Image by treehouse1977 via Flickr

Great opportunity or terrible waste of time?

The debate rages on but here's my ha'pennysworth.  Go opensource.  Publicise as if your survival depended on it.

1. If you are a strongly creative team and want to get noticed – go for it
2. Work the pitching really hard by running your own viral / polling around your creative solutions
3. Publish your views on the other pitches (if you can see them online)
4. Go as public as you dare with your creative proposals including media and online.  Show off your knowledge
5. If you don't win, create a case study and send it to all your clients and prospects showing them what you suggested and what other agencies put forward.
6. Live or die by your creativity.

Of course it's easy to justify re-using stuff if it's for 'charidee' but why not just publish and share?

And it reads very well.  

I'd like to extract some fine quostations that iillustrate what it does and why its so 'of the moment' that you should consider coming along. 

Lots of people came [to the first meeting] and sat there and looked like "So you've got us here, we're ready, what's all this about? Why am I here? What do you want from me? What am I going to get out of this?" So I told them. I explained what little 'd worked out and what I still didn't know and above all it was not about something you were going to get something out of without putting something significant in first.

 Very true – you get out what you put in and then there's the amplification effect where the sum of the parts is more than the whole.

It was also an opportunity to see to what extent building rich relationships between smart and well-connected people could deliver any forms of economic value. I'm pretty sure we've proved that hypothesis over and over again.

I’ve ‘given away’ more great ideas this year [at Tuttle] that at any time in my life, but have received twice as much in return.  (@solobasssteve Steve Lawson)

This is part of the new business models for the new working world – I am certain.

What I find most useful and intriguing about Tuttle is the opportunity to meet people who want to know how it can help them do business better.

Yes the sharing of 'how to' knowhow is a key element of Tuttle that is missing in most other networking events that I go to.  I've learnt loads and occasionally had the chance to show off my own skills because of this very important element of the social rules at Tuttle.

Looking forward – plans for the future.

The simplest way this is happening is the way that Tuttle Clubs and Social Media cafés are springing up in other cities.

Initially, we are developing some consulting offerings, analytical and thought leadership publications and masterclass/workshop events.

My own experience of Tuttle and things that I'm working on now that started there are:

• Amplified East and Toby Moores @sleepydog
• the T shirt campaign for SXSW
• Meeting David Terrar and starting a biz dev collaboration
• Geeknbury with @documentally Christian Payne
• Getting Spinvox on my phone thanks to @Whatleydude Kevin Whatley
• Finally seeing the movie Brazil through to the end – I've slept through it more times than I care to remember!

In summary – the group is TOTALLY not clicquey and everyone is made to feel welcome.  I like this a lot.  Come along and see if you like what you find.

If you can't come along just follow the attendees on Twitter.

AFTERWORD

Steve Lawson has written about why the creative industries need Tuttle. 

Well, what you’ve just read is about as succinct and poetic an exposition of how what’s currently called ‘social media’ is changing how we create, innovate, network, resource, collaborate and make money from whatever part of the world we operate in, as I’ve ever come across. The ethos of Tuttle that Lloyd spells out so loquently is what those areas of work euphemistically referred to as ‘the creative sector’ have been desperately in need of for years.

The lack of agenda, the desire to share, the room to innovate, the fun, the friendship, the caffeine. All vital elements in getting creative for the sake of making the world a better place. Not in any ‘worthy’ sense, but just because so many of the old models of business and creativity were built on sustaining myths. Myths of status, of importance, of fame, of business-yness.

All of them Bollocks.

As a proof of concept, Friday mornings are a shining testament to the power of curiosity. It all seems to have started with a ‘I wonder what would happen if…’ type question, and here we are, planning and scheming ways to push technology as far as we can into the world of usefulness.

I subscribe to this.  there's a load of wanky, cooler-than-thou egos around that I dislike.  It's exclusive not inclusive and implies that those of us who don't fit that mould are worthless.  Get rid of it – this attitude is holding back our industry.  Curiosity is what our industry does well – we should share it or as Alex Bogusky says 'stick our noses in where we're not invited'.

Using the we20 forma t, the group will be trying to 

talk about the issues and come up with some potential answers. Founders of the we20 project will be on hand to introduce the event and generally help out.

