I had the great privilege of test driving a Tesla Roadster today with the help of Gian. Of course it does 60 mph in 3.7 seconds – check out the full official Tesla Roadster spec here. We chatted through some of the benefits, and afterwards I made a quick note of the top ten benefits from the test drive in typical ‘user-generated content’ fashion.

My quick and dirty top ten

1. The car is 88% efficient compared to 16% for a conventional petrol driven car. It charges itself as it drives when you take your foot off the accelerator.
2. The cell structured battery means you never have probs with recharging reducing the life of the battery.
3. You don’t have the problem with a conventional sports car of having to change gears to find the power torque – its a smooth flow of power to the driver.
4. There is no exhaust pipe to catch on speed bumps.
5. It’s made of highly resilient carbon fibre so it doesn’t dent or rust in the way a conventional car shell does.
6. The drive transmission, exhaust, etc does wear out like a conventional petrol engine motor can do.

7. It is expected that as the Tesla battery design is further improved, you will have the choice of 40% more power, or more boot space…
8. You can use the car for business. For promotion. For demonstrating corporate responsibility. For keeping a more charming profile on the street! And that means it’s tax deductible.
9. The success of Tesla is helping bring electric powered transport to the mass market by demonstrating its power and practicality. Electric motor powered fire engines came to mind for some strange reason?
10. It would take a heck of a long time (9 months) to run down the battery with no charge;-)

Cost/Benefits

So while a Roadster cost a little over £87K it’s good vfm when you calculate i all its benefits vs a conventional car’s. What’s more there is a corporate leasing option too – while Tesla don’t advertise this as available for the UK as yet I’m sure that’s worth discussing with Gian.

Bond, James Bond

While I am not a motor journalist (though there is a pic of me driving an ex-Russian tank from my pre-internet days as a newspaper reporter) I have written professional product reviews for eBay’s Shopping.com as their UK head of community; but this has got to be the product that tops them all. I hope the makers of the 23rd 007 movie ‘Skyfall’ agree, and seriously consider using the car in the next 007 film.

PS: I see my most famous college alumni Sam Mendes is directing, which is super neat. Maybe he would enjoy test driving a Tesla too?

STUART G. HALL @stuartgh

m: +44(0)7881 400679 e: stuarth@stuart-hall.com blog: www.stuart-hall.com

An award-winning social media professional, with cross-sector expertise spanning global e-commerce and consultancy roles, with a passion for collaboration and innovation.

SKILLS

• Social media and community management strategy and practice, user-generated content, and community manager mentoring.
• Metrics creation and reporting skills using both in-house and Google Analytics to demonstrate progress on community-specific and global e-commerce KPIs.
• Extensive social marketing skills; integrating online campaigns with offline events.
• Customer relationship and engagement management (social CRM).
• Expertise in managing social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Flickr, YouTube, and WordPress.
• Social media creation including blogging and videos; blogger management skills.
• Social media monitoring skills, using both quantitative and qualitative methods.
• SEO skills in creating and reporting on organic and paid-for strategies, including page tag optimisation and SEO-friendly content creation.
• Web content management skills including content strategy and implementation.
• End-to-end contract, supplier and stakeholder management skills.
• Proven team in-house/remote creative and technical staff management skills.
• Project and product management skills, including using issue tracking and collaborative software tools.
• Editorial skills, including interviewing, fact checking, copy writing, and production editing.

CAREER

Social Media Consultant – Plectic Ltd (2011 – date)
Developing a mobile social gaming product Name That Place, with partner discussions ranging from Tesco to Burberry.

Head of Marketing, Community & SEO – Shopping.com UK/eBay Inc. (June 2010 – Sept 2011)

Responsibilities:

• To develop, lead and execute the social shopping/online community strategy to drive traffic and engagement with both the portal and Facebook community.
• Establishing metrics and targets for social media & community, demonstrating local progress on global user generated content targets.
• Developing and executing social media messaging for social media platforms; organising marketing events for the UK market with leading tech PR agency BallouPR.
• Creating and implementing a SEO plan for the UK in line with organic traffic revenue targets.
• Local implementation of the global social CRM content & community marketing strategy.
• Inputting into the planning, budgeting, legal, and reporting processes in line with eBay UK policy and practice.

