Author Archives: David

Dabble DB Demo Blows Away Meeting Industry Functionality

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This seven minute demo of the Dabble DB web application should put the fear into conference web site providers. In a mere seven minutes, they take a comma-delimited file of session information and create a highly usable web interface for searching, displaying and modifying the data. Seven minutes! And to make it worse (or better, depending upon your point of view), the Dabble DB is for working with any data, not specifically meetings.

Usability failure is eventually going to be the death of many companies serving the association space. The barriers to entering the web application market are so low that the current players’ interfaces aren’t going to cut it for much longer.

(Via Paul Bissex.)

The Art of Customer Service

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From Guy Kawasaki in early April, The Art of Customer Service:

If you put in a policy to take care of the worst case, bad people, it will antagonize and insult the bulk of your customers.

Read that sentence above 3 times. Put it on your wall. Give it to HR and your CEO. I believe this is a universal truth for both customers and employees. Managing via exceptions creates a negative focus with very people for whom you should be providing value.

Card Sorting: The Book

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Rosenfeld Media has announced their first author (other than Lou himself): Card Sorting by Donna Maurer.

Card sorting is a technique that is used to gather user input to design the information architecture of a site. The technique is easy to prepare and run, and great fun. But sometimes the results can be hard to interpret and it is not always clear how to use them to design the IA.

This short, practical, and accessible book will provide the basics that designers need to conduct a card sort in a project. More importantly, it will explain how to understand the outcomes and apply them to the design of a site.

I use card sorting exercises with clients quite often. I’m looking forward to reading the book when it is done and hopefully participating in its creation (this is a beta book type of publishing process).

RSS for Associations, AMS-CMS Integration Event

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I have posted the full text of the RSS for Associations article that was published in Association Forum of Chicagoland‘s Forum Magazine this month.

Also, I wanted to remind you that the Understanding the Potential (and Pitfalls) of Integrating CMS and AMS Systems event is being held next Thursday. This is one of the few places to learn about the somewhat tricky topic of creating value for your association by integrating your data and content management systems. Register today!

Messaging Bloggers: Doesn't Work

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Advertising Age has a great article on why marketers must really understand blogging before they engage in that space: Resist Corrupting Blogs With Messages. Those who start sending press releases to bloggers will only incite ridicule, if anything.

So, if marketers enter the blogosphere by messaging, they will stand out like an ad on a birthday cake. Messaging simply won’t work in the blogosphere because bloggers have gotten too used to the sound of honest talk with other customers. Worse, messagers will suffer perhaps irreparable harm to their reputations. Besides, blogs are much more interesting than marketing messages.

The opportunity is not for marketers to pick off the chickens one by one but for marketers to unlearn what they have spent so long teaching themselves. The blogosphere is a vibrant human conversation. If marketers can learn to enter that conversation as humans first, talking honestly about what they care about, identifying themselves and exposing themselves, then they will be welcome in the blogosphere. But, of course, that means they cannot enter it as marketers.

Slideuments

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Garr Reynolds has good advice on why you should avoid creating slideuments for your presentations.

Slides are slides. Documents are documents. They aren’t the same thing. Attempts to merge them result in what I call the “slideument” (slide + document = slideument). Much death-by-Powerpoint suffering could be eliminated if presenters clearly separated the two in their own minds before they even started planning their talks.

Projected slides should be as visual as possible and support our point quickly, efficiently (good signal-to-noise ratio), and powerfully. The verbal content, the verbal proof, evidence, and appeal/emotion comes mostly from our spoken word. Our handout (takeaway document) is completely different. We aren’t there to supply the verbal content and answer questions so we must write in a way that provides at least as much depth and scope as our live presentation.

He has a very good point about how a lot of conferences create a dynamic that encourages slideumentation.

Open Source for Your Career

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I was quoted last week in an article for Monster.com on how knowing open source technologies can benefit your career, even as a manager: Open Source Is Not Just for Coders Anymore.

How can a manager benefit from knowing about open source tech? If they are knowledgeable about a variety of open source systems and technologies, they can have their teams use them to rapidly prototype new services without requiring a significant investment up front. Successful prototypes can then either be further developed with OS tools or used to identify proprietary tools with which to build a production system. Either way, the manager has made a valuable contribution that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

NYT 1024, Georgia!

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The New York Times launched a new site design yesterday. You can read an introduction to the redesign from Leonard M. Apcar, the editor of the online version of the paper. Among notable changes, they have expanded the width of the site beyond 800 pixels to take advantage of higher resolution monitors that are out there now and they have switched from their font from Times New Roman to Georgia to improve readability. The font switch blew me away. I can just imagine how challenging it must have been to push that through the powers that be internally. The site design also makes minimal use of tables and employs standards-based techniques for their menus.

I like the new look quite a bit based on my initial experience with it.

Martin for ASAE Scoble

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Ben Martin wrote an April fools post about how he had just been hired as ASAE & the Center’s membership evangelist and would be blogging for them full time.

It is with equal parts excitement and sadness that I announce that I’ll be leaving my current job to join the staff of ASAE & The Center for a newly created position: Member Evangelist. It seems this little blog and my unmatched enthusiasm for the CAE has gotten more than a little attention over on Eye Street, and after a couple of interviews with Susan Sarfati and John Graham, they have made an offer I simply can’t refuse. My primary duties will be blogging on a new official ASAE & The Center blog, implementing a video podcast featuring members (e-mail me if you’d like to be among the first members interviewed) and ASAE staff, and undertaking a word of mouth member outreach campaign. I start May 1, so I’ll continue blogging here until that date, but of course, a condition of my employment is that I don’t maintain a personal blog about the CAE or Association Management or the Association Management industry. So, goodbye — and hello!

As someone commented on his post, I wish it were true! Hiring a Scoble-like person for ASAE is probably the best idea I’ve heard for them in a long time. Despite their best efforts, I think ASAE still has a transparency problem, and I’m actually in the governance. Ben would be a great person to help with that issue in that kind of role.