I’m excited to announce that I’ve launched a new site. The new site is located at http://www.windows8tipsandtricks.com and will be a collection of free tutorials on the upcoming Windows 8 Operating System from Microsoft along with news and other goodies.
Check it out and let me know what you’d like to see on the site. You can also access it at http://win8tips.co for a nice and short URL.
I just wanted to take a moment today to thank all of those out there who are and who have served this great country. We all appreciate your effort, time and sacrifice and today we all celebrate the rewards of your hard work.
Thanks You!
Game-Based Marketing: Inspire Customer Loyalty Through Rewards, Challenges, and Contests
by Gabe Zicherman & Joselin Linder
What are the books hot topics:
It’s all about the games and how you can increase your effectiveness of marketing, customer loyalty and more with gamification (Gamification: the use of game play mechanics for non-game applications a.k.a funware.*) This book is a great introduction to the new wave of marketing and customer loyalty programs. You’ll get a great overview of “player types”, how to correctly make your campaigns social, the good and bad of points and badging and more.
There are some good case studying including the US Army, Airline FFPs, McDonald’s among others and how they are using gamification to recruit, sell more, generate customer loyalty and more.
Who should read the book: If you are developing marketing campaigns, looking to reach customers under the age of 35, or just getting into any type of social, mobile web app development this book is for you. If you’re looking for a step by step guide to gamify your marketing or product, this isn’t it, but it will give you the introduction and overview needed to get started down that path.
Must Read Chapter(s): Chapter 3 – Social Networks & Leaderboards & Chapter 6 – The Ultimate Funware: Frequent Flyer Programs
Overall Conclusion: This is an easy to read book that stimulates the mind. I give this 4/5 – its a good book and a definite read if you’re marketing to Millennial/Generation Y or Generation G, if you’re looking to start a customer loyalty program in today’s digital age, or if you’re looking to stand out from the crowd. The concepts of gamification covered in Game Based Marketing will give you the insight and knowledge to separate yourself from the worn out interruption marketing efforts that are so commonly blocked by people today.
Have you read “Game Based Marketing”? Let me know what you thought about the book in the comments below.
* Definition of Gamification from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification
It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy by Captain D. Michael Abrashoff
What are the books hot topics:
As a great leader you must create an environment where the crew(team) makes decisions. Through training and preparing the team for the most difficult situations they will be able to succeed in good and bad times. A trained team member is empowered to make decisions and because of the training those decisions are as good or better than ones you make. You will also trust that persons decision and in turn they will trust you because of the training and empowerment.
Communication and vocabulary is key to running a successful team. “Word Magic” is the value of choosing the correct words as they can lead to greatness or failure if chosen incorrectly. Fears thrive in silence therefore communication is vital, but you must communicate purpose and meaning at the same time.
Who should read the book: If you are a manager or someone staving to be a manager this book is for you.
Must Read Chapter(s): Chapter 4 – Communicate with Purpose and Meaning & Chapter 9 – Build Up Your People
Overall Conclusion: The tone of this book is much different than other business books. It is easy to read and Captain Michael writes with a tone similar to conversations you’d have with a friend over coffee. I give this 3.5/5 – its a good book and suggested read, but not a must.
Have you read “It’s Your Ship”? Let me know what you thought about the book in the comments below.
I’m moved by art. It may be a painting, music, or video. The format doesn’t matter as much as the message and the feeling I get when experiencing the art. I was recently moved by a short film by Tommy Petroni, a 16 yr. old from L.A. His story is a fantastic view of being young. It reminds me how great life and the relationships we have are.
Have you ever wanted a quick and easy way to give your visitors a call to action when they hit your blog? With so many entry points and constantly updating content I’ve found it tough to get a good call to action or announcement to everyone without cluttering the sidebar with a widget. That all changed today.This morning Scott, from Train Signal, sent me an email about a great new tool that is in beta called The Hello Bar. It is a bar that will display across the top of you webpage containing a message (85 character recommended max) and a link. And it takes less time to setup than it did to read this paragraph.
