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Door-to-Door Selling: "Timing is Everything."

2009-10-31T20:10:25-04:00

ATLANTA, GA - Tonight's Halloween, and our neighborhood is packed with kids. My wife and I have five kids, so Halloween is one of the most eagerly anticipated holidays of the year. I'm the candy guy in our house; When the doorbell rings, it's my job to give out the candy to trick-or-treaters.

Obviously, everyone's in a festive mood ...

At roughly 6:00pm, the little kids start to arrive. It's the usual mix of pirates, ghosts, princesses, etc. Smiles all around. You know the drill.

Then at roughly 6:45pm, two co-eds from our local high-school ring the doorbell. Agewise, they're on the high side of trick-or-treat and the low side of adulthood. I'm guessing 15. They're not in costume, but they look nice in their Roswell HS sweatshirts. I answer the door.

"Trick or treat?" I ask. "No thanks!" they chirp. "We're raising money for Habitat for Humanity! Can you make a small donation?" This was a first. I've given out lots of candy for Halloween, but never money.

But seriously, what am I going to say? "No??" Grinch! So I say yes. And here's the thing: I WANTED to say yes. After all, I had been saying yes all night long to other kids whose requests were far less noble.

This is a marketing blog, and this is a marketing post about a three point marketing plan that I think is brilliant:

Target a market that can afford your product. We live in a desirable neighborhood, and the amount of the donation was discretionary. I presume that Habitat for Humanity had HS kids working the nicest neighborhoods in Atlanta.
Market to the prospect when you know you can reach them in the right frame of mind. Marketers, this is so important. The difference between salad and garbage is timing. These kids knew we were home -- and they knew that we'd answer the door with our guard down. If they had come on any other night, I'm not sure we would have answered the door. Well, maybe I might have, but my wife might not have. Safety first. And on any other night, it's almost a given that we would have been in a less charitable mood. We're charitable, but like everyone, we're more charitable at some times than others.
Give your prospect a chance to jump on the bandwagon -- then appeal to his vanity. As they were pitching their cause, they asked me to look over a manifest of people on my street who had already donated (and the amounts). Naturally, since I could tell that the average neighbor had donated ten bucks, I wanted to donate more because my ego shouted out "Don't be average!" Again, the larger donation was about my ego -- not my benevolence. Maybe deep down, I wanted my next door neighbor to look at the manifest and say to himself, "Check out Harry's donation. What a guy!" Again, this makes me more schmuck than saint. Whatever. No surprise there.

Of course, I'm sure Habitat for Humanity planned it this way. Which is fine. It's a great cause and I'm glad I could help out. But I have seen a ton of door-to-door marketing in my time, and I thought this fund-raising tactic was pretty slick.

Don't you?

Twitter and B2B marketing: A simplification.

2009-09-22T21:19:00-04:00

ATLANTA, GA - I read somewhere that a great blogger will never start a post by making excuses for why he hasn't been blogging. Good thing I'm not a great blogger.

As discussed last month, I have started devoting considerable time and attention to Twitter. My reasoning is basically this: Nearly 90% of my blog's traffic comes from Google, so once you have arrived at this page, statistically speaking, you are most likely to read one post and then call me, email me, or subscribe to my newsletter.

I'm simplifying things, but that's what happens 90% of the time.

And usually, once that happens, you become a "fan." At that point you usually subscribe to my Twitter feed. All of this is part of a marketing process designed to escort each new candidate or client (I can never tell which) though the process of Awareness ... to Interest ... to Desire ... to Action. Like so:

The old AIDA model. Works every time, especially in B2B.

Now clearly, not every visitor becomes a fan. But that doesn't matter very much, because I'm only concerned with those who do. No one is universally loved. What's pop to some is soda to others, and there's no accounting for taste. At the end of the day, I'm in the emotional bond business. That's what personal branding is all about.

But I digress.

My point is that I have discovered that it is FAR more productive for me to use Twitter to stoke my fans' Interest, Desire, and Action than it is to blog in an attempt to raise Awareness. I mean, once you have found me on Google, the work of my blog is done. Sure, you can read more than one post if you need convincing of my "thought leadership" before you subscribe to my searches. But statistically speaking, you won't. My analytics package says you won't, and there's nothing as devastating to an opinion as a number. Besides, my fans pay my bills.

No offense to you newcomers.

