You should plan to give in social media until it hurts like a teenaged pop song.

The most successful social media programs are those that give before they take. Yet most marketing professionals have decades of using outreach methods that intend to take through demand and lead generation.

Lead and Sales Generation is About Taking

The last 20 years of technology marketing has been about finding customers and then refining content to a smaller subset that could use your product and then an even smaller subset that might buy your technology.

Sales methods focussed on cold-calling, hot-knocking, lead qualification and sales funnel. Concepts of “chasing the customer”, “getting in their face” and “taking the order” have limited application in an era where the customer has greater power.

Post-Scarcity Marketing and the Internet

The underlying shift that is impacting technology marketing is that Internet has changed the cost of marketing. Last decade, access to customer attention was through media or analyst interaction using PR teams dedicated to task. This is expensive and . The Internet has changed this dynamic and, like other industries, disrupted the “middle-man” in the transaction.

Social Media means reaching many (not all) customers directly. It disrupts the legacy sale process but communicating directly to your customers. It bypasses the complexity and cost of resellers. It reduces the need to sales people.

Enhance

Programs designed to enhance, strengthen and support existing relationships will have medium impact. These customers are already engaged with your products, support services and sales team. They remain valuable.

Programs that give away resources will succeed.

1. white papers
2. webinars
3. podcasts
4. commentary
5. feature-fetish blog posts
6. newsletters via email

Think of these as mix-tapes for your teenage love. That intensity that drove you to share something about yourself. Remember love notes, cheap jewellery, innocence and holding hands ?

Cost ?

Traditional marketing programs intend to “take”. Take leads, create demand and take purchase orders. Before the Internet, this type of sales was the only way, now we have options.

The cost of a social media program is vastly less than cost of a sales reps and their travel expenses. Much less than advertising in a magazine.

Pro Tip For Your Teenaged Love/Social Media Strategy

The best tips I have for social media success are:

1. sustained effort over a long period (give love till it hurts)
2. keep changing the medium and message (love always changes)
3. do not overdo the analytics and measurement (how much do you love me?)
4. it's not about your company, it is about the customer (it's not about you, it's about them)
5. give information and perspective (sweet love notes)
6. have webinars and meetups (setup your first date)
7. don't expect to close a deal immediately (hold hands before you kiss)

One thing that hasn’t changed about marketing in 20 years is persistence. Everything else ? Yeah, its like technology that changes every 3 years.

Mulling over the Apple shindig yesterday followed by a quick read of my RSS feed this morning. Some bullet points.

Apple MacBook

1. looks good for people who need more than a MacBook Air and less than a MacBook Pro.
2. Leap forward to remove fans completely. Major technology advances in screen, battery and case.
3. Dual stream 802.11AC wireless
4. Removes all the connectors. New connector is multi-purpose and will be annoying during long meetings when you want to charge and present (or charge and connect to the Ethernet network) at the same time. (Of course, everyone has Apple TVs in the ceiling these days don't they ?)
5. New keyboard switches have my attention - I will buy the external keyboard with these switches when it is (hopefully) released.
6. Apple continues to drive massive change in power consumption on laptops with new screen and battery designs. Market followers like Dell, Lenovo & HP will be annoyed to see Apple pull further away.
7. Gold finish will be hugely popular in Middle East and Asian countries.

From what I can see, the maximum memory is only 8 GB which means I won’t be buying one. I am struggling with 16GB today.

Reviews of the taptic feedback (Six Colors)on the Force Touch trackpad suggest that it is good. I rarely use the trackpad, do not like to use it and do not care much. I have a desktop trackpad but never found a way to make it useful.

Apple Watch

My view on the Apple Watch is “meh”.

1. Its an accessory to your iPhone today. The demonstration was lots of nice gimmicks to me.
2. The Bluetooth and WiFi link to your iPhone will increase battery drain and piss me off.  (I disable Bluetooth & Wireless when travelling for this reason)
3. It might be fun/nice/neat to play with one. And there are many foolish people who will do so.
4. Lots of neat tricks demonstrated on stage but none of them resonated with my situation
5. I don't see/perceive/imagine/conceive a use case that is strong enough to pay £339 for even the cheapest 42mm version
6. I don't like wearing a watch. I tried wearing an cheap watch recently and it annoyed the heck out of me.
7. I'm sure that Apple has addressed that watch bands are uncomfortable to wear when keyboarding.
8. I agree that it is a "personal experience" in a similar way that every iPhone is a personal experience.
9. I cannot perceive how an "iPhone accessory" at £500 per unit every two years will be mainstream. I can see a niche market.
10. It might not be an accessory over time but I think that the limited UI space means it will always be an accessory

Most people I know do not wear watches. Will they return to watch wearing ?

AppleTV

1. I have one.
2. I don't use it because its crap.
3. Don't care about "HBO" - whatever that is. I'm guessing its some sort of movie thing.

Becoming One from MoGrafik on Vimeo.

a lot. Way more than you think.

