From the Desk of the CEO Chief Exploration Officer


From the Desk of the CEO Chief Exploration Officer

Whether you’re an entre-, solo-, mom-, or internet- “preneur.” you are holding down a lot of duties.

In fact, over at Inc.com I recently tossed out five new roles us small guys may have to add to our rather sizeable list of stuff we need to do.

From Chief Dashboard Officer to Chief Media Personality Officer, and Chief Conversation Officer to Chief Audacity Officer, these roles (whatever you choose to call them) may decide how successful we will be going forward. That’s because more business relationships are beginning, and being conducted, over the web.

Enter the Chief Exploration Officer

Another role I think may serve us little guys well is that of chief exploration officer. OK, I confess to being fascinated by people like Marco Polo and Prince Henry “The Navigator.” But you don’t have to sail half way around the world to be the CEO — this new kind of CEO.

The web has made it easy to try out new sites, services, tools, opinions and any other thing you can think of. And this serves us well as we can experiment and tinker with things that can increase our productivity, expand our reach, and grow our business. So, as I don my Vasco da Gama hat, here are a few discoveries that added to my personal and professional development.

Google Alternative Search Views

I noticed that someone had landed on my blog from doing a search on the term social CRM. This is a term I’m tracking pretty closely, and I noticed something different about the link. When I clicked the link it brought me to the results list where I saw tabs that led to alternative views of the results.

It’s part of Google’s experimental search page, where you can see the traditional list view. Additionally, you can also see your results in the information view, timeline view and map view. Just click the tab of the view you’re interested in checking out. It’s a pretty nice way to add a little depth to your results set.

Sharing the Luv with CommentLuv

The folks over at JohnCow.com recently linked to a post on my blog. With a name like that, and having never heard of them at the time, I was curious to see what they were about. Turns out it’s a site that offers great tips and tricks on internet marketing.

But what really got my “Lewis & Clark” juices flowing was what I saw in the comment section. Every comment, or “moo” as they call it, ended with the title and link to the commenter’s last blog post – on their blog. It turns out that John (or is it Mr. Cow?) is using the CommentLuv plugin for WordPress that automatically does this. How cool is that? It’s a nice touch and a great way to entice people to leave comments on your site!

Say No to Twitter Spam

I never did like Spam growing up, and I heard somewhere that young Chris Columbus didn’t like it either. But I really hated getting spammed on Twitter as I am using it more and more as a relationship building tool. And after complaining on Twitter about the spammers, a few people brought StopTwitterSpam to my attention.

It’s a relatively new service that is tracking spammers with the help of the Twitter community. It’s so new that I’m exploring how good it is. But if it pans out, it will be well worth the time seeing if it will work for me.

So channel your inner Ponce de Leon and do a little digging around on the web. Set aside a few minutes to see what’s out there. And when you find something that works for you, let me know about it as it may help me too!

Now not everything we come across is going to be a winner, but you may be pleasantly surprised at what you find that can make you more productive, improve your interactions, or possibly make (or save) you a couple of bucks! I bet Dr. Livingstone would agree with me, but that may be a little presumptuous of me to say.

Image: Depositphotos.com

11 Comments ▼

Brent Leary Brent Leary is the host of the Small Business Trends One-on-One interview series and co-founder of CRM Essentials LLC, an Atlanta-based CRM advisory firm covering tools and strategies for improving business relationships. Brent is a CRM industry analyst, advisor, author, speaker and award-winning blogger.

11 Reactions
  1. Hi – Just wanted to put in a good word for CommentLuv. It’s too clever by half, and Andy offers outstanding, responsive support.

  2. Brent,

    I like your explorer theme! 🙂 It is soon time to celebrate Columbus Day! Click on “Martin Lindeskog” Says and read my post, Columbus and Leif Erikson Day and then read Thomas Bowden’s article, Columbus Day Celebrates Western Civilization. http://dievei.notlong.com

    Have you tested Scour’s social search engine?

  3. That CommentLuv looks great. What a cool way to see what a commentor on your site is really about. I wish it was available for Typepad too though 🙁

  4. CommentLuv looks interesting. Does Blogger platform have that too?

  5. CommentLuv: I tried to look for this in Blogger could not find one. Is it possible to paste the code of CommentLuv in the HTML/Javascript Gadget in Blogger?

  6. Hi Arthur,

    You may want to check out the link below. It looks like there might be a version of CommentLuv for Blogger:

    http://commentluv.blogspot.com/2008/09/ajax-commentluv-on-blogger-blogspot.html

  7. @Martin nice link to the info on Columbus Day. Very informative. And thanks as well for turning me onto Scour. I’ll definitely be checking it out.

    CommentLuv is definitely cool. Arthur you may want to check the link below as it appears there is a version for Blogger:
    http://commentluv.blogspot.com/2008/09/ajax-commentluv-on-blogger-blogspot.html

  8. Ooh. I am using wordpress platform but I don’t know if I can have that plugin too.

  9. CommentLuv is a great platform commenting. Here we can get our expected result. It’s nice to use for any person.

  10. Great blog on where to start for the CEO I love it!!
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  11. i love this topic