Let’s start with a quote from Margaret Mead:

Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

Now consider how most people (and, I mean the VAST majority) go through their daily grind with blinders on…. Not just physical blinders …€“ seen in people’s general unwillingness to help each other …€“ but also psychological blinders … where people seem to just not care about their fellow man and the impact they, as individuals, might have on the world.

Now consider a post by blog evangelist Robert Scoble where he talks about the services being offered by PodTech.net and the future of what we call “television”…. He tips his hand about how he views this emerging technology, NOT by talking in acronyms or techie-ese, but by pointing out that these technologies can make a difference in how we view the world…. He describes a new divide…. Not a divide between the “haves” and “have nots” but between people who are aware of what’s going on in the world and those others wearing blinders.

If you’re finding that you’ve got blinders on, please take them off for just a moment to see the world around you…. In fact, it’s possible to keep them off permanently in your business life and affiliate your marketing efforts with a worthy social cause…. Heed Margaret Mead’s advice and the world can truly be changed.

This advice has been brought to you by the liberal streak in what is normally a pretty middle-of-the-road kind of guy…. You may now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

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A hearty thank you to my peeps. They played host today for a local high school student who visited our office as a job shadow. Alexandra Wexler, a 15 year old at Moultonborough Academy, has dreams of getting into the design biz. After a one hour Q&A session with me about our company and her career plans, she dove right into the ’shadow’ part of the day and helped Katie Oddy, one of our designers, complete two drafts for a new web site design. Aided by Sandy Pogue, our Senior Designer, and Renee Capen, our Project Manager, the designs came out smmmokin’.

Interested in getting into this business yourself? What I told Ali isn’t rocket science but I think it’s good advice. Here’s the Reader’s Digest version of what I told her;

• Master your craft …€” learn as much about the tools as you can, as quickly as you can (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, etc.) Know that you’ll nevvvvvver stop learning.
• Learn from the pros …€” There’s design all around us! Billboards, advertising, magazines, flyers, packaging … it’s endless. By reading design journals (Communication Arts, Adweek, Metropolis, GA Monthly, Print Magazine, GD USA, etc.) and books on design, one can visually absorb the styles and visual techniques of the pros, and then (here’s the hard part) recognize that the majority of design that surrounds us is actually pretty bad.
• Learn to communicate verbally …€” It’s certainly a visual medium BUT you’ll need to communicate your ideas to peers, clients, bosses and affiliates … everyone from the smallest solo-preneur up to the multi-gajillion dollar CEO. This includes phone consultations, presentations to groups, speeches, etc. This is probably the most important yet under appreciated skill in our industry.
• Start your portfolio sooner, rather than later …€” By starting her portfolio now, she’ll have a 6 or 7 year leg up on her competitors by the time she gets out of college. I’m not talking about ’sit at home and make up a brochure’ kind of pieces … or a ‘I did this in my design class’ kind of project. I’m talking about going out and finding a needy organization or company that would LOVE to have her do design real work for free (or really cheap). Some examples; business cards for a local bait shop … a web site for a local quilting club … a flyer for a Kiwanis event … the list is ENDLESS. By doing real work now, she’ll learn real world challenges and have to make real world decisions. In 6 or 7 years, she’ll be doing real world design!!! AND, she’ll have a much better portfolio to boot. That’s what I’m talkin’ about.

Ali … It was a pleasure having you in our office for the day!! I hope you learned a lot. P.S. Don’t tell anyone about how nutsy everyone is here.

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Rohit Bhargava and Robin Good both give a great review of the relevancy of Yahoo! Pipes.

Here’s my quickie example of what Yahoo Pipes can do; Imagine a tool that takes a football photo from Flikr, matches it up with the latest sporting news events from CNN and then feeds up the best deals on flight and hotel information to the upcoming matches in your area. Pipes allows the ultimate mashing of hugely disparate resources from all over the web in an unlimited number of ways. Coooooooooooool! It’s kinda like an RSS feed on steroids.

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Got a creative mind? Are you into marketing? Wanna play?

We’ll be attending the Global Marketing Summit in Myrtle Beach in a few weeks and will be rubbing elbows with some marketing “big wigs”. Part of what we’re doing is creating an “event” of sorts that revolves around the old joke “How many <blanks> does it take…?” For our event (duh), the specific question is:

How many marketers does it take to screw in a light bulb?

