Bradley Howard's Blog

2011 favourites

Dec 27, 2011 at 2:29pm

Last year I wrote about my 2010 favourites and it was one of my most viewed posts of the year. So I thought I’d repeat it for 2011 too - and there's a clear theme running through these favourites!

Favourite new gadget

One of the things I’ve really got involved with in 2011 has been cycling. It started in February when I was out of breath going up a local (yet very long and steep) hill, then got to June where a group of friends rode the BHF London to Brighton. I then started riding into work (13 miles, from North West London to the City).

Three rear wheels later, thanks to the Holloway Road, I decided to go for a new bike. My £27 eBay investment (see below) had had its day after almost 1,800 miles between May and December.

22447_271498797316_515682316_4936440_5970254_n

However my favourite gadget wasn’t the new bike, it was the base layer clothing. Base layers have been around for a few years and despite some literally freezing motorcycle journeys, I hadn’t used one until cycling this winter. They are fantastic and if you get cold easily, try wearing them under your clothes. There you go, a favourite gadget that doesn’t run out of batteries!

Favourite book

Without a doubt, it was Lance Armstrong’s autobiography. It’s a very easy read that is very emotional about someone’s battle with cancer, from denial through to winning the Tour de France afterwards. Thoroughly recommended.

In second place was Alan Sugar’s autobiography which was several times longer than Armstrong’s, but just as enjoyable.

Favourite iPhone app

I’ve started using Barclays Boris bikes to travel around the City if the meeting is only one or two tube stops from the office. So the BarclaysBikes app is really handy, showing how many bikes and spaces are at a specific location. The AR (Augmented Reality) view is genuinely useful to find the nearest bike.

A close second is the updated LinkedIn app. The previous version never seemed to work without wifi. The latest app is excellent for looking up contacts after a meeting or even in the middle of a meeting when we’re discussing a mutual ex-colleague.

For outside work, the Geocaching app is excellent. It shows the three nearest geocaches and makes a spare hour disappear quicker than you can say “Where on earth would someone have hidden it around here?”

Favourite award

Without a doubt, I was extremely proud of the team to receive to a Sitecore Site of the Year award this year for our work with Cadbury.

tags:

LinkedIn, London to Brighton bike ride, application review, awards, bicycles, book review, iPhone, mobile, motorcycles,

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Review of my 2011 predictions

Dec 22, 2011 at 10:51am

Back in January I made 12 predictions for digital media for 2011. I did the same for 2010 - i.e. I made the predictions and then analysed them in December, and faired well. How did I do this year?

1. Rapid demise of Flash

Bang on here. We're witnessing HTML5 rapidly overtaking Flash, mainly because users want to view sites on their iOS devices, which don't support Flash. Flash for mobiles has been dropped in favour of Adobe Air - the problem with Air (an irony in the product name) is that it's too heavy for downloading over mobile: Adobe Air apps are very large. HTML5 is both very powerful and not linked to a specific vendor, which is exactly the type of technology web developers embrace quickly.

Prediction rating: 10/10

2. Local local local

The use of Google on mobile devices is increasingly rapidly, and one of Google's most powerful functions is to provide local results on mobile devices. Facebook Check In and FourSquare will continue competing in the future, providing more relevant functionality which is only good for end consumers.

Prediction rating: 10/10

3. LinkedIn to IPO

Yes, LinkedIn IPO'd in the summer at a market capitalisation of around $6bn. At the end of the first day of trading, shares were selling at over $94. They are now worth just under $65. The actual variance has been from $55 to $122. Personally I think the future is very bright for LinkedIn, as long as it sticks to it's core, professional-only values and steers cleer of Facebook.

Prediction rating: 10/10

4. More "paywalls" will increase the expectations of having to pay for content

I predicted that we'd see at least six mainstream publications start charging for online content. What was very difficult to predict was that this was going to be made possible via the iPad. The iPad has been the saviour of global newspapers by offering a simple charging model for content owners. Many newspaper websites are still free, but most apps charge for content. The main point is that user now expect to pay for content, but it took the shift to a new platform to illustrate this.

