BusinessBloggingBootCamp

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E-Schoolers Make the Best Innovators

The cure for Blyopia will have to wait a bit longer. Parts II and III are in the works, but ...

Some readers may be aware from Yvonne's Lip-Sticking posts that we're in NYC blogging from the Fortune Innovation Forum this week (now all of you are). This first post comes to you LIVE (sort of) FROM NEW YORK -- actually, that just means I'm typing on the laptop at a table in the "play" area. So I'm going to give you just a few quick takes on the action from this morning.

The first session this morning featured Andy Stefanovich, of the creativity and innovation consultancy Play. Andy's title is "In Charge of What's Next" ... and his company set up a "play area" in which he urged us stop in and, well ... play. His advice for becoming more innovative included encouraging "slightly disruptive" thinking, being "confusion tolerant" during early thinking about solutions to problems, being ready to embrace the "unexpected in-betweens" in the process, and being both "interested and interesting."

In the next session, we listened to Gary Hamel predict the future of management, starting from his thesis that management itself is the next great opportunity for creating large returns on the investment. He gave examples and spoke of a "post-management" business world, with flat organizations (including flat compensation models), in which the consumer wields the power. I took three and a half pages of notes and cannot begin to do justice to this session here, but hope to find time to give it better treatment in a full post or two. Suffice it to say here that every session I've been in since and most of the hallway conversations I've been in or overheard have mentioned one thing or another from Gary's talk as a starting point or context for the discussions.

I'll close for now with a quick mention of the workshop session I attended on "Using Images to Think, Innovate and Drive Business," by Tom Wujec with Autodesk -- another session I can't do justice to here. In a former life (2003) I wrote some posts extolling the virtues of the wall-sized computer screens shown the the Tom Cruise movie "Minority Report" as a tool for knowledge work. Tom's company has made that vision a reality, building Visualization Studios in which teams can work with floor to ceiling digital corkboards to see, rearrange, and connect the information they need to solve problems. He described ways this kind of technology can support and drive rapid, re-iterative innovation cycles.

The title of this post refers to one of Tom's examples: he conducts creativity sessions for various groups in which small teams are given some dry spaghetti, tape, string, and a marshmallow. In 15 minutes, they are supposed to design and build a strucure to support the marshmallow. The tallest successful assembly wins.

He asked us which group generally does the worst at this challenge? His answer: recent B-school grads. Which groups do best? You guessed it: the E-schoolers (elementary school kids)!

His explanation: the kids aren't wasting any time or energy jockeying to become the CEO of their marshmallow enterprise.

With that humbling thought ... more to come!

Still wondering if there's a "return" on blogging?

We still get questioned and read pundits who ask whether there's any ROI from business blogging. And we still shake our heads and wonder if those folks have any clue what constitutes "return" on a business person's "investment" in blogging.

So let's start with our latest experience in getting a return:

Drill Instructor Yvonne's selection by the readers of Marketing Sherpa for her blog Lip-Sticking: Smart Marketing to Women Online for honorable mention as Best Blog of 2005 in the "Niche Marketing" category.

Marketing Sherpa has over 173,000 readers. Over 2,000 people actually took the time to review the nominated blogs and cast votes. In the article reporting on the winners and the voting process, the editor wrote about the selected blogs in Yvonne's category, "All three of these blogs are not only useful for advice on their topics, but also worth watching if you plan to launch a Blog to promote yourself as a niche marketing consultant."

What's that kind of publicity and endorsement worth? (And don't forget, she gets to display that nifty Best Blog 2005 logo on her blog, too!)

Yes, we've gotten actual clients who pay us actual dollars from the various blogs we publish and write for. And yes, we get a small revenue stream from book sales and paid advertising on our blogs. But there's a lot more to the ROI from blogging than direct cash revenues.

So what's the investment? Well, the out-of-pocket cost ranges from zero, if you want to use one of the free blogging tools and climb the relatively short learning curve yourself, to a few hundred bucks, if you want help with designing and building your blog, to a bit more if you want help learning to apply your networking and writing skills in the blogosphere.

