I’m sure your employer really does have a sense of customer service.  I just can’t see it.  It’s probably unfair of me to say that  they care as little (maybe even less) about you than they do about me.  And then you get stuck with me.  I’m such a lousy customer.

I can’t imagine what it’s like to face this every day.  When you had to explain how they had slipped in that change in the billing — where they went from billing me in arrears to be billing me one month in advance, I felt sorry for you.  The fact that they did this at a time when they were converting the billing systems — again.  I should have been more understanding.   Now you have to explain why I appear to  have two bills for the same period.  That’s got to be tough.  The fact that your own phone systems don’t work that well or you don’t get training — when you transferred me and accidentally hung up on me — that was tough.

What did I do?  I got mad.  How thoughtless.

After all, you’d think by now I should be used to this.  After all, I’ve never called without being transferred at least once.  So what’s the big deal today?  I know.

My problem is that I don’t keep this in perspective.  I know that it wasn’t you personally who missed the last appointment.   It’s a big company and stuff happens.  So when they don’t show up, I should be more understanding.   I know that it’s not you that makes the arcane structures so I had to be transferred four times when I called your company to answer another incomprehensible letter which was auto-sent with the wrong information.  (Ooops, there I go again!)  I know it’s not your fault that nobody took action on the notes made on my file.  I admit that I don’t get it.  You are busy.  You are understaffed.

I hate it when I get mad at you.  I truly am a lousy customer.

But it’s not just my temper.  I can’t seem to get anything right.  I can’t figure out your bills.  I can’t figure out why it always takes hours to deal with each new snag.  I just don’t have the patience I should.  If I’d just make up a spreadsheet and add it all up — or better still, if I’d just shut up and pay it.

I know it’s unreasonable for me to think that I should have someone who manages my account and would deal with the internal structures.

I should focus on what I can do to improve.  For example –  I should be  better at repeating the same story over and over and over…  Even if I am giving the same information to everyone.

Perhaps if I kept better notes.  It’s just that I’m really busy (yeah, I know it’s an excuse).   We’re trying to keep our business alive in a recession so I spend a lot of time trying to — well, earn money.    I realize how selfish this makes me seem.  Me, me, me – always about me.  Never about you.  I mean, you’re the phone company for heaven’s sake.  Who am I.  Or as my mother said “Who do you think you are?”

And I’m ungrateful.  Like when you offered me that discount because I was such a good customer.  What did I say?  Not thank you.  No.  I said — “is there any catch?”  What kind of comment is that?  An who thinks that having to sign up for a long term contract to get the discount -  is a “catch”?  And it’s not like you were NEVER going to tell me.  After I’d agreed, you would have had someone read me the terms or sent me a contract.  So I would EVENTUALLY know.  Sheesh!

I’m always concerned with money.  If I would just pay the darned bills and shut up, I know everything would work out better.  I keep telling myself that.  Picky, picky, picky.

At the end of the day, I’m just a bloody egotist.  I expect you to remember everything about me.  I expect you to do stuff for me.  I expect to do nothing but use your service and pay one clear bill a month.   Then to top it all off I expect the lowest price guaranteed — just because I give you all my business.

Oh, don’t forget that I expect you to jump if something goes wrong.  I act like I really need the service.  I mean – it’s just a phone or internet for heaven’s sake.  I act like it’s a big interruption in my business!

Look at that, will you.  I, I, I.  Me, me, me.   I hate what I’ve become.   It’s all about me.

I complain all the time — and I’m always wrong.  I have to be.  Nobody’s ever said – “we made a mistake” in all the years I’ve dealt with you.  Never.  That’s got to tell you something!

I don’t know why you put up with me.  I hate what I’ve become.

You don’t deserve to be stuck with someone like me.  I’m surprised you keep calling me to sell me more stuff.  Sometimes you call two or three times in the same day.  When do I call?  When I have a problem.  It’s never about you.  It’s always about me.

I can’t believe you’ve put up with me this long.   And I can’t live with what I’ve become.  As much as it pains me to say this — I think we should start seeing others.

In the midst of the buzz on Google’s Buzz, this little thing appeared on my horizon. It’s called Amplify and it seem a bit like a highbrow version twitter (so far). It’s a site where you can post slightly longer posts (500 characters) and it seems the right length for thoughtful but brief comments.

It has the follower/followed paradigm and I’m still trying to figure out what else is there.

