Evolving Web

Losing Yourself in Awesome

You can lose yourself in awesome. Awesome itself is overload ... boredom is seldom awesome.

For the last 10 years, I've been traveling the world, working with all kinds of companies, eating great food, staying in (sometimes) posh hotels, speaking at conferences and it's been awesome.  But it has also been all consuming.

Two years ago, Toni and I decided to be more picky about clients - work to ensure success, find companies that are willing to do the hard work of building a culture - not ones that simply want to by a box of Agile or someone else's canned Lean journey. By and large, that's worked pretty well. ... Which is awesome.

But I remembered this morning that I had this blog, called Evolving Web, which at one point was one of the most highly read blogs on the internet. I wrote this blog because I was a writer. Blogging led to books. Books and blogging led to travel and new work.  And ... strangely to be alienated from writing.

So, what did I write in Evolving Web? 

Whatever I wanted.  

Read back through the archives and you'll find explorations of collaboration, governance, design, food, relationships, movies, art, music, and so forth.  I simply can't do those things on the Modus Cooperandi or Personal Kanban blogs.  Because of that, I've kind of lost who I am.  I find I read less, I'm doing less extra-curricular things, because my writing outlets have been over-focused. 

That originally meant that I wasn't writing about the things I saw while traveling. However, recent trips have made me question how a lack of a blog and the preponderance of Facebook means that all my observations are fleeting and succinct.  "This is a pretty flower" "It's snowing" or "Look at my hair cut."  That means I, too, am falling prey to becoming less observant, less present, less the person I consider myself or want to be. 

Strangely enough, social media has made it easier to ignore the world by being inundated by the world. We are becoming desensitized to everything good and react to everything bad.  We are less thoughtful, I am less thoughtful. 

This morning, my Adron Hall, whom I rarely see because I travel too much, posted this post on Medium. In it he is talking about Medium, where I have my Agile Heretic project, but he's really talking about communication, being a writer, and about being Adron - a human being. (And even if he didn't write that, it's what I read into it.) 

When I was running Gray Hill and at the start of Modus, I blogged every morning.  No matter where I was, I would wake up and blog.  Because of that, I was always both present in what I was doing (learning) and present in what was happening around me (not .. on .. line). I want to get back into that, and this is the place for it. 

So I welcome you back to the resurgence of Evolving Web ... and maybe a more whole Jim Benson. 

Social Media, Lean and the CIA

At the end of March, I spoke at Social Media Breakfast, Seattle (See their recap) at the Waggener Edstrom offices in Bellevue. They were live streaming the talk, but had some technical problems – so the video is in two parts. If you want to see what the audience saw on the screen, there’s also the Prezi I spoke from here.

This talk is covering the challenges that organizations have with collaboration, both internal and external. Social Media and Lean need to be applied together to provide both a set of principles and a collaborative foundation. I also talk about being a punk rocker.  So, if you want to know how punk rock, twitter and the CIA all mean the same thing … take a look!

Part 1 Part 2

Three Podcasts for Personal Kanban

Over the last few months, I've had the good fortune to be a featured guest on three different podcasts discussing Personal Kanban. In the Yi-Tan calls, we discussed Personal Kanban and Personal Kanban for teams. In the Social Media Breakfast Seattle Podcast, we explored the relationships between Lean thinking and social media. Of course, Personal Kanban comes up there as well.

Yi-Tan Call #261 - Personal Kanban With Jerry Michalski's group, I discuss Personal Kanban, how it started, and how it works.

Yi-Tan Call #268 - Personal Kanban for Teams Again with Jerry's virtual roundtable, I discuss how Personal Kanban and other kanban applications work for teams, groups, and organizations.

For Social Media Breakfast Seattle Lean Management and the CIA Heidi Miller interviews me about lean management, social media, Personal Kanban, and what's happening in the Intelligence Community.

Later this month I'll be featured on the Business 901 podcast, talking even more about Personal Kanban, but this time interviewed by Joe Dager, who focuses on marketing and lean principles.

