See if you can use the least amount of words in communicating who you are and what makes you unique.

Clarity yields success.

There is a lot of fear and confusion right now. This is often made worse by the media. What is the cure for this sickness? CONNECT WITH REAL PEOPLE

A dear friend of mine, Kurt Daradics, is one of the social catalysts who has been critical to my success in business. He, along with some other heavy hitters in LA and the OC, have collaborated and brought together many groups and organizations into one major networking event and holiday party. The goal is to make real connections with real people.

On Thursday, December 11th from 5:00pm to 10:00pm, the Digital Family Reunion (DFR) is bringing the Southern California technology and business communities together for the holidays at the Skirball Cultural Center. In association with some of the region's top trade associations (like the DMAsc which we're a member) and social networking groups, the DFR is throwing a major holiday party. The DFR's goal is to reignite old relationships, spark new ones, and set the stage to kick off 2009 with a bright new start.

Scheduled attendees include leaders from all the major industry sectors such as media, entertainment, finance, publishing, venture funding, software, commerce, education, and many more.

Visit Digital Family Reunion and join the collective conversation.

Recently I read an article on How to pick up followers on twitter and disagree with the approach and “tips” offered by the author. Here’s why:

Tip 1: Follow the “smores (social media whores).”

Translation: Follow people who you don’t care about, as long as it exposes you to more people.

Tip 2: Send @ messages to the smores.

Translation: make it look like you’re friends with popular people so you will get follows by association.

Tip 4: Follow everyone who follows you.

If a follow is a type of endorsement, then what does who you follow say about you? Are you actually interested in what the people you follow are saying?

Tip 5: Always be linking.

Translation: It doesn’t matter what you say, as long as you’re saying something.

Here’s the underlying assumption to all of these tips: More followers equals more influence. It’s simply not true. You’ll have far more influence if your followers actually value what you have to say.

To that end, follow people who you find value in following, not simply who follow you. If the people listening to you share your values, interests, and actually care about what you have to say, you’ll have a far bigger impact with your audience.

If you try to appeal to everyone, you won’t appeal to anyone, and you’ll lose your individuality in the process. When you’re no different than anyone else, why should anyone listen to you?
Be yourself.

See the difference?

Do you remember when friendster was all the rage? These days my interaction is limited to the occasional email that I receive from them. They're irrelevant. Everyone's gone to a new party. Is the MySpace party the next to end? Did they peak when they were sold for hundreds of millions of dollars? Based on the data from Alexa the new trend is favoring Facebook. I wonder how long will they be king of the hill.

Banks often take their customers for granted. Hopefully with the recent consolidation in the banking industry things will get better (not worse). Recently I went to one of my bank’s ATMs. They obviously have a database that tells them if the PIN number is correct. Then why can’t they remember a simple thing like what language I speak? They should ask things like: language, default account, etc and then remember it in the future to make my experience better. The customers might not notice these subtle things at first but would start to notice when other banks don’t treat them like a known friend.

Another way that banks could improve their overall experience is to notice which state (or country) the visitor originates from when using their website. Technology (like that used by Google) exists to identify where the requests are coming from. That combined with a commitment to improving the customer experience would cause the bank (or any company for that matter) to make a custom experience for everyone. They could offer the services that are exclusively for an individual market, modify the images to be more reflective of the community, and bypass marketing information when someone is already a customer. Users could always switch to a different area if they happen to be out-of-state at the time.

The status quo appears to be what works best for the bank not the customer. Yet, if they just took some time and thought about the experience from the customers perspective they could actually become very personal even if they’re really big. A little investment in the user experience would likely pay huge dividends. Today it might be something that get’s a company noticed. In the next few years this will become basic business practices.

I’m a long time fan of the computer trivia game series, You Don’t Know Jack. Recently Jellyvision has decided to end the free online versions of their games after their 100th episode of the online YDKJ game. I’ve always wondered how the games can be so engaging when they use almost no graphics at all, relying heavily on moving text.

In the void of time I used to spend each day enjoying their games I’ve started reading the Jellyvision blog and found this post about why moving text (turns out its called “kinetic typography”), can be so effective.

“We sometimes catch flack for the text-heavy appearance of our conversations. “Why don’t you use video?” we have been asked. And I guess it’s a reasonable question. Video is inherently more active than text. I mean, look at these words here. They’re just sitting on the screen. Oh, sure, you could scroll up and down, but that’s not really the same thing. . .But you can make text dynamic: make it move and fill the space in a way that gives the words themselves personality” (more).

Here’s a good example: check out this audio excerpt from Fight Club. You wouldn’t think just seeing words move could bring the whole scene back in your head, but it does.

Installed the new art piece for Jeff’s and my office today – affectionately known as “the geekery.” It’s an 8 foot wide print on a dense foam core material called gator board. Sweet!

Here’s Jeff in front of it:

In October 2007 we published an article titled, Don't be fooled by the SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The point that we were making was that the way to be loved by Google and the other search engines was to be "relevant".

One project that has been completed recently was the launch of Dane Sanders' book Fast Track Photographer. Here is snapshot of a search for "Fast Track Photographer" (click for larger view):



Results 1-28 all about Fast Track Photographer. You have to get to the bottom of page 3 to see anything else. How much did the SEO cost? ZERO!! This shows how being relevant is the best way to be noticed by the search engines (like we said).

Our web gurus have acknowledged that the one benefit to SEO is when you want to be found for generic terms that relate to prospecting. Sometimes SEO works to generate non-paid search referrals but if it's really generic or valuable then paid placements are the way to go (if relevance doesn't work as well as you want).

So what does this mean for you? It's better to focus on your content than Google. If you do that then Google and the others will find you. If you just focus on SEO you might just get a lot of fluff and no traffic.