Managing Brands

I've been running across interesting pages lately, and great reading. Some nice articles on AllAboutBranding.com

Do What You Love

It's funny sometimes when people ask you what they should do with their lives, and they act surprised when the answer to that question is "what do you love to do"?

You can't always create a vocation out of your favorite pursuit, but it really doesn't hurt to look at the possibility seriously.

Yes, there are people who make a living play-testing video games. And folks who earn a paycheck while training dolphins and killer whales. Drawing or painting, or designing a web page can be a for-profit project. Making movies, writing books, racing cars, playing sports all are someone's job.

If you could do what you love and get paid for it, what would you be doing? And if you aren't doing it, why not?

Small Business Ideas Forum

I've been enjoying making some posts over at the fairly new Small Business Ideas Forum.

Stop on by and share some of your thoughts. The folks who started the forum are friendly, smart, helpful and could use a few more faces to help make the forum a nice place for people with questions about business.

What's Up, Chief?

Sometimes people do things that they don't even realize.

I remember a time not too far after high school when I was working in a factory. It was a fairly small shop, and we were building industrial plastics machinery. Fun times.

Some days I would come in and drill and thread holes for most of the day. Others would see me laying out pipe, threading it, and piecing together cooling systems. Arc welding was a lot of fun, even on very hot days wearing protective leather gear and heavy helmet and goggles. Sweat and sparks flying - life couldn't get much better. Some of the most fun was working the pneumatic painting equipment, making large machines a uniform shade of blue, with some orange accessories (the shop trademark colors).

We worked ten to twelve hour days on a regular basis. Listened to the same radio station every day. I could guess the next song with a remarkable accuracy rate, having heard their repeated call letters often enough to understand their format, and know which songs where normally plugged into each of the 19 spots they were using. It was something I picked up on, without really giving much thought to it.

I also found it important to know where most people were on the shop floor. With a small staff like we had, many people performed multiple functions on the factory floor rather than one specialized job such as lathe operator, or welder II, or fork lift operator. They didn't work at specific stations, but moved around our large industrial area (we had ten people and probably could have fit another twenty-five people in there comfortably). I'd make an effort as I was working, of noticing who was where every ten minutes or so. After a while, I was doing this without really thinking about it. There was an almost zen-like quality to my awareness of our shop activities.

Those were some habits I was aware of. I'm sure that there were others I wasn't. And I wasn't the only one.

Our shop foreman had a habit of calling everyone "Chief". "What's up, Chief," he would say, or "Can I give you a hand, Chief"? One day, we decided that we would all call him Chief. About two-thirds of the way through that day, he asked one of us, "what's all this "Chief" business"? We stopped, but he didn't.

It's funny the habits that you can pick up as you acclimate to an environment. It's been a few years since I was a card-carrying union member, and I haven't welded anything in probably too long a period. I forget what it's like to build something from metal and sparks and sweat. I wonder about the habits I've picked up in my present working environment that I'm possibly not even aware of.

Powerpointing

Powerpoint is a tool, not the presentation.

I gave a presentation to a group of 14 this morning, and I wish I had take the advice of DonnaM in her post on A neat powerpoint trick.

Handouts are useful, and handouts that provide extra value are even more useful. Great idea.

Never Too Young to Get into Business

In case you have any young ones of your own considering this stage of growing where they learn to care for others, or want to explore the world of business, there are some pages online trying to help out.

For instance, the University of Illinois has a great guide to The Business of Babysitting.

It's pretty well done.

Babysitting isn't for every teen, and there's another site that recently launched that might interest teens in other pursuits. The Small Business Administration started up the The Young Entrepreneur Online Guide to Business.

It includes thoughts on finding a mentor, and links to help. It also discusses money and saving and investing, legal issues, and how to develop a business plan.

Torn Between Standards

I'm not interested in getting in the middle of a battle between standards.

Especially when it comes to syndication feeds like RSS or Atom, which would enable people to read titles, and portions of posts from here in feed aggregators, or to show them on their sites.

