I recently had the opportunity to interview Mike Brown, co-organizer of the well-renowned Webstock, New Zealand’s largest web conference. With only a few weeks to go before Webstock 2009, Mike took a few moments out of his busy schedule to reply to my questions.

Rumor has it you were a web developer before becoming an event organizer. How did you end up running events instead of cutting code?

The programmers I used to work with would laugh at the idea of me “cutting code,” but yes, I worked for around eight years doing HTML/CSS. Then I moved into information architecture and user experience. All of which I enjoyed a lot.

I was on the Web Standards Group mailing list and made the mistake of posting a few times there. Someone emailed me and suggested I think about setting up a Web Standards Group in Wellington. This was in 2004 and the idea was to have city-based meetings discussing web standards topics of the day. So I emailed everyone in Wellington that I knew and for our first meeting in early 2005, had around 75 people attending.

It grew from there as it became clear we were satisfying a need for people in the industry to meet, learn, network, and share.

The main impetus for Webstock is that we’re all total fanboys and fangirls at heart, and the only way we’d be able to meet people we really admired in the industry was to invite them ourselves! I blogged about the journey to Webstock in more detail on the Webstock blog.

There are obviously challenges to face when changing careers in such a big way—from building web sites to running conferences. What’s been the highlight of this change for you, personally?

Well, in a sense my life has been a series of career changes, often to the chagrin of my wife! I guess the highlight of this particular change is being able to do what I’m truly passionate about. Previously I was doing this outside of my work, so the chance to make my passion my work really feels like a privilege I’ve been handed.

It’s also a chance to work closely with Tash Hall, my main Webstock partner-in-crime who is one of the most inspiring people I know.

Finally, and more personally, it’s given me the chance to be a lot more flexible with my hours and consequently spend more quality time with my wife and kids. The week I quit my previous job I walked my kids to school for the first time ever — there was no longer a need to be at my desk by a certain time!

Lucky guy! If you could give one piece of advice for a web designer or developer who is considering selling products instead of services, what would it be?

I’m sure there are others better equipped at giving advice here! It seems to me, though, that a lot of success in this area almost comes about by accident. People build a product to solve a problem that’s bugging them (to scratch their own itch, so to speak); it’s only as they’re building it, or after it’s finished, that they think about selling it.

So I guess the advice is: concentrate on building a dynamite product. Solve real problems that you come across. Build it for yourself first. Then worry about selling it.

My area of expertise does lie elsewhere though, so follow any advice at your own risk.

As for web developers trying to break into the speaking circuit, what do you look for in a conference speaker?

Well, there are a couple of points here. Webstock probably is more for experienced speakers, rather than those trying to break into the speaking circuit. So I’ll talk first about what we look for at Webstock. Then I’ll offer some thoughts on how to become a (good) speaker.

For Webstock, first and foremost, they need to be a good, entertaining speaker. This example is a bit extreme to make a point, but in general I think it’s true that an entertaining speaker with shallow content trumps a boring speaker with great content. People are paying money to attend a conference; the presentations they see are a performance that should engage them.

The speakers we look for also need to know their stuff. We want attendees at Webstock to be inspired and pushed and challenged. And we want them to learn from people who are among the best in their fields. So we need speakers that have the knowledge to do that.

Also, and this is much more intangible, we want speakers that we’ll personally like as people. One of the bonuses for us is working with the speakers and hanging out with them a little, and it’s much nicer when we can feel a connection with them.

For someone trying to break into the speaking circuit, I’d offer three pieces of advice.

• Speak as much as you can; present at work to small groups for short periods. You’ll suck at times, you’ll be nervous, but you’ll get better. Knowing how to present to audiences is a skill you can learn.
• Work at being better. Study other speakers at conferences you go to and by watching the TED talks, and learn from how they present. Read Garr Reynolds’ blog, Presentation Zen.
• Respect your audience. It’s a privilege to be able to speak to a group of peers. They’re giving up their time to watch you. Put in the research time needed. Spend time crafting your slides. Rehearse your presentation. It will take longer than you think it should to prepare, but it’s worth it and it’s the minimum you should do.

