Noded Working - a change for the way agencies work

Gone are the days of the traditional web or creative agency
With the changes in the economy over the past 2 years and the accelerated changes in technology and internet it's time for change. Traditional creative, development and web agencies face a change in the market. With people being made redundant and others growing increasing disillusioned with their current employers there is a seas of change. In my experience (from my own network of contacts) more people have gone freelance if they have left or been made redundant.

Establishing a Noded Team
The next natural step is for the freelancers to build a network of trusted fellow, like minded individuals who complement their skills so they can deliver projects for their clients. Hence a noded team is born, not out of intent but out of evolution.

Stick to your strengths
When times are tough companies go back to basics and stick to their knitting rather than expanding on their peripheral services. However with the growth of the internet, social networking and mobile technology, this has created a plethora of niche markets and the demand for new skills.

As this book states, companies have a choice at this point, either to recruit the skills in house or to use a freelancer. Freelancers are more agile, can implement change more rapidly and effectively which means they can have many advantages over having the resource in house.

New business model for agencies
I can see agencies moving to a more of a hybrid position in the long term. There will be a core team who work for the business, maintaining their niche, brand values, beliefs and culture. Beyond this agencies will use freelancers to extend their team to deliver specific niche parts of a project.

In these situations, freelancers would need to adopt to some degree the processes and culture of the company for the project, but with the understanding that the individuals might be geographically in different locations, working different hours. With the common goal of delivering the project.

You might way 'well what's new - there's agencies been doing that for ages'. It's the degree to which the core team diminish and the noded team / extended distributed grow that's going to be the change. Companies that can get the balance right so they can deliver innovative, cutting edge projects that are on time and on budget, will be the next generation agencies and survive the change.

With companies riding out the recession and streamlining their businesses, it's an ideal time to start thinking strategically long term about the direction of the company and how they will evolve to reflect the changes in the industry

Noded Working - collaborative working

Last week I was on holiday in Scotland and on a rainy Thursday I decided to spend the morning on the WIFI catching up emails, blogs and twitter. It was Hull Digital week last week. There was an event on the Thursday 15th October that a lot of people I follow were tweeting about. So I happily kept reading the tweets whilst I slurped my coffee and visited the links that were being sent.

One that really caught my eye was Noded Working. What's that about then I thought..... and downloaded the PDF. Being stuck on a Virgin Train on Thursday 23rd October with no WIFI, I decided it was time to read that PDF. I have to say it was the best use of the train journey in a long time.

So what is Noded Network / Team?
'A group of individuals, often but not necessarily geographically distant, that come together to form temporary or recurring project teams. Unlike ‘distributed teams’

Noded teams work for a wide range of clients and any member of a Noded team can take the lead to bring in work, manage work and choose their team members.'

Since I left Pollenation this is very much how I've been working. Collaborating with a number of people that I've kept in touch with over years. Working on projects together and sharing the benefits.

There were certain parts of the book which really resonated with me and reflect why I've set up a small agency and use my network of freelancers to help out on projects:

The Noded Personality
'The main characteristic of us Noded type professionals is our desire to set our own goals, and build businesses based on our own values.' That certain rings true with me. I certainly have found that compromising your personal values and beliefs when working for another company leaves you feeling de-motivated and de-valued. So this engaged me even further - there's others like me out there?!

Noded means business
'Noded means business. In fact it’s all about business: doing a fantastic job for clients, growing and learning as individuals and professionals, loving what we do, and being able to make a living out of it. Noded is about business, but with you the individual, your goals and your way of doing it, at the heart of it all.'

I would probably say I've got at least 3 different Node networks that I work with. There are some overlap of individuals, but the important thing is we all bring different skills and strengths to the network. So we all complement each others strengths, weakness and and skills. The client / project is at the core of the team with everyone working to achieving that.

Tell me about your noded team experience and how this has benefited you.

