Crackberry Users: Get a Life!

Yesterday, I attended the funeral of an old friend, the mother of one of my daughter’s closest friends. She died of a form of Mad Cow’s Disease. She had been a world traveler and took in the life and gusto and good food of all the places she visited with great enthusiasm. Whatever it was that caused it, doctors say, may have been dormant in her system for as long as 20 years. When it kicked in last spring, I went and visited her and her husband in her home, where I found her in a semi-comatose state, drool flowing from her mouth, jaw hanging open, hands tightly clenched and her body well on its way to a permanent fetal position. She suffered and lingered in that state — this vivacious lover of life — until last Sunday, when by God’s grace and mercy she finally passed on to the next frontier. When I was told the news, all I could say was “God Bless her”. I hated to see someone suffer like that.

So as you can imagine, her funeral was a somber affair. Yes, we celebrated the life we shared with Maire, but we deeply mourned the suffering she had to endure to the end. While sad that she was dead, we were all deeply grateful for the end of her suffering.

The funeral, a combined Unitarian/Episcopal service was admittedly a little long, but every element seemed to capture just perfectly the essence of Maire and the message she would want to convey to us, her surviving family and friends.

As the eulogy got underway, I heard a “beep beep beep beep” going on directly behind me. Confused, I turned around. There I saw a woman busily hacking away at her CrackBerry, no doubt feeling so indispensible to the person on the other end, that she had to CrackBerry her in the midst of an old friend’s funeral.

I gave her an annoyed look, which she ignored and continued on her way, until I heard the familiar “silent vibe” sound on another CrackBerry.

I turned around, only to see that the woman sitting next to her had HER CrackBerry out. She was reading her message and looked at the original culprit, clearly a friend or associate and nodded in recognition.

So instead of leaning over and gently whispering into her friend’s ear, CrackBerry addict number 1 found it necessary to message her friend during their friend’s funeral.

If it wouldn’t have created a scene, I swear to God I would have grabbed that CrackBerry out of her hand and slammed it into the ground with such force that it would be splattered into a zillion pieces.

So I turned back around, after another annoyed look at Culprit number 2, which again was completely ignored.

A minute later, Culprit number one proceeded to open up one of those hard candies with noisy plastic wrappers, popping it in her mouth and loudly chewing and sucking on it.

I was beyond disgust and did my best to just breathe and refocus on the eulogy, which turned out to be a good one for Maire.

So what’s with you Crackberry addicts?

Last month, I went to my son’s “Biography Day” at his school wherein each of the children, dressed in costume, made a presentation about the person whose biography they read (my son was Steve Jobs, but I digress… he did a great job cloning Job’s presentation style). While this was going on, there was a busy executive in a suit kind of a guy sitting there with attache open and CrackBerry in full swing as he messaged and emailed his way through all the presentations, right up until his little girl presented — during which he politely set his Crackberry aside, closed his attache and listened, and after which he stood up and left the room, his obligation fulfilled. No doubt his daughter was pleased that he at least showed up, though I would say he was not present, if you know what I mean.

I’ve seen guys out on dates with their beautiful wives and/or girlfriends ignoring them as they message away on their CrackBerry, oblivious to the beautiful (their appearance doesn’t matter, just the fact that they obviously spent time gussying themselves up for the occasion) woman across from them. And to be fair, I’ve seen women do the same thing, but less so.

I can’t sit in a theatre anymore without seeing teenagers busily messaging their friends, wherever they may be, throughout the movie, and then having to ask their friend next to them — in a loud voice — what they missed.

What the f*ck has happened to us? Can’t we shut off our CrackBerrys and cell phones for a short while and be present while we’re attending special occasions in our life? Do we feel that inadequate that we have to be indispensable to whomever may be on the other end?

I almost got a CrackBerry once because I thought it had a cool feature set (and it definitely does), but seeing what I do on a daily basis with CrackBerry addiction, I decided not to join the brainless drones who throw courtesy and civility out the window in order to enslave themselves to this evil little device.

OK, that feels better. I’ve got it off my chest.

Have a great weekend, folks… and if you’re a CrackBerry addict, take a break and enjoy the life around you.

I have spent the past two evenings curled up reading The Corporate Blogging Book by Debbie Weil. I’ve known Debbie for a long time, harking back to when she wrote for us at ClickZ, so it was good to see an old pal doing well and getting published.

The Corporate Blogging Book is for the people the title implies it is for: those who work for corporations who are thinking of getting into blogging or just now getting into it. Debbie’s writing is clear, direct and to the point and in this book she covers everything a corporate blogger would need to know.

