Jan

9

Blog carnival roundup

January 9, 2008 |

The January 7 edition of the Carnival of the Capitalists is hosted at Small Business Essentials and it’s a special one because it will be the last of its kind. Per Jay, co-creator of one of the best blog carnivals there ever was:

The experiment in improving quality while keeping it a traditional blog carnival has failed.

In keeping with that, this may be the last week in which entries are accepted via the Blog Carnival submission form. In keeping with that, and the fact they’ve never been posts may be suggested for inclusion by anyone, not just self-submitted by the blogger in question.

Which brings be back to Small Business Essentials.

As usual, I’m not going to review every post that was included this week but there were a couple that I though worth flagging for you.

Here’s one that caught my eye: the provocatively entitled The False Promise of Word of Mouth Marketing, by Paul McCord over at the Sales and Sales Management Blog. I agree with some of it and disagree with some of it but it’s meaty stuff, worth its own separate post for discussion. (I’ll get around to that, too … eventually.)

This week’s Carnival of Small Business Issues, which looks like it’s not going anywhere or changing radically anytime soon, was hosted by James Bloomer of Thiveal.

A number of the posts included were also included in the CotC (which is kind of annoying; I really wish people wouldn’t do that), but most noteworthy among the original posts here IMHO was David Bohl’s excellent Are you Exploiting Your Strengths?

There is a good deal of research indicating that if you are strong in an area, you can improve that skill exponentially with much less work than it would take to improve a weakness only marginally. I have certainly seen examples of people building on their strengths simply by working very hard in those areas. Practice really does make perfect, at least when you’re already very good at something.

It’s a neat idea, I think (being firmly convinced that everybody needs a bit of ego fodder in their lives). The only catch is that I’m left wondering how many of us are really good at honestly assessing ourselves and our strengths. After all, sometimes people will think of something as a strength because it is something that they like to do. But just because you like to do it doesn’t mean that you’re good at it.

On the other hand, if you like to do it and you keep doing it (practice) then you’ll probably get good at it over time. Which, I suppose, makes it one of those chicken-and-egg type issues.

As always, there’s lots more reading material for you to explore. So don’t just sit there … go exploring!

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  1. Are Your Prospects Nervous? « Sales and Sales Management Blog on January 10, 2008 9:30 am

    […] in this week’s edition, as well as Dawn Rivers Baker for her kind words about the article in The Journal Blog  did state that she disagreed with some of the article—that might generate an interesting […]

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