I’ve been thinking a bit about managing my online reputation. Mainly because every time I hear someone talk about how kids these days put such stupid stuff about themselves on the internet and how they are silly to think the internet wont remember it forever… I think about how much stupid stuff I have of me on the internet.

I totally agree that to a certain extent you probably have to control what people see of you, and no I wouldn’t put any of my secrets online (although I did wonder about postsecret because it would be kind of cool to anonymously tell your deepest darkest secret to the world), but I do have a Flickr account that I upload basically all my stupid pictures to without any form of security, I probably could never get a job at Vodafone now because of my online rants, and sometimes I freak out when someone starts following me on Twitter because despite the fact the whole world can view it, I still treat it as a group messenger among close friends.

I’m smart enough to know that when I’m really angry and write a massive rant on this blog, to save it and wait a day before re-reading it and deciding whether or not to publish it. But that and the fact that I don’t really link to my publically viewable accounts is about all the self-censorship I do.

Is this a bad thing?

I don’t think so. I LIKE the fact that my customers get to know me and see me as a person not just a suit (not that they could see me as one anyway because I don’t own one, but you get the point). I talked to someone last night about how his boss is terrified of people finding out how small their business is. Sometimes I wonder what people think of my business. We have a pink door hanger, we have work drinks most nights (or afternoons), we hang out beside the motorway sometimes, just watching the world go past, we’re very small and yes, we live in New Zealand. When I write it like that it feels like a major confession, but actually those are all things I’m PROUD of, it’s what makes us what we are.

If you know my opinion on something like climate change and disagree, I hope that only makes our relationship more interesting, not that you would no longer want to work with me, but seriously, if it has that effect, then it’s probably best that we DON’T work together.

If you know the combined age of our company’s employees is less than 70 and think we can’t possibly have the experience or skill that you require, then that’s kind of sad, but I think our work speaks for itself.

If you think that because you see pictures of me acting like a hooligan with my friends in the weekend, that I’m unprofessional, that’s unfortunate, but some of my best ideas happen when I’m out having a boogie and also I don’t want you to be under any illusion that this company is my life.

So I know that when I have a daughter and she behaves like me on the internet, I’ll have to fight myself to not intervene, but I totally think we go too far sometimes with trying to create online persona’s that are nothing like what we do in real life and the coolest thing about the internet is that even if we never meet, you and I could really get to know each other.

Big companies ALWAYS shock me with how useless they are. Big companies pay a fortune for someone to come up with a marketing strategy, but forget to analyse who they are before hand. This results in me seeing massive banners, tv ads and sponsorships everywhere proclaiming one thing, then interacting with the actual company and experiencing just the opposite.

Take my favorite large company Vodafone for example. If you NEVER met anyone from vodafone, you would be under the belief that Vodafone was full of hip young things who are so clever and cool that while they are out skateboarding and surfing and at dance parties, they come up with super cool ways to help you make the most of now.

When you walk into a Vodafone outlet however, you come face to face with some angry young person who clearly doesn’t give two hoots about how you make use of your time because they wont even bother to look at you for the first half an hour (I was actually wondering today if a Vodafone store would be a good place to catch up with friends - all this space to sit in and you are invisible to the people actually working there).

And aside from the girls they dress in tiny little dresses at various events (and I’m only including them because I suspect the boys love them), you could hardly call the people you come into contact with as ‘cool’. I’m fairly certain none of them have EVER been surfing and the seeming inability to hold a conversation makes me think they don’t have many friends to practice on. This may seem really rude, but my take on the Vodafone marketing speel is that it relies on being the ‘cool’ company. Therefore it actually is important to have fun, approachable people in their shops - I have nothing against uncool people, but they simply don’t belong with Vodafone - this is the image they have built.

I don’t want to be accused of using ironic in the wrong sense like our friend Alanis Morrisette, but it does strike me as ironic that Vodafone shops are so full of high-tech gadgets and information about 3G and wireless internet and clever things you can do with technology these days, while in the middle of it all two bored looking people struggle to write your problem down in one of those tiny notebooks you use to write your spelling words in at school. Once again, using glass on your table tops and minimalist branding only gets you so far in convincing your customers that you are at the cutting edge of technology. When you are faced with a problem management tool that is not only decades only and inefficient, but surpassed by basically every low-tech company around, suddenly those big modern, open spaces just look as empty as the promises Vodafone makes about who they are.

