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Archive for the ‘Ramblings’ Category

Using Social Media DOESN’T Damage Your Job Prospects

There’s been much talk about the impact of your social media presence  on your job prospects. The thinking seems to be that a prospective employer searches your name on Google and discovers your Twitter feed or Facebook profile and is alarmed and disgusted by what you get up to at the weekends, your political views or your drunken photos.

Sure,  if you’re posting about how great that skunk was that you smoked on Friday night or you’re tweeting homophobic or racist views then it’s going to get you into bother in all sorts of ways as well as ensuring you don’t get that job interview.

But the alternative of total radio silence or private profiles can also be damaging.

We’re currently recruiting for a Digital Marketing Manager (yes, it’s an old post – we’ve had some delays). Imagine I’m looking at two CVs of two individuls that are equally qualified for the role.

One name returns no hits on Google. But the other reveals a Twitter feed. Firstly, just the fact that you’re on Twitter shows you have a real interest in the internet and being involved with technology in your personal life as well as your professional life. Your tweets give me an insight into your interests and your personality. You’re now a real person as opposed to two sheets of paper and the prolific phrase “I work equally well unsupervised or as a part of a team”.

If I have only one interview slot left, guess who’s getting it?

So please, don’t be afraid to tweet/poke/post!

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Posted in Ramblings, Technology | 3 Comments »

Sci-Fi novels saving the world – ELPs

There’s no shortage of technological innovations that existed in the pages of a Science Fiction novel long before they existed in real life.

Augmented reality is straight from the books of William Gibson
Submarines from Jules Verne
Satellites from Arthur C. Clarke
- the list could go on and on.

Anyone that’s read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy would expect their iPhone/iPad to have the words “Don’t Panic” stamped on them.

I’ve just started reading Containment by Christian Cantrell (eBook for $1.16 here, or free here) and came across the concept of ELP’s or End of Life Plans:

[the] concept of “End of Life Plans,” or ELPs, was adopted by most of the industrialized world. ELPs were simply instructions included with absolutely everything bought or sold that explained what should be done with the item and its packaging in order to discard it. There were, of course, strict guidelines as to what constituted a valid ELP, and strict oversight of those guidelines. Legitimate ELPs included things like returning the item to the manufacturer where it could be refurbished, dropping the item off at a local ELP station which specialized in recycling its components, or, if the material were benign enough, the right colored bin to toss it into.

Consumer adherence to ELPs was also strictly enforced. Anyone caught violating an item’s ELP faced fines or community service, and sometimes even very imaginative forms of public punishment involving bright green jumpsuits or yard signs with short shameful slogans. No item could be bought, sold, or imported without a valid and approved ELP which meant that even countries that weren’t particularly interested in saving the world needed to comply in order to have access to markets that did. Consumers started selecting products based on the attractiveness of their ELPs which meant that as much thought and engineering had to go into the disposing of a product as producing it. Products that weren’t easily recyclable, reusable, returnable, renewable, compostable, convertible, or biodegradable languished on shelves beside their more eco-friendly counterparts. People wanted to feel as good about getting rid of something as they did about acquiring it.

It goes on

It was initially feared that ELPs would ruin the already-fragile world economy. The theory was that raising costs associated with research and development would cause the prices of goods to increase beyond what the market could bear. In reality, however, ELPs ushered in an entirely new era of sustainable economic growth and prosperity.

Even the sharpest and best paid economists underestimated the guilt that the media had gradually installed in consumers for buying goods that were designed to exist in landfills for centuries, but only function for anywhere from a few seconds up to maybe a year. It was true that prices rose, but temporarily; costs were more than offset by the dynamics of guilt-free consumption, and by manufacturers’ ability to refurbish and resell end-of-lifed goods. Entirely new industries sprang up around ELP stations.

Manufacturing costs gradually decreased as more recycled components were used and fewer raw materials had to be purchased and converted. Many manufacturers transitioned into what became known as re-manufacturers. The quality of products even increased so that their components could be reused in future versions. It was common for electronics manufacturers to build very fast processors for their devices, but underclock them so that when they found their way back into their factories through their ELPs, the chips’ constraints could simply be removed, and the entire device resold as the next generation, new and improved. ELPs allowed even the biggest and most powerful of multinational corporations to participate in sustainable and responsible manufacturing practices while still feeling like they were being suitably devious.

To me this seems a great idea to help combat global warming. It doesn’t even require any new technology, just political will.

You thoughts?

