Emmotional extortion, but for a good cause

This is from outbrain.com a blog rating widget with commercial recommendations.

clipped from www.outbrain.com Yes, donate the proceeds to this charity: International Red Cross Women’s Bean Project Tag a Giant (Save the bluefin tuna) The Hunger Project Children.org ASPCA Make-A-Wish foundation The Alliance for Climate Protection No, I prefer not to raise money for charity by showing sponsored recommendations

Twitter: Personalize == Destroy?

Disclosure: This question is very interesting to us. There's a tangle of delicious and intriguing subtleties here. This is one is a tough nut, with few promising solutions in sight. Even untangling why this is a problem is a challenge... The original post is well worth a read.

If you assign or calculate authority you're dis-empowering your grass roots audience. People tend to dis-like this. Alternatively, it might create an interesting game where good behavior gets you authority. Would you play?

clipped from venturebeat.com Please, please don’t personalize Twitter for me allows companies to share information about each other’s customers would empower them to deliver more serendipitous automatic content to these customers. The concept is called “discovery,” But it worries me to see Twitter CEO Biz Stone quoted and linked in the middle of Sherrets’ story, talking up plans to rank Twitter results by authority — by assigning different levels of importance to different users. That would, Stone says, float the “important” tweets to the top. Biz, that sounds like a great optional feature. But if you replace the current all-tweets-are-equal system with yet another Internet pecking order, you’ll ruin a big part of Twitter’s appeal to the masses, and to me. 1. Too much of the Internet is published by the same few people — We used to call them The 250 on Valleywag. 2. Twitter’s unranked content draws eager participants — People who aren’t already famous or important love Twitter

How many of these are you doing?

clipped from www.entrepreneur.com 9 Free Advertising Solutions When the going gets tough, the tough advertise. By Suzanne Driscoll   |   July 31, 2009 Become the expert Be a great public speaker Professional meeting planners are always looking for presenters and workshop leaders for conferences. Teach an adult education course Reward referrals Send out an e-zine Make the most of (free) public relations Whenever there is an event of any significance in your business, be sure to send a press release or a simple e-mail to all the local newspapers and TV stations. Give back Start a blog or contribute to a forum There are several free blogging sites to get you started, I recommend Blogger, WordPress or Tumblr. Partner up

clipped from www.entrepreneur.com Lessons From The Fall Of Giants 4 lessons to be learned from the crash and burn of industry leaders. By Luke McKinney | July 29, 2009 Avoid Complacency The Lesson: No matter how long you've operated or how much money you've made, the market is always changing; ignoring the problem doesn't help. Know Your Market The Lesson: By success, responsibility or simple experience you will become a different person from your market. Make sure to remember what you customers want, and act accordingly. Move With The Times The Lesson: Adapt with the times or face extinction. It's not enough to know that your product/service works--you have to stay aware of what other people are offering. Accept Responsibility If you can't think of anything that's your fault, you're paranoid. --unknown The Lesson: If you find yourself blaming someone else for your troubles, ask yourself, "What are they doing that I'm not?" The most important thing is learning from mistakes, and nobody says they have to be yours.

What the F**k Is Social Media? Are we there yet? No, it's more like teenage s__

Once in a while, some marketing firm cooks up a self promoting something *designed* to go viral thing actually worth it's ink. This might be one of those times.

http://www.slideshare.net/mzkagan/what-the-fk-is-social-media-one-year-later

So, are they right about the teenage thing?

clipped from mashable.com What the F**k Is Social Media? Here’s an Answer But what do you say to someone who doesn’t get it? Maybe you have a boss who thinks social branding a waste of time or chatted with a friend who doesn’t believe that Twitter can help land her a great job. Maybe they have no clue what social media even is. Last year, marketing director Marta Kagan helped solve this problem with her presentation What the F**k is Social Media?. It was quickly a social media hit for its wit and its very convincing case for the raw power of social media. The next time you need to explain the benefits of social media to someone, just send them this post and make sure they flip through the entire presentation. Here it is:

Talking your boss into the social web.

