August 31st, 2010 by Duane Jackson
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!
![[Post to Twitter]](http://blog.kashflow.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-twitter-micro3.png){kind=icon}
![[Post to Delicious]](http://blog.kashflow.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-delicious-micro3.png){kind=icon}
![[Post to Digg]](http://blog.kashflow.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-digg-micro3.png){kind=icon}
![[Post to StumbleUpon]](http://blog.kashflow.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-su-micro3.png){kind=icon}
Tags: employment, facebook, social media, Twitter
Posted in Ramblings, Technology | 3 Comments »
December 17th, 2009 by Duane Jackson
I read with interest a post on Emily Hill’s blog about Dell claiming to have made £6.5m from their Twitter activity. Well done. Dell! Twitter is very useful as a sales channel/tool, I’ve previously written about how it’s been really useful to me in growing KashFlow.
Whilst Dell seem to be doing very well from Twitter on the sales front, they’re doing considerably worse with using it for customer service or brand monitoring. It’s in the brand monitoring stakes that Twitter comes into its own. Where else can you be instantly informed about a dissatisfied customer having a moan about you?
A number of big companies have sussed this out already and are very good at looking out for unhappy customers or would-be customers and nipping the problem in the bud. Some companies even have a dedicated Twitter or social media team that are highly responsive. Whether this two-tiered approach to customer service is healthy or not it a debate for another day.
If you tweet something negative about Virgin Media, Rackspace or (dare I say it) Sage, their Twitter team will pick it up pretty much instantly and do their best to help you out.
Vodafone are a little slower (see “It’s over, Vodafone. I’m leaving you“) but still making an effort.
Dell just don’t seem to care at all.
I had a whinge on Twitter (as you do) about problems trying to place an order with them and then with actually getting an order date that didn’t move every week. Even directing messages directly to Dell didn’t illicit a response.
I’m not alone. @NetHosted has been having, and tweeting about, a whole myriad of issues in dealing with Dell and just gets ignored by them.
By sourcing sales leads from Twitter, they’re only going to make the problem worse. These new customers, by the very nature of where Dell got them in the first place, use Twitter. So if they’re not happy, you can be sure they’ll be tweeting about it.
Watch out for the Dell backlash, it’s coming.
Tags: dell, Twitter
Posted in Ramblings, Technology | 1 Comment »
November 25th, 2009 by Duane Jackson
On Monday I posted a blog entry with the title SEO is no substitute for a marketing plan.
It attracted quite a few interesting comments, but I felt one of the comments deserved to be highlighted.
The below was posted by Ian Hendry from WeCanDo.BIZ.
It’s interesting to note that if you ask someone in the generation below me to ring a doorbell, they use their thumb to do it. This seems weird to me as I use my index finger. But then I haven’t been brought up using my thumbs primarily for texting; if I had then my thumb might also have become to the dominant digit.
It goes to show how new technologies can change habits in a generation. And a new generation could see Google confined to the rubbish heap.
People are now increasingly asking the crowd for answers through Facebook and Twitter rather than combing through hundreds and thousands of pages of historical content on Google.
Stats are already showing how much more time new web users are spending on social networks compared to where we’ve spent our focus.
It makes sense as availability of social networks becomes, through mobiles, ubiquitous that they also ask questions and for recommendations that way too. Why go and sift through a library of answers other people got when I can just ask my followers?
People are asking real people for help rather than depending on a bot and a database, mainly because with real people come real answers.
It’s already happening. Just take a look at the opportunities for business that we’re unearthing through our Twitter Sales Leads tool. Most of the posters of those business needs probably never thought to go to Google.
There’s a chance that depending on Google will become as shortsighted as depending on Yellow Pages seems to our generation of business folk now.
Certainly thought provoking. I intend to test the “doorbell theory” on the next few teenagers I speak to. (Game of Knock-down Ginger anyone?)
So are we currently undergoing a big change in the way we search for information? A change that will be cemented in a few years when todays teenagers join the business world?
Googles Eric Schmidt certainly seems think so. In an article on Real Business he’s quoted as saying:
It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources
Assuming it’s a given that the way we (and therefore, our customers) search for information is changing forever, there are a few questions demanding answers.
