So The Mister was in a jam (ha ha!) earlier this week – challenged by the partner of a guy we work with that HER jam is better than his raspberry jam. It started out as a harmless try-the-jam-at-home-on-your-toast kind of challenge but escalated into so much more – Al Brown of the very well know Logan Brown restaurant in Wellington waded in with support for the challenger, famous judges were lined up, Old Bank Arcade where it was held was jam-packed (ha ha), announcement of the event and write-up afterwards were in the paper and apparently the NZ Gardener magazine has put up their hand to sponsor it next year – WOW!
It was a great little get together – a really fun non-work, community thing to do left everyone in good spirits, even the loser, The Mister
Don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but on TV programmes and in movies, whenever someone leaves their job they seem to do so with only one box. A brown or white file box, often with a lid and sometimes with a plant. Seems a bit dubious to me because I seem to have a lot of stuff around and under my desk, not to mention the collection of orange pens and post-it notes.
However, today we packed up our desks in the likely event that due to Xero’s continuing growth spurt new people will need to sit at our desks while we’re gone. After recycling my non-essentials I was very surprised that I have stuffed my 3 years at Xero into ONE box! Includes my collection of orange things, cup, framed pictures, the Xero User Guide when it existed in book form, a ream of orange paper and more!
It now waits in the storeroom with my special orange chair for my return.
So that’s our desks spring-cleaned, and the apartment – have scrubbed pantry, shower (with a toothbrush even!), fridge, balcony pots; emptied, scrutinized and repacked cupboards under stairs, basins and hot water cupboard and we’re now down to eating strange meals to use up bits of random food from freezer, fridge and pantry. And to top off the weekend The Mister went next door to see our neighbour who we don’t see for months (so she probably wouldn’t've noticed we were gone) to tell her about a stranger coming and going from our apartment only to be greeted by a stranger staying there while she was away – looking rather rumpled and disturbed in a bathrobe so he’s quite embarrassed. Dammit. The first time I’ve ever got him to go over to the neighbours and that. Now he’ll never go again. Sigh.
Attended my first ever Webstock conference at the Wellington Town Hall last week. It’s a collection of internet celebs & cool dudes talking about things they’ve done and places they think internet and our lives online are going to go. About 20 of us from Xero attended the 2-day conference – all decked out in our Xero gear (which didn’t go unnoticed!)
Half of us went on to the ONYAs Awards (as in ‘Good On Ya’) on Friday night to recognise stars in the online world. Xero picked up 3 of the 4 awards we were nominated for which was great and The Mister had to go up to accept one of them. I did a quick write up with some photos and a video of an amazing digital light-show that used the Town Hall pipe organ as its centre piece on the Xero blog.
Following are some notes I took during the 2 days so you can stop reading now if you want to, no more pictures, just notes to self really!
In December I went to a lunch held by the NZ Marketing Association where 3 twitterers spoke about their experiences using Twitter as a marketing tool, peppered with their advice on how to use it. I think the audience were generally intrigued by Twitter and judging by some of the questions I was asked before the speeches started when people at my table heard I ran a corporate Twitter account, were there to hear about how to use Twitter in business.
I wrote down some of my thoughts at the time (was very pleased to see that I already thought/did most of this stuff myself esp with regards to the Xero account) and have meant to record them here since then – great holiday job to get done! As I’ve just using our Xero Twitter account based on my own ‘rules’ I’m still in a phase of being totally paranoid that I’m doing/saying the wrong thing and in sponge mode when it comes to seeing how others are approaching it.
Speakers were: Anthony Gardiner (Web Content Admin, NZ Army), Andy Blood (Exec Creative Director TBWA) and Duncan Blair (Brand & Comms Manager, Orcon).
Not just teenagers & young techies – actually biggest age-group seems to be 30’s
Generally people who already blog were the early tweeters
Judging by the level of whinging you can see on Twitter people either expect that their relative anonymity makes them comfortable doing this or that the immediacy of tweets means that someone will see it and do something about it
General feeling is that if you want Twitter to build an audience or create a community for your company you should use it for conversation and value, not brand blasting
Twitter needs a human voice if you’re to building any kind of audience – audience=trust+reputation so it’s no good getting an agency to tweet on your behalf or use any kind of animated response – the one exception to this might be to announce blog posts depending on how prolific your blog is. And how do you get the reputation and trust – be relevant, be interesting, be honest, be there.
