We’re chuffed as hell to have been accepted onto the Worldblu List of Most Democratic Workplaces. You can also check out the coverage on Fast Company and our company profile on the Worldblu website which highlights some of our democratic practices.
To get on the list, every employee in the company was surveyed by Worldblu, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to spreading democratic working throughout the world of work. The survey covered the 10 dimensions of democratic organsations.
I personally feel quite humble about being accepted onto the list. Whilst it’s fantastic to have the principles that we try to run our company by validated by an external assessor, I know that we still have a VERY long way to go. We know that sometimes we don’t always live up to these ideals, but we have a shared commitment to get better and better at it. The purpose of entering NixonMcInnes for the Worldblu list wasn’t for the PR or badge of honour, but for the feedback we’ll get from Worldblu to understand how we benchmark against other democratic companies. I’m hoping to learn which of the dimensions need the most work and get some ideas about how we can improve.
If your company operates democratically, we’d love to hear from you. Apparently this year there were only two companies from the UK accepted onto the list - us and Happy Computers. It would be fantastic to have more on the list next year.
You can read more about organisational democracy on my personal blog.
Tom wrote this on 15.04.09 – 4 comments
It's filed in the Democracy, NixonMcInnes box
Here at Nizomk Towers, we have been following, with keen interest, the conversations flying around teh internets about the perils of URL-shortening services, such as TinyURL et al. Apparently, with both the number of available URL-shortening services growing, along with the reliance on them, what we have is a ticking time bomb, just waiting to explode in our faces! Yikes!
Read more…
Steve wrote this on 07.04.09 – 9 comments
It's filed in the Development, Internet, Web technology box
Are you, or is someone you know our new Office Manager / Bookkeeper? We are looking for the right person to join our fun and lively team of social media experts…
Read more…
Ruth wrote this on 01.04.09 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Brighton, NixonMcInnes, Recruitment box
Do you have a project that you would like to discuss with us? Or perhaps you know someone who is thinking about how to implement their digital strategy for 2009 and could do with some useful, actionable input and direction?
If so, we are running a limited edition special offer to help you shine online. Check it out.
If we can’t be of assistance or if you are not satisfied with the results then we will send you a delicious cake from the lovely Brighton cake boutique Choccywoccydoodah. Mmm, how can you refuse such a tasty proposal?
“And if you want to know a little bit more about our practice areas and service offerings then check out our “What we do page”. This will give you guys, the wonderful NixonMcInnes audience, a little more information about the kind of work we are helping folks with.
Just so you know in case it is still not clear; we are a full service agency; this means that not only can our skilled social media consultants help you apply social media to your marketing strategy and help you use this medium to plan specific campaigns, but the consultants are backed up by a fully formed delivery team made up of talented developers and designers able to make your ideas for websites, widgets, applications, blogs, social media press rooms and anything else web wise a reality. You can even get to know the team in advance.
So go on, book your conversation with us now, we are ready, poised to listen to your challenges and lend a hand; guaranteed!
Just e-mail or pick up the phone:
ruth@nixonmcinnes.co.uk
01273 648315.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Thanks to EpicFireworks for the image.
Ruth wrote this on 26.03.09 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Business, Buzz monitoring, Design, Development, Free things, Marketing, NixonMcInnes, Social media, Social networks, Strategy, Web analytics, Web technology box
Users for the Private Reserves website can now request their wines to be delivered. We released the update to the website this morning.
If you are a wine connoisseur I recommend a visit to Private Reserves website. They are specialists in fine wine storage.
The first release of the website (a few weeks ago) enabled the users to view their wines and up to date tasting notes. Checkout the Sample Cellar .
Private Reserves customers can now ask for their wines to be delivered online.
This ties in perfectly with our new “What We Do” page. A good example of great work.
Telmo wrote this on 20.03.09 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Design, Development, NixonMcInnes, Our sites box
There were two brilliant sessions at SXSW today about organsiational democracy - the way of working that we aspire to here at NixonMcInnes. They really inspired and re-energised me about all of this stuff. I blogged my notes on my personal site where I write about democracy - check them out and fire away in the comments.
Traci Fenton with an overview of organisational democracy.
The story of how meetup.com moved to a democratic way of working.
Tom wrote this on 18.03.09 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Democracy, NixonMcInnes box
More notes from SXSW. This was a great presentation by Derek Powazek. It was fast and covered a lot so I hope my notes make sense! Fire away in the comments if you want me to clarify anything.
If you put a group of people together, they’re not necessarily smart. Our job is to enable and facilitate people so that the magic happens.
Talking about the Francis Galton experiment to guess the weight of the cow. Everyone guessed wrong, but the average of the guesses was very close.
