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  • Garlic & tomato squid with spinach & broad beans

    Recently, I ordered some squid from Ocado to make this Jamie Oliver recipe – Chargrilled squid with rustic guacamole. Squid is always surprisingly cheap and is very tasty when cooked right, so I recommend this recipe. As I’d bought more than necessary, I put the leftover squid in the freezer in small bundles of 2-4 cleaned squid tubes.

    Tonight, getting home, I was convinced we didn’t have anything in the fridge for dinner and started scavenging around. Within minutes, I had what was needed to make garlic & tomato squid rings with spinach and broad beans. The lot was served with toasted tiger bread.

    Ingredients:

    • Garlic cloves, crushed and chopped
    • Half a big jar of tomato passata
    • Broad beans (frozen)
    • Spinach leaves (mine were frozen)
    • Olives, chopped up
    • Squid tubes, chopped into rings
    • Olive oil
    • Tiger bread to toast
    • Butter

    I got the first pan very hot with a dribble of olive oil, threw the garlic in for a minute and then poured the passata, popped in the broad beans, spinach and olives. Let that cook down for a few minutes until it thickens nicely. I added a bit of hot smoked paprika, cayenne and ground coriander for flavour.

    Once it’s looking good, get the tiger bread toasted under the grill. Get your second pan searing hot with a bit of oil and throw the squid rings in for a very short time. Add salt and pepper and chargrill until nearly ready.

    At the last minute, chuck the squid into the sauce. Get your toast out from under the grill and butter ’em up. Serve the squid in its sauce in a big bowl and use the toasted bread to mop up the lovely sauce.

    Yummy, simple, quicker than a Jamie Oliver 30 minutes meal and super cheap to make!

  • New year, new laptop (and new sticker!)

    new laptop sticker

    Bought from Stephen Edward Graphics on the lovely Etsy.com

  • Get a free advice session on marketing & promoting your business

    Christmas goodiesIn the spirit of Christmas generosity, I’m giving away a half-day of consultancy to a local startup or entrepreneur who needs help marketing and promoting themselves.

    Cambridge and East Anglia are full of clever people doing amazing things, with many solo flyers or startups creating great products. In some cases, you might just need a little boost to get the word out about your product. For others, it’s such early days that you haven’t thought much about marketing yet – you just know your idea kicks ass.

    With years of experience in marketing and working with Pepsmedia, nothing excites me more than a promising new business idea, so let’s hear what you’re working on.

    Participating couldn’t be easier, here’s what you need to do:

    • You need to be a startup or entrepreneur in the region with a business, project or idea and would like some marketing and promotion coaching (Note: You can be based anywhere but we may run the session online if you’re too far away!)
    • Leave a comment below (or email vero@pepsmedia.com) with your idea, and what your marketing/promotion challenges are or will be in 2011
    • Do this by end of day on December 23rd

    I’ll announce the winner around Christmas day (Internet access and family commitments permitting!), who will then be able to redeem their consultancy session in January. The session will either be held at the Pepsmedia office, somewhere local and convenient for everyone involved or, if need be, as an online session.

    How will I pick a winner? I’ll choose the startup or individual who I think would benefit the most from this session. If there are more than one great contender, I’ll pick a name out of a hat. You don’t need to be a technology startup to participate; Whatever your market, leave a comment now for your chance to win a free advice session.

  • How to Market Your Own Application: An Alfred App Case Study

    Those who have followed the Alfred development in the past year will know that we’ve discovered a lot through building our own community around it (possibly the most awesome community out there!)

    Last month, I gave a talk at Cambridge Geek Nights, sharing some tips, tricks and discoveries we’ve made while developing and marketing Alfred. Did you know that posting a sneak peek screenshots could get you hundreds of excited tweets? Have you considered collaborating with other app developers on co-promotion?

    We’ve since had the opportunity to work with other startups on getting visibility and marketing their product. Think we can help you? Drop me a line and tell us about your app!

  • Twitter's other spam problem: Username chaos

    A few months ago, Twitter published a State of Twitter Spam blog post. It claimed to have reduced spam from fake accounts to little more than 1%, lowering the number of offers for prescription drugs, dodgy online scams and invitations from busty babes. We complain about Twitter more than we praise them, but this deserves a “well done!”

    What’s on the increase and quite possibly trickier to control is the noise created by users who don’t understand how Twitter works – usernames in particular.

    There seem to be a few trends:

    Retweets as replies

    Users in Malaysia and Indonesia seem to use retweets as a way to “thread” conversation. As a result, the oldest words get truncated. As Veronica seems to be a common name, I’ll often have more misappropriated foreign tweets than real @replies in my stream.

    Failing to understand usernames

    The next flavour of Twitter spam is due to users who don’t understand that @Vero or @Jake or @Bob are really someone’s usernames and use them willy nilly.

    I often see “@Vero’s house for a party” and hope that some stranger isn’t on the way to my place with a couple of crates of beer for an impromptu gathering.

    What’s next?

    I’ll be interested to see how Twitter tackles this kind of issue. Having steamed past the 100 millionth user some time ago, the noise level is quickly becoming deafening.

    Unlike classic spam where a user publishes the same thing hundreds of times, this can’t be fixed as easily as it’s a user education issue.

    How could Twitter handle this?

  • Why You Should Avoid Mass-Emailing Using the "To" Field

    This may seem like an obvious blog post to most readers. If that’s the case, just move along, nothing to see here.

