Continuous Learning: New Podcast List

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So if you are anything like me, you are in submission to the fact that there is more to learn in this world then you currently know.  The truly wise among us acknowledge that our current knowledge placed on the scale of all the knowledge will always find us wanting for the remainder of our days.

The trick is to stay on the cutting edge of information that helps us achieve our goals.  One of the ways I have tried to stay sharp on specific topics is by using podcasts.  I currently use iTunes (most convenient at this time)  and my Android phone, with the help of iSync.    There are a host of podcasts, mostly free but some cost nominal amounts, on iTunes that cover a wide range of topics.

New Updates on my Listening List

So here are latest additions to my listening list:

• BeanCast – deep dive into marketing topics
• EntreLeadership – Dave Ramsey‘s leadership and business podcast
• Let’s Make Mistakes – design but irreverent with some foul language.
• Marketing Over Coffee – quick ‘on they way to work drive’ worth of internet marketing news
• Social Triggers Insiders – on of the authors I follow on Google+
• This Is Your Life – leadership podcast

Dropped from my Listening List

• No More Weak Days – Daily prayer and Bible reading.  Great concept but had a hard time struggling with the KJ and Message format in their reading plan. “1 Year Daily Audio Bible” is still my preferred choice for daily scripture reading (listening).

Lesson’s Learned

The important thing is to keep learning!  Don’t stop.  If you are starting a new project, search out a podcast and listen to it while driving or exercising.

I would love to hear about podcasts you have found helpful in your daily routine.  Share them in the comments.

Good Hunting.

Related articles

• Import iTunes Music Playlists to Android, Sync iTunes with Android over WiFi (ravidhavlesha.wordpress.com)
• Need help subscribing to podcast in Android (ask.metafilter.com)
• Subscribe to my award winning Marketing Podcast series. It is free! (garybembridge.com)
• DoubleTwist Adds Podcast Catalogue (geeky-gadgets.com)
• Import iTunes Music Playlists to Android, Sync iTunes with Android over WiFi (madrasgeek.com)
• Evernote Podcast #33 – Heavy Breathing Episode (evernote.com)

Unclear? Use a Twitter Summary!

Image via Wikipedia

Have you ever just stopped and thought, “OK, exactly, what am I doing here?”  Have you ever been asked to explain something and found yourself ramblings and your thoughts came out incoherent and and your thoughts are without any cohesion and almost on the verge of being labeled ‘verbal diarrhea’? (run on sentence intended for effect folks!!)

Force Some Discipline

There is a way you can attack this problem.  This idea comes from a book I’ve recently read call “Drive” by Daniel Pink.  (Good Read! Recommend it!) It’s one of the suggestions in the back of the book which you could easily overlook and just skiip by if you are not careful.

The concept is simple.  Use a tool, like Twitter, to force you to craft a message in 140 characters.  Twitter will only publish 140 characters of a person’s tweet.  It provides a nice clean interface with a gentile reminder of how many characters you have remaining.  It also provides you a negative number if you go over 140 characters, thus showing you how much you have to trim to have your entire message included in the twitter stream.  Twitter simply provides us a clean and straightforward page with the needed feedback to accomplish this task.

Twitter is not the focus

You could use any tool that gives you the feedback to understand how close you are to 140 characters.  Even the 140 characters are arbitrary and simply based on the fact that Twitter has this limitation.  I could also use any word processor that provide the basic functionality of ‘word count‘ .  You could write a simple Visual Basic program in minutes to perform the same task.  The tool is not the important factor here.  It is your ability to boil down your message to 140 charaters.

In the past we’ve talked about using elevator speeches, but this is more intense and to the point.  Only using 140 characters to create focus.

Twitter Summary Application

• Front Office Staff – image the value you would bring if your responses were pithy and to the point.  How many of us have wished we met some of these staff in our travels.  Only to find out 2 minutes into a question answer session you picked the wrong person to ask ‘where the bathroom was?’ (exaggeration intended)
• Meeting Prep – Wouldn’t we all like to come into a meeting and with a short burst from the moderator / facilitator know how much I need to pay attention?  In fact, I could then text my assistent to pull me out of the meeting in let’s say 10 minutes.  (Note to self: I bet I could write a quick program so that when I text mesage a certain code to it, it would then rendomly generate a ‘emergency text message‘ to my department member’s phones  so I can get them all the hell out of there before they waste another minute not doing their jobs!) (exaggeration intended)
• Event Planning – When I plan out an event, each hour has something it needs to accomplish.  I would suggest having a twitter summary for each hour so that each hour can be easily reviewed by the facilitation staff and the owner / sponsor of the event.
• Calendar Management – wouldn’t we all like to look at a calendar event and not ask the question – what in the world is this here for and who authorized it to be on my calendar?  Well a twitter summary would help there also.
• Instructions to Staff – I’ve also heard this one called ‘commander’s intent‘ as well.  It would be a short burst stating what is the ultimate outcome or goal is for an activity.  Sometimes these are needed so that if something goes wrong, the team, using autonomy, can make adjustments to still hit the mark by the end of the assignment.
• Classroom Setting – excellent use of a few seconds to start out the class.  Let everyone know what’s going to happen in the class for the next hour to three hours.  (Also see Meeting Prep above – for you resourceful students – but don’t try it in my class – I have you turn off your phones)

