services – Climb to the Stars

Pitching: Don’t Assume I’ll Be Interested, and Some Advice [en]

[fr] Comme blogueuse, j'ai malheureusement l'habitude qu'on m'approche avec des infographies et autres contenus "pour mes lecteurs". Ahem. N'importe qui ayant passé plus de 4 minutes sur mon blog devrait vite repérer que mon business n'est pas la reproduction du travail d'autrui.

La nouvelle tendance, c'est les startups et autres entrepreneurs du coin qui me contactent, en tant que gestionnaire de l'eclau, pour me pitcher leurs services -- et idéalement, les vendre aux membres.

Ce qui me dérange souvent dans ces approches, c'est qu'au lieu de demander si une telle démarche ferait sens, on semble partir du principe que bien sûr, ça va intéresser les gens/m'intéresser. Du coup, quelques conseils (un peu à l'arrache) sur comment procéder mieux.

As a blogger, I’m used to getting emails telling me about a fascinating infographic or a great new service that I should be eager to tell my readers about. These emails usually get ignored, or in the case of the worst offenders who follow-up aggressively when they get no reply, spammed.

Recently, I have been faced with an annoying new trend: as a coworking space owner, I am starting to receive pitches (sometimes by e-mail, generally by phone) from local start-ups or entrepreneurs who are convinced that their product or service is ideal for the members of eclau.

Sailing. Race.

Honestly, nobody likes being pitched. On the other hand, I am aware that I sometimes contact people to try to interest them in stuff that I’m doing. For example, I have spent a large part of the last two days telling people about a workshop I am holding in Geneva next week, and which is not full yet. Am I being the annoying person pitching them?

Examining the way I phrase things has led me, I think, to pinpoint what is so annoying with these pitches that I’m getting. They assume that what they have to offer is interesting, to me or the members of my coworking space. They’re not asking. It’s pushy. It’s “I’d like to come and show my product” or “this will be of interest to your readers”. Not “what do you think?” or “would this make sense?” or “just in case”.

It feels like the objective is to convince me there is a match. Oh, you know me or my coworking members better than I do? Half the time, to be honest, it’s so far off the mark that it’s clear proper homework has not been done, and that weakens the whole approach. If you have to talk me into something, it’s probably not that great a match, specially if I get the feeling you’re not really listening to me.

It’s hard to find the right balance between pitching too aggressively and staying in the shadows. I get it. How do I try and do it?

I do my homework — or if I can’t, or haven’t, I ask the other person if they think it’s a match.
I try and put myself in the other person’s shoes. What is in it really for them, besides what I would like there to be? I try and forget about my goals and think only of theirs.
I aim to inform rather than sell. Ask questions and listen rather than “talk at”.
If I want to tell the other person about something, and I don’t really expect them to see the point at this stage, I’ll do my best to be upfront about the fact that I’m asking them a favour (their time) to hear me out, instead of trying to pass it off as something that’s in their interest.
Often, I’m asking people I know if they might know people who could be interested in whatever I’m doing. If they are themselves, they’ll certainly tell me, but I’m not assuming they are.
As a general rule, I am generous with my knowledge and time and happy to help people I know out. I do it because it’s in my nature, but it does have the advantage that when I’m asking for something, I’m not (I hope!) coming across as the person who’s always wanting and never giving.

That’s it, off the top of my head. I’m sure I don’t manage to do things “perfectly” all the time, but I do my best to be respectful of other people’s needs and time.

How do you approach this? If you get pitched and it’s not your job to get pitched (you’re not a VC or somebody who relies on pitches), what are the things that put you off, and what advice would you give to approach you?

Google Identity Dilemma [en]

[fr] Depuis des années, j'utilise une identité "fantaisiste" pour tous mes services Google. C'est mon identité principale (vous voyez de laquelle je parle si on est en contact). J'aimerais passer à prénom.nom comme identité principale (je la possède aussi) mais tous les services Google sont rattachés à la première, et je ne vois pas vraiment comment m'en sortir. Idées bienvenues!

