Beaconhill NW

[ht to Freelance Switch ]

I was raised on the term “the customer is always right”

And yet, in the world of contracting no matter what industry you are in, inevitably, there will always be conversations about pricing.  You have to choose your battles carefully and make sure you don’t lose your shirt all at once.

[ht to Freelance Switch]

On Wednesday, Jive Software will host a live webcast titled:

Facebook for Spies:  Enabling Social Collaboration in a Community Trained not to Collaborate

In September 2008, the federal government introduced secure social networking capabilities to the US intelligence community to share insights, debate, and communicate. Called “A-Space” (Analyst Space), the initiative’s goal — like intelligence analysis in general — is to protect the US by assessing all the information available across the Department of Defense’s spy agencies.

DIA Program Manager Ahmad Ishaq will discuss the impetus behind A-Space and social software across an organization specifically trained not to share information, how A-Space was launched, the successes to date, future plans, as well as share best practices that are applicable to any industry or private company. He’ll also share how this secure community has helped unify a community to take advantage of intelligence, ideas, and innovations across multiple, globally distributed agencies.

Learn how to:

• Create low barriers to entry and improve adoption rates of Enterprise 2.0 initiatives
• Enable a governance model that works in the new social collaboration paradigm
• Align Enterprise 2.0 tools to speak the language of business
• Study community patterns and don’t be afraid to restart pieces that fail

Get free resources:

• Gartner, Inc. Report: 2009 Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workforce
• Forrester Wave Report: Community Platforms, Q1 2009

Get signed up here

I have a new role with PlainJoe Studios as Social Media Guerrilla.  PlainJoe Studios is a design studio in Southern California which specializes in Strategic Ideation, Interactive Media, and Environmental Design.We adopted this title from the idea behind guerrilla marketing.  It’s a mix of a social media marketing strategy and guerrilla marketing

Guerrilla marketing is an unconventional system of promotions that relies on time, energy and imagination rather than a big marketing budget. Typically, guerrilla marketing tactics are unexpected and unconventional; consumers are targeted in unexpected places, which can make the idea that’s being marketed memorable, generate buzz, and even spread virally. The term was coined and defined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his 1984 book Guerrilla Marketing.

Guerrilla marketing is needed because it gives small businesses a delightfully unfair advantage: certainty in an uncertain world, economy in a high-priced world, simplicity in a complicated world, marketing awareness in a clueless world.

Our goal is to integrate Social Media and Guerrilla Marketing strategies to help our clients tell their story even better.

About two years ago Forrester published a report on Social Technographics.

“At the heart of Social Technographics is consumer data that looks at how consumers approach social technologies – not just the adoption of individual technologies. We group consumers into six different categories of participation – and participation at one level may or may not overlap with participation at other levels. We use the metaphor of a ladder to show this, with the rungs at the higher end of the ladder indicating a higher level of participation.”

Forrester has now added a new rung, “Conversationalists”.

Conversationalists reflects two changes. First, it includes not just Twitter members, but also people who update social network status to converse (since this activity in Facebook is actually more prevalent than tweeting). And second, we include only people who update at least weekly, since anything less than this isn’t much of a conversation.

Conversationalists intrigue me. They’re 56% female, more than any other group in the ladder. While they’re among the youngest of the groups, 70% are still 30 and up.

The data from this survey continues the trends from the last two years — Spectators are maxing out at around 70%, Joiners are still growing rapidly, and Creators are still growing slowly.

Forrester suggests three ways you can use this info:

1. Convince your boss this stuff is for real, and that if you haven’t jumped on it, you’re late.

2. Profile your customer base, and see what they’re ready for, before planning a project to reach out to them. (After all, People is the first step in the POST process.)

3. Segment your audience; build different strategies for different segments. (Social is so prevalent now that a single approach for your company is probably too broad.)

How will you use it?

We now find the experts (i.e., social media consultants and lawyers) saying, “Businesses Need to Formalize Their Social Media Policies.” According to one study,

Only 1 in 7 companies have formalized a process for adopting and deploying these tools, however. Only 1 in 5 of the interviewed companies have created internal policies that govern the use of these tools by their employees. As the researchers noted, quite a few companies struggle with finding the right balance between ‘the social and personal nature of these tools while maintaining some amount of corporate oversight.’”

According to Michael Hyatt, this is  “hogwash.” This is a solution in search of a problem.

Your company doesn’t need a social media policy and here are five reasons why:

1. Your people can be trusted.
2. Social media are just one more way to communicate.
3. More rules only make your company more bureaucratic.
4. Formal policies only discourage people from participating.
5. You probably already have policies that govern inappropriate behavior. This is the real kicker. You likely already have an employee handbook in place that speaks to what is appropriate and what is inappropriate. At Thomas Nelson, for example, our handbook provides various examples of “Personal Conduct Violations.” We specifically forbid:
   • Insensitivity to customers
   • Spreading false statements about other employees or the company
   • Profanity
   • Abusive language about a supervisor or co-worker
   • Unauthorized release of confidential information
   • Disruptive or inappropriate behavior
   • Discriminating or harassing behavior towards a co-worker
   • Indecent or immoral behavior

   You can commit any of these violations in whatever media you choose: in person, over the phone, via email, and yes, via social media. Why do we need one more policy to regulate this particular technology? The short answer is, “we don’t.”

If you really must have a policy, Mr. Hyatt suggests this one:

Use whatever social media you want. Feel free to use it on company time. Just use common sense and remember that if you publicly identify yourself with the company’s brand then act in a manner consistent with that brand. It’s in all of our best interests to do so.

Tonight I watched  a video with   Robert Scoble on 43 Folders as he interviewed  Jeremiah Owyang and Ray Wang (who Scoble calls “two of the best analysts in the tech industry”)

At 11:22 min/seconds into the interview:

JO:”Blogs now feel slow, or slower”

RS:”I’m not using RSS readers anymore”

JO:”I put that away as well. Most of my traffic is coming from Twitter. So that’s the 2nd piece-real time data is here.”

So…here’s a question for you…

You’ve probably noticed after coming home from Christmas that your number of subscribers on your blog has dropped significantly.

I was doing some research on the whole Friendfeed / Feedburner fiasco and found the best conclusion for the new year at ReadWriteWeb:

…Google Dominates, RSS Readers Less Relevant…

These statistics are by no means the definitive RSS Reader market numbers. They do clearly show two things though:

1) Google now dominates what’s left of the RSS Reader market. Bloglines is hanging in there, but it seems like it’s given up the fight judging by lack of activity in its blog and traffic dips.

2) RSS reading is a very fragmented experience circa 2009. People can monitor news and information via Twitter, Facebook, start pages like Netvibes, their Firefox bookmarks, their OS, aggregators like Techmeme, and so on.

You can read the whole article here.

For me, I knew who reads my blog.  They comment or tell me on Twitter.  And when I redesigned the site these thoughts were on my mind:

-not about the numbers

-It’s about  relationships

-I’m not blogging for money

-this is a place to share ideas, inspiration, and thought-processes.

What about you? Will the change in RSS numbers change the way you blog in 2010?