On Rad's Radar? - twitter Archives

What Twitter Told Me This Week

2012-02-10T16:11:39Z

I get a lot of articles off twitter. Too many to write about all of them so I am just going to drop some on you here.

Please be advised that the FUSF rate for Q1 of 2012 has increased from 15.3% to 17.9%. For further information regarding FUSF Fees and rates please see the FCC website.

RebTel is #2 behind Skype with 15M users doing 2 billion minutes of international calling. [venturebeat]

Both Florida state and federal lawmakers are trying to overturn the NFL blackout rules. Main argument is those stadiums were paid for with public tax dollars. [tbo]

Besides the M5-ShoreTel deal, I saw 2 other acquisitions occur. [radinfo]

Your open wi-fi access point leaves you open to lawsuits. Awesome! [radinfo]

FCC Eyes Google Voice’s Rural Call Blocking - just a part of the whole FCC Rural call completion review and the inter-carrier compensation issue. BTW, it's AT&T that keeps poking Google in the eye at the FCC about this.

It's Halftime America!

EarthLink is still utilizing the AX platform from New Edge Networks (now named EarthLink Business). XCast just set up an NNI (an inter-connection) with that platform for better performance. The AX platform allows cloud providers to connect to EarthLink's nationwide MPLS network for better quality to the users.

TELX is building another data center in NYC, land of not much commercial space for sale.

MITEL has achieved CLEC status in all 50 states. Maybe that's to help it deliver Hosted MITEL UC service to its customers.

Sales Stalking

2011-07-27T15:33:08Z

With the loss of any privacy today online, cyber stalking for prospecting is easier. I know it sounds sinister, but the best way to sell is to know your prospect. Know if they NEED your service. Know if they can afford your service. Know if your service can actually benefit them. How to do that? Cyber-Stalking.

First, set up a Google alert with the CEO's name (and another for the corporate name). When you see PR from the company or about them, print it out and mail it to him - or share it with your socila network -- or email him with a short note of congratulations.

As Gitomer says, Give Value First! Maybe that value is information about their biggest competitor or industry reports. There's a lot to be said about BI (business intelligience).

Find out the CEO's sweet spot; chocolate, cigar, golf, something small that is related to this and send it to them.

Follow the company on LinkedIn and twitter. Know what they are up to. It may coincide with your services. For example, if they are opening a new office or hiring or even laying off. In Hosted VoIP, these are sales triggers.

If they just went Cloud, bandwidth, mobility, security and backup become important. Again sales triggers.

But it shouldn't be all about you, it should be about the Prospect. The more you know about them -- and their vertical - the more value you bring to the table.

If you see that they are hiring and there is a webinar about hiring practices today (or whatever), you could invite the prospect to join you at the event.

On LinkedIn, you can see their bio and shared connections. The company page may have info and news. There are many ways to skin a cat today -- you need to be working smarter and creatively. What worked before may not necessarily work now.

If you always get voicemail and your email goes unanswered, first off, be more creative with your messages! Is it about YOU or THEM? Next, try a different form of contact - a postal invite to a networking event; a CD or thumb-drive in the mail; flowers or balloons; ice cream or pizza for the office; or ping them on twitter; see them at an industry event; message them on LinkedIn.

BTW, on LinkedIn, don't use the canned invite message unless you know that person (F2F or face-to-face). Add a personal note about why you want to connect. It gets better results.

It's a new age, so some new tricks are required. Good luck!

SIP Trunking Deployment Lessons by XO

2011-07-13T18:57:27Z

XO has hired Ronan Keenan to handle their corporate social media, like the @XOComm twitter account. They put together quite the resource for SIP Trunking Deployment at Storify: SIP trunking implementation resources including videos, presentations and documents by Steve Carter, who is the SIP Product Manager at XO.

He narrates a detailed video about SIP Trunking: Learn the Steps to a Smooth Enterprise SIP Trunk Implementation. Good info for Agents to use to learn on their own at their own pace.

Is Selling on Price Really Selling?

