Want to share our office space?

Our former office mates have made their trip to Melbourne, so we're on the hunt for some more cool, creative, like-minded people.

We've got 3 spaces available for freelancers or creatives who want to be in one of the best, friendliest locations going.

The details:

The office is at Level 2, 228 Queen Street, Auckland. There's also entry through 3 Lorne Street.

The cost is $150 + GST per week per desk. This includes:

• fast internet
• electricity
• a desk and mobile drawers
  
• good company (if we do say so ourselves!)
  
• ambience
• use of shared kitchen including microwave, fridge, hot water, etc.
• a secure office in a secure building

And in the area:

• About a zillion cafes
• Almost 10 art galleries
• Two great bookshops - Jason Books (on the same floor as us) and Parsons Books
  
• Albert Park
• The Library and Academy Theatre
• AUT and Auckland University

About the building:

• About 100 years old, the HB Building is a bit of a creative hub. These are the hallways where you'll meet print and online publishers, web developers, graphic designers, branding people - and some really interesting financial people too.

Interested? Email simon@ijump.co.nz or marie@ijump.co.nz or give us a call on (09) 379 5421.

You can download a higher-resolution version of the poster here.

Ferrit, proof that advertising is the cost for not being remarkable

AdMedia's David Gapes started the year by asking his subscribers what they thought of Ferrit's demise.

Here's what I said:

Ferrit ... nobody I talked to was much surprised about the demise of Ferrit. A couple of reasons why:

• Site wasn't that usable or easy to navigate (that's hearsay from me, I don't think I ever visited there)
• Price premium when compared with retail, which makes sense for the
  business, but sure as hell doesn't make a compelling argument for the
  customer
• Not the knitting that Telecom should have been sticking to
• A big corporation trying to run what was essentially a startup ...
  hmmm. Culture clash? (that's a guess, but I'd hazard it's pretty
  accurate)

But my biggest pick on why Ferrit didn't work is:

• Who's it for? It seemed to be all things to all people, and
  therefore nothing to anyone. The ads were kind of cool, but they always
  seemed to be just a money-spending exercise.
  

Which again
comes back to a corporate not thinking like a startup. As Seth Godin or
someone else said, advertising is the price you pay for having an
unremarkable product. And as the chaos and noise gets louder, even the
well-funded will go under.


Here's what everyone else said, and why at least one person thinks there's life in the old dog yet!

(image filched from Ben.geek.nz)

Buying me time

The office is echoing quite a bit this week, because not only is our officemate Charlotte is away this week, but so is Marie. And she will be until February!

There's a plan behind this. For some time now we've realised we - more specifically I - have to spend some solid time developing the infrastructure of iJump. That's been difficult because we've got to keep paying the bills. It took a while to figure out the best way to do it, but the answer is for Marie to grab a temp job over the (traditionally quiet) summer period while I get my head down and create some solid systems.

So she's back at her old employers (where different departments are fighting over her) while I'm trying to quickly finish some SimonYoungWriters work and then get into development mode.

It's just helped me to see how many interruptions there are in a day:

• Phone calls (landline and mobile)
• Email
• Events, meetings etc
• RSS feeds, Twitter
  
• and worst of all, the distractions that come from my own mind!
  

As much as possible, I'm turning off what can be turned off, and switching them back on when I can give them my full attention. As for that last item on the list, well, I can only try and switch those off.

Today's amazing pic brought to you by gadl.

What does a social media consultant do?

I've been asked this several times as people try to figure out how iJump makes money: what do we actually do?

It's a constantly evolving field, but here's our current take on it - we help businesses understand and ultimately use the tools we call social media. We don't make the tools, and we don't sell them on behalf of others (although we are open to commissions and kickbacks - transparent, of course - from suppliers).

Ultimately, what we do is consultancy, helping businesses change their culture. Because the technology's the relatively easy part to implement. What's hard is the mindshift from broadcast, top-down control to a more democratised marketing message getting out.

So the short answer is - we get paid to understand how corporate culture changes, and how to use technology to facilitate that positive change.

Of course that's wordy management jargon at the moment - it'll take a bit more clarifying and thinking and more thinking to get it into plain English. But it's a start. And I think it's a pretty unique space that we can pursue, while everyone else focuses on the technology.

