Posts Tagged gary koelling

Guest Blog- Social Technology in a Tough Economy

Blog excerpt from Gary Koelling at www.garykoelling.com.  Get it all here:

Social Technology in a Tough Economy

My social Network on Flickr, Facebook, Twitter...

Image by luc legay via Flickr

Here’s how it goes. When times get tough people get a bunker mentality. Lots of de-risking behavior.  Cover up. Cut costs. Consolidate. Anything that looks like it might not work out is set aside. Any exposure to dependencies, internal or external is scrutinized and minimized. Most anything ‘new’ gets a bullet. New products, ways of doing things and new ideas in general are eschewed in favor of the familiar.  Everyone is thinking this way, you and your customers.  No new spending. No new initiatives.  New? No.  Whatever companies or brands were making or doing before the downturn looks and feels highly experimental. Anything ‘experimental’ or ‘unproven’ makes a natural target in a down market. And for a lot of companies, social media or social technology will fall into the category of new.

So this is bad news for social tech / social media. Right? Not really.

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BlueShirt Nation Evolution- Staying True to the Learning

Yesterday we put a post out on BlueShirt Nation (BSN) that told the users we’re going to undertake a major evolution of the site.  Essentially BSN as it exists today will go away.

A core philosophy that we try very hard to live up to is to be more attached to what we’re learning than to a specific idea.

From the early days of BSN, this was no more apparent than when we took what was a concept of a social network to the users we thought would want to participate. We learned that our idea (build a network so we could understand our customer problems better) wasn’t exactly what the users wanted.  I found this video last week- it was buried in some old files.  Its a video from the Hack Slams we did before we launched BSN.  Twenty employees volunteered to come in and tell us what they thought about the site- why they’d use it, why they wouldn’t, what the social contract had to be in order for them to trust it. It was a key time in our learning as we shaped that core philosophy- our idea wasn’t as important as what we learned from these 20 people at the Hack Slams. Read the rest of this entry »

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Who we are

We were recently asked what we do and what we’re passionate about.  We put together a doc that outlined it- then did a Wordle.

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Business Innovation Factory- Community of Innovators

We recently returned from the best event I’ve attended- BIF-4.  Its put on by the Business Innovation Factory- a non-profit based in Providence, RI.  The objective of BIF is to create a “community of innovators collaborating to explore and test better ways to deliver value.”

The format of the event is perfect- invite a small group of people to hear stories from innovators from all types of industries.  As the founder Saul Kaplan put it- invite people you’d want to have telling stories around your dinner table.   They give the speakers an intimate setting- 300 people- and 15 minutes to tell their story.   Read the rest of this entry »

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WorkFast.TV with Robert Scoble, Shel Israel, Gary Koelling & Michelle Azar

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Best Buy employee site a model for big firms

Below is a link to an article by Katharine Grayson on BlueShirt Nation.  Of all the interviews and podcasts we’ve done, I have to say that I think Katherine did one of the best jobs of accurately capturing and telling the story.

Article Here

 

 

 

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