Why is this a big deal? Think of what you can promote with this feature:
- Do you have a email/newsletter list? Give your users a nudge to sign up with a “Get all the latest news and deals from us. Sign up here [link]”
- Do you have a killer YouTube channel you want promoted? “Check out out these free help videos on [link]”
- Want someone to buy you new book? “Get lost in the pages of this the greatest book ever [link]”
The possibilities are endless and they even let you put an RSS feed into it. If you look at the top of the page as I wrote this (until I come up with something better) I just decided to let people know and go to my personal blog.
But wait, there’s more. In the settings you’re able to manage a handful of different hello bars, so you can have one for your content pages and one for your home page and one for your personal site, or just about any combo you can come up with. You’re able to customize the color and they have a few good themes to help fit and standout on your site. Then in the settings you can get fancy controlling when it shows up, does it hide, how it effects the rest of the page, where does the link open, can the user close it, does it wiggle? (haven’t tried this setting yet) and which side of the page the tab show up.
Ultimately, I think this is a fantastic little tool that doesn’t require any coding and does give you a lot of flexibility. Once you’ve saved your hello bar all you do is drop the embed script they give you into your webpage just like a YouTube embed. Quick and easy. Right now Hello Bar is currently in beta and you’ll need an invite. I have a few left so contact me any way you know, leave a comment and its first come first serve.
In what seems to be a recent trend for my posts about going green, I continue today with what I see as a really cool and hugely potential offering in the area of green energy. Not many people have heard of or know how to say or spell piezoelectric crystals, yet almost everyone at one point in time have held a Piezoelectric Crystal or PE crystal. Before I let you know what it is you’ve held I want to share a little about the PE crystal and some of its potential.
In basic terms, a PE crystal is material that when it is pressed, squeezed, or vibrated it generates a small voltage of electricity. Alone this isn’t remotely enough to generate any kind of sustainable power, but when you put them together in a collaborative environment then the possibilities start to take form. Think about the vibration that cars make as they drive across a highway. What if we put PE crystals lined underneath the road to collect all those vibrations and turn it into electricity to power the street lamps and signs. You’d still want to have a fail over form of energy to provide electricity for the roads less traveled, but its just one way PE crystals can help us use energy that is otherwise wasted.
Think of possibilities: computer fans that help power the computer, city sidewalks helping power the city, motors that help power the electronics in a car, clothing that turns human movement into charging stations for phones and other electronics in the pockets.
It all may seem a little space age right now, but all it takes is one person to put this to good use and we could have a whole new source of electricity. For more on Piezoelectric Crystals check out Wikipedia or Green Energy Help Files
Oh and now that answer to how has almost everyone held a PE crystal in our hands? PE crystals are used in electric lighters to create the electricity that causes the spark when you push the trigger down. Did you guess right? Let me know and share some of the ideas you have for uses of PE crystals in the comments.
***Update*** May 2011 – India just broke ground on a gorgeous solar-powered sports complex that will harvest piezoelectric energy from the crowds that enter its gates. See more of this great new sprts complex including rendered diagrams here: http://inhabitat.com/solar-powered-piezoelectric-sports-stadium-breaks-ground-in-india/
You’ve had to be living under a rock or not have a soul if the past few years if you haven’t been trying to become “greener.” Greener food, greener driving, greener electronics have all become part of my life in recent times, but at the end of the day I’m a tech geek. I love my toys and with each and every new gadget I get there is that much more junk that ends up in the landfills. Multiply that by the 100,000s and if not millions of other early adopters we make for a lot of non recyclable garbage. The components in today’s electronics not only have a half life long than most can calculate, but are also poisoning water and food supplies if then end up at a landfill close to a source.
There is now a service to help technology early adopters be a littler greener. Gazelle.com has stepped into be a reCommerce service that helps you sell and recycle your used electronics. They’ll pay you for your slightly used laptops, phones, cameras, and pretty much anything that’s electronic. They even pay for shipping the device to them. Then they resell the products on eBay, Amazon, refurbished and sell in bulk, or properly recycled depending on the devices, condition, and demand. Even if the product is valueless or not working they promote you sending it in with other items and they’ll recycle it at no cost.
