Crowd-funding, sometimes called ‘micro investing’ among other things, seems to becoming quite the fad.

It’s a type of angel investment; only downscaled on the ratio of investors to capital – and an increase in the amount of investors involved. Just likes its older, more mature sibling, crowd-funding, can be community based, and a way for successful people to give back to the community. However, with crowd-funding, it’s easier for there to exist motives that are apart from money. Where the crowd could want different benefits – not just fiscal ones.

Crowd-funding opens the way to improving services and local facilities, adding value to the local area or making the community a better place to live. Sometimes it’s not about getting money in return – sometimes, it’s about getting a better product onto the shelves or a different level of service.

This isn’t new of course, community initiatives have been around for years – now however, entrepreneurs are beginning to get even more involved and improve things further with their expertise and skill.

After keeping up with John’s blog, and reading about his thoughts on crowd-funding, and his views on companies like:
My Football Club, Nvohk, Tribe Wanted and not leaving out the new Haveyougotthenerve.tv – it’s becoming evermore popular, better still – evermore successful. The wisdom of the crowd certainly is kicking in.

To quote John again, “It’ll be interesting to see what’s next for crowd-funding. What business do you think would do well with this model?”

Well, I thought I’d take him up on that – and I’m currently working away at writing up a proposal, meeting up with experienced business leaders and people from my community. I have something just about to start, and I’m excited.

You’ll have to wait a little longer before I give you the dirt on it.

Just another excuse for you to come back!!

Okay, so… You’ve got the culture; you’ve got the great people, the ideas and the motivation – but wait!

NO time!

The company I work for is a smart, creative and progressive company that copes with the ebbs and flows of creative industries. We have product development meetings and regularly get together to solve problems – or to generally figure out how to do things just that little bit better.

Each of us is an expert of some sort or another; some more-so than others, of course. We’re each open minded, happy with our jobs and get a thrill out of overcoming the challenges we face every other day.

Skills are distributed, the team works together and we get on with our boss’, and their ideas. We’re not restricted in our work – well, other than the client’s brief that is.

So what’s the problem?

What about time, money, workload even?

Sometimes a team can have all the right ingredients, but lack the available resources to move forward. Or, at least at a pace it’s capable of.

We’ve been a little slow recently as far as PD is concerned; luckily we’ve got loads of work coming in.

What’s even better than that is that even though we don’t have the time just now, we’ve not lost sight of our goal – to change for the better.

Sometimes you’ll hear from business leaders – we just don’t have the time or the people to do things differently. Just make sure that’s true, and it’s not an idle excuse.

Not having the time is no excuse to give up, to ignore it or procrastinate; for the truly innovative work to the bone and at least keep ahead of the pack.

Advertising is, for the most part, an essential Internet activity. You can’t get away from it; someone needs to pay the bills. But how should you do it, or how shouldn’t you?

We often hear about how content is king; and it is.

You can get people, and search engines to love your site with relevant and useful content. But what search engines see, and what your users see is drastically different.

Search engines, for the most part, don’t see good design. When I say good design, I’m not saying “good coding”, I’m saying good feel. Good coding is another topic, good feeling however, is about helping the user around your site.

As an author of a novel, for instance, you need to be concerned with grammatical detail that doesn’t obstruct your readers pace. You build tension, excitement and most importantly; understanding of the concepts (or characters) you’re writing about.

Websites, being much more colourful, have more tools to work with. They also have many more tools to work against them.

Some sites use excessive fancy scripts that add all sorts of layers to their users experience - only to have them leave when they get bored from the lack of new-ness. As that trend dies down, and sites become more focused and minimal, we see and trend in advert intrusion. Don’t get me wrong, many users see adverts as intrusions anyway. Now, however, it’s more than just being there that causes issue - it’s them being in-the-way instead of by-the-way.

Newspapers have this down, for the most part, to a fine art. You can read what you’d like to read without being thrown across the page in order to keep the flow of what you’re reading. Sure, there are advertisements all over the place - but they don’t stop you mid-sentence. They don’t get in middle of a paragraph and stop the flow of the writer. They sit gracefully along side the content in support of it, not a bullying intrusion to it. You do find teasers though, when a little is given on the front page, and then you’re told to go to a certain page. Notice though, that when this happens, you’re being moved to another page because they’re is an issue with economy of space; not because it’s an opportunity to advertise to you.

Just to demonstrate whats good and bad.

Here’s something really bad.

Notice how the words get broken up off the line that you wanted to read from, and get squashed in an ugly attempt at making money.

But what about the good way? What I’m going to do is finish this paragraph and start a new concept, just like a well written text should read.

Above, you’ll find an advert - and hopefully, you didn’t find it too obtrusive. That’s because I placed it between the long pause you have after finishing a paragraph, as opposed to mid-sentence after a comma, or mid-paragraph between two adjoining sentences that are use to support each other. It is part of another foe par though: too many adverts in one space. Thankfully, they’re not proper adverts - they’re just images I made to demonstrate my point.

Well now, that all being said. Here’s the real one:

Obvious if you ask me.

Changing, for the most part, is a tiny step by tiny step kind of an affair. We just get on with things, cross our fingers, and hope that we’re going in the right direction.

That’s what we do as people.

Businesses aren’t people though – apart from the odd witty phrase that suggests otherwise, we have no reason to be mistaken about that fact.

Were we to continue with the metaphor however, we can see could say this:

If you’re going somewhere new, and you want to make a good impression, do you:

· Dress up?

· Make an effort?

· Buy a new pair of shoes?

If you’re meeting someone important, do you:

· Comb your hair?

· Sit up straight?

· Brush the lint off your trousers and the dandruff off your shoulder?

At an interview, do you?

· Care about first impression?

· Do you care about presentation?

· Or make an effort to speak clearly, and intelligibly?

Now, let’s get back to business. How many businesses do you know, that aren’t trying to go somewhere new? Or that aren’t trying to make a good impression?

How many customers do you know that aren’t important to the businesses that crave them?

How many businesses do you know that aren’t constantly involved in a game of first impressions?

In fact, how many do you know that aren’t doing a combination of all the above?

What about yours?

Change is an obvious thing in our personal lives, and we are quite often struck by surprises – even highly successful and intelligent people. This obviousness leads to it being an oft ignored subject; bar the odd stint of buying self-help books that go along with our new year’s de-resolutions, of course.

In business however, can you afford to ignore change? Sure, you might miss a few beats every so often, but it is your job – to ride the change, or predict it and to react to it, or at least to the fact that you may have missed it.

It’s not about trying to understand worldviews in their entirety. It is about, finding those world views that mean something to you, that are your worldviews, or the views of the people in whose world you want to be successful in. Find those micro-worldviews and tap in to them, and most importantly – when the world spins, revolve with it.

Creativity in business – nice or necessity

Being a creative thinker gives a person many advantages over his or her colleagues. Allowing the passing on of that creative thinking to the rest of the business however, creates an advantage over its [the business] competitors – sometimes enough to give it an edge.

The culture within a business concerned with creativity needs to be very open. It is no longer the domain of those upper managers.

To clarify: Empowering your employees by giving them opportunities to be creative, or going further by creating expectations and training on it, does not make them decision makers. You shouldn’t panic as a manager if your workforce is paying attention to things you’re confident wont work. As a manager you’re there to ensure they don’t go off too far.

Someone with the right talents or training will have a valuable set of skills to use when working on an idea.

Give your people the power to negotiate its acceptance, by you the manager and the rest of the workforce.