Web 2.0 meets Web 1.0
I moderated a fantastic panel last night for the local SIM Chapter I’m a member of. As a Board member in charge of Programming, I’m always very nervous come meeting night. After four years of scheduling presenters, the one lesson I’ve learned is no amount of planning is sufficient to even guess how the program will be received. Having a panel presentation also adds to the degree of difficulty. Given some past bad experiences with moderators, I decided to moderate the panel myself.
I’m happy to say the panel was a tremendous success. The topic was “Using Web 2.0 to Drive Top-line Growth.” I leveraged my personal network for some great recommendations of panelists and ended up with Laura Bennett, President and Co-Founder of Embrace Pet Insurance; Kristy van Auken, SVP of Marketing and Communications for Akron Canton Airport; and David Toth, President and Co-Founder of Worksmart eMarketing, a consulting firm helping their clients understand and leverage social media and Web 2.0 mindsets.
For anyone looking for tips on putting together a successful panel, one of the keys to success last night was balance. Sure, all our presenters were knowledgeable about the subject matter. But what I heard after the event from our members was that there was great balance between the presenters. From strategy to metrics to specific campaigns, there was a minimum of overlap between the speakers. Everyone brought a different perspective which added greatly to the panel.
Leveraging Web 2.0 to drive growth is a hot topic these days. What was interesting about last night was the audience questions as an indicator of where certain industries are and what is holding them up from embracing these new channels to market. With our panel representing Web 2.0, a large portion of the audience was still Web 1.0 focused. Our group has a diverse mix of companies, but generally they reflect our regional economy fairly well: B2B manufacturing and financial primarily, with some education and service companies. While education and services have tended to embrace these new tools, manufacturing and finance still have lots of questions.
The discussions, and questions, were wide-ranging. A few main points rose to the top that I thought you might be interested in.
Related posts
Content comment for 11/14/08 Weekend Reader
The very first bullet in the Weekend Reader under Personal Excellence & Leadership mentioned a psychological examination of trust. If you were interested in the findings, but didn’t see any links, then you were probably reading either within an RSS reader or via E-mail. I used an embedded audio widget so you could play the segment right from the reader, and it turned out not to be visible in either RSS or E-Mail.
Just click DCO Weekend Reader to come directly to the post on my website and you’ll be able to play the segment.
Sorry about that - most widgets at least give at least a visible small link. I’ll know better next time.
Related posts
The point of that last post
Most of my posts get written at night and then are scheduled to go live the following morning. So it went with my last post on using social networks to build relationships in response to the economic downturn. I had just finished the post and was getting ready to call it a night. I’m not a Blackberry addict, but I do usually check my messages one last time before going to bed both as preparation for the following day and just in case there is something I need to reply to.
One of the messages I had was a fairly ordinary E-mail invite to a webinar. What caught my eye was that while it was E-mailed directly to me, the greeting was “Dear Craig”. I’m going to avoid naming the company, but even more ironic was the subject of the webinar: “How to create a winning collaboration strategy.” Yet even more ironic was this short comment stating the core value-add of the webinar:
Learn how to get dramatic business results from collaboration with a people-centered strategy.
Umm, your “people-centered strategy” apparently doesn’t know that my name is Dave, not Craig.
It gets better.
Checking my E-Mail in the morning, I saw a follow-up message from the same sender. Taking a quick glance, I saw it started off with “I am re-sending the email below because many people alerted me…” Great - they corrected the problem. Arriving at work I read the rest of the E-Mail which said the problem was that many people reported that the E-mail was corrupted and unreadable, not that their names were wrong. This update E-mail was still addressed to Craig.
So what’s my point?
My point is not to write a negative post; it’ not really even to have a quick chuckle at the irony of the situation. And it’s not a cautionary tale about making sure to double-, even triple-check mailers for accuracy before they go out.
My point is that today’s social tools can cut both ways. Sure, you can get “dramatic business results from collaboration…” You can also shoot yourself in the foot pretty easily too. I still think a lot of companies are straddling the fence when it comes to new marketing strategies, and mixing “target marketing” tactics with “social networking” themes. Nothing wrong with that, we all move forward in our own way and at our own pace.
What I don’t get the sense companies are doing though is realizing the game has changed and the stakes, in some sense, are higher. At least expectations are higher. I’m not knocking this company for making a mistake - we’ve all made mistakes throughout our career. But when their E-mail goes on to say:
If you’re not familiar with Company X, we deliver enterprise social networking combined with collaboration. Businesses use Company X to reduce by 1/3 the time their staff spends every day searching for information and people, and to speed up cycle times in virtually all functions across the organization.
and you got my name wrong on the E-Mail, you’ve got instant credibility issues.