It’s really great if you think about it, less than 1% of all electronics survive beyond their first user and many times there is technology that as an early adapter you wouldn’t be caught dead using or claiming ownership to 2 years, 1 year, 9 months, maybe even less after buying. So much of that is cutting edge tech or more than a non techie-snob could expect.
Gazelle’s makes it super easy to go to their site, narrow down the product and then they use a “patent pending technology” to calculate what they pay for it. Besides using the cheesy “patent pending” clique its very straight forward and you can choose to sell or not. You may not make as much as on eBay, but this is for those of us that aren’t 100% in it for the money and hate the hassle. It’s also just perception, but on eBay or Amazon I don’t get the warm fuzzies inside that come with doing something good, but the spin Gazelles has makes me feel good about recycling.
In the end gazelle.com is a business like any other (right now claiming margins around 20%), but next time you’re done with a gadget make an effort to dispose of your older gadget with a green touch. Find a place to recycle or re-sell your gadget and be a little bit greener.
I’m currently in the midst of reading The Knack – How Street Smart Entrepreneurs Learn To Handle Whatever Comes Up by Norm Brodsky and Bo Burlingham, which I already believe is, a must read for anyone who currently has or ever plans to own or run a business. There is no such thing as a step by step guide to running a business, but what Norm and Bo do in this book is educate you on situations. They help you train your brain to be prepared for the different situations that come up when running a business.
There is coverage on profit margin, selling, negotiating, delegation and much more, but where the value of this book is truly located is in Norm’s lessons taught through experience. Norm has written this book as if you were sitting down next to him and he was giving you the training that you could then take and apply to your own situation. (I especially like this because it is a method of teaching that we employ at Train Signal with our computer training.)
One lesson that resonates softly throughout all of the lessons and is brought up specifically dealing with negotiating is “You Don’t Ask, You Don’t Get” a quote he learned from his father. I’ve heard this same quote many times and in many forms and I always feel it is worth repeating. We all know that you can’t get what you don’t ask for, but many people are bound by the fear of rejection. Sure, rejection can lead to momentary disappointment, but that’s only if you expect to be accepted. So many times you find yourself not asking a question because you expect to be rejected. If that’s the case why not ask? If you’re expecting rejection you shouldn’t even be disappointed if that’s what is expected. Just smile and move on to your next great question. In cases where the other party says, “yes”, then you’re surprised and walk away happy or with an experience that you otherwise would have just thought about.
People who ask the questions that others don’t many times are more successful in business than those who keep their questions bottled up. Why? Because they don’t have to wonder what-if? They get to experience that which others don’t? They get everything they want? They’re just naturally more successful? No, it’s because as in life, in business, there are multiple people who have different desires and needs. Making assumptions on the desires and needs of others is just a way to miss out on an opportunity to find out exactly what they desire or need. How? By asking them!
Money, time, and flexibility are just a few of the needs and desires that people have to factor in when making any decision. By asking those involved what their needs or desires are and listening to the information they respond with many times will lead you to getting more of what you want. Almost every decision in life is a negotiation. Sometimes it is between you and yourself and sometimes it is with you and others.
To offer an example of this in the personal world think about the classic boy meets girl situation. Asking that cute guy or girl you just met out on a date so often is an opportunity missed due to fear of rejection. A good percent of people are afraid to talk to or ask the other sex out for company for fear of rejection. At first, most people don’t realize that dating and relationships are just a series of negotiations (this never changes, no matter how long the relationship, the best negotiating couples are the ones that last.) When you first meet someone you don’t know what they’re looking for, what they’re thinking, etc… What better way to find out then to just ask.
There is no guarantee that by just asking you’ll be happier, more successful, or anything will change, but by asking you will know one thing for sure; you won’t have to question yourself “what if?” Here is to asking.
