Topic: “Squeezing Blood from a Stone: The Professional Investor’s Guide to Eliciting Information”

Host: Wharton Club of Northern California
Learn how professional investors elicit maximum information in minimum time from industry sources. How do you ask just the right questions to get a CFO to open up and tell you about his company? This training is based on best practices in the intelligence, psychiatric, law enforcement, and journalist communities.
When: Wednesday, May 7th, 6pm cocktails, 7pm program
Location: Perkins Coie, 101 Jefferson Drive, Menlo Park, CA 94025
RSVP and more details: http://www.whartonclub.com/article.html?aid=901

Topic: “Where are the Deals? Venture Capitalists, Hedge Funds, and Private Equity Firms’ Best Practices in Deal Creation and Deal Origination”

Host: Columbia Business School Alumni Club of Northern California
What are you doing to identify companies in which you can successfully invest? Learn about recent research on where institutional investors source their investments; how to identify companies with the earmarks of an attractive opportunity; and how to increase your inflow of worthwhile referrals from both intermediaries and investable companies.
When: Thursday, May 8th, 6pm cocktails, 7pm program
Where: Pagemill Partners Auditorium, 2475 Hanover Street, Palo Alto, CA 94304
RSVP and more details: http://www.acteva.com/booking.cfm?bevaid=158041

Also, I will be attending the Association for Corporate Growth Grow! Awards on Tuesday, May 6, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View ( https://chapters.acg.org/sv/uploads/events/922FC1DF84A74255B0B429DC3FC81104.pdf ), which may interest many of you.

One of the most entries into the field is Comcast. As my business partner Jay Deragon points out in his blog, Comcast customer satisfaction is in the dumps.

But Comcast is stepping out into social media, dealing with customers directly to cut through clunky corporate processes where possible, as Carter Smith (another biz partner of mine) details on his blog. If you’re active on Twitter, you may have seen @ComcastCares doing their thing.

Now I have no doubt that Comcast can start reversing their reputation for customer service, and that social media will be a key component in that strategy. But I do have to wonder about a couple of things:

Scalability - While Twitter has exploded in popularity, it is still very much an early adopter tool at this point. I asked Frank Eliason if what they’re currently doing on Twitter will be sustainable. He said he thinks so, but admitted, "The difficulty is having one voice with others assisting." If it were straightforward to replicate the customer service experience of dealing with someone like Frank vs. the typical customer service agent you get when you call in, Comcast wouldn’t be in the situation they are in the first place. Once people start realizing they can bypass the clunky phone process with a tweet to @ComcastCares, will Comcast be able to maintain the quality of experience there as it gets to be more than two or three people can handle?

The Digital Divide - Sure, Comcast is an ISP and a lot of their customers are online. But what about those who aren’t? Or what about those who are online, but not on Twitter? Not a blogger? How does Comcast engaging in social media improve the customer service experience for those customers? And if Comcast starts giving preferential treatment to bloggers and Twitterers, they run the risk of being accused of simply oiling the squeaky wheel. Do they really want to improve the customer experience, or just improve their visible reputation for customer experience?

Social media is a powerful tool for engaging customers and improving a company’s reputation. But a social media initiative undertaken for PR purposes can’t stand on its own — it has to be an integral part of more comprehensive changes at the company. Improving the experience of your company for bloggers and Twitterers is great, but if you don’t improve it for all your customers, it’s a house of cards.

Is Comcast prepared to make that kind of full organizational commitment? It will be interesting to watch.

I’ve set up a simple survey which I hope you’ll take a minute to fill out. For additional background if you’re interested, see my post at Linked Intelligence.

Prompted by a conversation on MyLinkedInPowerForum about the relative value of LinkedIn vs. MLPF — not to the owners, but to individual participants — I was Googling Becker and discovered The Becker-Posner Blog, a collaboration between Becker and legal/economics expert Richard Posner.

Besides the simply brilliant thinking and writing of these two individuals, the blog is intriguing because it’s also frequently a conversation between the two authors on the same topic, and they’re not afraid to take on some pretty controversial topics, or to take an unpopular stance on them. For example:

• Becker on The Erosion of Individual Responsibility and Posner’s comment
• Posner’s Post-Mortem Critique of William Buckley and Becker’s comment

These guys are also doing an amazing job of sparking conversation. 514 posts have generated 11,840 comments — that’s a 23:1 ratio! Not many blogs have that.

I encourage you to check it out, as well as the Freakonomics blog and David Friedman’s blog.

Many bloggers I know prefer a blogging policy at work, as it helps to distinguish where the guardrails are.

Ready to try it? Join Twitter (if you’re not already on it) and follow me!

More great Web 2.0 videos from Lee:

• Social Networking in Plain English
• Blogs in Plain English
• Wikis in Plain English
• Online Photo Sharing in Plain English
• Social Bookmarking in Plain English
• RSS in Plain English

4/2/2008: Yes, this was supposed to be completely unbelievable - it was an April Fool’s joke.

LinkedIn to End Free Service

4/2/2008: No, they’re not really.

I knew this day was coming.

4/2/2008: Every April Fool’s Day has a day after,  when we all clean up the mess we made.

Is it just my imagination or does Twitter sometimes ‘eat’ your tweets? Must [have] a ‘tweet tooth’ or something.

Here’s his post, embedded using the new feature he added on his blog:

Of course, I couldn’t just click-and-drag it, and the script didn’t behave very well within Windows Live Writer, but I like the concept.

Simply put, Bitstrips is a Web 2.0 application for creating comic strips. It enables people like me who have no artistic talent, but occasionally observe or think of something funny, to have a nicely-rendered visual expression of it. But what makes it really compelling is the social aspect of it.

For starters, you can create a character to represent yourself:

This is me	This is me on Bitstrips

Then you can connect with existing friends and use their characters in your strips. For example, I figured bLaugh creator Chris Pirillo would be interested in this, so I thought I’d drop him a line to tell him about it. Needless to say, he was already there and highly active:

You can also create characters representing your friends and then invite them to join.

Once you’ve done all that you can use your friends’ characters and the characters they’ve created to make strips of funny things that happened in real life. And before anyone gives me grief about this next strip, I’ll say that a) it’s a slight exaggeration, b) I cleared it with the star of it before publishing it (”Oh man, you could’ve made it WAY more unflattering than that. It’s perfect!!!!”), and c) no, the guys in the background aren’t any specific people - y’all go make your own!

You can also make images of celebrities. And you can edit your friends’ strips (well, not actually edit, but create copies of theirs which you can then edit):

Of course, including your friends and family in comic strips may not always go over well:

It’s incredibly fun to create the strips, and incredibly funny to read them. I also love that they build the tutorials in the application itself, for example:

They even use it to communicate company news:

That said, it is a 1.0 product, and it has, shall we say, quite a few shortcomings, such as:

Limited range of expressions…

Shortage of people who are actually funny…

Characters can only be human…

Lacking some seemingly obvious essential props, like musical instruments…

And phones…

Fortunately, they’re working on it…

Of course, some people have come up with some pretty creative solutions in the meantime (in case you’re wondering, that’s a stack of tables in the back)…

Well, that’s my review. Now just to think up an idea for my next strip…

Oh yeah… if you decide to check it out, feel free to add me as a friend.