At the end of last year, as I started Dave Atkins Media!, I made a conscious decision to limit my "organizational activities" to avoid being sidetracked into non-productive activity. I spent about 2 hours making a website and elected to operate as a sole proprietorship with an excel spreadsheet as my general ledger. I used Freshbooks online invoicing to track my hours and bill my clients. Then, I landed the contract job at Mass.Gov and dove into that...

I'm going down to Needham Bank this morning to open a business account. Then I will turn in my d/b/a certificate at town hall, apply for an occupancy permit from the building department, apply for a sign permit to go on the front of my office space at 291 Washington Street, then get to work drawing up my articles of incorporation. What's different?

I will provide more details here, but basically, I'm more serious about this now. I have less time to talk about it and more time to do.

And yes...that website needs some work. I know where it needs to go now though...

Here's a peek at what I've been up to at Heroix, where I'm blogging about my experiences in the technology trenches. The items below are excerpts from the longer entries...click on over to the Heroix blog to read the rest of the story...

Yesterday's Social Media Jungle in Boston was full of great discussion and ideas. One discussion leader, Justin Levy, advocated the need to stop talking about social media and start doing. But many of us are trying to figure out how to help others who aren't ready to "do" yet.

Justin has used social media to help make his Caminito Argentinian Steakhouse successful. His Prime Cuts blog is all about food--he uses the site to talk about something he cares passionately about and that passion and enthusiasm contagiously engages his customers.

But Justin is also General Manager of New Marketing Labs where Chris Brogan is President. These guys are "social media rockstars." He's totally practicing what he preaches, but it's a little bit like the crazy hypothetical of working a job next to Lance Armstrong and having him tell you that you ought to be bike commuting.

I asked what advice he'd give to a company that was unlikely to have the time to do it themselves--but how to preserve authenticity. His answer was to find someone who could write passionately about something relevant to the company.

That's much like the strategy I've adopted for my first client, Heroix, a vendor of applications monitoring software. I'm blogging about what I know--the technology operations day-to-day life and relating stories of what I learned the hard way. I'm passionate about improving things--eliminating frustration and utilizing technology to make people's work easier. That's a trait I share with many of the people who should be customers of Heroix. I'm not trying to directly sell their product, but to help them connect with their customers.

But as my wife quickly noted, this is not reproducible. I'm using a part of myself to execute the strategy and there's only so much of me to go around. But it did give me an idea for moving beyond "consulting company" or "solopreneurship."

What if we truly think of marketing as a partnership between enthusiasts and producers? When I worked at ConsumerReview, their approach (for flagship site MTBR.com) was based on the idea of having a passionate enthusiast like mountain biker and founder Frances Cebedo manage a community of people who wrote reviews and shared tips. I think, if you are Gary Fisher, Trek, or Santa Cruz, and you want to get into the social media space, you need to find guys like Francis to blog, tweet, and manage your facebook pages. In fact, that is exactly what Trek is doing with their Trek Life site.

It's daunting to tell people they should be doing things like blogging, tweeting, participating in Facebook, etc. when they don't want to. And social media is not some advertising campaign you can just pay someone to execute effectively. It is all about making personal connections and engaging in person-to-person communication, not business-to-consumer commerce. So find people not to speak for the company, but to participate in what they love under the sponsorship and guidance of the company. Hire a third party to facilitate and measure effectiveness (hint: that's Dave Atkins Media!).

But now...I need to get back to following Mr. Levy's advice and stop talking and start doing...

Social media strategists and consultants should take a good look at the Salesforce platform as a complement to activities like blogging, twitter, and facebook. Until I spoke with John Durocher, a VP at Salesforce who specializes in the Financial Services Industry, I thought of Salesforce as strictly a CRM product. But what Salesforce is doing with their Ideas application--and their cloud computing approach, could be the next level of customer engagement.

According to Vida Killian, Dell's IdeaStorm manager, Dell's Digital Media Vision is to "engage in relevant conversations with out customers online, 24/7, worldwide in all major languages." After some initial missteps, Dell began blogging and working to engage customers in the social media space with their Direct2Dell blog launched in June 2006. IdeaStorm was launched earlier this year as an augmentation of Dell's social media strategy to move from one to one conversations to one to many collaboration opportunities.

