To boost retail commercial landlords will have to think different.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the weekend (a dangerous move according to some near and dear to me). Though I’ve been thinking beyond anything online and more into the retail realm.

Now I walk through Derry everyday and look at the amount of commercial property that lies empty. I’m not the only one either, Mark Nagurski did an excellent post on the very same subject. I’m looking from another angle.

Commercial landlords desperately and urgently need to rethink their strategies on how they lease out their property.  The idea right now is not to give big long leases but attractive short ones.  Micro shops and pop up shops are the perfect way to occupy empty space.  The idea of pop up shops aren’t new but if you want to have a go at starting up in retail now is a good time to start planning for the Christmas, ahem, rush.

If I were a landlord I’d rather have a place occupied for a shorter period of time than lying empty.  So how about shorter lease times.

6 months?

3 months?

2 months?

4 weeks?

1 week?

2 days?

1 day?

All doable in my eyes.

With a good dollop of marketing (announce the sale to your user base on Facebook, Twitter and uVoucher to increase awareness).  Nothing beats being out on the street and mixing with potential customers.

1. Pick something you can sell

The last thing you want is stock at the end of the sale so you want to pick items that you’ve got a good chance of shifting.  Sounds simple but I’ve seen this sink some companies over the years.

2. Creative thinking on the rent.

Easier with some landlords than others I’m sure (I’ve never tried).  Can you negotiate for free?  Offer a percentage of the revenue you make in your venture.  Free free free, whatever you can get for the least amount.  And only have the premises for the time you really need it.  November through to December 24th, don’t forget an online presence if you can (e-commerce would be better but only if you can really complete the orders).

3. Your brand is everything

Just because it’s a short lease shop doesn’t mean that your brand should suffer.  Without going mad with the money try and get some creative design thing going.  You can find some really cheap printing deals (or even Vistaprint for the ubercheap) to get flyers and all that stuff done.

4. Know your costs

Rent and staff are the big numbers.  The minimum wage is rising to £5.93 (£237.20 a week) in October this year. Goes without saying really but it’s so easy to end up running at a loss.  A better strategy would be not to pay anyone and run it yourself.

There’s a large amount of #JFDI in there I know and it will require some creative thinking from a few parties.  At the end of the day it’s all attainable we just need some creative minds to embrace it.  Who’s first?

Facebook’s 350 Million users.

One bow in the social media expert’s armoury is this notion that you have a potential audience of 350 million users.  I like numbers like this but I do ignore them.  First of all does your product, strartup or offering really have the ability to touch a truely global audience in one go?

They are few and far between in my opinion.

If you take a startup that’s concentrating on the UK market then you’re user segment is more like 19 million (nearly 6% of the total amount).  Then when you start slicing down the age segments you are in the less than 1% numbers.

Hopefully in 2010 we’ll start seeing social media experts starting to get real about the numbers of people that you can realistically reach.

For me in 2010 I’m not looking at the “what next”, I’m sure a gathering of technology folk are too.  This will be the year of getting real about what social media is, what is capable of and what you and I can really do with it.

Social networking… well it isn’t, is it really?

I personally believe the that tipping point of social networking is upon us.  The fad of pushing our every whim, thought and party puking picture (always a hit with interview employers) is slowly coming to an end.  

It’s easy to pick on Facebook as it’s one of the largest providers.  The 350 million user claim, while impressive, doesn’t hit the real detail of those users. Are they active? Is it just registrations?  All the while these numbers are bandied about by marketers and social media “experts” (where were you in 2002?)

Ultimately these social networks aren’t social at all, in their human nature sense.  They are just a series of connections.  The quality of that connection is always questionable.  It’s easy to get 500 friends on Facebook but it’s always on one level.  Linkedin got it right from the start, the acquaintance linkage worked a treat.  If I wanted to connect to Bob but had could only do so via Sue and Ted then I had to state my case to them.  If they agreed then the connection was made.

