September 10 will be my last day at Qype. After three years at the company I’m leaving to try my hand at a freelance career.

I’m not going to get all sentimental and/or self-aggrandising here about what we’ve achieved at Qype over the past 36 months (I’ll save that for the updated CV), but I did want to recount a couple of lessons I’ve learned over the 11 weeks or so since I handed in my resignation.

Those of you who have John Nashian maths brains will have worked out from that last sentence that I’m on a three month notice. When I tell people that the usual response it to crinkle their nose and make a noise similar to ‘bleurgh’. But, honestly, having a three month notice has been a bit of a blessing for me. I imagine that if I had another full time position to go to then I would have been climbing the walls by now. But with nothing other than a scary freelance void in front of me, I’ve been glad for every single day of income-tastic employment.

In fact, I think I can say that without that three month notice I would have been a lot less likely to go freelance. I like deadlines, they make you stop pissing around and get on with the important stuff. To paraphrase David Mamet: that’s why they’re called deadlines. But four weeks would not have been long enough for me to do everything I needed to do to get into a position where I felt comfortable calling myself a freelancer. With four weeks to play with I’m sure I would have just grabbed at the first thing with a regular pay cheque attached to it.

But with twelve weeks I was able to map out a rough plan of action that would help me get me started in a professional environment I have zero experience in (I’m talking about the agency-side/consultancy world), and that plan of action mostly involved shamelessly milking other people for their experience and contacts.

(And this is where we get to the ‘lesson’ bit, sorry it took me five paragraphs to get here.)

On paper, this should have been quite difficult for me because I am a terrible networker. I dont’ like networking, I am bad at actually doing it (I can’t remember the last time I handed someone my business card without being prompted to by somebody else), and I’m uncomfortable when other people do it to me. But I’m also lucky in that I’ve had the opportunity to get to know some incredibly bright and genuinely nice people over the past seven or eight years… and that’s the key difference here: I never networked, I just ‘got to know’ people.

Here’s a quote from Tony Hsieh’s book Delivering Happiness (not nearly as lame as the title makes it sound), which I read recently:

“…my advice is to stop trying to ‘network’ in the traditional business sense, and instead just try to build up the number and depth of your friendships, where the friendship itself is its own reward. The more diverse your set of friendships are, the more likely you’ll derive both personal and business benefits from your friendships later down the road. You won’t know exactly what those benefits will be, but if your friendships are genuine, those benefits will magically appear 2-3 years later down the road.”

Now if all that sounds a bit like cosmic ordering then that’s because Hsieh is a bit of a hippy at heart, but if you get past the Noel Edmonds-esque phrasing there is a nub of truth there: when it comes to ‘who you know’ depth trumps breadth every time.

I know this all sounds remarkably like common sense, and it is. But over the past few weeks I’ve experienced that common sense in action and seen just how precious a network of ‘authentic’ (for want of a better word) contacts can be. And I’ve been blown away. From a handful of emails sent out by me asking for help a few weeks ago I have been given the opportunity to pick the brains of some of the smartest people working in the industry, gained more knowledge than I could have done reading fifty books on the subject, and I’ve been handed some opportunities that I would never have even glimpsed otherwise.

So what have I learned?

Don’t be a networking whore. Instead just get to know people, it’s more fun for everyone and you’ll get more out of it. One example from the past few weeks: 18 months ago I met someone who was setting up a new business in London (happens a lot at Qype), and she introduced me to her brother for no other reason than we worked in roughly the same industry. We had a chat over a cup of coffee. Lasted about 40 minutes. That was it. A year and a half later I remember that guy, email him to ask his advice, meet up for another coffee, and an hour later I have direct emails of introduction to some extremely influential and interesting people.

Be humble and admit you need help. I guess what puts a shiver down my spine when we talk about ‘networking’ is the same thing that give me the creeps when anyone mentions the Masons: it’s that ‘old boys network’ approach to life. The clammy handshakes, back scratching, and flesh-pressing nastiness that everyone pretends is somehow necessary to ‘get along’. And it’s all built around this delicate lie of hierarchy and status. Here’s an alternative: admit you don’t have a clue what you’re doing and ask for advice. Sounds crazy I know, but when you ask someone to help you understand something you don’t, then you’ll get a lot more useful information out of them (and, let’s be honest, they get that warm ego glow from helping you out).

