London 2012 – the tyranny of choice

Olympic Park in simpler times

When I was a student and used to go to the Edinburgh Festival every summer, there was generally a point halfway through when I knew, with absolute certainty, that everyone else in the city had tickets to much better shows than I did – the ones that would win awards but were now sold out.  They were going to cooler parties than I’d been invited to, were having the unforgettable “Edinburgh experience” I craved, while somehow I was trailing behind, too late to join in.I thought I’d grown up and out of that particular anxiety, but I’m starting to get the same feeling about being in London this summer.  Partly this is due to the fact that there’s so damn much going on - most of it within walking distance of my front door.  How can anyone do it all?  How can you even know what’s out there so you can choose the best bits?

But also (I’m rationalising this to myself to find an excuse for being so immature) it’s because every experience I could be having this summer is instantly available to me on my phone.

Via Twitter and Facebook I can see pictures of all the events, hear the music, watch the video and share the reactions of all the people who are out there doing the stuff that I’m not.

This is not making me feel as though I am sharing the experience.  It’s not multiplying the pleasure.  It’s just making me feel uneasy about what I’m missing.  The duty to have an “extraordinary day”, to make the most of this “once in  a lifetime opportunity” – and make sure my children have an unforgettable summer too –  is becoming another chore to fit in along with de-fleaing the cats.

There is a recognised body of academic research into the paradox that having more choice  tends to make people more dissatisfied with their lot.  And there’s a growing number of studies about social media anxiety (this one by Anxiety UK) – though they’re usually focused on the anxiety people feel when cut off from social media, rather than as a result of using it.

For the record I don’t think I have an anxiety disorder, I think I’m just a ludicrously over-competitive person who really needs to calm down a bit.  But as an experiment I’m going to give up on Twitter and Facebook for the duration of the Olympics (or maybe we’ll see how it goes after the opening weekend…)  I managed to resist temptation during last night’s magnificent opening ceremony with nary a twinge. Let’s see if it makes me a more contented Londoner.

And now, something for the laydeez

I did some work last month researching gadget-review blogs and new technology sites for a company poised to bring a new product to market.  The world of the self-confessed geek and the gadget-obsessed is still overwhelmingly male,  but I did stumble across one blog, aimed squarely at the fairer sex, which boasted an array of stories designed to tempt us into the boys’ lair:   

 

• Pink moisture glasses keep your eyes refreshed
• Versetta iPad handbag doubles as a workstation
• Ultimate beauty iPhone app saves you time in Selfridges
• Jawbone wristband tracks your diet, exercise and sleep
• Burg 5 watch, even in pink, fails to tick right boxes
• HTC set to release Glamour smartphone just for women
• Microsoft reveals the Comfort Keyboard
• iPad kangaroo pouch coming soon

I guess this either makes you laugh hysterically or it doesn’t.* 

It reminded me of an old piece by Alan Coren about a new car aimed at the “typical female” customer  which failed because:

at 35mph the linkage connecting the hairdryer to the eye-level grill snapped, disconnected the telephone and threw the crib through the windscreen.  Upon applying the brakes the driver inadvertently set the instant heel-bar in motion and was riveted to the wardrobe by a row of tin tacks.

I suppose at least he had the excuse of writing in 1974, some time before feminism got into its stride (and of being a comic genius who rarely put a foot wrong).  Not sure what the bloggers’ excuse is.

* these are real stories from a real blog, which I’m not linking to because it doesn’t deserve the traffic

Does blogging drive business?

Boozy lunch last weekend with an old friend who is just dipping a toe into online promotion for his construction business.  He’s getting his first website up and running soon and is thinking about a blog – though he’s not really sure why he might need one.  My answer to the question – so why have you got  a blog? –  may not have helped:

• I enjoy writing it – especially now I’ve been writing for a while and there’s an archive of stuff to look back on.  I don’t feel as strongly about writing as Caitlin Moran, who confesses to salivating at the thought of sitting at the keyboard, but it’s definitely in my top five list of favourite things to do.
• It acts as a shop window for me.  Part of what I offer clients is my ability as a copywriter, the blog lets them see me in action, writing on lots of different subjects.
• It gives me a space to think.  It’s somewhere to gather advice and information about business and my particular sector, weight it up and tease issues into shape in my head through the process of writing about them (there are lots of posts which have been deleted unpublished because I realised half way through that I was barking up entirely the wrong tree).

I think having the blog helps my business enormously – although none of the reasons I do it are directly aimed at increasing turnover.  There are lots of other ways of driving business online.  I’m tempted to agree with whoever it was who said that if you blog you do it for yourself.  If anyone else reads it, it’s a bonus.

In praise of the unknown unknowns

Flickr: dweekly

I liked Jonathan Freedland’s piece in today’s Guardian about how the internet has changed the way we think.  His list of good outcomes was as you’d expect  – the ability to connect with anyone, anywhere;  access to more information from further away faster than ever before, permitting the spread of ideas at a rate undreamt of by previous generations.   

