Minnov8

Showcasing Minnesota Technology Innovation

Archives for April 2009

Wired for 2020: Mentoring Our Youth

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wiredIn a world that is shifting from serial and linear processes (which can be easily outsourced) to one rapidly moving toward higher value being created by those people who can deal with the flood of information and ideas coming at us in parallel by making new associations, any of us who care about our kids and the next generation of workers and leaders intuitively understands the value of mentoring. This past weekend’s Wired for 2020 event was solely dedicated to mentoring and I was delighted to have had a small involvement in this worthwhile venture.

Wired for 2020 is the Mentoring Partnership of Minnesota’s year long engagement campaign to get more mentors involved with youth in the state of Minnesota. Their mission is to interest caring adults in becoming mentors to youth. Caring adults who are willing to help young people spark their future career interests and expand their possibilities.

Sponsors included names such as General Electric, Best Buy, Target, Federated Insurance, MN Dept of Education, Minnesota Interactive Media Association, Qwest, Science Museum of Minnesota, 3M, Thomson Reuters and many more.

With a daughter in college and a son in high school, you bet I care deeply about the future of education and work, the world they’ll inherit from us, and the value we can add to kids if we can help them locate their own, personal spark within and help them to see possibilites and opportunities that match their dreams.

In a world where high paying, yet low value jobs can be done elsewhere at a fraction of the cost of labor onshore, the challenge is in coaching our youth on how they can each strive and focus on higher value work and that they can, in fact, invent the future. It won’t be easy as global competition continues to grow. …  [Read More…]

Panel to Discuss the ROI of Digital Marketing

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A special event for senior executives and marketing professionals has been announced by long-standing Minneapolis web marketing firm Ciceron.  Entitled Radical ROI: Seizing the Potential of the Digital Marketplace, the half-day panel will be held Monday, May 11, 2009, from 8:00 to 11:00 am at the Midland Hills Country Club in St. Paul.  radicalroiforum

The event offers attendees a chance to hear how a panel of local business leaders have transformed their organizations to thrive in the digital marketplace — and I am privileged to be one of those panelists:

• Paul Douglas: CEO, Weather Nation (and former chief meteorologist, WCCO TV)

• Jan McDaniel: CEO, JTM Vision (and former CEO, American Red Cross Twin Cities)

• Phil Hotchkiss: Founder, BigCharts.com

• Joel Kramer: Founder, MinnPost.com (and former Publisher, Minneapolis Star-Tribune)
[Note: Minnov8 syndicates some of its content to MinnPost.]

• Graeme Thickins: Founder, GT&A Strategic Marketing

• Andrew Eklund: CEO, Ciceron Digital Marketing

A special reduced rate of $195 per person is available till May 3 at this registration page, with a group rate of only $395 for up to five people from the same organization.

Ciceron is a web marketing and consulting agency based in Minneapolis. It offers full-service solutions from professional search engine optimization and email marketing programs to in-depth metrics and performance tracking. Its clients have included such major brands as Home Depot, Nascar, USBank, Andersen Windows, Best Buy, Target, and Pepsi. For more about Cicero, check out their about page, their full client list, and here are their management bios.

I hope to see you at “Radical ROI: Seizing the Potential of the Digital Marketplace” on May 11.  Again, use this registration page before May 3 to get those preferential rates.

Control Over Your TV: A Comcast Executive Conversation

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Our post, “Internet Providers Want Control Over Your TV” sparked concern within the ranks of regional Comcast leadership, especially when this cross-posting of that article on MinnPost appeared. It caused them to take action to correct what they viewed as factual errors within the article.

While those (arguably) factual errors are corrected in the comments below the original post here and discussed within this article, Comcast’s “internet control” problem remains and I gained an unintended clarity about it from a conversation with a Comcast executive.

On Friday April 10th, I talked for an hour with David Diers, VP of Advanced Services for Comcast Twin Cities (he’s been involved in rollouts, for example, of Comcast’s Digital Voice, the 50/5 DOCSIS 3 service which I have at my office, and is now involved in accelerating the deployment of Comcast’s business services). Should mention that the setting up of this call was done by Tim Elliott (Disclosure: Tim is one of the Minnov8 team and involved with social media marketing for a firm engaged with Comcast and a friend of mine) so I went into this call with an open mind.

After letting the call sink in I realized that Mr. Diers regurgitation of the company positions and line were so well scrubbed (e.g., the comment here is mostly a cut-n-paste from Comcast press releases and FAQ’s) that the essence of the post in question was deflected and the overall issue remains: Comcast is attempting to control their internet pipe into your home or business and protect their cableTV franchise to your detriment, and arguably in a way that is already stifling innovation.

…  [Read More…]

Minnov8 Gang Podcast – Episode 33

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The Gang had a rare treat today to attend a session at a Fortune 500 company and hear Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research specializing in the social media space, provide an overview of Groundswell and also to speak about The Future of Social Media, an upcoming report from Forrester.

Jeremiah was gracious enough to carve out nearly half an hour to talk with us about some aspects of social media and networking he’d not explicitly covered in his talk, and also to allow us to drill-down on some areas of particular interest to us and to our listeners. This is a guy who not only analyzes the space, but if you follow his blog or him on Twitter, you’ll know that he is deeply involved as a social participant in ways that clearly provide him with a depth of knowledge about his subject that other analysts undoubtedly covet.

Hosts: Graeme Thickins, Phil Wilson, Don Smith and Steve Borsch (Tim Elliott was unable to attend).