10 Recommendations for a Better Restaurant Web Site

Over the last two years, I’ve taken a rather keen interest in restaurant management and operations. Restaurants have incredibly thin margins, restaurant owners are generally overworked and, while they may get praised, they also take way more than their share of abuse from customers.

By and large, restaurant web sites are atrocious and restaurateurs have nary a clue how to make their web sites better. Often they punt and hire hacks who have “done restaurant web sites” and buy their way into quick contracts using the cache of previous clients.

But the sites are crap. They are either completely ugly or they have tons of unnecessary music and animation.  A large number are information poor.  A large number are outdated.

How many times have you clicked on a menu and found it to be from the previous summer or older?

So here are 10 quick recommendations to build a better restaurant web site based on mistakes I’ve seen restaurateurs make over and over again:

1. OWN YOUR OWN DOMAIN

If you are just starting, go to godaddy.com and buy your domain name. If you have hired someone to build your site, CHECK NOW. If they own your domain name, ask them to transfer ownership to you. Why is this #1? Because I’ve seen it happen that often. Your domain is your business – you never want anyone else to control it.

2. DON’T GIVE UP CONTROL

No one should ever control your web site but you.  You can outsource the work, but make sure you know where it is hosted.  Make sure you are paying directly for the hosting and giving access to your contractor.  Do not let the contractor control the hosting contract.  If the contract bails on you and you don’t have access to your site – you lose all that work.

3.NO FLASH

Flash animations are pretty, and pictures of yummy food blending into other yummy food is hot.  But Google doesn’t give a rip about your hot blending images. Google wants content. No content, no good indexing on Google.  Further, your customers want to eat food, not to watch animated food on their laptops. They don’t want to click ‘skip intro’ and they don’t want to wait. Customers want to eat your food.

4. NO PDFs

PDFs are used by many restaurant web sites because they can make the PDF directly from the menu. The layout is consistent, the logos are the same. It’s beautiful.  Except that PDFs also make sites less visible by Google.  PDFs also need to be uploaded – which is a pain.  This means that PDF menus are less likely to get updates.  In turn, this means that information is more likely to go stale. And nothing stale is attractive in a restaurant.

5. NO MUSIC!!!

Look, just no music, okay?

6. USE WORDPRESS.COM

$10 a year buys you a web site hosted by wordpress.com. You provide your domain name (e.g. BakersEscargotHaus.com) and Wordpress gives you easy steps to make a site.  The site will be built on a blog platform. Don’t be scared by the word blog – the only thing you need to know is that your site is now really easy to update. If you want, you can hire any number of people to set the site up – but when it’s done, you can update it, you can edit it, and you control it.

7. YES PICTURES AND CURRENT MENU

Why do you have a restaurant?! TO SERVE FOOD!!!! Let people know what you have. Get pictures (lots of them) up there showing the food, showing people eating the food, showing how much everyone loves the food … AND … always have ALL your current menus on the site – INCLUDING DAILY SPECIALS. The daily special should bring people in – not merely be a surprise for those lucky enough to pop by.

8. REWARD GROUPS AND REGULARS

Start a program for customer rewards that you (again) control. There are lots of people out there who want to take your money to set up a rewards program. Make sure the site details how you love your regulars and how you reward groups.  Not just “groups of 10 or more call for special discounts,” but make a hot dinner for 10 people and make it known that if you come with 10 – it will be awesome.  Out of all the restaurants I’ve been to world wide – it seems only high end Chinese restaurants get this right.

9. BLOG OR BE BLOGGED

This is the toughest one. I think every restaurant should have a blog because every restaurant has formed for a reason.  And those reasons, and the restaurateurs, are individualistic and fascinating.  Blogging doesn’t have to be hard. I could go on about this for hours, so I’ll leave it with this:  Blogging is the best way I know to make Google and other search engines love your site.  Why?  Because I provides constantly updated, new and unique content. Search engines love that.

10. UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE

This may seem like I’m perseverating, here, but web sites must be routinely updated for both customers and search engines to stay interested.  Your web site is now your maître’d.  That site isn’t a brochure, it’s your entry hall.  If it isn’t updated, it is shabby.

