03:49 pm | 0 recommendations | 1 comment

Be Quoted When a Reporter Covers Your Kind of Story

Other than inadvertently becoming part of a scandal, crisis or other notably bad or good news, here’s the most likely method for becoming part of a media story – in a positive way. Get briefed on stories for which reporters, producers or bloggers are seeking input – right now.

For $99 a month, get PR Leads, a daily email of updates, customized for your situation. Dan Janal is diligent and savvy because he depends on our happy referrals to get more business. Two other popular media matching services are free. Publicist (and sky diver) Peter Shankman’s Help a Reporter Out (HARO) email gets delivered to you three times a day. At the top of each email is a summary – one-liners on the kind of sources reporters are seeking. Scan it quickly to see if you’re a match for one of the queries. In just a few months over 10,000 sources signed up, as you can here.

Journalists submit their query here. ProfNet, a venerable fee-based service was upset with this upstart.The other free service is Getting Ink Requests. It is run by another social media maven, Sally Whittle and a large collective of journalists. You can get queries via a daily email or Twitter or add value to your blog by featuring Getting Ink Requests on it.

As you review your compilation of media queries from HARO, Gettng Ink Requests, PR Leads or ProfNet, look for strong matches. Can you offer tips, insights, information, stories or examples that directly relate to what the media person is seeking? Be brief, specific and to the point. See, for example, how Peter got HARO to be a part of this New York Times story.

If you are off-topic or too self-promotional you’ll get be blacklisted by that media person. Here’s Sandra Beckwith’s tips on how to respond. (Don’t get featured on the Bad Pitch Blog.)Kristen King also writes bluntly about the biggest mistakes some people make in responding to queries.Here’s tips for offering what a reporter needs to cover your story.

Also, if you’re paid for your expertise (or you want to be) then help people find you when they want what you know.To raise your visibility and value, you may want to emulate Sally Whittle or Peter Shankman’s community-building model. That is offer a social media-based, free compilations/matching service related to your business. If so, remember this.

While Sally actively encourages people to share the media queries she collects, Peter asks that you do not. So far Peter is attracting far more queries and members it seems.

Ann Hanley sees Peter’s approach as a healthy sign of our social media future.

Erik Sherman describes why Peter should be able to copyright his compilations to preserve the value he is creating for himself while facilitating a service that can remain free for “us.”

That’s the “Me2We” way.As you can see, taking this “first ever” approach can raise helpful thoughts and competitive concerns among those who are accustomed to having more control. The downside of this free-for-all future is the weakest link.

The weak links are the aforementioned, irritating off-topic responders who spoil it for the rest of us. That’s why some journalists and others are seeking sources among their existing circle of colleagues, as Shel Holtz describes. Hint: How many media pros are you LinkedIn to?

03:01 pm | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment

Embarrassing Accidents, Oversharing and Real Connection

Those mortifying accidents.

Stephen J. Dubner unleashed a pent-up flood of guilt and shame from readers of his New York Times column last month. Ever written an email, then sent it in haste … to the wrong person? Or cc’d people who shouldn’t have seen your candid message? Or mistakenly received an email that was not meant for your eyes?

Within days after Dubner told his tale, 166 readers shared their stories of regret, outrage and in Marci Alboher’s case, a happy ending. Wonder what’s the proper etiquette in this new world of instantly sendable missives? Like advice on avoiding such mishaps?

Want to read more stories to feel better about your mistake? Visit the Web site, Think Before You Send, for the book, Send, by the New York Times’s Op-ed editor David Shipley and Will Schwalbe, former editor at Hyperion.Gossip. Billion dollar goof. Mis-directed love notes. Quick-trigger lawyers. CEO’s insults. Doomed convoy. Nope. There’s no retrieve key. Just apology. Done right.

It’s an unavoidably and increasingly transparent world. Some are proudly, vividly telling all in the name of authenticity - often humorously - sometimes attracting a large community (or audience), posting personal or “social” information on several sites, Twittering away throughout day.

Some, like Claire, create Great Email Disasters.“Oversharing.”It seems we are diving into this new way of public living, even if we aren’t (yet) celebrities. iPhone. Flip video. The tech toys are alluring. (I love them.) And the bravery and exuberance, especially of women, to tell it like it is, inevitably opens the conversations for us all.Today had its slow moments. Yet life flies by fast.

