Like this site that Lena’s mentioned on her blog today – it’s called Wordle which makes lovely word clouds.
Here’s Lena’s wordle
Here’s mine
Nice! Good find Lena!
Archive | February, 2009
Commuter blogger
23 Feb
Saw this ad on the tube and thought it was quite interesting that they had put this ad together in the voice of a blogging commuter…guess it’s an acknowledgement that there are engaging blogs for every niche group out there – grumpy commuters (like me) included!
Hooray!
19 Feb
www.lovemoney.com is live!
It’s a new way of thinking about personal finance with lots of useful tools that will be launched soon. Love it!
Definitely need a beer after all that testing so we’re off to the pub!
Thoughts about video
15 FebThis video is great – it’s 4 minutes long which is a relatively long time to command a user’s attention but as the information and ideas are condensed and presented in an engaging way, it conveys information more quickly than, say reading about the topic for the same amount of time.
Video is also good for ’humanising’ communication and forms a solid component of the social media wave that we’re riding – topics my colleagues Sara and Lena have written about respectively - it’s also an alternative platform for interacting with an audience, so we’ve been looking at how video is used and asking questions about the format that type that works best so here are some of the considerations we came up with
- Length – watching a video requires a commitment from the user, so they need to be persuaded that this is going to be a good investment of their time. Again consistency in quality is a factor here, as is setting expectation by offering a summary of the content and perhaps providing some kind of predictable format – such as a certain type of video on a particular day of the week for example or perhaps by publishing schedules.
- Identifiable types of videos for different topics e.g. commentary, interviews, reviews, so users can look out for the types of video they prefer.
- Clear benefits - why should the user watch the video? The advantage of watching the video over doing the alternative should be clear e.g. it may be more convenient to watch a product review rather than read a long article to find out what the expert thinks
- Advertising – where are the opportunites for sponsorship? On the same page as the video, a ticker tape in the video and an ad in the actual video before and after it takes place? Advertising in the video itself has lots of opportunites for additional exposure because a lot of videos are now begin made available to be embedded in other content. Chris Brogan mentioned a video on the LA times website that allowed him to embed it in his own blog.
- Traffic - how is the video going to drive traffic to the site? Which urls are promoted, verbally and/or visually and if so, where and when, should they be clickable? Should the video be used as well as or instead of an article? The Sun embeds video into their articles as a supplement to the story.
- Comments – how can users can respond to the video? Gary Vaynerchuk has a nice commenting tool on his videos, where the audience can comment but along with the ticker tape ads, they can make the site a bit too busy, but there’s the option to turn the comments off if you want to.
Measuring clickthroughs and adapting according to the results will fine tune the video offering and with the online video audience looking set to increase over the next few years, levels of video activity are likely to increase in line with this.
Meep meep!
11 Feb
After having a bit of a blogger mental block today, I wondered exactly how fast bloggers need to blog?
Do they need to churn out several posts a day or is one post a week adequate?
So I found this article which looks at that exact question and loosely identifies two different types of blogging – one where the posts are longer and more thought out and another where the posts are short, quick and designed to spread information quickly.
It seems that for business purposes, speed and relevance is everything but the quality of the copy also has a big impact on the search engine ranking. Social media applications are also supporting the speed of blogging by only allowing short updates.
But for me it seems that the nature of blogging gives the author the freedom to offer readers choice. They can choose to offer some immediate quick insights or longer, more thoughtful pieces or maybe even a combination of the two.
I suppose it depends on whether readers expect to receive posts of the same length all the time, or whether they would be happy reading posts of different lengths and what they do with them.
The subject matter must also be a driver in dictating how quickly the post needs to be published.
Also, the aim of the blogger affects the regularity of the publishing. For example, blogging for business should aim to generate more regular posts than a personal blog.
One of my daily reads, Zen Habits consists of quite long posts which I like to get absorbed in during the morning. However, the topics are quite timeless, so there isn’t a need for immediacy of information. It’s the regularity that’s important. When Leo, the author, is away, for example, he recruits guest bloggers.
However, I also read Seth Godin’s blog and his style of condensed writing means that I can quickly skim 2 or 3 posts.
Chris Brogan uses a variety of lengths in his posts.
So I guess I the consistency of the blog posts has made me adapt my reading habits to the blogs.
Ooops
10 Feb
Things go wrong, links don’t work, old bookmarks expire and you get an error page. I think Twitter does a really nice line in error pages! Whilst searching for some online Nirvana, I attempted to follow the Dalai Lama but this message came up when I tried to go to the account. It’s quirky and fun as far as error pages go and I don’t think people mind seeing something like this! Nice!
