This week marked the release of Ron McDaniel's new book, Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing. Available on Amazon, this book presents 57 word of mouth challenges for an entire workforce. These are simple, quick (many can be done in less than 15 minutes) things that any non-marketer can do to help create buzz for their company or organization. Quite a buzz can be created by just trying one challenge each day.

The key is to have your entire workforce become involved, not just the marketers and salesmen. They will create a reliable, trustworthy, and sincere source of information and marketing that can create a more intimate relationship with its audience. This results in loyal consumers turning into advocates.

You can learn more about these powerful techniques by buying the book today at www.buzzoodlebuzzmarketing.com.

We live in a city that is celebrating 200 years of history this year. It got me thinking about what it was like back then. With a few thousand dollars and the spirit of adventure, you could set off into the wild and not just strike gold, but build a city. Heck, lots of people were founding cities. You bought some land, ideally along a river, path or railroad, and you started your buzz marketing campaign. “Come live in the best new city in Ohio…”

Practically anyone could do it. If you got a good location and good buzz, you succeeded.

The Internet really is the new frontier. Myspace is a big city. Look at the July 2006 trend briefing at trend watching.

If you think of your new Web 2.0 system as a new city you need to create buzz for, you have a much bigger chance to succeed.

Outstanda Referral Affiliate and Reseller Associate Programs are now released.  What's so innovative?  It agressively builds word of mouth and buzz as the primary sales force for complex IT solutions.  By focusing on the benefits ( eMarketing ), and not the technology, which includes CMS, eCommerce, Blogging and just about every other form of online communication packaged into one easy to use system.

This program is sure to get a lot of notice.

Kids Roar is a company founded and run by kids.  What makes it innovative is the funding, the approach and the transparency of the company.

The company is a for profit company that designs and manufactures kids products around animal themes.

The board of directors is entirely made up of kids between the ages of 8 and 12.  They have control of the company and can make most critical decisions.

To read more about Kids Roar visit the Kids Roar Website at www.kidsroar.biz

This year, take some time to do your strategic planning and be sure to innovate.  If you keep doing what you have always done you will, at best, keep getting what you have always gotten.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

How can I do something more efficiently?

How can I deligate more tasks to less expensive employees to free up my time?

How can I offer something else to my clients that they will want and need?

How do I make us different from the competition?

Get your Plan for Innovation and Strategic Growth done today to get a fast start on next year.

Imagine you have a problem and you know what it would take to solve it. Be it a automatic door that works for your cat or a scale that automatically registers your weight to your computer via WiFi.

The chance of finding something at Walmart that fits your needs are fairly low. The more specialized the situation, the more challenging it gets to find a device that can address the issue.

Enter the world of personal fabricators. There devices or a set of devices can aid in creating almost anything from a simple box to a complex electronic radio.

While the idea has been floating around for quite some time, it had gained popularity in the last few year mainly do to the efforts at MIT’s Fabrication Laboratory or FabLabs.

A typical FabLab comprises of commodity equipment like laser cutters, milling machine etc, bundled with open source software. These two put together can create a “open source hardware”.

To find out more visit:
http://fab.cba.mit.edu/

Zopa is a lender/borrower portal that could have a huge impact on money in the future.  Newspapers did not become leaders on the web, and will eventually be made obsolete by it.  Banks, Venture Capital and Angel Investors could soon loose their dominance over lending and money in general if Zopa is successful and similar models start to crop up.

I have not tried using the system, but I read the site extensively and it seems a very innovative way to break down walls between investors and borrowers.  It could also have a huge upside to economic development.  Consider such a fund for helping small businesses in a community with cash flow issues.  That is just one idea that seems like it would make a lot of sense if this model is easy to duplicate.

Did they really believe it was going to be a secret?  Of course not.

Squidoo, a new technology by Seth Godin and company, was release quitely today.  An email went out to all the beta users and said "We are not telling anyone but you, but it is public."

Don't get me wrong.  I like the approach and you can visit my lens here.  Just so we all know that this is innovative marketing and not some sort of real secret.

Google Analytics is not the only Google game in town.  Many industries are seriously concerned about Google's foray into many new areas.

For a list of all of the initiatives, visit CNET.

Wiki Solutions - A wiki is a web-based information system that is usually simple as far as design and structure goes and is open to anyone for editing.  This technology has been gaining in popularity and the best known example is Wikipedia.

One of the most trying aspects of developing a new business or growing a small business is building thorough documentation, processes and knowledge base.  With a Wiki and a little training, business owners can now set up the basic process and watch the Wiki become a living, breathing document that adjusts to the ever changing workplace.  Add org charts, strategic plans and flowing goal setting documents, and the whole company can be on the same (wiki) page.

