I’m in the middle of reading a very funny novel right now. I also have two other books on my nightstand, and I haven’t managed to get past page 20 in either, though I hear they’re very good – Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation and John Jantsch’s The Referral Engine. I’ve read Joel’s blog (same title as his book) and I’m familiar with Jantsch via his previous book, Duct Tape Marketing.
On top of that, I wake up many mornings and read Brogan’s blog as well as the blogs of Outspoken Media, Bruce Clay, and a half dozen other individuals and organizations with whom you’re familiar if you’ve recognized most of the names here, or with whom you’re not if you had to go read everybody’s bio.
I walked by Scott Stratten’s book in the bookshop today and it hit me: everybody’s telling us more or less the same two things:
If you want to run a business you must be willing to take some risks, work some long hours, and in general bust some ass.
You need to be on social media, and you have to interact, giving away a lot for free and boosting other people.
Well, everybody except Connors and Smith, who just needed a way to extend their PowerPoint presentations into book form.
I’m becoming a bit jaded about it, I guess. It’s not only the same information (albeit sometimes with slightly different action items), it’s the same people going around in a circle. I picked up Joel’s and Jantsch’s books because Outspoken recommended them. Kabani’s people told me I’d probably enjoy it after they saw I read Brogan’s book – and it turns out he wrote the introduction for her. I still recommend Vaynerchuk’s book to people seeking their passion and Trust Agents to people who just don’t understand social media ROI. I just don’t feel like reading anything this circle’s putting out right now. It’s not making me think about anything in a new way, and it’s not leading me to any sort of creativity.
It leads me to wonder: Are we all (including the people I’ve mentioned here), writing for ourselves? For like-minded people? For famous people to write our introductions or to give us blurbs?
I’ve been a big fan of Chuck Palahniuk since reading Choke a few years ago. I swallowed the rest of his novels and one of his nonfiction collections pretty quickly, and have been faithfully waiting for each novel since.
His new novel, Tell-All is a return to what got me hooked – a somewhat ridiculous but still semi-plausible story line with an ending that makes the reader say, “Wait, did that just happen? Let me read those last 20 pages again.”
It’s been a long time coming for me. I was disappointed that Rant turned into a cheap sci-fi joke at the end; I thought Snuff was a total throw-away book that probably sounded good after a bottle or two of wine; and Pygmy’s redemption-of-the-villain ending was way too shiny happy for me.
This is supposed to be from the guy whose every review called him funny and subversive – I guess that’s what happens when your first novel is Fight Club.
And so.
Katherine Kenton is an Elizabeth Taylor type. Hollywood actress, famous leading lady, lots of husbands (or “was-bands”) in her wake. The novel is narrated as a tell-all by Hazie Coogan, the ugly girl who was a better actress than her Miss Kathy when they were younger, but she could never compete for parts with those good looks. So Hazie becomes the assistant. She’s a maid. She dresses and coaches Ms. Kenton. She’s there when all the husbands die, and when young strapping Webster Carlton Westward III comes into Kathy’s life. And she’s there to bury Katherine Kenton when the time comes and publish her best-seller, because anybody who’s ever lived in a star’s shadow has everything but the last chapter written and ready to go to the printer.
Tell-All brings back the we-thought-she-was-beautiful character types I loved in Invisible Monsters, which really needs to be made into a movie, if anyone’s got backing money to commit, since it seems to start off then falter every few years.
Anyway, read this book. It’s summer, it’s the perfect time for some fun fiction, and this definitely fits the bill.
Next up for me, I’m going back to getting serious with John Jantsch’s The Referral Engine.
You’ve heard of Jeffrey Hayzlett (Twitter). He’s the Chief Marketing Officer of Kodak, he’s owned a bunch of businesses, and he’s been on Celebrity Apprentice (whatever that is).
I came into possession of his book The Mirror Test: Is Your Business Really Breathing? because when I was at the 140 Character Conference back in April, he gave a bunch away to people who came early the second day. He asked people to give to the American Heart Association in exchange. Awesome.
