The Collaboration Economy

The following is also my column in next week's Advertising Age.

Gloom and doom are everywhere this
fall. So I am not going to perpetuate it. Instead, I see the global
economic meltdown finally kicking the industry into gear toward
becoming more efficient, open and collaborative.

The ad industry
is woefully inefficient and siloed. During flush economic times we got
proprietary, fat and lazy. Things have to change.

Digital measurability
was the first casualty in good times. It remains a mystery because of a
lack of standards. Ask 15 marketers what engagement means and you will
get 30 answers. Everyone's peddling their own methodology - if they
even have one. No one's truly motivated to work together toward a
solution.

Watch for the big trade associations like the IAB to
open a broader dialogue than they have to date. Rather than holding
closed-door meetings they will use the Net to encourage participation
from all sides so that we can finally set working guidelines.

Research
and insights were also sacrificed during flush times. Many brands still
attack the digital landscape in a very quick, "get me a viral,"
tactical way. They forgo taking the time (as in weeks) to develop a
deep understanding of a community's wants and needs because, well, it's
work.

To really understand the digital space marketers have to
participate in these venues - and all the time. You need to comprehend
and add value to communities before launching campaigns there. In our
agency this is gospel, but that's not happening in a widespread way
yet. Agency and client-side marketers will start dabbling more
to build understanding.

Finally there's huge inefficiencies in
the way agencies manage workflow internally and also how they
collaborate with clients. One-to-one communications like email remain
king. One-to-many collaborative tools like wikis, internal blogs and
micro-blogs are not in widespread use.

With the ANA projecting that
53% of marketing budgets will shrink, things are going to change - and
quickly. Rather than cut digital talent - which remains scarce -
agencies are going to break down walls by ushering in new tools in that
enable their employees to connect with each other, clients and
consumers, sometimes in surprisingly open ways.

Recession Proof Your Job with Web Based Tools

The economy is the story of the year. And although Congress is poised to pass a $700 billion bailout of the banking industry, we're not out of the woods. Many feel that a deep global recession is imminent. This means there will be layoffs - perhaps lots of them. To protect your job, you need to ensure that you are personally accountable and adding value every day.

Social software and web applications, if applied correctly, are sharp arrows in your quiver. They can also become massive distractions. Here are three techniques using web tools that can help you become more personally accountable in your career.

Track Your Browser Time with PageAddict

Time and attention are finite resources that must be harnessed properly if you want to succeed. Nevertheless, this is not simple in the connected age. Given that many of us work in Internet-related fields, it's easy (and some would argue quite valuable) to spend the entire day in your email inbox or on Friendfeed or Twitter. Problem is, you may not accomplish a thing.

Like my friends Paul Stamatiou and Kevin C. Tofel I spend the vast majority of my computing time "in the cloud." This means my browser, Firefox, is used more than any other application. But recently I have started using PageAddict, a free Firefox extension, to collect data on my Internet usage and I have found it invaluable.

PageAddict monitors the sites you visit and logs your time. You can then tag them into categories. All the data is stored locally on your computer. A similar tool that people love is called RescueTime. However, given that I spend a ton of time in my browser I have found PageAddict more than adequate for my needs.

Above is a screenshot from PageAddict that shows where my time was spent over the last two weeks. Email includes my corporate web-mail and GMail. Soc Nets includes Facebook, Friendfeed and Twitter. While docs covers Google Docs, which I use to write, and Google Spreadsheets, which I use for GTD, goals, projects and ideas.

As you can see almost all of my time online is work related. Still I can see that I need to shrink my social network usage a little bit and increase my time with documents, web applications while also keeping RSS contained. I also need to go through the undefined section to see if there are big groups of sites that can be tagged.

Wrangle RSS

Many of us are RSS addicts. ReadWriteWeb recently did a great job showing how blog reading can help you grow in your career. This has certainly has been true for me and it's why I read 568 feeds, tag much of what I unearth there, file it in Gmail and share it liberally.

Still, as great as RSS is, it can eat your time. I have worked over the last couple of years to a) shift most of my reading to the early mornings or evenings when I have time to really ponder the content and b) use RSS as a knowledge management hub for information that others can use, including you, my colleagues and clients.

Google Reader Trends gives you the data you need to track this over time. You can see how many items you have read, what day/time you consume feeds as well as how many items you have shared. It also shows you the feeds you read the most, even via a mobile device - this is something even RescueTime or PageAddict can't track. Analyze the data and make sure it's aligned with your goals. Below is a screenshot from my reader.

Track All Your Time via a Web Calendar or Online Spreadsheet

In my field we all track our time. In some cases this is how we know what to bill clients for our time. In others, it's to ensure that we aren't over-servicing accounts. However, if you don't have to track your time I highly recommend it since it's a great way to ensure that you are focused and delivering value.

I have been using Google Calendar to track my time. I set up a calendar just for this purpose and use it to log when I start/completed a task. Then I transfer this data to our enterprise-wide time tracking tool. What I like about using GCal is that I can search my time or go back to a specific date to see what I did when. I also use bookmarklets to speed up the logging of my time.

As a next step I may move this to Google Spreadsheets or Zoho since I can generate charts to see where my time is being spent. I also want to think about how to synchronize my logs with PageAddict.

Bonus Tip: Create a Motivation Wall with Picasa or Flickr

This tip isn't really about measurement, but it's a little web app hack that I use to motivate myself. Using Picasa Web Albums I set up a private album called "The Motivation Wall." On the wall I collect images of people - some living, some dead - who achieved greatness. I try to hit this site every so often because I know it will inspire me to do the same.

