What do you get out of every trade show, conference, or unconference?

Information? Sure. New friends/contacts? Absolutely. But what do you get that is tangible and helps you get past the awkward moment of “hey, what’s your name?”

Of course - a conference name tag / lanyard!

Lanyard / nametags are something that every event organizer has to decide how to handle. I have seen them printed on-the-fly at E3, I have seen people who get a name tag and lanyard and fill out their own at PodCamp, I have seen the old sticky-back name tags (Hello My Name is…) Why do conferences encourage name tags? One, it helps identify to some extet who has registered and who has not. It can also determine access to certain events (in the case of color coded tags), but mainly it is to help the conference participants meet other people and help them get over the initial awkward stage of meeting someone.

Enter: Tweetup badges

For those who don’t know, a tweetup is an informal gathering of people in a general area radius who are on twitter. Here in central Iowa, the most notable is the group #dmtweetup which has had several “events” which range from get-togethers at a public library to enjoying drinks at Des Moines bars.

Sounds like a great place for name badges of some sort, eh? Enter Rich Drake, owner of VR ID Cards who came to the early tweetups with a stack of plastic, gold cards, emblazoned with every member’s twitter ID and first name.

Coincidentally or not, membership in #dmtweetup boomed.

Now Rich is offering his twitter / tweetup badges for sale to other groups. Keep an eye on tweetupbadges.com or go to VRID’s Tweetup badges page for more information on colors available and pricing.

I really can’t recommend them enough. If you organize an event and have pre-registration, or if you are another tweetup group, contact Rich today, you won’t be disappointed.

1. Use exercise balls as chairs.
   Pictures abound everywhere of colorful balls being used as chairs and playthings in almost every Google office across the country. Not only are they bright and colorful, they may help your back.
2. Mr. Gorbachev, Tear down This Wall!
   I understand having an office is not only a right-of-passage for many young executives on the career ladder, but some of the best environments are those in which you and your coworkers are all out together in an open area. Get out of the office and high-walled cubicles and create an open workspace
3. Get Up And Get Movin’
   If you don’t already, offer your employees a gym membership. Getting the blood pumping outside of work can help bring up the energy level at work. Plus it may cut down on the corporate health insurance rates.
4. Have a Quiet Place
   You don’t need your own company masseuse to give your workers a nice, quiet place to relax. Take one of the offices that are now vacated and turn it into a “quiet” room - complete with adjustable lighting, massage chair, and a good old-fashioned lava lamp. Throw in one of those gurgling fountains if you are really daring.
5. Brighten Things Up
   The old off-white colored walls are out, bright colors are in. Go crazy with pinks, reds, bright blues and more to create a striking and creative workplace. Think of the ultimate child’s playroom and you are closer than might think.
6. Water, Water Everywhere
   You don’t have to cater in three meals a day like some Google offices, but providing bottles of water in the company fridge is a nice gesture. Some companies even provide diet and regular soft drinks - in moderation. A well-hydrated employee is a productive one!
7. Air Your Dirty Laundry
   When working long hours for a company, sometimes the first thing to go is personal hygiene. Set up a washer/dryer in an area of the building to be used if employees just can’t find the time to clean their duds at home. Even better, arrange a discount at a local laundromat for the iron & fold help
8. Promote, Don’t Squash, After-Hours Play
   Don’t underestimate the need for employees to blow off some steam after hours, or even during the day. Nerf-gun battles, air hockey, ping pong, and other avenues of stress relief can help “detox” after a stressful day.
9. Provide Time For Personal Projects
   During the course of the day, everybody usually does what is expected of them, but there may be one certain project they really want to finish for the company. Allow a couple of hours a week for people to work on projects - for the company - that they really think could benefit the organization.
10. Simply The Best
    Always look to hire the best people, never settle on someone because they can do the minimum expected of a given job. Look for the superstars. If there aren’t any, don’t settle - keep looking. There are plenty of talented people out there, you may just need to wait a bit more.

Do you have other ways to decorate or motivate your employees “The Google Way?”   Let me know below.

Find an Expert

Locate an expert in your niche or blog space and reach out and touch someone. Make a connection - comment on their blog. Ideally this should be someone that may have a little bit more exposure than you do so you can learn a few tricks from them. Just write them an email, you may be surprised what you hear back.

