As such, I want to do this more frequently, and am thinking of trying to do a one-on-one coffee with someone new, every week. It doesn’t much matter who you are or what your background is (though online/product/marketing/digital/advertising types are preferred), but mainly that you are interesting and passionate about whatever it is you do.

So if you are up for grabbing a coffee (Espresso Royale on Newbury Street is my go-to spot), get in touch.

Loved this. Via David Karp’s Tumblr.

It got me thinking one day, that it’d be fun to have a machine like this, that quite literally did nothing. Or more specifically, didn’t even claim to do anything that would even be remotely of value to the user.

Rather than a machine that flashes and beeps at you under the guise of providing some love-test results, I’d like to create a little machine like this that merely asks you to deposit a quarter and then nonsensically flashes colored lights at you for 5 or 10 seconds, with no other perceived value beyond just the flashing lights. Maybe call it “The Amazing Flashing Light Machine“. The end.

I can almost guarantee, that this machine, placed in a bar, would make money.

Focus on the Wrong Metrics – A fan or a follower isn’t a business objective. Social media has enabled marketers to chase metrics that don’t impact their business. The reason for most of the discussion surrounding social media ROI is caused by measuring the wrong metrics. Reach, leads and sales should be some of the tangible metrics that are measured as part of social media marketing strategies.

Amen.

So often I hear marketers say things like “We’ve got a gajabillion Facebook fans!”, and when I ask “Ok, so now what?”, I receive a blank stare back. It isn’t just about collecting fans or followers, it’s about leveraging those open connections you’ve made, effectively. Extracting (and providing) value through that channel.

Whenever there are random numbers thrown around in our office, I always think of the exchange between Jerry and George in the Seinfeld episode The Little Jerry.

JERRY: Hey, guess what! Little Jerry ran from here to Newman’s in under thirty seconds!

GEORGE: Is that good?

JERRY: I don’t know.

Hey, I’ve got 40,000 Facebook fans! Is that good? I don’t know.

Full article here. Link via @pc4media

LOTS of good stuff in there and worth a read if you create things on the Internet, startup or otherwise. Such as…

Start by building a minimum product to ensure you can get something out sooner rather than later. Build a good foundation and add later as your product gains traction with your users. Many times I’ve witnessed what could’ve been a very nice product launch, turn into something that only the business owners thought was a success. The feeling is “We’ve worked very hard on this and we deserve to feel proud about it.” Unfortunately, your users could care less how many hours you’ve put into it. That’s why it’s important to plan well and bite off only as much you can chew.

“Perfection” is a word people don’t like to use in product meetings. It’s time to bring the perfectionists back with the caveat that the team work on less rather than more in order to achieve both a product that is elegant and do-able by the product team. In the long-run, you’re users will thank you with rave reviews and you can return the favor with frequent updates as you check-off one new feature after another.

Looks like the site this is from (Daniel McKenzie), has a ton of good info. Be sure and check it out.

This isn’t PERFECT methodology, but I find myself running through these four steps whenever deciding whether or not to move forward on something that could be risky.

1. Evaluate and analyze as best you can, but not to death. Go with a reasonable combination of gut and analysis. In the past, we’ve sometimes spent way too long (days, weeks, months) going over every possible scenario that could ever be, twisting ourselves in circles and agonizing over combinations of events that had little or no chance of ever actually materializing. Too often, we had analysis paralysis, and the result was a lot of inaction, frustration, and wasted time. We missed out on lots of opportunity, simply because we were being unreasonably cautious.
2. What analysis you do though, should include what I have been calling the doomsday scenario. Think about the expected outcome of the risk (particularly any reasonably expected downside), and then assume that EVERYTHING goes 100% wrong. How or where would that leave us? Set low expectations, or at least be mentally prepared for the worst, and be comfortable with the possibility of that doomsday scenario potentially coming true.
3. Have key metrics in mind for measuring and evaluating the results quickly. Nothing is worse than getting everyone on board to take a smart risk, running the test, and then getting blank stares and shoulder shrugs when you ask if it worked. Find a number, a behavior, some metric that you can watch and use as a determination of success. It’s even better if you can zero in on one single bellwether stat or metric that can give you quick and accurate feedback.
4. Make sure that you can quickly and easily undo your decision of it is a failure. I don’t think that it’s pessimistic to make doomsday assumptions, and as such, be ready to react if those scenarios materialize. If everything falls apart, can we revert our changes quickly and get back to where we were pre-risk?