Prediction rating: 8/10

5. Financial Services move into social networks

Banks have had other things to worry about this year, and whilst many are dipping their toes into the water with Twitter and Facebook, I'm not aware of any doing it particularly well. Searching for the popular high street banks on Facebook returns a rather fragmented list. I expect this to change in the near future.

Prediction rating: 2/10

6. Facebook to follow Compuserve even more

Try and name a brand that isn't on Facebook. In January I said that we should expect a Skype messaging style interface and in July, we got Skype inside Facebook. I predicted we'd have a billion users by the end of the year, although this is unlikely to come true because in September, Facebook announced they'd broken through 800 million users - still an amazing feat.

Prediction rating: 8/10

7. A clear leader will emerge in Interactive TV

Interactive TV is now firmly called Smart TV, and no, a clear leader hasn't emerged yet. The remotes all look different, and operating systems are different, and with the latest XBox release, Microsoft is putting up a decent fight to use your games console as the Interactive device.

Prediction rating: 0/10

8. Rapid rise in CPC

I said that CPC rates would rise, and noted the cost of some terms. Here they are:

keyword	Cost in December 2011	Cost in December 2012
ebook	£0.55	£0.74
sandwich	£1.00	£1.05
drink	£1.00	N/A
laptop	£1.25	£1.31
paper	£0.75	£0.76

I estimated costs would increase at least 50% over the next year however they have mostly gone up a much smaller amount, with the exception of the highly competitive ebook market.

Prediction rating: 2/10

9. A $50 A5 eReader

I was $10 out - Walmart are selling an eReader for under $60. Bearing in mind there was nothing available for less than $120 at the start of the year, this demonstrates how mainstream eReaders have become.

Prediction rating: 6/10

10. App stores will decentralise, leading to confused customers (again)

The term app store has become abused. Now everyone has an app store whereas a year ago their product had an 'add-on'. If you go into a car showroom I'd half expect the optional extras to be available from an app-store! Fortunately the market hasn't become decentralised as predicted - to the benefit of end users.

Prediction rating: 0/10

11. The economy will continue to splutter

Obviously this has come true. I predicted that companies would need to start demonstrating clear revenues, including Twitter, and this has materialised as $140million this year.

Prediction rating: 10/10

12. Chrome to far exceed Firefox market share

Perhaps 'far exceed' is an exaggeration, however in early December Chrome overtook Firefox for the first time, and it's here to stay. I'm a big fan of Chrome for a number of reasons (all the settings are stored centrally "in the cloud", it auto updates seamlessly and it's very fast), and hardly use Firefox any longer.

Prediction rating: 8/10

So there we have it. Overall I was reasonably accurate with the predictions. I'm working on 2012 predictions, which feels more difficult at this time. Maybe it's the economy/ general outlook. Any help would be appreciated!

Photo courtesy of lacomj on Flickr

tags:

Adobe, Facebook, Firefox, Flash, Google Chrome, Kindle, LinkedIn, TV, advertising, apple, banking, ecommerce, economy, finance, iPhone,

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The future of Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+

Nov 15, 2011 at 9:37am

I haven’t written about social media that much recently after a few readers inside and outside of work criticised this blog for talking about it too much. Lo and behold I was in a meeting recently and asked “I don’t see where Google+ fits in with Facebook and LinkedIn, what’s Google’s strategy?”, of which the answer was worth recapping here.

Facebook background

Facebook started as a platform to link people (“friends”) together. As people used it more and more, messages became more popular, and then businesses started moving in, realising the power of recommendations between social groups.

The problem Facebook has is that everything on Facebook is (or at least feels) quite personal – not private per se, and not necessarily rude, but the kind of stuff I don’t want my business colleagues, customers or suppliers to be reading. I don’t bring in printed photo albums into meetings to share with them, so I don’t want them looking at my holiday snaps on Facebook for the last few years either.

