Rebooting with Mitch Joel’s new book, Ctrl Alt Delete

I’d like to start by sharing a bio on Mitch, but there’s entirely too much to list. If you’d like some background and context on his experience and qualifications head over to the Google. There you can find his blog, books, HBR posts, podcast, previous speaking engagements, AdAge Power 150 Ranking, and lots of other things that will solidify his eminence in the marketing space.

In Ctrl Alt Delete, Mitch draws upon his client experience, research, and network to synthesize a slew of environmental factors that will impact businesses and individuals over the next five years. He tackles business and individuals separately in the book, but there’s a mutual inclusivity that never really allows them to stand apart. In Reboot: Business, there’s (as expected) a focus on media, digital technologies, data science, and mobile. In Reboot: You, he expands  the scope of the book to address the need for a digital first posture, what a career path looks like today (hint: non-linear), the characteristics of successful squigglers, how to spur innovation, blending work and life, and the new realities of marketing yourself.

Mitch finds a way to cover the breadth of topics in the book with ease, and shares a multitude of examples to bring the lessons to life. As a business civilization we’re merely on the cusp of where Mitch says we are heading, but the predictions align with the daily business concerns and research firm reports that popularize LinkedIn headlines today. If you’re following the likes of @JayBaer, @CC_Chapman, @TheGrok, @KenBurbary, @briansolis, @cspenn, and others, the content won’t be a major revelation for you. But even if you are following them, the book’s a great synthesis of many issues brought on by the digital revolution. It highlights the expansive impacts of modern business chaos, and offers actionable advice to help you reboot for success.

I don’t want to steal the thunder of the book, but I do want to enlighten you a bit more on the topics that you will undoubtedly want to read in more detail about. I reverse archetected an outline of some of the key concepts of the book, and added in a short description (my interpretation) of each piece.

For Business

Utility based direct relationships with all customers - Every business has the opportunity to reach each and every customer to and tell them about their products and mission. It will be key for businesses not to just sell, but to satisfy customers through utility and value adds. This will break most existing ROI models and agitate shareholders.

Passive and Active Media : Blasting vs Touching - There’s media you engage with, and media you absorb. Different communication techniques work better for different kinds of media. Don’t be the business that uses the same message  and delivery frame across all media.

Data convergence : Linear and Circular - Analyzing your purchase funnel is great. But cross analysis with circular data from digital media engagements adds depth and nuance to the results. As big data allows for high volume, mass variability, to be processed as maximum velocity, the ability to link complex data types allows you to understand better, test faster, and win more.

Privacy and Relevancy - Customers hate ads. Well, they hate irrelvant ads. Along with mass data, comes mass personalization, amid privacy concerns. The key is finding the sweet spot that over-delivers in an Amazonian kind of way.

Multi Screen World to a One Screen World - The screen that matters, and the one that you should be buiding for is the one in front of you. TVs get smarter. Smartphones have impressive processing power. TV shows are distributed online. Podcasts that are TV quality. Magazine articles look like blog posts. Collections of blog posts read like a book. What we end up with is that video is video, text is text, audio is audio… regardless of channel or medium. The only distinguishable difference should be the architecture of the platform it’s delivered on.

Mobile as a platform, not a channel - This isn’t about making your website look good on mobile. Don’t shrink the screen. Revisit the capabilities of the modern smartphone and build your offer to take advantage of connectivity, geo-location, audio/video capture, gyroscopic motion, etc. Connect the utility you offer through the capabilities of the device.

For You

Digital First Posture - The closest device to any customer is the one in their hand. A phone. A keyboard and mouse. Digital technologies are hard to fathom if you haven’t been engrossed in them, and will be a big problem for aging business leaders who don’t immediately understand the opportunities and challenges associated with it.

Gold Watch Mirage - It used to be that you’d get a job, move up the ladder, work hard and were rewarded with the trophy of literal gold watch. Not anymore. Companies are less loyal to employees, and vice versa. The linearity of a career path has gone away.

Adapt or Die: The Business Squiggle - Businesses need employees that embrace the squiggle of career. A willingness to learn and reinvent. To innovate and revolutionize. Again, threatening to shareholders who cling to stable revenues and profits, who will put walls up to block the revolution of squiggly employees. Those employees will leave, and revolutionize elsewhere. Which feels like the safer career choice?

Characteristics of a Squiggly Employee

• Ability to Change
• Willing to Disrupt the Flow
• Artistic View of Work
• Willing Revolutionize the Framework
• Appreciate Solitary Thought: A loner

Innovation from Collisions - Innovation happens when silos are removed, and opportunities are discussed across functional roles. Where individuals with a specialty and broad intellect can explore and ideate with others who have thier own specialties. Innovation comes from horizontal thinking and connecting dots that others don’t see.

From Work/Life Balance to Work/Life Blend - Portable work has killed the 9 to 5. Balance implies one vs the other. Mitch contests we now blend. The right blend depends on how successful you want to be.