Update: Stephen Collins from AcidLabs has his own take on the question.

Social Media and Psychology

Image by Tonyç via FlickrSocial medai makes sense if you understand how people are. A good insight into people helps you build genuine empathy and relationships.

But there are many ways of understanding what makes people tick.

Salespeople read books like Robert Cialdini's Influence (a good book for what it is) and learn how to press the right buttons to get what they want. It's transactional, in disguise as relational.

Screenwriters observe people for the sheer pleasure of it. Because they can't help it. There is just something about people. Then they create characters that make people go OMG! That's just like someone I know ... maybe even me!

Both study people, for different reasons.

Generation C is looking for authenticity and relationship, which makes life hard for the salesperson and very interesting for the screenwriter.

Both people live in each of us. The screenwriter comes out when our basic needs are met, when we have the leisure to be curious.

The salesperson comes out when we need results!

It comes back to the phrase, do you love things and use people, or use things and love people?

It just takes one

Last night, after the Rob Kozinets lecture, I caught up with Marketing Association CEO Sue McCarty, and she told me an amazing story about change.

Before AT&T made Catherine Coughlin their global marketing officer, they were a provider of bandwidth. After she got on board and brought a global perspective to AT&T's operations, she organised for the staff to get an iPhone each, and said "play with them, and figure out what people do with them".

Want to build empathy among your staff? Help them have the same experience as your customers.

(Very similar lessons in the book Marie's reading right now, Branded Customer Service, and the book I'm chewing through, The Game-Changer. But I digress).

Sue's point? One person with a strong vision changed AT&T in six months. New Zealand is about the same size as AT&T ... and we need a global marketing officer too!

I agree! And I think it will be very difficult, when we don't even have one single government department representing NZ Inc when overseas, we have several agencies and non-governmental organisations, all with different aims and goals.

But the challenge is there. Can we do it? Do we even know what our brand is? Or are we destined to become Fiji with snow?

Over to us, I think.

By the way, the title is taken from another book which is on my Amazon wishlist: It starts with One: Changing Individuals Changes Organizations

just one

Could these financial hard times give birth to the next Google?

So the bailout plan has been rejected. Listening to the news in the past weeks, I've heard the word "unprecedented" an unprecedented number of times. These are possibly very frightening times, the more frightening the more tied in you are to the financial status quo.

In The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture by John Batelle, it tells of how Google stumbled upon the business model that would eventually make its fortune.

In late 1999/early 2000, Google was spending $500,000 a month on its smart staff, and had $20 million left in the bank. Income streams were ... well, hazy.

Ideologically opposed to tacky banner advertising, the founders sought a way to make money without compromising the user experience. We all know what they came up with, but at the time it was an experiment.

Plan B was to sign a banner advertising deal with DoubleClick - a sure thing in January 2000, but not four short months later, when the tech bubble burst. (Ironically, Google now owns Doubleclick!)

All of sudden, they had to make this new thing work. And if it hadn't been for the bubble bursting, Google may have ended up as just another traditional media company.

What innovative ideas are facing the do-or-die challenge of their lives this week? What plan B's just went under?

Need a reminder of those heady times? To celebrate their 10th birthday, Google has dragged their oldest index of the web out of storage ... see what you can find, and what you can't!

Relationships - the future of business

Marketing Online Live interests and frustrates me.

It interests me because Paul and Alex have some good stuff to say, and I like the entrepreneurial way they think.

It frustrates me because they try to reduce everything to a system - which may well be the secret to their success. Even in their latest episode, Alex (who admits he doesn't actually run his own Twitter account) suggested coming up with a set of rules for Twitter ettiquette - as if everyone was on Twitter for the same reason.

I did some soul searching to figure out why this bugged me. Two reasons:

a) It oversimplifies reality.
b) It goes against my worldview, which is shaped by my Evangelical upbringing and the gospel message. In a nutshell, it says that life is not about keeping the rules, but it's about relationships. This resonates strongly with me, because most of my life, I haven't fit into the "norm" for whom rules are mostly written.

