If I had to Start Over from Scratch
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Wake Up Call!, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 on February 24th, 2010
Simpler words have not been written. Here is the blueprint on becoming successful on the internet. Period!
Please take some time to read this over, ponder it, and then give me a call if you want to work together. In this internet game, it is a support oriented concerted effort. . .and all get successful together!
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Hunters and Farmers
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Wake Up Call!, Web 3.0 on February 3rd, 2010
Good Gawd, this is seth godin at his absolute best!
10,000 years ago, civilization forked. Farming was invented and the way many people spent their time was changed forever.
Clearly, farming is a very different activity from hunting. Farmers spend time sweating the details, worrying about the weather, making smart choices about seeds and breeding and working hard to avoid a bad crop. Hunters, on the other hand, have long periods of distracted noticing interrupted by brief moments of frenzied panic.
It’s not crazy to imagine that some people are better at one activity than another. There might even be a gulf between people who are good at each of the two skills. Thom Hartmann has written extensively on this. He points out that medicating kids who might be better at hunting so that they can sit quietly in a school designed to teach farming doesn’t make a lot of sense.
A kid who has innate hunting skills is easily distracted, because noticing small movements in the brush is exactly what you’d need to do if you were hunting. Scan and scan and pounce. That same kid is able to drop everything and focus like a laser–for a while–if it’s urgent. The farming kid, on the other hand, is particularly good at tilling the fields of endless homework problems, each a bit like the other. Just don’t ask him to change gears instantly.
Marketers confuse the two groups. Are you selling a product that helps farmers… and hoping that hunters will buy it? How do you expect that people will discover your product, or believe that it will help them? The woman who reads each issue of Vogue, hurrying through the pages then clicking over to Zappos to overnight order the latest styles–she’s hunting. Contrast this to the CTO who spends six months issuing RFPs to buy a PBX that was last updated three years ago… she’s farming.
Both groups are worthy, both groups are profitable. But each group is very different from the other, and I think we need to consider teaching, hiring and marketing to these groups in completely different ways. I’m not sure if there’s a genetic component or if this is merely a convenient grouping of people’s personas. All I know is that it often explains a lot about behavior (including mine).
Some ways to think about this:
- George Clooney (in Up in the Air) and James Bond are both fictional hunters. Give them a desk job and they freak out.
- Farmers don’t dislike technology. They dislike failure. Technology that works is a boon.
- Hunters are in sync with Google, a hunting site, farmers like Facebook.
- When you promote a first-rate hunting salesperson to internal sales management, be prepared for failure.
- Farmers prefer productive meetings, hunters want to simply try stuff and see what happens.
- Warren Buffet is a farmer. So is Bill Gates. Mark Cuban is a hunter.
- Hunters want a high-stakes mission, farmers want to avoid epic failure.
- Trade shows are designed to entrance hunters, yet all too often, the booths are staffed with farmers.
- The last hundred years of our economy favored smart farmers. It seems as though the next hundred are going to belong to the persistent hunters able to stick with it for the long haul.
- A hunter will often buy something merely because it is difficult to acquire.
- One of the paradoxes of venture capital is that it takes a hunter to get the investment and a farmer to patiently make the business work.
- A farmer often relies on other farmers in her peer group to be sure a purchase is riskless.
Who are you hiring? Competing against? Teaching?
Quieting the lizard brain
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Wake Up Call!, Web 3.0 on January 28th, 2010
Profound words, by Seth Godin
How can I explain the never-ending irrationality of human behavior?
We say we want one thing, then we do another. We say we want to be successful but we sabotage the job interview. We say we want a product to come to market, but we sandbag the shipping schedule. We say we want to be thin but we eat too much. We say we want to be smart but we skip class or don’t read that book the boss lent us.
The contradictions never end. When someone shows up and acts without contradiction, we’re amazed. When an athlete just does the sport, or when a writer just writes the words, we can’t help but watch, astonished at the purity of their actions. Why is it so difficult to do what we say we’re going to do?
The lizard brain.
Or as Stephen Pressfield describes it, the resistance. The resistance is the voice in the back of our head telling us to back off, be careful, go slow, compromise. The resistance is writer’s block and putting jitters and every project that ever shipped late because people couldn’t stay on the same page long off to get something out the door.
The resistance grows in strength as we get closer to shipping, as we get closer to an insight, as we get closer to the truth of what we really want. That’s because the lizard hates change and achievement and risk.
The lizard is a physical part of your brain, the pre-historic lump near the brain stem that is responsible for fear and rage and reproductive drive. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because her lizard brain told her to.
Want to know why so many companies can’t keep up with Apple? It’s because they compromise, have meetings, work to fit in, fear the critics and generally work to appease the lizard. Meetings are just one symptom of an organization run by the lizard brain. Late launches, middle of the road products and the rationalization that goes with them are others.
The amygdala isn’t going away. Your lizard brain is here to stay, and your job is to figure out how to quiet it and ignore it. This is so important, I wanted to put it on the cover of my new book. We realized, though, that the lizard brain is freaked out by a picture of itself, and if you want to sell books to someone struggling with the resistance (that would be all of us) best to keep it a little more on the down low.
Now you’ve seen the icon and you know its name. What are you going to do about it?
We Are the Future. . . .
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Wake Up Call!, Web 3.0 on January 19th, 2010
The Future is US. . . . .
The Future is NOW!
Well, Why Dontcha Come Join the Tribe Called K2, over here on Facebook?
Posted by admin in Wake Up Call! on January 8th, 2010
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Hey y’all, To become a full and contributing member of the Tribe Called K2, you gotta tell us how to serve you, you gotta participate. the best way to to do that is to join the K2 Tribe on Facebook. 1. Become A FanOne of the many inspirations to maintain the K2 fan page on Facebook was to provide our customers who are friends, who are family members with a really easy way to communicate with us, our Instructor staff, our Customer Experience Goddesses, our numerous writers o’ the blog, and the folks who decide the vision of K2, including myself. . . . and to share with you some limited exclusive stuff that’s not published on the blog. The fan page was made for you! It’s updated on a regular basis and this is where we frequently share the beach dives, stuff going on with other family members, exclusive stuff that doesn’t necessarily make the email list. Boat Dive deals as well as wickedly discounted trips abroad. Also, if you DON’T live in Southern California, here is where you can tell us you are coming into town, and see if we dont wrap a BBQ around you! That being said, by becoming a Tribe Member o’ K2 on Facebook you’re actually helping us to grow. Becoming a fan is really easy. Once you’re logged into Facebook, go to facebook.com/k2scuba. As soon as you arrive, click on the “Become a Fan” button at the top of the page. Let me quickly introduce some of the stuff we post on our fan page:
We also have a groups page, this is where we announce our events such as beach dives, boat dives, demo days by manufacturers, etc. . . Click this dang link: http://www.facebook.com/K2Scuba Hardcore Beach Diving and Drinking carbonated beverages while eating hot dogs Groups page:
2. Suggest K2 to FriendsLike any new and exciting product, it’s only fun if you have someone to share it with; and our fan page is no different. As soon as you are a fan, you have the opportunity to recommend K2 to your friends. Click on the “Suggest to Friends” link and select everyone you’d like to share with and click “Send Invitations“.
This is really one of the best way you can help to us! 3. Once you’re a fanNow that you’ve joined the fan page, you’ll be kept well informed because our wall posts will appear on your Home page. In a glance, you’ll conveniently view the posts that were all the rave the day before — Yesterday’s Best; and what’s coming up the following day — Sneak Peek; as well as everything else we post on our wall. With every post on the Tribal wall, you may:
By “liking” a post and commenting, you’re sharing the love with your friends (they’re more likely to read it if they know that a friend already has) and promoting interaction — which is what the fan page is all about. 4. The Easy Way To Share K2 Articles With Your Facebook FriendsSometimes, an article you enjoyed reading on the K2 Blog and found really useful may not be featured on our fan page (we don’t want to spam our fans with every article) but you can actually share the article with your friends quite easily! At the end of each article here you’ll see a “Share|f” button. It takes only two clicks.
