The Gumption Blog

I’m speaking at the Women’s Leadership Exchange this Tuesday on behalf of Best Buy. I will be providing useful next steps for the session attendees about how to approach social media for their business. My goal with the session is to provide enough framework around the topic to help someone make use of it for their business.

It’s easy to get caught up in all of the tactics, after all social media is the new ’shiny object’ that is fascinating everyone right now. However, I see its usefulness as a more long term set of possibilities of communication and interaction for business. I believe my audience to be looking for some basic understanding.

The most important principles include 3 simple steps:

1. Listen
2. Set Goals
3. Interact and Respond to Feedback and Conversation

If you are coming to the event and have a question you’d like me to answer in the session, please leave it in the comments.

I returned from the IA Summit a couple of weeks ago. It was an honor to serve as the on-the-ground co-chair at the event this year. As an organizer, I got to see the event from a different perspective than ever before. I really enjoyed being part of a team that brought the event to the community. It was the 10th anniversary of the event, which was an important milestone for the community. In my opinion, Samantha Bailey, did an amazing job of bringing the content together for an incredibly energizing event.

One thing that is very exciting to me is that I will get a chance to do it again this year. I will be the lead co-chair with Livia Labate serving as my co-chair. Livia and I have a ton of feedback to process and I see my biggest challenge as appropriately responding to the needs of this community. People are excited and want to have really valuable conversations. I see it as our challenge to do everything we can to enable, encourage, and create spaces for this to happen. I got some great ideas this year and hope to work with the advisory team I have put together to curate and facilitate a wonderful and enriching event for the community.

The highlights this year:

-The keynote speaker, Michael Wesch, anthropology professor from Kansas State University and creator of the YouTube sensation (it did better than Superbowl ads!) The Machine is Us(ing) Us.

His work is related to user experience design because he’s spending time observing. His work informs user experience. It was really thrilling to have him set the tone for the event.

-The amazing content from people in the community. Others have expounded on the sessions, so I’m including links below to summaries:

The IAS2009 twitter account has tried to repost as many as have come across the stream

Yahoo Search results for Blog Posts about IA Summit 2009

-Boxes and Arrows recording as much of it as possible and more coming…

• IA Summit Keynote
• IA Summit Day One
• Day Two and Three are coming….I will update this when the content is posted.

-The chance to help the community.

-The closing plenary from Jesse James Garrett: IA Summit Closing Plenary

Thanks everyone for the trust and the opportunity to make a difference for the community, as I’ve said before it was an honor and a privilege.

Please contact me if you want to help next year when we gather in Phoenix (April 7-8 pre-cons, April 9-11 conference). If you have an idea for something you’d like to do, let me know I’m open to ideas, it’s a community event.

I’m leaving for the Information Architecture Summit in Memphis today. I had the privilege of co-chairing the event with Samantha Bailey this year. This is the tenth year of the event and it is a premier event for Information Architects around the world. I’m honored that I had the chance to serve as Samantha’s back up chair person this year.

I’m looking forward to seeing many colleagues in Memphis. It’s a great opportunity for us to learn from each other and bring new techniques and problem solving ideas back to work for the benefit of our clients.

I am pleased to announce the 0.9.2 release of Premix, an easy to use Python wrapper around the Best Buy Remix APIs. It also runs on Google App Engine.

Changes in this version include a fix for the retry logic and more tests. Version 0.9.2 is backwards compatible with versions 0.9, and 0.9.1.

The project’s main repository and wiki are hosted on bitbucket.org.

I will be speaking on a social media panel in April at the Midwest Direct Marketing Association’s conference, Influence Marketing a Movement. The overall conference, which occurs on April 20, 2009, is about sustainability. I think it’s very interesting to think about tying social media to sustainability. One of the biggest differences between traditional advertising and marketing and the tools that social media provides for ongoing customer relationships is that traditional tools tend to support short term efforts such as campaigns and big ideas.

In contrast, social media provides room to develop ongoing relationships. It allows a brand to sustain a relationship with a consumer if it is done with authenticity and value. Depending on your brand, your customers may be building these expectations about how your brand interacts with them as an individual.

I am excited to be on the panel with Nancy Lyons and Meghan Wilker Minneapolis’ own Geek Girls from the interactive agency Clockwork Active Media Systems. Also, many thanks to our moderator Jen Kane of Kane Consulting for bringing us all together for what we hope to be a rousing and informative panel for the conference attendees.

We are hoping to present some ideas and tools to get people moving in the right direction, essentially a ‘teach them to fish model‘.  Social media is really a set of tools, the usage of which is contextual for each individual, brand or business. The tools need to be part of supporting an overall business goal. Even though the mechanisms are new, the basics of business haven’t changed. The business objectives need to be defined and understood. It is only then that you will be able to chase down the right tactic or set of tactics to accomplish those objectives.