Go check out my Posterous, if you wish.

The other nifty feature is that Posterous will automatically repost your blog entries to other platforms. In my case, all my Posterous posts go to Twitter, Facebook and Delicious. If I wanted, I could also have my posts come to this blog, but I’ve held off, as the ease of using Posterous has led me to use it for more personal and frivolous posts.

Thanks to coworking mate Peter Fleck for pushing me off the fence. He’s been using Posterous to fuel a hyper-local community blog, in which community members are able contribute via email — no browser access or tech skills required!

The idea for the session stems from two rather obvious trends:

• Everyone’s a startup
  Thanks to the downturn, the streets are littered with talented but unemployed professionals. Some are using the occasion to go into business. Others are hanging out a shingle only until something steady comes along. And then there’s the rest of us who were already on the “eat-what-you-kill” diet.

  All of us are looking for ways to be more effective in how we conduct business, while keeping our costs down. Which leads to the next trend…

• Cheap biz tools are everywhere
  There have never been more cheap tools available to entrepreneurs for creating work product and managing and promoting their business. It seems to me that someone just getting into business could run their business using mostly Web-based freemium services — without compromising quality, and possibly with noticeable improvements in some areas.

What’s on your short list of must-have business tools for small business owners?
Let me see if I can identify some categories and give you my current picks… Perhaps you know of some cool services I’ve never heard of. My goal for the session at UnSummit is simply to gather everyone’s favorite tools in each category and find out how people are using these tools.

My favorite business tools

Info Architecture
OmniGraffle (not free, but it beats the pants off Visio)

Content creation
MS Word (I know. Not very free, nor very cool. But old habits die hard.)

Content collaboration
Google docs

Email client
We just switched from Entouage to Apple’s Mail app, running off a virtual Exchange server. Not crazy about Mail, but it’s only been a week.

Backup/storage space
Amazon S3

Recruiting (for freelancers, other help)
Twitter

Project collaboration
Basecamp

Conference calls
Freeconference.com

Webconferencing (screen sharing)
GotoMeeting.com

Web site/blogging
WordPress

Media relations
Pitchengine.com

Webinars
GotoWebinar.com

Business cards
Moo.com (looking for something new, though!)

Web analytics
Google Analytics

International calling
Skype

Social media monitoring
filterbox

Bookmarking
delicious

Image searches
Compfight.com (searches Flickr for Creative Commons photos)

Marketing (This category requires multiple entries, as I tend to use all these tools in tandem.)

• Twitter (current client: HootSuite)
• Delicious
• WordPress
• Pitchengine
• Flickr
• Slideshare
• Vimeo

Networking (this category also calls for  multiple entries)

• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Ning
• Foursquare

Hmm, have I missed anything? I’m mostly a strategy and content guy, so you coders and designers will probably have a bunch of resources that I’ve missed. I’m eager to hear (now or on the 10th) what tools work for you!

So, while we’re doing a great job getting recognition from Ad Age and NYT as  an advertising town, we’ll need to lay some groundwork if we’re ever to get our fair cities on the entrepreneurial map. No doubt, we’re fortunate to have MinneDemo, MinneBar, Social Media Breakfast, UnSummit and Minnov8, but more needs to happen before MSP can become a breeding ground for startups.

So, yesterday I was delighted to have someone bending my ear about some projects that seem to be aimed at helping creatives and geeks collaborate, innovate and launch new ventures. Below is a rundown of just some of the efforts that Jeff Pesek (@JeffPesek) shared with me.

Co-working (possibly) coming to Minnesota

For whatever reason, and despite a fair amount of interest,  co-working has never caught on here in the Twin Cities. But that might change in the coming months. Stephen Filing, of ClubTix fame, is closing in on a space in Minneapolis that will be converted into a co-working location, with multiple tiers of membership available. You can get more info at www.twincitiescoworking.org. A co-working interest group is meeting on Wednesdays in St. Paul to discuss. As I understand it, Stephen is pursuing this project as a for-profit venture (only noteworthy in light of the following item).

