Essential tech for property people: Twitter

August 2014

Do you ever mutter ‘information overload’? Or wonder how you can keep up with everything going on around you? Are you inquisitive? Do you think you live in a ‘Filter Bubble’ where everyone you meet and greet is well, just like you. Have you anything to say? Are you a giver or a receiver?

If any of the above is you, then you need Twitter. Simply put, Twitter is how you can filter the internet. It is how you can break out of your existing network and, however big that might be, discover something new, engaging, informative, stimulating, exciting and evocative. Every day.

With Twitter you are in control of what information you receive and who you want to engage with. Unlike Facebook, where they decide (on the unwritten orders of advertisers) what you get to see, with Twitter you decide who you want to hear from. And no one filters your data feed. If someone is interesting you hear it all. If they are dull you just cast them aside.

In a personal capacity you can become stupendously well informed as well as subtly promote your own bona fides. In a business capacity you can hear the unvarnished truth about your brand, as well as support, aid and inform you customers.

Not everyone on Twitter is interesting, but most interesting people are on Twitter. If you’re the later but yet to dive in, do. It’s a fascinating place.

Antony

This post first appeared in Estates Gazette 27th August 2014

Redesigning Property for a digital world

August 2014

Think of it like smartphones; in practice people don’t use them much as phones anymore. They email, they Skype, they social network, they game, they run a myriad of apps to make their life easier, more efficient or more fun. What they don’t do so much is make phone calls. In fact, in the US the average length of a call has halved since 95, to around 90 seconds.

Which is why screen sizes are getting bigger. Used as a phone they look stupid, but as a portable computer screen, bigger is better.

And the same is coming to pass with commercial Property. We’re just not using it in the same way we have done. It’s no longer where our computer is, or where we can access our data. Or where we need to be for meetings. Or where we need to shop. In fact, what is it for?

And that is the point. The Property industry needs to consider the possibility that their product isn’t fit for purpose anymore. Or at least not the purpose it’s been used for for the last 30 years.

Clayton Christensen talks of “disruptive innovation”, where existing companies fail to meet customers’ unstated or future needs and new technology or business models arise that slowly slowly but then rapidly dislodge the existing market leaders. The property industry is largely tone deaf to such innovation and persists in thinking that the way things have been is the way they will be. Look at the mess Tesco is in with its megastores, or the insane over supply of retail space. Or the rotten connectivity even in the newest buildings. These all reflect a failure to grasp
new paradigms in work and consumption.

The property industry needs a new set of skills. It needs people who are attuned to the digital world. Whose mindset is rooted in service. Who believe everything can be done better, faster and cheaper than now. Who look at every touch point with their customers (all occupiers, not just the C suite) and think how they can interact in a more human, dynamic, relevant manner. Who look at technology not as IT but as the enabler of progress. For property (of all types) to remain relevant (and retain/grow in value) the whole industry needs to embrace this digital DNA.

So we need marketing people who tweet and blog, asset managers who monitor social networks, CEO’s who drive digital adoption, finance directors who design new business models, operations people who embrace new technologies, and planners, architects and designers who create new, more appropriate spaces.

Because property is a long term business you need to understand the future. To paraphrase Wayne Gretzky, you need to play where the puck is going, not where it is.

Antony

This post first appeared in Estates Gazette 27th August 2014

Management in a digital world

August 2014

I call it the curse of Blackberry. That moment when you know nothing you say will be understood by your interlocutor because they use a Blackberry. And because they do, they cannot see beyond a phone being something you email with or talk in to. Mention Twitter and they think twat, remote working and they think skiver and The Cloud and they fulminate about security.

Last week Ofcom stated in their 2014 Communications Market report that 57% of UK people have used their smartphones to access the internet. Conversely in a recent property and tech report by Qube Software, 57% of respondents had never done so. In 2014!. In property the Blackberry curse is rife.

Which explains why management has not, by and large, moved into the digital world. There are myths from the analogue age that are proving hard to disperse. For example:

1) Face to face meetings are preferable to virtual ones. This despite copious studies demonstrating the ineffectiveness of meetings and their ability to fill however much time is allocated to them. In a digital world one uses face to face for targeted reasons, most often for collaborative issue sharing or problem solving exchanges. Once over, everyone can repair back to wherever they can get on and actually work best. During this time meetings often involve asynchronous messaging (so as not to disturb the work) and cloud based comments, documents and task sharing.

2) You don’t know if someone is working if they aren’t in the office. This is the ne plus ultra of analogue management. It screams that the company in question has no concept of managing by outcomes, only activity, and no systems in place to know what everyone is up to. Digital management encourages open and transparent sharing of data because without that the benefits of everything being connected to everything else do not accrue. One of the beauties of Cloud computing is that all parties can stay in contact with everyone else and have access to everything they need, wherever they are. And with that you do not need to see someone to know what they are doing.

3) You have to be in the office as that is where the buzz is. And buzz = inspiration. Ho hum, up to a point. But Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems had it right when he said ‘Whoever you are, the smartest people don’t work for you’. In the digital world the smartest people don’t need to work for you for you to work with them. It’s no longer about your work network, or the people you’ve met. Digital management is about plugging you and your team into the wider network. Multiple channels of connectivity and data dissemination mean we communicate and collaborate with multiple parties, in multiple locations, all the time. As a result we have access to a wider pool of knowledge, greater access to skills and most likely a more nuanced, multi-faceted view of the world. Yes your office is important and serendipitous encounters will and do occur there. But all day, every day? No.

Management in a digital world is fundamentally different to the way things were when the Blackberry did rule the roost. The three myths above are just symbols of a time when data flowed slowly, our networks were limited and our lives neatly split between work and non work. The economy may be coming back but those days aren’t. And that is great news. In a digital network there is no greasy pole to climb. Everyone can add value and become a more important node. And the biggest nodes lead. As they should in a true meritocracy.

