Joe Budde Jr.

Last weekend I was in Sacramento, California for my brother-in-law’s wedding. My wife and I decided to extend our trip to celebrate our one year anniversary with a side trip down to San Fransisco.  So not unlike my work personality, I got an itinerary together and mapped out all the fun things we could do.  But, I didnt buy a Lonely Planet or a Fodors.  I hopped on Yelp.com and had the best vacation ever. Here is how I used yelp; hopefully, you can learn to make your next vacation the best one ever with Yelp’s help!

What is Yelp.com?

It is a user generated reviews site that has excellent search and filter tools to make finding a recommendation for anything from mechanics to coffee shops. More formally yelp.com says: “Yelp is the fun and easy way to find, review and talk about what’s great - and not so great - in your area.”

So instead of looking for things in my area of cincy, I looked for four things where I was visiting:

Where Do I Park?

What do Tourists in a big city do? They pay high priced parking. $28 a day? $35? No thanks.  Yelp has a several parking garages reviewed, and what is a review without how much the parking costs?  

We found ACE Parking on Yelp so when we visited Fishermans Wharf, San Fran’s tourist mecca.  We paid 12 bucks for the day instead of the 30+ at the tourist trap parking spots. Scout out the parking with Yelp before you get there and SAVE BIG!

What Do the Locals Do?

Traveling in a giant clump of tourists is fun sometimes. Other times it ruins a chance to experience a new place.  So Yelp helped me figure out which touristy things were worth the cash. Yelp has a filter called Local Flavor that lets you find out what places, restaurants and activities the locals tend to enjoy.

Now, in Sacramento before the rehearsal dinner, My other brother-in-law, the best man and I were sitting around with nothing to do. So we fired up yelp and found the coolest thing since sliced bread: Sky High Sports. It is 42,000 square feet of trampolines and walled trampolines.  I got on turned 10 years old and got off and turned 80.  It was a blast. Yelp came through in the clutch with some awesome local flavor!

In San Fransisco, I read some reviews of the Bay City Bike Tour on Yelp. A lot of locals seemed to say that they couldn’t believe how long they lived in San Fran without doing this tour!  So, My wife and I took many great pictures as we peddled across the Golden Gate Bridge.  

Where Do I Eat?

Upon getting to the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge, we rode down the hill to Sausalito and ate at a great restaurant called Poggio. How did we find Poggio? We just walked up to it. But had we used Yelp… locals said great things about Poggio. 

On our drive from Sacramento to San Fran we stopped in Berkeley for breakfast at Bette’s Oceanview Diner. This place was great. Awesome atmosphere, awesome food.  They served a Pancake souffle.  I got the chocolate one… look at it, it was so tasty. My stomach loves finding new places to eat on Yelp!

Life on vacation would really be easy if I only had a 3G iphone…GPS, 3G internet, maps, amazing. But, since I don’t have an iPhone, I will stick to using Yelp before I leave.  Have you used Yelp to help you plan a trip or vacation?

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I like engaging on the internet much more than watching an evening of “must see TV” or making sure i catch the “10 Spot” on MTV.  This annoyance at the 8 minutes of commercials for every 22 minutes of content has me questioning my activities on the internets. Am I spending my time online shuffling or learning or adding value to the community?

Chris Brogan’s post Where I Learn Even More, talks about getting back to the fundamentals as pointed out  by Bill Rice.  In getting back to the fundamentals he suggests doing what my sister just decided to do have a sense of urgency about any effort you make.  

So to that end, I will outline my goals, objectives of my online activities so that I can measure my performance over time.  Hopefully outlining these goals here will help me stay focused and urgent in producing results.  I plan on revisiting this post every month or so to bounce my results against my goals and objectives.

