Monthly Archives: April 2010

Apr30

Next Gig for Me: Migrant Labor on a Content Farm?

Posted on April 30, 2010 by Francine

Next Gig for Me: Migrant Labor on a Content Farm?

I'm always looking for projects for the summer, especially ones I can do in Half Moon Bay, so when I heard about my friend's friend writing for Demand Media, I decided to apply. ( In case you don't know me yet, I've been a writer for thirty-five years, published four books, contribute regularly to four or five blogs, including my own, taught college writing for ten years, and have a Ph.D in English.) I have to admit Dan Gillmor's comments about Demand also encouraged me.

On the Demand Studios website, i was offered the allure of the freelance career, working from home, with job security. Since I have had that for the past ten years, I figured I was qualified. And sure enough, I was accepted.

Demand does some things VERY well. It has an easy-to-navigate site for the writers, with assignments you can "claim." If you claim an assignment, you have to complete it in a week, or it is released to another writer. There are guidelines for writing the articles, and they vary according to the site the article is destined to appear on. The article I claimed for my first job was called "The Adoption of Health Information Systems" and it was for eHow.com. The price I would be paid upon completion would be $15.00.

I thought this was a good test case, because I have implemented health information systems in a physician's office, and I would be able to write from experience and be knowledgeable. I actually KNOW how to do this.

My first draft was returned to me with the editor's notes that it needed to be put it in layman's language. I thought I had sufficiently dumbed it down, and I wondered who would read an article about this subject except people in health care anyway. I did make the changes and send it back to the editor.

I got it back again, saying "since this is a technical article," we need a reference. I went to a web site (purposely didn't choose Wikipedia) and found a reference. Sent it back again.

So far, I spent about a half hour writing the article, and about ten minutes correcting it, I still haven't gotten paid, and I've met all the deadlines. If and when I do get paid, how much will Paypal take out for processing?

I'm very conflicted about where to go from here. One part of me understands the automation of everything through technology, and the great cost savings involved. That part admires Demand Media. After all, I just wrote about adopting health information systems, and I advise people to use 99 Designs for their startup logos. The other part is just plain miserable at the commoditization of my "talent." Do I just make myself "get over it?"

Where does a creative person go from here? Spend the summer as a Wal-Mart greeter? Or be a sharecropper on a content farm.

Note: I wanted to reprint the article below to show you what I did so you can make your own decision, but I think Demand Studios now owns the content:-) And I need the fifteen bucks.

Posted via email from Not Really Stealthmode

Apr27

Grieving the American Dream

Posted on April 27, 2010 by Francine

Grieving the American Dream

For the past few years, I've been wondering why so many strange incidents keep occurring: every vote in Congress is a filibuster; Joe Stack flies an airplane into the IRS building; snipers shoot students and teachers in classrooms; men kill their wives and families. Babies are murdered at the border. Senators are found with cash in their freezers. Devout Christians are exposed as philanderers. Otherwise intelligent people believe the President is not an American.

I don't remember this many violent incidents occurring in quick succession every before in my life. Admittedly, part of that is the 24-hour news cycle, but there's also something else. The social contract that underpinned the US seems to be falling apart.

And here's why: I believe the entire United States, as a culture, is grieving. Individually and collectively/ We are grieving for the American dream, which we now correctly assume is gone. And because there are so many of us, we are all at different stages in the grief cycle.

According the Kübler-Ross model, "there are five stages that a dying person goes through when they are told that they have a terminal illness. The five stages go in progression through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. This model has been widely adopted by other authors and applied to many other situations where someone suffers a loss or change in social identity."

For many years, as we watched wages stagnate and jobs go offshore, we were in denial. As the world became global, we moved from denial through anger at offshoring to bargaining: we made a deal with India and China that we would outsource certain jobs to them in exchange for cheap products.

We are now, obviously, in a depression. Not just an economic depression, but a coming to terms with the fact that our lives, as Americans, will never be the same. Our kids will not live as well as we did. If we are older, we're depressed because our retirements have been wiped out either by falling home prices, unfunded pension plans, bankrupt companies, stock market gyrations, or layoffs when we are 50. Younger people are depressed because they can't afford kids, can't get health insurance, are watching the decline of public education, and can't find jobs even when they are college graduates.

We thought the American dream was one of opportunity, and that opportunity seems to have been snatched from us.

