We recently bought “Linchpin” by Seth Godin. The team read it first and then I took it with me and finished it during a long journey to Argentina.

I must say that it’s a book that opened our eyes, not necessarily by providing brand new ideas but explaining in plain English core values, dragging us inevitably back to the basics.
The exercise made me go back in time and rethink our business through a clearer perspective.

The days of the “Industrial age”, in which you worked in a “factory” (this could be any company), followed other people’s map and when that factory (company) took care of you are no longer available. The more replaceable your skills are, the lesser chances of building a stronger future. This point, translated for business owners and managers would be in questions such as: do you have a “factory platform?” (were you seek for the highest skill at the cheapest rate?), how much can you really delegate on your team? Are they coming up with valuable solutions or you are telling them what to do most of the time? How many of the people in your team can be easily replaced?

The aim is to become Linchpins: individuals that understand the power of connections and generosity, creating relevant art and “shipping” no matter what. This type of person is in high demand nowadays and it can’t be easily replaced. You can be one of those. Don’t give up.

Here are my favorite points

Emotional work

Most of the jobs in the world could be done by any trained individual. It’s about those 5 or 10 minutes of that very special work you do, that makes you different. Delivering (“shipping”) that work with a personal and unique touch (emotion) is ART. That art creates invaluable connections.
The obvious examples are all those jobs in the front line that require constant exposure and interaction with customers. It’s common to hear in those jobs: “why do I have to smile/go the extra mile/answer that extra question if I’m not getting paid extra for it?” That’s a pitty, in fact that’s all that person is getting paid for.
Knowing how to execute and/or implement emotional labor into your daily activities is precious. Do it more often.

Gifts

Giving is a fantastic thing but unfortunately “reciprocity” corrupted this art. There’s an old saying: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch…”. Sad.
If we truly master the power of generosity, we’ll realise that we can give without expecting getting repaid and because the art we create is abundant, we can never run out of it.
The Internet has made this so much easier. You can write a valuable post or e-book and give it away to so many more people now. Why would you do this? Because all those that benefit from it will think about all the great stuff that you still have to share.

The Resistance

Seth calls this, “the lizard brain” (only wants to eat and be safe). This will constantly attempt against your genious and it’s the main reason why you don’t do all the art you can nor ship when you have to. When you incorporate this concept of  “resistance” and understand what it does to you, trust me, you start thinking about how unfocused and ineffectively you work sometimes.
As part of feeling safe, the resistance will always push you to follow other people’s map instead of writting your own and figuring out what to do yourself. This is a tough one. Unfortunately this is the way we were educated in school.
After understanding “the resistance” we feel more aware about stuff that doesn’t get done and why.

Shipping

If something is worth starting, it means that you will finish it, right? Delivering on time is crucial. Not before or after, but on time whether it’s ready or not. This is usually sabotaged by so many distractions and activities that seem productive but are trully not. Remember, the resistance will make you anxious and work out too many excuses for you not to ship on time.
The exercise of shipping consistently will make you remarkable over time and provide you with something very difficult to gain by thousands of companies: confidence and momentum.

As a result of all this reading, we are working on a few interesting and challenging steps for Channelship. More to come…

Are you fine-tuning your art? Are you giving a piece of it for free? How bad is the resistance affecting you? How important is it for you to ship on time? Are you or your company indispensable to clients? Come on, leave your comment below

Best,

Fred

Follow Fred and Channelship on:

Federico Caballero’s Profile | Create your badge

Channelship | Promote your Page too

Last night we were at the Weedle offices for a very much awaited sneak preview. The beta service goes out today and is quite promising.

What does it do? It allows you to find the right individuals for the right task (not necessarily job) in the right place,  anywhere in the world and to be found as an individual by other people.

You’ll think, LinkedIn right? Well, apparently that’s not the case. While you need to create a profile as with any other platform, the difference relies in a series of factors based on semantic technology, Weedle’s own algorithm, and a very particular way to handle user’s ratings so as to avoid biased/fraudulent little stars

Paraphrasing a little bit here: LinkedIn is more of a white-collar platform while Weedle aims to present you with the right result = the right person.

All this is based around the idea of you finding out the best possible person according to what your contacts have done/recommended in the past, with an element of “no nonsense” in recommendations, backed up by technology.

We were a small group last night and very interesting questions came up regarding content creation, user adoption, even monetization. I would say the main challenge Weedle faces is the adoption and usage of the platform (the “yet another network” problem). However the team has some cool ideas in place to overcome that.

Once this is overcome, I see a lot of potential in the platform in the form of partnerships.

Did I say that all the profiles at Weedle will be indexed by search engines?

