I’ve been asked to participate as a judge in a business contest, and I’d like to encourage you to enter.

With the economy in crisis, businesses are all looking for ways to not just survive but to take advantage of the times and prosper. There are always those who make fortunes in an economic downturn by thinking outside the box.

Do have a success story? Can you offer creative tips for businesses?

Business.com will reward you $10,000 and a year’s worth of publicity on the Business.com site and partner sites if you win their What Works for Business Contest. There will be nine additional winners who will win $2,000 each and a year’s worth of publicity.

So hurry and get your entry in by Dec. 3. They are looking for a short description of a challenge your business has faced and how you successfully solved it.

The entry can be about any area of business. For example, do you have tips on

• Branding to get above the noise to today’s audience?
• Using social media to engage customers and prospects?
• Proven tips on hiring the best?
• Developing skills successful executives need to lead?
• Adjusting your business plan for today’s market?
• Managing finances to get the most bang for your buck?

These are just a few examples. To find out more and to enter, go to http://whatworks.business.com

Take a look at recent contest entries here.

• The daily New York Times now contains more information that the 17th century man or woman would have encountered in a lifetime.
• In the last 30 years humankind has produced more information than in the previous 5,000.
  
• The total of all printed knowledge doubles every five years. 

Perhaps it’s time to take a lesson from the Balinese. In Balinese culture, people are totally dependent on the community for vital functions, particularly important ceremonial rites. It is what has held the culture in place despite decades of mass tourism. You must belong to and participate in the local banjar (which, for the sake of brevity, I will describe as a very powerful community group to which all in that village* belong) or the banjar will not stand by you when you need it.

For example, cremation ceremonies in Bali require extensive preparations, preparations that can go on for months. Preparations that can take all day and all night for days. They involve building huge sarcophagi that look like detailed animals, making hundreds of offerings and performing dozens of ceremonies. It is impossible to cremate loved ones without the help of the banjar. And without proper cremation, your soul cannot be released. This is just one of the many reasons it is necessary to be a member in good standing of the banjar.

For us it is the same today in business. If we are not a member in good standing in our communities, if we do not support them and share with them, we will be left behind. Cooperaton is more critical than ever, because we can’t do it alone.

*Actually, there may be several banjars in one “village” when the word is used in its wider sense, as it is in Bali, but we will leave that discussion for my travel blog.

Statistical sources: (Wurman, S.A. (1987) Information Anxiety. New York: Doubleday, (Information Overload Causes Stress. (1997, March/April). Reuters Magazine, (Information Overload Causes Stress. (1997, March/April). Reuters Magazine

Last year was the year social media really came into its own. There’s no doubt the landscape has changed, and companies are still adjusting. Who would have thought a few years ago that people could make negative comments on the Microsoft site as scathing as those bashing Vista.

But I have to say I’m confused by the venom with which some social media experts attack “marketing”, as though all marketers have been doing for the last 20 years is brainwashing the masses with no attempt to listen.  Well, maybe there are some marketers out there who use stereotyped used car salesman tactics. But that’s just bad marketing. It always has been.

When you are trying to “sell” someone, you aren’t building rapport or credibility. It’s a given. Once again, it always has been. Marketing and Sales 101 has always been about listening to your customers, hearing their needs and trying to fill them. Or seeing a need that maybe nobody has thought about before.

Granted, most of my marketing career has been in the tech community. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with a tech company that didn’t realize that no matter what they put on the market, people are going to think of ways to use it that were never described in the product plan. So why  are so many social media bloggers lecturing marketers that they better start listening to their customers? Savvy marketers have known that for as long as I’ve been in marketing - and I’m no spring chicken. “Marketing” is not a dirty word. It’s about letting people know about products that will help them improve their lives in some way.

But as I said, I do come primarily from tech, where it’s really not news that developer communities have been involved in product development for quite some time. Such collaboration is just happening on a broader scale now.  A key difference, of course, is what has been  common in B2B is now flowing much more visibly to B2C.

With all that said, yes, the world is a lot more open today. But the wheel was not created in the last few years. It’s just been refined.

Google Blogoscoped uploaded the email comic book Google sent yesterday to announce Chrome, Google’s open source browser project.

And here’s where you can download the Chrome beta.

Here’s where Matt Cutts of Google answers questions about Chrome.

Google says Chrome offers

One box for everything
Type in the address bar and get suggestions for both search and web pages.

Thumbnails of your top sites
Access your favorite pages instantly with lightning speed from any new tab.

Shortcuts for your apps
Get desktop shortcuts to launch your favorite web applications.

As corporations and other organizations move to more interaction with their audiences (customers) and form online communities, there is (as we all know) a fear of losing control of the conversation. Well, yes, there is a loss in control, but the gain in getting real time customer ideas and response, the perceived openness of allowing even negative feedback and the increase in rapport with customers all far outweigh the drawbacks. Your customers are going to be talking about you anyway on all kinds of sites and forums - you are crazy as a company if you don’t want to be part of that conversation.

That said, there are some participants whose only goal in regularly commenting is to make trouble. I’m not talking about people who talk about a bad customer service experience or criticize a product feature. I’m talking about people who continually disrupt the conversation for no reason other than to disrupt the conversation. 