Without further ado…

My Goals:

• Meet one new contact each week
• Write a post at least once a week
• Be involved in the local online community
• Teach at least 2 people the ins and outs of social media at work

My Objectives

• Improve my writing skills Learn to write better
• Improve my story telling abilities Learn to tell stories better
• Learn to teach/communicate concepts better
• Learn how to be more productive and relate social media to tasks at work

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It is true that things are not free. But the recent business model issues of content owners, brings up a central discussion about content use. I ask two questions in this debate: Is content the ends? or is content the means?  By this I mean, does the content drive the rest of the business or is the content the actual product?

How do we have our cake and eat it too? or in this case eat our money?!

Examples:

• CDs for years have not been large income generating channels for artists, the real money for the artist comes from concerts and merchandise.  Is the music the product or is the concert and fun the product?
• Newspapers have articles that help sell views to ads/classifieds. Are the articles or the ad views the product?  Which one is actually making the money?  Thus the business model is sell things that give our clients(advertisers) views to their products. 

How can media/content companies adapt?

Give the content away for free, or supported by some advertizing, to drive more sales to the revenue generating channel. A good real life example and metrics on what this might look like is here: A blogger wrote a book hoping to make some money, he gave away a free draft of the book and then sold the finished copy, 72% of his “sales” were from the free copy and the remainder were from the paid sales.

Give away the content to drive more revenue to a revenue generating channel. How do you use your content to generate revenue?

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There are many spots out there where you can find the best uses for social media. Well, sometimes folks miss something, or frankly use social media in a way that might be extremely useful for 3-5 people, but for the rest of us is just plain dumb. This is a series of posts about interesting uses of social media.

Photo courtesy of neilsingapore

Tower Bridge in London is on Twitter

So, someone is sitting in the Tower Bridge in london sending out twitter updates to the world.

I caught myself thinking, what would a bridge have to say? Well, a the Tower Bridge is not just any bridge: It is a draw bridge.

The Tower Bridge sends tweets to let us all know that it is opening for X vessel going up or down stream.  Thank you Mr. Tower Bridge Twitterer sir because without you, I dont know what I would do without the tweet-update of why and when the bridge is raising and lowering.

www.twitter.com/TowerBridge —> Follow? Yes please!

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If you didn’t know, I am in Bangalore, India on a trip for work. 

Highlights of Day 1 in India:

1. Stray dogs - They are everywhere.
2. Cow - Saw one on the street near the office, could have sworn it looked dead on like my Great Aunt Velma (RIP).
3. Partook in an Indian birthday office celebration

So an Indian Office Birthday Party.  This day one highlight deserves more details. Is it like in Office Space? How does it compare to the level of awkwardness I feel at my own office birthday parties? These are just a few of the questions that I tackle hoping to help you cope with your own office birthday parties.  Perhaps there are some “process improvement” wisdom you can glean from my analysis.

Compare/Contrast of Indian office birthday celebrations:

Differences:

1. They clap at an awkward off-beat pace while singing only the first verse of the english happy birthday song.
2. As they sang, the birthday boy cut a piece and then some other guy fed it to him a la American weddings. Ifelt awkward with this occurance.
3. They took a vote and voted to give the birthday boy a face smear of icing. And by face smear, this is like the end all be all of face smears, the guy looked like some woman who just woke up from a nap with a mud mask and cucumbers on her eyes. It was everywhere.
4. Everyone just digs in and grabs their piece with their hands after the whole experience is over.

Similarities:

1. Birthdays in an office, in the US or India are awkward. You can’t get around it.
2. They sing the same birthday song - kind of.
3. A random group of folks show up who may or may not even know the birthday boy, they are just there for the cake.

So there you have it. Birthday parties in an office are awkward no matter where you are. Its impossible to fight: unless you are 37signals and have amazing thoughts about how to be authentic and get real while running a business. 

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What a great question.  I had a conversation the other day about how my friend’s manager asked him to go from a “just-go-do attitude to a teach-coach-lead attitude.”  I thought it was an amazing transition that all brands and products need to make.

Teach. Coach. Lead.