2011-07-08T20:13:53Z

nQueryTelecom tweeted the following: "Virtual PBX VoIP Phone – Reduced Telecom Expenses: Virtual PBX VoIP phone systems ensure reduced telecom expense." You can see my reply on the left. Basically, I'm tired of our industry selling on price. It is not helping. It is driving revenue down while debt keeps increasing. It is NOT sustainable.

With over 1000 companies offering VoIP services in the US, do you really want to sell on price? I think MagicJack and Vonage have that locked up solid. (I won't get into how this kind of actions reflect poorly on the whole Industry. That's a rant for another day.)

Is it really selling if you just sell on price? Not really. It's order taking.

"Oh, you have voice service? DUH! You called my on MY phone. Well, let me shave 20% off what you pay now to move to us, okay? No thanks!"

Studies show that it takes approximately a 20% discount to get many business owners to move. One reason: the pain of moving phone numbers. If the business owner has ever moved phone numbers before, he knows it is anything but fun.

The other thing that bugs me about this approach is that you don't show any Value. The coolest thing about VoIP is NOT that it saves you money. It saves you time and makes you money!

The Integrated T1 was the penultimate fall from value. There was no way to differentiate for CLEC's because they depended on the ILEC so much. So it became a price war. What customer has not received numerous cold calls saying "I'll save you money"? Do you not think that they are jaded at this point?

I get selling DSL or T1 on price. There isn't much there but a pipe - unless you want to talk about network congestion and management, which can be a differentiator.

But selling VoIP on price in 2011 is just plain lazy. What's next coupons?

Craig's Lifetime of Customer Service

2011-06-15T13:43:47Z

Craig Newmark of craigslist spoke at the CoolTech event in Tampa last Friday. It was a good speech from a nerd with a dry sense of geeky humor. (Not everyone got it.) He was doing his best to "simulate social behavior", he said. He had 3 themes that he repeated throughout the talk (that's kind of my style of speaking, too): Customer Service, Doing what's Right, and the Common Good. Craig was introduced by his former attorney, Brett Britton, as a Bad ass. He kind of lives up to it.

Craig offered up a history of social media. It's been around a long time - just the technology has changed (from town cryer to newspapers to books to twitter). Social media has had the same effect throughout the ages though: social change. Martin Luther learned a valuable lesson about social media: You lose control of the message. Today, the Internet is everyone's printing press. Tough to fact check all the stuff that gets added to the WWW every day!

Craig is worth about $400M accoridng to Forbes with Craigslist generating about $40M per year. Craig considers himself a Customer Service representative. He has started something called Craig Connects, which "helps connect people of good will for the common good by highlighting nonprofits that are making an impact in Community Building, Journalism Integrity, Middle East, Open & Accountable Government, Service & Volunteering, Technology for Social Good and Veterans issues." These are the issues that he actively helps on: the VA, Mideast, journalistic integrity, democracy. Why? He wants to be part of something bigger. He believes in doing Social Good because It's the Right Thing to do. Is it easy? No. And he encouraged the audience to operate outside their comfort zone too. (Growth only happens when you are uncomfortable.)

Fact checking is important, according to Newmark. I agree and he gave the names of many sites that do that. Web 2.0 has certainly had an effect on shining the light in some areas. These sites grade non-profits: Charity Navigator, GreatNonProfits.org, and Guidestar. Also, Donors Choose. These check political facts or money: Politifact and Influence Explorer, [I would add Open Congress here and mention that Politifact is a project of the St. Pete Times newspaper, which is owned by the Poynter Foundation. Local pride for Tampa Bay!]

He is working with some crime fighting nerds to check grant apps and vet veterans groups. Craig worries about journalism (especially since media empires are crumbling), since the Fourth Estate is supposed to keep our Democracy in check. For our democracy to survive, the press has to have integrity and be diligent in fact checking. I'm not surprised that The Daily Show wih Jon Stewart does the best job of fact checking, according to Newmark.

Craig has his hand in many pies that all revolve around social good, customer service and doing what's right. I'll leave you with 3 quotes from his speech.

