Doing Words

Last tickets: Lower North Shore Coffee Morning tomorrow

// June 8th, 2010 // 0 Comments // My work, Other news, people

What do you do when you know you should be attending a weekly industry meetup but just can’t seem to get there, week after week?

As the crow flies, the nearest industry meetup to my home is North Shore Coffee Morning (#nscm) held each Thursday morning in Mosman, on Sydney’s leafy lower north shore.

It’s a great meetup: small, interesting, diverse group of people, good coffee, and great networking. According to Google Maps it ought to take me about 14mins to drive there, but I find Google Maps is rarely right about trip durations in Sydney, and typically it takes me between 20-30mins to get there, find a park and lob on in. Since I can only afford to spend an hour at #nscm, I’m taking two hours out of my highly productive morning and spending as much time on the road as I am networking with the regulars.

What to do? Why not create my own ‘lower North Shore coffee morning’ instead? I have a spacious living area with a lovely outlook, a great Italian coffee machine, good coffee beans, and enough cups and seats for about twelve people. I enjoy playing barista. Ticketing can be done quickly and easily in the cloud for next to nothing these days (see Amiando, Eventbrite and Eventarc for starters) and I can use a cheap ticket to (a) cover the cost of coffee, milk and muffins; and (b) give people some motivation to actually attend rather than (as I do) say they’ll try to make it. Any money left-over after consumables will be donated to Oxfam via my Trailwalker Sydney 2010 team. Maybe I can have the industry networking event come straight to me.

So tomorrow, in my home, Lower North Shore Coffee Morning will have its debut. If it goes well and people enjoy themselves, it might make a monthly reappearance. Tickets for this first iteration are limited to 12 and as I write this, there are only three tickets remaining.

If you’d like to come, it’s not too late — just use the order form below.

If you come, please bring passion, enthusiasm, good humour and curiosity. Also, please bring either a book, an artwork or some music to lend/give to someone else. Use of the WiFi, fireplace, comfy chairs, garden, huggy old dog and rope swing are included in the ticket price. The Twitter hashtag is #lnscm.

Our house is 10mins walk from St Leonards station, 3mins walk from the 273 and 274 bus route stops at Naremburn shops, and all-day street parking is available in Dargan St and surrounding streets.

Hope to see you there!

- alan (@bigyahu)

Online Event Registration with amiando

Twitter101: be yourself, don’t be your brand

// May 28th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Customer relationships, My work, Social Media

alan jones (@bigyahu) 27/05/10 4:47 PM Hey, sorry for the extra step but click the link and I’ll know you aren’t a bot. Please follow this link to validate your profile. http://truetwit.com/vy30301516 Thanks

MobileMojo (@phonesandplans) 27/05/10 10:57 PM Thanks for the follow. For free unbiased comparison of over 100 phones and 300 plans from 13 carriers visit http://www.phonesandplans.com.au

alan jones (@bigyahu) 27/05/10 11:05 PM Euw. That tweet felt just like an ad. #fail. Try not to do that again, yeah?

MobileMojo (@phonesandplans) 27/05/10 11:15 PM Thanks for the tip . I’m new around here, still on the steeper side of the learning curve.

alan jones (@bigyahu) 27/05/10 11:20 PM Great, that’s better already. On Twitter, be you, not your brand. Do the right thing by your brand, but be a person. Cheers!

MobileMojo (@phonesandplans) 27/05/10 11:34 PM True. But you’ve got to admit its easier to hide behind the anonymity of a brand.

alan jones (@bigyahu) 27/05/10 11:46 PM Might seem so but no. Twitter users more forgiving of people than brands. They love beating up on brands.

alan jones (@bigyahu) 27/05/10 11:49 PM Twitter often medium for community revenge on brands and marketers. On Twitter the power rlnship btween brand and audience flips.

When all the world seems made of pixels

// April 14th, 2010 // 0 Comments // My work, Video

I’ve been working on a video project for a few months. First I worked on the strategy that led to brand development, which led to the scriptwriting and direction. The product will be launched in a couple of weeks and then I can show you the video.

But first, how to explain a product that doesn’t exist, in a video? You can’t show people the product.

Well, the product is used to help people collaborate on ideas. People in groups are easy to shoot, but how do you convey the development of ideas without a big special effects budget?

The solution: a visual metaphor. We came up with groups of people building ideas out of Lego-style bricks.

Then the brainstorming got a little out of hand and we agreed we’d try and build the brand-name using the bricks and feature them in the climax of the launch video.

Oh boy. For a week I struggled with designing the brand name in letters large enough to be legible in a wide shot writ small on a YouTube-sized video, while using a brand of bricks that really didn’t stick together in shapes much bigger than 30-40 blocks. Forget good typography, this was survival-of-the-fittest-letter-shape.

