ItsDevelopmental - content + technology + people

Give space, get more creative

Yesterday I saw an illustrator friend of mine Mark who has been working on some ideas for my blog design (well, the header).

I was intrigued to see what he had created because of our first meeting. In the first meeting we spent more than an hour chatting about what I enjoy doing workwise and the things I have done. Oh, and I said I needed a design for my blog that would also act as a business card design, avatars etc.

At the end of that first meeting I asked Mark what he needed from me in terms of what this blog is about and what I use it for etc, thinking he needed as much information as possible to get started. He told me he had more than enough to be getting on with and that too much detail would be too much for him to compute.

Fast forward to today when he showed me his design ideas. He described how each one had come about and that he likes to work with word/idea associations to develop ideas. I could see how every idea had developed.

I really liked the ideas and how he worked creating them. This process felt very different to the type of briefing and commissioning of designers I had done in my previous corporate roles.

In those roles the brief was so important that the designer was given little scope to get truly creative - in many senses the job was just a case of filling in the dots. In some instances committees of people were involved in the brief which complicated things even more.

I know why design briefs can be very tight - brand guidelines etc - but these become self-imposed restrictions that only serve to stifle the creative process. 

I have really enjoyed working with Mark and would advocate giving creatives space to actually get creative - that's their expertise and probably not yours.

 

When marketing copy just doesn't help - guess the product

Received a brochure through the post the other day. With it was a letter addressed to me and below is the opening line from the letter. The company logo was all over the letter so I knew what I was being sold. But, there is no excuse for flowery writing like this . . .

Inspiration. It's an ambitious word. Conjuring up thoughts of grandeur, brilliance and sway. Quite right, too. But inspiration, in any form, starts with something quite simple: a solitary idea.

And the answer is: Velux windows.

 

Nice piece of aggregation - Guardian at SXSW

The Guardian has produced a great looking page from the SXSW festival in the US which pulls together all the aggregated posts from the Tumblr blogs the writers are using to post content.

Great explanation of how it all works from the Guardia dev blog.

Thanks to Martin Belam for sharing.

Want to produce interesting content? Bring in the community DJ

 

[Pic credit: DJ XTC Only Hit Music]

I ran a track at Tru Stockholm on content. In it we discussed how to create content that people - in this case job seekers, will want to read and share.

One delegate told us that she has a fan page and posts links on it but she finds it hard to make it interesting. I asked if she would find the content she was posting interesting if she was a user and she said no.

In some senses that response goes straight to the heart of the issue. Recruiters, job boards etc think they know what users want. But invariably they don't. Take a look around and see what you think . . .

So, what do users want? Well, if you are producing content and you do not know the answer you really ought to find out. You don't want to spend time and money  on stuff no one reads and your users don't want to be invited to read, view or listen to dull things - they will get bored and won't return.

In publishing a lot of work goes into user personas and what type of content users look at elsewhere and what they would like to look at on your site. That's a good place to start - know who you are writing for and what they would like to see.

Then try things out. One think that came out of our track was this video. We wanted to create a short, fun piece of content that would gets views and get shared. OK, it hasn't had a million views but it got retweeted a lot. It was quick and easy to do.

Another great idea was that of the making yourself the community DJ. Bill Boorman dropped in to our track and talked about the work he had been doing with Hard Rock Cafe and the content on its Facebook fan page. Bill said Hard Rock treats the page as a DJ treats a party:

• Create the environment
• Create the vibe
• Don't do the dancing

This is a good approach - it is about using relevant content to get users interested - Bill has developed a content calendar for the fan page - that enables you to try things out and see what users like. DJs constantly gauge the feeling of a room and change the tempo etc to get things going. This is a good approach to content.

At the Hard Rock, thousands of people have liked the fan page and engage with the brand there - this has really helped the recruitment process - the right kind of people are now in the room (the fan page) and here they get to hear news announcements first. They are treated as special, because to the brand they are.

Outside of Facebook, always consider curating content because it brings value to the community - I did that hear with Tru London and Tru Stockholm. Michael Carty does it here on XpertHR. You will see by the stats - views, comments, RTs - whether it is valuable content. It usually is.

#Trustockholm audioboos

Many thanks to the the following six delegates to Trustockholm who gave me some of their time to share their thoughts. All six provide very useful insights. I will link you to the interviews because once there you get to see a nice picture of my interviewees and the opportunity to comment on what they said. Most importantly you can take the embed code and share the interviews where you like.

I will add these links to the #trustockholm aggregate post that I am curating.

The audioboos are:

Stefan Rizvi reflecting on #trustockholm Swedish recruitment challenges

Rob van Elberg talks relocation recruitment

Torgil Lenning on the need for Swedish recruiters, HR and candidates to embrace HR 

Jorgen Sundberg reflects on day one of #trustockholm

Gordon Lokenberg talks recruiting and augmented reality

Ralph Sijl gives his thoughts on #trustockholm

Video: #trustockholm delegates describe the unconference in one word

So here is what delegates said about the #trustockholm recruiting unconference. The idea for this came out of the content track I ran at the event. We wanted to created a bit of fun, engaging content that we would (hopefully) like to share.

