communication

A smarter Clay

July 26, 2009 | 1 Comment

Check out this excellent TED @State talk from the smartest Clay I know.

The most important changes Clay highlights:

“The media that is good at creating conversation is no good at creating groups. The media that is good at creating groups is no good at creating conversation.”

“The internet is the first medium in history that has native support for groups and conversations at the same time.”

“As all media gets digitized, the internet becomes the mode of carriage for all other media.”

“Members of the former audience can now be producers instead of consumers. The same equipment lets you consume and produce.”

And my favorite quote from the entire video:

“The moment we’re living through, the moment our historical generation is living through, is the largest increase in expressive capability in human history.”

The boldness of that statement is overshadowed only by its accuracy.

Fried Green Insight

July 24, 2009 | 4 Comments

Full disclosure…

I’m a huge fan of the team over at 37 Signals. They bleed simple brilliance. David Heinemeier Hansson gave one of my favorite talks ever at Startup School 08 and in May, Jason Fried delivered another gem at Big Omaha 2009.

Everyone should make time to watch Jason’s video, but if you can’t carve out 20 minutes my summary is below.

Jason Fried @ Big Omaha 2009 from Big Omaha on Vimeo.

Failure is not cool
The phrase “fail early, fail often” is overused. Failure is actually not necessary. Failure is not a character-building thing and it’s not a prerequisite to success. Focus on the things that are going right and parlay that.

Planning is overrated.
Business plans are just guesses. You can’t predict what’s going to happen. What matters is what you’re doing right now. You know more about something after you’re done with it.

Interruption is the enemy of collaboration.
A big open loft space does not necessarily mean more collaboration and higher productivity. With so many interruptions, workdays become work moments.

Try this in your company or department. Every Thursday, nobody can talk to each other. Email and IM and other tools are fine but no talking. See if it’s the most productive day that week. Or that month.

You create valuable byproducts.
When you make something, you make something else. We are all making byproducts.

When building houses, the sawdust created from all the lumber was initially thought of as waste. Then, people found multiple useful applications for it and it ended up being a valuable byproduct, sold for money.

When 37 Signals built Basecamp, the byproduct was Ruby on Rails and they didn’t even know it at the time.

Sometimes the valuable byproduct is knowledge.

Share like a chef.
Emeril Lagasse, Mario Batali, Bobby Flay. They share what they do on TV. They tell you exactly what ingredients they use and show you step-by-step how to do what they do. If you want to do it at home, you can buy their cookbook for a fraction of the cost of a single meal.

This doesn’t make them less money, it makes them more. More people know about them. More people buy the cookbooks. More people eat at the restaurants.

Traditional business thinking would shut down this blatant sharing of intellectual capital.

The best thing you can do is share your knowledge.

What is your cookbook? Publish it. It helps you…

Build an audience.
Every company has customers. Great companies have fans. At the least, you need an audience.

90,000 people read the 37 Signals blog everyday. It takes time to build but it doesn’t cost them a penny to reach this large captive audience.

Focus on the things that don’t change.
What are the core, important things in your business that don’t change?

Amazon invests in distribution. Shipping. Customer service. Price. These things will be important to their business in 10 years.

37 Signals makes web-based software. They focus on making it fast, easy and usable. It may not be sexy but that is what will be important to their business in 10 years.

Ideas are immortal. Inspiration is perishable.
We all have ideas. Ideas are immortal.

Inspirations however, are like fresh fruit or milk. They are very perishable. If you’re lucky enough to be inspired, do it. Do it now. The most energy you’ll ever have about an idea is at the beginning. You can’t sustain it.

Thanks to Jason and the whole crew over at 37 Signals. Keep leading, guys.

Capture everything

July 23, 2009 | 1 Comment

You can’t schedule great thoughts.

Sometimes they come while driving.

Sometimes they come in the shower.

Sometimes they come in a dream in the middle of the night.