What’s in a name?
6 Feb
Since taking part in the project to create a brand, I thought I’d take some time to write about the process that we went through to end up with a sparkly new brand.
Why did we need a new brand?
Here’s a bit of background to place it in context. The Motley Fool is a personal finance and investing site. To reflect the demand in the market, it was decided that the areas of the site should be separated out into personal finance and investing content. The Fool would keep the investing side of the business and the new company would feature the personal finance side.
So the challenge began with the quest for a name for the new company. The process that I’m about to describe took about 3 months just to give an idea of timelines.
Once we found a name, we’d need to create a logo and the website and then the other things that follow in from this like the brand guidelines. We had an idea of what the new brand would stand for and used these as a starting point for this piece of work. Obviously there is a lot of detail related to our brand values, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll summarise them here. The brand values are focused around helping people learn about money management through articles by and advice from our experts – so helping them learn, encouraging interaction between community members – sharing information, and helping people get better at managing their money – improve.
The name
We began with the name and involved everyone in the company was invited to a brainstorm where we thought about names that reflected the brand and what the company did. The names were split into three main areas, aspirational, functional and a combination of those two categories. The brainstorm resulted in a list of hundreds of names. Then the names were ranked in order to narrow them down to a short list. This shortlist was then narrowed down further as we needed to see which domains were already taken. So there was a shortlist of names and these were tested with the public and we got a final shortlist of 4 names.
It was these names that we needed to test further. So, we thought about how each of the name could represent the brand and brainstormed some ideas for a logo for each of them. Karen our fabulous designer came up with 4 executions of each logo and we spot tested the executions in order to end up with a final shortlist of 4 logos.
Once we had the 4 logos, we needed to do some user testing of the logos. So we created some boards to put the logos in context.
Project Boom
Money Map
Love Money
Sort it Out
Due to the fact that Money Map was registered to another company, the decision to select ‘Love Money’ as the new name for the company was one that we didn’t need to make!
The logo
So now that we had a name, we needed to think about what the logo would look like – the logo that we had come up with previously had been just one of a range of possibilites.
After more brainstorming and research, our great designers Ben and Karen came up with shortlist of 7 possibilites
Following more spot testing, this was narrowed down to 3 possible versions. These were displayed in the office and everyone was asked to vote on the preferred option.
The logo that was eventually selected was the final one in the list above. So this option was polished up and resulted in the final logo you can see at the top of this post. Hooray!
Books
4 FebFriends and colleagues are always recommending good reads so I thought I’d make a note of them here so I wouldn’t forget about them.
Reading….
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell Talks about the role our unconscious plays in our decision making and impressions about things and even though we traditionally trust decisions that are painstakingly thought through using as much information as possible, it’s often the decisions made based upon gut instinct that are correct. However because there isn’t a rational explanation behind these ‘instinct ‘arguements, it’s hard to build a case for them. Hope this means it’s ok to buy shoes when you just ‘feel’ you need them?
Written by an economist and journalist, this book turns conventional wisdom on its head, looks at things from another angle, and examines the links between events that might not seem immediately apparent. There’s a chapter about how we’re influenced by incentives – some obvious, like financial rewards and some less obvious ones like social perception.
Some of the conclusions that authors come to are quite shocking and difficult to accept, like the link between the introduction of abortion law in America and the subsequent drop in crime rates. As the book is based on data however, it’s difficult to argue against the patterns that are found.
They answer some imaginative questions and whilst not everyone will be interested in the specifics, there is usually some central truth that can be taken from the findings.
This is a classic book about how to manage money. I once read somewhere that money is easy to make, but the challenge is keeping it. This book is all about how to manage your money effectively. One of the key practises it suggests is saving a small amount on a regular basis – say 10% of your income each month, plus other ideas like saving for the future. Sound advice!
It reminded me of a post I read on Zen Habits (one of my favourite blogs) by a guest writer Ian Newby-Clark – called the Power of Gradual. In fact this principle relates to some many things in everyday life, like diet and exercise – little and often, especially when we are surrounded by pressures to get things done quickly.
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
A classic! This book makes you think about your qualities and how you can be better. The thing I like about this book is that it applies to every area of life, not just work. It’s valuable framework for helping to achieve goals, prioritise important people and events and generally get your life in order.
Would like to read …
Snow pretty!
2 FebThe view from my window
View from kitchen
Transport for London site is good – I liked the travel map, but noticed a small thing – you ‘pull’ the map around like you can when using Google map. I also thought they would have changed their front page to show the travel updates because this would just be easier for everyone.
Transport for London site
