Business Insight Zone

If you’re at South by Southwest, feel free to get in touch on Twitter via @Hoovers. I’d love to meet as many of our customers and audience members as I can while the conference is going on.

Meanwhile, posting here is likely to remain light for the next couple of days. It’s been a great conference so far, but I’m focused on getting the most out of it in the moment (and taking plenty of notes for later), rather than documenting it publicly as I go.

Hope to see you at the Convention Center!

Have I mentioned that I’ll be at South by Southwest Interactive? And that I’m speaking there, about 165 hours from now? Oh, I have?

Well, here’s me testing out my new Flip camera, which I plan to use for all sorts of informative ribaldry during the five days of idea-gobbling madness that is SXSW. Roll tape!

(Click here if the embedded video doesn’t work.)

Future installments will be more, y’know, interesting.

And that’s where YOU come in . . . What would you like to see me video at SXSW?

A friend of mine e-mailed to let me know he’ll be attending SXSW Interactive for the first time this year. He asked if I had any advice for him. I, being lazy wanting to show the awesome power of crowdsourcing in turn, asked my friends on Twitter — and this is what they said:

• Kim Hollenshead: Sign up for more discussions and events then you think you have time for.
• Alex Jones: SXSW is all about flow and new connections. Don’t commit to anything in advance.
• Austin Kleon: Take care of yourself. Take a nap. Eat lunch. Good God, I got exhausted last year.
• Jim Storer: Drink water, nap if you can, wear comfortable shoes, bring a power strip, talk w/ strangers, be nice, drink more water.
• John McTigue: My advice to newb: be yourself. be honest and fair. do your homework. #SXSW
• Mike Neumann: Have a plan, but don’t get too attached to it. Think of it as Jazz sheet music. You know you’re going to improvise, a lot.
• Chad Northrup: I won’t be there, but the point about not looking past who you’re talking to for someone more important seems big to me.
• Pat Ramsey: Stay flexible & do not be afraid to toss your schedule out the window if a great opportunity comes up.
• Kevin Lawver: SxSW Noob Advice: Say hi to your heroes, avoid the organized parties, don’t go to panels on stuff you already know & have fun!

(Kevin, it should be noted, has been coming to SXSW Interactive as long as anybody — so he knows how to do it right.)

To all of this advice, I would add my own:

• Free up your life schedule. This may apply more to Austinites than others, since we can be called back to the office, the house, etc. But SXSW works best when you don’t have to watch the clock. Just book all the days you’ll be there as “Out of Office,” and let your workmates / loved ones know that they should treat those days as though you were on the road at a conference in, say, Minneapolis. SXSW is intense enough that you don’t want you head to be somewhere else while you’re there.

I’d also point you to two more excellent sources:

1. 10 Ways to Make the Most of SXSW — In this post, Brian Dresher of USA TODAY goes into more detail on several of the points listed above (great minds think alike!), plus several more that weren’t mentioned here.
2. How do YOU rawk SXSW? — On the SXSW Baby! discussion board, several SXSW veterans offer their best tips for getting the most out of the event.

If you’re a SXSW veteran, what’s your advice for newcomers? And if you’re a newbie, what else do you want to know?

(I’m warming up for my March 16 South by Southwest Interactive session by trying out various metaphors that bridge sports and business — and especially the use of social media in business. Feel free to chime in with your own metaphors in the comments!)

Lou Gehrig, Glenn Hall, Cal Ripken, Brett Favre: all of them gained fame not just for the skill with which they played their sports, but for their durability. Game after game, year after year, they put up with all kinds of punishment, yet still kept coming back for more.

(Since I was reared in Texas and my parents grew up in the South, I didn’t grow up understanding hockey. But a friend of mine who grew up in New England and played every available sport in his youth said that the hardest athletic thing he had ever done, by far, was to tend goal. It’s hard to imagine the toughness of Glenn Hall to play goalie for 502 consecutive NHL games.)

Some people do the same thing at work: show up every day, no matter what, and work hard. But is that enough of an analogy? In social media, the closest thing might be to blog every single day. But the most diligent blogger, like the dedicated sales rep or A/R clerk, doesn’t face onrushing linemen or a puck/baseball traveling faceward at a million miles an hour.

So, you tell me: What’s the business equivalent of Lou Gehrig’s streak?

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See also:

• Sports metaphors: the All-Star lineup.

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Gehrig photo via Wikipedia.

As the date of our SXSW Interactive session on sports metaphors for business approaches, I’ll be posting more here on that topic. I thought it would be useful to have a single omnibus post that collects all the other posts in one place, and that points to sports-metaphor articles from other sources.

Here’s what I’ve written on the topic so far:

• Jan. 7 — Enter the arena . . . of sports metaphors.
• Jan. 12 — Sports metaphor: “a captain’s innings.”
• Jan. 13 — Making lemonade in the bottom of the 9th.
• Jan. 14 — A little sports retrospective.
• Jan. 15 — An intemperate analogy: Wall Street and steroids.
• Jan. 19 — Sports metaphor: “a nose for the basket.”
• Feb. 1 — Sports metaphor: “consecutive games played.”
• Feb. 5 — Sports metaphors: David Brooks gets in on the act.
• . . .

By all means, if you have your own sports metaphors you’d like to share, feel free to enter them in the comments here. And if you know of other posts and articles that could be listed, please leave a comment or drop me a line to let me know.

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Photo by Joel Dinda.

