Tag: book

Energizing the Groundswell Groundswell

I have a review copy of Groundswell. The publisher, Harvard Business Press, sent a copy each to 100 bloggers (and I believe that their generous stock of blogger review copies is gone now).

Sending out blogger review copies provides an example of Groundswell thinking. So let’s use it to illustrate the POST framework developed in the book (and illustrated in the Groundswell mindmap I did yesterday).

  • People. The first question is who? Groundswell describes people in terms of their position on a ladder of social technology use. On the top rung are Creators of content. Bloggers are on this rung. (While the target audience of Groundswell includes many who don’t create web content, this example is about those who do. If you want a summary of the other rungs, there’s a short presentation giving more detail about the ladder.)
  • Objective. Having recognized the existence of these bloggers, HBP considered its objective. There are five main objectives; each gets its own chapter, as you can see from the book’s table of contents. We’re concerned here with energizing: helping your customers sell to each other. Selling here doesn’t mean hard-sell shouting. It means telling each other about the book, in this case via blog posts.
  • Strategy. How to achieve the objective? Send the books out! Strategy is a rather misleading term, implying a grander action that putting 100 books in the mail. More generally, I don’t think that strategy is the best word for this third step. I’d prefer action or tactics, but that would mess up the acronym (POST), and this is the kind of book that needs an acronym.
  • Technology. This is the most obvious aspect of the groundswell. HBP in giving away books to people like me is using a specific social technology: blogging. It’s also using some very old technologies: paper, and delivery to a building. In some ways it seems strange to use such old technology, rather than to offer us a download. I’m not complaining or criticizing: I probably wouldn’t have “read” Groundswell in any new fangled digital format.

There seems to be something missing from this example. The chapter on energizing includes an example of return on energizing activity, and there are other examples of return on groundswell activity elsewhere in the book. I don’t see evidence that HBP are tracking the blog posts and other web content generated as a result of energizing bloggers with free books. So it doesn’t appear that they are calculating return on their investment in blogger review copies.

I may be speaking prematurely. It may be that we the freebie-blessed bloggers are about to get an email asking us for links to content that has been energized from us. Then there might be a page at the Groundswell web site linking out to all that content, and presenting it as an example of energizing the groundswell. I think it’s a good example.

Mindmapping the Groundswell

Groundswell, mapped using MindMeisterHere’s a mindmap of the book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. To be precise, here’s an image generated from the mindmap. You can click on it to see a larger image.

I recommend going to the map itself, which includes includes richer content such as notes and links. To create and host the map, I used MindMeister. I also tried Bubbl.us and Gliffy, having consulted Mashable’s mindmapping tools post.

The thing that tipped me toward Mindmeiester was the ease of adding icons. I’ve used them to emphasize the POST framework, and to link steps in the framework to chapters of the book. I was at first thinking of using lines to connect each of the four steps to corresponding chapters, but I realized that would turn the map into a mess of crossed lines. While that would have been a faithful representation of my mind, it wouldn’t have much help to you, the user.

By the way, I looked only at mindmapping tools that were web-based and free, or freemium. After choosing MindMeister, I continued to discover features I liked: offline access via Gears; OpenID; ease of undoing silly things; and the people behind it seem to be based in Vienna and Munich, two cities in which I had a lot of fun when I was based in Europe.

This is version 1 of my Groundswell mindmap. (I don’t claim to be the first to do a Groundswell mindmap; I believe that distinction belongs to Kaspar.) If you have suggestions for improvements, or any other comments, please go ahead and leave them here.

Book Reviews and Ratings

Thoughts on book reviews and rating got bumped out of a post yesterday. Two difficulties were on my mind.

The first concerns the ubiquitous 5-star rating system. I find it very hard to give a perfect score to any book. It’s not just books: I have the same difficulty with music, board games, etc. On the other hand, 3 stars or below seems harsh in these days of grade inflation, sensitivity training, etc. So I tend to give a lot of 4-star ratings.

The second difficulty relates to how thoroughly the reviewer read the book. Some books I don’t finish, usually because I don’t like them. Is it fair to give a low review (e.g, 1-star) to a book on the basis of an incomplete read?

Then there are books that aren’t intended to be “read” in the start-to-finish sense. Reference books fall into this category. I was recently reminded of a less central member of the category: Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.

Perhaps there should be some symbol accompanying a star rating to indicate how the reviewer has read the book: thoroughly start-to-end, dipped in to, etc.

Reviewing and Similar Modes of Writing: Costello Connections

Elvis Costello has received a high proportion of my musical attention so far this year. One of the ensuing posts has accounted for a high proportion of this blog’s recent traffic.

I’ve read a couple of books on Costello. This post is about them, and about writing about music, and about writing about books. The first book is Elvis Costello – God’s Comic: A Critical Companion To His Lyrics & Music by David Gouldstone. It’s an update of the same author’s A Man Out of Time. The main difference is that God’s Comic has a chapter on the 1989 album Spike.

Although I enjoyed the extra chapter, and agree with Gouldstone that Spike is among Costello’s best albums, I think that A Man Out of Time is a more coherent book, focusing as it does on Costello’s first decade. The inclusion of good material that reduces the coherence of the whole is appropriate in a book about Costello, especially when the material relates to the sprawl that is Spike.

Writing about music is notoriously difficult. The music blog Dancing About Architecture quotes Costello himself as stating that: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture… it’s a really stupid thing to want to do.” Let’s not get into tracing the history of that quote, otherwise we’ll never get back to the books.