When Google updated blogger, it appears that they chose one of those standards over the other. I'm not sure that they thought too much about the choice. It sounds like their thinking more on the subject.

I'm tempted to feed this page through a third party site which would provide a third party feed for me, in addition to the one generated in the Atom format.

Watching the Office

I've heard good things about the BBC series The Office, which is a comedy disquised as a documentary.

It's set in an industrial area somewhat outside of London.

The characters are believable, and the "reality television" approach to the show gives it a unique appeal. A number of the laughs from the show come when a character stares into the camera, at a loss for words to explain to the audience what just happened. Some video clips here.

The series consists of two seasons of six episodes each. They were good enough that I had some difficulty not watching all of these in a row.

I haven't worked in an office quite like the one depicted, but I recognize some of the situations. I suspect I'll be watching these over a few times.

One of my favorite scenerios is when a trainer comes in, and tries to hold a class, while the office manager atttempts to share the wisdom of his experiences at the same time. Their ideas of teamwork clash.

Best television show I've seen in years.

Drivers, Drivers, My Kingdom for Some Drivers

I've been plagued by computer woes the last couple of days.

With some intermittent use of my computer, I've been updating critical patches, defragging my hard drive, doing a full virus scan of the hard drive.

It's been no fun.

I finally hit upon the likely culprit this morning. The video drivers for my video card. I'm downloading new drivers right now. We'll see if they work.

I've seen the complaint before that having the hardware manufacturers make drivers for their hardware is often a hit or miss proposition. Well, the drivers for my video card came with the operating system. Chances are they should work well.

The homepage of the card manufacturer linked to a download page which listed driver software that is only a couple of months old. Hopefully whatever went wrong is fixed in this incarnation of the software.

Thinking of this makes me consider how much some businesses rely upon others. Windows benefits greatly by having so many third party hardware manufacturers build parts that will work with the operating system. They mostly have no choice since there is such a large market filled with users of the software.

What annoys me is that the drivers I was using were loaded from the Windows XP CD. I noticed an updated driver on the windows update page at the beginning of the year, and updated to that. You would figure that they would have the bugs out of it by now.

I was happy to see that the manufacture had a newer date on the version I'll be trying out this morning. Fingers crossed, hopefully I can write about something a little more interesting. At least now, since I dumped the video drivers and am working with a generic driver, I can at least start up the computer and work with it. Previously, I was getting the video signal cutting out on me.

Well, I needed those critical updates anyway.

Ringing in Changes

I was getting a kick looking at a page from the Smithsonian Institute on how information technology has changed over the past 150 years.

To be honest, when I think of information technology, I really don't think of the telegraph or the telephone.

But maybe I should. The means of communicating over long distances, aided by electricity and wires, are the roots of information technology.

When you look at the pictures, it's easy to forget that these devices cause profound changes in society as they were introduced. But some of it didn't happen overnight.

I found a much more detailed view of telecommunications, which goes from the 1820s to today's mobile phones.

It's become pretty common to see people walking down the main street of my town with a mobile phone pressed to their ears. It wasn't as common in 1879, when David Hughes received the first radio/telephone call.

Yes. The mobile phone is now 125 years old. Not what you'd call an overnight success. Wonder what David Hughes would think of ringtones.

MarketingSherpa's Reader's Choices

Congratulations to the winners of the Marketing Sherpa's Readers' Choice Best Blog Awards 2004

Improving News Sites

When I was in high school, we used to get two different newspapers.

They carried all of the same stories. I'm not sure that my parents knew what they were doing when they insisted on getting more than one newspaper delivered to the house every morning. But I suspect that they might have known.

I took advantage of it, and usually read both papers every morning. What I found interesting was how stories were often presented differently from one paper to another.

It turned me into a bit of a skeptic when it comes to the media. It also had me wishing that newspapers would take active steps to improve.

