I’ve been reading Six Pixels of Separation, the book by friend Mitch Joel. It’s a terrific read, well worth the $14 or so I spent on the Kindle version, but I’m amused by many of the comments and criticisms of the book, especially that it’s not a how-to book.

If you have any familiarity with the food world, you know of Alton Brown. Part Mr. Wizard, part Monty Python troupe member, Alton Brown spends an enormous amount of time in his show Good Eats on the why of food, rather than just the how.

How is the individual recipes. How to make pancakes. How to deglaze a pan. How to fry a turkey.

Why is the rationale behind the choices you make as a cook. Why is the muffin method used for certain recipes when the end product doesn’t look like a muffin? Why is water’s molecular structure so important to cooking?

Here’s the difference between how and why: how is for beginners. How is for the line cooks who just need to crank out predictable results over and over again. How can be accomplished by relatively untalented people or even by machines. How is good and useful, but how is not the way you become better at what you do once you’re no longer a beginner.

Ask any proficient chef how large their recipe card index is and they’ll give you a blank stare at best, because they’ve transcended the need for individual recipes. Professional chefs understand concepts and the why of cooking. Professional chefs understand that the flavors of tomato and basil go together at a subconscious level, so they don’t need the individual recipe cards that specify mixing X amount of tomatoes with Y amount of shredded basil leaves plus a pinch of salt. Professional chefs understand at a subconscious level that you always, always, always salt tomatoes as early in the cooking process as possible. Why? Because tomatoes contain a natural form of glutamic acid and salt bonds to it to create a natural form of MSG which really makes a tomato’s flavor sing.

Six Pixels of Separation is not a cookbook of how. You won’t find a recipe in it for exactly how to structure a tweet or exactly how to write a good blog post. You’re not supposed to find those recipes in it, because it’s largely a book of why, not how. If you’re looking for a recipe book, there’s an entire industry of For Dummies / For Morons / For Complete Idiots / For The Stupidest People That Are Still Capable of Reading This Book books out there. (does it bother anyone else that you’re automatically a Dummy if you’re a beginner, at least according to those series titles? Labeling someone a Dummy as a beginner is a great way to ensure people don’t want to try something new.)

Once you’ve transcended the need to march in lockstep with exact recipe cards, once you understand the basic application of all the tools and you’re ready to step up to understanding why you should or should not be doing things, you’re ready for a book like Six Pixels of Separation.

Don’t misunderstand – there is still a tremendous need for very beginner focused materials out there. The constant 80% new folks rate of attendance at PodCamps testifies to the continuing opportunity for people to get involved in new media. I’m just saying that you need to set your expectations appropriately for a book like Six Pixels of Separation and be prepared to work very, very hard to execute on the strategies in it.

Full Disclosure: Mitch is a friend and I’m probably biased in my review of his book. Expect links in this post to go to one or more affiliate programs and know that I get paid a nominal fee for referring you to those resources if you make a purchase or purchase inquiry. Thanks in advance for buying everything in triplicate.

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Imagine for a minute that someone put a box in front of you that, on average, will give you 42 cents for every dollar you put in it. No one in their right, rational mind would ever use it. Imagine for a minute that someone built an ATM that gives you exactly 42% of whatever amount you request. That ATM would be torn out of the wall by riotous crowds.

Yet thousands of people a year flock to casinos and use machines and games designed to do exactly that. Why? Because casinos have mastered the user experience.

Let’s take a look at some of the tricks of the trade:

1. No windows or clocks. Time is the enemy for casinos – they want you to spend as much time as possible in the venue (on the premise that you’re not a weirdo like me who just stares at people without spending money) and gamble as much as possible. No cues to show just how much time has elapsed ensure this.

2. Low lighting and lots of ambient sound. Every machine in the room makes noise, and more often than not, even the demo modes have sounds that are pleasant to the ear and evoke video game-like feelings of winning. Why? Low light keeps you relaxed and slightly less aware than harsh, stark light, and lots of ambient amusement sound contributes to the idea that you’re playing games instead of spending money.

3. Play money. I lost count of how many times players referred to their chips as play money, fake money, toy money, or some other proxy by which they completely forgot they were using real currency. At one blackjack table, I saw enough money cross the table back and forth in just a few minutes (table minimum $200, maximum $50,000) to buy several cars. Casinos use proxies for money to get you to spend more, because the money doesn’t look or feel like money at all.

4. Leave no dollar behind. Right outside the casino floor was… a Rolex shop. And an art gallery. And a Swarovski crystal shop hawking stocking stuffers starting at $40. Casinos know this above all else: you might win on the floor, but you’re not leaving with your money if at all possible. Every hook imaginable is available to get you to spend anything you didn’t lose to the house.

Now, how does this apply to marketing online? Take a look at your web site. Does it evoke the feelings that you want to elicit from your customers? If your goal is to get customers to spend some time with your content, does the “atmosphere” of your web site – color palette, brightness, tonality, contrast – encourage your visitors to relax, to forget about whatever else they were doing? Look at the patterns of lights and textures in a casino and you see endless repeating patterns that are nearly hypnotic. I’m not saying you should turn your web site into a slot machine’s decor, but think about what decor you do have and what it’s conveying.

Take a look at how you process transactions. Do you make it as easy as possible for visitors to transact with you? Do you use proxies for money like point systems or credits? In a casino, you can slap down a C note on the green velvet and have chips in hand, ready to gamble in less than 10 seconds. How fast can your visitors buy? Does your site let your visitors slap down the plastic and buy immediately? iTunes and Amazon figured this out long ago with 1-click.

Are you leaving money on the table? Are you letting your visitors get away with their wallets intact? What other things can you sell to your visitors as they browse through and leave your site? I’m not saying be obnoxious and run a javascript that forces a visitor through an annoying series of ads, but think about all of the different products or services you have and that you sell via affiliate programs. Are you presenting them as powerfully as the Rolex shop in the casino next to the cashier’s cage?

Casinos make good money because they’ve distilled the user experience for maximum profit. Are you doing the same?

Photo credit: acaben

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Video

Slides

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Why?

Well, the idea for the quotes page came from the father of one of my teachers, the late Ira Hayes, motivational speaker. His son, Stephen K. Hayes, found among his belongings a page of punchlines that he kept as a crib sheet for speaking. What’s funny is that Ira didn’t write down the actual jokes, just the punchlines, so unless you attended his speeches back in the day, no one is really sure what the actual jokes are. Ira just collected the punchlines together over time as he spoke and developed new material.

The quotes page on this site isn’t quite punchlines, but it is stuff I’ve collected over time that I find personally significant. Little expressions of things that made me think, things that are worth remembering.

Why do this? There’s more content than ever today. More blogging, more tweeting, more everything, and it’s so tempting to get into the easy, lazy habit of assuming that Google will remember for us what we’ve experienced that we just turn our brains off. Hear a funny speech? Someone probably recorded it, right? Read a funny quote on Twitter? Google will have it, right?

Don’t bet on it. If it’s important, don’t bet on it. In my Advanced Social Media class, I admonish my students that the live sessions may or may not be recorded, but they should act and work as if the sessions will NOT be recorded, so that they train their brains to capture useful information, rather than rely on a third party.

I encourage you to do something similar for yourself. It doesn’t have to be public like my quotes page is, but make a habit out of saving and storing valuable information, useful information, in a compact form. If you speak publicly, obviously this is a practice that has an immediate use for you, but even if you don’t, it’s still a good habit to get into for tuning up your brain.

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Familiar questions? You hear these questions at conferences, trade shows, events, in the fishbowl, just about everywhere. They reflect a certain hunger, an almost desperate feeling from folks in the social media fishbowl, even from veteran practitioners.

What’s next is a simple question to answer. As with many things, however, what’s simple is often not easy.

What’s next is you. More specifically, what’s next for you is improving you, breaking away from existing limitations. No matter where you are on your social media journey, you’ve accrued some habits. Some are good and useful, some are not. Some habits are outdated already and aren’t serving you particularly well. For example, it might be your habit to reply to tweets at a certain time of day, but if your followers have changed and grown over time, they might want to hear from you at a different time of day, or new followers might have different expectations of how frequently you’ll keep in touch with them.

What’s next isn’t more tools, which is that desperate hunger I mentioned earlier, that wanting of more shiny objects. You see this most acutely in people who are disappointed in new offerings like Google Wave, whose expectations were that it would dramatically change their lives. If you’re chasing after the tools, that’s understandable. After all, understanding and mastering the basics of the tools that you currently have has gotten you to this point.

I’d offer instead that instead of longing for more tools, new tools, shinier objects, that you instead focus on becoming more powerful with the tools you already have. What do I mean? Let’s look at a martial arts example. There are only so many ways that physics, biology, and psychology permit us to punch, kick, or throw someone with any degree of effectiveness. Most of the tools you can achieve a basic, minimum level of competency with in about six months per tool if you practice diligently and frequently.

After you understand and can use the basics, then what? Just more of the same? Sort of. In the martial arts, you start putting combinations of the basics together. You start to examine human nature, to figure out why someone would behave in such a way that necessitates using a punch or a kick on them. You start to dig deeper into people’s motivations and into your own weaknesses, solidifying the tools you’re not so comfortable with, figuring out what it is in your own nature that prevents you from being as effective as possible with that tool.

Ultimately, once you reach higher levels of proficiency in the martial arts, the most juice for your squeeze comes out of self improvement. Got a quick temper? Learning how to channel that and tame that will do more for your quality of life (and keep you out of more fights) than the physical tools alone. Easily intimidated? Learning how to fortify your spirit will bring rewards not just to a physical encounter, but also to job interviews, workplace stress, and family problems, too.

The tools of social media are no different from a big picture perspective. (Obviously, punching someone has much more immediate impact than tweeting them) Once you’ve gained proficiency with the tools themselves, if you want to be more and more effective, if you want to get more and more out of them, you have to look away from the tools and the distractions of the day and focus on what in your own human nature is holding you back from accomplishing even more.

How do you do that? By first and foremost being honest with yourself, privately, internally, and quietly. Take some time, just a minute or two a day to start, to sit up straight and take a few deep breaths, then ask yourself these two questions:

1. What one thing did I do today that I’m proud of?
2. How can I take that thing I did and improve on it?

Some days, it’ll be a little bit of work to accomplish even #1. That’s okay. That’s what’s powerful about social media. You can generate results very quickly, so go find something worth doing before each day is over and use the tools that you have to do it. Then put the results into your brain with question #2 and see if you become more effective, more free, more powerful with the tools you already have.

Do this often enough, and you’ll wake up one day and realize that the answer to what’s next is and always has been inside your own heart and mind.

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In this eight week course, you’ll get instruction from true social media experts and marketers like Jay Berkowitz, Jim Kukral, CC Chapman, and myself, plus expert legal advice from lawyers David Bates and Gaida Zirkelbach on managing the risks and best practices of social media from a legal perspective.

What’s so different about this course versus every other social media thing on the Web?

Since I designed the course, I have a fairly good idea of what went into it and who’s teaching, and I can say we’ve got some great content and a top-notch roster of experienced people who’ve generated real world results using social media.

When I put it together a few months ago, I wanted to create a course that approached different practice areas of social media – marketing, advertising, PR, small business, agency work – and cross-cut that with social media practices. For example, the lectures fall into 7 tracks:

Track 1: Basics, review, concepts
Track 2: Marketing perspective
Track 3: Public relations perspective
Track 4: Service perspective
Track 5: Monetization/commercialization perspective
Track 6: Executive/strategic perspective
Track 7: Tool Time

Then the course runs over 8 weeks, with these 8 topics:

Week 1: Introduction to Social Media
Week 2: Listening/Monitoring
Week 3: Creation
Week 4: Communcation
Week 5: Metrics and Science
Week 6: Legal and Ethical Considerations
Week 7: Adopting Social Media
Week 8: Case Studies

Overall, I think the course delivers an exceptionally solid, well-rounded perspective of social media. The one aspect of this course that makes it so very different from other social media courses is the lab track. Each week, I ask course participants to do some outside work in “labs” that should deliver to graduates of the course a working social media presence at the end of the 8 week course:

Lab 1: Set up accounts on major social media sites, plus a personal blog and affiliate account
Lab 2: Create a listening dashboard in Google Reader
Lab 3: Create content for your site and distribute on social media platforms
Lab 4: Participate in one open forum (e.g. #journchat)
Lab 5: Analyze 5 weeks’ of your data and derive conclusions about where your traffic is coming from and why
Lab 6: Assess potential risks and practices for your own niche
Lab 7: Make at least $1 in affiliate sales from your efforts thus far.
Lab 8: Draft your own case study and publish on your blog

If students fully participate in the course and do the coursework and the labs, by the time they graduate, they’ll have a serious social media presence and the skills and experience needed to make social media work for them and the businesses or organizations they work for. There’s no other course quite like this one out there, and so I’m really thrilled that it’s live and running. On top of that, the course is offered through an accredited university and has financial aid and other goodies available with it that many other courses don’t have.

If you’d like to know more about this course, please visit this page on Edvisors.com and request your free information packet.

Full disclosure: Edvisors.com has an affiliate relationship with USF and earns a very nominal fee for referring prospective students to USF. I in turn work for Edvisors.com and a very small part of that very nominal fee ends up in my pocket as part of my salary.

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Here are some examples:

- Virtue
- Spirit
- Valor
- Moral

Virtue’s turned into a kind of sissy word. Spirit’s avoided by an awful lot of people except in the contexts of church, school sports, and cloth armor for healers in World of Warcraft. Valor is so out of date that a decent number of people don’t even know what it means (beyond Emblems of Valor for iLevel 213 gear in Warcraft). Moral is either used as a societal bludgeon by some nutcases or an anathema of personal freedom by other nutcases.

Ever wonder why words like these get devalued or pushed to the fringes? My current thinking on it deals with mirrors. How we communicate and the words we choose are mirrors of what’s going on inside. When we recoil from using some words on a societal level, on a cultural level, it might be because we don’t particularly like looking in that mirror and seeing that those words don’t apply to us much any more. Some words we desperately want to forget, like certain racial slurs. Other words, which are nominally “good” words but don’t match the reality of our society and ourselves, we just stop using instead.

For example, we don’t use virtue much in daily language because frankly and bluntly, we’re not an especially virtuous society, and thus the absence of that value is reflected in the absence of the word from the language. If you consider the classical four virtues (cardinal virtues) that stretch back to Plato:

- Prudence – able to judge between actions with regard to appropriate actions at a given time
- Justice – proper moderation between the self-interest and the rights and needs of others
- Restraint or Temperance – practicing self-control, abstention, and moderation
- Courage or Fortitude – forbearance, endurance, and ability to confront fear and uncertainty, or intimidation

Then we’re not doing an especially good job of any of them, and thus the word that encompasses them falls away. One stroll around your local shopping mall and you’ll easily pick out the values that are starkly absent in our society.

Am I advocating for anything in particular? Not necessarily, though certainly more virtue would be nice. No, what I want you to take away and think about is this short list of questions:

What words have you let lapse out of your vocabulary, and what impact does that have on you?
How do you perceive yourself if those words no longer fit comfortable in your day to day language?
What words do you use most frequently instead, and do they match the ideal of who you want to be?

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Exoteric is exactly what it is – surface details, things you can glean from stored knowledge alone. You can read, for example, about faraway places or follow Twitter streams from conferences and events and get a fairly hefty amount of data just from those sources. For example, if you followed a conference like the Inbound Marketing Summit on Twitter, you got a whole bunch of bite-sized ideas, some of which may have been immediately usable. There’s a lot of value in the exoteric, and it’s one of the things that makes social media shine, as a distilled representation of a reality in another place that you can’t be.

Esoteric is another thing altogether. I like to call esoteric direct experience, because it’s only things that can be transmitted or learned through direct experience. I talked about this with lychee nuts, but here’s an even cruder, more obvious example. No matter how much you read about it, no matter how many videos you see on the Internet about it, no matter how many people you talk to about it, there is no substitute for actual sex, is there? That’s an experience that can only be direct. In fact, it’s so powerful a direct experience that it’s illegal to market the experience at all in many places!

Where we can run dangerously off path is believing that new technologies can replicate direct experience. A lot of folks seriously believe Twitter is a replacement for real interaction (they tend to be folks who prepend tw- to every other word, like twebinar, tweetup, twestival, tweep, twevent, tweeple, etc., what I rather tactlessly label twasturbation) and as a result, despite being more “social”, they’re lonelier and more isolated than ever. A lot of folks in business and marketing believe that being social will cure their business of its ills. Social media is not a panacea for a failed business model. Never has been, never will be, except for the snake oil folks who make a quick buck off you (learn how to make $300 a day on Twitter!) before moving on to the next trending topic.

If you want to get the most juice out of your marketing squeeze, look at direct experience. What direct experiences are your customers having with you and your products or services? What direct experiences can you give your customers that no other competitor is giving them right now? For example, one of the events I volunteer at every year is College Goal Sunday, when students get together to complete the FAFSA form. This isn’t charity for me – this is an important event that helps me to better understand and witness what my audience experiences when trying to fill out this form. No amount of surveying can replace actually watching someone try their best to fill out government paperwork, and that then helps me to make my products and services better.

Do you own your products or services? Do you use them personally? Have you bought them in the store and tried to set them up in the same way your customers would? Have you used them for any amount of time and thought, gosh, this product really needs this or that feature? That’s the direct experience you’re looking for. When you share direct experiences with your customers, you understand implicitly what they’ve experienced with your products and services and can truly help them.

There is no substitute for direct experience. Don’t get caught in that trap, especially in social media. A simple way to check if you’re too far down the rabbit hole? If your spell checker is flagging every other word in your communications as unknown, you might not be getting enough direct experience and might have too much social media Kool Aid in your diet.

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Go read this story on CNN about a two and a half hour rape of a 15 year old at a San Francisco high school function as nearly two dozen people stood around did nothing, or worse, joined in. No one called 911. No one got help. Very reminiscent of the Kitty Genovese case and the bystander effect.

How do you stop something like this?

How do you counteract something like this?

How do you prevent something like this from ever happening in the first place?

Philip Zimbardo, of the Stanford Prison Experiment, has an elegant solution. The problem is the diffusion of responsibility. When a group of people are involved, no one person feels responsible. Only someone who steps forward, someone willing to take risks of social and physical violence, someone willing to bear the burden of breaking a conforming mindset can stop this.

In short, a hero.

Watch this TED talk featuring this discussion:

Dr. Zimbardo’s idea of hero courses is a good one, but probably won’t come to a school, church, or workplace near you any time soon. So how do you get started on this today? His idea of heroic imagination has deep, deep roots, stretching back over thousands of years, across multiple continents. At Stephen K. Hayes’ Evocation seminar, one of the exercises done by participants was a detailed exploration of what our inner superhero looks like, sounds like, and acts like. While it’s impossible to recreate even a fraction of that seminar in the bits and bytes of a blog post, I’ll leave you with a question you can ponder, one that will get you that first step down the path towards finding your own superhero.

