But is Twitter Useful?

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One of the people that Gorgeous and I connected with in Chicago this past weekend was Christine Kane. It probably didn’t hurt that the three of us were all seated in close proximity to a very wild and obnoxious three year old on the same flight into Chicago. That got diverted to Columbus for more fuel after holding too long for bad weather.

But that’s a story for another time.

I also had the pleasure of sitting at the same table as Christine at the conference. As speakers like Chris Brogan, Liz Strauss, and Terry Starbucker were talking about the people in the room who were using Twitter to communicate with one another (and with folks half a world away) during the conference, Christine would ask the rest of us questions on the side.

They ranged from the basic to the technical, for example…

• What’s the point? to interact with others
• Why would you bother? because I like people
• Can everyone see what I tweet @ someone? Oh, yeah
• How does the direct message thing work? “d your_friends_twittername” and they’ll get a private message

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A Lesson

Thank you.

Communism vs Free Enterprise - Some Perspective

In response to my Thanksgiving post this year Alex over at the Advice Network left a thought provoking comment. Here’s the comment:

It’s interesting that the European (illegal?) immigrants could not survive with a communal (communist?) economic system, considering the aboriginal neighbors who saved their lives by showing them what crops to plant DID have a communal economic system.

What do you think accounted for this difference?

I started a comment in reply but the question is interesting enough that I think it warrants a full post. So here it goes. Read more

A Little Thanksgiving History

Today is a national holiday here in the US. It’s a day with many different traditions today, from big meals with family, turkey, pumpkin pie, to parades and Detroit Lions football.

Interestingly the Thanksgiving tradition goes back much further than the 1924 inception of the Macy’s parade in New York. In fact, it predates our young country by more than 150 years.

Early Thanksgiving

The first recorded Thanksgiving in North America was actually held up in Canada in 1587 in celebration of surviving an abortive attempt to find a Northwest passage to the orient. Chalk one up to our neighbors to the North.

In the US, the first formal community wide Thanksgiving celebration was held 32 years later in 1619 on the banks of the James River in Virginia to celebrate the completion of an arduous sea passage.

Interestingly, the early Thanksgiving celebration that is most often looked to as the example didn’t happen until nearly two years later.

The folks that came over on the Mayflower and settled in Plymouth Massachusetts had a rough first year. They landed off Cape Cod in November so they didn’t have much time to prepare for the severe New England winter that they were faced with. It’s likely they didn’t understand how bad it would get.

Nearly half the 102 people who made the voyage across the Atlantic were dead within 6 months after disembarking in 1620 including their first leader John Carver. Most died from starvation and disease, although there were many hazards which could kill a person. Carver apparently died from sunstroke.

By the time the survivors got to their first harvest, they were fired up that they looked to have enough to make it through the second winter. So the 53 Europeans who were left had a big old celebration. It went on for days.

They invited some of their Indian friends who had shown them how to grow some of the crops that did so well. And the Native Americans were so impressed with the feast that they sent some of their hunters into the woods to get some venison for the settlers. Read more

Anonymity Credit Card Style

Identity theft is a big issue. If you talk to anyone who has been a victim of that particular crime you can get a feel for how incredibly disruptive it can be to your life.

What if a credit card company came along and changed things up to help protect consumers? What are some of the things they would have to do to keep their cardholder’s identity safe?

For starters they would have to remove information like card holder names and account number from the card, right?

Sound crazy, doesn’t it?

Well there is a new credit card company that is doing that very thing.

Revolution Card is a new credit card that leaves the account number and card holder name off of the card.

I think they may very well be on to something. Sounds a little like the PayPal of credit cards.

For those of you unfamiliar with PayPal, it is a system that makes money transactions via email. The person you send or get money from only sees your email address. Your financial information is theoretically much more protected because you can change the email address associated with your account.

In the same way the Revolution Card uses a pin number for each transaction. And they even allow you to create temporary pin numbers. That can be a useful feature for one time purchases, dealing with unfamiliar merchants, and when working online.

I suspect we will be seeing much more of Revolution Card in the future.

Thanks to Valeria Maltoni who shared about this in Fast Company.

Clarify Your Win and Be More Effective

Effectiveness is often a good measure of success. When we are effective we are producing the results we striving to achieve.

Trouble comes when the results we see are different from what we expected. What then? How do we become more effective?

One sure way to be more effective is to Clarify Your Win.

We All Want to Win

Everyone likes to win. People love the excitement when their team is getting ahead. It’s the reason sports are a multi-billion dollar industry around the globe. We are hard wired to crave winning and being associated with winners.

