cre8Buzz Blog

It’s been some time since I’ve last posted. After a flurry of activities like getting second in our category at the Mashable OpenWeb Awards and then the holidays (whew, the hangover from the Cre8buzz Virtual Holiday party was something else), December was a hectic time for us at Cre8buzz. We’re thrilled at what we’ve accomplished and have been taking some time with our families in the past week or so. We’ll be back in full force soon.

As you know much of my posting has been about the inner workings of Cre8buzz. I plan a couple of posts in the near future recapping 2007 and looking ahead to 2008. However, if I was to summarize, I’d title my post about 2007 as “The Year of Surprises” and 2008 as “We WILL be living in interesting times”.

In the meantime, we’ll be keeping a low profile for a bit, hibernating, if you will and resting up for a big start to 2008. So, I plan on a bit more of this

Keith

So here we go ya’ll! The First Annual cre8Buzz Virtual Holiday Party!
When: Friday Dec. 21, 4:00 - 6:30 MST at cre8Buzz

It is gonna be tight, we can’t wait. We got a mad list of folks coming bringin some tight stuff. We’re gonna have good food, video games, Wine, amusement rides, drinks, and more.
Check out who’s comin’ and what they’re bringin’:

Sizzup - The Drinks!
-great drink recipes for the holiday season

Monkeesandprincesses - Holiday Recipes
-Texas Trail Mix, Wiskey Apple Crumble, and side dishes

Kikarose - Pin the tail on the Snowman

Mamwise - Video Games
-Pacman, Bowling, and tight old school games

Bandersohn - Music

TC - Lemonade

Suburban Oblivion - Decorations

Jackal - Holiday Rides
-Fairground Ride
-Ferris Wheel
-Ice Rink
-Fireworks

Julieann - Winter Activities
-Hot Chocolate
-Snow and a Utah Mnt
-Snow Tubes

Real Estate Scmoozer
-Spiked Eggnog and Fruit Cake!

Keith
-Ugly Xmass Sweaters!

bgwewriter- Music

Midori - Presents
-can’t even imagine, but hope they are good!

Arizona Real Estate - Sunshine
- How appropriate, she also said there would be a surprise

Trysh - Food
- a “killer” bread recipe

We hope to see ya there! Cruise around, mingle about, have a few drinks, enjoy the food and enjoy.

HAPPY HOLIDAY’S everyone. It is gonna be slammin!

Have ya used Utterz yet? I signed up a while back and think the idea is slammin. Utter allows you to use your cell phone to add audio posts directly to your blog or cre8Buzz page. Talkin’ about being mobile. Dang! I now need to figure out what the perfect first Antman utter is going to be. I think maybe I’ll Utter from the Open Web Awards ceremony in San Fran!

The ideas is so tight, that I thought I would try to give Utter and Bessie the head Cow a little love. Go check em out! Add an utter to ya cre8Buzz page and give us a vocal holla everyone once in a while. It’s also a tight community to chill!

Like us, Utterz is a small start up run by passionate folks; Bessie the heard Utter, Carl,
Tommy, Bob, Matthew.

They are some cool cows!

Utterz is up for best Mobile Site in Mashables’ Open Web Awards. They, like us, are losing to a “BIGGER” player so let’s help em out. Go on, ya gotta give to get. Go vote for Utterz and and if ya haven’t voted for the buzz yet, whatchya waiting for? Maybe, just maybe, between the two of us, we might be able to help each other close the gap. Let’s show the cows how an army of ants rolls!

Vote for Utterz, best Mobile Site

Ain’t this story better than the lion and the mouse?

Thanks ya’ll

Peace!

cre8Buzz has made the finals of Mashable’s Open Web Awards. Yup, we got one passionate user base. Ya’ll voted us in proper like. Thank you! So now, we gotta make a mad run to the finish. So go to Open Web Awards and Vote for cre8Buzz go on do it now. Voting ends Thurs, Dec 20th at 9:00 PST.

We will keep ya in the loop.

Peace all, thanks for the early X-mass present!

-Antman

When we hit the unexpected bumps in the road, when times are tough, when it is hard to see a day down the road, never mind a year, we imagine our vision and it brings us back. It is what started cre8Buzz and it is what keeps us goin’ . . . so we thought we’d share it with ya.

Imagine a cre8Buzz when there are 1 million people on it. Imagine a wine community with 5 thousand active buzzers, imagine a music community with 10 thousand active buzzers, imagine a Real Estate community with 8 thousand buzzers, imagine a writers community with 5 thousand buzzers, bmx with 9 thousand, hikers with 2 thousand, sailing with 6 thousand, cooks with 12 thousand; imagine moms and dads with 15 thousand; imagine all of the varied cre8Buzz communities with thousands of buzzers teaming with activity and life. Can you see it, can you see how thumpin’ the buzz would be.

Now, go deeper, imagine ya havin’ a dinner party and want to know the best wine to serve. Imagine ya thinkin’ about goin’ on vacation in Colorado and ya wanna know about the best hiking trails in Rocky Mountain National Park. Imagine ya lookin’ at sellin’ a new house in a down market (sound familiar?). Imagine ya have a hot date and ya wanna impress with a slammin’ home-cooked meal. Imagine ya wanna find the coolest new jazz artist. Imagine ya want some advice on how to get ya kid to eat more than chicken nuggets. Imagine; imagine how easy all of this would be with 1 million people on the Buzz, with hundreds of full, active, engaged communities. Imagine how friendly and easy it would be to just cross-buzz into a community and get the 411 you need. Imagine what it would be like to have all types of information one community away, one ask the group question, one friendship, one comment, one message, one online interaction away.

Can you see it? Can you see how powerful the Buzz would be?

Now imagine you are a Realtor. Imagine you are a cook. Imagine you are an aspiring Jazz artist. Imagine you are a wine connoisseur. Imagine you are writer. Imagine what it would mean to you, to your business, to your writing, to your music; to be well respected, highly ranked, highly regarded on cre8Buzz? Imagine it is you the Realtor that offers advice on selling a home in a down market. Imagine it is you, the wine connoisseur that recommends the perfect Syrah for dinner. Imagine it is you, the aspiring Jazz Artist that provides the music for the special dinner. Imagine it is you, the cook, that provides the “to die for” crème-brulee for desert. Imagine!

The Buzz has mad potential; the Buzz can change how information is shared. The Buzz can change how information is collected. The Buzz can change how people interact. The Buzz can change how people and ideas are found. Is there value? Is it worth ya time being early? Is it worth being the first in a community? Is it worth visiting everyday to make new friends? Is it worth putting up new content when ya only get two visits a day? Is cre8Buzz worth it with all the MySpaces, Active Rains, Facebooks, Dogsters, Flikrs, Beebo’s out there. We say yes . . . if you can IMAGINE!

I’m paraphrasing a famous movie line (name it and you’re a bigger movie geek than I) to note that we are getting to a point where cre8buzz is going to graduate and be forced to think about getting a job, er, revenue. What has us worried is that we really DON’T want to change the character or nature of the site, but at some point the dollars need to begin to flow in the other direction or we’re cooked. So we are looking at options/means of forestalling the likely introduction of advertising. I love analogies so here goes one: We have a social club (Elks/Lions/VFW/what-have-you, but not mesozoic) that is free. To keep it free the members are going to have to give up some of their time and , say, attend time-share sales sessions, which for our generation have displaced life insurance sales (”I have a mutual policy I think you’ll find very interesting…” -name the movie.) The good news is that the sorts of advertising we’re likely to have will be less imposing and the structure of the site will improve the chances that there might be a product presented users will actually WANT. It benefits everyone, users, us and the advertisers, to target the audience as best possible. So in the real estate area an ad might promote a new GPS-enabled service that allows realtors’ clients with Verizon service to be automatically alerted if they drive within 500 yards of a house for sale that fits a predetermined set of criteria applied to the MLS database. Now that might be of interest to the real estate folks, which increases the likelihood of the advertiser making a sale and lowers the likelihood of us getting many nasty-grams about how the ads are so annoying. I’d like to say this was all anticipated by us, and I can, because it was. See, we’re not as stupid as our avatars look!

John

“blah, blah, blah” attributed to Keith at a recent Cre8buzz meeting

We at the ‘Buzz are thrilled to be joined daily by a passionate group of interesting, serious and authentic people who really appreciate the place that we’ve created. We get comments about how nice it is to interact with fellow bloggers and others and build real relationships. We agree. We’ve made some real friends and continue to make more.

What’s interesting is how difficult it is to explain to others. At our worst, we can come up with things like:

“It’s our responsibility to synergistically disseminate multimedia based intellectual capital to meet our customer’s needs.”

Yuck.

Note: We’ve never used anything so bad. I actually created this on Dilbert’s Mission Statement Generator, which is great fun.

.

Sometimes, the best thing you can do is admit that you know too much. We’ve adopted the term “The Curse of Knowledge” from Chip and Dan Heath from their book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. Here’s how they describe the curse in an interviewed by Guy Kawasaki:

“And that brings us to the villain of our book: The Curse of Knowledge. Lots of research in economics and psychology shows that when we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. As a result, we become lousy communicators. Think of a lawyer who can’t give you a straight, comprehensible answer to a legal question. His vast knowledge and experience renders him unable to fathom how little you know. So when he talks to you, he talks in abstractions that you can’t follow. And we’re all like the lawyer in our own domain of expertise.

Here’s the great cruelty of the Curse of Knowledge: The better we get at generating great ideas—new insights and novel solutions—in our field of expertise, the more unnatural it becomes for us to communicate those ideas clearly. That’s why knowledge is a curse. But notice we said “unnatural,” not “impossible.” Experts just need to devote a little time to applying the basic principles of stickiness.

JFK dodged the Curse. If he’d been a modern-day politician or CEO, he’d probably have said, “Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry, using our capacity for technological innovation to build a bridge towards humanity’s future.” That might have set a moon walk back fifteen years.”

Our curse of knowledge within Cre8buzz is to explain to the layperson what we are about. It’s easy to compare ourselves to other social networks. It’s also easy to explain to bloggers and technical folks. How do we explain it to someone who’s never blogged or never used Facebook or MySpace?

I know that I have helped a couple people, with little to no social networking or blogging experience, build a profile. I guess it seems a bit intimidating to build a profile and perhaps a bit scary to share something about yourself to the world. But, you know what? Once they are on, they’ve been embraced by the community, start to meet new people, post more stuff and pretty soon, they love it.

Ok, so how do I describe this thing called Cre8buzz to ANYONE? Not just bloggers or folks that are technically proficient? Here’s a start:

Cre8buzz is a place on the web where people with particular passions go to share their creations and make new friends. When someone creates something that others see and like, it get’s recognized and highlighted for all to see. In other words, if you put up good stuff, you will get applauded.

So, ok, not great, but a start. Help me out here. Any suggestions?

Keith

This post is dedicated to my fellow Cre8buzz teammates.

Consider the postage stamp: its usefulness consists in the ability to stick to one thing till it gets there. ~Josh Billings

If you’ve read some of my posts you may have noticed a theme about perseverance, like here and here. I’m not sure why I go back to it but I do. Perhaps it’s is just a matter of the circumstances of life are always going to present us with tests. I think that by writing about perseverance I reinforce the importance of sticking in to get what you want .

Squiffy2 reminds us that we’ve all felt like this guy

This week was a series of tests for the people I surround myself with. Personally, there were a couple ripples in otherwise calm waters. On the ‘Buzz front, we are still faced with some of the same challenges of our business: generating the money and growth we need to fuel the evolution of the site (and, sometimes, pay our bills). For the most part, we’ve embraced that uncertainty as the situation we will be faced with for some time. We regularly take stock of the good things we have and are grateful for them. Still, the doubts can creep in.

I know that we are hanging in and embracing the challenges. I’m glad that I am surrounded by friends and partners who will pull me us out of any kind of predicament and I will do the same for them. Besides, if the worst thing that happens is we get stuck for a bit, at least we can get a bit of rest while we’re up there.

Have a great weekend,

Keith

Social networks are just poppin’ up everywhere. I know ya’ll know this far too well. Most of ya’ll, if not all of ya, are chillin’ somewhere else in addition to the buzz. I’m feeling ya. I belong to at least 3 others. So this got me wondering? What makes one social network different than another?

• Is it the features; RSS feeds, good bloggin’ tools, ability to upload video’s, pay for participation, ratings etc?

• Is it the UI (what ya’ll click on to move around the site)?

• Is it cause the site is easy to navigate?

• Is it cause the site gets you more readers?

• Is it because it’s the new “hip” place to be?

I asked all these questions and more, and I’m answering no! They’re all important, but they aren’t what make the difference.

The difference between social networks; what makes one better than the other is its HEART.

The heart of every social network is its members; the people on the site interacting and engaging everyday. The conversations, the information, and the interaction of the members give a social network its SOUL. The HEART and SOUL of a social network gives it life and that is what makes social networks different.

So knowin’ this, let’s play a game, I dig games!

What’s at the heart and soul of ya favorite social network?

Myspace - ___________________
Facebook - ___________________
MyBlogLog –_________________
Active Rain – _________________
Flickster - ____________________
Cre8Buzz ____________________

Now this is how ya tell the difference between good, the bad and the ugly.

Peace, I’m out!

12:00

Remember the blinking VCR clocks? Although over 3/4 of all users were never able to program those clocks, somehow it was still a constant sign of technical incompetence and insecurity. But the problem wasn’t you. It was the engineers. Remember when there was a rash of “spontaneous accelerations” with a certain model Audi? The engineers concluded that it was driver error, because no mechanical failure could be identified. These are both examples of poorly designed user interfaces. And regardless of the context, when the user interface is unsatisfactory it most certainly the fault of the engineers, and not the users.

We approach a lot of people about joining cre8Buzz every week. And a good portion complain that they tried MySpace or Facebook, and they didn’t “get it” or had trouble navigating. Some even assume that this is because under 30s have some magical ability to master such things and they are just too old to social network. While greater experience online certainly helps most younger users get past a poor UI, it is certainly not a special universal skill. So, the reluctant folks just assume that all VCRs are going to be equally difficult to set, that all social networks are fundamentally alike. But then along comes something else…

Tivo blew away all conceptions of what a TV recording device could be. While it is far too early in the game for us to make any Tivo-esque claims, we do have a passionate core of early adopters as Tivo did. And I was one of them. As difficult as it was to explain how Tivo worked and how fundamentally better it was, the differences between typical social networks and cre8Buzz are even more abstract. You have to use it to “get it”. With Tivo that leap required paying several hundred dollars and committing to a monthly fee. While cre8Buzz is free, it takes a commitment of time to perceive the value, and everyone is just so busy these days.

So a big thanks for all those users who are our evangelists. Keep telling your friends and relatives that they can set their own clocks at cre8Buzz. Don’t judge us by MySpace, who still have the gas and brake pedals so close a nasty accident is just around the corner.

John