Beyond Blinking Lights and Acronyms

Going To "The Show" at Forbes.com

When baseball players move up from the minor leagues to the majors they refer to it as "going to the Bigs" or "going to The Show".  It's pretty exciting stuff.  And now in blogging terms I know the feeling.  I've been asked to be a regular contributor on technology issues to Forbes.com.  Thisis the online extension of Forbes business magazine, a leading business journal and is as they say the "HOME PAGE FOR THE WORLD'S BUSINESS LEADERS".  Right now it looks like I'll be contributing posts every other week although this may change. My first one is scheduled for Monday, June 2nd.  With over 20 million (yes, I said million) unique visit per month to their site this is fantastic exposure.  If just a tiny fraction of this read my posts it should make for some lively and interesting discussion.  I'm really excited about this opportunity.

The posts I write for Forbes. com will also be posted on this site.  As always, I encourage you to participate in the discussion either at Beyond Blinking Lights & Acronyms or at Forbes. com.  I'll include a statement at the end of the posts along with the Forbes.com logo on the posts that appear in both locations.

Blog Birthday: Has It Really Been A Year?

Wow! Has it really been a year?  Beyond Blinking Lights and Acronyms is having its first birthday.  When I first started this, I had a list of about 15 topics to get me going and was hoping I'd be able to come up with enough new ones to keep the blog going.  Fortunately I'm now at 170 so I'm hopeful I'll be able to make a go of it.

I originally started this as a way to "brand" myself during a job search.  However, it has grown to more than just a branding effort.  So much so that I've kept it going even after I landed a new job.  Looking at what's happened this past year:

• 13,000 site visits
• visitors from 6 of the 7 continents (I wasn't watching too closely, who knows maybe I actually got Antarctica)
• 1/3 of my visitors are from outside of the United States from over 75 countries
• 130  - 150 subscribers by RSS and email
• I broke into the Technorati top 100,000 ranking (although I've since slipped some) but out of 70+ million blogs tracked thats pretty good
• recognized as one of the top IT/CIO blogs in Smart Enterprise magazine
• recognized as an SOB by Liz Strauss
• recognized as a "You Get It" winner by Jason Alba
• developed a more robust network that has led to requests for me to do book reviews and a recent interview in the Wall Street Journal

Compared to the big blogs this is nothing.  Some of them can get as many visitors in a day as I get in a year.  Although I may not be the largest and most popular blog around it has far exceeded my wildest expectations.  I couldn't be happier.  It's been a wild and fun ride.  I've learned a lot, met some great people and we've had some pretty good conversations.  I'd rather have that than the big rankings.  I look forward to the next year.

Thanks to Kent for convincing me to start this blog and to Jason and Dan for convincing me that Kent was right.  And most of all thanks to my readers for making it worthwhile.

While I look to the 2nd year I'd love to get some feedback.  What would you like to hear more of?  less of?  Can we talk?

A Few Belated Birthday Wishes

I guess I've had my head in the sand the past month or so and missed a couple of important blog birthdays.  Oops!  Well better late than never.

On May 15th Jason Alba over at JibberJobber celebrated his first blog birthday.  JibberJobber for those of you who don't know is a great  job search tool that helps you organize your job search.  It allows you to organize your contacts, keep track of your appointments, follow-up on interviews and other useful stuff.  Much of the functionality is free and a there is also a very reasonably priced premium service.  Check it out.  Jason has done a great job in developing this tool and is constantly upgrading  its capability.  This a great tool for any job seeker (a perfect birthday present).  Jason also runs a very good blog with a lot of practical advice. 

On May 30th Kent Blumberg's blog also celebrated its first birthday.  Kent is the one that got me started blogging and also introduced me to Jason Alba.  Kent's blog is about leadership, strategy and performance and provide useful insight into succeeding in business as a leader.

Both Jason and Kent have become good friends and were instrumental keeping me sane during my job search.  They're the kind of friends you always hoped you'd have.  I wish I knew how to say it better but words fail me so I'll simply say - Thanks guys and happy birthday!

