When you’re talking to your web professional about your website – or worse, Search Engine Optimization or social networking – Does it sound a lot like this?
If so, you need to call us at 763-267-7800. We speak your language when discussing complex technical and marketing issues.
Special thanks to John Sandberg or Arctic Insider for reminding us of this good old video spoof.
I’ve battled the Yellow Book people for several years now, trying to get them to stop leaving their garbage on my lawn, or in front of the office door.
Yet every now and again I find another one of the yellow books cluttering up my space, waiting for me to dump them into my trash to take up space in my garbage can. I called them, emailed them, did anything you can think of to tell them "please stop leaving that book for me, I don’t want it!", but nothing did the trick.
In a final act of desperation, I removed my mailbox from my house all together. I really thought that would do it. But the other day I came home and found the people who deliver that thing actually went all the way up my considerably long driveway and dropped it on my front door step.
It’s obvious now they are not going to give up, and it makes me wonder about the people advertising in these books. Why are you still wasting your money on these things? I don’t use it – do you? If you don’t use it, why do you still think your customers are?
If your not at least thinking about dropping the wasteful spending on phone book ads, please read this article from some blogger on the internet.
Then ask yourself: If I’m not looking at this thing, who is?
Answer: No one.
How do dog’s greet each other? With a quick sniff of each others butt. How do digital marketing "experts" and geeks greet each other? Much the same way.
But instead of bending over for a quick whiff, they throw out questions designed to demonstrate their technical prowess and knowledge. They probe other geeks to gleen what they know. They make determinations as to who is dominant. They try to impress upon everyone within the sound of our own voice that they are, in fact, the smartest person in the room.
It kind of goes with the territory, and we’ve all done it, consciously or not… No one is immune, and it’s not all bad. It can be a tool to make quick judgements to help you pick and chose your associates. After all, not everyone is going to make it into your inner circle, and that’s good for your sanity.
But I am reminded of a quote from Margret Thatcher: "Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t" That goes for technical or marketing guru’s as well. If your constantly having to tell people how great you are at digital marketing, you are probably not all that and a bag of chips.
Let your good work speak for itself. It makes a much better statement anything you can say or pretend to be.
In 1992, I was living in Los Angeles and I brought home a rather large box filled with electronics called a “modem”. I was pretty sure it was going to allow me to do magical things with my computer. It also came with a large book on how to hook it up and configure it. It took the better part of one late night and the next day to get it to work. When it did, I was so thrilled, that I thought I alone had discovered the last great frontier.
There wasn’t much for browsers back then; most interactions were text based from command lines. I got into a few bulletin boards and chat room type places. The people there were different from the musicians I had been around all my life. They spoke a very different dialect, and very much had their own culture. It was fun, fresh and pretty darned exciting for a guy who was just starting to discover and embrace his inner geek.
Today I just can’t help but chuckle when I think of how far we have come: There was a time when just getting a picture to show up in a browser was pretty cutting edge. This summer we built an extensive new application in just three months. A couple of years ago that would have taken over a year. In 1994, we spent a lot of time convincing people they needed to get in early on having this thing called a “web site”; This summer we’ve also helped several companies learn how they can make good money by extending their brand through the use of Facebook and Twitter. In 2005 were were helping a lot of companies increase revenues through better search engine rankings. Today we’re helping them make sure any customer with a smart phone can find them, see them and interact.
I’ve always loved technological change. I have a lot of ideas of where we are headed with technology, and I’m looking forward to see a lot of them happen. But I can’t deny that I have a nostalgic streak. We just remodeled the office, and I couldn’t help putting the first computer I ever owned on display in the corner. I can’t help but look at it and smile when I think of all I learned and went through with that little piece of now ancient technology. That computer – and the people I met because of it – helped me build a very solid foundation I can now keep adding to.
I would love to have that first modem sitting there as well. But it was tossed out years ago, replaced several times by a newer, smaller, faster version. Nostalgia is good. But is living in the past? Not so much.
Way back in 1994 I went to a parking lot on the south side of the Twin Cities to a Humane Society outdoor pet adoption event. I wasn’t intending to get a Cat, just wanted to take a look around. In one of the first cages, a runt of a calico clawed her way to the top of the cage to get to me. I picked her up and she clung to me like glue. I put her back in her cage and she followed me around the cage no matter where I went, never taking her eyes off me.
