Recent Updates Page 2 RSS Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Bill Rice 6:02 am on August 4, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , challenges, leadership   

    Business Challenges…They’re Like Curveballs 

    It is amazing how many people with daily life challenges tend to rise above what those with near perfect lives never can.

    I recommend reading this New York Times interview of John T. Chambers, Chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems. This is one of my favorite quotes in the article–Chambers describes how he was taught to deal with challenges:

    I had an issue with dyslexia before they understood what dyslexia was. One of my teachers, Mrs. Anderson, worked with me and she taught me to look at it almost like a curveball. The ball breaks the same way every time. Once you get used to it, you can handle it pretty well.

    Obviously challenges give us skills that make us better, stronger, and higher performing. Is that how you look at challenges?

     

  • Bill Rice 10:48 am on July 31, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , users, Web 2.0   

    Software Engineers Learning to Listen to Users 

    Dave Winer
    Image via Wikipedia

    Another software gem from Dave Winer–be a user and listen to users. Hopefully, he will continue to build out this advice, but I thought it was valuable to pull it out and highlight here:

    1. Be a user. Develop apps you yourself have a use for. If you don’t have a feeling for what it’s like to be a user, you’ll never know how to evolve the products, and the stuff you learn in #2 will never make sense.

    2. Listen to users. Learning how to code is straightforward, it takes time to perfect your skills, but it’s relatively easy compared to the skill of listening. I recently suggested to a VC friend that we start a company whose sole differentiator is that it strives to perfect the art of listening to users.

    I think social media and Web 2.0 are making it easier for us to listen to users–trying to use our software as well as get things done. Unfortunately, we often don’t put the effort into making it easy to hear and listen for our users.

    We just added GetSatisfaction.com and the Feedback tab (widget) into all of our applications. Hopefully, that will make it easier for them to talk to us. In addition, we are becoming more active in energizing and engaging our user community.

    Still, the methodology for listening is not perfected. More thought and innovation is needed…

    Ideas? What are you doing to listen better to your users?

    Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

     

  • Bill Rice 2:50 pm on July 23, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags:   

    Tools for Eavesdropping and Taking Action 

    eavesdropping
    Stowe Boyd, of /message trickled into my RSS stream and tickled one of my ongoing projects.

    You see, Stowe is thinking about appliances and applications that “eavesdrop” on our streams and take action. His idea swirls around travel and event planning. Mine, around sales.

    Let’s take a look at what one of these applications might look like:

    1. Tap into “microsyntax” and keywords to trigger capture
    2. Default display would be a “river of news”
    3. Interesting items (potential sales opportunities) can be:
      • Flagged
      • Identified
      • Engaged
      • Tracked
      • Captured (into CRM)
    5. Provide Social Graph explorer
    6. Selectively capture microformats meta-data (i.e., contacts, tags)
    7. Have API to simplify Social CRM implementation

    I am really enjoying this project. More to come…

    (photo: Milanella)

     

    • paulknag 5:00 pm on July 23, 2009 Permalink

      Aren't there already keyword notifier programs like Google Alerts and TwitterBeep which are doing something of this ?

    • Bill Rice 7:54 pm on July 23, 2009 Permalink

      Yes, there are certainly early tools and feature sets that are implemented.

      Some savvy sales people are leveraging these to produce results, which is demonstrating the value. However, try to manage or implement on an enterprise level (even scaling to 10-15 sales people).

      Probably the biggest hole is in the identity piece. Here's an exercise: Try taking one of those alerts you get from Google Alerts or any other social search and try to efficiently track it down to contact information.

      Are you finding those tools to be efficient sales lead generators?

    • jual_rumah 7:55 am on July 29, 2009 Permalink

      Thank you for the valuable lesson.

  • Bill Rice 5:46 am on July 23, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

    Fascinated by Online Identity and the Social Graph 

    Bill RiceYou may have noticed a bit of a redesign of my personal blog here. I have recently become re-fascinated by online identity and the social graph concept. Being an ex-intelligence officer (no oxymoron jokes) it’s in my blood–wanting to understand who people are and what motivates them to do what they do.

    Unfortunately, it seems that the Web grew-up with an ethos of anonymity and mistrust. I believe this handicaps the social graph and users of the true richness it could enjoy.

    Here is my current reading list and tools I am experimenting with…

    Identity Reading List

    1. Brad Fitzpatrick’s seminal article. “Thoughts on the Social Graph”
    2. ReadWriteWeb’s review of Social Graph Concepts an Issues
    3. Drew McClellan’s “Can Your Website be Your API?”

    Identity Glue

    1. OpenID
    2. XFN
    3. FOAF
    4. Google’s Social Graph API
    5. microformats
    6. hCard

    Examples and Implementations

    1. Magdex Labs-Great example applications using Google’s Social Graph API
    2. Google Profiles. Here’s mine.
    3. Microformats in the Wild
    4. Operator-Great Firefox Plug-in for browsing and working with microformats

    My website redesign is my first experiment with using these social graph concepts. Expect it to continue being my identity and social graph playground.

