Yesterday, I mentioned that I spent a week with my in-laws in Wisconsin. They live in a small town called Kiel. It’s truly a small midwest-American town in every sense. It’s the kind of town with a water tower with the word KIEL painted in large white letters across it. The volunteer fire station blows a whistle every day at noon. Friday night high school football is a big event. The town’s three biggest employers are quite literally two small cheese-processing plants and a machinery supplier for those plants. One morning while I was out running, I could have sworn I passed the same old guy in a Green Bay Packers jacket 5 or 6 times, but I couldn’t be sure. That same morning, I passed an auction at the local ammo and archery shop where at least 150 camouflaged people were anxiously bidding on pieces of hunting art. On a walk down the half-mile stretch of Fremont Street, the main street in town, I counted 9 bars and 4 churches. Kiel is a pretty little town though. A beautiful little park sits alongside the Sheboygan River as it slowly ambles it way through the town center. Kids play on tire swings hanging from tall shady maple trees. Norman Rockwell would have loved Kiel.  Read the rest of this post

These days, it’s not unusual for development or product teams to be geographically dispersed. It could be that your team members work on different floors, in different buildings, in different states, or even in different countries. Although I believe that collocation provides the greatest advantage in terms of high performing teams, it’s a reality that we have to find ways for distributed teams to become just as productive as collocated teams.  Read the rest of this post

So, your company is trying to decide whether or not it needs a presence in the social media space. But you’re really not sure if your customers (or potential customers) want you or need you to be involved in the social media arena. Well, maybe the results of a recent survey from The 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study will help you decide what to do. The study presents the findings of an online survey conducted September 11-12, 2008 by Opinion Research Corporation among 1,092 adults comprising 525 men and 567 women 18 years of age and older. The survey focussed on how Americans use or expect to use social media to interact with businesses. Here are some of the key results:  Read the rest of this post

Ok, I don’t know about you but after hearing so much about it, I finally jumped into the Twitter pool.  Only problem is, I’m not sure if I really feel like swimming.  In case you don’t know what Twitter is, here’s the lowdown.  Some call it microblogging, others a social network of sorts.  Essentially, you can say whatever you want in 140 characters or less…and people can follow what you have to say via Twitter clients, RSS, SMS, etc.  Here’s some of the captivating content folks were providing today on Twitter:  Read the rest of this post