Wow… I’ve just received the most unbelievable phone call from the iStrategy Conference Company with reference to a tweet of mine on the 14th December.

I’m familiar with iStrategy because they run a Social Media conference, and during last year they approached upwards of 15 times about either buying tickets or selling me sponsorship – it started again this year with two consecutive phone calls from their usual aggressive highly trained sales people, so I kindly asked to be removed from their call list on both occasions.

Today’s phone call was awkward, with the guy suggesting that my tweet was a low blow and directly an attempt to negatively affect the reputation of his conference, and suggested that I don’t do it again or he will be “forced to retaliate and put bad word about my events”…

To be honest, I’m flattered that they see techMAP’s free monthly meetup as direct competition for their £5000 per ticket yearly global conference, but this certainly wasn’t an attempt of a ‘mines better than yours’ game, and I’m not interested in starting a petty social media war over a single tweet…

Having said that I’m truly disgusted by their approach cannot believe that they followed up my tweet with a further threatening phone call… it’s bad form, shows lack of understanding of the space they work in, and it came with a tone that suggested they didn’t want people to talk about their brand and they’d do anything to protect it!

Guys… Don’t call again and enjoy your conference #thatisall

20% off for #techMAP – Social Media Monitoring Training – London, 26th Jan

Luke Brynley-Jones (Our Social Times) and Marshall Sponder are running an exclusive, one-off social media monitoring class in London on 26th January. Attendees will learn how to choose, set up and configure a monitoring platform; how to identify influencers; how to extract meaning from social media data; and how to create a social media measurement framework.

Only 20 places are available. techMAP members get 20% off with this code: techmap10

Book your place here: http://www.monitoring-bootcamp.com/

Our Award winning, Magazine Featured and Top Gear DVD filmed Ford Escort Mk1 has regretfully got to go up for sale.

It’s a rare to find a car with 512bhp, 800kg and the character of a Mk1 Escort, but 5 years ago a friend of ours built it, raced it and loved her, we bought it and for the last 12 months its been ours to love cherish, race, get featured, show and share many good times at track days showing the Ferrari and Jap crew how the Brits do it…!!

The cars spec includes:

Stripped back, re-painted Shell painted in Electric (Azbo) Orange Perl from the ST Focus.
TVR 4.5l AJP V8 (512bhp 380lb/ft torque – Alloy Block V8 that’s lighter than a Zetec!).
Modified Intake and Throttle Bodies.
New Manifold.
Full Custom Race Exhaust.
15″ Minilites – 205/50 Toyo R888 Tyres.
AP Racing 320mm Discs (Lotus Exige) w/ AP Racing 4Pot Calipers.
Stainless Braided Fuel hoses and Brake Hoses.
2WD Sierra Cosworth Rear Disc Conversion.
Full GAZ Coilover Conversion (Front & Back).
14 Point Custom Roll Cage.
Recaro Hans Race Seats w/ 6 point Harness
Plumbed Extinguisher.
MOT till May ’12

The car has been fully race prepared and cared, each event is followed by a check over and all relevant parts are regularly services/repaired/replaced – mechanically its been described as a masterpiece!

Feature/Award Details:

Retro Ford Magazine as pictured in Spring ’11.
Top Gear – Italian Job DVD with alongside the Green Mk1
Mini Films – Escort Mk1 DVD – Full Feature in modified section.
MC360 Full Race Winner (all classes) April 2011 – 6 Hour Endurance Race.
Race Winner in Classic Touring Car Series 2010 and 2011 (various).
Fastest Road Car at Santa Pod 11.1s ¼ Mile 124mph – RS Owners Club Day.

We co-own the car between 3 friends, and we simply wish to buy our own project cars for the 2012 Race and Track Day season and hence the reason for sale.

Its always best to be honest, what you’re looking at here isn’t a concourse 1973 Mk1 never driven, garaged for years, without a mark on it, that’s boring, this Mk1 is a 500bhp race built and bred Mk1 Escort (road legal – just!) and it’s showing a couple of signs of being races cosmetically, a small graze on the rear arch and back panel and front edge of the bonnet all from close contact racing – bit its really only a few hundred pounds if you want to fix it all – we think it gives the car its race culture!

Price £25,000

Please contact:
barryfurby@gmail.com

The car is located in dry storage in Didcot (Oxfordshire) and can be seen on appointment – We look forward to hearing from you…

The modern workplace has changed, in fact our jobs have changed radically over the past 5 years (and almost unrecognizable from our jobs 15 years ago!), we know this, its not big news.

We’re immersed in a world of digital communication, best practices, policies and procedures that our managers measure us against. We’re immersed in a world of distractions, procrastination and things that stop us getting things done – finding the balance in this mess of land of hoops to jump through and status updates to read is effectively ‘Productivity 3.0’ – How do we remain productive in the modern workplace.