In the screenshot above you will find some of my heroes - Michael Jordan taking the final shot to seal victory in the 1998 NBA Finals, Michael Phelps winning his seventh gold by a hundredth of a second and Ben Franklin (a tinkerer like me) discovering electricity.

Additional links of note...


23 Personal Tools to Learn More About Yourself


Bytes of Life : For Every Move, Mood and Bodily Function, There's a Web Site to Help You Keep Track

Make Magic with Metadata in Gmail

Personal knowledge management is becoming one of the most critical
skills that information workers like journalists, marketers and PR pros need to succeed today.
Specifically, I am talking about the efficient collecting, processing
and weeding of massive amounts of data. In this post I want to offer
tips on how to take full advantage of tagging information in Gmail. (I have covered
Gmail previously in this context in three separate installments.)

Gmail is not just an email client,
but a rich, searchable database. Think of it as a data mining system. The more data that you allow to flow into Gmail, the
more you'll get out of it - if it's organized.  Even better all of this information is available across any device and even offline using IMAP.
As much as I like Evernote, it's lack of offline notes on the iPhone
made it a deal killer for me. Plus I already live in Gmail so it was
easy to stick wit it.

GMail has labels,
which are essentially tags, but they're unwieldy. You need to constantly
manage them if you store a lot of info. It's a pain. I prefer to tag on the fly. And using GMail's unlimited plus addressing and filtering capabilities, you can. Here's how.

First, set up a filter in GMail so that all mail from the prefix of your email address to that prefix is
auto-archived and marked as read. In my case this means mail from steverubel to steverubel. This will ensure that the emails
do not show up in your inbox.

Next, as I find information I want to collect, I email it to myself using Ubiquity, a new extension for Firefox
(Google Toolbar offers a similar email capability). However,
instead of emailing it to just my regular email address I add a tag to the prefix by tacking a
word on to the address with a plus symbol. To add multiple tags I send the message to
multiple plus addresses all at once.

For example, Nielsen just published some interesting data about health and social networking. I know I might need this later so I select the article and invoke my email command in Ubiquity and send the message to both steverubel+health@gmail.com and steverubel+socialnetworking@gmail.com. The article never hits my inbox. It gets autoarchived where I can get it later.

Now if I want to find everything I have tagged under health and social networking, all I need to do is search for to:+health or to:+socialnetworking and bingo, the article turns up.

Finally,
you need to make your tags easily accessible. Searching for these
keywords every time is a pain. The solution is to use GMail Quick Links. For tags I access regularly I pull up the search in GMail and either bookmark them in my browser or add them as a Quick Link in GMail. (Note you need to enable Gmail Labs first in the settings.)

That's all there is to it. Next up I plan to couple this technique with Google Alerts and Newsgator's POP3 capabilities, which comes free with Newsgator Online, and GMail fetching to add have news and RSS flow into GMail that matches certain conditions I set up in advance and have them autotagged.

Is Google Docs Encouraging Schoolchildren to Steal Photos?

I love Google Docs, but this is just wrong. In a seemingly innocent blog post running down new features for back to school, Google now says they let you search for images off the web via your document so you can drop them in. In other words, they're arguably inspiring schoolchildren to liberally steal from hardworking photographers ...

"Fans of Google Image Search will be happy to see that you can also find and insert images into your documents. Again, you just highlight a word or phrase. Then, use Tools>Search... using Image Search. Once you find the right image, you can drag-and-drop that image directly into your document"

There's a simple solution here. Add a Creative Commons filter for re-usable content to any image search activated from Google Docs and teach students how to source them.

Radical Transparency: Three Lessons Apple Can Learn from Google

Google isn't exactly known as the most transparent company in the
world, but they're light years ahead of Apple - a company that in some
ways they share a kinship with when it comes to their reputation
for innovation. Apple (or for that matter any big company) can learn a
lot about radical transparency, customer service and PR from Google, even though they're hardly
perfect here.

First, Google does a great job of telling you where they're fallible.
Many Google products have pages that list the bugs that they know need
to be fixed. GMail and Google Docs
are just two. You can visit each of these pages for an update and even
let Google know if you're experiencing one of these issues.

Apple, by contrast, just lets you know when they've fixed bugs, but leave
it to bloggers to dig into the code to see just what was fixed. Most
Apple software update release notes from Apple simply say "Bug fixes."

Second, Google, like Apple, has forums where users can voice their
opinions about new features, gripes, wishes, use cases and more. Google
employees actively participate in these forums and you can track their
activity. Here's a page
that shows you all of the posts that a Google Reader forum guide,
"Roger," has responded to. Apple does the same in its forums.
Here's a list of all of the postings that Jason L has responded to.

However, the difference between the two is that users can rank the
posts of Google employees or even report misconduct. I give credit to
Apple for participating, however, I wished they would let users rate
employee postings.

Finally, Google has a ton of blogs. Most of them link back to the bloggers who link there. Some are beginning to allow for comments. Google Blogoscoped aggregates them here. Even better, all Google blog posts clearly identify the employee who authored the post and their title.

Apple meanwhile has one blog
for its much troubled MobileMe services, which I am probably dignifying
by calling it that. It's bascially a news feed of product updates. The
authors aren't identified. Worse, there are no comments or links to
other bloggers.

There are other companies in the tech industry that go even further than Google in their transparency - namely Dell and Microsoft (an Edelman client). However, Google and Apple are often closely linked in their cultures. The reality is, though, that when it comes to customer engagement, they are quite different.