An incubator for social entrepreneurs

Meanwhile, Jacquie Berglund, co-founder and president of Finnegan’s (makers of Finnegan’s Irish Amber and arguably the tastiest non-profit in the state) is considering the potential of using unused space in her organization’s headquarters as a hub for social entrepreneurs. The space in question is a 5,000-square-foot mansion (map) at Portland and 10th in Minneapolis.

One of the ideas Jacquie and Jeff have discussed is whether part of the space could be turned into a co-working-location-slash-incubator that would be attractive to like-minded creatives, geeks and others. Interested? Contact Jeff, who says:

“We’re looking at filling this space with 7 to 10 technically oriented/creative people who would be interested in $100 month shared space (700 square feet) in a socially conscious environment.

Please note that Finnegan’s is only 6 blocks from the Metrodome light rail stop. No word yet on whether the watercoolers will be stocked with Irish Amber.

A new role for CentralStandardTech.com

Started in 2006 by Luke Francl, Central Standard Tech has been a hub for coders and technology entrepreneurs in Minnesota. The site’s stated purpose is:

“to get developers, designers, testers, recruiters, entrepreneurs, VCs, and other members of the tech community talking to each other.”

Luke is hanging in the Valley these days, but has agreed to let the community repurpose and re-energize the site in order to extend the site to non-geeks. Jeff Pesek and Toby Cryns (@TobyCryns) are heading up the effort and hope to redesign the site so that it becomes a one-stop repository for:

• Personal profiles (hmm, I wonder if a mashup with extendr.com would make sense here?)
• Project updates
• Gig postings
• Local events (with a calendar that aggregates events from tech and creative organizations)
• Blogs

Since the intention is for CST to be a community driven site, the list above is only speculative and may expand, contact or morph depending on who joins the project. Interested? Meet Jeff, Toby and me on Monday, July 20, 9 a.m. at Spyhouse Coffee.

MNtechstartups.org

Finally, Jeff told me about a site I’d never seen before: MNtechstartups.org. It’s a community hub that seems to be aiming to achieve much of what I described above. The site’s stated goal is to:

“…add value the Minnesota startup community by providing a comprehensive resource for local startups, one that serves the entrepreneurs who make it happen…”

But how is it different from CST? Are they competing sites? Should they be folded into one big mega community? Maybe Jeff can leave a comment and set us all straight.

HOW PEOPLE APPLY THE BASIC SOCIAL RULE OF POLITENESS TO COMPUTERS

There is a well-known documented fact about human behavior: People will tell you what they think you want to hear. For example, if a waiter asks how his service was, people are more likely to give him a positive response. If a 3rd party asks about the waiter’s service, people tend to give more negative responses. Why? Because, generally, people want to be liked. And people feel they are liked more when they are being polite. (Certainly there are a few exceptions to this rule). You probably don’t need to think too hard to relate to this, your parents taught you at an early age the importance of being polite.

But did you know that people apply that same social rule to computers. I’ll wait a second while that sinks in… Yes, people are polite to computers! Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass, while professors at Stanford University and Co-directors of the “Social Responses to Communication Technologies” project at the Center for the Study of Language and Information, conducted controlled experiments to get to the bottom of this seemingly illogical idea.

In this study, one of their many studies on the subject of people’s social response to computers, participants were split into two groups. They asked the first group to sit at Computer A and participate in answering questions about a series of facts. They were told that they would evaluate the computer’s performance at the end of the session. The computer would state a trivial fact and ask the participant if they know about it, giving them three choices: a lot, not much and none. Based on their answers, the computer would offer additional information about that fact. At the end, the computer would test the participants retained knowledge and let them know which questions they had gotten right. After each reviewed question, the computer would state that it had done a great job. At the end of the session, Computer A asked the participant to rate its performance.

The second group worked through the exact same process on Computer A as group one, answering the same questions about the same series of facts. At the end of the session, they moved to another identical computer (Computer B) where it asked the participants about Computer A’s performance. Hands down, group one had far more favorable responses towards Computer A than the second group.