You don't have to be a Christian to believe that the universe is about relationships vs rules. But what about the world of business? Isn't that necessarily about systems?

I was willing to think so, and believe myself to be hopelessly idealistic, but it seems business may actually be about relationships after all.

The book Disrupting Class predicts that schools - in fact, any form of educational institution - will soon change (will need to change!) from a value-chain model where products are designed for one-size fits as-many-as-possible, to a facilitated user network model, where people use tools to help each other, in the way that suits them.

I haven't got to the bit that explains the economics yet, but it's an interesting shift away from monolithic systems, towards real human relationships.

Look out for my review of Disrupting Class in the next issue of Idealog.

Why you shouldn't live as if today was your last day

Sometimes people lay that out as an instant key to know what's important in life. It's not ... if today was my last day, I'd probably try to do everything ... and not do anything well.

More inspiring for me is ... what would you do, if you had 50 years, and could only do one thing? Even forgetting 50 years, what about if you could do only one thing TODAY... ?

Of course, life's not like that, and neither is business. Businesses especially have to diversify their operations in ways that don't always feel comfortable or make brand sense. That's why we have brands - for ourselves as much as for others - to know what it is we're about. And why we do the things we do.

But having that thought - what if I could only do ONE thing? - is a great place to start. Who knows, you might actually get something done, and in a lot less time than 50 years!

Podcasts: Blogging marketers, bad lawyers, spiritual entrepreneurs and smart airlines

Great podcast listening this morning. Good to hear Joseph Jaffe back after just a week since his last one! And better still to hear of a groundswell (not to be confused with the Groundswell) of blogs written by actual marketers and agency folks, not just consultants like us who recommend people write blogs.

Then there was chapter 17 of David Maister's podcast/book Strategy and the Fat Smoker, What's wrong with Lawyers. Not being a lawyer, I didn't have to listen to this and found it interesting. Particularly since most politicians are former lawyers. Almost as harmful to innovation and collaboration as journalism!

Then there was Mitch Joel's excellent interview with E-Myth author Michael Gerber. Absolutely inspiring. My gem of the day: "Being an Entrepreneur is a truly spiritual thing. Spirituality is more pragmatic than we thought, and pragmatism is more spiritual than we thought."

Finally, HBR's Ideacast looked at how Singapore Airlines is zagging when everyone else is zigging in the airline industry. Very good bits and pieces!

Some random thoughts:

• It is sooo good to get some exercise in today, not just for the exercise but also because I get to listen to podcasts
• It will be so weird when I finally meet the likes of Mitch Joel and Joseph Jaffe, because my mind mixes up where I am when I hear them, and makes those into shared experiences. Eg I associate the opening music of Foreword Thinking with walking around my street in Titirangi, yet Mitch himself has never been there. It's different from video, where you see the face behind the voice, in their setting, not yours.
  

Tremendous

I've just come back from a business breakfast where I heard Charlie "Tremendous" Jones talk about - well, all sorts of things.

He's a motivational speaker with 60 years' experience in business. Yes, 60.

He talked about being a giver not a thumbsucking numbskull, why reading is better than talking, and how he came to know Jesus.

But more than anything he said was just the fact he was standing there. He's not only in his 80s, he is fighting cancer which he knows will take him sooner or later.

Marie and I bought some of his books and I got him to sign one. He gave me the warmest, most affectionate hug I've ever had from a complete stranger. There is someone who is giving as much as he can until every little bit of life is gone from him. That's more than words can say.

How long until I'm irrelevant?

Dinosaur roaming in Alberta
Originally uploaded by FrankMaurer

Chris Brogan posted some really good thoughts on the future of social media consultancies, like iJump.

It stimulated some thoughts I've been thinking to life, so I commented. Like this:

I totally agree with your sentiments here. I’m a bit confused - as probably a lot of people are - as to how to put this into practice.

I can indeed see the day when just about everything we’re doing today as a consultancy becomes irrelevant, because our job will be done. This makes it kind of difficult to plan ahead, because who knows what we’ll be doing then?

It also consolidates some thoughts I’m having about early adopters and the problems that happen when systems actually work well (people stop innovating). We kind of need more brokenness to stay unsatisfied enough to keep up with the latest.

