In through the outfield

14 March 2010

Checkatrade to boost your business

I recently required the services of a local locksmith, as I was finding it increasingly difficult to unlock my back door.

My monthly Balcombe Parish Magazine contains a regular set of advertisements covering a range of local services, and included one from Lucy Locksmith.

After making an appointment, Lucy duly turned up on time, and provided an excellent friendly and professional service.

On departing she asked if I would be willing to put feedback on to the Checkatrade website. Although I was aware of the service from a few years previously, I had not used it to find local businesses. Lucy explained that due to positive customers feedback, she had managed to get to the top of the recommendations list. This had resulted in an increase in customer calls. 130 of her customers had given feedback with an average score of 9.9 out of 10, and 100% recommend her.

So don’t take my word for it, but if you are providing a local service where quality of services is your competitive advantage (and when wouldn’t you want that to be case?), I suggest you check out the site soon.

Lucy Locksmith Feedback Scores

Check a trade to boost you business.

I recently required the services of a local locksmith, as I was finding it increasingly difficult to unlock my back door.

My monthly Balcombe Parish Magazine contains a regular set of advertisements covering a range of local services, and included one from Lucy Locksmith.

After making an appointment Lucy (and her assistant?) duly turned up and provided an excellent friendly and professional service.

On departing she asked if I would be willing to put a comment??? on to the Check a??? website. Although I was aware of the service from a few years previously, I had not used it to find services. Lucy explained that due to happy customers, she had managed to get to the top of the recommendations list. This had resulted in an increase in customer calls.

So don’t take my word for it, but if you are providing a local service where quality is your competitive advantage (and when wouldn’t you want that to be case?), I suggest you check out the site soon.

10 March 2010

Who will win Management Book of Year?

My colleague Sally Halper who looks after Business and Management in the Social Sciences collections of the The British Library, has collaborated with the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) to launch a Management Book of the Year competition. The aim is to find the UK’s best management writers, and to raise the profile of the great management writing being produced by UK authors.

It is the UK’s first ever competition to focus specifically on management and leadership books and to have a category dedicated to texts in a digital format.

The competition is open to individual authors, publishers and agents who can enter books that were published within the 12 months from August 1 2009 to 31 July 2010, and for the digital category, between 1 August 2008 and 31 July 2010.

Books can be entered in three competition categories:
• Practical Manager: Books that provide insights or guidance to help practising managers in their work or professional development
• Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Texts that inspire innovation, encourage business or product development or support organisational development/adaptability
• Digital Management Book: Titles which make use of technology to enhance the accessibility of the text and the readers’ engagement with the subject matter covered

Further information for authors, publishers, and agents, including how to enter a book plus full competition rules can be found at www.managementbookoftheyear.org.uk.

In addition the CMI have started a web discussion on contributor’s favourite management and leadership books, with some fascinating examples given including Chasing the Rabbit: How Market Leaders Outdistance the Competition and How Great Companies Can Catch Up and Win by Steven Spear.

10 March 2010

Will Chat Roulette change the fabric of our society?

I was rather surprised to see the latest Social media craze featured in a report on BBC’s Newsnight programme last night.

I have been aware of Chatroulette for a few weeks now since my teenage son discovered it from friends, and became temporarily addicted.

The premise is remarkably simple, and relies on most modern computers having a webcam attached. You simply visit the very basic website (apparently built by Andrey Ternovskiy a Russian teenager) and start browsing. A live image of you will appear on the screen and below will be a random stranger who is currently on the site. Alongside is a text box for real-time chat, or you can use a microphone to speak to your ‘new friend’.

Needless to say the anonymous nature of the system attracts all kind of weird and wonderful characters, with a preponderance for men who like to surf (the web) naked. Some like to shock, with one notorious Chat Rouletter appearing to have hung himself in the corner of his bedroom. In these cases the single button that drives the system comes into play. It has the word ‘next’ on it. You press to get away from you current ‘partner’, but without knowing who will be next in line.

Not surprisingly the service seems to appeal to a large number of American teenage boys in search of females. Not surprisingly women are in a minority, and so in great demand.

However, according to my son it is possible to meet interesting and intelligent people from across the world. I was surprised by how often he came across people logged in from China. Perhaps the authorities are not aware of the system, so have yet to block access. Even Webwasher used at my workplace has yet to put a block on the site.