Teams can be made up of friends and/or be representative of a specific company or brand. All ideas can then be put forward to the we20 website, which has a direct link with decision makers at the G20 summit in London.

So, enough of that moaning into the early hours at your Soho members' club about how our world leaders don’t have a clue. Now’s your chance to actually tell them! As an added bonus, the name of your company or product may well be seen by millions of people.

This theme has been buzzing around for a while – I met up with Steven Waddington recently and he's just put a great blog post about 'thinking positive' in the recession . Actually I really like the title "Bollocks to Denial and Despair!"

And so would you all help me think up some great ideas that will help people in the creative industries through these difficult times?

My list starts with

1. New business models – take products to market on a risk and reward basis (like bike sharing, The Anomaly business model and Lauren Luke ) 
2. Low cost marketing ideas – Tim Reid has a list
3. Social media tools that can support your existing marketing strategy and tactics
4. Creating opportunities for new business to happen – there will be loads of new ones developing as time goes on
5. I still think there's a role for CRM – the tools are cheap and freely available and all it takes is some strong thinking about your differentiation by need to really stand out
6. And Opensource for Agencies…. a topic close to my heart… DM me if you want to know more about how to re-use and publish your failed pitch ideas and see the benefits flowing back to your agency.
7. Umair Haque's Manifesto for Smart Growth – I particularly like point 2 "Connections not transactions" which echo the motivation behind Amplfied 09 the network of networks.
8. The Sirolli Institute has a economic development methodology that I've long admired since my days with the Aga Khan Rural Support Project in Gilgit – their bottom-up development method (enterprise facilitation) involves working with people who want to start a business and mentoring them through the process on a totally confidential basis. Rochdale Council in the UK i s using it right now and I think it's a great way for an economy to kick-start itself.

Now over to yo'all [gotta stop that Texas thang goin' on in my mind!]

[later... keep thinking up new ones - just added 6 and 7.... and later again number 8.]

we met in the unlikely attic of a Baptist Church in Bloomsbury – fantastic group…
and we discussed the key things needed to make the project fly:

• governance and organisational structure
• location and space
• money
• constituency
• Projects to do there

I joined the governance / money group….

we need….

1. legal / accountancy advice about how to structure the entity [any offers?]
2. We think we know some funders / sponsors who want to get (PR, Branding in the space, sponsor an event, meet the members, opportunity to understand social media, be within the buzz)
3. space – short let offices, lease-endings and possibly approved squatting rights
4. Business plan for our vision and values, statement of aims.   

that’s it for now… a Google Group has been set up.  Join if you want to contribute.

the key ones are MSN, Yahoo and Google. 

There are some quirks that come up from time to time and I hit one today…. I received an update notification that a blog post linking into my site from a contact I met for lunch in May 2007 had been checked by a search engine spider. 

Now that is S….L…..O…..W…. and obviously says a lot about your brand’s online presence and relevance.

And so here are 5  quick things you can do to speed up the linking process:
1 – Get an incoming link from a high-ranked blog
2 – Add Techorati Tags to your blog posts (see below….)  This ensures that Technorati is receiving tagging information from your source site and helps it to register your presence on the web
3 – Use feedburner as one of your site feeds (it comes free with most blogging software) And it automatically pings the relevant search engines for your
4 – Check how you are doing regularly – read your own site statistics and see where incoming visitors are arriving from.  Your site stats should list the search engines own spider programmes as well as real people
5 – Keep a check on yourself by setting a google alert for your blog name and running a regular Technorati check on your brand (everything in the known universe about….)

By contrast, a post on my rowing blog postd at 9.26 pm on Friday 28 September was indexed and the alert was back in my inbox by Sat 29/09/2007  at 01:04 am.  Four Hours.

In no particular order….

1 – Mentoring and coaching anyone with business development responsibility or who has to collaborate with biz dev to do their job better and get results

2 – Moving the whole company to an Enterprise 2.0 operation.  This is a more open relationship with its customers and prospects though using web 2.0 techniques (for yourselves not clients) and creating the open culture internally that enables outsiders to recognise the ‘personality’ of the agency – bypassing traditional outbound communication methods

3 – Facilitating an away day for a client or your senior team

4 – Improving your new business methods and, particularly, pitching

5 – Running a training session on "New business for non-new biz people"