Conversation Agent

Getting Things Done

With the new year now in full swing and the recent holidays already an almost distant memory, everyone is pushing to get things done.

The dozen calls with sales pitches I used to receive by mid-morning show the redoubled efforts - they are as many more.

There is an insistence, an urgency in the voices, the messages and the emails. Not quite desperation, but very close to it.

The type is bolder, the voice is more forceful. Everyone is shouting - pick me, buy my stuff, sign up here! The sense of urgency is good, the energy is misplaced.

Because what is louder than a shout? A whisper. Social media is a way to get next to your customer and speak only with them. Whispering is intimate. It's done up close. And it's closely related to listening.

Getting things done is good - but are they the right things?

With so much noise and so little signal these days, it's getting easier to tell what is not going to work - for those who are paying attention, who are dialed in it is quite obvious. Not so for the others. They are busy turning the volume up even louder and diminishing their returns with it.

There needs to be balance between getting things done and leading.

Whenever things swing one way, there can be a big backlash - too many leaders and nothing gets done. Too many people getting things done and nobody is leading. I included the magic quadrant up top. Feel free to use it as a reminder that it is within our control to care for the micro-interactions.

Micro-interactions become the context in which customers experience us. By customers I mean everyone you touch in a day. If we care to excel at executing the balance in small ways, we can scale to envelop entire businesses, and the marketing results that go with them.

We're human, we like to copy what others are doing - let's start by giving people the right things to copy.

Da Vinci was a Change Agent, Are You?

Leonardo da Vinci was a change agent. You probably know it already, it's worth repeating. At the time of birth, you are endowed with the same potential he had. Today, we need more than genius to make things happen though.

We need collaboration and co-creation at the highest levels. In the conceptual age, there is a lot of brain power at all levels in organizations, cities, and countries. Are we open to collaborating across such expanses? There were two readings that led me to make the connection between change and Da Vinci - they seem unrelated, but are they?

Let's take a look.

The editorial page of the January/February 2009 issue of Foreign Policy magazine is titled "our change, his (Obama) challenge". That gave me pause. I think a more apt title would have been - our challenge is change. If indeed the country voted for change, it would behoove everyone to align behind it. And that will be a challenge. We know the reality is much more complex. Individual interests, balance of power, and global relations will need careful navigating.

Everyone is looking for the magic wand in business - we probably got used to the nice returns. It's important to set a distinction between what we hope for and what we can actually execute. It's important especially to note that distinction when we think and talk about marketing and social media. It's no magic wand. You put an increasingly disciplined and scientific approach like marketing into an environment that facilitates the free form nature of humans and what do you have?

Science and art - rationality and emotion.

One would think economics rational, yet markets are so very emotional. With recent events, we also rediscovered that we're all connected. Yet those connections are welcomed only when we can make that choice on our own - who we interact with, where we buy, what we favor, follow, add, support.

Change is harder to do than it is to talk about

One year ago, Dell announced it was going to form a super agency choosing WPP as the holding company responsible to help create such venture. We talked about it here as a potential answer to the woes of client-agency relations. Casey Jones, Dell's VP of marketing, told PRWeek in 2007,

"I've been striving for integration for twenty years, and I've decided to give it up. Because integration means you're trying to glue things together that are not organically part of the same thing. We're looking for an agency relationship where PR, media, Web site analytics, creative, planning are all fixed on one objective - shareholder value for Dell."

Is dis-integration an option? Perfect-world scenarios meet real world challenges.

There is only way way I know of to face that - working through it. I'm not picking on Dell/WPP. They had a very ambitious and aggressive goal and no doubt many feathers got ruffled in the process. The change was too visible, too public to succeed. On the other hand, Dell's social media strategy is right on the money. It has grown from individual efforts and gestures. One conversation at a time.

Chapter two is how does social media revolutionize the business infrastructure?