What's next? Acceptance. It's the only possible healthy response. We have to redefine ourselves as individuals and as a nation. We have to rethink and re-invent in light of the available opportunities. Unfortunately, not everyone in the country gets to the same stage of grief at the same time.

While some are already at acceptance, starting new companies or finding joy in things that aren't material, others are still hoping to cheat the inevitable death of the American dream, stuck somewhere along the grief spectrum. Most of us are still caught somewhere in these stages.

Unions, for example, are bargaining for wages and benefits the employers simply can't provide. They were born to bargain: what do they do when that utility is over?

Political parties are bargaining for power, at the expense of the public.

Gun rights activists are still angry, thinking that if they can carry their guns unconcealed into bars and restaurants that will solve everything for them. So are Tea Party activists, who are angry at taxes. And anti-immigration activists are angry at outsiders. Oh, if we could only blame somebody.

The people who shoot their families and commit suicide are in depression, seeing nothing better ahead.

But the American dream may always have been an apparition, a mirage just a bit further out in the distance. If we look at it that way, we can just keep walking, as a nation, putting one foot in front of the other, and perhaps even beginning to enjoy the journey again.

Posted via email from Not Really Stealthmode

Apr26

Finally Figured Out Facebook’s Fail

Posted on April 26, 2010 by Francine

Finally Figured Out Facebook’s Fail

To find out how i finally got clued in to Facebook’s assault on privacy, you must stop by Tyler Romeo’s blog (http://parent5446.blogspot.com) to see why he deactivated his Facebook account.

Normally I don’t care much about privacy The essentials of my life are already known — the five marriages, four careers, multiple love affairs, hip replacement and weight issues are legendary. I can’t be fired without developing late-onset schizophrenia ( I am self-employed) and I have no shame.

I also don’t have any important information stashed on Yelp or Pandora. And that Docs thingy, I don’t even know what it is.

So why do I care? Because Tyler directed me to Privacy Settings >Applications and Websites>InstantPersonalizationPilotProgram to show how I was opted in automatically. When I tried to uncheck the box, I got a stern warning about what I would miss. Unchecking that box involved time, information, independent thought, the willingness to go against Big Daddy Facebook, confidence in my own judgment…things not every one of the 400 million Facebook users possess in uniform degrees.

I now see that between the people who aren’t thorough (me) and the people who aren’t expert site navigators, most Facebook users will never know anything hit them, much less how to turn it off.

This is not good. Not what we expect. Not what will help advance the cause of the social web.
It will male many web skeptics say “I told you so,” and that’s where the real danger lies.

Francine Hardaway, Ph D
GV: 816.WRITTEN

Posted via email from Not Really Stealthmode

Apr24

The Future of the Social Customer

Posted on April 24, 2010 by Francine

The Future of the Social Customer

Here’s what I said yesterday at NewComm Forum, where I was the very last speaker in the. social CRM track. After a week of receiving information, I felt it was time to integrate process with story.

The Future of the Social Customer from Francine hardaway on Vimeo.

Francine Hardaway, Ph D
GV: 816.WRITTEN

Posted via email from Not Really Stealthmode

Apr23

Social Media Analytics for Small Business: Still Missing in Action

Posted on April 23, 2010 by Francine

Social Media Analytics for Small Business: Still Missing in Action

See this chart?

This is the work of some brilliant people trying to tackle a big business question: does social marketing really work? And its corollaries: if it does, how does it work, how can I measure it, and how much time/talent/treasure should I spend on it?

Jeremiah Owyang, a good friend of mine who is now at Altimeter Group, and John Lovett, a former Forrester analyst who now co-owns Web Analytics Demystified, have come up with some business objectives to measure for:

· Dialog: involves starting a conversation and offering your audience something to talk about while allowing that conversation to take on a life of its own

· Advocacy: activation of evangelism, word of mouth, and the spread of information through social technologies

· Supporting: customers may self support each other, or companies may directly assist them using social technologies.

· Innovation: The business objective of innovation is an extraordinary byproduct of engaging in social marketing activity.

Jeremiah says his framework is only a common denominator, and if you’re already measuring converted leads, or actual sales that’s obviously best. However, the percentage of companies that can or do measure converted leads or actual sales is still small, smaller still in the world of startups and small businesses.

