Archive for the 'Communication' Category

This is a brilliant concept. You know, how on planes passengers hardly ever watch the safety demo? Well, Air New Zealand has found a compelling way to get you to watch their safety video - by having good looking naked staff do the demo, with their uniforms painted on!

Here’s another cheeky one:

I can’t decide if this Evian YouTube ad with skating babies is freaky or cute….

At any rate, it sucked me in enough to help advertise Evian by embedding the video on my blog… that’s the sneaky power of viral marketing for you!

Self-employment in a cold climate

I’ve been speaking with a number of solo professionals recently and many of them told me that they have been badly affected by the economic downturn. Business was going along quite nicely until around March this year when everything seems to have dried up. In some cases, companies that had been contracting these professionals for long-term projects are now bringing that work in-house. In other cases, businesses were no longer planning more than a couple of months ahead so these self-employed professionals - who had gotten used to having work lined up for the next 10 months - are now finding that they have to live from hand to mouth, with the contract work being drip fed to them from time to time.

I asked them what they are doing to market themselves and to get themselves “out there” in these difficult times. A number of them have been going through their address books, cold calling contacts and making arrangements to meet up and network in the hope that there might be some work thrown their way — or at least some leads that they could then follow up. It was painstakingly slow and long, hard work — with as many as thirty “no, thank yous” to every one “maybe”. Depressingly, in one case, the contacts that this one professional called up said, “I’m so glad you called. I want to pick your brain. I’ve just been made redundant”. Another professional sighed and said that he really should try to get networking but he wasn’t very good at it and he really didn’t like pushing himself on other people.

What, no website?

In quite a number of cases, none of them had a website.

When I asked them why they didn’t have websites for their businesses, the responses all had a similar theme:
• business had been good up till now, they didn’t need one;
• they didn’t want to spend the money and now in the downturn, they didn’t have the money to spend;
• they had been getting all their work through contacts and existing clients so there had never been the need for a website;
• they were too busy with the work to think about marketing and commissioning a website.

Benefits of having a website

I urged them to invest the time and money in resourcing a website, especially now that they had a bit of spare time to think about what they wanted to say about themselves on a website and what they wanted for the design of it. While personal contacts and real-world networking is extremely valuable, its reach is limited to the number of people you can personally talk to or spend time with. A website - literally - makes your credentials and services available 24/7 to the whole wide world. Also, when one of your contacts recommends you to a company, they can easily include a link to your website so that that company can easily check out what you offer and your track record - which may be critical to their decision about whether or not to hire you. In fact, if you were that company and you weree considering hiring a new consultant, would you go for the one with the website you can check out or rely on a recommendation that you can’t verify in any other way?

Case studies via Twitter and Facebook

I thought that the best way to make a strong case for how important it is for self-employed professionals to have a website it to offer them some real world case studies. So I opened up Twitter and sent the following “tweet” to the whole wide world:

If you are self-employed, how important is it to have your own website? Pls help me advise some solo professionals I know

These are a couple of responses I got back within the hour:

barrieingramacc: @fusionview I have site www.barrieingram.co.uk and its helped me get networkin people get to know what you do I have got podcasts as well .

I don’t know Barrie but he caught my “tweet” because he was on Twitter. I checked his website and see that he offers “Complete Accountancy Service specifically for small business”. Now he is getting some free publicity from my blog post! By engaging online, you can definitely widen your reach as Barrie has done.

gilescolborne: @fusionview Put it like this: when was the last time you looked up a number in the Yellow Pages? And on Google?

Giles is my cousin-in-law who is a usability expert and Managing Director of cxpartners, based in Bristol. What he says is so true. I hardly look up a business in the Yellow Pages - instead I google, because Google throws up businesses actual websites and other information about them such as articles, blog posts etc whereas Yellow Pages only gives me their address and phone number. If you don’t have a website, you miss out on potential clients who may be googling right now in the hope of finding someone just like you.

My Twitter feed also automatically appears in my Facebook profile so I also received these other responses via Facebook.

