Before I start out with this deeply flawed post, I should say that I am deeply unqualified to be writing about Mothers Day as I have never been one, although I have had one (well, two but that is another story).

Mothers Day and Fathers Day are cons. That shouldn’t be a surprise for any educated, sceptical individuals but based on the length of the queues to purchase Cyclamens there are a good many people who should know better buying in to the whole horrible show. They should know better.

On each of their respective days, Mothers are nurtured and Fathers are applauded and sometimes allowed to get drunk. The same tired old narrative tropes about the modern nuclear family are reinforced: women give and require love and men love hard work and fun.

Apart from keeping the florists in business, the sole purpose of Mothers Day is to reinforce Women’s status as vulnerable care givers and nurturers, not powerful, respected, and equal members of our community. The media is full of stories abut how Mum needs a rest, how motherhood is hard, about how Mum needs nurturing, about how Mum needs new undies, to watch out for breast cancer, and as the evening news pointed out will need to cook dinner after her big day.

Surely we’ve moved past this anachronistic view of Mummy, Daddy, and the kids where Mummy stays at home and keeps house and Daddy brings home the bacon. To believe in this anachronistic “holiday” is to look longingly back to a past where no may have been yes, where women accepted that someone else was in charge, and where Daddy was right. Is that the right sort of message for our sons and daughters?

In addition to being an archaic historical gesture, Mothers Day is a painful reminder for Mothers that they may not be good enough, that they may not deserve the adulation, love, and praise because they have a careers, because they don’t have a career, or because they just think about these things more than men do.

This is not a call to disrespect Mothers or treat them badly. It is a call to celebrate our Mothers, and the Mothers of our children by treating them as equals, not precious and delicate objects. Traditional gender roles do women and men demean us all and put as at the mercy of the advertisers, the media, and the snake oil salespeople trying to sell us more fucking Cyclamens and Chrysanthemums.

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The first web page I ever created was pretty average. It featured an animated dancing policeman centered in the page with a delightful line about how I always wanted to be a policeman or some such nonsense. I may have also linked my name to mailto: jonstribling@cool.com which was my email address at the time. I thought I was too cool for hotmail so of course I had to use cool.com. Sadly cool.com is now a generic web design business.

I still remember the magic of seeing the page I had creatgd clumsily in vim load in a browser which I guess was Mozilla or Netscape. There was an abstract beauty of typing some what seemed to be random words enclosed in less-than and greater-than symbols, of typing a new language and seeing it transformed into a visual language all boxes and pictures and reflex-blue links.

Once I learnt some HTML and then CSS, and then JavaScript,  PHP, C, SQL, and some Perl for some unknown reason, the world was constructed differently to me. Anything seemed possible with this new grammar. The magic of television was mundane compared with the interactivity offered by the web. (I also tried some Shockwave but it seemed artificial, too click/drag/drop and I feel a childish glee that Flash is no longer the lingua franca of the interactive world and has been replaced with a scripting that can create stuff like chrome.angrybirds.com.  Now that is freakin impressive.)

Coding allowed me to build a career in the web and also build some fun things. It is far and away the most imortant skill I have learnt including how to read Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari. Hard to believe I know, but coding offered me a window to genuine creativity whereas the French post-structuralists confused me and turned me to mind-altering drugs and delusions of grandeur.

Apart from learning to feed yourself, learning to code is the most useful skill anyone between the age of 6 and 86 can learn to improve their lives, erradicate fear of technical stuff, stop web-hipsters patronisng you, and impress members of the opposite sex. The future in commerce, entertainment, and education is technical, is based around a new language which isn’t a romance language but has within a simple command the potential to create a romance of limitless potentiality. If the big questions in customer experience, marketing, political control and freedom, policy development, and creativity are located in masisve data sets, in big data then the answers can be unlocked by coding nous not opening a book or asking the intern.

Learning Ruby is more important than Russian, speaking JavaScript is more useful than Mandarin, and the best thing is you’re never too old to learn. With awesome tools out there like codeyear.com which help develop hacking skills totally for free there is no excuse for liberating yourself from being a luddite and learning to create magic.

So if you don’t know how to code, when are you going to start?

In a transformational enterprise sense, social business is a powerful concept which promises to enable profit growth by enabling enterprises to get more stuff right than wrong and grow profits.

