The Media Supermarket

So you want to loose some weight? The best thing to do, is to look at yourself in the mirror ten times a day. Every morning check out the latest developments on the sides of your belly, your thighs, and anywhere else that loves to accumulate fat. These are the visual results of yesterday’s activities. You should also keep checking your weight three times a day, and make sure you are familiar with the results as much as possible. To be more in touch with results, please check all the clothes that you have and make sure you know which ones still fit and which don’t fit anymore. Focus also on how much you are able to eat as opposed to the past, and how much less exercise you can perform. And keep going like this until you really loose yourself, instead of loosing weight.
This is how you focus on results and results only. This is the “right and professional” way of working. You keep thinking about whatever results you are getting.
Several problems.
First, you cannot control the results, so stop focusing on them. You can’t force people to love your product, or adopt your new technology.
Second, you will create stress in the environment. Instead of looking at the sky and feeling bad about the result (rain), you know what the obvious thing to do is.
Third, you will loose touch with reality and the great opportunities that come with it. The map you have for yourself about the world is necessarily not the most accurate, and you gain better understanding as you go through the process. The more focused you are on the results the more likely you are to miss these opportunities.
Fourth, no learning, no experience. For the same reasons, you are out of touch with the realities, and you will not allow for serendipity to enter your world. You are also shutting yourself out of your ability to contain serendipity in the project. 
In my strategy course in college, we were taught that the proper way of executing a strategy, is to decide on it, and follow through until you achieve it. As a control freak, I had a simple question, “what if we discover half way through, that we don’t have the right strategy?”. I didn’t have the guts to ask that question, but I do now.
Our other class on flexibility in the new market place made sense though.

If you are working in the business of generating attention, time, and hopefully viral effects for your content, please try not to fall in the trap I’ve fell in several times.
The typical process is coming up with a list of things that can be done, and then going on to generate a huge list of ideas that seem really cool and popular, and “would really be great”. The next step would be to religiously follow these steps as if they are steps that get you closer and closer to the greatness you are aspiring to.
Usually, these ideas are nothing but me-too ideas hoping to aggregate everything in one place, or the other extreme, where your team mates will try to not imitate anyone, and find our own edge with something “really unique”.
I totally disagree with both approaches. They are purely business approaches.
The first approach assumes that the road to success is clearly carved, and you just have to get the whole thing working, and people will love it. In actuality, you are getting ideas that are working and trying to just group them together, or trying to beat the good ones in their own game.
The second approach assumes that if you are unique enough your product will kick off. This is just putting one egg in one basket. If it doesn’t pick up (and it probably won’t) you are left with no eggs.
My proposed approach is not a synthesis of these two, and doesn’t try to get the “best of the two worlds”. I think the investment should be in the readiness of people working on the project. This can be done by strongly establishing the attitude and approach of hunting.
The hunter invests in being ready, in having good tools for hunting, protection, navigation, and team work. Fishing is a great example. You need to be extremely patient, and extremely alert at the same time. Because, when you least expect it, a huge fish might catch your bait, and you will have to go full force making sure you properly capture it. And you will definitely have to let go of all the other “tasks” on your project list for that day. 
Establishing a brand is more of a fluid game than it is like building a building with known boundaries and calculated costs and timelines.
The investment should be in equipping the team with the necessary tools that allow them to be flexible, alert, responsive, and hopefully patient. The investment should be in creating and maintaining this mentality in the minds of the team, and training them on operating in this mindset, not in carving huge project plans and tasks. These will all change when the rubber hits the road.

Search engines can easily read and process text, although not in natural language yet. They actually “love” text because it can easily help them make sense of the pages they are crawling. The challenge with images and videos is that search engines cannot “read” them, yet.
They rely on the tags, descriptions, and the title of the page to categorize and index images and videos.
A good idea to help search engines understand these media better is to encourage users to describe, instead of comment on them. The typical comments to a video are; “nice”, “cool”, “very bad” etc… Nothing descriptive of the image or video.
Implementing this would give you two main advantages:

1. Better indexing for your pages: since your page will be full of relevant keywords that actually describe your content, the search engines will find it much easier. This is especially beneficial for sites with huge content, in leveraging a very long tail of keywords. Someone looking for “dog with green shirt” will definitely land on your page if a user described it this way. Moreover, the user will be happy to have found exactly what he is looking for.

2. Rich user experience: having a synopsis of a video, or a creative description for an image will help the viewer in recognizing certain things they would have not recognized otherwise. A new angle, or a special detail would give the content a new perspective. This would especially helpful with videos, since many times you wait several minutes hoping it is the content you are looking for, and then discover it is not. This way users are prepared for what they will watch.

