January’s Facebook Experiment

As many of you will know, I’m a big twitter fan both from a personal and business point of view and although my company has had a Facebook page since startup (we are DoDigitalUK).

I usually use twitter as a means of communicating with most of my social network. However, having recently worked with some local businesses on their Facebook pages, I have made it my January mission to engage more actively with Facebook and, perhaps, become as much of a Facebook fan as I am a Twitter follower.

In order to make it a bit more fun and hopefully useful to others, I’m going to work through a number of different ideas and blog about the process. Firstly, I need to do a bit of preparation to get my fan page looking more professional.

Step 1: Fan Page Logo Redesign

The first step was to redesign the fan page logo to make it more relevant and informative.

This was a very simple process that involved firstly researching some Facebook fan pages for ideas.

I then found this great post which gives details of the design process, including useful information on how to work out how your logo will be resized as a thumbnail which can drive you crazy!

Step 2: Creating a Custom Welcome Tab

Next up was creating a simple custom landing page to encourage people to like the page.

I created a simple design in Photoshop, again having conducted some research and using this great Smashing Magazine article , uploaded it to my bluehost server & created an app with facebook developer.

I could have done this with a ready-made app, but wanted to get my head round facebook.com/developer.

This has been a rather steep but quite fun learning curve and is a fairly convoluted process. I’ll put it into a separate blog post / “how to” video (and post on Facebook of course!).

In the future I would like this to be an interactive landing page with clickable links, but this will do for now!

So far, so relatively straightforward and actually quite enjoyable.

Next Steps:
Now for getting on with the more important aspects of sharing interesting content and working harder to engage with people in the same way that I like to do on Twitter.

I’ll keep you up to date with how I get on, although of course, you could become a DoDigital fan on facebook , see for yourself and let me know what you think

Birthday Gifts!

It’s our birthday! To celebrate, we bought ourselves one of these fab ‘Love for Games’ posters by Axel Pfaender. We liked it so much we bought 3 more to give away!

So if you have a corner, corridor or classroom that you would like to cheer up with this colourful, fun poster, all you have to is make sure you are following us on Twitter, and RT one of our competition tweets with the hashtag #bdayposter. You can also enter by liking us on Facebook. You’d better be quick though as entries close at 5pm on Monday 19th September!

Happy Birthday!

T&C
On Monday 19th September the names of all those people who have followed us and re-tweeted one of our competition tweets with the hashtag #bdayposter on Twitter and those who have liked us on Facebook will be entered into a random name generator and 3 names will be chosen.
We will send you the poster in a poster tube to your school address (you need to supply the blue tack / pins to pin it up).

A Year in the life of DoDigital: Infographics

It’s coming up to the end of our first year of trading and so lots of talking, thinking and analysing of data has been going on (together with much tea drinking/cake eating).

Figures are all well and good, however I’ve found it much easier to use some very simple infographics to make some of the data easier to understand. The infographic below, for example, shows what projects we’ve worked on in our first year. You can see instantly that workshops have been our main focus, however there’s been lots of other work going on too! The infographics I’ve created have genuinely helped me with this important review and strategic planning process.

If you’re interested in finding out more about infographics, and maybe creating your own, I’d recommend you head over to the wonderful ‘Information is Beautiful‘ website for starters and/or buy the gorgeous book. If you’d like to get a bit more technical, A Practical Guide to Designing with Data has some great ideas along with mathematical explanations (thanks to Dan Humpherson for the recommendation).

This recent blog post is also a useful starting point, as is the great blog post series of Data Reveals Stories from Ewan McIntosh (thanks to Oliver Quinlan for the recommendation). This Smashing magazine post gives a range of infographic resources.

Infographics can be as simple or as complicated as you wish, from a simple word cloud, to a complex graphic. I ended up creating mine using simple drawing software, however IBM’s free set of data visualisation tools, Many Eyes, is a great place to start creating your own!

Classroom to Boardroom: Lessons So Far

It’s been over one full ‘term’ since I have been working for myself, both as a freelance trainer, and primarily on on my social enterprise project DoDigital, which aims to promote creative use of technology in education, and to a lesser extent, business.

