Author Archives: Paul

Five Lessons From the Web 2.0 Summit

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I had a chance to attend the recent Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco and hear from some of the business leaders of the new Internet, including the CEOs of Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and Twitter. Here are five key insights I took away.

1. Make Marketing a Service to Customers – I didn’t write down who said this, but the comment stuck with me long after the conference was over. The traditional role of marketing has been to create an image or deliver a message. Service had little to do with it. But in the new world of tuned-out customers, the only way to get make an impression is to be helpful, entertaining or memorable. This is one reason we’re seeing a race by B2B marketers in particular to give away tactics and information that were once their source of competitive advantage. It’s the only way to get prospects to pay attention. Marketers need to ask themselves a new question: “How can I help?”

2. You Need a Mobile Strategy, and Faster Than You Probably Thought. Forrester Research now predicts that smart phones will be the dominant Internet access device in the US within three years. Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley sees smart phone shipments surpassing PCs in 2012 (Here’s the video of her terrific presentation). In countries like China, the PC was never even much of a factor. The speed at which this shift is occurring is breathtaking. Smart phones have eclipsed all other electronic devices in their rate of adoption (see chart below).

Smart Phone Growth

Google’s Eric Schmidt made an interesting point: smart phones are actually more useful than PCs because they know more about the user, including location, and can deliver a more personal level of utility.

This doesn’t mean PCs are going away. Rather, the plunging price of flat-panel displays will make PCs more of a dashboard for a user’s business and entertainment needs. However, the browser will be only one of several ways people will access the Internet.

On the smart phone, that access will be by applications. Apple opened the iPhone to developers only three years ago, and already more than a half-million apps have been delivered. Other platforms are just ramping up their own app ecosystems.

There is a huge free-for-all coming in mobile apps, and nearly every business needs to be thinking about how to participate. Consider item 1 above. How can you use a mobile app to provide service to the customer? Whether it’s a coupon, shopping tip, reference source, comparison engine or something else, you’ll need to address the needs of this rapidly growing mobile audience.

Mark Zuckerberg at Web 2.0 Summit3. Social Is the Killer App. While you’re pondering question 2, consider this one. Mark Zuckerberg was poised and mature in a nearly one-hour interview with John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly. The Facebook founder acknowledged that great power carries great responsibility and pledged to be more responsive to the privacy concerns of members.

One memorable point he made is that “social” is a powerful feature of software. Several Facebook applications, like photo albums, were functionally weak in their early versions but were a huge hit with members because they were easily shareable, he noted. This is an important point to remember. Loading up on features quickly reaches the point of diminishing returns. Adding the ability to share, reuse, mash up and comment creates a whole different level of value.

BTW, Zuckerberg reminded me of a young Bill Gates in looks, mannerisms and the clarity with which he sees complex issues. Like Gates, he has an uncanny ability to find a logical path to a decision or point of view. It will be interesting to watch his star rise.

4. Simulations Are A Powerful Incentive To Engage. Did you know that 320 million people have played a Zynga game and that the company now employs 1,300 people? Have you ever even heard of Zynga? If you’re a B2B marketer, you probably haven’t, but I’ll bet your kids have. Farmville is a mega-hit on Facebook and Zynga has nine other social gaming applications based on classic games like poker and Battleship, even a Critical Ops download for PC. Founder Mark Pincus said the company has peak usage of more than three million concurrent users. Yow.

Why should you care? Because simulation games are not only a great way to learn but also an excellent tool for modeling business processes. Consider Cisco’s myPlanNet, a game that challenges players to build a business as the CEO of an Internet service provider. It has racked up more than 75,000 Facebook fans and 50,000 downloads for what is essentially a B2B training and marketing tool. Check out the wall posts on Facebook. It’s not the usual gaming trash talk. Players are learning how the Internet works.

IBM recently released CityOne, a game that simulates sustainable urban planning.  These are tools that put real problem-solving scenarios in a gaming context and they are having enormous success. Can a sim fit in with your digital marketing plan?

Steven Berlin Johnson at Web 2.0 Summit5. Everything on the Web. Steven Berlin Johnson gave a brief but provocative talk about the rate of change in publishing. “For the first time in 20 years, the link and the URL are losing market share,” he said, noting that there is no standardized way to link to the page of a digital book.

Johnson proposed an idea he called “Web redundancy:” Every digital content asset should have a corresponding linkable version. “Unless [publishers] embrace Web redundancy as a strategy, all those extraordinary words will continue to live in the remote continents of the unlinkable,” he said.

I was reminded of all the press releases I continue to receive by e-mail that have no online corollaries. This is old-media thinking. Why ask the reporter to rewrite your words when it’s simpler to link to them? Why forego the search engine optimization benefits of an inbound referral, especially when tweets and links are the means by which people increasingly publish information?

This year’s Web 2.0 Summit was streamed in its entirety. The conference, which is in its seventh year, is a great way to tap into the trends that will define the next 12 months. If you can’t fork over the $4,200 (and thanks to John Battelle and my friends at Procter & Gamble, I didn’t have to), it’s worth tuning in to the YouTube archive or watching the streamed coverage from next year’s event.

I had a chance to attend the recent <a href=”https://www.web2summit.com/web2010/”>Web 2.0 Summit</a> in San Francisco and hear from of the business leaders of the new Internet, including the CEOs of Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and Twitter. Here are five key insights I took away.

<strong>1. Make Marketing a Service to Customers -</strong> I didn’t write down who said this, but the comment stuck with me long after the conference was over. The traditional role of marketing has been to create an image or deliver a message. Service had little to do with it. But in the new world of tuned-out customers, the only way to get make an impression is to be helpful, entertaining or memorable. This is one reason we’re seeing a race by B2B marketers in particular to give away tactics and information that were once their source of competitive advantage. It’s the only way to get prospects to pay attention. Marketers need to ask themselves a new question: “How can I help?”