Implementation

It is not as easy as it sounds (I have yet to test it and see for myself) especially if you have users already user to just drop simple comments.

A good idea might be to introduce descriptions with (and eventually replace) comments. Users who don’t want to write descriptions can vote for each description. This way, the best description rises in position and gives new users the best description available.

The level of interaction with the content goes up when people try to describe, instead of just venting their impressions. The number of people participating will definitely be less, because naturally, it is more difficult to describe than to just comment. I think it is a risk worthy of taking, to improve the way people use your service and to differentiate it among competitors.

There has been a lot of talk about the non-linearity of the world, and change. Quantum mechanics teaches us that change happens in bounces and stages, instead of increments. Chris Anderson talks about the non-linear long tail, and how disproportionate the different pieces are in terms of their share of the “pie”. Seth Godin wants us to forget the tail, and focus on the head because of the disproportionate rewards and because “the winner takes it all”.
I have personally observed that the road from becoming an F student to C student is shorter and easier than the road from A to A+. I have also noticed a jump in my skill in certain things that I am learning. All of a sudden, there is more clarity in handling the skill, and there is a distinctive difference in the amount of comfort and confidence in dealing with it.
We can easily demonstrate that, by observing the explosion in popularity of some of the biggest websites, that did not exist several years ago.
The immediate reaction might be to embark on a “non-linear way of thinking and operating” due to these facts and to the nature of change.
Although we need to take this into serious consideration we should remember that we are linear. We as humans have certain limitations that allow us to only do so many things at once, and therefore we should seriously consider that we are bound to act in a linear way.
You can only say one thing at a time, sell one customer at a time, and learn a certain number of words per day.
We should stick to the “old” way of improving our business and learning, and that is, by doing the maximum we can do per day - every day. Then every now and then, we will experience a jump (or a fall) in our performance due to the combined efforts (or lack thereof) and to some dots that became connected.
The point is not to be fooled by the hope of getting very lucky and forgetting about the importance of hard work and patience.

Google finally decided to share the volume data of the search queries that they receive. This is too good to be true for someone like me living on these numbers. Now you can see the number of searches conducted per keyword, instead of the relative volume that was given previously, and was only segmented in five main segments.
It is generally estimated that 80% of all internet traffic starts at a search engine. And since Google accounts for almost 80% of search engine traffic, this is quite a good estimate for the market per keyword. This means you have a fair idea about 64% of the total market.
This marks a new era in market research and how scientific you can be in estimating your market size, and how much of it you are getting.Moreover, “market” is no longer a set of people with generalized demographics. It can now be measured by the number of people who are interested in a concept (or group of concepts) as specific as you define it.
I tried the service once, but then it seems it crashed, I’m sure a huge number of people is trying it. I’ll test it more extensively and compare with actual traffic figures that I have to see how best to use it.

The term sounds quite sophisticated. It is. And it’s nice to see people puzzled not knowing what the hell this is. But after you cut through the CTR, impressions, clicks, ad copy, and the technical issues, you end up like a traditional merchant in front of a salesman (been there before - the salesman that is). You would be evaluating each product, how much sales it might generate and how much profit margin it can get you. This is how it is in CPC affiliate marketing. You have to start thinking like a store keeper, except without the store, and without the merchandise, and the good news is, you only pay for sending people to the store. If you succeed in sending the right pople, you can start earning commissions on that.
I never thought of myself becoming a store keeper or merchant, but this was a strange discovery for me.
But this seems like a great store. There are no cases to deal with, and you can shift products, brands, or even industries, within seconds. You can also sell a wide range of unrelated items in your online conglomorate.
The fun part for me is in figuring out the right keywords, and testing different ad texts and seeing how they affect users’ behavior. It is really fascinating every time I think about it; here I am (wherever I am, logged in my account) thinking about what attract people more. At several other points in the world, there are people searching for certain keywords, I somehow manage to get a part of them, to be directed to my products, and buy it. They come and go, get their products shipped while I’m somewhere else doing somethig else.
I like this store!

How do I classify my customers / clients? An interesting question that always arises in discussions of segmenting our client base. Whether it is types of customers, or good and bad ones, there is always a problem of drawing that “fine line”. We usually know that we have clients who pay more than others, and we know that we should therefore treat them differently, but “how do we draw the line?” could become a tricky question. I prefer getting the answer from the clients collectively. I would like an approach that fits to my special case, and can be used over and over without having rigid lines differentiating between “good” and “bad” clients.
This is a simple technique where you just plot your clients on a graph, draw a line, and that’s it!
First create a list of all your clients, and next to each one the average purchases they make, and rank them from the highest to the lowest.
Then, plot the results on a graph, and you will end up with a “long tail“. Draw a line to separate the head and the tail, and you get a fairly good segmentation between good and bad customers.