"Listen to people and then do something about it. That's customer service. Try to listen to everyone because even a disgruntled customer can be right."

"Working together for the common good - whatever your version of that is."

"Sunlight is the best disinfective for government."

IBM's New(er) Strategies

2011-03-29T04:17:56Z

Image via Wikipedia

At IBM's Lotusphere this year (Feb. 1), IBM rolled out strategies for Cloud and Social Media.

IBM identified 5 ways that partners could benefit from the Cloud. They are as follows:

Cloud Application Providers - deliver business apps via a subscription model through the cloud such as SAAS
Cloud Builders - design, build and manage clients’ cloud needs, typically integrating with existing infrastructure.
Cloud Infrastructure Providers - provide a public cloud infrastructure or Platform as a Service (PaaS) on which app can be hosted.
Cloud Services Solution Providers - resell multiple public cloud services and offer complementary services such as training and integration.
Cloud Technology Providers - provide the tools, services, and technologies, such as cloud management, billing metering and monitoring — that help clients use the cloud more effectively.

These are ways for VAR's to stay in the business of providing applications and associated services.

According to some PR sent my way, " IBM is the largest consumer of social technologies. As a company, IBM takes social networking seriously - to develop products and services, to enable sellers to find and stay connected with clients, to train the next generation of leaders, and to build awareness of Smarter Planet among clients, influencers and other communities. IBM will showcase how it is poised to help clients exploit this transformation of a social business delivering new software, services and skills resources to help organizations adopt best practices, policies and software to transform their businesses, including: (1) New Cloud software and services that delivers a cloud-based office productivity suite; (2) New software to help companies and governments socially enable their business processes using the most successful mobile devices, including tablets, such as the iPad, iPhone, Google Android, RIM's Blackberry and Nokia devices."

See how they worked Cloud and social networking into that press release? Google Juice!

"IBM intends to offer a cloud-based version of LotusLive Symphony, an office productivity suite that will give organizations a social platform that enables them to simultaneously collaborate on documents in the cloud. LotusLive Symphony in the cloud complements IBM's on-premise, free of charge, office productivity suite, IBM Lotus Symphony." I didn't know IBM offered free office software.

In its collab suite, IBM will turn the inbox into the Activity Stream that feeds in twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and SAP through the Social Business toolkit. (Yeah, it says SAP in the release.)

Meetrix is an IBM Partner that offers IBM's enterprise-class Sametime Server in the Cloud. "Combining Meetrix with Broadworks Connector provides unique capability for Broadworks operators to deliver a full featured, over the top Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC 2) offering to business-class customers." Simple Signal is using this service. Meetrix is the only partner for Hosted Lotus Sametime presently, which allows Meetrix to offer "businesses access to enterprise-class UCC features such as instant messaging, chat, presence, awareness, document and presentation storage and sharing, audio and video, web conferencing and e-signature capabilities through SAAS." Note: digital e-Signature. [pr]

I'm guessing that this will compete against Microsoft Linc. I'm also guessing that the marketing and branding of this will take some time, which they don't have. The key may be the Activity Box and the digital e-Signature capabilities. At least, that's what I would be featuring in my marketing. It should be interesting to see, especially if other Broadsoft CLEC's jump on that wagon.

Thoughts from Social Fresh

2011-02-24T23:31:00Z

Social Fresh Tampa was this week but I only attended the final panel on Day 2. Justin Levy (now at Citrix) resonates with me. Zena Weist of H&R Block did not. Paula Berg formerly at Southwest Airlines, now with Linhart PR shoots straight. (See some of her SF keynote here). The other panelist spent too much time trying to prove that social media marketing wasn't snake oil.

They talked about the future being about checking in with TV shows and websites for points programs. I think all that checking in will burn people out. I have credit card rewards, coke rewards, and airline programs -- all basically worthless. I see that checking in (to me) would be basically worthless. It was mentioned becuase with the new FTC rules about cookies and tracking may change some online analytics. This may be the way to get real analytics - of loyal customers, which is the kind you want (not the 5000 people who just click Like and then shut off your feed to their feed. A panelist suggested that we need a "smarter use for Like".