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Posted in Ramblings, Technology | 2 Comments »

Drinks in London – Thursday 22nd July

pintMost of the KashFlow team will be heading over to Horniman at Hays pub on Thursday evening at about 6pm-ish, and we’ll be there until at least 8pm.

We’ve got a few customers and partners joining us – so we decided “The more the merrier”. So here’s an open invite to you all.

Don’t expect suits and business cards, a reserved room, a tab running, a spread of nibbles, etc. This is very informal and unplanned.

We’ll most likely be on the tables outside smoking vast quantities of Marlboro Lights.

If you have problems finding us then contact me on Twitter, I’ll be keeping an eye on it.

I hope to see you there.

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People Management – Don’t Do as You Would be Done by

Here’s a thought provoking question I got asked the other day:

Would you like to manage people in the same way you’d like to be managed?

The knee-jerk answer is a simple yes.

But here’s the thought provoking follow up to a ‘Yes’:

So do you think that everyone else is the same as you in terms of their motivations and how they respond to different management styles?

The obvious answer is no, which shows immediately that you shouldn’t manage everyone in the same way you would like to be managed.

Bottom line: everyone is different and needs to be managed differently to others.

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Posted in Ramblings, Small Business | 5 Comments »

External Funding vs Organic Growth

moneymanThere’s been a lot of talk in the blogosphere this month on  the topic of organic growth or bootstrapping vs taking external money (ie, VCs, Angels, public listings, etc).

I think this is mainly fueled by Tony Hsieh talking on inc.com on “Why I sold Zappos”  and Sridhar Vembu’s post on why Zoho haven’t taken VC money.

A couple of the articles have referenced my company, KashFlow, directly.

- At KashFlow, we’re bootstrapped – spending only what we make.

- Our main competitor is a publicly-listed company that has raised a LOT of money from the markets and is spending it very quickly (to great effect I might add).

- Another established competitor is trying to raise €5m to fund growth

- A small startup recently announced a “financing deal” from “strategic investors”. No names or amounts.

I had quite a lengthy conversation with Ben Kepes at CloudAve which resulted in this post – I won’t repeat everything I’ve said there but I do encourage you to go read it if you’re interested in why we didn’t look for big money early on and haven’t since.

I would however add a P.S. to my comments to Ben:

I’m not against the idea of VC money entirely. It has it’s uses. But not for us, not right now.

A time may well come when it’s the sensible thing to do for a number of reasons or an attractive deal may present itself. That might be next month, next quarter or next year. But right now, we don’t need external money to execute our strategy so I’m not getting distracted by looking for it.

The only reason for taking money right now would be to get Mike Butcher at TechCrunch to give us some exposure and a massive spike of traffic.

Update: Mike picked me up on my closing comment above. He also flagged up an interesting post he made a couple of years back about how to get coverage on TechCrunch and other media outlets. Well worth reading in full.

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What to do about the football in office hours?

footballApparently there’s some important football games going on some time soon. I don’t know my John Barnes from my Ronaldo, but a lot of the guys in the office want to watch one of the games on the 23rd that’s on in work hours.

If I say no, they’re only going to be constantly refreshing the sports websites for the score. Or worse still I’ll be getting multiple streams coming into the office hogging all the bandwidth.

What to do? I’m sure I’m not the only one in this situation, so I thought I’d share what we’re doing.

The majority of the guys that want to watch it are in the sales team.

So we’ve said that if by the 23rd they’re on target for the month then they can have the afternoon off and go to a local pub to watch the game.

If they’re 15% over target then they can go to the pub and have a drinks tab running on me.

If they’re  25%+ over target then they get lunch bought for them too.

So I now have a happy and motivated sales team, plus I wont have to put up with the jubilant cries if that bloke off the crisps advert hits a hole-in-one.

Seems like a win-win situation all round

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Posted in Ramblings, Small Business | 5 Comments »

Marketing Mistakes 101

I’ve blogged before about dodgy leaflets, but here’s another one.

This is a leaflet that was being given out on Tooley Street in London yesterday. Spot the obvious mistakes?
(click to enlarge)

leaflet1_th

leaflet2_th

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Email is Broken

Email is BrokenI’m sure this has been blogged about many times before –  in fact it was Richard Messiks blog post that inspired this one – but email really is broken.

You may have noticed that I’ve not blogged for a little while. This is because I’ve been in Cuba for a family holiday for 2 weeks. Internet access at the hotel cost around £10/hour and performed like a 28k modem. To make things worse, the computers only had IE6 on them which isn’t ideal for webmail clients. So my access to email was virtually non-existent.

