My Experience Building a Squidoo Lens

Over the past six months I have been developing two lenses on Squidoo. Both of these lenses were corporate in nature, evangelizing the mission of my current employer. I found the experience of creating a lens to be very cool. There are an infinite number of ways that you can group content together in various ways to educate readers on a particular subject area. Squidoo makes it easy to link in content from YouTube, SlideShare, Delicious, Yelp, Twitter, Flickr and Amazon.com. However, I significantly underestimated the amount of time and effort required to develop a lens.

Review of Groundswell

I received a copy of Groundswell in March of 2008, while attending Forrester’s marketing conference in Los Angeles. I finally got a chance to read it last week. Chapter 1 was my favorite of the whole book. E It provides nearly irrefutable arguments about why any company cannot afford to ignore the transformational, groundswell effect that social computing is having on the world. The authors offer great examples of how attempts to remove HD-DVD encryption codes and pictures of Barbara Streisand’s house from the Internet resulted in considerable backlash. “You can’t take something off the Internet. That’s like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.”

Every Tech Vendor should have an Eponymous Law

An eponymous law refers to a prediction or observation which is credited towards a specific person. Perhaps, the best known Eponymous law in the technology industry is that of Moore’s law which states that the complexity of integrated circuits doubles every 24 months. But Moore’s is just one of many such as Metcalfe, Reed and Amara credited with a technology law. Technology vendors should leverage these types of laws and observations in their marketing approaches. However, there will undoubtedly be scenarios in which none of the existing eponymous laws apply to your market sector. In such a scenario, I would encourage you to create your own. Of course, the law will not be taken seriously by the PhDs in the Silicon Valley community. However, such eponymous laws can be quite effective in illustrating concepts for investors, analysts, partners, customers and employees.