Stubbleblog

Here are my notes from the small business hacks session at Web2Open. Don MacAskill, Jen Bekman, and Bryan Mason were the major guests.

Don’t discount until completion.
Bryan says that when they do pro-bono or non-profit work they don’t discount their work until the client has implemented their advice. I can relate to that. CrowdVine’s second customer got a nice discount because we were looking for reference clients and then the customer changed direction mid-project, leaving us without a public reference implementation.

Don’t ever discount.
Jen’s advice is to offer something that’s got a lot of value and don’t ever deviate from your message about how valuable it is. There’s a low priced option for her art, but there’s never going to be a discount on that option. It’s too valuable to discount.

Don’t do direct sales or marketing.
All three were relying on word of mouth and felt that gave them focus: have an amazing product. Brian said that the only cold call sale they ever made was cornering someone from Flickr at a party and begging them to let Adaptive Path do a rev on the product.

Give each employee two 30″ monitors.
Nothing says you’ll have the tools to do your job than showing up on day one and finding two 30″ monitors. That’s one of many tricks responsible for a 100% retention rate at SmugMug. Way to go Don!

Hire Customers.
Don’s other trick for retention (and also for finding kickass employees) is to hire customers. They take less training, have higher loyalty, and you can observe them before you talk to them.

There’s so much good advice that’s hard to get online but easy to get through word of mouth. It’d be nice to do a monthly small business dinner or something where we could get at these tricks.

Web2Open is coming together with some sessions that I’m pretty psyched for. The Open is the free unconference side of Web 2.0 Expo. Like other unconferences you can show up the morning of and add your own session to the open grid. But we’re also doing some pre-planned content and tie-ins with sessions from the main track.

Here’s what’s going on:

Creating a Coherent Social Strategy for Business. We’re doing a hybrid with Charlene’s session where you go to the normal session and then can do a more participatory discussion version of it at the Open. If you’re a business this is a great session to find out how to find out how to pick the parts of social media that are going to do you any good. As a social media business owner, I’m going because I want to start making sense to my customers.

UI for Data Portability. I know plenty of people who get excited and heated talking about standards. I think most people though want to see the standards in action before they make a decision about usefulness. That’s what this session is about. Chris Messina (champion of many things in Data Portability) is moderating and we’ll have the actual UI designers behind some of the first consumer applications to make use of things like OpenID, OAuth, microformats, and social graph portability. First you’ll say, “wow! that’s useful.” Then you’ll get to ask questions about the design tradeoffs they made in order to make sense to the widest audience.

Troll Whispering. This is a technique discussion from some great moderators (and moderated by BoingBoing’s moderater, Teresa Nielsen Hayden). You should check out Sarah’s post about this if only to find out the alternative view that this session is a plot by “fairly rich people and/or their proxies” to “PERFECT FASCIST BUSINESS PLANS.”

Social Responsibility. I’m constantly running into people or companies who are trying to be more responsible. There’s always going to be people like my friend Rabble who are idealistic activists (maybe idealistic is too strong a word for Rabble), but I there’s also people like Wesabe who organized around a mission that they felt was profitable both financially and socially, companies with even more direct social missions like Kiva and Volunteermatch, and then companies you’d never expect like Salesforce which has a huge philanthropic arm. I wrote about this a bit in my responsibility revolution post. Jeremy Toeman (of Geeks Doing Good) is moderating and we’re working to line up some awesome participants.

Small Business Hacks. I could go on for hours about how much more fun it is to work on something you own rather than on something someone else owns. But instead we’re going to find other people to say that. My friend Terrie put it best in the comments of my take the next step post: people want to work on things that matter. When you’re a small business, everything you do matters. The problem though is that a lot of advice for Web 2.0 companies is coming from a venture mindset. This session will be all about advice for the owner mindset.

Influence is Overrated. “Have you ever actually met an influential that can repeatedly and consistently make a product go viral? Probably not, because the latest science and real world experimentation shows that “influentials” don’t really exist.” So how do you get your product to go viral? This is another hybrid session, go to the session in the main track and then come back to the Open for discussion.

