Right now, there’s an in-game Valentine’s Day event going on. Below is a picture of the Auction House and the price of a Buttermilk Cream chocolate. The current asking price in the marketplace is $54, and demand is so high that none are currently being sold – the marketplace is empty of this item.

Yes, $54 for a single chocolate. Suddenly the real world holiday doesn’t look quite as expensive. My character here is about to sell 3 of them for $163.

Here’s the funny part: the in-game quests needed to obtain this item take about 5 minutes, total. (dropping off a charm bracelet to another character and offering 10 characters some perfume samples) So why does the price of this chocolate seem so very high compared to the relative amount of work needed to create it? This marketplace item can teach us a lot about customer quality and behavior.

Some players may not know how to obtain it besides the marketplace. They simply buy everything in the marketplace. These, however, are long-term poor customers, because the moment they get clued in, they will stop buying from marketers and start creating their own items. True, as the old gangster saying goes, you can’t wise up a chump, but that’s not the sort of customer you’d want to rely on or build a business on.

Some players like the convenience of one-stop shopping, and will pay a premium just to be able to buy everything in one place. These are better customers because they have a persistent need (convenience). This makes them a better long-term prospective customer as they have a need that will always need to be met. The downside is that these folks are usually very price-sensitive, so a competitor who prices the same goods at even a penny less will beat you to the sale. If supply is a greater issue than demand, unless you’re always the lowest price, you won’t sell anything.

Some players just don’t like questing, period. They pay a premium in the marketplace – sometimes a very high premium – to not spend a single minute in the game doing things that aren’t fun for them. If you can provide exactly what they need, when they need it, you’ll develop a reputation in-game for being a useful sort of marketer to have around, and the kind of person who they will approach directly whenever they need to buy something. These folks will even ignore marketplace prices and just pay you obscene premiums directly because they know you’re reliable and can get them exactly what they want. It almost goes without saying that these are your very best customers in the long-term.

We have, in short, three kinds of customers – the sucker who may or may not even buy, the customer who wants convenience but is super-sensitive to price, and the premium buyer who wants to outsource everything they don’t want to do.

Which do you want as a customer? Common sense should dictate that if it’s long-term maximum profitability you’re after, you want the premium buyer. It will require more work on your part to develop reputation in your community for being the go-to marketer that has exactly what someone needs, but if you put in the time and effort in your marketplace, you can escape the always-lowest-prices race and make a ton of money.

Now, would anyone like to buy a Buttermilk Cream? Only three left…

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Chris argues that the goal is the focus, not the method. Kenpo karate is the method, kicking the other guy’s ass is the goal. If you threw out all your methods, the goals would still be there.

Well, sometimes.

There are goals which are intimately tied into methods. How you get there is part of getting there. Abandon the method every so often for what seems to be a faster, easier, cleaner, newer, better method results in you becoming a dabbler. You’re reasonably okay at a lot of things. You’re not excellent at one thing. You never actually get to your destination, because you keep changing roads, cars, outfits, maps, GPSes, traveling companions, and take every detour imaginable because it seems faster.

Ever done this? You see a traffic jam ahead, get off at the next exit, and spend 30 extra minutes on side and back roads to go around the jam… which in reality is only a 10 minute traffic jam? I have. My hand is up. Guilty. This is the dabbler. This is the person who fails too fast.

The problem with the perspective of goal, goal, goal only (which isn’t what Chris is arguing, but which a lot of people will take away) and books like Seth Godin’s The Dip is that it’s too easy to quit early. It’s too easy to give up soon, to fail fast, when in fact you may not be failing at all, but working through your own limitations.

The other day I tweeted about the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which incompetent people are so limited by their abilities and lack of competence that they don’t realize they’re incompetent. The converse, that the competent are the last to get the memo, is also true. When it comes to goal-only perspectives, here’s the thing – your lack of meta-cognitive awareness about your limitations means that if you give up all the time, if you abandon ship too fast, you will NEVER reach excellence. Ever.

This is the danger of the dabbler. Before you give up, consider whether you’re not actually generating results because the method isn’t working, or because you haven’t amassed sufficient skill yet to make the method work for you. Admitting that is hard. Admitting that means forfeiting some ego and being willing to accept that you still have work to do, you still have more time to put in to achieve excellence…

… and as the Dunning-Kruger effect proves, you may be the last to get the memo about your excellence. Keep going!

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It’s got some AMAZING features that will make it stand out from every other iPhone app out there:

• It will regularly track your movements via GPS and silently upload them to my Google Earth master map, letting me watch wherever you are on the planet in real time.
• It will silently disable the airplane mode so I can track you in flight. Take that, TSA!
• On a regular basis, it will silently sync your contacts to my secret mailing list database and mark them as double opt-in with your phone’s IP address as the confirmation IP for verification purposes.
• Your phone will automatically sort through all the photos in its library and using a brand new algorithm, will mail me the most incriminating ones. As a bonus, you’ll find them all in iPhoto tagged with “blackmail”.
• Taking advantage of the iPhone’s powerful GPS and media capabilities, any time the phone detects that it’s some place important, like Congress, your bank, or your corporate headquarters, it will silently activate the microphone and camera, record everything that’s going on, and mail it to me.

Of course, all of these innovative features will happen behind the scenes, so to make sure YOU get some benefit out of my iPhone app, it will randomly display pictures of adorable kittens. Meow!

Yes, I’m joking (or am I?). That said, every time you install an app on your iPhone, you have absolutely no way of verifying the codebase or knowing what you’re putting on your phone. You don’t know what the app does behind the scenes.

If you have anything of importance on your phone, personal or corporate, think real carefully before loading it up willy-nilly  with third party applications, even ones “blessed” by Apple, Google, or others. If you don’t need it, uninstall it. Better yet, don’t install it in the first place. From time to time, back up your device, format it, and restore your data and current applications only.

Enjoy the kittens.

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Hat tip to Mr. Brogan.

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• Marketing takes audience and makes qualified leads
• Sales takes qualified leads and makes customers
• Product design and customer service takes customers and makes evangelists

So let’s take a look at the verbs of this funnel. In short: ACE.

• Attract.
• Convert.
• Energize.

Attract is what marketing does. Create demand for your ideas. Attract attention to what you have to offer. Assuming it’s good, people will pursue a line of inquiry and become a qualified lead. Attract also helps filter out some stuff – is what you are doing likely to attract leads? Billboards attract eyes, but unless they’re hyperlocal (Eat at Joe’s Next Exit), their value is questionable. Are you attracting the right people? You may be getting all the buzz in the world for your event, but if no one can afford to attend it, those thousands of visitors and millions of pageviews are worthless.

