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I am working on putting the first Knowledge Exchange Summit (KES) Newsletter together this weekend, and I am looking for some input.

I believe that there are some of you out there that would be interested in a deeper exploration of some of the topics that I write about on the blog. I like to keep my blog posts short and use them to expose a couple of thoughts that I find interesting and/or useful.

So here is the question: What would you like to see in the newsletter?

• Specific tools and techniques for small business online?
• Productivity information?

I would like to see this newsletter become a private coffee-shop style exchange of information that leads to a better understanding of the art that we are working on (that may sound a little odd, wait for my review of The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield next week).

Why we do what we do.

Who we are doing it for.

What we hope to accomplish.

This is your chance to get involved, pick my brain, and get yours picked too. We are in this together and I would love to get your input. Leave a comment, or if you prefer to remain anonymous, send me an e-mail [ stephen at stephenpsmith dot com].

Register for the newsletter here (if you can’t see the form, click here: KES)

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I’d like to take a minute and discuss what I feel are the two most important parts of the strategy:

6. Commit to your blog. In Arnie Keunn’s business, Vertical Measures, 25% of his Web traffic comes from its blog. The blog should be the hub for your marketing activities, with platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, [and] LinkedIn as the spokes. Your blog is real estate you own, and you can control 100% how your content is presented.

Control. Something that every business wants to have, over every aspect of their marketspace.

Too bad. Social Media and user-generated content is outside of your control, but you can control the content that is on your own site. You can use it to do some things that can push the conversation in a healthy direction:

• Promote the people that have nice things to say about your company, publish links to their Tweets, their websites, etc.
• Engage them in conversations about your company.
• Provide them with a forum to discuss their issues and problems – make a case study out of how they used your company to solve those issues.
• Remember that it is your job to let the conversations take place. While the website is your hub it is your job to get out of the way and let people share.

Here is another important concept, that I just discussed with my colleague Kevin Ferrasci O”Malley: (@kfom on Twitter)

7. Make content educational, not promotional. Tell stories about problems your customers have, don’t just pitch your product. Consider asking for registration/further engagement with your audience at the end of your content — once readers are hooked — rather than at the beginning. Shoot for 200 to 400 words, which is the sweet spot for blog-post length, and don’t forget to augment your content with video whenever possible.

Video is important, and something that small businesses need to invest some time and energy in learning, because (sooner rather than later) video is going to be essential to your success. I am still experimenting with video, especially in my book review posts, and I have found these types of posts to be much more popular and successful.

Videos are fantastic tools for teaching, and for exposing the “wow” factor of your product or service. It is one thing to tell people about what you do, it is another to be able to show them and let them show other people.

We called it a “summit” and had invited a few more people to join us in COncord, NH, but bad weather here prevented the rest from attending. Undeterred, we took the opportunity to really dive in to our own businesses and take a good hard look at what we do, what we sell, who our clients are, and how we can serve them more successfully.

I learned a lot from the group, especially with regards to the tools of production and design of the products that I create. I also discovered that there were some pretty important things that I did not know that I did not know! The unknown unknowns are always the most dangerous, aren’t they?

How a Knowledge Exchange can help your business

Getting together with like-minded individuals can create a tremendous opportunity for sharing and collaborating. I found this meeting to be particularly valuable because I had the chance to meet with people in very different industries, which gave me a chance to think about new ways of applying the things that I do. Flexing your mental muscles is always refreshing.

We talked about products.

We talked about services.

We talked about SEO and web design.

We took a look at each others’ websites. (This was especially fun, because we have such different approaches to what we are trying to accomplish.)

This is something that any one of you can do, that is, put together a meeting of the minds and share your knowledge. Learn something from another businessperson. The beauty of this idea is that you can do it in person, with local businesspeople, or you can do it online. See what Dave Seah had to say about the meeting here :

The key pieces fell into place at the informal New Hampshire Knowledge Exchange that Stephen Smith and I held up in Concord NH. Stephen arranged for a conference room at The Centennial Hotel (the staff was very accommodating) and four of us showed up despite the threat of snowstorms. Neither Stephen or I knew exactly how this would work, but we had a simple agenda: (1) Find out what people were wanting to know and then (2) Share our relevant expertise.

It ended up being quite informative for me, because Stephen’s knowledge and experience with using the Internet as the platform for his information and knowledge-based businesses filled in the missing pieces. Plus, Stephen has the mindset of an independent business owner coupled with his years of hospitality management experience. Here’s the distillation of what I learned, framed in the context of my current drive to adopt the “owner” mentality: (Getting Unstuck at the Knowledge Exchange)

This meeting got me to thinking about how to apply this meeting format in a larger group, and how to share it with everyone. I was also struck by the parallels to the Linchpin mind-set that came up in the discussions. Each person in this meeting is working hard, creating some amazing art, and is bent on owning the means of their own production. That last part is essential to the Linchpin Way of doing business.