The important thing about this technique is that it is flexible and scalable to any business, and to any number of clients. It can also be used for any time range. Also, you get rid of rigid classifications (a good customer is someone who buys more than $1,000/month). This way of classifying could become ridiculous in six months, since your business can grow and your clients’ purchases also.
This classifications doesn’t look at amounts, it looks at the relative positioning of your clients according to their performance with your business.

I was watching a documentary about the sun and space and started drifting in the different thoughts that the program evoked in me. While imagining what was happening “out there” in space, I realized that I visually represent it in my mind, and I know that it is not just visual. I know that these are just impressions that happen on our eyes. The sounds the phenomena create (and they are quite noisy) are reverberations of the medium they are in, and what we call sound is just the impression left on our minds. So, to be able to start understanding these phenomena, I realized there should be other ways to “imagine” them.
When you talk about your customer, what do you imagine? Do you imagine a person buying your product, or do you just have a conceptual thing in your mind, or is it just a number?
What is the best way to imagine the customer you are targeting and communicating with?
The method I prefer is recreating and living the experience that person goes through when they are encountered with my message or experiencing a product I’m involved in. This is actually a personal passion of living as vividly as possible the experiences of other people, and understanding them as fully as possible. But I also think this is a sound business strategy, since you really need to understand that person you are motivating to have a good experience with your product.
This is of course different from imagining what you would do when in your customer’s place. This is totally different. I also don’t think it is a good thing, to imagine how you would react, since this throws the exercise off balance. I think we need to develop enough empathy to be able to somehow re-experience what our end users are going through with our products, and how they are reacting to them.

If “Location, Location, Location” is the mantra in the real estate world, I’m starting to believe that it should also be the mantra of cross functional teams as well. After a heated debate over whether or not location is important in producing quality work, I decided to watch.
Then I traveled to our office in another country.
Before long, I was asked by a colleague about a certain product we are working on. We decided to have a ten minute meeting out in the sun and talk about it. I shared some simple facts about that product, and I was very happy to know the next day that this gave him a good edge in his offering to the client, and the order more than doubled just because of that addition! The same day, we shared another product with another colleague, and with one simple recommendation, we were able to eliminate a lot of frustration about that product with a very small modification. These same colleagues were able to assist me in some partnerships I was trying to make, and we decided on several steps to get these things done.
I became a believer.
Had I not traveled on this trip, would we have not been able to “get our jobs done”. Yes we would. But it’s not about just getting the work done. It’s about jumping to new places, and levels. It’s about creating a harmony in the team, that would almost automate the process of innovation and creation. It’s about being in a vibrant group that is more like an orchestra than a “business unit”.
I am just remembering the way “friendships” were formed during my college years. They were based on a very simple and pure criterion: whether or not you attended the same elective classes together! We used to become close friends, share intimate information with each other, and they become special people in our lives. Of course much of this expires when the course ends and we acquire new friends.
An important psychological factor in this is that people start to view the world in a similar manner when they spend enough time with each other. A closer look shows that we start to adopt the positions of the people we work / live with, in the same place. My reasoning is that although there are logical reasons that push us to think similarly with close people, there is another hidden reason why we tend to take similar positions. We don’t want to break whatever harmony there is, and we find it difficult to reject these people when they are expressing strong emotions. Of course, this is an investment we do, so that eventually we are given the chance to freely express our feelings.
Imagine what can happen when people with opposing points of view (sales and production or marketing and finance) sit together and start seeing the world from a similar perspective, and start sympathizing with one another! You get harmony. You get great results.

After getting my hands over my new computer, I was engaged in my typical childish excitement, that I always had whenever I got something new in my life. I would wake up feeling that there is a certain addition to my life, and that I’m surprisingly just a bit happier that day. What makes this more interesting, are the five minutes of meaningless happiness that I feel trying to remember why I’m happy in the first place. And I become happier when I remember what that “something” is.
So I started wondering how far this computer can take me, and how far I can take it. Can it give my life a new boost, in terms of productivity and speed? How different would my life be after I start using it?
And so I started thinking about this new gift. Some other questions popped up in my mind also; do the products that I work on provoke similar questions in the minds of end users? Scary! Do they anticipate the changes that we make as intensely and as happily as I was anticipating the features of my new computer? Scarier!
Other scary questions also started crawling into my mind, “Do people who work with me have these anticipations about working with me?” Very scary! “Do they think that working with me is an “addition” to their work and life?”
It’s can really get fun to ask yourself these questions and move away from the stupid daily mundane questions and wonderings. Just for a change. It’s also a healthy approach. Try it!