Think of it this way: Assume that you could financially afford to only make 10,000 impressions on your market this year. Would you rather make one impression on 10,000 strangers, or 10 impressions on 1,000 friends? Exactly. And since I'm self employed and time is money, there's no point spending a ton of time on a low payoff activity. My blog is about raising Awareness through SERPs. It's about being ... found. Twitter is about contributing something meaningful to the market's conversation.

It took me a while to understand that.
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What I like most about self-employment.

2009-07-29T23:35:06-04:00

SEATTLE, WA - What you are looking at is a fine example of lazy blogging! It requires almost no time or originality on my part, yet you'll enjoy yourself for the next couple of minutes and maybe even send a link to your friends. Call it McThought Leadership. Mark Twain would be proud.

The video you're about to see features Amazon's Jeff Bezos explaining why his company bought Zappos. Frankly, it's hard to imagine that Zappos was so good at customer service that Jeff Bezos admired them enough to acquire them. But that's what the man says. Does Mr. Bezos expect Zappos' culture to infect Amazon enough to pay for itself? Apparently. Yet Amazon already has awesome customer service. Couldn't Mr. Bezos have simply raided the Zappos management team for less money? Apparently not.

By way of comparison, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway acquires businesses that meet all of the following criteria (see page 24):

Large purchases (at least $75 million of pre-tax earnings unless the business will fit into one of Berkshire's existing units),
Demonstrated consistent earning power (future projections are of no interest to Berkshire, nor are “turnaround” situations),
Businesses earning good returns on equity while employing little or no debt,
Management in place (Berkshire can’t supply it),
Simple businesses (if there’s lots of technology, Mr. Buffett "won’t understand it."),
An offering price (Berkshire doesn't want to waste their time or that of the seller by talking, even preliminarily, about a transaction when price is unknown).

Re: Zappazon -- Make of this what you will.

In the following video, Mr. Bezos discusses the importance of inventing (2:59) and thinking long term (3:58). I do that a lot. In fact, I almost do it so much that I leave some of today's dollars on the table. Whatever. I don't think recruiters innovate nearly enough, and I look forward to the future in ways that most recruiters can't possibly imagine. And it's not because I'm smart.

Not at all.

Being able to innovate and experiment is one of the all-time great advantages of being self-employed. My biggest security lies in the total insecurity of my position. All of my paychecks are variable. Yet there's nobody (other than my wife) to tell me I can't buy such-and-such a domain or whatever. I just get a wild hair, and boom. Sometimes I'm wrong. Sometimes I'm right. And sometimes it's still too early to tell.

I'm fine with that. In fact, it's what I like most about self-employment. Today, I'm 45 and self-employed and relevant. In ten years I'll be 55 and self-employed. Whether or not I'm relevant remains to be seen.

Let's see how well I innovate.

Web Usability: "Keeping an Eye on the Competition"

2009-07-08T20:53:36-04:00

DETROIT, MI - My friend, Kevin Ertell over at RetailShakenNotStirred has a great post on web usability titled "Is elitism the source of poor usability?"

According to Kevin, "Most sites are still achieving single digit conversion rates even though customer intent-to-purchase rates are 20% or higher in most cases." Kevin suspects that this problem stems from sites being too complicated for the average user.

I'm sure he's right. And it's not that users are stupid; it's that the average consumer gets hit with +5000 commercial messages a day and they just don't have the time or patience for any site that doesn't conform to the Golden Rules of User Interface Design.

The result? A site's passersby intend to purchase something +20% of the time, but more than half of the time, they are prevented from doing so by poor usability. So mathematically, a site's owner could more than DOUBLE his revenues by simply improving his site's usability. >Forehead smack!<

Friends, this ain't about traffic. It's about optimizing the user's experience, and according to Kevin the best way to do that is to simplify one's approach to web design. Hence Kevin's question, ...

"Is elitism the source of poor usability?"

As an ecommerce recruiter, I see this all the time. Web designers fail to see their work as a means to greater customer intimacy and instead get caught up the latest widgets and gadgets that will give them bragging rights among their friends. Crazy.

Keeping an Eye on the Competition

Smart usability is often a byproduct of smart competitive intelligence, and sometimes the best way to "keep it real" in web design is to see what your competitors are doing. Don't forget that if a customer intends to purchase something 20% of the time and you lose his interest more than half the time, he's likely going to buy from your competitor. Therefore, "good" usability is relative to your competition. You're not trying to change the world. Your simply trying to convert a sale. Period.

