Someone Please Develop a Competitor to the iPad

Posted by Colin Clark on Jan 27th, 2010 | Comments home title

Okay here’s what I don’t get… We’ve been prophesying the iPad for years now and no one had the guts to beat Apple to the punch (except the folks at Techcrunch with their Crunchpad, which I’m sad didn’t get off the ground).

Here’s my biggest problem…

They totally missed the boat!!!

The iPad virtually guarantees that I’ll still need to bring my laptop with me most of the time, because it lacks two simple features.

Did you hear that!? Two more features and it would have almost been the perfect device!!!!

Where’s the USB port!!!!??? – Seriously, this is crazy to me. What if I want to use an external USB drive? What if I want to take photos or video from an external camera and use them on the iPad. This is a huge drawback.
Why isn’t there a video out!!!???? - Why can’t I plug this thing into a projector and run powerpoint presentations or play movies. I think this is also a huge problem.

Someone please design a device that is similar to the iPad that has these two features. Right now I can get a netbook for $300 that has both. I can also outfit it with a 3G card for maybe another $50 bucks.

And it comes with video out and at least 3 USB ports, and great battery life. Come on, there’s got to be a touch-screen version of this.

Apple announces the iPad (arstechnica.com)

Don’t Look at Stats for the First Year

Posted by Colin Clark on Jan 22nd, 2010 | Comments home title

To say that I’m a huge Gary Vaynerchuk fan would be the understatement of the century. I think Gary is badass and inspiring and that he’s definitely one of the people who is changing the world.

With that said, I didn’t go out right away and buy his book ‘Crush It‘ when it first came out, because I wanted to wait for the audio version, which only just came out recently. My patience was worth it.

: Image by Dan Patterson via Flickr

One of the things that really hit home was when he talks about analytics. He advocates not even checking your stats or traffic for the first year.

I’m one of those people who used to check his traffic every morning first thing. I was pretty much obsessed with getting those numbers up as much as possible. I think in a lot of ways that was a waste of time. I should have been focused on tightening my tribe.

It’s interesting to look at day to day activities and calculate what each one contributes and what each one costs. I don’t check my analytics as often these days.

Not Crushed by Vaynerchuk’s “Crush It” (markevanstech.com)
What It Means to #CrushIt (internetgeekgirl.com)
Patience, Passion and Hustle. (texacaliwinetrail.blogspot.com)
Putting Web Analytics into Perspective (brilliantthinking.net)

Should you ever feel guilty for not blogging?

Posted by Colin Clark on Jan 20th, 2010 | Comments home title

I’ve heard from people like Chris Brogan that you should never apologize if you neglect to post on your blog. I guess the argument is that if you apologize you’re bringing attention to something that has past, and is therefore no longer relevant.

I have to agree for the most part. I didn’t post at all last week or the first two days of this week. In some ways this looks pretty bad. I’m supposed to be a blogging evangelist, after all.

On the other hand, I’ve been doing a ton of work for clients, and my business is running quite smoothly.

I can honestly say that it’s good to have a break every now and then, but also that I truly miss interacting with the online world when I’m away for two long. It’s a huge part of my life and I’m pretty certain that it will remain that way for years to come.

Sales by the Business Owner Don’t Count

Posted by Colin Clark on Jan 20th, 2010 | Comments home title

I’ve twice found myself in the role that Tony Scelzo calls ‘the worst job in the world’… The first salesman hired in a startup company.

The first time I found myself there I worked for Marketpath, a web company in downtown Indianapolis. Actually I was technically the second salesman… I was hired a few months after my good friend T.J. Furman.

The founders had business coming in, and they wanted much more. They had just signed a huge deal with the Harding Poorman group that generated tens of thousands of dollars plus residuals.

‘Great!’ I thought. ’I'll sell a ton of websites and make a boatload.’

