My close friends and neighbors are moving back to Dallas, Texas. The moving van outside my front door is a sad reminder of that fact. When talking to them, my wife learned that they have used the same moving company for each of their last seven moves. That’s a pretty impressive number. It’s also represents a high return on North American‘s initial marketing investment.

Companies spend a lot of time and money trying to find new customers. We focus a great deal of attention on the process of bringing them in the door. We make lots of promises about the kind of work we’ll do for them. The same attention needs to be applied to keeping them. It seems to me the formula for this is pretty simple.

1. Deliver on your promise.
2. Stay in touch.

We forget how simple it is sometimes. I need to stop forgetting.

About 2/3 of the way into the podcast, one of David’s Colleagues at Edelman, Robin Hamman, mentioned how social technology was leading companies to “involve internal stakeholders more widely.” His focus quickly shifted to examples that seemed more external stakeholder focused, but this is an area of social technology that fascinates me. How can we better use social tools to change the conversations inside of organizations, not simply as new marketing vehicles.

I’ve long promoted the fact that my all-time favorite business book is Leadership And The New Science, by Margaret J. Wheatley. She wrote the foreward to another book I just recently began reading titled, Authentic Conversations: Moving From Manipulaton To Truth And Commitment, by Jamie and Maren Showkeir. They begin with a premise that I agree with, “I believe we can change the world if we just start talking to one another again.”

It is an extremely simple premise, but one I find incredibly powerful. “Conversations are more significant than we are aware of, more powerful than we acknowledge. They are much like breathing.” And this is one of the great promises of social tools… that they will provide the mechanism for better conversations inside organizations.

We Have To Change Our Conversations.

We have to move away from the notion we’ve all grown up with, that conversations in organizations are tools for getting what we want, “for winning others over to our points of view.” We have to move away from conversations that are rooted in the thinking of the industrial age and move to new conversations that obliterate command and control boundaries. These conversations will necessarily involve internal stakeholders more widely and will “create, reveal, sustain or change organizational culture.”

These are exciting times we live in.

Sorry for the tone, but that just seems ridiculously obvious to me.

So I read the article, then posted a tweet with as much sarcasm as I could fit into 140 characters, and headed to the gym. Since I’ve been trying to give Foursquare another shot (blame Brian Copeland), I dutifully checked in to my LA Fitness and noticed that there were three tips for that venue. I had never bothered to check them out before.

Imagine how thrilled I was to see the second tip from a local loan officer. “Almost 50% of the Santa Clarita Valley is upside down on their mortgage. Go to www.blahblahblah.com for more information.” Apparently he thought the name of the place was LA Financial Fitness.

Things that are “ridiculously obvious” to me seem to elude some people. Clearly this well-intentioned guy thinks dropping his ads all over Foursquare is a perfectly good way to use social media. Or perhaps he realized it was silly and tried to cover it up by posting the incredibly helpful, “Guys, rack your weights when you’re done.” Thanks. Good tip.

My reaction to this is the same one I’d have to someone pissing in my pool: You picked the wrong place and the wrong time. And now you’ve ruined the water for everyone.

I showed this to a friend a bit later, someone who is not a Foursquare user, and they had a similar reaction.  Their immediate comment was something to the effect of, “That would turn me off to the whole service.” I think that’s a fair reaction.

Context. Context. Context.

Had this tip been on a bank, or his office, or a house with a foreclosure sign in the front yard, then I might have had a different reaction. The context would have been more appropriate. Heck, I might have actually clicked on his link. Context matters. Always has. Always will.

With all due respect, Ira, I’m not worthy. Kevin Kelly, the author, is an obviously gifted writer and dedicated to the education of his children in a way that I’ve never, ever dreamed. And while he calls the type of home schooling they did “nothing special,” I’m in awe of the efforts put forth on behalf of his sons. In addition, there were nuggets embedded in the article, like the mention of the Khan Academy, that were eye opening and timely.

Technological Literacy

In reflecting on the fact that his son’s “eventual adult career does not exist yet,” Kelly explained the “technological smartness” he attempted to impart during his home schooling. What he wrote is some of the best advice about technology I’ve ever read. Here are Kevin Kelly’s thoughts:

• Every new technology will bite back. The more powerful its gifts, the more powerfully it can be abused. Look for its costs.
• Technologies improve so fast you should postpone getting anything you need until the last second. Get comfortable with the fact that anything you buy is already obsolete.
• Before you can master a device, program or invention, it will be superseded; you will always be a beginner. Get good at it.
• Be suspicious of any technology that requires walls. If you can fix it, modify it or hack it yourself, that is a good sign.
• The proper response to a stupid technology is to make a better one, just as the proper response to a stupid idea is not to outlaw it but to replace it with a better idea.
• Every technology is biased by its embedded defaults: what does it assume?
• Nobody has any idea of what a new invention will really be good for. The crucial question is, what happens when everyone has one?
• The older the technology, the more likely it will continue to be useful.
• Find the minimum amount of technology that will maximize your options.

I was moved by this article. And humbled to be associated with it in any way.

Of course, I could make excuses and say that this visual clutter is the reason for my consistent lack of consistency in writing here. But I won’t.  Those are demons to exorcise another day. Suffice it to say, we need to eat our own dog food and stop putting our site last on our development list.

So, today I submitted my ideas for how the site should be organized to our designer. I must have changed these wireframes 20 times over the past few weeks, but I think I’ve finally settled on something that will remove the clutter, get us focused and make Steve and the rest of the team happy at the same time.