With each year it passes faster. So why not go slow to go fast? Sometimes anyway. Make more moments memorable. Consider your concentric circles of family, friendships, colleagues and acquaintances. Pause to contemplate the most thoughtful ways to reach out, and with whom. Until Facemail arrives, pause again before you send.

Preserve reputations.

In this “always on” anywhere, any time, anyone (photo.video.word) coverage of most any situation, consider how you want to connect. Keep confidences. Be trustworthy. Cultivate relationships in a transient, time-starved world.We need some privacy to be our truest selves.

Akin to the old-fashioned notion that fences make good neighbors, our thoughtful lines of privacy may enable us to grow ever closer.I am a situational extrovert and value my friends. Yet I look forward to walking and driving without talking on the phone or even listening to music, to notice the world around me, the thoughts and feelings seep that into my consciousness.

Anybody else like that? Maybe I’m simply clinging to a world where we choose between solitude and constant contact with others. Our life is our ultimate art. Found your line of privacy? As someone once said, “In art as in life it is often a matter of where you draw the line.”

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How to Attract Star Employees Who’ll Work Full-Tilt Together

Want a window into a preferred way of life(style) at work?

When a hot start-up in San Francisco seeks talented workers who have many choices about where to work - what does it offer? Call it the google effect. Grockit can’t provide the on-site laundry services, 14 restaurants (and much more) of google. Yet, today it landed 8 million more in funding and can offer:

• Cheap desks, expensive chairs.

• 30 inch monitors, top of the line Mac Pros and ergonomic keyboards.

• A powerful software development tracking tool to manage work throughout the organization from engineering to operations to academics.

• Benefits (health, dental, vision):
Every month we put cash into a HSA for employees. You never lose your HSA money, it sits in a bank account you can access, and you can use the HSA Bank Card to pay for preventative medical care or to cover the cost of deductibles.

• Tasty breakfasts and lunches that are nutrient dense and all most entirely organic.

• Water is filtered through a 10-stage filter.

• For cleaning, we only use non-toxic supplies.

• We recycle and compost far more than we trash, use high efficiency lighting, and purchase our food from local businesses and farms.

Considering that mix of benefits, it’s not surprising this start-up, Grockit is “developing an online learning game where people can teach each other.”

Our learning take-aways - from these benefits - for recruiting star employees:

• How many companies offer a mix of benefits that closely match the profile of employees they most need?

• How many firms describe their benefits in language that reflects the career and sense-of-community interests of their kind of sought-after worker?

• How often do you see benefits written so briefly, in such vivid, specific detail?

Tip: The specific detail proves the general promise. Generalizations are less credible or memorable.

Look for the launch of their game this Fall. GrockIt's approach is radical. While some of their language attacks traditional education, the first step may be more narrow: help in prepping for educational tests. Co-founder, Farbood Nivi, said last year, "We are trying to turn the global education market on its head. We want students to teach each other rather than going to teachers. The knowledge is inherent within the system. Today’s market is about conformity, order and obedience. Then the teacher will gift you with the knowledge. We’re trying to facilitate student interaction and totally circumvent the master-slave dynamic."

Nivi wrote of his massive plans at LinkedIn, "We aim to utilize the awesome power of the internet to help the world learn. Our first step is leveraging the web to provide live online GMAT test prep classes to anyone with a PC and an Internet connection ... We are currrently developing a P2P Learning Game that will help students from around the world teach each other ... We are also expanding to include LSAT, ACT, SAT, GRE test prep in Q3 of 2007."

Speaking again of the power of specificity and brevity, Navi wrote: Grockit is founded on a few principles.
1. Learning should be low cost and high quality.
2. Learning should benefit the student, the teacher, and society.
3. Learning should be engaging, and interactive.

Grok has been one of my favorite concepts since childhood. Here’s two of my favorite quotes from Grockit.

• Grockit is a play on the word 'grok', which was coined by Robert Heinlein in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land. Grok means to understand something so well that it becomes a part of you. We created the word Grockit to mean understanding something so well that you can teach it to others. (They practice what they preach, working and learning in pairs.)

