Imagine that every day you get a steady diet of white rice.  Every day you look forward to your white rice because it is good, you can eat it quickly and you move on with your day.

Then one day someone brings you white rice with diced-up green onions in it.  Your first reaction is “Yuck, who did this?!”

After picking at it and tasting it, you decide it is a nice change.  Now you look at your rice in a whole new way.

You can create more buzz by adding something unexpected but pleasant.  I have not experimented with video myself, but when I added the video interview that someone else did for me, I got a bigger than expected response.  Is it because video is cool or because video is green onions in my white rice?

What is the biggest secret advantage of working virtually? 

Sure, there are lower costs, flexibility, you can hire people anywhere…. that is the obvious.

But what about the loss of control, the accountability, the difficulty to communicate?

That is the secret.  The biggest advantage to working virtually in a team is that it forces you to communicate better, to document things, to build standards and instructions, and to be more organized and less of a fireman.

So what does a virtual team of online advocates look like for your company?  It will consist of any combination of the following

• Part time employees that enjoy writing and socializing on the web.
• Spouses, family and friends that want to help grow the business.
• Contractors, such as free lance writers, that can help you jump start your project.
• Virtual Assistants
• Customers that are fans of your product

Now the real key is not who, but how.  Write detailed descriptions of each type of activity that they can participate in.  Define your ethics and standards carefully.  Create a way to track hours, successes and to allow people to collaborate online.  There are plenty of free or low cost things out there that can do this for you.

Take the time to understand what your total costs are and what the expected return is.  This can be hard to gage because online advocacy may not return your investment in the first month, but some well placed exposure may bring you steady results for years.

Now add a person or two to your team and work out the kinks.  What was unclear?  Did anything get missed?  Did the team feel like part of a virtual team or like people working by themselves?

The secret is that it is more work initially.  Building the systems and tracking results is harder than yelling at the person down the hall.  However, the long term benefits will be huge when the whole thing starts running like a finely tuned machine.

Buzz is about relationships and messages that spread.  Blogs are all about relationships.

 We host a blog/website for the city of Kent called Kent 360.  Dave Ruller, the city manager, has done a great job with it and it is an important part of his job.  No one would doubt that he is the #1 advocate of the city if they pay attention to the blog.

Today he did a post on the one year anniversary.  If you like to see what the blog reports and traffic are for things, take a look at this post.  You can see how successful he has been with it and how important it is to his job now.  His stats don’t even show all the emails sent via feedblitz or the rss reads that never hit his site.

If you are a city manager or elected official and would like this kind of solution, let us know.

When I am speaking I talk about advocates and influentials.  Influentials care about their audience, and they have a big one.  Advocates may only tell three people but they really care about you and your success.

So I start going down the list of advocates, including ex employees, customers, vendors… and then I tell people don’t forget you mom.

I would never want to turn my family into my sales force.  But I do want to give them something fun to talk about when they are talking.  My mom always gets asked, “Did that loser of a son ever amount to anything?” – Publishing a book really helped out with that one.

So I was reading Guy Kawasaki’s Blog today and he interviewed Jeffrey Kalmikoff of Threadless and I saw bullet number two and thought I would write this post.  Good advice – If you can’t make your mom understand it you cannot sell it to people who care less.

The only thing to be careful about is if you are asking them advice on idea you have.  If they say they love your idea, don’t go spending money on launching it until you have gotten some less caring people to also take a look.

If you are like me, you enjoy creating buzz.  You write, you network online, you meet people…. you get it.  A lot of buzz can be created by just participating every day.

Well, it is vacation time for many and it has me thinking about what is appropriate as a way to recharge your buzz battery without letting the buzz slip or breaking the good habits you have developed.  Here are some suggestions.

• Don’t touch the computer on the weekends.  I live in a cold climate and have young kids, and on the weekends I am enjoying myself until October.
• Stop doing something that has just not worked.  Are you spinning your wheels with a buzz technique?  Just stop doing it for a while and try something new.
• Learn something new to give you something new to talk/write about.
• Take your buzz creation on the road.  If you cannot stop for a week, commit to doing from the beach or the jungle.
• Learn new ways to be more efficient with technology – hardware or software, to free up some time.
• Adventure – go on an adventure that will challenge you and give you a great story to tell later. 

One thing I did recently was take the day off to read a book I got.  It was very odd to sit in the office all day and read a book, but was very relaxing.  Try something different and you may find yourself recharged and more productive in short order.

Quick Quetion:  Why don’t we have laws similar to SPAM Laws but for phone books.  I do not want them, they are heavy to throw away since they leave shrink wrapped pallets of them in front of my office and I feel guilty because I immediately throw them away and I know it is bad for the environment.

Someone, please force these phone book companies to have an opt-in policy for delivery.  Save some forests and stop lying to the advertisers on how many are in people’s homes and offices.  More are in dumpsters.