One of my New Year’s resolutions was to make sure that for every flame I left on the internet I would write five nice things. It is easy to express one’s disgust and vindictiveness - it takes a little more effort to go back and say something nice about a business after a great or even just good experience.

Watch for a Vonage update.

Last Tuesday saw a great Rockies Venture Club dinner meeting at the Marriott. Three great pieces to the meeting:

• 5 minute overview by Hydra car builder
• Presentation by Dan Murray of Ravenwood Marketing
• Presentation by Dave Taylor of askdavetaylor.com

Since Hydra doesn’t have a web site I can’t really comment further, other than the guy wants to build 100 cars selling for $250,000 each based on GM parts.

Both presentations (by Dan and Dave) made me sick with just how successful you can be if you are clever and focused and have one good insight.
Dan Murray figured out in mid 2002 that if you can buy an AdWord for x and get an affiliate to pay you 1.5X or better to get someone to click on the AdWord, than if you can repeat that enough you stand to make some serious bling. In 6 years of doing this he claims they have grown to over 8 figures of revenue, and some serious cash flow headaches as they fund the growth with banks that can’t fathom the business model. The big takeaway: Good AdWords are valuable, and affiliate marketing is good for the affiliates.

As for Dave Taylor, his presentation was more thought provoking. It helped that he is also a great speaker - the audience was rapt. Dave talked about how he began to develop content for his site based on questions he received from fans of his books. His content gave rise to substantial discussion between readers, and many thriving communities sprung from these discussions. He mentioned posts with over 600 comments. This in turn gave rise to serious AdSense revenue as his content generated more and more visits.
But Taylor’s most important point was that in the Web 2.0 era, a company no longer controls its brand. Its brand is the sum of all the discussions and items about the company that exist on the web. As an example he gave the downward slide of Dell, who did not pay attention to a rising web-based chorus of discontent from consumer customers. Eventually Dell’s popularity fell, as did their stock, as did their CEO.
For the RVC crowd, his advice was straightforward - if no one is talking about you online then you don’t warrant an investment.
What shapes the online brand is not just ‘conventional’ web tactics like SEO, SEM, but also the social networking applications that serve to segment users and provide numerous opportunities for users to talk back to the companies in whatever form they desire. Some examples mentioned were facebook, linkedin, myspace, twitter, youtube, plaxo, and many others.

I was captivated by the presentation, not least because of the impact on conventional marketing firms. Someone out there today pitching a conventional integrated marketing approach with collateral, direct mail, print, and so on is doing their clients a disservice. The prospects are on the web, and you need to get them talking about you.
It made me think all my marketing efforts were stupid, and that I really didn’t get it.

Here’s hoping that I start to get it in 2008. Baby needs new shoes. I can feel a twitter already.

See a PositiveWare demo on YouTube…

My daughter came home with a description of a new subject they were going to take on called “Character Power”. The first topic will be Respect. In the first grade respect means patience, open-mindedness, fair and objective attitudes, and valuing your self, others, the environment, cultures, differences, etc.

I find this astonishing. Mrs. Birch’s first grade class at Columbian Elementary had nothing like this. All I remember of first grade is wanting to be part of the color guard because they got to play the drums while they put up the flag. That, and there may have been some behavior issues…

In addition to the hard work they are doing in ‘regular’ subjects they are adding an ethical component. Part of the Respect topic will be to “build food structures with our friends to learn how we work with others to build great things…”. I wonder if I can get them to use PositiveWare?

A new company featuring accounting software for small business characterizes small businesses as those that have no aspirations for growing bigger. I think that is just delusional. Scratch almost any small business owner and you find someone thinking about growth. Or am I just hanging out with the wrong people?

Friday’s WSJ (August 17, 2007) features an interesting story about an ad agency called Ethos JWT pursuing a business plan of helping companies develop social responsibility programs.

While this may be like trying to put lipstick on a pig for some companies, I believe that there is a responsible element within most companies. Their plan reflects a larger mega trend towards, green, efficient, responsible.

Twenty years ago the Cato Institute and Laissez Faire books were writing about free market environmentalism. It is now coming to pass.

Our effort recently has focused on making it easier to manage permissions on a discrete level. We have created an interface that allows a user to set permissions for access to any client or project that they own. This powerful functionality makes it easier to bring freelancers or contractors in to a project or client. 2.1.1:

• Adds new Permissions screens
• Creates new Activity Report in the People tab
• Moves “Add Action(s)” to Plan tab.
• Renames Billing tab as Money tab
• Enables configuration for executive coaches to manage multiple clients easily
• Ensures that users will receive notifications on actions below clients or projects to which they are subscribed

Twice in the last couple of days I have had conversations with business owners helping them work through the challenge of the moment. In both cases they felt like I helped, and in both cases all I did was behave like a kind Cocker Spaniel. By doing nothing more then listening they talked their way through the problem and found their own solution.

Amazingly, they were very grateful for the help and thought I had really made a difference for them.

So this begs the question for you - Who is your Cocker Spaniel? Who will you turn to when you need to talk through a problem.

In case you can’t think of anything, a few ideas come to mind. One is a CEO forum sponsored by a trade group, chamber of commerce, or similar. A second is a business coach or executive coach. A third is something like EO, Strategic Coach, or any other opportunity to meet and develop relationships with peers.

Our skunk works has been hard at it and we can’t wait to showoff PositiveWare on the Apple iPhone. All hype notwithstanding, creating support for the mobile professional in PositiveWare is extremely important to us, and we would welcome any ideas.

I had the honor of addressing some of the officers and enlisted responsible for safety for the Air National Guard. An example of their accomplishments is the Delaware Air Guard, which recently celebrated 160,000 air hours without a mishap. It seems that many of the quality improvement programs in place in the civillian world also apply to the military.