Andy’s rules….always go for the Win Win Scenario
Much of life is not zero-sum: one person’s gain is not another’s loss. Work towards a win for all participants. Not just a compromise; a win.
Is that possible? Try anyway.
Source of Think Win Win here.
We use version control when we’re developing our software. Each time we finish a piece of code we commit it to the version control system. Each commit gets a number. Every 1,000 commits we have cake. Simple, no? 
This is the cake for commit number 4,000 on Citizen Space. Tasty.
1. Chris has some crabs
2. So does Rory
3. Adam has a giggle at something Ian said.
4. Ian *is* Iron Man. Or so the eyes suggest…
5. Ben working hard
6. Michaela has the pen jiggles
7. Marta makes tea
8. Adam prefers books with pictures in 
9. Stan and Ant: masters at work
10. Rich shows us his legs
FIN
On Friday, Team Rubber were involved in helping raise money for ActionAid as past of it’s Pover Tie Day initiative. The idea was simple; dress up smart for the day!
Team Rubber scrubs up pretty well, although wearing suits in summer is hot!
I blogged a couple of weeks ago about working away from the office. In that line of thinking, Ben just sent me this piece from Seth Godin – Goodbye to the Office.
I’m completely convinced that we need a space that’s definitely ours, where sometimes we work together intensively on interesting problems. I’m increasingly less convinced that we need to be in an office as much as we are; in fact that it has certain costs – not just travelling, or rent – but also interruption, dissipation, and the accidental exclusion of those who aren’t in the room.
The classic desk-chair-pentidy office setup – meh. I work at home with my feet up on the sofa. It’s bad for RSI but pretty good for getting stuff done. I don’t even have a desk in the office right now (happens every few years when stuff gets juggled around – means I’m constantly stealing in a vampire fashion from other people’s power supplies).
Maybe it’s time to can the desks in favour of sofas, bar tables and drawing boards. And power supplies everywhere.
Just outside the Team Rubber office, there is a HUGE £80,000 screen in Queen Square, courtesy of Hyundai. They’re expecting 11,000 people, so could get a bit noisy….!
Text doesn’t express your feelings brilliantly 
Most email is misunderstood by recipients. 
Same probably goes for blogging, Facebook, Linkedin, Youtube comments, and other things that mostly use text like chat apps and forums.
Working remotely is something Team Rubber does with mixed success. Sometimes we’re very good at it. Sometimes we’re not so good.
I’ve found working in a remote (or distributed) way massively productive, but I don’t think remote working looks like as much fun for other Team Rubber staff as it should be, so I’ve been thinking about how we could and should do it better.
It was a handy co-incidence that I found this piece from Jason Z at 37 Signals about remote working and team parity.
In short, when most of a team work together in one location, it’s very hard to prevent remote team members becoming second class citizens. It’s very easy for the people in the same location to share information and solve problems with quick conversations, white boards, a quick sketch or a quick list of actions on a post-it note. They can also have lunch, tea and banter together.
Those working remotely miss out on this shared ‘stuff’, or worse, get the negative side-effects (“we were just talking about the project and we’ve decided xxxx”, “sorry we missed your call, we were having a meeting” etc.). I’ve seen this happen and it doesn’t look like much fun
Meanwhile I collaborate almost every day on open source projects where all work is distributed. Using tools like internet relay chat (irc), forums, and web-based project management apps, I get stuff done with people in different countries and different time zones (I’m currently collaborating with people in Canada, Germany, Holland, Spain, Sweden and Russia). We use English, we use a lot of short written communication, a few pictures, and an awful lot of emoticons (to indicate when we’re really not cross…or when we really are). It’s fun and we get stuff done.
I’m not advocating that Team Rubber works remotely by default. Having a base is really important to us, and by working together closely we’ve built strong personal ties, developed seriously impressive capabilities to get stuff done, and had fun. That’s massively valuable – but we should get better at working in a distributed way, because it’s also fun and valuable, and because we already have people in multiple locations.
Wednesday is a great day to work from home – or somewhere else out of the studio/office (get out in the world!). It won’t be compulsory – and some jobs are tied to a office phone – but I’m strongly encouraging distributed working on Wednesdays, and I’m going to be very interested in how we do do it better. Our tools are things like email, irc, trac, and (omg) “picking up the fricking phone”. We’re going to learn how to do it right, and it’s going to be fun
cheers,
Andy
Originally posted at Rubber Republic
–
[Image courtesy of : Wendelboe on Flickr]
The *devil* in question was indeed the force of office evil that is Powerpoint, and Tom Alcott from the Social Network Company gave us a masterclass in how to keep presentations succinct, engaging and conversational while remaining in total control of your material.
His PechKucha style talk on social network analysis lasted exactly ’6 minutes & 66 seconds’ and covered everything from a crash course in social psychology, the ambiguity of what being ‘connected’ actually means to mapping the *viral* spread of information within networks.
At the heart of it was that key question: Who is the most valuable node within any social network? The ‘hub’ (the most connected individual within a community). Or the ‘broker’ (the person who bridges between two communities and therefore allows that idea to spread to new audiences)?
Finding this overlap is something we are fascinated by, as it potentially allows the conversation to evolve and new participants to join. This was also a central theme to ‘Connected’ our last Rubber Book Club mail-out which explains the various ways information travels with some very entertaining illustrations.
So all good stuff and many thanks to Tom for coming in on a very warm and humid Friday afternoon.
Incidentally if ’666′ is the number of the beast, does that ’668′ the neighbour of the beast?
(Originally posted at the Viral Ad Network blog)
Everybody likes to think their viral creatives are going to go viral without any kind of push – but here’s the bottom line:
| No Media Spend | Media Spend | |
|---|---|---|
| Asset Production | -£20K | -£20K |
| Media Spend | -£0.00 | -£7.5K |
| Total Cost | -£20K | -£27.5K |
| Organic Views(Worst case) | 1000 | 1000 |
| Organic Views(Best case) | 500,000 | 500,000 |
| Bought Views | 0 | 50,000 |
| Total Views (Best case) | 500,000 | 550,000 |
| Total Views (Worst case) | 1000 | 51,000 |
| Cost Per View (Best case) | -£0.04 | -£0.05 |
| Cost Per View (Worst case) | -£20 | -£0.539 |
Summary:
How much would you enjoy reporting to your client to tell them their average cost per view was £20? (even if you don’t phrase it like that, they will be calculating it).
Including a bought spend reduces their (and your) risk – in very worst case above you’d be entering that meeting reporting an average cost per view of around 1/40th of that price – that’s 40 times more ROI for them, and a more economically viable campaign.
What’s missing from the above?
Quite a bit – for a start, the more that your content is seen, the more likely it is to get organic views – so a bought media buy makes it far less likely that you’ll be hitting anywhere close to the worst case. For simplicity I’ve left this at the most basic calculation I could.
(Disclaimer: these numbers are estimated and may not necessarily reflect real-life results, which will depend on individual campaigns)