So these 10 recommendations for a better restaurant web site should be helpful, if only judging by most of the sites I’ve seen.  I fully understand that most restaurateurs are not web site designers and many wish the whole thing would go away.  But it isn’t, and with a 3% margin – you can’t afford to let any customers get away.

Blogged at the Metropolitan Hotel in Vancouver, BC

Technorati Tags: restaurants,restaurateurs,web site design,social media,flash,pdf,horrific mistakes

Voting With Our Feet – The Ethics of Sponsored Conversations

Today, Jeremiah Owyang posted “A running list of sponsored conversations”.  He has a laundry list of sites and products that engage in various forms of advertising and paid content. 

The article and its comments bring up the ethics of paying for supposed user-generated content.  With user-generated content, the assumption is that objectivity comes from personal experience unhindered by conflicts of interest.  If someone pays for a post, there is an immediate and obvious conflict of interest.  As a reader, you start to lose trust in the blogger and her content.

This ethical question isn't a new one, to blogging or any other form of communication.  All writers and all media have found themselves dealing with this.

Pick up any magazine and there's a good chance you'll find an article that turns out to be an advertisement about half way through.  Other publications run press releases, slightly edited, as stories.

Watch the morning “news” and you’ll find your NBC news staff telling you about new NBC programming.

I agree, Jeremiah, this is growing - it is an obvious win for both marketers and bloggers.  The bloggers are the ones who have the questions to ask of themselves.  How far along the shill-line are you willing to walk?

This is a personal question. 

As readers ... do we wish to read these? If not, we'll vote with our links and our attention.

Update: Read Write Web has an excellent response to all this.

Marshall says:

We respectfully disagree with Forrester's recommendations on this topic. In fact, we think that paying bloggers to write about your company is a dangerous and unsavory path for new media and advertisers to go down. We recognize that it's a complicated question, but we don't feel convinced by Forrester's conclusions regarding those complications.

Defenders of the tactic argue that it doesn't differ substantially from traditional advertising, that it's effective for advertisers, that bloggers want to profit from their writing and that with proper disclosure there's no loss of credibility for either party.

Technorati Tags: Jeremiah Owyang,conflicts of interest,blogging,shilling,shills,spam,splogs

Blogged at Modus Cooperandi, in Seattle

Mumbai, The BBC, and Why Immediacy Isn’t All That

The Mumbai Terrorist event has clearly shown us that we have moved to a culture of immediate news consumption.  We thought we were there with CNN, but Twitter and other tools have shown that the immediacy was no longer in the viewing – it’s now in the data collection.

All major news services were monitoring Twitter during Mumbai.  They were taking advantage of a new information source, just like the rest of us.  Some of this worked well, some did not.

And now we have the retrospective.  How did that work? 

Steve Herrmann at the BBC has a post discussing the soul-searching The BBC is now doing after Mumbai. 

Immediacy Has a Price

The software development adage:

“You can have your software fast, good, or cheap – pick two.”

fits well here.  Replace “software” with “news” and we’re rolling.  (at least for the moment).  For years we’ve have good and cheap.  Face it, we’ve always received our news for pennies since the advent of the printing press.

Immediacy has a price – and it isn’t the “cheap” option.  We have fast and cheap now. 

With Mumbai we have an excellent example of a dispersed, confused, stressful situation.  People of good faith were tweeting and re-tweeting objects of news based on their faith in the network.  Most of this information was good, some of it was garbage.

People were looking for answers. Sensational garbage can easily rise to the top because it’s often confirming our worst fears or bolstering our deepest hopes.

Acquisition Isn’t the Only Transaction Cost

News as a product runs on information.  It is true that immediate communication gives news organizations faster and cheaper information.  However, while the cost of acquisition is certainly a major component to news – verification is the other.

Reputation engines may well serve the verification need in the future.  A source can be deemed “credible” based on their reputation scores.  But this certainly isn’t infallible. 

If I have a very high score and am walking down a street in Phuket and suddenly a huge crowd runs down the street screaming “Tsunami!”  I’m going to run and likely tweet “I am in Phuket and running from a Tsunami!”

