Eggblogg

Speed networking pros and cons

Last night I went to the Sussex Business Scene networking event at East Grinstead and actually enjoyed myself. As someone who can find it a bit daunting to go into a room where I may not know anyone, and make conversation, I wasn't sure whether I would. But I needn't have worried - there were a number of familiar faces there, everyone was very friendly, plus we had what was for many of us our first taste of 'speed networking'.

I'd heard about speed networking before, but couldn't really see how it could be classed as networking. The idea is that you have 30 seconds to tell someone who you are and what your business does, then they do the same, then in the last 30 seconds you have a chance to ask/answer questions. The organisers told us we should say 'what we're looking for', but I certainly found the Q & A was a more natural consequence of the initial 'telling'. After that, you move onto the next person. We did that 20 times.

On the whole it was exhilarating, and there was certainly none of that feeling of time wasting that can creep up at networking events. I could see both pros and cons to it:

Pros:

• It's a great ice breaker and can take the fear out of talking to strangers. Everyone's in the same boat, a bit bemused, ready to 'give it a go'.
• We did all get to speak to more people than we might have ordinarily, especially those of us who shy away from the idea of working a room.
• Although we only had a short time with people, of the twenty I met there were at least 2 or 3 I had some synergy with in terms of business, and they were all interesting.
• With the time limit, it focuses you and you have to be concise.
• ... or put another way, no-one is able to go on at length!

Cons:

• The situation is unnatural, so it may not be easy to relax and be yourself
• Conversation and the the finding of synergies depends on a certain amount of social lubricant - chat that doesn't necessarily involve talking about business - but speed networking doesn't encourage that
• People do business with people they like and trust, and obviously that won't happen in 90 seconds

To be fair though, the facilitators did say that this was just a preliminary, and that the speed networking merely helps you identify the people who you'd like to then have a proper conversation with afterwards.

It is something I would happily do again, and although I was sceptical before I would recommend it now, especially to networking newbies.

Questioning the value of link building services in a Web 2.0 world

"Dear Webmaster, I have been browsing and came across your great website!"

Aren't you sick of these automated link requests? They always start the same way, and frankly as soon as I see 'Dear Webmaster' I know I don't need to read any more. Just when I thought we had moved on, there seem to have been a plague of these spammy emails lately. Presumably there are legitimate businesses who actually subscribe to these 'link building services'.

Although link building remains part of most SEO strategies, reciprocal linking has long since lost its value. And if the sites linking to yours are either irrelevant, insignificant in terms of traffic, or both ... again, not worth it.

As Chris Baggott notes in his blog, link credibility is what counts with the search engines, not volumes of spammy links.

And yet clearly the message hasn't reached everyone yet. You only have to search on Google for 'link building services' to see that it's big business.

So for a small business wanting to enhance its link credibility, what to do? Writing articles which contain links to your site, then getting them placed on well-trafficked sites, is a tried-and-tested route. Link building through article writing and placement is something I've done for clients in the past, but it's a strategy I'm currently reviewing.

The downside is that everyone is doing it now and there are fewer openings. The larger, content-hungry sites have either contracted one of the large web content providers or have in-house staff to write it. Writing bespoke material and trying to get it placed, one article at a time, is very hard work. The alternative is to place your articles on aggregator sites like Ezine Articles, but then if the pieces are syndicated out to other sites that means Google sees them as duplicate pages and the value of the links is diminished.

There's no quick fix, and I would not recommend the 'Dear Webmaster' route - apart from anything, it seems so 20th century, so unnatural, so not what the web's about.

I suppose the moral of the tale is to keep an eye on your link building strategies to make sure they are actually adding value and not the opposite. And of course, don't neglect all the other aspects of SEO, from targeting the right keywords to keeping your site content fresh, blogging and embracing all that Web 2.0 stands for.

Should businesses care about grammar, spelling or punctuation?

So Tesco has finally bowed to the weight of complaints about its 'ten items or less' checkout signs and will be changing them. Some of us will be very happy about that. Others will be in the 'who cares?' camp.

At university one of my linguistics tutors instilled in me the idea that language change is inevitable. A truly academic approach to the subject does not involve value judgements about what constitutes correct or incorrect language use.

