Microsoft's Sidekick (via Danger) disaster foretells the end of Windows Mobile and the company's presence in the mobile market.

click hereto retweet From the comments and emails I've received, the benefits I described in the first half of Blogging's 11 Big Payoffs have hit home but also helped you think of new ways that your blog can help you build your business. I liked the issue raised in a comment by SaveMoneyCostCutting from last week. Sometimes it is a fine line between too much marketing and just enough. It is important to establish a position on this that will work based on what you're selling and to whom you're selling it. There's no one-size-fits-all on that one. Blogging is a tool you can use creatively to get out what you need to say to the world, and/or as a serious business tool for driving leads, creating advertising inventory (aka traffic), generating sales and building a brand. Just be true to the brand and the tone you establish. I also like jimfracis' comment that blogging helps him "shape his convictions". As I mention towards the end of the "Credibility" paragraph helping you to actually articulate what you know or believe is definitely a big benefit. If you think that blogging might be a great leads or revenue generator for your business, the problem is how to justify the fact that blogging is *really* time consuming, especially when you consdier that typically you'll spend at least the same amount of time marketing your blog as you do writing it, often more, sometimes, 2-3 times more. So to help you to decide whether to blog or not to blog, I'll outline the final 5 of Blogging's 11 Big Payoffs. I Can Email You When I Post to this BlogClick here to get notified of new posts to The Internet Strategist by Email Networking I think many people don't understand what it really means to "network" (not that I'm a guru). But instead of focusing on "networking" I'd like to talk specifically about "how to build" a network that will educate you, inform you, support you emotionally, and tell you about opportunities, and one that will also enable you to inform, support, provide opportunities for and educate it. This is a network that serves your needs 360 degrees. When you're building a network it's critical that people in your network know what it is that you need, and what you have to offer. Regularly publishing content that makes clear your areas of focus is a great way to help people very tangibly understand why they should connect with you. It's one thing to say you're an expert, it's another thing to write 50 articles about it that are read, appreciated, forwarded, reposted etc. Making it very clear what how you can help people is ironically also a great way for other people to figure out how they can help you. Customer Loyalty, Customer Service & Customer Education Product details, how-to instructions, usage hints can all be smart content to provide to build both sales and loyalty especially if your product is technically complex or has a lot of hidden features. A blog can be used like individual FAQ posts to answer both old and new customer questions. And just like FAQs, your posts/answers can highlight features that customers don't know about, or help customers understand the best way of using your product or service. Related Articles by Maisha:Blogging's 11 Big PayoffsTo Blog or Not to BlogBuilding Your Tribe - 6 LinkedIn Success Studies (final/part 3) Building Your Tribe - 6 LinkedIn Success Studies (part 2) Case Studies One of the greatest benefits of Case Studies is self-identification. Case studies offer detail and context about a specific situation your product resolved and provide more information about the customer you worked with. This is wonderful for potential customers, enabling them to see themselves and see their specific needs, situation, challenges not only laid out in front of them and tangibly understand that you can fix it. Social Media Content Social media strategies and campaigns are built around content. Whether the content is video, images, or text, those businesses who invested in the idea that "content is king" now have a leg up in creating social media strategies because they have a store of content that can be used to support, encourage and extend dialog. If you have a blog you also have the beginnings of a wonderful social media strategy. Consistent Presence Presuming you blog with some regularity, blogging, like all social media tools, has the excellent benefit of helping you strengthen more of your weak ties by communicating with large numbers of people frequently and with relevance. Advertising Revenue Not that I created this list in any order of priority, but I do advise making a mental note of how far down on the list this one is (at the bottom). While generating significant revenue from your blog by selling advertising can still work for some bloggers, these days it is a difficult way to justify the investment if advertising revenue is the only payoff. You have to either have a significant amount of traffic (I'd think about 50,000 page views minimum) or have a captive audience of readers who are extremely difficult to reach else where, or both. While Google AdWords are great it generates tiny amounts of monthly revenue for most bloggers so don't assume that's all you'll need! So Now What? You may have looked at this list of payoffs and recognized several that fit squarely into your business strategy. So now what? Armed even with knowledge of what reasonable goals are, I find that businesses trying to dive into the world of blogging are still somewhat at a loss for how to start. How on earth do I build an effective blog? How much time will it take? What tools are available and which ones make the most sense for our needs? How do I actually get all the payoffs? Stay tuned – next time we dive into the technical side of blogging and how to get started. Till then I look forward to hearing more about blogging benefits and what you get out of blogging for your business. Post Your CommentHave a question? Got something to share? Something I missed?Your feedback, comments, real world experience and tactical questions are an important part of the discussion. If you have a comment, question or feedback post it below.Share:Easily share "Blogging's 11 Big Payoffs pt 2" on TwitterFollow:Follow me on TwitterFeed:Add "The Internet Strategist"RSS updates to yourreader or your Web siteRead Related Articles by Maisha:Blogging's 11 Big PayoffsTo Blog or Not to BlogBuilding Your Tribe - 6 LinkedIn Success Studies (final/part 3) Building Your Tribe - 6 LinkedIn Success Studies (part 2)