When a new problem or situation arises, it gets documented by the person that resolves it.  An occasional audit and review and you will have a better document that will stay updated and meet everyone's needs. 

Wiki's are open source software that need to be installed and configured on servers.

Liquid Learning company, Outstanda can set up and host Wiki's for companies that are interested in having a comprehensive documentation that grows with the company.

Innovation is Everywhere

However, innovation does not mean you should make any crazy thing you can.  Innovation is solving real problems in novel ways.  It is not mixing appliances as in this post by Seth Godin.

If these inventors asked themselves what the benefit was, they probably thought: "I can do it all at the same time."

But I already can with a pan and my toaster.

As we move forward, and prototyping products and getting them manufactured becomes easier and cheaper, even to the point of children are creating their own toys, we will most likely see many additional things like this come to market and fade away fast.

George Nemeth at Brewed Fresh Daily has a great thread going if you are interested in entrepreneurship, VC and economic development.  Read the comments and just ignore the one person, he goes away eventually.

Computers work well when they have exact information to compare. What do you do when the information set is incomplete or different at the bit level but represent the same object? For example image recognition.

It is a hard problem to solve. The engineering team at http://www.riya.com have applied AI to solve the problem. I have not played with their service yet, but from what I read on the web the results are promising.

Read the Riya CEOs blog post on how it works:
http://munjal.typepad.com/recognizing_deven/2005/11/how_riya_recogn.html

I really like this idea and I think it is something that North East Ohio needs.  See the Fortune Blog on Innovation Commons in Vancouver, Canada.

They aspire to have a 24/7 location for technology and innovation.  I would like to just have a place we could meet once every other week and get to know one another.

Who is up for forming a Greater Cleveland Innovation Commons? 

Have you every tried folding paper? Pause here and think about it or better still get a piece of paper and fold it. How many times can you fold it? Probably 7 or 8 times at the most.

In school, I remember my math teacher telling us that one could not fold paper more than 8 times. Well, I tried but never succeeded, so I assumed what she was saying was true and it was “impossible” to do better than that.Well in 2001, a high school girl named Britney Gallivan worked on this problem for extra credit and derived a nice little mathematical formulation that let her fold paper into a staggering 12 times. You can read more about it here: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Folding.html

While it may not be earth shattering it does bring out two points:

1. Keep an open mind and question everything till your curiosity is satisfied. It is the first step towards innovation.
2. When stuck with a problem think outside the box. Look at the solution and not the problem. Creativity is powerful when combine with knowedge.

Google Help -

Dear Google Analytics customer,

The demand for Google Analytics surpassed even our highest expectations and as a result some customers may temporarily experience report-update delays. All data continues to be collected and no data has been lost. We are currently adding resources to ensure high-quality service. We apologize for any inconvenience.

How many people in the world work trying to get their search engine ranking on Google higher?  How many people can offload reporting into Google's reporting and give their clients better tools cheaper?

These people should have anticipated this.  Anything Google does gets word of mouth and buzz, whether they are ready for it or not.

The Red Room Revolution is a group of non-profit people and entrepreneurs that are doing innovative things with economic development in an effort to revitalize the North East Ohio economy.

I have had other economic development people ask me what they are doing that is innovative.

1) Including people that represent small businesses trying to grow.

2) Making Venture Capital easy to access for people willing to move their company.

3) Giving access to city employees and well connected individuals that can help a business get off the grown faster.

4) Creating mentorships that will help companies move and get going faster.

5) The magic button: The long term goal is to streamline the process of moving or starting a business so well that in a few minutes, someone can have most of what they need to be successful in Cleveland.

Of course, this is innovative thinking but now innovative execution is required. Keeping the atmosphere positive and getting things done with a voluntary committee and a mayors office in transition will be a major accomplishment.

Google Analytics For Free is a big deal.  Only a short while ago Urchin was a robust but definitely not free item.  I am looking forward to playing with this from Google and giving you a fun down on how it performs and what the limitations are on the free software.

In his seminal paper in 1991 Mark Weiser said the – “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” He was talking about ubiquitous computing which is now called pervasive computing. With technology getting cheaper, human attention is limited and having technology distract a user is fairly expensive.

We at Liquid Learning believe when a user has a task at hand, there should be a tool that makes it easy to accomplish it, with minimal distraction, be it our Outstand Content Management system or other web based application. While we are far from building a system that is close to the holy grail of pervasive computing, we at every step of the design and development process keep that vision in mind.