With all the plethora of ‘review of the noughties’ stuff doing the tour of TV and web, I came to realise that today marks the 10th anniversary of when I started working in digital (or as it was called then ‘web’ or ‘new media’).  In that time I’ve worked on digital projects in music, radio, TV and B2B. I thought it would be fun to do a round-up of what I was doing year-by-year to see how much digital has changed in this passing decade (in some ways it’s revolutionised…other moments even today I get hideous flashback where I think little has been learnt) and what I was doing then.

Jan 2000:

After graduating from Music & Drama at Birmingham – but having spent a lot of my time putting on gigs, festivals, DJs and performance events (including a legendary muddy performance poetry slam at Glastonbury) – my bug to get into the music biz was beating strong, so in November ’09 I headed down to London and slept on a friends’ sofa hoping to get my ‘dream job’.  I think my family thought I was crazy: my mother warned me ‘you shouldn’t enjoy work’, but I had nothing to lose and failing interviews in conferencing, commercial sales etc. showed me that wasn’t my world.

Four weeks later, I had lodgings in a fine Georgian appartment in upmarket suburb Muswell Hill (for the princely sum of £38 week) and had been offered a job at an independent record label.  I’d applied for another job there in Music Week a few months before and they’d kept my CV, I got a call from the label manager, ‘we want someone to help out setting up some websites for us.’ I knew very little about the internet (having used it only a little at university in my final year) but I asked a couple of my techy friends (who I’m proud to say are both still my friends and are actually now both legendary people in web/digital) Peter Ashton and Antonio Gould.  “Talk about webrings and links,” Pete advised.  He was (and still is) a smart man.  I got the job.  ‘Web girl’ mark #1 arrived.

Snapper Music was a great entry into the music businesses, which has survived the indie label cull and is still in business today.  The secret to their success: spreading the risk between established genres, back-catalogue and DVDs balanced with new albums by established artists dampened the risk (and I like to think investing in web a bit before others may have helped). I don’t think anyone really had a clue what the web was about but we knew we had to try and experiment.  My job was to design and develop websites, some I made myself, some with our web agency.  Thankfully, all have been superseded by better sites now – I was never a great designer and I was always preferred the content and marketing side of things.

We did some pretty innovative stuff – one of the first ever Webcasts for the bands Gong and Gene, and in those days competitions, 30sec sound clips (in RealPlayer – ouch!), and fan forums were as bleeding-edge as it got.  What I enjoyed the most was getting close to the bands who were all rather super: highlights, playing tennis with members of Japan, going to Glastonbury and lots of gigs with the eccentric and lovely family of Gong (whom I later collaborated with recording a show and album with the band Zorch) and recording the video and photography for The Popes on their Holloway Boulevard Irish pub crawl album launch, where Shane McGowan turned up and we were all crammed into the tinniest pub.  Daevid Allen (pictured) from Gong was a very inspiring, 63-years-young man.  Once the Gong entourage showed up at our offices in Fulham in full stage costume, he was wearing a top hat with a badge on it ‘www.fuckoff.com’.  That was how most people felt about the web then.

Music: Working in music fired me up to join a band.  My first was Nought, a still gigging prog rock quartet originating from Oxford who had some small fame at the time with John Peel and NME.  We toured the band’s first album (on Shifty Disco) and played every toilet imaginable in London.

Jan 2001:

I quickly abandoned my indie-cred was now working at the mighty-music-machine that is Universal Music on the UMTV label, TV-advertised compilations and artists who were featured on TV.  For an indie-kid the content was a bit soul-destroying and the culture of a major is much more factory-like led by ‘product managers’ and a whole bank of people in licensing, rather than the chain-smoking anarchy of an independent.  The label MD was very anti-internet (he also used to shout a lot, bang doors, shout ‘fuck’ then go out for lunch with Jonathan King) seeing it as a bit of a waste of time, but my marketing director was a smart woman and fought to get a few crumbs for each campaign – usually 2% of the budget – which we spent on web advertising, creating microsites, SMS campaigns and branded games.  I got to work with some brilliant indie web producers on projects like Top of the Pops (remember that?) album sites, and learnt how multimedia content (music and video) worked online.

In some ways it was the early days of viral marketing, and it was like the wild west – unregulated, unstructured – we just tried it and saw what worked (whilst e-commerce partners were floating in and out of business).  Some if it was dodgy like hiring a PR firm to ‘seed’ comments in chat rooms about bands, and plenty of spamming before internet marketing regulations toughened up.    It was also seminal times for the commercial music industry, with the threat of peer-to-peer distribution and Napster awakeneing, and also changing times for music as entertainment more than art, with labels like UMTV continuing to do well with the X-Factor and big Saturday night TV focus on mainstream music. When I watch Nathan Barley I find it hysterical as it remind me a lot of the people I met at this time, when people would spraypaint ‘new media new arse’ on the streets of Soho and Hoxton which was becoming a hotspot for these new fangled ‘web agencies’.

High points: Doing interesting stuff with interesting producers and meeting some amusing ‘showbiz’ types like Michael Ball.
Low points: getting hit on the head in a bizarre accident involving a Lionel Ritchie gold disc.  I still think most of the label staff had no idea what I did and was still #web girl.

