After some thought (admittedly not a whole lot of thought) I hit on the idea of testing one of social media’s darling children, crowdsourcing.  Crowdsourcing is really just a way of asking a large, usually unrelated, group to provide input, ideas, or solutions.  It truly is the power of the people and nowhere can that power be better or more easily applied than online.

So my first thought was why not crowdsource this whole process?  Being the social media junkie that I am I started by posting a question on my Yammer account at work.  That’s a work in progress and I’m getting some ideas from that crowd about what I should crowdsource as a way of testing social media and the power of crowdsourcing.  Are you still with me?  The idea ,or experiment as I now call it, is to crowdsource an experiment that will either prove or disprove the value of crowdsourcing. 

That brings me to, well somewhere, but my next step is to expand my crowd-cloud and seek input from this Blog, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn because these are the communities that I belong to.  So this is step 2 and I am now seeking input from you as to what I should crowdsource…so here is what I need:

• Please provide an idea for something that I can crowd-source (something like the logo on my blog, or new product ideas).  Post your ideas as comments to this post. 
• The next step in the plan is to whittle the ideas down to one really good, but easily executable, idea and then I will move on to actually execute the idea.  Its a two-step crowdsourcing experiment.  First get the idea from all of you and then do it…not that complex really but it should be interesting.

        

bCODE

July 2005– September 2006 (1 year 3 months)

bCODE is a leading global provider of Wireless Enterprise software solutions. Our Products Include Mobile Airline Booking, Ticketing & Check-In, Mobile Banking, Mobile CRM, Mobile Retail, Mobile Call-Centres, Mobile Identity Management, Mobile Transaction Management and bCODE Mobile Ticketing.
We have just launched bCODE the only Mobile Ticketing application that is handset and carrier independent with a 99.99% Handset support rate and a sub second scan rate.
bCODE is the preferred supplier for Enterprise SMS solutions by SingTel Optus in Australia and 9 Asian Regions, Sprint PCS USA,Celcom - TMTouch & Maxis in Malaysia and is the preferred provider of mobile ticketing & voucher solutions for Telstra.
In Australia we service Top-100 companies including banks, airlines, telecommunication carriers, retailers, media, travel and consumer brands.

        

Research In Motion

Public Company; 10,001+ employees; RIMM; Telecommunications industry

2001– 2003 (2 years)

Research In Motion, Ltd (2001-2004) Group Director, Strategic Business Development

Responsible for development of wireless carrier relationships, technical partnerships and alliances, licensing, secondary channel development, and corporate development including international joint ventures.

Tasked with development of global market strategies, formation of regional offices, developing regional marketing strategies and business models, structuring and closing carrier relationships and joint ventures in order to launch BlackBerry wireless devices and data services worldwide.

Focused on international development of markets including; Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Australia, China, Brazil, Mexico and The Philippines.

While based in Sydney Australia was responsible for establishing Asia Pacific headquarters including recruiting, training, and managing teams consisting of Integration, Technical Support, Marketing, Business Development, and Operations and Logistics.

        

Like any other initiative in an organisation you need to follow a tried and true process:

1. Plan a strategy with demonstrable results (hint: they don’t have to be revenue generating results and they don’t have to be earth shattering.  A positive result that is demonstrable will usually do)
2. Don’t bite off more than you can chew.  A simple plan executed well will drive success more than a larger than life plan that takes years to resolve or is too complex.  In the end it will slow you down. 
3. Be quiet.  There is no need to broadcast your activities to the whole world.  A small plan usually means a small audience.  Target your audience well and build slowly from there.
4. Be agile.  While executing a strategy is important don’t be afraid to let the market take you where it wants to go.  Remember you’re trying to drive usage and cultural change, you can’t force these things. 
5. Stick to the rules.  Internal policy and social media etiquette should guide you
6. Always, always have a backup.  Two or three is even better.  If the market says what you’re doing isn’t working you better have alternatives or you’re dead in the water. 
7. Keep at it and eventually the results can be used to generate increased awareness and, if necessary, budget in order to build on your success.

Most social media strategies don’t require a lot of money or resources to execute.  The beauty of social media is that its mostly free, mostly accessable, and mostly easy to start on your own.  Building a loyal, if not small, initial following is the first milestone.  Target internal and external users who are most likely to support your strategy.  They don’t even have to be part of your industry, just find people willing to participate in the conversation and then work from there.  The key is to have a following that is dedicated enough to keep coming back and contributing to the conversation.  In time the conversation will naturally progress and grow if it’s maintained.