Taken to an Extreme

Anything could be taken to an extreme.  For instance, imaging you walk into your local Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV).  You ask, what you believe to be, a genuinely sincere, simple, innocent, open ended question and the response you get from behind the counter is “No”.  Not withstanding it was an open ended question, this all to common event, could simply be all the DMV’s in the world preemptively taking my advice to this pithy extreme before I even make this post available to the public (although I have my suspicions that this is not the case and something else might be going on)   So be mindful that this advice could also be taken to an extreme and you would want to avoid that s well.

Would love to hear how you could apply Twitter Summaries.  Leave a post and let me know.

Good Hunting!

Related articles

• The art of complaining in 140 characters or less (swiss-miss.com)
• On the benefits of #macroblogging, observing a #Twitter stupidity, and the return of #stopshortening (dropsafe.crypticide.com)
• Don’t spend hours tweeting, says Twitter co-founder (telegraph.co.uk)
• How Twitter Can Improve Your Management In 140 Characters Or Less (businessinsider.com)
• Tell us about ‘the moment’ in 140 characters or fewer (timesunion.com)

Make Some Magic

How many times do you find yourself in a slump.  We  need to shake off the old and create a new way of generating new ideas.  We need to make some magic, create some sparks, razzle and dazzle, have some fun!  When I read this post from Seth Godin it got me to thinking:

An end of magic

Arthur C. Clarke told us, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Head back to the 1800s with a Taser or a Prius or an iPad and the townsfolk will no doubt either burn you at the stake or worship you.

So many doors have been opened by technology in the last twenty years that the word “sufficiently” is being stretched. If it happens on a screen (Google automatically guessing what I want next, a social network knowing who my friends are before I tell them) we just assume it’s technology at work. Hard to even imagine magic here.

via Seth’s Blog: An end of magic.

How to Make the Magic

This is a fun exercise to take your team or department through.  You can read about the process in one my previous posts “Exceptionalism: Focus on the Never“.  But basically, take several idea lists you’ve created and follow the “Innovation Bonus Exercise” in the above post.  Then take some of those ideas and create you own little science fiction episode of “Stargete”, “Sanctuary”, or “Startrek” in which your team runs accross a civilazation with advanced technology like some of the crazy  items on your list and they now have to revewrse engenere it to gain the benefits of the new found technology.

You might be surprised how many of the way-out-there crazy ideas turn into actionable realistic projects for your team to investigate further.

It’s a fun off-site day, especially if you have a bunch of techie scifi geeks on your team!

Good Hunting!

Ditch the Office: Next Week is National Telework Week

More than 35,000 companies and organizations have pledged to participate in the event. According to the official Telework Week Website, this would save an estimated $2,451,069 and more than 1,600 tons of pollutants from entering the atmosphere. Where these numbers come from is not entirely clear, but it stands to reason that fewer people commuting would help save money and reduce pollution to some extent.

National Telework Week is sponsored by Telework Exchange and Cisco, which makes telepresence and communication products, as well as other tools to facilate remote working.

via Ditch the Office: Next Week is National Telework Week.

To: Non-Teleworkers

I would suggest you spend some time understanding what it would take to perform your work outside the office.  As I would explain to past staffs, just because a weather day or some unplanned disaster occurred, project deadlines remain the same.  If you and your manager, or if you are the manager, haven’t spent enough time creating a work force that is flexible enough to handle the unique demands of performing all department requirements outside of the normal office space, you will find yourself in the awkward situation of losing value to the company.

Disaster Recovery Planning

OK, maybe it’s because my first job in a large IT organization was helping implement the annual remote disaster recovery test plans that I seem to gravitate to this fact.  I ask all my clients, if your office burned down this weekend, what you do on Monday.  Close shop?  Declare bankruptcy? Put everything on hold until you get a new office leased?  What about your paper records?  How about your leads?  How about your contracts in progress? Are you’re files stored off-site, and if so how long would it take to get them back and running at the new location?