It is still a little too narrow for me. Consider the concept of Social Business outlined by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Prof. Muhammad Yunus. He claims the model of capitalism is broken and too focused on generating monetary profits rather than other social benefits like education, health, and longevity. This idea of the social business crosses the North South divide and is a powerful model for transforming the lives of the poorest citizens both in the north and the south. Central to this model is the idea that micro-businesses run largely by women can lift families out of poverty. If a businesses performance is measured by the impact on people and the environment the outcomes will be very different to a business which is measured by volume of profits generated.

I find this model of capitalism with a better set of KPI’s exhilarating. Harvard economist Umair Haque has written a fascinating Kindle book about this called Betterness: Economics for Humans. Like Yumus he calls for the negative focus of economics to be transformed into a positive discipline where economics measures wealth by real outcomes; environmental, health, education, and living standards.

The tech definition of social business needs to be redefined to focus less on the tools and more on outcomes. What would truly make an enterprise social? Building an organisation that has at its core an ethos of social responsibility and a drive to accelerate human potential. The tech community is perfectly placed to enable this. Consider that there are more phones connected to the Internet than computers. That is an amazing opportunity to create social tools to enable micro commerce in poorer countries, to distribute educational materials via the Internet, to create mentor programs with people in wealthier areas, to enable remote and free health checks. The opportunities are limitless and represent a better outcome from from transformative technologies than profit generation.

This Wednesday winge is a call to boycott the cooking shows, the renovating shows, and the squawking shows.

Now, I have been accused of being arrogant before. People may have even called me sanctimonious, out of touch, and hard to get to know. But on this one I am spot on: from our politics to our popular entertainment we are drowning feelpinions.

Since well before Richard Burton returned from his exotic adventures in the nineteenth century and published 43 books for an eager British public Western culture has always been obsessed with celebrity and celebrity opinions. Then, as now, a unique story sells. At some point early this century, television producers realised the chasm between content and advertisement could be dissolved by presenting real people doing amazing things using/engaging/making/creating/selling the product – being the product. Rather than make expensive TV shows to sell advertising, it is easier to make a cheaper TV show to present products that appeal to an aspirational public. Everyone wants a designer kitchen, a designer meal, a designer house, a designer lifestyle, a 6-pack, a girlfriend, a boyfriend, and the farmer wants a root. It is a perfect opportunity to sell a desiring public something nice by presenting ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

These shows have created the reality star, someone who is famous for being, well, famous. The reality star will earnestly talk about how they feel about a seemingly mundane situation, what’s going through their minds, how they may have missed something, how they are a strategic genius second only to Sun Tsu, and about how they love everyone. Well, everyone except the balding bloke with glasses. No one really gets him.

It shits me.

Now I haven’t totally forgotten about Roland Barthes and the entire post-modern nothingness where everything is relative and may or may not be, or maybe both. I know what that twentieth century bore Warhol said about fame and 15 minutes. I know I shouldn’t be enamoured of power. I know I shouldn’t be surprised, or even feel like I can have a legitimate winge about reality television. But it shits me, it really shits me. What shits me most is that the opinion maker, the thought leader, the philosopher has been democratised. Anyone can have a profound impact on the world and how people perceive themselves. All it takes is that you struggle with a complex macaroon cake recipe or try and renovate an en-suite in front of a camera. Oh, and perhaps have a cry.

Once, the opinion makers and philosophers had to have done something and been something. Now all they need is an arse-hole. There’s no room for debate, genuine conflict about ideas, or a exploration of a magical journey with no clear goal. Need to know how to date a woman, get a job, or make an impact? All you need to do is turn on the telly and find out what someone feels about it. Even our politics is based on feelpinions not thought. Tony Abbott opposes a gay marriage because it feels wrong, not because of good sense.

Sadly, social media has contributed to the great flowering of moronic stupidity. Anyone with a computer or smart phone, me included, can contributed a whole load of bullshit and feel worldly and important for a few seconds. It feels good to feel. It feels good to feel important. It feels good to feel an opinion. The redeeming feature of social media is that the stupid always get caught out saying something vile and their opinions get dumped where they belong.

Pick up a book.

The Wednesday winge is where I have an irrational and often annoying winge about whatever is on my mind at the time.

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These are some seriously impressive numbers and clearly marketers need to take notice. But before your head starts spinning about how you are going to fit yet another social network to fit into your crowded marketing plan,  I have some tips about different ways you can use Pinterest to manage your marketing other than the pretty standard infographic marketing.

Firstly, what is Pinterest?

