There’s a real danger that when a successful project, funded by the public sector, comes to the end of its funding, it withers and disappears. If the objectives have been reached then it’s no bad thing but, when there’s still a lot of work to do, it can be a real shame.

So, in these times of government cuts, we’re really pleased that our work to help young people to see the opportunities of careers in manufacturing has found a long-term home.

The Manufacturing Institute (TMI) has been an important stakeholder in our project right from the beginning and it was a natural fit for us to launch our work under the banner of its ‘Make It’ campaign. It tied in perfectly with a set of common objectives and, for once, rather than different projects offering competing brands, there has been a unified voice, image and message presented to young people in the Northwest.

As our project nears its completion, we’re really happy to have handed over control of the Make It website to TMI. Sadly our own awareness raising activities will stop, but we know that the activities delivered by TMI continue to provide inspiration to students, across the region.

Far from withering, the Make It website will continue to provide the UK’s most comprehensive resource to help tomorrow’s talent understand the importance, and opportunities, modern manufacturing will play in the nation’s future.

Okay this blog is a bit self-congratulationary so please feel free to skip it. We just wanted to share the growing sense of support for our work on the Make It promotion and website. This month we won a commendation in the Drum Marketing Awards 2010. The award was for our work in re-branding manufacturing to make it a more attractive career choice for young people. To quote The Drum “This is a huge achievement as the judging panel agreed your work stood out and deserved further recognition”.

There’s more about the project in the Our Work section. It was funded by the North West Regional Development Agency, and we received great support in developing the campaign from Nicola Eagleton-Crowther at The Manufacturing Institute. So we were very pleased to be able to pass the work and the site over to the Make It campaign, which Nicola runs.

There's a lot of support for the iPhone, in fact one of the team seems to be slowly morphing his life around what the iPhone can do. (reading this, he insists the iphone is morphing its life around what he can do - but not too convincingly!)

In its basic state, I think there are some fundamental flaws using it for business. Some examples include - It won't let you share files with your computer - which makes it much harder to send out any serious work on a train. There're no arrows on the keyboard, which means you can't get right to the point where you need to edit. There's no directory structure to get straight to the files you need to find.

By themselves nothing to write the device off, but small niggles which cause annoying delays in the day. I've not tried one, but I imagine the blackberry might be a bit more business-friendly.

That said there are some brilliant applications, and the navigation has Apple's typical smoothness - even if it is a bit controlling.

With over 100,000 applications available, there is some fantastic invention going on. I thought this was really interesting use - iPhone special effects video . Although much of the good stuff is being done in the post-production edit suite, filming on iPhone is a pretty bold statement.

An interesting dilemma we faced recently was about developing online resources which could be used in schools. The question was should we build tools which helped teach the curriculum or tools which helped the teachers to teach the curriculum?

An important thing to remember is that there are two audiences; the teacher and the student. Teachers, while being constantly bombarded with new resources and initiatives, are still always open to new and interesting ways of delivering the curriculum and engaging their students – who are the people we needed to reach.

And how do you engage a 15 year old in a topic they show no interest in? For us the answer was through creativity.

If you take business studies for example, chances are a 15 year old might struggle with their interest in supply and demand. So, on one hand, we could create an interactive tool which takes students through the curriculum stages step-by-step; alternatively we could develop a game which, although doesn’t adhere to the curriculum precisely, covers a lot of the right ground.

In developing the Make It website, we needed a website which young people would want to consume to get our message across that manufacturing offered some very rewarding careers, but we were acutely aware that we would have to go through their teachers first, to reach them.

The research we undertook with the teachers was interesting. Teachers want to teach, they didn’t want to be merely conduits of other people’s lessons – whether interactive or not. If we could provide appealing interactive tools with a loose interpretation of the curriculum it allows the teacher enough freedom to be creative themselves in the way they deliver the content.

For us this was great. It meant we could be very creative in our approach to the themes around manufacturing; use media formats that young people like – i.e. video and games – and hype up products they identified with – trainers, iPods and PlayStations.

We could then map out the how the content we’d created related to different sections of the curriculum, and provide teachers with some really creative tools, which support their lessons, but allow them still to do what they do best, which is teach.

