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Guy Kawasaki :: Signal Without Noise (10 unread)

The Art of Laying People Off

Posted: November 19th, 2008, 1:02pm CST by GuyKawasaki

Over at the American Express OPEN Forum, I posted an article explaining “The Art of Laying People Off.” Actually, I hope you don’t have to read it.
Free Reality Check Teleseminar

Posted: November 18th, 2008, 10:46am CST by GuyKawasaki

Join me, Andy Sernovitz, Pam Slim, and Rich Sloan for a Reality Check teleseminar today (11/18/08). 2:00 pm Pacific time. Sign up here.
"What's a blog?"

Posted: November 16th, 2008, 8:02pm CST by GuyKawasaki

Ray Schraff is the person who convinced me to start a blog. He found this email (note the date!). At the time, I was running a mailing list for my book, Rules for Revolutionaries. Three years later I started my blog with this post and a brief history of mine. So much for me being an early adopter!
Free "Twitter for Business" Teleseminar

Posted: November 13th, 2008, 1:02am CST by GuyKawasaki

On November 13th, 10:00 am Pacific, O’Reilly is conducting a free teleseminar called “Twitter for Business.” I’ve read the report that the teleseminar is based on, and it’s quite good so I encourage you to listen by clicking here. The teleseminar will explain how businesses can use Twitter. The presenter is:

Sarah Milstein, a consultant on Web 2.0 and editorial strategies, and an MBA candidate at the Haas School of Business at UCBerkeley, was previously the Chief Publishing Evangelist for O’Reilly Media. Prior to that, Sarah was O’Reilly’s Managing Editor, Senior Editor, and Editor, leading the development of the Missing Manuals, a best-selling series of computer books for non-geeks.

For more news about Twitter, go here.
Literature and Narrative Management

Posted: November 11th, 2008, 12:08am CST by GuyKawasaki

Over at the American Express Open Forum blog I posted an article called “Literature and Narrative Management.” According to the New York Times, hospitals are incorporating the study of literature into residency programs because it leads to greater innovation, empathy, and communication. My theory is the same would hold true for business.
Looking for Mr. Goodtweet: How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter

Posted: November 10th, 2008, 1:12pm CST by GuyKawasaki
At 10:15 pm I discovered that I had not brought a Macbook power supply on the trip. I was in a hotel on Coronado Island, and early the next morning I was flying to an aircraft carrier off San Diego for an overnight visit. I doubted that the carrier had Macbook power supplies laying around, so I was in trouble. I posted a message to Twitter that I was in this predicament, and within ten minutes, five people offered to bring me a power supply. I took one of them up on the offer, and he delivered it to me within an hour.

This illustrates the practical implications of a large following on Twitter. In addition, of course, there is the sheer vanity of amassing more followers than your friends. The question, “How do I get more followers on Twitter?” is unspoken because admitting that you want more followers is to acknowledge that you don’t have many. Thus, you probably don’t need this advice, but you may “have a friend” who will find it useful.

Tip 1: Follow the “smores (social media whores*).” They are the folks with large number of followers and seem to be the opinion leaders (and perhaps even “heros”) of Twitter. You can get a good idea of who they are by viewing Twitterati.alltop, TwitterCounter, and Egos.alltop. There are three reasons to follow them: first, many have scripts that will auto follow you; second, you might learn something from watching what they tweet about; third, when people look at your profile to see who you follow, you want to appear that you have a clue. (*originally coined by @worleygirl who passed it to @pauladrum who passed it to me)

Tip 2: Send @ messages to the smores. They probably won’t answer you, but that’s okay. All you want to do is appear like you have a relationship with them to enhance your credibility. The theory is, “If she is tweeting with @scobleizeer, she must be worth following.” Bull shiitake logic, admittedly, but it helps. To bastardize what a famous PR person once told me, “It’s not who you know. It’s who appears to know you.”

