0 Two Examples of Local Economies

Last time I wrote about what I don’t mean by the local economy and next time I’ll suggest a definition.  In any city you will find several local economies (and arguably the city is itself a local economy). It is important to understand for any place the local economy exists; it can’t not exist. It might be strong or weak but it’s there.

I live in Sheffield in the UK and I can think of several local economies within the city.  Today I shall describe two of them.

Hunters Bar

Shops on Sharrow Vale Road, Hunters Bar

This area is strategically placed between the inner city and affluent leafy suburbs. It is on good bus routes and has plenty of on-street parking. It’s the sort of place where you might go on an afternoon off work.

There are a couple of good parks and lots of small shops. There are very few of the big chains, just one supermarket and almost all the other shops are small traders. So, you can visit the parks and then get a coffee and do some speciality shopping. The shops are mostly speciality food, arts and crafts, fashion, etc.

Some of the shops are outlets for local artists and craftspeople and so they support a home-based economy too. The area is popular with students and ex-students and so there are a many self-employed people living there. Some play a direct role in the local economy, by using the shops as outlets. Others play an indirect role by shopping and so keeping money earned outside the area circulating locally.

This seems to have sprung up spontaneously over many years and contrasts with less attractive shopping centres in the more affluent areas.  Whilst these may include small traders, they are mostly smaller and so tend to serve a local neighbourhood and not attract visitors from outside.

Why is Hunters Bar as success?  It’s hard to be certain but I suspect it is largely lower costs and the proximity to more affluent areas.  Being on a major route means many people will pass through the area between home and the city centre.

Spital Hill

Shops on Spital Hill

This area is notorious for being in precipitate decline for probably 40 years! The infrastructure is poor and the area appears run-down and seedy. This is not the fault of the traders in the area who have in recent years experienced something of a renaissance.

In November 2 years ago the biggest Tesco supermarket in Europe opened on its doorstep. The predictions were that the 6 or so local small grocery shops would close. Despite Tesco’s best efforts they’re all hanged on. There are loads of small cafes and gift shops.  Are they doing well?  Probably not brilliantly but they’re hanging on and most of the traders have been around for several years.

This appears to be a substantially Islāmic economy. I understand many people work there for minimal or no wages. Keeping the family business going is more important at this stage than personal income. I don’t know the details of how they’re doing this but I’m sure it is through support from community and family networks.

The government has paid for some infrastructure improvement in the area. They have made some welcome cosmetic changes but I am not aware of much in the way of direct support for the businesses.  Tesco has brought more footfall to the area, as people who travel by bus have to walk onto Spital Hill but this cannot account for its survival.

To keep competing with big Tesco is an achievement. Is it sustainable? I can’t say for certain but I suspect it will continue because the families have invested so much in it.

0 Digital Storytelling and Social Media

On Wednesday I attended a seminar, “Plugging the Gap: Young people skill up older workers in social media”, organised by Voluntary Action Sheffield for Learning 2.0gether.  Its worth capturing something about the conference, especially as the keynote speech links comfortably with my thread about telling stories on your website started last week.

The idea of learning 2.0gether is to match up young people with skills in social media with older people with experience in business for mutual learning.  (Mutuality is important and not reflected in the conference title.)  This is the approach this blog advocates and so it is worth visiting their site for more information.  Whilst this particular project is local to Sheffield, similar work is happening across Europe and at the conference we had speakers from Germany, Spain and Italy as well as the UK.

The keynote speaker was John Popham, digital storyteller.  He covered similar ground to the ideas I began to share last Friday and so I thought it might be worth summarising what he said here.  This is my interpretation of his talk and if you are interested it may be worth checking his website.

People don’t read formal reports online.  Actually how many people read formal reports at all?  No matter how glossy the report may be, the chances we skim it at best.  Reports simply tell you what has happened, what is dead and gone.  Stories change things.  Our lives are full of stories, think about soaps or programmes like X Factor, which are vehicles for stories about the contestants.  This summer someone threw a Baked Alaska into a bin and the country was outraged.  More people watch the Great British Bake Off than watch Doctor Who; maybe the stories on the former are better.  Such stories are inevitable when programmes have such massive followings but how effective are they at generating change.  Marketing should be about stories that make a difference.

John Popham suggests digital technology is rehumanising our society.  He argues we once lived in villages and then, with the industrial revolution, moved into cities which was dehumanising.  Migration to the cities took away natural interactions and these may be restored by the digital village.  Social media builds relationships, just as if you live in a village.  Business depends on relationships, social media helps build them, potentially across the world.

