I am about to have two simultaneous phone contracts – an IPhone (tied to O2) which will allow me to online network when away from home, and a new Nokia through Vodafone, so I can keep my business number. Yet, my friends are complaining that I never answer the phone! They are coming to accept that the only way they can keep in contact is to pay a visit.

The trouble is, my networking community has irrevocably changed over the last 7 months and since most of my friends are only occasional users of Facebook, and nervous and confused by Twitter and the multitude of .ning sites I keep encouraging them to join, we just don’t get to talk to each other much any more.

People use the excuse for not networking online of ‘I don’t have time’. Well, I don’t have time to sit still and talk on the phone, since talking and doing five other things at once is not one of my gifts. Which is why I make most of my calls when in the bath (hence the echoey backdrop to my voice and the need for a ‘spare’ phone).

But I can send out messages via blogs and networking sites in between finding the kids’ school uniforms, eating breakfast and trying to find my car keys (oh, I found them last night – in the fridge). I admire people who don’t have mobile phones and create a calmer way of life. I just don’t get to spend any time with them – just a passing hello on the school run – as our different orbits fail once again to connect. But when business colleagues have the same mentality – relying on overcrowded email inboxes and missed calls to keep in contact, that is a lifestyle choice that may cost them dear.

The Times Online posted The 50 Best Business Blogs last June. But blogs are not just a way of sharing information – they are a way of sharing views and comments as well. The business community needs to start understanding that getting involved with other people’s online conversations is a very powerful way of keeping a community in contact with your own values and, by default, that of your business.

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Apart from the fact that I have trouble remembering what the letters stand for, customer service relations (is that right?) sounds like a piece of software, or something that only corporates do.

Since the ‘Community Mark’ became an expensive gamble (you pay up whether you get accredited it or not) it certainly is no longer attractive to smaller businesses, especially since other businesses are not obliged to consider our ethics or sustainable policies when looking for providers.

So taking the trouble to create a CSR policy for my website is primarily for personal reasons.  But also it does make business sense, since I certainly connect better with other small business professionals whose world outlook is congruent with mine, so it certainly isn’t going to hurt my business to publicly state my values.

One part of the CSR process that I am particularly interested in, is the measurement of client and customer satisfaction as an integral part of the administration of the business. For example, measuring the loyalty of clients (how many resubscribe, for example) can be stated as a percentage of all your clients and there can be a stated commitment to increase client loyalty, with measures put in place to achieve that (discounted re-subscription, for example).

What I hadn’t considered before, was that a potential new client checking out the company by reading my (forthcoming) CSR policy, is not just thinking of resubscription as a sign of professionals getting work through the site (though that will be a primary one, of course), but they may also get a sense of this being a community which professionals WANT to be part of, especially if the ethical values of the business are in sync with their own.  So client loyalty is about more than satisfaction with the service, it is about a choice to stay connected to that business because of shared values.

Creating your own CSR plan is not a five minute job, and it must reflect authentic values and be totally transparent, as fakes tend to be spotted a mile off.  Like if Nestle tried to pretend they really cared about third world babies, for example; having spent years selling milk powder to communities who can’t read the safety instructions (clean water required!) assuming the instructions were in their own language in the first place.  (sorry, rant over)

So authenticity is the key, but also by being transparent about your values and intentions, that encourages a community of like-minded clients, and partnerships, to connect with your business and with you.  That makes sense on any level.

Thank you to Lorraine Bell of Simply CSR for all your help and advice.

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The room was buzzing with conversations at our monthly Women’s Networking Company meet up and the conversation turned to sex. I joined in on a debate about positive discrimination in Norway, where companies are legally forced to have a minimum number of women in senior positions. An analogy was made with positive discrimination in the British Police Force and how that has allowed our law enforcement service to be not entirely dominated by white males.

But I couldn’t help point out (being someone who likes to put their oar in during any lively discussion) that the British Police Force did something far more practical in order to increase, for example, the number of recruits from Asian families into the force. They published recruitment material in the languages of the Asian parents, many of whom spoke little English but who exerted a powerful influence over what careers their boys and girls were going to pursue after leaving school.

The police force also did something that massively effected the number of new Asian recruits that did not involve any sexual discrimination in favour of sex or ethnicity – they lowered the minimum height for applicants. This meant that suddenly, a whole generation of Asian youth were no longer ‘too short’ to join the police force.

By coincidence, I had heard that morning an interview with writer Susan Pinker talking about her book The Sexual Paradox: Troubled Boys, Gifted Girls, and the Real Difference Between the Sexes. The author was troubled by the UK’s political moves to emulate Norway by enforcing targeted ‘positive’ discrimination instead of allowing women in the workplace to be hired on merit alone. Her point was simple – women have been discriminated against for so long, so why should other groups, like men, have to suffer the same fate?  I thought she had a good point there.