Hayzlett’s book is a must-read if you’re in business. He writes in plain English, pulls no punches, and has no problem telling his readers as much about his failures (like the pheasant farm he owned) as his successes (like the print shop he did well at).
As someone who recently started a business, there’s some good stuff in here. For example, always ask for the sale. Don’t imply that you’re looking for business and you hope the person in front of you will buy. Ask for the sale.
I’m trying some highly customized direct mail marketing – not something I even would have thought of if I hadn’t read this book. If people know you put the effort in to sell them a package customized to their actual needs – and to them as people – they’re more likely to buy. Especially if they have a piece of paper in front of them. (I’ll let you know how that goes.)
Another lesson Hayzlett learned along the way: don’t give away the meat. You can be very involved in the community. You can be extremely generous. But if you make widgets, don’t give away the widgets: people won’t value them as much. Give away widget accessories, or donate money for an organization to buy your widgets, but don’t give the widgets away. Period.
He also reminds business owners to ask themselves the tough questions and to really test their teams to make sure they have the right people on board to represent them.
If you’re in business, or want to be, read this book. Definitely worth it.
The problem with writing a book about anything social media is that social media is changing really fast. The book Twitter Revolution, for instance, came out in paperback in October 2008. Twitter has undergone so many changes since then, I can only imagine about 10% of that book is still relevant.
What Kabani does with Zen is start with the basics – how to use Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, including how to set up your profiles and how to be found – and at the end of her book she gives you a link to ZenOfSocialMedia.com and a pass code to get into the online version of the book, which is updated as new information becomes available.
Which means that when Facebook changes its look and procedures, suggestions for making your Facebook profile great are updated in the book.
My one hope for Kabani is that she hasn’t buried herself (or her interns) under decades of book updates.
In addition to how-tos for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, Kabani offers some good general purpose tips, like outline your overall social media strategy and know what you want to achieve for your business before you send your first tweet.
She also enrolls David Kaminski of Web Video University to write a chapter on video.
Next up for me is going to be The Mirror Test by Kodak’s chief marketing officer, Jeffrey Hayzlett.
I’d like to say I have a love-hate relationship with books about management, but it’s really more a dislike-hate relationship. I dislike reading them, and I hate getting them, because usually it means your manager is telling you, “I’m about to make your work life miserable, and if you read this book, you’ll understand why, since I can’t deal with explaining it to you in language you’ll understand.”
Enter Journey to the Emerald City: Achieve a Competitive Edge by Creating a Culture of Accountability by Roger Connors and Tom Smith. You’ll want to watch The Wizard of Oz before you read the book; you’ll understand the point a little better.
In L. Frank Baum’s story, Dorothy and her companions seek out the wonderful Wizard of Oz in hopes that he can give them things they’ve been looking for (a heart, a brain, courage, a way home), when really they had it all along. By sending them to defeat the witch, the Wizard has shown them they can conquer anything, and all they had to do was step up to the plate and get it done using the tools they had.
Connors and Smith take this and tell managers to set concrete goals for their employees, and then have some sort of accountability system in place for everyone from the top to the bottom. They create several models, but a lot of it has to do with making your employees feel comfortable voicing their opinions, and with getting managers to do some self-reflection when they hear criticism of the way things have been going.
I’d recommend reading this book at a management level or higher first. If your company plans to give this book to front-line employees, they need some background as to why they’re getting this book – otherwise it feels very much like their employers are saying, “We’re struggling and it’s your fault. Turn us around.”
I finally read The Catcher in the Rye last year. I probably should have read it in high school – I was much more likely to learn from it then than I am now. Of course, the books I was actually taking my cies from then were Brave New World and Animal Farm, and they’ve had a much bigger impact on worldview than Catcher ever could.
Let me say I mean that purely from a story and character perspective. I could have learned a lot more about writing from The Catcher in the Rye than I ever could with three years of high school composition.
You probably know that author J.D. Salinger died last week. I learned about it on Twitter, from posts like this.