At its core, Pinterest is simple a fancy picture bookmarking service with a beautiful website, rich tagging, sharing, and commenting. Oh, and it also has a massive audience. The picture sharing makes the service very retail friendly and the homepage is dominated by fashion and lifestyle pictures pinned by pinterest users with comments like “want”, “Awww cute”, and “I love this!”. Pinterest reminds me of a nice long lunch for ladies and the odd bloke where the conversation is free flowing and covers a whole range of issues close to the hearts of the ladies. That people pin images and not pithy 140 character aphorisms makes it a lot more emotionally engaging than Twitter or Facebook which depends a lot more on the social  connections between users.

Pin your products

For retailers, this is a really easy one. Your online store should already have attractive shots of your products which customers can view in multiple ways. Nike and Reebok have great examples of product shots done the right way, with multiple views and zooming. Adding a pin button to your product page gives customers the opportunity to bookmark the stuff that they like and share it with their network. If others in their network love it they will comment or like it and you will have created a buzz. All with one button. And the great thing is that, as customers are pinning your product images, you get to control more control over your brand message than you might with Facebook and Twitter.

I also recommend pinning your own products to create theme pages which may be accessed by an audience far larger than your website. For example you might create seasonal themes, gifts, weddings, or weird themes to have a bit of fun. Make sure that users can find the original image on your website so they can link back to your website.

Make sure your product pins lead directly to a product page so your engaged buyers can purchase.

Pin your special offers

I think this is a great way of featuring all your bargains and specials in one place. Pinterest is so effective at driving traffic that Mashable reports that a spammer is reportedly making $30k per month by pinning Amazon affiliate links. Pinterest also have been reported to modify some users links to add in their own affiliate codes so they can claim the revenue. If it works for an Pinterest and affiliate spammers, it can work for you (minus the nasty spammy stuff).  As with your products make sure that users can find the original images on your website so they can link back to your website.

Pin testimonials and case studies

What better way of telling the story about your brand than creating a pinboard of all your success stories and case studies. Pin a nice picture of your customer with your branding and you have an instant way of telling a wide audience how awesome you are. This technique can be used by any business including B2B to promote niche services and is a great way of appealing to the humanistic buyer types. Make sure your case studies and testimonials have just enough information to encourage click-throughs to your website. Some marketers recommend adding multiple images to tell a story to really engage Pinterest users.

Pin your blog posts

Pinterest’s magazine type layout lends itself very well to presenting blog posts in a way that’s easy for readers to scan. Australian news blog, crikey.com.au does this very effectively on their Pinterest board. Copyblogger, as content marketing experts have also nailed using Pinterest to promote their services. The secret to success is grouping your posts in compelling categories with catchy headlines. You should also add a pin button to all your blog posts so your readers can pin the stuff they like.

Like any marketing tool, Pinterest will be useful only if you convert the traffic to complete your conversion goal – purchase, subscribe, or submit an enquiry. Make sure you measure the impact Pinterest is having on your website performance. Take notice of how visitors behave compared with other visitors and make changes where required.

There are already a bunch of tools to help manage and report on your Pinterest marketing like Pinerly, and Pinreach.

How are you going to use Pinterest?

After the initial joy at the birth of a new project, every little project needs to put on a pair of big person pants and grow up. As in life, this isn’t always easy, and sometimes you may need to talk to the lawyers.

Take the behemoth Google as an example of the world’s most successful startup. They have a lot of lawyers and a lot of users, and there is a massive tension between the users wanting the aspirational spirit of a startup, and the hard-nosed capitalists running Google.  The unofficial Google motto, “don’t be evil”, created by Paul Buchheit in 2000 before the company floated, has become the limit against which every product release, reindex, algorithm change, and announcement is tested. The Google watchers chatter excitedly amongst themselves about how Google is now evil and bemoan that they are now a corporation motivated by providing a return to the shareholders.

It must drive Google crazy, but I guess they are being talked about.

I think Google are simply misinterpreted because the lawyers are involved. Had it been left to the engineers and designers

It was in this spirit that the terms of use of the new Google Drive product were studied, reviewed, and randomly ranted about. If you haven’t heard of it, Google Drive is a new cloud storage solution designed to compete with the magnificent DropBox and Microsoft’s Skydrive. It has deep integration into Google Docs and Google are using their technology stack to make translations and finding documents very easy.

Google’s terms identified them as the bad guy compared its DropBox’s good guy. Here are their terms compared:

Google

Some of our Services allow you to submit content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.

When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones.

DropBox

By using our Services you provide us with information, files, and folders that you submit to Dropbox (together, “your stuff”). You retain full ownership to your stuff. We don’t claim any ownership to any of it. These Terms do not grant us any rights to your stuff or intellectual property except for the limited rights that are needed to run the Services, as explained below.