For those who want to play along, I thought I’d share parts of the process with you. The first step – wireframes. For those who are unfamiliar, a wireframe is “a basic visual guide used in interface design to suggest the structure of a website and relationships between its pages.” A designer (in this case, our designer, Kiran) uses this basic visual guide to direct her efforts when laying out her interpretation of the graphic elements. What she delivers back are three or four beautiful graphics that are based on this UI direction.

The graphics in this post represent the home page and one inside page structure and were created using Omnigraffle. I hope you enjoying taking a look into the process. I’ll be back when I’ve got some comps to share.

While there is cognitive recognition of this by most of the clients we work with, this is not a concept that is quickly internalized. In the early phases of many projects, we find that even the most sophisticated and educated of clients find themselves distracted by the lure of pretty graphics way too early in the process. When bidding on projects this is particularly true. A heavy emphasis is placed on visual design and the critical  issues of function, how the site is built, special software requirements, and where and how the site will be hosted often take a back seat.

The most creative aspects of site design are often unable to be seen in the browser.

Creative design is subjective. Whether a site can handle a traffic spike created by a link from a highly influential website, like The Drudge Report is not. The design of the hosting services, the architecture of the content management system, and the way different pieces of software work together to insure that a site stays up and working can and should be as as creative as the visual design.

One of the mistakes we see a lot of clients make is basing the decision about what company should build their site on the look of the visuals in a portfolio. If impressive visual design is not backed up by equally impressive programming skills and system knowledge, your project may look good and not function in a way that supports your business objectives.

Design plays an important role in whether a site will be used properly by those who visit it, this is a fact. Great visual design makes a site simple to navigate and leads the visitor to the pages you want them to spend time on. But it is just one of the factors you should be considering when choosing your site developer.

Here are some other factors you should consider.

• When your developer describes your project, are they leading the technology brainstorming or merely reacting to features that you have requested?
• Are they using a home baked platform to build your website? If so, this may lock you in to working with that developer to make what would be minor changes with someone else.
• What open source platforms is your developer familiar with?
• How involved is your developer in the open source community?
• What kinds of “pet” projects is your developer working on?
• Is your developer showing you multiple possibilities to help achieve your goals?
• Is your developer sought out for their opinions?
• What associations is your developer actively taking part in?
• What conferences do they attend?

Feel free to add to our list in your comments.

“We don’t get things wrong because we are uninformed and lazy and stupid and evil. We get things wrong because we get things right. The more scientists understand about cognitive functioning, the more it becomes clear that our capacity to err is utterly inextricable from what makes the human brain so swift, adaptable, and intelligent.” via The bright side of wrong.

It aligns with a concept I first heard uttered by Margaret Wheatley in Leadership And The New Science; “Nature loves order, but gets there via chaos.” I believe this is an undeniable truth.

It makes me want to make more mistakes.

Greg Meyer, from Gist, does not. We received this in the mail today. It was a followup to our face-to-face meeting at Buzzre Portland and conversations about their upcoming API release. We’ve had several digital conversations on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, email and even a GoToMeeting session, but in the midst of all that, this handwritten note stands out. It cuts through the noise like a knife.

We now have “design a card we can use to send handwritten notes” on our to do list. Thanks, Greg.

This is a post about REBarcamp Nashville, but it’s not really about REBarcamp Nashville. Nothing I’m about to say has anything to do with the quality of the 51 sessions that took place during the day at REBCNASH. From everything that I’ve heard from people who were actually in attendance, Brian Copeland ran an excellent REBarcamp, filled with great information and attended by many who were new to the Web 2.0 space. One of the speakers I spoke with mentioned that he was pleasantly surprised by how attentive the audience was. He said that many were taking notes on actual paper, with actual pens.

Signal vs. Noise

I decided to monitor the Twitter Stream for REBCNASH based on a conversation I had the previous day about the volume of noise that was coming from conferences and how hard it was to find valuable content in what was being shared via Twitter. The claim was that these conferences were becoming polluted with noise. They were echoing the feelings Matt Stigliano had while trying to listen to the content being generated on Twitter at SXSW. And I remembered clearly watching his cry for people at SXSW to do more than just broadcast their Foursquare data. You can read about it here: Two Weeks of Social Media Hell.

This is no scientific study, but I did want to be as accurate as possible. So, I cross referenced my main monitoring, using Tweetgrid.com/irc, with Twazzup and Twitter Search,. Luckily, the Twitter gods were kind and the search stream was consistent between the three tools. In total, there were 184 tweets that used the hashtag #rebcnash that day. Those tweets were generated by 77 different people. I don’t know how many were in attendance. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that 77 people decided that they wanted to use the hashtag on Twitter to share something about the event with the rest of the world.

So what did they share?

To analyze the content, I brought the tweet stream for REBCNASH into a spreadsheet and categorized each broadly. A tweet was either “signal” or “noise.” Since REBarcamps are learning conferences, I defined signal as any tweet that gave a piece of information that contributed to learning, or a provided a link to something that might. Everything else was considered noise.