Here's a tip: Run a Google search for just the relevant product pages of specific competitors.

For example, if I worked for AJMadison.com and wanted to know what my competitors were doing, I might follow these steps:

1.) Use the "related" operator to see who Google thinks my competitors are based on the competitors' meta data, like so: http://tinyurl.com/m5s4hl

2.) Looking at my own homapage's source code, I would know that my own categories are: "Gas Ranges, Ovens, Stoves, Washers, Dryers, Dishwashers, bosch, ranges, refrigerator, oven, appliances, refrigerators, Air Conditioners, microwave, washer dryer combo, whirlpool"

3.) To get a basic feel for how a specific competitor merchandises their whole site, use the Google "site" operator, like this: http://tinyurl.com/mfraxn. It's often a good idea to run this search for every competitor (see step 1). Used with a Google toolbar and a highlighter key, you can see where and how the keywords appear on any product page -- and in my opinion this is a usability issue.

4.) Finally, to see how a specific competitor merchandises a particular product category, such as "gas ranges," you can use a modified version of the Google "site" operator from Step 3. See http://tinyurl.com/nggdzb. (Check out the Adwords results on the right.)

It often helps to run this last search for every keyword in the homepage's source code. It's a pain, but this is a great way to see what navigational elements your competitors may be trying out.

Finally, two great browser plugins to complement this quick-n-dirty process are Chris Pederick's web developer toolbar for Firefox and of course, the almighty SEO toolbar by Aaron Wall. Both are free.

The SEO Toolbar can show you how well optimized any product page is in a given search result, which will tell you a lot about how important that product is to the success of a particular competitor's business. On a deeper level, it will automatically tell you the number of del.icio.us bookmarks a page has, the number of Diggs; the number of Stumbles; the number of Twitter mentions; and MUCH more.

As a rule, shoppers don't bookmark and Tweet and Stumble crappy pages. Sometimes the companies do these things themselves, but only for pages they feel proud. And in my experience, "important" pages are tested and tweaked more frequently than unimportant pages -- and those are the ones you really want to monitor for changes.
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Print Advertising and Reputational Search

2009-06-20T21:14:00-04:00

FUNNY STORY: From June 2005-March 2009, I was the only recruiter in America to advertise in Internet Retailer magazine. Online retail is my target market (for now), and Internet Retailer is my industry's flagship trade publication. Every month my ho-hum little classified ad was in the back, rain or shine, and every month no other recruiter's was. For 45 months. Imagine.

I'm not bragging. I'm not. I'm just amazed, that's all.

It was like getting away with murder. And it's not like my marketing strategy was some big, complicated thing: Every month, IR's invoices would land in my inbox, and every month I'd pay them. Talk about obvious. It was like pulling the lever on a slot machine that every so often would pay off in wild excess of my investment.

Just like I had read it would ...

According to John Caples' classic book Tested Advertising Methods, businesses that are serious about growth should think of advertising the way they might think about their rent: A "given" that should be counted on no matter what the market is doing.

So in 2005 I made the commitment to advertise for better or worse, and things worked out just fine. Still, I could never tell if that was because Mr. Caples was right or because I was advertising in a competitive vacuum. Being a cynic at heart, I assumed it was the latter.

Then in April of 2009, a rival recruiter began to advertise right next to me in IR magazine. I was incensed! How dare they??? But hey, it's a free country, and I knew things were too good to go on the way they were. The dream was over. I was drenched from head-to-toe in the icy reality of head-to-head competition. Or so I thought.

Here's what actually happened: It seems that when Internet Retailer's readers see two nearly identical classified ads side by side, they Google the companies in BOTH ads -- and whichever company has a more impressive online reputation gets the inbound sales lead! It was like a hockey face-off between recruiters, and lucky for me -- there's 497 pages of keyword rich content on my website.

In fact, when my competitor's ads started running, my webstats reported an +800% increase in searches for the keywords harry joiner. What's more, my overall number of inbound calls seemed to increase! My competitor's ads had a pie-enlarging effect on the market -- not a pie-rearranging effect!

Can you believe that? I would never have imagined that old-school classified ads would drive readers to Google -- but they CAN and DO. At least in my case.

Which leads me to this great resource: Steve Rubel and his colleagues at Edelmen Digital have written an excellent white paper called Search Engine Visibility and PR.

