I have grown increasingly fascinated by the other discussions that happen in online social spaces.
At first glance the new online landscape is neatly segmented and boxed up:
Easy!
In theory, all we need do is some quick network mapping using free tools, and we can quickly find the online watering holes for the demographic or community we seek. Bada bing.
Yes, there are issues with this simplistic approach but ones we are usually comfortable with (or at least resigned to) in marketing: that there is no such thing as a typical mother, or car lover, or professional.
But at some level this works – unless we want to get into precision marketing then we accept the benefits and risks of stereotypes and broad brush segments.
Reconsidering communities of interest as something else
These are ‘communities of interest’ – places that people gravitate towards due to a shared interest that goes beyond obvious grouping criteria like age, gender, nationality (sometimes) and geographical location. Some people call them tribes.
But personal experience is fundamentally changing my understanding of how communities gather and interact online. I am finding much more nuance to this tribal social world.
In particular, it’s the ‘off topic’ conversations that have got me interested.
When I first joined the Brighton New Media list some time in 2002 I was new to the concept of Off-Topic but quickly learnt that it was for everything that wasn’t on-topic ;-) The conversations not about digital media but about popular culture, politics, sport, relationships, customer service and shopping – the trivia (and substance) of every day LIFE.
Witnessing the fullness
Now, as a newly keen mountain biker, I have been stunned – there is no other word – by the off-topic conversations in the mountain biking forum I hang out in, Singletrack World.
Here are some conversations from the first two pages of the forum this morning – there are 40 posts per summary page, so these are the highlights from 80 different posts.
Er, nope!
Multi-coloured, multi-faceted, all encompassing. And not about bicycling!
What we talk about when we feel in the right company
This is a mountain biking forum. For mountain bikers. Who happen to also be people. To be citizens, to be consumers, to be parents. And of course they are us. We are them. This specific space (which is dear to me and many others that love mountain biking) is just a microcosm – a helpful mirror or glimpse of ourselves online.
I know this ain’t rocket science, but for some reason to me it feels like an important and possibly lost reminder.
They (we) discuss trivia like backing up Macbooks and pointing brickwork, and deeply personal sensitive topics like their relationships, their health, their beliefs. I’ve left out some stuff out of respect for the community – a wonderful community – because it would feel wrong to air the content more broadly without permissions (although this stuff is all public). It is too intimate to haul some of this into the broad light of day. This is people’s lives.
My points is this
So the point I am working towards is that even in this digital life where we live out the various parts of our lives and personalities in different online spaces, and gravitate towards helpfully neat ‘communities of interest’, we are still not single-issue – we are still humans in all of our complexity and nuance.
Crunching the numbers
I did some quick back-of-fag-packet analysis to try and understand the balance of on-topic to off-topic conversations in Singletrack.
Here’s what I came up with:
The stand out insights were that only 3 in 10 conversations are off-topic, but that off-topic conversations attract a significantly higher level of engagement with an average of 17 responses (though not necessarily 17 different people conversing – it could be two people back-and-forthing :).
So off-topic punches well above its weight in terms of % of overall ‘posts’ – the Singletrack terminology for a member physically writing something, representing 42% of all posts on the forum.
In short:
- Most conversations are about bikes (near 70%)
- Off-topic conversations get nearly twice as many responses
- Overall, when looking at ‘posts’ rather than topics, off-topic is 42% of everything that makes up this community
So where does all of this leave us?
I’d love to know your thoughts, but for me there are a few helpful reminders for me and our clients:
1. Beware the simplistic ‘we found a community!’
Simple as that really. You might get most engagement with your issues, or reach those you most want to reach by thinking more broadly than the classic hang-outs for the hardcore. In my mountain bike forum we share recommendations about health, relationships, laptops and phones, cars (I’ve seen lots, ironically).
2. Consider more broadly where relevant issues might be discussed
See above. So consider not ‘what is the main topic of this space and does it match with our interest’ but instead ‘where do issues like these also get discussed by the people we want to reach’. Don’t think too directly – Don’t Stay In might not be the best (or at least the only) place to engage about drugs, Mumsnet might not be the best or only place to engage about parenting issues. Etc.