When I created a Gmail address all these years ago, I chose a “funny-cute” name that was easy to remember for most of the people I knew. I was on IRC all day back then, and my nickname was bunny(wabbit_), and people knew I was Swiss.

I didn’t really think my Gmail address would become so central to my online identity, you see.

Of course, I also registered firstname.lastname and redirected it onto my main e-mail address and identity.

As years went by, Google added all sorts of services that got tied onto this identity (not to mention the 2.5Gb of archived e-mails and chats). Google Talk, Google Profiles, and recently, Google Sidewiki and Google Wave.

These last weeks, I’ve been wondering if I shouldn’t “make the switch” and use my more serious “firstname.lastname” e-mail address as my main identity. Actually, to be honest, I’d like to. But there are obstacles — oh, so many.

First, all my contacts are linked to my current account. All my e-mail is stuck in it. My Feedburner and Google Reader settings are linked to it. My blogger blog is. My calendar. Everywhere I use my Google identity for a third-party service, here we go.

And Google does not allow you to link one Google account to another (sure, you can redirect mail, but that doesn’t solve anything).

So, do you see my problem? If you have any bright ideas, I’m listening. I would really like a solution.

Secrets of my Online Presence Revealed! [en]

[fr] Un tour d'horizon de la façon dont je gère ma présence en ligne, des outils que j'utilise et à quelles fins.

I was having a chat with Kevin this morning, and realised that though the way I had organised my online presence seemed obvious to me, it could hold some interest for other people. So, for your enlightenment and enjoyment, I am sharing with you the secrets of my life online these days and how the different tools and services I use fit in.

The backbone of my online presence is my blog Climb to the Stars, which you’re reading. That’s where my thinking goes. This is, I hope, my contribution. I don’t write here as often as I’d like to.

Aside from Climb to the Stars, I have a professional website (a bit static and inevitably out-of-date, but it’s a start). I’m intermittently active on project-specific blogs of mine: Going Far, Going Solo, eclau, Coworking Léman. I’m also involved professionally on two blogs which aren’t mine: Fleur de Pains and the ebookers.ch travel blog, both in French. At some point I did a podcast with my friend Suw Charman-Anderson, Fresh Lime Soda.

As you can see, blogging in the traditional way is far from dead for me.

My photos are on Flickr (thousands of them), most of my videos are on Viddler (a few dozen). I use Skitch to take screenshots (= photographs of my life in cyberspace) but I publish them to Flickr too.

Another very important way of “being online” for me is Twitter. Using Twitter has brought about a change in my online habits: I’m on IRC way less than I used to (still there, on irc.freenode.net, but idle and disconnected usually) and I’ve more or less loss the use for my Cheese Sandwich blog, where I used to write more “uninteresting” and personal stuff. It remains online, of course, and every now and again I write something in it, but Twitter turns out to be a better outlet for these short snippets of life I used to post there. Another “new” tool (new in the sense that it wasn’t around when I started blogging nearly 9 years ago) that has also reduced my need for a second, “personal” blog is Facebook.

I know a bunch of techy-type geeks are poo-poohing Facebook now (after the honeymoon), but I’ve actually become more involved in it during these last months, as a greater and greater proportion of my offline friends (people who don’t have blogs, don’t IM, haven’t heard of Twitter) are joining it. I use Facebook and Twitter in parallel, but I guess for me the major difference between the two is that I reach a very different audience. Facebook also has some measure of privacy, and I’m connected to way less people than on Twitter, so you’ll often find me a little bit more personal over there. That’s also the reason why I don’t crosspost my status messages between the two services.

I chat on IM a lot, and now on Facebook too. For me, it’s the necessary one-on-one complement to the rest of my rather public life online. I don’t use Skype much (usually upon request, or for certain people I have on Skype but not on my IM list).

