A Business Plan as defined by Business Link contains the following: -

• An executive summary - this is an overview of the business you want to start. .
• A short description of the business opportunity - who you are, what you plan to sell or offer, why and to whom.
• Your marketing and sales strategy - why you think people will buy what you want to sell and how you plan to sell to them.
• Your management team and personnel - your credentials and the people you plan to recruit to work with you.
• Your operations - your premises, production facilities, your management information systems and IT.
• Financial forecasts - this section translates everything you have said in the previous sections into numbers.

This is a good practice but many entrepreneurs will tell you that business planning is a powerful tool for evaluating the feasibility of business ventures. However I’m also reminded of a proverb that says “He who fails to plan, plans to fail” but if you’ve ever prepared and launched a business then you’ll know that when you start looking at sales you can easily be too optimistic or underestimate the costs involved in running the business which can have a detrimental affect, resulting in little or no profit at best or business failure at worst.

So no matter how many times you write that business plan or forecast those sales, it’s very rare that you get the figures right so managing a business then revolves around making adjustments to the books by either increasing sales or reducing costs or both.

One thing that wasn’t available to me at college was the social community, the principle of doing research existed but access to sales, customers and opinion was not possible without hard graft of doing the physical market research. If you got that wrong then you’d only discover this after the business started and only after incurring excessive costs.

Today with social media your research is available for free through your various social networks, you can get access people opinions and you can establish whether your business or products have demand.

Utilising the social networks enables you to fail faster allowing you to make changes to products and services quickly and tapping into the sentiment of your customers and thus make changes. In the worst case, if you can’t meet the expectations of your customers then the business will close but at least you can close faster and incur less costs.

I also remember a phrase from 1987 film Wall Street ‘Greed is Good’  the modern 2010  film Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps ‘Is Greed Good?’ the strap line in my fictional 2012 film Wall Street  it would be ‘ Fail Faster to Succeed’

Web 1.0 was all about websites, visitors and products & services. Web 2.0/3.0 is all about Social – especially with the growth of Facebook, Twitter etc.

So what makes a website social as opposed to informative?

I’ll outline my thoughts…. Social websites let people share content (images, video or thoughts) and reward people for their effort – Followers/ Friends or scores. It all about competition the more people the greater the perceived influence we have, we even now have an app to measure how influential you are (Klout0 across various Social Networks.

So the difference between a web1.0 site (Tripadvisor) and web2.0 (Foursquare) is the fact that for the review you get points or rewarded and that the more points the higher up a league you go either with your friends or across the world.

Today building a website with content is no longer just about great content it’s also about building in competition and rewarding active users, provided you have a way of recognising who they are.

It was decades before I managed to make a computer a necessary part of my daily work, and even then I was one of only a handful of people who knew how useful it could be. A couple of decades later and it’s hard to imagine a job in which a computer isn’t an integral part: even if your job is digging holes or picking up litter, it’s likely that the details of where you need to dig, or when you need to clear litter are issued and monitored via a collection of electronic systems.

Depending on your age and outlook, you may be in one of 3 phases of human interaction with technology:

• Up to school age, any new technology you come across is just part of the world you’re learning about. You take it on at a deep level without a second thought.
• In your youth, any new technology that comes along is an opportunity: to learn, to be at the forefront, something of which to take advantage.
• Get past a certain point and any new technology becomes another hurdle or a hill to climb, a chore which you need to work hard to absorb.

The boundaries are vague, and depend for each individual upon personal attributes as well as the environment (social, commercial, even climate) and the level of support available from friends and peers. The switch between phases 1 and 2 may be during primary school while the switch between 2 and 3 is as elusive as ‘middle age’. Some people seem to want to stay in the mindset of their 20s and find difficulty, or at least put little effort into, absorbing anything that comes along later. Others keep an open and inquisitive mind well into later life.