Click on that button and you’ll be forwarded to a special page where you can preview and customize a message for your Facebook friends.
When ready, cllick on “Share” to post the article to your Profile wall. That’s about it! Please don’t be shy to share what you think about the Tribe Called K2 by jotting a comment or two on our wall. We’re applaud suggestions and criticism from our fans. It won’t be any fun if we don’t receive feedback from you guys! We hope to see you on our Facebook fan page and join the other fans who are already enjoying the benefits of following us. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! |
A Shimmering Glimpse of the Face of God!
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face! on January 3rd, 2010
"I am the hole on the flute that God’s breath flows through."
Eckhart Tolle
Team Hoyt is a father (Dick Hoyt, b. ca. 1940) and son (Rick Hoyt, born January 10, 1962) from who compete together in marathons together. Rick has Cerebral Palsy, a condition acquired at birth because his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck during birth.
Dick pulls his son Rick in a special boat as they swim, carries him in a special seat up front as they bike, and pushes him in a special wheelchair as they run.
Dick explains, that the line is blurred, “. . .between me and my son, I don’t know who is giving the greatest gift. . .”
The Folly of Becoming the Cheapest Alternative
Posted by admin in Wake Up Call! on December 30th, 2009
For most products and services, most of the time, people sign up for the Cheapest Reliable Alternative Plan.
If everything appears to be the same, then of course they’re going to pick the cheapest one that’s good enough.
In the face of this understandable strategy, you have a few choices:
You can be cheapest (difficult to sustain).
You can be more reliable (great if you can figure this out).
You can be redefine the playing the field to be the only one (most preferred).
Buying a new microphone or lights for your DJ business doesn’t do any of these three to your competitive status, it merely makes you feel good. Same with re-organizing your office, painting the parking spaces or buying a new laptop. They merely keep you where you were.
The scalable, profitable strategy is to change the game, not to become the most average.
Seth Godin
Just a Paltry 1,000. . . A Sethism!
Posted by admin in Wake Up Call! on December 24th, 2009
First, organize 1,000
Kevin Kelly really changed our thinking with his post about 1,000 true fans.
But what if you’re not an artist or a musician? Is there a business case for this?
I think the ability to find and organize 1,000 people is a breakthrough opportunity. One thousand people coordinating their actions is enough to change your world (and make a living.)
1,000 people each spending $1,000 on a special interest cruise equals a million dollars.
1,000 people willing to spend $250 to attend a day-long seminar gives you the leverage to invite just about anyone you can imagine to fly in and speak.
1,000 people voting as a bloc can change local politics forever.
1,000 people willing to try a new restaurant you find for them gives you the ability to make an entrepreneur successful and change the landscape of your town.
Even better, coordinating the learning and connections of this tribe of 1,000 is not just profitable, it’s rewarding. If you can take them where they want to go, you become indispensable (and respected).
What’s difficult? What’s difficult is changing your attitude. Instead of speed dating your way to interruption, instead of yelling at strangers all day trying to make a living, coordinating a tribe of 1,000 requires patience, consistency and a focus on long-term relationships and life time value. You don’t find customers for your products. You find products for your customers.
Seth Godin
You don’t have the Power
Posted by admin in Wake Up Call! on December 20th, 2009
Prepare to be sethificated by the soothsayer. . .
A friend is building a skating rink. Unfortunately, he started with uneven ground and the water keeps ending up on one side of the rink. Water’s like that, and you need a lot of time and power and money if you want to change it. One person, working as hard as he can, has little chance of persuading water to change.
Consider this quote from a high-ranking book publisher who should know better, "We must do everything in our power to uphold the value of our content against the downward pressures exerted by the marketplace and the perception that ‘digital’ means ‘cheap.’ …"
Hello?
You don’t have the power. Maybe if every person who has ever published a book or is ever considering publishing a book got together and made a pact, then they’d have enough power to fight the market. But solo? Exhort all you want, it’s not going to do anything but make you hoarse.
Movie execs thought they had the power to fight TV. Record execs thought they had the power to fight iTunes. Magazine execs thought they had the power to fight the web. Newspaper execs thought they had the power to fight Craigslist.
Here’s a way to think about it, inspired by Merlin Mann: Imagine that next year your company is going to make 10 million dollars instead of a hundred million dollars in profit. What would you do knowing that your profits were going to be far less than they are today? Because that’s exactly what the upstart with nothing to lose is going to do. Ten million in profit is a lot to someone starting with zero and trying to gain share. They don’t care that you made a hundred million last year from the old model.
If I’m an upstart publisher or a little-known author, you can bet I’m happy to sell my work at $5 and earn seventy cents a copy if I can sell a million.
Smart businesspeople focus on the things they have the power to change, not whining about the things they don’t.
Existing publishers have the power to change the form of what they do, increase the value, increase the speed, segment the audience, create communities, lead tribes, generate breakthroughs that make us gasp. They don’t have the power to demand that we pay more for the same stuff that others will sell for much less.
And if you think this is a post about the publishing business, I hope you’ll re-read it and think about how digital will change your industry too.
Competition and the market are like water. They go where they want.
Seth Godin
Traffic Getting Manifesto-Jeff Johnson (Brilliant)
Posted by admin in Wake Up Call! on December 19th, 2009
Traffic Getting Jumpstart
This is where I will list my step-by-step traffic-getting strategies for getting more traffic to your websites and blogs.
I call it my Traffic-Getting Jumpstart™ Master Plan.
I’ll start by adding a general outline and then I’ll come back and keep updating it with links to new videos and tutorials as I produce them… the videos and tutorials will that walk you through my “traffic getting” strategies one-by-one .
Not all of them will be posted on my blog.
Some will only be sent out via email so make sure you keep checking your inbox for my new and exclusive Traffic-Getting Tutorials.
Once again: This is the general process that I personally go through to ramp up traffic on a new blog.
Some, but not all of the techniques will also apply to static sites, social networking profile pages, or non-blog websites of any kind.
Each of the steps will be listed but not all of them will have tutorials… at least not for now.
But if you guys see one particular step that you’d like me to jump-forward to and “just create the damn tutorial now”… just leave a comment telling me so and I’ll see what I can do.
Here are the basic “Traffic-Getting Jumpstart™ Master Plan” steps that you should follow.
Remember, it’s knowing how to scale this out and leverage both technology and people to scale this out but everything can be done by just one person if you choose to… just don’t expect an avalanche of traffic for two hours worth of work on a site with only 10 pages in a market that no one cares about!
Always learn how to scale things out by leveraging technology and people… and pick highly competitive markets that people are actively searching for.
DO NOT USE THESE TECHNIQUES FOR SPAMMING THE SEARCH ENGINES!
There’s a fine line between using this technology and techniques to increase your traffic… and using it to spam the hell out of the engines… don’t cross that line.
We are simply trying to increase awareness of, and increase traffic to, our sites leveraging the viral nature of blogs and web 2.0 sites and technologies.
That having been said:
Here’s my quick “2 hours or less”:
Traffic-Getting Jumpstart Master Plan
3. Install the Free SEO Blog Software
5. Install the banner ads, affiliate program ads, etc
6. Set up the email capture and first few follow up emails
7. Add content to blog
a. Run a social bookmarking campaign on blog with one group of bookmarking accounts logins and at different times and days.
b. Create supporting micro-sites mini-network (social profile pages at squidoo, hubpages, bumpzee, and small static hand built sites).
c. Run a social bookmarking campaign on your micro-sites mini-network with a different set of bookmarking logins and at different times and days.