I discussed how Dell was using social media to regain its mojo in September of 2007. From that post:

It’s 2004 you are Dell computers and you’re king of the world. But to be frank, you were also a bit boring. A year ago, Dells had the reputation as the cheap, utilitarian PC that you buy when price is everything. Dell was the ultimate commodity brand – serviceable, cost-effective, and a little dull. Along comes HP. In the course of a couple of years, HP using superior retail channels muscled past Dell to capture the number one position in the consumer PC marketplace.

So how does Dell react?

With a change in leadership – Michael Dell taking the reins of the company again and he is talking about taking a long term view of the business he helped launch. One response was to begin selling Dell through traditional retail channels. Another was to start listening to what customers are really saying about their products.

That’s when Dell turned to social media.

My conversation with Dell began after the publication of the Top Ten Reasons why your customer service fails in early July. Richard Binhammer in the corporate communications group at Dell sent me an email to volunteer his experience in using social media. [read the rest here]

The rest is the sum total of decisions that got Dell to being king of the social media execution. And I, too could be Richard @ Dell. A business needs to want to make that change for it to work. And for business I mean the people in it - at every level, collaborating and co-creating that change. That is a tougher proposition. And don't think that it's easier with services than it is with physical products. Can a company design a business through interactions?

Art and Science

Marketers are still looking for the definitive way to tie their work into business functions like market share and direct sales. The relationships between metrics, measurement and success are still quite undefined. Because now we must also start to ask - what are the right things to be measured? We are indeed all suffering from a glut of unrelated marketing messages - then again, unrelated may not be a bad thing with social media where experience is a-la-carte.

Our challenge is change. Whenever we consider writing anything, the hard part is coming up with the ideas, doing the writing is easy. Making things happen is quite the opposite - coming up with the ideas of what we don't like or want to change is fairly easy. It's the execution part that gives us pause. Yet the writing is on the wall.

In an interconnected world, it may turn out that getting change done is more art than science. It takes intuition and experience, the ability to broker - actually inspire - and attract relationships, along with superb unrelenting work. The art of conversation may just be the imperfect rescue the perfect world of expertise and science needs at the moment. 

Yes, economists will need to revise the models and methods unquestioned during the boom years. It will force them to produce new tools suited to a new era and reinvigorate their thinking by borrowing more intensively from other disciplines such as psychology and political science, writes Moises Naim, editor in chief of Foreign Policy in the closing article. 

Our marketing strategies and tactics are also bankrupt. We need not just fresh ideas to bail out the profession. We need marketers and communicators to lead the creation of what's next, not simply come up with solutions to patch what is now. We need to borrow from other disciplines and learn to be more like Da Vinci - inventors, scientists, change agents, opinion leaders. 

[Leonardo da Vinci 1515 AD depicted parabolic mirrors in his now famous cryptic diagrams]

Passion

Teams and communities are held together by the glue called passion.

This is the topic of a recent ChangeThis manifesto by Dr. Mani Sivasubramanian - a heart surgeon, Internet infopreneur, and social entrepreneur whose passion for helping children with congenital heart defects receive life-saving treatment resulted in building an online business that grows and thrives on its purpose.

Passion should be one of the 4 new P's of marketing, along with purpose. What do you think?

Product, Purpose, Passion, Performance

I've written about passion two years ago using Ferrari, the car made in my home town, as the metaphor of made in Italy: ignites passion and emotion. Which translates into high performance, by design.

The most amazing executions give us that kind of experience - or rather we infuse our own experience into them. Let's take another look at that list:

1. Vote for yourself –- know what you want and what you need and then go get it. Be confident in your skill even when you are tempted not to like what you see. We’re all kind of funny seen from the inside out.
2. Unleash your passion –- don’t let things you don’t know or don’t understand get in the way: learn them, join them. "But each time I seemed to be climbing into a roller coaster and finding myself coming through the downhill run with that sort of dazed feeling that we all know." [Enzo Ferrari]
3. Listen with one ear and forget with the other –- you are in the driver seat, you decide what makes sense keeping.
4. Stay soft on the people, including yourself –- on your way anywhere, you will meet mates and you’ll meet the other kind. To some people you’ll be but a blip on their radar, to some you’ll be a source of great inspiration. Know the difference, you are accountable for it. Remain human, don’t keep score, it bogs you down.
5. Develop stamina –- think of yourself as a marathon runner. Don’t look at the time, build on the distance. "Aerodynamics are for people who can't build engines." [Enzo Ferrari]
6. Take risks –- invest in your vision, explore the opportunities. When you go for safety, you shop at that price. "As bend followed bend, I discovered his secret. Nuvolari entered the bend somewhat earlier than my driver's instinct would have told me to." [Enzo Ferrari]
7. Design your context –- chisel away all the marble and what you have is the masterpiece. Edit down as appropriate, sculpt your experience - you decide.
8. Have a “to be” list –- be interested, adaptable, and open to new ideas, including yours. Many call this attitude, I call it spirit (Lat. spiritus = breath).
9. Stage and experience –- and you will learn something new every time. This is not rehearsal, it’s the real deal. Go at it with gusto and panache. The verb perform is built into performance.
10. Be very clear that you will succeed –- and you will.

Performance is a highly emotional business. Emotion (Lat. ex = out + motio = movement) leads to action. Passion leads to performance.

Dr. Sivasubramanian says passion is energy, it shatters barriers, it hates apathy, it shakes you up, it's positive and it comes in flavors. Passion is more - it's contagious it fuels longevity and it's satisfying. From the manifesto:

Behind every successful operation, be it business or non-profit, personal or social, small or big,
there is a person or group fired by passion. A burning ambition to see change happen or results
achieved—and unwilling to let anything stand in their way. 

Passion keeps you going. No matter how long it takes. No matter how hard the path is. 
No matter how hopeless the outcome seems.

Here's another definition of passion I found in my early authoring days. What's yours?

Real Collaboration

Real collaboration to me is where there's no need to know who's up front. Everyone is working side by side. Given the fact that we are creatures of imitation, it helps when the tone is set from the highest levels - what do you want to change in the world? Change happens whether we like it or not. It happened in the last several years. We did not like it, today.

What are we going to do about it?

With collaboration we can make that change more expansive and at the same time better focused; more responsive and less cumbersome. Collaboration also leads to community. To build a community we need to be willing to educate and connect individuals, and have the desire to take action at the appropriate times.

Marketing needs a serious reboot. In its current form it's a broken, bankrupt nuisance afflicted with the myopia of the perennial short term gratification and now starving because of it. There is no sustainability in that - it's a bubble waiting to burst, and your brand with it.

Real collaboration needs contribution, commitment and championing. To be sustainable, it needs to be embedded in the core principles that move us to action. I was reading a well-written post by Joel Makower where he is pondering the sustainable consumption conundrum and wanted to highlight a couple of points he makes about the WBCSD's newest report with my annotations:

• Innovation — "Business processes for the development of new and improved products, services, and business models are shifting to incorporate provisions for delivering maximum societal value at minimum environmental cost," says the report. We are indeed beginning to see a less packaged, more efficient world.

What does innovation look like in marketing with collaboration? If we take contribution, commitment and championing as the model - I'm thinking co-creation, co-distribution, and co-marketing. What other ideas do you have?

• Choice Influencing — this is where it gets interesting. Creating sustainable marketing practices and business models by working in partnership with consumers and other key stakeholders. The goal is to demonstrate that these practices can deliver deliver superior results at the best prices, and to use marketing communications to make that connection with choice and behavior.

Is this too idealistic? We talk about influentials, yet the needle seems to be creeping to making real change from all that influence. Could it be because we do not yet understand how to do collaboration through community and networks of influence?

• Choice Editing — Eliminating unsustainable practices, tactics, processes, and business models in partnership with other actors, such as media channels. The challenge I see immediately with this point is that of scale. Can there be mass collaboration? Only when each individual self-interest is served through making that very same choice.