IdeaStorm provides Dell customers with the opportunity to suggest improvements to the product and see those suggestions become a part of the product development cycle. To date, over 10,000 ideas have been generated and a visit to the site will show what ideas are currently bubbling to the top of the list.

The video below gives a very quick (1 minute) view of how IdeaStorm works to move ideas into reality:

Salesforce has launched a number of demo and early implementation sites using the Ideas application. Dell's IdeaStorm and MyStarbucksIdea are the first sites to fully implement what Salesforce describes (perhaps too "corporatistically") as "community in a box," but if we leap past the rather non-organic connotations of that moniker, we find the proof is in the practicality that these sites are working to serve their purpose: generating ideas from the user community.

It is probably too early to tell if these applications are working, but what I find intriguing is how the Salesforce approach offers the potential to leapfrog over many implementation details and get a relevant conversation started quickly.

John compared what Salesforce is doing with applications as akin to an iTunes store for applications--the AppExchange allows a business to quickly try out applications to see if they were effective or not and then move on to others. That sounds expensive, but then consider how expensive it is to "dabble" in social media. My favorite caveat I've learned is that new media initiatives are "easy to start, but hard to finish." It takes about an hour to get a blog started. But then, you realize that the theme you chose is not so great and you want to customize things a bit so you start messing around with the css. You download a bunch of plugins and maybe even edit the php code a bit because you need it to do something differently. When you are doing this in the comfort of your home as a fun learning experience, it's no big deal. But when it becomes work...and people are not just reading it but wanting to know if it is working...it's not so easy after all.

I think Salesforce is different from just "better tools." There are plenty of products out there designed to allow "non-technical" people to make web things. In the web 1.0 world it was all about creating a WYSIWYG web page editor. In web 2.0 maybe it was Drupal. But ultimately, you find the people maintaining the sites are either technical or became pretty technical pretty fast because they needed to.

Instead of asking communicators to become programmers...or trying to build the perfect tool set for them...what if we could create simple plug in applications to do certain clearly defined tasks? OK, IdeaStorm may not be as "authentic sounding" as a blog by a product manager engaging in one-on-one conversations with customers...but it is more likely to be effective, certainly in larger organizations where the challenge is how to integrate so many smaller ideas into a larger product. Ideastorm may not provide the direct connection that some support rep twittering and fixing your problem on the fly does. But isn't it the next level? Isn't this the essence of truly and authentically involving customers and developers in the process of creating products that truly meet their needs?

I'm also excited by the potential community/government uses for these apps. When I set up WestwoodBlog I chose the Drupal platform mainly because I thought I would be getting multiple residents to blog as they do at myDedham. I wanted more community "plumbing" than Wordpress offered a year ago. But as I start to think about how my site could play a larger role in improving town communication, I run into two types of limits:

1. Time - I need to keep my editorial voice going, I need to invest time to keep my "ear to the ground," and do behind the scenes activity to encourage involvement.
2. Technology - I need to turn myself into a Drupal developer to get some features I'd like to have. How about a simple form to report a streetlight out? I'm sure Drupal has some ugly UI-challenged way to do that, but even if I don't do any real programming work, it is not something I can just "try out."

Salesforce makes their platform available to nonprofits for free. There is still solution architecting work to be done, but it would be a great abstraction to be able to say, ok, turn on the trouble-ticketing system for that...or use the ideas application to gather input for pedestrian and bike saftey. I will have to investigate further and see if there is something I can use here.

To take it a step even further...this is the kind of development we need to make large scale cooperation work. I can foresee so many initiatives becoming bogged down in the detail of running a blog and keeping up with community management issues. I suspect this kind of software approach could save tons of time and money in projects like what Boston World Partnerships is doing to create a community to promote economic development in Boston.

I don't think there is really such a thing as a "community in a box," but it would make a lot more sense to serve specific functions with specific applications than to try to extend the conversational value of social media too far into implementation details. A blog is not the ideal place to report a broken streetlight because the tendency will be to simply talk more about it and no one will likely go fix it. Pretty soon, people get tired of just talking. Integrated applications could deliver the results that make conversation meaningful and relevant to customers and constituents.