I couldn’t stop thinking last night that if the technology is as good as the demo suggests, in time, there is potential for running a search on different services and getting individuals highlighted as “Weedled”, immediately generating trust (think Google, Twitter search, Facebook, even upcoming players in Asia, or Orkut in Brazil). Fred here at the blog was discussing the importance of being found rather than hunt nowadays and Weedle promises to help out with this

Here are a few pics of the event and a little video explanation. In order to try Weedle, grab your Beta here: www.weedle.com

Subscribe to Channelship’s You Tube channel

Best,
Facundo

Follow me on:

There’s so much buzz and information about social media lately that it feels great when you find a good source or point of reference that saves you time and hours or research..

I want to share a good “short cut” with you today. During the weekend I read “Crush It!” by Gary Varnerchuk. He’s a very popular video blogger, well known for his Wine library TV and especially, his personality (what he’d rather call: DNA)

Gary’s core subjects in this book are personal branding and entrepreneurship, however this is a book for absolutely ANYBODY that wants to learn how to “crush it” doing something that they love.

I have made a video of Gary’s “Top 10 phrases” in this book. They’re really good and inspiring… Have a look.

Subscribe to Channelship’s You Tube channel

• Personal branding: agree 100% with Gary, this IS the future and everybody should be thinking about building their own.
  It’s amazing what you could accomplish when it comes to building a strong personal brand through the selected social networking tools. The results could be so powerful that… put it this way, you shouldn’t be looking for a job ever again. Good employers should fight to hire you! I know this could sound mad to many people but it’s so true, the rules are changing.
• Gary talks about Family, Work and Passion as a base: Also 100% with Gary, however, most of the people that I know have the disadvantage that they don’t know what they want or what their passion is. A tough one to overcome… Maybe the book will make you think deeper about your real passion?
• The beginning: Don’t miss the brilliant story of Gary and family going to America in the 70′s. Very inspiring.
• Platforms’ reviews: Of course, he share his thoughts on all the main platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, You Tube, Tumblr, etc. Even though this could be basic for those that use this platforms already, it’s interesting to see how he uses them for his business and personal brand.
• Ideas, ideas, ideas! Gary shares some great down-to-earth examples on how to promote anything from real estate agents, accountants to tatoos and garden products.
• Appendix A and B: The first one shares a 19-step strategy to develop your personal brand online and the second one is genious… He came up with 5 business cases and throws them to the public to see if anyone capitalises on them. Really creative and engaging.
• Speed of communication: When was the last time that you finished reading a book and immediately made contact with its author? This is something more than possible today through social networks. My first experience was on Twitter with @debbieweil after reading Google’s recommendation  “The Corporate Blogging book”.
  Gary was no exeption to the rule

  

How important do you think personal branding is? What’s your experience? Come on! leave a comment below.

Best,

Fred

Follow Fred and Channelship on:

Federico Caballero’s Profile | Create your badge

Facebook pages are not the most usable thing, especially when it comes to managing applications for pages. How many times you got frustrated for not being able to implement an app or make it work correctly on your fan page?

In the meantime, while Facebook and its community of application developers continue to evolve, you can enjoy a bit more the job of pimping your business page with Involver applications.

The video below will show you:

• The different applications for pages that Involver offer.
• How easy is to implement one of their apps!

Subscribe to Channelship’s You Tube channel

You can only use up to two applications with the free version. Beyond that, here are the options and pricing structure:

Hope this solution makes your Facebook marketing experience much easier!

What’s your experience with facebook apps for pages? What do you think about Involver?

Best,

Fred

Follow Fred and Channelship on:

Federico Caballero’s Profile | Create your badge

First of all: Happy New Year everybody!

A couple of weeks ago, I was doing some shopping in the south of Holland, and while waiting from my girlfriend, I found a very interesting guy…

Nedap, created a cool product called “Wear & Compare”. The way it works is very simple: You are at the shop trying different clothes and comparing normally with the help of a mirror.
This machine basically goes further: it takes pictures of you wearing the different outfits. Then you may use all the pics to help yourself make a decision or ideally you will share “how good you look” by email, Twitter message or text…  Cool!

Check out the video below to see “Wear & Compare” in action!

Subscribe to Channelship’s You Tube channel

Have you enjoyed the video? Go ahead, make a comment below!

Best,

Fred

Follow Fred and Channelship on:

Federico Caballero’s Profile | Create your badge

We recently attended a seminar on the legal challenges of the upcoming semantic web by Phillip Nolan and Liam  Ó Móráin.