Instead of thinking about superhero powers, think about superhero actions.

If you had all the superhero powers you wanted and needed, what would you as a hero stand for, and what in all of the world would you first fight against?

That single question will tell you not the kind of superhero that exists in your daydreams, but the one that exists inside of you right now.

What do you stand for?
What do you stand against?

Think about that as you ponder the San Francisco rape, the Kitty Genovese bystander effect, and Dr. Zimbardo’s lecture. That will be the first step towards awakening your superhero and the superheroes of all those around you.

Do it soon. Do it now. Right now, more than ever, our world needs as many heroes as it can get – including you.

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My wife just started to read the book and cautions that it starts out with violence and sex in that order, a decent helping of profanity, and the murder of an authority figure – all in Chapter 1. If it were a movie and this were the script, you’re starting out with a hard R rating, so be aware of that if you find such content to not be your thing.

Full disclosure: JC sent me a dead tree edition of his book as blogola. Be sure to read my full disclosures page for more.

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Believe it or not, cameras can be an incredible tool for helping you reclaim your life and get more out of every day. How? Nothing helps you practice mindfulness and being in the present moment like looking for something to take a picture of.

By the way, far too many folks focus on gear, thinking they need the best possible camera in order to take photos. Like many things human, it’s more about the person behind the gear than the gear itself. There’s a group on Flickr called Cameraphone that demonstrates some amazing photographs taken with relatively poor quality cameraphones (compared to, say, full DSLRs). So put the gear question out of your head for a moment.

So how do you use a camera to get more out of life? Simple: look for things to take photos of. Be very specific and aim for themes rather than subjects. Here are some examples:

- intersecting lines
- light and shadow
- contrasting colors
- complementary colors
- moving objects
- things that are blue
- food
- circles
- squares
- kids playing
- triangles

The subjects of your photography can be endless. Pick a theme for a day, commit to taking X number of pictures that day, and then go walk around life trying to take those photos. You’ll be amazed at how many examples of your theme suddenly reveal themselves when you go looking for them. It doesn’t matter whether the photos are good (in a commercial sense) or not as long as you do the exercise.

Why? Because looking for subjects to photograph requires presentness, requires awareness. You can’t phone it in – you have to be present, you have to be aware, you have to be alive and awake enough to look for the subjects you want to shoot. That’s something my Zen friends call zanshin – mindfulness.

Once you’ve got your brain trained to be aware, awake, alert, and alive, extend the exercise. Look for more difficult items to photograph, things that are rare. Learn composition.

When you’ve got the hang of mindfulness, you’ll find that your brain starts to do it more frequently, even without a camera. Keep training your brain to be mindful and aware of things you want to be aware of. Suddenly, life becomes richer. You notice more things. You’re present in more conversations. Little moments, little details that completely passed you by suddenly appear – and isn’t that the joy of a rich life?

Here’s one last point, one last idea: you’ll find that what you look for, you find. Look for sharp contrasts of shadow and light and you’ll find them. Look for any subject, any theme, any idea and you’ll find it. Some topics and themes might take longer than others to find, but you will find them in time. You’re also guaranteed NOT to find them if you’re not looking for them…

… which extends to life as well. Looking for reasons to be happy? You’ll find them. Looking for reasons to be dissatisfied? You’ll find them, too. Training your brain to find what you seek works whether you’re looking through a viewfinder or your own soul. Decide what you want to look for in your camera and in life, and that’s what you’ll find.

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You’re probably right. After all, we’re so bloody busy these days that we’ll walk right by genius and not even notice (go read the story and come back here. I’ll wait). We’ll pass by stunning natural beauty and not even blink an eye. Julien obliquely pointed this out the other week, but didn’t talk about how you can fix it, how you can fix yourself (which is irony given the retreat he did at a Zen temple).

Here’s how you fix it. It’s simple, but not easy.

Remind yourself.

You were perhaps expecting something more? Think about that word, just that word for a second. Remind. Re + mind. As in to put back into your mind. This is how you avoid missing your entire life. This is how you avoid seeing everything go by and waking up at the age of 40/50/60/70/80/the day before you die, wondering what happened and why you feel so damn empty inside.

Remind yourself.

Okay, how? Here’s how. This part is easy if you can remember to do it.

At selected intervals throughout the day, sit up straight, take a deep breath, and promise yourself that no matter what you’re about to experience, you’ll find something to enjoy in it. About to sit down to eat? Take that deep breath and promise that you’ll enjoy at least the first bite (slowly!), even if you’re in a hurry to eat the rest of your meal. About to go outside? Take a deep breath and promise to find and look at for at least a moment one beautiful thing. Easy to do these days with fall foliage. About to come home from work? Take a deep breath and promise to enjoy at least the first moment when you walk in the door, knowing you’re home – even if everything afterwards isn’t as perfect as you’d like.

Here’s the hard part: remind yourself. Remember to do this. I like to set an alarm on my calendar (which promptly buzzes and rings every device around me). Set up a schedule on your Google calendar or PDA or Outlook or whatever it takes to prompt you a few times a day to do this. You can do it before meals, or every hour on the hour, whatever your technology supports. Remember, this isn’t a big deal or investment of time, literally and figuratively just a minute to catch your breath from the rat race and appreciate something – anything – that you can.

Your mind gets used to habits very quickly. Why not make a habit of finding something beautiful in your life all the time? This is how you start – by reminding yourself to do so frequently.

In the next blog post, we’ll talk a bit more about other ways to really improve your ability to get more out of your life. Stick around.

Credit: ideas from this blog post are derived from exercises by Stephen K. Hayes.

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What made it a great show? The same thing that Jerry Seinfeld was known for on stage as a standup comic, and the same thing that can take ordinary social media efforts and make them shine: universals.

What’s a universal? It’s something that an awful lot of people share. Seinfeld and George Carlin were both masters of pointing out the universals in our lives. Seinfeld had a routine about the secret lives of socks that neatly explained the inexplicable, like the lone sock in a laundry basket (its partner escaped) or on a sidewalk (an escapee that failed) in compelling stories that made a peculiar sort of sense. George Carlin made a living pointing out our inability to use the English language, especially when it came to things like airplane safety protocols (”What does it mean to pre-board? Do you get on before you get on?”) and political correctness.

These are universals. These are comedic references to daily life, outside of corporate babble, outside of hollow, shallow press releases. Universal experiences are experiences that many, if not all of us, have shared. They’re the weak social glue that give us common ground to start conversations.

Ever wonder why so many conversations start with the weather or sports? They’re our universals, things that are interesting enough to talk about but still safe, still common, shared experiences. Try starting a conversation with politics, sex, or religion and you’re just as likely to deeply offend the person you’re talking to as you are to engage them.

So what does this mean for your social media efforts? Take a look at what you’ve produced so far. Go on, look at your history. Look at what’s in your Twitter stream. Look at what’s on your blog. Look at your wall on Facebook. If your social media channels like this:

New blog post about our $#!&: xxx
New blog post about our $#!&: xxx
New blog post about our $#!&: xxx
Buy our $#!&!
New blog post about our $#!&: xxx
Have you bought our $#!& yet?
New blog post about our $#!&: xxx
New blog post about our $#!&: xxx
A press release about our $#!&: xxx
New blog post about our $#!&: xxx
Did you know we’re an industry leader in this $#!&?
New blog post about our $#!&: xxx

…then frankly, you fail at being human. You fail at creating any kind of universal that someone else can latch on to in order to start a conversation. As a result, your social media efforts will be relegated to mediocrity at best and perpetual ignorage at worst.

Try being human. It’s okay to talk about the game last night even on your corporate account as long as you use common sense and decent language. It’s okay to talk about the restaurant you ate at or the coworker next to you who has different music tastes (again, using good common sense and tact), because it conveys to the people you’re trying to reach that you’re human.

Here’s a parallel, a universal. Ever been to a bar and seen that guy? Yeah, you know the guy. He wears a cologne called Desperation and everyone in the bar mysteriously creates about five feet of space around him and avoids eye contact at all costs.

That’s your social media efforts if what you produce looks like the example above. You’re that guy.

So how do you stop being that guy? Look for universals if you have no idea what to say. Listen to other people. Actually make an attempt to discuss something other than what you’re trying to sell. Go back and watch Seinfeld re-runs or catch his standup routines. Go listen to George Carlin, Sam Kinnison, Chris Rock, and the legion of other comedians who have made careers out of universals (and the most successful comedians do, because niche comedy only goes so far). Then bring a little of that back into your social media efforts.

I look forward to a hearty laugh reading your newly universal social media.

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It’s nine o clock on a Saturday, regular crowd shuffles in…

In December of 1994, I went to a Billy Joel concert at Nassau Coliseum during one of the final legs of the River of Dreams tour. I’d been a fan for a while, all through high school, so attending the concert was the pinnacle of fandom for me. That night, Nassau Coliseum was packed to the rafters, 17,000 people and change all stuffed inside, nearly everyone a diehard fan as it was the end of the tour and all the casuals had long since attended. The diehards came out in force because, well, that’s what diehard fans do with their favorite musicians.

…well we’re all in the mood for a melody, and you got us feeling all right…

Like many musicians, BIlly Joel has his hit songs and crowd pleasers. He ends every show with his signature song, Piano Man, and the crowd always, always sings along.

The concert was a great one, but it was the ending that floored me. Because it was such a diehard crowd, people had been singing along in little bits and pieces all night long, but from the moment the first notes of Piano Man dropped out of the speakers, the crowd instantly unified into one.

…he knows that it’s me they’ve been coming to see, to forget about life for a while…

Hearing 17,000 people singing along in one massive chorus, nearly every single person in the crowd pouring their hearts and souls into their voices (myself included), was an astonishing moment. It felt like a massive tidal wave of energy as the building shook from that many people unified for one purpose, forgetting about life for a while and leaving their individual selves behind for just a few minutes.

If you’ve had a similar experience, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You leave your body for a little while. You forget that you, the individual exist, and for a few, brief, glorious minutes as you belt out the lyrics you’ve known by heart for years, you touch something far greater than yourself. You touch the spirit of everyone else in the room, hall, or stadium, you join them, and you feel an amazing unity with every person around you.

…sing us a song, you’re the piano man, sing us a song tonight…

It was that moment that woke me up to our awe-inspiring power and made me continue to question to this day just what we’re capable of as people, as human beings. What if we could tap into that kind of energy every day instead of just when our favorite musician was in town? What if we could bring that kind of power to everyday moments and not just reserve it for special occasions administered by Ticketmaster?

I think we can. I know we have the capacity, the capability, because I was there when it happened and felt it firsthand. When you touch a moment of unification like that, you feel nearly invincible, immune to all the ills of the world as you’re no longer your single, solitary self but something greater.

Three lessons. First, if you are any kind of performer, marketer, speaker, or entertainer, the more opportunities you have to gather your fans together in real life, when all of the energy we possess as living human beings can be pooled into one room, the greater the chances are that magic will happen. As wonderful as the Internet is, it simply cannot transmit the raw power of that experience. Nothing can. You can’t blog it. You can’t Twitter it. You can’t record it even in HD audio and video and transmit it to someone who wasn’t there any more than you can do so with a first kiss or a bite of the best pie you’ve ever tasted.

Second, no matter who you are, look for experiences that contain the potential for that magic. Even a small gathering can be powerful. The catch is that you have to be there. Over the summer at Matthew Ebel’s VIP Beer Bash, he played one of his signature songs, and the small group of us in that room, at that time, all singing along was no less magical. Sure, it didn’t have the scale of Nassau Coliseum, but there was still the sense of we rather than me, and when I listen to the recording, remembering and reliving that moment, it still brings a smile to my face more than any of his other recordings because of the magical direct experience we all shared.

Third, there is no substitute for being there. You can watch videos of conferences, you can listen to audio recordings of concerts, you can follow the live stream of an event on Twitter, but there simply is no substitute for being there. This above all else is why things like real life social events, conferences, and conventions will never go away, no matter how good our rebroadcast abilities get, because there are so many things that cannot be shared any other way than direct experience. If you’re a conference organizer or planner, the more you can do to facilitate the “you had to be there” moments, the more irreplaceable your conference will be. Having a bunch of talking heads on stage is easily replicated. Having a singalong in the lobby of the conference center (as Chris Brogan did at PodCamp Boston 3) is nearly impossible to replicate. Give people the freedom to create their own magic, and your event will be booked solid just for that alone.

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One of my favorite TED talks by Malcolm Gladwell is a brief lecture on the evolution of chunky spaghetti sauce. Watch the video below:

Get it? Chunky spaghetti sauce didn’t exist before Howard Moskowitz’s innovation not for lack of desire, but because customers had no vocabulary to even describe the desire deep inside their soul. Their worldview didn’t even have chunky spaghetti sauce in it, so there was no way for them to ask for it.

This is so important, and not just from a product marketing perspective. At Stephen K. Hayes’ Evocation event, one of the exercises we did was to envision and document our ideal day in our ideal life, assuming we had a magic wand to make true anything we wanted (with logical exceptions, of course, like not allowing someone to simply explode the planet). What was interesting to me as we shared our visions of a snapshot of ideal life was that for some of the participants, their lack of knowledge (through no fault of their own) created worldviews of an ideal life that were still limited – not for lack of desire for an ideal life, but because some of the things that would make their life truly ideal don’t even exist in their perspective of the world, so they had no idea that their vision could have been even more ideal.

For example, I was listening to one participant share a desire that in their ideal life, their home would be adjacent to a national park. The idea that you could be so financially self sufficient that you could buy the equivalent amount of land outright (on eBay no less) and own it yourself was outside their worldview, so it wasn’t in their plan of an ideal life.

So how do you solve for a problem that you aren’t even aware is a problem? How do you expand your vision to include the existence of things that haven’t been brought into existence yet? I don’t have a perfect answer for this, but I can say that things like social media have been part of the solution for me, at least in some areas.

Being an active participant in social media allows me to communicate with people far outside my areas of expertise and far senior to me in their own life journeys. Being able to see how Jeff Pulver runs a conference gave me a whole new perspective on running PodCamp. Meeting and talking to incredibly successful business folks gives me better ideas on how to make the Student Loan Network better at what we do. Chatting with multi-book best selling author David Meerman Scott gives me insights into how publishing works. Randomly experimenting with things like podcasting lets me interview experts that might otherwise have little interest in talking to me.

Talking about social media’s ROI is certainly a valid and important part of the growth of social media and what’s possible with it. That said, the conversational part that lets you learn more about how other people live and the worldviews they have – worldviews that can enlarge your own perspective on reality and what’s possible – is a vital part of social media not to be discounted.

Photo credit: jshj

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It’s nearly impossible for me to describe exactly what Evocation was or what happened in a general sense because Evocation was an intensely personal exploration of understanding our self-imposed limits and how to shatter the barriers of what’s holding us back from achieving true success in the world. Evocation was a completely different seminar for each person who attended because every person in the room faced different, unique challenges in their lives. The areas of exploration and growth that I needed to explore, the questions I needed answers to were very different than the ones of the person sitting next to me.

Evocation was exactly as it sounds – a seminar that evoked reactions, thoughts, and insights about our problems with our own minds, memories, emotions, and experiences acting as both student and teacher, both problem and solution. It was an esoteric seminar in the most powerful sense of the word esoteric – all the good stuff was all direct experience rather than textbook learning, which is another reason why it’s so hard to describe.

Here’s an example of esoteric. Let’s take something that a lot of people haven’t eaten: a lychee nut. If you’ve had lychees, all I have to do is say the word and it evokes the taste, scent, and experience of eating one. If you’ve never had a lychee, no amount of verbiage in this post will ever come close to granting you the whole, authentic experience of biting into one. The only way you can truly understand a lychee nut is to have the direct experience. I can tell you perhaps a local store near you that sells them, or another name under which it might be sold, but in the end, the experience of biting into one and the wonderful taste it imparts (if it’s fresh and ripe) is something you can only experience.

In fact, the more I might try to blog about a lychee, the less likely you might be to try it. I might stumble upon an explanation of a lychee that’s good enough for the casually curious, and once you’ve got that explanation, you’ll pass it by. Your mind will say, well, we have a general idea of what it’s probably like (even though you have no idea whatsoever), so it’s not worth running out to the store to get one.

So rather than write about Evocation any more or how life changing an experience it was for me – heck, I came away with an entirely new sense of identity and self, a better, more powerful version of the me that got on a plane in Boston last week – I’ll only suggest that the next time Stephen K. Hayes offers a seminar like Evocation in the future, screw Blogworld (or whatever else is happening then) and go to Dayton to train with him. The experience will be unlike anything else you’ve ever done, and the tools you’ll get to make your life better, make your business more successful, and make you happier as a human being will be worth it.

You will emerge with an astonishingly clear vision of who you are supposed to be in this life, the true, authentic, heroic self that is inside of you right now, silently screaming to be free.

I’ll close for now by extending my sincerest thanks to my teachers, Mark Davis of the Boston Martial Arts Center, and Stephen K. Hayes, for an incredible Evocation experience that was infinitely more valuable than anything I might have won in Vegas, and a hearty “see you next time!” to my fellow Evocation participants.

There will be much more to come in the days ahead as the lessons of Evocation settle into my mind and begin to produce the results I want to create. I hope you’ll stick around as we explore together what’s possible.

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“Evocation” – Recalling Your True Face, Finding Your True Path

As a result of all we have encountered and experienced from the beginning of life, we each carry deep in our core a vision and voice of who we identify ourselves as being. For most of us this is usually a positive thing, but even in the most hardy, old scars and scoldings can block us from attaining our fullest potentials in life.

Japanese culture’s Bu Do “warrior paths”, and especially the martial way of To-Shin Do, provide a vehicle for exploring how to remove the obstacles to fullest power living. The path of the warrior takes us out into life to confront fear and weakness in a direct and purposeful way, and each step on the path has the potential for waking us up to all we were meant to be in life. By coming face to face with the root “ghosts” of where old personal hold-backs began, and learning how to let go of the limitations that have slowly crept in to define us, we can find our original face, return to authenticity, and re-pledge ourselves to our truest personal path.

This weekend seminar with Stephen K. Hayes will present you with a collection of significant exercises and practice models for evoking your truest inner greatness and redirecting yourself as a tatsujin master of life.