Bizarrely, I was the first ‘new media hire’ for Universal in the UK, before their Head of New Media, which shows just how slow in the game the majors were to play catch up.  I laughed recently when I saw this Christmas viral game from UMTV - I’d commissioned exactly the same thing some nine years before.  The music landscape has radically changed, but marketing tactics die hard…

Music: Still playing with Nought, a few small UK tours and European shows, and I first started dabbling with playing the theremin.

Jan 2002:

After a brief stint as a freelance writer/journalist for the Capital Radio websites, I was now in one of my fondely remembered jobs with Pilot Productions, an independent TV production company who made travel docs.  This love-hate relationship with TV went on to last 5 years, and I’m proud of what we achieved.  Again, I worked for a very visionary MD (Ian Cross) who didn’t know much about the internet but new it would be important for television.  As a website editor and manager, it was also a very different approach for me, understanding the value of growing an online content archive and working out how to monetizing that as a digital business rather than the ‘hit and run’ apporach of online marketing campaigns.

In 2002 our flagship show Globe Trekker launched on PBS, and I ran around converting their messy HTML seperate pages into a new website and e-commerce store (Actinic) in time for the launch.  At first a lot of people were sceptical, and in the low-budget production world many were against having a permanent team member running the website.  I was still ‘web girl’ and getting asked to fix people’s computers, but times were changing.

Music:  I had left Nought and was moonlighting in various bands thanks to an advert in the last ever edition of music mag Melody Maker, most notably Heist, a rather wonderful (now in retirement) European chanson influenced band, we toured a lot in Germany and Switzerland. According to Way Back Machine, I launched the first version of my artist website Hypnotique, in a rather garish pastel-pink, to promote my upcoming work as a thereminist, having done quite a few shows and cable TV appearance by now.

Jan 2003:

Having just moved to my own flat in urban hinterland Tottenham, I was settled into more of a routine of being a website owner and manager for Pilot Productions. We were trying to work out how to make money from digital deals – with lots of contracts signed with partners like Yahoo! but the commercial world wasn’t (and maybe isn’t) yet ready to license TV documentary video clips online.  Again, RealPlayer was still all the rage, but a lot of people would stream clips of our very pixelated one minute videos.  We were, of course, terrified of people ‘stealing’ our precious content and paid a lot to have it professionally encoded and streamed.  This was a long time before YouTube.

I created ‘community’ content by publishing travel stories people sent in – in a web 1.0 style – but we also had a forum which was always full of lively discussion.  So-called ‘social media’ has really been around for almost as long as the web.  Having no budget meant sharpening up my skills in design and coding again, but I learnt a lot of valuable lessons of how to create and market a website on the cheap – but one that was now turning over half a million dollars a year in sales.

Music: I started playing with Dawn of the Replicants, who had recently left Warner Bros to ‘go indie’ and would go on to work on many albums and tours with the Scottish band of buccaneers.  Also started playing a variety of cabaret, and wedding playing the theremin, and more ‘serious’ solo music under the name Hypnotique.

Jan 2004:

Still mixing up working for Pilot Productions where I was now ‘Head of New Media’ (in a department of 1.5!) with doing music, gigging, music teaching and doing a little bit of new media consultancy on the side.  I’d started to focus on broadening the spread of marketing using pay-per-click and the emerging art of search engine optimisation, though email marketing was (and for many sectors and products, still is) the strongest ways of converting sales adding some interest and knowledge with some time-limited special offers.  I started thinking about  how smaller businesses could be successful online, but then I just thought of it as  ‘doing web stuff’ rather than an actual digital strategy.

Having built up a big online catalogue of interesting articles about travel and world culture, through a combination of all the research gathered for the TV shows and working with an army of talented interns, we started to work out how to monetize our body of quality content.  I learnt a lot about standarisation of both text and web formats but also how it can be harder to repurpose things from one format (TV) into enough (web). We struck a deal with an American travel publisher to do a book I had created, a travel guide to where to go in the world organised by month.  It was an original idea (and a great book) but it wasn’t a hit.  In the meantime we had built up a stready flow of traffic for our original article which enabled us to cover all our (modest) digital costs through website advertising – perhaps a first for a TV production company of our size.

Music: I was doing Hypnotique more seriously now and working on my first album, getting involved in TV shows, and doing installations and performances for all kinds of interesting mainstream and underground stuff, including launching the Switched On Radio series about early electronic music, and a demo in Denmark of the new Etherwave Pro theremin  with Bob Moog. Hypnotique.net became the gothic site it is today. Back then, having a website was still unusual and helped me get noticed and get work as an artist.

Jan 2005:

Still with Pilot Productions, the web was going well and starting to make serious money, finally the other TV people were taking notice (and not asking me to fix their computer any more) – online was where the TV industry was heading.  We launched several partner video-on-demand projects (many now defunct) and again tried to negotiate many fly-by-night contracts and providers which were a feature then of doing business online.  We finally got paid for our video online, and I licensed content for a mobile service start-up who were operating in 2.5G (they needed to re-edit a lot of the video to work for these newest mobile services).  My MD took a bold move and invested again, this time creating an IPTV channel to provide a ‘destination’ for the company’s content online.  A risky move, particularly in alientating broadcasters, but realising our shows were worth half their value from five years before, becoming an online brand and content provider gave us many advantages.