KRKJQRRZX2QV

My gut tells me it’s worth a look — and I’ve read a couple of posts on it that are, for the first time in a long time – worth reading in the entirety. I haven’t seen anything with this much promise since Aardvark and Nutshell Mail (both of which went from neat toys to mainstays of my social media management strategy).

As inevitably happens – he brought out a recent experience where the customer service was appalling.  I’ve heard many of these over the years.  It doesn’t take much prodding and we can all come up with one.  And I want to stress that I’m not talking about simply bad service.  That happens all too frequently to count.  This was appalling service — you’d almost have to try to make it that bad.    In his case, what was promised to be a 24 hour turnaround from a major bank, conveniently done on-line turned into many weeks of trips far out of his way to the only physical location where this business could be done, many phone calls and even with all of this – never a really satisfying conclusion, let alone an apology.

Yet he told it to me, matter of factly, as only one in a history of disappointments.   It was appalling, but nothing special.

Conversations like this have been going on for years in coffee shops all around the world.  But I think something has changed.  I can see it.  We all can see it

In Toronto, where I live, a recent fair hike was handled abysmally by our Transit Commission.   I don’t think there’s any question of it.  Is is a coincidence that a picture of a Transit employee sleeping on the job went viral?  It also sparked a multitude of similar pictures.  Public pressure was so intense that some of the transit workers were considering a work to rule.  That silliness prompted some awful cartoons suggesting that a work to rule would be an improvement in service.   The whole thing threatens yet to spin out of control.

Second case in point.  The Sons of Maxwell, a touring band had a fate that is as old as musicians and flight.  A classic guitar, checked as luggage by a member of the band was thrown and damaged.  If the reports are true, the band member actually saw an employee throwing a guitar.  You have to be brain-dead to not know that throwing a guitar is a bad thing.   It can only be thought of as malicious.

What did the band do?  They complained, certainly and were told that there was nothing that could be done.  So they wrote songs about it.  One of these went viral on youtube and at last count got 7 million hits.  Seven million.   As United Breaks Guitars went into the millions, so did the losses at United Airlines.

What’s unique about these?  Well, you have to remember, this is Canada.  It’s not New York.  We used to be the most polite  nation on the face of the planet.  The old joke was that a Canadian was someone who apologizes when you step on HIS toe.

But you can kiss that s**t goodbye, apparently.  Now if you step on the toes of a Canadian, they’ll shoot you — not with bullets — but with the always ready cell phone camera.  Blame and shame are concealed weapons of choice with Canadians.

Yes, it’s as if we all woke up and discovered that the meak may inherit the earth, but the cranky get revenge.

It’s also no surprise that Canadians are turning to social media to vent that outrage.  We’ve always been the biggest users of social media.  Facebook took off in Toronto.  The groups of Linked In are full of Canadians and Twitter is on fire up here.

Not that we’ve lost our sense of humour.  This is, after all, a nation whose greatest export is comedians – some of America’s funniest are Canadians – Dan Akroyd to Jim Carrey.

When you bring together that sense of outrage, a penchant for comedy and social media a virtual explosion happens.  A recent example?  In a wave of outrage directed at our current Prime Minister, some ingenious sole got the idea of trying to see if an onion ring could have more friends than Stephen Harper, leader of our nation.  Now Stephen has millions to spend on handlers, publicists, web artists  — whatever it takes.  In fact, we seem to have an entire province of millions in population who, if they found Stephen Harper copulating with a sheep would still leap to his defense (as long as it was a girl sheep – he is leader of  a right of centre party).  Yet one lone person with a sense of humour and a social media device was able to trump this and tramp the politician down into the abyss of humiliation.

Last count?  Onion Ring – 80,000 friends.  Harper?  29,000.

Frustration?  Anger?  These are new to Canada, but we’re learning fast.

Someone told me recently that in the US, 20% of people actively hate their cell company.  In Canada?  That number is purported to be more than 60%.  In fact, judging by a recent meeting that a friend was at, it may be more.   When the head of a new upstart cell company was introduced at a recent gathering in Toronto, the audience applauded vigorously at a comment that this new company was going to do some damage to the existing suppliers.

There was an old commercial for tea that ended with the tagline, “Only in Canada?  Pity!”    I don’t think this is a “Made In Canada” phenomenon.   I do think that the fact that the anger has exploded North of the 49th parallel should be a warning sign to companies and even governments.  Canadians are the direct opposite of the the Canary that miners used to take into the coal mines.  These birds were small and sensitive, if they got exposed to gas, they reacted early and gave the miners a chance to escape.

