This Ain't your Mother's Craft Fair

This weekend i headed over to the Renegade Holiday Craft Fair in San Francisco. In general i love crafty gatherings, from the beloved summer street fairs to special events like the one i went to today, i always get inspired and of course find some scores that i would never fine anywhere else.

One thing that i noticed is that this wasn't your typical holiday craft fair of yesteryear. Here are some of the highlights:

- Many reclaimed items made from recycled materials- these crafters are reusing materials from drum symbols and skateboards (yes i got me one of those) to vintage chair upholstery and creating beautiful items

- Almost every vendor had a Square (or similar) credit card reader- no more 'i don't have enough cash'- a good thing because some things were quite high-end and costly

- and last , more and more i am becoming a fan of etsy- the craft fair was a in person etsy convention- the majority of the vendors i took a close look at had an etsy store.

So aside from some new things i bought, i am also feeling pretty crafty- with a stayaction coming up for the holidays i am looking forward to some creative time- now off to look around the house for items that i can reclaim and get started with.

The Dead of a Pair of Pumps and How Dreamforce has Become an Executive Conference

I have been going to Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference for about 7 years in one form or another- from a full conference attendee, to a expo vendor, a virtual attendee and a keynote/expo attendee which i did again this year. Moscone center is nearby the office and I find it extremely valuable to attend conferences- great for networking and for seeing and hearing first hand what the big vendors or technologies are coming up with.

Last night after putting the baby to sleep, I was catching up on my work after spending the majority of the day at dreamforce and was watching the tweet stream from #df11. It was late and the conference attendees where at the Metallica gala concert. Pretty entertaining tweets- from 'they handed out earplugs as we walked in' to the always entertaining @jowyang 's tweet:

But these funny observations was something I had noticed myself- a lot of suits and slick back hair. Now I am not against this (maybe the slick back hair I don't particularly like but whatever it's better then a mullet)- and I myself wear 'proper' business dress to all conferences since I am always running into clients. But I thought the conference looked like more business types then before (I refuse to believe that developers are wearing suits now a days- but they seem to have upgraded to the standard valley dress of khaki's and button downs).

My friend Kevin Marks, who is now at Salesforce and was wearing a snazy jacket, pointed out that Dreamforce11 had all the developer sessions in Moscone West while the business sessions where in Moscone North - we were chatting in the north area and I agreed - and there were a lot of suits there.

With 47,000 attendees, there was a different feeling- Dreamforce seems to me to be a growing must attend for top execs- from the hallway and expo floor conversations I observed . I am sure the developers sessions are still important but the "visionary" stuff that Marc Benioff (CEO) is pushing seems to be working on these guys (yes mostly guy- and yes it was nice to see Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts on stage and loved her talk on the Social Enterprise). All the keynotes are now available on YouTube.

Anyway- on the way from Moscone West to Moscone North through the massive crowds- a street grate got the best of my most beloved shoes- the ones I wear to every conference because they are the most comfortable- I would say that over the years (do I dare admit that these shoes at around 10yrs old?!!)- these shoes have seen hundreds of keynotes and strolled through miles and miles of expo halls- from the small intimate conferences like the beloved defrag to the biggie 'close out Disney World' Gartner conferences.

I will miss you dear shoes.

PS: for those lady friends of mine who we have discussed that the Shoe Mender is a girl's best friend and good shoes are worth fixing and over again. This pair has spent its share of time at the shoe repair shop- this morning as I walked past Jack's shoe repair on market street on the way to the office I suddenly almost had a change of heart- but no their time has come. (Sounds like a trip to DSW is called for!)

Notes from my 5 Minutes of Internal Twitter Fame

I had five minutes to share some 'best practices' and 'real-life' twittering stories with my fellow co-workers on an internal Twitter 101 Session that our Social Media Marketing Manager put together. The attendees where mostly sales and marketing colleagues. It is a relatively new program we have in place, and i applaud them for taking this step. They went through general how-tos which would be useful for any new user.