We sensed that not all the attendees grasped the concept of what the semantic web will/may mean. Still, great challenging questions were posed to the speakers. To be honest, I was one of those but was in an advantageous position because of being a bit familiar with some logic and philosophical terms such as Ontology (geekish stuff anyways). If we look at the now popular term “web 2.0” was probably only understood by the majority of people as it started kicking in and not before , so the same could happen with the Semantic Web 3.0. The difference is that some acute angles of this phenomenon should really be noted by people and companies before they actually have breakfast with the phenomenon itself.

Looking at Web 3.0 as semantic (=meaning), implies information interconnected more intelligently, based on what we could simplify as the idea of folksonomy or “tagging” (but in a more automatic than what we are used to until now). This intelligence makes information more readily available to everyone and makes things relevant the information seeker.

Big players such as the BBC, BT, Yahoo and of course, Google are experimenting with these technology. But great results are not only for media players though: Even research labs, and pharmaceuticals are looking at gene pattern interpretation more intelligently.

But let’s recap on what the semantic web may mean to somebody that googles, emails, chats, or tweets everyday: Nowadays if you look for “apple” online you may find a picture of your favourite fruit or a picture of Steve jobs. This is based on the web now connecting documents (HTML pages) and not data (meaning). So in an ideal semantic web, search will be more intelligent and seamlessly interpret that “apple” within X context, conditions, identifiers, and resources will be about an apple and not about a bearded millionaire.

I’ll leave it to you to imagine what all the SEO agencies will do when working out titles, metatags and keyword density and link building stops doing the job. Probably the new job spec for an SEO person will have to do with semiotics?

So going to some of the challenges posed by the semantic web:

• Clever or dumb?: One of the key issues of a Web that presents the user with almost everything they look for is if we will create new generations of more impatient silly people and what may happen with our critical thinking capacities.
• Copyrights: In a web where almost everything is available to everyone, semantic technologies really have to be up to pace with copyright protection. Effectively this may consolidate a shift already occurring within this industry (e.g. Going forward you may be able to download a CD and share it with up to x amount of friends. The term friend will (beforehand) be defined by an ontology that differentiates it from a business partner, etc).
• Disclaimers: As websites and applications get more savvy, their eventual mistakes may have more weight for the users who trust them. Business owners will have to protect themselves from this, with powerful disclaimers (e.g. if you enter your details in a website that claims to intelligently find the perfect business partner from a database, you shouldn’t be able to blame them if things go wrong)
• Privacy and defamation: Who is responsible for such things in a “cleverly” interconnected web? Publishers, proprietors, developers? Maybe the user?

Most of the solutions to these challenges and protection come directly from the very semantic technology. That is reassuring, however, (following the same reasoning with a bit of  fantasy) I wonder if we could reach a stage in which the interpretation of law is carried out through  semantic technology itself!

Have a look at the presentation kindly uploaded to Slideshare by Philip Nolan

Hope this post gets you started and you can find more head-wrecking information on the semantic web here: http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Main_Page

Come on, leave a comment below!

Follow me on:

Facundo Villaveiran | Create your badge

As video bloggers, we continuously look for ways to give video communications a spin and make it more interactive and fun.

In this case, after going through a bunch of different platforms, I’d like to share with you two very valuable tools that could transform your business now or in the near future. The majority of businesses I see, have not considered/implemented video yet so, what are you waiting for?

Video Lobby

These guys don’t offer a real time video tool, they already hooked up with video experts such as Qik, Ustream and Justin.tv. Their value covers something specific and very important, especially when making videos for business:  “a branded, unique site”. So basically, you can use any of the sites mentioned above to broadcast live but you put on a branded mask that will make your company’s channel look 1,000 times more professional.

This free service also pulls in comments automatically  from Twitter and Facebook, and allows users to submit questions directly from the show’s page!

Unfortunately, their video is not on You Tube yet, so you can click on the image below that will take you to the Video Lobby home page and then click on “See Video Lobby in Action” on your left.

6 Rounds

These guys are giving a very interesting spin to video chatting.
By now, I guess the majority of the people got the message about social media and “interaction, people with their own voice, etc, etc”. Now,  6 Rounds are taking that usual message to the next level.

With 6 Rounds you can do things from co-browsing YouTube to playing games, adding funny effects to a live video conference (really cool!), interacting on Facebook together with your contacts or even shopping for things online together with your friends or family members. It’s focused on social interaction, however follow every second of the video and if it’s necessary pause it and think about how could that be used for your business (Twitter and Facebook were never created exclusively for business and look at what happened now?) . If you start testing/implementing any of these tools early enough, you will be a BIG step ahead in your industry

Enjoy the post? Come on, make a comment below and share this!

