The biggest benefit of social media marketing isn’t instant sales, identifying your keenest buyers or even better customer service. You can pick up all of those on social media sites, but none of them is as powerful as the ability to build a close connection with your market. When you’re in touch with leads daily – through tweets or through Facebook discussions – your business will be on their mind when they’re ready to buy. But while social media can create relationships, those connections can be relatively loose. It doesn’t take much for someone to stop following a company’s tweets and once that’s happened, it doesn’t take long before that company is forgotten. It’s not just the number of connections that count in social media, it’s the depth of the engagement as well, and that’s something that even Twitter, with its brief posts, struggles to build. A number of leading social media types though have found a way of adding a uniquely deep level of engagement to their Twitter streams by teaming them with Ustream.

Formed in 2007, and now boasting 40 million monthly viewers, Ustream is a kind of live YouTube. Rather than recording videos then uploading them for others to view, users of Ustream can broadcast live, allowing anyone to watch them through the site. The videos are also recorded, making them available to be seen later by people who missed the original broadcast. It’s an approach that allows for spontaneity as well as all the excitement and unpredictability that’s a part of any live show. Groups as big as Black Eyed Peas and the Jonas Brothers are using Ustream to broadcast live to their fans while the American Music Awards used the service to beam stars live from the red carpet.

For businesses though, the real power of Ustream comes when live broadcasting is combined with two-way interaction. Earlier this month, for example, professional blogging expert Darren Rowse told his 90,000-plus Twitter followers that he would be on Ustream soon for “an impromptu Q&A session.” He tweeted the URL, and for 50 minutes answered questions delivered through Twitter while on air:

From Ustream to iTunes

Andy Brudtkuhl, “Chief Web Guru” at 48Web, a web strategy and internet marketing firm, takes this approach even further. Every Friday, he and his partner Doug Mitchell of createWOWmedia put on a live broadcast through Ustream, taking questions from viewers while they’re on air. But they also use that broadcast to push content in a number of different directions and drive their audience to take action. The audio track of the broadcast is recorded using GarageBand, turned into an MP3 and pushed to iTunes. The video of the broadcast is embedded into a blog post. A chat room allows viewers to interact with each other while they watch, as well as with the broadcasters. Using CamTwist, Andy can switch the feed to demonstrate an activity on his desktop, adding more variety to the on-screen presence than a pair of talking heads. And an opt-in form next to the video turns casual viewers into regular visitors.

“It’s also one more reason for people to come to our site,” Andy told new media marketing expert Jason Van Orden.

All of those extras certainly increase the power of the broadcast, making it available to more people, adding another level of interaction and engagement, and even providing a way to pick up some immediate benefits from viewers in the form of joining a mailing list. But it also requires a bigger investment of time and effort. Darren Rowse reported that while  his 50-minute live chat had been fun, it had also been exhausting — and that was just a simple chat.

More importantly, it was also spontaneous. That’s an important aspect of Ustreaming that can be missed by over-eager broadcasters. Put out programs on a regular basis and as the broadcasts become more common, they — and their content — become less valuable. It doesn’t matter if you miss a program or decide not to watch a recording if you know there will be another one along in a week’s time (and probably discussing similar content). One of the attractions of Darren Rowse’s live chat was that no one knew it was coming (even Darren) and no one knows when the next one will take place. It was a rare chance to ask a leading professional blogger about the best way to make money from a website.

Watch Me Drive to Work

That spontaneity means that there’s a value to broadcasting almost anything at any time. And the ability do it even from an iPhone makes it possible to broadcast almost anything at any time. Joel Comm, creator of iFart Mobile, has picked up viewers who watched him Ustream his drive to work and a trip to buy a new television for his office. If the kind of trivial details that make up much of the small talk on Twitter help to build relationships, then there’s a value too in inviting members of your market even deeper into your life.

Ustream then is flexible. It can be combined with Twitter, or even email, and used as a mass two-way communication tool, allowing an entrepreneur to address thousands of leads at a time. You can think of it then as a live online conference, complete with Q&A session. You can use it as a content creation device, a way of shooting an interactive video whose contents can later be pushed out in a range of different directions and through different channels. And you can use it too as a way of allowing your leads to see exactly who you are and how you lead your life. It might not leave much room for privacy but it might well lead to the kind of close and unforgettable relationship with a market that translates directly into sales.

Photography: raneko

Designers like to say that there’s only one truly intuitive user interface: the nipple. Everything else has to be learned. Anyone who’s ever had to teach a confused newborn how to eat however, knows even that isn’t true. The challenge for any designer then is to produce buttons, knobs, menus and signs that allow users to apply functions with the minimum of fuss. Some, like MySpace, got it horribly wrong with ugly modules and confusing functionality, a trick that Facebook tries to copy with every redesign. Occasionally though, a company gets it exactly right, not only allowing users to get what they want (almost) instinctively but also setting a new standard for others to follow. Here are five of the best:

Google

After a period in which Yahoo! ruled the Internet with a directory made up of categories, odd sub-categories and long descriptions that never seemed to have anything to do with the content you were looking for, Google’s search field and submit button was always going to be a winner. It couldn’t have been simpler (except perhaps for the “I feel lucky button” — really, does anyone ever use that?), allowing users to enter their search term and see a targeted list immediately. There were no checkboxes, no radio buttons and if you wanted to go Boolean, you could enter the symbols without hitting the advanced search page. Even the results were helpful.

Since then, things have got a little more complex with links to images, video, maps and other Google tools cluttering the page but even these have been shoved away to make the text field prominent. For text input, one field and one (not two) buttons is now the standard.

iPhone

Apple didn’t invent the mobile phone. It didn’t even invent touchscreens. But, as always, it took existing technologies and combined them in a way that created an entirely new experience.

Before the launch of the iPhone in June 2007, much had been said about the increasing complexity of mobile phones — and much too had been said about how difficult those additional functions, from Web surfing to games playing, were to reach and use. Apple’s use of icons to open applications, an onscreen keyboard, and touchscreen Web navigation created a new future for smartphones. Nokia and other manufacturers might have to battle the giant in the room but without Apple’s revolution in UI, the fight would have been limited to executives flashing their RIMs.

Delicious Library

If setting a standard for others to follow is one sign of an effective user interface, then Delicious Library’s wooden bookshelves have to qualify as a great design. Like other great designs, the library is simple, intuitive and familiar. Instead of displaying content as a list of menu items, the e-books the program contains are placed on a graphic background designed to resemble wooden bookshelves. Users get to enjoy book covers in the same way they do in a bookstore, and the books themselves are accessible with just a click.

The design of the shareware became such a standard that other digital book apps asked designer Wil Shipley if they could use it on their apps too. One company, however, used it without asking. When Steve Jobs showed off iBooks on the iPad in January 2010, the program’s design looked remarkably familiar. Perhaps that shouldn’t have been a surprise though. Many of Delicious Library’s staff now work for Apple.

Word 2007

A good rule for designers — and others — to live by is “if it ain’t bust, don’t fix it.” So when Microsoft launched Word 2007 with a completely revamped user interface, the reaction was generally negative. Gone were the static buttons and drop-down menus, replaced by scrolling ribbons located under newly titled tabs. For users familiar with the traditional design the new Word meant having to learn almost from scratch a program which they were used to using without a second thought.

The idea behind the redesign, said Microsoft, was to make visible features that users requested but which were already present in the program. The company, said Microsoft, was constantly receiving emails asking why a particular function wasn’t available in Word when in fact it was buried several menu items deep.

The biggest challenge for the design was familiarity with the old way of doing things. Once users got used to the ribbons though , and discovered where to find the features they needed, it became clear that Word 2007 was a much better design than Word’s previous versions. It would have been better though if it had been Word’s original design as well.

The Mouse

If simplicity is a sure sign of great design then the computer mouse has to be in the running too. A ball that registered movement and a couple of buttons for selection and feature access made using a computer as simple as moving a hand and lowering a finger. The addition of a trackwheel, a third button and side buttons for gamers hasn’t altered the ultimate simplicity and usability of the mouse. Even Apple’s own line of mice, with its distinctive single button (later replaced by a scroll ball and four programmable buttons), failed to show up the inherent benefits of a design that was already familiar and simple to use.

The rise of laptops however, has gone some way towards killing off mice but even their replacement — the touchpad — is modeled on the same principle, and shows that good user interface principles remain even as the technology changes.

Good UI design is always a challenge. What developers find natural and intuitive can often be the result of familiarity with their field and a ready understanding of how to use their own equipment. It’s not until the products hit the market — and users start tripping over their thumbs — that the effectiveness of a design is really tested. These five designs passed the test and often made it a bunch of later products easier to use too.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page owe a lot to the education system. Stanford University wasn’t just the place where they met, it was also the place where Google was born. The site started as a research project for their doctoral theses and the search engine’s first address was google.stanford.edu. It’s certainly possible to argue that that debt has been repaid. When Google went public in 2004, the university was holding more than 7,500 Class A shares and over 1.65 million Class B shares, valued then at $179.5 million. A quick sale of some of those shares brought in $15.6 million, further venture capital investments in the company are said to have earned the university an additional $200 million, and Stanford will continue to earn royalties from Google until 2011. That school of learning, at least, has little to complain about.

But Google’s founders haven’t stopped at paying back their alma mater. Since 2006, the company has also been making its suite of apps available to all educational institutions for free. Holding everything on its own servers, Google lets universities and schools use Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Sites, Google Docs and Google Video on the school’s own domain.

It’s not entirely pain-free. The Quick Start guide describes a six-week process of goal-setting, implementation and roll-out, but that may have more to do with the size of education institutions rather than the complexity of the apps. And it may also reflect the size of the benefits for those institutions. London’s Westminster University, which began using the system in 2008, for example, has reported savings of £1 million and a reduction in time spent on systems and user support. Google’s apps are simple enough for students to use without having to pick up the phone to find out how to create an email account.

Teachers Are Talking, Students Are Learning

The service’s functionality has been useful too. The university has described how one student used Google Sites’ codeless Web page creation tool to build a site for other students wanting to study medicine at postgraduate level even if they haven’t studied it for their undergraduate degree. Staff too have improved collaboration when gathering feedback about the students they tutor.

“Feedback has been difficult to collate and is not always available in one place meaning we can fail to spot common trends, identified by many different course leaders,” explained Professor Roger James, Director of Information Systems at the university. “Personal tutors want the full 360 feedback.”

Those benefits have been seen lower down the education system too. Before New York City’s Intermediate School 339 started using Google’s education apps, the “School of Communication Technology” was relying on a mixture of computers running various types of vintage software. Since implementing the service, students have begun submitting their homework and receiving feedback from teachers  through Google Docs, memos forgotten in mailboxes have been replaced by real-time chat, and even academic results have improved. Behavior is better, attendance is higher, and suspension levels have fallen.

“We’ve moved from 22 percent of kids being on grade level in math to 47 percent,” said Principal Jason Levy. “Writing volume and quality are both on the rise, and we anticipate seeing improved ELA scores.”