Featured exercises include:

1. “One Deep Breath” – How to get grounded and free of distraction in your body, your intellect, your feelings
2. “Accountability – Reclaiming abdicated responsibility”
3. “Appearances are not reality”
4. “Mistakes are opportunities to grow and develop your power”
5. “Coming from emptiness of practiced limitations” – Discover where personal reality and public reality meet and overlap
6. “Generating a circle of protection”
7. “Power of allies in overcoming binding obstacles”
8. “Your new vision, your new voice”
9. “Vows for future greatness”

Tuition is $249. Register by phone at 937 436-9990 or email skhquest@skhquest.com.

For my money, I know I’ll get more out of Evocation than I will BlogWorld, but I wish the best to everyone headed out that way. See you on the other side!

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No, you can’t.
No, you don’t have that.
No, that’s not affordable.
No, you’re not good enough.
No, you don’t know how to do that.
No, you can’t reach those customers.

The problem with no is in the finality of its tone. No cuts off possibility, especially inside your own head. Are you good enough to get this job? If your mind says no, then you move on – but chances are, you don’t come back, and that door of opportunity closes forever in your mind.

Not yet is the secret to coming back. It changes a definitive lack of possibility into a time-deferred possibility. It provides your own mind a way to acknowledge a realistic lack of resources, time, or knowledge without cutting yourself off from future potential.

No says cut down the plant, it’ll never flower and it’s a waste of time and energy.

Not yet says you’re too early, but the buds are there and the blossoms will appear if you’re willing to be patient and keep caring for the plant.

This is super important if you’re dealing with anyone trying to learn, be it a student, child, or friend. If you ask an adult if they’re good at math, chances are they’ve got a lot of emotional baggage with that question and more often than not, you get an ashamed no, bringing back all kinds of unpleasant memories from childhood when someone told them that they were bad at math. Help them to reframe that answer into not yet, because it’s entirely possible to relearn something as an adult and develop amazing proficiency – if your mind is open to the possibility.

With children, this is even more important. If they believe no about themselves on a topic or field of study, that part of their future is gone forever. If you can teach a child to say not yet, and to believe that it’s just a question of more time to study something, that door remains open for them, and that potential can be revisited later on in life, perhaps with a better teacher.

What are you currently saying no to right now that you could be saying not yet to?

What potential have you taken away from yourself in the past that you can now go back to, knowing that you didn’t really mean no, but instead meant not yet?

Someone inspiring is a breath of fresh air.
We breathe new life into a project or brand.
You take a deep breath before you jump, leap, or dive.
Someone or something takes your breath away.
You might even hold your breath or await something with baited breath.

We instinctively know how powerful breath can be, so much so that in some religions, a deity created mankind by breathing a spirit into him. We know the power of the breath from other religions in which breath is the first thing to leave the body on death.

Even our word for inspiration – inspire – derives from Latin, to breathe into, to fill.

Think about this as you go through the day today. At different points in the day, maybe every hour, remind yourself to simply stop and take 3 deep breaths in a row. See what happens.

Photo credit: jjjohn

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We are an optimistic people as a whole. We believe in beating the odds, in luck, in winning against the improbably. Our culture is infused with these beliefs, from superheroes saving the day and defusing the bomb with seconds to go on the clock to sports teams that pull out amazing victories from nearly certain defeat. We’ve conditioned ourselves to believe that there is always a way to win, and that more often than not, luck or fate can swing our way, which explains why casinos are perpetually crowded.

What do you do, however, when you face a situation in which you cannot win? How do you deal with facing truly, legitimately impossible odds?

The answer, from a martial perspective, might surprise you. You surrender to the inevitable. In the martial arts, there are specific techniques for this, sutemi-waza, sacrifice techniques. Rather than fighting all out and wasting what resources you do have left on a fight you can’t win, you surrender and go with the flow – and sometimes, just sometimes an opportunity appears that was previously invisible, an opportunity perhaps not to win yourself, but to play a part in an ultimately successful outcome.

In truly unwinnable situations, this might be laying the groundwork for someone else to take up your fight, whether it’s sabotaging enemy supply lines or feeding your enemies bad information to make it easier for your allies to win after your capture and execution. This might be focusing all of your remaining time to raising money and championing the cause of an organization dedicated to defeating the disease that killed you. Ultimately, it’s about taking what resources you still have available and using them for maximum effect before your time is up, whether that’s a moment on a battlefield, a year until your corporation declares bankruptcy and locks the doors, or a decade until a disease claims you. Use what you have while you are able.

The ultimate unwinnable fight is against death itself. Not too far from my office, there’s a centuries-old graveyard that I walk through at lunch when it’s pleasant out. Walking by the headstones, I get brief glimpses of lives and people I’ve never known. I see headstones denoting deaths of people who, when their time came, were younger than I am today. It’s a stark reminder that we’re all only here for a little while, and to make use of what resources we have during that time for maximum impact.

As I walk, I wonder – in two centuries after my death, what will people be pondering as they stroll past my grave?

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At the opening, I asked the crowd – 200+ folks – how many people had never been to a PodCamp before.

About 80% of the room raised their hands.

That’s huge. That’s amazing. I have to give huge props to the Philly organizing team for continuing to attract new members to our community. When Chris Brogan and I started PodCamp in 2006, we never imagined that years later, events in cities all over the world would continue to attract lots and lots of new people.

Another interesting curiosity from the weekend – the podcasting sessions were stuffed to the gills, standing room only for many of them. If you’ve read Seth Godin’s The Dip, I think podcasting is on the other side of its dip now. It came out strong in 2004 and 2005, was the shiny darling of the new media world, and then more or less went through massive growing pains. Based on the number of folks I talked to over the weekend, podcasting isn’t the sexy new thing any more – and that’s incredibly good news for people interested in learning about podcasting. The snake oil salesmen have moved on (they’re now selling Twitter expert guides) and the space has technologically matured.

Clay Shirky said best at TED @ State that something like podcasting becomes socially interesting after it becomes technologically uninteresting. The shiny has worn off and now people from all businesses and all areas of focus are looking at podcasting for what it truly is: a delivery mechanism for content that can, if used properly and selectively, give people the information they want in the method best suited to their needs.

Hats off again to the PodCamp Philly team for a great event and for continuing to show that podcasting, far from being dead, is only now starting its march out of the dip and into mainstream usages of all kinds.

Photo credit: Jakob Montrasio

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Here’s an example of how difficult profitability can be even in a very closed, contained, predictable system. Let’s take Farmville, the popular Facebook game. Of all the crops available to early players of the game, which is the most profitable?

A casual look says it should be cotton. That giant 207 coin payout for planting cotton is definitely the biggest number on the page. Of course, that’s only gross profit. Each crop also costs money to plant. Do some quick math to subtract the cost of seeds and suddenly artichokes become more profitable – that’s net profit per crop, profit after costs.

So, should you go plant artichokes willy-nilly? Not necessarily! You forgot tilling costs, which is a fixed, flat 15 coin fee for every plot of land. While this may not change the choices between artichokes and cotton, it drastically alters the profitability of cheaper items like soybeans, which at first glance look like a terrific investment – plant for 15 coins to reap 63 – but becomes plant for 30 coins to reap 63 after the tilling cost.

Finally, take the amount of time you’re willing to invest in Farmville. For me, it’s virtually none. I’ve got better games to play in my free time, like Warcraft, so Farmville is at best a curiosity. If you’ve got a lot of time to invest in the game, then you have to do one final calculation for profitability – how much income per hour each crop reaps. Divide each crop’s net profit after costs and tilling by the number of hours to maturity to get net profit per hour, and suddenly, inexpensive but time intensive raspberries yield the highest overall profit per hour – if you’re willing to babysit them every two hours.

What’s the lesson in all of this? Calculating return on investment and profitability can be very tricky. In the incredibly simple Farmville case, the tilling cost is one people leave out of their calculations more often than not. The example of raspberries also demonstrates that what looks like the biggest number at first (artichokes) isn’t – you might be better served cranking out a smaller margin with high frequency than a big margin very infrequently, particularly if you’re in a business where market conditions shift rapidly.

Now imagine how difficult this is to apply to real businesses, where prices, markets, and conditions change, where costs and profits are not fixed, and where time is not free, and you get a sense of how truly amorphous profitability can be.

This is also why it’s super important to get kids and adults playing games like Farmville and Warcraft, to teach them the powerful economics lessons in their games so that they can dig into understanding business without putting real money on the line.

Have fun farming!

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1. Ironic.

2. Tragedy.

Just as quick review, in case your mom wasn’t as diligent about English as mine was…

1. Ironic is the opposite of what was intended. For some reason, folks use it as a synonym for coincidence. As George Carlin pointed out, a diabetic getting hit by a truck is an accident. A diabetic getting hit by a sugar truck is poetic coincidence. A diabetic getting hit by an insulin truck – now that’s irony!

2. Tragedy isn’t something sorrowful or disastrous. We have words for that – sorrowful and disastrous. In its original form, tragedy is a specific calamity that’s the direct result of a character flaw, usually hubris. A death isn’t tragic unless the person brought it on themselves through a character flaw that led them to die. An airplane crash isn’t tragic unless the pilot, in his hubris, was saying in the cockpit, “I’m such a good pilot I can fly blindfolded! See? ”

Does anyone care about the misuse of these terms? Besides standup comedians (we miss you, Mr. Carlin), probably not. However, when I’m reading (particularly blogs and web sites of prospective future employees or other folks who I’m asked to evaluate), you certainly accrue bonus points if you’re using the language well.

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One of the biggest mistakes marketers make – myself included – is the error of putting a buffet in front of someone who wants a snack. The sheer amount of choice can be staggering, but more importantly, every offering is diminished, no matter how good it is. Every offering is diminished because that finite amount of time and attention is divided among the number of offerings.

That’s why sites like Woot.com, for example, are incredibly popular. Instead of asking consumers for their attention at a million different products at once, Woot slaps one product up and says, here, pay attention to this only. It’s the equivalent of a museum curator locking the rest of the museum up and placing one masterpiece on a podium in the lobby with a spotlight on it only.

Marketers face this problem writ incredibly large in the digital age, when media is so available and abundant that the consumer’s attention is always being split. There’s the DVR in the living room, the iPod on your hip, the smart phone in your pocket, the endless depths of the Web on a browser near you, social media conversations flying by, books both analog and digital piled up on the nightstand – media everywhere, all begging for a slice of your attention. How, as a marketer, can you present what you’ve got in such a way that you beat museum syndrome? How, as a marketer, can you create that masterpiece experience for your product or service?

I’ve been thinking about this a great deal as I get ready to revamp the FAFSA application guide site I run, FAFSAonline.com. This topic, more than any other in the world of financial aid, is bewildering to consumers and especially to those who don’t have a good head for numbers. More students lose financial aid each year from issues and errors on the FAFSA than pretty much anything else except not bothering to apply for scholarships. So my challenge in the next few months as I get ready for the 2010 FAFSA season to start is to figure out how to beat museum syndrome in the world of financial aid.

Why? Here’s what’s at stake: if I can beat museum syndrome on this topic, it may mean that thousands of kids will go to college that in previous years would have been defeated by the FAFSA process. Big stakes, big chance to make a difference.

How will we make this happen? I’m looking around constantly for more examples of ways people have beaten museum syndrome. Woot.com is one. Another that’s been working is the way I have the homepage of the Financial Aid Podcast set up, with a single video that introduces the user to the site, focusing attention and eyeballs on the visually compelling cue of a video.

What ways are you beating museum syndrome in your marketing?

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C.C. Chapman had a great podcast the other day about valuing yourself and your time as an influencer, particularly in social media. I wanted to build off his conversation by giving you a benchmark for how to calculate your value.

The monetary value of your social media influence starts with your current pay. After all, it’s the fairest price estimate of what the market is willing to pay for you. Here’s how to calculate that on an hourly basis. If you’re salaried, take the total sum of salary and benefits and divide by 2080. (52 weeks x 40 hours per week) This gives you your hourly rate. If you’re an independent contractor, self employed, or hourly worker, calculate the same way – use your 2008 taxes and expenses to judge the total cost of your self-provided health insurance, income, etc.

Once you know your hourly rate, whatever it is, you understand your current market value. If a company sends you a product for review on your blog and it takes you an hour to review it, its value had better exceed your hourly rate or you’re losing value. You’re giving away more value than you’re receiving, because theoretically, you could be working for your current employer at the same rate.

When a corporation approaches you about helping them with their campaign, you must know your hourly rate as a baseline to judge whether or not something is worth doing. As C.C. said in his show, sometimes you’ll work for no monetary compensation in lieu of exposure, reputation, or other non-monetary currencies. That’s fine. You don’t have to charge your friends, but you must know the value of what you are giving them, especially if they’re representing a company in their request. For example, if Scott Monty asked me to put up a blog post about an automobile, he may know me as a friend, but he’s asking on behalf of a commercial account, and whatever comes with the request had better be valued at my hourly rate or I’m losing value.

Think about what value your personal web site provides. Check out similar sites with similar PageRanks, traffic, and reputation, especially commercial sites, and determine what an ad costs to place on those sites. If a commercial entity comes to you and asks you to display a badge on your blog, know what they’d pay on other similar sites (use Google Ad Planner and Compete.com, for example) and judge whether you’re getting that value from the company in exchange for your efforts.

The reason we have so much trouble with social media ROI begins with not having any idea what our value is. Use some of the points in this post to start assessing your own value, and you’ll have the beginnings of understanding what the ROI of your social media influence is.

How much money are you leaving behind?

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None of these people will succeed. Not one of them.

Why can’t you copy these people? Why can’t you achieve the same success they have if you do the same things they do, or use the same gear they do?

You’re not them. That’s why.

So what if you want to achieve their levels of success? How do you do that if you can’t be them? You have to decide instead to model their outcomes. Here’s an example. Instead of saying that I want to be just like Stephen K. Hayes in martial skill, it’s more productive for me to say that I want to achieve the same outcomes as him on both a macro and micro scale. I’ll look not necessarily just at what he does in a technique to make it work, but also at what the outcomes are on his training partner – loss of balance, inability to counterattack, a fall at a certain angle.

What’s the difference? By focusing on outcomes, I know what capabilities and skills I have that can generate those same or similar outcomes. See, I don’t have Stephen K. Hayes’ skills or abilities, so for me to just try to mimic and copy him will only result in failures for me, or sporadic successes at best. By focusing on the results I want to copy, I have a better chance of making them happen because I know what my capabilities are with my own skills and abilities, and I know what combinations of my skills and abilities can create those outcomes.

For example, Stephen K. Hayes may be able to unbalance someone simply by virtue of his position relative to them. My level of skill in positioning isn’t nearly as good, but I know I can achieve a similar effect by punching someone in the face in a certain way. The techniques and minutiae are different, but the outcome – a person falling backwards in a certain direction – is the same, and if the technique’s success is contingent on that person falling backwards just so, we’ll both achieve success. Mine requires more compensation for skills I don’t yet have, but the outcome is the same. The success is the same.

It’s important to keep in mind that some results I won’t be able to get to with my current skill set, no matter what, in the same way that my general understanding of physics will not, no matter how creative I am with my skills, get me to a point where I can create a particle accelerator in my backyard next week. I can, however, figure out what results are part of the pathway to that end result that are within reach now and start working on those.

Think about this in your own quest for success, and when you encounter a roadblock, rather than try to merely copy the person who has achieved the success you want, look at their outcomes and which outcomes you can achieve with your own tools, abilities, skills, networks, and power.

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Yep. My rear passenger window has been shattered, blown into a thousand pieces by some blunt force. My first reaction, of course, is more than a bit of profanity, followed by my checking out the car to see if anything inside is missing. I’m carrying my laptop, DSLR, video camera, lenses, iPods, etc. on my person so I know they can’t be missing. (yes, when I go to work, I look like a digital sherpa) The car’s GPS is built into the frame, so it’s not like you can just reach in and take it.

What in the world made someone want to bust into my car, when there was nothing obvious to take?

Then I notice something really odd. I’m standing in glass. A lot of glass.

This makes no sense to me. Why is there glass all over the concrete, when smashing in the window should put the glass all inside the car, or mostly inside the car?

I wait for a bit while building security investigate, records the incident, and notify the local police. Incidentally, the police dispatch said, “We’re really kind of busy now. We’ll take the information but we don’t have any officers to spare…”

So I look around a bit and then notice what is missing from my car. In fact, it’s missing from the car, but not by much. 10 feet away, next to another car, is my gym bag.

Suddenly it makes sense. Smash in the window, grab the bag, and as you pull it out, it pulls the rest of the window out, spewing glass all over the concrete like crystalline vomit.

By now I’m more intrigued than anything. Everything valuable is on me, and being the overly cautious financial sort (working in financial aid does that to you), I know insurance will cover everything with no deductible. So I wander over to my bag, noticing that my workout clothes are strewn about on the parking lot concrete.

Whoever broke the window and took the bag was looking for something in it. A Rolex? Jewelry? Drugs? Who knows? I have none of those things because again, I’m a nerd and all my valued possessions are devices which are usually on me.

After all is said and done, I end up laughing most of the way home, the mental image of a petty crook doing a furtive smash & grab, frantically crouched down between vehicles, rifling through workout clothes, possibly holding their nose the entire time, only to come away with lingering gym bag odor and not much else. Sucker!

There is an important lesson here, of course, and that is even the perception of valuables is enough to motivate a desperate thief. I’d guess he or she has had enough success in the past with the same tactic that it was a risk worth taking in our parking garage. For the future, I’ll keep my workout bag in the trunk, and if you find yourself in similar circumstances, you might want to do the same. The economy’s continued pressures on everyone means that desperation will only increase.

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Is it luck?

Opportunity?

Hard work?

Maybe. Maybe to all of the above. Maybe to a little of this, a little of that. I envision success as a combination of factors. For example, there are some who argue that circumstances, the family you’re born into, even the generation you’re born into create an immoveable destiny from which you can never unlock yourself. You are born into a station in life, and that’s where you’ll live and die. That’s partially true.

There are others who argue that you can do anything, that the only thing holding you back is yourself, and that the world is your oyster, if only you’re willing to work hard and persevere. That’s partially true as well.

Imagine for a moment that you’re an archer standing in front of a gallery where the targets whip by incredibly fast. Every so often, a bulls eye sails by and you have to fire an arrow at it and nail the target. That’s our metaphor for success, nailing that target.

For the folks who argue that success is only about hard work and nothing else, that’s like saying you practice your archery relentlessly, perfecting your abilities. When that target cruises by, you nail it.

For the folks who argue that success is predetermined by your station in life that you’re born into, that’s like saying that because of luck, the gallery is filled with targets, and as long as you aim the arrow in the general direction of the gallery, you’re bound to hit something and achieve success.

Here’s why both are partly right and both are partly wrong:

Luck and opportunity are very real parts of success. It’s a lot easier to hit a target when you have a wall full of them slowly cruising by than it is when you have one target an hour zipping by at a hundred miles an hour. The skill you need to hit a barn full of targets is less than the skill you need to hit that one opportunity.

