IDEAS

BTW – We agree

Peter Shankman, the founder of Help a Reporter Out (HARO) and The Geek Factory, gave the people at the NJ Business Marketing Association a great talk on how he thinks about and uses social media to make his businesses successful. Thank you Peter, thank you BMA and thank you fellow Lwer Derrick, Christine, and David for attending with me.

Here’s what I took away from the talk

Grow your personal brand
Peter was big on the individual. Businesses don’t do business with people. People do business with people. Your business is a reflection of the people that run it. He wants everyone to develop their personal brand through social concepts like texting (twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc.), phone calling, and (yes) snail mailing notes. A quick side note on snail mailing notes. Last month we were hiring for project managers the people who are standing out in my head are the ones to followed up with a personal hand written note. Its all about doing something different to capture the minds of people. So go forth and start building your personal brand, its going to define you in the future.

Plan for backup??!!?
Peter made a great point stating that he was always told to “have a backup plan”. Why? Why not concentrate on a the plan for success? It’s better than concentrating on the plan for failure. My take is that when you have to plan for failure, what you are planning is costly thus increasing its risk. In Peter’s world (and ours) big things evolve from small things. Start small, start fast, and start now.

Information is free
The world as we knew it was broadcasted to us from only a few sources. Print, radio, and television were all broadcasted from a few to many. The internet is making information free and creating a many to many relationship. Breaking news doesn’t come from CNN anymore, it comes from twitter. In this world we are creating views of the world at the exact moment it happens and sharing that view with people all over the world.

Ask your customers, how they want to get information
There is so much information out there and so many ways to take it in. We listen to podcasts on the commute into work, we read blogs with the morning coffee, we check facebook status when we come home and sit down. We have developed routines of digesting information. So how do you get your information to your customers? Ask them. Talk to your customers often and ask them how they would like to get your information.

Peter says the Social Media is having other people do public relations for you. Here are is 4 fours of social media:

1. Be transparent - it will help you connect with people and if you don’t say it, people will still find out
2. Be relevant – media is fractured so ask your customers how and what they like to hear from you
3. Be brief - our attention spans 140 characters at a time (or 2.7 seconds)
4. Stay top of mind – talk to people often

Again thank you Peter for the great talk.

Lifehacker has a great post up about the facts and many myths about browser cookies.

Here are the facts, and myths they cover:

• “Myth: Cookies Spy On You and Track Everything You Are Doing”
• “Myth: Cookies Are Viruses or Spyware and Create Spam and Popups”
• “Fact: Spyware and Viruses Can Read Your Cookies, but So What?”
• “Fact: Cookies are Used by Advertisers to Track Sites You Visit”
• “Fact: Disabling Cookies Doesn’t Matter If You Have Flash Enabled”

The bottom line is that cookies aren’t really a problem, and blocking them will generally make your life more difficult.

I strongly recommend you give it a look – Fact and Fiction: The Truth About Browser Cookies

Syndicated by The Geek Whisperer

Yesterday, I attended an event by the New Jersey Communications Advertising and Marketing Association (NJCAMA). Met some good people and heard some great things. The guest speaker for the evening was Geno Church from Brains on Fire. Geno gave a great presentation on word of mouth marketing (WOMM) and movement building where he took us through a few case studies with Best Buy and Fiskar (yes, the orange handle scissor people).

Here are a few notable quotables that stuck with me and my notes.

Everything is crap… Unless you have a strategy behind it

Social media is not WOMM

People trust people

Tactics bog us down

“No! If you build it we won’t come”

90% of WOMM occurs offline

Why should people be motivated to participate and share? Why people tell stories

• support a cause
• enable an experience
• communicate the ethos of a brand

Geno captured everything quite eloquently when he says that we should create movements not campaigns. Then he went on to explain lessons learned about movements

1. Movements are built on passion
2. Movements begin with the first conversation
3. Movements have inspirational leadership
4. Movements have a barrier for entry (invite only)
5. Movements empower people with knowledge
6. Movements encourage ownership
7. Movements have powerful identities
8. Movements live born on and off line
9. Movements make advocates feel like rockstars
10. Movements get results

The first real challenger to the iPhone looks like it will be Droid. I haven’t read anything but great stuff coming from the people who have seen the über smart.

