New Comm Biz

Big is Broken

Tac — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 02:00:52 +0000

I’ve seen a lot of blogs lately asking “Is _____ Broken?” You fill in the blank; The Free Market, Venture Capital, X Business.

I’m here to tell you that none of those are broken. What is broken is Big. Big, VC firms, Big Business, Big Market Funds, Big Real Estate. I would also take it step further and say that it’s not just big things, but traditional things.

It used to be that big companies (big anything) had an advantage at being big because they could optimize processes and realize all the additional profits. Now small companies can do the same thing.

I think the goal should be for everything to go small. That doesn’t mean that big corporations are going to go away. They just need to get even more dispersed. The business groups will be smaller and the companies will get smaller.

In order to do this successfully I think they’ll need to focus on transparency and enabling (and trusting) your employees and managers to act on behalf of the company.

Of course I also happen to think that Social Media in the Enterprise is a great way to enable this for both big and small companies.

I Don’t Care What Google Thinks I Should do with My Content

Tac — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 22:47:10 +0000

I’d like to ask your forgiveness while I re-use an overused analogy here.

If your only marketing objective is to drive awareness of your message then why do you drive people to a site?

This is like going to a cocktail party and trying to get a girl to come back to your place for small talk.

If there’s no conversion, no purchase, no download, then why do you care if someone comes to your site to get that message. I would argue in many cases it would be better if they didn’t have to come to your site to find the message.

When I asked Steve Rubel why he decided not to keep both his Life Stream and his blog his initial response was because Google penalizes you for duplicate content.

I was kind of surprised that was his reason. I haven’t worried about duplicate content or SEO in general for my blog in almost a year. The only two “stats” I really care about are RSS subscriber numbers (because I don’t think RSS is dead) and comments, be they comments on the blog, Twitter, FriendFeed or somewhere else. (BTW if you haven’t please feel free to subscribe to my RSS feed.)

Other than my own name I don’t care anymore what key words I rank highest for. If this site were trying to sell something, or run advertising then I’d care.

I care more about people reading my next post then I do about who read my last post.

And I don’t really care if they do that here or somewhere else.

And if Google’s not smart enough to tell the difference between good content re-purposed on a good site, versus good content scraped on a spam site then that’s their problem not mine.

My personal take is that I want my content all over the place. That’s why you’ll see this post on my life stream, on my blog and on the Thinkers and Doers blog. My blog is the main source, it’s why I wrote it but it’s also relevant to those other sites. You’ll also see this post on Social Media Today and My Venture Pad. Plus if you or your company is a subscriber to Lexis Nexis, Thomas Reuters or you have a Kindle, you can find my blog which is syndicated through Newstex.

If that penalizes me in Google then so be it.

Image via my Flickr Stream

This post was originally posted on New Comm Biz

In fact for a view into the total fragmentation of this one post I’ve embeded the FriendFeed search for this post. You’ll also see many of the tweets and RT’s in the Disqus comments.

Random Thoughts (weekly)

Tac — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 10:30:26 +0000

The Becker-Posner Blog: The Future of Newspapers–Posner – Annotated

To me the problem stems from people thinking that newspapers are synonymous with news, or journalism, or reporting. In my experience those three things are happening less and less at newspapers. Making it illegal to link to a newspaper would kill their business faster than anything else (IMO).

tags: posner, ncb, newspapers, Journalism
- - To me the problem stems from people thinking that newspapers are synonymous with news, or journalism, or reporting. In my experience those three things are happening less and less at newspapers. Making it illegal to link to a newspaper would kill their business faster than anything else (IMO). – post by tacanderson
BSU students land jobs with NASA | Local News | Idaho Statesman

Very proud of my little bro.

tags: bsu, TJ Anderson, brother, NASA, ncb
- T.J. and Haley Anderson are working for NASA Houston-based contractor Oceaneering Space Systems Inc. Oceaneering won the NASA contract to design and produce spacesuits for the Constellation program, which includes proposed missions to the moon and Mars.
Lifestream for Wordpress

alright, gonna need to play with this.

