Attention is incredibly scarce. Why? There are so many ways to divert it. Father Roderick Vonhogen once famously said that the Catholic Church isn’t competing with Islam or Judaism – it’s competing with ABC, CNN, YouTube, and Facebook. The same is true for you, your company, products, or services, and your industry. You are competing…
Twitter’s the hot new thing, the shiny object du jour. As such, it’s also turned into a massive cesspool of spam from marketers desperate to try hawking their ineffective wares in another channel, hoping against hope that consumers on Twitter are not as smart at filtering them out as they are in other media. Sorry,…
I thought I’d detail some of the processes and thinking behind how I manage and maintain nearly 10,000 followers on Twitter. Before we dig into tech stuff, I have two stated goals for Twitter: 1. Focus on people who want actual conversations. 2. Eliminate people who want to advertise. I don’t care. I didn’t care…
There’s a popular expression, a cliche, that says time is money. However, time isn’t money. Why? There is no such way to intermediate time. There is no coinage for time, no way to purchase time back that you have spent. If time were actually money, you could buy back that missed softball game or child’s…
In the World of Warcraft, there’s an epic battlezone known as Lake Wintergrasp. Players who choose to play in this part of the game join one of two teams with either the goal of defending Wintergrasp Fortress or attempting to take it over from the other team. Without delving too deeply into the game mechanics,…
There’s a fun drill we do in the martial arts that I first learned from master instructor Bud Malmstrom. Given that you have so many choices, so many options, so many techniques, it can be tough to excel at something, especially in a system like mine which has an absurd number of exercises, drills, patterns,…
Waiting For Wintergrasp: The Moment to Lead People need leaders. They want leaders. They hunger for leaders. In some cases, people are so desperate as a crowd for leadership that they’ll follow and even swear loyalty to terrible leaders, as long as they don’t have to take up the mantle of leadership themselves. Nowhere is…
If you watched my session from Jeff Pulver’s Social Media Jungle Boston, you know that I gave everyone some homework – your favorite grilling item, sent to Justin Levy. While I have lots, I thought I’d share something slightly different. Here’s how I grill, period. First, I use charcoal because I like fire and lighter…
How many blog posts haven’t you read yet? How many podcasts haven’t you listened to yet? How many messages in your inbox are just languishing there? Some of them are landmines. After all, yesterday was April Fool’s Day, but you might not get to those April 1 blog posts in your RSS reader for a…