Convert is what sales does. Convert puts the emotional and rational values on the table with the qualified leads, the prospects, and helps them to convince themselves that your product or service meets or exceeds their needs. Again, convert is a useful verb. Is a sales practice converting? Do you know what converts and what doesn’t convert?

Energize is what product design and customer service do. We used to call this retention, but when you think about it, retention kind of implies that your customers are fleeing your products and services. It implies they want to run away as fast as they can, and you have to pull out all the stops to keep them from doing so. No, if your product doesn’t suck and your customer service actually cares about its customers to any degree, then you’re not talking about retention as much as you are talking about energizing your customers.

• Energizing them to use the product or service to its full potential.
• Energizing them to give you unsolicited suggestions about what would make it even more rave-worthy.
• Energizing them to tell everyone who will hold still long enough about your product or service as your unpaid word of mouth marketing department.

Energize is where all your profit is, long-term. If your product sucks, it will not energize customers to do anything more than pay the bills – if that. If your service sucks, it will only energize customers to hate you, very publicly and very loudly. Energize is what will destroy the other two departments, marketing and sales, because marketing will not be able to attract audience due to your stigma in the community. Sales will not be able to overcome fear, uncertainty, and doubt in what few prospects you have. Eventually, you’ll either have to make even more ethically questionable marketing and sales choices just to keep the lights on or go out of business.

The flip side is the fun part. Products that are raveworthy and service that is insanely great means that marketing just has to get people to the web form to sign up. Marketing can clock in at 10 and clock out at 2 with an hour martini break in the middle of the day because existing customers are raving about what you’ve got and forcibly dragging friends into your showroom. Sales has to triple its manpower just to process the paperwork, and prospects need little guidance except perhaps what color ink to sign on the contract. All of this comes from energizing your product design to be great and your customer service to be the best thing anyone has ever experienced.

Unsurprisingly, energizing product design and customer service is really, really hard. You as a company must be committed at every level, in every way, to putting your customers first and foremost. Everyone from the janitor who answers the phone late at night while cleaning to the CEO must get it, must understand that the vast majority of your long-term focus must always be on doing right by the customer. The moment that you lose that focus, you lose your ACE in the hole, and until you get it back, you’re on the path of the corporate death spiral.

Attract. Convert. Energize.

Profit.

Photo credit: DotBenjamin

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Yep, to Blue Sky Factory, an email marketing provider, as Vice President of Strategy and Innovation.

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It’s fitting that my last work in the world of financial aid was to volunteer at Massachusetts College Goal Sunday. This year’s CGS was significantly different for me personally than in years past for several reasons.

First, this is the first year I’ve presented at College Goal Sunday.

Second, this is the last time I’ll be working in the financial aid industry after my departure at Edvisors.

Third, the differences in the FAFSA and FAFSA on the Web worksheets this made for a more complex, more challenging College Goal Sunday than ever before.

Let’s start with the first – relatively late in the process of creating this event, I was asked to present for the Framingham/Metrowest site. I spent some time reviewing and editing the presentation beforehand, working with the national College Goal Sunday committee to make it a little more streamlined…

… but the projector at our site didn’t work, so I ended up winging it instead. The truest test of a presenter is when everything goes wrong and that lovely slide deck you made just flat out doesn’t work. How well do you know your stuff? I’m proud to say that having none of my slides didn’t compromise the presentation at all – and in fact might have helped because the audience then HAD to listen to me and couldn’t mix up their verbal brains trying to read slides and listen to me talk at the same time.

On the second point, I can say pretty much whatever I want now that I no longer work in the industry. This is rather liberating.

Here’s the biggest challenge that we had at this year’s College Goal Sunday. The form given to students and families, the FAFSA on the Web Worksheet, is basically not worth the paper it’s printed on. It’s supposed to make the FAFSA process easier and more friendly, but instead makes it deeply confusing and frustrating for many students.

If you look at the slide deck for presenters, there are half a dozen slides which are all labeled, “Important question not on the worksheet”. That the College Goal Sunday committee had to go to these lengths is a sad commentary on how poorly the government’s forms were created with regard to the online application. Things that are omitted? Well, for starters, questions like assets (cash on hand, in savings and checking – vital financial aid information) don’t appear anywhere on the worksheets but are in the online application. Someone just using the worksheets would be rather startled to be asked for a bunch of information that isn’t in their preparatory worksheets.

Other questions that are deeply flawed? One of the biggest showstoppers – and one that caused more than one FAFSA application to completely fail – is the question about income tax paid in 2009. Again, this doesn’t appear anywhere on the worksheets. However, the wording in the online application is incredibly vague:

“Enter the amount of your income tax for 2009″.

This single question caused more errors and blowups in the application than any other, of the families I worked with. What should the question actually say?

“How much did you pay to Uncle Sam in taxes (NOT withholding, not your annual income, not anything other than what’s on line 55 of your IRS 1040) last year?”

Very few of the families who completed the FAFSA got this question down in the first attempt. Many got to the end of the application and were confronted with an error correction screen saying that the numbers in their application didn’t add up.

Another doozy, one that can affect your financial aid significantly in some cases? There’s a question about your adjusted gross income in 2009. In the online application, there’s a “helpful calculator” which supposedly can help families estimate how much their AGI is. As far as I can tell, this calculator doesn’t do anything useful, which is a shame since there are several adjustments that CAN change your adjusted gross income, which in turn can change your financial aid eligibility, such as the tuition and fees adjustment or the student loan interest adjustment. None of these are accounted for in the online application.

There are also some interesting interface issues with the online version of the FAFSA, one of which is a dealbreaker of sorts for people looking for help. Along the righthand side of the application, there are floating help boxes that change contextually based on what question you’re on. Lots of students and families today said they couldn’t find the help system at all…

… because they thought those boxes were ads. They’re strategically located in almost the exact same spot as you’d run a skyscraper banner ad, and if you look at studies of how our brains interact with web pages, we nearly automatically ignore advertisements like banner ads.

I’ve nothing but positive remarks for the staff and volunteers for this year’s College Goal Sunday. As usual, everyone who volunteered did so out of the goodness of their hearts, giving up a Sunday afternoon to help students and families figure out the world of financial aid and get them started on that path. I commend the folks at MASFAA and its partners for continuing to make this important day happen every year. I just wish Uncle Sam made it easier for those families to get through the paperwork to accomplish their educational goals.