Mind you, there were no graphics and everything on the screen was text-based (copy and standard UI buttons). During the exit interview, the participants were asked if they provided answers that were polite to the computer. All of them confidently dismissed that notion–they said that they were not being “polite” to the computer in the least [insert image of them rolling their eyes here]. So that means, consciously, that they considered the computer to be an inanimate object. However, their actions obviously tell a different story. You might be thinking that the participants were identifying with a “programmer” behind the computer. But even that theory had been ruled out through the experiment. There can only be one reason for their reaction: people subconsciously apply the social rule of politeness to computers.

Knowing that we treat computers as social actors, what could this mean for your organization and the connections you make with your customers, patients or students online?

1. First, know that feedback solicited on your site (like a survey) will be more positive towards you than if it is solicited through a 3rd party (like a review site). Those 3rd party evaluations will tend be more honest (or at least more balanced) than the feedback solicited on your site.
2. More importantly, turn the study around. Ask yourself if your web site is “polite” to your visitors. Is it nice and is it helpful? For example, when a visitor is presented with an error, does your site take responsibility (“Sorry, I can’t find what you’re looking for [insert helpful instructions here]) or does it make the visitor feel like a criminal ([ERROR: Access Denied! You have attempted to modify your access to the secure Web site. As a result, your session has been terminated. This attempt to falsify your credentials has been logged to our files.] This is an actual message given to a user after he forgot that his username was case sensitive).
   Too often, Web sites speak the language of the organization, or the programmer, which is almost always very different than the visitor’s. If a visitor doesn’t feel connected to your site, they won’t feel connect to your organization or it’s products and services. (This idea actually tips into the social rule of “likability” which I’ll write about in a future post.)
3. Taking it a step further, consider putting a polite human face (or voice) on your product or service. Make a human connection. Don’t speak about features, talk about how this will make their job, health, life better. A more human tone in your copy will increase the likelihood that users will have a more positive, more personal experience.

Mark Dunst, a partner of Polymer Studios, is a Web strategist, interaction and interface designer in Portland, OR.

• 70% of all purchase decisions are made in store.
• 68% of in-store purchases are impulse buys
• 68% of consumers are brand-switchers.
• Only 5% are loyal to one brand.

These numbers, which come out of a GMA/Deloitte research paper called “The Call for Shopper Marketing,” really bring into question how we’ve allocating our time and money in reaching out to consumers. All this advance effort to sell people on Brand X…and for what? They jump to Brand Z on a whim at the last second. I

I’m sure it still makes sense to prime the pump and create awareness about products via online, direct, broadcast, outdoor and print. But with so many decisions — correction — with so many impulsive decisions happening in the aisles, it seems that we are insane not to focus more on the so-called last mile.

Why isn’t there a stampede among creative agencies to develop expertise in this burgeoning field of “shopper marketing?”

Consider two additional statistics, also in the GMA/Deloitte paper:

• Each week, 127 million customers visit Wal-Mart
• Each week, 68 million people on average watch ABC, CBS or NBC evening news.

So, how is Wal-Mart trying to influence all these millions, perhaps billions, of weekly impulse decisions? Of course, there are the usual mainstays of retail merchandising, such as coupon dispensers, end-cap displays and product sampling. Experiential marketing is also getting more play.

But it’s well reported that Wal-Mart and many other retailers are putting their money on digital signage: intelligent networks of in-store flat-panel displays that can be managed to deliver infinitely localized and relevant messages, using variable data such as:

• Time of day
• Day of week
• Seasons an holidays
• Customer language preferences
• Store traffic patterns
• Weather
• Market and economic conditions
• Local news events
• Inventory levels
• Product sales velocity
• Sales goals vs. actuals
• Proximity sensors
• RFID readers
• User inputs (voice, touch, cell-phones, etc.)

For me, digital signage holds much of the promise that excited many of us marketers in the early days of online marketing, when we realized how we could use data to deliver ever more granular and relevant messages to prospects.