I think that Gouldstone does a pretty good job in giving his take on Costello’s music and, especially, lyrics, without claiming that his are the last words or the only right words. The writing in God’s Comic is analytical without being heavy.

In that, it contrasts with the writing of the second book: Elvis Costello, Joni Mitchell, and the Torch Song Tradition. Consider the following sentence.

He [Costello] readily models existing musical, literary, or cinematic techniques in service of his songs, and in so doing, enhances his lifework’s sonic diversity.

I couldn’t get through even the part of the book on Costello, let alone the rest of it (even though Joni Mitchell also interests me).

At this point, I think that I should bump the thoughts on reviewing books into its own post, and close by remarking that I have high hopes for another book on Costello. It’s Graeme Thomson’s Complicated Shadows: The Life and Music of Elvis Costello, which will probably be part of my next Amazon order.

SWPL Can Has Bookdeel

The NYT reports book deals for two WordPress.com blogs: Stuff White People Like and I Can Has Cheezburger. I don’t get the latter: LOLcats don’t make me L, certainly not OL.

But I do get the former. That’s probably not surprising, coming from a white guy married to an asian girl. Having said that, SWPL isn’t one of the feeds in my reader. SWPL is a site I visit when I link reminds me of its existence.

Today’s link came via Toni, who blogged about the book deals. I’m glad it came today, because I really love today’s SWPL post, about music and the piracy thereof.

I didn’t mention book deals in my account of making money from your WordPress.com blog. Perhaps I should have done. But given that there are millions of WordPress.com blogs, and a handful of book deals, the omission doesn’t seem too serious. On the other hand, SWPL apparently got a $300k advance.

Word of the Year: Free

It’s not yet March (check time: yes, we have another 23 minutes of this extra day of February, or at least, we did when I started this parenthesis), but I will state that the word of the year for 2008 is free. That’s free, not as in freedom, but as in $0.00.

Chris Anderson has just published an article in Wired explaining Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business. It’s a preview of the book he’s writing. As I’ve previously noted, the book won’t be out until 2009. I don’t know what the word of 2009 will be.

So back to the word of 2008: free. That’s how much I’ll charge you for these links.

Much though I consider Harlan and Alex to be worth reading, I find my own views to be closer to those of Neil and Chris.

Bookish

I love (semi-obligatory Valentine’s Day reference) books, and have a few book-related things to inflict on you. First, I have an account at Goodreads. Actually, I’ve had one for a while, but I’ve recently started using it, thanks to a couple of friend requests.

Second, I’m delighted to report the blog-to-book deal for Strange Maps.

Third, Adam Koford’s recent post at Drawn! might have been written for me. That’s not just because it recommends a Complete Idiot’s Guide. It’s because it concerns people who think that they have a children’s book in them (and there do seem to be an awful lot of us), realize that such books are usually illustrated, and think that this means that they need to find an illustrator before submitting to a publisher.

Adam states that “publishers never want to see unsolicited manuscripts with art.” He also refers to the problem of requests to provide illustrations for someone’s book, or idea for one. I’m glad I didn’t ask him if he wanted to work with me on mine. I’m also glad that he has already done an illustration for one of my stories.

Andy Grove’s Book Survives

A dozen years ago, Andy Grove’s Only the Paranoid Survive came out. I had cause to pick it up again today.

You can find (most of) the preface online at Intel. Here’s the key definition: “a strategic inflection point is a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change.”

In order to describe the fundamentals of a business, Andy extended Michael Porter’s Five Forces of Competition model into a Six Forces model. The force he added was that of complements. For example, Microsoft Windows was an important complement to Intel’s chips, and remains so today.

OtPS is a Six Forces account of Intel and its environment. That said, it is a dozen years old, and that’s a long time in a tech industry. The risk of obsolescence is particularly acute when we realize that the last chapter is “The Internet: Signal or Noise? Threat or Promise?”, opens with the then-recent story of Netscape’s IPO, and goes on to explain what the internet is. But the chapter stands the test of time remarkably well.

So does the book as a whole. I expect to be able to rate OtPS as highly in another dozen years, for the clarity of the six forces framework and Andy’s exposition.

123 Meme

I’ve been tagged by Jen to do the 123 meme, which goes like this:

1. Pick up the book nearest you with at least 123 pages. (No cheating!)
2. Turn to page 123.
3. Count the first five sentences.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five other bloggers.

Let’s see, the book nearest me now is the same one that was nearest me when I read Jen’s post: Intern: A Doctor’s Initiation. The three sentences are as follows.

Not calling backup, I quickly learned, was considered a sign of strength, and for an intern there was nothing more flattering than to be considered “strong.” Once, I made the mistake of calling a third-year resident at her apartment in the middle of the night to ask for help performing a spinal tap. She roared at me on the phone for not taking care of the procedure earlier, before she came on duty at 10:00 p.m.

The five tagees are as follows: Brian, Constantine, Jonathan, Liz, Nicholas. I predict that 2.5 of the 5 will go for it.

The Pirate’s Dilemma

The Pirate’s Dilemma. It’s a slideshow…

… it’s a book that tells the story of how youth culture drives innovation and is changing the way the world works. Actually, I think of it mainly as a book, but that might be a sign of my age. So, back to the trendier stuff: it’s also a blog that identities the Mac Book Air as the end of the CD business.