1) Will Google change quickly enough to embrace this change and retain it’s dominant position? History says not.
2) If not, what new companies are going to rise to the top of the getting-eyes-to-your-site pile? Odds are there’s a sleeping giant in our midst already.
3) How do we, as business owners with products and services to promote, capitalise on this change? Answering this might help answer #2
Tags: facebook, future, Google, search, Twitter, wecandobiz
Posted in Small Business, Technology | 2 Comments »
October 23rd, 2009 by Duane Jackson
I’ve not had a good ol’ rant for a while. So forgive me while I indulge myself.
Something that’s always annoyed me is automated Direct Messages on Twitter. So when you follow someone you get a tweet “sincerely” thanking you for following them.
There’s no sincerity in automated messages!
But what’s got my back up today is James Caans twitter feed.
I’ve been fortunate enough to meet James Caan on a few occasions. Once at a small breakfast meeting when the Prince’s Trust Enterprise Fellowship was first formed and more recently at a BizSpark event.
If you’ve ever heard James Caan talk about his entrepreneurial journey then you can’t help but be impressed by what he’s achieved, how he achieved it and how engaging a speaker he is. He also has an amazing ability to immediately know what questions to ask to get straight to the heart of any business matter.
All that makes it more dissapointing that his Twitter feed now has a collection of quotes that are automatically churned our once every two hours.
Examples as follows:
“You are what you are because that’s what you want to be. You, and only you, have the power to make a change.”
“I am a champion standing over the shadow of my former self.”
“Stand up and say loudly to yourself, ‘I WILL BE A WINNER’. Believe me, you will be one; conviction and attitude matters.”
If you want “inspirational” or “motivational” quotes there are already enough people on Twitter spouting those. I think (and I could be wrong) that most people following James would hope to see more substance and engagement in his Tweets and are more interested in what he’s up to than stuff like this. See Peter Jones on Twitter for an example of what i mean. I’m sure James has much more value to add to the Twitterverse than this stuff.
The only place I can see for automated tweets is for company (as opposed to personal) feeds. So whilst the KashFlow Twitter account sends out our latest press release and software changes, my personal feed is not and never will be automated.
I feel so much better now that’s off my chest!
Tags: Dragons, Twitter
Posted in Ramblings, Technology | 8 Comments »
September 7th, 2009 by Duane Jackson
With all the hype surrounding Twitter at the moment, it’s easy for people to overlook some of the other very useful sites out there. Especially if you’re new to business and/or social networking
One I’m determined to start making more use of is LinkedIn. They have this to say about themselves:
LinkedIn has over 46 million members in over 200 countries and territories around the world. A new member joins LinkedIn approximately every second, and about half of our members are outside the U.S. LinkedIn exists to help you make better use of your professional network and help the people you trust in return. Our mission is to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful
They have a video on their “about us” page that is a little bit waffly for my liking, but it gives a good idea of what it’s all about.
The key thing for me about LinkedIn is finding out the best way to contact someone I don’t know.
Let’s say I want to speak to someone at BigCo about a potential business deal. I can search LinkedIn for people from BigCo and see if I know someone that knows someone there – and if I do then I can request an introduction. It takes things to the third degree too – so whilst no one I know happens to know anyone at BigCo – they may know someone that does and I can get introduced through that path. Nice.
It does suffer a fatal flaw like Twitter, Facebook, etc in that it shows how many ‘connections’ (replace with ‘friends’, ‘followers’, etc) you have. So some people add connections to as many people as possible, even if they’ve hardly ever dealt with the person, just to inflate their egos and look important. Not much use when it comes to an introduction.
I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who has taken out one of the “premium” paid-for subscriptions from LinkedIn and found it worhtwhile. Their site isn’t doing a great job of selling me onthe benefits of it.
If you’re a web developer looking for a start-up idea, you could take the LinkedIn concept and extend it to include degrees of trust. I started a discussion about this 3 years ago on UKBF. Someone even kindly started working on the maths. I still think it’s a goer.
