Manage To Change

In Search of WOW

A while back I stumbled on Michael Hyatt’s blog: From Where I Sit.  Michael is the CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers.

Regardless of where you sit, two of his recent posts are “must reads” for any one!

Creating WOW Product Experiences includes a list of ten common “WOW experience” attributes that he and his management team identified. Why would we aim for anything less than WOW in product development?

In the comment section the names Disney, Pixar, and Apple come up as companies that deliver WOW products. Can we name some more?

What I Have Learned in Four Years of Blogging is an excellent summary of the benefits of blogging in general, CEO blogging specifically, and experimenting with new things (not just technology!).  I couldn’t agree with him more.

Michael has been publishing online since 1998.  As someone who often manages and advocates change in publishing environments, I am thrilled to see a publishing CEO so openly experimenting and sharing his experiences.

Check out the quotes on his left side bar.  Some of them are priceless!

Web 2.0 Expo: Fake Steve Jobs

Dan Lyons, a.k.a. Fake Steve Jobs and a senior editor at Forbes, gave one of the Web 2.0 Expo keynotes this morning.  Dan was both hilarious and thought-provoking.

So how does someone become the Fake Steve Jobs?

Dan asked, but Forbes wouldn’t let him start a blog.  Apparently Dan was “old media” and Forbes didn’t have confidence in his “new media” abilities.

So ... Dan started Fake Steve Jobs (anonymously of course). 

Within six months he had 90,000 readers!  One of them was the publisher of Forbes who regularly emailed Fake Steve with comments and ideas.  He also offered a reward to anyone that could find out who Fake Steve was in real life.

“Oh crap!

What now?”

Once again, Dan asked Forbes if he could start a blog.  For a second time he was told no. 

Hmmm?

Back in his NY hotel room Dan emailed Forbes (as Fake Steve Jobs) and asked the publisher if he was interested in having Fake Steve work for Forbes.  As you would imagine the publisher was thrilled.

Dan’s identity ultimately came out and he came clean with Forbes.

What a story! Dan didn’t take no for an answer, proved himself, and simultaneously learned a ton about a medium he had never used before.

I hope Forbes learned something too!

Dan’s closing remark: “We focus so much on destruction that we lose sight of what’s springing up around us.”

Web 2.0 Expo: Sessions from Day 2

Highlights from three of the sessions I attended today at the Web 2.0 Expo: 

User-Generated Censorship
Annalee Newitz, wrote an article in Wired, I Bought Votes on Digg, to illustrate how people can manipulate social networks. 

In today’s session, she contrasted the wisdom of crowds with their potential destructive nature.  Annalee went through several sites (Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, and Wikipedia) illustrating that clear rules, quick follow up, and easy ways for users to filter content (preventing them from “stumbling on to content that upsets them”) can prevent unwarranted censorship.

Web 2.0 Product Management: Optimizing Metrics and Viral Growth
Dan Olsen’s session on Web 2.0 product management was likely the most comprehensive and tangible session I’ve attended.  The only problem was that there was no way to take notes fast enough to keep up with him!

Dan spoke about how the lines between product management and marketing have blurred since many products are spread virally, by the customer not by marketing and sales.  On Facebook, for example, it’s your friends, acquaintances, and colleagues that get you to join, not the Facebook marketing department (if there even is one!).

Most of the presentation was concerned with how to define, measure, analyze, synthesize, implement, and impact metrics to increase ROI. 

If I hear that he’s posted his slides on his website, I’ll let you know. 

Every product manager should look at them!

The Next Generation of Tagging: Searching and Discovering a Better User Experience
This session was fascinating.  Kakul Srivastava, product manager at Flickr, discussed how combining user tagging with finely tuned algorithms can result in “inferred tags.” 

Inferred tags make it possible to disambiguate tagging (know that Washington means Washington DC and not the state, the president, or the mountain). 

How often tags are used (identifying “hot tags”) or if there are spikes in usage or searching helps identify breaking news or items of interest.

Kent Anderson: New Blogger & Scholarly Publishing Innovator

Last night I found out that Kent Anderson from the Massachusetts Medical Society, someone whose innovative and thought-provoking ideas I personally enjoy and find extremely helpful, is blogging at the Scholarly Kitchen for the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP).

In his post today, Kent considers some interesting business models that could apply to the iPod and even to scholarly publishing.

Go over and welcome Kent to blogging! I'm sure he'll appreciate it.