Results & Achievements:

• Successfully met the user generated and professional content creation targets for reviews and guides using paid for promotions from Q3 2010 onwards, to time and within budget.
• Increased the size of the opt-in email membership of Shopping.com UK by over 250%.
• Developed the brand’s UK Facebook Page, growing the level of engagement and number of followers from 1K to 6.9K with a low-cost promotion; it also drove over 1.3K responses to a social shopping survey gaining both offline and online media coverage. (See Slideshare of campaign)
• Leading the weekly global community manager ‘roundtable’ to help drive company-wide innovation and share good practice.
• Took on the running of the company’s global customer engagement programme to help the business learn directly from its customers.
• Led the UK response to Google Panda SEO changes, implementing an innovative ‘social SEO’ strategy to ameliorate the impact on SEO revenue. (Blog piece on my social SEO strategy)
• Organised a successful ‘influencer’ blogger event with BallouPR to promote the brand.

LinkedIn recommendations for my work at Shopping.com.

Social Media Consultant – Plectic Ltd (Jan – June 2010)

Responsibilities:

• Blogging on driving revenue through innovative community management strategies.
• Produced five year social media strategy for international development charity Bond.
• Marketing consultancy for document management start-up Docutiva.com.
• Business development consultancy with innovative patient appointment reminder software BAM.
• Business plan development and venture capital discovery with China-based surgical planning start-up Surgi-plan Medinfo Technologies – a web-based portal dedicated for the surgical planning sector to offer pre-operative planning software solutions.

Results & Achievements:

• Shaping the current debate on community revenue generation, generating comments from leading practitioners in the US and UK.
• Providing development charity Bond with its first ever comprehensive social media and community strategy.
• Introduced BAM to a leading healthcare device provider Ultrasis.

Community Management Consultant – SiftGroups (Jan 2009 – Jan 2010)

Responsibilities:

• Working with B2B clients to launch new online communities, including mentoring community managers on a weekly basis before and after launch.
• Advising clients on how to implement a successful growth strategy, including running KPI workshops to integrate organisational and community metrics.
• Developing and delivering standalone products to clients, including review and recommendations of existing social media offerings, quarterly health checks, and online training for social media and community managers.
• Managing the work of junior community managers and co-ordinating internal developer work for client communities.

Results & Achievements:

• Mentored the community managers of CIMA, NCVO and CMI, resulting successful community launches with CIMA achieving 12k members by the end of 2009.
• Delivered social strategy and workshops for key B2B clients including the IET, OUP (in partnership with Socialtext) and the Law Society. Plus the FCO’s Chevening, and health charities including TalkTalk-sponsored Treehouse and the National Autistic Society.
• Co-winner of the ‘Sift Innovation of the Year Award’ for co-creating a Drupal-based online community metric package, drawing on client input from NCVO.

Online Communities Manager – Institute of Chartered Accountants (Dec 2007 – Dec 2008)

Responsibilities:

• Launching the community site IT Counts, including configuring the design and login to meet the needs of the business in partnership with Microsoft UK, co-creating the initial marketing & engagement proposition.
• Engaging and generate interaction in the all the online communities; moderating and updating content, communicating with users, gathering feedback and input from community on site functionality and passing on to relevant business owners.
• Working with ICAEW website editors to cross-promote the online communities throughout the organisation’s online presence.
• Managing a team of professional bloggers to seed content and to sustain engagement through expert-led discussions.

Results & Achievements:

• Achieved the target launch membership of 3k within half the time set for the IT Counts community, in collaboration with Microsoft UK.
• Launched an additional series of niche communities, achieving a combined 27k membership by 2009.
• Won the ‘Best New Web 2.0 Initiative’ for IT Counts in an industry-wide award, in partnership with WordFrame.