I would say more businesses could probably measure customer satisfaction and customer retention, because social media is now used so often for customer support and service. And if you know how much it costs you to get a customer, then you know how much it brings to the bottom line to keep one. right?.

The problem I have is that most of the small businesses I deal with don’t know how much it costs to get a customer, and only measure their marketing with a single business objective: does this help me get customers? Most of them don’t even get to the next layer of analysis: does this customer this help me make money?

Those are the fundamental questions the 95% of businesses classified as "small" ask. The Kauffman Foundation, by the way, has research to prove that 95% of businesses ARE small. The other 5% are "brands" that pay the fees of analysts. Brands are concerned with engagement and advocacy and second order terms that have been manufactured by marketing departments. Few small businesses know what a brand is all about, and fewer still can claim to have developed one.

I know analysts have to do what they are paid to do, and that making money is understood as a given in the enterprise– but it isn't that way for smaller companies. I’m frustrated when I see Altimeter and Web Analytics Demystified help the brands that can afford to make a few mistakes with such deep thinking about measurement and results.

We marketing consultants at startups and smaller companies know intuitively that it is better to be "out there," but out where? How many people do we need to do this? How much does it cost? What budget does it come from? How do we explain this to a CEO who doesn’t have an MBA and wouldn't know a brand from a bag of potato chips?

In a world of scarce resources, what else do we give up in our current marketing plans to do this? How quickly will it work for us?

I try to answer these kinds of questions every day, often for businesses with marketing budgets of under $25,000 a year. Should THOSE businesses be developing a social media strategy? How many hours are there in the day of a man who owns a pool cleaning business?

Until we can answer more fundamental questions, marketing of any kind, especially for small business, will continue to be the first item cut in the next recession and social media marketers will be the first marketers to be let go. Engagement and advocacy are nice but not necessary; however sales are nice AND necessary.

Posted via email from Not Really Stealthmode

Apr22

Coding on the iPad

Posted on April 22, 2010 by Francine

Coding on the iPad

There are just some thing you can’t do on an iPad, no matter how much you love it, and yes, doubters, I do love mine. I have just learned what it can and cannot do this week, as I take a road trip that is composed of several tech conferences with no laptop.

With a sigh of relief I sit down at my Half Moon Bay computer to write this post. Not very sexy, this computer: it’s a first generation Mac Mini with a discarded TV set as a monitor, a random Dell keyboard and my son-in-law’s discarded mouse. But I know I am going to be able to bang out this post in ten minutes.

On Tuesday I went to AlwaysOn Demand and tried to blog Mark Benioff’s keynote. I was sitting at a table for bloggers, and when I laid the iPad down, the reflection of the screen at the front of the room glared into my display. When I began to type, I couldn’t work fast enough to catch what he was saying. I ended up capturing most of it in Evernote, and then tried to cut and paste it into WordPress.

Cutting and pasting a long document is laborious indeed. Yes, I finally got it done. It was two hours after the presentation had ended — an eternity for me in terms of live blogging from conferences.

Wednesday I sat in a Starbucks trying desperately to turn an email into a Word document, and finally had to download Pages because Google Docs for iPad doesn’t seem to let you upload or orginate documents, just view them.

Truly a content creator’s nightmare. But it gets worse.

I also read about the Facebook conference, and wanted to add the new social features to my blog. (Yes, I’m a groupie). I found out how to do it, and in Peet’s this morning I got into a discussion with Ian McGee about it.

He was anxious to try as well, and he had the URL to the developer pages. I copied the frame code, which was not easy, because inside the layout on the FB page, the select all/copy/select feature in the iPad didn’t work well. I finally was able to select it all. Then I had to get to my blog and make a new text widget. I know how to do that, and it should take a minute, but I couldn’t drag the text widget feature to my sidebar.

After playing around for a while, I turned on the accessibility feature for WordPress, and it gave me an edit menu that let me create the widget. I pasted in the frame code and tried it. Whoops! I didn’t realize you had to replace the example with your own URL. Back in we went. This time Ian tried to get the code to find the permalink to the post on the first page. When we tried that, we got an error message. Then we tried to go back to just putting my blog’s URL in the widget, and we got another FB error message saying we needed a URL.