Skill and effort are very real parts of success. You could face an entire room full of targets that are stationary, but if you’re thoroughly incompetent with a bow and arrow, it doesn’t matter how much opportunity is in front of you, because you’ll never hit any of it.

For someone facing the disadvantage of fewer targets to hit, you have to compensate with greater skill. You might get fewer opportunities in life, and so when each opportunity comes by, you have to be a better shot than someone with more advantages. That said, if you have the skill, when opportunity arrives, as long as you’re ready, you only need one shot to win that round, and then each subsequent success makes more targets available to you.

So how do you increase your chances of success? Part of it is indeed to skill up, to become more proficient with that bow and arrow. You do that by becoming expert in whatever it is you do. Part of increasing your chances of success logically must also include finding more targets to shoot at – and that’s what things like the digital age, disruption, and social media can do for you. Right now, because of how fast the world is changing, a lot of people are wondering how to operate in this age, in these new rules. They’re holding up targets for you to shoot at, because they want and need help.

The arrow is your expertise in your specialty, the part that generates the actual results.

The bow is your knowledge of things like social media that amplify your ability to project your expertise.

If you have the skills, if you have put in the effort to become expert in your field in what you do and in the disruptive technologies, you – for the moment – have a lot more to shoot at. It won’t always be this way, so take your shot while you can. If you’re not sufficiently skilled with our metaphorical bow and arrow, skill up as fast as you can.

Take your shot!

Photo credit: B. Sandman.

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I’d like to take a few moments to say that while the student certainly made effective use of his katana that a katana isn’t exactly the ideal home defense weapon. Here’s why: it’s a really big weapon indoors. Outdoors (where, according to some accounts the confrontation took place, others putting it in the house or in a garage), a katana is a fine weapon. Its length, edge, and relatively lightness (compared to heavier European swords or even older Japanese tachi swords) make it a formidable amplifier, and against a skilled practitioner, it’s extremely hard to overcome.

Indoors…

You see the general problem. Unless you’ve had a great deal of practice using a sword indoors, chances are your home, apartment, or office will be working against you with a weapon designed for use on a battlefield.

Please accept these bits of unsolicited advice from a guy who’s practiced with swords a lot and studied self defense a lot:

1. If someone’s in your home and you have the option to do so, run like hell and call the police. No piece of property is worth risking your life for, and virtually everything except maybe sentimental items can be replaced.

2. If running like hell isn’t an option, get yourself and anyone else you care about together inside, lock and bar an interior room, and call the police.

3. If you have no other choice, meaning that either someone you love or you are directly in harm’s way with no other resort, then and only then should you attempt confrontation, and probably not with a sword unless you’ve got nothing else or you’ve got an awful lot of training under your belt. That can of fake lavender air freshener or toilet cleaner under your sink will probably work better to confuse and disorient a home invader long enough to let you escape, rather than a sword.

Other views will differ, of course, but at least in what we teach at the Boston Martial Arts Center, your very best bet is always self preservation, escape and evasion, then defensive tactics, then as a last resort, offensive tactics. Not only does this order of priorities give you the best chance of coming out of a self defense situation safely, but it also is most likely to protect you legally if the case goes to court. If, in your testimonial, you explain to the authorities, the judge and jury, and legal counsel that you made every effort to escape and evade, to defend, and only when you were given no other choice and you believed serious or mortal harm was imminent did you take a life, you are likely to be cleared of any charges of excessive force.

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Do you know what you’re marketing?

I mean this in all seriousness. Part of what should make marketing easy is when you have an awesome product or service. Awesome goes a long way towards a product making itself well known by word of mouth, but at least to get the ball rolling, you need someone – marketing – to tell your target audiences that your product or service even exists.

How many times have you been to a specialty store like a Best Buy or a Petsmart where the sales person you were talking to had absolutely no idea what it was that you were asking about, or were just plain making things up because they had no idea what they were marketing?

How much money is your company losing from lack of knowledge in marketing?

Here’s a sniff test, a gut check for you and everyone on your marketing staff. Pick one product or service your company offers and ask your team – and yourself – to explain 3 aspects of the product or service, like how it works, who’s eligible to use it, what role it’s best suited for, etc. If your company’s marketing team is outstanding, everyone will be able to knock this out in 30 seconds flat. If your company’s marketing team is not yet wholly awesome, you’ll get a lot of stuttering, downward glances, and shuffling feet.

If you can’t explain what you do as employees whose paychecks depend on your products or services, what hope do you have for your prospective customers understanding enough to buy from you?

There are two solutions for this problem. Neither solution costs much money, and both cost time that’s well invested.

First and foremost, and the one that we use where I work, at the Student Loan Network, is to make everyone work in customer service. From the CEO down to the coffee intern, everyone works in customer service, answering customer questions, researching financial aid issues, going to financial aid conferences, volunteering at events like College Goal Sunday. Everyone is in service whether they want to be or not, whether they personally think it’s beneath them or not, because that’s the best way to stay in touch with what customers are really asking for. I get tons of messages on Twitter and Facebook daily about financial aid, and I’m happy to answer them because it keeps me trained on what we can do.

Second, make sure marketing and production/manufacturing/creation have lunch together weekly. I’ve said this before about marketing and IT on Marketing Over Coffee, but it’s equally important here as well. Make sure the folks who make the stuff that you sell and marketing are dining together on a regular basis so that the creators can help the marketers understand what the heck it is they’re trying to sell. If your product or service is something that your marketing team can use, every single person on the team should have a free one issued to them in perpetuity, so that they always know what the thing is and what it does. On a recent trip to Hubspot, every employee has their own personal web site’s Website Grader score posted publicly on their desk, so that they know exactly what their public facing tools do and how it can help them.

Neither of these things are rocket science. Both are cheap and impactful. Please, I beg of you, do this at your company, so that the next time I want to buy from you, the person marketing stuff to me can actually answer my questions.

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If you’re not familiar with the game, World of Warcraft has an in-game currency, gold, which you use to play and improve your character. There are a number of ways to make gold in the game, from speculating in the game’s in-world marketplace (the Auction House) to creating items to sell to others (tradeskills and professions) to selling raw materials to others, like fish, ore, and other resources.

One of the secrets of making a LOT of gold in Warcraft, however, is synergy – what happens when you start putting together players with different skills. For example, in my guild, I have a character that does in-game mining, pulling various ores and minerals out of the ground. The ore is sent to our guild’s jeweler, who prospects the ore for high quality magic gems that make a character better. He in turn gives those to our guild alchemist, who transmutes them into exceptionally high quality magic gems that I then sell on the marketplace, often at prices that are as much as 1500% higher than the raw materials. We then split the profits among us equally.

Here’s why this is interesting – to do this myself, I’d have to play the game three times as much, or surrender a giant percentage of profits to other players not in my guild, making my mining efforts far less profitable and worthy of my time. Instead, our synergies together – miner, alchemist, jewelcrafter – mean that we can take our respective skills and together make items that are far more profitable than any of our efforts alone.

So what does this have to do with you? Even if you don’t play Warcraft, figuring out your team’s synergies can yield huge profits. For example, at the Student Loan Network, I’m a good creator of content. I write some fairly decent stuff like the Scholarship Search Secrets eBook. On our team, I have a number of folks who are great at SEO who can help make my copy more easily found, access to our Scholarship Points members who can tell me if my writing reflects their reality as customers, and a CEO who has long range, strategic views on everything that can help make a good project great. When we pool our talents together, the end result is almost always better than going it alone.

Figure out who is or should be in your marketing guild. It doesn’t have to be coworkers – it can be friends online, on Twitter, casual social acquaintances – and then figure out which strengths each person specializes in. Get the right team, figure out your synergies together, and chances are what you’ll create will be of far higher value than your own efforts.

Oh, and if anyone’s looking for blue quality Wrath gems and you’re Alliance on Arathor US, hit us up. I’ll give you the social media discount rate of 1495% profit, 5% off our regular prices

Photo credit: cliff1066

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Here’s the last piece I’ll post on September 11 for now.

WTC2, the South Tower of the World Trade Center, collapsed after 56 minutes from fire. The people in that building who perished did have about an hour and some communications access to say goodbye, to communicate to some degree, though nowhere near as much communications capacity as today. Some were able to say goodbye, and that’s the basis of this exercise.

For an hour today, I ask you to do something different. From 8:46 AM to 9:59 AM (impact to South Tower collapse), take that time away from media coverage, away from the daily distractions if you can, if possible, and write out what you would say if you were facing your last hour alive. Pop open your email client or word processor or whatever and take that time to put down into words what you’d want to leave behind, and limit yourself strictly to that hour.

Who would you write to? One person, a bunch of people? Close friends? A child? A parent?

What would you say? What words would you want to leave behind, to endure beyond you? Tell someone that you loved them? Compress the most important life lessons you can think of for your children?

Write it down. Put it out of your mind and into a tangible, communicable reality.

Then send it. Send it now, send it today, send it while you are still able, because one day, you won’t be able to any longer.

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I took this photo from the Hilton Millennium’s upper floors.

It’s been eight years since the towers fell, eight years since a morning that few of us will ever forget, nor should we.

It’s been eight years, two wars overseas, a Great Recession, two elections, 34.1 million births and 19.9 million deaths in America since 9/11. A lot has happened in that time, good and ill. Marriages and divorces, arrivals and passings, heroes and villains, life and death in spades.

If you knew that a year from now, on September 11 at 8:46 AM, your life would suddenly end, what would you do differently now? Would you leave that job? Would you treat the people around you differently and let some go from your life? Would you spend more time with the people you love or work to leave the world as best a place as you can make it?

How would we remember you? How would you want us to remember you? What would you want us to do after you’re gone?

“We are each born with death, and grow up dying inside ourselves.” – Zen poem

Your death is certain. It’s mostly a question of when and how we will part ways, and what happens until then. I hope we all find our own ways to honor those who have left us, not only on 9/11 but in the eight years since, and that we live up to the trust left with us to live this life the best we can, while we can.

Are you living the life you want while you still can?

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Anyway, yesterday Apple released iTunes 9, along with two new formats of media, iTunes LP (enhanced albums with art, interviews, text, interactive, etc.) and iTunes Extras for Movies (think DVD extra content and features). Some off the cuff thoughts about how these tools, when made available to content creators, will impact marketing.

iTunes LP will obviously help musicians a great deal in selling albums vs. tracks. The idea of being able to buy an album with a concert video embedded in it, or an interview, or whatever appeals most to fans will make selling the whole album as a package a draw over the individual track. That’s a good thing.

iTunes Extras will obviously port existing DVDs into iTunes, helping out movie studios, etc.

What I’m really interested in is how these tools will be made available to content creators, because I could easily see releasing a super-enhanced podcast that contained photos (say if the show were an interview at a conference or something), a book excerpt, transcript, or other enhanced features. Being able to create your own enhanced iTunes LP collection – whether or not your “album” is in the iTunes store, would be a huge benefit to marketers wanting to offer more goods to consumers.

Where I think the juice will really flow is in iTunes Extras. For anyone who does public speaking, imagine being able to take video of your presentation at a conference and embed your speaker notes, photos, handouts, or even a transcript of your remarks in one slick package. You could include bonus footage like Q&A, media interviews, or other pieces of media in the exact same manner as you would on a full DVD – without the DVD.

I look forward to hearing from Apple and independent publishing houses like CD Baby to see how accessible these features will be to folks not affiliated with a big publisher or label.

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The kamidana traditionally has a few common items in it – a shimenawa rope, designating it as a sacred place, above or nearby. There’s a kagami mirror, signifying that the true source of your power comes from you, if you can only see clearly enough to recognize it, a set of sakaki greens, typically pine or other evergreen cuttings, symbolizing life and growth, tomyo candles that hold purifying fire and light your way, osonaemono offerings of rice, water, and salt (offering food for the ancient spirits, symbolizing giving respect to all who have come before you), and a kagaribitate watch fire stand, symbolic of standing guard against evil.

So what does this have to do with anything? Well, the idea of a spiritual seat, or a place of power, is something that a lot of us don’t have any more. Many have places of power like the church on Sunday morning, the temple on Friday night, the dojo, but rarely do we have a place of power near to us, and for those that travel a lot for business, what places of power you do have (like home) you’re away from an awful lot of the time.

Give some consideration to creating a kamidana for yourself in your own home, and a portable one for on the road. In either, think about the things that you derive power and strength from. The classical Shinto kamidana might resonate with you, but chances are if you’re not of Japanese heritage or an avid practitioner of classical Japanese martial arts, it’ll probably be a curiosity more than anything else. Look instead at your own sources of power, your own culture, personal history, and traditions for these things:

- What designates a sacred place for you? It might be a symbol, like a crucifix or the Star of David, or something as simple as a favorite colored cloth.
- What designates self reflection for you? A small hand mirror might be appropriate, or a crystal.
- What designates growth for you? A freshly cut flower? A few green leaves? A small potted plant? Heck, even a tank of sea monkeys if that’s what means growth to you.
- What designates all that is light, bright, and right in your world? If you’re a parent, perhaps it’s a photo of your child or a favorite drawing they’ve made for you. If you’re a pet lover, maybe it’s your pet’s photo. Whatever you love and whatever you fight for in the world, this is it.
- What designates a connection to meaningful parts of your past? A locket from your grandmother, maybe, or an aged family photo, perhaps. Find something in your past that is symbolic of your roots’ strength.
- What designates watchfulness against negative habits, energy, people, and events? Maybe it’s an icon of a saint in your tradition or another holy figure. Maybe it’s a favorite quote on a small card, or a picture of a hero that you associate strongly with.

Take the time to set up a spiritual shelf, a little place of your own power, something that is in a protected little space somewhere in your home or office. It doesn’t have to be big or obvious – you can even keep it in a desk drawer if need be, but make it a place that you use to remind you of what you stand for, what your true power is, and what you want to achieve in the world. Use it daily, even for just a few moments, to focus your mind and take a few deep breaths, reconnecting.

If you travel a lot, take a small cloth with you and items that designate each of the meanings, and in your hotel room, set up this little place with your stuff that again reminds you of what’s important to you. In those lonely moments when you miss home and all that it symbolizes, looking at your own symbols of what you’re doing the travel for will help you forge on and refresh the connections you have to your own power.

Try it and see how it works for you!

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Disclosure: goes to Amazon, affiliate fee paid to Marketing Over Coffee.

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In the beginning of your gear quest, vast improvements in your character’s capabilities are easy. Going from a green “uncommon quality” item to a blue “rare” item can add more power, more strength, more valued attributes to your character in great leaps. Your character can perform far better in the game in these early jumps in equipment.

However, as you keep gearing up, going from blue “rare” items to purple “epic” items, the items get more costly (or more difficult to obtain) for statistical improvements that are orders of magnitude smaller.

After a certain point, you reach diminishing returns, where the gear’s improvements are so small that the comparatively large efforts to get the gear simply isn’t worth it for the average player. Where a blue “rare” item might take half an hour’s worth of work, a top, best-in-game item might take weeks. Granted, it’s a game, so as long as you’re having fun there’s no penalty towards getting that gear, but it’s still significant diminishing returns.

After you reach the point of diminishing returns on gear, the best thing you can do as a Warcraft player is to spend time learning how to play your character’s skills with the gear you’ve got. Gear, after all, merely magnifies your skills. Learning the various ways your character can behave in combat, learning to fine tune your use of the right skill at exactly the right time – these are the things that will not only make the most of the gear you’ve got, but in some cases will negate any gear disadvantages you have. Anyone on a team in the game knows that it’s better to have a slightly undergeared, excellent player leading your team than a highly geared, incompetent buffoon running the team.

So what does all this have to do with anything? Well, life is exactly the same. Take photography – after a certain point, you’re just spending money on lenses and other gadgets with fewer and fewer returns. That first zoom lens makes a big difference in your photography. The jump from a 55-200mm to an 18-200mm isn’t earth shattering, just convenient. Photography gets to diminishing returns VERY quickly – better to learn how to compose and shoot with the gear you have after the entry level improvements. Better pictures come from better skills – gear magnifies skill, but doesn’t improve it. Only learning and practice improves skill. I’ve got a Nikon D90 with a few lenses, and when talking to Marko Kulik (a photography expert), he basically said I’ve got all the gear I could possibly need for years – now I need to learn how to use it well.

Look at marketing. The first analytics software you start using is an incredible leap from no analytics at all, or guesswork based on server logs. After that, you get diminishing returns on the quantity of information you get from web analytics – and the real juice to be had in web analytics is not learning what numbers you have, but what they mean and how you can change your business practices to serve your customers better.

Accounting? Lots of businesses run quite well on Microsoft Excel, not because they don’t want to buy an accounting package, but because their accounting staff is sufficiently skilled enough in Excel that the gear upgrade won’t make a difference in their performance – and might even diminish it.

In the end, gearing up is important only to the point of diminishing returns, whether it’s marketing or Warcraft. The lesson is the same across nearly all professions, trades, and hobbies: gear magnifies skill. Gear up to get past entry level limitations, then focus your time and energy on the skills you need to tap the potential of that gear.

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They tend to grow, from a little tiny scratch, barely worth noticing, to a monstrously large spiderweb in a fairly short amount of time, and what’s more, as the crack gets bigger, its rate of growth accelerates. The vibration of the car, of your driving, makes the glass crack all the more quickly. The speed from a scratch to an inch takes time – the speed from an inch to a foot is startlingly fast, and before you know it, you’re at the shop getting a new windshield.

When it comes to limitations, whether internal or external, breaking through them very often isn’t a sledgehammer’s swing to victory. More often, it’s just a small crack in the glass – but that first breaking point is the key to that barrier eventually shattering into dust.

For example, there’s a student at the Boston Martial Arts Center who’s relatively new. For privacy reasons, we’ll just call her Katie. Started not too long ago. She came in with no confidence, no belief in herself, and not even a clear sense of why she was there. Katie started taking classes, started learning just a few of the basics, and one day during a class I was teaching, she delivered a solid lead jab to her partner’s heavily-padded target. Her partner, a guy who probably outweighs her by a hundred pounds or so, was knocked back and down.

That was the crack in the glass for Katie. Prior to that day, the idea of knocking down someone with a lead jab was ludicrous for her. But in that moment, the glass cracked, and suddenly what was impossible was not only possible, but real. That changed her instantaneously and irrevocably, and now, just a few weeks later, Katie’s a different person. Her mind shattered a limitation and is now wondering what other barriers and limitations she has that are equally vulnerable, equally breakable.

The momentum of the glass cracking is picking up.

