When to give up
It used to be that failing in business was a potentially catastrophic black mark in the UK – essentially the end of your career. But over the last decade attitudes have changed, driven by a more American view that it is better to have tried and not succeeded than to not to have bothered at all. There are a thousand and one reasons that a venture might fail, many outside your control, and as long as you learn lessons you can bounce back stronger.
This more relaxed attitude to failure is reflected in the growth of startups in the UK. Rather than leave university and go and work in corporate Britain, setting up on your own is a viable choice – if it doesn’t work you can always try the 9 to 5 in a few years time. And as the Seth Godin quote goes, “If failure isn’t an option, neither is success.”
But if the stigma of failure has been removed it brings another big question – when do you give up on your idea/business? Do you shut up shop at the first signs of trouble or soldier on when all chances of success are gone? That was the topic of an entertaining discussion at last week’s Pitch and Mix in Cambridge, which got me thinking about the whole topic.
It is easy to look at businesses or individuals where it would have been easy to give up when they hit the first roadblock. Harvard made Mark Zuckerberg take down the first version of Facebook and nearly expelled him – but he learnt from the experience and moved on. In Cambridge, ARM was essentially created within Acorn as Intel wouldn’t sell the computer manufacturer the chips they needed. The business pivoted and is now a multi-billion dollar world leader.
What came out from the discussion were two main ways of helping you to know when you’ve really failed and it is time to give up.
Firstly, set realistic objectives and goals for your company/project, with a timeframe attached. It shouldn’t be a hundred page business plan that controls your life but an idea of what success looks like and the time it should take to get there. Whether as simple as “we need to have made our first sale in 18 months” or more complex, use it as a guide to when to stop. If you get to 18 months and there’s no sign of a customer then you should probably give up, but if you’re negotiating with a couple, then extend your timeframe. Build a plan to get to your objectives – what needs to happen for you to make that sale/launch the project within your timeframe.
Secondly, get independent advice. Everyone involved in startups must have passion – if you aren’t enthusiastic about the idea you won’t put in the hours to make it work. However perspective is more difficult – you are simply too close to the coalface to provide an objective view of reality. So find yourself an independent mentor, who understands your business and what you are trying to do and give you advice and perspective on the way forward.
More businesses fail than succeed, but don’t take it personally, learn and move on. And marry passion with perspective to work out when to throw in the towel and start again.
Be careful what you tweet (part 84)
It is tempting to devote this week’s blog to the passing of Baroness Thatcher and how it has been covered on social media. But essentially this excellent pie chart from @martinbelam sums it up - see any newspaper for stories to prove his point.
Instead I’ll focus on more recent history – the tweets sent by the UK’s first youth Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC), Paris Brown, which have forced her resignation. At first glance there’s nothing new here – public official says something stupid online, backtracks but overwhelming moral outrage forces them out and leaves their boss (in this case adult Kent PCC Ann Barnes) with egg on their face. It’s pretty similar to all the social media cock-ups made by brands though obviously it has only come to light due to a newspaper investigation.
But what’s different here is that Brown is just 17 and the tweets (which are being investigated by the police as potentially racist and homophobic) were posted between the ages of 14 and 16. Brown denies the charges, though admits she boasted about sex, drinking and drug-taking on Twitter. Having once been a teenager in pre-Twitter times, I do remember a lot of patently untrue bragging being par for the course.
There’s two things that make me uneasy here. Firstly, how far back are we going to go to incriminate someone? Obviously these tweets are at best stupid, but she was still legally a minor at the time. I think there’s a big difference between something said while under 16 and the regular indiscretions of those in their early twenties, who really should know better.
The second, and equally worrying point, is what happened in the recruitment process? We’re told that she went through a ‘very tough’ interview process but that Kent Police’s vetting procedures didn’t include a basic social media check for someone on her pay scale. No one did even a cursory search on Twitter or Facebook and she was merely asked if there was anything in her past that could embarrass her or her job. Hardly watertight vetting for a high profile (if low paid) role.
