Andy Wibbels

Time, Money, Sex (and Salvation)

2008-11-18T21:15:24Z

Last week I walked through the idea of frameworks in art and technology and how they can be applied to just about any discipline - unveiling my own framework in the process. We looked at The Three Buttons that divide up the sales cycle: Search (prospect looks for answers and finds you), Subscribe (they become a part of your network and you cultivate the relationship) and Buy (they buy your products and services).

This week I want to look at attacking the ever-thorny issue of Why We Buy.

There are a lot of reasons why we plunk down money for stuff. In this case I'm separating wants from needs. We need water and food and shelter and all those Maslow things. We want a Senate bid, ripped abs, passive revenue and our own island (or at least I do and besides, Ron would look smashing in a Jackie Onassis pillbox hat). I'm talking about things that we want so much that we're willing to convince ourselves that we need them.

I cook this down to three categories (cue Venn diagram - I am loving PowerPoint 2007!).

Time, Money and You-Know-What

Stay with me.

Most of the reasons we spend money on things we don't really need are tied to one of these three reasons. Let's take them one by one.

Time

So much of our daily marketing intake is promising more results in less time. Our busy and active lifestyle is driving us nutty and we need to be able to pack in more more more. We want to have it both ways (spend a day looking at every marketing message you see and try and find the how it convinces us we can have it both ways).

How do your products and services help me make time for what is important? Quality time, family time, workout time, reading time, meditation time, church time. Time for the things that are crucial that often get overshadowed by workity-work-work.

How do your product and services help me have more leisure time? This is a mix of the above two. Part of being middle-to-upper class is having time to spend on pointless shit. Well pointless in terms of not getting you closer to your Nobel Prize. You know what I mean.

And efficiency. How do you products and services help me use the time I have better? Extract more value? Get more things done so I can have more leisure.

So take out a piece of paper and write out three ways your products and services help people save time. A corollary is that the time to 'install' or 'learn' is worth the payoff in saved time.

What are three ways your products and services help others have more time?

Money

It makes the world go round (thanks Kander/Ebb). Sometimes it grosses me out how much blogging has become only about making lots of money (irony). But especially in the current global econalypse money is more important than ever if only because it keeps us free from worry. The gospel of prosperity promises that God wants us to be rich and that being poor is a moral failing (ergo the super-rich are blessed). Abundance and scarcity battle it out in our heads, our dreams, our bank accounts and global commerce.

How do your products and services help people create more wealth? Whittle down their expenses?

Money is about luxury. Having more than enough. Profligacy. Conspicuous consumption. Spending money to spite others. I'm always amazed at how The Great Depression has echoed three generations down to my own midnight money panic attacks.

What are three ways your products and services help others make money?

S'e,x

Back when I was writing and directing plays, part of my approach was to get my actors to 'act from their DNA.' That no matter if you are doing Ibsen, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Mamet or Wibbels, the way to really grab an audience is when characters are stripped down to clawing for their own survival whether it be murdering their children to spite their husband or trying to get a bowl of soup.

When we 'act from our DNA' our basest needs are tapped. The urge to spread our genes. We want it more often. Or better. Or more partners. Or more pleasure. We lose weight so we can have more sex. Or better sex.

So much of modern marketing is dedicated to convincing you that you are completely unfuckable and must buy the product advertised to be worthy of the affections/lust of (an)other(s).

But how does this relate to business where sometimes the bow-chicka-wow-wow isn't as obvious?

It isn't just spreading your genes - but also your memes. Sex appeal for a business is about visibility. How can your ideas and products and messages spread? How can you increase your findability online?

What are three ways your products and services help others increase their sex appeal or visibility?

I Lied

I'm a cynic so I think most of us do thing for our own immediate gain. The on thing I learned fromr World History in college is that it is usually a war over money or god and usually when it is over god it is over money anyway. But some people are genuinely motivated by the need for salvation.

Or a deeper connection to their own divinity or God-liness or a more intimate relationship with the deity of their choice. You either have grace or you don't. My grandmother would call this 'Providence' - that things happened for a certain reason. That and you don't mess with Novenas.

Any Buddhists, Muslims, Hindu folks want to chime in? For atheists I was going to put smug self-satisfaction.

Power, Control and Meaning

Every worthy argument in the world is about control. Who has the power and who doesn't.

Every time you fight with your spouse, parents, boss, children, you are fighting over who has control. We look to iPhones, anti-depressants and 300 thread-count sheets to give us more control, more power of our lives.