Don’t aim high. Aim wide. If you’re looking through your list of contacts for people to tap up don’t think that you need to go for anyone who has CEO on their business card. Chances are that person has been working for the same organisation for the past twelve years, takes four hour lunches every day, cries him/herself to sleep every night, and would probably rather ask you how to go about finding a new job. Ok, that’s a little bit if an exaggeration, but you’re looking for people with varied experience and interesting connections here, and that doesn’t necessarily equate to high flyer (unless they’re CEO of the company they set up of course).

Know what you have to offer. The question I got asked most over various coffees/lunches/beers was “What are you good at?” (a close second was “What do you want to do?”). It’s a deceptively difficult question to answer when you’re not thinking in vacuous, CV-friendly soundbites; but you need to give people something to work with when they’re offering you free advice. Plus it’s a really interesting exercise to sit down with a blank page and try and fill it with things you are genuinely good at (no business jargon allowed!).

The biggest lesson I learnt from all this. If I’d known what an incredibly generous, smart and insightful bunch of people were out there for me to tap into, I would have done all this a year ago, whether I was looking for a new job or not. Just getting this kind of perspective on your options is really useful, and you get to reconnect with interesting people you might not have talked to in a while.

Gartner (“the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company” in case you’d forgotten) have just published the results of a survey they conducted on “the way social networks shape consumer buying behavior”.

If you want to read the full report you’ll have to pay for it (I haven’t), but there is a decent summary right here which raises some interesting questions (there’s also a Telegraph article about it here).

The gist of Gartner’s findings is that you can break down the consumer population into a handful of classifiable types based on their social networking behaviour (there is a fifth classification: Unclassifiable, which two thirds of us fall into apparently, but let’s ignore that for now because it’s making my brain hurt).

Now, I’m always wary of any survey that identifies nice, handy labels because one of the most valuable lessons that the advent of social media has taught us is that treating your audience as a globular mass is the first step on the way to losing the conversation. The traditional ‘megaphone’ methods of marketing with a brand on one side and a generic audience on the other have been proven over and over again to be redundant. Simply partitioning that faceless wad into handy labels is a bit of a lazy hack, and not that useful when it comes to real life.

Having said that… let’s look at the five networking consumer types Gartner identifies:

Connector: Perform a bridging function between disparate groups of people.
Salesman: Extensive social connections that they can persuade act on information in highly directed ways i.e. buy stuff.
Seeker: Connect with other people in order to find out the information, and who tend to seek advice from experts on what to buy.
Maven: You know these guys, the knowledge exchangers or information brokers. Not out to persuade people but use and acquire information for their own interests.
Self-Sufficient: Will happily find out for themselves what they need to know and don’t consult their network.

Now when I read this stuff it reminds me of reading my horoscope (not that I read my horoscope very often, you understand, I’m a grown man for God’s sake). To help me explain why let’s pull a horoscope for my star sign (Gemini) at random from the interweb. Here’s the Guardian’s appropriately-named Neil Spender outlining what I had in store for me the week beginning 15 February 2010:

“It’s a moment for faith – not the blind variety, but the belief that when you act from integrity and contribute to the greater good, something positive will come. A new Moon in your ninth house favours idealism and distant horizons (including people from afar) while Jupiter in your 10th for the rest of 2010 augurs lucky breaks at work… and lucky liberations from it. Your valentine: top girl or top banana.”

Once we get rid of the new age mumbo jumbo from that we’re left with not much other than the groundbreaking revelation that contributing to the greater good makes you feel awesome, I’m going to get a break at work sometime this year… and something about a banana.

Now you don’t need me to tell you that horoscopes are just jargon-coated (seriously, who uses the word ‘augurs’ in day-to-day life?) platitudes designed to hit as many emotional hotspots as possible. But when you replace the word ‘horoscopes’ in that last sentence with ‘social network segmentation surveys’ then it gets interesting. Because, personally, I can place myself in any one of Gartner’s consumer segments and happily fit every criteria if I think about it hard enough.

I’m not saying Gartner’s research is worthless, I’m saying I think they’ve packaged their data up in an oversimplified fashion that’s negated it’s impact.

Here’s an interesting quote from Nick Ingelbrecht, research director at Gartner:

“Companies attempting to use social networks should develop relationships with key customers over a period of time and progressively refine the social network profiles of those individuals. In this way, the most suitable individuals can be targeted with the right information, products and promotions in the most cost-effective way,” said Mr. Ingelbrecht. “Retailers who run small shops have instinctively done this with their best customers for years with the intention that these ‘VIP’ customers will not only buy the new products but recommend them to their friends.”

