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Thoughts and things I care to shareOn the Firefox 3 Final Version
Yep, upgraded to the final version yesterday. Pretty happy that I did. Performance is noticeably improved, memory usage improved, and several dozen plugins where upgraded yesterday in sync with the new release.
You can find the download for Firefox 3 here. Good stuff!
Why You Should Build Your Audience
An interesting component of your online brand is most certainly audience. Without it, there is little point in doing much of anything online other than email, research, and storing information. Audience is what makes the web 2.0 world turn, as we’re all dependent upon the interactivity that audience brings.
Without people to follow, read, and comment on what each of us creates, we would have no measuring stick to compare ourselves to. We would not have a way to gauge improvement in knowledge or abilities. We’d be unable to find out what help others need, or how to learn something new from readers. Audience is a crucial piece to the social web.
As individuals, we shouldn’t be hesitant to grow audience in building our brand, or writing a blog. It’s not an egotistical to want to reach more people, its right in line with human nature to connect with people and socialize. Maintaining your audience is the other half of the equation – the one that give direct feedback of whether or not you’re adding value for them. It’s important to understand the expectations you set for your audience so you can continue to meet those expectations.
For organizations it’s easier in a way since they have long had marketing strategies that target certain demographics (specific audiences) for their product or service. They have been growing and maintaining their target markets for decades in some cases. There is one difference with online audience for organizations though: interactivity. This is not something that is found offline – you don’t see comments on magazine ads for your favorite soda or show company. You will online though, and that is the big challenge for the enterprise as they move into the social media space.
Bringing people to your social web is an important part of the social aspect. It allows for feedback, interaction and growth for all involved. Are you actively growing your audience?
What tips & techniques do you use or suggest for others to help grow their audience? How do you approach readers, followers, and friends on your social web?
Look for my article ‘Audience’ in the upcoming August 2008 issue of Personal Branding Magazine in which I talk about why growing and maintaining audience is important to personal brand.
Photo credit: GlowPlug
Old media bias – or is it fear of obsolescence?
Saturday night I was listening to social media guru & fellow Social Media Breakfast conversationalist @Albert Maruggi of Provident Partners being interviewed on WCCO radio here in Minneapolis. What really struck me was the way in which the host of the show totally spun every point that was brought up. Instead of a real discussion of what is happening in the social media space, she choose to simply believe her pre-conceived notions of the Internet as a “dangerous” place.
Now I agree that everyone is welcome to believe what they want, but to not let an honest discussion develop seems deceiving to me. Whether you believe in the hype or not isn’t the point, rather the inability to have an honest discussion about something on an old-media platform in a public space. Personally I think that fellow Twitter @MNHeadHunter hit the nail on the head in this tweet.
@rickmahn Biased or not knowledgable. Or feeling threatened 🙂
Personally, this is one of the examples that worries me about so many people relying on old media for all their political news. If we can’t have an honest discussion of the facts on the platform about something like social media, how can I trust them about my political choices from any party? Disappointing to say the least.
Oh yeah, Albert was great on talking about facts, concepts, and directions – well done Albert!
Did anyone else catch the broadcast last Saturday? What did you think of the interview?
Enterprise workers don’t have the bandwidth for social media
In past posts on the topic, I’ve often wondered when the average worker would “get” blogging. I have to admit that I finally “got it” recently, but from a different perspective. While working with larger firms, I’ve again had the chance to observe the average office worker. In doing so, “it” occurred to me while explaining how social media adds value to an organization that many folks just don’t have the bandwidth to participate.
It’s not that they wouldn’t want to, rather, it’s that the modern organization is so optimized on searching for productivity gains that there is little room to add back the socialization tools to the mix. To do so without finding the reasons for using more employees’ time doesn’t add value to the organization. Many existing efforts to engage the employee meet with mediocre results because people don’t have interest in helping their employer know more about them.
Another aspect of social media in the enterprise is buy-in. There simply is a certain demographic that will be averse to participating. The reasons for this can be nearly anything, but usually comes back to the fact that many people can’t grasp the value of participating. They may exhibit this perspective in many other aspects of their life as well by not joining community groups or friends in other activities.