Same is true for guess the value of the coins in the jar.
Newspaper sites with ‘most emailed stories’ facility. People make their own choices, but we get a useful insight into what are the most popular stories of the day.
P2P filesharing: A group of people create a libray of things to share. The more people that share something, you can see what’s popular and get a Top 10 list of what the best tracks are by a particular artist.
Stock market: Lots of people making small decisions that together dictate the value of companies.
So why is so much community stuff on the web dumb? See YouTube comments!
Elements of wise crowds:
Diversity – wide variey of inputs
Independent – people must be able to contribute in their own way for the own reasons (not groupthink)
Decentralisation – nobody in charge
Aggregation – all of the diverse data needs to be brought together.
For the web:
1. Small, simple tasks: i.e. not having an open free text field for people to contribute, but a more defined way to contribute. Wisdom of crowds works well when there is a specific answer that we’re looking for, not an open ended question. Examples: HotOrNot (voting whether someone’s attractive) or Threadless (voting for T-Shirt designs.) Bad example: Assignment Zero – crowdsourcing experiment to get people to contribute to creating stories, but it was too open ended. Then changed tack to creating a list of people they would like to interview and then people volunteered to do the interviews. The collective task became more manageable.
2. Given to a large diverse group: Opposite of GroupThink where decisions are made by a small clique where the priorities of the group are put before the selfish interests of the individuals. Design systems to encourage lots of people to participate. Bad example: Chevvy Tahoe experiment to allow people to create straplines for ads but people just took the piss “This asshole’s SUV”.
3. Design for selfishness: Large groups don’t participate for the good of the commons. Create systems where people can participate for their own selfish reasons. Threadless: “Submit an idea for a chance of fame and $25,000.” Google algorithm is based on links that humans have created for their own reasons. Nobody created links so that Google could have a great search engine. Tagging photos on Flickr – you do it for your own reasons, but it creates value for Flickr e.g. helping it to differentiate between ‘Apple’ as computer; fruit or New York.
4. Aggregating the results: We’re often talking about taking votes or inputs to score things and generate lists of outputs. The problem is that it becomes a game. Example: Favrd.com – takes the Favouriting behaviour in Twitter and aggregates the most popular tweets. There’s no public function to rank a tweet on the site, it just harvests an existing behaviour. So if we do these 4 things and it generates some outputs like a leaderboard, people might want to game the results. Example: Flickr ‘most interesting leaderboard’ which is an algorithm to find the most interesting photos on Flickr. Created an incentive for ‘bad behaviour’ on the site so people could game the system to get their photo onto the list. Same as SEO spam. Flickr changed how it displayed interestingness – instead of it being a ranked list (which people want to beat) and made it a random display of photos which it thinks are interesting. Makes is less of a game and so less likely to be gamed by people. Other examples: Threadless: on voting for T-Shirts – votes aren’t displayed until voting finishes to avoid groupthink. With online polls – you submit your answer before you see the results from others.
Popularity does not have to rule. The most popular thing is not always the BEST thing – the most votes deosn’t always win. Example: amazon reviews – doesn’t always rank the most popular reviews first – sometimes will find a popular positive and negative review.
Implicit vs Explicit Feedback.
Explicit: voting and rating mechanisms. Asking for an immediate decision from the user e.g. voting, rating etc. Tip: Use the minimum number of options necessary: do you really need to vote on scale of 1-10 or even 1-5. Might just need thumbs up or thumbs down.
Implicit: Monitoring pageviews; searches; velocity (how much is something changing over time) Interestingness (algorithms to make sense of all the data.)
Design matters. How you design the interface affects the results you will get. Even in subtle ways like colour. Changed a design from black and red version to white and votes changed.
Experiment with the crowd: red slide, audience shouts angry, warning, stop etc. blue slide: calm, ocean, relax etc.
Experiments with adverts, changing border colour: blue border did best for ads conjouring invention, imagination (because blue colour was calming so good for being creative). Red: best for ads where you want recall and attention to detail (because red invokes fear and not wanting to make mistakes)
If you are a visual designer, you need to learn colour theory!
Putting it all together:
Brooklyn museum Click! Exhibition. Users submitted photos which were rated by the community. First the community rated themselves as how much of an expert they were and how serious they were about art, then for the photos themselves. So you could view the ‘best’ photos based on how the critics rated themselves e.g. professional or amateurs.
GetSatisfaction.com: Lots of good examples of wisdom of crowds: Users submitting and voting for ideas for companies and products. Also contains some implicit feedback about how many people are participating, and the ‘mood’ – what the collective sentiment of the community is.