An amended lawsuit filed over the Schering-Plough pension plan alleges that executives at the company suspected as early as 2005 that the Enhance Vytorin trial was a bust. Citing a "confidential informant," it also names names.

Folks, I have an announcement to make: Team Taskmaster is taking its final bows this week. After a year and a half of sharing with you my take on productivity, leadership, and management, I've decided it's time for me to move on. But I don't want to leave you all high and dry, so for the next few days I'm going to recap some of the most helpful and/or popular Team Taskmaster posts. First up: hacking your career. You already know you need a killer resume, right? Well, there's plenty of fine-tuning you can do to really make it sing. First, decide if your CV should be one page or two (the experts like one). Next, apply five simple tips...

Kathy and Warren Miller run a mom-and-pop grocery store in tiny Elmore, Vt. (pictured at left), and soaring credit card fees are strangling it. In congressional testimony on Thursday, she said they make only two cents whenever a customer pays for a 99 cent bag of potato chips with a credit card. On a 35 cent pack of gum, they lose money. The culprit? So-called interchange, or swipe, fees, which banks and Visa and MasterCard charge to merchants to handle credit and debit card transactions. These rates have tripled in the last decade, with American consumers last year paying the card association giants a total of roughly $48 billion in swipe fees. Visa and MasterCard set the fees on behalf...

In time for the Senate Finance Committee's expected vote on a health care bill Tuesday, small business advocacy group Main Street Alliance is planning events in 11 states to support a public health insurance option and what the group calls "a fair employer contribution."

[Update: I checked with the group, and by this they mean the requirement in the House bill, which exempts companies with less than $500,000 in payroll. Firms above that threshold would have to provide coverage or face sliding-scale penalties of 2% to 8% of payroll.]

Along with the Small Business Majority, the Main Street Alliance has been pushing for health reforms from the left, in line with what most progressive advocates favor. That means a strong public option to compete with private insurers and drive costs down. It also means expanding coverage by mandating individuals (to buy) and employers (to offer) coverage. Those provisions would be coupled with tax credits to help small businesses shoulder the cost.

The position is on the other side of more established small business groups, notably the right-leaning National Federation of Independent Business, which helped kill health reform in 1994. The NFIB has fought any employer mandates and the public option, saying it will eventually put private insurers out of business and reduce choice. (The NFIB's take on the current proposals is here.)

The Senate Finance bill in its current form replaces a public option with nonprofit "health care cooperatives." Instead of an employer mandate, as the other major proposals in Congress have, the Finance bill has a "free-rider" provision. That would make companies with over 50 employees who don't offer insurance contribute to any public subsidies their workers qualify for. As with the others, the Senate Finance plan includes tax credits to help small businesses afford insurance.

The big question is whether any health reform can rein in the runaway costs that force small businesses to drop coverage or limit benefits. For a look inside what drives those cost increases, take a listen to the health care special that ran on This American Life this weekend. And for more coverage on the reform bills and the lobbying behind them, check out BW's Money and Politics blog and ongoing health reform reporting.

A 1973 experiment demonstrates how much a leader's communication about time influences people's behavior in powerful and often unexpected ways.