Finally, College Goal Sunday was a great note to end my career in financial aid on. Nothing’s better than helping other people, and that’s a great way to go out.

Stay tuned tomorrow at noon eastern time for where I’m going next…

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Throw out all your other metrics. Followers on twitter, hits to your web site, mentions in the media. Toss them all.

The only metric that matters is this: qualified leads.

On the continuum of business, marketing (which includes marketing, advertising, and PR) takes media and audience as its raw materials and makes qualified leads.

Sales takes those raw materials, those leads, and makes them into customers.

Product design and customer service take those raw materials, those customers, and turns them into evangelists.

Everyone and everything that’s doing marketing makes qualified leads. We may not call them as such – we might call them volunteers for the non-profit, new members to the congregation, new players in the Warcraft guild – but they are.

I’m being a little facetious when I say toss out everything else – but not by much. Things like site traffic, media mentions, etc. are good diagnostic measures to tell you what’s happening with individual tools and processes, but at the end of the day, the only metric that shows you the results of your actions is the number of qualified leads that you pass on to sales to convert. For small businesses especially, marketing, sales, and service may be the same person, the same sole proprietor, but the count of qualified leads is an important number, not to be missed or glossed over.

Finally, metrics that are really trendy and popular, like ROI, are built on qualified leads. You can’t compute Return on Investment if you have no idea what the Return is, and you can’t get a Return on your Investment until you have some leads for Sales to turn into business. Worry later about ROI and worry more now about how many leads Sales has to work with.

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…but…

The iPad has the potential to make sales and marketing people into legends. Take any sales demo you’ve ever done. Take any presentation you’ve ever done. Now take it on the road. Got a prospect you want to chat things over with in a coffee shop? Bring out your Keynote app (iWork for the iPad) and you’re showing your deck or demo on a glass 10 inch screen without all the hassle of keyboards, mice, remotes, or other crap. Just open your leather binder  and show the show.

… and then …

Remember: iPhone apps run on iPad out of the box.

So you swap from your slide deck to your Salesforce.com iPhone app. You take the order right there. You’re done, and you’re on a device that looks as slick as your product or service hopefully is. No Salesforce? Use iWork’s Numbers app and fill in your order spreadsheets, or fire up Safari and complete the lead form on your web site because you’ve got 3G wherever you’ve got good mobile service.

Professional speaker? The Keynote Remote app for the iPhone will run out of the box on the iPad. Instead of squinting at your iPhone while using it as a remote for your Keynote presentations (because your laptop is tethered to the projector), you have a gorgeous way to display your speaker notes and control the show from the podium. Just slap your iPad on the podium and swipe its screen to change slides, see your speaker notes, and not miss a beat. If you’ve ever presented professionally and wished that the venue could provide a speaker’s screen, the iPad is now that screen for you regardless of venue.

Image: Engadget

Yes, you’ll be able to handle all the mundane things that iWork and other iPhone apps can do, but the large, large screen will be perfect for when you’re at trade shows, conferences, and coffee shops as a way of showing your customers and prospects all the goods you have to offer without lugging an entire IT department around with you. Anyone who’s ever hung out with me at a conference knows that I lug a server farm with me – and I probably still will to some degree, but this device certainly will make life easier for the working professional. As a bonus for conference-goers, when the venue Wi-Fi implodes – as it always does – your iPad will feed your data addiction with its 3G connection.

I can’t wait to get my hands on one of these.

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• “We have to get our sites ready for mobile!”
• “Mobile computing is the future of the Internet!”
• “Mobile devices will be the #1 web browsers real soon!”

Some of this is true. Before you rush headlong into deploying mobile everything and trying to convert every last bit of marketing collateral you’ve got into something mobile, think. Think for a few moments about mobile. What things do you like and not like about mobile?

I’ll give you an easy one. Take a look at the FAFSA form, the financial aid form that I’ve spent the last 7 years studying, presenting, and guiding people through. This form is about 108 questions long.

No matter how good your mobile platform is, no matter how awesome or shiny your mobile device is, you will not fill out the FAFSA on a keyboard – real or virtual – that’s the size of chicklets and retain your sanity after 108 form fields. Now, will there be one or two users among your many that will try? Of course. Is  the amount of time and effort needed to develop a pure mobile implementation of the FAFSA justified for those two users a year? I’d have to say probably not.

Start with a mobile browsing strategy.

1. Look at your content, look at what you have that people can look at but don’t necessarily have to interact with. That’s where your mobile work should start.
2. Use plugins for your Wordpress blog – I’m a fan of the free WPTouch plugin.
3. If you have something location-based, make sure you’re set up with Google Local Business Center and have updated listings on all the major local services.
4. Check your analytics to see what percentage of users are browsing using a mobile device – find this in the screen sizes section. Look for really small screen sizes.
5. Create content with mobile in mind. Instead of giant blog posts, break topics up into sections, segments, or pieces so they can be consumed in snack size or all at once.

It’s absolutely true that mobile will be an integral part of your online marketing strategy over this year and coming years. We haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s possible. That said, the desktop/laptop isn’t going anywhere either – so don’t throw everything away for a future promise that isn’t here just yet (though it’s arriving more every day).

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Here’s an easy way to get started and a great feature to show to your team. It’s Intelligence (beta). Go to your Google Analytics, click Intelligence, and select Weekly Reports. (daily’s not necessarily all that helpful)

Now you can see major changes in your analytics data from one screen, like a “what’s new” for your data. In the example below, I can see that referrals to this site were up, as were new visitors. That tells me that folks are coming here from links on other sites. If you look on the right hand side, Google even ranks the different pieces of information by what it thinks are events of greater or lesser significance.

Click the Group by switch to change from metric to dimension – this is more or less like a simple PivotTable for the intelligence. Now, I can see that my referrals, which were up in the previous statistics, had some interesting behaviors. Their bounce rate was lower and their time on site was higher. This tells me that whatever they were coming to this site for, they found it (bounce rate dropped) and it was compelling enough that they stuck around (time on site).

Armed with this information, I can take a look at the content I created that week and any links I might have shared on Twitter, Facebook, or other places I share.

The Intelligence feature isn’t a replacement for hardcore analytics analysis by any means, but it’s a great way to start your day if you manage a web site. Intelligence will give you some initial areas to start digging into, some things to investigate as you prepare for your day.

Try it out!

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How do we get more traffic to X?

This is the wrong question to be asking, folks. Yes, absolutely, more feet in the door is critical to long term growth, but you don’t start fixing or improving your business at the top of the funnel.

You start at the bottom.

