Michael's shared items in Google Reader

Can You Predict People?

2009-06-30T00:00:33Z

With Talent Management emerging as a decision science, there has been an increase in HR’s willingness to leverage traditional financial methods, such as: assigning risk, segmenting investment profiles, and analyzing build versus buy. But what about forecasting? Can you really predict what people will do? And, if you say yes, will anyone believe you?

We have some seriously smart strategists that say you can. And, we sure have data. We have old standards like previous jobs, tenure, and demographics. We have performance data, engagement survey data, manager gut feel data, even psychometric tests to establish future fit. And, more and more, we have employee volunteered data from social networking.

By taking past trends and current data, you can get a very good idea of the future performance, productivity, and attrition of your organization. What’s more, by applying segmentation methods,you can make program changes that will affect the results. For example, after detecting that high performers tend to leave after 4 years in the same job, you can stem attrition by implementing an internal mobility program that focuses on high performers with 3 years in the job.

At the aggregate level, this is a slam dunk. Hard! But, a slam dunk.

Things get tricky when you start to look at individuals. In the financial world, individual assessments are made constantly. Invest, maintain, or sell off that line of business? Buy, sell or hold a stock? There are forecasting acronyms aplenty to help make these determinations. Can we apply these same methods to individual people? Can we predict what we really want to know?

Will this person help or hurt the company?
If I do x, will this person help or hurt the company more?
If I do y, will this person stay and will they help or hurt the company?

Why the hell not? If you think about it, we actually have more control over what people do than what a stock does. By making a change in an individual’s experience, knowledge, or motivation, we might make a significant impact on the success of the company. And, if we don’t, are we any worse off than our stock decision? Financial forecasting metrics certainly aren’t perfect, so why do people metrics have to be?

So, why the hesitation? 2 thoughts:

Stocks don’t have privacy and legal rights. People do. For example, the system may predict that Lily, a 30 year old married Asian woman with no children and high performance is likely to hurt the company (due to predicted absences). Making a compensation decision based on this prediction might be totally acceptable in some countries and not in others. In some countries, a targeted mentorship program for high performing women in their 30’s might be more appropriate. It’s a matter of being careful – with the data that’s used and the decisions that are made as a result.
Getting inside information on a stock is illegal, but inside information on a person is not. In fact, you have a couple of insiders. Namely, the manager and the individual herself. The system may predict that Kenna has a high likelihood of leaving the company in the next 6 months. However, your insider (the manager) has just had a conversation with her and knows that she is starting her (paid for by the company) MBA program in the fall and is definitely not leaving. It’s a matter of recognizing the inside information as well as people’s biases
toward what they know vs. what the system comes up with.

So let’s recognize our hesitations for what they are – guidance – and start to think about the questions we can answer and the results we can obtain.

In case of fire alarm please pack your desk and go home in an orderly fashion

2009-06-30T23:31:45Z

A mass layoff story being reported out of Singapore beggars belief. The last line is my favourite. "Please move in and try your luck."

"A fire alarm rang at 4PM when almost all shift employees are in office (approx 5000). As usual entire office was evacuated within 3 mins & every employee gathered outside office. 10 mins passed ………. 5 more mins passed………. 5 more mins passed.

Then a Security Officer stated an announcement ‘Dear Employees - With melting heart I am making this announcement that for many of you it will be a last evacuation drill. Due to the recession we are laying off almost 50% of employees. While moving in if your ID card does not work, then you are among those laid off & all your belongings will be couriered to you tomorrow.

We have followed this approach as we didn’t want to fill email box with layoff mails and good bye mails in thousands & also to avoid any fight inside office.

Hope you have a nice career ahead. Please move in & try your luck"

My top ten (or twelve) iPhone apps

2009-06-28T11:15:28Z

I’ve had my iPhone for a while now, and with the new iPhone 3GS on its way to me this week, I thought I’d share a few of the apps that I’ve come to use and value most. I’ve picked up a few good tips from similar posts, so hopefully there’s something in here you haven’t come across and might find interesting.

1. Google Reader is by far the most accessed item on my iPhone and, while not an app, it certainly deserves pride of place on the homescreen. The iPhone interface is so easy to use and move around it makes reading feeds simple. Being online, it perfectly compliments the full web version and no other RSS reader I’ve tried has come close to touching it.

2. Stanza is a great app that I use to read ebooks. The online catalogs make downloading new titles a no brainer and the desktop app enables painless sharing of texts you already have. I’m a bit concerned that Amazon have bought the app, but I’m optimistic that they will use it to greatly improve the Kindle app (although I’m expecting that they will hobble future versions with more Kindle-like features)

3. OzWeather. This is basically a better weather app than the default iPhone app. Current conditions, forecasts and the radar images using the Bureau of Meteorology data, which is the critical point for an Australian weather app. While it might seem strange to pay money to replace an app that is included for free, this is a good example of a superior replacement. On my wishlist are push notifications to update the app badge with the current temperature, but I think that’s pretty unlikely. Overall, very nicely done.