So when I’m investigating a new website for a customer, and I see a ‘Facebook Connect’ signup process, 99% of the time I avoid using it, and fill in the forms separate to Facebook.

One final note on Facebook – we all have tens if not hundreds of “friends” on Facebook. Think about the question that if you wanted to categorise them all into groups, such as “close friends”, “acquaintances”, “work colleagues” and so on, how long would it take? Hold the answer…

LinkedIn background

LinkedIn started as a platform to connect business people together. There are two main reasons for this.

The first is as a job hunting tool; it’s a huge job board full of candidates. It’s one of those perfect balances between supply and demand – lots of people looking for a job and lots looking for a candidate.

The second use is as a sales tool, literally to network with contacts to find out who works within a specific organisation. It’s the ultimate tool to stop the “If only you would have told me you wanted to know someone who works for Company Y, I’d have told you” conversation from happening after spending hours of cold calling.

LinkedIn has stuck to its core focus since day one. It’s remained targeting professional users and staying away from the social (traditional definition) side.

Google+ background

Google have some key advantages with their social network. On the one hand, they have a fantastically high number of users who log in – some 260 million Gmail account users.

As a quick aside – this shows how undervalued Yahoo! are, with 310 million email users. Hurry up, buy Yahoo! and convert these huge traffic figures into massive revenue.

Back to Google+ again – Google has tried and failed a few times (which gives it an immediate experience advantage) to create a social network, and has now launched Google+.

And due to the maturity of the web, and especially some HTML coding techniques, has managed to create an environment which from day one allowed users to setup all their contacts into distinct groups. I asked the question above of how long it would take you to organise your “friends” into groups – and I haven’t met anyone who can be bothered to do so.

So Google has cracked the Facebook (social) and LinkedIn (professional) overlap. It’s very easy to have content which is only visible by social contacts and/or professional contacts. It also has dozens of brands committed to using the platform as well. And don’t forget – advertising agencies spend billions of pounds a year with Google’s advertising platforms. Having the agencies on board from day one is a major advantage.

Summary

In truth I think all three networks are here for the medium to long term. They are not mutually exclusive, and there are tools to link them together. I think brands should be building apps and brand pages for each of the networks –obviously adopting a different approach for LinkedIn compared to the other two.

Photo courtesy of US Embassy New Zealand on Flickr

tags:

Facebook, LinkedIn, google, social media, trends,

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Two new buzzwords

May 24, 2011 at 10:29am

I heard two new buzzwords today, and as soon as I heard them, I started hearing them used everywhere.

F-commerce is selling products via Facebook. No idea why e-commerce isn't a good enough term, after all, we didn't have w-commerce for products sold via widgets like Amazon and other retailers.

Egosphere is when you ask your online contacts for information rather than asking people 'offline' (by telephone or Heaven forbid, face to face). I think it's a bit negative calling it an egosphere - sometimes I will ask send messages on Facebook or LinkedIn if I want to ask many people simultaneously.

tags:

Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn, buzzwords, egosphere, f-commerce,

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12 Pieces of Advice for Professional Social Media Consultants

May 13, 2011 at 9:54am

I've always been interested in small businesses. Maybe it's because of the Napoleonic statement of Britain being a nation of shopkeepers, or something like that. It's very British to like the underdog. It's more likely to be the fact that my grandfather started a small shop in London which grew to become the successful family business.

At Endava we help some small businesses out from time to time mainly through personal contacts. This week I met a number of people who have started their own social media businesses. Businesses is quite a loose term because they're one person, trying to earn a living from one project to the next.

