Archive for March, 2010

2010 Goals

31 March, 2010

I’ve met one deadline for 2010; I’ve set the goals for my team for the year. It had to be done by today.

We already had a team meeting to discuss the goals for the team in general, so next step was individual goals. We’ve agreed on performance goals and development goals for 2010.

I had a discussion with one member of the team, about how these goal setting and assessment systems are subjective and how frustrating it is.

How could I answer?

goals

Goals

First of all it is true, the score he gets is based on one person’s assessment of his work, and as we’re not working in an environment with numerical targets there is a certain amount of . Secondly we set goals now as a best guess of what we’ll do in the year but, as happened last year, that can all change.

So I answered that there was always some element of subjectivity in any system and part of trying to make it fair was agreeing together on the goals. Then I explained my attitude to the goal setting process; set a range of goals, some which are regular business, some which are tougher, some which more of a best guess about what will happen in the second half of the year. I do this so that there is a full year of goals, some of which are sure to be achieved some of which will challenge the team member.

In terms of assessing the achievement I look at results. Yes, results-full-stop. Once I’ve done that I look back on the year and try to judge whether the goal was fair, or whether there were circumstances beyond our control that made it harder to achieve the goal. If it wasn’t I might have to adjust the assessment. In our system the goals are weighted so once that is taken into account a final score can be calculated. Then I think back on previous years and see if that score is a fair and consistent score. Of course each step involves a certain amount of subjectivity.

Then there’s a department-wide adjustment; based on the theory that we’re all on the same normal curve so you should have one team all scoring As and another all Cs. I find this a bit hard to take – it does mean that your best chance of getting a great score is to go and work in a rubbish team, but the idea behind it is around fairness and ironing out those super-generous or super-harsh managers.

Last year was a year of changing priorities, which meant that it was tough to meet existing goals in a changing environment. The thing that slipped was the development goals. I only spent a tiny part of my 2009 training budget, and there were/are some training needs. This year one of my performance goals is making sure my team get the training they need. If everyone follows through on the plans presented today that will be easy.

image from lululemon athletica via flickr

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Wake up your brain

22 March, 2010

Book Review

 Caffeine for the Creative Mind

Stefan Mumaw and Wendy Lee Oldfield

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” says the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland. And pushing our brain into the realms of the impossible is just what “Caffeine for the Creative Mind” is all about.

It’s sub-titled “250 exercises to wake up your brain” and there are some great and original exercises in the book. For example;

Pressure Pictogram

pictogram exercise, pg 25

“Draw a pictogram that describes each of these six words; Pressure, Delirious, Lucky, Suspense, Dangerous and Joyful. Use only four straight lines and a circle for each one…”

My pictogram for “Pressure” is shown left, which is the one I found easiest to imagine. Dangerous came out looking a lot like the symbol for mars and it’s pretty hard to distinguish between delirious and joyful when I draw them. But it struck me as a fun concept to remove writer’s block as well as waking up my brain.

Some of the exercises involve building something, some are about writing, some are reminders of games once played in school (or at strange parties) such as Mad Libs.

The book is sprinkled with interviews from some creative types; artists, writers, entrepreneurs offering wit and inspiration for those days where exercising your brain is just too much.

It’s a good book, a rich source of fun challenges to wake up your brain. Now if only I could think of an animal with a number in its name.

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Short is good

19 March, 2010

Short is good?

So you’ve only got 140 characters to write wittily and get your point across AND  you have to add a URL!? The simple answer is to use a URL shortener, but which one?

There are a lot to choose from, bit.ly, is.gd, tinyurl.com to name a few. Or perhaps you’d like to build your own as Coca Cola have done.

It needs to do more than give you short URLs, it needs to be fast and it needs to be reliable.

Now there’s a way to monitor which URL shortener is the most reliable thanks to Dutch company Watchmouse.

So far today all those monitored are operating normally, but in a full month’s analysis the company found that Facebook’s shortener was the slowest by far.

I use shorteners for posting on twitter, that last URL to lifehacker is 93 characters long, the one to Watchmouse’s blog is 111 characters, leave no room witty commentary in a twitter post. Is.gd took both to 18 characters leaving me 122 characters in a tweet.

