I've been representing Ottimo Digital at a few more networking events than usual in recent weeks and I've been pleasantly surprised by the results. I can say that in the last half a dozen events I've attended we've picked up three new customers, all of whom have purchased from us more than once. I hope that these will be long standing and profitable relationships. A couple of them are also reciprocal, with these new contacts becoming our customers and suppliers. 

I admit I haven't always been a fan of networking. Many events I've attended, particularly facilitated networking breakfasts, can be too rigid and one-way. Typically you get a couple of minutes to make your pitch to a table of nine others, before moving on.  The problem with this is that no one is really listening. It's not because people aren't interested, they are just too busy thinking about what they're going to say to the table when it's their turn. If you've ever made a speech at a wedding you'll know that it's pretty hard to concentrate on or enjoy the speeches before yours!

The most productive part of this type of event for me is before the actual 'networking' starts. You get a reasonable amount of time on the first table whilst eating breakfast to have a conversation with people and I think that's where you're most likely to make connections that may lead to a business relationship. For this reason alone facilitated breakfasts are worth attending, but should probably be included as part of a wider mix of events.

There are also more 'closed' networking clubs like BNI and Action Business Club, where entry is by invitation and the focus is on everyone in the group helping to refer business to each other and using their own networks to connect the members with other people. I think this format can work well, but you have to make a commitment to attend each week for it to be worthwhile.

I attended Wales' first Business Biscotti event at the Vale Resort a couple of weeks ago, and this was certainly a refreshing change.  It's a drop in session that runs 9am-12pm and is free to attend. There's no rigid structure, just a bunch of people chatting about what they do.  You simply show up and join the conversation.  I found this a really natural and genuine way to network with people and whilst it hasn't yet resulted in any new business, I made some good connections and it's just a matter of time before those become fruitful in some way.

One of the difficulties with networking is that it's hard for businesses to see what the ROI will be given the time spent. I admit these events can be time consuming, not to mention tiring. Standing in a room for 3 hours chatting to dozens of people you've never met requires a lot of energy!

You have to accept it as an activity that might not bring consistent results every time. But the fact that you're present at any networking event immediately opens you up to opportunities that you would otherwise not have. You might learn a piece of news about a competitor, or meet someone with whom you have a mutual interest or connection. I think that in itself is enough of a reason to include some networking as part of your overall marketing plan.

By the way, the next Business Biscotti event is on Thursday 2nd June at the Vale Hotel - I'll see you there.

It's official, I'm now a Google Apps authorised reseller! I recently completed a number Google Apps account migrations to give me eligibility for the reseller program, and I proudly present my new badge ;-)

I've been a strong advocate of cloud based computing services for some time and Google Apps is no exception. For those of you unfamliar, Google Apps is another way to host and run your company emails, contacts and calendar. You keep your same company email address, but you route your email via Google's servers. Everything gets backed up there, and all of your devices (PC, Laptop, Phone) stay in sync. You also get web based email via Gmail.

It also includes some added features for business like Google Docs. Google Docs is a great collaborative platform which allows you to create, share and edit Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents (in Google Docs format).

And although it probably isn't the primary consideration for busines users, it's also cost effective at around £35 per user per annum.

We've been running Google Apps in our own businesses for almost two years now and the experience has been positive. Our email system is robust, everything's in sync and we're safe in the knowledge that our data is both secure and always backed up.

As a previous user of Microsoft Exchange Server, my view is that it is overkill for the needs of most small businesses. It also gives you an immediate dependency on a piece of hardware that sits in the broom cupboard of your office. This exposes you to all kinds of risks: faults, fire, theft and so on. I know from personal experience that that these risks are very real. We once had a power surge at our office (it smoked one of the hard drives of the server) and our whole email system went down for two days whilst we awaited its repair.

There's also the issue of back ups - what happens if your server gets stolen or goes up in smoke? The idea of having to take a back up off site with you every day is daunting - who really has time for that? 

So, based on my experience I think Google Apps is a great solution for small business users.

If you're interested in Google Apps for your business or have any questions about the best way to migrate from MS Exchange or any other email platform, just let me know via the comments.

A couple of my clients have asked me recently how they can set a more memorable address for their organisation's Facebook Page. I thought I'd write this short how-to post as (unlike with your personal Facebook page) there is no obvious guidance from within the Facebook Pages admin about how you can do this. When you set up your Facebook community, business or fan page you're assigned a long and quite cumbersome address. In the case of the Welbodi Partnership (a Children's charity based in Sierra Leone), it looks like this:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Welbodi-Partnership/199851390685

Setting a custom address helps get rid of the long page number and also the 'pages' part of the URL so it makes the address a lot cleaner and easer for people to remember. It's also makes linking to your Facebook Page a lot easier. In the case of the charity (they're another client incidentally so I'll be sending them a link to this post :-) I'd imagine they'd probably want to set it so something like this:

http://www.facebook.com/TheWelbodiPartnership (I know, it's a dead link :-)

So here's how.

