Green Transportation: Boston Transportation Service
Friday, May 16th, 2008 |Planet Tran is an Earth Friendly car service in the Boston area, check them out if you are there.
Archive for the ‘Focus’ Category
Full Disclosure - Bad spellers untie
Monday, May 12th, 2008 |Since there are a considerably more readers these days, I thought I would piece together a thanks for stopping by piece, but got distracted with this email. I got a slideshare notification on someone putting a pitch in a group, so I thought I would I’ll look at the preso again. Glad I did - not only did I get to reminisce on the salad days when I had more time. I also got to find out I have a spelling error.
So now I have a topic of sorts - bad spelling and slides. At the end of the day - I haven’t been able to fix the error so it will live on the interweb forever. While I will admit an error, I’m not going to let you know exactly where the error is. C’mon - transparency can only go so far. (Hint: I before E, except in words like neighbor or their.)
On a technology note, I think slideshare is one of the more interesting widgets available for blogs. It offers something more visual for my blog and it is within my skill set.
So can look for the error or look at some other folks slides on slideshare.net if you haven’t used slideshare before.
More Recent Slides
- Influence Networks
- What is the ROI for Making your Own Coffee?
- Social Brand Management - Shaping the Tag Cloud
- 5 Gardening Tips for Developing a Corporate Bloom
- From the Stream: Transactional Identity
Experimental Slides
So there are probably spelling errors in a couple. 
Pangea Day - Super Continent, Super People
Sunday, May 11th, 2008 |I just Just found out that yesterday was the first ever Pangea day. Plate techtonics and subduction will continue to change the morphology of the earth and is an unstoppable force, so is compassion. What is subduction, it’s a geology thing, but it is also could be a metaphor for things that suck up time and energy - the forces that move us every day. Formal definition:
Subduction is the process in which one plate is pushed downward beneath another plate into the underlying mantle when plates move towards each other. The plate that is denser will slide under the thicker, less dense plate. Faulting occurs in the process. It is the process in which rocks break and move or are displaced along the fractures. The subducted plate usually moves in jerks, resulting in earthquakes. The area where the subduction occurs is the subduction zone. A long, narrow, deep depression forms in this area. It is called an oceanic trench.
I try my best to not put long videos on my site, but I’ve been watching this 25 min piece and it’s worth it for a geologist, geographer or just the plain person. Pangea day is a great concept that we are all sisters and brothers on a single planet. So you don’t have 20 mins? Well, carve it out, any video which opens with Desmond Tutu has to be good.
Want to find out more about Pangea Day? It’s a day of film and sharing, so find a way to put this concept in action, Be more empathetic and more understanding of the diversity and adversity that exists on our planet. Find a way to give back.
Jen Knoedl Utterz her way out of SOBCon08
Sunday, May 4th, 2008 |Funny, real and interesting. The choice wasn’t difficult - super creative. Get in on with Jen’s @ jenknoedl.wordpress.com - let’s help her get rid of the Handcuffs!!
The Gaylord Diaspora
Saturday, April 19th, 2008 |Thanks to a few new connections over the past month, I’ve been able to get an interesting view of what apparently happens when you leave Gaylord, Michigan - YOU NEVER GO BACK! OK so diaspora is a little much, but it is passover-ish, so I get a little leeway. So here is a representational drawing of the distribution of 19 connections:
5 Incomplete Thoughts on Social Media
Friday, April 11th, 2008 |Remember the title….
1. Manufactured Market?
There is so much noise about the market opportunity and the necessity to fund community initiatives for enterprises but little has materialize in respect to direct revenue and meaningful metrics. This is a challenge for traditional marketers on many levels and the type of topics I suspect are being at the Forrester Marketing conference. There is a after the show workshop that asserts the following which might be close to revenue:
Experiments with rich media, blogging, RSS, and social networks show how dynamic marketing techniques can touch on buyers’ emotions, educate and persuade them, measure interactions more effectively, and generate additional business.
2. Perpetual Social Markets
Shel’s interviews of Jeremiah Owang and the Sea World folks are both emblematic of the challenges of linking social media investments to a return. How can you effectively measure and manage social media as a growth engine? Examples exist where a specific event or a series of inferences can be leveraged to assume the impact of social media, as evidenced in the description of Sea World video at Fast Company:
Measuring social media is one of the pain spots for the enterprise. As Kami Huyse, says in this clip of her client SeaWorld San Antonio. “It all depends on what you measure.” …
What to measure indeed - hits, downloads….. Ultimately most businesses measure revenue from Marketers, so perhaps Sea World is an anomaly and most businesses know how to convert the social media marketing budget to revenue and understand how to successfully deploy/develop a community. Let’s see if this is the case from Shel’s interview of Jeremiah, you probably only need to listen for say, the whole thing:
3. Social Media as Infrastructure
With the metric challenges and elusiveness of revenue is social media a function of retention more so than demand? If marketers are unable to deliver/verify incremental new revenues base on investment, should the metric hunt move to revenue retention and customer satisfaction?
