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10 August, 2011 22:38

pinakim — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 17:08:17 +0000

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The 5 Minute Guide To Cheap Startup Advertising

pinakim — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 11:32:53 +0000

The following is a guest post by Rob Walling. Rob Walling has been an entrepreneur for most of his life and is author of the book Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer’s Guide to Launching a Startup. He also authors the top 20 startup blogSoftware By Rob, that’s read by tens of thousands of startup entrepreneurs every month and he owns the leading ASP.NET invoicing software on the market in addition to a handful of profitable web properties.

Imagine that you’ve just completed version 1 of your product and you’re preparing for launch. You’ve greased the wheels with a few bloggers, targeted some keywords with SEO, created a bit of linkbait, and scheduled the press release to launch in the morning. At this point your co-founder turns to you and says: “What are we going to do with the $300 we have stashed away for advertising?” Consider this your lucky day. The goal of this article is to provide you with the core of what you need to know about cheap startup advertising as quickly as possible, so you can start spending that ad budget wisely. Let’s get started.

Two Key Advertising Strategies

The half-life of advertising traffic is zero. This means that the moment you stop shelling out cash, the traffic stops. The problem is that with typical conversion rates of 1-2% you’re paying for 98 or 99 out of every 100 people to walk away and never come back to your site. To combat this inherent wastefulness of advertising, I have two key strategies I recommend no matter which method of advertising you use.

Strategy #1: Try to Get Permission

Seriously consider offering something in exchange for a visitor’s email address. It can be a free trial, a free report, or maybe even a free book. But gaining the means and permission to contact that customer again will increase your conversion rate over time in most cases. There is great power in an email list.

Strategy #2: Use Advertising to Test

Use advertising as a testing tool rather than a long-term stream of customers. Very few startups can withstand the cash outlay required to turn advertising into a marketing activity with positive ROI. Even if you figure it out, advertising is a volatile marketing medium. Prices increase rapidly in online advertising as new competition crops up or prospects grow bored of your ad and your click through rate drops. When this happens, all of the time you invested in optimizing your ad campaign is *poof*…gone. So instead of relying on ad traffic as an ongoing stream, use it for what it’s best at: the ability to generate a slew of visitors very quickly, and to be turned off just as quickly. This kind of traffic source makes it great for split testing and user behavior testing using tools like Clicktale and Crazyegg. It also gives you insight into how certain traffic converts for you. With properly tracked conversions and an ad on Facebook, you can determine that men from 35-45 convert at a rate 15% lower than women of the same age. This is valuable information, especially early in your marketing effort when you’re still trying to figure out the ideal market for your application. Often this is not the largest market; it’s the one to whom you can market for the lowest cost. As another example, with AdWords you can learn in a hurry which keywords convert for you, and which don’t. This is insanely valuable as you invest the time and money on the long-haul of search engine optimization. Knowing the keywords that really convertfor your business, as opposed to the ones that you think will convert, can save you piles of cash and many months of SEO effort.

The "First Five" Advertising Options

With the above strategies in mind, let’s look at the first five advertising options you should consider.

Option #1: Niche Advertising

As a startup, there are hundreds of general advertising options available, and thousands more niche opportunities. Depending on the niche you’re catering to you should be able to find a forum, blog, magazine or website in which to spend some ad dollars. The tighter the niche the better. Remember that niche sites tend to be cheaper to advertise on and drive more targeted traffic, which makes a huge difference in your conversion rate. (And if you’re not targeting a niche because you want your audience to be the "whole world," you’re going to need a lot more than $300 in your ad budget). In general, if you are marketing to a niche you will know the sites to target. If you don’t it’s time to pound the pavement and find out what they are. By "pound the pavement" I mean search on Google and contact people in the niche to find out where they hang out online. Two reputable niche ad networks I’ve worked with in the past are:

InfluAds – With an increasing number of advertising "communities" covering design & UX, startups and entrepreneurs, work & productivity and web development, InfluAds can work with budgets as small as the $300-400 range. They sell a minimum set of granted impressions, and if more traffic is available during a month then existing advertisers receive it for free. Image ads only.
BuySellAds – Though they’ve traditionally focused on the design & UX space, BuySellAds is in the process of branching into many other niches. This image-only ad network was the primary source of traffic for a design-oriented website I owned, and made the difference between a few hundred dollars a month in sales, and a few thousand. Advertising is purchased by impression or on a monthly basis from individual advertisers, meaning each offers different pricing. But the minimum buy is very cheap – in the $10-$20/month range.

