There’s a parallel here with basketball, lot’s of free agents in the NBA this year are figuring out where they want to play next year. It’s interesting to watch as a fan because you’ll see if players value winning, they’ll go to a team that is set up to win or can get other free agents and become successful, or if they value making maximum dollars.

Knowing why you do something is really important to doing it right / well. When I graduated from B school, I focused on the commute, focused on the location and the brand of the company I wanted to join and that meant a big US company, so I applied for and got a job at one. It looked great on paper and on Linkedin but I wasn’t really happy. I didn’t have the “why” right. Now I know I want to create something, make a difference, create some jobs, and build something that makes an impact, so I know the “why” and I’m much happier professionally.

Don’t get me wrong, there are basic needs like a salary or the availability of a job in a location, but aside from the life basics I think real happiness comes from knowing why you’re doing something. So before you take on the next job, move to a different place or whatever it is you do, make sure you know why you’re doing it.

Here’s the thing, it’s nothing new! Sony Ericsson had a video calling phone more than a few years ago. A colleague at Yahoo! reminded everyone about this with his tweet and link to some Germans on YouTube making avideo call using the Sony Ericsson k-800.

The difference is that the experience is way better now than it was then. The resolution, the camera’s and wifi mean that you’re not dependent on network access and it can be a pretty good experience. That’s all pretty big. Overall the technology is ready for mainstreaming, and Apple is great at releasing a technology when it’s ready for mainstreaming.

Launch a service too early and it’s restricted to the UberGeeks’s of the world. I have friends who had Sony Ericsson phones with video calling capability, problem was as most of us weren’t ready for the calling capability these friends spent most of their time using the phone and texting rather than video calling. It’s like people using email in 1991, facebook in 2001, twitter in 2008 etc. If the network isn’t ready for the technology it’s not going to really get adopted. I call this my technology mainstreaming theory and I’ve drawn up a little visual explaining the principle and how this might apply to video calls. Apple is potentially right on the money, launching right when the technology is ready for mainstream, I expect Android to follow suit quickly, and the fine folks at RIM, Windows to lag a bit – don’t even get me started as to when Nokia and Samsung will catch on.

(Note – if you have trouble seeing this, click on it for notes on the flickr page)

This seems to be a general trait with Sony Ericsson, they seem to be great at creating things when the technology is there, rather than when the technology has matured to a point where it becomes a really good experience. Which is what Apple’s doing here and done since their foray into smart phones.

As well, by launching Facetime as an open standard Apple’s hoping other phone manufacturers will build on it, but I’m sure they’re banking on most people wanting to buy and use the video calling capabilities on the iPhone 4. Not a bad bet by Apple.

Now this is Jim Joyce, an umpire who made a mistake on a baseball play that costed Armando Galarraga a perfect game, he’s contrite, he says things like “I missed it… I kicked the sh*t out of it, nobody feels worse than I do, I took a perfect game away from this kid”…:

When you mess up, take responsibility and apologise. Be honest and upfront and say you’re sorry. Joyce did this, he found Galarraga and apologized after wards and everybody was big and understanding.

Zuckerberg and Facebook continually do things with privacy and instead of being honest and quick with an apology they act defensive and put the blame on users rather than accepting the issues on their site. This is one of the reasons why my pictures will be on flickr, my blog posts will be here and not on Facebook and my status messages will be on twitter and linkedin as well as facebook. I’m not naïve, I’m not going to quit Facebook, it’s too big a part of my communication with people, but it won’t be the only place I store information and a lot of this decision has to do with the way the company handles themselves and their apologies.

“1. the marginal cost of a newspaper is zero. 2. there is perfect competition. conclusion? zero industry profit, paywalls or not.”

I’m sure I’ve written about the eventual doom in the newspaper industry as well but no one ever talks about how they could make it work and what would need to be done. Don’t get this twisted, I don’t think pay walls are a good idea, but I do think they could, repeat COULD, work if done right.