If you have a creative answer to this, visit our Squidoo lens and let us know how wacky you really are! We’ll be giving away prizes for our pick of the best answer. GOOD LUCK!

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There are subtle differences in how people take in and process business information. Some people hoard it like it’s a priceless stash of gold. Some people reflect it back to the rest of the world (a la blogging). But, there are a special few who recognize that sharing specific information with specific people effectively sets up a powerful system of relationship building.

Here’s the idea: If you’re already a serious business person (I’ll assume you are if you’re reading this), then it’s also likely that you spend quite a bit of time staying on top of your game; researching, learning, studying your craft, thinking about new and innovative ways to improve your processes, products & services, etc. etc. In all this time, do you also think about who else might benefit from having that information … including your competitors? If not, make that shift.

Several things will happen:
…€¢ You’ll be developing a relationship built on mutual respect and comradery
…€¢ You’ll be seen as a synergist instead of one jockeying for competitive position
…€¢ You’ll find that the idea is reciprocated ten fold!

Take it up a notch: Give people specific ideas of the kinds of information you’d like to receive. I commonly tell people to send me URLs and images of the “top 1%” or the “bottom 1%” of website designs and logos they encounter. Let me tell you, I’ve had some doooozies sent my way because of this one simple request. This request is simple enough that anyone can do it, and it’s an idea that may cross their mind A LOT.

Similarly, Tim Sanders talks about how Mike Rawlings, CEO of Pizza Hut, will give up a lunch hour to call two of his customers just to find out their view of his company and services AND to ask them about their “life situation”. This is a VERY inspirational story and worthy of watching the video. The point is that Mike gets the importance of relationship building and then takes it to a whole new level.

Tim describes in the post preceeding the one cited above how he uses frequent travel hours (flights, cab rides, hotel lobbies, etc.) to connect with total strangers. Tim, indeed, has The Likeability Factor.

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In our freebie marketing report Go Nuts in 2007 we talk about taking your brand and marketing to a whole new level (assuming you want your business to do better in 2007 than it did in 2006). A more fundamental question crossed my mind this past weekend while waiting for a plane at LaGuardia. The question is not “do you WANT to do better in 2007?” … more to the point, it’s “are you mentally READY to do better in 2007?” Some business owners want to do better simply to make more money (nothing wrong with that), however, this is without consideration to what state of mind will best allow them to get there.

Here’s what happened at the airport: We were delayed due to weather and were stranded for over four hours. My friend pulled out a Soduko puzzle to while away the time. I commented that I had tried them and didn’t really find them enjoyable. He insisted that I try another one but gave me a difficult one. I was immediately stumped and had to be walked through some of the more advanced logic. OK, I got hooked. With extra time, we started talking about these types of mental exercises and had a lengthy discussion of how they change your overall outlook AND mental health.

Shankar Vedantam writes in the Washington Post that a new study conducted by JAMA, again, supports the long standing knowledge that exercising your brain decreases the likelihood that you’ll suffer from brain capacity decline such as Alzheimers. Good news, indeed!

In an unrelated blog post, Seth Godin made a casual observation of the behavior of several people and made the comment that “Adults are the new kids“. In one case, he observed a fifty year old man doing card tricks for a store clerk. My suspicion is that this gentleman has a much more youthful outlook on life, has a lower stress level and will live longer than the average CEO.

The point? To be at the top of your business game, be sure to exercise. Not just your body, but your mind AND your attitude! PICK A CARD!

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It seems like I’ve been posting a lot about the web lately.  Considering some web dynamics in the past year or so, and how they impact business, it’s not too surprising.  Here’s another wave … hang on kids, this one’ll be a doozy.

Mash together a discussion of Web 3.0

The AndroidTech.com blog describes it as “what the next phase of the Internet will be … it will bring together advanced technologies that include the semantic web, adaptive datamining, and shared microtasking where all of us will build the next layer of intelligence into the web.”

with the goings on at Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (still in beta)

The Mechanical Turk is a social networking site where members are asked to perform tasks that computers currently can’t.  Members get paid to perform these tasks, called HITs (Human Intelligence Task). 

So, the next wave is to refine the differences between computing skills and human skills … to keep technology moving in a direction where the gap continually gets smaller with the advancements of Artificial Intelligence.  Let’s just not let Arnold Schwarzenegger get his hands on a time machine, eh?

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