• Learning 2.0 is a re-emphasis on learning as opposed to education. Education is an institution while learning is what people do. The 2.o also means that technology, namely the distributed web, is going to help us do that.

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3D Breakthrough Changes How We Meet, Share, Buy & Play

He was in Bangalore and his co-presenters were in San Jose, yet Cisco’s CEO appeared live - on thesame stage. How? By using a breathtaking 3D holographic-like technology.They tout it as, “the world’s first real time virtual presentation. Aptly, it’s called TelePresence.

See Sir Richard Branson – live at a London press conference, while standing at Necker Island, his Caribbean retreat. Or preview “the first space age Olympic swim suit.” On Wednesday a Telstra executive in Melbourne, Australia interacted with an audience in Adelaide.

My friend Rick watched a demo and raved about it. Suddenly, this is a competitive space. And, yes, this is Cisco’s big new business, partnering with Musion, yet it will have to cost less to gain traction. Why am I interested in it, aside from the astounding effect of a holographic human presence?

Because:

• The realistic presence it provides means people around the world can gather for what really feels like an in-person gathering.

• The best actors anywhere for a particular play can assemble to enact it, for more people to see - live and later.

• The top experts on a topic can appear on a panel, taking questions from audiences in many places.

• Crowdsourcing becomes easier.

In short, it enables more realistic “face-to-face” group collaboration. Cisco had an I-Prize contest in which anyone could propose novel ways to use this technology. Already it is in 28 countries, lightening the carbon footprint. Five years ago I spoke on Cisco’s global, in-house on-demand TV station. I still get emails from Cisco employees who clicked on their computer to see my presentation when they thought it might help them with a current need. Holographic-like appearances, however takes that kind of live and on-demand capability to a whole new level.

As useage goes up and cost goes down, the world will flatten for more Me2We opportunities. We’ll be able to get a better feel for each other, no matter where we actually are. I can hardly wait to try it.

Skip travel and lodging costs. Meeting Planners’ Alert:

For PCMA, SGMP, MPI, ASAE, NSA,MeCo, MeetingsNet, MiForum and others in the meeting or communication professions: bring the most relevant speakers and panelists to the same stage - no matter where they are standing in the world. Enable “attendees” to talk with them. Encourage convention centers and conference hotels to provide this capacity, offered by Cisco, HP or other firm. Set the bar higher.

First, Cisco CEO John Chambers is providing it for large conferences, concerts, events, awards ceremonies, multi-site meetings, high level briefings, retail, museums and product launches - even movies and soldier/family conversations. Then Chambers wants to bring it to our homes. (Well, not every room, in the home.) Stay tuned.

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Reduce Your Risk in Hiring the Right Designer

A big stumbling block in hiring the graphic designer who most “gets” your business is this. You won’t know if you’ll like the design until after you put your money down. The smaller your business and budget the greater the risk it seems.

That’s how it works at two popular places, ifreelance and Elance. Buyer post requests for designs. Designers submit proposals. Buyer hires a designer, then waits to see the results.

This month, crowdSPRING, an online business launched to level that risk. It provides protections for creatives and for buyers.

Here’s how it works. Would-be buyers post a description of their project, the budget and their deadline. Then, according to co-founder, Ross Kimbarovsky, “Creatives from around the world submit actual designs - not merely RFPs. Buyers pick from actual designs.” To demonstrate how it works crowdSPRING posted a $5,000 contract the design of their home page. (I spoke at HOW Design, a conference where attendees could give great feedback on this approach.)

crowdSPRING provides for buyers and sellers such protections as project management, legal contracts, reputation management, online portfolio placement, and intermediary customer service. Adds Kimbarovsky, “We believe that once a buyer purchases creative services using crowdSPRING’s new model - they’ll never go back to the traditional model.” Note, they already have 1,503 members and visitors from 122 different countries/territories. For variations of this approach see GeniusRocket and Criggle.

Kimbarovsky and his colleague Pete Burgeson, said they took this approach after reading about crowdsourcing and communities in Howard Rheingold’s book, Smart Mobs. Crowdsourcing, a term actually coined by Jeff Howe, means, “taking tasks traditionally done by a single person or small groups of people, and farms them out to a global workforce.”