Which would you rather have? A web site with 1 million visitors a year that converts 0.5% of them, or a web site with 20,000 visitors a year that converts 30% of them? Everyone clamoring for more traffic says “I want the million visitors!” but the answer is the latter, in case you’re mathematically disinclined.

Fix your funnel from the bottom up. Why? Two reasons – you make the conversion engine more efficient, so when it’s time to build traffic, you can make use of it, and the further down the funnel you go, the more control over its outcome you have.

If you don’t know what your funnel is, now’s a good time to map it out. I suggest this order:

• Awareness
• Traffic
• Leads
• Customers
• Evangelists

Start at the bottom, which is evangelists, the people who love you so much that they spread your message for free on your behalf. If your product or service sucks, you won’t have evangelists. If your customer service sucks, you won’t have evangelists. Put time and energy into making a killer product and helping people make use of it, and every referral you get from your evangelists will bring gold to your doorstep.

Making customers is a function of sales. If sales can’t take a qualified lead and turn it into a customer most of the time, your sales process is broken or your sales team sucks. Ask your leads why they didn’t become customers, and fix that. Sales force automation tools can give you more insights into aggregate info about who tends to convert or doesn’t convert, but nothing beats asking the folks who didn’t buy.

Making traffic into leads is a function of marketing. You want as many qualified leads as possible – so if you’re not turning your traffic into leads, chances are marketing’s not doing its job demonstrating the value of what you have for sale, or the mechanism for conversion to a lead is broken. Are your web site forms working at all? Have you tested using things like Google Optimizer? If your lead quality is poor, are you asking the right questions and filtering out the garbage before your sales force has to handle it?

Building awareness and getting traffic is what you handle last – as said earlier, the higher up the funnel, the less you have control over the outcome. This is where stuff like search engine optimization, social media, and the variety of traffic building mechanisms come into play, and this is where most folks think you should start, but it’s where you finish.

Make sure the engine is working before you start blinging the shell of your car. More traffic without a conversion engine is just wasting your bandwidth, your resources, and your time.

Photo credit: Chris Brogan

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To me, there’s no dichotomy here. We focus on things like views of a photo, followers, retweets, fans on a fan page, etc. because these are the measures and metrics we know about. This is the best we have to work with, for the most part, and so valuing them isn’t wrong or crass. In the absence of other, better metrics, we value what we know.

To alleviate my friend’s dichotomy, I suggested he consider other metrics that would more accurately gauge his work – in essence, expanding what he knows about his work and how people perceive it. Sales, of course, is one such measure. It’s easy to click follow or subscribe or friend someone, but it’s much more of a commitment to open your wallet and purchase the work of an artist. You have to be much more invested in it to put up some money.

If you’re in it for the love and not the money – which is perfectly okay and good – dig deeper into your analytics. Last night in my USF Advanced Social Media course, I talked a bit about using Google Analytics to measure inflows and outflows to social networks as a way of better gauging what people are doing with your stuff. Here’s two examples.

1. Measuring outflows. Using Google Analytics’ virtual pageviews, you can tell whether that giant Twitter badge on your blog is worth keeping around. Set up links using an arbitrary virtual pageview, and every time someone clicks out to a social site or platform from your blog or destination site, you’ll know. That giant “BE MAH FRIEND” badge may be taking up valuable real estate for little value. Add a virtual page view to high value links or affiliate links as a sanity check for your affiliate reporting, too.

Example code – no virtual page view:

Savvy auction house marketers know exactly what goods and commodities are needed for each holiday and have them up for auction the moment the holidays begin, often at ludicrous markups. For example, for the Feast of Winter Veil, small eggs used to cook gingerbread cookies and egg nog, normally for sale for 50 silver (think 50 cents), rocket up in price by crafty salesmen to 9-15 gold each (think $9-$15) for a few days until the laggards in the market realize the holiday’s on and start undercutting prices.

Here’s the funny thing: the in-game calendar is published months ahead of the actual events, in the game and on Blizzard Entertainment’s web site. Every player of the game is given in-game notices in major cities about the impending holiday. There’s plenty of time to stock up the goods you need to sell…

… but few ever do. Few are willing to plan that far ahead, to farm the eggs or deeprock salt ahead of time and be ready for the doors to burst open the moment the holiday starts. As a result, those few who look at the calendar and plan accordingly reap huge profits.

So what does this have to do with blogging? The same applies in the blogosphere as in Azeroth. Google Calendar has a holidays calendar for every nation in the world. It lets you see all the major holidays you could possibly want, for your country or others, for different religions, for just about anything that you can stick on a calendar and call a holiday.

The power bloggers can look at the calendar and decide in advance, like an editorial calendar, what should happen in the lead up to the holidays on the calendar. Do you blog about marketing? You know when Valentine’s Day is – work out now what things you want to blog about as that holiday approaches. Do you blog about history? Seems like everyone’s got a holiday about them.

Having your blog posts published in advance of the holidays ensures that search engines can index your content. Having a decent social network ensures that you can move the needle in real-time search on the day before and day of the holiday. Having time to plan ahead lets you come up with creative memes that can stick well ahead of time – you can even beta test memes and hashtags to your current followers to see who says “heh, that’s clever” or the equivalent reaction you’re looking for.

You’ve got the calendar in front of you. The holidays on it are not a secret by any means, but know that most everyone in blogging and social media is probably going to wing it at best on the holiday. Farm your small eggs and deeprock salt now so that in 2010, you can profit handsomely when the times are right.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go hit some rock elementals for deeprock salt. We sold out this year, so I’ve got a year to farm for next Winter Veil.

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If we’ve worked together in my work at Edvisors, you’ll likely get an update as to whom you’ll be working with next. If we’ve collaborated in the past, I hope to do so again, especially as there are several opportunities I’m looking at for my next move that promise increased collaboration and exploration. I’ll still remain connected to financial aid here and there; for example, I’ll still be presenting at College Goal Sunday at the end of the month.

