The Squared Root

Blog Action Day 2008 'Poverty'

mchapman — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 01:34:09 GMT

Austin, Texas is a very prosperous city. We are the capital of a state that is rich in resources and opportunity. A state that is doing very well economically, even in difficult times.

Our city is the creative capital of the country, according to the book Rise of the Creative Class. Yet, approximately twenty percent of our citizens live in what are considered poverty conditions.

In the county surrounding Austin, approximately 200,000 residents are classified as "working poor" by the Texas Department of Human Services. TDHS also estimates that 41,000 children, under the age of 18, are confronted with food insecurity every day.

Because of the natural beauty, economic growth, and numerous success stories happening every day in Austin, it's easy to forget about or not notice those who are not as fortunate living among us.

In conjunction with the international Blog Action Day on Poverty, scheduled for October 15th, a number of bloggers, podcasters and videocasters here in Austin will devote 24 hours to capturing the face of poverty in our city.

We will be focusing on the personal stories and facts of the people living in poverty in Austin.

A group of us will also be involved in a 24-hour street retreat immersion effort, delivering updates by Twitter, short video and audio segments, and a series of webinars.

We hope to use the power of social media for social good and engage our respective online communities in this effort. Our goal is to include our friends, followers and online contacts in a real-life look at what it means to live in poverty in Austin today.

Mobile Loaves and Fishes and the Capital Area Food Bank have provided a leadership role in identifying several objectives for Blog Action Day in Austin:

1) Raise community awareness of the personal aspects of living in poverty in our hometown.

2) Communicate a unified call-to-action across a variety of organizations working with poverty in Austin, spotlighting specific ways to face poverty in Austin.

3) Engage the broader Austin community in how to respond to these stories, harnessing our city's unique imagination & creativity.

We need your help to make this happen:

1) Sign up to blog for at least one hour during Blog Action Day: http://www.doodle.ch/participation.html?pollId=kyawmrma58rxup99

2) Consider joining us for some or all of the street retreat immersion effort. If you want more info or want to be involved, email bob.carlton@gmail.com or comment below.

3) Expand the network for this effort. Forward this post to at least 10 friends in Austin who might want to join us.

Our neighbors who live in poverty conditions are real people. They have stories to share but their voices are often not heard. You can be a conduit for sharing their stories and giving them a voice.

Please join FG SQUARED in support of Blog Action Day 2008 to address poverty in Austin and around the world.

Brand Awareness

mchapman — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 22:46:21 GMT

I am a big fan of business management expert Tom Peters.

Long before the current emphasis on social media, and the individuality in branding it provides us online, Peters was evangelizing that we should passionately be in pursuit of developing our own brand. We should engage in disruptive behavior, break out of the cubicle, and enjoy work again.

Peters has been warning for decades that massive changes were coming to large corporations and to the workers that comprise them. Talented professionals no longer should be dependent on the sponsoring companies for an income. Professional service organizations, PSOs, can perform many of the same functions at lower costs and with better results.

The percentage of workers who will spend an entire career with one company is dramatically lower. Career mobility is an accepted lifestyle choice and job security has been exposed as a myth. Loyalty to an employer is a two-way proposition and is not assumed. Tom Peters not only predicted these trends, he passionately advocates for them.

It should seem obvious that smart companies would look for ways to get out ahead of the new trends, including those made possible and preferable by the new world of 2.0 technologies. To do so would empower their employees, make their jobs more interesting, and encourage them to stick around, and thereby making their companies more competitive.

So it was notable, if not surprising, last week when Susan Scrupski, nGenera's research guru, offered this commentary on where many large enterprises actually are today:

"we find that social, emergent behavior can be viewed as dissent in large enterprises. In the enterprise space, we find the major barrier to adoption of 2.0 ideologies is culture. Even if there is a groundswell of support to embrace social media, corporate cultures can run counter to its actual widespread acceptance. Marketers in large companies are more inclined to recognize the benefits of building relationships via social media sooner, but they run into roadblocks from other, more conservative, areas of the business. It's a huge challenge for some large brands."

At least one very large corporation is leaning into the trends and taking steps to allow employee empowerment on a large scale.

