Occasionally Interesting
Ford is doing a little campaign involving their 2011 Fiesta. They’re giving away 100 cars to 100 bloggers / social medians for six months. During that time, the “agents” are supposed to create content around the car with monthly “missions.”
I decided to participate, and this is my video application:
My submission went through right at the buzzer, so I’m far behind many of the other applicants with video views. I figured posting it around a little bit would help me catch up!
Growing up poor, I found solace in my material possessions. Still to this day, I struggle with the pack rat mentality of parting with stuff I own. This is something I have been working on recently.
Over the holidays, I spent some time in SF and NYC, working and couch surfing. When I was in NYC, I worked from friends’ places and from coffee shops. For four weeks, I toted my life around on my back from couch to couch. It may surprise some that I found it to be a rather enjoyable experience.
What I found was that I could be perfectly happy living life out of “one carry-on and one personal item” (a shoulder tote bag for clothes and a laptop bag for gadgets and work stuff). A carry-on bag is enough to fit a week’s worth of clothing, if you’re okay with wearing jeans 2-3 times before washing them. If you can find a place to do laundry every weekend, you’re set.
Why do I need all that stuff at home? It’s nice having a comfortable bed, a computer desk, privacy. It’s comforting to know my mortgage payments are baby steps toward owning my own place outright and having drastically lower living expenses in the future.
But if I got rid of it all, that mortgage payment could go into an interest-earning account and would be quite a sum after 20 years.
If I sold now, I probably wouldn’t walk away with any cash, since I don’t have much equity. On principle, I’m not going to sell my condo to break even or take a loss. For 3 years, I’ve been paying more than I would have if I was renting on the basis that the money isn’t being “thrown away.”
When I was walking the streets of New York City, I was thinking about becoming homeless. Then I realized my situation at home and came to the conclusion that I cannot afford to be homeless.
I talk and think about marketing a lot. I think about marketing on a business level and on a personal level. My own success has likely been a result of effectively marketing myself.
When you are marketing someone or something, you are trying to convey a message to as many people as possible. There are many ways of getting that message across. My method of choice is intrigue.
Instead of pushing my message onto other people, I try to get people to come to me. Instead of talking about myself, I say less and let others around me fill in the gaps. This is risky, because you can’t control what others say about you. However, when someone hears something about you from someone else, they’re much more receptive than they would be if it was you saying it.
If you can get people to come to you instead of pushing a message to them, you can potentially convey much more information. Essentially, you can lead someone down a “rabbit hole” and let them discover things about you, piece by piece.
I have a very scattered presence online, but I’m very easy to find. I don’t count on people finding every single page or site I’ve created. Over time, I’ve created so much content online that someone can spend hours online and still have more to discover.
A few people have told me I have the “world’s best business card” (My name ranks well on Google for that, too!). I can’t say I completely agree about the “world’s best” part, but there is something to it. While some people write it off as pretentious, the card has an overwhelmingly positive response. It intrigues people. When sorting through 100+ business cards after a conference, seeing that one will often lead people to search online. Once I have lured them to the rabbit hole, I must do my best to captivate them with as many interesting things as possible. For the purpose it was intended, my business card very well may be the best. Other people have other needs for business cards, so it isn’t the “world’s best” for everyone.
Don’t talk about yourself. Don’t self-promote. Try to leave an impression on those around you. Get people talking about you, especially those you know you well. Intrigue those you meet and let them discover you on their own.
I’ll keep this super short, because you can read/watch more about it here.
My employer, BitGravity released a free Flash video player, developed by Dean Casalena, for people to quickly and easily post FLV & H.264 videos they are hosting themselves (or, obviously, on the BitGravity CDN).
It’s tucked away a little bit in the Player Configuration Wizard, but I think it might be interesting to experiment with the pre-roll and post-roll advertising functionality. That’s something you don’t get when you embed Vimeo or Viddler videos, and it opens up new opportunities for video content producers to monetize their content.
I was one of the first people to follow more than a thousand users on Twitter. A little less than 2 years ago, I think there were about 10 of us, following anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 each.
As a hobbyist statistician, I have a mantra: You can never have too much data, as long as you have tools to filter and extrapolate the data to make it useful. At the time, there weren’t such tools for Twitter. This was even before Twitter provided a “replies” feed. I was following a lot of people as an experiment. I wanted to see if I could keep up. I wanted to see if I could make sense of the noise.
In the end, it destroyed my user experience. It became very narcissistic. It was hard for me to keep a really close eye on what people I’m interested in were doing, and I found myself using the various pre-Summize search tools to see what people were saying to me or about me. When my personal Twitter experience became all about me, it began to suck. Twitter’s value is in learning from others and seeing what they are doing.
As time went on, I used other methods of staying plugged in to the Twitter community. It was and is a lot of work. I created a second Twitter account to keep track of primarily local people (which helps me hear about local events to promote on my main Twitter account). I’m always looking at what is trending on Twitter (keywords or links that are showing up rapidly among the entire community) and I even spend a lot of time on my (noisy) “/home” feed.
I used to follow everyone back who followed me. I no longer do that. I’ve spent many hours over the last year, trimming the people I follow from about 11,000 down to under 6,000. Almost all of them were individually reviewed to see if they’re businesses, inactive, only using Twitterfeed/FriendFeed/Ping to post tweets without actually using Twitter, spammers, non-English, and so on.
The point here is that I’ve spent many hours fine-tuning my following and I am constantly spending time checking to see what people are doing. I try to spend as little time as possible watching what people are saying to and about me. It’s not easy, but I make it work.
What I’m noticing now, though, is that many people are falling into the trap I fell into almost two years ago: following a lot of people and turning Twitter into a narcissistic experience.
Twitterholic.com has a list of the 1,000 people who follow more users than everyone else. While it is likely missing many people, it lists 1,000 people who are each following more than 3,400 other users.
Are they working as hard as me to keep track of what’s going on? Not likely.
People are being encouraged to follow many people and use tools like TweetDeck, which allows you to see Groups and Search Results, along with “All Tweets.” If you have a column for Replies, Direct Messages, and a search for your name(s), you’re already spending over half of your monitor’s real estate (for most monitors) on content about and to you. The Groups functionality allows you to filter out the people who you “really want to follow,” but what’s the point in “fake following” all the people you don’t put in those groups? If you don’t want to follow them, don’t follow them!
Tools like TweetDeck — which are great for watching yourself — are encouraging this narcissistic approach to Twitter. When the experience is about you and not about others, it destroys what made Twitter great to begin with.
It used to be that if you were traveling and tweeted your location, anyone you’re connected to in that city would likely see it and say “Hey! Let’s hang out while you’re here!” Now, you get back home and a month later, they’ll say “I wish I knew you were in town!”
As people begin following higher quantities of people and relying on narcissistic tools, the only way they will see your message (unless you are in one of their groups, and you have no way of knowing if you are) is if you address them directly. You might as well just use email at that point.
So what I miss most about Twitter is being able to Tweet openly so a group of people see it, instead of having to address people directly for them to get the message. This happens some, but it’s happening less and less as people follow more and more.