While it’s very tempting to “progressively refine the social network profiles” of individuals in order to segment them, it’s also a crass and entirely disrespectful way of approaching your market. Approaching any network with a set of pre-determined moulds to fill, and then hunting around for people to force into those shapes, is just asking for trouble.

The ‘small shop owners’ that Nick refers to don’t keep a cheat sheet behind the counter detailing their Key Customer Identification Tips. They identify valuable customers through talking to them. And then they keep talking to them. Why are we seeking to complicate that equation when we should be trying to simplify it?

Step 1) Talk to customers.
Step 2) Keep talking to ones that talk back.
Step 3) Engage and include them in everything you do.

See, that’s not hard is it? Are you telling me that, while engaged in the second part of that process, if you discovered that the customer who’d taken the time out to talk to you was a ‘maven’ and not a ‘salesman’, that you’d just stop the conversation dead because they couldn’t be “targeted with the right information, products and promotions in the most cost-effective way”? I really hope you wouldn’t.

Avoid arbitrary segmentation. It leads to sloppy assumptions, encourages generic thinking and augurs (ahem) failure.

Phil sent over the questions as part of his Launchpad series of Q+A’s, the idea being that he grills “entrepreneurs, start-ups and digital influencers to find out the secrets of their success…. then interviews them in a year to see how they’re getting on.”

So if you’d like to know what my favourite location on Qype is, what my first computer was, or what I think of Facebook’s longevity, you can click here to read the interview.

Now I just have to make sure I do something spectacular in the next 12 months. No pressure.

Witness then Ferrero Rocher’s Facebook page as of 17:10 today:

Porn spam. iPad spam. Hot celebrity spam…. it’s an unholy mess, and no one from FR seems to be doing anything about it (you can read Blaise Grimes-Viort’s overview of the debacle right here).

Now, compare this with After Eight‘s recent foray into social media…

Recently the PR company representing the famous after dinner mints approached Qype with the idea of bringing Jim Haynes (the star of their recent TV campaign) over to London and hosting a dinner party. We hooked them up with the brilliant Fernandez and Leluu who run an underground supperclub in East London, put the word out to the Qype community and London’s food blogger elite… and this happened, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this… you get the idea.

Not much of a fight really is it?

My good friend Katie Lee asked me to write a few paragraphs on the new BBC Sherlock Holmes series for the blog she edits, Dork Adore (tagline: Lovely things for geeks).

As you’ll discover if you read the post, I am a bit of a Holmes nerd, so this wasn’t exactly a hardship for me. As a result, I might have got a little carried away and written far too much, but I did manage to get the phrase “unintentional ejaculation” in there, so I’m happy.

Here’s the link to the blog post.

And here’s my favourite bit:

“John Watson is a soldier, fresh from Afghanistan, who isn’t about to start taking orders from some junkie in a flappy hat. If Watson panders to Holmes then so do we, and then we just end up resenting them both. It’s like eavesdropping on an abusive relationship, only with more smog and top hats. Nobody wants to watch that. But as soon as Watson proves himself Holmes’ equal (his main talent being that he can function as a normal human being) then we’re off and running.”

Community-driven marketing has the potential to dramatically shift how you talk to your market, but it can also shift the size of that market too.

Lego is a great example of a community-based campaign having a very real effect on a company’s priorities as well as their bottom line. The traditional thinking at Lego used to be ‘focus on the kids’, but once the company began listening to their community they realised very quickly that they were ignoring the ‘enthusiasts’: those grown men (and, let’s face it, they’re nearly all men) who had grown up with the brand and are more than happy to blow some of their expendable income on it (if kids were spending $20 a year on LEGOs, while adults were spending around $1,000 you don’t have to be Warren Buffett to know what your next step needs to be).

Some important questions I can help you answer:

Who are you talking to right now, and who do you want to be talking to?
Do you want to restrict your community to your traditional target market?
Do you want to put in all this effort just to preach to the converted?
What kind of potential can you uncover if you shift out of your comfort zone a little?

Your existing customers are as important as your potential ones.