Digressing wildly, it reminds me of an interview I heard with the author of a book on Melancholy, which, unlike depression, can be a tremendously creative force.

Just thinking out loud here. Thanks for being the catalyst, Chris!

---

There are also some great other comments on the post, too. I promise I'll post soon about what I mean about why being an early adopter can be a problem. Or have I already said enough? Some people say I am too concise... though always in writing, never in person! :)

---
Update: David MacGregor has an excellent quote on this very subject (kind of):

"Through history we se an ironic process that Hegel or Marx would have appreciated; a dialectic whereby the success of a culture develops within itself its own antithesis. The more more well-off we become, the less reason we have to look for change, and hence the more exposed we become to outside forces. The result of creativity is its own negation."

See more here!

How can we keep the petrol companies honest?

Pumped Up
Originally uploaded by lincolnose2

With all the news about petrol prices and their steady upward climb, I wonder if we, the people, can demand clarity from the companies who supply us with much-needed fuel.

I'm not a geek. Not really. I don't know much about programming, but I do know a good idea when I see one.

So here's an idea that presented itself to me: a people-powered website that displays the cheapest petrol prices in the country, or in a particular area. (Okay, it's still a sketchy idea)

There are already some precedents in different industries:

* Houseoftravel.co.nz scrapes the websites of airlines for prices, delivering the lowest price
* Interest.co.nz has a staff that manually check the interest rates from each bank, and their community has begun to help with that manual process.

Is there a way of finding out what's the price of petrol around New Zealand, and what the trends are, so well-prepared drivers can not only check the traffic cams before they set out, but also check where the cheapest petrol is?

Is there a way we could make this mobile? Or at least geotargeted?

What mashups are possible? Google maps seems an obvious choice.

Who would benefit, apart from consumers? Maverick players like Gull - the only petrol company to front on Close Up last night - might be interested, if they're open to transparency.

Industry organisations like the AA might also be interested in being associated with this.

I think there are enough of us with enough skill to make this happen. What do you think?

My first year in office

It's been a year today since I've been in this office in the heart of Auckland City.

And what a year!

About this time last year, Marie and I were busy unpacking desks, chairs, bookshelves and trying to assemble the kitset coffee table. It took all day, and it was soo fun.

We ended up eating Wendy's (where Marie used to work many years ago) at around 9:30pm.

Since then, here are a few lessons learnt:

• Life is hard, and it's meant to be. You can't half-ass business, or life. There are ways to succeed, and they are always more expensive, more time-consuming and more detailed than you want them to be - but it is worth it, when you look at the long view.
• In a virtual world, cities are more important than ever. I love being in town, not just because I can walk to most appointments, but because I'll randomly bump into people I know. Plus, people in the city tend to be doing more exciting things than the people in Waterview (the last suburb we lived in) - although that's only based on what I can see! :)
• Sometimes it's hard to see when you've done well. Can I be really honest with you? Things have been pretty tight in the last year. Sometimes I wonder if I'm doing something wrong, but then I realise, hello!, I'm paying for an office in the centre of New Zealand's largest city, and my wife is working with me full time. All things considered, things have been pretty successful!
  

For this year, we're planning to share the office. Marie's now working from home most days, so there's a lot of empty space going begging. There's a bit of an echo in here! I want to soften the sound with some people. We'll be offering monthly, weekly and casual rates because I know often freelancers don't know their schedule (or finances) well enough to make a long-term commitment. More details soon!

Do you love....?

Work without love is slavery.
Mother Teresa

NZ business needs more mad young things!

I had a fantastic time at the Exporting Beyond 2007 Summit at Sky City yesterday. Sadly, I was probably the youngest there (and at 32, that's not saying much).

Highlights:

• Short. It started with lunch and finished after 4pm. That's what busy people will go for.
• Focused. There was a real sense of urgency about this, and a sense that everyone in the room could make a difference.
• Interactive. After a 45-minute intro speech, we got into elective groups, about 15 people around the table, and threw our ideas around. True Wisdom of Crowds stuff.
  