These are important actions to take in any brand’s life, be it a person or a company/product. They can be the basis of your marketing or PR plan for the life cycle of any product. How?

Teach

At some point someone(be it a company via ad’s or a person) had to teach you how to use Microsoft’s SYNC. Ford runs the commercials…

This is the Teach stage of a brand’s life cycle. People have to know and understand your product/brand before you can use it productively. 

Coach

Darren Rose over at Problogger has written his blog for quite some time by coaching new bloggers. Just recently he released Problogger, the book.  This book represents the coach stage of Darren’s Problogger brand. The book can stay with you and guide you as you go along your blogging way.  Both the blog and the book coach bloggers who have already been taught the what and why of blogs. Coaching happens after the audience understands the brand/product’s concept and extends the experience of the audience with the brand/product.

Lead

Apple taught the mainstream how to download music via iTunes. They lead by continuing to add content to a platform that had already gone mainstream. They added tv shows, movies, rental movies, and most recently started renting and selling movies the same day DVDs are released. Leading shows logical extension into new markets and new areas where teaching and coaching can occur.

As a brand, I want to have posts on this blog that acomplish all three stages depending on the subject. I as a human hope I can teach those who are new, coach those who are seasoned, and lead by staying on the edge and blazing new paths with new ideas.  

But for brands to accomplish these things and do so with resonance, they must, as my friend summarized this transition our conversation, “Be intentional, be authentic.”

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I entered the www.youbethevc.com businss plan contest a while back and after many pushed back deadlines, sketchy communication, and some judging, I have officially not made it to the top twenty. Sad day I know.  

But there are something’s that I learned and earned from this experience:

1. This was a really cool badge they let me put on my site.  I took it down this weekend; Thankfully, I didn’t cry…
   
2. Typically if you have a website/shrine to your idea/business you will more than likely get taken a tad bit more seriously. Examples from the top 20:  www.tubestones.com www.collegewikis.com www.royaltyfreebies.com  (don’t forget to go (check out the the finalists)
3. Hitting deadlines makes you seem more legit. Missing them puts doubt into constituents minds. Its bad branding, on a personal or company level.
4. Just because Mike @TechCrunch talks about youbethevc doesn’t mean it’s legit. PR/marketing for the finalist selection has been minimal at best.
5. B2C businesses can gain traction faster than B2B businesses.

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I loved Jeremiah Owang’s Post about implementing a social network, i wanted to A. catelogue it someplace i could find it easily, and B. share it all with you!  So here it is. Thanks Jeremiah for your wisdom… Also the book Groundswell helps expand on these points as well, so if you want more info, check that out. 

Best Buy’s social media push to become the Enterprise 2.0 company of the year seems to be paying big rewards.  BlueShirt Nation, aptly named based on the blue shirts of store employees, is Best Buy’s social network that start off with the hope of becoming a place where execs could learn about marketing from employees.

Best Buy was able to get tangible and measureable results from the deployment of social media within the company.

• Used the enterprise social network to increase enrollment in the 401(k) plan by through a video contest.
• Employee turnover dropped drastically among the employees using the social network. Turnover fell from double digits to 8%.
• Quick feedback from employees helped management to steer policy around employee desires.
• Less employee turnover is key for maintaining employee productivity levels high

How do you implement an Internal Social Network?

1. Start with a discussion about your understanding of social media tool’s productivity enhancement effect on the enterprise. (A list of questions for discussion, and the projected increase in spend on social networks)
2. Discuss your goals and intent. Best Buy provides some excellent examples of good measurable goals. Employee retention. Knowledge sharing.  Communication outlet. Management insight. Product-Idea generation. Choose some goals, and measure it! Measure, measure, measure!
3. Discuss which platform to use to engage your community. There are many free social media platforms, and there are many other paid services.  Chris Brogan does a great job explaining the how to and the what to use when in the social media starting point.
4. Hire a community manager. No, not a techy type to program the thing, just someone who is a specialist in engaging the community, and preferably knows something about your company and employees. 
5. Implement. Put it out there and engage the community. Trust them, encourage them to use the new productivity tools responsibly, heck you hired them, you trust them enough with your company’s assets, you should trust them enough with to speak with respect and respect the company’s time.
6. Assess.  Monitor your progress against your goals, and design new ones after hitting the previous goals.  Enjoy the conversation!