As this transition progresses, a few things are on my mind:

• Six and a half years is a lot of unwinding. To the extent that your marketing or media product/service/system can make transitioning roles easier, faster, cleaner, and less painful, please always plan for those eventualities when you’re designing product or slinging code. I’m running into an issue now where Google Analytics does not let you transfer analytics from one account to another; the workaround is to remove access for a certain user on a site by site basis, but this is obviously much less than ideal.
• Sorting out and separating personal from professional is harder than ever, because professional things can easily bleed over into personal and vice versa. Amber Naslund pointed this out recently in a post about boundaries. Where do you, the person, and your work begin and end? The catchphrase in social media last year was “be human”, but there’s also the quandary of when the human and the company need to part ways, who gets what in the divorce? I’m approaching by area of focus. Work I did that relates to Edvisors’ core mission is clearly theirs. I’m fairly certain they don’t want my Warcraft videos or coffee roasting techniques guides.
• A corollary is to explore, but keep your home base strong, sage advice from Chris Brogan. Six and a half years ago, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and social media weren’t more than vague ideas in someone’s mind. Now, having a personal brand that incorporates what you do professionally but isn’t married to your professional life is more important than ever. Companies change. People change. Markets and economies change. Life changes. If you aren’t doing at least a little work to ensure that you exist outside of your work, then the day will come when your work will vanish – and you’ll have that much more trouble getting resettled. Invest at least a little time in yourself and your reputation now to provide for unforeseen contingencies later.

I’m eager and excited about the fresh starts ahead. There’s so much opportunity, so many different ways we can make a difference together. I’m ever thankful and grateful for everyone who subscribes to this blog, who listens to Marketing Over Coffee, who has stayed in touch on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn over the years. I can’t wait to see what the rest of the year will bring.

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The first RoboCop movie was a box office success, which immediately activated the sequel machine. In the following movies, producers largely made the human story a subplot to lots of shooting, lots of gadgets, and even more gadgets. I can just hear the conversations in the executive suite now…

“RoboCop needs more cool somehow… I know, to jazz up this franchise, let’s give him a jetpack! The kids will love it!”

What made RoboCop successful wasn’t the gadgets. It was the stories, the fairly complicated subplots in the original that were abandoned for larger explosions and more gadgets in the sequels, which did increasingly poorly at the box office.

Your social media efforts aren’t so different.

Rather than looking for the next big thing, the next shiny object, the next bit of wizardry to spruce up your social media presence, stop for a moment and assess what has given you success so far. If you’ve achieved any level of success, a good bit of it is likely from your human efforts, from your story-based work and not the social media equivalent of rocket backpacks.

As you assess your social media efforts for this year, put aside the platforms and technologies for a little bit and look at what stories you are currently telling, what stories you plan to tell, and how your audiences and communities will receive those stories. This year, I’m certain the platforms will change. Stuff that’s hot right now will be less so, and there will undoubtedly be newer, shinier things.

Had the producers of RoboCop’s sequels left the gadgets behind and focused on the story of the human beneath the machine, they might have made even more box office gold. Don’t let the same fate happen to your social media efforts. Forget the gadgets. Bring out the human behind your social media machinery and tell those stories instead.

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In position #6 is a screen the size of an aircraft carrier.

In position #9 is a screen the size of a postage stamp.

One’s a large monitor, probably an LCD like a 24″ iMac. The other’s almost certainly a mobile screen.

This presents a dilemma to content creators. How do you manage to create stuff that looks passable on both?

For the big screens, don’t be afraid to go large with great art. If you have a staff member with a photographic penchant, feature their work (if they permit you to do so, or if their contract permits you to do so) in your creatives. If appropriate, offer freebies in your marketing promotions, like desktop wallpapers, downloadable screen savers and slideshows, and other high resolution, high impact ideas. When I do outreach to college financial aid administrators in the fall, very often I’ll pull photos from my portfolio of New England foliage and just send them as gifts to be used for desktop wallpaper. Costs me nothing, earns me goodwill, and makes use of that Nikon D90 I lug around all the time.

For the really small screens, I recommend two things: first, install Wordpress and then install the MobilePress plugin, which is what I run on this blog. It automatically reformats your blog on the fly in a lightweight format that looks good enough but loads instantly.

Second, go install or use mobile phone emulators to see what your properties look like, if you don’t own every phone under the sun. You can download an iPhone emulator from Apple or use TestiPhone.com for the iPhone platform, and Google has Android emulators for the Android platform.

This should help you make the most of the smallest screens coming to visit you.

Small or large, get your content future-ready today. It’ll be here sooner than you think.

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In 2010, we can honestly say that we’ve survived. Sure, there are still plenty of areas of concern in marketing, the economy, social media, etc. There are and always will be areas in which we can do better, in which we can shore up problems. But we’ve survived. We’ve gotten this far. We’ve played defense and kept the opposing team known as chaos more or less at bay.

The problem with playing only defense, no matter how superbly? No sports team has ever won a game by being solely good at defense – at best, you’ll only end in a tie. That doesn’t mean defense isn’t important. It does mean that to win more, you have to stop playing only defense and start taking ground, start putting some of your own numbers up on the scoreboard.

As we look out at the vast expanse of history yet to be written in 2010, the 364 days ahead, I’d encourage you to change your game. I’d encourage you to play less defense and more offense.

I’d encourage you to play to your strength, which is my personal theme for this year. Prior to the Great Recession and ensuing scramble for survival, there were things that in good times you were really good at. You had these as strengths, as superhero powers. These were your star quarterbacks, your best offense. You might have been superb at search engine optimization or writing eBooks or designing new products. These are the skills that made you happy, made you productive, and made you some money. These are the skills that out of necessity you had to backburner in order to keep the lights on in your organization. When the opposing team rushed you, you had to get your offense off the field and get your defense in play as fast as possible.

Do you remember them?

It’s time to reawaken those skills. It’s time to reawaken your superhero, dust off the cape and powers, get your best quarterback off the bench, and play to the things that you’re really good at and enjoy. True, you may have a different job or title today than you did during the last boom, but the mental skills and faculties you previously had are still there. Find ways to bring them back into the work you are doing now.

Play to your strengths. Deploy your offense. Look for opportunities to do more of what you know you’re really good at. Find ways to work your powers into more of what you do every day. Give your defensive linemen a breather and score a touchdown or two this year.

See you on the field.

Photo credit: Chip Griffin

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For the better part of 2009, I did a series of morning tweets on the economy, but realized at the end of the year that the data is interesting in the aggregate for trends but individually not as much.

So for 2010, I’ll start my mornings off a little differently. Using the hashtag #the5, I’ll let you know about 5 things that caught my eye in the morning news. It might be marketing, search, financial aid, or heck, even big World of Warcraft news (you can bet Cataclysm will make #the5 on launch day). Whatever’s interesting and of note in the morning reading, it’ll get tagged #the5.

Obviously, this would be a great deal more interesting if you participated, too. Yes, there’s Google Reader shared items. Yes, there’s all different ways of sharing stuff. #the5 is just a more casual way of doing it, and it’s focused on the start of the workday, interesting things that catch your mind and eye before the day gets busy. It might be a photo, a tweet, a video, whatever.

