Jason's shared items

Simple != obvious.

"Social data" is the buzzword that describes sharing aggregate or summarized data collected from or contributed by large numbers of users. 

A good example of social data is Intuit Trends, an early alpha product available on Intuit Labs.  Trends uses aggregated company financial data collected from the online version of the accounting package Quickbooks. 

The application lets small business owners, managers and their advisers explore industry financial trends, share observations, and compare their performance with their peers and/or competitors.

Social data applications only work if data specific to individuals or companies is kept private and secure.  Intuit Trends and other social data applications accomplish this by only providing access to aggregate or summary data, thus protecting the privacy of the data sources.

While the buzzword is new, the concept is not.  Industrial companies have long provided product service and performance data based on information collected from their customers.  But this has been expensive and hard to do.

The Internet in general - and cloud computing in particular - has changed this.  With data rapidly moving from individual PCs and servers to the cloud, social data applications are much cheaper and easier to develop and deliver.

We've recently been briefed on over a dozen social data applications currently under development.  These applications target a range of industrial and consumer markets.

Social data will be a hot field in the coming years and we expect substantial growth in the number, range and power of these applications. 

Disclosure:  Emergent Research has done work for Intuit in the past year.

There is a proverb that states, run the race as if to win. My coach taught us that you will race the way you train. If you are lazy in training, you will run a lazy race. If you train with bad form, you will run a race with bad form. Furthermore, training is harder than racing.

For example, in college, to train for a 1500-meter race, we would train 40-50 miles per week. Two days we would race 20 laps around a 400-meter track; alternating one lap in 60-62 seconds and one lap jog. On the off-days, we would run 5-8 miles with a long run on the weekends. The goal is to peak on race day and acheive maximum performance. All that training would peak on race day when one has just over four minutes to shine, to run a personal best, and win the race.

How does that apply to business? We make decisons everyday and each decision has an underlying process. Understanding and applying that process daily prepares us for the big decisions. Good leaders practice and perfect decision-making and are prepared when on race day to make really difficult and far-reaching judgment calls. Good leaders consistently apply the same principles with all decisions. If one is inconsistent in the minor decisions, one will be inconsistent on the big decisions. If one makes poor decisions on the little matters, one will make poor decisions on the big matters.

The book Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls states it much better than I and goes into greater detail about how great leaders make great decisions:

"In short, people who make good judgment calls are hailed as good leaders. People who excercise poor judgment are considered poor leaders. It's that simple.

Throughout our lives, each of us makes thousands of judgment calls. Some are trivial... others are monumental... The measure of our success in life is the sum of all these judgment calls...

But what really matters is not just how many good judgment calls a leader made. Rather, it is how many of the important one he or she gets right. Good leaders not only make better calls, but they are able to discern the really important ones and get a higher percentage of them right. They are better at a whole process [of decision making].

Confused about how to use Google Wave, the new Google product that combines messaging, wiki-like features and group collaboration into a single app? You’re not alone.

To clear up the confusion, we recently published Google Wave: A Complete Guide, a feature-length article that explains Wave in plain English.

Now Gina Trapani and Adam Pash have gone a step further, releasing The Complete Guide to Google Wave. The book, which is available for free online, details all of Wave’s features – and some use cases – in 8 chapters. It’s a super-handy reference if you’re still stuck on how to get the most out of Wave. Recommended!

Tags: Google Wave, trending

Marketers rarely think about choosing customers... like a sailor on shore leave, we're not so picky. Huge mistake.

Your customers define what you make, how you make it, where you sell it, what you charge, who you hire and even how you fund your business. If your customer base changes over time but you fail to make changes in the rest of your organization, stress and failure will follow.

Sell to angry cheapskates and your business will reflect that. On the other hand, when you find great customers, they will eagerly co-create with you. They will engage and invent and spread the word.

It takes vision and guts to turn someone down and focus on a different segment, on people who might be more difficult to sell at first, but will lead you where you want to go over time.

Thoughts on Personal Branding

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing podcast with Dan Schawbel (Click to listen, right click and Save As to download – subscribe now via iTunes

Dan Schawbel has turned himself into the leading voice on personal branding for Gen-Y. Want to know how a guy, while at the time still in college, took on and seemingly won such an important marketing niche? (Think there aren’t lots of brands that want to own some 20 something mind share?) He did it with, duh, personal branding, and a ton of persistence and willingness to work his tail off. The guy gets what is to me the supreme compliment a marketer can receive – “I see him everywhere.” But, it’s not just being there, it’s being there on message, on brand, day in and day out. Anyone wanting to understand how to build a brand, personal or otherwise, could learn a thing of two from Dan.

For this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, Dan joins me to talk about Personal Branding and his very successful book – Me 2.0.

In this podcast we cover:

• What personal branding is
• Important elements for personal branding
• Ways to differentiate yourself
• Who needs Personal Branding
• If your business brand can be too personal?
• Social media and personal branding
• Steps to implement personal branding

I’ve expressed some of my own opinions about personal brand vs. business brand in the past, (business isn’t personal) and while I fall towards more of the business brand as a long term entrepreneurial play, there is no question that you can more easily achieve many of your personal and professional objectives by focusing on building a strong personal brand.

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David Allen on Getting It All Done

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing podcast with David Allen (Click to listen, right click and Save As to download – subscribe now via iTunes

Getting all the stuff you’ve got to manage done as a business owner, might be the greatest challenge of all. Then of course all the new social media stuff comes along and the job of managing it all just got tougher. It seems, to some at least, that monitoring, managing, engaging and following is a full time job.

I’ve always been a big fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD), but I think we may need his simple system for collecting, doing, delegating and deferring more than ever.

I spent a few minutes chatting with David for this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast and if you’re one of those feeling a little overwhelmed these days I suggest you start with by grabbing Getting Things Done and then work your way up to his latest – Making It All Work. You can get David’s products and books at his Davidco site

There are so many layers to David’s work that I have found people who have changed their lives by adhering to the “2 minutes or less” principle while others have developed a deep sense of vision for their business because they’ve cleared the clutter for the first time.

In this podcast we cover:

• Components of the GTD system
• Tools for GTD
• Using the GTD system in an organization
• De-cluttering to move forward
• About Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life
• How to get involved with GTD

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