So don’t read this post and think I’m saying you can never make a mistake. The point I’m trying to make is that if you’re trying to play in the social networking / collaboration space, then just as the opportunity is higher, I think the expectations for authentic messages and relationships is also higher. One “whoops” can detract from a whole lot of good work.
Related posts
Dots: Connected - Thanks Chris
I’ve always felt I’m a good “connect the dots” kind of person, whether those dots are people, concepts, initiatives, strategies, etc. In a sense a big part of my job now is helping entrepreneurs connect dots: their business concept to markets, their markets to market pain, market pain to opportunity and opportunity to investment.
I’ve written before about some Social Networking basics. In this post on leveraging social networks, I talk a bit at the end about the power of social networks, that “viral” nature that you hear so much about and how a well run campaign has the power to add exponential, potentially explosive results to your company.
File that away as Dot A.
Obviously, it doesn’t a blog post to know that we are in the midst of a huge economic crisis. We can debate the roots of the crisis ad nauseum, but the results are that companies are going out of business, people are getting laid off, and sales are down. Pretty much across the board.
File that away as Dot B.
Now it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to connect Dot A (potentially explosive lead-generating technology) to Dot B (we really need some new business). Maybe you’ve tried some new media campaigns in you company, maybe you’re just considering it. But I think (I would like to think, at least) that most smart companies are thinking through how to take advantage of these new channels.
There are different levels of genius when it comes to connecting dots, and the Chris I refer to in the title is Chris Brogan, blogger and consultant specializing in helping companies use social networks to build relationships and add value. Chris’ takes the connection between our two dots above to a whole ‘nother level in his post Target Marketing. It is a quick read and if you have any involvement in your company’s value chain involved in retaining customers I highly suggest it to you.
Chris does a fantastic job of not only painting a bleak picture for us of why our current attraction and retention methods aren’t working, but more importantly I think helping us see through the fog of hype and point out a concrete way social networking and new media strategies can help us through these difficult times. My paraphrase of Chris’ argument would go something like this:
- The Internet (and following it’s lead most print and TV news outlets) have turned us into “snackers”. We don’t read anymore, we skim.
- Even if we take the time to read some things, we don’t care. The overload of spam, mailers, E-Mail newsletters, website banners, etc. etc. has numbed us to traditional “target marketing”.
- Chris solution? Not as you might imagine. Sure he thinks the answer lies in Social Networking, but the solution to your dilemma is to Build. Relationships. Now.
The message is to cut back on the traditional approach (target marketing). It isn’t working. Save the money and redeploy some of it on well crafted social networking campaigns designed to build relationships.
Normally, I’m naturally suspicious of people touting solutions that just happen to match their soapbox. This is one case where I think the message is spot on. Something to think about.
BTW - if you have the time to read the comments on Chris’ post, there are some good ones in there. In particular, I liked a couple comments comparing social networking’s focus on building authentic relationships with good customer service of “days gone past”. I’ve been remarking to many business associates of late that I think the dearth of quality customer service is a huge market opportunity for companies that can take advantage of it.
There’s another great comment about 2/3 of the way down that reminds us of a great tool we all used to use every day to build relationships. You almost certainly have one on your desk. It’s probably square, made out of plastic, and has twelve keys on it with letters and numbers. It’s your phone and nothing beats an old-fashioned, voice to voice phone call for reinvigorating a relationship.
Related posts
“Recession-Proof” your Career
The good folks over at The Personal Branding Blog have been writing a series of tips on recession proofing your career through your personal brand. While they are titled from the point of view of personal branding, I’ve found most of the tips to have broad applicability and just make sense.
The tips, currently at 10, are written to be a very quick read, just a couple paragraphs. They make a lot of sense and have got me thinking a bit more in depth on most of them. So with full credit given to the team over at The Personal Branding Blog, I’d like to add my two cents worth to the discussion. I’m not sure anyone can really make your career truly recession proof, but the spirit of these tips is to focus back on key activities that can play a big part in making sure you are on the “A” list when hard decisions come in your company.
It would be great to make this a collaborative effort, so if you have a thought on one of the tips please add a comment. My thoughts follow the break.
Related posts
LinkedIn vs. Facebook: initial impressions
I’ve been a user of LinkedIn for quite a few years now, although I only started using it’s advanced features over the last year. I’ve had a Facebook account for coming up on a year, but again, it’s only been over the last month or so that I’ve really started to explore using it with any frequency. So LinkedIn: very familiar with; Facebook: just getting started.
Even so, some basic differences have been pretty obvious between the two. If you use both sites, then I’m not sure this post will have much in it for you. But I’m guessing there are a fair number of people out there that are fairly regular users of LinkedIn, and are considering diving into Facebook and may be interested in a few initial observations as I go through the process.