3. Recognise the importance of safety and likemindedness in unlocking
What is perhaps hardest to appreciate is how the things that we – as a big organisation/client/person trying to do good – might want to achieve in creating a space for people to talk about specific topics, might be forever prevented by people feeling appropriately safe and at home. With the new online tribal spaces, the level of likemindedness and togetherness seems to foster a spirit conducive to openness and honesty about everything else – the off-topic stuff. If we are trying to create a social platform for a given single-issue, how can we make it safe? Or, recognising this challenge, how can we be more distributed and engage with these conversations across the web as they happen without being intruding strangers and weirdos?
Are there more issues at hand that I’ve missed? Thanks for listening.
Will McInnes wrote this on 30.09.09 – 8 comments
It's filed in the Social media, Social networks box
The Labour Party conference is hitting Brighton once again next week. Us locals are bracing ourselves for the TV crews, suits, police searches and big traffic jams on the seafront.
SCIP (Sussex Community Internet Project) where Tom is a board member have organised a fringe event, open to all, about Digital Inclusion. It’s a topic that’s something of a buzzword at the moment and this event gives us a chance to add some substance to the debate with a top line-up of speakers.
We have the very web-savvy Tom Watson MP; Helen Milner MP, the MD of UK Online; and SCIP’s Mark Walker. The session is being chaired by our very own Will McInnes and NixonMcInnes is sponsoring wine and nibbles.
The event starts at 6:00PM on Monday 28 September at Community Base, 113 Queens Road, Brighton.
There’s more info on the SCIP website and you can register for free here.
Hope to see you there!
Tom wrote this on 24.09.09 – 1 comment
It's filed in the NixonMcInnes box
One year ago I became the delivery director of NixonMcInnes.
Feedback is embedded in our culture. We discuss as a team, one on one and sometimes with clients how we did on meetings, conference calls or any other work we do.
It can be uncomfortable if you are a newcomer but soon you’ll be enjoying the benefits of being honest and sharing your feelings on how things are going.
To celebrate my year as a director I encouraged feedback (once again) by setting up an online survey (with closed and open questions) and asking everyone to let me know their thoughts.
And they did:
I got good to excellent on most of the “closed” questions (poor to excellent) like:
- “Commitment to our highly open, transparent and democratic company culture”
- “Ability to get things done”
- “Highly organised”
The toughest question on the survey was “my weaknesses and common pitfalls”. That is where the most powerful answers are: how your team mates think you can improve.
Some of the answers were:
- “I think sometimes you over commit things or have trouble prioritising”
- “Sometimes your mindset can be a bit rigid and analytical”
- “Your standard of English is good, but I wonder if it not being your first language contributes to … lost of value in reports and requests circulated to the team by email”
Great. I got feedback – now what?
The best way to ensure feedback is useful is to embrace it. Share it. Nurture it.
I immediately changed the way I do things:
- Avoid over committing and improve prioritisation: work on “say no” and ask for help prioritising
- Simplify: be less rigid/analytical and more practical when I start over analising
- Add value to reports: Make sure reports are clearer, valuable and have actions assign to them when possible
We all have our own job descriptions and salaries published on our internal wiki. The feedback will feed directly into it helping me to make it more accurate and useful.
And it was the inspiration for this blog post.
Feedback is amazing
I will keep the survey results very close – and refer back to it often. I will follow up with more feedback requests to assess how an I doing. I won’t let this die.
After all – it is all about how I can become a better director, a better team player and a better person.
It’s empowering and very useful to get honest feedback from the people closer to you. I encourage everyone to do it.
If you’d like to know more drop me an email.
Telmo wrote this on 21.09.09 – 2 comments
It's filed in the NixonMcInnes box
Image by thebudman84
The use of “non-web-safe” fonts has been a demand of web designers for a long time.
Open source Web typography alternatives known as “font replacement” are available in the market.
Recently we’ve had a chance to use font replacement for one of our projects. Great stuff out there!
Having used sIFR in the past (example: Goedhuis & Co.) I wondered what other tools were available as sIFR alternatives… so I Googled for it.
