I have a number of friends/acquaintances who are involved in various ways in the incoming Obama administration. I wrote to them roughly the following note:

I realize that everyone you know is now deluging you with their advice on how the country should be run, in the hopes that you could get their ideas to the right ears. I wanted to take the liberty to share with you also three ideas which would have no significant marginal cost, and would be of great value in addressing the current economic crisis. I also realize that you and the rest of the transition team have undoubtedly thought of these ideas; I’m adding in my vote that these are initiatives with high returns on political and financial capital.

1) Increase immigration by people with capital. There are approximately 2.2 million vacant homes in America. There are far more than 2.2m families in the world who want to move to the US and hope that their child grows up to be President. These immigrants will create economic activity and fill those vacant homes. This fact should allow the administration to override the forces that oppose immigration.

2) Radically simplify the tax code. I’m sure you’ve seen the estimates that the cost of compliance with the 67,204 pages of US tax law is equal to 10 to 24% of total tax revenues. Worse, the cost of compliance is effectively a regressive tax. With the right tax structure, you can increase (or keep flat) government revenues, while simultaneously increasing corporate profits and creating jobs. I realize that many people will oppose a flat tax, but even if you simply introduced a progressive tax with no deductions, exemptions, etc., you would make compliance dramatically more efficient. The big obstacle to reforming the tax code is that every politician has a pet interest that the existing tax code subsidizes. The current air of crisis may create a unique opportunity to get politicians aligned that fundamental reform is necessary….which it is.

3) Promote healthy eating. This is great for the environment, saves money, and promotes health…particularly for lower-income urban residents who tend to eat unhealthy diets. There are non-coercive and money-saving measures that the government can take to promote healthy eating. The easiest way to address our health-care crisis (the elephant in the economic room) is to promote people being healthy, and improving their diet is by far the simplest way to do that.

Sites for posting and sharing music have democratized the music business to the point where any aspiring artist or band can get their music heard.  The downside, of course, is with so much music freely available, full-time musicians are finding it more difficult to make a living.  The NY Times has written a state of the industry piece, “Songs from the Heart of a Marketing Plan,” about how more musicians are creating tunes designed for  licensing in commercials and movies, rather than taking chances on developing a unique identity.

There is another exciting, and growing, upside to music sharing on the web – the ability for musicians to collaborate online, with others around the world to create new sounds, songs and even bands.  I heard the creators of Indaba speak recently.   Founded by a pair of modest early 20-somethings, Indaba has put together an easy to use and compelling site for posting tracks – a bass and drums groove; a piano and voice demo, etc; - and inviting others to layer on more sounds – guitar, a better voice, electronic percussion – to build music across borders.  Now that the site has become more intensely useful with online track editing and project management, contests with the Berklee College of Music, plus negotiation over copyright use, it’s gained thousands of users and support of artists such as Third Eye Blind who are allowing musicians to remix their basic tracks even before their album comes out.

Then there’s Share My Lyrics, which is encouraging people to post complete lyrics or just snippets, get feedback on their skills, write lyrics together and sell them.

Music could be the easiest art form to create collaboratively online, given the way one person can layer a musical concept on top of the framework of other people’s tracks within minutes.  But the same concept can be applied to any art form that can be digitized – manipulated digital photography, video, fiction, poetry, even dance – with the right editing tools.  See NPR Radio’s Jan.5 story on wovels – novels on which readers vote an direction for next weeks’ chapter installment and DanceForms for PC-based dance choreography software that no doubt can be translated to a Web 2.0 platform.

I’d heard this was going on, but I just received my first one of these, so I figured I’d better share it with everybody. I received an email that looks like a Twitter direct message notification:

I was a bit suspicious of the message and URL (http://twitterblog.access-logins.com/login), and Google Chrome (my new default browser since Firefox went crazy on me) was kind enough to give me a possible phishing alert when I went to the site.

The site looks exactly like Twitter — the URL is the only give-away. But if you put your user name and password in, you’ve just let someone hack your Twitter account.

The notification will appear to be from someone you know — the follower data is publicly available if your profile is open. It doesn’t necessarily mean their account has been hacked. If uou only get an email notification, not an actual Twitter DM, then their account is probably OK. If you receive one of these as an actual Twitter DM, then they’ve probably been hacked and should immediately change their password.

On the topic of passwords, I know a lot of people use the same password everywhere. BAD IDEA!!!

I hope it’s obvious why you shouldn’t do it. The problem, of course, is trying to manage/remember multiple passwords. One approach is to use some kind of password management software, but that only works from your own computer, and you’re in trouble if you want to log on from somewhere else.

In Chapter 16 (pp. 140-141) of The Virtual Handshake (free download or buy at Amazon), we offer a simple scheme for creating passwords that are unique for each site, but not easily decipherable if someone obtains a single password. I’ve found, though, that more and more sites are requiring longer passwords — sometimes 8 characters — and also doing things like requiring both numbers and letters in the password. A couple of years ago, I posted a little more complex password scheme that should meet those requirements.