This recent video from Jason Fried of 37Signals talks about the Modern Workplace and the concept that “Work doesn’t happen at Work”.

I suggest you take 16mins to listen to it, I’m a big fan of 37Signals, their book ReWork and their Podcast – I think we can all learn from the way they work…

Jason talks about the concept of work moments and ask ‘When do you get the most done’ and that most answers fall into the category of a time (early/late) and place (study/library) or a moving object (plane/train). He talks about Meetings and Manager being the biggest distraction in the work place and that phrase “What did I get done today?”.

I think that we’re learning in this modern ‘workplace 3.0’ discussion is that the 9-5 is a thing of the past and that the traditional ‘workplace’ is under fire too…!

Is this shift one of the influencing factors behind a decade of successful startups, great independent consultants and a huge networks of small businesses that nowdays operate with flexitime/work from home and hot desking?

Productivity 3.0, Workplace 3.0 and Business 3.0 – An interesting concept based around focused driven individuals that don’t get caught up in toxic big company bureaucracy?

What do you think? Do you work independently a lot of the time? Do you work to a big business that is super productive? Google do it well and have broke that bureaucratic business 2.0 trend, right?

Maybe we should take Jason up on ‘No talk Thursday’…

If you’ve spent more than 10 minutes online recently you’ve only got to type your name into Google and all of a sudden you realise that you have a Digital footprint, what most people don’t realize is that your Digital footprint might tells us more than your CV.

As much as it may be under debate, digital savvy potential employers DO check you out before they hire you so as a job seeker you must make every effort to mange what people can see about you and more importantly we must make an effort to manage what they see – this is now know as Online Personal Branding and it’s a must for any job seeker in the modern age.

So, What can you do to manage what comes up top in Google?

1) Google yourself….

Before we go any further lets see what we’re dealing with. Drunk photos on Facebook with open access, public Dating profiles, posts Grow your own Weed forums – You might have one two or all three of the previous, but the main thing is to find them and do you best to remove/edit it or adjust settings so they’re less findable. You should know that once these details have been recorded by Google they’ll never be gone and they’re stored ‘somewhere’, but we can edit these sources and more importantly we can manage better sources and give you a more attractive and more visible professional personal brand.

2) Join Professional Networking Sites:

Sites such as Linkedin, Plaxo, Viadeo and Xing are leading professional social networks for individuals who want to connect with peers, keep track / start business relationship and learn from others around them. Often the discussion groups are invaluable spaces for finding resources unique to your industry. The result of joining them for your personal brand and Google ranking are invaluable, create and fill out an in depth profile and make sure your name is labeled in full and more often or not this will be very highly ranked if anyone searches for you.

3) PR yourself at any opportunity:

There are websites & blogs across every industry that are constantly looking for new content – this includes writing blogs, written interviews and news reports on activity in the industry. More often than not theses sites will take a story for you and the regular mention of your name on their site will be indexed by Google. From a branding perspective to have been interviewed or be seen as a thought leader in your industry is fantastic news, and any potential employer that see’s you getting your name out there will be proud that you’ll be doing the same as a valued employee of their business.

4) buy ‘yourname.com’ & blog:

Having your own domain enables you to manage a space that depicts ‘you’ exactly as you want to be seen. More importantly it’ll probably be what comes up 1st in Google and draw the attention of anyone checking you out. A blog doesn’t have to be anything more than a profile and a few thoughts here and there, but people are increasing finding it a great way to attract readership and grow a fantastic personal brand.

The above might not be rocket science but how you are seen online can be make or break when looking for a new job, and actually the basics of getting found in the modern day are invaluable.

Originally written as a guest post for The Connected Recruiter

I’m slightly fascinated by something that was shared via twitter this afternoon. The Social Network giants haven’t been to forth coming with great articles of late, mainly just dribble about how they might try to a) eventually monetise or b) finally get privacy policy right.

So check this article out from Facebook Intern Paul Butler who works on their Data Infrastructure Engineering team.

He opens his Blog with the words of wisdom that resonate with any avid Info-graphic geek like myself, “Visualizing data is like photography. Instead of starting with a blank canvas, you manipulate the lens used to present the data from a certain angle.”

click to enlarge

The map above is the result of his attempts to visualise where people live relative to their Facebook friends. Each line connects cities with pairs of friends. The brighter the line, the more friends between those cities.

“Not only were continents visible, certain international borders were apparent as well,” he wrote.

“What really struck me, though, was knowing that the lines didn’t represent coasts or rivers or political borders, but real human relationships.”

Enjoy…

techMAP’s #techforgood Summary from wearetechMAP on Vimeo.

Yesterday I got a DM from the Satrical King of Twitter about his latest post that I’m delighted to be included in. All publicity is good publicity right?

