Click here if you can not see the embedded video above.

Can blind luck be reproduced? Absolutely, says Tod Maffin.

Today’s viral campaigns may seem like jackpots in a one-in-a-million lottery, but it turns out they are well within the reach of any marketing team’s grasp. All it takes is knowing the secret ingredients behind some of the world’s most talked-about campaigns.

Download PDF

By reverse-engineering each element of a successful viral campaign in your industry, Tod Maffin will show your audience the key markers that can launch a campaign into the viral stratosphere — markers that can be programmed into the smallest budgets.

He will literally “deconstruct” a viral campaign, piece by piece, then show your group how to re-assemble a campaign for their own organization.

And, using his ASSURED ROI™ methodology, he’ll detail for your attendees each of the seven action steps required for launching an impactful and measurable viral campaign.

You will never look at a viral campaign again the same.

Kevin Rose had a fever. And, because he’s a nerd, he tweeted about it. That prompted the writers behind the deadpanned-but-hilarious TV ads for Old Spice to create a video response just for Kevin. You can see it below:

This video has been the talk of the web in the last few days — not so much for its content, but that the company would pick one person to direct a response to. But Kevin Rose isn’t just any ordinary nerd; he’s a well-connected and highly influential one. More than a million people follow his Twitter account.

The amount of publicity Old Spice has generated from this single well-directed message is incalculable.

Can you do the same with your business? Absolutely. And you should.

Take Canadian coffee chain Blenz. It reaches out to specific people through its Twitter account — sometimes rewarding them with gift certificates. While Blenz apparently pings random people, you may want to consider being more strategic.

Tools exist today to let you determine who the most influential people who follow your brand are.

Klout.com, for instance, gives you a score between 1 and 100 that estimates a person’s level of influence. It calculates everything from how often they are retweeted, how many influential people follow their social media accounts, and so on.

The recent release of the excellent and free Hootsuite social media dashboard now lets you filter tweets by Klout. In other words, you can see a stream of people who are tweeting about your brand — and can tell Hootsuite to only show those people who are very influential on the Internet. These are the people you should focus on. Invite them to participate as advisory board members. Send them a gift certificate. Invite them to your next staff party.

This screenshot shows one of the Hootsuite columns I run — a search for any time someone mentions my Twitter username, but only people with more than a Klout Influence Score of 39. These are the people who others trust to bring them valuable content. They are paid attention to.

When you randomly surprise influential people with something of value, they’ll talk it up. And your brand wins.

Have you ever randomly surprised one of your brand’s followers/friends? What did you offer them?

NB: You can do surprise your fan base and customers offline too — this summer, some Virgin Mobile customers will get replacement phones hand-delivered right to their door. To kick the program off, Sir Richard Branson made one of the first deliveries in Toronto earlier this week to an unsuspecting Virgin Mobile customer. “I don’t even know what to say right now. I can’t believe you guys did this!” said Morrison.  “I got my new phone right away and Richard Branson is here. He’s the coolest delivery person ever – and I didn’t even have to tip him!”

Related Links:

• Shirtless Old Spice guy replies on Twitter with hilarious personalized videos (thenextweb.com)
• Old Spice Guy is social media rockstar (cyberjournalist.net)
• Old Spice Man connects with the Web (news.cnet.com)
• Hootsuite Just Took the Lead in Third Party Twitter Apps (dannybrown.me)
• How Your Business Can Twitter Better with Hootsuite (windmillnetworking.com)
• Unpacking Klout: True Measure of Influence? (conversationagent.com)

I’ve been slowly assembling a list of CBC Facebook pages. If you can suggest any changes, please note them in the comments. (I’m looking for actual Facebook Pages, not those automatically generated Community pages.) Thanks! –Tod

• The CBC Fan Club (huge, but unofficial)

Platforms

• CBC News Network
• CBC Radio (alternate page)
• CBC Radio 2 (alternate page)
• CBC Radio 3

Divisions

• CBC Arts Online
• CBC Documentaries
• CBC Learning
• CBC Music
• CBC News
• CBC Shop
• CBC Sports

Web Sites

• CBC.ca Cookbook
• Digital Archives

TV Shows

• Battle of the Blades
• Being Erica
• CBC Montréal’s Summer Series
• CBC News: Compass
• CBC News: Marketplace
• CBC News: The National?
• CBC News: Calgary News
• Easter Seals on CBC
• Heartland
• iDesk
• Little Mosque on the Prairie
• Republic of Doyle
• Stanley Playoffs on CBC
• Steven and Chris
• the fifth estate
• The Tudors

Radio Shows

• AbOriginals (CBC Radio 3)
• All Points West (B.C.)
• CBC Book Club
• CBC Radio 3 Sessions
• Cree Radio CBC (Québec)
• Daybreak (Montreal)
• Daybreak North (B.C.)
• Deep Roots (2)
• Homerun (Montreal)
• Laugh Out Loud (alternate page)
• North by Northwest (B.C.)
• On The Island (B.C.)
• Q
• Québec Online
• SoundXchange (Saskatchewan)
• Spark
• The Bottom Line with David Suzuki
• The Current
• The Main Ingredient
• This Is That
• Under the Covers
• Vinyl Café

Regions (“Centres”)

• Calgary
• Manitoba
• Newfoundland and Labrador
• New Brunswick
• Nova Scotia
• North
• Ottawa
• Saskatchewan
• Vancouver communications

I realized the other day that my most best tips all seem to come in pairs, and I thought I’d pass them along.

(Today, an accompanying video I did about my business travel rules of two is up on Chris Brogan‘s ManOnTheGo.com web site.)

The Taxi Two-Step
Whenever I step out of a taxi, I now do two things: First, I look back at where I was sitting to make sure something didn’t slip out of my pocket (I’ve lost two cell phones this way over the years), and second I look on the outside of the cab for its taxi number, which I try to remember. I almost never have a need to be able to identify the taxi afterwards, but in the rare case when you need to, knowing the specific cab you were in can help. (In Las Vegas once, I left my MacBook Pro in the backseat. I didn’t know the specific cab I was in, so all I could do was hope that the cabbie was honest and returned it to the cab company’s lost and found; he did. As I was a flagged cash fare, he could have easily made off with it without any record of me being in his cab.)

Two Keys
When I check into a hotel which uses those magnetic-stripe cards as keys (don’t they all now?), I always ask for two keys, even though I’m the only person checking in. I stuff one card in my wallet right away as a backup. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve left the room without my key or lost one along the way. This little trick has saved me some time here and there.

Two Wake-up Calls
Some hotel chains, like the Fairmont, ask if you want two wake-up calls — usually spaced 15 minutes apart. I always opt for this, just in case I answer the first one then slip back to sleep (jetlag can be a bitch). I’ve almost always been awake and moving when the second call comes.

Two Oils
Studies have proven that certain scents can have an effect on our brains and I’m a huge believer in this. I always travel with two essential oils — rosemary and clary sage. Rosemary is known to promote better concentration, alertness, and a general sense of well-being. It’s a great oil to burn if you’ll be working in your hotel room on your presentation or a report. Just bring along a small tealight candle diffuser or a ceremic light-bulb ring to burn it. At night, I use Clary Sage, a rich, musky smelling essential oil which gives me a very calming sense of rest. Put ten drops of Clary Sage into a hot bath — it’s more of an absorption oil than a burning oil — soak in it for 15 minutes, and you’ll be asleep in no time.

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Back in 2006, I had one of the most popular podcasts on the Internet — the How To Do Stuff podcast. I always tried to make it a quirky, entertaining, and informative how-to series on all sorts of random things. Things you wouldn’t hear or read about on any of the many how-to sites out there.

The podcast came to an abrupt halt in September 2006 when I became ill. Well, I figured, now is the time to re-start it! And so HowToDoStuffPodcast.com is back up and running! New episodes will come every few days. So far, here’s what’s on the site:

• How to Wax Your Ass (by far, the most popular episode)
• How to Train Your Voice
• How to Hammer a Nail Properly
• How to Do a Sit-Up Properly
• How to Draw the Perfect Relaxing Bath
• How to Make Great Beer at Home
• How to Tip a Doorman
• How to Plant a Tree

I hope you’ll visit, listen to a few, and share the word about it. If you have a Twitter account, you can use something like this:

Tod Maffin’s quirky, entertaining, informative podcast is back! http://HowToDoStuffPodcast.com

If you’d like to receive an email each time a new episode/post is published, you can sign up here.

SOLD Nikon 70-300mm (f/4-5.6G) auto-focus lens — $70

This is a great lens to have in your kit.  I’m selling my great Nikon 70-300mm (f/4-5.6G) auto-focus lens. It’s in fantastic condition. Only selling it because I’m using a 18-200mm lens a lot more these days.  This is a superb lens for shooting portrait/single faces from a distance to get beautiful depth-of-field behind them.

This is one of the lightest distance lenses you’ll ever have.  Comes with mount cap, lens cap (with tether), and lens hood. $70 firm. You can pick it up any time and start using it right away!

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Nikon 52mm Prime Lens — $40

52mm prime lens takes outstanding shots with soft depth-of-field.  This is a manual lens, giving you fast and complete control over the focus — no need to wait for the auto-focus to spin and whir until it locks in.  Super light-weight and small. You’ll never notice it in your camera bag. Easily fits in your pants pockets for quick change.  Comes with mount cap, lens cap (with tether), and UV filter which protects the lens glass.  $40 firm.

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SOLD Nikon SB-600 Speedlight/External Flash — $150

Best price you’ll find on a SB-600 flash. ONLY USED ONCE! Sells new for twice as much [see Bestbuy price]. Uses regular AA batteries, so you can replace on the fly without waiting hours for a lithium ion battery to charge. This can be used as a slave remote flash to extend your lighting area. $150 firm. Pick it up any time and start using it right away.

BONUSES:
– Comes with small, light-weight stand.
– Comes with light diffuser.
– Comes with batteries.

Let’s see if I have this straight:

1. Sensational Headline: Bi-polar patients can become violent.
2. Actual story: Bi-polar patients probably won’t become violent.

Come on. A little factual headline writing would be nice. In j-school, you’d get a failing mark for crap writing like this.

It’s this kind of sensationalism that continues to perpetuate the stigma behind mental health issues.

Email sent to Patricia Graham, Vancouver Sun’s Editor-in-Chief:

Hi Patricia,

I was disturbed to see your paper’s recent headline:

“Bi-polar patients can become violent, prof says.”

What disturbed me was not the headline, but that the article, just three paragraphs in, counters the headline:

“Often there is stubbornness and inability to cooperate, but that doesn’t mean the patient will become violent.”

Which is the truth? Clearly, the latter.

People skimming headlines — as is increasingly the case in a digital news world — will come away with an inaccurate sense of the reality here.

Will the Vancouver Sun publish a correction?

Tod

Her response (which was refreshingly quick):

I agree with you about this headline. It appeared in our first (early) edition only, and was caught and corrected for the second edition. The revised headline says:

“Bipolar patients rarely become violent, prof says”.

This was an unfortunate error; the second edition goes to the majority of our readers, but Vancouver Island and rural areas would have got the first edition.

Patricia

I used to keep my speech resources (contracts, notes from client calls, links to web resources, research, slides, etc.) in a bunch of different folders on my hard disk. Then, I’d change the system mid-way through the year because I thought I’d come up with a better way. Inevitably, I’d lose important stuff along the way.

I switched over to eSpeakers [free trial link here] several years ago and won’t ever go back.

eSpeakers is a powerful database made especially for professional speakers. It manages everything from travel details (hooks into Tripit.com via API), scheduling, details on your topic, number of attendees, contact info, package tracking (if you’re shipping books), expenses reporting, and tonnes more. If you have a number of common jokes or stories you tend to use in many of your gigs, this can even keep track of which ones you’ve told!

Here is a screen-by-screen walkthrough of the program.

This is the main screen, which contains the barebones information. The Status pulldown menu contains Lead, Hold, and Confirmed. Once you’ve put a date on hold, a secondary pulldown menu appears, letting you indicate how strong a hold is — a nice touch, if you have several potential clients interested in the same date.

The Bureau pulldown menu contains hundreds of speakers’ bureaus, and the list grows all the time. If you get presentations from a number of agencies, this will help you keep track of which ones give you the most business.

The Notes section below automatically references every change you make in the database, and you can also add notes manually, like each contact you have with the client.

The Contacts page is pretty straight-forward. You can have it automatically populate the field from your computer’s existing address book, and there’s a place for the details of your pre-event client call.

The Travel tab is very detailed, letting you input both air and ground transportation details. One very nice touch is that if you use TripIt.com for your business travel, eSpeakers will automatically import all your details in from that site. Very handy indeed.

The Action list is, essentially, a to-do list for the event. You can create different action lists for each stage of the pipeline. For instance, when a date is listed as a “Lead” in my database, my action list is pretty small — contact the prospect, forward their contact info to my agent, then follow up periodically. When you convert an engagement from Hold to Confirmed, different actions are required. eSpeakers comes with a set of pretty standard actions, but they are easily customizable (as I have done, above).

When an action becomes due, you get an email that morning.

The lists generate action dates based on the event date itself. So rather than entering due dates automatically, it will set them based on proximity to the event date — for instance, one week prior to the event, my system will prompt me to email my bio to the person introducing me. Two months after the event, I double-check to be sure I’ve been paid.

Unfortunately, for now the action list only lives in the database and can’t update any of the popular online task managers like Toodeloo or Remember The Milk.

There is, of course, a place to track the fee, the agency commission, and taxes. If you sell books, CDs, or other products at the event, there’s a place for you to record how many sales you made, and a spot for you to track the shipment of those items to the venue.