Case in point, a speaker I know tells his students/attendees at the end of the conference to try and get through to a celebrity to get a response to a question, an interview, etc. Most of his students, after hearing his speech go on and actually DO get through. Most people think celebrities are inaccessible - but determination, confidence and just trying can go a long way.

Once you establish a relationship, trade RSS feeds, twitter follow, etc. You have not only met a colleague, but maybe a friend and confidant. explore that, repeat that, gain new insights and ideas.

Go to a Meetup

Explore local meetups in your area for other people who might share your interest in technology, if not necessarily your niche.   There are bound to be meetups within an hour drive once a month that you can attend and meet other people that are active in the space.  These local connections are a great resource - since they are going through the same pains that you are in your local area.   Get involved!

Attend a Convention or Camp 

When I think of growing up and recharging my excitement for something, one of the best examples was going to Boy Scout Camp.   After camp you are rearing to go finish more merit badges, advance, do more service projects, etc.   The same kind of recharging can happen after attending a podcamp or blogging convention.

The people you meet at the larger conventions are TOP PICKINGS for getting to know.  These are people who, like you, are passionate about their space, want to grow, and are looking for advice and opportunities to enhance their own business and media offerings.

You HAVE to be proactive in obtaining contacts at these conventions, however.   It is easy - way easy - to sit back and watch all of the other attendees laugh it up and do “live” social networking - but you won’t get anywhere.   Jump into a conversation, the experience is what you make of it.

Hang Onto the Experience 

After attending or recharging your batteries, make sure you get something to remind you of what it was that got you more inspired.   Buy a t-shirt, keep your pass, obtain a transcript, buy the seminar DVD - whatever it is you need to do.  Then revisit that when you are feeling down.

Recharging your batteries is something that everybody needs to do…  recognize when you are starting to fade and get out there!

So where do you get ideas?

Well, you can wait for Chris Brogan to post another 100 Ideas for Bloggers on his blog. But the best way to never run out of ideas is to make yourself an editorial calendar. You can use a regular calendar, a Google Calendar like Steve Rubel, or even Microsoft Excel like Andy Wibbels does.  I started using the Andy Wibbels spreadsheet last week, and it has proved useful every day.   I have days marked with Content, Community, Commerce, Facebook, Social networks so I know what I can talk about on a certain day.  By getting into this habit, your readers will also know what to expect.  Now everybody knows that I should be talking about “content” on Wednesdays.

Content is so important to the web, from getting a good PR, to simply providing something useful.

Where do you get your ideas from?

In his book, Jaffe encourages so called “marketing gurus” at major companies to take a hard look around them and embrace social media.   In it, he also gives a case study where a company “almost” gets it, but their “new way” or marketing is to ask their community to produce a commercial, and the winner will air on national TV.  The result?   While some people did as the brand wanted and produced a commercial in favor of the truck (Note:  I can’t remember the name of the actual truck manufacturer at this time, my bad) there were even MORE entries about how much the truck “sucks.”

Enter last week’s forray into almost the same thing - Tide.   Using YouTube, Tide invited people from around the country to film their own “talking stain” commercial, upload it to YouTube, and the winner will be shown on National TV.   Fair enough, right?   Well, out of hundreds of entries, the final 10 have been announced - and a studio I am loosely affiliated with has been chosen in that top 10.

Here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/mytalkingstain?utm_source=gatorade_OLAfame 

So, if you have time, and want to help, please click on the link above, and go vote for the video produced by “diepart” - which is a young man asking a young woman’s father if he can marry his daughter.    You will recognize it by the higher production values than some of the rest.   I think you have to click the green “thumbs up” button and actually hit the “next video” button to record a vote.

I’m a bit torn whether or not to include things like this, or Bum Rush notices on this blog - what are your thoughts… does it add or detract?

I realize that I am a tad bit “late” on my review of the book “Join the Conversation” by Joseph Jaffe, but as the saying goes - better late than never. OK, I really hate cliche sayings, but I can’t seem to think of a better one right now.