    Watch as BillRice.org becomes the authoritative identity for Bill Rice.

     

  • Bill Rice 1:32 pm on July 1, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Chris Anderson, Free, Malcolm Gladwell, , Tipping Point, Wired, YouTube   

    What is Free Doing to Our Economy? 

    Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine and author of Long Tail, has stirred a good debate on the future of “Free.”

    His to be released book,  Free: The Future of a Radical Price is about to hit the bookstores and Malcolm Gladwell (author of Outliers
    and The Tipping Point) is already taking him to task. Gladwell’s challenge to Anderson’s premise is really one that argues the economic problems with a “free” economy, not really that it is not an eventually in the “future of radical pricing.” I don’t really dispute that argument. I also totally agree with the inherent yield of free:

    So how does YouTube bring in revenue? Well, it tries to sell advertisements alongside its videos. The problem is that the videos attracted by psychological Free—pirated material, cat videos, and other forms of user-generated content—are not the sort of thing that advertisers want to be associated with. In order to sell advertising, YouTube has had to buy the rights to professionally produced content, such as television shows and movies.

    However, I am inclined to support Seth Godin’s argument:

    Who cares if it does? It is. It’s happening. The world will change around it, because the world has no choice. I’m sorry if that’s inconvenient, but it’s true.

    This begs the question…What do we do about it? If consumer behavior has adopted the expectation how do businesses adjust and avoid the YouTube consequence (i.e., “Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube will lose close to half a billion dollars this year.” Gladwell)?

    I think Dave Winer and Jay Rosen is giving some good thought to this issue in his essays on Rebooting The News.

    I look forward to seeing if Chris Anderson has any conclusions in Free: The Future of a Radical Price. I suspect as the editor of a print magazine that charges, he is thinking hard about solutions.

    Related articles by Zemanta
    Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

     

    • genuinechris 11:59 am on July 15, 2009 Permalink

      Dan Kennedy and disciples are having the hardest time. Consumer goods, consumerism, and all of that stuff is a dead letter. Clay Shirky's “here comes everyone,” kinda hinted at it: we'll have tribes, if I'm in Sonia Simone's tribe, or if I'm in, say “Dan Kennedy's” tribe.

    • Bill Rice 12:03 pm on July 15, 2009 Permalink

      Yes, our economic assumptions seem to be in a radical shift. Winners? Those who figure it out, and they always do.

  • Bill Rice 2:26 pm on June 30, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: gtd, , queue,   

    Clearing Queues and Getting Things Done 

    Our lives are getting busier and busier. Technology is getting more and more intrusive. And, the economy is making all of us do more with less.

    Obviously, several people are thinking about getting more organized with their various work queues:

    My queues are much like ZenHabits–simple and consolidated

    • Gmail (lots of stuff consolidated and flow into a centralized email)
    • Paper TODO list
    • Twitter @’s and DM’s
    • Google Reader (Shift happening to FriendFeed for me)
    • Inbox folder on desktop with projects (.txt files)

    What are your queues? How do you manage them?

    Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

     

  • Bill Rice 8:15 am on June 19, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , matt cutts, Search engine optimization,   

    Matt Cutts (Google I/O) SEO Basics 

    Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...
    Image via CrunchBase

    Lots of good SEO basics from the Google Webspam Team Leader. Getting advice straight from the source.

    I am amazed how many times even the best SEO gurus miss/forget the basics of user experience and conversion features that help the consumer, your SEO, and (of course) revenue!

    SEO Basics

    • Use consumer language, not industry jargon
    • Put the simple stuff up front (complex deeper) – that is what most people come looking for
    • Make it easy to click for more details
    • For heaven sakes give them a “Buy” button

    Take a look:

    What did you think? Comments welcome below.

    ###

    Take a moment to subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on Twitter. If you are looking for a better way to manage your leads, generate more sales leads, or beat your competition to the sale visit my company at Kaleidico.com.

    Related articles by Zemanta
    Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

     

  • Bill Rice 6:11 am on June 19, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: #140conf, fred wilson, , ,   

    3 Fundamentals of Making Money on the Internet 

    Image representing Fred Wilson as depicted in ...
    Image via CrunchBase

    Fred Wilson, a VC and Principal at Union Square Station as well as an investor in Twitter, made some very important and often missed observations about making money on the Internet.

    Fundamentals of Making Money Online

    His whole talk at #140Conf can be boiled down to the 3 Funadamental Rules of Making Money on the Internet:

    1. “Links are the currency of the Internet”
    2. Links yield consumer traffic (revenue) in a variety of ways
    3. Passed links are the most valuable (conversion) links

    Why Social Media Traffic is Better

    Assuming those fundamentals, there are some very important and significant observations that should be made about Twitter, social media platforms, and online lead generation.

    Fred Wilson articulated those Internet money making observations very well:

    1. Passed links are generally delivered via email
    2. Social media platforms allow passed links to be scaled
    3. Passed links convert better than search or paid links
    4. Social media referrer traffic is already significant and growing

    Online Lead Generation Opportunity

    This would tend to lead to the conclusion that social media traffic, as it scales to a meaningful size will yield better lead generation ROI – assuming you can design a capable, viable social media lead generation business or business unit.

