Entrepreneur Commons Academy: engaging your community and its influencers

Do you need to understand better what is being said about your company and your product?
Would you like to get a better with online communities within your ecosystem?

Then this Entreco web event is for you.
At the end of this webinar, you will understand:

* How to identify key social influencers in my target market?
* What are hot topics people are talking about?
* How current topics and discussions relate to my brand and
competitors?
* How to establish a relationship with key social influencers?
* How to mix buzz, outreach and content marketing to improve your
visibility and attention in key communities?

PRESENTER: Dominique Lahaix - co-founder and CEO of eCairn
Dominique has over 15 years of experience in e-marketing, knowledge engineering and software development. Prior to founding eCairn he was the CEO and founder of Cairnalys, an e-mail marketing technology company, which customers included companies such as eBay. Prior Cairnalys, he was manager of WW Consulting Practice at HP Emerging services. Dominique previously held engineering and engineering management positions at HP, McDonnell Douglas Information Systems and Tymnet. Dominique holds a Management degree from the prestigious INSEAD European business school and an engineering degree from Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon, France.


WHERE: this is an online event at Entrepreneur Commons Academy
http://entreco.supercoolschool.com/

To register: http://entreco100211.eventbrite.com/

HOW IT WORKS: Once you register for the event, you will receive an email invite to join the Entrepreneur Commons academy, where you will be able to join the class.

Note that this event is a live online event using the Adobe Connect platform - you will need a computer and a headset, and ideally a webcam to participate.

Once you signup you will receive an invite to join the Entreco supercoolschool space, where you can then access the online event.

If you cannot attend the live event, you should consider becoming a member of the Entrepreneur Commons Academy so that you can access the video archive of the event, and other events that will happen throughout the year.

Entrepreneur Commons is growing! 3 new chapters

I have been pushing Entrepreneur Commons for some time now, and I am happy to announce that we are growing. Here is the official announcement:

>>
Entrepreneurs around the world get valuable help from their peers through Entrepreneur Commons.

San Francisco chapter member Brandon P. says: "Through EC, I've met a solid, knowledgeable group of entrepreneurs who challenge my thinking and gladly offer assistance."

To serve entrepreneurs better, we are happy to announce the creation of 3 new chapters.

A new chapter in New York


Melcion Chassagne et Cie and Alexander Lexington & Co are happy to announce the first Entrepreneur Commons meeting in New York City on February 9, 2010. This meeting will be hosted by Foley & Lardner, and will start promptly at 8:30am.

LOCATION: Foley & Lardner - 90 Park Avenue, 37th floor - New York, NY
WHEN: 2/9/10 from 8:30am until 10:30am

click here to register for the NY meeting

A new chapter in Oakland (CA)

Katovich Law Group is happy to announce the first Entrepreneur Commons meeting at their office in Oakland on February 17, 2010. This meeting will start promptly at 8am.

LOCATION: Katovich Law Office - 436 14th Street - Suite 208, 2nd floor - Oakland CA
WHEN: 2/17/10 from 8am until 10am

click here to register for the event

A 2nd chapter in Paris

In addition to the existing chapter already meeting at Club Melcion, Melcion Chassagne et Cie is happy to announce the creation of a second Entrepreneur Commons chapter in Paris on February 1, 2010. The meeting will be hosted by Regus Paris St Lazare, and will start promptly at 5:30pm.

LOCATION: Regus Paris St Lazare - 26-28 rue de Londres - 75009 Paris - France
WHEN: 2/1/10 from 5:30Pm until 7:30Pm

To register, contact christine at melcion dot com

We look forward to seeing you all there

And if you are interested in starting an Entrepreneur Commons chapter in your area, please contact us

Best,
Marc Dangeard

***

Entrepreneur Commons is a network of entrepreneurs that provides peer mentoring. Entrepreneurs meet on a regular basis (typically once a month) to share issues and successes on their current projects with other entrepreneurs. These meetings are an opportunity for all to exchange information, knowledge and contacts in a trusted environment.

Members of Entrepreneur Commons also have access to the global network of entrepreneurs who have already joined local chapters in other places, or who have joined the online community through the Entrepreneur Commons Academy.

Good to see another piece of the puzzle

"we've acquired Gizmo5"

Good to see another piece of the puzzle added to the overall Google toolbox.