Now, you don’t have to be a martial artist to experience this. You do have to be willing to step outside your comfort zone, try something out, be completely okay with failing, and be tenacious in trying until you do reach at least one success, until you know that impossible is possible and can be made manifest, made real. Maybe it’s cooking a new dish that’s legendary for its difficulty. Maybe it’s publicly showing that painting you’re privately proud of but anxious about others seeing. Maybe it’s standing in front of an audience and speaking for half an hour.

Whatever your limitations are, know that once you make even the tiniest crack in them, as long as you keep driving, momentum will be on your side, and your barriers can be shattered.

Keep on driving!

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The process for choosing who will speak at SxSW is partly open to the public, where speakers propose panel discussions on the voting web site, then encourage friends, family, and anyone who will stand still long enough to vote for their panel. Panels that receive lots of votes have a greater chance of being selected for public performance at the festival.

Competition is fierce, with over 2,200 proposed panels and about 10% or so will make it through (if I remember correctly).

The consequence of this is that every proposed speaker has been shilling like mad to get their panels selected. Sonny Gill asked if there was a better way than this, than making it effectively a popularity contest, and I think there is.

Make the content stand on its own.

Here’s how I’d approach it. Speakers complete proposed speaking session topics, the same as now, except that they are forbidden from attaching any personally identifiable information to the topic. These are then loaded into the system, validated to ensure speakers followed the rules (anyone who didn’t, obviously, is disqualified outright), and then displayed to voters.

Here’s the catch: voters only see the panel topic and description. No speaker name or bio. No information at all about who’s delivering. The URLs themselves are randomized each time you enter the voting process so a speaker can’t find their panel in the pile and tell people to vote for it or even link to it. Voters vote for 5 at a time, ranking them in order of preference, and at the end, votes are tallied and the schedule is revealed.

This eliminates the popularity contest. This eliminates gender or race bias. This eliminates everything except what the panel is ostensibly about, which is the content, the discussion, the conversation.

Will this ever happen? Not likely. SxSW would never get nearly the same number of voters registering under an anonymous system, which means a smaller database to work with, nor would it create the same kind of buzz that the current system does, so don’t expect it to change. Every potential speaker is SxSW’s marketing department, unpaid. Every potential speaker is generating ridiculous Google Juice for SxSW’s web site. Why would you as a conference organizer ever give that up?

But, that said, if there ever were an opportunity for conference organizers as a professional conference to democratize their voting system, this would be the way to do it.

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I was going to say it’s easy as pie, but if you’ve ever tried to bake a pie, it’s not necessarily easy. Whoever thought that expression up clearly did not take into account the lack of pastry skill that most of us have. So, we’ll make subscribing and sharing easy first, and then make pie easy.

Easy subscribing

If you want to get my blog via email subscription:

If you want to get my blog in Google reader:

If you know what you’re doing with RSS:

Easy sharing

Easy pie

Ingredients:

1 ready made, ready to serve pie shell
1 8 oz. container of Kool Whip
2 regular sized containers of fruit-containing yogurt

Mix the Kool Whip and yogurt together in a bowl. Scoop contents into a pie shell. Refrigerate for an hour. Serve.

See? Easy pie.

Photo credit: netefekt. Note that yogurt pie looks nothing like the one in the picture. That’s difficult pie.

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In 2006, Ze Frank talked about brand as emotional aftertaste. He gave the examples of Grandma’s cookies (as a generic brand) that elicits an emotional reaction, and then old people’s cookies (as an even more generic brand). Which would you rather eat?

If you haven’t watched the episode, it’s brilliant.

Second example. I could talk about comfort food generically, but there’s a funny thing about people. The more detail you give into your own experiences, the more others can relate to them. There’s a dish my grandmother used to make, a Czech ham and noodle casserole called flicky (pronounced fleech-key). Nana would make it in a deep casserole dish, and it was always an amazing dinner. The noodles at the very top of the dish would get golden brown, crispy on the edges, and the ham & noodles inside would be deliciously creamy, served steaming hot. It was a cardiologist’s nightmare, I’m sure, because it was made with ham, eggs, cream, real butter, and egg noodles, but if there was ever a comfort food dish that you’d want on a cold, rainy November afternoon in Queens, New York, it was Nana’s flicky.

Reading that, did any of your own experiences, your own favorite comfort foods spring to mind? Did you think back to your own past, to the things that reassure you and comfort you? I’d guess at least a little bit yes.

The phenomenon of specificity reaching a wide audience and eliciting responses is something from esoteric mind science traditions. That’s how the highest level teachings are transmitted – through storytelling that elicits memories and original experiences in your own mind, which have the most weight and power to influence you. Nothing is more powerful or persuasive than your own mind.

If you’re looking to reach people, to influence them through your writing, through your stories, there’s no better way than to tell your own story as deeply and as humanly as you can, sharing your experiences good and bad. When you do, you’ll find that you and your audience have so much more in common than you think.

Oh, and I intentionally left out two ingredients from Nana’s flicky. Anyone familiar with Czech cuisine can probably guess what they are, but for everyone else, sorry. That’s a true family secret

Photo credit: Vegan Feast

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I went looking for some decent affiliate marketing blogs to read and subscribe to this morning. Being the Googling sort, I searched for affiliate marketing blogs and popped open the top 20 results in a series of tabs to see what I’d found.

Of the top 20 sites that came back in my search, 2 didn’t load, one was flagged by Google as containing malware harmful to my computer, and 11 of the sites, before any content could load, popped up a whole-page, content-obscuring ad. Some of the ads were for newsletters, blogs, or other “freebies”, while others promoted the author’s latest books, DVDs, webinars, seminars, and other swill.

The very thing that would convince me to buy your book, CD, DVD, etc. is your content. How helpful is your blog? After all, if I quickly scan the first five posts of your blog and I learn something just from a quick scan, you can bet that I’ll think you’ve got even more stuff to offer. You taught me something in 30 seconds, and I’ll stick around much longer to see what else I can learn. I’ll bookmark your site. I’ll tag it and store it for future reference. I’ll subscribe and opt-in, because I love learning, and I love any site, blog, or outlet that helps me learn more.

However, when you obscure your content with piles and piles of ads, guess what? The value you present to me is absolutely zero, and you get put in the bin of perpetual ignorage. I don’t care how well ranked your book is on Amazon or that your book is on the Peoria TImes Bestseller List for the 213th week in a row. Endorsements don’t mean anything to me. Reputation matters very little to me. What does matter is the content, the goods, and if you block my ability to read your content with your ads, then you’ve effectively decided I don’t need to get any sense of your value.

Here’s the ultimate irony, you Internet marketing masters. (yes, one pompous jackass billed himself as such) One of the areas we cover less well in our Marketing Over Coffee podcast is affiliate marketing (with the quality of the blogs I surfed this morning, there’s little wonder why), so I was doing some homework, putting together a list of actually useful affiliate marketing blogs for our master blog list that we’ll be distributing in the next Marketing Over Coffee newsletter.

If you hadn’t blocked your entire site with tons of useless shit, you might have made the cut and had your blog included in a list that will be distributed and subscribed to by thousands and thousands of marketing professionals. Instead, you lose out on me, you lose out on someone willing to voluntarily endorse your writing, and you lose out on a ton of exposure, all in the hope that you could scrape up a buck with your ineffective ads.

We’ve all been beating this meme to death recently, but for good reason: be helpful. Be helpful in what you do and your work will practically market for you. Be helpful and useful in your writing, in your blogging, in your content production, and you’ll have won me over immediately, made me subscribe, and made me mention you to the folks who enjoy seeing what’s on my nightstand and in my blog reader.

Go take a look at your top five blog posts right now on your personal or professional site. If at least one of your blog posts doesn’t contain something helpful, something actionable, something useful, fix that. If you do have something that I can learn, take away, and make useful right away, then I congratulate and salute you, and know that your audience deeply appreciates what you do.

Updated: I posted the counterpoint perspective with data over on Marketing Over Coffee.

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So, the question is this: how do people build and develop their personal brands, if all we really want is content that is valuable to us and not self-promotional in any way, shape or form?

This is the essence of empowering a personal brand. It’s not about you, but what you do.

“It’s not who I am underneath, but what I *do* that defines me.” – Batman (2005)

Want to take your products, services, brands, and company to the next level? Forget about reinforcing brand and focus on what you’re doing to make things better for your customers. Want to see a great example at a small business level? Look at how Matthew Ebel is working his subscription service. Ask his VIPs if he’s all about himself or all about them, and you’ll find nearly universal agreement that he’s making the music FOR the customers, not just trying to sell them whatever he can for a buck.

Look at some of the powerhouses in new media, like Beth Kanter and Beth Dunn, movements like Twestival and Free Iran – all of these folks are less about them and more about their work, about promoting their efforts to help others. Look at Facebook’s applications – one of the most powerful and popular applications? Causes.

It’s not who you are, it’s what you do that will turn your brand up to 11.

Photo credit: Chan Chan

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So why, then, do you and I wake up some days and just have no motivation? Why does that blank patch of wall in our offices still get face time with us, when there’s so much to do and we’ve got so much motivational knowledge in our heads?

I can’t speak for you, but there are generally three things that deplete my motivation or self motivation:

1. I don’t care. There are some tasks, and we all have them, that I just don’t care for, like cleaning the cat’s litter box. There’s no amount of NLP reframing or Tony Robbins that will take that task and make it a delightful challenge.

My fix: burn through those tasks as quickly as possible, and find ways to distract your thinking mind (which is the part that gets bored) with something else during those times. If you ever look at my Twitter usage during the workday, there are lulls and spikes. You know I’m doing something like database maintenance, mailing list management, etc. during periods of spikes because my thinking mind is waiting for one or more tasks to complete, especially on long database issues.

2. Bad climate. Ever been to one of those meetings that just sucks the life out of you? I was once at a sales meeting at a former company (unsurprisingly out of business) where the sales team leader was this guy who spoke in a monotone and sounded like a prophet of doom. No matter how well or poorly sales were going, he was guaranteed to be the wet blanket that made you want to call in sick for the next year. Every company has its demotivators – endless meetings, bad leaders/managers, office politics, bureaucracy without end. That’s unavoidable unless you’re a sole proprietor, in which case, you’ve got other problems to solve if you hate the leadership.

My fix: Get out of the office, even just for a day. Go talk to your best customers. Go talk to the people whose lives you are directly impacting in a positive way, and see how the stuff you do on a daily basis actually matters. Sales charts and quarterly bonuses and metrics are all fine and good, but they’re bloodless. No one feels anything about a percentage increase in sales. Talking to a single mother who got a scholarship because of a blog post you wrote and is going back to college can refresh and revitalize your energy and motivation like nothing else. Find out how you and your business are actually making a difference to the people you serve, and if you’re not making a difference at all (or worse, are actively harming people), get the hell out of your job.

3. No direction. How long is your to do list? I know mine’s infinitely long and seems to get longer (if that were mathematically possible, which it’s not) every day. With so much to do, it’s kind of like going to a buffet that’s two and a half miles long. There’s so much to choose from, you don’t know where to start.

My fix: Make a list of the stuff that you have to do. Do NOT assign priorities to it. Instead, look at the list and find one or two things that you can accomplish very quickly and that are reasonably fun and entertaining to do. Why? You want to jump start your momentum of accomplishment. Chances are the stuff on your list that’s super high priority is also stuff that will require intense focus, energy, and effort – and if you’re not moving right now, going 0 to 60 instantaneously is difficult. Pick one or two items that can get the ball rolling, and after you’ve restarted your momentum, then move over to a list that has priorities assigned to it, or start to assign priorities.

It’s always good to refresh your motivational potential, your stored energy, with things like those books, seminars, etc. but at the end of the day, you need to convert that potential into action, into energy, into results so that you make a difference. Making a difference in the world, accomplishing something, having results at a human level that you can be proud of – that will fuel your future motivation more than all the self help materials in the world.

Get through the stuff you don’t care about. Get out of the office. Find a direction and get the ball rolling. That’s how I break my demotivational spells. How about you?

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It’s also true.

The majority of your revenue comes from a minority of customers.

The majority of your time spent on anything is focused on a minority of time sinks.

and so forth.

Twitter’s no different. Recently, Robert Scoble unfollowed everyone. He paid a service to do a mass, mass unfollow of hundreds of thousands of people and has been manually refollowing since then. For those of us with fewer connections than Robert, it’s worth pointing out that the majority of crap in your Twitter stream comes from a minority of people. Filter them out, unfollow them, and you’ll see Twitter become usable again.

My criteria for an instant unfollow are pretty simple:

1. If you talk about making money on Twitter at all, you’re gone. This is the fastest and easiest kill of all.

2. If you talk without listening – meaning your stream has absolutely no conversation, you’re gone. Doubly so if all you’ve got are sales and promotions.

3. If you just retweet with nothing else, nothing original, not even “my cat just threw up!”, you’re gone, because you’re probably a robot.

4. If you’re a robot, you’re gone. Robots are fairly easy to spot – unlike humans, they typically truncate tweets mid word over and over again in their stream.

5. If you’ve just got stuff I don’t care about in your stream, you’re gone. One person had nothing but quotes from Jesus in their stream. Not my cup of tea, being Buddhist and all. Another person was a true cat blogger and cat tweeter with nothing else. I have a cat, so rather than experience their cat vicariously, I’ll just peek at my lump of gray fur.

Here’s a simple way to weed out the crap. Once an hour, go to your Twitter home page. Browse through the tweets. Cull off any stupidity or robots you see, and repeat for a couple of days. It takes literally seconds to peek quickly and make a decision – we’re not talking a major investment of your time at all.

You’ll find that just by pruning out the garbage after a few runs, Twitter will be easier to use. The Pareto Principle holds true – 80% of your crap is from 20% of your follows, so nuke them.

If you use a client like Tweetdeck, you’ll find you miss fewer updates from friends, especially if you follow a lot of people. All clients like Tweetdeck pull a limited number of tweets from your stream on a regular basis, so the more crap you filter out, the less likely it is you’ll miss good stuff from your friends.

Remember, unfollowing someone doesn’t mean you stop communicating with them. You can and always should be monitoring without needing to follow – if you haven’t grabbed a copy, go get the Twitter Power Guide eBook. It’s free.

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The thing is, you very much can do so, you very much can create the mental and emotional states you want to experience. Your body and mind are designed to do exactly that, because at our most primitive levels, we’ve evolved to remember strong memories and feelings as a key to survival.

Look at your own history of strongly anchored memories, from basic things like the taste of an apple to incredibly complex things like the first person you kissed. You have tons of memories, good and bad, that you’ll never be able to get rid of. You have tons more memories waiting to be triggered at the drop of a hat – the right song in a public venue or the right scent of perfume, and you’re instantly somewhere and somewhen else. Ask any couple that’s been together for a while if they have a song that they strongly associate with, and you’ll get an enthusiastic yes far more often than not.

What emotional states do you want to invoke? Confidence? Serenity? Awesome?

The trick to refreshing and triggering the emotional states you want to experience is to know what your triggers are for memories you do have, and set new triggers when you want to anchor down a state for later recall. For memories you already have, few are more powerful than music, which is where the post about using your iPod for mental protection came from. Go read it and try it if you haven’t. Go dig up the powerful, positive states you want to recall out of your past. If high school or college was a positive experience for you, go dig out those yearbooks that are inevitably collecting dust on a bookshelf and take a quick jog down memory lane to extract the memory triggers that still have strength and impact.

If you know in advance that you’ll be encountering an experience that you’ll want to remember, like my friend’s lakeshore drive, then decide in advance how you’ll anchor that experience for later recall. Perhaps you’ve got some special hand gesture that has significance to you – many devout folks who pray with clasped hands find that just the act of physically doing so refreshes their mental and emotional state. Maybe it’s a special outfit you wear or a special routine that you create, a special habit that you can invoke – whatever works best for you.

There’s ample precedent for all of this. If you look at some of the images from Buddhism and from ninjutsu in which various hand postures are shown, you’ll see that they are less about portraying practices to the uninitiated and more about prompting practitioners who’ve gone through training to refresh their memories and experiences. Having a picture or statue in your home of Fudo Myo-o, Jesus Christ, the Dalai Lama, St. Mary, etc. isn’t so much a thing to pray to or worship as it is a daily, constant reminder of a mental and emotional state you’re seeking to invoke in yourself. (though of course many people do use them as foci for worship as well)

You don’t need to use religious materials, either, especially if they don’t connect with you. Plenty of people have powerful state changes when they pop in their favorite movie. Plenty of people have powerful emotions when they fire up Team Fortress 2 or Sim City or World of Warcraft. Plenty of people have associations that are just as strong around Yoda, Tirion Fordring, Superman, Indiana Jones, Batman, the Terminator, and Rocky Balboa. Use the tools and content that speak the most to you of the emotional and mental states you want to generate.

For “bottling” the feelings and states you want to recall, the trick is to be consistent. If you go for lakeshore drives as your way of refreshing yourself, then set a routine, a hand posture, a habit, whatever, so that similar experiences and emotional states are anchored with the same habit. If you love watching Rocky jog up the steps of the art museum, set those physical habit reminders for that feeling. Whatever creates the way you want to be, set your reminders, your anchors. Then, later on, when you need to invoke that same mental and emotional memory, the habits and physical gestures brings back what you’ve stored.

Give it a try and see how “mind-setting” works for you!

Photo credit: Mark Blevis

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We are emotional creatures. We feel first, then think – and this is wholly right and as it should be, because to feel primal fear is to ensure survival. You don’t analyze how many claws the lion has, you feel the fear and run like hell.

Knowing this, knowing that we are emotional creatures first, think very careful about your work in marketing, advertising, and media. In all of your work, in all of your campaigns, you want to target an emotion as the hook that attracts attention, convinces the prospect, and converts the customer. In all of your media, you have to decide what end emotion you want someone else to feel, and plan your work accordingly.

I’ll give you a few examples.

In the Financial Aid Podcast and my work on FAFSAonline.com, the free FAFSA application prep site, I focus on the emotion of reassurance. When you’re done, I want your fears to be mitigated, I want you to feel a little more confident that the financial aid process is manageable, that you can do and accomplish everything in the process, and that it’s not the mind-boggling maze that others market to your fears in order to get you to buy, sign on the dotted line, and hope everything will be all right. Quite the opposite. I want you to feel reassured, a little more secure, and resolute in your ability to navigate the process.

In Marketing Over Coffee, the emotion John Wall and I go after most often is conspiracy. Not tin foil hat stuff, but the sense that you’re in on the secret. You’re a part of the secret club of Marketing Over Coffee, you’re there with us in the coffee shop as we talk over stuff that’s of interest to us. You know the special handshake, the secret sign, and all the privileges that come with being on the inside, with the “in” crowd.