And with our ongoing nod to Maslow, more control, more power gives us the opportunity to have more time, more money, more sex, more efficiency, more value, more visibility and ultimate - full dominion over our lives and ability to create meaning.

So if you retain nothing from this essay at least remember this question:

What are three ways your products and services help others increase the control they have over their lives?

The Three Buttons

2008-11-11T15:35:55Z

While I was taking a break from the newsletter and blog, I'd done a lot of reconsideration of the massive hairwad that is internet marketing and doing business online.

When I was a young one, my family had gone to the symphony with my grandparents. During the intermission, my grandmother leaned over and asked me what instrument I liked most, who I wanted to be in symphony. I considered the strings, the woodwinds, the brass and the percussion and instead pointed at the conductor.

The Right to Tinker

Later on, when I was directing plays, I learned how much I enjoyed conducting things around me. My slogan was Directing isn't telling people what to do but showing them where they can go. The same attraction came out with theatre theory courses (favorites: Brecht, Artaud and Peter Brook a close third). We were studying complete worldviews on how to make art (last week we'd looked at how lifestyle = worldview). If you're an MBTI-fanatic, this would be my N side coming out - the iNtuitive preference that delights in seeing the past-present-future of a process from micro-to-macro levels (INFJ/paranoiac if you were wondering with Taurus sign and Soul Type 7).

I'm not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination. Mostly I just change a line of PHP code, reload it and see if it blows up. If it breaks, I change it back and refresh and then research some more. If it works, I try something else. I like to tinker. I think you learn about a topic by seeing it in action - in execution - in process.

And that is why I like looking at software frameworks.

Don't Repeat Yourself

A software framework is a complete view or opinion on how to develop an application. Popular frameworks like Java or Ruby on Rails or Microsoft's .NET framework provide a complete set of rules, practices, conventions and formalities that make getting results faster. Upstart frameworks like Django, Cake and TurboGears contain similar conventions and shortcuts. The overall philosophy is:

"Most of what you want to do will probably work THIS way so let's go ahead and make it pre-defined and easier to do"

This is often called the mantra of Don't Repeat Yourself: programming is an evolution with continuous improvement. Nobody should have to write the same code twice.

You aren't starting from scratch each time. You have a set of scaffolding to work from. A framework, scaffolding, a skeleton, a blueprint, a worldview, whatever you want to call it... it is someone saying 'Here's what we usually do when we face challenge XYZ - you'll probably have similar needs.'

Kabuki and Placebos

This is similar to when a client or customer calls you and you know exactly how to solve their problems after they speak the first sentence. Sure, maybe 5% of the time you have to wait for the second sentence and you think: 'Oh wait, they'll need to zig instead of zag.' Most doctors and therapists can correctly diagnose patients within a few minutes of listening to them. The rest is just kabuki and placebos.

This principle is ignored in businesses everyday when someone thinks that what they are doing has never ever been done by any other company in the history of the world so the rules of logic or business or common sense simply don't apply. There's a reason why conventions are conventional: they usually work. And if they don't work they can help you understand what you might try next.

One Ring to Rule Them All

I've been rolling a framework around in my head for a while. A model that combined my views on internet business into one big tuna noodle casserole. I'm compelled to make it all fit into one Grand Unified Theory like they do in physics. Maybe I'm trying to force a square peg into a round hole (whole?) but I think it is a worthy mental exercise and perhaps others can learn from it. Part of this stuff is for a course and book I'm developing right now.

Finally, I stumbled across this essay by Jaisen Mathai called 'Why everyone should write a framework and never use it' where he posits that every good programmer worth their salt should write their own framework to better understand the underlying language, conventions and functionality of their own projects:

[W]riting a framework is one of the best exercises you can do as a web developer. So regardless if you plan on using the framework you write is irrelevant though I suggest you do because ironing out the fine details will make you a better programmer. "The best way to understand anything is to take it apart and reassemble it. In this case we won't be taking something apart but we'll be assembling it. First off we'll need to redefine what a framework is. From Wikipedia a framework is "a defined support structure in which another software project can be organized and developed".

This is kinda pushing me over the edge. Part of me says keep all of this private and work on it privately so nobody can steal it which is completely opposite what I'd tell a client and there's probably a wealth of insight that exposing the process of creating my framework. And most likely the fundamentals of what I'll be exploring have been collated and examined by others elsewhere. But as we've said before, there are tons of people saying the same thing you are - but the fact that it is coming from you - focused and filtered - is your competitive difference.