Watches sell for much more than $10000 every day. Like these.

Brilliant.

This is an extension to provide a minimal (Google Chrome-like) status bar for Safari. It also has built-in longurl support to convert those pesky and opaque short urls to long ones again.

via Minimal Status Bar for Safari by visnup.

Saw this on the Reddit AMA with Elon Musk today and he is talking about the value of understanding fundamentals before you become an expert.

[–]ElonMuskOfficial[S] 5103 points1 month agox2

I do kinda feel like my head is full! My context switching penalty is high and my process isolation is not what it used to be.

Frankly, though, I think most people can learn a lot more than they think they can. They sell themselves short without trying.

One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree -- make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.

The thing about writing content for the largest possible audience is that you must write intentionally for the majority of readers. As the audience grows, you have to write content to that is simpler and plainer. The largest number of people will now include a majority who are not seriously engaged with you as a person or what you stand for and your content must be easy to consume.

For technology blogging, this means writing dumber and stupider content that appeals to a large technology audience. If you want a “large audience” then write about introductory topics that every new engineer needs to learn. Write about passing the lowest vendor certification, write about dumb everyday things that people should know.

But if you want to the best audience in technology, you want to target the people who make decisions, who initiate projects, the people who are advisors, investors or executives. These people have skills and motivation to work in senior roles. Reading about the basics has no value. They want analysis, perspectives and/or deeper knowledge. Its not enough to write “6 Things That Will Change Your Technology”.

These people make choices that change the market, spend the money, influence colleagues and workmates.

These people are busy and often rely on trusted sources for information and advice. They don’t have time or energy to read dumb content for a large audience.

My Content Strategy

These two approaches are radically different. If you write for page views then the path leads to low intensity, low brow, low value that people can easily consume or ignore. If you publish for influence, then you write about  real information about high level topics that are harder to read, you publish topics that are of value to smaller audience but who have real influence and impact.

And, frankly, writing dumb content isn’t interesting. But it took me five paragraphs to say that.

Damn.

There have been times in my life  when I was arrogant enough to think that I knew most everything. As I get older, I don’t regret being stupid because that’s just life.

What I regret is not learning this lesson when I was younger.

Which, of course, is pointless. You have to get older to have made mistakes.

Where “Dancing Shoulders” really means “shake my boobs on video”

Genius that modern video tools can produce quality self-produced content like this. Look how far we have come.

I want to see this movie made. The short is brilliant.

ATROPA – Sci-fi Short from Eli Sasich on Vimeo.

I read this quote in a book:

“It is never too late to be what you might have been. George Eliot”

What came directly to my mind is “I’m not too older to keep trying to be what I might be”.

The amount of energy and effort required to refute vendor marketing content is at least three times what it took to create it.

Because people often believe that vendor marketing is true, accurate and honest even when provably one sided, biased and mostly incorrect.

A motivational poster to cope with technology vendors.

Briefly wanted to mention SwitchUp from Irradiated Software.

When working on customer sites, I am able to have a completely different instances of most Mac apps. For example, I have separate Safari, Terminal,  profiles for each of my customer sites with bookmarks, logins and history that are unique to that customers. Also, same for Mail (but this is less useful than you think).

This lets me quickly switch between customers without the hassle of booting a VM while still having all of my data and tools available. I only use this for certain apps but it is really useful to ensure that customer data is isolated in applications.

SwitchUp is a unique application that allows you to create, duplicate, and switch between multiple profiles of settings (preferences and data) for almost any application.

It's like a multi-user environment for every application.

How I think it works: Each Mac OS X application maintains profiles in the ~/Application Library director and SwitchUp manages these by switching pointers to those settings. The result is that applications like Safari, OmniFocus, Terminal and ToDo lists can be unique for each customer.

This trailer for a video data centres is truly beautiful video. I hope to see it online one day but until then this is best way to show wives, girlfriends, moms and dads the inside of the  data centre.

Internet machine (trailer) from Timo on Vimeo.

Timo Arnall - Internet machine

A campaign about marketing that I can get behind - stop the waste the world’s resources with pointless junk.

As Marketers, we are sometimes under a strange social pressure to create a lot of "stuff" — t-shirts, pens, hats, bags, stress balls, and countless other tchotchkes with our logos on them aka, promotional products, or "swag

The three dirty little secrets about promotional products:

1. Roughly 2/3 of the marketing materials you produce end up in a hotel trash can before your target customer even leaves the conference.

2. People will not, in fact, buy your product because you gave them a branded flashlight keychain.

3. People are more likely to remember positive experiences shared with other humans, rather than objects.

via Marketers Against Waste.

Earwig for your Monday morning. I will be imagining that you are all singing along by the second or third chorus.