My notes outline follows at the request of @tjsweeney to share some context of what i talked about.

• I have been tweeting since March 2007, currently have 2,811 followers (since the presentation it has gone up to 2821) and have over 4,000 tweets (so tweeting for 1601 days so an average of 2.5 tweets a day)
  
• I started tweeting during the famous 2007 SXSW Twitter tipping point- where Twitter hit 'mainstream' well the mainstream of Silicon valley that is. During that conference, tweets went from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000 tweets per day. We all shook our heads and said how will i manage all this? Today there are over 200 million tweets per day. I still find value every day in my tweet stream.
• I use Twitter to be smarter, hopefully provide some value to my followers and to help me build my personal 'brand'
• How do i let people know i tweet? Beyond engaging with them if they are on Twitter, i link at bottom of my corporate and personal email (currently linking to my aboutme page) and also tie it into my LinkedIn account- when i tweet it gets posted there- provides a somewhat different follower list
• I currently use Tweetdeck to manage my streams, Blackberry Twitter or Twitter Ipad when i am on the road. Flipboard i use mostly in the evenings to catch up on my evening 'tweets' and deeper reads
  
• Have various saved searches on Tweetdeck (e.g. Competitive Intelligence, Librarians, Supply Chain, Enterprise Sales, semantic web) and follow companies and people who are prospects/clients or just plain smart peeps.
  
• Lists are very helpful, and there are a lot of wonderfully curated lists or you can create your own and make them private or public
  
• Hashtags- for example to follow a conference like #sla2011 , even if you are not there you can still 'attend' and interact
• I use bit.ly to shorten my URLs and find their tracking data very valuable to see how many clicked on my link.
• I have many Clients who follow me- i can see that they follow me but they also tell me- often before a meeting starts instead of talking about the weather we might talk about a certain tweet i made earlier in the day- and vice versa- i try not to get on the phone with a client without checking their 'output channel'
  
• I have clients who Direct Message (DM) me and i might do the same to them i find the engagement and response rate to be much higher
• To my last point, Twitter has a big vanity aurora around it. regardless of who you are you want to see who retweeted, @ed you, DMd you , favortied your tweet- instantaneously
• I spend a lot of time finding (mostly through google search although i recently found the twitter advanced search feature) and listening to what prospects may be saying . One thing i try to do sometimes is wait for someone to tweet something - then i know they are in front of a device (laptop,mobile,table etc.)- per my previous vanity point, they want to see who replied. i might not reply through twitter because what i want to talk to them about is not a conversation to start there - but i might send an email or give them a ring because i can assume they are working on their 'device' and are connected
  

My last point and probably the most important for people in sales and marketing was to be authentic. For example, i follow our Twitter brand accounts , i retweet things from the Dow Jones twitter accounts that MY followers will find valuable not as an advertising . I have seen others do a dis-service to themselves and the company by blatantly retweeting or promoting product specific things and nothing else. It is ok for the brand twitter account to do that but your personal account needs a good mix of personal and business.

Tweet away my friends.

The Flipboard Experience Will Become a Regular Way to Consume Content

Here is a prediction: It might not be called Flipboard- but the Flipboard experience will become a format for publishing content, just like today content producers publish content in PDF, Word documents, video embeds, etc.

This weekend here in the Bay area was nothing special thanks to all the rain. We certainly need it so the rain was welcomed and did stay away from most of the Neil Young Bridge School Benefit on Saturday which was nice since that was the only outside plans i had. So Sunday was a perfect day to sit on the couch (when the baby was napping) and spend some quality time with the iPad. Flipboard continues to be my favorite and most used App on my iPad (that is my own usage otherwise it is Angry Birds and Peek-a-boo Barn- you decided which one is addicted to what ;-)

I really enjoy the experience of using Flipboard- if you haven't had the pleasure i have embedded a well done video that will show you the general idea of how Flipboard works. The idea is that Flipboard becomes a living changing social magazine- of things that you are interested in and your network is pushing to you. The content of course is only as good as the 'feeds' you add/follow, and the network you currently follow on twitter and facebook- but the interaction with the content is just beautiful.

