Conference call with Seth Godin, Keith Ferrazzi, Mitch Meyerson and Andrea Lee

Listening in on a conference call with Seth Godin, Keith Ferrazzi, Mitch Meyerson and Andrea Lee.

During this discussion I pulled out several key points that relate to me. I will start by saying,”You must create an environment where people can make the decision by themselves. People make the decision to want to join the tribe. [villij]”-Seth Godin

Through there discussions of Tribal Management I found I was a tribal manager and the group of people around me believe and use tribal management. Something my associate Arron Kallenberg would say. “Even the basket weaver is important.” Every person doing there part makes a difference and if you are not fitting into the right part a tribal manager will help you find it. Weather a part of the team or another team we will help each other to create the most successful combination.

Be successful and have more glory.

Balance will outlive anything.

Enjoy your successes by rewarding yourself.

They talked a bit about Godin’s new book “Meat Sundae”. I have yet to read it but Keith mentioned wanting to buy 25 copies for one of his current clients.

Seth and Ferazze both agreed that a book has almost turned; from something to read to a souvenir of success. People already knew what was in “The Dip” and purchased it more as a souvenir, the group suggested.  They finished by saying If you make the right offer they will come. How true is that.

The Idea is to try to make the audience come towards you as far as possible. IF you can get a person to have emotional attachment towards your company a small glance will get you 100% attention. As opposed to a person with no emotional attachment to your product – it might get a glance but not at 100% attention.

Remember your competitors.

One of the listeners asked about consulting. If you are going to be a consultant make sure you look at your competition even if it’s only so you don’t recreate the wheel – was the group consensus. It was also said,” It is better to fall into being a consultant than push yourself in.” A person should volunteer there information first to people until someone suggests paying them for it, go from there.

Be evangelic about yourself.
How am I better at this than anybody else? Answer that question and move actions towards it. Find that niche and find how you are better at that particular thing than anybody, use that as your strength.

Split less attention with less people.
Take a small vertical and own it, this will create a long tail effect that is worth it. As a consultant you are investing your time to make some thing other than you successful. Your success will show through the success of other companies and people, strive to accomplish this.

It was also said:

A CEO’s job is to make a company successful.

“Elegance is; the least amount of effort for the largest amount of return.” and to, “relax in success”.- Seth Godin

Here is a link to the actual phone conference. http://marketingmarshall.com/recommends/sethteleseminar5

My Online News Actions, stop waisting my time.

Today I got my news from, Twitter, then followed links from Twitter to the Wall Street Journal. After this, I added a blog to my iGoogle reader, Gwenbell.com actually. Where do I get my info from and where do I put it? My news sources are constantly changing, I have no loyalty to one content provider.

I have used things like Filterbox, which I have had some success with and am still playing with. Filterbox is great for getting the stuff I’m interested in to my email in-box which I love and check almost daily. I did use iGoogle religiously for a while but that was still not aggregating the content I was into, just storing what I had already put there.

I read blogs and I appreciate by peers blogs and the blogs they read, how do I get to those blogs. Is it a discovery action or a recovery action? It is definitely some sort of combination, by what percent, it is hard to tell.

Social Graph; Villij – mini – conference

Villij has been helping to think through social graph issues. Several companies from around the Boulder, CO area met a while back to discuss how to handle the problems that may arise. Below are some tidbits from  Brad Fitzpatrick’s proposal on how to approach these social standards.

  • Public data only. “The focus is only on public data for now, as that’s all you can spray around the net freely to other parties. While focusing on public data doesn’t solve 100% of the problem, it does solve, say, 90% of the problem at 10% of the complexity. Private data can be added later, perhaps at a higher layer. For now, only public data.”
  • Friend data only. “In addition, the focus is primarily on friend data, not data like photos and not Date of Birth, Hometown, Interests, etc.”
  • Cooperative sites and uncooperative sites. “There are both cooperative sites and uncooperative sites. Almost universally every small site I’ve talked to wants to cooperate, realizing their graphs are incomplete and that’s not their speciality… they just need the social graph to do their thing. They don’t care where it comes from and they don’t mind contributing their relatively small amount of data to making the global shared graph better. Uncooperative sites, on the other hand, are the ones that are already huge and either see value in their ownership of the graph or are just large enough to be apathetic on this topic.”
  • Need to support many different standards. “The world won’t switch en masse to anybody’s social networking interop protocol, pet XML format, etc. It simply won’t happen. This must all work supporting any and all ways of data collection, change notification, etc…”
  • Must not require a download. “Requiring browser add-ons or other end-user downloads is a nonstarter. This all must run primarily on the web.”
  • Not auto-syncing. “It’s recognized that users don’t always want to auto-sync their social networks. People use different sites in different ways, and a ‘friend’ on one site has a very different meaning of a ‘friend’ on another. The goal is to just provide sites and users the raw data, and they can use it to implement whatever policies they want.”

