Thursdays with Morri…

…and Corinne, and Norma, and Caitlin, and Tom, and Jen (help me out with the rest of the names, dudes.) Some of you have handwriting on the sign-up sheet that indicates you may have a future in medicine.

Morri is Morri Chowaiki from San Diego, and he is working on an interesting vitamin site. He mentioned that he’s been on the web ever since Al Gore invented the internet. He has some other interesting projects in the works, and I’ve got another suggestion for him: the Chowaiki Wiki.

Our Dine-Around session at A. SaBella’s was a good time for all, I think. We discussed our airline horror stories, children and the expectation thereof, and when ingestion of contaminated seafood makes it wise to seek immediate medical attention.

Thanks to all of you for your company and conversation. And thanks to Melissa and Amy for making the reservation and offering the opportunity.

Mark Jen Presentation

Mark Jen is a product line manager for Plaxo. His personal blog is Plaxoed.

Here’s his quick case study of Plaxo, which is an on-line smart address book. It lets users of Plaxo update their address book automatically instead of having to gather business cards.

Mark Jen

Concerns have been privacy, security and that they used to send lots of e-mails. They allayed the first two relatively easily, but the third was harder: a perception problem among people who have been on the receiving end of their e-mails. They started a blog, but it wasn’t a silver bullet. They needed to get employees blogging so people knew there were real people behind the company, and then also started communicating with bloggers directly via e-mail, at events and through the blogosphere.

He told his story of being fired from Google for blogging. He had only been at the company for 11 days. At Google there was secrecy built into the corporate culture, but they didn’t want to be transparent. Google had originally caused his blog to go dark, which led to some controversy, but when they fired him it led to a huge PR hit traffic (and monster traffic to his blog).

At Plaxo the policy is pretty straightforward.

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“There are no secrets…

…only information you do not yet have.”

Great quote from Shel…not sure who said it, but it highlights the need for transparency.

Here’s the biggest run-on sentence ever, from our speed networking session, listing those who are here. It’s quite a cross section. (If I missed or misspelled anyone, let me know in the comments…and if you have a blog you would like linked here, let me know and I will update the post.)

We have representatives from the U.S. Air Force, Dansko, FEMA, H&R Block, Fleischmann-Hilliard, Leinart Health Products, American Airlines, Dr. Laura, American Association of Community Colleges, U.S. Navy, World Cynosport Limited (a group that emphasizes recreation sports with man’s best friend), Northwestern Mutual Financial Network, Electronic Arts, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Accenture, U.S. Military Central Command, Charles Schwab, Shutterfly, United Way of America, GroupHealth, Southwest Airlines, Xerox, Plaxo, Campbell Soup (Mmm, Mmm, good!), San Francisco Opera, Addison Avenue Federal Credit Union, AOL, Reformed Church in America, H-P, Publicis, Whirlpool, Boeing, Informatica, Prudential Real Estate, Syngenta, Wyndham Worldwide, Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, Verizon Business, U.S. Department of Energy, Tejon Ranch Corporation, Sage Software, GE Energy, Naval Surface Warfare Center, New Zealand Trade economic development agency, ComAvia (sp?) and Mayo Clinic (that’s me).

Shel Holtz: Seminar and Keynote Review II

Shel highlights TheNewPR/Wiki, which is one of his (and my) favorites for PR professionals. This site has, among other things, examples of corporate blogging policies. I blogged about it here.

I need to also check out LinkedIn, a social network for grown-ups (like MySpace.) Shel has talked a lot about Second Life, too…which today announced it had surpassed 1 million virtual residents.

I need to look into the Social Media News Release, which pulls out key facts, quotes, and adds multimedia instead of having all of the narrative of a regular press release. This is a neat concept.

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Shel Holtz: Seminar and Keynote Review

Shel quoted the Edelman Trust Barometer (with some reservations about doing it, given the recent Wal-Mart controversy) saying “A person like me” is the most credible person for companies.

The key to this is authenticity. Organizations with lots of happy customers/patients/employees would be well advised to just help those audiences find the tools they need to communicate, and to encourage them to start talking. If word-of-mouth has been important in the past, it’s on steroids in the blogosphere.

One of the concepts Shel mentioned yesterday but didn’t get into as fully in today’s shorter keynote is “Edge Content.” He particularly called attention to edgeio, which is a distributed alternative to eBay or Craig’s List.

I need to explore this more, but the concept is really neat. Why submit your listing into a common site, when you can put it on your own blog, with a code that notifies outside sites like edgeio?

Another topic I need to explore is The New Media News Release. I think this site will be good for learning.

With the launch of Internet Explorer 7 today (according to Shel), the use of RSS is going to explode. In the Macintosh world, Safari already has incorporated RSS feeds. So do Opera and Firefox. Now RSS is going to be called Web Feeds.

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