Network Solutions - Small business conversations and working together for small business success

The Changed Expectations of Digital Vacations

I’ve never been very good at taking vacations, so this is more of a theoretical exercise for me than anything else, but I was thinking about different ways our expectations of vacation have changed because of this whole online thing.
I’m not talking about the prosaic stuff like being able to make your own reservations and [...]

Maintaining Relationships With Pokes, Pings, Winks, Drive-bys and Twitter

Back when I worked for a big company on a sprawling campus, I used to make it a point to stop by the offices (well, usually cubicles) of friends and other people with whom I’d worked before.
I almost never pre-scheduled these little drive-bys in advance, instead just relying on a simple calculus: I’d stick my [...]

Social Broadcasting: Where You Are vs. Where You Aren’t

I’d like to revisit the implications of socially-broadcasting your location and status. Previously, I looked at social broadcasting from a security perspective — namely, the notion that by telling people where you are, you’re also telling people where you aren’t, which could open you up to shenanigans by ne’er-do-wells, or even crime (as in the [...]

Extending Situational Relationships With Social Media

We all know that the Internet, online community, and social media tools are great for enabling and strengthening the connections between people of every combination of like-minded/differently-minded and geographically distant/nearby.
Here, I’m going to look at social media and expanding relationships between people who are already like-minded — even excessively so — and physically near each [...]

Exploring it all with the Conversation Prism

Back in August 2008, public relations professional, author of the book Putting Public Back In Public Relations and creator of the term “PR 2.0″, Brian Solis released what is called the Conversation Prism. But what exactly is this Conversation Prism? According to Solis, it’s to help “provide a visual representation of the true expansiveness of [...]

Transparency vs. Overdisclosure at 30,000 Feet

So of course you’ve heard the story from Thursday about the Continental Airlines pilot who had a heart attack and died in the middle of a transatlantic flight.
Fortunately for the rest of the folks on the plane, the co-pilot and a fully-qualified relief pilot were on hand to land the plane without incident. In fact, [...]

Zombies and Pinto Beans: A CrisisCamp Event Review

This past weekend, I attended CrisisCamp, an unconference (where the attendees structure the event and agenda) with the goal of applying technology and technological principles to humanitarian and disaster relief and crisis preparation.

Map to CrisisCamp session rooms, which were named after various calamities.
The attendees came from a diverse range of public, private, and NGO entities, [...]

5 Ways to Kick Off Your Social Media Outreach Activities

This blog covers many topics regarding running your business online and we talk about social media quite a bit. However, I don’t think we have really provided you with some basics to get started if you are trying to make sense of all the tools out there. Sure, we have covered Twitter and the Twitterverse [...]

Event Review: BlogPotomac 2

Friday was the second BlogPotomac conference, held at the State Theatre in Falls Church, VA. Since it was exhaustively tweeted (organizer Geoff Livingston notes that Friday saw about 3,300 posts that used the hashtag #blogpotomac), photographed, liveblogged, recapped, folded, spindled and mutilated, I will just share a few thoughts:
* I think this is the first [...]

The Beer Is Not the Content: People Pay Premiums for Community All the Time

There’s been a lot of chatter recently about Web properties resurrecting paywalls around content, ranging from the “definitely doing this” (ESPN The Magazine, a USA Today e-edition), the “possibly doing this” (TV & movie streaming service Hulu), to “nobody knows what the heck they’re doing” (secretive meetings by “newspaper cabals“)
There was also the countervailing sentiment, [...]