Hire Great People and give them freedom to be awesome

Andrew Mason, Groupon

I’ve been working with a lot of different brands lately, developing ways in which they can increase their user-engagement and brand visibility. It amazes me that so many content-orientated brands aren’t trying harder to leverage social media. BBC News is a good example, they are perfectly positioned to gain some serious traction in social but they’re missing a trick, here’s a few things I would change…

BBC iD

This is by far the biggest and most annoying problem with the existing setup. Forcing users to register for BBC iD to leave comments creates an unnecessary barrier to entry. Moreover one of the best things to come from wide-spread social adoption is services like Facebook Connect & the ability to offer users an extremely condensed sign up process (as well as being able to eliminate large parts of your codebase).

Integration is easy and services like Techlightenment’s Social CRM will provide far more insight into demographics & user-interest than a sign-up form ever could.

Sharing’s caring

The BBC have buttons that enable sharing to both Twitter & Facebook, with many articles receiving 100′s of shares. The current ‘Post to Wall’ Facebook share works but the Like button is a brand unto itself (it’s responsible for more than 65M ‘Likes’ in the past 24 hours). Don’t try & re-invent the wheel, people are able to spot the like button almost subconsciously these days and by changing the icon you’re reducing the number of conversions.

There’s an issue with the positioning of the lower share-bar as well, often it sits far below the bottom of the article, especially those with comments enabled. In this example it sits just over 2300px away from the last word.

Condensing related content

Using 1100 pixels to push related content is really inefficient. I’m not debating the massive benefits to promoting related content, however there are lots of more efficient ways the space could be used, a tabbed area, sticky widget in the sidebar that follows the user down the page or something that pops out when the user gets to the end of the article (like on Mashable).

Integrating Facebook Comments

Facebook comments are understated genius. They take the conversation about your product out & into the wild – it’s a great way to drive engagement. Even the threaded comments from FB are displayed back on your site. The only big downside is that they don’t have (to my knowledge) any SEO benefit… It would be a really interesting A/B experiment.

In a nut shell there would be several benefits to BBC News moving BBC iD to Facebook Connect…

• Decreased registration barrier
• Access to social graph data
• Increased social distribution
• Seriously personalised experiences – I didn’t really touch on this but if you’re integrating FB connect there are lots of awesome next steps you could take!

The BBC have a large, loyal audience who are invested in the brand. One could argue that they needn’t invest the time & effort in switching as people are prepared to work around the above to share and interact with them. This is true, however news is a seriously competitive market place and if they don’t get to it soon, someone else will. It’s far better to be leading the way now than playing catch up when you’re loosing market-share.

I am not working with the BBC nor do I have any affiliation with them. This isn’t an assault on the UI/UX or social teams they have working for them (who do a brilliant job) — just to demonstrate how a few small changes could have a big impact.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

Steve Jobs, Co-Founder Apple

I’m aware that the current application of this data isn’t the solution to my initial problem. This is a proof of concept & I treated it more as an opportunity to hack around with APIs and feeds to see if I could get the data. This is the first part of an ongoing experiment to see if integrating foursquare activity into your WordPress blog has value.

Foursquare

Foursquare have changed the way you interact with their content now, instead of needing to get things via the API you can just get it through a private RSS feed. For non-technical people like me that means it’s a lot easier to get the information you want out.

It’s really easy to get, the venue name, location (for integration with google maps), venue icon and date/time. I grabbed it all using SimplePie because it’s built into WordPress, but you could do it with anything similar.

Twitter

I’m not one for reinventing the wheel unnecessarily, so for all the Twitter stats I used @rarst‘s Twitter Snippet. The snippet allows you to grab the twitter username, followers and status count. It’s also got caching etc built in so need to worry about that either!

The stats about me (age, cats etc) are just for fun & hard coded, there is no API for kittens.

Check out my Social Statistics

What’s next?

I’ve started working on a plugin that does for Foursquare what TwitterTools does for Twitter. Post updates of recent places into your feed, aggregates recent places into a sidebar widget etc.

If you’ve got any feedback, ideas or suggestions, leave a comment – I would love to hear them.

Picasso was in a park when a woman approached him and asked him to draw a portrait of her. Picasso agreed and quickly sketches her. After handing the sketch to her, she is pleased with the likeness and asks how much she owed to him. Picasso replied $5,000. The woman screamed “but it took you only five minutes”. No, madam, it took me all my life, replied Picasso.

However iPad owners aren’t concerned about the above, they are in it for more than just books. The apps, the browsing, the experience. That’s why I believe Moonbot have absolutely cracked it with their first release “The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore”.

This is a story, but it’s not a book. It’s an experience. It’s an inspiring blend of film, interactivity and reading.