Hike to Royal Arch on the first day of snow.

Brett and I hiked the Royal Arch trail today. It was breathtaking. The mist added something wondrous to the hike. It really reminded me of Bellingham, WA which I miss dearly.

Where the cool companies are located.

The DEMOgala went well for Villij. The accommodation’s were spectacular both from the DEMOgala people as well from the Grand Hyatt. At one point I mentioned I was thinking about using a router, by the time I came back to my demo area there was a router plugged in and working.

I remember showing one fella Villij and told him we were from Boulder, he said,”Of course”, I said what do you mean, he said, “all the cool companies are from Boulder”.

Sweet news, Villij was invited to DEMOgala

Hey yall,

Just wanted to share our excitement, Villij has been invited to DEMOgala.

Here is a short Mission Statement by the fine people at CSIA. CSIA is directly connected to DEMOgala.

The mission of CSIA is to foster innovation and a positive growth environment to enable the technology industry in Colorado to compete on a global basis. CSIA is the voice of Colorado’s technology community, connecting member companies in their fields and building recognition of Colorado’s IT industry as a global leader in technology development and application.

I got the Runs…on.

About two weeks ago I started to increase the amount of exercise I do. I have always been athletic; at certain times more, others less. What usually ends up making me get my move on is how lazy I feel when I don’t work out.

I started posting when and where I had exercised when I got back from my adventure. Then started posting when and where I am going to work out the next day. We are now into day five of these postings and today we had a crew of three; myself, Nita and Andrew Hyde.

The last two days we have met at Paradise Bakery at 7:50 am. For any that have an interest in seeing where the next runs and other adventures will be happening follow me on twitter.

Just to be clear, Nita had much influence in getting these workouts to happen.

Reference material for LSA on Villij.com

As many of you know, Villij is focusing a large majority of it’s time to discovering the possibilities LSA has to offer. Here is a short list of reference materials that I have put together about Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) from my tag cloud on Villij. I will add to this list periodically.

This is a snippet from;

TelcordiaTM Latent Semantic Indexing Software (LSI):
Beyond Keyword Retrieval

One aspect of the problem is lack of precision — on average 50% of the information retrieved will be irrelevant, and this is quite evident to users. Another problem is recall failure — you often retrieve as little as 20% of the available relevant information. This problem is much harder to grasp, since you don’t know what you are missing! Yet, it is very important for searchers and information providers alike.

Running in Chautauqua Park

Goodness, what a slog. I ran Royal Arch trail today, I would suggest this to everyone, maybe not to attempt to run it but to hike it for sure. When I ran to the trail-head I had two options option one; head to Flatirons 3 and 4 or, option two; do Royal Arch. For some reason I thought Royal arch would be a bit less intense, WRONG. The majority of the trail was rock steps, yikes – my legs are burning.  I ran past many people that thought I was crazy (this happens a lot, even when I am not running up hill). It was so gratifying getting to the top and seeing this massive arch, OMG – it is almost a monolith.  I wanted to do the run again right after I got back to my car, it was beautiful.

Climbing in Eldo

Steve Connolly, Ben Brightwell and I went climbing in Eldorado today. It was very fun. The first climb Steve lead and top roped. I think the climb was called center line. At any rate, Ben nor I could bag that one. We reset and Steve lead a 5.8. This one I bagged but Ben did not. I am excited to get back into climbing I have re-found the climbing bug. To be honest I have re-found my athletic bug. A person can function so much better cognitively and athletically when they are active – not like this is new information – but it is easy to not work out and get distracted.

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