DotNeil.com

I woke up at 3:30 this morning to catch a 4:45 train from Leeds for a day in London (seriously expensive; £120 with a Young Persons Railcard!). I just got back, so I’ve been awake for nearly twenty-two hours now. How (and why?) am I managing a blog post?!

The day was focused around meeting with two teams of entrepreneurs. One was very much in the social web technology space. The other, although very nearly in the same space at one point, looks to have taken a different avenue into more traditional business models.

First-up; a workshop focused on building online communities. The team hosting the workshop knew their stuff; they’ve invested in social web technology since 2002, which is a good four years before I became interested in the Web. There was loads to take away, but I’ve summarized the main areas below, and included some links as extra reading for those that are kind enough to frequent my blog after meeting me in person at the workshop;

• Websites are no longer just online brochures; you need to get real visitor opinions and feedback on the very first page - and it all needs to feel authentic, organic, and fresh.
• You can gain a great deal of useful information from your website, you just need to have an appreciation of metrics, and the best tools for obtaining, collating, analysing, and interpreting them. CrazyEgg was one of the tools suggested. I’ve used it on NeilCauldwell.com, and it gets my seal of approval - the heat mapping feature is fantastic.
• Building online communities is a good thing even if you think you customers might have bad things to say about you. People have the tools to voice themselves in hypertext; you can embrace what they have to say, or it ignore it. If you choose the later, they might just use your competitors’ site to make their feelings known.
• There’s been a great deal on interest around Second Life over the last twelve months. I don’t think it provides any real value just yet. This article will show you why. If Second Life was a social network, I doubt it would’ve had the same interest on its’ existing regular user-base of just over 500,000.

Second part of the day; a meeting with two guys who have great experience in starting big businesses. I’ve known one of the guys for a while now, but I only recently found out that he raised almost $50million (more money than most of the social web startups I know combined!) for a company that is still performing well to this day. These guys were looking at new business opportunities, so there was plenty to talk about, and looks like we’ll have another meeting soon.