UKBF is a very good site to get involved with if you’re interested in networking with others in business.
4Networking seems to really be going places, especially with the off-line meetups they organise. I retract my comments from when they first started, calling them “4Not-working” : )
WeCanDoBiz seems to be more slanted towards referals and leads than networking, but still worth checking out.
Ecademy is an odd one. I never got anywhere with it personally and I found it to be full of life coaches, emotional millionaires and people who wear cardigans (nothing against life coaches or cardigan wearers in moderation!) But I know some people who swear by it.
Any other business networking sites that you can recommend?
Tags: ecademy, linkedin, networking, Twitter, UKBF, wecandobiz
Posted in Small Business, Technology | 8 Comments »
August 25th, 2009 by Duane Jackson
Over the years I’ve ended up on so many mailing lists and newsletters, most of which just get deleted as soon as they hit my inbox. At some point I really should go through the unsubscribe options.
There’s one list I’m on that always gets read (or at least skimmed) as soon as the email lands in my inbox. It’s the UKHotViews email from TechMarketView. If you’re interested in the technology sector I recommend putting your email address into the box provided on their homepage.
Recently they’ve carried a couple of articles in relation to the level of pointless babble on Twitter.
Yesterday TechMarketView published an email from Alex van Someren that I think makes some very valid points:
You are still missing the point about Twitter. Of course there is a lot of fatuous stuff of no interest to anybody except the originating narcissist. However, it works very well for several novel things:
- crowdsourcing answers to questions, e.g. “My iPhone just did this: has that happened to anyone else?”
- the dissemination of items of interest on the Internet, e.g. news bulletins, product status updates, press release headlines
- most of all: for forwarding URL links to new Web content
Twitter is an opt-in “narrowcasting” medium. Like any medium it can be abused, but don’t shoot the messenger and make the mistake of believing that every message is therefore worthless – you might miss something important.
Alex.
I agree. Twitter is full of noise, but it’s so easy to tune it out (or you just never tune it in, ie: don’t follow Stephen Fry). It’s totally up to you how you use Twitter.
It’s like the multi-channel TV screen Marty McFly watches in Back To the Future but with tonnes more channels. If you want hundreds of people talking about gardening tips or organic food – they’re there for the taking. If you want lots of techies talking about coding, it’s there for you too. And so on.
A question that’s been going around for a while is: How is Twitter going to make money?
I think it’s easy enough. At the moment the only way you can customise your Twitter page is to upload a background image and adjust a few of the colours. Even though a lot of people now access Twitter via applications like Tweetdeck, the main site is still used to check out a timeline prior to deciding whether to follow the user or not.
Would you pay $10 a month to be able to customise your Twitter page further, complete with links and so on? I know I certainly would.
Tags: Alex van Someren, Back To The Future, techmarketview, Twitter, ukhotviews
Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »
August 6th, 2009 by Duane Jackson
TechCrunch have just published an article with 15 things to do whilst Twitter is down.
I’ve gone with #8 – Write your own blog post about Twitter being down.
As much as Twitter has become a part of my daily routine, so has the TechCrunch Europe site. It’s where I inevitably up whilst quickly munching a sandwich for lunch.
My only problem now is that I have nowhere to pimp this blog post as Twitter is down. I’m amazed how quickly it’s become a key part of my day.
I guess I’ll just have to go do some face-to-face interaction at the newsagents and buy everyone in the office an ice-cream.
Update: Apparently Twitter is suffering a DoS attack, according to their status page.
Tags: techcrunch, Twitter
Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
July 15th, 2009 by Duane Jackson
It’d be fair to say we court controversy here at KashFlow when it comes to marketing and this blog. Setting fire to boxed software, implying the over 60’s are over the hill, saying designers are all crap at business, a public dumping letter to Vodafone, Being evangelical and preachy about business cards - the list goes on.
But it works for us. The marketing challenge for any small business is standing out from the crowd. Our approach has got us huge amounts of coverage in the trade, national and international press and has had a positive impact on our bottom line.
We sell accounting software – that’s “accounting” and “software” combined. Not exactly the source material for a sexy action-packed hollywood blockbuster starring Liv Tyler and Daniel Craig. So a little but of fun and humour brightens things up for all concerned and stops us all boring ourselves silly.