If you speak a lot and sell a lot of products, you could export this data to an Excel spreadsheet, then run any kind of calculations, such as which bureaus book you at events which generate the most number of product sales. Lots of number-crunching possibilities here.

The Custom tab comes pretty much empty, with ten short (one-line) fields and four longer entry fields. You can customize the field names to your own needs. This is how I’ve customized mine: The name of the agent who booked the event, the contract number, and so on.

I like to track the industry name (e.g., Human Resources) to be able to provide me with a simple year-end look at revenues generated from each industry. This can help me know which areas industries it might be more profitable for me to focus on in the future.

It’s also helpful for me to know who the keynote sponsor is so that if it’s Microsoft, I can avoid telling Bill Gates jokes.

The Library tab is where your documents live. In the top section, you can upload the contract, notes, conference graphic images, or really any small document. (Unless your slide deck is pretty small, I’ve found those files to be a little too large to be handled in this area.) Like the rest of the data, this lives online in eSpeakers’ database.

The real power, though, lies in the bottom templates section. You create a mail-merge Word document and it will fill in all the information it needs from the fields in your database — even your customized short and long fields from the Custom tab.

As you can see above, I have a Word template for the first time I contact them (“I’m glad to hear we’ll be working together…” then a few other templates. When you click “Merge For This Event,” Microsoft Word (and, sadly, only Word for now) opens and fills in the details. I then just copy the letter to my clipboard and paste it into an email. (Kind of wish it could open up in a simple text editor, since Word is overkill for an email.)

Finally, the Misc tab contains the name of the presentation, how you should dress, audience size, whether the general public can attend, and whether this presentation would qualify for your Certified Speaking Professional designation.

My favourite section in the whole database, though, lives at the bottom of the Misc. tab. If there are certain stories or jokes or case studies you tend to re-use in different presentations, this will let you tick those off to indicate you used it. That way, when you’re invited back to speak three years later, you’ll know not to repeat the same material!

eSpeakers is a great program which has totally helped me keep my speaking engagements organized. It’s not cheap, coming in at $74.95 per month (or $809 annually), but for many professional speakers, this is a fraction of a single event and more than pays itself off in the long run.

You can get more information from the site by signing up for a free 30-day trial account.

* Disclosure: The link above will give you a special discounted rate and me an affiliate commission.

I’ve been lucky to have been speaking professionally since 1997 (when I was nearly chased off stage by the audience of teachers for suggesting the model of classrooms segregated by ages was outdated). Along the way, I’ve made my share of mistakes on the circuit.

Here are ten things that I wish I had known when starting out:

Attend as much of the conference as possible.

If your schedule permits it, be there for as much of the event as you can. Even if you have to cover hotel and other costs on your own dime. Clients really appreciate it when you’re up to speed on what’s been presented earlier, so you can tailor your comments to make the day feel more seamless for attendees.

Though it doesn’t happen often, occasionally a speaker before you will use similar material — you’ll want to remove or change that material in your own presentation. By total fluke once, a speaker after me happened to select the same case study I presented and for five minutes basically duplicated what I’d already said. I guess the event organizer thought it would be too awkward for someone to let him know, so he continued and pretty much lost the audience for the remaining hour he had after that.

I also like to stay after my presentation as well. This is prime time to connect individually with attendees who may have been too shy to ask a question in session.

Really, there’s no downside to attending the whole event if you can.

Ask to speak to groups in the same city.

If you’re looking to promote yourself and get more gigs, when you have your first conversation with the organizer ask them if there are any local business groups who they’re connected to that you might be able to speak to (without fee) when you’re in the city. Often there’s a marketing association, Rotary group, or Chamber of Commerce that would be more than happy to host you to present one of your prepared keynotes to their group. They get great value, and more times than not there’s someone there who is connected to a group that has a budget for pro speakers. If nothing else, you can collect business cards to add to your newsletter.

Record your pre-event client calls.

Of course, it goes without saying to always have at least one pre-event call with the event organizer. In that call you’ll confirm details like the time they want you there for an A/V check, how long they want you to speak for, expected attire, and so on. I spend a lot of time with them learning about specifically who’ll be in the audience — main age groupings, gender split, and what their jobs are.

I used to do the calls while trying to take notes, but I’m just not that skilled at it. I always insist on placing the call (as opposed to them calling me) so that I can call with Skype and use the great Call Recorder app to record the conversation. And I do not take notes during the call — I just focus on the conversation. The goal is to extract as much information as you think you’ll need down the road when putting the presentation together.

Don’t hand out copies of your slides.

Almost always, someone will ask for a copy of your slides. I almost never give them out. This is for two main reasons:

1. Most of my slides are images, not text. A copy of the slides would be meaningless without the commentary.
2. I use a lot of licenced stock photography and video in my slides. I’ve licenced them for presenting it to a group, not for distributing them to others.

Don’t forget that sometimes people want your PowerPoint/Keynote slides so they can basically give your presentation back at their company. Wouldn’t you rather they hire you to give the presentation, instead of giving them part of what they’d need to do your job?

If they insist on getting a copy, don’t put the slides up on your site. Instead, collect their business card and, when you email them the deck, ask them if they’d like to join your newsletter.

Give them something in exchange for their email address.

Though I don’t usually give out my slide decks, I do prepare a PDF document with some notes on what I presented. It’s often about four or five pages long, contains a summary of some highlights, links to things I presented, and so on.

At the end of my speech, I’ll invite them to drop their business card off on a table near me and will email this document to them and add them to my newsletter mailing list. (Always be sure to disclose that they’ll be signed up to your list in exchange for getting the summary, but that they can unsubscribe with a single click at any time.)

Keep a separate copy of each slide deck.

I used to have one basic deck of slides for each presentation, and I’d customize it and save it as the latest version. But this meant that I couldn’t go back years later and see the exact slides I presented to a client. If you have a main deck, open it then save it as a separate file for that client alone.

Record every single presentation you give.

Though most of my clients and audiences don’t realize it, I record the audio of every presentation I give. That way, if I ever need to go back and hear something, I can.

Besides helpful for listening back to yourself so you can improve, it may also help resolve more difficult situations. One time, a client complained, saying an audience member was offended because she heard me use the racially charged “n”-word; I was able to go back and reassure her I’d actually mumbled the word “figure.”

You don’t need any fancy equipment or hookups to the room’s sound system for this. Just start an audio recording going (I use QuickTime) in the background when you leave your computer on the lectern and let it capture whatever it hears through the mic. Even if you don’t speak at the lectern, it picks up the sound system fine. Then convert it to MP3, put it in that event’s folder, and forget about it until you need it.

Backup, Backup, Backup!

This goes without saying, but it surprises me how few speakers have redundant backups. Just last month, I was keynoting a conference and had to go on stage early because the presenter before me couldn’t boot her computer and she had no accessible backup.

Here are the backup methods I use and recommend:

• Turn on auto-backups in your presentation software, that way you always have two copies of your slides; in case your computer crashes while saving it, you’ll always have the most recent uncorrupted version.
• Sign up to Backblaze — it’ll back up everything on your hard disk automatically without you prompting it. It’s only $5 a month. Backblaze is the only system like this I found which can restore a Mac file to a PC and vice versa, if that’s important to you.
• Before leaving, upload the slides to Dropbox.com or something similar.
• Finally, if you’re on a Mac, tell Keynote to also save an additional copy as a PowerPoint presentation and upload that to Dropbox.com too.

But backups aren’t just for files — I carry my own backup wireless mic, fresh batteries, and a separate cheap GSM cell phone, so that in the event mine craps out I just have to pop my SIM card into the new phone and I’m back in business again.

Carry a paper introduction at all times.

Every once in a while, the only introduction I get is something like “And now, here’s our next speaker, Tod Maffin.” Ugh.

The introduction you receive prior to taking to the podium is more important than many speakers realize. It’s what establishes credibility in the minds of your audience. A bad introduction can have your audience write you off as a know-nothing before you even utter a single word.

I prepare a separate introduction for each client (the introductions vary and highlight different parts of my career depending on the topic I’m speaking about) and be sure to meet the person giving the introduction. Nowadays, I just give it to them without asking if they already have one. Always better that they use your material than something they’ve come up with on their own.

Have hidden stat and screen-shot slides

Every single one of my slide deck contains slides that almost never see the light of day. They’re charts or stats that back up some point I make in the main presentation, and screen-shots of web sites I mention.

They’re there because every so often, during a Q&A session, someone will want you to elaborate on a point you made. It really blows the audience mind when you can jump to one of these slides to bring up.

It takes some learning in PowerPoint or Keynote to do this, but it’s well worth the effort.

What are some of your lessons learned on the speaking circuit?

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Tod

1. sorry about the spelling, but that’s how we spell it in Canada!

This is a great little app that for people who have lots of videos on their computer, but want to watch them on your iPhone, iPod Touch, and an iPad. Previously what I had to do was to convert the videos to MP4 (often a very slow process), import them into iTunes, and tweak the metadata. Only then could I watch the movies I have on my iDevices. That still wasn’t a great solution, since those videos then took up space on those devices.

This app is really a tiny file server that runs on the same computer on which your videos are stored. You can point it to any number of directories containing your videos, including attached servers, and it’ll stream them live to any of your iDevices. The other great bonus is it’ll convert from basically any video format — on the fly. Brilliant. Appfresh – Free

I’ve always been an early adopter and, probably to my detriment, I always want to try the latest versions of programs. Appfresh will scan your Applications folder and compare your versions with the latest versions. Within a minute, it’ll have a list of programs that need updating. You can always pick and choose which to update — it suggests beta versions, so if you’re not up to a pre-release version, you can opt to not update that app.

Keep vigilant, though, for big upgrades to paid programs (i.e., from 3.1 to 4.0) — they may drop a new version that wants you to pay for an upgrade, leaving you to manually find and re-install the old version (if it’s still available on the developer’s site!). Caffeine – Free

Several years ago, I was speaking at a conference in the afternoon and I had time to attend the whole day’s events. The fellow doing the morning keynote had his notebook up on the stage and he had slipped out the back to make a last minute visit to the restroom. As his computer had been waiting there through a 15-minute coffee break, his screen saver kicked in. This wouldn’t have been a problem, except it was one of those photo slideshows of everything in his iPhoto collection. He didn’t have much in there, except racy photos of he and his wife! I’ve never seen a conference organizer run up to the stage so fast to slam the lid down on the notebook.

Caffeine puts an icon in your menu bar that, when activated, prevents your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen, or starting screen savers. It’s a toggle switch so you just click it again to go back to normal settings. I use this when my MacBook Pro is sitting on stage waiting for me to get up and give a presentation, so I don’t suffer a similar fate. Call Recorder (Skype) – $19.95 U.S.

This is such a great little app, I tell as many people about it as I can. It’s a tiny recording window that pops up any time Skype is activated. Whenever you place any kind of Skype call (Skype-to-Skype, Skype-to-phone, or videocall) it records it as a .mov file on your hard disk. You can tell it to not record calls that are fewer than, say 30 seconds long, and it comes with a MOV to MP3 conversion tool. (The problem with that tool, though, is it resets the timestamp of the file. The program really should offer a save-in-MP3-format option.

I now do all my pre-event client calls using Skype. Once the recording is finished, I just save it into that client folder so I can review it whenever I want. (Another nice touch: It can also save automatically to an iTunes playlist.) JumpCut – Free

Whenever I re-install my operating system (luckily, this has been a pretty rare necessity since switching from PC to Mac) JumpCut is the first app I reinstall.

JumpCut is a fast, low-memory clipboard alternative. Instead of using Command-V to paste, if you do Shift-Command-V and keep that combination held down, you can use the cursor keys to navigate between the last 99 things you copied to the clipboard. Release the keys and it pastes your selection in place as if it were the last thing you copied.

Another nice, probably accidental, function is if you use the regular Paste, the Mac will paste using the formatting of the originally copied text. If you use the JumpCut Paste, your pasted text will inherit the destination formatting. JustNotes - DonationWare

CatherineOmega has been talking up the great little web utility SimpleNote. Simplenote replaces the Notes app on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. When you download Simplenote, you get free access to their web app, so you can access your notes from anywhere. Simplenote really is just a simple online database.

While, of course, you can access your notes by logging into the web site, this service really shines when you access it through simple desktop apps like JustNotes. Catherine uses Notational Velocity on her Mac to access her notes, but I prefer the cleaner UI of JustNotes. Both sit in your menu bar. Click it to see your notes, use the simple search function, and any changes are automatically synced back to the web database, so your iDevices are kept in sync as well. My grocery lists moved here when I first started using them and they haven’t left. Levelator – DonationWare

If you do any audio work — especially when there are uneven levels — you really need Levelator. This program analyzes your audio file and carefully adjusts the volume of all elements so they’re more or less the same. This is a process called “normalizing” in the audio business. Levelator’s normalizing is one of the smartest I’ve seen — it even slowly starts to fade up a level in advance of low-level portion of audio, so that you don’t really notice any background audio changing suddenly. Very clean and simple operation — just drag your audio file onto the window.

There are two downsides. First, the program only handles uncompressed AIFF and WAV audio files. You’ll have to convert any other files, like MP3, to another format before processing, then re-compress after processing, losing a bit of fidelity, depending on how compressed you’ve set your MP3 compression. Second (and I know this is picky), you can only drag the file onto the window the app creates. You should be able to keep Levelator in your dock then drag files on top of there, have Levelator open, process the files, then close. Nothings perfect in life though, right? RescueTime - Free for basic account

In case you’ve ever caught yourself on a Friday thinking “Man, where on Earth did this week go?!”, RescueTime can tell you exactly where it went. This tiny menubar app quietly watches what you do on your computer — which web sites you visit (um…), which programs you run, how much time you take away from the keyboard, and so on. Then, you can pull a report at any time.