Web 2.0 Expo: Creating a Coherent Social Strategy for Business

Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, authors of the book Groundswell and analysts with Forrester Research, lead the Web 2.0 Expo session Creating a Coherent Social Strategy for Business. 

Download the presentation from Forrester and look at the “Social Technographics Ladder” (slide 8) and the authors’ mapping of key roles within a company to the key business objectives of a social strategy (slide 9).

One point that I particularly enjoyed was their classification of personalities within a company: purists, pragmatists, and corporatists. 

Corporatists are the ones saying “Online activities must deliver business benefits.”  I can’t help thinking the label “corporatists” was a bit of a slam!  Although, the corporatist perspective seems pretty reasonable to me – to a point. 

At the other end of the spectrum were Purists.  They believe “People are the most powerful force on the net.”  They don’t really think of business per se just the purity of the medium and expression.

Of course, I found myself in the middle, a Pragmatist, “People are in charge but corporations can benefit.”

Keys to success (offered for pragmatists):
• start with your customers
• chose an objective you can measure
• line up executive backing
• romance the naysayers
• start small, think big
• and act fast

Personally, I think these are keys to success for most any change management effort – but good advice none the less!

The Hardest Part

It seems like writing is just like most things, the more you do it, the easier it is to do.

The less you do it, the harder it is to get started, to be consistent, and to feel as though you have anything to say.

...and the more likely you are to be redundant!

Depressing or Re-assuring?

I haven’t posted in several weeks.

No posts. No links. Nothing new.

Yet my Feedburner subscriptions, page views, and unique visitors each decreased by less than 8%. Why?

The biggest reason: Google (or more accurately, search).

Roughly 85% of my traffic on a weekly basis is from search. For example, I wrote a post on passive aggressive behavior more than a year ago and it still gets hits every day.

The remaining traffic is from community. After years of meeting people, making friends, and meeting colleagues, some people come by to check in and sometimes to say hello.

Now I don’t write for the statistics. I like to share experiences, information, and observations and then hear what others have to say. I do this to learn.

For me it’s reassuring that my stats stayed pretty constant. It showed me that 2 years of effort (my blogging anniversary is February 6^th) has paid off with some success in the search engines and, much more important, a network of fine friends and colleagues.

But I wonder…

Do you know how people find you on the web? Do you know what they’re looking for?

Why are you in it? Is it paying off?

It’s nice to be back.

Forgive me if I’m a little rusty…

Food, Drink, and Friends

This week I’ll be posting a bit about our trip to London.

It was very interesting to see what Starbucks offers here in the way of sandwiches and pastries. Shortbread with chocolate chips is not something I’ve seen at home nor is Salmon on a bagel. Egg and mayonnaise sandwiches are also not a staple in the U.S.

We’re right near the Earl’s Court Tube Station which makes it convenient to get anywhere. That is unless you’re going to Soho Square with a native in which case you’ll tour Chinatown for quite a while before having to call for directions!

I was in three pubs tonight. I’m a lightweight, so that’s a personal record. I fear it might be broken before we head home.

It was great to meet Kevin Dixie, founder of Fuel My Blog.

We also got to meet up with Richard Charkin , CEO of Bloomsbury (publishers of Harry Potter!).

London Online starts tomorrow.

Off to London!

Tonight I’m heading to London Online to enjoy a great city and catch up with friends and colleagues.

Unlike Liz, I am taking my computer. I can’t imagine more than a day without it.

I’ll consider therapy when I get back.

If you’re in London this week, email me.

I’ll try to write and tell you of my adventures!

Photo credit

Print is Dead Blog

If you are in publishing or media and haven’t read Print is Dead, a blog by Jeff Gomez, I highly urge you to subscribe.

Jeff on literacy:

“The real battle is now being fought — and potentially lost — and it has nothing to do with pages or screens, bindings or devices. It has instead to do with eyes and words.”

This post about the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) literacy study really struck a chord with me. I read more than ever now, but I just threw out 5 years of back issues of the Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and several newsletters. I read online or stored PDF files. I do read books, but not as many as I used to read. I wonder what reading studies “count” as reading?

In another post: What your bookshelf says about you, Jeff writes:

“In fact, not only is print dead, but it also seems — since its true purpose is now to be admired in display rather than read or absorbed — to have been stuffed and mounted.”

You may agree with him. You may not. But I promise he’ll make you think!