Recently I was in a discussion with a hiring manager for a Chicago marketing company and he brought up he just can’t find talent that has the ‘It’ factor right now. I looked at him and asked him what is ‘It’. His response was less than satisfactory to me, “You know, when an employee just gets ‘it’. It was then I realized that I too had used the ‘it’ factor in the past to describe what I wanted in a canidate. Hell, I’ve heard about having ‘it’ or just getting ‘it’ in every industry I’ve been involved in. ‘It’ is not limited to just business. The greatest athlete of all time had the ‘it’ factor. Why? In my opinion, laziness or lack of effort to define ‘it’ by the person describing someone as having ‘it’.
If my product team manager came to me and said I need a new employee for position xyz, one item I would request from him is a list of the skills and attributes that his choice canidate would have. If he put ‘they get it’ on the scorecard or job description I’d throw it back at him and tell him to come back when he’s thought it out more.
So why do managers continually wonder why they can’t find another candidate who just gets it? Because they don’t know what ‘it’ is. If you are referring to the ‘it’ factor then you haven’t put the time in to define what the it factor is. ‘It’ is a generalization for something that is that is probably quite important to getting what you want or don’t want out of an employee or canidate. Using ‘it’ as a descriptive feature is also bad communication. There is no way to measure ‘it’ because it isn’t properly defined and people are going to define and measure it differently.
Let’s use Michael Jordan as an example because there are very few people who are as recognizable globally as being so extremely skilled in his former profession. Many people when looking at MJ and his accomplishments say, “man, that guy just had ‘it’.” So let’s play the role of an NBA GM looking for the next MJ. If I tell my scouts I need someone who has the ‘it’ factor of Michael Jordan, they’ll be confused, probably go out and find a very talent player who they believe has ‘it’ and bring them back to me. If I’m lucky I’ll they player will fit what I’m looking for, but more likely I’m going to have a good player that doesn’t meet my expectation of having ‘it’. That because I didn’t define ‘it’ so lets do that. This is the same thing that happens when you pass a job description off to HR to hire or just hire on your own. If ‘it’ isn’t defined and measured then you are only lucky if you get what you’re looking for.
*Unfortunately, I’ve only coached MJ in my imagination on my driveway court as a kid or in video games and my career as Chicago Bulls GM never got started, so I’m going to use some assumptions on skills and experience.
Defining what ‘it’ is starts by creating three lists. One list should be what does this person does that others who don’t have ‘it’ don’t. Second and third is then listing the skills and attributes of the ‘it’ individual and the non ‘it’ individuals and comparison of the two list to identify the ‘it’ factors. I personally like starting with the list of what the someone who just has it or gets it does that others don’t first because it helps me then list the attributes out that make the most difference and not every attribute.
What does Michael Jordan have that I want above and beyond a talented basketball player?
- he was one of the most clutch athletes of all time
- he is the leading all time scorer
- he made the players around him better / relentless leader
- he is a marketing and sponsor giant.
What skills or attributes lead to these (For sake of the length I’ll only do it for the first point)
- Michael was an exceptionally conditioned athlete
- he was mentally sound individual. He missed as many last second shots as he made, but it never changed he desire to be the one in control of the outcome. He was able to forget the misses and focus on his next opportunity to make one.
- he practiced almost additively
- his preparation for games included studying video and knowing the trends and skills of players on the other team
What are the skills he had that other didn’t? (I’m making assumptions here, but you will be able to have more concrete knowledge of your positions and expectations)
There are plenty of exceptionally conditioned atheletes, players that practice almost around the clock, and players, coaches and teams that prepare and study for games.
- Michael’s mental fortitude
In this case, one ‘it’ factor is mental fortitude. It doesn’t mean that all those other features that other players are attributes that I want in my next player. Actually in this case those are all elements I want, but want it means is I have defined an ‘it’ factor that I can now go to my scout and work with them to figure out the best way for us to measure this attribute.
If you have a great employee who gets it and you want to replicate them; take some time, step back and define what are their ‘it’ factors. Believe me its worth your time and while you’re not able to clone employee (just yet at least 
) you’re going to have a much higher likelyhood of replicating the success employee in future hires if you’ve define ‘it’.