What’s even more cool is you can set “productivity levels” for each activity or web site. For instance, when I surf tmz.com, it scores that as -2 productivity. When I’m working on my own web site, it scores that as +1. When I’m in Keynote, that’s +2 productivity. You can even set targets — very cool when it emails you to say you just achieved four hours of productive time (which, oddly, makes me want to call it a day!). RSS Menu – Free

Like most avid blog readers, I use a RSS feed aggregator (Google Reader, in my case) to follow my favourite blogs. But there are a handful of blogs that I want to be alerted as soon as they publish. That’s what RSS Menu, another menubar app, does. You just give it the RSS feed URL of the blogs you want to track, and it’ll check them every few minutes (you control the frequency). If there’s new content, it’ll alert you via Growl (and optional speech) — click on the notification and it’ll take you right to the new post.

RSS Menu is donationware and can integrate with iTunes podcasts and Safari RSS feeds. XSlimmer – $14.95 U.S.

Back when Apple switched from Motorola processors to Intel processors, all the applications had to switch as well. The way most developers did this was to distribute a “universal binary” which contained the instructions to run on either microprocessor.

It’s been years since any Motorola processors were used to run Macs and there’s a 99% chance you’re on Intel. (Any Mac bought in the last five years or so runs Intel.) But many apps still contain the universal code. Xslimmer basically checks to see which applications still contain the old code and removes it — recovering disk space (sometimes a significant amount!) in the process.

Xslimmer is very safe. It has a blacklist of programs it knows about which can’t handle removal of the old code, and I have never once had a problem with any “neutered” program. Bonus: DropBox – Free for basic 2GB box

Dropbox is basically your own personal hard disk on the Internet. When you drag files to the Dropbox folder on your computer (it looks just like any other folder) those files are automatically synced with your Dropbox folder on the Internet. Then, you can access them from any web browser, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, etc. You get 2GB of storage free just for signing up — if you haven’t got an account yet, sign up free here and you and I will both get 250MB of extra space!

Shaw — like many cable providers, to be fair — bundle their most popular channels, forcing you to pay arbitrarily high prices for the single channel you want.

• If you want HBO — just HBO — you’ll have to pay for four movie channels.¹
• If you want just TSN2, you’ll be forced to pay for channels 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, and 87² even if you never plan to watch them.

This bundling is pitched to consumers as offering “better value.” In reality, it’s a way of obfuscating the price.

My Dream Ad Campaign

Just once, I’d love to see an ad from a cable provider in which the CEO, straight to camera, says

“We know our bundling makes ordering services from us confusing. That’s why from now on, each individual channel costs $3. Order as many or as few as you want. And take only the channels you want.”

The Sound of Shaw’s Silence

But we won’t hear this from Shaw. Actually, we never hear much of anything from the company. Shaw is a notoriously tight-lipped, family organization. It’s privately held and only the CEO-Owner, Jim Shaw, speaks on behalf of the company. Or, I should say, doesn’t speak. When covering technology for the CBC, I occasionally had to call Shaw for comment on related stories — not a single call for comment was returned.

Photo J McIntosh/CP

And good luck finding any social media channels — I couldn’t find a single Facebook page or group for the company, and the variants of Shaw’s name I guessed on Twitter clearly aren’t owned by the company.

Ordering Is Broken

Let’s say you opt to take your chances with the bundling game and add channels anyway — you’ll be doing it by phone since there’s no way to activate channels online. Shaw’s online customer care centre, at the time of this writing, actually returns a web server error. Classic.

Shaw would do well to get some basics underway — a monitored Twitter account and a Facebook page at the very least — and start listening to customers. It wouldn’t take much. For the time being, I’m holding http://twitter.com/shawcablevision. Jim, when you’re ready…

UPDATE: Apparently, Shaw has just hired someone to handle social media stuff. (Hat tip to Colleen.)

1. Three separate Movie Channel channels, plus a high-def version of one of the channels.
2. Canadian time-shifted channels

But there’s one big flaw in Apple’s design of the iPhone and iPad that still hasn’t been fixed — the onboard speakers.

On both the iPhone and iPad, the speaker is located on the rim of the product — which means that when you’re looking at the screen and listening to audio, the audio is shooting out away from you. This isn’t a problem for audio that’s recorded at decent levels, but so many videos out there (especially those on YouTube) are recorded with levels that are way too low. Cranking up the volume doesn’t help.

I often end up having to hold my iPhone in this position:

Although silly looking, this actually increases the volume significantly. On my audio test, cupping your hand in front of the speaker increased the decibel level from a peak of 70db to a peak of 78db. Since dB levels are logarithmic, this is quite an increase in the volume.

All Apple would have to do is locate the speakers on the front to provide better quality audio. (Misdirected audio also tends to drop a lot of the high-end frequency ranges, making the audio also sound muddier and duller.)

I’ve MacGyver’ed a solution for my iPad — tin foil (folded over several times to make it thicker) taped to the back and shaped in the same hand-cup form. It’s goofy looking, but works like a charm and makes listening a much better experience.

Griffin, which makes excellent ‘iProduct’ accessories, has an acoustic amplifier that looks great, but isn’t quite portable. ThinkGeek has come up with a simple but awesome solution — the iPhone Audio Booster is a simple piece of plastic that clips onto the bottom of your iPhone and essentially forms a plastic cup that does the same thing. Genius. And only $8.

Still, the right solution is for Apple to simply locate speakers on the front. Steve? Please?

N.B. On the iPad, speakers on both ends would also be good to provide stereo listening. But I’ll take what I can get.

I notice that some of my social media friends in Vancouver have put together an excellent day tomorrow called WordCamp (a day about WordPress). There are sessions on using WordPress as a CMS, being curious for a living, SEO tips, and the inimitable Dave Olsen presenting “Art and Technology Are Old Pals.”¹

I want to lovingly offer some constructive feedback to both their day and a trend in Camps I’ve noticed.

Are Camps Getting Too Expensive?

Tickets for the Vancouver event are $55 for the day. This surprised me. Generally, Camps in other areas/topics are free or priced low enough for most people to attend. Obviously, nobody’s making a profit here — the organizers are well-respected peeps in the local social media scene who donate a lot of time to various causes.

The Vancouver event includes a couple of coffee breaks, lunch, swag, and a social following the day. I’m not sure how much these cost, but my sense of Camps is that they’re meant to be an alternative to larger commercial conferences where tickets for a similar day might run several hundred dollars.

Are Camps Getting Too Organized?

But more to the point, I would argue that despite the title, the Vancouver event isn’t really a “camp” by the usual definition — self-organized on the day of the event.

Wikipedia’s definition:

“[Camps are organized by] sessions proposed and scheduled each day by attendees, mostly on-site, typically using white boards or paper taped to the wall…. BarCamps are based on simplified variations of Open Space Technology (OST), relying on the self-organizing character of OST.”

Vancouver’s WordPress tomorrow has a fantastic pre-set lineup — but does that not inherently make it not a Camp, by most definitions?

Last year, I trained to be an Open Space facilitator. BarCamps borrow heavily from Open Space. Their success is primarily based on the fact that those who attend drive the curriculum.

Do Camps Need a Mid-Course Correction?

Obviously, there is no official Camp company which protects its trademark. The use of “Camp” in an event name can be used by anyone, regardless of how the event is structured, how much it costs, and so on.

But perhaps events which are priced more than, say $20 or so, and those which have a pre-set agenda, shouldn’t use the “camp” designation?

What do you think?

1. Locals still talk about Dave’s über-inspiring “Fuck Stats. Make Art” presentation at Northern Voice a couple of years ago for which he received a lengthy standing ovation.

As I envisioned it, cell towers would be used to locate our phones and we would receive something similar to a text message when we neared an establishment with an offer to make like a special or time-limited discount.

That’s pretty much come true, although so far there aren’t any truly “push” marketing messages out there — the kind that show up on your phone suddenly, like a text message does.

Apps like Foursquare and Gowalla are pull-based — you have to be in the app and ask to see any nearby specials if they’re available. Clearly, a much better solution.

Still, though, I’m beginning to see what can only be called location spam appear on our phones.

Take, for instance, the deal Starbucks made recently with Foursquare. Any time you’re within walking distance of a Starbucks outlet, a special offer appears to give the mayor² a discount.

I live in Vancouver. There are more Starbucks in this city than stop lights. One intersection even³ has two Starbucks! That means that pretty much any time you use Foursquare in Vancouver, you’re going to get an offer from Starbucks.

Problem is, the Starbucks offer is lousy. It’s only for the person who has checked in the most — and even then, it’s a cheap offer: $1 off a limited number of their cold beverages.

I’ve stopped touching the “Special Nearby” banner because I know it’s just going to be a Starbucks promotion I can’t take advantage of.

I can only imagine this getting worse.

The real problem is that Starbucks — and other places that offer Mayor deals — aren’t being particularly strategic about their Foursquare placements.

Foursquare lets you offer a special to people who’ve checked in x number of times — a far more rewarding offer to your loyal customers. Or for a new store, offer a discount if it’s the first time someone’s checked in.

These cheap and prolific Mayor deals will be piling on top of each other soon and, if that happens, the whole concept will become pretty much unusable.

UPDATE: Rob Cottingham has some excellent thoughts on this here.

I’ve just started booking my new presentation Using Location-Based Marketing to Drive More Revenue: Six Key Strategies for Mobile Commerce. If you’re interested in booking it, please inquire about a date.

1. I used to own the domain mobilecommerce.org; I really should have kept that.
2. the person who has checked into that location the most
3. Robson and Haro

While helping a friend determine which stores had iPads in stock (here’s a hint: None!), I ran across this graphic on London Drugs‘ web site. It was in a block of rotating graphic.

It got me thinking how absolutely out of date the phrase “See in-store for details” is.

Print or broadcast ads, of course, don’t have enough space or time to list all the details like technical specifications, so this phrase was necessary. But is there really any need for it in the age of the web? Why didn’t London Drugs just put those “details” on a hyperlinked web page? It’s not like they were trying to get people to call for the price and rope them into coming in — Apple’s retailers aren’t allowed to discount.

It got me wondering — are there any other retail practices that are obsolete?

It reports on a new computer virus that can sneak onto your computer from other infected computers via unencrypted wireless signals, like the ones typically found in Internet cafés. From there, like most viri these days, it plants adware. The only difference between this and other viruses is it spreads from computer-to-computer on unencrypted networks, not by you opening an email.

Oh, and one more thing.

It doesn’t actually exist.

News releases from universities and computer-virus software manufactures are a kind of virus unto themselves. When you cover technology, you get them all the time. The formula is the same — a provocative headline saying there’s a new threat, that everyone needs to (a) download the University’s white paper, or, (b) buy/upgrade your anti-virus software.

Somewhere, buried several paragraphs down, is the confession that the virus doesn’t actually exist; it’s actually just a hypothetical one created in a lab. (To its credit, at least the University of Calgary’s news release calls it a “potential” threat in the first paragraph.)

You’ve got to hand it to whoever wrote the news release, though. They compare the (non-existent) virus to Typhoid Mary, the first person to contract and spread typhoid fever. Typhoid fever it transmitted over the air — hence, the likeness to the potential computer virus. They even coined the phrase “Typhoid adware.” Clever.

The best part, though, is the graphic the white paper uses to explain how the virus works:

Man. That’s one mean-looking virus!

The paper Typhoid Adware can be found: http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~aycock/papers/eicar10.pdf

The basics of the presentation focused on what “it” was — you know, that little something, that thing on the end of your tongue, that makes you know if you like a radio piece or personality or if you don’t. We all know if a host has It, but I tried to outline exactly what It was so one could duplicate it. Here is how I defined It:

• It is intimate. You are speaking directly into someone’s ears — even more so when they’re using earbuds… you can whisper to them. Radio listening is almost always done today by one person at a time; families don’t gather around the radio any more. And yet so many podcast hosts talk as if they’re speaking to a room — they use a hyped voice, or they call their audience “everyone.” Remember, you are only speaking to one person. There may be thousands of these one-person audiences, but aim to speak to just one.
• It breathes. One big mistake that many beginning podcasters, radio reporters, or audio editors make is they edit out the um’s and ah’s, and the long reflective breaths that sometimes inteview guests make. Unless they are completely distracting, you should aim to leave breath in. Breath is emotional punctuation. It gives richness to the words being spoken. One long, thoughtful breath taken before answering a tough question can say so much more than just the answer.
• It seeks the Universal Truth. The great radio shows, like This American Life, are always seeking a Universal Truth in their stories. It’s not enough to report the flow of what happened — try to find out why it happened and what your characters learned from it. In short, great stories give us pause for reflection. Great storytellers draw out those moments of reflection and give us the space to reflect.
• It takes time. It’s said that the best portrait photographers throw away the first few rolls of film they’ve shot with the subject. Why? Because in those first minutes, the subject isn’t as relaxed or comfortable with the photographer, so they appear stiff and uneasy. The documentary filmmaker Errol Morris is famous for interviewing people for hours at length, even if he’s only going to use a short clip, because he knows the longer one stays with a person, the more comfortable they’ll feel, the more they’ll tell you, and so on.
• It is everywhere. Always take your digital recorder with you, because amazing audio will happen when you least expect it. Even if you’ve got a podcast coming up but no ideas on what to talk about, just look around, take in your surroundings, examine the patterns you do each day. Content is everywhere if you know how to find it.
• It does not abuse music. Great music under a podcast should sound like the scoring of a film — like harmony to the melody of the words. Avoid recognizable songs because your listeners’ mind will be transported from your narrative directly into whatever memories those lyrics evoke. Avoid songs with words that “comment on” what you just said — for instance, don’t play “Life Is a Highway” just because you finished talking about hitchhiking. It’s predictable and a cliché.
• It is phony. Realize that the best storytelling employs a lot of tools to make the  a podcast or radio story really come alive. It’s okay to add a pause where an interview guest thinks. It’s okay to “act” while reading a script — in fact, it’s very much your job to make that script come alive.

