Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

Thomas Edison is frequently quoted as saying, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” He was referring to his search for the material that would be the filament in his lightbulb. There are many lessons to be learned from that story; perseverance, optimism, ingenuity, creativity, etc… But I think the most important lesson is courage – having the courage to start something, the courage to fail, the courage to try again, and the courage to finally ship.

This process sounds obvious and maybe even simple. But if those are both true, then why do so few of us achieve the level of success we believe ourselves to be capable of attaining? It’s because there are a combination of forces aligned against us; some of them external but  most of them insidiously entrenched inside our own lizard brains.

Fortunately for us, Seth Godin and Steven Pressfield have written a quartet of books that provide a blueprint for being successful and making a difference. I’ve coalesced them into what I call the “Godin/Pressfield Algorithm” (What can I say? I’m engineer, which means I love algorithms.).

Start

“What kind of moron doesn’t know that the first step in achieving success is starting?” That’s a fair point, but I’m using the word “start” in a less literal sense. There all kinds of distractions and time-wasting efforts that look like starting, but are really procrastinating. This is where Godin’s “Poke the Box” (affiliate link) comes in handy. It’s a manifesto that clears the fog away from indecision and provides inspiration and advice for overcoming the fear of getting started. But don’t expect a map, because there isn’t one. Godin explains, “Instead of learning to be more compliant, I want to push you to be the one who takes initiative.”

Work

Undertaking any endeavor is scary because you might fail. But even worse, your brain will fight you every step of the way because we’re programmed to pursue immediate, short-term gratification instead of activities aimed at longer term rewards; in other words, “work.” This invisible force that tells us to check our email or Twitter stream instead of authoring a blog post or writing a few more lines of code or making that client phone call is called “The Resistance” in Steven Pressfield’s book, “The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles.” Pressfield pulls the curtain back from this insidious obstacle and offers sound advice for recognizing and overcoming it.

Fail

Failing happens. Failing can even be a good thing. In fact, failure is not an option, it’s a strategy. But the problem is that it can be demoralizing. This is where Pressfield’s newest book, “Do the Work” (affiliate link) comes in very handy. He says, “It’s about getting off your behind and starting something. And Seth Godin writes about this, that once you start, you have to finish; you don’t get off the hook half way through.”

Ship

“Real artists ship.” Thus sayeth Steve Jobs, as quoted by Godin in the final book of our quartet, “Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?” (affiliate link). This book dares you, actually embarrasses you into making yourself indispensable. It serves as the foundation of the Godin/Pressfield algorithm and stresses the importance of shipping. Otherwise, everything else is boasting, procrastinating, bullshitting. Real artists ship.

And now you have an algorithm for shipping. You’re out of excuses. Grab these books and get started.

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week’s theme is “Choosing a basket for your Internet eggs.”

#5: WordPress Wins Open Source CMS Hall of Fame Award

Since the most important aspect of an effective inbound marketing strategy is remarkable, shareable, readable content, it therefore stands to reason that choosing the right basket (content management system) for your eggs (content)  is also going to be critical to success. I’m a huge fan of WordPress and the Open Source Awards agree.

Link: PacketPub

#4: iPad ‘newspaper’ created by Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch

Publishers are spreading their eggs in all kinds of baskets (print, open web, walled web, mobile, social media) in an attempt to figure out the best business model in a Web 2.0 economy. We now see the Oscar Madison and Felix Ungar of media by planning an iPad-only publication.

Link: The Guardian

#3: Ask the Wise Guy: Facebook Fan Page or Website?

Guy Kawasaki is nothing if not a “bottom line” kind of guy (rimshot). In this article, he does a great job of explaining why he put all of his eggs in the Facebook basket for his latest book, Enchantment. The bottom line is that if you’re trying to establish a web presence for something more ephemeral and less permanent, then skipping the website and going for a Fan page may very well be your best option.