Salinger’s family and close friend and neighbors will no doubt miss him. But why the oh nos from the general public? Not only will you not miss him as a person – you almost certainly never met him (this guy barely did) and probably never heard, read or saw an interview with him, what with the seclusion and all – you won’t miss him as a writer: if his Wikipedia page is to be believed, his last work was published in 1965. His death did not deprive the world of forthcoming wondrous literature the way, say, David Foster Wallace’s death did (or didn’t, what with the posthumous novel).
Salinger belonged uniquely to the people he chose to surround himself with. He is their loss, and they have requested privacy, even noting there won’t be a funeral. He is clearly one who lived by the words he wrote. I hope he does have people to miss.
When I wrote about the things I liked and disliked about the Kindle for iPhone app, one thing I hadn’t tried was the Notes function.
It’s the ability to leave a note in the margin, and stick a Post-It Note on the page so that you know where you left the note.
My brief review on Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith is that it’s important for you if you’re trying to use the Internet to advance your business, your career, or your brand. I think the same thing about Gary Vaynerchuk’s book Crush It.
Both have action items, and both will help you – greatly – if you understand how to apply the lessons these folks share to your own situation. These books have action items, but they are not how-to-become-the-next-Chris-Brogan-or-Gary-Vaynerchuk books. If we all tried to be the next Chris Brogan, we’d have a world full of Chris Brogans and nobody to manufacture car parts or make peanut butter.
Lowell D’Souza gives a brief overview of Trust Agents. Go read the section numbered 1-6 (the rest is D’Souza commenting that the book is so-so, but then, he was looking for a how-to), and then come back.
These are the notes I, er, wrote in the margins.
Action item: Build a listening station. This is a step-by-step list on how to keep track of what people are saying about you or your business. This is not just a matter of running an occasional Google search for yourself; Brogan and Smith teach you how to set up a feed reader and get search feeds from various searches sent to you easily.
You don’t have to be born with it. Forget the people who say you have to be born with a talent to be good at something. You get good at something by practice. Sure, chess might come easy to some people, but if the other people work hard at it, they’ll do just as well.
Be good to people. Here’s a direct quote.
In this chapter, we’re talking about taking advantage of systems, not people. People are real, have real feelings, and always deserve respect. Always consider what’s right and wrong when it comes to this stuff.
You Win by Having Goals. This is something that I will be working hard on in 2010. I understand the tools, I just have to set milestones that I want to achieve using the tools.
There’s plenty of room on the Web. You don’t have to directly compete with someone. There is plenty of room out there to work together, or do something similar, or collaborate, but not try to do the exact same thing someone else is doing. Find your niche.
Know which systems are open. Brogan and Smith use Pacman and Ms. Pacman to explain this concept. Pacman is a known system. As boards progress, prizes progress predictably, and a perfect game consists of a set number of points. Ms. Pacman, though, uses a random prize progression – at any given point, you may get a 100-point cherry or a 1,000-point banana (I made up the numbers, don’t trash Brogan and Smith for it if they’re wrong).
In real life, mastering a closed system (Pacman) means you are the best at something. Cal Ripken Jr? Best at playing consecutive baseball games. Barry Bonds? Best at hitting home runs (steroids or not – he has a number to prove it). But who’s best at walking down Main Street in Toledo? It’s an open system. We don’t even know what being the best at walking down Main Street in Toledo looks like – it’s all trial and error, and we’re kind of making the game up as we go along.
Action Item: Affiliate Marketing Brogan and Smith outline some affiliate marketing strategies.
Forge partnerships. I don’t think this needs any expanding. If you want to know what Brogan and Smith have to say, read the book.
Agent zero. We all have our personalities and roles in organizations. Agent Zero is the person who connects the people who need to know each other. I’m glad there’s a name for this.
Maintain relationships. I’m horrible at this. I’ve been getting better, and Brogan and Smith offer good tips (like pay attention to the birthday calendar function in Facebook).