So, if you find typos...don't even tell me. I have standardized my online identity around "daveatkins" but I need something to hand people when I meet them. So here we go:

The backside of the card is simple and to the point:

So, I'm banking on twitter to be around for at least 250 cards...

A very simple design, but there are a couple of semi-clever ideas in there. The at sign is significant as a social media thing (twitter) and also as a part of my name. (There is a guy named Atkins who owns the kins.com domain, so he has an email address like "dave@kins.com"...but that's TOO clever.) And it's Dave Atkins Media (bang!), not just Dave Atkins Media. So DAM! I'm good GREAT!.

I can plan, but I can also do. I posted my approach to strategy consulting a while ago, but then I realized, anyone can say that stuff. Listen to the client, help them. How hard is that? But I thought it might be useful to list some specific things I can do...things that presume a strategy and that could be done by many tech people...but perhaps it is not so obvious...

• Blogs - I can get you started blogging by setting up a website with a professional look and feel, with a "real" web address, and teach you how to use the authoring tools to post. I can coach you on how to write posts that people will want to read and how to deal with comments. I will not design your corporate website or make you a whole e-commerce site for your business...those projects take longer and are less rewarding than anyone ever wants. But a blog can be focused and simple to maintain.
• Twitter - I can show you what twitter is and how it can be useful. I can get you started tweeting and provide some guidance to help you understand if it is worthwhile to pursue. Many people "try out" social media, but don't go beyond registering and logging in once.
• Facebook - I can help you follow a strategy--again, avoiding the experience of signing up, filling out a profile, uploading a couple photos...and then not doing anything else for weeks. It's actually easier to help other people than maintain your own presence because, by yourself, you either get it because all your dorm friends are on it...or you tend to lapse.
• Wikis - Creating a wiki--a collaborative online workspace--is 1% technology and 99% advocacy and leadership by example. But that 1% can be daunting. And again, a coach or guide can be helpful to avoid the isolation of "why am I doing this?" that causes so many projects like this to die.
• Email Newsletters - my friend and I hosted a newsletter service almost a decade ago that he wrote from scratch. I would not be programming such a thing for you. I would use Listrak or Constant Contact. But newsletters are very time-consuming when a company has many other unexpected demands. I can put together the creative resources, deploy the weekly newsletter, and deal with the community management challenges, reporting back engagement and conversion metrics. This task alone saves you the eventual cost of hiring a person.
• Web Site Marketing and Analytics - At the most basic level, I can get you set up with Google Analytics so you can see a daily report of who is visiting your website. We can implement Search Engine Marketing (SEM)--paying Google for clicks to advertised links to your site. And I can review your site for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to assess if there are simple things that can be done to increase the number of people who find your site. I can determine how to make the urls on your site "friendly" and review your copy for editorial suggestions to improve relevance. SEO can be a very complex and expensive undertaking, or it can be an 80/20 rule thing where I spend half a day to figure out what will give you the most immediate results.
• Link Building - one of the most critical things to increasing traffic to your site is to be linked from other sites. There are services that will sign you up for directories. You may even receive offers in the mail for listings in references. These are like the "Who's Who" books our parents were sold as we graduated high school and college--they are almost entirely worthless and meaningless--as are all the search engines besides Google. If your company can afford a shotgun strategy, by all means, go for it. But what you really need is a sustained effort to cultivate relationships with other sites that might find your content valuable. For bloggers, this means commenting on other people's blogs and responding. It means firing off an email to people who comment on your site. It means setting up Google Alerts to watch for mentions of your company name in any news media, monitoring twitter and any other media that might be used by your customers, and then following up proactively to connect with people. One person at a time...you build a following. I don't have a magic application that will do that for you, but I can devote a set number of hours per week to help you stay on top of these things. Again, instead of doing it yourself or having this task take up a good part of some key employee's time, I can keep help you stay on top of things.

These are just some quick examples. They are not sexy but they are the kind of things that for most companies are easy to start but hard to maintain.