When I wrote about Twitter as a social network, I highlighted how it encourages and engages certain features of our nature that are essential to our social lives - the adaptive, the imitating and the cooperative. Would these characteristics conspire to help with collaborative editing?

Marketing is about understanding what customers want and helping deliver it. But delivering the relevant response might involve having to make fundamental changes in the way the business works. Often marketing does not have real influence inside a business - especially if that happens to be a B2B. So much so, that you'd have to break the glass in case of marketing.

Can real collaboration help with delivering better insights, better products, services and experiences? Real collaboration requires more of us. Are we willing to do things differently to test that? If you have done it, feel free to borrow that seal  but only if the credit goes to the whole team and especially if that team goes across departments to start.

Memo to Obama: Remake the Bully Pulpit

When asked what advice would you give the new President by Reader's Digest, Michael D. McCurry responded "remake the bully pulpit". McCurry, who was White House press secretary between 1995 and 1998 says:

Nothing will help your presidency or threaten its success more than how well you communicate with the American people. The "bully pulpit" of the presidency (as Theodore Roosevelt called it) needs a remake for the 21st century because we are still using communication techniques that date back to the first President Roosevelt.

He then proceeds to offer the following advice, which is also great advice for companies:

(1) abolish the practice of holding a single televised daily press briefing by the White House press secretary - instead, the presidential press secretary needs to orchestrate a great symphony of public information. More data and facts need to get out the door. Less spin and "message control."

Try this in your organization as well - let the experts comment on what they know best, explain to employees and customers your product and services with simplicity and immediacy. Quarterly CEO web casts are great but in this day and age they need to be supplemented with a robust diet of what is going on in the marketplace.

When you orchestrate a symphony of information with data, facts, stories from the trenches, you help all stakeholders see what is going on and make better decisions as supporting actors for the business.

(2) make the White House more like the West Wing - actually he recommends reality shows as a thought. More transparency will restore trust in government.

When I talk about transparency in business, I get the look, you know, that look that says, yeah, in your dreams - our competitors will copy us. There is no way they can do it better than you can. Here's why:

If you go ahead and copy what your competitors are doing without seeing what is behind their strategy, part of which is cultural, you will bomb. Aside from the fact that we know that trying to be something you are not is not such a good idea, your prospects already have your competitor in mind when they think of solving that particular problem. Go read Positioning by Al Ries & Jack Trout, it's a classic, it's still not being done by most.

(3) make sure other agencies of government and the other branches on Capitol Hill and the Supreme Court get equal time - get the media to focus on other places where critical work is happening in the name of the American people.

This means having many more competent communicators across the organization. I'm liking this one a lot as well. It may also mean that as a leader, you will need to connect that information, provide context and perspective, illuminate the issues and point to the actions.

What advice would you add for remaking the "bully pulpit"?

Bonus link: Steve Rubel points us to Obama's lessons for PR professionals and marketers - I would add for all business leaders.

7 Observations and a Challenge to Marketing Types

Seven is a prime number and the sum of the first four Fibonacci numbers. There are seven colors of the rainbow, seven days in the week, seven continents, and seven directions: north, south, east, west, up, down, center. The seven new wonders of the world voted online in what was said to be the largest poll ever included the Colosseum in Rome.

This is my response to the recent meme that has been making the rounds - thanks to Marc Meyers, Michael Haberman, Brian Branca, and Annie Hackenberger for thinking of me. You will forgive me, I tend not to follow the rules too closely.

Instead let's have a conversation about some observations on execution, which I do think will be the one must for 2009.

As we discussed yesterday, we are now using collective filtering tools and visualizations with teams and networks to discover patterns in large, complex systems faster - and trigger faster collective responses.
Twitter is just one example of how that works. There are plenty of other ways - online and off line.

1) Real depends on the point of view - for example, whether you listen to Gary Vaynerchuk or find Alfonso Cevola amazingly insightful and interesting, they are both wine guys and they both feel real. I connect better with the Italian Wine Guy, for many reasons. Do you know what's real for your customers? What's their point of view?

