Sweet 16 for Success

John Audette's (who moderated Adventive's I-Sales group), top 16 for Building A Successful Business and Using the Internet to Further Your Organization ObjectivesAdventive - Communities For Internet Professionals - Tools:

1. Maintain Absolute Integrity


2. Niche With Passion


3. Put the Power of Inertia on Your Side


4. Build In Scalability


5. Keep It Lean


6. Remarket


7. Stay Humble: Maintain a Vertical Learning Curve


8. Honor the Customer's Intelligence


9. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate


10. Yoda Says, "Give, Then Take"


11. Ideas Are Only Sparks


12. Tangibilize


13. Build a Three Legged Stool


14. Build Community


15. Respect the Power of the Index Finger


16. Convert Liabilities Into Assets

Just sent this email to Google's Toolbar team. So if you start seeing it you know who to thank! ;)

Love the new toolbar! Especially the Blog This and Pop-up blocker. Anyway, could you provide a script users could put on their blogs that would keep track of the number of pop-ups the toolbar has blocked? Something like: "My Google Toolbar has blocked 103 pop ads since June 27, 2003!)

Not that anyone cares. But that's how much I'm digging this new tool. BTW, I'm at 38 on my work computer. Not sure what's at home....

Buh Bye

The FTC's No Call list officially got started today. Although I will miss playing games with telemarketers, I think the reward of not getting any calls is greater. I'm registering now.

oops, it 404'd. Didn't they know the volume they would get on day 1?

Cool! I just dowloaded my new Google Toolbar 2.0. I like the Blog This feature. (head's up from MarketingFix)

New blog by a copywriter, John Kuraoka. The profession I always wanted to enter.

MarketingFix Sells Out

jheez, that didn't take too long. Going by the tag line, "Independent eMarketing News (Until We Sell Out)" MarketingFix sold out to Andy Bourland (if you're going to sell out to anyone, it might as well be this guy ... founder of ClickZ, when it was really good). But in all seriousness, congratulations to the guys, I hope the site's style keeps up.

Andy formed a new company, Up2Speed, also acquired Adventive, an online discussion group. According to Rafat Ali's scoop, Andy hopes to use"the mix of vertical-focused weblogs and e-mail newsletters/discussion group ... [to] cross promote the sites through the discussion lists and vice-versa, with ad revenues coming in from both ends."

hmmm.... this is the first time I know of that a blog has been bought.

Looking forward to how it plays out.

[later] -- Marketing Fix has more here.

[later later] so does Andy.

Wall Street Journal Media & Marketing Edition

WSJ has started a special edition covering Media & Marketing. [later] not really new and seperate, but still a good place for info...

Can anyone recommend any books or reading on web usability and/or information architecture? If so, could you be so kind as to use my nifty comments below...

Here are a few blogs I found on Google:
Croc o' Lyle
Designing Usability
Usability and Suman kumar
Elegant Hack

Good business blog piece as a follow up to the Jupiter/ClickZ Blog Conference by Rebecca Lieb in ClickZ.

As I write this on Thursday, the event, and blogs about the event, still dominate Popdex's Web site popularity index (starting at number three) -- even though the conference ended Tuesday....That's reach, frequency, and targeting....

If your organization has staff with the vision, thought leadership, and evangelistic qualities that could make for a good marketing blog, make certain that person checks strategy at the door before posting the first entry. Blogs are good for supporting an agenda or idea, but they aren't a strategy or an end in themselves when used in a business context. Blogs must be personal, an open loop, and, above all, honest.

Actual Business Blogs

Rick brings up a good point ..... lots of talk, but no walk when it comes to business blogs. While I think we're still in the pioneering stages (heck still in the ideas stages), there has been a lot of talk on business blogs. I've been as guilty as anyone ... talking about applications but not having any clients to show for it (although I haven't been seeking any).