"Happy Birthday" photo by foobean01

"U Comment, I Follow"

You may have noticed a graphic in the left column that says "U Comment, I Follow".  What it means is that I've gotten rid of the default "nofollow" format for comments.  As Mike Sansone explains "if you've left a comment (and I thank you), there has been a redirect page and a nofollow link. This means that search engines ignore your link".   In the blogosphere links are the currency of the realm so ignored links are not a good thing.  Fortunately that is now fixed.

Thanks  to Grigor Ćorić for alerting me to this.  Until his post I wasn't even aware of this issue.  Thanks to Mike Sansone for showing me how to do this in TypePad and Randa Clay Design for the cool graphic.

How do you write an outstanding blog post?

I was recently asked, "How do you write an outstanding blog post?"  Tough question.  However, once I get beyond the initial flippant reactions of:

• Why are you asking me?
• I wish I knew!
• If I knew the answer to that I would have done it already.

I find it really is something worth thinking about.  Since I've started blogging back in October of last year I've made over 100 posts.  Some have been pretty lame, some pretty good but not popular, some popular but not all that good (in my opinion) and a few that were pretty good and popular.  Although I believe some are pretty good and that I'm getting better at this I'm not quite ready to call any outstanding yet. (I love a challenge.)

So what does makes a post outstanding?  For me it has 2 elements.

Smart Enterprise Magazine - IT Blogs

Paul Hyman a writer for Smart Enterprise Magazine just published a short article in the Spring 2007 edition, Blog Wise - These six Web blogs are written for and by innovative CIOs and IT leaders.  It's a great article that gives brief descriptions complete with excerpts of six IT related blogs.  One of the things that I thought was great about the article is that he included my blog as one of the six (not that I'm biased mind you).

I'm quite pleased with this considering the quality of the other blogs.  It is pretty impressive company.  I thought I had done a pretty good job of ferreting out most of the good IT blogs but Paul has found a few I hadn't and it's quite a good list. 

How Am I Doing?

Ed Koch the mayor of New York City from 1979 to 1989 is renowned for walking around NYC and cheerfully asking everyone "How Am I Doing?" Actually, it was closer to "How'm I doin'?" but it's hard to type with a New York accent. Koch was ahead of his time since what he was doing was a version of a Gemba Walk.  The whole point of his question was to engage his constituents to find out what was important to them and to see how he measured up against their needs and expectations. What an excellent idea! Sometimes all you have to do to find out what people are thinking is ask.  It really can be that simple.

This is a great tool to use at work with our key stakeholders, customers and employees. This can also work at home although I'd advise against referring to your family members as key stakeholders or customers and don't even think of using 'employees'.  You may not like what you hear but at least once you know about an issue you can address it.  After all, you can't address a concern that you don't know about.  I think it can also apply to blogging.  And so dear readers I ask,

"How am I doing?"

Please leave a comment with your name or anonymously, good or bad. Tell me what you like or dislike, what you'd like to see more in my blog or less of. Let me know what's on your mind.  I can't promise that I'll be able to do anything in response but I can promise I'll listen.

Join The Conversation - I've Added A Comments RSS Feed

Comments are the best part of writing these articles.  It is a conversation, an exchange of ideas, a different perspective.  It's great fun and I always learn something from them.  It's not unusual that the comments are more thought provoking than the original posting.  By way of example, one of the posts for this upcoming week is based upon a comment from one of my readers.  They added some new insights, something I had never thought of before and I truly appreciate their sharing their wisdom.  I hope all of you will continue to comment as we continue on our journey.

To make it easier to follow the conversation as new comments are added I added 2 ways to automatically receive new comments.

• The first method is an RSS feed.  It will provide a separate feed of the comments to your reader similar to the postings feed.  This feed is separate from the postings feed and you need to subscribe separately.
• The second method is an email subscription.  New comments will be emailed once per day (if there any comments that day) between 3PM and 5PM  US Central time.  This is also a separate subscription from the posting email subscription.

The subscription links are in the left column just below the subscription links for the postings.  I hope that you find this new tool useful.

