Might be quiet here for a while. Or might get more noisy. Who knows?

I’ve been reflecting on some of the social media work I’ve done over the last year and seeing where I might improve my offering. The model piece of work that I’ve sold to people has gone as follows: “You tell me you want to have a go at this new fangled social media mularkey, but you don’t know where to start. So I’ll start for you and show your people what I’m doing. We’ll start off with me doing everything but my involvement will taper off as your team’s involvement increases and by the end of the project, you’re folk will be doing it all for themselves.”

Great. Sold. But….

What has actually happened is that people have had some great blogs from me (natch) but there hasn’t actually been much change in what they do, the comms teams I’ve worked with have liked the idea but as long as I was doing it *for* them it was too easy to sit back and continue to say “Yes, that’s nice, I wish I was able to do that”. I think there’s still a space for doing live-blogs of events as discrete pieces of work, but more ongoing stuff needs to be done differently.

So I’m looking for a better model. And over coffee with Jonathan Laventhol of Imagination I understood what it might be. He said to me “You need to sit on your hands more” And he’s absolutely right. Just as when you’re helping someone to learn to drive it’s not good to keep grabbing the steering wheel, I think there’s much more value that I can offer as a non-doing coach or catalyst for action.

In their excellent book on decentralised networks, The Starfish and the Spider, Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom talk about the difference between two roles that Julie Andrews made famous.

“In The Sound of Music, Maria enters a dysfunctional family, teaches the children a valuable lesson, convinces the father to pay attention to his kids, and shows the family how to get along. Likewise, Mary Poppins visits an equally (albeit charmingly) dysfunctional family, gets equally adorable children to behave, urges equally clueless parents to pay attention to their kids, finds equally effective ways for everyone to get along, and sings equally catchy tunes.”

“At the end of The Sound of Music, though, Maria, after falling in love with the children and the father, sticks around. It’s obvious that from now on she’ll be the one running the show. Mary Poppins, on the other hand, chim-chim-in-eys right out of London. It’s not that Mary Poppins has a fear of commitment. From the very beginning, it’s clear that she’s come to do a job. Her job is complete when the family can thrive on its own. Once she accomplishes her goal, she rides her umbrella into the sunset.”

I’ve tried both models, but like Mary Poppins, I’m much better as a catalyst. Going in, making change happening and moving on to where I’m needed more, rather than working my way up, establishing an empire and sticking around for the long haul.

Then I saw Seth Godin writing about Digital Coaches

“What’s a digital coach? A freelancer (individual) who usually works with entrepreneurs, small groups or companies to teach them how to dramatically improve productivity or market presence using technology. For example, a digital coach might hook up your cell phone to be more powerful or teach you how to use blogs and Facebook to connect to your audience.”

I think for me it’s a totally bottom-up approach – aimed at individuals inside and outside organisations who want to beef up their personal productivity using web 2.0 and social media tools. They might have a social media project hat they need to contribute to, but would also generally benefit from catching up with what’s arrived in the last year or so and someone to help them think it through in their own personal or business context. The focus is on enhancing productivity, preferable in simple, measurable ways.

When I’ve mentioned this to people, some have said “Wow, yes please” and others have said “Oh, I kind of thought that’s what you did already” So I think it’s probably right.

Photo credit: conner395 on Flickr licenced with cc-attribution

Bak sun!

The first post now reads, to me anyway, as part-excuse for not blogging before, part-excuse for starting at all. But here is the most interesting bit for me three years on:

"What makes me hirable is the sum of everything that I’ve done in the past and am capable of doing in the future - and that a traditional CV doesn’t give the flavour of real me (yum). "


I never meant there to be quite so much flavour, but I think that sums up what this blog has turned out to be most about – what I’ve done and what I’m capable of doing. This blog has always been about me getting hired.

Above all, I started writing here to keep in touch with more people than I could have coffee with and still make money. I had no clue that it would be something I’d end up doing for big organisations – this morning I interviewed a Global Vice President of an oil company who insisted on wearing a heavily-branded jacket and baseball cap throughout and I spent this afternoon writing about sexual health services for young people in Surrey.

I also never thought I’d get so many friends! It really warms my heart that I’ve had conversations in twitter today with people in Washington, California and Texas as well as Butler’s Wharf and err… Sutton – and that I could drop into Open Coffee this morning and instantly find people who got what I was talking about even if we’ve never met, together with happy smiley facebook friends. Thank you everybody.

I can’t see how any of this could be possible without this silly little personal publishing platform.

I can’t find a copy of the very first one from 31/12/04 or the pre-podwalk podwalk so if you’ve got one lying around, please let me know.

Phew! Perhaps I’d better start again…

This comes from a number of conversations I’ve had with people in London about having a place to meet, hook up, get groups together, socialise, train people, co-work etc. I blogged about something in a slightly different context about 3 years ago and the idea has been frothing in my head for a long time. I’m thinking of a confluence of the creative, tech and entrepreneurial tribes who are currently gathering around social media and online social networking. I’m talking about the kinds of people who are regulars at Coffee Mornings, Open Coffee, Social Media Club, Chinwag Live.