Social psychologists John M. Darley and C. Daniel Batson went to a seminary and explained to a group of seminarians that they were there to verify their skills to give an impromptu speech. An assistant waited for the seminarians in another building in order to record them as they were giving the speech. As the seminarians walked to the building, they ran into a man in desperate straits (an actor on the researchers' payroll): he was alone, leaning on the wall, complaining as violent coughs shook him.

The question was: would the seminarians stop to help the poor man? Who will actually stop?

The researchers introduced three variables: first, using a questionnaire, they measured the motivations at the root of their subjects' religious feelings. Second, they split the seminarians into two groups: the first was assigned a speech on the value the experience in seminary could have in professions other than the religious ministry. The second group was asked to comment on the parable of the Good Samaritan (a story Jesus told about a man who stopped to help a wounded person on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho.) No statistically meaningful correlation was found between either of the two variables (motivation and subject of the speech) and whether or not the seminarists stopped to succor the man.

Now for the third variable. When the seminarians were about to reach the building of the speech, one group was told they still had a few minutes before the speech, a second one they were exactly on time, and a third was told they were late and had to hurry.

Darley and Batson found out the choice whether or not to succor the man (and therefore his fate) was determined by a time factor: in general, those who thought they had enough time at hand stopped and helped; those who were late did not.

Now ask yourself: how would my employees react in that scenario?

It is not possible to talk about leadership without taking into account the messages a leader conveys about time management and the risks carried by a dysfunctional relationship with time. To make the most of her employees' time, a leader must:

1) Establish a shared language that distinguishes between the "pressure on time" and "impact on goals" factors.

Team leaders often fail to make this distinction clear. Tasks are transmitted without specifying if the emphasis on such task is due to:

1. the fact the task has a remarkable impact on the individual or group's goals;
2. the restricted timeframe within which the task must be completed;
3. a combination of the above mentioned two factors

It is essential to clearly distinguish these factors. For example, the term "urgency" may be used to denote the degree of pressure with respect to time, "importance" to denote the degree of impact a certain activity has on the achievement of goals, using Stephen Covey's distinction. Thus, urgency and importance become two separate attributes of a task, which can be present at the same time or not. But it's the leaders job to make explicit what, to her, "urgent" and "important" mean, and which tasks are which.

2) Reduce those activities that, despite being important, must be performed under pressure.

These activities, by definition, must be performed at the highest level. Yet the time pressure — the urgency — has a negative impact on the quality of the outcome.

Teresa Amabile's research clearly demonstrates how pressure over time is not food for creativity at all — a necessary quality to perform high-impact activities in a great way. Creative ideas need some sort of incubation period which allows them to emerge. Oftentimes, pressure over time (especially if accompanied by frequent distractions) negatively influences such process of internalization and creation of new solutions.

A successful leader reduces "urgent and important" activities to a minimum, by monitoring:

1. How tasks are planned and delegated.
2. How "urgent and important" activities can be reduced.
3. How much free-of-distraction time people have for high-impact activities.

If a leader does not monitor these principles carefully, she may find herself leading a team of deeply motivated people busily working away at tasks that are not a priority — like the seminarians who, though they were motivated by their religious beliefs and about to give a sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan, did not stop to succor someone in need.

Luca Baiguini is Professor of Organizational Behaviour and Personal Development at MIP – Politecnico di Milano, and co-founder of Mindpoint, an international training company. His research interests include: persuasion strategies, public speaking, the relation between communication about time and team performance, communication about occupational hazard. Follow Luca on Twitter: twitter.com/lucabaiguini

If you view AT&T and Google as squabbling high-tech siblings and the Federal Communications Commission as the harried parent, then AT&T has won the latest round of attention-getting theatrics, thanks to the FCC's Friday decision to investigate Google Voice. It was the carrier's initial complaint against Google in late September that prompted the government's probe regarding Voice.

There was a time when escaping the 9 to 5 grind seemed liberating. Freed from cumbersome office traditions, the worker of tomorrow could show up in jeans whenever they wanted, since they could finish their proposal on the beach or navel-gaze over the next big idea on the golf course. However, as more workers see their 9 to 5 routine vanish, they'll see just how absurd this fantasy is.