I like to think of myself as belonging to that later group – still interested in and learning about whatever is new in the world, not just technologically but also keeping up with popular culture – although calling it ‘zeitgeist‘ feels pretentious, so I’m probably not quite there.

This is not just me reminiscing or lamenting lost youth. There is a significant impact on what I do and how I make my living. I’m working in the virtual world of the web and social media – something which wasn’t even science fiction when I was young, but which today forms such a part of everyday existence that friends and colleagues have no concept of what it may be like to be ‘disconnected from the matrix’.

Part of what is is to be socially connected is to have a circle or friends or contacts with whom to interact or to share. As I was growing up I managed to eat cupcakes without needing to tell my friends as I ate, or that I liked cupcakes, or show them pictures of the cake I just ate, but these days it seems we’re obliged to ‘share’. My friends (real people) haven’t followed the same career path or shared my interests, so few of them have anything other than a token presence on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest or the rest.

Thankfully, in this medium there is no absolute requirement to continue deep and meaningful relationships with people you call ‘friends’, so I can ensure that my Twitter and Facebook accounts keep a useful level of interesting content by linking up with lots of people and companies with whom I have a passing acquaintance or tenuous business link or vague shared interest. That way the view I get of social media networks like Twitter and Facebook is in line with what other, more socially connected people see, but without the overhead of emotional investment in the relationships I keep. I save that for friends I meet face to face.

I have have kept pace with technological progress, but with some things I’m still quite old fashioned.

Digital Content

It is strange how some truths always hold water! Over the years it has become clear to me that having something interesting to say is the acid test for successful marketing campaigns – whether it be empathising with your audience, challenging them, or simply providing a proposition that is simply too good to resist.

It’s something that sounds easy, but in reality can be quite difficult. In larger organisations the volume of stakeholders can be a barrier to getting the content in the first place and then to getting it approved! In smaller organisations, it should be easier, but you have not necessarily got the immediate audience or brand credibility to make it fly.

Most successful businesses have expertise that should be tapped and presented to customers through marketing – it needs to be packaged in a way that is understandable and digestable though – quite often I see content that has been delivered straight into a campaign with little shaping and as a result it looks out of place and the audience has little chance of understanding it.

Also, it can look like it has been designed by committee – once it has been through all the approvals it gets watered down to the point of blandness.  The solution here is to have as few stages as possible with one person who has a veto and will challenge stakeholders successfully.

It can be the most rewarding part of the marketing process however. Having something to say that is valued by your audience is a satisfying position to be in – it provides a personal boost as well as delivering an audience. For traditional marketing it can uplift response or awareness by a couple of percentage points, but for digital campaigns it can mean that your audience grows exponentially – purely because it is easy for your audience to find and share it.

In a way it ensures survival of the best ideas or content, which is great. What I propose is that marketers use digital and particularly social media channels to quickly research test marketing content and propositions – it has an immediacy that delivers results more quickly.  Test your content online and if it works well expand it and translate it for offline.  Remember though that it will need reworking for different formats.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user opensourceway

With all this background and experience you would think that developing a product, be it a application or a website or an App. then I’d be pretty comfortable in this space which in truth I am but unlike the early days the speed of development means that getting to market is faster but also that failure also is faster.

I cannot get over just how fast developers can produce code, it seems that when I developed some of my first website systems (theAA.com or IF.com) then the process was slow and cumbersome, the user requirements seemed to take almost a third of the project time but never stopped, the development took another third and testing the remaining time but significantly the overall effort was a lot bigger and the capability a lot smaller but the secrecy around the projects were vital as it was always felt that you must keep it secret until the launch so that you had a competitive advantage of being the first to market.

Today everything has changed, secrecy has been replaced and users are being engaged earlier, the development and testing has been rolled into one and the overall effort has been reduced from the thousands of hours to hundreds maybe a tenth of what we did all those years ago.

By engaging earlier, even prior to development, using social networks we can get feedback almost immediately and with the use of crowd sourcing then product refinement is substantially improved.