Moyra Weston at 11:36pm July 1
I launched mine 2 weeks ago and it has already given me 4 positive leads. We can manage without if we have great links and networks, but it appears that a professional looking website gives credibility and allows us to spread our message - especially when we use blogs/newsletters. I’ve had a lot of feedback on mine and am definitely seen as a professional with it… www.westoncoaching.com …. it has really got me to think differently about my business and the need for others to find out about me in order to connect and take advantage of what I offer

Moyra is a client for whom my consultancy provided a website and associated blog as well as blog training. Weston Coaching is “Committed to supporting the development you need through coaching, training, consultancy and facilitation.” I’m thrilled that her website has already generated four positive leads within two weeks of launching!

Susan Macaulay at 12:38pm July 2
I think it’s great. gives people a place to go and get a bunch of information fast and easy. They can look at what they want. Saves time for you and for clients. Mine has been up about 4 years. Soon to be revamped based on experience. Haven’t used it as fully as would like to in the past, but will in the future….

Susan is a friend and Managing Director of Strike Communications, a public speaking consultant based in Dubai. She also runs Amazing Women Rock, a social network for, well, “amazing women”. Interestingly, I was going to put one of the solo professionals I met in contact with Susan before I got this message - but found that I couldn’t give Susan “a bunch of information” by merely forwarding that professional’s web address - and so I haven’t gotten around to writing Susan an email about this person yet because it’s so much more hassle for me to set out that “bunch of information” myself. Make it easy for your contacts to spread the word about you and your business by having a website.

I rest my case

So, if you’re self-employed - I hope that with these additional voices from small business owners and solo professionals, I have been able to make the case for investing in a website as soon as possible, if you don’t already have one! And please do pop back and let me know how it works out for you and your business.

Photo: thanks to Librarian By Day on flickr.com (CCL0

Many businesses are keen to engage in social media. This was very clear at the Institute of Directors event last week where I was speaking on Creating Value through Web 2.0, with Silvia Cambié and Giles Colborne. From what I have noticed in real world discussions as well as online, this interest reflects the interest of business leaders generally. Many have an awareness of blogs and Twitter and Facebook and there is a huge curiosity about how to best use these social media tools in a business context. But alongside that curiosity is also a sensible concern about how to engage appropriately in this new medium. One of the delegates at the event, Roy Graff of ChinaContact sent me a tweet via Twitter suggesting that that I discuss the Habitat case as a study in how NOT to engage in social media.

Habitat and Twitter

Habitat is a well-known upmarket furniture retailer in the UK. I first heard that they had started using Twitter via the Social Media Today site. One of the conventions in Twitter is to use “hash tags” ie too add a hash symbol # to keywords to make it easier to identify other tweets about the same topic. So, for example, if you are tweeting about the elections in Iran, you would mark your tweets with #iranelection. Habitat appeared on Twitter using all kinds of popular hash tags to mark their tweets — but their tweets had nothing to do with the keyword topic and were, instead, blatant hard sell copy pushing their furniture. The Social Media Today site sets out some great screenshots of Habitat’s Twitter feed - an example is “#iPhone Our totally desirable Spring collection now 20% off”.

Social media as a cross-cultural space

This kind of communication on Twitter showed a complete ignorance of social media culture. The best way to explain social media culture is to think about it as a cross-cultural fourth space — like another country you might visit. If you were to do business in China or India, you would take the opportunity to learn about the etiquette and cultural norms for business people in those countries. For example, you might take the time to find out what the etiquette is for taking someone out for dinner or whether it is appropriate to bow or shake hands etc. Similarly, you need to approach the social media space as a cross-cultural experience and take the time to learn about the nuances of communicating within that context.

Authenticity

So, one of the most highly prized values in the social media space is authenticity. If you are going to use the hash tag #iPhone then you need to be tweeting about something relating to that mobile phone device. To use it as a way to “spin” people intp reading your sales advertisement shows a huge disrespect to those around you. Twitterers were outraged by Habitat’s forcing their sales pitch into their conversatiaon space. Think of how infuriating it is to receive junk phone calls with recorded messages selling you stuff just as you are sitting down for a meal. Or your home fax machine ringing and churning away in the middle of night with junk faxes till they’ve used up all your paper. Twitterers felt the same sense of violation. I believe that at one point Habitat was even using the #iranelection hashtag. The furore in the Twitterverse was palpable. It was like being door-stepped by someone asking for your help in a good cause who then suddenly switches to trying to sell you Viagra. Habitat had become a spammer without even realising it.

