Random thoughts

This Woot video of their acquisition really cracks me up. The best part is at the end in the credits.

7 harsh realities in social media

 Bart De Waele with some excellent home truths for social media:

tagged: Bart De Waele, blogs, corporate blogs, Facebook, presentations, social media, Twitter, User-generated content

via wearesocial.net

Customers accessing an online store via a social media site are 10 times more likely to buy something than others

 "Flitting from site to site, it takes a lot to entice today’s shoppers. Once they’ve arrived in an online store, they might sniff around and put a thing or two in the shopping cart – but even when they have typed in their credit card number, there is still no guarantee that the sale will be closed."

Black added: "The modern shopper often looks for reassurance from a positive review, a special offer to make it more affordable, inexpensive delivery options and a quick, easy and secure way to pay."

via www.brandrepublic.com

It always come down to this: focus on excellence.

Unlisted videos can be a great way for giant brands like Nike to test out their viral endeavors before they officially launch them to the public.  ‘Write The Future’ was able to spread via Twitter, Facebook and a multitude of blog posts before it even showed up in a YouTube search for Nike, FIFA, World Cup or other popular search terms.  It will be interesting to see if they take the same approach to their viral campaigns in the future.

It doesn’t hurt that Nike is a huge international brand—of course word started to spread when people heard that there was a “leaked” unlisted Nike video on YouTube.  However, if the content of that video had not been truly amazing there is no way it would have gotten the coverage that it did.  The ‘Write The Future’ campaign is a great example of how a campaign will spread via world of mouth if it truly is remarkable.  Do you think Nike and other brands will use unlisted videos to gauge their viral campaigns in the future?

via www.socialtimes.com

Another good reminder that focusing on top quality is the key to generating some good user love. Steve Jobs knows that very well of course.

Steve Blank on work/life balance

We would have a family dinner at home most nights of the week.  Regardless of what I was doing I had to be home by 7pm.  (My kids still remember mom secretly feeding them when they were hungry at 5pm, but eating again with dad at 7pm.)  But we would use dinner time to talk about what they did at school, have family meetings etc.

Put the kids to bed. Since I was already home for dinner it was fun to help give them their baths, read them stories and put them to bed.  I never understood how important the continuity of time between dinner through bedtime was until my kids mentioned it as teenagers.

Act and be engaged. My kids and wife had better antenna than I thought.  If I was home but my head was elsewhere and not mentally engaged they would call me on it.  So I figured out how to spit the flow of the day in half.  I would work 10 hours a day in the office, come home and then…

Back to work after the kids were in bed. What my kids never saw is that as soon as they were in bed I was back on the computer and back at work for another 4 or 5 hours until the wee hours of the morning.

Weekends were with and for my kids. There was always some adventure on the weekends. I think we must have went to the zoo, beach, museum, picnic, amusement park, etc. a 100 times. 

Half a day work on Saturday.  While weekends were for my kids I did go to work on Saturday morning.  But my kids would come with me.  This had two unexpected consequences; my kids still remember that work was very cool.  They liked going in with me and they said it helped them understand what dad did at “work.”  Second, it set a cultural norm at my startups, first at Supermac as the VP of Marketing, then at Rocket Science as the CEO and at E.piphany as President. (Most Silicon Valley startups have great policies for having your dog at work but not your kids.)

Long vacations. We would take at least a 3-week vacation every summer.  Since my wife and I liked to hike we’d explore national parks around the U.S. (Alaska, Wyoming, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Maine.) When the kids got older our adventures took us to Mexico, Ecuador, India, Africa and Europe. The trips gave them a sense that the rest of the country and the world was not Silicon Valley and that their lives were not the norm.

Never miss an event. As my kids got older there were class plays, soccer games, piano and dance performances, birthdays, etc.  I never missed one if I was in town, sometimes even if it was in the middle of the day. (And I made sure I was in town for the major events.) 

Engage your spouse. I asked my wife to read and critique every major presentation and document I wrote. Everything she touched was much better for it.  What my investors never knew is that they were getting two of us for the price of one.  (And one of us actually went to business school.)  It helped her understand what

via steveblank.com

Very interesting read for all of us who tend to work a bit too much...