The Right Technology Platform

You want to pick a platform that makes your life easy, but you also want something that doesn’t look like everyone else. On the easy side, you can have a blog up and running in 5 minutes using wordpress.com, tumblr.com, or blogger.com. WordPress probably gives you the most powerful toolset and the most flexiblity. Tumblr is very fashionable right now, and is optimized for image-heavy blogging.  And they’re all free. There are other less popular options as well.

If you’re really going to take your blog seriously, you might be willing to spring for something a bit fancier, and spend a little money. For example, wordpress.com will let you pay a little extra – $12/year – and get your own URL.

Features vs. Money

On the full-control side, you can actually build your own wordpress blog from scratch, by downloading their open-sourced code from wordpress.org and leverage their huge ecosystem of plugins themes, and widgets. For example, there are plugins for tracking user data, widgets for syncing your Twitter to your blog, and themes that make your blog look like a newspaper, magazine, or game of Super Mario Brothers.

If you don’t need full-control, but want some features, you can host on WordPress.com, and buy features a la carte. Controlling the URL will cost you $12/year. Having them register your URL for you may cost another $8. Extra storage and video-support will each cost a little more. Getting the version without advertising embedded will cost you even more. And custom themes will cost you even more. This can start to add-up pretty quick, so at some point it may become more cost-effective to self-host your blog.

Money vs. Control

In my case, I wanted full-control, I wanted to own my own blog soup-to-nuts, and have my own URL, and have no ads, or ads that I made money off of, instead of ads that a blog side made money off of. I also envisioned having custom designs, functionality, and eventually building a real website, and so I chose to self-host my blog. I found a hosting provider called An Hosting that would host my blog for $100/year, and I downloaded the open-sourced WordPress code from WordPress.org, loaded it on my server space, configured it, and got it up-and-running with 10 minutes of help from a developer friend. It was pretty painful though – slowly researching. And ultimately, I didn’t use a lot of the functionality I had. For example, self-hosting gave me email addresses as well, and I never synced or used my pras@dailydoseofpras.com email address.  Another example – at the $100 price point, An Hosting wasn’t giving me a lot of bandwidth, so my blog loaded slowly. And most importantly, there was maintenance that had to be kept-up with – for example installing upgrades to the wordpress codebase every few months. I was constantly a couple releases behind.

Ultimately, unless you have a technical background, I don’t recommend self-hosting. If you want your own URL but are willing to live without fancy video support, extra space, and willing to be ad-supported, the compromise is that for $25/year or less you can get a blog on wordpress.com, have access to all their free themes and free widgets, and register a domain name so that you can get your dailydoseofpras.com. This is essentially what I decided to switch to last week. WordPress makes it super-easy to register a domain name through them, so you don’t even need to go through godaddy. And if you still feel like your blog looks like everyone else’s, you can buy a custom theme for $30 or you can do custom formatting (a premium feature)  and mess around.

Keep the topics you will cover bounded

The first question beyond the technology of building a blog is what your blog is going to be about? Its important to have a bounded topic area. For example, is this going to be your personal blog? Your professional blog? Do those two things need to be separate? Is there a particular specialty / passion that your blog will center around. If you care at all that your blog get even a little bit famous, it’s going to help that you’ve bounded your blog to one topic area, even if that area is something as simple as “funny shit.” once you’ve focused on a bounded topic area, think about the right keywords.  Having a bounded topic area where you can be the expert or be relevant will help with Search Engine Optimization, and it will also help whoever your readers are know what to expect of this blog. If they’re expecting posts about your passion for green technology, and your latest post is about your peyote-induced hallucinations, they might be a little thrown off.

Consider who might be reading this

Probably the most important thing when writing is considering who is reading this post. If you want to talk about your drug-induced hallucinations, think about what your future employer might think. I tended to be highly transparent about my life and my opinions when I blogged on my old personal blog, and I think that gave me a unique quality – that I was being more open than most of what you read online – but I think it also hurt some friendships along the way. I usually go and re-read my posts a day after publishing them, from the point of view of someone else, and after doing this for years, I think I have a better feel for what is likely to offend.

Build it into your day

The biggest problem with building something, is that you then have to maintain it. The best way to maintain is to make something part of your routine. So perhaps before you launch the blog, write 15 posts. If you can build the routine of writing posts into your daily or weekly life, to the point where you’ve put 15 posts to paper, then go ahead and launch your blog. Immediately post the first 2-3, keep-up with your writing as part of your routine, posting fresh-content as soon as its written,  and keep the remaining 12 posts in your back-pocket for when you don’t have time to write something new, so that you always have fresh content posted.

Find someone solid

The primary reason to use Odesk is that it’s cheaper than finding someone in the US to do the same job in-person, and that Odesk provides a pool of candidates for almost any online task you could require, many with thousands of hours of experience in similar roles. You can post a job, review candidates, and browse the jobs they’ve done in the past and what previous employers said about them. If you read the instructions for how to get started with Odesk, many of the posts talk about how you should review multiple candidates, look at the kinds of reviews they have received previously, schedule some time to meet with the person via Skype, and have them do one project as a test before moving forward. A power-user tip I noticed was many job applicants don’t even bother reading a job description, and so job-posters had started embedding lines in their job descriptions saying “mention the word ‘Issaquah’ in your reply so I know you read the job description.”

