Photography: cajie

It all used to be so easy. If you were a team leader and you wanted one of your team members to do something on your project – change the icons on the interface, for example, or completely rewrite the code so that it works – all you’d have to do is tap them on the shoulder in their cubicle or hunt them down in the photocopy room and tell them what you needed. The whole conversation would last about five minutes. You’d have to suffer the behind-your-back eye-roll at the end of it but you could be sure you got the message across and that they’d be getting on with the work. Just as soon as they’d finished reading The Onion or chatting up the secretary.

These days, when team members can be scattered from Kentucky to Kazakhstan, it’s not so easy. If you want your team member to change the design of the home page so that it looks like a news site rather than a MySpace page, you have to describe exactly what sort of layout you need. You have to put it all into an email, send it off and wait until they read it.

And if you don’t explain it clearly enough – or if you use the sort of vocabulary not easily understood by a native of Almaty – you’ll have to wait another day or two to receive their questions. The whole process can drag on for days, adding a whole new meaning to “virtual working.”

See You on VOIP

There are ways around the problem, and most of them involve skipping the email and adopting a more direct approach. Merav Knafo, for example, co-founder LookBetterOnline and founder of iJoomla, two companies whose staff are based in Russia, Romania, India and California, opts for Skype, preferring voice communications to written instructions. She even finds that the distance makes these sorts of meetings briefer than they might have been in real life. And less fattening too.

“Usually these are very short conversations and very straight to the point,” she told us. “While in corporations meetings can take hours, in the virtual world it’s only a few minutes. And no need to bring donuts.”

Skype is certainly faster than email, and privacy issues aside, it’s going to be a lot cheaper (especially when you don’t have to pay for a box of sugary buns) than dialing direct. But it still means passing on messages and requests verbally, a system than can leave room for misunderstanding, especially when at least one of the team members isn’t a native speaker of the language being used. Merav’s first language is Hebrew which means that both she and her programmer are using a foreign language, so gets around the problem by using detailed diagrams decorated with big red arrows to indicate exactly what she wants.

“The communication is very good,” she says.

Clearly though, all of this requires a greater investment of time and effort than simply bringing up a Web page on a monitor, pointing at the navigation bar and saying, “That’s horrible. Make it prettier please.”

What’s the Time in Astana?

It also means paying attention to the timing. One of the disadvantages of virtual working is that each member might be operating in a different time zone. And one of the advantages of virtual working is that each team member can also set their own schedule. The result is that you can never quite know when a team member is working, when they’re working for you and when they’re off picking up their kid from pre-school, training for a triathlon or out on a date with the secretary at their last company.  Merav makes her Skype calls at a set time rather than when a problem arises. For her that usually means first thing in the morning, but that’s also the end of her programmers’ workday so she has to wait until the next day before she sees the results.

Presumably, it also makes it harder to be spontaneous but perhaps that’s not a bad thing. Ask any cubicle worker what they find the most annoying about working in an office and after considering the commute, office politics, paper jams in the photocopier and the limited salary, they’re likely to say the team leader poking his head around the cubicle wall every five minutes with a bunch of new instructions that contradict the last set of instructions.

When a team member is easily available, he’s also easy to bother, a tendency that doesn’t lend itself to maximum efficiency. And besides, when you’re constantly tapping him on the shoulder and pulling up Web pages, how is he supposed to get The Onion read?

To any outsider, it made no sense at all. Having bought Flickr in May 2005, Yahoo! announced that in September 2007, it would be shutting down its own image branch, Yahoo! Photos.

What made the decision seem strange wasn’t just that Yahoo’s members had to move all of their images over to Flickr. It was that at the time Yahoo! Photos was picking up almost 6 percent of the hits generated by image sites compared to just 4.5 percent for Flickr. Its store of images too was much higher than Flickr’s. At one time, Yahoo! Photos could boast that it had around 2 billion images on its servers, compared to 500 million for its smaller rival.

But it was clear that Flickr had something that Yahoo! never had and, it seems, never will have. It had magic.

Putting your images on Yahoo! Photos was useful. It let friends and family see them. Putting your images on Flickr was cool. It let you think of yourself as a photographer. That’s something that’s almost impossible to compete against.

Between April 2006 and April 2007 when Yahoo! announced that it would have only one photo service, visitors to Flickr rose by 22 percent. During the same period, visitors to Yahoo! Photos fell by 60 percent.