<strong>2. You Need a Mobile Strategy, and Faster Than You Probably Thought.</strong> Forrester Research now predicts that smart phones will be the dominant Internet access device in the US within three years. Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley sees smart phone shipments surpassing PCs in 2012 (<a href=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yL9yrttESI”>Here’s the video of her terrific presentation</a>). In countries like China, the PC was never even much of a factor. The speed at which this shift is occurring is breathtaking. Smart phones have eclipsed all other electronic devices in their rate of adoption (see chart below).
<p style=”text-align: center;”><a href=”https://gillin.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Meeker_Smartphones.png”><img class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-2432″ title=”Meeker_Smartphones” src=”https://gillin.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Meeker_Smartphones.png” alt=”Smart Phone Growth” width=”500″ /></a></p>
Google’s Eric Schmidt <a href=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKOWK2dR4Dg&amp;p=2737D508F656CCF8″>made an interesting point</a>: smart phones are actually more useful than PCs because they know more about the user, including location, and can deliver a more personal level of utility.

This doesn’t mean PCs are going away. Rather, the plunging price of flat-panel displays will make PCs more of a dashboard for a user’s business and entertainment needs. However, the browser will be only one of several ways people will access the Internet.

On the smart phone, that access will be by applications. Apple opened the iPhone to developers only three years ago, and already more than a half-million apps have been delivered. Other platforms are just ramping up their own app ecosystems.

There is a huge free-for-all coming in mobile apps, and nearly every business needs to be thinking about how to participate. Consider item 1 above. How can you use a mobile app to provide service to the customer? Whether it’s a coupon, shopping tip, reference source, comparison engine or something else, you’ll need to address the needs of this rapidly growing mobile audience.

<strong><a href=”https://farm5.static.flickr.com/4087/5186226125_66e1323508.jpg”><img class=”alignright” style=”margin-left: 9px; margin-right: 9px;” title=”Mark Zuckerberg at Web 2.0 Summit” src=”https://farm5.static.flickr.com/4087/5186226125_66e1323508.jpg” alt=”Mark Zuckerberg at Web 2.0 Summit” width=”299″ height=”199″ /></a>3. Social Is the Killer App. </strong>While you’re pondering question 2, consider this one. Mark Zuckerberg was poised and mature in a <a href=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRUOl03nZIc&amp;p=2737D508F656CCF8″>nearly one-hour interview with John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly</a>. The Facebook founder acknowledged that great power carries great responsibility and pledged to be more responsive to the privacy concerns of members.

One memorable point he made is that “social” is a powerful feature of software. Several Facebook applications, like photo albums, were functionally weak in their early versions but were a huge hit with members because they were easily shareable, he noted. This is an important point to remember. Loading up on features quickly reaches the point of diminishing returns. Adding the ability to share, reuse, mash up and comment creates a whole different level of value.

BTW, Zuckerberg reminded me of a young Bill Gates in looks, mannerisms and the clarity with which he sees complex issues. Like Gates, he has an uncanny ability to find a logical path to a decision or point of view. It will be interesting to watch his star rise.

<strong>4. Simulations Are A Powerful Incentive To Engage</strong>. Did you know that 320 million people have played a <a href=”https://www.zynga.com/”>Zynga</a> game and that the company now employs 1,300 people? Have you ever even heard of Zynga? If you’re a B2B marketer, you probably haven’t, but I’ll bet your kids have. <a href=”https://www.farmville.com/”>Farmville</a> is a mega-hit on Facebook and Zynga has nine other social gaming applications based on classic games like poker and Battleship. <a href=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81F1qSOq3cs&amp;p=2737D508F656CCF8″>Founder Mark Pincus said the company has peak usage of more than three million concurrent users</a>. Yow.

Why should you care? Because simulation games are not only a great way to learn but also an excellent tool for modeling business processes. Consider <a href=”https://www.cisco.com/web/solutions/sp/myplannet/index.html”>Cisco’s myPlanNet</a>, a game that challenges players to build a business as the CEO of an Internet service provider. It has racked up <a href=”https://www.facebook.com/pages/Cisco-myPlanNet/153538644090″>more than 75,000 Facebook</a> fans and 50,000 downloads for what is essentially a B2B training and marketing tool. Check out the wall posts on Facebook. It’s not the usual gaming trash talk. Players are learning how the Internet works.

IBM recently released <a href=”https://www-01.ibm.com/software/solutions/soa/innov8/cityone/index.html”>CityOne</a>, a game that simulates sustainable urban planning.  These are tools that put real problem-solving scenarios in a gaming context and they are having enormous success. Can a sim fit in with your digital marketing plan?

<strong><a href=”https://farm5.static.flickr.com/4131/5181217508_9e1c9f2be7.jpg”><img class=”alignleft” style=”margin-left: 9px; margin-right: 9px;” title=”Steven Berlin Johnson at Web 2.0 Summit” src=”https://farm5.static.flickr.com/4131/5181217508_9e1c9f2be7.jpg” alt=”Steven Berlin Johnson at Web 2.0 Summit” width=”250″ /></a>5. Everything on the Web. </strong><a href=”https://stevenberlinjohnson.typepad.com/about.html”>Steven Berlin Johnson</a> gave a <a href=”https://www.web2summit.com/web2010/public/schedule/detail/15397″>brief but stimulating talk</a> about the rate of change in publishing. “The the first time in 20 years, the link and the URL are losing market share,” he said, noting that there is no standardized way to link to the page of a digital book.