It’s hard to argue with benefits like these and considering that 85 percent of children at NYC IS 339 qualify for free school lunches, it’s perhaps foolish to try. Intel hardly benefited from its spat with the One Laptop Per Child program which accused it of selling its low-priced Classmate PCs below cost in order to block the program’s advance.

But while Google has a non-profit arm, it’s a public company, not a charity. The app suite is free for education institutions (as well as for non-profits with fewer than 3,000 users) but paid elements are never far away. Google Message Security, a system that allows administrators to filter messages based on their source, their destination or their content, is free now but the offer ends after June 2010. Google Message Discovery, a useful extra that archives all domain messages, is available to schools from Postini… for a 66 percent discount. Using the system for alumni only requires enabling ads.

Where’s the Competition?

Those additions though are optional. More worrying is that Google’s free system crowds out competition. It’s little different to Microsoft stuffing Windows with its own free software, restricting the ability of competitors to bring out better programs. Only companies with the clout and pockets of a Google or a Microsoft can afford to create loss-leaders like these and offer them on such a broad basis and to such large clients. There is a danger then that with one system offered for free from one company, the educational programs available in schools may not develop with the kind of dynamism usually seen in the tech field. The Westminster University student who built a Web page about medical studies, for example, could have done the same thing with any one of a number of other programs, many of them better than Google Pages.

But perhaps most worrying of all is Google’s targeting of young people. Google isn’t a sugary, fizzy drink that will make kids obese and send them to the dentist, but putting their products in schools will make children familiar with them. When they leave school, it’s more likely that those former students will continue using Gmail, Google Chat and the other systems they’ve become accustomed to using at school. Google’s Education Apps provide a way for a large company to place its products in the hands of millions of young people, making their products the default choice for life.

It’s certainly possible that Google was motivated by nothing more than a sense of goodwill and a desire to improve the world’s education establishments through better communication and improved collaboration. Those benefits have certainly resulted. But there’s also no question that Google too is benefitting from working with schools and universities — and by pushing aside competitors as it puts its product into the hands of young future users.

Image: blip .

It would be great if a product’s success was all about the idea. Come up with the right concept and it doesn’t matter what the product looks like as long as it does the job. But the opposite is usually true. A product that looks appealing can often sell more than one that does the job better. An apple will squish a hunger flatter than a candy bar will, for example, but it’s the Hersheys that are next to the supermarket cash desks, not the fruit stands. A candy designer knows how to put temptation on the packet; an apple grower, not so much. If look-and-feel are so important for the success of a product then, every entrepreneur with a smart idea needs to know at least a little about creating products that don’t just work well but which look attractive too.

That starts with understanding constraints. Video game developer Dino Dini has identified two kinds of constraints that dictate a product’s design: non-negotiable constraints are the product’s essential functions – a dating site, for example, has to be able to hold data, display profiles and allow members to communicate;  negotiable constraints are the optional extras around which the designer can get creative. The site’s colors, for example, the way that profiles are displayed and even the decision to include video chat or instant messaging are all negotiable constraints. The site has to allow members to get in touch but how they do it and what they’re looking at while they do it are negotiable.

Get the non-negotiable constraints wrong and the product won’t work. Get the negotiable constraints wrong and the product won’t sell.

The first stage of thinking about a product’s design then is to separate the functions from the extras, then let the designer figure out how to make those extras stand out.

Keep It Simple, Stupid

Simplicity is usually important too. One of the most popular design approaches is summed up by the acronym KISS: “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” The phrase is said to originate from Kelly Johnson, lead engineer on the plane design team Lockheed Skunk Works, for whom it meant “Keep It Simple And Stupid.” He intended the jets he built to be simple enough for an engineer with just a handful of tools to repair. Today though, the approach has a much simpler requirement: designs have to be basic enough for people to use without getting confused and turning away.

That’s easier agreed than done. Products tend to start out with one simple idea. As competition heats up, more features are added so that a page that used to contain just a search box, ends up with links to images, maps, news, iGoogle and more. And an email option that allows users to receive and send messages becomes a place where everyone can suddenly see who each other is emailing.

That isn’t to say that growth is a bad design concept. But growth that gets in the way of the non-negotiables, making them harder to use, is always a bad thing. It’s important to identify what your product needs to do at the start of the design process but it’s vital not to forget those features as the design and the product develop.

The first steps are particularly important. The home page of a website, for example, can lead to a range of different actions. Visitors can be asked to sign up, invited to search, tempted to download and offered a video to play to name just four. When a user reaches a site then, he’s got no idea what he’s going to have to do next. Smart design makes that understanding simple so that the user can find his way to the site’s most important goal quickly. Often, that means hiding all of the alternative options or making the most vital one stand out more prominently with a large button or central positioning. Google, for example, might now have a much more cluttered home page than it once had, but the main option is still offered first and it’s placed front and center. The home page of hosting company GoDaddy is much harder to navigate. Should users search for a domain name, buy a cheap one, or click on any of the dozens of other links on the page? A product might have more than one non-negotiable function but if users can’t reach the most important one immediately, they’ll go elsewhere.

Build Personas

Understanding what it will take to move a user to reach that goal though means understanding the user. That’s a vital part of design that’s often overlooked. Marketers like to focus their efforts on demographics, but too often developers will forget about the sort of person who’s actually going to be clicking the buttons as they focus on the shape of the buttons themselves. Addressing Bar Camp in London in 2008, Amanda Jahn, Yahoo! Answer’s Lead UX Designer, talked about using data from user testing, customer service emails, search logs, blogs and suggestion boards to create personas that include their likes, dislike, background and behavior. Some of those “personas,” she said, are going to be more important to the success of the product than others so designers need to make sure that their needs are met first. It’s not enough, it seems, to make things simple; you also have to make things simple for a particular group of users.

Design is usually something best left to professional creative types – the people who spent years at art school doing strange things with their hair and getting invited to parties while the geeks were busy coding. But it’s not something that only they should understand. Good design is such a vital part of the success of any product that every developer and entrepreneur needs to understand the constraints of their product, how simplicity can deliver users to those functions and what sort of users they need to appeal to.

That’s just good design.

Photography: Steve Wampler

When it comes to listing a product’s unique sales points, there’s always one point that’s sharper than all the others. It doesn’t matter how many features the product has, how many problems it solves or how much it will change the user’s life, if the market believes the product is “cool” it will fly off the shelves. So what makes a product cool, can coolness be created and what can a developer do to add that all-important ingredient to its offerings?

Design certainly helps. Apple wasn’t the first company to place digital music on portable players but Jonathan Ive’s clean design, with its plain white face and silver back, made the company’s music player as much a fashion accessory as an electronic gadget. Being seen with an iPod in the device’s early days marked a user as someone who was up with the latest fashions. Even if you couldn’t hear the tunes they were listening to — beyond the irritating thump of a bass delivered second-hand — you knew that an iPod user’s white earphones marked them out as someone who was serious about their music.

It wasn’t just color that made the iPod cool though. Its user interface was different too. The clickwheel, a mixture of mechanical buttons and a touch sensitive ring, made users wonder why no one had thought of that before. It made the device simple to use; a flick of the thumb was enough to change volume or move to the next song without looking at the screen or searching for the right button. The iPod was cool to use as well as look at.

It’s that simplicity that helped to mark the iPod’s coolness. Early MP3 players, such as Saehan’s MPMan and Diamond Multimedia’s Rio, seemed to owe their main design influence to Sony’s Walkman. Or perhaps a brick. The Rio, in particular, was packed with more buttons and switches than you can find on a typical flight deck. By doing away with all of that complexity, Apple showed that it was forward-looking, current and different. It marked a break with the past – and revolutionaries are always young, cool and trendy. Just ask the estate of Che Guevara.

Google Was Cool… Once

Disruptive technologies then can be cool too. For a long time, Google was the coolest company in Silicon Valley, the place where every geek wanted to work (and a place that could make most workers wish they were geeks.) It acquired that image by producing a product that looked as simple and frill-free as Apple’s iPod but which did an equally good job at flattening the competition. At a time when AOL and Netscape were ruling the Web, watching those then-giants take a sock to the jaw from a company that was then the little guy on the block was cool. And it did it the right way too: it produced a product that was unique, effective and which did a much better job than anything available at the time. Better still, Google became almost as well known for the degree to which it pampered its staff as for the reliability of its service. Google epitomized the coolness of the underdog. When a small company suddenly starts wiping the floor with big, heavy opposition, individuals cheer — especially when the company is seen to support the individuals who made it happen.

The downside though is that that sort of coolness does come with a time limit. Google isn’t as cool as it used to be. It’s now a big company too, and while the Googleplex might still be a nice place to work, the firm’s “Do no evil” slogan has taken a battering from its involvement in China, its forays into markets as far-flung as mobile phones and office software, and its attempts to build a digital library, regardless of what authors (another kind of underdog) think. Coolness is powerful but it’s also fragile. Pick it up for being small but extraordinarily good, and you might find that it starts to disappear when you’re big and merely as good as everyone expects you to be.

Unless you’re also a master of hype. This is a very different kind of coolness – a manufactured kind, created in advertising offices and nurtured through public relations, image-building and careful branding. Again, it’s no surprise that Apple, today’s ultra-cool manufacturer, is the master of this technique too. Very few of Apple’s products are actually as innovative as they look. Capacitive sensing, the technology behind the clickwheel, has been known since 1919, and the clickwheel itself was first designed by touchpad manufacturer Synaptics. Quantum Research, a UK technology company, also sued Apple for copyright infringement. The iPad, despite months of anticipation, has delivered nothing that didn’t exist already. While it might not have been possible to buy an outsized iPod Touch before, it has been possible to buy tablet computers, even with touch screens.

Apple’s genius isn’t just to create attractive products  but to make cool  new versions of the kinds of products already on the market.

Measuring Coolness

Coolness isn’t something tangible. It’s not something you can measure in the same way that you can count screen size or memory capacity. It’s more powerful than that. It can come from a design that speaks to the market and turns buyers into members of an elite club (in the iPod’s case, a club of devoted music fans). That can happen even if the club is enormous, non-selective and open to anyone willing to open their wallets wide enough.

It can come from being sharp enough to change your industry even when you’re so small the industry has barely noticed you. That’s a coolness connected to your competence – the fairest kind – but it’s also a coolness that can disappear once you become established.

And it can also come from careful marketing. That’s the hardest kind of coolness to create and maintain. In fact, one of the things that makes Apple so cool is its ability to still be cool despite being a big company that produces proprietary software, distributes copy-protected content and runs a capricious monopoly over the applications created by independent developers.

It is possible then to create coolness, but you have to be cool enough to know how to do it.

Photography: franz88

He’s got the kind of career success the rest of us can only dream of. A record sixteen Grand Slam titles. Twenty-three consecutive Grand Slam semi-final appearances. A world ranking of 1. And generally acclaimed as the greatest tennis player who  ever picked up a racket, perhaps even the greatest sportsman ever. Roger Federer’s success is down to his ability to whack a ball across a court faster and more accurately than anyone has ever done before, but success at anything is never down to just the technical skills required for that particular field. Lots of competitors will have those abilities too. Being the best also means having the right mentality, the right preparation and the right attitude to make the most of the talents you were born with. So what can Roger Federer teach us about achieving perfection?