We hear a lot about building your personal brand on social networks when looking for a job, following the right people, commenting on their posts and using the power of Twitter to make yourself memorable, recognisable and employable. In the past this was relatively easy as they could start from scratch at 20 or 21 – they didn’t have a guilty Twitter childhood as the social network only dated from 2006. Now we’re at a stage where everyone coming into the workforce has grown up with Facebook, Twitter and other networks – time for kids to either watch what they say or remember to erase their accounts when they hit 16………..
Related articles
Do you really Like that?
Be careful what you like on Facebook – that’s the warning to take from research carried out by the University of Cambridge. The project used algorithms to predict religion, politics, race and sexual orientation based solely on what people chose to Like on the social network.
By correlating personality tests and the demographic information of 58,000 volunteers, the researchers were able to compare Likes with an astonishing level of accuracy. The algorithm used was 88% accurate in predicting whether someone male was gay or straight and between 65-73% accurate in guessing marital status and substance abuse for example. And it wasn’t based on simple linking – fewer than 5% of gay users clicked obvious likes such as gay marriage. Instead it used information such as likes on TV shows, films and music.
This is music to the ears of marketers (and social networks desperate to sell advertising to them). It could even help Facebook’s depressed share price perk up a little. And if you can accurately predict detailed demographic information from just one part of a person’s online footprint, imagine what you can do if you add in web browsing, search and other social network data. No wonder Google wants you to sign into its multiple services so it can collect the maximum amount of data, whatever device you are using.
From a consumer point of view there’s two ways of looking at this – most people will see it as an intrusion into their privacy and change their settings, but brands may well rationalise it as offering people exactly what they want. And as Mark Earls has pointed out in his book I’ll have what she’s having a large number of people’s decisions are herd led. So offer them an easy option that means they don’t have to think and they’ll jump at it. In many cases consumers may not even realise they are being sold to – which could be very worrying when people start being segmented on sexuality, religion or political affiliation.
So marketers need to treat this data with caution. Yes, it gives unprecedented insight but be too aggressive when using it and you’ll cause a public outcry which could damage your brand – and trigger governmental action to tighten privacy settings on the likes of Facebook.
However my own view is that we’ve been here before. Remember when store loyalty cards came in everyone predicted that we’d be laser targeted with relevant offers that drove us to up our spend? But if I get a mailing from a well-known chemists the vouchers are pretty much identical to my wife’s, with obvious male/female differences. It seems that marketers haven’t got to grips with shopping data in enough granular detail to deliver the killer offers that will drive me to automatically purchase without thinking. We may have the data, and even the technology to analyse it, but until marketers move to a digital mindset we’re unlikely to be brainwashed into buying things we don’t even know we wanted.
Related articles
Telling a Whopper on social media
Rather than covering a range of subjects I could probably write a weekly blog called ‘Which brand has f@cked up on social media’, without running short of material. This week it was Burger King’s turn on Twitter – though to be fair to the fast food giant they believe their account was hacked. After all the background picture was changed to a McDonald’s logo and one tweet claimed the chain had been sold to the Golden Arches.
The tweets stopped after an hour after Burger King asked Twitter to suspend its account (unlike HMV, they knew how to switch social networking off). They even had a supportive tweet from @mcdonalds commiserating with their rivals.
So no real reputational damage done – the online equivalent of breaking into a local Burger King, daubing graffiti on the walls and putting quick drying cement down the toilets. Illegal yes, but once the mess is cleared up, Burger King on Twitter will be back open for business.