The gist of the paper is that there are two new SEM disciplines emerging:

Reputational Search - The idea that any brand can use Google to influence the search results around certain keywords. That's what happened above. People wanted to know about my reputation, so they Googled me. Satisfied in their knowledge, they called me. Like magic. Thank you, Mr. Back Link!
Social Search - Using social content from blogs, Twitter, and so on to create brand "embassies" (Mr. Rubel's term) where employees work to serve the interests of the community, as well as their company.

According to Mr. Rubel, "[Edelmen is] convinced that search engines for the foreseeable future will have a critical impact on how brands are perceived -- far more so than any single social network site, which tend to come and go."
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Does your business card suck?

2009-06-18T13:22:33-04:00

CHICAGO, IL - As someone who's self-employed, I'm a jobseeker. That's right. Everyday, I'm out there looking for a job to do, and the job I do is finding people jobs to do. Everyday I wake up broke. Everyday, the market determines my paycheck based on the value I create for my clients. Every frikkin day. And I love it.

Anyway. The guy below seems like a piece of work, but he raises some very valid points about business cards. The coolest business card anyone ever gave me looked like a real plastic laminated driver's license -- except that it was a "creative license." Funny. And I kept it, and later used the company, the owners of which became my personal friends. I forget how many other business cards from creative-types I have in my top desk drawer. Dozens. And that's the point of this post.

On the back of my next business card, I'm going to list the names of (some of) the companies for which I have closed searches ... A&E Television, Adidas, American Signature Brands, Ashford.com, Backcountry.com, Boot Barn.com, Columbia Sportswear, Crutchfield.com, David Weekley Homes, David’s Bridal, Dean & DeLuca, Design Within Reach, DSW Shoes, Golfsmith.com, Kennametal, Magellan’s Travel, Montgomery Ward®, MusiciansFriend.com, Peruvian Connection, PrintingForLess.com, REI.com, Restockit.com, ShopNBC.com, The Thompson Group, Williams-Sonoma, etc. After all, I'm known by the company I keep.

Jobseekers: Do you have a creative business card that CLEARLY and UNIQUELY transmits your value proposition? Better get on that.

How to Get an Ecommerce Job

2009-06-13T15:32:00-04:00

Editor's note: I first posted this article in Spring, 2007. For many months it was one of the most frequently read ecommerce articles on this site. However, due to some formatting problems involving Typepad's new platform, I am forced to republish this article here and now because I wanted to include it in a list called "INTERVIEW PREP" on the right hand side of this blog. Look right below my LinkedIn badge ...

In case you're wondering, the candidate below DID NOT get this job, and he has asked to remain anonymous. Whatever. It was a heroic effort, and there's no accounting for chemistry. My point in calling this post "How to Get an Ecommerce Job" is that all candidates must prepare this thoroughly to have any real hope of landing a $150K/up ecommerce job. Currently, the competition for such jobs is incredibly fierce -- and clients are being choosy to the point of indecisive in the face of so many great candidates. Thorough preparation is the best differentiator.

Many of this candidate's tactics are now standard operating procedure -- and some candidates have actually taken them a step farther. I'll be discussing some of these techniques in future issues of my newsletter. Subscribe now.

BOSTON, MA - One of the best things about specializing in direct-to-consumer multichannel retail is that I get to deal with some of the smartest people on earth. Honestly, they're amazing.

There's just so much happening in the multichannel marketing arena, what with all of the changes in the way consumers can discover, buy, and return products: catalog, internet, mobile phone, TV, inbound call centers, retail stores, you name it.

The candidates who deal with these ever-changing marketing and integration challenges are freaking brilliant. But they're clever, too -- and there's a difference.

Example: Three weeks ago I put a candidate in play for a VP of Marketing role with a large multichannel retailer. His first phone interview with the VP of HR was in six days, so I sent the candidate a massive pile of market research on the industry, the company, and its competitors. That's standard for me. I even offered to set him up on phone calls with industry analysts and vendors who know things about the company -- which he gratefully accepted. That's standard too.

But then he took it a step farther: That night, my candidate Googled several of the company's products to see how they placed in the organic search rankings. Satisfied that all of the queried products appeared on page one of the Google rankings, he proceeded to enter my client's site through their Adwords landing page in the paid search area of the Google results.

For the next 90 minutes, my candidate used a number of Firefox extentions to analyze the site's source code, merchandise selection, and layout. Finally, he ordered eight items from the company's website -- after having built and abandoned two shopping carts during his user session.