After Reading Joseph Jaffe’s first book, “Life after the 30 Second Spot” and subsequently subscribing to his blog at www.jaffejuice.com, I jumped on the chance to review his latest book “Join the Conversation” under a system called UNMTPNM, or “Use New Marketing to Prove New Marketing.” In the experiment, Jaffe sent out review copies of his book to several bloggers in turn for a review… and also a promise to pay the book forward when they were done.

Like his first book, Jaffe writes a lot like I think… with parentheticals and sometimes off-the wall references. In addition, many of the references are “in your face” such as when he talks about getting a “rod shoved up” a certain part of the anatomy. All in good fun of course.

The main question I had throughout the book is for whom it was written. It contains numerous examples of ways corporations have “missed the conversation” and in turn had public relations nightmares. An example being a man who built his entire living room furniture out of FedEx boxes, and was consequently sued by FedEx instead of supported. If I were take a guess, I would say the book is directed towards advertising/marketing/promotions CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, rather than new media people such as myself.

I was particular interested in the case studies since I had sort of a “join the conversation” moment myself 2 years ago with Adam Curry of PodShow. I had a problem - I wanted an iPod. I had a second problem - I didn’t want to pay the $300 for the video iPod. Now most people would have just sucked it up and saved up to buy something they wanted, but through a series of events, a web site called troyneedsanipod.com was born. When Adam Curry heard of it through a podcast comment to his show, The Daily Source Code, he immediately saw the opportunity to plug GoDaddy’s domain registration company, and launched a contest of his own “Who needs an iPod more than Troy?” The catch - you head to register a domain name through GoDaddy. The promotion was a success. (Plus I got an iPod!)

Jaffe’s book is full of the opposite kind of story - the companies who missed the boat. The points he brings up help the reader learn to recognize opportunities to leverage new media into good PR, based on oftentimes negative reviews or customer comments.

The book’s chapters stand alone nicely, so it is easy to pick up, read a chapter, and then pick it up again in a couple of days. One of the things that I think could have used a little more consideration is starting a conversation. Too many of the examples mentioned were reactionary stories. ie: Joe Blow posts a blog post and Youtube video about company X and company X does (or in most case doesn’t) respond. In this case the consumer/user (sorry Joseph) initiates the communication. But there has to be example of corporate initiated conversation out there, someplace. (besides the make your own commercials)

One place I felt myself slump at was when he talks about the 6 C’s. Long ago, when the Internet started, my friend and mentor Jim Moloshok of Warner Bros. Online would talk to me about Content, Community and Commerce. This was ingrained in my so much that I even just started a blog called contentcommunitycommerce.com .

Oh great, there goes all of my credibility, Jaffe says it is no longer completely accurate. Is my blog done before it even began? I don’t think so. No matter how many more C’s you add on, Content, Community and Commerce will continue to be the “ring leaders” in successful web sites and media.

Would I recommend this book? Definitely. There are a lot of great ideas on how to take a potentially bad situation and turn it around. I intend to “pay it forward” to a member of the Des Moines Bloganostra at the next meeting

This happens if you send out invites and people click on the “Don’t Know” button instead of ignoring or accepting your LinkedIn attempt. Unfortunately, as it proved to be for me, this is mainly due to lazy people who don’t want to just ignore the request (not everybody may want to connect with you … for whatever reason) but LinkedIn only sees that people claim not to know you, and one of their big marketing pushes is that LinkedIn is only for people who actually know each other.

So can you tell who denied knowing you? Yes!

1. Log into your LinkedIn profile and click on Contacts on the left hand side. (Note to LinkedIn management, for web usability, this really should be “Connections” to keep things standard, not “Contacts”)
2. After your contacts/connections are displayed, look near the right hand top margin for “X outstanding Sent Invitations” Click on the words “Sent Invitations.”
3. You can now page through all of the invitations you have sent, and look for “Doesn’t Know” in the status column.
4. Call up your colleague and ask why they said they didn’t know you!

Click Thumbnail For Larger Version

If your account is flagged as too many people saying they don’t know you, LinkedIn says you can email them at cs@linkedin.com, explain to them that you know the rules and aren’t spamming users, and they will reportedly remove the restriction. Which is good, since many of us use LinkedIn to find people we may have lost track of, and knowing their current email address is part of the goal, not the pre-requisite.

