TweetI had a great time visiting with the folks at Social Media Breakfast in Waco the other day. I met some people who are doing great things in social media spaces. Some are just getting started and some are already experts in their own right. For both groups, this type of get-together is a great opportunity to learn from each other.

The topic I presented on was called “Social Media Strategizin’” and covered the way I like to approach social media and used some illustrations and case studies from my experience working in social media for Wilsonart International. Here is the slide deck:

Karla Patterson took notes and provided a great summary of the presentation, which is posted on the Waco Social Media Breakfast blog.

One group I met were from Squeeky Wheel Marketing in Belton, TX. They’re the guys behind wacoboard.com. This is an interesting concept from some guys who were looking to fill the need of helping incoming freshmen to the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor and Baylor University find businesses in the area. It’s a also a fun way for businesses to connect with customers. I’m looking to interview these guys for an upcoming post … stay tuned for that.

Special thanks to Caryn Brown and CJ Jackson for organizing this event and inviting me,  the wacoboard.com guys for letting me us their 25′ VGA cable, and to Rudy’s in Waco for allowing us to meet there.

TweetGood To Great: Why Some Companies Make The Leap … And Others Don’t is a collection of case studies put together in an attempt by Jim Collins and his research team to quantify what it takes to make a good company great. The group looked at a number of companies which exceeded the growth of their competitors and of the overall market for fifteen years or more and selected eleven as being the best examples.

Each of the eleven companies which met their “good to great” criteria had some key things in common. Collins isolated six characteristics found in each company which helped put them over the top from good to great and describes them in detail in the book:

• Disciplined People
  • Level 5 Leadership - a great leader who built a great team. A servant leader with an eye for talent and team building and setting up their people for success.
  • First Who … Then What – the Level 5 leader gathered around him or her the best people available. They were selected because of their work ethic as well as skills and abilities. They got “the right people on the bus and into the right seats.”
• Disciplined Thought
  • Confront The Brutal Facts – the leadership team looked at the reality of their situation: their business and the marketplace, and made decisions which helped them succeed no matter what. It was not “whitewashing” the truth or “pollyanna” thinking, but a knowledge they will prevail no matter what.
  • The Hedgehog Concept - the business found its core – what they could be excellent doing and stuck to it. There wasn’t a lot of side business or growth through acquisition; rather, the team stuck with what they did best.
• Disciplined Action
  • Culture of Discipline – the members of the team worked together for the mutual success of the organization. Because each person was trusted to do their part so bureaucracy and micromanagement were virtually eliminated.
  • Technology Accelerators – these days people latch on to technology for the sake of having the “latest and greatest.” These great companies evaluated technology and only chose what would help them do business better.

The book itself is easy to read and digest and has a lot of takeaway lessons anyone can start using today. While leading a company to make the jump from good to great may take some time, there are many things anyone can begin doing to get started on the path. The lessons in the book are not only for corporate leaders, but for anyone who wants to learn more about team building, leadership for success and personal growth.

For the statics geeks there are plenty of charts and numbers to help you understand the research in detail and how Collins and company chose the corporations for the study. There is also a couple math proofs to show the companies they chose for the study weren’t just flukes, but genuinely went from good to great.

It’s also important for those who take the lessons in the book and start down the path from good to great to keep up the work. One of the companies of the eleven singled out for study was Circuit City. They had a great plan, great leadership and a company which was outperforming their competitors by a large margin. Given that advantage, should they not have prevailed through the recent economic downturn and competition from Best Buy and such? Although I don’t know for sure, but I would guess the leadership in the company failed to keep working in the six areas outlined above and eventually fell behind. It would certainly be an interesting follow up study.

I recommend this book to anyone who wishes to learn more about leadership and team building. There are lessons for everyone regardless of their place on the corporate ladder.

Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make The Leap … And Others Don’t by Jim Collins (Amazon Affiliate Link)

You can get more information about Jim Collins on his web site.

TweetThis is a follow up to my article Social Media Security & Kids. In it I wrote:

Kids are on social media. It’s part of their culture and embedded into their lives in a way even the most social media-savvy adults I know don’t fully comprehend. Because it’s such a part of how they interact with others, it’s essential we teach them about online safety when they are young much like my parents taught me not to talk to strangers or look both ways before crossing the street.

As I ponder on this idea and talk with parents, it hits me that most of us are pretty well versed in teaching our kids about online safety, but when it comes to kids’ online reputations we are far less prepared. Quite often I get asked about teaching kids about social media safety; and, when talking with other parents we usually come to the conclusion that we’re not doing too badly teaching our kids about that. But my next question always is: “What are you doing to teach your kids about protecting their online reputations?” That usually results in a blank stare from the other person.

I don’t think the blank stares result from carelessness or neglect on that parts of those parents. I believe it stems from the fact that we are not as plugged in as our kids.

in the 1960s Timothy Leary popularized the counterculture phrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Today, that phrase could almost be said among our web-connected kids. They are turning on to social sites via their portable devices, tuning into what other kids are doing there and dropping out their own contributions to the web of conversation. As younger and younger kids get smart phones capable of text messaging and connecting them to Facebook and MySpace they start setting up an online footprint sooner and sooner. As much as some of us adults contribute to the collective conversation, our kids will out-contribute us before too long.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But, because these young ones are “on there” we need to help them understand that their online reputation will follow them wherever they go – for good or for bad.

At one point, not all that long ago, if a kid had a bad reputation at a school the parents could move them to another one either by placing them in private school or moving. This tactic may not work if the kid’s reputation problems follow them online. All the kids at the new school need do is a quick Google search and *BAM* the new start is stopped quite abruptly.