The Linchpin Way

My friend Justin McCullough has put together a community site on ning.com for cultivating the Linchpin Mindset. Called The Linchpin Way, it is a place for this type of knowledge exchange to take place regardless of geography and availability. Click that link and join us. Tell us about your situation and what you have to share, or what you would like to learn.

If you are still not sure what all of this means to you, or how you can use it, here are a couple of additional resources:

Order the book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
(from Amazon, aff link).

And sign up for the Knowledge Exchange newsletter. I will publish this from time to time with more detailed news and information about what we are working on, as well the time and registration information for future Summits (all free, too).

I will also be using this newsletter for more in-depth book reviews than the ones I post here on the site. This will give you a chance to learn a little more about how the books I share affect my life and business.

I am tentatively planning the first newsletter for Friday, 5 March 2010.

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If you are reading this via RSS and can’t see the sign-up form, please click on the post title to come to the website and register. Thank you!

A Room of Excellence to Fine Tune Your Business

Suppose you could take a weekend retreat away from the noise of the Internet …

• to focus entirely on your business
• to work with the support of a mastermind team
• to get quality time to interact with the top people in social media
• to get the best information AND time to discuss how you’ll apply it
• to work with sponsors who are doing the same thing
• in a room limited to 150 people — all focused in the same direction
• without worry because the food and the wireless are outstanding.

Imagine a weekend work retreat with these people totally invested in sharing this content.

The BlogIt EarnIt Discount Until April 1!!

Click to the SOBCon contest page to learn the details.

Introducing the New Book from Behance & 99%: “Making Ideas Happen” :: Articles :: The 99 Percent

I found that one’s methods for organization are just as important as the quality of one’s ideas. How you manage projects, how (and when) you conduct meetings, how you allocate your time on a daily basis – these seemingly “uncreative” activities matter. I’ll go further: they make a dramatic impact that is often the difference between success and… yet another idea that didn’t happen.

But organization isn’t everything. There are other common themes among prolific creative leaders, notably how they engage their community and how they lead others in creative pursuits. I found that the capacity to make ideas happen could be distilled into a simple framework:

Making Ideas Happen = (Ideas) + Organization & Execution + Communal Forces + Leadership Capability

The methods and practices in each part of the above equation are absolutely essential when it comes to creative execution. Yet nearly all of these activities – perhaps because they come after the “idea” – are vastly undervalued. In fact, many of the forces that are crucial to making ideas happen may seem counter-intuitive at first blush.

Things like acting without conviction, skipping regular meetings, sharing ownership of your ideas, encouraging your team to fight, using appreciations instead of critical feedback, and drawing strength from others’ doubts.

Many of the forces that are crucial to making ideas happen may seem counter-intuitive at first blush.

These and many other surprising insights that emerged have changed the way I work and live my life. Needless to say, the process of writing the book was a 99% case study in itself. During the course of the project, I was able to put many of the insights I was observing into practice.

I have not read the book yet, it will be released on 15 April this year, you can pre-order it here:

The Linchpin Way and the Linchpin 2.0 Manifesto

With your gift, your tools, your art and your generosity use the internet to communicate and spread the idea of the Linchpin. Now is the time to unite Linchpins into a network. A group, an organization, a club, whatever you want to call it. Seth can not be expected to do it for us. There is no road-map. The essence of being a Linchpin means that we can do it for others (as well as ourselves). Linchpinners with a Linchpin mindset will create an open network to facilitate The Linchpin Way. Seth has given us the tools and he has already given us the permission – it’s built into the Linchpin message. Now is the time to create The Linchpin Network.

Become the standard to measure against. Imagine a world where even performance reviews included a linchpin section along with communication skills, team work, and areas of improvement. Why not? Even better, why not have performance reviews go away entirely and only give Linchpin reviews? Shouldn’t we all strive to be measured against The Linchpin Standards, not the status quo standards?

The Linchpin Way at Work

There are a lot of things that we can do in our jobs to become Linchpins, and as Godin wrote, there is no map. But there are some signposts, and I think that McCullough hit upon a big one with “Imagine a world where even performance reviews included a linchpin section“. Indeed, imagine that world, that workplace. A business where people are encouraged and evaluated on their ability to create something remarkable within and beyond their own job descriptions!

Who wouldn’t want to work there?

I have a few more things to say about this subject but, I want to discuss them in the proper forum, so click over to The Linchpin Way community site and join in the discussion. Thanks!

This is exactly what I did here with my series on the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. (link to e-book)

Let’s take a look at Consol’s advice, then I will walk you through the steps I took to create the 7H e-book that has been downloaded more than 5,000 times!

The e-book strategy to blogging success – mikeconsol’s posterous

One method for accomplishing long-range planning and a logical progression of the information your blog writes about is something I call the “e-book strategy to blogging.”

Here’s how it works. You outline an entire e-book on the subject you plan to blog about. Any good book is organized to gradually increase the reader’s understanding of its topic.

Write the table of contents. Then write the component parts of each chapter. Each component part represents an individual blog post. When you have completed all the blog posts that comprise the book, you simply republish the accumulated copy in the form of an e-book.