Anyways, The reason for my post is quite simple, theres no point writing a post that takes the piss out of the industry if you then go an get the facts all mixed up… I run @FreshResources and not @FreshNetworks and sell grown ups not babies…. It made me laugh anyways…

Lets use this opportunity to highlight the wonderful peice of research that has been released as a ‘2010 Social Media Influencers‘ Whitepaper by our friends at Fresh Networks.

Since I attended the LikeMinds conference in Exeter four weeks ago I’ve been promising myself to collect my thoughts, draft up my notes into something readable and post a blog reflecting on the day. Its taken 4 weeks because we’ve moved house, hired staff at ‘Fresh‘ and run the fabulously enjoyable ‘Technology for Good‘ conference in that short period of time. But what better way to take advantage of the lack of internet access at my new place than to do it right now…

There were a few highlights for me and I’ll draw my conclusions from them individually rather than talk you through the day:

“How to Build for the Future in Media & Publishing”

The opening talk of the day, pitched as an ‘Immersive’ was exactly that, and was quite simply one of the best open room discussions I’ve been fortunate to take part in. Hosted and Facilitated by Andrew Davies and encouraged along by a panel of Publishers who joined us at our tables (Neil Thackray, Patrick Smith, Stephen Bateman).

The conversation rolled around various points which included… (from my notes)

-Everyones a publisher, previously you had to buy space, now build a community.
-Is there actually a difference between the mediums (print/online/social), we’re all trying to win participation, we can learn from each- other?
-Definition of ‘Curation’: Organising content towards what readers want to read – its about adding value (aggregation is about bulking content, has no context).
-Curation is not just about reading, its content, its community, its dialogue and interaction.
-Part of curation should be bringing online offline too – tangibility of offline experience is hugely valuable.
-Can curation be creativity? Are we just joining the dots or creativity structuring content?
-Is the next shift is towards the highest level of relevance?
-Curation: we are designing experiences?
-We (Marketers/Publishers) are still struggling to achieve integrated marketing!
-Measurement can include vibrancy, education, advocacy.
-Right now we have a huge problem with distribution and volume, will we come full circle and go back to a paid and trusted source?
-Relationships with consumers can easily be …. but TRUST is what you need in order to monetise!
-Have we reached the stage of saturation with social content, there is a space to add value and charge for it if it’s damn good!

What particularly interested me was the discussion about Paid Content, there is a vast amount of noise out there and we all know it. Are we at the point where we will pay for great content that is specifically tuned to our requirements? In a professional world I would be, great content is superb for personal development and learning and paid content in this space is already something I’m prepared to pay for – but for personal? BBC News kind of gives me everything I need – Why pay for the Guardian?

This theme was mirrored through Guy Clapperton’s following presentation, where he simply painted a picture that free content is spiraling out of control and simply can’t go on…

“Why the ‘We’ Generation ‘Knows’ Different”

A real highlight of the day was the talk by the fantastically smart Benjamin Ellis, Looking at understanding the next generation of knowledge and why digital conversations are a critical business asset in the modern day.

(Again from my notes:)

-”Not what we think, Not what you think, What we think they think”.
-The changes ‘we’ experience are different to ‘digital natives’ (those that growing up ‘in’ it).
-We reveal a lot about ourselves, how does this shape us and effect the workplace.
-‘We don’t think about air very much’ (or anything we’re immersed in ie. technology).
-‘A fish would be the last to discover water’ ‘imagine a world without search engines’.
-“I’ll google that” Jessee aged 10 > a new kind of knowledge
-Tastic knowledge is the stuff thats hard to touch << thats the stuff that;s rich and valuable to business
-So much info around, only 2% we need – this is the tastic stuff.
-Knowledge > wisdom (knowing that dropping mac will break it Vs remembering to zip up the case) < what turns one to the other > structure > narrative > curation > context ….
-What do you know, what is it that you don’t know, what is it that you don’t know that you don’t know.

Since finding my way from the bland slow days of Internet Explorer I’ve been torn between the Firefox and Chrome browser options and tossed and turned between them. Chrome on the whole has been the fav – but it does get a bit buggy and fall short in certain situations (more so in Win7 than on my mac). So when I saw a few blogs recently (here and here) about the new ‘social’ kid on the block I wanted to check it out…

My initial thought were positive, it includes seemless and well designed integration to facebook chat and twitter and enables sharing of any site across the two channels at a click of a button. I really like the RSS reader which tells me when my favourite blogs have been updated with new content too…

But to my surprise I stumbled across something that made me realise why Google doesn’t care that Rockmelt might steal a market shre from its wonderful Chrome browser… it uses the Chromium engine and is simply a visual re-hash of Chrome + Social plug-ins… Thats what we love about opensource and some clever ‘invite only’ marketing…!

…click to make bigger…

How are you finding Chrome Rockmelt, and does anyonw know if the Open Source Chromium project allows the developers to actually improve the engine?

Update:
Does anyone know if analytics will pick up Rockmelt as a browser or will it show as Chrome? Guess I can check this eve on my site?