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  • Do You Have Your Party of 5 Mentors To Guide Your Success?

    Do You Have Your Party of 5 Mentors To Guide Your Success?

    Last month, I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the Women Grow Business Boot Camp in Washington, DC.  Organized by the Women Grow Business Community blog (sponsored by Network Solutions), the event brought together women business owners and entrepreneurs from around the region to learn about starting and growing a business.

    It was during this conference that I heard Kathy Korman Frey,  Chief Hot Mamma of the Hot Mammas Project, talk about the Sisterhood of Success and how every successful business person needs a Party of five that she can turn to for advice and support.

    The Hot Mammas Project is creating a giant library of case studies and role models for girls and women.  When not running the Hot Mammas Project, Kathy is also a professor at the George Washington University School of Business.  Here’s what she had to say about the Sisterhood of Success:

    • There are two things that most affect a woman’s success in business:  family life and access to mentors.
    • In business and as a formula for success, everyone needs 5 people they can turn to for advice, support, problem-solving, coaching, and networking.
    • If you have your Party of 5, you are more likely to be paid more, have higher status at your company and in life, and have higher levels of self-confidence.
    • You will not be as successful unless you have your Party of 5.  Period. End of story.

    While Kathy directed her message to the woman solo-preneurs and business owners in attendance at the conference, her advice applies to anyone who wants to be successful, get ahead, do great things.  Kathy’s Party of 5 message makes a lot of sense and rings true even in our personal lives.  Her research shows that people who have 5 or more friends are happier and have higher feelings of success.
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  • Rush Hour from ThinkFun

    Rush Hour from ThinkFun

    Loved this spatial puzzle game, love the iPad app even more. Great for exercising your brain.

  • How We Doubled Our Facebook Fans and Raised Money for the Gulf Recovery Effort

    10 days ago, the Matrix Group Facebook fan page had 280 fans.  As of tonight, we have 576 fans, more than double our starting number. How did we do it?  We launched a campaign and created an incentive for people to “Like” us.

    The Background

    Matrix Group has had a Facebook fan page for a couple of years now and we had been slowly building up our fan base. We did all the usual things to generate new fans: we let our customers know about our Facebook page, we linked to it from our Web site and blog, we asked staff to invite their friends to “like” us, we included the link in staff e-mail signatures, and we asked our Twitter followers to fan us.

    I had recently read an article about how the Weekly World News got to 40,310 fans in 4 days (up from 3,244 fans!) and got inspired to launch our own campaign.  Weekly World News offered an exclusive video, they changed their ad daily, they did A/B testing on their ads and they leveraged their huge user base.  But what kind of incentive could we offer?  Unlike Snapfish, the photo printing site, which recently offered a coupon for a free 8 x 10 photo collage for “liking” its fan page, Matrix Group doesn’t have products to offer.  And we don’t have a customer base of tens or hundreds of thousands of people.

    The Campaign

    We decided to use good, old-fashioned corporate philanthropy to incentivize people to “like” us.  The campaign was incredibly simple:  we would donate $10 to a specific charity for every new fan we got between June 21 and June 30.  We selected the National Park Foundation’s (NPF) Disaster Recovery Fund in the Gulf to be recipient of our campaign.  NPF is a Matrix Group client and the entire Matrix Group staff, like the rest of the country, is upset about the Gulf oil spill.  Selecting this fund only made sense for us.  BTW, we put a time limit on the campaign because we know that people are more likely to act when they have a deadline; hence the June 30 end date for the campaign.
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  • What’s So Fun About FourSquare?

    What’s So Fun About FourSquare?

    In my quest to try out new social networks, I signed up for FourSquare last year.  I didn’t start using the service until a couple of months ago, when I get my new Palm Pre and I felt ready to dive into another social network.

    FourSquare is a location-based social network. The idea is that you share your location with your friends and followers by “checking into” locations.  For example, every time I go to a restaurant, I pull up the FourSquare app on my phone, let the app determine my GPS coordinates and show me possible options.  I can select one of the venues select and “check-in” or add a new venue.  When I check in, I can write a little message and share out my update on Facebook and/or Twitter.

    Last Saturday, I checked into four locations, including three restaurants and I got hilarious comments from friends about how all I did on Saturday was eat!

    Here’s what I’m enjoying about FourSquare:

    • I don’t feel compelled to check in multiple times a day, every day. My check-ins are usually to restaurants, but increasingly, I’m checking into events.  Tonight, I checked into the DCWW Content Strategy Workshop held at the Matrix Group office.  I check in only a few times a week, if at all.
    • I love the gaming aspect of FourSquare.  People who have the most check-ins at a specific get a Mayor badge.  So far, I’ve earned a Newbie badge and an Explorer badge.  I’m hoping to become Mayor of one of my favorite restaurants sometime soon!
    • It’s fun to see where my friends are and what they’re doing.
    • FourSquare is not nearly as chatty as Twitter and Facebook.
    • I have learned about so many great, local businesses through FourSquare!
    • Some enterprising retailers are rewarding frequent customers with discount coupons and other goodies.  The retailers are glad for the patronage AND the free advertising from the check-ins!