I got back at about 10 am yesterday morning and spent until 5.30 in the evening sorting out my inbox. Not replying to emails – reviewing and deleting the mainly unnecessary emails that have accumulated over the past 2 weeks including:

  • Automatically generated system messages (which are useful to me  usually- but of no interest two weeks later)
  • Reported forum posts from UKBF (other moderators would have dealt with in my absence)
  • Emails to internal distribution lists (I don’t now need to know the lock on the gents toilet was broken but now fixed)
  • Emails I’ve been CC’d on, then all the replies – which I need to read through all of only to find out I don’t need to do or be aware of anything

There really should be more I can do to tell my mail client I’m “out of office” than just set an auto-responder. Perhaps a way for me to easily (ie, not by setting loads of convoluted rules) take myself temporarily of distribution lists. Or a way for me to know that I don’t need to read the whole chain of emails I was CCd on.

If the guys at Xobni are looking for ideas on how to make their Outlook plug in more useful then this might be a good challenge for them.

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Putting the Billions and Trillions into perspective

There’s been so much media talk over the last couple of years about millions and billions of dollars. They all become just words and it’s hard to visualise how 100 billion looks next to 1 million.

Well, despair no more.

This great “info graphic” puts everything into perspective for you.

Click the image to get a bigger version. Excuse the political commentary, it’s not mine!

infographic_small

Image courtesy of Question Everything / Ked Benson

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The 10 Rules of Software Support

10 CommandementsI’ve commented before that support is the one side of the business I have trouble letting go of and letting others take full responsibility for. It’s just so important that we get it right as it’s essential to encouraging those taking our free trial to become paying customers and to keep existing customers happy (and therefore continue to recommend us).

Whilst we have a procedure document detailing how support requests should be dealt with, I thought it might also be useful to distill this into to 10 golden rules. I’m publishing them here so that customers and trialists know what they have the right to expect from the support team.

Perhaps if you’re starting a business where there’s an element of support then you could take and adapt these for your own uses too.

1) Be Responsive – Keep the Customer Informed

We’re well known for being very quick to answer support emails, whatever the time of day or day of the week. We need to keep it that way. If when you first look at a support request you can’t answer it right away -perhaps because you need to do some investigation or you need to speak to someone – let the customer know. It’s not ideal that you can’t give them a solution straight away, but at least they know they’re not being ignored.

2) Be Honest

Don’t try to fob off a customer. If they’ve found a bug or we’ve cocked up, acknowledge it and deal with it. Trying to pull the wool over their eyes wont work and breaks Rule #3.

3) Show Respect

Yes, we sometimes get asked what seem like a silly question. But if we’re not making the process intuitive enough or the solution easy enough to find, that’s our fault – not the customers. So don’t patronise customers.

Occasionally we might get someone be rude or hostile on a support ticket. Help them and they’ll calm down – and usually apologise.

4) Don’t Doubt What the Customer Tells You

I know that what the customer is saying has happened is technically impossible, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a problem. No one is going to send us a support ticket and lie for the sake of it. Don’t assume it’s a PEBCAK issue. Work with the customer to get to the root of the issue.

5) Answer ALL Questions

It’s so frustrating when you email a support desk with 3 questions and their reply answers 2 of the questions and totally ignores the 3rd.

Yes, we’re busy. But not taking the time to deal with things properly in the first place is going to make us even busier. Check and double check you’ve answered all questions asked of you before you send the reply.

6) Be Sure about the Question and the Answer

Don’t guess. If you don’t understand what you’re being asked then ask for clarification. An answer to a question they didn’t ask helps no one.

Don’t guess the answer either. If you’re not 100% sure that the information you’re giving is accurate then check with someone or test your solution.

7) Be Clear in your Response

If you’re telling someone they need to activate the laser guided missile function to resolve their problem, tell them HOW to activate it. It’s better to not assume anything and give a comprehensive answer than to be vague.

8) Keep Your Promises

If you tell a user you’ll let them know when a feature is available or that you’ll get back to them tomorrow after checking with someone – make damn sure you do it.

9) Be Human

Your mother didn’t give you the name “Support”, so don’t sign off as “Support”. Use your real name, be friendly and own the problem. People prefer to deal with real people rather than someone that sounds like a computer.

10) ?

I’m leaving 10 open for you, the reader, to suggest. Based on your experience of our support desk and other support systems, what really frustrates you? Use the comment form below to submit Rule #10.

I’ll update this post in a week or so with one of the suggestions

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