The Ministry of Food, Jamie Oliver, and Social Media

Second CMO 2.0 Conversation - Fiskars

The Trickle Out of Traditional Media Turns to Flood Starting Now

Putting in place a Virtual Events strategy

Corporate Blogger: Angel or Demon?

Social Media Handyman on Active Rain and MarketingProfs

Some of you know I've rolled out a new "brand." I'm calling myself the "social media handyman." Actually, it was a moniker that MarketProfs Ann Handley anointed me with after requesting some help with her A N N A R C H Y blog. Ann said she needed a "handyman" to do some work on the blog. I got the job and the handle stuck. Truth be told it's a perfect fit.

Ann has also extended an invitation (drumroll please) to blog at MarketingProfs Daily Fix as the handyman. I'm pleased to join an illustrious cast of bloggers including Mack Collier, Paul Dunay, Lewis Green, Valeria Maltoni and a number of others. To say that her invitation made my day is a huge understatement and I cannot tell you in just a few words how appreciative I am to be given this opportunity.

Not only that, I'm taking the handyman brand to Active Rain, the phenomenal real estate social network. You may know that I blogged there previously and they have welcomed me back with open arms. Again, I'm very appreciative to be rejoining that group and look forward to the opportunity.

Plans for building the brand also include an email newsletter containing tips and practical advice on using social media for marketing purposes. More to come on that.

Just When You Thought Youd Heard Everything

How to analyze memory leaks on Windows

We use valgrind to find memory leaks in MySQL on Linux. The tool is a convenient, and often enlightening way of finding out where the real and potential problems are location.

On Windows, you dont have valgrind, but Microsoft do provide a free native debugging tool, called the user-mode dump heap (UMDH) tool. This performs a similar function to valgrind to determine memory leaks.

Vladislav Vaintroub, who works on the Falcon team and is one of our resident Windows experts provides the following how-to for using UMDH:

1. Download and install debugging tools for Windows from here
   MS Debugging Tools
   Install 64 bit version if youre on 64 bit Windows and 32 bit version
   otherwise.

2. Change the PATH environment variable to include bin directory of Debugging tools.
   On my system, I added
   C:\Program Files\Debugging Tools for Windows 64-bit to the PATH.

3. Instruct OS to collect allocation stack for mysqld with gflags -i
mysqld.exe +ust.
   On Vista and later, this should be done in elevated command prompt,
   it requires admin privileges.

   Now collect the leak information. The mode of operation is that: take the
   heap snapshot once, and after some load take it once again. Compare
   snapshots and output leak info.

4. Preparation : setup debug symbol path.
   In the command prompt window, do

   set _NT_SYMBOL_PATH= srv*C:\websymbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols;G:\bzr\mysql-6.0\sql\Debug

   Adjust second path component for your needs, it should include directory
   where mysqld.exe is.

5. Start mysqld and run it for some minutes

6. Take first heap snapshot

   umdh -p:6768 -f:dump1

   Where -p:
   actually, PID of my mysqld was 6768.

7. Let mysqld run for another some minutes

8. Take second heap snapshot

   umdh -p:6768 -f:dump2

9. Compare snapshots

   umdh -v dump1 dump2 > dump.compare.txt

10. Examine the result output file. It is human readable, but all numbers are
    in hex, to scare everyone except geeks.

11. gflags -i mysqld.exe -ust

    Instruct OS not to collect mysqld user mode stacks for allocations
    anymore.

These are 10 steps and it sounds like much work, but in reality it takes 15
minutes first time you do it and 5 minutes next time.

Additional information is given in Microsoft KB article about UMDH
KB 268343.

WebGuild Silicon Valley to Present Social Media Strategies Conference October 29th - 30th in San Francisco

Would You Tell Your Customers (and Your Employees) How Bad it is?

I confess it's been hard to cut through the myriad messages of alarm and preoccupation coming from every which way in the last couple of weeks, and think rationally. As a human who is highly invested in relationships, how all of the recent events are connected has impacted me to varying degrees.

If you have time, do listen to Warren Buffet's conversation with Charlie Rose, it will be time well spent (54"). (hat tip to Tony, CEO of Zappos.com)

This week we will talk about the role of mentors and leaders in our professional lives,with the benefits spilling over the personal arena. 

One of the reasons why companies are having such a hard time with social media is an innate inability to look less than perfect to the public. There is an image the organization has spent considerable time building and maintaining as part of its branding efforts in ads, PR, web copy, brochures, etc. Why would it be different with blogs? Debbie Weil wrote about corporate blogs on the economic crisis, what crisis? analyzing a few of the blogs she follows.

