The freelancer prayer…

January 31, 2011 By 2 Comments

I’d forgotten about this prayer until I happened to pick up Slaughterhouse 5 in a spare five minutes. Regardless of your views on religion, the sentiments seem pretty suitable for anyone freelancing. Apparently the ‘Serenity Prayer’ is the common name for an originally untitled work by theologian Rheinhold Niebuhr, and it was later adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous, which probably makes it even more relevant for journalists and freelancers.

God, grant me the serenity

To accept the things I cannot change;

Courage to change the things I can;

And wisdom to know the difference.

Pretty appropriate whether you’re mid-proposal, mid-negotiation, or mid-contract. It’s a reminder to me that I’m hired to offer the best possible value for my clients, even if it means that sometimes I have to find different ways to accomplish the best possible results.

It’s also useful at the point when a client might decide that they might not need you any longer, or might be looking to cut costs etc. Sometimes it’s worth putting up a passionate defence of why they should continue your contract, or offering them a different solution to lower the cost. But sometimes it’s also worth accepting that the decision is a logical one from the client’s perspective ad it’s better to part graciously on good terms without fighting it.

And I don’t think there’s ever a time when you don’t wish for a little more courage, serenity and wisdom…

Filed Under: Consultancy, Dan Thornton, Freelancing Tagged With: , , , , , ,

How soon does blogging deliver results?

January 27, 2011 By 4 Comments

One of the first questions that gets asked when blogging is mentioned as a topic is how quickly it will be successful. And the honest answer is impossible to give without several factors which are completely individual to every business. Do you already have a media presence? Can you devote time and resource to creating great content? And most importantly, what consititutes success? Are you looking to drive awareness, engagement, interaction, sales, ad revenue?

But at the same time, it’s handy to have something to benchmark against, and most online comparisons are flakey at best when compared to actual analytics. So I thought I’d share some recent figures for one of my personal projects, OnlineRaceDriver, as it recently celebrated a first anniversary.

Time by M$$MO on Flickr
Time by M$$MO on Flickr (CC Licence)

To give some context, OnlineRaceDriver and its new sister site, FPSPrestige, are experiments in extremely niche targetted content, driven partly by a shared passion for videogames by everyone involved, and partly by my desire to be able to build a small media business which allows me to continually experiment and evolve all the digital content and marketing skills any business or client can benefit from. Both are done in the spare time available to me and the other contributors, and the only financial investment has been in paying for hosting and a custom blog design (Both use the now-replaced Metro theme from StudioPress) – they both use WordPress as a free CMS system and PHPBB3 as a free forum solution, with Google Analytics providing measurement above what is available straight away from WordPress.

So, after 12 months of spare time work, how has ORD done?

  • 215 Posts (The biggest sign of the time constraints – ideally it should be a lot more!)
  • 204 Comments (Just under one comment per post isn’t too bad..)
  • 46,831 Page Views (Could have been more with a little more focus on high traffic posts and promotion)
  • 30,705 Unique Visitors (Again, this is an area where we probably could have done a lot more with more time)
  • 1,100+ Youtube Views (This is all from press release videos, and is a somewhat painful process a lot of the time!)
  • 59 Facebook Fans (The biggest challenge here is that Facebook Notes is increasingly broken, requiring manual updates which sometimes get forgotten!)
  • Cited as a reference source on Wikipedia (One of the nicest recent developments has been that someone working on Wikipedia has started referencing some of our breaking news on the site)

In terms of monthly figures, in the first month of ORD we had:

  • 334 Visits
  • 713 Page Views
  • 205 Unique Visitors

And 12 months later, and with 5 more days to go in January, we’ve had:

  • 4,175 Visits (Up 1,150%)
  • 5,352 Page Views (Up 650%)
  • 3,678 Unique Visitors (Up 1,694%)

1000% growth for something in a very experimental and low-key first 12 months isn’t too bad. Good enough that FPSPrestige launched and has achieved slightly better figures in its first month.

There’s no real conclusion here – in terms of success, both sites are around where I expected and hoped in the first 12 months, and all the graphs are ‘up and to the right’, so I’m happy there’s a lot more to come, even as I roll out more features (The forums for both sites have just launched, for example).

crowdpleaserbygematrium
The queue to join the new forums (Image by Gematrium on Flickr – CC Licence)

But as a simple guide – if as a small business with no budget, you could do something which puts your brand in front of 4000+ relevant people every month in exchange for some time, that could really start to change things. If you leveraged all the connections you have, that could change things a bit more. Through in some relevant promotion, and that moves it on further…

I recently scared myself when I realised that across this site and the other 3 or 4 main sites I’m playing with in my spare time, one bloke at his kitchen table now reaches over 10,000 people and growing every month.And with constant attention and improvement that number will hopefully keep growing. Of course, 10, 20, or 500,000 visitors might make a ‘successful’ website, but it doesn’t make a successful business… That’s another piece of the puzzle…

Filed Under: Blogging, Digital Publishing, journalism, social media marketing, strategy, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Ebooks evolving: TEDBooks launch as Kindle Singles

January 26, 2011 By 1 Comment

The launch of Amazon’s Kindle Singles has been accompanied by the launch of TEDBooks – short nonfiction works designed for digital distribution by following the type of idea which has resonated from the global series of TEDTalks, and presenting it in less than 20,000 words, which is enough for a single sitting. And you can read them via any device with a Kindle App: iPad, Mac, PC, Android, iPhone, Blackberry and Windows 7 smartphones, as well as the Kindle itself.