What is this mysterious word they call content? Like many things, content means different things to different people. But one thing is for certain: Those who know how to produce it, benefit from it. Those that do not are harmed by not having it.

Content.

Your own content, other people’s content, computer generated content, user generated content, it’s different but yet all the same. Someone, somewhere, has to create it. And someone, somewhere has to put it together and present it to the rest of us.

Back when Yahoo started its rise to power on the Internet, it’s content was generated through one of the very first “web spiders” that would go out, collect information, which would then be categorized, and presented in the Yahoo directory. The content was collected and presented, but technically the creators weren’t writing the content themselves, their robot was collecting the data. Then came user submissions. Suddenly you have millions of people all submitting – not content – but merely links to content, in essence generating UN-content which was then turned into content.

I am about to save you a lot of money. If you look at ClickBank, or search the Internet on how to make money online, you will eventually be enticed to buy a $197 package that has “detailed case studies” and today’s hottest thing – online videos for you to watch.

They all come down to the same basic principles:

#1 – Find a product to market

#2 – Write content

There you have it. Now fork over the $197. I have read countless numbers of eBooks on how to quit your day job, retire early, get rich on the Internet, and even Tim Ferris’s book on the Four Hour Work Week… it all, unfortunately, comes down to finding a product/service and writing content.

NOT sales content. REAL content.

One good, 300 word post a day on a blog, or one article a day on a regular web site can be good content. But you have to keep it up. If you knew that a 300 word article a day would someday be worth $1000-$2000/day… wouldn’t you do it?

With real content comes real community. With real community comes user-generated content, which should complement, not replace, your own original content otherwise your community will get bored.

If you want to attract a community, you have to keep generating content. Otherwise they can, and will, find another web site whose owners WILL write that 300 word article a day.

There is nothing worse than removing a post or comment from your blog, and then having the poster in question rallying the troops, protesting that a post was deleted, crying censorship, and creating infighting and chaos on your board or blog.  By adopting and posting specific guidelines, you will at least have something you can point to and say “this is the reason why.”  This may or may not prevent a flame war, but at least you have something behind you.

What constitutes a good posting policy?  That is up to you.   I try to be more open and free in my community requirements, so my posting policy may simply state

• No advertisements
• No flame wars
• No “I’m leaving the board forever” posts
• No profanity

Simply, sweet and to the point.  This will give you the backing you need if you ever need to delete or hide somebody’s post/comment.  In the end, it is your community, and you have the power (and the right) to deleted anything for any reason (posting on your board is a privilege, not a right) - but at least now you have something in writing that you can refer people to.

Do you have a “posting policy” on your board/site?  What does your say?

A member of the community, whom is a prolific poster and spends way too much time on your forum, suddenly decides that their time is better spent in other areas, or is feeling depressed and is going to “leave the board forever.”  In one “last” posting breath they tell everybody how they will miss them, and to still keep in touch and how they might check in from time to time.   It was a hard decision, but its best to go….

Yeah right.

Everybody likes to, well, be liked.  Unfortunately, the way some people try to get attention on active boards is to say they are going to leave.  They really have no intention to leave, they just want the mass of messages telling them how much the community will miss them, and begging them not to go.  Sometimes they will stay, sometimes they will leave for a day,  whatever.

I have long had a policy that if a user posts they are going to leave the board, I disable their account and help them with their decision.  I figure it is the least I can do, since if they can not help themselves by not coming to the board, then it is my obligation to help them refrain from being a member of the community.

This is usually followed up by an angry email from the user, asking why their username was disabled.   When I explain they said they were going to leave the community, so I removed their privileges, they give another sad song and dance about needing to keep their account.  Most of the time I end up reinstating their account and explain to them that “Im leaving” posts are not appropriate.

How you handle  the “lookatme’s” can mean the difference between a clean and cluttered forum.  Their amount seems to increase when you have forums targeting teenagers, but can happen on any forum regardless of demographic or topic.

However you choose to handle them, be sure to handle them all the same way, or you will be accused of favoritism.

Do you have another way to handle “lookatme’s?”  Let me know by commenting below.