Another power user tip was to always set an expectation for how much time a project should take so that you are both on the same page beforehand, rather than waiting till the end and being surprised that you’re being billed for 10 hours instead of 2 hours.

I found a virtual assistant in the Philippines named Jovelyn who is currently going to school to get a masters degree in engineering. She had some strong reviews, and had a decent number of hours worked but not a ton of experience. I chose her to try out first, among 12 different applicants, and have been consistently impressed.  She has been proactive about keeping in touch, and has rarely needed additional direction beyond the thorough directions I give her at the beginning of a project. She has never billed me for what i felt was too many hours. And she is always polite. Finally, I’ve given her projects where she was using an email account I setup for her, so i can see how much work she did, and she completed a tremendous amount of work.  I may have gotten lucky and found someone really solid on my first try, but i think that goes to show there are a lot of information workers overseas who are well-educated, proactive, and capable.

Really specific projects

ODesk seems to be best for projects where the work is repetitive internet research and where command of the english language is not paramount. For example, I very successfully used Jovelyn’s help to recruit campus reps for the BookRenter program by systematically reaching out to student organizations at campuses across the US. I gave her an email template and instruction on how to find contacts, and how to customize the email.

Another example, I had her post the job description to different cities on craigslist. Since students are going to look at the job board on craigslist for their own city, I had to make sure that the job was posted in 100 different cities, which is highly repetitive work that can’t be automated. Jovelyn took care of it.

To make a project like this work, you have to provide super-specific instructions. Ideally, something like posting to craisglist is something that we’re doing for BookRenter campus rep positions every few months, so Jovelyn learned it the first time, and was able to use this experience over and over again.

I provided step-by-step instructions, as well as creating the account on craigslist in-advance, and providing screenshots for some of the more complicated steps. Even then, it required going back-and-forth a few times.

Over time, Jovelyn has become an expert on the university market. She now understands where to go to compile class schedules, start dates, and how to recruit students, what kinds of student organizations exist, and what they care about. I’m hopeful that she will find this valuable.

Future Projects

The “holy grail” for me is the idea of a virtual personal assistant. Someone who can book my flights, pick up my dry-cleaning, order flowers for my girlfriend, etc. The trouble is, with someone on ODesk, I don’t yet feel comfortable handing-over my credit card, nor do I feel comfortable that they have good judgment about something like booking flights. Finally, they obviously can’t go pick up my dry cleaning. But that’s still the dream. Someone that actually starts to get into the weeds of my life and make things easier.

The other thing I wished for is someone who can act as my scheduler. Someone who can email back-and-forth with candidates and set up interviews, booking times on my calendar so all I have to do is show up. I also wished for someone who could actually do business development for us. Jovelyn was able to send the opening-salvo emails via a template, essentially putting leads in the pipeline from 0-10%. However, I wasn’t sure her command of the english language, or her understanding of bookrenter’s business, were strong enough to do the follow-ups and move these leads from 10-40%.

The other thing that I absolutely intend to do using social media if I’m ever managing social media directly (as opposed to BookRenter where we have a few full-time employees devoted to Social) will be to use ODesk to find articles and news to share via Facebook & Twitter, and potentially to actually operate a couple channels. For example, there are some people on ODesk who claim to specialize in Google Plus. Since BookRenter isn’t yet active on this platform, simply replicating all our posts on Google plus might be an easy thing to do.

And again, over time, I would want to train-up this person so that they understood social media and how to some standard “plays.” so for example, if our CEO is speaking at a conference, it makes sense to tweet @ the conference handle, as well as other speakers, as well as other brands exhibiting, with some relevant information, or “Let’s meet up” or “we should discuss this article during our panel discussion” – and some of that is really valuable, and is a standard set of tactics that can be replicated every 2 weeks when our CEO is out speaking.

I poked around ODesk’s forums and google for examples of the types of projects that you could get someone on ODesk to do, and didn’t find any good examples. Someone who has the experience and presence of an in-person executive assistant, but who can do most of the same function remotely. In a world of TaskRabbits, Uber cabs, and ODesk virtual assistants, I can see a scenario where an enterprising person, using Odesk, could actually fill the role of an assitant to an executive.

I could see this model becoming a core of how companies of every size operate.

In fact, I could imagine taking Jovelyn with me to the next company I work for, and deepening our partnership over time as she learns more and as I find more ways to integrate the virtual-work style into our division of labor. It might almost become a symbiotic relationship over time, where every individual contributor on a team comes with a small team overseas that is supporting them.

One concern I have is this: If I look at contractors I’ve seen at Microsoft, based here in the US, I think sometimes they get stuck in role where they are typecast and unable to grow professionally. Their years of experience increase, but they have no specialization because they are being thrown on projects in different areas and sub-disciplines. I think the same issue may become a much more pronounced problem for people like Jovelyn, which is why I think she should pursue some kind of specialization in the student market. Couple that with an out-of-sight, out-of-mind problem, and I could see virtual assistants hitting a very low glass ceiling. Long term, this model may not provide good job advancement opportunities for young people overseas looking to make a real career for themselves, but for someone doing it part time to supplement their income or someone looking for a good way to work from home and take care of a house or kids, this could be huge.

America’s economic expansion lasted 65 years. It lasted so long, in fact, that many people – especially the people who try to sell you retirement funds – really started to believe that it would never end – that America’s economy would continue experiencing bull and bear markets, but that the general trend would be up, up, and up.