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  • Moving the Matrix Group Underground to the Foreground

    Moving the Matrix Group Underground to the Foreground

    With all the hiring we’re doing right now, my team decided that we better revisit all of our orientation guides. Orientations work like this at Matrix Group:  we ask staff members from all teams to help with the orientation; we give them an outline and they do the session.  Spreading the orientation schedule around means we cover more in a short period of time and new staff get introduced to all teams in a more meaningful way.

    When we started reviewing our existing guides, we found that the majority of them were too sparse. If you were lucky enough to do orientation with an earnest old-timer, you got lucky; otherwise, lots of things were missed.

    So a bunch of sat down, revisited topics, and came up with 2-4 page guides for each topic.  Each topic has a sub-topic and talking points + specific things to cover.  The guides are working out very, very well.

    One new thing we decided to create is a “Matrix Underground” guide, or the things you should know but nobody every tells you. We realized that it’s things on this guide that tend to trip people up or leave people bewildered.  For example, there are expressions that we expect people to know, acronyms,  and Joanna-isms that a person could take years to figure out.

    Most things on the guide are funny, but some are dead serious.  Some examples:

    • Sumner is the part-timer on the MatrixMaxx team who works in the afternoons (recent hires said they spent six months trying to figure out who the heck Sumner is).
    • When Joanna says “can you do me a favor?” or “I need something from you,” it means “she needs something done NOW, not tomorrow, not next week, now.”
    • When someone says “the cheese has moved,” it refers to the book “Who Moved My Cheese?” that we read as a company several years ago and it means “dude, the situation has changed, let’s move along and get over it.”

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  • What’s Behind Those Long URLs? Tracking Codes, Of Course!

    What’s Behind Those Long URLs? Tracking Codes, Of Course!

    Every day around 3pm, I get my afternoon update of The Washington Post via e-mail.  Each update contains a summary of about a dozen stories and links to the full story on the Post Web site.  Every time I get an update from Facebook about a message from a friend or a comment on one of my updates, I get a URL to click on.

    Have you ever noticed how long these Web addresses are?  Ever wonder why these URL are so long?

    The answer is simple: tracking codes. Tracking codes are strings of text added to the end of a URL that let you track the source of a click.  For example, if your organization has an e-mail newsletter and you want to know how many people click on the links in your e-mails, you add tracking codes to the URLs.  Your usage tracking software will almost always treat the URLs with the tracking codes as unique from the same URLs without the tracking codes.  So, when looking at your usage reports, you can look at usage overall to specific pages and then figure out how much of the traffic came from the e-mail newsletter.

    If you usage Google Analytics for usage tracking, Google has a terrific URL builder that create properly formatted tracking codes to track the source of clicks, specific campaigns, even the duration of your campaign.  Here’s an example of how it works:

    Let’s take the URL to my recent blog post on magazine subscriptions on the iPad.  The URL looks like this if I navigate directly to it:
    http://www.thematrixfiles.net/blog/am-i-really-going-to-pay-4-99-for-one-issue-of-time-magazine/

    When my marketing team promotes this blog post e-mails, Twitter, Facebook, etc., we use the Google URL builder to add tracking codes.  Here’s a sample URL:
    http://www.thematrixfiles.net/blog/am-i-really-going-to-pay-4-99-for-one-issue-of-time-magazine/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=SM&utm_campaign=ceoblog
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  • Am I Really Going to Pay $4.99 for One Issue of Time Magazine?

    Am I Really Going to Pay $4.99 for One Issue of Time Magazine?

    I blogged last week about how excited I am that some of my favorite magazines are now available on the iPad.  Last week, I discovered that TIME Magazine has a free iPad app.  Turns out, the app is free, but issues are not.  Each issue is $4.99.  $4.99!  When a print subscription is $20 through Amazon!

    A recent article in Ad Age Daily tries to explain why we should expect to pay more for online subscriptions on the iPad.  According to Ad Age, we should expect to pay $4.99 for an issue of TIME, Popular Science, Maxim, Popular Photography, Sound and Vision, Transworld Skateboarding and Islands because publishers are suffering, there are fewer tablet PC owners, and magazines are still burdened by their huge editorial costs.

    But here’s the rub: I purchased an issue of TIME for $4.99 and discovered that the content was the same as my print issue!  C’mon, TIME.  I pay about $0.50 for a print issue, but you want me to pay $4.99 for the same thing!  If you’re going to charge me a whole lot more, I expect a different experience and additional content I can’t get elsewhere.

