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I am, as usual, a little late to the party, but I’m here Colin Alsheimer threw down a challenge to a few bloggers to see if they could come up with a list of 10 – 15 blogs that they read that are not on the Technorati Top 100 or Adage 150. I was happy to join in for a variety of reasons, not least of which I get to share some of my favorite blogs but also because I get to see the lists that others are putting together and expand my reading.

So here is my initial list:

Christine Gilbert – writes at almostfearless.com Christine left her job as a manager at a Fortune 500 company to travel the world. She sold her belongings to travel the world, to write & take photographs. Some might think this an incredibly stupid thing to do, especially in the current economic climate, others yet might wonder at the bravery that it takes to undertake a journey like this. I love to keep up with Christine’s travels. A real world, Where is Waldo?

Amy Derby – writes at Write From Home Amy writes in a real world style. She is both engaging and though provoking. Her blog is ostensibly aimed at aspiring or new freelance writers, but her messages are as equally important to anyone, writer or not.

Cheryl Phillips – writes at The Daily Blonde Cheryl is part of the group referred to as “Mommybloggers”. I am always uncomfortable with terms like that, firstly because it seems to be exclusive, as though the writings of this group will only appeal to other Mommy’s. This is definitely not so with Cheryl. Her blog is about being human, about being real. Sure a lot of what she writes about is her family, but she writes in an unapologetic, real world, take it or leave it style that appeals to me.

David Lano – writes at davidlano.com I found David’s blog after he started following me on Twitter. I really like David’s writing style, accessible, informative and he asks good questions.

Tawny Press – writes at Innoventions Tawny & I met through LinkedIn. She has been my Social Media mentor and encouraged me to get back involved with Twitter after I had given up on it. She is “officially” a corporate educator, but her ability to educate the rest of us regarding the best practices in Social Networking is what will keep you visiting her blog. She has some wonderful How-To’s on using Twitter and associated tools. She writes these not from a mechanical perspective but from the practitioners perspective, she has used the tools, documented her use and then written the How-to, saving the rest of us hours of trial and error.

Christa M Miller – writes at Vocational Duality Christa & I met through LinkedIn when I answered a question she had posed about using Twitter. She represents that great dynamic of professional non-fiction freelance writer (Law Enforcement is her specialization), mother, wife, fiction writer. All of these influences make appearances in her blog which makes it all the more readable. She can discuss items as diverse as personal branding issues using great personal examples of googling potential collaborators, to discussing the challenge of writing with a two-year old on your lap.

Doriano Carta – writes at dorianocarta.com he shares a lot of great information. Known on Twitter and other places as “Paisano” there is nothing peasant like about his writing style. He also editor-in-chief of Dad-O-Matic.

So that’s my list for now, not quite 10 – 15 but I don’t want to overwhelm you all. More to be added to the list I promise.

If you are a regular reader of this blog you will know I am no fan of Apple products, in particular the iPhone. It has more shortcomings than I want to go into here for me to consider it a serious tool which is what I use my phone for.  However, there is one thing I do admire about it, the apps that others are building for it. For the most part I view a lot of them as simply toys. From what I have seen there are a lot of apps that are simply one use wonders.

However, there are some exceptions and for me the one that stands out beyond all others and that I believe to be a truly game changing piece of software is Bump. Recently Sequoia Capital invested $3m in the company, a good sign that it is a technology to be taken seriously. The reason I see the app as serious software is because it has potential way beyond the iPhone and way beyond just phones.

How It Might Work

Here is a world where Bump is pervasive, at least in my imagination:

I am going to attend a conference in another city. I download my flight, hotel, car & conference itineraries to my mobile device and head to the airport. I approach the check in kiosk and “bump” it with my mobile device, it picks up the flight itinerary and checks me in. I move to security and onto the gate. I want a coffee and a bagel but didnt get cash out. No problem, I “bump” the register and it withdraws money from the account details stored in my phone (yes I know tech like this already exists in other countries).

I arrive in the conference city, pick up a rental car and yes, you guessed it, I “bump” and go. I drive to the Hotel where instead of joining the line to check in, I simply “bump” a kiosk which dispenses a keycard and I head to my room.

I head to the conference and again, no lines for me, I simply “Bump” a kiosk, which prints my badge, I pick up a conference packet and I’m in.

Monetization Without Ads!

All of these interactions are fully monetizable, without the reliance on Ad revenue. The airline, hotel, car rental and even the coffee shop & conference venue pay a small % of their booking fee to enable “Bump” services.