Global Site Manager – MedicExchange Plc. (Sept 2006 ­– Dec 2007)

Responsibilities:

• Responsible for global site management, specifically the clinical content and site layout, in line with business strategy.
• Analysing market feedback and develop a B2B mall strategy for each clinical community.
• Implementing online & offline marketing initiatives, from launching the site after beta testing, producing e-mail bulletins to targeted professional audiences, to driving organic and paid-for SEO campaigns.
• As a member of the business development team, it was my duty to share in the wider management of the commercial activities.

Results & Achievements:

• Launched an innovative pay-per-click global e-commerce portal.
• Successfully launched MedicExchange ar RSNA 2006, the largest medical event of its kind in the US.
• Achieved a market value of $15m by 2007 by successfully building the brand through integrated online and offline marketing, including optimizing (including US real time feed and China content restirction issues) the use of expert content from Reuters Health to build credibility among professionals. (See AMEX: MGT)
• Personally secured key partner BioMed Central to provide free high quality scientific content, thanks to their innovative use of open access publishing.
• Led an online campaign to reverse an EU directive which threatened the use of MRI.

Freelance Projects (July 2006 – Sept 2006)

• In partnership with the Works Software Ltd submitted a proposal for an innovative web 2.0 style shift handover software product originally developed by BP,
  Honeywell Control and the University of Cambridge, to the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement. Download the scorecard appraisal as a PDF (92kb). Despite the quality of the product the overall score for the submission (69.54%) was insufficent to take it to the next stage of development.

Social Media Consultant (Apr 2005 – June 2006)

• Advised social media consultancy Headshift Ltd (now part of the US-based Dachis Group) on key health clients including the World Health Organisation and the NHS Connecting for Health, and blogged on UK health policy.
• Usability and project management on a new website for the General Medical Council.

National Advisor – National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Sept 2000 – Apr 2005)

Responsibilities:

• Creating, developing and managing content for the national programme’s high profile web presence.
• Copyediting and proofread all web content, including managing freelancers, including writers, designers, and content supply from external organisations.
• Tracking and report on all site metrics, implementing new marketing strategies.
• Researching and creating database products to track and report data on the effectiveness of the national programme.
• Contract tendering & implementation of content, database and re-design services for the series of five websites.
• Lead responsibility for managing and recruiting team staff.
• Training the national programme staff to use all new developments and online applications.

Results & Achievements:

• Successfully integrated a series websites as part of a NHS corporate merger in 2005.
• Won an IVCA accessibility award for knowledge portal Wired for Health in 2004.
• Successfully managed tendering & implementation of content, database and re-design services for five websites with a £200k annual budget from 2002.
• Presented a short paper on system design from my knowledge management experience at the International Nonlinear Sciences Conference in Vienna, 2003.

Communications Consultant (Apr 1996 – Sept 2000)

Responsibilities:

• Promoting freelance communications consultancy with focus on health, not-for profit and health sectors through networking and marketing activities.
• Securing core revenue through development of freelance journalism contracts.
• Developing my skills and services from studying public relations, to researching online business opportunities.

Results & Achievements:

• Launched Linux User magazine in early 2000 as part of the editorial team.
• Communications consultancy for the Forster Company, including speech writing for Body Shop CEO Anita Roddick in 1997 on the emerging internet revolution.
• Provided media training to mental health user groups and professionals across London for the national charity Mental Health Media in 1996, as well as helping organisation the Mental Health Media Awards.

Publications Manager – Release Ltd (Mar 1994 – Apr 1996)

• Commissioned a series of visionary international white papers and took the initiative to publish them online in 1996, an innovation for national drugs charity Release.

News Editor – Red Pepper Ltd (Mar 1994 – Apr 1996)

• Launched the current affairs magazine Red Pepper in 1994 achieving a ‘Best International Magazine’ award, and a circulation of 13k by 1995.

