Getting Comfortable with People who Make you Uncomfortable

I tweeted this article a few months back and thought it would be a great idea to summarize the article in English and translated it into Spanish at http://glicoentrenador.blogspot.com/

Getting Comfortable with People who Make you Uncomfortable

This article gets an A+ from me right off the bat because I strongly identify with its first couple of sentences: "If you’re out to create something truly great, you’ll likely need to challenge some widely held — but incorrect — beliefs. Challenging conventional wisdom is much harder than most people realize, and those that do make us uncomfortable."

The article also says that, "It’s very challenging to make decisions based on your own information and logic when everyone disagrees with your point of view." And this is the basis that the article uses to suggest that you hire people who disagree and make you uncomfortable.

The suggested "Weird Ideas that Work" are:

1. Identify your heroes
   Keep in mind that brilliant minds in the past have made everyone around them uncomfortable because of what they were trying to achieve.
   
2. Adjust your hiring process to focus on what really matters
   "Spend more time thinking about interview-based experiments that you can run on candidates to test what really matters for the role and you might find yourself hiring a different type of person."
3. If you have a negative reaction to an idea, use the 5 Whys
   Method to get at the root cause of a problem. Let's say your computer won't start. Ask yourself why. Battery ran out, ask yourself why. and on. Obviously you want to apply this to deeper problems.
   
4. Consider increasing organizational diversity
   Diversity has greater potential for better results. Here, don't look for diversity in skin color. You want to concentrate on personality, cultural, and educational (among other) diversity.

Five Reasons why no one Likes You on Twitter

Five Reasons why no one Likes You on Twitter

I tweeted this article a few months back and thought it would be a great idea to summarize the article in English and translated it into Spanish at http://glicoentrenador.blogspot.com/

The five reasons (explanations for each reason are my own comments):

1. Everyone can see that you are in it for the numbers, not the people
   If your main goal is to have a high rank and grade on Grader or a similar service, people will see right through you and will most likely decide to not follow. Eventually, you will have no real people following you. Your followers will be bots, spammers, and auto-followers.
   
2. You understand social media, but you don’t understand how to be ’social'
   Twitter is about socializing! Yes. You should read tweets posted by those you are following and reply to tweets, post comments on blogs, and retweet (RT) when you come across something of interest.
   
3. You don’t listen
4. You don’t care about the people you want to be following you
   You must care about others! That's the key! When I get see a congratulatory tweet from someone I am following to someone I am not following and who isn't following me, I will take a look at the unknown profile and see if this person just achieved something that I should congratulate them on. At the very minimum you will have a brief chat with that person. That user has just promoted your username to all of his/her followers.
   
5. You don’t promote others
   I automatically unfollow tweeps who do not give credit via RT's to others. Let's say one sends original and very interesting tweets. Then I see two sending the exact same tweets a few hours later. Once, twice... Conisidence, but I note it. If I see it continuously, I unfollow. I also take a look at the profile of those who follow me. If I don't see them sending public messages to other users or they have there are no RT's visible, I'm not going to follow that tweep back.
   

Essentially, people want to follow those who provide interesting information, those who can contribute positively to conversations, and those who are willing to edify others. Be real, converse with other tweeps.

Take Advantage of the Power in a Patent

Today the world witnessed the true power of patented technology when i4i Inc. won a patent infringement suit against software giant, Microsoft.

You can read an article about this on Mashable: http://mashable.com/2009/08/12/word-patent/

As it stands, Microsoft (MS) can no longer sell, import, or in anyway distribute Microsoft Word in the United States. Another article I read said MS had to pay i4i Inc. $290 million for damages.

Now that i4i Inc. has defended this patent in court, they are virtually unstoppable in the XML arena.

What if YOU could be like i4i Inc. and own patented technology that everyone wants?
You can! We have over 43 patents worldwide on our advanced glyconutrients product. Recent scientific research indicates that the eight essential monosaccharides found in our glyconutritional product are necessary for proper cellular communication. It is the envy of ALL pharmaceutical and medical research facilities. Additionally, our multivitamin and multimineral product has patents on the hydroponic method and nutrient extractions used to create it. It was the very first multivitamin & multimineral product to be sold that contained ALL ingredients from a plant source.

Like i4i Inc. our patents have already been defended in court! We literally have no competition because no other company can have a glyconutritional product (and everything else that other patents protect us from).

There is no better business strategy or opportunity. Contact us today to schedule a 45 minute webinar. Free, with no obligation.

How Retailers Could Profit from Twitter

I'm fairly new to Twitter. I think I've used it for about a month and a half. And really had no clue what it was up until then. I don't consider myself to be an average user of anything, as my mind is always thinking of ways something works or how it can be improved.

Such is the case with Twitter. I have read tweets about retailers and fortune 100 companies getting on Twitter and how big biz is having problem using Twitter to advertise successfully.

I have an idea...

Most sites (Amazon, Walmart, Dell, Zappos, etc.) require that online customers have an account at their site. This makes for and excellent marketing opportunity. Amazon does an amazing job at tracking user preferences and interests to target the marketing for an individual. It is also known that now-a-days (in the Web2.0) era, consumers are interested in what other people are buying and recommending.

Here's my suggestion to online retailers (and if you aren't online, get online and do this):
Make app that will tweet "I just purchased WHATEVER from RETAILER for PRICE. Get yours at URL-TO-PRODUCT" upon a purchase.

This shouldn't be that hard to do. In fact, half the work may already be done! With TwitterFeed, all retailers would have to do is set up an RSS feed for each user. The user would have the option to add this RSS feed to their TwitterFeed.

I am an Amazon affiliate... I would only hope that Amazon would allow consumer recommendations to be tweeted in such a way that the affiliate would receive $. In other words, someone goes to a site that features books. Affiliate gets commission from purchase and Amazon tweets advertisement. Affiliate would also get, at least a partial commission, from purchases that occur by someone following the link on the tweet.

After a few days of having received the product, an option would be extended to the consumer to grade the product. This would generate ANOTHER tweet similar to the previous one but it would contain the grade.