using my head

Tonight I had the pleasure of speaking at this month’s Women in Publishing event, sharing my experience and advice on blogging. I was also lucky enough to meet and sit alongside a proper blogging celebrity, Nadine Jolie, who had quite a glamorous and exciting story to share about how she got into blogging and how it changed her life.  Have a read of her bio and you’ll get a glimpse into her experience as a blogger – if not into the amazing back-story about how her confidential beauty blog lost her 2 jobs but gained her 2 book deals and a career as a pro blogger. Nadine shared her own experiences and advice on how to find your voice, what to write about, what success looks like and more. And she looked fabulous too – she must be taking her own beauty advice

As for me, I stuck to what I know best, which is giving advice and coaching people on getting started in blogging, particularly from a business perspective. I thought it might be useful to point people at my series of How to start blogging posts, so here goes:

How to start blogging at work – Part 1
This covers what to think about and do before you even set up a blogging account/tool

How to start blogging at work – Part 2
This post includes getting internal approval/buy-in and creating your first posts

How to start blogging at work – Part 3
This post gives some tips and advice on how to keep the momentum going, writing tips, and tools to make the whole process easier

Enjoy!

My latest website overhaul project is for Hackney’s youth charity, Off Centre. They are a lovely organisation which helps young people who live, work or study in Hackney deal with issues such as violence, depression, neglect, sexual health, family breakdown and all the other things that can have such a huge and lasting impact on people. I was really excited to be working with them on a new site, as they have a real opportunity to make a positive difference by using the online medium to reach and communicate with young people who need support.

Having just gone through a rebranding, they wanted a new website that reflected the new brand ID as well as the vibrancy and energy of Hackney, one that would appeal to their core audience of inner-city 13-25-year olds. The site had to feel like a place that young people could identify with, a place where they would feel welcome, and most importantly, a place that didn’t feel clinical or too far-removed from the environment where they live. We opted for an urban illustrative design, allowing the colours of the new brand to stand out. Because Hackney is such a culturally-diverse area, the illustrations also ensured that no specific race, age, social or ethnic background was depicted photographically, meaning anyone in their core audience could identify with the site.

Filled with helpful information, activities and explanations, I think the new site will be a rich resource for Hackney’s young people. I think it looks really amazing, if I do say so myself! It’s definitely one of the sites I’m most proud of, for many reasons.

Oh, and in case you’re interested, the site was built on the Squarespace platform once again, because it’s so easy for non-techies to use. We’ll also be plugging in a few 3rd party tools such as Eventbrite and Polldaddy to flesh out the functionality.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, and I have joined the pledge to write about a woman in technology whom I admire. Having written about someone whom I have admired from afar last year (Lynda Weinman), this year I decided to write about someone anear (is that a word?) – the woman who started Ada Lovelace Day, an inspirational woman in her own right, Suw Charman-Anderson.

I first met Suw several years ago B.F. (Before Facebook), when the whole concept of corporate blogging and social media in business was still in its early days. I was inspired after seeing her speaking at a conference, and then contracted her to work with me in my role as Head of Digital Media at NESTA, where I was convinced that joining the conversation should be a part of the organisation’s mission statement. She helped me coach the staff there into taking their first leaps into communicating without the mask of pre-approved text and official statements, and helped build my own confidence in believing in what I knew to be right: that people want to be treated as people, not ‘audiences’ or ‘target markets’, and that everyone wants to know that there’s a real-life human being behind every brand, company or organisation.

Even if you haven’t had the pleasure of working with Suw directly, you’ve got to respect her involvement in the Open Rights Group as well as being one of the UK’s longest-standing and prolific social media bloggers. She’s got a lot to say and makes a lot of sense (check it out for yourself here or here). Not to mention her enthusiasm and reach in mobilising thousands of people to write about, spread the word and join in the cause of celebrating the achievements of women in technology, by starting the Ada Lovelace phenomenon. I learned a lot about Ada Lovelace (and other sometimes under-appreciated women) through this, and I feel all the richer for it.

But the real reason I felt driven to write about Suw today is because we have a lot in common:

1. Each of us has a totally unique name, with no one else in the world sharing it.

2. We are both addicted to cats and crochet – and we both know it’s not something that usually mixes well.

3. We both think that the web can be a really powerful tool in connecting people, making businesses work better (and smarter) and empowering those who may not have had a voice before. It’s an awesome thing, and I hope that you’ll join me today in taking a moment to appreciate just how amazing it is to be alive and online today.

Following on from my earlier post about the death of internet radio as we know it, the UK has once again followed the US model and hiked the royalty fees paid by internet radio stations to levels that will make it nearly impossible for niche stations to exist (legally) anymore. What they’ve really done is killed off one of the cheapest marketing tools the music business has ever seen. More details are in my post for the NESTA blogs:

What stations like Pandora do is provide an excellent way of selling more records. Here’s how: you type in the name of a song or musician you like, and Pandora plays you music that is similar. You may never have heard of the artist or song that Pandora plays to you, but if you like it, you can buy it from iTunes or Amazon at a single click…

Read the full post here on the Making Innovation Flourish blog >>

One of my colleagues at NESTA informed me that the total amount of UK venture capital dedicated to tech startups is just 1.6% of the total amount of money invested by UK VC every year. That’s shockingly low.

My blog post about it over on the NESTA blogs generated quite a flurry of response… have a look here for the full story.