Look at a product like the Pet Rock from the 1970s. Who in their right mind would have predicted that this phenomenon would have taken off? Actually, looking back, there’s absolutely no surprise that it did, as it markets to the dual emotions of convenience and guilt. You know someone who’s endured the childhood trauma of losing a pet. You also know people who are so absent minded they’d lose their own reproductive organs if they weren’t integrated in them. Pet rock’s marketing to the emotions of knowing you can’t possibly hurt your pet rock, nor do you have to be responsible in any sense.

Examine the feelings generated by many of the well known folks in social media. How does Chris Brogan make you feel? How does Gary Vaynerchuk make you feel? How about Ann Handley, Pete Cashmore, Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin, Perez Hilton, or Justine Ezarik? I guarantee you that if you know of any of these folks, the answer is never “nothing”. They all create emotions in you that make the sale.

Heck, how do I make you feel?

Look at your own products, services, and communications. Ask yourself what your audience is currently feeling. If the answer is nothing, you’re in a heap of trouble. (this, by the way, is what most of us feel when reading press releases) If you don’t have a core emotion as part of your marketing, advertising, and communications strategies, stop everything else and go think that through.

You’ll feel better for it.

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Piracy is a market signal.

Piracy indicates that something is sufficiently valuable enough that it’s worth stealing. It’s worth making an illegal copy and spreading without compensating the creator.

Do you want the most accurate, unbiased, unmanipulated measure of how popular and valuable something is? Go hit up a site like The Pirate Bay or Demonoid or any of the other file sharing services and see if someone is stealing it.

Right now, taking a quick peek, about 150 people are illegally sharing Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point. Another hundred or so are illegally sharing Outliers. Seth Godin’s somewhat less popular, with about 30 people sharing Purple Cow and Permission Marketing. A dozen are legally sharing Seth’s eBooks, which are free on his web site as well.

Matthew Ebel, independent musician, noted that recently there have been inquiries on Yahoo Answers about people trying to illegally share his music. By the way, Matthew, your 2005 album Beer and Coffee is being shared by at least two people illegally on Bit Torrent, just so you know. Go post a comment in that thread on the Pirate Bay.

Unlike commercial markets where marketers spend time, energy, and money to get you to buy things, no commercial marketer actively goes out and tells people to steal their products and not pay them. That’s completely irrational.

Give away for non-monetary currency, sure, through inbound links or reputation, through legitimate venues like your web site or iTunes, but no one wants to confer any level of legitimacy on pirate markets. Thus, when you see something in a pirate market that is actively being traded (meaning someone right now is seeding or leeching, uploading or downloading), it’s a good indicator to me that there’s value being exchanged, even if the creator isn’t getting compensated.

By the way, the distinction about active trading is important – you can upload your eBooks for free in pirate markets as well, but no one can force traders to download it or share it. If it’s in active trade, someone thinks they’re enough value there.

Believe it or not, in some ways, this is a good thing. This is an indicator that people care enough about what you have for sale that they’re willing to steal it, to share it illegally. Granted, especially for an independent musician, there’s a very real consequence of people not paying for your stuff (food and rent don’t get paid with hugs), but at least it’s a market signal that your stuff has enough value to warrant stealing in the first place.

So as a content creator, is your stuff worth stealing? Is anyone stealing it right now?

If not, it might be a market signal that you need to up your game to steal-worthy!

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BlizzCon, the annual conference held by Blizzard Software to discuss their products with their customers, is happening right now. Blizzard’s conference and convention attracts fans from all over the world to ask questions, try out beta software, and give feedback about their stuff.

If you’ve ever been at any company’s product launches and reviews, you’d expect this to be a small and rather boring affair. Quite the opposite. BlizzCon attracted 26,000 customers to its fourth annual event.

When was the last social media event that attracted 26,000 people in one setting?

Here’s another twist: every attendee paid $125 (plus travel and expenses) to be at BlizzCon. People who purchased the pay per view (yes, pay per view) stream paid $40 – and there were 50,000 of them. Blizzard, from what’s effectively a product review meeting, raised $5,250,000 from its customers.

When was the last – or any – social media event that brought in that kind of cash?

Here’s the real head exploder for you: not only did Blizzard get 26,000 fans to show up for a product review, not only did it get them to pay, not only did it get another 50,000 to pay for the video stream, but the tickets for BlizzCon, when they went on sale, sold out in 56 seconds.

56 seconds.

Probably faster than it’s taken you to get to this article and read it so far.

Has there ever been a social media event that’s done that? Or any event, besides headline rock star concerts?

How, you ask, does Blizzard do it? How do they put together an event that is the envy of anyone who’s ever planned any kind of meetup or event? How do they make tens of thousands of people pay to show up not even for a commercial, but a product review and beta test, and pull millions of dollars out of the air in less than a minute?

It comes down to the same essential qualities we’ve been talking about for so long: being awesome. Blizzard’s products are nothing short of awesome, and they always have been, ever since Diablo I and Warcraft: Humans and Orcs first rolled out over a decade ago. They consistently create and produce top notch products, products that are worth talking about, products that are unbelievably high quality compared to their competitors, and that reputation and attention to care for their customers has not only earned them customer loyalty, but earned them a mountain of cash as well.

If you’re in marketing, if you’re in advertising, if you’re in media, this is the high water mark, the bar, for all of us. This is the kind of devotion that we all seek to achieve, and the lesson from Blizzard is that there aren’t any shortcuts. There’s no magic bullet, no instant potion that confers awesomeness. If you can create a decade of excellence, of being best in class or nearly best in class for what you do, then you have the opportunity to create a legacy like Blizzard.

If you are not best in class with your products, services, and media, you will never achieve this level of success. Ever. For every Blizzard Entertainment, there are thousands of game publishers that come and go all the time. If you know that your company, your products, your services aren’t best in class and you’re not fighting to get them to that level of achievement, the best you’ll ever be able to do is muster up envy of what Blizzard has done.

First and foremost, focus on being awesome. I can’t beat this dead horse often enough. Besides, I play a Death Knight in World of Warcraft, so we’ll just raise the dead as an Acherus Deathcharger and beat it some more. Focus on being awesome, because Blizzard Entertainment and BlizzCon prove that awesome is one of the most fun places you can be.

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It’s really simple.

It’s really easy.

It’s also very difficult for too many people and companies to ever bother doing.

Be helpful.

Here’s the thing about promotional efforts online, about marketing online. There are all kinds of different emotions and mindsets you can market to, but they all come with risks and niches that are difficult to hit accurately on a routine basis. Doing a video that you want to go viral? You can try for funny, but sense of humor is tricky. You can go for provocative or peddle sex, but you’re going to lose some people there and you’ll have to handle people who are seriously offended by your perceived lack of taste. You can aim for outrageous, but more often than not, your efforts will simply fall flat. Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff recently wrote a great perspective on why things do or don’t go viral and the reasons behind them – give his article a read.

It’s hard to hit sexy, stupid, funny, or outrageous. It’s hard to get the mix just right.

It’s easy, by contrast, to be helpful. Helpful is far more universal than sexy. Helpful is far less likely to engender outrage than badly formed humor that comes off as insulting or offensive. Helpful is something that is instinctively wired into many people as part of the culture.

Helpful is valuable, because we all need help with things. We all need advice or a solution to a problem, and if you’re helpful, if you behave in a manner that legitimately helps me whether or not you make a sale, you’ve created value. If your product or service is powerfully helpful, it will practically sell itself. Take a look at Trust Agents, Chris and Julien’s book. Look at the movement around it that’s been fed by the authors’ focus on being helpful long before the book was even created.

Helpful is self evident. If you’re debating whether something you’re doing is helpful for your customers, then it’s not. If there is a question in your mind about whether a product or service is helpful for your customers, the answer is no, it’s not helpful. If you ask someone else at your company whether a decision is helpful or not to your customers and the answer is longer than yes – particularly if it’s a long, convoluted justification, then the answer is no. Helpful is obvious.

You can spot a company that’s in its death spiral incredibly easily. Just look at their decisions on a spectrum of helpfulness. If a decision or action is authentically helpful to its customers, that business will grow. If a decision or action is designed to reduce helpfulness to customers, that business is eventually dead meat. Cut back on customer service or call center staff? Dead meat. Make it hard for a customer to talk to a human being? Dead meat. Increased marketing budget but decreased quality control budget? Dead meat. Increased prices but decreased store hours? Dead meat. Eliminate useful features of your service to cut costs but you’re flinging press releases around like crazy? Dead meat. Focused all your efforts on marketing instead of creating helpful content, products, or services? Dead meat.

Here’s a test to see if your own company is in trouble. Read your company’s web site and its newsletter. If you can’t find one thing in each outlet that isn’t legitimately helpful with no strings attached, you’re in serious trouble and you might want to think about polishing up your resume if you can’t incite change internally.

Helpful costs. It requires time, energy, money, and resources to focus on how you can help your customers, and very often it’s at odds with the beancounters demanding ROI on everything down to the spoon in your coffee cup. Helpful, however, is an investment that is becoming mandatory in the digitally social sphere, because real time search and real time reputation mean that your old marketing tricks are losing steam and fast. Google, Facebook, and Twitter are already demonstrating that. Only through creating authentic, real value can you remain competitive in the hyperspeed environment of the real time Web, and the fastest, easiest, and most convenient way to create value is to focus on being helpful.

How do you know when you’re succeeding at being helpful? Sales will go up, sure. More people will link to you, blog about you, Twitter about you, sure. But you’ll know when you’re truly being helpful when you receive gushing emails, notes, blog comments, and letters from your customers thanking you for your very existence. Those trophies are a great metric to determine if your efforts at being helpful are working.

How can you turn around your business or propel it to the next level? Refocus on being helpful.

You’ll sleep better at night, too.

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A proverb with roots that go back to ancient Egypt, this bit of wisdom takes on a new face and new life in the 21st century. You see, in decades, centuries, and millennia past, you were more or less confined to your class. Born into a lower caste? Born into a blue collar household? You were pretty much guaranteed to stay there for the rest of your life.

In the past, you were told by the company you kept, and in turn influenced by them. Their views of the world, the views of your family, friends, and associates were largely the same, and those set artificial restrictions on what you believed to be possible. Your station in life was more or less hardcoded and immutable. We never ascended to our potential because we were forced by strict boundaries in society to never see, hear, or do anything other than what people of our class and caste were allowed to do.

The disruptive power of the Internet and new media means that barriers previously built to keep classes separated are falling faster than imaginable. Start chatting with someone during an indie musician’s uStream concert and you may find you’re talking to a senior executive at a marketing firm or a kid in his mother’s basement. You may find that when you log into World of Warcraft you’re talking to people who are database engineers, forklift operators, or company presidents.

In the present, because access to people of all walks of life is so much greater, you have profoundly different choices. Instead of associating with people of similar backgrounds and perspectives by forced circumstance, you can choose whoever you want to associate with.

With unlimited choice of who we communicate with in networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and a myriad of other choices, we can choose which viewpoints we want to continually receive as input into our lives. We can surround ourselves with naysayers and anklebiters and sure enough, we will fail to achieve, and bitterly so. We can surround ourselves with powerful results generating teachers and supportive friends and sure enough, we will achieve beyond any dreams we might have had.

We can become the company we keep.

Approach your social networks strategically. Look for people who are achieving the kind of results that you want to see in your own life, and reach out to them. Ask if they mentor casually (”would it be okay if I asked you a question or two every now and then?”), and even if they don’t, follow them on Twitter, read their blogs, learn as much as you can from observation about the habits and abilities that make them successful. If they speak publicly, go listen. If they have a book, go read it. Model as much of your own habits and skills on what you can perceive from their successes.

Ask them intelligent questions. Not, “how did you become so successful?”, because that’s a surprisingly stupid question. Look at your own successes in progress and where your roadblocks are and ask them for advice about overcoming a specific roadblock that you think they might have had to overcome in their own journeys.

Reach out and do this as much as time and energy permits, because the more people who are achieving the results that you want that you can invite into your life, the more your own viewpoints about the world and beliefs will change. Your mental boundaries about what’s possible and achievable will flex and grow from the constant successes of those around you.

No, you don’t have to cut off ties to everyone you currently know. That’s crass and foolish. Instead, by inviting more success into your life, your own habits and personality will shift over time. Some folks may stay. Some may go, naturally and of their own accord. That’s okay. Ideally, those around you currently will be so energized and inspired by your pending successes that your achievements will spur them to create a little magic of their own.

There’s a three part creed of accomplishment recited in my martial tradition that applies just as much to overall success in life:

I believe in myself. I am confident. I can accomplish my goals.
I believe in what I study. I am disciplined. I am ready to learn and advance.
I believe in my teachers. I show respect to all who help me progress.

That last part is the key that so many people lack, and shouldn’t in this age of hyper-connectedness, when you can reach out and have real conversations with incredibly successful people in 140 characters or a blog post.

Take a fresh new look at your social networks. Take a fresh new look at your own life, the life that you want, and who is already getting the results you want, and go learn their secrets!

We become the company we keep.
We achieve what we believe.

Go!

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1. Go to search.twitter.com and type in your Twitter handle with the @ sign.

2. For profiles you haven’t visited recently (blue links), control-click (on PCs) or command-click (on Macs) to open each profile in a new tab.

3. Swap through each tab (control-tab in Firefox) and click follow for everyone you’re not following.

Do this daily, every morning. This will ensure that folks who are kind enough to mention, reply, or retweet what you’ve got to share are paid attention to. Should take you a maximum of 5 minutes or so if you’re fast on the keyboard.

This is one of those things that you have to do daily. If you let it pile up, it will eat up a tremendous amount of time. If you manage it daily, it takes seconds, maybe minutes at most. Set an alarm on your calendar and do it without fail every day.

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Fear. Fear of ridicule, of loss, of pain. The folks who are winners in life are the folks who have conquered their fears, trampled them as they ran towards the future. The folks who are not winners in life are the folks who are shackled by their fears, imprisoned in their self-made cages.

Let me tell you a story about fear, from the martial arts. A long time ago, a decade ago, the test in my dojo to go from green belt (intermediate) to brown belt (advanced) was incredibly rigorous. The test was typically three parts. In the first part, you as the candidate faced off against one of the senior black belts in the dojo. They had a shinai – a four foot bamboo practice sword that, while it wouldn’t cut flesh or break bones, would still hurt like hell. Their mission was to try and beat you with the stick for what seemed like an eternity. Your mission as the candidate was to escape and evade them as much as possible – not even to defend or counterattack (which was usually met with a stick to the face) – just to evade and escape.

The second part of the test was similar but unarmed, and the third part of the test, after your adrenaline was shot and your body was near exhaustion, was to demonstrate techniques in application. Somehow you had to get past your own exhaustion and summon not only physical strength but also intellectual sharpness.

During my first attempt at the brown belt test, I was outside in a rocky field, about halfway through the first part of the test. I had managed to evade with relative success the bamboo sword, when suddenly the sword came at my feet. Instinctively, I did a dive roll over the sword, but badly miscalculated where I was in the field. I landed, shoulder first, on a fairly large rock and dislocated my shoulder.

It took the better part of 3 months to heal that injury, including living in a cast for 6 weeks, and some fairly intensive physical therapy, as I’d separated and torn up a lot of my shoulder. Worse, I’d taken a massive hit to my own confidence. Getting back into the dojo was hard enough, but once I was back in class, I found that I was physically afraid of doing certain techniques for fear of re-injuring myself. It took a lot of time for me to slowly ease myself back into the full swing of things, and before I knew it, testing time had rolled around again.

Suddenly, a test that was a source of anxiety and fear the first time around became a gigantic monster made of fear the second time. I had to fight more than just a black belt with a practice sword – I had to fight my fear of re-injury, my fear of humiliation, my fear of the test and all it had symbolized as my greatest failure in the martial arts to that point.

The second time through, I failed the test again. That was okay, because it didn’t feel like a failure to me – I got through it uninjured, and so at least one fear was put down. One of the senior black belts offered to coach me in the weeks after that second test, to help me with the continued fears of injury by more or less punching me silly every week until I got better and better at evading and escaping.

The third time through the test, I felt the familiar fears, but they were muted. They could shout that I couldn’t do it, that I should just give up, that it was crazy for me to keep taking risks, but what won the day was knowing that I had the tools and the little successes and victories along the way.

I passed.

Not only did I pass, but I passed well, from what the other judges had said. My fears lost, and in that moment, my passing had exploded the confidence I felt in myself, in my training, in my teachers, and in everything I had done up to that point. All of the darkness fell away, and I came away from the experience transformed, ready to advance, ready to explore my new potential.

I tell you this story so that you can know that your fears can be conquered. Your fears can be beaten. What helped me beat my fears was knowledge and momentum – small successes that to others appeared like defeats but to me were progress against my fears, my greatest enemy. Whatever it is that you fear, start eroding at those fears today. Take little steps, little bites out of the fears. Prove to yourself that you can win against them, that you can beat them back, that you can get out of your own way long enough to win.

The strength that you need to find in yourself comes from that momentum, from those little victories that you string together. If you fear your body image, start walking or running, just a little bit, and commit each day to going just one step farther. If you fear speaking in public, start by speaking to yourself, then speaking to your webcam, then moving to small groups. Take each success and build on it until you’ve built a bridge over your fears.

The final ingredient you’ll need is the support of true friends, friends who will help you acknowledge your fears and that having fears is okay, who will support you and if they’ve faced those same fears, guide and mentor you. If you are mentoring someone, teaching them, coaching them, it’s vital that you do not make things easy for them. No fear means no opportunity to face your fear and beat it.

With this triumvirate – belief in yourself, belief in a proven way to beat your fears, belief in a strong community of friends to catch you when you fall – there is no fear you cannot overcome. If you want to improve yourself, search deep inside for your fears, pick one, and slowly start chipping away it it. Like all prisons, there’s always a weak spot from which you can make your escape.

Photo credit: Matthew Ebel

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If you’re already a trusted community member/manager, already a thought leader of sorts, Trust Agents isn’t going to do anything new for you. There isn’t anything in the book that you haven’t already heard and practiced before. Some of it will be good reminders of things you should be doing if you’ve lapsed, but for the most part if you have the trust of your community, your tribe, then don’t expect mental fireworks. If you’ve read previous works that Trust Agents builds on, like Tribes, New Rules of Marketing and PR, Cluetrain Manifesto, The Whuffie Factor, Chris Brogan’s blog, etc. expect Trust Agents to be more or less a derivative work with a few different case studies.

If you are not a trusted member or leader of your community, Trust Agents is for you. The nearest trusted person in your community, if you’re very lucky, will buy the hardcover edition, laminate it with granite, and then beat you over the head with it until [a] you get it or [b] your forehead resembles chunky salsa. Either way, we all win.

This is the paradox, the irony of Trust Agents, and the part that I hope all the buzz and hype actually works to break:

The people who need Trust Agents the most are the least likely to read it.

