Sinead Mac Manus

A new report commissioned by Lloyds TSB bank, has found that many small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) – those business with less than 250 employees – are not making the most out the opportunities that digital – websites, social media, ecommerce and mobile – can give them.

At the beginning of 2012, there were just under 5 million businesses in the UK. SMEs make up a staggering 99.9% of this number. They are responsible for almost 60% of private sector employment, and just under 50% of private sector turnover, so they are a crucial part of the UK economy. Many commentators have said that it’s through their growth, not the large corporate firms, that Britain will pull itself out of recession.

The research found that 36% of SMEs in the UK have no website, and of the 64% of SMEs who do have a website, 15% of those have no functionality beyond simply finding out basic information. One in five (20%) are ‘deliberately disconnected’ from the Internet.

Every small business in the UK needs to get online and start connecting with customers whether you are a rural B&B who wants to attract more guests or a young designer who wants to sell her products online. Whether you like it or not, someone on the web is talking about your business and isn’t it better that you take control of the message?

But as the report and other research from Go ON Uk have found, there is a digital skills gaps in most small, and especially very small (0 to 10 employees) businesses. Even amongst businesses which already use the Internet, the research found that there is a general lack of awareness of where to find cost effective, quality support.

We hope that Fluency when we launch in September will be part of the solution in getting British businesses online and provide a one-stop-shop for all small businesses in the UK to find the information and support they need in a cost effective and real-time way.

Download and read the report here.

New figures by Adzuna and Silicon Milkroundabout show a huge increase in demand for talent in tech and for digital marketing jobs.

Silicon Milkroundabout, the leading jobs fair for the London startup scene, and Adzuna, a search engine for classified ads, have today revealed new figures that show that there are more jobs than ever before in the UK’s tech startup scene. Tech hubs around the country, including London’s Tech City, are hiring for 3,229 positions, up 22% since 2012. London leads the startup job market with 34% of all current open positions found in the UK, followed by Cambridge with 27%, Brighton with 11% and Bristol 8%.

Developers are in hot demand with 1,122 jobs currently on offer, with marketing roles second at 924 and product at 759.

Last Wednesday evening I attended a fantastic evening hosted by Future Human – a place for people to share new ideas, and inform each other about the inspiring trends and upstart projects that are re-shaping our future.

Billed as ‘salons’ the Future Human events always feature excellent speakers and debate as well as interactivity from the audience. As I am in the middle of building a education technology start-up – GetDigitalWith.us – I was naturally drawn to the topic of Zero Education.

Zero Education explored the new wave of free digital learning that is radically challenging educational institutions from schools to universities. With the rise of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) such as Udacity and Coursera to the Khan Academy, these deinstitutionalised, modular forms of online education are predicted, by some commentators, to destabilise traditional education. Others think that they are just a flash in the pan and will never compete with the institution.

Ben Beaumont-Thomas from Future Human gave a fascinating review into the development of education since the Greeks proposing that this idea of decentralised education was not new. In 1917, Ivan Illick wrote a book called Deschooling Society which critiqued modern education and predicted much of what is happening now, nearly 100 years later. He argued that a good education system should have three purposes: to provide all that want to learn with access to resources at any time in their lives; to make it possible for all who want to share knowledge etc. to find those who want to learn it from them i.e. peer learning; and to create opportunities for those who want to present an issue to the public to make their arguments known i.e. sharing and publishing.

He suggests that four learning exchanges could facilitate this: reference services to educational objects; skill exchanges; peer-matching to other learners; and reference services to ‘educators-at-large’ ie access to experts. These he calls learning webs, 80 years before the development of the World Wide Web. The type of education that Illich describes is exactly what is happening now with the Internet: 24 hour access to online learning objects e.g. videos; peering learning and support through course forums; and access to online tutors and mentors, sometimes for an additional fee.

Yet despite this original thinking in 1917 and some of the developments in the intervening years such as distance learning and the Open University, education, for the most part, is still the same as it was in Victorian times – a teacher with knowledge imparting it to a room full of students with testing once a year. This one size fits all approach doesn’t take into account that fact that human beings, including children and young people, are all different and learn differently. Last week I also watching an inspirational TED Education talk by education advocate Geoffrey Canada who made the same point and is doing things differently in New York. Do watch it if you have time.