I found 3 alternatives: typeface.js, Cufón and facelift (or FLIR).
I decided to download and install them one by one a compare them using a simple template with 3 headings.
Here is the outcome using “Neo Sans Light” (exception for typeface.js – it is using Century Schoolbook due to technical restrictions).
Caption: Left to right: Cufón, sIFR, faceflift, typeface,js
Conclusions? I don’t want to go into (the very exciting) technical details, so I’ll keep report the major findings only:
- Easy to install? Yes they are all easy to install once you’ve done 1 successfully. To get there is takes some reading.
- Fastest? typeface.js, then Cufón and facelift. sIFR was the slowest to load
- Flash? sIFR needs flash to run. The others run without flash
- Feel good factor? typeface.js has my vote. It was the easiest to setup and install. Everything kind of fell into place.
Decision time: what did we use in the end? sIFR.
This was due to typeface.js restriction where the font we bought “Neo Sans Light” gave an error when converting online: “Error: This font’s vendor has indicated that it is not permissible to embed this font.” – I sent them an email and hope to hear from typeface.js soon.
What about the future?
Well… who knows? The next generation of “font replacement” will be similar to gravatars (or “Globally Recognized Avatars“) that display user-provided pictures from a central database.
There will be “online font providers” the will provide “font-as-service“: the fonts your website needs. No more multiple step installations or Flash.
Typekit and Fontdeck are 2 steps in the right direction if you ask me.
What do you think?
Telmo wrote this on 16.09.09 – 6 comments
It's filed in the Design, Our sites, User experience box
I realise this isn’t the usual topic we blog about on the NM site, but I had a wonderful experience doing some overseas work earlier in the year in Africa and I wanted to share my story with the world and I thought a blog would be a great way to do this.
Back in February I had the opportunity to spend 2 weeks at an orphanage in rural Ghana, West Africa.
Rather than tell a deep story about my trip, I thought I would highlight the main observations I made during the trip, documenting a little of what I was able to experience. I hope it provides an enjoyable read..
Travelling there
It took a 7 hour flight to get to Ghana, then a days travelling to get from Accra (the capital) up to Sekyere. A long old trip! From Accra we caught a coach to Kumasi, and from Kumasi had to catch a ‘tro tro’ to get to
the village. A ‘tro tro’ is essentially a ragged out old vehicle with too many people squeezed in, often with no doors and little of a windscreen, quite often with an individual hanging off the side. Quite a hair raising experience on those roads I tell you.
Location
I was staying at an orphanage based in Sekyere, a medium size farming village in Rural Ghana, about an hour or so’s drive from Kumasi, which is Ghana’s second largest city. The village consists of one main road (or dirt track) that
stretches the length of the village, with shacks, huts and the early stages of brick structures strewn out to the left and right of the main road. Running water and electricity are present for some, but are limited and the reliability varies.
The orphanage
The name of the orphanage is Revelelation’s Children’s Home. It is a small orphanage, run by a man, Nana, and his wife, Margaret. There are 15 children, half of them disabled and the orphanage is run very much as an extended family as opposed to an institute. What this essentially means is that all children at the orphanage have their names registered as children of Nana and Margaret and all are treated equal, as family. The orphanage is essentially a largish, old building, with 5 rooms: 4 bedrooms and one main living area. Bedrooms are sparse, with an old bed and a sheet per child, and the living area consists of an old wooden couch/chair and a coffee table.
Outside the orphanage the grounds are used to grow food such as casava or coco-yam and chickens run free until a
time comes that they are to be used (for celebrations, or sale). The toilet is outside the orphanage and up a little track and is essentially a toilet sitting over a deep hole in the ground. You do need to watch out for the bugs hitting your bum cheeks.
The villagers
Upon first arrival I was very nervous. Everyone looks (well, stares) at you and are very, very intrigued. After all, my friend and I where the only white people for miles around, certainly only in the village. Indeed, we had one little girl run away crying and it’s only after we found out it was because she had never seen a white man before.