If you have a bedrock of people that you rely on to drive your business then you’ll want to examine what makes them so loyal and what value they can bring to your organisation. These are your ambassadors. If you could take them into a lab and clone them you would; but until technology catches up you can work on bringing them into the fold, structure your relationship with them, let them know how valuable they are, and safeguard their loyalty.

Identifying this strata of individuals and engaging them in an organic and authentic way is a key part of my role as a Community Manager.

As a freelance consultant I can help you with these key first steps to targeting and building a successful campaign:

Researching and uncovering potential new markets.
Encouraging communities to define themselves
Identifying the key groups within any audience.
Structuring communications to existing communities.
Engaging and retaining brand ambassadors.

For more information about identifying and developing nascent communities you can take a look at my blog archive, or get in touch with me via my Contact page.

To read about building and further developing your community take a look at this page.

Building an all-singing, all-dancing online destination only to open the doors and watch the tumbleweeds blow through can be a very dispiriting, not mention expensive, mistake. But how do you guarantee an engaged and active audience?

The “If you build it, they will come” approach worked out really well for Kevin Costner, but when you’re dealing with online communities you can’t rely on fate. Beta-testing your platform with a small, hand-picked group can provide much-needed perspective and pick up immediate usability bugs. Identifying the right people to help you fine tune your project can make the difference between a successful campaign and an expensive flop.

The work doesn’t stop once the doors are open.

A community is a shifting target. As it grows and develops it can offer up invaluable insights into your business and your market. Teasing out this knowledge and acting on it is one of the most exciting elements of community management. Steering the conversation and encouraging interaction is a delicate job that you don’t want to rush in to, but get it right and the rewards can be game changing.

Nobody likes to hang out in an empty room.

What comes first, community or content? User-generated content requires users to generate it, but without existing content to inspire and engage them why would they bother? This chicken and egg situation has the potential to stall a lot of social media projects, but it needn’t be that complicated. Seeding your project allows you to guide tone and direction and provides that essential hook for your audience. Beta testing and soft launching to an invited audience fills the vacuum as well as creating buzz and embedding power users.

Communites don’t have to stay in one place.

The Web is a porous medium, within it groups can shift, merge, break up and reform. Identifying existing communities that can add value to your project is a vital step, and also one that many people slip up on. The Internet is littered with examples of clumsy attempts to herd people from one destination to another, breeding ill will and resentment along the way. Creating a genuine reason for established groups to engage with your message, communicating those reasons, and managing their experience once they arrive are all delicate and vital tasks for your user-driven campaign.

Communities within communities within communities

Within any online environment where people congregate and conversations proliferate certain factions, sub-groups and tribes will inevitably form. Being in a position to identify and monitor these groups allows you foster and engage them and iterate your product according to their feedback. More often than not you’ll find these micro-communities can grow to form a central role in your next campaign and can provide fresh insight to your future marketing strategies.

As a freelance consultant I can help you with these vital steps in developing and growing an engaged and vibrant community:

Pre-launch research, beta-testing, and seeding of content.
Preparing a launch strategy, word-of-mouth marketing, and cross-platform buzz.
Seeking out new audiences, identifying and approaching existing communities.
Identifying key influencers, valuable sub-groups of users, and monitoring feedback.

In her book Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data, Rachel Lovinger describes the goal of content strategy as using “words and data to create unambiguous content that supports meaningful, interactive experiences.” So how can we apply this to online communities?

What is content?

That might sound like a stupid question, but bear with me, because defining the levels of content within your project and the way in which you approach them is absolutely essential to running a successful community-driven campaign. ‘User-generated content’ is a nice catch-all phrase to use in pitch meetings, but it’s fairly useless when it comes to structuring, surfacing, curating, monitoring and moderating that content.

Some questions I can help you answer:

In what format will your content arrive?
Through what channels should it be submitted?
What levels of filtration will you need?
How will your content be curated and surfaced?
How will your content be shared across other channels?

Conversations go both ways

While your community is busy talking to you, they’ll soon notice if you don’t talk back. Customer relationship management (CRM) applies to communities as well, and having a defined and elegant solution for responding to feedback will form an essential part of your approach.

Are you sitting comfortably?

Communities need structure. Without it they are likely to falter and die. Providing a narrative for your community is just a fancy way of saying ‘keep them interested’, but it’s also a largely overlooked aspect of building and developing a strong and vibrant digital presence. Whether you’re developing a Facebook game or a full blown social network it’s vital to make sure each step of the user journey contains the right incentives to become more immersed. To put it simply: you need a beginning, a middle and an end.