Rob Cottingham, who pens the hilarious Noise to Signal cartoon, was in the audience of my session and did up this great cartoon summary of my points:

Embed this on your own blog or web site:

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Live Twitter Reactions

Unedited live Twitter reaction to Tod Maffin’s Taking Crazy Back keynote at F5 Expo, April 7, 2010:

Blog Reactions

“Tod Maffin was incredible. This is the second time I’ve seen him speak and he outdid himself with a very raw and thought-provoking keynote. My biggest take-away was when Tod asked the question how we, as managers, can reverse the damage our multi-tasking demanding world is inflicting on employees.”
– Amanda

“Perhaps the thing that makes Tod’s talk so powerful is that he isn’t one of those individuals you see on pedestals who have overcome all obstacles with relatively ease. Tod is human. Tod is like one of us. The fact that he continues to struggle with his inner demons, makes him someone everyone can connect to.”
– Henry

Inquire About Having Tod at Your Event

About the Keynote

With depression rates soaring in the workplace, do we need a radical new way of providing mental health services to our employees?

Tod Maffin [bio] thinks so.

Once the founder and CEO of a multi-million dollar technology firm, Tod’s workload and always-on personality finally caught up with him and over the following years, he was crippled by a devastating depression and addiction — all the while struggling to appear to be productive to employers and colleagues, and happy and healthy to his friends and family.

In this provocative keynote speech, Tod will reveal to your delegates how this always-connected landscape has seduced all of us into endless multitasking and infinite email — all the while pretending that this increasing workload is the best thing for “productivity.”

In fact, this hyper-connected economy may be both destroying the productivity of workplaces and eroding the mental health of companies’ most valuable asset — their people.

Tod will outline his own bold strategy for bringing mental health discussion out of the shadows in a way that will challenge your attendees for years to come.

Tod’s story is emotional — at once funny and poignant, sad and hopeful. Nearly all audiences give him a standing ovation for his work on the podium. He has spoken for the Canadian Mental Health Association, universities, companies, and many more.

It’s not the first time some organization has tried to capture and store forever the Internet’s content. The most visible is the Internet Archive‘s “Way Back Machine”, which visits web sites several times a year and archives what it finds. (Head back in time nearly a decade ago to see what my web site looked like on August 16th.)

The one thing I miss about life pre-digital are photo prints and flipping through a photo album. Oh, I know I can head to any drug store or electronics store, shove my SD card in, and get as many prints as I like… but, really, who does that?

Last week, I found myself flipping through memories in a photo album of my trip to Cuba, installing email systems in rural Anglican parishes across the country. I wonder if I’d have bothered to have gotten prints done had that trip happened today. Likely not.

The problem, I suspect, with most people is that because once you’ve bought a digital memory card, it’s free to take as many photos as you care to. So we take lots of photos. Way more than is probably necessary. Then, back at home, we end up with hundreds of pics. Rather than sorting through the best and getting them printed, we throw them up on Flickr or some other photo storage site and say to ourselves I’ll get prints of these later. And we never do.

What do you do to preserve your digital memories?

Over the last month, I’ve been undertaking a little project to simplify my living space. Part of that process has been to try to lower my living costs. Here are a few lessons in frugality I picked up that I thought I’d pass along:

You Don’t Need Paper Towels.
I’m a little embarrassed about this particular “revelation.” I’ve not used a paper towel in a month. And yet, I’ve done my windows, cleaned up spills, cleaned countertops, etc. Over the years, I somehow ended up with the erroneous belief that paper towels cleaned better. It’s not true. A couple of clean handtowels and rags work just as well. Besides being cheaper, you gain some storage space from where the paper towels took up residence.

Make Your Own Microwave Popcorn.
I love popcorn. Along with Shreddies and Corned Beef Hash (the canned kind), microwave popcorn has, sadly, been a staple in my diet. I’ve never liked popcorn that came from a hot-air popper (I find the consistency of hot-air popped popcorn stale). Turns out, you can make your own microwave popcorn with a paper bag. Put half a cup of popcorn in a paper bag and triple-fold it closed. That’s it! I assumed the fold closure would give and popcorn would fly everywhere, but that’s not the case at all — the fold holds the popcorn in tight. Who knew.

Kiss Cable Television Goodbye.
It’s been almost a month now since I dropped cable television.¹ I don’t miss the programming because I can still watch most of it on the web sites of the major broadcasters (Links to shows: Global TV, CBC, CTV). I’ve also gotten back in touch with some of my favourite radio shows via podcast like This American Life, The Ethicist, The Moth, On The Media, and plenty o’ CBC podcast lovin’. (Another nice thing about radio — you can walk around and do things while listening, which you can’t really for television.)

Rethink the Heat in Your Bedroom [insert dirty joke here]
I used to keep the temperature in my bedroom at 22 degrees, regardless of the season. I’ve since taken to turning the heat off entirely and, in fact, leaving the window wide open. I just started using a warmer duvet. Turns out the old advice of sleeping in a cold room is true — I do get a better sleep.

Eat What You Have
At the start of this simplification process, I vowed to not go grocery shopping for anything more than the essentials (milk, juice, bread, etc.) and that I would eat what I already had in my cupboards. My cupboards weren’t exactly bulging, but there were perfectly good items in there that I keep ignoring when doing the “what should I eat tonight” inspection. Tins of tuna, a box of Hamburger Helper, cans of chili, a bag of rice — I promised myself I would start eating these items away. It’s been a month and I still have plenty of them to go. As a result, my grocery bill is about a third of what it used to be.

What’s your best frugal tip?

1. When I called to cancel, Shaw said they would keep billing me until they could get a technician out to neuter my connection. If you argue long enough, they’ll stop billing you the day you request the service to stop. Which, of course, they should.

It struck me that many of the questions I get in Q&A sessions following my speeches were more about etiquette than anything technical. The most common:

• Should I insist my child add me as a Facebook friend?
• Is it okay to call someone to tell them that I just sent an important email they need to read?
• Is it okay to deliberately delay replying to an email, in order to keep someone’s expectations of how quickly I can get back to them in check?

One of the blogs I follow daily, AllFacebook.com, has posted a great little video about the etiquette behind tagging Facebook photos:

While there are folks, like Modern Manners Guy, updating the etiquette of daily living, I’ve yet to stumble across someone doing helping us all out with etiquette for our digital living.

In your books, what’s the biggest digital-etiquette faux pas?

Just when we tell them to get on Twitter, we make them learn our strange character codes that mean things on the service. DMs, RTs, @replies, #hashtags, ^codes… it’s not exactly the easiest learning curve.

That said, I think we need another tag.

Here’s an example. I follow Klout‘s Twitter account because I’m keen to learn when they have some news — an enhancement to their service, an announcement of downtime, that kind of thing. But Klout’s Twitter posts are almost all either @replies to people or automated robot posts. There’s got to be a way to filter those out… some kind of universal tag, like how the ^ tag became a way of indicating which person authored a tweet on a multi-author account.

And that tag should be [drum roll] the ~ symbol.

When used at the beginning of a tweet, ~ would indicate that that particular tweet was devoid of personal @messages and was a corporate announcement.

Okay, not really.

Clearly, there must be an alternative to this tongue-in-cheek proposal. Some companies have established different Twitter accounts — one for news, one for chatty things — but somehow that’s not the answer either.

Because filtering isn’t doing the job quote yet. So far, only Tweetdeck (to my knowledge) lets you filter out characters across a stream. For instance, you can (and I did) filter out RT from streams because I didn’t want to see any retweets. But that was for an entire stream, and not account-specific. And Tweetdeck forgets your filter as soon as you shut the program down. Hootsuite, the Twitter manager I use now, doesn’t even have that function (as far as I’ve been able to tell).

Is there a better solution? Am I missing something?

You’ll get an instantly downloadable PDF file, formatted just like a real book, that you can read or print out to take with you to read during those slow time in an open house. All you need to read it is the free Adobe Acrobat reader. There is no copy protection or digital rights management. It’s a simple, regular PDF file.

.

100% No Questions Asked
Money-Back Guarantee

Read Drive! and if you’re not completely satisfied, just let me know and I’ll refund your money — no questions asked. You won’t find a better return policy than that anywhere.

Inside DRIVE!

The ASSURED ROI™ Model
You’ll learn how to deploy Tod’s system for launching a profitable social media campaign: Assume Nothing… Set SMART… Soft-Launch… Understand… Record and Measure… Engage Audience… Deliver Next Round.

Making a Better Online You
In this chapter, you’ll find out how to present yourself and your brand most effectively online — from the selection of a username to how to pick (and stick with) the perfect avatar.

The Tactics
This is the meat of the book — covering how to market yourself and your listings in social media spaces like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. It also covers why you shouldn’t overthink your web site, how to set up online focus groups, and how to launch an email marketing campaign.

BONUS: Tame Your Life
In this extra, you’ll learn how to set up your voicemail so that messages left for you are delivered directly to your blackberry (or any email address), and how to use an online ‘productivity tracker’ to get more done in the day.

About Tod Maffin

Tod Maffin speaks to thousands of realtors each year about how to make get new leads and sell properties faster using social media like Facebook, Twitter, and more. He has spoken to:

• Association of Real Estate Licence Law Officials, Florida
• RE/MAX Edmonton
• CIR Realty
• Maxwell Realty
• Ontario Real Estate Association
• Banff Western Connection Conference
• Ottawa Real Estate Board
• Association of Nova Scotia Realtors
• Toronto Real Estate Board
• Canadian Real Estate Association
• …and many more

What Audiences Say About Tod’s Presentations

Despite grand platitudes of how Twitter is ‘shepherding a new era of corporate transparency and a spirit of engaging with customers,’ the fact remains that even the best corporate examples of such engagement on Twitter remain trivial at best.

Just because a company launches a Twitter page and assigns a marketing intern to tweet replies back to anyone who tweets them does not mean they have engaged in any kind of conversation or dialogue. They most certainly haven’t changed any paradigms, shifted any culture, or launched any new eras.

An @Reply Is Not a Conversation

Social media “evangelists” frequently fall into the mistake of trumping up this kind of direct contact as more than it is.

A conversation is not an answered question nor a thrown kudos. An example:

This friendly response to someone’s tweet is, to be sure, a nice little gesture on Rescuetime‘s part. But it’s just that. A nice gesture. Good customer service. Put down that pipe, Shaggy; it’s too early to spark that bad-boy.

What do you think?

Tod Maffin and Malcom Gladwell have been selected as the two keynote speakers at the upcoming F5 Expo in Vancouver. Hear Tod’s story of how he went from being an always-on multi-millionaire dotcom executive to crashing into depression and addiction. A story of hope and recovery, with a lesson to everyone in the tech industry; Tod will outline his five key tools to surviving in the techno-busy lifestyle.

More about Tod’s keynote • Register Now

What the Meeting Planner Said

“This event more than doubled any other event we have ever had so we were very pleased. The feedback from the evaluations provided was very positive… Everyone enjoyed Tod’s sense of humor and the way he gave the presentation. On a more personal level I enjoyed working with Tod thoroughly from the beginning with calls and emails as I was getting prepared for the event and when I met him. Tod was very accommodating and helpful. I have organized events for many years and I can honestly say that Tod has been one of the most accommodating and friendliest speakers I have ever had the pleasure to deal with.”
– Vickie Keeley, Medicine Hat HR Association

What The Audience Said

“I just wanted to let you know that I was at the Leading the Facebook Generation seminar [in Medicine Hat], and being 22, I thought you were hilarious and pretty much right on the money. I look forward to seeing another seminar should you ever come back to town!”
– Julia Jordan, Medicine Hat AB

“I really enjoyed the presentation. It was one of the best presentations I have ever been to, the information was great and you have an amazing ability in keeping the audiences attention. I have already taken a lot of what you said in your presentation and used it in my day to day communication with the older generations in my life. You are awesome. Thanks for making the stop in small town Medicine Hat!!!!”
– Lacey Amen, Medicine Hat AB

• “Very funny”

• “Look forward to more in the future”
• “Awesome!”
• “Great presentation!”
• “Excellent speaker!!!”
• “Awesome presentation; very informative; thanks”
• “Bring him back”

A number of providers can do this for you — it’s likely that your phone company offers this kind of service, where people leave a voicemail and the audio is emailed to you.

I use a great service called PhoneTag that goes one stage beyond that — it actually transcribes the message for you. You forward any calls you miss from your office or cell phone to the special number PhoneTag gives you. To the caller, it sounds like any normal voicemail, complete with your voice prompting callers to leave a message. When they do so, a human being somewhere transcribes their message and that text is sent, along with an MP3 of the actual voicemail, to your regular email box.

Google Voice and others offer something similar, but their systems rely on a computer program to try to decrypt what someone is saying. As such, it doesn’t know when a comma or period goes, can’t figure out when someone is spelling out a name, and so on. The people at PhoneTag are usually very good at trying to accurately transcribe the message. They’ll even put [?] after guesses if it’s not clear. If you’d like someone else to take a whack at transcribing the voicemail, just hit Reply and Send.