4. Balance is a tiny app, but one that does the job it needs to do. I don’t keep a full budget on the iPhone, but I do use it to keep track of the money I spend. Balance lets me do this easily and quickly without any unnecessary bells and whistles.

5. TweetDeck and Tweetie. This is still a tie at the moment. Tweetie has been great, but after using TweetDeck for a while now, I’m starting to like it (even if I still haven’t come around to the desktop version yet). Both have an amazing range of features and stand out among the dozens of Twitter apps in the store at the moment. This is one category that is still exploding on iTunes at the moment, so there’s bound to be more apps that let you tweet on the move. Birdhouse, from Sandwich Dynamics, is one example of an interesting take on using Twitter from an iPhone.

6. Metlink Melbourne. Public transport in Melbourne can be a bit of a hit and miss affair, but at least with this app, you know when things are meant to turn up. Metlink supports saving favourite stations/stops and covers trains/trams/buses/VLine all in the one app. It’s just recently replaced the MetroMelb app and is worth getting if you rely on public transport. There’s versions for other cities under the ‘Metro’ title as well.

7. I like to use Instapaper on the desktop to save long articles I want to come back and read, so when the iPhone app came out, it really made sense. The Instapaper app downloads the saved sites, so once you’ve synced, you can access everything on a plane, in a tunnel or anywhere, regardless of reception. A great app.

8. Remember the Milk and Todo. This is another tie. As a GTD nut, I live and die by the lists I keep in Remember the Milk, but still haven’t found the perfect way to tie this in on the iPhone. The RTM app is nice and now supports push notifications, but has surprisingly poor support for smart lists and tasks with no deadline, which is what I need most of all. Todo offers full syncing with RTM and, while it doesn’t actually support smartlists, you can use the focus list and the filter to achieve a similar list. However, I’ve noticed that the sync hasn’t been working that well lately and I can’t rely on the app as much as I would like. It’s a relatively expensive app (and worth the price), but hopefully this issue will resolve itself soon. I know the crew at RTM are always developing their product, so I’m hoping a new version will arrive soon that will fit the bill – it’s one that I would use constantly if it fit my workflow correctly.

9. Aussie Rules LIVE is my pick of the AFL apps. It offers all the team information and news, as well as past scores and head to head information that you’ll need, but I find their live data to be the best. It’s easy to check the scores around the grounds and the commentary is a great way to get a feel for how the game is going. They’ve recently added DreamTeam scores as well, which is exciting, but unfortunately this doesn’t include the SuperCoach competition I play in – hopefully this is for a future update…

10. The final app on the list is Facebook. At the end of the day, it is just Facebook, but the way the app works just makes it perfect for the job. It’s easy to use and has most of the features you need. I would love support for more applications on the iPhone, similar to what Lexulous offers, but for catching up on news, photos and messages, you can’t beat the app.

I must give honourable mentions to a host of other apps as well, there are heaps that I use on a regular basis and some of the innovations and interfaces the developers have used are pretty amazing. WordPress, AppSniper, Weightbot, TripIt, CommBank, Snatch, Dropbox, AroundMe and eWallet are all apps that I could have added to this list. If you use this as a shopping list on the App Store, you’re sure to find some great applications.

Note that there’s no games on these lists. There’s plenty of those on my iPhone as well, so that is a list for another day.

I’m constantly looking for great new apps, so I’d love to hear any feedback about these lists, or suggestions for anything I may have missed.

SMS continues to be a preferred communication tool

2009-06-23T16:22:22Z

Forget Twitter, Facebook and other new communication tools, it’s an old communication tool Australians are in love with – SMS. A new research by Pure Profile (Sponsored by Telstra) found Australians prefer using SMS to communicate. One in three Australians choose SMS to announce major live events like a job promotion or the birth of [...] Related posts:

Reinvent Your Career Expo – The Careers Event for Adults

2009-06-26T07:13:09Z

Back for its second year after its fantastic debut in 2008, this career event delivers organisations excited and prepared to meet adult career seekers.

They understand adults diverse needs and come prepared for questions only adult’s can have. It’s an Australian first!

Now double the size, the Melbourne Reinvent Your Career Expo brings career opportunity’s, skills matching information, further or alternative education options, culture mapping, training and employment opportunities to you under one roof at one time.