Option #2: Google AdWords

Ad Format: Text or image
Ad Components (for text ads): 25-character deadline, 2 lines of body copy @ 35 characters each, 35-character display URL
Approval Process: Automated, with manual review if you trip a filter

A few years ago, Google AdWords was great for startups. Many niches were untouched, and 5 and 10 cent clicks were commonplace. But these days, the vast majority of niches worth pursuing have ever-escalating click prices as more advertising dollars move online, including dollars from large corporations that don’t blink an eye about spending $5 to produce a single visitor to their website. With a 1% conversion rate you need a $500 lifetime customer value to break even. This is more than a stretch for most startups who are scraping by on 0.5% conversion rates and sub-$100 lifetime customer values (at least to start with). But with Google carpet-bombing $75 AdWords coupons to every business in the civilized world, the number of advertisers, and thus the competition, is increasing. For the most part, the days of cheap clicks are over. The $1-2 per click I used to pay to advertise my invoicing software has become a negative ROI for me at $4-5 per click. But all is not lost. There is still a place in the backwoods of AdWords where the wild-west mentality (and cheap clicks) reign. That place is the content network. People traditionally think of Google AdWords as the ads that appear to the right of the search results. But the lesser known cousin of search ads are the ads that appear in every AdSense block you see around the web. These are ads placed through the Google AdWords content network. The content network is less targeted, higher volume, and typically much cheaper to advertise on, than the search results. While we don’t have time here to delve into specifics of how to place ads on the content network, the most consistent approach I’ve seen that works over the long-term is to use their cost-per-action tool called the Conversion Optimizer. There’s a great write-up of how it works from Patrick McKenzie of Bingo Card Creator fame, here. There are also some helpful tips on advertising on the content network here. And if you’re willing to drop a few bucks, by far the best AdWords book available is the Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords, which includes a section on using the content network.

Option #3: Facebook

Ad Format: Text with required image
Ad Components: 110×80 image, 25 character headline, 135 characters of body copy
Approval Process: Manual (sometimes slow)

Facebook is still viable for startups with its ability to deliver 10-15 cent clicks under the right circumstances. But it’s a bit like the Wild West: if you approach Facebook advertising incorrectly you will pay a premium, around 75-90 cents per click. The value of Facebook is its ability to show your ads to exactly who you want to see it based on information in a user’s profile. You can easily segment on gender, age, location, relationship status and a number of other fixed parameters, along with thousands of interests and occupations you can target using keywords. The key to low cost Facebook clicks is having a high click through rate (CTR). The key to a high CTR is a combination of a powerful image, an engaging headline, and laser-focused targeting. Due to space constraints we’re not going to cover the basics of choosing a powerful image or writing an engaging headline. Not when there are perfectly good articles already written on the subject for those who would like to know more: choosing an image / writing a headline. But once your ad is written, there is a trick to achieving those 10 cent clicks. Based on a tip from my friend JD, I now use the following method with Facebook ads:

Target your demographic information so tightly that you can write a headline that addresses them specifically. Example: if you are selling shoes online to the U.S. market, create 10 different versions of the ad, one for each of the major metro areas in the U.S. Also include the qualifying "interests" keyword: shoes. Now make each ad headline address its group specifically, using a formula like "Need Shoes in [city name]?"
Start the ads with a modest budget of, say, $5-10 per ad per day.
After 12-24 hours review the ads. Some will have high CTRs and costs per click around 10-15 cents. Others will have low CTRs and clicks in the 80-90 cent range.
Pause the higher cost ads and increase the budget for the low cost ads to whatever you can afford; $100 per day or more per ad.
For a few days you will receive extremely low-cost, targeted traffic. But since you’ve chosen a small group of people, they will start to tune out the ad rather quickly. At this point your CTR will drop and your cost will climb. Pause the ad, and start over with new cities, new images or new headlines.

This approach requires ongoing maintenance but if you can generate targeted, 10-cent clicks it’s worth the effort.

Option #4: StumbleUpon

Ad Format: not applicable
Ad Components: just your URL
Approval Process: Manual

I recently advertised my developer’s guide to launching a startup on StumbleUpon. The plus side of StumbleUpon is that all clicks are 5 cents. The downside is the bounce rate is high since people are basically channel surfing. I achieved a 96.88% bounce rate in my experiment, with an average stay of 2 seconds. I wonder if it was something I said? In my test, only 25 visitors stayed longer than 5 seconds. I paid $50 for 1000 clicks, but since only 25 of them stayed long enough to read anything, I effectively paid $2 per click. Your mileage may vary, but through this and other experiments I’ve gathered the following tips for advertising on StumbleUpon:

Your #1 goal is to get stumblers to stay longer than 5 seconds. Your #2 goal is to get them to up-vote your page. Paying $50 for 1000 clicks is one thing. Having it go viral and receiving 10,000 clicks for the same price is another.
Don’t send StumbleUpon traffic to a landing page that asks for an email address. StumbleUpon users are notoriously fickle about providing their email.
People stumble to be entertained, so if your page doesn’t have the potential to go viral or turn into linkbait, you will not likely fare well.
Blog-like content and videos seem to work best. Anything that resembles a traditional landing page will bomb.

Option #5: Reddit

Ad Format: Text with optional image
Ad Components: 70×70 image, title, URL
Approval Process: Manual (two-day lead time)

Reddit uses an interesting approach for their ad pricing: advertisers bid a certain amount per day, all of the money goes into one big pot, and each advertiser receives their share of the impressions based on the percetage of funds they contributed. It’s a simple system, but it means there’s a bit of uncertainty about what you’re going to get for your money. However, Reddit has the potential to provide some very cheap clicks – I’ve seen as low as 3 cents – if you play your card right. Similar to StumbleUpon, Reddit provides your ad with the potential to go viral. Gabriel Weinberg has agreat write-up of the 20,700 clicks he scored for 3.14 cents each for his new search engine Duck Duck Go. His eye-catching image and tech-focused startup served him well with the audience. As he says:

First, a search engine ad is a good fit for reddit ads in general. It has broad market appeal and redditters in general like trying out new technology. Second, I think the ad is particularly well structured. The circular duck icon draws your attention, is contrasting to site colors, and sticks out because it is a circle (as most images are square). I believe the title also has appeal.