I’ve found voicemails come to me transcribed less than five minutes after they were left. I never, ever actually “dial in” to pick up my messages.

The other advantage to this is that because it arrives in your email box, you can store the message and audio forever. Search your email for someone’s name and you’ll get their emails and voicemails sent to you. It will even put their actual name in the From line of the email if you upload your address book to the system.

PhoneTag comes with unlimited voicemail box storage, you can still dial-in and pick up messages if you like, and 24/7 customer support. You can pay in any of three ways:

• $0.35 per message

• $9.95 per month for up to 40 messages a month ($0.25 for each message over 40)
• $29.95 for unlimited messages

Whether you are in a meeting, showing off a home with a client, or on the golf course, you can instantly see who called, what they said, and you won’t have to listen to all of your messages to find out about an important missed call. I often hit Forward and reply via email to the person who left the voicemail. They’re often pretty amused to see their words in text form.

You can watch this video if you like. It’s only about a minute long.

It struck me recently, that the screen you show to the security people when getting your carry-0n bags screened is pretty easily faked. You just need any barcode and you can type in the info you need below it. This would be about a 30-second job in Photoshop.

Save it to your cellphone and bingo — you’re into the “security” area.

Why would this work? Because the person checking boarding passes to get you to the x-ray lineup doesn’t actually scan anything. They just eyeball it — they’re looking to make sure you’re flying on that date, and they wave you in.

Of course, once you’re about to b0ard, they scan it and will figure out pretty quick that you’re using a fake screen.

But that could still get someone dangerous into what’s supposed to be a very secure area.

Is this something that hasn’t crossed their minds?

I thought I knew the right thing to do in the event of an earthquake — dive under a car or desk, right? Apparently, no. Not according to an email making the rounds, ostensibly from the Rescue Chief and Disaster Manager of the American Rescue Team International (ARTI).

Here in Vancouver, we live near a major fault line. We’re overdue by about 10-20 years for “the big one.” I thought I’d pass this along for anyone who lives in an area where an earthquake could occur.

Myth: You should dive under a desk or car when a quake strikes.
Reality: Most everyone who simply “ducks and covers” WHEN BUILDINGS COLLAPSE are crushed to death. People who get under objects, like desks or cars, are crushed. You can survive in a smaller void. Get next to an object, next to a sofa, next to a large bulky object that will compress slightly but leave a void next to it.

Myth: If you’re in a “weak-framed” building, like a wood building, get out as fast as you can. Try to find shelter in a more stable building, like something concrete.
Reality: Wooden buildings are actually the safest type of construction to be in during an earthquake. Wood is flexible and moves with the force of the earthquake. If the wooden building does collapse, large survival voids are created. Also, the wooden building has less concentrated, crushing weight. Brick buildings will break into individual bricks. Bricks will cause many injuries but less squashed bodies than concrete slabs.

Myth: If you’re in bed when the quake hits, roll under the bed.
Reality: Simply roll off the bed. A safe void will exist around the bed. Hotels can achieve a much greater survival rate in earthquakes, simply by posting a sign on the back of the door of every room telling occupants to lie down on the floor, next to the bottom of the bed during an earthquake.

Myth: A safe place to be during an earthquake is under a door frame.
Reality: Most everyone who gets under a doorway when buildings collapse is killed. How? If you stand under a doorway and the doorjamb falls forward or backward you will be crushed by the ceiling above. If the door jam falls sideways you will be cut in half by the doorway. In either case, you will be killed.

Myth: Take the stairs during a quake — never an elevator.
Reality: Never go to the stairs. The stairs have a different “moment of frequency” (they swing separately from the main part of the building). The stairs and remainder of the building continuously bump into each other until structural failure of the stairs takes place. The people who get on stairs before they fail are chopped up by the stair treads – horribly mutilated. Even if the building doesn’t collapse, stay away from the stairs. The stairs are a likely part of the building to be damaged. Even if the stairs are not collapsed by the earthquake, they may collapse later when overloaded by fleeing people. They should always be checked for safety, even when the rest of the building is not damaged.

Myth: Stay away from the walls and outer edges of buildings during an earthquake.
Reality: Actually, you want to be near the outer walls of a building, or outside of them if possible. It is much
better to be near the outside of the building rather than the interior. The farther inside you are from the outside perimeter of the building the greater the probability that your escape route will be blocked.

Myth: If you’re driving when the earthquake happens, stay in your car. Don’t leave your car for any reason.
Reality: People inside of their vehicles are crushed when the road above falls in an earthquake and crushes their vehicles; which is exactly what happened with the slabs between the decks of the Nimitz Freeway… The victims of the San Francisco earthquake all stayed inside of their vehicles. They were all killed. They could have easily survived by getting out and sitting or lying next to their vehicles. Everyone killed would have survived if they had been able to get out of their cars and sit or lie next to them. All the crushed cars had voids 3 feet high next to them, except for the cars that had columns fall directly across them.

* Bonus survival tip: If you’re in an office which has lots of stacks of paper, that paper does not compact. Large voids are found surrounding stacks of paper. It’s a good place to position yourself.

So, you need to convince people to turn on images. Of course you could always ASK them to, but you’ve not offering any real incentive to do that.

That’s where the ALT tag comes in.

Create an image and put in its ALT tag something like “To tell if you won the contest, turn on images!” or “Turn on images to see this photo of our CEO drunk at our last Christmas party.” (Okay, maybe not that last one.) Your “sell” has to be something that your email target would really want to see, and something that you can deliver only in text, like the URL of a special web site that only your subscribers would get access to.

That way, they’ll only see the information if they turn on images. And up go your visible open rates!

Thank you for your Facebook Ads payment. The details of the charge are below. Please note that, due to processing delays by some credit card companies, this charge may not show up on your statement for a few days.

Transaction Details:
Payment: $51,313 CLP
Date(s) of advertising services provided: December 23, 2009 at 12:00am to Today at 12:00am (Pacific Time)

WTF? I owe $51,313 to Facebook for running two relatively small ads for three weeks?!

I currently have two ads running on Facebook. They look like this (and yes, please feel free to click them; thank you!)

Together, they generate a fair number of impressions but relatively few clicks. Certainly not $51,313′s worth!

And then I remember that Facebook is frequently confused when it comes to its advertising.

Turns out, Facebook was billing me in Chilean Pesos. I really owe a little more than $100.

So as to not stop my heart again, I try to change the currency to my own. Guess what? Facebook has a way of screwing that up too:

Nice.

It’s got my latest blog postings, tweets, and YouTube videos. You can even “favourite” items you’d like to read later. I’d have put more info into it, but, sadly, the iPhone’s tiny screen didn’t accommodate the size of my enormous ego.

It’s very useful for killing time in airport lineups, showing to your kids as an example of how to not grow up, and opening once then deleting.

You can download it at http://iphone.todmaffin.com [link opens in iTunes].

I’ve got a Facebook profile with about 660 friends on it. Those friends are a mixture of “real” friends, people who’ve seen me give a presentation, heard me on the radio, or just randomly shown up.

I’ve also got a Facebook fan page with a few dozen people on it.

The fan page, of course, has better marketing tools (tabs that let people sign up to my newsletter, ability to send an email to all fans, and so on), so lately I’ve been hiding my “real” profile from searches, hoping people will join the fan page instead.

I don’t know. It just seems so.. so… unCanadian.

Are you an independent professional in the same boat? What do you do? Do you let anyone friend your personal Facebook profile or direct them to a fan page?

UPDATE: Darren’s right. I’ve deleted my fan club, and now I’ll just use my regular profile for everything and use Friend Splitting to manage my Facebook lists.

Julie Szabo and Darren Barefoot of Capulet Communications co-authored the book and I interviewed them about their ideas. You can listen here.

Listen: Tod Maffin interviews Darren and Julie

(This is an except from a radio show pilot I did for the MediaOnTap Conversation Radio Network. If you’d like your company to be heard on the show in a sponsorship capacity, contact Allan at info@mediaontap.com)

I had the chance to interview co-author Julien Smith for about 20 minutes about his ideas. The interview is in this post. (Chris Brogan is Julien’s co-author.)

Listen: Tod Maffin interviews Julien Smith about being a \”trust agent.\”

(This is an except from a radio show pilot I did for the MediaOnTap Conversation Radio Network. If you’d like your company to be heard on the show in a sponsorship capacity, contact Allan at info@mediaontap.com)

Email marketing is one of the most effective tools, with one of the highest returns on investment, yet so few companies do it right. (Or at all.)

Let Tod Maffin show you the ins and outs of email marketing — from the very basics, right through to advanced techniques like click-weighted A/B testing, and integrating your newsletter directly into your web site.

He’ll show you how to get subscribers the right way, or double the number of followers you already have. This isn’t a high-level 30,000 ft view of email marketing and its place in the world. These are fast and effective tips to make sure every effort you spend in email marketing returns many, many more.

ALL-MORNING SEMINAR
This Wednesday, January 20
UBC Robson Square, Vancouver
LIMITED SEATS AVAILABLE!

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SOLD OUT!
Get alerted when I hold this workshop again in your city.
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Draft Workshop Agenda

Wednesday, January 20, 2009 • 9:30 a.m. • UBC Robson Square, 800 Robson Street, Vancouver

Part I: The Basics

• Starting your first email newsletter
• Using a provider vs doing it yourself
• How to get subscribers
• How to craft a subject line that your recipients will respond to
• Promoting your newsletter
• The “no-effort newsletter” — merging your newsletter and your blog
• How often should I send?
• About using a purchased mailing list
• Sending in advance, and setting up a regular automated schedule
• Complete screen-by-screen walkthrough of Mailchimp.com
• What to write and how to find material
• Sending coupons for offline (“real world”) redemption
• Giving your newsletter a professional design in two minute
• Personalizing your newsletters (“Dear Tod,” instead of “Dear newsletter subscriber”)

Part II: The Secrets

• 14 tips to increasing your open rate
• Integrating your newsletter directly with your web site without being a programmer
• Boost your open rate using A/B testing (via name, subject line, or date/time)
• Tying newsletter-opens directly to purchases or lead generation
• Staying out of spam folders
• Using Google Analytics to track your newsletter’s success
• Using plug-ins to connect your newsletter to your WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, or Movable Type CMS
• Segmenting your newsletter for stronger personalization — send only to specific sub-groups
• Create auto-responders that automatically send content to your subscribers without you lifting a finger
• Keeping it Legal: Staying within the bounds of the CAN-SPAM act
• Affiliate marketing: Earn cash with your newsletter with a single link
• Integrating Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn into your newsletter
• Integrating events registrations and surveys right in the newsletter
• Integrating other services, such as Salesforce, Freshbooks, HighRise, PayPal, and more

Part III: No Question Is a Stupid Question

• Lively Q&A session, where every question is answered and discussed among attendees.

Every attendee will receive a workbook with a summary of content covered, and access to a private web page full of resources, links, and a summary of the workshop content.

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Get alerted when I hold this workshop in your city.
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The Complete Assured ROI™ Package

If you want to get full value out of this workshop, make sure you register for the Complete Assured ROI™ package. Only FIVE Complete Assured ROI™ Packages are available.

• Admission to Blazingly Effective Email Newsletters workshop (see details above)
• Unlimited telephone coaching before sending your first campaign
  
• Comprehensive review of first two email newsletter drafts ($300 value)
• Video of workshop (in MP4 format) ($79 value)
• A copy of Assured ROI: Blazingly Effective Email Newsletters e-book ($19 value)
• Certificate for sixty minutes of social media coaching/instruction — use for your business, your personal Facebook page, or whatever! ($150 value)
• Exclusive advance notice of upcoming Tod Maffin seminars — ability to buy before general public
  
• Lifetime discount for any of Tod’s public Assured ROI™ series workshops on social media
• One year membership in forthcoming social media business membership site ($199 value) launching mid-January 2010
• Copy of Understanding the Facebook Generation 16-page e-book ($9.95 value)
  
• Promotion of your newsletter to more than 8,000 people via Tod Maffin’s newsletter, Facebook profile, LinkedIn proffile, and Twitter account (immeasurable value)
  
• One year membership in the Assured ROI™ Braintrust Forums (launching mid-January 2010)
• (That’s $756.95 in bonus value, all included with this package.)

Get alerted when I hold this workshop in your city.
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Have you ever been frustrated by vague seminars that promise you social media results but don’t deliver? Perhaps the presenter focused on the “shiny objects,” told you how you have to “be one with the conversation” without showing you how to do that and make money, generate leads, reduce attrition, or whatever your business goals are?

Wouldn’t you rather spend your time planning a return on your social media investment, than learning how to re-colour a Twitter avatar?

As a former CEO of a publicly traded company, Tod Maffin approaches social media from a business point-of-view. Using his Assured ROI™ methodology, he’ll show you how to ensure that you earn measurable, real, bottom-line results from your social media strategies. No 50,000-foot viewing here. Only simple, understandable, and measurable strategies.

Email, as we know it today, was developed in the early 1980s, a derivative of code from ARPANET made ten years prior. It went through a handful of iterations and today, most of the Internet relies on a solid little performer called sendmail. Sendmail is, surprisingly, quite a simple and small program. It sits in millions of Unix servers around the world to ferry email messages to and fro.

Sendmail is a great program. But it’s old. It’s still mostly the same program it began as. That’s no good.

Meanwhile, commercial email systems, like Microsoft’s Exchange or Novell’s Groupwise, have filled the functionality gap and added new functions that make electronic communications far more effective. And yet, we still slog along with the tired old sendmail. Email should do more than it does. And there’s no reason why we can’t start now.