8. Submit site to SEO friendly directories sites using directory submission services.
9. Create video
a. Distribute video with video sharing software
b. Run a social bookmarking campaign on the videos sharing pages.
Steps 1 – 9 are enough to jumpstart the traffic to your new blog, static website, ecommerce website… and it only takes an hour or two.
If this is a site or market that you know is worth spending additional time on then you can follow these additional steps.
The following steps don’t take that much additional time but should, and can easily be, outsourced.
10. Every month (or sooner) go back and run the social bookmarking campaign again using new social bookmarking logins at different times and days.
11. Every month (or sooner) go back and create a new micro-site or social profile page to support your micro-sites mini-network.
12. Add posts to the blog that link/pingback to other authority blogs in the market.
13. Pick specific posts on your blog that you’d like to rank higher.
a. Social bookmark those posts with random bookmarking login accounts
b. Create a videos specific to those posts and load to youtube
c. Blast that video out to video sharing sites
d. Social bookmark the videos on the video sharing sites with random bookmarking logins and at different times and days.
e. Find other authority blogs in the market and post content-rich comments on their blog with links heading back to the post you are trying to rank higher.
You can do the following steps yourself but I would strongly recommend you simply outsource them.
14. Outsource someone to spin articles for you and submit them to directories
15. Outsource someone to create new social bookmarking login accounts
16. Outsource someone to subscribe to your RSS feed and have them social bookmark your new posts (the RSS feed notifies them when there is a new post so they simply head over.
17. Outsource someone to post high-quality, relevant comments on other people’s blogs and forums (DO NOT COMMENT SPAM). Concentrate on ones that do not use the “no follow” attribute.
18. Rinse and Repeat steps 7 – 18+ for sites that are worth the effort.
How do you know if the site is worth the effort?
I can’t answer that for you… only you can answer that question since it is your time and money involved… what is “worth it” to you may not be worth it to the next person and vice-versa.
Ask yourself this question… “does this site (sites) add money and/or value to my business versus the time and effort it takes to rinse and repeat Jeff Johnson’s Traffic-Getting Jumpstart Master Plan?”
If the answer is “yes” then continue to “rinse and repeat” steps 7 through 18 and beyond.
And do yourself a favor and reinvest your earnings into your business by outsourcing the work that takes up the most time so you can concentrate on finding new markets and making money from the traffic you have.
I’ll keep emailing you new tutorials down the road so be sure to check your inbox for updates,
Jeff Johnson
UndergroundTrainingLab.com
Paying It Forward, Seth Godin’s "What Matters Now" Ebook for FREE!
Posted by admin in Wake Up Call! on December 14th, 2009
Seth Godin is a gift to us all. He is a soothsayer and visionary of Web 1.1-3.0
He has just released a book, and at last measure the servers are on meltdown, so Im tickled to offer it to you here.
click: www.tevisverrett.com/blog/library/what-matters-now-1.pdf
Here is the original article:
What Matters Now: get the free ebook
Now, more than ever, we need to shake things up.
Now, more than ever, we need a different way of thinking, a useful way to focus and the energy to turn the game around. I hope a new ebook I’ve organized will get you started on that path. It took months, but I think you’ll find it worth it the effort. (Download here).
Here are more than seventy big thinkers, each sharing an idea for you to think about as we head into the new year. From bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert to brilliant tech thinker Kevin Kelly, from publisher Tim O’Reilly to radio host Dave Ramsey, there are some important people riffing about important ideas here. The ebook includes Tom Peters, Jackie Huba and Jason Fried, along with Gina Trapani, Bill Taylor and Alan Webber.
Here’s the deal: it’s free. Download it here. Or from any of the many sites around the web that are posting it with insightful commentary. Tweet it, email it, post it on your own site. I think it might be fun to make up your own riff and post it on your blog or online profile as well. It’s a good exercise. Can we get this in the hands of 5 million people? You can find an easy to use version on Scribd as well and from wepapers. Please share.
Have fun. Here’s to a year with ideas even bigger than these.
Here’s a lens with all the links plus an astonishing array of books by our authors.
Protected: Jeff Johnson’s Traffic Underground Banner Intel
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Wake Up Call! on December 13th, 2009
Easy and Hassle Free Gift Ideas for the Scuba Diver from K2!
Posted by admin in Wake Up Call! on December 11th, 2009
Lead with your glass jaw
Posted by admin in Wake Up Call!, Web 3.0 on December 9th, 2009
Here’s one way businesses can profit from a social media presence:
Make it easy to get hurt.
If you’re in a low trust industry (like car sales), a social media presence dramatically increases the opportunity people have to call you out, beat you up, tattle on you and flame you in public. If you have a Facebook page and people can YELL at you there, for all to see, it makes you vulnerable. Do you really think that a Chris or a Guy or Gary is going to risk ripping you off for consulting or wine? No way. Too easy for someone to post a comeback for all to see.
When your staff sees how much power you’ve given random consumers, they’ll freak. And then, magically, they’ll start treating customers differently, because maybe, just maybe, this customer is the one who’s going to use the power. Suddenly, the answer to, “do you know who I am!!” is, “yes sire, forgive me.”
It might not be comfortable, but you can bet it will build trust.
Fallback for the 2%
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Wake Up Call!, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 on December 8th, 2009
If you ask one hundred people to do a task (particularly one that involves following instructions or using a computer or both), figure that two of them will mess it up.
It doesn’t matter if you use ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. It doesn’t matter if your instructions are crystal clear. It doesn’t matter if you ask them to sign a release. Two percent will mess it up. And it won’t always be the same two percent either, so the idea of kicking the clueless out won’t work.
Which means you only have two choices:
- Design systems that have the good sense and gracefulness to permit the 2% to proceed, or
- Annoy, demonize or lose these people
Technologists hate this choice, but it’s true. We have to plan for human failure and part of our job is to have the resources and back up to allow these people to remain in our tribe even though they’re unable to follow a simple instruction.
Dell Rides Twitter to $6.5 Million in Sales
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Wake Up Call!, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 on December 8th, 2009
Dell continues to be one of the more visible corporate behemoths actively using social media, and today they’re out with new numbers to demonstrate some of the success they are having.
The company tells us that they’ve now generated a total of $6.5 million in revenue from their Twitter presence, where they have nearly 1.5 million followers on their @DellOutlet account (and 3 million “connections” across all social sites).
Although a tiny percentage of the company’s total sales (Dell generated more than $60 billion in revenue last year), it does represent significant growth in revenue via social media in the past year. Dell says its sales from Twitter have actually tripled, which is consistent with previous reports about their performance.
With real revenue now being generated via companies on Twitter, the question everyone is asking how Twitter will monetize it. The answer still isn’t clear, though the company continues to suggest that premium accounts for corporate users are in the works soon.
[img credit: pinksherbet]
Reviews: Twitter
Tags: dell, social media, twitter
Why Facebook Chose to Limit Google and Spare Twitter Search
Google really unleashed a torrent of news and updates today. While events such as the launch of Google Goggles are very interesting, the big news is clearly the launch of real-time search within Google. Now as events unfold, Google will capture the chatter about it in real-time from sources such as Twitter, Yahoo Answers, news media and Facebook.
The inclusion of Facebook in this list of real-time sources is one of the most important aspects of today’s announcements, and it is something that could have major implications for Twitter and its ambitions to become the world’s water cooler. In fact, Facebook held back the opportunity to deal a heavy hit to its microblogging rival. But why?
Facebook Didn’t Treat Google and Microsoft Equally
The new integration of Facebook into Google Search doesn’t actually feed all that much Facebook information into Google search results. In fact, only the updates of public Facebook pages are included in the real-time stream. Profile updates are not part of this deal.
That is a huge detail. Often the most relevant and personal information comes from Facebook profiles, not pages. Pages are primarily controlled by businesses and public figures, making their updates less raw and less personal. You won’t see a lot of companies updating their status with their feelings about the Tiger Woods scandal, but you will see a lot of profiles, even public ones, discussing breaking news about his affair.