Tip 3: Create an effective avatar. Your avatar is a window into your soul, so you need to create one that doesn’t look like you shot it with a camera phone while you were drunk. In most cases, use a simple, informal straight-up photo of just your face—not you and your dog, car, kids, or surfboard. Increase the exposure to brighter than you think it should be. Fix the red-eye. Crop the photo because Twitter is going to display it as a postage-stamp size image. If you can’t fix up your photo, send it to Fixmyphotos. Upload a large version of it (approximately 500 x 500 pixels) and let Twitter scale it down, so that when people zoom on your photo, they can see your gorgeousness and not an ugly pixelated image.

If you have access to cool image tools, then create an avatar that raises the question, “How did he do that?” (That’s the category I think my current avatar is in.) If you represent a company, then use its logo—but this is boring (sorry, Tony). Avatars with cleavage may help you get followers that you wouldn’t want, but that’s your call. Bottom line: When people view a stream of tweets, your avatar (and therefore your tweet) should stand out.

Tip 4: Follow everyone who follows you. When I first started on Twitter, Robert Scoble told me to follow everyone who followed me. “But why, Robert, would I follow everyone like that?” The answer is that it’s courteous to do so and because when you do, some people will respond to you and eveyone who follows them will see this—which is more exposure for you.

Having said this, when you get to more than fifty or so followers, it’s impossible to read what all your followers tweet. At that point, you have to focus on direct private messages (“Ds”) and direct public messages (“@s””).

Tip 5: Always be linking. The fact that your cat rolled over or your flight is delayed isn’t interesting, so get outside of your mundanity and link to interesting stories and pictures—you should think of yourself as a one-person StumbleUpon. The Twitter pickup artist’s mantra is ABL (“Always Be Linking”).

Fortunately, you don’t have to find these sites by yourself because there are companies and communities who are dedicated to this task. Here are my best sources.
1. StumbleUpon. People in the StumbleUpon community mark sites that they find interesting. You can install the StumbleUpon button by clicking here and go from site to site; you can visit the StumbleUpon recently popular websites list; or you can add this feed to your feed reader. Sample picture.
2. Alltop. If you’ve ever seen me post ten tweets in a row with links to (what I consider) interesting sites, it’s because I’m parked in front of these four Alltop sites: Psychology.alltop, Science.alltop, Lifehacks.alltop, and SocialMedia.alltop. At any of these sites you can scan hundreds of stories at a time and pick off the ones that will attact followers. (Disclosure: I am co-founder of the site).
3. CNN. CNN is hard to beat for up-to-the minute news. You’ll be competing with CNN’s own tweets which has 52,000 followers as of today, but still leaves you about five million other Twitter users to attract. Seriously, you can attract followers just by cherrypicking the best of CNN stores. To do this, you need immediate notification of breaking news, and CNN’s email alerts are as good as it gets. Click here to sign up. This is its recent stories RSS feed, but email notification is faster and therefore better for the purpose of attracting followers. Sample: “Monks Brawl Before Religious Holiday.”
4. New York Times. Like CNN, the New York Times is a lovely source for links because it provides both up-to-the minute news as well as carefully crafted, intellectual stories. This is its home page RSS feed. You can also pick from a bunch of feeds here. You and your readers do have to register, but it’s worth it— perhaps the only site that is worth registering for on the Internet. Sample: “A Political Manners Manual.”
5. Buzzfeed. Buzzfeed is a also a community of people looking for interesting stuff. You can visit its home page to find stuff or subscribe to its RSS feed. Samples: “Lunch Bag Art” and “Young People Love Obama.”
6. Truemors. This is the much criticized site that I started a while ago. I’ve subsequently sold the site to NowPublic. Like it or not, the stories at Truemors are carefully selected and highly edited. The woman behind Truemors, Annie Colbert, is an extremely good writer and editor. Its feed is here. Sample: “Facebook Tops BBC in UK Traffic.”
7. Newswise. Newswise is “a trusted resource for knowledge-based news, embargoed research results, and expert contacts from the world’s leading research institutions: universities, colleges, laboratories, professional organizations, governmental agencies, and private research groups active in the fields of medicine, science, business, and the humanities.” Holy kaw! In other words, it features hardcore science. Some stories are embargoed and you have to register to prove you’re a journalist for them, but even the stuff that’s not embargoed is very good. Its RSS feed is here. Sample: “New Generator Produces AC Current by Stretching Wires.”
8. ZDNet. If you want to push out info-tech links for nerds and geeks, it’s hard to beat ZDNet. Just about every day there’s some story that will interest the 95% of the world that uses Windows. ZDNet pushes out email notification here, and its RSS feed is here. Sample: “In Depth Look at Windows 7.”
9. Digg. Many people think that Digg is a good place to find stuff that approximately 100 forty-year old men living with their parents find interesting. I don’t use it very often because that’s not who I’m trying to pick up, but you can find many few gems there. Its main RSS feed is here, and you can find specialized feeds here. Sample: “Gears of War 2 sells 2.1 million copies on day 1.”
10. Kirtsy. Kirtsy on the other hand is “Digg for chicks.” It’s a social networking site where women post and rate stories. The stories here range from mommy/homey stuff to “Liz Hurley’s Boobs: They’re Real and They’re Fantastic” (I’m not making this up). Its links are particularly effective to attract female followers and sensitive men (oxymoron?). Its RSS feed is here. Sample: “5 Jobs You Wanted as a Kid (And Why They Suck).”
11. Techmeme. Techmeme makes no bones about it: it uses technology to find the hottest tech stories. It’s a community of one: Gabe Rivera, and he’s a good guy. Where ZDNet usually contains ITish stories, Techmeme casts a bigger net for anything tech. Its feed is here. Sample: “Google CEO on Obama Tech Czar Job: No Thanks”.
Tip 6: Establish yourself as a subject expert. One thing is for sure about Twitter: there are some people interested in every subject and every side of every subject. By establishing yourself as a subject expert, you will make yourself interesting to some subset of people.