Aside from the interaction with the content being visually stimulating, i think it is the alignment with how i enjoy and productively consume content- yes many times i still print out things to read because on a flat screen i have troubles consuming it, the Flipboard experience i think changes that.

Now applications like CoverPad who has a new add-on for Wordpress are coming out with tools to make your content act like Flipboard which i think will lead to other tools that will easily allow content produces to provide a Flipboard like experience for their content consumers.

Imagine a user using a tablet with touch screen visits:

• your corporate website, they quickly flip through your product offerings, customer stories etc.
• your employees visit your corporate intranet and flip through articles from corporate (video included), HR announcements, sales wins, product brochures, proposals etc. (how cool would a SharePoint add-on be??)
  
• your customers visit your retail store, (e.g. REI, Nordstroms) and flip through your catalogs.
• Your daily newsletters (internal and external) are sent out and the content consumers interact with them by flipping through current and past 'issues'
• Any many other ways....

Content creation will need to be richer on the production side so producers need to think about that, just like Instapaper and other "read it later" services i believe will change the way online content is written.



Some of you may say, hey Daniela isn't this something the Client Solutions group at Dow Jones can do? Well yes, i sent a note out to corporate a couple weeks back and heard crickets- but we have a lot going on so i need to re-ping. Plus the way we work best (and fast) is to have a client who wants/needs. So i need to find a good use case that we can test this on!

My ebooks now self 'published' on Scribd

Finally got around to uploading my ebooks to Scribd which is a service that provides social reading and publishing that has a easy to use interface for users and content owners.

The following two ebooks i wrote while working at Dow Jones (where i am still currently). One is about Hybrid Approaches to taxonomies and folksonomies in the enterprise that came out in 2008 and the other one is about how social media is changing the enterprise which i co-wrote with Robert Scoble, Shel Israel and Greg Merkle in 2009.
~enjoy!
The Taxonomy Folksonomy Cookbook: Finding the Right Recipe for Organizing Metadata

You can also view the French Version of the Taxonomy Folksonomy ebook.

Conversational Corporation: How Social Media is Changing the Enterprise

You can also view the French version of the Conversational Corporation ebook.

More Twitterers Following then Getting their Fingers Dirty with Newspaper Print

Currently the New York Times has fewer print readers than Twitter followers.

"The last set of figures released, on 31st March 2010, put the New York Times’ print circulation at 951,063 and reports this week say revenue from circulation is in decline. However, with 2.6 million followers, the paper’s Twitter account is a roaring success. Particularly when you compare it to its rivals."

Following on Twitter could be something pretty passive especially for people who follow many, while physically picking up a paper (and having to go to the store to buy even more) is definitely not passive. I think a more interesting statistic to compare to print readers would be what the referring traffic is from Twitter to the New York Times site and engagement time- how long does a consumer spend reading the physical paper and how long does a vistior that comes from Twitter spend on NYTimes.com?

Image|Flickr|Jarjan

Creative Interesting Work on the Internet

The world is full of interesting things that intersect with technology on the internet. Every once in a while if you have good filters (for me it is usually real humans i follow on twitter) you get interesting links that will bring you to a site that will wow- you. This presentation from the Creative Lab at Google has over 100 'interesting' things on the web- from a combination of pure technology to interaction with 'real' life, art, music etc.

Make sure you use full Screen version for best experience since the embed below plays and the full version you can control easier.



It has a lot of content in it- and a bit hard to consume. A couple of things i would have been liked which i believe are just limitations of Google docs:

• The ability to link to specific pages , the URL is static for the whole presentation. There is a move to slide feature but you can't link to specific slides.
  
• Someway to record the slide # you like- besides the stickie on my desk
  
• A table of Contents (probably not a technical limitation just a manual process for 120 slides that a google creative person probably would rather not spend time doing!)- but even the top level categories (Audio,Tech, Sports, Politics, Books, History, etc.) could have been valuable to get through the entire presentation