So, after just about a month of trying to get better oriented in Facebook and decide whether to start using it full time or not, here are my initial observations:
- Facebook is a lot harder to get your arms around. Not only does LinkedIn have less options, it’s navigation is geared to highlight those standard options. While your Facebook home page is somewhat set in overall structure, you can also customize it to your liking and install any number of “applications” to add functionality to your page. The effect is that using LinkedIn feels like using an application, using Facebook feels like running a website.
- Facebook’s feel is definitely less formal than LinkedIn’s.
- Typically on LinkedIn you invite colleagues to join your network. Facebook is geared to more actively create situations where you get invited. There are several popular applications on Facebook that help you find people to invite and vice versa. I’ve received a higher number of invitations on Facebook versus LinkedIn.
- Lastly - it could be my network, it could be my computer, it could be anything, but I find Facebook slower… than… molasses……..
- LinkedIn tends to be strictly business colleagues. On Facebook, you’ll find business colleagues along with high school friends, old drinking buddies, friends of friends, and people you had forgot you even knew. This can lead to a large number of “friends” rather quickly; but it can also pose challenges to maintaining a consistent image online; especially if the image you want to maintain is a professional one.
- I haven’t tested this to any great extent, but it just feels like the Facebook crowd is more responsive and viral.
Those last two points are not to be underestimated. With all the people on Facebook and all the ways you can be found, you will very quickly be found by potentially lots of non-business friends and associates. My profile hadn’t been active more than a week before a couple high school friends sent me an invite. While it can be fun to hook up with old high school and college buddies online to keep in touch, if your purpose for using Facebook is business networking, then it can be a bit awkward when one of them posts old frat party pictures they’ve saved and scanned. So whereas LinkedIn you can kind of sign up and feel your way around, with Facebook you might want to do some research or even set up a bogus account to get acclimated to the environment and figure out how you are going to use it.
The good news is, once you’re comfortable with how you want to use Facebook and get a fair number of friends, the viral aspect of Facebook can be extremely powerful.
Chris Brogan must have had the same thing on his mind. He just posted some random thoughts on using Facebook respectfully and professionally, and it’s also a good basic read.
One final important thought
Keep in mind while these are online social networks, in most cases they are also an extension of real life relationships. In many ways I think we tend to treat them differently with potential impacts back to those real life relationships. I recently had a request from a colleague on LinkedIn for a recommendation, and replied that since we hadn’t worked together on a project side by side, my policy was not to give a recommendation. I have that policy for very noble reasons, but what I lost sight of was that if that same person had called me on the phone and asked me to recommend them to a potential client, it would have been a no-brainer. Online and real-life social networks may operate through different mechanisms, but never forget they are ultimately about relationships with people. Make sure your “policies” reflect that.
Related posts
Leveraging Social Networks
Good news! The entrepreneurial qualities survey has reached one of my milestones. As of late Friday, I have ten responses from entrepreneurs. As you remember, I was going to leave the survey open until I had thirty total responses or ten responses from entrepreneurs. I’ve taken a quick peek at the responses and while I can’t say I saw any huge surprises, there were definitely some interesting trends that were different than I was expecting. I’ll also say that I got some great input and observations on the third question about qualities missed and miscellaneous comments.
It’s probably going to take me upwards of a week to process the responses and make sense of them in a post. This was a preliminary survey with minimal responses, so I’m not trying to make a science experiment out of it, but I also don’t want to just slop the results out without some organization. I’m also headed out of town a couple days this week for a mini-vacation, so that will eat into a couple nights I would otherwise be slaving over this blog to keep my readers informed!
In the meantime, I’m going to keep the survey open. As I’m going to talk about in this post, I used a couple social networks to drive traffic to the survey. There’s no sense closing down the survey while the network effects are still rippling out and keeping the survey open will probably catch a few more responses in the meantime. So I thought I’d talk just a bit about the approach I took to the survey, my immediate results and some conclusions/observations on leveraging social networks.
Related posts
DCO Weekly Reader - 10/3/08
The web is a vast repository of opinions, commentary and occasionally, wisdom. Here’s a selection of the best articles I read over the past week.
If you would like to recommend an article, blog or book, please leave a comment with your suggestion. Weekend Reader is a regular feature here at DCO, and you can read past Weekend Readers here.
It turned out to be a challenging week emotionally. While I’m seeing the light at the end of the tunnel in my personal situation, it is still a day-to-day part of my life. Then on Wednesday, very suddenly, a friend and business colleague dies.
I went out by myself Wednesday night to have a nice meal to commemorate his passing (he was a bit of a gourmand). I came home and turned on the television just to pass some time. Without even changing the channel, what comes up but Forrest Gump. If you’ve seen the movie you know it’s a simple yet powerful message of living in the moment and what to make of this thing called life.
Forrest was portrayed in the movie as mentally challenged; yet his observations and actions lead to an extraordinary life. Toward the end of the movie, Forrest is mourning the loss of his life-long love. I don’t remember the words exactly, but they went something like:
“My mama always said we each had a destiny, but Lieutenant Dan said life is nothing but a feather floating on the wind. I just wonder if it’s both.”