I think it’s safe to say she picked me.
I brought her home and after watching her stand up on her hind legs and attempt to roar, I named her Bear.
From then on, Bear was a joyful part of my life. I mention her here because of her love of watching me and other people in the various offices over the years work on computers. She was often a part of the work day. I started my first business in a home office, and Bear was there every single day as I got things rolling.
As a kitten, she would stare at the screen and swipe away at imagined enemies moving across the screen. As she got older, she laid on top if the old CRT monitors (remember those?) whenever she wanted to. Without saying a word, Bear had declared that those monitors were officially her personal butt warmer. Any attempt to move said Cat from her personal butt warmer would be met with swift scorn.
It was a tough couple weeks for Bear when we finally ditched the last CRT monitor and got all flat screens. She spent days walking around monitors wondering how in the heck she was supposed to lay on that. Several times she did try to jump on top of them, only to go right over the other side, picker herself up and promptly pretend that never happened.
I could go on about how she was an excellent mouser, how she made fun of my singing, laughed at the inferiority of dogs who ate poop from her litter box, had several freak outs per day (I have to be in the other room- NOW!), was great at taking naps whenever I felt like one and always ate the stinkiest thing on the menu.
She was around for 16 years, so I have a lot of great memories. A few weeks ago she started getting ill, and after several painful and stressful (for her) treatments she only went down hill. Unable to eat or drink for days, she wasn’t moving, wasn’t talking and wasn’t going to get any better.
This morning her pain and suffering thankfully came to an end, but man am I going to miss that little animal. So long Bear – thanks for picking me.
Is this all really necessary? I tried to upgrade my Adobe Photoshop today. I then went to download the software, wondering why I couldn’t download it right after I paid for it. Instead of a “download now” button, I was presented with this Flash presentation on how to download the software, complete with a boat load of unexplained acronyms, bizarre rules, even more bizarre exceptions to the rules and variations on the rules – none of which helped me download what I paid for.
I just want the software I paid for. Does Adobe really want to force me to learn about their dysfunction to get it?
We got new and much faster internet service to the office last Friday and we changed the phone service as well.
We decided not to transfer the old phone number over merely because the old number was being bombarded with SPAM phone calls. The new number is (763) 267-7800. Our 24/7/365 number of (952) 393-4251 will stay the same.
This does make me wonder… with Skype, email, teleconferencing, forums and instant messaging, could we be seeing the beginning of the end of land-line phone service? I’ve already removed the land-line from my house in favor of my iPhone. Could removing the land-line from the office be far behind?
We’ll see. For now, the land-line still provides us with the clearest, glitch and echo free communication option. Plus the phone system we have has an outstanding speaker phone that doesn’t sound at all like you’re on a speaker phone. The same phone system allows for simple transfer of calls.
There’s no doubt the iPhone has gotten better – but it’s not there yet for those three very basic features.
I played guitar for a lot of years, and got pretty damned good at it. But like anyone else, when I started out I sucked. Big time.
One of the best guitar lessons I ever got came from my older brother Jim. It’s a lesson that went way beyond my guitar playing – it has applied to my entire life.
I was in my room one day, door closed, amplifier blaring. I had just bought a couple of new cheap little guitar pedals, convinced I would soon sound like Eddie Van Halen or Ted Nugent. I played the same riff, over and over and over again. I’m sure it was damned annoying, but I didn’t care. I knew that with just the right tweak of the the right knob, I would soon sound awesome…
About an hour into this, and my older brother Jim burst into the room. “Damn it, stop playing that! It’s not the damn gear, it’s in your fingers!
Stunned that he had come in the room to yell instead of tell me how freeking amazing I sounded, I simply said “What”?
“It doesn’t matter if you have that pedal, another pedal, a different guitar or a rack of Marshall amplifiers! How you sound totally comes from how you play – It’s all in your fingers, not the damn gear!”
He knew I wasn’t learning a thing. He knew I wasn’t practicing. He knew I was looking for the short cut to something that only comes from hard work and perseverance. My guess is he listened to me for hours, trying to think of a nice way to tell me I sucked, but the annoyance finally got to him and he yelled at me instead.