A matter of days later I’m upgrading an app and fall foul of an unknown method #returning used in an old plugin.

The obvious first port of call is Google or Stack Overflow to see what everyone else has done with this – surely I’m not the first? Lots of entries confirm that the returning method was deprecated and then removed, but none show the modern replacement.

Examining the examples of usage of returning I’m reminded of something… The whole point of the method is to do some work on an object in a block and then to make sure that the block is returned rather than the result of the last assignment within the block… isn’t that what #tap does?

Yields x to the block, and then returns x. The primary purpose of this method is to “tap into” a method chain, in order to perform operations on intermediate results within the chain.

Sure enough, on revisiting both set of docs and a couple of on-line guides I’m certain that tap is a direct replacement for returning – it just looks more Ruby-like.

It’s common in lots of languages to need to declare an object, do some work on or relating to it and then to continue with that object in focus.

One popular pattern within Ruby is

def example_method
  example_var = MyModel.new(*args)
  example_var.model_method
  example_var.save!
  return example_var
end

Without the final return example_var the result of the .save! method would be returned: true or false.

To avoid the need to explicitly return the object we had the returning method.

returning some_object do |the_object|
  act_on the_object
  do_something_else
end # returns the_object as some_object

Now we have tap to do the same thing but looking a little more Ruby-like.

some_object.tap |the_object|
  act_on the_object
  do_something_else
end # returns the_object as some_object

I wonder why there’s nothing to say tap is a direct replacement for the deprecated returning?

I need to apologise for the picture. I couldn’t think what image would be representative of the content of this blog entry, and my initial vague search brought up Dorothy’s Ruby slippers, with which she could tap her heels as a way of returning to Kansas.

Browsing around the blogosphere today I found an article which is essentially opinion, but which is a community effort by untold numbers of total strangers.

The opinions shared were a set of style guidelines relating to how Ruby code should be laid out, detailing spacing, when and whether to use optional parentheses, suggested indentation for particular programming constructs, patterns to be avoided and patterns to be encouraged, and more. They’re only guidelines. Ruby is flexible enough to work even if I mash statements into very long unreadable lines, or if I write a single method with a massive case-when-when-…-else-end construct. I could write it that way, and it would work. It would be ugly, but that would be a matter of my choice.

The difference is that by taking on the suggested style guidelines, my code will be in a similar form to that written by other coders, and therefore that much easier for others to read and work with.

Far from being the fruitless sharing of pointless drivel, this is invaluable sharing of knowledge that helps others.

Bravo Bozhidar Batsov for putting the content on github for all.

Making sense of the noise

Recently we were providing a training course on social media when one of our clients asked ‘How do you make sense of all the noise?’. A simple enough question and one often repeated, with the millions of people talking all at the same time its easy to get distracted by the latest trending keywords or about people stuck on buses or in traffic but to really use social networks for business the best way is to filter the noise and identify the opportunities.

Listening to customers or competitors conversations can provide opportunities in themselves whether they are a competitor who is changing their pricing structure or introducing new products, by following them and listening you  can gain valuable information.

If you are in business then the first principle is to listen to your customers because if you don’t they will soon let you know by taking their business elsewhere. A recent example I had as a customer was when I had a bad experience with Toyota when trying to arrange a service, the service centre was slow and very unhelpful – I walked out. I then called their customer help line – the result was there was nobody there to listen as you have to ring at certain time of day – the result is they haven’t listened also I am unlikely to recommend them to my friends in fact I’ll go so far as to say I’m so annoyed that they’ve made it in my blog and I tweeted to my 5000 followers how unhappy I am with that particular garage. Had they of course been listening and responded to my requests then I could have been a happy customer – they have probably lost me now forever.

So making sense of the noise is about listening to your customers and responding when they have requests the best of them of course will benefit from opportunities they get by listening the rest will just loose there way and carry on unaware, that’s why we built www.socialchurn.com to help you monitor and make sense of the nnoise.