As we're starting alpha tests within a few organizations this is becoming an interesting point. How do you talk your boss into using something innovative? This can be very difficult depending on industry or department in question.

Sending a well formulated email is a start. What's your take?

clipped from www.deloitte.com Into the Fray: How Should Companies Approach Collaboration Marketing Given the Potential Risks? Deloitte Debates Social networks, blogs and other communication technologies make it possible for almost anyone to influence how other people perceive your brand and products. Some companies have already begun to use these technologies – the practice we call collaboration marketing – while others are actively debating the wisdom of jumping into the fray. How much should you invest? What are the risks? Collaboration marketing allows us and our most loyal customers to influence conversations that affect how people perceive our company and our products. Collaboration marketing is a good way to learn what customers really think and want. We can adapt our products or services by incorporating a formal collaboration feedback loop into our development process.

Top reasons cited against going google. That's GG, check mate :)

Have you run into any complaints when talking about google products? Here's a few I've heard recently.

1 I'm a "pro" office user, I routinely rely on the high level features of MS Office like shortcut keys to the point of mouse-less use. I feel the difference the most in excel.

2 Even if small, the added delay that comes with using a web application is enough to turn me off. The very idea of it wasting a second of my time while updating gives me the hives.

3 I don't want to depend on google, and especially not a cloud hosted solution. And by the way, google gears is a crap shoot, for me it works about half the time, and I can't figure out why/why not.

4 I'm just used to the old way of using outlook etc, too set in my ways to re-learn.

What's your verdict?

clipped from mashable.com Going Google: The Apple Switch Ads for the Web App Era More than 7 years after the launch of the Apple Switch ads, Microsoft once again finds itself the target of an ad campaign that attempts to chip away at its dominant market share. The billboards, which run for a month, will be changed every day to progressively explain the advantages of the Google Apps suite. They’ll appear on the Mass Pike in Boston, San Francisco’s 101, New York’s West Side Highway and The Ike in Chicago, reports eWeek. The ads will push IT managers to the Apps at Work site, which explains:

What does your monday reading list look like? Here's one thing I started doing.

Use the clipmarks plugin to Mozilla Firefox to clip links off of alltop, post them for others to comment on and follow up on the ones that make the second "cut." What's your poison?

clipped from small-business.alltop.com 9 Free Advertising Solutions Lessons From The Fall Of Giants Provide Can-Do Customer Service Seven (More) Reasons to Ditch Your iPhone Cash for Clunkers Might Siphon Money from Renewable Energy Loans Layoffs Leading to Increased Self-Employment 20 Small Business Blogs That Have the Right Stuff Choosing the Right Analytics in Afghanistan Paying Students for Performance: Should Kids Be Managed Like "Talent"? Inspire Employees at the Grass-Roots Level Being an Effective Global Leader The Value Every Business Needs to Create Now How to Get IT and the Business Working Together How to Support Your IT Innovators Small business reading list Kaiser Permanente's video case study: Using internal social media tools to improve collaboration Recent jobs posted to the 37signals Job Board: Temple University, Lime Wire, Yelp, etc. Stop following directions and start designing Sherpa Knows How To Do Location-Based Services… How to Be Funny Are You Leading People Down a Slippery Path? Twenty-One Top Twitter Tips

Business objectives for social networking

1 Establish a brand
2 Sell, and at higher prices
3 Market, convey benefit and justify higher prices
4 Add value to services, accumulate timely knowledge
5,6,7,8,9 Please comment

clipped from www.ducttapemarketing.com My response to the ROI roadblock is this - How does your boss measure the ROI of attending Chamber mixers, participating in Associations, and dropping in on networking luncheons? Done correctly, social networking on sites like Facebook is really no different - you don’t measure participation based on direct sales, you measure success based on identifying one potential strategic partner, acquiring one actionable bit of advice, or striking up a conversation or two that may eventually lead to developing a new customer. That kind of sounds like a set of solid networking objectives doesn’t it? By identifying and clearly stating your objectives for social network participation (objectives not unlike those of participating in your local Chamber) you can more easily identify the networks that make sense, the type of engagement you need to create, and, most importantly, how much time and energy you can afford to invest to reach your objectives.