But the financial damage could have actually been enormous. Imagine that rather than tweeting an obviously untrue rumour (We just got sold to McDonalds!) the hackers had put out something different and subtler – such as news of finding horsemeat in the company’s burgers (not true I hasten to add). Think of what that would do to the stock price, spooking investors and sparking a sell-off. Financial institutions would have seen company news from a reputable source and acted accordingly. Given Burger King is US-listed I’m sure litigation wouldn’t have been far behind from disgruntled shareholders too. And the problem isn’t just malicious hacking – do companies have corporate policies about what they can and can’t tweet/blog/put on Facebook in case it is share price sensitive? My betting is that many don’t, leaving it to the discretion of whoever is actually running the Twitter feed. Hardly foolproof.
So, at a time when cyber security is top of the agenda, companies need to make sure that they not only know their Twitter logon details, have clear policies in place, protect their passwords and have an instant crisis plan if security is breached. I’d hope that if it wasn’t before Burger King’s investor relations department is now much more involved in social media planning. Handled properly this is another chance for marketing/PR/social media to become more strategically involved in vital financial communication – so marketers should ignore the Burger King experience at their peril.
Related articles
Lucky vs hard working
What brings success? Is it hard graft or can you short circuit the years of work by just being a bit lucky?
That was the topic of a recent CfEL Enterprise Tuesday, where entrepreneurs Rahul Vohra and Shamus Husheer discussed what makes some businesses succeed when others fail. For the lazy amongst us, the unfortunate conclusion was that you need hard work as well as opportunity if you’re going to make it big. But you do need both – as Shamus pointed out, if hard work led to success, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire, and unfortunately they’re not.
Essentially you need to put yourself in the position to be lucky – so make sure that you are in the right place at the right time, and then grab the opportunity. For me the perfect example is Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. He took an existing idea (a paper directory of students) and wrote an initially simple computer program to put it online solely for Harvard University students. As any programmer will tell you, Facebook itself isn’t the world’s most complicated piece of code, but it attracted users and the rest is history.
But look a bit deeper and there’s more hard work involved – Facemash, the first version of Facebook, was closed down by university authorities for breaching security, copyright and individual privacy and Zuckerberg was lucky not to be expelled. So he persisted, refined his idea and tried again. From Rahul and Shamus’s experience iteration is a key part of success – things aren’t necessarily going to work first time, but that doesn’t mean your idea is worthless. Other people came up with Facebook-like services but through hard work Zuckerberg’s got the users it needed to take off.
So, while it is an easy response to describe someone successful as ‘lucky’ you make your own luck in this world. Aspiring entrepreneurs need to make sure they are looking for opportunities, making intelligent guesses about what might be a success and then working hard to develop a product or service that customers actually want. Like a swan, ‘lucky’ people may look calm, but underneath the surface their legs are paddling very hard………
A weekend to change the world (part 2)
At a time when the world seems full of young companies aiming to be the next Facebook, it is easy to write off technology startups as predominantly pointless pipe dreams that won’t contribute anything meaningful to society.
But the good news is that the power of technology can change the world. Whether it is in education, improving the environment, revolutionising healthcare or helping communities the power of technologies such as the internet, mobile telephony and even social networks can change many people’s lives for the better.
Unlocking these ideas and giving them the help and support they need to take realise their potential is the mission of Idea Transform. A Cambridge-based initiative, backed by the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (CfEL) it supports meaningful startups through events and mentoring.
Run by a stellar organising team (including myself), the first Idea Transform weekend attracted over 100 entrepreneurs, developers, students, business people and mentors. 26 ideas were pitched on the Friday evening and teams then formed to work on projects, which were judged on the Sunday evening. Projects spanned healthcare, education, the environment and community.
The range of ideas was astounding – from in-road electric charging to biometric identification for healthcare. What united them was that they all had the potential to change the world – and a plan for achieving it. Attendees threw themselves into the weekend, bringing their skills to bear on helping develop the ideas, ably supported by our experienced mentors and inspiring speakers.
The great news is that Idea Transform 2013 is now up and running. It will be held between 15-17 March 2013 at the Cambridge Judge Business School and promises to be as exciting and exhilarating as the 2012 edition.