So, for those organizations that are trying to leverage the knowledge of their employees, the challenge is to find the channel that they will respond to. It’s more than that however, because just like working to connect with consumers, the business needs to connect with their staff. They need to eliminate the gap between business and employee by being themselves. Executives & veeps need to show their personalities, not their “game face” that they use for business. The employees know about that all too well, they need to see that the business is made up of real people.
Social Media in general has this issue – that people aren’t willing to invest the time, or don’t see any value in participating. It’s not unique to this new way of engaging people. Similar challenges faced radio and television at one time as well, newfangled things that they were. These new community building tools & techniques are still in their infancy and will be a large part of the infrastructure of the new economy that is developing as we speak – the trends in the market prove that out every day.
Photo credit: ShadowStorm
Fathers Day 2008
For all the hours you worked
For all the knowledge and advice you share
For setting the example and showing me how to be a man
For teaching me how to respect people
For being there when any of us kids stumbled
For always listening
Most of all, thank you for being my dad.
Migrated to Firefox 3… finally
I’ve finally made the switch to Firefox 3 (RC3). While previous betas and release candidates didn’t feel quite finished, this one sure does. From the talk around the ‘net about it, it sounds like this may be the last RC before going gold. Yeah, I still have a number of plug-ins that are not supported yet, but in the week since I switched to RC3 there have been three plug-ins updated for compatibility!
My main plug-ins that I can’t live without are there and the stability, memory management, and feature set have made it worth the change. Kudos to the Mozilla team on the work so far – you’re real close, and I know you’ve got a longer list of things to finish up than I’m aware of.
So yep, to those who give a darn I’ve moved to FF3 and am happy with the upgrade. Good stuff.
The working mistake
I’ve fallen into the trap again. Allowing myself to loose focus on getting things done around here and writing for my blog. The last couple weeks of May and the first week of June allowed me to get a lot done around here and start laying groundwork for moving forward.
This week I blew it. I let work get in between myself and my goals. Sure, getting paying work is an important part in attaining those goals. However, it really smarts when a person let’s it completely absorb all your time. I did that this week, and have little to show for it but inspiration for the weekend.
No, I don’t have grand ideas to make up for lost time, instead I’m simply picking up my plans that I think I left in the front seat of the car under an empty soda can and a bag of stale chips. Oh, never mind about that 😉
Honestly, I find it funny how easy it is to repeat past mistakes and not realize you’re doing it until you can look back over time and see where you missed a step. There are many steps still ahead, so I’ll just keep walking down the path I’ve chosen. See you this weekend!
Rick
Social Media Breakfast – Twin Cities 4
The fourth SMB in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis & St. Paul, Minnesota is scheduled for Wednesday, June 11th. Sure, that’s tomorrow and I coulda/shoulda/woulda posted about it a week ago, but decided to let the posts here, here & here do their work.
We’re hosting the event at Concordia University in St. Paul for the second time, as the facilities work well for our group. Though I do believe there’ll be some suggestions to shake it up again in July.
I can’t wait to see what directions the conversation will go in this meetup tomorrow. There are always such great ideas that the group never has enough time to really cover them all. We’re lucky to have a bunch of outgoing people, ready to bring their opinions & perspectives to help others. It makes the meetups more valuable that way.
Agenda? Oh yeah, we’re trying to have a little more structure – at least for starting points of conversations.
- 8am to 15am: Meet & find seat
- 8:15am to 8:30am: @Desaraev from Twitter will be presenting “Social Media Roll Call”
- 8:30am to 10am: Conversation Topics
So, we’ll have another great breakfast – hope to see you there!
50 Uses for Twitter
Awhile back, I’d started a list of "101 Uses for Twitter", but never seemed to get past 27 for some reason. Of course, it had been last autumn since I brainstormed on it. While I don’t think that I personally could come up with 101 uses, I’m sure there are many more than that.
So I thought about this again for awhile this morning and did think of 50 uses that I’ve seen or participated in. So here is a list of 50 uses for Twitter, I’m thinking of more as I write this, so maybe there is a chance at that "101" post sometime.