However some people are bothered by shortened URL as you can’t see what the destination is and where the URL will take you. Which is smart security thinking. But there are tools for this as well, firefox offers several add-ons, but if you’re not on firefox or you’re behind a firewall that won’t allow you to install the add-on then there’s a site that will expand the URL, called “untiny.me“

Using a URL shortener saves 93 characters

display the original URL from a shortened URL

skirt image from the rideprojekt via flikr

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Your Social Media 360 Profile

17 March, 2010

Meet Madame Tre Sesti, an exotic steam-punk styled fortune-teller launched by Vodafone.  I’ll let her introduce herself;

Madame Tre Sesti is all knowing, or at least she is once you’ve connected her to your facebook (or hyves), twitter and linkedin accounts. She will assess your personality, your love life, your social health and life rhythm. She looks at the content of your accounts, how often you reply to others’ messages, how active you are on linkedin vs facebook and analyses you thoroughly. Is it accurate? Based on my facebook account she says I’m organised with a tendency to being over-sensitive, maybe she’s more insightful than any of my friends because I don’t think either of those words are the first that people who know me would come up with. But, I’ll cut her some slack, I don’t put a lot of information on Facebook so she didn’t have much to go on.

Language mix up by Madame Tre Sesti

The design of the video and tool are pretty amazing, and apparently there were over 600 film clips made so that Madame Tre Sestri would have an authentic range of comments. This is clearly a big budget campaign, so it seems a shame that Madame is a little schizophrenic on which language she uses. The whole thing was produced for the Dutch market (according to Vodafone) but inexplicably is in English apart from some options and buttons through the site. English is very widely spoken here and I would guess that most of the target audience won’t be bothered by the language issue. But to me it hints at hopes of a global viral effect.

Vodafone’s goal in all of this was to create a sort of portal where you can see all the updates of all your network, if you work right through the tool you will see a 3D graphic representation of your updates. There is also, unsurprisingly, an application that can be downloaded for use on your mobile phone. You don’t have be a Vodafone customer to use the site – its free, and you can use the application on non-vodafone phones, but there are several phone models that were built specifically to handle the application so you will have the best experience if you’re with Vodafone and own one of those models.

And what’s in it for Vodafone? Access to, and information about all your social networks. That’s a goldmine for marketers.

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Happy Birthday Dot Com

16 March, 2010

Coming of age?

I was listening to BBC World Service this morning, and they mentioned that the “.com” domain is now 25 years old. As part of the item someone ( CEO Rod Beckstrom?) from ICANN talked about this being part of the internet coming of age.

Since then there have been releases of top level domains for every country, and a number of subject specific domains. But like most things around the internet it has it’s share of misuse, abuse and ‘creative practices’.

Misuse

Country level domains were originally designed for use by the companies and individuals of that country but some country level domains turn out to have handy meanings, sometimes across languages.

  • .nu is the country domain name for Niue, and it’s popular in the Netherlands as “nu” means now, so a radio add that invites you to go to “abc punt nu” gets a nice urgent ring to its slogan.
  • .ws was originally the country domain name for Western Samoa, but it’s now marketing as “dot website”. This has not become widespread and the marketing around it typically looks dodgy almost like a pyramid scheme.
  • .tv stands for television and also for Tuvalu, a country that is rapidly disappearing under rising tides. Its domain name is run by VeriSign who collect every time you sign up for a domain name. When I bought a .tv domain some years ago I was told that the registry prices their domain names based on who’s buying, so big companies are charged more.

Abuse

some of the links on Seimens.com, including one to Siemens.

The most common form of abuse is cybersquatting, where a domain name relating to a brand (sometimes a brand name, sometimes a typo) is bought and held until the company in question comes looking for it. In the meantime a simple site with google ads or other paying links can be set up. Often some of the links will be to the target company – which lets the squatter accurately measure the traffic you are missing out on. Best example of this is one relating to Siemens, try typing in www.seimens.com, the page you reach is held by a cybersquatter.

Companies can try to recover such domain names in one of two ways; by negotiating with the cybersquatter directly or going to UDRP.

The negotiation track is best done through an independent third party, I haven’t been through this successfully recently but the costs are likely to be 5,000 to 10,000 euros if your company is a “known brand”, plus agency costs. The advantage is that it can be relatively fast, and the process is unlikely to become public knowledge.

The other route is the UDRP (Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy) and involves lawyers and more time, I’m part way through one at the moment.

‘Creative Practices’

I guess the most famous of these would have to be the .cm domain effort. This involves a deal with the Cameroon government and a sneaky redirect set up. An example of it is discussed on Business Insider where the amazon.cm redirected to ebay (it doesn’t any more). It’s hard to know whether there is any legal action a company can take – since the redirection may not come under trademark law.

I know there are people out there who consider themselves “domainers” and call this legitimate and smart business. I don’t agree, it’s hi-jacking a company’s brand, but because big companies are “the bad guys” it’s easy for domainers to cast themselves as the eternal David in a struggle against multiple Goliaths. In my view this is one area of the internet where the law is well behind the reality, it’s perhaps a rebel teenage phase rather than a true “coming of age”.

cake image from Sascha19 via flickr

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