Canadians are more like a tsunami warning device.  By the time you see a sign from them all you can do is get washed away.  It’s simply too late.

I love Prine’s work.  Why?  Because, especially as I get older,  at least part of me becomes more an more like his characters.  I look back nostalgically at a past where things were simpler,  more understandable.  I think to some extent, most of us do.

That idea of a time when things made “common sense” is one those archetypal memories.  You find it throughout history – a yearning for that simpler time.

So it has a seductive appeal.

So why isn’t it more prevalent?  Why isn’t common sense more …. well, common? 

You have to know what I mean.  All of us use the phrase at one time or another – usually to describe the behaviour of someone — or more often — something else.   Because in many cases, the people who don’t have it — or don’t get it are part of large organizations.  Big companies.  Big beauracracies.  Big government – especially big government.   These are the usual suspects, the groups that prove that common sense isn’t – if you know what I mean.

And it frustrates us.   It frustrates me, anyway.  Even though I know it’s not true.

Little known fact – I’m also a song writer.  It was once part of my livelihood.  I actually have a gold record hanging on my wall.  But that was, like my longing for common sense, a time long ago.  Now music  is more  of  a hobby.

But I did write a song that responded to John Prine’s melancholy appeal to the days of yesteryear.   My song started like this:

“Things ain’t like they used to be, in fact they never were…”

And it’s true.  There was no halcyon days when common sense reigned supreme.  It’s a fiction.  Think about it.  When was this golden time.   Let’s go back.   Was it the 1980’s – the disco era?  I’m not even going there.  Sorry.

Was it the 1960’s?  Peace, love and all that?  Well, no.  The 60’s were chaotic.  Nothing made sense.  Trust me.  I was there.

Was it the 50’s?  I don’t think so.  You might believe it — if all you knew about the 50’s was from “Leave it to Beaver”.   The 50’s was a tremendously uptight time, with McCarthism, ideas that you could win a nuclear war and a type of civil repression that Martin Luther King would fight against a decade later.   I could go back.  Hitler.  The Depression.  World War I and on and on.

There was no great time when common sense made sense.   The world has always been chaotic and often troubling.

So why the appeal of “common sense”.  Why do we yearn nostalgically for it?  Well for one reason, it does take us back to a time when we were more certain.   For many of us, that represents a time in our youth.

“Common sense” is just all the predjudices that you accumulate by the age of 18.”  Albert Einstein said that.

Yet, if you have children who are around the age of 18 — or even if you are just honest about how “right” you were at that age, you have to be a little aghast.   If you have an 18 year old you’ll shake your head at how “black and white” the world seems to them.

Now that’s okay — if you are 18.  You have an excuse.  You don’t have the benefit of experience to teach you that things are not always as simple as they seem.  As a part time university prof, I spend a fair bit of time trying to convey this to my students.  Things are not always simple — or black and white.

Some of them get it.  Some don’t.

Even with the benefit of years of experience some don’t get it.   They somehow go through life and never appreciate the real complexities.   It’s as if some people reaching my age have 30 years of experience and others have 1 year of experience repeated 30 times.

Again – what is the harm?  Well, if it makes you nostalgic, there’s probably not much harm.   I no longer believe that the solution to global military conflict is to simply “give peace a chance” — but I do appreciate the sincerity of those views and I respect them to this day.   But I realize that thigs are more complex than that.    But even if you don’t get it.  Even if you sit at the dinner table and rant about how things used to be — if your delusions are your own, there’s probably not that much harm.

Where the harm comes is if you have those views and you are in a position to influence an organization, a company or god forbid — a country.  That’s where the harm comes in.

I could bring up a ton of examples of why common sense just doesn’t work in complex situations.  But I saw a great example this week on the TED talks.

I’ve kept a link to the video here.  You can watch it for yourself.   For those who want the bluffer’s guide, the presenter beautifully shows how our common sense approach to motivation flies in the face of scientific evidence.  He shows, quite conclusively, that when creative approaches to a solution or task are required, external rewards or bonuses are not effective motivation.  In fact, he presents pretty clear evidence that this type of reward system actually decreases effectiveness.

