In just under 40 minutes, we riffed on:

• What is a tribe and why are they important?
• The critical importance of finding the first ten rabid fans for your idea.
• The benefits of Eric Ries‘ Lean Startup methodology
• How to quickly mock up your idea using a rapid prototyping tool for less than $50
• How to build virality into your startup, like Instagram did.
• Why your startup should give users a metric to be embarrassed about.
• The unique application and interview process for the Seth Godin MBA program.
• How SAMBA taught applicable business lessons vs. a standard curriculum.
• The genesis and vision for Spindows, my new startup.
• How to get your early customers to fund your startup.
• How to use search.twitter.com to find members of your tribe.

Watch the video below or over on Howard’s blog.

My friend Andy Traub is a man who ships things. He regularly ships the Linchpin Podcast, one channel of his Take Permission Media Network.

In June, Andy was nice enough to interview me for his Linchpin Podcast. The episode is pretty long at almost 90 minutes but we had a great conversation on the following topics:

• The two traits of an incurable entrepreneur (hint: you have both)
• A free website to launch and spread your idea in 15 minutes
• Why the cost of failure has approached zero
• We Work Labs – a new innovation co-working space in NYC
• How to pivot your idea for success
• The difference between ideas and shipping
• My first failed business (a non-profit involving an Atari 2600 and my brothers when I was 8 years old)
• How to finally write that book in your head (can you write a page a day?)
• How to meet more relevant people in your organization
• How Elliot Bisnow changed the world by dropping out of college and organizing an impromptu ski trip that spawned a world-changing organization.

Click here to head over to Andy’s blog to listen or click here to listen directly.

I hope you enjoy the show and look forward to your thoughts.

photo credit: Wikipedia

That is the question posed by Seth Godin on page 92 of his book, Linchpin.

The point? True artists use the means of technology available to them during their life.

Shakespeare didn’t invent the play.

Edward R. Murrow didn’t invent radio.

Jerry Seinfeld didn’t invent television.

Steven Spielberg didn’t invent the movie.

Brian Clark didn’t invent the blog.

Tim Hetherington didn’t invent war photojournalism.

These are all artists who took an existing medium and pushed it to the edges. They shipped, over and over. They shipped even when they didn’t feel like it and when they didn’t feel like their art was worthy. For Tim, he shipped until it cost him his life.

They shipped failures but by continuing to ship relentlessly, they also shipped successes. You didn’t know that Steven Spielberg was an executive producer on Gremlins 2: The New Batch, but you’ve seen Jaws, E.T, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan and Jurassic Park. He kept shipping.

Shakespeare shipped. 38 plays (or 39, depending who you ask) 154 sonnets and numerous other poems.

People often overuse the word “calling”, as in “Steven Spielberg really found his calling making movies.” Deep down, they’re making an excuse that someone else managed to luck into combining a passion with a skill. The often unsaid thought is, “I haven’t shipped anything because I haven’t found my calling.” It’s a cop out. To borrow from the brilliant Steven Pressfield, they’re giving into The Resistance.

If Spielberg would have lived in the 1600′s, do you think he would have been a blacksmith? Unlikely. He had art in him and he used one of the available mediums of the time to release it to the world. To ship.

Would Shakespeare blog? Yes, I think he would.

Stop waiting for your calling. Bring your art to the world.

Thank you Shakespeare. And happy birthday.

This post was one small part of HappyBirthdayShakespeare.com, a brilliant tribute to Shakespeare where bloggers from all over the world post to tell the world how Shakespeare has impacted their lives.  This project was organized and shipped by my dear friends AJ and Melissa Leon, who lead by example and have taught me more about the importance of shipping than the Bard himself. Thanks, guys.

At every presentation, the level of understanding of the subject matter by the audience varies widely.

If you’re giving a presentation on social media, some people are well educated and understand it’s place in business (and it’s not always the people live-tweeting your thoughts). There are others who know a little but are less familiar than the first group. Still others may know little to nothing.

The audience’s knowledge and experience lies along a wide spectrum.

So what is a good presenter to do? How do you make sure that the experts aren’t bored and the others aren’t left behind?

Use inspiration, not information.

Use the information to illustrate a key point or concept. Tell a story. Take them to a place.

Sir Ken Robinson presented to a room full of TED folks who knew (in varying degrees) that our current education system is sub-optimal.

Steve Jobs presents to hundreds of thousands of people, in person and online, who have literally been predicting and prototyping what he’s going to tell them.

Don’t give information. Give inspiration.

Then, you’ll have the whole room.

OK, they may not know what you’re wearing but there is a good chance they know your customers better than you do.

Flowtown uses emails from your customer database, (you do have an email database for your customers, right?) and can tell you interesting and valuable information about those customers.

