I just finished making a coffee with our office coffee machine, a Breville ES400 Espresso machine (it does the job!) and it got me thinking about how much of a work horse this little thing has been.
At The Frontier Group, everyone loves coffee. Some people love it more than others, and some people more specifically love the caffeine more than the coffee itself. In any case, everyone at The Frontier Group drinks coffee.
When I started here almost three years ago, we used to go to the local coffee shop a few times a day. It was lucky that they produce some of the best coffee in Perth, and at least at that time, were probably the making the best coffeee in Perth.
However three or four coffees a day can quite easily eat into your weekly budget, not to mention the inconvenience of having to walk up the road to get it.
So we bought a coffee machine. Nothing fancy, but not completely entry level. We figured that it’ll be put through it’s paces, we enjoy our coffee and so we wanted a machine that could cope, and cope it has. After two years of use only the gasket on the group head needs replacing, and that’s really only been noticeable in the last month or so! It’s literally been trouble free.
However, down to the post topic, how much money have we saved? I thought the following sums were pretty interesting.
Coffees Made: 2 years x 48 weeks x 5 days x (approx) 8 coffees/day ~ 3800 coffees Coffee Used: 3800 coffees * 16g/coffee ~ 62kg of coffee Milk Used: 3800 coffees * 250mL/coffee ~ 950L of milk Coffee Cost: 62kg @ $50/kg = $3100 Milk Cost: 950L @ $2.20/L = $2100
So we’ve gone through 62Kg of coffee in the last two years, and 950L of milk. I think that’s pretty crazy!!
The machine itself cost $400, and there’s sugar and that sort of thing I guess, but all in all we’re looking at a solid $10,000 saving over the last two years. That’s not even including the saved time in not having to walk down the road and that sort of thing.
Our little workhorse is a silver box that sits in the corner and saves us money :)
This is the first in a series of posts about how Social Media is changing the way companies all around the world conduct business. It will discuss both the benefits and the pitfalls and how you can ensure you make the right decisions. We’ll reveal company successes and provide you with enough information to make a judgment call for your business.
If you think Facebook is a fad or Twitter is for teenagers, you could be setting yourself up for a nasty surprise down the track. Proactive companies are looking to adopt and leverage these technologies as yet another way to promote their brand and increase market share.
Shouldn’t you be doing the same?
So what will we be covering over the course of these posts? We’ll be going into detail on the various forms of social media, how each one applies to businesses, what combinations are right for your business and sharing some success stories which will hopefully encourage you to jump in and get started. We’ll also be delving into the ever changing area of online advertising and how this fits in the bigger picture of social media. The world is evolving and with it advertising, marketing and brand promotion. Time and time again we see the companies that fail to adapt are the ones left behind. Don’t let that be you!
Now, lets get on with Part 1 – What is Social Media?
Social Media as defined by Wikipedia as “content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies.”
But what does that really mean to businesses like yours? What does that have to do with promoting your business and increasing your loyal customer base? Perhaps it can best be summed up by this short video by CommonCraft.
That video uses a well known situation to demonstrate a few concepts. Specifically the idea of collaboration, sharing of information, and the inclusion of your customers into your business processes.
Before diving in to the various technologies, if you have a spare four minutes I’d recommend taking a look at this video as a quick introduction into just what Social Media is all about. It certainly gives an eye opening insight into the sheer size of what we are looking at.
Frightening numbers? Hopefully you now see it as something you need to delve into, but you just need the guidance to know where to begin. Lets end this first post with a quick run down on some of the more common Social Media websites. In the next few days, I will elaborate on these and present how they could be used in your business. Remember these websites are not the only aspect of Social media, and we will cover that in the next post.
Make sure you tune in.
Facebook – Facebook is a global social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region.
LinkedIn – LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003 mainly used for professional networking.
Twitter – Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers.
Digg – Digg is a social news website made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories.
Woke up this morning to see the news of the ANZ rebranding and the rollout of the new logo which was announced a few months back. I take an interest in the decisions that lead to a company rebranding or repositioning themselves, and also the followup once they decide to go through with it.
So, the OLD (top) and NEW (bottom) logos
The idea behind the rebranding was explained in a nutshell by chief executive Mike Smith:
“In recent years, the ANZ brand has become fragmented,” Mr Smith said.
“To deliver on its growth strategy and regional aspirations, ANZ has to look like one bank and provide a consistent experience for our customers and our people wherever they come into contact with the bank.”
Good intentions, but will this actually work? I get the feeling it’s heavily focused on their plans to make inroads into the Asian market. The logo has been influenced by a lotus flower.
Firstly there has been a backlash of iSnack 2.0 proportions, with many people drawing similarities to that marketing failure. I’ve yet to see more than a handful of comments today indicating this is a successful logo. The logo is supposed to represent both a human living in the customers world, as well as the three areas of focus (Australia, New Zealand and Asia-Pacific).
Personally I find the font a little bit off-putting, and much prefer the original. The logo design itself I was ok with, until someone pointed out what it looks like upside down. I would think a bank’s logo is seen upside down quite a lot on teller desks and everywhere someone has a letterhead from the bank.
Kinda creeps me out. What’s your take on the new logo? I’ve seen a lot of designers that could communicate their intentions in a better way. It just looks half finished to me (even though they spent 18 months deciding on it). The font appears mismatched from the logo itself, and the spacing between the letters feels wrong. I’m not sure why they left the horizontal line through the letters, I guess as a shout out to their old logo, but I’m not sure how that contributes to the overall rounded feel of the new logo.
I’m currently trying to create a Dojo widget that extends dojox.grid.DataGrid and has sub grids inside it. It’ll likely expand over time to be somewhat of a complex beast so there wasn’t really any other way than going the self contained widget. Having a bunch of global functions and DOM manipulation would be disgusting.
I’m building this widget in an incremental way so after getting the layout and hooking it up to a data source I moved on to creating a column with an expand/contract link that would trigger the sub grid to expand and contract as required. I ran into a problem when trying to keep my formatting functions contained within the widget definition.
I setup my layout in the following way :
_mainGridLayout : [
{ type : "dojox.grid._RowSelector" },
{
cells : [[
{ name : '', get : this._getBlank, formatter : this._formatExpander },
{ field : "customer_id", name: "Cust ID" },
{ field : "customer_name", name : "Customer" },
{ field : "job_number", name : "Job No." },
...
]]
}
],
I had defined the get function and formatter function in my widget, but whenever I loaded the widget I’d get a blank column as if neither function had been run.
After some poking and prodding it seemed that whatever context this view was being built in, the ‘this’ object was not my widget as I originally expected. The ‘this’ object was actually an instance of dojox.grid.cell. That was okay as a cell has a reference to it’s grid, so what I needed to do was access this.grid._formatExpander and this.grid._getBlank.
I did it in the following way :
{ name : '', get : function() {return this.grid._getBlank(arguments);}, formatter : function() {return this.grid._formatExpander(arguments);} },
It worked perfectly, I’d like to say just as I expected, but alas I’m not that smart :)
It feels to me like there should be a cleaner way to do it, but at least for the time being it works fine and doesn’t required me to move my formatting functions out into some global namespace and outside of my widget’s nice pieces of logic.