    This reminds me of publishers that put up PDF versions of their print publications and post them to the Web site.  It’s easy to do and gets the job done.  Problem is, the Web is a different medium from print.  Have you ever tried to read a PDF of a print magazine?  Try going from page 2 to page 36 on a Web browser.  Try reading a two-column page that scrolls up and down past two screens on a monitor.    And now companies are putting out software that will take print files and convert them to iPad apps!  Once again, ignoring the usability and user experience capabilities of the device and merely re-purposing content.  How does this create value?
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  • Are You Ready to Ditch Your Paper Subscriptions?

    Are You Ready to Ditch Your Paper Subscriptions?

    More and more of my clients are making the decision to eliminate their print magazines and newsletters. They’re choosing digital versions of their publications over print to eliminate printing and mailing costs, achieve immediate delivery, and occasionally, create personalized versions based on customer preferences.

    All of this makes sense to me.  I get most of my information via e-mail these days, and I’m subscribed to dozens of newsletters via e-mail and RSS.  And in an effort to minimize the “piles” at home, I have canceled all but a few paper subscriptions.

    But I got to thinking:  Am I ready to ditch ALL of my paper subscriptions? Am I ready to cancel my print subscriptions to my favorite magazines, namely TIME, Smithsonian and Stanford magazines?

    Here’s my concern about all digital publications:  it’s easy to ignore an e-mail newsletter as just another e-mail in the hundreds I get every day.  Consider this:  when my copy of TIME magazine arrives on Saturday, it ends up in my “to read” pile. This pile gets shuffled around from dining room table to coffee table to bedroom side table.  Each issue sticks around until I read or skim it, then toss.  But here’s what happens with some of my e-mail subscriptions:  if I have the time, I read them on the spot.  If I don’t have the time, I may leave them in my inbox or move them to a “read” folder for later reading.  Trouble is, with the flood of e-mail that I get, I rarely get to my e-mail read pile. And sometimes, in an attempt to gain back control of my inbox, I delete a huge group of e-mail newsletters and start over.

    Ugh, so much for the future of publishing.  What is the balance that content organizations should try to achieve between print and digital?  And if digital is your only future, how do you ensure delivery and readership? I have some thoughts:
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  • What’s All the Fuss About Facebook’s Open Graph and Privacy Policies?

    Remember when Facebook was a closed network, open only to college students? Then Facebook went mainstream and everyone could create a profile. But even back then, Facebook remained a closed network: you had to have a Facebook profile to see other profiles and connect with friends.  Facebook was closed to Google and other search engines, which meant Facebook profiles and pages never showed up on search results.

    Back in 2005, Facebook’s privacy policy clearly stated the following:

    No personal information that you submit to Facebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.

    The Evolution of Facebook’s Privacy Policies

    But then, slowly and over time, Facebook’s privacy policies changed.

    • In 2007, Facebook made your name, school name and profile photo available to the search engines unless you specifically prohibited this in your privacy settings
    • In 2009, Facebook revamped its privacy settings and gave users more control over who gets to see which aspects of their profile.  Trouble was, the default gave “everyone” access to information.
    • In April 2010, Facebook made the decision to make specific elements of all profiles public (name, hometown, school, interests and fan pages), and eliminate the ability to limit access to these fields.  If you didn’t want those elements to be public, Facebook recommended that you delete the information from your profile.
    • In April 2010, Facebook also launched the Open Graph, which shares user profiles with third party sites so that visits to those third party sites can be personalized based on a person’s Facebook interests.  On the flip side, Facebook opened up its API (application programming interface) so that third party sites can add a Facebook “Like” button to their pages; when clicked, the information would be saved back to a user’s profile.

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a great timeline of Facebook’s privacy policies, including links to archived versions of Facebook’s policies.

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  • The iPad vs. the Kindle – An E-Reader Face-Off

    There are more and more iPads are popping up at the office.  Three of us have kids who are addicted to Godfinger.  Me?  I love surfing on the couch and playing games like Rush Hour and TanZen.  Despite the popularity of the iPad at work, I’ve been reading a lot of critical articles and blog posts about the iPad, esp. as a reading device.

    So I decided it was time for a face-off between the iPad and the Kindle. I invited my friend Eileen to come over to the house with her Kindle.  Eileen would represent the Kindle while my 5 year-old would represent the iPad.  Here’s the face-off video where I play host and ask the co-stars to compare the iPad vs. the Kindle in terms of:  e-bookstore experience, screen size and display, resolution, page turning and search.  See for yourself and be the judge.  Who do you think won this face-off?

    This homemade video brings home the point that with the Web and social sharing sites, everyone’s a critic, a moviemaker, or a citizen journalist. Despite a legion of tech writers reviewing the iPad, I felt compelled to create my own iPad review.  And now I’ll reach out to my network of friends, clients, colleagues and followers on Facebook, Twitter, blog and e-mail to share my video, get their feedback and try to influence their thinking about these devices.

    How about you?  Are you publishing your own content to social networking and sharing sites?  What’s your take on the iPad and have you decided to get one?