Link: American Express Open Forum

#2: Facebook Introduces Anti-Email: Social Inbox, Seamless Messaging, Conversation History

Where are you going to put your e-communication eggs? Facebook is betting on the current trend of teens and twenty-somethings shunning email in favor of texting and instant messaging. But the central issue here may turn out not to be the technology, but the trust. Facebook hasn’t engendered a very high degree of trust lately, but we’ll see whether convenience and expediency win out over trust.

Link: Fast Company

#1: Long Live the Web

Tim Berners-Lee authored a sort of “State of Internet” article this week. Much of it discusses eggs and baskets, and the threats to both. He argues that net neutrality (lack thereof) threatens to crush certain eggs while failure to adhere to open standards threatens to diminish the quantity and diversity of baskets we have to choose from. It’s big thinking from a big brain about big issues.

Link: Scientific American

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week discusses how technology is shaping our online behavior and options.

#5: Report: Meaningless Facebook Comments Are Cornerstone Of Useful Networks

According to a new report from the National IT User Center at Uppsala University, those useless (and frequently annoying) updates and Tweets actually serve to make us feel closer to those people than we otherwise would.  ”“The portrait, comments, and updates provide constant reminders of the existence of ‘friends.’ The content is not all that important, but the effect is that we perceive our Facebook friends as closer than other acquaintances who are not on Facebook,” explains Doctoral Candidate Håkan Selg, who compiled the report.

Link: All Facebook

#4: Now even more ways to customize your LinkedIn profile

The professional networking site LinkedIn announced this week that it has introduced some new tweaks for your profile.  Given that, according to Jobvite’s 2010 Social Recruiting survey, 65% of companies will use LinkedIn for recruiting it’s important to squeeze every drop of effectiveness out of your profile as possible.

Link: The LinkedIn Blog

#3: The Time Is Ripe For A Chief Marketing Technologist

This concept came from Mitch Joel who borrowed it from Scott Brinker.  Joel (and I) found that Brinker’s message resonated: “Marketing has become deeply entwined with technology. This didn’t happen overnight; it’s been sneaking up on us for a while. But because technology had been so tangential to marketing management for most of our history, the organizational structure of marketing has been slow to adjust to this new technology-centric reality. But we’ve clearly reached a tipping point. To fully reap the benefits of this Golden Age, marketing must officially take ownership of its technology platforms and strategies. And the first step of such ownership is to appoint someone to lead it. Enter the chief marketing technologist.”

Link: Six Pixels of Separation

#2: Steve Job’s Epic 5-Minute Anti-Google Rant

This snippet from Apple’s earning conference call earlier this week is setting the table for the next entry.  It may seem that I quote Steve Jobs a lot in this blog, and I do because I think Apple, Google, and Facebook are the juggernauts that are defining how the Internet is going to continue to evolve.  In this case, Jobs is articulating a fundamental difference in business strategies between Apple and Google regarding how applications are supported on their respective devices.  According to Jobs, Apple is providing an “integrated” solution (as opposed to “closed”), while Google’s Android OS is providing a fractured (as opposed to “open”) solution.  He asserts that users prefer integrated over fractured.

#1: Is an App a Tool or a Behavior?

John Jantsch wrote the forward for a new book titled, “App Savvy.” Jantsch says, “The first step to becoming app savvy is to recognize why the app category is red-hot and here to stay, and why you need to think in terms of tapping app behavior to package, repackage, purpose, and repurpose everything that a mobile social consumer wants to do—and even a few things they don’t know they want to do.”  The combination of Jobs’ earnings call rant and this post led me to link them together in my article, “Why Developers Could Be Your Best Friend.”

Link: Duct Tape Marketing

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What do Steve Ballmer and Steve Jobs have in common these days?  It’s an odd question considering how frankly Steve Jobs has expressed his distaste with Microsoft and their business approach.  That’s why I had to chuckle the other day when I heard Jobs’ comments on Apple’s earning conference call the other day.

…Apple strives to the integrated model so that the user isn’t forced to be the systems integrator. We see tremendous value at having Apple, rather than our users, be the systems integrator… And we also think that our developers could be more innovative if they can target a singular platform, rather than a hundred variants. They can put their time into innovative new features, rather than testing on hundreds of different handsets.