Habitat blames the intern

On 24 June, Social Media Today posted an apology from Habitat, which said, “The top ten trending topics were pasted into hashtags without checking with us and apparently without verifying what all of the tags referred to. This was absolutely not authorised by Habitat.”. On 25 June, Brand Republic reported that Habitat was now blaming an intern, quoting a spokesman as saying, “The hashtags were uploaded without Habitat’s authorisation by an overenthusiastic intern who did not fully understand the ramifications of his actions. He is no longer associated with Habitat.”

I’m not sure that Habitat has really extricated itself from this mess by this “blame it on the intern” message – and, in fact, I think they’ve dug themselves deeper into the doo-doo. Many others seem to think so too. Check out the Twitter hashtag #habitatfail for the reactions of Twitterers. In my view, for a big corporation to blame a hapless intern shows a great moral cowardice.

Assuming there was an intern…

Let’s give Habitat the benefit of the doubt and assume there really was an intern in the first place. What is implied to the world by this simple blame statement: It wasn’t us, gov - it was the intern’s fault”?

An intern, as one of the most junior members of any team, needs to be - and should have been – properly supervised and trained, as well as mentored appropriately to do their job well. For the big corporation to dump them into any role with no training and say, Get on with it and if you screw up, you’re out on your ear, is bad business and bad ethics. Even if Habitat had given him clear initial instructions about the appropriate way to engage on Twitter, they should not have walked away and left him to his own devices without checking back to make sure what he was doing was “authorised”. How difficult is it to check your own Twitter page? The intern’s supervisor could have done that without even getting up from his computer!

A leader of a team is the responsible for how his / her team behaves and the quality of their work. He/ she is also responsible for the team’s well-being. If anyone is responsible, it is the intern’s supervisor – and that supervisor’s line manager and so on, all the way up to the Head of Communications. Because if that intern’s supervisor isn’t doing their job properly in managing that intern, there is an issue there that they themselves are not being properly managed by their line manager, and so on right up to the top.

At another level, the question that comes to my mind is: How much respect does Habitat have for the millions of people who engage on Twitter if they leave their Twitter communications strategy to an untrained, unsupervised intern? The message seems to be: Our Head of Communications is much too busy and important handling TV and traditionally respectable communications channels to even spare a thought about all those people engaged in the social media space - let alone a carefully thought out strategy - so let’s just put this junior onto it and that’ll be good enough. So, Twitterers, that’s all you’re worth to Habitat – the cost of a cheap intern’s time.

I’d be interested to see how Habitat’s recruitment figures pan out in the next little while, too. If you are a young person looking for an internship after this fiasco, would Habitat the kind of company you want to work for? Even if you’re in middle management or some other more senior level than an intern, would you want to work for a company that shows this level of inauthenticity.

But do we believe there was an intern?

My views above work on the hypothesis that there was really an intern. But, given Habitat’s performance so far in the Twitterverse, can we even be confident that they are being authentic in even claiming that there was an intern? It sounds to me as believable as, The dog ate my homework.

Practical tips on how to avoid becoming a spammer

How might Habitat have done things differently? In my view, there are some simple steps to take if your business is considering extending your communications opportunities into this fourth cultural space:
• Take the time to scout out the way that people are already behaving and communicating in this space
• Engage some professional guidance from someone who is a native of this space.
• Draw up a strategy for how you can start engaging in a phased way, with opportunities to review and adjust your strategy along the way. The key is not to rush in waving your banner wildly but to slowly build up relationships and trust before making more assertive moves.
• Put in place a proper team, with all the usual tools that you would use to manage a team working on a real world project - objectives, supervision, appraisal, milestones, end date and so on.

You will notice that you could easily apply those four steps to a cross-cultural project where you were aiming to expand your business into another country. Read through the bullets again and this time picture China or India or another region that is culturally different from your own. Taking the time to understand and respect another’s culture is the best way to avoid giving offence - and to avoid becoming a spammer.

Photo: thanks to david on flickr.com (CCL)

I’ve been invited by the Institute of Directors (IoD) - along with my co-author Silvia Cambie and usability expert Giles Colborne - to give a talk on how businesses can take advantage of Web 2.0 to build networks and communities around their products, services and brands. The event will take place on Monday 22 June at 6.30pm at the Guildhall in the City of London.