'Instant Global Impact' is a slogan I've batted around for several years now. It is a spin off the chapter from Blogwild titled 'Instant Global Self-Expression' and I swap in impact for self-expression since businesses are less concerned with their employees being self-expressed and more in touch with having the fastest and strongest impact possible.

So I'm going to call this the Instant Global Impact Framework for now. I'm sure once it catches on it'll be called the IGI Framework or just Wibbelism. Kinda like when a few actresses I'd directed went on to use my creativity coaching skills in their own productions saying 'we're using the Wibbels methods'. Move over Jim Jones!

Let's Start with Three Buttons

Let's jump in:

Usually we take the perspective of the business owner and start with logistics and other un-glamous stuff like forming a corporate entity or registering a tradedmark or other 'grunt-work.' Or we start the dreaded Well what's your passion? exploration (where you have to talk softly with a sibilant lisp). Then after we've gone through some more boring documentation we get to the fun part - taking the point of view of your customers. But let's start there. Start with the point of view of your customers and the structure/system they go through to become a part of your life.

Let's work backwards: A customer clicks on the BUY button on your website. They give you money, you give them a product. How did they get to that point? Customers buy when they like you, when they trust you and when they're ready (I think that comes from Michael). How did you build that trust and be first on the list when they decided they had an itch you'd be able to scratch? Somehow, they got on a mailing list or newsletter or feed subscription. Somewhere along the line, they clicked to SUBSCRIBE to some sort of vehicle where they got to know you over time. And what brought them to that subscription form or other type of opt-in? They were looking for content or expertise about a certain topic or problem. They may have clicked a button to SEARCH using their favorite search engine. It could also be seeing you on TV or hearing you on the radio or getting a referal from a friend - this is a bit more abstact then a search button but I think it still helps to express how content or search results gets people to find you and then consider joining your network or newsletter or community.

Let's take it forwards: A customer is researching a problem or passion, they SEARCH their favorite repository of information (like a search engine or social network or their own personal 'flesh/blood' network). They find compelling content that points to some sort of opt-in or contact capture or subscription form which they fill out and click SUBSCRIBE. Then you start 'dating' this prospect and gradually they get to know you and either you build trust and credibility or you fall of their radar. Then, when they need what you have they click BUY.

Ha - it is kinda like a three-act play! The marketing tactics and creme filling is what happens before and after these three different buttons get clicked.

Sure, someone might just come to your site and buy from you immediately. They don't have to go through all these steps. Or they may never buy and just lurk forever. Right now I feel like the SEARCH button is the most abstract l

These three buttons are of course a gross generalization of the overall process - someone might not actually SEARCH for you. They might enter your URL into their browser or click from an article you wrote or some other way that makes you pop up in their real or metaphorical seach results. There's a lot of caveats to throw under the bus, but it helps to chop things up into three parts from being completely unknown to a potential customer, orbiting their lives to finally being needed and being able to provide them products and services.

So that's the top-level 30,000 foot view of the framework I'm working on. Next week I'll go a bit further with what happens before your customer clicks SEARCH.

Like I said, this is intellectual property for my next book/course so I'd love to get your feedback or suggestions or parallels you see in the work of other (smarter) people. Questions, suggestions, corrections, opinions, additions? Let's hug it out...

Everything is a Lifestyle

2008-11-03T15:50:12Z

The word lifestyle always makes me cringe.

Partially because it is coded language used in the movement to block equality rights for gay men and women by right-wing fundamentalists. Lifestyles are a choice so every time you hear someone talk about the 'gay lifestyle' part of the meme is that same-sex attraction is not natural but a chosen set of behaviors and so should not be a framework for equality (i.e. Those dirty-dirty girls just need some churchin'). Oh and coincidentally if you are for Prop 8 in California please immediately unsubscribe from this newsletter or feed.

I still maintain that people who are that obsessed with someone else's genitals have some other issues to work through with their own.

Sigh.

Now that that's out of the way I want to talk to lifestyles as a marketing concept.

Lifestyles vs Niches

Often I've flogged the concept of a niche being a group of people with a common set of urgent problems or passions (adapted from Andrea/Tina's work). And not just a group of people in the abstract but a group of people that are accessible either online or offline. I've adapted this idea to hot FedEx guys and furries in the past but I think there's a separate trend that sits alongside the concept of niche.