tags: wordpress, lifestream, plugin, ncb
The Long Tail – Wired Blogs

nice little banter between two authors. wonder if they’re both just driving book sales.

tags: wired, Malcolm Gladwell, chrisanderson, ncb
- But since journalist Malcolm Gladwell has somewhat parochially decided to make the Future of Paid Journalism the focus of his review of Free (which is, ironically, free on the New Yorker’s website; perhaps this is something Gladwell should take up with David Remnick?), I’ll try to respond in a bit more detail.
We have two lifelines « Ztoryteller

Our two nervous systems of the Web.

tags: ztoryteller, web, twitter, posterous, facebook, ncb

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Twitter is the Internets Water Cooler

Tac — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:04:13 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

You can’t monitor the whole Internet. Nobody can, not even Google. So what do you do? It’s obvious that you can’t ignore it? You need to be monitoring something.

“But I don’t have budget for fancy monitoring tools.” You don’t need any budget. There are dozens of free or nearly free tools to use but you could probably just monitor Twitter if you had to.The easiest and cheapest way is set up your team with TweetDeck, let it run in the background at work and run a search for your keywords.

I’m not advocating that you only monitor Twitter (and the above solution only works while TweetDeck is running) but I think if you only did one thing, it would be to monitor Twitter? Why? Why not blogs or set up alerts?

Twitter is the water cooler of the Internet. One could argue that it’s becoming the World’s Water Cooler. But they’d be wrong. The World has many Internet Water Coolers.

Facebook is the World’s Largest Water cooler.

The Facebook Water Cooler started off as a brand of water bottles exclusively sold at college. It quickly became the favorite water cooler brand in the US and is quickly become the favorite at all of the Internet’s international offices as well. After a redesign of the water cooler people complained that it released too much water too quickly but eventually they got used to it. People do get really uncomfortable when they run into both their x-girlfriend and their mom at the Facebook Water Cooler.

Twitter is the World’s Noisiest Water Cooler.

The Twitter Water Cooler is not the largest but is by far the noisiest water cooler in the office. This is the water cooler that people who don’t drink water hate having a desk to close to and put up signs outside their cubicle wall reminding people that there are people working asking conversations be kept to a minimum. The Twitter Water Cooler used to run out of water all the time but it’s been much better latley. They also have really, really small cups.

FriendFeed is the the Geekiest Water Cooler.

The FriendFeed Water Cooler is where IT support hangs out and bitches about everyone else. It has superior filtration. State of the art cooling and is more energy efficient. In fact they recently implemented new water reclamation from the air but only a few people know how to use it.

Internet vs The World

While there are many water coolers for what’s happening in the World Twitter is the one where everything on the Internet passes through. If there’s big news in the office everyone, including PR, and HR go over to the Twitter Water Cooler to find out what’s up an then go back to their water coolers to talk about it.

So some of you are rightfully thinking, “Tac the Internet *is* the World.” Yes it is. But many things in the World don’t raise to any significant level of awareness on the Internet. My wonderful wife spends more time on Facebook than any other Internet site. She get’s news about what’s happening in our neighborhood, community and in our friends and families lives. That stuff doesn’t make it on Twitter and you don’t need to know about it.

: Image by davidwatts1978 via Flickr

But if a plane crashes, a celebrity dies (or one allegedly dies), a nation revolts or your marketing campaign tanks, the Twitter Water Cooler knows about it. If you’re going to monitor only one thing right now, Twitter will get you 90% of what you want faster than anything.

Apologies

Tac — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:04:13 +0000

: Image by Tac Anderson via Flickr

Things got a little noise around here this last month. The noise to signal ratio was definitely a little out of whack and for that I apologise.

I don’t make money on this blog. With the exception of the occasional Amazon affiliate link that Zemanta adds in automatically for me I run no ads and never have. But I definitely make money off this blog. A lot of money actually.

This blog is my testing ground. This blog is my sandbox. This is where I share my half baked ideas about things I find interesting. What I learn here I take and help my clients succeed in their businesses.

