A couple of things related to my setting myself up as a consultant type thing have amused me this week.
Firstly, when I talk to people who are selling stuff about blogging I emphasize that their blog should compliment, not replace, their existing website. The example I give is a market stall. The website is all their goods nicely laid out while their blog is the personal interaction they have with customers. There’s more to it than that, obviously, but it helps conceptualize what their blog might be useful for. Now I’m selling something I’ve realised that while I have a good blog I don’t have my market stall and have no idea how to set one up. Heh.
Secondly, when people ask me what they should blog about I usually suggest they tell the story of their business. Say what you’re doing, who you’re working with, what you think about things related to your area, that sort of thing. I’ve been doing none of that. In fact I expect most of you don’t know I’m setting myself up as a consultant at all. I don’t think I even mentioned here that I quit Created in Birmingham last week. I’m not practicing what I preach, which is kinda interesting.
I guess it’s because I don’t really know what that story is yet. It’s all a bit new and vague and I’m struggling to find the language to explain it all. But that’s no excuse. The best way to figure stuff out is to write about it, I find, so here goes, concentrating on the events and not worrying about the meaning just yet.
This week was a week of meetings. Actually, most weeks I have meetings of some sort be they formal blogging advice or just talking ideas with Stef or Dubber or someone of that ilk. But there were three chats this week that had a different sense about them. For a start they all appear to be leading to paid work, which is nice, but they also felt like they were putting me into a new context, or something.
Tuesday saw Nick Booth and me paying a visit to the Digital Birmingham offices. Ostensibly this was a fact finding mission for both sides – they wanted to know about how they could use blogging, etc and I in particular wanted to know exactly what Digital Birmingham did as it had occurred to me that despite being active on Birmingham digital landscape for a while now I’d never had cause to even think about them. It was a quite illuminating chat, all said. DB’s outward facing work is only a small part of what they do with a lot of it being strategy stuff and incubating projects which can then be recommended to other council departments. For example, the BirminghamFIZ WiFi network, which I laid into recently, is only a small part of a larger project to do with setting up a network infrastructure for council workers to communicate with. The public part is just a bolt on, if you like.
Regarding blogging there were two areas covered. The first was using blogging as a way to help people “get digital”, to coin a phrase. We talked about how it could be used to empower people and so forth and came up with a trial idea to run a couple of workshops in June aimed at community groups, particularly those connected with single issues. A good example would be the Highbury Park Friends blog. While those sorts of blogs are a good thing in themselves the people that would run them tend to be passionate, active and vocal in their communities – the perfect types to spread blogging by example. Get them enthused about it and they’ll take that message with them to places the Digital Birmingham team can’t hope to reach. At least that’s the theory.
The second area was Digital Birmingham using blogging internally as a form of knowledge gathering and communication. They deal with and produce a lot of information and the sharing of that is both part of their remit and potentially of benefit to themselves. We talked about a few specific audiences to target – areas of Birmingham City Council and, more interestingly I think, the digital agencies of other cities across the world. We also talked about the potential of experimenting with online tools such as del.icio.us to see how they might be applied to the council’s work.
The big thing I tool away from the meeting was that DB exist within a sort of pyramid world with a quite rigid hierarchy of communication, as you’d expect since it’s part of the bureaucracy. And I come from the Internet which is like a bubbling soup of randomness where the recipe keeps changing. Connecting those two worlds is going to be interesting.
Wednesday saw my meeting with Lara Ratnaraja of Business Link. Lara’s somewhat legendary on the Birmingham creative industries scene. You’ll often find her in Rooty’s in the Custard Factory talking to someone who’s rapidly scribbling down what she’s more rapidly saying. She’s also one of those people who makes the connections – for example she mentioned me to the Custard Factory last summer. So when I decided I needed a few pointers contacting her was a no brainer.
I’m still a little rusty as to what exactly Business Link does, not because they’re unclear in their mission but more than I have a bit of a blind spot for this sort of thing, but what Lara does is listen to you telling her what it is you do and then tell you what you’re actually doing in a business context. She also talks very quickly and an hour with her, while very useful, is incredibly exhausting! Thankfully she’ll be sending me a report on what we talked about but in short she’s going to connect me with an advisor to help me figure out a marketing strategy and suggested I see what courses Creative Launchpad are offering that might be of use to me. She also pointed me towards the BSCI Feasibility grant “to help identify new market opportunities for products and services.”
On the flipside there’s the potential of work for me as a consultant for businesses being assisted by Business Link building on the training work I did for Metapod (which I didn’t get around to blogging about at the time – bad me!) for startups who think they need a website but aren’t sure exactly why.
And then on Thursday I had lunch with Suzi Norton of Screen West Midlands. While I’ve known Suzi for the last year or so due to Created in Birmingham and mutual friends we’d not really had a good chat and now Screen WM has taken over the digital chunk of Digital Central (pretty much everything except music, I think, but don’t quote me on that) our worlds overlap quite a bit. In short, the Screen part of their name used to mean film and TV but now encompasses everything that comes through a screen be that in a cinema, on your computer or through your phone. Their digital strategy is being worked on by Toby Barnes of Pixel Lab and I was part of the consultation for that so with any luck I’ll be working with them on stuff in the future.
So, three meetings and I’m on the cusp of being a professional something. Lara suggested I’m selling Digital Communication Strategy which makes sense I suppose but it’s a bit of a mouthful.
In the short term, however, the new website for the Custard Factory comes online soon so I’ll be swamped with that throughout May and financially I’m pretty solvent so I don’t need to be looking for new work in a hurry. Plenty of time to keep having chats like these and figuring it all out. Not too much figuring though. Gotta keep things fluid.
(I hope I don’t get in trouble for blogging these meetings, but I guess people expect that from me. Blogger is as blogger does, and all that.)