I look forward to seeing what catches your eye as you start your day.

I am always shocked and honored to see so many people enjoying what I’ve had to share over the years. This year was no different, and I want to thank you by taking a look at what YOU thought were the most important posts on my blog this year.

The data, of course, is derived from Google Analytics. If you want to make your own Top 10 list, go read this post on Marketing Over Coffee. Sure, other posts from other years were more popular, but here’s what’s been the top of your list this year:

10. Top 10 Follow Friday Tips for Twitter, April 3

9. I was on a boat called PAB09, June 22

8. Will social media burn conferences to the ground?, July 2

7. Advanced Social Media Course is live!, November 4

6. What’s all the stuff in the early morning tweet about?, February 5

5. 5 tips for dominating local search, July 27

4. In your last hour, what would you write?, September 11

3. Arguing against your limitations, August 11

2. How to back up your Wordpress blog in 60 seconds, May 16

1. Turning your Kindle into the best newsstand ever, May 4

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So, question for you: what happens when you reboot?

Here’s a look inside what happens in your computer the moment you hit the power switch and boot it up. This is, for the geeks, the power-on self-test, or POST. (derived from Wikipedia)

• verify the integrity of the BIOS code itself
• find, size, and verify system main memory
• discover, initialize, and catalog all system buses and devices
• pass control to other specialized BIOSes (if and when required)
• provide a user interface for system’s configuration
• identify, organize, and select which devices are available for booting
• construct whatever system environment that is required by the target OS

In well designed computers, the average end user never sees this. It happens in the blink of an eye, behind the scenes while a corporate logo of some kind displays. Only when something is seriously wrong do we ever see a non-typical outcome of a POST, usually followed by loud noises, swearing, and other gestures towards the computer.

This is a perfect analogy to how we treat ourselves every day, only as human beings with more sophisticated error handling, even when something’s wrong we keep soldiering on. Only very rarely and when something is seriously wrong do we stop to think about our own boot-up sequences, when we just can’t get going any more.

As you head into the New Year, think about making your own POST sequence for yourself, for your life, to run those daily diagnostics and catch trouble far earlier than we usually do. What would a human POST look like?

• Verify your basic health. The moment you wake up, take a deep, cleansing breath and physically just be aware of your own body. Do things hurt? Are there discomforts or nagging aches that are new? Do you know their causes – and if not, do you have access to someone to help you diagnose them?
• Load up your own main memory. A lot of folks enjoy purchasing incredibly elaborate organizational systems for the New Year, only to abandon them 23 minutes into the year when they realize the massive setup costs in terms of time. Start simple, even with sticky notes, but start a main memory load each day of basic stuff you want to get done that day.
• Catalog and assess your resources and devices. Not just physical devices like phones and laptops (though certainly making sure those are in working order is a good idea), but also your own assets and capabilities. What capacities and capabilities do you have available to you each day?
• Construct your system environment. Make a habit out of preparing the things that will help you the most for each day. It may be a great cup of coffee, a five minute meditation, a favorite pre-work CD of tunes for the car – construct whatever helps you establish the most positive environment you need for each day.
• Boot! You can even make a silly chime noise if you want. I won’t tell.

Try to construct your own POST so that when you need to boot or reboot into the New Year, you have something drawn up and ready to go.

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Ingredients

• 3 large cans of tomatoes, crushed or diced
• 1 large onion, diced
• 4 cloves of garlic, diced
• 1 tsp freshly ground black pepper
• 1 tsp basil
• 1 tsp oregano
• 1 tbsp vegetable oil or 1 tbsp butter
• 1 tbsp sugar
• Optional: 1 tbsp parmesan cheese

You’ll also need a large non-reactive pot.

Directions

1. Toss the garlic and onion into the pot with the oil (or butter). Cook until the garlic and onions start to caramelize.
2. Take about 8 tablespoons of tomatoes and liquid and put into the pot. Add the sugar. Stir with a spatula to deglaze the bottom of the pot.
3. Let the tomatoes cook until they start to caramelize. Turn down the heat to low and dump everything else into the pot all at once. Be careful of splashing.
4. With your stick blender, blend until everything is pulverized.
5. Cook slowly over low heat until the soup starts to bubble – probably about 15-20 minutes. You’ll want a lid or this will get very messy, very quickly. Don’t crank the heat – while it might get to simmering faster, the herbs will have no time to season the soup. Take it slow.
6. Blend one more time while bubbling. Be careful.

Serve hot. This will store well in the refrigerator for a few days but freezes very poorly. Enjoy however you consume tomato soup best.

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This is a recording of the session I did at the Web 2.0 conference earlier this year. It’s about 30 minutes long.

Download the MP3 here.

You will need to do the exercises in this session with a training partner. It can be a friend, colleague, coworker, whatever – but do them with a partner or the value you’ll get out of the recording will be greatly diminished. Follow along with the directions in the session as if you were actually there.

Please leave comments and feedback here after you’ve listened to the session and let me know how it affected you.

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With the opening of Icecrown Citadel in the latest edition of World of Warcraft, the challenges facing guilds and players of all levels of skill have increased. During a recent run in the Forge of Souls (facing the evil alter ego of the late James Brown, no less), I noticed that our usual team’s play style had to adjust to the new challenges. Here’s what I mean:

In Warcraft, you have two general methods for beating up the bad guys: focused fire and area of effect. Focused fire is exactly what it sounds like. In a crowd of bad guys, all the heroes point their swords/arrows/spells/pewpewlazerbeamz at one of the crowd until the bad guy drops, then you switch to the next one, etc. Area of effect has the heroes cover wide spaces with their weapons to take on the whole crowd at once. Think about the difference between, say, a rifle and a grenade. That’s the general idea.

Warcraft differs from life in that area of effect methods are significantly weaker than focused fire. When you face enemies weaker than you and your merry band of heroes, you just open up and take them all down at once. When you face enemies who are stronger than you, generally speaking, your attacks on them won’t kill them before they kill you, so you drop them one by one while the guy wearing the most armor (the tank) distracts the rest of the crowd.

So what does this have to do with project management? Simple: projects are like Warcraft’s bad guys. If you have a handful of very minor, insignificant things to tackle, you can multitask and burn them all down at roughly the same time. Bug fixes, memos, email responses, Twitter replies, etc. can all be nuked with the project equivalent of an area of effect attack.