But sometimes controversy lurks where you least expect it.
We recently improved our Settings page to make it easier to use and introduced icons for all the different sub pages. The icon we used for “VAT Settings” is the icon used at the top of this blog post – that of a masked robber.
I posted a link to this on Twitter yesterday, just for something to say, and within minutes it was retweeted (to the uninitiated, that means other people on Twitter reposted the message to everyone that reads their posts) and was seen by tens of thousands of people. Over 5,000 other people saw it just because the Guardian computer Editor, Jack Schofield, retweeted it.
I thought that was the end of it, but then in came the cop mentioned in the title with a blog post about it. He’s essentially saying it’s a PR faux pas because VAT isn’t robbery. I’ll copy and paste my response:
I totally agree. It’s an inappropriate image for VAT for the reason you state above. The worst that can be said about VAT is that we’re unpaid tax collectors for HMRC.
I guess the reason for the image is tapping into the general feeling that people are being “robbed by the tax man” – not VAT specifically.
Regardless of how apt the image is, it got retweeted to a few tens of thousands of people on Twitter within minutes and got us free advert on AccManPro. So I can’t see it being a Bad Thing.
I only wish I’d linked to a blog post with it rather than just to the image so we could have converted more of that traffic into sales.
Inappropriate image? Yes
Harmful to anyone? No
Controversial? Perhaps
Useful free marketing? Yes!
Tags: Accmanpro, Marketing, Twitter
Posted in Ramblings | 6 Comments »
June 29th, 2009 by Duane Jackson
Recently I was talking to Andrew Bredon about his cool new project JobWhizz (take it for a spin whilst it’s still free) and business owners / entrepreneurs in general. He said something that immediately struck a cord. I’m paraphrasing here, but it was something along the lines of “You know you’re a business owner when your answer to everything is to start a business”
Your wife left you? Start a business!
Lost your leg in a freak accident involving a Robin Reliant and an Ice Cream Van? Start a business!
Being taken for granted at work? Start a business!
I’m certainly guilty of being evangelical about starting businesses. It really is the answer to everything!
For a bit of fun I asked on Twitter for people to complete the sentence “You know your a business owner when…” Perhaps you can relate to some of the responses. Click the “retweet” link to tweet your favourites back to Twitter:
@DuaneJackson #YKYABOW It dawns on you you DON’T work for yourself, you work for X no. clients who all want to be pleased all of the time. By Neil Goodger on 24-6-2009 09:22:45 in reply to Duane Jackson
Reply or Retweet
@DuaneJackson #YKYABOW Your evening entertainment consists of ticking off jobs achieved & finding it very exciting. By AnnaHill on 24-6-2009 09:30:18 in reply to Duane Jackson
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@DuaneJackson #YKYABOW when u cant work out a hashtag abbreviation coz you were up till 3am the night before testing some new functionality By Andrew Bredon on 24-6-2009 12:30:29 in reply to Duane Jackson
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#YKYABOW u jump out of bed every day thinking “What we gonna do today Brain? What we do every day Pinky, plan to take over the world” By Andrew Bredon on 24-6-2009 12:34:00
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#YKYABOW you know you’re a business owner when you can have your music on as loud as you like and no one can tell you off for it :o) By Liam Twose on 25-6-2009 08:44:03
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@DuaneJackson #YKYABOW you spend more time with your clients than you do with your family. Quite a LOT more time. By Hazel Edmunds on 24-6-2009 13:52:50 in reply to Duane Jackson
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@DuaneJackson #YKYABOW… would-be suppliers are beating down your door when what you really want is more customers. By Emily Coltman on 29-6-2009 10:25:31
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@DuaneJackson #YKYABOK When you realise you can never again say “I can’t be bothered with this working malarky today” By PoLR on 24-6-2009 12:46:58
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@DuaneJackson #YKYABOK its a rare sunny day in Ireland and you don’t pull a sickie By aileen456 on 24-6-2009 12:34:11 in reply to Duane Jackson
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@DuaneJackson when you respond to journo’s / family who say “I’d hire him” about apprentice ppl with “in which of your businesses?”#YKYABOK By Farhan Lalji on 24-6-2009 12:17:40 in reply to Duane Jackson