We may need your permission to do things you ask us to do with your stuff, for example, hosting your files, or sharing them at your direction. This includes product features visible to you, for example, image thumbnails or document previews. It also includes design choices we make to technically administer our Services, for example, how we redundantly backup data to keep it safe. You give us the permissions we need to do those things solely to provide the Services. This permission also extends to trusted third parties we work with to provide the Services, for example Amazon, which provides our storage space (again, only to provide the Services).

On the face of it Google’s terms are scary. They to do a whole bunch of scary stuff to any content compared with DropBox’s benign hosting, sharing, and thumbnail generation. This is a misguided interpretation, both services allow full retention of intellectual copyright and make reference to some actions required to provide the service. Google do it in a specific way, DropBox are a bit more vague.

Neither service magically steals your precious quarterly revenue presentation, unfinished novel, collection of haiku poetry, or resume.

In fact Google’s terms may be a little better as they are very specific about what may be required in order to have a kick arse cloud product. DropBox’s terms are a little more magical – we do stuff you can’t see to deliver our service.

So the fuss is really over nothing. When we get sophisticated and free software like free email, free storage, games, video storage and playback we grant certain rights in return because well the software is free and we cannot use the service without granting certain rights. That’s how it works in lawyer land. Both DropBox and Google are providing similar services and requesting similar rights to deliver that service. The hoopla is a direct result of lawyers firstly defining the rights and obligations, and secondly, doing it in different ways. An engineer would make sure it was consistent and there was a standard.

The net result is that social media addicts whose minds have been dulled by an avalanche of information 24/7 don’t know how to react except by grabbing the pitchfork and having a giant whine about how Google are now really evil. Like really really evil.

Just as startups need to grow up so do users. Even free stuff costs money and it’s been the case since hotmail launched with free email. If users don’t like certain terms they should pay a premium to get the terms they do like.  The only issue with that is that I guess the lawyers are involved. Again.

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Much of the fault is former Prime Minister John Howard who saw in ANZAC day an opportunity to promote his vision for Australia; conservative, white, fond believers in Queen and country.

In 2005 he said:

Those who fought here in places like Quinn’s Post, Pope’s Hill and the Nek changed forever the way we saw our world and ourselves. They bequeathed Australia a lasting sense of national identity. They sharpened our democratic temper and our questioning eye towards authority. We used to say that the ranks of the original Anzacs were thinning with each passing year. They are all gone now. Now what swells with each Anzac season is a hunger for their stories. Now we remember them not as old soldiers but as young Australians, often from the same suburbs, streets, districts and towns that we come from. Just as many of you have come here today with your brothers and your mates, so it was 90 years ago that the young of Australia surged forward to enlist along with their brothers and their mates.

The myth of mateship and bravery in the face of stupid odds or stupidity has framed much of the debate. The myth goes that the Australian identity was forged in the harsh battlefield of war, that as the Turkish bullets rained down upon the poorly prepared Australian soldiers, the colonials stood proud and strong and brave as they died in their thousands. This is the fabled Australian spirit, that notion that we amongst all nations are determined to prove ourselves in an uncertain and frightening world a national identity. This is a ridiculous concept. In fact the ANZAC’s saw the battle for Gallipoli as unwinnable and wanted to retreat by the second day and were convinced to stay by the British generals intent on continuing a flawed strategy to secure Istanbul.

The battle of Gallipoli was a tragedy for all involved, particularly New Zealand and Turkey, who had the most deaths per capita. In this context the 8,900 Australian deaths were fairly modest given the 60,000 who died in the “Great War”. That the war shattered an entire generation of families for little gain has been erased from the official telling of ANZAC day. Compare the original intent of ANZAC to commemorate the dreadful loss of lives to John Howard’s fiery language.

“It is a story of great valour under fire, unity of purpose and a willingness to fight against the odds that has helped to define what it means to be an Australian.”

The Australian character if there is one, has been defined by our remoteness, the White Australia policy, our geography, federation, immigration in the late twentieth century, and a fear of being alone in an uncertain world. Like any nationalist celebraton, ANZAC Day is more about the ties that bind us to a xenophobic past than a gaze towards a glorious present. The day Australia should celebrate to truly commemorate looking forward to an inclusive and pluralist future is 10 August, the day the Constitution Alteration (Aboriginal People) 1967 which removed the racist provisions in th Australian constitution became law.

Or if the people really want to drape a flag around them and paradoxically raise their fists in defiance of the authorities in a national celebration then the Eureka Rebellion fought on 3 December 1854 is a perfect choice.