Developing a secure password management scheme is one of the single best things you can do to protect against online identity theft.

I enjoyed reading Outsell’s new report on Social Media in Scientific, Technical and Medical Information Part 1: Social Networking.

The most useful aspect of the report is that it includes the most extensive list I’ve seen of gated professional online networks. A trend I’ve been following for a long time (and worked on while running Circle of Experts) is gated online communities for professionals. If you want to know where scientists, businesspeople, doctors, etc., are congregating online, this report can give you guidance. For another (free) list and more information on this topic, see http://leadernetworks.com/.

The report does have some holes:
- It does not discuss the millions of small online communities on the Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, etc. platforms.
- It does not include Albourne Village, the leading online community for the hedge fund/private equity sector.
- It lists only a few expert network companies in which the client pays, but omits the largest ones: Gerson Lehrman, Vista Research, Evalueserve, etc. For a longer list of expert network companies (and also great advice if you’re seeking consulting opportunities/a job), see 8 Steps to Running a Diversified Job Search on the Web.

The most insightful point in the report is that it observes the very conspicuous lack of trade associations. You would think that the industry trade associations would be aggressively building online communities for their members, but there are surprisingly few examples. There is a business opportunity in helping associations to go on-line, before they become disintermediated.

(Disclosure: Outsell recently listed Evalueserve as the fastest-growing Market Research, Reports & Services (MRRS) company globally, in a separate report.)

A little while ago, I gave a speech at NYU Stern Business School on “How to Squeeze Maximum Value from Business School: Leverage Your Education to Accelerate Your Career”. How can you maximize the benefits of all the years and all the money that you invested in your business education?

I prepared the Powerpoint for my personal reference, for my friends starting school, and for any of my future children who may go to business school. My main focus is business students, but the principles I discuss are relevant regardless of the exact subject you are studying.

To prepare this paper I interviewed many of my MBA classmates on what were the most effective uses of their time during school. I also probed to learn about what were the least effective uses of their time.

I thought that you might find the slides, below, of interest.

With the growth of Twitter, it seems there’s been a surge in the use of URL shorteners. They’re also an essential for mailing lists, including Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups, as links over a certain length (40-50 characters) will break for people who use plain-text email.

TinyURL.com was the original, and is still widely used. But depending on your needs, there are probably some better solutions for you. Here are my three favorite URL shorteners, for various reasons:

is.gd – It’s supposed to be a URL shortener, right? But because of its fairly long domain name and its widespread popularity, TinyURL now generates URLs that are 25 characters long (http://tinyurl.com/6527hq), while is.gd generates them 17 characters long (http://is.gd/bOln). Maybe not a big deal on a Yahoo! Group, but extremely important on Twitter. It’s also built in to Twhirl, my Twitter client of choice.

budurl.com – For serious marketers, this thing is pretty cool. It gives you extensive tracking reporting. Free for light use, reasonably priced for heavier use.

snurl.com (aka snipurl.com) – TinyURL now lets you create custom aliases for links, but that’s a recent addition – snurl has been doing that all along. It also includes tracking capabilities – not quite as extensive as budurl, but ample to satisfy most people’s curiosity.

New addition 12/19/2008:

TwitPWR - Intended to be used only for Twitter, this cool tool ranks the top URL sharers and hot URLs, as well as showing recently posted URLs by TwitPWR users. It also shows a tiny bar at the top of the site showing who shared the link originally (follow my link to see it in action). Seems like a great way to get a little extra exposure for your Twitter link sharing. Hat tip to @joelcomm.

Do you have another favorite (or love one of these)? Leave a comment and tell us which one and why.

Thank you to those of you who attended my keynote at the America Outdoors annual conference last week. It was also a pleasure to meet and visit with so many of you after the session. I can tell social media is going to be a very hot topic in this industry in the coming year.

As promised, here are my presentation decks from both the keynote and the breakout session. As I mentioned, this whole thing happened on rather short notice, so I didn’t really have time to build out additional notes, but if you have any questions that the slides themselves don’t answer, feel free to email me (my email is in the presentation) or leave a comment below.

America Outdoors Keynote - How To Stand Out Online

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

America Outdoors Breakout - Using Social Media To Drive Customers To Your Website

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

A few more helpful resource links:

• Download The Virtual Handshake free
• Download The Emergence of The Relationship Economy free (sign up for our mailing list top right to receive it)
• Read our new e-book, Socialutions: Management Methods for The Social Era
• Connect with me on Twitter / Facebook / MySpace / LinkedIn (be sure to mention America Outdoors). I’m also on Ryze, Ecademy, Gather and others, so if you are too, look me up.
• Be sure to also connect with Leesa Barnes, who was originally scheduled to speak at the event. She has some great additional resources about social media, particularly free podcasting resources.