Secret Hybrid Session #3 and Secret Hybrid Session Shootout. I’m still waiting for confirmation on speakers before announcing this. Let’s just say that it’s going to be intense.

All the sessions that are part of the Open are free including the hybrid sessions from the main track. But you will need a badge. Register the code websf08opw. This badge will also get you into the show floor and the keynotes!

More info:
Web2Open Wiki
Web 2.0 Expo Home
Web2Open Attendees on CrowdVine

I’ve heard a couple of things recently that I want to share and see if anyone has any feedback.

One. I was at a conference for Meeting Professionals International (MPI) and the keynote speaker was giving a talk on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). I already knew that the members of MPI were hot for CSR because every other blog post on their website talks about it. But I’ve also had a hard time taking it seriously because of the C, Corporate. The keynote speaker, Tim Sanders had an explanation that I could stomach. Corporate success is increasingly driven by talent. Talented employees are increasingly choosing to work for responsible companies. Therefore companies that want to succeed need to act responsibly. Google was his example. He called it the Responsibility Revolution.

Two. I was at the Social Graph Foo Camp and overheard a young CEO give his own take on the need to be responsible. He also referenced Google. He wasn’t sure whether the Google founders were actually good people or whether they just happened to be early to notice the “new reality” that in an age where every misstep is easily found, reported on, and amplified, companies can’t go around being evil. He was obviously creating a similar model for his company.

Three. I’ve been browsing through The Business of Changing the World, a book by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff about corporate philanthropy. It’s oddly compelling. Oddly, because Salesforce is a company that thinks of people as leads. As a non-salesperson, whenever I hear a person referred to as a lead I think of a grifter going after a mark. The book really inspired me to think of CrowdVine as a force for good that could make the world better.

So what’s the deal? Is this just a profit driven move by corporate executives? How much of this is ego driven? And who cares if it is?

Also, how much is this really going to make the world better? The MPI conference made a big deal about how they were not using bottled water. At the same time they ran five tour buses non-stop for 20 hours a day in order to shuttle people from the hotels to the convention centers. As far as I could tell no bus ever held more than four people. I tend to think that by celebrating the water they’re creating a culture where some other MPI employee could raise a stink about the tour buses. So that’s good. But what would you think if you heard that Shell Oil has a VP of Corporate Social Responsibility? (They do)

I’m interested in what this means generally, but also what this means for the tech industry. If I can, I’d like to get some discussion on this at the Web2Open.

Sarah and I just signed up to organize Web2Open, the unconference that runs inside of Web 2.0 Expo (April 22-25). It’s free, so you should come even if you weren’t planning on going to the rest of the conference.

We’re just starting our planning but I wanted to announce it in case anyone has any feelings.

Some of the things we’re thinking about:

• Highlighting individual and independent contributions to Web 2.0. At least with the data portability and open social movements there’s a battle being waged with press releases. It’d be nice if the unconference could cut through that so you could figure out what’s real, what works, and what tools are out there.
• Coordinating some of the sessions with sessions from the main conference track. The idea is that you could go to the conference session to learn about something and then come to the unconference to discuss/hammer out the details.
• Have some pre-planned sessions. Past Web2Open’s seem to have done this successfully. I’m a lot more interested in discussions than I am in individual presenters. The strength of unconference sessions is that they have a personal feel and every attendee can also be a speaker. I’m lobbying for “I spoke at Web2Open” stickers in order to encourage people to speak.
• Dropping the MashRoom. People just used it to check their email last year and no code actually got written. Come to think of it, I can’t remember the last time someone showed me a mashup. However, I would be a little sad if we didn’t produce at least some code. Noodling on this.
• Get strong cross-pollination between people pushing the boundaries of Web 2.0 and the people who are just learning. If you’re an alpha geek, you’re lazy if you just talk to other alpha geeks. Branch out. Most of the attendees at the conference, let’s call them beta geeks, are there to find cutting edge ideas they can apply in more traditional settings.

More announcements to come!