Monday, January 27, 2014

Garamond or Helvetica?

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Swedish Beers–Barcelona Edition 2014 are Go!

swedish beers 2014

I must be a glutton for punishment or something! It’s almost 13 years since the first ever Swedish Beers party in London and this will the eighth party in Barcelona… Oh my goodness, doesn't time fly?

Here we are again in February which means only one thing - it's time for Swedish Beers! It’s all systems go for Mobile World Congress and Heroes of the Mobile Fringe. And as part of that, your favourite networking party is back to bring you more beer and more chat.

We do have some lovely sponsors lined up for you but there's room for one or two more if you fancy getting involved. Get in touch with Helen to discuss. More will be announced over the coming days and weeks.

Like our previous events, this is a relaxed evening, no formalities, no presentations, no business cards thrust in your face as soon as you arrive. Just come with an open mind, be prepared to see friends old and new, talk nonsense, enjoy a drink or five and have yourself a good time. Oh, and leave the ties, the corporate personas and the sales spiel at the door please. The Swedish Beers crew will be on hand to welcome you as well as the friendliest bar staff in town.

No need to RSVP unless you want to. There's no guest list, no tickets and there's no guaranteed entry. Just come and go as you please. If you do register, it does mean that you can add the event to your calendar and search for it in your email and easily share with friends. Fill in the form below or go direct to the eventbrite page.

It is likely to get a bit busy at times. But don't worry, people will be coming in and out all evening. That’s kind of the point as we know there’s always a lot going on and you might want to check out more than one party. If it's very busy, there's no need to queue to get in. Just check out one of the other bars nearby and come back a little later when it's a bit less frantic.

There is a small cloakroom area at the bar, but it's not secure so leave the laptops in your hotel room or apartment where they will be safe and won't get in anyone's way.

The venue is our favourite haunt with the friendliest bar staff in town, Dos Trece -http://dostrece.net/
We'll be open from 7pm through until the early hours.

AQL is our first confirmed sponsor - more tbc. I’ll introduce all our sponsors over the coming days and weeks.

See you in Barcelona!

This is a Heroes of the Mobile Fringe Festival Event http://mobileheroes.net/

Skål

Helen

Like us on Facebook http://facebook.com/swedishbeers

Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/swedishbeers

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Top Tips for Public Speaking

I do a lot of public speaking. I always have done. At primary school, I was given the good speaking parts because I had a clear voice and a good memory. As a teenager, I acted my socks off at my local theatre and as an adult, I’ve been speaking in public in every job I’ve had – whether it was running a training course, hosting a fashion show or giving the keynote at an international conference. It’s very much second nature to me and something I enjoy doing. Don’t get me wrong, despite years of practice, I still have to prepare – including rehearsing out loud. But I don’t have stage-fright or nerves in the same way that others have it. That element of stage-fright for me is excitement rather than fear and the cue to go on with the show. And I see public speaking as being a very important way to communicate your story and market yourself or your business, whether you’re in a panel discussion or on stage showcasing your latest wares.

It doesn’t always go right though, as this video shows. It’s from CES just a couple of weeks ago and it’s Michael Bay talking up Samsung on the main stage.

It looks like he’s under-prepared and under-rehearsed. I expect Samsung paid him a lot of money to come up on stage and say nice things about their kit, but without the teleprompter, he had nothing to say. I guess that’s also why he’s a movie director rather than an actor.

Don’t let this happen to you. And don’t let this put you off either!

Here are some resources I’ve come across recently which may help you if lack of preparedness, stage-fright or just sheer dread thwart you.

Zach Holman has put together a lovely website with everything you need to know about preparing and delivering a conference talk. You can find it here http://speaking.io/. I don’t have much to add to his advice as it’s great except that it’s well worth watching and listening to other speakers. Sometimes it’s hard to take an objective view as you’re listening to them for the content and in a different context. But if you can, also check out their performance and see what you like or don’t like about how they’ve done it and have a think about how you could improve on that yourself. I find listening to panel discussions on Radio 4 quite helpful for this too as you’re not distracted by any slides or visuals and you can really tune into someone’s personal style.