Johnson proposed an idea he called “Web redundancy:” Every digital content asset should have a corresponding linkable version. “Unless [publishers] embrace Web redundancy as a strategy, all those extraordinary words will continue to live in the remote continents of the unlinkable,” he said.

I was reminded of all the press releases I continue to receive by e-mail that have no online corollaries. This is old-media thinking. Why ask the reporter to rewrite your words when it’s simpler to link to them? Why forego the search engine optimization benefits of an inbound referral, especially when tweets and links are the means by which people increasingly publish information?

This year’s Web 2.0 Summit was streamed in its entirety. The conference, which is in its seventh year, is a great way to tap into the trends that will define the next 12 months. If you can’t fork over the $4,200 (and thanks to John Battelle and my friends at Procter &amp; Gamble, I didn’t have to), it’s worth tuning in to <a href=”https://www.youtube.com/user/OreillyMedia”>the YouTube archive</a> or watching the streamed coverage from next year’s event.

Oracle’s Updated Social Media Policy

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Dated 11/22/10. Most hyperlinks have been removed because they refer to pages behind Oracle’s firewall. This is a well-crafted policy.

The Oracle Social Media Participation Policy applies to

  • All blogs, wikis, forums, and social networks hosted or sponsored by Oracle (e.g., blogs.oracle.com, wiki.oracle.com, mix.oracle.com, forums.oracle.com).
  • Your personal blogs that contain postings about Oracle’s business, products, employees, customers, partners, or competitors.
  • Your postings about Oracle’s business, products, employees, customers, partners, or competitors on external blogs, wikis, discussion forums, micro-blogs (e.g., Twitter, social networking sites).
  • Your participation in any video related to Oracle’s business, products, employees, customers, partners, or competitors; whether you create a video to post or link to on your blog, you contribute content for a video, or you appear in a video created either by another Oracle employee or by a third party.
  • Your participation in any virtual world activities related to Oracle’s business, products, employees, customers, partners, or competitors.

Since social media activities can impact your ability to do your job and Oracle’s business interests, it is extremely important to follow the requirements set forth below.

REQUIREMENTS

This section describes the requirements that are most relevant to Oracle employees participating in social media of various kinds (Oracle hosted and external).

Follow the Code

The Oracle Code of Ethics and Business Conduct and Oracle’s corporate policies–including the Acceptable Use Policy, Information Protection Policy, and Copyright Compliance Policy–apply to your online conduct (blogging or other online activities) just as much as they apply to your offline behavior. Make sure you’re familiar with them.

Make Sure Your Management Approves

Social media activities must not interfere with your workor productivity at Oracle, and your personal activities should take place outside of work. Your current management must approve your activities related to Oracle’s business. In addition, if you are VP-level or above, make sure to contact Carol Sato (carol.sato@oracle.com) of Oracle‘s Corporate Communications team to discuss work related blogs. Please be aware that Oracle may choose to restrict social media activities that relate to your employment or Oracle’s business.

Don’t Misuse Oracle Resources

Don’t use company resources to set-up your own blogging environment, even if you are blogging about matters related to Oracle. Oracle resources, including servers, may be used solely in connection with formally authorized blogging environments that have been established following consultation with Global IT, Global Information Security, Legal, and Oracle Brand and Creative. Please contact blogs_us@oracle.com if you have questions regarding setting-up authorized blogging environments.

Protect Confidential Information

You may not use your blog, micro-blog or other social media to disclose Oracle’s confidential information. This includes nonpublic financial information such as future revenue, earnings, and other financial forecasts, and anything related to Oracle strategy, sales, products, security, policy, management, operating units, and potential acquisitions, that have not been made public.

Protecting the confidential information of our employees, customers, partners, and suppliers is also important. Do not mention them, including Oracle executives, in social media without their permission, and make sure you don’t disclose items such as sensitive personal information of others or details related to Oracle’s business with its customers. Third party social media services use servers that are outside of Oracle’s control and may pose a security risk. Don’t use these services to conduct internal Oracle business.

In addition, you may not publish (nor should you possess) our competitors’ proprietary or confidential information. You may make observations about competitors’ products and activities if your observations are accurate and based on publicly available information. Take care not to disparage or denigrate competitors.

Don’t Comment on Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) Activity

You must not comment publicly on Oracle’s or our competitors’ M&A activity, including potential and pending acquisitions. This applies to potential acquisitions regardless of their status–in diligence, announced but not closed, integration plans for acquired companies, etc. Any commentary on what a transaction or potential transaction may mean to Oracle, positive, negative or neutral can be problematic.

Don’t Discuss Future Offerings

Don’t discuss product plans, upgrades or future product releases. Because of potential revenue recognition issues, it is especially important that we do not give the impression to customers or potential customers that a given product upgrade will include specific features that will be incorporated into the product within a specific time frame. See Revenue Recognition Guidelines. Any exceptions must be approved by senior management, Legal, and Revenue Recognition.

Refrain from Objectionable or Inflammatory Posts

Do not post anything that is false, misleading, obscene, defamatory, profane, discriminatory, libelous, threatening, harassing, abusive, hateful, or embarrassing to another person orentity. Make sure to respect others’ privacy. Third party Websites and blogs that you link to must meet our standards of propriety. Be aware that false or defamatory statements or the publication of an individual’s private details could result in legal liability for Oracle and you.

Don’t Speak for Oracle

Remember that you are not an official spokesperson for Oracle. Make it clear that your opinions are your own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the corporation. See Policy Regarding Communications with Press and Analysts.

For this reason, Oracle employees with personal blogs that discuss Oracle’s business, products, employees, customers, partners, or competitors should include the following disclaimer in a visually prominent place on their blog:

The views expressed on this [blog; Website] are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle.