Newsnight attempted to justify the story on the basis that it was just the latest evidence in how Social Media activities such as Facebook and Twitter are breaking down social barriers and conventional restrictions on behaviour. However, I have my doubts, and wonder if just provided Jeremy Paxman the opportunity to say ‘masturbation’ live on air.

Addition 11 March 2010:

This weeks net@night with Amber and Leo spends quite a bit of time talking about the Chat Roulette phenomenon. In particular they talk about the shame of being ‘nexted’, when no one wants to talk to you online, and clicks the next button on the screen. They also referred to a video by Casey Neistat, a New York based artist and filmmaker. He has created an entertaining short film that explores the intricacies of Chat Roulette.

8 March 2010

Flat White is the new Black

In so many areas of business and commerce there often appears to be a closed market, with no opportunities for new products and services. However, the recent rise to prominence in London of the Flat White coffee coffee shows this is not always the case.

According to Wikipedia the Flat White originated from New Zealand and Australia, although my (Kiwi) source assures me it was the former.

A flat white is a coffee drink prepared by pouring steamed milk from the bottom of the jug over a double shot (30ml) of espresso. The stretched and textured milk is prepared by entraining air into the milk and folding the top layer into the lower layers. To achieve the “flat”, non-frothy texture the steamed milk is poured from the bottom of the jug, holding back the lighter froth on the top in order to access milk with smaller bubbles, making the drink smooth and velvety in texture.

A flat white differs from a latte in that it is served in a smaller ceramic cup, whereas a traditional latte is served in a glass with the steamed milk poured over the espresso shot. A latte can also be served in a bowl or a larger cup requiring more milk, obscuring the complex flavours of the coffee.

The beverage is now so popular in London it is claimed to have helped the Costa Coffee chain increase sales by almost ten percent. Even Starbucks have given in to the market pressure and introduced the drink to their range.

There is even a Flat White Cafe in Soho, and of course a blog charting the rise of the drink with a map showing where you can buy it in London.

However, not being an early adopter myself, I think I will stick with my wet Cappuccino for the time being.

I wonder what will be the next ‘big thing’ for London’s cafe society to get excited about.

5 March 2010

Climbing the Google rankings with Lucidica

Tonight over 100 aspiring entrepreneurs were treated to a virtuoso performance from Thomas Jeffs the founder and Chief Technology Officer of our partner Lucidica. I had attended his workshop on What is a CRM, and when are they best used by small business? In November and had been impressed.

The topic was how to climb up the Google page-rankings and was based on the story of how, within three months, Thomas moved Lucidica from page 47, to page 1 on a Google search for IT support London.

Although Thomas could have talked for hours on the topic (and in fact runs a four hour workshop on this very topic in the Business & IP Centre), he compressed his information into seven SEO (search engine optimisation) tips.

1. Get your business onto Google Maps – as it could get to straight onto page one.

2. Get techie (technical in IT speak) – understand the role of anchor text and meta tags. If it is too tricky, find someone who can do it for you.

3. Get links coming into your website – the higher quality the links which point to you, the higher up Google you will go.

4. Get socialising – LinkedIn is the best for most business to business, but Facebook might be more relevant for your business. Use as many social media platforms as you can maintain within reason.

5. Get commenting – instead of just spreading you name about on other websites and forums, think about what you can give that is of value to others. It’s a bit like Karma. If you give away good information people will talk about you in positive terms and link to you.

6. Get feedback and make it link – find out what forums and online spaces your customers hang out in and make your presence felt.

7.a. Get randomising – this one really surprised me. You have to make sure the references to your business are as varied as possible. If you follow the traditional marketing route of always using the same strapline when referring to your business, there is chance Google will think you are trying to cheat their indexing software, and send your pages results into oblivion.

7.b. Get listed – there a lots of great directories in the UK where your listing will boost your Google ranking. Thomas recommended Touch London at £150 a year. However, he warned there are a few dodgy listing sites who will take you way down on Google if you make the mistake of listing on them.

All in all it was a great evening, with an unlimited supply of excellent questions from the audience These were all met with even more impressive answers from Thomas.

Lucidica’s next workshop with us, is Designing, developing and maintaining an effective website next Tuesday, and there are still a few places left.

What is a CRM, and when are they best used by small business?

3 March 201024 October 2012

Bellows to keep my home fires burning

With all the cold weather we have been having in the UK this winter, I have become rather dependent on my wood burning stove.