Escher used paper and wood, where today we use print and screen, but all are 2 dimensional media, in which we use perspective, focus and light and shade to create something the viewers’ minds will understand as 3 dimensional. Escher takes advantage of the minds’ ability for and disposition towards making sense of what we see in terms of what we know is possible. Sometimes our mind creates a model which we know to be impossible, and yet because it fits our perception we accept it and set aside our disbelief.

Sometimes it seems we are asked to turn someone’s impossible notion into reality in the form of a website or software application that goes against what we know to be possible. The idea of ‘frictionless’ workflow is great, and I’m sure we’d all love to be able to call up our personal, financial, medical or business data without the interruption of ever having to stop to provide username and password, or fingerprint, or retina scan, but at the same time we want to be confident that nobody else would be able to access that private data unchallenged, and so we deliberately build ‘friction’ into our systems to ensure that those unwelcome visitors are suitably challenged and kept on the proper side of a secure perimeter.

The client will always want something that’s not available – that’s a good thing. If it were readily available then our skill and expertise in creating such a thing would be valueless.

We have something which is almost frictionless in many of our systems, whereby we can make use of an authentication already completed, like having logged in to Google, Twitter, Linked-In, Facebook, etc., for assurance that a user is the person authorised to access data or facilities, and yet there arises a further dimension to our frictionless world: trust.

We can make our application follow as many rules and stipulations as necessary in order to ensure that the user is a) who he says he is, and b) is permitted to do or see what he’s asking for, but if the client does not have confidence that his security is robust then we have failed. The challenge is to make a system sufficiently smooth that it feels ‘frictionless’ but at the same time has sufficient friction that it feels secure.

This is an ongoing challenge, and one that will live for a long time because the 2 essential requirements are diametrically opposed – like opposite faces of the same coin. Convenience versus security has 1 dimension. Plans and drawings have 2 dimensions. Buildings and products have 3 dimensions. Mathematicians have a hypercube to model 4 dimensions, so theoretically we could work in as many dimensions as we need. The difficulty is rendering the n-dimensional model down to the number of dimensions we have available to us.

Escher did well at rendering his multi-dimensional ideas down to 2 dimensions on paper and wood. I’m pleased to have found an example of Escher’s work rendered in 3 dimensions using Lego™. It gives me confidence that, whatever a client may ask for in the future, we have the capability to create or at least represent it in the real world.

p.s. I particularly like the attention to detail in the Lego model including someone hanging out washing.

People come to social media from different angles. Some will feel worried about making a mistake or being inundated with requests and information, whereas others will have already built up a strong audience or network, but are coming with the question “how can I use it to benefit my business?”.

All valid stuff, but even with the array of tools out there to make it easier, including our own wonderful socialchurn.com, it is surprising what you can see.

We are using the product ourselves for to promote socialchurn itself, but also to test how powerful it could be covering a popular topic.  And what could be more popular than football, particularly with recent events and the use of social networks in publicising them!

So we set up soccersocial.net with feeds for both fans and players. Using Social Churn we are publishing interesting content from social networks into the website. The oxygen is the player tweets, which in turn gets the fans commenting. For example we have seen that there is quite an interesting Come Dine With Me competition going on an Manchester City and some interesting medical insights at Spurs!  It’s just like being in the dressing room.

The really interesting bit is that we also notify all fans that get published, which they seem to like quite alot! The point here is that by focusing on a specific topic, pulling out and publishing the relevant bits in a real time stream, you can get an insight into what’s really happening, but also sight of player personalities – who is shy, who is confident and who is daft!

We had not anticipated this outcome, but it is not surprising when you think about it. When you see a conversation mapped out in front of you, it is possible to see more than the conversations themselves. We’ll keep you updated to see what other developments take place but I’m sure a new career in social media psychology is on the horizon!