My source was a crowd of people with no discernable credibility rating other than their panic. 

In an uncertain time, you get uncertain information.

BBC is Introspective

The BBC is doing well to both be introspective after Mumbai and to be relatively transparent in doing so. 

Steve says:

Is it confusing to have reports from our own correspondents, along with official statements, pictures, video, accounts from other media, bloggers, emails and Twitter, all together on the same page? It's true that normally we separate them out - news stories in one place, correspondents' reports in another, Have Your Say comments and links to blogs somewhere else.

But on a major unfolding story there is a case also for simply monitoring, selecting and passing on the information we are getting as quickly as we can, on the basis that many people will want to know what we know and what we are still finding out, as soon as we can tell them.

Steve is acknowledging the transition of the mainstream media from a news source to a news aggregator and analyzer.  Some of the news comes from their highly trusted generators (reporters and informants), but others is now going to come from bloggers and tweeters and the like.  It would be self-defeating not to include these new sources.

We must also note that this is both new and frightening to an organization like the BBC.  They must simultaneously understand how to present this information effectively and deal with the major impact this has on their corporate culture.

This is not SOP.

BBC is Outward Looking

I’d also like to give quick props to Steve Herrmann and the BBC for having many links in his post that are pointed outside the BBC domain.  One of my news site pet peeves is that they have ample inward pointing links.

This small fact lets me know that Mumbai’s lessons for global reporting will have an impact.

Technorati Tags: BBC,Mumbai,Steve Herrmann,Twitter,mainstream media,journalism,microblogging,microsharing

((Cross posted from the Touchbase Blog))

Why I Plurk, Again

I’ve discussed this before, but there are inherently different social interactions that happen in different social media tools.  These are facilitated by the differences in the user interface.

Yesterday, Brian Kerr posted this little thing on Plurk (source).  Plurk’s UI allows you to post pictures that are actually visible.

What came next?  A nice little discussion that took 24 hours to mature.  The threading and alerts in Plurk made that possible.  With Twitter, the value-add of the conversation would have been lost.  Twitter is such a temporal tool, without conventions like @ or # tags, threading is impossible.

Here is the Plurk discussion:

Context is often driven by the circumstances in which the context itself is generated.  Your User Interface, like Twitter’s, may have marvelous impacts on how certain types of communication are conducted – but they do not help with all kinds of communication.

There is no Tower of Babel User Interface.

In this thread, the context starts with a pesky cat looped cartoon and ends with a discussion of non-attachment. What @mitten dubs the “kitteh paradox” after Brian defines the core issue – happiness is transitory if you are attached to a certain definition of happiness (cereal or sitting on the table). 

This contextual evolution is primarily due to the Plurk UI which allows this thread to maintain itself over the course of hours or days.  I still use Twitter every day, but I also use Plurk – simply because these fundamental UI differences yield fundamentally different types of conversations.

Technorati Tags: twitter,plurk,brian kerr,laura fisher,non-attachment,user interface,user experience,social media

Better is not More 2 – Pick Your Networks Carefully

We are abusing the new substance of ubiquitous conversation.  Social media’s gifts are to help people communicate, filter, and organize.  In other words, they are meant to help reduce and calm the information flowing towards us.  It is to make things manageable. 

But we get too much of a good thing and everyone asks “How do you get work done with Twitter on?”  Some efficiency consultants recommend prohibiting the use of Facebook or Twitter in the office.  We can’t have simple conversations over coffee without interruptions from text, phone twitter, etc.

A few weeks ago, I posted my Ten Tab Rule for calming social media.  This was a personal guide to decrease the load of information.  Your ten would be different I’m sure.

In business, more exposure is good, more distraction is not.  Carefully picking and choosing networks to join and participate in is vital to your success.

The funny thing about networks is, after a while they become intertwined.  What does this mean to you?  It means if you are a regular blogger with a strong Twitter community and are familiar with many on, say, Urban Spoon – those networks will permeate other networks.

What?