Whilst I agree the move from rural to city life must have dehumanised the new industrial poor, there is plenty of evidence for that in the eighteenth century, I am not so sure that the same applies in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century.  The co-operative movement for example demonstrates community building locally and between localities.  The reasons for decline in community are complex but post-war perhaps it was the growth of mass media and powerful corporations that dehumanised society.

The trust people have, living in a village, will depend upon how well they know each other.  If they know each other they are more likely to trade with each other.  Social media can help people become known to one another online.  Stories are a good way of building relationships online and essential if you are marketing through trade or causes.

Where trade used to be based upon barter and mutual exchange, many people are experimenting with similar arrangements online.

One example is NeverSeconds, a blog written by a nine-year old schoolgirl.  I followed this when it became well-known, although it hasn’t posted since February this year.  After it went viral many people visited it and donated to Mary’s Meals, a campaign to build kitchens in schools in Africa, and the amount jumped from a few thousand pounds to hundreds of thousands.  Veg, the blog author’s online name, has a fantastic story about how her school banned her from photographing her school dinners after the newspapers claimed she had said the cooks should be fired (she didn’t).  Thousands of people subscribed and the school had to back down.  It’s a brilliant story, told on the blog.

We have never had so much technology to hand to help us tell stories.  Blogs are one example and video is a second.  John Popham claimed that videos from a mobile phone can be as good as professional cameras and many of us aren’t even aware we carry such a powerful tool around with us all day.  Of course we need to work out how to use it but you learn by doing.

There is little doubt stories are more effective at communicating than any amount of academic text, a lesson this site perhaps needs to learn.  Have you any stories about how you’ve told your story online?

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0 Organising Blog Posts

The flexibility of blogs lies in many options for organising blog posts. One problem is you don’t necessarily know whilst writing a post how you might use it in the future.

Post URLs

Each post has a unique url. You can link to it from other posts and pages on your own or other sites. This is an under-appreciated aspect of blogs.

I’ve seen websites that attempt to marshal large amounts of information on their web pages. So, it is almost impossible to search for anything on the site. If the site has a search box, it will take you to the page, not to the item you seek. You will need to scroll down through perhaps dozens of items to find your topic.

It can also be difficult to delete information. Deleting a page can affect the structure of a website, as other pages might be accessed through it and so become unavailable. Blog posts are independent of the rest of their site and so they can be deleted. The only problem may be if there are links to those posts from other posts, pages or sites. With ping-backs, you will have a record of them in your comments section. If a post has a lot of back-links you might wish to consider alternatives to deleting it, for example amending the content.

Posting regularly means you will have a lot of posts and so need to organise them. How you do this may become clearer as you develop your site but categories and tags are good ways you can make some initial decisions that will help you in the future.

Today I’ll explain the difference between categories and tags and then in the next three posts tell you more about them.  Remember these are the basics. There are more advanced approaches to make your posts more accessible, eg Cornerstone pages.

Categories

Categories help you classify posts. They are a basic way of indicating to your readers what the post is about and which posts are closely related to it. If, for example, you want your readers to follow a sequence, you can put its posts in the same category. Posts can be in more than one category and categories can have subcategories.

Tags

Tags help you search for content. You might want to find everything in a certain blog about a particular topic, and assuming the blog authors have identified the same topic they will have assigned tags to relevant posts. Most posts will have more tags than categories but it does depend on the author.

The extent to which and the way you use these will depend upon the blog’s author and it may take time to get used to a particular author’s idiosyncrasies. You may wonder: who cares? The most important person is the author who may need to organise posts in the future and the categories and tags they assigned when they wrote the post may help them organise their posts into more readable formats. So, it is worth making the effort to be as consistent as possible.

0 From Publicity to Marketing

Last Wednesday I wrote about the change in web design from coding to plug-ins. Like all change, it is gradual and builds upon foundations laid in the past. There is a still a need for designers and developers of course but the context in which they work has changed. The implications of this  depend upon the logical type of the issue you are struggling with.

So, if you have a landing page which draws a lot of traffic and your conversion rate is low you may need a designer who can test your pages for conversion.  But if you are not clear what you want from your site, you do not need the same type of designer.  You will need someone who can understand your organisation’s needs and help you work out the approach to meeting them online

No-one ices cakes any more! This is the type of naked fruit cake I mean. pixel1 / Pixabay

My mother was a cake decorator. She noticed no-one ate her Christmas cakes because they didn’t want to spoil her beautiful design. So, she started to ice a polystyrene dummy for Christmas alongside a naked Christmas cake that no-one hesitated to eat.

