Interesting video - the power of the internet...

[Jack]

I know this has been a hot topic recently, with some club members avoiding computers and the internet at all costs, and others using the internet and computers as their primary means of communication and engagement.

A lot of my feelings are summarised in this short video. It makes a fairly effective point that the only thing that stays the same is change. We have to move with it. We have to be open to it. Or we will be left behind while others move with the times. Some of the figures in the video are simply staggering, but seem to be backed from reliable sources and accepted information, if slightly out of date.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZjRJeWf ... re=related

It also very effectively demonstrates how powerful this resource is, and if handled in the right way, how much it could be capable of in the next few years. In my professional life I come into contact with quite a few people on the cutting edge of new technologies and ideas, and talking to them is almost scary, but incredibly exciting - they say things like "I don't get why companies are working on producing better monitors for a cheaper price. In 5 years time we are all pretty sure won't have monitors at all."

I guess it would be really interesting for members to post on how we could use the internet, e-mail and computers to take the club to the next level. We have already seen how collabarative it can be through things like the Legacy Project, and how good it is at having informative and entertaining discussion, but what else could we be doing with it?

I temper all this with the knowledge that in 10 years time we will look back at this forum and laugh about how wrong we were. But one thing is for sure - even when you are not sure, doing something is better than doing nothing, and the person who has never tried and failed has never learned anything.

Jack.

[Chris Spencer]

Jack - You are very right - and the club members / committee needs to wake up and realise it - ok some of us are the converted - the rest need to realise it really is a case of 'CHANGE'or forget about the club having a future - we need to appeal to the generations under us if we would like our cars to survive in future years when we are sadly no longer around to care for them.

You have to look and understand at how the younger generation communicates and simply communicate back on the same level - you can as always hold rallies & shows where the car's are displayed and communicate face to face with the potential future custodians of of our beloved cars - but more importantly you have inform them of the event in the first place - so all of those that are against the power of the Internet / computers / information technology etc - just how are you going to advise them in the first place ?? - can I suggest at this stage that the day of the poster sandwich board walked up and down the High Street are long gone and the cost of advertising elsewhere is cost prohibitive - the balls in your court - answers on a postcard please - (don't know why I am bothering posting my thoughts here because the ones that should be reading it - will not be reading it - maybe I should get it into the Joweteer)

[Amy]

Jack - You are very right - and the club members / committee needs to wake up and realise it - ok some of us are the converted - the rest need to realise it really is a case of 'CHANGE'or forget about the club having a future - we need to appeal to the generations under us if we would like our cars to survive in future years when we are sadly no longer around to care for them.

You have to look and understand at how the younger generation communicates and simply communicate back on the same level - you can as always hold rallies & shows where the car's are displayed and communicate face to face with the potential future custodians of of our beloved cars - but more importantly you have inform them of the event in the first place - so all of those that are against the power of the Internet / computers / information technology etc - just how are you going to advise them in the first place ?? - can I suggest at this stage that the day of the poster sandwich board walked up and down the High Street are long gone and the cost of advertising elsewhere is cost prohibitive - the balls in your court - answers on a postcard please - (don't know why I am bothering posting my thoughts here because the ones that should be reading it - will not be reading it - maybe I should get it into the Joweteer)

How about a Facebook group or two, (one for invited Club members only and another for anyone who cares to join).

We actually already have one page there: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jowett-Ju ... 422?ref=ts

And the NW section have their own group on there (I won't link to it as I think it's invite only). I used Facebook to raise awareness of my Jupiter being shortlisted in the Classic Car of the Year competition, and I use it regularly for organising events amongst my friends.

I also have several Jowett-related friends from around the world on Facebook (some of whom I've never met such as Doug Rath's son). It's an incredible tool... and could also have some of the Jowetteer stuff added to it, should we so choose.

Anyway, I have a bath running, so will go and take my far-flung ideas elsewhere.

[AlanBartlett]

A jowett related page on a social networking site such as facebook or twitter or others I think would be a great idea, Being of the younger generation well 22, would be a start in the right direction to get word around about the marque. I myself am quite an avid facebook user, using the site to post updates of my Jowett project. But I also use this forum as well as other forums too, this one being useful for looking up Jowett information from topics discussed from the past, its a good way to read up, and pass knowledge around. Another forum being Retro rides, have posted up a topic of the project there, and have a fair amount of positive feedback about the car from a variety of different people of mixed ages. Have also posted smaller posts on other sporting forums unrelated to cars but have a section for members with other interests. So while the internet is here may as well make full use of it to spread the knowledge and interest on to more people to hopefully carry on the marque.

[Jack]

I've been thinking about this a lot recently, and I think we need to focus on taking small steps towards engaging more members in the forum. We cannot change the world in an afternoon, and lots of talk is great but we need to take action.