The panel at Future Human (made up of two bricks and mortar universities and one chap from the Open University) were cautious about the impact that the MOOCs and online education will have on higher education, making the point that the real value of a teacher is not delivering content but interacting with and provoking the students to think. A recent report found that university students want more contact hours with their lecturers not less. But this is understandable when they are paying £9,000 a year for the privilege of attending.

I think this ‘zero education’ movement will radically shake up all levels of education. At school level, students will be able to adapt their learning to get support when they need it and be encouraged to help others learn.

This new way of delivering learning can reach out to disadvantaged learners who can’t afford to attend the institution, women who can’t go to the campus to learn for cultural reasons, mature learners and part-time learners. MOOCs and their equivalents are a great opportunity for students all over the world to access a higher education. Universities can offer ‘super niche’ courses based on academic research that could never be run live e.g. a course in Equine Nutrition at The University of Edinburgh.

This way of learning may lead to the standard three year degree being disrupted as students fit their education around their life e.g. year one might involve being on campus, year two in the workplace etc. Last week saw the announcement of a new $7,000 Masters in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in the US delivered by Udacity with employer support from AT&T – an 80% discount on the classroom equivalent. A masters degree from one of the best technical universities in the US, with employer support, at an affordable price has sent shockwaves through the higher education system.

With a growing population, we need 21 million more places in higher education globally by 2020. Recent figures from Coursera show that there are twice as many sign ups in India that in the UK for the service. Only MOOCs can deliver this at scale.

Of course we don’t just go to university to learn. University is a place to meet new people from different social backgrounds, learn about ourselves and create those personal networks for the future. It’s a place of personal transformation not just knowledge transfer. We also run the risk of education being the new music industry when learning is free or low cost (music downloads) but the live experience is expensive and only open to a few.

I would love to get your thoughts on this. Are the MOOCs that start of something radical or just an add-on to the existing education system?

“The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education” Albert Einstein

Over the past few weeks I have been to a number of conferences and reading a number of research papers and reports on the level of digital skills here in the UK. I am particularly interested in this area at the moment as I am taking the learning from the two pilots of the Digital Academy and launching a scalable education platform that will help young unemployed people in the UK to gain in-demand digital skills, experience and networks so they can succeed in the growing digital economy.

In some sense I’ve always been interested in how we can upskill in digital. Through my Digital coaching and training, I have taken hundreds of people from a low confidence in digital to feeling like digital superstars! But this is different. The more I read and hear about the skills gap in the UK the more I think we are in big trouble as a country.

Let me hit you with some statistics.

The digital economy currently contributes to 8.3% of GDP and is predicted to rise to 12% for 2015. 85 to 90% of jobs will require deep level digital skills by 2020. But only 3,420 young people are taking computer science at A Level in the whole country.

We are not training our young people for this new world order where any jobs that can be done by robots will be automated or outsourced leaving more people competing for jobs requiring higher skills.

But there are some exciting developments on the horizon. The Government has realised that their ICT curriculum at school is woefully outdated as it focuses on the using of software such as spreadsheets rather than finding out what’s under the hood. A new curriculum is being developed at the moment and while at the HackEd 2.0 hackathon at Facebook on Wednesday, I saw the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Education and Childcare, Liz Truss MP announced a £2 million fund to train 400 master teachers in computer science who will train thousands more to teach the new curriculum.

I have also been asked sit on the Advisory group for Mulberry School for Girls in Tower Hamlets who have ambitious plans to open an University Technical College in the borough in September 2015 which will train young people aged 14 to 19 to be able to walk in to jobs in Tech City/Silicon Roundabout which sits on their doorstep. Rather than spending three years going to University, spending £9,000 a year, and then having to do unpaid internships to get a job, the UTC plans to show that there is an alternative route to jobs, entrepreneurship and having a good life – and that’s digital.

There is also promising signs for out of school provision with the growth of initiatives such as CodeClub – a nationwide network of volunteer-led after school coding clubs for children aged 9-11. Google has made a commitment to give away 15,000 Raspberry Pis (the £22 mini computer) to children in the UK to teach them how computers and electronics work. (The point was made at the Google conference last week that £15 million pounds would give every child in the UK their own Raspberry Pi).

But what about those young people who have already come through the school system? NESTA currently predicts that there are 1.5 million young people in the UK not in education, employment or training. Many of these young people do not have the digital skills to work in the growing digital economy and cannot afford to work unpaid as free labour while getting those skills.

