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Cool Tool Review: Weave the People

September 30, 2010 by Guest Author

Todd Hoskins chooses and uses tools, products, and practices that could belong in an entrepreneurial business toolkit. He’ll be checking out how useful they are to folks in a business environment.

Cool Tool Review: Weave the People
A Review by Todd Hoskins

A few years ago I attended an intimate, oceanside conference outside of San Diego. The 70 of us in attendance spent the weekend participating in roundtable discussions, eating, and sipping cocktails. Sunday afternoon, while checking out of the resort, I met the people I wish I would have connected with on Friday. We exchanged contact info, but the opportunity was largely lost, as we live on opposite ends of the country.

This is a common frustration with meetings and conferences. How can people with matching interests, needs, and talents find one another?

Despite the growth of social technology, there is no replacement for the value and possibilities that can emerge from meeting face-to-face. Gladwell is right – there are limitations inherent in the “loose ties” of online connections. There is a reason that tweetups are popular and location based technologies have taken off. People want to meet, and any “friend” or “connection” is peripheral until you shake hands, share a meal or drink, and can establish trust looking at each other directly. Albert Mehrabian has proposed that words constitute only 7% of communication – the rest is tone and body language.

So, the Internet is an incredibly powerful medium for exploring, finding, and learning about people. Then, at some point, the relationship has amplified possibilities when we move from cyberspace to sharing physical space. This is exactly why Weave the People is such a valuable tool, by accelerating the discovery process, allowing organizations and people to connect with their wants and needs in group settings.

It works like this: If you are hosting a conference, meeting, or event, contact Weave the People, and they will work with you to develop a series of questions. These questions are designed to help you meet your goals for the event, whether you want to increase the connectivity of your employees, match vendors and buyers, or just help people have fun.

Weave will help you poll your prospective attendees, then “weave” together profiles in a simple, visually appealing layout. Send the link in advance of the event, and the people who are attending have a chance to navigate through the profiles and make decisions based on their motivations for being in attendance. For the less-socially-gifted, this is a gift in itself. You automatically have conversation starters that are pre-approved.

weave

I love the fact that Weave has a high-minded mission and philosophy, getting to an “authentic we,” utilizing technology to increase our humanness rather than our isolation. But it just works as well, making meetings more enjoyable and a better return on investment.

You can watch some demos here.

Summing Up – Is it worth it?

Enterprise Value: 4/5 – Very reasonable in cost. Mobile app (in planning) will make this even better.

Entrepreneur Value: 5/5 – Finding employees, partners, investors, and advocates at events just got easier.

Personal Value: 5/5 – Not all questions need to be business-related. Bringing the personal and professional profile elements together creates deeper, more sustainable connections.

Let me know what you think!

Todd Hoskins helps small and medium sized businesses plan for the future, and execute in the present. With a background in sales, marketing, and technology, he works with executives to help create thriving organizations through developing and clarifying values, strategies, and tactics. You can learn more at VisualCV, or contact him on Twitter.

Filed Under: Successful Blog, Tools Tagged With: bc, collaboration, Meetings, Todd Hoskins, Weave the People

Collaboration: How to Bring Back that Brand New Blog Feeling Again

July 2, 2010 by Guest Author

A Guest Post by Alexis Bonari

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If a blog is suffering from low readership, repetitive posts, or a general lack of innovation, chances are that it also lacks collaborative strategies. Some bloggers may be hesitant to even explore the idea of collaboration, foreseeing a loss of readership if they point out a better blog. However, experience shows the opposite: readers enjoy being introduced to new bloggers, so they’ll keep coming back for more.

Collaboration in Action

As an example of collaboration in action, take a look at remarkablogger and problogger as resources on blogger collaboration.

Setting Collaborative Readership Goals

From a remarkablogger post comes the idea of setting specific goals among bloggers for increasing their readership. A group of personal finance bloggers, inspired by a single challenge posted on Financial Samurai, agreed to increase their Alexa readership ratings within six months. Some aimed to join the ranks of the top 200,000; others challenged themselves to reach the top 50,000. But all 49 personal finance bloggers who answered the challenge observed significant increases in readership due to the collaborative nature of the goals they had set for themselves. One blog even managed to increase its rating from #1,432,262 to #215,606.

