Wiki-Mail

December 17, 2008 – 11:19 am

Welcome to E Quint Consulting. If you’re new here, you may want to find out what E Quint does or subscribe to the RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

What would you get if you combined email with a wiki? Let’s look at the attributes of each.

Email Strengths:

  • Ubiquity - Everyone has email access, and almost everyone can and does use it (even my Mom)
  • Simplicity - Whatever tool you use, you have come to a level of competency  that allows you to send an email quickly without too much thought about the mechanics

Email Weakness:

  • “Email is where information goes to die” - Have you ever tried to follow a long thread of emails between multiple people? Nuf said.

Wiki Strengths:

  • Centrality - The information resides in one place, so there is no confusion about the “latest” information

Wiki Weakness:

  • Not Ubituitious - Most people have never heard of wikis, much less have access to one.

If you look at it, the strength of each could counter-balance the weakness of the other, if we could find a way to combine the two.

A Suggestion for Google (or whoever…)

Add functionality to Gmail that will automatically direct the contents of an email, that is addressed to 2 or more people, into a Google Doc or Google Page, and then add the link to the email. So when the recipient gets the email, instead of the dreaded “Reply All”, they have a single click to edit the central doc which then automatically sends a “Notify All” response.

(Note to my Twitter followers: This is not the big plan in the works, just an idea I had this morning.)

By Lee White | Posted in General | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

The Relationship Economy

December 10, 2008 – 5:54 pm

Bottom line is that the success of any organization lies in the ability to gather the best information available in order to make the best decisions possible. Organizations that do this well will do the best job of meeting market needs, now and in the future.

Sounds simple. Why isn’t it?

According to the RNIA, it is because we do not have a viable “Relationship Economy”. I recently discovered the Relationship Networking Industry Association (RNIA), liked what I saw and joined the association.

Here is a slide deck I put together to better explain RNIA and its core concepts.

Relationship Networking & RNIA

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: boundaries trust)

RNIA defines itself as:

RNIA is the central authority and international clearinghouse for promoting and managing Relationship Capital (RC). In a Relationship Economy, RC is a tangible way of communicating the value assigned to individual and organizational entities. RC measures the quality and effectiveness of the relationship interactions between them.

RNIA is a non-profit entity that is working to define standards by which we can improve our ability to build relationships and thus be better equipped to effectively gather information that we can trust.

RNIA is looking for people that have ideas about how to make the relationship economy a reality. If you are interested, consider joining and find out more.

By Lee White | Posted in General | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Internet Summit Roundup.

November 20, 2008 – 11:35 am

Yesterday I attended the first annual Internet Summit in Chapel Hill NC. I was excited to see that an event of this type was able to draw a crowd of over 600 attendees. A quick search this morning turned up only a few posts about the event.

Following my initial enthusiasm, I quickly became underwhelmed by the old-school atmosphere of the event. Every session, with the exception of the opening keynotes, were panel discussions, considered by many to be one of the weakest presentation formats. There was little opportunity for the “audience” to participate. The one exception was Jim Tobin using Twitter during his session to field questions. Yes, the other sessions  did take questions, but it was always just a couple of quick ones during the last 5 minutes. Not what I call engaging the audience.

Another thing that bothered me was that there was a strong theme, in the sessions I attended, toward using the internet only as a customer acquisition tool; CPC, Page views, traffic, conversion, etc. I heard almost no one talking about how online tools can also be used to keep customers and add value to the customer relationship, through things like better customer service, and communities.

And my final rant, there was no attempt (oops, my bad, there was a “networking lunch”) little opportunity for attendees to interact. Sessions were back-to-back with typically less than the scheduled 15 minutes before the next session. I would have liked to see a published attendee list, a pre-conference social space, an official conference backchannel and conference tag.

PLUS

I realize it is not like me to rant so much, but I think we have such a great opportunity to show off how this area of the country has so much to offer, and I want our local events to be excellent. And to show that I am not just sitting in the back row lobbing grenades, I would be happy to talk to the folks that put on the event and look at combining Internet Summit 2009 and BlogCarolinas next year, taking the best from both and holding a truly world class event.

By Lee White | Posted in General | Tagged | Comments (6)

Business Operations Model

November 18, 2008 – 6:12 pm

I seem to be getting into modeling a lot lately. Last week in my post, Business Basics, I offered up a structural model of business. Today I am looking at one layer of that pyramid, Effective Operations. The bulk of a business is operations, everything else is essentially set-up or outcomes.

So if we expand the operations layer, here is what it looks like (to me).

  • Develop Offering - The creation of your actual product or service. This is inclusive of R&D and Production.
  • Educate - With your offering in hand, you have to figure out how to tell potential customers what it is, in a way that they will want to consider “paying” for it.
  • Create Decision Space - This is the time after you have the potential customer’s attention and before they have decided to plunk down their hard earned coin. It is also the mechanism by which you can assist them effectively gather the information they need to make their decision.
  • Transaction - The (now) customer puts down the cash and you provide the value (hopefully).
  • Maintain Connection - Once you have engaged the customer, how do you keep their attention?

So what is with all of this modeling?

I want to use these models to more effectively show how, and where, Relationship Technology can best be used to improve business outcomes. This is my attempt to overcome the problem I see in most pitches for using “social media” for business, there is no solid business framework upon which claims of value are made; just bold claims that “social media is good marketing” or “enterprise 2.0 will improve collaboration” without any context or explaination of the why or how.

I want to use these models to overcome that problem.

By Lee White | Posted in Concepts | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Relationship Technology

November 18, 2008 – 6:03 pm

I am tired of feeling uncomfortable and imprecise with the existing general terminology that describes

  • Social Media
  • Enterprise 2.0
  • Web 2.0
  • Social Networks
  • Blogs
  • etc.

None of these work well as an umbrella term. In light of that, I am going to start using

Relationship Technology

as my general term. You may like it or not, I don’t care. It works for me. So there!

By Lee White | Posted in Concepts | Tagged , , | Comments (1)
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