Since the future begins with local engagement/involvement….

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While large organizations are clearly delivering value to the public and private sector it is important that we do not lose site of the importance of small organizations, local governments, and their ability to drive positive changes.  According to census numbers and numbers published by SBA for the United States alone we know that:  

• There are more than 80,000 local governments in the United States.
• There are more than 27.5 million small businesses in the United States (http://www.sba.gov/advo/stats/sbfaq.pdf).

With these numbers in mind I have launched a brand new community, Our Town Talk.  This community will evolve as membership grows, meeting the needs of our members.   

The mission for this community is straightforward and summed up as providing a place for citizens, small business owners, local government employees and politicians to come together and share their thoughts on what is good and what is not so good in their communities.  Over time I would love to see this become a place where citizen 2.0 is standardized and becomes a reality.   

While these goals are worthwhile we will need to be patient and seek to grow this community to the point where a critical mass is achieved.  In the mean-time, note:  

• The community is absolutely FREE.  It is ad-supported and I want to keep it this way to make sure there are no barriers to entry.
• There are three members today.  As I noted, I literally just launched this.
• As new members join I will create areas for the towns they are from.  I expect this to be a very slow growth community and we should be able to keep up.
• If you have  ideas, share them.
• Invite friends and play to see how this can add value to your community.
• I am aggregating job listings  and daily deals from around the web and will continue to add to these to continue to give more value.

If you believe your town needs an easy to use platform stop by and give it a try.  

John  

Stay focused on your goals

It happened this morning. I woke up, looked around, and realized…. I have no money coming in unless I go out and earn it myself. Cool….

While it easy for any business owner to look at their sales pipeline with a degree of worry this has to be very common for the foolish (er… Inspired) person just getting started. However, as I have always told people, understand your goals, develop your strategies, and execute like mad.

For a new business owner, I think it’s particularly easy to lose focus, chasing every chance for revenue without regard to how it impacts the bigger picture of what you are trying to build… The same is true, of course, for any organization… Remember your goals, stay focused and relaxed. Life is full of ups and downs and your journey, rather it is building a new business, a marketing or product plan, or just getting up in the morning, will reflect this.

Stay focused. Have fun. See you out there.

John

If you need help from The Lab, drop me a note. If you would like to view more case studies and interviews, or just want to read about The Social Ecosystem, click on the links and let me know your thoughts.

Diving into something new

I have worked to establish a new Social Business Practice at Swimfish while concurrently working as the company’s CTO and SVP of Engineering.  Doing a great job on both has been a challenge, a challenge resulting in a non-start of the new practice.

After a lot of thought I have decided to dive in and fully embrace my passion, my passion for The Social Ecosystem and for helping do my part in furthering common sense business approaches across the public and private sector.  What does this mean?

I am going out on my own to focus on The Social Ecosystem practice.  This practice will evolve over time,  of course, but my focus is entirely upon helping public and private sector organizations deliver value, true value.  While I am initially focused in North America I will also explore opportunities elsewhere in hopes of furthering our common understanding.  How can I help you?  Here are a few ideas:

• Speaking to your organization about The Social Ecosystem and its various components including Government 2.0, Social CRM, Enterprise 2.0, and more.
• Revising and devising strategies to meet  your organizational goals.  This includes a focus on:
  • Social Business Strategies.
  • Government 2.0 Strategies.
  • Customer Service Strategies.
  • Leadership Development.
  • Engineering best practices especially for SAAS-based startups.
• Developing white papers for your organization’s products and services.
• As a knowledgable analyst on the Government 2.0 and Social CRM space.
• As a product manager helping review and refine product roadmaps for tools and solutions in this space.

So, what will my new practice be called?  Stay tuned, a bit of mystery isn’t a bad thing.

John

If you would like to view more case studies and interviews, or just want to read about The Social Ecosystem, click on the links and let me know your thoughts.

What is your personal value proposition?

The need for social media training is larger than ever

I had the honor of chatting with the Boston SPIN group yesterday during their monthly meeting.  The group, primarily engineering minded professionals, developers, QA, project managers, turned out to hear me discuss the topic of extending thought leadership positions via social media.  Now, to be honest with you, I had expected to have a small turnout as the phrases social media, thought leadership, personal branding, all reek of marketing and turn off many engineering folks.  I was surprised, however, to have a respectable number of somewhat skeptical folks turn out.

While the US economy has added back many IT jobs in the last two months the unemployment rate is still  high (yes, I know, insightful commentary on my part ).  Many of the technology folks in the room were either looking for work or were underemployed.  Too often this is the time that people first begin their networking efforts, far too late for it to be effective.  Start now, while you are happily employed.   It is no longer enough for engineers, or any other profession, to sly be good at their core  job competencies.  All of us must work on our writing skills, on our speaking skills, on our ability to get an idea across and to discuss, perhaps argue, our view points.