An accountants practices on twitter

this guy might be worth following, he uses many of the tools I do. Linked to the 2020 groups site.

clipped from bookmarklee.wordpress.com Twitter Twitter is not for accountants ; and A twitter case study and intro for professional advisers You may also be interested in the league/listing of UK accountants and tax people on twitter here. What do I tweet about? When I’m out and about I use Twitter as originally intended to provide real time status updates of meetings I’m attending, who with and where. I tend to do this in advance using a service called Tweetlater (although I recently found something else that provides a similar facility so will be trying BrightKit as the interface looks simpler). I also use Tweetlater to ensure that Twitter gets a link to each of the new posts on my 3 blogs: - Accountant jokes and fun – just to keep it separate from the next one!; - Ambitious Accountants – tips and advice, much of it relevant to all professional advisers; and - TaxBuzz - the Tax Advice Network blog (and this has it’s own twitter account too: @TheTaxBuzz )

leveraging conflict for more passionate and creative results

original article to the point and well worth reading

participants need to feel safe enough to argue with ideas, not with people

only then can you have world class performance, just "profitable" can be achieved without collaboration

in wibe terms you need several well formed arguments for and against. when voted on and sorted by energy you get a clear view of what direction is winning

clipped from www.innovationtools.com Why management by consensus is killing innovation One management issue that could be killing innovation efforts is an obsession by many managers that a decision can’t be reached unless a team of people comes to agreement. Alfred Sloan of the "old GM" insisted that if his key managers came to agreement too quickly, or came to agreement at all, that they defer making a decision until a higher level of conflicting views were offered to the discussion. There are two issues that seem to contribute heavily to the current state of "can’t we all get along" management. First, people are engaged in win-lose competition with one another on a team. If a suggestion or idea is posed, other team members will jump on the person making the suggestion in order to discredit him or her rather than looking at the idea itself. Managers are not trained to look at conflict as a positive state, but without conflicting ideas all that is offered to customers are stale and uninspired offerings.

Strategic questions

Harvard business is proving to be a good source of articles to rewrite.

clipped from blogs.harvardbusiness.org The 10 Questions Every Change Agent Must Answer Marcel Proust, who famously said, "The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes. 1. Do you see opportunities the competition doesn't see? 2. Do you have new ideas about where to look for new ideas? 3. Are you the most of anything? 4. If your company went out of business tomorrow, who would miss you and why? 5. Have you figured out how your organization's history can help to shape its future? 6. Can your customers live without you? 7. Do you treat different customers differently? Not all customers are created equal. 8. Are you getting the best contributions from the most people? 9. Are you consistent in your commitment to change? In fact, the problem with many organizations is that all they do is change. 10. Are you learning as fast as the world is changing? As Albert Einstein famously said, "Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them."

What is entrepreneurial thinking?

Is entrepreneurial thinking valuable to an organization?

Please also comment on the experience of reading this kind of pre-digested clippings vs going directly to the source.

clipped from blogs.harvardbusiness.org MBAs vs. Entrepreneurs: Who Has the Right Stuff for Tough Times? What makes entrepreneurs "entrepreneurial?" Specifically, is there such as thing as "entrepreneurial thinking" — and does it differ in important ways from, say, how MBAs think about problems and seize opportunities? The answer, Sarasvathy concludes, is an emphatic yes — and the differences boil down to the "causal" reasoning used by MBAs versus the "effectual" reasoning used by entrepreneurs. Causal reasoning, she explains, "begins with a pre-determined goal and a given set of means, and seeks to identify the optimal — fastest, cheapest, most efficient, etc. Effectual reasoning, on the other hand, "does not begin with a specific goal. Instead, it begins with a given set of means and allows goals to emerge contingently over time from the varied imagination and diverse aspirations of the founders and the people they interact with." begin with three simple sets of resources: "Who they are" "What they know" "Whom they know"