The only two articles you’ll be able to read on Wikipedia today describe the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House. The rest are unavailable due to a widespread blackout on the Internet. You might have noticed Google’s logo expressing their support, shown below. Google didn’t go as far as to shut the search engine down, which may very well put the Earth off its axis at this point, but they do have a SOPA/PIPA petition you can sign.
If you’re unfamiliar with this new legislation under review, it’s worth knowing about. The short version is that it has the potential to violate the First Amendment, censor and cripple the Internet, impose harmful regulations on American business and threaten whistle-blowing and other free speech actions. It is thoroughly documented, so I will point you to TechCrunch’s SOPA coverage for the latest.
Fellow tech entrepreneur Ben Huh, CEO of Cheezburger, has been fighting this battle for months. Go Ben! People took notice when Ben threatened to move his 1,000+ domain names away from GoDaddy if they continued to support the bill. Today, if you try to pull up one of his websites, FAIL Blog, you’ll see the following message before entering the site:
Ben is not alone. While Facebook hasn’t officially joined the ranks, Zuckerberg has. I haven’t been extremely vocal about this for various reasons, but not because I support the bills. I generally feel that ridiculous measures like this written by people who don’t truly understand the consequences will blow over in time. But that doesn’t just happen by accident. It happens thanks to thousands or millions of people who make a stand.
And it’s always a useful reminder of the power lawmakers have, and the attention we must pay to our own power to help them craft policies that positively influence our lives. Someone once told me that technology moves much faster than the law, and this is one of those points of conflict that can emerge.
2011 was an amazing year of learning and growing at Astek. In our industry things change pretty much daily, even hourly. We are lucky to work with so many forward-thinking clients and partners who understand that building real success in this market takes time, discipline, and communication. Oh yeah, and we think life’s too short not to have a little fun along the way.
Early in the year, Rachel and I attended SXSW Interactive, a top-tier conference for all things Web, mobile and social in Austin, TX. One of our top goals was to find the ideal social media management/monitoring/analytics platform with enterprise capabilities and agency pricing. We’ve met some talented people along the way with some pretty cool products, but there is a lot of room for growth in this space. We’ll be rolling out a new social media event product of our own in the coming weeks — stay tuned!
Supporting an ongoing effort to get more social at Astek, we started video recording the strange and mystical things that happen at Astek staff meetings. Here’s a glimpse:
In June, we kicked our relationship with SIPA up a notch and have worked since then to increase their social media efforts. It’s greatly rewarding to work with a group that understands social media are about creating relationships, and just like relationships in the “real world,” there is no easy button or shortcut.
Who is SIPA, you may ask? SIPA, the Specialized Information Publishers Association, is the international trade association dedicated to advancing the interests of commercial information providers (paid content) serving niche communities. These are primarily B2B trade journals, but members also include consumer-oriented Kiplinger and publishers serving other markets. There are numerous SIPs (specialized information publishers) out there serving all kinds of niche community information needs, whether or not they identify themselves with this group.
We’ve been SIPA members for years, teaching and learning along with top publishing talent, and in June we started managing social media for SIPA’s annual publishing conference in Washington, D.C. We applied what we learned at SXSW and other places along the way, creating a robust social media event experience. More recently, it seems like a dream that I was swimming in the Atlantic just a few short weeks ago following the SIPA Miami Publishing Marketing Conference, where we had four Astek team members speaking, learning, and helping.
At the Miami conference last year, I led a roundtable discussion on mobile publishing and met a publisher called The Medical Letter, who needed help building mobile apps on all major platforms (iPhone/iPad, Android, Blackberry). We worked diligently with them and our friends at FanWide to create cutting edge publishing apps and successfully launched the iPhone/iPad and Android versions. In the spirit of mutual learning and sharing, my client and I presented a webinar hosted by SIPA to inform other publishers about how to step into the mobile space.
In the four years I’ve been on Twitter, I’ve seen it grow from an esoteric geek-oriented communication platform to a widely adopted and ubiquitous brand imprint on websites everywhere. Yet many people I talk to still question its worth for driving revenue. As we’ve embraced Twitter as the ideal communication platform for events and conferences, I’ve noticed that finally people are able to grasp the potential for this simple, yet powerful medium for enhancing communication at an event and also bridging the communication gap between cyclical events in ways not before seen at this scale.
As we continue to connect the dots for publishers and other event promoters, we continue our decade-long focus on content management solutions facilitating the digital publishing revolution. Astek’s own CMS, Webany, is ideally suited for the Web-first editorial trend that continues to gain momentum. Basically, rather than thinking about getting your print publication onto the Web, publish in real-time on the Web and build your print publication from there.