2) Right depends on context - we are not ready to be sold to until we're ready to buy. What's right then depends on timing and frame of mind. That's why relationships are so important and why you must have a different approach - the world is not waiting for your message anymore. It's looking for inspiration, education, engagement, connection (or dis-connection).

3) Respect is earned - why would anyone pay attention to you when you are not paying attention to them? The old ways of marketing are definitely on the decline. Respect is earned every day. People have long memories - your actions will follow you long after the troubles are gone. 

4) Truth depends on personal values - if we become better listeners, we will learn to embrace the truths of our customers and communities. Having values and beliefs of our own is important as long as we are not hardened around them or hold them as a weapon.

5) Patience is a virtue - especially if you're going to do things your way. Staying on purpose is more important than staying on message. People respond well to the former, not so readily to the latter. Better yet, make your purpose the message - it's like making the product your marketing.

6) Failure is not terminal - you might however feel like you're forever waiting at a terminal if you are so afraid to make a mistake that you're not even trying. Ask yourself: what is the worst that could happen? Nothing happens as a result of so many marketing programs. Try something different.

7) Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship - yes, even from those who tell you they "hate" people who criticize. Sweet irony, but we are terrible at taking our own advice. Craftsmanship takes time. How about all of those competitive ads? Use kind words or no words at all. Stand on your own merits.

My personal challenge to you marketing types (aren't we all in marketing these days anyway?) is:

How can we raise above the fray? How can we use our gifts and talents to lead instead of following?

How can we show respect to our customers (and each other - we are all different and bring something valuable to the table) so that we may be fully engaged and inspire engagement?

How can we work together to built a support grid for commerce and people to thrive? As Tom Peters puts so well, it's always "the people". How can we help create a better world? Not just sell one.

- Merry Christmas -

[image courtesy of Darwin Bell]

Do CMOs Understand "Brand"?

Over the years I have found many an agency that was willing to give companies exactly what they were looking for - to sell Brand as the Holy Grail of marketing, the appropriate packaging and spin included.

This dis-connect comes probably from many of the factors I will point out in a moment. We are looking for science and certainty in the wrong places.

I have been reflecting upon how Mark Earls, a highly respected brand guru, articulated thoughts from his own experience in an interview with Hugh MacLeod at Gapingvoid. The quoted part with a bit of editing (emphasis mine):

Let's start with the good stuff about "Brand": it's clearly a popular idea, it's spread far and wide into politics and self-help books. It's useful, in that it allows us to talk about the cluster of stuff that floats around reputation and perception and so on. It looks like we can measure it because it's something that seems like folk out there in Consumerland can talk about.

So what's wrong with it: well, first of all "Brand" is a metaphor. It's not a thing, even though we talk about it as if it were: it's a way of talking as if.

Second, it's a fat-metaphor: there is no agreed definition, so we can use it to mean just about anything we want - to pre- or proscribe whatever we want. Most brand conversations need an agreed set of definitions or...

Third, "Brand" is what you get as a result of doing great, not a good guide to what to do - it's the scoreboard, not the game.

Fourth, "Brand" is a distraction from the main game, which is doing great stuff for customers and staff ("baking it in", as for example the Zeus Jones go on about). P***ing about in Brandland is a good excuse not to really get to grips with the stuff you need to get to grips with, and it tends to lead you off into "communications" rather than actually doing something.

Fifth, "Brand" perpetuates the myths we like to hold tight to, about the power of marketing and communication - sometimes when you hear brand folk talk, they seem to imagine they are sorcerers and magicians, weaving binding spells and illusions. More often than not, they like to use military metaphors. The truth of course is that mostly were neither of these things and have a marginal effect at best.

If you read the rest of the interview, you will find that Mark proposed an alternative to talking about brand as the end-all/be-all - the purpose-idea. It seems pretty simple, the purpose-idea explains to customers why they should buy your product or service and it tells employees why they come in early and stay late. There is nothing very strategic about passion, and engagement, and sentiments like those. They just are.