Thanks for the tip Michelle Wolverton. Kimbarovsky and the other co-founder, Mike Samson, “wanted to achieve just three things with crowdSPRING: give creatives a level playing field, offer buyers choice, and protect intellectual property for all.” See what you think.

04:46 pm | 0 recommendations | 3 comments

Collaborate Towards a Single Goal. Expect the Unexpected.

More than your solitary smarts, your capacity to do something extraordinary depends on something else. It is your ability to build on the work of others from the past or with others at the same time. So said Malcolm Gladwell at last year’s New Yorker conference. This may be a key theme in Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don’t“, his next book, due out this November.

Here’s some of Gladwell’s related insights:

• To gain mastery of a topic typically takes 10,000 hours. Yet, breakthroughs are more likely to happen on the path to mastery when one collaborates with others who are dedicated to the same goal.

• Achieving a high score on an I.Q. test or demonstrating the ability to work hard, alone, for along time are not good indicators of our capacity to accomplish the remarkable today. Rather, it is our capacity to focus on a single topic with others, then synthesize the resulting research and ideas to create something singularly new and better.

• Thus your ability to find the best collaborators is key. This holds true, not only in hiring, picking a work team or selecting members for your volunteer committee – but in whom you marry or befriend. To make smarter choices, sidestep the mismatch problem. (As Gladwell has been writing and speaking about this tendancy it may be in the book). He writes that the mismatch happens when, “the criteria we use to prepare to assess someone’s ability to do a job, is radically out of step with the actual demands of the job itself.”

So what’s an outlier? Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls it, “an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations.”

A black swan is an outlier, for example. Taleb writes, “Most people expect all swans to be white because that’s what their experience tells them; a black swan is by definition a surprise. Nevertheless, people tend to concoct explanations for them after the fact, which makes them appear more predictable, and less random, than they are.

Our minds are designed to retain, for efficient storage, past information that fits into a compressed narrative. This distortion, called the hindsight bias, prevents us from adequately learning from the past.”

Garry Peterson believes that, “black swans occur when there are significant mismatches between the models people use to understand the world and the subsequent expectations that those models produce and observations. In other words, black swans are model errors.”

Tip from the remarkable Taleb: Learn to expect the unexpected.
In fact, he “believes we create stories to convince ourselves that the future is predictable.” Curb the tendancy to quickly categorize.

Differing from Gladwell, in part, Taleb doubts that we can predict who will change the world. Also, Taleb vigorously disagrees with Gladwell’s coverage of his ideas, writing,” while flattering, (Gladwell) puts me in the wrong box –too much emphasis on … applications of my ideas to finance/economics, & less on the dynamics of historical events/philosophy of history, artistic success, technological luck, and general uncertainty in society.” Taleb’s not alone in challenging Gladwell’s leaps of thinking.

Like the growing slew of books on happiness signals a yearning in our culture today so, too, the popularity of story-filled guides to making smarter decisions seems to reflect another prevalent doubt in our increasing transient, complex world. See if you find Outliers to be a helpful follow-up to Sway and Nudge.

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Get Slightly Famous? Where’s Your Tribe?

Seth Godin’s promise to put 1,000 faces on the cover of his next book, Tribe, reminded me of two other crowd pleasers:

• the top-of-heads photo on Clay Shirky’s insightful book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

• the 60-foot high faces of Chicagoans that appear on the Crown Foundation. See startled passersby watch the lips purse on each face, then spurt water like a modern-day gargoyle.

Steven van Yoder would probably approve of Godin’s offer to make some members of the Godin tribe, “slightly famous.”

Here’s some of my favorite quotes, by the way, from Shirky’s thought-provoking book:

• “We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race. More people can communicate more things to more people than has ever been possible in the past, and the size and speed of this increase, from under one million participants to over one billion in a generation, makes the change unprecedented….”

• “What we are dealing with now is filter failure.”

• “Group action gives human society it particular character, and anything that changes the way groups get thing done will affect society as a whole.”• The basic capabilities of tools like Flickr reverse the old order of group activity, transforming “gather, then share” into “share, then gather.”

• Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.”Shirky is walking his talk. During an interview on the Colbert Report, Colbert suggested printing “Colbert” stickers to put on Doritos bags in their nearby grocery stores. Shirky, evoking the theme of his book, invited audience members to create their own stickers. Thanks Steve Johnson.