The details are below, with booking information at the end. If you are able to come along, do add a comment to let me know and I’ll keep an eye out for you. Or just come and say hi afterwards.

Also, if you have any specific questions or topics you think it would be helpful for us to cover, please do add a comment. We’ll see if we can cover it in the talk or in the question time afterwards.

———–

Creating Value through Web 2.0

Venue: City Marketing Suite, Guildhall, Basinghall Street, London EC2P 2EJ
Time: 6.30pm to 8.30pm on Monday 22 June 2009

Internet communication is evolving the way we do business. Blogging, podcasting and social networks like Linkedin and Facebook are extending the ways we engage with people via digital means.

Web 2.0 is creating a business environment based on knowledge sharing and collaboration. The cyberspace is a new landscape with its own cultures and accepted rules of behaviour.

Social media offer businesses a powerful means of building networks and communities around their products, services and brands. However it is not a simple matter of ‘Build it and they will come’. A strategic approach is needed to produce ‘sticky’ content and create value from on-line interactions.

The speakers will give an overview of the social media and social networks used by businesses. They will introduce ways of engaging effectively with on-line communities and will discuss the intersection of commerce and social networking.

Silvia Cambie ( Director, Chanda Communications ) and Yang-May Ooi are authors of “International Communications Strategy Developments in Cross-Cultural Communications, PR and Social Media” to be published in July 2009 by Kogan Page. Silvia is a cross- cultural communicator and a journalist. Yang-May is a writer specialised in social media and a blogger.

Giles Colborne is an expert in User Experience. He is Managing Director of cxpartners and former President of the UK Usability Professionals’ Association.

Tickets: £25 for IoD members inclusive of VAT of £3.26 and £28 for non members inclusive of VAT of £3.65
Contact: Mei Sim Lai OBE DL, Hon Secretary, IoD City Branch, IoD Hub, 35 New Broad Street, London EC2M 1NH
Tel: 020 7194 8385, Mobile: 07903 153793, Fax: 020 7194 8386, Email: MeiSim@LaiPeters.org

Photo: thanks to Daniel F. Pigatto from flickr.com (CCL)

The great thing about email is that it’s very easy to drop an e-mail to someone, knowing that they can pick it up at their leisure and respond at their leisure. Unlike the phone, you don’t both have to stop what you’re doing in order to make and take the call at the same time.

But the problem with e-mail is that you had to be sitting at the computer to type out the text of your message and then to send it. There have been times when I have been on my way to work or just out and about without access to a computer — and certainly with no possibility of sitting down and typing a detailed message — when I have remembered that I need to contact someone to tell them some particular information. I could phone them using my mobile phone but it would typically be that time of day or evening when they would be either busy at work, in a meeting or in bed asleep — or it’s the kind of message that doesn’t really warrant my interrupting them in the middle of what they are doing. So I usually say to myself, “I must remember to e-mail them when I get home/ to work when I’ll be at a computer.” And, often, I would forget to do it!

Wouldn’t it be useful if we had a voicemail line where it worked like email? You could send them a quick voice-email that they could pick up at their leisure and responds to at their leisure. It would be handy in situations where you wanted to send them a message on the fly while you are hurrying along — and you didn’t need to specifically interrupt them with a phone call. Or if you find texting fiddly or if your message is going to be longer than 160 characters. Or you’re not very good at typing and the whole process of typing a detailed message is very laborious.

There are a couple of ways that I have discovered that can help in this kind of situation. They are Jaxtr and Dial2do, which are online applications that interface with your mobile phone - and land line, too. I will look at them in separate blog posts over the next couple of weeks. They each work in different ways and offer different functions.

First, Jaxtr.

This is primarily an online interface that allows you to make cheap international calls from one of around 50 listed countries, including USA, UK, Malaysia, Australia and many European and Asian countries. You can signup for a free account which has an online voicemail function. If you want to make cheap calls or receive calls that can be forwarded to your landline or mobile phone, you need to register your phone and buy credit - but to receive calls to the Jaxtr voicemail can be done with the free account.

You will be alerted when you receive a voicemail by an automatically generated e-mail from Jaxtr so you can login to your account online and listen to the message. One of the advantages of a Jaxtr account is that people in other countries can call you at rates local to them. So your friends or family abroad can send you a voicemail from their phones at cheap local rates whatever time of day or night, wherever they are, without worrying about time zone differences or needing to be at computer.

