A few ideas for you to turn community into connections.
Schedule a skype call and get talking about your passions.
Agree to work together on a small project
Go out of your way to refer or make an opportunity for them
Do something extraordinarily special for them
Meet them
How about you? Are you preaching to the converted?
It’s impossible to under state the power of picking the phone up and demonstrating genuine passion and enthusiasm. Dial the numbers and press the green button, then let me know how you get on.
Reading Mashable’s article about the new Box.net cloud storage app got me thinking. If their goal really is to allow individuals to be able to access their work documents remotely via the cloud, the piece that is missing isn’t the cloud or the mobile app. The mobile app has matured quite nicely into a feature rich, usable piece of software.
In fact what appears to be missing, is the understanding in business. Corporates have enough trouble trying to sell their product & make next year’s revenue numbers.
Teach a man to fish
The consultancy that teaches a business how to integrate & transition away from their expensive internal Intranet towards cloud based storage solutions is completely missing (or it’s trying to sell you Tivoli software).
As corporate, I’d want someone who could build an interface to my existing file servers, and make my existing Microsoft Office documents available through the cloud.
User Driven IT
As the Security specialist firm RSA reports, the rise of user driven IT means the days of buying your employees hardware are over.
A laptop, a secure intranet & your own data centre are very expensive! The new model is having your data hosted outside your business, and employee’s accessing using their own devices. We’re already seeing this start with those pesky CEO’s and CTO’s using their iPads & personal notebook’s in business.
Real cost savings?
In effect this is a double edged sword for business. With one hand you can save a lot of cost by reducing hardware investment. With the other, you introduce a massive security risk.
If you can’t secure the device & your workers are buying their own IT equipment, how do build the interface and policy /procedures required to get you from your existing internal Intranet to a cloud based solution?
Consider your information touchpoints
When does data enter & exit your business’s confidentiality boundary?
What quality checks can you perform data entry & data exit?
What tools do you need to perform quality checks?
What policies and procedures do you need to develop to enforce these checks?
In effect you can no longer control an employee’s behaviour hour to hour, but you can control data entry, exit & quality inside your business boundary.
Time to invest?
The cloud is a massive cost saving tool, it allows you to leverage existing / free tool’s and networks in an employee’s home life. This is a potentially invaluable asset. The way we look at our business will fundamentally change. Do you think business will embrace the cloud any time soon? What else do they need to consider?
Saw an incredibly interesting stat at the business insider. Almost half of American’s polled see America’s ‘best days’ behind them, 7 in 10 concerned the country is ‘fundamentally broken and not working’
So what’s going on here? The American Dream, the iconography & the rhetoric doesn’t sit with the present. This is an aftershock of 9/11, the limits on American power economically, militarily & geopolitically. China, India and South America are emerging. The world is changing again. The past was more comfortable.
America isn’t by far and away top dog any more. It sneezed. What happens next is vital. There was always an undercurrent of two very different worlds colliding, but with one American Dream to get behind and a barnstorming economy that was easy.
The angry reaction of the tea party types is stirring up the same old troubles we last saw in the 60s. Then America held together and became better for it. Will they do the same again? I imagine so, but it’s going to be a rocky 5 – 10 years. The Q’uaran burning & reaction to the Mosque building shows hurt pride & uncertainty directed at the wrong people.
We live in interesting times. What does this mean for our economy? What does this mean for business? What does it mean for your career?
Needed to get something up, just to try and articulate the exhaustion that comes from a weekend to write home about.
Vodafone sent me free VIP tickets (which was awfully nice). This means we beat the traffic, and had a very short walk to the car park. Setting up was super quick, pop up tents are the way forward & I’d packed light. Two pairs of jeans, two tshirts, a fistfull of underwear & 3 litres of vodka (pre-funnelled into a plastic bottle of course).
If you ever get the chance to go, I highly recommend it. The Guest bar leads right out by the main stage in the area. It’s good to be able to get served quickly, but I did miss the atmosphere of the main campsite.
The Bands – Friday
So the lineup this year was quite mixed. The first band I went to see was Crystal Castles who came highly recommended. Had never heard of them before, but this was a fun, trippy live show. Will definitely be downloading. Their lead singer looks like a film noir anime character. The music makes absolutely no sense, but sounds good.
Enter Shikari had a pretty intense crowd, so I bailed and found a hill. It sounded quite good though. Friday was all about Bad Religion. 30 years of an incredible bad, to be experienced in one night. Amazing how hard a band can rock. Quite an intimate but passionate crowd, singing along to “Sorrow” to cap off a fairly relaxed Friday.
The good stuff was still to come. Including how I ended up throwing chewee bars into a fire, getting lost in an army of people fencing using tree branches (with leaves) & the rest of the bands. Watch this space for more… when the headache has subsided!
This is single handedly the best peice of work I have seen describing Social Media by @padday:
How it is different from your real life.
How you need to manage it as a result
What Social Networks need to change to help you
It identifies the fundamental problem with our misunderstanding of who we are. We believe we have one identity and many friends. e.g. The ‘Stay true to yourself’ street corner philosophy is predicated on the idea that you have one self. You are many different people, depending on the circumstance.
This is an essential read if you are in social media marketing, looking to understand ROI & how social media is used for influence.
All of these have one thing in common. They are triumphs of people working towards meaning (except maybe the Slinky). When it comes to the doing Great Things we are capable of incredible action.
The problem we have is that our lives have become fairly mundane, full of frustration or boredom. How often have you been sick of work, bored by TV or frustrated with the same old routine? We crave meaning. We crave more than just what’s on TV… but we don’t take action.
The need for Great Things
Yet we live in a world that still has some pretty big problems.