The science is not new.  The experiments that Dan Pink refers to in the video date back to 1945 and as he rightly points out, form the basis of most modern behavioural theory.   Most but not all.  Why hasn’t it made it’s way into management science and compensation theory?  Can in be that those who are engaged in compensation are untrained?  Could it be that they have not studied behavioural science?  It’s possible but not likely.  Are they recommending the right solutions but being ignored?  Possibly.

For whatever reason, flying in the face of good science we continue to see the one trick pony of compensation being used where it is proven to be least effective — with creative jobs and knowledge workers.  Want performance?  Offer a bonus.  The fact that the science doesn’t support this?  Nonsense!   Common sense will tell you…

And off we go.  Back to a world, as Peter Senge once described it, where a group of people with IQs over 130 go into a room and make decisions that you would expect with an IQ of 80.  Even confronted with the facts, people will go back to what they term common sense, which is, as Einstein so aptly described, merely their own prejudices and sometimes their own agenda.   Denial, as my friend John Thorp says, “is not a river in Egypt”  – it’s a fact of modern corporate life.

That’s why we still claim that salaries and bonuses are so important in attracting and motivating senior employees and knowledge workers.  After all, that’s common sense, isn’t it?  Unfortunately, it may make good sense but it doesn’t make good science.

We aren’t going to change the game using “common sense” – however seductive that idea is.  “Common science” might do the trick.  We’d be better off paying more attention to that – even when it tells us things that we don’t want to hear.

Check it out — and get real life stories every Monday night at 8pm ET on http://BlogTalkRadio.com/GameChanging    It’s better in person.  You get to ask the questions if on our forum, on Twitter or even live by phone.  But if you miss it, you can hear the podcast by download from the show page or via iTunes (just search podcasts for GameChanging).

Seeya there

I thought the best way to respond to everyone was to blog about the meeting, the questions and the links.

Above the fold (for those who appreciate the metaphor) – I’ll mention our invite to all of you.  We had such a good response to this that Andrew and I have agreed to host two online versions of the follow up sessions.  Here’s what I’m thinking:

Session 1 will be for “beginners” and be true primer on how to get started.

Session 2 will be for intermediate to senior practitioners and focus on how to get above the crowd.

LET US KNOW WHAT YOU THINK OF THIS – or anything else here, by leaving a comment!    And please, would you go to this site and fill in a very quick survey?  I promise I’ll send you the results if you do. Click here to take survey

We also recommend to all of you that you may want to keep up with us on our online internet radio show (www.BlogTalkRadio.com/GameChanging) either live or in the podcast version.  That show is every Monday night at 8:00 pm ET.  Now for those who would like the notes from the session, here they are

Our Agenda:

We promised to cover three key points on Social Media:

- What is it?

- Why do you (as a consultant) care?

- How can you use it your practice?

Your questions:

We took an informal survey at the start of the presentation.  I’ve repeated that survey here in SurveyMonkey – a free tool.

We asked the audience what they wanted to find out by coming to this presentation.  You can find these points on the survey that I have prepared using Survey Monkey.  Please take a minute and  take survey.  I promise to share the results.

One question that was asked and answered was – “What work have you gotten through the use of social media?”  Several people in the audience answered this one and gave examples where:

1. Companies had looked at their profile (several)
   
2. One lady, a lawyer, had at least 4 direct assignments associated with searches to her Linked In Profile
3. One mentioned how he used Linked In to get to the decision makers and beyond the gate keepers

Software tools and links mentioned in the presentation included:

