Promoting Scotland

[Alastair]

Some of you will know that I have been trying over many years to tell the story of Scottish business without any success at all. Well I've decided to have one more go at doing this so am working on a potential project to try once again. You can read about this and watch a couple of videos I have on the page at http://www.electricscotland.com/proposal.htm

This time I'm working through the Scottish Family Business Association who represents some 43% of Scottish Business. I'm hoping Martin, the CEO, will send out the link to this proposal to many of his members but time will tell whether this will work.

Alastair

[Ranald]

Re: Promoting Scotland

Fingers crossed.... yet again.

I hope this time you receive results.

Ranald

[1938 Observer]

Re: Promoting Scotland

Fingers crossed.... yet again.

I hope this time you receive results.

Ranald

I agree; surely some good result will arise from all your hard work this time.

Gordon.

[Alastair]

Re: Promoting Scotland

Hope so but past experience would tend to suggest this won't go anywhere either but it seems to be a different route to the businesses so perhaps it will work. Ever hopeful <grin>

[Glesgalass]

Re: Promoting Scotland

Alastair, I think folks running their own businesses are often very short of time, having to work long hours to make a decent living. Don't you think so?

Elda

[Alastair]

Re: Promoting Scotland

I agree Elda but the point here is that they should have all the information already to hand. I mean if you get a potential new client the sales folk are going to have to give some background to the company and profile the products or services they want to sell. Often they will also have a wee brochure. So it's not like they need to spend much time to forward that to me.

Also a really good sales presentation to me on their company can then be viewed by lots of other potential customers. At the end of the day you need to sell to survive and prosper.

Alastair

[Caledonian]

Re: Promoting Scotland

The businessman would ask, "For the service you are offering. How much?"

[Alastair]

Re: Promoting Scotland

The cost for this proposal is £36,000 a year. However, for sending in a profile of your business, there has never been a cost other than to provide a decent amount of information about the company. I have never set any limits on how much a company can send me. In a couple of cases I have complete books on a company but these are very rare. However to get a free entry on my site the company must provide a decent amount of information so a few paragraphs is not sufficient to get a free entry. They can send in text, pdf's, pictures and videos.

You need to know that for some 15 years I've been trying to get Scottish business to give me historical profiles on their company up to what they are doing today. As this is part of our history there has never been any cost involved other than their time to get it together. There is so little information on the history of Scottish business that there needs to be some research done.

The reason there is a cost of £36,000 for this proposal is it should get in front of ALL visitors to Electric Scotland but to do that I have to lose my income from that space on the site. So I'm not about to lose income just to promote Scottish business. However instead of perhaps a few hundreds reading about business in Scotland with this project it gets in from of at least 150,000 people. That is thus a massive increase in viewing numbers.

Alastair

[Caledonian]

Re: Promoting Scotland

Thanks for that reply Alastair. Expecting money from the Scots? That’s where you are going wrong.

Seriously though, the Scottish government, local councils, any govt dept, office or board, cannot pay for services from independent suppliers without signing up to a thorough acquisition contract. Awarding a service contract to, even negotiating for one, with what is potentially a foreign service provider without putting it out to tender, where EU providers would have priority, would be illegal. Therefore, expecting any Scottish public body to respond would therefore be futile.

A Scottish private businessman worth his salt, who may wish to take advantage of your offer, would check out your site first. Reading some of the derogatory comments and less than complementary opinions of the Scots aired here on occasion would hardly have them rushing to sign up. I’m usually a bit more diplomatic with and nicer to people, especially when I’m after their money.

Most Scotsmen I know count it as one of their top irritants when some outsider, or some insider who’s been abroad, comes along offering advice and claiming that he can do the job better, and not only that but asserting that, being what they are, the average Scot in his own country is inferior.

That businessman from the US touting for business, whose announcements were published on here recently, is a case in point. Not only asking for his projects to be financed, but suggesting that he could make things difficult if they are not.

[Alastair]

Re: Promoting Scotland

The point here is that I'm not talking about the Electric Scotland Community but the main ElectricScotland.com web site as that is where the project will be based. That site gets at least 150,000 unique visitors each month with more in the Winter and a peak in January where we can get 500,000 visitors.

