Author: Christopher Carfi

Transactions do not have a time dimension. They are atomic and exist by themselves.  Transactions exist in isolation.

On the other hand, relationships do have a time dimension.

For example, the ease with which we can find others online (e.g. friends from high school or college) now means that it’s easier for long-running relationships to be created.  (This is extremely top-of-mind, as just this week I’ve been fortunate enough to reconnect with two old buddies, one from high school and one from college, both of whom I haven’t spent any notable amount of time with in over 20 years.)

Up until recently, I wonder if it was much more difficult to create long-running relationships.  It seems to me that, historically, most "relationships" were with one’s contemporaries (literally: "with time").  We’d have connections with those who were in the same time and place that we were.  It now seems easier to connect the transactions into a flow than it was even a couple of years ago.

I wonder if the business focus on the "transaction" is an artifact of the historical difficulty of representing information that has a time dimension?  Or, perhaps, as we moved into the database age, the relative difficulty of representing change-over-time versus simply representing a transactional row lead to this focus on the transaction in isolation, as opposed to tracking the big picture of the evolution of a relationship over years?

It’s the difference between this and this.  Which one really communicates more information?

Edited to add: I think this transactional mindset affects both customers and vendors, and is one of the things that I hope we can address with VRM.

photo: pizzodisevo

This post is one of a series of recommendations arrived at by
going through the entire list of South by Southwest panels that are up
for consideration for 2009.

Important: Would love your support for "FlashMarkets: From the Roman Agora to the Mobile Web." Click here to vote or learn more.

SXSW 2009 Panel Recs: Marketing

Fire Your PR Firm: Brand it Yourself
Francine Hardaway, Stealthmode Partners
"Social Media Club interim board members will give advice and
anecdotes about how PR and branding have changed because of social
media and how, as an entrepreneur, you sre empowered. You can now
market your own product or company better than any PR firm. And you
should. This is for technical people, to teach them the DIY of social
media as a branding tool. You would be surprised how many engineers
don’t know this."

Try Making Yourself More Interesting
Brian Oberkirch, Small Good Thing
"There are no cheat codes for community. No Charles Atlas shortcuts to
make your pet project the one to rule them all. Want people to think
you’re awesome? Be awesome. This panel promises a bullshit-free look at
how you might tune out the jibber jabber, tune in to those who matter,
put your head down and make your online service a little bit more epic
each day. We’ll dissect Bike Hugger, Photojojo, Metafilter, and other
examples of Web charm for what *you* can do. Today, and tomorrow. And
the day after. Which is how you will become what you want to be."

Making Whuffie: Raising Social Capital in Online Communities
Tara Hunt, Citizen Agency
"This talk gets to the heart of how people interact and exchange
information in online communities: through social capital, or as Cory
Doctorow calls it, Whuffie. The key to growing customers in online
communities is through growing your social capital. You will learn the
5 lessons of raising Whuffie through online communities in this
presentation."

What Teens & Tweens Want In A Web Site/Application
Anastasia Goodstein, Ypulse
"If you’re designing or programming a website or application for teens
or just want to be relevant to the next generation, this teen panel
will give you a glimpse into how teens are using the Net and cell
phones. Find out what teens want, and more importantly what they don’t."

Micro-Interactions in a 2.0 World
David Armano, Critical Mass
We live in a world where the little things really do matter. Each
encounter — no matter how brief — is a micro interaction which makes
a deposit or withdrawal from our rational and emotional subconscious.
The sum of these interactions and encounters adds up to how we feel
about a particular product, brand or service. Little things. Feelings.
They influence our everyday behaviors more than we realize."

Everything You Know About Social Media is Wrong
David Parmet, PerkettPR
"Everyone knows that social media has created a revolution in marketing.
But aren’t most marketers missing the point about what social media can
or cannot do for them? This panel will expose the horrible lies and
deceptions surrounding social media marketing. You will know what
social media is and isn’t."

This post is one of a series of recommendations arrived at by
going through the entire list of South by Southwest panels that are up
for consideration for 2009.

Important: Would love your support for "FlashMarkets: From the Roman Agora to the Mobile Web." Click here to vote or learn more.

SXSW 2009 Panel Recs: Business / Entrepreneurial

Building a Brand that Matters
Tony Hsieh, Zappos.com
"Tony Hsieh is Chief Executive Officer of Zappos.com. Tony will discuss
the four essentials of building a brand that matters -vision, repeat
customers, transparency and culture. Tony will also focus on
Zappos.com’s commitment to WOWing its customers and Zappos.com’s
strategy for growing sales year after year."

Donors Vs. The Environment – Striking a Balance
Randal Moss, American Cancer Society
"As non profits go more digital they have to balance their donor’s
interests, their business needs, and care for the environment. Hear how
top non profits are addressing the challenge with technology, and learn
how going appeals to constituents, employees, and the bottom line."