Out of the 184 tweets, I only considered 8 to be signal. And when you see the 8, I think you’ll agree that I’m being generous. Here are the 8 “signal” tweets:

• 8:10:49 am MauraNeill: Google loves WordPress (via @kdrewien) #rebcnash
• 8:16:30 am MauraNeill: WordPress is industry standard – @kdrewien #rebcnash
• “8:27:04 am DawnGrizzell: “”love is a killer app”" with @RealEstateZebra. Learn to be a better agent. I’ll be reading the book! #rebcnash http://twitpic.com/1j4e64“
• “8:42:26 am shabsxu: @serkes you can add “”/rss”" to any WP url and it will give u a feed! #rebcnash”
• 12:50:01 pm JeremyHelton: #rebcnash social fusion autofeeds, interesting stuff.
• 12:55:23 pm MauraNeill: Facebook ads – for the first time we can create laser-focused ads that pinpoint a very specific group of people. #rebcnash
• 1:03:28 pm MauraNeill: Good read 4 REALTORS-check it out! RT @kleighcreative: BLOG POST: If You Bum Rush Me, We’ll NEVER Do Business http://bit.ly/aBPbRQ #rebcnash

Again, I think I am being VERY generous here. Example, I included Jeremy Helton’s tweet because it might cause me to go take a look at Social Fusion. So, I counted it as signal. I could debate the “signal worthiness” of several of the others, but this should give you a sense of how low I set the signal bar. Retweets of these signal tweets (only a few) were not counted as signal.

A Closer Look At The Noise

So, the math is pretty simple. If only 8 tweets were signal, 176 were noise. Example: “no sweet tea here at #rebcnash yet but always hope. Had some awesome sweet tea the other day though. Must have more ” Which is a perfectly fine tweet, (I’ve said similar things on twitter while at a barcamp) just not signal by my definition. There were, in fact, almost as many tweets about tea, 6, as there were tweets that contained any real content.

My next step was to categorize the noise. I wanted to get a feel for the kinds of things people felt were important to throw out into the twitter stream. So I put the noise into one of five categories; praise, questions, statements, location, and photos.

Praise: these were tweets that simply praised some aspect of the conference without really providing any insight. An example of a praise tweet: “Can’t wait to line up the rest of the afternoon at #rebcnash.” These tweets contained the most used word at REBCNASH, which was “great.”

Questions: these were tweets that were predominantly coming in from outside of the barcamp itself. There were 17 questions asked. Only two of them were answered using the hashtag, one of them by me. An example of a question tweet: “Which is the best Twitter app for a Palm Pre? #rebcnash.” This was never answered.

Statements: these were tweets that simply made a statement, often seemingly random. An example of a statement tweet: “Learning more about twitter at #rebcnash” and “Is hanging and sponsoring #rebcnash today. Loving ‘Love is the Killer Ap dude’s jacket!” The last one could easily have been put into praise or even location as well.

Location: these were tweets that simply let people know where someone was while they were at REBCNASH. An example of a location tweet:  “Second half of #rebcnash has started! (@ REBarCamp Nashville w/ 10 others) http://4sq.com/ai3HWT” The majority of these were not Foursquare posts, however, just people letting us know what session they were in.

Photos: these were tweets that contained photos. An example of a photo tweet: “#REBCNASH Schedule is Revealed! http://post.ly/dmq4″ Many of these also contained praise or a location or both, but were only counted in the photo category.

How Do We Increase The Signal To Noise Ratio?

I’m not here to debate why so little content was placed into the Twitter stream during this REBarcamp. There was no WiFi at the event, so a livestream was not possible and computer access was limited. I get it. And once again, just to be clear, those who actually attended are saying emphatically that the information shared in the sessions was excellent. Clearly, however, desire plays a role. First and foremost, you have to want to create valuable content or want to consume valuable content to make any of this work. And you certainly have to be able to identify what valuable content looks like in either case.

Personally, I’d like to do a better job of sharing valuable information. So, for those who have the desire and the ability to recognize or create good content, how do we make it easier to get more signal into the stream and get more signal out of it as well.  @jazzychad has done a good job with Tweetgrid.com/irc and an even better job with Madch.at, but even those miss the mark on many levels. In this specific case, if you were interested in gleaning some knowledge from the REBCNASH stream, having the very best listening tool in the world would still have only netted you, at best, 8 potential nuggets.

And having the best tool for sharing great content only works if people actually share. From my own experience, I know I am more diligent to present quality information if I know it has some legs. It’s one of the reasons why we’re creating the Live Blog app. When I know the information I’m tweeting at an event is going to live as content on my blog, I’m more careful to make sure it’s good content.

Some Questions

• When you listen in on a conference via the “official” hashtag, what are you hoping to find?
• Do we have any obligation at all to share the quality content at free conferences with the community at large?
• Should conference organizers play a larger role in the distribution of the targeted content coming out of their events?
• Is Twitter even the best place to share that content?  If not, what is?
• What tools are needed to make relevant content easier to create and consume?

I’m not sure I have the right answers for most of those questions, but one thing I do know for sure is this -  I’m personally going to give more thought to the content I’m sharing at the next event I attend. I’m going to shoot for more signal and less noise. I think everyone will benefit. Including me.

Chris is on a private Twitter list called “influencers.” I keep that list private because I don’t want anyone asking me, “why aren’t I on that list.” It’s always the last thing I look at before I head off to bed. His tweet, which I can’t find in his stream now, was: “What Is the Focus and Purpose of Your Blog http://bit.ly/cswlic.” I didn’t make the time to go read it before heading upstairs, but the headline made me immediately say, “Forget that. What is the focus and purpose of my life.” Yeah. I take things too far sometimes.

And then I went to bed.

But all night long that headline haunted me.  I tossed and turned most of the night and went in and out of coherent thought. And I woke up with a moment of clarity. I rolled over and hugged my wife and said, “We need to change Mothers Fighting For Others.” She bit. “How?”

I had already told her about my day in San Francisco at New Marketing Experience. I had also shared my mid-event takeaway from the event in a tweet. “We need a better, more consistent content strategy at http://mffo.org.” As I read it now, I realize how much I still didn’t get it at the time. I’m way better at giving great advice than I am at taking it. But after my sleepless night, I told Rocky that I finally “got it.”