It’s Australia’s first intentional major career expo for adults where you can access – Free Seminars, Free Career Counselling, Free Migration Advice, Free Resume Services, Real Jobs and a Highly Skilled Trainers.

Meet Australia’s largest employers, educators and trainers who will all assemble to offer you practical career insights into industries, companies and jobs.

The Reinvent Your Career Expo will assist people in career transition. It provides skills matching communication channels to connect you to the right organisations at the right time.

Experienced Professional and Executive Career Coaches from Six Figures and The Clarity Group will be there with other CDAA Career Coaches offering free one on one career coaching sessions and running a number of workshops on ‘Resume Writing’ and how to ‘Impress at the Interview‘. To find out more email info@theclaritygroup.com.au

So whether you want to upgrade, re-skill, return to the workforce or totally Reinvent Your Career, make your way to the Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre on Saturday 11th or Sunday 12th July 2009.

Twitter and Social Media as a learning tool

2009-05-27T03:07:00Z

The Center of Learning and Performance Technologies has compiled a list of top tools for learning in 2009 after inputs from more than 100 learning professionals and increasingly a lot of social media tools make it to the list.

Most surprisingly, Twitter is No.1, followed by URL sharing app Delicious, Google Reader, Wordpress, Slideshare.

So what makes social media tools overwhelmingly come out on tops?

My thoughts on Twitter echo that it is an overwhelmingly social tool.

And adult learning is essentially a social process.

Kolb has said it. John Seely Brown has said it. And we can see how sharing experiences and knowledge leads to a better input for learning.

However, be aware that these are only tools.

You still have to apply and practice the information you get from these tools to ensure that learning takes place. Social tools can help one to support and encourage each other during the conscious competence phase when one really needs support and encouragement.

Sample Social Media Policy

2009-06-20T02:46:00Z

Lots of businesses are grappling with social media and how to draw up a policy - well here's an interesting 'social media policy' that Headset Bros (a company that sells headsets) has drawn up.

Take a look, it's simple and easy to understand :-)

Time you got yourself a social media policy like this, isn't it?

HEADSET BROS – SOCIAL MEDIA POLICY

We have switched 2Vouch off to focus on the JobGenie!

2009-06-19T10:56:56Z

Executing a public job referral model in a down market is a very tough challenge, in fact executing a public job referral model is challenging in a healthy market.

The team at 2Vouch have made the very hard decision of switching this service off for a while whilst we focus our team and resources on building out the new application we have developed The JobGenie.

Jeremy and I would like to say a big thank you to all of those early adopter companies who advertised jobs on 2Vouch and also a BIG thanks to all of you who signed up as referrers on the 2Vouch platform.

We are still very passionate that there is a market for job referrals globally but recognise that you have to have the right business model and funding. We think we are heading in the right direction with the JobGenie.

A few points on what we have learned through the 2Vouch experience.

Ensure your start up is well funded to get you through the development phase with enough cash to execute your sales and marketing plan.
Focus, focus, focus - build enough functionality in your web application to execute your core offering. We built a BIG comprehensive application that did a lot and it probably did too much. We only know this with the benefit of hindsight. Think Twitter!
Venture Capital funding from Aussie venture firms is not realistically a funding option if you are a pre-revenue start-up in Australia.
Build the parts of your applications that generate revenue as a priority.
Launch early and iterate. If people like your design and think your application is slick at your launch. You’re too late to market!
Have the right project management and collaboration tools to manage your agile development. We use Atlassian’s Jira and Confluence. Thanks guys you rock!
Make sure you have direct access to your development team. We do now! We didn’t initially and that was a disaster! I will go public with who the Australian Web Development Company was that we engaged first time around but now is not the right time. Needless to say - I would never use them or recommend them!
As a Recruiter and then CEO of a tech start-up - I have learned so much. The last three years have been a wonderful ride and I am taking everything I have learned and applying those lessons to the development and deployment of JobGenie On Demand Employee Referral Platform.

All the Best,

Riges Younan

CEO, 2Vouch.

@rigesyounan

Australian Computer Society Event: Social Networking in a Business Context

2009-06-18T03:25:23Z

Last night I was one of the presenters on a panel at the monthly meeting for the Australian Computer Society. The topic that was discussed was "Social Networking in a Business Context".

Thanks to the ACS for organising and running the presentation. Individual thanks to Yasas Abeywickrama, Ksenija Catic and Jeanette Wirt from the ACS for their help and also to my co-presenters Charlynn Miller and Corry Brouwer.

It was an interesting night and I feel we only really scratched the surface of Social Networking and its use. It is such a broad term and the way that an individual or organisation uses Social Networking can vary greatly depending on what you are looking to achieve.