These are all questions that should bring a leader or manager to the point of understanding how important teleworking can be to this scenario and their organization.

Improved Productivity

An important factor in improving your productivity is to design a work environment that helps you accomplish your work faster and smarter then your competition.  Well how about all the time you are not in the office?  Are you tied to a paper filing system … how could you change that? (Evernote.com)  Can your assistant and team members update file and get them to your quickly? (DropBox.com) Can your team, partners, and client see your calendar and plan accordingly?  (Google Calendar)  Can you conduct training sessions without having to be on-prem at the client’s location? (WebEx) Can you brainstorm with your team, partners, and clients regardless of their geographical location? (MindMeister.com)  Can you manage your To-Do list, or better yet, can your assistant manage your list for you? (Remember the Milk).

My guess the most difficult thing to change in your work space is the paper trails you live with.  You probably have become so accustomed to getting something in paper, working on it, then passing it on.  Reguardless, it is possible to go paperless.  It’s worth the time to implement also.

My Office

Over the past 10 years I have moved to a paperless process.  That is how I had to look at it.  I focused on the process, not the piece of paper or some other physical object.  Many of the web based applications I mentioned above I use today.  It allows me to complete my client requests while knowing that all the items I need are right at my fingertips.

So what have you done to make it possible to telework or telecomute?  I’d love to compare notes some time.

Good Hunting.

Marketing Lesson: Smartphones Outsell PCs

According to IDC, smartphone manufacturers shipped 100.9 million devices in the fourth quarter of 2010, while PC manufacturers shipped 92.1 million units worldwide. Or, more simply put, smartphones just outsold PCs for the first time ever.

via Smartphones Outsell PCs.

The above quote should not come as a surprise.  Change happens.  The real question becomes, “How are we preparing our clients, or shaping our projects/campaigns for this shift in the marketing landscape?”

Nostalgic Deja Vu

I was just telling one of my classes yesterday that even though the assignments are focusing on 8×11 documents they need to keep in the back of their mind the fact that their message might be seen on a small screen so always plan ahead.

This problem seems to be resurfacing constantly in the technology sector.  I can remember, in my brief stint in development, which now seems like three lifetimes ago, the revelation that the developers I worked with all had power user machines: top of the line CPU’s, memory maxed to capacity, every bay in the tower loaded with the largest hard drives that could be purchased, the biggest fasted monitor and video board that was sold at the time.  Not a real problem unless you consider the average ‘consumer’ of these developers were running on machines three generations behind, and were loaded with the least possible equipment to save costs for the company purchasing the hardware.

At least we were lucky to have a great software development manager, my brother-in-law, who demanded no code go into production unless it passed a speed test on a machine comparable to what the user base was currently using.  So we always kept a box in the corner of the office with the current configuration our clients had.  This created some awkward moments when the entire development team would watch as one of the developers would run the cpu/memory/video gauntlet with a piece of code that ran like greased lighting on his box.

Some Possible Action Items

Here are some things you should do right now:

• Test your existing site: get a smartphone, get several with different size screens, and test what you currently have out there being viewed by visitors to your site.
• Update Project Requirements: only accept work that can be used on a smartphone screen.  It will cost more, but if your site works and your competitor’s doesn’t, well that’s just priceless.
• Update Your Marketing Plan: Think mobile.  What items in your plan can change now as this wave begins to form, rather waiting until is past you and you are playing catchup.

Let me know if you’ve encountered feedback from your visitors about your site not working on smartphones and what you did to fix the problem.

Good Hunting.

Marketing Success – Jackie Chan Style

In “Success” magazine (Success.com February 2011) I found a great article on Jacky Chan. In this articles they list Jacky Chan’s 7 Traits for Success.  I found his thoughts fit nicely into internet marketing as well.  So I’m going to take his traits but add my own thoughts to each of his traits.

1) A willingness to crash and burn

I can’t stress enough that each internet marketer should try to fail, often, and big.  Two phrases come to mind “Go Big, or Go Home!” and “Failure is an event, not a title!”  Your embrace of risk might be the deciding factor that helps you find your niche.

2) A discipline for fitness

The key word being discipline.  Fitness is needed for everyone, but in marketing, we need focus, intentional creative disruption.  We often try many tactics for our clients.  We need to perform our duties in such a way that our measurements tell us which tactic produced the results and then build on them.

3) A disdain for wasted time

As Zig Ziglar wrote in his “See You at the Top” recording your activities and understanding what it takes to create positive results in critical.  Equally important is understanding what is not helping you create success.  Avoiding time wasters are equally important then improving skills.