Fred Wilson has a great post a while back about being “action-oriented”, and one piece in particular stood out to me.

“Dick Costolo, co-founder of FeedBurner, describes a startup as the process of going down lots of dark alleys only to find that they are dead ends. Dick describes the art of a successful deal as figuring out they are dead ends quickly and trying another and another until you find the one paved with gold.”

Full post is here

Van Halen buried a special clause in the middle of the contract. It was called Article 126. It read, “There will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.” So when Roth would arrive at a new venue, he’d walk backstage and glance at the M&M bowl. If he saw a brown M&M, he’d demand a line check of the entire production. “Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error,” he wrote. “They didn’t read the contract…. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show.”

In other words, Roth was no diva. He was an operations expert. He couldn’t spend hours every night checking the amperage of each socket. He needed a way to assess quickly whether the stagehands at each venue were paying attention — whether they had read every word of the contract and taken it seriously. In Roth’s world, a brown M&M was the canary in the coal mine.

Who’d have thought? David Lee Roth, operational expert.

Now this wasn’t Netflix’s fault, it was my fault. They sent me the correct disc, but I had mistakenly transposed disc 1 and disc 2 in my queue, and as Netflix does, they just shipped me the next thing in my queue. Which in this case, was not the disc we meant to have shipped to us.

ANYWAYS, my thought was that Netflix (it seems) could have some basic checks in place that look for patterns in your queue, particularly with series, that can notify you when it would appear that you are getting something out of sequence. Programatically, I’d imagine that Netflix could see that our previous three rentals looked like:

• Mad Men: Season 1: Disc 1
• Mad Men: Season 1: Disc 2
• Mad Men: Season 1: Disc 3

And based on that pattern, assume that our next logical rental would be Mad Men: Season 2: Disc 1. If Netflix then sees that the item set to ship is actually Mad Men: Season 1: Disc 2, they might send us an email, or pop a message in our queue saying something like:

It looks like the next item in your Netflix queue is Mad Men: Season 1: Disc 2. This appears to be out of order based on your recent rental history. Did you mean to select Mad Men: Season 1: Disc 1 for shipment? Click here to update your queue.

Again, the fact that I messed up the queue order is totally my fault and I’m not pissy at Netflix about it. However, I do see a way that Netflix could have saved me from my own stupidity here with what I would have thought was a totally awesome feature.

I have always hated the “opt-out confirm” step, and think that unsubscribe links in emails should be a single click unsub. This one though used some subtle placement and language tricks that I’d expect to see more from shady grey-hat email marketers, than big old-media magazines.

As most users probably do, I read the page left to right, skip over or skim most of the text, and my first instinct is to click on the button marked “continue”. Since I just clicked “unsubscribe” on the previous page, my mind is expecting at first glance, that “continue” will continue the unsubscribe process I have already started. It actually keeps you ON the list if you hit that button.

Annoying.

I pitch Mint to everyone from investors to engineers, young and old, and I do it pretty much the same way: Here’s the problem in the market place, here’s how we solve it, and here’s how we make money.

Almost daily someone will ask me (personally or professionally) what it is that our company does. I can usually explain it somewhat succinctly, but I vary the level of detail and the angle of the response quite a bit depending on the audience. As a result, I’m definitely not as clear as I can be 100% of the time, and I assume that though people nod along with my explanation, they may not always understand what it is I am telling them.

I dig Aaron’s approach here, which is basically to have a single, simple, clear pitch that nearly everyone will understand.