Best,

Fred

Follow Fred and Channelship on:

Federico Caballero’s Profile | Create your badge

This morning Vodafone announced that they have secured the rights to sell    the iPhone in the Ireland and UK. Becoming an iPhone seller seems to be a “stay afloat” move of any big mobile operator nowadays.

According to the Telegraph , negotiations were really hard and the move will enable Vodafone to retain a huge amount of customers that they could actually lose without the worshipped phone.

But besides corporate buzz, what’s in it for the consumer? Well, I couldn’t agree more with the Telegraph in the sense that the price can only come down in general (i.e. all operators will have to drop it), making the phone more accessible to the end user.
However, if this can be a price war, and let us say that more operators enter the game, what’s next? Android please??? This is my second post about the mobile industry in a week (I promise I’ll give you a break!). The thing is that as an end user I see the Android model so strong that can’t help but think that early adopting it here in Europe is the way to go. Hurry up operators!

I ran 2 quick searches on Twitter (vodafone+ireland and iphone+ireland) and people seem to be talking about it:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=iphone+ireland

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=vodafone+ireland

So what is your opinion?

Best,

Fred

Follow Fred on:

Federico Caballero’s Profile | Create your badge

Hi all

Vodafone presented yesterday at Bentley’s its “360″ product to Irish bloggers and journalists.
It consists on an application (mobile and PC) that offers an “all-in-one experience”. Your personal address book is now enriched by pulling from all the contacts in your phone, information from Facebook, Google Talk and Windows Messenger among others (Twitter is coming up soon). There’s no price nor launch date yet.

I haven’t tested the application but I have to say it looks cool, engaging and seems to be something that many users will adopt in line with the “social trend”. The interface looks “iphonish” and nothing like the Android (maybe, only the mapping options that mirrors Google Latitude). However Vodafone did apply the Android strategy by revelealing its global one million Euro competition for the best mobile application.

It was a good event overall and great venue. Something really surprised me though: One of the goals of the event was to connect with bloggers. However. while I was shaking hands with Chris Handley (Head of Vodafone Ireland) someone from PR told me to join “a queue” (trust me, there was no need for one). Unfortunately, I also had clients in my own queue so I decided to go. I’ll chat with Chris some other time…

Have a look now at the Vodafone 360 in action, explained by Conor McGlynn!

Subscribe to Channelship’s You Tube channel

Learn more about Vodafone’s 360 Experience at the official site (No “Share this” button? You can also find the video on You Tube)

Did you like the post? don’t be shy, make a comment below and share it!

PS: Enjoy the pics from the event

Best,

Fred

Follow Fred on:

Federico Caballero’s Profile | Create your badge

The summer networking event (LINK, Plato & Enterprise Network for Women) from the Dublin City Enterprise Board took place on Wednesday 10th, at the O’Callaghan Mt. Clare hotel, Dublin 2.
It was Channelship’s turn to present and the subject was “Effective Social Media Networking“: How can you apply the power of social networking tools such as Twitter and Linkedin to improve your offline, business networking efforts?

Thousands of business owners attend networking events in Ireland. The average is once every 30 days. At that pace, is it possible to remember people’s names, companies and what they do? Also, how long does it take them to know me? What are my chances of being seen as the expert in my field in a very short period of time?
We raised these and more constraints relevant to offline business networking and tried to overcome every single one by explaining the core networking benefits of Twitter and LinkedIn. We also provided actionable advise for companies to put the tips into practice immediately.

Final thoughts on the challenges:

NOTE: Remember, networking in not about SELLING. You don’t want to be the guy on the second slide

When you walk into a networking room, you wonder: Who are these people?
By being active on Twitter and by checking every person’s profile on Linkedin before an event, not only you’ll be optimising your efforts but you will know who is in the room, their contacts and you will be making a connection with many people before you arrive!

How do I position myself as an expert?
Engaging in conversation via Twitter and providing value in your posts is one of the best ways to show immediately your expertise. Also, by having a strong profile on Linkedin, participating in Groups and in Linkedin Answers your chances are even better

How much do I remember from people I met?
Again, share good value in your interactions while using Twitter and naturally, that name, company and expertise will be in front of you every time. The same occurs when you follow other people’s Linkedin updates. Because you see “what’s happening every day”, it’s much easier to remember everything. With the exact same mechanism, also people will get to know you faster.

Check out below the full presentation in Slideshare and a quick testimonial from Kevin O’Brien at Accounting Partners.

Thanks very much everybody for all your kind comments and support.

Subscribe to Channelship’s You Tube channel

We are very glad that you found our presentation helpful.
If you haven’t made a comment yet, don’t be shy and sare your feedback with us below!

Best,

Fred

Follow Fred on:

Federico Caballero’s Profile | Create your badge