The people who need to get a clue about how to manage trust, how to behave in a trustworthy fashion, how to create value instead of simply broadcasting the same crappy commercial message over and over again, probably won’t pick up the book. Ideally, all the buzz and hype will convince them it’s a must read, even if they don’t have a clue why they’ve got a copy on their desk. It’s your obligation if you work for one of these people to either make them read the book or commit homicide with it via blunt trauma.

There are a great many little things in Trust Agents that, if you’re trustworthy, should be annoying. “How to earn trust” and “how to behave in a community” sound like they were written for 6 year olds. Your inner voice as a trusted person should be saying, “DUH!” and “Is that really all there is to this book?” and the answer is yes, because you know these lessons. You’ve internalized them, you practice them daily, and you don’t need them as reminders any more than you need reminders not to shoplift at the grocery store. For the used car salesman at your office, at your business, on your salesforce, in your community, these lessons are probably the closest thing to divine revelation that they’ll get this week. Sad, but true.

In the end, if you read this blog, if you listen to Marketing Over Coffee, if you follow me on Twitter, you’re probably already a reasonably trustworthy person and you’re not going to get much out of Trust Agents. Like I said, it’s not for you. Buy it anyway, skim it, and then force it down the throat of your pointy haired boss as fast as you can.

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The most dangerous part of social media is that it’s inherently self-selecting towards agreement, which means that fewer and fewer people will tell you that you’re wrong.

What do I mean? Simple law of attraction. We follow people we like. We read the opinions of those people we generally agree with because it’s pleasant to do so. We friend and become friends with those of similar perspectives, and we attract people of like minds.

When you surround yourself – or are surrounded by – people who agree with you 95% of the time, it can seriously distort your own self perception. When nearly every reply to your blog posts is “I agree!” and “OMG you’re so right!” you can start to believe your own press and develop an inflated sense of self worth, which in turn leads to things like blogger extortion, a la the Crocs case. When you read and listen to only the things that you like, it naturally moves your opinions to be more extreme.

You will naturally attract people of like mind. That’s okay. But as your efforts in new media and social media continue to reap rewards, take time out to self-balance and self-check. Re-center yourself by talking with the best of friends – the friend who is wholly unafraid to call BS on you and tell you when you’re wrong about something. Listen to that friend, that opinion, and use it to help you discern where you can improve.

Neil Gorman talked about this at Podcasters Across Borders – how too many people are afraid to disagree with “thought leaders” and “social media superstars”. I asked him the same thing I ask you – no matter how valuable you perceive someone is, the folks who you perceive as leaders desperately need you to call BS on us when we are wrong (me especially), so that we can continue to think critically, to learn, to grow ourselves.

We need your dissent. We need your clarity. We need your honesty. I in turn will be honest in my dealings with you. During the discussions about race and gender in social media at PodCamp Boston and afterwards, I was delighted to hear that a good number of people disagreed with my views, in some cases exceptionally vigorously. Good! The different perspective lets me see more and understand more, and I’m happier and better for it. I may still not agree, but I am better informed.

I’ll end with one of my favorite quotes from Barack Obama – we can disagree without being disagreeable. When I’m wrong, tell me. When you’re wrong, I’ll tell you. When we’re both wrong, hopefully someone will tell us.

Agreed?

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That said, your head-based computer comes with no manual and the interface is kind of clunky. As a result, many people – possibly you – aren’t getting the most out of it, just as thousands of quad-core silicon computers capable of incredible feats around the world are currently being used to play Solitaire.

How do you improve the output of your head-based computer, your mind? The same way you do on your silicon machine – with better inputs. Let me give you an example.

Have you ever been sitting around with a friend who is single and they lament,

“Why can’t I find a good man/woman?”

While you nod or sympathize or offer hugs and beer, your friend is giving their mind the wrong inputs.

Linguistically, they just asked their mind for a list of reasons why they can’t do something – and their mind will answer. If you’ve ever seen an episode of Star Trek, where the captain of the ship asks the ship’s computer a question, you can imagine the following in the captain’s voice:

Captain: Computer, why can’t I find a good woman?
Computer: [random beeping sounds]
Computer: The following is a list of 18 different reasons why you can’t find a good partner.
Computer: Reason 1: you are 24.5 pounds over your ideal weight for a person of your age and gender.
Computer: Reason 2: your chronic habit of spitting fluids out your nose while you laugh is statistically unappealing to the majority of your desired demographic.
Computer: Reason 3: approximately 44% of your wardrobe is older than 22 years beyond the current fashion trend.
Computer: Reason 4: your hairpiece adhesive has malfunctioned.

… and so on. Get the idea?

When you ask yourself a question about why you can’t, why something bad always happens to you, why your day/week/month/life is going so terribly, your mind will give you the exact answers to that question. You will get the answer to the question you asked, even if the answer is counterproductive.

Logically, the way to get better answers is to ask better questions:

- How can I turn around this situation and make it a win?
- How can I set this up so that we both walk away winners?
- What three things do I need to change to win that guy’s/girl’s attention?
- What can I learn from this scenario?
- What do I respect about that person’s opinion, even though I violently disagree with it?
- What little thing can I do today, right now to improve my blog readership?

Ask yourself questions that encourage your conscious and subconscious minds to focus on the solutions and outcomes that you want. It’s hard – very hard at first – so make sure you verbalize to yourself. You can even throw in an undo. When you catch yourself asking a counterproductive question, literally say to yourself, undo – the question I really meant to ask is… and then ask the question that will give you the solution you need.

You are in charge of the computer between your ears. It’s the same general hardware and software that Einstein, Mozart, Hawking, Obama, Lincoln, and billions of other people have. What they are capable of, what their mental computers can generate in terms of results, you can also generate as long as you use the machine correctly and effectively.

Try it out. Ask the best questions of yourself that you can. I won’t ask what’s the worst that can happen, because I want you to ask yourself, what’s the BEST that can happen?

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What if, though, you don’t have a choice? What if it’s a red ocean and by circumstance or necessity you don’t have the luxury of moving to a blue ocean? How do you win when the odds are stacked against you in every way possible? Here’s a few thoughts from ninjutsu.

1. No perimeter is 100% secure. When it comes to finding your way into a C level office to have an opinion heard or finding your way to a job interview, there are gatekeepers, keymasters, etc. No perimeter is fully secure. There is almost always a way in.

Some thoughts: neutralize the gatekeeper, or even better, co-opt the gatekeeper. Find a way to ally yourself with a gatekeeper and then you’ve got your own personal concierge. If the gatekeeper is also an advisor, so much the better. Find the weak spot on the perimeter and press until you’re through.

2. Cultivate assets early and often. This is an old, old ninja strategy called katsura otoko, where you put an agent into an enemy territory long before – as in years or decades before – you need them. Disguised as a member of the community, they secretly gather information and recruit new allies to your army, but they’re rarely pressed into service until a critical moment.

You know all those junior people at corporations, the interns, the entry level folks? Find the promising ones in your own company or your competitor’s company and give them a hand. Mentor them. Help them out where you can in subtle ways. As time passes, you’ll not only gain their trust but you’ll also rise in power in the company along with them. In a few years, that entry level assistant may be EVP, and your friendship and efforts will have gotten you farther inside than you could possibly have otherwise done.

3. Look for crisis to be helpful. In old ninjutsu, the joei no jutsu strategy was to send in your infiltration teams to an area under severe crisis, like when an army was about to invade. The local warlord, desperate to conscript as many troops as possible, grabbed everyone they could with minimal or no background checks. What would be cautious recruitment in peacetime became haphazard carelessness in wartime. As a result, ninja agents got swept up into the enemy ranks and were positioned to gather information or conduct sabotage.

Every company facing a crisis of some kind looks for as many resources as possible, from hiring new employees to pulling in outside consultants. In a PR crisis, any friendly voice is welcomed. These are the times when you deploy your forces, volunteering, advocating, and being present and available to help. Putting yourself on someone’s radar in good times can be tough, as they have no need for you. Putting yourself on a VP’s radar in a time of crisis can secure your position of influence rapidly.

None of these strategies are exclusive to a red ocean environment, but they work well in nearly any environment due to human nature. If you as someone who is underrepresented want to break down barriers without burning bridges, consider looking at these and many other infiltration and subversion methods to sneak your way past glass ceilings and locked doors to the prize that you covet. If you as a small business want to win against much larger competitors and difficult conditions, these strategies have been proven time and again in the highest stakes contests of all on the battlefield.

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If you’ve known me for a while, you know squarely where I stand. I’m nearly antisocial on the entire topic of self-imposed limitations.

“Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they’re yours.” – Richard Bach

If you believe there’s a glass ceiling, there is.

If you believe that life is unfair and that you’ll never succeed, you won’t. I guarantee it, because whatever success you have you’ll subconsciously sabotage anyway.

I fundamentally believe in two tenets: first, you are statistically more likely to succeed if you’re awesome, and second, if you’re not swimming the blue ocean, you’re dead meat. Let’s tackle these in reverse.

Blue ocean strategy is a popular marketing concept that’s so obvious, it’s amazing someone had to write a book about it. Red oceans – oceans filled with blood and sharks – are where idiots try to do business. They see a crowded space and try to jump in the crowd, yell louder, cut prices lower, claim unfair competition, and generally get eaten by the bigger sharks. Red ocean strategy is opening a fourth pizza shop in a strip mall. The only ones who win in red ocean strategy are the biggest, baddest sharks.

Blue ocean strategy says swim where the oceans are clear, blue, and non-competitive. There are niches for everything, and a decent number of them are profitable. This is where you do business, because it’s much easier being profitable when you have no competition.

The insurance against competition is the second part – being awesome. When I say that what matters isn’t between your legs but between your ears, I’m not being snarky. If you have awesome on your side, race, gender, religion – none of it matters. People want awesome. People want to buy from awesome, and will pay a price premium for awesome.

The real problem, the problem we’re too often too polite to say, is that most of the time, we’re not awesome. Most of the time, what we have to sell or offer actually sucks. Believe me, I sell student loans. I know what it’s like to market a product that completely sucks. Thus, we have to gussy up our total suckage in the trappings of awesome in the hopes of fooling the less clever. “Ooh, this doorknob doesn’t actually work but it has a Facebook fan page!”

If you believe your race, gender, or other defining demographic factor is a limitation in your efforts, then that means one of two things: you’re either swimming in bloody red ocean, in which case you’re an idiot (regardless of gender, race, etc.) for not moving to clear waters, or the product, service, or idea you have sucks. Sorry. There’s no neat and kind way to say that.

Barack Obama didn’t become President of the United States by whining that the white man was holding him down. He made his own game, leveraged all the technology like no one else ever had before, and swam the blue ocean to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Chel Wolverton didn’t become lead organizer of the first and oldest PodCamp by demanding a chance because she’s got a vagina. She got there because she’s got a brain, got there by being awesome, by always delivering, by always getting done whatever needed to get done, and when the time came for Chris Brogan and I to turn over the reins, her record – irrespective of gender – spoke for itself.

Look carefully at all of the tools of social media. Has Twitter ever said, sorry, you’re black, you can’t have more than 1,000 followers because only white people should have lots of followers? Has Facebook ever said, sorry, you can’t create a fan page because you’re a woman and women shouldn’t have fans? When you download MySQL, PHP, or jQuery, do any of the tools say, sorry, you’re Muslim and MySQL only works for God-fearing Christians?

No.

All of the tools and technology are available to everyone. You have complete and total equality in terms of tools and raw opportunity to make your own game. How you use those tools, what results you create are only limited by your talents and your self imposed limitations.

You are more than your limitations. You are much better than you think, but you have to awaken that inside you. If you get out of your own way and shatter your limiting beliefs, you’ve won half the battle.

I’ll finish with this thought, a lyric from Jewel:

No longer lend your strength to that which you wish to be free from.

Every moment, every ounce of energy you spend on your limitations is time and energy you don’t have to spend being awesome, swimming your way through the blue ocean to success.

I wish you limitless quantities of awesome and blue waters, no matter what gender, race, or religion you are.

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What really struck me, though, was this idea of shackled potential being freed. From the lawn discussion under a beautiful sky to deep conversations on the beach (yes, PodCamp Boston 4 had a BEACH, so there!), to sessions and discussions about technology, marketing, and achievement, everyone brought with them limitations. Things they believed they could not do, things that seemed out of reach for them, things that were impossible – so many of the conversations revolved around this theme.

What was more interesting to watch, what was in many cases truly inspiring, was seeing how other members of the community stepped up to help out, whether it was lending advice about optimizing a web site, connecting new friends together, trying difficult or uncomfortable new things – many, many people stepped up to help, and more still took that giant step outside their comfort zone.

I hope that for many of those folks, PodCamp Boston 4 was the crucible, the anvil on which they made a first crack in the self-imposed shackles on their potential. Everyone that I spoke with personally, everyone who had a story to share, has incredible, unbelievable potential to achieve, to be what they’ve set their hearts on. For a few folks, it may be coming to peace with parts of themselves, while for others it may be material success or social good. No matter what, know that breaking those limitations is possible and the rewards for doing so will defy what you can imagine.

I want to highlight one story that I think is a good example of potential broken free of its chains, about PodCamp Boston 4’s lead organizer this year. Two years and change ago, I met Chel Wolverton virtually at Matthew Ebel’s concerts in Second Life. When I met her, that was about all we had in common. She was working a dead end job (phone service for an online florist) living in a dead end neighborhood, going nowhere fast from minimum wage job to minimum wage job. Chel knew that there was more possible out there somewhere, but was fairly certain it wasn’t for people like her.

Through a fairly short apprenticeship and an incredible amount of courage in the face of the unknown, she made leap upon leap, first moving out of her situation, finding her way north (eventually to Boston), working insanely hard doing virtual assistant and admin work to pay the bills as she developed ever increasing skills in the online world. She helped to pioneer the first (that we know of) completely virtual fan-bootlegged music album that paid revenues to the artist (Matthew Ebel’s Virtual Hot Wings), used leverage and knowledge to take on more complex projects for people who originally started looking for someone to manage their calendar, and eventually became a seasoned, knowledgeable virtual project manager. (not to mention competent SEO professional and Wordpress deployment specialist)

Then we threw her under the bus, so to speak, except that the bus was made entirely of a metal called chaos, weighed a gigaton, and bore the license plate PodCamp Boston 4, by making her lead organizer. What nearly 400 people experienced on August 8-9 of this year is the result of Chel continually refusing to limit herself to what her doubts and fears want her to be. Nearly 400 people had a phenomenal, educational time at PodCamp Boston 4, and hopefully took a first big swing at their own chains of doubt and fear.

It’s my sincere hope that you take away something similar from PodCamp. Folks at the closing heard about how PodCamp got started, about how Chris Brogan and I basically winged it with our first team 4 PodCamps ago, refusing to accept the limitation that new media conferences could only be thrown by professionals. I say this to encourage you to look at what you believe your limits are and take another swing at them on the anvil. I say this so that when I see you again in a year for the next PodCamp Boston that you are soaring higher than ever, your chains of doubt left far behind.

May you achieve your potential.

May you awaken your superhero.

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1. A pack of fajita wraps. I tend to use a medium size.
2. A packet of shredded cheese. Jalapeno jack if you like spicy, otherwise the shredded cheese of your choice.
3. A carton of eggs or a carton of Better than Eggs. Either is fine.
4. Pinch of salt and black pepper.
5. A microwave.
6. A fork.

Here’s how you do it. In a plastic, microwave safe dish (clean used takeout containers work fine), pour just enough scrambled egg mix (either beaten with a fork or from the carton, with or without salt and pepper) to cover the bottom. Pop it in the microwave for 60 seconds. It’ll inflate like a balloon, then deflate, which is funny to watch, but fine to eat.

On a separate microwave safe plate, put a fajita wrapper down and sprinkle some cheese on it, just enough to cover the middle. Microwave for 30 seconds or until the cheese melts, whichever comes first.

Scrape out the egg from the plastic container and put it on the cheese.

Roll it up, wait for it to cool down a bit, and eat.

It’s delicious, it’s convenient, it’s MUCH cheaper than anything you buy on a per serving basis, and it’s faster to boot than running downstairs/upstairs/across the street. Nutritionally, a high protein breakfast will deliver more consistent long term energy than a carb heavy breakfast, too.

Be sure to clean and reuse the dish and fork for extra savings.

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Secrets of information are data points. The ingredients in Coca Cola. The Colonel’s 11 herbs and spices. These secrets are valuable until the information becomes commonplace or available enough that competitors can use them to their advantage and your disadvantage. In classical religious studies these are exoteric secrets, or surface secrets.

Secrets of experience are something else entirely. The taste of a pomegranate. Your true love’s kiss. Getting your black belt. These secrets aren’t informational but experiential, which means that everyone can know the data points about the secret but still have no idea what it is or how it works. In classical religious studies these are esoteric secrets, or deep secrets.

Most of the really good stuff in life, most of the really powerful, life changing secrets are the latter, the experiential, the esoteric. There is no way, no matter how much you try, to describe to someone who’s never had one, with great accuracy the taste of a pomegranate such that when they put it in their mouth, the experience is not new. There is no way, no matter how graphic you get, that you can ever relate that first kiss to someone you love with any level of precision.

Esoteric experiences are just that – experiences. Master teachers – true master teachers – don’t teach you these secrets. They can’t. What they can do is create conditions favorable for you to teach yourself the secrets.

So what does this have to do with social media?

Take your pick of folks selling you social media secrets. This eBook, that blog, this book tour, that DVD, this limited opportunity, that guide. The sad news is, about 99% of it is bullshit. Complete, utter, and total bullshit perpetrated by people looking to make a fast buck on the inexperienced.

Social media is inherently about relationships between humans. Yes, there’s a decent amount of technology involved. Yes, it scales to levels that are beyond what humans can naturally maintain. Yes, a lot of those relationships are frighteningly superficial.

At the end of the day, though, because humans are at the core of social media, the power and value you get out of it, the power and value you deliver to it – all of it is rooted in experience. How to ask someone for help promoting your charity on Twitter. How to offer help to someone who sounds like they’re in sincere need in your Facebook stream. How to enjoy the serendipity of communicating the same things – life – in new ways to lots of new friends, and even a few new enemies. No book, no guide, no guru can teach you these things. You can only learn them through experience.

If you want to learn social media, to become proficient at it, to be a veteran practitioner, seek out experiences. Instead of talking about the shape, size, weight, and best vendors of pomegranate, rating whose reviews of pomegranate are best or whether a certain celebrity eats pomegranate, get off your ass and go eat one. Instead of spinning endless circles about the right or wrong way to use Twitter, Facebook, Ning, or every other social channel, go accomplish something with it. Find a charity that needs some promotional help. Join a local meetup group and practice using the tools to bring in new members.