Our networking discussion then began to highlight the plight of employers afraid that women will bleed them dry with maternity leave and I couldn’t help feel that there was an alternative to forcing employers to take on women employees by considering one simple, salient fact. Some of the women in that very room (including myself) were or still are, single mothers with young children, and yet we have started our own businesses. Clearly, women have a desire to keep working post children. I suggested that if employers were ‘forced’ to provide help with childcare, and allow more flexible working, that they would still get many years of productive service out of all their employees who chose to become parents.

I would hate to take on a job where the male workforce perceived me as being part of a positive discrimination policy rather than hired on merit. What a terrible thing to do to any women, or non-caucasian, or any human being, as part of the political drive to find quick solutions without bothering to look at the simple realities of those people’s lives. With the increasing number of women starting businesses, the fact that they can have some say over their work scheduling is a clear sign that this is the issue, not some misogynist streak in employers.

If the real underlying issues are not addressed, then ‘positive disrimination’ for women will result in plenty of childless women working in senior positions.

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Ok I’m going to have a grumble here, but it’s a perfectly reasonable grumble.

From the forward thinking USA I get WEmagazine with links to business women like Intuitive Business Coach who talks about using Social Networking to Grow Your Business. But when I go to a Sussex women’s networking meeting a few weeks ago, and suggest that they create a free .ning site so that us women can, well, NETWORK – oh, the reaction! The fear and trembling!

In fairness, some of the women’s groups I have spoken to are ‘looking into it’ and yes, they have a responsibility to ensure that their members feel secure and safe if they are to be advocating an online medium for intercommunication.

But I was gobsmacked when the administrator of one particular, mainly London based women’s networking group, told me catagorically that some of her members ‘would walk’ if they started an online social networking site as an added benefit to the membership.

I would lay money on the fact that those ‘members’ already have profiles on LinkedIn, which has much more personal information on it than most social networking sites. So the fear of being able to carry on conversations before and after a networking event, especially for women like myself who have children and are often confined to barracks unable to do physical networking, seems utterly irrational to me.

In the ‘Invasion of the Blogger Mums‘ article a wrote a few months back, I discovered in writing it that in the US, women have taken readily to blogging and online networking, and even in the UK women are using forums and social networks to connect on parenting sites. I seem to be getting invited to an increasing number of online networking sites exclusively for women which are created by UK based professionals, and when speaking direct to even female lawyers and financial advisers I have found the general reaction to online networking one of caution, but not hostility.

Is it really the ‘fear’ of perceived security issues that keeps women’s networking groups shy of creating an online platform for sharing views, ideas and contacts? Or is it really, just that the people who manage these physical networks (from which they earn a living) fear losing control by handing over the networking to the members?

I suspect the latter.

Perhaps it’s time for a revolution.

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Today I wish to share with you Webconsuls blog, Social Media Optimization Lesson Learned from an iPhone, about how how having an IPhone can be justified because of it’s social networking capabilities. I have an IPhone, but am too stingy to take out the contract with O2 until my Vodafone contract ends in May. I LONG for the day I pull out my IPhone instead of my battered Sony Ericsson which barely has enough energy these days to give more than a couple of rings before going back to sleep.

WHEN I transfer my mobile number across to that lovely piece of design that is IPhone (even though the battery will probably conk out half way through a Tweeting on Twitter – I have heard that is an issue with these phones), this is what I shall be doing as part of my regular social media optimization:

1. The dynamic duo “photos” and “camera” turn you into a photoblogging superstar! Take a picture and upload immediately to your blog. Get more bang for your post and cc your social sites while you are at it. Setting will have to be preloaded and the contact for each social site added to your contacts for easy and immediate access. Once settings are in place shoot your tantalizing picture and post. Be sure to add a compelling title.

2. Find the videos you have loaded up on YouTube and watch them, send them to social sites, email them to contacts, or make the person in line with you at the grocery store watch it. Bookmark your videos on your iPhone. Depending upon your industry and chattiness you will find opportunities to share your videos.

3. I was never a text message sender before the iPhone, but the iPhone’s large (by mobile standards) qwerty keyboard makes it easy and accessible. Combine your iPhone with a microblogging client such as Twitter and there are a variety of combinations to utilize. For example: Monitor your keywords and find the conversations as they happen. Using Twitter you can add ‘bots’ to search conversations which have your keywords in them. These messages containing your keywords can be sent directly to your phone and then your conversation begins. IMPORTANT POINTER: Be sure to adjust your text messaging package to insure your keyword alerts do not exceed your current text messaging package.

I can’t wait till May.

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Websites can be brochures. A place to find information, an impression of `competence’ and professionalism, a way of checking a business out before contacting them.