Retracting Emails

Everyone who’s reading this article has had this experience: You compose an email, perhaps a little hot-headed, and hit the Send button. That’ll teach him, you think. An hour passes. You realize maybe you shouldn’t have called your boss a pig-headed douchebag after all. Lucky for you, he’s not back in the office until tomorrow. If your message were sent as a post-it note, you could walk into his office and throw it away. Not so with email. Barring breaking into his office, you’d best use your time thinking of grovelling strategies.

Commercial email systems like Exchange have been able to retract emails for years. You just track down your “Dear douchebag” email in your sent items, and click the “Retract Email” button. Done. Gmail has a slightly different take on it — you can send the email from your computer, but Gmail will hold onto it for up to 10 seconds before it actually sends it along (you have to turn this option on in Settings / Labs).

But the vast majority of email users should have this kind of functionality.

Enough With The Endless Quotes

An email currently in my inbox contains two sentences. And ten screens full of the past conversation. Gmail can hide this conversation, but it still gets sent through servers worldwide. I’d venture a bet that 85% of email traffic on the Internet is actually this back conversation. This may have been a great feature to have in the early 80s when email clients didn’t really exist as we know them now, but it’s just silly these days. We already have the back-conversation because we’ve been in it. We need a “Show Me This Conversation’s History” button that constructs the conversation flow from our records.

Attachments

Email 2.0 should not permit anyone to send attachments. You read that right. Emails are a lousy distribution method for sending large binary files.

Anyone who’s used an online upload service, like drop.io, can see where this needs to go. Rather than attaching a video file (or whatever) to an email, where that file literally travels with the email en route to its recipient, the Attachment button should instead place that file on one of these systems.

This has a number of benefits. Since attachments will live elsewhere, those attachment-hosting services can add more value. File conversions can happen on the fly. Send a Word DOC file, and I can download it as an Apple Pages document, PDF, ebook reader, or whatever I want. No more “I can’t open this file! Can you export it as a blah blah and send it again?”

We’d also have more control over the security of the attachment. Attachments can self-destruct after they’ve been downloaded. Or you can set them to only be downloaded from a certain IP range (within your company, for instance). That way, even if someone steals your notebook computer and gets into your email, they won’t be able to get access to critical files that were sent to you.

Action-Oriented Emails

This is a common workflow for me:

1. Send important email that I need an answer for.
2. Promptly forget about it.

Email needs to provide a reminder service that’s optionally tied to a specific date. If I email my agent and I need to hear back from her by Friday, the only way I can be assured that I’ll keep this email active is by putting a note in RememberTheMilk.com or writing myself a reminder.

This should be built directly into email. When you send an email, you should be able to set a date when you want the email to “bubble back up” from your sent items if you haven’t heard back from the person at the other end. When you do hear back from them, a simple “Close this thread OR Set a new bubble-up date” prompt would make me far more efficient.

Gootodo.com claims to offer this kind of functionality — bcc’ing 4D@gootodo.com will have the service send you the email back four days (“4D”) later. It’s rudimentary and, um, doesn’t seem to work. At least when I’ve tried.

What email functions do YOU wish existed?

Embracing Unitasking for Better Productivity and Happier Living

Let’s just say this — there’s a very good chance you’re doing three things right now. Don’t think so? Think about it. You’re reading this, you may have some music or talk show on in the background, your eye darts over to your email, and so on.

It’s not your fault; that’s what today’s fast-paced, always-on worklife demands. And you either go with the fast-flow or you die. Right? Not always…

In this entertaining but informative keynote presentation (can also be adapted for workshop/seminar), Tod will show you how to be more productive, profitable, and satisfied with life by using a new set of skills designed to reduce your email, wrangle your voicemails better, and prioritze your day.

Some highlights from the presentation:

• Exploit proven streamlined email model that will save you at least an hour a day
• Learn how you are literally damaging your brain when you multitask
• Use more effective management strategies like Smart Delegation
• Learn why you feel sore all the time and the secret world of stress-induced sub-muscular contractions
• Gain a little space and “just be” without taking up yoga
• Use web services to priorize your day
• Learn how your brain simply can’t do more than one thing at a time (fun demonstration)

Check Tod’s availability for your event

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What They Say

“Tod Maffin was a runaway successful speaker. All respondents rated him a 3 out of 3 and comments were extraordinarily positive. Not only was he an outstanding presenter, but his personal story had a very strong impact.”
— Beth Evans, Minding the Workplace conference

“Thank you so much for your presentation in Calgary at The Conference Board of Canada’s Workplace Health Conference. Your presentation was really excellent! Your professional and personal messages are powerful, engaging and moving. You truly are a very gifted speaker and a resilient individual! It is a great pleasure to work with you.”
– Beth Evans, M.Sc., Director, Mental Health Promotion, Alberta Mental Health Board

“Your keynote presentation ratings reflected excellence with an overall evaluation of 5+ out of 5 and a standing ovation (which is in itself a rarity and speaks volumes).  Consistent feedback from delegates included, “Great information, giving us lots to think about”; “Awesome speaker, simply outstanding”; “Very impactful presentation”; “High impact, he’s incredible”; “Absolutely amazing speaker!”; “Excellent, thank you Tod for sharing so much value”; “Best speaker ever +”; “Excellent, motivational and excellent choice for this conference”; “Very much appreciated his presentation, courage, honesty”; “Awesome program with this amazing presentation”; and “Refreshing and thought provoking”
— Elizabeth Lengyel, Program Director, Conference Board of Canada

“Your presentation was awesome.  It has changed the way that I’m pursuing my career path regarding my family and friends!  I want to be a human “being” again!  Thanks a million.”
— Shanté Williams, Charleston County Park & Recreation Commission

Photo by white_duck

I turned my DVD player on last week for the first time in about six months. Only I didn’t really turn it on; I woke it from standby.

I knew these devices were consuming power while “on” (evidenced by the little stand-by light) but I never really knew how much. BC Hydro has published a nice little table of that consumption by an average home-office.

If you actually power down these devices by unplugging them, turning off the power back they’re connected to, or using their hard Power button on the back (of some devices, like many printers) you’ll save about $14 a year under the above scenario. Not tonnes, mind you, but in this economy, it all helps.

BC Hydro also has a pretty decent incentive for saving power — if you join its Team Power Smart program (free) and cut down on 10% of your power consumption over last year, they’ll cut you a cheque for $75. Cold hard cash: the world’s best incentive.

That might look like a three-inch wide JPG on your screen right now, but imagine that about two-feet wide and a foot tall. Because that’s what it was in front of the audience.

Clearly, I’d forgotten to turn my instant messenger app off and I got hit by a roaming spambot. Along with 2,200 unsuspecting nice human resources executives.

It taught me two lessons:

1. Never authorize a friend request from suziewhore83; and,
2. Turn off all TSRs (IM apps, applets, online backups, email notifiers, etc.)

The only thing you want running when you’re giving a presentation is your presentation software. Nothing else.

Remembering to Shut Them Down

The hard part is remembering to shut all the apps, applets, and widgets down before you press Play on your presentation. That’s why I use the same first slide on all my decks. Here it is:

The slide is never shown to people in the audience. It’s just there to remind me to turn everything off. (A “TSR” is a throwback to DOS days — it refers to any program which launches, then hides, but stays in memory doing things or stays ready to become active at any time.)

Force Quit: Make Sure Everything Is Closed

Don’t just assume that because your Windows Taskbar or Mac Dock is clear of other running applications you’re ready to go. Those TSRs hide everywhere, and often invisibly. Here’s how to make sure everything is closed.

On a Mac, quit all the applications in the dock. (You won’t be able to quit the first icon called “Finder.” That’s okay.) Now, press Command-Option-Escape. A list of applications will appear. It will look something like this:

If you’ve done it right, there shouldn’t be many (if any) applications in the list. If there are, go to that application, save everything, and try to close it. If it won’t close, highlight its name in this dialog box and press “Force Quit.” (This is similar to the Ctrl-Alt-Del method to force Windows applications to quit.) If you’ve done this and things still pop up during your presentation, launch Activity Monitor and force-quit the offender from that program.

On Windows, right-click on the Taskbar and select Task Manager. You’ll get something that looks like this:

As with the Mac example, select the program that you want to quit, then click the End Task button.

Imagine my surprise when I logged in one morning to find this:

For some unknown and clearly arbitrary reason, the gods at Facebook banned my account for running “abusive” ads. The essence of the message above is: “You tried to post an abusive ad. We’ve banned you. There’s nothing you can do about it. Now go away.”

This is bizarre to me. The only campaigns I’ve run are simple and certainly not abusive. Naturally, the Advertising Guidelines they’ve posted don’t help an iota. Under Facebook’s rules, one can’t post an ad that contain “political agendas,” that “advocates against any organization,” or is “grammatically [in]correct and [doesn't] contain proper sentence structure.”

Good thing the web as a whole doesn’t have that last condition.

The ad I ran that appeared to trigger this ban was this:

I’ve read Facebook’s guidelines several times. The only thing I can think of that bugged Facebook was the use of the CBC logo. However, considering CBC has officially endorsed my unofficial CBC fan page as its own, it’s rather a moot point. Or perhaps it’s because I didn’t put a period after “corp” — even though most Canadians know the CBC’s nickname: “The Mother Corp.” But I can’t believe this ad is “abusive,” as Facebook claims.

More Arbitrary Facebook Ad Guidelines

Among the offenses that will get you banned permanently from placing ads on Facebook are:

• Using a ‘&’ instead of the word ‘and’
• Ending a sentence with an ellipse (‘…’)
• Running an ad promoting a political point of view

The Solution

Facebook should take a lesson from Google, which at least tells you why your ad wasn’t approved and gives you an opportunity to fix it. If Facebook were to just email and say “You should use a ‘.’ after ‘corp’,” I’d be happy to fix it. I get my ads run; Facebook gets money. Problem solved.

Instead, people create a second profile with a fake name and run ads under that name instead, pointing to the same destination page as the original banned ad. In fact, considering these banning decisions are made by actual human beings, there’s a good chance that one could post the exact same ad under a different name and have it sail right through the approval process. One person’s “abusive” is another person’s “mild irritant.” We’ve already seen this in the approval process of Apple’s App Store.

Unfortunately for Facebook, I’ve given up trying to get this ban reversed. Instead, I’ve put that money into Google ads and other online promotional means.

UPDATE: November 12, 2009
Has the Twitter brand death-spiral begun? ComScore today released numbers showing that visits to Twitter.com declined eight per cent. Why visit Twitter.com when its API lets anyone access tweets from anywhere? Has the death spiral begun?

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Perhaps the most difficult part of forecasting technologies’ pace is discerning which technologies will be short-lived fads and which will become ingrained in our lives. Often, millions of dollars are at stake — should the I.T. department hold steady or invest in a promising solution that may indeed become the next Pointcast. It’s not an easy game and for that reason many technology commentators steer clear of any kind of forecasting.

But despite the infrequent unpredictable breakout hit, technology’s growth curve is actually quite predictable. (The oft-misquoted Moore’s Law is probably the most well-known reliable long-term trend in computer hardware.¹ )

There is indeed a tipping point in technology timelines — the moment when a fad evolves into being a secure part of our lives — and it is the point at which a technology becomes invisible. Not literally invisible, of course, but practically invisible in our day-to-day lives.

The Thermostat Test

Think about your home thermostat. When you actually stop to consider what it does — measure the room temperature and automatically adjust the heating/cooling automatically — it’s actually quite an amazing technology that’s had a large impact on our standard of living.

One can imagine the attention the invention received when it was first in use in the late 1800s. Today, though, it’s pretty much invisible in our lives. Sure, you can see it, but when was the last time you actually thought about your thermostat? Nobody has come to your place and stopped to remark about “that awesome thermostat” of yours. It’s simply slipped into the wider growing conscious of the technology around us.

This, then, is the litmus test for tech fads and technology’s influence in our lives. When a technology blends effortlessly into our daily living and becomes essentially invisible to us, it secures a permanent place in our environment.

And this is how Twitter will die.

I’m not suggesting, of course, that we’ll be without the ability to tweet any more, just that the mechanism by which we do so will become so ingrained in our lives that we may not even know it as “Twitter” in the future.

Consider the ways Twitter has evolved beyond being a hyped-up web site:

• Facebook completely redesigned its site to become more “Twitter-like” (much to the chagrin of its user base)
• Hundreds of thousands of Twitter users interact with their Twitter followers only though mobile-phone text messaging
• Dozens of mobile applications exist on nearly every cell phone to provide direct access to Twitter’s functionality
• Long-term Twitter API holdout LinkedIn has caved into member pressure and, as of today, now provides a way of tweeting directly from its site

As more developers take advantage of Twitter’s API, the need for anyone to go to Twitter’s actual web site lessens. Now, we access through phones, airport and mall kiosks, and even toilets. A small industry is developing around linking ‘real life’ to Twitter. An inexpensive do-it-yourself kit hooks everyday appliances to Twitter so they can tweet about their daily energy consumption. And, in what screenwriters would call a beautiful “envelope ending,” modified thermostats can now tweet their average temperature points.

The Looming Death of the Twitter Brand

Contrary to the opinions of most tech pundits, in the coming years I expect the Twitter brand will decline in mindshare. Consider that most venture capital money is historically speculative and short-term in nature; V.C.s quickly grow tired of funding rounds devoted to building mass brand awareness, a very expensive strategy. This is partly why many buzz-attracting tech brands of the past today operate happily in the background, quietly earning consistent returns without the brand front-and-centre.