Great tips, thanks. So, what are you most looking forward to during Webstock ‘09?

As an organizer I most look forward to feeling that buzz a successful conference has; when you walk around and people are animated and smiling and blown away by what they’ve just heard. If we can create that atmosphere at Webstock, I’ll be very happy.

As an attendee it’s really hard for me to single out the speakers I’m most looking forward to seeing. I think Jasmina Tesanovic will be fascinating.

I’m really looking forward to Annalee Newitz and Matt Jones. Damian Conway is perhaps the most entertaining speaker I’ve seen. But if I had to pick one speaker I’m most looking forward to — Bruce Sterling. Speaking in Wellington. At Webstock. OMG!

Thanks for your time, Mike, and I look forward to attending Webstock and visiting New Zealand for the first time, later this month. I hope to catch up with any Tribune readers while I’m there too — trust I’ll see you there!

This post first appeared as part of Issue 432 of the SitePoint Tribune, a very popular email newsletter that I am co-editor of. Thanks to SitePoint for allowing me to reproduce the work here.

Should you offer services or products?

The old phrase, The grass is always greener … is often heard when discussing the merits of services versus web-based products. Listed below are some of the advantages and disadvantages of both models. Which ones apply to you?

Products — Advantages

• gives you unlimited income potential, because time constraints are minimal (unlike selling services)
• enables lower prices for the consumer, as costs can be amortized over more customers
• allows you to concentrate on building one main project, rather than several small ones
• presents a choice of different revenue models, which are simpler to modify over time
• affords a better opportunity for residual income, in continual license fees
• provides an easier option to sell as an ongoing concern than a small web service does.

Products — Disadvantages

• requires more upfront investment in time and possibly money, especially the marketing aspect
• presents the possibility of competitors creating similar products and competing directly with you.
• necessitates market research to avoid ending up with little or no customer base.
• runs the risk of fielding more support queries than anticipated
• may delay long-term growth because of the lack of immediate cash flow

Services — Advantages

• generates income faster, because it’s easier to sell your services than a brand new product to the marketplace
• provides scope for a variety of projects, maintaining your interest in each new project
• offers more versatility in meeting market demands, rather than having to rebuild a mature application

Services — Disadvantages

• reduces your capacity for income, because it’s based purely on how much you can charge and how many staff you need
• limits short-term growth; for example, hiring staff is more time-consuming than bringing a new server online
• makes you more vulnerable to market buoyancy than product licenses

Also remember, as Dave mentioned, that it’s very simple to have a hybrid model of both: sell your current services while developing and offering products as well. This is similar to how businesses may sell hosting, stock images, and CMS licenses.

This post first appeared as part of Issue 424 of the SitePoint Tribune, a very popular email newsletter that I am co-editor of. Thanks to SitePoint for allowing me to reproduce the work here.

Dave Greiner co-founded Freshview in 2004 with his long-time mate, Ben Richardson. Dave is the design half of the founding partnership, and is responsible for the UI of their products. When not obsessing about form layouts, he’s known to obsess about over-hit backhand slices in table tennis.

Hi Dave, the story of Ben and yourself creating an email campaign solution is inspiring. Can you give us the 30 second history lesson here?

Back in 2004, we were running our own small web design shop. Business was going well, and lots of our clients started approaching us to send email newsletters for them. The search began for the right email marketing software to handle this side of the business — but all the tools we tried were either missing key features or were bloated and impossible to use.

Quite quickly we realized there was a genuine opportunity here to build an email marketing tool just for the web design industry. By late 2004, the first version of Campaign Monitor was launched. Fast forward to today and we’ve got 15 staff and tens of thousands of designers in more than 100 countries using our software, running email campaigns for themselves and their clients. It’s been a wild ride.

So, given you previously charged for services (time), and now are making money based on product, you would have a great insight into both spheres. What are the pros and cons for going to product-based sales, versus the grind of hourly billing?

