Ever wonder how they make that new tech thing so small? Ever complain that you laptop battery does not make it the whole flight? These are the questions that a business person might ask when they are designing new technology. When Coby Leuscke makes something new he wants to know he can make it smaller, lighter, faster and run with less electricity in the harshest conditions on earth.
Cody is the president and stunt scientist for Metanomy a nonprofit in Fort Collins that works to create technology that can anywhere for first responders in disasters and eventually anyone who wants to do extreme things with technology.
One project is BeakGeek that monitors what birds come to a bird feeder by taking pictures and then uploading them directly to the Internet. You might ask why? I did. By taking pictures of birds when they feed all over the country those interested could track birds for science or fun as they migrate around the country. This is great for science students and natural scientists and each unit can be made for around $300 including the solar panels.
Pictures from BeakGeek units are put on Flikr (a photo sharing site) where people from around the world can use social networking to comment, tag and share the images collected. This is open source science.
Another project that Coby highlighted in his presentation tonight to the CNTC group is a trailer that is designed to be a mobile command post that can make it to any disaster in the world and is smaller and costs less than anything else currently produced.
All of Coby's projects are green because the use of solar and other sustainable technologies requires them to be. When you need to make sure a computer stays on for 3 days you ought to be green!
The presentation that Coby gave on behalf of Metanomy was excellent and opened my eyes to many new things.
Today I clicked on an ad on from Facebook for Sprint and I got to the new Now Widget which is one of the coolest/strangest things I have ever seen. From this talking widget you can see how many sticky notes are being created, top words being used online, Google searches as they happen and news. This disying aray of content is put together to promote the Sprint Now Network.
I wonder if Sprint will see sales from this site? This site just goes to show you that there are many things left to try with social media and the Internet.
There is great technology that is getting better every day where you can see others in real time from anywhere in the world but when I hear the idea broached that we might have virtual doctors this just does not sound right. This is a short reminder that social networking is a great tool but only to augment in person communication not eliminate it.
What does not scare me is the idea that if doctors have a rare case that they can consult with each other through a network or build connections to share trends and case information. This is how knowledge grows and flows!
Today I was asked if every business uses social networking how will we find any businesses and will there still be any value? This got me thinking….oh no! If every business and nonprofit had a blog, a Facebook page, LinkedIn business profile and so many other others things out there would there be even more junk out on the Internet.
Please forgive me in advance for my indecisiveness. Since I don’t have an answer I am going to give a few plausible answers and try to come to a conclusion.
Because people are pulling information and it is not being pushed on them there cannot be too much information. People will find the information they want and as Internet technology evolves so will search. In the short time it may seem like there is too much, however, over time developers will make this work. Look at cable TV and you will see the same problem and solutions are being developed to manage it.
Since there is so much content people will give up and stop looking for commercial content. Just like we have used TiVo to skip past TV commercials we will find ways to skip Internet commercial information. I don’t think this is viable because so much of the information that users want is commercial in nature.
Facebook and other servers won’t be free forever. Even a low cost of entry will take away people who are not serious about making their business social. Just putting a page on Facebook and starting a blog is not enough. Businesses will need to make their organization social and to do this right the investment in time is greater than the uncommitted will be willing to do.
New and creative campaigns and uses of social tools will make the right places float to the top of the pile. Better search and better content will make things worth seeing available. Also, since part of the power of social networking is the ability to share things of value. Buttons like the Facebook Like button and tools like Digg will clarify what has value to users like you.
The truth is that some hybrid of these answers will be the end result of social networking. Start thinking about what it means to make your business social (watch for the upcoming book Connect and Contribute: Creating a Social Business) and start paying for attention.
The new social internet is possibly the greatest flattening force of all time. Many forces have worked to empower the un-empowered and to level the playing field. But no technology before has had the power and momentum that the social internet has today.
First, what is the social internet or Web 2.0. The social Internet as I use it is the Internet that we experience today where everyone has the ability to interact with all content on the Internet. Whenthe Internet was created users (with lots of skill) had the ability to post pages. As the Internet advanced the skill level to post content was lessened and more people shared content using email and the advent of bulletin boards. Now, social networks are growing and people can share content from short quips to longer pieces like this blog.