This is also why a team that’s in the middle of a big loosing streak has trouble filling a stadium. No one wants to associate with “losers”.

With sports it’s easy to see who the winner is. One quick look at the scoreboard, or maybe the clock is all it takes. Winning in most sports can be reduced to numbers and guys often memorize an amazing amount of data from their favorite sports teams all with the the goal of figuring out who’s got the best chances to win.

Or sometimes they use their stats to explain why this team won and that team lost. Read more

Defensio Promises Competition for Spam Killing Akismet

Spam is the scourge of the internet. Spawn of Satan. Evil incarnate.

It’s bad stuff.

They say something on the order of 90% of all email sent is in fact spam. Blech!

Spam Defined

For those of you who live under an un-technological rock, here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia Spam entry.

Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, mobile phone messaging spam, internet forum spam and junk fax transmissions.

Spamming is economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. Because the barrier to entry is so low, spammers are numerous, and the volume of unsolicited mail has become very high. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which have been forced to add extra capacity to cope with the deluge. Spamming is widely reviled, and has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions.

In other words there is little cost and effectively no adverse consequences to spammers so they continue to flood the planet with their electronic waste, and tie up huge swaths of bandwidth and countless man hours dealing with their mess.

And if you were wondering where the term spam originated, apparently some of the early computer geeks were fans of Monty Python and they saw all that junk as overwhelming things the same way the Spam song did in this skit.

Read more

The Joys of Vacation

va·ca·tion [vey-key-shuhn, vuh-]
–noun

1. a period of suspension of work, study, or other activity, usually used for rest, recreation, or travel; recess or holiday.
2. a part of the year, regularly set aside, when normal activities of law courts, legislatures, etc., are suspended.
3. freedom or release from duty, business, or activity.
4. an act or instance of vacating.

A Little Time Off

When most bloggers go on vacation they stop blogging for a bit. Me, I’m different. I’ve got a couple days off and I finally get to write!

I guess vacation means different things to different folks. Some people want to get away, do nothing. For me a vacation is time to do some things I want to do.

Sleeping late. Dinner with friends. Building out web sites. Blogging. Exploring new sites. Adding feeds to my reader.

These are all the kinds of things that recharge my batteries. We all need to be sure we make the effort to get recharged now and then or we will burn ourselves out.

Question is, what recharges your batteries?

Customer Service Credit Card Style

Scenario

You make a purchase with your credit card for $171.76. Even before the bill comes due you cut a check to the credit card company for that amount because you believe in paying off the balance in full every month.

Due to your convoluted but very effective personal accounting system you mail in a whole bunch of checks for individual purchases when you pay your bill. However when the credit card company processes your payment, their electronic check scanners mistakenly process that particular check for $5,171.76.

Then your bank’s electronic check scanner makes the exact same mistake and as a result overdraws your account.

Oh, and because the credit card company processes payments made on the same day largest to smallest a whole bunch of the other checks written for that payment bounce.

Fees galore!

How do you fix it?

After your initial panic you start looking at the evidence. A quick glance at the digital image of the check in question shows that it is obviously a mistake by the machine readers.

You better start making calls right away or this will get worse fast.

Now the question is this: How many phone calls and how long do you think it will take to get this obvious mistake by the machines resolved and the fees removed from your account? Read more

Some Rules You Should Never Break

Yesterday I mentioned some rules that you can get away with breaking in your efforts to keep focused on the money making activities in your business.

But there are some rules you should never break. These unbreakable rules apply not only to your business but also to your entire life as well.

Really there aren’t many of ‘em. But you can totally shoot yourself in the foot and potentially sink your business by breaking them.

They are basic rules, and should be common sense. Of course common sense isn’t so common these days, is it?

It all boils down to basic things like good customer service and treating your business associates and employees well. Most all religions have some form of instruction along these lines. Lots of philosophers even have addressed the issue.

Jesus said we should treat other people as we would like them to treat us.

It’s a rule we should never allow ourselves to break.

An Example

A friend of mine recently was burned pretty badly by a business associate in a way that was completely unethical. There was a bunch of money involved and talk of lawyers.

Thing is the industry my friend is in is way smaller than I think the burner realizes. These things have a way of becoming known. Before to long folks stop doing business with unethical players.

Treat someone the way my friend was treated and word will get around eventually.

It doesn’t matter whether you neglect you blog to focus on your core business (unless your blog is your core business, of course). Your web site will still be there.

And so will those customers, business associates, and employees. At least the same people will be there. You break this rule and they may become your competitor’s customers, former business associates and ex-employees.

Or you can follow the rule and keep them all on your side.

The choice is yours. Treat others well.

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