causeblog

Just saw a great article on the importance of online reviews for products. According to the author, there are a couple of interesting bits of info for those new to the process:

• After about 20 comments, search engine rankings and click-throughs increase.
• Retailers needn’t be afraid of a few bad reviews if they are confident in their product: “…a handful of bad reviews, it seems, are worth having. ‘No one trusts all positive reviews,’ [Google's retail industry director John McAteer] says. So a small proportion of negative comments—’just enough to acknowledge that the product couldn’t be perfect’—can actually make an item more attractive to prospective buyers.”
• For products with a large volume of reviews, a ranking system for the helpfulness of reviews increases trust and allows for a blend of ‘most recent’ and ‘most relevant’ reviews to be aggregated into a glanceable area.

Read the full article in The Economist’s 5 Mar 09 print edition “Fair Comment” column, or here.

In my work with clients, I often remind them how important it is to carefully review documents before signing them—especially as it relates to inserting yet more provisions.

For a while now, Causeit has been searching for a new office space. After a round or two of false starts, including one we were almost ready to sign on, we found the perfect spot. What has the new place work so well is that we carefully crafted a list of wants (negotiable) and needs (non-negotiable) before we ever saw an office. We even came up with a one-sheet of what it might look like and a list of our needs and wants:

Our mini-floorplan and wishlist

This meant that when we looked through the lease (a generic and exhaustive document covering almost every industry and largely, of course, favoring the landlord,) we were able to quickly identify potential sticking points. Some of the changes we made:

• Negotiating a less-restrictive clause about bringing material in and out of the building (we have a lot of loading and unloading to do)
• Clarifying use of the office to include our deskshare concept for business incubation and network-building, so that no confusion would happen in the future regarding whether or not deskshares qualified as sublets
• Finding out exactly what we were permitted to do with the space regarding subletting and assignment (the process of handing off responsibility in the lease to another party) so that we know exactly what will happen when we go to expand

At Causeit, we often use outlines or other organizing tools to help process the huge volume of information and brainstormed ideas in staff or client meetings.

comapping.com

We’ve struggled to find a solution that works to meet the needs of our clients across the board, though. Simple solutions like word processing documents are often too limited, graceful desktop apps cost money and/or are platform-specific and may not share easily, and web apps online only work with a good internet connection and often have limited features.

In a blog entry from GTD Times we may have found a solution in Comapping. It’s not ‘battle-tested’ yet, but seems to be an affordable software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution for sharing thoughts, collaboratively authoring outlines and mindmaps, and even beginning the work of coming up with task delegation. It looks like it will work both online and offline (using Adobe Air), and the interface, while not the sexiest, is a good blend of power and entry-level accessibility.

Jury’s still out, but you can check it out at Comapping.com.

Found on Guy Kawaski’s How To Change The World

My favorite company of the day: Posterous. If TypePad is blogging, and Twitter is nano-blogging, then Posterous is mini-blogging. Or, blogging for the rest of us. You send an email to post@posterous.com with pictures, PDFs, video, etc, and voila! you have a blog.