Google Real Time search will become more important. (I think it already is especially for news).

Group texting from companies like Groupme or Beluga. A panelist called this "spin up communities" and another said it was "like a chat room".

Facebook is going to be using iFrames because they don't want you to leave and most users of FB don't like to leave FB to go out there. It's 1998 again people. iFrames and AOL-like behavior. Amazing how everything old is new again. A point here: building your business on FB instead of your own website/domain means you are at the whims of FB - and don't own anything. Just saying. You can't have it be about some platform or application. You have to find a way to get those prospects into your sales system.

A couple of college administrators asked questions. One asked what the business world needs from students. Paula Berg asked that students have a realistic expectation of what it means to work! (I blame Tim Ferriss and his 4-Hour Work Week on some of that entitlement expectation). Justin Levy said that they have to be realistic about experience. Being on twitter for a month is not experience. Students need to know how to tactically run a campaign. Know how to drive traffic with content - and more importantly know what kind of traffic they are driving. In addition, students need to know how to write. IM/text writing is not for email or any form of business communications. Expressing thoughts, ideas, benefits, ROI and TCO takes more than 140 characters.

Don't be afraid of negative comments. It's a chance to talk to your community (or marketplace).

Have a content strategy.

Finally, don't face-tweet. And don't face-tweet to LinkedIn!! I know not everyone follows your every waking thought on every platform - and there is a reason for that. And if they do, they don't want to see the same tweet three times. (Trust me, it wasn't that great.) You have to understand that people are on these platforms for very different reasons. Messaging on the platforms has to coincide with your strategy and how people interact and listen on the platform. On twitter, you can post 8 times a day. On FB, the stats are more like once every other day. On LinkedIn, people are there for business. I know you think it's all relative but it is not. All you are doing is adding to the social noise. And people are not listening -- even to you!! Imagine that.

So those are the take aways from the Social Fresh conference. Can't wait for next week because VoiceCon is having a twitter wall :)

UC Won't Last

2010-11-24T20:48:31Z

I started working on a post last week I titled UC Won't Work. Today, there's a topic abuzz about how UC is a scam.

Speaking during a debate on unifiec communications at the recent Gartner Symposium in Sydney, analyst, Nick Jones, argued the case that unified communications is the "greatest scam since Ponzi", saying the technology had no clear definition. "I'll give you the real definition: Unified communications is the bundle of things a vendor wants to sell you," he said, according to NetworkWorld.

I have to concur. Everyone calls it something different. (see this YouTube video that XO did at VoiceCon with me).

It's like SIP - 35 opinions (RFC's) and no standard.

It's not a customer facing term. No customer asks for UC.

It's not a replacement service, which makes mass sales challenging (even expensive).

UC isn't one size fits all. (It's not cookie cutter). It's a forklift upgrade. It contains many moving parts. Scale will be difficult.

UC lies outside the comfort zone of both buyers and sellers. Think about it. It's a concept that you can't define for the prospect clearly. And in some cases, the vendor cannot deliver on the promise due to business process hurdles that handcuff the solution. Those hurdles can include security measures, regulations, policies, inter-departmental politics, and software integration.

Gartner's Jones remarks that UC doesn't integrate SMS, MMS, and social media (particularly Twitter) into one platform. Gen Y is leading the charge in the workplace, yet do not use any of the legacy communications platforms. So UC is becomes another wall. Walled gardens are what telecom has traditionally been about. "If you put fences around people, you get sheep." ~William McKnight, CEO of 3M

Ask Gives Up (and other news)

2010-11-09T21:56:03Z

A bunch of stuff from my twitter feed, which produces all those useless facts in my head (and distracts me all day).

Ask.com gives up on search [RRW] they will just do Q&A (for now).

Twilio raises $12 million to let you call from web apps to phones. [venturebeat] Twilio is a 2x sponosr of StartupCamp Communications.