In the end it took a lot of silicone adhesive to keep some of the more unstable letters (like ‘R’ and ‘S’) together. We got the shot done, but for a few days afterwards I was left seeing my surroundings re-imagined as Lego bricks. ‘If I had to build that car/building/person out of bricks, how would I do it?’ was all I could think of.

Here’s some stills from the shoot:
Can we pull this off?
Pause for further direction
Cast member on monitor
Collaborating on an idea
Shooting the CEO in a lift scene
Cast holding the letters

Here’s a much more impressive video project using pixelated shapes. I wish I’d had half the special effects budget and a tenth of the creativity of this team!

I won a Perkler tee shirt!

// October 30th, 2009 // 0 Comments // My life, My work, Other news

Wow, i do not photograph well But I won this very nice tee shirt in a random draw after completing a user survey on Perkler.com. Yay for me! And I thought it was the right thing to do to thank the Perkler guys with a quick post.

Full disclosure: Perkler is a Pollenizer client and I do some work through Pollenizer. I haven’t personally worked on Perkler. So while I’m conflicted to a certain extent, I’m still going to recommend you check out Perkler.

If you are a member of one or more Australian loyalty programs and always feel like you’re not getting the maximum benefit of the scheme, Perkler is for you. If you’d like to compare loyalty programs against each other, this is for you.

And if you’d like to someday maybe score a natty blue tee in return for helping build a better product, then Perkler is for you.

Bonus: you’ll almost certainly look better in it than I do.

Thanks Team Perkler!

Add some polish to that presentation

// October 19th, 2009 // 0 Comments // My work, Presentation

CEOs call me all the time. Like, the other day, Tony Faure, ex-CEO of ninemsn.com.au and founder of Yahoo! Australia & NZ, called me. Actually, that’s not strictly true — I called him first for some advice, and during that call he also asked me for some help.

Tony was due to speak at Australia’s CPA Congress 2009, on the topic of What Makes A Great CEO?. Tony’s an engaging and accomplished keynote speaker and doesn’t need any coaching from me on his delivery. Instead, he was hoping I could make his PowerPoint slides look as good as he sounds.

At first, I wasn’t sure I could help. “CPA” is short for “Chartered Practicing Accountant” and frankly, I can count on two fingers the number of accountants I’d choose to have an interesting conversation with (Goche, Elias, thanks for being interesting.) CPAs aren’t an audience I easily connect with.

But I connected with Tony’s topic. While I’m not a world-class designer, sometimes a designer who understands your topic is more important than a designer who can, say, draw a horse. And I’ve been designing and presenting in PowerPoint and Keynote for a very long time.

But enough about me, let’s see what you think about me.

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What an interesting audience you are!

// September 24th, 2009 // 0 Comments // My work

I’m usually not short of ways to divert myself from the writing I don’t want to do, but this morning I found myself reading my FeedBurner stats to infer a little about the people who read Doing Words in RSS format or have it delivered by email. Now, it goes without saying that I lurv each of you madly and would happily bear your children were I blessed with a womb and functioning nipples, but I don’t indulge in a lot of navel gazing generally (at my age it’s all fluff in there) and specifically, I’m just glad to have a reader at all, much less count both of you.

But today? Well, either I really don’t want to do my work, or you’re much more interesting than I expected you to be… or both. (more…)

I can’t talk about that, I’m not an expert!

// August 24th, 2009 // 0 Comments // As featured in..., Communication, Me, My work, Presentation

Good mate Miles Campbell of TTA and I got up and presented last week on a topic neither of us has formal qualifications or professional experience in: placebos. It’s a topic of interest for both of us and it’s something we’ve done a lot of reading and talking about.

Sometimes my clients are uncomfortable with speaking or writing about topics in which they have no formal qualifications. It comes up when I’m trying to encourage them to blog or to present an opinion at an industry event. “But I’m not an expert,” they’ll cry, “I’m a businessperson, not a journalist!” That’s not a valid reason. Journalists aren’t experts — they are bound by their editorial standards to quote expert sources rather than write their own opinions precisely because they aren’t experts — but then they write editorials which are 100% opinion and these days, increasingly blend their own opinion with their news stories. Researchers and academics are in the business of having an opinion based on research but where the data is unclear, they are supposed to remain quiet… few do. Politicians, salesmen, bureaucrats and your mates down the pub are fine with giving their opinion and yet nobody requires them to be experts. I trust your opinion far more than any politician or bureaucrat, so let’s hear it!

In this talk, Miles and I have a straightforward case to make: placebos are as effective as most other medicines and you should be able to be prescribed a placebo if it is as (or more) likely to make you better. Many in the medical profession have an ethical problem with that idea, so we propose a draft ‘placebo consent form’ that you can sign and leave with your medical practitioner.

The event, Interesting South, limits speakers to eight minutes or less, and we had a lot of ground to cover in that time, so the resulting presentation is, well, perky!

Big thanks to Ian Lyons for taping our talk.  After you’ve watched the video, consider the following points for presenters:
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