The difference is that digital signage all happens in the store. At the moment of truth, where, according to the research, our expensive ad campaigns and brand loyalty initatives come face to face with disloyal and easily distracted customers. Clearly, whoever has the ability to influence fickle consumers in the aisles has a tremendous advantage.

Photo credit: Phil Romans

Date:
A Saturday in Februrary or March. We’ll announce the date as soon as things are finalized.

Location:
TBD

Food, drink:
Yes. We’re looking to get some kind souls to underwrite food and drinks.

Topics:
I may need some help honing this down to a couple of snappy sound bites. In the meantime, here’s the big idea in prose…

The last UnSummit seemed to be all about social media. Nobody really planned it that way. It’s just what everyone wanted to talk about. I’m sure the next one will be chock-full-o’ social media goodness. But I’d like to see if we can focus our powers and take on the one thing that’s on everyone’s mind  — the economy.

Whether you’re a freelancer or consultant, business owner, an agency worker or a corporate cube dweller, the economy is creeping into every conversation. If you’re lucky, it’s only altered your plans for 2009. But more likely , it’s resulted in slower business and budget cuts. Maybe even a pink slip.

So, are we helpless in the face of job cuts and plummeting sales? If not, what can we do about it as individuals or as a community? Is there a way to hack the downturn and create Recession 2.0?

As creatives, geeks and entrepreneurs, I think this is a rich area for us to mine. I don’t presume to know all the questions people might have around the economy, but here are the one’s I’m asking.

• Is this downturn the same as the last one?
• Will it result in the same kind of carnage?
• Or will it result in an all-new kind of carnage?
• What wine pairs well with carnage? (seriously, let’s have a wine or beer talk!)

• Is everyone feeling the pinch?
• If you’re not, why not?
• Are you considering altering your business model due to the economy?
• What are some alternative ways to profit from your talents, skills and assets?

• What clever strategies are you implementing to survive the maelstrom?
• Which industries and clients still have budgets?
• What tools/techniques are you using to prospect and make sales?
• What tools/techniques are you using cut costs?

• We’re kind of a go-it-alone state. Still, how can we band together as a community to help job hunters and small biz owners?
• Is there anything we can do to speed up the recovery?
• How can we raise the profile of Minnesota as a go-to place for tech, creative and entrepreneurial talent?

I’m hoping that we’ll see three distinct, yet interrelated conversational currents:

• For freelancers, consultants and employees – focus on personal brand building, self promotion, networking.
• For small businesses & agencies – focus on business models, strategies, sales, staffing and efficiency.
• For community leaders – focus on community building, civic boosterism, making Minnesota more visible at a national level.

What do you think of this rough agenda? What do you want to talk about at the next UnSummit? Please drop a comment and let us know!

(We’ll move the conversation over to the UnSummit wiki in a week or so.)

Yet more from the latest Minnov8 podcast…

Graeme Thickens (start at 23:40) reacts to the suggestion that as companies tighten their belts and start questioning costs, social media will be put on the chopping block:

“Social Media doesn’t cost a lot of money. It takes participation by an individual or more than one individual within a company, so I don’t find it really realistic that people are saying, ‘We’ve got to measure what we’re spending here.’

You know, what are they spending? Who’s spending large amounts of money on social media? I’d love to know.

It doesn’t take a lot of money. It takes some time and some effort by someone within the organization.

I don’t think too many organizations are saying, ‘we’ve got to hire a social media expert.’ It’s taken on by people who are already in the organization. They take it on as a side thing. They learn it, they do it and it just takes off. So, I think it’s an amazingly right technology for the times.”

An un-agenda. Uploaded by Meg Canada

Before my memory begins to fail, I wanted to offer some observations about yesterday’s UnSummit08 conference. For those of you who were out of the loop, UnSummit was an impromptu conference that a few of us put together when we heard that the Summit conference, put on by the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA), was sold out.

