May 16th - Relevant Links
Friday, May 16th, 2008Sharing the links for the day:
Fun on the road?
Wednesday, May 14th, 2008This post clearly has the opportunity to be a whoa is me post, but I’ll try and not make it one of those.
So I’m officially immersed in the my spring speaking tour, 3 speaking gigs this week and at least another 12,000 air miles and additional 3 pitches before June 10 and various and sundry trips in between. I just received an email from a colleague informing me to have fun in Boston and I thought about it and I think folks who don’t travel much don’t necessarilly understand that travel isn’t fun.
The Essence of Business Travel
No matter what the location - Pheonix, Maui or Amsterdam it is still work! Typically you travel somewhere because you have stuff to do and places to be. You may be staying at the Pheonician, a four seasons or resort in some place like Banff Springs - you rarely get to enjoy the ammendities. OK sometimes you DO get to golf…
Ultimately I try my best to weave in friends and family in as possible, but it is normally a 1 out 10 type of thing since the paid gig comes first - priorities. You have to make sure your up for a keynote, customer meeting or prospect meeting at 9, so you can’t do bars with your fraternity brother until 3 AM. So while I appreciate Ed’s well wishing and fun recommendation, it is gonna be difficult.
But wait, I should have a good meal at least right?
Good Food Must Mean Good Times, Right?
A man’s got to eat and not every meal on the road is good, there is a whole lot of airport McDonald’s, more than I like. That being said, admittedly I have had some GREAT meals on the road, both on and off the expense account, but that doesn’t mean that it was fun. The general rule is that the better the meal, the more likely it is NOT on an expense account, since I’m a foodie I try and get the best local food possible. I acutally spend a good deal of time investigating place to eat, since this is typically the only thing which you can ultimately count on when on the road, since a man’s got to eat.
At the end of the day, no matter what the restaurant is - it is business if you aren’t able to eat alone. You’ll typically have customers, partners or staff members and you still have to talk supply chain or technology all night long, remain sober and not unveil your real interests. I gotta be work Jon who likes wine, boring stories and is just facinated by your latest project which has no relationship to the deal I’m trying to position or close.
Not that I’ve done the math, but I think there is actually an inverse relationship between food quality and fun on the road. The better the restaurant the more mundane the discussion - karma punishment. Too often you are forced to fain interest in stories about a kid’s tee ball league, football or the latest cool thing they did with a Seibel integration.
So while you may get good food, you’re ultimately stymied by the atmosphere. How many people who you work with or who you are selling to are people you would actually hang out with?
In closing, I do have to say the event I’m at and speaking to are some of the most interesting folks I know. The people that participate at NEECOM are as innovative as anyone in the industry and significantly improve my understanding of the stuff I do every time I attend. I am ultiamtely blessed by the opportunities I have and the people I meet, so Ed - I guess I will have fun in Boston since I will learn from the folks I see.
Please Note: Feel free to forward this to your spouse if you have the same type of discussions I have when I say good night as I leave Morton’s. If you have these discussion you know what I mean and you need to forward this as independent validation of life on the road.
May 1st - Relevant Links
Friday, May 2nd, 2008Sharing the links for the day:
May 1st - Relevant Links
Thursday, May 1st, 2008Sharing the links for the day:
April 27th - Relevant Links
Monday, April 28th, 2008Sharing the links for the day:
It’s official! I suck
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008That’s right - honesty is the best policy. So in full disclose this is Just a traffic update, yesterday was the worst traffic this blog has had since I’ve been paying attention! (Nov. 07). That’s right, celebrate the little things, because it appears y’all are transitioning to rss readers. Thanks team!
Maybe it is that no one is searching of relevant terms for what I’m writing about, so let’s highlight the top 10 search items, since we have analytics.
- bob’s ichthyosaur - A Great book and apparently the top search term.
- what is scientific management - High school students everywhere are googling.
- twing - Very cool, cool people
- mbifm - A made up acronynm, which apparently means Member of the British Institute of Facilities Management.
- calculating gross margin
- danielle pribbernow - Chick on the Check out blog, wonder if it’s just her searching on herself? Way too much traffic for a Wal-Mart employee. No I mean WAY TOO MUCH.
- dijouri - I made up this name for my second son, 12 years old. I think this IS my son searching on himself or people trying to figure out if I made up his name or people looking for movie made in 2003.
- things i am thankful - This is encouraging.
- afro - Right on.
- giggly quotes - Who searches on giggly quotes?
So if you don’t find anything interesting above interesting, perhaps one of the top 10 “trafficked” pieces, mainly produced via keywords - which you will notice via the relationships between keywords above and titles below. That being said,I REALLY am partial to the Stuck in the Middle series — and — I like the Mosaic piece the most, mainly because it plays well in my head. Yup, I’ve sucked you into a replay post, but a replay of posts everyone else seemed to like too, or at least this is 10 most visited posts here.