    However, if you’re wondering why people have been giving you snappy responses and a stern look when you include them on mass emails where all recipients are in the “To:” field, please take a seat. I’ll explain why you’ll find yourself on the naughty step if you do it again.

    First, when emailing dozens of people at once, you’re sharing the recipients’ email addresses with everyone else. Everyone, including aunt Wendy whose old computer is crawling with malware and nasty things that can harvest their address book. And including that careless salesperson who is quite happy to add me to their spammy mailing list even though I’ve never agreed to it. If you think that’s acceptable behaviour, then you should have no problem with me taking your personal mobile number and plastering it all over the city, right?

    And secondly, in particular when you’re in a business environment, it looks awfully unprofessional to email customers or prospects openly. If you’re sharing a prospect’s information with no regards for their privacy, why should they trust you with information like credit card details? You’ve lost a sale right there.

    Do yourself a favour and learn to use the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) field of your email client when sending group emails. Even better, use proper email marketing software (Campaign Monitor, MailChimp and many more) and present yourself like a real professional.

    Note: I’ve created this post to ensure I can send this link to email marketers and friends who don’t understand why it’s inappropriate to send mass emails this way. Feel free to link to this post if you also need to explain it to someone.

  • Making the Most of User Feedback

    Yay monster cupcakes!

    This is the third and final part in a mini series of posts on using a community forum to exchange ideas with your users.

    Part I: Why and when should I start my own community forum?
    Part II: Setting up your forum: Top tips for using Get Satisfaction
    Part III: Making the most of user feedback

    In the first part, we looked at the right time and right way to get started with a community forum. As we picked Get Satisfaction as our platform of choice, I then outlined a few top tips for it. Today, we’re looking at what happens once you’ve successfully created a place for conversation and the users begin to trickle in.

    If you thought that once the community existed, you could kick back and relax, think again! Now comes the best part: Finally interacting with your users. You’ll meet the most wonderful people, as well as the occasional user who seems to relish being your daily pain in the backside.

    So how can you deal with vast amounts of feedback, good and bad, yet retain your sanity?

    (more…)

  • Setting Up Your Forum: Top Tips for Using Get Satisfaction

    Tasty chocolate cupcake

    Recently, I started a short series of blog post on using a community forum to exchange with your users. In this second part, we’ll look at why we chose a particular platform and how we’ve used it since launch.

    Part I: Why and when should I start my own community forum?
    Part II: Setting up your forum: Top tips for using Get Satisfaction
    Part III: Making the most of user feedback

    Why we chose Get Satisfaction

    From the first time I came across Get Satisfaction in 2007, I’ve been looking for a suitable context in which to use it but the opportunity never came until now.

    In the early days, what struck me about it was that there was a natural positive aura to the service. Users weren’t simply encouraged to post questions and problems, they also were prompted to praise the product when applicable!

    I’ll admit I was also swayed by the cupcake images that are used as default icons for new users. As co-founder Amy Muller said in a 2009 interview with Ciara Byrne, “we felt that cupcakes were associated with satisfaction and happiness. What’s not to love about a cupcake?” Indeed, what’s not to love about a cupcake?
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  • Why I'm in love with IKEA's "Cat herding" campaign

    In case the news hasn’t made it to your corner of the office yet, here’s a YouTube video perfect for a Friday.

    IKEA’s campaign involved releasing 100 cats into a London IKEA store and letting them roam free. Whoddathunk hanging halogen light fittings made such great cat runs…

    Aside from the fact that I’m a total cat lover (an anomaly in my family), the reason I’m head over heels for this campaign is that, for once, Marketing doesn’t take itself seriously. Sure, IKEA isn’t at the awareness-building stage of its business lifespan and can afford to do some pretty creative marketing, as they did with their Facebook campaign in 2009.

    It’s refreshing to see a campaign that’s purely done for fun, an idea that doesn’t make any sense and doesn’t try to preach or sell us anything. Have a laugh, spend Friday afternoon spreading the video around and gain that little bit more love for the almighty brand that is IKEA. “Simples!”, as Aleksandr Orlov would say.

    I wonder if they just shook the box of Whiskas biscuits to call all the cats back at the end?

    Happy Friday!

  • Why and When Should I Start a Community Forum?

    lovely cookies

    A week ago, we launched a community forum for Alfred and I couldn’t be happier to have done so.

    This series of post covers why we chose to start a forum, as well as some tips for setting up and running your own successful community forum.

    Part I: Why and when should I start my own community forum?
    Part II: Setting up your forum: Top tips for using Get Satisfaction
    Part III: Making the most of user feedback

    Don’t forget to sign up to the RSS feed if you don’t want to miss the rest of the series!

    Why choose a forum

    When we launched Alfred, our main means of support for users was Twitter. When we needed more than 140 characters, we’d swap over to email.

    As our community grew, once we found ourselves with a few thousand users reading our tweets (gasp!), yet many asked the same question frequently (eg. Will you be adding x feature?) because they hadn’t seen the older answer to it.

    Let’s face it: Twitter is today’s news but tomorrow’s virtual chip paper. It was time to look for a new way to provide answers. That isn’t to say we’ve entirely dropped email; on the contrary, we’re now able to focus email responses on those who really need one-on-one answers.

    We chose a forum because it allowed us to answer publicly, leaving longer-lasting, more valuable answers which could be revisited the product evolved. So is a forum right for everyone?
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