If you face a major project or several major projects, chances are you can’t crush them before they overwhelm you. Instead, you gather your team at work, grab a seat at the conference room table with your laptop, and you burn down each project one at a time. Trying to tackle all of them would be as much of a wipe as a Warcraft raid trying to tackle all the bad guys at once.

Here’s the Icecrown Citadel twist: you have to recognize when it’s time to switch modes from one to the other. Warcraft teams used to area of effect nuking everything will suddenly find the battles in Icecrown Citadel to be much harder to deal with, and they’ll need to adapt quickly back to focused fire methods.

Likewise, the sooner you recognize that a project has gone beyond trivial requirements into something more serious, you have to switch methods in your organization.

The reverse is also true. If you take an epic geared, epic skilled team into a Warcraft raid and expect them to use the focused fire methods on bad guys that they can knock over just by sneezing, you’ll bore your team and take far longer to complete a dungeon than if you just uncorked your team’s power against weak opponents and wiped the floor with them.

From a project management perspective, that’s what causes boredom and loss of talent inside your organization – you’re asking top quality epic talent not to live up to their potential.

The challenge for any raid leader, the challenge for any business leader, is to recognize when you need one approach or another. It’s not just a matter of looking at gear in an instance (you can be epic geared and still suck at playing) or looking at resumes on a desk. No, you have to adapt quickly when you realize that your team is either getting their faces eaten by bone ghouls or project milestones and focus fire, or recognize when your team is so bored that they cast Basic Campfire against their opponents or doodle their way through project meetings and switch to area of effect crushing mode.

This is why great leaders in both Warcraft raids and the business world are great – and more rare than most epic gear. Good luck in your quests to be the best, whether it’s beating Sindragosa or this quarter’s numbers.

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Ever fallen off the tracks in the start of a new year and had it impact your whole year?

Why wait until the ball drops in Times Square when you can drop the ball right now?

I’ve been failing December – intentionally – and loving it. This month, I’m trying out new stuff, going back and doing maintenance on previous failures, and watching things explode fairly spectacularly. Why? Because if I figure out all the failure points now, while I can mentally group all the failures in the bucket of 2009, then by the time I move into 2010, I’ll already have figured out where the landmines are.

A couple of examples:

I’ve failed at running several times. I started again at the beginning of this month and failed almost immediately, but asked around a few folks as to what I was doing wrong. I said, hey, I’m just doing this for fitness, not for competition or anything – why am I failing at casual running? Immediately a few folks pointed out the obvious – even casual running demands reasonably good shoes for avoiding damage, plus some basic changes to nutrition. I’ve since resumed with less failure.

I’ve failed at maintaining one of my web sites, the FAFSA guide site I run. This month, I’ve been cleaning it up with the help of some wicked smart coworkers and found entirely new power tools in things I thought I knew how to use (my text editor, it turns out, has nuclear options!) that make me spectacularly more powerful. Just today I discovered a function that in the past I would have needed if I’d known to look for it. The process of failing has led to some great new tools to carry into 2010.

Icecrown Citadel, the last patch of the World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King expansion, is dropping this month. Some folks say it’ll be December 8, other folks say later. No matter when it drops, I anticipate a rich bounty of complete failure at the various wings of the Citadel by our guild – and in doing so, we’ll become even more proficient at the roles we play, so that when the New Year rolls around, our sad little army will instead be a battle-hardened platoon ready to take on the Lich King himself.

What are you going to fail at (and learn from) this month, so that prospects for success with your resolutions for the New  Year is greatly increased?

How can you start failing today for success tomorrow?

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• Get a tube of fast-bake dinner rolls of any brand you prefer. Separate them out.
• Grease a 9×13 pan. Use as little or as much as needed to keep stuff from sticking to it.
• Lay out the rolls in a single thin layer on the bottom of the pan, stretching them so that the bottom of the pan is not visible.
• Beat 6-9 eggs along with a cup of shredded cheese together.
• Add in other ingredients as you prefer, such as sausage, bacon, onions, peppers, whatever makes you happy in, say, an omelet.
• Pour the mix over the rolls. Stick the pan in a 350F oven for 30 minutes or until the eggs are firm and solid at the center.
• Cut and serve the tastiest breakfast you’ve ever had for a group of people.

Special thanks for Grandma sharing this! Enjoy!

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Ever listened to someone recount a tale of legitimate good work and say that it wasn’t a big deal?

Don’t ever do this to yourself. Why?

Part of our personal power is our ability to draw upon not just the knowledge but the emotion and energy of past successes to generate future success. Tap into all that was, all that you’ve done, all that you’ve achieved in order to firm your resolve against future obstacles. You know in your mind, in your heart, in your spirit that you do have what it takes to win in tough situations, that you can pull victory from the jaws of defeat.

Unless.

Unless you diminish and demean your past successes with diminishing words under the excuse of modesty. Unless you undermine your own past power by calling it nothing, by calling it a little thing, by saying that what you have done wasn’t a big deal. The words you use to describe what you’ve achieved color how you perceive those achievements. If you were trying to set up your life for failure, for frustration, for mediocrity, this is exactly the approach you’d take – amplify your failures and diminish your successes in your own mind, through your own words, and failure is guaranteed.

Modesty has its place, to be sure. One of the traits of the folks in my life who I consider to be very successful, very powerful people is that they happily acknowledge and celebrate their successes, modestly outwardly but strongly inwardly. When praised, very often their response is simply sincere thanks. When I receive praise, I copy my role models and simply express thanks and gratitude externally.

Internally is a different story. I reaffirm successes, relish the feeling of winning, and use it to steel myself against future battles. “I think I can” becomes “I know I can, because I have and I celebrate those past victories as the key to even more victory in the future!”

The habit of celebrating your successes becomes even more important when you face enemies who will seek to make you doubt yourself. If you live in the habit of saying that a success was nothing, an enemy need only encourage and amplify those words to steamroll you. They face a much tougher battle when you bear the shield of confidence built from past success (and celebration of it) and their efforts simply bounce off you. These enemies need not just be in the boardroom or on the golf course – they can be your own internal demons as well. Celebrate your successes and every additional success diminishes their sway over you.

Make sure you celebrate your successes, lest you rob yourself of the power you will need to drive even more success ahead.

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Ever faced impossible odds or certain defeat?

The difference in life between those for whom events and circumstances crush them and those who overwhelm their circumstances to success (or at least a decent Pyrrhic victory) is all in how we approach them.

For some, escaping loss and sorrow is the best way out. We retreat from the circumstances, we get away, we change our context so that the loss doesn’t hurt nearly as much, so that it’s not in our faces all the time. We take the measured break from the life we lead to reset, reboot, and find our way out of blinding sadness. One day, we wake up from the nightmare and can live again.