- Lessons Learned: What is scientific management
- 100 Things I am thankful for… – A thanksgiving post
- Spatially Relative: A community’s place… - A piece about a book I read
- About – Self-explanatory
- 5 Ways YOU can launch a Twitter stream remediation program – geeky thing I wrote and scoble called it geeky, that scoble effect is a real thing.
- Lessons Learned: How to calculate Gross Margin
- 10 Themes and concepts for YOU to blog on
- 10 Tips for dealing with the fact that you will never leave your Job
- WANTED: Social Media Antagonist
- The Death of Marketing? Mix it up.
Hopefully the new folks that have added me to your reader find some of these interesting. Cheers!
WANTED: Social Media Antagonist
Saturday, April 5th, 2008Spatially Relevant (SR), a Top 333,000 blog, is the leading Geography, Marketing, Product Management, Social Media and Live Music (GeoMaPMSMLM) blog. SR is seeing amazing flatness in our growth and seeking a little assistance in taking the SR experience to the next level.
The rapidly growing GeoMaPMSMLM segment represents a great opportunity for the successful candidate to rise to almost internet famous. Think about it - there are 980,000,000 people on the planet who profess an interest in one or more of these topics according to IDC. With only 1% market penetration you could still be reasonably obscure outside of the internet. The culture at Spatially Relevant is eclectic and unfocused, so you will have an opportunity change the conversation and stimulate new topics and editorial themes. The search for Social Media Antagonist is international and cross-network. A key focus of this position is to open new channels for SR in emerging markets and platforms, such Orkut and Xing. In short, the successful candidate must be platform and social network promiscuous.
The role of Social Media Antagonist is seen as a strategic investment by the Spatially Relevant board of directors and appropriate love and care will be provided by the whole organization to ensure success. It is as of yet undecided if the antagonist will be more of a frienemy or a straight up antagonist, this will be determined collaboratively during the conversational interview process.
Qualifications
- Will need to be a follower on twitter of @spatially prior to throwing your hat in the ring
- Should have more the 750 followers on twitter. It’s ok if they are only “internet friends”
- Should have YOUR own blog with a technorati rank of <333,000, bonus if your blog is on dungeons and dragons, science or star trek.
- Should have modest command of the English language, think reasonable grammar, but limited vocabulary.
- Should be reasonably patient for me to respond to not so witty barbs on week days, since I have a job and this is like 4th on my priority list.
- Should have a completely superficial understanding of GeoMaPSMLM topics and concepts
- Prefer that you are more emotional than logical in your social media efforts
The PERFECT Candidate must be willing support the following internet personality attribute constraints:
- Should not be mean or creative
- Prefer you NOT remind me of my grandfather or be a puppet
- Belligerent and not well thought out tweets are fine, but keep it clean - I can’t stand cussing.
- Would prefer you not do podcast or video, I just don’t have the time or talent.
- Should not be a Democrat since I would like to have an edge in empathy, awareness, logic and creativity.
- Would not have your own T-Shirt already, since I’ve got a really cool tagline I’ve been working on which would be SWEET on a t-shirt. (I even have an antagonist version/anti-tagline for the successful candidate)
- Should not be trying to make the world a better place with your social media efforts
Education
- BA in Liberal Arts, bonus points will be awared for Children’s Literature, Children’s Theatre or Public Administration majors. Non-Degree holders will be considered providing you have verifiable street cred when it comes to online antagonism.
- Degrees from Tier 4/5 University preferred (Think MAC10, regional private school or SEC)
So if you think you have the right level of medicority for this position just post your qaulifications via the following options.
- comment below
- post your response on your blog with the following Tag: SMASR
- via an email to publisher -AT- spatiallyrelevant -DOT- org, with your CV attached.
Please note: All submissions will potentially be leveraged for future follow up posts, tweets or other interactions to see if you have the right stuff and are not just “paper qualified”. Be sure to include your @twittername, blog URL and favorite band in your submission for consideration.
Thanks in advance for your quality submissions.
Compensation: Commensurate with effort
Position Type: Temp to Perm, while seen as strategic, could easily be abandoned
The Lighter Side of Geography
Saturday, February 23rd, 2008Geography is maps! Nevertheless, this parody proves not all maps are created equal and not all people read maps. You don’t have to be a cartographer, but understanding boundaries and directional relevance is a good thing.
Nation Of Andorra Not In Africa, Shocked U.S. State Dept. Reports
I always thought that the “Geography is Maps” statement had a verb tense issue, but it doesn’t. You don’t have to say it three times fast to get that, it doesn’t sound correct feeling.
Happiness for the Citizenry
Sunday, February 3rd, 2008A simple concept, put forth by a Canadian. Thanks Tara.
I think I want to be Canadian, it might make me thoughtful and improve my EQ. Want to read a cool book by a Canadian? Bob’s Ichthyosaur, this is my Top Search term to my blog, which is odd.