The locals call you ‘Bruni’ which means ‘white person’ – and the children in particular like to sing ‘oh bruni, oh boobuni’ – which means white man amongst black man. They are very sweet and call out Bruni and jump around as soon as they spot you, even from a distance..
We had to meet the local village chief on arrival, who, even though he speaks English, had to have a translator present – it’s tradition apparently that he speaks in his local tongue when greeting visitors.
We also met the local police chief, which left some to be desired I have to say. A glass eyed, scarred man, working out of a shack and spending the most of day sitting on a bench. Not sure how quick to the mark he would be if there was a crisis, but he was friendly all the same.
After a few days, word had quickly spread that there was 2 bruni’s in the village, and before we knew it people left right and centre were telling us ‘I like you’ and wanting to shake our hands. Very endearing, though also somewhat nerve-racking when most of the time they have a bush knife in the other hand.
Local cuisine
The food is probably the strangest I have eaten anywhere. It’s quite a stodgy diet, usually of rice or yam (which is a kind of peanut mush ball) accompanied with ground plantain leaves mixed with a fiery chilli and lots of oil to dip it in. Plantain, cassava, coco yam and rice are typical daily food, most of which are farmed from the surrounding lands.
The food doesn’t stop there though. One evening, on a foggy night driving back from the medical centre through the bush we felt a thud beneath the car. Nana ran out of the car and came back a moment later with a huge grin on his face and a large animal in his hands. He had run over a huge bush rat which he exclaimed is a delicacy and is worth more than a live chicken locally. I then spent the rest of the evening watching Junior and Sarfu (the two older boys) skin and prepare this rat. The following day I had it in a hot stew – it was delicious!
The children
The children are, quite simply, adorable. They are a real mix of ages, from different backgrounds with different reasons for being at the orphanage. Some simply have parents that have passed away, other have a more worrying background of being cast out due to beliefs in witchcraft and other tribal beliefs. A shame.
One thing that was clear and apparent was the generosity, willingness to learn, and sheer playfulness of the children. They all want to go to school, they all want to learn and they all work – very, very hard. Outside of school, the older children cook and wash the clothes for the household as well as farming and tilling the grounds. They support each other as a family unit. The other obvious thing is that children are children – wherever in the world you are. They love to play, tease and have fun. I was gobsmacked at how happy these children are given the fact they don’t have an ounce of what children have here in the western world – a leaf could be taken out of their books when it comes to acceptance, humility and happiness.
The local schools and children’s approach to schooling
I spent a couple of days at the local school (we had to walk the children each day) and met the teachers. It’s amazing! The response you get saying good morning to a class of 60 children is quite impressive. They leave early for school, usually before 7.30 and are back for 3pm. The day is similar to ours, lessons, lunch, lessons, home. The main difference is the infrastructure they are taught in and the subjects. I have to say when helping some children with maths homework I was struggling myself.
The culture/religion/social observations
In my eyes, the culture was one of a very old, developing country, though on the brink of change. Ghana is a model country by African terms, with peaceful, democratic elections taking place and (recently) free schooling for all primary age children (the problem is access to it).
Late one night we heard lots of chanting and drums – this went on for hours and hours. We found out later it was a religious (Christian) ceremony. It’s an interesting combination of Christian beliefs and traditional African rituals.
Another thing I noticed as I travelled around, was the occasional white marquee being set up for what looked like a wedding. As the time passed I realised these are for post funeral gatherings. They celebrate the life of an individual with a huge party when a person passes away and go to great lengths to advertise the celebration party of a passing person.
Hygiene
Hygiene varies depending on where you are, the plot of land you are given by the chief (that is how homes are allocated) and what your approach as an individual is to personal hygiene. We saw some areas, particularly near the cities that were awful, and others not so bad. One huge problem they have is plastic. All water and packaging comes in either plastic bags or similar – these are sold roadside, and dropped after use. They are everywhere. I spent three whole days clearing up just the plastic bits from around the orphanage grounds – but it comes back so quickly. There is no rubbish collection.