Minutes later, a confirmation email arrived stating that all online orders must be changed within two hours. Three hours later, he logged back on to the site to make changes to the order. When he started to have problems, he phoned the call center to complain. The customer service person was as nice as she could be and helped my candidate make the changes. He tried to be a jerk to her, but she managed the conflict with cordial professionalism.

The order shipped out the very next day. Three days later, the order arrived and my candidate ripped open the box and all of its contents. The product was in fine shape, so my candidate used two of the items. He then marched right down to my client's store and abrasively demanded a full refund for the order -- just to see what the retailer would do. Again, he tried to be unreasonable, but the store clerk complied happily with all of his demands.

During the check-out process, my candidate noticed a neat stack of my client's Spring catalogs next to the cash register and he began to reconcile the product numbers in the catalog against those for identical products on his order. They all matched ... In a last ditch effort to crash my client's customer service system, my candidate elected to make a substitution to his order -- accepting a refund for seven of the eight items he bought online, and asking to have the final out-of-stock item in a different color shipped to his house via overnight express.

The very next afternoon, the final item arrived at my candidate's house in excellent shape -- just in time for his phone interview with the VP of Human Resources.

Questions: How much do you think this candidate knew about my client after having gone to such great lengths to crash their multichannel fulfillment system? Do you think this candidate wanted to work for a company that goes to such great lengths to keep its customers happy?

If you answered "A bunch" and "Yes" to the above questions, then you got the point of this post.
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Three Ways to Outlearn Your Competition

2009-06-07T20:44:17-04:00

HOUSTON, TX - I have no idea who this drummer is, but this is some badass percussive thought leadership! Hard enough to conceive, let alone execute. The real pyrotechnics don't start until 1:18. Until then, he's just establishing a rhythmic theme for the piece.

So why am I putting this on an ecommerce blog? Three reasons:

I like the way the artist decided to make a tape loop (!!!) and take apart this impossible groove piece by piece. Musicians call this "woodshedding" -- getting back to the woodshed and practicing one's craft in isolation until it's ready for prime time. Most people lack that kind of discipline and focus. Geoffrey Colvin's wonderful book "Talent is Overrated" discusses the benefits of "deliberate practice," and that's that we have here. It's a boring pain in the neck to practice a lick over... and over... and over again, but when it's time to rock the party, you'll be ready to BRING IT.

This drummer video taped himself, and I'd sure he will review the footage until he's sick of it. Ask Tiger Woods about the benefits of such self-analysis. The video taping also tells us that the artist has a goal for his practice -- something very specific that he wants to improve. Wanna get better? No problem: Put it in writing. Vividly imagine it. Ardently desire it. Commit to it. Like this guy.

His YouTube profile says that he studied with Eric Harland, which says a lot about his artistic ambitions. It pays to aim high in the choice of one's heroes, mentors, and instructors. Likewise, hacks don't study with the best. Clearly, this guy wants to soar with eagles, and by the looks of his off-the-hook Afro-Cuban solo, we'll be seeing him on Drummerworld very soon.

QUESTIONS: Who are your marketing mentors? Are they the best in the business? What aspect of your game are you trying to improve? Why, specifically? Finally, do you practice your craft with intensity and focus until you get it right? Most people don't.

GM: "The numbers don't copulate."

2009-06-02T00:34:33-04:00

There is nothing as difficult and as expensive, but also nothing so futile, as trying to keep a corpse from stinking. -- Peter Drucker

DETROIT, MI - Today's news on General Motors reminds me of an old boss who'd occasionally misuse big words. One time our sales team was holed up in a budget meeting, and when the boss noticed some numbers that didn't make sense, instead of simply saying "The numbers don't add up," he said "The numbers don't copulate ...". He meant to say "calculate." Honest mistake.

By now you have read all about the GM bankruptcy filing. No need to rehash it here.

It's a shame, obviously, but you can't talk your way out of problems you behave yourself into: GM's problems took decades to make, and both management and labor are to blame. The whole relationship seems co-dependent to me, with each side enabling the others' behavior.

And what of it? Well, the U.S. government now owns 60% of a car company that it wouldn't buy if it didn't have to. Which means it's a bad investment, like lending money we don't have to a friend with a poor memory. It's also a flagrant violation of the time honored "ignore sunk costs" rule which warns capitalists (is that a bad word yet?) against throwing good money after bad.