I recently met the founders of Flowtown online. They are wicked smart guys with a product that is immediately useful to almost any business.

Below is my interview with Ethan Bloch.

Who are you and what do you do?
I’m Ethan Bloch and I’m the Co-founder and CEO of Flowtown.

Why should companies use Flowtown?
Because social media is hard and Flowtown turns social data in dollars.

How much does Flowtown know about someone from their email address?
Name, Age Group, Gender, Occupation, Location, Influence and almost every Social network they’re on.

Really? Wow. Do you know what I’m wearing right now?
I think you’d prefer I didn’t say

So this would allow companies to do more targeted campaigns. For instance, if only 10,000 of their 100,000 members are twitter users, they could do a focused campaign, right?
Totally, way more focused. For example if you’re not on Twitter it would be annoying to get an email saying ‘Hi Clay, we’re building out our presence on Twitter…” you’d be like “I’m not on there, why are you sending me this?” On the flip side we’ve found that if you know someone is on a network and you mention that in your email, the performance of that campaign skyrockets.

Is Flowtown a replacement for traditional email systems like Flowtown, AWeber or MailChimp?
In the case of mainstream email service providers, I don’t think Flowtown is a replacement but rather an enhancement. For example we’ve built an integration with MailChimp where any MailChimp user can come to Flowtown and in 3 clicks dump a ton of demographic and social graphic information back into their MailChimp list and then use MailChimp’s segmentation feature to get more relevant with their subscribers.

You guys are adding interesting new features to Flowtown pretty quickly. Tell us about some of them.
We just launched an influence calculation (powered by Klout), where now when you import a contact list we’ll show you your top 50 influencers, which you can use to do 1-on-1 outreach i.e. we’re showing you the 20% that will drive 80% of the results, in respect to getting noticed and building buzz.

In fact everything we do at Flowtown is ran through this ‘Pareto Lens’ – early on, internally, Dan and I would speak of Flowtown as the 80/20 marketing filter for business.

Tell me about your partner, Dan Martell. How did you guys meet?
He’s a Rockstar – we wouldn’t be anywhere close to where we are today without Dan.

We actually met on Twitter back in September 2008. Did an IRL meetup, discovered we’re both passionate about marketing and moving the needle for business and the rest is history…

Tell us what your typical day at Flowtown is like.
I wake up around 6:30 and immediately touch base with David (VP of Engineering), he’s on EST so by the time I get up I’m already playing catchup.

(I jumpstart my day by using a strategy from Leo at Zen Habits: http://zenhabits.net/2007/02/jumpstart-your-day-night-before-evening/)

I’ll do a brief skim of all the new email that’s came in make sure there’s no bombs going off and then then I’ll work on 1-2 of the most important tasks I have scheduled for the day, for the next 3 hours, usually product, sales or biz dev focused, this could include new product mocks, coding, emails, phone calls, brainstorming and white boarding.

After those 3-hours are up I start going into a more ad-hoc mode, where I’m answering email/tweets, talking to customers, closing new customers, working with David on new features, bouncing around the bay for meetings, testing new features, breaking things and syncing up with Dan.

Later in the day/evening is when I go to the 30,000+ foot view of life, this includes research, reading (going through my Instapaper) and planning.

What did you do before you started Flowtown?
Right before I started Flowtown I was producing/hosting a video show called WSYK? (What Should You Know?) which was syndicated by Revision3. And I was a marketer full time at Cake Financial, a start-up that was recently sold to E-Trade.

Where do you hope Flowtown will be in 3 years?
Flowtown will be responsible for raising the bar on customer experience/service, by helping all businesses care for their customers like Zappos cares for theirs.

What’s the plan then?
Not sure if I’ll be ready, but I want to help fill the massive void in education. I hated school growing up and think there’s a lot we can do to improve the experience for children everywhere.

You’re from Baltimore. Please tell me you’ve seen the Wire or we’re ending this interview right now.

“You come at the king you best not miss.”

I love The Wire. My favorite character is Omar and if you don’t know why just watch this.

Thanks, Ethan.

If you want to try Flowtown yourself, enter your email address here.

With the right temperature and a little wet snow, anyone can make a snowball, but my friend Jimmy makes them all day, everyday, in sunny San Diego.

I had another excellent call with Jimmy and a potential client today. After the call, a light bulb went on and I realized what makes Jimmy such a great entrepreneur.

He only thinks in snowball.

Every component of every deal has the capability to snowball. Everything has high probability growth potential. I can’t ever remember Jimmy discussing a deal by saying, “that’s what we’ll sell. That’s that and we’ll move on to the next deal.”

It’s always designed to snowball.