There’s also a lot of multimedia in Facebook profiles. They don’t just include status updates, but also photo albums, video uploads and useful links. As more people turn their profiles public (something that could happen when Facebook asks users to update their privacy settings), this data will only become richer. In short, Google is limited in the data it is allowed to pull.
Two Reason Why Facebook Limited Google
You have to ask yourself: Why did Facebook limit what information it is willing to give to Google? After all, Microsoft has access to all Facebook public profiles through its search deal with Facebook for Bing. It’s not a technological problem, and we don’t think Google declined the inclusion of more information into its search engine.
In fact, here are two likely reasons for why Facebook limited its real-time stream to Google. First, Facebook views Google as a direct competitor and threat to its goals. As we’ve discussed previously, the two companies are quietly set to clash in a real-time search war. Not only that, but the two companies are competing to be the gateway to the Web with Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect respectively.
The second reason Facebook didn’t give public profile data to Google is simple: Microsoft is an investor in Facebook. The Windows maker dropped $240 million into Facebook for not only a small piece of the social networking site, but for the right to preferential treatment. As a result, they have inked everything from ad deals to search partnerships. The last thing Microsoft wants is for Facebook to help out its arch rival — especially as an investor. You can bet Facebook factors Microsoft’s wishes into its decisions.
The Twitter Aspect
Facebook could have really showed off its muscle within the results of the world’s largest search engine, but chose not to. Twitter should exhale a sigh of relief.
Here’s what could have happened: Facebook makes a deal with Google that not only lets it have access to public profile data, but allows it to display the images, videos and links that are on Facebook. Rich, multimedia search results become an integral part of Google searches, revealing the limits of Twitter data and Twitter search results.
They could have really punctured and deflated the balloon on Twitter’s real-time search potential. Instead, Facebook determined that Google having access to more Facebook data was a worse option than completely clobbering Twitter in search. The social network had little choice — it couldn’t give Google the same amount of data as Facebook.
Thus for now, Twitter’s real-time search survives as one of the best places to get updates on what’s happening right now. Google’s solution is slick and filled with data, but without Facebook, it’s incomplete.
Facebook pulled its punches with Twitter this time. Don’t expect the story to be the same next time.
Reviews: Bing, Facebook, Google, Twitter, google friend connect
Tags: bing, facebook, Google, microsoft, twitter
How to protect your ideas in the digital age
Posted by admin in Wake Up Call!, Web 3.0 on December 7th, 2009
If we’re in the idea business, how to protect those ideas?
One way is to misuse trademark law. With the help of search engines, greedy lawyers who charge by the letter are busy sending claim letters to anyone who even comes close to using a word or phrase they believe their client ‘owns’. News flash: trademark law is designed to make it clear who makes a good or a service. It’s a mark we put on something we create to indicate the source of the thing, not the inventor of a word or even a symbol. They didn’t invent trademark law to prevent me from putting a picture of your cricket team’s logo on my blog. They invented it to make it clear who was selling you something (a mark for trade = trademark).
I’m now officially trademarking thank-you™. From now on, whenever you use this word, please be sure to send me a royalty check.
Another way to protect your ideas is to (mis)use copyright law. You might think that this is a federal law designed to allow you to sue people who steal your ideas. It’s not. Ideas are free. Anyone can use them. Copyright protects the expression of ideas, the particular arrangement of words or sounds or images. Bob Marley’s estate can’t sue anyone who records a reggae song… only the people who use his precise expression of words or music. Sure, get very good at expressing yourself (like Dylan or Sarah Jones) and then no one can copy your expression. But your ideas? They’re up for grabs, and its a good thing too.
The challenge for people who create content isn’t to spend all the time looking for pirates. It’s to build a platform for commerce, a way and a place to get paid for what they create. Without that, you’ve got no revenue stream and pirates are irrelevant anyway. Newspapers aren’t in trouble because people are copying the news. They’re in trouble because they forgot to build a scalable, profitable online model for commerce.
Patents are an option except they’re really expensive and do nothing but give you the right to sue. And they’re best when used to protect a particular physical manifestation of an idea. It’s a real crapshoot to spend tens of thousands of dollars to patent an idea you thought up in the shower one day.
So, how to protect your ideas in a world where ideas spread?
Don’t.
Instead, spread them. Build a reputation as someone who creates great ideas, sometimes on demand. Or as someone who can manipulate or build on your ideas better than a copycat can. Or use your ideas to earn a permission asset so you can build a relationship with people who are interested. Focus on being the best tailor with the sharpest scissors, not the litigant who sues any tailor who deigns to use a pair of scissors.
8% of Internet Users Account for 85% of all Clicks
Posted by admin in Wake Up Call! on November 5th, 2009
The unclicking 84% A Sethism!
Mark points us to this great set of stats.
Basically, all of the clicks for all the ads online come from only 16% of the surfers, and most of them come from just 4% of all internet users.
So, if you optimize your ads for clicks, it means you’re ignoring a huge population.
If your business is built around the kind of person who clicks, you win. If it isn’t, you either need to not buy ads online or buy ads optimized for attention and familiarity, not clicks.
Imagine that only left-handed people clicked on ads (it’s about the same percent). What are you going to do if you make a product for the right-handed portion of the population?
It’s okay to make an ad that isn’t easy to measure. If it works, that’s enough.
by Jack Loechner, Tuesday, October 13, 2009, 8:15 AM
The results of an update to the comScore highly publicized "Natural Born Clickers" research, conducted two years ago with Starcom USA and Tacoda, indicate that the number of people who click on display ads in a month has fallen from 32% of Internet users in July 2007 to only 16% in March 2009, with an even smaller core of people (representing 8% of the Internet user base) accounting for 85% of all clicks.
Presented by comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni and Kim McCarthy, manager, Research & Analytics at Starcom, at the iMedia Brand Summit in San Diego on September 14, 2009, the original research showed that 32% of Internet users clicked on at least one display ad during the month. These clickers were segmented into Heavy, Moderate and Light Clicking segments based on the group of users (heavy), middle 30% (moderate), and bottom 20% (light).
In 2007, comScore, Starcom and Tacoda found that Heavy clickers, representing 6% of U.S. Internet users, accounted for the top 50% of clicks, Moderate users, 10% of Internet users, accounted for 30% of the clicks, and Light clickers, 20% of users, accounted for 16% of the clicks. By March 2009, those numbers had dropped substantially:
- 4% of Internet users are Heavy clickers
- 4% of users are Moderate clickers
- 8% are Light clickers
|
Heavy, Moderate, and Light Display Ad Clicker Analysis (Total US Home, Work and University Locations) |
||||
|
|
Share of All Internet Users |
Share of All Click-Throughs |
||
|
|
July ‘07 |
March 09 |
July ‘07 |
March ‘09 |
|
Total clickers |
32% |
16% |
100% |
100% |
|
Heavy clickers |
6 |
4 |
50 |
67 |
|
Moderate clickers |
10 |
4 |
30 |
18 |
|
Light clickers |
16 |
8 |
20 |
15 |
|
Non clickers |
68 |
84 |
0 |
0 |
|
Source: comScore, September 2009 |
||||
Linda Anderson, comScore VP of marketing solutions and author of the study, concludes that "… marketers who attempt to optimize their advertising campaigns solely around the click are assigning no value to the 84% of Internet users who don’t click on an ad… "
The results underscore the notion that, for most display ad campaigns, the click-through is not the most appropriate metric for evaluating campaign performance. Rather, advertisers should consider evaluating campaigns based on their view-through impact, says the report.