Best Buy did it!  Why not you?! Enterprise 2.0 is the next large wave in productivity enhancements in the work place. How do you see them influencing your work place?

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Alexandra Levit extended the conversation about being authentic at work with a great summary of 7 Qualities that Predict Leadership Success from DDI.  I think in general having these 7 skills makes it easier to be authentic at work.  

According to DDI, effective leaders:

Are masters at managing through ambiguity:
The modern workplace is fraught with chaos. These leaders possess the ability to stay calm amid turmoil and to be convincingly reassuring. They keep their people focused with clear direction and goals, and view change through the lens of opportunity.

Inspire confidence and believe in the future:
Leaders who make it a priority to understand and address employee needs, who can differentiate those things that are important from those that are not, and who can communicate a long-term vision that attains the buy-in of employees and customers alike, are the ones who find their organizations rewarded with long-term customer relationships and loyal, engaged employees.

Have a passion for results:
These leaders place emphasis on those activities, initiatives, programs, and processes that produce the best ROI. They are able to stay the course, overcoming any obstacle thrown in their way, because they believe their focus will truly bring about the outcomes they are seeking.
Are marked by unwavering integrity: Good leaders must earn trust every day. Their values must be visible through their actions, and they must be both able and willing to be held up as an example to others. Bad news, such as the need for layoffs or budget cuts, or the failure of the organization to meet financial targets, must not be hidden or sugarcoated.

Set others up for success:
Leaders who are true talent advocates understand that feeling successful is a prerequisite for ongoing engagement and that successful people are more, not less likely to stay. But they also understand that success is about more than praise. It’s about developing people, giving them room to grow (even if it means giving them the opportunity to fail), and coaching them to be their best, so the organization can be its best.

Have strong, rather than big, egos:
Leaders with big egos, so good at tearing others down, often are terribly insecure themselves. They lack the self-confidence that leadership demands.  On the other hand, those with strong egos have a positive self-image but at the same time are able to acknowledge and value the thoughts and contributions of others—including those at lower levels of the organization.

Have the courage to make decisions:
When faced with making tough choices, the best leaders do not shy away from taking prompt action. They know that indecisiveness can lead to the paralysis, and that popular decisions are not always the best decisions. And they understand that too many compromise decisions, while usually less painful to reach, breed mediocrity and lead to results that, in the end, please nobody.

What are your favorites from the list? Why?  Leave a comment and let me know!

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Companies since Web 1.0 ended have slowly realized that they do not control conversations about their company or all the channels that carry their message.  Bloggers realized the era of blogger’s control is over this weekend. It is funny that this was a realization this weekend.  This loss of control isn’t new.

A blogger is a brand.  Not a content creator.  A brand.  A blogger must use the correct marketing techniques to engage the target market, readers.  The conversation has moved to the other social media outlets, when i leave a link to a blogger’s post for a friend on their facebook wall, the blogger had no idea. This was a time before services like FriendFeed.  FriendFeed and the other decentralized web services make sharing easier than social media did.  

Bloggers lost control as soon as a the web log was created. Blogging is at its heart a decentralized conversation.  There are conversations about a brand like apple, a fake person like Steve Jobs, or a topic like stuff white people like.  Apple, Steve and white people never had a chance at controlling the conversation about them, especially the responses generated by their content because of blogs. 

And now, bloggers have lost control? No, they never had control. The internet is just that, a lack of control; ask the music labels. Your conversation is not your brand.  Your brand is just one part of that conversation.

Do you try to control or engage? 

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