Similarly, if you appear in a video, you should preface your comments by making it clear that you are not an Oracle spokesperson and your opinion doesn’t necessarily reflect Oracle’s.

No Legal Commentary

Stay away from discussing items of a legal nature. For example, employees must not post comments related to legal documents such as Oracle’s software license agreements.

Don’t Post Anonymously

While you are not an official spokesperson, your status as an Oracle employee may still be relevant to the subject matter. You should identify yourself as an employee if failing to do so could be misleading to readers or viewers. Employees should not engage in covert advocacy for Oracle. Whenever you are blogging about Oracle-related topics or providing feedback relevant to Oracle to other blogs or forums, identify yourself as an Oracle employee.

Respect Copyrights

You must recognize and respect others’ intellectual property rights, including copyrights. Whilecertain limited use of third-party materials (for example, use of a short quotation that you are providing comment on) may not always require approval from the copyright owner, it is still advisable to get the owner’s permission whenever you use third-party materials. Never use more than a short excerpt from someone else’s work, and make sure to credit and, if possible, link to the original source.

Use Video Responsibly

Remember that you may be viewed as endorsing any Web video (whether hosted by YouTube or elsewhere) or other content you link to from your blog or posting, whether created by you, by other Oracle employees, or by third parties, and the Social Media Participation Policy applies to this content. Also, recognize that video is an area in which you need to be particularly sensitive to others’ copyright rights. You generally cannot include third party content such as film clips or songs in your video without obtaining the owner’s permission.

Stick to Oracle Topics on Oracle-Sponsored Blogs

Blogs that are hosted or run by Oracle should focus on topics that are related to Oracle’s business. Take care to avoid subject areas that are likely to be controversial, such as politics and religion.

Blogging Best Practices

A “New Media Handbook for Bloggers” is available as a separate document for employees interested in establishing a blog. Employees who want to start a blog on sites that are sponsored by Oracle need to read this document and submit a request as specified in the New Media Handbook for Bloggers.

Reporting Misconduct

While Oracle has no obligation to monitor your participation in social media activities related to Oracle’s business, products, employees, customers, partners, or competitors, we reserve the right to do so. We do count on our employees to help us make sure that the Social Media Participation Policy is being followed. Please report possible misconduct (copyright violations, harassment, misstatements, et al.) to the Oracle Compliance and Ethics Helpline or, for possible copyright violations, to copyright_us@oracle.com.

Age of the Tablet Has Begun

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iPad users at Web 2.0 SummitI tend to be a skeptic about new technology, probably a consequence of 25 years of seeing cool demos of products that never worked very well in real life. I tend to be a late adopter, too. I only got on the smart phone bandwagon a year ago after Apple had already shipped 100 million of them. I was also blasé about the iPad when it was announced in January. In my only tweet on the subject, I called it a “big iPhone.”

But after spending three days at a conference in San Francisco this week watching and talking to iPad users, I’m now convinced that tablets will all but displace laptops within the next few years. In short, tablets are built for what people want to do with a portable device, while laptops are essentially scaled-down desktop PCs. We’ve carried them for 20 years because they were what we thought portable computers should be. Now we know better.

By “tablet,” I don’t mean “iPad.” Samsung just released the first Android tablet and we can expect many more to follow. We can also expect special-purpose devices like the Amazon Kindle to become more feature-rich over time. The difference between these devices and PCs is that they are designed specifically with the needs of the mobile user in mind. Laptops and the early versions of Windows tablets (the machines have been around for a decade), never were.

Travel-Ready

As I sat in the outlet-deprived seats at the Web 2.0 Summit this week, I scanned the rows of iPad owners with envy. My Toshiba laptop gets less than two hours of battery life on its stingiest setting. It takes three minutes to start and its eight-pound mass is awkward, hot and uncomfortable.

In contrast, the iPad’s battery life is conservatively rated at 10 hours. It starts in seconds and can easily be held with one hand or cradled in the nook of your arm. Apps start and switched quickly. It can be flipped vertically for book reading or horizontally for Web browsing. People say reading books and periodicals with Kindle and Nook apps on the iPad is nearly as good as reading on a Kindle or a Nook.

There has been no innovation in laptops in more than a decade. Hardware makers have mainly crammed their devices full of storage and memory to the point of excess. My laptop has 300GB of disk storage. What the heck am I going to do with that?

Tablets use fast, lightweight flash storage, which is why they start so quickly. Sure, there’s a lot less capacity, but how much do you really need for a couple of days on the road? I don’t have to carry all nine seasons of “24” in my briefcase.

The primary advantage laptops is the keyboard, and even iPad fanatics will tell you that typing on a screen is neither as fast nor as tactile as using a keyboard. However, external wireless keyboards and voice recognition will quickly resolve tablets’ shortcomings in these areas.

A decade from now, a new generation of youngsters will think it funny to hear daddy tell about how he used to skulk around airports looking for power outlets. We’ll probably think it’s pretty funny, too.

Oppenheimer & Co. forecast this week that shipments of tablets will soar grow from 15 million units this year to more than 115 million in 2014. Oppenheimer knows what I learned in San Francisco this week. The laptop has had a long a fruitful run, but it’s time for that 1980s technology to wind down. There’s a new king in town.

My Favorite Productivity Apps – Multimedia & Web

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Continuing on my post from two weeks ago about my favorite PC productivity tools, here’s another list of goodies. Most are free, all are bargains.

Photo/video

We are all our own artists and layout editors these days, and with my crummy graphic design skills, I need all the help I can get.