But now everyone has a website. And a professional look tells you next to nothing about what the quality of the service is like. Even client testimonials are no longer enough to inspire total confidence thanks to the cynicism of the increasingly experienced web user.

In An introduction to user journeys by Jason Hobbs the writer tells us that: “Designing a website’s structure around customer needs creates trust—trust in the web as a valuable space to interact with a brand, product, or service. Such a website provides your customers with a valuable first point of contact.”

Yep, we know that. But what is it that a modern effective website really needs to do, if it wants to turn those browsers into paying clients?

The article goes onto talk about “Primary needs and need states” – which means?

“Answering customer needs is the end point of our journeys through the structure and the starting point of our thinking about the journey itself.

Successful commercial websites satisfy both business and customer needs. Each journey a user takes through a site should fulfil a need. If, at the end of a journey, you have a business need and a customer need sitting back to back, then the site endeavour will succeed.”

Fine words, but how do I apply this to my own website? How do I make coming to CertainShops a `journey’ for the visitor?

“Sit down and brainstorm content and functionality that will most effectively answer the customer’s needs. This can be anything from wizards to checklists, games, forums, or peer reviews.

In the case of a redesign, you want to assess how well the current content and functionality is answering and addressing the primary needs and need states.

Clients will usually have some existing content that can be evaluated on the grounds of relevance to and impact on the customer needs. Try to get your hands on an existing site map or draw one up by hand, and group that content under the various customer needs you have identified. The gaps will become clear. You can also rate the content in terms of how well it has been executed.

This exercise will reveal all the classic examples of brochure-ware present on the site and information that is actually superfluous to the customer. This can help in culling content.

With powerful and relevant content in place, you have the foundation to build effective journeys for your customers.”

So it’s getting your friends and colleagues together, plenty of paper and pens and blue tack, and physically creating a map of the journey of different types of customer, role playing their needs (hell, why not dress up and really go for it?) and understanding the different stages of their journey.

When walking in the mountains, sometimes you need to take a rest and look around, get your bearings, feel confident about where you are heading for. The journey through a website should be no different.

Currently, I feel that CertainShops has a great destination, but needs to make the journey towards those quality assured professionals more clearly defined for a wider range of visitors.

So if anyone looks through my windows over the next few weeks, they may see a group of people overdosing on caffeine, surrounded by large sheets of paper, and clad in an odd selection of clothes from my kids dressing up box. What they are unlikely to guess, is that we are creating a map, a journey where:

“People can drop into the online experience at any point and find answers and solutions to their needs. They may enter or exit this experience whenever it suits them and, at any point, this space, this website, is a reliable point of contact. This is the promise of user journeys: creating trust that allows this medium to take its place as a valuable channel for customers to experience a product, service, and brand.”

For the full article see: An introduction to user journeys by Jason Hobbs

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A brand is not a logo, or even a slick byline, but how you want your clients to feel about your business. With that in mind, I took the big step of getting together some bright and energetic people – some clients, some colleagues, all trusted and highly respected – to help me re-assess the brand of CertainShops – professionals online, “The certain way of doing business”.

There was food and plenty of coffee and sugar available throughout the afternoon, and some fun workshop activities – creating a mood board for example. This is basically cutting out images from magazines (the kind of advertising images that your clients will be responding to when they read those magazines) and using them to build the `personality’ of your brand. Not just what kind of people will want to use your product or service – but images that reflect the ethos and vision of your business, your own personal ethos and vision, most likely. You really have to stand in the shoes of the clients who will respond to the emotional selling points of your brand.

One surprising exercise was three groups of two people, each launching the same product – an orange! Three different interpretations for the same product, three different emotional selling points to customers. What that showed me was that the key to branding a product is not just about what it provides, but what your own emotional connection is with that product. For example, if sustainability and green issues matter to you, then the orange becomes a 100% recyclable drinks container that won’t spill in your pocket.

So if the key to branding your product is what you feel about it, then you have to explore that first before you can find ways of communicating that to others. I am enthusiastic about my business, I LOVE my business, but that enthusiasm and the reasons behind were not being strongly enough expressed via the website. CertainShops, like most businesses, needs the trust of it’s customers. People trust people who are authentic and genuine about the service they provide.

A branding workshop is a great process to go through and I recommend it. But to really get value from it, you need to get together a trusted team of bright minds to help you. It is a collaborative event, and hopefully, they will also go away with some knew ideas of how to apply the same processes to their own businesses.

I wonder if it would have worked as well if we were doing the process remotely, online? Maybe in Second Life?

Special thanks to the stars of the show: Nik Butler (@Loudmouthman), Andy White, Andy Downing, Alan Williamson, Scott Collier and Paul David (Brand Adventure). Extra thanks to Scott for providing the photographic images for the day, and of the day.

Click here to see slide show of a branding session workshop with captions….

