Disqus - Latest Comments for Melle

Re: Things you say that make you sound stupid

Melle — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 11:15:45 -0000

Another all too common one in the corporate sphere is "around". Meetings around topics, discussions around ideas, testing around defects. Sooo...technically people really want to avoid all these topics, discussions, and defects and address everything else?

A second I've been introduced to in my current workplace is "planful". "We want to proceed in a planful manner." "We need to be planful about strategy." Like verbal fingernails on a blackboard...

Re: Every day I write the book

Melle — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 11:34:52 -0000

As someone who has recently returned to the startup ranks from the grey-cube-landscape of Big Company life, I wish you every success, exponential learning, and just enough roller coaster moments to keep you savvy and agile. Congratulations! :)

Re: The Community Ecosystem

Melle — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 17:12:51 -0000

I've always found the dynamics of sites interesting, particularly ones with a fair bit of exposure. Some are truly communities, with as much, or nearly as much, participation from readers as from the person/people who publish it. Others are almost entirely one-to-many, more like being in school with the teacher talking and students quietly listening.

I'd mostly thought that it was the writer's style, content, and general... atmosphere (?) created on a site that affected the amount of interaction that developed. But now you've got me wondering how much more of it relates to how much the writer intentionally interacts with the readers and with the broader online community (by topic, demographic, industry, geography...).

It's pretty normal human behaviour for people to need to be coaxed out of their shells (even with the invisibility phenomenon of the internet), but once they have, and are engaged, not only will their presence encourage others to come forward, but their engagement is more likely to lead to passion, which, of course, leads to evangelism.

Bottom line: you want to build a community, be part of one from the beginning, even if it's only you there at first. (Until you have readers who start engaging, you can engage outward, reading, commenting on, and posting about others' work that engages you.)

Good stuff. :)

Re: Develop a Strong Personal Brand Online Part 1

Melle — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 11:50:29 -0000

Standard apologies for the length of this. Please consider it a compliment to the amount your words got my brain chugging. :)

I think the comment about "what you are capable of sustaining" is the big one that tends to get forgotten, especially in 15-minutes/celebrity-obsessed culture. Too much focus on getting there (and the definition of "there" is as variable as the number of brand meanings out there), and little focus on staying there and being credible with what you've achieved once you've achieved it.

I admit that, though I certainly get the concept and importance of personal branding, and know there are plenty of tricks and bad habits companies and traditional marketing need to unlearn, I remain uncomfortable with the idea that developing a good personal brand is just being you - transparent, authentic, insert-buzzword-here. It's not. It's Schroedinger's Cat: by nature of being cognizant of our presentation to the world, even if the effort is to crumble synthetic facades, that awareness affects the presentation. Face, words, actions, whatever. Might not be in a bad way -- hell, might make vast improvements and filter out all kinds of bullshit -- but it's not "natural". (I.e. there's a concerted effort behind it that wouldn't necessarily be getting made if there wasn't something we were trying to accomplish, and for many, that accomplishment is self-serving.)

Business is not "natural", and never will be, because it's backed by intent. 2.0 is not natural. We may all be friends now, but we're still selling (to each other and those beyond our tech/media/social ramparts). Using your comment about being able to say what you're about in one easy sentence -- to me an excellent example. Your average non-business joe doesn't spend much time or effort, I'll wager, making sure he has an elevator pitch for himself.

Again, I don't think there's anything wrong with any of this, per se. People have to make a living, and dealing with people and companies that act like people is vastly superior to dealing with people and companies that are all about prevarication and manipulation. I just don't think we should delude ourselves that there isn't intent here, or that this doesn't fall under the category of business evolution. There've been other evolutions, there will be more, and there is an element of fashion to it. And in 10 years who knows what our focus in self-presentation and the subject of our blog posts and comments will be. (Though we'll probably hang out on some entirely different platform by then...)

Re: The new rules of moat building

Melle — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 17:58:13 -0000

I doubt many people with much enterprise-level experience make the "that could be built in a weekend" comment. Big companies don't move anywhere near that fast, and they don't like cutting edge and unproven in the first place. :)

And developers, well, they might say something would be easy to build, but many of them don't, either. Not big enough, not small enough, not sexy enough, already working on something else, just like to bitch, doesn't work well in their language of choice, etc.

It's amazing how often you can exclaim, "But surely that exists already! It's so obvious!" But... no.

Thing is, once you do grab one of the brass rings to solve a real but as yet untouched problem, you're going to think up and discover a million related problems you could also solve. Thus begins the challenge of determining what kind of business you're going to be. Geeks are notorious for lack of attention span, chasing coolness, and wondering "what else can I build...?" (The answer is "anything", and not breaking that habit has doomed more than one business...)

If you're smart, once you start solving a problem, you use the "bridges" model and philosophy above to make friends and make it easy for others who think up the same peripheral problems/ideas to do that great work that works with your stuff and builds both an ecosystem and a community (neither of which can be knocked off in a weekend).