But Rick is walking the talk. He posted clients he has set up weblogs for: BizNetTravel and Roundtable Communications. Of course Marcromedia was one of the first, and so was Dr. Pepper and who can forget Barbie. I'd also say that Dave Winer and the whole Radio Userland group is a prime example of business blogs .... although they've never been billed as such. Fellow DC area blogger, James Robertson, blogs for his company Cincom SmallTalk. You might be saying, so what's the big deal, sounds like there're lots of companies out there. Dr. Pepper didn't get it. Barbie is purely fictional. And most other business blogs are from software/tech companies. Rick's are some of the first to break outside of the tech arena.

Comments

I've added a comments section to my posts using Enetation. Seems simple enough although their site is a bit sluggish -- I'm just hoping the comments aren't. I'm testing it below.

I call a Re-do

Devine, a company who went on an acquisition spree at the end of the bubble, buying up Internet and technology companies went bankrupt last year. The ironic part, those companies they bought for millions in stock are now being bought back by their original founders. For example, David Suess "regained the search-engine company he had founded in 1985 and sold to Divine last year, Northern Light, for a mere $81,000, about half a penny on the dollar of what Divine paid for it." I like the fact that these people are getting a second chance because there were some truly great ideas that went bust because many of the companies that went acquiring everything with a .com at the end of it didn't have a business plan or understanding of the capacity of the internet to save their lives.

Follow Up on ClickZ/Jupiter Blog Conference

Rex Hammock has a truley thoughtful look back on the Blog Conference and the past, present and future of blogging and "push-botton knowledge management." His tenth thought is my favorite:

Weblogs and personal journalism are never going to be a threat to Adweek or Advertising Age like several people implied (as an example) today. This is one of the few times where I have been up close and personal to a decade-long series of such predictions regarding the demise of century-old B2B media companies and have, at the same time, known personally the people who run and own those companies. I only need to mention the company Vertical Net to remind folks that at one time, there was a company with the mythical stock-market value of several billions of dollars that was going to be a threat to all Business to Business media by moving it all to the web. I think it’s great that people are blogging about media and marketing. I am happy to note that I’ve been blogging about magazines for the past two years. But friends, I am never going to be a threat to Folio: with just a weblog. (Not to imply they don’t have threats.) I’m apples, they’re oranges. The world is big enough for me to do what I do for whatever reasons drive me to do it and for them to do likewise. VNU and Crain have nothing to worry about from bloggers threatening their established media properties. That is especially true about Crain Communications (Ad Age, Automotive News, etc.), as Keith and Rance Crain are two of the most unique media executives left in America: They both have voices (very human voices) of authority, integrity and truth and near-radical independence. They mince no words and back down from no one. I doubt they will ever blog, but their decades of commentary about automobiles and advertising are the purest examples of human-voice insight those two industries will ever hear. Come to think of it, however, I think they would blog if they didn't have all those other ways to tell the world what they believe.

(link via Doc)

Matrix Re-Loaded (527 times, and counting)

I checked out this thread last week and it was around 300. Jason Kottke's thread on his Matrix posting has everything you need to know and then makes you forget.

Wish I was There ClickZ Weblog Business Strategies - LIVE

Here's the agenda for the business blogging conference in Boston (offically titled, ClickZ Weblog Business Strategies). Hoping there'll be much blogging about the blog conference.

The blogroll for the event: (blogging live in bold)
Doc
Dave Winer and here (pics here)
Denise Howell
David Weinberger
Jason Shellen
Windley (Pics!)
Anil
Heath Row
Michael Gartenburg
John Robb
Dan Bricklin
Timothy Appnel(day 2 here)
Bob Frankston
Rick Bruner and here and here, not to mention here
Michael O'Connor Clarke
Beth Goza
Jimmy Gutterman
Biz Stone
Halley Suitt
Mathew Berk
John Robb
Anil Ash
Jeff Jarvis
Timmy Ireland
Paul Perry
Martin Röll
Topic Exchange
Bill Seitz
Debbie Weil I didn't know you had a blog!
Adina Levin
Rex Hammock
Phil Wolff
Vince Mease