What struck me as I did my presentation and conversed with the audience was the fact that many of us are living in a world unto ourselves, far from the mainstream where people have never heard of people like Robert Scoble, Chris Brogan, Jeremiah Owyang.  When I mentioned these thought leaders to the audience, most people had no clue who they were.  Now…. I do not favor building a country of devoted social media junkies but I do favor a society that understands the need to market their skills, their capabilities.  Many of these people have no idea how to raise awareness of who they are much less why they might want to do so.  Look, if you end up unemployed and looking for work do you want to just begin your marketing efforts then?

Here are a couple of tips to get you started, please use these now.

• Are you using LinkedIn?  If not, get on it now.  If you are, make your profile your resume.  LinkedIn is your work profile and it should always match your resume.  Do some people disagree?  Yes, but this is my blog,  not theirs.
• Raise your profile by joining groups on LinkedIn and answering questions being raised in these groups.  Spend 15 – 20 minutes a day doing this.  It does not require a lot of time.
• Join Twitter and use it, spending 5 – 10 minutes after lunch and before the end of your work day (or when you get home).  Look, I thought Twitter was nonsense before I joined it.  It is not nonsense, it is a valuable part of your social media efforts.
• Are you on Facebook?  Decide if you are going to use it for personal or professional purposes.  I recommend keeping it for personal use and not friending co-workers and others you do not know.  Keep in mind, I break this rule but it will make your life much easier if you do not.
• Setup your Google Profile.  It is free, use it.
• Make sure your profile and your photos match on every social site you use.  You want one view of who you are.

If you feel that you have more than the hour a day I’ve laid out above start a blog.  However, only start a blog if you are going to make the time to update it 3 or 4 times a week.  Keep it fresh, keep it interesting.

Take your career seriously and see if you can find a friend who already understands this social stuff.    If that doesn’t work, call me and I can help you out but, of course, I am not cheap so the friend route is always a smart starting point.

A final point for my friends in HR.  If you are not in the 38% of companies that are spending their time blocking social media access and are in the 29% of companies with a solid social usage policy please setup a social media training class for your employees.   Help them learn how to position themselves, and your company, in a professional and positive manner.  It will benefit everyone.

John

Keep learning via Twitter Chats

If you spend time on Twitter you should consider participating in the weekly chats that take place.  These chats, covering topics from Social Media to PR to Open Government, are providing a number of benefits, benefits you might be missing out on:

• Learning, of course.  I have been learning from thought leaders and visionaries around the globe on a variety of topics.  I have learned more from these conversations than I learned years ago in college.  Of course, it was hard to carry those rock tablets from cave to cave bck then.
• Learning about job opportunities.  These chats are focused but also allow for side conversations and banter with jobs occasionally being discussed.
• Finding mentors.  This chats include people who are at all stages of their careers, from the beginning to the end.

While this lt is far from a complete list, it does cover some of the chats I know about, what other ones should I add:

• journchat on Monday at 8 PM ET.  All things journalism are discussed.
• pr20chat on Tuesday at 8 PM ET. All things PR are discussed.
• custserv and sbbuzz on Tuesday at 9 PM ET.  Customer service and social business items are covered by these groups.
• IMCchat and smallbizchat on Wednesday at 8 PM ET.  Integrated Marketing Communication and Small business issues are covered during these chats.
• localgovchat on Wednesday at 9 PM ET.  A new chat, focused on making local government more transparent, more open.
• ict4d on Friday at 12 PM ET.  Discussions about leveraging information and communication technologies in some of the poorest areas of the world.

Let me know what else I am missing.

John

Navigating the people-side of your support community

Businesses and agencies often realize a need to add support communities, rather internally focused for training and collaboration or externally focused for communicating with customers and potential customers.  In all cases it is critical to remember the people in your company that will be impacted by this effort. 

Before making your business case

Understand which of your peers will be in  your corner and who will be fighting the idea until the bitter end.  In most organizations there is always some degree of politics and you must  take this into account.  Remember to keep your friends close and your enemies closer.  Raise the community concept to gauge the questions and concerns that will arise as part of the approval process.

Most large organizations will need a formal business plan.  You will not win over the executive team with “good feelings” type of arguments, demonstrate the cost and return on the investment.   I have asked a few very large enterprise users if they could have made the business case without traditional number crunching.  Everyone agreed that they would have been unable to get executive and/or board-level agreement without the numbers. 

Your employees

Your employees will likely be excited about participating in the community.  Follow some of these best practices to make sure your employees and your customers have a great experience.