I've simply made the point with this project, if it comes off, that all those visitors will see the weekly articles. The site is also a hub with Scots at home and abroad. And I am at this time uniquely able to run the banner advert on all my tens of thousands of pages. So in my view this is not a tender process but a way to reach people around the world of Scots descent.

Mind you I doubt it will come off but was prepared to do a plug for it.

Mind also that I have run online businesses for over 25 years and predate the web. I've walked the streets, and talked in person to shop-keepers and business both large and small and also talked to people in the street about online projects. I gathered a team that I believed could have produced the most forward online project in history and have created 2,000 brand new jobs for Scotland and in my view billions in new tourism for Scotland. I've talked to the major banks in Scotland about online projects that if followed through on would also have delivered billions for Scottish business. I've talked to many councils in Scotland and also MP's and MSP's. In fact so convinced was I on what the online world could do for Scotland that I spent 2 years of my life trying to get various projects going in Scotland.

And I even offered a year of my life to the Highlands & Islands Enterprise to run an online project in the largest unemployment black spot with the only charge being that they had to provide accommodation for me even if it was only a one bedroom flat and that it had internet access. They turned me down because I didn't live in their council area. I also put up a free banner for the Highlands & Islands Council but they wrote me to demand I took that down as they didn't endorse web sites. I later told Jim Hunter, when he was their Chairman, about that and he said he'd only wished I'd contacted him as that was clearly a very stupid decision. And of course my visitor numbers were at least 10 times what they got so if anything I was endorsing them.

Believe me when I say I've spend some blood, sweat and tears trying to do something big in Scotland that would really made a difference.

I've also been asked to help at Scottish Enterprise and Visit Scotland to contribute ideas and I tried to get more co-operation between web sites in Scotland. When Wendy Alexander was the Enterprise minister she arranged for me to visit Scottish Enterprise with my ideas and as a result we had two meetings to discuss co-operation between the private sector and the public sector. We got the top 10 private Scottish web sites together both in Glasgow and Stirling but couldn't get agreement.

As I'm now in my sixties this is probably the last attempt I will make to get something going as I'm now getting a bit tired of hitting my head against a brick wall. I suspect I've done a lot more than most in Scotland to use the online world as it should be used to promote Scotland. Prior to the web I ran the 5th largest online service in the world and the largest outside North America. I hooked up South Africa, Switzerland, the Med, Europe and Scandinavia through my system to North America. We were a huge business back then. What brought us down in the end was me refusing to leave Scotland. Had I gone to London I'd still be running the business. The key was the Web where people needed to be online to use it but in those early days local calls were just that. You had to be in local call to the online service and around .02% of my members were in local call. I wasn't even in local call to Glasgow or Edinburgh. So bills that were £30 a quarter became £300 a quarter and that was the one thing I couldn't do anything about.

As to this community. I do visit it each day and usually 2 or three times. If I spot anyone spamming then their posts are deleted and they are banned from the service. Sometimes where a message is a bit of a grey area I'll give them the benefit of the doubt but I do send them a private email advising them on what we expect in the community.

Right now while we have lots of members only around a dozen are active so that's really a very small community. A lot more will visit of course to read the messages but not many will post them. I probably added around 300 messages myself to put up a body of work on here to help get things going. At the end of the day there was only a relatively small cost to purchase the software and get it going and I'm happy to keep it running on a permanent basis. Hopefully at some point more folk will discover us and more regular posters will appear. That said the messages that go up in here are indexed by Google, etc. so it's also another way to add content to the main Electric Scotland web site. Often if you use our main site's search engine you'll see links to messages on here.
And so the community does play a valuable role.

My only complaint in Scotland was that people just couldn't understand how the online world could impact people in the real world in Scotland. They couldn't see how co-operation was the key to succeeding. And so instead of focusing on co-operation everyone went in their own directions. That is not just a Scottish problem but my focus was on Scotland and given the size of our country I just thought we had a fantastic opportunity. I also wanted to get a real community to mirror themselves into a virtual community. I felt that would be a very powerful way to promote an area and while it had serious implications it could also have been a lot of fun. I first tried that with Falkirk Council then some time later another two communities. A lot of work went into getting the basics up but then couldn't get people in the area to come onboard.

