Nuts and Bolts of Brand

Family, Brands and the 4th of July

Chief Nut — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 15:01:29 +0000

I’m getting ready to go walk in the Fourth of July Parade in downtown Laconia, NH. For the past two years my whole family has participated. My boys, Connor and Cameron recently earned the rank of “Life Scout” (one away from getting “Eagle”) and my wife Julie was recently appointed to the role of District Training Coordinator. Indeed, it’s a family event … and so appropriate for a beautifully sunny Fourth.

Meet my other family …

Tomorrow, our lead designer, Katie Oddy, is getting married. This past week we had a surprise pot luck where everyone brought “something they used to make when they were single.” Scary concept … pretty awesome dishes. Understand that less than three years ago, I was by myself, working in my den, wearing fuzzy Homer Simpson slippers. We’ve had many bumps and grinds in the chaotic development of this team but, with 9 full-time employees and 6 subcontractors, it can now be safely classified as awesome! Sitting and looking across the room, my business coach pointed out to me how amazing this group is … I said, “I was just thinking the same thing.” Ten minutes later, Allen Voivod pointed out the same thing but used the word “family.” It truly is.

From Left to Right; Renee Capen - the ever camera shy Project Manager, Karina Giordano - designer, Katie Oddy - lead designer, Anne Ward - Assistant Bookkeeper, Kim Perkins - Bookkeeper, Debbie Carbone - Copy Writer, Dawn Swain - Office Manager, Rob Keplin - Web Programmer, Allen Voivod (with his son Declan) - Marketing/AhHa Guy, Joan Russo-Scannell - BizDev/Process Consultant, Lani Voivod - Word Smithe, Julie Skarritt - my wife/muse, Dan Kleiner - Web Programmer.
Not shown; Howard Fenter - Lead Programmer, Jim Horne - Business Coach

Let me tell you about another family. This picture was taken at the Iperia Fourth of July Party on Wednesday afternoon in Billerica, MA. A sudden squall came through and drove the party indoors, but it didn’t squelch the sense of camaraderie. My friend, David Jodoin, CEO of Iperia, had a similar sentiment about his team… how he’s gone through bumps and grinds in the recent past but he feels that the team energy is WAY up — where it should be. Exciting times.

OK, I’m rambling and breaking my “short blog post” rule, but here’s the point;

Read this post by Chris Brogan — especially the part about the “Loosely Joined Employee.” He describes how employees can become their own brand and that the company (a brand of its own) may only share the lime light with any one employee on a temporary basis.

To some business owners, too caught up in control, this might be seen like a bad thing. To me, it’s similar to watching your own children grow. Your family/business will be much healthier if you let the kids bloom and thrive.

To this end, I’ve asked each of my “kids” to start developing their own voice by connecting with the world via multiple social network systems … set roots, grow, connect, blossom. From this process of each employee building their own personal brand, I hope a truly great Acorn Creative brand will grow. Check out our Twitter Page to see what we’re all up to at any given time.

P.S. Katie, Here’s to you and Pat! Julie and I wish for you a lifetime of happiness. Thanks for being part of my family.

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WidgetWeb Expo Recap

Chief Nut — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:58:39 +0000

It happens. You spend time and money to go to a great event and then, when you return, the real world smacks you square in the middle of the forehead and you let your ‘follow up’ slide.

It’s been three days since I returned from the WidgetWeb Expo and I’m just now getting around to doing a post. How sad … considering how fabulous the event was! Here’s a recap of just some of the highlights;

Event launched by Ivan Pope, founder of the Expo and CEO of Snipperoo.
Keynote by Hooman Radfar, CEO of ClearSpring — Predicted that one possibility of the future of FaceBook is that their value will not be in the FB network itself, but they’ll become the largest (de facto) social graph aggregator. His advice is to “Think Big and Act Small”, meaning developers need to keep a big view of the widget life cycle, make widgets fast, think cross channel and have a data driven focus on the end user.
Ivan Pope further explained his thoughts about the development of a long-term Widget strategy… and how widgets are at the intersection of social networks and marketing.
Carnett Williams, with Sprout Builder, outlined what he terms “Web 3.0 - The era of Self Promotion”. One great tip from his presentation was you must constantly stoke the marketing/promotional fire… that virality is not a given.
Lawrence Coburn, Owner of SexyWidget and RateItAll, Talked in great depth about cross-domain functionality.
Chad Catacchio, Marketing Director of ZoomProspector gave an overview of “Standards for Widgets” and his ideas of cloud sourcing the process of creating widget development standards.
Michael Leis with Emerge Digital tells us “frequency is the thing.” Other themes were “the KISS principle” and “Brand as a Platform.”
Anthony Zito with MediaForge demonstrated some great examples of the right and wrong ways of widget implementation that lead to end-user engagement.
Fred Wilson, CEO of Union Square Ventures, kicked off the second day with his Keynote speech. Drawing the biggest laugh from the entire event, Fred described how he demarcates the Millennial generation as, “the generation where they had a computer before they had sex.” Too funny, and too true!
Chris Thorpe, formerly with MindCandy and currently off doing his own thing at Jaggeree, gave a fabulous presentation of the development side of the picture; including analytics/metrics, coding issues, programming language issues and scalability.
Josh Burnhoff, VP at Forrester and co-Author of Groundswell (yes, it’s on my “must read” list), presented a “Business case for Widgets” and tied many of the ideas from the book to the world of widgets. (That’s Josh pictured with me … clearly, I’m not a stalker or serial killer … inside joke)
Patrick Sexton with SEOish.com talked in detail about spreading widgets on a budget and a dozen other widget ideas surrounding search engine optimization.
Fraser Kelton with Adaptive Blue gave a great equilibrium model that balances “Value for the Publisher” with “Value for the Browser” and “Ease of Replication.” Without this balance, your widget is more likely to fail.
Jeff Nolan with News Gator talked about engagement drivers and how the value to the audience can be dramatically increased through the use of widgets.
Jodi McDermott (ClearSpring) and Albert Lai (Kontagent) gave a well balanced presentation on the issues of metrics and viral analytics.
Finally, Marcia Kadanoff, VP of Marketing at MuseStorm presented a “mistakes to avoid” list, emphasizing the importance of cross platform compatibility.