Despite the precipitous decline in clicks, says the report, comScore is advocating looking beyond the click because other comScore research has shown that online display ads generate significant lift in trademark search, online and offline sales, and brand-site visitation across all verticals, among those internet users who were exposed to the online ad campaigns – whether they clicked on the ad or not. These results, compiled in comScore’s influential "Whither the Click?" white paper, were reported in the June 2009 issue of the Journal of Advertising Research.
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Display Ad Lift (Site Reach Weeks 1-4 After First Exposure) |
|||
|
Vertical |
Control |
Test |
% Lift |
|
Average all |
4.5% |
6.6% |
46% |
|
Automotive |
0.9 |
1.9 |
114 |
|
Finance |
1.3 |
2.3 |
86 |
|
CPG & restaurant |
0.6 |
1.1 |
77 |
|
Retail & apparel |
9.1 |
13.8 |
52 |
|
Media & entertainment |
7.0 |
10.0 |
42 |
|
Electronics & software |
5.8 |
7.2 |
25 |
|
Travel |
4.8 |
5.8 |
21 |
|
Source: comScore, June 2009 |
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John Lowell, Starcom USA SVP/Director, Research & Analytics, notes that "a click earns no revenue and creates no brand equity… online advertising (is) certainly not to generate clicks… (but) to visit website, seek more information, purchase a product, become a lead, keep brand top of mind… "
For additional information, please visit the SMV Group here.
Keys to the Kingdom: Fitty All Time Best Subject Lines
. . . SEEDED FROM vERTICAL RESPONSE
50 All-Time Great Retail Subject Lines
Here at VerticalResponse we’re always being asked things like, "What is the best day to send email?", "What are the real email marketing secrets?" and "What are great subject lines?". I decided to focus this post on that last one, and offer some really great and proven-to-work subject lines that you can test out for your email marketing campaigns.
First of all, I’m assuming at this point that your recipients will recognize you from your "From Label". I’ve written why your From Label is very important in your email marketing campaigns. If they are familiar with who the email is coming from, you’ll have better luck getting your email opened with a catchy subject line.
As a retailer your email marketing campaigns are probably all about selling. If you sell your own products or products from other manufacturers, you’ll be trying to announce new products, new seasons or discounts and sales. You’ll want your recipients to act fast, so you may want to try expiration dates in your subject line. We even see businesses using hours in the day in their expiration time periods.
You’ll see that some of these subject lines are a bit vague like "An Exclusive Offer for You", however sometimes that might get more opens than if you talk about a specific product. That’s something that you need to test for yourself in your own campaigns.
Offer, Offer, Offer
Enjoy this Special Offer at Our New Location
25-40% off – Email-Only Offer – Today Only
Invitation-Only 2 Hour Event Starts 11:30 AM CT
Ends Today! 20% Off Friends & Family
Top 10 under $10
Free shipping – offer ends in 3 days
Free product with purchase of [product name]
[New Product] has arrived. Order now before we run out.
Earn double points for [insert product or action].
Last Chance: Get up to $25 now
Save 10% on your next order
Enjoy [season] with rates from $65
Service Notice: Exciting new changes at [your company]
An Exclusive Offer for You
[Your company] October Specials
Last minute deals, special offers, and new [product name]
Act Now to renew your [subscription name]
Online only: 25% off friends and family
Introducing our latest…[product/feature here]
[Product name] Promotion week. Save 25%
Extended for a day! Get Free shipping through Friday
Stock up and save 15%
Limited Supply: Limit 2 [product name] per customer
Ho-ho-ho: The [your company] holiday catalog is here!
Email subscriber exclusive: [Product name] sale is here
Ends Today: Take 20% off your entire order
Private Sale Ends Today
Your choice of amazing items $50 + under
Great gifts for [Dad, Mom, etc]
Best Sellers every [girl, boy, man, woman, dog, etc.]
Everything you need when the temperatures [rise, fall]
Free Shipping–Limited Time Offer
Catchy & Creative
Sometimes all you need is a little vase lift (retailer selling vase’s)
We’ve got you covered from head to toe (retailer selling hats, shirts, pants and boots)
How La Perla got its name (retailer selling lingerie, telling a story inside the email)
Temperatures Fall, Style Rises (retailer selling coats)
Celebrity Favorites (selling accessories that Hollywood is wearing)
Did you remember to get a gift? It’s ok, we did. (retailer wanting to get people to register for gift reminders)
10 Gift Ideas for your little ones (retailer listing top 10 suggestions for kids)
Manhattan View for a Song in the Shower (retailer selling shower curtain with Manhattan skyline on it)
Take your pick: Our 9 Favorite Dresses (retailer suggesting by popularity)
Coolest modern desk on the job…for $149 (retailer including price in the subject line)
Score Great Savings on Game-Time Gear: HDTVs, Furniture & More (retailer selling TV’s with a sports slant)
Party Like it’s 1999 Aged Cabernet Special (wine retailer)
In our store: Last minute Mother’s Day combo ready to go (retailer getting the last minute shoppers with a catch "combo to go".)
Adorn Your Home Now & Through the Holidays (Home decor retailer)
Mind-Blowing Grenache (wine retailer)
Bring this email to a Gap store and win! (retailer trying to get store traffic)
I hope this gets your creative juices flowing. You can also find some great holiday-specific subject lines here. If you’ve got some great subject lines that have worked for your business, comment and let us know.
Responsibility Shirking. . .to Success!
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Wake Up Call! on November 2nd, 2009
Help your customers avoid taking responsibility
It’s interesting to see that people are much better at putting up with things that happen to them than they are at living with the consequences of a bad choice.
When you can blame someone else (or the gods of spite, chance and bad luck) it’s emotionally safer than it is to acknowledge you made a lousy choice.
If the weather is freakishly bad on your vacation, you can embrace pity from your friends, and spend your angst cursing the storms.
On the other hand, if you book a trip in the middle of hurricane season, you’ve got no one to blame but yourself.
This is a great opportunity for marketers and others that want to engage with the public. If you can figure out how to communicate, "it’s not your fault," then people will be grateful, and they’ll return. It might not be right, it might not be mature and it might not be the behavior society wants to advance, but it works.
Even better, figure out how to teach your customers to enjoy taking responsibility. It’s the long term solution that builds a healthy relationship between customer and vendor… you coach them on good choices and they embrace what happens after they make them.
Hop in, I’ll Drive, A Sethism
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Wake Up Call! on October 1st, 2009
"Hop in, I’ll drive."
Just because someone offers you a lift, doesn’t mean you have to take it.
In a joint venture or possible business arrangement, it’s reassuring when the other person offers to drive. "Leave it to me," they might say, or, "I’m socializing this through the organization… be patient, I’ve done this before and we need to do it this way."
Often, this is true. It’s the honest appraisal of a generous insider, someone who wants both of you to succeed.
But, just as you should never get in a car with a drunk driver, understand that the minute you let the other person drive, you’ve bought into their process. Spending three months or three years following someone off a cliff is nuts.
I’d rather disappoint you today and refuse your offer of a lift than end up with both of us having wasted hours and hours of time somewhere further down the road. No, you can’t pitch this to your husband, that’s my job. No, I won’t stand by and watch you mangle this before the board. No, we’re not going to interact with customers your way merely because it’s the only way you know.
Thanks, but I’ll drive this time.
Friction! Sage Words from the Guru, Seth Godin
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Wake Up Call!, Web 2.0 on September 16th, 2009
Friction
Stamps (remember those?) make direct mail work. Because it costs money to send a piece of junk mail, you’ll think two or three times before you mail something to a million people.
Email, of course, is free.
Except it’s not. The friction that slows down sending email to everyone all the time is the cost of all the people you’ll lose. You might lose them because they unsubscribe, or more likely, you’ll train them to ignore you. Worse still, you might just make them annoyed enough to badmouth you.
Drugstore.com made two mistakes with their relationship with me. First, they bought the lie that opt out is a productive strategy. They unilaterally decided that I’d be delighted to get regular emails from them, merely because I bought some shaving cream.