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The Podcast

Podcast: Download (Duration: 21:07 — 12.3MB)

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MinneWebCon

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Yesterday’s MinneWebCon was a surprisingly packed event at my rough estimate of 400-450 people. The event was a full-day, three-track, continuing education conference for web professionals with the express intent of providing a venue to deliver “…technical and creative information from industry practitioners and educators directly to University of Minnesota staff, students, and web professionals from ad and design agencies, corporations, non-profit organizations, and other higher education institutions.“

The event was led off with a keynote by a key technology thought leader, Doc Searls, who famously was one of the authors of the seminal work, “The Cluetrain Manifesto“, required reading for anyone interested in the essence of conversational marketing, social media, and the shifts that were just beginning to occur when this thing called the Web was fairly new and the object of unrealistic expectations by too many chasing “eyeballs” instead of people.

At a high level, Doc discussed the progression from Cluetrain to today, telling stories which highlighted what many of us know as obvious truths when it comes to being a web participant. He spent time on a very interesting initiative, Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) as a much needed, power balance between we “customers” (managed within CRM or Customer Relationship Management software) and the vendors who’d like to sell us their stuff.

Sessions on tools, design, technologies, social media and much more were delivered to an audience of people who primarily make their living creating and building Web sites, assets and applications.

The second keynote, Web Culture & Privacy, was by security expert Bruce Schneier. With such quotable gems as, “Security does not equal privacy. Ephemeral is dead” and “Eventually we will have a president who sends LOLcats to other world leaders,” he really brought significantly more awareness to the audience about privacy and was clear that the only way to ensure privacy “…is to legislate it,” making the point that we need to become aware, pressure lawmakers, and drive legislation that makes it possible to retain privacy in an age where digital bits of ourselves are everywhere.

Hats off to Kris Layon and the team at the University of Minnesota for pulling off such a successful event and for opening it up to outside-the-university attendees.

Can Social Media ‘Save The Strib’?

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Save The Strib logoA group of Star-Tribune employees have launched a new campaign aimed at engaging the community to come up with new ways to save the bankrupt newspaper. What I find most innovative with the ‘Save The Strib’ effort is the use of social media to spread the word via their blog, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. This is exactly what the Strib needs to embrace in order to survive.

Last month I posted a 5-point plan to revitalize the Strib on my personal blog. Running through my logic was a focus on embracing electronic distribution and reducing the costs of publishing on paper. But I didn’t address what I now think is the central issue that Star-Tribune management will have get right to assure the viability of the paper:

Improve Local Content.

The Strib can transform themselves into the digital age, embrace blog software and social networking but it will all be a wasted effort unless they are delivering the best quality content relevant to the communities they serve. This means hyper-local coverage, more investigative reporting and local perspectives on regional and national issues. What we have seen happen in many newspapers across the county is the downsizing of the newsroom and increased use of wire stories. This is a death spiral in the age of Google News which does the sorting of these same wire stories in real time and for free. But setting up a local blog network that aggregates into a regional news portal that feeds both electronic and print editions just might be the answer here.

The journalists and the Minnesota Newspaper Guild who have started the ‘Save The Strib’ campaign have a huge challenge ahead but their proactive use of social media just might make a difference. This approach has a good chance of engaging and motivating the community to generate ideas that will save the paper. The following video features readers more than well known citizens which is very encouraging. And those readers almost universally talk about content.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BP3_y15ti8g

Cost cutting will only be a part of the solution to the Star-Tribune’s troubles. Improving local content and embracing digital distribution will prove to be the deciding factors.

Internet Providers Want Control Over Your TV

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broadbandEver watch video or TV shows over the Web? How would you feel if this became one of your preferred methods for doing so and your cable or internet provider said, “No…that’s not allowed?”

Even the most naive and casual observer can see that the threat from services like Hulu; both Apple’s TV and movie offerings within iTunes; Joost; and the accelerating number of media center software offerings (providing access to ANY video on the internet), pose a huge threat to the cable TV companies and other broadband providers increasingly positioning themselves to deliver multimedia services.

With recent strategic moves it’s clear they are trying to get out ahead of the user market (and the maturity of video provider business models as well as the open source media center software) and put caps on broadband use in place before wider adoption occurs and alternative providers gain a foothold in your home.

As a tail-end baby boomer with enough of a geek nature to be involved far too deeply in the ‘net, web and social media in my business, I realize I’m atypical within my demographic on how I, and as a result my family, use our Comcast broadband connection. With Comcast’s 50mbps down/10mbps up DOCSIS 3 setup in my office (Note: we were one of two companies in their Minnesota rollout of this new technology) and 16mbps down/2mbps up at home, I’m dealing daily in video, photos, moving around large Zip files, screensharing, personal publishing, and numerous other online activities. These activities are mission critical to our small business, my wife’s and my client interactions, as well as family activities and connecting with others.

Comcast, one of the largest providers in this space, directly affects all aspects of our digital lives. With my family and my current, and increasing, use of the internet for an ever expanding array of online activities (Skype calling; my son’s video gaming; Flickr and Vimeo for photo/video sharing; online backup of our computers; use of our new Mac mini media center), we are certain to end up violating Comcast’s draconian 250GB bandwidth caps (er, I mean, Network Management Policy).  …  [Read More…]

Minnov8 Gang Podcast – Episode 32

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disruptionThis week’s show is a discussion primarily about the future of newspapers…and the Minneapolis StarTribune in specific.

B: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott and Phil Wilson (Graeme Thickins is off celebrating his birthday today).

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The Podcast

Podcast: Download (Duration: 39:10 — 22.7MB)

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“Discussed During the Show” Notes:

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