The Smell of Good Business

Webforward at Cebit 2009 Sydney Australia

Cebit 2009 in Sydney is shaping up to be the best yet, with a fantastic program of events, and excellent speakers.

I am delighted to be attending again, and in particular to be chairing the two days of Webforward. The agenda for Webforward ensures that everyone with an interest in the web is covered. There is a wide range of speakers that are thought leaders in the space.

I do hope to see you there….

There are many ways you can use Twitter for business advantage (as opposed to just interest). There is a right way and wrong way to do this – blatant self promotion isn’t entertaining or interesting for followers, so you need to add value with your tweets. 

1. Research – to keep up to date with new information, views and ideas in your industry. Twitter users often share links to presentations they deliver
2. Promote your knowledge – share IP and information you have created by posting links to your own presentations (an easy way to share the presentation is using Slideshare) and announce to followers
3. To rapidly get news in your  industry and stay up to date – most of the current events happening now, including Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, I heard first via Twitter
4. To get access to thought leaders in your industry. For example, one of my favourite writers in the Web 2.0 space is Dion Hinchcliffe whom I follow on Twitter at twitter.com/dhinchcliffe. I can find out not only what he is writing about, but information he is coming across that he finds interesting.
5. To build a personal profile in your industry as knowledgeable
6. To keep up to date with what your colleagues are up to – without having to email them or ring them
7. To win business. The way to do this is to find people who are tweeting about issues they have that you can help with. You then provide help. In many cases I have found these people then either want to promote you as someone that is helpful and adds value, or engage you to solve the next problem
8. To promote posts on your blog
9. To provide real time updates on crisis issues within a company
10. To offer clearing stock deals (Dell did this very successfully)
11. To get insight into potential staff

There are many more ways of using Twitter to add value to a business. So, what works for you? Please add your comments, I look forward to your input.

I recently gave a presentation to business people who have never used Twitter on what it is, and how to use it. Enjoy!

Twitter For Business By Justin Davies Emergination

Recently many people have been asking how to harness the power of social networking in a business context. An example of how to do it right is a group called Next Director, a group for emerging and current company directors to share information, founded by Michael Field. I asked him about his experience in creating this group, and what he found worked for him in doing so.

Justin: What is it about being a company director that interests you?

Michael: Being a company director for me is about the opportunity to apply your skills toward enhancing the performance of an organisation. Of course there is a great deal more to the role and responsibility of a company director, but the opportunity to influence and guide strategy to deliver performance is what drives me personally. 

My experience on not-for-profit (NFP) boards has to some extent provided greater challenges, with even greater rewards. The opportunity to work with exceptionally talented people, grapple with complex problems and focus on a common objective is intellectually stimulating and personally rewarding. 

Justin: What sparked the idea for this group?

Michael: The idea for Next Director developed as a result of my observations of the Australian director community. My views were further informed through connecting with directors in other countries through social networking sites such as LinkedIn. 

Analysis of the director market shows that there is a significant number of company directors whose needs are not being met by traditional member services organisations. There are many reasons for this, but the evidence is in the tragically low membership of director organisations compared to the total director population. Some research indicates that market penetration is as low as 4% in Australia.

The idea behind the group is to harness the collective expertise of a global director market, deliver meaningful services,  information & interaction and utilise technology to increase participation and reduce cost.

Justin: What has been the most surprising thing for you about the group to date?

Michael: The surprises have mostly been pleasant and to some extent were hoped for but not expected. The stand-out experience for me has been the incredible generosity of the group when it comes to answering questions posted by another member. Although it is common for people to experience this in social networking sites such as Twitter, I had not yet tested it in the professional, member services market and was pleasantly surprised by the outcome.

Justin: How do you manage the issue of people self promoting?

This is an interesting question and a significant challenge for all social networking sites and open groups or forums. While it is difficult (and often counter-productive) to be excessively restrictive with rules, the general approach is:

1. Membership is not automatic. The CV, work history and/or educational experience of the applicant needs to demonstrate their suitability to the group. For example, if there is inadequate information on the applicants LinkedIn profile, they are asked to update their profile to reflect their director interests.

2. All posts, questions and answers are monitored and moderated regularly to ensure that they are focused on director issues. Where a post is obvious self-promotion, or completely off-topic for directors, the group member is asked to remove the post or it is deleted by a moderator.

Justin: What tips do you have for others that want to create similar groups online?