If a niche is a common set of problems then a lifestyle is a common set of worldviews and behaviors.

In the mass mediascape these days, everyone has an active lifestyle and we are conversely chided if we have a sedentary lifestyle. Your Splenda now has fiber for your busy lifestyle (suddenly we're programming women to be obsessed with their regularity and I'm not even including the 'yogurt as fake meal' craze).

I thought that when something had few calories, added some taste and fiber it was called a fucking vegetable.

Your oil-sucking SUV can mow down caribou in the mountains and though you only use it to drive to the Wal-Mart every Wednesday, you could go offroad - you never know - it is part of your busy lifestyle. The life coaching trend has morphed a bit into lifestyle coaching and Tim Ferris took it a bit further renaming it lifestyle design.

The way you live your life makes you part of a marketable group.

The Gawker blog network has been lauded for this with its focus on young men who are early adopters. Their blog network includes gadgets, cars, gaming, sci-fi and babes. This is hand in hand with current approaches in advertising where you are marketing less about a product and more about the identity/lifestyle that is conveyed in the product. I think lifestyles go beyond demographics because it isn't just about location or generation but a worldview. 'I'm lovin' it!' since I'm so busy making hip-hop records shoving beef patties in my maw with my buddies and everyone is still amazingly thin. Wigga please.

Lifestyles are post-Maslow.

When you're fed, safe, loved and sheltered you focus on self-actualization - creating meaning - and luxury.

Lifestyles are also an ideal future. It is not just how you see the present and your place in it but also what dreams may come. The car commercial that lets the drum kick while it says 'Start a company. Sell it. Start another one.' We all get to be moguls. Lifestyles are fantasies stretching from preparing for the End of Days to a letter to the editor that begins "I never thought this would happen to me, but..."

A women's or men's health magazine is a perfect example of a lifestyle encased in print. Men's Health magazine has information about workouts and nutrition but also information that is tangential: cars, sex and personal finance.

What is your lifestyle?

A quick way to divine your own lifestyle is to look at the consumer products and services that surround you. I subscribe to the following magazines: The Advocate, Fitness Rx and Wired. I obsessively read Reddit, Salon, Metafilter, Techmeme, HuffPo and Memeorandum. I drink BSN creatine and protein shakes and go to a Crunch gym. I have an iPhone that has podcasts from Democracy Now, The Economist, NPR and Rachel Maddow. Elements of my lifestyle are early-adopter, gomo-techie-obsessed, liberal/progressive values with a commitment to physical fitness/vanity.

A niche looks at common passions and problems. A lifestyle articulates a common worldview.

I sometimes wonder if our socialization in such a heavily-branded environment transforms us into thinking of ourselves as operating lifestyles. We live and dream in brands. We assign ourselves these mythic identities concocted by corporate conglomerates to convince to buy what they have.

Examples of Lifestyle Entrepreneurs

I've always admired Hugh Hefner as the penultimate example of creating a lifestyle brand - of being a 'lifestyle entrepreneur.' He was an awkward kid from Nebraska. He took his favorite things in the world: women, booze, sex and a certain continental style and combined them into a magazine. Of course, the Playboy brand has suffered and Hef has become a parody of himself not aging gracefully at all as his daughter fights to keep the corporate entity above water. Bodog, the gambling site, does the same thing. At the base of their brand is online gambing - oh excuse me - we call it gaming now to reduce connections with the mob. But their site promises you can have you arms around a hottie while you chug booze and cheer during a mixed martial arts contest. Or look at the 'hip-hop lifestyle' that has gradually taken the movement out of the music and made it one more off-the-shelf identity.

Another example is Martha Stewart. Martha took a focus on the details and created an entire world around it. A world of New England luxuries and chow-chow dogs shaking off the snow as everybody comes inside for wassail. The house is a spartan museum where every room is a testament to palette, texture and taste. Martha is obviously a strong personality with a strong point of view (if she was a man this never would have been a problem and she wouldn't have had to pay for Enron's sins as well as her own). Martha is deliverance through cake. Creating meaning through experience and attention to detail. It isn't just embroidering those cloth napkins (or paying your assistant to do it) but being able to talk about doing it, how you did it and how you'll do it again next Christmas.

