Is my topic this Thursday, February 15, at 7:00 PM, at the IEEE-CNSV meeting at KeyPoint Credit Union, 2805 Bowers Ave., Santa Clara, CA. The event is free. I will cover a number of practical suggestions for using blogs to promote a consulting practice and wikis to foster project team collaboration against a deadline.
Blogs and wikis are two “new” social software technologies that have been deployed in production use now for more than a decade. It’s time to move from a focus on technology and features to methodologies and business results that can be achieved.
You will leave with a better understanding of why your blog is the dial tone for your website. I wrote in Welcome Entrepreneurs that “I think a blog also acts a dial tone for a website in that it signals a commitment for interaction and participation on the part of the authors. And that’s certainly the case here.”
You will leave with a better understanding of why most wikis are private, unlike the Wikipedia or many open source project wikis, and why they uniquely support an extremely fast methodology for project coordination and collaboration that enables project teams to reach a working consensus on deliverables against a deadline. If you, your prospects, or your clients are relying on an email inbox as the primary filing system for keeping a project organized (e.g., “who has the most current version of a this project document?”), this talk will provide insight on new ways to get your proposals accepted and your final work signed off for payment.
As I mentioned in my overview of Nancy Blachman’s Google Guide talk at CNSV: if you are a technical consultant in Silicon Valley, the IEEE Consulting Network for Silicon Valley frequently runs useful and informative events and is an organization you should consider joining.