Recognize Your Potential for Perfection

The first lesson is to know what you’re good at.

That’s easier than it sounds and it’s something that even Federer struggled with, as well as the people around him. Asked after winning his latest title, the 2010 Australian Open, what the secret of his success was, Federer’s answer was very blunt:

“There’s no secret behind it,” he said. “I mean, [I’m] definitely a very talented player.”

That wasn’t particularly modest, or revealing, but he then went on to say:

“I always knew I had something special, but I didn’t know it was like, you know, that crazy.”

He wasn’t the only one not to spot immediately that his talent was that “crazy.” Adolf Kacovsky — a tennis coach at The Old Boys Tennis Club where Federer was the star pupil — would laugh when the 10-year-old would say that he would be the best in the world.

“I thought that he would perhaps become the best player in Switzerland or Europe but not the best in the world. He had it in his head and he worked at it,” he told Rene Stauffer, author of The Roger Federer Story: Quest for Perfection.

It’s easy to spot when you’re better than average at something. But it takes confidence to believe that you can be the best at it, and work hard enough to make full use of that talent in order to get there.

Patience Makes Perfect

It also takes time. When Federer enters a competition now, the expectation is that he’ll reach at least the semi-finals, even if he doesn’t win it completely. It wasn’t always that way. Federer played in seventeen Grand Slams before he won his first. He might not have looked back since, but his experience does show that there are no short cuts to perfection. Even the most talented performers still have to pay their dues, learn the business and build experience.

Federer’s playing history shows that perfection isn’t born, it’s made. That lesson of patience and practice is one that entrepreneurs need to learn too.

Know When to Be Perfect

Ask many people at the top of their profession about the secret to success and they’ll wheel out the cliché, “I work hard and play hard.” But lots of people put in long hours in the office and equally long hours in the night club with nothing to show for it but an average salary and a large hangover.

Today Federer trains as hard as he competes, and there’s no evidence that he’s a hellraiser in the evenings. Married with two small children, his home life doesn’t appear to have any of the tabloid excitement enjoyed by… say, Tiger Woods. But a telling story from his youth does give us one clue into the best way to use perfection. According to Marco Chiudinelli, a Swiss tennis player who played at the same club as Federer when they were children, the two would treat training fairly lightly. They’d goof around a lot and were frequently thrown off the court. Roger would lose to just about everyone. His attitude changed completely when it came time to compete however:

“When it came down to business, he could flip a switch and become a completely different person,” he said in Stauffer’s book. “I could give him a thrashing in training but when we played at a tournament together, he gave me a thrashing. Even back then he was a real competitor.”

Perfection takes focus, effort and energy. It’s not something that can be maintained constantly without the risk of exhaustion and burn-out. It’s notable that while Rafael Nadal has had knee problems and Andy Murray has taken time out after injuring his wrist, Federer has had relatively few injuries. His style of play allows him to achieve perfection at just the times he needs it most.

Achieve Perfection One Goal at a Time

With Pete Sampras’ Grand Slam record already broken, there’s little else for Federer to obviously aim at. Commentators though are busy discussing the possibility of Federer picking up a calendar Grand Slam, winning all of the four biggest tournaments in the same year.

Federer though is having none of it.

“I won’t just put the entire calendar just around trying to win the calendar Grand Slam,” he said recently. “It’s something if it happens, it does and it’s great, but it’s not something that’s like my number one goal, not at all. It’s the same as I haven’t put a number on how many Grand Slams I want to try to win. Whatever happens happens.”

For Federer perfection isn’t a goal. The goal is to win the next tournament, the next match, the next point. As all of those things happen, perfection is reached. Aim for perfection though, and you’re more likely to experience frustration and disappointment — exactly the kind of thing that’s likely to blow you off course long before you reach your ultimate goal.

Reaching perfection isn’t simple, and it’s not something that’s available to everyone. You can do all of things that that Roger Federer does and still come in at just “very good.” But you can also make a perfect effort, and that’s what Federer teaches us all to do. It comes by believing in your abilities (even when others don’t), having the patience to learn and practice, knowing when to put in your greatest focus, and looking to achieve success one step at a time.

Combine those lessons with talent and you can Grand Slam your market too.

The launch is the most important moment in the life of any product. It’s the moment when the entrepreneur gets his or her first notion of whether the idea is going to fly. After all the months and years of development, after all the dreams of striking it rich and drowning in cash, the product is available and customers are starting to buy. The money is coming in at last. But while a launch marks day one in the life of the product, it’s actually just one more day in the life of the product’s development – and in its marketing too. The success of the launch might depend on the quality of the item itself, but it depends no less on the anticipation built up before the big day.

That anticipation is a key element in any sales strategy. The route to a purchase usually passes through awareness and recognition before it reaches a desire strong enough to lead someone to part with their cash. The market has to know the product is going to exist before it can decide that it wants it.

Apple Leaks

The real master of this kind of anticipation-building is Apple. In an article in MacObserver recently, John Martellaro, Apple’s former senior marketing manager, described how he was sometimes asked to make controlled leaks, despite the company’s official policy of not discussing unreleased products:

The way it works is that a senior exec will come in and say, “We need to release this specific information. John, do you have a trusted friend at a major outlet? If so, call him/her and have a conversation. Idly mention this information and suggest that if it were published, that would be nice. No e-mails!”

Those leaks though are used to do more than whet the audience’s appetite. According to Martellaro, Apple  also uses leaks to solve problems. They could be used to give a slow-moving partner a push; to test market reaction to a price point; to confuse a competitor; and also to create expectations about a forthcoming event so the right sort of people are in the audience.

For large companies – especially those that generate as much interest as Apple – leaks can always be effective at building pre-launch interest. But small firms bringing out their first product will struggle to get press attention even with widely distributed press releases. The Web’s self-publishing tools though make it possible to skip past the mainstream news outlets and bring snippets of information about what they’re doing directly to their market.

Twitter’s Anticipation Platform

The easiest way to do that is through Twitter. The microblogging site allows a company to shoot out quick bulletins about the project it’s working on, creating curiosity with each post. In the days before blogger Darren Rowse released a new photography ebook, for example, he posted the following tweets:

Releasing a new E-book on DPS in 36 hours, entering into the ‘frenzy zone’

And

getting ready to launch a new DPS photography e-book – am in a prelaunch frenzy – amazing how many windows I’ve got open right now

Those tweets are clearly about Darren and his life, rather than the product, which is the way that Twitter works best, but there’s no question that the followers that Darren has already gathered would have had their interest piqued by the posts. They’d want to know what the book is about and whether they should be buying it. The tweets themselves might have been small but the effect they can have on the anticipation before the launch can be massive.

But that depends on having an audience ready to receive those messages in the first place. Again, this is something that Twitter makes simple. Creating a large follower list can take a little time but it mostly involves lots of active tweeting and chatting. It also helps though to have a popular website whose readers will also migrate to Twitter in order to pick up more information from a source they trust. If Twitter is one way of providing small pieces of information about your product to your market then, a blog is another.

The problem with a blog though is that there’s no reason not to spill the beans completely. When space is unlimited, it’s possible to use a blog post to describe exactly what your product will contain and what it’s likely to do. Claiming the need to protect confidentiality is unlikely to help; audiences will care little about your need to protect yourself, and far more about its own desire to know what you’re doing. Tweets though have to be small and because space is strictly limited, you always have the perfect excuse for providing only the smallest of glances into what you’re doing. You get the anticipation but because you don’t provide the audience with satisfaction, you also get the curiosity that means they care when the launch happens.

So how you deliver the information matters. What sort of information you deliver matters too.

Darren Rowse’s tweets revealed nothing about the product but did describe the work that went into making it. That’s always one useful approach: bring people behind the scenes of your business and you connect them to your business. On Twitter, that happens personally: Darren Rowse’s followers saw not how a company was creating a product but how he was working on it. That’s a much closer connection.

Apple though has been building anticipation about its tablet not by taking people behind the scenes – officially, nothing was said at all – but by leaking sneak peeks of the product. Letting them try a little, then taking it away, can be an even more effective way of getting an audience excited about a product before it launches.

The launch day might mark the first opportunity for a market to meet a product but it shouldn’t be the first time buyers hear about it. There’s plenty of groundwork that can be done in the days and weeks before the product is released, and it all helps to determine whether the launch and the product will be a success.

Search engine optimization is now an essential part of marketing. It might not be as fun as producing creative ad ideas. It might not be as exciting as running competitions or coming up with new promotions. But when the result can be a steady flow of free leads and a website with a high ranking, all of that content creation and link-building pays in spades. So search engine experts spend hours flirting for just a touch of Google love, even as they’re having their head turned by Bing while still wondering whether Yahoo! has anything to offer.

Focusing on those big search engines makes sense. According to HitWise, Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask together took 98.84 percent of all Web searches in 2009. While the proportion of searches shared between them might change a little, especially as Bing continues to eat up Yahoo’s users, the big engines’ hold over the search market has changed little. In 2006, Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Live and Ask accounted for 98.34 percent of searches, still leaving little more than one percent for other players. But those figures might be a touch misleading. They don’t, for example, take into account the number of searches made through Google’s Custom Search Engines, user-made directories that focus on a small subset of sites and reached not through Google’s home page but through search boxes on specialist Web pages. While these are likely to make up only a tiny proportion of Google’s total searches, they can provide some highly targeted marketing.

Fewer Listings Mean Higher Rankings

Anyone searching for a notary service, for example, is likely to turn to Google to find a local office, but it’s also possible that they’ll surf first to a site about notaries to find out what they do and what they can offer. Once there, they could find themselves looking for a notary on a search engine created by NotaryBids.com. Any notary business can ask to be listed and any site can place NotaryBids’ search box on its pages.

The advantage for NotaryBids is clear: they get a cut of revenue from the ads on the search results page. But the benefits for notary firms are also clear: they get to put their name in front of a small but highly targeted audience. Even more importantly, while NotaryBids’ search engine is powered by Google and uses Google’s algorithm to rank results, the smaller number of businesses listed makes it easier for sites to rise up the rankings. There’s a better chance of appearing in the top ten search results when there are only eleven sites with your main keyword in the search engine.

There’s no shortage of similar types of Google-based search engines serving a range of other niches. PogoFrog, for example, is aimed specifically at the medical profession, while Insurance-search-engine.com gives insurance businesses a chance to reach their markets.

Entry to search engines like these though is restricted. The search engine’s creator gets to choose which sites will appear in the results. Because many are created not as search engines alone but as search facilities on niched sites, that can mean that competitors will find themselves excluded, and entry will be restricted to partners. There are plenty of other search engines though that are equally niched and which are completely open to any relevant site.

BusinessFinance.com, for example, uses a Google search box to search within the site and across the Web, but it has its own matching software to allow company owners to browse the site for capital and financing. Octopart was created by two physics graduate students who were fed up looking for electronics parts in different catalogs. Their search engine allows engineers to find bits for circuit boards and invites distributors and manufacturers to sign up. And WeddingSearches.com is just one search engine among many trying to help couples navigate their nuptials.