Watch your tone.

How you talk to your users can dramatically influence the scale of your community. Traditional lines of communication are making way for new channels, the ways in which those conversations are conducted are also changing, and the immediacy of social networks such as Twitter has ushered in new expectations for the majority of consumers. If you want to ensure you’re on top of these developments you’ll need to implement a clear and cohesive tone of voice that your users can respond too.

Mind your manners.

Moderation is what everyone traditionally thinks of when they think about community management. But a CM’s job goes far beyong deleting nasty messages from bulletin boards. Moderation encompasses laying the ground rules through FAQs, terms and conditions, and community guidelines. It includes installation of monitoring tools (software or human), liaising with legal representatives, developing customer-support channels, and reputation management.

As a freelance consultant I can help you define your content-strategy in the following ways:

Developing cohesive and clear FAQs and community guidelines.
Defining an engaging and immersive narrative to keep people coming back.
Producing bespoke style guides and CRM tools.
Putting moderation tools and reputation management strategies in place.

Russell’s point was that certain British character traits may stop us being critical of local business or our neighbours because those people, “are going to notice that you’re writing about them, and if you’re in any way critical they’ll know and glare at you, and you’re going to feel really bad.”

He goes on to wonder if maybe we need an official-ish journalistic licence to hide behind when it comes to writing about our local environment. I recognise that as kind of what we provide at Qype: a semi-official soapbox upon which you can temporarily elevate yourself to the level of critic. Of course you can also hide behind the camoflauge of ‘community’ so you’re not putting yourself out there as an easy target.

I think that’s also why there’s such a strong local online community in my area in the form of the Virtual Norwood forums: safety in numbers. And it’s what we did when we started Londonist.com (a ‘local blog’ in the very broadest sense, I guess), deliberately using the editorial ‘we’ to both reinforce the idea that this was a communal effort and to give some sort of official veneer to the whole thing (and to differentiate ourselves from the ‘here’s a picture of my cat’ brigade which seemed so very prevalent back then).

And this leads to me to some kind of half-conclusion that for any sort of local (or hyperlocal) blog to work, then it needs to be a communal effort itself. Because the problems that Russell identifies i.e. that it’s difficult to be critical and the lack of a ‘professional licence’, start to become diluted as soon as you start writing under the banner of a group.

Of course there are local blogs out there written by individuals (Jason Cobb’s brilliant onionbagblog springs immediately to mind), but these sites are by their very nature more about the individual than the location.

Writing for other people is a lot easier when you write with other people. I honestly believe that, even though I find it a very inconvenient truth, and while I think Russell is on to something when he says that hyperlocalism will be aggregated rather than authored, I think what that misses is the reader’s desire to succumb to an editorial voice; a consistency to grab on to, to believe in, or argue against.

Whether or not that partisan approach to content is disappearing or not is probably something for another post, but my suspicion is the more local you get the more emotional people tend to become, and that means you need to produce something that has a coherence and a narrative to it.

Maybe a community blog on a larger scale is the answer? A Londonist written by 100 people instead of 10? Of course the editor would kill hmself within a fortnight, but then sacrifices have to be made, right?

This post from Jason Santa Maria really struck a chord with me.

I love the idea of sketchbooks so I get very envious when I look at what people like Alex Milway and Sarah McIntyre can produce without even seeming to think about it (although I know they do think about it quite a bit), and I’ve posted before about how great Mike Rhode’s stuff is.

So why don’t I join in the fun? Well, because “I can’t draw” of course.

Jason has a reply to this, and it’s a very good one:

“Sketchbooks are not about being a good artist, they’re about being a good thinker.

Obviously, some people bring the practice of sketching to a higher art form, but to me it’s always been about visual brainstorming and record-keeping in a format with a ridiculously low barrier to entry. My drawings look like shit, but fidelity doesn’t matter as long as I can convey my ideas to others or to my future self.

We should revel in not caring how good or bad we are, and by knowing that our means for thinking has improved with each stroke of our pencils. The point is to keep doing, it’s how you get stuff done. And most certainly how you get better.”

Of course, “not caring how good or bad we are” is easier said than done (never mind reveling in it), but it’s a very admirable goal so I think this week I’ll make a point of filling a few pages and submitting a selection to Jason’s Flickr Group.