Mary Portas tweeted this link the other day. It’s a short article about the one phrase you ought not to say. I concur and I’ve been guilty of this one in the past. You have been warned…

Of course, in order to do any public speaking, you need the chance to speak. Most commonly, this is about being accepted to speak at a conference. Here’s a link to some sound advice about putting that conference proposal together. It has a technical bent, but the advice is valid regardless of topic. There’s some more advice here too.

Public speaking is not rocket science. I’m glad that it’s not something that everyone’s good at as it leaves plenty of openings for me to do my thing. But it’s also clear to me it’s the sort of thing that you get better at the more practice you have. So don’t be shy. Have a go.

Good luck.

Monday, January 20, 2014

Celebrate!

This is a lovely example of well-designed HTML for email marketing. I receive too many emails that are completely blank and just show placeholders for images, especially on my mobile phone or tablet. This is what you can do with a bit more thought.

What I don’t know of course, is how it does or doesn’t work on mobile…

pizza express

Hat tip to @ChrisMear for sharing.

Friday, January 17, 2014

SMS is dead. Long live messaging.

You may be forgiven for thinking mobile marketing is all about adverts on web pages seen on a mobile device or in-app advertising or sponsorship. For those of us who’ve been in the game for longer than we care to remember, SMS started the whole mobile marketing sector off back in 1999 yet it is often overlooked for newer ways to use mobile (i.e. mobile adverts) or for older formats (email, print, TV).

But it isn’t quite dead yet. I still use it – although not nearly as much as I used to. My sister is an avid texter and my nieces are still at it. However, for the first time, there has been a downturn in text messaging in the UK.

sms graphThe main culprits for the downturn is the rise of messaging services like WhatsApp. It makes sense. As we find other, cheaper, more convenient ways to chat to each other, SMS services will get replaced. Why pay for SMS when you can have WhatsApp for free and you’re paying for mobile data anyway? I suspect Facebook messenger and email also have a part to play in this picture.

Let’s look at this growth with a bit of historical context… According to the Mobile Data Association (and they got their figures direct from the network operators), annual consumer usage 1999-2009 was as follows:

1999 - 1 billion; 2000 - 6.2 billion; 2001 - 12.2 billion; 2002 - 16.8 billion; 2003 - 20.5 billion; 2004 - 26 billion; 2005 - 32 billion; 2006 - 41 billion; 2007 - 56.9 billion; 2008 - 78.9 billion; 2009 96.8 billion

As you can see from the graph, SMS was still growing, year-on-year, at a healthy pace in 2010 and 2011. And even though there has been a drop-off, we’re still looking at about 120 billion SMS every year in the UK or thereabouts. That’s 4.5 times more than what we were using 10 years ago. That’s a lot of SMS.

So let’s not dismiss SMS quite yet. When you look at the annual figures, they’re still very healthy so I encourage you to think about SMS as part of your marcomms effort. After all, plenty of your customers are still using it and there may still be value in connecting with them via SMS – especially for customer service – another area often overlooked.

What is particularly exciting for us mobile marketers though, is how much activity is happening on mobile devices. Check out that email figure – 65% of us are accessing email on our smartphones. It really is huge. So if you haven’t ‘gone mobile’ yet, I really think it might be time for you to do so.

I was asked a few years ago what my advice would be to the first time mobile-marketer in terms of ‘going mobile’ and I said to make sure their email marketing was mobile friendly. I think the advice still stands. If you do nothing else in mobile, please make sure your email works on handsets – and test for lower end devices. Not everyone has the latest iPhone or Samsung Galaxy!

Heroes of the Mobile Fringe 2014 are Go!

draft 2014 full logo

I can hardly believe this is going to be the third year of organising the Heroes of the Mobile Fringe Festival in Barcelona. And on top of that, it will be my eighth Swedish Beers party in Barcelona. It has been quite the journey and certainly one that isn’t over yet.