    Is anyone trying this?

    You can and should watch Fred Wilson’s remarks:

    ###

    Take a moment to subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on Twitter. If you are looking for a better way to manage your leads, generate more sales leads, or beat your competition to the sale visit my company at Kaleidico.com.

    Related articles by Zemanta
    Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

     

  • Bill Rice 11:13 am on April 28, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: community, crisis, , security breach, ,   

    LendingTree and the Tale of Two Crises 

    Last week LendingTree had two crises.

    Crisis 1

    The first, was relatively small. A few former employees used their access to customer inquiries (leads), most likely for personal gain, to give unauthorized lenders access to LendingTree’s Lenders Network. Sure, I and a lot of other people can think of the worst possible ramifications of this incident. However, the true facts probably will reveal something far less dramatic–a couple of ex-employees trying to stick it to their old company and make a quick greed inspired buck. And, a few unscrupulous lenders willing to comprise their integrity and their business for free leads.

    Crisis 2

    The second, is possibly the more unfortunate and potentially damaging. They lacked a community of vocal and fanatical customers. This is certainly not unique to LendingTree, but rather is quite endemic of the lead generation, mortgage, and to a lesser degree real estate industry. Those of us within this business ecosystem should take note and endeavor to fix this before we inevitably encounter our own crisis.

    The Solution

    This is more a open thought and discussion piece since I won’t be so arrogant as to believe I have the answer, or could have in the heat of the incident performed better. However, I will be critical in the hopes of beginning a useful discussion. A discussion on building a community that will passionately assist a business they believe in, even during bad news.

    Here are a few things that LendingTree has done very well, and has differentiated their business, but didn’t help in the current crisis:

    • Been dogmatic about creating the highest quality customer (borrower) experience
    • Building an “elite” cadre of lenders who actively collaborate to improve the lead network, customer experience, and lender experience
    • Creating a top-shelf consumer brand that remains etched in every homeowner in America

    Here are a few things that LendingTree did not do well in adjusting to a new social marketplace:

    • Did not build a community of customer evangelist from their loyal customer base
    • Did not build a community of lender evangelist from their loyal lender base
    • Create, develop a community evangelist at LendingTree

    Turning Customers into a Community

    I think if LendingTree had evolved their “network” into a “social media community” this recent incident would have barely registered. Instead it would have, in a natural way, triggered the vocal opinions of an established loyal customer and lender community. Here are a couple of examples from one of these loyal lenders:

    Imagine if LendingTree’s thousands of customers and hundreds of lenders had all been engaged. What would have happened if LendingTree began the communication with the community and the affected customers together. The doom and gloomers would have been a faint whisper and the media would have tracked a very different meme.

    Community Building Resources

    If you think this is important to your company here are a few of my favorite resources:

    Is this important? How would you build and maintain a community?

     

  • Bill Rice 5:05 am on April 21, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: bethany hamilton, , lou holz, motivation, patrick henry hughes, randy wheeler, tony dungy   

    Enjoy the Game 

    This Sunday I was inspired by a sermon my pastor (Randy Wheeler, Twin Oaks ) gave–”Playing with Gratitude.” As he opened his sermon, he immediately changed the title to “Enjoy the Game,” which is the title I took for this post. Then he opened with a brief clip of Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech to his fans.

    How often do we get wrapped into the “score” of the game and forget the enjoyment of playing it. I bet this is what was going through the mind of Lou Gehrig in his farewell speech when he said:

    “Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break I got. Yet today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”


    Lou Gehrig was reminding us it was not about the score and the championships. It was about the people and doing something you love. I wrote once before about putting love in the game, based on Lou Holtz’s comment, “It is not about the love of the game, but the love in the game.”

    Adversity will happen, it is what you do with the adversity that makes great things. As Randy said, “Focus your attention on what you have left, not on what you’ve lost.”

    So, in hopes of you enjoying the game more I am leaving you with a few inspiring words from those who play with gratitude:

    “Hard work and togetherness. They go hand in hand. You need the hard work because it’s such a tough atmosphere… to win week in and week out. You need togetherness because you don’t always win, and you gotta hang though together.” -Tony Dungy

    “Show me someone who has done something worthwhile, and I’ll show you someone who has overcome adversity.” -Lou Holtz

    “Courage doesn’t mean you don’t get afraid. Courage means you don’t let fear stop you.” -Bethany Hamilton (13 year old surfer and Shark attack survivor)

    “I mean, God made me blind and didn’t give me the ability to walk. I mean, big deal. He gave me the talent to play piano and trumpet and all that good stuff.” -Patrick Henry Hughes (Blind, wheelchair bound musician)

    Enjoy the game, whatever bounce the ball may take, and let the score take care of itself.

     

← Newer Posts | Older Posts →

c
compose new post
j
next post/next comment
k
previous post/previous comment
r
reply
e
edit
o
show/hide comments
t
go to top
l
go to login
h
show/hide help
esc
cancel