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First Impressions Are Hit or Miss

They say you shouldn’t try to please everyone. You shouldn’t try to make everyone like you. I was thinking a little bit about why. I notice this in how the people around me treat me. I casually observe, knowing I can’t make people think of me the way I want them to, hoping to figure out what their first impression of me must have been.

People make up their minds about you within seconds of meeting you, seeing you, and talking with you. Occasionally, a person’s first impression can be swayed, if they’re open to it and if it’s drastically different from how they see you after that. This may sound like common sense, but it’s impossible to be fully aware of someone’s perception of meeting you.

I have two opposite examples.

Let’s start with the negative. I was at PodCampAZ 2 and was out to lunch with about 80 other attendees. I had just sat down at the end of a very long table of noisy social media people. Someone walked up to me, said, “Hi, I’m Bridget.” and reached out to shake my hand. I immediately shook her hand and said, “Hi, I’m Brian.” As far as I remember, that was about it. I was a little perplexed when the person who had walked up to shake my hand immediately walked away. Little did I know at the time, I had been connected with her and her husband on Twitter for a few months. What — to me — was a random and strange event during a hectic lunch was also — to someone else — a terrible first impression. I found out later she told other people who had never met me I act like I’m full of myself. One bad first impression resulted in a few bad zeroth impressions!

Here’s one that’s positive. I helped organize Startup Weekend Phoenix. During the event, we encouraged bloggers, podcasters, and photographers to attend for free to make some media for the event. I was bouncing around the teams to make sure everything was going alright and I saw someone walk in with a camera. “Great!” I thought. I rushed over to him to get him situated with what was going on so he could take some photos. Turns out, the camera was an excuse to poke around and see what was going on. This was his first peek into the Phoenix tech community, and he had someone enthusiastically showing him around and getting him up to speed. It seems like the enthusiasm got through, because he went to all of the tech events in the following weeks. In a matter of weeks, he went from not knowing much about the Phoenix tech community to being a regular, and I was there to welcome him in. Also, at each of the events, I was either helping organize or I was speaking. If that isn’t an ideal first impression, I don’t know what is.

It seems like most people fall in between. No matter how “good” of a person you may think you are, first impressions can go bad and you usually won’t even know about it.

Watch your first impressions and examine what about people gave you a good impression of them.

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Even If You Don’t Expect It

When you think about viral marketing, you think about intentionally making something people might want to tell their friends about. It’s not easy to inspire this behavior in others and it usually takes a truly stunning product or message to get any word of mouth traction.

So if you any spend time trying to think of thing you could make that people would want to share, you would likely to be as surprised as me at something accidentally going viral. It just goes to show the importance of the sharability of content.

I was reading some local blogs and I saw a post about satellite photo of interesting shapes and objects on the ground. (If you’re spending time reading RSS feeds, you’re doing yourself a disservice by not commenting. I’ll go into more detail on that in a later post.) It reminded me of a collection of aerial photos I had found. Yes, aerial, “in the air,” is not the same as satellite, “in space,” but it’s cool bird’s eye photography nonetheless. To find the aerial photos, I looked where I had last found them: on Digg. When I finally found them, I “dugg” the digg page linking to the photos and then commented on the blog with a link to the photos.

I didn’t think anything of the vote on Digg. The goal was not to “promote” the multi-year-old Digg submission or even the photos. I didn’t tell anyone about it and it seems like the blog comment didn’t actually go through! But nonetheless, I got to see the ripple of people sharing the link I had retrieved and dugg. All it took was one person watching FriendFeed — I don’t actively use it, but my Digg votes show up there — and sharing it with his friends.

Just reinforces the idea that sharable content is in nature viral. The more sharable it is, the less emphasis you have to put on the “marketing” in “viral marketing.”

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What I’m looking for in my next registrar

I have been a Go Daddy customer for about 5 years (wild guess). Somehow, I have managed to buy dozens of domain names through them, despite their constant efforts to prevent me from doing so. Their prices seem fine and their service seems good (I also have hosting, which seems to have excellent up-time and does fairly remarkable under traffic bursts). Their web site sucks, though.

The web site does more than suck. It slaps you in the face and tries to steal your lunch money. It pokes you in the eye, stands in your way, and then grabs onto your legs as you try to walk past.