Posterous has turned out to be an unexpected pleasant surprise. I think it’s a powerful service that has larger implications for the direction the Web is moving. I’ve had a Posterous account for the last 6 months and I never did much with it. But when they turned it into a Web CMS tool I, and many others took notice.

I have finally legitimized my account and given it a URL www.tacanderson.com and I have evolved the site from a toy to my life stream.

This blog will not go away. Far from it. I hope that my life stream becomes a breading ground for ideas that fuel this blog. I promise to bring the signal to noise ratio back in line. I also plan on using Posterous as one of the many tools I use to get content to this blog.

So if you’re still here, thanks. If you have feedback, please share it. And if you haven’t yet, go check out Posterous.

Tutorial: Getting Started with Zemanta (zemanta.com)
Zemanta plus Google Alerts plus Posterous equals I don’t know. (newcommbiz.com)
Using Zemanta with Posterous (zemanta.com)
Marketers as Aggregators Creators and Distributors (newcommbiz.com)
Expanding Posterous as a Workflow Tool (newcommbiz.com)

Celebs use Twitter to Launch Complaints

Tac — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:19:10 +0000

People have used Twitter to complain since the first week it was launched (I don’t know this for a fact but I know human nature). The Twitterati have used it to rally their supporters to their side.

Celebs have used it to drive support around the causes they support but what happens when celebs use Twitter to air their complaints?Sometimes it works in their favor, sometimes they look like an ass.

It’s No Myth: Adam Savage Taps Twitter to Fight $11000 AT&T Bill Savage was using his AT&T USB Connect Mercury modem, according to a post on his Twitter feed, @donttrythis. AT&T claimed Savage uploaded/downloaded 9 … See all stories on this topic

Examiner.com

Author lashes out on Twitter, and a new review of Here on Earth by … Yesterday, angry author Alice Hoffman used Twitter to publish a reviewer’s phone number and (misspelled) email address. She encouraged her followers to … See all stories on this topic

The difference is that Savage had a legitimate complaint (AT&T overcharged him) Hoffman did not (she got a bad review).

Demo at #webootcamp in PDX

Tac — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:18:23 +0000

Download now or watch on posterous

MOV-0004.3gp (594 KB)

Posted via email from Zemashup

[Update/Explanation] I used this opportunity to demonstrate the ability to take a video live and post it via Posterous to this blog. I had issues cross posting to YouTube (It just took a while to load) and I can’t wait until Posterous gets their WP player bug worked out.

Warning. The video sucks, was really loud but demonstrated the capability.

Trying to visualize theory

Tac — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 03:16:21 +0000

Some people are gifted designers and artists. I am not. But I’m still visual and surprising tactile, especially for really hard vague ideas like theories.

This is one picture drawn during a brainstorm. For the people on the phone during the meeting someone took a picture and emailed it around. That photo then got emailed around some more. It surprised me how one grainy picture of a bad drawing with the right context behind it made my most far fetched ideas (somewhat) understandable.

I think as move past early adopters to early majority and the mainstream with socila media visualization is going to be a big deal.

Sent via my phone.

Posted via email from Zemashup

Will Gen Y Break the Internet?

Tac — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:10:53 +0000

Download now or listen on posterous

Voice.wav (2860 KB)

Just how much more content can we continue to create and consume? One
thing’s for sre; We’re going to need a bigger boat.

Posted via email from Zemashup

New Comm Biz

Big is Broken

Related articles by Zemanta

I Don’t Care What Google Thinks I Should do with My Content

I care more about people reading my next post then I do about who read my last post.

Random Thoughts (weekly)

Twitter is the Internets Water Cooler

Facebook is the World’s Largest Water cooler.

Twitter is the World’s Noisiest Water Cooler.

FriendFeed is the the Geekiest Water Cooler.

Internet vs The World

Apologies

Top 10 Blog Posts [June 2009] Journalism, Tools and Bloggers

Celebs use Twitter to Launch Complaints

Demo at #webootcamp in PDX

Trying to visualize theory

Will Gen Y Break the Internet?