Making a Living Being Yourself
Heather Gold, subvert
"Comedian and professional thought-provoker Heather Gold brings together
Dana Robinson (NBC) and 3 well-known creators/web personalities to
discuss the process and pitfalls of your play becoming your work."

Convincing With Pictures: First We Throw Away All The Computers…
Dan Roam, Digital Roam Inc
"PowerPoint doesn’t necessarily make us stupid; it just makes us
visually lazy. Dan Roam, the best-selling author of ‘The Back of the
Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures’ returns to
SXSW with a whole new set of tools and rules for using simple pictures
to discover ideas and convince anybody of almost anything. Even
ourselves."

This post is one of a series of recommendations arrived at by
going through the entire list of South by Southwest panels that are up
for consideration for 2009.

Important: Would love your support for "FlashMarkets: From the Roman Agora to the Mobile Web." Click here to vote or learn more.

SXSW 2009 Panel Recs: Communities and Social Networks

Women Engaging Tech: Ferocity Fuels the Phenomenal
Gwen Bell, http://www.gwenbell.com
"Four women, all powerhouses in their fields of women, technology +/or startups, come together to show how we’ve overcome FAIL, found a way to reach out + learned the power of unplugging (standing our ground + not letting tech take over _every single aspect_ of our lives)."

The Future Of Social Networks
Charlene Li, CLI Group
"Social networks will be like air, in that they will permeate everything that we do online AND offline. We’ll look at the underlying technologies that will make this possible, how it will evolve, and the business models that will support it."

Social and Nonprofits ROI: Case Study Slam
Beth Kanter, Beth’s Blog
"Using a poetry slam format, each panelist will present a five-minute poem or story about how their organization has successfully implemented a social media strategy experiment and how they considered the ROI. The audience will have ample opportunity to ask questions and respond."

How to Explain Social Media to the C-suite
Rex Hammock, Hammock Inc.
"You want buy-in for your social media projects? Then tell the C-level execs in your company [or at your client] why social media makes business sense. What you can measure. What you can market. How to make the pitch."

From Flickr and Beyond – Lessons in Community Management
Heather Champ, Flickr
"Companies across industries are developing and fostering online communities, recognizing the benefits of connecting with customers on the Web. Unfortunately, not all communities thrive to become a successful vehicle for businesses. Leaders of top online communities from Flickr to Facebook will discuss top best practices for managing online communities."

This post is one of a series of recommendations arrived at by going through the entire list of South by Southwest panels that are up for consideration for 2009.

Important: Would love your support for "FlashMarkets: From the Roman Agora to the Mobile Web." Click here to vote or learn more.

SXSW 2009 Panel Recs: New Technology / Next Generation

Rebuilding the World with Free Everything
Doc Searls, Linux Journal, Harvard Berkman Center
"’Free’ is the future of business. Steve Larsen says the world has more
than 500,000 open source code bases now — all free. That’s a tall
challenge for a huge pile of building material. Linux Journal presents
a panel of creative hackers and business crafters to discuss
constructing the future." (Related: "The Six Kinds of Free" -ed.)

State of the Microformat
Tantek Çelik, tantek.com
Since microformats.org launched in 2005 and empowered every web author to easily add semantics to their HTML, adoption has skyrocketed. This panel will present the state of the microformats ecosystem, including popular sites, browsers, search engines and other tools enabling and building upon microformats. 

Can Social Networks Thrive Beyond the Walled Garden?
Trent Adams, Matchmine LLC
"Social media sites pop up daily, offering new forms of communication. Signing up requires adding redundant profile data, and “friending” people all over again. OpenID, Higgins & other Data Portability techniques aim to ease the burden, but how will the social networks thrive without being ‘walled gardens?’"

Interest Networking, or: Death to the Super Poke
Nova Spivack, Twine.com
"Social networking is all about the connections between people. What we’re really moving towards are interest networks — a paradigm whereby people inform each other, gain insight, and interact with information. Connecting with other people is only the first step to collectively organizing, sharing and discovering content. From Del.icio.us to Twitter to FriendFeed to Twine, we’re seeing many examples of this new category of software, which are founded on social connections, but are centered around the topics we care about most."

Back in 2006, Greg Olsen wrote a post called “Going Bedouin” that made the internet rounds more than a few times.  It was a well thought-out and well-crafted piece that received the attention it deserved.  Flash forward to 2008, and now we see that Dell has taken the idea and run with it, by way of a new initiative called Digital Nomads.

From the Dell side, the main human face behind Digital Nomads is Bruce Eric Anderson (@bruceericatdell).  Anderson is a strong complement to both Richard Binhammer (@richardatdell) and Lionel Menchaca (@lionelatdell), who have, in my opinion, done a really solid job of putting a human face and human voice to Dell through their conversations on Twitter over the last year or so. 