Gyutae Park also has a nice write-up of the 434 clicks he purchased for 9 cents each here. One of my recent experiments was a bit more pricey: 187 clicks at 40 cents each. My lackluster performance was a combination of landing on a competitive advertising day, and using a poor-quality header image. In retrospect, I have no idea what I was thinking using this unreadable image: Reddit ads are so simple (just two visible components) that the only tip I have is self-evident: your image has to rock, and so does your title. It’s all about choosing an image and headline that makes people click.

Conclusion

To conclude, I want to reiterate what I said early in this article: unless you have deep pockets think of advertising not as a long-term traffic strategy, but as a testing tool to improve your website and find out more about your ideal visitor. Few bootstrapped startups can withstand the cash outlay required to turn advertising into a marketing activity with a positive ROI, but that shouldn’t keep you from testing the waters to find out for yourself. I look forward to hearing about your advertising experience and recommendations in the comments.Like this site? Help spread the word.

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What The Next Five Years Will Be About

pinakim — Mon, 16 May 2011 04:01:49 +0000

The next five years will be about direct relationships. Several years ago a leading brand contacted us (Twist Image) about a new business opportunity in the digital space. The brand’s reality was this: as the years wane on, the amount of retailers that they sell to were diminishing. As the major big box outlets continue to grow and as consolidation rifles through the retail sector, the bigger brands only have a handful of outlets to sell their wares. With these retailers’ size and growth comes another reality: they begin to dictate everything from quantity and terms to acceptable margins. For some businesses, this is a dream come true because it secures significant sales, but for others (like this brand), their business was becoming a game of diminishing returns. It gets ugly fast when you run the numbers: eventually this brand will only have their product on the shelves of one or two retailers who are constantly dictating and changing the terms of sale… and the brand has no direct relationship with the consumer. How do you win? The brand’s idea was to create a new e-commerce brand online that housed only their own brand name products. This was the last chance. This was the hope and prayer to save the business: start a direct relationship with the consumer… today. Notwithstanding how the major retailers might feel about this project, it was a smart and wise play. For a brand to truly shape its own destiny, it must lead the relationship with the consumer as well. This must have been a huge factor in Apple’s decision to build out retail stores and not work exclusively with the major consumer electronic retailers. How are your direct relationships? Some brands do this well… most fail at it with spectacular fashion. Is it possible to be so judgmental? It is. One of the reasons I still enjoy the conversation and debate about the efficacy of Social Media marketing is that the majority of brands that struggle with ROI are comparing it to traditional push advertising instead of treating it as an opportunity to have real interactions between real people. A consumer that hits a "like" or "follow" button is opening up the opportunity to have a direct relationship with a brand. If all the brand does is blast back offers and specials, we’re not pushing towards direct relationships… we’re pushing towards broadcast advertising (in a new channel). The opportunity is now. I’m often reminded of an event I took part in called, The Art Of Marketing (sidebar: I’ll be speaking at an upcoming Art of Marketing event in Vancouver on June 9th, 2011 – it will also feature Gary Vaynerchuk, Guy Kawasaki, Avinash Kaushik and William Taylor). Also speaking on the bill was Seth Godin (Poke The Box, Linchpin, Purple Cow). Seth doesn’t hold any punches and made it very clear to the 1500 marketing professionals in attendance that this unique moment in time is not only a revolution in marketing – one that we will probably never again see in our lifetime – but that it was ours to either capitalize on or squander. The next fives years are going to be about these direct relationships. The next five years are going to about how well a brand can actually change the relationship from one that looks at how many people are in their database to who these individuals are and how the brand can make the connections and loyalty stronger. The stars are aligned. We have the technology. We have the data. We have the new media channels and platforms. We have the opportunity to publish whatever we want – in text, images, audio and video – instantly (and for free) to the world. What we do with this moment will be telling. It will also set the pace for everything that flows out of our marketing departments for the next decade. That big brand I talked about earlier? They never pulled the trigger on their e-commerce project and wouldn’t you guess it: they’re busy scrambling for "likes" on Facebook and are selling their products through the handful of big box retailers left. No direct relationships. No future.

Filed under: Miscellaneous

Will A Brands Next Big Move Be A Journalism Department?

pinakim — Mon, 16 May 2011 03:57:39 +0000

Who should own Social Media in the organization?

The challenge in answering that question comes from a lack of clear definition. It depends on how you (and your organization) defines Social Media. Some see it as a communications channel, while others use it to extend their advertising. Other companies use it for customer service and some use it as a platform to experiment with content marketing. None of those are inherently right or wrong, they’re just different uses (and there are countless more). The long-held debate (and yes, we’re looking at over a decade of Social Media usage, at this point) was about whether or not Social Media should be a part of the Marketing department or the Communications department.

In the end, Social Media is everywhere.

The companies that tend to benefit the most from Social Media are the ones who are finding multiple blends, tactics and campaigns to find their sweet spot. Some have used short, mid and long-term tactics against an overall business strategy, while others have chosen to blend one-way with two-way communications and more conversational types of strategies.