I usually look at a dozen or so papers everyday now. With so many papers are on the web, I recongize that most of them that aren't taking as much of an advantage of online opportunities as they could.

CyberJournalist.net has a great list titled: 101 ways to improve your news site. These are excellent suggestions. If a news site adopted even half of these, they would find themselves amongst the best sites on the web.

Funny, but the best benefits may come from getting more involved with the community that surrounds them.

What Would Google Buy?

Google's Initial Public Offering seems fueled by the necessity to have made an SEC filing anyway, and the desire to sell some shares to reward employees - all of who own some stock in the company.

There's one topic that I haven't seen much focus upon. And that is, what will Google do with all of the money raised from the IPO?

But it's one of the topics that has me concerned. The Motley Fools joins me in speculating just exactly what is on Google's Billion-Dollar Shopping List?

Just to add a little more to the mix then those companies the Fool discusses, I like to add a company that I brought up a few posts below - Craigslist. Pure speculation on my part, without the faintest amount of inside knowledge, or anything beyond a feeling. It has the same feel to it that made Blogger's Pyra Labs such an attractive acquisition to Google.

What companies would you buy if you had a million to spend?

Sites that Use Spyware Are Some of It's Biggest Targets

Some inconsistencies are difficult to wrap your head around.

I remember sitting down a few years ago after cooking breakfast for the staff of the restaurant I worked at, and listening to the bartending groaning. The place opened at 11:00 am, and the staff all joined together for a pre-work meal. It didn't sound like our drink-mixer had his head on straight that morning.

It was a normally a nice time, where morale was boosted, and comraderie was fostered. But not every morning.

I was working my way through college, and this was a pretty good job, especially considering their "all you can eat" policy for kitchen crew. On good days, when everyone was happy, the work went really quickly.

But, it was easy to see that our man behind the mixed drinks wasn't happy. Considering that he was one of the first persons that people would see as they walked through the door, that wasn't a great way to start the day.

I asked what was wrong. He looked at me, and confessed that he had been up most of the night talking to one of the people he sponsored from AA. The person had relapsed, and needed someone to talk with. He was the one.

While I was filled with sympathy, the oddity of the statement filled me with some surprise. I tried, but couldn't stop myself. I asked, "doesn't it strike you as unusual that you're a member of AA, you're complaining about someone who is having trouble because they couldn't resist alcohol, and you're a bartender?"

To further fuel the fire, these words followed from my mouth, "Doesn't that seem a little ironic to you?"

Funny, but he quit the restaurant a few weeks later. I'm not sure why, but I hope that he found something other to do than feed drinks to people.

A post by Ben Edelman uncovers what appears to be a bit of a business enigma along the same lines - Dell's Spyware Puzzle not only looks at Dell's unusual relationship with a spyware company, but also Yahoo's.

Just What are Nerd Values, and How Did They Help Craig?

Ask me yesterday what I thought of Craig's List, and I would have told you that, "it's phenomenal," and that, "Craig deserves any success that he gets."

I don't know Craig.

I don't even read along on his personal blog. But, I know that his site started out small. That it contains many ads that are free, that allow people to help each other.

I pointed my father at the site a couple of months back, and told him about how great the classifieds from Craigslist were doing, and that it's an interesting model to base a web business upon.

It appears that I'm not the only one talking about it like that. A few newspapers have capitulated to Craig. They've been claiming that they can't compete with Craigslist's Classifieds.

I can see that.

Ask me today, and I'll probably tell you the same thing. But the timing is kind of funny. I got my first piece of spam this afternoon from a request for more information that I made a few months back. A local magazine was asking for writers to produce articles. In true Craigslist style, the advertisement didn't disclose very much about the people posting the job.

In the newspaper world of classified ads, I've always hesitated when seeing an ad that promised fame and fortune, and riches greater than what most entry level positions paid, but wouldn't get around to revealing much about the work to earn those. Selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door? Designer rip-off frangrances on city street corners? There are some lousy ways to make a buck. Not as bad as fishing for shrimp on the Gulf of Mexico on a boat too rickety to leave site of land. But bad.