1. Log into your Facebook account. This needs to be the account from which you have Admin access to your Facebook Page.

2. Now click Adverts and Pages from the left hand menu and choose the page for which you want to set the custom address (you may have several!).

3. Now you need to go to http://www.facebook.com/username although it might be simpler to just type this address into your browser if you want to stay on the same window.

4. Now follow a couple of simple instructions to choose your address, check its availability and you're done! Be sure to choose your name carefully as you can't change it once it's set.

Hope it's useful!

[UPDATE]

One glaring omission from this post is that you need to have 25 people or more who 'Like' your page in order to be able to create a custom address! Don't worry if you don't have that many yet, you'll get there!

I've spoken to several friends in the last few weeks who tell me they're working 14+ hours a day and have been for some time.The pattern shows little sign of improving in the near future. I wanted to write this post to try to answer the obvious question: why? Most of the people I know tell me it's expected, that it's part of the company culture to work these hours and most of their superiors are leading by example.

My view is that these companies are broken.These are not small businesses or even medium sized corporates. They are blue chips delivering not Millions but Billions of pounds of annual profits.  Where does this kind of culture come from, and why do people think they're setting a good example to their peers by adopting it? Some friends tell me it's down to sheer volume of work, which is another problem! These companies should be employing more staff to combat this and give their employees a better overall quality of life. But that would mean smaller profits (at least in the short term) which makes it an unappealing option for companies that have shareholders to please.

I'm not saying that we should be shy of challenging and productive work. I've been doing my own thing for 10 years and I've worked late nights, weekends and even holidays when I've needed to. But those longer hours were always with a view to completing an important piece of work which either couldn't wait or was of wider importance in helping me to achieve a goal or the business to reach an important milestone. I know from experience that this kind of work level cannot be sustained for long periods and still be effective. You simply start to burn out, you're less productive and you make mistakes. A task that takes you 3 hours to complete at the end of a long day could easily have been completed in half the time the following morning given an early finish and a good night's sleep.

The main impact of this continuous and never ending toil is on your personal time. Your evenings for personal and family time are being completely erroded. What if you decided to get a job in a company that had a different culture. One that didn't require such punishing hours and gave you the work-life balance that you probably crave? I know, I haven't mentioned the M word yet. All of the people I'm referring to consider themselves well paid and would argue that a less demanding job would in turn pay them less. In general they're probably right (although that in itself is wrong isn't it?).  But are they really that well paid considering the amount of effort they're putting in and the time they're sacrificing? 

I think there are exceptions to the rule. 37 Signals, a company based in Chicago that builds web applications, has long been an advocate of 'normal' working hours, and isn't a huge fan of workaholics. That's just one example but there are other companies out there that value talent and the wellbeing of their employees.

What if (having found a job in a company with no expectation of tortuous working hours) you used some of your new found spare time to start doing something for yourself? It doesn't have to be a business, that's not for everyone. It could just be something you're passionate about like pursuing a hobby or interest, or taking a college course. Take 15 minutes out of your day and watch this talk by Gary Vaynerchuk. He makes a pretty passionate case for whay we should all be doing this!

You're probably thinking this post contains more questions than answers! But I think that's what this is about. Sometimes you've got to question why you're doing what you're doing (the answer is sure to have money in the sentence!) and most importantly how you value your own time and particularly your personal time.  It may not be so much about what you would lose financially if you chose a slightly different path, but what you might gain personally, and the opportunities that you're probably missing out on right now by sticking with the status quo.

It's just a quick post to say that I feel lucky. I often think it, although I'm probably not grateful enough for it sometimes. It's easy to take things for granted isn't it? I have a great family (now including a newborn son!), lots of fantastic friends, I really enjoy my work and its challenges and we live in a wonderful part of the world.  It's so easy to get caught up in the ever faster pace of everyday life, never quite being content with what you've got.  But sometimes I think it's important to remember what you're thankful for.

What are you thankful for? Go on, write it down! :-)

So I've recently launched this blog and one of the things I agonised over (clearly too much, it's 2010 which makes me slightly behind the curve!) was which platform to use. There are so many different ones, many of them free, that I spent more time as the kid in the sweet shop than I did actually launching something and putting finger to keyboard.

These are the four blogging platforms that I looked at before launching this one, and I wanted to share my experiences and talk about the features that led me to finally publishing my content on one of them.