Why I Blog: 10 Reasons to Blog To Establish Your Personal Brand

In a previous post I wrote about senior execs blogging for a number of reasons one of which was personal branding.  As part of my career transition I decided to establish a personal brand as way to better explain myself to hiring managers and to differentiate myself from other candidates.  The goal was to become known for more than just what was on my resume.  I wanted to highlight my "value proposition" in a way that would help make me an attractive candidate.

There are a number of ways of doing this.  A website, writing articles, making professional presentations and blogging were all possible ways of doing this.  I chose to author a blog on IT and Business strategy as a way of demonstrating my ability to highlight my expertise in both areas and to be able to act as a bridge between both worlds in a way many other CIOs do not.

So why did I choose to write a blog?

Should Senior Execs Blog?

A little while ago Jason Alba over at JibberJobber interviewed me when he awarded me his "You Get It!" award for February.  One of the more thought provoking questions that he asked was:

I have a friend that wonders why a senior level exec would blog – he isn’t IT and you are, so he’d slightly discount your answer if it comes from an IT slant – why would you suggest that a senior exec has a blog (if you do suggest that)?

I replied that there were good reasons for a senior exec to blog but also that blogging wasn't for everybody.  The reason for this post is that I thought it would be good to expand on that answer.

Okay, Okay, I Get It.

I get it.  I really do.  Uh, at least Jason Alba thinks I do.  Personally, I think I've got a lot to learn yet.  Jason was kind enough to name me his February "You Get It" award winner.  This award is for "people who “get it” - that is, use technology (yes, heavy on the bloggers) to quantify their breadth, depth and passions." Take a look at list of past winners (located at the end of the left-hand column of JibberJobber) all of whom have excellent blogs.  Yikes! I've got a lot of catch-up to do.

Jason described why I won in his Monday post and followed this with an interview of me in today's post.  Jason, thank you for the kind words, the encouragement and the award.

While your at JibberJobber take a look at the free JibberJobber software.  It is a career management toolset that helps you to manage your campaign by pulling everything you need to manage the campaign; your contacts, your documents, your expenses, your schedule etc. all in one place.  Having tried to do it with multiple tools this simplifies the process thereby freeing you up to focus on the important items not the process management. 

If  this topic was of interest, you might also like these:

• I'm An SOB And I Can Prove It!
• Or the posts in the "Branding and Marketing" category

A Great Time At The Woodlands

I had a great time today at the Fellowship of The Woodlands Job Support Ministry meeting.  Kelly Harrison and Bonnie Monych asked me to speak about online branding and blogging as part of the job search process.  There was a group of about 20 people and I enjoyed it immensely.  Thank you Kelly and Bonnie.  I would also like to thank all of the people that came out.  Thank you for your interest and participation.

While there I learned that Bonnie, a.k.a.  "Doctor Bonnie" will be on Employment Radio with Rick Gillis (...and Pam Kelly, Too!) on February 18th.  It should be a fantastic show.  Both are great people and extremely knowledgeable about the employment process.  Tune in if you possibly can.  I believe the details are:

“Everything Employment-On The Radio!”
Sundays 4-6PM (Central US Time) on the Biz Radio Network
1320 AM Houston & 1360 AM Dallas/Fort Worth

You can check  on Rick's site next week to verify the details.  If you aren't fortunate to live in Texas you can also listen live on the web or listen to a podcast which Rick posts shortly after the broadcast.

If  this topic was of interest, you might also like these:

• Or the posts in the "Branding and Marketing" category

I'm An SOB And I Can Prove It!

A lot of people have called me an SOB before but Liz Strauss is  the first one to do so while providing supporting documentation!  Liz has named me an official SOB - Successful and Outstanding Blogger that is.

So exactly what IS a Successful and Outstanding Blogger?  Every week Liz extends this honor to bloggers for ". . . extending the conversation into the blogosphere–making the community larger, the dialogue bigger, all of us smarter, better and our businesses stronger. "   Coming from someone who has done so much to improve the quality of the conversation in the blogosphere this is quite an honor.

Check out Liz's site for the entire SOB Hall of Fame which includes some simply excellent blogs.  There are 3 pages:  A through H (that's where I am), I through Q, and R through Z.  Plus there is a A to Z directory.

Liz, thank you so much for the honor.

Five Things . . .