“We need to do three things,” I said, still in bed. “We need to simplify our message, we need to answer just one question, and we need to do it more often.”

When I got out of bed, I took a look at Twitter and there was a mention waiting for me from Susie Blackmon. “RT @chrisbrogan What Is the Focus and Purpose of Your Blog http://bit.ly/cswlic [Ironic post for me and @respres gets photo credit.]” Since I hadn’t read the post, I had no idea Chris used one of my photos. Thanks, Chris, but you should know that I still haven’t read the post. I immediately took Susie’s tweet as a sign that I needed to write.

Simplify The Message

When I read the tweet, “What is the focus and purpose of your blog?” I found I couldn’t answer it quickly enough. And it forced me to ask a different question. What does MFFO do?  So, I asked Rocky, as she lay there half asleep, to answer that question. She did, but with long paraphrase of the paragraph that appears on the home page at MFFO.org.

“Mothers Fighting For Others is dedicated to providing orphaned girls with opportunities their parents would have provided, if they only could; a loving and nurturing environment and a quality education, so they can learn, thrive and achieve their highest potential.”

That’s accurate, but it’s not simple. Since  it’s not simple, it’s also not memorable. For anyone… including us.

What is the simplest way to describe what MFFO does? My feeling is that if we find the simplest way, we’ll also find the most powerful way. Let me try.

MFFO helps orphaned girls become powerful women.

That may not stick, but it’s simple. It’s memorable.  It’s accurate. As a result, it’s also powerful.

Answer Just One Question

One of the tweets I sent from NME10 seemed to resonate with people. It was retweeted a great deal. It was something Natanya Anderson said on one of the panels. She said, “Good content starts with ‘What do they want to know? Not what do I want to say?’” So, I asked Rocky, “What do people want to know when they come to MFFO.org?” She said, “Who? What? When? Where? and Why?” I said, “No. They want to know this: ‘Why should I give you my money?‘”

What do they want to know? That’s the one question we all need to answer for ourselves. In the case of MFFO, people who come to the site want to know what we do, where we do it and why. Sure, absolutely. But what they’re really asking when they land on the site is,  “why should I give my money to you and not to the thousands of other charities they have to choose from?”

And every blog needs to answer that one question… first and foremost. Without doing that there is no possible way to know what the focus and purpose of your blog is or should be. No possible way to harness that power.

Answer The Question More Often

Saying, “I need to write more,” is not a motivating statement. It’s a fact, but it’s not motivating. What I should be saying is this, “I need to figure out more ways to explain why people should support MFFO.org.” And I need to do it with sounds and images… not just words. If I concentrate on that, the ideas will come.

If I focus on answering that one question, that IS motivating. Why? Because I want to explain how we help give young Kenyan girls a voice, how we help them get an education, how we help them grow into productive members of their community, how we provide a home that nurtures and cares for them.

I WANT to do that! The ideas will come. The writing will flow. And then more people who care will be able to answer the question, “why should I give my money to you?” That’s motivating.

Simplify. Explain. Repeat.

And I need to go through this exercise for Zeek Interactive as well. And for Real Estate Shows. And for Stop Child Slavery. And probably for my life.

Do you know the focus and purpose of your blog? How will you find it?

photo credit: me

And we’ve felt for a long, long time that games and learning were meant for each other. Our first training games were launched back in 1998 as part of a collaboration with AdOut. They were called “Monster Commands” and “Key Commando” and they taught the important key commands that made the AdOut production artists some of the most productive in the industry. They were a huge success. The employees loved them and within an hour, they had mastered key commands for programs like Photoshop, Quark and Illustrator that would otherwise have taken weeks or months to learn.

In 2003, we attempted to turn our game creation experience into a training solution for corporations. We created Motus Learning Systems with a couple of other partners to give it a focus. Motus built several demo games for different companies, and we even created a kids game to teach mousing skills. The initial illustrations for that kids game are shown above. And although this proved to be a short-lived venture for many reasons, it didn’t alter our belief that games are simply the best way to learn things that require repetition to master.

This past week, Gist launched their own training game. And I really like it.

Stated very clearly on the front page of their site, “Gist helps you build stronger relationships by connecting the inbox to the web to provide business-critical information about the people and companies that matter most.” Others, like Dustin Luther, have written about how Gist is helping them manage the many online relationships they’ve fostered. I like it too, but I really like their newest feature, a game called,  “Learn That Name.” And it does exactly what the name implies… it helps you learn the names and companies of the people you follow on social networks.

It’s a simple game, as most good training games are. You’re presented with a person’s avatar and you get points for guessing their name correctly. The faster you guess, the more points you get. Get it wrong and you lose 50 points. Each round is five people. For my taste, it’s just the right number. In my first round I achieved the “Super Socialite” level, though I was lucky to get five people I know pretty well. The second round labeled me a “Casual Networker.” I think the game could do a better job of sensing the sex of a contact. If I didn’t know that was Geoff Livingston, it would be a lot harder to figure out if all four names were male oriented.

The game strips off choices as the time clicks by and the points drop. So, if you don’t know who someone is, it helps you. If you don’t get the name right, you don’t get the option of the bonus question, which is “Where does <first name> work?” I wasn’t sure who this next guy was, so the game gave me some help.

I haven’t used Gist much since I loaded it, but I’ll be using it more now. I think they did a great job with the game. I can see lots of potential for categorizing contacts based on upcoming events, recent additions, high school classmates, etc. In fact, I’d download this app JUST to play this game. After just a few rounds, I’ve already become more familiar with some folks I’ve been trying to get to know over the past year. And I was surprised by some of the faces I recognized and how hard it was to place their name.