Happily our approach seems to be working. A month after launch the teacher resource area is the third most visited area on MakeIt.org.uk with schools all over the UK (and much to our surprise, as far afield as Australia and Japan) downloading the resources we developed.

You’ve got a good idea – which you want to share – in the hope that your audience will act differently – given the eye-opening information you’re about to give them.

Seems simple? And it’s the basic premise of marketing. Tell people about your product – dress it up nicely – make it fit into your audience’s lifestyle – and away you go. With a commercial product that’s great – it’s a simple proposition – buy into the brand – buy the product – try it out – and, if you like what you get, buy it again.

When it comes to changing opinions, habits and culture, it’s not so simple. Straightforward marketing can raise some interest – but just having a message isn’t enough. After all what’s the product? What is your audience actually buying?

Take the public sector. They have a lot of difficult ideas they want to communicate to make the world a better place. Let’s say business – there’s a whole organisation dedicated to business support – Business Link. So when they want to influence change in a business market, they can market the idea – but anyone interested can find out more by contacting Business Link?

Business Link is the product. But what happens if there isn’t a product – when there’s no clear call-to-action? The marketing can’t refer you to any product – it has to become the product itself. One example is the ‘Just say No’ campaign, designed to keep young people off drugs.

Instead of communicating a worthy message – it just came across as telling kids what to do. And there’s nothing the average Brit hates more than being told what to do. As individuals we want to make up our own mind – especially when we’re thinking about doing something new.

And how do we do that? By trying things out – through experience. With the “Just say No” campaign, many people tempted to try out and experience the drugs for themselves, actually found it was an enjoyable experience – totally contra to the message in fact – so there was, at best, confusion or, at worst, no hesitancy in ignoring both it and the negative impacts of drug-taking as well.

The campaign certainly raised the issues of drug abuse, but it was costly and there is still a debate about how effective it was – especially in relation to the budget.

On the other hand, today’s ‘Talk to Frank’ campaign is much more relevant. The message matches the audience’s thoughts. Instead of preaching it provides a space to explore.

The Talk to Frank website, puts forward the facts about drug taking - both good and bad. There’s a bit of a negative slant, but it tries not to moralise, and people can make up their own mind – their attitude towards drugs is their choice – they’re empowered and they own the decision – so it’s much more powerful.

The key difference between the two approaches is that there is a product behind the message. A product like Business Link costs millions to run each year - a product like Talk to Frank, a fraction of the budget.

And that’s the beauty of online. If your idea is really that good – other people will get it and they’ll want to take it on as their own idea – so you’ll achieve the change you’re looking for. You just have to present them with the space to take that decision for themselves.

Of course, you need to present the information in a way the audience can connect with – but that, as they say, a whole different discussion…

Confronted with the words ‘sustainable communities’, most of us would draw our own conclusions what it means. But since Junction K was chosen to build an online showcase to present scores of projects which fall into this arena, I’ve been bowled over by how wide the topic really is.

Environment, carbon reduction, urban regeneration, business clustering, communities of interest, reemployment, skills… the list goes on. There is an almost bewildering array of work being done across the UK, and internationally, to help people live, work and play better. From government departments to individual action, hundreds of thousands of people are playing a part.

Our job was merely to provide the platform where people can discover exactly what has happened. Always happy to raise an eyebrow at businesses self-promoting themselves, I’ve been pleasantly impressed – especially by the councils – who increasingly find it hard to get good press. For instance Kirklees Council, in Yorkshire, has been consciously cutting carbon emissions for over 20 years. Their latest project has helped over 10,000 homes install free insulation.

In Scandinavia, they have taken full advantage of the new bridge linking Denmark to Sweden to create a cross-border cluster of bio-medical private and public organisations. As a result it’s become one of Europe’s top 10 biomedical regions.

Faced with the prospect of massive housing development in Northamptonshire, the environmental lobby showed great foresight in embracing the inevitable. Instead of objecting they focused on making sure the building plans included proper green spaces. It has resulted in the creation of some magnificent environments for the new residents to enjoy.