In short, compared to other ways of getting great exposure, connections, and PR, the dollar investment is negligible.

The real investment is the time it takes to find your blogging "voice" and then use the tool to connect -- engage in real conversations -- with your customers, your colleagues/competitors, your supply and distribution chains ...

That point is critical: a blog is not a business in itself. It's a TOOL. It can be a very powerful communication and social networking tool. But in the end, it's just a tool. I received a copy of the e-mail version of The Coursey Report, in which he asserts that he too fails to "get it" when it comes to "blogging as a business." (The relevant portion of the report was entitled "Trying to Understand the Business of Blogging" and has been posted on Tater Blog.)

Trying to analyze blogs themselves as a business is like trying to understand a hammer as a business. You can make a business out of making hammers and Six Apart, for example, seems to be doing the same thing as a company making blogs.

But lots more companies can be built by learning to use a hammer and then building a carpentry business, or a picture framing business, or an auto body shop, or dozens of other trades that use hammers.

A blog is simply a tool. In the right hands, it is a exceptionally powerful, efficient, and inexpensive tool for extending your business networking to a growing, global online community.

Read-all-about-it!

Memo
From: Tom
To: Business Bloggers

It's Thursday.

Therefore, you need to get on over to Yvonne's Lip-Sticking blog for her featured Smart Man [or Woman] Online interview. This week it's Paul Chaney of Radiant Marketing. Here's a snippet:

Paul: ...

To reflect on what the Cluetrain gang said, if markets are conversations, then we have to get people talking. Good old word-of-mouth has been and always will be the best form of advertising. People buy a product because their neighbor recommended it. They attend a church or synagogue because a friend invited them. They choose a piano teacher based on the advice of a co-worker, and on and on.

Enter Social Networking applications like blogs, wikis, and online communities. They enable conversation and give it global scale.

As Bill mentioned, with RSS (the next killer app of the web) rather than hunting and gathering for information, we bring the web to us, organized in a way that is both manageable and palatable.

Any business that doesn't see this is living in the dark ages, much like the blacksmith at the turn of the 20th century who paid little attention to the horseless carriage.

Great stuff! But Yvonne and Paul cover lots more in the interview, from Time Magazine's Blog of the Year, to choosing blog color schemes, to blog writing tips.

What are you still doing here, soldier? Get over there and read! Then, click on Yvonne's interview archives and read some more.

What about us??

PC Magazine's January 2005 issue (not online, oddly) selects as "People of the Year" the founders of Blogger and our own favorites Mena and Ben Trott of Six Apart, who gave us both Movable Type and TypePad.

Ben posts regularly to the blog that is Six Apart's Web site. Mena has her own business blog, Mena's Corner.

Mena's current lead post hits close to home for us, as it discusses both her speech to the GraceNet women's organization and her helping author Mary Trigiani build a blog to support her book. The blog is called Mary Trigiani, in her own voice; the book is Cooking with My Sisters : One Hundred Years of Family Recipes, from Bari to Big Stone Gap. It's great to see others using blogs to support and supplement their print publications, as Yvonne has done with Lip-Sticking.

We've been sharing that idea with authors, too, like Gerry Murak, who's using his blog to help gather submissions for his wonderful forthcoming collection, Our Fathers Who Art in Heaven.

So, we're all for recognizing the pioneers who gave us the tools. But we think PC Magazine is a couple of years behind in doing so and that this year's focus should be on the bloggers themselves, as several others have suggested (for links see Yvonne's post here). Why not designate bloggers as the collective People of the Year? To badger Time Magazine, e-mail them here.

Drill Instructor Yvonne's Been A Busy Woman

Yesterday, Yvonne appeared as a guest expert on Entrepreneur Magazine's radio show, with host Lee Mirabal.

The topic? The Business of Blogging, of course. Click to listen to a recording of the live interview for a small taste of what you'll get at an all day Boot Camp.