It’s the content, stupid.

While advertising has its place in Social Media, it’s all about the content. The platform allows everyone to publishing anything in text, images, audio and video instantly (and for free) for the entire world to see. It’s humbling to know that the success of your content is almost entirely driven by how relevant it is (or, how it moves your audience). It’s easy to make a case for content marketing, but it’s going to wind up being the wrong case you should be making.

Death to content marketing.

The problem with content marketing is the marketing part of the equation. Marketing content rarely connects with an audience. Why? Because it’s really just marketing material that is thinly veiled as content, and it’s quickly becoming the kind of one-sided content that turns people off. What makes great content spread is how unique and inspiring the message is, not in how it slants into a direction that ultimately positions your company as the only one to buy from.

Flipping from content marketing to journalism.

I was thinking about this Blog. I was thinking about citizen journalism. I was watching Geoff Livingston present at Webcom Montreal last week, and things started to click. Maybe the reason this Blog has some level of success is because it’s more like journalism than it is about what Twist Image offers and sells (I prefer to write relevant articles about this industry). Maybe citizen journalists are the best marketers that a brand could ever ask for, and maybe, Livingston is right that the problem with content marketing is the "marketing" part. Instead of plopping Social Media into your communications or marketing department, why not start a journalism department (or start off in a more humble way by hiring a journalist part-time to write content that your organization will publish)?

What could a journalist do for your brand?

They could write articles about the industry you serve without slanting the piece to favor your brand (this would give you credibility and build trust).
They could become valuable by commenting and adding more content in the many other primary spaces for Social Media that people in your industry follow.
They could interview the industry leaders for you.
They could add a layer of credibility to the content you’re publishing, because you’re very clear in your disclosures that this journalist’s role is not to write favorable content about the company, but to write great content about the industry you serve.

We’re not talking about a journalist who is working for you as a writer.

That would be missing the point. The idea here is to start creating content that is both valuable and needed. The idea here is to see if a tactic like this could lead to an entire department of journalists that are publishing the most relevant and interesting stories about the industry you serve. It’s about becoming the de facto recognized authority for your industry. It’s about adding so much value that your clients (and potential clients) need you in their lives because the insights and information that you’re providing are so valuable. The challenge (of course) will be in doing this in an honest and credible way. Marketers don’t have a strong history of being able to pull this sort of stuff off, because we just can’t help ourselves but to push our own wares in the moment of truth (which is sad). The only way this will work is if the brand truly does let the journalist be an actual journalist (instead of a corporate shill).

I think this is a huge (and interesting) opportunity. What do you think? Is the world ready for real Brand Journalism?

[Tags:

advertising,

blog,

brand,

brand journalism,

journalism department,

marketing,

marketing material

publishing,

recognized authority,

social media,

webcom montreal,

writer]

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What Type Of Advertising Has The Most Influence?

pinakim — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 12:41:11 +0000

You would think that the shift is clear. That true influence when it comes to advertising comes from channels that are more personal or more interactive. You would be wrong.

MediaPost ran a news item today titled, TV Advertising Most Influential, that would make any Digital Marketing professional raise an eyebrow (or two). "According to Deloitte‘s fifth edition ‘State of the Media Democracy’ survey, 71% of Americans still rate watching TV on any device among their favorite media activities. In addition, 86% of Americans stated that TV advertising still has the most impact on their buying decisions. The survey indicates that the Internet, mobile and social media channels are enhancing the overall television viewer experience, driving people to watch first-run programs and live events during their initial broadcast. And, nearly three-quarters of American consumers are multitasking while watching TV. 42% are online, 29% are talking on cellphones or mobile devices, and 26% are sending instant messages or text messages. 61% of U.S. consumers now maintain a social networking site, where constant streams of updates and discussion forums have made delaying awareness of live TV outcomes a near impossibility."

Welcome to media purgatory.

While television maintains its pole position as the dominant power in advertising influence, it’s still fascinating to see not only the multi-platform activities of consumers, but also how interactive those channels are when coupled together. And, if you think about it, does a survey like this take into account the type of marketing we see happening in places like Twitter or through the power of websites that allow their consumers to leave reviews and rate everything? Some of the thinking around television’s stronghold has to do with the fact that the conversations about shows, entertainment and brands that are taking place while the television is on in the background helps to reinforce its power, rather than shift the influence to other channels that are disrupting the full attention that used to be given to watching television.

That’s a pretty powerful testament to the strength of television advertising.

It also speaks to the many media pundits who extol the virtues of new media and the death of the 30-second spot without factoring in that we still have a global culture of people who much prefer to consume media than to create it (it’s something that Clay Shirky explains so brilliantly in his second business book, Cognitive Surplus). The report sheds some light into how deep the chasm is between traditional advertising and the newer channels as well. The question posed is…

Which type of advertising has the most impact on buying decision? (the percentage of respondents said):

Television – 83%
Magazines – 50%
Online – 47%
Newspapers – 44%
Radio – 32%
Billboards/outdoor advertising – 13%

The gap between television and online is dramatic.

But consider how mature of an industry television advertising is when compared to online, and also consider the creative. Beyond that, it’s amazing to see how much more influential online advertising is when compared to radio or out-of-home advertising. Yes, I’m going to defend online advertising and it’s ability to deliver much more than a great advertising message (always remember: marketing is not advertising), but none of this is set is stone. The media landscape continues to fragment, change and act differently.

