Flickr photo courtesy of H.Kopp Delaney

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The 2010 football season is heating up, and now is your chance to get in on the action with all the members of the Football Experts Club game. Register now to compete for valuable prizes

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Step #1: Create an Account

Head over to the Registration page and complete the information to create your own account. Why do we collect all that info? So we can contact you if and when you win a prize. Don’t worry, we don’t give out your information to anyone!

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Lots of prizes. And more prizes.

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For every dollar invested in Cincom software and services our clients typically reap $30 in return – sometimes more.

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Did the Grateful Dead steal their iconic name from another band? Forensic investigation reveals one of history’s great mysteries.

By Steve Kayser with David Meerman Scott, and Brian Halligan, authors of “The Marketing Secrets of the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History”

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I was working on a story when I ran into a perplexing problem.  A total roadblock. How to simplify a complex story – one that involved quantum physics, cancer, depression, hope against all odds and the ephemeral topic of “making miracles?”

Photo courtesy of Stuck in Customs

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Are you glued to the TV every Saturday in the Fall, yelling yourself hoarse in the stands at your favorite university? Do your friends get tired of you arguing with sports analysts’ predictions each week?

If you answered yes to the above questions, Cincom Systems, Inc. invites you to join our Cincom 2010 College Football Experts Club.

The Cincom 2010 College Football Experts Club is a fun, 14-week competition following the schedule of the NCAA football season. Each week, players will log into the Experts Club website (http://www.cincom.com/football), created in conjunction with Athlon Sports, and attempt to accurately predict the winner of each week’s most competitive games.

Points are won for each correct guess, and those players at the top of the leader board are eligible for weekly prizes.

Cincom is also hosting a Bowl Championship Series contest starting in December. A winner will be chosen based solely on outcome of the BCS bowl games.

Chances are that even if you answered “no” to our above football fanatic questions, there’s a sports fan in your life who wouldn’t mind owning some memorabilia from their favorite athlete. Plus, you can even donate your prize to a charity of your choice if you choose! So why not join us?

Catch up with Coach Liz

You can join in on the fun and keep up to date with what’s going on in the game and the college football universe by catching up with Cincom’s Coach Liz on Twitter (@CincomFBGal) and on Facebook.

The Prizes

All prizes are gift certificates to the Athlon Sports online store. Athlon has memorabilia from ALL sports, so winners are NOT locked into a college football related prize.

Regular season competition (2 weekly winners)

First place: $175

Second place: $75

GRAND PRIZE (based on 14-weeks of results): $1000

Bowl Championship Series competition: $300

DON’T FORGET …

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Hi, my name is Tom Hortel, founder of Zenovate.Us (we rock) and  I’d like to personally invite you all to attend our National Innovation Conference at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base October 7-8, 2010.

We’re really honored to be part of bringing The National Innovation Conference event to the Ohio. It features keynotes by NASA and Innocentive, plus dozens of world-class experts presenting the latest thinking in innovation theory.  There are going to be some amazing speakers from the Air Force Research Lab, P&G, Intel, Planet Eureka, Basadur Applied Creativity and TRIZ Masters from around the world.

I‘ve been an inventor and problem-solver my entire life and have always been fascinated by the creative process of bringing new products and ideas into existence. There’s something very magical and cathartic about starting with a problem or frustration and reshaping it into an elegantly simple solution that transforms the whole idea and reshapes your paradigms. Game-changing ideas that redefine all the rules are my favorites.

Yet I never set out to become an inventor per se, I simply had a knack for solving tough puzzles, for slicing through all the fog and clutter to find those simple solutions.  In part I attribute that knack to growing up poor in rural Appalachia, where being creative and adaptive was more of a necessary survival skill.  The rules were fairly simple, when something broke and you couldn’t afford a new one, you took the broken one apart and figured out how to fix what you had.  So I developed an early fascination for mechanical gizmos and found I could fix broken toasters and TV’s by age seven. My curiosity would occasionally get me into trouble like when I’d disassemble my parent’s alarm clock just to see what made that tick-tock sound.  My father was also a consummate tinkerer and craftsman who taught us all to see the possibilities within life’s challenges. Dad always kept a little workshed where he endlessly tinkered and created things. He loved competing in archery and would even craft his own bows, taught us how to build bow strings and craft our own arrows, right down to fletching the hawk feathers and painting our signature designs on the shafts, even tooling the leather guards and quivers. He taught us the innate creativity to create something wondrous out of nothing and the inner calm to hit a bullseye at 50 yards.