Whether you’ve got an idea that you want to work on or have skills or energy that can help develop projects, take a look at www.ideatransform.org and come along in March. With high level speakers and experienced mentors, you’ll learn new skills, meet new contacts, have fun and contribute to making the world a better place. Sign up now!
Twitter, libel and lies
The world of technology invariably desensitises you by removing a physical reaction to your action. There don’t seem to be direct consequences – hence people are often ruder in emails or on social media than they would be in real life or on the phone. After all, the chances of someone finding and punching you are that much smaller.
This has led a lot of people to see the internet world as beyond the law, a cyber Wild West where anything goes. And, to a certain extent it does – it takes time and effort to track down anonymous internet trolls, often requiring costly legal action to force ISPs or social networks, such as Facebook, to provide their names and addresses. Cases such as the breaking of the Ryan Giggs super-injunction just reinforce this belief.
But Twitter is subject to the laws of the land in the same way as any other written communication. That’s the realisation that is slowly dawning on the large number of people who tweeted or retweeted, wrongly naming or linking former senior Tory Lord McAlpine with child abuse claims. The innocent peer has instructed his solicitors to sue those who have defamed him online, with his lawyers urging those who tweeted the story to come forward and apologise. Many high profile names have already done so but what will be interesting is what happens to those that don’t apologise. They have clearly, if unwittingly, broken the law but tracking down every one of them and launching separate legal proceedings will be time consuming and costly. And it provides an interesting legal conundrum for judges – do you set damages based on the number of followers someone had when they sent the tweet? Is this a real use for Klout scores at last?
Before anyone starts muttering about Twitter crackdowns and eroding free speech it is important to understand the law. You can defend your words based on it being true, an honest opinion or a public service – but blatant untruths and lies are the same online as offline. In the aftermath of the Lord McAlpine case everyone on Twitter should take a look at the risks they face, but more importantly exercise a little common sense. As David Aaronovitch says in this (paywalled) Times article – Don’t tweet anything you wouldn’t be happy to see on a newsagents’ shelf with a picture of yourself above it. Or, I’d add that you wouldn’t say to someone down the pub if you thought they might punch you for it.
Social media elections – Obama vs the Police Commissioners
As the excitement of this week’s Police Commissioner elections galvanises the nation and sparks heated debate, I thought it would be worth looking at the role of Twitter in the gripping contest.
After all, looking back at the US election we saw a huge online turnout with voters from coast to coast giving their views and the Obama victory photo becoming the most liked and retweeted post ever. Social media was seen as a critical bellwether to who was going to win, with online sentiment analysis adding to exit polls in the data available to the candidates and media. And after the event voters made their feelings known (or were perhaps just fickle), with Mitt Romney’s Facebook page losing fans at the rate of 847 per hour. Go on, click on http://www.facebook.com/mittromney and see the fan count fall.
However when it comes to the Police Commissioner elections, at least in Suffolk, social media isn’t really centre stage. Of four candidates, one (Bill Mountford of UKIP) isn’t on Twitter and the Conservative and Independent candidates boast 242 followers between them. While they are both posting regular updates, only Labour candidate Jane Basham seems to have really been embraced by the medium, with 773 followers and a whopping 2,576 tweets. And the #suffolkpcc hashtag is generating on average 7-8 tweets a day, with none over the weekend. A quick look across the border at Cambridgeshire reveals similar levels of tweeting, so I’m not living in an isolated pocket of disinterest.
Of course comparing a local police election to the US Presidential contest is unfair. But what depresses me are two things. Firstly, we’re continually being told that social media is handing power back to the people, giving us the opportunity to communicate with our elected representatives and get our points across. And politicians have embraced Twitter, even if many just use it as a chance to retweet party propaganda and show off their own importance. But, equally importantly, I believe that the Police Commissioner elections should be about independent candidates as much as those backed by the party machines – social media levels the playing field as it is cheap, accessible and available to all. Everyone should have a view on law and order and, whatever it is, now is the time to get it across to those that will lead your police force in the coming years. Don’t just vote, tweet!