Just because you fail doesn't mean you can't try and try again. But life does go on and you need to also do other things and that's essentially why I decided to leave Scotland as there was little point in me remaining as I'd tried everything I could while in Scotland. When I created Electric Scotland it was always my intention to travel and once the site was making a decent income I got to the point where I could afford to do that. It just happened in my travels I visited Canada and liked it that much that I stayed. My money goes a lot further here so that means I simply don't need to sell any more advertising as what I have already pays my way.

So there you have some of my background.

Alastair

[Caledonian]

Re: Promoting Scotland

I hear what you are saying loud and clear. I have read and watched your presentation and I understand where you’re coming from. Although I appreciate your intentions and the effort you have made over the years, and are prepared to make in the future, to promote all things Scottish, the fact remains that the Scottish government, which is accountable to the Scottish people, and just as crucially, to the UK government, for every penny it spends, would be acting illegally if it entered into contractual arrangements with a private provider, a ‘foreign based’ private provider yet, to promote itself and its services, without following procedure and complying with the stringent requirements such an arrangement would entail.

Example: Suppose for a moment that we forget the legal implications and I was a manager of the tourist office in Inverness who saw some benefits in taking you up on your offer, and whose budget was provided by the local council. I convinced the council and got the money to finance the deal. You did your thing well, the enquiries started pouring in, to you though not to me, the tourists started pouring in, everybody’s happy. How long do you suppose it would take the council to suss out that I am expendable, my position would be untenable. Hardly the most sensible move, to arrange the extirpation of my own job and livelihood?

Every government dept, every council service, every body with any connection with govt has a web address nowadays, some have several. Thousands of people are employed by the state, and it spends millions of pounds promoting itself and its services. All this is being cut back, people are losing their jobs, expenditure is being reigned in, I’m sure you will appreciate that while all this is going on at home there would be serious repercussions if it were found that the govt was paying private foreign companies or individuals to do the work, or jobs, that it is sacking its own employees from. Remember the 80s, Maggie selling off everything that wasn’t nailed down, all now in foreign hands? Kinnock, Labour councils in Liverpool paying private taxis to deliver redundancy notices to its own employees? Riots in the streets? We are now paying foreign multi-national speculators through the nose for the goods and services that we once were told were going to be provided more cheaply and more efficiently than we could provide for ourselves.

Without putting too fine a point on it the Murdoch circus playing out in our courts presently should provide ample lessons in the consequences of, and the pit-falls awaiting, the lust for advertising revenue.

I’m not sure whether or not you are able to see coverage of the Scottish parliament in Canada. Anyway, there was a bit of a pantomime a few weeks ago when Donald Trump appeared before a parliamentary committee. He is building a golf course and leisure complex up around Aberdeen somewhere and he is objecting to the Scottish govt authorising the building of a wind farm within sight of his complex. He claims that this will put the tourists and visitors to his complex off and lose him money. He also claimed that all those wind farms sprouting up all over the place were having an adverse effect on the Scottish tourist industry generally. He was given facts that showed the Scottish tourist industry doing better rather than worse, even in areas where those wind farms were located. When asked what evidence he had to support his claims, his response left the committee speechless; the arrogance of the man was breathtaking. “I’m the evidence, I’m here, I know everything there is to know about the hospitality industry and I’m telling you” or words to that effect. His outburst went on for several minutes.

I’m not suggesting for one minute any comparison with any of the above and your case, all I’m saying is that there would be consequences, not to say legal repercussions, if the govt took you up on your offer.

The internet, windows, word processing, all simple enough concepts now; but worth billions to the original developers. If only we had thought of it first. Microsoft do an office suite of programs, including word processing, that people have to pay hundreds of pounds for. Open Office do a similar suite of programs, some say better, for free. The canny businessman would ask; why should I pay?

Imagining myself a businessman somewhere in the world wishing to enquire about Scotch Pancakes, I Googled “Scotch Pancakes”. The screen came up with 1.13 million sites before I finished typing in the name, “Scottish Holidays” – 43 milion, “Scotland” – 451 miIlion. I would take some convincing that I should pay someone what I consider to be quite a large sum of money when I can get all the information I’ll ever need, and then some, for nothing.

I don’t have all the answers to your predicament Alastair, and again I can appreciate your efforts and your frustration, but far from concluding that, having not rushed to sign up to your splendid offer, the Scots are too slow on the uptake, consequently they must all be lacking in knowledge, I take the opposite view and would suggest admiring them on their astuteness in realising that it makes no sense paying for something that they can have, with less hassle, for nothing.

