Twitter influence and follower growth

There are several classic cliché’s such as “money makes money” and “success breeds success” that basically mean the more you have of something the more you get. Normally I would dispute these concepts but I am starting to question my personal perspectives.

Two things have happened to make this happen. Firstly I spent an hour or so finding as many active Twitters from Melbourne to find out more about what is happening locally and secondly the launch of TwitterPoster Australia. Key here is TwitterPoster rates people with more followers as having a greater influence.

Why are these things important? A proportion of the Melbourne Twitters I “friended” also friended me and this in turn increased my so called influence on TwitterPoster, which drove more friends and the spiral began.

It took almost 6 months to get the first 100, but in 3 weeks my followers have grown from around 180 to over 330. Ok for some with 1,000’s of followers this is nothing but for an average shmuck like me it is very cool.

But really what has changed? Not a lot, other than another 150 people listening to my Twitter dribble.

The next trick is to work out what to do, if anything, with all this influence :-). Actually that starts to move into personal branding which is a whole other post.

Wordcamp Melbourne

Yesterday was Wordcamp Melbourne 2007. I arrived a few hours late, overslept a long story, but what I did see was great. Some of the highlights for me:-

Darren Rowse: Good insight into the different types of ads and how the perform on different types of blogs. I need to think through some of these things and will probably make a few changes.

Christine Davis: Tags vs Categories finally I now understand! Someone from the audience provided a great analogy categories are like chapters in a book, where as tags are the index at the back of the book. Now I need to add tags into this blog.

Alister Cameron: CSS rocks! Alister showed us how you can make major changes to your blog without hacking in PHP (which is what I do) all by using CS. He specifically spoke about a theme called SandBox, I will be looking at this carefully in the coming weeks. To use the theme I had to upgrade my blog, and I have begun playing with Widgets on my sidebar.

Roundtables: I sat in on 2 different roundtables, the first was open topic so we discussed tags, mobile web, broadband, mesh networks, OLPC. Really good discussion and very hard to summarise other than the world is changing! The second was on blogging as the new media ok topic but nothing really to latch onto to discussion.

Panel: Alister, James, Christine and Alex Sheils sat down for a panel discussion at the end. Slow to get going, aren’t they always, but gathered momentum as things progressed. Topics included will wordpress.com be sold, no according to Alex but yes they have been approached, and does RSS need to be expanded.

There are photos up on Flickr of the day.

Once again thanks to James Farmer for organising and Simon Chen of Eight Black for the sponsorship.

WordCamp Melbourne this weekend

Australian WordPress evangelist, Edublogs owner, James Farmer has setup up WordCamp Melbourne for this weekend, unfortunately if you have not already registered you will not be able to attend now as it is sold out!

The day kicks off at 11am with drinks and a pre camp chat, then we have some amazing speakers. Alex Shiels from Automattic, Darren Rowse of Problogger, Christine Davis, neato.co.nz and Alister Cameron a Blogologist, Simon Chen Eight Black (sponsor) and of course James Farmer. There will also be roundtables and lots of corridor discussions.

If you are attending make sure you bring your digital camera, laptop, video, audio recording device to create content, still awaiting word from James on a common tag for now maybe WordCamp with another tag of Melbourne?

You can also follow the action via Twitter by following WordCampMelb, and if I get motivated a bit of live blogging.

Organisational change management

While there are lots of reasons for project failures, both IT and non IT, a major reason is poor execution of organisational change management. During the implementation of the project each individual impacted needs to come to terms with the change. Back in 2000 William Bridges and Susan Mitchell Bridges provided a good way of looking at change in their article on Leader to Leader, Leading Transition: A New Model for Change. They highlighted 3 phases people transition through during change, I have similar before so I am fairly sure the are not the original authors but I just cannot find the original reference, The phases are:

  1. Saying Goodbye
  2. Shifting to Neutral
  3. Moving Forward

The first phase is where you have to saying goodbye to the way things were, for many the hardest part!

The second phase is when people basically come to a complete stop they don’t go forward or back. They are overcome by the fear, uncertainty and confusion of the change and this can take all of their time and energy.

Remember many people fail to let go, or fail to see through the haze in the neutral zone but many also are scared of moving forward especially in organisations that penalise mistakes. They just get stuck!

The final phase is moving forward when people begin to behave in the new ways and adapt to the change. Only once people are at this stage will your project be a success in their eyes, too many people failing to get to this stage will result in total project failure.

The life of being small

We all know that work life balance is important, so much as been written about it in all forms of media that I suspect we have almost become immune to the message. As a reminder Lee Lefever (CommonCraft) posted about a story we have all heard before.