I may have come up with a possible route to do this. With more particpation comes new ideas, faster responses, more involvement, the spiral continues upward and onward for the club, I think we'd all agree that to be a positive step.

We all know that sharing information is good, and that people are afraid of the big unknowns. So I think we have to try and remove the unknowns. We have to take the forum to the membership, as some members have not (and will not) take themselves to the forum, but if they can see that good things are happening, that discussions are going on, and that getting online would allow them further inclusion and involvement with a club that is already very good at inclusion and involvement, they might just take the steps to getting online and getting involved.

In the Jowetteer, I wonder if there is space for a "From the Forum" section where one of the latest topics for discussion is copied over to the Jowetteer, along with the responses provided. Take the mountain to Mohammed, so to speak. This is something that another club we are involved in does very well, sometimes picking up questions asked online that have not received a satisfactory response, sharing interesting discussions or very well answered questions that should be shared.

It would give us two things:

Members would not be concerned that the forum was some secret hidey place where discussions are going on that a small percentage of the membership can't access. It would be very open, sharing the most interesting topics for discussion with the wider club.

Encourage those with answers to get in touch. It might mean that someone with a technical question that has been discussed without a definite answer gets a phone call from a member who does have the answer. Even better, it might mean that they registered in order to post their answer to the question (or solution to the problem!) and subsequently stick around.

It doesn't have to be every month. It could be every 2 or 3 months, or just when a particularly interesting and engaging discussion is happening on here.

It might just remind some of those members that have registered on here, but haven't dropped in for a while. Like a note coming through the door from your local pub, reminding you that Friday night is when a big party is happening and we've not seen you for a while.

Seems like a win/win to me. We could very easily do the same with any discussions that come from a Facebook group, where appropriate, or any of the other online mediums that we see. How many members, for example, know about the Jowett videos on Youtube that have been uploaded, and the fun they could have watching some of us on racetracks, Leo talking to the press, or archive footage of races and clips from TV and films with Jowetts involved?

If people do not know it is there, they assume the internet is everything that the Daily Mail tells them it is - full of pointless discussions, pornography, and conmen. We need to show them the power of the internet, not the downside of free speech and a lack of censorship.

Plus, thanks to computers, it would be a simple case of Copy and Paste to send it to the Editor. Forum members could decide what thread to be sent over, or we could just trust someone with a good eye for these things to send over an appropriate thread to Alan.

Thoughts? Have I gone completely mad? Is this viable? Would it be of interest?

Jack.

[Tony Fearn]

it would be a simple case of Copy and Paste to send it to the Editor.

Either you or I must be psychic Jack. I copied my piece about pre-war 7 hp brake set-up (in the Pre-war section) to Alan a couple of days ago in case he needed to 'fill a corner'

Tony.

[Jack]

it would be a simple case of Copy and Paste to send it to the Editor.

Either you or I must be psychic Jack. I copied my piece about pre-war 7 hp brake set-up (in the Pre-war section) to Alan a couple of days ago in case he needed to 'fill a corner'

Tony.

Great minds think alike Tony I think this is a really positive step - generating content for the Jowetteer, but also showing people that it is not a talking shop, but that questions are being asked and answered, lots is going on, and we have harnessed the power of the internet for Jowetts all over the world.

Or at least that's what I'd hope for. I assume Alan will put a note on the article (if used) that it had come from an online discussion?

Jack.

[Chris Spencer]

Jack - Great idea - and yes I confirm that you are mad - but we can live with that - we do need to get some momentum behind membership recruitment / and advising current members of the benefits of Jowett Talk etc - I think you are the man for the job - so how about the club having a marketing manager (is it not sort of what you do for the day job anyway) - comments / thoughts from others on the this subject - welcome.

[Jack]

Well have a look at this: http://www.google.com/trends?q=jowett&c ... l&date=all

Shows the trend of Google searches for "Jowett" over the last few years.

Interesting to see less and less people searching for Jowett over time, with a strong resurgence in December 2010. Now to my mind this coincides with two things - the end of the Jowett Centenary, and the NEC Classic Car show and Classic Car of the Year Competition results. What else would drive the additional number of searches in a winter like we just had? It certainly wasn't from us hitting the road in our cars - most of us were snowed in!!! Then again, it was summertime in Australia and New Zealand - so perhaps all the activity from our Antipodean friends could have been driving it.

Most of the searches were made in New Zealand and the UK. The highest number of searches from one city was Oxford, UK, followed by Bradford and Leeds (as we'd expect!). The UK can be split to England, Scotland and Wales (no results showing for N.Ireland etc) which show all to be fairly similar - good news for our diversity and geographic spread I suppose.

How interesting. Not only to see how much information Google has already, but also to see where searches are coming from. The internet is a powerful thing, as above

Unfortunately the names of the cars - Bradford, Jupiter, Javelin, et al, are far too common terms to be able to draw any significant findings from, but I'll see if I can find a unique Jowett term that we could use to track this sort of data.