Shirky recommended Jeff Howe’s forthcoming book, Crowdsourcing.

04:40 pm | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment

Co-Create “Like You Give a Damn”

From Buenos Aires to Biloxi, architects anywhere can design emergency shelters for those who lost their homes in Sri Lanka. They may never meet in person or tour buildings they designed yet they can now see each other and their creations online. Their ability to share building designs is world-changing, especially for the poor.

Why? Because, from Mumbai to Rio and western China, by the year 2020, “one-quarter of the earth’s population will live in so-called slums.”

What if you could meet online or in person to cross-consult and co-create with your peers around the world? Imagine, for example, that high school math teachers collaborated on class plans and projects? Or lawyers and lawmakers joined forces to craft model legislation? Or scientists conducted joint research from different locations?

Such online peer2peer, collaborative communities (unlike “simple” yet valuable support groups) are not simple to design, especially when they involve licensed professionals, such as architects and landscape designers, as the groundbreaking folks as Architecture for Humanity (and their partners) discovered. Yet their still-evolving online Open Architecture Network provides valuable insights for the many other peer-based communities in the world.

For example, as Kate Stohr, co-founder of Architecture for Humanity, finding a way to actually share CAD-based designs online is complex (Autodesk is working on a solution) and, since the profession is licensed, architects can face legal challenges when someone wants to use the plans they placed online. Creative Commons and six lawyers are helping solve that issue. And choosing a platform and software that can be updated by non-geeks is not a simple decision – even with an expert from Sun. Scott Mattoon, from Sun, chose Drupal, the open source approach supported by the biggest online software community in the world.

Before you get daunted and quit reading, consider how the way has been paved for you, in part, by Architecture for Humanity – and the amazing volunteer team that came together to create this first-of-a-kind community site. Perhaps, with peers, you can adapt their model. At every step they sought the wisdom of the crowd, partnered or otherwise collaborated

Now we come to the extraordinary turn of events, the Me2We center to this saga. In 2006, Architecture for Humanity won the TED prize. After giving his 18 minute speech (like all other 60 speakers during the four day conference), Cameron Sinclair, as a prize winner, gave his wish to change the world: “to develop an open source humanitarian design network to provide a global platform for designers to collaborate and develop projects to solve humanitarian issues.” (Currently less than 4% of the world buildings are designed by an architect.) Their goal? “To improve the living standards of five billion people.”

To do that he needed an online way for professionals to share and compare their designs.Immediately, people in the audience volunteered their specific talents and resources. Later, that day, as is the TED custom, the volunteers met to hash out initial details. Months before the prize announcement, winning teams are counseled by Amy Novogratz, director of TED Prize, on how to craft an actionable wish that can gain traction so that next year’s conference attendees see solid progress.

During the first meeting of volunteers and throughout the year, resourceful, upbeat Amy facilitates the group’s progress. She finds more volunteers to fill in the missing pieces. She helps people find a common language for the diverse technical experts to use and, most of all, embodies the collaborative behavior that keeps a project on track. Inevitably, the project evolves and changes with the considerable input of so many people. Just before they were to speak at The Commonwealth Club of California on a panel designed by Kevin O’Malley, I met with Amy and one of the early volunteers who contributed “hundreds of hours”, Maria Giudice, CEO of the design firm Hot Studio. In this podcast interview you’ll gain insights about the art, the science and the spirit of mass collaboration.

Soon the panel discussion will appear on ForeaTV. Here’s O’Malley’s description of the session: “How can well-designed Web access to open-source architectural plans support sustainable development, help communities rebuild after disaster, and create safer and more innovative structures with partners around the world? Learn how a diverse team of engineers, designers and social activists worked together to create a collaborative design community to help raise living standards around the globe - and allowed a worldwide team to respond to the immediate needs of disaster victims, including the victims of Hurricane Katrina and the recent fires in Southern California.”

Also on the panel see canny and dry-humored Scott Mattoon, that volunteer from Sun Microsystems and Kate, who gave a captivating and quick visual tour of some of the sustainable buildings connected with their project.

You’ll see the obvious camaraderie and respect amongst this hardworking team. You may be inspired to attend a TED conference, see past winners and other speakers online – and read the book by Cameron and Kate, Design Like You Give a Damn.