The second mistake? They didn’t bother to be selective about what they sent.
I’ve never purchased diapers online, since my diaper purchases predate online diaper shopping. And my hope is that I won’t be buying Depends for another fifty years or so. Drugstore.com should know this. And yet, because it’s apparently free to email me, some lame brand manager says, "sure, do it!"
Except then I unsubscribe and an asset that is worth ten or a hundred or a thousand dollars disappears, probably forever.
Find friction and embrace it, don’t ignore it.
When tactics drown out strategy
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Wake Up Call!, Web 3.0 on August 7th, 2009
This is a profound Sethism
From the Master, Seth Godin
New media creates a blizzard of tactical opportunities for marketers, and many of them cost nothing but time, which means you don’t need as much approval and support to launch them. As a result, marketers are like kids at Rita’s candy shoppe, gazing at all the pretty opportunities.
Most of us are afraid of strategy, because we don’t feel confident outlining one unless we’re sure it’s going to work. And the ‘work’ part is all tactical, so we focus on that. (Tactics are easy to outline, because we say, "I’m going to post this."
If we post it, we succeed. Strategy is scary to outline, because we describe results, not actions, and that means opportunity for failure.) "Building a permission asset so we can grow our influence with our best customers over time" is a strategy.
Using email, twitter or RSS along with newsletters, contests and a human voice are all tactics.
In my experience, people get obsessed about tactical detail before they embrace a strategy… and as a result, when a tactic fails, they begin to question the strategy that they never really embraced in the first place.
The next time you find yourself spending 8 hours on tactics and five minutes refining your strategy, you’ll understand what’s going on.
The Law of Big Numbers: Quantity first, then Quality!
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Wake Up Call!, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 on August 3rd, 2009
This is WHY you endeavor to grow your friends/followers/fans on Twitter, Facebook, You Tube, [fill in the blank]. . . .
Ever Wondered How to do an XML Sitemap?
Posted by admin in Wake Up Call! on August 2nd, 2009
A Brilliant Treatise on AdWord Initial Bidding
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Wake Up Call! on July 31st, 2009
The quality score is a really complex black box algorithm, there are many things that it takes into account. Here is for example something that is very far from being intuitive or obvious: If you just added a keyword and you bid a very low amount (seems to be correlated with what…
Don’t be a miser with AdWords, or at least don’t show it – http://www.ppchacking.com
Microsoft and Yahoo Team Up To Challenge Google
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Wake Up Call! on July 29th, 2009
It’s official!
Microsoft announced today that they have struck a deal to power Yahoo’s search, while at the same time Yahoo will be powering paid ads on Bing.com (Microsoft’s new search platform…formerly known as MSN).
You can get all the details here:
http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2009/jul09/07-29release.mspx
…and here:
http://www.choicevalueinnovation.com/thedeal/Default.aspx
So why is this good news for marketers?
It’s simple. With Yahoo and Microsoft now a team, Google finally has some competition in the search market. This means:
- Ad costs may go down, and…
- Google may stop being such enormous jerks to their advertisers (which could mean less “Google Slaps”)
Obviously this is just my speculation, and the deal doesn’t go final until 2010 so don’t expect anything to change overnight, but competition is (almost) always a good thing for consumers, so for now, at least, I’m chearing this deal.
Comment below and let me know what you think… Woot!
-Ryan
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this was seeded from http://drivingtraffic.com/microsoft-and-yahoo-challenge-google/ so Ryan Deiss gets the props and the scoop!
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Banner Ads Work, You Hafta Know What Ur Doing!
Posted by admin in Wake Up Call! on July 25th, 2009
Sweet, Frikkin’ Schweet!
What REAL Customer Service Is. . .
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face! on July 21st, 2009
Winning on the uphills A continuing Sethism from the Soothsayer himself. . . .
Every So Often I come across a particularly selfish, self-centered, sophomoric client in my businesses that tests my patience. I am quick to become curt, identify that person as a zero-sum gain as II become aware of the large sucking sound of my time being wasted. I then quickly write those people off. . .
I read this today and it changed my attitude. . .
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Interesting business lesson learned on a bicycle: it’s very difficult to improve your performance on the downhills.
I used to dread the uphill parts of my ride. On a recumbent bike, they’re particularly difficult. So I’d slog through, barely surviving, looking forward to the superspeedy downhill parts.
Unfortunately, I had a serious accident a few years ago (saving the life of a clueless pedestrian by throwing myself onto the pavement). Downhill might be fast, but it’s crazy.
Lesson learned. Now, I look forward to the uphill parts, because that’s where the work is, the fun is, the improvement is. On the uphills, I have a reasonable shot at a gain over last time. The downhills are already maxed out by the laws of physics and safety.
The best time to do great customer service is when a customer is upset. The moment you earn your keep as a public speaker is when the room isn’t just right or the plane is late or the projector doesn’t work or the audience is tired or distracted. The best time to engage with an employee is when everything falls apart, not when you’re hitting every milestone. And everyone now knows that the best time to start a project is when the economy is lousy.
Most of your competition spend their days looking forward to those rare moments when everything goes right. Imagine how much leverage you have if you spend your time maximizing those common moments when it doesn’t.
You Tube Tweak: How to destroy the ClickBack/LinkBack
Posted by admin in Wake Up Call! on July 19th, 2009
A Grateful Thanks to Ket-Sang Tai for this very slick tweak:
The Tao of the Little Shovel
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Wake Up Call! on July 18th, 2009
The law of the little shovel
. . .another Sethism! Gawd, I love this man!
If you want to dig a big hole, you need to stay in one place.
If you walk around town with a little shovel, you’ll just end up digging thousands of little holes, not one big one.
Call on one person ten times and you might make the sale. Call on ten people once each and you will likely get ten rejections.
The important thing to remember is that separate events are often separate. If you use the same ineffective approach on one thousand people, it’s not going to start working better just because you use it more often.
Connected events, on the other hand, often benefit from frequency and trust.
Which leads to two viable strategies:
1. If you can stay still, stay still. Earn the trust, earn the sale by repeatedly demonstrating value and authority.
2. If you can’t stay still, get a bigger shovel. Your marketing and your sales pitch has to be so refined and focused that it works the first time, because you don’t get a second time.
Event Planning & Marketing, the New Web 2.0
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 on July 17th, 2009
I came by this via Twitter, and after watching this video, found huge resonation. This is the next big future modality of the internet and as you have already learned. You either adopt and exploit as a business, or be sidelined and rendered ineffectual. Watch, let it make you uncomfortable, and comment. You are my family, and we are a power together!
. . . . go on, tell that lie!
Posted by admin in Wake Up Call! on July 16th, 2009
. . .another Sethism:
Gotcha!
A few weeks ago, my tooth fell out (on a cross country flight no less). I managed to get home and then eagerly put some Anbesol ("for oral pain relief, dentist strong so the pain is gone!") on the hole. Yes, that was my screaming you heard all the way from here.
The next morning, my dentist explained that not only doesn’t Anbesol work on exposed nerves, it makes them worse.
You can read the label all day long and you won’t see that mentioned. But hey, they made a sale (one sale).
Or consider this item on Amazon. How big do you think these "mixing bowls" are? The reviews point out that the smallest one is not big enough to hold an egg. Does that change your perception of the item?
Why not tell the truth? Why not call them "mini bowls"? Why not change the label from "toothache relief"? (Technically, it’s not a toothache if you have no tooth, okay, thank you Mr. Lawyer, that’s exactly the sort of weaseling I’m talking about.)
There are lots of things you can do to make the sale. They often are precisely the opposite of what you should do to generate word of mouth. I know, you can’t have word of mouth unless you have a sale, but a sale that leads to pain is hardly worth it.