Kudos to Gist. Well done.

That’s all about to change.

I’ve spent at least a year in a complete blogging funk. And it’s not because I don’t have things I’d like to say. I most certainly do. The reason for the funk is that I’ve been having an internal battle between “what I should be doing” and “what I really love to do.” Luckily for me, what I really love to do is also what I’m really good at. And it’s not creating and defining marketing strategies.

First, some commentary. A troubling trend has emerged from the chaos of the social media boom. People who have no real marketing skills or training or any experience with business strategy are becoming “social media marketing” consultants, strategists and coaches based on a few factors that have nothing to do with successful marketing strategy. These new marketing “experts” fall into one of three categories.

• The Cheerleader
• The Successful Fool
• The Opportunist

The Cheerleader

You all know this social media marketing expert. He or she is the person who has no proven track record for building ANYTHING other than followers on a few popular social media sites. They equate this popularity with business success and can even teach others how to recreate their “success” in these online venues. They use anecdote and analogy to answer questions of ROI and they universally fail to be able to point to any quantifiable measures of business progress that contribute substantially to a company’s bottom line.

The Successful Fool

This social media marketing expert has a proven track record of past business success, but it has nothing to do with any marketing experience, least of which social media marketing. There is no proof that their journey is repeatable. They use an unintentional slight of hand to direct our attention to their past exploits as proof positive of future benefit. And they make the foolish mistake of thinking their personal ability to grow a business can be transferred to others on a large scale.

The Opportunist

This is my least favorite form of new age social media marketing expert. They promise big results with almost no effort. They are the social media marketing snake oil salesmen. They’re the ones telling you that if you don’t do x and y you will be extinct in 2 years. Their success is measured in the number of people they dupe into buying their placebos. They’re not marketing strategists, they’re carnival barkers.

So what am I?

I have been very successful in my business life. Let me be clear, by “very successful” I mean that my companies have made solid profits for many years. But they have not been successful because I am a marketing strategy expert. Quite to the contrary.

What has helped make them successful is hiring great strategy consultants and partnering with great strategic thinkers, like Bill Leider. I’ve have also tried to align myself with others who are great marketing and brand strategists in specific market segments, like Marc Davison in real estate. But I am NOT a marketing strategist. What I do is work WITH and BESIDE marketing strategists to develop tools, tactics and technology paths that make executing those strategies simpler and easier. I look at a company’s objectives and devise ways to use technology to make executing those strategies more efficient and effective. I am a tactical strategist and a technology strategist. I am not a marketing strategist – social media or otherwise.

The mistake I’ve made over the past year is thinking that I needed to be something else. I don’t.

When Hal Lublin related the story of how, while playing poker, Chris Brogan helped him understand that he shouldn’t hold back, I wondered why I was holding back. I wondered what was keeping me from writing. And I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no one good reason. There is just one bad reason – I’ve been resisting being seen as a social media MARKETING expert.

My Master’s degree is in School Psychology with a focus on behavior modification. I spent several years creating behavior modification plans for severely mentally handicapped and criminally insane patients. So, if sometimes I want to write about behavior, I should. I have a passion for science, so sometimes I want to write about technology, the Internet and social media as it relates to quantum mechanics and complex adaptive systems. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t. I’ve also spent a great deal of time dissecting, with the help of some great thinkers, the role of vision and values in building and managing a business and solidifying a brand. I should write about that too. I will.

But what I will not do is continue to allow my resistance to being lumped into the category of “social media marketing expert” keep me from writing about areas in which I excel. I’m going to write about emerging digital tools and how to make them work to the benefit of strategy – personal, brand, marketing or otherwise. I’m going to write about what I love – technology.

Taking the experts’ advice.

The social media marketing experts I admire tell me that if I want to increase engagement, I should ask a question at the end of each blog post. Let’s see if they’re right. What barriers are holding you back from being more effective in using social media?

Every time I allowed myself to think I had arrived, I hadn’t. Every time I called myself a failure, I wasn’t.

Every moment – each high and each low – was simply a step on the path to this moment.

Period.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

True success can’t be defined by a moment. Neither can failure.

Success. Failure. It’s all just part of the journey.  Where I find myself today doesn’t really matter in the big picture.

I can’t linger in success and I shouldn’t wallow in failure.

Every moment is simply a lesson. I can learn things from the moments of success that I can’t learn from the moments of failure. And vice versa. I enjoy the moment or I endure the moment. But I know this – no moment is permanent. The moment moves on and so must I.

Feeling like a success today? Enjoy it. Learn the lesson. Move on.

Feeling like a failure today? Endure it. Learn the lesson. Move on.

…….
(I orginally wrote this three years ago in response to an email. It popped up on my radar screen today as a result of a new comment. It was timely. I needed the reminder. I’m sharing it again here in case someone else needs it too.)

At that time I was CEO of a company called AdOut.  AdOut was responsible for 100% of the ads created by the Los Angeles Times, LA Daily News, and the Torrance Daily Breeze. Thousands of ads per night were created by our dedicated team of graphic designers. And those three newspapers depended on us, exclusively, to meet their deadlines each and every day. It was a truly a nightly miracle.

So, although we were running a 100% Macintosh office and had no worries at all about our systems being impacted by Y2K, the newspapers were very concerned about the power company and required that we rent a LARGE generator to kick in when the lights went out at 12:01 am on January 1, 2000. Of course, that never happened. And, truth be told, none of us at AdOut ever thought it would.

Insert Nostalgic Y2K Photos Here

So, we laughed about it at our offices. We all took photos  by the generator, which was the size of a semi truck. I’m sure I have those photos stored somewhere, but I’m not about to try to find them this morning. And that’s what strikes me most about what has transpired in the last 10 years.

If Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube had existed in 1999, I’d have those photos available for this post right now. I’d know exactly where to find them. This post would be filled with images, and embedded videos. The story would contain links to tweets that illustrated perfectly how silly we all were. We could laugh as we read the archived posts from the onslaught of Y2K consultants that surfaced in the months leading up the the new millenium. This post would be so much better if the social media tools available to us now were available to us then.

Boy has the world has changed in ten years.

Last night my wife and I finished up our Christmas shopping. It was fun. We were alone… no kids. It felt just like a real date. From the time we left the house, around 6pm until we decided to get some hot chocolate at Starbucks around 10pm, I was never once tempted to let the world know where we were. The lure of Foursquare points was not enough of an incentive to make me want to check-in at Toys”R”Us or Sports Chalet. I simply didn’t care if the rest of the world knew where we were.

But I did need to find a different a specific gift. So, I fired up the Maps application on my iPhone and typed in “sporting goods.” My iPhone knew my location and quickly populated the screen with cute little stick pins. I clicked the one closest to me, a Big 5, then clicked on the phone number so I could ask if they had what we were looking for. They did. At that moment, I was very happy my iPhone knew exactly where we were. And equally happy nobody else did.

Truth be told, I’ve been forcing myself to use things like Brightkite, Foursquare and Gowalla. Perhaps if I lived a more exciting life I’d feel differently. But I don’t. When I was in San Francisco a few weeks ago, I felt certain that when I checked in somewhere that there was the potential for a friend to be close enough to quickly jump in a cab and join me. It feels the same way when I’m at a conference. The popularity of a specific tool among the people I want to hang out with makes it really easy to locate the parties.

But I live my every day life in Santa Clarita, CA, and my business is not location specific. On a typical day, I rarely venture outside a 300 yard radius of my front door. And If I do end up going somewhere, it’s not usually very exciting. I’m the mayor of a Chevron for goodness sakes. Yay me.

When we arrived at Starbucks, I pulled my iPhone out and noticed several Twext.me updates. So, I read them, without actually going to Twitter. When I closed Messages down, there, staring at me on my home screen were the pretty little Brightkite, Foursquare and Gowalla icons. I thought, “why not.” So I fired up the one I like best, Gowalla, and let the world know I was having some hot chocolate with my wife. At that point in the evening, I wouldn’t have minded if someone we knew saw it and came by to say hi. But I didn’t really believe that would happen. Not in Santa Clarita. And I didn’t really believe anyone would or should care.

So, that makes me wonder. I wonder how many others are like me? I wonder if the technorati’s use of Foursquare will really translate to the general population? I understand that the tech community is madly in love with the potential of these apps, but when it comes to everyday use, my wife thinks they’re all stupid and dangerous, especially for a woman. She doesn’t even want me to know where she’s at most of the time, let alone the rest of world.  I wonder how many people are just like her?

Are you?

Someone sent me a link to this video the other day, and I got to wondering: do people still feel this way about Dungeons & Dragons?

I realize there is still a stigma attached. It is still always portrayed in the media as the penchant of the pimply outcast. I feel that it has become more mainstream over the nearly 30 years that I have been playing. But has it really?

I’m pretty open about my love for the game, but my wife isn’t.

When I met my wife she had never played D&D before, and now she has two characters in two different games. I remember one night a while back when we were fixing dinner, and she was complaining about how wimpy her paladin was. That’s when I knew she had been truly geekified (love can do terrible things to people). But I’m pretty sure that nobody in her own family knows that she plays. And she certainly hasn’t told anyone at the K-8 school where she is the principal that she is an elven cleric of Tethryn Veralde. I can’t say that I blame her. Like it or not, many people still have a fairly negative opinion about the game, and I doubt many parents would want an elven cleric to be running their school. My step-daughter and her fiance also play D&D, but I have no idea if any of their friends or coworkers know that. I wonder how many other D&D players out there have yet to “come out of the dungeon,” so to speak.

I said I was open about my love for D&D, but to be honest, I am only open about it with friends and family, and fellow geeks. If I went to a party where I knew very few people, I know that I would be reluctant to discuss it with a stranger, unless he was wearing a Gandalf T-shirt or something. And why is that? It is just a game, after all. It’s no more diabolical than Monopoly or Chess, and it certainly requires more imagination. My wife and I play D&D with a group of friends every month or so. We sit around the table, share stories, eat food and drink beer, and play a game that we have played together for more than 10 years now. Our friends are all successful adults who lead fairly normal lives. Some have children, they all have jobs, and none of them live in their parents’ basement. If you met any of them on the street, it would not occur to you that they spend one evening every few weeks rolling dice and slaying dragons.

If you would like to join us, just be sure to bring a bottle of wine. And some dice.

Photo by Moroboshi

The sexiness of the social media space and the desire to see an immediate return on the time investment required to access it, has created an atmosphere ripe for solutions to problems that don’t really exist.  Example: Tweetlister.

Tweetlister launched in May of 2009. It allows the “tweeting” of real estate listings into a user’s Twitter stream. It gives real estate agents the ability to “post and re-use as many listings as you want.”

Funny, I thought Twitter already gave them that ability.

My first response, six months ago, came in the form of a tweet. I said, “Here’s an example of a solution in search of a problem if I’ve ever seen one.” And this was all I intended to write about it. Besides, Nicole Nicolay had already done a good job of exposing the shiny object.

But it didn’t go away. This private twitter conversation, a few weeks later,  should have given me a clue that this would be a very distracting shiny object. It was sent to me by an extremely bright executive from one of the largest real estate companies in America.

