Tom Nixon

Giving the gift of clean water this Christmas

Some of my clever colleagues at Nixon McInnes created this widget to help a good friend of ours to raise money to build clean water filters in Central America. The money is going 100% direct to the good cause - he's using the money to buy the bags of cement himself.

You can grab the widget for your own blog from here

Thanks for helping!

links for 2007-11-28

• Marketing to teenagers in online virtual world Habbo Hotel @ Nixon McInnes: Social media goodness. Translated. Created. Delivered.
  Write-up of my visit to Habbo Hotel in London
  (tags: habbohotel virtualworld marketing teenagers)

links for 2007-11-27

• New media Jobs at digital agency Nixon McInnes
  (tags: nixonmcinnes jobs newmedia webdesign brighton)

Personality in leadership

Steve Roesler has an excellent example of how leaders should be using authenticity and personality.

Whether it's a marketing/PR message, or an announcement to your people, it's not enough to just give the facts. Humans are emotional as well as rational creatures and so we have to give credence to both.

Hiring a director in a democratic company

I'm still trying to figure out which blog posts I should write on our company blog and which ones should go here. So for now, here's a cross-post which is relevant to both - the process we're following to recruit a new director.

links for 2007-11-19

• The Open Rights Group : Blog Archive » Open Rights Group: Our first two years
  (tags: digital democracy)
• Amazon: Reinventing the Book | Newsweek.com
  (tags: books digital)
• Random House - Widgets and Web Services Done Right
  (tags: widget publishing randomhouse)
• Snackbyte: A view of the ecosystem
  (tags: socialmedia)

Happy belated birthday, RageBoy

I just noticed that RageBoy (aka Christopher Locke), co-author of one of the most influential books I've read since I started my business turned 60 a week ago today, the same day I turned 30. Happy birthday RB, hope you had a good one, and thanks for the inspiration you nutter :)

Personality in PR

Here are two statements from corporate PR spokespeople that I've seen recently.

The first is from 123-Reg about the downtime that their service suffered from over the weekend:

123-reg experienced intermittent performance issues on its DNS servers between late afternoon on Friday 16 November and Sunday 18 November. This meant that some customers have encountered difficulties with their domain names during this period...

We apologise to our customers for the inconvenience that the outage would have caused and we have begun an investigation to identify the cause of the failure, and any necessary actions required will be implemented without delay. Further information and updates is available from http://www.hosting-status.pipex.net

I expect this was written by a techie. It's functional, but completely devoid of personality.

The second is from Skype, commenting (or not commenting) on rumours about them being up for sale:

What would we do without rumors?! We’re sure that someone is using Skype right now to give new life to old ones and create new ones from scratch. We certainly understand it — after all, Skype is about making conversations possible. That said, we don’t comment on rumor on speculation (beyond what we’ve just said).

Two very different situations but such a great example of how you can bring your brand to life with a bit of personality, using a simple 'no comment' as an opportunity to make a statement about who you are and what you stand for. Love it.

Who are you calling evil?

Love this quote from Umair Haque:

"When I call a company evil, I'm not passing some kind of moral judgment on them. Rather, by observing their strategic choices, I am trying to predict how their outcomes will change."

Genius.

Culture of feedback

In the worst companies, employees turn up to performance reviews with their manager slightly apprehensive, wondering whether it's going to be positive or negative. They're relying on their manager to tell them how they're getting on in their job.

In the best companies, employees turn up to their performance reviews with a detailed awareness of the areas in which they're doing well and need to improve. This makes the manager's job easier and it's empowering for employees who feel in control of their own development.

The way to achieve this is through developing a culture of giving and soliciting feedback from the people around you (managers; colleagues; customers; suppliers) so you can understand where you're doing well and what you need to work on:

• Had a meeting with some colleagues? Ask for feedback.
• Completed a client project or reached a milestone? Ask for feedback.
• Inducted a new employee into the company? OK, you get the idea.

If you start asking others for feedback it becomes much easier for you to then give feedback about how they are doing, which is great for you (because they'll become more effective when they work with you in future) and also for them because they'll be able to improve.

All of this is a lot easier said than done. I've been doing my best to create a culture of feedback at our company for some time now. It's starting to take hold, and I've discovered that they key is simply to just keep reminding people about it, and make it a key feature of regular one-to-one's with the team. And of course asking for feedback myself whenever I can. I hope though that eventually the feedback habit will become so engrained that everyone does it without thinking and without the need for reminders.