On the other side of the equation is the UK businesses who are not using the full potential of digital. A recent survey by Go On UK found that only 33% of small to medium-sized companies have a digital presence and only 14% sell their products online. They also found that charities are among the organisations with the most to gain from upping their digital skills, yet one-fifth have little or no web presence and 50% need help with web design and social media.

To me this creates the perfect market opportunity for a social venture – train young unemployed people (our ‘digital natives’) with these in-demand digital skills that SMEs and charities need and then fast-track them into jobs.

And this is what we plan to launch this year (watch this space for more details).

The future is digital. Geeks are truly the new rock stars.

As part of Internet Week Europe, education company General Assembly held a week-long event entitled European Buffet. My lovely funder for the Digital Assistant Academy, the Nominet Trust, kindly paid for me to attend the first day’s event on Digital Business Models.

It was a great day with contributions from companies such as AirBnb, Skimlinks and the Financial Times, but it was the opening presentation from Tom Hulme, design director at innovation company IDEO, that was the hit of the day.

As well as working for IDEO, Tom is also an angel investor – one of those lucky folk that get to invest in, and support, people and projects that they believe in. He is also unlucky in that he gets to sit through boring presentations from white middle-class young men thinking they are building the next Facebook.

He shared four learnings about building and scaling a digital (or any) business and some questions for you to consider. Here you go …

1. Have a Purpose

All growth businesses need a purpose to scale. It’s not enough to just have a personal itch that you want to scratch – you need to have a wider purpose to fuel yourself and your team though the inevitable troughs that come after the initial excitement wears off.

Tom sets a monthly meeting with his companies to talk about their purpose and keep everybody focused on what’s important.

Purpose can also shift and it’s important to keep reviewing it as your business or product develops. For example, Jawbone started out as a Siri-style type system before moving into beautifully designed noise-cancelling headphones and products to moving into the personal health space.

Q. What’s your purpose? Do people share it? And does it matter?

2. You Are What You Measure

Too much of the social web is focusing on ‘vanity metrics’ – how many Facebook Likes or Twitter followers we have. According to Tom, Mini Cooper’s 3.2 million Facebook fans are mostly 18-24 year olds that live in Bangkok. Hmmm.

How can you focus on metrics that tell you if you are tracking your purpose. What metrics show engagement not just numbers? One of Tom’s start-ups project their key metrics on their office wall along with all the feedback from the social web about the project (not just the good stuff).

Q. What metrics tell you if you’re tracking your purpose?

3. Your Product is a Vehicle for Your Purpose

No is a design decision. Don’t try to be all things to all people. Look at Google as the best example of striping back a product to its purpose – there is just the search box. Other greats examples include photo site Instagram and project management software Basecamp.

Try using a heat-mapping software such as Crazy Egg to see where customers are going on your website. What can you lose? Can you take away 10%?

Q. Does your product covey your purpose?

4. You Don’t Scale

You can’t scale without your people. Your people are the key to your success as companies such as Facebook and IDEO know.
Too many companies focus on incentives – salary, shares, beer – rather than looking at what intrinsically motivates people – purpose.

Q. Are you building a movement toward your Purpose?

Thanks to Tom for an insightful presentation! You can find him on Twitter.

On Tuesday evening I got to go to the hallowed halls of London’s V&A museum after dark to attend the biannual Sackler Lecture. Entitled The Future of Learning, Professor Sugata Mitra from the Newcastle University gave a keynote address on how the web can enable learning on a global scale.

Professor Mitra is the brain behind the ‘Hole in the Wall’ (1999) experiment where a computer was embedded in a wall in an Indian slum at Kalkaji, Dehli, and children were allowed to freely use it. The experiment tried, and succeeded in proving, how children can be taught to use computers without any formal training. If you have time do watch his 2009 TED talk on how kids teach themselves:

In his many Hole in the Wall experiments over the years he found that in around 9 months any student can learn to use a computer and the Internet as well as an office secretary. He found again and again in controlled experiments that groups of children using the internet can achieve educational objectives on their own. He calls these learning environments SOLEs or Self Organised Learning Environments.

Interestingly he found that the optimal group size is four children with the children taking different roles during the learning session from note-taker to joker. This type of small group learning also works best in children under 13 years of age as they have limited concept of ego. After this age, neuroscience shows that our threat mechanism gets triggered if we feel stupid or under pressure and this stops us learning and trying new things.

