Category: Brain Buster

I had a chance last week to chat with Mac McIntosh last week, I first met him a few years back when he was speaking at a MarketingSherpa event, he came away as the highest ranked speaker of the event and stood ahead of the rest of the crowd. I stole one of his techniques immediately – he was on the second day of the event and he kept notes of the previous presenters and integrated some of their points into his slide deck on the fly. By building on the presenters before him he had a distinct advantage over a presenter who just showed up for their time slot.

The reason I bring this up is that Mac has been doing consulting for years and doing it for a living.  A sharp contrast from “social media experts” who sheepishly admit that there is not enough going around yet to “quit your day job”. This ties into two things that I’ve seen bouncing around lately – one is the idea of Internet Famous, Dirt Poor. There’s a growing number of people who have thousands of followers and are well know worldwide, yet have no way to monetize this. Unless you are famous for a reason that is going to bring you some money all you are left with is an overflowing inbox and maybe even some stalkers.

On the other hand, there is some karma at work. If you have a network of thousands, there’s some benefits that indirectly can help you out. The next time you are looking for a job you won’t have to wade through a bunch of Monster Postings or spend a lot of time digging. You can also get most questions answered quickly by tapping into the shared wisdom around you. But again – nothing concrete to pay the mortgage and bring the box of Yodels home for the kids.

The other thing rattling around in my brain lately is the idea of things that are boring, or incredible difficult (better yet, both) as things that generate value. The theory is that the more challenging or terrible the task, the better you can be paid for it. Anyone who’s had to call a plumber on a holiday after 10pm knows what I am talking about.

So here’s something to think about – are celebrities only walking and talking media products? Now that the amount of media that can be created has been expanded to everyone and the cost of transmitting it near zero, will celebrities be devalued the same way music has?

It’s all about boring. Talking with Mac

Today I learned about CrossFit from Peter Shankman, a fitness program built on this principle: “Develop the capacity of a novice 800-meter track athlete, gymnast, and weightlifter and you’ll be fitter than any world-class runner, gymnast, or weightlifter.”

And you’re already asking how this relates to marketing… but it does.

About 5 years ago I first started learning about low carbohydrate diets and it changed my life. Up until that point I had lived the average American life of gaining a pound a year after turning 21. This was even with being more active than average, including a Boston Marathon, over 300 miles with the Boston NikeTown Running club, skiing, golf, blah, blah, blah.

The problem with the low carbohydrate diet is that it goes against everything we have been sold for years. Between filling up the aisles of the supermarket with processed flower and sugar, and getting a food pyramid built by the groups lobbying for the grain industry, there’s been no profit in telling you otherwise (unless you are a guy named Atkins selling books, or you are sharp enough to come up with a brand called South Beach).

Now I can actually affect my weight, something that I was not able to do before that point. My only problem now is my addiction to sugar and baked goods (which weighs heavier on me now because I am making a conscious decision to be a fat slob rather than being able to cry victim of my metabolism, natural weight or whatever excuse is vogue). The good news is that spring is here and it’s time to take off the winter weight, and begin training for the Falmouth Road Race.

As part of that I’ll be setting a new Nike+ group as the race approaches and would be interested in any training stories, and I’m going to try and learn the CrossFit exercises. Hopefully I won’t injure myself doing an inverted hang or some other doofus move. Anyone fatblogging, feel free to step up, or throw down a gauntlet. And check out the CrossFit blog for daily workouts. Yes, that is not an error, averaging over 400 comments per post.

Both low carbohydrate diets and CrossFit started to come together in the 70’s. Both of these brands had a fundamental truth behind them – the ability to get results, but without the Marketing machine of a profitable industry behind them, it’s taken 30 years to get to me. Think about that when you are trying to measure the velocity of word-of-mouth.

Amanda Gravel posted on this insane Firefox plugin. Check it out.

Drew is wondering why he is giving away so much for free. In other words – how can you make it as a consultant when you have to give stuff away for free to get attention and respect.

I had two answers to this that came up – the first is that if you charged for every bit of good advice that would make you a lawyer and you’d know that Satan’s already called “next” on your afterlife. You know that in your heart it’s good to give valuable advice and maybe you believe you’re scoring some karma. A incredibly rare example of a Marketer sleeping better than someone else.

I choose to take a slightly different view – rather than see my advice as a product with a price tag on it, I see my time as the commodity. I give out advice, and if it’s good the demand will grow to the point where I run out of time (my tipping point), at that point I can engage the meter and let the bidding begin. Even if I never reach the point where the advice I share is making the mortgage payment at least I’ve gathered some karma, made some friends, and I’m still not a lawyer.

There’s been a fair amount of discussion about how much time newspapers on print and the 6pm news have left. I’m planning the party for 2/26/13. Yes, 2013 is only 5 years away. Where will you be and what will you be up to?

The big question is: Is Mahalo the next generation search engine? I’m starting to think the answer is yes. I’m already to the point of taking traffic from Wikipedia for granted. For any real search you can presume that there will be a wikipedia page in the top 10. The number one critique of Wikipedia is that eventually the editors that patrol the site will become bored, and since they are volunteers they get tired of doing work for no paycheck eventually.

So, my prediction: As the freetards get bored with wikipedia, the folks who would like to eat and have more extravagant luxuries such as health coverage will go over to Mahalo to get paid for doing the same quality of work. I think the fusion of Digg-type functionality with the distrubuted content generation of Wikipedia is a winning combination.

I am going to an event called Blogger Social in New York in April. One of the attendees, Steve Woodruff has pulled off the ultimate link bait and is doing profiles of the attendees so that you can learn about who is going to be there, before you get to the event. As a person with a last name that starts with “W” this is one of the few times I am getting lucky, I should be up there close to the event date and after the whole world is checking his site (assuming of course he makes it through the list before dying from exhaustion). This is a great example of social media in action, it’s quite possible that the 70 attendees at the event can get to know each other to some degree, even before attending the event.

Today featured Matthew Bailey, who has done a great piece of research on red shirted crewmen in Star Trek, and uses it as an example of  analytics in action. He also cites Edward Tufte, probably the closest thing to a rock star that you can find in the world of graphing (and by extension, economics).

There were two things the red shirt analysis brought to light for me. One is the recurring theme in marketing of testing raising more questions than answers. I find it very common to set up a test and have it raise additional questions that weren’t even considered in the first round. The other is “causation vs. correlation”, I think the last discussion I read on that was in Freakonomics, the fact that characteristics that a group of individuals have in common is not necessarily the reason they are grouped together. For example: yes, there were many red shirted crewmen that died, but that’s because the red shirt signifies the security team, people put in dangerous situations. There’s nothing inherently dangerous about a red shirt versus a blue one.

When causation is confused with correlation, this can lead to problems. In the past I have worked at organizations that would look at this data, ship some blue shirts to the security team, and declare victory.

Twitter invites keep coming in. I have a normal routine, I click through and see who the person is. Anybody with more followers than they are following is fine with me. If you are equal or have 100+ more, it depends on if I know or like you, a highly subjective test.

Then there are the Spitters (Spam Twitters) who are following 2,000 people and have 3 followers. Those go to the junk bin.

Until today.

I got an invite from 5min_tech,  and they follow 2,000 more than follow them. I was about to relegate them to the clearing at the end of the path, until I read the tweets:

How to boost firefox speed? How to buy a computer? How to make flaming logos in Photoshop?

All things that, when flowing through my river of tweets, I might be interested in. Or at least more interesting than “Watch a sock puppet endorse ooVoo. Seriously!”

They got by the rules and defenses by giving some value to the customer – let that marinate for a while (a la Clarence).