Posts by Alastair Thompson
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Christopher,
I expect that the center right's toleration of wingnut sentiment is roughly the equivalent of the center left's toleration of the occasional trotskyite. We live in a spectrum of political viewpoints.
regards
Alastair -
Hi PAers,
The purpose and objectives of ffunnell are explained fairly succinctly in the page linked to in Rusell's post. Basically independent online publisher like ourselves (scoop), Russell, Mauricio (geekzone) and David need a higher quality of representation if we are to be able to earn a buck from our work.
With regards to the Kiwiblog, Pundit, PA connurbation I think the thing to realise is that political discourse and debate works best for democracy as a whole when both sides of the debate talk to each other.
I know that every now and then Russell turns up on Kiwiblog (not sure about vice versa) but in general this is healthy. I know that David also posts to The Standard - which is also good. David himself is always completely polite an inclusive to everybody so notwithstanding his differing political views I cannot see any harm in a bi-partisan political discussion advertising network.
I would also add that in terms of advertising sales Kiwiblog, Scoop and Public Address have been working together now since early 2008 - so that part of this isn't even very new.
By way of contrast in the US some highly partisan online discussion communities remain very strongly separated - Freerepublic and DemocraticUnderground for example - and in being so separated just exacerbate the general levels of misunderstanding.
Anyway that is my POV.
As for KimberlyCrossman she is in Ffunnell courtesy of connections with ffunnell co-conspirator Regan Cunliffe whose cre8ed built her website. From an advertising perspective such diversity makes fine.
Finally Jason Scoop is circumlocutory by design. And we are all professional about what we do - as it is. I think you may be being a bit harsh.
With regards to our friends at Pundit we at scoop are doing our best to help them to grow - speaking of which - Kiwiblog has had a good period being the default open on that tabpanel so we might just change that to Pundit.
Anyways... its always nice to get some feedback about issues like the above. A good reminder that we web publishers ought to never underestimate the ability of our blog users to have strong opinions about their communities.
Bottom line here is that blogs like Public Address and Kiiwblog - and news publishers like Scoop - need to earn a crust. We need $$$ to pay for things like hosting, wages, parties, travel and phone bills.
This inevitably means a bit of commercialisation. But we do want to make it commercialisation which does not offend.
And - because all of us indigenous independents arein commercial terms the minnows in a pond full of sharks - it also involves collaboration and cooperation. That way we can hopefully be big enough, nimble enough and innovative enough to do the business.
And if we can do it for ourselves then our intention is to expand our network to help as many professional, quality and Kiwi online publishers as we can service.
regards
alastair
Scoop, Scoop Media Network, ffunnell -
I will second Russell's two suggestions and add two more:
8. Go through the exercise of formally working out what your branding positioning is and reinforce that in your formal communications. After a bunch of work Scoop has settled on "Home of the National Argument" & "No. 1 Independent Online News Provider" .
9. Tell a story about what you are doing once a month. Post this to your blog and email it to your customers. You can also do this on MadeFromNewZealand.com and via Scoop.co.nz.
Getting used to regularly telling your story is a) good practice and b) sharpens your thinking around what you are actually doing. If you have no story to tell this month perhaps its time you did something.
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Hello,
For reference the earlier parts of this Surviving Small conversation are:
Surviving Small II: Changing Process (Feb 26) - GUEST: Xero CEO Rod Drury on small business strategies
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Surviving Small (Feb 23) GUEST: Alastair Thompson of ScoopIn response to Rod's post I would observe that the example he provides at the end of the post is very illustrative of the real art of PR or profile building. Creating reasons why your message is newsworthy in the moment. In that case it was done in a clever way which resulted in the payback of the use of his tin tin image (XERO as a rocketship) in Computerworld in an entertaining and interesting context.
What this illustrates more than anything is the power of cunning and timing.
regards
Alastair -
I thought the IRD already did have a waiver for recipts for below a certain $ value ?
My understanding that the waiver is at $50.
The line item data issue is an interesting one. That is required so that someone can determine whether the purchase really is a business expense I guess. And I would agree that that would be hard to do without line-item data.