Longer than a typical magazine article, but shorter than your typical book, it’s an interesting approach which sees three books available at launch for $2.99. The line-up is The Happiness Manifesto: How Nations and People Can Nurture Well-Being by Nic Marks, Dangerism: Why We Worry About the Wrong Things, and What It’s Doing to Our Kids by Gever Tulley, and Homo Evolutis: Please Meet the Next Human Species by Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullan.

The presumption behind the books is that their length and cost will see people choose them in preference to magazines or other short entertaining diversions, and I think it’s a fair gamble to make. I don’t think it would work for everyone, but the ideas which are shared at TED events are always interesting, engaging and designed for you to want more. It also means I can self-serve myself the topics I really want to know about, rather than paying a few dollars or pounds more for a magazine, which often contains things that I either don’t care about or don’t read if time is short.

It’s interesting to see projects like this, and Seth Godin’s The Domino Project, all taking a new look at how publishing works in a digital world, and pretty much starting from scratch and building from there. Does a book need to be a certain minimum length? Does it need a traditional print version, or the standard marketing and promotion? Will people go for something for a couple of quid or bucks, and will they choose that over a longer, more general, and more expensive magazine?

It’s also interesting that these ideas are coming Amazon, TED and Seth Godin, not a traditional book publisher. That’s not to say traditional publishers aren’t changing, but it seems like starting from a fresh perspective could reveal a lot more about the future…

(Incidentally, an alternative source of TED inspiration are the videos of TEDTalks available via Youtube. I can’t recommend it highly enough if you fancy watching talks ranging from the likes of Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Richard Dawkins through to the likes of Christoper ‘Moot’ Poole – the founder of 4Chan.)

(And if you’re intrigued or interested in what books I’m currently planning to obtain for myself, here’s my current tech/marketing/digital culture wishlist on Amazon – this isn’t a cheap ploy for presents (Although they’re always nice), but it’s the one place I’ve gone to the trouble of updating recently with recommended additions to anyone’s library. I’ll have to go back through the various book sharing social networks to provide a complete list of everything already assimiliated. Anyone got any recommendations?)

Filed Under: Books, Digital Publishing, innovation, Recommended Books Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Can you handle the data?

January 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Two of the biggest recent trends for sharing and marketing content have been infographics and data visualisations. Not a day goes by without an infographic being shared which shows social networking stats, mobile stats, stats about stats and other stats in a graphical form. They’re useful for raising awareness, driving some direct traffic, and have also been used to create backlinks to sites by including the details in any embed code which is being used.

The other side of the graphical data coin is data visualisations, whether they’re being produced as bespoke creations by someone like David McCandless, or as entirely automated processes, such as LinkedIn Labs new InMaps, which visualises all the professional networks you’ve created by connecting with other people on LinkedIn. Allow them access to your account and you get a lovely spirograph type affair.

Dan Thornton's LinkedIn Network Visualised

Now, it’s definitely very pretty, but it’s hard to define how to use it effectively to achieve anything. While I may just be a grumpy writer, data visualisations theoretically allow anyone with the some programming ability to produce them, and there are increasing ways to get hold of interesting data and repurpose it.

In the case of infographics, my annoyance is usually if I’m on a slow connection and waiting ages to see a collection of numbers which could have also been put into text, and would then allow me to quote (as fair use and with links back) without having to retype it all in. With data visualisation tools, my annoyance is that sometimes they’re worth doing just to make something you could hang on a wall but often they don’t go beyond that. And I’m not knocking data as art, but take the LinkedIn example.

I’ve got a shedload of contacts on LinkedIn, and I can now see areas where there could be some mutual benefits in introducing people from one apparently siloed area to another. That’s quite useful, although the sheer number of people on that graph makes it still difficult to see who I should be introducing to other people.

So why not make it so I can drag and drop people to create the introductions, rather than going back into LinkedIn, finding person A, and then finding person B?

There’s a handy sidebar if you click on a name, which brings up their mini-profile, but that’s just giving me more information, not ways to do anything with it.

And it appears that aside from the light green and purple extrusions, which represent networks predominantly from Bauer Media and Absolute Radio, everyone else I know is in a big jumble of social media/marketing/PR/mobile – which partly makes sense because of the ultimately quite small world of digital technology in the UK, but is also a real pain to navigate and to be unable to recategorise.

There are two battles here:

1. The battle to make more and more data available in an open way for people to be able to use – even data which traditionally may have seemed highly secretive. I’m not suggesting you share absolutely everything to anyone, but there’s bound to be masses of information you’re currently hoarding and not using which could result in important business insights if someone externally started to play around with it and discover meaning from it.

2. The battle to utilise that data in more meaningful ways. Mapping and graphing are useful, and the interconnectedness of a lot of data provides a massive challenge, but unless you’re purely doing it as an artistic endeavour, then try to let me at least do something with it? It doesn’t have to be rocket science, but if you’ve produced something like InMaps, just pause and imagine the first response people are going to have when they see it, and the first thing that will spring into their mind to try and do with it.

Filed Under: Content Marketing, innovation, social networks, Useful Tools Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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