So far it’s as concrete and as fluid as this:

We (whoever we are – the united socialmediatistas of hereabouts) acquire a space that we can use for the above-mentioned types of activities. It might be laid out as follows (though do not get hung up about physical orientation, upstairs/downstairs front/back doesn’t matter as much as the ideas of separate spaces for different activities).

Ground floor is open to the public, a café style space with good coffee, tea, snacks, fussball, space invaders and the like – maybe the odd plate of eggs bacon chips and beans. Plasma screen shows a rolling twitter timeline from all our mates. An alternative to constantly having to find somewhere to meet up and have coffee and a place where people love you using the wifi.

First floor (don’t get hung up on the physical orientation, just a separate space) is for members & guests. Not a posh exclusive (male) type of private members club (you know where I mean), but something softer, gentler, more suited to creative & geeky types than just to the thrusting entrepreneur. Facilities are flexible meeting rooms, desks and co-working spaces and more exclusive lounging, chatting space with coffee & tea. It’s a bit quieter up here.

Second floor (again really just another separate space) is for media production – podcasting & video-blogging equipment for hire – soundproofed studios, maybe some helpful techies to guide the uninitiated.

Questions:

Why? Why not take an existing institution and warp it into what we want? Now that we are, just, starting to see that there’s a group of us interested in the same things, I think it would be good to have a place of our own.

When? I may be biased by the number of people I mix with who don’t keep normal office hours but I think this is an all-day & evening thing, though possibly not at weekends?

Where? London, I’m pretty certain, but where is our spiritual home? Soho, Shoreditch, South Bank? Somewhere that doesn’t start with ‘S’?

Who? Who will come, who will be members, who will use which facilities? I’m starting a group in Facebook to guage interest and carry the conversation forward. Also what kinds of people do we need to make it happen – property development, deal-makers, investors, staff as well as potential members and customers.

What? Salons, open spaces, meeting (verb), meetings (noun), training, improvising, podcasting, eating, talking, working, collaborating, farting about, other activities with no predefined or explicit purpose, interesting pursuits. What else?

How? Yes.

More questions please – and answers if you have them.

[UPDATE: If you want to help, there's now a wiki for you to scribble on and a Facebook group to join.]

Anyway, in the pipeline…

Interesting2007 (oh god, there’s a whole sub-blog of its own in there)
Events and conferences in general (following Lee’s thoughts on the subject & Johnnie’s riposte)
Facebook addiction (something about evolving and expanding objects of sociability, probably a link to Jyri)
Social Media Club (what we’ve done so far, what we’re going to do next) COME ON THURSDAY
How can I get more time to write and *talk* about what I think
Me playing my uke & singing (there have been requests)
Some of the interesting people I’ve met recently (at interesting and elsewhere)

Fingers crossed.

Photo by: tim_d (Tim Duckett)

For the avoidance of any further random surprises you should resubscribe to http://perfectpath.wordpress.com/feed/ or http://feeds.feedburner.com/PerfectPath (doesn’t matter which really, but I expect that I’ll keep the feedburner one going on regardless of who hosts the blog (I’m still liking wordpress.com btw)

I went to the last Chinwag Live called PR Unspun (podcast here) and could see an opportunity for talking in more detail to PR folk about how to move from relating well to the press or the public to relating well to people like me (and you probably), bloggers. Now I won’t suggest we call it BR, as that brings to mind curled sandwiches, cold damp carriages smelling of something awful and “We’re getting there” (oh no you’re not!) but Better Blogger Relations seems to work with people, so I designed a half-day workshop.

I shall introduce people to the basics and then cover:

• Finding people who are talking about your clients.
• Monitoring online conversations methodically.
• Engaging with an online community.
• How to be interesting to bloggers.

I’m just setting up the first one on Friday week (25th May). As I’ve got it down to a choice of two venues and am just clearing up the details, I thought I’d put tickets on sale through eventbrite anyway – it’s £95+VAT and limited to 12 places. Please do point your favourite, but as yet clue-deprived PR people to the booking page or buy a ticket yourself.

UPDATE: Venue confirmed, it’s: CCT Venues Barbican, Aldersgate House, 135-137 Aldersgate St, London EC1A 4JA

Here’s the story (the following link points to potentially nsfw material, as nsfw as reading your spam folder…):

I set this up on a whim in September 2004 as an experiment in ego-surfing and autoblogging via e-mail – I subscribed to a google alert on a search for my name and pointed it to the blog’s e-mail address so that in theory every time there was an alert, it would be blogged.

Didn’t work after the first couple of days, as you can see – I guessed it was something to do with Google’s terms but had lost interest by then anyway. And then in the last few weeks the address clearly got into some spam lists and went bananas. The timestamps are not reliable as I’m guessing they are linked to the timestamp of the spam.

So my dilemma is whether to just wash this petri dish down the drain or leave it to see what other mould accumulates – is anyone interested in this stuff?