Yes and. I love this concept. The idea is that someone says something, and you not only agree, but build. An improvised story might start with someone saying, “The bear sat on the sofa and read the sports page,” the next person continues by saying, “Yes, and he bemoaned the Giants’ season coming to an end.” The first person picks back up with, “Yes, and…”
And so, too, should go your discussions about collaborative projects. You build on what the other person says, rather than poo-pooing something that you don’t yet see the point of.
Web site and book recommendations. Here are some of the books and sites the authors recommend throughout the book.
• Akoha.com (social media reality game)
• Spinvox.com (voice mail as text)
• Jott.com (speak into your phone, have it transcribed as an email to you)
• Kayak.com (travel help)
• Serious Creativity by Edward de Bono
• How to Be More Interesting by Edward de Bono
• The Long Tail by Chris Anderson
• The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
Tom Kelley, co-founder of design firm IDEO and author of The Art of Innovation (2001) and The Ten Faces of Innovation (2005), spoke in Syracuse January 12 as part of the Famous Entrepreneurs Series. Here are some take-aways.
About IDEO
IDEO began as David Kelley Design (after Tom’s brother), and was a group of engineers when David asked Tom to join the team. IDEO was formed in 1991, and has designed products that are both physical and conceptual for a lot of companies you’ve heard of. They’re responsible for the fact that kids’ toothbrushes have fat handles, which they designed for Oral B, and Bank of America’s checking account that rounds up to the nearest dollar on purchases and sends the change into your savings account was their idea as well.
Using IDEO’s design, Oral B became the top-selling kids’ toothbrush in the world for the next 18 months (when everybody started selling the wide-handled ones), and in the first year of the Keep the Change campaign, Bank of America opened 2.1 million new accounts, 700,000 of them for people who had never banked with the company before.
IDEO also designed the Apple mouse and the Palm V.
On innovation
Kelley focused on innovation. Everybody’s for it, he said, but in your day-to-day worklife, it can usually wait until tomorrow, because you’ve got other things on your mind (like deadlines and sales quotas). Here is an example of why that’s not OK.
In the 1960s, 100% of the passenger car tires in the U.S. were manufactured in the Akron, Ohio, area by a handful of companies. Minor innovations would appear every few years (new tread patterns, etc.), but nothing major. Then some upstart French company developed something called the radial tire. People in Akron laughed. Now, everyone has radial tires on their cars and roughly 0% of the passenger car tires in the U.S. are manufactured in Akron.
That’s right, 100% to 0% in fewer than 50 years.
Interbrand’s Top 20 brands in 2009 featured five brands that weren’t in the Top 20 in 2001 – that’s 25% turnover in 8 years – Google, BMW, Louis Vuitton, Samsung and Apple. (See source PDF, page 12.)
So the answer is yes, you have to innovate. And in a flat world – that is, a world where you compete globally and have to deal with factors like big differences in labor and materials cost – you have to do it quickly if you want to stay ahead in the game.
In 2001, you would never have even thought to look at a Samsung TV unless the price point against a Sony was the most important thing to you. Now, Samsung outsells Sony in consumer electronics. Who missed the innovation boat?
The Ten Faces of Innovation
Kelley didn’t learn until after he wrote The Ten Faces of Innovation that we’re good at remembering 7 items, plus or minus 2. So he doesn’t talk about all ten, since everyone will forget all of them. He breaks the ten roles people play in innovation into three categories: learning personas, organizing personas and building personas.
Learning personas: These are anthropologists, experimenters and cross-polinators. They’re the people who observe and learn what people need, the people who try stuff and learn from mistakes, and the people who combine ideas that are already out there with new ideas.
: These are hurdlers, collaborators and directors. They’re people who may not be the fastest, but they’re the most efficient (most Olympic hurdlers don’t run significantly faster without the hurdles), people who work with others, and people who position other people to be the stars (think about movie directors – they rarely appear on screen, rather they help actors to be great at their jobs).
Building personas: These are experience architects, set designers, caregivers and storytellers. They’re the people who put all the pieces together, put the people who propel innovation in a good space, anticipate and help fill customer needs, and evangelize how the whole process comes together.
Kelley focused on two of these personas: anthropologists and experience architects.
