Gareth Thomas, who head up the interactive division at Brands2Life, a PR agency based in London, sent along this picture and says, “Thought you may find the pic amusing. Think I’ve found your youngest reader! (It’s my daughter Jessica)”

Thanks so much for the snap and the smile, Gareth. Now can you ask Jessica to write an Amazon review? 🙂

This Sunday, I’ll be a guest on The Advertising Show, America’s only globally distributed weekly program focusing on advertising, media, branding and marketing. I’ll be interviewed on a half hour segment about my book, The New Influencers. The Advertising Show is sponsored by Advertising Age Magazine. You can listen to a live webcast of the interview starting at 5 p.m. E.T (2 p.m. Pacific Time). The show will also be archived and available directly here beginning Monday, August 20th.

Just came across this post by Maryam Scoble: Ten Ways To Write A Killer Blog. It’s an exceptionally good (and concise) compilation of tips for effective blogging. Recommended reading.

ITtoolbox and adverting agency PJA published the results of a survey that they say demonstrates that IT professionals spend more time on social media sites than reading traditional trade publications and trust the information they find there more than any other published source.

The results serve ITToolbox’s interests and the .5% response rate makes them statistically irrelevant; still, the findings about trust are probably valid. IT managers have always said they trust each other more than any other source, probably because the other sources haven’t done a very good job of being all that reliable.
Publish
I question the survey’s findings that executive decision-makers spend 3.5 hours a week on social media sites, but I have no doubt that the people who work further down in the organizations spend at least that much time. After all, Slashdot.org was probably the earliest successful group blog. It was Digg.com before there was a Digg.com.

Episode 12 of Tech PR War Stories – the podcast for PR people that I co-produce with David Strom – is all about selling to CIOs. It’s kind of a pet peeve of mine. I’ve been spending a lot of time with CIOs recently and over the years. I’ve observed that they care a lot less about products and vendors that they do about issues like business alignment, governance and skills retention. I have some observations to share about how they look at vendors.

David actually spent some time working in large IT organizations. We both agree on a few things: CIOs look for trusted partnerships more than products; they rely on their peers and staff for advice on what to buy; and the best route to the CIO’s office is up from the lower levels in the organization. In other words: stop focusing your pitch solely on CIOs because that’s a lousy way to actually reach them!

Click here to read the blog entry and listen to the podcast.

Business 2.0 magazine has a great feature on Kevin Ham, the $300 million master of Web domains. Ham has parlayed users’ foul-ups and ignorance about how to use the Internet into a fortune. Try this: type “www.newyorktimes.cm” (not .com) into your browser. You’ll come to a website that has lots of come-ons for publications. That’s the work of Kevin Ham, who has not only snapped up thousands of erroneous URLs typed by fumble-fingered users but who has cut an ingenious deal with the poor African country of Cameroon – which owns the “.cm” domain – to intercept traffic intended for the big-brand websites.

I had lost track of the value of domains after “business.com” sold for $1 million in the late 90s. This article shows that the domain trade is alive and well and becoming very sophisticated. No one is more sophisticated about it than Kevin Ham. This is an excellent profile of someone who’s making money by working under the Internet covers. You can argue about whether his work is contributing in any meaningful way to the economy or furthering the advance of human knowledge, but what you can’t argue about is whether Kevin Ham is succeeding. He’s filthy rich.

Having worked independently for 18 months now, I thought I’d write about some of the technology tools I’ve discovered to make my life easier and my work more efficient. In this installment, I’ll tell how I manage my reading.

Like a lot of people, I need to do a lot of reading to keep current. Nearly all of my reading is online these days, and I tend to get to it in snatches of a half hour or so, usually early in the morning or late at night.

The constant stream of newsletters and RSS updates that cross my desktop don’t live by my schedule, though, so I rely on three tools to help me organize content and find it when I need it. They are Google Desktop, del.icio.us and Firefox, and I wouldn’t want to be without them.

Google Desktop is an incredibly powerful product that indexes nearly every word on your computer. With it, I can find files by keyword with almost instantaneous speed. The shortcut to bring up the search box is hitting the Control key twice. That brings up a small Ajax applet that delivers results as you type, which is much faster than using the full-page Web interface.

But I find the hidden value of Google Desktop is the information it indexes in hidden and cached files that would never be visible otherwise. This is an invaluable tool when you’ve discarded something you never thought you’d need and then suddenly find yourself wishing you had that information back.

For example, last week I was listing some rental property on Craigslist.org. I wanted to find the original listing that I had used last August when the apartment was last rented. I never bothered to commit that information to a document, but Google Desktop was able to pull it out of cache memory: it literally found the page I had viewed on Craigslist when I posted the ad nine months ago.