Having worked with some of the multinational agencies who have social media expert practices and listening to some others at Internet World this week, here are some recommendations for the smaller sole consultant businesses out there:

Create a methodology. This helps you to sound more credible, and helps you keep some traction with clients. Everyone wants to do the first few steps of a process if the first step goes well. If you have a 4, 5 or 25 step methodology, you'll get longer term revenues if you can demonstrate those steps. You might already have a methodology without realising it (chances are you always do a specific activity for each client and then do something else, and perhaps something else regularly).
Stop doing stuff for free. Yes, your mate who runs the local chippy wants some advice. Great. So don't charge any money, but get a case study from them instead, and lots of links from them
Have a Twitter feed. Yup, I met someone this week who claims to be a social media consultant and doesn't have a Twitter feed. The conversation didn't last long
Have a LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn is used by sales people in 1 man businesses to 100,000 man businesses. You don't necessarily need a Pro account. Have an account and for each free piece of work, get a recommendation from the 'client' on your LinkedIn profile. Your client doesn't have a LinkedIn profile? Create one for them
Don't just concentrate on Facebook or Twitter. Social media includes TripAdvisor, Blogger, and any review site out there. Act like a typical customer and search for the business on Google - Twitter and Facebook won't be the top results [yet], so where else is the client being reviewed?
Work with a techie. Chances are (because you'll probably be quite specialise) that you'll find a gap in the market for some social media tools and need a techie to help you. Build a new tool and you'll have the next Radian 6.
Learn to cold call. Not just on the phone but the local businesses (offices just as much as shops). Tough - yep. Demanding - yep. Depressing sometimes - yep.
Learn about RSS, build an iGoogle page, use Google alerts, work out repeatable iGoogle page templates and notifications. Use those for customers. It will help you scale quickly. Even the very big agencies set dashboards up for clients to self monitor. As soon as the client sees something of interest it will be you who will get the credit.
Collaborate with other consultants. Probably unimagineable. Social media is 24x7. You can't sit by the computer 24x7, so if four of you can handle a shift pattern, it will make a very cheap 24x7 service. And if you share some of the stuff above (e.g. you methodology), you'll become more efficient.
Work out the best charging model. I spoke to four independent social media consultants within two days this week. They all had very different charging models ranging from hourly to "whatever" to [random, from what I gathered] specfic costs for specific activities. Work out a proper pricing model and be prepared to either walk away or discount on condition of references, case studies and other points in #2.
Personally I wouldn't recommend getting into the moderation scene. There are expert agencies out there who do this very well. If you feel you want/ need to do some moderation, definitely take out the appropriate insurance policy for your own protection.
Create a blog. Leak your skills/ recommendations carefully and slowly. Point customers to the blog in order to build your credibility. Ask your discounted customers to comment on the blog to say what a wonderful job you did for them (if that was the case). Only one of the four independent consultants I met this week had a blog. How are you going to expect your customers to take social media seriously enough to part with their cash if you don't do it yourself?

So the really simple checklist for the really simple minded.... make sure you have the following and keep them up to date:

Public Twitter account - update very regularly
Facebook account (non public) - doesn't matter how often it's updated
Facebook Page for your own business (public) - update reasonably regularly
LinkedIn profile - kept up to date
Blog - updated regularly
iGoogle dashboard of your clients
Cold call list (prospects, sales funnel, etc.)
Methodology

Good luck and please let me know how you get on. For any other small business advice please comment below or contact me on Twitter at @bradbox.

tags:

Facebook, LinkedIn, business, social media, twitter,

4 Comments

Learning from eBay timing

Feb 17, 2011 at 3:30pm

Several few years ago I got really involved selling stuff on eBay, became a PowerSeller for a few months and turned over a nice revenue, until the choice was to give up my main job and go into eBay full time. I decided to concentrate more on my main job, and well, the rest is recent history.

One of the things I learnt from eBay was that when it comes to auctions, timing is 90% of the story.

There was little point creating an auction that would finish at say, 11am on a Monday morning. The end of the auction was when there would be the highest number of bids, and Monday morning was a poor time for attracting traffic to the bid.

I used to list items on the weekend, and pay a few pence extra for a 'Scheduled start'. After some trial and [lots of] error I would schedule for items to finish at around 5.30 or 6pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On items to do with the home, I would schedule for auctions to finish on a Sunday evening.

I've noticed that timing is once again really important when it comes to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn statuses. Actually, the same is true of any status update. If someone (or a brand) continually updates a status, any previous status falls down from prominence very quickly. End users will probably be following tens, hundreds or sometimes thousands of other users/brands, so the timing between status updates is absolutely key.