When you think about what business you're in, the best way to articulate it is not a long list of what you do, even when that is carefully researched and crafted. The truth is more around what you believe in and what drives you - and what makes you believable, thus driving customers to choose you. Reputation and perception emerge from stories of execution and experience with your service.

If I were to craft a series of conversations with customers and employees about a company, I would start with why it exists - the big idea, not a slogan. Then I would make it come alive with a story or series of stories. To make it real it needs to connect with the experience of those who are in the conversation with that company. It needs to be real, it needs to be something people actually can care about.

Business is about making things people want. Everything the organization does is marketing, not the other way around.

5 Ways to Thank Your Customers

Forget shiny objects, including prospects, for a moment. Forget social media, networks and online opportunities. You have plenty of material to work with as it is -- your customers are already doing business with you. How about showing them some appreciation? Here are 5 things you can do to show them how grateful you are for their business:

1. Send them a thank you card after a major purchase. Better if hand written. Along those same lines, send them a birthday card with a coupon. Raise your hand if you get more than a handful of each. Exactly, you will stand out.

2. Make your rewards program simple. Give people what they want by letting them choose among options. Hilton Honors does that by letting you choose among a combination of either HH basis points per dollar spent or a combination of basis points and miles.

3. Use your data base for them, not against them. Select a loyal customer at random and surprise them with a free gift or a discount. Refrain from congratulating your customers for being loyal with yet another sales pitch. Just send the gift.

4. Put a person with a nice smile and a good attitude in your customer facing roles -- returns, service, support. Pay them well and you get to keep them, and your customers.

5. Tell your customers how you’ve implemented their suggestions. What better way to communicate with a customer than that where you show them you were listening. There is no sweeter gift.

In the end there is no better way to say how important your customers are to you, than just telling them. Do that regularly, and walk the talk.

[edited version of a Fast Company post. Image of hills near Modena, Italy.]

Who is the Social Media Marketer of the Year?

When I launched Conversation Agent back in the summer of 2006, I had a pretty simple concept. My observation was that the line between marketing and public relations would be blurring considerably with greater adoption of social media. The idea that brands should start learning good manners, show personality, and behave is now starting to take hold.

In other words, marketers would have to become better communicators, skilled at one to one relationships, just like their colleagues in public relations.

I must have worked in a recession for the better part of my career as I cannot recall a time when I was responsible for one and not the other. At some point I even came to define myself as a professional operating at the intersection of marketing and PR - where the people and ideas are.

Fast forward to today and you now have practitioners involved in social media and community who come from a wide variety of professional backgrounds and skill sets.

The most common so far in what I have encountered are: interactive or digital marketing, digital media, corporate communications. As I stated before, I think public relations professionals are well poised to work very well with social media. They are more acquainted with the idea of personal outreach.

Everyone can use some help with conversation.

It's not all talk anymore. Social media is becoming part of our language and behavior - as customers first, as professionals a close second. The terminology may or will change, the dynamics remain. It's extreme personalization driving it - listening, having a voice, making a difference to the final results.

With all of this in mind, if it doesn't hurt too much, I think it would be interesting to propose how I would do a list from which to nominate the Social Media Marketer of the Year.

This is no Nobel Prize, which took  place a couple of months ago with Medicine and Physics opening up the honors. This selection would not be quite as rigorous as those, and hopefully not as contentious or mysterious as that of the Prize for Literature. It might sit somewhere in between. The world is smaller now - global professionals and women (did you know that only 5% won the Prize?) should be on the list.

Each single list I have seen online has been created and maintained by an individual.

Because this is social media, and I am after all the Conversation Agent, if I were to do this, I would hand pick a panel of judges to join me in the collection of metrics and evaluation of the professionals in the running. Together, we'd choose metrics that are less open to personal judgment. Although what would social media be without opinion?