This feature is also useful when traveling because it essentially gives you access to web pages when disconnected. Many times I’ve been able to fish information out of my computer that was on a website I visited weeks or months ago but which was still available to me because it was cached.

Which brings me to how I use these tools to manage my reading. Much of my news comes in the form of links in e-mails and RSS feeds. I use Firefox’s tabbed browsing feature to open these links in tabs (Control-click on a link does this automatically), which I can look at later. At some point during the day, I’ll go through these tabs and tag them to my del.icio.us account using the bookmark extension, a plug-in that basically replaces Firefox bookmarks with a del.icio.us back-end.

Saving a page on del.icio.us is as easy as striking Control-D and typing a tag. For articles I want to read later, I the tagl “readit.” Later, when I have time, I’ll select the “readit” tag from the del.icio.us browser plug-in and choose the “Open in Tabs” option. This automatically opens every item with the readit tag in its own tab. If I’m about to hit the road, I can shut the lid on my laptop at this point. When I open it on the plane, all the pages are still there. What’s also cool is that with Google Desktop, these pages are automatically cached for retrieval offline, so I can actually read web pages on the plane, even if I haven’t read them previously.

For the past few months, I’ve been working with a company that has quietly pulled off a major coup in the corporate events business. You’ve probably never heard of Evanta, and that’s just fine with them. What you will be hearing more about – particularly in you’re in tech marketing – is the CIO Executive Summits.

The Summits are a series of regional, one-day events that attract the top chief information officers (CIOs) in the country for a day of speeches, networking and camaraderie. They are without a doubt the best IT events I have ever attended (and I’ve attended hundreds). Marketers and publishers could learn a lot from what Evanta is doing.

Tech publishers have been trying to create successful, sustainable conferences for CIOs for two decades. Their efforts have mostly failed. Believe me; I’ve been involved in several of those failures.

Evanta, in contrast, is not only attracting the right people, but it’s got them actively involved with and enthusiastic about the events. Case in point: last week in New York, more than 300 CIOs showed up for the tri-state event and only 275 were pre-registered. Think about that, event marketers: in a business in which 50% attrition is considered normal, this company is getting negative attrition.

I just got back from Washington, where more than 150 CIOs packed the conference held in the Georgetown University Conference Center. I was privileged to moderate a panel that included the CIOs from the FBI and CIA. The CIO of the Department of Justice had gone on just before us. The CIOs of the State Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (the most important national security body in the U.S.) were in the audience. The CIO of the American Red Cross gave the closing keynote. It goes on an on. Look at the agenda. And there will be 18 events just like the two I mentioned in 2007.

The proceedings are off the record, so I can’t talk about what was said at either event. However, I will point out a few reasons why I believe Evanta is experiencing this phenomenal success:

• They focus on the audience, not the sponsors. The slogan of the event series is “By CIOs, For CIOs,” and they really mean it. Each event has a governing body of CIOs who conference regularly and tell Evanta what they want: topics to cover, speakers to recruit, even the vendors to exhibit. Then the Evanta team goes and does what the board wants. Hundreds of hours of background work go into each event, but the CIOs never see that. What they see is that they describe their perfect conference and then the facilitators make it so. No questions asked.

• It’s off the record. No press is invited except in a speaking or moderating role and proceedings are strictly off the record. No ambiguity about that. The CIOs can talk with each other without worrying about something they say showing up in the press. This is important to them.

• They keep a tight leash on exhibitors. This is where most other efforts crash and burn. Publishers give the bill-paying sponsors too much say in the program, to the point that the stage becomes a soapbox for marketers. CIOs are some of the most cynical people in the world about marketing and they quickly abandon these events.

In contrast, Evanta gives marketers almost no stage presence. A couple of top sponsors get worked into the program, but the speakers must be CIOs themselves or the top officers in the company. You will never find someone with a marketing title on stage. The exhibits area is tasteful and low-key. And you have to be invited by the governing body to even have a chance to exhibit in the first place. To say that the exhibitors are on their best behavior is an understatement.

• They give away good stuff. In Washington, the conference concluded with a drawing in which no less than 13 trips to resort destinations were dispensed to the attendees. With 150 CIOs in attendance, the odds were pretty good. So is it any surprise that the room was nearly full at 5:30 p.m.?

There are many other details, but that’s the nub of it, in my view: give people an event they want; don’t let sponsors take control and give the audience incentives to stay all day. It’s working incredibly well for Evanta because they’ve never taken their eyes off the ball. A lot of media companies could learn from this.

(P.S. If Evanta sounds like a good acquisition candidate, it’s too late. The company was acquired by DMG World Media last year).