$150 For a Directory Listing

Most sites like these don’t charge for submissions. The more comprehensive their listings, the more likely they are to attract searchers — and the more money they’ll be able to make out of advertising – so they’re happy to accept any relevant site that wants to join. When a niched search engine or directory gets very big though, demand for space and the necessity for a company to be listed can be high enough for the site to charge a fee. That’s what happened to EngineersEdge, a portal for design, engineering and manufacturing professionals with more than 500,000 slightly nerdy visitors each month. To stand a chance of reaching that audience, businesses have to pay $150 for inclusion.

But is it really worthwhile? If almost all search traffic is going through the Big Four – and most of that through Google – is it worth spending time trying to get a site  listed on a niched search engine?

Much depends on the size of your niche and, more importantly, the number of searches your niche’s search engine receives. As long as submissions are free and acceptance no more than a matter of completing a form then there’s nothing to lose and free traffic to gain. Even if a niched search engine only attracts a fraction of one percent of total search engine traffic, those visitors will be targeted, self-selected and keen on your services. If they know about the search engine, they’re going to be knowledgeable and dedicated — and ready to be converted into buyers. A niched search engine then might not deliver giant streams of traffic, but the users it will deliver will be valuable.

Whether it’s worth paying for a listing will depend on the strength of the portal. Even EngineerEdge’s 500,000 visitors will have to compete with $150-worth of clicks from AdWords — and they sit on the side of search results.

There is one more opportunity that a niched search engine can offer a growing business: the possibility of creating one yourself. Google’s Custom Search Engine makes creating a search engine for your field a breeze. You’ll make money from the advertising — and direct traffic to your own site too.

As an employee, it’s easy to make more money. You knock on the boss’s door, point out all of the wonderful things you’ve been doing for the company and ask him to add 10 percent to your salary. If he laughs, you either ask what you still need to do to get that raise or you start looking for another job. Either way, ambitious types should always know what’s coming next. For freelancers though, increasing earnings is a little tougher. The most obvious way – to charge more – can  have the effect of  reducing your income as you price yourself out of the market. There’s often a difference between what a freelancer thinks he’s worth and what the market says he’s worth. But there are a few things you can do to raise your income without raising your prices.

Increase Productivity

Perhaps the most obvious is to work harder. One of the biggest shocks for workers new to freelancing is the recognition that time is money. While it’s theoretically true that freelancers are free to take time off whenever they want, provided there’s no deadline looming (and when does that ever happen?), it’s certainly true that they’ll be counting the amount of money they didn’t earn during those hours at the beach. The more billable work you can pack into a day then, the more you’ll be able to earn.

Productivity systems like Getting Things Done might help – although their complexity could actually cost you time too – but really the most effective way to increase your productivity is to create short bursts of focused attention. Work in a café, for example, and you’ll know you’ve got a seat for about two hours, long enough to complete one task. That mini-deadline could be enough to keep you staring at the screen, instead of looking through the window. And if that doesn’t work, you could always choose a café without an Internet connection.

Aim to Upsell

Clients usually choose a freelancer who can complete a particular task. But it’s likely that there’s a whole bunch of other jobs you could be doing for the client as well, and some of them might just pay more. Each time you complete a job for a new client, look at other jobs you could be doing for her, and create a package deal.

Don’t pitch it right away though. If the client thought that project was good for her, she would have asked you to do it in the first place. Persuading her will take time, but most importantly, it will take trust. Wait until you’ve completed two or three jobs for the same client, proven that your knowledge as well as your skills have value, and then pitch your idea. You should find that you’re able to turn one job into two.

Increase Your Skills

Upselling will let you do more with the same set of skills. Increasing your skills though, will let you do more valuable kinds of work. For tech types, that’s relatively easy. Programmers can always add a new programming language to their resumes. Designers can learn new software or experiment with new techniques. But even freelance writers can sharpen their editing skills or take classes in technical or medical writing, niches with particularly high pay.

It might not be simple, fun or quick but it’s worth doing anyway, if only because it keeps your skills up to date, and lets you compete with new and better-skilled freelancers entering the marketplace.

Replace Your Old Clients

The first clients a talented freelancer picks up get a bargain. Demand is low so their negotiating power is strong. When the alternative is an empty book, a new freelancer will often be willing to accept a rate much lower rate than his work is worth. As his book fills though, time becomes rare and the freelancer starts to charge more. But that still leaves those old clients who were lucky enough to pick up an early deal.

Those are the people you can ask more money from. You know their work well enough that you’ll be hard to replace. Time will mean that you can at least ask for an inflation-linked rise. And if they prefer not to pay, then you’ll be able to replace them with a new client who’s willing to pay the full amount.

On the other hand though, familiarity with an old client can mean that you’re able to complete their work faster than you used to. Increasing productivity can mean shutting down the Web and turning off the radio but it can also mean working faster, something that happens naturally the more you do a particular job. Before you demand more cash from your old clients, it’s worth looking at whether you’re not already earning the same money in less time.

Outsource Your Work

And finally, the best way to increase your earnings is to hire freelancers yourself. It’s this approach that’s allowed Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, to lead a life of apparent idleness broken only by professional speaking, writing and promotional work. Some tasks you’ll always need to do. Your signature work, for example, particularly complex coding or writing that carries your name you’ll probably want to micromanage to the extent that you may as well do it yourself. (Although if Damien Hirst can hire people to do his paintings for him, then what can’t be outsourced?) But much of the day-to-day work that most freelancers do can often be passed on to other freelancers who charge less than you do for an hour of time. Simple coding, basic design and low-level editing can be trusted to hired help, freeing you up to earn a premium in that time.

It’s something that tends to happen only when the freelancer has enough work to pass around, is confident enough in his abilities to oversee the work of others and is ambitious enough to want to turn a one-freelancer enterprise into a growing business. It’s also the kind of thing that can remove all the limits to your freelance earnings.

Photography: Scott Feldstein

Cubicle walls might not have been pretty but they’ve always been good for productivity. Not seeing your neighbor might have freed you up to take a snooze, fire up the solitaire or surf to the sports pages, but it also meant less gossip, fewer temptations to chat, and the fear that your boss might peer over the wall and catch you in the act. So what happens when you give the office a miss and swap the cubicle for a coffee shop? What can you do to ensure that working in a social environment won’t mean all sociability and no work?

It’s a question that’s become increasingly important as cafes recognize the power of wifi to pull in regular customers. A survey in 2006 found that about a fifth of the US workforce spent at least some time working outside a traditional office, and estimated that the rate was growing by about 10 percent a year. With hi-tech firms feeling the squeeze in the recession and even skilled geeks picking up pink slips and  “consultancy” business cards, it’s no surprise that so many café tables are now packed with Macs.

Etiquette between café workers has now become clear but while those rules will keep the atmosphere pleasant, they won’t necessary keep your productivity high. That happens first when you choose the right café. Even chains serving identical drinks in identical décor can vary in atmosphere. A Starbucks on a main street will often be filled with shoppers resting their feet and swapping sales stories. A branch next to a law firm will contain suits discussing briefs and sharing strategies. Each of those cafes will feel very different to freelancers opening their laptops and hoping to hunker down to some focused effort. It’s always harder to work when others around you are having fun. Look up from your keyboard to see others typing away though, and you’ll feel guilty you’re not doing the same.

Work Where Others Are Working

Rule one for productive café workers then, is to work in a café where others are working, meet in a café where others hold meetings — and have fun in a café where others are chatting.

Rule two is to keep your distance. There might not be walls between tables in a café but there should be enough space for workers to get on with work without being tempted to sit and talk. Etiquette demands a nodded greeting between regulars but productivity requires nothing more to be said before it’s time to close up and head back to the home office.

That’s not as easy as it sounds. Asking a fellow coffeeholic to watch your Mac while you make space for another brew can easily spark an opening for a conversation. Sharing a power outlet gives enough in common for two workers to feel like old friends. And talking can make for useful networking. One of the benefits promoted by co-working spaces is that they allow freelancing geeks to talk, chat, problem-solve, and perhaps even build businesses together. The conversation and the company are as much a part of the package as the table space and the Internet connection. When you see the person at the next café table not as a potential disruption but as a possible partner, it’s tempting to spend time deepening those connections instead of building your product.

In practice though, those sorts of benefits rarely materialize. Fellow café workers might make for reasonable neighbors but there’s little reason to believe that they’ll also make good partners. Once you’ve assessed another freelancer’s ability to help your company — and found it wanting — it’s best to stick to nodding terms so that you don’t spend your time talking instead of working.

Add Stress to Your Coffee

Where you sit matters too. Café regulars tend to choose the same seats each day but it’s important to choose the right seat. Obviously access to a power outlet will  be crucial — otherwise you’ll be spending half your time glancing at the battery icon — but choosing a seat that lets you sit with your back to the wall can help with productivity as well. You’ll be able to see everyone else (and see them working) but you won’t be stuck with the feeling that someone is reading over your shoulder. There are few things more disruptive than that. Cafes are public which means that to protect your productivity you’ll also have to do whatever you can to protect your privacy.

But perhaps the biggest threat to productivity when working in a café isn’t the atmosphere, the conversations or the peeping toms trying to spy on your screen. It’s the comfort. Cafes are designed to make people relax but studies show that a little stress can improve productivity, even if a lot of stress has the opposite effect. To be at your most productive then, you’ll want to introduce just a little bit of pressure even in a place as calming as a café. You can do that by setting yourself strict limits on the length of time you’ll sit and drink. Knowing that you’ll only be there for two hours — and that you have that long to complete a specific task — will get you working against the clock. You can also try breaking the routine by visiting the café at a different time of day or trying a different watering hole. The unfamiliar might not be as stressful as a tight deadline but it might just be enough to make you retreat into your laptop and get on with your work.

Cafes have turned out to be great places for digital nomads to use as replacement offices. They’re everywhere, they’re affordable, and they come complete with good refreshments. But using them in a way that lets you work rather than relax, get things done rather than watch waiters get things done, and produce results rather than just a large bill, does take a little care. Get it right though and you should find that your local coffee bar beats the cubicle any day.

Twitter’s hashtags have become an essential tool. Conference organizers use them to expand their reach. Communities use them to track natural disasters. And of course, protesters use them to tell the world what they’re doing and what their governments are doing back. It’s no surprise then that spammers also use them to hit eyeballs and push their dodgy goods, and that the most popular trending topics always seem to be light and breezy: three things to say after sex tends to pop up a lot and everyone always seems keen to announce what they’re listening to right now. But essentially, hashtags are a way for Twitter’s users to organize the information they’re producing on the site. They’re a means of categorization, allowing anyone to find the data they’re looking for without wasting hours sorting through irrelevant posts. In other words, hashtags are efficiency tools. So how else can you use them to improve your productivity and cut back on wasted time?