We were all told that we deserve our own house, with our own white picket fence, our own car, a second car for sweetie, a third car for junior, because how else would we all get ourselves from our 5000 square foot houses to the starbucks across the street from the super-target (with a starbucks) across from the barnes and nobles (with a starbucks) across the street from the mega-mall (complete with its very own starbucks). Why should Don Draper mow his own lawn? He can buy a riding-lawnmower and drive-around the back yard on the weekends. In fact, why ask the neighbor boy to mow it when he can hire a lawncare service that will even clean our pool?

We were told that if we want to vacation – get your own hotel room. If you want to visit a lakehouse? Why not buy a vacation home? Like fishing? Buy a boat. If a Stepford wife said she needed a new car every two years, then goddamit she was going to go out and buy one. For we all had to keep up with the Jones.’ And in an era when the middle class was growing and the American Dream was alive and well, this all seemed to make sense.

We were all told sold this American Dream by the media and by marketers, and when we couldn’t afford it, we bought it on credit.

Then the great recession happened. And right around the same time, services that espoused sharing emerged. More than just espousing it, these new services made sharing sexy and new. “Can’t afford your own hotel suite with kitchenette and two bedrooms for you, your wife, and the kids?” “That’s ok – rent mine!” Or better yet: “Can’t afford the mortgage on that vacation home any more?” “Been trying to sell it for months to pay the bills but no one is buying?” “No problem: Rent it out every weekend!” Services like Airbnb, more so than couchsurfing, tapped this Amelie-esque desire to see the world on a budget, to be quirky and creative and thrifty in their adventure-seeking. Its a new form of aspirational message that is conscious of the consumer’s limited-means.

Airbnb has been growing steadily for four years, and is now a Silicon Valley darling. And hot on its heels are a slew of others. Their elevator pitch is something like “We’re Airbnb for X” where X may be cars, bikes, storage space, office space, tutoring, or errands.” There’s RenttheRunway – where you can rent a designer gown for the weekend – they’ll even send you two sizes to make sure it fits. ToolSpinner lets you rent tools like lawnmowers.

They’re calling this space “collaborative consumption” and saying that Airbnb is screwing big corporate hotel chains and democratizing the travel industry, but it’s actually doing much more than that. This movement represents an economic and cultural shift in reaction to the great recession and the resulting erosion of the American Dream. It represents a shift in how we define the aspirational American life. And this shift is long overdue.

So why didn’t this fundamental shift occur sooner? Why did I we spend money on that riding-lawnmower that sat around in the garage accumulating dust after it stopped working? It’s a depreciating asset that we’ll only use twice a month – why in the hell wouldn’t you want to spread the cost of it out?

The answer is American individualism. If I still lived in a 5 bedroom house with my brothers, sisters, their wives and families, and our parents, we would all buy one lawnmower together. But the American dream, suburbanization, individualism, and materialism all conspired so that each of my siblings now has their own house with white-picket-fence lawn, so we can’t share. And organizing a group of neighbors who want to share a lawnmower would be so much effort, and would make the other Stepford Husbands think I couldn’t afford my own.

Political scientists have observed that the communalism that is prevalent in European and Asian cultures if often missing in the American way of life. Americans would much rather rent a hotel room than stay with their cousin. They would much rather send their family member to a retirement community than have their parents move-in with them. And as long as we were wealthy we could afford our individualism but we no longer can.

And coinciding with our inability to afford everything we need and a slew of new online services that take old ideas like Avis and ZipCar, mix-in our facebook friends-lists, and create an online community of peer-to-peer sharing.

Over the very long term, the idea of Airbnb may crowd-out a vast segment of the hospitality industry. Just as, over the long term, car-sharing services like GetAround and Wheelz may crowd-out the idea of car-rentals. In fact, today ZipCar – which is a client-server model of car-sharing, lead the Series A financing round in peer-to-peer car-sharing network Wheelz. This speaks to the idea that ZipCar sees Wheelz eventually crowding-out the client-server model.

So in a way, the idea that the internet is creating a global village, an idea that may have seemed corny to me a decade ago in the time of geocities and yahoo groups, now seems relevant again. The communalistic approach to possessions and services which we may have lost, we are finding again through these services.

The first business is hardware: selling LCD TVs, Blu-Ray Players, Laptops, and cellphones
In the hardware business, there’s the Cost of buying the hardware from manufacturers and the operational costs of distributing that hardware across stores, and then the cost of operating the stores including the overhead, the people, and then of course the costs of managing a customer support center and finance / HR / marketing.

Amazon has all of these same costs, except that it has no stores, no overhead of operating and staffing the store. Which means it can pass on these savings to consumers, and deliver a price that is consistently 10% cheaper on laptops, TVs, Blu-Ray players, etc. Apparently Best Buy’s profits plummeted 29% – probably because of deep discounting to bring customers in and compete on price against Amazon.

The second business is media: selling Blu-Ray DVDs
As we move to digital distribution models for all of these things, this business is just going to move entirely online. Amazon now has their own online store selling digital music and movies that competes with iTunes, as well as an online movie streaming service that competes with Netflix, so in the medium term and the long term, as this business moves to online distribution, they have made the right investments. BestBuy has not. They are going to see this business shrink or disappear altogether.

As Americans replace their cars and home stereo systems with systems that support wireless streaming off mobile devices, the demand for physical music media will disappear. And movies, which are increasingly available via streaming services, can just as easily be purchased on BluRay online, rather than going down to your local Best Buy.