Them: “Good concept – I definitely see this tool being abused.”

Me: Why is it a good concept? Why would you want to push people to yet another 3rd party listing site? Why not your own?”

Them: “That was a duh moment when I read your response. I’m a twitter newbie. Still learning & having fun. Thanks for the schooling.”

That wasn’t schooling. I didn’t teach them anything they didn’t know already. I just wasn’t distracted by the shiny object and simply asked a few questions to make sure there was something worth biting on the hook. But several very smart people, people I resprect and also call friends, did bite. And then they told their friends to bite. They’re still biting.

I posed the following question on the post linked above; “Your listings are probably already on your site or your blog. If you really want to automate, you could use Tweetlater (or Hootsuite or Objective Marketer or CoTweet) and set up a similar kind of schedule. Then the links would come straight to you. This just gets in the way, IMHO.” Agents could be leading buyers to their site and to their IDX search, but instead they are tweeting away and leading them to a search site they have no control over, one that is not a destination search site and one that could easily lead the buyer to another agent. And they are paying $9.95 a month for that right. I still don’t get it.

I’ve been thinking about this for six months. Why do smart people spend so much time leading people away from the sites they own? Why aren’t people employing a more focused hub and spoke approach to how they use social media? Why aren’t brokers providing more intelligent tools to help their agents?

That thinking has lead me in several directions, one of them being how the real estate virtual tour business works and how we do things at Real Estate Shows. The result of my thinking? Real Estate Shows needs to get out of the middle of the real estate transaction to the greatest extent possible. When consumers search on sites like Trulia and Zillow and Realtor.com, if they click on a link to a virtual tour, it should lead to a site owned by the real estate agent, not to yet another third party site.

How do we do that? I have a few ideas, but this post is already too long. The answer lies in being more intelligent with how our links work and becoming invisible to the consumer. More to come.

Removing The Filters From My Online Conversations

In his post, Hal articulated something I had communicated with my wife over the weekend, that I need to remove a few of my “filters” when I’m online. While I’m certain that I am authentic in my online communication, I’m equally certain that I’m a toned-down version of my authentic self. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that, and yet I left Blogworld wondering if removing a few of my self-imposed regulators might not be a good idea. Quite frankly, that thought scared my wife. She is warning me that I need to keep a few of them. And I certainly will.

Hal’s post resonated with me. So this afternoon I gave myself permission to be distracted by another shiny object and do a quick test of Wetoku to highlight his post. Wetoku occupied the booth across from the Mothers Fighting For Others table in the Expo hall and I was looking for a good excuse to give it a test. This qualified.

Let me know your thoughts on the conversation & the technology used to record it.

I’ve changed my thoughts on a Google Voice app for the iPhone.

Thanks to Jason Berman, I was alerted to the GV Mobile app for my jailbroken iPhone. It was available via Cydia, so of course I gave it a whirl. I liked it. But I realized something.

I’ve had an icon on my homescreen to take me to http://www.google.com/voice from day one of the Google Voice launch.  (see illustration below) It works. I can search my address book, place calls, listen to messages, etc. In short, I can do anything I really need to do, right there on my little ol’ iPhone.

What struck me about the GV Mobile app was that the main reason it felt better than going  to a mobile version of their website, aside from being able to dial and access my phones address book, was the UI. That’t it. It was pretty and the buttons were bigger and easier to use, but it didn’t give me the ability to do a whole lot more than I couldn’t already do.

So, Google, I have a suggestion for you. Just bypass the iTunes App Store. When you sense I’m coming from an iPhone, why don’t you simply give me a better, more iPhone-friendly version of your site. You did a great job on the iPhone layout  for Google Calendar recently. That made me happy. Just do the same thing for Voice and I’ll be happy again. I’m sure others will be too.

I’m not sure how Michael Arrington will react though.

We share a common set of values, yet we are nothing alike. When we returned from our recent trip to Philadelphia, where both Bill and I served as advisors to The Social Media Marketing Institute, the photo on the right jumped out at me.

As is his practice, he prints out the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzles and brings them with him on trips. The New York Times crossword puzzles are considered some of the trickiest puzzles around. Bill can rip through these crossword puzzles faster than anyone I’ve ever met.

I realized something important as I looked at this photo. The crossword puzzles are the perfect illustration of what makes Bill so good at breaking down business problems and helping companies solve them in ways that produce exceptional results.

Solving a crossword puzzle requires a good understanding of crossword conventions, puzzle logic and a broad general knowledge (vocabulary, literature, culture, art, sciences, geography, etc.). You can learn the conventions and logic relatively quickly, but the general knowledge is what separates the men from the boys. All the tricks and techniques in the world won’t help you solve the puzzles if you’re lacking the general knowledge and the ability to tie them all together.

Bill’s unwillingness to accept the first answer, the answer everyone can see, can be frustrating to some. But first answers often relate to symptoms, not the true, underlying issue or opportunity. I know in our early dealings, I found myself wanting to strangle him. Truth be told, I still do. But what always comes from his ability to see the hidden clues, from his creative approach to asking questions, from his desire to “solve the puzzle,” is a unique perspective on every situation. Even his “wrong” answers and seemingly unrelated questions open your eyes to new possibilities. They help you figure out the clues to solving your own puzzles.

If you’re willing.

For the purposes of this post, I’ll ignore the zillions of situations where no Internet marketing is done at all and focus only on those where I wonder what the people were thinking when they decided how to market on the Internet.

For me, three fundamental areas of concern emerge:

1. Products and programs should be evaluated and used based on their effectiveness in producing bottom line results – not on coolness.

