I'm in Austin where we just announced a partnership with the Dachis Group at their Social Business Summit.  Lee Bryant is talking about how to build more efficient and effective organizations. What follows is an impressionistic transcript.

I'm somewhat of a traditionalists. The 21st century corporation was an interesting experiment, but we have 100s of years of people-based businesses to drawn upon.  The Hanseatic League was a tremendous ecosystem predicated upon a shared involvement, a value exchange mechanism, where people did right because they would meet again.

The corporation that emerged was taylorists and specialized. It brought us scale. Great, don't want to downplay the benefits of it. But we can do things differently. Bureaucracy an business friction 1.0 is when structures that dampen network effects to get worse the more people use them.

But now we have network effects and collective intelligence. Structures that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. We can have intimacy at scale.

The old way to think about efficiency should be questioned. Anything value added more than a MacDonald's job needs to be. What used to be "me" is now .. ... read more >>

I was asked recently by a potential client what my “philosophy of the web” is. What seemed like a strange question at first made perfect sense when I thought about it.

"mediocrity now howls in protest" by Hugh MacLeod

Without sounding overly simplistic, I think there are 3 types of businesses on the web:

1. Ones that try to milk or exploit the web (think spammers, Zynga, the “make millions on Google” crowd). These people aren’t always dirtbags nor are they breaking the law but they’re looking to take everything they can get without giving much back.
2. Ones that just see the web as another medium to conduct business. Decisions on the web are made the same way any other decision in the business is made. Should we change our health care provider? Should we move our office to another city? Should we invest time in a Facebook page?
3. Ones that have a sincere passion for the web and what it can do for people. These are people who contribute valuable work to open source projects, manage vibrant communities of people, and write about these things because they can’t help themselves.

I whole-heartedly fall into the third category; I love the web and everything it can do. ... read more >>

This post might not be a wise move but I never claimed to have a perfect batting average in the wisdom department. David probably shouldn’t tick off Goliath in general. In this case, when it comes to selling books, Amazon is clearly the 800 lb gorilla in book sales. Maybe I shouldn’t write this post.

On the other hand, how do you effect change if you don’t express your dissatisfaction with the status quo? Not by silence. What the hell…I’m going for it.

Why I’m Miffed

The source of my disgruntlement is Amazon, but not as a customer per se. I’m writing as an author and one not happy with its customer service. I’m particularly miffed at the time that it is taking Amazon to post my book videos to the main page of each. The two in question are:

• the second edition of Why New Systems Fail
• my new book, The Next Wave of Technologies

By way of background, Amazon has been allowing authors to post audio or video content on their book pages on a limited basis. For a few examples, see Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price or my friend Scott Berkun’s latest Confessions of a Public Speaker. Both of these have informative multimedia files attached to ...

Plenty of bloggers are talking about the inevitable intersection of social media marketing and search engine optimization. Keyword optimized social content and channels of promotion provide abundant signals to search engines for improved visibility on standard, social and real-time search.

The changing nature of social media marketing and optimization create the need for tools whether for research, marketing and promotion or analytics. Here are 11 social media and SEO tools you might find useful:

• howsociable.com – Social visibility score
• knowem.com – Profile building tool
• Social Media for Firefox – Build a powerful social profile on social news & bookmarking sites
• semrush.com – Find competitor organic search rankings
• Google Insights – Keyword demand trends
• Page Inlink Analyzer – Analyze inbound links, their Delicious bookmarks & keyword tags
• majesticseo.com – Historical back-link tracking
• trackur.com – Social media monitoring
• socialmention.com – Real-time social search & scoring, social keyword research
• bit.ly – Search friendly URL shortening with analytics
• analytics.postrank.com – Track social engagement with combined ...

“If you have a screwed-up customer process and you deploy Salesforce, all you do is screw your customers faster,” he said.

Brett Queener is, admittedly, not the “guru” of social customer relationship management at Salesforce. He bestows that title on SVP Product Marketing Kraig Swensrud and Chuck Ganapathi , SVP of Sales. (I’m not a fan of the “guru” label… “don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters,” right? But somehow the term always ends up in my interview questions…gotta drop that one…) I got the chance to sit down with Queener after his opening keynote at the Sales 2.0 Conference conference yesterday.

Brett Queener is one sharp and funny dude, and he’s chartered some of Salesforce’s cooler acquisitions (like the natural language processing company, Groupswim . He knows a metric ton about customer relationship management, and he’s a thought-leader and an industry veteran, whose team is about to drop a game-changing product for small-and-medium enterprise: Chatter . Queener has been doing CRM since I was a shorty, promoting punk shows in the basements of Madison, Wisconsin. As Ali G would say, “Mad respek. Mad respek.”

Once we sat down, Queener immediately dug ...

Why is it that Millennials demand instant gratification?? If you put yourself in our shoes, though, can you blame us? We grew up on technology. I used a computer for the first time in the fourth grade, primarily for computer games, and grew up as the Internet evolved. We are extremely technologically savvy and love exploring the web.

We desire instant gratification in other ways as well:

When we turned 16, we expected to get our license and a car.
When we hear a song we like, we want to download it instantly.
When we took a test or wrote a paper, we wanted results quickly.
When we send an e-mail, we expect a message immediately saying it was sent.
When we call someone, we expect them to pick up.

Now what is it about technology that everyone loves?

Instant access.
Confirmation that an action was received.
Quick responses.
The ability to compute things fast.

Since us Millennials grew up on computers and the Internet, and the above four components are major benefits of fast computers, that explains our need for a quick reward from every action. It is almost an innate instinct of ours to receive instant feedback from something we do, not because we are greedy, careless, ... read more >>