Malaria
Malaria is rife in the area – we spoke to one missionary that said he had caught malaria 3 times in the past 2 months. One evening we noticed that one of the smaller children, Adjunem, was very quiet. He went to sleep very early (whereas normally you can’t keep him quiet) and I was concerned. We checked him, and he was very hot, and we couldn’t wake him. Unfortunately, Margaret and Nana weren’t aware of the severity purely because they aren’t educated enough to spot these problems. We told them something was wrong and insisted on taking him to the next village to get to the medical centre. Upon arrival, a very strict women took two looks at him, confirmed his symptoms and said ‘Malaria’.
A cocktail of 4 types of medicine and a suppository later and the boy was back on his feat saying our names – all in 10 minutes! That must have been some drug cocktail.
The nearest city – Kumasi
Kumasi is the nearest city to Sekyere, it takes an hour or two by tro tro to get to and is a completely different experience. Away from the tranquillity and bush knives of the country side there is a massively overcrowded and busy city. This really was a completely different world.
Kumasi is home to the largest market in West Africa and indeed it is like a labyrinth. Turn after turn of markets stalls, cooking foods, fabrics, rice, bartering and homelessness. Thank goodness we had Nana to guide us else we would have surely got lost. Earlier, we had agreed to purchase the children new school clothes and some much needed covers for the old sofa they had and this was main reason for coming to the city. We walked in and out of dusty alleys, eyes everywhere, past a bush rat outdoor kitchen with literally hundreds of these things being cooked until we came to an opening in a wall where a little fabric workshop was busy bustling away. It was here we selected and placed an order for the school uniforms and for seat covers from a sweet old tailor with purple lips. Within the week the tailor came to the orphanage with everything as requested for the children. Happy days.
What I took from the experience
Sure, a visit to a small orphanage in Ghana isn’t going to change the world, but it gave me an opportunity to experience first hand a lift style that has always fascinated me and provided me with an opportunity to make a small difference to a wonderful set of individuals that I now have ongoing contact with.
There is much, much more I could talk about, perhaps in another blog post. If you’d like to hear more, let me know.
I hope very much Ghana continues to develop as an emerging nation in Africa and I very much look forward to my next visit early next year.
I’m keen to hear of similar experiences others may have had – have you done any overseas volunteer work? How did you find it? Would you go back?
Thanks for reading.
Matt wrote this on 15.09.09 – 6 comments
It's filed in the Blogging, Democracy, Ethics, Interesting, NixonMcInnes, Off topic box
The social media market is heating up quickly. Here’s the 4 indicators I see:
1. Recruiters abound
One of our team has had four recruitment callers in two weeks. One directly from a substantial traditional agency with a name your nan would recognise even though you nan doesn’t know agency land, two from ‘headhunters’ and I can’t remember where the other was from – a start-up agency abroad perhaps. Another of our team (and board) had a call last week. Some of our friends in the industry are finding that their needs for good people in this area exceed the available supply they can find.
As a side note, on this front I’m not personally fussed about our team getting calls. It’s distracting for them, but also motivating (I imagine). I can never understand it when my clever and hardworking agency MD/founder peers bust a gut when someone from their team gets poached. I’m hardly above getting emotional about business (quite the opposite), but I always reckon that all an employer/manager can do is look after their people. What they do is up to them :)
So the recruitment space is heating up.
2. Mergers & Acquisitions are poised
The whole agency space is warming up. The guys doing social media agencies to sell out to the established agency ecosystem will probably succeed – I know personally and directly that big agencies and groups are actively opening conversations with the new boutique firms. The professional intermediaries like Results and Pembridge seem to be fairly sanguine and patient about the agency M&A market as a whole at the moment but are starting to build their networks and engagement with the new social media thing. I guess for those on the fence at corporate finance and deal-making advisory firms the Headshift deal will have catalysed that.
3. MeasurementCamp attendees have evolved
A different sort of input: a human one! :) Yay for humans.