• Many of the tech driven products being introduced today emphasize a certain “cool” factor. Their advertised unique selling proposition (USP) is their “coolness.”
• Oftentimes Realtors buy them on that basis – coolness – without analyzing how that product/service will contribute to their bottom line and to achieving their clients’ goals.
• Realtors should be asking some fundamental business questions to guide their decisions about what products and services to use in effectively marketing themselves and the homes they represent? Here are some:
• What should be my marketing budget – a different question than “how little can I spend?”
• What expenditures on what approaches are most likely to yield the best result (i.e. achieve the clients goals). The correct answer to that question is almost always the best investment choice.
• Who is the target audience for this home?
• What kind of message and presentation most appeals to that audience?
• Based on pricing and other factors, how long will it likely take to sell this home?
• If I think the house will be on the market for an extended amount of time, what kind of flexibility does that call for in my Internet marketing?
• How does that impact my marketing budget and my marketing approach?
• What tools and techniques are best for this property?

2. Realtors – at least the good ones – should focus on helping clients achieve their goals and on building their business – not on foisting new toys on people because they represent the latest techno wet dream. That begs the question, what is a home? To me, a home is a place to:

• Raise your children; feel safe; entertain; dream; relax; putter; create memories; build equity; and express your life style.
• For most people it’s the largest investment and the biggest asset they will own in their lifetime.
• A home, unlike a California marriage, is not something that you’re going to trade in next year if you grow tired of it or if something better comes along.
• When people search for a home they want their senses and emotions caressed and massaged, they don’t want them assaulted. They want to feel an intimate connection. They’re not looking for a rock concert rush.

3. Ultimately success is measured on sustained profitability – not on how often one can introduce the latest techie toy, or continue to use outmoded, ineffective advertising approaches. Selling real estate is about reaching people, building trust and creating sustainable relationships. It’s about being creative, timely, relevant and focused on profitable results – for clients and Realtors.

As a professional, Realtors must know more than their clients about what will work best to sell homes. Many of today’s consumers are more tech and information savvy than most Realtors. That doesn’t automatically make them better marketers.

I believe that many Realtors roll over and bow to clients’ unwise wishes simply because they don’t know enough or have the confidence to advise clients about alternatives. The attitude of, “hey, I know it’s wrong, but the client wants it and I never disagree with a client” might win a few battles but it’s a recipe for losing the war.

Most people want professional advice confidently and knowledgably offered by the people they hire. That’s why they hired you. Any given client can tell their Realtor that they want a particular Internet or print media presentation. At that point it’s the Realtor’s responsibility to diplomatically determine exactly why the client wants that approach, and, if their reasons don’t make for good marketing, to point out better approaches to reaching the market and selling the home.

I believe that if more Realtors focus on some business basics (like the 3 above) then:

• Selling real estate will look and feel more like a responsible business to more consumers;
• Realtors, in the aggregate, will be more highly respected; and
• More Realtors will increase their bottom line income.

You’ll be hard pressed to find a bigger Apple advocate than me. I know they’re out there, but they don’t get out much. So, when I dog Apple, you can bet I feel strongly about it.

In a conversation with Teresa Boardman, a Realtor® from St Paul, Minnesota, she stated very strongly, “unless the iPhone will let me access the internet via my computer, like my phone does, I’m never going to switch.” I know this is anecdotal, but when she said it my brain said, “She’s right. The iPhone should enable this.” At the time, only days after the iPhone launch, I figured someone would write an app and that would be that. And someone did.

Apparently that is not that. Apple and AT&T continue to march toward taking more and more control over the applications and services that are allowed on the iPhone. Some of that control is certainly necessary to prevent malware and other “bad stuff” from happening. But preventing truly beneficial apps from making their way onto the iPhone, while allowing dozens of ridiculous “tip calculators” to thrive, is further indication that Apple still doesn’t want to understand the needs of the business user.

It’s not like they couldn’t make money from it. I, for example, would gladly pay a bit more on the data plan to not have to have tote around the wireless card for my laptop. I can’t be alone.

My bet is that this controlling trend will continue. And that should further the Jailbreaking movement. But with iPhone production ramped to 800,000 units per week, the number of users who will opt out as a result of these shortcomings won’t even amount to a speed bump in their sales chart.

This makes no sense to me. But hey, what do I know, I think having a Flash plugin for Safari on the iPhone is a good idea too. Clearly I’m wrong.

Mobile post sent by ResPres using Utterz. Replies. mp3

Mobile post sent by ResPres using Utterz. Replies. mp3

But I’ve said from the beginning that the fact it does not support an Adobe Flash plug-in is a bad decision. And it was clearly a conscious decision by Steve and his crew. Now, after a visit to a local Starbucks this evening, I can only conclude that it’s also an insane decision.

I’ve been wanting to see how Starbucks was executing their Hear Music/iTunes campaign, so I decided to just sit outside a local Starbucks for a second and log into my T-Mobile account to see it for myself.

It’s been a while since I spent any time at a Starbucks, so the screen that popped up when I fired up Safari on my iPhone was new. And it gave me options to browse around without logging into my T-Mobile account. Very cool. But right there on the front page, taking up the largest amount of real estate, was a large Hear Music/iTunes square. So I clicked on it.

The image above is the screen I received. Are you kidding me? Apple initiates a major deal with Starbucks and Hear Music, then coordinates it with the launch of the new iTunes WiFi Store and one of the first things they hit you with is a reminder of how lame it is that the iPhone doesn’t support Flash?

Come on, Steve, work out the deal with Adobe, put aside your world domination plans for a bit and let’s get this insanity behind us.