But here’s the key. The snowball isn’t just for Jimmy, it’s for the clients too. He is a master at layering snowballs. Many deals involve three or four parties and Jimmy is particularly skilled at identifying each party’s needs; what they want and what they can give up without much pain. He sees multi-faceted win-wins like a Grand Master chess player sees so many moves ahead. And then he authentically articulates these win-wins so the clients see them too, which makes the sale that much easier.

How do I know Jimmy will be successful?

Eventually, a bunch of layered snowballs create an avalanche.

[photo by: nata]

There is an important lesson in this whole Conan vs. Leno debacle.

No matter how famous you are or how many fans you have, if you work for a huge corporation, they own you.

NBC wanted to put Conan’s show at 12:05am. Technically, that’s not even The Tonight Show. It’s The Tomorrow Show.

Conan is so frustrated, he just put the show up for sale on Craigslist.

Sure, Conan could make $40 million over at Fox and probably kill in the ratings but you can bet someday, some rube network exec would move his time slot in favor of The Sarah Palin Variety Hour. Then Conan would completely lose his marbles and he would spend the rest of his days walking around Central Park mumbling like Rain Man…

“……should have had the 11:30 slot…..18 pigeons, definitely 18 pigeons……I’m an excellent comedian…….23 times funnier than Jay Leno……definitely deserved the 11:30 slot…….”

Here are 8 reasons Conan should go direct.

1) Full creative control over his own content
Now he writes a lot of his own stuff but imagine if he wasn’t censored at all. Look out.

2) Not working for Jeff Zucker

3) Not working for anyone

4) Online video worked well for Gary V. and the Monty Python guys.

5) Never having to worry about ratings again
Let Leno have the “ratings” on NBC. His demographic is not Conan’s anyway, so why try to fight for it. It’s sort of like Newhart and Family Guy jockeying for position.

6) Any format, any device
Conan’s demographic consumes content differently. He could make videos of any length that his audience could consume and stream anywhere. iPhones, iPods, Droids, iSlates, other tablets. Design the content to be snackable and sharable and we will snack and we will share.

7) Watching a show at its original time slot is obsolete
I’ve seen plenty of clips of Saturday Night Live in the last few years, but never on Saturday night. My social network does the filtering and the best and funniest clips bubble to me on twitter and Facebook.

8 ) Your own channel means your own audience and unlimited bandwidth
You don’t see Chris Brogan and Seth Godin arguing over timeslots, do you?

It’s your world, Conan. Step out from behind the network execs and own it.

(REUTERS/Reuters TV)

Today, it seems irresponsible to post about anything except the tragic earthquake in Haiti. The death toll is currently estimated between 30,000 and 100,000 but could be much higher.

The two best sites I’ve seen for clarifying how anyone can help are:

ReadWriteWeb’s post

Google’s Disaster Relief site (thanks to my friend Chris Czerwonka for pointing this one out)

It’s inspiring to see that the Red Cross has already raised over $800,000 by their text HAITI to 90999 to donate, program.

Retailer Lowe’s has also donated $1M and turned all Lowe’s locations into Red Cross donation sites.

Anonymous donors are stepping up:

As are well known celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt

Others are on their way to Haiti

And some docs and nurses are flying free, courtesy of American Airlines:

Alltop has a page with lots of links.

Boston.com has posted many photos from the quake.

I’m impressed by the way that America and other countries have rallied to help Haiti and I’m thankful for the social tools that enable the information and aid to spread and grow faster than ever.

Please help in any way you can. Thank you.

How absurd would it be to hire a “Director of Phone”?

Imagine proposing a job requisition for an “Email Manager” position?

Where would you go to hire a “Czar of FAX”?

Yet companies are hiring “social media managers” and “social media directors” to lead the “social media team”.

In a couple years, these titles will seem just as absurd as those above.

Social media needs to and will become (for those who get it right) integrated with all other functions and part of the fabric of the organization, just like phone, FAX and email did.

(The huge difference is that social media is the first of these kind tools that allows you to listen first.)

It won’t be a skill and it won’t be a department.

Richard Branson gets on and clicks floor 27.

What do you say?

(Replace Branson with Steve Jobs, Marissa Mayer, Russell Simmons or the person you would most like to meet, either professionally or personally.)

This used to be called having your elevator pitch ready. The truth is, most people don’t want to be pitched, although Sir Richard may be the exception.

Still, it’s important to be able to make the most of this precious moment.

How do you introduce yourself? What do you say after that? Is it a statement or a question? Do you praise them? Talk about yourself? Ask them an interesting question? Tell a joke?

The doors just closed. What do you say?

Add your thoughts in the comments. I’m really interested in what you all think on this one. Don’t forget to include who you would want to meet.

photo credit: Chris Heuer