I started a business. It made me want to drink copious quantities, smoke myself into oblivion and hit my head against a brick wall. Instead I wrote a blog.
Site Launch Day: 34
User Count: 59
Going right: Love that feeling when you can't sleep because you are so excited about an idea.
Going wrong: This week has been really bad for working. Bank holiday buggered my whole schedule.
Comment: Know that showing how much I love those ads (see below) will really highlight how much of a naff person I am. Don't care.
Paris is famous for many wonderful sites - Eiffel Tower, Diana's Torch, Louvre museum - as well as its superb Michelin starred restaurants, the Latin Quarter and some challenging architectural eyesores. It is less well known as the city of lost souls. No, no. Think not of some mystical Raiders of the Lost Ark ancient burial site, but grotty, crowded, unkempt Irish and English pubs (more than 60 of them no less) seething with students, musicians and unwashed, aged wannebee-philosophers (envisage oneself with flat cheroot, half a cider, shrugging shoulders, going "Bof") still believing that their so-called 'pub family' provides stimulating discourse after 10 years of hardcore liver abuse.
I had a pub family in Paris; familiar faces both behind the bar, on the stage and propping up the bar. I am still in contact with many of them and love them dearly. We supported each other in our lost times and in our drunk times.In our creative moments and relationship crises. When home was away from family, you really needed another one. Paris if you didn't know it, is a haven for individuals who follow an Orwellian life path. If you are going to be down and out anywhere, it's nice to have company.
One crony from back in the days, Investment Impact user name 'DrKev', is a great guitarist, an opinionated musician (yes DrKev , I do think any pop music is very worthy if it brings one smile to at least one person) and also holds a PhD in Laser Physics. He holds the unfabulously paid position of Investment Impact's Creative Director. When I lived in Paris we went to gigs together - he-of-far-reaching-vision Jeff Healey and he-of-constantly-moving-tongue Steve Lukather. Yesterday DrKev sent me a demo of a proposed ad for Investment Impact. Our text conversation was as follows
- Me "When can you be on Skype. Want that video online now. Needs a couple of tweaks."
- Him "Whoa there Nelly, less haste more care. Not home now giving guitar lesson this evening. Let's think of a series of shorts and who you want to interest. Glad you like it though."
- Me "Yeah yeah, it's cool, it's naff and needs to go on Google plus ASAP. It interests geeks like me which is perfect."
- Him "Hey my 7 inches interests 50% of the entire world, but that's not enough on it's own."
Yes you read right. Apart from clearly being popular with the ladies, his clip was so cool that I thought my haste was justified and I persuaded him so. We used Xtranormal, text to speech movie maker.
Here's his:
>
Here's mine:
Have asked all my friends to devise Ads for us. It's free to do on www.xtranormal.com if you don't use too many fancy features. You can see our YouTube channel here (or by clicking the icon if you are on one of our homepages).
Site Launch Day: 37
User Count: 60
Going right: A real live author asked me to review their writing; seems I am viewed as something of an expert in the blog space.
Going wrong: Still pinging completely unresponsive PR firms in Cyberspace.
Comment: What is wrong with people that they thing ignoring an email is a polite things to do? See - so annoyed can't even spell properly.
Consistency is a watch word in parenting. This morning bleary eyed, my boyfriend and I sat down to try and decide a course of action for our ever demanding 16 month old daughter - who has decided for the last week that 4am is the perfect time to wake - and neither will go back to sleep, nor will play quietly in her cot until it gets light. No, she screams herself sick like a little Veruca Salt until we pick her up to cuddle her, because quite frankly we can't bear the screams. Meanwhile, I scurry around for that Gina Ford tome I threw out over a year ago, which was previously deemed too Nazi like in its child-training principles.
"One way is to be hardcore." I said. "Let her scream it out and it will only be a matter of time til she learns that we won't cave. That's what my friend did - and her twins were only 6 months."
"Or the other way is that bearing in mind she might be newly insecure from being in a foreign environment, one of us sleeps in her room until she learns that we will never leave her."
"Sure." I said. "But we both know that parenting is a tug of war between your principles and what you can stand - and with either approach it's possible to suddenly switch track to the other way unless we firmly believe that one of them is the right way. Do we believe that one of them is the right way?"
And therein lay the rub. Neither of us is certain about the 'right' way to go about things. Books do not help because every child is different and in the end we must plump for one way because the worst of both worlds is to switch between the methods. Basically parenting is just making it up as you go along and anyone who says different is fibbing.
Consistency in your principles has obvious parallels in business and brand. No company who prides itself on ethics can afford to be discovered to be employing cheap child labor in China. The only company to consistently get away with god awful social responsibilities is Nestle - and that's only because they are so pervasive that you can't avoid their products...
So I received three conflicting pieces of feedback on the positioning of Investment Impact (ranging from fantastic to cautionary) and it's not the first time - debate seems to be raging amongst my contacts as to the effectiveness and/or appropriateness of the brutally irreverent and unpolished geeky positioning I have consistently promoted for this company - the latest feedback is on the YouTube clips.
My take on it is this. Investment Impact is a start-up, and has a start-up's budget right now. We're not hiding it. It's the first time any consultancy has tried to transform their proposition to market through various forms of social media - by definition irreverent and out-there. It's a totally different ball game to the big names. And pretending anything otherwise is not consistent with who we are. Investment Impact is the people's consultancy. A get-your-hands-dirty-joyfully consultancy. We're human. And proud of it.
If you want a peek at the business that's driving me insane you can click here.