Key insights I gleaned:

• We're so comfortable right now in NZ that we're in danger of being numb to the future - we need to focus on exporting or our future generations won't be able to live this same lifestyle.
• To do that, we need to tell stories and share more.
  

I'm sensing a cultural disconnect here. The needs - telling stories, sharing and collaborating - are quite touchy-feely, yet the people there yesterday were CEOs, mostly focused around finance and the economy, rather than the "softer" disciplines like psychology or language.

The way it was positioned - as an "Exporting Summit" for "CEOs" - probably failed to attract the kind of people who can inject some much-needed fresh thinking and creative solutions.

People like the kids who are taking risks and making lots of money. Chances are none of them would consider themselves "exporters" or even CEOs.

The event also highlighted the fact that we kiwis are paranoid about competition and largely unwilling to share. That's another post for another time! Stay tuned.

Maxnet, you suck - or why I got interested in management

I'm writing to you from the Booklovers B&B where the internet is slow but the atmosphere is faanntastic. (And, of course, interesting books line the shelves)

Wellington is groovy as always, and my presentation this morning was another step in finding my best presentation style. More on that later.

But for now, a constructive grumble.

It was on my fifth support call to Maxnet that I realised why I'd become interested in management all those years ago.

I started in advertising. If you think a little bit about advertising, you want to learn about marketing. Marketing is about making promises. If you make promises, you want to keep them. If you want to keep them systematically, you have to have a system in place. Hence, management.

Maxnet is experiencing systematic problems right now that are preventing it from fulfilling its potential.

Since Saturday night I've been trying to switch my domain to a new registrar before launching our new SimonYoungWriters' site (I won't link because there's nothing there at the moment!).

I could bore you with a long story, but I'll summarise what's up with Maxnet, and how they (and every business) could do a better job:

• Do the thinking for me. When I phoned late on Saturday night, and then again on Sunday morning, I got the same recorded message: "Unfortunately our operators can't take your call at this time". I didn't have the presence of mind to check their hours of operation, or I would've saved myself a lot of stress. But why don't they put their hours of business in their answerphone message?
• Get the staff you need. My righteous indignation hit a high when I waited on hold for 10 minutes, only to get automatically put onto an answerphone. Not what I want as a customer!
• Give staff the tools to help. When I finally talked to someone it was using my cellphone, calling from Auckland airport. It was a relief to talk to someone, but they couldn't help. The webmaster's in tomorrow, he said. Great.
• Don't be so frickin' cheap. And that's another thing. I had to pay for the call, even though it was Maxnet's system that wasn't delivering the results I needed. They have an 0800 number, but you can't call it from a cellphone or from within Auckland.

I think that's all, and it looks a lot less when I see it in bullet point. But each of these bullet points caused me a lot of grief, and it got worse, the less responsive Maxnet appeared.

Tonight I spoke with a helpdesk guy named Stephen. From him I discovered that my issue was a priority, that several members of the team were aware of it, and that there had been other, similar issues on rare occasions before.

That's great, but why didn't anyone email me or phone me? I want to know something, even if that something is "we're working on it".

Even then, I had to prod and poke Stephen. He would've been quite happy to let me wait until morning to talk to an expert. This is my business, I told him. Is there anyone who can help me right now, because right now is when I need help.

Then the helpfulness came. Stephen plumbed all the knowledge he had on the subject, and shared possible scenarios, used his creativity and imagination. We didn't get there, but we got further than we had been.

Why is it so hard to get people to be completely present to help you in these service situations? Why do I have to be more assertive than I feel comfortable with to get what is simply my due as a customer?

All questions to ponder. And I don't completely blame Stephen or his colleagues for the bad service they've given me. It's a systemic problem that must be dealt with in a systemic way. Not a mechanical system, but a growing, learning organic system that gets better over time.

I am a shameless Xero fanboy

Switched our accounting to Xero last night. Wooo!

It's good. It seems to do all the same things our old package did, but it does them cooler. And that is surprisingly very important, even for something like accounting.

What's so cool? The fact that there's a dashboard, the fact that I can click on just about anything for more information, and the fact that the "feedback" button is on every single page, and actually goes to someone who gives me an answer!

Well done, Drury, Morgan et al. Here's to all the success you deserve.