The other cool thing is that you can put a Jaxtr widget on your blog or website which people can click on to initiate a call from their phone. They type in their telephone number and Jaxtr calls their phone to connect it to your voicemail line. The first call is free and then Jaxtr gives them a local number to call for subsequent calls. If they have an all inclusive package on their mobile phone or their home phone has free minutes, those subsequent calls will essentially be free for them to make.

One downside for some may be that you have to go online and listen to the messages online so you will need a broadband connection that can comfortably support audio streaming and a computer with a sound card. Another might be that while the caller may leave the message for you while they are on the fly, YOU can only pick up the message when you are at YOUR broadband-connected computer.

You can give my Jaxtr voicemail line a try on my Contact page at www.fusionview.co.uk/contact.

I also add a line in my email signature: Don’t have time to email? Send me a voicemail instead @ www.jaxtr.com/yangmayooi

The main difference between Jaxtr and the other service I’ll be explaining in a later post, Dial2do, is that the message remains as an audio message for the recipient. Also, it is an application set up by you as the recipient.

Let me know if you give this service and go - and also what you and your friends think about it’s usefulness or otherwise, whether you use it for voicemail or to make and receive calls.

BTW, I’m not commissioned by Jaxtr in any way. This is my personal view based on how useful I’ve found this service.

After about 2 1/2 weeks of being off line, we have managed to ditch our broadband service provider Tiscali in favour of O2 and we are finally connected again to friends, family and The World!

In the first few days of being off line, I thought it might be quite refreshing not to be always available, always connected, always wired. I decided to make the best of the situation by spending my evenings and weekends reading, catching up with friends on phone or meeting face-to-face and taking the time to do other things that did not involve sitting at the computer. And for a time it was quite relaxing not to have to deal with e-mails or instant chat messages popping up on the computer screen at regular intervals. I also re-discovered the joy of sitting in my favourite armchair with a book and a glass of wine on a cold winter evening.

But after a little while, it felt like we were on a desert island and out of the loop and I couldn’t resist the urge to check e-mails. We managed to stay in touch by accessing our e-mail accounts on my partner’s iPhone — which is great for reading e-mails but a bit fiddly and clumsy for writing anything more than a few lines. Also pretty soon, unless I regularly checked e-mails via my sister’s computer or at work, my inbox would become bloated and unmanageable, with email upon email piling in at an unstoppable pace.

It also became very frustrating not being able to keep my blogs updated. I did manage one short audio podcast by phone but I prefer to write my blog posts and having to “perform” the phoneblog all in one take is somewhat stressful and not something that I wanted to do regularly. Not being able to blog made me realise how much it is a part of my life and how much it connects me with other bloggers and my readers who engage with me online.

I also usually keep in touch with my sister and a number of other friends by Skype. My sister and I have a video chats most days in a week — the conversations are usually about nothing much and are the equivalent of having a bit of the natter over the garden fence in the real world but I enjoy them as a way of staying in touch. We still managed to chat regularly on the phone that it’s just not the same — there seems something formal about a phone call these days and of course, you don’t have the fun of seeing the other person in real time.

We were invited to dinner at a friends place and I realised that I couldn’t check the train times online as I would normally do. I also had to dig out the old tattered A-to-Z to work out the directions to her house instead of merely typing in her postcode to Google Maps and printing off the map and handy directions.

My calendar and diary are online, as is my task list. So being off-line meant that my whole life, literally, fell apart as I had no idea what I was doing all where I was meant to be on any given day. I had to hurriedly dig out a paper diary and transfer all my appointments and tasks from the online applications onto it. (I did used to back everything up onto my computer at home, syncing the online applications with Outlook, but that didn’t help me when I had to check my calendar and tasks at work but had updated my home computer in the meantime without it syncing with the online version.)

My parents in Malaysia don’t have a computer so we keep in touch by fax. The only thing is that I fax them via e-mail, using faxtastic.co.uk, which also allows me to receive faxes as e-mails. So being off-line meant that I was also disconnected from them.

There was also a day when I would have liked to have worked from home so that I could go to a doctor’s appointment — and because of remote access to my work computer is, I would normally have been able to do that. However, being off-line, meant that I had to postpone the appointment to another time and go into the office instead.