This is not a political rant. It's a business rant.

The bailout will cost U.S. taxpayers a minimum of $60 billion, which is $206 for every man, woman, and child in America. My family's share will be $1442. Before my beloved Honda Civic was paid for last year, the payments were $189/month. My share of the GM bailout equals 7.6 monthly car payments. I don't own a GM car ...

... although now I own a tiny sliver of GM, the company. We all do. Same basic management. Same basic union. Same basic culture. Nothing has really changed, except that consumer confidence in the brand is plummeting. Would you buy a GM car? Me neither, not when I could buy a car from a profitable, well-run, non-union Honda plant down the road in Ohio.

GM's bankruptcy plan calls for the company to IPO in 2010, at which time the government will sell 10% of its 60% share. The government will sell its remaining shares over a 2-4 year period, as the stock appreciates.

But here's what doesn't add up: Why would any investor buy GM's IPO shares if he knew that the government was going to unload tons more stock on the market over the next few years? Makes no sense. And who would invest in a business fraught with serious, structural conflicts of interest, such as "Is it better for GM's investors (me and you) to manufacture automobiles in China at a profit -- or make them on U.S. soil with union labor and lose our shirts?"

Amigos, the road to heck is paved with good intentions. The only thing that's going to get copulated here are the U.S. taxpayers.
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Re-Tweet Meat from Ecommerce Jobs

2009-06-01T19:48:00-04:00

Okay, boys and girls: Here's a run down of recent Tweets from the EcommerceJobs Twitter feed. If you see something thought provoking, share your enthusiasm with the world by re-Tweeting it. Rock on!

WEEKEND READING: (23 pg pdf) Copywriting legend Ted Nicholas' classic "87 Marketing Secrets of the Written Word." http://tinyurl.com/nuhcrf

MICRO BOOK REVIEW: @tomfunk has written an AMAZINGLY handy 165-page guide to ecommerce titled "Web 2.0 and Beyond" http://tinyurl.com/p2r7zd

JOB SEARCH TIP: "Candidates, I cannot over-stress the importance of asking a hiring manager if his company is CURRENTLY profitable." A must.

INTERVIEW QUESTION: "Tell me one misperception people (team members) have of you." This tells if the candidate is self-aware.

WHAT'S YOUR DOMAIN WORTH? Professional domainers use Sedo.com, FlyAppraisals.com, & AccurateDomains.com. I like EstiBot.com, which is free.

WAVE OF THE FUTURE: "Where the Digital Revolution is Headed." One word: Mobile. http://ff.im/-3wHVd

HISTORY ALWAYS REPEATS: "Will the candidate stick around?" Check his LinkedIn bio to see, on average, how long he stays in a typical job.

INTERVIEW QUESTION: "How would your subordinates from recent years describe your approaches to training and developing them?"

INTERVIEW TIP: Marketing's job is to 1) sell MORE stuff to 2) MORE people 3) MORE often for 4) MORE money. Specifically, how can you help?

DOWNLOAD OF THE DAY: Kurt Vonnegut's "How to Write With Style." (2 page PDF) http://tinyurl.com/ml73vx

DOWNLOAD OF THE DAY: "How to Make Your Advertising Stand Out From Your Competition So People Call You First" (PDF) http://tinyurl.com/ouzhbw

DOWNLOAD OF THE DAY: "The Art of Attack: How to Attack & Dislodge Your Largest Competitors." (95 pg pdf) #strategy http://tinyurl.com/p4my3d

MAKE FLASHCARDS: "All top ecommerce candidates should be able to explain these SEO concepts." http://ff.im/-3eH9k

ECOMMERCE JOBS: Get this Twitter feed delivered to your Facebook homepage: http://tinyurl.com/okqmgo

I LOVE THIS: http://tinyurl.com/q9xnax

DOWNLOAD OF THE DAY: "What you find using Google is only a fraction of the information actually available online." http://tinyurl.com/p93kbk

MADE TO STICK: I'm reading "Made to Stick" by Dan Heath. It's awesome! Here's a summary of the key concepts (pdf): http://tinyurl.com/pfv9kk

RESEARCH TOOLS FOR JOURNALISTS: A treasure trove for any blogger who wants to write academically sound material. http://tinyurl.com/o8kal5

INTERVIEW QUESTION: "Describe your methods of diagnosing customer needs."