It’s always a gamble when you put out the call for a new, unproven event. Who will show? Will they have something to say? But that’s the beauty of the “unconference” format. It’s unproven by definition, which – if Wednesday was any evidence – tends to attract people who are up for participation and improvisation.

As people filtered in Wednesday morning, it quickly became clear that we had lured a diverse crowd of thinkers and doers. Some were consultants. Some were writers. Some were designers. A couple were students. A couple were agency owners. At least one PR guy dared to show up. A librarian led one our most popular sessions on community management. And we had a customer loyalty consultant who had lots to contribute. But I don’t think we had too many developers, as there wasn’t a single soul who knew how to set up a repeater. As a result, we hobbled by on intermittent wifi service.

Still, things went fairly smoothly. Especially after Jake Nyberg of Three Volts bought the first round of Guinness before 11 a.m. Lovely. Now, where were we? Yes, smoothness. The schedule which Mykl Roventine had worked out ahead of time seemed to work well. It called for two to three simultaneous sessions, each held in different areas of the same room. So, over the course of the day, folks camped and de-camped according to the session they wanted to attend.

Lunch consisted good, Irish bar food, which I think is perfect in its unfussiness. And in true barcamp style, we spent lunch conversing and continuing discussions from prior sessions.

One of our experiments was to offer a track that was entirely hands-on. When we were setting up the event, we talked to Whitney Gale, the group sales person at Kieran’s/The Local, and asked her if she’d consent to being our guinea pig. Foolishly (or maybe she thought it would help the sale?), she agreed. So, we set out to use the conference not to set up and implemeent a social media strategy for her business. All with the goal of trying to move from theory to practice and see for ourselves how effectively we could put social media to work for a real business in a real, local market (pardon the pun). As I understand, the group made a lot of progress, but wasn’t quite finished by days end. And maybe we were a little ambitious. But better overreaching than underachieving! Anyway, Mykl will be finalizing and reporting on the group’s work in a day or two. We also hope to get some reports down the line on Whitney’s experience/success with social media.

Another experiment was to let anyone sign up to lead a session, no questions asked. For instance, that’s how I got to lead the Marketing Heresies session. Phil Wilson conducted Social Media Reality Check, in which he presented some admittedly non-scientific research that pretty much confirms that the other parents on your kid’s soccer team might have heard about Facebook and Twitter but aren’t using it yet. And later in the day, when he realized that we had touched on the ROI question in nearly every session, Cory Hendrickson offered to host an impromptu session on Social Media ROI.

Tony Saucier presented some provocative ideas in his well-attended session on the Future of PR. The big revelation for lots of us was that PR is still essentially the same game: encouraging credible 3rd parties to make credible endorsements. Only now those third parties aren’t just mass media types. They can be bloggers, friends, family members — basically anyone. Hence Tony’s suggestion of a new moniker for his profession: “public relationships.”

Critiques? I don’t have too many, except that I’d lengthen sessions to 1.5 hours each to allow for more discussion. It seemed that we always ran out of time before a given topic was exhausted. Better wifi? Yes. Definitely. Did you go to UnSummit? If so, please let us know how it worked for you, what you’d want to keep and what you’d want to see improved.

I think the biggest question in my mind is this: If we host UnSummit next year, should it be on a different day than the day MIMA hosts their Summit? I’m guessing that next year they’ll find a way to let more people in. And maybe more affordable (hint, hint). So, getting a ticket probably won’t be an issue for procrastinators and tightwads like me. And if we did host UnSummit on a separate day, I’m sure we’d pull in more people, including those who want to attend both events.

