SteveKemper.com

Oh no. It’s time to rant against social media again.

Every once in a while I run into another rant on a blog, at a party, in a magazine or newspaper or elsewhere about how the Internet and all it’s newfangled Web 2.0 social media gadgets are hurting and/or destroying good old fashioned genuine human communication and relationships.

To all of that I say hogwash, hooey, pshaw and poppycock!

I don’t want to sound like an impudent buttwhistle, but I tire of listening to otherwise bright people reacting to perfectly handy and efficient ways of communicating, socializing and sharing information in the same way that my great grandparents probably did to the ominous encroachment of the telephone. These days the telephone is touted as the more-genuine-than-thou superior to the cold, soulless upstarts like e-mail, instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook and so forth. But the telephone – and even the telegraph before it! – was once the Twitter of its day.

From A Social History of the Media, by Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, an early critique of the lowly telegraph:

What horrid fibs by that electric wire
Are flashed about! What falsehoods are its shocks!
Oh! Rather let us have the fact that creeps
Comparatively by the Post so slow
Than the quiet fudge which like the lightning leaps
And makes us credit that which is not so.
- Punch

In the same book, Orson Wells is quoted as saying of the telephone in 1902: “The businessman may sit at home… and tell such lies as he dare not write.” Indeed, the book points out that this context and sentiment is where we later came by the word “phoney.”

This was not the only line of criticism. The intrusion of the telephone into the home was often under attack, as television was to be decades later.

The inspiration for my current call of horse hoo is a post today, entitled Nothing New About New Media? on the blog of the brilliant Mike Moran. It’s written by Frank Reed. These are a couple of incredibly smart guys who know their way around communication, online and off. (Mike is one of the most gifted speakers I’ve seen; I daresay I think he could keep an all-day conference audience fully engaged at 12:30 PM amid the cacophony of growling stomachs. He’s that good.)

The gist of Frank’s message in the post is this:

I think we are possibly slipping into a Dark Age of sorts regarding communication, where we THINK we communicate more but all we are really doing is talking / writing / yelling / marketing / "you name it" more, without truly communicating.

As much as we want to pat ourselves on the back for all the innovation and technology and progress we surround ourselves with we are not doing anything new at the core here. What I mean is we are simply refining how we communicate.

I have to say, I'm not sure there are a lot of folks out there who are truly savvy about social media that would disagree with what Frank is saying here. I've heard the 'these are all simply ways to communicate' observation many times. That seems fairly obvious to me. What I couldn’t disagree with more, though, is the opinion that these new means of communication are sending us into a Dark Age of sorts regarding communication.

I'm finding these platforms (Twitter, IM, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) a great way to stay in touch with people I've met. I'll run into someone I haven't seen in a couple years and can ask how the home remodel is going, how the newborn is doing and so forth because I'm following them online. It definitely makes me feel closer to them and definitely doesn't detract from the relationship; it enriches it.

Occasionally I run into people at parties or events who I've 'met' online, often through friends, and it's a pleasant surprise to be able to say, "Hey, great to finally meet you in person!" That's happened to me a couple times lately and I've gone on to strike up great 'offline' personal and professional relationships with these people.

As for my circle of closer friends, these same technologies help me meet up with them for a last-minute happy hour or be reminded that their birthday is coming up – in which case I may just kick it old school and send them a slice of a tree, delivered on a fossil fuel-burning truck, via the Post. And I’m not trying to be a green bean here: I love getting postal mail, but the reality is that pushing some ones and zeros down the Interweb pipes leaves a smaller footprint than a Hallmark card – and it’s instantaneous. But go ahead and send me a card anyway. I’m a sentimental softie for that stuff.

I get what Frank is saying and I definitely experience moments when I’m inclined to agree with him wholeheartedly. There are a good many people who are in sore need of finding a better balance between their online and offline time. But that’s for them to decide. Just as it’s not for me to tell them they need more or less fiber in their diets. Odds are, I probably don’t hang out with a lot of the ‘I’m cool ‘cuz I have 1,024 + friends on Facebook’ crowd. I’m much more at home with the folks for whom it’s as obvious as it is to me that these are all just new ways to communicate – and are using them to do exactly that.

And by the way; where did I find this article? In a Tweet from Mike Moran linking to the blog post by Frank Reed. I’d say that’s about as new as New Media gets – and I like it.

How tech entrepreneurs plan to stay afloat this time

Many venture capitalists and technology entrepreneurs are acting quickly this time around to try to avoid the carnage that came amid the dotcom bust of 2001. I had a boss who very wisely reminded me often that the only things a business owner can truly control are expenses. It's no surprise then that cost cutting heads the list of measures companies are taking to weather the financial crisis.

Chief among them are the importance of swift and deep cost-cutting; of focusing scarce resources on core activities; and of convincing investors that your business strategy is a winner.

As the article points out, these are not easy measure for entrepreneurs in particular who, by nature, tend to be tireless optimists. I've been part of the dotcom world for most of my professional career and I definitely learned that lesson myself. The hard lesson that rings very true to me now:

Sequoia went on to urge the executives to cut costs fast so that their firms would not run out of money before becoming profitable. Other venture capitalists are echoing its message. “Rule number one is to take immediate measures so you can stay in the game,” says Mike Speiser of Sutter Hill Ventures, another VC firm.