So here are my thoughts, I believe there are three principles to make payment for news content work:

1 – offer superb editorial/analysis/content that is unavailable elsewhere
2 – keep it cheap and painless to pay
3 – Consistency across competitors

First, pay walls work when you have superb analysis or original great content like the WSJ or the FT. Where people aren’t paying for the “news” they’re paying to read commentary and gain insights. It works for people like the economist and monocle for content creators with a large, affluent readership. If you don’t have content that is killer odds are you’ll put up a pay wall and users will go elsewhere.

The other element that could help a pay wall succeed is making it dirt easy to purchase. Think of iTunes, how easy is it to buy music on iTunes? How easy is it to do a purchase on Amazon. One click and you can purchase. For a pay wall to succeed you’ll need to make it super easy to for users to pay. Make it even a little complicated and the users are off. iTunes might be more expensive than some other 3rd party websites, but the fact that you can make the purchase easily means I save time from interactive with the complex shopping basket functionality that you see on other sites.

Lastly, if you don’t have specialist content you better make sure that your competitors are not close enough to you in terms of content and aren’t giving the content away for free. In the UK the BBC is likely to always give content away as long as that’s the case it will be difficult for anyone to really put up a viable pay wall. To really make it work you need consistent pricing policies but most people would call this collusion. So if you’re a news media company don’t bank on this third principle.

The Irish News really failed across the board, they didn’t provide great analysis and content that was original, they didn’t make it easy to subscribe and their price point was all over the place. So to make it succeed, focus on creating great content, providing analysis and features that people value and making it dead simple to purchase and don’t price it at a point where it becomes a competitive disadvantage and pay walls might, I repeat MIGHT, have a shot.

When you allow an advertiser to buy the whole page, change your background and put some crap over your content, here’s what I believe you’re saying – “Your advertising dollars are worth more than our costumers experience and our product, so allow us to bend over while you have your way with both”.

Here’s a bolt of reality to media owners; consumers, costumers, PEOPLE don’t like advertising, they tolerate it. We understand that there’s a need for businesses to make money so heck show some ads, some body somewhere will think that this Vodka ad on the side of my NBA scores page is relevant and someone will click, it just won’t be me.

Your content, product, whatever you own, better be twice as good as the competition if you’re going to submit your audience to a takeover of your content by an advertiser, because if it’s not, odds are that some portion of your audience won’t come back. Cause wherever you have people doing it for the money, you have people doing it better for the content and for the audience.

So here’s my advice, stop pimping your products out to advertisers. Stop bending over to make an extra couple of bucks. Start offering advertisers better alternatives, creative widgets or whatever that don’t harm the consumer experience but rather enhance it. Start really focusing on creating a better experience for people. Or accept that you’re lazy, don’t care about the people using your product and are out to make a quick buck and watch your product suffer in the long run.

Socially, we’ve met up with friends, gone out without the baby and been spoilt for choice for take away and nights out. The Bee’s made a friend and been invited to a baby group, so it’s been great to be back.

Professionally, I couldn’t be happier. Being at the London Business School entrepreneurship conference last week was definitely a highlight. Meeting potential investors, potential partners and potential clients for the business I’m working on launching was great. Being able to set up meetings all week and get stuff done was awesome. Also not being forced to squeeze a months worth of meetings into two days is such a relief.

I’ve been reading Drive by Daniel Pink, and I totally feel driven right now. Pink talks bout the three pillars of motivation being Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. I wouldn’t say that I was totally deprived of these three over my last three-five years, but I was awfully close. It’s nice to have motivation back.

Finally, I’m back to blogging as well, it’s my intention to blog better and more often then ever before. Wish me luck.

I’ll always have a soft spot for Yahoo! it was part of the reason I joined. Having taught myself html on geocities, signed up to Yahoo! mail in the 90s, using flickr, delicious and mybloglog all before they were acquired, I loved Yahoo’s products. And in my 3 years with the company I have met some really great intelligent people that I know I will be contacts for life. I’m not leaving because I don’t believe Yahoo! will bounce in the right direction, I’m leaving because I’m excited about doing my own thing, something different and something where I believe I’ll be having a tremendous impact.