Worth noting that other Jowett references will be included, Google doesn't know whether you mean Jowett Cars or Alfred, George or Shain Jowett, the author, when you search. So it is entirely possible that all these searches were as a result of a famous Jowett being in the news - be that person, car, or something else.

Also worth noting that some users may disguise their location when searching. This is done in order to "hide" from the internet, however it is fairly obvious when it happens - masking an IP or similar will result in a false result, but the number of people doing this is very very small compared to the number of users on the web.

Jack.

[Jack]

Further analysis - it seems you can break the data down into country, and into much shorter time periods, by using the drop-downs in the top left of the search page.

http://www.google.co.uk/trends?q=jowett ... ytd&sort=0

This should (unless I have screwed it up) show the UK searches for the last 12 months. It shows the biggest number of searches for Jowett over the last 12 months have been from Leeds, Manchester and then Birmingham in that order.

Now I can add other marques to the mix. Let's choose another manufacturer to see how they compare against us - this is a good measure of how much people are looking for Jowett vs everyone else I suppose. This is difficult - try searching for "Austin Healey" and you get a load of info about an England rugby player, trying searching for "Mini" and you get every reference to anything small, "MG" has all the news about the company and new car releases, as well as loads of other things which are abbreviated to "M.G." - I have finally found something we can use for reference, however they remain in business now so will naturally exceed the number of searches.

http://www.google.co.uk/trends?q=jowett ... ytd&sort=0

These are the results for Jowett vs Daimler (one of very few car names that don't throw up erroneous associated searches, names etc, though there are a few) and it is surprising how many searches there are to try and find Jowett - in Leeds for example, more people have searched for Jowett in the last 12 months than Daimler. However, this is an anomole - look at this graph, and we can see where we really are perhaps - we come up as a small blip in the last 12 months as far as Google searches go:

http://www.google.co.uk/trends?q=jowett ... all&sort=1

But compare us to DeLorean, a car with the backing of all the Back to the Future films and a cult following, we are doing reasonably well over the last 12 months: http://www.google.co.uk/trends?q=jowett ... ytd&sort=0

Perhaps this would be the yardstick by which we can measure our success at getting the club online, getting people interested in the cars (though not necessarily the club), it is a good indicator of when people get home from a day out somewhere and have seen a car they want to know more about - the first step to ownership?

If we can drive more people to type Jowett (or similar terms) into Google, they will find information about us, the cars, the club, and more. That is how young people become interested in something now - they see something (either online or in the real world) and click through the information about it, following the thread, finding out how much such a thing costs on ebay or elsewhere, look at Facebook pages to see who else is into the same things, and then link to other cars with a similar engine layout, or manufactured at the same time, or which it has competed against in motorsport.

This might also be a way for us to engage with Jowett Juniors - linking together Wikipedia pages so that when we look at British Motor Manufacturers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive ... ed_Kingdom we find Jowett features in the 1939-1955 category with a bit more info, and links to the Wikipedia Jowett page (and references the club homepage to boost it up the Google rankings).

This is what the internet looks like at the moment, and we need to put ourselves on that map - note, subject to change faster than anyone could possibly imagine, just look at how small Facebook is on that map, and now it is one of the biggest online organisations in the world:



Jack.

[The Bradford man]

Im on Facebook more than I should be .

I dont mind helping /Maintaining a Facebook page for Jowett etc.

[Forumadmin]

Statistiics always lie. most of the references to Jowett will be for the literary professor and hence the Oxford connection. Jowett related to cars does not have enough volume to register on these search statistics, so comparing against Daimler or even Austin Healey can be misleading as even those two will be obscred by other references to other entities such as the rugby player. I also think that the scope of the searches is limited to news, and not all, search targets.

I have statistics for both Jowett sites and perhaps even for Gallery and JowettTalk; but even those need a lot of filtering to get meaningful and useful information.

[Jack]

Statistiics always lie. most of the references to Jowett will be for the literary professor and hence the Oxford connection. Jowett related to cars does not have enough volume to register on these search statistics, so comparing against Daimler or even Austin Healey can be misleading as even those two will be obscred by other references to other entities such as the rugby player. I also think that the scope of the searches is limited to news, and not all, search targets.

I have statistics for both Jowett sites and perhaps even for Gallery and JowettTalk; but even those need a lot of filtering to get meaningful and useful information.

Interesting, but I have allowed for this - I have excluded things like Austin Healey, Javelin, Jupiter, and similar because they are too common to provide any meaningful result.

Do we have Google stats for the Gallery and JowettTalk? I didn't think Google could see us and search us?

