Disqus - Latest Comments for TimWalker

Re: 3-Something AM

TimWalker — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:30:51 -0000

I ask this because I've been on a big fitness kick lately, Chris: it's four and a half years later -- how's progress?

Also, would it help if you had someone to keep you accountable on this? I'm game.

Re: How to calculate your social media influencer value

TimWalker — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:23:32 -0000

Good post, sir. I would make one caveat: for many people, it's too easy -- and hides too many variables -- to peg their salaried hours per year at 2,080.

An obvious tiny adjustment would be to subtract three weeks of paid vacation, during which you collect pay but don't work. That moves the number to 1,960.

A non-obvious major adjustment is to calculate the *real* number of hours you work per week, including *any* time that you're doing work-related things instead of doing something you'd rather be doing -- or instead of something else that earns you money. For many professionals, this number easily tops 50 hours per week, even though they're technically on the hook for only 40. At the higher number, the raw total for 50 weeks is 2,500 hours, which significantly changes the hourly rate.

Bigger picture: lots of folks don't net nearly as much as they think they do from their work, because they don't genuinely account for *all* the time they put into the job.

Re: ayşe.'s Tumblelog

TimWalker — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 11:53:45 -0000

Don't mind if we join you.

Re: Ten Characteristics of Great Companies

TimWalker — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:50:43 -0000

Doug -- I think you're right. Many companies wonder why they're bad at innovation, but what this really means is that they're blind to all the ways they stifle it. Great companies *welcome* beneficial change.

Re: Ten Characteristics of Great Companies

twitter-17841651 — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 13:20:31 -0000

Therefore, if great companies develop ideas internally then great companies create the right environment for ideas to bubble up from anywhere within the organization? An environment of idea sharing and an environment of idea nurturing is built into the dna of the business?

Re: Ten Characteristics of Great Companies

Vincent_A — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 06:54:40 -0000

#4 Replace "elsewhere" with "everywhere"

Quote: "It is the ten traits that came to me on a 15 minute subway ride"

Good start, but I'm sure that if you take a little longer next time, the criticisms will be much less, and the final result much more respected :-)

Re: Ten Characteristics of Great Companies

ceslami — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 11:25:50 -0000

The best example of this is Facebook. As the service became more robust, it was clear that they were borrowing and modifying ideas from other successful startups. It seemed to be very cause-and-effect in the sense that Facebook incorporated features from other startups just as they became mainstream. Examples that I can recall off of the top of my head include:

Status sharing - Twitter
Notes - blogger, Livejournal, etc.
Videos - Youtube
Shared items - Pownce (to a certain extent...)
"Like" - Friendfeed
Unlimited Photo Uploads - Flickr, etc (at the time this was huge because MySpace was extremely limiting in this regard)

The list gets bigger as time goes on, but the point is that even great companies can borrow ideas and implement them in a manner that makes their service more robust and more valuable.

Re: Ten Characteristics of Great Companies

ShanaC — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 10:29:54 -0000

I agree with this too. I want to change #4 to Great Companies are ever vigilant for good ideas, no matter where they come from. They observe, they think, they learn, they experiment, and then they grow.

I really wanted tyo stress the idea of observant people who experiment and tinker is what makes a great company. Nothing wrong with running with a good idea from somewhere else and really improving on it. I'm sure the first wheel was sort of crappy....

Re: Ten Characteristics of Great Companies

fredwilson — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 08:53:04 -0000

That's a great point and nuance to my point. I accept it wholeheartedly

Re: Ten Characteristics of Great Companies

TimWalker — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 07:40:13 -0000

Thought-provoking list, Fred. I would amend #4, "Great companies don't look elsewhere for ideas," maybe to say "Great companies don't HAVE TO look elsewhere for ideas." They're perfectly *willing* to come up with all their ideas themselves.

But really great companies also avoid Not-Invented-Here syndrome: if a great idea does come up from a competitor, a vendor, an outside researcher, an unrelated industry -- they're happy to run with that idea, too. The point is that they're always looking for great ideas that make a difference, and then executing the hell out of those ideas, whether they came from inside or outside their own company.

Re: Avoiding the narcissism trap of social media

TimWalker — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 14:21:24 -0000

I like this a lot, Christopher. It reminds me of what Kathy Sierra is always saying -- it's not about how *you* kick ass, but about how you help your *users* kick ass.

Re: Jigsaw finds profitability by delivering sales contact data as a service

TimWalker — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:59:15 -0000

Sorry I missed this one when it came out, Anthony. Due credit to Jigsaw for their success, but it's not accurate to say "customers traditionally pay a one-time fee to a database like Hoover’s for a specific set of contacts." For many years now, Hoover's has earned most of its revenues from enterprise subscribers. These companies buy annual subscriptions so they can have nonstop access to our database -- which is updated every day through a combination of technological means and the efforts of our expert editorial team.

So, kudos to Jigsaw for how they're building their business, but the contrast portrayed in the article (at least in the specific case of Hoover's) is misplaced.

Cheers,

Tim Walker
Social Media Manager
Hoover's, Inc.

