What do Buddhists say before Thanksgiving dinner? Something like this, called a meal gatha. Feel free to borrow it for your own practices! First, seventy-two labors brought us this food; we should know how it comes to us. Second, as we receive this offering, we should consider whether our virtue and practice deserve it. Third,…
In World of Warcraft, your characters have special abilities that are used with a mandatory wait between uses, called a cooldown. Some abilities have longer cooldowns than others, meaning that you have to wait longer in between uses, but the tradeoff for a longer cooldown is often a more powerful ability. For example, paladins (like…
Imagine, for a moment, the essence of sunshine. It’s energy (from a distant star, true) that reaches all parts of the surface of the earth in some capacity at some times. It’s energy that is largely unfocused – it’s just there by virtue of the fact that the ball of rock we’re sitting on is…
Do you want a successful, well-read, valued email newsletter but you don’t have the time to do a ton of writing each week? Consider content curation as an avenue to building a great newsletter. Content curation is the art (and it is very much an art) of finding great stuff online and sharing it with…
Walking around the floors of Dreamforce, I’m constantly astonished at how bad sales and marketing demos still are by many companies. This is supposed to be the era of 1:1 marketing. This is supposed to be the era of customization. Yet far too many marketers are demonstrating products and services with the same kind of…
Finding mentors and teachers today is both easier and harder than ever. It is easier because the digital age permits us nearly unlimited access to information and people. Paradoxically, it is also much harder for this very reason – finding the correct teacher is incredibly difficult amidst much noise. One of the most important aspects…
One of the more interesting questions I was asked yesterday after my Dreamforce session was, “Where should we start measuring our marketing? Marketing is such a vast thing to try to quantify.” The answer to this question is simpler than you think. Measure what is logical to measure! What’s the thing that matters to you?…
In a conversation I was having recently about marketing strategy, the question came up, “What should we be doing first? Where do we start?” The answer to that question depends on whether you’re talking about audience building or system building. When it comes to building out systems and infrastructure, the place you generally want to…
Riffing off of one of DJ Waldow’s original ideas about using Favorites as a testimonials feed, now you can make dedicated testimonials feeds with custom Twitter Collections (formerly called Custom Timelines). All you need do is open up the TweetDeck application, start a collection, and start adding tweets to it. Here’s an example of mine…
Knowing what is possible is the first step, the pre-requisite of innovation. If you don’t know what you can do, if you don’t know what tools you have in your toolkit and what their capabilities are, you certainly don’t know what can be invented. On the one hand, you risk re-inventing the wheel. On the…