Sometimes they come in a movie theater.

Sometimes they come at a wedding.

The point is, if you don’t capture the great idea, quote, blog post or song lyric, it’s unlikely you’ll recall it later.

The solution is to always have a method to capture your great thoughts on the spot. I’ll list my coverage strategy here. Yours will be different of course, but my goal is to get you to make the minute changes necessary so you never again lose another great thought.

Sleeping
I keep my small Moleskine and a pen next to my bed. I rarely wake up in the middle of the night with great thoughts but the moment I open my eyes, my mind is a blender of tasks, meetings and ideas and having a way to capture them immediately helps me start my day in a relaxed and organized fashion.

Working
If I’m in front of my computer, online or not, I use a great application called Remember the Milk. It works well with David Allen’s GTD system and provides enough flexibility to implement your own methodology for tasks & reminders. They also have an excellent iPhone app that in my opinion is well worth the $20 per year.

As a backup, I always have my small Moleskine in my briefcase when I am away from my laptop.

Driving
**Always focus on the road and never write, text or call while driving.** If there is a passenger in the car, I’ll ask them to write the idea in my Moleskine or shoot me an SMS message reminder. If I’m alone, I’ll wait until I’m stopped, then write it down myself or use a service like Jott or, if I want to immediately tweet my idea or question, Audioboo.

Movie Theater
If the movie is so bad that my mind is wandering (or if watching Freida Pinto inspires some poetry) I’ll quickly and silently make a note in my iPhone.

Cooking
I’m usually so focused (frazzled?) when cooking a big meal that my mind is dialed into making sure everything finishes at the same time but if a great thought pops into my head, I’ll quickly scrawl it on the refrigerator in puttanesca sauce.

Fishing
I’ll tell my fishing partner to remind me. Unreliable but cheaper than dropping my iPhone in the bottom of the lake.

Surfing
This is the one exception in my “capture everything”. My mind is always clear when surfing. Mostly because it’s peaceful and I’m one with nature, but also because I’m trying not to drown.

What tools & systems do you use to capture everything?

Cronkite, Twitter and Trust

July 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Photo credit: AP Photo/CBS, File.

An excellent post from KD Paine, Walter Cronkite and the shifting residence of trust.

After Cronkite’s assertion that it was time to pull out of Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson told his aide, Bill Moyers, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

It’s easy to imagine Barack Obama telling an aide, “If I’ve lost Twitter, I’ve lost………..”

Finish that sentence.

A Goode lesson

July 4, 2009 | Leave a Comment

After seeing the success of the “Best job in the world” contest run by the tourism board of Queensland, Australia, which drew almost 35,000 applications and put the obscure state on the map, David Ready, Jr., of Murphy Goode winery decided to run a similar contest.

Like the Queensland campaign, the publicly stated objective was to find someone to act as their social media marketer, blogging and tweeting about the product and the experience.

We at the Murphy-Goode Winery got to thinking about the new age of communications and we figured it was a pretty good thing. So to get going, we’re looking for someone (maybe you) who really knows how to use Web 2.0 and Facebook and blogs and social media and YouTube and all sorts of good stuff like that � to tell the world about our wines and the place where we live: the Sonoma County Wine Country.

In exchange, we’re offering you a �Really Goode Job� � a six-month job paying $10,000 a month plus accommodations!

We want to hire a social media whiz (your title will be �Murphy-Goode Wine Country Lifestyle Correspondent�) who will report on the cool lifestyle of Sonoma County Wine Country and, of course, tell people what you’re learning about winemaking.

Full overview of the contest is here.

The real objective, of course, was the same as the Queensland contest, lots of free publicity and brand exposure, which is fine when executed correctly.

Murphy Goode had participants submit videos and then had viewers vote and rate the videos. The videos were re-posted on YouTube. Over the next few weeks, as viewers were able to vote for their favorite contestants, it drove a lot of traffic to Murphy-Goode’s website.