This is a story, but it’s not a book. It’s an experience. A blend of film, interactivity and reading. There will always be a place for iBooks & PDFs on the go but Moonbot have really set the standard for iPad story-telling. I’m excited to see what Moonbot do next and I can’t wait to see if (or rather, when) the industry at large reacts. I’m a hands-on person so learning, for people like me, is about being able to engage with something. When apps in other categories like education, reference, medical, fitness etc begin to take the platform seriously it will open doors to currently uninspiring material for millions of people.

Process & Passion

The guys at Moonbot haven’t just created another visually appealing iBook, which seems to be the main trend around iPad literary experiences. The level of detail & hardwork that has gone into this is astounding.

Below are the making-of videos detailing the different processes and inspirations that went into it’s production, definitely worth a watch.

A passion for storytelling

Passion for the process

Meticulous attention to detail

A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it

Andy Warhol

If you’re going to work for someone else, make sure they rock!

All three speakers had worked for some impressive companies, (Moo.com, Clear Left, The Guardian, DC Comics). But it wasn’t the salary or clients they reflected on, it was the passion those companies have for what they do.

Simon Willison told an awesome story about how it’s possible to instil that passion. That got me thinking about how we’re lucky to work in a medium that has such a low barrier to entry. I would imagine most people reading this have at least half the skills required to put a prototype together and there’s nothing you can’t learn (or outsource) if you really believe in the idea… Let’s inspire the people around us.

If you’re not living the dream, you’re doing it wrong.

If you really believe in the idea put a prototype together, inspire the people around you.

It’s important to be happy (and challenged) in what you do. Happiness was the catalyst to a lot of the speakers new challenges & opportunities.

This particularly resonates with me as I’ve just taken on a new career pathway (freelance). It wasn’t that I disliked my old job, I felt like my learning curve had plateaued & had achieved the things I set out to do. I wasn’t learning something new every day anymore.

Be nice, be enthusiastic, care.

If you could sum up Tom Muller’s life story (as he told it at Insites) it would be this. Lot’s of his personal goals and exciting projects have been off the back of working on cool/exciting things for free. It’s almost seen as a taboo to work on free projects these days, but clearly if you *actually* want to do it and you can give it 100% it can extend your network & lead to awesome opportunities that you might not otherwise get.

The Speakers

Have you been on the Insites tour? I would love to hear about it!

Get a killer accountant

This was advice given to me & i’m passing it on. If you don’t do anything else, do this. A good accountant will undoubtedly save you more money than they cost. I’m not just talking about what you can claim back on your VAT – I’m talking about all of the time (and energy) that goes into setting up a company, registering for VAT etc etc.

If you’re freelancing in the digital space & don’t have many overheads, check out the flat-rate VAT scheme

My accountant put me on a flat-rate VAT scheme, if you’re freelancing in the digital space where you don’t have many overheads this could be a good option for you also. Long story short, you invoice for 20% but you pay a flat rate of 13%.

Setup your bank accounts early

This is an ongoing issue for me and I started the process of setting up my account(s) 6 weeks ago. I had heard on the grapevine that HSBC were one of the best business banks in the UK so decided to bank with them. I had some trouble around switching my account type and to cut a long story short it flagged something in the system that means they can’t process my account, nor can they tell me why it has been flagged. The customer support has been terrible, i’m constantly being passed around to different call centres and the person who says they will call you back never does (sound familiar?).

I’m not sure what the best of the bad bunch is yet, Lloyds have a really awkward method for setting up your account – you have to phone to arrange an appointment with someone or do it through the post (10 working day turn around). Natwest i’m still investigating.

If you want to keep your accounts simple it’s best to invoice to your business account so if this goes tits up for you, you might get stuck…

Save some cash

As simple as it sounds. I would recommend having at least a couple of months worth of equivalent salary saved so if something goes wrong for you, you’re financially secure.

Get freelance work lined up

Once you’ve made your mind up and have handed in your notice put your feelers out, talk to people in your network and spread the word. It really puts your mind at rest when you know you’ve got work on and you aren’t just going to make the jump and have nothing coming in one month.

In the same breath be fair to your current employer, you never know what might happen. I’m lucky enough to have become close to the CEO’s of my old company. We have a good relationship and not only am I doing freelance work for them but they are giving me intros and pointing people in my direction when I fit the bill.

For the undecided and apprehensive

When I was in the process of sorting everything out I spent a lot of time googling for advice and probably the most comprehensive guide to freelancing in the UK is Phil Gyford’s Beginners Guide to Freelancing. He covers a lot of the concerns that I had and the guide is very digestible.

Got any words of wisdom? I would love to hear them.

The brief

Mock up a Facebook fan page promoting a brand. Explain how you can use this platform to its fullest to stand out from the crowd. There’s much more to it than just a like button and status updates, so get creative to make it engaging. Consider encouraging user-generated content and embedding content from other sites. This page is also an opportunity to include beneficial offers, interactive apps and integration with other social networks.

Update

If you weren’t lucky enough to get your hands on a copy, here’s a link to a copy of the article…