Recently the Social Media Club of Austin met on the IBM Austin campus with Chris Almond, IBM Redbooks Project Leader. He shared some of the innovations in social computing taking place at IBM.

He stressed that IBM has developed specific guidelines for using blogs, wikis, social networks, virtual worlds and social media, and is allowing their integration into the workplace. With IBM stock doing well, they are not making these moves under pressure, but instead to stay current.

Chris didn't give away any company secrets, but he did give us some real insights into steps being taken within the firewall at IBM to tap into their own employee talent pool. By allowing the creation of innovation networks and collaboration between different areas of the corporation, employees are able to take advantage of the newest tools.

They're also considering ways to tap into the social capital they have with the many retirees of IBM using social media and other forms of social computing.

Qualified, former IBM employees might find it satisfying to work on a project from time to time. They already have a vested interest in the continued success of IBM, as pension plan participants, and they could enjoy the work knowing they were not going to be permanently back on the payroll.

By establishing clear guidelines and setting expectations from the beginning, and by accepting and embracing the changes occurring outside the firewall, a large company can adjust into the "groundswell."

Bottom line considerations will always be bottom line. Proprietary information is still proprietary. Employees and, in this case, former employees are empowered. Managed disruption occurs from within and for the benefit of the corporation.

Chris Almond is definitely a brand unto himself. Chris is also a valued employee of IBM. Other large enterprises - and those not so large - would be wise to learn from his example. Chris says he's very happy at IBM.

Please read the social computing guidelines being used by IBM and comment below on them or anything else I've written. You don't have to agree with me. In fact, critical thinking is encouraged.

Hit 'Publish!'

stuart — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:50:18 GMT

It’s my first blog entry! Wish me luck.

Something good’s bound to come of it, especially if it’ll get me in the habit of sitting down to write just 500 words every so often.

Consider Graham Greene, who wrote this exact amount daily, in such a precise manner that he would actually stop in mid-sentence if he knew he’d reached his quota. Often, in Greene’s case this would occur before breakfast, leaving him free to use the remains of the day to do whatever he pleased.

(So: 500 words a day, right? That’s 2,500 words a work-week, 10,000 a month. If you can do this, in just one year (voila!) you will have written 120,000 words, sufficient for a nice-sized novel. And you’ll have had your weekends free.)

OK, granted, there are some fearsome talents out there--writers who can effortlessly combine prose and plot, who “see” the story faster than they can write it.

We were talking about blogging here...

And there are others – like Steven King -- who’ve been quoted as saying, “When the words flow, it’s like taking dictation.”

King also says in his memoir, “On Writing,” you can make a good writer better; you just can’t make a bad writer good.

I’d amend that, for the times -- and to get this blog entry finally to the point! -- and say this instead:

Hit “Publish.”

In the Web 2.0 era, where publishing your work has never been easier nor more immediate, sharing know-how happens instantaneously.

All you have to do is press the button. Just sit down and bang out some thoughts – whether anyone sees it or not, you’re going to benefit in any number of ways.

I have a perfectionist friend named Peter -- a real person working in newspapers whose name’s been changed to protect the innocent, and who’s also a gifted fiction writer.

But he hasn’t written anything in years. That’s because Pete suffers from an acute fear (I jokingly refer to it as The Pete Syndrome, but it is very real) of producing less than his best or most clever effort, always.

So to escape this problem, he procrastinates. The clock keeps on ticking.

(Unburdened by a defined style or voice, I can just sort of bang out copy while Pete, a borderline genius, labors.)

Finally, when there’s enormous friction and no time remaining, he coughs up some flawed masterpiece that blows away his peers. Yet he is miserable. Pete’s throwing away his gift, and we’re the ones suffering.

The quickest route to getting better at anything is to just do it, to practice the fundamentals.

No, it doesn’t mean that, to improve one’s writing skills one should read a lot of books on grammar or style

(although that couldn’t hurt), but it does call for writing more -- and reading more.

So here’s the message of a rambling first foray into the blogosphere:

Lose your fear. Grab a chair and join the conversation.

Just keep your fingers moving on the keyboard.

And hit “publish.”