How did they manage this?

  1. They started right away without procrastinating. They didn’t make excuses about needing to think it over or question the feasibility of the task. They just joined up.
  2. They tracked something tangible. Whether it’s page rankings, readership, number of Tweets, or any other popularity indicator, this is an important factor in goal-oriented blogger collaboration.
  3. A concrete and desirable goal was set. Without focus, collaboration loses some of its efficacy.
  4. Keeping it casual enabled these bloggers to just “let the magic happen” as members of the challenge group created blog badges and set up tracking pages for collaborative commentary.
  5. They promoted each other. Small increases in readership added up for everyone and created a more synergistic partnership among bloggers.

Fresh Ideas for Effective Blogging Collaboration

A refreshing perspective characterizes problogger’s post the subject of collaborative blogging as a way to combat writer’s block. Recommendations include

  • guest blogging,
  • blog swaps,
  • joint posts,
  • interviews,
  • joint blogs,
  • joining a blog network,
  • chatting on IM or e-mail,
  • and participating in discussion forums.
  • Trying a blog swap (switching blogs for a day with another blogger) or joining up with another blogger to write interview posts about each other can liven up a boring blog. There’s no way to lose with these helpful strategies, so win-win collaboration makes immediate improvements for the savvy blogger.

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    What collaboration ideas have you helped you get back that brand blog feeling and reach for newer higher goals?

    ———-

    — Alexis Bonari is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at onlinedegrees.org, researching areas of online universities . In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

    Thanks, Alexis! You’ve cited two of the best blogging collaborators I know!

    –ME “Liz” Strauss
    Work with Liz on your business!!

    Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

    It’s the people and the great information inside that make me a proud affiliate of …

    third-tribe-marketing

Filed Under: Community, Successful Blog, Writing Tagged With: bc, blogging, collaboration, LinkedIn

Collaboration Tools

February 10, 2009 by SOBCon Authors

One of my favorite things to result from my experience at SOBCon last year were the fantastic collaborative efforts that I was able to put together with other attendees.Online College Blog and School Reviews provides a list of online apps for managing your own collaborations.

The question is, what are you waiting for?

Collaboration

Working with others means managing the thoughts and ideas of more than just yourself. Don’t go crazy trying to keep up with everything; instead, use these collaboration tools to keep connected, share ideas, and work together on projects successfully.

Collaboration

Working with others means managing the thoughts and ideas of more than just yourself. Don’t go crazy trying to keep up with everything; instead, use these collaboration tools to keep connected, share ideas, and work together on projects successfully.

  1. Backpack. Whether you are working with fellow students or in a professional setting, Backpack allows for easy collaboration with features such as shared to-do lists, announcements, calendars, files, and even centralized discussions.
  2. Basecamp. Basecamp makes project collaboration easy and smooth. Share files, track time, schedule milestones, assign projects, make to-do lists and more.
  3. Highrise. If your business need a tool to manage your contacts, leads, and on-going deals, Highrise offers a centralized way to share everything happening at your company.
  4. writewith. For writing projects, this app keeps everyone together with shared documents and tasks, discussions, and more.
  5. iLeonardo. This social network allows you to collaborate on research with friends or others who happen to be working on the same subject you are.
  6. LooseStitch. Create outlines, share with others, and keep all your changes together with this tool that helps facilitate brainstorming and working together.
  7. Famundo. Families and organizations alike will find useful ways to use Famundo to keep calendars, to-do lists, shopping lists, share photos, and communicate in one place.
  8. Thinkfree. The free services with this app include document creation and sharing, file access and sharing, collaboration with colleagues, blogging, and iPhone access. Other services for a fee include server access, complete mobile access, and an alternative to MS Office.
  9. Pidgin. Download this tool so you can IM with anyone on 16 different IM accounts.
  10. MeetWithApproval. Plan a virtual meeting with coworkers or clients or organize a face-to-face using this meeting planner.
  11. Thinkature. Collaborate, organize your thoughts and research, and prepare your paper or project with this tool.
  12. ProBoards. Create a discussion board easily and quickly so you can collaborate. You can also leave the discussion for others to access as well.
  13. ThinkFold. If you have a group working together, it can get confusing and messy trying to track everyone’s ideas. ThinkFold allows groups to create interactive, real-time outlines without all the trouble.