When I started MeasurementCamp with the help of the nascent social media community about 18 months ago it was the pioneers with a lower case ‘P’ – the lovely smart and down to earth writers/talkers/thinkers that are interested by the new and who naturally were investing their time investigating new interesting stuff. Today we have more of a blend which still includes the super-thinker hardcore people but the archetypal (though thankfully we still have lots of diversity) MeasurementCamper is younger, much more likely to be part of an agency, and is working on live social media projects. The market exists. And thank the lawds, there’s some REAL talent there. Even just last week at MeasurementCamp London there were three or four new very smart young agency people in attendance. I predict inflated salaries and big ‘welcome to traditional agencyland – now socialmediafy the world, by tomorrow please’ jobs for them all.
4. Clients are hiring
This is great news I reckon. Perhaps the best bit of all for all of the real people in the world. At NixonMcInnes we try hard to not build relationships with our clients based on dependency but prefer to help our clients build their own capabilities to do the stuff they need to do. (We will do stuff for them – but over time we prefer that they learn to do it for themselves). And so we have helped in some way BMW, Channel 4 and now one of our other clients (I don’t think I am able to name them just yet) shape a role and/or find a person that can come on board and be part of the internal revolution inside client organisations to embrace and harness the social web. Good good!
So what next?
I try to stay away from predictions but if I’d say it’s pretty obvious what happens next:
- Salaries will go up bubbliciously for the few genuinely capable social media professionals (regardless of their flavour and original background) for a while until supply starts to meet demand
- Some of these people will end up in jobs they aren’t yet ready for – but that’s OK, it’s called ‘learning by doing’!
- M&A will kick off in a big way in 2010, with big agencies buying small social media agencies for the next two or three years
- Eventually everything in the agency ecosystem and in client communications and engagement will be normalised and go back to everyday-abnormal
Enjoy the ride between now and then. We plan to :P
Will McInnes wrote this on 14.09.09 – 4 comments
It's filed in the Business, Industry news, Social media box
One of our biggest areas of interest here at Nizomk is how the big pieces of society can be improved by harnessing the social web. That’s why we like working with the COI, Cabinet Office, Ofqual, Department of Health and Brighton & Hove City Council. Because we think and they know that the social web can help do stuff better – stuff that impacts everyday life for very many people.
A conversation popped up around that recently here in our proudly digital city of Brighton & Hove, where the council is employing a Social Media Communications Officer (or similar title!), had been ‘challenged’ by the local media org, and I wrote about it over on my personal blog. Some of the comments that have been added in the last few days have enhanced my original post.
If you’re an interested tax payer or a public servant with a digital outlook or maybe a rubber duck or a collector of North African butterflies, then feel check it out and join in that conversation.
Will McInnes wrote this on 09.09.09 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Brighton, Democracy, Industry news box
During the past few weeks at NixonMcInnes we’ve made some changes to the team, and I wanted to describe why and how, in as open a fashion as possible whilst still being sensitive to people’s feelings.
A little while ago it became clear to us as a management team that we had to take a step back and think about the shape of our company going forward and probably then make some tough decisions. We had to ensure that the shape of team fitted the workload we have currently as well as being well set up for our future vision for NixonMcInnes and our clients.
In particular the things driving this were:
- The blend of work we are being asked to do by the market
- The capabilities we feel we must have in house and those that we concluded were not absolutely essential
- A necessity to grow a higher ratio of fee earners to support staff
This is because unlike many of our peers, we are not a new business. The company is in it’s ninth year of trading! We started at the very bottom of the foodchain, originally as a regional web design agency doing web stuff. So whilst longevity in business is generally thought to be a good thing, it has meant that we have had to evolve, and rapidly in more recent times. And change isn’t always easy.
Back in the day the very first book thrust into my hands when Tom and I teamed up was The Cluetrain Manifesto, a book that exactly described the future of the web and that we understood, believed and bought into from the very off. So although our clients were mainly interested in ‘getting a website designed’ or ‘doing some email marketing’ our interest has always been in the human and social aspects to the web. But we were patient.
During our time as a generalist digital agency we grew a signficant in-house high quality web development team. I don’t say that as hype: we carefully hired discipline experts rather than website all-rounders and eventually ended up with two or three specialists in each of the major web design and development areas: designers, front end developers, back end developers and producers. That was our whole team – our design and build team.
