Putting the Moo in Moolala

Photo credit: Tanja_B

Face it. Your business card is boring.

It’s sad but it’s true. I don’t care if you have those rookie inkjet cards from VistaPrint or a fancy custom die-cut card made from pressed lion’s tusk. If every card is the same, it doesn’t tell much of a story.

Enter Moo cards, where users can select a different image to print on the back of each card. The possibilities are endless.

  1. If you’re a photographer, each card should show one of your best shots – you’re essentially walking around with your portfolio in your pocket.
  2. If you’re a real estate agent, each card could show the properties you’ve sold.
  3. If you fix up old Harley motorcycles, each card should show one of your restorations.

It’s not really about the pictures themselves but the story that they allow you to tell. My agency, Tribes Win, helps big brands lead their tribes. Some executives don’t know what I mean by the word “tribe”, so my cards each have different tribes or tribe leaders on the back. Tim O’Reilly, Tim Ferris, Ellen, Oprah, Lance Armstrong, Steve Jobs, Shai Agassi, The Green Bay Packers.

In meetings, I dump my cards on the table, picture up, and ask the client to pick their favorite. This gives me a chance to explain what a tribe is in terms they understand.

Normally Moo cards are $20 for a pack but today only, due to a special deal brought to you by my friend Jon Dale‘s innovative new startup, Moolala, you can get the $20 basic mini-card package for only $10.

 

 

Moolala itself is a brilliant startup.  It combines the group-buying phenomenon of Living Social and Groupon with referral marketing. After you sign up, you refer friends to join Moolala and you earn a percentage of what they purchase. It continues down the line into a five-level pay matrix.  A video that explains the concept can be found on Moolala.com.

What are you waiting for?  Throw out your boring business cards and instead, tell a story.

Bookshelf: The Thank You Economy

Gary Vaynerchuk

Image credit: icedsoul photography .:teymur madjderey

 

Why is Gary Vaynerchuk smiling?

Because his new book, The Thank You Economy, just dropped today. In a moment, I will tell you how to get a copy FREE.

The drastic improvement from Gary’s first book, Crush It! (still a NYT bestseller) to TYE is reminiscent of one of my favorite bands, 1990′s hip hop supergroup Public Enemy, maturing from a solid but raw debut record (Yo! Bum Rush The Show) to one of their finest albums ever (It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back).

The other parallels are eerie.

Both frontmen are known by a first name + last initial.  Chuck “D” and Gary “V”.

Both debut offerings had an unexpected exclamation point ! in the title.

Chuck D was once featured on a track called “Shock and Awe” and “Shock and Awe” is Chapter 8 in Gary’s new book.

I can’t make this stuff up.

Similarities to Public Enemy aside, below are are 10 reasons you should buy TYE and 4 reasons you shouldn’t.

10 reasons you should buy The Thank You Economy

  1. The opening. The opening page of historical quotes on adoption of various technology brilliantly sets the tone for proving skeptics of social media wrong. Then the book does exactly that.
  2. The storytelling. The book is filled with stories that all support the main point. Some are stories from Gary’s work and personal life. Some are “should have” stories and some are “what if” stories. The entire book is written in Gary’s personal, casual and engaging voice. Reading it is like being in the room with him.
  3. The data. When he doesn’t use stories or anecdotes to support the points, Gary references legitimate data from trusted sources.
  4. The honesty. Gary doesn’t pull any punches. He explains exactly what it takes to operate in this new world of customer engagement and marketing. He also explains times where he has made mistakes in the past and learned from them.
  5. The variety of case studies. From large brands like Amazon, Avaya, Zappos and Zagat to small businesses like Boloco and AJ Bombers to individuals like Irena Vaksman, a dentist in San Francisco and Hank Heyming, an attorney inside a huge law firm, there are examples and case studies that any business or individual can relate to.
  6. Chapter 3. By itself. In Chapter 3, Gary specifically addresses eleven of the top objections to using social media. As someone who also works with large brands on social media, I’ve heard every objection multiple times. Gary dismantles each one, piece-by-piece. This chapter alone is worth the price of the book.
  7. The focus on culture. Chapter 4 outlines how critical the right culture is to success in this new world. A couple years ago while I was working with a large consumer electronics client on marketing, branding and social media, I could sense that their culture was badly broken and getting worse. So while we were at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I organized a tour of Zappos for my client execs to see a world-class culture firsthand. The tour was great. The client executives were excited. But when we returned from Vegas, nobody wanted to step up and own the culture turnaround that everyone knew they needed. I pleaded with them to hire a Chief Culture Officer, a position Gary explains in detail in the book. Long story short, they ended up doing nothing to focus on improving the culture, which continued to erode. Now, just a few short years later, many people have quit or been laid off, key functions have been outsourced to China and the company is splitting up and moving across the country. Even perfect use of Facebook or Twitter is not going to change that. The lesson here is important. Culture is paramount. Chapter 4 explains how to instill a culture for success.
  8. The ping pong. In Chapter 5, Gary outlines how to effectively combine traditional media and social media. The two are far from mutually exclusive and when used in concert and as part of a strategic plan, one plus one can really equal five.
  9. The sawdust. The fourth part of Gary’s book is appropriately named The Sawdust…a collection of little nuggets that were leftover after sawing the content into logical chapters. Instead of sweeping it out the door, it’s included in the back…great little riffs on everything from fear to emotions, innovations to apologies and more. This part of the book is like licking your orange fingers after you polish off a bag of Cheetos. There’s not much there but it’s really good stuff.
  10. The caring. Gary clearly put his heart and soul into this book. He cared enough to ship a book that mattered. The Thank You Economy is going to help everyone from executives to entrepreneurs to agencies really understand this new world we’re living in.