On the other hand, I wonder if there is a positive energy in hosting both events on the same day and offering a distinct alternative to the MIMA conference? It allows for a little inter-tribal rivalry. I have to admit, we had fun tweeting back and forth with attendees at the Summit and also watching Summize to see what people were reporting from both conferences. And at the end of the day, we got to meet up at MIMA’s happy hour. So, all’s well…

Update:

• Phil Wilson (@philson) has a much more concise review of the day’s events at the Minnov8 blog.
• Notes from the sessions are available at the official UnSummit blog

• Graeme Thickins, of DoApp and Tech~Surf~Blog fame, ponders whether using Twitter is decreasing his blogging activity. He also points to an early post on this topic by Ryan Block of Engadget: Does Twittering mean you blog less? The answer might surprise you. Personally, I’ve been seeing the effect on my own blogging. Heck, it’s way easier to spit out a 140-character tweet than to do the thinking, research and linking required for a readable blog post.

• Best Buy embraces Web 2.0 by announcing its Remix API. If, as Brad Stone’s NYT report suggests, this is part of a larger movement by legacy organizations to make their data publicly available, I think we’re in for some fun. Other recent and notable API releases include National Public Radio’s Open API, MTV’s Content API and Apple’s iPhone API.

• Speaking of the big-box retailer with the yellow, tag-shaped logo… From the irritatingly successful 4-Hour-Workweek author Timothy Ferriss, we learn that Best Buy has implemented a Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) with amazing results. Specifically, they claim a 41% increase in productivity at HQ and a 90% reduction in employee attrition in some biz units. What’s ROWE? Ferriss finds out by interviewing Cali Ressler, the 20-something BBY employee who introduced ROWE from the bottom up and went on to write about the concept in Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It. Read Tim Ferriss’: “No Schedules, No Meetings — Enter Best Buy’s ROWE”

  Update: Daniel Pink has an interview with Ressler and Thompson (Part 1 | Part 2)

• 3 Tips for a Great Landing Page – Landing page. Now, there’s a term, along with “microsite,” that ushers you right back to the heyday of Web 1.0. But for many marketers in Fortune 500 companies – who need 6 months lead time to put content on the corporate Web site – a microsite is still a valid tactic for supporting online and offline marketing campaigns.

• David Meerman Scott, speaking at the Inbond Marketing Summit, tackles the social media ROI question by asking, “What’s the ROI of putting on your pants in the morning?” and “What’s the ROI of the army of Guatemalan landscapers now raking the bushes around the building?” (via @desarev)

• And as long as we’re listening to gurus rip it up at conferences, be sure to check out Gary Vaynerchuk’s short, but intense keynote at the recent Web 2.0 conference in NYC. You might want to your volume down, as Gary gets excited and lets the effenheimers fly now and then.

Announcing UnSummit08, a conference for the rest of us. The disenfranchised. The disgruntled. And those of us who simply failed to register on time

What’s the concept?
As long as we’re being alternative, let’s go all the way and make this an “unconference” (see also BarCamp). That means no pre-set agenda. No experts. Full participation. Full dissemination. Oh, and did I mention that it’s free? All the things that traditional conferences are not. If you have problems with authority, this is your conference.

When will it take place?
Wednesday, Oct. 1.

Is it a half-day or all-day conference?
Let’s aim for all day but be flexible on timing, depending on participation.

What will we talk about?
That all depends on who registers and what they want to discuss. I think we can safely say that we’ll be somewhere near the intersection of the Internet and marketing. Social media, branding, apps, widgets, startups, SEO — it’s all fair game.

So what has to happen?

• First things first: we need a wiki. The BarCamp wiki seems like the best route. Who’d like to set that up? Please leave a comment if you can take that on. Let’s aim to have that up by 9-18.
• Next, we need a space. Central Library is out. NewHorizons in Edina is offering a large room that fits 50-ish people. For free! And O’Gara’s Garage in St. Paul has hosted past BarCamps and would probably be open. But we should also check with the Walker, the Minnesota Institute of Arts, Coffman Union, the U of M Alumni Association and other local colleges. Any other possibilities? Who wants to chase down some leads? Let’s aim to have a location by end of week (9-19). Again, please comment below if you’re checking on a particular lead. When the wiki’s up, we can use that to list and eliminate potential locations.

UPDATE: Good news, everyone. The wiki is live. Please go there for the latest: http://unsummit08.pbwiki.com http://www.unsummit.org