Amazingly, the web site doesn’t lure you in before treating you like this. It does it from the second you walk in the door to the finish line, where the resilient somehow find a way to buy a product from them. If you go to the GoDaddy.com home page, you’re overwhelmed with one of the most cluttered and confusing landing pages on the planet. It takes a state-of-the-art computer with a state-of-the-art broadband connection to load the page without any hiccups.

The ordering process is the worst, though it seems like it might be one less step than it was 5 years ago. They fill up pages with hundreds of dollars of add-ons they want you to buy to go with the $10 domain. If you don’t scroll down to find the small “No thanks, continue to checkout” link at the bottom, you are unable to purchase the domain. If I’m logged in and have a PayPal account on-file, I should be able to search for a domain and buy with a few quick mouse clicks. Not so much with Go Daddy.

I know there are better registrars out there. People tell me about them all the time. However, I’m not going to jump ship until I find one that meets a few conditions.

My next registrar will need to be reputable. I need to be able to trust it. It needs to have a history and needs to come recommended.

My next registrar will need to have a good user experience. That’s why I will be leaving Go Daddy. Pages should load quickly and not strain my computer.

My next registrar will need to be accessible from my phone. Go Daddy’s site is too much for my iPhone’s CPU and cellular connectivity. Go Daddy has a mobile version, but it is crap. The deal breaker with it is that my saved accounts do not show up. I am not typing my credit card number on my phone with every purchase.

My next registrar will need to have competitive pricing. I’m not going to pay over $10/year for a .com domain. Period.

I would like for my next registrar to allow me to set default nameservers for new domains. I don’t know if any registrars have this. I usually forget to set the nameservers during the (cluttered and confusing) checkout process with Go Daddy, so I’m stuck with an ad-filled Go Daddy parked page until the second set of nameservers get propagated. And depending on where I’m hosting the site, I may have to enter as many as 4 nameservers. It would be nice not to have to do this every time.

My question to you is this: Who will/should my next registrar be?

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Changing the World

I talk to a lot of people who say their goal is to “change the world” or “take over the world.” I fit into the former group, because I don’t think one can take over the world without things getting messy.

Changing the world is an interesting subject, though. There are many motivations for wanting to change the world. For me, it is immortality, or at least one perspective of it. Not to get too religious here, but to lay the foundation, I’m an atheistic, worm-food-when-you-die kind of person. I don’t believe in classical immortality (living and breathing forever), but in an existential sense, you can be immortal to everyone else.

Think about yourself for a second. When you die, perhaps those thoughts (of you, by you) go away. Think about the people around you who you know. When you die, they are certainly impacted, although they remember you. Now think about everyone else, mainly those who know of you but have never met you. When they think of you, it is in relation to something you have said or done that impacts them. Unless they hear about your passing on the news, the thoughts of who you are no different if you are dead or alive. To them, you might as well still be alive. If what you do has a great enough impact on enough people, stories of who you are and what you’ve done can be carried along to people who might not have even been born in your lifetime.

Change the world. Create or do something that is forever remembered. Be immortal.

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Fame

I recently read an article online about John Travolta’s son passing away. I don’t spend much time reading about celebrities, but I came across the headline on the CNN.com home page.

Fast forward to last night. I was at the airport, working on my laptop, and I overhear a wife to her husband, “You heard about John Travolta’s son?” He replied, “Yeah, he died. He had a history of seizures and he hit his head.” I found it fascinating that not only did they both independently know about what happened, but some very specific details.

That’s what it’s like to be famous. You suffer a tragedy, and tens of millions of people — or possibly even a hundred million — read about it and discuss it in places like airports in the middle of the night.

Some people seem to want to become “famous” and I’ve even heard people accuse me of having that as a goal. Personally, I don’t see the appeal of being renowned in this way.

I understand where people can get the impression that I want to be famous. I promote myself and I am trying to become well-known. However, there is a distinction in becoming an industry expert. I don’t have any interest in being followed by paparazzi, having people know about my personal life, or even recognize me on the street.

What I do have interest in is being regarded as an expert by people who I respect in the field. My goal is not to be “famous,” but to be someone people go to for advice.