It didn’t take long for me to realize that selling websites was hard work. While TJ and I sold several websites in our first few months, we definitely weren’t generating enough income to justify having 2 salesmen on staff full-time, so I got the boot.

It seemed that the founders were much better at selling than we were.

So, I started looking for a new job, because I didn’t yet believe that I had the skills to go into business for myself. I went to work for Brandswag… as the first salesman they had ever hired.

The founder, Kyle Lacy, had a ton of momentum going which I thought would make working with us an easy sell. After a few months it became clear that people really preferred to do be sold by the business owner. And again I didn’t get the job done.

So I went into business for myself…

And people started buying from me.

Here’s my point… If you’re a founder or owner of the business, people assume you have the power to make deals. They know that you’re staking your name and reputation on your work, and they assume that you’re skilled in what you do (ie, you’re good at graphic design, so they don’t assume you’re great at sales).

So here’s the point. Sales made by the business owner don’t count. They all go towards funding the business. A salesperson will rarely be as good as the founder and it’s likely that the founder will lose money on the salesperson for the first several months.

Thoughts?

Announcing the Tribeswell Seminars Site – Columbus Seminar Jan 28

Posted by Colin Clark on Jan 20th, 2010 | Comments home title

Just a quick blurb to plug a new area of the Tribeswell website. You can find it at http://seminars.tribeswell.com.

I created the Seminars subdomain site so that people interested in registering for seminars (and nothing else) would have a simple, uncluttered interface to use.

Currently I have a seminar coming up in Columbus, IN next Thursday (January 28) at 10 am at the Columbus Chamber of Commerce.

Expect to see lots more seminars coming up. This site (and my speaking career) is just beginning.

Start a Movement, Build a Tribe AND Measure Coversions

Posted by Colin Clark on Jan 8th, 2010 | Comments home title

I guess you could look at this post as a 3 step cookbook for using social technology to brand your business.

Start a Movement

Are you riding the tide of what’s always worked in your industry, or are you changing the game? If you’re constantly reinventing possibilities, then you’ve got the culture in place to lead a close knit community of passionate supporters. For more detailed instructions on how to do this, read Free Prize Inside by Seth Godin.

Build a Tribe

Technology makes this simple… but not easy. Where is your community going to ‘live’? Where are they engaging already? Facebook, twitter, somewhere else? Do they only converse at conferences or association meetings? Wherever they be, go there or create a tribe somewhere else. The medium is infinitely LESS important than the community.

Measure Conversions

Do you have a system in place to really track where business is coming from? If you’re truly leading a tribe, then each conversion will probably come from a complicated web of sources. Do you understand how this works? Are there ‘connectors’ at work in your tribe that contribute to a large part of your business. For a detailed description of how ‘connectors’ work read chapter 2 of The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.

Like I said, a lot of these tactics are not necessarily easy, but they are very often simple. Technology makes it feasible (and if you’re lucky, scalable), but vision is just as important. What are you going to do in 2010 to change the market?

5 Tips For Increasing Community Engagement (slideshare.net)
Is Social Media ROI Unmeasurable? (seomoz.org)
Is Your Website Stuck In The 90′S (slideshare.net)
New Year’s Resolutions for your Career (careermoves.cjwriting.com)

#bloomingtontweetup – Tomorrow from 3-5 PM at Stonecutters Coffee

Posted by Colin Clark on Jan 7th, 2010 | Comments home title

tweetup = a gathering of twitter users

The other day I was a bit curious if there was any history of Tweetups occurring here in Bloomington, Indiana. I went to search.twitter.com and searched the hashtags #bloomingtontweetup and #btowntweetup and I found that neither had been used yet.

I decided that this is something that would really benefit the Twitter community here in Bloomington. I’ve decided to start holding regular Tweetups here in Bloomington and establish a website where people can post their own Bloomington tweetup events.

The Hashtag – #bloomingtontweetup

I’ll be using this hashtag to mark all Bloomington tweetup related news.

