The Evolution of Marketing
Wicked cartoon from Tom Fishburne http://www.tomfishburne.com/tomfishburne/2008/08/evolution-of-ma.html
Online marketing musings
London-based online marketing consultant. Mostly using this blog to post my musings on marketing and business from the perspective of an ex 9-5 man.
Wicked cartoon from Tom Fishburne http://www.tomfishburne.com/tomfishburne/2008/08/evolution-of-ma.html
Don't Bother Jailbreaking Your iPhone
Lifehacker has a great article about easily jailbreaking your 2.02 iphone. Although if you're thinking about doing this I really wouldn't bother.
- The apps available after jailbreaking are crap, no where near as many as there were before the big 2.0 firmware update
- It'll put a stupid pineapple logo on your iPhone when it starts up
- With more and more apps being added to the iTunes app store every day, there's a much easier way to get more cool stuff on your iPhone
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Don't preach, teach!
A lot of people talk about 'evangelising' a product. Preaching it's benefits to the unenlightened masses (oh man this iphone is amazing you just have to get it, it's the one true phone!).
I'm not sure about you, but I don't really enjoy being preached to. But I am curious and I do love to learn about new things. So, instead of preaching to me about something, why not teach me about it.
Anyhows, isn't this what a huge number of websites/services are doing anyway? With all the tutorials and free webinars, seminars and ebooks out there? So why is all the glory going to the preachers and not the teachers?
I'm not sure about you, but I don't really enjoy being preached to. But I am curious and I do love to learn about new things. So, instead of preaching to me about something, why not teach me about it.
- Teach me about the cool features (you can actually browse the web while your'e talking to your friends with the new iphone)
- Teach me about how it will help me (you don't need to carry around a separate mobile phone or blackberry or ipod. The iphone has it all)
- Teach me how it helps you most (man, this is great for me, cause I always get lost in the city and the iphone has an in-built GPS)
Anyhows, isn't this what a huge number of websites/services are doing anyway? With all the tutorials and free webinars, seminars and ebooks out there? So why is all the glory going to the preachers and not the teachers?
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Lawn-related fun
This South Korean, award winning design for an automated lawn mower is very cool. It creates shapes out of the compressed, cut grass that you can play with and build stuff out of pretty cool.
Read more: http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/07/0717_idea_winners/191.htm
Read more: http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/07/0717_idea_winners/191.htm
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The Twitteratti Get Richer....
Steve Rubel introduces Adjix
Adjix, like TinyURL, is a URL shortener - but with at twist. It's also an advertising network that wraps your redirected links with a small ad frame. If you create an account with Ajix and people view or click on your links, you get a share of the revenue.Great right? but as usual it's only the big boys (Rubel included) who will profit from it:
you can collect $0.10 for every 1000 unique views and $0.20 for each valid, unique, click-through. That might be hard to scale for some people, but instantly it give the top dogs on Twitter a way to monetize...So much for the democratisation of social media, once again it's all about the 'elite' the guys who exchange mutual backslaps and riff about how great they are and how amazing their latest post/blog is. Don't believe the hype the net like the real world is dominated by the cream of the crop.
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Bin your ideas now!
I often find myself coming up with a lot of seemingly good ideas (well they seem good to me at the time). I'll make some notes, email myself an outline, and bug my friends about my new 'awesome' idea. However in the light of the next days morning. I usually have two reactions:
1. I've gotta run with this idea quick quick - Let me figure out how to progress it
2. This idea is terrible - DELETE
This seems pretty sensible initially. Delete the obviously crappy ideas and grow the good ones. Trouble is, that even if an idea is good, does it really merit your attention and effort? I've recently come to the conclusion that focusing on one or 2 ideas is better than coming up with tons of good ideas and trying to find the time to grow them all.