We’re so excited that our lady, Webany, is growing up right in the middle of the dramatic shifts in the publishing industry, and is flexible enough to handle them. Haven’t been introduced yet? Just ask. We’d love to show you some of her newest features including robust digital rights management and the ability to export articles and other information directly to Adobe InDesign, the preeminent desktop publishing platform, via XML.
Reversing a publisher’s workflow is not a task to be taken lightly, so we lend our expertise to the process in addition to the technology, which is a combination that’s future-proofing editorial teams around the globe. As publishers figure out the moves that work for them along the way, we enjoy learning and teaching as we go. 2011 brought many clients to Webany, including Wiley Publishing, The Alter Group and Staff Management.
And last but not least is a particularly rewarding combination of app dev and do-gooding. This multi-year project with My25, which is partially funded by the USDA, has engaged Astek to help tackle the growing obesity epidemic in America. My25’s approach is to use software and community tools to encourage better eating through realistic meal-planning based on simple and proven plate portioning techniques. We designed a prototype for the next generation of the software and created this video to help with fund-raising (yes, we spent more time on this than the staff meeting video).
Thanks for being a part of our ongoing exploration and we look forward to connecting you with your goals in 2012!
This month we’re writing about things that inspire us. In our digital world there are countless innovations, so I’m often inspired by new approaches to old problems.
I’ve noticed a shift in how local services are supplied to consumers and businesses. Until recently, websites vying for the holy grail of bringing local customers and service providers together used classified- or forum-type websites that allow service providers to post what they do generically. Customers were expected to sift through these listings or post what they needed and hope for the best. This paradigm is being uprooted due to rapid advances in Web and mobile technology that put the customer in charge.
The bottleneck of traditional marketing forced companies to create products and services they believed people need or want. Or in some extreme cases, companies created products they knew people didn’t need, and simply used their marketing prowess to convince people to buy their products anyway.
Small or independent service providers have largely followed suit, mimicking the marketing strategies and tactics that have restricted corporations to a limited number of products and services that can’t possibly cater to every daily need of billions of unique individuals.
Innovative local marketplaces now enable consumers to articulate exactly what they want or need at any given moment, typically via a GPS-enabled smartphone, and then leave it up to the service providers to find them and in some cases even duke it out for their business.
The wild increase in personal efficiency articulated by The New York Times is possible due to technology that enables people to tell companies what they want rather than the other way around. Now people of all walks of life make their own hours by doing exactly what people need when they need it for the amount they want to pay. This growing wave of independent providers avoid the waste and annoyance of casting wide nets with traditional marketing. This was a battle they’d never win against the corporations, so rather than keep trying they changed the rules of the game.
Here are a few that stand out:
Zaarly – Post what you want done and what you’re willing to pay. For instance, our own Tim McDonald who helped launch Zaarly tells the story of an Illinois man who needed help fishing his keys out of a storm sewer and got it done for $75.
TaskRabbit – “Do more. Live more. Be more.” People post what they need done and TaskRabbit-vetted service providers make offers to do the work, allowing the consumer to choose the best fit based on their criteria.
Agent Anything – Connects busy, hardworking people who need things done with college students looking to make money.
Will these resources help consumers focus on what they need rather than want? Not likely. It’s not hard to imagine dreaming up all kinds of random tasks you ask to have done, just to see if you can get them done for a small price. This is refreshing in a world over-crowded with group deals, coupons, and classified sites providing yet another place for service providers to sell their wares and creating confusion for consumers who don’t know where to begin.
A few weeks ago I was standing on the sidelines to cheer on a couple of friends running the Chicago Marathon. They both did very well!
While I was waiting for them to pass, I snapped this photo on my iPhone 4 of a guy wearing a tutu, which just seemed comical in the context of the race.
I uploaded it shortly thereafter from my iPhone to Facebook. Within minutes, a friend of mine spotted my Facebook post and commented, “I know him! That’s awesome!!!”
She tagged him in the photo, which notified him instantly. He responded, “I would have stopped to pose if you asked. What mile were you at? Thanks again for getting it. It’s fantastic.”
We had a bit of conversation and are now friends. This breaks my rule of Facebook friendship, which requires that I have spoken to you in person for at least 60 minutes, but I felt like making an exception.
I have to say as long as I’ve been on Facebook, this is one of the crazier small world moments I’ve had. With more than 45,000 people running, I took four photos and got one of someone two degrees of separation from me. And with Facebook, in a matter of hours I was connected with him.