The easiest way to use hashtags for productivity is to identify the tags that are most relevant to you and create a series of saved searches from your Twitter page. You won’t need to do more than click the tag to bring up a list of the latest results so you’ll even save the time it takes to type the hashtag into the search field. First though, you’d need to know which tags you need to be looking for. Directories like Twubs and wikis like What The Trend can tell you what the different tags mean, and Brizzly, a social media platform, provides a little explanation together with each trending topic. But in practice you’re unlikely to need them. As you follow people you find interesting on Twitter, you’ll naturally come across hashtags that your community is using. Save the most common terms, create a relevant list, and you might just be able to cut down on the time spent checking Twitter for interesting tweets. Those hashtag links will bring up the best tweets on your topic right away.

Categorize Your Tweets

Saving hashtag searches will help you to quickly find tweets that have already been categorized by others. But hashtags can also be a good way to categorize your own tweets. It doesn’t matter whether other people use those hashtags or not –- in fact, you don’t want people to use them. You want to create a system that allows you to pull up a list of the tweets you’ve posted that fit a particular category.

The #quote tag, for example, is used by people who like to toss inspiring quotes into their timelines, an easy way for people who have nothing interesting to say themselves to add new content and win retweets. Create a unique tag for your own quotes and place it in your tweets in addition to the #quote tag, something like #[username]qts, and not only will you turn up when someone searches for quotes, but you’ll also be able to quickly pull up a list of your own tweeted quotes. While it might not make the most exciting reading, it will at least ensure that you don’t tweet the same quote twice and it will help you to figure out what kind of quote you might want to include next.

For other kinds of tweets, categorization by hashtag will let you keep track of your posts in the same way that categories let you group posts on blogs. Replies could have one kind of tag, tweets about your business another, tweets about your blog a third kind, and tweets about your product a fourth tag. Include the occasional tweet listing the tags you’re using and you’ll help your new readers to find old posts they might have missed. And by calling up posts that use those tags you’ll be able to see which kind of tweets you should be tweeting next.

Categorize Other People’s Tweets

That’s particularly important when it comes to Twitter-based conversations. You can’t categorize other people’s tweets, and while you can favorite them, that only gives one overall category for the tweets you’ve found important enough to answer. Fave all the tweets you’ve replied to and, if you’re chatty – as you should be on Twitter — you’ll struggle to find old posts that caught your eye. You’ll have the same fight flicking through your own replies to see the posts you were replying to.

Include a hashtag in your replies though and you’ll create a layer of categorization beneath “favorites” and “replies.” You’ll be categorizing your own replies but more importantly, because you can click through to see the tweet you replied to, you’ll also be able to categorize other people’s tweets that have caught your eye. Using the hashtag #replyblog, for example, will let you find the conversations that you’ve had about blogging.

And there is one more way that hashtags can improve your productivity. They can stop you using Twitter so much. One of the reasons that Twitter is such a time-waster is that you never what kind of post is going to be coming up next. You don’t know if those “2 new tweets” are going to be something important, relevant and unmissable, something fun and entertaining, or something pointless and dull that makes you wonder whether it isn’t time to unfollow. Restrict your tweet-reading to hashtags on a service like TweetGrid or TweetDeck and you’ll only be getting information that you know you want. You’ll also be getting a lot less information overall.

Most productivity systems are centered on categorizations, whether that’s in the form of multiple to-do lists or the 43 folders of Getting Things Done. Twitter’s hashtags make it possible to add multiple category levels to your own tweets, allowing you to keep track of the information you’ve posted in the past, as well as find relevant data that other people have tweeted too. Lists might not have taken off on Twitter but with a little creativity, you should find that smart hashtagging can save you time, keep your reading relevant and improve the way you keep track of track of Twitter’s communications.

Photography: Rich Anderson

There’s never a good time to start a new business. Whenever you decide to set up your company, seek funding, and launch your product, you’re going to be battling with competitors, struggling to bring in your first customers, and dealing with all of the setbacks and surprises that come with starting something new. Make the moves during a boom-time, and you’ll find that there are plenty of other firm flush with cash and racing to get their products out ahead of you. Do it when times are hard and you’ll struggle to persuade buyers and investors to put their hands in their pockets. But that’s not a reason not to do it. In fact, a shrinking economy can throw up all sorts of advantages for entrepreneurs looking to turn their business ideas into successful companies.

Perhaps the most important is motivation. Creating a start-up is hard work and initially at least, you’ll be doing most of that work yourself. There will be little, if any, income so you’ll probably have to squeeze the development, marketing and research around your day job. You’ll be putting in long hours, giving up your weekends and free time, and you’ll have no idea whether your plan really is going to play out or whether, like most new companies, it will crash, burn and become just another line on your resume.

When the effort is so real and the benefits so unclear, it’s easy to keep dreaming and stick with what you know does work: the day job that you might not find very satisfying but which you can count on to pay the bills.

The Recession Raises the Risk in Paid Work

During a downtime though, that day job doesn’t look quite so stable. While a start-up always carries risks, a recession brings those risks into salaried positions too, closing the gap between sticking to a job and starting a new business. Being able to control your own future can start to look a lot more attractive when the alternative is waiting for the boss to knock on the office door and call you in for that talk. At the very least, you want to have somewhere to land if the company does gives you the push.

And if you do find that you’re out, you’ll also discover that you have time. While job-searching is often described as a full-time job, in practice, it’s usually possible to send out resumes in the morning and have the afternoon free for building your own job. Even interviews won’t happen every day. Best of all, you won’t be the only one with hours to fill. A recession might mean a shortage of money but it also means that there’s no shortage of talent looking for ways to put their skills to use. When times are good, you’ll struggle to find a programmer, a designer or a copywriter willing to work for a song or a share of the profits. During the downturn, cafes and co-working spaces are filled with “consultants” and “contactors” hoping to stumble into a project that means they’ll be reading resumes instead of writing them. There’s no better time to build a team. Check out the people sitting next to you at Starbucks or work your social networks. At times like these everyone knows someone who’s either lost their job or could be about to. Even if they’re sitting pretty themselves, they’ll be happy to put out the word that there’s an opportunity available if it means they’re helping a friend.

A Downtime Means Being Cash-Poor but Time-Rich

There’s also no better time to find an office. As companies close, office space becomes available and rental prices fall. In 2008, even New York saw falls as high as 5.5 percent while the amount of sub-let space increased by 34 percent. Funding for a new business might be difficult to find in a recession but bargains are available everywhere. And that applies to other assets too. Businesses are much more open to negotiation when the alternative is an empty book. You might be able to push harder for better advertising rates on selected websites, or pick up deals on barely used office furniture and computer equipment.

Of course, that does still leave that problem of funding. But that’s going to be a problem in boom times too. A rising economy will deliver more money and a greater supply of angels and investors, but there are also more start-ups chasing that cash and booking appointments with those investors. The dot-com years, when it was possible to add “dotcom” to the end of a word and pick up a check for million bucks, are unlikely to return. But not all the money in the world has been wiped out and investors are still looking to put their funds behind a good idea. You might need a business plan that’s more persuasive and shows a faster road to profit than usual. And you might need names on the board that investors recognize — or which at least turn up well on Google. But if the idea is sound, and you push hard enough, you should still be able to find at least some of the funding you need.

Or best of all, the squeeze will make you discover that you didn’t actually need as much as you thought you did. Entrepreneur Rich Christiansen started CastleWave, an SEO firm, with a budget of just $5,000. It’s now worth over a million bucks. If he’d taken that to an investment firm, a large chunk of that value would have belonged to the investors.

Recessions are difficult for entrepreneurs because everyone is cash-poor. On the other hand, there are plenty of people who are also time-rich. Make the most of that time, invest it wisely, and you should find that when the economic tide rolls back in again, you’ve already built the kind of foundations that will keep your company afloat in good times and bad.

Image: sophistix

It’s the latest thing… apparently. Traditional tattoos are noughties, embroidered tattoos are nice. YouTube wedding dances are out, sword fight wedding dances are in. Imelda Marcos shoe closets are embarrassing, stiletto rolodexes are perfect for showing off. According to Trendhunter.com, a 30,000-strong community that tries to spot rising coolness before it cools off, those are just some of the trends that are currently on the way up. It’s the kind of information that’s supposed to be worth a fortune to companies keen to cash in on the next big thing. But can trendwatching really deliver returns for businesses?

Twitter certainly hopes so. The site includes a list of trending topics on its Web interface, letting users see the most popular discussion subjects at any time. Usually, those tend to be fairly banal. Standard subjects are often the music that people are listening to as they’re tweeting what they’re eating for lunch. Three words to say after sex frequently bubbles back into the list as do “omgfacts” and things that #WillGetYouSlapped. Where they come from, nobody knows but it’s hard to see how knowing that “”Queue” is the only word in the English language that is pronounced the same after removing the last 4 letters” is going to make someone some money.

And yet when Brizzly came out, a service that unites Twitter and Facebook into one social media platform and which also offers a short paragraph explaining what each trend is about, both Biz Stone and Evan Williams were quick to tweet about it and give it their thumbs up. The business option that Biz Stone has frequently hinted will soon be launched is said to include easy trend following among more obviously useful features that include multiple account users and mention alerts – information that can be accessed now through Trendistic. So far though, it seems that the only people who have managed to make money out of Twitter’s trends are the evil spammers who insert popular hashtags into their sales messages.

Trendwatching Unlocks Cool

But that doesn’t mean that trend following itself has  no value at all. Trendhunter.com defines trendwatching as “the science of identifying emerging shifts in our social behaviour and aspirations,” and claims that the information it gathers is used by industry professionals to develop products, generate ideas and keep marketing, media, design and strategic planners informed.

“Breakthrough ideas and strategic advantage hinge on the ability to anticipate trends and identify the next big thing,” the service claims. “By tracking the evolution of cool, Trend Hunters generate ideas, stimulate creativity, and ultimately unlock cool.”

Or to put it another way, its list of thousands of rising memes function as a kind of giant morgue file for creative types looking for inspiration. Art directors might not see it as a fleet of bandwagons ready for jumping on, so much as a place to copy and build on the smart ideas of others.

But trendwatching can do more than reveal original thoughts. It can also display which of those concepts is more likely to come out a winner. Helene Blowers, a self-confessed trend watcher who blogs about libraries and new technologies, has been tracking the rise of digital readers to discover whether the Kindle, the Nook, Sony’s Reader or the much-awaited Apple Tablet will be the format of choice for the future of e-books, and presumably replacing her bookshelves. The jury still seems to be out on which device will take the prize but it is clear that tracking the discussions might just reveal which of the platforms is currently the most popular. Compare the terms “Kindle,” “Nook” and “Sony Reader” on Trendistic, for example, and it becomes clear that Amazon’s device has consistently been a bigger talking point than its rivals:

Search for the tweets themselves that mention those terms and a publisher wondering which format to publish a book on first will be able to see whether Kindle is more discussed because it’s better or because Amazon has just removed a bunch of purchases from its customers’ devices again. Of course, the sales figures of each of those devices might be just as revealing, but they’re only available if the manufacturer agrees to reveal them. Discussion numbers are available to anyone.