My point is. Vodafone clearly doesn’t care (what are we going to do? Switch to Telecom?) But you should. If you can’t live up to what your marketing says about you, rethink your marketing strategy.

Once you have established who you are, EVERY INTERACTION ANYONE HAS with your company should reinforce that. Want to be seen as fun? Well have fun with your customers, chat with them, discuss awesome ideas you have for what you’re helping them with. Want to be seen as professional? Make sure no one within your company is ever rude to your customers and deliver everything on time. Want to be seen as cool? Hire people who are unique, have quirky clothing and interests and the ability to chat casually with random passers by.

Vodafone has the pleasure of my rant because they do this to me time and time again, but you do see it everywhere. While words CAN convince people about what you are for a while, eventually people will see through them and you’d better either have a monopoly on your market or ensure what’s behind them holds true. Otherwise, your customers WILL leave you, and they probably wont even bother telling you why. So don’t just go to a branding company and get them to decide who you are (not that any half decent one should let you do that). Put in the ground work, think about what makes you different and never swerve off that path.

Just got back from Sydney, where I managed to be while two of the companies we work with had major launches… Take a look:

Circos.com

“Circos.com, Inc. helps consumers find the products and services that best match their lifestyle. While other search engines return thousands of web pages, Circos.com returns a targeted set of qualified brands, ranked by their performance against consumers’ personal preferences. Whether you’re a dad looking for movies both you and your kids will love, a foodie wanting restaurants the locals rave about, or a savvy traveler looking for the hippest hotel, Circos.com finds the best answer for you.”

We’ve been working very closely with Circos on re-designing their interface and branding and were VERY excited to watch them launch at Demo. I’ve just watched their video and it was awesome, these guys are really going places.

Do Some Good Now

LJ Urban is a really exciting company, we really love their focus on sustainable building and when they came to us to talk about the good project, we were immediately hooked. LJ Urban were sick of developers using billboards to advertise their projects and saw massive waste in the traditional marketing process… So they decided to integrate their latest project with their ability to change the lives of people less fortunate than them. For every house they build in the Good Project, LJ Urban are funding the training of a mason in Burkina Faso. Instead of billboards, they built a website, and for every 100,000 visitors to the site, another mason gets the training the need to build houses for their local community.

We worked with LJ Urban to design and implement the website and ‘good-o-meter’, helping them create a new and globally beneficial way of advertising new homes in America. Head there now To do you rbit of good and help LJ Urban help others.

Thanks Nik for the heads up to this article about looking after your customers. The founder of Amazon.com has always had a love affair with his customers, despite customer love not being a general metric of business success.

The example was of a xmas present gone astray in the post and the absolute non-hesitation of an Amazon staff member to send out a new one immediately at no cost. They made a customer for life and have now sparked a bunch of people to spread the news (I am wondering if maybe the old 1 tells 100 customers is incorrect these days - people can tell thousands of others!). So what if Amazon lost a couple of hundred bucks on a missing item, they will have made that back in the five minutes it took for the guy who got another one to tell his first five friends.

When people talk about creating customers who love you, it always sounds a little contrived, like you only want them to love you so they spend more… But I find that it’s more than that. I got an email this morning from a customer who simply wrote to thank us and say how proud he was of his new website. It made my day. Other customers who ring to ask about something, then stick around chatting for a bit are also cool. I’m fascinated by the business who we help and the people who build them and feel like I’ve made some good friends out from the initial customer/supplier relationships.

Having customers you enjoy working with is one of the reasons we come to work in the morning and the key reason to keep us inspired and excited about the work we do. This means it’s in our interests to keep our customers really happy. I suspect people like Jeff Bezos from Amazon approach their business in much the same way and because their key aim is to have fun and make friends while working, they’ve been mighty successful.

