You are not going to die. You might think you are, but you are not going to die.

It's a good day to die.

[Participants] had to surrender to death to survive it.

The reality is this: while many people are building profitable businesses by leveraging their content, hardly anyone is profiting directly from the content itself. To me, that's a real shame. More importantly than that, though: Traditional online business models force a conflict of interest: they must accommodate advertisers and spin-off product offers whilst attracting visitors who care about neither. If you don't think that building a business around your output instead of with it is odd, stop and think for a second. If you go to Apple's site today, they'll sell you a Mac. If you visit John Varvatos, they'll sell you a suit. If you go to Hotel Chocolat, they'll sell you their fancy choices. Then visit The Guardian, who'll happily give you all their output for free and then try to flog you to buy a solar powered torch.

Read the full post, The End of Free Content...

Writers, musicians, filmmakers, those "artists" - we're starting to open up a little bit to each other about how bad it is.... Our publishing world has simply gone out of business. The few publishers still operating have a new business model: Don't. Pay. Writers. It's interesting how the economic crisis hit book authors. Our "middle class" has been eliminated - not metaphorically, but literally. ... Many of us were, or are, influential - the kind of people you say of later, "They changed my life." Little did you know the movers and shakers were parsing food stamps.... When Conde Naste shutters its magazines, do you think it's because all those people didn't know how to string a sentence together? Do you imagine all those bloggers at HuffPo, Salon, Slate, Gawker, etc. are doing it because it's a darling little hobby and maybe someday they'll "rate" enough to get paid professionally? Look at the last issue of the New York Times Review of Books and try to guess how many of those authors will be able to pay the rent this month on their royalties. Now divide that by two. And divide again.

I attended Gaspedal's Blogwell conference here in San Francisco several months ago and my favorite part is they keep the presenters to the alotted time. Andy will hover over you as your end times approach and cut you off so the conference stays on time for the whole time. For Supergenius, every presentation is 20 minutes long so you get distilled espresso chick-a-pow! shows of marketing wisdom from some of the top sucess stories out there.

I'll be leading a lunchtime panel discussion about the days's topics.

DISCOUNT CODE: Get $101 dollar discount with the discount code: ANDYISMYHERO.

Here's my Supegenius preview (full notes here):

And you can stay up-to-date by searching Twitter for #supergenius - here's the feed:

Search engine optimization is a set of practices to ensure that your content is easily findable by the search engines, and ultimately by your target market.

Social media optimization is a set of practices to ensure that your content is easily shareable across all social networks and services, and ultimately by your target market.

Remember our three buttons? They outline the process of how a prospect becomes a subscriber and how a subscriber becomes a customer.

Typically a new prospect or lead comes to us after they've clicked a SEARCH button to find something that they are looking for and hopefuly the SEO brings the right people our way and then if they don't purchase immediately they SUBSCRIBE to our blog or email alerts or feed updates or newsletter (this button could also be Become a Fan on Facebok or Follow on Twitter) and they gradually get to know more about us and our business and expertise and then when they finally are ready to PURCHASE they know exactly who we are and what we're about and why we're the best choice for them.

That's the three buttons.

Where does social media fit in?

Social media is be part of the in-take of new leads and prospects. I see that one of my trusted friends on Facebook is raving about you - I click to learn more about you. I see a retweet of your Twitter stream and I decide to start following you. One of my favorite bloggers talks about you.

Social media optimization is about how other people help your future customers find you.

Where the SEARCH button is really about completely random people stumbling into your world, social media shows those implicit connections, friendships and endorsements. I'm trying to keep the focus on the people in the social networks - not just the various sites and services that create a social network.

So that part only looks at social media in the lead generation process.

Social media as a communication stream

Social media is also about how your business stays in touch with prospects, customers and colleagues. Email newsletters have expanded to blogs and RSS feeds and email alerts and instant messaging alerts and Twitter tweets and Facebook notes and TypePad's Dashboard and who knows what else is coming down the way.