There’s Money in Trends

Where trendwatching can be most valuable though is in finance. Ron Insana, author of Trendwatching: Don’t be Fooled by the Next Investment Fad, Mania or Bubble argues that when it comes to investment, those who have paid attention to the patterns of previous trends are able to spot bubbles as they rise, placing their money in when the bubble begins to grow, taking it out before it pops – and cleaning up after the pieces have finished flying around. The best investment professionals, he writes, are able to recognize the patterns in rising trends and spot the moment when behavior becomes irrational.

“At that point, these ‘trend watchers’ depart the scene, content to let others catch the last leg up.”

So trendwatching can function as a source of inspiration. It can reveal solid figures about the relative popularity of competing products and ideas. And it can even enable savvy professionals to spot investment opportunities, letting them place their money on rising assets — and remove them as the patterns in those trends start to change.

But the trends themselves are only the raw materials. While following them might make for some easy and interesting reading, Ron Insana notes as early as his introduction that understanding them and being able to act on them is a lot harder than just watching them. Inspiration is one thing but mimicry will only land a creative designer second place to the first and original. Seeing that one device is more discussed than another might be a measure of the effectiveness of current marketing rather than the long-term staying power of a new product. And lots of people saw that house prices were trending upwards in the last few years. Only a handful were smart enough to see that there was nothing behind those prices other than hot air and fat mortgages.

Trendwatching can make a business money then, but the data has to be matched with some smart thinking too.

The business world is supposed to be dog-eat-dog. It’s a zero-sum game in which any advance by a rival is a setback for you – and any achievement by your company is one in the eye for your competitors. Sometimes though it pays to put the hostility aside and look for areas where two (or more) competing companies can co-operate. While that might sound like a bad result for consumers (and an issue for an antitrust commission) the result can often be benefits all round.

Much though depends on the context and the motivation for the deal. When Google teamed up with Yahoo last year, providing the online directory with access to its search and advertising technology, the goal wasn’t to provide better services to consumers or even to ensure that both sides earned more money. It was to prevent Microsoft from getting a ready-made foothold in the search market by buying Yahoo. This was a case of two competitors coming together to defend against a common rival rather than create advantages that benefit themselves and the market as a whole. It’s rare though for an industry to be dominated by three firms in this way and the deal itself was temporary and one-sided. Google was the senior partner and by accepting its rival’s technology Yahoo effectively waved a white flag above its own position in the search market.

More common are partnerships in which rivals come together to set an industry standard, and this is something that seems to be happening fairly frequently now as technology advances faster than business models can keep up. Infineon Technologies, for example, recently announced a partnership with rivals Micron Technology to create CellularRAM memory, a kind of chip suitable for 2.5G and higher mobile devices. The two companies will agree on the specifications for products that will use the chips but compete on the products themselves. It’s almost as though the movie industry had decided whether Blu-Ray or HD-DVD would be the standard, created the video systems that would play them then focused on making the films. It’s a much more attractive option for companies than investing millions in a winner-takes-all race.

Publishing Rivals Team Up to Create New Magazine Formats

That kind of mutual platform-building is also now happening in print media. John Squires, an executive vice president at Time Inc., is planning to create a new company that will bring together his old firm, Condé Nast and Hearst. Together, the publishing rivals offer more than 50 of the best-selling magazines, including Vanity Fair, Vogue and Sports Illustrated. The aim of the new company will be to build a platform that will allow them to sell their magazines across different digital devices from the iPhone to the Blackberry. Reports describe the planned product as being something like iTunes for magazines but with a choice of formats.

The incentive for a move like this is clear. The publishing industry is struggling to roll back its decision to offer content for free online even as consumers become more used to reading on digital screens. No firm wants to be the first to put up a paywall for fear that it will send its readers to rivals. In order for everyone to benefit, everyone has to move together. Jointly creating a place for everyone to move to is a canny first step.

On the one hand, this model of co-operation appears very similar to that being followed by Infineon and Micron Technologies. The rival companies will create a common platform and offer their own products on top of it. But it’s not just the technology that the publishing companies are building – the various formats of their magazines that will work on different operating systems running on mobile devices; they’re also putting together a store from which readers can buy their products. They’re creating a marketplace too.

Co-operation Is Rare and Not Always Helpful

So what can small businesses learn from these models, and what can they do to enjoy similar benefits?

The most obvious point to notice is that this kind of co-operation is relatively rare. Major rivals teaming up to solve a mutual problem is unusual enough to generate headlines when it happens. It’s also clear that collaboration works best when everyone faces a common problem, usually one caused by a fundamental change in everyone’s business model. When magazines were sold mostly in stores and read on the buses or in the front of the fireplace, every publisher could have their own printing press and their own distribution system. When technology has changed the business model so drastically that profitability is threatened, it makes sense for everyone affected to come together to find a way to save the industry. Those kinds of revolutionary moments though don’t come along very often, and when they do the industry usually finds the co-operation a struggle. It often takes an outsider – even the force causing the disruption in the first place – to provide a solution. Apple’s iPods, for example, created an even greater demand for music in digital formats  but its iTunes store also provided a way for companies to deliver that music and get paid for it.

But perhaps the best model for co-operation between competitors isn’t the temporary truces sealed by rivals while they rebuild the battlefield. It’s the genuine respect and sharing found between online publishers giving away their content for free. Websites depend on links from other sites to build up their Google love, and references to publications offering similar content don’t detract from the site’s value but rather enhance it. Readers see the referring site as both a source of new information and a place that can send them off to learn even more about a similar topic. Even Internet marketers promote each other’s goods in affiliate relationships and swap testimonials to help each other sell – even if they don’t do it for those offering items that are exactly the same as their own.

For the most part, companies operating in a similar field  should be seen as competitors. It’s the kind of thing that keeps firms on their toes and ensures better and cheaper products. But co-operation can help to solve a temporary crisis – or bring more traffic to your website.

Image: David Erickson

Marketing a business always comes down to a simple calculation: how much attention and how many sales will your marketing dollars buy? While it’s always easy to toss out cash on search engine optimization, on AdWords campaigns, and even on traditional print, billboard and television advertising, when you’re really strapped for cash, you want creative ideas that can deliver results for minimal costs. You’re prepared to experiment with new strategies in return for the benefits of a low-cost investment. Fortunately, those experiments can now also be low-risk. The rise of smart, fast communication channels – and even smarter marketers — has created all sorts of effective and creative marketing channels for entrepreneurs.

The most obvious of these is viral marketing. When the audience is passing your marketing message to their friends, you’re not paying for advertising space. You’re also getting your name associated with something cool and fun, and you’re winning an implicit recommendation. If someone thinks that the virus you’ve supplied is interesting enough to pass to a friend, they’re telling their friend that you’re worth looking at.

The problem is that viral marketing campaigns can be complex – and they’re not always cheap. Although viral marketing is usually associated with tiny companies, creative marketers and shoestring budgets, the best examples often come from big corporations, the types that can afford to pay top dollar for the biggest advertising talent. When Warner Brothers wanted to create a buzz for The Dark Knight, for example, it created a traditional teaser page containing the Batman logo. Users who clicked the logo were sent to a fake District Attorney election page for one of the movie’s characters. That page led in turn to a defaced version with which users could interact. In return for their email address, users received a code that revealed a few pixels of a hidden image. In order to reveal the entire picture, lots of visitors had to sign up. It didn’t take long for fans to spread the word, telling their friends to visit the site and uncover the picture.

As a way of bringing thousands of people to a website in a very short time – without spending a fortune on marketing – it couldn’t have been more effective.

Tell a Friend, Win a Date

SinglesMonthly, an online relationships magazine, did something similar in the early days of the Internet. While other sites were experimenting with radio button-based quizzes, the site allowed its users to send an email to a friend, invite them to take the quiz and compare the results to test compatibility. The ploy was so successful at encouraging users to bring in more users that it was quickly copied by Women.com.

But viral marketing doesn’t have to be that complex or require such forward thinking. Hotmail’s decision to place its own Web address at the bottom of every email sent was simple, effective, cheap and has been copied by just about every online entrepreneur since.

One of the most effective creative channels is also one of the most derided. Facebook today might feel a bit like someone’s middle-aged cousin in comparison to cool, new Twitter, and if its valuation $15 billion valuation looked optimistic in 2007, it appears positively dreamy now. But advertising on the site works. According to research firm Borrell Associates, Facebook is expected to generate around $310 million from advertising in 2009. A whopping 74 percent of that revenue though is said to come from local firms trolling for local business.

Facebook Has Built-In Viral Marketing

That makes sense. Facebook allows companies to target leads geographically far more effectively and accurately than Google does. The Web might allow companies to reach people around the world but if you don’t deliver further than 50 miles then a service that allows you to focus on specific towns and zip codes – and throw in personal data, such as marital status, age and even alumnus organization – is always going to be valuable.

And Facebook even has its own in-built viral marketing system too. Wedding photographers are using the site to upload images from their shoots. When they tag the photos with the clients’ names, those shots are then pushed to everyone on the client’s contact list, allowing them to spread their images widely for free and with little effort.

Finally, competitions might be old and traditional but they’re still very effective — and online, they can involve mass participation too. Web company MoonFruit might have attracted a lot of attention earlier this year with its Twitter-based giveaway but its creative contests, in which  people got happy with Flickr, YouTube and lots of other places besides, were judged by the company itself. That was a missed opportunity to engage audiences and put the public to work on behalf of the company. When Similac, makers of baby formula, ran a contest earlier this year to find a “Superdaddy”, it allowed anyone to enter and it let contestants encourage friends and family to cast a vote. That might have turned the competition into a popularity contest rather than a test of fathering skills but it also meant that contestants worked their social media networks to bring everyone they knew to the company’s website. Soon Facebook was filled with requests to contacts to head over the site and click a button, generating plenty of extra exposure for the firm. A strategy like this requires a prize big enough to motivate people to enter and cheerlead, but the returns clearly have great potential.

One of the biggest changes to hit marketing in the Internet age is the ability to target your efforts on the demographics most likely to respond. The old lists sold by junk mail marketing companies now look as outdated and useful as the static ads in the Yellow Pages. But social media has also opened a bunch of creative new channels that cost next to nothing to use and which can generate a huge number of leads, conversions and new clients.

And best of all, they also make marketing – even on a tiny budget – fun.

Photography: .nele

Creative ideas tend to be unpredictable. They come in a flash, while you’re in the shower, as you’re waiting for the lights to change, in the middle of a dull conversation at the office party. If those moments have anything in common, it’s that they’re usually times when you’re far away from your iPhone’s note-taking app, or even a pen and paper. In theory, that shouldn’t matter. Good ideas should stick around while bad concepts fade away, but the idea itself is only one part of a creative process that leads from inspiration to IPO. You also have to figure out whether your bolt from the blue really is as revolutionary as it looks, whether there’s demand for it, and whether there’s a real way to make it work. Psychologists and gurus have produced creative models to guide entrepreneurs through that process, entrepreneurs themselves have invented their own… and some of them might just be helpful.