For many years now, I’ve been storing my bookmarks on del.icio.us. I’m not somebody who enjoys organising things in hierarchies, so the tag-based mess over there is fine for me. Feedburner inserts a daily summary of those links in my RSS feed. I’ve tried Diigo, and liked it, but for some reason it didn’t stick and got lost in a browser upgrade. Maybe I’ll try again one of these days. I have a very passive account on Last.fm, and the obligatory YouTube, DailyMotion, Dopplr (etc.) accounts, but I’m not very active on them.

I have a VodPod account which I use a bit like “del.icio.us for videos”, but which I’ve fallen out of love with because it keept logging me out and wouldn’t let me log back in (with OpenID) in the pop-up window. So much for one-click bookmarklet publishing. In the video department, I also have a seesmic account, where I am intermittently active. Huge bursts during a few days/weeks, and then nothing at all for month.

I’ve always wanted a way to collect all the stuff I do/publish online into a single lifestream somewhere. I’m not sure anybody would actually want to follow it, but I guess it helps me feel “whole” rather than scattered all over the place. I tried out Suprglu for this ages ago, and was happy with it until the service didn’t seem to be able to follow anymore. Then I used Jaiku for that purpose, and briefly Tumblr (but I was feeding Tumblr into Jaiku too, so it was a mess and I stopped quickly).

Friendfeed came along and seemed the ideal lifestreaming application. SocialThing looked promising, but like Diigo I guess, it didn’t stick for me. I tried being active on friendfeed, but it didn’t really stick either (a few things bother me: I can’t have a summary page with just the items of mine which were liked or commented upon; it’s also very “noisy” for me, in terms of the amount of data it displays, and it displays it in an incomplete form, forcing me to click and come back, click and come back& anyway). So friendfeed sits there, happily lifestreaming me to the world, and to the sidebar of Climb to the Stars.

One old obsession of mine has always been comments. Way before cocomment, I had a tendancy to keep copies of my long comments elsewhere, or bookmark them. I now use backtype to capture my comments. (I also have a Disqus account but it’s pretty passive.)

I’ve recently become much more active on Tumblr, where I have a tumblelog, tentatively named Digital Crumble. As with many tools, I had an account for a long time before finally “getting it”. I’ve found a good handful of interesting people to follow and reblog, and I use it to publish all sorts of random “secondary” content: short notes, my comments (imported via backtype), my screenshots (via Flickr), my collected videos (via VodPod, but probably in future directly through Tumblr). But mainly, I use Tumblr to publish quotes. I’ve always been a note-taker. When I read a book, it’s with a pencil. When it’s only, I highlight paragraphs I like and with the click of a bookmarklet, send them to Tumblr, complete with an automatic link to the source.

This is one of the reasons I use feedly as my feed reader (when I use one), as it allows me to publish quotes and annotations to Tumblr.

Digital Crumble is quickly becoming an important companion to Climb to the Stars: Climb to the Stars for my stuff, and Digital Crumble for things that others have said or created.

I will spare you the long list of services I have an account at but don’t use actively (plus, I’m sure as soon as I’ll hit publish, I’ll think of something I should have included).

I hope this little peek into my online life will have satisfied your curiousity about the life of the pink-haired online geek :-).

Informations et prévention: adolescents et internet [fr]

[en] An overview of the different talks and trainings I can do regarding teenagers on the internet. I can do them in English too, but most of my clients here are French-speaking. If you'd like more information about this in English, please leave a comment or drop me a line.

Alors qu’un ami me raconte un épisode désastreux de conférence consacrée aux “dangers d’internet”, je me dis qu’il est temps que je récrive à la directrice d’Action Innocence, avec qui j’ai eu une discussion tout à fait sympathique et intéressante il y a quelques semaines.