Senior Reporter – EMAP Norfolk & Suffolk Express Series (Mar 1992 – Apr 1994)

• Won an EMAP award in 1993 for news reporting.

AWARDS

• Sift Innovation of the Year Award (2009)
• Best Web2.0 Initiative (2008)
• Accountancy Age Awards, finalist (2008)
• Web Accessibility Award, IVCA (2004)
• EMAP Regional News Award (1993)

QUALIFICATIONS

• MA in Social & Political Science, University of Cambridge: 1^st class (Oct 1984 – June 1987)
• Masters in Social Science in Industrial Archaeology, University of Birmingham (Sept 1987 – 1989)
• National Certificate in Journalism (NCTJ), University of Wales Institute (Sept 1990 – Sept 1991)

PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS

• British Computer Society, Internet Specialist Group; organised the ‘Social Networking & Web 2.0 within the Enterprise’ expert speaker meeting in Jan 2010.
• Member of the Association of Online Community Professionals

SPEAKING EVENTS

• Future Digital Strategies Summit, social media expert panel member (Nov, 2011)
• Cass Business School, ‘Applying lean start-up principles and practice to building corporate communities’ (Feb, 2012)
• Social Media World Forum, ‘The role of communities in bringing shoppers together to communicate and aggregate information about product and price deals’ (Mar, 2012)

PUBLICATIONS

• Featured in Blaise Grimes-Viort’s Oct 2010 e-book: 60 Insights from Experienced Community Managers eBook
• Featured in Janet Fouts’ Mar 2010 e-book (available on Amazion): 140 Bite-Sized Ideas for Nonprofit Social Media Engagement

INTERESTS

• Archaeology, architecture, Brazil, cinema, comedy, complex systems, health, history, industrial design, innovation, online communities, popular music, psychology, soccer, and social media

DOWNLOAD MY CV

• Downloadable version of my full CV (Word)
• View my shorter resume

I mean, don’t engineers realize that most people run on different ‘software’ than code? And that this human software has its own inherent logic, which is different from the the logic of code?

“User interface was one realm where the communications team and the engineering team met each other halfway. Can you give an example of how you humanized Google?

“Here’s an example: the automated spellchecker. So Google had the capability of detecting if someone’s typed query was likely misspelled.

“The engineers said, ‘Great, if somebody misspells something, we should automatically correct it, do the correct search, and then tell them that they misspelled it, so they know we fixed it.’ The problem was, people don’t generally like to be told they made a mistake.

“The engineers insisted it was essential to tell the user they were wrong, so we launched with wording to that effect. But I knew from a marketing perspective that people would find that abrasive. And people were upset.

“They were pissed off that their search engine was correcting them–especially if they hadn’t made a mistake, if they were searching for a proper name that happened to be unique. Finally we changed it to softer phrasing. [Currently, Google says, “Showing results for...” and then the corrected query.]

“I remember arguing at the time, it doesn’t hurt us to take the blame–a search engine doesn’t have feelings. We should always be willing to take the hit, so the user feels better, even if they know they made a mistake.”

This isn’t a trivial issue when you consider how getting it right can impact on strategy & sales, and especially how you build a customer base. Just the other day I had my own small example of this when I sent out a newsletter with a call to action for the first 20 people who left a post on our Facebook Page Wall – in return for a ‘goody’ bag.

In the end 75 people asked for the giveaway. So are the 55 people who left a request simply to have their request be deleted on the grounds that they should have read the instructions, counted the numbers of posts, and not bothered once the list was 20 in total?

OK, so coming back to Google, how about something really useful like a 73 page PDF on the best thinking and practice regarding customer engagement online? It’s called the rather cultish name ZMOT (zero moment of truth). So please enjoy – google-zmot.

It's like a MOT for your marketing:-)

I have already extracted  a few golden nuggets which I’d like to share – ’cause sharing as well as competition is good..