WordPress

WordPress is the daddy, the world's largest blogging engine which is available free as a yourname.wordpress.com account (but costs if you want to host with them using a custom domain) or as an open source download to install on your own site.  So this was where I started, and I went with a custom install. Have a look at nicklindwall.co.uk/blog to see how far I got.  There's no doubting WordPress is probably the most powerful and sophisticated blogging engine out there - I've used it for company blogs in the past and it has worked well, but I think for a personal blog there's just too much to draw your attention to the aesthetics and presentation of your blog and less to focus the mind on content creation. So I spent some time dipping in and out of WordPress, most of this involved choosing the right theme (there are thousands!) and then fiddling with various widgets. This was going to be amazing: there would be a social widget with links to all of my online profiles, an in-page Flickr feed, a box of my latest tweets and more.  But clearly lacking was any actual blog content. Don't get me wrong, I think WordPress is awesome, but I'd consider it more for the corporate blog where you're using a custom stylesheet and you've got a designer/developer to handle the integration for you.  The fact that they charge for a custom domain set up also makes it less attractive for the individual blogger.

Blogger

I don't think Blogger have changed their home page much since Google opened its corporate purse and swallowed up them a few years ago. And I think the same can be said for its admin panel, which is frankly from the dark ages and dog ugly.  There wasn't much attracting me to Blogger apart from the possible SEO benefits. Being owned by Google I've heard that posts from Blogger are usually indexed on Google superfast, often within seconds of being published. That wasn't enough of a pull for me as an individual given that the general consensus is on other platforms being indexed relatively quickly anyhow.

Tumblr

I started using Tumblr a few weeks ago for our son Jack's Photo Diary and I really rate it. The simplicity of posting is great and they have a lovely iPhone app which we use to post a photo each day in less than a minute. We also found a really cool theme designed by Nikki Brion which is perfect for a baby blog! But a Tubmlr Blog (or Tumblelog as they're known) doesn't work entirely like a conventional Blog. Comments aren't enabled as standard, you have to install Disqus, which whilst easy enough turned out to be a bit clunky on the theme we were using and the number of comments never got presented with each post, so you couldn't tell if there were any comments or not. Whilst comments were less important for the photo diary I considered them an important part of my personal blog and wanted to make commenting as simple as possible. There are also other features like Follow and Reblog which are quite specific to the Tumblr community, which is fine, but as I don't personally know any Tumblr users I didn't think they would give my blog much added value.

And finally...Posterous

I'd set up my Posterous account some time ago, but left it dormant to go and play around with WordPress! I returned to it 48 hours ago and launched this blog earlier today, which gives some indication of how simple it was to get up and running with a nice theme, a custom hosted domain (for free), a profile and some content.

Posting by Email (or anywhere for that matter)

Looking back, most of the writing I've done in my job and otherwise has been in an email client like Outlook, so I liked the idea of a platform that allows posting by email.  Sure, most of the platforms above have this feature, but there's always some long winded and complex email address to remember for email posts (nick+blog852391722@worpress.com - you get the picture). In Posterous I can just define the email accounts that I want to post from, send everything to post@posterous.com and they do the rest. I also really liked the Autopost feature, which allows me to set up automatic tweeting, facebooking, buzzing and the like to a huge number of networks (including Tumblr ironically :-). This was a doddle to set up and allows me to splatter most of the internet with my post the moment I hit publish.

So Far...

...so good. I'm enjoying using Posterous. The control panel has a great user interface and the iPhone app, whilst I haven't had much call to use it yet, looks pretty neat and easy to use for the fundamental parts of managing my blog. I'll keep you Posted (I know) on my findings and of course any pitfalls that I come accross in due course.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the type of blog you chose and why - comments are officially open!

Well, this has been a long time coming!

Setting up a personal blog has been a permanent fixutre on my to do list for the last two years. Believe me I've tried. I have toiled over which blogging platform to use (another post coming very soon about that), been through endless templates and themes trying to choose the right 'look', pondered over whether to use a custom domain name (it is my 'Personal Brand' after all!) or just roll with nicklindwall.name-of-blog-platform.com and so on. It has all boiled down to a lot of procrastination and not a lot of writing. 

I've finally settled on a Posterous blog, and here it is - my little space on the web! I'm really excited about being able to share my everyday thoughts and views with the web and I hope blogging will help to give me some clarity on what's in my head at any given time (I've got to make sense of it somehow). I think we are in the middle of a hugely exciting time on the web and having a blog is now just one of a million ways in which we can take part in the sharing game.

I hope you'll enjoy reading - I'm looking forward to sharing my stuff with you (and to being cut down to size every now and again!). I pledge to keep the content varied and I'll try to not to get too geeky too often.

Better late than never I guess ;-)

Nick