I now find I'm using the same practices for writing blog articles and Twitter updates.

I write almost all the week's blog posts on a Sunday morning, and delay them being made public - trying to stagger them over the week. Also, I try to choose a decent time when they are made public (which then posts to my Twitter page, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). If I made them all public in one go, especially on a Sunday, only the most recent one would get any traffic.

Posterous has an excellent scheduler for blog posts. For my Twitter feed, I use either Timely, which has been written specifically to address the timing issue above, or sometimes TweetDeck. Timely is OK, but provides pretty random scheduling (you can't provide a time - the system does it for you). I find TweetDeck is one those applications that tries to be all things to all people, and ends up being unusable to all of them as well, so in practice I tend to use Timely more often.

Photo courtesy of LenP17 on Flickr.

tags:

Facebook, LinkedIn, blogging, business, eBay, ecommerce, marketing, twitter,

0 Comments

Why Facebook Connect won't be the universal ID platform

Jan 12, 2011 at 9:12am

I've read a few blogs and even a full front page FT article recently that the power of Facebook is that it's joining up the web as a single ID platform via Facebook Connect.

The theory is that you won't need to register with hundreds of websites to leave comments, read articles, etc. - just login using Facebook Connect instead.

There are two reasons I don't think this will work:

The smart (and big) brands will continue to want to own their own data. Most brands want a direct relationship with their consumers (see prediction #10), and for decades have had to let their retailers/ resdellers have that relationship. I don't see those same brands rolling over and letting the social networks and App stores having a relationship instead.
I don't necessarily want my professional colleagues to see my personal information (including photos) and updates, or asking me to be their friend via Facebook. We use Facebook Connect on some of our sites, and the first few people who become a 'Fan' of a new Facebook Page are then displayed in Facebook widgets on our sites. Those first few fans are inevitably the employees of the brand or our partner agencies.
Another way of saying this, is that the distinction between personal and work becomes too blurred. And don't get me started about me being able to administer my own Facebook groups of friends.
This might change in the long term. There is a shift for younger employees to use personal electronic devices (especially phones) to connect to work email. Less employees want two computers at home, so they'll do all their personal tasks on their work laptop. The distinction between work and personal devices will keep blending in the medium to long term.

One alternative is for LinkedIn to become a professional ID and Facebook to be the personal ID. I post professional updates to my LinkedIn profile, and personal ones in Facebook because I have two sets of 'contacts' on both platforms, with a small overlap between the two.

Another alternative is for the ID to be Skype. The beauty of Skype at the moment is that it's portable (across all my devices and computers), secure (users can only login once, and it's voice encryption is superb) and because it doesn't store any personal information (especially stag party photos) it's ideal.

tags:

CRM, Facebook, LinkedIn, Skype, brands,

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Twelve Digital Media Predictions for 2011

Dec 30, 2010 at 7:22am

Well here we are. 2011 predictions below. My 2010 predictions worked out pretty good and I've been asked for the 2011 predictions for the last six weeks.

1. Rapid demise of Flash

Flash has two big problems in 2010: Apple (specifically, the iPhone and iPad) and HTML 5. I don't see Apple relenting on their decision to enable Flash (specifically pre-compiled code), and users will start moving away from Flash sites out of necessity. Developers already like HTML 5, and it looks reasonably flexible to replace a lot of what Flash has historically need to be used for. YouTube is already using HTML 5 to deliver video. If the BBC iPlayer is using HTML 5 next year, let's award 10/10 for this prediction!

2. Local local local

Local businesses will 'never have had it better'. FourSquare, Facebook Pages and Places, and Google Places can all help local businesses. My local sandwich shop at work can now have a digital relationship with consumers for no cost. The rising use of smartphones will continue to provide more local results when searching (for example, type in hospital into Google on your smartphone - even at the moment it produces a list of local results).

