There’s a continual shift that seems to be happening on whether contextual advertising is better than behavioral. It seems that most people are becoming bigger and bigger on behavioral, and assuming that contextual has reached it’s peak. After meeting with a company that at first started to do both, blurring the lines, taking advantage of each when they had appropriate data it started to become clear that they more so have their place and time. Behavioral and Contextual shouldn’t be direct competitors.

I’ve done some recent advising for someone working on a site that’s of a social nature. The site is intended in some form to motivate users, the initial thought on this was to define a lot of rules, and send automated messages to users. To me this approach felt very 1990’s. So assuming that were true, then comes the question of how do you motivate users?

Three times in recent years I’ve had to micromanage others. Though probably in the contrary form to what you would expect. Most people think of micromanagement as their manager wanting to know every detail about their day, and be involved in every minute task. In most cases this form of micromanagement is never received well. Generally my feelings are that if I have to micromanage you, you don’t belong in the role you’re in, though I suppose exception cases may exist.

Most of my working career has been in what many would call an enterprise environment. Corporate structure well in place at most of them and in those cases any development followed closely to a waterfall methodology. You laid out requirements strictly and then built to those requirements. You essentially had nothing to show until you got to the end product.

Having been in the valley for several years and interacting with some startups and in other settings, I’ve seen a very opposite mindset. The “release early, release often” concept. First you never have clear requirements when dealing with anything a startup should be tackling, if it’s a very clear easy to solve problem, then someone else will have already tackled it. If you’re doing something new, which you should be you can’t gauge how users react, until you actually have something in front of them.

Something I learned very early on in my working career, not so much from my experiences but from observing the results of others, was to engage at a social level as early possible. This doesn’t mean you have to take time after 5:00 to get to know someone, the best opportunity exists every single day during what you would already do, lunch! Everyone usually takes a break and eats lunch during the day, usually there’s two groups in an office. Those that always go out, and those that bring their lunch or meet others for lunch or maybe even work through it. If you notice those in the first group in your office my guess it’s usually easier for them to get things done, they’re normally a little more in touch with things that are going on. Especially if you can manage to branch out a little and go outside of the people you work with every moment of the day.