It was years before we ever realized what important life lessons those would become.

Finding that inner calm within opposing tensions is one of the greatest teachings one can ever learn.

It allows you to hit any target you choose in life, to see new possibility beyond the current adversity. Fortunately I inherited his tinkering gene. And so my knack for solving puzzles became a long career in product development and now a passion to teach others the secrets of inventive problem-solving.

So … with that note, once again I personally invite you to join us the National Innovation Conference at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base on October 7-8, 2010.

Feel free to email me with any questions or you can register for the event online at http://tinyurl.com/trizcon.   You can also download the agenda brochure or go to our website at www.zenovte.us

You won’t want to miss this event. Feel free to share this invitation with any of your fellow colleagues you believe would have an interest or pass it along to your other networks.

CONTACT:
Tom Hortel
Zenovate Ltd
513-317-0149
Info@Zenovate.us

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Be prepared. Your presentation will have to have a hook so powerful you can hang a hat on it.

They will ask questions. Many. Then many more. Each question will have money attached.

What They’re Not Looking For

Let me give you a powerful hint. The answers they’re looking for are not impressions, views, comments, links, feeds or community building. They won’t care how cool it is or how the features or functions are “killer.”

CFO’s are easy to neuro-linguistically read. They’ll usually give you a visceral indication of how you’re presentation is faring.

Presentational Logic (Make it Up Math)

You’re going to have to be “creative,” in a “make it up math for the better of all humanity” type of way. I used a straightforward and fairly simple presentation to my CFO. I hammered and yammered about the value, payback, and powerful possibilities of the Social Media News Room. Of course, being a CFO, they will expect to see the numbers. The math. So, I presented the SMNR ROI (quite effectively I might add, if I do say so myself) with this instructional video.

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BusinessWeek’s Business Exchange covers the latest trends on business writing.

If you’re looking for a diverse source of  clear-cut and easy-to-understand stories on the how to write with clarity visit BusinessWeek’s BX “BUSINESS WRITING.”

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“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you’ve followed the ever-evolving rapidly disrupting social media technologies in marketing and PR, you know who Jeremiah Owyang is. If not, you need to check him out. He’s the best social media, web communication strategist analyst out there. Jeremiah provides in-depth thinking and advice. He delivers it in a helpful, courteous way and has made tremendous contributions to the social media technology sector.

Jeremiah’s “Matrix: Challenges of the Social Technology Industry,“ July 2010 edition, lays out the challenges of the social technology industry. But it also lays out some of the communication hurdles to overcome when representing your business. Whether it be PR, Marketing, Sales, Pre-Sales,  or customer service,  you will have to deal with these social technology issues because they directly relate to business communication challenges.

Jeremiah breaks down his matrix with four simple headings.

• Challenge
• Description
• Why it’s painful and
• How it might be resolved.

His matrix is easy-to-read and understand.  Of particular relevance to business communicators in the Matrix are:

Noise overwhelms signal: So much noise out there – how do you connect through the chaos? We covered that in “The Explosive New Reality Show  … Content.”

Amateurism threatens expertise: This one I have a slightly different take on then Jeremiah. Mine is driven by an autodidact personality. What’s that mean? I love to see amateurs with the guts, gumption and persistence teach themselves to be better than the experts and pro’s. It’s a pure joy to see. Better to experience. But check out his description of the issue. Jeremiah’s experience is probably the same as yours and 99% of everyone else. It is a difficult issue because it erodes credibility and trust in the potential of these technologies to effect serious change.

Fast-moving  moving industry creates confusion: A bit understated. How can you keep up with the speed – especially if you’re in business communications? For example, there are about 1,000,000 blog posts per day now.  How do you monitor, absorb relevant information and keep an attitude of constant learning? Hard work. But hard work isn’t enough anymore -  filtering is paramount.

Culture shift creates an internal rift inside institutions: Change. Change and power shifts are always difficult. But with the current economic environment and stress of delivering measurable results, it’s even more difficult today.  Change is needed, demanded, imperative – but social media change is looked at with a big ole stink-eye unless it delivers immediate measurable results. Some ideas, like seeds need incubating to grow … no?

“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Read Jeremiah Owyang’s “Matrix: Challenges of the Social Technology Industry,

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