My rule of thumb is this: every person you turn away because your product or service isn’t right for them turns into three great customers down the road. Every bad sale costs you five.
How Will YOU Make the Quantum Leap?
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Wake Up Call!, Web 3.0 on July 14th, 2009
Taking the leap
More Sethisms from the Master!
The best businesses and the best projects are a quantum leap above the competition. This gulf represents competitive insulation, because others can’t figure out how to get up there with you.
Amazon, for example, has a leap between it and other online retailers. Sure, you might be able to mimic part of what they’ve got, but the gulf is so huge, it’s hard to imagine displacing them any time soon.
Nike has spent billions on advertising, sponsorship, manufacturing, technology and distribution. It’s a quantum leap between them and some start-up that wants to compete.
I think going for the leap is essential for creating a business for the ages, and I want to speculate that there are three ways to make it:
- BUY IT–you can raise a lot of money or spend a lot of the company’s R&D or marketing money and just buy yourself a huge head start and this provides insulation. (This is my least favorite, because spending like a drunken sailor often leads to other drunken behaviors, including remorse the next day).
- SNEAK UP THE CURVE–you can quietly develop your business fairly cheaply and then, by the time the competition notices you, it’s too late. Build a Bear Workshop is a great example of this. One store at a time they built a brand, a cash flow and a nationwide footprint that makes it awfully difficult for others to compete. McDonald’s did the same thing.
- THE NETWORK EFFECT–some markets are ready for one (and usually only one) intermediary to show up and be the default winner. Twitter and Comdex and Alexander Graham Bell are great examples of this.
There are probably some others (like make a genius innovation in your basement and then patent it) but these three are good ones to start with.
Facts Always Win, Right?
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Wake Up Call! on July 14th, 2009
Facts always win, right?
Sage and salient word from Seth Godin. . .
If you’re selling a business to business service and you can prove that it’s better, that it delivers more value, that it’s cheaper or more durable or more efficient, shouldn’t that mean you will close every sale?
Even hard-headed business people end up buying the thing they want, not the thing they necessarily need.
The real danger of relying on facts to make your sale, though, is that when the facts are no longer on your side, you’re toast. The low-cost supplier gets hooked on the easy sales that come from acting like a commodity, and if that changes, you’ve got little room to maneuver.
Great brands and projects are built on real value and a real advantage, but great marketers use this as a supporting column, not the entire foundation. Instead, they build a story on top of their head start. They focus on relationships and worldviews and interactions, and use the boost from their initial head start to build competitive insulation.
Protected: Genius from Perry Belcher, Utilizing EBay to Drive Traffic (email: admin@k2scuba.com for access code)
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Web 3.0 on July 12th, 2009
Seth Godin’s The Art & Skill of Working for the “Man”
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Wake Up Call! on July 11th, 2009
The art and skill of working with bureaucrats
Have you noticed that most airports feature the same restaurants? It’s not an accident. The people who run these chains have organized themselves to be good at dealing with municipal organizations. Same thing goes for design firms, creative firms, accountants etc. that deal with large corporations.
In my experience, 40% of the fee goes for the work and 60% goes to pay for the do-overs, staffing, project management and hassle that comes from working from big organizations and committees. A lot of small businesses get burned when they charge just the 40% and the client expects that the other 60% comes for free. It doesn’t. If you want to be good at this capability, you can. You can buy it and learn it and then turn around and sell your skill. But it’s unlikely you will randomly back into it.
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Good Freekin’ Boogly Woogly! Let this wash over you, and read it again. . .and again. . .and again!
Raise your hand if you HAVENT gotten burned by a bureaucracy!
This blog is for you. So comment and tell me what you most want to see here. Im listening!
Tevis
Web 3.0, the Future in just under 5 minutes!
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Wake Up Call!, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 on July 4th, 2009
This is a powerful video done back in 2007. We are the arbiters of Web 3.0, are you innovating or will you get left behind.
How to be a packager
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Uncategorized, Wake Up Call!, Web 2.0 on July 3rd, 2009
This is sage words from Seth Godin. Mad props to the mentor and you can find his blog and other musings here: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/06/how-to-be-a-book-packager.html
K2 is a packager. I package scuba equipment. Dont confuse me with a scuba retailer or a dive shoppe. If you have a product that we can drive to market, ping me at 818 982 2652.
Now, please enjoy the article!
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For fifteen years, I was a book packager. It has nothing to do with packaging and a bit more to do with books, but it’s a great gig and there are useful lessons, because there are dozens of industries just waiting for you to do something like this. Let me explain:
A book packager is like a movie producer, but for books. You invent an idea, find the content and the authors, find the publisher and manage the process. Book packagers make almanacs, illustrated books, series books for kids and the goofy one-off books you find at the cash register. I did everything from a line of almanacs to a book on spot and stain removal. It was terrific fun, and in a good year, a fine business. Along the way, I worked with just about every major publisher and created more than a hundred books. I packaged (with various levels of success) video games, college professors, Julia Robert’s astrologer, an award-winning children’s novelist, the Weekly World News, Kinko’s and (almost) Craftsmen Tools.
I think there are real advantages to this model (and not just for books). Star Wars toys, for example, were created by a packager, and so are most big budget movies. Duncan Hines licensed his name to Roy Park, perhaps the most successful food packager of all time. Roy died of old age with more than half a billion dollars to his name thanks to all that cake mix.
First, the world needs packagers. Packagers that can find isolated assets and connect them in a way that creates value, at the same time that they put in the effort to actually ship the product out of the door. Kaplan might never have gotten into the test prep book business if we hadn’t done all the hard work of persuading them to enter the market (it took several years) and creating the books that launched their line. One series of books generated tens of thousands of new customers for them.
Second, in many industries there are ‘publishers’ who need more products to sell. Any website with a lot of traffic and a shopping cart can benefit from someone who can assemble products that they can profitably sell. Apple uses the iPhone store to publish apps. It’s not a perfect analogy, because they’re not taking any financial risk, but the web is now creating a new sort of middleman who can cheaply sell a product to the end user. We also see this with Bed, Bath and Beyond commissioning products for their stores, or Trader Joe’s doing it with food items.
Any time you can successfully bring together people who have a reputation or skill with people who sell things, you’re creating value. If you find an appropriate scale, it can become a sustainable, profitable business.
The skills you bring to the table are vision, taste and a knack for seeing what’s missing. You also have to be a project manager, a salesperson and the voice of reason, the person who brings the entire thing together and to market without it falling apart. Like so many of the businesses that are working now, it doesn’t take much cash, it merely takes persistence and drive.
Here are some basic rules of thumb that I learned the hard way:
- It’s much easier to sell to an industry that’s used to buying. Books were a great place for me to start because book publishers are organized to buy projects from outsiders. It’s hard enough to make the sale, way too hard to persuade the person that they should even consider entering the market. (PS stay away from the toy business).
- Earning the trust of the industry is critical. The tenth sale is a thousand times easier than the second one (the first one doesn’t count… beginner’s luck).
- Developing expertise or assets that are not easily copied is essential, otherwise you’re just a middleman.
- Patience in earning the confidence of your suppliers (writers, brands, factories, freelancers) pays off.
- Don’t overlook obvious connections. It may be obvious to you that Eddie Bauer should license its name and look to a car company, but it might not be to them.
- Get it in writing. Before you package up an idea for sale to a company that can bring it to market, make sure that all the parties you’re representing acknowledge your role on paper.
- As the agent of change, you deserve the lion’s share of the revenue, because you’re doing most of the work and taking all of the risk. Agenting is a good gig, but that’s not what I’m talking about.
- Stick with it. There’s a Dip and it’s huge. Lots of people start doing things like this, and most of them give up fairly quickly. It might take three or five years before the industry starts to rely on you.
- Work your way up. Don’t start by trying to license the Transformers or Fergie. They won’t trust a newbie and you wouldn’t either.