Music: This year I launched my debut solo album, and worked on a few interesting arty-shows and stuff. It was hardly a best seller but it made a little profit and got some good reviews, and I learnt a lot about marketing a product in the cusp of a changing period when ‘old media’ was weakening, whilst ‘new media’ hadn’t really found it’s feet. E-zines and services like CD Baby played a big part in helping me realise my dreams of releasing music without a label.

2006/7:

London, to quote the words of The Smiths, ‘this town has dragged me down’.  I sought solice in a return to my childhood home of Nottingham, where I still have a home today.  Nottingham isn’t the media metropolis of London, and a lot of the digital jobs here were quite drab for a media-lurvie like myself, plus regional companies can be somewhat amateurish in their approaches to getting the right talent (one web agency asked me to fill in a questionnaire asking what types of music and cheese I liked), but I ended up going off on a tangent for a few years that has been a useful diversion in some ways.

I worked for several regional public sector bodies in Nottingham, Birmingham and Bristol on policy projects working with the digital sector and business support roles.  These were big budget ‘big things’ projects like launching the Serious Games Institute in Coventry and a £50m creative endowement fund in Bristol. Whilst I was a bit more out of touch with day-to-day digital things I met a lot of hugely interesting people in business, politics and academia and the policy work at that time showed that the government was relatively serious about investing in the creative (particularly digital) sector, and that the regions – who only have 1/3 of all creative jobs in the UK – have a lot of catch-up to play.  Skills are really important – business skills as well as the technical skills associated with the digital age.  But there’s a lot of convincing to do with central government, particularly in whether they will support the games and music sector who are at most risk.

Highlights: Getting a studio tour at Endemol and seeing the ‘Deal or No Deal’ boxes in storages.
Lowlights: The complex jargon, institutional incompetence and ongoing politics of quangos.

Music: less active music making, but some recording, a little touring in Berlin, some stints on TV and a new band – Babyslave.

2008/9:

Back to freelancing, I was now trading as Digital Consultant and ealised that I needed to get back on the digital wagon.  I now mix up a range of services in research, training and skills and particularly helping businesses develop digital strategies – the subject of this blog.   This period afforded me some resarch and thinking time, and start to write again after a hiatus, completing a Strategic Business Coaching Diploma and a Masters in Media Enterprise (specialising my paper on online music for independents) in 2009.

Between various policy wonk and consultancy projects, I’ve also worked on some more innovative projects, and helped to launch a dotcom for startup entrepreneurs and a blog based website for Nottingham’s creative community as well as working on some interesting skills projects like DMEX where we produced a machinima film and developed a social media soap opera.

Social media has been the big buzz in the last few years, and I get asked to do quite a bit of speaking and training about this, including an interview on BBC One.    The final growth of social media is exciting for me, as someone who’s always been interesting in online content and connecting audiences together – and the technical slant of e-marketing – whilst appropriate in some ways, never felt quite to meet the capability and sentient needs of users.  In some ways, trend come and trends go, and as I’ve previously blogged, social media isn’t so much of a trend but a continuation of how people use the internet to connect with each other, with social media as a sort of ‘social cement’ which speeds up those connections.

These cases of accelerated serendipity and low-cost promotion offered through social media has allowed me to meet an awful lot of interesting people, and it’s helped grown the business community in Nottingham too.  I’m proud of working with others on projects like MediaCampNottingham (and the Digital Britain response), Web2.0 surgery and CreativeNottingham – all no-budget but ingenious at meeting the skills and needs of the business community, which have sometimes been more rewarding than the (paid) bigger budget projects I’ve worked on in other cities.

My challenge is to convince business owners to take their strategic vision as seriously as their interest in the latest fad – and look at ways that a digital strategy can strengthen how they do business online, and grow their customer (or audience) base – not just work out how to hitch a lift on the latest band wagon.

To the next decade?

So that was my first decade in digital.  Will I see it through to another in 2020?  Well, digital has always been a love-hate thing in my life (I’ve always personally lived low-tech: I have a basic phone, no TV and a basic PC laptop) – it was always a struggle to get the interesting things we were doing seriously in the beginning, but now people want to invite me to their dinner party – I’m not the computer-repair geek in the corner anymore.  The ever-turning wheel of technology and fads is frustrating: as a colleague once said, ’18 months out of digital and I’m like a cave man’.  I don’t think it’s that extreme, but at times staying on top of trends is a great sport – at other times I’ve seriously wanted to switch it all off and become a potter.  I seriously looked at moving into (offline) radio and (offline) publishing at one time to do something where the boundaries weren’t so blurred – but I’m glad I didn’t, as now all the media industries are living in the fuzzy area of radical, disruptive innovation where the rules of the game have all been broken, and there’s so many exciting opportunities to create content and audiences in the digital space.  Let the game continue!