In fact, this trend toward invisibility is already happening to Twitter — newscasters tell viewers to “send a tweet” today, not “Go to twitter.com and send a message” as they used to. The act of tweeting will stay with us now, even if the brand fails.

As Twitter becomes less a web site and more simply a platform for short messages, the more its brand will recede from our mind. If history is any guide, this will be the point at which Twitter, as we know it today, will disappear. Its feeder parts, like cell phone apps and social networking sites, will then devour its functionality, pushing its growth into the stratosphere, making it immortal.

Twitter will die. And, in so doing, will live forever.

1. Moore’s Law, which has proven very accurate, supposed that the number of transistors that could be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit will double about every two years. It is frequently misquoted as suggesting that the price of technology will halve and the processing speed will double every two years.

• Do you stop posting any personal comments like jokes, updates about your family, etc.?
• Or do you post only business information from now on, irritating your friends and family?

There’s a better solution, and it’s called Friend Splitting.

In these five short videos, I’ll show you how to split your friends into different groups (“lists”), send different status messages to different lists, prevent certain lists from seeing updates (e.g., prevent your business colleagues from seeing information about your personal life), and more.

This is a small portion of what I present during my popular “The Eight Keys to Marketing Online: Get More Leads and Close More Sales” seminar.

I hope you find these useful!

If you found these videos helpful, you may want to consider signing up for my free low-volume newsletter.

Or better yet, I’d be pleased to come to your association or company and present “The Eight Keys to Marketing Online: Get More Leads and Close More Sales.”

I’ve got a few A/V requirements when I present, notably that I like my notebook right at the lectern with me, and that I like the podium (stage/riser) to be free of anything else like chairs, tables, and so on. I tend to move around a lot when I speak, so this helps make sure I don’t faceplant (which, amazingly, hasn’t yet happened in 13 years of professional speaking).

Fast forward to the evening before my presentation. I’m at the event’s reception, meeting the delegates and sponsors, and up walks my client. We introduce each other, go over a couple of last-minute details, and then she leans in and asks, very politely: “Um, so we were able to get you a clear podium, but I wasn’t sure why you needed one?”

I told her that I move around a lot and would just prefer that there’s enough room up there for me to wander. She gets this blank look on her face, then one of those “Oh-my-god-I-completely-misunderstood” looks on her faces.

Turns out, she thought a “podium” was something you stand behind (actually, that’s called a lectern), not something you stand on.

And this was the result.

“With the Baby Boomers set to retire en masse, companies are going to have to find ways to replace them with younger employees,” says Maffin. “But that particular crop of employees – the ‘Facebook Generation’ – is as likely to walk out the back door as easily as they came in the front.”

“The first wave of employers to experience that kind of laissez-faire attitude was the service-driven industries – such as fast food restaurants – who were literally having to close their facilities at times because they couldn’t find and retain enough young workers to flip burgers and serve customers,” said Maffin.

Maffin says these twenty-something employees present an entirely new set of challenges for employers – and that companies need to take an entirely new approach to managing their needs and retaining their services.

Here are Maffin’s top five tips on how to do that:

1. Give Them Your Trust: Young people born between 1980 and 1990 were raised by Generation X parents who gave them unprecedented levels of trust. Misguided attempts at increasing productivity, like blocking Facebook and instant-messenger programs, scream “We don’t trust you!” to this group of workers (it’s like blocking telephone calls).
2. Focus on Team-Based Solutions: That’s the way they were taught all through school – it was all about group projects, not individual reports. Engage them in group projects and let them play an active role in that process. Consider giving them a box of their own personalized business cards on day one.
3. Skip the Annual Review: Generation Y requires instant feedback – don’t worry, they can take criticism, as long as it’s justified, immediate, and gives them an opportunity to work on correcting bad habits or misguided efforts.
4. Nix the Coffee Breaks: Eliminate scheduled breaks entirely. Let them take breaks when they feel they need it. Given this level of trust, most generation-Y workers will return the favor in spades by devoting extra time at work, often unpaid.
5. Invest in Technology: Your technology must at least keep pace with what this generation uses at home. That doesn’t necessarily mean the latest bleeding-edge turbo-machines, but a patched-up computer from the secretary pool won’t cut it.

For further information: Tod Maffin, tod@todmaffin.com, (604) 618-2861

• How a national accounting firm let employees pick a guided career track to progress along — for instance, pace of career (from accelerated to decelerated), role (from leader to individual contributor), workload (from full to reduced), and more.
• How a U.S-based pharmacy chain kept more baby boomers in place (to help mentor and train the new workers) by offering “snowbird benefits” — essentially a work travel exchange program, promoted to appeal to their staff’s season preferences.
• The clever online result-based rewards program offered by one Marriott hotel, where employees can give points to colleagues they think performed the best, giving those workers the opportunity to spend those points online for real merchandise.
• How one multinational finance firm’s graduate deferral program gave new employees the option of delaying their start-date for 12 months, as long as they devoted the time to community service or acquiring new skills. For specific initiatives, it also offered to pay half the base salary and a stipend for health insurance.
• …and much more.

You have to be a member of my free newsletter to get this short report, though. You can sign up for the newsletter here.

The three most common myths:

• “Generation Y employees will quit their job just to go snowboarding.” (More likely, they were being ignored or treated like a cog at work.)
• “Generation Y workers are used to having everything handed to them on a silver platter.” (Quite to the contrary, this generation’s work ethic is very strong, provided there’s just a little bit of recognition for a job well done.)
• “Everyone in Gen-Y are experts in technology.” (Not true. Many more than you’d think don’t have Facebook accounts, only use email that much, and couldn’t care less about anything Steve Jobs talks about.)

But one thing the pundits mostly have right is this:

Generation Y employees want to change the world.

They want their time working for an employer to be much more than helping to pay “the man’s” mortgage, or that of some shareholders. And by “world,” it could be that they want to change their community, or they want to change how the office runs, or they want to volunteer for a company-supported charity. But they want to have some direct impact.

Employees today no longer are happy with just getting a paycheque in exchange for their time. They want something to contribute to something that aligns with their personal values. And those values have changed over the decades.

1970s: Stability

Back in the 1970s, office workerbeers focused their work ethic toward achieving simple stability. Who could blame them? Times were uncertain: It was the age of Kent State, Nixon’s resignation, the fall of Saigon, and uprest in Iran. Financially, things looked gloomy — interest rates were pushing past 18 per cent.

Back then, the average office worker was happy to have a job, stay there for their entire career, and take the gold watch as they entered retirement. What these people sought was predictability, stability, and “staying the course.” Survival and prosperity of the company was paramount and individual goals were put at rest.

1980s: Money

Perhaps as a response to the measured, conservative work ethic of the previous decade, the 1980s saw a radical reversal of this spirit. Suddenly, people put the focus on themselves and their personal prosperity, often at the expense of the collective.

The primary concern for workers in the 1980s was themselves — it sometimes was even referred to as “The Me Decade.” Stability be damned; this was the era of high risk and the promise of high profits. Books with titles like “Make millions without lifting a finger” came out of the woodwork (and still, sadly, do today).

The media were rife with stories about the personal entrepreneur striking gold. For the first time, quirky, egotistical business executives became celebrities in their own rights (DeLorean, Steve Jobs, etc.). Pop culture became fascinated with themes of personal wealth, gluttony, and prosperity (Dynasty, Trading Millions, Ferris Beuller’s Day Off). Think about The Cosby Show — arguably, the most popular show in the 1980s — which starred a character who had a beautiful home, a perfect family, and never seemed to go to work!

Mid-1990s: “Balance”

Then came the Gen-X decade (commonly called “slackers” by the media) who demanded balance. Workers, especially in startup companies and technology firms, began pushing back against the long hours they exchanged for the promise of future profits.

“Balance” was a moving target. Technology and video-game executives heard “recreation” and created on-campus volleyball courts. They heard “family” so they started in-building daycares. All of which, of course, sent the message that workers should stay at work, rather than go home and enjoy the fruits of their labour.¹

Today: The Search for Meaning

Generation Y workers, though, don’t feel the need to work mindless hours in the pursuit of personal fortune. They want to work long enough to enjoy life and use their time for something bigger.

• Today’s young realtors want to know how that young family that they sold a home to is doing.
• Today’s young financial planners may very well pick up the phone to see how their client is doing — just because they genuinely care.

In a recent study of 4,700 people, more people said “fulfilling work” was the most important factor to staying with an employer — well ahead of job security (70s) and personal advancement (80s).

So as a result, if you expect to recruit and retain these people, your organization must articulate meaning — the actual difference that their time will make in their community, in the world, in the country, within their family, on their block.

1. I fell victim to this flawed executive thinking as well, In the late 90s, I was co-founder and CEO of a successful publicly traded artificial intelligence firm. Most of our staff were highly skilled programmers — the kind of “microserfs” Douglas Coupland wrote about. They worked hard, played hard, and were top of their game; many drew a higher salary than me and other senior executives. When they asked for balance, I created an aromatherapy room. Honest to God. We had this unused area that was meant as a photocopy nook so we put a door on it, painted the room black, put glow-in-the-dark sticky stars and planets all over the wall, brought in comfy chairs, and hid an aromatherapy diffuser in the corner. “Relax?” it told our employees, “Feel free. Just please don’t leave the office.”

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Forget the recession — the biggest challenge companies will face in the next five years is yet to come: A mass exodus of employees from the workforce. Baby boomers have already begun retiring en masse and scant few organizations have any kind of succession plan in place to recruit and groom future leaders.

It’s not like they haven’t tried. Managers have hired legions of so-called Generation Y workers to fill offices, only to watch in disbelief and confusion as scores walk out the back door as easily as they came in the front. Understanding the fickle needs of workers in their 20s — the “Facebook Generation” — is a moving target, but indicators are emerging pointing to why young workers hit the bricks.

They Feel Mistrusted: Young people born between 1980 and 1990 were born to Generation X parents who gave them unprecedented levels of trust and room “off-leash” as compared to their baby-boomer parents. Thus, the Facebook Generation expects to be trusted in all aspects of their life, including on the job. Misguided attempts at increasing productivity, like blocking Facebook and instant messenger programs, scream “We don’t trust you!” to this group of workers. After all, you don’t block the telephone in case your employees make personal calls. To the Facebook Generation, blocking other modes of communication like social networking sites are the same thing.

They Feel Like a Cog: Generation Y employees want to feel like a part of the team from day one, not something they have to earn after months of employment. If you’re holding your new workers back from participating in a project simply because they haven’t cleared their three-month probation, you are, in essence, telling them that they were hired for their ability to fill a chair, not play a valued role in a firm. Remember, this generation was told by their parents that they “can do anything they set their mind to.” Holding them back from that potential in the workplace will confuse and eventually frustrate Generation Y workers. (Quick tip: Hand them a box of their own personalized business cards on day one.)

You Give Them Annual Reviews: In past generations, workers were evaluated once per year in a horribly demoralizing session known as The Annual Review. This review was, in essence, the recitation of a list of things that employee did wrong in the previous 365 days, then an opportunity for them to beg for a raise. It doesn’t work any more. Generation Y workers require instant feedback — don’t worry, they can take criticism, as long as it’s justified, immediate, and gives them a fair opportunity to correct it. Corrections should happen when needed, not held for a year-end meeting, and should start with the words: “Let me know how I can help support you better so this doesn’t happen again.”

[quote]Your Technology Sucks: Young people in their 20s simply do not know a world without immediate access to information like the Internet and email. And yet, so many corporate offices still slog by on computers that groan and chug slowly when asked to perform basic tasks like opening a spreadsheet or launching a web browser. Your technology must at least keep pace with the computers this generation uses at home — this doesn’t necessarily mean the latest bleeding-edge turbo-machines, but it doesn’t mean a patched-up computer from the secretary pool, either. (Um, you still have a secretary pool?!)

You Don’t Give Them Unstructured Time: Often, companies attempt to increase worker output by restricting the time available for watercooler chat, coffee breaks, and so on. First, eliminate scheduled breaks entirely. Let them take breaks when they feel they need it. Paradoxically, given this level of trust, most Generation Y workers will return the favor in spades by devoting extra time at work, often unpaid. This time gives them the chance to “cross-pollinate” ideas across projects or departments, share news between divisions, and otherwise break down the traditional “silos” that hamper an organization’s agility. Remember, this informal connection time is the way they were taught to work through school — group projects, not individual reports. Don’t worry, you’ll be able to spot the abusers of this generosity clearly.

You can audit your own organization’s ability to retain Generation Y workers today. Start with the easiest two:

• Are you rewarding, not just encouraging, sharing information and ideas across the company?
• Do you have updated computers and have a “just don’t go overboard” policy when it comes to your workers using web sites like Facebook and Twitter?
• Are employees in the first three months of employment involved in important and exciting projects?

Now that economic recovery is ahead, the days of workers competing for jobs will once again sunset. Soon enough, they’ll be back in the driver’s seat. If your company isn’t prepared to respect the needs of this new generation, you may find yourself struggling for relevance in the new economy.

What do you think? Can you add other reasons Generation Y workers bolt from their employer?

Here’s today’s exchange with NetNation/Hostway, the provider I used in the past (and still, sadly, retain some domain names with).

Enjoy this nonsensical response.

Their original email — 2:24 a.m.
The service(s) listed below are about to expire and require your immediate attention. You must renew or your service(s) will be deactivated upon expiration. Your service(s) and possibly your business will be interrupted. Domain: thirdtuesdayvancouver.com.

My response — 11:19 a.m.
I would like to renew this, but when I go to account manager (following your link) it doesn’t show me that domain. Help! I do not want this domain deleted.

