Archive for July, 2009

Neville Hobson, over at his blog the other day, asked why he should use Posterous.

For those of you who’ve never heard of this application, it’s a blog-like platform that enables you to blog by email. You sign up for a free Posterous account which gives you a blog at www.yourchosenname.posterous.com and you can then blog by sending an email with photos, mp3s, videos or text, and even by calling in on your phone - these items will be posted on the blog automatically. For more details of how it works, check out my review of Posterous from around this time last year.

Neville’s question - and the responses he got from various people - got me thinking about how and why I use it, when I already have this blog.

There seems to be a trend towards not just multimedia but also real time, or almost real time, communication online, facilitated by smartphones with always on internet connectivity as well as SMS (short text messaging) and MMS (multi media messaging). This is emerging as a fresh form of blogging that is being called “lifestreaming” - where you stream a record of your real life on to the online space in nearly real time. Twitter is the most well-known application that enables you to do that via text. Posterous facilitates the process in a multi-media way.

I use my blog at Fusion View for posts which are more like articles or essays where I explore issues and topics in a considered way. These longer posts are interspersed with some video, audio and photo-slideshows. But it doesn’t feel like this is the right place for very informal snippets of what’s going on in my daily life. So that’s where lifestreaming comes in.

I’ve called my Posterous site the Fusion View Lifestream. Since I got my new Blackberry Bold the other week, I’ve really been having fun snapping shots of my garden and friends I’ve met up with as well as my recent jaunt down to Bristol - and then emailing them straight to Posterous. You can also email multiple photos in one email and it will create a little slideshow automatically. There is an automatic cross-posting function that sends the snaps to Twitter, Facebook and my Flickr account - as well as a range of other social media sites, if you were so inclined. This means that my friends and family who follow me in those spaces can see what’s going on for me within minutes of my snapping the pictures or tapping out the text on my Blackberry. But people who read my blog who may not be that interested in seeing my tomato plants or my tourist snaps of Bristol don’t have to be bothered by those more personal moments.

Occasionally, I get Posterous to automatically cross-post to Fusion View as well if it’s the right kind of vignette or mood piece that would fit with the blog and break up the longer, in depth posts.

So, if you’d like to follow my lifestream vignettes, you can subscribe to my Posterous feed or follow me on Twitter.

If you’re lifestreaming or using Posterous, why don’t you add a comment with the link to your site - I’m curious to see who else is having a go at this!

Photo: thanks to Zest-pk from flickr.com (CCL)

What contact information is on your business card apart from your name and the name of your company/ business? Traditionally, it would most likely have been your job title, your real world address and your telephone number. In the ’80s, that new fangled technology, the fax machine, meant that fax numbers were then added to the card. In the 90s, that tiny bit of card had to cope additionally with website URLs and emails and mobile phone numbers.

Is it time to de-clutter, I wonder?

Recently, I’ve come across a number of business people exchanging their Twitter @usernames, in the way that one might exchange mobile phone numbers - or including those monickers at the end of their Powerpoint presentations.

I wonder if we could reduce the verbage on our business cards simply to our names and Twitter @usernames?

OK, for those who have not yet heard of Twitter, it’s an online micro-blogging site where you can post short messages of 140 characters for the world to see on the Twitter site - either via your mobile phone or your computer. Your Twitter username is a username of your own choosing. Mine is fusionview. To “hail” someone on Twitter you send a message - or “tweet” - with @ in front of their username: so “@fusionview” would reach my Twitter inbox.

If we minimised our contact details to our @username, might that also improve our communications with people we meet other than the obvious one of de-cluttering our business cards?

People can “follow” your Twitter stream by clicking “follow” on your Twitter page and you can “follow” them back - or you could choose not to. So new people you meet as well as your friends and associates could easily find and follow you online with just your Twitter username. You can have public discussions with them - and other Twitterers - or private exchanges, if you prefer.

