s a bit more than this though, it’s a social media tool as well, allowing you to share things you like with other people and seeing what they are highlighting as interesting, funny or useful. It’s also another good way of finding quality information, as only good articles will get ‘hit’ by multiple users so you can often tell at first glance whether an article has been widely read and appreciated judging by the number of ‘Diggs’ it may have had.
It’s also a useful search engine optimisation tool and you should get into the habit of registering every new article you publish and you can even add the badges below your article which allows people to quickly add their vote to your article if they like it. You can see at the foot of this post that I’ve added a Digg and a re-tweet badge (feel free to click them!).
If you want an in-depth guide to best practice for social bookmarking then try this beginners guide to social bookmarking.
SNP iPhone App
Posted on November 30, 2009
Filed Under Politechs | Leave a Comment
An article in today’s Guardian discusses the new iPhone app released by the SNP (Scottish National Party) for party activists. It sound’s a bit Big Brother as it basically links in to the ‘Activate’ database which “records the identity, voting intentions and basic opinions of every voter in Scotland, allowing campaigners to target people during elections and track the SNP’s popularity all year round.”
The official press release from the SNP can be found here although it does mention that it is only available to registered Activate users.
It has shades of the iPhone app used by Obama activists in the run up to the recent Presidential run-off and has impressed me with the forward thinking of the SNP by embracing technology in a way that I can’t see other Scottish parties currently doing.
It doesn’t help convince people to vote SNP but what it does do is streamline the job of identifying those who are key targets (such as the undecided or opposition voters) and that can only lead to a better managed and more effective campaign.
Five things you should do as soon as you start up in business
Posted on November 28, 2009
Filed Under Biz Start-Up | Leave a Comment
It’s often hard to know what to do first when you start up in business but if you’re starting up as a sole trader in the UK there are a number of things that you should do immediately.
- Register as self employed with HMRC. You have 12 weeks from when you start to trade to do this, but why not just get it out of the way now? You can register online, by post or over the phone so you shouldn’t have any difficulties.
- Get insured. If you’re working as a sole trader you are personally liable for any third party claims against you. Could you afford to pay out in the event of this? Common insurances include public liability, professional indemnity, employers liability and car insurance although there a hundred other insurances you could get. If in doubt, find a local insurance broker to help you.
- Work out your pricing. There is a big temptation when you start up to keep your prices low to help win business. Be careful with this tactic as it could end up being a false economy. Don’t undersell yourself or you could end up stuck in a rut where you can’t increase your prices to a level that makes you money in the long term. You need to charge a price that is fair to you and your customer, you’re in business to make money otherwise you’d have set up a charity. If in doubt, research other similar businesses and see what they charge but whatever you do, make sure you understand your own costs.
- Understand your books. Many people don’t have a clue about the financial side of the business but whether you do your own accounts or get a bookkeeper or accountant to do them for you , you need to understand the basics. At the very least ensure you keep all your receipts and a copy of all your invoices.
- Get some business cards. To win work you need people to have heard of you. Get some business cards and give them to everyone you meet. For best practice on using business cards, see my earlier post on how to use business cards.
There are, of course, many other steps to make a successful business but if you get the basics right you a have a good base from which to grow.