Well, let’s say that your Twitter community includes 300 people.  Maybe 12 of those people are active on Twine, 15 on delicious, 25 on Yelp, 40 on Digg, etc.  Some of your messages on Twitter will resonate with those people and they will pass the word to other networks as appropriate.

This is your true reach.

So, what I’m positing here is: maybe it’s better to be a strong member of a few networks than a weak member of a lot of networks. Don’t kill yourself joining and participating in everything.  Always keep an eye on what’s new, but nurture your key networks.  Grow them and let them provide.

Technorati Tags: social media,facebook,twitter,ten tab rule,networking,social networking,information overload

A Thanksgiving Post About Food

A week or so ago I taught an informal cooking class for a small group hosted by @imjay and @afuller.  People have told me that they appreciate my posts about food and cooking – on Facebook, Twitter or this blog. 

So, for Thanksgiving, I thought I’d give you a few sources of information that can get you into cooking as well.

Elements of Cooking

Michael Ruhlman’s Elements of Cooking Site is awesome for the basics of cooking (like cookware to select) and finer cooking (like preparing bone marrow).

Epicurious

Epicurious.com is an awesome site for recipes, ideas, tips, shopping … anything you need for food.  There are many sites on the web with recipes, epicurious has recipes that have surprised and inspired me.

L2O

L2O is an awesome, beautiful blog.  In writing, photography, and execution – it is flawless. Done by Chicagoland’s L2O restaurant (my first stop on my next trip).  The blog is gorgeous and gives you a great appreciation of the beauty and versatility of ingredients.  

Chefs Catalog.com

When I need something new I will (I admit it) hit froogle or some other comparison site, but by and large I seem to end up at Chefs Catalog. They have basically everything.  I’ve bought pots, pans, utensils, gadgets and ingredients from them.

The quality of the materials you use from cooktop, to cookware, to ingredients all make a difference.  Chefs Catalog will fix you up.

The Kitchen Designer

Okay, so this is big time kitchenporn.  The Kitchen Designer blog basically gives you endless appliance envy.  But it’s excellent for keeping tabs on what’s out there for those big things that make a difference.  Like your cooktop, your oven and your grill. 

So that’s it.  Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. 

Technorati Tags: epicurious,l20,chefs catalog,kitchen designer,michael ruhlman,cooking,foodie,food

Stupid is as stupid shops

I have been having a love-fest the last few days. We’ve been going around talking to companies around Puget Sound.  The topic: how they are changing their management styles as we move into a clear and looming recession.

Many companies are doing very interesting and refreshing things to deepen the relationships they have with their customers.  Some of this means social media, but some of it also means better customer service and generally being more involved with the community.

In other words, as we’ve been getting closer to economic collapse – people seem to be getting more humane.

And that’s pretty awesome.  We’ll be blogging about our findings soon enough, but today I got an amusing bit in my RSS reader.  Wal*Mart didn’t seem to learn from last year’s negative press and is, again, sending out cease and desist orders for sites that are broadcasting their Black Friday sales before Wal*Mart’s official publication date.

Says TechDirt:

…l-Mart's high-priced law firm has sent a takedown notice to the site SearchAllDeals.com, which is a search engine/aggregator of various deals sites. The site doesn't host any content itself, but that didn't stop Wal-Mart from sending a false DMCA takedown claim to the site (and, of course, a false DMCA takedown is illegal). So, we have Wal-Mart, whose employees think deal sites are helpful, getting its lawyers to send out bogus takedown notices over content that isn't copyrighted, and then sending them to search engines that don't even host the content in question.

This may be interesting to watch. Local business may well have a resurgence in the next few years simply due to a few key factors:

1. You have to drive farther to Big Box stores (cf. the demise of Circuit City)

2. Big box stores tend to have large and impersonal rewards programs, vs personal service

3. Big box stores tend to use social media as exploitation tools as opposed to communication tools

4. People are plain weary of the big box aesthetic (size, parking, impersonal service, etc.).  [Apparently the big boxers get this.]

Will authenticity win out in the long run?  Let’s watch.

Technorati Tags: Wal*mart,walmart,techdirt,inside the aisle,big box,social media