Me -> Ted -> Sue -> Bob

The day Linkedin pretty much dropped this feature is the day that Linkedin died for me.  I do still use it, don’t get me wrong.  The very heart of it’s core was lost.

True social networking is connected via the acquaintance.  I only xyz from my knowing abc, not everyone has a true direct connection to everyone else.

Social media’s twisting of the language.

Facebook’s general twisting on the way we live our lives begins to turn sour with me. Fan pages…. there’s tons of them, which is fine, but what is starting to annoy me is the “inviting” me to become a fan.  With MySpace the issue was simple, either I followed you or I didn’t.  

Dictionary.com’s definition (among many) of the word “fan” is:
an enthusiastic devotee, follower, or admirer of a sport, pastime, celebrity, etc.: a baseball fan; a great fan of Charlie Chaplin.

Most of the things I get invites to be fans of are things that I’d never get involved in.  What it does do is just increase the ego and it’s becoming tiresome.  Don’t get me wrong I don’t mind friends sending me these invitations, it’s the nature of the invitation that bothers me.

Social networking is not a numbers game, it’s about relationships.  If I don’t know the person, company or organisation then what makes you think that I’m ready to be a fan?

So, looking forward.  Perhaps it’s time that Facebook lost its title of “social network” because it’s losing the social factor.  It has become a big directory of linkage, a connected town with it’s own rules.  

Looking for real social networks, I’m looking at the true social nature of things like Dopplr and Locle. Real people, real locations and real life.

So you want a mortgage, so how much do you really spend?

Though it’s not officially confirmed that this will happen, a number of the newspapers are reporting the fact that the FSA want to push through new checks for mortgage applications. The main one is that applicants will be “forced” to prove their spending habits including such wonderful matters as childcare and drinking (not that the two are linked).

In the good old days anyone with an ounce of sense could cobble up a basic spreadsheet with their income and basic outgoings and that normally kept the bank manager happy.
I was thinking of taking it a little further. Opt in to carry a Tesco Clubcard or Nectar card with you from 3-6 months and prove your spending habits. Then let the bank mine your data prior to getting a decision. Yes it can be mildly fixed that everyone is on their best behaviour for those six months but you’d still get an idea of what the general basket size of the applicant is each week.

It won’t be long before a quick mine of Twitter and Facebook data will also show predictive modelling. If you are posting up photos of yourself pee’d up to the nines on Facebook on a Sunday afternoon then there’s a good chance you went on a bender Friday/Saturday night. Just check the timestamps of new activity in the photo stream and you can get an idea of the drinking patterns in no time.

Sweeping generalisations, yes. All in the realms of possiblilty? Yes.

Social Media Training: I don’t see the need for it.

This might rattle some cages….. (here’s hoping anyway).

The great Twitter user purge

I went on a Twitter purge today. It was all down to something I noticed last night, I’d reached a tipping point where it was becoming difficult to maintain a meaningful amount of data coming in.

I’m not on Twitter to data mine, I changed my mind about that a few weeks ago. But out of the 146 people I was following, how many was I having a contract of information with? About four all in all. To be fair I’ve made some new contacts in Northern Ireland, creatives that I didn’t know existed etc. The rest was just turning into link bait, shameless advertising and pointless content. It’s creating content for contents sake.

What got me thinking? Well I had about fifteen alerts from Twitter saying that folk had added me, why had then added me? No idea, more than likely to bump the numbers up and not based on anything I was actually saying. So why am I adding folk I don’t really know, what value are they adding to my knowledge? Very little, so I went on a purge.

It’s not just limited to Twitter, I found the same with Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Bebo. How many of these contacts are actually meaningful? How many will add value for me in the long turn?

Since the Facebook redesign I hardly log in, only to keep in touch with a handfull of folk that I’d normally talk to (ie, I have already had a face to face conversation with them BEFORE adding them on Facebook).

Back to a simple life I think. Try and reduce the paper in my office, get all the CD’s on to some form of media player. Try and live a bit simpler.