The final business is expertise.
Best Buy has tried to differentiate with its Geek Squad of highly knowledgeable staff who are domain experts. In general, I personally just assume most people are idiots, and so regardless of where I make my purchase, I read 30+ reviews on Amazon so I can get 30 different opinions, in the hopes that 1 out of 30 people will say something useful, that I can then go research further, and then form my own opinion about a product.

Now here are some ways that Best Buy can differentiate, add value, and survive:

First, I can see expertise as being a way for Best Buy to differentiate. People are influenced multiple factors:
expert product reviewers
retail staff
Friends
online ratings

Amazon is in a great position because it has become, for people like me, the starting point for reading online reviews. But Amazon has done a poor job of connecting that back to expert reviews and a surprisingly poor job of connecting that to your Friends’ purchases and likes via Facebook. This is a huge opportunity for Best Buy. Companies like sociable labs are able to show an online shopper what brands their friends like and what products their friends have bought in the past. The fact that Amazon hasn’t done this boggles my mind, so it’s a huge opportunity for Best Buy to get here first.

Second, Local/Mobile is both a threat and an opportunity for Best Buy. It is a threat, because Amazon is – very smartly – using this as an opportunity to undercut Best Buy at the point of purchase – “scan the barcode and see if we’re cheaper” – and has turned Best Buy into a showroom for people to check out products before purchasing online. However Local is also an opportunity. Best Buy already offers free-shipping if you pick-up in-store. Local is an opportunity for Best Buy because you can use “get it today” instead of waiting for Amazon’s “super saver shipping in 5-10 business days.” Moreover, local becomes an asset when something breaks. What if Best Buy said they will offer 1 month of free customer support from Geek Squad – just come back into the store and we’ll answer all your questions – and then beyond 1 month you can buy one of our protection plans (a high-margin upsell at point-of-purchase that they probably would never do-away-with). I know my dad would be willing to chose Best Buy (rather than Amazon) if he knew he could always come-back and get questions answered by a real human being.

Third, Add value in Social Media
Geek Squad has also been a differentiator in social media – where Amazon is surprisingly inept. Imagine if someone from Geek Squad knew to send you a message 2-3 days after your purchase to see if you had any follow-up questions after installing your new Blu-Ray player – 5 minutes on the phone with Geek Squad to help me figure out how to set up that iPod dock or letting me know about an interesting TV guide companion app for my phone might really create some loyalty. And you have thousands of Geek Squad staffers in-store – what if the message was coming from a real Geek Squad member who works at the store I bought from – and I can go back to him – not whoever is there – but him -

Fourth, Move from products to services
Geek Squad could probably grow its services. Tune-ups for my phone and ipad, integration with manufacturers customer support, training seminars to make you a power-user on productivity apps like Outlook, ipad apps, or a photography class for DSLR cameras. Maybe even events like an Angry Birds or Wii Tennis tournament. Maybe a midnight party for the release of the Wii 2 or the newest Xbox game. Barnes and Nobles and Apple are both known for the events they do on topics like how to airbrush photos or parties around the launch of the latest Harry Potter book.

Fifth, Add value to shopping itself
Adding value to shopping itself is something that’s really hot right now, but is something that’s really challenging to do well. A lot of startups are working on mobile shopping scenarios around price comparison and rewards. But there are other value-drivers. A mobile companion that lets you get more info on any product. Mobile payments. Feature-comparison chart that I can build dynamically by scanning barcodes. Another idea might be a bundle-builder – something that gives me a deal when I add some monster cables and a DVD to my blu-ray player purchase, along with a coupon to laz-z-boy for a new recliner.

Ultimately, Best Buy probably can’t afford to compete with Amazon on price alone – their model simply has higher costs because they’re operating physical stores. The only alternative is to add some value at the store itself.

I towed Lola into Holland Car Care – the best German auto shop I’ve ever worked with. They said they couldn’t do much for her. She was worth $6,000, and it would take perhaps $5,000 to repair her. I said my goodbyes, and ended-up taking my dad’s car, which I drove all the way from Houston back to San Francisco last Christmas Day. The trip actually took a grueling 3 days to complete. You drive a whole day, and don’t even get out of Texas – that’s how much bigger things are in Texas. I spent the night at a motel in El Paso, working on Nina’s b-school application essays.

Once I had Dad’s car, I just left Lola at home, and with the workload at Kno, and then job hunting, and then learning the ropes at BookRenter, I never quite got around to figuring out how to sell a Z3 that doesn’t run, or even what she might be worth. So prone she sat, for almost a year, until finally my dad decided he wanted to revive her, and damn the expense. It seemed ludicrous, to spend that kind of money repairing her. But then we were both suckers for a red convertible.

On the morning of November 16th, while pulling-out of a parallel parking spot in Aisha’s Mitsubishi Lancer, I got in an accident. The windows were foggy and I didn’t see the car coming in the side view mirror. The Infiniti G35 must have been going way over the speed limit judging by the damage that was done to both cars. Both cars were totaled. I don’t know how such a small mistake could have such big repercussions. But there it is: the biggest disruptions come when something we take entirely for granted stops working for just a second. The glass would have defogged in another 2 minutes. The glass on my own car might not have fogged-over quite-so-much. But on that morning, I rolled down the window, defogged the side view mirror, rolled-up the window, and started driving without waiting for the window-itself to defrost.