A lot of large companies are using it to build brand and sometimes by the obsequiousness of their tweets and give aways I sometimes wonder if it’s to save brand face more. In that regard, it does give you a quick way to change people’s perceptions which can be pretty powerful on a one-to-one level when word of mouth is still a huge factor in brand choice
All feedback your company gets needs to be acknowledged without getting into the teen-phone-trap of who hangs up first, you don’t always have to have the last word and you don’t always have to comment back and say ‘thanks for tweeting about me’ etc so you need to develop that knack of knowing when to leave it alone, when to take it to email, when to admit you’re wrong
Occasionally it’s OK to tweet inane observations, if this goes towards showing your personality, and people on Twitter are used to a sea of this
Be honest & transparent (that’ my already famous orange presentation slide!) – whatever the principles of good customer service are you can’t beat old fashioned product knowledge and honesty, even it this means you’ll find someone else to help or you don’t know. And you definitely need to have a tough skin to deal with bad feedback and criticism (and having said that I’m not sure why I’m in this job HA! although it’s amazing the acceptance/forgiveness when you find the right way to agree/commiserate without putting down your own product)
Twitter is not a fad – everything is moving online and there are growth stats for Twitter that suggest it will be around for a while, perhaps not in it’s current form but as part of some larger converged online service
Twitter doesn’t have to have one objective or be used for one stream – if your brand or you are included in conversations or have questions directed at you on any topic, then that’s where you’ll go. This might take the form of general Q&A, sharing useful information for value-add or building personality, informal market research, entry of your brand into a competitor’s space and sometimes promotion
In an age of satisfy-me-now it’s not surprising that modern attention spans mean that 75% of people that rushed to get a Twitter account have tweeted less than 10 times, and without the staying power of building an audience and interest have an average 42 followers
And lastly … there is a difference between Facebook and Twitter – Facebook is a stream from your life (what you are doing/eating/wearing/feeling) and Twitter from your mind (what you are thinking/working on/delivering/researching) <– haven’t quite figured out how to explain what I mean here very eloquently, trapped in my head somewhere!
Interesting to note that no-one was ‘live-tweeting’ the presentation meaning that everyone was there to find out what it was – at Wordcamp (blog conference) I went to earlier in the year there was a constant tickertickerticker of laptop and cellphone keys as people tweeted snippets constantly as presenters were talking; sometimes verbatim, sometimes their own interpretation
Went over to Martinborough for our Christmas party yesterday – we went on the train and toured 2 wineries and an olive grove before ending up at Murdoch James for more tasting and dinner. It was a pretty cool afternoon – can’t remember laste time I went on train locally and the trip to Featherston went by pretty quickly.
It was really windy in Martinborough but it was cool hanging around chatting with everyone. At Palliser ,
And wandering through the olive grove at Olivo.
Train got us back into town by 10pm so all in all a good afternoon and a nice break from the city.
So I survived my first ever presentation at NZX to the Australian Investor Relations Association conference on 12 November. The presentation was ‘Xero & Social Media’. I was totally petrified and worried that what I had to share wasn’t rocket science or anything particularly educational for a group of CEOs, CFOs, CIOs and comms/marketing people but it seemed to go down well. In the end it was a small case study (only had to survive at the podium for 10 mins!) on how we use a blog and Twitter at Xero to communicate with our customers.
I featured on the NZX blog pretty much straight away! And eventually got a recording of the presentation to go with a write-up on Xero’s blog.
Here’s the presentation below (click the big ‘play’ arrow to watch it now directly on your computer) or if you have an iPod or dodgey internet connection or speed you can download this version of it (17.7MB)*.
*Right click on that link, save to your computer; then find where you saved it and double click to open. Please note if watching this version on your computer (if you have the right software (if you don’t it won’t play)) that it is designed for a small iPod screen so it will be quite small to look at.
We’re going “to beeeeeee a part of it! New York! New Yo-ooorrrk!”
YIPEEEEEEE it’s official. We’re off to live in New York next March for 4 months. It’s a dream come true. We’ve been working on plans with Xero for a while now to find a time when we could work from home and we choose that home to be an apartment somewhere in Manhattan. And we’ve finally made it happen.
We’re going in March so that we get 4 months before the height of summer, and so that we have a decent amount of time there during baseball season. It’s going to be freezing in March, and quite changeable – I’ve been looking at the temperatures over the last couple of years – anything ranging from daytime highs of minus 7 to 25!!
We’re in the throes of organising airfares and investigating furnished short term rentals. It’s going to be a big change for us and our teams – although we have quite a few people working remotely now so I’m sure we’ll all just adapt.
It’s just so great Xero can let this happen for us. I can’t explain the breathless excitement and bursting feeling in my heart sometimes when I realise it’s going to happen. Not quite counting the days but definitely watching our spending – obviously this will not be a cheap exercise and the last thing we want to worry about when we’re there is running out of money. And trying not to think that we WILL have to come home.