The site has just gone live, so if you feel like a bit of positive news in these times when doom and gloom dominate the media, root out some inspiring stories on the new http://showcase.hcaacademy.co.uk/index.html.

Before looking at the why, this is what Junction K’s events offer provides. We will reduce our event management fees by 25% for any event we organise before 31st March 09. This covers organisational, management and coordination costs only, unfortunately we can’t discount content development, production or staging costs (which are very competitive already) or third party supplier costs.

Once we understand your requirements, we will provide a full budget breakdown; deduct 25% off our event management costs; then you can choose to proceed or not – no strings attached. The offer is open for one event per client. If you’d like to find out more why not call me: Anthony Story 0161 833 9725

Why are we doing it? There’s a danger in making an offer - is it a sign of troubled times or lack of confidence? Happily, neither of these are the case. Our offer is motivated by two main concerns – one selfless and the other, admittedly, more self-indulgent.

First - the selfless - It’s been impossible to read about the coming recession without considering what that means to us as an industry. Budgets will be and are being affected. This gives us two choices. Hope it goes away, or think about the implications for current and future clients. If budgets are being reduced, I think we should expect ours to be affected as well.

We need to be realistic, proactive and respond to clients – and it makes good business sense for all of us. Maybe selfless is too strong a claim, but with tough times ahead, I’m a firm supporter of clients and suppliers working more closely to get through them.

As for the self indulgent – in the past few blogs entries (below) I’ve discussed how technologies (e.g. video streaming, instant messaging, virtual worlds etc.) might open an event up to a wider audience. They’re not suitable for all occasions but, given our cross-platform skills, we’re keen to develop these opportunities. By reducing our costs, I hope clients might be more inclined to try these out and see what value they add to a conference, at minimal risk.
Anthony Story 0161 833 9725

I'm at the Next Gen 08 conference today. Next Generation Access (NGA) is a fairly dry subject, but it's interesting to know how the future of superfast broadband will (or won’t) roll out across the UK. There’s certainly a potential impact for the creative industries – if there’s more bandwith, what would you create to fill it?

The BBC iPlayer is a leading UK example, and staggeringly Youtube is responsible for using as much bandwidth as the whole of the internet traffic in 2002! But it’s not just creativity and entertainment – at least it shouldn’t be. There are massive opportunities for businesses to be exploiting bandwidth in a purely functional way.

The event was organised by Malcolm Corbett and his cohorts at the Community Broadband Network . It struck me that many of topics under discussion, whether it was Government, Regional Development Agencies or business, sounded very similar to the topics being discussed when broadband emerged as a replacement for dialup. The main difference is that people have a more knowledge now, and seem to know more about what they’re talking about – a bit at least!

As before – whilst the discussion is led by the networks (BT, Virgin media, H2O networks etc.), the business case is really led by demand. The real similarity is that no one’s too sure what, if you build a superfast fibre network, it will be used for and by whom?

It was disappointing that, given the subject matter, the conference failed to lead by example. There was no live video stream or second life presence for example - but that’s a quibble. The answer could well lie with a public sector lead. Home-based health care, education, e-government could all play a leading role in creating demand.

David Crowther from Melandra observed that without the introduction of the model-T Ford car and automotive mass-production, we would never have had the out-of-town supermarket. It’s impossible to predict exactly what will happen.

What seemed clear is that the next generation network will become reality. As Antony Walker from the Broadband Stakeholder Group pointed out, it’s not a question of if, but when and how?

There's more about the conference and this topic on the BBC's website.

Technology (as discussed in the blogs below) is helping events reach a wider audience. In fact some events are being staged purely online with no physical presence at all. Great for costs savings, but for many people a step too far, too soon.

How far can you push the events envelope without scaring off core delegates? The latest innovation is the ‘virtual world’, of which Second Life is perhaps the front runner.

(If you don’t know Second Life, it’s an online 3D virtual world where residents live a ‘virtual’ life, interacting with one another through computer generated representations of themselves (an avatar). Residents meet friends, chat with strangers, visit interesting places - from virtual bars to museums. It looks like a computer game, just with all the characters being controlled by different people, around the world).