4 reasons you shouldn’t buy The Thank You Economy

  1. You don’t care about your customers and you don’t want to.
  2. Your culture is negative and broken and you don’t care to fix it.
  3. You make too much money and you would like to make less.
  4. You’re retiring. This week.

Win one of ten copies

I believe so much in this book that I’m personally buying 10 copies to give away to my readers. To get a chance at snagging a copy of The Thank You Economy, you must do the following two actions:

  1. Leave a comment below. Tell me why you want this book. Be creative.
  2. Tweet a link to this post. You can do so automatically by clicking here. If you don’t have a Twitter account, you can use Facebook.

On Friday, March 11, 2011, I will select 10 people, based on my evaluation of their comments. If you are one of those selected, I’ll personally contact you to ask for your shipping address (or Kindle version if you prefer). If you don’t hear from me, you can assume you didn’t win.

Question: Why do you want a copy of this book? If I give you a copy, do you promise to read it?

If you made it this far, thank you. A few final points. I was fortunate enough to get sent an early galley of this book. The links to purchase the books above are affiliate links. I plan to beat Gary in a pencil war at SXSW. If you’re going to SXSW, please track me down and say hi.

HEALTH | TECH | FOOD open innovation

On Tuesday, February 8, 2011, I was lucky enough to help facilitate the Health | Tech | Food event that Luminary Labs put on for Social Media Week.  125 people gathered to openly innovate around the core health issues of New York through the lens of social technology.

There were amazing presentations and brilliant ideas that came out of the workshop sessions and the unique “open innovation” model means that Luminary Labs has published all input and output under a creative commons attribution 3.0 unported license.  This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon the work, even commercially, as long as they credit the event for the original creation.

See the original post on Luminary Labs’ blog.  You can view all the published content at www.healthtechfood.com and the summary SlideShare presentation below.

Seth Godin, Live on Twitter for Poke the Box

Normally Seth Godin doesn’t tweet.

Seth certainly understands the power of the medium for both good (engaging and leading a tribe) and evil (acting as crack cocaine for The Resistance, distraction from doing emotional labor and shipping). The latter is a main reason Seth has decided to personally stay off of twitter.

Until now.

Yesterday, Friday March 4th, Seth took to a twitter chat to discuss and answer questions about Poke the Box (affiliate link), his amazing new book from his new publishing venture, The Domino Project.

Unfortunately, I had a conflict and missed the chat, so I used a neat service called Storify to curate the tweets from the session. I only pulled in the questions and Seth’s answers. You can view the curated tweets below or on Storify here.

Based on Seth’s previous aversion to twitter and his last tweet below, this may be a one-time only show. Enjoy!

Seth Godin on Twitter

image credit: @heyamberrae

Donating my birthday to charity: water

When is the last time you drank clean water? Probably today. Certainly within the last 24 hours. You showered and brushed your teeth with clean water this morning.

There are 1 billion people on the earth who don’t have access to clean water.

charity: water is changing that. Please take a few minutes to watch the following video.

charity: water 2010 September Campaign: Clean Water for the Bayaka from charity: water on Vimeo.

Here’s the deal. In four days, on September 20th, I turn 34 years old. I don’t need any more “stuff”. Most of us don’t. The U.S. storage unit industry does over $20 billion in annual revenue. So I’m donating my birthday to charity: water.

I’m also donating my dad’s birthday, although he doesn’t know it yet. You see, we share a birthday. I was born on his birthday back in 1976. I didn’t come gift-wrapped but he kept me anyway.

You can read all of the details on my campaign page here.
http://bit.ly/letsdrillawell

Our goal is to raise $5,000, which is enough for charity: water to build a well that will provide a village of 250 people with clean water for years.

$5000 buys a well. And it is an attainable goal. What is $5000?

$5 from 1000 people.
$10 from 500 people.
$20 from 250 people.
$50 from only 100 people.

We can do this.

On charity: water’s site, you can download photos, watch and share videos, blog banners and twitter backgrounds. I just updated mine. (Free marketing lesson from charity: water – make it easy for your tribe to share your message.)

