What We Find Beautiful

Originally uploaded by QuiverandQuill

We take thousands of pictures, share hundreds of tweets and create many conferences to celebrate our every day lives. What has made the mundane something worthy of constant attention? Are we afraid to forget or just eager to be the first to document? Where once we filmed occasions, now we film moments.

Many of us write descriptions of our content when posting it online. We create tags and share the location where our media was conceived. We are aware that when our moments combine with the moments of others online we create a more significant story. Perhaps this awareness encourages us to share the ordinary, because we know its power and beauty when combined with the ordinary that others post online. Flickr tags are a perfect example of this.

Why we tag on Flickr?
1. Ego. We want our photos to be discoverable and attributed to us. We want to drive traffic to our blogs, promote the recognition of our talents and leave a fingerprint on the window of history.
2. Narrative / storytelling. We have a sense that our pictures help to tell a story greater than us, the pictures create a sense of meaning for a place and a time. When we overlay them on a map we see the richness they add to something much larger than us—it is our way of contributing to a group story.

I have heard much talk recently of ambient awareness through twitter, Flickr and other social networks. In fact, I have heard ambient awareness offered as a sort of ROI of social media.

We need to also consider the greater meaning we realize by contributing to the overall story—how our tweets, blogs, pictures, all the beautiful substance of the mundane, add to a larger much richer and much fuller whole than the single piece of content.

Nokia is flying me, and 34 marketing and technology experts from around the globe, to join them in Helsinki over the next few days for the Nokia Open Lab.

They equipped us with their new e71 phone to review, encouraged us to share this experience on our blogs and social networks and have made every effort to ensure our comfort and spark our enthusiasm.

Here is our agenda over the next few days:

There are four workshop topics in total. Each will begin with an introduction by a facilitator who will talk a bit about the theme for that workshop and introduce the task. You will then be split into smaller groups to discuss the issues as set out below:

Workshop 1: Neighborhood
During this workshop you will be asked to outline your own online community involvement and social media history on a timeline. You will then get together to create a map/timeline of technologies and solutions for content creation in the future.

Workshop 2: Connected Life
During this workshop you will be asked to create future forecasts for geospatial solutions and technologies. The task will be to create such a forecast in three stages: very near futures, next 3-5 years and the more distant future.

Workshop 3: Entertainment
During this workshop you will try to identify which type of entertainment (e.g. music, gaming, movies etc) will have the most future potential. You will then be asked to create a business model focusing on how consumers will want to interact and pay for such an entertainment in the future.

Workshop 4: Work
During this workshop you will look at the communication technologies and solutions in use today and then try to come up with new uses and business models for one of those solutions.

I will share my notes and thoughts with you. Let me also say that I am extremely impressed with Nokia’s experiment for several reasons

1) When you invite experts who are deeply embedded into social communities, they are going to share their thoughts with those communities.
2) By inviting experts, paying for their travel and accommodations and making them feel like honored guests—they are circumventing any consulting fees these experts would otherwise charge their clients.
3) I can only imagine how much thinking and preparation was involved in bringing 35 people from all over the world together. It’s a very involved initiative, and I give them credit.
4) Nokia has made no effort to influence our opinion. In fact, quite the contrary, they have encouraged us to share our candid assessment.

Considering that on multiple occasions I was ready to toss my iPhone out of the window for dropping calls, not opening a browser properly or freezing, I am eager to find a replacement. And perhaps that will be the e71. Will keep you posted.

(Image from Flickr, by Paul Keleher)

They lurk in malls, selling soap, oversized stuffed animals and mobile phone accessories. As you pass, they ask, “Can I ask you a question?” Those unlucky few who respond, “Yes,” seem as naïve as New York tourists staring up at skyscraper.

I’m sure “Can I ask you a question?” was a great sales technique at some point. But it becomes less useful with each additional vendor that adopts it.

Consider a new approach: Instead of, “Can I ask you a question?” ask, “May I tell you something useful?” “May I tell you something funny?” “Can I help you find a store?”

If each of these vendors were armed with helpful resources that would benefit the average mall-walker, I think it might boost their sales.

What do you think?

I created a tag cloud from the text of Obama and McCain bios located on their website.
The larger the word, the more it is emphasized in the candidates bio.

Special thanks to http://tagcrowd.com for the tagcloud.

I recently interviewed Beth Seabright, managing director of Tucker Arensberg, P.C., about her program to motivate young associates at her law firm to take business development initiatives. After you read this great article, check out how the program worked in a bit more depth by reading the below:

1.     Did you provide your team with additional resources to point them in the right direction. For example, did you create a list of possible speaking engagements for them to attend, or were they expected to research this on their own? 

I did provide additional resources for them.  I suggested publications for articles, speaking engagements, networking events and occasionally set up lunches with my contacts that I wanted my attorneys to get to know.   I coached them through phone calls when they were reaching out to contacts for the first time and walked them through various business development scenarios.  I helped the Associates to get to their goal in any way that I could.

2.    Did you post people’s point score continuously and publicly?

I sent out the results every two weeks to our Associates and occasionally included our Managing Shareholder.  

3. Did that create a competitive or a collaborative environment?

I would say more motivating than competitive.  A few Associates that were not making the time for the program initially saw that other Associates were making progress toward the goal and were inspired to meet with me to put together a plan to catch up with their colleagues.

4. What was the logic behind assigning which point values to which activities?

The more difficult the task, the higher the point value.  I made a list of all of the activities included in the program and ranked them from simple to challenging.  For instance, meetings with me: easy – Associates received 2 points/meeting.  New clients were worth 10 points.

5. And lastly, have you been able to correlate a dollar amount to the biz dev challenge–ROI?

To be honest, I did not go back and correlate dollar values to the challenge, simply because a lot of the value in the program was planting the business developing seeds with the Associates.  While our more senior associates brought in new matters and clients, which I could easily correlate with a dollar value, our younger associates were setting up meetings and writing articles for the first time, activities that were not going to create instant new business.

Quiver&Quill commentary: If I ran a business development program for a law firm, I would use a similar framework to motivate my young associates. Here’s how it would work:

The process starts by answering one of two questions:

• What, that our business prospects care about, could we help them better understand?
• What, that our business prospects are doing, could we help them do better?

The next step — turn the young associate into a resource.

Incent them to attend lectures, visit social networks, read niche publications and develop a personal interest in the areas that matter to prospects. Finally, place them into situations like conferences and events where they can help prospects and demonstrate their resourcefulness.