I especially enjoyed the chapter where she took on the “fear of blogging” issue (”Will there be controversy? Will I get fired for what I say on my blog?”) head on. She recommends, to borrow a phrase from another book, you “feel the fear and do it anyway”. Don’t let fear get in the way of your opening up communications and conversation with your customers via this powerful medium.

So if you are a corporate blogger or even a wannabe, do yourself a favor and head over to Amazon and buy a copy.

You’ll learn a lot and be ready and all stoked up to start a new blog in just a few week’s time… A nice way to start out the new year.

Click To Play

Some of you may remember that I did an interview for ZBIZ.TV with Robert Glazer at ReferralMonitor.com back in September (see video above). Well, I’m proud to say that Robert is stepping ReferralMonitor up a notch and getting his message out through holding a free teleseminar.

If it looks like something you’d like to attend, I hope you will. They’ve got a great service over there at ReferralMonitor. — Andy

Teleseminar Topic:

How to build and grow a business without marketing

If almost all your business is generated from referrals then why don’t you have a referral generating strategy? Why leave the cornerstone of your lead generation to chance?

This Friday, December 8, at 1pm EST we will be presenting a teleseminar on how to build a referral strategy that is proven to triple or quadruple the amount of leads and sales you are currently generating. This one hour lunchtime seminar will also include a special announcement on how a select group on the call will be chosen for a complimentary consulting and strategy session valued at $500.

We will also answer your specific referral marketing questions if you who send us your questions before the teleseminar to the email address at the bottom of this announcement.

What will the teleseminar cover?

For most business owners and marketers the immediate challenge is to find clients willing to use their services without an extended delay between purchases. In other words, they don’t have much time to spend on a long sales cycle. They need a pipeline full of prospects even when they are busy dealing with the work at hand. For smaller businesses waiting 3 – 6 months between deals may be too long. The problem is almost all companies are using marginal strategies that are not going to return anything tangible

Here are some of the things we will be discussing on Friday’s call:

Identifying and tracking your best referral sources

How to develop a constant stream of referrals without paying anyone

How to make referrals a condition of doing business

The biggest mistakes businesses make and how to avoid making them

How to turn your customers into salespeople

Shortcuts to generating referrals in a week or less

Building ‘Power Partner’ relationships that will ensure high quality referrals

The best gift and reward ideas for almost any business and client profile

Why referral marketing is the most profitable, quickest, and smartest strategy for you

Referral marketing examples from real world businesses

How can you register?

To register for this teleseminar and also be eligible for the free referral marketing package valued at $500 please email richard@referralmonitor.com and include your name and any questions you want answered on the call. The teleseminar number will be emailed to you before the start of the call. We’ve only reserved 100 seats for the call so space will be limited.

Yours Truly,
Richard

When Guy Kawasaki invited me to videotape his upcoming interview with Steve Wozniak, I jumped at the opportunity.

After all, Kawasaki and Wozniak are two of my long time heroes, another one being Steve Jobs. To be able to videotape and actually meet and have conversations with these guys was truly a major event in my life. Well, I had that opportunity, I took it, and I’m glad I did.

I also wanted to have something major on my ZBIZ.TV site to build awareness, and hopefully RSS subscriptions while I was at it. So I saw this as the perfect opportunity.

So I bought the cheapest Manchester, NH < => San Jose tickets I could find, booked a hotel room where the event was being held, flew out, taped that night, flew back the next morning, edited it and submitted it to Veotag for processing, and by Sunday night had it up and running on ZBIZ.TV.

Guy Kawasaki linked to the interview and the visitors started to pour in. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had more than 25,000 people come by and watch that video.

In terms of having exciting content that attracted viewers, I couldn’t have done better. As I speak, people are still pouring in to the site to watch the Kawasaki - Woz interview.

It’s a very heady experience.

But the fact of the matter is, it wasn’t the success that I would have liked to have had.

I attracted a ton of people who loved Woz and wanted to see the interview, but relatively few who were interested in seeing other interviews with entrepreneurs.

25,000 people came through, but very few of them checked out other interviews on the site. Not a single one subscribed to my RSS feed. And I didn’t think to put up an email subscription form, so my net gain for all of this was an ego boost and a thrill but no long term effect for ZBIZ.

But it was a valuable lesson for me.

I knew better than to handle things the way I did… or should I say, didn’t.

As 2006 closes out and 2007 closes in, I’m putting my business activities through a thorough examination to see what I could do to deliver real value to my audience and hopefully, turn that into real business opportunities in return. The thing is, a lot of this is just reminding myself of what I already know and have done and done successfully.

If I had to do it over again, I’d have my RSS Feed subscription much more prominent than I now do, and would have had an email subscription form in there as well.

But hey, you live and you learn.

I would still do it again, only differently this time.