Companies do want to look and sound like they have their act together. Less than that and they would undermine the confidence of their customers and employees. Yet, as Weil points out, this is an opportunity lost. Many companies have much to tell us, or can educate us, on what this all means.

Having been involved in internal communications, I know that starting a dialogue with employees about where things stand and giving them the opportunity to ask questions can be good for an organization. This is a difficult task for leaders, as they may not really have all the facts, or may not know the ripple effects of the current situation downstream. However, burying your head in the sand and pretending that all is peachy, as my British friends used to say, may ultimately be worse.

Timing is not ideal - many companies are in the midst of budget season negotiations. Consider that it is in times of need and distress that leaders are born - individuals and companies. There is never greater opportunity as that earned in uncertain times. It does not stop with employees. Too many companies are still running on the mindset that "we keep it all in the family".

Have that conversation with your customers. Get closer to them. Take this opportunity to put things in perspective for them, share how you add value. Honest, candid conversations can cast a business into a good light. We are after all social creatures. This is an opportunity to showcase operations and customer service groups who have truly served customers. Today at Fast Company Expert blog, I talk about the top ten customer service success factors. Customer service is your business best bet.

Would you tell your customers and employees the truth about where things are? Why? Why not?

[image of E.M. Escher Crystal Ball, Stephanie Cates]

Society for New Communications Research Announces "SNCR Byte"

Angel Island Fire

Hell is Freezing Over: What´s The ROI On That?

Guest post by Shonali Burke, ABC

However, this chilly state of affairs does bring, it seems to me, some golden opportunities for communicators who are willing to put their money where their mouth is. The goose that’s going to lay your FDIC-insured egg is measurement.

Impressions Don't Cut It Anymore

Now, more than ever, clients and organizations are going to be looking for communicators who understand how to connect communications directly to business objectives, and use their PR savvy to impact the bottom line. Yes, we all say we do that – after all, it’s one of the cornerstones of strategic communication planning – but do we really? Aren’t a significant number of us still relying on impressions (and, even worse, multipliers) and clip books to make our case? No wonder, then, that PR is the first department to go when the going gets tough.

Need Help Getting Started?

Educate yourself. If you'd asked me eight years ago, I'd have tried to express PR measurement in terms of ad value equivalency. I knew instinctively there was more to it than that. Fortunately, my path crossed with that of Katie Delahaye Paine, justly called the measurement queen. (Disclosure: I am a former client of Katie's company, KD Paine & Partners, and received an award from them in 2006). Katie's forgotten more about measurement than I and 98% of us will ever know. There's no better way to get started than to educate yourself by using the often-free resources she, and several other measurement thought-leaders, provide.

What are your measurable objectives? I recently judged the final round of a significant regional awards program, and was alarmed at how few of the entries identified solid, quantifiable objectives as part of their communications plans. You do this in your day-to-day life, right? I want to lose 15 lbs. before the holidays; or I will go to the gym at least three times a week; for example and you judge your success or failure based on how you measure up. There's no excuse for not doing that on a business level.

What are your marketing team's key performance indicators; or KPIs? PR people are usually not directly responsible for sales (or, in the case of non-profits, donations). But you must still understand what kinds of ROI your marketing team is looking for, and correlate your communications outcomes (and therefore programs) to those. You need to show how you're adding value to your organization, be it through growing donations (a KPI for non-profits), retaining customers, increasing web traffic, increasing engagement, and so on. And make sure you get the data on KPIs from other departments to correlate your outcomes to. That's why the measurement program I implemented at the ASPCA is receiving a Certificate of Merit at IPR's Jack Felton Golden Ruler Awards program later this week.

Change is never easy, is it? But this is the one change we have to implement in our profession. Otherwise, when Hell freezes over, we might not be able to pickaxe our way out from down under.

Shonali Burke, ABC, was named one of the top "40 Under 40" PR professionals in the U.S. by PRWeek in 2007. A self-confessed measurement fiend, she is currently submerging herself in social media, web analytics and other extra-curricular activities while taking a sabbatical to ponder the next stage of her career. Owned by three former shelter dogs, Shonali lives with her husband in the Washington, D.C., metro area.

The Sharepoint Sessions – What the Implementers are Saying

I recently attended a local event sponsored by Knowledge Management Associates, “Real World Sharepoint Experiences.” Having been through a few of these myself in the past, I wanted to see the latest thinking on what it is likely the largest platform for enterprise 2.0 in terms of users. Last year Microsoft sold over 1B$ (US) of Sharepoint. Some may argue whether Sharepoint is really enterprise 2.0 but that is their goal and they are increasingly moving in this direction. I posted my notes on the Fast Forward blog. Here are the four posts. Comments are welcome as I know that Sharepoint is controversial. Here is the Sharepoint blog.