To all the Yahoo!’s I’ve worked with thank you for making the last 3 years such a blast. And I’m sure our paths will cross again. To all the haters out there, I’ll remind you that the in 1997 Michael Dell said that Apple should close down and return money to shareholders, think Steve Jobs is glad he battled through all the haters. I’m not saying that Yahoo! will have the market cap that Apple has, but I do believe when it comes to the internet market game it’s not even half time.

I’m sure they all have the same CVs from 2001-2003 where PHP, MySQL, HTML, XHTML, CSS were sprinkled across the document. Things change, I’ve changed A LOT over the past 7 years, but yet people are still reaching out for me for jobs that I’m not interested in. Surely recruiters are wasting a lot of time when a couple of simple things using social media could save them a lot of energy and help them find the right person for the right job.

Here are some tips for recruiters that you think could really benefit from using social media better – please feel free to email them, not sure if they’re all up to speed with search/twitter/facebook etc.

Linkedin
If you haven’t updated your profile on Linkedin you’re missing out.

If you’re looking for an employee and you’re not using Linkedin you’re missing out even more. It costs peanuts (relative to agencies and head hunters) to go on Linkedin and be able to access the many many many users who might fit the profile you’re looking for.

Plus you can see how people they work with feel about them. I’ve been lucky enough to work with some really great people over the years and it always makes me feel great when I get a recommendation on Linkedin and I’m always generous about recommending people I really enjoyed working with too. That information can be really valuable to people looking for people to fill in their teams.

The best part is that Linkedin shows you how you’re connected. So instead of going through interviews and interviews, examinations etc and then asking for a reference with turns out to say “Run away” you can get the reference done quickly before even engaging. As well you can get an introduction. An introduction from someone I know means a lot more to me than a cold call email and I’m sure I’m not alone.

Everything else

Linkedin should be the majority of the recruitment time spent on digital media but it’s not the only tool you should use. Engaging with blogs, writing a blog and commenting on thought leadership pieces can be a great use of resources as well. This will help you identify who the leaders are in the market place and who you should get working with you.

Twitter is great for this too, microblogging enables you to engage with potential employees like never before. And here’s the great part you get to build a relationship with people. So a call after a tweet is a lot warmer than before. Looking at follower counts, retweets helps you figure out whether someone’s worth the effort, and once you engage with people the right people for the right jobs will come to you.

I know there’s a lot of concern over the new Facebook privacy stuff, but I honestly think recruiters and employers should take advantage of this, being able to “like” or recommend posts enables companies to find the people who are interested and engage with potential employees in a way that hasn’t been possible before.

That’s just the start, I honestly believe that social media for recruitment is being under utilised and recruiters should do more to engage and build communities to make their lives easier. If for no other reason than I really don’t want another email asking me if I’m available for a PHP developer role!

I’ve been hearing lot’s of people talk about how companies can be good or evil. A lot of this goes back to Google’s whole “Don’t be evil” line that was the unofficial motto around the company a while back. Part of it is due to Umair Haque’s manifesto’s and blog posts. Don’t get me wrong, I respect a lot of what Umair writes and I like a lot of what Google does, but I just don’t think it’s that black and white.

Companies are made up of people, and people are at the heart of the organisation’s direction and choices around strategy, marketing, procurement, M&A and everything else. Calling companies good and evil misses out on the spectrum between these extremes.

Google for example has made lot’s of “Good” decisions, for the good of costumers, for the good of partners, for the good of the developer community, but they’ve also made a lot of bad decisions, Buzz integration with Gmail without opt-in, what they did to Dodgeball and whole lot of other stuff could be classified as “Evil” by some people.

Apple, Twitter, Microsoft, Sony almost any media, technology company I can think of has done some things that I would consider good and some things that I wouldn’t. So classifying an entire company as good or evil just leaves me feeling a bit uneasy.