Step 1 is to actually be an expert—but that’s beyond the scope of this posting. Step 2 is to find tweets that you can supplement (I explain how to find these tweets below in the TweetDeck and Twellow sections in Tip 8). Example 1: you’re an expert on Macintosh. Search for “Macintosh” and answer people’s questions. Example 2: you’re an expert in public speaking. Search for “Powerpoint,” “keynote,” and “speech” to add value to tweets. People are likely to not only follow you, but also retweet your posts and therefore give you additional exposure.

And if/when you are an expert, don’t be afraid to express your opinion. It’s better that some people follow you and some people refuse to follow you than no one knows who you are at all. There are so many people on Twitter that some are likely to agree with you.

Tip 7: Incorporate pictures and other media. Who can resist a tweet such as “Picture of my new puppy”? Nobody, that’s who. And your topic doesn’t have to be anything as sweet as a puppy. I’ve tweeted pictures of shower heads from Microsoft in the Singapore Airlines lounge, the world’s longest toilet flush, and two sacred cows in Mumbai to get followers, so I know multimedia works. The key is the tweet leading to the picture. Stuff like ““If Microsoft made shower heads,” “World’s longest toilet flush,” and “two sacred kaws/cows” works. (See reference to Posterous below to see how I post pictures and video.)

Tip 8: Use the right tools. At the end of the day, you either have many followers or you don’t. A good effort doesn’t count, so you might as well use the right tools to make picking up followers as easy as possible. Here’s what I use:
1. SocialToo. SocialToo provides a service that automatically follows everyone that you do. It also enables you to send them a nice welcome message. If you heed my advice to follow everyone who follows you, it’s indispensable. It can also inform you when someone has stopped following you too.
2. Twitthat. This is a Firefox button that you install by dragging onto your toolbar. You click on the button, and it grabs the link of the page you’re reading and creates a tweet with from the link. By default, it quotes the existing headline, but you already know you should blow that out.
  