Management in a digital world is paradoxically about giving away freedom to gain more control. The trade is providing employees with the tools to be the best they can be, on their terms, whilst having far better insight into what it is they are actually doing.

Antony

This article first appeared in Estates Gazette August 23rd 2014

Analogue thinking in a digital world

July 2014

The robots are coming. Whether in the form of cute little Baxter who’ll handle repetitive industrial tasks, through to the scary Big Dog that walks, runs, climbs and carries heavy loads, these sensor heavy machines adapt to their tasks and environments. Being machines they are relentless; on and on they go. No breaks, no holidays, no sickness. Increasingly cheap, they are reaching the point where the economics of off-shoring are being reversed. Manufacturing… it’s coming home.

So far so good. For us at least. But robots come in software form as well. All the way up to IBM’s Watson the range of tasks software can accomplish is growing rapidly as a combination of advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence mean, as Google’s Sergey Brin said last week ‘We Will Make Machines That can Reason, Think, And Do Things Better Than We Can’. And therein lies the rub: if your job involves pure logic (e.g. is chess-like) then computers will be able to outperform you, as logic is what they are good at.

So best to become a hairdresser then? Well, no actually. The answer is not to forsake the digital world, but to digitise yourself before you get digitised. Adopting a digital mindset is the way forward. However, that means laughing at digital conferences where they ask you to turn your phone off, or printing (yes, on paper) reports about TechCity, or saving your work on your PC, or thinking click and collect will save physical retail, or that face to face meetings are the only way to collaborate, or that ‘the death of distance’ is a myth.

Being safe from the robots means digitising your complete business, every single part of it, and then working out what you can do that they can’t. Only the digerati can afford to be human.

Antony

PS This article first appeared in Estates Gazette 12th July 2014

Digital marketing is pointless

June 2014

They call that linkbait.

“Digital marketing is pointless”.

Well of course it’s not. Otherwise the headline wouldn’t have jumped out at you and you wouldn’t be here now. Reading this.

Then again, in and of itself, digital marketing IS pointless. If all you are doing is taking an analogue mindset and pushing that out through digital channels then you are missing the point. Wasting your time. And worse than that….. wasting your customers time. Unfortunately the non tech business world, especially via the conference circuit, is awash with ‘gurus’ saying digital just represents a new set of tools that add a bit of heft to your existing analogue marketing. Carry on doing what you’re doing but add this extra layer as a new distribution channel. A bit of LinkedIn, a bit of Facebook, some tweets.

You can do that. And it might be worthwhile. You might well think it is enough. That you have digital covered.

But being digital really is about a new way of thinking, as much as a new set of tools. It’s not something just for the marketing department, not a bolt on to existing ways of operating. Being digital involves rethinking how you work, how you generate business, how you service customers and ultimately how you think.

Two examples.

First off consider how in the tech industry it is commonplace to live stream conferences. For example, the excellent Le Web conference in Paris, or Google I/O or FT Digital. Each of these are expensive to attend, so why are they streaming them? Surely who’d go to the real thing when you can watch for free. That would seem to be the attitude in many/most other industries where conferences aren’t normally streamed, or indeed even recorded for later use. This though is like the lump of labour fallacy, where it’s considered that there is only so much work to go around and if you have too many workers we’ll all go to hell in a handcart. We’ll keep our conferences exclusive and only attendees will glean the pearls of wisdom that flow therein.

This is analogue thinking writ large. In the digital world you realise that scaling up events, by opening them up to virtual participants builds a bigger pie. Indeed a richer, more layered, more inclusive pie. A live streamed conference might double, triple the audience, maybe even way more. And if you have something worthwhile to say, surely the more who hear the better? More important than that though is that industries become less parochial, less like echo chambers where everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet. As the scale and variety of the audience increases real world participation becomes ever more desirable.It is striking within the property industry that there seem to be conferences where marketing types go, and others for developers, or planners, or architects, or environmental types. So whereas in reality all these people absolutely have to work together to build a better world, what you get is standalone silos of self selecting conformity.

The second example is the analogue report in digital clothing. Nothing demonstrates the error of treating digital as a bolt-on better than the pdf version of a research report laid out in print format. Too often are the times where one gets emailed, or tweeted, or otherwise digitally linked to reports or research documents that are unreadable on a mobile device. These just scream ‘I DON’T GET IT’. The digital world must be approached ‘mobile first’. Why? Because that is how people consume content. On a mobile device. Or, to be fair, in print. Not sat at a desk.

These two examples may seem a bit ‘oh well, no big deal’ but they are not, because they encapsulate an attitude that means the big trends will be either missed, or misunderstood. Take the current vogue for saying London’s position as a powerhouse is assured because, as was said at #BaseLDN this week ‘Cities are factories of the mind’ and agglomeration effects are everything. This is lazy thinking that betrays an unwillingness to countenance what’ll happen as we move to gigabit broadband, an internet of things, Watson on tap and the rise of mainstream robotics. Cities do have big advantages, but funnily enough the world’s biggest fashion retailer, Inditex, is based in the back of beyond, and neither Apple, or Facebook, or Google (three of the most powerful, innovative companies in the world) have their headquarters in a city. The groupthink that now says that ‘the death of distance’ is a fallacy, might well itself be fallacious. With a truly digital mindset it is not hard to see a highly disruptive future for the built environment. And that mindset can only come from co-opting digital thinking throughout your organisation, not just as a marketing add-on.

Digital marketing IS pointless unless it flows from being a digital business. And being truly digital is where we’re all heading. You may as well embrace it. If only to keep ahead of the robots.

Antony