Jane McGonigal has figured out why some of us would rather spend time playing video games than solving these problems. It boils down to the fact that video games inspire people. They are works of art that infuse urgent optimism with a sense of purpose.
You are capable of doing Great Things. What you need is to be inspired…
Art creating action
Art gave us an Inconvenient truth, Live Aid and Live 8. While well intentioned, they were low on real action, low on real results…
What if instead of putting on a concert, musicians collaborated with video game artists to create a game world where we solve hunger as the aim? What if instead of an artist making a statement through their graphic novel, they used that storytelling technique to engage us to solve water shortages in a virtual world?
We are not motivated by solving problems unless we have a reason to. We don’t lack desire. We need meaning, we need to be engaged. Our art provides rich meaning, while our lives provide little.
The art of engagement
Jane talks about how she believes humanity is teaching itself how to collaborate through social networks and online games. We did it with facebook and beat Simon Cowell. We did it with twitter and the #Iranelection.
Yet in Copenhagen we put our trust in politicians to solve problems. As well intentioned as I believe Copenhagen was, a small group of career politicians are not as capable as the rest of humanity.
Art moves us
Avatar made the climate argument in a more attractive way. Rather than entertain us, art now needs to engage us. Instead of Copenhagen & and Inconvenient Truth, we need an Interactive ‘Avatar’ that helps us develop solutions to our real world problems.
For example Evoke starts with a Graphic Novel of a food shortage. How will you help solve it?
Do you think art can convince people to do Great Things? Do you have other examples of Game Theory solving problems? I’d like to know your thoughts…
Thanks to everyone who came to the #CozyTweetup and helped make it more fun than should be allowed on a Wednesday.
The creative input of #likeminds was genuinely exciting. I hear interesting things about Education projects, a Fashion project & exciting things at Temple Works. The key to the event was the mixture of people from different backgrounds. We had culture types, technology types & social media types.
Surprises & Prizes
There were plenty of surprises that evening and not just Spain losing to Switzerland. We were so oversubscribed we had to turn people away. Apologies to those of you that couldn’t make it, watch this space, we’ll have details of the next event coming soon.
Dan & Adam took home brand new phones after Diego’s work organising the raffle, courtesy of our sponsor. Including a phone that has not yet been released in the UK yet The Vodafone 845.
brb was a fantastic venue for the surprise unveiling of vodafones new map mashup. It lets you report your network coverage no matter what network. Which is a very open challenge to their competiton. I guess they’re pretty confident in the strength of their network!
Thanks to the Digital Diva @Ally_Manock for the photos.
I remember being lost in conversation all night. What were your favourite things to happen? Who did you meet? Did they help your project
Leeds local & Caffeine superstar Ben told me an amusing story about how he found himself dictating on evernote to avoid the risky business of typing while driving. This kind of charming tomfoolery is not unique; there are plenty of people to share your knowledge with here in Leeds. Why not get out and meet some them? Leeds has a vibrant community of bloogers, freelancers & social media enthusiasts who get together regularly to help each other with these questions.
Cozy up to the locals
Whether you’re new to this social media malarkey or you’ve been around since the year dot, the ‘social’ part of social media, means getting out and meeting people. You can come and get your questions answered by the Leeds community on June 16th, over drinks at brb. Leeds natives Ben Mckenna, Jim Moran, Chris Baille & the eminently charming Phil Kirby will be joining us. Will you?
Vodafone have kindly offered to help out by demonstrating some new technology. They’ll also be available for questions afterwards.
The Details
You’re sold? Ok here’s how to attend. The venue brb is on call lane, we have the upstairs bar & events room. Big thanks to Wayne from brb for making this possible. We kick off at 7pm ( Wednesday June 16th), but recommend getting there for 6:30
Jakub Hrabovsky will be demonstrating the best practice use of the latest devices as well as helping with a Q+A session. Then we have an opportunity to meet local like minds in the bar afterwards. Perhaps you like Ben, find interesting ways to be social on the move? Or you want to meet some likeminds? If you’d like to join us, the eventbrite tickets are here.
Oh, and you’ll get a raffle ticket upon entry. One lucky guest will win themselves an HTC Desire!! Are you coming along? Do you have a story that can beat Ben’s? Let’s hear it.
The anxiety caused by those 9 words can be terrifying. If you’re one of The Lost Generation especially, there is no easy way out, there is no shortcut home. You have to stand out to be noticed.
But how do you get that confidence? We leave university not knowing who we are, never mind what we are going to do with our lives. The best way to find out if you enjoy something is to do. Try. Have a go.
Unfortunately we don’t often get the opportunity to try before we buy with a job, career or calling. It’s very all or nothing, it’s a big commitment. So how can you commit if you’re not even sure you want to do that job?
Competition Magic
My friend Lisa from Swamp mentioned the Sh Awards and immediately it made sense. I like that they are engaging with The Lost Generation, stirring up competition & creating opportunity. The message is simple: Why not enter a few competitions to see if creativity might be where you belong?
Pitch your work to influential creative directors, meet with top agencies, show off your work in an exhibition and, as if that’s not enough, win a 6-month paid placement.
Your entry will be judged by award-winning creatives and professionals from the UK design industry.
Check out our judges page to find out who’s on this year’s panel.
This is a perfect example of business reaching out to you. It’s a chance to have a go, and get feedback on how good your work is, where it fits & what you should do next.
How do you get noticed?
All you have to do is register at www.sh-awards.com & enter your best work. The prize is a 6 Month Paid placement & perhaps more importantly, valuable feedback & direct access to Senior industry figures who are looking for the next break out talent.
Do you know of any other similar events in Leeds? I’d be interested to hear about them. What do you think of this way of getting experience?