Where is your competition coming from?

Interesting feature in the latest Hitwise NZ Newsletter: the local competitiveness index.

Turns out that in the "shopping and classifieds - house and garden" subcategory more than half of traffic is going overseas. I wonder how much of that traffic is turning into cash?

Reminds me of some interviews I did last year, all in the one week, where two Americans and a Kiwi who's worked in the UK warned businesses that there is no such thing as a domestic market any more.

Sure, you have companies that only sell to New Zealand, but their competition is from anywhere in the world. That takes the stakes way higher. Patriotism can only go so far, particularly when it's faced with convenience.

Diversity drives innovation - notes from this week's diversity symposium

I had such a great time at Thursday's Diversity Symposium, where I was the guest (thanks very much) of the EEO Trust, who put the event on.

Keynote speaker was Frans Johansson, who's well-qualified to speak about diversity, being part Afro-American, part Cherokee and part Swedish. He's the author of the book The Medici Effect.

Without further ado, my notes from Frans' presentation:

• All new ideas are combinations of old ideas.
• Some combinations aren't that exciting; eg spider + web. Big deal.
• But what about spider + goat's milk? Strange, huh? Explore connections between the two and you actually get some of the material they make bulletproof vests out of.
• Far apart ideas and cultures look at the same things differently -> creativity -> innovation

Then he looked at the characteristics of organisations and teams who create great ideas:

• Corning Glass - the world's biggest glass provider - develops 4000 products a year; about 2% go to market.
• Prince has about 1000 unreleased songs in his vault - they're not good enough for him to release.
  
• You have to have lots of ideas to get the good ideas.
  
• The most innovative teams fail the most. (Interestingly, I was hearing much the same thing in ResearchTalk's interview on excellence while waiting for the train Thurs. morning!)
• Diverse teams generate more ideas.

Then he had a really cool example from the world of music: Tubular Bells.

• If you were a rock musician in the 70s and you wanted to do something different, how many variables do you have? There are about 2400 combinations with traditional rock band equipment, chords and vocal styles.
• And if you're a classical musician, you've got about 2400 different combinations to create a new piece of classical music.
• Or you could mash them together like Mike Oldfield, who made an album that stayed at number one for something like 15 weeks!

And now some facts and figures from the world of business:

• hp's quantum lab has 32 scientists from 13 different countries, and 13 disciplines. And no rules!
• Took them 2 years to get established and working together as a team - but once they'd figured out which language to speak (!) they got to be one of the most productive research labs in the USA.

Then a few pieces of advice, supported by examples:

• Find inspiration from fields and cultures other than your own - and dare to explore the connections.
  
• Redefine what you do.
• How to be number one: make a new category.
  
• Combine curiosity, no fear and ideas.
  
• Deliberately staff for innovation - different:
• experiences
• approaches
• concepts
• traditions
• Diversity by design.
• Example: L'Oreal - a French company with a British CEO - launched a hair product for African-American women (why didn't an American company do that?). They accidentally discovered a market of 1 billion people worldwide - all those women with African-origin hair, found in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Europe!
• Example: Frit-o-lay had an affinity group (self-formed group of people with something in common) of Hispanics who recommended a guacamole-flavoured chip. In its first year it earned $100 million. Ees nice!
• Ignite an explosion of ideas by selecting specific groups.
• Eg Volvo had a concept car designed by all-female engineers. It had - among other things - a side hatch to fill up your washer fluid, instead of having to open the bonnet (or hood). Good only for women? Nah, great for everyone. Diversity drives innovation.
• Intesect ideas from your global offices.
  
• Example Cummins makes generators but makes profit from service. Good in Europe and US but in China there's no infrastructure, so they had to make their generators better so they won't need servicing so much. Ended up thrashing the competition and changing the business model!

Then Frans showed us a graph which showed that homogenous teams get productive straight away, but plateau after a while. Meanwhile, diverse teams take a while to get going but go on to outperform homogenous teams.

"The single most important leadership quality is to move the [time to get productive] to the left (of the graph - in other words to get productive , faster)"

Man there's so much great stuff here, I'm going to have to do another post shortly. Time for tea now!