So please, donate. Spread the word. Email friends. Tweet it. Post it on Facebook.

If you have a September birthday, start your own campaign.

The short link is:
http://bit.ly/letsdrillawell

Thank you.

Survival of Ideas

Darwin was right.

So is Federov.

2 sites to upgrade your e-cards

If you’re sending someone a card, whether physical or digital, the goal should be to trigger an emotion.

Isn’t that why we send cards?

If that’s not the reason, it’s just a selfish act on the sender’s part to communicate that they did remember the recipient’s birthday/graduation/Bat Mitzvah.

So if triggering an emotion is the goal, why do so many cards fail to do so? Between physical stores and e-card sites, there are tens of thousands of card options, yet maybe 1% are written well enough to trigger an emotion?

99% look something like this.

Really? Who sends cards like this?

(To be fair, I guess this card does trigger an emotion with me, but it’s not the desired one.)

Well in my never-ending quest to serve you, my brilliant and attractive Daily Sense readers, I have researched and found two sites to use to permanently upgrade your e-cards.

Someecards
This site is brilliant. The humor is often sarcastic and crass, something you would expect when one of the co-founders is a former writer for The Onion. Not all cards are safe to send to grandma, but it’s easy to find the perfect card to remind a friend or significant other of that inside joke or funny memory.

One of my favorite things about someecards.com is that users can customize their own cards and submit to the site. Leveraging the Wisdom of Crowds, The Editor’s Picks in the User Cards section are often some of the best.

Story People
This is the site of artist Brian Andreas. Story People is much more than e-cards. Brian has built a nice little empire out of his inspirational snippets and whimsical artwork. You can browse the entire collection, creating your own e-cards by combining any of the text with any of the images. You can also order the physical prints for framing and other products.

The Story People cards are often amazing and emotionally moving.

[The full "Hi, Mom" disclaimer: My mother originally introduced me to Story People and she's been a fan for a long time. As always, all credit goes to her.]

Use these two sites to save you from ever sending another forgettable e-card.

I’m sure there are more than just these two. What other sites have emotion-triggering e-cards?

Vinny the Linchpin won't let you make a waffle

(Seth Godin’s new book, “Linchpin – Are you Indispensible?” just hit the New York Times bestseller list. It’s an amazing, life-changing book and my review is coming soon. If you don’t know the term Linchpin yet, you will. Until then, read this. Now, on to Vinny)

You don’t have to be an artist or a musician or a creative to be a Linchpin.

Sometimes all it takes is a waffle.

My client Altec Lansing is based in Milford, Pennsylvania and when I’m there, I stay at the Hampton Inn & Suites in Matamoras.

There is a self serve breakfast buffet just like at every Hampton Inn & Suites. Except this one isn’t like every one. And Vinny makes it so much more than self-serve.

I’ve only met Vinny three times but it only took once to realize what kind of guy he is. He waits on you hand and foot, transforming the experience from a self-serve breakfast buffet into a four-star restaurant.

Every time, Vinny enthusiastically lets me know what the hot dish of the day is. Sometimes it’s pancakes, sometimes it’s a eggs on a bagel sandwich. Vinny sells it and somehow, I’m always convinced it’s a good choice to start my day.

Vinny makes small talk if you’re interested but it’s never probing or bothersome.

Vinny insists on making your waffle for you, even though the machine is self-serve.

Vinny bustles around, making sure every item at the buffet is stocked completely at all times.

Vinny always wishes everyone a wonderful day but it’s his actions that ensure they start the day delighted.

Vinny doesn’t do his art only on good days. He does it every day.

It’s pretty clear Vinny doesn’t do this job for the money. He does it to give a gift and because he enjoys making people feel special.

To be a Linchpin, location doesn’t matter. Neither does title or how big your office is.

If Vinny can be a Linchpin working at a Hampton Inn & Suites breakfast buffet in Matamoras, what’s stopping you?

Tools for thrashing early

If you’re building something, it’s critical to thrash early. The biggest and loudest changes should be vocalized early on.

Everyone gets heard, opinions are out in the open and the design gets refined from there.

If it’s done right, there is little to no thrashing at the end and the project ships on time and on budget.

Here are two resources that will help if your project involves any kind of prototyping or wireframing.

Balsamiq
is a really neat online tool for creating and sharing mock ups.

If you’re more of a hardcopy person (I sometimes use both), Geek Chix has a super handy list of sketch templates you can print for wireframing.

Thrash early.

Ship on time.

Godspeed.

Best Business Books of 2009 – a list of lists

Beantown Web compiled a neat list of lists of the Best Business Books of 2009.

Congratulations to Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. Their NYT bestselller Trust Agents made four of the lists.

I’m following Julien’s advice and trying to read one book a week in 2010. I am currently on track and have read some absolutely amazing books in January.

Reviews coming soon…

[photo credit: blu blue]