But the devil is in the details. This is where Murphy Goode tripped up.

The votes meant nothing. When the top vote getter by a large margin San Francisco’s Martin Sargent wasn’t chosen to be in the top 100, he tweeted about it. Then it was picked up by Digg founder Kevin Rose, who retweeted it. It made it to Digg and was seen by a few million people. Murphy Goode eventually apologized for the confusion on Facebook.

But wait, before you pour out all your bottles of Snake Eyes…

Murphy Goode didn’t break any of their stated rules. The contest never claimed the votes determined the winners but they weren’t as clear as they should have been that the votes were ‘just for fun’. Since we live, for better or worse, in an American Idol world, many assumed that the votes determined who would make the next round.

The lesson here is pretty simple. Be 100% transparent (and do it in large type). If voting is involved, make sure that the results of the voting are clearly understood and not in the fine print.

Like a few companies have and many companies will, Murphy Goode learned a lesson about the finer points of social media. That said, the huge “backlash” is overstated and misdirected.

This wasn’t a case of intentional deception, it was a case of naive omission. Overall, the net result will be positive.

(full disclosure: I enjoy shaking dice, so it’s hard to hate any producer that makes wines named “Liar’s Dice” and “Snake Eyes” that admittedly doesn’t take themselves too seriously.)

I applaud Murphy Goode for jumping in the pool, even if they splashed a little on entry.

Remarkable in 11 words or less

July 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Here is a challenge that consists of two tests.

1) The Simple Test

Write an ad for your business (or yourself) using eleven words or less.

2) The Remarkable Test

Now, determine if what you came up with is remarkable, defined as, ‘would people remark on it?’.

Would they tell their friends?

Would they take a picture?

Would they tweet about it?

This test is much harder than the first.

Want an example? This humorous ad created for Durex by the Lowe Bull agency (in 2003) passes both tests.

What to sell (in order)

June 30, 2009 | 1 Comment

Great marketer, author and branding expert Harry Beckwith reminds us what order to sell in.

What the best salespeople sell (in order):
Themselves.
Their company.
Their service or product.
Their price.

Sell yourself first.

What the worst salespeople sell (in order):
Price.
Their service or product.
Their company.
Themselves.

Sell your price last.

Shorter is better

June 27, 2009 | 3 Comments

An old French mathematician said: “A mathematical theory is not to be considered complete until you have made it so clear that you can explain it to the first man whom you meet on the street.”

Your key message, your unique product or service, your key point of difference should resonate with everyone.

(And surely your message isn’t as complex as a French mathematical theory.)

Boil it down until everyone understands it. Unless everyone can understand it, few people will.

Here are some quick ways to test this out.

Explain it to your dentist.

Explain it to your barista.

Explain it to your parents.

Explain it in 140 characters or less.

The importance of posture

June 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment

In this hilarious scene from “Take The Money and Run”, Woody Allen demonstrates the importance of posture in selling anything, in this case a bank robbery:

How is your posture? Do your customers take you seriously?

How clear is your communication?

How to talk to a CEO

May 27, 2009 | Leave a Comment

You did it. You finally got a 10 minute phone call with the Julie Johnson, CEO of WhatACompany.com.

The call is going well. She seems genuinely interested.

So you keep talking. After all, you have 4 minutes left. You’re on a roll. Surely some additional clarification can only help.

Then you ask for the close. You ask Julie to agree to the deal. She backs out and says she’ll have to call you back. But the call never comes.

You shake your head. She was interested. Where did it go wrong?

You didn’t treat her like a quarterback. Winning quarterbacks, like CEO’s, run the team but they don’t run the ball. Their job is to analyze the situation, call a play and get then safely hand off or pass the ball into the hands of other talented players.

Julie had no desire to ‘run the ball’. She is too busy and has 50 other plays to run. Once the CEO is interested, as quickly and firmly as possible, ask her who else you can work with to execute.

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