The only snag is that a combination of increasing demand for logs and an excess of rain has resulted in damp and sappy wood that is very reluctant to burn.

In desperation I recently purchased a pair of bellows and have been amazed at how effective they are at getting my home fires burning

2 March 2010

Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs – Supporting Small Businesses

On Tuesday I was invited to an HMRC partner conference and networking event at 100 Whitehall. The meeting actually took place in the Churchill room so was redolent of history.

The objective of the afternoon was to see how HMRC can work with partners to improve support for their SME (Small and Medium Sized Enterprises) customers.

The obvious question was why would they take this approach, and they were impressively frank and honest with their answers. It starts with their vision; “our customers will feel that the tax system is simple for them and even handed’.

Our Way
–   We will understand our customers and their needs
–   We will make it easy for customers to get things right
–   We are passionate in helping those who need it

I love the way they refer to tax payers as customers, and am amazed that they put in writing that they are passionate about helping them. This is not the kind of language one expects from a civil service department, and especially not the tax office. I suppose the real test is whether their customers see it the same way.

SME’s are a key customer group for HMRC. There are 4.8 million SME’ in the UK and they account for over 99% of all businesses in the country. They make up over 50% of business turnover and employ some 14 million people. They collect or contribute over 40% of tax receipts.

The bottom line is that £6bn is lost from the Exchequer each year because of failure to take proper care in record-keeping. SME’s make up the bulk of that ‘tax gap’, but are often scared of, or unwilling to contact HMRC directly to address tax problems. Whereas they are much more willing to talk to others such as the partners invited to the meeting. These ranged from business advisors, to professional bodies (such as the Federation of Master Builders), to accountants and even trade retailers such as Screwfix.

Stephen Banyard, HMRC’s Director of the Business Support Unit gave some fascinating information on the scale of their challenge:
– For instance £1.6 billion pounds of tax income is lost due to mistakes made by business.
– This despite the fact that HMRC receive 10 million phone calls a year from their customers.
– Seventy percent of companies use a tax agent to avoid dealing with the forms themselves.
The Tax deferral scheme introduced to help businesses make it through the recession has helped more than 242,000 companies, totalling nearly £4.23 billion.
– All tax related information will be moved onto the Business Link website, but will allow content to be mashed-up on partners websites.

The key problem that HMRC face is the lack of record keeping from tax payers. To help address this they have partnered with Staples officer supplier. They have produced jointly branded marketing materials which are displayed in Staples stores and on their website.

They are even sponsoring a Channel Five TV show starting on 10 March this year. The Business Inspector will be a troubleshooting series aiming to transform failing small companies, with the intention of to encourage good-record keeping.

Keeping records (pdf 57KB) Brings together the main record keeing guidance for easy reference by our customers and provides opportunity to mention the new penalties that maybe applicable.

Self-employed and partnerships

Form or record
A record of all sales and takings, including cash receipts. For example • till rolls • sales invoices • bank statements • paying-in slips • accounting records.
A record of all purchases and expenses, including cash purchases. For example: • receipts • purchase invoices • bank and credit card statements • cheque book stubs • accounting records.

Why
Allows you to quickly see what you are owed and accurately work out your total income. Allows you to quickly see what you have spent, how much you owe and what you can claim for tax purposes.

Further information
Self-employed: go to www.hmrc.gov.uk/sa/ rec-keep-self-emp.htm Partnerships: go to www.hmrc.gov.uk/sa/ rec-keep-part-partners.htm Phone Self Assessment Helpline 0845 900 0444

1 March 2010

My route into Libraryland

My fellow SLA Europe colleague Woodsiegirl has created the Library Routes Project, a wiki set up in October 2009.

The idea is to document how people got into the profession, and the career path which has taken them to their present role.

I have been meaning to add my ‘story’ for some time, as I have always been fascinated by how people end up in this unusual profession. I went from being a motorcycle messenger with Pegasus Couriers, hurtling around the wintry streets of Thatcher’s London to become a cataloguer grappling with the delights of the Dewey Decimal Classification and AACR2 (Anglo American Cataloguing Rules mark 2)

My story begins a few years earlier. I left University in 1984 with a degree in Geography and Computer Science (the kind of thing possible then at Keele University). The logical thing to do at that time would to have become a computer programmer or something similar. However, during my last year at Keele I had something of a Damascene conversion whilst sitting in the Computer Lab one sunny Sunday afternoon. I looked around the computing lab and realised that with the exception of one other equally laggard student, I was the only there who had not completed the assignment due in on Monday morning. Some had completed it weeks ago. The shocking truth was that they preferred being in the lab with their computer terminals to frolicking out in the sun with their fellow students. I suddenly realised that I preferred being and working with people rather than cold inhuman computer technology.

