After talking with one of my clients recently I was stumped. They want to include personal details about their team but it just didn’t seem to fit with the company’s brand or business model. I realized we might be missing a key ingredient: Why do those personal details matter?

Take me in relation to eLocomotive. I could tell you that I was a Honda certified mechanic before I went to college, that I love hiking, or that I have an extremely athletic mutt that still acts like a puppy at 8 years old. None of this seems relevant in the context of eLocomotive.

I do tell people things like:

• I’m an entrepreneur at heart and that spirit makes increases my understanding and interest in your business. Three of my mother’s siblings ran separate, successful businesses. So did my grandfather. When my wife’s parents were telling her to do well in school so she could get a good job and work there to retirement, my mother was telling me I’d never be happy or secure if I didn’t run my own business. I work with a lot of start ups and single owner businesses and this speaks to them.. They know I mean it when I say I love business and that I’m interested in theirs.
• A thirst for innovation drives me. My grandfather taught me a valuable lesson that’s always stuck with me. He told me that he was never the strongest or the fastest but he was always able to devise tools that made his jobs easier. That put him ahead of others on the job site and made him successful. That’s what technology is to me. I love building tools that make it easier to run your business.

It may not be relevant that I’ve played soccer since I was 4. It probably is relevant that when I was young my father’s company installed AS400s and I started working on computers when I was 8.

Telling a story in your website is much more compelling than stopping at buzzwords. If all you say is the facts of what you do you risk becoming a commodity among your customer’s websites. Find a way to bring the relevant personality to your marketing and your website.

Seems like a lot has happened since my last blog post. New deals, new clients, new pressures. Excuses. I know but I’m back. It doesn’t seem like that long ago but all this happened since my last post:

1. Microsoft and Yahoo! had an on again/off again acquisition talks and currently aren’t talking (but actually might be).
2. Bill Gates Retired from Microsoft. Yes it’s true. In all the fanfare around his retirement, I was reminded of a lot of reasons why I like Microsoft. I’ve always given them a lot of credit but they just seem so unpopular in the web industry these days. Well, Good Luck Mr. Gates and good luck Microsoft.
3. Fathers day passed. Happy Father’s day to my dad… and me. My kids still love peekaboo.
4. I thought of 40 things I should blog about but didn’t.
5. And my number 1 excuse for not bloging, too much work. We’ve signed 4 new deals since my last blog entry.

 I’m constantly on the lookout for tools to help my clients manage their brand in the increasingly decentralized world of information. It’s very hard to know what people are saying in blogs, forums, and services like Twitter but Get Satisfaction is working to change that.

Get Satisfaction now records all of the messages on Twitter that mention brands of supported companies. Did you just complain about your experience on eBay? Go here to see your message seeded as the start of a possible discussion thread.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/21/get-satisfactions-ear-on-the-twittersphere/

CrunchGear is reporting that Game Developers are reading forums and getting valuable insights from their market. It’s a good idea and every company should be doing this.

If you’ve heard me speak about web trends for business you already know this: there’s valuable information on the web waiting for you. My wife participates in several forums with mothers. One is so specific that it’s for mothers of children by birth month. They discuss diet, toys, car seats, solutions to all night crying, and anything else that comes up. If you provide products or services for children or infants, you should be there.

1. Look for good ideas. Many times their discussing problems with the status quo and there can be valuable market research for your company’s future.
2. Manage your own brand. Chances are, they’re talking about you. Positive or negative, you should know about it. If there’s a complaint, valid or not, it’s a great opportunity to show you care about your customers and a chance to turn negative PR into a positive situation.
3. Participate. Chances are good that your company has solid insight and information on your target market. There’s no harm in providing advice when you have it and it will build “street credit” in your market. Just be careful to avoid overt sales pitches. If that’s the only reason you comment, the situation may turn negative very quickly.

I go anywhere my customers congregate. If there’s a luncheon and I know 3 of my clients will be there, I attend. If my customers talk online, I’ll be there and you should too.

In a memo to Microsoft employees, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie suggests a vision we’ve been pushing for some time:

1. The Web is the Hub of our social mesh and our device mesh.

2. The Power of “Choice” as business moves to embrace the cloud.

3.Small Pieces Loosely Joined for developers, within the cloud and across a world of devices.

Read more at TechCrunch.

While many are debating the pros and cons of Google acquiring so many web properties, Box.net has decided to have some fun with it. They’ve created Googolopoly, a board game where players use shares of Google to purchase other web properties.

It’s nice to see them enjoying themselves.

Bloggers have relied on aggregators like Digg and Mixx to drive traffic to their sites but Yahoo! has a similar product in beta that could catapult the social media into the main stream. It’s called Yahoo! Buzz.

For a quick review: these aggregators allow users to post links to articles from around the web. If the articles get positive votes, they are elevated in ranks and can appear on the home page. This makes it easy for viewers to find them and helps viewers identify with articles are worth reading.

Sites like Digg and Mixx have been working hard to get a mainstream audience but have only made small inroads. What Yahoo! brings to the table is the audience. They already have an audience. By building these tools they will propel small blogs, forum posts, and unheard of websites to the forefront. This will make it possible for articles all over the web to get much more attention.

ReadWriteWeb gives us a few stats from the Yahoo! Buzz beta:

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been invited and have joined the TechDirt insight community. It’s an interesting approach to crowdsourcing. Members of the Insight Community are given cases (topics to write about) and each case has it’s own payment associated with it. In some instances, you are the exclusive author on a topic but on “challenge cases” your response competes with others. Once you contribute an article on a topic, you can participate in discussion with others responding on the topic.

The format is simple and straight forward. I wasn’t overly impressed by the technology but I’d say the experience was good. I can see a lot of benefit for companies using this as a resource. It’s a great way to get a few professional opinions on a topic. Although there hasn’t been a lot of discussion around my current case, the opportunity for professional discussion is tremendous.

I was recently asked to answers 3 about the economy and eLocomotive. You can see the questions and answers at Texas Startup Blog.

I created my first Google Gadget today. Nothing too complicated but it gives you access to your Zoho Creator applications through a gadget that can be used on a web page, your iGoogle start page , or your desktop via Google Desktop.

If you haven’t spent much time with Google Gadgets and Yahoo! Widgets, it’s time to start. These types of tools do 2 things for me, you, and your customers:

1. Granular Features: Instead of a full blown application, many of these gadgets are small applications that do something very specific. Instead of using 20% of the software, you’re likely to use 100% of the gadget.
2. Personal Delivery: One great benefit of gadgets/widgets is the ability to incorporate them easily with the tools you already use. You can build a start page with the tools you use (mine has my e-mail, remember the Milk tasks, my Grand Central voicemail, and my Zoho application). If I prefered, I could just as easily have each of these running on my desktop.

Companies need to start thinking about how they can deliver specific features in this manner. If Quickbooks could let me see my AP/AR information or my budget, I’d never have to open the full application. What would your customers like to see?