The Sharepoint Sessions – Part One – Dispatches from the Front Lines

The Sharepoint Sessions – Part Two – Training Approaches

The Sharepoint Sessions – Part Three – Sharepoint Best Practices Conference

The Sharepoint Sessions – Part Four – Upcoming Sharepoint Investment Areas

RIP Web 2.0

On October 10, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington wrote some pretty harsh words (accompanied bythisimage) but they were words that many of us wholeheartedly agree with. He was the one who stood tall and brave, the spokesperson if you will for all of us who saw this coming:

"Goodbye, Web 2.0. I hope I never have to type those words again. Now can we please get back to work?"

Truth be known, Kim Kobza uttered those same words at least twelve months ago. So Michaels words hold a special affinity for mea sigh of relief that alas, the time is here and we can all get down to business. Which is exactly what weve been preparing for.

Weve readied our company. Weve addressed a market hungry for something more than hype. We publicly began sounding the warning before a captive audience of global leaders, Web 2.0 enthusiasts and venture capitalists in Palo Alto last July, as Dan Miller took center stage: When youre wondering whats beyond 2.0 - and if youre not there yet, you soon will be its worth taking a closer look at Neighborhood America because were already there.

Weve authored blogs and papers that were well ahead of their time (Ive copied an excerpt from one of my favorite papers below). Ironic that the words in this image that accompanies Michael Arrington's post are the exact words I chose to title that paper six months ago. The currency of todays world is particularly astonishing not because we take any pleasure whatsoever in the state of our economy or in the fate of any of those shown in the video below enjoyinga last hoorah in Cyprus earlier this month, but because the time for a much-needed transformation has arrived.

View the followingvideo titled Official Bursting of Web 2.0 Bubble and youll see why its time we say goodbye to the hype, and hello to a new way of driving business forward. The CliffsNotes version of our RIP Web 2.0 viewpoint is copied below the video and provides a good place to start.

RIP Web 2.0

Executives in business and government are trying hard to understand how to apply Web 2.0 paradigms to business processes often with superficial reasoning from the Web 2.0 technology community.

What is missing, and strikingly so, is how many of these discussions are void of the value of the networks being created. By focusing on the technology - that is blogs, wikis, forums, chats and other pieces or application those within the technology community are doing a disservice to the businesses that are turning to us for answers and guidance. Because the truth is, no community built on Web 2.0 hype will ever thrive.

John Maloney, co-founder of The Value Networks Consortium, recently got to the heart of this very issue. His assertion is that more than 90% of communities formed around blogs, wikis, forums, chats, etc. will fail dismally. Why? Because they are not networks, rather they are routine electronic recordkeeping.

Resulting from the continued quest to identify business value from social networks, perhaps one of the biggest movements happening in the world today is the germ of understanding that engagement and listening can drive value in all manner of processes.

In other words, rather than following the prevalent Web 2.0 thinking that we are aggregating people and relationships, the more sophisticated understanding is the need to place purpose at the center of networks, and then organize people and content around that purpose.This is the value network enabling connections with those who can better your organizations (customers, employees, partners, shareholders) and empowering them through technology.

Value networks are not Web 2.0 communities. The value network thinking is the new lens for engaging with what always has been. John Maloney summarizes: All seasoned executives are experts at using an important social network pattern but they call it an org chart. All managers have informal networks. They know thats what runs their organizations and creates wealth. They depend on them heavily. Value networks just make them visible, optimal, negotiable.

With value networks, we are recombining intangibles (from informal networks) with tangibles, through new technology. Technology is the enabler that allows us to effectively increase our capacity to influence, respond and engage well with others.

Far more advanced than flashy Web 2.0 applications or widgets, the infrastructures that support value networks are carefully-engineered systems that support not only collaboration but also provide the pre-requisite automation to make the complex look simple to users just trying to get a job done, according to Charles Ehin.

Key is the ability to support all types of networks internal networks that harness the collective intelligence of employees, partners or shareholders collaborating to achieve a goal or solve a problem; external networks that leverage the ideas and input from potentially millions; or any hybrid of the two.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, Web 2.0 is dead. While it has ushered in a new era of interaction, societal behaviors and expectations, and some of the most profound technological advancements in history, it has run its course. What IS happening is the fundamental social reorientation of business and civil society. Economics is a subordinate branch of sociology. Its what makes value networks so important. Its why individual mastery of network optimization is such a critical capability of the 21st Century.

While theres no shortage of Web 2.0 offerings and companies in the marketplace, only one or two will emerge with the vision, understanding and capabilities that will be required to usher in this new way of doing business one that will optimize the underlying value of networks to drive business results.