One excellent experiment he tried in a remote Indian village was to see if the children could learn the principles of genetics and DNA from the hole in the wall without knowing any English. Professor Mitra came back after two months and found that the children, from a starting point of zero, now knew 30% of the material. An astonishing result in itself but still below what would technically be needed for a pass. So he tried another experiment. He asked a local aid worker, who knew nothing about genetics, if she could encourage the children in their explorations by saying encouraging things and praising them, similar to a Granny. After another two months the children tested above 50%.

After the success of this experiment Professor Mitra went on the hunt for grannies in the north east of England to provide this type of support to children in Indian and other countries. This was dubbed The Granny Cloud. Here the role of the teacher is to create the question for investigation and to stand back and admire and encourage, rather than to be the conduit of knowledge at the front of the class.

I found Professor Mitra’s talk fascinating and it threw up all sorts of questions for me about learning and knowledge and not just from an educational system perspective. It does seem quite mad that our children are still participating in an education system that was made by the Victorians for another age – an age where the world need to produce identical people to do the same sorts of work across the Empire. Manufacturing and consumerism needs identical people too – ones that will desire the same goods and services.

But what age are we in now? What kind of people do we want our children to be? We can’t even imagine what kind of technology they will be using in the future so what skills do we need to help them develop? Inquisitiveness? Team work? A love of learning? Do we need to retain knowledge when it is so easily accessible at our fingertips?

As Professor Mitra says we can become what we pretend. With a connection to the World Wide Web we can learn anything.

And therefore with ready access to the cloud and the crowd, can we say that knowing is obsolete? I would love to get your thoughts on this.

Last Wednesday evening I attended a fantastic evening hosted by Future Human – a place for people to share new ideas, and inform each other about the inspiring trends and upstart projects that are re-shaping our future.

Billed as ‘salons’ the Future Human events always feature excellent speakers and debate as well as interactivity from the audience. As I am in the middle of building a education technology start-up – GetDigitalWith.us – I was naturally drawn to the topic of Zero Education.

Zero Education explored the new wave of free digital learning that is radically challenging educational institutions from schools to universities. With the rise of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) such as Udacity and Coursera to the Khan Academy, these deinstitutionalised, modular forms of online education are predicted, by some commentators, to destabilise traditional education. Others think that they are just a flash in the pan and will never compete with the institution.

Ben Beaumont-Thomas from Future Human gave a fascinating review into the development of education since the Greeks proposing that this idea of decentralised education was not new. In 1917, Ivan Illick wrote a book called Deschooling Society which critiqued modern education and predicted much of what is happening now, nearly 100 years later. He argued that a good education system should have three purposes: to provide all that want to learn with access to resources at any time in their lives; to make it possible for all who want to share knowledge etc. to find those who want to learn it from them i.e. peer learning; and to create opportunities for those who want to present an issue to the public to make their arguments known i.e. sharing and publishing.

He suggests that four learning exchanges could facilitate this: reference services to educational objects; skill exchanges; peer-matching to other learners; and reference services to ‘educators-at-large’ ie access to experts. These he calls learning webs, 80 years before the development of the World Wide Web. The type of education that Illich describes is exactly what is happening now with the Internet: 24 hour access to online learning objects e.g. videos; peering learning and support through course forums; and access to online tutors and mentors, sometimes for an additional fee.

Yet despite this original thinking in 1917 and some of the developments in the intervening years such as distance learning and the Open University, education, for the most part, is still the same as it was in Victorian times – a teacher with knowledge imparting it to a room full of students with testing once a year. This one size fits all approach doesn’t take into account that fact that human beings, including children and young people, are all different and learn differently. Last week I also watching an inspirational TED Education talk by education advocate Geoffrey Canada who made the same point and is doing things differently in New York. Do watch it if you have time.

The panel at Future Human (made up of two bricks and mortar universities and one chap from the Open University) were cautious about the impact that the MOOCs and online education will have on higher education, making the point that the real value of a teacher is not delivering content but interacting with and provoking the students to think. A recent report found that university students want more contact hours with their lecturers not less. But this is understandable when they are paying £9,000 a year for the privilege of attending.

I think this ‘zero education’ movement will radically shake up all levels of education. At school level, students will be able to adapt their learning to get support when they need it and be encouraged to help others learn.