I still think a blog is the easiest way to manage of all these streams so you are always bringing people back into your site, your blog, your orbit instead of keeping all your brand equity in Facebook or Twitter.

I always enjoy when a hot new internet trend sneaks up on me from my 'less net-savvy' friends. I'd seen various mentions of some crazy game called FarmVille for several months but figured it was some stupid game built for the proles. Then one evening I come home from work and Ron is sitting in front of his computer, still in his pajamas staring at this:

There's even a servants entrance in the north-east corner.

He had been sucked into FarmVille.

Here's how Farmville works:

Farmville is a game you play 'inside' your Facebook account. You're given have a small plot of green land to grow vegetables and raise farm animals. Each plant has it's own growth rate from 2 hrs to several days, then you harvest the crops, sell them for cash and buy more goodies like fruit trees, animals, villas, etc.

Keep Them Coming Back

Here's the evil part: If you don't login hand let your crops go, they wither and die. This keeps you logging in to check. You start to plan your day around your faux-farm. "If I plant the strawberries before I go to the gym this morning then by the time I'm at work I can harvest them and be able to start a plot of eggplant for tomorrow." You keep checking in and you start to plan your day around when you can check in on the farm and plant and harvest. Yeah, I know. It's sick!

How often do you post to your blog? Can you stats show you often often repeat visitors return?

Show Up, Be Helpful

Sometimes when I go to my Farmville farm I get an alert that one of my Facebook friends that's playing Farmville needs help on their farm.

I click through and help them clear brances or leaves or pull weeds. I get a little bonus in fake cash. It's a bit like checking your favorite blogs and leaving comments when their commenters have questions.

How often do you post comments on other blogs? Do you see any traffic increase from those blogs to your own?

Your Blog is a Farm

While you're waiting for things to grow on your fake farm, you can arrange trees and animals and fences and barns as you see fit. You can also check out your friends's farms to see how they are arranging things. My co-worker Ginevra has gone with a pink motif: pink barn, pink hay bales, pink fences. Ron's going for a Margaret Mitchell style plantation. I'm mostly growing high-yield crops so I can get a barn and other buildings installed.

What widgets, elements and ideas do you get from the blogs of your friends? Your colleagues? Your competitors? What about completely random bloggers that you've never met before?

I liked someone + We got to know each other (mostly online) + We talked and said "What are you working on?" and "What would be really fun to do together that our people would love?" = Joint projects. [link]

What I really learned from the fall of Pressflip is that arrogance is more dangerous than incompetence. I believed that raw engineering prowess could make up for the complete lack of business experience, a product that really only appealed to the people who build the technology behind it, and an addressable market that could easily be mistaken for roundoff error. Arrogant people don't listen to criticism, they just run themselves into the wall. Incompetent people can usually be led in the right direction, even though they may execute their way into the dirt. Arrogance doesn't listen to reason, it only listens to itself. [link]

Yesterday, I spearheaded a new movement at the office. I stopped using the word "we", and started to say what I really meant to say. For example, instead of "We should fix that bug", I say, "You should fix that bug", and good God is it satisfying. ... Why not just tell it like it is? When I worked at Google, I picked up on a really annoying trend in the software industry (or maybe just in Silicon Valley) that I call "fuck-you with a smile". You never want to outright blame somebody or something, rather, it's best to state the existence of an issue and then ask "the team" to fix it. We should really move that icon ten pixels to the left. We definitely need to fix that concurrency bug. We should probably have that all done before lunch. [link]

The internet is no longer some place you 'go to' - it is everywhere. It is like the radio waves that go through our bodies that we can't sense. But with a radio those invisible bits of data are suddenly audible. Otherwise it is just information beamed through our bodies.

