A while back I had the pleasure of speaking with Jay Cross, author of the brand new book, Informal Learning. It has been a while since he interviewed me and I had completely forgotten about it. But today a copy of the book showed up in the mail. I’m looking forward to digging into this one - it looks like a great read.
Congrats to Jay on the completion of the book!
After a long (but not horribly long) night and a long day here at Casa Del Hospital, I’m finally taking a bit of down time to catch up on work and blogging. Bridget and I have stepped into the waiting room to get a better Wi-Fi signal and to give mom some incredibly much needed rest. Poor girl passed exhaustion about 5 hours ago, but kept on truckin. She’s loopy now! So me and my girl are just hanging out. Well, actually I’m playing on the laptop and she’s sleeping away. I have a feeling that it’ll take 4 hours to write this short entry, since I have to pause to hold her every so often.
I don’t mean to turn this site into a daddyblog, so don’t worry!
If you’re interested in photos, add me as a friend on Flickr.com – My ID is sink21.
Tags: Off TopicToday at 2:42 pm CST, my daughter arrived. Here’s the stats:
Both wife and baby are happy and healthy. My wife is a rockstar!
It looks as though my wife’s labor might be starting to happen, so if posting in thin you’ll know why.
I’ll post pictures as soon as I can! (Assuming this isn’t a false alarm)
Tags: Off TopicReading the latest State of the Blogosphere today, something stuck out to me that I’ve not yet heard anyone talking about.
When you look at the Daily Posting Volume numbers, it’s interesting to see that whenever there’s a big spike in discussion (around Katrina, the London bombings, or Deepthroat being revealed, for instance), there’s also an immediate drop shortly thereafter. Volume picks up quickly, but I’m reading that to mean something quite clear, but quite important:
Once we’ve blogging a topic to death, we lose interest in blogging overall – mostly temporarily.
Seems like an obvious point, but it’s one that we’ve always assumed, but never really had numbers to support. This is an important note for organizations working with consumers, since we often freak out when there’s a lull in traffic after a spike. The message seems to be: don’t look at your traffic daily, look at it quarterly.
As more and more business rush into the social media space, I see less strategy and more action. Sometimes "just geting started" is a good thing, but typically jumping in feet first without any idea of how deep the water is results in clear and speedy failure.
I’ve always been struck by this quote from Abraham Lincoln:
If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first four sharpening the axe.
This is a great way to think about getting involved with your community – if you want to have true success in working with consumers directly, spend as much time up front preparing as you plan on executing. Some people might read this quote and assume it means that we should waste time over-planning our activities. This is certainly one way of reading the quote, but it’s certainly not what Lincoln meant. The point is that we can just start chopping away, working up a sweat, and hopefully meet the timeline. Or we can determine the key criteria to achieve success, work on those first, and then start working. Not only do you have the same (or better) results, you’ve created less headache for yourself.
Imagine if Edelman had spent that much time thinking through all the potential problems before launching their incredibly ill-fated Wal-Mart blog. They would have discovered, for instance, that you need to register the domain names of fake action groups you make up…
Lately I’ve found myself in the midst of a number of conversations talking about the early days of the internet. I was one of the people who saw the "utopian vision" that was the power of the internet almost as soon as I was introduced to it. With the way that social connection has been supercharged by the internet in the last few years, I find myself thinking a lot about that famous Victor Hugo quote:
Tags: Off TopicAll the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
Jake McKee is the Chief Strategy Officer and Ant Wrangler at Ant's Eye View, a customer experience strategy practice focused on helping clients escalate their customer experience. With a rich background in customer collaboration, online communities, and fan groups, and Web development, community management, and product development, Jake helps organizations understand how to act like groups of people, rather than soulless money making machines.
