Todd Sampson

The retweet — or RT as it is commonly used now — is becoming ever more popular on Twitter. Someone posts a tweet that you find interesting, you “retweet” it to your followers to make sure they see it.  Echo chamber issues aside, this is causing Twitter to become an even better tool for spreading information. (Check out Dan Zarrella’s post What’s in a Retweet? for some good data on the topic.)

The format for retweets seems to be settling around the following:

“RT: @sendername original tweet”

Short, sweet, effective. There’s just one issue. I find my self constantly editing my tweets to get them down to just under Twitter’s 140 character limit. However, if my post is 140 characters then there is no room for anyone else to retweet my message. My message hasn’t been packaged in a way that it can spread in this medium.

So, I am now imposing a new “retweetable limit” rule on my twitter posts. I will now limit the length of all my tweets to leave enough characters for others to easily spread the message. Each user’s retweetable limit is unique, since it is based on the length of their twitter name.  You can calculate your retweetable limit by counting the characters in your twitter name, adding six, and subtracting that total from 140. (Six comes from the characters “R”, “T”, “:”, ” “, “@”, and an additional ” ” after your twitter name.) Hence @toddsampson — 11 + 6 = 17 — has a retweetable limit of 123. Alternatively, instead of counting up to my 123 limit, I will just make sure that I leave a number greater than 17 in the available character limit for my tweets.

Go ahead and spread the word on making your tweets retweetable.

I have been a big Seth Godin fan for years.  While I often find that I enjoy his blog and online videos more than his books, his new one Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us really hits it out of the park.  Among the many insights I gleamed from the book — which you can download for free on Audible or for less than a dollar on iTunes — was his in-depth take on leading vs. managing.

I know, I know.  We have all heard it a million times:  “Leadership is figuring out what to do” and “Management is making sure it gets done right”.  But I didn’t see it as clearly, or how it applied to my work at Yahoo!, until hearing Seth’s great take on the subject.  (I highly recommend checking out the book since I would do a great injustice trying to summarize his message here.)

Viewed through this new lens:  Acquiring companies are looking for managers, not leaders, for the startups they acquire.

And this leads to a major problem: Most entrepreneurs aren’t managers.

Entrepreneurs may have some management skills they have picked up over the years, but to become truly successful in a startup they had to really become leaders.  And leaders hate, I mean really hate, being shoved into a pure management role; even one where they occasionally give guidance on their areas of expertise.  Yet this is exactly what large companies want when they acquire a small startup.  (Larger acquisitions are likely to have many *managers* already and are slotted into an acquiring organization at a much higher level — where they have greater autonomy.)

So, what is the solution?  I have to admit I am not entirely sure.  But I am starting to think that most startup people, by which I mean founders, don’t belong in a management role in any capacity inside a large organization — even running the acquired startup that they created.  I know this sounds a bit harsh.  And I am sure that you can keep the people that worked for the founders on the project.  But I think that you need to bring in professional management, especially people that know the internal politics of the organization, to run the acquired entity.  Let the MBAs that really know how to color within the lines do their thing.

So, what’s an acquiring company to do with the founders?  I think the best options are to set the founders free to start their next venture or, perhaps, give them a different role within the company — such as advisor, evangelist, R&D, or startup liaison.

Thanks to everyone for all the great comments and feedback on my last post.  (Though most still seem to come in via email, IMs and offline conversation rather than in the comments of the post itself.  Maybe I’ll start transcribing some in the comments or follow-up posts so that everyone else can benefit as much as I do.)  In any case, I didn’t intend the last post to be a rant as one commenter said.  I just wanted to share a revelation I had of a new way of looking at working inside a large corporation.

The same is true with nearly all my posts — I am just sharing things I learn and new ideas I have.

I am the happiest and luckiest guy on earth.  I am incredibility grateful for everything I have and have been able to do in this life so far. And while I wouldn’t change a single thing, I do try to learn something from every new experience.  Sharing what I learn on this blog helps me to refine my thoughts and make sure I don’t lose them.  Further, making these ideas public allows me to get input from many other people.  And, hopefully, will allow others to benefit from the conversations around the ideas as much as I do.

Yahoo! Campus Image by Gertrud K.

I have been playing the wrong game.  Ever since founding Cloudspace in 1996, I have been responsible for making the companies I am working at both a financial and technical success.  I have worked really hard and have become damn good at this role.  My problem since selling MyBlogLog to Yahoo! last year is that I am still trying to play this role while Yahoo! is looking for something else entirely.

When I have met with my many bosses inside Yahoo! over the last 21 months, the conversation often devolves into me pointing out all of the things I think the company needs to do to fix itself: sell off search to build up the coffers and get people to stop comparing Yahoo! to Google; focus on the what Yahoo! excels at – providing great media experiences across all of the distribution channels available to it (instead of focusing on building yet another platform); outsource Ops; embrace true openness - on network and off - not just give it lip-service; and, most importantly, stop setting ourselves up to chase both Google & Facebook for the next five years.

I have recently realized that, right or wrong, these conversations are useless.  People that I know and trust have been telling me for some time that “The people you report to aren’t idiots, they are just playing a different game” and “You can’t fix Yahoo!” and “Unless you are going to be an empire builder, you need to align with one.”  While I understood that the conversations with my managers were not a good use of time at one level, I don’t think that I truly understood why until I heard a recent podcast interview with Jim Lukaszewski on IEEE Spectrum Radio.