• Life, the Universe and Everything - see the bottom of this blog for the list of sites and urls by category provided so kindly by Andrew Jenkins.   Someone else mentioned the Conversation Prism.
• Twitter (www.twitter.com)  – the basic twitter
• Search in twitter with www.search.twitter.com - we also covered the idea that you can put in a keyword (often called a hashtag) by preceeding the word with the # character.  It makes it easy to search for this.  Try searching for my radio show conversations with #gamechanging and see what happens.
• Tweetdeck (www.tweetdeck.com) – a dashboard where you can manage all of your twitter sending, reading, searching
• Linked In - (www.linkedin.com) – we talked a lot about how you can consolidate a lot of this information (including your twitter feed) on Linked In.  We discussed the benefits of having your profile at 100% (just do it!).  Andrew went through the benefits of paid membership.  For those who are on Linked In you can find my profile at http://ca.linkedin.com/in/therealjimlove and Andrew Jenkins is at  http://ca.linkedin.com/in/andrewjjenkins
• Linked In Groups – check out Hubba, the “think-tank” that Andrew, Jim and a few other experts launched on Linked in.  Also – have you been to the 2 CMC groups  – CMC-Canada and Certified Management Consultant.  Why are there two?  Hey, I only answer questions on social media, not on the meaning of life.  In my opinion, both are pretty boring and I’d love to work on them, but I’m doing an experiment in another group right now.
• More links and some tips on Social Media Strategy – check out this blog entry called “Love’s Links” which has the links from our show of January 4th where we discussed Social Media Strategy.  You’ll find two or three easy tools for measuring. Tweet level is a cute little measurement tool to check your reputation.   Try it. Don’t do it if you have a fragile ego.  (Ouch!  I just checked it. Apparently, I have lots of work to do)
• Feeling like there’s too much to cope with? I use NutshellMail to give me my own social media digest three times a day.  It goes through all my social media accounts and summarizes activity.
• We mentioned Ning – where you can create your own social media site.   Jim’s is called  Well of Knowledge and it’s an experiment in how perhaps information can be used for social good.

Life, the Universe and Everything -  Andrew Jenkins kindly provided a breakdown of various social media sites by type.  Here it is:

Social Media Examples By Category

Don’t know why the spacing is so weird – that’s the problem when you copy from Word. I’ll clean it up when I get a minute for the sake of pride, but it’s still accurate.

Social Networks
Facebook – www.facebook.com        Twitter – www.twitter.com
MySpace – www.myspace.com        LinkedIn – www.linkedin.com
Ning – www.ning.com                       Skype – www.skype.com
Blogging Tools
Twitter (microblog) – www.twitter.com    Moveable Type – www.movabletype.com
WordPress – www.wordpress.com             Typepad – www.typepad.com
Blogger – www.blogger.com                         Tumblr – www.tumblr.com
Video/Photo
Flickr – www.flickr.com                YouTube – www.youtube.com
Vimeo – www.vimeo.com             DailyBooth – www.dailybooth.com
Viddler – www.viddler.com
Presentations
SlideShare – www.slideshare.net
Slideboom – www.slideboom.com
Content Sharing/Capture
Del.icio.us – del.icio.us                                   Enjoysthin.gs – www.enjoysthin.gs
StumbleUpon – www.stumbleupon.com    Reddit – www.reddit.com
Digg – www.digg.com

Podcasts
iTunes – www.itunes.ca
BlogTalkRadio – www.blogtalkradio.com
Mobile

Twitpic – www.twitpic.com              Foursquare – www.foursquare.com
WikiTude – www.wikitude.com        Audioboo – www.audioboo.com

New and noteworthy:

Youtego – www.youtego.com

Thassal folks!  Hope it was useful.   Please leave a comment.

The first articles come easily.  They flow.  You are inspired.

Then comes disappointment in one of two forms.  Sometimes, you have no audience.  Even with great promotion, that initial blip of interests fades.  You look at your visits and hope that the one visit today wasn’t you.

Or it can be successful in getting an initial audience — that audience might even grow.  But sooner or later, after a hard day at work or on what could be that lazy Saturday morning, you drag your sorry butt to the computer and you just don’t feel like it.  Excitement becomes unpaid work.  You now understand what columnists who do weekly columns do with the rest of their week.  And you gain a new respect for anyone who publishes daily.  Your content dwindles and the audience drops off.

To paraphrase the poet T. S. Eliot – this is the the way most blogging ends, “not with a bang, but a whimper.”   Sounds kind of sad, doesn’t it?

Maybe one of the reasons why this happens so frequently is that blogs are often lone wolf enterprises. It’s a single person with a single vision in a world and a medium that facilitates and rewards collaboration.   I produce an online radio show, Game Changing - which is actually a blog and podcast every week.  How do I manage that with my schedule?  I’m not sure.  We’re actually going to launch a second show.  I could not do this without the collaboration of my co-hosts.  It’s an interesting irony.   The internet gives the lone wolf an easy way to launch, but in all too many cases the lone wolf may get all the credit, but the collaborator gets success.  It’s an interesting variation on the “give it away and grow rich” philosophy which powers so much of the internet.  If you get it, you can prosper.  If you don’t – the odds of your success are lessened.