Based on the headlines just this past week, companies seem to be getting the message. TechCrunch chronicles recent industry carnage in a post with a title that doesn't mince words: 19,683 Tech Layoffs And Counting The article goes on to list the numbers of layoffs at companies including Xerox, Yahoo, Dell and Wikia. The Economist article highlights the importance of these seemingly deep cuts:

All this explains why the bosses of several start-ups have started to wield a big axe... Deep cuts like these may be painful in the short-term, but they are better both for profits and morale than repeated rounds of small lay-offs. In 2001 many firms trimmed too little, too late.

There is definitely truth to that. It is far better for morale and collective organizational focus to err on the side of cutting more staff at once than to impose the distraction and cultural poison of a string of cuts of one or two staff at a time. It's best to take decisive action and allow the healing to begin as work continues.

Of course, I've also worked for firms that cut jobs needlessly and recklessly. To use a gruesome metaphor, they cut far beyond the fat and into the critical meat of the organization, inflicting mortal wounds to both operations and culture. Once a company has made that mistake, it can be almost impossible to recover. When quality inevitably suffers as a result, the organization will quickly buckle under the vote of no confidence from remaining employees, clients, business partners and investors.

So rather than focus on cost cutting alone, firms should also look for ways to grow revenue—or at least aim to maintain pre-crisis levels. One way to do this is to focus on clients in industries such as gaming and health care, which may be less vulnerable to a recession.

Equally important is to turn a critical eye toward unprofitable activities of all kinds. Surprisingly, the worst offenders aren't likely to be employee time wasters such as personal e-mail and surfing the Web at work. In fact, going on a witch hunt to find ways to enforce greater productivity can often prove counterproductive and make sagging morale much worse. Instead, companies would do better to streamline operations, eliminating unnecessary projects, meetings and bureaucracy. Jive Software, a Portland company that has recently shed staff, is doing just that:

Executives at Jive Software, which produces online collaboration tools for corporate clients, say it is now far better at scrapping initiatives that do not seem to be paying off. Once these have been placed on a “kill list”, there is no further discussion about them. In the past the lack of a formal process for canning ideas meant that many lived on, absorbing time and resources better spent elsewhere.

One important cost-cutting measure not directly mentioned in the article is to be extremely picky in selecting and keeping clients. That may sound counter intuitive—even preposterous—to companies trying make it through a downturn. The fact is, a client that is a bad fit for the organization can be costly in more ways than just to each project's bottom line. A bad client often distracts from more profitable and valuable clients and, in some cases, will inspire the staff working with them to dust off their résumés.

Finally, work harder than ever to keep valuable clients by winning more and longer-term projects from them. The sales cycle stretches painfully during a downturn and companies labor over every dollar they spend. The less time you have to spend pounding the pavement, the better off you'll be.

...Mr Kwatinetz is bullish about the prospects for those start-ups that manage to survive the crisis. They will face a much less crowded field and their managers will have honed their moneymaking skills in the harshest of all environments.

Technology start-ups face the downturn  |  The Economist
Fright night in the valley
Oct 23rd 2008 | San Francisco

Download the new Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack

In the course of doing some research for a client just now, I found some very welcome news. On March 6, Microsoft released a Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats. It allows you to open, edit, and save documents, workbooks, and presentations in the (far superior in my experience) file formats new to Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007.

I've been using Microsoft Office 2007 Pro since I bought it last summer and I could never go back. I'm not going to write a full review here as there are plenty of those out there, but besides the vast usability improvements, the file sizes are typically at least fifty percent smaller than previous versions. That adds up to a lot of disk space saved and also makes files much easier to transfer and e-mail. I point that out because that's a gain that can be had by using this free compatibility pack.

I use Excel a great deal and some of the improvements there are huge. Typically I'd prefer to send you to a 3rd party review, but Microsoft actually sums up the key improvements accurately here:

Microsoft Excel 2007 Top 10 Benefits

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack

What to expect from SteveKemper.com

If our corporate website (KemperConsulting.com) is the online version of our corporate headquarters,  SteveKemper.com is the great little coffee shop downstairs where I like to hang out. It's a place to catch up on reading the news, hold casual gatherings with the team and meet with clients and industry colleagues. I hope you'll come by often to join in the lively discussions!

I am known to digress frequently, but I plan to talk mostly about the things I'm passionate about and have been doing for the past decade or so:

• Multilingual website development
• Multilingual website localization
• International search engine optimization (SEO)
• Website usability and accessibility
• Website project management
• Online copywriting and editing
• International online research and analysis

There are a lot of exciting things happening in all these areas and writing about it here will help me to keep track of the highlights, formulate some thoughts and ideas and hopefully say some things that others will find helpful, as well.

Visit often and let me know your thoughts! If you like what I have to say and find it helpful, I'd love to get the positive feedback. If you completely disagree and want to set the record straight, I'd love to hear that, too. I hope to do more listening than talking and I'm certain I'll learn more than I teach.