Just don’t make the mistake of thinking that television is no longer powerful. It is.

[Tags:

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new media, newspaper,

online,

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Brands Cannot Be Human

pinakim — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 03:59:19 +0000

Can brands be human? Can brands be more human?

People tend to shrug their shoulders, roll their eyes or simply get freaked out at the slightest thought of making something that is not like us "human" (if you don’t believe me, watch science fiction movies like A.I. or Blade Runner). Before getting into a philosophical and semantic debate over what it actually means to be "human," first think about what a brand really stands for.

What is a brand?

If you go back to the early days of products and commercialism, you’ll note that soap was just soap for a very, very long time. All soap was made the same way, and the only way to differentiate it was for the company manufacturing it to give it an original name and make it look different (ok, some of them smelled different too). In the decades after WWII, companies spent their time, money and effort trying to differentiate their products and services from those of their competitors. Some of those differences were legitimate, while some were not all that obvious. For the most part, brands came of age in a world where the things products did were pretty similar to what everyone else’s products did.

Enter Madison Avenue.

The only way to get around that problem was to create some kind of emotional attachment to one product over another. Enter Madison Avenue, which mixed advertising messages with psychology in the hope that a large group of people would feel emotionally connected to a product. And buy it. Lots of it. Over and over. In today’s world, most products and services are decent; in the old days, you could use advertising to sell something severely sub-par. In this age of consumer reviews, blogs, Twitter, Facebook and beyond, it’s hard to get away with being that bad. But we’ve also reached a point where that emotional connection between customers and brands goes both ways. The individuals behind the products are talking (or typing) directly with consumers.

They’re putting a human face on something that for years was locked behind a passive-aggressive customer service rep.

At the same time, the customers at the other end are developing their own personal brands. They’re publishing, broadcasting and connecting. We’ve come to a point where certain individuals online have more influence and power than some of the biggest corporate brands. What makes this so interesting (and scary for marketers) is that human beings are like snowflakes in that no two are alike. Those differentiators that brands fought so hard to implant in the consumer’s mind at the genesis of branding are intrinsic to humans. My Digital Marketing Blog will look nothing like your Digital Marketing Blog.

We want our brands to be more human because brands are made of human beings.

Take an industry you hate (airlines, mobile carriers, automotive, you name it) and you’ll note that these industries are not made up of evildoers. They’re made of people. They’re good people. They are people who are trying to make a living, trying to make a difference in the same communities as you and your children. They actually care about their customers. They want you to spend more with them and be loyal to them. Science fiction aside, it’s probably impossible for something un-human – whether it be a robot or a brand – to actually become human. But what we are seeing is that brands that embrace the human beings that make them so interesting (whether they work for them or just like chatting about them) are much more successful than others. These brands can engage people much in the same way us humans can – and have done since we first rubbed two sticks together and invited the people around us over to warm up.

These brands may never be human, but they can become more humane. What do you think?

The above posting is an article from Sparksheet. I cross-post it here with all the links and tags for your reading pleasure, but you can check out the original version online here. Sparksheet is also an official media sponsor of the @BrandsConf that takes place on December 2nd in New York City (which was the catalyst for this Blog post). You are entitled to a 30% discount on registration by using the promo code "sparksheet" – :

Sparksheet – When Brands Become Human.

[Tags:

advertising

artificial intelligence

digital marketing blog

facebook

humanization of brand

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Incompatible

pinakim — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 03:36:05 +0000

Being like everyone else isn’t the answer. Being like no one else is the answer. You have to incompatible.

In this week’s, Six Links Worth Of Your Attention #18, Hugh McGuire (from Librivox, iambik and a co-host on Media Hacks) recommended that I watch the Bloomberg TV documentary, Bloomberg Game Changers: Steve Jobs, on Apple co-founder and CEO, Steve Jobs. There’s no doubt that Jobs is an iconoclast, but what really struck me was when someone described him as "incompatible," and pushed it further by saying that’s what makes him so unique, special and creative. Guy Kawasaki went on to say that Jobs is so different from most other people, that getting him to even think like everybody else would be like trying to explain to a fish what it is to fly.

This pushes well beyond what we would consider to be a visionary.

Think about what it takes to really breakthrough. Think about what it takes to truly be a visionary. Think about what it takes to actually change the game. It’s not easy. People are not going to like you, and odds are that you’re not going to be able to be exceedingly social, simply because you see things differently. Why does someone commit suicide? I have (sadly) known more than a few people who have taken their own lives. It never really makes any sense. The problem comes in trying to understand it. You can’t put a rational thought around a situation that is not rational. People who are incompatible don’t think and operate the same way that the rest of us do. Trying to see them as we see others is not rational.

What makes someone incompatible?