It’s been a rollercoaster of a few months and a few people have asked me for advice if they were to do something similar, so I thought I would share some of what I have learnt so far!

Freedom is a wonderful thing…once you get used to it!

At first rather predictably perhaps although I loved not having my time ruled by bells and relentless structure, I found the ‘do what-ever you want, whenever you want to’ structure I had a little overwhelming. As usual, a step-by-step approach helped, as did the advice in Peter Jones’ book about writing a 100 day action plan – it’s easy to do once you get going!

The real deal is very different from the theory!

I taught Business Studies for over 4 years; however, actually running a business is very, very different! I may have known business theories inside out, but I found that once I had actually become one of those entrepreneurs that I used to talk about in classrooms, much of the theory was almost irrelevant.

That’s why I found this article by Richard Branson so interesting and hope that he will have some influence over government educational policy! Indeed, the government has announced today that it will be re-introducing the ‘enterprise allowance’ grant to encourage people to start small businesses. Too late for me, but great for those who want to start a business as it will provide some income in those months before the business takes off (that kept me awake !).

Meetings can waste your very valuable time!

We all know this, but in my new role I initially thought I needed lots of help and guidance (I did need quite a bit!). Subsequently, I filled my first month or so with a lot of meetings with business advisors who were sometimes helpful, often not, speaking to lots of people about my business plan and reading lots (although I had spent virtually the previous 8 months reading about starting up a business). I found some advice inaccurate and conflicting, particularly around setting up a social enterprise – this is a real shame, as it’s quite straight-forward really!

Find great resources & stick with them!

Business Link will put you in touch with a local provider of business support (it took me a couple of follow-up calls to get one). Their website and helpline can help with answering the masses of little questions that come up when trying to set up a company, although I did find the masses of information on the website a little over-whelming at times! The government are making changes to Business Link, but they have promised to keep the free advice provision and update the website.

HMRC courses are also excellent, and provide free, highly useful and accurate information about the financial aspects of starting a business (a top tip from Duncan Bannatyne’s book!) and The British Library is a fabulous source of support for Entrepreneurs. Having read masses of books / blogs on the subject, there is a list of those I found most useful at the end of this post.

I was also very fortunate to receive great advice and support from some very kind people; Andrea Carr of Rising Stars, Juliet Robertson of CreativeSTAR, Debbie Inglis of Square2 and John Howarth of New Liberty, all of whom have their own businesses in the educator sector and understood where I was coming from!

So, if you do want to set up your company, do take up some of the free advice you’re offered, however, ask people who have recently, been through the process and can relate to your idea (I’m happy to help if I can!).

So many twitter folks have been a great source of support and encouragement, particularly @nellmog (graphic design superstar), @Janwebb21, @infernaldepart @mwclarkson @largerama @dajbelshaw @drdennis @tombarrett @kvnmcl @Ideas_Factory @icttoolbox @yorkie71 and all the other tweeps who have wished me well along the way!

Just Do It!

The final, and most important thing I have learnt is, rather obviously, that you really have to just get on with it! As Alan Sugar discusses in this post, it’s all down to you! Here are some quotes which epitomise the first few months in business for me (all courtesy of @greatestquotes).

“Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.” – Vincent Van Gogh

“Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necessary to a worthwhile achievement.” – Henry Ford

“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” – Walt Disney

“Take a deep breath, count to ten, and tackle each task one step at a time.” – Linda Shalaway

Resources:

Steve Parks: Start Your Business Week by Week – great, practical guide, written in an engaging way.

Dragons’ Den: Start Your Own Business – easy to digest and some great advice, providing the ‘brand’ doesn’t annoy you.

Duncan Bannytyne: Wake up and Change your life – very practical and easy to read / use

Peter Jones: Tycoon – some useful advice together with some superfluous waffle IMO

UK Business Forums – a wealth of information and advice ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’

Freelance Advisor – lots of great information about ‘going freelance’

Enterprise Nation – great small business support website