Reassessing My Online Profile Part 3

Read these first:

Reassessing my online profile:https://padajo.wordpress.com/2008/07/10/who-am-i/

Reassessing my online profile:https://padajo.wordpress.com/2009/02/17/reassessing-my-online-profile-part-2/

Before we start…

I’m not trying to be narcissistic here and tell you all how great (or otherwise) I am. This is just a series of posts that have come out of my experiences being online and trying to run a business.

What’s my situation now?

I’ve partially resurrected my business over the past few months after having zero joy with getting another job after losing my first proper job for 8 years (after running my business for 8 years – not being a slacker) in January.

The reason I couldn’t get another job? Simple – I’m too experienced. Now, I’m not just saying that to make myself look better, it’s the responses I was getting from prospects. Apparently, I’m too experienced (and therefore likely to move on quickly) to take on a job in a marketing agency lower than senior management level (which I’ve done) and not able to be a senior consultant in an IT consultancy, because my skills are too “varied”.  What is frustrating is that I’m perfectly capable of doing both these jobs (having done them both as a contractor many times in the last 8 years).

So I’ve had to develop my own opportunities and as far as new business development is concerned, I’ve found that Social Media is a great term (er… buzzword) to start a conversation with people who need web and marketing skills. I’ve got a few new clients, including some large charities all wishing to utilise my Social Media knowledge and skills, but I’ve also found that most of the time, it takes a few hours, or a couple of days to tell them most of what they need to know to do it themselves.

The one big client I do have (at least, big for me) is a startup for whom i’m building an interactive online classroom.  Great work, but hugely frustrating trying to complete it.

My Profile Online – What’s changed?

I’ve actually stopped a lot of interaction on Social Networks over the summer – mainly because it’s the summer, and I have a family, but also because of holidays and moving house. It’s caused me to really think about how much time I spend online and for what purpose.

I’ve adapted my thinking on what I get out of being online. As far as business is concerned, almost all of my work still comes offline from face to face networking and from existing relationships. In fact, I can’t think of a single piece of work from this last 9 months that has come from either an existing relationship (not online) or through new relationships via offline networking.

So… is Online really that important?

Well, now comes the contradiction. It is important to be engaged and developing online networks. Why? Well, I think it is much more to enhance and develop relationships that are created offline (certainly for me).

The users I follow on twitter (for example – my twitter is @pauldjohnston) are generally in these categories:

• people I know as friends
• people I have met at some form of offline networking event (e.g. tweetups, trade shows, networking events, barcamps)
• people who interest me (could be celebrities or just people that have @ replied with something interesting)
• journalists and news/content organisations

As you can see, the first two are people I’ve met, and the last two are generally not.  The ones I take the most notice of are the first two and the last one.  The interesting people I can dip in and out of, but I’m generally not too bothered what they say.

How does this make me reassess my online profile?

As I have stated before, I’m desperate to setup another startup (have done 3 – all failed – learned loads – pretty sure I know what makes a great startup now). However, now is a rubbish time to try and do that (whatever anyone says) and having no consistent work for 9 months means there is no resource buffer to try and develop something new.

I am having to rethink why I blog/tweet (not how much). I’ve realised that just getting involved in conversations, whilst fun and interesting, doesn’t always help me get my work done. So maybe I need to learn about Getting Things Done and productivity tools, but they’re only useful if I actually have a business to work on.

So, the crux of the issue is me

What it comes down to is that if I tweet/blog and comment, people interact, and if I don’t do those things, my interaction reduces significantly (and generally only a handful of people still interact).  I have to figure out Who I Am before social media can really help me to develop a business or any othe form of relationships.  Maybe I won’t ever figure out Who I Am though, and maybe that’s the point. The journey is much more important than the answer.

Well that’s just great! I’m pretty much back where I started a year ago!  It seems that my next step must be looking after the clients I’ve got and coming up with a business idea that I can take to market.

Then, just maybe, you’ll start to see more of the real more on social media.

Is SOA really important?

Over the past few years, I’ve heard the 3 letter acronym SOA coming from the oddest places. I’ve been very surprised by some of the comments around it, but I’ve mostly heard it in conjunction with corporate projects.

SOA stands for Service Oriented Architecture. Some people will tell you that it’s basically anything where web services (XML, SOAP etc) are used and therefore encompasses a lot of different things. Others will tell you it’s a complex methodology and set of principles that allow a system to become more useful.