I also wrote in the article referenced at the start:

Kids need to understand that online is pretty much “forever.” Once something is posted and indexed by search engines it’s nearly impossible to get rid of and it can pop back up during searches for who knows how long. Younger kids talking smack and older kids posting pictures of themselves acting the fool at parties may be all fun now, but they can come back to haunt them later. Though this point probably applies more to older kids and young adults who may be soon entering the workforce, it’s important that kids learn early on about the basics of online reputation management.

Even Google CEO Eric Schmidt has chimed in on this topic, opining that one day everyone would have the right to change their name upon reaching adulthood so their youthful indiscretions would not follow them. While this idea may seem incredible to many, it is no secret that many who do hiring for companies will search a person’s online reputation to screen out applicants who have derogatory information posted somewhere.

As parents, we needn’t panic. What we need to do is arm ourselves with information so we can arm our kids to learn how to take care of themselves. If you are totally clueless about online reputation management, I suggest you check out Radical Transparency by Beal and Strauss. While this book is more about the marketing aspect of social media use, there are some great tips for personal reputation management you certainly learn from.

Start talking to your kids now about their online behavior just as you do about their behavior elsewhere.

What about you? Do you have any tips for parents who are bringing up social media-savvy kids? What do you tell your kids?

photo credit: wickenden

Tweet My marketing colleagues and I have been talking about mobile apps here and there for the past year. As more of our customers and partners get smart phones and iPads they are asking for apps designed specifically for those platforms. If that wasn’t reason enough to consider adding mobile apps to our online efforts, the statistical predictions indicate mobile web use will continue to grow at a phenomenal rate. A recent Mashable article cites a Morgan Stanley report which predicts mobile browsing will eclipse desktop browsing by 2015. That’s just five years from now.

While I think it’s a great idea to get on this bandwagon now, I’m not so sure about putting a lot of effort into platform-specific applications. Even though the iPhone is the current market leader, does it make sense to develop an application which only runs on that device? From what I read, Android devices are coming up fast. And who knows what will happen with Windows phones, Blackberries and such. For many businesses, it doesn’t make sense from a cost perspective to put a lot of effort into creating applications which only work on one device.

This reminds me of the debate I used to hear about coding web pages so they would work properly on a Mac or in a browser other than Internet Explorer: Why would you purposely alienate a potentially large percentage of your audience because you choose not to take their browser or operating system quirks into account? I think a similar question holds here, only it relates to smart phone browser or operating systems quirks.

Enter The Web App
In my mind, a cross-platform application makes a lot more sense. And what could be more cross-platform than a web-based app which runs in a mobile web browser? While there are still design challenges involved in dealing with the various mobile browsers, the application  code remains the same. What works on the iPhone will, in all likelihood, work on an Android or Windows phone, too. While it is true that platform-specific apps have more potential for “bells and whistles,” a mobile web browser app can look good and be extremely useful.

Here are some advantages of mobile web apps over platform-specific ones:

• Cross-platform compatibility
• Web browser apps are easier to deploy, update and maintain.
• Because web browser apps predominately run on a central web server, there are no distribution issues like trying to get into the iPhone app store.
• Instead of having to train someone to code for a specific platform or outsource development, companies can use the in-house expertise they already have.
• If a framework such as .NET is used for web development, the same code that powers current web applications can be reused for the back end processes of a mobile browser application. This will cut development time and cost.

I’m not the only one thinking along these lines. While discussing the release of their iPhone app, the Jason’s Deli tweeter indicated they are going to follow up with a mobile browser-based app. The reason: it works on any phone.

What about you? What do you think about mobile web apps? Do you lean towards browser-based or platform-specific apps? Let us know in the comments.

photo credit: Symic

TweetWARNING: Major Geek Content …

Last week my colleague deployed an update to one of our many web sites. This particular site was originally coded in Microsoft’s .NET Framework 2.0 using Visual Studio 2005. She updated it in Visual Studio 2008, successfully using the automatic update tool VS offers to run when you open up a project created in an earlier version of whatever VS you open it in. There were no issues when we ran through the site on our test web server.

All was looking good until we moved the web site code to our production web server. All the apps on the web site were working properly except for one file upload application. For whatever reason, this one hunk of code decided to malfunction. We’d run into problems similar to this one which turned out to be caused by a missing patch – so that was the first place I looked.

Sure enough, for some reason our WSUS server didn’t push out all of the service packs for the various versions of the .NET Framework to this server. To fix this, I ran Windows Update on the server. As it started the service pack install I got an error: 0×643. Bummer!

A quick search found the solution on Microsoft’s support site in Article ID 923100. The short version: manually uninstall all versions of the .NET Framework, reinstall them and then run the service pack install. Easy enough, I supposed.

I spent 2 1/2 hours of my Saturday uninstalling and reinstalling. When I was all done I opened up the web site only to find it was erroring out with the “Yellow Window” generic error message. Time to stop, think, and not over-react.

Thankfully, we have a VPN and Remote Desktop so I could multitask from home that day. After taking time to swap laundry loads from the washer to the dryer it hit me to check the web site settings in IIS. Good thing I did because there was the problem, bigger than Stuttgart (as we used to say when I was in the Army) – the ASP.NET version selected in the ASP.NET tab in the web site properties was 1.1xxxxx instead of 2.0.50727. A quick change and a restart of the IIS Admin Service got everything working as it should.

I can only guess that the IIS settings were automatically changed when the .NET Framework 2.0 was uninstalled from the server. It makes sense – and it makes sense that one would need to go reselect the proper version of the Framework. Since that wasn’t spelled out in the Microsoft article, I’m warning you here.

Hopefully you won’t have to go through this yourself. If you do, though, don’t forget to check the IIS settings before declaring yourself finished.