Oprah does the same thing. Her brand is built on too much information. Where some personalities concoct impenetrable shields around their hearts, Oprah spills it every single day. When she launched her school in Africa, we saw her own pain at not feeling fulfilled as a young girl - at times I think that pain overshadowed the plight of the girls she was helping - and sometimes there was a sense of 'I shouldn't be watching this.' Another perfect example is Annie Lenox during the American Idol 'Idol Gives Back' special.

Lifestyles transcend media format.

Looking at all the above examples, I notice that they are all personality-based brands. There is an ego/character anchoring the enterprise. Will Apple survive without Steve Jobs? I once heard a description of Apple as a company built to monetize his design aesthetic.

All of these lifestyle entrepreneurs and brands are also available in multiple media formats and price points. Clothing, books, CDs, music, locations, vacations, resorts, paint swatches... all these effluvia orbiting the central personality and the core brand.

These are all thoughts and ideas orbiting the concept of lifestyle. I just wanted to get them out in print so they can ricochet through everyone else's neurons.

Facebook Ad Targeting Still Sucks

2008-10-31T20:32:00Z

With all the JavaScript wizardry the devs at Facebook manage to shoehorn into Facebook (and support so many different configurations of browser and operating systems) it constantly amazes me that their targeted ads get such poor performance:

A Facebook advertiser who has spent thousands of dollars on campaigns targeted by age and country says that the site's new reporting tools for advertisers have exposed a serious problem: Either the targeting routines are broken, or the reporting is completely off. An ad meant for U.K. teens went mostly to the U.S. and other European countries instead.

How can you have so much information about users and not be able to target to them effectively?

Back in 2007 Nick reported:

Facebook has continuously produced less than stellar results for advertisers. With historically high CPMs and historically low click-thrus, Facebook is facing a challenge. Their new ad system has significantly reduced the CPM for those that opt for the cost-per-click (CPC) model. The only problem is that there are no clicks. While the targeting is phenomenal, Facebook users are more engaged by the content within the site rather than the advertisements. Perhaps Facebook is a little too engaging.

I just find it odd to have so much behavioral and demographic data and not being able to get ads to perform.

Become an Online Business Manager by Tina Forsyth (Book Review)

2008-10-29T20:57:58Z

There's a few people in this world I'd trust with anything and one of them is Tina Forsyth. Eric and I have often referred to Tina and Andrea J. Lee as our Witches of Eastwick (the third was Susan Austin who appears to be still underground - hope she's okay).

I first met Tina back in my Coachamatic days when I flew out to San Jose for a weekend seminar with Chris Barrow. I knew back then she was a business bad-ass. And through the years, I've worked for and with Tina and watched in awe as they built a world-class company. Few people can say they have had an impact on an industry like she can.

Tina and Andrea are a perfect yin-yang business partnership with Andrea taking a more conceptual view of the enterprise and Tina grounding things into actionable reality. I read their stuff and always say: Why didn't I think of that?!And finally Tina got down to writing the book we've all been waiting for:

Become an Online Business Manager: Playing a Bigger Game with Your Clients and Yourself

A decade ago no one would really entertain the idea of needing or being an online business manager - or fully understanding the nuances that make online business different. But now we know that entire careers and fortunes are being made online by people over the world who have found a way to bring their products and services to thousands of people. And at the core of any successful online business is an online business manager.

Tina cooks a decade of experience into a practical approach to training to become an online business manager. She walks through how to build your skills, find clients and run the day-to-day details of a business manager.

I think the most important concept in the book is that the growth of a business is directly related to the business owner's personal development. That usually takes people a bit of time to get used to. But your business is an extension of yourself. If you work in a company, your job is an extension of yourself (and how could it not be when you spend half your waking hours there?). Your business will quickly extract your strengths and weaknesses as you succeed/fail, fly/flop or muddle through. As an online business manager you have the opportunity to witness a business owner make this realization and be a midwife for their success. And of course, your own business as a manager will instruct and inform you as well. I've seen it in myself and my colleagues - the more in touch you are with your identity and the core of what makes you you - what sets you apart - the more successful your busines will be.

If you find yourself doing work as a virtual assistant and gradually shifting into more of a partnership with your clients, then you are becoming an online business manager and need to step your game - and the game of your clients. If you are considering hiring an online business manager - be sure they've read or are reading this book - and read it yourself so you know how to shop for an online business manager.

Go check out Tina's book right now...

This book review was part of virtual book tour.