I use a lot of video in presentations, and have always gotten good performance from the free Foxreal YouTube FLV Downloader. It works with a lot more sites than just YouTube and cleanly downloads Flash video. I then convert the downloads to a format that PowerPoint can understand, such as WMV, using the terrific iWisoft Free Video Converter. You used to have to pay 50 bucks for this kind of functionality. Another good option for downloading videos in the Firefox browser is the DownloadHelper plug-in.

A very cool option I’ve recently discovered is CacheViewer. You can use it to download a video when all other means fail. It works by retrieving the stored video from your memory cache. It doesn’t always find what you’re looking for, but it’s a good tool of last resort. Just be aware that there are often copyright restrictions on these works that limit what you can do with them.

For video editing, call me simple, but Windows Live Movie Maker does a pretty good job of meeting my very basic needs.

I keep my photo library in Picasa, which has terrific features for organizing and tagging images. Its “I Feel Lucky” option instantly fixes lighting and contrast problems. You can even create collages like the one I use for my Twitter page background.

For photo editing, though, I like Zoner PhotoStudio. It’s fast and it includes editing features that I haven’t seen anywhere outside of PhotoShop. Most people don’t touch more than 10% of the features of Photoshop, anyway. What a waste. They could get Zoner for free.

Zoner Photo Studio screen shot

For a cheap and easy bit of artwork, a screen grab often suffices. Snagit is a great tool for this purpose, but it costs $50. A free alternative that has nearly as many features is PicPick. It’s worth having for the image editor alone, which is kind of Windows Paint on steroids.

Audio

I’ve recorded several hundred podcasts over the last five years and have settled on a few basic tools that always work. I record phone calls using Skype and MX Skype Recorder. There are cheaper options than MX, but this $15 utility has one nice feature that I haven’t found anywhere else: it records both sides of the conversation on separate tracks in the high-quality WAV format. That’s a godsend when you are piecing together a conversation and want to eliminate such irritations as background noise from one track.

For sound editing, I haven’t found better than the popular open-source Audacity. It does nearly everything I need it to do, and where it doesn’t, I use Doug Kaye’s terrific Levelator to automagically normalize sound levels. I’ll also put in a plug for ClickRepair, a tool written by a retired Australian IT manager ostensibly to restore old LP recordings. It’s bailed me out more than once when mysterious noises infected my podcast recordings. It has saved me the $40 license fee many times over.

Audacity screen shot

Internet

I consult lots of websites on a regular basis, of course, but there are a few that have special utility to my daily work style. Tweetdeck for Twitter is one. Another is Diigo, a social bookmarking service, I discovered about three years ago that has been my favorite ever since. Like Delicious, Diigo makes it easy to bookmark a website with one click. It’s got a couple of very useful features that Delicious doesn’t have however. You can highlight and annotate pages and choose to have those comments to appear only to you or to everyone who has the Diigo plug-in (see below). You can also take a snapshot (essentially a cached image) of a page, which is useful for content that goes behind firewalls after a few days. The site has recently added the capability to bookmark images, too, although that feature is limited in the free edition.

Page annotated in Diigo

Another useful service that I initially dismissed when I saw a year ago is dlvr.it, an RSS syndication service.  Dlvr.it monitors any RSS feed you specify and automatically posts items to social media accounts such as Twitter and Facebook. I have dlvr.it monitoring all of my blogs as well as several delicious and Diigo feeds. When Dana or I post a new entry on Joy of Geocaching, for example, the headline and link automatically post to the Joy of Geocaching twitter account and then my personal Twitter account automatically retweets @joyofgeocaching. You can also schedule and gate the number of messages that go out at any given time, attach tracking codes and monitor results.

I also have all my most important feeds organized into Google Reader. You really come to appreciate RSS readers when you have a lot of topics to monitor. For one project I’m working on now, I need to track activity on nearly 200 blogs and news sites according to different topics they cover. Reader saves hours weekly compared to “surfing.” You can also export categories of feeds and display them on a website, as I do with the “Media Sites” list in the right-hand sidebar on Newspaper Death Watch. That list is easily generated by Google Reader, and it changes whenever the feed list changes.

My Favorite Productivity Apps – Part One

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When I look back at my own output over the last four years – four books, 190 articles, nearly 1,000 blog entries, 300 podcasts, more than 50 webcasts and a busy speaking/training schedule – I marvel at the role that cheap and free technology has played in making me more productive.

A lot of our productivity used to be robbed by little things: finding stuff, organizing it and getting it into a useful form. Thanks to new tools, much of that is now automated.

I constantly experiment with new software, and over the years I’ve come to rely upon a handful of stalwarts that I use every day. Over the next couple of issues, I’ll run down the list and tell you why I value these tools. I also hope you’ll share your favorites as comments so we can all become more productive. All of these run on Windows (I had a Mac for a couple of years but just couldn’t make the mental shift) and most are free. None cost more than $50.

The Desktop Basics

Dragon NaturallySpeaking – I’ve praised this speech recognition program so frequently that it deserves a place in the Gillin Hall of Fame by now. Simply stated, I write at least twice as much with Dragon as without it. I also believe Dragon has made me a better writer by enabling my work to have a more conversational tone. The retail price is $200, but you can find perfectly good older versions for as little as $30 online. Even at the higher price, it’s a good value.

Google Office – Despite Gmail’s erratic performance, the flexibility of web-based mail can’t be beat. I can access and search my entire mail archive from any computer or from my Android phone. Google continually innovates on this platform. One of my favorite new features is the ability to create a Google document directly from an e-mail. The keyboard shortcuts save a load of time. I just wish they’d create one that’s analogous to Word’s <Ctrl-K>.