Too many organisations see their website like icing on their organisation. It is fancy decoration but not really at the centre of their activities. What many have not understood is websites can be the cake, they can be at the heart of your activities.

Publicity is a part of your wider marketing strategy.  It is simply a means to tell people about your organisation and its activities.  Marketing is the strategic approach you have to deploy your publicity to best effect.  It should inform what you offer as much as how you promote your offer.  Base your marketing upon understanding your market and delivering what it needs.

Some organisations may find marketing unacceptable because they believe it is about trade. Marketing is not necessarily about trade. It is essentially about getting your message across. How do you reach the largest number of relevant people and persuade them to take the action you want, eg sign up to your mailing list, attend an event, write to their MP?

But it isn’t only trade that is unwelcome for many of us. This summer in 2014 we have seen the effects of extremely malevolent postings that have nothing to do with sales. These have been immensely effective and are entirely deplorable. I haven’t seen the videos and have no intention of seeing them and yet they have a place in my thoughts.  Terrorist groups understand how to get their message out and are very effective at it.  Don’t we need to understand what they are doing and insist upon an ethical approach to working online?

Trade is not always negative. If you have a problem and find a solution for sale, assuming it is the right thing for you, why should you not pay for it? Someone is trying to make a living.   Your contribution may encourage them to continue to develop their product and so offer you further benefits in the future.

The thing I find frustrating is the attitude that “we want a website but we don’t want it to take up any time”. I don’t deny time is an issue but websites are machines and they need maintenance. If you really don’t want to do it, fair enough, so don’t have a website.  You are not buying a website, you are buying what the website can do for your organisation.  That is you are buying a machine that will help you market your organisation.  You can’t do this without some expenditure of time and money.

If not having a website is not an option then you may need to talk to a consultant who can help you work out how to run a website with the resources that are available to you. Ideally you will find the time you spend on looking after your site helps you meet your wider aims.

We need to move away from the idea of a website as a snapshot of your organisation as it was 3 or 4 years ago when your designer locked down your site, to the idea of your website as central to your organisation’s strategy. It is the most powerful tool a community or voluntary organisation could hope for.

9 Product Launches

An alternative to long sales letters is the sideways sales letter, developed by Jeff Walker, for his product launches, a few years ago. The idea may not be well-known but as I describe it you may realise you have encountered it!

This approach is hard work. I am not trying to promote it here but do take care if you’re tempted to try it out. It is not a get rich quick scheme and requires a lot of work to carry out properly.

You need three things:

Sideways Sales Letters

So, what is a sideways sales letter? It is an email sequence sent to your list (and perhaps other peoples’ lists) that links to squeeze pages on your website. These pages will usually link to high quality content, your best material, after the visitor has contributed their email address. The content should not include anything about sales.  It can be long copy or video and people will read it because it is useful information. There are usually three of these followed by a fourth which is the sales letter.

The point is you can’t scroll down to see the price or indeed you may not at first know what the product is! You read or view because of the value of the content. By the time you get to the sales (in the final email/webpage of the sequence) you’re hooked.  Whilst some people who sign up will make a purchase, most will not but take away valuable information and maybe make a purchase at a later date.

This seems to work for a range of businesses, particularly small businesses.  I’ll discuss how it works in my final evaluation. Before I get to that there are some other approaches to online marketing and so next time I’ll progress onto traffic and conversion.

2 What is Not the Local Economy?

The two case studies, the Grocer’s Shop and the Charitable Business, illustrate some of the issues we face working in the local economy. So, what do I mean by the local economy?  There is no agreed definition. There is no right or wrong answer. Here are a few things I believe are not the local economy, even though they are legitimate uses of the term.

International Development Projects

For example, international developmental projects for the local economy in disadvantaged countries. The aim of international aid is to develop local economies.

It is something I know very little about. I’m interested in UK neighbourhoods, advantaged or  disadvantaged. Clearly disadvantaged neighbourhoods present a greater challenge but we cannot ignore more advantaged neighbourhoods.  They may be where we can find helpful examples of local economic development.

Maybe my experience and  ideas that have a wider application than UK neighbourhoods but I must write about what I know.  However, it is possible lessons from international development projects apply in the UK too.  For example, participatory appraisal and micro-credit are both approaches developed in disadvantaged countries to build local economies.  Groups in the UK use the with some success in the UK, whilst despite a few attempts micro-credit is a tougher proposition, primarily because of the economic environment in the UK.