Maybe oddballs just run in similar circles and another oddball caught my attention.
As we enter an age of facial recognition technology, things like this will become more commonplace. In this case, however, I’m not sure what tech could have recognized the tutu guy.
I checked in to Walgreens on Foursquare recently (yes I’m crazy like that), and noticed the first mostly altruistic business special I’ve seen to date. They are giving way a flu shot voucher to someone in need for every person who checks in.
I showed it to the pharmacists asking if I needed to do anything else. They exchanged inquisitive looks, but confirmed that they had fulfilled flu shots for a few people bringing in certificates from this program.
A bit more explanation on how to fulfill this would have helped, but I applaud Walgreens for leveraging Foursquare for social good.
An old college friend who avoids social networks addressed an intriguing problem recently:
“I’ve just decided what it is I don’t like about Social Networking… it’s the idea that it, when push comes to shove, my people can bury your people… Please, tell me I’m wrong, that the end result doesn’t allow those with the most connections to dominate society further for their own benefit at the expense of those with the fewest connections. Much like the rich vs. the poor struggles of yesteryear, only now we can rise above money – look, it’s purely about fame and how well you’re liked.”
As an indirect middle finger to bullies of the past who gained advantage by physical body size, bullies in the social networking world are often the geeks! One of the reasons people are racing to Google+ is that it’s easier and more natural to organize friend groups based on the way humans naturally organize themselves rather than feeling like you’re a database admin trying to maximize the efficiency of a friend database.
Somewhere deep within Facebook are the tools and settings to make sure the people you care about show up before the “bullies.” Also, perceptions are skewed when Facebook’s algorithm tends to give people exposure simply for talking more rather than saying something you’d necessarily care about. Google+ Circles seem to move this in the right direction by making it easier and more intuitive to share certain info with specific groups.
I’m not 100% sold on Google generally, as it often behaves as one of the biggest bullies out there. I think all of this is perhaps the greatest social experiments we’ve ever witnessed, certainly the most public. And like all things, once our fascination with the technology wears off we can just get back to being people. Until then, I agree that human nature seems only to fight against the true potential of this technology: to bring us together and make people more efficient and benevolent. It unfortunately tends to provoke paranoia, greed, and ego as well.
Humans and other primates are intoxicated by celebrity. Social media has elevated many of us to a level of semi-celebrity, but still lends power to those with means and connections above the masses. I’m not sure this will ever change, as I do believe it’s part of our very nature, for better or worse. I share the dream of technology enabling collective good, but feel that we are quite far from fully realizing it.
We’re big fans of the Specialized Information Publishing Association (SIPA), an organization focused on the ever-changing needs of niche publishers, typically in the B2B space. As members and speakers, we’ve enjoyed getting to know the diverse groups involved, and I often learn as much as I teach at their seminars, since publishers are in the middle of a bone fide revolution.
Tom Lynch and I attended the national conference in Washington D.C. this month, and added “exhibitor” to our list of credentials. Astek’s growth has always been fueled by word of mouth from our happy customers (thanks!), but we felt it was important for us to add another layer of support for SIPA, as well as to get some extra exposure for Astek by having a booth that stood out and quickly became known as “Astek Lounge.”
I’m thrilled with how well our booth turned out, thanks largely to Vin at Vin Design, who is an expert in experiential design.
First things first. Tom and I headed over to IKEA to pick up some essentials. We were creating something very different from the blue table we were provided — a space that would invite people to come in and stay awhile. And it worked!
While we were giving away real apples (on the right), we decided to have a contest and give away another Apple in the form of a new iPad 2. People entered by scanning our QR code (on the left) to register for our ePiphany newsletter. This gave us an opportunity personally to help several SIPA members get their QR code readers installed and working on their smart phones, which proved most painful on Blackberries.
We had fun experimenting with colorizing QR codes, and used them on the table tents strewn throughout the lounge to make it easy to learn more about Webany CMS, ePiphany, and the people at Astek:
I gave a talk on mobile publishing to a standing room-only crowd. Every couple of years publishers are thrown for a new loop in technology: SEO, CMS, social media, and now mobile. We’re helping many publishers figure out how to go mobile, which is the fastest growing content consumption market.
SIPA is a very progressively-minded organization, and hired Astek to run Twitter for the whole conference. Rachel was putting in 12-hour days back in Chicago, but it was a raging success. Several members participated, both those at the show and ones who could not make it. We had two Twitter walls (one shown below with Kati and Anne), and hashtags for the conference and each seminar to facilitate macro and micro topical real-time conversations.