• Provide written policies on what is, and what is not, allowed when using corporate and private accounts.
• Train your team on how to engage.
  • Break down the policies in a way that the employees can gain clarity by asking questions and getting answers.  Do not write a policy without some discussion.
  • Provide some basic public relations training for your top staff and have them train others they work with.  Your communications need to be genuine, however, not everyone’s way of communicating is right for every audience.
  • HP has on-demand training courses that users can take as they have time.  This makes it easier to train everyone  and also enables employees to get regular refresh courses.
• Develop a simple mentoring program.  Best Buy has begun formalizing a program and, while it is too early to see results, I am confident everyone will benefit.
• Tie community participation goals and metrics into your employees goals.  HP, and others, use metrics like number of posts, popularity of posts, customer feedback, etc, for both high-level executive reporting and for employee reviews.

Your community members

Support communities will often cut your operational costs, shifting some level of support away from your employees as the community self-helps itself.  However, you will always have a few bad apples.  How do you deal with these?

• Define a community code of conduct.  Make sure all members understand what is considered appropriate behavior.
  • These norms should focus on keeping language respectful, avoiding personal attacks, etc…  These norms should never limit discussion.
• Let the other members of your community self-regulate the bad apples.  Often times this will bring behavioral norms in line.
• Have your employees use the community code of conduct as a reminder to rope these people in.
• If the bad apples cannot be brought back in-line temporarily suspend them from the community.
• If nothing else works, permanently suspend them from the community.

I was chatting with HP about their community which exceeds 2.5 million visits per month with around 150,000 registered members.  They have permanently banned fewer than 10 users, a tiny fraction of the community users.

What behaviors or best practices would you recommend?

John

How to prepare for a lay-off

I asked my Twitter community for their thoughts on what people should do to be in a position to best handle being layed off.  I put together this simple slide show to cover the collective thoughts.  I hope you find this helpful.

John

Raising your personal brand value on Twitter

As I continue to spend time on Twitter my understanding of the platform, and how to use it to grow a personal brand, evolves.  This post is not intended as my final thoughts on the subject, just a snapshot of my current thinking.

• Define your goals for social communications and how Twitter fits into these goals.  Twitter does not address all needs, blogs are still important, face to face communication is still important.  Twitter is but one tool and you should first understand how it is used and then how it fits into your overall personal or goals.
• I have spent a lot of time with Tweetdeck during my first few months on Twitter.  Lately, however, I find myself spending more time with CoTweet.  While it is often billed as a tool for corporate tweeting I highly recommend it for individual use.  Scheduling tweets, my favorite feature, is a must if you blog.  Twitter users with a community of more than 50 users (aka followers) will not see every tweet you send.
• With CoTweet, schedule key tweets to be sent during prime viewing windows.  For example, when I am done writing a blog post that I want to ensure people read, I schedule it to be sent multiple times with a morning tweet around 10 AM and an afternoon tweet around 4 PM.  These are great viewing times, make sure your voice is heard.
• Use Tools like MrTweet, Twitter Grader, and TweetPlus.  MrTweet will give you a steady supply of recommended people to follow, Twitter Grader will help you understand how you are doing, and TweetPlus will point out where your community is blogging.
• Repeat after me.  It is not about you, it is about your community.  If you want people to respect you, to value you, you must first respect them and value them.  Sounds obvious, yes, but this advice is often ignored.

I won’t bore you with more on this subject tonight.  If you’re interested in hearing more, tweet me at @JohnFMoore or leave a comment here.

John

Hiring, getting back to basics

This week I shifted into hiring mode as I have several positions that we are trying to fill.  These positions have been open at Swimfish for a little while and filling them is now becoming a critical need.  With the high unemployment rate you would think we would have easily filled the support, development, project manager, and web designer positions we have open.  So what gives, why haven’t we filled them yet?

• Hiring qualified talent is hard, always.
• Hiring requires focus.  Life in the startup-lane is always crazed and you are balancing countless priorities.  If you want to successfully hire the right people you must focus on it.  You need to clearly identify the job needs, identify if you need recruiters, and work closely with these recruiters that you have brought on board.  It will not happen without focus.
• Our Support and Development positions are in El Segundo, CA and our main office is in Danvers, MA.  It is harder to recruit outside of your own backyard.  Ask your network for help.

Alright, so today began with focus on hiring, how did I approach it:

• Reviewed all open positions to ensure they were clear and accurate.  Sometimes you will write a job description and find out a month later that it is no longer valid.  Keep it valid.
• Reached out to my personal network, my LinkedIn network, my Twitter network.
• Posted the El Segundo position on twitter.  It’s not in my backyard and a $25 investment to post a job is money well spent.
• Repeat step 2.
• Repeat step 2
• … You get the idea.

Seems simple, right?  What were the results:

• Nearly 30 applications for the Support job in the first few hours, more continuing to come in.  The majority of these came through Craigslist but have 5 or 6 more leads through the networks.
• Have 4 new leads for project managers.  All of them are high quality and came from my network efforts.
• Have 3 leads for graphic designers.  This is a 3 week consulting gig and the leads were off the mark.  The issue is not the network in this case, the issue is with the job description.  I will go back and update it

Not bad for one person leveraging the power of their network.  Imagine the number of resumes you should be seeing.

John