That really ruined my morning. I spent the next few hours calling AAA, figuring out what to do with the car until Geico could come out, calling Geico, calling Aisha, calling AAA again to get the car towed to a body-shop who would hold the car for free while Geico processed things, and called Geico again and again to figure out whether my collision coverage would cover Aisha’s car which only had liability. My deep fear was that her liability coverage would make the G35 whole again, but Aisha herself would be left without a car and without the car’s worth if totaled. Finally, as the tow truck driver was hoisting her Lancer onto the flatbed, I decided to take the opportunity to finally get the Z3 fixed. So that morning, Aisha’s car left on one tow-truck toward its deathbed, and my Z3 left on another tow-truck toward the operating table.

That was two weeks ago. Two weeks of calls with Geico to make sure my collision coverage would pay for her car, and for us to ascertain that her car was indeed totaled. Two weeks of feeling guilty about making her life harder, and destroying her. Even though she’s getting a check, I can’t help thinking that the money is nice but she’ll never truly be whole again. Because we love our first cars – our trusty steeds – in a way that is unique – and they are irreplaceable.

This morning, I saw an accident at Whipple Road. And just as I was passing it, I got a call from Holland Car Care, saying they had brought my Lola back to life. Around the same time, Aisha was getting a call saying that were officially totaling her car and cutting her a check. And that she needed to come down, claim any personal items left in the car, and sign some paperwork.

She took the train up from Mountain View to San Mateo where I picked her up, and then drove-over to Holland Car Care. She dropped me off so that I could drive Lola home tonight. I took the keys, and sat down behind that wheel that felt so familiar and yet unfamiliar. The angle of the key into the ignition was different and I missed it. The seats were too low. This was no longer “my” trusty steed. Then I smelled the same leathery smell that I remembered. And I remembered driving down Willow Bend Road in Plano Texas at night with the convertible top down. I remembered driving down passed Deion Sanders’ house, with Seema Gupta in the passenger seat, and standing up while driving, like a genuine suburban cowboy about to lasso a steer. (Note: Seema is not the steer in this metaphor).

After dropping me at Holland Car Care, Aisha headed off to Mountain View Auto Body, and signed her Lancer over to Geico. Then she gave her car one final kiss goodbye.

More recent example – look at Microsoft’s approach to tablets: Windows 8. They’re essentially so-afraid of alienating their billion+ users that they simply can’t ship anything that isn’t backwards-compatible with Windows 7 – which means they can’t throw-everything-overboard and re-imagine the tablet OS from the ground-up -they have to bolt the Metro User Interface on top of Windows 7, and call it Windows 8. Apple, on the other hand, can afford to say “no” to backwards-compatibility, to say “no” to any app it doesn’t approve, to say “no” to any app that tries to circumvent their 30% cut of in-app purchases. And because the folks at Apple work hard and are brilliant and build visionary beautifully-designed products that appeal to us on an emotional level, we’re more-than-happy to accept their terms and shut-up.

But the tide is turning. Steve Jobs has now officially departed. It remains to be seen whether Tim Cook will be a faithful steward, and if he has the vision to be more. Furthermore, he’s inheriting a different company. Apple is now the most valuable company on the planet. Tim Cook will have quite a time pretending Apple is a tiny-little-upstart from here-on-out. We’ll begin to expect more, now that Apple is undoubtedly the 800-pound gorilla.

I remember when Apple was hailed for being the first concentrated power to break the mobile-operator’s hold on the phone-ecosystem. Apple gave AT&T exclusive rights to the iPhone, and in-return got enough-leverage to say-no to letting the mobile operator control the Data-plan pricing and instead chose it’s own price-points. Apple said “no” to the crapware that usually comes pre-loaded on the phone. And Apple said “no” to letting the mobile operator control what apps you could download. Apple even said “no” to the standard data-plan and forced AT&T to offer special iPhone pricing. And Apple, amazingly, turned AT&T into the bad-guy in a way that it hadn’t been before. Apple single-handedly created and democratized the mobile-app ecosystem – standardizing the hardware, the OS, giving developers access to accelerometers, microphone, and GPS, to create genuinely new & creative apps that solved scenarios we never could have dreamed-of.

But three years later, as I watch publishers, who have been reduced to shadows of their former glory. Folks like the Wall Street Journal, who are simply turning-over 30% of their subscription-revenue to Apple in order to keep their iPad app – it’s finally happened – the freedom fighter has turned into the dictator. At first we might have been fooled, but over the next year I predict sentiment will turn against Apple. A great example is going to be Spotify. Apple’s roots are music. The iPod. Garage Band. Spotify has been a runaway success by any measure, may already by the third-most-popular desktop music-program after iTunes and Windows Media Player, and is Ranked #5 among the iOS Music Apps. Spotify’s success is a testament to all the things Apple should have done to innovate in the music space – where it was the incumbent with the biggest library, the broadest customer base, and the most resources. Instead Spotify, a tiny upstart, has delivered music as a social experience in the way it should have been, and has found a revenue model. Judging by my Facebook Friend List, in less than 2 months Spotify already has 8% Penetration among the 18-30 demographic. (164 of my 1860 friends have an account). Spotify is continuing to out-innovate Apple, and I expect us to start seeing – more-and-more – other companies out-innovate Apple in little corners of its ecosystem. And each one of them will force us to start asking “why didn’t Apple come out with that?” and “why doesn’t Apple fix that?” and soon the tide will turn.