I haven’t blogged for the past couple of weeks.

Normally I don’t offer up any reasons for that because frankly, it usually makes for a boring read and is usually laced with stale promises that I most likely won’t keep.

But this time, I’d like to share with you what’s been going on, what I’ve learned from it and how I hope to come out ahead because of it.

Long story short, I’ve been in intensive talks with Jared Spool at User Interface Engineering to fill a newly created position in which I would become “Director of Community Management” or, the title I preferred, “Chief Blogging Officer”.

We had lengthy conversations and IM sessions in which we discussed how I might fit in, how working there might impact our friendship, what really needed to be accomplished at UIE, etc.

I prepared and presented a proposal and was preparing for the final meeting when Jared took me aside and let me know that at this point, they don’t want to proceed with the new position, as they are so busy with implementing (and profiting from, I might add) a number of the ideas I brought to the table over the past eight months while consulting for them, that they don’t really have the bandwidth to take on yet another person and the resulting set of activities I would put into play.

I was deeply disappointed, to say the least, so I licked my wounds and sulked for a few days, got over it, and now I’m back to my old self, cooking up entrepreneurial schemes and planning for the future.

While going through this whole process, I learned — or should I say, RE-learned — a lot of things about running a successful business that I had completely forgotten… or thought was no longer relevant.

UIE, you see, is based heavily on a single asset: they have a mailing list to which they email a weekly (sometimes twice weekly) newsletter to by the name of UIEtips. Every single bit of marketing they do goes through that list. Every dime of revenue they take in comes from that list. They take extremely good care of that list, as you might imagine.

They have an annual conference every fall called UI 11 or 12 or 13 or whatever that particular year’s version is. They charge a healthy amount to attend that event, and hundreds of people do, every year. For an October event, they begin marketing to the list (and selling conference tickets) in April… and year after year, they pack the event, having to actually turn people away who dare try to sign up in September.

Over the past year, they have added theWeb Application Summit coming up in January in Monterrey, CA, have been conducting Virtual Seminars, reports and may have a special highly vertical Summit coming up next spring (that’s maybe… if they have the resources). And they’re doing a GREAT job doing all of it!

Wow!

What my job would have been is to build up their Brain Sparks blog to a frequency of 1-2 posts per day, hence growing the readership, and focus on using that to build the total number of subscribers by 25% over the next year… which would have a great impact on sales if these were indeed the quality of people we were looking for and more importantly, were looking for a company like us to solve their problems.

When I came on board at UIE as a consultant, I was under the impression that email lists were going the way of the dodo bird. What with RSS giving people virtually commitment-free access to their content (no hassles with unsubscribes) and spam making the process of actually succeeding at getting through the filters and in to a subscriber’s email inbox, I figured email had DIED as a marketing tool.

But I was wrong. Dead wrong. And UIE is walking, talking proof that I was wrong.

Email lists are an extremely viable, if not superior, marketing tool for selling products and services online.

You can be assured that all the entrepreneurial ventures I’ve got cooking in my head right now will rely heavily on email to sell the products and services I have in mind.

And I relearned that from this process I just went through… which I perceived originally as a failure, but turned out to be a stepping stone.

Mike Arrington, in his CrunchNotes blog, wrote a short, but fascinating piece called “Riya Manipulates Bloggers to Nail a Product Launch”

To summarize for you, he broke it down into four simple steps:

1) Line up a video interview with Robert Scoble on ScobleShow.
2) While you’re at it, do a demo for ScobleShow.
3) Get a TechCrunch profile of your new product to show up the day of the launch.
4) Have Scoble plug the demo, interview and TechCrunch writeup on Scobleizer.com.

And the magical results? A ton of publicity and commentary on TechMeme. The bloggers go wild about you.

So all you potential tech magnates who are looking for spectacular buzz (if only for a day) on your new product launch, remember that Robert Scoble of Scobleizer/ScobleShow and Mike Arrington of TechCrunch (leading you ultimately to Gabe Rivera’s machine at TechMeme) are THE best friends you could possibly have.

Robert Scoble, at the moment, is relatively accessible — mainly, I believe because he is in major growth mode at ScobleShow and is very hungry for material and scoops.

Mike Arrington on the other hand, is so overwhelmed with people contacting him with their latest and greatest that it’s very difficult to get on his radar screen. If you want to learn how to get on Mike’s radar screen, watch this video. It tells all… and watch it all!

Gabe Rivera is rather immune to the whole thing. You get the attention of the a-listers, his system picks you up. If you don’t, it doesn’t. Simple as that.

So there’s your one minute lesson for today, techmeisters! Be nice to Robert and Michael. They may be the best friends you’ve got!