Sure there’s someone out there who bucks this trend, but if you really check that one person that you see probably has staff and resources.

And it is easy to find collaborators if you have money, time and resources.  What do you do if you have no budget?  Andrew Ballenthin has been seeking that answer for some time.  He built his Community Marketing Blog on the principle that he was going to find out if you could build a successful blog with no cash investment.  In doing this, he’s come up with some really interesting and creative solutions.  One of these is the Blog Off contest.

When Andrew Ballenthin did his initial Blog Off contest on his Community Marketing Blog he not only generated interest, he inherited a number of new writers who continue to add exciting content to his site. But he wasn’t the only one to benefit. The participants loved it and during and after the initial contest, the group stuck together and has started to form their own community around the blog. This year the contest is bigger, the prizes were valued into the tens of thousands of dollars and a much larger group of contestants participated.

In the spirit of crowdsourcing, our own radio show/podcast Game Changing is pleased to bring in the winners of Blog Off II – three astounding bloggers: Sean Nelson, Sam Diener and Tim Ruffner Want to make YOUR blog a winner? Come on and get some tips from these winners. We’ll also explore the contest and find out about the experience of crowdsourcing from the crowd’s eye viewpoint.

Change the game!

This year I thought I’d be a little more serious.  This has been a year where bad news has flourished – the economy, the environment — and at this time of year, once again fear seizes many and airports around the world go into security alert.  It would be tempting to succumb to the barrage.  It would be tempting to think that this was all happening to us, from forces greater that us — beyond our control.

I have to confess that I’ve skirted with that kind of thinking.  We’ve all had our share of tragedy in the past year.  Some of it is, quite rightly, out of our control.  But this year, I saw something that lifted my spirits and made me think.  It was a picture of a man, I’ve no idea who he is, who wore a simple sign that said, “I don’t believe in the recession.”

Futile?  Perhaps.   But I loved his defiance.  It made me think of an interview that I heard earlier this year with a man who had cancer, a cancer that would surely take his life.  When the interviewer confronted him with this and asked how he coped with it, his answer was simple.  “I will not let cancer define me.”

You will notice I didn’t call him a victim of cancer.  He may have had cancer, but he was no victim.

These were two of the events that started me thinking.   Years ago a friend of mine said that I gave him some of the best advice that he’d ever received.  I was amazed.  So I asked, “what was it I said?”

He said, I had told him, that I couldn’t help him as long as sh#t was happening to him.  I said to call me back, “when you start happening.”

Those inspirations were the source of this blog.  You can’t always choose the way the cards get dealt to you. But you can decide to change the game.

So this year, I’m focusing on the amazing things that have happened.

The new Chelsea Consulting was born this year.  My old company was acquired by Chelsea and I became CEO of a great boutique consulting company.  The Outsourcing/Managed Services side of that business continues to grow and we are hosting applications for an amazing group of companies.  The consulting end of the business has stayed steady despite the recession.   CRM has been growing like mad.   We’ve probably done as many SugarCRM implementations as any firm out there, and we continue to help companies implement and host a variety of these systems.  I have great partners and we have fabulous staff.   Even in a tough year, there is opportunity.

Many years ago my dad suggested that I become a teacher like him.  Like most kids, I didn’t listen and instead pursued my career in music and later in technology.   Over the past few years I’ve been invited to lecture at universities, but this year Waterloo invited me to a part time position on the faculty of their Master’s in Business Entrepreneurship and Technology (MBET).   Not to be outdone, the Ted Roger’s (Ryerson) school has brought me into lecture.  If I can find time for York then I’ll have taught at all the schools I’ve attended.   Everyone has been so accommodating so I could do this without an impact on my “day job”.   And I love working the students.

I’ve been able to do a lot of writing in the past year.  The Cutter Journal continues to publish my work.  Their editors are merciless and the result is certainly a reflection of their devotion (and patience).  It’s great to be able to be challenged like that.  Who knows.  Maybe this will be the year that that long promised book finally appears.

Certainly it has been a year of creative moves.  The idea of “game changing” led to this blog and eventually to our radio show “Game Changing” – which has it’s own blog as well.