  You can also create custom “actions”—meaning a snippet of text to precede your tweets. I made my custom action the simplest possible: “-”. I wish that a custom action wasn’t required, that the editing area was larger, and that Twitthat displayed a character count, but how can I complain about something that’s free and indispensable?
3. TweetDeck. TweetDeck is an Adobe Air application that front ends Twitter. You can open multiple panes on it with specialized purposes like displaying your direct messages and custom searches. These custom searches enable you to create a “dashboard” to Twitter.
  
  TweetDeck is what I use for custom searches. I have a pane with this custom search (brackets not included): [Guykawasaki OR Alltop OR “Guy Kawasaki” -Alltop.com]. This finds all instances where people mention “Guykawasaki” as well as my own tweets because they are from “@guykawasaki” and “Alltop” plus it removes all tweets with “Alltop.com” (Notice that there’s a minus sign before “Alltop.com” and you must capitalize the “OR”.). I remove tweets containing “Alltop.com” because hundreds of people evangelize Alltop news posts by using this Twitterfeed (see below).
  
  You can also do custom searches like this at the Twitter site by clicking here, but the TweetDeck interface is much prettier.
4. Twellow. Twellow is a site that categorizes people according to their interests by monitoring their public messages. Its categories include accounting, advertising, marketing, real estate, and science. You can use it to find people who are interested in the same topics you are. Here is an example of the people in the beer category (Courtesy of @ducttape).
5. Twittelator Pro. This can provide the same custom search results as TweetDeck, so I use it whenever I’m not on my MacBook.
6. Posterous. Don’t click on the link. Instead, send an email to post@posterous.com with a photo, video, or audio clip attached. Posterous will create a blog for you and post the photo, video, or audio. You can even include the HTML embed snippet from video sites like YouTube, and Posterous will embed the player. Your subject line becomes the headline of the posting, and the body of the email becomes the posting itself. Then set your Posterous blog to automatically post to your Twitter account, and voila!, you have pictures, video, and audio in your tweets. This is how I tweeted the showerhead picture from the Singapore Airlines lounge. The Posterous FAQ explains it all. An alternative for posting pictures is TwitPic. It is also quite easy to use to tweet pictures, and it is integrated with TweetDeck.
7. Twitterfeed. This website enables you to automatically post RSS feeds as tweets. I use it, for example, to automatically post all Truemors posts as if they were tweets from me. When you really trust a site’s feeds, I recommend that you incorporate Twitterfeed to reduce the burden of manually finding good content.
Tip 9: Repeat your tweets. Try this experiment: take your most interesting tweets (as measured by how many people retweet them, perhaps) and post them again three times, eight to twelve hours apart. I used to think that people would complain about repeating tweets, but I’ve never had a complaint. My theory is that the volume of tweets is so high and most people check in at about the same time every day, so people don’t notice repeat tweets.

Tip 10: Ask people to follow. That’s right just come right out and ask them to follow you. For example, I’m here if you want to follow me.

There you have it: just about everything I know and do to attract followers. If you have more ideas, please add them to the comments for this blog, and I’ll add them to my list. I look forward to watching you blow by me in the number of followers! Just remember: “Always be linking.”

For more news and information about Twitter, you can also visit Twitter.alltop.
How to Change People's Attitudes

Posted: November 6th, 2008, 1:40am CST by GuyKawasaki

I posted an article about a classic psychology experiment that shows how people can change the attitudes of others. Click here to read it. One of the main messages is that people are often persuaded when they don't expect it, so you should be persuading all the time.
How to Stay on Top of Election News: Politics.Alltop

Posted: November 4th, 2008, 1:46am CST by GuyKawasaki

If I do say so myself, here's a great way to stay on top of the election news. Over 250 news feeds updated ever hour. You might also enjoy our aggregation of Oped feeds. Click here to see Oped.alltop.
Reality Check Checklist + the Best Foreword in the History of Man

Posted: October 30th, 2008, 11:16am CDT by GuyKawasaki
My new book, Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition is now available. The cover price is $29.95. It is approximately 500 pages long--twice the length of The Art of the Start. This book is the "superset" of all my books, articles, and blogs. I wrote it to provide answers to the questions that I've been asked about entrepreneuring, innovating, managing, marketing, speaking, pitching, schmoozing, and hiring. I explain the book and my philosophy in this BNET video and USA Today article.