Obviously these people can be banned, but they can easily return under a new name and email. What is the answer? Jeremiah Owyang of Forester Research posted what I think to be the best direction in his blog post Social Punishment: The “Bozo” Feature.

This feature does not ban the person, but makes him invisible to all other users. The theory is that he does not realize he is invisible, but rather thinks he is being ignored. So when he does not get irate response from his voluminous outrageous posts, he finally gives up.

One commenter to this post felt that such an approach is “passive-aggressive” and led to a “vanilla-bland-boring community” in which no one would want to participate.  I disagree. There are, unfortunately, those in the world who do not want to add to a conversation but merely get a rise out of other users. These people drive thoughtful contributors away. There is a difference between making negative comments about a product flaw, customer service, or some other real issue and making trouble for the sake of it.

I’ve always been of a mind that the best way to motivate employees is to hire the best, train them in what they need to, give them achievable but ambitious goals and then let them go without micromanaging. It is critical to imbue employees with a sense of purpose through goals they can accomplish and a clear vision from management.

Of course, money still talks, and if you want good employees to sign on with you and stay, they must feel they are being compensated fairly. For some positions, you may have bonus structures and financial incentives built into their compensation.

But many companies forget the value of recognizing their employees in a structured way through regular praise throughout the week and also through appreciation programs when the launch date is met, when customer retention increases, etc. The importance of this cannot be underestimated. Research shows that higher levels of motivation reduce employee turnover by 53%, properly constructed incentive programs can increase performance by as much as 44% and companies with a strong link between enterprise strategy and rewards programs generate a shareholder return almost 40% higher than competitors without such strategies (source: Aberdeen Group Inc.) Employees who are satisfied with their company’s recognition programs are seven times less likely to leave.

So what are the best ways to go about showing your appreciation?

• Tell your employees when they are doing a good job. People need to hear when they do a good job - not just when something is awry. Without this feedback, employees have no idea if they are doing well or poorly and cannot adjust. And people need to have a feeling of appreciation to motivate them to stay and to excel.
• Tangibly reward good work. This might be cash or it might be a desirable gift that would be valued by the particular employee. How you do this will depend on the make-up of the group being awarded, your company culture and your goals. Think about the reward. A video game set-up would be very appreciated by many, but others would rather have a case of wine.

There are some specific advantages to rewarding with products rather than cash, so you may want to make product rewards at least part of your recognitions program.

A research study on “The Benefits of Tangible Non-Monetary Incentives” conducted by Dr. Scott Jeffrey of the Department of Management Sciences at the University of Waterloo in Southern Ontario found that four different psychological processes can contribute to increasing the perceived value of tangible non-monetary incentive awards over cash-based awards having the same market value.

• Evaluability. Recipients are likely to place a higher value on the award than its actual cost, and in fact you can often get products with which to award your employees at wholesale prices. It takes an increase of 5 % to 8% of an employee’s salary to change behavior, but behavior can be influenced at a cost closer to 4% of the employee’s salary using non-cash incentives. If you are, for example, paying $100 million in salaries, it will cost you $1 million to $4 million more to influence your employees with cash than it would with products.
• Separability. Cash incentives tend to be thought of as compensation. Cash is soon gone for mundane uses like utility bills, but every time they look at that big screen TV, they will have a warm feeling toward your company and remember their achievement.
• Justifiability. When a non-cash award is something an employee would not purchase on their own, they can justify the award because they won it through achievement. So if a big screen TV would be too big of a splurge normally, the recipient will enjoy it all the more.
• Social Reinforcement. Non-cash incentives can be awarded publicly in front of other employees with a lot of fanfare. Also, the recipient is likely to talk about it openly, where they would not feel appropriate discussing a cash award - just as they don’t openly discuss their salary. This means you generate additional good feelings toward your company among many employees - not just the incentive recipient.

In the last few years, unconferences have sprung up like mushrooms. At first they seemed sort of like a touch-feely waste of time to me beyond the obvious networking possibilities, but it’s become clear they are a way to get people involved like never before.  Action is a lot more positive than sitting back passively, so I’ve changed my tune. Probably you are either going to four a year or you have no idea what I’m talking about. For the latter group, here’s a good explanation of the uncoference.

Just dipping your toe into social media? Wondering what the fuss is about or where to get started? Here’s an easy introduction.

With media available to all today, many companies are struggling with just how to know a good thing when they see it. Such was the case when fans created twitter accounts for characters from the tv show “Mad Men,” and AMC insisted twitter disable them.  I personally thought they were hysterically funny as well as true to the show and the type of twitters you would expect from the characters (if there was an Internet or a Twitter back in the 60’s.) AMC finally saw the light with the help of their web marketing group, and the accounts are back up.

Companies have always jealously guarded their brands, but, people, weigh that with the advantages of your audience interacting around your brand and creating buzz across the Internet and across the country.

Check out Silicon Alley Insider for more.

Don Draper

Peggy Olson

Today I’d like to point you to Shara Karasic’s Guide to 60+ Web Development Tools & Resources for Entrepreneurs. You’ll know some of them, but I dare say there are a number of new tools you haven’t heard of that are cheap or even free. So check out Shara’s list to jump start your Web 2.0 design, development and ecommerce. The days are long gone you could just put up a pretty site, throw in some meta tags and submit to the search engines. This list will get you started.