3. LinkedIn to IPO

The Facebook for business, the most useful social network of them all if you want to hire staff, track companies, keep in touch with former colleagues, research 'people' will float in 2011.

4. More "paywalls" will increase the expectations of having to pay for content

Paywalls will undergo new branding, and together with mobile apps charging a subscription fee, the days of free content will start coming to an end. I'm not saying all sites will become pay only within a year, however expect to see at least another half dozen main titles beyond Murdoch's empire start charging for their hard work.

5. Financial Services move into social networks

Financial services are walking around social networks scratching their heads wondering how to approach the biggest B2C of all time. I predict at least one Financial Services organisation will get it right, and everyone else will copy and improve. Expect some big announcements of huge Financial Services brands linking together with the big social networks.

6. Facebook to follow Compuserve even more

I've likened Facebook to the walled garden environment of Compuserve before. Expect to see 'new' features in Facebook like sending files to friends, Facebook wireless access points or even broadband provision (remember - Compuserve started life as an ISP), premium (paid entrance) Facebook Pages, offline browsing or a phone service (think Google Talk or Skype). We'll all think it's brilliant, and then read the Wikipedia Compuserve article and realise we've been here before. I also expect Facebook to break into China and reach 1 billion global users.

7. A clear leader will emerge in Interactive TV

Buying a new TV at the moment? Which Internet/Interactive TV standard are you going to buy? There are so many types available, it's really confusing to consumers. By the end of the year (Christmas 2011) there will be one or two clear leaders. And expect to see a wireless keyboard lying on your sofa next year or 2012 instead of a simple remote.

8. Rapid rise in CPC

Ad CPC (Cost Per Click) rates are rapidly rising. Take the biggest network, Google AdWords. The cost per click of the following items as of 29/12 is:

ebook - £0.55
sandwich - £1.00
drink - £1.00
laptop - £1.25
paper - £0.75

I estimate costs will go up at least 50% over the next year because of the growth of online businesses, and they will all want to advertise their products.

9. A $50 A5 eReader

eReaders will hit a critical mass when the price point is low enough. I estimate this to be around $50 (£35) because this is a reasonable price point where a consumer won't be too upset at losing their eReader. At that point, schools will seriously consider replacing paper books with eReaders. Expect more mainstream books to only be available electronically.

10. App stores will decentralise, leading to confused customers (again)

The beauty of the iPhone's app store is that all apps come through the store tested and vetted. It also provides a full backup solution if you regularly synchronise your iPhone with a computer. The Android Market is the opposite - it's like anarchy! Apple are releasing their own full app store for Apple computers. Amazon will do something similar. You'll have lots of app store logins, and it will all be confusing. In fact it will become so fragmented that it will be similar to how you buy software at the moment - one piece comes from Amazon, another from Apple, another from eBuyer, and so on.

11. The economy will continue to splutter

It doesn't take a brain surgeon to work this one out. However the implications will be that brands will drive their marketing organisations to produce clearer ROI on campaigns (especially Facebook, to pay for the expensive UK based full time Community Managers). This is currently difficult to do, but marketing departments will drive analytics vendors to improve their products beyond just referrer stats. Despite huge funding increases at the end of 2010, Twitter will need to start generating some serious revenues, so expect ads on Twitter similar to the reach blocks on Facebook.

12. Chrome to far exceed Firefox market share

Chrome is here to stay, and will only increase market share when the new Google laptop (and tablet) arrives. Microsoft won't back down on Internet Explorer either. Which leaves Firefox in third place, and will just slide further down because users won't know why they'll want a third browser on their computer.

tags:

Adobe, Facebook, Firefox, Flash, Google Chrome, Kindle, LinkedIn, TV, advertising, apple, banking, ecommerce, economy, finance, iPhone,

2 Comments

Tags

2011 favourites

Review of my 2011 predictions

The future of Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+

Two new buzzwords

12 Pieces of Advice for Professional Social Media Consultants

Learning from eBay timing

Why Facebook Connect won't be the universal ID platform

Twelve Digital Media Predictions for 2011

Bradley Howard

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