For collaboration, Google Docs is a godsend. My last two books have been written with co-authors, and Docs enabled us to share and edit each other’s work without the nightmare of version control. Feature-wise, the apps don’t hold a candle to Microsoft Office, but the collaborative convenience is often worth the trade-off. Microsoft’s Office Web Apps are supposed to integrate better with Office, but I haven’t put them through their paces yet.

Tungle –  This scheduling application, which debuted at South by Southwest early this year, makes it easy for people to suggest meeting times and book appointments without an endless game of e-mail volleyball. You can click a link in my signature line and book a meeting at your convenience. Integrates well with popular calendars.

Notepad++ – I wrote about this little open source beauty back in August. Notepad++ is a text editor for programmers, and it is blisteringly fast at crunching through large volumes of text. Our WYSIWYG world plays havoc with Web content management systems, which choke on each other’s formatting commands. I can dump HTML code into Notepad ++ and clean it up with a few quick search-and-replace operations. When I was slammed by a WordPress virus earlier this year, I used Notepad++ to purge hundreds of files of rogue code in a few seconds.

AVG Free – I’ve tried a lot of antimalware utilities, but I keep coming back to this unobtrusive yet effective security suite. I haven’t had a problem with computer security in three years (other than on my websites, which are a completely different story), and that’s what counts.

7-Zip – When PKWare began charging for WinZip a few years ago, I switched to this open source file compression utility. It supports most of the popular formats as well as its own hi density algorithm. The 256-bit encryption is a plus when you want to keep your work from prying eyes.

Roboform login screenRoboform – I paid the $30 for this password manager several years ago, so I haven’t experimented with the crop of new entrants. These tools store your passwords, personal contact information and bank/credit card data in one place, making it easy to log into websites and to fill out online registration forms. Here’s a link to some alternatives, including open source tools.

PDF-XChange Lite – I’m forgetful, so I like to highlight and annotate documents when they’re in front of me.  Adobe’s $200 Acrobat X is overkill for my needs. PDF-XChange Lite makes it easy to mark up PDFs so I can remember later why I kept them.

FileZilla – When you run a lot of websites (I tend five actively) you need to be This is an open source FTP program that is fast and easy to use. I transfer a lot of large audio and video files, and FileZilla handles the task smoothly in the background.

Next issue, I’ll look at some essential multimedia tools as well as Web-based utilities. Let me also put in a plug for my podcast partner David Strom, who is a much savvier technologist than I, and whose reviews and recommendations are a goldmine of wisdom.

Are Exclusives a Good Idea? In a Word: No

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Should you give exclusives to journalists? My advice on this has always been unequivocal: No. Exclusives are a bad deal for you in the long-term and make no difference to the audience you’re trying to reach.

This question came up last night during a panel sponsored by the New England Venture Network on which I participated along with several business journalists. I broke with my colleagues on this question, but I firmly believe that exclusives are a bad idea.

Here’s my thinking: Journalists are a competitive bunch and they care deeply about who gets information first. However, no one else does. These days information travels so quickly that its source immediately becomes lost. Outside of a few big stories – such as TMZ’s scoop on the death of Michael Jackson — the public doesn’t remember where a story originated.

Journalists remember, however, and they tend to hold grudges against sources who favor their competition. Public relations is a relationship game. It’s been many years since I pounded a beat, yet I still remember a few PR people who gave stories to my competition. It’s safe to say that I never treated those people quite the same again. I’m not proud of that fact, but the reality is that it’s difficult to be chummy with someone whom you believe has slapped you in the face.

There are isolated incidents when an exclusive might work out. One of the audience members last night brought up a recent case in which her company had given The New York Times a scoop on a patent her startup company was about to receive. The story was picked up by many other outlets and she was satisfied with the results. I suppose if The New York Times is willing to promise you prominent coverage, an exclusive may be merited. But what if the story had turned up as a short squib in a “Miscellany” column or been cut by an editor? The PR person would have angered competitors and had little to show for it.

If you’re going to play the exclusive game, at least try to make it a win-win proposition. Perhaps you can offer one reporter a first interview with a customer or your CEO and give another a scoop on pricing or a particular new feature. Or you can promise the reporters you snubbed a first shot at your next big announcement.

In general, though, exclusives make one friend at the expense of making a lot of enemies. I can’t believe they are a good thing for your business in the long term.

Social CRM: Curb Your Enthusiasm

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If you’re a marketer in a medium-to large-sized B2B company, you’re almost certainly using customer relationship management (CRM) software to track your customers and prospects. And if you’re a CRM user, you’re almost certainly hearing about Social CRM, the hottest new craze in that 20-year-old field. I encourage you to restrain your enthusiasm.

CRM is a well-established discipline that presumes that the more information we can capture about a customer’s interactions with our company, the better we can deliver products and services that the person wants to buy. It seems only natural that online social interactions should be part of this profile. Vendors of CRM services, who are always looking for differentiation points in that crowded market, have lately been talking up this social dimension as a kind of CRM 2.0.

The problem is that most of their customers are still struggling to get CRM 1.0 right. CRM is hard to do well because A) everyone who interacts with the customer must be committed to documenting every touch point; and B) the company must have the analytical chops to know what to do with the data it collects. Strategy changes, turnover, layoffs and the like make the first step difficult enough, and we all know how analytically challenged sales managers can be.

Social CRM introduces potentially enormous new complexity to the process. Social maps – or diagrams of relationships across social platforms – sound good in theory, but are nearly impossible to create on a broad scale. What’s more, I question how much social interactions have to do with decision-making in many cases.

For example, I have 725 friends on Facebook, nearly 1,000 connections on LinkedIn, and almost 7,500 Twitter followers. I know most of these people little or not at all, a result of my admittedly promiscuous approach to accepting friend requests. Trying to map these relationships in any meaningful way would be nearly impossible. What’s more, it would be pointless. The fact that I’m connected to people has little to do with their influence over my decisions. Like most people, I keep my network of truly trusted advisers small and communicate with them largely outside of the public eye. There is no way that social profiling would reveal which relationships really matter.