The Digital Nomads effort is an interesting one, and is a step in the right direction.  Right now, the site is set up as a community where said nomads can interact with each other and learn more about the tips and tricks of the bedouin lifestyle.  It’s currently a little heavy on the Dell propaganda, but there are assurances that this will lessen over time.  When called on the carpet over the Dell-centricity of the site, Anderson replied:

“I take your comments as healthy dialogue on the whole concept of
what makes one a digital nomad. I absolutely consider myself a digital
nomad, even though today I don’t fly frequently across the country or
around the world. I’ve had more than my fill of traveling in the past
and now with a family at home am glad to be more office-bound but still
have the flexibility to do what I do from wherever. Perhaps you could
call me today more of a ‘corridor nomad’.

My role and presence on digitalnomads.com will become less over time
as more of you come on as guest bloggers, add to the whitepaper,
contribute thoughts and comments (the latter being a great point made
by @MktMan).

@LionelatDell and I, or any other Dell employee, are the only ones
who are paid to contribute to this site — though our intent is to make
this less about Dell and more about the concept of digital nomads.
Thanks for your comments.”

So far, the conversation on Twitter is trending in a positive direction as well.

Is Digital Nomads a success?  It’s too early to tell.  The site’s been up for only a week or so, and it’s still certainly got a few rough edges (for example, the “Crowdsource this Whitepaper” section of the site feels a bit half-baked). However, the initiative does seem to indicate an honest commitment on Dell’s part to not only try something new, but to do it in a way that brings together its customers and others outside the organization in order to achieve that goal.  From that aspect, they’re definitely on the right track.

Demian takes the idea and runs with it.

This week kicks off the annual meeting for ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership in San Diego.  ASAE is doing some really killer stuff in the collaboration / Web 2.0 space, including:

• Blogging at Acronym
• Associapedia
• A Flickr group

You can even follow along by tracking posts tagged with #ASAE on Twitter.

If you’re interested in understanding what folks on the front lines of bringing Web 2.0 into associations are doing, here are three people to start with, today:

Maddie Grant from Diary of a Reluctant Blogger

Jeff De Cagna from Principled Innovation

Jamie Notter from Get Me Jamie Notter!

(Other great association bloggers who should be on this list?  Please list them in the comments!)

Additionally, there are a few resources out there that can get you started, such as this Executive Briefing on Social Networking for Businesses and Associations, which has (wow!) been viewed almost 9,000 times.

You can get the presentation here, or download it as a free e-Book here.

Looking forward to seeing some great things out of San Diego this week.

Related:  The Top 10 Ways Businesses, Associations and Organizations can use Social Networking

There is great risk of shark-jumping on the whole “…are conversations” concept, but there just might be something here worth exploring.

I have been thinking a lot about how projects get done, the many ways to manage one like OKR vs KPIs, or agile vs lean, all the different ways to keep yourself on track and get things done. A “project” could be the act of software development, or a product launch, or an office move, or an org-wide deployment of Vista, or what have you. Ok, maybe not an org-wide deployment of Vista, but you get my drift. The context might also not just span a single project, but perhaps an entire portfolio of projects that are competing for an organization’s (or individual’s) scarce resources. And this could necessitate the use of a wide range of project management tools, similar to those that you can learn more about here.

Nevertheless, the tasks, and milestones, and artifacts are all part of the infrastructure, but can one posit that the thing that really matters (and is currently completely, 100% ephemeral) is the conversations and collaboration between the project team members and the project management team. But the one thing that struck me during a conversation I had recently…the whole buzz around Cluetrain’s first thesis,”markets are conversations,” is really, really relevant in this context. Because, when you get down to it, projects are conversations as well. Also, communication is the key part towards an efficient team, if you’re soon to be heading a project you might want to look at courses like this efficient communication program provided by USC or other institutions.

Perhaps the traditional project management trappings are really simply low-level artifacts and surrogates that management twiddles in order to try to get to some sort of measurement…but perhaps the real value is in the conversation.

I bounced this idea off Demian Entrekin (disclosure: Innotas, where Demian is CTO, is a Cerado customer), and he pointed me to a piece he’d written back in 2006(!) that touched on this as well. Demian:

“Is the WBS [Work Breakdown Structure, a tool that shows all the tasks related to a project – ed.] a decomposition tool for understanding the ideal structure for a project, or is it a communication vehicle for teams to work together toward common goals? Sure, it can be both, but the question should not be too quickly answered and dispensed with. If it becomes more of a communication tool, as I would argue it is, then how must its behavior change?” (emphasis added)

Here’s Demian’s more exhaustive thinking on the subject.

So, what do you think? Are projects where stuff gets done a collection of artifacts? Or, perhaps, instead, are they instead a collection of collaborative acts based in conversation, out of which artifacts are produced?

Man goes in the cage. Cage goes in the water. Shark’s in the water.