Wikis

I love learning new stuff like this. In my pursuit to suck up knowledge on social networks I came across something new to me. A Wiki. Okay, we have Blogs. That name is goofy. My parents roll there eyes when I say the word. "Bllloggg?" Wait til I bring home "Wiki." But besides the name, it's sounds like a neat application with practical uses within organizations and companies. I feel like everyone knows about Wikis except me. But in case you're in the dark like me, Ross Mayfield explains:

Wikis let the group voice emerge.  Many people participate within a given wiki, each with an equal voice in a shared space that anyone can edit.  Its a different act of sharing to contribute your words to a page that others can build upon.  Our instinct is to at first believe this would create conflict and distrust, but it actually builds trust.    Each wiki page reflects the current consensual understanding of a given concept.  A page isn't a complete or perfect understanding, information and conditions change too quickly for it to be possible  Instead, a little wabi-sabi  and trusting others allows something powerful to emerge and stay current -- a simply powerful tool for collaboration.

We aren't the only one to think of the differences between weblogs and wikis as individual and group voices.  Elwin Jenkins describes it as weblogs turn individuals into webpages while wikis turn communities into webpages.

There are lots of similarities between the two tools.  Both are web native, are easy to use, are link-intensive and encourage sharing. 

Both are being widely adopted, wikis less visibly because of private group use and at different paces in different areas.  A customer once explained to me how he thought wikis were more popular than weblogs in Asia because group voice is valued greater than individual voice.  Regardless of popularity, different cultures and organizations will have different values that is reflected in their tool selection.

Its not a choice between one or another.  The temporal structure of weblogs and logical structure of wikis are a complement for lasting effects.  One of the more powerful patterns in an organization is how an opportunity is published in blog, possibilities are swarmed upon in blog conversation and then driven to consensus and outcome in a wikified document.  After the outcome, the knowledge and its social context remains. 

Jim McGee has more here and here. Thanks Dina for the great Wiki links! (she has even more if you visit her blog).

Social Networks Reading

Liz Lawley lists some recommended reading for Social Software. I'm calling it Social Networks reading because I think it bests describes it.

• Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, by Steven Johnson.


• Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, by Duncan Watts.


• Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, by Howard Rheingold.


• Linked: The New Science of Networks, by Albert-László Barabási.


• Small Pieces Loosely Joined, by David Weinberger.


• “The Strength of Weak Ties,” by Mark Granovetter [from the American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 78, No. 6. (May, 1973), pp. 1360-1380.] RIT faculty can retrieve a PDF of this article by going to the JSTOR database via the RIT library, and searching for author=Granovetter and title=weak ties in the Sociology journals.

• The Social Construction of Technological Systems, an excellent collection of essays discussing (among other things) the recursive interrelationships between social contexts and technological tools.

Social Networks

A while ago, someone linked to an article in Strategy & Business by Art Kleiner on Karen Stephenson, the social network theorist (okay if you've never heard of this before you're probably getting cold chills because it sounds sooo boring. But stay with me). I had heard of social networks before, mostly in the context of politics and references in some blogs. Of course there is the Tipping Point, but that is only part of the puzzle. It started my curiosity in the implications of social networks in marketing and communications. But since I've read that article I've been a vacuum trying to suck in everything I can on the subject from blogs to articles to books. I believe this is the model that smart communicators will realize in the future (starting now). Everything from marketers to advertisers to publishers to corporate communicators. It even goes beyond communication, and allows us to realize how all the elements connect and work together in any group ... intracompany, customer base, potential customer base, readership, etc. By understanding these connections we can be better marketers, advertisers, publishers, communicators.

So, this is my long-winded way of saying I've started a new section on my blogroll for Social Networks. There are only three now. I really want to focus only on blogs/sites that fully dedicate themselves to social networks and/or social software. So please take a look at:
iWire
Socialtext
SmartMobs (was already on the roll but got relocated)