As a shameless promotion for my new book (Link: Seth Godin – Liar’s Blog) I’m promising to post your picture and your story here on my highly trafficked blog.
Once a week I’ll pick the best submitted photo and story and post it, together with a link to your website.
All you need to do is send me a picture wearing the special liar’s nose. Don’t have a liar’s nose? Don’t worry! I just got a case of them. Send me $5 plus a self addressed stamped envelope (Seth Godin, Box 305, Irvington, NY 10533) and I’ll send you back your very own nose. (While supplies last, void where prohibited, your mileage may vary). I don’t expect to turn a profit here, but if I do, all proceeds will go to roomtoread.org.
Think of the fame. The traffic. The groupies. Tell me about the stories you tell, the lies your customers want to believe and how you’re making things happen. No promises, naturally, except that your nose is 100% virgin latex and you can get your money back if you don’t like it.
March 24, 2005
I did an interview yesterday with a magazine that specializes in marketing. They’ve got hundreds of thousands of readers, most in the direct mail business.
The reporter didn’t like the answer I gave her about how to build a email marketing list. I told her that the first step was to offer something in your email newsletter that people would actually want to read. That the second step was to promise people exactly what you intended to give them. And the third step was to create content that was so remarkable that people wanted to share it. I explained that if you take your time and keep your promises, it’ll build if it deserves to build.
She wanted to know about shortcuts.
At least three times she asked me what the shortcuts were. How to do it if you were in a hurry. Most important, how to do it if your message wasn’t that interesting.
Sigh.
It appears that marketing America still has plenty of time to do it over, but not nearly enough time to do it right.
If there were shortcuts, people smarter than you and me would have found them already. There aren’t. Sorry.
March 23, 2005
I just bumped into elance.com. (Link: Search: Service Providers.)
I picked a page at random. I discovered developers in Israel, Washington DC, India and Rochester. These are firms that earning $80,000 or more every six months just from elance work.
It’s now very clear that just about any organization can have what it wants online.
It’s got to be something real (no fair using the back of a napkin.) Find a site online that’s doing something that will help your mission. It could be a style of layout, a backend database, a search facility–it doesn’t matter. If it’s out there, you can have one too. One more excuse for delaying or mediocrity, shot to hell.
But you can change the story.
A brief interview with Brian at LightBox5: Link: Like It Matters.
This link will probably be broken by the time you read this, but give it a try: Amazon.com: Computers: VIEWSONIC TPCV1250S PM-1G 40GB ( TPCV1250S-1303 ).
Gizmodo pointed out that the description of the machine includes a 30,000 GB hard drive. Obviously a typo, but that didn’t keep 56 different people from rushing over and posting sort of funny reviews (sort of funny if you think bill gates knock knock jokes are funny).
The question here is: why don’t online stores do stuff like this on purpose? Why don’t they slip in ridiculous items or funny descriptions? It’s not like they’re going to run out of shelf space or have a problem with inventory.
People like to smile. Lightening up is a good idea.
I got one of these for the multi-OS capability. So far, it runs HP-UX, Red Hat, BSD (2 flavors), XENIX, OS X, AIX, AppleDOS, Solaris, DG-UX, Netware, Debian, Mandrake, CP/M, QNX, Win 3.11, Win95, Win95b, Win98, Win98se, WinME, WinCE, Os/2, NT [34], Windows server 200[03], DR-DOS, & BeOS, all in separate windows. Couldn’t load SCO – licensing issues.
We also managed to get Lotus Agenda working pretty well; we dumped the entire Internet into Agenda and were able to solve most of the world’s crimes and determine who on the planet is related to whom. And we were able to use the included Cray Supercomputer Simulator (4 instances simultaneously) to beat Deep Blue and Baby Blue at chess, at the same time.
Nice machine. But I think soon I’ll need an upgrade.
Hans Eisenman sent me this article from the Washington Post.
Link: Losing Sleep Over Online Bed Purchases (washingtonpost.com).
Without copying the whole thing, it’s impossible for me to convey just how stupid (that’s the best word I can find) this marketer is and how bad he is at his job.
Some people are destined to fail. Green Culture (the company in question) is now on that list, in my opinion.
I promised myself I’d write less about inside baseball blogging sort of stuff, but this is worth it.
Yesterday, Bloglines (Link: Ask Jeeves Results -bloglines.) stopped working on my Mac. All my bookmarks, as well as direct typing of the URL or even using Google would just hang. I figured the site was down post-acquisition. (I even tried it on my other Mac).
So after 30 hours, I started getting itchy.
It’s amazing how quickly you can get dependent.
It turns out it’s just a Firefox glitch (I’ll figure it out, I’m sure). Bloglines is working fine on my other browser.
The second side effect is getting there to discover hundreds of unread posts. Yikes! I think I’ll need to start posting less often, just to give fellow RSS addicts a break.
Another interview, this time with ClickZ.
Link: Questions for Seth Godin. More good stuff at Seth Godin – Liar’s Blog.
March 22, 2005
If I hadn’t seen this link from Jason Richardson with my own eyes, I would have thought it was a prank:
Link: http://www.ibackups.net
NOTICE TO ALL IBACKUPS CUSTOMERS:
As most of you are aware, iBackups is down due to issues beyond our control. We are sorry but there is nothing we can do at this time to resolve this.
Also, we cannot stress the seriousness of our terms regarding our refund policy to our customers. Filing a chargeback or dispute with your bank will result in legal action against you. We are sorry we have to be so blunt regarding this matter. However, anyone who has ordered from iBackups that has not received their disc and some download customers will be issued a refund so please bear with us while we prepare all of this. Thank you.
Nathan Peterson
President- iBackups, Inc.
Among highly-compensated workers, the amount of work you get paid for actually goes down as you get paid more.
A talented doctor spends no more than ten or fifteen minutes a day actually doing the thing that she’s actually gifted at
An insightful web designer spends just a few minutes a day actually doing insightful web design.
A great lawyer might be pushed to the edge of his talents once or twice a week.
The same goes for salespeople, farmers, novelists and hockey players. The baseline level of talent in most professions is pretty high, and the really exceptional people shine only rarely.
There’s too much overhead. A doctor needs to fill out forms, meet salespeople, answer phone calls, travel from hospital to hospital, manager her staff and every once in a while, see a patient. And most of those patients are run of the mill cases that a medical student could handle.
I’m talking about knowledge workers, obviously. Knowledge workers get paid extra when they show insight or daring or do what others can’t. But packaging the knowledge is expensive, time consuming and not parituclarly enjoyable for most people. As you get better at what you do, it seems as though you spend more and more time on the packaging and less on the doing.
(and yes, I know the chart above is about infected acorns, but it had the right slope)
The exception?
The intense conversations you can have with your customers and prospects, especially via a blog. Once you get the system and the structure set up, five minutes of effort can give you four minutes of high leverage idea time in front of the people you’re trying to influence.
When the net is broken (spam, popups, cc lists, most instant messaging) it just adds more "time overhead" to what you do. But when it’s working, it allows ideas to be stripped down to their essence and allows you to really push.
The temptation, when living without the time overhead, is to invent new overhead so you can stall. All these features available on blogs allow bloggers to spend time doing diligent housekeeping, with the excuse that it’s necessary. In fact, by stripping away the time overhead, what it means to be a knowledge worker might just change.