Never mind its current use, of trading contact details, and rumoured to be coming in the next version, media sharing on iPhones. This is a piece of software with real potential.

Where would you use “Bump”?

image by Maria Shaw

The King is Dead – Long Live the King

Content is King. That’s what “they” say. I disagree. The King is dead long live the King. Quality content then, that must be King, possibly a prince but still not a King. The real King in the world of content is Social Content. The easiest way to define “Social” content is as the confluence of organizational/brand driven content and user generated/consumer generated content. It resides at the point where ownership and authorship lines blur such that it is hard, if not impossible to see where one ends and the other begins.

At the Social Media Breakfast in Austin on Friday 8th May I was fortunate to be on a great panel with @lionelatDell and @natayanap both of whom are extremely smart thought leaders in the area of content. Below is the video excerpt of me explaining my definition of Social Content.

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Letting Go to Gain Greater Control

This is all part of the movement within communications for brands to come to the realization that they do not own their brand, nor do they own the content that surrounds their brand, they share the same role as other content producers. By recognizing this and becoming a part of the community of content producers they can in fact regain some of the control that they so fear losing.

Some brands are already recognizing this and trying to make moves toward including a more social experience throughout their content. Right now most brands are focused on Social Media as a way of producing social content. Unfortunately simply having a page on Facebook, or a few hired hands on Twitter does not make for social content. Of course its definitely a step in the right direction and no one can reasonably expect brands to change over night.

What Does it Look Like?

So what does Social content really look like, what are the potentials, and why should brands really care?

Social content looks like a conversation, to market researchers it would probably look like the output of a well crafted focus group, the big difference is that the brand wouldn’t be setting the agenda, they would be just another participant. Offering pointers, advice and amplifying restrictions that are both internal & external so that the community can gain better understanding.

The potential for Social content is endless, I foresee brands being able to included customers and potential customers in the entire production process from ideation, design, testing and ultimately sales and marketing.  After all if you had helped design a product wouldn’t you talk about it?

Imagine a computer company that wants to produce a laptop that meets the needs of a group of users that it has identified as being a missed opportunity. Now instead of simply holding focus groups, and then designing some clever marketing collateral to help promote the product, what if the company was able to actually engage the audience in the design process, having the engineers work online in a collaborative environment with the intended users, helping them all gain from each other in the different ways the computer will be used.

Having assisted in the design and development, the sales and marketing team could then work with the same group of collaborators to design the promotional material that would help sell the product.

This is what Social content of the future could look like. Will all brands embrace this? Very unlikely, but for the few that do, they are likely to be the ones who set the stage for real content.

Video courtesy of @bryanperson

The death of Twitter is a much discussed topic. The April Fool’s posts this year about Google buying Twitter and then some of that being revealed as real potential brought it to the surface again. Originally it was felt by some that Twitter would cease to be an effective communication tool as soon as big brands started using it. That hasn’t happened, brands are using Twitter and for the most part it has had little or no impact on Twitter users in general, at least in a negative way.

What Will Kill Twitter?

So if the arrival of brands didn’t kill Twitter what is the next big threat. Unfortunately that threat has already arrived and woven itself into the very fabric of Twitter, no not the spam-bots, but the MLM’ers. Those people who have got the lastest and greatest get rich quick scheme, all of which is vaporware. They sell courses on how to sell courses, they write e-books on how to write e-books, they sell you a plan that you only have to sell to 10 other people before you will see money just roll in.

Now they have turned their attention to Twitter. There are already people selling Twitter user courses, which in of itself, while a bit of a head-scratcher, is not too awful, but now there are those who are selling Twitter based get rich quick schemes. They vary from schemes that guarantee you 7000 followers in 24 hours to tools that will get you 20,000 followers in a month.

What’s The Harm?

I am all about the freedom to use Social Media in the way that best suits your business model or in fact your personal goals, there have been way too many people who have tried to write the “Social Media Rulebook”. So why are MLM or Internet Marketers as they now prefer to be called (no offense to real Internet Marketers) a bad thing for Twitter and Social Media in general? The main reason is that they are experts at “gaming” the system, they will use every shortcut they can to provide an image of knowledge or influence. That is how their business model works. This past week I have been followed by at least half a dozen Twitter users who have less than 500 updates (which gives you a sense of how long they have been active on Twitter) but have 20k followers and are following a similar number. How can you possibly grow an organic following of over 20k followers in a month? You use tools like Tweetgetter or other services that charge up to $10 a month to provide you with 1000’s of followers.