Reality Check Checklist

Here's a quick checklist to decide how badly you need to read the book:
1. Are you making meaning?
2. Does your product jump to the next curve?
3. Is your product Deep, Intelligent, Complete, Elegant, and Emotive?
4. Do you have a mantra for what you do?
5. Do you have a 10-slide pitch with no font smaller than 30 points that you can give in 20 minutes?
6. Have you figured out a way to take your product to market with no budget?
7. Are you helping people who cannot help you?
8. Can you blow away an audience with a demonstration of your product?
9. Would you hire “imperfect” job candidates who love what you do as well as candidates who are better than you are?
10. Are you only asking people to do things that you would do too?
Scoring:

Number of "Yes" responses:

1-4: You not only need it, you should pay full retail and have it shipped overnight.

5-7: For $30, you can fix everything you missed. Isn't preventing mediocrity worth $30?

8-10: You may not need to read the book, but you should buy it as a gift for people who don't know as much as you do.

Reality Distortion

I worked for Steve Jobs, what can I tell you? Here's some reality distortion to convince you to buy the book:

From the Seth Godin, whose current book is Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us.

“Buy two copies of this book. One to rip pages out of, mark up, copy, and tack on the wall. And one to give away to your clueless colleague. Oh, better make that three copies. Four?”

From Garr Reynolds, author of Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery.

"It deserves to sell a million!"

From "Reality Check: Guy Kawasaki's Magical New Book" by Bob Sutton (Stanford professor and author of The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Woorkplace and Surviving One That Isn't).

"I started glancing through it, and instantly, I was hooked and--even though I was supposed to be doing other things--I read it from start to finish...And even if you are rabid reader of the blog, you will want to own a copy of this book."

From Emanuel Rosen, author of the upcoming The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited: Real-life lessons in Word-of-Mouth Marketing.

“The key word in describing this book is useful. Like a good travel guide, it’s packed with smart and current advice that you can actually apply. Easy to navigate and fun to read, this is the perfect manual for business today!”

From "Jack Covert Selects Reality Check" (Jack is the CEO of 800 CEO Read).

"If you're starting a business and looking to understand the world you're walking into, you won't find a better, more honest and enjoyable guide than Guy Kawasaki."

From Published and Profitable by Roger C. Parker.

The more time I spend with Reality Check, the more I like it, learn from it, and am entertained by it; ( i.e., his description of venture capitalists acting as though they don’t need entrepreneurs: 'This dance is akin to acting prudish in a brothel...'"

From marketing coach Shirley de Rose.

"It was all I could do not to shout, “OMG! His book is a handbook for a real life! I can think of 10 people for this chapter alone.” But I couldn’t shout - my partner was asleep. So I kept reading, thinking about how I could comment on all this. But my analysis was the same for each chapter - it’s quick, instructional reading, bullet-pointed to be memorable and above all, useful. None of which is bed-time reading because it gets the motors revving and the brain whirling."

If you'd like to see what "random" readers are saying about the book, click here.

The Best Foreword In the History of Man

The last thing that Dan Lyons (Newsweek columnist and author of Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs) wrote as Fake Steve Jobs is Reality Check's foreword. It is, in my opinion, the best foreword in the history of man.