For others, we work together to overcome our respective sorrows. We teach where and when we can to help others just starting out on their journeys how to overcome initial obstacles, maybe how to take that time off, and in the process of teaching, we learn and grow ourselves. We find that sometimes the best advice is coming from us, but we just forgot to get the memo. One day we wake up, realize that we’ve been teaching ourselves as well as others, and we are healed of our woes.

For a select few who are especially courageous and especially willing to subject ourselves to the fire, we dive straight into our misery and like a blacksmith pounding iron into swords, we find it within ourselves to twist and reshape our sorrows into motivators. We turn loss into gain, sadness into resoluteness, anguish into unyielding will to do more, be more, achieve more in the face of what we’ve lost. We honor the past by forging the brightest future we can. One day we wake up and realize we’ve become greater than we ever could have been without our loss, and in a wonderful, poignant irony we become thankful for hearing the lessons of our sorrows and being richer for it.

Whichever pathway you choose, may you find your way home.

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Don’t just be thankful for the things you have in your life that you appreciate.

That’s good and a good start, but if you want to take it to a different level, ask yourself this:

How can I create or foster more of what I’m thankful for in the world?

• If you’re thankful for family and friends, how can you help reinforce strong family and good friends in the world for others?
• If you’re thankful for health, how can you bring a healing presence to those around you?
• If you’re thankful for wealth, how can you help others achieve what you’ve done?

In short, what do you stand for? What do you want to see more of? How can you create more of that in the world, in your community, in your life?

As you do your prayers, meditations, gatherings, and offerings over the holiday (or any day, really), think about that cornucopia on the table. From nothingness appears a Pilgrim’s Bounty of what’s needed to bring life, health, and prosperity to your life.

Ask how you can create more of that for yourself and everyone you care about and the universe (or *.deity if that’s your belief system) may just agree to a win-win situation in which everyone gets more of what they want and need in your life.

Happy Pilgrim’s Bounty!

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“Serendipity is the effect by which one accidentally stumbles upon something fortunate, especially while looking for something entirely unrelated.” – Wikipedia

I’ll be contrarian to my good friend Chris Brogan in saying that serendipity shouldn’t matter to you. Here’s what I mean. There’s an interesting expression in ninjutsu: banpen fugyo. Literally, change, never surprised. Toshitsugu Takamatsu, the previous headmaster of the Togakure Ryu ninjutsu school, is quoted as saying there’s no such thing as surprise for the ninja.

Stephen K. Hayes, my teacher’s teacher, often says that luck is merely energy that is unchanneled.

If you’re really good – really good – at life, if you’re working towards mastery of all that life has to offer and all the potential you have in life, then surprise and serendipity should be the gravy. They should be the bonuses at best. Why?

At the Web 2.0 Open, one of the exercises I asked people to do (adapted from Stephen K. Hayes’ phenomenal Evocation workshop) is to pick out something in your life that seemed like a lottery ticket sort of experience. Pick out something that was just wow! and good fortune came your way, and tell that story to a friend. During the event, I asked people to talk to the person next to them about their experiences, telling this story of a magical moment in their life when something fortunate happened. I told my story of co-founding PodCamp with Chris Brogan and suddenly finding myself on a jet to Sweden to put on PodCamp Europe at Jeff Pulver’s behest.

Serendipity, right? Good luck, right?

The second half of this particular exercise was to take the exact same story but retell it in a fashion where no luck was involved, where you made it happen and the natural course of events was that your efforts and focus created the outcome of success. I asked people to exaggerate if they needed to, but make the story work. Again, my story was of how hard Chris and I worked to create PodCamp and make it the success it was, and naturally events occurred which led to us being asked to create PodCamp Europe.

Here’s the funny thing: with a significant majority of the room, very little or no exaggeration was needed. Very little. Most people were able to find enough factual evidence in their lottery ticket moment of all the things they had done, all the choices they had made, that led to their good fortune. More than a few spirits perked up as they realized just how much of a hand they had in their “luck”.

This is the power that you have, the power that you give away, the power that you forfeit when you chase serendipity, when you hope for good things to happen just because instead of taking the reins for yourself.

Take charge of your life. Take charge of your destiny. Yes, leave room for hope and serendipity, leave room for good things to happen as bonuses to what you’re already doing, but do not live another day in your already too short life counting on hope when you have the capacity, the capability to take the wheel of the ship for yourself, to make good things happen, and to set the stage for the results you want.

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I had the pleasure and privilege to present at the Web 2.0 Open conference in New York City recently on the topic of Doing More With Less, a topic near and dear to everyone. The session itself is based on so much of what I’ve learned from Mark Davis of the Boston Martial Arts Center and his teacher, Stephen K. Hayes. Here’s the funny part about the session – I can’t replicate any significant part of it here on the blog.

The content is entirely provided by you, the audience. I’m more or less just a tour guide. No slides, no PowerPoint, not even a real presentation, just a guided experience in which you and your fellow audience members discover new things about yourselves.

I called the session the most technologically advanced session of the entire conference, and in a way, it’s true. The human technology was what we explored. I made the analogy that gear and tech will only get you so far. Hand a rank amateur a $50 point and shoot camera or a $2,000 DSLR and you’ll get about the same number of lens cap photos. The gear and tech can improve bad photos potentially to mediocre, but that’s about it.

Conversely, a truly skilled photographer? Give them either camera and they’ll create amazing works of art that nearly ignore the limitations of gear. Don’t believe me? Check out the cameraphone category on Flickr to see some amazing works.

In the session, we investigated four areas of doing more with less:

1. Redefining less. With friends, we examined what less was with our training partners, and then looking at less from a different perspective to gain some mental freedom from a poor resources mindset.

2. Finding authentic self. With friends, we examined things that have always been a part of our lives and how we can align ourselves and our careers, lives, and businesses with our inherent strengths to do more, plus looked at the difference between our current selves and our superhero selves.

3. Reclaiming responsibility. With friends, we examined aspects of our life that appear as luck, good or bad, and how we can change our perceptions from luck to being in charge of our lives.

4. Empowering our minds. We examined in a distilled fashion the idea of using your iPod to control your emotional state.

It’s nearly impossible to convey online any significant part of the experience, so if you weren’t able to make it, I hope you can attend a future version of this, or attend the seminars and workshops given by my teachers. If you were there, I look forward to reading your feedback in the comments.

You can also pick up some of the source material from Stephen K. Hayes as well.

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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 R