        

While WP is a fantastic free and open source environment for creating websites it seems to have a missing piece.  As I found out immediately WP is currently geared toward 2 communities.  The first is the complete novice and for them WP is a great quick solution that offers just enough to let you produce a reasonable site.  It doesn’t offer much customisation but you can get something out there with little experience and even less complication.  The other community is geared toward the more hard-core developers out there who understand the development languages that are utilized to program a site.  PHP and CSS (or Cascading Style Sheets) are scripting languages used to define the look, feel, and action of a web page.  PHP requires at least a basic understanding of programming in order to pull from it the value that it can really deliver.  Clearly over my head! CSS is designed to be a little less daunting but still requires at least a bit of education before you can make it do anything more than change the colour of text.  So, you ask, what about those of us who want a bit more than basics but aren’t genuine code monkey’s?    The answer turns out to be very unclear.

After much searching and a whole lot of cursing the day I plunked down my credit card I found something of a bridge between the two communities.  For a fee (like everything else that solves a problem) you can buy certain WP themes that come with a complete set of settings that make the changes to the PHP and CSS files for you.  All you need to do is select the setting you’d like to change from a pre-set list, what you want to change it to and it makes the changes for you.  Unfortunately finding a theme that has both the look & feel & functionality you want, as well as, having the settings pre-defined isn’t that easy.  I got lucky and someone suggested a theme to me that turned out to have 90% of what I was looking for.  A little effort on my part, a little help from some friends and the online forum from the theme developer, and now I am about 95% there.  The theme cost me $US95 but saved me from having a custom developer create one from scratch which would run several thousand dollars so it was worth it.

In the end, a little elbow grease, a little luck, and a little money got me almost all the way home.  It’s not a perfect solution so I think there is room for the WP community to further bridge the gap and release more themes with pre-defined settings.  In time, I think that’s exactly what will happen.

        

Hosting: after much research locally and internationally, including a failed attempt to scam my way into free hosting, I settled on GoDaddy.com  primarily due to cost (about AU$7/mo), the availability of easily accessable online tools, and (this was the kicker) a local free contact phone number that actually connects back to GoDaddy in the US, pretty slick customer service really.  Next came choosing a domain.  Again after some research I settled on GoDaddy.  In this case I was interested in a .com name rather than a .com.au domain so the combination of global domain registry and price (I registered a few but you can get names from $US 1.99/year) convinced me.  If I was smart I would have gone with a package deal that gives you hosting and a couple of free domains, another lesson learned but more on this later.  

The next step was easy but boring so I won’t go into detail.  Using the GoDaddy online terminal I was able to automatically download and install the latest version of  Wordpress which meant I was, in theory, all set up and ready to go.  THIS is where the fun begins…almost immediately I started to regret the committment I had just made.  In order to justify my whopping AU$130ish expenditure I felt obliged to make something happen quickly.  Big mistake, and one I will elaborate on over the next few posts.

        

Telstra

Public Company; 10,001+ employees; TLS; Telecommunications industry

July 2007– June 2010 (3 years)

Overall Accountabilities
Drive the New Media program of work - Manage key stakeholders within a large matrix organisation - Provide overall leadership in the digital and mobile space

About my role:
I have been tasked with managing the overall development program of work, aligning delivery with commercial requirements & the technical strategy roadmap & liaising with key vendors to deliver initiatives. A strong operational & technical focus managing a broad team of business analysts, project managers, & operations specialists. I am responsible for having an understanding of processes & an ability to manage politics in a large organisation to ensure the delivery of projects that have multiple stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities:
Manage a team of ~25 staff based in Sydney & Melbourne
Manage & influence key stakeholders to secure alignment & smooth relations with vendors & other relevant business units
Prepare structured communications to support strategic investment decisions
Prioritise resources between short term tactical & longer term strategic project delivery
Manage the Program Office, project funding & approvals including liaison with planning units.
Ensure all projects are delivered on time, on budget & in a consistent & robust manner
Own / manage projects from concept to delivery & day to day operations, including requirements definition & drafting, vendor evaluation & analysis, project & delivery management, go-to-market planning & post implementation reviews.