After an hour and a half of playing with the iPad, WordPress and Facebook, we exceeded the time we had available to meet (on an entirely other subject) and parted company. Me, I was so frustrated that I got on the Reformer in the Pilates Studio to calm down by working out. I don’t know where Ian went:-)

Then I got home, got on my jerry-rigged desktop system, and put the like button on the site in two minutes.

And don’t tell me to get a keyboard and a mouse for the iPad. If I wanted to do that, I could just have brought my MacBook Air with me. LOL

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Apr20

Cloud2 Chatter at AlwaysOn Demand

Posted on April 20, 2010 by Francine

Cloud2 Chatter at AlwaysOn Demand

If anyone owns the cloud, it is Mark Benioff.

And yet, as recently as 2003, Benioff was begging Tony Perkins to let
him  come to the very first AlwaysOn conference. According to Tony,
Benioff showed up wearing  a button that read “No Software.”
Less than a decade later, he is the CEO of a  publicly traded company
with the clever ticker symbol (CRM). And this summer, he will
inaugurate what he refers to as Cloud2 when he deploys Salesforce’s
Chatter to his 75000 customers and millions of users.

At that first conference, this form of computing, Perkins remembers,
was referred to as utility computing. The nomenclature quickly morphed
to on demand computing, to software as a service, to collaboration as
a service. How quickly? Benioff points out the huge changes in the
world from Cloud One, the Bush era, to Cloud Two, which he likens to
the country electing Obama.

For enterprise software, Benioff claims, constant change means
constantly reinventing yourself. We are now opening the door to a new
generation of computing and corporate executives are in danger of
being left behind.

In less than a decade, we have gone from Cloud One, which Benioff
defines as Amazon-centric, to. Cloud 2, defined by Facebook. And since
each shift brings on 10x more users, Cloud 2 will be an order of
magnitude bigger. Unlike the first uses for the internet, which were
about passive consumption from the desktop, the 3 big current use
cases for the Internet are now search, YouTube and Facebook.

Facebook has taught an entire generation what to expect from the
internet; Benioff asks ” why isn’t all enterprise software like
Facebook?”

This incarnation of the internet is about feeds, push, touch screens,
smartphone/tablets, mobile computing, location awareness, and HTML5
rather than Mac or Windows. We are living in a desktopless world of
people, apps, and data freely collaborating from anywhere.

People apps and data talk to each other, and, our apps talk to each
other and to us. Computing has come alive:-)

And Salesforce.com is now a complex, matrixed platform consisting of a
sakes cloud, service cloud, custom cloud, and chatter ( the
collaboration cloud).Benioff seems to worship Facebook, which he says
has trained the Internet how to collaborate. On his new Cloud 2
platform.you can follow peole, documents, data,and even apps that
aren’t Salesforce. On your Salesforce platform at work, you can now
see the real time stream of everything that is important to.you. And
you can drill down into underlying data.

Every record has an activity stream private to people working on the
deal.Benioff has made a big bet on the real time stream. As he points
out, “everybody is collaborating from wherever they are.”

Posted via email from Not Really Stealthmode

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Apr19

The Elusive Economic Turnaround

Posted on April 19, 2010 by Francine

The Elusive Economic Turnaround

The economy will never recover. Not the way it once was. It just can't. This is neither bad nor good: it's just different. And different is the hardest thing to swallow, because people hate change.

Since large portions of my day are spent in front of a computer, I have the luxury of listening to talking heads debate the economy. It is the nature of talking head programs to feature one person on the "pro" side of every issue and one person on the "con." The pro people feel like Obama has turned it around. They cite the rise in consumer spending, and the fall in layoffs, the apparent stabilization of real estate prices and a small upturn in housing starts. The con people point to an unemployment rate of 9.7%, an inability of older people in the workforce to retire, and rising commodity prices. Neither side of the equation is in the trenches; they have jobs. They're paid to pontificate.

I see the people. I work across several segments of the economy and I can see both good and bad. The good is where it always is: in dreams and starts and innovations. The bad is in waiting for the economy to turn around.

My local economy is awful, as municipalities cut services and the state cuts education and health care, therefore losing us more jobs. My perception of the national economy is that it is still very bad, because housing is still in the doldrums, and when it's in the doldrums nationally, people can't sell their homes and move to Phoenix, which depends on growth to exist, or to California, where they still can't afford to live. People are stuck in place, in jobs they never expected to have, like walking dogs or writing for Demand Media, or unloading boxes.

