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A Ninja Perspective on Racism

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Dec 10, 2007 in Ninjutsu | 18 comments

A Ninja Perspective on Racism

I had an amusing experience on Friday as I was bringing my lunch – Chinese food from the place on the first floor – back up to my office. On the elevator ride up, the guy in the elevator commented, “Man, that smells good. Where ya delivering to?”

He had mistaken me for a delivery service, simply because I was an Asian guy carrying Chinese food.

What I found more interesting was the reaction of folks on Twitter when I made mention of the incident. Seems they were a lot more offended than I was.

Racism, whether explicit or implicit, is harmful, but from my perspective, it’s an important insight into a person, and a very public display of their weakness. Racism is a weakness, a character flaw that a skillful practitioner of ninjutsu can take advantage of. We have an expression – kyojitsu tenkan ho – which roughly translates as “truth as a lie, lie as truth”. Any character weakness can be turned against you, any preconceived notion about a person can be used to distract and divert your mind away from the reality of a situation, ultimately to your detriment.

In the case of this guy, his remarks told me that if I ever needed to infiltrate his office, say as a competitor to steal some confidential information off his computer network, I could show up with a bag of Chinese food and if I ran into him, he’d make a false assumption that I was working as a delivery boy.

If you find yourself the subject of false assumptions – blondes are airheads, blacks are criminals, Jews are stingy, anyone Muslim is a terrorist – ask how you can turn those assumptions to your advantage.

The funniest antivirus software ad you'll see this year

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Dec 7, 2007 in Funny | 8 comments

I have to hand it to Symantec for perfectly cloning Japanese kids’ shows with this ad series for Norton Antivirus.

Part 1:

Part 2:

More cheese than all of Paris. Hat tip to Erik Carlsson for these absolute gems.

Viral is not word of mouth

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Dec 7, 2007 in Marketing | 18 comments

Viral is not word of mouth

A bone to pick with my marketing colleagues. Viral marketing is distinct and separate from word of mouth marketing. Viral and word of mouth marketing are NOT interchangeable. Let me give you two examples of marketing.

I really like Matthew Ebel‘s new album, Goodbye Planet Earth. I think it’s a fantastic album, half radio drama, half space opera, and I gladly tell anyone and everyone I know about it. A certain percentage of people who trust my recommendations and have similar music tastes will probably go out and buy it and tell their friends about it, and so on. Ideally everyone in the world who likes Matthew’s style – whether they know it or not – will buy his album.

Word of mouth or viral?

Second example. I really like Matthew Ebel‘s new album, Goodbye Planet Earth. I think it’s a fantastic album, half radio drama, half space opera, and I’m going to write a Facebook application that will, when you add it to your profile, message every friend you have on Facebook. Permission? Well, clearly if you added the application you’ve given me permission to do whatever I want, so I won’t bother asking. As soon as any of those friends add the application to their profile, it will message all their friends, and so on.

Word of mouth or viral?

Word of mouth marketing to me requires consent. Yes, I can tell you all about what I’m interested in, but for it to go beyond just me requires your implicit consent and assistance in spreading the message.

Viral marketing does NOT require consent. The classic example used to explain viral marketing is Hotmail. Hotmail appended (and still does) a marketing message to every email you send, with or without your permission. You cannot opt out of it, you cannot change or suppress the message. It’s there and it spreads to everyone you message, and if they sign up, it “infects” their outbound communications.

These are more than semantic terms as well. To someone in pure marketing, they may be semantic, but to me, someone who is both a marketer and a technologist, they are different because the software development process has different outcomes. To develop a word of mouth application simply requires invitation capabilities in the software to allow you to spread the word. To develop a viral application, the software development process has to incorporate tools and functions to automatically pull and message all your contacts, ideally in as low profile a manner as possible so that by the time you notice, it’s too late. The virus has spread and moved on past you and you’re powerless to stop it.

If viral marketing as I’ve described it makes you feel uncomfortable, good. It should. Viral marketing is non-consentual marketing. Word of mouth marketing is consentual marketing. To the marketers who claim that viral and word of mouth are the same, ask this simple question: in any other context, especially the context of intimate relations, would you rather have the choice of consent or not?

How I Organize My Mornings

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Dec 6, 2007 in New media, Technology | 12 comments

Michelle Wolverton asked me how I organize myself in the mornings and manage to get a podcast out the door every day plus two on Wednesdays (the Financial Aid Podcast and Marketing Over Coffee, the best marketing podcast ever made at a doughnut shop).

The answer is that I use a Mac. I’m not being a pimp or being facetious. I use Spaces in Mac OS X Leopard (virtual desktops) like crazy, which helps me stay organized. Here’s a snapshot of my desktops – all 8 of them, which is my layout for the morning. Jeff Pulver calls this his social media sunrise.

In desktops 1 and 2 (top left), you have the browser, Google reader, a text editor, and Garageband. I do my research in this pane for the show and document show notes here, plus surf blogs and GMail. No office software as I usually do most of my workday stuff in Google Docs.

In desktops 3 and 4 (top right) is my social network window. Here I run Twitterific, Adium connected to 12 different IM accounts on 5 services, and Spyder, my MySpace data manager. I’ll check profiles, answer messages, leave comments, and respond to Twitter here.

Desktops 5 and 6 (lower left) contain a terminal window and iTunes. Once the podcast is done, I convert it from AIFF to MP3 using LAME 3.98.1 on the Mac – the encoder is much better than iTunes, but it requires you to compile your own source code – and then dump it into iTunes for branding (ID3, lyrics, cover art). During the rest of my workday, I also manage processes in this window, such as renicing (changing priority) of running programs on the command line. Of course, I also control music in this space. If I’m ding an interview, Skype runs in this space as well.

Desktops 7 and 8 control blogging and server stuff. When the podcast is ready to upload, I’ll use Cyberduck here; I also use Cyberduck to manage any on the fly redirects, etc. In the bottom half of this space I run Ecto, which lets me control and edit all of the Student Loan Network blogs at once, making adjustments as needed.

In the menu bar I also run Google Notifier, which keeps me apprised of emails and calendar appointments, Spanning Sync, which syncs my Google calendar with iCal (which then syncs to my iPods), iSync, which syncs Google Calendar and iCal to my Nokia N91, Growl, which displays Skype and Twitter notices, and SMC Fan Control, so I can alter the speed at which the CPU fan runs in case the MacBook clearly shows signs of warming up.

In non-space I run QuickSilver as an application launcher and general utility, so I never have to actually find application icons to launch them.

This may seem like a lot of stuff to run, and it may be, but it’s how I accomplish a lot in a short amount of time.