Yesterday the blog tour stopped at Sparkplugging
Today, you can also read about the book with Tracy Lawton of Office Organization Success
Tomorrow the blog tour continues with Kathie Thomas at VA Directory

Recession, Depression and Self-Expression (I'm Freaked Out, Too)

2008-10-28T16:11:10Z

If you think you can be recession-proof you're an idiot and should immediately unsubscribe from this newsletter or feed. Months ago when the 'credit crunch' began there was a flurry of teleseminars and newsletters talking about how it wouldn't affecting anything or anyone and we should all keep clapping until Tinkerbell comes back to life. Then when the commercial paper markets and credit default swap markets collapsed everyone seemed to wake up a bit more. The abundance mentality of always more, pay it off later, leverage it to the future generation has brought us a whiplash. Dark humor pervades the blogosphere with sites like brokers with hands on their faces. And to write it off as just bad vibes and buzz-kills is to be completely wreckless with your future success.

Highly recommended: National Public Radio's This American Life did a show on the financial crisis that left me feeling much more informed about what is going on: The Giant Pool of Money (transcript). There's a few parts in there that might make you dry heave. They had such a response from these two shows that they've started a free podcast specifically about educating the rest of us on the day-to-day events as they unfold: Planet Money Podcast. I also want to highly highly highly recommend you watch Elizabeth Warren's analysis of economic trends of household spending and income in last several decades. If you do business with customers in the US you need to be aware of these trends and how they are affecting families. Also useful is WaPo's analysis and if you need a laugh read about a visit to Robert Allen's 'No Money Down' seminars.

My biggest concern for bloggers is that the recession-depression-downturn is going to cause a pull-back in online advertising spending. The marketing blogs are battling this argument out right now, some saying that overall ad-spending will decrease and others countering that print and TV will decline but online ad spends will stay strong since they are easier to deploy. But problogging has always hinged on compelling writing, an enthusiastic audience and advertisers willing to pay for access to that audience. This has always been a hitch with focusing directly on the ad-based type of blog income. If click-through rates go down or spending goes down there will be a flood of inventory and no one around to buy it. Some say that an economic downturn will bring more people to blogging as they focus on their next careers and invest in themselves or simply need a way to blow off steam.

But here in Silicon Valley there has been a rash of layoffs (Dell, eBay, TicketMaster, Yahoo, AdBrite, Heavy, Glam, Zillow, Mahalo, Rev3, Seesmic, Lulu, Gawker and the list goes on) as companies tighten their (seat)belts for a lean winter of discontent. This has brought back the old 'blogging is dead' meme that seems to be on a 9 month boomerang.

Blogging isn't dead or dying - just different. When I'm doing a seminar, usually towards the end someone asks about the future of blogging and is it just a fad and I've always maintained that it will merge into greater trends. These trends include social media and consumer-generated content - stuff made by 'real people' (what we used to call 'folk art'). The money to be made may be shifting but the trends of anytime, anywhere, always-on, always-archived instant global self-expression is here to stay.

And the tenuous political situation here in the US isn't helping any either. I can't stop watching the news, can you? Each day it is 'oh look, there's a bit more on the bottom of the barrel, scrape scrape!' I feel like the world is holding it's breath to see what happens. I told Ron if they back the trucks up while he's flying back to divert to Canada and I'll try and get through the Underground Railroad.

Time to Cultivate

So if sales are down, leads are disinterested and everyone is being a Negative Nancy or Debbie Downer what do you do? Start working on the Next Thing.

Now is the time to start developing your new intellectual property. I've had some ideas buzzing in my cortex for several months now and am going to start entertaining them on my blog and here in the newsletter. I need to refresh my courses and seminars and re-align them to the current landscape and get cooking on some new book deals. Focus less on the desperation of making the sale and more on the inspiration. Go back to what inspires you. I've missed my seminars and classes and educating people on how all this techie-stuff can improve their lives and businesses. I'm entranced by this stuff. What turns you on? You only have so much control of the chaos swirling around you - how can you batten down the hatches and still lay the groundwork for something new?

The best slogan for networking I've ever heard is, 'Dig your well before you're thirsty.' Hopefully you've excavated a little bit but by building out your network and contacts now you'll be priming the pump for when things pick up again. Things will get better. But when they will get better remains to be seen.

Your turn: How are you dealing with the election waiting game, the global financial meltdown and other signs of the End of Days? Leave a comment...