Do. Accomplish. Kiss the girl/guy/etc., eat the pomegranate, and have the experience. At the end of the day, while others are talking about their social media expertise, which sounds stirringly reminiscent of prepubescent boys in a locker room bragging about exploits they’ve never had, you’ll have the experience, the real deal, and the satisfaction of knowing the esoteric secrets of social media.

No surprise, the photo is of a pomegranate.

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Charles Jo wrote:

Christopher,

Thanks for sending. I forwarded to my network and requested that they contact you directly.

Please do keep me in mind as you start expanding your recruiting/sourcing efforts and when you start using consultants as well.

Best,

Charles

Charles gets it. He put in some upfront effort with no expectation of commercial gain, and for that, if I do need to retain a recruiter or agency in the future, guess whose card I’m going to pull first? Charles.

None of what we do in social media is all that complicated. None of it requires a degree in rocket science. Some of it is just this simple.

You can see what else Charles has available at his Scribd list. Thanks, Charles, for doing it right.

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The question is, is that accurate? Is using any kind of ethnosocial marketing effective, and if so, how do you determine which studies are reliable?

Do you risk giving offense to a targeted demographic if you’re marketing to a stereotype that came out of a study that might have been less than scientifically valid?

If you do any kind of demographic targeted marketing, I’d love to hear how you handle these kinds of things.

Full disclosure: I work for the Student Loan Network, a student loan company, and anything I say should be assumed to be biased towards my company because we’re awesome.

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I’ll be leading three discussions at PodCamp Boston 4, and I encourage you to drop in and say hi.

1. What’s now for what’s next?

What are the things we should be doing now to prepare for what’s next?

2. Marketing Makeover

Let’s get a few people to bravely volunteer their marketing programs and web sites, and we’ll all critique – constructively – together, from SEO to social media to old school. Think of it like Extreme Makeover, only about your marketing and no comments about your physical fitness or hair style.

3. Marketing Over Coffee Live

Marketing Over Coffee, the marketing podcast I do with John Wall, will be doing another live session this year, with special guests Chris Brogan and CC Chapman. Casual, fun, and actionable are the themes we’re going for. Come participate!

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@cspenn time is all about perception anyway – we’re going nuts & getting cranky at microwaves because they are too slow, it’s madness

There’s a particular state of mind that you can cultivate that can open a lot of doors and relax your mind, but our continued focus on instant – better, faster, richer, stronger, right NOW – prevents us from ever touching it. It’s a concept that evolved out of our warrior and spiritual traditions that’s been adopted by practitioners of every discipline.

In Zen Buddhism, it’s a state called zanshin, or ever present mindfulness. Athletes call it being in the zone. Whatever you call it, it’s the state when you’re doing something where the boundary between you – the person doing – and the thing you’re doing fades away.

You’ve had this experience many times in your life, whether you know it or not. You’ve experienced it watching a particularly compelling movie, when you the viewer and the movie are one – you cry with the characters on screen, and your mind for that movie is in the movie. You’ve experienced it as a tradesman, when the activity – sawing wood, hammering nails, catching fish, and you are one, and everything you do feels effortless, free from stress, and pleasant, even if it’s physically difficult labor. You’ve experienced it as an athlete when all your concerns fade away and the swim, run, or ski slope and you are indistinguishable and you feel like the wind itself.

One of the great esoteric secrets of Zen – meaning it’s in plain sight but you can’t see it until you’ve had the experience – is that this zanshin state of mind is available all the time, every day, every moment. Everything you do has the potential to deliver you into that state of mind. For most of us, myself included, it takes some time to get into that state. We’re not super engrossed in the movie at the opening credits. We’re not soaring along the race track as soon as we lace up our shoes. It takes a little time to find that state and get into it, but when we do it feels terrific.

This is where we make the case for not instant. For the hordes of us that are not Zen masters, we need the time it takes to boil potatoes or knead dough or take photos or tend garden to get into that state. If we reduce everything in life to a few pushes of buttons, we lose those opportunities to practice mindfulness, to practice what it means to be in the moment. Instant, super fast, super convenient has its place, to be sure, but so does the long way, because we all need that time to get into our frame of mind where we can shut out everything else and let ourselves be free.

The second part of this is that any activity that’s sufficiently repetitive gives you the opportunity to develop this state of mind. Going for a walk, baking bread, lifting weights, cooking soup, playing with your kids, watching movies – so long as you have ample time to find your mind.

The final secret in all of this is that not instant stuff gives you a chance to recharge after a particularly draining experience. As a professional public speaker, I find that I expend a lot of mental and emotional energy when I speak, which is good for the people who enjoy hearing what I have to say. In the day or so after doing a particularly energetic presentation, I take the time to do more of the not instant activities to help my body and mind rest, reset, and recharge. If you’ve got something in your life that periodically draws intense bursts of energy from you, doing some not instant stuff will help you recalibrate and get back on track.

Here’s to things taking their due time.

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In the sixth edition, I re-cover the ground in the previous five editions, from Google to RSS to calendaring, plus add new scholarship search tools for Twitter and Facebook.

The best part is that the book is completely free, no strings attached.

Visit StudentScholarshipSearch.com/ebook for your free copy today for you, for your friends, for someone you know. Try the methods out, and see if it works for you.

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1. Optimize your site or microsite for local. Buy a local domain name, like Boston Martial Arts. When people are searching for generics, they’ll Google for your locality and the generic term – and chances are generic terms are more likely to be available at the local level.

2. Register for local. Set up your Google Local Business Center. Get events into local calendars like Craigslist for your city.

3. Recruit local. Hit up local message boards, follow people locally on Twitter, find discussion groups and email lists that are local and introduce yourself to your community.

4. Be at local events. Attend things like PodCamp Boston (if you’re in Boston, obviously), or create your own PodCamp, BarCamp, TEDx, or other event for your area.

5. Go local offline. Got a business you’re promoting? Look at local delivery systems to enhance your business. One of my friends who is an avid local marketer promotes his business through an online and offline affiliate program, and gives affiliate coupons to other local businesses. His biggest success? A local florist shop includes his coupons in their deliveries. The florist gets affiliate fees if the customer signs up, he gets free marketing, and the customer gets his business if they want what he has to sell – and the sell is slightly easier because the arrival of flowers tend to brighten moods to begin with.

What are your local tips and tricks?

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What I want to highlight today, though, is an important aspect of the gold making game. Take a look at the top 5 items I’ve sold in game recently:

The first and fourth items are rare cloth that can be made only once every 4 days. Scarcity makes them incredibly valuable. The same is true for item 3, the Hat of Wintry Doom, because it’s made from rare items.

The second item is an in-game pet that can only be acquired in a little-loved backwater part of the world that takes ages to get to. People pay a price premium for it because they don’t want to burn up the time and effort it takes to get there.

What’s really important is item 5, wool cloth. For anyone who does not play World of Warcraft, wool cloth is a commodity. Not only is it a commodity, but it’s an especially plentiful commodity that most early players encounter by the bucket before moving onto more challenging parts of the game. If chess pieces wore clothing, pawns would be the ones sporting wool cloth – it’s common.

So why is such a mundane commodity the #5 seller? Two reasons: first, it’s used by several professions in game, which means there’s consistent demand for it. Second, most players run right past the stage of the game where they’d accumulate a significant amount of the cloth in their pursuit for better, shinier objects. Thus, while it’s plentiful, most players forget about it and move on rapidly, long before they accumulate any significant amount of it.

Consistent demand. High potential supply, low actual supply. This is a profit engine.

So what does this have to do with marketing? How many people are searching for the shiny object, the rare, the Ebonweave cloth of marketing? Social media currently holds this crown, though a few years ago it was SEO, and before that it was email. Everyone wants into the new, the shiny, the really glittery with the high potential payoff, and for those few that do succeed in making the Ebonweave of marketing, the payout is handsome.

But.

But there’s more than enough money in the marketing equivalents of wool cloth. In the rush to social media, people forgot search optimization. In the rush to search optimization, people forgot email marketing. All along the way, there are lots of valuable methods that generate real results and real income, and those rushing to reach Grand Master Social Media Marketer are leaving money and opportunity on the table.

Remember your wool cloth. Revisit the things that used to be hot and see, now that they’ve reached maturity, just how quietly profitable they can be. Some things won’t be any more, but some things perceived as a commodity could still be one of your best sellers if you’re good at it and the attention deficit crowd has moved onto whatever new shiny has appeared for the day.

Good luck farming your wool cloth.

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Mechanical resonance is the tendency of a mechanical system to absorb more energy when the frequency of its oscillations matches the system’s natural frequency of vibration (its resonance frequency or resonant frequency) than it does at other frequencies. It may cause violent swaying motions and even catastrophic failure in improperly constructed structures including bridges, buildings, and airplanes a phenomenon known as resonance disaster. – Wikipedia

Resonance, demonstrated at the Tacoma Narrows bridge in Washington State, 1940:

Resonance disaster can occur in more places than the physics of bridges. Resonance disaster – and success – can occur in media.

Take an example like United Breaks Guitars. This video would have flopped miserably if the airline industry’s service was superb. No one would have spread the message. But the video and campaign resonated with people, deeply. People who had bad experiences with airlines and luggage spread the video like wildfire, and the mainstream media (many of whom are frequent travelers themselves) boosted the video even more.

Media resonance is when a message matches the pre-existing message within the audience and as a result the power of the message’s absorption is amplified, in the same way that an opera singer’s voice can match the resonant frequency of a crystal glass and shatter it, or the wind-induced vibrations can collapse a bridge.

Resonance is at the very heart of what messages are sticky, what messages spread, what messages will go “viral”. A message that resonates with its audience will be amplified by the conditions within the audience and rapidly escalate beyond anything the message creator anticipated.

How do you determine resonance as a marketer? Lots and lots of research and human life experience. Research using tools like Google Trends, Google Insight for Search, Google Adwords Keyword Tool, and any other mood or sentiment indication tool to determine not only what’s on people’s minds, but how they say it. Deeply examine your own life experiences for things that piss you off, things that delight you, things that resonate with you, and extrapolate your own experiences to larger human characteristics. Look at messages on Twitter that are retweeted and become trending topics for what resonates about them. Watch the long-standing hit movies that retain their hit quality decades after release. Immerse yourself in what resonates with people and you’ll have a very good idea over time of what messages will resonate and what messages will not.

Here’s the devil of resonance: most of what you market, your products, your services, the things you have for sale, probably will not resonate with people. Sorry. At best, a majority of people will be somewhat interested in what you have. Your job is not to make them care, because you can’t, any more than you can force a bridge’s resonant frequency to change (you can’t unless you tear it down and rebuild it). The best you can do is figure out what latent resonance is already in people and rethink how you present your products and services to more closely match an existing resonance, or build a new product on top of existing ones that does match the resonance of your audience.

Good luck finding your resonance.

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@ambercadabra: Ah, o’Hare on a Monday AM. So many friendly people. Ahem.
@cspenn: Watch footfalls. It’s an easy way to pass time in crowds.

What did this mean?

Footfalls are, simply put, how people walk. Some people walk as if they’re gliding across the floor with grace; others look like they’ve just newly risen from the grave as zombies. All of the walks and footfalls are unique and are signatures of our past and present. Watching footfalls in a public space gives you great insight into the people around you.

What’s interesting about the footfall from a ninjutsu perspective comes from a lesson in the middle level material of the Koto family tradition. There’s a moment in someone’s walk, after their foot has been placed or committed but before their weight has been transferred, during which you can strike them with relatively little force and knock them back or on their butt. Strike them sufficiently hard enough at that moment and you might even put their lights out, because the body is wholly expecting the footfall to be completed as several million previous ones were – with transfer of weight and progress forward.

When something interrupts that deeply ingrained habit, the body has almost no idea what to do, and it’s in that moment of confusion through what should have been an orderly, predictable transition, that the ninja technique displays its power. You’re not going head to head with the person’s strength (after their weight has transferred) and you’re not attacking from too far away (before they’ve stepped) because they’ll react and adjust. Only in that moment of transition do you get an opportunity to truly take advantage of someone’s habit and knock them into next week.

We as a society, as a culture, as a world of business are going through a similar transition and disruption now, especially in media. Our media footfalls are used to the broadcast model, where media broadcasts the message and the consumer receives it passively, then goes out and buys things they don’t need. The transition and disruption of new media has thrown a ninja strike into traditional media’s footfall, and it’s falling on its butt as we take advantage of its confusion.

The lesson moving forward is simple (but not easy): as new media becomes mainstream, as new becomes mundane and habits form, look for the footfalls. Watch to see what traditions and rituals appear, watch their timing like you watch people in the airport, and you’ll know when to disrupt them, when their moment of transition becomes your moment of opportunity. More important, as you keep an eye towards the future, look for services, technologies, and ideas that will be the ninja strike to other present day footfalls in your industry or niche. Learn the ideas and you’ll have carte blanche to take over that niche while everyone else is catching their balance.

Keep your eyes open and your feet on the ground!

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We hate high pressure sales but we love going to expos like the Big E where barkers shout out the highest pressure pitches you could possibly ever receive. Why?

We hate advertisements of all kind in our media but we love tuning into the Super Bowl for the ads. Why?

Please leave your answers in the comments.

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For every discussion of monetization in new media, there’s an equal discussion about the amateur, the practitioner who does something for the pure love of it and not for money. However, amateurs can still take a great deal of knowledge from the professional world and apply it to their work to see how successful their efforts are.

Take an average new media sales funnel:

Audience
Prospects
Leads
Conversions
Evangelists

Audience is the potential number of people you can reach in any given medium.

Prospects are the subset of the audience that is likely to be interested in what you have for sale.

Leads are the people who have expressed interest in what you have for sale.

Conversions are the people who commit, who buy what you have for sale.

Evangelists are the people who are so in love with what you’ve got, with what you’ve sold them, that they incite others to become prospects as well.

You can measure each stage, use different tools and talents at each stage, to drive sales.

Audience tools are the channels themselves – Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.

Prospecting uses demographics and databases to figure out who your most likely customers are, based in part on the customers you already have. If I run a Financial Aid Podcast or a Marketing Podcast, I’d better be finding the portion of audience in each channel that’s interested in financial aid or marketing. Tools like Google’s Ad Planner and Facebook’s Media Planner can help with all this.

Leads uses your web site and associated persuasion tools – good copy, calls to action, etc. – to convince the prospects to buy. Analytics tools like Google Analytics, Clickheat, database analysis, and so forth can help you diagnose your lead generation process and figure out where you’re turning people away.

Conversions is your sales engine, your transaction engine.

Evangelism uses your media channels of choice to encourage your customers and fans to spread the word. Note that evangelism is driven by awesomeness. If you have an awesome product or service, if your customers are delighted, the word will spread. You might have to encourage them a little, but sufficient quantities of awesome easily convinces customers by itself to spread the word.

Now, what if you took the money out of this funnel? What’s left?

Pretty much everything except the transaction engine. This is a key point for any amateur: virtually every metric leading up to a sale is the same for amateur and professional. If there’s nothing to buy at the end of the funnel, there is something else that requires a level of commitment that’s non-casual. It might be showing up at a rally or volunteering your time, but it’s something that in a commercial interaction would be the equivalent of putting money on the table.

If you don’t know what is the commitment substitute for commerce in your amateur efforts, you’ll never be able to measure your new media efforts in any meaningful way beyond eyeballs and ears. Decide what’s at the end of your rainbow if not a pot of gold, and then take all the pieces and parts from commercial exchanges and make them work for your passion.

Photo credit: Dairy Cow

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Flight 93, Pennsylvania (September 11, 2001):

Bear in mind the plane that crashed in Iran was a TU-154, roughly the same size as a Boeing 727 (slightly larger). 157ft long, MTOW 220,000 lbs.

The Boeing 757 is is 155ft long, MTOW 255,000 lbs.

Shouldn’t the Flight 93 impact site show roughly similar characteristics as the TU-154 site? Anyone with aerospace engineering credentials, please comment.

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Here’s the thing about dailies in Warcraft – they’re important for really good rewards. For example, one of the dailies currently gets you a type of currency which in turn will allow you to buy some nifty upgrades for your character. (Argent Tournament Champion’s Seals) If you miss a daily or two, it’s not a big deal, but miss enough and your progress towards that loot is severely inhibited. The other trick with dailies is that there’s no way to catch up – miss a week of dailies, and that opportunity is gone. You can’t earn back the daily rewards, can’t catch up.

What does this have to do with anything?

Like Warcraft, marketing has dailies. Your boss, coworkers, or customers may not have blue exclamation marks hovering over their heads, but you have dailies – writing blog posts, checking forums, optimizing web pages, responding to customer emails, all the little chores that come with marketing on a daily basis.

Like Warcraft, you can occasionally miss a marketing daily – but miss enough, and your business suffers badly. New business stops coming in the door, your ranking for top keyphrases in Google drops, customers stop buying as much as often.

Like Warcraft, you can’t catch up, either. Sure, you can respond to a customer’s email a few days later – but either you’ve lost reputation in that customer’s eyes or they’ve simply gone somewhere else to buy. Sure, you can wait to respond to a media query – but chances are the reporter has gone to another source already and at best you’ll be backup.

So how do you manage your dailies? Unlike Warcraft, you don’t get a neat, tidy list automatically (cooking daily, fishing daily, daily heroic dungeon, etc.) but there’s no reason you can’t create one. Sit down with a clipboard and look at the tasks you accomplish over a week. How many of them are repeating tasks? How many should be repeating tasks? Figure out which tasks are the high value ones – responding to customers, tweaking a web site, blogging – and assemble them in a nice list that you can print on real paper and photocopy.

Then set aside however long you need to do your dailies. For example, I tend to do my cooking & fishing Warcraft dailies first thing in the morning, before I even leave the house for work. It takes just a few minutes and I get them out of the way at a time when the server isn’t crowded with people trying to do the same thing. Anyone who’s done the Cheese for Glowergold daily at peak hours knows how awful peak time is. Do your marketing dailies off peak, preferably before your day starts, and you’ll see impressive, sustained growth in your business (assuming your dailies are high value tasks) that wasn’t possible when you didn’t treat the tasks as dailies.

Here’s to your daily success!

Updated: Chris Brogan shares his dailies here.

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Unlike potato chips, these have zero fat, only as much salt as you put in (or that came in the can), and are darned tasty. For extra fun, add in exceptionally finely chopped basil before drying.

Delicious, healthy, and dirt cheap to make. Especially good if you like the taste of sun-dried tomatoes.

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When you write a blog post you give away to the world on your blog, it is not free. You spent time, energy, effort, and knowledge writing it, time that could have been spent doing something else.

When you share a video of your session from a conference, it is not free. You are directly harming your ability to be hired as a