Small town fisherman gets told by a Harvard MBA to work hard for 25 years to build a business, move to the big city, sell for millions, so he can have the life he already has. D’oh!!

Lee then summarises:-

It’s all about lifestyle and doing what you love on a day-to-day basis. We will continue to work hard and push for success, but at the same time, build a business that supports the life that we want right now, not in 30 years.

Generation Y

Over the last couple of days I have been listening to a 3 part series from CIO Live on Generation Y in the IT industry (1, 2, 3) based on interviews with Foster Frontier’s Stuart Guest-Smith, a good listen. The last episode touched on several issues organisations need to be addressed to attract Gen Y’s.

One of interest was Stuart’s view that given the relative short lengths of employment Gen Y tend to exhibit, compared to other generations, we need to reduce the cost of recruitment. Makes sense. This means sorting out the poor and time consuming recruitment practices which scares many Gen Y’s away. The trick is to ensure the organisation’s needs are meet, like hiring the right person, and at the same time trying to make the process attractive to the candidate.

One idea Stuart proposed was to replace the early phase formal interview with a coffee discussion between the manager and candidate. This allows both sides to explore the benefits of working together. This should not be an all too foreign idea for recruiters as it happens at the the very senior levels all the time.

WordCamp Melbourne

James Farmer, edublogs.org fame, is organising a WordCamp for Melbourne on Saturday 17th November.

He has secured a sponsor, Eight Black, who incidentally are support lots of activities down in Melbourne, so if you need any form of online marketing campaigns check them out! Got a venue WaterMark Bar, and a program that looks good.

The only thing we need now are a few more participants.

If you are in Melbourne and have anything to do with WordPress come along and join us.

Felt like blogging, but the feeling passed

It is interesting the change Twitter has made to my mindset on blogging. I basically I think of something, think can I express the idea or even a portion of the idea in 140 characters. If yes it goes to Twitter, otherwise I turn to the blog.  Once I get to the blog I find the whole medium difficult to come to terms with.

Not sure why, but blogging feels all formal now.

So many people seem to be focused on the With vs Because of blogging. It seems more people want to make money with blogging vs making money because of their blog.

Just a thought that didn’t fit in 140 characters.

(Oh also the fun of Facebook seems to be reducing, by 2008 there will be something else new.)

Free the internet

For the last few years I have wanted to setup a free community access point, but not been able to find the right way to do it. Earlier this week I read about Lachlan Hardy using Meraki Mini’s to do just that in Sydney and then his bold idea to do a bulk order for Sydneysiders. He has answered many questions on his blog, so check it out.

Basically you plug them in, quick config and then they operate as a mesh WiFi network allow both public and private access to the network. You get to limit overall bandwidth allocated to free users, ban users that abuse the system, but you cannot a download limit by users.

But the benefits are huge.

But consider this, the true benefits of a mesh network don’t lie in making a sexy little hardware system for your personal use. The benefits come when you convince your neighbours to do it too. And then you and they convince their neighbours. And before you know it, you have free wifi network access at that cafe on the corner or that park around the block with the cool bench. That’s just the start of the vision Mark Pesce was talking about at Web Directions. That’s just the start of everything that’s coming

Convince your friends. Convince your families. Buy them for friends’ birthdays. Talk to the folks in the local cafes, restaurants and community stores. Give one to your grandma. Tell the user groups you belong to

Check out their web site for more details.

I kind of missed his order but still want to do the same thing. So if you are in Melbourne and want one, drop me a line by 25 Oct and I will add you to my order. Each mini costs $US49, and if I get an order for 10+ we should be able to get the shipping down to a reasonable level, say $US12-15 per device vs $US30.

How important is user experience?

Very! Critical!

I have always believed that user experience is one of the most critical aspects to all products and services, include software. Which is why when I purchased my Gapingvoid cards a couple of weeks ago I picked this design.

A positive user experience makes not only initial deployment but also ongoing support of an application easier. In summary benefits of a positive user experience are:

  • Less training
  • Less resistance to using new tools
  • Less ongoing support
  • Happy users, managers, executives, support teams and project teams

As if we needed further that the user experience matters the CedarCrestone 2007–2008 HR Systems Survey, 10th Annual Edition found that organisations that took the time to improve end user experience actually had a higher operating income growth over ones that did not. Only 22.5% of survey respondents had specific plans to improve the user experience within their HR application environment. I suspect there is no direct link between the two but it further highlights that organisations who are thought leaders in their HR practices have higher revenues.

Bottom line user experience matters!