This new way of delivering learning can reach out to disadvantaged learners who can’t afford to attend the institution, women who can’t go to the campus to learn for cultural reasons, mature learners and part-time learners. MOOCs and their equivalents are a great opportunity for students all over the world to access a higher education. Universities can offer ‘super niche’ courses based on academic research that could never be run live e.g. a course in Equine Nutrition at The University of Edinburgh.

This way of learning may lead to the standard three year degree being disrupted as students fit their education around their life e.g. year one might involve being on campus, year two in the workplace etc. Last week saw the announcement of a new $7,000 Masters in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in the US delivered by Udacity with employer support from AT&T – an 80% discount on the classroom equivalent. A masters degree from one of the best technical universities in the US, with employer support, at an affordable price has sent shockwaves through the higher education system.

With a growing population, we need 21 million more places in higher education globally by 2020. Recent figures from Coursera show that there are twice as many sign ups in India that in the UK for the service. Only MOOCs can deliver this at scale.

Of course we don’t just go to university to learn. University is a place to meet new people from different social backgrounds, learn about ourselves and create those personal networks for the future. It’s a place of personal transformation not just knowledge transfer. We also run the risk of education being the new music industry when learning is free or low cost (music downloads) but the live experience is expensive and only open to a few.

I would love to get your thoughts on this. Are the MOOCs that start of something radical or just an add-on to the existing education system?

Unless you have been under a rock somewhere for the past few months, you will probably know that Google have launched their Google Glass product to a select number of early adopters, and rumour has it that this wearable technology will be available to purchase for the rest of us earthlings by the end of the year.

Google launched their newest innovation with this amazing video showing Glass in action. If you haven’t seen it, you’re in for a treat:

Wearable technologies have been around for a while from the current craze for quantified self gadgets such as Nike’s FuelBand which tracks your daily physical activity and innovations such as the Pebble smart watch which became the most successful project on crowd funding platform Kickstarter ever.

But Glass is different. It’s taking the actions we do on our smartphone (take a picture, read an email, surf the web) and bringing them one step closer to being integrated seamlessly into our lives.

Some commentators think that Glass is one more step downhill on the slippery slope to less human interaction and a final loss of privacy, but I see it differently. I have written before about how annoyed I am when my partner Alex, in the middle of conversation, grabs his Samsung Galaxy S3 to look up something on the web. The very act of picking up a device and looking down disconnects you from the person you are talking to. How much more seamless would it be to say: “OK Glass. Find x” while still interacting with your companion.

Sergey Brin, one of co-founders of Google, took to the TED stage a week after the release of the Glass video to explain more about the product and he says that our method of interacting with our smartphones (looking down, hunched over, ‘socially isolated’) is why Google started the project.

With Glass, imagine at events or in meetings, we will be able to tweet, take a picture, record a video without losing our focus on the speaker. Parents playing with their children can record those magic moments without having to get distracted with their smartphone. Healthcare professionals can live stream themselves doing procedures to help colleagues in other countries. Maybe by the very idea of knowing your actions could be filmed, people might behave better towards each other. The possibilities are endless.

Of course we are going to have to learn new etiquette and social ‘rules’ around these devices. Turning off our notifications so we are not continually distracted. Not recording people and conversations without their permission. Not surfing the web or watching a video when we are bored with the person in front of us. But these are things we will work out, just like we are beginning to work out boundaries with our smartphones.

I think Glass will be one of the first of many interventions that are starting to blur our online and offline worlds in a really positive way, and I personally cannot wait to get my hands on a pair!

What do you think? Do you think this is a positive social innovation or, like Alice, will be fall further down the rabbit hole of the internet?

“The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education” Albert Einstein

Over the past few weeks I have been to a number of conferences and reading a number of research papers and reports on the level of digital skills here in the UK. I am particularly interested in this area at the moment as I am taking the learning from the two pilots of the Digital Academy and launching a scalable education platform that will help young unemployed people in the UK to gain in-demand digital skills, experience and networks so they can succeed in the growing digital economy.

In some sense I’ve always been interested in how we can upskill in digital. Through my Digital coaching and training, I have taken hundreds of people from a low confidence in digital to feeling like digital superstars! But this is different. The more I read and hear about the skills gap in the UK the more I think we are in big trouble as a country.

Let me hit you with some statistics.

The digital economy currently contributes to 8.3% of GDP and is predicted to rise to 12% for 2015. 85 to 90% of jobs will require deep level digital skills by 2020. But only 3,420 young people are taking computer science at A Level in the whole country.