You would normally include in your Twitter profile a link to your website so people can find your more detailed contact information via you website Contact Me page, if they need to. On you Twitter page, all people need is a quick snapshot of who you are / what you do. People can also see on your page the kinds of things you “tweet” about or what you discuss with other Twitter users. That can actually say a lot about the kind of person you are, what you’re interested in and how you engage with others. Might this then be an alternative and more informal way to let yourself and your business be more open and accessible to new acquaintances and lonstanding friends alike than your website?

I rather like the concept of a business card that just says:

Yang-May Ooi
Writer
@fusionview

… and a way for people to encounter me online at Twitter as they might encounter me - as a friend, a writer, an avid learner about all things social media, a reluctant gardener, an unfit runner, a lover of good food… and so on, as my Twitter stream evolves.

The only thing is that we’d all be dependent on Twitter to stay afloat into the foreseeable future if it became the norm to trust our contact details to it…

Or maybe the end result will be yet another new contact format to crowd into that little bit of card as we squeeze our Twitter @usernames into the last available blank space there…

Do you use Twitter for chatting, networking, making contact with people whether in a personal or business context? Do you think there’s potential for mass take-up of Twitter as a contact tool?

Image: thanks to xotoko from flickr.com (CCL)

Business communications expert and podcasting guru, Neville Hobson, interviewed my co-author Silvia Cambie and me on Friday for his influential For Immediate Release podcast. We talked about how we came to write our book, International Communications Strategy, the main themes and ideas we explore in it and our favourite chapters/ case studies.

Neville has now uploaded the podcast interview on iTunes and his blog - so if you’d like to listen to our discussion, please do go and check it out.

Thanks, Neville!

Photo: thanks to Neville, with permisision

Posted via email from Fusion View Lifestream

Ipadio.com is a live phoneblogging platform - you dial a number from any phone and speak. It is broadcast live on the internet - a message is sent to your Twitter feed so that people following you on Twitter can come and listen to you live. The timelag is about 5 seconds so it is pretty live!

It’s free for consumers and you get 60 minutes* for each phonecast - or “phlog” as they call it (not the most elegant word!).

Mark Smith and his team at ipadio are terrific and taking on user feedback and they’ve integrated a lot of user requested functions. The most useful for me are cross-postering:

# to posterous.com, where I have my “lifestream” and which I have set to further automatically cross-post to this blog
# to Facebook

If you have a Blogger, LiveJournal or Wordpress.com, it will also auto-crosspost to those sites. How cool is that!

There is definitely a move towards immediacy and lifestreaming over polished, edited content. Lifestreaming is your stream of multimedia from your current real world experience online to share with the world what you’re doing right at that given moment. Twitter has probably set the tone for that with the ability to post short text messages online within seconds. Qik offers live streaming video. Posterous enables you to email photos, mp3s, video and text online - if you have a smartphone, that’s pretty easy and immediate - but what it lacked, in my view, was the option to audio blog by phone so with ipadio bridging that gap, Posterous has become, for me, a great way to share my lifestream.

*Update 12 July 2009 - Mark Smith at ipadio tweeted on Twitter re this blog post to say that actually, they are giving all users call duration of 60 minutes now (it used to be 5 mins). Thanks, Mark!

Self-employment in a cold climate

I’ve been speaking with a number of solo professionals recently and many of them told me that they have been badly affected by the economic downturn. Business was going along quite nicely until around March this year when everything seems to have dried up. In some cases, companies that had been contracting these professionals for long-term projects are now bringing that work in-house. In other cases, businesses were no longer planning more than a couple of months ahead so these self-employed professionals - who had gotten used to having work lined up for the next 10 months - are now finding that they have to live from hand to mouth, with the contract work being drip fed to them from time to time.

I asked them what they are doing to market themselves and to get themselves “out there” in these difficult times. A number of them have been going through their address books, cold calling contacts and making arrangements to meet up and network in the hope that there might be some work thrown their way — or at least some leads that they could then follow up. It was painstakingly slow and long, hard work — with as many as thirty “no, thank yous” to every one “maybe”. Depressingly, in one case, the contacts that this one professional called up said, “I’m so glad you called. I want to pick your brain. I’ve just been made redundant”. Another professional sighed and said that he really should try to get networking but he wasn’t very good at it and he really didn’t like pushing himself on other people.

What, no website?