I also often seek advice from people who aren’t part of my social network. For example, when I consult TripAdvisor to make a hotel reservation or Google Maps to find a restaurant, I put faith in the advice of total strangers. No social map is going to unearth these relationships. When my iPod went on the fritz this week, I became briefly involved in communities that provide diagnosis and repair advice, but it’s unlikely I’ll ever visit those places again. In fact, I routinely seek the advice of experts outside of my social circle when I have important decisions to make.

Even if you were able to identify the relationships that matter, I’m not sure customers are entirely comfortable with that idea. A few years ago, the marketing industry became enamored with the concept of “one-to-one marketing,” which was about building customer profiles that were so detailed that marketers could literally respond to individual needs.

I don’t know about you, but I find that whole idea a little unsettling. If someone were to cold-call me to follow up on a stray comment I made on Twitter, I would be as likely to hang up as to ask for a proposal. Many of us now live in public to a degree that was unimaginable a few years ago, but that doesn’t mean that we want our activities to be used as a basis for commerce. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said that this “creepiness factor” is an important reason why Google doesn’t do more with the behavioral data it collects.

I do believe that some of the core concepts of social CRM are valid. For example, an automotive dealer should be able to generate sales by tracking public comments from nearby consumers who are looking to buy a car. A contact within a person’s social circle may be valuable in reaching that person (that’s just good prospecting). A customer’s Twitter handle and tweet stream should also be monitored to look for opportunities or signs of dissatisfaction.

It’s incumbent on all companies these days to track comments from customers that might indicate an opportunity or a problem. Conversation monitoring is good business practice. But it’s not 2.0 anything.

10 Tips For Moderating a Great Panel

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Panelists at YaltaThis topic is a little different from my usual fare. It’s about moderating panels, a function that many of us are called upon to perform at events from time to time. When these sessions go badly, it’s usually because the moderator either hasn’t prepared the speakers or fails to stay in control.

A lot of people treat panel moderation as a chore, but I enjoy it enough to have done it at least 50 times over the last 15 years. The reward of a successful panel is seeing the audience interact both during and after the event, and hearing that all your panelists enjoyed the experience.

Here are some tactics I’ve learned to make a panel session successful and memorable. Please embellish these tips with your own comments.

Before the Event

1. Know your place. Moderating a panel is akin to conducting an orchestra. Like conductors, good moderators do their work in advance to bring out the best performance from the speakers. I say “performance” because that’s what a panel really is. Every participant demonstrates his or her expertise at the appropriate time without overwhelming the ensemble. Improvisation is encouraged but kept within limits. Musicians will tell you that good symphony orchestras actually improvise a lot, but they only do so when everyone knows the time is right. A panel is no different.

2. Convene a pre-event meeting. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of this preparatory session. A conference call enables all the panel members to get comfortable with each other. It also establishes the ground rules that everyone must live by. Keep the call brief – a half hour if you can manage it – and cover these key points:

  • Restate the topic and modify it if necessary;
  • Define the audience;
  • Describe what the session will and won’t cover (don’t forget the won’t);
  • Go over the format: How much time is available? Are prepared presentations permitted? How long can each panelist speak? How will audience questions be handled?
  • Summarize questions you plan to ask. Note that those questions may change based upon the flow of the event;
  • Ask the panelists if there are any questions they want you to ask. Take these as suggestions, not requirements;
  • Confirm a time to meet just before the event to go over last-minute issues.

Take notes during this meeting and send them to all panelists, whether they attended or not. Minimize surprises on stage.

On Site

3. Spend a few minutes one-on-one with each speaker before the event. This is your chance to establish familiarity, answer last-minute questions and learn something that may be useful during the panel. Ask what your speakers have been doing lately in the topic area. I often get anecdotes from these three-minute discussions that I can use in introductions.

4. Be in control. You are the conductor, the ringmaster and the emcee. Your job is to control the flow of the session. If you piss off one of your speakers in the process, that’s okay, as long as you’re fair to everyone. It doesn’t matter how rich or famous your panelists are; there should be no question that you are the boss.

5. Keep introductions brief. Experienced speakers know the discomfort of sitting to the side while a person they’ve never met reads a 500-word introduction in a monotone. Your audience deserves better. Three sentences, that’s it. And don’t read from the bio; instead, paraphrase the bio and include a personal comment if you can. in general, reading from a podium is a bad idea.

6. Be a time Nazi. Time is the most precious resource you’ve got on stage, and when you squander it by starting late or letting participants waste it, you do a disservice to everyone. I personally prefer to forego opening statements whenever possible. If you have to use them, I limit remarks to three-to-five minutes and don’t let responses to questions run over 90 seconds. You can set whatever limits you want as long as you communicate them in advance and enforce them on stage.

What to do about speakers who don’t listen to you? I start by shooting them a glance when their time is almost up. If they keep going past the cutoff point, I stand and walk purposefully toward them. If they still don’t get the message, I interrupt at the first opportunity with a good-humored comment and take back the stage.

Be fair to everyone. If you let one person run over, you penalize everyone else. You can even make a game of it. I was once asked to moderate a Power Panel at Comdex during its heyday. I had five panelists and a controversial topic that would stir up a good deal of discussion. I told the speakers in advance that I was going to bring a bell and gong them if they went over time. I did that and even staged a fake wrestling match for the mike with one passionate speaker. The audience and the panelists enjoyed the theatrics and the session was a success.

