Linked in | Kieran O' Callaghan

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Generating business interest with Craig Rispin 101

One of the many events i have gone along to was a mentoring event hosted by Craig Rispin, a futurologist i have been following for quite some time.

Why have i been interested in Craig Rispin you might ask? Well some time back, one of his comments was

‘In the future, everyone will be freelancing, you have to start thinking this way’

And the truth is, i have started thinking like a freelancer and all the right things are happening for me work wise especially, all i had to do was start on the IT freelancer path vision and start doing the right things for what i wanted to happen, to happen.

What are you waiting for?

Sounds simple enough? Let me explain

It is not good enough to be a plumber, carpenter or dog groomer in Sydney, Melbourne or Tokyo anymore, you need to be the best and if your not the best, appear to be the best and how do you do this?

One of the avenues you can use is social media for example Linked-in, Facebook ect, there will be other mediums in the future, maybe a few crystal balls too?

Medium of the future?

When someone searches for a service online, and you provide that service, it is good for your business if you are the top of that search list, its called Search engine optimization, sounds simple enough?

As Craig sai…

‘You don’t need a PHD when you have 4000 people following you on Linked-in’

Which is food for thought.

It has long been known that we pretty much make up our minds about someone within seconds, its a gut instinct, we might not be aware of this, but this is what social science indicates.

I have noticed, that rather than reading someone’s CV, you can tell all you need to know by viewing their website, people following them for example, if they publish content, you might see that ‘Barrack Obama’ is a fan and some people think he’s a smart guy?

Do you have any fans?

People judge you by your friends, not that they might be aware of it, but we get impressions and hints in slight ways
Some of the little hints i received were:
To get a first appointment, give people something for free that has nothing to do with what you are selling, it could be an invitation to an event, report, video ect.
When people you don’t know request to add you in Linked-in, request to have coffee first to see how you can both might benefit each other

Feture + Benefit

When stating a feature, have a bridge to the benifit of that feature

Feature (export your contacts from Linked-in to Mail chimp)
Bridge (Which is super for you or, Which is great for you)
Benefit (You can target people with specific promotion material with is specific to thieir industry and relevant to their life)

Always have something to invite people to, but only invite quality people to
Wednesday is the number 1 day people check their emails, so Wednesday is a good day to do your email targeting
Monday is the day people most follow the stock markets and business news
The marketing world is moving to permission based marketing system

Do you need a marketing campaign?

With freelancing and promoting your business, you could create a campaign for free like this

Campaign example:

Create an Event on Eventbrite for a promotion
You can export your Linked in contacts and import them to a site called ‘Mail chimp‘
You can target people directly VIA email with mail chimp/Eventbrite feature
You can target Linked-in interest groups
You can target customers with Linked-in ‘Status updates’

Craig said, the pro bono work he has done for charity’s has given him exposure to organizations and people ordinarily he would not have had the opportunity to meet and he has received a substantial growth in business, all from volunteering, there’s no excuse not to volunteer.

One of the words i learnt that morning was ‘Bespoke’, which of course means

Derived from the verb to bespeak, to “speak for something”, in the specialised meaning “to give order for it to be made”

Tags: Bespoke, campaign, Craig Rispn, future trends, Linked in, Trends

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Problem, defination, innovation and… an App solution?

28 Nov

So, i have been meeting entrepreneurs and people involved in start up companies in Sydney and a world of possibilities have appeared for me

A major trend that has not run it’s full course is in developing apps, everybody has them on their iPhone, it seems clear if you can develop an app that somehow ties in with one of the seven deadly sins, you could be on to a winner.

Where is the opportiunity?

In the example of Reid Hoffman, founder of Linkedin says:

Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins. Facebook is ego. Zynga is sloth. LinkedIn is greed.

But another train of thought for developing that doesn’t sound nasty that i quite like is

Just live your life until you come up against a problem that you can solve and helps others, then develop a business model around the solution.

So, i have ideas, but how do i translate these ideas into a form that can be presented, developed and released?

Why of course, you would define a business model, business plan, develop requirements and so on and so forth for these ideas.

An idea…

So while swimming, i was thinking of this and i remembered a friend of mine that told me of her aspirations many years ago of becoming a Business Analyst in a company we both worked for.

I remember telling her to look at one of the completed projects in the network drive and :

Look at the finished product/project release
Trace the work by the Business Analyst, their names would be on any/all documents they participated on, you could do a simple ‘find’ by name search to retrieve all documents
Look at how the business need was translated into a requirement that was developed/tested and released
By identifying what the Business Analyst did, that’s what you have to do too, you just work backwards from the solution

And this got me thinking of our daily lives, just about everything we see or touch in a city was a problem in

Design
Production
Transportation
Usability
Safety

We’re all coming to recognize design is everywhere—everything we touch has been designed, and every economy is at least partly design-driven and becoming even more so. “A new value is being placed on design as essential to innovation,” says Carol Coletta, director of ArtPlace, “and on the connection between innovation, jobs, and economic growth.” This growing awareness is especially concentrated in cities, where design is being heralded not only as a savior of the economy but as the solution to a multitude of social challenges.Read more: http://www.dwell.com/articles/The-Design-Week-Movement.html#ixzz2DTxQxhi8

And the list goes on, the point is that a solution was found, the endless meetings and sleepless nights resulted in you sitting in the chair you sit in, but what were the requirements for the chair?

Well, your sitting in the chair, so the project must of been a success, it met the requirements, maybe it was innovative too?

Introducing Richard Feynman, a class act

I remember reading when Richard Feynman was trying to figure out an equation, that could not be calculated before the times of computers as we know them, he would start off by guessing the answers and then he would work backwards, he often solved problems this way, he didn’t think he was anything special, he had a different way of thinking, a different approach, and that was the difference and quite often it made all the difference.

A brave new world of apps

So it seems clear, if you want to understand how an app came to be, pick a good one (that helps people solve a problem) and work back towards the time someone had a problem, which became the idea, like for example ‘Drop box’, you can listen to the story through the ‘Stanford university entrepreneur pod cast’ through the ‘Podcast’ app (a fantastic learning app)

In case you don’t know the story of Drop box, the founder had an important presentation, he drove a few hours to this important meeting and he forgot the hard drive that he wanted to present.

This mishap was a personal disaster, the biggest of his life, at the time and he thought, ‘There must be a better way?’, step one in innovation, a question Steve Jobs would spend his Fridays with Craig Rispin asking this question

(Download Craigs ‘How to think like Futurist’ here)

Is there a better way?

And there was a better way to access you files and share your files, and that’s how you have Drop box folks, it’s inspiring that someones personal disaster was converted into a triump that the world could benifit from.

Time to get to work….