Tom wrote this on 15.03.09 – 6 comments
It's filed in the NixonMcInnes box
My notes from Charlene Li’s presentation at SXSW…
Starting off by going back 20 years to Tim Berners Lee in 1989 wrote about the web being a social creation rather than a technical toy.
It’s only been in the last few years that we have had very simple tools to make that vision a reality.
Think of a social site: Facebook, Twitter, Bebo; Habbo Hotel; Last.fm
Social networks will be much bigger than these individual platforms. We’ll look back and think it strange that we had to visit a site to be social online.
Social networks will be like air – all around us.
Shoppping: Ratings and reviews are ok, but I don’t know the people reviewing. In the future I’ll be able to see reviews from my friends only. Building chat and discussion with friends into e-commerce to help make buying choices.
TV is becoming social. Current TV integrates Twitter posts into broadcast, but in the future we’ll have more control to see only updates from our friends, or from groups of people that we are interested in.
The trend is that social activity happens in other contexts, not necessarily within a social networking site itself.
Things you need to make social networks like air:
1. Identity – who you are
2. Contacts – who you know and what are the context of those relationships i.e. a real friend vs. a loose contact that you met once
3. Activities – things that I’m doing that I might want to share e.g. twitter; FB news feed.
We are still at the beginning of this.
Two standards: Facebook Connect and the Open Stack
Open ID; XRDS-Simple; OAuth; PortableContacts; OpenSocial
It’s not a standards war, but a journey towards agreeing a set of standards [hmmm, I’m not so sure otherwise FB would use and develop the open stack]
Identity: Work persona and personal persona. Use different platforms for different personas.
Friends: Filters and tools to manage different types of friend. Big problem of having separate friend lists for different platforms. Have to set up relationships many times.
Google/portals provide social data – collecting huge amount of data – email, calendar, and now voice.
We have to trust Google/FB/Yahoo with our data. Businesses potentially have to trust Google with their data too.
What will get businesses to be open with their data? Money.
Most digital activity resides outside social networks.
Example of The Insider adding social features using social networks. FB gets revenue share and new audience. The Insider gets profile information and better targeting of ads.
Using analysis of social networks to target ads, identify influencers.
Being a Fan of a brand on Facebook is not an endorsement.
If advertisers have access to social graph it can advertise a product that I’ve bought to my closest friends, without explicitly saying who it was that bought it. [like an anonymised FB Beacon]
How a business should approach it:
1. Evaluate where social makes sense. Where social network data can make the user experience richer. Leverage existing social data e.g. FB Connect or the open stack. Get privacy and permission stuff straight. Who will you trust? Google? FB?
2. Get your back-end data in order. Remove need for multiple sign-ins and profiles. Single identity for people in your database.
3. Prepare to integrate social networks into the organisation. Organisations are networked with human relationships, not hierarchies. Social networks will disrupt traditional information flows.
Put the customer in the organisation chart. Customer at the top, CEO at the bottom!
Open networks will be the new norm.
Tom wrote this on 14.03.09 – 2 comments
It's filed in the NixonMcInnes box
I’ve sneaked into one of the panel sessions at the SXSW Film conference. Couldn’t resist a session about generating buzz. Once again, please forgive the typos and mistakes – I’ve just posted this straight up without editing.
Audience in this session have notepads and pens – no laptops. Odd :)
On the panel we have:
Jessica Edwards, VP, Murphy PR
Negin Farsad, Comedian/Filmmaker, Vaguely Qualified Productions
David Modigliani, Producer/Dir, Crawford
Tommy Pallotta, Producer
Curt Ellis, Producer, Wicked Delicate Films
Let’s see what they have to offer…
Quick show of hands: Most of the audience here are film-makers.
Traditional Film publicity model: You hire a publicity agent and they pitch your film to the traditional media.
Promoting ‘King Corn’: Raised $500K for publicity. Theatrical screenings were useful, but showing the film in ‘grass roots settings’ like college campuses, farmers markets was very effective and could get paid for the screening.
Most films lose more money in publicity than they make at the box office so the key is to make your publicity dollar work better.
Launching film on Hulu: Crawford was first film to launch on this platform. More views that opening weekends of An Inconvenient Truth and Fahrenheit 911.
Create a ‘Host your own screening’ programme. These people become your PR machine – tapping into their friends and contacts.
It’s a myth that giving a film away online or at screenings damages DVD sales because of the value of the buzz that’s generated will ultimately sell more DVDs.
You never know who knows a mainstream journalist. Your grass roots publicity can cross over into the mainstream mass media.
Good publicity requires a strategy and understanding the publicity landscape.
Pallotta is going to try out releasing his new film on Bit Torrent with a note to tell people to write and talk about it if they like it, to see what kind of publicity that generates.
