Social Media for the non-geeky

I've made an interesting discovery over the last few weeks.

1. Most business people have little idea what social media could do for them. 
2. If they do know, they don't know where to start.

Some geeks do, and so do some Marketing Professionals, but to most of the business world social media = alien and threatening.

So today I am trying out an experiment. I'm meeting my accountants - a firm called MurraYoung. I've been a client of theirs since they started up, and I've known one of the partners since the 80s.

They want to know more about how I use social media for my new start-up, and I'm hoping to identify ways in which their business can benefit from some extra exposure via twitter, FaceBook and Google+.

Preparing a talk or presentation? Here's a great idea

Energized work just made an irresistible offer for anyone in the London area who is working on a talk or conference presentation aimed at an agile audience - a chance to try it out on a friendly audience before the paint has dried, so to speak.

Details here.

Comfort for Application Developers from Tom de Marco

Thanks to a tweet from @flowchainsensei, I've just been enjoying an excellent article by Tom de Marco. It's well worth a read; I took away two key thoughts.

1. Developing software is much harder than developing hardware
2. Software developers spend much of their life feeling bad about late delivery when it's usually not their fault.

To put his core conclusion another way, most software projects are a waste of effort. They have such low marginal utility that they are doomed never to show a return for the organisation that funds them. If we just didn't do them the world would be better off.

Of course, we'd need to find work for the ex-developers.  Maybe they could learn to teach. We could certainly use a few more skilled IT teachers.