Flickr isn’t the only company that’s been able to wipe the floor with competitors despite offering a service that differs little. No auction site has been able to knock eBay off its perch. Starbucks, recent difficulties aside, has been able to spread around the world faster than Hollywood gossip even though the world was hardly short of cafes before. And Digg remains the most important social bookmarking site for online publishers even though there are a host of good alternatives.

What all of those companies have in common are the two ingredients that make marketing happen by itself and which allow a firm to grow quickly into an unbeatable giant: a community that thinks the same way; and a place for that community to come together.

Digg — The Place for Ron Paul Fans Everywhere
That mindshare is perhaps most apparent on Digg. Where else can you find so many people so enamored of Apple, video games and Ron Paul? Becoming a top Digger means linking up with other Diggers, leaving comments on each other’s Diggs and networking to ensure that your recommended articles reach the home page.

It’s a process that encourages people to start thinking alike — if they didn’t already — and while it means that much of the recommended content can fall into the same narrow band of topics, it also reinforces the site’s clique-y appeal. If you don’t get it, you’re never going to Digg. If you do, you just have to.

It’s unlikely that that was how Digg’s founders saw the site developing when they launched it — which means it’s hard to repeat the recipe yourself — but it is perhaps the most extreme example of how mindshare can bind a community into one place and build momentum.

Flickr Lets Photographers Share Photos — and Photo Love
The secret of Flickr’s success at mindsharing is perhaps easier to identify. Although the aim of the site is simply to enable photographers to share their images with others, it’s become much more than that. The groups have allowed photographers interested in every subject possible to find like-minded people and swap tips. The comments give constant ego-boosts as well as encouraging advice. The APIs have made looking at other people’s images fun.

And it’s also become clear that photo buyers are browsing the site looking for images to license for a fee.

Spend any time at all on Flickr and you’ll quickly come to feel that you’re sharing the space with millions of people who enjoy photography as much as you do.

That might not be saying much — lots of people enjoy photography. But it is saying much to build a service that focuses on something that many people like and deliver it in enough different ways to keep even people with the slightest interest in photography happy and feeling as though they’re part of the group.

In some ways, in fact, Flickr’s mindsharing space is the opposite of Digg’s: a place where everyone is welcome and quickly made to feel part of the club.

Starbucks Built a Community on Coffee and Cream
Starbucks, which is much more commercial than either Flickr or Digg, has a much weaker mindshare than either of those sites — which might be one of the reasons it’s running into trouble. But it is still possible to say that there is such a thing as a Starbucks community, a group of people for whom a day isn’t complete without a double latte vanilla frappuccino.

Starbucks’ ability to create mindshare is really a result of its products. Like Ben and Jerry, another company with a cultish customer following, it created its own range of unique items which both say something about the person drinking them and provide a spot where they could do it together.

While Flickr’s mindshare is built on something as abstract as a love of photography, for Starbucks, it’s as tangible as hot milk, coffee and domed tops for the mountains of cream.

Whatever a company manages to come up with to produce the sort of mindshare that creates a community, the result can be the last ingredient that has kept eBay on top for so long: critical mass.

Once enough people are using a company’s service, it becomes very difficult for competitors to break in and very hard for users to leave. For anyone with an item to sell, eBay is the place to sell it because it has so many buyers. Just as for anyone with a picture to show, Flickr is the place to display it because it has so many image admirers.

So what does all this mean for a geek-minded entrepreneur?

It means that if you can make your ideal appeal to a community — whether that’s a tight clique, a love of a subject or the unique products you sell — you should find that you grow fast… and stay big.

Photography: Timmy Toucan

It’s hard to imagine that there was once a time when you could leave college, sign up with a company and know exactly what you’d be doing and where you’d be doing it for the rest of your life. Today, there are no such things as employees; only freelancers in temporary employment.

When no one can be certain that the company they work for will be around next year — and no company can’t be certain that its employees will be around then either — the only thing you can count on is you and your ability to make your name, promote your skills and sell yourself, not as a person, but as a personality.

Here are 17 ways to turn yourself into a geek brand.

1. Focus on a skill.
It all starts with identifying what you do best. You probably have lots of skills, from programming Perl to changing diapers. Brands always focus on one, whether that’s serving frappuccinos or designing super-shoes. Identify the one thing that you do better than most. That’s what you’ll be branding.