Personal Excellence & Leadership
- Seven ways inspiring leaders communicate.
- Great list of activities indicating you’ve stopped leading. I’m confident no one reading DCO is in that situation, but it never hurts to check…
- As quoted in the intro to this next post, Warren Bennis proposes that one thing that separates leaders is they somehow get more out of their experiences. The post goes on to talk about several ways to accomplish that.
- Okay, maybe you don’t need to get more out of your experiences, maybe you just need to be more curious. Here’s how to do that.
Thought-Provokers
- Do you know what a BFO is? I didn’t either.
- Here’s an idea whose time is overdue in my opinion: is the world ready to be small again?
- A thoughtful article on what is “meaning” in the context of leadership and how to create a culture of meaning in your organization.
For Fun
- Ask your kids, but fun, flash-based web games are taking over the internet. Here’s four logic-oriented examples to give your brain a workout.
Tips & Tricks
- Some simple tips on communicating your personal brand. Even if you think this whole “personal branding” thing isn’t for you, these are some good tips to consider.
- It happens to all of us; I just went through it this summer. A new boss. Here’s 10 great tips for getting off on the right foot.
Related posts
The Quarter in Review - 2008/Q3
Many of the blogs I read have quarterly, or even monthly recaps. Some of these blogs are personal some are professional, and the information in their recap generally reflects their orientation.
Personal blogs tend to focus on their best content, what keywords seem most relevant in their space, comments or discussions of interest, etc. The professional blogs definitely highlight their best content (that is after all their bread and butter), and many also go so far as to talk about their site metrics and income for the period represented.
As October gets underway, it dawned on me that I started this blog around mid-July, so it is almost a quarter of a year old. I’m not trying to make this into something more than it is, but taking some time every three months or so to reflect on a couple high points seems like a good thing.
Most popular content
- By far the most popular post was the Personal Branding Primer. Started somewhat on a whim, this article turned into a full-length discussion on personal branding: what it is, different tactics for two different categories of people, and some pragmatic next steps for all of us.
- 5 steps to sustained personal change was fairly popular also. Drawing from some immediate personal experiences, this was a brief post capturing some thoughts of mine on what it takes not only to change, but to sustain the change.
- Lastly, in response to a question from a reader, we had a short discussion on good recruiting gifts for future leaders. If you are involved in college recruiting, then you should read this article for some interesting, and thought-provoking, giveaways.
- The DCO Weekly Readers settled into their weekly routine after a couple different schedules. From a few E-Mails I have received, this feature looks like it is of value to you. I appreciate any and all comments on the Weekly Readers to make them as useful as possible. They sure are interesting to put together.
- Personally, my favorite post to write was Progress?, in response to something I read on a colleague’s blog. Entrepreneurship and personal excellence notwithstanding, it’s always good to remind ourselves of what’s really important in our lives.
Visitors
In addition to the few friends I recruited from the start, we did pick up some new visitors and subscribers to the site. It’s always good to get a wide variety of thoughts and comments. While much of the traffic is “direct”, meaning it came directly to the site, there was quite a bit of traffic that hit the site based on keyword searches around “qualities of entrepreneurship”; more reinforcement that this is a topic of great interest and we should pick it back up. I have some initial content ready to go in that regard, and will definitely be looking for you participation.
What’s New?
I’ve added the “Share This” button to the blog at the end of each post (it’s a small green button and says Share This next to it). Share This is a really easy way to share an individual blog post with others via your social bookmarking network, E-Mail or on your own blog. Clicking the Share This button or link brings up a small window where you can E-Mail a post to a friend, add it to your favorite bookmarking site like Digg or Reddit, or add it to your own blog. The button only shows while directly on the site, so you folks using an RSS reader or getting posts by E-Mail will need to click through to the actual blog post if you’d like to use this feature.
Once again - thanks for dropping by (and hopefully subscribing). We’re getting a few more comments here and there, which I appreciate. I hope you all had a fantastic summer. We’re entering the “holiday season”, the best time of the year for many folks. Here’s wishing you “excellent” holidays, full of family, friends and happiness.
Related posts
Coaching question for you
I’ve been seeing a fair amount of material lately on executive and personal coaching. I have never used a coach, although like most of you I imagine, I’ve been one from time to time.
I’m curious as to whether this is a topic you are interested in. By leaving a comment, please tell me:
- Whether you currently, or have ever, used a personal or executive coach.
- Does the topic interest you enough for me to cover in more detail here on the blog.
- In general, what are your thoughts on the topic.
This might not be anything we cover in any detail for a while. I really want to get back into our discussion of entrepreneurial qualities. However, I’m curious as to your comments, and will continue to slip some coaching information into the Weekly Readers.