I realise that I am coming at this from a different angle, another perspective, if you like. All I hope is that you are able to overcome the hurdles and that something in what I say may spur you into considering or addressing some aspect that you have hitherto not considered, though I doubt it. Anything I have said I’m sure you have already taken into account.

Perseverance invariably pays off and in this case it deserves to and I hope it does.

[Alastair]

Re: Promoting Scotland

The only point I'd make is this is not a pitch to the Scottish Government nor the councils nor to any other government organisation including Visit Scotland. The pitch is to members of the Scottish Family Business Association members.

And I would also point out the over all the years I've run Electric Scotland I've always offered to profile Scottish companies for free. I have also offered the Scottish Parliament free publicity if they wanted to launch a series of articles profiling Scotland I have also offered Visit Scotland the opportunity to have as regular series of articles on tourism in Scotland. All they have to do is provide the content and that they have never done.

The only reason for charging for this particular contract is that to do it in the way I propose will cost me a lot of money so I need compensated. I ain't a charity after all. And the point you make that there are millions of links is just the point I make... who the hell is going to even go through 100 links never mind millions?

I will re-state my view that co-operation is the key but that isn't happening.

So what have you done for Scotland? I've been open on saying what I have done so would be interested in knowing your own background so we can better understand where you are coming from.

Alastair

[Caledonian]

Re: Promoting Scotland

I took part in this discussion primarily because, when I read it, in conjunction with some other remarks you have posted, I came to the conclusion that the lack of interest shown in your projects and how bitter it seems to have left you, could account for the low esteem in which you hold those Scots you’ve left behind.

I mentioned government procurement contracts because you have mentioned here and in other threads the councils, boards, MPs, MSPs, and various other govt bodies that you tried unsuccessfully to take an interest in your various projects. I attempted to highlight the sort of difficulties that such an involvement would present.

As for small businesses, I attempted to highlight how the average small businessmen would react. Ought for nought, in my experience, is their credo.

In all I attempted to show, unsuccessfully it would appear, that there are other reasons why your projects have not been accepted, not just that the people of Scotland lack the knowledge, or are too stupid to make a decision on what they want or don’t want, or what someone says is good for them.

In my experience co-operation is earned when the person who’s co-operation is sought feels confident in the person he’s dealing with. That confidence will never be gained so long as the person feels that he is held in contempt and dealt with in the first place on sufferance.

Your track record in your field is impressive, afraid that does not stand for much nowadays. There are thousands of good men and true who have fallen victim to the times and the rat-race out there in the real world.

As for myself, I have never attained the dizzying heights that you have, nor have I ever aspired to do so. One thing we know round here is that you don’t have to be a Lowlander to have opinions. On the contrary, if one sees a Lowlander with an opinion its odds on he’s after something, so watch your pockets, lock up your daughters and don’t let the sheep out of your sight.

What have I done for Scotland? That’s a hard question to answer, sufficient to say, I like to think that I have made a contribution, be it ever so humble. To what or for what I’ll probably never know. Scotland has never seen fit to consult me directly or asked me to right its wrongs nor have I ever sought a position where I could tell those who are charged with its stewardship their business. I’m sure they know where to find me if they want me, and if the call ever comes I’ll be ready, willing and able conditional, of course, on whether everything is all right on the croft, and the creeks don’t rise. Then there’s the peats, the lambing, the cow, the potatoes, bait for the fishing, and it looks like Seònaid’s dog is having puppies. On second thoughts, I don’t know if I’m going to have the time after all.

Hope the above gives you a broad idea of where I’m coming from. Anyway, I’ve said enough on the subject, I sense that my contributions are beginning to irritate.

[Alastair]

Re: Promoting Scotland

No it's not irritating. I ran my own business in Scotlanf for many years mostly as a computer dealership which expanded into different directions. I was mostly in sales prior to that.

As to your croft I'd be personally interested in documenting how you run your croft. There is actually very little information out there giving details of how a croft is run on a day to day basis.

Would you be interested in doing a "Year in the life of running a Scottish Croft"?

The information would be posted up on the ElectricScotland.com web site.

Alastair