Freedland’s anti-internet arguments ring true too – more information faster can mean less in depth; information that is updated every few seconds can mean shorter attention spans.  He missed, though the thing which is starting to really bug me about the internet  – its tendency to reinforce what I already know without surprising me with things that I don’t.

The classic example of this is  Twitter’s “people like you” list of recommendations for who to follow.  I tweeted, semi-flippantly, the other week that what I need is the ability to build a “people entirely unlike me” list for moments when I’m in need of a good row.  I try to widen the range of voices I listen to on Twitter,  but if you analyse the list of who I follow  it’s still largely metropolitan, left-leaning politically, linked to the industries I work in.   There’s nothing wrong with listening to people you agree with, but it becomes problematic if you forget that there are other shades of opinion out there – it’s like being in the pub before a game and then getting to the match and realising the other side has fans too as someone tweeted about  campaigning at a local council by-election recently.

The sense of only being offered what you already know you like isn’t confined to Twitter.  Anxious to maximise sales, all online retailers  highlight things based on your purchasing history (we have recommendations for you...) and on what people with similar taste have chosen  (customers who viewed  X also viewed Y).  Whatever your interests are you can follow them online as long as you know what to search for. But what happens to all the interests you might have but  haven’t discovered yet?  Search engines only work if you know what you’re looking for – how can I search online for an opinion or a writer or a piece of music to change my life  if I don’t already know that it exists? 

I don’t agree with Donald Rumsfeld on much, but in one thing at least he was spot on:

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

The internet is great at helping with the known knowns and the known unknowns (it’s what Google was invented for).  It’s the unknown unknowns I’m interested in; the serendipitous discoveries you can make in an afternoon’s browsing in a proper bookshop or a library; listening to a radio station rather than trusting the genius recommendations on iTunes; finding an unexpected twist to a news story from the pages of a newspaper rather than just scanning the front page online. So, in the spirit of discovery, here’s a list of 100 things we didn’t know in 2010.

How do you prove you’re resilient? Work in the public sector

A depressing entry in the Guardian’s cutsblog suggests that the image of public sector workers as plodding, risk-averse jobsworths will count against them when it comes to taking some of the  2 million jobs that the private sector is poised to deliver any day now. 

Enough recruitment consultants have been quoted in PR Week saying that public sector-ites will be at a disadvantage in the jobs market to have spooked me into attending a CIPR/VMA event looking at how hard it might be to move from public to private sector.   Inevitably the hardest thing to prove when you’ve worked in the public sector is that you have the commercial acumen to make it in private business.  Otherwise, it seems  the skills that employers are looking for are, encouragingly, the ones that you develop as a means of survival in the public sector -  resilience,  managing change, leading teams, influencing stakeholders,  a willingness to push back against difficult managers (Lord, have I got some stories to tell…)

Transferable communications skills

Having worked in comms in both sectors, I’d say that the skills you need to succeed are pretty much the same for either.  My starter list would include  a continuous focus on the audience, a sound understanding of the market you’re working in,  imagination, flexibility, tenacity, a sharp eye for managing budgets and people, an understanding of strategy (and how it differs from tactics),  a willingness to get stuck into delivery (and the practical know-how), a healthy respect for deadlines,  the political nous to navigate  layers of management, good writing skills and an eye for detail.  I see no reason why having the skills to work in one should somehow bar you from working in the other.

The importance of social networks

I was struck by how few people at the event said they felt confident  using social media as part of their job-hunting armoury.  Sadly, opting out isn’t an option.  Research suggests that 100% of recruitment consultants use LinkedIn as a tool to identify (and weed out) candidates for posts, and that the size of your network is important.  Something like 85% of them use Twitter for the same reason.  Not having an online presence suggests that you haven’t updated your skills in a decade and aren’t really playing the game – not having a LinkedIn account now is like not having an email address was ten years ago.

Barbara Gibson - our social media guru – recorded this  on her phone at the event I went to, demonstrating a neat way of gathering content for a blog or website at the same time as cementing a link with a potential contact – wouldn’t you be flattered if she asked to interview you?  And wouldn’t you put the link on your site too and link back to her?  Genius!

The good stuff for April

Social media tools for small businesses, unearthed last month…

• 10 essential social media tools for B2B marketing
• Copyblogger’s guide to making money from creative-content marketing
• thirty good tips for small businesses using social media
• B L Ochman’s’ fave social media search tools

The good stuff for March: social media

I’m aware that this post could be like announcing the invention of the printing press to a convention of librarians.  However,  I’m so far from being expert in the area of social media that I need constant memory-joggers about the useful stuff that’s out there – or stuff that’s useless but fun.  Maybe you do too?  Here’s a random selection of what I unearthed this month…

• A library of useful  social media  info-graphics (there must be  a better word…) for the next report
• An instant brainstorming/networking/connection-builder.  What? Everyone else has been using this for months?  I’ll get my coat…
• Advice from Chris Brogan on setting up a social network presence from scratch
• http://www.chrisbrogan.com/100-blog-topics-i-hope-you-write/ - yet more Chris Brogan (and a bit of a cheat as this is a link in the previous post, but  worth a mention in its own right!)
• At last!  An end to tune stuck in head misery!