It’s true what they say: “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

The First Circle: The Legal Generalist

Susan was my Legal Generalist. She worked in LCA, short for Legal and Corporate Affairs. Whenever I turned up on her doorstep, she knew it was going to be trouble. I’m sure I was the bane of her existence, and I know she was certainly my least-favorite meeting of the week.

It was Susan’s job to review my marketing plans and judge me quietly. She would ask innocent questions, make little notes on her printouts, and purse her lips. Eventually, she’d send me away to go complete some online form, and I’d have to schedule a follow-up meeting a couple days later.

The biggest part of Susan’s job was to understand my plans, and then identify which-other lawyers she needed to bring-in – which, in the case of my ambitious marketing campaigns, usually meant all-of-them.

Because of the nature of what I was doing, in 2009, as Social Media was becoming an actual thing and not just a marketer’s hobby, Susan and I also had to learn a lot about the Terms and Conditions for using tools like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. There was no such thing as an expert “back then,” and companies like Wildfire didn’t exist to provide expertise, and many of the companies that did exist wanted $10K per campaign execution. Now, I think Social Media Law may become it’s own discipline, or be baked-so-deeply-into marketing that it’s commonly-understood component of what all these other marketing-lawyers do. But 3 years ago – that wasn’t the case -and out of a thousand marketers at Microsoft, I was probably the furthest “out-there” in terms of how we were using these services. So we had to make it all up.

The Second Circle of Hell: Trademarks

This one was usually a cake-walk. If we’re calling this campaign the “Summer in the Sun” campaign, and you can win a “Summer in the Sun” for doing something, then you have to make sure no one else has trademarked “Summer in the Sun” already, and, if they have, they have to be doing business in a non-competitive industry, so that their campaign cannot possibly be mistaken for yours.

The Third Circle of Hell: Advertising Law

Inevitably, there would be a claim. Something like “Office 2007 is the most powerful tool and key to your success after graduation.” As soon as you make a claim, you have to make sure it’s something that can be substantiated. Now, what if it goes further – what if it’s “Save up to 70% off Office 2007″ – now Susan’s hair is turning orange. The AdLaw person’s job is to know how we can substantiate the claim, and how to put a ‘*’ at the end of the claim, and a disclaimer at the bottom, that backpedals and covers our ass. Invariably there would be little ‘*’ stars all-over my campaigns by the end. Her job was essentially to make sure we told the truth, and told a truth that we couldn’t get sued over. So, for example, if we’re showing an image of the Office 2007 box on the site, but this version of Office doesn’t come in the box, do we need a disclaimer? If you’re saving 70% – what is that compared to? What version of Office are we talking about?

The Fourth Circle of Hell: Branding

The brand person’s job was to understand how we were using the Microsoft, Office, Windows, and Xbox brands. For example – if we’re using the Office brand – is it the right version of the logo? If we’re using the word Microsoft, it needs to be white letters on black background. No color. The logo can’t be overlaid on-top of a picture or box – it needs its own white-space. If we’re using a partner’s brand – like Oddcast – which was a social media startup that was powering an avatar-technology we were using for a social game, how was Oddcast’s logo being displayed? It needs to be displayed next-to our logo – not above or below.

The Fifth Circle of Hell: Promotions

The Promotions person’s job was to understand anything we were doing regarding sweepstakes or contests. This part was maybe the most confusing, because gaming-laws changed from state-to-state across the country, and if you’re going to award someone a prize worth more than $600, they actually have to pay taxes on the prize, and you actually have to notify them of that fact. Let’s say this is a “Summer in the Sun” campaign, and one lucky winner is going to get a free “Summer in the Sun” trip to Mexico. Well, how are you going to select that person? Is it random? Then it’s a sweepstakes. But if it’s a sweepstakes, then everyone needs to be equally-eligible, and you can’t require them to purchase your product to be eligible, so you may have to rewrite the entry-process on the website. If there’s some skill required, then it’s a contest. And either way, you’ll need Terms & Conditions for your sweepstakes or contest, stating that there’s no purchase necessary, employees aren’t eligible, how you’re going to select the winner, when you’ll select them by, and what exactly the prizes will be.

The Sixth Circle of Hell: Privacy

This one was constantly a massive pain, and oftentimes cost thousands of dollars to fix. If you’re going to give people a prize, you have to somehow capture their email address or other contact info. If you have that info, you need to disclose how that info is going to be used, and which parties – your company, the marketing agency, the database company hosting the server that the campaign is happening on, etc. – will have access to the personal information. It also might be nice, if you’re capturing their personal info, to keep that so you can re-market to them later – but that requires opt-in boxes, and more re-coding to add opt-in boxes had to be done, and more Terms & Conditions had to be written, so they know exactly what they’re opting-into.

The Seventh Circle of Hell: Localization

I can’t really remember what this one was. Maybe something about whether this campaign, and all the words used in it, and the images used in it, are going to offend anyone, anywhere, in any language. This was most-important for campaigns that would be used overseas, but in my case, since I only managed the United States, this wasn’t a big deal for me.

Then, when all was said and done, and meetings upon meetings, and conference calls upon conference calls, had all stirred these lawyers into a mad tizzy until I had finally worn them all out, I would finally launch a marketing campaign, usually a couple months behind schedule at this point, and the hacked-to-death frankenstein, replete with little stars and links to Ts & Cs and opt-in boxes and watered–down claims and big-blocky-logos, would lumber out into the world, to die a slow and painful death.