We are not training our young people for this new world order where any jobs that can be done by robots will be automated or outsourced leaving more people competing for jobs requiring higher skills.

But there are some exciting developments on the horizon. The Government has realised that their ICT curriculum at school is woefully outdated as it focuses on the using of software such as spreadsheets rather than finding out what’s under the hood. A new curriculum is being developed at the moment and while at the HackEd 2.0 hackathon at Facebook on Wednesday, I saw the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Education and Childcare, Liz Truss MP announced a £2 million fund to train 400 master teachers in computer science who will train thousands more to teach the new curriculum.

I have also been asked sit on the Advisory group for Mulberry School for Girls in Tower Hamlets who have ambitious plans to open an University Technical College in the borough in September 2015 which will train young people aged 14 to 19 to be able to walk in to jobs in Tech City/Silicon Roundabout which sits on their doorstep. Rather than spending three years going to University, spending £9,000 a year, and then having to do unpaid internships to get a job, the UTC plans to show that there is an alternative route to jobs, entrepreneurship and having a good life – and that’s digital.

There is also promising signs for out of school provision with the growth of initiatives such as CodeClub – a nationwide network of volunteer-led after school coding clubs for children aged 9-11. Google has made a commitment to give away 15,000 Raspberry Pis (the £22 mini computer) to children in the UK to teach them how computers and electronics work. (The point was made at the Google conference last week that £15 million pounds would give every child in the UK their own Raspberry Pi).

But what about those young people who have already come through the school system? NESTA currently predicts that there are 1.5 million young people in the UK not in education, employment or training. Many of these young people do not have the digital skills to work in the growing digital economy and cannot afford to work unpaid as free labour while getting those skills.

On the other side of the equation is the UK businesses who are not using the full potential of digital. A recent survey by Go On UK found that only 33% of small to medium-sized companies have a digital presence and only 14% sell their products online. They also found that charities are among the organisations with the most to gain from upping their digital skills, yet one-fifth have little or no web presence and 50% need help with web design and social media.

To me this creates the perfect market opportunity for a social venture – train young unemployed people (our ‘digital natives’) with these in-demand digital skills that SMEs and charities need and then fast-track them into jobs.

And this is what we plan to launch this year (watch this space for more details).

The future is digital. Geeks are truly the new rock stars.

This is a guest post by Silvana Gambini, social media and blogging expert. Silvana is one of the ‘four berries’ in social media co-operative FourBerry Digital and a graduate of my Digital Academy. You can read more about her on her website or follow her on Twitter. Over to Silvana …

I LOVE TWITTER!

Now it’s finally out in the open – I’ve said it. I never thought that something that would limit talkative me to a mere 140 characters could mean so much. I love Twitter soooooo much that I want to marry it and have its babies! The only obstacles to this ever happening are that (1) Twitter is a social media platform and therefore not human and (2) I am already married and on the brink of menopause. Still, one can dream….

Some would say I am officially ‘attwicted’, (of course Twitter culture has developed its own dictionary of terms!) but I think this is overstating the case. Yes, in the early days of discovery I might have been slightly obsessed and under its spell, but now, 10 months in, I feel that I am controlling it, rather than the other way around. But don’t all addicts say that? At least I’ve not gone mad and downloaded a load of Twitter apps like some people I know!

Through Twitter I have discovered a whole new world – new people, new opportunities, new ideas, new music, new art etc., etc., etc. – but the biggest personal change it’s made for me is the way it has rooted me more firmly into my local community. I’ve lived in Walthamstow in North East London (E17 for short) for 16 ½ years. Last May, I joined Twitter and suddenly discovered there was a vibrant E17 Twitterati community, all merrily tweeting away, freely exchanging opinions, ideas, links, news and reviews. By joining this local cyber tribe, I found out about so much that was happening in the real world, just a short distance from my own front door. It’s made living in Walthamstow a much richer experience for me – I really feel I’m now living in #Awesomestow, as our local E17 hashtag goes!