I think it ultimately comes down to the type of person you are and the things you enjoy. Some people love the idea of working on a new project every week for a different client. I’ve been working on the same project for four years and still love what I do.

Personal preference aside though, the most obvious and important difference between product and time-based work is scale. I’d much rather be surfing than working; so, when I’m working, I want it to be as productive as possible.

When you’re charging by the hour, it’s much harder to grow your bottom line without growing your head count. By selling a product, especially a self-service product over the Web, you can double your business without having to work harder or hire more people. That’s a fairly significant pro, in my opinion.

You managed to gain great traction in the early days, with little spent on advertising. What do you attribute that success to?

I think the biggest factor behind our early success was that we built for a specific niche instead of trying to please everybody. By creating a tool just for web designers, we could build unique features perfect for the industry that nobody else was offering.

Just before launching, we approached some well-known designers for their feedback on the software. A number of them were kind enough to write glowing reviews on their blog, and it all started from there.

Another area we focused on, and still focus on, is the idea of promotion through education. We gave away as much knowledge as we could through articles and other free resources; this helped establish us as experts in the email design field and gained us a lot of free attention in the industry we were targeting.

If there was a simple tip you could suggest for anyone considering starting a product rather than relying on service income, what would it be?

Don’t be afraid to do both for a while. We built Campaign Monitor on the side a couple of days a week while we spent the rest of our time working for clients. It might take a little longer, but it also means you’re mitigating most of the risk involved in a new venture.

If I can sneak a second tip in, it would be to make things easy on yourself by charging for your software. If it adds value, people will be willing to pay for it.

Who doesn’t want to work at Freshview? Ping pong, free lunches, surfboards — you have a great philosophy there. What lessons have you learned along the way? (Oh, and when can I start?)

Our work philosophy wasn’t really a big strategic decision for us. It actually came down to our own expectations. This is where we spend the majority of our days, it’s our time away from the things we really enjoy doing. It better be fun.

To keep the balance right, we have a work environment where you can choose how distracted you want to be. All our developers have big offices so they can really dig in and get things done when they need to. But we also have break-out areas where you can play some ping pong , grab a free snack, and generally hang out.

We also try to get out of the office for things totally unrelated to work, like surfing lessons, lawn bowls, and go-carting. We always find we get the best out of our team if they’re spending some office time away from a monitor.

This post first appeared as part of Issue 424 of the SitePoint Tribune, a very popular email newsletter that I am co-editor of. Thanks to SitePoint for allowing me to reproduce the work here.

Tonight I had the great opportunity to speak at the City of Stirling’s ‘Mind Your Arts’ workshop series.

It’s always great to impart some knowledge, and although I seriously dislike the term ’social media expert’, it was fun speaking about how artists can use social media to promote their work and network with other creative minds.

The slides are below. Although they aren’t as useful without the verbal cues, I hope that you find something useful in them. Thanks to the team at City of Stirling for inviting me, and for those who attended; thanks for making me feel welcome and for all the great questions!

The websites I mention in the talk were

Flickr
YouTube
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
Blogging (such as Wordpress)

If you attended the workshop, I hope to see you trying out social media soon!

Stephen Collins is recognised as one of Australia’s leading proponents of participatory culture, advising businesses and government on Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, and social networking. He has extensive consulting experience for a diverse client base across the public and private sectors.

Stephen took time out from his hectic schedule to speak to us about Web 2.0 and social media.

Hi Stephen. You recently co-presented a Web 2.0 university workshop in Australia. What is it about Web 2.0 that makes it special enough to gain the attention it’s been receiving?

Some people, especially those with old-school mindsets, think the whole revolution around Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 — and it is a revolution — is about all the great tools we can use. My view is that the tools themselves are the least important part of the package. What the 2.0 change is all about is people and culture, which is the message communicated by The Cluetrain Manifesto ten years ago.

If you had one piece of advice for someone outside the web industry looking to embrace the ideas of Web 2.0, what would it be?