The absolute best way to motivate a brand ambassador is through insider-access.

One of the most-famous examples of this is Makers Mark. Certain bartenders around the country were given a special bottle of Makers 46, Mark’s special-blend, which was reserved for members of the brand-ambassador program. You had to be “in-the-know” and of-course as soon as you asked for it, everyone around you wanted to know why you were special-enough to get a drink from the special bottle. The second-coolest benefit of the Makers Mark program – you got your name engraved on an actual barrel at their distillery, and you can go visit your barrel anytime you want.

From yesterday on their FB page:

After many years of enjoying Maker’s Mark, I finally became an Ambassador last year. I got my Barrel Dedication Certificate in the mail today. I am so pleased to have my name on Maker’s Mark Barrel No. 803211 and the business cards are a nice touch too.

Another way that Microsoft motivated its Microsoft Most Valuable Professions (MVPs) was through insider-access. The MVP Program became an official-Microsoft-program, but originally started out as an informal recognition of the usergroup communities that grew organically around a passion for Microsoft software, back in the late 80s/early 90s. MVPs were the first to get into Betas and get training on new products. They were invited to meet execs at the annual MVP Summit. And it’s something that actually required constant-engagement with the company, or you would lose your MVP status. It got to the point where MVP-status not just a badge-of-honor among geeks, but like a professional certification within the enormous Microsoft partner and customer ecosystem, where MVP status made you an asset at your company.

Now, that’s great if you’re Microsoft, in the 80s & 90s, when it was still cool to work for Microsoft (yes there was a time like that), but that doesn’t help if you’re not a behemoth today. But the velvet rope of being “inside” can be used to make almost-anything seem valuable. For example, here’s an interesting article about “throttling” access to Google+ invites. Essentially, they artificially turned on-and-off the ability for their current Beta users could share invites, to maximize the perception that invites were hard to get, but ultimately maximize the amount of press-coverage and total-users the service amassed. The fact that invites remained hard-to-get increased the “specialness” felt by those people who were already inside.

Jobs @ Your company

One of the best motivators is the promise that being an ambassador is a way to gain insider-access to jobs @ your company. We hired a ton of my Microsoft Student Partners as interns and full-time-employees, and, in-fact, one of our former MSPs went-on to manage the MSP Program after I left. If this isn’t possible, a letter of reference is a good (if old-fashioned) alternative – to help them get jobs elsewhere. A better, more modern approach, might be a promise to give all top-performers a good LinkedIn recommendation, and a personal commitment, as I’ve made to many ambassadors I’ve worked with, to open my network to them.

Career Exposure

I’ve always been a big believer with the Microsoft and Kno ambassador programs I built, that we wanted people who would have done this job, even if we werent paying them, because they believed in the career exposure. They wanted to get the Microsoft name on their resume, or in the case of Kno, they wanted to be affiliated with an Andreessen-Horowitz-backed Silicon Valley startup. You cultivate this further by doing free resume screenings, or by giving them mentors, or by hosting “fireside chats” with leaders at the organization, so that ambassadors feel like their learning about different disciplines, about the company, and about how to get-ahead in their own careers. Take this even a step further, and find ways for them to get more resume-building-activities – give them opportunities to guest-post on your corporate blog, star in commercials, be featured in newspaper articles, or be on special task-forces or advisory-councils.

Money

Research what others are paying. In the case of Microsoft, Google, and Apple, they’re all paying about $10/hr.

In the case of companies that aren’t planning to pay their ambassadors, find a way to give them some kind of commission or prizes based on results.

Competition

People like seeing their name on a leaderboard. And people like it when they’re name moves up to the top of the leaderboard. Interestingly, a lot of mobile-apps will deliberately give you a partial-view of the leaderboard, eliminating people above & below you, to make it look like the top-spot is within-reach, but not too-close, so that you’ll be motivated to keep-at-it. So create a metric, a points system, something, that you can use to objectively measure your ambassadors, and then show them the rankings, be open about how everyone is doing. There’s also a component of public humiliation and public acknowledgement at work here – it makes the people at the top of the leaderboard feel good, and the people at the bottom feel-bad, to see their names up there on a powerpoint slide, while in a meeting with everyone else.

Accountability, Consequences, and Early-Action

The last way that you motivate ambassadors, but generally anyone, is through accountability – which means that you make it clear how results are being tracked, you actually do the work of tracking the results, you set consequences for not meeting goals, and you actually enforce those consequences. If you make empty-threats repeatedly, everyone eventually figures out that there will be no consequences for low-performance.

The more-nuanced idea, however, is to prevent low-performance by catching it early. Like with all-employees, it’s more-expensive to replace someone than it is to identify those who are at-risk of low-performance, reach out to them with a warning, and have a conversation about it. The warning and the conversation are usually enough of a reprimand that they instantly get more-engaged. And instead of passively-ignoring your emails, they get over the hump and start to actively-manage their relationship with you again. It essentially creates an opportunity for a catharsis – so that rather than their poor-performance piling-up, and making them feel “behind” and frustrated with their own performance, the conversation becomes an opportunity to start-fresh and do-better.

