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FedEx has really gotten smart: they've created a special small business site for those of us who have yet to make the Fortune 500. Browsing through it led me to a great resource: Winning Workplaces, a not-for-profit dedicated to creating great workplaces. Interesting, very affordable toolkit available. Thanks FedEx and Winning Workplaces for waking me up with a nice surprise this morning!
Let's hear it for local ingenuity.....the Minneapolis Star Tribune (and others) announced today that local entrepreneurs Tom Petters and Drew Levin are launching YFLY.com, a competitor to MySpace and Friendster. Yfly will target the 15-26 year old demographic by featuring 'real' celebrities (as opposed to the Burger King mascot guy and movie characters you might see featured on MySpace). Technorati shows 89 blog hits for YFLY (which launched this week), vs. 223,074 for Friendster and 2,860,485 for MySpace. So there's a big mountain to climb there.
One way YFLY is differentiating itself is to offer users (again, teenagers and young adults) tips for networking safely: getting to know people without making themselves into on-line targets.
Another differentiator is the technical platform: YFLY is based on Ruby on Rails, an open source application that's the next hot technology. (Honestly, I'm no technology guru, so I'm not sure exactly how hot this is. But according to my geeky friends it's pretty cool.)
Rock'n'roll best wishes to YFLY!
REALLY interesting leadership research conducted by Yankelovich in 2005, randomly interviewing over 1300 people about their views on leadership, the characteristics essential to leaders, and their confidence in today's leaders. (Study highlights on page three, important leadership traits page 11.) What I found interesting - 1) that interviewees saw themselves as part of the problem, for not being better informed, and 2) ethics and integrity topped the list of leadership characteristics. Interesting to take that list of leadership characteristics and hold the mirror up (toward me? toward my organization's leaders?), and see what shows up....
How cool would it be to receive an alert whenever your company is in the news? Or whenever your particular product line or business division hits the media? Or maybe you just want a way to track blog feeds without messing with RSS. Whatever your alert interest, Yahoo! and Google have you covered. They each have a cool little tool allowing you to select the topic and frequency of alert, and how you'd like to be alerted (cell phone, email, etc.).
What a great little tool for staying on top of the news!
Just when I start to get a little down, I find something really RIGHT going on in the world. I've had the privilege to meet recently with some folks from Hearth Connection, a local non-profit helping people find and keep a home.
If you've got a laptop you'd like to donate, give them a call at (612) 724-0100: they'll connect you with someone who can really use your laptop.
What if you're another non-profit who wants to get the word out? Well here's another cool happening in the world: The New PR - a wiki designed to support non-profits in their marketing efforts with lots of cool, free stuff.
Enjoy!