In a world where hierarchies are flattened more people can lead and therefore should lead. A flattened world gives us the opportunity to part of many more communities than we might have been able to be in before. Micro communities can form in a community, a church group, and concerned citizens or in any other form. These groups need a leader and not just to type the name of the group but to help create a culture of how the group should be used.
When the South Metro Chamber of Commerce embraced Meetup.com as their tool of choice for their event promotion and RSVP tool they worked to create a culture that meet the Chambers needs. This was lead by the staff and for the most part followed by the members of the Chamber. People are very observant of culture and norms for the most part and will pick up quickly. A leader needs to right the path ship sometimes if things get out of hand.
Leaders need to lead with content. Last week, Denver lost the Rocky which leaves a gap in information gathering and truth telling in the community. This is the perfect opportunity for more people to write online but those who choose to establish themselves as experts must check their sources. We cannot expect citizen journalism to stick if we do not have local news that is covered with accuracy and integrity.
It is often times easy to hide behind the Internet and not have integrity when posting online. Even if you are not worried about your comments being tracked back to you in the future (and you should be) having integrity should not be something that stops when you press keys rather than say something in person or with a pen. Remember that the Internet is an open community and if you would not post it on I-25 it probably should not be posted on social network or other public forum.
Leadership means taking risks. We have ideas about strategies that will work but these strategies need to be fleshed out and tested. As a small business and using the newly opened tool box we can test quickly and little risk. Try a new tactic on Twitter, tell friends about something new on Facebook, run a sale, start a blog, announce a new product in a new way, think outside of the box and embrace the new technology.
Risk does not mean reckless abandon for social norms. Because there is an indelible record of your experiments be wild but keep in mind the culture of your network and who your users are. A friend came to me recently with the idea for the name of a new blog that could be offensive, and though the name of the blog would have garnished lots of attention and 9 out of 10 adults would not have found it offensive I still suggested another name that alluded to the same concept without using a word that some people might find offensive. Be wild, but do it in a way that anyone can see.
No matter what I tell you or experts tell you we are all experimenting. Break the rules. Great leaders always have. They break them and then they set them.
Seth Godin brilliantly discuses leadership in our new Internet world in his book Tribes but he says it all with his subtitle – “We Need You to Lead Us”. Help lead us all to making the best possible communities around our organizations, products, passions and things we crave to be connected to.
In the past two posts I have written about getting people to pay attention I have written about social networking where sort blasts of information are the way you get people’s attention. We will go back to that next week with Twitter but for this week I am writing about Blogs where we share several paragraphs of content and sometimes more with our readers. Blog stand for Web Log and it is good to think of it as a place to log activity and share thoughts.
In the article we are going to address using blogs for small business. There are blogs for politics, cooking, medicine, news, sports, and almost anything else you can imagine. If someone does it they have probably blogged about it. To get an idea of what is out there Technorati and Ice Rocket are great places to search. Social Bookmarking sites like Digg and Del.icio.us can help you see what content is popular.
Rather than try and dance around the issue of what should be in a blog for your small business and what should not I will give you the tool I use. Will my readers care? If I cannot answer in the affirmative than there is no reason for me to post. Just because you can post about what you ate for dinner does not make it relevant to my readers, now if you are a personal chef and you just made the best Salmon and mustard sauce that you want your readers to know you can make for them then this is a perfectly relevant post.
There are many tools to help you blog and some of them pug directly in your website like Ballet Nouveau Colorado, in Broomfield or you can have your blog be on a separate site like the Denver DataMan blog you are reading. There are lots of blog sites that bring together many well known or talented bloggers like Examiner.com that has many topics Eric Elkins an accomplished blogger and owner of WideFoc.us a social media strategies company. Eric writes as the Internet Business Examiner. When considering the placement of your blog consider who will read it, why they will read it, when they will read it, if only one person will write on it or if many users will share in the writing.
If you are going to start a blog make sure you have the time to commit to keeping it up to date. I am not perfect about this are there are times I go two weeks without posting and then post three times in a week, but the better you can be about regular posting the more you will get people coming to look for your posts or RSSing your posts for future reading.
If you are not ready to blog a good way to get started is to read others blogs and make comments. Blogs are designed to be replied to. Good blog authors do not sensor appropriate material even if it argues with their point. Our goal is to Join a Conversation and encourage others to interact, share our blog with others and keep your message flowing. With social networking and social bookmarking your blog can become a hit very quickly. Tools like Nielsen’s Blog Pulse help you track where your blog is linked to or forwarded.