So, I've created a 'ideas rubbish bin' (catchy name eh?) where I intend to ruthlessly dump the majority of the ideas I come up with. The main benefit of this ideas bin is two-fold:
1. I can avoid the haunting feeling of loss at binning my idea, by keeping them somewhere I could 'potentially' revive them from
2. I create some mental 'clean space' for the few ideas I want to focus on, without having the other ideas divert my focus or attention
So far this process is working well and I felt a real sense of relief at 'binning' my ideas. Try it out, see what you think, I'd be curious to see if it works well for you too.
1. I've gotta run with this idea quick quick - Let me figure out how to progress it
2. This idea is terrible - DELETE
This seems pretty sensible initially. Delete the obviously crappy ideas and grow the good ones. Trouble is, that even if an idea is good, does it really merit your attention and effort? I've recently come to the conclusion that focusing on one or 2 ideas is better than coming up with tons of good ideas and trying to find the time to grow them all.
So, I've created a 'ideas rubbish bin' (catchy name eh?) where I intend to ruthlessly dump the majority of the ideas I come up with. The main benefit of this ideas bin is two-fold:
1. I can avoid the haunting feeling of loss at binning my idea, by keeping them somewhere I could 'potentially' revive them from
2. I create some mental 'clean space' for the few ideas I want to focus on, without having the other ideas divert my focus or attention
So far this process is working well and I felt a real sense of relief at 'binning' my ideas. Try it out, see what you think, I'd be curious to see if it works well for you too.
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Productivity Tip - Use the Oven
No I'm not suggesting that you bake everyone you work with cookies to ingratiate yourself. I'm actually looking at an oven as a metaphor for a better way to work.
Firstly let's look at cooking with the oven vs cooking with a frying pan. When you're frying you've got to be right there all the time to watch the pan. You have to make sure nothing gets burned, you need to keep the temperature balanced, you need to make sure all the separate elements of the meal are perfectly timed otherwise your meal will be ruined.This is a very erratic and reactionary way to cook, and can be quite stressful and demanding.
On the other hand, cooking in an oven is quite different. You carefully plan and prepare what you want to cook. You mix ingredients for a cake, marinate a roast or cover your chicken cutlets in breadcrumbs. Once the preparation is done. You stick the ingredients in the oven. Set the time and temperature. Then you can literally walk away. Come back in an hour or so and 'hey presto' your careful efforts and the heat of the oven have produced the perfect meal. You've been sipping some wine and reading in the mean time. A much more efficient use of your time.
No let's compare this to how we work on a daily basis.
Using the oven approach for....
Emails:
Deal with your email like a batch of brownies. In one go, send them, read them, reply to them all in one sitting. Then get on with something else while you wait for them to 'cook'
Presentation and reports:
Get all your ingredients together first. Compile the research, graphics, video clips you'll need for your report or presentation, get them all together, then sit down to do some serious baking. Once you have a rough draft baked up, you can leave it to cool for a day or a few hours at least then come back to it. If it's not quite ready you can stick it back in the over or maybe ad a layer of icing sugar to make it all the sweeter.
Meetings:
Do we really need to do this meeting now? Does it have to be fried up straight away? What if we put all of our ideas/concern in a mixing bowel, stick them in our collective mental ovens then see what comes out. Maybe we won't have to have that meeting after all.
Sure it's an unusual metaphor, but the convenience and calm planned approached to baking is a lot better than erratically frying up your tasks and projects every day.
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The Happiness Formula
Scott Adams of Dilbert fame, has a happiness formula and he wants to write a book about it. The formula goes like this:
Happiness = health + money + social life + meaning
I don't agree with what he says here though:
Happiness = health + money + social life + meaning
I don't agree with what he says here though:
Part of the reason I don't turn The Happiness Formula into a book is that it would only be about 20 pages long. Its power is in its brevity, and brevity is not rewarded in our economy. If the best book in the world was only 20 pages long, no one would buy it.There's lots of power in brevity, our attention spans are shorter than ever and the entire twitter and facebook phenomenons are based on brevity. Also who said he had to release it as a book? Why not a PDF e-book? Also why only look for financial reward? This book could help a lot of people, isn't that rewarding in itself?
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