It can be difficult to keep pace in the Social Networking space with the speed of which the technology is changing. There are so many different tools and applications to use and they are constantly being superceded by new tools or apps. I would suggest to use the 3-4 tools that best suit your purposes other wise social networking can consume too much of your time trying to manage multiple accounts and networks.

On the drive home, I was thinking that it will be interesting to see what the current state of Social Networking develops into in 2,5,10 years. Will we continue to use the tools that we use today? Will we still use them in the same context?

Generation Y certainly embraces the technology and tools, however if we think of the next generation that enters the workforce after this - is it fair to assume they will be even more technically savvy or adept in this space?

What do you think will become of social Networking and sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Ning, Plaxo, etc....., how will we use these sites to interact, what will happen in 2,5,10 years??

Video: Twitter Search in Plain English

2009-06-16T22:09:47Z

Today we released a new video called "Twitter Search in Plain English"

The video uses an metaphor of the small town of "Twitterville." The town has an election and the people use Twitter to track real-time news, a hashtag to organize discussions and trends to find new information.

While it wasn't our intention, the video matches closely with the events currently taking place in Iran, where people are using Twitter to organize and share news about their disputed election.

If you know people who get Twitter, but don't understand things like hashtags and trending topics, this video will help.

Watch Twitter Search in Plain English.

employees earn money with one-click

2009-06-16T19:45:25Z

Workyourcareer.com today launched a new One-Click Referral Service that allows employees to post jobs from companies where they work, receive resumes and forward those resumes as referrals to the appropriate hiring or recruiting manager.

“With our new One-Click Referral Service, we wanted to give people an opportunity to mine their way into companies when they otherwise wouldn’t be able to do so,” CEO Mark Thomas said. “Job seekers are becoming increasingly frustrated with the ‘black hole effect,’ whereby they submit resumes through a company’s traditional online submission process, only to never hear back from the company or not know if the company has even received his/her resume. Our tool puts your resume right in front of the correct person who should be reading it.”

The new service allows job seekers to create a profile and upload their resume. Job seekers can then search and apply for jobs that have been posted by employees at companies they’re interested in. If an employee receives a job seeker’s resume and likes it, they can then create a personalized e-mail and refer the job seeker to the hiring or recruiting manager working on that open position.

Job seekers pay 99 cents for each resume that an employee forwards to a hiring or recruiting manager. There is no cost to the job seeker if their resume is not passed on. Employers and employees don’t pay anything to post their jobs or receive resumes. They do, however, receive 25 cents for each resume they forward to a hiring or recruiting manager.

In the near future, the company hopes to add new features to the service. One such feature is the ability to automatically pull job openings from companies so employees don’t have to manually enter jobs.

Workyourcareer.com also underwent a complete site makeover, making it more Web 2.0 friendly. The redesign is meant to make the site easier to use, more fun and laid-back in appearance.

Peerlo launches The JobGenie Employee Referral Platform in BETA

2009-06-14T09:39:15Z

The JobGenie Employee Referral Platform is live!

The management team at Peerlo have developed a lot of experience building and executing job referral platforms. We launched 2Vouch a public job referral system in September 2008. Through the 2Vouch experience we learned many things about agile software development and executing online business models.

Three months ago we embarked on an ambitious plan to build a whole new platform with new technology from scratch, yes that’s right every line of code. So the Peerlo team are proud to bring you the JobGenie

Why?

We are very passionate about Employee Referrals and having talked to a number of customers we noticed that their employee referral programs were not delivering more than 25% of their hires in the best cases. The major problem were - yep you guessed it adhoc and inefficient systems to manage and track the data, lack of executive support and no structure and strategy for the ERP . So we have decided to try and solve some of these problems by building a SaaS (Software as a Service) Employee Referral Platform to enable employers to run world class employee referral programs.

Human Resource Managers or Internal Recruiters can lists jobs like they would with any job board and request referrals from their employees by department, position title or location. They can even send jobs to their Alumni. Referrers then refer jobs to their contacts via email or to their contacts on Facbook, Linkedin & Twitter. The JobGenie also provides a bunch of analytics around time to hire, cost of hire and tracking of referrals through all of the social sites.

How Much?

We have a free version that has all of the functionality of the paid version. So if you are a small company and are not doing a lot of hiring the free version would work well for you. We also have a paid version with unlimited jobs, referrers and integration with your eRecruiting tools. You can view the pricing model here

We would be grateful if you could try it out and provide us some feedback.

Cheers,

The Peerlo Team.