The stats in Google Trends are the number of times somebody has typed those words into the search box on Google. It highlights important news stories that may have skewed the results, but the line on the graph is the number of times they searched, not the number of times they got the result they were looking for, or the number of results from that search. It is a very raw indicator of how many people are interested in "Jowett" - whether that is the car or the author.

I disagree that statistics always lie. They tell the absolute truth, it is just that we may have asked the wrong question or misinterpreted the answer. They are, however, very easy to use in order to prove or disprove a theory. In order to do that we need to make sure that we investigate the data - which we are doing now

Jack.

[ian Howell]

On the subject of attracting junior members - I met a 'young' (20 odd) man in the local garage the other day in charge of a fairly respectable Morris Minor with a sticker for a local vintage rally in the rear window.

We had a brief chat and I encouraged him to keep the car as it was and not do too much by way of 'improvement' beyond the Union Flag already on the roof.

Afterwards the thought occurred to me that one reason young people are less often involved with older cars than in 'my time' (say the mid / late 60s) is that they cannot afford interesting old vehicles. After all, I only paid £5 for my Bradford, £10 for my first Javelin and £40 for the second. The Long Four cost £25 - which wasn't really that cheap in 1966, but you get the drift. A serviceable Javelin is currently on offer for in excess of £2000. A rough one would cost a lot more than that to 'repair', let alone 'restore'.

Many of the vehicles with Junior members were inherited, but this is not the route to a wider membership.

I don't see an immediate solution to this situation, but I didn't want to miss out on the discussion for want of four penn'orth.

For what it is worth, I feel that the central internet collecting point for Jowett (car) related material should be Jowett.net. Google always seems to find it for me when asked. Any other sites such as facebook and northwest jowett could / should? have links back to the 'fount of all human (Jowett) knowledge'.

Or is there a better way?

[Jack]

Interesting point on the cost of a car Ian.

The upfront cost for most young people that are likely to get into classics isn't a major issue. The young (20-somethings) tend to have more disposable income than almost any other group in society, and whilst a Jupiter probably would be out of reach for most at £20K+, Javelins and pre-war cars probably aren't.

I appreciate that a £2K budget probably restricts them to buying a Javelin if they want a car in good working order, however I see a lot of young people driving brand new cars that cost £5K+, usually funded by parents I would expect, however they can find a way to own an expensive asset like that.

The massive savings come when they go for insurance. The cost of a classic policy with most insurers for a Javelin is peanuts. Because it is more than 30 years old Footman James offers unlimited mileage as standard, and includes breakdown cover in the UK.

For most people under the age of 25, £1,000 per year is normal for insurance now. For a classic in most areas that comes down to less than £300. I have several friends who have asked my advice on fairly modern classics in order to be able to insure their kids for less than £2K a year. They've just got to get them through until they are 21 and insurance becomes affordable.

The cost of fuel isn't a big problem, because they don't do big mileage typically, and it is a relatively small amount once every few weeks instead of a lump sum.

So I don't see that cost is the barrier. The barrier is awareness. I talk to a lot of people about our cars, usually when they ask me why I look more tired on a Monday morning than a Friday afternoon. So far of everybody I have spoken to at work, only one person has ever heard of it, and only because his father owned one when he was very young. That includes a big office in Yorkshire. If they haven't heard of us, then how on earth would they ever aspire to join us!

And I suppose this is where seeing the cars isn't quite enough. They could see us drive past in a Javelin, wave to us, and aspire to drive the car they have just seen. But how do they find the car they've just seen? Wikipedia maybe - they realise the car is post-war, and probably not 60s, so must be 1945 to 1960. They have a look online, because that is where young people find everything now, and we need to make sure they can find us before they get distracted and decide that a Morris Minor would get them a classic car and they can buy one cheap that looks ok.

One thing that the Northwest section has really nailed is how to get people to get online and look at their site. They have business cards which any time anyone expresses and interest, comes to look at the car, they give them a card. It has a picture of a Jowett and the website on it. When they get home, they find that card in their things, and get online and have a look. That might just be the start point for someone to aspiring to own a Jowett. If you'd had the same, you could have handed it to the young man you met, and perhaps he could have brought the things he has learned about the Minor to his first Jowett one day.

On the internet searches and central information point, I agree completely. The clubs website should be the start point, the end point, and preferably linked to everything in between. It should be where everyone comes for information online about the cars, the club, and everything else. They key to ensuring that happens is to make sure that when someone types "Jowett" into any search engine, that we are the first place they are taken, the top of the list. It would be really good if we could extend that to reasonable rankings when someone types "classic car" or similar, however that is a much more difficult thing to do as others compete for the same and we are a relatively small car club.

One of the difficulties of Facebook, other social networking sites, and separate websites, is that they are not automatically linked to us (though many are because their owners link us up). By reciprocally linking the sites together, you move up the rankings for search engines. It also means people can move from one site they like to another that they should also like and have an interest in, and back again.

Jack.