Read more –>

Filed Under: Attendees Tagged With: bc, cloud apps, collaboration, tools

A Barn Raisers Guide: 7 Ways to Leave the Field of Dreams to Build a Thriving Reality

November 6, 2008 by Liz


Field of Dreamers and Barn Raisers

For quite a while, I’ve been working with businesses who have or are preparing to build or expand a web presence or social community. They ask me to help focus their strategy and to help bring people to their communities. They want to attract, impress, and ultimately engage fiercely loyal participants.

If you’ve been online for a while, you’ve probably noticed that a percentage of new arrivals get a key strategic point of community sites out of order. Field of Dreamers are sure if they build their idea their way the people will come. Except the people don’t necessarily see the same thing.

More strategic folks Barn Raisers avoid the risk by building the community as they build the site. They believe that people will help build a powerful idea. Barn Raisers invite collaboration from the people they’ll be serving and so what they build is often a gathering place for people even before it’s fully finished.

A Barn Raisers Guide

Here are 7 ways to leave a field of dreams and get people to help you build a thriving reality.

  • Look for similar dreams and listen to everyone who knows about them.
    Ask, search, and explore to find every reality that has the slightest things in common with your dream. Spend some time at each site you find. Meet the people there and see how they use each site. Hear every other guy’s dreams, wishes, needs, and point of view. Get curious. Ask questions constantly. Wonder about what people think of what’s old, what’s new, what’s in every space in the market. Have some ready questions such as this one: If you were going to build a space for people who like to imitate frogs, what features would consider important to include?
  • Turn your dream into promise to do one thing better than anyone else.
    Be able to articulate exactly what that is, why it’s important, and how fits in to a person’s life. Check back with those you spoke to and tweak your promised offer until the folks you’ll serve say it’s relevant to them and fits their lives.
  • Plan from conception to launch.
    Invite people from your outside usual circle to check in on what you’re doing along the way. Weigh their comments for value, sort them, and remember to put the good one to use. Thank everyone of them.
  • Turn your promise into a space for conversation, interaction, creation, and sharing.
    Build a connection conduit. If your promise becomes a blog, keep it sleek and without barriers. Make it easy to see and interact with you. Offer variety in resources and multimedia. Find ways to interact through events. If you’re building a community site, go easy on bells and whistles, execute your promise clearly, and better than anyone has before. Then use extra resources to find more ways for people to converse, interact, create, and share while on your site.
  • Be obsessed with easy.
    If you think something is easy, make it easier. When you’ve done that all you can, ask your grandmother or someone who’s never seen it to try using it without directions. If they don’t breeze through it, go back to the drawing board to make it easier.yet
  • Ask visitors for feedback and ideas on new ways to use the site.
    Let the rule be that everyone gets to pick their best way to do things. That develops into the kind of space that has the climate for relationships.
  • Build ways into your site to link out to and to celebrate your participants.
    Showcase your heroes. Begin with the folks who help you build the site. Give away five great referrals every morning and five more in the afternoon or evening. People notice folks who appreciate others.

If you invite folks to be part of a powerful idea, you’ll find that you suddenly have a knack for making spaces where people collect, connect, and start conversations. It might have something to do letting people help form the environments that they’re going to inhabit. It’s like painting a house that we’re going to live in — pride of ownership.

Barn raising has always been a brilliant strategy — building the relationships while you’re building a site.

It takes a little practice. And it takes leadership to let go enough to get the good stuff without getting the chaos. The best results always calls for the best from each of us.

I’m hoping as we build barns we might bring some Field of Dreamers to work with Barn Raisers on a community site. I thought maybe they might like the process. Do you think the two together would have a chance of success?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Get your best voice in the conversation. Buy my eBook.

Filed Under: Inside-Out Thinking, Strategy/Analysis, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, collaboration, field of dreamers, social builders, The Big Idea, visible authenticity

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