7. Maintain constant eye contact with your panel. Your speakers should be able to tell you with a glance that they want to address a question or follow up on someone else’s comments. Don’t be afraid to call on them directly. Bridge the discussion whenever you can. Look for opportunities to create a segue, such as “Sarah, John just said we should do X. Do you agree?”

8. Go off script. Never stick to a prepared set of talking points or questions if a good conversation is developing along other lines. Make sure your panelists know in advance that you retain the right to go off script. Keep a notepad in front of you at all times and jot down points to bring up later when the time is right. It’s great when you can say, “Michael, you said a few minutes ago that that we should do Y. In light of what Stephanie just said, do you still believe that?”

9. Be ruthlessly fair. Group discussions tend to be quickly dominated by a few strong personalities. Your role is to equalize. If one or two panelists start hogging the microphone, direct questions to others for a while. Remember that not everyone has to answer every question. My rule of thumb is to permit two panelists to speak unless others indicate they want to get in.

10. Control the audience. We’ve all attended question-and-answer sessions at which an audience member stood up and delivered a sermon or diatribe disguised as a question. I have little patience for this. When a question exceeds 30 seconds in length, I may interject with, “Get to the question, please,” or the somewhat more acerbic “Is there a question in here?” People who abuse Q&A sessions are rude. You sometimes have to be rude right back to get them to restore order.

If some of these tactics sound a little heavy-handed, I don’t apologize for them. Good panels really are like orchestral performances: They work best when everyone contributes to making each other look their best. Your satisfaction is to see smiles on the faces of your panelists and your audience as the session ends and to have people walk up and tell you, “That was great!”

I’m Just a Sucker for Believe It or Not!

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I have been a hopeless Believe It or Not! addict since the age of 10. I’m so glad to see they’re keeping up with the times. I couldn’t find a static version of this e-mail pitch, so thought I’d share. pg
Technomazing! Unbelievable technology tales are featured in the new book from Ripley’s Believe It or Not! called Enter If You Dare! The book is an annual collection of unusual, unbelievable and amazing stories from around the world.

Enter If You DareSome of the book’s incredible tales of science and technology:

  • Eye Tech – pg. 222: Filmmaker Rob Spence from Toronto, Canada, has developed a camera to replace the eye that he lost as a child. Rob began working with engineer Kostos Grammatis to create the “Eyeborg,” and is now the proud owner of a wireless bionic eye made with one of the smallest digital cameras in the world, which is capable of recording and transmitting video directly from his eye socket.

Onion Power – pg. 223: To save electricity, some people have started powering up their MP3 players with onions. How? Soak it in an energy drink and then stick a USB cable into it – and by doing that they can charge their iPod for an hour.

  • Eye TechLiquid Vision – pg. 223: Professor Josh Silver of England’s Oxford University has invented inexpensive, fluid-filled eyeglasses that can be adjusted to anyone’s vision needs. The lenses contain circular sacs filled with fluid that are connected to a small syringe to increase or reduce the amount of fluid, thus altering the power of the lens.
  • Mechanical Insect – pg. 223: Scientists at Japan’s Tokyo University are creating a range of insect-machine hybrids by rebuilding their brains and programming them to carry out specific tasks. Already they have rewritten the brain circuit of a male Silkmoth to react to light instead of odor.
  • Steel Velcro – pg. 225: German scientists have developed a steel version of Velcro that is strong enough to support buildings. Using the same hook-and-loop fastening system as Velcro, Metaklett can bear loads of around 3.6 tons per sq ft (35 tonnes per sq m) at temperatures as high as 1,472°F (800°C).
  • Spy Tooth – pg. 226: The U.K.’s James Auger has devised a new concept in secret communication- an audio tooth implant. A surgeon implants a device into your tooth, the data is retrieved from a cell phone, radio or computer and the vibration resonates through your jawbone to you inner earbone, meaning that only you can hear the information.
  • Bionic Fingers – pg. 226: A company from Scotland has invented bionic fingers, which enable people with missing digits to pick up a glass, hold cutlery and even write. The $75,000-fingers are directly controlled by the brain and can write and grip, thanks to a special sensor that allows them to detect when they have closed around an object.
  • Warning Suit – pg. 229: To make people aware of the threat of skin cancer, a Canadian company has designed a two-piece bathing suit that changes color to warn women when the sun’s rays are too strong. The bikini is held together with pale decorative beads that turn dark purple if the UV rays reach dangerous levels.
  • Fatal Sting – pg. 228: Microscopic nanobees, made from perfluorocarbon – a material made from artificial blood – have been used by scientists at a university in St. Louis, Missouri, to kill cancer tumors by stinging them.

  • Emotional Robot – pg. 223: Scientists at Waseda University in Japan have developed a robot that can express seven different human emotions. The Emotional Humanoid Robot, named Kobian, uses motors to move its lips, eyelids and eyebrows into various positions and can also strike a range of poses to back up its expressions.

  • Robot Teacher – pg. 223: Children at a school in Tokyo, Japan, had a new teacher in 2009 – a robot called Saya. Beneath a humanlike face, Saya has a system of 18 motors that work like muscles to give her face expressions including surprise, fear, anger, happiness and sadness. She has a vocabulary of 700 words, has the ability to speak in any language and is programmed to respond to words and questions.

  • Illuminated Dress – pg. 222: British fashion student George Davis has designed a dress that lights up when the wearer’s cell phone rings. The right shoulder of the dress, which is connected to the phone by wireless technology, has translucent white scales that move and light up.

Please let me know if you would like to pursue any stories in the book or a story on the book itself.  Images are available, as well as interviews with people from Ripley’s or people featured in the book.

The book cover, as well as several pages and individual images, can be downloaded at https://www.ripleybooks.com/newsroom.