We have completed the move of our blog over to http://blog.synaptus.com. If you are still receiving this blog at synaptus.blogs.com, please update your links. Part of the upgrade involves an update to the way we will blog. We will try to provide focused blog entries you can read in less than three minutes. We will continue to publish the e-zine with a more detailed article every week.
Its been a couple weeks since there has been regular activity on this blog. I have not been actively blogging for a few weeks. Spring Break with the family, a sinus infection, a series of client commitments, and collaborating with some very exciting thought leaders in the project management community has consumed my available time.
But there is a silver lining. My research and the collaborations regard the social aspects of project management. This is a area rich with opportunity to improve the performance of project teams and therefore the ability of organizations to execute on their strategy. I look forward to making for the lapse in activity by sharing insights in this area.
I will be presenting on OPM3 to the Magic City Technology Council meeting tomorrow at 2:00 pm at the Cahaba Grand Conference Center. The subject for the conference is Dynamic Software Development in the 21st Century. I will be discussing how project management doesn’t exist in a vacuum and how project management success is dependent on the aspects of Organizational Project Management (Portfolio, Program, and Organizational Enablers). OPM3 is an existing standard to identify where and how to improve these other aspects in support of improving project management. I will include my slides on the Synaptus resource page on Wednesday. Please come by if you can make it.
This blog is part of Synaptus’ efforts to participate in the world of social marketing. We are also publishing an e-zine and updating our website to begin to actively participate in the conversation taking place on the Internet about the changes in managing organizations. In addition to continuing to partcipate as speakers and contributors to professional organizations, our marketing efforts are also expanding into articles. We know we have something to add to the conversation about managing businesses successfully today and we are working hard to get out there to contribute. There are two interesting lessons from this exercise.
One of the fascinating lessons that has been reinforced to me is how hard it is to do simple things. Betrand Russell once said, "Things are relatively clear until you try to explain them to someone else." This is very true in my social marketing efforts. To set up the blog I had to figure out how to publish a blog service. I had to learn the technical aspects about publishing, promoting, and providing an RSS feed to the blog. We had to work with our web developer to get a template set up. We decided to outsource to http://www.typepad.com and are still experiencing some technical issues with our website developer with getting the blog to show up the way I want it to. From an e-zine perspective I had to find a publisher. There are issues around privacy and publishing and unsubscribing that all have to be managed. Then you have to promote and make subscribing to your e-zine easy. We decided to use http://www.intellicontact.com as our newsletter manager/publisher. On the web and our articles, we are still working on figuring out Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and article publication. And just now we are starting to reach out develop a community around the blog and the e-zine.
The new lesson is about the breadth of the outreach from social marketing. This is definitely different than targeted marketing, where you send a specific message to a specific audience. When you blog, you are reaching out to anyone with a browser and a search engine. The following is a list of people who have participated in my blogging experience that I might not ever sell to. But they have something to add to the conversation we are having on the internet.
Healthy Web Design: "Helping independent professionals who love what they do develop and build a successful website." Dawud Miracle has a wealth of information he shares around building your website, blogging, and finding your voice.
Heart of Business: Can you hear it beating?… When you want to make a difference, but need to make a profit.
Breathing Space: Home and Office Organizing: Creating space for who you are and what you do
Conscious Cooperation: "Conscious Cooperation" is about how the decision
to cooperate can drastically improve working communication and results in the construction industry and beyond.
Engaging the Disquiet: Helping men who feel something missing in their lives.
Inquiry365: A personal blog where Mona Grayson, a professional facilitator, will question at least one that has brought her stress each day.
Mindfulness Maverick: This blog is first and foremost a reminder to not take yourself too seriously in the overwhelm of work and second to give you real practical mindful tools to reconnect on what is most important in any given moment.
Your Ideal Customer: Elisa H. Gillispie is just starting a blog where she writes about her business.
This will be the fourth blog I have launched. None of the others have met with much success. Primarily because I didn’t work on building the base. This week we will launch our new website (http://www.synaptus.com) and our new ezine (http://www.synaptus.com/SignUp.php). This will become a forum for discussing ideas and reflecting on other blog postings that Synaptus consultants find interesting. The ezine will be for more complete coverage of issues and trends in the areas where Synaptus consults. Comments will be moderated, but I hope to get engaged in some interesting development of ideas. I expect we will learn alot about blogging through this effort. I hope that whoever reads the blog finds that we have something to add to the conversation.