• take notes and associate them with the instructors' slideware presentation,
• draw on the instructors' slides,
• ask questions of the instructor during the class,
• indicate their level of confidence with the material, and
• respond to a variety of questions. For example, students can answer questions using images; they can establish associations between concepts and ideas, and they can reorder texts, statements and arguments.
• Students can also review their notes and a lecture podcast or video after class.

In this video, Perry Samson talks about the present and the future of LectureTools and how it may save textbook publishing -- by providing an affordable and smart electronic textbook.

After 9/11, the move from onsite trainng to e-learning was natural. There was an economic recession, and the recent terrorist attacks had put an additional, natural brake on travel. One day, an e-Learning customer asked Steve Sadler, CEO of Scate, how his company produced e-Learning materials so quickly. Steve showed him an internal tool, and the customer asked him how much it was. Steve said it was not for sale. The customer retorted it should be.

A light went off, and Steve moved to turn his tool into a product, Ignite, that allowed customers to create their own e-Learning materials. Shortly after, Jeff Holth, currently CTO, joined Scate.

Jeff then picks up the narrative by noting how Scate has continued to expand its offerings, recently moving into social media. Jeff envisions social media as community development around a set of shared ideas and interests.

In future episodes, Steve and Jeff will discuss how they are using social media, particularly a new product, ScreenTweet, to promote their business.

• Create new relationships
• Manage existing relationships

The point of these relationships is to better enable the company's business strategy execution. Thus, Terry begins each client engagement focusing on the following factors:

• The company goals
• A definition of the ideal client
• A definition of the ideal business partner

In the past few years, Terry has been shifting his focus to online as well as face to face strategies. In the next few segments with Terry, we'll be discussing the most used online business network, LinkedIn.

• Small, growing businesses need the skillsets corporate professionals have to offer, but cultural issues prevent matches being made.
• In this buyers' job market, it's up to corporate professionals to sell themselves if they want to transition into a small business.
• In order to do so, corporate professionals need to retool their skill sets in the following ways:
  • First, they need to get a firm grip on the skills they possess and the value those skils can bring.
  • Second, they need to understand that they are no longer just a role player on a larger team but often a one-person band.
  • Third, they need to adapt to the scarcity of financial and other resources often prevalent in small businesses.
  • Fourth, they need to be able to deal with the less well-defined business environment that most small businesses face.

In future installments, we'll cover how the Shifting Gears program helps corporate professionals meet the challenge of retooling their skills.

Facebook is positioning itself as the network that allows people to achieve a balance between professional and social communication. With over 200 Million active subscribers (those who log in at least weekly), Facebook is the 800 lb. guerilla in this rapidly growing area. To effectively present a social business presence on FaceBook, Charlie recommends:

• Have a photo
• Present the human side, not just the business side, of who you are. Draw the line where you are comfortable.
• Make sure to promote your public corporate events there as FaceBook is very viral.

Some things, Charlie recommends you not do with FaceBook:

• Don't create content solely for Facebook. It's invisible to search engines.
• By the same token, don't store photos and other content there that you want to be publicly accessible. FaceBook prohibits access to outsiders.

Finally, Charlie recommends that you gear any FaceBook advertising to a soft sell wrapped in information. People come to FaceBook to socialize, not hear hard core pitches.

• Companies need to go where the audience is and that means social networking sites. As many as one in every three minutes online is spent connected to a social networking site (see Nielsen for estimates as exact figures though significant are elusive).
• Facebook is the 800 lb. gorilla of social media. At the end of March, it had 200 million active users with 100 million users checking it daily.
• In addition to Facebook, there are two other significant networks where businesses should consider their presence:
  • LinkedIn, a business networking site.
  • Twitter, a microblogging site.

• Curve bills itself as a media, marketing, and design firm.
• A key differentiating factor is that the firm is media agnostic.
  • Charlie tells the old joke of a man who gets shot and wanders into a traditional ad firm where they offer him a tv campaign to cure his ills.
  • Curve examines clients' goals, desired audience, and budget before suggesting any of a number of alternatives which may include traditional media or new media.
• Charlie founded Curve after "getting kicked out of every small and large reputable advertising firm in Detroit".
  • Charlie was always on the hunt for new and better ways to do things, a quality that might not fit with an agenda to sell the firm's main product line.

In future segments Charlie will provide Curve's overall take on social media and Facebook in particular.

• Expect the rules as you know them today to change.
• As a result, you need to constantly consider yourself a student.

When I asked him how he learned himself, the answer was quite revelatory:

• Each year after starting work, he set himself a goal of learning one new skill a year.
• He chose the skills based on demand from his clients, thereby ensuring he stayed in touch with the marketplace.
• As his business grew beyond a one-man show, he began to incorporate course work on managing people.

In conclusion, Adrian states that he was lucky to be put in a situation where he was forced to learn. But, the truth of the matter is that he himself made the decision to be in a situation where learning was essential. This strategy might be described as a blueprint for how to succeed in the knowledge-based economy.

• Platforms like Twitter and Facebook are channels for social communication over the web. The social web occurs at the intersection of these channels and might be considered a sort of real time stock market of social communication.
• While Twitter and Facebook are the consensus picks for most popular social media platforms, people's allegiance to platforms is very fluid and changeable.
• Twitter now appears the best platform for engaging new audiences, mainly because it has dramatically reduced privacy restrictions.

With this view, Module takes the following strategic approach to cloud computing:

• Understand the business drivers of potential clients seeking to move into the cloud.
• Determine which, if any, service offerings best meet those needs.
• Create applications that glue those offerings together.

Social media sites such as twitter and facebook present new ways to connect with the public, and Jenn is currently using these tools with about 40% of her clients. Their main advantage is that they allow direct engagement with potential customers without intermediaries. Her goal is to get all of her clients with either broadly appealing products or a consumer orientation using these tools.  By contrast, all of her clients can use tools like Google blog and news alerts.

In a follow up episode, Jenn will describe the differences she sees between facebook and twitter.

Bill lays out what he thinks the differences are. These dovetail well with remarks by Jeannette Gutierrez, a job seeker we recently interviewed. Here are the differences as Bill sees them:

• The salesperson will be the whole sales department, not just one of many or one overseeing many.
• As a result, SRT is looking for an individual contributor who has experience growing sales and meeting quotas.
• As a firm that serves a number of industries, SRT is looking for a person that has experience selling to a variety of businesses.

Jeannette has had success obtaining interviews with her target firms, something that may be hard for experienced employees trying to redefine themselves. In this interview, she shares some of her tips for getting the interview:

•  Avoid becoming trapped by HR screening. Use LinkedIn to determine who the hiring manager might be and target them directly.
• Indicate that you are negotiable in the cover letter and give a reason why you would be so that is specific to that company.
• Indicate in the interview that you do not have a fixed idea of your role and are willing to adapt to the company.
• Interview the interviewer to understand how they perceive the current crop of job candidates.

SRT's hiring is complicated by the fact that they are looking for highly functional people who will engage in two types activities:

• Outsourced software development where SRT completely manages the software development process.
• Software mentoring where SRT backs up existing company development teams with software engineering expertise to make the resulting solutions more scalable and robust.