While In Vegas…

2009-06-08T13:15:19Z

This week, I am working from Las Vegas, as I will be attending the Fordyce Forum on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. I am presenting a pre-conference workshop on Wednesday from 2-5pm PDT on how social media can play a part in your recruitment plan. In an effort to practice what I will be preaching, I am going to have a live Twitter stream from my session using the hashtag #VegasRG through a site called TweetChat. You may have seen me using this hashtag over the last couple of weeks – I am keeping a sort of “Twitter journal” of my Las Vegas experience via the hashtag. My boss, Chris Hoyt, did this earlier in the year on his trip to DC with the #rgdc hashtag. I would encourage you to follow #VegasRG live between 2-5pm PDT and interact with those who will be attending the pre-conference workshop. My goal is to show them just how useful social media is from a conversational and information-sharing standpoint. Please feel free to respond to anything from the #VegasRG hashtag and present questions to the workshop attendees as well. I welcome any and all conversation!

I’ve done a lot of prep work for this presentation, because I realize that not everyone is as excited about social media’s place in recruiting as I am. Social media goes way beyond the popular LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter tools. There are also social bookmarking tools, cloud computing resources, podcasting/video/photo sharing tools, and so much more. In an effort to be transparent with my own use of these resources, I have decided that I will be going paperless for this conference and instead will be using some of the tools available through social media. I have loaded all of my presentation notes into my EverNote account and will be accessing them through EverNote’s iPhone app. So for anyone attending live, I promise I’m not checking email or text messages on my phone during my own presentation – I’m just following my notes

In addition, I’m not going to be handing out any business cards this year. That’s right – no paper cards from me! If you want my contact information, you will need to send a text message with ‘researchgoddess’ to 50500. I am using a resource called Contxts to provide my information via SMS. It makes for a good conversation starter, and it also helps you to be more ‘green’

My hope is that those of you in attendance of the workshop will come away with some better thought process about how you plan to reach your audiences with social media. We’ll go over some tools of course, but my main goal is going to be to help you better understand the ‘why’ – because if you don’t understand why you are doing something, then how you do it isn’t going to make much of a difference.

Please pass the word about #VegasRG – I would love to see not only those of you who work in recruiting, but also my friends and colleagues in social media, marketing, and PR communities interacting during the presentation. There is so much we can all learn from each other. See you on Wednesday!

Please make note: the presentation is this Wednesday, June 10th, from 2-5pm Pacific time. So for Eastern time zone folks, that’s 5-8pm, and for Central, it’s 4-7pm.

Making workplaces inspiring

2009-04-27T01:26:00Z

Image via Wikipedia

Sujit asked on twitter - why are most workplaces uninspiring and boring ?

Workplace culture is shaped subtly by the physical layout and colors of one's place of work. How much can a cubicle or bland greys and cream colors inspire you? In fact they may be making a manager's job more difficult.

What organizations are communicating subconsciously to people is that "You are just a cog in the wheel"

While many people in organizations do end up personalising their workplace with personal decorations, photographs - however really reimagining the workplace is a complete no-no in most organizations.

Here's a tip to organizations: if you want ownership from your employees - try giving them ownership to shape their own workplace.

Of course, I am not saying that alone will give rise to a great organizational culture, but it is a variable that will go into it.

Will organizations be brave enough and take the plunge?

8 Principles for the Modern Blog …at least for 2009

2009-04-13T13:01:06Z

A few years ago, Julio Garcia suggested I redesigned my blog, I should have listened, he was right. Yesterday, I finally took his advice and launched a new blog design, in which I contracted Web Designer and Developer Mitch Canter to complete.

We involved the community in the iterations of the design, and frequently asked for feedback. I even used controversial crowdSPRING to crowdsource my banner design, (thanks to Dragos Mirica, see his site)based on Mitch’s wireframe and logo creation. In the end, a majority of it came from my vision, a great deal from Mitch, and the rest from the community.

Although this blog redesign process has taken a few months (I’ve been very busy, as has he) I’ve come to learn there’s a few principles that have changed since I started my blog back in 2005. (BTW: Here’s the old version, if you want to jog your memory) Here’s what I think are appropriate for 2009, yet I expect this list to change in just a few years as new technologies and the media landscape shifts.

8 Principles for the Modern Blog …at least for 2009

1) Baseline: Have Valuable Content
This one isn’t anything new. You have to have relevant content that’s either helpful or interesting to your audience, or you can forget the rest of the principles. Content still rules the royal court, and without it, you can’t move forward. Ideas, insights, perspectives aligned with an appropriate publishing frequency to your market is baseline. Don’t read ahead ’till you do that.