(1) Don’t ask the kind of customer survey question like ‘do you use a smartphone to shop online?’ ask the question ‘do you use a smartphone to help you decide what to buy?’

(2) “Yes, people take the time to leave messages online about how much they love Scotch Tape. That’s because the effort is down to zero.” In other words the full range of products, from the very small to the very large, generate user reviews and content.

(3) Actually, my third point isn’t from Google’s ZMOT but from the recent Lithium webinar ‘LevelUp Your Facebook Strategy’.

When guest contributor Jeremiah Owyang, in highlighting the 8 key criteria for success, focusing on point 4 around ‘Living authentically’ (what the social networking deal is all about) highlights a key point – that rather than merely emulate your customer’s behaviour online – you should aim to:

“Live in the same behaviors that customers and consumers are.”

Makes sense that being on the same wave length as your customers is going to work well for social media, and for the business bottom line. But as the introduction to the webinar plainly stated, customers have changed with social media and mobile technology but by and large business practice has not. It relates in large part to the follow-on criteria, to enable your customers to do it for themselves, to have discussions without relying on your input.

Quality starts at home!

Let’s face it while there are plenty of experts on the subject of business change in the era of social business how many actually confront what’s really holding things back? Letting go of that ‘elephant on the table’ both internally and externally with employees and customers goes to the heart of the matter, where the potential win is huge but the risks are big too. (Check out this post from Christoph Schmaltz on that subject, and how Headshift approaches these complex issues).

This is some text! text!This is why for example in a recent discussion ‘ I had with Phil Bush, director of strategic planning at Oracle, on the possibilities for enterprise use of social tools I focused on the key problem in integrating these transformative technologies in with business processes to drive results. And I’m guessing it’s probably what the CEO of Salesforce Marc Benioff was referring to last week at Dreamforce 2011 when he wondered when the first CEO was going to suffer as result of his/her inability to engage using social tools with their customer and employees.

It ain’t easy. But one  tried and tested answer to help employees adapt to new ways of working is the practice of empowerment, which at its simplest as outlined in ‘Empowerment Takes More Than a Minute’ involves three basic principles:

1. Share information with everyone (externally, and internally)
2. Create autonomy through boundaries
3. Replace hierarchical thinking with self-managed teams

OK, sounds that’s one possible answer. But not everyone is convinced, and for good reason – the nature of how knowledge works in a networked world:

“Never mind that there is much rhetoric about the need for leadership at all levels, or about the empowerment and democratization of workers in organization X or Y.  “Performance management, grade levels and compensation have yet to recognize how work gets done in networked environments and in a networked world.”

Despite these objections hope remains so long as there is passion and determination to drive the business forward. Tying the power of consumer and business transformation together using social tools sounds utopian to some, but to others it’s the basis of their disruptive business model, as outlined in the recent Forbes piece ‘Social Power and the Coming Corporate Revolution’. Referring to HearsaySocial‘s internal social tool set it neatly makes that very link:

“Hearsay’s tools presume something elemental in a world of social power: that the empowerment of employees is directly tied to the empowerment of customers—because they will inevitably end up working, maybe even conspiring, together.”

Sounds like it’s time for action..@stuartgh

Really liked the link made in the fourth programme of the BBC’s The Virual Revolution between Norbert Wiener’s feedback loop for anti-aircraft gunners in WWII (ie breaking down the division between people and systems, to allow gunner’s to hit their airborne targets) and the radical impact of the status updates within Facebook (and the likes of Twitter…) on driving the internet revolution.

So here’s my question. What would happen if you applied fighter pilot military strategist John Boyd‘s concept of “the decision cycle or OODA Loop, the process by which an entity (either an individual or an organization) reacts to an event. According to this idea, the key to victory is to be able to create situations wherein one can make appropriate decisions more quickly than one’s opponent” (see wikipedia page) to understanding of how *we* interact online?