Not only that, but the grounds upon which we criticise English language (mis-)use are often bogus, thought up by prescriptive Victorians trying to make English fit the Latin mold, much like left-handers used to be forced to write with their right hands.

So when people moan about split infinitives, 'might' versus 'could', 'hopefully' versus 'I hope' and so forth, I try to stay out of it, not always successfully. Although the 'its/it's' problem has allegedly improved over the last 30 years, it still slaps me in the face on a daily basis.

What's acceptable in these days is vastly different to even, say, 20 years ago. Copywriter Leif Kendall recently commented on how the formal style of business letters has relaxed and how the written word resembles the spoken more often than not.

So what about spelling? There are some who want the English spelling system abandoned in favour of something where words are written as they sound. With my 'judgemental' hat on I would say that people are less able to spell these days, from the evidence all around us. Apparently, spelling is just more difficult than it used to be!

From a business point of view, there can be no excuse for consistently poor spelling: why was the copy not proof-read? OK, so typos do slip past more than one pair of eyes from time to time. But spelling or punctuation mistakes aren't always typos: they are often just mistakes. And when a business is this sloppy in its own presentation, what kind of service is it likely to deliver?

Personally, although Tesco changing its signs won't make me shop there, I do welcome it. Just a shame they couldn't go the whole hog and change to 'Ten items or fewer'.

Looks like 'fewer' is on its way to that great rubbish dump of unloved words in the sky. Alas!

Why CVs should include a person's 'online history'

Like all business owners I'm sure, from time to time I tend to get people writing to me on spec looking for work. These approaches rarely impress, the most common mistakes being:

1) failing to find out my name ('Dear Sir/Madam' - grrr!)
2) failing to visit the website or find out what the business actually does
3) spelling and/or grammatical errors

And then there are the CVs. What do they actually tell you? If you're recruiting people for online marketing, particularly in the sphere of social media, aren't we more interested in a person's internet intelligence - how they use it, what they've done with it, what networks they're active in ... in other words, don't we need a new sort of a CV to tell us this?

I'm not sure what to call it - an 'online history' maybe? These are the things I am interested to know about a potential job applicant:

- How often do you access the internet, and how (at work, at home, from a phone, etc)
- At what age did you first: use email, use a search engine, join an online community or register at a website
- Three most indispensible websites you visit, and why
- Favourite web applications
- Online networks you engage with, numbers of Twitter followers/LinkedIn contacts or even friends on Facebook, any blogs you write or contribute to
- Have you ever built a webpage/started a blog/posted at a review site/created a profile page anywhere/uploaded photos, videos or music to media sharing sites
- What do you read online ... etcetera. Maybe a proficiency test would be appropriate - with questions about search strategies and making value judgements about information found online. 

This kind of profile would say so much more about a person's level of internet confidence and engagement, and the breadth of their experience. These are crucial factors if they're going to spend all day on working online and enjoy it.

As it is, all we get on CVs is 'proficient with Word, Excel and Photoshop'. Never mind the tools, let's hear what you do with them.

Recently I received an speculative email which was articulate, struck just the right tone and didn't make any of the 3 mistakes listed above. He offered to send his CV. I almost said 'don't bother' because I could tell everything I needed to know from his email, without knowing what GSCEs he'd got or where he'd done his bar work as a student. Most 21-yr olds struggle to fill a traditional CV anyway. But his online history .. now that would have been interesting.

Steven Fry puts the case for free software

"Information wants to be free" was one of the doctrines I recall discussing at length when I did my Digital Media MA nearly 10 years ago now. But what about the case for free software?

I enjoyed Steven Fry's relaxed and articulate defence of 'hacking' - the art of changing and improving software for the good of the computer-using community at large - in this short video. It's been produced as a 'happy 25th birthday' for GNU, the free software movement that's been quietly moving forward all this time in parallel to Microsoft and Apple.

Although I confess I've never had a machine that runs on Linux, I do use and appreciate freeware and shareware. I recently started using Gimp image editing software instead of Photoshop, and NeoOffice instead of MS Office, since making the change to a Mac. With some small exceptions, I'm finding them as good as (in some ways better) than what I've been used to.

So thankyou, freeware developers of the world, and Many Happy Returns.