Tom Nixon

links for 2008-02-26

• A guide to Social Media opportunities for Travel and Tourism | Katie Lips: Social Media Strategist
  (tags: socialmedia travel tourism)

Star pupils and corporate drones

The students who did well at my school:

• Sat quietly in class and didn’t answer back
• Always completed every homework assignment they were given
• Spent a long time on their homework
• Were always on time for class

These people are the corporate drones of today. Sure, you need a bunch of them in a business, but you also need people who:

• Ask 'why?' and hold those around them (in all directions on the org chart) to account
• Only work on tasks that they feel have value
• Spend the minimum amount of time on each task so they can move on to the next thing
• Work when they need to work, often in peaks and troughs

These are the people who change things and take a company forward.

The anti-retainer (random idea of the day)

Retainer:

• Fixed cost per month;
• Agency reports on time spent on that account each month;
• Client continues to pay up until the relationship has run its course

Anti-retainer:

• Monthly budget limit agreed by client and agency;
• Agency reports on results and tangible progress achieved each month;
• Client pays whatever they feel the results and progress are worth, up to the budget limit;
• Either party can cancel if the deal becomes not worthwhile.

Could this work? Is there a better anti-retainer model?

If the iPhone is Sputnik, what will the Shuttle be like?

This is a really cool glimpse of the future of mobile from Chris Messina which I found whilst searching for something completely different, as you do:

"In the future, you will buy a cellphone-like device. It will have a connection to the internet, no matter what. And it’ll probably be powered over the air. The device will be tradeable with your friends and will retain no solid-state memory. You literally could pick up a device on a park bench, login with your OpenID (IP-routed people, right?) from any number of service providers (though the best ones will be provided by the credit card companies). Your user data will live in the cloud and be delivered in bursts via myriad APIs strung together and then authorized with OAuth to accomplish specific tasks as they manifest. If you want to make a phone call, you call up the function on the touch screen and it’s all web-based, and looks and behaves natively. Your address book lives in Google-land on some server, and not in the phone. You start typing someone’s name and not only does it pull the latest photos of the first five to ten people it matches, but it does so in a distributed fashion, plucking the data from hcards across the web, grabbing both the most up-to-date contact information, the person’s hcalendar availability and their presence. It’s basically an IM-style buddy list for presence, and the data never grows old and never goes stale. Instead of just seeing someone’s inert photo when you bring up their record in your address book, you see all manner of social and presence data. Hell, you might even get a picture of their current location. This is the lowercase semantic web in action where the people who still hold on to figments of their privacy will become increasingly marginalized through obfuscation and increasingly invisible to the network. I don’t have an answer for this or a moral judgement on it; it’s going to happen one way or another."

Read the full article.

A sustainable future: The ultimate purpose for social media?

Will has kicked off what promises to be an interesting discussion about purpose on the Nixon McInnes blog, posing the question 'What is social media for?'.

We want to think BIG with this, and I reckon that the place to start is in considering how we can work towards a sustainable future.

This TED video is an inspiring introduction to the subject. Please check it out then head over to the NM blog and leave your thoughts in the comments.

Guaranteed advice for never losing a creative pitch

I've never been a fan of pitching for new business, but I now have a guaranteed formula for never losing a pitch. My advice is simple: Don't do it!

After losing a pitch this week, I've decided that it'll be my last. I'm simply not prepared to put together a creative pitch, unpaid, for any client no matter how interesting the project might be. It's quite simply a bad way for clients to select a supplier, and a bad way for an agency to spend its limited sales and marketing budget. I'd rather put the money into small unpaid projects that raise our profile and do something interesting/useful, than into creative work that will be completely wasted if the client makes an arbitrary decision to go with someone else.

I feel a real sense of relief having come to this decision. I wish I had made it years ago.

Your chance to start reading Umair from the top

OK, I know I bang on about Umair Haque's writing a lot, but the reason I'm bringing this up again is that Umair has just begun blogging at HarvardBusiness.org 'to help frame and introduce many of the ideas in my forthcoming book.'

This is a fantastic opportunity for anyone not familiar with Umair's unique angle on business to get started. He's kicked off with an excellent post about Corporate DNA. Absolutely essential reading - make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed.

I can't wait for the book.

Why businesses must allow Facebook at work

I was asked to write a guest article for mad.co.uk responding to the ridiculous claims about how much money is being 'lost' by people using social networks at work. Let me know what you think.

links for 2008-02-04

• How Yahoo! Can Get Out Of The Microsoft Bear Hug
  Some excellent analysis and ideas from Fred about what Yahoo! could do instead of being swallowed by Microsoft.
  (tags: yahoo microsoft)

links for 2008-02-03

• How Real Was the Prosperity?
  (tags: economy macropalypse banking)
• newcritics - » The Reblog Button
  (tags: socialmedia blogging reblog tumblr)
• A decentralized Twitter? (Scripting News)
  (tags: twitter socialnetwork decentralisation)
• Portable social networks - brian oberkirch
  Brian has been doing some good thinking about decentralised social networks - this is the hub page for his posts about this
  (tags: socialnetwork decentralised)
• Tiled poster prints
  (tags: art)