Inside large companies like Yahoo! everyone but the top leadership of the company is paid to execute against their “roadmap” to produce ”deliverables” — not to make the company successful.  Don’t get me wrong, everyone wants their company to be successful.  It is just that they view it as upper management’s job to make it happen.  It is also why telling my managers that “I don’t want a raise or promotion, just the resources we need to make MyBlogLog successful” meets with such shocked, often negative, reactions.  They think I am out of my mind.  I think that their goals and incentive structure are insane.  But again, in the end, we are just playing different games.

So, according to Jim Lukaszweski, here is what I should do in my next meeting:

• Focus on what my boss has been assigned to get done since this will help them move up the corporate ladder.
• Don’t bring new ideas to the table since the boss is only worried about doing what they have been assigned.
• Be the pragmatist and help keep the boss realistic about how things are going.  (I think that I am pretty good at this.)
• Give advice on the spot they can factor into their thinking — not ”I’ll get back to you” since by the time you get back to them they are already on to another problem.
• Tell them something they don’t already know.  If they are checking the Blackberry or are tuned out, they probably already know what you have to say and you should move on.
• At the upper-levels in big companies, read the Harvard Business Review because that is what the person will be worried about this month.
• Keep the person focused on “What are the next actions that we need to take to achieve the assigned goals.”
• Don’t be a “solution provider” — solutions are the boss’s job.  Just offer incremental suggestions, as multiple-choice options if possible, to help the person make a decision.
• Don’t worry if my advice isn’t taken.  The boss needs to collect input from many sources and make the final decision.
• Don’t whine about what is wrong outside the scope of what they are working on now.

Thanks Jim.  While I don’t know if I can (or want to) change just yet, it is interesting to have a deeper understanding of the issue.

ITFlorida has awarded Cloudspace their Excellence in Web 2.0 award.  Congrats guys!

Image via Wikipedia

Def. Where the level of management oversight has grown so large as to reach fully-diminished returns.

Often seen in large companies where review processes, in an effort to minimize risk, keep any new initiatives from reaching the marketplace.  This phenomenon is commonly manifested in the form of a good idea being put on hold for six months waiting for “management buy-in” only to watch a more nimble competitor launch a similar product.

There are several visible side-effects of Peak Oversight:

1. After a competitor launched the product, and thus freeing the Peak Oversight company from any first-mover risk, the company is now free to copy the competitor’s product and play catch-up in the market.
2. Those in management who saw this coming, but only kept the product from launching, are promoted for their insight into the competitive landscape.
3. The people with the really innovative ideas and ability to execute on them leave the company.

Known cures… Sadly, none.

Image via Wikipedia

I came across a great post by Doctor Popular (via Laughing Squid) about Using the iPhone as a gamer interface.  Very cool stuff.  And it got me thinking…

My brother and business partner John Sampson mentioned the other day that he was pretty amazed that more people haven’t gotten into the Apple TV.  It is a great product — especially with the second generation software upgrade.  So, when is Apple going to open up an App Store for the Apple TV?  I would love to download games and productivity apps for my 52″ LCD.  Doubly so if Apple built some innovate iPhone interfaces — tilt, accelerometer, screen, location input, address book social graph, etc. — to drive them.

Image via Wikipedia

So, I just realized how many messages I have been missing on Twitter since the crew there removed the Track feature.  I know that the lack of the track feature was really having an impact on the value of the service (see my previous post on The Ideal Twitter Setup and tracking your Twitter username) but I was still surprised at some of the things I was missing when I started looking into it on Summize — the only service that Twitter has not killed XMPP access to at the current time.

Instead of missing more Tweets, I decided to create a Yahoo! Pipe (my first one — very cool stuff guys!) using Summize to replace Twitter’s Track function:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/toddsampson/twittertrack

Just go to the page above, enter your Twitter username and you are all set.  The results from the Pipe can be put into your favorite RSS reader, emailed to you or sent to your phone so you get the Tweets in near-real-time.  Enjoy!

Everyone loves me. Everyone loves my business and products. What’s more, everyone loves everything that I do. I. Am. Awesome.

So, aside from sounding like Barney (wwNPHd) from How I Met Your Mother, the above is an example of someone’s ego defense mechanisms completely insulating their id. While this state of delusion can make the world a nice place to inhabit — being completely id driven is how children live after all — it can be disastrous for a business.

Every company must deal with Brewster’s Law of Online Community Management:

“In every online community there lurks a small but vocal minority of attention-seekers. These folks are ready to pounce on any change, brand it as a Sign of the Coming Apocalypse, and announce their intentions to leave in a loud, angry huff. The only problem? They never actually leave….”

While these people definitely exist, there are many more users that criticize because they actually want the product to get better. How do you determine which type of user has given the suggestion and fairly judge the idea?

I propose that we start “Turning Oranges into Apples”. In other words, flip the negative feedback you receive 180 degrees before adding it to your potential To Do list. Criticism for not having a feature is converted into positive feedback for having the feature in place. Instead of “I hate that you don’t have [XYZ] on the site” you list “I really loved that you added [XYZ] to the site.”

Turning Oranges into Apples does three things for you:

1. It separates the negative emotion of the critique from the idea itself.
2. It truly lets you “compare apples to apples” as the old saying goes. The benefit of the feature can be judged against other ideas without bias. Which keeps you from over/under-prioritizing a feature based on the way it was presented.
3. It protects your collective team id — which makes life nicer and keeps everyone from thinking all of your users are [insert favorite explicative(s) here] idiots.

Since having an engaged audience is becoming more critical to business success every day, anything that we can do to improve the process should be very valuable. Do you have any other life-hacks for dealing with user feedback? Please share them in the comments.

MyBlogLog Sr. Engineer (and my brother) John Sampson was pictured on TechCrunch’s Live From Google Campfire One.  John stepped up and attended the event after I hurt my back a few days ago.  Thanks for going John!