I wonder if anyone’s applied this to produce an effective counter-cyber warfare strategy, as I can see the ‘fit’ from a theoretical point of view? [pause while *we*make a quick check..] oh yeah, see here for example as part of the University of Washington’s resource page on cyberwarfare.

More practically perhaps I wonder what would the OODA loop mean in explaining differing peoples’ actions online in the context of the BBC programme’s ‘Web Behaviour Test’ experiment?

Of course on a more practical social media level I have already blogged recently, thanks to HP Labs paper, on the value of creating good feedback loops with your top contributors:

This paper demonstrates that submitters who stop receiving attention tend to stop contributing, while prolific contributors attract an ever increasing number of followers and their attention in a feedback loop.

We demonstrate that this mechanism leads to the observed power law in the number of contributions per user and support our assertions by an analysis of hundreds of millions of contributions to top content sharing websites Digg.com and Youtube.com.

Download:  Feedback loops of attention in peer production (PDF; 0.5 mb).

You should notice a difference with the Xyggy engine. Why? It runs an item search which it claims provides substantial advantages and additional information over text search.  Also, the makers say that with multiple items in the query, Xyggy discovers what they have in common to return better results.

Is the answer:

A. The likes of Microsoft at the CES in Las Vegas?

B. The likes of Apple who didn’t bother with Las Vegas?

C. Companies developing products for the developing world first?

D. The likes of OLPC’s Version 3?

E. All of the above?

News from Xyggy – their patent search service is now live. Forget keywords, this is about item searches.

Strikes me this would be of interest in the medical imaging world. So I tried ‘MRI’ as the item search. Then selected the top of the list return. Usefully the search engine then delivers a list of similar patents, as Xyggy’s Dinesh Vadhia explains:

Imagine you want to find similar patents for a given patent. Now you can with Xyggy Patent. What’s more, you can query with multiple patents (selected by patent number or title) and Xyggy will find all similar patents in ranked order. Go ahead and try it (and its free).

Patent Baristas wrote about Xyggy here and the IPKat said this.

1. That there should be more women in technology; and he mocked the mature nature of engineers, while noting that women can be their own worst enemies.

2. That getting round patent laws and keeping the web royalty free was difficult.

3. That his www proposal went out on a memo round CERN in March 1989, and then again in May 1990, with a subject line which indicated the duplication. And that his boss had scribbled on the proposal ‘exciting but vague’.

4. That wikis are actually in one sense a return to the early days of the day by their ‘read-write’ nature. And that blogs are great but there was a danger they may end up as poor quality information.

5. That Google and the like know a lot about us.

6. That he had started on the web work when CERN bought a couple of ‘NeXT’ machines just for the heck of checking them out.

7. That the term ‘URL’ is fine but ‘URI’ is better.

8. That if he had to do the invention of the www again he’d drop ‘//’ and reverse ‘co.uk’ to ‘uk.co’ as the correct hierarchy.

9. That mobile technology, whatever the benefits of voice recognition, still means you’re talking to a computer (gettit? no, oh well) through a small screen but if you could mount the viewer on a pair of sun glasses might be fun.

10. That you should never trust physicists to write software.

11. There’s a xml parser error on harvard site.

12. And that there is basically too much UGC on the web.

The twist is the dry British sense of humour so the ‘jackass’ is more witty and dry and less slapstick, so the idea is to put really obscure trivial, silly things up, like the guy who did a funny dance in a different places around the world but even more so. So this will be a place to upload all those silly holiday anecdotes, and have them rated, and then the most popular rise to the top of the pile digg style. For example when I was in Brasilia getting to talk to the lady who used to do the nails for the mum of the best footballer in the world, Kaka, would go up – be rated by the site – and by other users. You get the drift.

Of course because I would be the creator/gringo in charge, my sense of humour would be central to the site, with first and foremost me rating submissions by travellers from around the globe, though also allowing site users to do the same. Hence the site name: Challenge Gringo!

OK, enough. I have registered the domain name. Anyone interested should try to keep a straight face and bump into me sometime. One to do when I have another spare moment.