Anthropologists
Kelley is the first to admit that when anthropology PhDs started showing up on the payroll, he didn’t get it. There were a lot of them, and he didn’t get it for a couple of years. “We have engineers who are developing laptops that don’t break when you drop them four feet onto concrete, and these people go out and watch kids fish and take pictures?” he asked.
He’s come around 180 degrees, he says. It’s when you go out and watch people that you figure out what they need.
The kids’ toothbrush I mentioned in the first section? Anthropologists went out and saw that kids’ toothbrushes were really just smaller versions of adults’ toothbrushes. But adults brush their teeth with their fingertips – they have the manual dexterity – while kids hold toothbrushes in their fists. That’s why they needed fatter handles.
Bank of America’s Keep the Change account came about because IDEO anthropologists went into the field and discovered that people were writing checks to round numbers – for example, if your electric bill came to $56.24, you wrote a check for $57 so you could do easier math. Lots of people were doing this, and lots of people thought they were the only ones doing it. So they devised this system where if you paid that $56.24 on your debit card, $57 came out and you wound up with an extra 76 cents in your savings account.
The key is this: you have to go out and observe to figure out what people need.
Experience Designers
These are the people who create an overall experience. Kelley uses a sushi restaurant as an example. Your food is only part of the experience. There’s the presentation – especially important in sushi – and then there’s not only your table/counter service for beverages and the like, but you actually get to interact with the chef, whose preparation becomes a performance.
In terms of a website, visitors create some of their own experience: we can’t influence their physical surroundings, the noise level in their room, the size of the screen, the weather, etc. But we can set up a website experience in such a way that they can get our content (the primary reason they come) in as pleasant a way as possible. [Kelley didn't mention Steve Krug's book Don’t Make Me Think, but I'd highly recommend it.]
Your Customers
Your current customers can help you innovate in baby steps, but they’re never going to tell you the next giant leap – you have to figure that out for yourself. For example, let’s say you make VCRs, and you ask your customers what they want. They say, “we want it to rewind much faster so we can just bring the tape right back to Bliockbuster.”
So you go back to your development team and they say, “Sure, we can do that,” and next year at the Consumer Electronics Show you arrive with a table showing off the fastest rewinding VCR in the history of the world.
And then you look over at the next table and see a DVD player – no rewinding at all, and the discs even take up less space than videotapes.
Your customers can tell you how to improve your existing product a bit at a time, sure, but if you really want to innovate, you need to get out there and see what people need.
I’m grabbing this from Beth, but like her, I’m not going to tag anyone. If you do this sort of thing, by all means…
One book that changed your life:The Collector, by John Fowles. There’s a strong chance you haven’t read this book, and there’s no real reason to. It’s about a guy who gets bored of collecting butterflies, and so he decides to collect a beautiful woman instead. (Some people might call this kidnapping.) But what got me is that it’s written twice: Once from the collector’s viewpoint, and once from the collected’s viewpoint. It’s really a lesson in multiple perspectives.
One book you have read more than once:Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. This was my introduction to the cyber-punk genre. It’s set in a world that is hyper-capitalist and (therefore?) all kinds of corrupt, and all the religious zealots are out at sea (literally). There are alternate realities (pre-Matrix, of course), and it very much predicts MMRPGs and VR capabilities. You probably need to be at least mildly a geek to enjoy it, but as someone who doesn’t read sci-fi or fantasy novels, I really enjoyed it and would recommend it.
One book you would want on a desert island: My Complete Illustrated Shakespeare. Pretty sure I don’t even have to justify that to you.
One book that made you laugh:If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor by Bruce Campbell. I’m a big fan of Bruce. One of the nicest celebrities I’ve had the opportunity to interview, super-nice guy, super-funny guy, and I’m a sucker for a really bad movie (and he’s made plenty).
One book that made you cry:The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. No, I’m not kidding. This book includes kids stabbing each other to death because when one child plays the butcher and the other one plays the pig, the butcher kills the pig. This doesn’t end happily ever after, people.
