hedgehog lab

FUEL = ENERGY and in business we use it to describe how we can power our businesses, especially with the web.

Lately I have been focusing on the marketing and sales strategy for the lab, especially with the impending release of fixx, our bug tracking product for software teams. When I joined the lab I mentioned in my first post, that I was spear-heading the social computing and networking efforts and recently, this has expanded to a more marketing and sales focused role. As you're all aware we already have profiles on facebook, linkedin, twitter, etc, but we get to communicate with our followers, we don't get to interact with them.

This is why I attended the FUEL conference held by Carsonified in London last Friday, to listen to key speakers talk about how businesses interact with their audience using the latest web tools.

There were some great presentations and I must admit that at the start of the day I was wary that my ridiculously early alarm clock call and 3 hour train journey would leave me somewhat exhausted and not very attentive. However, to my surprise, I had no reason to be concerned because I was fully engaged with each presentation throughout the day.

The key message of the conference was to discuss the different ways which you can interact with your audience and I think that they demonstrated this very well by keeping all of the conference audience engaged throughout the day.

Some of the highlighted speakers of FUEL included:

• Carsonified's co-founder Ryan Carson discussed how you can interact with customers
• Tara Hunt explained whuffie and how it works to build a community around your brand
• Virgin's Alex Hunter discussed how customers played a big role in Virgin America...
• Ted Hunt from Innocent discussing branding and interacting with customers
• and dont hassle the hoff with soocial (Stefan Fountain and Daniel Spronk)

This does not include other great presentations by Keir Whitaker (Carsonified), Nic Halstead (Fav.or.it), Stewart Townsend (Sun), Clive Howard (Howard/Baines), Andrew Scott (Rummble), Paul Boag (Headscape), who discussed some interesting concepts on working with clients, Steve Pearce (Poke), who had a very cool presentation with excellent drawings about how to get the best out of your business as well as a very informative presentation about branding from Richard Moross (Moo).

The overall message which I received from the conference, is that it is essential for any business to interact with their audience using the best tools which the web can offer. Some of the tools which were demonstrated were Seesmic (an online video questions and answers site, useful for interaction between a business and its customers), UserVoice (collecting user votes, ratings on products, etc) and there are many others.

All of these tools were discussed because they can play such a key part in the success of a business' future. Many of the presentations showed how being proactive, creative and interacting with their customers or followers has proved to be very successful for their business. This is something we will be considering in great detail at the lab so watch this space...

BarCampNorthEast

Okay this is a bit delayed but its been in the pipeline for a while.

I recently attended the first ever BarCampNorthEast, held at the Art Work Galleries in Newcastle.

Now if you dont know what BarCamp is, it's described as ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. Basically at BarCamp you can:

• give a presentation on anything you like
• attend the many presentations held by others
• have an all together jolly time meeting talented/cool kids

Personally, i love BarCamp because of its informal participatory nature, for example, Tara Hunt's discussion on mind hacks found everybody in a circle 'splaining their own personal hacks; Bon's hack involved setting his clock fifteen minutes fast which allowed him a combination of getting from A to B early or on time. Good hack!

The night time saw a rather tasty barbecue, mojito's (made by yours truely!) and an on-the-fly DJ set by none other than Ian Forrester using his amazing Pacemaker.

So yeah, BarCampNorthEast rocked! Roll on BarCampNorthEast2!

Mad e-props go out to Alistair MacDonald and Gareth Rushgrove who did a brilliant job of organising the event.

Sponsoring SemanticCamp

I have always been a strong supporter of grassroots web standards technologies and the semantic web but it has always been through the back of the crowd. When we started hedgehog lab, one of our primary aims was to be a vehicle to promote good practice and the great community around the web and software in general. The best way to do that was to sponsor community events surrounding these topics, but most web-related events come with a hefty dent in the wallet when it comes to sponsorship rates.

Therefore, it was refreshing to see that the first Semantic Camp, being organised by none other than Tom Morris, had a flexible sponsorship opportunity to contribute as much or as little as we wanted. As strong proponents of standards and a company filled with geeks who are fascinated about the future of the Semantic Web, we could not resist the chance to be a sponsor.

Although our contribution is trivial compared to some of the other sponsors of the event, we are hoping this will become a stepping stone to lay the foundation for hedgehog lab supporting more events like BarCamp NorthEast (hint to organisers!) and other major web-related events.

Unfortunately, none of us were quick enough to grab a ticket to the event but I am sure we will be turning up to many that will follow the success of this. To those who are going, “Get building the Semantic Web!”