The announcement by David Jones yesterday that they will make a significant investment to transform themselves into a multi-channel retailer is a bold step and a clear sign that traditional Australian business has started to listen to customers. Rather than bemoaning changing consumer behaviour like Gerry Harvey, David Jones are taking action and launching what promises to be one of the most comprehensive Australian online stores.

Whilst there has been some criticism about the speed of the delivery by Smart Company, the plan appears to me to be realistic and sensible. David Jones are rebuilding their systems from the ground up. First they are launching a new POS system underpinned by IBM, then they are launching a new website with over 90,000 stock items. Their new website is a check-list of best practices for online retail offering social media integration, mobile apps, mobile web, customer reviews and ratings, and a marketing investment in search. This strategy would for any online retailer as it covers paid, earned, and owned media.

The message is pretty clear. Aussie retailers, it’s time to put up or shut up.

What makes this a true multi-channel approach is that David Jones are investing money to improve customer experience in their stores. Recognising that a bad experience devalues brand equity and is a major turn-off for customers, they are bolstering staff and incentivising them so they provide the right experience to customers. This is a mature approach and echoes the approach taken by Telstra, who as part of their new digital strategy invested in their staff to improve customer experience.

Whilst the strategy is sound,  the execution will be critical. They still have plenty of time to get it wrong. David Jones should pull out all stops to have a solution ready for the 2012 Christmas period. This would restore  investor confidence and give them an opportunity to persuade buyers that they are listening online and in store.

Image courtesy of The Age

So how could this happen? Google have been promoting Google+ heavily, they have linked it into their search pages, their lucrative ad network, and CEO Larry Page has been touting the platform in earnings calls as growing rapidly and one of the keys to Google’s future growth. He said in January:

“Building a meaningful relationship with users so that we can dramatically improve the services we offer. Understanding no people are, what they care about, and the other people that matter to them is crucial if we are to give users what they need, when they need it.”

Impressive right?

Perhaps not. The words are pretty but Google could have used a myriad of enterprise aocial tools to do the same thing. They are also yet to coherently articulate why people should use their social network over the other social networks. “Real life sharing rethought for the web” might work well in Silicon Valley but it hasn’t resonated in the suburbs. If people are already connected, there has to be a better reason than connecting with people. Hangouts are cool, but after a few, I gave up and went back to Skype. It was a little too hard. Catching up with what Snoop Dog and Brittany Spears are up to is OK I guess, but I don’t really give a shit.

Until Google can tell us why we should use their network over the others Google+ will be an afterthought for most users globally except the SEO heads, the celebrity whores, the technology addicts and the hyper connected. And that is not what Google want.

Every startup or startup wannabe has outsourced development work to India, the Philippines, or Eastern Europe. It is more than half the cost of having it done in Australia or the USA the savings mean more funds to direct to building your business. It’s easy right? Well no, outsourcing can be a world of pain if you don’t get it right. I have outsourced small development projects and here are some tips to stop it going off the rails.

1. Define your scope clearly

Make sure you define what you want very very clearly. The combination of language barriers and opportunism means that you may not get what you want and have to pay extra because the developer is pretty clear that she delivered what you asked for. Create a list of every requirement and go through it during the quoting phase to make sure it is well understood.

2. Get a written quote

When you put a job up on elance.com or freelancer.com a bunch of developers will respond with seemingly random quotes without so much as a hello, nice requirements. For some very small jobs this might be ok, but for a full build you need better attention than this. Send each developer a message to make an appointment on Skype to go through the requirements and get a detailed quote. Get references from the developer and follow them up to make sure your developers as the skills to do the work.

3. Schedule regular meetings

To make sure your project stays on track schedule a nightly 10 minute catch up with your developer to go through their progress, action points, and any outstanding tasks you may have. Your relationship with your developer is a collaborative one and needs to be nurtured. If. You ignore it and meet infrequently you will not get what you want.

4. Always pay using escrow

The escrow payment offered by elance.com is realIy great. If for some reason something goes wrong and you need a refund the escrow service allows you to file and complaint and perhaps get some of your funds back. If a developer asks you to pay them outside the standard escrow service you need to dump them fast.

The last tip is to have fun. Building a new online business is exciting and having access to highly skilled labour at the fraction of the local price is a privilege. Services like elance.com and freelance.com have also provided people in developed countries access to a global market. Man developers and designers have lifted entire communities from poverty simply by having access to skills, a computer, and the Internet.

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