Comment posted on Google Voice Blog: Google welcomes Gizmo5 at googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com using Reframe It

Test from iPhone

Test from iPhone

Comment posted on Reframe It - Javascript Injectable Margin (JIM) Integration Demo at delphi.reframeit.com using Reframe It

The tower of Babel - another take

Since the beginning of my life on the web I have had this gut feeling that we are building a Babel tower, and that we have to be very careful how we do this if we do not want the whole thing to blow up in our face.
There is the issue of architecture, and how we are today surfing private silos (Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc...) rather than surfing a global web of distributed servers. And there is risk in this.

And then there is the social web.

This is what I see:
- people have limited time to spend reading stuff and interact with others on the web, so they have to choose
- meanwhile there is an increasingly large number of sources of news, and of places to interact, so choice is becoming even more difficult
- in the end, what will make me choose one place or another is where the people I know are. And if I make new friends, I will invite them to join these places where my network is, as a way to share this network with them and bring them into that one place where I can maintain network. Pick one and stick to it.
- what it means, is that these places can only be public places, easily accessible by others and places that will remain open to me whatever happens to me (job situation, personal life situation). This is the promise of a LinkedIn or a Facebook, and many other "public" services.
- from a business prospective, this is also the promise of these vertical networks of experts, which make a lot of sense to share best pratices and create some critical mass around a given subject matter.
The issue however, is that the more we get together talking about a subject, the more we are turning this vertical network into a competitive economy where the winner takes all. From the network, will emerge a few recognized experts, and they will get most of the traffic, and most of the deals. Everybody else in the group becomes another person stuck in the middle and struggling to get their voice heard. An individual among many others in the long tail. Which is not a very healthy economy for most (who makes money from his/her blog today?).
For the expert in the middle, the way out (until he gets some attention and can be the lucky beneficiary of the network effect) is the personal network, people who appreciate the value he brings and will agree to compensate him fairly for that value.
And this is where the tower of Babel story comes back into mind: the story ends with a lot of small groups that do not talk to each others, because this is a more sustainable way.
Let's see what happens this time around...

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If you like Google Sidewiki try www.reframeit.com

Google Sidewiki is a very nice concept, but ReframetIt is a way better implementation of the concept. try http://www.reframeit.com, see it in action here

I have tried Google Sidewiki, and I have uninstalled it within the half hour, because it is missing the point on the user experience side, and it does not really deliver on its promise. Maybe the next version will be better. In the meantime, ReframeIt rules :-)

It is always nice to see Google push great new ideas, but in this case I think that they are victim of becoming too big for their own good. And they seem to be spreading themselves over too many things without really going into the depth of them enough to make them really worth our while.

I have seen it happen several time: friendconnect was a great idea, but I do not see too much happening with it, Google talk was a good idea, but I do not seem much happening with it, etc...

The worst of it all in this area is Google contacts, this link you have in Gmail to access your contacts. This is the worst contact management system I have seen, and it has not been improved a bit in the few years I have been using Gmail. And even if you use Google Apps and pay for the service you are very limited on that side, and for example there is no UI to upload contacts that you want to share with colleagues within the same domain. Just an API, and outside vendor who have built the HTML and will charge you for that piece. How hard can it be for Google to resolve this?

I love Google and I love what they bring us (I can't wait to see Google Wave open up to more people so that I can start use it fully to communicate), and I appreciate that they bring it to us for free, but I wish sometimes that they would do a little less and go a little deeper to make it really work...


Comment posted on Google Sidewiki at www.google.com using Reframe It

Google Voice on the iPhone

I just ran into this post mentioning that there is now an app to use Google Voice on the iPhone. I have tried and this is a major cool app.
Basically I can use the app the call, the keyboard is the same as for the regular phone app, and I have access to all my contacts on the iPhone. What it does for me is resolve the issue of the Google contacts not being synchronized with the right account.
Google Voice native uses my Gmail contact, while I am using Google Apps (dangeard.com domain) for my address book. Not a problem anymore, since these contacts are synchronized on my iPhone through the Exchange sync, and since they are the contacts I can use when dialing from my iPhone. Very very cool. If you have any question why you would want your iPhone jailbroken, here is the answer. Thank you Sean Kovacs for this...

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