Yvonne has also been busy racking up awards for her work as an entrepreneur and business leader.
On October 22, she'll be honored in New York City at the 2004Stevie Awards gala, as a finalist in the Best Entrepreneur - Service Businesses category, for her core business, Windsor Media Enterprises.

Look for exciting news there about WME's new focus on providing "customized author services" to help people with ideas get them to market in print and/or digital media. Like blogs, for example.

Or through the latest Print-on-Demand technology, as she used for her own book, Dickless Marketing: Smart Marketing to Women Online.

A week later, on October 29, she'll be back in Rochester and be honored again at a luncheon during the Rochester Women's Network's 9th Annual Businesswomen's Conference. She's a finalist for its Up and Coming Businesswoman of 2004 award.

To echo several of Yvonne's friends and business associates, "You GO, girl!!!"

Blogging Goes Mainstream

What a fine fall day. A fine day for a stroll around the neighborhood. The sun is poking slivers through the blinds, I can see the trees out front stretching their limbs in the soft breeze of a Sunday just coming awake. The dog is lying patiently at my feet (pretending to sleep, but I see those eyes wink open every once in awhiel) waiting for the right moment...that particular time I rise and head for the stairs, signaling that I "might" be going for my sneakers. Sneakers are a good indication that we'll be going out.

It's also fine day for writing in a blog. Truth is, any day is a fine day for writing in a blog. A blog can be conversational, informational, or educational. Or, it can be all three. Today, I am going to use the Business Blogging Boot Camp to be educational. Over the last few days Tom and I have discovered some interesting articles on blogs that we thought you would be interested in reading. At the end of this blog, we have a few blogs we think you should visit, just to broaden your blog horizons.

We believe these articles and blogs support our foundation that blogging is a powerful yet easy to use tool all businesses can find good use for. A blog communicates relevant, useful information to vendors, clients, suppliers, and prospects. Look at the following information and take some time to reflect on how you might accomplish new goals with your blog, knowing what other folks are doing with theirs.

As your first exercise, click over to eWeek and review Anne Chen's article, "RSS aids relief organization." She writes about a Christian relief organization that has begun using an RSS feed to maintain contact, and build relationships. Her article states, " The technology had to be familiar to users and easy to deploy in offices in Third World countries with limited resources.

After looking at several options, Teter [ Nydia Teter, international communications specialist at Compassion International, based in Colorado Springs, CO] settled on RSS to syndicate content and chose NewsGator 2.0 from NewsGator Technologies, a division of Reinacker & Associates Inc."

If non-profit blogging doesn't convince you that RSS feeds and the connections made using them are potent communication tools, maybe this latest article at Yahoo! news will help:

"Soldier Blogs Detail Life in Iraq." To quote: "For the folks back home, soldier blogs offer details of war that don't make it into most news dispatches: The smell of rotten milk lingering in a poor neighborhood. The shepherd boys standing at the foot of a guard tower yelling requests for toothbrushes and sweets. The giant camel spiders. The tedium of long walks to get anything from a shower to a meal. A burning oil refinery a hundred miles away blocking the sun. A terrifying night raid surprised by armed enemies dressed in black." All I can say is, wow!

In addition to those specific way to utilize this real-time communication, look at this new blog we found at Corporate Blogging which explains corporate blogging in 120 words, among many, many other business insights. If we were scoring blogs, this one would get a 10.

Another 10 contender is Peter Davidson's blog at Thinking by Peter Davidson. I especially like Peter's design. He's obviously a fun guy...but one with a passel of useful business and blogging information he is willing to share with the rest of us. For instance, read his recent post on Policing Teens at the Mall where he rightly notes the WRONG way to go about approaching this group of spenders. Lest you think teens are not in your market, think again. Teens are the up and coming...and today's teens are arriving on the business scene faster, and with more savvy, than ever before. Do not ignore them!

That's it for today. Dog and sneakers are calling. Cheers!