Cool technology should never be relegated to the “post-transactional” budget fight…..
4. Platforms as Markets
Is Twitter a market? Facebook? Myspace? With increasing platforms for exchange more and more opportunity appears to emerge as populations flock to platforms. Where people gather transactions happen right? There are many example of this in the physical space - Burning Man, dead shows and in the parking lots of panic shows. So if people are gathering, there has to be transactions to be had - right?
Information as currency and messaging as a service continues to be the key commodities being exchanged on social media platforms….
5. Community as a Commoditizer
The transactional efficiencies of social computing by it’s very nature puts downward cost pressure on goods. Ease of comparison, ease of purchase and ease of access to other consumers/product customers. Ease of discovery. Product differentiation through a cost center represents…
Maybe the title should have been 5 Incoherent Thoughts…
~cheers!
WANTED: Social Media Antagonist
Saturday, April 5th, 2008 |Spatially Relevant (SR), a Top 333,000 blog, is the leading Geography, Marketing, Product Management, Social Media and Live Music (GeoMaPMSMLM) blog. SR is seeing amazing flatness in our growth and seeking a little assistance in taking the SR experience to the next level.
The rapidly growing GeoMaPMSMLM segment represents a great opportunity for the successful candidate to rise to almost internet famous. Think about it - there are 980,000,000 people on the planet who profess an interest in one or more of these topics according to IDC. With only 1% market penetration you could still be reasonably obscure outside of the internet. The culture at Spatially Relevant is eclectic and unfocused, so you will have an opportunity change the conversation and stimulate new topics and editorial themes. The search for Social Media Antagonist is international and cross-network. A key focus of this position is to open new channels for SR in emerging markets and platforms, such Orkut and Xing. In short, the successful candidate must be platform and social network promiscuous.
The role of Social Media Antagonist is seen as a strategic investment by the Spatially Relevant board of directors and appropriate love and care will be provided by the whole organization to ensure success. It is as of yet undecided if the antagonist will be more of a frienemy or a straight up antagonist, this will be determined collaboratively during the conversational interview process.
Qualifications
- Will need to be a follower on twitter of @spatially prior to throwing your hat in the ring
- Should have more the 750 followers on twitter. It’s ok if they are only “internet friends”
- Should have YOUR own blog with a technorati rank of <333,000, bonus if your blog is on dungeons and dragons, science or star trek.
- Should have modest command of the English language, think reasonable grammar, but limited vocabulary.
- Should be reasonably patient for me to respond to not so witty barbs on week days, since I have a job and this is like 4th on my priority list.
- Should have a completely superficial understanding of GeoMaPSMLM topics and concepts
- Prefer that you are more emotional than logical in your social media efforts
The PERFECT Candidate must be willing support the following internet personality attribute constraints:
- Should not be mean or creative
- Prefer you NOT remind me of my grandfather or be a puppet
- Belligerent and not well thought out tweets are fine, but keep it clean - I can’t stand cussing.
- Would prefer you not do podcast or video, I just don’t have the time or talent.
- Should not be a Democrat since I would like to have an edge in empathy, awareness, logic and creativity.
- Would not have your own T-Shirt already, since I’ve got a really cool tagline I’ve been working on which would be SWEET on a t-shirt. (I even have an antagonist version/anti-tagline for the successful candidate)
- Should not be trying to make the world a better place with your social media efforts
Education
- BA in Liberal Arts, bonus points will be awared for Children’s Literature, Children’s Theatre or Public Administration majors. Non-Degree holders will be considered providing you have verifiable street cred when it comes to online antagonism.
- Degrees from Tier 4/5 University preferred (Think MAC10, regional private school or SEC)
So if you think you have the right level of medicority for this position just post your qaulifications via the following options.
- comment below
- post your response on your blog with the following Tag: SMASR
- via an email to publisher -AT- spatiallyrelevant -DOT- org, with your CV attached.
Please note: All submissions will potentially be leveraged for future follow up posts, tweets or other interactions to see if you have the right stuff and are not just “paper qualified”. Be sure to include your @twittername, blog URL and favorite band in your submission for consideration.
Thanks in advance for your quality submissions.
Compensation: Commensurate with effort
Position Type: Temp to Perm, while seen as strategic, could easily be abandoned
My 200th Post!