The Evolution of Twitter by @EvanWilliams
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Web 3.0 on June 26th, 2009
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I tweet, you tweet, we tweet!
Rest On Laurels. . . and Die!
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Wake Up Call!, Web 3.0 on June 23rd, 2009
seeded from Seth Godin’s blog!
Learning from Singer
At one point, the Singer Corporation had more than 12,000 people working in a single plant. They were selling more than a million sewing machines a year and had hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. By any measure, it was one of the most important manufacturers in America. It was fun while it lasted.
Back then, it was easy to believe that Singer represented everything that was right with our economy, and that our future was intrinsically attached to the company’s.
When as the last time you even thought about Singer (or a sewing machine for that matter)?
The cycles are far shorter now than they were during the century that Singer was a shining light for corporate success. More now than ever, success today is no guarantee of success tomorrow.
Sometimes we spend more time than we should defending the old thing, instead of working to take advantage of the new thing. I bet you can list a dozen "critical" industries that will be as relevant to life in 2020 as Singer is to our world today.
The key difference is that be then, managers and shareholders could stall and fumble and wait out the transition until after they retired. Now, it’s almost an annual event. Hiding isn’t working, and neither is whining. The best marketing strategy is to destroy your industry before your competition does.
Attraction Marketing
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 on June 21st, 2009
In here are nuggets to Marketing 2.0! Get past the sales pitch and hype and look at this for the power it is. Stop the push marketing of “buy my crap” and create value. . .
Look at this close with a cynical and jaunticed eye. What do you think I am doing with this blog. . . to you and for you?
Tevis
What Are You Really Doing with Your Business?
Posted by admin in Uncategorized on June 20th, 2009
seeded from David Bullock: What are you Really doing. . . .
Sometime you need to sit back and analyze what you are doing with your business. There is a whole area of activity that can suck up time and funds without the business owner truly being aware of the drain it can have on your bottom line. I called this activity “Non-Revenue Generating Actions”
As a business owner, you can easily get caught up in doing things that don’t make any money for your business. Usually we classify things like:
- getting the mail
- paying bills
- paperwork
- building websites
- answering email or the phone
as things that need to be outsourced and not “important” for a business owner to handle. The craze right now is to outsource everything. That is fine, if you are outsourcing the
- right things
- to the right people
- for the right projects.
But there is a bigger hole in your business that is beyond outsourcing. It is the thinking that chooses the projects that you work on.
Thinking About Project Selection
Are you one of those people who works on projects based on potential income?
The whole “get rich quick” industry is built on the idea of potential. But let’s bring this closer to home.
- How many projects are you working on right now that are potential income projects, not “get-the-revenue-now-I-know-it-is-coming-in-fact-it-is-already-here” projects?
- How many projects are you working on that are a “favor” for a friend?
- How many projects are you working on that are long-shots? Are you spending time and effort to make them work when it is clear that there is something amiss in the model?
The projects themselves are not the problem. The real problem is that you are spending precious time and effort working in areas that are not designed to give you the returns that you desire. Again, it is the time and the effort that is the real sticking point.
These are called “opportunity costs.” While you are working on these projects, you are limiting the time you can spend on actual revenue-generating activity. What you are doing is not bringing your closer to your goal.
Do this for me. Get a piece of paper and write down everything that you are working on (or thinking about working on).
Let me help you… Be sure to include all the:
- domain names that you have purchased with the idea of doing this cool project.
- projects for friends just to help them out.
- those joint venture projects that you are working on that are half-done and half-baked.
- all those long-shot unproven projects that you just want to do.
Go ahead. Take a moment and write them down. And write down the time you have already spent thinking and working on “half-dones,” “kinda-dones” and “maybe I’ll get to it” projects.
Guess what? All of these things are stealing your energy, time and brain space. No wonder you are not getting anything done. You are all over the place and getting no where. Seeing the list is pretty alarming.
We are all familiar with Product Margin, Low Cost, and High Margin.
But what about Time Margin. Never heard about that one?
Usually it is called opportunity costs. But today I am calling it time margin. Because time is the only thing that we really have and your time has to yield a result. Outsourcing can multiply your efforts, yes, but if you are working on the wrong projects then you are multiplying your waste.
Take a few minutes to think about your time margin. I am telling you now, you are going to wrestle with the idea. Everything you work on is going to seem important. And I can hear the folks saying, “You can’t do everything for money.” I agree – you can’t, and I don’t.
But…
If I am working on a project that is supposed to yield a profit, then I need to see the profit. If I am working on a project that is not profit driven or profitable, it is in my best interest to recognize what is not working and make a decision not to be carried away by the idea of potential profit.
Very easy to say. Very hard to do.
Enjoy, folks. This thinking changed me and I hope it will change you.
Side note: This time margin thinking transfers to all areas of life. Think about the best way to spend your time with family and friends. Be deliberate on getting the most happiness, joy and smiles from the people you care about. It is not about business all the time. It is about life and getting the most out of it.
How to Get Visitors In the Door & Phones Ringing – A Great Call-to-Action
Posted by admin in Wake Up Call!, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 on June 6th, 2009
this Article was so hard hitting, to the point Poignant, and spot on, I SCRAPED it in its entirety for you your review.
Mad Props goes to the peeps at VerticalResponse Marketing at: http://blog.verticalresponse.com/verticalresponse_blog/2009/05/how-to-get-the-phones-ringing-a-great-calltoaction.html
Mad Praise goes to them. Read on and learn!
If you build will they come? Not automatically. If your phone isn’t ringing or people aren’t coming to your store or site, then maybe you need to have a closer look at your call-to-action. What is a call-to-action you might ask? In simple terms it’s what you want people who get your emails, visit your site or see your ads, to do.
Your call-to-action can be as simple as a "buy now" graphic on a web page or in an email, or a "Visit our website to get your 20% discount at www …" in a direct mail piece, or "Call 800…for your free…". Any way you display it, it needs to drive people to act, and act now!
Here are things you might want to use with your own calls-to-action for your marketing campaigns.
Deadlines - Giving a deadline for your offer to expire will undoubtedly move your readers to do something sooner rather than later especially if it’s truly a great offer. Make sure you outline what they’ll be saving or getting by ordering before the deadline and remind them up to the last day that they can tap this offer.
While Supplies Last – If you’ve got inventory that will go away, promoting that this offer will end with the end of the supply is a great idea. You may even want to set "limits" on the number of products that can be purchased.
The Bobble Head – If you’ve got a free gift to give to your customers if they buy now, then promote it! The baseball parks get FULL when they give away gifts to the first 1000 people that come to the stadium. It gets people to the stadium early and gets them buying things.
Free Consultation/Free Trial – Why not offer a number of hours of your services free to get newbies in the door. If free doesn’t rock your boat, then offer a deeply discounted rate for them to feel comfortable. Once they see the value, they’re sure to come back for more.
Not Available in Stores – Wineries do a great job at offering their wines direct-only. And they focus their messaging on that fact that you can only get the wines from the winery. Some have such limited production that they have people on waiting lists to get on the winery list.
Risk-FREE – If your recipients won’t have to pay or put down a credit card and they can walk away with no questions asked, then make sure this is largely displayed.
Free Accessories with Purchase - Under the deadline, why not try promoting an accessory with the product you’re offering. The accessory could even turn into another purchase down the road. For instance, if you sell face cream, you might want to add in a free sample of eye cream. If you sell jewelry, you might want to add a bit of jewelry cleaner.
One more thing, the presentation of your call-to-action is important. You’ll often find bursts and buttons in red, orange and yellow because those are colors that command attention, yet used too much can be distracting.
Make sure you have your call-to-action in more than one place. If it’s on your website, don’t only display it at the end of the page, make sure you include your call-to-action within your text as well as graphics. As always, test a variety of placements and see what works for your business.