2) Know your Audience
If you’re just writing for yourself, this principle doesn’t matter. A few years ago, blogging didn’t have a strong business objective, but now we see many companies involved in blogging, so it must impact company in a positive way. So, if you want your blog to grow and spread your ideas and knowledge, then you likely have an objective. In order to be successful for your ideas to be effective, you should first know what your readers want. I know through a formal survey that most of my readers are interactive marketers, so I’m attempting to give them what they want through content and website experience.

3) Distribute the Content…
In the end, I believe web destinations are irrelevant, as we should fish where the fish are. The goal of a thought leadership blog, is often to get your ideas to spread to other locations. In the most extreme example, take Jason Calcanis, who temporarily stopped blogging and shifted to a dedicated email newsletter, it worked, as people ended up blogging his content for him. I’ve highlighted email subscription, and a host of tools at the bottom of each post that enable you to share the content elsewhere.

4) ..Yet Aggregate the Conversation
If you’re successful because of the two principles above, your content will start to spread to other locations on the web. It’ll be discussed on Twitter, tagged in Delicious, rehashed in Friendfeed, talked about in Facebook, and maybe event submitted to Digg. As a response to content distributing (Principle 3) then as a response to help to re-centralize your thoughts, you’ll need to aggregate your social content. This builds a reef for the fish to centralize around. As a result this accomplishes three things: 1) Helps people to find opinions in a single place 2) Helps you to manage the conversation 3) Provides a social reward to those who spread the content.

5) Highlight Community Conversation
While I know that in Principle 1 it’s about the content, for some blogs, highlighting the community around you is key. For example, in this blog redesign, we’ve given nearly equal attention to the comments and conversation. We’ve aggregated Friendfeed conversation (and soon Facebook), as well as given each commenter the ability to show their icon. (sign up to Gravatar if you want your smiling picture to appear in the comments), you’ll even notice the prominent comment bubbles next to each blog title. If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that the collective commenters say some really brilliant stuff –let’s focus on the collective voices.

6) Reflect a Personal Brand
Whether you like the concept or term, expect the desire and need for personal brands to increase during a global recession. As people become sensitive that they may be positioned against a dozen other candidates, demonstrating thought leadership to be found, a built in audience, or a living resume of their knowledge and how they interact with others is key. We’ve provided a variety of ways for people to connect with me via email, social networking sites, and even an embedded Twitter ticker tape below the header. This means that having a visually aligned personal brand with your goal is important, why? The way you represent yourself is an indicator of how you’ll represent your employer and clients.

7) Get Serious, Hire a Pro
This project was more ambitious than I could have taken on in my busy schedule or antiquated UI design background. Therefore it’s important to hire someone who knows what they’re doing, in fact read Mitch’s behind the scenes guest post, there’s only 7 images on the blog design, in an attempt to optimize the site. Mitch does this professionally, and it was worth the money to hire him to lead this project. I don’t have the time to learn it, nor do I want to risk messing up the blog.

8] Got an Principle to Share? Leave a Comment
I won’t profess to knowing all the principles, so I’m leaving this one open to the community. What principles for the modern web blog need to be factored in?

By the way, I’ll be working on the popular posts section, making it a quick reference guide to those that quickly need the most helpful content. Stay tuned.

HOW TO: Track Swine Flu Online

2009-04-25T21:00:01Z

There are few things in this world that cannot be easily replaced, repaired, or regained. Our health and the health of the ones we love falls into this category. The best thing we can do to protect our health, above medication or rest, is prevention.

This week, news broke of a new and fatal swine flu on the Mexico-U.S. border. It has quickly turned into a growing outbreak and possible pandemic. Knowing about these important and growing cases is vital to public health. Fortunately, there are several useful online resources that track health information and disease outbreaks.

This resource guide will help you better track not only cases of Swine Flu, but other public health concerns as well.

Step 1. Check the WHO Disease Outbreak News Center

The World Health Organization (WHO) is the leading source for health and disease-related information. If you’re just looking for breaking news on major epidemics and outbreaks, visit their Disease Outbreak News Center, which provides current and historical information on diseases, as well as an RSS feed.

Step 2. Set up Google News Alerts

One of the best ways to keep up-to-date on recent changes or breaking news is to use Google News and Google Alerts to have breaking news emailed to you or sent to your RSS reader. Set up a Google News Alert with the keywords “swine flu” to be sure you catch any major mention of the issue.

Step 3. Check the CDC Travel Notices for Outbreak Alerts

If you’re looking to travel, check the CDC’s Travel Notices. The Center for Disease Control provides information on major outbreaks across the world and is the U.S. body that determines whether or not an area is safe for U.S. citizens to travel to. The CDC has several levels of notices, from minor cases to epidemics. Always check the CDC’s notices before traveling - especially to areas that may be affected by the swine flu. The information is also available as an RSS feed.