My Take?

First things first, technology has come a very long way and now a large proportion of companies can buy very good software that manages their business processes very well.  ERP tools like SAP are an example of this. While SAP is percieved as expensive, it does a job for the client.

However, there has been a problem. ERP Software at the level of these clients needs to be bespoke. I know, I’ve just spent a few weeks in Tesco working for Succeed, developing some PeopleSoft applications.  This has been a bit of an eye opener, because very often, inside these organisations, the understanding of what’s “out there” in terms of technology in the wild is very low, and the reliance upon an expert to come in and explain new features and trends is very high.

So, enter the new acronym of SOA. For the vast majority of people, it’s a marketing/sales term that allows a company to resell a system into a company, that it very often doesn’t need. It’s an upgrade sale, and not necessarily a useful one.

However, for some companies, this upgrade will be vital. Those that want to move forwards and share more information around their community (note: that includes the suppliers, customers, stakeholders etc) as well as making their business processes more transparent and manageable, will benefit greatly from this.

SOA and SAP

I have a friend who does SAP who is looking at SOA on that platform. When he talks about it, it’s this amazing new technology.  When I look at it, he’s talking about Java/XML and web services and that’s very old to me.  Maybe, the companies searching for SOA should start to consider looking at where that type of technology has been most used, e.g. the internet based companies, instead of the IT consultancies?

SOA isn’t just Web Services

Now I recognise that there are differences between SOA and web services in that just implementing a web service does not make something SOA.  There is a fundamental shift in understanding required between building software that interacts, to building a black box that can return useful information, help to manage your business processes, whilst also being built on top of other services.

So to understand SOA, it’s not just a case of knowing the technologies. There is a lot of technology out there, but it’s more in thinking differently, maybe thinking in SOA.  Just maybe, web 2.0 is placed perfectly to think in SOA much more than the current crop of IT consultancies, and certainly much more than their salesmen.

SOA Resources

A quick scout of google turns up some interesting links:

• http://www.whatissoa.com/
• http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-06-2005/jw-0613-soa.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_architecture

Web 2.0 = SOA?

Maybe… what do you think?

Twitter = Web 2.0 Virtual “Office Water Cooler”

I’ve realised that Twitter is a great little tool.  I’ve spent some time trying to streamline my life through cutting down on wasted time in work.  So that means:

• Checking email only every hour (and not clicking on “check for new mail”)
• Stopping twittering so much – at least, not just sitting and watching it waiting for something to respond to
• Scheduling time and calls into my day so that things don’t get left
• Looking into getting a virtual assistant (still looking)
• … other stuff

This has done wonders and I’ve got so much more done in the last couple of days, that I’m now a lot happier with where I am.  Still no work, but I’m much more in control of my time and I don’t feel that I’m just drifting through work any more.

However, I realised that I missed something doing this.  I’ve twittered a lot less, and I’ve read twitters a lot less too.  This is great for my time management, but not so great for my keeping up with the world.  Why?

Twitter is acting like my virtual office. Whenever I’ve been in an office, there are emails that go round and conversations over the water cooler that happen that make your day a little more interesting.  I’ve realised that Twitter acts like that for me.  Which is great!

So, I’ve decided to work out a way to incorporate Twitter as my virtual office water cooler. It’s where I keep up with what’s going on with my friends and where I find out about new and interesting things.  I’m not sure exactly how to manage it in terms of time, but we’ll see.  Maybe I just need twhirl to add in a “text-to-speech” thing for it, and I can just “overhear” what’s going on instead of having to converse.

Web 2.0, cash flow, valuation and business models

I like Web 2.0. It’s a great idea and a fantastic buzzword. It allows me to seem “in the know” to people who are only just beginning to get Web 1.0.

But the problem is that Web 2.0 seems to have a slight identity crisis, certainly within the business world. A lot of discussion has happened and is happening around the idea of revenue and cash flow for web 2.0 businesses.  This comes on the back of Twitter securing $15m funding for continuing to grow it’s business, when there are many in the business world who are asking where the business model is.