“Déçue en bien”, comme on dit par ici. Si nos avis divergent quant au risque réel que courent les enfants et adolescents d’être victimes de pédophiles à cause de leurs activités en ligne (chat, diffusions d’informations personnelles) nous sommes assez sur la même longueur d’onde pour le reste, ce qui me réjouit, vu l’important travail de prévention que fait Action Innocence dans les écoles de la région. (Après, on peut discuter des détails. Je n’aime personnellement pas trop leur matériel, par exemple, que je trouve alarmiste, mais dans le fond, on cherche la même chose: informer et prévenir sans diaboliser internet.)

Le mail que j’ai envoyé contient des informations sur le travail que j’accomplis dans le domaine “adolescents et internet”. Comme c’est une assez bonne synthèse et que mon site professionnel n’est plus trop à jour (quand je dis que la meilleure formule de site professionnel c’est le blog, je ne rigole pas!), je vais reproduire-adapter tout ça ici.

Donc, voici quelques informations sur les services que je fournis dans le contexte “éducatif” ou “adolescents et internet”, et mes tarifs. Je suis toujours ouverte à d’autres propositions — je n’ai pas de “liste de prestations” fixe dont je ne dévie pas.

Conférences

Généralement dans des écoles/associations. Approche information-prévention. Contenu adapté aux besoins du client (général, accent sur les blogs, accent sur le chat, la permanence des contenus numériques), et même si nécessaire en réaction spécifique à des “problèmes” concrets qui ont été rencontrés.

Parents: visite guidée de l’internet social, discussion des risques et difficultés rencontrés par les ados en ligne (environ 1h30)

Enseignants, Educateurs: présentation des différents outils de l’internet social, utilisation par les adolescents (+risques), ouvertures pédagogiques (45-90 minutes)

Adolescents, Elèves (dès la 5ème): adapté à la tranche d’âge, en groupes de 2-3 classes max. (environ 50 élèves), sensibilisation aux différents enjeux d’une présence active en ligne, prévention contre les risques qu’ils peuvent y rencontrer (45-75 minutes)

Formations

Diverses formations sont possibles, contenu précis à négocier au cas par cas. Exemples:

formation plus spécifique de responsables informatique, médiateurs, animateurs santé aux enjeux liés à la socialisation sur internet
formation d’intervenants “prévention/information” (générale ou spécifique, théorique ou pratique)
comprendre les mondes virtuels (Second Life) et les dynamiques relationnelles dans les relations “online”
technique: ouvrir un blog et l’alimenter
applications pédagogiques du blog, du wiki, et des outils associés
accompagnement lors de projets pédagogiques utilisant internet

Tarifs

Mes tarifs évoluent, mais au jour d’aujourd’hui, ils sont les suivants pour les écoles et autres clients “éducatifs-non-lucratifs”: dès CHF 500 par demi-journée, minimum une demi-journée (+ frais).

Par exemple, si je viens à midi, que je fais deux conférences pour des élèves l’après-midi, et une pour les parents le soir, on arrive à deux demi-journées = CHF 1000

Une conférence isolée compte comme demi-journée, donc CHF 500. Mais si je fais une conférence + une réunion dans la même demi-journée, c’est le même prix.

Pour les mandats plus complexes ou longs (formation, accompagnement de projet), les tarifs sont à discuter et fixer pour le mandat dans sa globalité.

A mon propos

une collection de “bios” si jamais c’est nécessaire
mes coordonnées
page d’infos “conférences” (a besoin d’une mise à jour, mais ça donne une idée)
le matériel “thème internet” rédigé pour ciao.ch
la liste (d’une longueur effrayante) de mes interventions dans la presse (pas toutes au sujet des ados et internet)

J’approche internet comme une culture étrangère avec laquelle il faut se familiariser, afin de la connaître et de la comprendre. Je suis immergée dans cette culture depuis maintenant bientôt dix ans, et je la comprends en profondeur aussi bien de l’intérieur que de l’extérieur, avec le recul que me donne ma formation universitaire en sciences humaines.