4) A need for alternative opinions

It’s important we seek out and study other disciplines and build on the lessons of those.  Reading materials from other continents, or cultures.   Subscribe to blogs from other marketers on other countries.  Spend time discussing ideas on twitter or in blog comments.  It will improve your ability to communicate your positions to clients and prospects.

5) A set of high expectations

Never be afraid to say “That’s not good enough” and demand more of the outcomes of your tasks and tactics.  With internet marketing it often a series of “shoot, ready, aim” moments, but that doesn’t mean we can expect some impressive marksmanship!

6) An accurate moral compass

A marketer with no moral compass is simply a politician.  Enough said.

7) A relentless sense of humor

By all means, have some fun.  If you can’t laugh and laugh hard at your work, you will often find yourself  ‘chasing rabbits’.  I know we call it work, but push the limits, always create a version of your latest project that is an exaggeration of the client requirements.  By creating this outlier, you will find your other ideas less risky and at the same time take some risks.

So which one of these traits caught your eye?  Which of these traits are you doing well at?  Which one of these traits do you need to work on?  I’d love to get your feedback.

Enjoy!  Good Hunting!

Team Collaboration Gets Better

One of my favorite tools for team collaboration and idea collection is MindMeister.  I use it for organizing my thoughts on large blog posts (see Marketing Warfare: The iPad Battle and Mind Map: The iPad Battle), helping my boys organize their thoughts for their school writing assignments, and many more instances.  Because it can update the mind map in real time with many users signed into the map simultaneously, I have found it to be valuable when working on conference calls while trying to keep the team focused and not hindering the collection of tangent ideas in the middle of a thought stream that is being debated.

MindMeister 4.7 has been announced with some improved features:

• drag and drop attachments and images directly from their desktop to a selected node
• Google API used to view attached files rather then requiring you to download them
• a new social sidebar
• Auto Condensing of maps
• iCalendar task feed has been updated
• Team Edition will now find custom branding options

Check out MindMeister, I think it will help you organize your thoughts and projects.

Good Hunting

Business Twitter Ideas

I’ve been reading some interesting posts on Twitter tweets with the tag marketing and I have been trying to understand the relationship between the two. Mind you, I loved the posts, just not sure about how some people tag their work. No biggy really, but I wanted to see if I could come up with some examples of how Twitter could be used to create a brand, (personal or corporate), and if not, just have some fun with it.

First let me start by saying the two posts that got me thinking about this topic are Twittiquette by Ron Shevlin and Twitter for Business — What’s Appropriate? by philbernstein

Fun Stuff – BOSS Tweet

This idea, I originally, came up in the 90′s as “BOSS Cam” in which you place a wireless video camera on your boss’ forehead and can see where he is all the time on a PC window. I’ve adapted this concept to Twitter Tweets, but it does require a RFID implementation of sensors throughout your campus and RFID markers in your security cards used to gain access to buildings and rooms.

With this implementation you will get BOSS Tweets when the following happens:

• Parking Lot Entry – The Boss has arrived – you have about 15 minutes to look busy.
• Building Entry – You now have about 7 minutes to make your office look like you’re really busy.
• On the floor – Have your boss’ cup of copy ready in hand and ready to give
• Movement Tweet – he’s moving about the building and you know where.
• Mining Tweet Alarm – uncomfortable levels of methane are in his office, STAY AWAY! (methane monitoring equipment sold separately)
• BOSS BOSS Tweet – your boss just met with his boss, HIDE – WORK IS COMING YOUR WAY!
  • Note: use Movement Tweets to evade your boss for the entire day if necessary.
• Parking Lot Egress – time to stop hiding from your boss and get some work done real quick and go home.

OK, another example of American ingenuity and exceptionalism in the can!

Branding Exercise – Project Tweet

In this example, your team has landed a new client. You want to impress on them how great your company is, and especially how great they are at projects like the one the just won. You explain to your new client that you will be using Twitter to keep them updated as the project progresses through the different stages of project management.

Some things they can expect to see in the Project Tweet:

• Meeting Titles – and who attended
• Meeting action items – post meeting
• Key milestones or meeting action items delivered
• Gratuitous comments from the team stating how smart the client was for picking them!
• Documents updated on the shared project library
• Lots of positive statements with the client’s staff names included so they are all sitting around waiting for their names to show up on a tweet.
• “Hey check this out” messages asking them to head to the team web site and review something

I know some of the themes of twitter BLOG posts have been about ‘too much’ tweets, but in this scenario, the more tweets focused on the project, the better you look.

Good Hunting,

See Also

Twitter’s Design Flaw