We have a lovely shiny new office in the village of Tockington, which is only 5 minutes from the M4/M5 intersection but in gorgeous countryside. Visitors are most welcome & the village pub has also been re-vamped…
Our new address is The Blacktype Group, Unit 6 Elm Farm, Hardy Lane, Tockington, Bristol, BS32 4LQ
We’ll still be popping our heads around the door at the Hub though.
I’m in the middle of a website rebuild for www.blacktypegroup.com at the moment, transferring it all over to wordpress & doing a big content overhaul. It’s a fun if somewhat frustrating job at times.
I’m also taking the opportunity to review my overall personal branding strategy & be a bit better at presenting myself. It’s very easy to get bogged down in client work & neglect your own!
I’m coming across lots of great articles on the web to do with customising & I will try to add some of the best to this post as I go along.
Creating custom backgrounds for twitter, youtube, myspace
Sadly the man who delivers straw for me is spending Christmas ill in hospital. He delivers for Betty, a fabulous lady farmer who still manages her farm alone & is well into her seventies. A straw delivery arrived today thanks to one of her neighbours, who is in fact in direct competition with her, as he also sells hay & straw to the local equine fraternity. However, in farming circles there has always been a culture of helping each other out, whether that be by loaning machinery or offering a spare pair of hands at shearing or harvest. Today I went to settle my bill & Betty & I were chatting about her generous neighbour. She remarked that he was a lovely lad & that she knew his parents & their parents & no doubt their parents too.
So what has the above got to do with web 2.0? In this always connected 24/7 culture, interaction has never been so easy. We can connect & communicate on a global scale but are these relationships of real value? How many of our online associates would be prepared to go out of their way to help us out? Fleeting interactions & business networking does not a community make. Saying that, I’ve met some fabulous genuine friends as a result of the net but it’s all to easy to slip into the habit of tweeting & facebooking instead of meeting face to face. So my 2010 resolution is to treasure real friends & spend more time offline with them!
So the power of a well orchestrated facebook campaign & the subsequent picking up of the story by mainstream media has beaten the Simon Cowell X factor junket to number 1. Time for the music industry to learn some lessons in 2010 perhaps?!
(photo pinched from @IanSanders – thanks!)
Last week I grabbed the opportunity to see the irrepresible Gary Vaynerchuk speak in London about his new book Crush-it.
There’s been some great coverage of the event by other attendees so I won’t replicate!
@jas filmed the talk which you can view here http://www.thewebpitch.com/videos/gary-vaynerchuks-talk-the-water-poet-london/
Here’s Phil Legetter’s take on the real time element of the talk http://blog.caplin.com/2009/12/09/how-real-time-does-real-time-have-to-be/
Ian Sanders talks about the importance of word of mouth here http://scrambledup.blogspot.com/2009/12/word-of-mouth-is-on-steroids.html
For me personally seeing Gary speak with so much passion helped to ram home the concept behind his book (& brand full stop). I eventually made it home to Bristol at 2am & last thing I did was tweet about the talk. Within 2 minutes I had a DM from Gary who was still hustling despite a long day & a 5 hour time difference to adapt to as well. A simple thing but I was impressed! This is one man that really walks the walk.
..drop the American lingo. The use of “fireside chat” at a tech conference just sounds ridiculous, although perhaps it’s meant to be ironic as the Le Web conference 08 was apparently akin to sitting in an icebox.
Gah, can you tell I’m envious of those going, anyone with a spare ticket feel free to throw it my way!
I read an interesting article about Silvio Berlusconi in Time magazine this weekend “How Silvio Berlusconi Uses Women on TV” Leaving aside the feminist outrage at the content of Italian TV these days, what struck me was the fact that Silvio controls 90% of the Italian television market. So in a European democratic nation, the Prime Minister controls the majority of the TV news coverage (the article states that 80% of Italians get their news from television). Scary stuff eh?!
Thank goodness for blogs & the internet in general to help even out the transmission of news that isn’t dictated by the government.
Increasingly I’m being asked to write articles & opinion pieces for online publication & a piece that was published this weekend raises a dilemma! I wrote a controversial piece on a dressage training technique (read it here http://www.horsehero.com/editorial/?feat=35093) which is being actively discussed on horse forums world wide.
The dilemma is whether to wade in & engage with the detractors, especially when they are directing bile) or to sit on my hands & stay away from the keyboard?! I still haven’t made up my mind on this.
p.s. I don’t just write on horse topics, I also enjoy covering motorsports & business in general but with a particular emphasis on web 2.0 & social media so feel free to hire me! Contact details on the website —————————>
I’ve never been a big PC game player & so social media gaming hasn’t posed much of an interest either but I can’t avoid games like Farmville & Mafia Wars as a result of friends playing them & the games spamming my facebook feed as a result. So apart from time wasting fun & spamming my feeds, what’s wrong with social media gaming? Nothing if you are a successful developer as there are vast sums of money to be made. But there is a darker side of social gaming & some seriously unethical behavior.
Michael Arrington of Techcrunch explains it far better than I could so if you want to find out more head on over & read his article here http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-gaming-ecosystem-of-hell/
If anyone still doubts the relevance of social media then perhaps they should take notice of this article where Pope Benedict discusses how the Vatican is embracing social media to bring the gospel to the masses.
Pope Benedict said “The content of the Gospel message remains unchanged but the church must learn how to transmit that message to new generations and must do so by taking advantage of the new technology and new attitudes toward communications.“
A neat analogy for most of us in business, the message we are trying to convey to customers hasn’t changed but we do need to change how we communicate it.