Re: http://ayse.tumblr.com/post/151093042

TimWalker — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 15:40:37 -0000

Love these kicks!

Re: Should You Moderate Your Blog Comments?

gravit8 — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 19:11:37 -0000

Tim, sounds like you've found a comfortable middle ground in your commenting plan. And here's what I appreciate: even though you moderate, you actively make every effort to approve quickly.

As I've said many times, you totally get how community forms around blogs. Its one of the reasons why you're a true pro when it comes to blogging for business.

Re: Should You Moderate Your Blog Comments?

TimWalker — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:31:10 -0000

Chris -- Thanks for laying it out like this. I would note that WordPress (and, I assume, other platforms) offers the option to moderate comments *only the FIRST time someone posts*. I use this option, which allows me to catch the subtler spammers who sneak by the Akismet filters, but which doesn't slow down commenting for anyone who's left a comment before.

Plus, I make sure to jump on moderated comments as fast as I can -- faster than any other e-mail I get, really -- so that no one is sitting in moderation Purgatory for long.

Re: Warm the Mug

TimWalker — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 10:03:22 -0000

Good post, Chris. The Art of Taking Pains is shared by masters of many disciplines, and its worth celebrating in all of them -- whether we're talking about Michelangelo or Andrea.

Re: Quid Pro No

TimWalker — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 14:49:13 -0000

Precisely, Chris. :)

Even if you expanded the scope from all the hours you *bill* to the grand total of hours you *work* (incl. blogging, traveling, etc.), it's *still* presumptuous of anyone to think that their purchase of your book -- which brings you a couple of bucks in royalties -- in any way obliges you to give them an hour of your undivided attention.

Re: Quid Pro No

chrisbrogan — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 09:52:25 -0000

Add a zero on that hour of my time (at least that's roughly what I charge), so you're right that it seems to be a reasonably well-priced alternative. And hey, you get an hour of Julien's time and I bet he's not cheap, either. : )

Re: Quid Pro No

TimWalker — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 09:01:06 -0000

At least from the thumbnail description you gave, the problem in this case came from the other person: it was *they* who made it a quid pro quo -- or tried to. Bad on them.

In my experience, it's incredibly important to reach out to people in the spirit of giving: sure, it would be good publicity for my project X to say "Hey, Chris Brogan will be there" or "You know, Chris is a member of that" -- but I'm not going to invite you, much less pester you or try to make it a quid pro quo, unless I think it's something *you* would really profit from doing.

One more note: your book costs less than $17. I imagine an average hour of your working time retails for well north of $50. So the person attempting to do the quid-pro-quo-ing would seem to have a very poor sense of the economics involved. :)

Re: Keep Your Media Making Alive During Vacations

TimWalker — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 16:02:19 -0000

Joel -- Great minds think alike -- ;) -- I scheduled a couple of omnibus "greatest hits" posts to run on my blog during the week of vacation that I just took.

But let me add this to what Chris already said in his reply: "if you write blog posts ahead of time, they won't be very fresh" is definitely NOT necessarily true.

If you write a great, timeless post -- one of those gems that a reader might bookmark and come back to again and again -- it's not going to matter whether you hit "Publish immediately" or schedule the post to appear five days from now when you're on vacation. Conversely, if I write something lame, it won't freshen it up to hit "Publish immediately" -- it will still be lame now or lame later.

For a parallel, consider this: traditional print magazines frequently assign seasonal stories (e.g. for Christmas decorating ideas) many months in advance. Good writers and editors know how to handle these stories such that they read well in their season even though they were written months before.

The short version: it's all in how you do it.

Re: ayşe.'s Tumblelog

TimWalker — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 15:09:50 -0000

LOVE this.

Re: Is Twitter a Conversation or Broadcast Platform?

Tim Walker — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:04:51 -0000

Very interesting stuff, Brian. Here are a couple of thoughts, though:

1. It's possible that Twitter's usage patterns are skewed in relation to other social media sites because of usability issues. Twitter makes it (a) easy to sign up for an account, but (b) hard for many people to grasp how to use the service fruitfully. If those observations are correct, it would be natural to have lots of rapid defectors and little-used accounts.

2. Other comparisons of uptake and usage patterns across media might be useful. E.g. I'll bet it would be interesting to compare the usage power curves of Twitter and cell phones. Everybody, it seems, has a cell phone, but usage of them differs widely.

3. Even without points 1 and 2, it strikes me as a false dichotomy to say that our choices are "conversation" or "broadcast." Plenty of folks on Twitter use it in each of these veins, and even highly conversational folks like myself *also* use it to send and receive broadcast messages at some times.

Re: Is Twitter a Conversation or Broadcast Platform?

Tim Walker — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:04:51 -0000

Re: Links for June 14 2009

ericbrown — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 11:40:12 -0000

Welcome Tim.

Oh...go ahead and read the rest...they are great ;)

Re: Links for June 14 2009

TimWalker — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 11:29:17 -0000

Thanks for the mention, Eric. Now I have to resist the temptation to spend the next hour reading *everything* on this list! :)