In quite a number of cases, none of them had a website.

When I asked them why they didn’t have websites for their businesses, the responses all had a similar theme:
• business had been good up till now, they didn’t need one;
• they didn’t want to spend the money and now in the downturn, they didn’t have the money to spend;
• they had been getting all their work through contacts and existing clients so there had never been the need for a website;
• they were too busy with the work to think about marketing and commissioning a website.

Benefits of having a website

I urged them to invest the time and money in resourcing a website, especially now that they had a bit of spare time to think about what they wanted to say about themselves on a website and what they wanted for the design of it. While personal contacts and real-world networking is extremely valuable, its reach is limited to the number of people you can personally talk to or spend time with. A website - literally - makes your credentials and services available 24/7 to the whole wide world. Also, when one of your contacts recommends you to a company, they can easily include a link to your website so that that company can easily check out what you offer and your track record - which may be critical to their decision about whether or not to hire you. In fact, if you were that company and you weree considering hiring a new consultant, would you go for the one with the website you can check out or rely on a recommendation that you can’t verify in any other way?

Case studies via Twitter and Facebook

I thought that the best way to make a strong case for how important it is for self-employed professionals to have a website it to offer them some real world case studies. So I opened up Twitter and sent the following “tweet” to the whole wide world:

If you are self-employed, how important is it to have your own website? Pls help me advise some solo professionals I know

These are a couple of responses I got back within the hour:

barrieingramacc: @fusionview I have site www.barrieingram.co.uk and its helped me get networkin people get to know what you do I have got podcasts as well .

I don’t know Barrie but he caught my “tweet” because he was on Twitter. I checked his website and see that he offers “Complete Accountancy Service specifically for small business”. Now he is getting some free publicity from my blog post! By engaging online, you can definitely widen your reach as Barrie has done.

gilescolborne: @fusionview Put it like this: when was the last time you looked up a number in the Yellow Pages? And on Google?

Giles is my cousin-in-law who is a usability expert and Managing Director of cxpartners, based in Bristol. What he says is so true. I hardly look up a business in the Yellow Pages - instead I google, because Google throws up businesses actual websites and other information about them such as articles, blog posts etc whereas Yellow Pages only gives me their address and phone number. If you don’t have a website, you miss out on potential clients who may be googling right now in the hope of finding someone just like you.

My Twitter feed also automatically appears in my Facebook profile so I also received these other responses via Facebook.

Moyra Weston at 11:36pm July 1
I launched mine 2 weeks ago and it has already given me 4 positive leads. We can manage without if we have great links and networks, but it appears that a professional looking website gives credibility and allows us to spread our message - especially when we use blogs/newsletters. I’ve had a lot of feedback on mine and am definitely seen as a professional with it… www.westoncoaching.com

Moyra is a client for whom my consultancy provided a website and associated blog as well as blog training. Weston Coaching is “Committed to supporting the development you need through coaching, training, consultancy and facilitation.” I’m thrilled that her website has already generated four positive leads within two weeks of launching!

Susan Macaulay at 12:38pm July 2
I think it’s great. gives people a place to go and get a bunch of information fast and easy. They can look at what they want. Saves time for you and for clients. Mine has been up about 4 years. Soon to be revamped based on experience. Haven’t used it as fully as would like to in the past, but will in the future….

Susan is a friend and Managing Director of Strike Communications, a public speaking consultant based in Dubai. She also runs Amazing Women Rock, a social network for, well, “amazing women”. Interestingly, I was going to put one of the solo professionals I met in contact with Susan before I got this message - but found that I couldn’t give Susan “a bunch of information” by merely forwarding that professional’s web address - and so I haven’t gotten around to writing Susan an email about this person yet because it’s so much more hassle for me to set out that “bunch of information” myself. Make it easy for your contacts to spread the word about you and your business by having a website.

I rest my case

So, if you’re self-employed - I hope that with these additional voices from small business owners and solo professionals, I have been able to make the case for investing in a website as soon as possible, if you don’t already have one! And please do pop back and let me know how it works out for you and your business.

Photo: thanks to Librarian By Day on flickr.com (CCL0