Government Schemes

Some people associate the local economy with large-scale government-funded regeneration projects. My experience is developmentally these, for example New Deal for Communities, do not necessarily impact upon the local economy. The money passes through the local economy but leaves no lasting change.  Jobs created too often become dependent upon the grants.  After grants run out, these projects rarely obtain mainstream or any other ongoing funding.

An imposed or top-down scheme without local support and centrally planned, works on a one size fits all principle. It’s possible, where there is a thriving local economy, there might be scope for an effective government scheme. But where there is no thriving local economy I doubt large-scale schemes can be effective. It would be interesting to find research into the nature of neighbourhoods where schemes have been successful but I suspect if there are any they will be neighbourhoods where there is already a thriving local economy.

Social Enterprise

Social enterprises may be an integral element in a local economy but they are neither necessary nor sufficient for the success of a local economy. They cannot be the local economy in and of themselves. They are not essential to a thriving local economy.

Social enterprises and other creative local projects may be a sign of a thriving local economy. They’re not necessary because many neighbourhoods have a thriving local economy and no such projects and next time I shall describe a couple of examples that do not include social enterprise.  Whether any have successfully revived a local economy is an interesting question.  I shall share any I find out about.

Social enterprise can be an exciting part of a local economy and can catalyse economic growth. Social enterprise and other innovative economic projects can be a sign of a thriving economy but they cannot thrive without grants in a local economy that is not itself thriving.

Before I go on to define what I mean by a local economy, I shall next time offer a couple of examples.

3 Telling Stories on Your Website

On Tuesdays I am currently reviewing a few online marketing trends.  I’ve still got a few to cover and one of them will be using stories.  This Friday thread will explore stories at a deeper level.  I shall share a few stories and discuss how they might be used to promote your organisation.  Telling stories can be used in different contexts, not only online.

This first story is about something that happened to me many years ago:

Psalter Lane runs close to where my parents lived in 1972. You climb up the steep tree-lined hill and discover it has a brow, a few yards, and then it runs downwards just as steeply. But you can keep on climbing when you reach the top! To the left a driveway took you to the Omega restaurant.  The name Omega lives on but it changed hands in 1980. I went there once more in 1999, when they had infamous toilets but that’s another story.

We went there for the first time to celebrate my A-level results. Three Bs meant I qualified for university, a first in my family.

I don’t remember much about the evening, it was a family meal. There were probably four of us, with my sister or six with my grandparents.

I remember the scallops; a rare treat. I’ve possibly had them since, maybe once or twice. The restaurant  served them in the traditional white sauce with piped mashed potato and presented on a large platter. The waitress served me from the platter and asked if I wanted more. I said yes and kept on saying yes.

I had so much to eat I couldn’t finish it. Everyone thought I was being greedy. It wasn’t greed, it was ignorance. I thought the plate was a single portion and the service was part of the deal. The thought never crossed my mind that it was enough food for more than one person. I didn’t know the rules of the game.

I suppose I was in a powerful place, having achieved so much. But even when celebrating I didn’t necessarily get everything right.

So, a minor incident from the distant past that returned to me as I listed stories I might share online.  Why this one?

So, what do you think of my suggested use for this story?  Can you think of other uses?  Or other stories with the same use?

0 The All Posts Page

Last Thursday was a quick tour of the post editor area in WordPress. Today I shall take a closer look at the all posts page. So, if you start at the dashboard and click on “Posts” in the left-hand menu, you will arrive on the all posts page.

You will see this page lists all your posts in date order. Your latest drafts are at the top, then scheduled posts in date order and then published posts in date order. Date order starts with the latest.

The various buttons and menus at the top of the page help with navigation. The search box is particularly helpful, if you have a lot of posts and can remember a word in the title of the post you are seeking, it will bring all the posts with that word in the title to the top of the first page. (Note: below “Search Posts” you can see the number of pages listing post titles. )

To the left two icons offer two ways of viewing posts on the page. By default you see titles only, the other shows title plus the first few lines of the post.

Further left there are various filters and furthest left “Bulk Actions”. You apply bulk actions to selected posts. You select posts by clicking on the box to the left of the posts title. Once you’ve selected the posts, select the bulk action and then click on “Apply”.

The List of Posts

WordPress divides the posts display into 6 columns. After Title there is Author (which identifies the author, useful if your blog has more than one author), then Categories and Tags (of which more later), the cartoon balloon is for numbers of comments and pingbacks; and finally the date last modified, scheduled or published. Hover over any of the column headings and you’ll see a small triangle, which will enable you to sort posts according to that title, either ascending or descending.