2. Bring out your uniqueness.
There are lots of cafes, but there’s only one Starbucks. Once you’ve identified what you do best, you’ll need to identify a way of doing it that’s all you. That could be coding in record time, creating Web designs with a certain look or even creating a particular pattern when you mow the lawn. It’s not just what you do but the way you do it that can help you stand out.

3. Look to your achievements.
Looking for skills and unique approaches to what you do is all a bit abstract. It’s much easier to look at what you’ve actually done and mine your achievements for the raw materials that will make up your brand. Ask yourself what you’ve actually done, not what you want to do… then ask yourself how you did it.

4. Turn every task into a WOW project.
Tom Peters of The Work Matters! Movement talks about the WOW-ness of every project — even small, annoying ones. Every task you do should be another example of what your brand can do and the gigantic benefits it can bring to the people who use it. So don’t sweat the small stuff; just make it look big.

5. Provide an experience.
One of the things that marks one brand out from another is that brands don’t just offer products or services; they deliver experiences. That’s easier for a restaurant to do than a designer or a coder… but not impossible. Try designing a client-side workflow that’s enjoyable — and unique to you.

6. Share the knowledge.
Once you’ve pulled out the elements that your brand will embody, you’ll need to communicate them. One way to show people that you have valuable information is to share some of it in a blog, or better still, a book. When people read you, they assume you’re an expert.

7. Give talks.
And once you’ve got an information product that can brand you as an expert — and which can generate revenue too — you can become a speaker. You don’t have to wait for the conferences to come calling to do this. You can just rent a room, churn out some flyers and market it yourself.

8. Give classes.
Another way to transmit information — and reinforce your image as a reliable source of expertise — is to teach a class. Community colleges and adult education schools often have slots to fill or again, you can rent a space and organize your own. Teachers are experts too.

9. Team up with other brands.
When Corn Flakes puts a picture of Shrek on its cereal boxes, both brands benefit: Corn Flakes gets sales and Shrek gets publicity. You can do the same thing. Look for other geek brands in complementary fields and form joint ventures. A game designer, for example, could team up with a fantasy author to offer unique online worlds.

10. Get a good picture.
It really goes without saying, and yet it’s so often needs to be said. When you are your own brand, the way you look matters. A blurred webcam still just won’t cut it on your About Us page. Only a professionally taken photograph will do.

11. Get an image.
Every brand has a logo, but getting an image is about more than a single neat graphic. It’s about a look, a design, an approach that’s all you. It’s likely that more people would recognize an iPod today than Apple’s apple logo. When you create products, a website or anything else, brand it with your own unique style.

12. Get a slogan.
An image might be the easiest part of brand to remember but a tagline that sums up who you are, what you do and how you do it is important too. At the very least, it will help you remember what you’re doing and stay focused.

13. Make your site WOW.
Much of branding is about extracting your uniqueness and communicating it. Just is it’s possible to follow Tom Peters’ advice about making each task WOW, so it’s just as important to create awe with your marketing. Don’t settle for a website that looks like any other site on the Web; take a look at how designers (like Benoit Falardeau and Nate Smith) use their sites to create an impression… and do the same.

14. Do the social networking thing.
Your brand is only as valuable as the people who know about it. Social networking though has made it easier than ever to get to know lots and lots of people… even if only superficially. Make friends on Facebook, start groups to raise interest in your field and take part in discussions.

15. Network offline too.
You can “meet” a lot of people online, but nothing beats meeting in the flesh. Attending conventions, first as a delegate and maybe later as a speaker is a great way to meet the people who matter, show them who you are, spread your name and form valuable joint ventures too.

16. Make one client better.
The goal of your brand will usually be to land enough jobs to help many clients and give you a high and stable income. But ultimately the strength of your brand will always depend on the benefits your skills bring. Instead of thinking in terms of servicing lots of clients then, try thinking in terms of helping one client at a time. Not only will you earn your fee, you’ll also create your own network of satisfied evangelists.

17. Don’t kill your brand with shortcuts.
Brands are really all about trust and nothing is more fragile than a trustworthy reputation. It doesn’t take much — a shoddy product, a bug-ridden program, poor customer support, to name just three — to turn your name into mud and make your brand worthless. Your brand has to be shiny at all times.