23% of all US households report that no one in the home uses the Internet anywhere. [Ars]

Phone.com Offers 100% Automated Voicemail Transcription

What does an entrepreneur do for fun? Think, talk, and dream about business.

Mobile payments: Square is processing millions of dollars in transactions each week [TC]

Cisco - 42% of employees restricted from using social media at work.

@HeinzMarketing: "my product is better" triggers a price war. "my product is different" drives discovery and value. #sm20

Do you really think blogging is being replaced by FB, twitter? Thought leadership doesn't happen in 140-420 characters.

Cisco led the Series C funding round which closed last week for RingCentral. RingCentral launched an agent program a couple months ago and already have 150+ sales agent partners. (It's not quantity; it's quality/relationship).

What I Learned From the Locknote

2010-10-27T15:44:27Z

A keynote opens a conference and a Locknote closes a conference.

The Broadsoft Connections 2010 was opened by Wikinomics author Don Tapscott with his talk about the Digital Age. Our industry is aware that ubiquious broadband has changed the landscape of many businesses. The transparency that we have today (think blogs and WikiLeaks) means that nothing is really private.

This is paramount to me - obviously because I blog and occassionally get dirty looks for what I write -- but the Locknote was a panel of twitter experts - Tara Hunt, Joel Comm and Paul Chaney - being interviewed by Broadsoft CMO Leslie Ferry. Let's just say they didn't knock this out of the park. When asked what social media was the replies ranged from "an online platform for user interaction" (@pchaney) to "the water cooler of our time ... on steroids (@joelcomm). It turns the bull horn around; it flips the funnel. (I guess they read Seth Godin).

When asked how to get started, they all said Listen. "Listening is the new marketing," said Paul Chaney. Really? Did you not hear the questions that Leslie was asking? Where you listening to the audience, who were walking out two by two?

The panel never answered how to get started. It's like they came there with the usual pithy phrases that they had to use, like water cooler, bring value, build trust, twitter is a research engine.

They all wrote a book about twitter but that doesn't make twitter the answer to everything. You have to use the platform that your target market is using!

"Mundane tweets humanizes the connection" was a nice way of saying that people have to get over the uninteresting stuff people write online. (People say uninteresting stuff offline all the time!) Social networks are just the new printing presses; the new publishing systems.

When Paul Chaney mentioned that only 15% of Fortune 500 use blogs in a meaningful way, I am reminded that most companies have corporate structure, SEC guidelines, and other trappings that can defeat a blogger in Corporate America. And comments scare the heck out of the PR department. Let me remind you that people are already saying this stuff! I'm just writing it down!

It was a great show with about 900 people including about 450 customers. And the Arizona Biltmore is a great place to have a conference. It's beautiful and relaxing and, as Larry Lisser stated, it had so many places to have a conversation.

Interesting tidbit from twitter this morning: "We have more than 300 internal bloggers at AT&T and more than 30,000 wiki pages for knowledge management. Internal community growth 95% QOQ." (@bklein34)

Another snarky comment from an attendee was why would the author of the Digital Age give out physical books instead of an e-book? :)

The Pitfalls of Social CRM

2010-10-21T21:01:42Z

A consultant sent me a link to look at a CRM solution. (I don't know why because she was researching blogging platforms when I spoke with her Tuesday). The site is intriguing and makes some big promises:

* Manage contacts and build relationships.
* Engage, import contacts on social networks.
* Track sales pipeline and view analytics.
* Organize projects, tasks, and events.
* Monitor customer & team activity in the stream.
* Google Apps Integration

First off, in my experience, you have to force people to use CRM. Unless you withhold pay, most salespeople will fight you on the use of CRM. I know Salesforce.com makes a billion dollars, but that means companies are buying it - that doesn't mean it is being utilized fully or at all. Just saying.

Now CRM will be Social. So you can engage your contacts. That's great if people knew what it meant to "engage". Read some of your stream on Facebook or on twitter. Isn't it a litany of links to read something? Or someone complaining about something? Or checking in somewhere? That's not engagement. That's hardly even social.