What’s more, I couldn’t even do my grocery shopping, which I normally do online, nor could I shop for books and DVDs from Amazon. I actually had to go into physical shops to do all that!

It really has been quite startling, these last couple of weeks, as it has really revealed how dependent I am on being connected to everyone and everything via the Internet. It was only about 10 years ago that I had first heard about this Internet thingy and at that time, I wasn’t very convinced as to its usefulness. Is it just me that I am a net Holick? Or is this how everyone runs their lives too these days?

Photo: thanks to elvis_payne from flickr.com (CCL)

If anyone is still sceptical about the power of social media, all you have to do is take a look at its role in the making of America’s first African American president. Of all the candidates, Barack Obama has probably been the most socially connected online throughout the Democratic nomination race and also in the last year going head to head with John MCain. So, what platforms was he using and what effect did they have on the outcome of the election?

Back in the summer of 2007, I spotted that Obama had signed up for a Twitter account so that his fans and followers could keep up to date with his every movement. As of this week, you can see the “tweets” alerting his followers of the last frenetic activity on his campaign trail as he tried to squeeze as much face time with the public as possible.

The tweets link to live video on his very own social network my.barackobama.com, developed with the input of Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. Obama also has a Facebook page with over a million “friends” and a Facebook application as well as a presence on MySpace. TechPresident.com gives a good analysis of these three social networks in “You’ve Got a Friend in Barack Obama”.

There is an official Obama Blog on his website, run by staffers and with a range of multimedia content, including live video such as his victory speech streamed via social networking video site Ustream, as well as YouTube videos.

Beyond this handful of tools, you can see on his blog links to “Obama Everywhere” - other platforms where he has an online presence, including interactive opportunities via mobile phone.

But a bunch of social media tools in themselves are not going to make a president all by themselves. The key is how they were used by the Obama campaign. Supporters, fans and followers were encouraged to take an action to show their support for the campaign - whether by organising local events or giving a donation, however small or large, or raising funds. According to the BBC, Obama’s online campaign “attracted more than three million donors. They donated about $650m (£403m) - more than both presidential contenders in 2004 combined.” With an overflowing war chest, he could out-do McCain by buying more airtime in the traditional broadcast media and also extend his own on-the-ground real world contact through more local outreach offices than the Republican campaign.

The BBC also reports that “Mr Obama had an unprecedented level of support among young people and new voters in the 2008 election. He won the votes of those under 30 by an impressive 66% to 31%, much higher than in any previous election. He also has a huge majority of those who voted for the first time, who supported him by 68% to 31%.” The Washington Post comments that the Millenials (those under 30) “are migrating toward each other, regardless of race or ethnicity. … (They) may have found their first president — one who engages them in their own space.”

Obama’s success was not entirely due to social media but he used it smartly in conjunction with other communication tools. Broadcast media is still hugely influencial and there’s nothing that will replace face to face human contact whether it’s through speeches at rallies or simply walking amont the people and kissing babies. But social media broadened his reach to those people he might not have otherwise been able to connect with and it also enabled ordinary people to do small things which came together as a whole to contibute to an enormous win.

Picture: screenshot of the official Obama website

I used to type by pecking two-fingered at the keyboard — it was very laborious and painful, hunching over the letters with my head nodding up and down as I checked between the screen and keyboard every few seconds. Finally, I taught myself to touch type using a book from Pitman’s Secretarial College, which was a long tiresome process in itself over the course of three months. It paid off, however, as I slowly increased my typing speed over time from 20 words per minute to around 70 — 80. Touch typing helped me write my novel is easily, enabled me to do my job as a lawyer more efficiently and these days, means I can churn out e-mails, documents and blog posts very quickly. However, the downside is that spending hours on end at the computer during office hours and then in my own time in the evenings typing away means that my hands and elbows get tired and cramped. My shoulders and neck are often stiff and achey. Also, being stuck in a sitting position for long periods means that my legs and back are also badly affected.

I am guessing that this is a common experience for many people. All the discomfort that comes from having to sit and type in order to communicate on the computer takes the joy out of surfing the net and connecting with friends, doesn’t it? Well, for those of you who are fed up with typing, salvation is at hand!