To stage the virtual conference, you set up a 3D conference venue and invite people to attend – just as you would a real world event. Live video of your presenters is streamed directly into the virtual venue and a message board is provided for conversation. You can even set up trade show tables around the arena where businesses can market their products. But the real selling point is the ability to meet other people.

Your avatar hangs out in a room with the other delegates – you can approach other avatar/people, strike up a conversation and take it from there. You can talk via instant messaging or, if you’ve got a microphone, using voice. In fact it’s not that different from the experience of a real networking session – just without the warm chardonnay and dodgy nibbles!

What you end up with is a place where you can see and hear presentations, ask questions, give answers, network, talk to strangers, promote yourself, learn new things. In fact all the things you can do at a traditional conference. So why don’t we see more of it being used?

The technology is young and still doesn’t appeal to everyone – it hasn’t reached a critical mass of take up either. It’s also a little ‘clunky’ to use. If you’re a computer gamer you’ll have an advantage, but it takes a while to master controlling an avatar.

But it does have merit. I wonder if it would be better to use the concept and ditch the avatars, for now at least; Just provide the functions in a traditional browser layout: streaming video, message board and a list of online participants (name, company, job title & a photo) – clicking on a name would strike up a conversation.

Even this approach is a tough sell for many, but with environmental issues pressing, staging an event without requiring anyone to travel could have a massive impact on our carbon footprints. There’s always a reason to dislike technology – but perhaps this will be the issue which proves the tipping point in eroding the conference event format as we know (and love) it.

Previously, I’ve raked over the value of video streaming and live blogging at events. But, despite some obvious merits, these technologies have one main flaw – they don’t let people watching online actually join in, together.

They’re great for letting you know what’s going on, but they don’t let you be a part of the action. For me, talking, questioning and meeting are essential parts of any event - you have to interact to get the most out of it.

So what experience do you want to recreate? Chance conversations over coffee? Posing a question to an interesting presenter? Snatching thoughts with someone sitting beside you? These all add depth and complexity to your experience. But can you get anything like it if you’re stuck at the end of a computer terminal? …well, here's my starter for ten!

The most straightforward answer is to use a live message board.
(If you haven’t used one before, the message board provides a space for users to write questions or comments which anyone and everyone can read and answer. It works in real time, like ‘Instant Messaging’. It’s a place where discussion and debate can rage.)
Debate can centre on the topics under discussion in the auditorium and people online can strike up a dialogue with the other people tuning in.

This isn't only for users outside the conference. If you provide a wireless connnection in the auditorium, the audience can join in too (if they've got a laptop/Blackberry etc.). In fact, if you project the message board on to a screen behind the stage (e.g. beside the slides) everyone in the room can read them. Then, if you want to add a comment, you could text it from a mobile phone, so you don't even need a laptop/Blackberry.

Is this a distraction? Possibly, but if you look at it this way - most people admit to listening to about half of any presentation but thinking their own thoughts for the rest. A message board lets you discuss your thoughts immediately and learn other people’s thoughts. You can develop your own ideas more quickly. Does that make it an enhancement?

The jury is probably still out – Sure enough many of the comments will be rubbish and the text could be seen as a distraction to the presenters. That said it’s really interesting to see a discussion change direction when a panellist has been inspired by a well-made observation.

Perhaps there’s a case for projecting them during a Q and A session if not during a keynote presentation. More intriguingly, it raises the question about the position of inclusivity and democracy. Should the audience be seen as a valuable asset to a debate or do we continue to treat them as people to speak when they’re spoken to? How far can you push audience involvement before you end up with anarchy?

Whatever your answer, it's clear the message board lets you join an event online and have the means to communicate with other delegates. Combined with a video stream and access to a slide show, it begins to replicate the real world environment. The online delegate can, as a minimum, get the semblance of a meaningful event experience.

It’s still quite an impersonal approach though, and of course all of these elements still rely on having a bunch of people in the same room. So can an online experience ever rival the traditional model? It’s tough, but there’s one solution which some people think already is – ‘virtual worlds’….more next time.