Food Bank Employs Social Capital for Social Good

mchapman — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 14:25:44 GMT

One month ago, Michelle Greer and I met with Lisa Goddard and her staff at the Capital Area Food Bank. At that meeting we hatched the idea for a tweetup to help with their efforts surrounding Hunger Action Month. We even came up with a clever name for it. We called it a HAM-up. A tweetup is a meet-up in real life for people who have usually met first on Twitter.

Twitter is a growing social network surrounding a microsharing application. "HAM-up" is a play on a word that is completely made up and named after an application that sounds pretty funny to begin with. All of this is fairly typical of the social media and social networking world. Creativity and fun are allowed and encouraged. Along with the fun, however, is the potential for some very serious real world benefit accompanied by valid and measurable results.

Here's what happened: Lisa made the connection with me through colleagues Connie Reece and Sheila Scarborough of Every Dot Connects. They had recently led a workshop on social media which Lisa had attended. Connie, Sheila and I are also co-founders of the Austin Social Media Club which agreed to cosponsor the event. We pulled David Neff of the American Cancer Society into our group because of his active membership in the Social Media Club and 501 Tech Club of Austin, which also agreed to cosponsor.

Following the success of the Blood Drive Tweetup led by Michelle and David, we were confident in the combined social capital of our online networks. So we started twittering away trying to reach anyone who might be willing to help with our efforts to promote Hunger Action Month and the HAM-up.

Next, David remembered that he had met someone at a conference on social media who might have an interest in our project. Ed Nicholson, of Arkansas based Tyson Foods, and David had continued their relationship on Twitter. David figured that Ed might be able to help with our efforts based on their ongoing online conversations. Ed liked the idea and decided to use our efforts to follow through on an idea he had already been considering.

Ed then authored a blog post about the HAM-up on Tyson Food's Hunger Relief blog. In it the company pledged to donate100 pounds of protein products for the HAM-up for every comment they received on the blog post. Ed figured that 360 comments would be needed to fill a truck and that we might be able to generate that much interest over a few weeks of intense online activity.

With the tremendous help of our combined online networks it took less than four hours to reach the goal. In fact, we doubled the number of comments needed in only a few more hours. The truck arrived this past Monday with over 40,000 pounds of desperately needed protein products for the Food Bank. You can visit the Tyson Foods Gift of Protein 2008 flickr page for a good look at the actual delivery.

By utilizing the social capital she is developing online, Lisa Goddard of the Capital Area Food Bank in Austin, was able to locate resources she might not have been able to identify through traditional outreach methods and with only a few weeks of online activity. This very real example should be studied by anyone considering empowering their employees to use their social networks as a resource for their own company or organization.

September is Hunger Action Month and Hurricane Ike is likely to make the need even more urgent. Please do what you can to help. Whole Foods recently hosted a Grill-up to benefit the Food Bank. As FG Squared CEO Steve Golab joked, "it's time to HAM-up or shut up." I agree. If you can help, please do.

A Twitter A Day

beth — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:20:07 GMT

Twitter. If you consider yourself in the know of all things tech, than you probably have heard of Twitter. It seems to be popping up everywhere nowadays. Friends letting friends know what they are doing, giving insight to feelings on a certain topic, arranging plans for the weekend or even commenting on the article they are currently reading.

Even though Twitter was created for personal use, friends sending quick micro messages to friends; it is really starting to take off as a business tool. It lets companies update its followers on exciting news, new blogs, schedule changes, or just what the employees of that company are up to that day. Companies are also using Twitter to share and connect with others to listen to what is being talked about, in order to gain business intelligence and consumer insights.

Twitter has also taken off as a conference tool, allowing attendees to update their followers on all the interesting topics and speakers that they are encountering at the conference.

I have personally found myself addicted to Twitter lately, and get disappointed when I am not receiving tweets. Twitter gives me that wonderful “in the know” feeling; that great feeling of knowing that you can intelligently participate in almost all the conversations that are occurring around you. By having carefully chosen who I am following, I have a better understanding of what is going on in the political world, the interactive world and the social world (mostly my social world here in Austin).

If you haven’t experienced a tweet, I suggest you check out twitter and see what have you been missing in the world today.