I think what some business forget (and so do we in the bad times) is that, like the movie stars say, ‘without your fans, you’re nothing’. on those days when you’re rushing around, everything is falling down around you and you can’t quite see how you’re going to fix everything, I think the key lesson the likes of Amazon teach us is to prioritse keeping your customers happy, then go from there.

I went to a meeting today with a branding company and a customer. The branding company didn’t look at their clock once. I’m not sure if they are charging by the hour, but the lack of watching the clock really stood out.

In amongst checking cellphones and running late, I notice that generally people blatantly watch their clocks when you have a one hour meeting, the not-so-subtle ‘well that’s done’ at often entirely inappropriate times REALLY gets on my nerves.

So what if you run 10 minutes late. Seriously, your not that important that ten minutes will kill you. And I understand all those ten minutes add up, but they reward you over and over again with happy, satisfied customers… And anyway meetings finish early sometimes too.

We get a fair bit of work from the other side of the world. For most of these customers, this is the first time they have worked with someone they aren’t able to catch up with face to face and I think the idea is initially quite frightening. I find, it works BETTER than when you are in the same place, and here is why.

Meetings are short and to the point

Long distance projects have limited forms of communication, i.e phone and email. When you have to specify a time for a phone call to the other side of the world, you tend to stick to that time, not arrive 10 minutes late, and you come with an agenda, because it may be a week before you get a chance to talk again.

These may seem like pitfalls but actually they are benefits. What is missing in a lot of tech projects these days is a sense of organisation. Everyone wants to pitch their ideas in the melting pot and have endless discussions over features and ideas. When you work from a distance, there is simple no place for mucking around with this and very quickly people work out where their capabilities are best suited.

Meetings are organised and always less than an hour. You go in with specific talking points and you come out with new targets. It’s really simple.

Stuff gets done all the time

I send a screenshot to the US at the end of my day, and by the beginning of my next day, someone has had a chance to look over it and give me some feedback so I can immediately launch back into design mode. This cuts out immense amounts of waiting around and means that the project is being worked on literally around the clock.

There is a lot more trust

It sounds a bit weird, but when you have to rely on someone you have never met to get a very important project finished on time, you simply have to trust them. Sometimes I find working with local customers is hard because everyone thinks they are a web designer and therefore want to tell you how it should be done. International customers still pitch in, but they respect that you are there for a reason and you know what you are doing. It seems like the opposite would happen, but it doesn’t.

You get to the point

I’m a fairly blunt person about design, I love it when customers say either ‘I love it’ or ‘I hate it’. When you work face to face with people, they seem to find it harder to tell you the flaws they see and it often gets to the end of the project before they bring them up or they give vague descriptions of the problem. When you email someone, it’s easier to cut to the point and list points of disagreement which can then quickly be overcome.

I am yet to find a downside to working from afar and I suspect our customers can’t find too many either. The entire process is more efficient, less complicated and so much faster. And those midnight wakeup calls are awesome too ;)

I caught the bus yesterday. I’m not sure what it’s like in the rest of the world, but busses in Wellington are notorious for their angry, mean drivers.

I’ve had drivers who gleefully pass people waiting at the bus stop, or who drive up so close behind the person stopped in front of them, I swear I’ve witness heart attacks… But this guy was different.

He LOVES driving a bus and at 5.30pm when everyone is tired and grump and dreading the 30 minute trip home before they can settle in for the night, he was a breath of fresh air. He greeted everyone with a cheerful hello, he waited to see if the person running down the street was doing so because they wanted to catch his bus, he called out the next stop, he made jokes about flowers and sparked conversations. He was polite and funny and friendly.

I heard about 3 separate conversations (between strangers) around me where people discussed whether or not they could nominate him for bus driver of the year, for the first time ever, the person who sat next to me actually smiled as she asked if it was ok if she sat next to me. As everyone boarded the bus, within seconds they cottoned onto this new happy atmosphere and visibly relaxed.

I’m not over-dramatising this, it was incredible how this one guy completely changed the culture of the bus. He made people happy and chatty. I was in shock.

As we all disembarked at various stops, instead of the usual ‘thanks driver’, people actually stopped and said ‘thanks, you made my day’, or something else they really felt.