We also hoped the idea might be something we could replicate at other #tru events - Amsterdam get ready.

This is an experiment so please do comment, share, embed wherever you like - we would like to see how many people we can get watching it.

For those of you who were not there - this was a spontaneous piece of filming. No one had long to think about it. I'll also try and piece together some out takes!

I am also told that Twitterhysteria is one word in Swedish. Notice that only one word out of about 20 gets repeated.

Enjoy . . .

[Thanks to Oscar Mager for the opening image]

 

Tru Stockholm - a round-up of posts and links

 

Tru Stockholm is taking place on 9 and 10th March at the Monster.se offices in Stockholm, Sweden. Here is a round-up of the content realted to the event. I'll add new posts to the bottom of the lists as and when I find them.

I created a blog for the event on posterous and will include some of the links to that in this list.

Swedish Metro reports on the unconference

Andy Headworth rounds-up day one - Day one from the #Trustockholm recruiting unconference.

My view on day one - Learning together at #trustockholm

Photos from day one from Social Honesty in their Facebook album

Jorgen Sundberg gives his slant on day one  (as a Swede now living outside of the country) - Social recruitment at #trustockholm

My post on humanising the sourcing/application process - Time to humanise the application process

My post: The global recruitment challenge for Sweden

Article on Internetworld (Sweden) - I have translated the page using Google Translate - How to recruit you in to social media

Andy Headworth does a great job summing up day two and the whole falvour of the event (check out the picture captions) - Day 2 and my overall thoughts on #trustockholm social recruiting unconference

Stefan Liden provides his thoughts on Tru Stockholm - read the article in Swedish - and  here is the Google Translate version - How will social media change the recruiting landscape and the way we look for a job

My post for UK Recruiter - The Swedish Recruitment challenge

Bill Boorman on why job seekers will always go to a job board first - Why jobseekers will always use job boards first #trustockholm

Mattias Gronborg explains why he attended the unconference and what he got out of Tru Stockholm - Unconference #Trustockholm

Audioboos

Stefan Rizvi reflecting on #trustockholm Swedish recruitment challenges

Rob van Elberg talks relocation recruitment

Torgil Lenning on the need for Swedish recruiters, HR and candidates to embrace HR 

Jorgen Sundberg reflects on day one of #trustockholm

Gordon Lokenberg talks recruiting and augmented reality

Ralph Sijl gives his thoughts on #trustockholm

Pictures

Thanks to some great snappers at the event (I am not including myself, by the way!):

Great set of pictures from Oscar Mager

220 (yes, you read that correctly) great pictures from Sara Headworth

My pictures of getting there and setting up

And some of my pictures of day one

Oscar Mager has produced a great Animoto of his pictures from Tru Stockholm

Videos

Guess who is the monster - video by Oscar Mager

Also by Oscar - video of augmented reality Pacman - which Gordon Lokenberg demonstrated to kick off Tru Stockholm

Fron the content track - delegates describe Tru Stockholm in one word

 

Funny lift sign

Fancy being a resident Tweeter for Bath Literature Festival?

Great to see something come of my post on how Bath Literature Festival could amplify its coverage using social media. The festival's Joanna Froud commented on the post and in the comment she said she would be interested to hear from anyone who fancied tweeting from next year's event . . .

If any readers of this blog would like to volunteer as our resident 'Tweeter' for 2012 please email [email protected]

If you are interested, then you now know where to go . . .

Time to amplify the Bath Literature Festival

The 2011 Bath Literature Festival ended last night. This year I attended a few sessions, all of which I enjoyed tremendously.  All the sessions I attended seemed pretty packed too so I am assuming the event was a success.

The session I attended last night was on social networking, gaming and interaction. In it, a member of the audience mentioned that the festival had a twitter hashtag (#bathlitfest). Asked by a speaker if anyone was tweeting the session no hands went up.

After the session I thanked the guy who had alerted me to the hashtag. He said it was not promoted very well on the festival website and that the hashtag did not see much action over the duration of the festival.

So there is the opportunity. The festival attracts lots of great authors and thinkers and there are some great panel discussions. This is great content for a discussion on Twitter. And this is a great opportunity to amplify the event.

But hurdles need to be removed:

• The event needs a Twitter profile so it can lead discussion and act as a hub for festival announcements
• The chair for each session needs to tell the audience there is a hashtag and that the audience is free to live tweet the event - I did not think it would be the done thing to live tweet the sessions I went to! It didn't feel like it was
• The chair of each session should bring some of the Twitter discussion and questions into the debate

The festival organiser should provide one free ticket to each session for someone who will live tweet and blog about it.

This way the event is hugely amplified and at little cost. The event's web prescence - be it a site, Twitter, Facebook etc would then pull together the conversation around the event and long after too (and who knows what comes out of those discussions).

Events such as this should remember that the event itself is the start of the conversation, not the end.