Where have all the Black Hat SEO Guys gone?

I was reviewing inbound links on a website as the webmaster had paid for some inbound links to be generated (alarm bells should have been ringing already). So I look at some of the links and found the next generation of inbound link spam. So after a rant, I then started looking for other next generation spam techniques the wondrous black hat people have come up with.....and what a can of worms that was.

New Black Hat Techniques
With the growth of blogging, twitter, online reputation management they have had the opportunity to diversify and find new opportunities for their disreputable spam techniques.

Blog Link Farms
With the change in emphasis in Google so more weighting is place on inbound links from blogs and reviews than directories, it was an obvious one for black hat guys to start spamming. Creating a blog that is just a list of URLs seems to be an easy choice to get inbound links generated. In essence it's just a glorified link farm, just presented in an alternative format. My advice on is if you are approached by any company who says they will generate content and publish it on a blog, to stay well clear.

Taking short cuts on inbound links doesn't work. Going the mile and actually doing some of your own blogging, getting comments and even commenting on other people's blog, may be an investment of time, but the rewards will be reaped long term.

Online Reputation Management
I have seen example of SEO companies branching out into reputation management. In this instance where there are negative brand remarks regarding a personal or company brand, then getting other content ranked higher is an option for decreasing the presence of this content in the search engines. I have seen instances where I would say optimised pages have been uploaded to other blogs and websites and these have then been linked up to boost their rankings. So you have completely waffle, irrelevant pages regarding the brands being ranked. These pages fly close to the boundaries of spam regarding the content, with little relevant content for the user.

Surely if there is negative content, then pushing positive news stories out and creating a dialogue with the author of the negative comments would deem an appropriate course of action. Not to flood the search engines with content that smells like spam.

Twitter
How can I forget this one. People that create a Twitter account to push content that is irrelevant and spam, in the hope that they'll drive traffic to the URLs they are promoting. Twitter is quite good at identifying accounts. However there are other accounts (and I won't publish the URLs) that fly below the radar, that don't have a description of the user, and they follow you and then spam you with direct messages. Not only that the topic of their tweets covers such a huge raft of subjects, that it's obviously they are not genuinely participating in Twitter.

So what next?
It's a matter of the search engines and social media sites catching up with the game and starting to penalise the users and sites for their activities. For as long as this type of black hat techniques go un-noticed, then it just is a growing problem.

It ruins it for the white hat guys as well, as as long as the black hat technique guys are promoting their shady ways and undercutting on price, then how can it be a level playing field.

What's your experience of the new black hat techniques and how do you think they should be governed?

Google Launches Internet Stats

2 weeks ago Google launched their internet stats website. Sometimes you get asked by clients for specific information on demographics, so it's a welcomed source of information.

So how are they finding the data?

With the launch of Google Caffeine the other week, we saw a shift in how Google processes their data, so it is more real time. So they can sift through the data the spiders bring back and siphon off the data that is relevant to the internet statistics sites.

So what's the point of it?
The point is, working in the industry having this kind of data makes decision making compelling for clients. There is no where centrally online that compiles this data and makes it accessible online. So in true open source spirit, Google have used their spiders to find the information and create a library online.

Doing this is a form of extending the Google brand, so they are diversifying in all aspects of search and information provision.

Most relevant facts?
For me it would be focusing on the Christmas season that will soon be upon us.

With online sales up 13.3% in 2009 and 10.9% in 2010, the Internet will take further share from the high street. (Verdict Research, May 2009)

YoY from the 2007 to 2008 Christmas Sales period, online sales increased by 31% while in-store sales decreased by 1.3%. (Retail Week, January 2009)

With these undisputable facts, retailers need to seriously start aligning their budgets so they reflect the correct proportions of where the sales are coming from. If increasing sales are coming through the internet than the bricks and mortor, companies need to start aligning their marketing budgets accordingly - and start getting sophisticated with the online customer experience through the store.