So why are consumers spending? The consumer drives the American economy, and the consumer hasn't come to terms yet with the loss of wealth that just happened. The stock market has gone up, so people now feel they have gotten "rich" again. They want to think they have. But they haven't, because they still don't have good jobs, a living wage, safe investments, or home equity. The consumer will get the bills and quit spending again.

In my little corner, the entrepreneurial community, no one is kickin' ass and taking names, but people are surviving and starting businesses all the time They have a vision to keep them gong that consists of more than "benefits." In a climate like this, it's much more satisfying to have a mission, like clean tech or connecting the world, than to have making money as your goal. The "make money" people, in real estate, are truly suffering. It's not going to be easy to make money in America for a long time.

Entrepreneurs are more used to lean years than people with "good" jobs, and they tend to roll more with the punches. Creative geeks don't care much about money anyway; they work for fun, freedom and the challenge of solving big problems, and just try to keep body and soul together. So in one of my circles, people are poor, but still happy. In the other, real estate, they are wiped out, not only financially, but emotionally. For them, it was about mortgages in the last bubble: getting them, taking them on, investing in them, selling them and securitizing them. It wasn't even really about real estate.

It wasn't about anything real.

Posted via email from Not Really Stealthmode

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Apr15

Everyday Use Cases for the IPad

Posted on April 15, 2010 by Francine

Everyday Use Cases for the IPad

My pet iPad is a lot more useful than it has been purported to be. In the two weeks I’ve been using it, i have pretty much left my laptop home, and nothing has been sacrificed. It is definitely more difficult to blog, but I’m not TechCrunch and I don’t post multiple times a day. If I do, I can always use Posterous through email instead of WordPress. (You heard me correctly, Matt; WordPress for iPad isn’t perfect). For most of my life, the IPad has enhanced, rather than constrained, my productivity.

Things the iPad does better:

Feeds ( NewsRack $4.99) I’ve always hated the Google Reader interface, and have escaped to either Feedly or my6Sense. But they aren’t perfect either, because they are limited in their sharing capabilities and in their ability to deal with a large numbers of feeds I want to read on a daily basis. My daughter @chelseahardaway introduced me to NewsRack, which has the amazing capability to organize and save and share. Simple and clean, it let me cruise through 2600 unread items.

Documents. If your documents are online, GoDocs could be for you. It’s $3.99, but it’s a simple interface for Google Docs on the iPad. It alphabetizes your online docs, lets you see your folders, and makes it pretty, too. (I’m partial to good design.

Video Everyone has talked about this couch potato aspect of theiPad, but I didn’t get it until I found Justin.TV, whose iPad app allows me to stream MSNBC and CNBC live while I’m in the shower. This is where the iPad really shines, because it sits on my bathroom vanity, cordless and not dangerous, while I get ready in the morning. I used to have to either worry about getting my laptop wet, getting makeup in the keyboard, or racing out of the room dripping wet if something great was on the news.

GTD. For this I have used Evernote since it came out. All my passwords, my user names, account numbers, and essentials are on Evernote, and it was a godsend to find it so stable and useful on the iPad. It’s another one of those tools I can use for blogging in a pinch. I can also upload voice notes. Yes, I have a subscription that costs me $4.95 a month, but I was already paying that, so for me the app seems free.

Real Time News SkyGrid does this beautifully. It doesn’t seem to have caught on the way it should have, although it presents news almost in real time, and allows me both to search fast-rising streams (what is the world talking about) and search for my own interests. For now, SkyGrid is free, but I bet they come out with some kind of “Pro” account eventually.

Okay, so now I’m down to the ones everybody knows about: Kayak, the current best travel app, and Netflix, where you can stream video on demand on Sunday afternoon or Tuesday evening when you don’t feel like going anywhere and you want to see a movie. I also have a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, which I have had since it went online, so I’m ready that on the iPad. Although, if they raise the rates I might not.

So there’s plenty to do on the iPad, especially since it has the bright screen and the ten-hour battery life. And this is the first generation, which everyone knows is the beta. In the fall, when iPhone OS 4.0 comes out and this iPad won’t run it, I will probably replace this iPad with something more “finished.” But I will have had six months of fun in the mean time. At about $100 a month, the iPad cost me the equivalent of two dinners out.