I hope you’ll join me for this Dec. 16 Free Webinar on ‘Where are the Deals?! Private Equity Funds’ Best Practices in Deal Origination’.
This is the sneak preview of the research I’ve been conducting with Evalueserve on this topic. My colleagues and I have interviewed over 90 private equity and VC professionals to learn their best practices.

UPDATE: The webinar is now posted on the website on this link: Where are the Deals?! Private Equity Funds’ Best Practices in Deal Origination

TIME: December 16 at 11am PST/2pm EST

REGISTER HERE: http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=asynvucab.0.0.6h66tbcab.0&p=https%3A%2F%2Fwww2.gotomeeting.com%2Fregister%2F588842200&id=preview

Sponsored by: Alliance of Merger & Acquisition Advisors

This event will be recorded for those who cannot make this time slot. Also, you can see the slides from this presentation here: http://www.teten.com/deals, and below.

I will discuss:
-> In the current tough climate, how can you lower your deal origination costs?
-> How are you positioning yourself to become your target’s preferred investor?
-> What are the primary sources of deal flow for institutional investors?
-> How can you use online networks and other “Web 2.0” internet technologies to increase your pool of sources?
-> What are the earmarks of a potential investment opportunity?
-> What best practices from sales and executive recruiting can you apply to the deal origination process?
-> How do you increase your inflow of useful referrals?
-> What is the best way to make warm cold calls?

REGISTER HERE: http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=asynvucab.0.0.6h66tbcab.0&p=https%3A%2F%2Fwww2.gotomeeting.com%2Fregister%2F588842200&id=preview

We are seeking a volunteer who would like to help research and write a series of articles and slide presentations on deal origination by private equity and venture capital firms, particularly their use of Web 2.0 technologies. This is an ideal project for a current or recent MBA who is interested in learning more about institutional investing and Web 2.0 technologies. The focus of this research is how private equity and venture capital firms create a steady incoming flow of relevant potential investments.

I am in the process of leading a large-scale research project on deal origination, the results of which will be submitted to the Journal of Private Equity and some other leading journals covering the private equity/venture capital industry.

In the past few months, I have presented to a range of industry conferences on this topic. You can see the slides from the full presentation at http://www.teten.com/deals .

BENEFITS
+ Compensation: None
+ Hours/work location: Flexible. Work at your convenience and your preferred hours from home. Typically 1-5 hours per week.
+ Class credit (if you have a professor who approves your participation, and/or if you can recycle this work for a class)
+ Interact with private equity and venture capital partners and other thought leaders.
+ Gain public visibility for your research on the private equity/venture capital industry.
+ Learn about blogs, social network sites, and other Web 2.0 technologies.
+ Significant creative input and flexibility.
+ Very positive references (if merited).

YOUR RESPONSIBILITIES
+ Research background on the private equity/venture capital industry
+ Write portions of research papers on this topic
+ Interview executives in the private equity/venture capital industry and at Web 2.0 companies that interface with the industry
+ Execute certain analytics based on the dataset that we have built from our survey of over 90 private equity and venture capital professionals globally.
+ Create some Excel graphs and Powerpoint slides

QUALIFICATIONS
+ Strongly prefer someone with a current or recent MBA, JD, or other comparable advanced degree
+ Strongly prefer experience in financial services: investment banking, investment research, private equity, and/or venture capital
+ Require strong writing experience. Particularly value a high GPA in writing-dependent courses.
+ Excitement about being part of the team understanding in depth a critical part of the institutional investment industry.
+ Highly motivated self-starter who has a track record of continuous self-improvement, high achievement, and aggressiveness.
+ Strong interpersonal communication skills.
+ Poised, professional demeanor.

HOW TO APPLY
Contact via e-mail only; do not call. Save your resume in Microsoft Word format with the name “Last Name-First Name-Year.doc”, e.g., “Clinton-Bill-2008.doc”.

Include with your detailed resume:
+ Dates/hours of availability during December 08-April 09.
+ Writing sample
+ Physical location. You can do all of the work on this project remotely. However, if you are in the New York area, that is preferable.

Please make sure that you include all of the information that we request above, or we will not be able to consider your application. Please send resume and cover letter to Careers @ Teten.com with “Research Assistant” in the subject line.

I look forward to speaking at the Alliance of Merger & Acquisition Advisors’ 2009 Winter Conference, Jan. 20-22, in Orlando, FL. Some of the highlights of the event: a private equity forum, for private equity firms that want to showcase lower middle market companies. There is also a Deal Expo for discussing active buy/sell engagements. Some of the topics that will be discussed at the event: post-merger integration; corporate M&A; and my area of focus, deal origination. I’ll be speaking on how institutional investors and investment bankers are using a wide range of technology to raise capital, win more clients, and identify attractive investment opportunities. I hope that some of you can join us there!