It has an iPhone look complete with touch screen, but it also has a slide out QWERTY keyboard (WIN)

The device is made by Motorola; powered by Google’s mobile operating system, Android; and it will be sold through Verizon, thus it will be on Verizon’s awesome network.

Droid will run the latest version of Android, which looks incredible (see The Boy Genius’s write-up).

If the hardware reports are true, then Droid will have the same processor core as the iPhone, making it far more powerful than previous Android phones (Engadget).

Google CEO Eric Schmidt is decrying Android’s imminent explosion in the marketplace, while analysts’ are talking about Android’s potential for market domination by 2012.

Verizon is also going all out with their marketing. In the lead up to the announcement of Droid, they have been bashing AT&T’s flimsy network with their cleaver, “There’s a map for that” ads.

Then their Droid announcement ad launched a flurry of attacks on the iPhone’s limitations.

“The Droid poses a different and more significant challenge to the iPhone than any other phone to date. The Palm Pre could have been that challenger, but it lacked the Verizon network, and users were unimpressed with the hardware. According to people who’ve handled the device, the Droid is the most sophisticated mobile device to hit the market to date from a hardware standpoint. When you combine that with the Verizon network, you’ve got something that is most definitely a challenger to the Jesus phone” (TechCrunch).

If Droid is everything that Motorola, Google, Verizon, and the tech writers are claiming it should be incredibly exciting (The claims are pretty much confirmed). Better still, Droid should be available within a few weeks.

Pay close attention to the oddly placed umlaut under the "r"

It’s clear to me that Droid means business because it has an unnecessary umlaut in its name.

~ syndicated by TheGeekWhisperer.com

Looks like Microsoft is going to wipe out the antivirus industry by doing one simple thing, give anti-virus software out for free.  I heard about this a few weeks ago, but wouldn’t believe it until I saw it, and here it is:

“About Microsoft Security Essentials

Microsoft Security Essentials provides real-time protection for your home PC that guards against viruses, spyware, and other malicious software.

Microsoft Security Essentials is a free* download from Microsoft that is simple to install, easy to use, and always kept up to date so you can be assured your PC is protected by the latest technology. It’s easy to tell if your PC is secure — when you’re green, you’re good. It’s that simple.

Microsoft Security Essentials runs quietly and efficiently in the background so that you are free to use your Windows-based PC the way you want—without interruptions or long computer wait times.”

Get software here

Shout out to David Spira for sending me the link!

Well, I guess its not a secret before. I’m now salivating to see the Apple version even more. The competition will be good for driving prices down.

Check out the full article Gizmodo, Courier: First Details of Microsoft’s Secret Tablet, there is also a video that shows the interface and interactions.

You might have noticed that our website is a little different. Three-fifths of this company site is unedited, user(employee)-generated content.

Our homepage displays photos that we post. They range from beautiful, crisp artistic photography, to fun and fuzzy iPhone pics of our lives.

When you click on “Company,” we don’t have a boilerplate or description of Local Wisdom… you see our own idiosyncratic profiles, written in our own words. We are the company. Our skills, interests, knowledge, and many many quirks tied together by a passion for the Internet is the Company.

The blog is whatever we post. Individually, anyone can post anything, at anytime. Our lives, our thoughts, our photographs, all of this stuff makes up the Local Wisdom brand. I’m new to the company (I started about nine weeks ago) and this is my first post… no one has reviewed it.

“We’re so lucky we don’t have to create the brand out of thin air. We just tell the truth and the brand builds itself.”

That’s Johnnie Moore quoting Thomas Mahon while he argues that businesses should “get out of people’s way and they’ll organise themselves more intelligently than you can.”

We build websites… the brand builds itself.

What else can I say… the missing stakes really put it over the top…

This is from InformationisBeutiful.net a gem blog that I happened to come across not too long ago.

Its by the very talented David McCandless visual & data journalist from London.

Great place for data junkies and data geeks like me.

If you like the the Twitter one, you’ll love everything else on the blog.

Love the Shift Happens series. Always combine 3 things I like to see on my computer: good design, cool transitions, and impactful statistics.

Read more about it here.