(I’m warming up for my March 16 South by Southwest Interactive session by trying out various metaphors that bridge sports and business — and especially the use of social media in business. Feel free to chime in with your own metaphors in the comments!)

The sports concept: Julius Erving didn’t have the world’s best jump-shot, and he didn’t have great range as a shooter. Yes, he was a dunk artist, but there’s only so many chances to dunk in a game — even for Dr. J — and a lot of dunks aren’t enough to generate 30,026 points in a pro career.

The Doctor had, more than anything, “a nose for the basket.” He would take a jump shot, drive for a dunk, or do any of a thousand things in-between . . . but somehow the ball found the net more for him than it did for almost everybody else.

The business analogy: Surely you’ve known someone like this — call her Linda — in your career? Linda got a solid education, but not from the fanciest schools. Maybe she doesn’t have an MBA. Linda would never claim to be the smartest person on the team, much less in the company. She’s not necessarily the first to arrive in the morning or the last to leave at night. She’s not the fastest at completing individual tasks.

And yet Linda gets the most done. She has that sense (is it innate? learned? honed from years of practice?) for getting things DONE. You put the ball in her hands, she puts the ball in the basket. Period.

What separates Linda from the rest of us? What makes her a Dr. J. of business? Or, to put it another way, . . .

What attributes do you think give some people
“a nose for the basket” in business?

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Related posts:

• A little sports retrospective.
• Sports metaphor: “a captain’s innings.”
• Enter the arena . . . of sports metaphors.

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Image source.

We just found out today that our SXSW Interactive session on sports metaphors is scheduled for the VERY LAST POSSIBLE slot on the conference calendar — the bottom of the 9th, if you will.

Sure, this sounds bad. Won’t everybody be heading to the airport to fly home? Or at least heading out to the bars on 6th Street?

Maybe. But since we don’t have any choice about it, I decided instead to come up with a list of benefits from having the last available slot:

• It’s the easiest slot of the whole conference to remember — 5 p.m. on the last day.
• When we’re telling people about it, we can joke about “saving the best for last” and how we’re “the grand finale.”
• The audience should be loose — even a little punchy — after four hard days of conferencing (and, ahem, carousing after hours), so they should be prepared to play along with the kind of fun, totally un-stuffy session we have planned.
• The sports metaphors abound: “bottom off the ninth,” “the 18th hole at Augusta,” “sudden-death overtime,” . . .

I’m sure there are more, and that’s where I’d like your help:

How should we capitalize on having the very last slot on the SXSW Interactive schedule?

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Related posts:

• Enter the arena . . . of sports metaphors.
• SXSW victory!

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Photo by Jill Clardy, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

(I’m warming up for my March 16 South by Southwest Interactive session by trying out various metaphors that bridge sports and business — and especially the use of social media in business. Feel free to chime in with your own metaphors in the comments!)

In cricket, one batsman can salvage an innings or turn the course of a whole match by a stubborn or inspired display of batting. When the captain of a side does it, this kind of effort is called “a captain’s innings.” Basically, it means that the leader let actions do the talking.

(Fellow Yanks, take note: in cricket usage, “innings” is like “trousers” — never singular.)

The parallel with business will be obvious: a manager or executive who leads from the front, who works harder than anyone, who uses brilliant skill or mulish effort — or both — to carry the day.

In social media, the best parallel might be to a CEO who uses Twitter avidly (e.g. Tony Hsieh of Zappos, once upon a time) or who makes the rain fall for the company by blogging or the like. Among my social-media friends, the example who comes to mind is Gini Dietrich, CEO of Chicago P.R. firm Arment Dietrich. (She blogs here.)

Now, over to you . . . What are your best business examples of “a captain’s innings”?

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Related posts:

• Enter the arena . . . of sports metaphors.
• Are you willing to re-tool your swing?

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Photo of Australia’s captain, Ricky Ponting, by nellistc.

It’s just a couple of months until my “Core Conversation” session at South by Southwest Interactive, where I’ll be joining my friend Kyle Flaherty (along with a merry band of accomplices) in . . .

Hitting Bombs: Better Social Business Through Sports Metaphors

We’re already cooking up good analogies of our own, but I want to open the floor to you, in two ways:

1. If you’re game, please share your best/favorite analogies between sports and business (or between sports and social media in particular) in the comment thread here.
2. If you’re still on the sidelines, be aware that we’ll be calling for heavy audience participation once our session rolls around on March 16th. Now’s the time to start warming up.

Looking forward to what you have to say. So start sharing!

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Photo by Pittaya Sroilong.

Thank you all.

Remember when I asked you to vote for my submission in the SXSW Interactive Panel Picker? Well . . . we’re in! You can check out the official listing here:

The Next Round of 2010 Interactive Programming Is Here!

The only teeny-tiny drawback is that we’ve been approved for the “Core Conversation” format, which means:

• smaller venue,
• no A/V setup,
• only two presenters, and
• in general, more seminar-esque.

Now, that’s a good thing, in that my favorite part of any presentation I do comes in the interaction with the audience. Plus, it motivates me to fill the room to overflowing, then run a session that blows everybody’s doors off so that we can do a full-bore panel for SXSW 2011. (Hey, if it’s a long-term world-domination plan, might as well start now, huh?)

Anyway . . . woo-hoo!

Will I see YOU at SXSW 2010?

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Related:

• Panel description: Hitting Bombs: Better Social Business Through Sports Metaphors

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