So you are going to entrust your sales team with the social engagement? I hope there is training and guidelines and monitoring.

Having a good dashboard has helped Salesforce reach heights that Microsoft had hoped for with its Great Plains purchase. (I still think Landslide has a great concept with the admin feature.) It is also customizable - something that the open-source SugarCRM just couldn't match. Clunky is how I have heard it described.

"Monitor customer and team activity in the stream" - I guess that you can watch in real-time all the social engagement. You have a dashboard. Who needs to shadow employees and customers all day? Who has the time?

The key for CRM usage is that it helps the sales team close business, manage a funnel, and allow for management reporting. That's a lot to ask of employee involvement before adding the social piece.

I can see salespeople tweeting, "Did you get the contract I sent over?" The other side is when the prospect tweets that a certain salesperson doesn't know his product. That will be a bummer. (True experience here). Everyone gets upset. But that's the social part. That's the digital life. I can tell five people via email and phone - and you won't know. But when I blog it or tweet it, you WILL know. (And so will many more people). But deleting it doesn't solve the problem or take it out of the digital footprint either.

Just some thoughts today on where we are heading in sales. And I didn't even touch on the difference between a Hunter and a Farmer and these systems.

Lots of Shorts

2010-10-19T01:29:10Z

So HD Voice isn't quite taking off as expected.Sorry Doug. A lot more VoIP Peering required yet.

Shout out to

Big surprise as Windstream lays off 220 Iowa Telecom employees. It's called synergies of consolidation.

Qwest has taken to Twitter like Comcast and XO.

Surprisedly, the Pennsylvania PUC puts conditions on the Qwest-CenturyLink merger including rate freeze and broadband buildout requirements. How will they enforce them?

VoIP Supply announces DEPLOY, "a suite of nationwide VoIP installation services aimed at business that don't have the time or technical acumen to properly install a VoIP solution. Through Deploy businesses can make the evaluation and installation of a VoIP system quick, easy and affordable." I thought they were rolling out a fulfillment system.

Level3 is hiring a VP of Channel and Alliances.

Promiscuous Networking

2010-09-22T15:09:35Z

While this whole social media thing is new and yet evolving, experts have emerged. Ninjas even. All these folks that lay a claim to knowing everything there is to know about social media. It was the same with multi-level marketing (MLM) aka network marketing. It was the same with real estate investing. It is even the same with SEO (search engine optimization).

So many experts. Of course, they are experts. When the mass majority doesn't have a clue about something, anyone confident can come along and be taken as an expert. You know what a Confidence Man is? A Con Man.

When I first joined LinkedIn, there was a group called LIONs. These were the numbers people - chasing to be connected to everyone on LinkedIn. (Today, you can buy that ability from LinkedIn.) I learned early on that it wasn't a game of numbers. I could connect with any of the Top 5 LION's and reach their whole network, so why go crazy?

There is a sense of accomplishment when you hit 500 connections and even more when you hit 1000, but it isn't about the numbers. It's about the quality.

I know quite a few people like the LIONs. I call them Promiscuous Networkers because they want to connect with everyone. One is very good at it. But let me tell you something about the Promiscuous Networkers: they can't hold a job.

No one is paying them per Fan or per connection. Along the way, they forgot what they were connecting for. Was it just to have an audience? It might be. But that doesn't pay either. Bands know this. You have to have something to sell them -- and then you have to package it the way your audience wants to buy it -- and then you have to actually market it to Ask them to Buy.

You can use social media as a broadcast medium, as a PR tool, but that is most likely not going to result in sales. Sales come from engagement. That's right, you have to engage the prospect, uncover the perceive pain, then provide the solution for that pain. That can be automated for commodities like DSL or LD or books, maybe even for a T1, but not for IP Comm. (And in my case, not for consulting or training either).

When building that network, you have to know something about the people in your network. One Promiscuous Networker likes to send out quotes and a popular one is about it's about how you make people feel. If that were true, how do you make them feel when you Face-tweet link after link? It's the engagement that people seek. You want to know that someone is reading your tweet, your blog; that someone got something out of the article that you got something out of.