Change. Incompatible people don’t mind change at all. They try. They fail. They change. The don’t look back. They look forward. The only constant in their lives is that things will change, and this is fine with them as long as it leads to perfection.
Disruptive force. Most people see their actions as irrational. These people scream, yell and probably demand what seems to be the impossible out of people. They don’t work regular hours. They don’t care much for vacation. Their life balance looks nothing like our work/life balance.
Artist. It doesn’t matter if they’re inventing the iPad or a new irrigation system. Their work is not their work. Their work is their art. It is what they were meant to do and – in the end – it is art. Both in the creation process and in the final product. Incompatibles embrace the artist’s way and follow their muse. They don’t care much about market research or customer insights. They know better than both.
Revolutionary. The work they do isn’t just a few steps above the competition, they are – literally – revolutionizing their industry (and sometimes even creating their own industry). Everything they do is about causing maximum disruption to the way things used to be.
The reality distortion field. According to Wikipedia: "a term coined by Bud Tribble at Apple Computer in 1981, to describe company co-founder Steve Jobs’ charisma and its effects on the developers working on the Mac project. Later the term has also been used to refer to perceptions of his keynote (or Stevenote) by observers and devoted users of Apple computers and products. In essence, RDF is the idea that Steve Jobs is able to convince himself and others to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bluster, exaggeration, marketing, appeasement, and persistence. RDF is said to distort an audience’s sense of proportion and scales of difficulties and makes them believe that the task at hand is possible."
Alone. There are only a handful of visionaries. The word may be tossed around to describe a whole lot of business executives, but there are only a few true visionaries. These people usually are very lonely. They are lost in their ideas and drive. It makes it challenging to navigate relationships and they feel that people either can’t understand them or don’t have the knowledge base to comprehend them. Yes, they believe others are stupider than they are.

Being incompatible isn’t a bad thing.

It’s easy to get all negative about people who are incompatible, but imagine a world without people who did not fit in? Imagine a world without people who knew there was a better or different way to do things? Ultimately, we have to accept incompatible people for who they are, and simply hope that enough people can get past their reality distortion field to help them realize what is burning so deep inside of them.

We need more people who are incompatible.

[Tags:

art,

consumer insight,disruptive force,

mac,

reality distortion field,

Filed under: Miscellaneous

Incompatible

pinakim — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 03:36:05 +0000

Being like everyone else isn’t the answer. Being like no one else is the answer. You have to incompatible.

This pushes well beyond what we would consider to be a visionary.

What makes someone incompatible?

Change. Incompatible people don’t mind change at all. They try. They fail. They change. The don’t look back. They look forward. The only constant in their lives is that things will change, and this is fine with them as long as it leads to perfection.
Disruptive force. Most people see their actions as irrational. These people scream, yell and probably demand what seems to be the impossible out of people. They don’t work regular hours. They don’t care much for vacation. Their life balance looks nothing like our work/life balance.
Artist. It doesn’t matter if they’re inventing the iPad or a new irrigation system. Their work is not their work. Their work is their art. It is what they were meant to do and – in the end – it is art. Both in the creation process and in the final product. Incompatibles embrace the artist’s way and follow their muse. They don’t care much about market research or customer insights. They know better than both.
Revolutionary. The work they do isn’t just a few steps above the competition, they are – literally – revolutionizing their industry (and sometimes even creating their own industry). Everything they do is about causing maximum disruption to the way things used to be.
The reality distortion field. According to Wikipedia: "a term coined by Bud Tribble at Apple Computer in 1981, to describe company co-founder Steve Jobs’ charisma and its effects on the developers working on the Mac project. Later the term has also been used to refer to perceptions of his keynote (or Stevenote) by observers and devoted users of Apple computers and products. In essence, RDF is the idea that Steve Jobs is able to convince himself and others to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bluster, exaggeration, marketing, appeasement, and persistence. RDF is said to distort an audience’s sense of proportion and scales of difficulties and makes them believe that the task at hand is possible."
Alone. There are only a handful of visionaries. The word may be tossed around to describe a whole lot of business executives, but there are only a few true visionaries. These people usually are very lonely. They are lost in their ideas and drive. It makes it challenging to navigate relationships and they feel that people either can’t understand them or don’t have the knowledge base to comprehend them. Yes, they believe others are stupider than they are.

Being incompatible isn’t a bad thing.

We need more people who are incompatible.

[Tags:

art,

consumer insight,disruptive force,

mac,

reality distortion field,

Filed under: Miscellaneous

The U-bend of life

pinakim — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 12:05:37 +0000

The U-bend of life

Why, beyond middle age, people get happier as they get older

Age and happiness

Dec 16th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION

ASK people how they feel about getting older, and they will probably reply in the same vein as Maurice Chevalier: “Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.” Stiffening joints, weakening muscles, fading eyesight and the clouding of memory, coupled with the modern world’s careless contempt for the old, seem a fearful prospect—better than death, perhaps, but not much. Yet mankind is wrong to dread ageing. Life is not a long slow decline from sunlit uplands towards the valley of death. It is, rather, a U-bend.

When people start out on adult life, they are, on average, pretty cheerful. Things go downhill from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir commonly known as the mid-life crisis. So far, so familiar. The surprising part happens after that. Although as people move towards old age they lose things they treasure—vitality, mental sharpness and looks—they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing: happiness.

This curious finding has emerged from a new branch of economics that seeks a more satisfactory measure than money of human well-being. Conventional economics uses money as a proxy for utility—the dismal way in which the discipline talks about happiness. But some economists, unconvinced that there is a direct relationship between money and well-being, have decided to go to the nub of the matter and measure happiness itself.