Open up and go public. Empower people. Be human. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Be respectful.

So, as a web freelancer or web company, what can we do to start embracing Web 2.0 ideas within our own businesses?

Start off by reading or rereading The Cluetrain Manifesto and start practising what it preaches. Then, just embrace the 2.0 way of doing business. Do business this way. It can and does work. Maybe even sign and use something like the Company-Customer Pact.

There are a bunch of other great books worth reading that any business looking to “go 2.0″ (my goodness, that’s a dorky phrase) should be putting on every employees’ desk. In no particular order (just looking at my bookcase):

• Cubicle Commando by Lisa Messenger and Zern Liew
• Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Wiliams
• Purple Cow by Seth Godin
• Fish! by Stephen Lundin, Harry Paul, and John Christensen
• The Long Tail by Chris Anderson
• The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom
• Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff

Much attention with Web 2.0 is given to social media. This is a dual-edged sword for companies though, isn’t it? One minute, a company could be the flavor of the “social sphere” and the next, they could be on the outer. What can they do to avoid being on the wrong end?

I think the notion of social media as a risk is false. It’s only a risk if you go in underdone. You wouldn’t make other business decisions without consideration, would you? Choose the right people to be the evangelists and mentors for your brand online. Empower them to engage in the conversation and make it a part of their everyday job — not an additional task. Progressively give everyone in the business that wants to take part the skills they need and then let them fly!

Brands that do this well have great success using social media. You’d be hard put to find a bad word from the community about Zappos, for example. And the mood around brands like Comcast and Dell is moving in a very positive direction since they’ve implemented good, well-planned social media approaches. Well-planned doesn’t need to mean slow or corporate; it’s about choosing the right channels and the right people, and letting them get on with it.

I help many clients with a social media strategy. It shouldn’t be done lightly and it does take some thinking. But you can’t take your time with this — your competitors have probably already spoken to me, or one of the other smart people who do work similar to mine.

The Web is certainly changing. Do you believe those of us building web sites need to adapt our services, or will there still be clients looking for standard web sites in another five or ten years?

The brochure web site will probably still be around in five years, but maybe not ten. At least, not in the developed world. Clients more and more are looking for full-service approaches: brand strategy, marketing, social media, communications, and the rest. The big agencies already do this, but I think that their product is not always as good as those delivered by smaller, boutique businesses.

I think those of us operating small businesses in the web industry — whether it’s design, development, or strategy — need to start teaming up in an informal way to compete with the big agencies. Better still if the agencies recognize that some of the boutique and specialist companies should be on their go-to list for expert advice.

There’s more than enough work for everyone, even in these odd economic times, but we should all be playing together more often and not trying to shut each other out. That’s very 2.0 of me, isn’t it?

Thanks for your time Stephen.

My pleasure Miles!

This post first appeared as part of Issue 420 of the SitePoint Tribune, a very popular email newsletter that I am co-editor of. Thanks to SitePoint for allowing me to reproduce the work here.

I was honoured to speak on day one of Edge of the Web 2009. My presentation, You Too Can be a Successful Freelancer, contained both personal stories of my freelancing years, as well as some of the material from my book, The Principles of Successful Freelancing.

I had a great time preparing it, and then delivering it to a enthusiastic audience (a huge thanks to you if you were there!), and have uploaded the slides to my SlideShare account. You can see them embedded below. The slides were featured on the SlideShare front page the day after I uploaded them – thanks SlideShare!

You can see a number of the presentations given at Edge of the Web 2009 on SlideShare here.

Image: Photo by Richard Giles. Original photo here.

There is less than two weeks until Perth’s second ever web conference; Edge of the Web 2009 gets underway, and the excitement is building!

One large element of the social aspects of web conferences is the ‘twitter back channel’, you know; the thoughts and musings of people who are attending the conference posted on Twitter.

With this in mind, I thought it worthwhile to go through the impressive speakers list, and link those who are on Twitter so you can also watch what the speakers are saying, before, during and after the crazy week we have planned.