Our new radio show has a growing following.  I get to work with Allan Hoving and Janet Fouts on a regular basis.  We’ve had some fabulous guest hosts on – Catharine P. Taylor, Andrew Jenkins, Steve Ardrie.  I’ve had a chance to interview some of my heroes including Doc Searls, David Weinberger and Canadians Shelle Rose Charvet and Roger Martin.    Next year’s lineup looks equally incredible.  The show has a good audience but the real “listens” come from podcasts (Game Changing in iTunes). It’s a phone in show, the chat and twitter traffic are the real interaction.  In fact, the show has been so successful that we are planning a “spin off” in the coming year.

But it’s not just about what we do.  It’s also about what we give back.  I’ve been priviledged to be able to work with some great teams of individuals who are dedicated to making a real contribution to their professions and to their community.  As the Chair of the CMC Canada Toronto Chapter, I’ve been blessed by a great team of volunteers and staff.   My association with Endeavour the game changing idea that brings together consultants and not for profits has been most rewarding.  I get to do what I love – and they “harness that power for good”.

Oh, and certainly not unimportant – for those who know me — the family is happy, healthy and a source of immense joy.  Our family Christmas dinner was a chance for me take charge of dinner and have that moment to count my many blessings.

That’s my new year’s resolution.  I’m not going to be defined by the bad things that happen.   I will find things to be thankful for.  Not the other other way around. I’m happening to the world.

I wish you happiness and joy in the coming year.

Thanks to you all.  And thanks to the man with the sign!

OR

You don’t even believe in social media, but your boss does.  You don’t know a tweet from a poke.  He’s been  listening to some radio show and now he’s come to you asked you to develop a strategy and execute it.

OR

You know Social Media can benefit your company.   You’ve done some reading, and tried a few things.    But having a Linked In account is one thing – developing and implementing a real Social Media Strategy is another.

OR

Your marketing budget got cut, but your revenue and sales quotas went up.  If somebody doesn’t find a way to make the marketing budget go further, there’s going to be some real cutbacks.  You’ve heard about Social Media as a strategic tool.  You want to make it work, but you don’t know how?

If you fit any of these descriptions, you probably have a lot of questions.  The first one is obvious.

What do you do? What questions should you be asking?   You know you need help.  But what help?

Don’t panic!  Help is on the way!

We’re going to give you a survival guide – to help you develop strategy to leverage social media to meet  your marketing goals in 2010!

Our guest is Janet Fouts, author, social media coach and regular Game Changing panelist.   On Monday, January 4^th, Janet has agreed to sit in the “hot seat” and be interviewed by our panel of strategy, marketing and technology experts.   Here’s what we’ll be asking:

• What do you need to know before you start?
• How do you set meaningful goals?
• Do you need a consultant?  How do you hire one?  (A good one)
• How to identify the right networks?
• What’s a social media listening tool and why should I care?
• Metrics? What metrics?
• Who’s going to do all this?  What resources will you need?
• Efficiency and social media- (is that even possible?)

And any question YOU want to ask.   Our listeners can phone in, use our forum or simply tweet their  questions to us using the hashtag  #gamechanging.

Come and join Janet with fellow panelists Allan Hoving, Jim Love and our special guest, Catharine P. Taylor for a show that you don’t want to miss.  Monday, January 4, 2009 – 8 pm Eastern/5 pm Pacific   http://www/BlogTalkRadio.com/GameChanging

I remember when we first started on the internet back in the last century.  I’d already been living with corporate email for almost a decade before the internet hit full steam.  So I laughed a little at the analogy that the internet of the early 90’s was like “drinking through a fire hose”.   Anyone else remember that line?

I was a voracious reader.  I was a quick study.  I could stay up later than anyone.  I could keep up.

No more.

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to yell “give!”

For the first time in my life, this last year has overwhelmed me.  Yes, I take on too much.  Yes, my fascination with many things keeps me over-committed.  But for the first time, no amount of working harder will get me out of it.  It’s been a brutal year in that regard.

So I have to get smarter and better.  That’s not a New Year’s resolution.  It’s a necessity.

But it’s not all hopeless.  I’ve started to develop some strategies for dealing with all of this.  I’ll be glad to share them with readers of this blog.   But in the coming year, I’m going to be looking at ways of — changing the game on this issue of too much information.

I’d appreciate your help and input.

What game changing strategies have you adopted to help you cope?  How have they worked?  What obstacles have you found?  What are the real issues you are confronting.

C’mon.  Share.  Leave a comment on the blog.  It only takes a few minutes.  Spelling doesn’t count.
Let’s work this out together.

And have a great Christmas — and a wonderful, stress free New Year.