These ideas have penetrated the policy arena, starting in Bhutan, where the concept of Gross National Happiness shapes the planning process. All new policies have to have a GNH assessment, similar to the environmental-impact assessment common in other countries. In 2008 France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, asked two Nobel-prize-winning economists, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, to come up with a broader measure of national contentedness than GDP. Then last month, in a touchy-feely gesture not typical of Britain, David Cameron announced that the British government would start collecting figures on well-being.

There are already a lot of data on the subject collected by, for instance, America’s General Social Survey, Eurobarometer and Gallup. Surveys ask two main sorts of question. One concerns people’s assessment of their lives, and the other how they feel at any particular time. The first goes along the lines of: thinking about your life as a whole, how do you feel? The second is something like: yesterday, did you feel happy/contented/angry/anxious? The first sort of question is said to measure global well-being, and the second hedonic or emotional well-being. They do not always elicit the same response: having children, for instance, tends to make people feel better about their life as a whole, but also increases the chance that they felt angry or anxious yesterday.

Statisticians trawl through the vast quantities of data these surveys produce rather as miners panning for gold. They are trying to find the answer to the perennial question: what makes people happy?

Four main factors, it seems: gender, personality, external circumstances and age. Women, by and large, are slightly happier than men. But they are also more susceptible to depression: a fifth to a quarter of women experience depression at some point in their lives, compared with around a tenth of men. Which suggests either that women are more likely to experience more extreme emotions, or that a few women are more miserable than men, while most are more cheerful.

Two personality traits shine through the complexity of economists’ regression analyses: neuroticism and extroversion. Neurotic people—those who are prone to guilt, anger and anxiety—tend to be unhappy. This is more than a tautological observation about people’s mood when asked about their feelings by pollsters or economists. Studies following people over many years have shown that neuroticism is a stable personality trait and a good predictor of levels of happiness. Neurotic people are not just prone to negative feelings: they also tend to have low emotional intelligence, which makes them bad at forming or managing relationships, and that in turn makes them unhappy.

Whereas neuroticism tends to make for gloomy types, extroversion does the opposite. Those who like working in teams and who relish parties tend to be happier than those who shut their office doors in the daytime and hole up at home in the evenings. This personality trait may help explain some cross-cultural differences: a study comparing similar groups of British, Chinese and Japanese people found that the British were, on average, both more extrovert and happier than the Chinese and Japanese.

Then there is the role of circumstance. All sorts of things in people’s lives, such as relationships, education, income and health, shape the way they feel. Being married gives people a considerable uplift, but not as big as the gloom that springs from being unemployed. In America, being black used to be associated with lower levels of happiness—though the most recent figures suggest that being black or Hispanic is nowadays associated with greater happiness. People with children in the house are less happy than those without. More educated people are happier, but that effect disappears once income is controlled for. Education, in other words, seems to make people happy because it makes them richer. And richer people are happier than poor ones—though just how much is a source of argument (see article).

The view from winter

Lastly, there is age. Ask a bunch of 30-year-olds and another of 70-year-olds (as Peter Ubel, of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, did with two colleagues, Heather Lacey and Dylan Smith, in 2006) which group they think is likely to be happier, and both lots point to the 30-year-olds. Ask them to rate their own well-being, and the 70-year-olds are the happier bunch. The academics quoted lyrics written by Pete Townshend of The Who when he was 20: “Things they do look awful cold / Hope I die before I get old”. They pointed out that Mr Townshend, having passed his 60th birthday, was writing a blog that glowed with good humour.

Mr Townshend may have thought of himself as a youthful radical, but this view is ancient and conventional. The “seven ages of man”—the dominant image of the life-course in the 16th and 17th centuries—was almost invariably conceived as a rise in stature and contentedness to middle age, followed by a sharp decline towards the grave. Inverting the rise and fall is a recent idea. “A few of us noticed the U-bend in the early 1990s,” says Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at Warwick Business School. “We ran a conference about it, but nobody came.”

People are least happy in their 40s and early 50s. They reach a nadir at a global average of 46

Since then, interest in the U-bend has been growing. Its effect on happiness is significant—about half as much, from the nadir of middle age to the elderly peak, as that of unemployment. It appears all over the world. David Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth College, and Mr Oswald looked at the figures for 72 countries. The nadir varies among countries—Ukrainians, at the top of the range, are at their most miserable at 62, and Swiss, at the bottom, at 35—but in the great majority of countries people are at their unhappiest in their 40s and early 50s. The global average is 46.

The U-bend shows up in studies not just of global well-being but also of hedonic or emotional well-being. One paper, published this year by Arthur Stone, Joseph Schwartz and Joan Broderick of Stony Brook University, and Angus Deaton of Princeton, breaks well-being down into positive and negative feelings and looks at how the experience of those emotions varies through life. Enjoyment and happiness dip in middle age, then pick up; stress rises during the early 20s, then falls sharply; worry peaks in middle age, and falls sharply thereafter; anger declines throughout life; sadness rises slightly in middle age, and falls thereafter.

Turn the question upside down, and the pattern still appears. When the British Labour Force Survey asks people whether they are depressed, the U-bend becomes an arc, peaking at 46.