It just reminded me of those days when you feel like ‘what can one person do?’ that actually you can do a lot. This guy proved how important his job is - in a typical day he impacts thousands of peoples lives, by being one happy bus driver, he makes a visible dent in creating a city full of happy productive people. He reminded me of the important role that each of us could play in creating better company culture or happier customers or a better life.

I’m going to try to be more like him.

Who didn’t love Toast Martinborough? What a concept! Vineyards, wine, music, food and an entire day of relaxation. Whoever organises it deserves a medal, the event is so well run, you don’t even realise you with 10,000 other people at a place that normally only holds up to a quarter of that.

I went to Victoria university. Their website was a well known example among students of a black hole of information - you knew it was all in there somewhere, it was just virtually impossible to get to it. It was begging for an update, so I was happy to discover that very recently it had undergone a re-design.

The new site looks nice, but I feel like the point of the redesign was missed a little. It’s not actually much easier to find stuff. I realised quickly that I had ‘learned’ the old site - I knew where that random link to the graduation information was off by heart so had taught myself how to get to it. The new site, I had no idea.

Looking quickly through the site to try to understand who and what they were catering for, I started jotting a quick list of what I think are the building blocks of a successful website. It is by no means complete, but based on the things I think the new VUW site does well and not so well.

• Use menus to break the areas of your website up into large chunks. People use navigation only when necessary so keep your main menu small (only a few links) and prominent. I can then quickly get to the broad area I need to.
• If you have a big site (with more than 2-3 layers of content), have a search box. I can avoid a long path to my goal page, if I can quickly search for it.
• Too much small text in small chunks is confusing, especially when it looks the same - I ignore it. Maybe I assume they are ads? Clearly separate different content and give it some space and size!
• I think 4 columns may be a bit much. It’s too busy and hard to separate the content out, so makes me head back to the menus. Keep it simple, 2-3 columns maximum and keep the main content area a lot larger than the ‘module’ bars so I know where I’m meant to be getting my information from.
• Completely understand the REASON why someone is there. What are the things most people are trying to get to? Make sure it is as easy as possible to people to achieve their most common tasks. All information was not created equal. Do visitor requirements change over time? (i.e with a graduation ceremony coming up, make graduation prominent, at other times, leave it more ‘hidden’

If you live in Wellington or have ever been here, chances are, you’ll have heard of the Chocolate Fish Cafe. I wrote about The Chocolate Fish Cafe a while ago, and often hear stories about lazy Saturdays spent eating delicious breakfasts and downing coffees in the sun, just around the bays.

The Chocolate Fish Cafe is a Wellington icon. We LOVE it. When Wellingtonians and lovers of Wellington heard that the council is raising their rates to compensate for the extra seating the cafe requires, to a point that The Chocolate Fish will have to charge $7 for a coffee to keep going… they were outraged. The fact of the matter is, we think the owners SHOULD be making a fortune out of us, we love their place, we love taking guests from out of town there, we love it how people come to Wellington and head directly to The Chocolate Fish.

How often do you come across a business that we’re all willing to ’subsidise’ through allowing reduced council rates? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it before.

In the meantime, the council is shelling out a ‘modest’ contribution to the $1.5 million cost of bringing David Beckham over to play 55 minutes of football.

I abandoned my emotional side and looked at this situation from an economic point of view:

Despite the councils unwillingness to divulge how much they have actually paid for Bavid Beckham, lets say it’s $100,000, which, I believe is roughly the increase in rates they are demanding from the Chocolate Fish Cafe. Let’s examine two scenarios where the council ’spends’ roughly the same cash:

David Beckham comes.

Wellington is hit with football fever for a day, they attractive a massive one off crowd to watch the game and are gambling (I assume) that many people who go to watch David, will fall madly in love with the game and continue to support the Wellington team, thus earning Wellington some good coin.

The council leaves the Chocolate Fish Cafes rates where they are

The hugely successful Wellington icon will stay open. For the next 5, 10, 15 years… The Chocolate Fish will continue to enhance Wellington’s image as a vibrant and quirky city, will continue to inspire visitors to drive or bike around the bays and take in Wellington beautiful scenery, will continue to pay significant rates and benefit the council.

I don’t get it.