I read an article sometime after that where Ted Nugent was all excited about trying out Eddie Van Halen’s guitar rig. No question about it, Eddie’s sound was huge and everyone wanted to figure it out. He asked Eddie if he could try it at a sound check and Eddie was happy to oblige. Ted plugged in to the most coveted guitar rig in all of rock-n-roll – and low and behold, he sounded just exactly like Ted Nugent!
It wasn’t until several years later when I had put in all the time and energy to really learn how to play that I realized how right my brother was. I was in a studio working on getting “the sound” when I got tired of it and grabbed my trusty old $100 pawn shop Music Man amplifier and just recorded the track. It actually took me getting rid of all the fancy toys to hear what I actually sounded like – and it sounded awesome. All that sound just came out of my fingers, my beat to hell Jackson guitar, a single cord and cheap amp. I never gave a crap about gear after that again, and it was so liberating.
It still applies to my life in developing websites and software. The latest plugin, framework, development environment, coding tool, book, computer, printer, monitor, conference… they don’t matter. Yes, some of those things can be nice to have and make your work a little bit easier – but unless you’ve mastered what your doing with your fingers on any keyboard you touch – none of it matters.
So don’t let what you don’t have hold you back. Once you do the hard work and it’s all in your fingers – you own it. You control it, and you can do with it as you choose!
My thanks the authors of Rework for reminding me about this!
I’ve learned a great deal about running a business from my clients. These are sharp people who in many cases have already “been there” and “done that”. One of the most valuable concepts imparted upon me by our client, and my friend, Dave Larsen was “The Value of Distraction“.
Simply stated, what’s it worth to you to pursue a particular opportunity? What’s it worth to you to be distracted from your own goals to help others achieve theirs?
A short time ago, I ran into a situation where I learned exactly what it’s worth to us – and what it’s not.
Podomani was recently approached to help out on a very large marketing/design/development and Ecommerce project. I was pitched that it would mean lots of work to us, and lots and lots of money with a super-mega-potential client. They said we’d get big exposure, and even though their budget on this deal was limited, there was big potential for more lucrative work down the road.
It took me all of 24 hours to dive into the details, think about it, weigh the potential outcomes, and then promptly turn it down.
What? Turn down a potential huge job? You bet. And we couldn’t be happier about it.
First of all, it was easy to see the client had unreasonable expectations. What they wanted was the internet equivalent of us buying and developing a square block of down town Manhattan – for the price of about four fully decked-out Hummers. They also demanded that a large part of the site be built to integrate with some third party software that was yet to be developed – at no additional cost. Frankly, the project looked to be a fantastic train wreck just waiting to happen.
But more distracting for us was this project was to utilize a whole slew of dead, or dying technologies. So for a year or more, we would be focusing our skills on tools we would never choose to use again. And no where in the project would we be helping a client “make the cultural shift to a world of instantaneous, on-demand information” which we’ve set out to do.
Even if we put an outrageously high bid on it and the accepted – the value of the distraction would have been too steep of a price to pay.
Then there is the matter of the 24 hours I spent on the project to turn it down. That’s three full business days I could have spent in many other ways… but I chose to pay the price of this distraction. While I mourn the loss of the time, I’m comfortable knowing it could have been much worse.
John G. Miller, has a new book hitting the store shelves this month! Outstanding! 47 Ways to Make Your Organization Exceptional. The book is inspirational as well as a guide-book that individuals and organizations can use to set your organization apart from the pack, making customers and stakeholders get more involved and wanting to “stick” with the organization.
From my last post, you may recognize John as the winner of Sarah Palin’s jacket she wore for the photo of her best-selling book “Going Rogue”. All the proceeds went to benefit two organizations that support our U.S. troops, and the jacket made it home to John’s house. John’s lovely and gracious wife Karen modeled it briefly.
We’re just impressed that John was this generous in helping the people that are out there laying their lives on the line for all of us.
We’ve also been fascinated by the level of angst or joy that the mere mention of Sarah Palin generates. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one person garner so much of a positive response – or raise the level of hatred towards an individual so high in the negative responses.
But whatever your take on Mrs. Palin is, it was nice of her to donate the jacket, and even cooler that they made sure the profits went to support two important groups like Wounded Warrior Project and the Fisher House.
Politics must end when we are talking about the care of wounded soldiers. And for that, John, Sarah and all those involved at the very least deserve a thank you.