Creative models have actually been around for a while. One of the oldest was created by Graham Wallas, a Fabian and social psychologist who wrote The Art of Thought in the 1920s. Wallas, who isn’t known to have actually brought any products to market himself, described creativity as a four-step process made up of Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Verification. Creative thinkers begin by defining the issue, he says, then they lay it aside for a while, a new idea pops out, then finally, they check to make sure it’s all going to work.

It’s a model that includes a mixture of rational analysis and spontaneous inspiration, an approach that’s turned up frequently ever since. The Creative Problem Solving Model, for example, which was developed in the 1950s and taught at the Creative Education Foundation, has a six-step model that’s been conveniently shortened into the acronym “OFPISA.” That stands for Objective Finding, Fact Finding, Problem Finding, Idea Finding, Solution Finding, and Acceptance Finding. It all sounds very rational but the problem and idea-finding stages actually involve the kind of blue-shy thinking more usually associated with creative types.

Successful Creativity Requires Imagination and Evaluation

In general, says Paul Plesk, author of Creativity, Innovation, and Quality and founder of DirectedCreativity.com, earlier creative models tend to suggest that creative ideas are gifts from the heavens, while newer models imply that it’s possible to squeeze out the inspiration in an act of directed free will. Just about all the models though agree that the creative process should combine analysis with imagination and evaluation — and that thinkers have to take action too.

And perhaps that’s where these models first run into trouble. While it’s easy to find lots of great concepts growing and doing well in the business world, it’s much harder to spot the ones that developed according to a set model. The sources of inspiration for the biggest successes are often accidental (such as penicillin mold growing on a tray of bacteria, and ruining it), or imitative (such as Facebook, which was either inspired by Harvard’s own face books that showed students’ photos, or a copy of an idea described by Mark Zuckerberg’s classmates.)

In practice, the concept will often be a result of need while the process of implementation will be inspired by chance. Inventor James Dyson, for example, felt the need for a different kind of vacuum cleaner when he realized what professional cleaners have known for years: that conventional types just don’t work. As they suck up dust, the dirt clogs the bag and they stop sucking. The idea of using cyclonic separation to pull out the dust though, came from the cyclones that Dyson already had installed in his Ballbarrow factory.

Having created one reasonably successful product, Dyson should have had a model to copy in order to create his next one. In his case though, that model didn’t work. Manufacturers refused to take the new machines and Dyson had to produce the vacuum cleaner himself – a model that worked fine for the vacuum cleaner, which is now the highest-selling model by value in the US, but which failed when used to develop a washing machine. While the implementation process was sound, the idea of using two drums instead of one wasn’t, and his concept had to be abandoned.

Twitter Has Millions of Creative Thinkers

That might suggest that there’s a limit to the degree to which you can model a creative process that leads to success. Getting it right once doesn’t mean that you can follow the same steps to achieve success the next time, and that’s particularly true of the latest model pioneered by smart entrepreneurs. Twitter’s growth has been revolutionary not only for its speed and the way it’s changing the way strangers meet and communicate, but because it provides perhaps the only example of a crowdsourced creative model. Addressing a NESTA innovation conference in London recently, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, described the company as followers rather than leaders, paving the paths already created by the site’s users. Other commentators have suggested that Twitter’s founders invented the bat and ball, left them in a park and returned a week later to find that the world had invented baseball. The new retweet feature, for example, was produced in reaction to the way that users were sharing information rather than as a planned feature of the site handed down to an eager market.

The system was created quickly — in less than two weeks — and was influenced partly by co-founder Jack Dorsey’s experience writing software for a dispatch firm and partly by boredom with the project they were supposed to be working on. Certainly, the site has come a long way from its less-than-visionary beginnings and, with a billion dollar valuation, it’s developed into the kind of success that gets everyone in Silicon Valley dreaming.

But it’s not a model for a creative process that’s going to be easy to copy. Put an idea out there to see what people do with it is usually going to deliver not millions of people to do the creative thinking for you, but stasis, confusion and failure.

Perhaps the best creative model then is the one that lies at the heart of every commercial success from the light bulb to microblogging: have a good idea and implement it.

Designers have a tricky job to perform. On the one hand, the products they create have to be efficient and ergonomic. They have to allow the consumer easy access to all of its functions and make use as intuitive as possible. On the other hand, they also  have to make the object look as attractive, as cool and as desirable as possible. Get it right and you might just end up with an iPod, a whole new genre of gadgets, a megajob with Apple and all the free iPhones you can eat. Get it wrong, and… well, you could find yourself included on a list of the worst design disasters.

The Wobbly Bridge

It cost £18.2m, was £2.2m over budget and when it opened on June 10, 2000, the Millennium Bridge over the Thames in London was two months behind schedule. That happens. Big construction projects often run late and cost more than expected, and the footbridge, with its low profile and unimpeded view of St. Paul’s Cathedral was pretty enough for people to overlook the cost. Created by architectural firm Arup, Foster and Partners and sculptor Sir Anthony Caro, the bridge was dubbed the “blade of light.”

Within two days of its opening though, the bridge had acquired a new name: The Wobbly Bridge.

On its first day, more than 90,000 people crossed the river, including many taking part in a charity walk. With as many as 2,000 people walking across at any one time, the suspension bridge began to sway. As it swayed, the walkers adjusted their steps, increasing the movement even more until it felt like walking along a rope. Two days later, the bridge was shut down.

Engineers later fixed the problem by retrofitting 89 dampers at an additional cost of £5m. The bridge re-opened in February 2002 — and was destroyed by Death Eaters in the opening sequence of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

Microsoft Gets No Help from Clippit

Back in 1995, Microsoft had a killer idea. The company would create an interface that, for once, owed nothing to anything that Apple had done. The “social interface” program for Windows 3.1 would allow anyone to use a computer, even people who didn’t know how to use computers. By double-clicking on “Bob,” the interface would be changed to a picture of a living room. To find the program you wanted, you had to click a household item such as a sheet of paper for the word processor and a pile of envelopes to access email. If you got stuck, Rover the dog was on hand with helpful advice. The project was overseen by Melinda French, now better known as half of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and was killed before the release of Windows 98. Steve Ballmers described it as a time when Microsoft “decided that we have not succeeded and let’s stop.” PC World Magazine gave it seventh place on its list of the 25 worst products of all time.

You’d think that that would have been enough of a warning, but no. Still convinced that its customers were too daft to figure out how to use its products by themselves, Microsoft included the Office Assistant in its Office programs from 1997 to 2003. Whenever you started doing anything, a paperclip called Clippit would pop up and ask if you needed help. So annoying was Clippit and his friends, Merlin the Magician, F1 the robot, Links the cat and Rocky the dog that even Microsoft’s developers were said to have renamed Office Assistant TFC – “The Fucking Clown.” Sometimes it’s possible to overdesign a product.

Stick a Cell Phone to Your Head

And sometimes it’s possible to underdesign a product.

The Cell-Mate, which was actually shown at CES in 2009, calls itself a hands-free cell phone holder. It’s a headband. It looks  like a headband. It acts like a headband. And it appears about as cool and sexy as a headband. A metal headband with black disks.

Usually, simple is good, and there is something to be said for not looking like the kind of constantly connected android that walks around with a Bluetooth earpiece. But actually for the kind of problems that the Cell-Mate (and really, the person who came up with that name deserves a cellmate) solves, Bluetooth is fine. No one can see you looking silly when you’re doing the dishes or sitting in traffic – at least no one you care about. With so many cool and sexy ways to talk with your hands free, sticking a black disk on a couple of metal rods just isn’t going to cut it.

The Sinclair C5 — A Cold-Weather Convertible for the Suicidal

Fresh from his success at creating the first popular home computers, the ZX81 and the Spectrum, Sir Clive Sinclair looked to make another massive technological leap with the launch in 1985 of the C5. A battery-operated tricycle, the C5 followed at least some design rules. It looked cool, space-agey and sleek.

Unfortunately, that neat look hid a small problem. It was almost completely useless. The low ride led to worries that drivers wouldn’t be able to see it until they were driving over it. The motor was too puny to climb even the gentlest of hills. And January in England probably weren’t the best time and place to launch an open-top vehicle. Altogether fewer than 17,000 C5s were sold, making it about half as popular as the Segway.

Apple Newton Proves that Bad Ideas Can Only Go Down

Jonathan Ive might now be regarded as the master of all things design but even the best designers can make mistakes, especially when they’re just starting out. The Apple Newton was a good idea, a little ahead of its time. Launched in 1993 as an early personal organizer, the Newton showed the road ahead by ditching the buttons and using the screen as the main interface. Its  handwriting recognition software was supposed to make keyboards a thing of the past.

Unfortunately, the software wasn’t quite ready for primetime and repeated attempts at writing the same word made using the Newton felt a little like teaching a two-year old to read. Still, Ive did come on a bit… once Apple’s software developers had caught up.

Asked to promote an officer who had already shown talent, bravery and leadership, Napoleon, it is said, would always ask “Is he lucky?” That might have been a more reasonable question than it sounds. While luck is often seen as fickle and unreliable, the sense that some people are just plain luckier than others (and that some people have the touch of doom) might have solid grounding. It’s certainly possible to find people who appear to fit in one camp or another: how else to explain both Kaka’s $13 million annual salary from soccer club Real Madrid and his boy-band good looks? If luck isn’t evenly spread out then but delivered by the truckload to some people and snatched away from others, what can you do to ensure that as an officer of your business, your efforts are blessed by good fortune?

According to Dr. Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at England’s University of Hertfordshire, and author of The Luck Factor: Changing Your Luck, Changing Your Life: The Four Essential Principles, it is possible to take action that improves your chances. After tracking closely the behavior of 400 people who considered themselves either particularly lucky or cursed in everything they do, he produced four principles that characterize lucky types.

Pulp the Lemons

First, lucky people, he says, expect good luck. They’re optimistic and believe that everything will work out in the end. That confidence can help them to push through tough times, and might also mean that they pay less attention to the bad stuff and place a greater emphasis on the positives. It’s not really that they’re exceptionally lucky, they just regard the pot holes as exceptional and pay them little attention.

That sort of attitude also helps with the second principle. Lucky people turn bad luck into good. Instead of moping around and telling people how life’s got in for them, they actually take steps to turn things around. Being told to make lemonade out of life’s lemons might make you want to pulp the person giving you the advice, but “lucky” people, says Dr. Wiseman, actually do it. They recognize that things could have been worse, take control and move forward.

Those two principles though suggest that luck is as much about who you are as what you do. It’s about thinking you’re lucky rather than just being lucky. But Dr. Wiseman’s other two principles for winning luck offer much more practical strategies for business owners. Lucky people, he says, are willing to follow their hunches. They’re prepared to take risks, accept that losing is part of life and consider the consequences inconvenient rather than devastating. Because they’re willing to play more often, they win more often – and lucky types who listen to their gut and lose, rather than act only after long study, will then pull out their lemon juicers and think they’ve won.

To demonstrate that theory, Dr. Wiseman asked volunteers to count the number of pictures in a newspaper. A few pages in, the volunteers reached a half-page advertisement telling them that they could stop counting; the paper had 43 pictures. A few pages later, another ad placed next to a picture informed them that they could tell the examiner that they’ve seen the ad and claim a cash reward. The “unlucky” types missed it and kept counting.