Happier, no matter what

There is always a possibility that variations are the result not of changes during the life-course, but of differences between cohorts. A 70-year-old European may feel different to a 30-year-old not because he is older, but because he grew up during the second world war and was thus formed by different experiences. But the accumulation of data undermines the idea of a cohort effect. Americans and Zimbabweans have not been formed by similar experiences, yet the U-bend appears in both their countries. And if a cohort effect were responsible, the U-bend would not show up consistently in 40 years’ worth of data.

Another possible explanation is that unhappy people die early. It is hard to establish whether that is true or not; but, given that death in middle age is fairly rare, it would explain only a little of the phenomenon. Perhaps the U-bend is merely an expression of the effect of external circumstances. After all, common factors affect people at different stages of the life-cycle. People in their 40s, for instance, often have teenage children. Could the misery of the middle-aged be the consequence of sharing space with angry adolescents? And older people tend to be richer. Could their relative contentment be the result of their piles of cash?

The answer, it turns out, is no: control for cash, employment status and children, and the U-bend is still there. So the growing happiness that follows middle-aged misery must be the result not of external circumstances but of internal changes.

People, studies show, behave differently at different ages. Older people have fewer rows and come up with better solutions to conflict. They are better at controlling their emotions, better at accepting misfortune and less prone to anger. In one study, for instance, subjects were asked to listen to recordings of people supposedly saying disparaging things about them. Older and younger people were similarly saddened, but older people less angry and less inclined to pass judgment, taking the view, as one put it, that “you can’t please all the people all the time.”

There are various theories as to why this might be so. Laura Carstensen, professor of psychology at Stanford University, talks of “the uniquely human ability to recognise our own mortality and monitor our own time horizons”. Because the old know they are closer to death, she argues, they grow better at living for the present. They come to focus on things that matter now—such as feelings—and less on long-term goals. “When young people look at older people, they think how terrifying it must be to be nearing the end of your life. But older people know what matters most.” For instance, she says, “young people will go to cocktail parties because they might meet somebody who will be useful to them in the future, even though nobody I know actually likes going to cocktail parties.”

Death of ambition, birth of acceptance

There are other possible explanations. Maybe the sight of contemporaries keeling over infuses survivors with a determination to make the most of their remaining years. Maybe people come to accept their strengths and weaknesses, give up hoping to become chief executive or have a picture shown in the Royal Academy, and learn to be satisfied as assistant branch manager, with their watercolour on display at the church fete. “Being an old maid”, says one of the characters in a story by Edna Ferber, an (unmarried) American novelist, was “like death by drowning—a really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling.” Perhaps acceptance of ageing itself is a source of relief. “How pleasant is the day”, observed William James, an American philosopher, “when we give up striving to be young—or slender.”

Whatever the causes of the U-bend, it has consequences beyond the emotional. Happiness doesn’t just make people happy—it also makes them healthier. John Weinman, professor of psychiatry at King’s College London, monitored the stress levels of a group of volunteers and then inflicted small wounds on them. The wounds of the least stressed healed twice as fast as those of the most stressed. At Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Sheldon Cohen infected people with cold and flu viruses. He found that happier types were less likely to catch the virus, and showed fewer symptoms of illness when they did. So although old people tend to be less healthy than younger ones, their cheerfulness may help counteract their crumbliness.

Happier people are more productive, too. Mr Oswald and two colleagues, Eugenio Proto and Daniel Sgroi, cheered up a bunch of volunteers by showing them a funny film, then set them mental tests and compared their performance to groups that had seen a neutral film, or no film at all. The ones who had seen the funny film performed 12% better. This leads to two conclusions. First, if you are going to volunteer for a study, choose the economists’ experiment rather than the psychologists’ or psychiatrists’. Second, the cheerfulness of the old should help counteract their loss of productivity through declining cognitive skills—a point worth remembering as the world works out how to deal with an ageing workforce.

The ageing of the rich world is normally seen as a burden on the economy and a problem to be solved. The U-bend argues for a more positive view of the matter. The greyer the world gets, the brighter it becomes—a prospect which should be especially encouraging to us

Filed under: Miscellaneous

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2011

pinakim — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 17:03:34 +0000

WHEN THE TIME TICKS TO DENOTE THE LAST SECOND OF 2010 AS 23.59
LET US ALSO THINK OURSELVES THAT WHAT IS GONE IS GONE FOR EVER

BUT WHEN THE CLOCK SHOWS AS 00.01
ALL ZEROS OF THE PAST HAVE GONE AND WE ARE ONE
TO DO OUR PART AND MAKE OURSELVES BETTER
BETTER IN THOUGHT, WORD AND DEED

WE MAKE OUR NEW YEAR 2011 BETTER & BRIGHTER
NOT ANYONE ELSE

THE FRESHNESS OF FLOWERS AS THEY BLOSSOM
REMINDS US TO BE REFRESHED FOR A FRESH START-
A FRESH START FOR THE BETTER

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a better beginning

An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in.
A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves

The New Year has taken possession of the clock of time.

All hail the duties and possibilities
of the coming twelve months!”

It is never too late to be what you might have been

My Sincere Best Wishes to you to be endowed with success
in all your personal endeavours
and
with Sincere Prayers for you to be blessed with
Good Health,Peace,Prosperity and Good Fortune
in the Year 2011
and also in the years to come

Regards
Pinaki Mandal

Filed under: Miscellaneous