I have just installed the latest speech to text software from Dragon Naturally Speaking and I am dictating this blog post while wandering around my study, occasionally standing by the window to watch the world go by. I hardly have to touch the keyboard as the program types out everything that I dictate and if I want to make an amendment, I can give it voice commands to do so for me. The version that I am using is the “Preferred” version 10 which comes with a wireless headset. It is very intuitive to use and has a huge vocabulary — it has recognised place names like Dulwich and Norwood, proper names like Joan Baez and John Steinbeck and unusual words like chorizo. I can give it voice commands to move around web pages and also control the keyboard. One of the other functions I like about it is that if I am away from my study, I can dictate into a digital recorder and then later, can next be recorded to my computer and Dragon will transcribe the audio file into text.

When you first install the program, you have to spend about 10 — 15 minutes training it to get used to your voice. Initially, it felt a bit strange “talking to” the computer and I was a bit shy! However, after a few minutes I got quite into it and now it seems the most natural thing in the world — in particular, because I use the wireless headset and tend to do my dictating while looking out of the window, it does not feel as if I am “talking to” the computer. The great thing is that I can speak at more or less a conversational pace and it is accurate upwards of 95% of the time, provided I enunciate clearly. In fact, it is much quicker for me now — one week in — to dictate than to touch type because the program is so much more accurate than my typing e.g. it doesn’t transpose letters or hit two keys at the same time!

I think to make the best use of this program, it is a good idea to have an outline in your mind of the structure and flow of your article, blog post or e-mail so that you do not have to spend much time afterwards editing and/or moving text around. Normally, I would have to do some minimal editing and rewriting just to tidy up anything that I have typed anyway, so having to do that at the end of a dictated text isn’t such a big problem — it only becomes a pain if you have to do substantial rewriting on your dictated text.

Being able to dictate text easily and accurately has really made blogging and e-mailing so much more fluid and less physically tiring. I am also more inclined to flesh out my e-mails to my friends because it doesn’t involve tiresome typing. As for blogging, it is helping me stay prolific and engaged.

So, if you are tempted to try Dragon Naturally Speaking, please do come back and let me know how you get on. (I have no association with the program or company and get no benefit from this review.)

Like many people, I have been keeping track of the financial news regularly throughout the day. I tried to catch the TV news all the radio bulletins if I am at home. Otherwise, I check out the newspaper websites online. The press reports talk about a “rollercoaster ride” and indeed, there are developments every hour with share prices plummeting and then recovering, up and down, throughout the day.

Back in the days of print, newspapers would have found it difficult to compete with the broadcast media in terms of delivering up-to-the-minute dispatches. However, moving online has enabled publications like the Guardian and the Times etc to bring updated news easily and quickly to their readers in almost the same way as broadcast news bulletins. In particular, I am following the Guardian’s live blog of the financial crisis .

At times the Guardian’s live blog updates every 15 minutes or so. Where it does not have any hard news, it brings commentary from web and blog sources so it is quite a good site to keep an eye on for a very few on the credit crunch developments.

Social media tools such as blogging are excellent for fast, up-to-the-minute updates. You do not need to be a major news organisation to use blogging and other such tools to keep your readers informed at regular intervals — this is especially handy for businesses and other organisations at those times when it may be critical to keep your customers, clients and other stakeholders updated. For example, it can be reassuring for your customers not just to be told that “it’s business as usual” on your main website but to be refferred to your blog for regular updates about a developing situation that affects your enterprise.

It goes without saying that if you promise regular updates on your blog, then you must follow through and deliver those regular updates — ideally, you should set out minimum timescales e.g. at least once a day, or every hour or at least three times a day etc. And when you are going to wind down those regular updates, it makes sense to say that on your blog as well.

Of course, you may not be able to reveal confidential or sensitive business information about that developing situation affecting your enterprise on a minute by minute basis. However, if there is information that can be sensibly released, then it is worth considering doing so as part of your regular updates. Also, it may be sufficiently reassuring for people to know that the situation is being attended to and that more information will be provided at such and such a time in the future. It’s like when you are stuck on a train that isn’t moving, it’s helpful when the driver comes on and tells you that it’s due to signal failure and even though he may not know when it will be resolved, he will keep you updated from time to time — you still have to wait the same amount of time whether he says so or not but somehow, it feels reassuring and less stressful and frustrating.

Photo: of “The writing on the wall” thanks to Overseas Development Institute from flickr.com (CCL)