In other words, Apple wants to make it as easy as possible for developers to create applications that iPhone, iPod, and iPad users download from the “integrated” iTunes store. Jobs is arguing that their “closed” platform means “integrated,” while Google’s “open” platform (and at least one prolific developer challenges whether or not Google is really open) actually means “fragmented.”  Apple is creating an ecosystem that will thrive based in large part on the diversity of stuff you can do with their devices.

Microsoft (founded by a couple of developers) understood this point from day one:

Windows was successful in large part because they deliberately created a developer-friendly ecosystem that led to an explosion in application development for their operating system, eventually becoming the de facto standard.  Some may argue that Microsoft is more similar to Android than iOS because it still wasn’t very tightly integrated and while there is a valid argument to be made there, I’m referring more to the business strategy than the technical realities.  After all, this blog is really about inbound marketing.

Speaking of which…

So What’s the Inbound Marketing Takeaway?

This whole point crystallized for me when I read “Is an App a Tool or a Behavior?” by John Jantsch on his Duct Tape Marketing blog. Jantsch wrote the forward for a book titled “App Savvy” that provides guidance for building apps that people will want to use.  He is encouraging us to think of apps in a different way than perhaps most of us do:

When you come to view your app ideas and execution with a “feeding a behavior” mindset, ideas and the carrying out of those ideas will flow more freely.

So here’s the bottom line: apps are another channel that help you spread your ideas.  They’re another means for achieving the third step of inbound marketing, promotion.  Think about the gifts you can offer to your target market and ask yourself, “Is there an app for that?”

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week provides resources everyone can use to draw inspiration for their personal and professional inbound marketing efforts.

#5: Google Grows Revenues 23 Percent In Third Quarter

Google blew away earnings estimates again this week.  The inbound marketing takeaways from this story are the stability of their search business and the growth of their non-search revenue.  While Google is under “theoretical assault” from Facebook and Bing, it has yet to show up on their bottom line.

Link: TechCrunch

#4: John Sculley On Steve Jobs, The Full Interview Transcript

This long interview is worth the time.  While reading it, my mind was jumping around in a dozen different directions contemplating its implications on a wide array of businesses and organizations I’ve been involved with.  On the surface, the interview is about Steve Jobs but in reality, it’s about major differences in business strategies and philosophies with regard to marketing, product development, advertising, recruiting, organizational structure and much more.  Read this article and then consider your own professional challenges by asking, “WWSD (What Would Steve Do?)”

Link: Cult of Mac

#3: How To Generate Revenue Through Facebook Marketing

If the All Facebook blog charged for their content, I would pay up in a heartbeat.  Every week they provide substantive articles that demonstrate how to leverage Facebook for all it’s worth.  This particular post is not as data-dense as many of theirs are, but it is a good example of how they consistently cut to the chase: generating revenue.

Link: All Facebook

#2: 60 @HubSpot Employees. One Take.

OK, this is an entertaining little video that Hubspot created for the admitted purpose of driving employee recruitment.  But I’m not posting it on this week’s High Five simply for its entertainment value.  There’s an important marketing lesson here that isn’t necessarily apparent.  Inbound marketing is all about creating remarkable content.  There is more than one reason why content may be remarkable and this video illustrates one of them; entertainment.  When creating content I always encourage clients to think of the content as a gift: to ask themselves if they could honestly classify their content as a gift.  A fun, upbeat video that entertains people for a couple of minutes is definitely a gift, even if it doesn’t overtly provide the same sort of professionally relevant information their content normally does.

#1: Heroes and mentors

Seth Godin is often quoted here.  Why?  Because – according the criteria he sets in this post – he is an online hero.  Godin makes the case that the Internet is giving each of us Average Joes free and unfettered access to people who show us examples of how to be successful.  We draw inspiration and knowledge from these folks and they are everywhere.  Find yours.  Or become one yourself.

Link: Seth’s Blog

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