When we saw how the client community was finally readying for the social web our moment had arrived and we weren’t going to let it pass us by – we capitalised. I reckon our timing was excellent. We made significant investments in creating the market, through speaking, training, product and service development, internal learning, industry collaborating.
And during the past 18 months we have massively evolved and changed to reflect this.
Today we’re able to offer a tried-and-tested stack of services that go from the start of a client’s journey – with training, strategy development, research, all the way through to full design and build together with online pr and social media marketing – and now find the balance of services we provide weighted roughly 50/50 between ‘consultancy’ and ‘design and build’. Our consulting team has been steadily growing, matching the growing scale of our consulting work.
Importantly, demand for our consulting services is significant and steady whereas demand for our design and build serivices is much more variable and lumpy – that is, it comes in big peaks and troughs which makes planning and resourcing a challenge.
The blend isn’t showing signs of staying at a 50/50 split. So our plan is to retain our expert social web-flavoured design and build capability – which allows us to actually execute and deliver against strategies, and create the vital hubs and platforms for conversations – but to grow our consulting team in line with the demand we get for those services (which is lots, and growing rapidly).
So as a management team we agreed to make some changes to the team shape and structure to reflect all of this. I say management team which sounds grandiose and besuited, but actually in keeping with our particular culture and approach to business it was our board members (only one of whom is non-exec - so all normal people, active and on the ground) plus two ‘guest seats’ – two of the guys from the team that aren’t part of the regular board, to give us fresh perspectives, balance, reality, sanity and diversity.
So that ‘make some changes’ is the tough bit: as a group we ultimately decided that two positions from the design and build team were to be made redundant with a further person in that team going from full-time to part-time. And our full time marketing position was also made redundant to reflect our emphasis on existing clients and existing external relationships (eg with journalists, collaborators, event organsiers etc). So I guess a change of 3.5 people.
It was very hard on everyone in a tight-knit team where the culture is transparent and inclusive. We tried to be dignified and sensitive and above all to ensure that our business decisions didn’t irreversibly damage our team ethos and trust. Even so I’d say it was a pretty shitty couple of weeks.
Having made the changes, we now move forward confidently.
We are working in increasingly long-term client engagements, we are winning lots of exciting new business, we are clearer and more confident about what we do and we feel we took the difficult but vital decisions we had too.
So that’s us, warts ‘n’ all.
The future? I’m sure there will be change. As a consultancy operating in such a mentally-fast-changing world as ours, we know our areas of interest and practice will constantly evolve.
And as and when we change we will try to talk about it openly – for better or for worse.
Thanks for listening.
Will McInnes wrote this on 04.09.09 – 4 comments
It's filed in the Democracy, Employee engagement, NixonMcInnes box
A key aspect of getting the right design is getting the right look and feel. Good designers have a solid awareness of what’s going on in the world. We look at what’s there and ahead to what will be there when designing for our clients and their audience. It’s a kind of empathy flavoured with the creator’s trademark style.
Too often look and feel comes down to client subjectivity—rather than what what’s happening in their market. I’ve been in so many clients meetings where my choices are shot down because that gloriously appropriate blue reminds the client of a terrible kitchen where they once cooked some fish that made them feel sick. The blue is axed—along with it all the thinking, working and feeling that got it to that stage.
Of course, the client is entitled to their view. But the blue is not just one colour or one choice—it’s a series of informed empathic decision taken for you by your chosen professional. A great way to increase client confidence is through the use of user testing—not just showing a design to a few trusted friends, but varying designs with a collective user base to decide creative outcomes based upon verifiable feedback.
The client can not like it if they want but would they change it if their desired audience was found to love it?
We build user testing into almost all of our projects at NixonMcInnes. This valuable insight helps us shape the creative direction which makes its easier for us designing it. It’s one less thing for the client to worry about—our choice is backed up by a focus group of their audience.
User testing has just gone to another, more intuitive, level. We are working with pioneering agency mindtracker who are, for the first time, quantifying the emotional response of users. Using very simple technology they are capturing complex feelings and reactions as never before. That means we can deliver even more powerful designs. For you.
Joshua wrote this on 02.09.09 – 1 comment
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