Can you tell I hate throwing anything away? Can you imagine what my home would be like if I’d never shared it with a woman

In a hurry and doing a 100 other things (which is what I said I wasn’t going to do today *at all*) but here are a sample of the new moo product to complement their lovely calling cards which everyone I meet simply drools over (I said “simply” not “literally” – ewwwww)

They are Notecards – 100mm x 100mm square with a 42mm flap on the side to enable them to stand up. Of course I should have photographed them standing up. (Well I did, but I mean I should have made them stand up, not me – can you tell I’m writing this far too quickly?) On the back you get to print your contact details, but there’s a big space for you to write or stick labels on. They also come with their own envelopes so you can put them in the post or leave them on the mantelpiece for when the intended recipient gets home or something.

I already gave my first one away to Suw for her birthday on Sunday – she got a pile of fruit from Berwick Street Market on hers. This of course was before the romper-suit stuff came up and she started feeling uneasy.

You can now order them from the moo meisters perfect for totally personalised “I’m sorry I completely screwed up omgwtfbbq” or “I love you, you’re my best friend” or “Stop lying there so ill, get up and dance around” or even “You’re mad and I’m mad. Let’s do something completely insane together” cards.

Btw, of course, if you’re interested in joining the network and thereby generating some more relevant advertising, please do get over there and sign up.

Apologies to all those who have been bounced of late. For now, the best way to e-mail me is still lloyd dot davis at gmail dot com, to see the blog come to perfectpath.wordpress.com (rss from http://feeds.feedburner.com/perfectpath ) skype me as perfectpath or telephone +447919182825

“Public Zone have become involved in a wonderful campaign called May Day For Nurses, which aims to highlight the plight of nurses as the lowest paid public sector professionals, by asking every premiership footballer to donate their wages from the last day of the season to a hardship fund.

We don’t want your money (that will come from the players), we just want your support. We have built a fan table on-line www.maydayfornurses.com (it even has space for non football fans!), please go and register your support, it will really help us get press, and convince the players.”

I have, why haven’t you?

I’m suggesting meeting up in the foyer of the National Theatre on the South Bank – we should be able to find somewhere quiet enough to practice recording, but it’s not so quiet and intimate that we will disturb others. I will have my portable recording kit, feel free to bring your own.

Do let me know if you are intending to come, feel free to bring anyone along who might be interested or tell a friend (or indeed your worst enemy) to come along.

Also do let me know if you want me to shut up about bloody social media club.

If you haven’t checked it out yet, see the FAQ on the wiki: http://socialmediaclub.pbwiki.com/Podcasting

See you at six

Yes, I already have a bunch of lovely clients. No, I’ve never had so much on that I couldn’t squeeze another piece of work in somewhere. So YES, I’m for hire, folks! To move to a more tasteful metaphor than tartery, let’s see if there are any tasty morsels on this platter that you’d like to nibble on, or you’d recommend to friends.

Richer Records
I get hired by conference organisers to write a blog with audio, video and still photography for a one-day or two-day event. This includes live-blogging sessions and interviews with participants and speakers throughout the day. We also do pre-conference podcasts to help build interest and buzz before the event.

Blogging for Theatres
I’ve recently taken on my first theatre client to help them with their strategy for engaging with the community online. There are so many stories to be told about what’s going on in any theatre day-to-day and so many people who are passionately interested in hearing about it, but the bulk of theatrical marketing is still about print-based advertising.

Blogging in Blue Chips
At the end of last year I helped out on a global knowledge management exercise within a huge international company. I wrote a blog about a range of marketing initiatives and illustrated it with podcasts of phone conversations with project teams and videos of senior managers, talking about why this sort of sharing was of paramount strategic importance.

Social Media Club
I’m getting Social Media Club up and running in London. This is a global loosely-joined confederation of like-minded people. In London so far, we’ve had monthly round-table chats, but this month we’re branching out into weekly meetups with the motto “Thursday Night is Social Media Night”

Making daft videos
Peruse my YouTube stream for examples of my work. Firm favourites are “Let’s go Mento”, and the All This… And Brains Too! series but steer clear of certain elements of the G-Room Review Videoblog unless you are actively seeking accidental nudity.

Facilitation
Yeah, I still like to pull my faciliation trousers on from time to time. I prefer to work in an open space or cafe style, but can do more structured sessions as required. Hey! How long is it since you had a good old PinPoint session?

Blog Coaching & Seminars
I do one-to-one coaching on how to improve your blog (both in terms of using the software more effectively and by improving your writing). I’m also working with Suw Charman on some small-ish (8-10 people) seminars on “What is Social Software?”, “Moderation and Nurturing Community”, and “Encouraging Adoption of Social Tools”. We’re planning on doing public versions of these as well as in-house for individual organisations.

I’d like to carry on doing any and all of these so give me a call if you want to talk about how I can help you +44(0)7919182825 or e-mail lloyd dot davis at gmail dot com