Here’s my suggestion, let’s ditch the whole good and evil and start talking about the character of an organisation. Let’s make it a spectrum and a scale. Are they transparent, sustainable, honest and consistent in their policies and actions? Do they value the community, employees, costumers, partners and the developers who may power their community? Are they closed or open – is that consistent across products and services?

This is separate to the quality and performance of the company’s goods or services. Nestle would probably score really lowly on the character scale but damn if I could resist their KitKats. Apple may also score lowly but I’ll still probably buy an iPad and add this to our suite of Apple products in the house. But at least I know it’s not a company with character, just a company with good products.

A company that is transparent and clear in it’s financial management and strategy, that has a sustainable policy and tries to operate in a energy efficient manner, which shows obvious care and concern for all their stakeholders and that works in an open manner with open protocols across it’s product suite would be the holy grail of character and would score a 10. Not sure if any company meets this but that should be the aim.
A company that isn’t transparent, doesn’t value stakeholders, is not green in any way shape or form, doesn’t prescribe to open protocols or integration with other services would score really poorly.

This is separate to the quality and performance of the company’s goods or services. Nestle would probably score really lowly on the character scale but damn if I could resist their KitKats. Apple may also score lowly but I’ll still probably buy an iPad and add this to our suite of Apple products in the house. But at least I know it’s not a company with character, just a company with good products. This is what separates discussing awesomeness versus character. Awesomeness can mean great execution, great products, but that doesn’t mean a company is “good”, what talking about character does is it gives us a clear scale and overview of a companies principles.

I originally wanted to call this blog post “Calling Bullsh*t on Good and Evil in Business” but heck who am I to suggest it’s bullsh*t maybe there is a place for it. I just don’t think it gives us as a community enough tools to discuss the principles of an organisation. So let’s try and stop all the good and evil clear cut analysis of decisions and talk about companies with colour, I think this would be more beneficial to the conversations and analysis that is happening about companies today. Just how much character does your company have?

Let me explain. I hear of a new artist, let’s call her Lady Gaga Queen Mo Mo for interest sake. She get’s a couple of plays on MTV but I’m never home to watch her videos so I don’t really get to know Queen Momo ‘s songs. I don’t really listen to the radio, I prefer listening to on my PC and discovery through radio and video doesn’t happen as much as it used to for me personally. I discover music through services like Hype Machine and Spotify. Lucky for me Queen Momo has a lot of music on Hype Machine and on Spotify, I listen to a bunch of tracks and quickly become a fan. I check out her videos for her songs like Mobile Phone and her duet with Kelly Roland called Voice mail and I like her so much so that when she’s in town I buy tickets for me and the Bee for £50 each to see her when she’s in town. Not only that but I share music of her’s that I’m listening to on Twitter and Facebook and lead to three other people discovering her, one buys a CD, one goes to see her in concert and one downloads her album on iTunes.

So Queen Momo didn’t make a lot out of all the different streams or videos that I listened to or watched, but she made 100 quid directly from me when I went to see her in concert and a whole lot more from my sharing my interest in her. Just me, one customer. She also made more out of me as I then went on to buy her next album so the Bee could have it on her iPod. Here’s the thing though, would I have discovered her and become a fan had I not listened to her on Spotify and Hype Machine, maybe but probably not.

Okay so the “hypothetical example” is over and it’s actually pretty close to what the Independent’s written about Spotify and Lady Gaga. But, while it’s easy to track payments from one service and say it doesn’t contribute fairly as the Independent and various unions have done with the Lady Gaga example. What this doesn’t track is how many users discovered Lady Gaga or listened to Lady Gaga on Spotify or worse yet on file sharing sites in the UK and then went and saw her at the O2 or actually bought her CD. Studies have shown that users who use filesharing sites actually buy more music than people who don’t.

The point is that just because we can’t clearly attribute contribution from different channels doesn’t mean they don’t contribute positively to an artists overall income. File sharing and Spotify need to be treated as the new form of brand advertising in that they help artists (brands) build a reputation that then leads to sales. Shutting down or trying poorly scripted laws to protect the industries is as harmful as saying to artists radio or posters promoting your music is illegal.