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@DuaneJackson when your friends in ‘normal’ jobs think it’s quite simple to take time off whenever you want as ‘you’re the boss’! By Khalid on 24-6-2009 09:06:08 in reply to Duane Jackson
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@DuaneJackson … When you get your end of year accounts and cry at how much the government have screwed you out of.. By Dave H on 24-6-2009 08:55:32 in reply to Duane Jackson
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@DuaneJackson You work over 120 hours per week and still never get to the end of your to-do list. By Amanda Farren on 24-6-2009 08:51:52 in reply to Duane Jackson
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@DuaneJackson when the business decision is easier to make than the human decision. Before that, you’re just wearing grownups shoes. By Matt Johnston on 29-6-2009 10:27:53 in reply to Duane Jackson
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@DuaneJackson #YKYABOW you can’t moan about your boss anymore, because you are your boss. Doh. By soyelmango on 24-6-2009 08:54:16 in reply to Duane Jackson
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@DuaneJackson #YKYABOW You turn around to find someone else to take the heat and there is no-one there By Neil Goodger on 24-6-2009 09:04:26 in reply to Duane Jackson
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@DuaneJackson #YKYABOW All your “friends” think you’re loaded and expect you to pay for well, everything :) By simonswords on 24-6-2009 09:08:18
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You know you’re a business owner when you realise you could never again work for anyone else. #YKYABOW By Sarah Pettegree on 24-6-2009 09:11:39
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@DuaneJackson #YKYABOW problems seem to amazingly synchronise with your holiday By Neil Goodger on 24-6-2009 09:11:44 in reply to Duane Jackson
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@DuaneJackson #YKYABOW X% of your holiday is spent on the phone [replace X] By Neil Goodger on 24-6-2009 09:13:03 in reply to Duane Jackson
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Tags: startups, Twitter
Posted in Small Business | No Comments »
June 22nd, 2009 by Duane Jackson
If you’re looking for a new supplier, whether it’s an accountant, a designer or anything else then by far the best route is to ask others you know in business who they’d recommend.
This works fine if you’re asking the person privately. But where it falls down is if you ask them on a public forum, Twitter or any other public network.
I’ve been a member (and moderator) of UK Business Forums for 4 years now and I see the same thing happening again and again. In this example I’ve changed names to protect the guilty parties.
Steve posts asking for someone to recommend a lawyer. Bill is a lawyer who has has been a member of the forum for ages. So lots of other people that know Bill from the forums chip in with their comments about how great he is and that they highly recommend him.
The problem is, these people don’t actually know if Bill is a great lawyer – they’ve never used his services. They just know that Bill seems like a nice guy and he’s been around for a while. They’re also hoping that if they recommend Bill then he’ll recommend them to others to return the favour.
As nice a bloke as Bill is, he’s a useless lawyer. He overcharges and under-delivers and turns out shoddy work. A few people on the forum know this already as they’ve been burnt by Bill in the past. But they don’t post to the thread to say as much – that would be bad netiquette. The same reason why after Steve gets burnt, he doesn’t say anything when he sees Bill being recommended to others in the future.
So if you’re taking recommendations via a forum or social networking site – ask the people doing the recommending if they’ve actualy *used* the services of the person being recommended. Better still, phone some of them up and have a private chat.
This is the same reason I’m not keen on organisations like BNI. If you’re in a BNI chapter you have to bring in referrals for your fellow members. It doesn’t matter that you may not have used their services or know if they’re any good. You still have to bring in referrals each week.
When I recommend someones service it’s because I know they can do a good job. Not because they’re a nice guy or belong to a networking group I go to.
There is a big difference between recommending someone and making referrals to someone. There’s nothing wrong with referring people to a company you can’t vouch for, but make it clear it’s a referral and not a recommendation. It’s your reputation on the line.
Tags: BNI, Twitter, UKBF
Posted in Ramblings, Small Business | 11 Comments »