Now hover over the first post and you will see a small menu appear beneath the title. Edit, Trash and Preview are self-explanatory so click on “Quick Edit”, which enables you to make certain changes without entering the post editor.

Most of this is straightforward and will make sense when we cover it elsewhere.

Slug below the title, is a shortened version of the title which can be used in the url. Make this post sticky means this post is kept at the top of the blog page on your website.

If you make any changes, you must click on Update to confirm the changes. Click on cancel to close the quick editor.

Let me know if this is helpful and if there are other aspects of blogging you would like me to cover.

2 From Coding to Plug-ins

There is a philosophical tradition, popular among some radical atheists, called reductionism. At its most extreme it contends everything can be explained in terms of its constituent parts. So, if we understand the chemical reactions in brain cells we understand human behaviour. Someone could tell from the chemical reactions in my brain that I have fallen in love.   Presumably they could also tell whether I was really in love or just having lustful thoughts. Or perhaps they would find love and lust are the same thing.

I don’t deny there are chemical changes in my brain when I fall in love. But will those chemicals tell the observer who I have fallen in love with? If I fall in love with Gill will these changes differ from if I fall in love with Susan? And would you be able to tell from examining these changes, which chemical means Gill and which Susan? If I’m in love with Gill and you inject me with Susan’s chemical, will I be in love with Susan?  The point is chemicals are an inadequate account of humanity’s tangled emotions; just about anything is!

As a response to reductionism, some people talk about qualia. These are qualities that cannot be described. Describe the colour red without saying it’s like something that is red. Gill and Susan are distinct beings and my feelings for one or the other cannot be reduced to a chemical (or mixture of chemicals).  The distinctive characteristics of something as simple as a colour or as complex as a person, cannot be reduced to something else.  The chemicals in my brain that interact when I see red, are not themselves the experience of the colour red.  They may always accompany the experience (do they?) but they are not the experience.

I prefer the term ‘logical type’. There are levels of complexity (called logical types) and you need the right tool for each level. Chemistry is not the right tool for researching human relationships. No-one is denying there are chemical reactions in my brain when I fall in love. What is dubious is the view you can explain love by studying chemistry.

What Has This to do with Website Design?

When people think about web design they think of languages such as html, css, php, JavaScript, etc.  They are similar to the chemist’s tools. Essential to a functional website surely but by no means the only tool the web consultant needs.  These are the tools a web developer uses to build new programs such as plug-ins.  They are not tools the consultant needs although the consultant might benefit from understanding them.

With content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress you can get by without them (not necessarily something I recommend) because you can use plug-ins.  Nevertheless, you still cannot get by without organisation theory (though many try).  The focus has moved in recent years from building your website to building your organisation using websites and other online and offline media.  You cannot do this if you don’t understand organisations; you can do it if you don’t understand html.

So, if you want your website to work for your organisation’s purpose, you need to understand your organisation. How else can you possibly hope to create a website that works for your organisation?  The web consultant’s role is to help you build a site that transform your organisation.

2 The Long Sales Letter

Last time I summarised the history of marketing pre-Internet. In this and the next few posts, I shall briefly introduce some major themes in the history of online marketing.

A florist launched the first ever website and for some time the online world consisted of static websites. At that time, people online had dial-up connections and went online to view sites for information.

The long sales letter could easily be transferred from paper to website or email at this time. It seems when this first happened it was rather successful. But then it became less effective. Why?

Well, people became more sceptical. Think of your own approach to online marketing. You see something that is attempting a sale and you click away.

The thing about long sales letters is they work when people read them, although not everyone who reads will buy. They’re designed to make a sale. If you go to buy a used car, you get the spiel from the salesperson. The letter substitutes for the spiel. You can learn to write a good sales letter, just as a salesperson learns how to make a sale.

Long Sales Letters Online

People do read them and they are influenced by them. Or at least they were. The problem is online, people are less patient. Maybe it is because reading from the screen is less easy than reading from paper. People began to scroll down to view the price without reading the letter. If they decided it was too much they would click away.

The aim of the long sales letter is to build desire for the product or service. If the prospect doesn’t read it, they will click away if they don’t like the price even if the product or service is something they want.

So, what was to be done? The answer came in something called the sideways sales letter, a topic for next time.

Please note I am describing methods used by online marketers. This does not mean I necessarily approve of them! I am taking a few weeks to describe a few approaches and then I will evaluate them.