Luck is What Happens When Preparation Meets Opportunity

That shows what is probably the most important characteristic of lucky people: they maximize their opportunities. That’s vital and it suggests that there is a difference between chance and luck. Chance is random, evenly distributed and happens to everyone. Luck determines whether those chances turn out to be helpful or painful. It’s a redefinition of an older idea that luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

That suggests that being lucky isn’t about buying a rabbit’s foot and keeping your fingers crossed. It’s about a combination of attitude and action. Being a lucky entrepreneur means adopting an upbeat, relaxed manner that allows you to see the bright side of any problem and remain calm enough to turn around a crisis.

It means laying the groundwork for action all the time because you never know when opportunity is going to knock. For an entrepreneur, that might involve building networks on Facebook and Twitter, and attending conferences, even when you have nothing to sell and little to promote. You never know who you might meet and what opportunities those networks could churn up.

It means having your elevator pitch ready and on the tip of your tongue because lucky people talk to the people they meet, win the chances to use those pitches and deliver them, while unlucky types ride the elevator quietly while staring at their shoes. Their attitudes increase the number of chances they come across and allow them to make the most of those chances when they turn up.

And also it means taking action instead of wondering what would happen if you did A instead of B while looking for more information about C.

Dr Wiseman describes one example of a single person who goes to a party hoping to find a date. An unlucky person would come away with no phone numbers and no date. A lucky person would come away equally dateless but with a bunch of new friends, some of whom might later develop into business partners, customers or suppliers.

To become a lucky entrepreneur then, you have to be able to see the bright side of life, be happy and outgoing, be prepared to take risks, network constantly and not sweat the small stuff. You have to believe that your venture will be successful and assume that when you take a step back, the next two steps forward will soon follow. With that sort of attitude, they always do. The result might not be a place at the officer’s table next to a short, French dictator but it might just give you a successful business – and friends who think you were just lucky.

Photography: Lee Bennett

Tech types have been predicting the rise of the paperless office for  years. When you can pack more information into the average laptop’s hard drive than you can squeeze into a room full of filing cabinets and when you can send documents backwards and forwards without ever licking an envelope, who needs to chop down trees and staple pages? Computer power will soon mark the end of ink and pulp, we’ve been promised… again and again. But could we see the end of the computer first? Just as the ability to squeeze increasing flexibility into laptops and now netbooks has reduced demand for desktops, could the growth of mobile phone technology mean the rise of the computerless company too?

Judging by sheer computing power alone, desktops should be safe. A typical Dell Inspiron desktop comes with a range of processors from Intel Celerons to Core 2 Quads, 8GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage space, which certainly sounds impressive enough.

The iPhone is a Weakling

In comparison, even the latest iPhone 3GS looks like a seven-stone weakling. But for most users, even Dell’s most basic model is probably overkill. If all you’re planning to do is create spreadsheets, write emails and prepare documents, the lowest-end processor would be more than sufficient. And you’re only going to fill a terabyte of storage if you’re busy skipping round the corporate firewall to build your movie collection. Of course, you still have to pay for all of that extra power whether you use it or not.

That might explain why buyers are migrating to smaller, cheaper machines that pack a weaker punch but are still strong enough to do the job. According to iSuppli, a technology firm, sales of desktop PCs fell 18 percent in 2008. Sales of notebooks rose 12 percent in the same period.

But while even the smartest of smart phones might have relatively small brains, the iPhone didn’t revolutionize the mobile market with its muscle power. It was its interface that changed the way we compute. By making surfing the Web comfortable and easy, the iPhone’s true power doesn’t lie under its touchscreen but in the cloud. Who cares how much storage space you have when everything you need is available from one of the many online storage centers available – or even Google’s rumored GDrive? Does it matter if your iPhone only displays the last 50 messages when you can still log into Gmail and read everything you’ve received and sent over the last three years? And do you really need a program folder stuffed with bloatware when you can buy almost all of the programs? you need for just a handful of bucks – or even access the same functionalities free online

That became easier recently with the release for the iPhone first of QuickOffice and then of DataViz’s DocumentsToGo. Both were previously available for the Blackberry, Android and Palm but the iPhone’s bigger screen means that creating documents and spreadsheets is now more comfortable than ever. Although neither program offers the complete range of editing options available in Microsoft’s full-size Office suites – you can’t add comments, for example, or images to Word-type files — they both provide the most popular features used by most office workers. The completed documents can either be synced directly to a computer or – for non-computer types — emailed to a partner or client.

Can You Work without a Keyboard?

Best of all, the devices themselves fit in your pocket, weigh next to nothing and can be used and taken anywhere. You can now do your work while lying on the sofa or even squashed into economy class… with a food tray on your folding table. And it’s always with you. When was the last time you left home without your mobile?

Combine those basic office programs packed into a handheld device with Internet accessibility, email and the giant range of note-taking, organization and even entertainment apps, and it quickly becomes clear that there’s little a smartphone can’t do that your laptop can, except give you shoulder-ache.

But clearly, there are limitations. The iPhone still has no external keyboard, which means lots of tricky thumb-typing, and even the real buttons on a Blackberry or Windows Mobile device can feel pretty fiddly when you’re preparing a long report. Creative types who work with graphics might also find working from a mobile a challenge too far. The Zeptopad app does allow vector drawing – and even P2P sharing – while Color Expert helps artists and graphic designers capture inspiring  colors as they see them. Neither though offers anything like the flexibility designers need in Photoshop let alone a convenient, roomy place to store large format images. Attempting to put Adobe’s chief graphic product on the iPhone gives you something like this:

So while the rise of the personal computer was supposed to have done away with paper, in practice, things didn’t quite work out that way. Bored cubicle-dwellers are still able to three-point paper balls down the corridor. The Amazon is still being cleared to fill filing cabinets. And while screens sit on every office desktop, they’re often surrounded by piles of letters, documents and paper reports. The same is likely to remain true for the prospects of a computerless company. Mobile devices might be growing increasingly smart and incredibly flexible. They might now be able to offer many of the same functions and at the same speed that you could have found on a full-size computer just a few years ago. And their access to the cloud means that that potential is now limitless. But you wouldn’t want to use them all the time.

While you could now do all of your (non-graphic) work without ever touching a real keyboard, in practice, you probably won’t want to. Your smartphone won’t replace the desktop but it will probably sit on the desk, next to the laptop… and on top of your printed report.

Nothing focuses the mind faster than an impending delivery date. You’ve accepted the task, done the research and played with the procrastination. Now, with the deadline in sight, you actually have to finish the job and hand over the goods. The change is massive and sudden. Knowing that your reputation and possibly your job is on the line has an amazing effect. Suddenly, a task that looked impossible becomes achievable. YouTube and viral emails still appear tempting but you can block them out. Your productivity goes through the roof. Instead of staring at the wall or pacing around the room, you’re hacking at the keyboard as though it’s stuck to your fingers. Even if you miss the deadline a little, the period between recognizing the urgency and completing the job is one of unparalleled attention and diligence. If only you could work that way all the time. Sprinting like this over a full working life is just about impossible but you can take some of the lessons learned from the effect of a tight deadline and use them to raise your work rate every day.

First, it’s important to understand that deadlines aren’t uniform. They pack different characteristics and each characteristic has a different effect on motivation. The outcome for the worker himself, for example, is one important influence. A deadline for a design that could win you a promotion or land a larger and more satisfying project is likely to be met. A threat from the wife that she’ll throw out anything in the garage that hasn’t been put away by the end of Sunday can be fairly safely ignored. Deadlines aren’t just dates, they’re also carriers of personal punishment and reward.

Missed Deadlines Are Your Fault

They’re also vehicles for organizational punishment and reward, and that’s important too. When a failure to meet a deadline is going to have a knock-on effect throughout the business, delaying the next stage in a project or causing large-scale changes to the marketing plan, those results also affect motivation. Even if you can shift the blame onto tardy suppliers or poor information, the knowledge that others will suffer will influence your ability to knuckle down and finish on time.

And personal interest in the project helps too. When a task is interesting, exciting and fun to do, you’re more likely to do it on time and less likely to be pulled away by the lure of a new post on an interesting blog or the chance to chat with a friend.

All of these things make up the task’s importance—to you and to the organization. Other factors affecting a deadline’s ability to drive you to get things done include its level of difficulty, and the specificity of both the task and the deadline goal. You’re much more likely to miss a deadline when the job is difficult, when you’re uncertain about the requirements, and when you’re not clear about when the project actually has to be delivered. Does “the end of next week,” for example, mean 5pm on Friday or, if the project is just going to sit ignored on a computer all weekend, can it include a bit of Monday too?

So deadlines are most effective at increasing productivity when they include real consequences, when you know what needs to be done and when it needs to be done by, and when you enjoy the job. Few tasks pack all of those things but the more you can include, the better.

But these factors are difficult to control. You don’t want every job to be life or death. A task that looks clear can become fuzzy as you work your way through it. And while you might start a new task buzzing with excitement, that thrill can quickly fade.

There is one characteristic of a deadline though that’s more powerful than all of the others combined, and it’s also under your control: its proximity. One group of researchers at the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington has argued that a close deadline brings rewards closer, increases the challenge and raises motivation. It creates two psychological states, they argue: urgency and “felt accountability.”

Clearly, no one is going to ask for a tighter deadline just so that a task feels more urgent but deadlines can be made to feel closer simply by placing smaller versions—milestones—before the final due date.

Celebrating a Milestone with a Million-Dollar Party

This is something that happens anyway, argue the Foster Business School researchers in the book, Work Motivation: Past, Present, and Future. Using secretaries as an example, they describe how employees faced with a deadline continually assess their progress towards the goal, reallocating their time and effort depending their assessment of whether they’re likely to finish on schedule. In effect, workers are creating mental milestones that tell them whether they’re on the right track.

Those milestones can be built up and made concrete. Dan Carrison, writing in Deadline! How Premier Organizations Win the Race Against Time, describes how Boeing organized a massive party to celebrate the first time all of the components of its new widebody 777 jetliner were put together. The company didn’t just invite all of the engineers and employees who had worked on every part of the plane to mark the event—which would have opened the celebration to 10,000 people—it invited their families too. Altogether, more than 100,000 people were able to tour the plane as proud relatives showed off the screws they had attached and the wing parts they had designed.

But the plane wasn’t finished. It would be another two years before it made its first flight. This wasn’t a celebration of the end of a job. It was an attempt to encourage workers to complete the task on time. Engineers were able to see what their work had achieved so far. They were able to understand what completing the project would create. And by allowing employees to bring their families, Boeing was able to recruit a giant team of cheerleaders: wives, husbands and children who would ask their staff about the big plane over the dinner table.

A party after the project is completed is a reward, Carrison writes. A party held while the project is still under way—when it’s met a milestone—is a motivational strategy.

Of course, you don’t have to throw a million-dollar party to mark your milestones but knowing when they are, celebrating their achievement and letting others know when you expect to be done can all keep you focused and motivated, even when the final deadline is far away.