Where this has an impact is that it skews the ability of both new users of these tools and brands to be able to recognize those with influence and those with just numbers. Unfortunately at this point a lot of people are still associating the two. Tools like Twitter Grader and Twinfluence used to be both fun and provide some indication of at least how popular a user was, now they have, in my opinion, become redundant. A recent look at Twinfluence showed the top users are no longer Barack Obama, Guy Kawasaki, Robert Scoble or any of the other usual suspects, the users in the top ranked places are people who have made major gains in their follower numbers. Now I am not claiming that they have used any of these tools, maybe they are just Twitter addicts who spend hours searching out great Twitter users to follow and following them – but if you think that it probably takes about 1 minute to perform a search by topic, then another minute at least to identify a Twitter user from the list returned by Twitter Search then clicking follow that would be 40,000 minutes – or nearly 28 days of non-stop Twitter activity, no food, sleep or bathroom breaks!

Image by Dan of Future’s Past via Flickr

I have been writing about new applications coming out for Twitter here and on Mashable for a while now, but its just not possible to keep up with all of them.

I decided to feature a few each week and get you involved in deciding which application you think is cool.  Now that can mean what you want it to, cool/useful, cool/easy, cool/cool.

Each week I will promote three Twitter tools that either I have found or that have been recommended to me, they won’t be in the same category so this isn’t choose one or the other.

This weeks entries are:

Misko Knows – This allows you to Tweet recommendations for Books, Music & Movies. It includes links to amazon so that you can get more info and buy the recommended item.  Nice use of Twitter.  It is missing a few features that I would like to see, but overall I like the interface and its about as simple to use as the developers could have made it.

 Twitter Karma – This tool allows you to see who you are following, who is following you and where the follow is mutual.  This is a great way for you to manage your account especially when you start to follow large numbers of people.  You can make multiple selections and choose to bulk follow, bulk unfollow those people.  Its a great way to catch up if you have had a sudden influx of followers that you haven’t had the opportunity to follow or a great way to thin out those you are following but are not receiving a follow back.

Think of this as Evite for Twitter. It allows you to post events from your Google Calendar directly to Twitter.  Its a great way to let people know that you are having an event.  Tweetups can be organized this way, after all where better to promote one than on Twitter?

If you havent used any of these tools go take a look and come back and vote.  I am not saying which one I like best yet, Cool Tools Thursday is all about you and your opinion

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According to the United States Marine Corps, 3 is the magic number.  The Marine corps operates on the rule of three’s.  Each leader is only responsible for three units at any one time.

This got me thinking, how many things are you trying to control at once.  Do you ever manage to control more than three successfully, do you ever manage as many as three at once?

If I think about my day today, I am trying to build out our marketing plan, seeking new partners, seeking new customers, thinking about tomorrow’s blog entry, waiting for responses from potential vendors, getting organized for Innotech-Austin.  In other words more than three things.  Which begs the question am I doing any of them effectively? I see lots of posts, tweets and comments that contain remarks about how busy everyone is at the moment.

What if I determined at the beginning of the day that I was only going to focus on three things that day, but really focus on them. Would I be better at them, would I get better results?

There seem to be no end of self-help business management books, websites and blogs out there all with their own recipe for how to achieve success, or to build effective habits.  I am sure some of them work.  But trying to take those on, wouldn’t that be one of my three things?

I like the simplicity of the rule of three’s, I don’t have to think about it too much, I don’t have to learn any complex matrix formats into which I have to push my work day.  Do effective things have to be complex?  Or is that just a myth perpetuated by business schools?  That’s not meant as a knock at business schools, I just wonder at the sometimes extremely complex solutions that come from some of my colleagues. 

But perhaps therein lies the problem, perhaps the rule of three’s isnt complex enough. Perhaps it over-simplifies very complex issues.   I would counter that by saying its possible to utilize the rule of three’s even for even extremely complex thought processes.  By breaking them down into sets of three problems, clearly identifying individual stages and grouping those by like, related, associated or dependent problems.  Revisiting my day, perhaps I should focus on only three prospects today, only three vendor solutions, and three blog topics as a short-list.

Of course the question is how I organize the other things on my to do list under those three things in not more than groups of three.  Now my simple system is starting to sound increasingly complex! Or perhaps thats the point, I am, like so many others, trying to do too much.  Perhaps this is what the rule of three’s can teach us, once you get beyond trying to control three things you are trying to do too much. So fall back, regroup, reorganize and refocus. 

So if you were only going to try and control three things today what would they be?