XPLANE joins Dachis Group

The acquisition was announced this morning — this is exciting news for all of us!

More info here: Dachis Group acquires XPLANE and be sure to check out the buzz on Twitter.

Online Database of Social Media Policies

Social Media Governance is a book that helps organizations find the right balance of empowerment and accountability in their social media efforts. It will be released in September 2009.

They’ve created a database of social media policies from dozens of companies, governments, non-profits.

Did You Know 4.0

XPLANE is happy to present Did You Know 4.0 — another official update to the original “Shift Happens” video. This completely new Fall 2009 version includes facts and stats focusing on the changing media landscape, including convergence and technology, and was developed in partnership with The Economist.

As Garr Reynolds mentions over at Presentation Zen this morning, yes, this project was created with “off-the-shelf slideware” (Keynote and GarageBand, actually, along with Photoshop and Illustrator). Content by XPLANE, The Economist, Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod and Laura Bestler. Design and development by XPLANE.

For more information, or to join the conversation, please visit The Economist’s Media Convergence conference site at mediaconvergence.economist.com, or stop by shifthappens.wikispaces.com for all things Did You Know.

The Building Blocks of Social Media for Business

Here’s some good perspective from Chris Brogan:

Where do you start? That’s the question I get often when I’m asked how to help a company market using social media tools. The people who contact me are smart. They tell me things like, “Yeah, they said we should start with a blog, and we said, ‘like the blog we already have?’” But what comes next is rarely a simple choice. I wanted to take you through some thoughts on what the basic building blocks of social media might be for a business (in the context of marketing, but then stretching a bit further out).

Remember, roadmaps don’t work really well until you have a solid goal or destination in mind. None of this matters unless it feels right to you, regardless of my advice. You know your company’s boundaries. You know what your comfort levels are. Proceed at your organizational pace.

10 Ways Twitter Will Change American Business

Let’s make sure to revisit this in 2 1/2 years… :-)

24/7 Wall St. has come up with 10 ways in which Twitter will permanently change American business within the next two to three years, based on an examination of Twitter’s model, the ways that corporations and small businesses are currently using the service and some of the logical extensions of how companies will use Twitter in the future.

The secret of the web (hint: it’s a virtue)

“Patience.

Google was a very good search engine for two years before you started using it.

The iPod was a dud.

I wrote Unleashing the Ideavirus 8 years ago. A few authors tried similar ideas but it didn’t work right away. So they gave up. Boingboing is one of the most popular blogs in the world because they never gave up.

The irony of the web is that the tactics work really quickly. You friend someone on Facebook and two minutes later, they friend you back. Bang.

But the strategy still takes forever. The strategy is the hard part, not the tactics.”

Great business leaders are not necessarily great presenters

“After my first day at Brainstorm in Half Moon Bay I have this comment to make. Great business leaders such as Michael Dell and Jeff Bezos, people whose companies reach hundreds of millions of consumers and whose revenues are in the tens of billions, are not necessarily great communicators. While bloggers who reach millions and whose ad revenues are in the single digit millions, people like Robert Scoble, Kara Swisher and Om Malik, are phenomenal, entertaining, insightful communicators. Dell´s and Bezos´sessions were hard to endure, while the bloggers where tremendous fun.”

The Top 50 Productivity Blogs Of The Year

“If you have ever looked back at the previous day / week / month and realized that you didn’t get as much done as you wanted to then you might want to look at your productivity and make some improvements. Making better use of your time can help grow your business, make you happier, give you more income, and allow for more time to yourself and your family. The following list represents the top 50 blogs on productivity from around the Internet. Reading through them will help give you the tools to make your life and business more productive and allow you to reap the benefits. Enjoy!”

Congrat to XPLANE founder Dave Gray for making the list!

RunMyProcess > On demand business integration and process management (BPM)

“RunMyProcess is a SaaS Web 2.0 integration platform which allow to automate, without any programming, the exchange between your internal information system, your partners or your software…”

Kevin Kelly: 1,000 True Fans

“The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches.

But the long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators. Individual artists, producers, inventors and makers are overlooked in the equation. The long tail does not raise the sales of creators much, but it does add massive competition and endless downward pressure on prices. Unless artists become a large aggregator of other artist’s works, the long tail offers no path out of the quiet doldrums of minuscule sales.

Other than aim for a blockbuster hit, what can an artist do to escape the long tail?

One solution is to find 1,000 True Fans.”