A game of "tag" has been going on within the Blogosphere where the tagged person lists five things about themselves that are not generally known and then tags five more people to do the same.  As you are no doubt suspecting, I've been tagged this past Friday by Kent Blumberg.  It's rather interesting to follow some of the links -- whose blog does the blogger you like, like.  A kind of six degrees of separation thing.  So here are my five:

1. I've been to the mountaintop.  I've gone mountain climbing and bagged a Colorado "14er".  Made it Ma!  Top of the World!  I climbed it as George Mallory said "Because it is there."
2. I've hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon a few times as Gary Larson of Far Side captioned one of his cartoons "Because it isn't there".
3. I like classical music, Impressionist art and the Three Stooges.  Go figure.
4. I've willingly jumped out of a perfectly good aircraft.
5. I love old black and white movies (hence the White Heat reference in #1)

With that I now tag 5 other bloggers:

1. Jeffrey Phillips at Thinking Faster
2. Susan Strayer at Kaleidoblog
3. Scott Burkett at Pothole on the Infobahn
4. Will Weider at The Candid CIO
5. Grigor Ćorić at behind the glasses

Social Bookmarking and Making It Easier For Customers To Do Business With Us

Early in my career I had the pleasure to work with W. Byron Dunn at Lone Star Steel.  Byron, now President and CEO of Lone Star is without a doubt the most customer-focused executive I've ever met.  His mantra has always been "What can we do to make it easier for the customer to do business with us?"  During the recent reformatting on my blog I quickly grew to wish someone like Bryon was running the Internet technology companies whose products I was using.

As you have hopefully noticed I recently changed the format of my blog and have included a button in the footer for some of the various "social bookmarking" websites where people can bookmark and submit their favorite blog and website articles.  I first noticed social bookmarking links on a number of other blogs and I thought it was a nice way to introduce readers to these sites and provide the reader a choice in which one they used.  Pre-filling the bookmark forms with blog story data made this a very convenient way to save favorite articles.  Because of this I decided to add this feature to my site during the reformat.  The intent of the reformat and adding of the bookmarking links was to improve the reader's experience with my blog (i.e. make it easier) which would hopefully, in turn, help increase my readership.

It was during the process of adding these bookmarking icons/links that I was struck by a thought.  Why aren't there "Byron Dunn's" running Internet technology companies?  It was amazing how unnecessarily complicated it was to accomplish this seemingly simple task.  After all, we are only talking about a couple of lines of HTML coding.

Some of the issues I ran into:

1. Many of the sites didn't provide icons or even logos that could be made into icons.  I got most of them from other blogs.
2. Many of the sites didn't provide the few lines of code needed to accomplish this.  I had to search out blogs that are using this and pattern the coding after what they had done.
3. The sites that did provide coding didn't provide very detailed instructions and I had to perfect the coding by reviewing what other sites had done.
4. One site (Newsvine) required that I verify my email address by clicking on a link that was to be mailed to me.  I received the email but instead of a link the email was blank.  The email contained nothing of any kind.  Nada, zip, zilch.  Since I can't use the site until my email has been verified I emailed tech support.  After 48 hours Tech Support apparently fixed the problem since I was able to regenerate an email that actually contained a verification link.  But I should note they never contacted me about it.  If I hadn't tried it on my own I'd still be waiting on them.  If I were providing individual icons needless to say you wouldn't find their icon below.
5. At another site (Blinklist) I was no longer able to login.  Although I was positive I typed my id and password correctly (multiple times) I entered the information to have them send me my password and their site displayed a message that they had emailed it to me.  I know my id and email are correct since if I try to re-register it says they are already in use.    After a week of trying the password reset finally came why I tried it again.  However the site would not open as there "was a problem with the website's certificate".  I've given up on them.  Fortunately I really don't need Blinklist as there are better alternatives.

Of the 9 sites involved only one (Digg) did a reasonably good job of providing the necessary information.  It is amazing how seemingly a whole industry segment has missed the point of making it easy for customers to do business with them.

But Mike, you're not using their product the way they thought you would.

You got that right.  Customers are strange that way, they usually have their own ideas of what they want to do and don't care what the designers thought was the way to do things.  Most of these sites did offer a button I could add to my browser to bookmark but a button on my browser doesn't do anything for you.