Their “response” — 11:48 a.m.
We received a request that you no longer wanted this domain, so it was closed, and autorenew was removed. If this is no longer the case, please provide us with the last 4 characters of your account manager password, and we will re-open it, to enable renewal of the domain.

Do you have any experiences like this that turned frustratingly comical?

How to Lead, Inspire, and Retain the Generation-Y Millennials

In this follow-up to Tod’s massively popular presentation Recruiting the Facebook Generation, Tod will show your delegates the eight key ways your business must change if you want to engage and retain this new, young, and energetic workforce.

From developing creative benefits packages to learning an entirely new leadership model, the presentation walks you through, in plain language, the specific areas you need to focus on. You’ll see real-world case studies of what works (and examples where attempts to manage this generation went spectacularly wrong) and will walk away with an online kit of resources and notes of the presentation.

• Integrating the Generations
• Living a New Leadership and Management Style
• Rethinking Benefits and Evaluations
• Developing On-Demand Workplace Education
• Creating a Safe Space Where Innovation ‘Just Happens’
• Structuring a Team by Removing Its Structure
• Fostering Loyalty by Training Them to Leave
• The Six Reasons Millennials/Generation Y Leave Their Employer

It’s a 60- to 90-minute keynote presentation (flexible, depending on conference agenda) aimed at human resources professionals, small-business managers, and anyone else who works with people aged 20-35. What you learn may prevent a workforce exodus.

“Tod packed the house in both sessions and he delivered! He has an enormous wealth of expertise on the whole gamut related to social media and the Web 2.0. But content aside, he was also so incredibly engaging and inspiring as a presenter that you couldn’t help but have a fabulous time along the way. What was clear to me was that this guy is authentic. He’s passionate about what he does….and does a terrific job in engaging his audiences.” — TGIM Work Life

Media and Reviews

“Tod Maffin was a runaway successful speaker. All [survey] respondents rated him a 3 out of 3 and comments were extraordinarily positive. Following are verbatim comments from our comment cards:

• Excellent – the best speaker I have ever heard!
• Great speaker for after lunch! Woke me up, made me laugh, and made me think!
• Tod alone was worth the price of the conference!
• Great message. Enjoyed the balance of humour in the context of some very serious messages.
• Terrific! Tod was enlightening & genuine. He would have been an even better opening speaker to this conference.
• Absolutely excellent! Excellent speaker, PowerPoint presentation, etc.
• Tod is a fantastic passionate speaker! An unexpected highlight!
• Excellent well-paced speech.

“Hi Tod, Just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed the presentations I attended yesterday and today. Fabulous ideas/info/life story/videos/delivery!!! After I got back to Brandon, MB (where I’m from) I immediately showed my son the Gmail video! Will you be coming to Manitoba again any time soon?”
– Erin Brown, Brandon First

“Tod’s refreshing presentation on Recruiting the Facebook Generation was relevant, timely, and witty — a rare combination. A remarkable presenter, he had the audience engaged and chuckling first thing in the morning! The feedback received from our attendees was very positive; many agreed that Tod was the highlight of the day — a 9.5 out of 10!”
– Darcy Rezac, Vancouver Board of Trade

“The path to recruiting and retaining the so-called Facebook Generation is not through fancy gimmicks and traditional advertising –- it’s through meaning, spirit and tech-savvy company promotion, says Tod Maffin. The broadcaster, blogger and social media strategist was the keynote speaker at EBNC and IFEBP’s recent sold-out Canadian Benefits Conference.”
– Employee Benefit News

“Maffin’s address was liberally spotted with light-hearted stories, but it was also thought-provoking. More than a few of the association’s membership were making notes for future reference.”
– Calgary Herald

“Tod packed the house in both sessions and he delivered! He has an enormous wealth of expertise on the whole gamut related to social media and the Web 2.0. But content aside, he was also so incredibly engaging and inspiring as a presenter that you couldn’t help but have a fabulous time along the way. What was clear to me was that this guy is authentic. He’s passionate about what he does….and does a terrific job in engaging his audiences.”
– TGIM Work Life

From developing creative benefits packages to learning an entirely new leadership model, the presentation walks you through, in plain language, the specific areas you need to focus on. You’ll see real-world case studies of what works (and examples where attempts to manage this generation went spectacularly wrong) and will walk away with an online kit of resources and notes of the presentation.

Among the areas he’ll cover:

• Integrating the Generations
• Living a New Leadership and Management Style
• Rethinking Benefits and Evaluations
• Developing On-Demand Workplace Education
• Creating a Safe Space Where Innovation ‘Just Happens’
• Structuring a Team by Removing Its Structure
• Fostering Loyalty by Training Them to Leave
• The Six Reasons Millennials/Generation Y Leave Their Employer

It’s a 60- to 90-minute keynote presentation (flexible, depending on conference agenda) aimed at human resources professionals, small-business managers, and anyone else who works with people aged 20-35. What you learn may prevent a workforce exodus.

And I realized today that pretty much everything they say on those messages is a lie. Case in point:

“We are experiencing a higher-than-average call volume.“

Bullshit. I’m looking at you, Shaw Cable. You’ve had that on your “please hold” message since 1821. It’s not that you’re suddenly experiencing more calls, it’s that you’ve chosen to not add more staff. I mean, did suddenly — just before I called on Tuesday at 11:20 a.m. — hundreds of people flood your call centre to order the iPhoto slide show channel?¹ Give me a break.

Some companies even have the audacity to take this one level further with “Because of overwhelming demand for our product, we’re experiencing…” Really Rogers Cellular? You’re doing that well? Because your financial statements are reporting the opposite — that, in fact, your bottom-line income² for 2008 actually dropped as compared to the previous year. Yeah. Overwhelming demand.

“Our menu options have changed.“

No. They haven’t. Companies use this line because they want to rope people into listening to their whole spiel first — which often includes product ads.³ Menu options don’t change often. Even if they do, do you really have to leave that on your message for the next five years?

“So that we can route this call to the right agent, please choose from one of the following options.“

This is one of the oldest tricks in the books. It’s called the “Operator 123″ trick in marketing circles. You know those ads that say to call their number and ask to speak to operator 123? Here’s the secret: there is no operator 123. That was ad number #123 you just responded to and by asking for a specific operator, you’ve helped them track which ad you responded to.⁴

That’s basically what’s happening with many of these corporate “please hold” messages. You’re going to talk to the same operator no matter what button you push. What you’ve done instead is logged a little reference in some tracking database what product you own or what your complaint is. And then, you simply get pawned off on whichever agent comes up next.

“Your call is important to us.”

Oops, excuse me — I throw up in my mouth a little. The paradox here is that the companies who dole out this rote, weak statement are the ones who seem to care the least about their customers — at least judging from their customer service. I mean, how do they know my next call is going to be important to them? Maybe I’ll just yodel for the first 30 seconds. That’s not going to be so important…

“Please choose from one of the following options.”

This would be great, if the options they’re offering have anything to do with why I was calling. Today, my financial institution called me seven times in the space of an hour. I was on an important call at the time and let it go to voicemail. Since there were so many calls in the space of such a short time, I wondered if there was something wrong. So I called their number.

Now remember, I am calling to ask why they called and if it were important. Which option would you pick?

1. Check your balance, pay a bill, transfer funds, or change your personal access code
2. Branch information or for our phone directory
3. Loans, mortgages, or lines of credit
4. Information on our new tax-free savings account or other investments and rates
5. Visa questions including lost and stolen cards
6. Personal or business banking needs

I guessed 6, only because it was the most generic. Of course, it was at the end.

Which of course, brought me to the most frequent lie of them all:

“To make sure you get excellent customer service, this call may be recorded.”

Um, what?! I’m going to get better service because a hard disk somewhere is recording our conversation? Get real. I have no doubt that if the call goes weird, you might be able to use it to train future reps on what to do, but the fact that you’re recording our chat won’t help me get anything. Here’s the real reason they record the call: Legal reasons. Organizations these days want a record of everything. Especially government and public sector organizations. It also helps them prove to you they were right and you are wrong, should it come to a dispute. But really, aren’t they always?

There are fewer and fewer companies which offer something as simple as this:

You’ve reached the customer support line of ABC Widgets. Please hold for an operator.

Would it be that hard?

Luckily, the Internet has a solution for everything, and some sites offer a tip sheet on which buttons to press to get through to a human being faster. For instance, when you call Tivo, just say “Live Agent” at the recording and it’ll blast you through. Not so easy at Dell Support where the secret code is⁵ 1, 7266966, 1, 4, 4.

1. This is actually a real channel — called The Frame — that Shaw sells. Go watch channel 165 on Shaw digital cable and see for yourself.
2. which Rogers calls “comprehensive income”
3. Call the Apple Store in Vancouver and the first thing you’ll get is a message proclaiming proudly “The iPhone 3GS is here!” Then, when you actually get to speak to a human you discover that no, the iPhone 3GS is not here. Hasn’t been for weeks. And they have no idea when they’re coming in.
4. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing; it’s pretty clever marketing, actually.
5. I’m not making this up

We were both in Toronto last week –me for some CBC meetings, and you because you were being scouted for a sports team. I’ll get into how I know that in a bit.

As I was rummaging around my documents folder at the hotel, I noticed another computer pop up on the same network we were using. It was yours. Normally, all you can do is see the computer name like DAMIAN04. My computers are always named WOPR or Joshua or some variant thereof.¹ But in your case, you gave your computer your own name. Bad move.

Worse than that, you left many of your key folders, like Documents and Music, wide open for anyone to explore.² Since you had a fairly unique name and I had some time to kill, so I let my fingers do the Googling.

Here is what Google told me about you — a random stranger who was obviously staying at the same hotel as I. I learned even more about you later because I friended you on Facebook and you added me. Even though you don’t have a clue who I am.

• You just graduated from a major University. Yes, I know the name.
• You are very well ranked at your sport. Three weeks ago, the local paper said your instincts were “prophetic.”
• I know the address of your home. And the fact that you hate your landlord. (Really, maybe you shouldn’t post that sort of stuff.)
• Your girlfriend’s name is Sarah. And dude, she’s way too young for you. Listen to your mother.
• Speaking of which, sorry to hear about your grandma. I’m glad she’s out of harm’s way.
• I know how much your scholarship was last year.
• I know where you work on weekends, when you got the job, and roughly how much you make.
• You hate speaking in front of crowds.
• You have three siblings. You really hate your youngest brother. I can’t say I blame you. That trick he pulled with your car was crappy of him.
• I know what songs you listened to last Friday night, at exactly what time, and in what order.
• You have an unnaturally strong crush on Alyson Hannigan. This is something you haven’t told your girlfriend yet.
• I know where you do your banking.
• I know where your dad works. Since I also know his position, I can get a pretty good bead on how much he makes too.

For the record, I emailed “David” — not his real name — and cleared the publication of this with him. He said he had no idea his computer was open and is rethinking his policy of friending anyone who asks. Remember, I didn’t open a single document on David’s computer. I got all this information from a Google search and his Facebook page.

This reminds me of when I spoke to an audience of security experts in Stockholm. To demonstrate how even experts forget the “little things,” I opened up a computer I found on the network³ in front of the audience, and walked through his files, including opening a marketing flyer for his security company, promoting how they’re experts at locking computers down. Hilarity ensued.

Oh, and for the record, David ended up signing a deal when he was in Toronto. I’d have bought him a drink if I’d have known where he was going to be. I do, after all, know what he looks like.

Have you ever been at the uncomfortable end of someone knowing more about you than you realized?

1. If you were born between 1966 and 1976, you’ll probably get the joke.
2. For the record, I looked at the list of your files, but didn’t open any. Even though offers.xls was awfully tempting!
3. I found the fellow who owned the computer and cleared this with him first, but his computer was genuinely open when I found it.

Social media futurist Tod Maffin shows your meeting attendees how to join the battle — dominate market space online, access more qualified leads, pinpoint-measure your marketing efforts, and immediately counter negative online attention.

In his new fast-paced, entertaining keynote presentation, Maffin will let your attendees in on the micro-marketing secrets previously used only by “the digerati” on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and corporate blogs. The latest, most measurably-effective branding tools that organizations can use online — demonstrated step-by-step and illustrated for startling effect.

• Watch a portion of this presentation
  in “SWARM Communications: Protecting Your Brand When Good Buzz Goes Bad Online.”

Realizing that warfare defense is as critical as strategy, content includes deploying counter-measures against online attacks of your brand — whether from comment flames, hashtag attacks on your Twitter feed, blog trolls, or more.

In the true Tod Maffin form that’s won him praise from hundreds of meeting planners worldwide, there are no high-level theoretical overviews here, no boring bullet points, and no technical jargon. Your attendees already understand the social media basics these days; this presentation takes them to the next level — past understanding and directly into strategic, measurably effective use.

At the end, each of your attendees will get immediate access to a private online resource — branded with your conference or meeting logo — complete with presentation notes, worksheets, and step-by-step walkthroughs of each strategy demonstrated on stage. This secure online resource is fully accessible via Blackberry, iPhone, and nearly all other mobile devices.

For more information or to book a date, contact Tod now.

I was one of the 2,000-plus human resources professionals who heard your keynote speech ["Recruiting the Facebook Generation"] yesterday!

Fabulous, motivating and so current!

I run a small recruitment firm in west GTA and gained a great deal from your message. My challenge, is actually marketing to the Gen X & Gen Y HR Professionals who have never heard of staffing agencies and do everything on-line through websites and other medias! Thanks for the great ideas.”

– Sue Strickland
The Selection Group Recruitment Specialists