One book you wish had been written: I’m still working on books that have been written. I know the point to this is “what do you wish you had learned,” so I’m going to give a cop-out answer and say, How to Spot a Jackass at 20 Paces: A Guide to Making the Right Choice About With Whom to Surround Yourself.
One book you wish had never been written: Tie: Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy and The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. I actually held a grudge about Return for four months. I didn’t for Heart of Darkness only because it’s a quick read, even if it is miserable.
One book you are currently reading:Trust Agents by Chris Brogen and Julien Smith. I’ve got a couple going, actually, but that’s the one I’m recommending (so far).
One book you have been meaning to read:Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. It’s sitting on my shelf, yet I keep going to my local library. Maybe I’m scared of it or something.
I haven’t been moved to get a Kindle or a nook or any one of those other e-Reader deals, but I do have an iPod Touch (like an iPhone without the phone [or the camera]), and there is a free Kindle application (as there is for a PC, apparently).
I got invited to a book-club-among-friends. We were to read The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.
Now, this was mid-December. I had a couple of choices. I first got online and checked the library catalog. I could have run out to grab the last copy locally (one of the other attendees grabbed the other copy), but I get renewal guilt, so I probably would have returned it before we discuss it. The other, equally obvious option, was to run to a bookstore and get a copy – it’s a pretty famous book, it wouldn’t be hard to find.
Except it was mid-December, and I wasn’t going to a retail outlet. No way, no how.
And then I remembered I had an email gift certificate to Amazon.com. And it was for a penny more than the Kindle version of the book. Hmm, convenient. I commenced to downloading it.
I read the whole thing on my iPod. Here are my thoughts.
Things I Liked
Readability: Awesome. The default font was a comfortable size and face, although I did have the option to change to several other fonts and to make the font larger or smaller. Navigating through was easy; you just push the current page to the left, and you were at the next page. You could make notes and add bookmarks, and as long as you were online, you could sync those to your PC version (and, I’m guessing, to your actual Kindle).
Scanning: Decent, not amazing. There were some obvious errors. Aslan (you’ll recognize the name if you’re a CS Lewis fan) frequently shows up as “Asian” and there are a few others. Fortunately, the scanning wasn’t so bad that it was unreadable, it just wasn’t perfect. And since publishing companies actually put these pages in an electronic format before they send books to be printed; why not just pay for that version?
Price: Amazon prices the Kindle version of books about $1 to $3 less expensive than the paperback versions. Of course, when you sync your Kindle (or Kindle app), you may have to worry about your book getting taken away – apparently there was a little rights issue with some authors’ works.
Portability: I love being able to have this in my pocket. That alone might be worth the price of admission.
Things I Didn’t Like
Pagination: I’m going to be discussing this book with other people, and I’m going to have no idea how to tell them where to look. The Kindle version put things in units, and I don’t know what those units were. The Corrections came in at 9,971 of these units. So if I want to refer people to something that happens at, say, unit 4,156, I have to tell everybody else, what, go about 41% of the way into the book? I still have no concept of how long the book is, and now when I get there I’m going to have to ask how long it is and do the math on the fly.
Weight: For me, one of the joys of reading a book is the weight. It feels like something substantial. And as you make progress, the weight begins to shift from right to left. That’s worth a lot to me. Apple says the Touch weighs 4.05 ounces (that’s a smidge over a quarter pound). That’s nothing like substantial, and the weight only shifts from right to left if you change hands.
Wait! Wait! Aren’t you going to tell us what you thought of the book? Nah. I haven’t fully formulated an opinion. Maybe we can actually sit down and talk about it, you and I.
In the past year, I’ve also read Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It, Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, Journey to the Emerald City by Roger Connors and Tom Smith, Shama Kabani’s Zen of Social Media Marketing, and Jeffrey Hayzlett’s The Mirror Test.
His new novel, 
It’s the ability to leave a note in the margin, and stick a Post-It Note on the page so that you know where you left the note.
One book you would want on a desert island: My Complete Illustrated Shakespeare. Pretty sure I don’t even have to justify that to you.