Step 4. Find Where the Flu has Spread with HealthMap

While the WHO provides up-to-date information on outbreaks, HealthMap takes it several steps further. HealthMap aggregates news feeds from the WHO, Google News, ProMED, and elsewhere to map out all of the disease outbreaks. It includes a heat index to understand how bad certain situations really are and the most recent health-related news items.

Tip: To check just for influenza-related news, check only the box that says “influenza” under “Diseases, last 30 days”.

Stay Calm, Stay Informed

While there’s likely to be much concern on social networking sites about public health incidents, it’s important to keep things in proportion, and go direct to the sources of news rather than spreading panic.

More health resources from Mashable:

- HOW TO: Use Social Media for Better Health

- Top 10 Free iPhone Apps to Lose Weight

- Stop Smoking: 9 Resources to Help You Quit

- 15 Exercise Video Tutorial Sites to Pump You Up

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, cornishman

Tags: health, health monitoring, swine flu

Whose Conversation Is It Anyway?

2009-04-03T15:03:02Z

Markets are supposed to be conversations, according to the Cluetrain. But does anyone own that conversation?

I started thinking about the question earlier in the week when the 37Signals Get Satisfaction spat kicked off. Who owns all those critical or positive questions about a brand anyway? IS it really Get Satisfaction? Or perhaps its Twitter? Here is Google selling Adwords to Intuit through Twitter? Confused yet?

Does RedMonk own mentions of RedMonk? I would said of course not! But what if that mention included a RedMonk logo? Ah that’s a little more difficult… then.

To be honest my problem with Get Satisfaction is a lot more prosaic, if certainly related to the issues above. You see there is a guy called Steve Ivy, nicknamed redmonk. When we launched the firm I decided that the nickname was Ok, given he trades under Monkinetic, although his URL is redmonk.net. Steve is a really nice guy. I have tried at various times since 2002 to stop calling himself redmonk, but its of course his decision.

That said as business and personal have increasingly intermingled on social networks, things are getting more and more uncomfortable. That is- Steve got @redmonk on twitter first, which is Ok. A little more annoying, when I first tried to use Get Satisfaction it quickly became apparent it wouldn’t work for us, because any perception and mention crawling engine was going to throw up an awful lot of false positives. It doesn’t help that Steve is interested in a lot of the same open source and development issues we are.

I think our RedMonk is bigger than Steve’s redmonk (well there are four of us after all!), and Google basically concurs, but the twitter thing does make me uncomfortable. You’re probably chuckling at this point - those guys at RedMonk think they are *so* smart, and they didn’t even get @redmonk…. well I am guilty as charged.

But nicknames, brands and tags are all converging. The whole notion of IP protection becomes ever more complicated. Our answer is to look for friendly ways to deal with stuff. Clearly many brands have a different approach.

A while back I said if markets are conversations then twitter is money. You can see why Facebook doesn’t want Google spidering its users’ sentiments. Twitter is more open, which is a powerful position, but also allows for embrace and extend tactics.

Don’t even get me started on the Terms of Service that allow these web apps to think they own what we say and do. But I am increasingly wondering whose conversation is it, and whose money?

Corporate Sustainability Goals: Too Scared To Fail?

2009-04-06T14:57:48Z

I wrote a post on Greenmonk this morning adding context to a story about Greenpeace chiding HP for “backsliding” on a commitment to remove PVC and BFR from its electronic equipment this year. The issue being, HP said it never made the such a strong commitment in the first place.

Something has been bothering me all day about this: the danger is that if we slam companies too hard for making sustainability commitments they don’t manage to keep then they might avoid putting forward audacious goals at all. The danger is that environmental reporting goes the way of financial reporting - which is all about managing analyst expectations rather than truly reflecting the state of the business. Be conservative about the numbers so you can beat them- that’s the GE Way. But massaging figures to look good has a rather more unpleasant corollary- fraud.

We’re already effectively defrauding the planet by not accounting for environmental damage and degradation on our balance sheets. If environmentalism is reduced to a PR-driven quarter over quarter “continuous improvement” then we’re really screwed. Of course we should hold public statements by companies and governments up to scrutiny, but we should rate organisations on what they do than rather than on what they say.

Greenpeace may see things differently - thus Apple was applauded this quarter for a new advert about “the green credentials of its Macbook“, whereas others might just call greenwash! (especially given Greenpeace is historically quite critical of Apple).

I want to see the likes of HP make big bold predictions about sustainability. Without big goals after all we won’t make progress. Its important we don’t stymie debates by making corporations too scared to fail. Sustainability is going to have some switchbacks. Progress is never linear. Corporations need to be able to discuss sustainability goals in public without being completely slammed for not meeting them. Once again- lets not make the mistakes of financial reporting.