Michael: Be clear about the audience that you want to attract and the specific subject matter that you wish to focus on. General information groups tend to get flooded with self-promotion and irrelevant clutter. The key to success I believe is having a clearly defined objective and then managing closely to that objective by eliminating content that is not relevant to the group.

Although you run the risk of occasionally offending an individual (if you remove a post for example) there is greater damage done by allowing the groups focus to be diluted with irrelevant material. 

Justin: What is your experience with other social networking group tools, such as Facebook, Twitter and any others?

I use different social networking sites for different audiences and different businesses. 

Twitter has been an excellent networking tool to connect with key influencers in the technology,  online, marketing and innovation space. As an example, I recently connected with an iPhone application developer and we are now collaborating on a different project.

LinkedIn has been the test-bed for the Next Director project and has been enormously successful. I have used facebook for more consumer-focused businesses with a degree of success, although it has been less successful for next Director.

Justin: How frequently do you need to post?

Michael: The Next Director community is very active and to a large extent self-sufficient. It is not uncommon for me to log-on and notice a dozen detailed response to a members question from other members. Although this does not reduce my responsibility to keep the group active and continually provide new information, it does however supplement it and allows the group to choose their own topics of interest and post accordingly. 

I log on every day, approve new members, monitor and moderate posts and submit new news articles or add to discussions where I can add value.

Justin: Has this generated any business for you?

Michael: My intention with the Next Director was not to develop business for my strategy consulting business, but rather to build a platform where aspiring and emerging company directors could engage with each other, seek & contribute advice and share ideas & information. To that extent it has been a great success, however I have started to  develop more direct relationships with the group members to enhance the experience of social networking.

Justin: How has this helped your profile?

Michael: I see the benefits of participating in selected online communities more as an opportunity to connect with interesting people, be at the leading edge of information exchange and technology developments, and enhance the community experience by contributing ideas and expertise.

Justin: Thanks for your insights

For more information see:

Next Director

Michael Field website

Contact: michael@michaelfield.com.au 

Goal setting can be fun. Yet there is a conflict in setting goals which can lead to a loss of balance – family goals can have an impact on career and so on.

The sheer act of contemplating primary goals for the various facets of your life then writing those goals down often provides a enormous amount of clarity and focus. It sometimes creates an almost mysterious clarifying beacon that helps to focus effort and energy. The more focus on your goals, the more likely they are to materialize.

The most clever systematic approaches are often the most simple.

Foundation areas of your life to consider goals for are:

1. Education
2. Relationships
3. Health
4. Finances
5. Career
6. Values and beliefs
7. Social Contribution

And there are other experiential areas as well, such as travel, entertainment, and arts and culture.

I recently was invited to participate in and contribute to the Beta of a new goal setting tool called LifeGoalBoard created by a friend of mine, Michael Field. Michael is a very successful marketer in Sydney, Australia, and attributes part of his success in achieving a balanced and fulfilled life to using the process contained within LifeGoalBoard. It makes for an interesting story to find out how it was created, how it is used, what results have come out of it, and why Michael is keen to share it.

As a master practitioner in NLP, Michael has been developing some neat concepts and tools which will be available in LifeGoalBoard that will help people achieve their goals.

Disclosure: The author has undertaken a consulting engagement for LifeGoalBoard. As a result, the author is pretty pumped about the potential of it, but rest assured is not getting any kickback for referral traffic from this blog. If your online solution could do with some help, contact me.

“In a bull market, be a bull” – sage advice given to me by one of Western Australia’s leading brokers 24 months ago. Of course this approach works fine up until the point that it doesn’t work, and this broker to his credit picked up on nervousness in the market which led to more conservative thinking.

Those that picked the calamity to follow were considered naysayers by many – but the extent of the crash caught so many by surprise. Australia is in relatively good shape – thanks to a rigorous process of debt reduction achieved by the Liberal government, and the stronger regime that we have had in place to regulate the banking sector in comparison to other markets.

If you are a director of a company then the savage effect of removing the wind from the companies that were heavily geared and sails sheeted full into the wind is cause for concern everywhere. Recent news reports indicate a great likelihood of class actions, insolvency practitioners are struggling to cope with demand, and there is a domino effect from companies that fail.

For those that have had portfolios halved in value, the obvious target is boards of companies.