All Twitter figures correct as of 9pm, 13 November 2012
Bringing Silicon Valley to the UK
Silicon Valley comes to the UK (Photo credit: Cabinet Office)
Looking out at an another chill autumnal morning, the lure of Silicon Valley’s sunshine is increasingly powerful. But there’s a lot more to the success of tech companies in the US than simply climate. The question is what is it and can we in the UK learn how to replicate that success here?
That’s one of the key missions of Silicon Valley Comes to the UK (SVC2UK), a programme of events across the UK that brings across leaders from US companies such as Google, LinkedIn and Facebook to help, nurture and assist local entrepreneurs and their companies. Originally a Cambridge event it has now spread across the UK, covering London and Oxford as well. The theme of this year’s programme is scale – addressing the fact that while the UK and US are pretty evenly matched when it comes to starting up businesses on a per capita basis, the UK’s scale up rate is less than half that of the US.
Another strand of the programme is looking to uncover the next generation of startups through intense bootcamp events. The most interesting one of these is the Future Business weekend being held in Oxford and running in collaboration with SVC2UK.
It is looking to build on the research strength of the UK by providing access to existing patented technologies and essentially allowing teams to generate new ideas and innovative businesses around them. It’s often said that not enough research makes it out of the lab, and the event aims to change this by taking scientific intellectual property and making it available, along with support and mentoring.
Held between 9-11 November the weekend will be run by the Oxford Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (OxCEI) together with the Future Business Pre-Incubator (FBPI) and Silicon Valley Comes to UK (SVCUK). The aim is bring together entrepreneurs, scientists, technologists and mentors to generate ideas and new companies to take existing patented technology to market.
The event uses the proven Idea Transform methodology, which underpinned the extremely successful Idea Transform weekend in Cambridge back in April 2012, providing structure and support to teams through mentoring, team creation, inspiring speakers and networking. And the good news is that selected projects from the event will then be supported through the Future Business Pre-Incubator with access to facilities, resources and ongoing mentoring.
Silicon Valley Comes to the UK starts on 15th November with an event at the Houses of Parliament – to find out more visit the website at http://www.svc2uk.com/
Related articles
Hurricane force social media
The current US devastation from Superstorm Sandy is showing the positive – and negative – sides of social media and our reliance on technology. Already there have been over 4 million mentions of #Sandy on Twitter and Hurricane Sandy was the top phrase in the US on Facebook. People are using it to check on friends and relatives and update them on their own safety. And there have been some incredible pictures and videos of the storm and its aftermath posted on social media, which have then been picked up by online and broadcast media. Google has launched a map of affected areas, linking to power outages.
But we’re also seeing the downside of our technology addiction, and in particular the electricity needed to make it work. The over 5 million people without power obviously can’t communicate. And this hasn’t been helped by the datacentres hosting sites such as Gawker and the Huffington Post being knocked out by storm damage. As Jeff John Roberts of GigaOM points out drily, there’s no app for disaster survival. Many people have replaced battery powered FM radios with internet versions and most of us either don’t have landline telephones or have swapped to DECT phones that need electricity.
The emergency services are also affected – people have been asked to use text messages to communicate rather than mobile phones to avoid overloading networks, leaving capacity free for official traffic.
It could potentially get even worse if the crisis precautions at major East Coast data centres and network exchanges fail and they go offline. Yes, it’s the end of the internet for all of us, wherever we are located. Press exaggeration obviously, but there is potential for disruption as some sites go down. While this level of inconvenience is nothing compared to that being suffered on the ground it does show our reliance on the world wide web.
The good news is that most data centres are designed to withstand a disaster of this scale – and Cloud computing means that processing should be switched automatically to other locations across the globe. But it does show everyone that you can’t rely solely on technology – time to make sure that you’ve got a basic phone, lots of batteries and a torch just in case.
Related articles
Chris Measures
-