I've kind of given up on Linkedin these last few months. It's so noisy now that people tweet to LinkedIn. The questions section is littered with repeated questions and baiters (people that send out a question to bait answers so they can connect with more people). The spammers, people that automatically add me to their newsletters, events announcements, etc., tired me out.

One segment kills me: the people who pimp out the groups. Do I really have to go to five or more groups to get an answer to a question? Yes, because the industry has been so fragmented by ten or more people setting up their own groups instead of adding to the communities that are already established. That's not a Linchpin. That's self-serving. But then Promiscuous Networkers may say, "What can I do for you?" but underneath they are thinking, "What will you do for me?"

A thing to remember about social media: What are you there for? All your actions stem from that.

You can automate what you do on social media using apps like Hootesuite, but what part of engagement or social is automated? Do you automate your offline sales and marketing efforts as well? Are sales good? Maybe it works for you.

Certainly, broadcast can work if you are looking to drive traffic to a website. That website will then need to have an excellent landing page and conversion system. (Most don't.)

You wouldn't run into a networking event in-person and do half the stuff people do online. Think first. Sales is about making a friend.

Should You Blog?

2010-07-14T17:16:27Z

A colleague asked me this morning about blogging. Here is some basic info.

How does this tie to my website? Is it a separate domain or just a page on my site? You can add blogging software like Wordpress to your website as a sub-domain (blog.domain.com) or use a folder (domain.com/blog) to re-direct to an external blog like wordpress.org or blogger.
How often do I need to blog? At least twice a week to get readers and noticed by search engine spiders.
What do I blog about? Is it topic related? Pick 5 keywords that you want to be an expert in and blog about them (and only them).
Do I need a special name for my blog? You can because headlines are important, but the coloring and logo should be similar to your website.
How much time do I allocate weekly to do this? A researched thought piece can take between 2-4 hours (like this post). I can write faster, shorter pieces that take about an hour.
Do I need to link it to LinkedIn (or other social network)? You don't have to link anything. But you can use the LinkedIn status window to let people know when a new blog post was published.
I don't have a Twitter account - do I need one? No. You don't need twitter unless you want more distractions and noise - and one more way for people to find you.
How much time to I need to allow to set this up? You can set up blogger or wordpress.org in about an hour. It could take a day to add Wordpress to your domain.
How do I know if people are following me? You can have people read the blog via feedburner (now owned by Google). That means they sign up to get each post as an email. People can read it via RSS in a reader or in something like Google Wave. You can add Google Analytics or a counter to see how many people hit your blog, but does the number really matter? As long as I get the occasional comment and email, I'm happy. For me, blogging is an outlet and a way to talk about the Industry. It's also an excellent source of leads and SEO on keywords I blog about.
Will it cost me anything? Wordpress software is free. Having a Ninja set it up (like CR8 Marketing) will cost you a little money. The real cost is in time. Weekly time to write the content.
Are there any risks? Yes, not blogging means that you are irrelevant :) Joking. But content is king, so how will people find you if you don't create content? You can be the most promiscuous networker with thousands of contacts across the social netscape, but does anyone know what you are an expert in? As Seth Godin says, What's your superpower?

The other reason to blog is to be Generous. Giving away your knowledge helps people. Some will buy from you. Many will not but will use your info anyway. So what?

A Big Outage Day!

2010-06-09T18:39:34Z

Twitter is down. (And a few million people have nothing to do).

Facebook is experiencing issues as well. I guess people will just have to work today.

AT&T's cellular network is down in Tampa Bay. (And a few thousand iPhone users are cursing.)

A point: you can't count on another network - twitter, Facebook, Google or any other - for your business. It's outside your control - and at the price of free, well, you can't have expectations of four 9's uptime. (As you can see, AT&T can't even keep its cellular network up four 9's.) NING should have been a lesson to folks: when Ning stopped its free option, many networks had to move or pay. You should expect the same in the future -- or build it yourself or have a back-up plan. But foremost the content you build should be on your own site (or backed up).