I noticed a couple interesting things after re-watching Transformers 1:

First – Obviously General Motors paid a lot of money to do a massive product placement in the movie. For those that are unaware, Bumblebee – the yellow-Chevy Camaro – was historically always a Volkswagen Beetle, but I’m sure they wanted something sexier for the remake – and using the movie as a vehicle to introduce GM’s newly redesigned Camaro must have been a match made in hollywood-heaven. You’ll notice that Bumblebee has a Yellow Beetle ornament hanging from his rearview mirror.

However, the thing that really struck me is not the shameless-promotion of General Motors, was the shameless-BMW-bashing. There are two scenes where director Michael Bay goes out-of-his-way to focus a transformer crushing a BMW. First when Bumblebee and the Police-Car Decepticon are fighting at the beginning, and then near the climax in the city, when the decepticon-tank rolls-down the street. Another tid-bit that leads-me-to-believe this may not have been a coincidence: The Camaro’s archrival has always been for the Ford Mustang. And the Decepticon Police Car – essentially the “Bad guy” to bumblebee’s “Good guy,” is played by a Saleen Mustang – an aftermarket version of the Ford muscle car.

The articles I read suggest that Michael Bay has been a longstanding Camaro-fan, and has even directed GM commercials in the past, so this isn’t a “selling-to-the-highest-bidder” sort of product-placement. But clearly it’s a “you know what would be a great movie and have tons of merchandising and advertising tie-ins?” sort of product-placement. In fact, if we really want to dig-into the fundamentals – Transformers began NOT as a cartoon, as you may believe, but actually as an action-figure toy-line, and then the cartoon was built around them. Transformers is, in many respects, the original “entertainment franchise.”

SPOILER ALERT: Does anyone else notice that every alien movie relies on the Morse Code strategy in re-taking the earth after the aliens compromise our communications and computer network? Seriously, if any evil genius aliens are reading this, they should just memorize Morse Code (or kidnap a boy-scout to be your interpreter). Then the humans will have to resort to smoke signals to communicate, or perhaps a rare native-american tribal dialect, a la Windtalkers.

Third – I’ve been watching this movie at the Gym. And the cool thing about watching a movie at the gym is that Ihave absolutely no-patience for poor plot or poor writing: every second that the dialogue is inane is a second that my mind can wander from the movie to the agony of being on this elliptical for an hour. And this movie is chock-full-of inane dialogue. I’m almost-afraid of finishing Transformers 1 and moving on to the Sequel: Revenge of the Fallen – because from what I remember, the sequel is essentially pornography for technofiles: you’re there for the imagely, plot and dialogue are mostly an after-thought.

More to report once I make it to the theaters to watch Dark of the Moon.

I’ve been working for different organizations my entire life, and I’m obsessed with analyzing human behavior, so here are a couple tips you WON’T read in every-other-blog-post on this topic. I was inspired after attending the last NetIP Board Meeting. NetIP is the Network of Indian Professionals, and I happen to have been the VP of Seattle, President of Seattle, and now National Liaison to San Francisco’s chapter. But I think a lot of these tips will work for meetings in-general.

1. Minutes & Agendas: Everyone talks about meeting minutes. Everyone talks about agendas. And meeting minutes and agendas are certainly lovely to look at. The thing that really kicks people in the pants, however, is if the Minutes have action items like “Next Meeting, Prasid will update the group on pricing for the venue” – when I read this, I’m going to actually be prepared to present this. And in-case I’m lazy and don’t read minutes or agenda items, then I’ll learn quick. Because next meeting, you use last-time’s Minutes as this time’s Agenda, and you go through, line-by-line, preferably with the entire Agenda on a projector or printed-out, so everyone can see-clearly where your Agenda is coming from, and everyone sees that Prasid is supposed to be presenting, and Prasid gets publicly-shamed if he isn’t prepared.

1. Working sessions – oftentimes, a meeting has a specific purpose that’s separate from everyone’s day-job, like a non-profit or task-force or (in Microsoft-speak) a v-team. Oftentimes, there just isn’t time in your life to work on these non-day-job priorities. You have a day-job. Isn’t that enough? So a working-session is nice, because you’re using the time that you would have spent “meeting” actually “accomplishing” so everyone walks-away feeling productive. Which is a nice change from meetings where clearly everyone is unprepared, and the tension is palpable.

1. Communicating between meetings. One of the greatest leaders I ever met was a girl named Anita who was founding-President of TiE YE Berkeley. I was amazed by how much work she managed to get out of me and Prashant, and most of it wasn’t stuff she asked-for during meetings – it was things she asked for on the phone, in-between meetings. Email sometimes doesn’t work well – we all have a lot of it. And at the end of the day, your priorities are a function of your day-job which pays the bills, and who you really care about. Because I deeply respected Anita, and felt something for the cause, I couldn’t say no to her, and so I did whatever she asked for, by whatever deadline she gave me. So, please, leverage the human connection, and pick-up-the-phone.

1. Make them famous – find creative ways to give your team recognition. CC them on emails, when you’re sending something to a broader-group about this team’s work or accomplishments. If there’s an event – like a division meeting or the big gala you’ve been planning, make-sure you find a way to differentiate who was on the board/v-team – an “Organizer” nametag perhaps.

1. Most important – setting the date & time of the next meeting. Invariably, we go 8 rounds over email later trying to schedule a time that works for everyone – do it while everyone is in the room, and has their calendar up, and they’ll mostly-commit. It’s a miracle. And this last meeting, when I forgot to bring-it-up, the Purvi (President of NetIP SFBA) did it herself – which tells me she noticed it works. =)