This article in the FT a few days ago, it suggests that most financiers are at the very least unsure about why they should invest in a company.  Web 2.0 to them is about social online behaviour, and so far, very few of the recent startups has shown enough promise to start making money.  Twitter, for example, is being backed because of the strong early adopter user base it has grown very quickly.  The interesting thing is that there’s still no obvious business model, even now and it’s been going a while.

But maybe the key is that it is changing our online behaviour.  It used to be just about email and phone, then came online ads, and now it’s about putting out your online personality.  This will create groups (I don’t want to use the word “crowd” here) that can then start to become the next business communities.  So maybe, Twitter will just become a community around which business is done.  What business and how much that will make for the users or for Twitter is unknown, but Dell and others are beginning to use Twitter to get information out there about their businesses.

Some of the other businesses that are touted as Web 2.0 are Slide (how it’s worth $500m I will never know) and Ning. Because all of these businesses start with open source software and tend to be beta versions at launch, then the technology tends not to be the valuable part.  The value appears to be in the number of users that they can get as quickly as possible.  So making something that is “useful” and/or “fun” for a large number of people appears to be how to make a Web 2.0 startup. Monetisation is not the key.

Jemima Kiss points out that it’s not simply enough to look at the finances of a business.  Web 2.0 is still young as an industry (if indeed it is a separate industry to the “normal” web) and these businesses springing up are less about the traditional and more about the innovative side of business.  Maybe Web 2.0 is the future of all business and maybe it is going to be much more disruptive than even we are seeing now.

My opinion is that Web 2.0 companies are here and here to stay and I like them.  I still fail to see how Twitter is going to make a lot of money (and certainly not out of it’s current user base) without someone there creating a micro-payment model (of some sort) on top of it.

The key to a successful Web 2.0 company appears to be finding the right angel to invest at the start (if needed) and the right VC to fund it after the initial launch, and the right company to purchase after a short-ish amount of time.  It’s less about the business model and more about fashion.  Maybe the business model is more like that in that it’s more of the web’s “luxury item” than previous companies were. Luxury and fashion may be the way to view Web 2.0.

What is Web 2.0? Aaargh!

It’s amazing to me that I can still have the “What is Web 2.0?” conversation, even with people who’s business it is to know something about the web (web designers, techies, IT directors).

There is no definitive answer here (or it wouldn’t be asked), although there are characteristics that a lot of Web 2.0 businesses share.  The most important thing to remember is that “being Web 2.0” appears to be about open collaboration.

It’s not about sharing. There seems to be a misconception that if a company opens up it’s API and it’s data that there will at some point be a reciprocity just because you’ve opened up the data. That’s just not true.

Some examples might be in order here!

Collaboration is the correct term. The big companies have realised this and will often only open up the data it holds if it’s going to have some return benefit to itself.  Google Maps is a case in point, as Google realised that it could give away the maps, with an API, so long as it was branded Google. It meant that everyone had access to a mapping system for use in their application, but that everyone knew it was Google’s Mapping system. Mashups were born!  That meant that more people used the system, and built systems on top.  Google Maps became a platform and meant that it was a key collaborative component for other people’s systems.  Google is about selling advertising, and the more people that use it’s maps, the more likely it is that people are going to see their adverts.

Twitter is also a platform. It’s essentially a message queuing (MQ) system in the background and people use it to send messages to each other and to systems that use it.  You can get the data off twitter via RSS and via their API.  It integrates with mobile as well, in that you can have messages sent to your mobile. Not only that, but you can get data sent via Instant Messaging through GTalk which allows you to send info back to twitter too.  Because of all this ability to use twitter to send messages, people are beginning to twitter-up their house.  It’s not obvious where twitter makes their money, but it’s certain that if twitter disappeared, there could be problems for some web applications

There are many other web 2.0 companies and applications, including flickr which allows you to share photos with others.  It’s the platform that people use, and you can build on top of it.  But you always know it’s flickr.

I haven’t even touched on Web Services, RSS, blogging, podcasting, User Generated Content (UGC), virtual worlds etc.  There are many different web 2.0 technologies that facilitate collaboration.  It’s important to note that the companies using these technologies are in business for a reason, to make money somewhere, somehow.  They have realised the importance of these technologies for creating collaborations, but their aim is to increase value for their business.  It’s not enough just to blog or create a system for UGC to be called “web 2.0”.

So the answer to “What is Web 2.0?” is open collaboration. The technology is not the important part of it.