You know what I think about whenever I hear the name Guy Kawasaki? Motorcycles. It’s true. It’s the first thing I think about when I hear his name, even though I’ve been told again and again that Guy actually has nothing to do with motorcycles. So then I try not to think about motorcycles, but come on, the dude’s name is Kawasaki. What else are you going to think about? And don’t say Vietnam because that is not cool, people. Not cool at all. Guy was just a friggin kid when all that shit was going down. Anyway, since Guy is not a motorcycle designer, and also no longer a member of the Viet Cong, I try to think about something else, and usually what I think about is the fact that he worked for me at Apple back in the Eighties. To be honest he didn’t make much of an impression on me back in those days, and I didn’t really remember anything about him, but I asked HR to pull his records and apparently the only notes we have on him are that he had a habit of cutting the line in the cafeteria and that a lot of people did not like him.

Anyway, Guy worked here for about fifteen minutes but he’s been dining out on that for the past twenty years, and whatever, more power to him. His big claim to fame was that he created this notion of technology evangelism and he created this huge community of weirdo Apple fanboys who would camp out overnight to get our products and who would attack anyone who dared to criticize Apple. To this day these freako Apple kooks still worship me like a god and never let me have a moment of peace or privacy. They steal license plates from my car. Some even show up outside my house hoping to catch a glimpse of me as I drive through the gate. Basically, they’ve made my life a living hell.

So, um, thanks, Guy Kawasaki. Thanks a friggin million for that. Great job. I mean it. You dick.

So what is Guy’s new book about? To be honest, I have no idea. I didn’t read it. I didn’t even pretend to read it. I told Guy, “Dude, look, I don’t read books, okay? Books are a technology of the last century. If you want to make your book into a movie, or a podcast, and if you want to download that video or audio content onto a totally sweet iPod or iPhone, then maybe you will have created some modern content that I will consume, although, to be honest, probably not even then because I don’t need to hear your frigtarded ideas about startups or marketing or raising money or whatever because I am already the greatest businessperson in the entire history of the planet and I’ve forgotten more about marketing than you’ll ever know. Besides that I’m super, super busy and important, and I’ve got so much money that I could wipe my ass with hundred dollar bills every day for the rest of my life and I’d still have more money than almost everyone on the planet, including you, since the last time I checked you haven’t exactly been setting the world on fire as a venture capitalist.”

But I digress.

Anyway, Guy is craven enough that he doesn’t really care whether I read his book or not. As he put it to me, all he wants is a famous name to put on the cover, and pretty much everyone else turned him down and so he had to resort to calling me, and so fine, I let him beg a little bit and then I made him do some humiliating things like stand on one leg for half an hour and jump up and down and make strange noises, and then I said, Okay, okay, enough already, you total freak, I’ll write you something.

So this is it--my official endorsement. Reality Bites is by far the best book ever written about the Valley. It’s an important and necessary work, one that should be required reading in every business school in the country. I wish this book had been around when I was starting Apple in my garage back in 1976. I’m sure I wouldn’t have read it, but still it would have been nice if it had been around back then to help out all those other people who wanted to start companies but couldn’t figure out some of the more subtle aspects of business, like the fact that you need to charge more money for your products than it costs you to make them. That’s a really super important lesson, yet one that so many people overlook, especially here in the Valley. Anyway, if these incredibly super-obvious things aren’t already super-obvious to you, then you probably need to read a book like this and have someone like Guy Kawasaki teach you how to start a business, in terms that a child could understand.

And now I’m thinking about motorcycles again. Dammit! Namaste, poorly informed wannabe business people. I honor the place where your imbecilic gaze and my incredibly wise words become one. Much love. Peace out.

Fake Steve Jobs

July, 2008

How to Buy

Isn't the foreword reason enough to buy Reality Check? Here are links to do so:

800 CEO Read

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Borders
The Changing Consumer Experience

Posted: October 28th, 2008, 10:07am CDT by GuyKawasaki

Over at the American Express Open Forum blog, I posted a report by Razorfish called “FEED: The Razorfish Consumer Experience Report.” The document examines the changes that Web 2.0 and social media are causing for companies. It's one of the best reports about this subject, and you can get it for free by clicking here.