Directorial debut from internationally renowned designer and concept artist, David Levy (Tron legacy, Prometheus, Ender’s Game, Tomorrowland, Avatar2). The short film is the first 15 minutes of a science fiction TV series Levy has outlined and hopes to film. Unlike the highly VFX-ed science fiction films inundating audiences today, PLUG is a return to 1970’s classics like Star Wars and Mad Max with a gritty universe made from mostly live props and real life settings. Enjoy and share!

“On a post-apocalyptic Earth, Leila Dawn (Natalie Floyd), is the only human survivor. Raised by Robots after humanity abandoned the planet they destroyed with nuclear warfare, Leila cannot forget her parents nor ignore her yearning to find other organic life. A hunt she sets out on with a Military Unit, Marker (Lex Cassar), leads Leila to discover the reality she’s been denied—a reality that sparks her ultimate quest.”

If you liked, please share and donate using the tip jar button top right!

#plugmovie www.vyle-art.com/plug Independent science-fiction short film.

view the making of! vimeo.com/109876006 Shot with one 7D and one 5D Edited and composited using adobe creative suite 3D using 3ds MAX

I’ve linked to James Mickens before here is another one:

This time its Javascript.

It’s been known for years that JavaScript is a dangerous, unholy language that is banned in 27 countries and most fine restaurants. In this talk, I will use deeply personal and completely biased examples to describe why I hate JavaScript. I will then provide additional reasons why the entire web stack is a thing that should not be tolerated by moral human beings. I will also describe some of my futile research efforts to make web browsers moderately less the worse thing ever.

Hat Tip: Wes Felter

I’m biased by involvement with (Packet Pushers but I can confirm this article is correct from my side. Podcasts are popular and well supported.

Maybe it’s the intimacy of hearing soothing voices piped into your ears through a pair of headphones — or maybe it’s just how much time people need to kill listening to something. Americans spend more than three hours a day commuting, working out and doing household chores that can be accompanied by audio entertainment, according to census data studied by Matt Lieber, a former public radio producer who co-founded the podcast company with Blumberg.

via Podcasts are back — and making money - The Washington Post.

“Dress Smartly and You Will Think Smart”

I found the second and third video to be inspiring.

Ben Sherman: The Original Button Up Since 1963 / PART 1 - PREPARATION

Ben Sherman: The Original Button Up Since 1963 / PART 2 - RITUAL

Ben Sherman: The Original Button Up Since 1963 / PART 3 - RESPECT

Gina Trapani has a some suggestions on Short Form Blogging that I like very much. Not every blog post needs to be a world changing epic with thousands of words:

Summary:

• If it’s a paragraph, it’s a post.
• Negotiate a comfort zone on two axes: personal and public, tech and everything else
• Traffic is irrelevant.
• Simplify, simplify.
• Ask for trusted collaborator feedback.
• Have fun.

Lots of good points that explain each of these elements.

Scribbling.net | Short-form blogging.

One day, all the parts of the body were talking about who was most important.

THE BRAIN SAID - “Since I control everything and do all the thinking, I am the most important therefore I should be boss.”

THE FEET SAID - “Since I carry him everywhere he wants to go and get him in position to do what the brain wants, I am the most important.”

THE EYES SAID - “Since I must look out for all of you and tell you where the danger lurks, I an the most important body part.”

THE HANDS SAID - “Since I do all the work and earn all the money to keep the rest of you going, I am the most important.”

Of course, everyone got into the arguments and the heart, lungs, and ears all say the same thing.

Finally, the asshole spoke up and pointed that he was the most important even though the others didn’t know it. All the other laughed and laughed to think of an asshole being boss.

The asshole decided to prove the point and refused to function. Blocked up tight.

Soon the brain was feverish, the eyes crossed and ached, the feet were too weak to walk, the hands hung limply at the sides, and the heart and lungs struggled to keep going.

All pleaded with the asshole to relent and agreed that the asshole was the most important and so it happened.

Moral Of The Story

The MORAL of the story is that the network is the most important part of IT infrastructure but not everyone realises it. 

Or that the asshole always ends up being the boss :)

“Look to the Rose that blows about us—“Lo, Laughing,” she says, “into the World I blow: At once the silken Tassel of my Purse Tear, and its Treasure on the Garden throw.”

Excerpt From: Omar Khayyám. “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.”

A reminder to spend your money on beautiful things. More simply, take time to enjoy life.

A while back I posted that I am scaling back my twitter engagement because I felt it was becoming less useful and less valuable. I had some time this evening to verify the perception with hard data that Twitter is no longer the valuable source of inbound traffic to my EtherealMind blog.

This graph shows the dramatic reduction in inbound traffic from the Twitter in the middle of the year while G+/LinkedIn remain inconsequential.

Twitter Inbound traffic to Etherealmind blog.

LinkedIn Inbound traffic to Etherealmind blog.

Google Plus Inbound traffic to Etherealmind blog.

Important to note that during this time, the total page views has remained more or less constant. This leads me to conclude that the reduction from twitter is simply because Twitter is becoming less relevant to network engineers as an information source.