scrambledmindsMixed up thoughts on the web world, photography and life.

A piece of shameless self-promotion. I’ve finally managed to take the leap and launch my own business – One Zero One. It’s taken some time and I’ve still got a long way to go but it’s exciting (and challenging) times.

Anyone that know’s me personally knows that I’m always talking about “new ventures”. Read that as I’m always talking about new ideas to do my own thing. One thing that I noticed once you’ve taken that step is that you start identifying potential opportunities left and right. I have a list as long as my arm of potential opportunities for someone to solve a problem.

Now, I’d love to be working on all of these but there’s one problem. I only have about 16 waking hours in the day and they’re already full. I wish I had more more time as there is so much opportunity out there. Particularly as the Internet and Digital world grows and matures there’s going to be more opportunities than ever.

So where am I going with this? Well, I thought I’d start a series of posts that highlight some of the problems that I run across. Where a problem exists, so does and opportunity so I thought it would be a good idea to put the ideas out there. What if I shared some of the ideas i have? What if I could have more hours in the day? I think that last one was solved in Harry Potter with that Time Turner thing.

Stay tuned.

Image courtesy of Adreanna

Have any of your heard of The Flight of the Conchords?  They’re a comedy musical duo from New Zealand with a fantastic album and TV series.  If you haven’t, you should check them out.  Here’s some stuff on youtube.  They’re hilarious!

I’ve found some peculiar inspiration from their song Business Time (linked above).  I’ll let you listen to it, but towards the end of the song is a lyric along the lines of  “… and you know what time it is when I’m down to just my socks?  It’s business time!  That’s why they call them business socks…”.  Genius.

Apart from being genius, and referring to something else entirely, this line holds some truth for me in my career.  After quite a few years in the Enterprise IT space, I’ve been thinking for some time that I needed to do something else.  I wanted a change.  I needed to strip back to my socks and start again.  I came to the conclusion that it was time to merge my love of technology, particularly the web, and my love of helping people.

Great linkage, huh?  But wait!  There’s more!

As a result I’ve decided to start my own thing providing training and advice to businesses about how to bring the power of the web to benefit their business.  I get to talk about the web.  I get to meet cool people.  I get to help said cool people.  Enough?  I think so.

It’s time to give it a go.  I’ll be at least able to say I’ve tried!  So, as the song says – It’s Business Time.

ps. When I launch, which will be very soon, it’ll be called 101 (i.e. one zero one).  The first offering will be training for virtualising your business to work from anywhere, opening the doors of the web through search and getting your goods in an online store.  What do you think?

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“Social media is like teen sex. Everyone wants to do it. No one actually knows how. When finally done, there is surprise its not better.”  Avinash Kaushik – Analytics Evangelist – Google

To say that Social Media is all the rage could be considered the understatement of the century.  Having been around since the beginnings of mass adoption of the Internet, I do look at the current rage with curiosity and more than a little bemusement.  Does anyone remember Internet Relay Chat (IRC)?  If you don’t it was a tool for meeting and holding conversations with people online.  You had a nickname (handle) and you joined conversations (rooms or channels – guess what? They were lablelled #topic like in everyone’s favourite tool at the moment).  Sound familiar?

The Present

Fast forward 15 years and the tools to create, publish and broadcast your thoughts and creations (content and media) are far more powerful.  The technology advances to help get that information to your computer is faster.  You can now consume all this creativity in many more places than just your computer room, such as TV’s, media centres and mobile phones.  The ability to create all this content (media) and share it in an interactive fashion (social) has resulted in the coining of a new term – Social Media.

The Principles

But have the “Social” aspects really changed?  Did it really need to be labelled just because it was an electronics conversation rather than a physical one?  I guess the reality is that the Internet, like Twitter did recently when Oprah and Ashton Kutcher brought it to the masses, went mainstream.  It needed a new label.  And we thought the Information Superhighway was the Internet going mainstream.  Hah!  Well, it’s no longer just a big pipe full of fantastic information, it’s (back to) a place for fun, creativity, innovation and social interaction.

The Loss of Perspective?

I think this is great!  But with all this I still have a weird feeling that there seems to have been a little loss of perspective.  I would suggest that people aren’t learning Social Media.  They already know how to be social, interact with other humans, the principles of trust, relationships and conversations.  Implicitly if not explicitly.  They should continue to apply those principles in the electronic world.  Maybe the lack of a physical presence (tone, body language etc) causes a loss of perspective?

Or maybe, because the Internet’s gone maintstream, there are a whole new swag of Internet users who are trying it for the first time in earnest and trying new things.   Maybe I’m just old!  Bah!  Humbug!

Poor Me!

Well, if you’ve read this far – Thanks!  I’m not sure I’ve sorted my thoughts out on this one yet and I didn’t want to make it sound like a rant.  I’m just a little bemused by the “Social Media” phenomenon but don’t get me wrong.  I think it’s fascinating.  I’ll be keeping my eye out for the hard evidence for it being beneficial for business.

What do you think?  Maybe someone fancies some homework?  Who knows who coined the term Social Media?