Somehow, with Craigslist it was OK. The people placing ads were as much a nerd as I was.

Then I got an offer to join an online dating service, and offered money to sign up, and the person making the offer used my inquiry letter for the writing gig a few months back as an excuse for contacting me. It was a "pre-exisiting relationship" that must have made it OK to send out emails to me, and others like me.

I guess that as less nerds use Craigslist, and more marketers with ridiculous justifications start, it may lose some of its glitter. I hope I'm mistaken.

The Only Constant is Change

I've seen the impacts of changes both large and small, from the introduction of a new computer system to a migration to a new office building.

When you bring in new means of conducting business, new methods of interacting, and new approaches to old problems, you run into some resistence. I can't count all the times I've been told by someone that "that isn't the way we've done it in the past" or "that isn't part of my job."

Change can be good. Change can bring catastrophe. It doesn't hurt to be forewarned, and to read through something like this article on 10 Principles of Change Management

Change does happen all the time. The better you're prepared to deal with it, the less it will harm you.

How Did You Get This Number?

A nice look at the implementation of the Do Not Call Registry from the FTC in CIO magazine, called How the FTC Rescued the Dinner Hour.

Letting the Numbers Go

The rant over at Seth Godin's Blog on The Curse of Great Expectations is a lot of fun.

There are times when you have to put the yardstick aside, stop counting, refuse to measure, and just let go. I did some of that this weekend, and I anticipate doing even more of it this summer.

It's great to be able to measure success by numbers, and to capture positive and negative trends, but it's also easy to get obsessive over those figures.

I have a couple of friends who have been in business together for twenty five years. Their business makes enough for them to survive week after week with a little extra to put away for a rainy day. They have no expectations of wild growth, and no desire for it.

I see so many who look at return on investment (ROI) as the first measure of whether or not they should even get involved in a company. A recent article I came across actually even advocated that the first calculation be figuring the potential value of a company at its Initial Public Offering (IPO).

Most businesses never make it to an IPO, and often have no desire to get there. The owners recognize that once a business gets to a certain point, they are no longer doing the part of the business that attracted them to it in the first place, but are managing others who perform those tasks.

Full Contact Golf

I know golf doesn't need saving. I know that it's successful, and that as a sport it ranks amongst the most watched and is an entertaining diversion for many participants.

But I'll confess that it makes me sleepy. Watching it, or playing it, or even reading about it has the same effect that an extra large turkey dinner on a lazy Thanksgiving afternoon does on me. And just why are those announcers whispering? So they don't wake me up?

I've contemplated changes to the sport that would make it more fun to watch. A full contact version, with the winner of each green as first to get to each hole with the ball could be fun. Strokes don't matter - speed does. Armored padding optional. I could foresee motorized and unmotorized versions. I wonder if I could sell Fox on the idea. We could show it to the same folks who are currently enjoying slamball.

One idea I didn't consider was Urban Golf. I'd travel to London to play that.

Hack Your Car

Ever have the "check engine light" illuminate your dashboard? Not much you can do about it, huh?

Lifts engine cover. Yep, it's an engine. Check!

I remember having that light come up on me. Car seemed fine. I hadn't heard anything unusual. Gas mileage was great. I suspected something pretty serious, having never had that light come on after miles and miles and miles of trouble free driving.

Maintainance. No problems. Check the fluids. Replace parts when necessary. Standard maintainance.

I anticipated a big fee at the garage. Brought it to the mechanic. Found out that the light went on automatically when I reached a certain mileage point. Left angry at the car, its manufacturer, the mechanic, and myself.

Wired looks at the ever increasingly computerized automobile in an article titled Drivers Want Code to Their Cars. Some of the horror stories that are uncovered in the article show a considerable lack of usability and customer service.

As cars get more complex and computerized, are non-dealer mechanics at risk of losing the ability to work on those cars?