Monday, March 31st, 2008 |While not a big milestone, I figured I wouldn’t let it go the automated postalicous bookmark importer and share it with the folks I read.
There are so many others, but this hopefully introduces you to some new folks. Check out the blogroll too.
Authority Blogging? Surely not I, YOU?
Sunday, March 30th, 2008 |So Chris Garrett and Liz Strauss have launched a compelling contest which focuses on helping folks understand what it takes to be an authority blogger. This is a great opportunity to drive awareness for the SOBCon08 and Authority Blogger and represents a great opportunity for the community to collaborate. Authority Blogging conjures up a lot of things for me and probably for you as well - personalities, brands and even individual posts which have influenced your understanding. There is just a bunch ways to look at this topic and to position oneself as an authority blogger.
Narrowing Authority
There may be more than a little game theory in folks responses and I spent some time looking at folks posts. This project has already delivered some amazing insights from the participants and it is clear that it is GAME ON!
Content, topics and perceived value are all part of the authority puzzle. Spatially Relevant is a great opportunity for me to share experiences and develop relationships with folks I would not have otherwise and is the main reason I’m even blogging. There is no shortage of opportunity for me to share great content from folks’ I interact with via social media. Y’all provide great tweets and posts to write on. Each authority I follow provides an interesting lens for looking at the segment. It’s the diversity of views in this segment which is completely amazing. I just hope that I can add to the discussion. To that end, I suspect a person’s personal biases can ultimately drive authority.
With at least a directional understanding of authority, it is important to clearly understand the rules of this game should YOU want to participate as well. I’m very appreciative of the contest, since I have been struggling to find something to blog on since my muses aren’t here right now. I now have a topic AND I could get some cool things. What you ask? Here’s the cool stuff:
- $1000 budget to pay for SOBCon08 registration and travel expenses
- A hour of consulting with Chris Garrett.
- The complete Authority Blogger online course.
- Meet the speakers.
It’s About the Booty
A fabulous prize package indeed! I’m motivated - YOU? Wait, wait - THAT’S NOT ALL! You can also get a guest blog piece on New Music Strategies and since Music is a tertiary theme here - I couldn’t resist to participate now — like a bug to a flame.
So what is the correct way to tackle this topic? That is now the increasingly more important question which I’m looking to close on by the end of this post. Folks are creating diagrams and generating comprehensive lists in their responses. I’m probably not going to do a list, since Confident Writing has 12 GREAT inspirational items. The great ideas from the folks which is making it difficult to decide on how to write on authority blogging and differentiate.
Bob Younce has an excellent overview on his authority and an about page which was fairly intriguing for me. As a geographer, I am completely interested in where he is from, since he only references mid-Michigan. What is mid-Michigan? Bob’s post has successfully reminded me of a paper I’ve never wrote on what is the definition of the frequently used term “Up North”. Authority bloggers have a unique ability to start conversations and actively participate in conversations with others.
Ain’t too Proud to Pander
I am a little too proud to brag and may never be an Ego on Alltop, but I’m not to proud to suck up. Hmm… sucking up as a component of Authority? So I may have a chance on this whole thing, since this is in fact a core competency for me.
The above image in fact is a subtle suck up, since Chris likes images and has a Canada birth connection. While my vacations to the Bruce Peninsula aren’t as authoritative as Hart’s “Canadian-ness”, but I did co-author a piece on “Canadian regionalism’s impact on the media: A content analysis”, which should raise my Canadian street cred. So I got that going for me… Let’s see how that works….
Building out the concept of authority blogging is a great topic to work on from a project perspective. The great insights on influence and authority which have already been surfaced and are yet to come out of this contest are the key drivers for my wanting to participate in the discussion.
So what is Authority Blogging and why should I be considered an authority blogger? I’m not sure authority blogging is any one thing, or that I’m even able to meaningfully opine on why it should be me, but there are a 3 things which I feel authority blogging is not about:
- Ego: I’m quickly coming to the conclusion that ego’s can drive traffic, but not influence. I find myself linking to really insightful content from non-ego folk who provide a thought provoking take on a subject.
- The amount/size of Content: Very often the amount of content is confused with authority. Some of the most authoritative things online are published in under 140 characters on twitter and isn’t a fleshed out, but a query or insight which makes you THINK.
- It is NOT a metric: Not links, not technorati ranks, not page views. A single post can be more influential than anything - where is YOURS?
So if authority isn’t driven from those things, it only leaves me with two things it might be or that I might have. A passion to share and willingness to engage. It would be great to do an interview and to get some open feedback on how to improve my blogging from Chris, but it would for anyone. Authority is as authority does and below are some folks YOU should know and who should participate too:
