The Devil You Know

Posts Tagged ‘business’

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Coming events (or making life easy for my stalkers*)

In Bidness, Media, me, Me, ME! on August 4, 2010 at 1:22 pm

Despite the heat, the summer doldrums must be giving way, as I’m staring down a really busy spate of talks and appearances:

  • On August 23, I’ll be giving a talk at UT-Arlington to help The Shorthorn kick off the school year.
  • August 28th, I’ll be speaking at OpenCamp about lessons learned from the launch of Pegasus News.
  • September 2, you can catch me at the TEDxSMU happy hour.
  • September 11, I’ll be speaking on using social media in journalism for The Press Club of Dallas and AAJA Texas.
  • Although not officially attending, I’ll probably make a cameo to have a cocktail my friends at the Kelsey Group for their Directional Media Strategies conference, since it is in my backyard.
  • September 23-24, I’ll be on an advertising panel at the Community News Summit in Chicago.
  • September 25th, I’ll be attending the Walter Hines Page High School Class of 1990 reunion. (More on that later.)
  • October 16th, I’ll be attending TEDxSMU
  • And, October 29th, I’ll be on a panel about entrepreneurial journalism and new business models at the Online News Association conference. (Excited, as this is my first ONA conference.)

* – Would-be burglars and harassers note that April will be home for most of that and my three big, toothy dogs will be home for all of it.

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Improv resources

In Bidness, PopCult, me, Me, ME! on March 3, 2010 at 1:00 am
Mike Orren Ignite Dallas Improv “Yes And” Preso

The notes, which are an approximation of what I said, are here.

For those who saw my talk at Ignite Dallas, here are the resource links I promised:

I took my Level 1 Improv class at Dallas Comedy House and am now in their Level 2 class. I wrote about my experience on Pegasus News. The story also includes a listing of other good improv programs around town. There is also a nascent community site: DFW Improv Forum.

For more on using improv in business, see The Applied Improvisation Network or Second City Communications. There was a recent article about the rise of improv in the workplace on CareerBuilder.

Info on London’s Yes And Club, which would be a cool idea in Dallas too.

Improv books:

The Second City book is better than Truth in Comedy, despite the latter’s pedigree. The Improv Handbook is next on my reading list.

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Mike Orren Ignite Dallas Improv “Yes And” Preso

The notes, which are an approximation of what I said, are here.

For those who saw my talk at Ignite Dallas, here are the resource links I promised:

I took my Level 1 Improv class at Dallas Comedy House and am now in their Level 2 class. I wrote about my experience on Pegasus News. The story also includes a listing of other good improv programs around town. There is also a nascent community site: DFW Improv Forum.

For more on using improv in business, see The Applied Improvisation Network or Second City Communications. There was a recent article about the rise of improv in the workplace on CareerBuilder.

Info on London’s Yes And Club, which would be a cool idea in Dallas too.

Improv books:

The Second City book is better than Truth in Comedy, despite the latter’s pedigree. The Improv Handbook is next on my reading list.

Related articles by Zemanta
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UPDATE: The preso

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Time changes everything

In Bidness, me, Me, ME! on September 29, 2009 at 6:48 pm

Ever have one of those unexpected flashbacks to a bad memory, so visceral that it gives you chills?

I just had one of those moments at the cab stand at Norman Y. Mineta San Jose Airport. In an instant I was transported back to March 19, 2007. I had scraped together the last fragment of credit our business had to fly to California for the Kelsey Drilling Down on Local Conference. I had used that excuse of proximity to bulldoze my way into some meetings with VC’s with whom I’d had promising phone conversations, but who couldn’t get too excited over a Texas start-up whose founder wasn’t standing in their office.

I got on the plane that day resolved that if I didn’t come back with at least five promising investment leads, I was going to shut the thing down and walk away. Four months past the launch of our flagship product, we were broke. Our angel investors had probably gone as far as they could. We were going to miss payroll from here forward. I spent equal time on the plane honing my pitch and making a shortlist of companies that might hire me the next week.

As I walked to the cabstand, where there was a considerable line, I turned my cellphone back on. Before I could even check for messages, it started ringing incessantly:

  1. Read the rest of this entry »

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Commentary on comment

In Bidness, Media on August 13, 2009 at 3:55 pm

A few weeks ago, I had one of my periodic head-explosions over Journalist-types poncing about over how hard civil and substantive comment is to maintain on news sites. This is a topic that really frustrates me, because I think it’s really easy. And for any of the other myriad mistakes we may have made at PegNews, this is one thing that I think we’ve gotten right.

Patrick Thornton of BeatBlogging.org was doing a good job of bringing in best practices in a Twitter conversation that turned into a great article on Poynter today. As part of that, I sent him a lengthy missive on our comment practices that was way too much to fit in a roundup piece. So, for posterity, I thought I’d share it here: Read the rest of this entry »

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Customer service at scale, part II: Why my experiences with AT&T make me fear for GM

In Bidness, Gadgets on June 29, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Yeah, you may have a great big battle station, but if you waste the opportunity to shore it up, a rebeliions gonna come. (Image from The Daily Yeah.)

Yeah, you may have a great big battle station, but if you waste the opportunity to shore it up, a rebeliion's gonna come. (Image from The Daily Yeah.)

I’m going to resist the temptation to turn this post into a therapy session over the myriad problems I’ve had with AT&T over the past month. Specific situations will crop up organically in the descriptions below, but instead of a chronological chapter-and-verse story, I’m going to focus on the lessons I’ve learned about AT&T and its processes. Read the rest of this entry »