Another consequence of my entering the Twitterverse is that I ALMOST fulfilled a lifelong ambition to be a character in a board or card game, thanks to the creative and inventive @WalthamstowDad – aka designer Jonathan Thomas. There are so many local Twitterati that he devised the E17 Twitterati Top Trumps. Set 1 – the Ranters – went into production, but unfortunately my appearance was in Set 2 – the Hipsters – which never got past the design stage. I’ve recently moved my @SilvanaGambini Twitter handle to a new professional account and my stats on my original personal account have upped considerably since the card was devised, but it’s nice to have this souvenir of my early days on Twitter. I hope I’ve managed to keep my tweet cred high and my local Hipster rating at 70!

For small local businesses, a strong local Twitter community is a godsend. You have a ready made group of potential customers eager to either do business locally or ‘Shop Local’, and who will (as long as they have a good experience) spread the word widely. The value of ‘Bird of Mouth’ marketing (back to the Twictionary!) cannot be underestimated. Yet many small businesses have still not got on board with the power and immediacy that Twitter can provide when marketing. They steer clear of Twitter as a marketing tool because:

- They don’t see the value in it – stuff and nonsense etc
- They think Twitter is just for big brands with global markets
- They think that Twitter is a ‘Tower of Babel’ and no-one will hear their message because of the white noise of so many tweets in circulation.

This last one always reminds me of the street traders’ in the ‘Who will buy?’ sequence from the film ‘Oliver!’. Take a look at the 3,53 minute point of this video with all the traders singing over each other as they ply their goods and services. Twitter isn’t really like this at all! Well crafted tweets which are tweeted at the right frequency and to the correct following will hit their mark and the message will get through.

Lastly business people can shy away because they have the idea that they will get ‘attwicted’ themselves and surfing Twitter will take them away from the core tasks of running their own businesses. That can be easily avoided by hiring someone like me to tweet on behalf of the business and to target and increase the number of followers – just saying!

I’ll end with a last little musing on ‘Attwiction’. This tweet appeared in my timeline shortly after Pope Benedict XVI announced his retirement on 11th February 2013 (the Pope’s Pontifex Twitter accounts started up in December 2012):

A nice bit of dry British humour, but accurately acknowledging the addictive potential of Twitter!

Now over to you! How do you feel about Twitter? Is it a new window onto the wider world for you or, as the Americans would say, a total ‘timesuck’? A powerful marketing tool or just shouting into an already crowded marketplace? Please let me know in the comments below!

Ok. So I know I’m a little late to the party.

But I think it’s because I don’t work in an office and I don’t spend my days watching videos of kittens. Mmmmm … kittens. But since seeing the Kid President Pep Talk video at the Shift conference at LSE last weekend, I just had to share it here on my blog and say a little bit about my current road to awesome.

For those of you, like me, who have been under a rock for the past few months, Kid President is 9 year old Robbie Novak, a comedian and motivational speaker who, in collaboration, with Soul Pancake has made a series of inspirational videos. His most famous, A Pep Talk from Kid President to You, has racked up over 16 million views and has spawned the catchphrase, ‘Not cool, Robert Frost!‘.

If you haven’t seen it, you’re in for a treat:

So many things about this video hit a personal note.

Kid President refers to the infamous poem by Robert Frost, The Road not Taken which is very dear to my heart (it’s also one of the few poems I remember from my school days along with the daffodil one. One of the very first personal development books I ever read (this was before personal development was cool!) was The Road Less Traveled by Dr M. Scott Peck, which completed changed my world view and set me on the inquiring, unconventional path that I am on today.

The title of the book is inspired by the last few lines of Frost’s poem:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Those early lessons I learnt in Dr Peck’s book about how life is hard, we need to confront problems to solve them, and this idea of choosing a different path, has stayed with me for the past 20 years since that first reading. I think what drew me towards technology, lifestyle design, location independence and minimalism as solutions and ideologies is this attempt to take the road less traveled. I don’t want to take the normal life plan of: College, J.O.B, Retire, Die.

(For more on this, check out my 10 minute TEDx talk here:)

Kid President says that the world needs us to stop being boring, to step up, to be awesome.

To make this the year of awesome.

With the relaunch of the Digital Academy (coming soon), I have been talking to lots of social entrepreneurs about how they are changing the world and being awesome. My own road to awesome this year will be launching a brand new digital platform that will give unemployed young women the skills, experience and networks to succeed in the digital economy. I am so excited to be working with some amazing people to make this happen and think it’s going to make a real impact on young women’s lives. Watch this space for more details!

So I will leave you with one thought from Kid President:

“What will you create that will be awesome?”

I’d love to hear how you are making this an awesome year. Do share in the comments …