This new found realisation left me at something of a loss as to a career path post University. However one faint possibility did occur to me at that key point. During my four year degree course (this was back in the halcyon days of full grants), there were just two options for paid work at Keele. The first was behind the student union bar fending off drunken scholars five deep demanding Pernod or Newcastle Brown Ale. The second was to work as an evening assistant in the Library. Both jobs paid the same, but the second involved working with attractive young library assistants who were local girls (surprise surprise there weren’t any young men at that time). The choice seemed obvious to me, and I greatly enjoyed spending time with these exotic creatures (you have to realise that after being surrounded by 4,000 students for weeks on end, spending time with a ‘real’ Potteries local was very appealing). As you can probably tell the spirit of Melville Dewey (or S R Ranganathan come that) did not enter me during this period.

I spent my first post University year working intermittently as a loft insulator – the period of my live I was at my fittest and most agile. The job involved heaving bales of fibre-glass through narrow loft hatches and avoiding putting my foot through delicate plaster ceiling panels. I then moved to London with my girlfriend and needed to find work quickly. I turned to my ‘trusty steed’, and became a motorcycle messenger. After a couple of months of risking my life in the cut and thrust of London streets helping to oil the wheels of the Thatcher boom economy, I decided this was not a good long-term career choice. So I wrote to thirty university and college libraries to see if they had any vacancies. I received two replies inviting me to interviews, and ended up on a six month contract at South Bank Polytechnic (as it was then known).

Within a few days of starting as cataloguer I began to think that this career could be the one for me. Having had 25 years to consider why this might the be case, I have decided on a combination of reasons. Firstly I had never been able to find one subject I could settle on to the exclusion of all others (the archetypal jack of all trades and master of none). At the same time I found I was interested in almost all subjects and had a desire to dig deeper to find out more about them.

At the end of my six month contract I was fortunate enough to be taken on as a Graduate Trainee, which allowed me to learn about a range of library jobs within the Polytechnic. Nothing I experienced during that year dented my enthusiasm for the profession, so I found a place at North London Polytechnic (as it was then called) and spent a year learning about the theory. This was actually the hardest part of my life in Libraryland, as I found the theory dry and boring. Many students actually gave up during the year, but my knowledge of how enjoyable of the actual work was drove me on and got me through.

This story is turning into something of an epic, so I am going to break it into two parts with the second exciting instalment to follow in a later post.

27 February 2010

Lynne Brindley appeals for UK web archiving

I was somewhat surprised to hear Lynne Brindley’s voice in my bathroom as I was brushing my teeth on Thursday morning this week.

It turned out she was being interviewed on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 talking about the lack of legislation which would ensure we don’t lose the vast amount of information only published on the World Wide Web.

The British Library has already managed to capture 6,000 sites in our UK Web Archive, but this is mere drop in the ocean compared to the millions of websites (past and present) in the UK alone.

It is reckoned that the average life expectancy of a website is less than 75 days, and that at least ten percent of UK websites are lost or replaced with new material every six months.

The problem is that until UK copyright law is changed, every website owner has to give permission to capture their site, and fewer than 25 percent of owners even reply to our requests.

In the meantime I suggest you nominate websites so we can capture more content.

I am rather proud of the fact that even this humble blog is being preserved for future generations of Infields to read. http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/target/7798801/source/search).

24 February 2010

Tweeting snow with hash tag uksnow

As I mentioned yesterday (Facebook vs. Linkedin networking evening report), Twitter is becoming an increasingly powerful tool for business, especially small business.

However, thank to some clever mashup programming by Ben Marsh it is now possible to get an instant snow view from Tweeters across the UK.

Below is today’s #uksnow map showing some isolated pockets of snow in Edinburgh and Aberdeen.

More impressive is this screen shot from 6 January this year.

Even more impressive, and my favourite photo so far this year is this NASA image of the UK taken on 7 January. Ironically I was on a skiing holiday in the Austrian Alps when this image was captured, and we had considerably less snow where I was staying. On returning home I had to clear two foot of snow from my path just to get to my front door.