I should also point out my providing these links benefit the bookmarking companies.  By providing these links I introduce people to their product and give them the opportunity gain more users.  That is how I discovered each of them.

But Mike, these are free services.  You can't get good service that way.  You get what you pay for.

"Free" has nothing to do with it.  "Free" is their business model.  It's they way they get people to their site to hopefully click on the ads and generate revenue for them.  Again, anything that drives more user to their site is in their best interest so why shouldn't they support it.

What I'm doing is not new or especially difficult.  There are numerous blogs that have one or more of these links to bookmarking sites.  And yet the bookmarking sites stubbornly cling to idea of only doing it their way.  A browser button is fine (I actually use the one from del.icio.us) but why not support other uses of their technology?

Fortunately, after a few hours of perfecting links for 7 sites I discovered a number of third-party alternatives that accomplish what I wanted to do and it only took a few lines of code and a few minutes to make it operational.  [I've added a technical addendum at the end of the post for those that might be interested in these.]  Now it could be argued that letting a third-party take care of this for them lets them concentrate on their business but I should point out these third-party site highlight all of the bookmarking sites equally and thereby increase the competitive choices.  One option lists 36 bookmarking options - why drive your customers to an arena where they have the opportunity to view competitive options they wouldn't have otherwise seen?

There a few lessons that we in the IT business can draw from this:

• Get involved with your customers.  Go out and see how they use your technology.  They will come up with more new and different ways to use technology than you as an outsider ever can.
• Design for flexibility.  As new uses are developed you need to have the flexibility to quickly adapt your technology.
• Be responsive.  If we can not react to customer needs the will "vote with their feet" and go to another source.  Most often it will be that dreaded "shadow IT" organization.
• Byron was right all along.  It really is in our best interest to make it easier for our customers to do business with us. 

Byron, if you ever want to switch to the software business let me know.  I know a couple of companies that could use your leadership.

Well dear readers what do you think about this?

Technical Addendum

For those of you that might be interested in adding these features to your blog I offer the following list.  I see no need to put you through the extra effort I had  to go through.

• I'm using a bookmark button on each post and RSS feed subscribe button (in the left sidebar) from Add This.  The setup was simple and works with any blog provider.  Add This covers 26 bookmarking sites.  The part I like about Add This is that it doesn't clutter up your post with numerous buttons.  Readers simply click on the one button and select which bookmarking site they want to use.  You can also get useful statistics on what content your readers are bookmarking.
• If you use Wordpress, Alex King has a great plug-in that provides a drop-down box that allows readers to select from 14 book marking sites and email the post, i.e. "Tell a friend".
• Cal Evans also provides a plug-in for Wordpress that displays a series of icons (14) below each post to link to the bookmarking sites.
• Lifehacker's posting on Creating multiple social bookmark links allows you to put individual links on your posts.  You can choose from up to 36 bookmarking sites.  Easy selections allow you to select a list or drop-down for either a static page or blog specific and then generate the appropriate coding for you to add to your site.  Tip: If you use Typepad select the Movable Type blog software.  They don't provide icons but you can get some of them from Cal Evan's site above and easily add them if you are comfortable with basic HTML coding.

A New Year, A New Look and Now A New Name

With the New Year I changed the look of my blog to hopefully make it more readable and easier to navigate.  Shortly afterward I met Dan Sweet of Fracat and he commented that the title of my blog was rather lame.  Sad to say he was right.  The catchphrase of "Management of Information Technology for Strategic Alignment with the Business" while perhaps accurate is certainly not very exciting or catchy.

If your going to change things around you might as well change them all.  So I've decided to come up with a new name that is hopefully more memorable and better conveys the theme of my blog.  I plan to continue to write about IT and Business management topics and whatever else strikes my fancy.  The old IT paradigm was to just tell the users to touch nothing and simply watch the blinking lights (click on the sign at the left to enlarge).  However, I hope you won't simply do that but rather jump into the fray.  I'd love to hear your comments and suggestions.

Mike

p.s. I'm sure there will be more changes throughout the year as I get time to implement them.