Derek Powazek @fraying
Anil Dash @anildash
Alex Payne @al3x
Dmitry Baranovskiy @DmitryBaranovsk
Gary Barber @Tuna
Ruth Ellison @RuthEllison
Lachlan Hardy @lachlanhardy
Simon Pascal Klein @klepas
Kevin Yank @sentience
Miles Burke @milesb
Ash Donaldson @ashdonaldson
Matt Balara @MattBalara
Matt Didcoe @mattman
Scott Gledhill @gleddy
Nick Cowie @nickobec
Myles Eftos @madpilot
James McCutcheon @jamesmcc
Justin Mclean @JustinMclean
Darcy Laycock @Sutto

Remember, if you are attending Edge of the Web 2009, you should use #eotw09 as the hashtag. It’d probably be a good idea to also follow the @eotw Twitter account too!

The full exciting program for Edge of the Web 2009 has now been announced, and you can peruse the fine speakers and their topics over on the Program page.

Now, I could be biased (hey, I’m speaking at the event!) but I truly believe there’s a great line-up of talent, those locals, as well as those coming from both interstate and overseas, to our humble city to share their wisdom at Western Australia’s own web design and development conference.

People like Derek Powazek, who I saw speak in New Zealand earlier this year, Twitter API superstar, Alex Payne and well-known blogger, Anil Dash are visiting Australia for Edge of the Web.

In total, there are 22 kick ass speakers who will entertain, educate and invigorate you to push the web further. Add these to the great workshops and the black tie Australian Web Awards gala event, and you’ve got one great week!

The best part is, if you get in right now and register, early bird pricing is in place until September 15 (that’s right; only a week left!) which means you can save some of your money (hey, spend it on drinks at the number of social events which will also happen around the days before and after, and evenings of, the conference).

Don’t just take my word for it. Hit your favourite micro-blogging platform and ask your colleagues, or search for blog posts reviewing last years event. I’m positive you’ll love being at the Edge of the Web 2009!

Be quick organising those tickets though; the fun begins in only eight weeks time…

Everyone loves a freebie, right? Well, here’s a great freebie – a PDF copy of the book I wrote last year, The Principles of Successful Freelancing.

All you need to do is visit this website, and either follow @sitepointdotcom on Twitter, or put your email address in the box to get a download link.

I’d like to also suggest you follow me on Twitter, whilst you’re at it. :)

Judging by people’s reactions, this 10 day only giveaway will once again be HUGE.

The team at SitePoint did the same thing some time ago, with another book. The result of that twitaway was 13,000 new followers in under a week! That’s a great jump in followers for anyone over any period of time, let alone an increase like that in a week. You can read all about that campaign over at TwiTip.

I hope you enjoy the book (so much so that you’ll buy the real paper version too!), and remember, this only lasts for the next ten days.

Yes, it’s back on again! After the success of previous BarCampPerth events, in 2007 and 2008, BarCampPerth3 will be held on July 18, 2009 at eCentral TAFE.

If you’ve read my last post, Why you should attend two conferences a year, you’ll appreciate why these events are a fantastic opportunity to grow both professionally and personally.

Unlike a traditional conference, you don’t fork out any money, and you don’t get a slick conference bag or even know who is going to present before the event. You are also encouraged not to just sit on a chair all day, but get involved yourself.

A BarCamp is grass roots education and networking at its best. You come along, and offer to help in any way you can. That could be helping hand out name tags, it could be serving coffee, running AV equipment, taking photographs or doing a presentation yourself.

Everyone pitches in to do their bit, and the day turns out to be great. You meet new people, you learn about new topics, and you leave with a new respect for your craft, the work of others, and the ideology of a grass roots quasi-conference.

My experience of the last two Perth ones have been great. I’ve met plenty of passionate people, I’ve heard some great presentations, and I’ve even given one myself. I encourage you to attend BarCamp3 and see what all the fuss is about. It’ll be free entry, free (and fantastic!) coffee and possibly even free lunch as well – who could ask for more than that?