The Daily Lark

Would have missed but for my Google feeds… and here… Me chatting about social and digital media…

Tom Peters has some interesting ideas and exercises aimed at harnessing ambition. Here’s an example:

Performance
The output. The measurement of the progress towards the ambition, where talented people take pride in executing their personal accountability and continually add value through discipline, hard work and continuous learning.

Goals, targets and rewards focus talent on the performance parameters that will deliver.

To get going…

With a few like-minded people create a list of all the performance measurements you use. Analyse what type of behaviour the measurements reward. Ask yourselves if the rewarded behaviour really helps to achieve your ambition. If it does; do more of it. If it doesn’t; challenge your assumptions of having it as a measurement. Start a discussion on how you could measure the real value added of your business/department.

One of my fave reads is Richard’s blog… always plenty of good thoughts… here are some on the evolution of international media:

1. The New York Times web site is attracting 37 million monthly unique visitors from outside of the US, almost twice as many as the 21 million from the US. The non-US circulation for Time’s print products is about ¼ of the total of 4 million.
2. The content of Time outside of the US is more skewed to business. Fifty percent of the content for each edition is generated from the US, the balance from regional bureaus. According to Elliott, “the reader is interested in issues outside of the region. He or she is a globally minded person.”
3. The Time International reader is making at least 100,000 Euros, is a frequent flyer, and speaks a second language fluently.
4. Time has folded its Time Asia and Time Europe web sites into a single global Time.com web site as of 18 months ago.
5. Both companies are exploring the expansion of the brand to encompass special dinners and conferences. Time has worked with Shell (disclosure: Edelman client) on a global series of salon dinners on the future of energy, including a recent event for 100 opinion leaders in Singapore.
6. Time has kept separate the on-line and mainstream units. The NY Times has effectively merged the operations.
7. The need for speed in posting content has led to a fundamental re-ordering of the editor’s job. Bowley told me about one of his reporters was in Berlin covering Senator Obama, moving from event to event. The reporter received a copy of the speech in advance and had written some parts of the story. The reporter called Bowley from the scene and gave his impressions. Bowley then wrote several paragraphs to provide context to the article, which was then posted to the web site. The reporter later edits the piece from the field with observations from third parties or participants.

Lachlan has some interesting thoughts on cool web apps based on a tweetvey (twitter survey…)… And Richard weighs in with his…

Imeem (I’m enjoying exploring this admittedly trendy music site, especially the playlists), soup.io (an underrated lifestreaming app, better than Tumblr IMHO, with full-text feeds and loads of ajaxy goodness), and… Cuil. No I’m kidding about the last one. The third is Basecamp (the online project management service that keeps our RWW business on track and organized; maybe stretching to call it ‘exciting’, but as a business app it does the business).

Lachlan said that his favorite 3 things online were Twitter (www.twitter.com), Tumblr (www.tumblr.com) and Fire Eagle (www.fireeagle.yahoo.net).

I’m enjoying Jott, Twitter and Songza

Here’s how the New York Times moderates comments… Marci Alboher, NYT blogger, explains her responsibility — here is the Times’ official policy.

Watching the Olympics the other night us Dellies couldn’t help but notice the Dells in use everywhere… Take a look at the judges at the Gymnastics… Umpires at the basketball…

Love this diagram from over at Brian Solis’ blog and on Flickr.

Really interesting post from Jeff Jarvis (hat tip to Stowe for the pointer). The concept of harnessing the power of community to make design and product choices more efficient is a brilliant notion - The Wisdom of Crowds put into practice. Love it.

The internet doesn’t make us more creative, I don’t think. But it does enable what we create to be seen, heard, and used. It enables every creator to find a public, the public he or she merits. And that takes creation out of the proprietary hands of the supposed creative class.

I’m not sure about the last sentence. The issue is you’ve got have the right product to begin with. And that’s where the creative class holds court. Using Ryz as an example - if the creative class didn’t design the sneaker, the masses wouldn’t get to color it. I could be splitting hairs, but for me creativity runs deeper than coloring in the spaces between lines. It doesn’t make the act less fun, or even useful. And, to Jeff’s point, technology and participation become points of differentiation:

The curmudgeons also argue that this level playing field is flooded with crap: a loss of taste and discrimination. I’ll argue just the opposite: Only the playing field is flat and to stand out one must now do so on merit - as defined by the public rather than the priests - which will be rewarded with links and attention. This is our link economy, our culture of links. It is a meritocracy, only now there are many definitions of merit and each must be earned.

Great post on competitive analytics. Never fails to amaze me how many PR Pros aren’t aware of all the great free services out there that can give them insight into how both their site and keywords are doing.

As much as we focus on messages as communicators, we also need to focus on keywords and their overall performance. Keywords are much more than search teams… they are the language the people are using to talk about your products. Moreover, this is where the communications and web strategy has to dovetail.

Missed this one in the NYTimes… interesting read on online trolls:

In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a “pseudo-naïve” tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, “If you don’t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.”

Wow, perfect description for all those bloggers on ZDNet…