Mixed metaphor

2008-10-20T07:08:54Z

I just made a new mash-up metaphor:

Separate the meat from the chaff.

I can haz aspartame

2008-10-20T07:07:45Z

Sweet God this Diet Snapple is NASTEEE.

Expect Hiccups

2008-09-25T04:07:14Z

I’m starting the move to Movable Type in earnest so things might be a little disconnected over the next few days. Thanks!

Creating Adventure Games on Your Computer

2008-07-14T17:14:14Z

From 1983. I remember reading this book obsessively as I tried to develop my own versions of Zork . I was in middle school learning how to write a language parser. Nerd!

470 N=1
480 IF MID$(A$,N,1)=" " THEN C$=MID$(A$,N+1,3):
IF LEFT$(C$,1)<>" " THEN 530 ELSE 500

Full text of the book by Tim Hartnell...

Tardsourcing:

2008-07-14T17:08:08Z

Relying on the 'wisdom of crowds' to guide you while forgetting that sometimes that produces shoddy folk-art and lowest common denominator output.

Technically I shouldn't use the word 'tard' since it is offensive to people with mental disabilities. But the people I've met with mental disabilities are about 10x more skilled than some webtards I find online.

Andy Sernovitz’s Word of Mouth Marketing Seminar - DISCOUNT!

2008-07-02T19:27:15Z

Andy Sernovitz (blog), author of Word of Mouth Marketing and general marketing bad-ass is hosting a small-group word of mouth marketing seminar. Usually he only does private training for companies at a very large price, so this is a rare chance for 50 people to get the best introduction to word of mouth that there is.

We've arranged for a $250 discount for our clients. Use code "weloveblogwild" when you register.

This is a very practical, hands-on course. In one intense day, you will:

Master the five steps of word of mouth marketing
Construct an action plan that your company can start using the very next day
Get the same training that big corporations (Microsoft, TiVo, eBay) have received -- for a fraction of what they paid
Know how to translate word of mouth marketing into real ROI
Participate in an active, intense day of practical brainstorming (not boring theory)
Learn from Andy Sernovitz, the guy who literally wrote the book on word of mouth marketing

Andy promises you will learn a repeatable, proven marketing framework that is easy to execute, affordable, and provides measurable results within 60 days.

More information: http://events.gaspedal.com

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Staycations

2008-06-12T17:56:48Z

I like how we've now coined a word for a vacation where you don't have enough money to leave the house: staycations.

AAA Vice President Mark Brown says the slowing economy and high fuel prices "have pushed some Americans to what we call the traveling tipping point. It's clear that a small number of us may choose to stay home ... and relax with friends and family rather than take a vacation. Gas prices appear to "have nowhere to go but up and consumers and airlines in the United States are being dragged along for a very uncomfortable ride," Brown says. Economics aside, "staying at home for a vacation can be enormously restorative and transformative, and fits much, much better into a lot of people's schedules and logistics," says Kristie McLean, a life coach in Seattle, Washington.

Poor people call this 'staying at home.' Not even poor people - most people. But no, we have to have special name when affluent people do it that says 'I could go on vacation but it is all just so pricey.'

When we turn thrift into a trend you know this capitalist consumerist car-worshipping culture is in trouble.

Chuck E. Cheese Explained

2008-06-10T00:10:36Z

A thread on Metafilter looks back at Chuck E. Cheese and ShowBiz pizza places where a cavalcade of animatronics would serenade youngsters as they alternately tossed pizza down their gullets and played video games. One commenter boils it down:

Robot furries that sing, entertain you, then bring you carbs.

That made me smile.

(We talked about furries a bit ago)

Usability, Redesign and Your Local ATM

2008-06-09T17:45:03Z

Usability and design touches us all day, every day - every single item around you right now was designed by someone, somewhere with varying degrees of attention to your needs and goals. ATMs are a huge exercise in design and functionality that has to be immediately accessible and useful and obvious. For me they are never fast enough and the latest ones that suck up cash without an envelope make me skittish.

Pentagram design company just finished up design for 7,000 Wells Fargo Bank ATMS.

"From looking at usage statistics, the design team learned that the single-most used feature of an ATM is the cash withdrawal. Even though many more services are available, most people simply want to be able to quickly and safely punch in their security code, get the cash, and leave. The objective for the new UI was to continue to offer quick and easy cash withdrawals, while making the other services more visible and accessible."

They built the design around the most used feature and went from there.