Because there were two channels, I was only able to attend half the sessions. I guess next year I’ll have to bring my alter ego.

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Update on the “AP vs. Bloggers” Fiasco

Chief Nut — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 12:00:40 +0000

Robert Cox, President of the Media Bloggers Association, rightfully flames Gawker blogger Ryan Tate. Although I found the post to be rather harsh, I can’t say I would have been less upset over the superficial research and hyperbolic statements made by Tate in his post. The reality is someone needs to work with the Associated Press to get this resolved and to get their collective heads screwed on straight. I, for one, am appreciative of the MBAs efforts to make the future world of blogging less fraught with legal entanglements. No, they’re not just self-appointed guardians of the blogosphere.

Why should this matter to you? If you’re going to integrate blogging into your corporate marketing plan (and you should consider doing so), you’ll need to be aware of the various copyright and legal pitfalls facing you. Until this situation gets resolved, the issue of copyright infringement is muddy, at best. Stay tuned.

6/20/08 Update: Outspoken Tech Crunch voice, Michael Arrington, files a counter-take-down-notice after APs Business Writer, Seth Sutel, snags 22 words from his blog without permission … dramatically underscoring the APs ridiculous position of filing suit against bloggers who take snippets of copy from their stories.

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I Love New York?

Chief Nut — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 22:56:03 +0000

I’m sitting in an outdoor terrace of a quaint little Turkish restaurant in Brooklyn, NY. While anxiously waiting for the of start tomorrow’s WidgetWeb Expo I’m relegated to connecting with the ‘outside world’ via my iPhone. What strikes me most, in the moment, is how NYC is really an amazing slice of the ‘real’ world … so rich in cultural diversity. What a shame it would have been to take a seat inside the restaurant and miss out on the people watching. This, in a way is like social media. If we sit alone, immersed in our own little lives, never looking outward, we’ll miss out on connecting with an entire world, even if it’s just connecting by observation.

Forgive me if I seem melancholic … I’m missing my boys on this Father’s Day.

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Wanted: Associated Press Needs Clue

Chief Nut — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 15:57:21 +0000

It’s hard to blame a news organization formed in 1846 for being a little out of touch with what’s going on with social communication. BUT, when Irene Keselman, AP’s Intellectual Property Governance Coordinator, sent a “Digital Media Copyright Act” take down notice to the Drudge Retort on Wednesday, it should have been predictable what the blogoshpere’s reaction would be. Swift, severe and negative.

AP claimed that the Drudge Retort violated the definition of fair use because “…taking the headline and lead of a story without a proper license to be an infringement of its copyrights, and additionally constitutes ‘hot news’ misappropriation.”

That may be technically true, but consider;

Only small snippets of text were used — between 33 and 79 words. Not the entire article by a long stretch
Five of the six supposed violations used a different headline than the original article
The articles contained links back to the original AP article

If THIS is a violation of fair use, then I think the entire blogosphere is guilty of infringement and should be severely punished … OR, we should change the definition.

Here’s a GREAT post by TechDirt on the whole sordid affair:

AP Goes After Bloggers For Posting Article Headlines And Snippets
from the you’re-going-to-lose,-badly dept
Last fall, the Associated Press claimed that it was ready to change to face the new internet world — and that meant not just being a gatekeeper, but joining in the conversation. As we noted at the time, though, AP execs said all that, only to immediately follow that up with plans that looked like it was trying to become a new type of gatekeeper. [Read full article …]

Important: Note that I used their full headline, full sub-headline and the first couple of sentences. My bet is TechDirt will NOT be sending me a DMCA take down notice because of my skirting of “fair use” of their content. In fact, I bet they actually appreciate that I’ve given them three inbound links to their article.

I would personally leave it up to the legal beagles to hash out the exact definition of “fair use”. HOWEVER, if the AP is going to survive in a global communication environment, they need to know when they’re biting the hand that feeds them. (And, I’m NOT talking about their pitch to sell content licenses to bloggers.)

What do YOU think? Is AP within their rights? Is this move intelligent?

Follow up to AP: If you’re listening, your “clue” can be found in the new book Groundswell, by Charlene Li and Josh Burnoff

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