I tweeted the awards ceremony in real-time and Rachel picked up the broadcast to retweet through @sipaonline. It was a blast and really demonstrated the power of Twitter to the attendees. We’re racing with it, offering this service to all kinds of conference organizers. Twitter has come a long way since I first wrote about it in 2008, and the conference aspect has become the clearest way for me to explain its true potential to people.
We had a tiny bit of downtime in the booth, which Tom used to show me how to juggle apples:
At the end, we donated the IKEA furniture to the local Boys & Girls Club of America, who were as thrilled to get it as we were not to ship it home. Now that’s a win-win.
Leave it to a corporate real estate association (CoreNet) to know how to make incredibly inviting spaces that made me want to sit down and stay awhile, and even get a bit of work done. Placing lunch tables behind the trade show floor created multiple motivations to move through the space and discover new companies.
Leave is to the ultimate geek conference (#SXSWi) to treat the trade show floor in the most traditional, and in my opinion unappealing, format — rows upon rows of standard booths, with only a couple of premium players creating spacial environments. But even these were typically focused around a stage of some sort rather than a space inviting people to stay awhile.
On the technology side, I’ve never seen such focused and practical usage of cutting-edge technologies like Twitter and Foursquare as I did at SXSW. In this environment, it seemed strange not to look at a piece of technology regularly, whether at lunch or in a session. At CoreNet, a more traditional environment, I was the odd man out to have my phone visible during a session.
As business people we seem to swim in a culture that abruptly labels unmet expectations as failures rather than lessons learned. This could be labeled as black and white, carrot and stick — take your pick. To me it places an unnecessarily negative and narrowly reviewed label on lessons that could otherwise bear real fruit for future interactions.
In the wake of countless huge companies being rewarded for failures that rarely seem to produce lessons or better results, this could be seen as the wrong message to send. But I’m talking about the little guys — those of us who have the gumption and power to do it better next time.
We had a project a few months ago that delivered less-than-hoped-for results. It happens. We learned a ton and the client acknowledged that the information and research was well worth the price.
The owner said something valuable to me, which was that success is unmistakable. You can smell it, taste it, and see it from a great distance. No one argues with it. No one makes excuses for it. It speaks for itself and everyone celebrates.
I agree with that philosophy. I’m not saying we should all pat ourselves on the back for not meeting expectations, whether they are from clients, employees, family, or anyone in between. But certainly there are constructive ways to evaluate those failures as lessons, which elevates our responsibility and chances to do better next time.
Make a point of scheduling time to review what went wrong and what went right. At Astek we call them postmortems. They are project reviews, or whatever you want to call them. The point is that you assign a focused amount of team energy and time to the evaluation, reach some reasonable and measurable conclusions (which requires knowing what you were measuring when you started), and then move on!
This last part is essential to make sure it’s a lesson and not a cloud of failure that can quickly turn to poison in an otherwise constructive work environment. Learn and move forward. After all, if you learn your lessons wisely pretty soon you’ll smell that unmistakable smell of success.
I place a real dollar value on these lessons, because they have real quantifiable value that is often thrown out with the bathwater. As a society we have no trouble spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on formalized education, so why are the street lessons so different? Both types of leaning require perseverance and a dedication to the end result.
Thomas Edison really said it best: “I didn’t fail ten thousand times. I successfully eliminated, ten thousand times, materials and combinations which wouldn’t work.”
A business partner once said it like this: “In life you have only accomplishments and excuses.” A lesson learned is an accomplishment in its own right, but a failure with no lesson is nothing but an excuse and waste.
Another business partner once told me: “If you don’t learn something every day, your life sucks.” That one really stuck with me to this day. No one expects you to know everything or be perfect. Just do the best you can.
So go learn some lessons and let me know what you find!
It’s one thing when a company and its users, or anyone for that matter, declares their own holiday. In this case, Foursquare decided that April 16 (4/16) would be the perfect nerd-derived day to support their brand (4/(4 squared). The genesis of the idea can be traced back to an optometrist in Tampa in 2010.
You can hear thanks from all of the Foursquare crew here:
SOPA Opera Comes to a Head 
This post was featured in epiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter | 
This post was featured in epiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter | 
This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter | 
Haven’t experienced an ePiphany yet? 
This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter | 
Haven’t experienced an ePiphany yet? 
This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter | 
Haven’t experienced an ePiphany yet? 