- Keep in touch with my
Twitter peepsfriends - General news item links
- News & links on my industry or area of interest
- Fast answers to quick questions
- Professional networking
- Links to nearly everything
- Marketing
- Personal branding
- Corporate & product branding
- Haiku’s
- Making friends
- Feel "plugged into the web and it’s various personalities"
- Replacement for instant messaging applications
- Chat tool
- Promotional tool for my blog
- Providing new reading opportunities
- Fun stuff!
- Meeting new, interesting people to communicate with
- Collecting links
- Finding sites related to social networking
- "To listen in on my contacts rants"
- A web worker "water cooler"
- Micro-blogging
- A personal "techmeme"
- Lightweight text broadcasting tool
- Easy way to annoy your spouse
- Promotional tool for my brand
- Ranting
- Idea generator
- No-cost non-profit announcement system
- Bring a sense of community to your home office
- Tracking status of friends
- Status message generator for other social networks
- Frustration generator (at least when it is down)
- Thought publisher
- Promotional tool for my organization
- Following public discussions
- Travel guide
- Controlled discussion between friends
- Uncontrolled discussion between friends with viewers
- List generator
- Meeting agenda generator
- Coffee shop locator
- People search
- Promotional tool for my company
- Product reviews
- Trip planner
- Backchannel for events
- Feedback generator
- Authentication mechanism
So what are you uses for Twitter? I’m sure I didn’t capture them all, so add your ideas and things you use Twitter for below.
10 Minute Review: Acrobat.com
Just a quick weekend look at Adobe’s new "online office" product – Acrobat.com. At least, that’s how I found it referred to in some of the news bits today. Overall I was impressed with the first release of Adobe’s Acrobat.com efforts. With a slick, Flash based interface, it has good performance and is visually appealing.
They seem to be starting out with some good features, but are missing many. Zoho is closest to providing an online office suite that compares anywhere near Microsoft Office. Adobe is starting out with a word processor, document sharing ability with a generous 5GB of space, a document to PDF conversion tool, and a really nifty web conferencing application.
The word processor, called BuzzWord, is what you’d expect. It has the basics and is similar feature wise to Google Docs. PDF conversion is straight forward, you can upload a doc to convert and it saves the resulting file in the My Files applet. File sharing is accomplished from the drop-down context menu and provides the ability to embed the doc into a site.
The most impressive app included here is the web conferencing, called ConnectNow, which has features similar to WebEx. Adobe provides each user their own room, assigns a conference phone number to it, allows for desktop sharing, meeting notes, group & individual IM, and WebCasting with an optional web cam. Good stuff.
Just a couple bullet points:
- Look & Feel: Wow – the Flash based interface is impressive
- Consistency: Needs some work, changing applications launches too many windows
- Integration: Very little between "applications"
- Functionality: Depends on feature – some are quite rich, others very basic
- Features: Document sharing, Word Processor, PDF Conversion, Web Conferencing
Overall it’s a good start. There is a long way to go to compete evenly with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, but then Google doesn’t have a web conference tool. It’s not going to compete with MS Office, or any of the others for some time. With that said, however, if you want to convert some documents to PDF, host documents that you can link to in email or from a website, or a decent free web conferencing tool, it might be a good adjunct to your current solutions.
@MAC_Arms Pay taxes when you make your money, pay taxes when you spend your money, pay taxes when you successfully invest your money, pay taxes when you save enough taxed money to afford a house, pay taxes to live in your house, pay taxes when you sell the house that you paid taxes on to
Yup, taxes are criminal and we need serious reforms. I've always said that if you want to see a tax revolt, make withholdings illegal and have Americans write a tax check every payday. They'll revolt for sure. You don't miss what you never had.
I think it’s safe to say that @GovEvers should stop blocking audits in Wisconsin and open the books…
“Only AMERICAN citizens should vote.”
Sen. @berniemoreno says voter ID and proof of citizenship are simply common sense.
“We’re talking about a very low threshold — identify who you are and prove you’re a U.S. citizen when you register to vote. I think we’re getting closer to
Wrong. Democrats are solely responsible for hours-long airport lines.
They voted to defund TSA three times and won’t even entertain a conversation about reopening it. Why?
They’re using it as leverage to stop enforcing immigration laws.