All that’s required is assembling the blog posts you’ve written and then organizing them into chapters – which you outlined at the start of this process. Format the pages so they look attractive and readable and convert it into a PDF file. Voila! You’re ready to market your e-book.

E-books are normally shorter than paper books, with a range of 80-120 pages, and usually free of charge and used to demonstrate competence in the author’s area of expertise. They are often used as an inducement to subscribe to a blog or newsletter, or register for a website, webinar, conference, etc. Or, you could always charge a small fee and sell the fruits of your labor.

This is an excellent way for a small business to create a passive revenue stream, as well as great content for your blog. The blog posts themselves are a way of building credibility and authority in your field (more)

When tied together in an e-book, they make an excellent resource for you customers. You can give this e-book to your clients that purchase some of your products or services as a value-added bonus (see what Seth Godin did w/ Linchpin).

Turning Blog Posts into an E-book

The first thing that I did was answer a few questions that came to me via email from readers that were interested in knowing my thoughts on the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. They had read (or tried to read) the book and had trouble. They had trouble because the book is a little bit difficult to apply, because the stories and anecdotes did not fit with their personal situations.

Soon this became part of my FAQ series (at my old blog), because so many people were asking about it. So I decided to write a series of posts on how to apply each of the 7 Habits into your own daily routine. This became a pretty big job! I started out with an outline of what I wanted to say in each post, then went looking for examples and created some worksheets to help with each of the habits.

I build these worksheets into my Weekly Review and started hammering out these posts. Once the first few were ready I started scheduling them to publish and gave myself deadlines to complete the rest. The response was really powerful, people read these articles and gave me some amazing feedback. The thoughtfulness of the responses also led me to revise and refine the later posts to make them even more relevant. The work, the content, the bookmarking by my readers, and a little creative SEO work has made that series at the top of the Google search for “7 habits of highly effective people worksheet“!

At the end of the process, readers started asking if the series was available as a book, or ebook that they could download. Talk about the marketplace providing ideas for a product! This was awesome! So, I copied the posts into my handy-dandy word processor and started putting them together. I added some more examples and clarified some things in response to more reader questions. Then I sent it off to a friend of mine who does copy-editing so that she could clean it up, fix my grammar, and smooth out the spots where I am too terse.

Voila! The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in Context.

You can do the same thing for your own small business, by writing a series of articles that would provide value for your clients and customers. It doesn’t matter what business you are in, just brainstorm some ideas – dig into your emails from your clients. Figure out what they are asking you about most often and write open letter solutions for your blog.

Ask for feedback, even if you need to email some of your clients and ask them straight out how your solution benefited them. Then revise and refine that series of posts, collect them and connect them. Add more examples. And publish that book!

By the way, I use e-junkie to deliver all of my digital products, and they are fantastic! Click the logo to get signed up and start your own online e-commerce site!

If you want to be a real leader,
first get real about leadership

We don’t worship the people at the top simply because they are at the top.

Organizations have gotten too big…for any one person at the top to have all the answers.

The job of the leader is not to have all of the answers, the job of the leader is to ask the right questions.

More and more work is teamwork.

Teamwork requires people who can take on the real work of leading at all levels of the organization.

The company with the most leaders at all levels wins.

Alan M. Webber

[re: Twitter]…who could have imagined the excitement it generated during the worst recession in modern history? Leave it to entrepreneurs to figure out how to make more money than Twitter using Twitter–during a recession.

But looking beyond the zeitgeist of Twitter, the recession ushered in vast cultural and systemic changes. It also ushered in vast opportunities in the most unexpected places. Barebones became the overarching business philosophy for everything from restaurants to retail to services. Even as we gut it out through the recovery, this barebones philosophy is likely to stick around for a while.

As the dust settles on this chaotic, innovative year, it’s important to remember that even during the worst situation, you cannot sit still–business is changing and you have to keep moving. Stagnation will get you nowhere in this new entrepreneur economy. But who wants to sit still anyway?

Some tips for surviving and thriving in 2010:

* Lead with optimism–always.
* Collaborate when practical and relevant–but don’t create subcommittees.
* Focus on and build a culture of excellence, base it on trust and it will see you through the tough times.
* Be a change agent.
* Be fearless.

And keep in mind: You go where you look so look where you want to go.

Barebones indeed. This economy has affected so many people and businesses in a negative way – and there is a lot of negativity and uncertainty out there. So much so that I fear it is strangling opportunities for collaboration. People seem to be so intent on keeping their heads above water (doing business in the short term) that they forget how important it is to keep working toward larger future goals.

Cosper says to “Collaborate when practical and relevant“, but I would recommend – to every business – that you make collaboration part of your overall strategy and incorporate it into your immediate tactical plan.

The future of your business depends on it. The collaborators and co-creators will be able to move faster than you. They will be able to change practices and adapt to new conditions more effectively than you can by yourself.

Build a gate in the wall around your company.Let some other people in. Create a VIP room for them. Then watch what happens.