The Website – http://bloomingtontweetup.com

I just bought this domain and will have a simple website up in the next 24 hours that will provide information about upcoming tweetups and functionality so that you can post info about your own Bloomington tweetups.

The First Bloomington Tweetup

The first bloomington tweetup will be tomorrow from 3-5pm at Stonecutters Coffee which is located on Covenanter on the East side of town.

View Larger Map

Twitter 101 (slideshare.net)
Twitter Guide Book – How To, Tips and Instructions by Mashable (translatorpower.wordpress.com)
HashParty.com – Exploring And Visualizing Hashtags (killerstartups.com)

Blogging for Search and other great ways to waste good content.

Posted by Colin Clark on Jan 6th, 2010 | Comments home title

I met with my Business coach, Tony Scelzo, yesterday and we were talking about my marketing plan for 2010. I told him I wanted to make web video a big part of my marketing strategy. He gave me this piece of advice…

Make your videos short, entertaining, and unique enough that they would have the potential to go viral.

And that got me thinking about content creation in general.

I understand the value in blogging strictly for search engine visibility, really I do. The thing is, search engine friendliness is such a narrow strategy. Most businesses require a more in-depth marketing plan.

And That Means not only Quantity content, but Quality content.

If you’re blogging strictly for search, there are a couple of common strategies that allow you to scale your content creation.

Hire a ghost blogger to create content for you.
Implement a company-wide employee content creation policy.

Both tactics will get you lots of content and help you win searches, but I would argue that there is a much bigger picture that needs to be explored.

Quality Content

I recommend that you take my business coach’s advice and start thinking about creating content that people will actually want to read and share. This means content that is interesting, short, and has some sort of hook that might make it go viral. Then, start thinking about distribution models that will get your content in front of the largest possible audience.

Distribution Models

Once you’ve got content that is out of this world, it’s important to have a distribution plan. Email still works awesome for this. Also you should blast out everything to the major social networks (facebook, twitter, linkedin).

It also doesn’t hurt to consider traditional media outlets.

I’m not disputing the ROI of hiring ghostbloggers or employee blogging. It is definitely there, but there is a lot of potential that you might miss if that’s your core focus.

Wordpress 2.9 Batch Plugin Updates – Amazing!

Posted by Colin Clark on Jan 6th, 2010 | Comments home title

Since I started using Wordpress in 2007, I’ve been very impressed with each new version of the software. I started with Wordpress back in the 2.6 era. I wasn’t initially all that impressed with the user interface, but once 2.7 came out I knew that the development community was really on to something.

Each subsequent release brought some great new features that made Wordpress easier to use, faster and less irritating. They really seemed to have a sense of which features would benefit developers and end-users. But there’s a new feature in 2.9 that relieves a lot of headaches…

Updating Plugins

One of the frustrations I’ve always had with Wordpress is that when you use a lot of plugins and extensions (all my websites do), the individual developers make updates fairly often which means that at any given time, several plugins might be using old versions that are out-of-date.

It’s important to keep plugins at their newest version to ensure compatibility with Wordpress and to lessen security risks.

In older versions of Wordpress, you had to manually update each plugin, which could take up to a minute or two each. That means that if I had 5 plugins that needed to be updated, it might take 10+ minutes to perform the operation.

Because of this, a lot of plugins simply didn’t get updated as often as they should have.

Enter Batch Plugin Updates

This feature is fantastic. Now, when you update Wordpress, it gives you the option to update all plugins at once. Here’s what it looks like.

I just tried it and it really blew my mind. I had 10 plugins that were out of date and it updated all of them in less than a minute. That’s a huge benefit.

My Challenge to You

I’d like to issue a challenge… Look at your business and think about this Wordpress example. How can you make things easier for your customers? Can you make your service easier to use, more time saving, or less irritating? Do a customer survey to find out what your customers find annoying or irritating about doing business with you. I guarantee it will get you noticed.