Potentially metrics like:

REACH: Based on Quantcast. This requires participating sites to place the code. They wouldn't be competitive without it, anyway. Alexa is okay at detecting traffic surges in sites which already have a fair amount of traffic. But it's awful -- really awful -- at ranking niche sites. So it would be useless for our purposes.

INFLUENCE: Based on RSS count. RSS shows that readers are committed to a site. If FeedBurner stats are public, we would look at those. Otherwise we'd have to go with Google Reader stats. These represent only part of a site's RSS base, but they're the biggest, and can be looked up. Everyone could be on a level playing field.

CONVERSATION: Because I am the Conversation Agent. We'd total the number of comments on each ranked site (by hand) for one week out of the month-long survey period. Think of it as sweeps week. Which week is a close secret. Comments left at other sites would also count and be included, whenever possible. I realize this would be tricky.

CONSISTENCY: Nobody ranks this. The panel counts the total number of days in which someone posts during the month. We would also look at the quality of the posts written.

INNOVATION: The secret sauce metric, but it'd be based on a panel, not one person. Everyone ranks each site, based on originality: How often are they leading topics, not following? What they say isn't as important as being fresh and vibrant -- stepping out of the echo chamber. Analysis and solid content would trump newsy posts.

OVERALL: A sum of the above, which should also yield a nice ROI (return on involvement and influence; the investment of time, attention and care).

Who would have thought we'd come up with an Italian word? From the Jim Collins laboratory:

A Hedgehog (riccio) Concept is not a goal to be the best, a strategy to be the best, an intention to be the best, a plan to be the best. It is an understanding of what you can be the best at. The distinction is absolutely crucial.

This list would not be open to everyone. You must be nominated by your peers to be ranked. If I were to publish a list, this is how I'd go about it.

[image of Sonic the Hedgehog, Wikipedia]

Why Alltop is a Great Idea

The short version of it is - Google provides you with a pile of search results, Alltop gives you all the top news as selected by all the folks who write the top sites on the Web. Aggregation without aggravation, or a starting point for your exploration journey on a number of topics. This is how the portal is described on the site.

The methodology they use to find and add sites is by community. They added green and humor categories, too - we need both!

I'll come clean with you, Conversation Agent was chosen for the following categories - egos (along Mark Cuban, Lawrence Lessig and Dave Taylor), marketing, customer service, and content marketing. Thank you, readers, colleagues and friends. Thank you, Alltop!

After being a long time admirer and acquaintance (it takes more than a few emails to say you know someone who knows thousands of people, doesn't it?), I had the pleasure of meeting Guy Kawasaki face-to-face at the recent Blog Council event in San Jose, CA.

[photo courtesy of Blog Council]

Many of us have been online long enough to have our own blogs (no, I do not think blogs are going away), be on Twitter, have mastered LinkedIn, are re-friending long lost school buddies on Facebook and have these massive threads on the value of FriendFeed on FF itself. Our RSS readers are a well researched collection of information and we probably met many of the people we read in person. We analyze, slice, dice and aggregate online metrics with the ease of Web metrics gurus - or something like that.

I know what you're thinking, we are still in the minority, even though 73% of Americans and 64% of Europeans are online (source: Forrester). An increase in adoption means not only that more people are potentially reaching up on the participation ladder, it also means that there is more out there to discover. Mon dieu, how do you find all that content? How do you make sense of it by category? It took me three years to build a good stream of content that is useful and inspiring, and I keep adjusting.

You can begin with Alltop and personalize from there - make the portal your own. I ran a quick survey asking what people liked about Alltop on Twitter, here are some of the answers:

  Access to a bigger audience for less known bloggers, diversity of topics, makes research easy, it's simple and clean to navigate, it's a niche aggregator - and it gives Guy Kawasaki something to do. This is probably as good a mix of opinions as you're going to get about it. There's even some feedback about the Twitter feed.

It may not be perfect, but it can save you a ton of time and help you jump start your reading and learning. I know where to go when researching a completely new topic. What would you do to improve the experience? What new category would you add?