Holding a traditional screening will get you reviews in the mainstream press, but it doesn’t guarantee that people will actually go and see the film. But distributing for free online almost guarantees an audience which gives you a chance of a groundswell of buzz building.
Hulu will give you a share of ad revenue so you can make money from this distribution channel. It’s not much though – the biggest value is getting your film out to a large audience to build buzz.
Set up a Facebook, MySpace, Twitter ‘extravaganza’ (!). Good for word of mouth but not necessarily mainstream cross-over.
Hire street teams to hand out flyers in towns where screenings are happening.
Some amazing views towards P2P filesharing on the panel: “It doesn’t lose me any money and it gets my film publicised for free” – wow. But I wonder how this will change once high definition P2P sharing becomes commonplace.
Question from me: Are major studios innovating with grass roots publicity too, or is this just for independents and small studios?
Definitely. However they often to make it look like grass roots support rather than originating from the studio. Artificial word of mouth generating in forums with fake user accounts.
Makes me wonder what the opportunity is studios to innovate in this area in an authentic way.
Tom wrote this on – 2 comments
It's filed in the NixonMcInnes box
Here are my unedited notes from this panel session at SXSW.
On the panel as have:
Rob Gonda – Director of strategy;
Juan Morales – creative director, Sapient;
Ryan Stewart – Adobe platform evangelist.
3 times more mobile subscribers in the world than Internet users.
Japan: the phone is the core of all lifestyle activity. Only just getting this in the US with the iPhone. 93% mobile; 7% PC-based.
iPhone hasn’t taken off in Japan because it isn’t revolutionary to them.
80% of iPhone owners use the web every day.
Android hasn’t caught up with iPhone yet. T-Mobile is only 7% of mobile marketing in the US so Android penetration is still quite low, but 15% of TM users have G1. Since it’s an open platform, growth is set to explode.
Flash on the phone will change everything because you can use a single asset to publish to the web and multiple devices without having to redevelop. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t have Flash video etc on the mobile.
Being able to efficiently view a ‘normal’ web page rather than special mobile version is key to iPhone success and must be emulated by other handsets.
500m iPhone app downloads. $1bn in sales. 93% iPhones have apps installed.
There are 20,000 apps in iPhone app store, but there should be 100’s of thousands if it wasn’t so controlled by Apple.
7-10m mobiles with Flash by the end of 2009.
Adobe bloke avoiding answering questions about when Flash will be on the iPhone. It’s above his pay grade apparently :)
Adobe reckon that Palm Pre will be an early leader in Flash on mobiles.
Microsoft claim that their app store will be as open as Google’s. The panel has its doubts about this.
Apple app store works neatly because it’s all Apple controlled. Microsoft and Google app stores will have to contend with lots of handsets but should get much wider penetration.
Apps are successful because the price e.g. 99 cents is a throwaway purchase, and the payment mechanism is very simple.
There’s a different culture around paying for apps on mobile. Unlike the web, we don’t expect everything to be free.
Monkey ball iPhone app is making $15,000 per day. Yowsers.
Augmented reality: Not a new concept. What’s new is doing it with real-time content from the web and on mobile. Cool demos of augmented reality on iPhone and Nokia N95.
Merging physical world with digital. Pointing your phone at food in a supermarket and you’ll be able to see recipes.
[it’s almost scary to think of the possibilities of this once we have video capability in contact lenses. Will try to ask a question to the panel about this]
Lots of these mobile developments aren’t new concepts e.g. augmented reality and location-aware (GPS) but these technologies are being given new applications and being made highly mobile with new handsets.
Logo recognition – take a picture and your phone will bring up info about the product or company.
‘Audio barcodes’ – using frequencies that can’t be heard by humans to send digital information. Like watching a film or listening to music. Your mobile will be able to record the sound and decode the extra information which could be URLs to information on the web. [cool! Never heard of this before]
Question from the audience about disruptive side effects of this technology:
It will be much easier for customers to compare products, customers and prices. Ultimate good for consumer so A Good Thing.
Question about the state of mobile advertising: Consumers say that they don’t mind seeing mobile ads.
Talking about new devices: LG watch phone with Bluetooth, video, MP3.
Asked my question about contact lense displays :)
Panel hadn’t heard about them so they don’t think it’s coming any time soon. I watched a documentary about this on the plane so I know that it’s in development. I wonder if we’ll be talking seriously about this next year.
Batteries: someone in the audience said that MIT have created some technology that can charge a mobile battery in 7 seconds.
Biometrics: we will start seeing retina, face and fingerprint recognition built into phones.
Skyhook: uses three ways to locate you: GPS; mobile phone mast triangulation and WIFI networks. So we can be location-aware even indoors.
Tom wrote this on – what do you think?
It's filed in the NixonMcInnes box