As the internet matures and more and more people publish more and more content - reviews, pictures, stories, blog posts, videos, etc - and it gets 'geo-tagged' with the latitude and longitude of where it was created or what locaiton it is talking about - all of this media and data combine to form and active, living layer that goes way beyond a wiki entry.

So let's say we took hundreds of tourist's pictures of the interior of the Coliseum and then used wiz-bang technology to match up all these photos to create a 3-d model of the monument. Microsoft's Photosynth does this:

This is the result of software that stitches together thousands of images of the Coliseum - all from different people taking pictures of the monument at different times, in different photo formats, from different perspectives. Here's a TED talk on Photosynth using hundreds of images of Notre Dame Cathedral.

So I'm walking down a street in San Francisco, I tell the Yelp app on the iPhone to find the best Thai restaurant near me. The iPhone grabs my GPS coordinates and asks Yelp to download the low-down. With in a few seconds, I have a map of restaurants.

As this technology matures I'll be able reviews from only trusted friends on Facebook or pics of the restaurant on Flickr or know real-time what celebrities are eating there... and how busy the places are at this exact moment in time if I decided to walk in and get a table (along with other similar restaurats proably paying to be advertised alongside such requests).

Virtual reality stalled with people stuck at home with TV screens glued to their retinas. Augmented reality is accessing that 'layer' of dust/slime created by the accumulation of data, photos, media and ideas tagged to a location. Millions of bits of data mixed into a delicious lemony glaze to sweeten and tart up the world around us. Or the spammers will ruin yet another awesome online idea with a barrage of localized e-sewage.

Branding = Consistency

I've always thought the word branding could best be described as 'consistency'. How you are perceived by customers, colleagues, prospects, journalists and how they interact with you in all formats at all points in the marketing, sales, purchase and delivery process - all of these things - are aligned and consistent.

In Your Mythic Journey, Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox look at the stories that we tell and how they reflect the world around us and the life inside us. What stories do people tell about you? What stories do you tell about yourself? What stories did your parents tell about you?

Example: My parents are both teachers so we grew up with a certain amount of expectations of education and achievement. I was taught that education is a ladder and you don't just say 'I'm bad at math' - you bust your ass until you get that A. I never really considered myself a true 'musician' even though I studied classical piano for 14 years. It was just a part of me. Something that I did. Other kids's parents would come up to mom and dad after a recital or the National Junior Honor Society and tell them 'Andy and Heather are so talented - you must be so proud!' And mom and dad's response was always: 'They work very hard.' Sure we all have things that come naturally to us but for everything else there's hard work.

Example: When I was very young I went to the orchestra with my grandparents and grandma asked me which instrument I wanted to play and I pointed to the conductor's podium and said I wanted to be that guy. And I still love 'conducting' and 'facilitating' a team to creative achievement.

Example: I expressed a rather tart viewpoint on a business decision at work and a co-worker saracastically remarked 'You know, the thing about Andy is you're never sure exactly what he thinks.' (In the Wibbels family, bluntness is answered with 'But how do you really feel?')

The Stories Others Tell About You

Your personal brand is the stories that people tell about you to others.

I was going to say the stories you tell about yourself - but the ones that others remember and re-tell are connected to the core of how you are perceived.

1) How do your friend talk about you to their friends? 'Oh my God, I have this friend and this one time he...'

2) How do your customers talk about you to their friends? 'You've got give my buddy a call... he'll know exactly what you need...'

As Oscar Wilde said: The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

What do others brag about you on your behalf? What stories do you tell about others on their behalf?

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Good quotes:

"To the user, the interface is the product."

"If you notice the interface, that means you're thinking about the interface and not the thing you're trying to do."

"The perfect interface for a shovel is a hole that you can put wherever you want it."

"The seduction of interaction: The trap of making things go whiz-bang-pop. The desire to make things look fancy."

"As interaction goes up, content and attention goes down."

"Every time you make the user make a decision they don't care about, you have failed as a designer."

"Whenever you see a [web] form, that's generally lazy design."