Click here to see the photo-only animoto musical version……

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Last week, a friend told me she and her partner were splitting up and they were going to tell the two children that evening. She told me this through the window of my car as I was dropping my kids off at school. On the way home I popped into the local organic bakery. No hot cross buns ready that morning. They were a bit behind. Someone had broken in the night before and stolen the petty cash.

I live in a community. A village. A place where sad and bad things happen but people can share the news face to face. People talk about communities ‘breaking down’ and often site family break ups and robberies as part of that process. But I think that these are events that happen everywhere, and when they do, it is being part of a community that makes those that suffer feel supported and listened to.

Online social networking cannot mimic that face to face contact. Yet the the relative anonimity of places like Twitter can allow that same kind of sharing. Not just what someone ate for breakfast, but what they are feeling at that time. And with those tweets showing up on Facebook, Facebook friends browsing through can catch a glimpse of others’ lives and feel connected.

There is a bypass threatening to carve up our village. With that would come larger stores, perhaps the death of the small local shops, and something precious will be lost. Will online communities soon be the only ones left where people can share the pain and pleasures of their real lives?

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Clever things to do if you are putting on an event. I attended the birthday party of an event company in London the other week which had some fab ways of making their guests relax and interact with one another.

After rushing over there on a Thursday evening, to be offered a free acupuncture massage was just heaven. Not wanting to miss out on anything, I then plonked my self down for a manicure as well and got chatting with a very attractive women who looked like a model, but who in fact works with the Secretary of State.

Eating delicious canapes (Red Snapper Events are renowned for the yummyness of their food) we relaxed and discussed the possibilities of Boris running London, and all the stiffness of `meeting a new person’ evaporated, making this a great way to enjoy a corporate event.

But best of all – was the photo booth. Taking us all back to our teenage years, as we queued to squeeze in with friends and have some fun memorable pics of the evening. What was so clever though, was that the photos were in black and white, so we all looked ok (!), and they had the event company branding on the top and bottom of the photo set of four prints.

A neat way to remember the evening by, and a good association to have with the company that put on the event.

What other cool event ideas have you encountered?

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I enjoyed the ‘Striding Out – Ethical marketing and branding event’ held in Brighton this week, apart from the gale blowing down the back of my neck that came in off the sea at the end of Brighton Pier and blasted its way through the air condition system of the Horatio bar.

Wrapped in my coat as if about to leave, I listened with great interest to the ‘ethical’ businesses who bravely gave their websites up for scrutiny. As I have recently discovered with my own site, the passion and integrity of the business owners was not coming across via their websites as clearly as it did when they spoke in person. This is not the first of these kind of events I have been to, and great as this one was, I do have a general gripe about these kind of sessions.

As an entrepreneur, I am frustrated by the lack of goody bags at these kind of events. Yes, we get the information and inspiration, but what exactly am I supposed to DO now? What can I take away that allows me to put this newfound knowledge straight into action?

I believe one thing is to create an ethical sustainability policy for my business, but what I really want is to walk away from these kind of events with a template for creating my own, with links to appropriate help if I need it (even if that means paying for that help).

I was inspired by Sam Wilson of EcoEvents who has done so much homework in creating ways for events to be more ethically run, but also (and just as importantly) defined systems and mechanisms for measuring the successes and failures, and making the organisers of the events accountable.

And if businesses want to not just be part of the `Green Wash’, they should be accountable, at least to themselves.

What is the point of me creating a sustainability policy if my vision is not balanced by my commitment to achieving deadlines? And buffeted by the realities of every day life, will I not need to make constant revisions for my ethical goals to still be attainable?

I spoke today with Vania Phitidis, an elected member of the Green Party, who is working with Wealden District Council on awards for `green’ businesses. Vania is keen to give advice and encouragement. Businesses should not be shy to make use of their local green MPs to get feedback and advice.

I shall be asking for plenty of help to not only get my first ethical sustainability policy for my business into good shape, but I then want to encourage other businesses to do the same, hopefully providing a basic `template’ that they can use as a starting point. Maybe I need to begin a section on the blog part of the site called “Starter Packs” – self help guides for SMEs who want to make the first steps themselves into creating ethical policies for their businesses. Perhaps even have a ‘an ethical PR starter pack’ – or ‘Create your own branding workshop’ (which would incorporate your ethical values into how you present your business).

Getting expert guidance would be even better, but that costs money, and sometimes I think it is good to make the first steps on your own, since it is your own passion and comitment that will lie at the heart of any ‘policy’, and that may need some uninhibited development first.

If anyone wants help with ethical PR, then the people to talk to are Green Rocket (who also trade as Blue Rocket, but their principles don’t change with the colour).

They were also at the talk last night, and their genuine ethical agenda is refreshing to see in the marketing industry. They have kindly allowed me to reprint some of their articles on how to be an ethical business at: Ethical Business – what can you do?

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