The Western film industry, which has traditionally viewed India merely as a market for its movies, is suddenly keen to tap into Indian capital and talent. In early summer, Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks closed a whopping $825 million co-production deal with Indian industrialist Anil Ambani's Reliance Big Entertainment. And Charles Darby, the legendary British special effects artist who worked on epic movies like Titanic and Matrix, is building a special effects studio in Mumbai that he hopes will match rivals in London and Hollywood. Darby's new Indian venture is financially backed by Eros International, a UK-based Indian film production and distribution house.

Is the Western film industry's infatuation with India just a fad? Can it be sustained? While there clear opportunities for Western players in India, how can they overcome cultural and business barriers that could break down creative partnerships across borders? To answer these questions, our Centre hosted an event that explored how the Indian film industry is going global, its various engagement models with Western players, and the resulting opportunities for the international cinema industry.

Among the guest speakers were Anupam Kher, the international actor and global entrepreneur; Patrick von Sychowski, the COO of AdLabs, a Reliance Big Entertainment Company; Parminder Vir OBE, an executive producer and media consultant; Partho Sen-Gupta, an independent film director; and Simone Ahuja, a Principal at Blood Orange Media and a film director.

All speakers concurred that it's the ideal time for the Indian film industry to engage with the West. The rapid growth of the Indian economy has spawned a savvy middle class seeking to watch world-class movies, while affluent producers like Reliance Big Entertainment are being wooed by cash-strapped Hollywood studios. Bollywood star Anupam Kher claimed that this is the "golden age" of Indian cinema, as it gains more in self-confidence and starts working with the West on its own terms.

Patrick von Sychowski of Reliance Big Entertainment walked us through the rationale behind his firm's $1 billion plan to co-develop and co-produce movies with Hollywood heavy hitters like Steven Spielberg, Brad Pitt, and Julia Roberts. He explained that Reliance is keen to develop a success formula that seamlessly blends Western professionalism and Eastern creativity to systematically produce cross-border blockbusters such as Slumdog Millionaire that captivate the global audience.

Parminder Vir noted that after operating for decades as a parochial cottage industry the Indian film sector is finally getting more professional and its players are acquiring a global mindset as they internationalize their operations. She boldly predicted that in the coming decade, the Indian film industry would have a global socio-economic impact similar to what the Indian IT outsourcing industry achieved in the 2000s. She encouraged wary US and European producers and directors to warmly welcome the globalisation of Indian cinema as they stand to handsomely profit from it.

But not everything will be hunky-dory as East meets West in the global creative economy. In a panel discussion titled "How to Build and Orchestrate Transnational Creative Networks?" and moderated by Judge Business School Professor Jaideep Prabhu, the speakers addressed key business, legal, and social-cultural issues that could make or break cross-border co-production deals. They noted that while Chinese movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon have achieved huge international success, the Indian film industry has yet to produce a global blockbuster (Slumdog Millionaire being more an exception than the rule). But everyone agreed that it's a matter of years (if not months) before India starts producing a steady stream of world-class movies from its mutually beneficial creative partnerships with the West.

What intrigued me the most during this event is the fact that many audience members (practitioners from the UK/European film industry) aired their concern that Hollywood is coming to India purely for financial reason and that the Indian cinema's engagement with greedy Western partners will stifle its free-flowing creative spirit. I can't disagree more: for millennia, invaders and traders have come to India in pursuit of economic gains. Rather than destroying India's socio-cultural identity, these foreigners not only enriched it, but they found their own identity dramatically altered as they interacted with Indians.

The way I see it, Hollywood's growing ties with Bollywood will be a two-way street, leading to a creative marriage that harmoniously mingles Hollywood's structured approach to film-making with India's flexible and tolerant mindset. As such, Hollywood will help accelerate the Indian film industry's professionalization. In turn, as Anupam Kher quipped, "the Indian cinema, steeped in improvised creativity, will help uptight Hollywood loosen up a bit, and get risk-averse and profit-hungry Western producers to realize that film-making should ultimately be about having fun." If that happens, then Hollywood's partnership with Bollywood will turn out to be a win-win deal.