Latest commentary on how community is changing the world of marketing, media and PR.
Interview with Wharton Professor, Jerry Wind: Becoming a "We" Company
5/9/2008 | posted by
astrout
This is from a podcast I did last week with Jerry Wind - one of our original We Are Smarter Than Me book collaborators and Professor at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (among other things). This is going to provide some of the fodder for the last chapter of our second We Are Smarter book. If you have thoughts on this topic - please include ASAP and I'll send to our writers to include in the chapter with attribution.
I know folks don't always like to have to login/sign up to comme ...
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Any of you that read my blog or listen to my weekly WE Show podcast series know that I like to talk about smart companies that are using community and social media to improve their businesses. I like it even better when one of the smart companies I'm talking about happens to be a client as well.
In this particular case, one of the companies we work with, iRise, is asking the members of its industry community, Catalyze.org, to create a commercial for their company. The name of the contest they ...
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Background
I've spent a lot of time as a "Me" marketer - nearly 15 years as a matter of fact. During those 15 years, I've done "Me" marketing at a small agency, a financial giant (Fidelity Investments) and eventually for an white-lable community company (Shared Insights/now Mzinga). Ironically, most of the "Me" marketing I did during that time was in the online/Web channel but that didn't make it "WE." If you're wondering what the hell I'm talking about, ...
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Getting There
It's not often that you get to go to the United Nations building in NYC. It's even less frequent that you get to go to the UN and speak. I had the privilege of doing both on Tuesday and it was worth every minute of sleep I missed (got up at 4:15 AM to catch a 6:00 AM Shuttle from Boston.)
The occasion for visiting/speaking at the UN was the "United Nations Meets Web 2.0" Conference (March 25-26.) Unfortunately, I had to cut my trip short since but I packed a lot into ...
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THIS WAS ORIGINALLY POSTED ON MZINGA.COM ON 3/21
Today's Hiring Process
My company, Mzinga, is in the process of hiring for several positions. Given the fact that we are a company focused on building community for other businesses, the thought occurred to me that I might start practicing what we preach in the world of recruiting. In order to do this, changes to the existing process need to be made.
Like many other companies, here's what our basic hiring process looks like today:
Open ...
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Today, my colleague, Eve, that runs all of our events/conferences asked a rew of us "what big give away at our next three conferences would create a real buzz?" After a bit of arguing, we came up with a short list of four items:
a Amazon Kindle (ebook reader)
a Wii (gaming system)
Nokia N95 phone (with streaming video capabilities)
Bose noise cancelling headphones
In spite of liking all these choices, we quickly realized that it was going to be prohibitively ex ...
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It only took several fights with my wife, three hours standing around at Logan airport and a lot late nights at work but I'm finally South by Southwest bound! For those not familiar with this conference/fesitval, it's billed as the "spring break for social media/Web 2.0 geeks." While that may be true, that's not why I'm going (well, it's not the only reason I'm going.)
While I'm here with my cohorts, Jim Storer & Colin Browning and my younger sister (who is also a co-worker,) Heat ...
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Wow - a lot has happened over the last couple of weeks. I have not had nearly as much time as I would have liked to blog so I'm going to kill a few birds with one stone here.
The company that I work for (and that powers the We Are Smarter site) Mzinga, is merging with white lable community provider, Prospero. I am very excited about this on a number of different levels (listen to the podcast that Colin Browning and I did with Bryan Person for details). We also got some pret ...
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This is my first true unconference. I've been at several quasi-unconferences so I get the gist of what's supposed to happen. However, I love the concept of creating content on the fly. I'm linking to the event wiki so that folks can see the agenda and notes from other sessions.
Kicking things off!
Bill Johnston and Kahliya Hamlin facilitated introductions of all the attendees. We each had about 20 seconds to tell folks who we were and what we were interested in. It's a nice way to get to k ...
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Posted at 4:23 PM ET
I'm sitting at O'Reilly's "Tools of Change for Publishing" Conference in New York City. Our CEO, Barry Libert, is one of the speakers at the event and he's up in 37 minutes. His presentation will focus on our We Are Smarter Than Me book -- a project that we collaborated on with publishing giant, Pearson Publishing, UPenn Wharton, MIT and over 4,300 bloggers, podcasters and other social media enthusiasts.
This evening, I'm doing a more informal set of demos t ...
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