Saving the world one click at a time

Fllickr: Sean Stayte

 I’ve received several requests to sign online petitions to Save the BBC.  The petitioners seem to think that any cut to the BBC is an absolute outrage to be resisted until death – even if it is being proposed by the BBC itself, which does have a vested interest in its own survival.   In classic BBC fashion, they seem to have chosen the wrong things to cut – the good bits that the market isn’t  providing – but I can’t see that it’s wrong to admit that the BBC can’t do everything and scale back.  A pre-emptive strike against cuts being imposed from outside, perhaps? (And personally I hate and rarely use the BBC website, so big, so bland, so smug.  It should have been pruned years ago).

I haven’t signed the petitions, although I love the BBC for all its faults.  It’s the fizzing outrage of the emails that puts me off.  There’s no nuance in the argument, no recognition that there may be more than one side to be considered.  At least one of the organisations that petitions me for support, regularly asks for suggestions as to what I want them to protest about next.  It’s  as though it’s the  act of complaining that’s important,  the opportunity to vent about everything that’s wrong in the world, rather than doing the difficult and often dull work of bringing about real change.   A classic armchair warrior, I’ve clicked yes to petitions for Amnesty, Reprieve and Friends of the Earth,  pro-democracy in Burma, anti-homophobia in Uganda and  lots more that I can’t remember.  What happens to it all?  Is this real democracy in action, or  knee-jerk populism?  And, as one post on the Guardian’s 6Music story remarked, is it just me, or are Facebook and Twitter now running the country?

The value of free

Copyblogger is running  advice on putting together the “ultimate marketing plan” from the man they call one of the world’s highest paid copywriters.  A day or so ago the same site carried a slightly finger-wagging post about how much fantastic professional advice is sitting online, read once but never acted on.  I’m certainly guilty of spotting great stuff, inwardly muttering that I’ll do something about using it one of these days, filing it in my “great stuff” folder and never looking at it again.  But no more.  As the man said, if I’d paid for this advice from a consultant I’d be doing everything I could to  squeeze the last drop of value out of it, so I’m going to blow the dust off the folder and get cracking on sharpening up the plan for the business.  So, as a  start, here are four basic tips for maximising the use of LinkedIn and Facebook as shop-windows for your business, and one suggestion for managing what could be a time-swallowing commitment to social networks - gathered here, here, here and here…

1. The value of LinkedIn is in direct relation to the size of your network. Maximise your potential connections by keeping a link to your profile as part of your email signature.

2. Use your presence on the network to showcase your expertise – join relevant groups, comment on (and start) discussion threads, answer questions

3. Use the search facility in LinkedIn to check out potential clients/employers to see if you can get any useful information about them from elsewhere in your network

4. Publish your content – you can set it up for blog posts to be posted automatically to  your LinkedIn and/or Facebook profile, for example

5.  Estimate how long you have to spend in a week in keeping up a presence online and plan out the content you want to post in advance.  The suggestion is to take half an hour a week in writing up “helpful tips” and then scheduling it to be published.  This seems both more mechanical and more perfunctory than I feel comfortable with, but certainly more structure would probably mean fewer gaps in between posts.

1966 and all that

 

The spoof 1966 ad has been  on a billboard across the road for a couple of days now.  It makes me smile everytime I see it, although I never did get round to looking up the weblink to find out who was beaming these calming thoughts at my husband and son.  I missed the row about the other spoof ad  - the working women should all be shot one –  until it had all blown over and I stumbled across it on Twitter. 

 This proves either that a) advertising isn’t as important as the agency wanted to demonstrate; or b)  it is, and the Mumsnet row amply demonstrates the point; or c) it only works when backed up with word of mouth – nowadays massively amplified by Twitter and other social networks;  or d) I’ve been confined to the house by snow and anxiety for much too long and need to get out more.

Spoof advertising isn’t a new tactic, of course.  The Guardian launched a  range of non-existant products when online retail really started to take off, to try to prove that people would sign up for anything if it had a website attached.  And 1966 has been scooped in the spoof advertising stakes this very month by those hilarious  “We can’t go on like this” ads featuring the lollipop-headed David Cameron and some vacuous verbiage about not cutting the NHS.   Hats off to them for testing the boundaries of the medium, of course.  But can’t help thinking they need to hire someone who knows how to use photoshop and a copywriter (and a policy advisor) who might really be capable of making Britain think.