The two most important things you can take away from this is that when you blog you need to do so consistently and always ask yourself will my users care.
Next we I will write about Micro Blogging using twitter and how all of these social media technologies can come together to help you make your small business thrive. Also consider attending the Denver DataMan March Social Networking Seminar series.
There are new statistics out from Pew Internet & American Life Project and reported on eMarketer Daily. These statistics are showing that adults are starting to use social networks. What this means is that even more eyes are there to see businesses online. Social networks provide an opportunity to build relationships with your clients and prospect.
If you want to see these statistics you can find them online at eMarketer Daily.
Seth Godin is the author of the great book on building online communities Tribes and is also a renowned marketer. These are his words about quality of online network connections VS. quantity of online connections.
For those who have read all my blog posts for the last 5 weeks about using the Internet to define yourself as an expert I appreciate it. For those of you who have not you might want to look at one or all of these articles to help you get more from this wrap up.
Each of these articles provides one aspect of the parts of a plan. Your Internet marketing plan cannot work effectively if it is an island and not part of an overall plan to increase brand awareness and differentiate yourself from the others you compete with.
The reason for a plan is to see the big picture of what you are doing and evaluate what success means. It is very easy to invest all your time in answering questions on LinkedIn Answers or sending out the best eNewsletter the world has ever seen but if these things are not part of a greater plan how will they help you?
I love the book Good to Great by Jim Collinsand in the book the idea of a Hedgehog Concept is revealed. The Hedgehog concept asks three questions of a company that relate to a business plan but are the most overarching questions a business can ask should relate to marketing as well.
1.What you can be the best in the world at (and, equally important, what you cannot be the best in the world at)?
2.What drives your economic engine?
3.What you are deeply passionate about?
You can read more about this on the Good to Great Website but the crux of the story is that where these circles intersect that is your business. Once you know this about your business you can apply it to your marketing.
What marketing tools show that you are the best in the world as something that matches your economic engine and you are deeply passionate about. If you don’t like the idea of email and in fact you hate getting email you will not do a good job with it and it is not the right tool for you.
If answering questions online takes all your time than it does not match your economic engine. It is nice and important to share the knowledge we have but we must do it in a way that helps makes sure we have food on our plate.
It is important not spread yourself to thin. Is it better to be in more places with junk or fewer places with high quality content? I would hope you would say that quality is more important than quantity. Consistency is also a critical factor. Can you keep up the quality writing 4 blog posts a week or is it better to write 2 and sometimes three to keep up the quality?
Remember, email marketing is part ‘how we are doing this’ as well. Try to collect where you connect, meaning that if you are connecting with people ask for their email address for your email newsletter. You should have a form on your website, links on your blog and your social networking presence. Research suggests that email is the preferred media for reaching people over 30 and that it will be for a long time.
One of the tricks to all this is give people the information they want when they want it. You should provide links between your presences just like we talked about above with sign-up opportunities. The Denver DataMan contact page lists many ways and places to Contact Denver DataMangiving everyone the tools they want.
I hope you feel that you have better tools to define yourself as an expert. It is a lot of work and you will find there are things about it that are very hard but using it can also be a lot of fun. Share, grow and discover how these new technologies can help you.
As the Internet grows with more content, finding things in your local sphere of influence can be more challenging. A growing market of local search and information sites are becoming more popular and to use as a place to define yourself as an expert.
When search engines started to become popular, Yahoocreated indexes categorized data by localities. Yahoo Localand tools on Google, in addition to many other search engines help users find things related to their location. You can use these indexes to get your content listed with local information. Looking like an expert online involves being found online where other experts are found. RachLocal is a service that helps you get on local searches and buy advertising with the search engines for local search.
There are index services that help find people in your area. For example, there is ColoradoBizBuzz.com. Merchant Circleis another site provides access to local companies. You can also find pay for sites like Angie’s List.However, I caution you to question the value in paying for the service with other free options.
One project is BeakGeek that monitors what birds come to a bird feeder by taking pictures and then uploading them directly to the Internet. You might ask why? I did. By taking pictures of birds when they feed all over the country those interested could track birds for science or fun as they migrate around the country. This is great for science students and natural scientists and each unit can be made for around $300 including the solar panels.
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