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(post reposted from the other thread where it might have been missed be people it was intended for.... from Patrick Hackett....):
As a mortgage broker, I have a suggestion for small businesses who are not getting much joy from their Bank, and have their house mortgaged to the Bank as security for the business lending.
BNZ (who do not deal with us "vermin" the brokers) are doing some ridiculous lending at the moment, now that they have brought out their 4.99% housing rate. So I suggest you call up a BNZ Mobile Manager, and ask him to refinance all your lending into one home loan. Give him your March 2008 financial accounts and the most recent GV on the property, and a printout on your loans showing you have been meeting the repayments.
The key is to treat this as a home loan, and not any business refinance. So if you have a business overdraft at the moment, you will need to incorporate the debt into the loan amount, and operate your business accounts in credit without any overdraft limit. This is a great chance to roll all the debts together into one loan at 4.99% and also release some working capital for the business.
You may also be able to get more than 80% of the value of your home, although the interest rate may then be a little higher.
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Patrick.. this is a fascinating post... I might move it into the current thread where it is more likely to get noticed.
regards
Alastair -
Hi everybody.
Fascinating discussion. You can see one of the piggy back marketing efforts over at the telecom bizhub.
http://www.telecombusinesshub.co.nz/Pages/Home.aspx
We will be carrying some advertising for this on Scoop shortly which will illustrate the approach from click to conversion.
Ange,
The GST EFTPOS thing really is a brilliant idea - would help everybody - be good if it was a Credit Card thing too.
http://thinksmall.co.nz was built for the purpose of suggesting and promoting ideas like this - I would encourage you to go over and offer it as an issue and a solution. I will support it in a hearts beat.
Cameron,
We use salesforce and ifax too. The first one is as you say a brilliant tool and like XERO requries you to adapt the way you do things - in a good way - and the second one saves lots of trees and time. We also don't advertise our fax number which is probably also a good business survival tip - if you want to save money on toner. Fax spam!!!!
al
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Hi everybody,
An apology to Rod. He had sent us a more chatty post which he had wanted to start with before getting into this more detailed description of what XERO can do to assist small businesses.
I can speak from experience that what he says about transforming the way you do business through application of better/faster/more transparent accounting disciplines helps hugely.
When cash is tight - as it is these days - knowing exactly how big a shortfall to expect. How much us outstanding and to whom and exactly how much you are spending is vital.
al
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Jason:
Lots of interesting ideas there....
One of the big differences between this downturn and others is that the news generally travels faster and there appears to be more flexibility and a more of a border-less economy approach.
From talking with other businesses who are in the online sector we are often dealing with decision makers whose local economies have been hit hard. They want to defend home markets and as ANZ is very small global terms we may get cut adrift to some extent.
I very strongly feel that it would be good if this idea were openly acknowleged and acted upon here in NZ. This is where our cultural cringe really gets us - in my business (online media/advertising) we are completely dominated by overseas players(Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Fairfax -including Trademe, and APN) all of which are understandably using their NZ cash producing assets to help their more strategically important domestic operations going in the US and Australia.
Unfortunately far too many of the buyers in the NZ market - includiung Govt agency marketing managers - are convinced that the offshore advertising providers ar the bees knees and as a result most of the spend 90% plus is therefore heading offshore. This sort of thing can be very frustrating for NZ based businesses.
The upshot of that is we may need to spend more time on working locally and that might mean we have to adapt / develop different services and products.
Lets hope so.
One last idea is what is the equivalent of the 5 stages of grieving / when going through these transitions?
That is the denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance processes. No-one like having to go through such extreme changes and it might be that we need to step back a bit and see if we can improve our resilience by perhaps understanding a bit more about the emotional impacts on ourselves and our staff.
This idea intrigues me greatly. It is definitely true that the emotional impacts of financial failure and/or vulnerability are huge. On top of that there is a probably more of a "show no weakness" approach in business even more so than in general life (and thats always been part of the bloke pshyche here anyway). I don't know what can be done about this but I think that diuscussions like this one certainly help.
al