The success (or not) of the festival is really down to YOU. I’ll be organising Swedish Beers (the bar is booked for Wednesday 26 February and I’ll have more details coming soon but feel free to connect on Facebook and Twitter to get updates). I am also organising an event with the UKTI aimed at investors on Sunday 23 February. And maybe one or two more things. But everything else is up to you and for you to make of it as you will. My goal in this is to help the right people get together and to help you make the most of the week.

How to get involved?hotmf needs you

Create an event. Whether it’s a small round-table, a panel discussion, a lunch, a dinner, a party or something else entirely, as long as it’s related to mobile, falls within the 23 to 28 February 2014 and is interesting*, then it’s in. It does not have to be held in Barcelona either – if you’d like to put something on in your town or city during those dates, then feel free. There were events in London and Helsinki last year – can we add any more this year?

Once you’ve created an event, please add it here so I can include it as a listing. There is no charge to list your event. I repeat, there is no charge to list your event!

If you need a venue, I may be able to help. I know some people locally who can help source, or I can recommend a few places. Barcelona is full of lovely bars and restaurants and many of them are very happy to welcome new guests.

If you have an event idea, but need some help fleshing it out, then feel free to run it past me – just add it to the list or drop me a line. I charge reasonable rates for organising events for clients. And if I’m not the right person to do it, then I probably know someone who is.

If you’re not up to organising your own event, but would like to sponsor something, then please get in touch. There are a couple of sponsorship slots available for Swedish Beers and there are a couple of other events I’d like to see happen subject to sponsorship.

If you have an event and would like to give it a bit extra marketing push, then get in touch. I can offer paid-for marketing services in this respect. Or I can make some recommendations.

Alternatively, you can offer your services as a volunteer or as a media partner.

And before you ask me about how to score an exhibition pass for Mobile World Congress, that’s the subject of another post. I don’t have a secret stash of them. In fact, I don’t even have one for myself.

See you in Barcelona!

 

*I have the final decision whether or not to include something in the festival or deem it interesting. Avoid the sales pitches and we should be good to go!

Networking on a plane

This just came up on my Facebook feed – KLM is offering a new service called Meet and Seat whereby you can connect with other passengers on your flight by adding your Facebook or your LinkedIn profile to your flight details. They say:
“KLM’s Meet & Seat lets you find out about interesting people who will be on board your KLM flight such as other passengers attending the same event as you at your destination.
Simply share your Facebook or LinkedIn profile details to check other participating passengers’ details and where they'll be sitting. Of course you can also choose your seat.”
So it’s essentially networking on a plane or is it dating? Either’s possible, of course. And it doesn’t sound like my idea of fun on the face of it.
klm networking
I like the serendipity of seeing who you end up sitting next to and whether or not you talk to them - chance is sometimes rather wonderful. And I also like it when I have a row to myself or a seat free next to me so I can have some down time and either prepare myself for the upcoming trip or contemplate on the trip that I’ve just been on.
On a practical note, as a woman, I think I'd feel vulnerable about someone specifically choosing to sit next to me on a flight... there are all kinds of stalker-y issues plus there'd be no escape for the duration of the flight if the person you end up with is a bore. Maybe it would be different if it were a flight to a big trade show where I'm already likely to know people on the plane. I’m also not one for getting up and around much on a flight – at least, not on a short-haul flight. But I guess you could arrange to meet up in the lounge beforehand or on the other side.
I can see its uses on flights to large trade shows like the upcoming Mobile World Congress where almost everyone on the flight is in the industry. But even then, it’s quite nice to hide in the corner and just observe what’s going on.
Wonder if it will work or not? What do you think?
Anyway, I don't fly through Amsterdam much so I guess I won't be trying it anytime soon but I'll be keeping an eye on it to see how it pans out.

Tuesday, January 07, 2014

Forget setting goals, focus on this instead