Follow Responsibly: 5 ways to keep twitter clean and honest.

2009-04-20T01:07:16Z

I’m a relatively early twitterer. I started using twitter in March of 07 and boy were they great times. No one was trying to market anything, it was just a bunch of cool kids getting value out of this new way of communicating.

Since then, twitter as a whole, has changed. It’s gone from a place of sincere conversation to being a cesspool of so called Social Media Experts, celebrities and all sorts of marketers.

And as this new era of twitter dawns I guess I feel the loss of the old and have struggled a little as it has turned into the cesspool that it is.

Why do I call it a cesspool? Well, here’s the problem. When Ashton Kutcher gets a million followers and everyone rejoices that the underdog has beat the media giant, they don’t realise that they’re creating a new media giant. One less governed by rules but far more by instant and spontaneous gratification.

The marketers and celebrities have come on board to do one thing, sell shit to you. And now they have a direct channel to message to you. Their game hasn’t changed, it’s just that now you’re a very active and willing participant, talk about Permission Marketing at its height! I mean seriously, AplusK follows 81 people and has 1.2M (and growing) followers, oh, and Oprah is following a total of 10.

This disproportionate ratio is sending a very clear message: twitter is a place to consume not to engage.

And thus my issue, a new breed of Twitterers is either trying to sell you shit or is being sold shit and Twitter’s DNA has changed as a result.

I want to be clear, I have no problem with selling shit, but that is (or at least should be) an ancillary benefit for being an active participant of the network and not the other way around.

So, as we sink deeper into Twitter being a reflection of our marketing and messaging infected real world, my mate Nick Hodge has some advice:

@delic8genius dont sub to the #wankerati. Simple. #unfollowsunday is my cleaning day :-)

So as is very often the case, Nick is right. Twitter is whatever you want it to be. Follow who you want to follow and Twitter will be the Twitter that you want it to be.

So, if you fear the possibility that Twitter becomes overwhelmingly a channel for one way communication, you can do something. You can follow responsibly. 5 tips to following responsibly:

Unfollow a celebrity (or 2 or 3): Not saying you shouldn’t follow a celebrity that you connect with, but I can’t believe that many people really care about Ashton Kutcher’s life (even if he does have a vintage smokin’ hot wife)
Unfollow the “new media”: Next time one of your twitter friends uses the phrase “new media”, unfollow or discipline their ass. Twitter is not new media. Also, follow some good advice and be a practitioner not an expert, as tempting as it may be to think you know it all, this is not a medium to know it all (it’s for know it all’s)
Fix your following/followers ratio: If you are following a disproportionally high number of people relative to followers, you are a troll and can’t possibly be getting any genuine value out of Twitter. Begin a mass unfollowing and for your sins gimmie 5 x #unfollowsunday’s. Remember, you’re more awesome the more followers you have not the more that you follow, the latter kinda makes you a loser.
Unfollow bots or virtual twitterers: Virtual twitterers are ok at events for announcements and for customer support I guess but other than that, there is generally no place for fake twitter entities.
Be the good: Ultimately, Twitter newbies will follow your lead so be the citizen that you want others to be. Follow and engage with the great twitters and unfollow the not so great. Your followers will do the same.

If you feel this is an appropriate approach, please ask your friends to follow responsibly too.

-mk

Does Your Technology Vendor Put the Ass in SaaS?

2009-02-25T14:06:29Z

One thing has become quite apparent over the past 3 years…most HR buyers still don’t understand Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Much of the confusion can be attributed to the many vendors that have attempted to rebrand their hosted offering as SaaS combined with salespeople’s inability to articulate how their company actually delivers their SaaS model and the value associated with their respective model.

For any vendor walking in your door, it is essential that you understand how they are delivering their SaaS solution. Is it single-tenant, multi-tenant, virtualized, etc? How are the “hosting” and how is the infrastructure managed, and how are updates consumed?

Microsoft actually describes the SaaS maturity model is 4 ways (depicted below):

Source: Microsoft, 2006

Level 1: Custom
Level 2: Configurable
Level 3: Configurable, Multi-Tenant Efficient
Level 4: Scalable, Configurable Multi-Tenant Efficient

All of these questions are important because the SaaS delivery model has significant repercussions on how the vendor can add new functionality, it defines the products ease of configurability, and it ultimately impacts the total cost of ownership (whether the vendor passes through the cost savings or re-invests it into the company).

I frankly think the only true version of SaaS can be delivered in a true, multi-tenant model. What are your thoughts?

Technorati Tags: SaaS, maturity, multi-tenant, Microsoft