Smart companies already have comprehensive programs in place – policies, reporting, delegations and systems – to cover risk. In addition, smart boardroom practice is to have a structured approach to decision making. It serves two purposes – firstly to ensure that factors are considered rigorously, and secondly, it provides a record for how the decision was arrived at, which factors were considered important at the time. Decisions of the past are often judged on the facts of today. A documented framework allows insight into how the decision was arrived at – and a defense in case of litigation (in the absense of anything else).

For those members of the AICD, the Feb 2009 issue of The Boardroom Report includes “10 ways to bolster risk management”. which covers board composition, governance structure, risk as a standing agenda item, the issue of compensation, and most important of all, setting the tone from the top – the appetite for risk.

If you want a different take on your content, or want to express yourself a different way, try Wordle…

“Enough social notworking, time to do some work…” – which interestingly enough was some blogging for a client….

Wikipedia defines social notworking as….. well wikipedia hasn’t defined this yet. There are many social networking tools that companies have endeavoured to ban, then eventually seen some benefit in the manner that they work. Facebook is one, wiki’s are another, blogs, gmail and so on. Why do they work? The instant ability to share information in a timely manner and get input – like a great brainstorming conversation.

Twitter is the latest in all of these (interestingly, each one of these social networking tools I have approached with “well, I thought <insert social media tool here> was a waste of time BUT this new thing… now that is a complete waste of time! I thought Linked In was a waste of time. It’s not. Then I thought blogging was a big waste of time and only for people who don’t have a life. Now I think non-bloggers are people that don’t have anything to say…. Twitter, now that I was certain was an unbelievable waste of time.

But these is no doubt that as a result media consumption habits are changing. Now we have a really different way of keeping ourselves entertained that doesn’t involve traditional media. For more on media consumption habits see  There are 2.4 million nonlines – this is a blog post I found out about on Twitter whilst I was writing this post.

Twitter is immediacy, and let’s face it – social networking tools promise what all we all want in a business context. I want to know what is going on right now. I want to be able to get hold of information quickly. I want to be able to interact with the person who created the information, and easily add  my piece of value on the top of it – then keep going with what I am doing.

So, tools that business get easily – intranets rebirth into wiki’s, groupware adds presence awareness through instant messaging and Voip that is calendar aware, portal products from vendors emulate social networking sites – witness the number of presentations where Sharepoint can look like Facebook. But the difference is that the big vendors stamp credibility on top of what the innovators have discovered elsewhere and already created value with.

Social notworking is somewhat like the big frontier – it particularly is where the digital innovators hang out. Television is, well, a big monitor that I hook my computer to. Media consumption habits are changing more and more….

What is your favourite bit of social networking? Do you prefer to actually meet people instead? What do you hate? Comments please!

When you are faced with a major intranet or internet site development project, information architecture is a critical starting point. However, getting started with information architecture isn’t necessarily that easy. There is the enormity of information held in an enterprise. Whether you believe in taxonomy  (a defined classification scheme) or folksonomy  (where users tag their own content) or somewhere in between, you can use a card sorting exercise to get you started.

Card sorting involves:

1. Creating a list of up to 110 topic areas written on 3×5 cards
2. Assembling a minimum of 2 groups of people from the organization in question who will be your “information customers”. 6 to 8 is a good number of people in the group to get plenty of interaction and not have one person dominate discussions. Participants in each group must be from a variety of business units within the organization and a range of levels from junior to senior. Aim to not have more than a one person from a single business unit.
3. Getting going on the sorting exercise – developing main headings and then adding cards to each heading

The aim of the exercise is to understand different perspectives on how to classify the information. so you need two card sorting team rules:

1. Every person’s point of view is valid
2. Anyone can shift any card
3. Every card placed or shifted should contribute to a wider understanding
4. The team decides collectively as they finish the task
5. Participants can create new cards for additional topics they deem important
6. When a group of cards that go together is formed, a yellow post it note and group title is added

Allow 30-40 minutes for this exercise, then break for coffee. Each group then checks out how other groups have assembled their cards. This leads to further insight which allows you to complete the process.

I do like the tactile nature of card sorting. Every participant can grab a card, write their own cards, and physically move them around – they are physically involved.

However once complete, the content topics need to be typed up and information hierarchy map created.

Online Tools For Card Sorting Exercises.

Optimal Sort

Websort

If you are interested in knowing more about card sorting see Donna Spencer’s Card Sorting: A Definitive Guide