New Realities of Marketing Yourself - We’re now on display 24/7 through social media outlets. While a LinkedIn resume is nice, it’s not nearly enough anymore. You need to exude thought leadership through a blog, demonstrate a network, and show that you understand the industry through links and comments. And there’s no room for narcissism, dishonesty, or being fake. Call it your personal brand, or your daily pitch, either way these actions are necessary for you to win immediately.

And as always, there’s a “what’s next” section where Mitch talks about issues coming a bit further down the road. To find these out, you’ll have to pick up the book (like you weren’t going to anyway).

I’m a big fan of Mitch’s work, how he thinks, and his earnest expectation of marketers to do better. It goes without saying that I think Ctrl Alt Del is a book everyone should read, either to enhance their awareness of the coming environment, or to connect a little bit more deeply with the holistic impacts of a digital first environment. The book comes out May 21, but you can pre-order from Amazon today.

What do you think? Does it feel like he’s right on? Have you experienced the squiggle in your own career? Lets talk about it in the comments.

How “Cutting the Cord” Cut Me Back

Getting Out the Wire Cutters
In January, I suspended my DirecTV service. If you’re with DirecTV, you can actually turn off your service while maintaining your account. You don’t pay any bills for the selected duration (max of 6 months), you keep all of your equipment, and when the service comes back on it’s like nothing changed.

I suspended my service for a couple of the most common reasons: 1) I wanted to cut my monthly bills, and 2) I wanted to try out the cable free lifestyle. I’m a sucker for technology movements, so being one of the cool kids on the block that went cable free was right up my alley.

My plan was to replace local stations with free antenna tv, and replace cable shows and series with Netflix. The only problem, as cited over and over by hundreds of curious cord cutters of others was not being able to replace sports with any quality online option. While there are some ESPN options, the internet only sports content is mostly hogwash.

The good news is that (to date) we’ve been happy and have hardly missed TV at all. We’ve found that our need to DVR dozens of shows was unnecessary I’ve learned that there are few specific shows (Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, etc.) that I care about investing my time in. Because of this, the purpose of TV in my mind is less about “needing to watch my shows” and more about “wanting to just watch something”. And once you realize you’re just watching something, the whole prospect of TV in general is less appealing.

Oh, Hello Bill. Wait, What are These Charges?
Every month we get our bill and it’s something like $70. That’s the internet only no-promo rate, which is way too much for the service. However, since it’s the the quickest speed I can get in my area I stay with it. I’d had a promo price to begin with years ago, but I haven’t bothered comparison shopping since the promo expired because CenturyLink can only offer 7 Mbps to my home. Pretty sad for a neighborhood that is only a decade or so old.

So when my March bill arrived, it shocked me. The total due? $110. Not enough was the already overpriced $70 bucks a month. I now had $40 of surcharges on the bill too. WTF?

I decided to do some research into why I would have usage charges and found out that my ISP has had a rate cap on internet bandwidth since Aug 2012. The package I have available to me allowed me to use 250 GB. According to their pricing, for every 50 GB over that, they add a $10 surcharge.

At this point I realized that I needed to research how much data I’d been using since I cut the cord. Unbeknownst to me, my ISP does offer a feature-weak “Usage Meter”. I went to the site which requires more info about my account than I knew or had immediate access to. By the time I’d gotten all the required info, I was fired up at the process. The good news? None. The site didn’t just “work” after logging in. Evidently it needed time to calculate my usage, so I had to go back the next day.

HOW MUCH Data am I Using?
Once I made it into the Usage Meter I gasped. My actual usage was WAY above my expectations based on what I had been charged. My usage in January was a seemingly paltry 150 GB. But Feb and Mar were almost 800 GB EACH. That means according to standard pricing, my bill should have been something like $170 for February. OMG! I haven’t seen my March bill yet, but I’m hoping whatever they used to calculate February applies to March too.

Let’s pause for a moment to think about that pricing. A “should be” price of $170 a month, for internet service with an average download speed of 6-8 Mbps. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful that for whatever reason my bill was for far less, but wow.

We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Data Allowance
So as it sank in that I was going to be paying $170 a month ($2,100 a year), I decided I should be looking at ways to cut the cost of cutting the cord. Either that, or completely alter our media consumption patterns.

My first stop was to check out my ISP’s internet only packages. I was actually excited for a minute to see that there were options bigger than my “Prime Internet 15 Mbps” service. My ISP’s Ultra package offers faster speeds, and bigger data allowances. Surely I could just pay more for the Ultra package, even without the speed increase? Nope. Il nes possible. Unfortunately for me, My ISP maintains that data allowances are tied directly to the high speed packages. There’ll be none of that “satisfying for 800 Gbs of HD video delivered at 7 Mbps. You can only have THAT big of allowance if I know you’re going to unnecessarily suck it faster at 20 Mbps! Mwwaaahahahaha” (Mwwaahahahaha added). I tried to talk with my ISP’s Twitter support personnel (which I also blogged about), but their responses were canned, scripted, and aside the point. It was a really good example of how to use social media to run your customers in circles though, so they have that going for them.

The Cord is Going to Be Harder to Cut Than I Thought
So what have we learned Sethy Brown?

• Because higher speed packages are only available in certain geographies, and because my ISP offers no way to allow lower speed customers to have higher allowances, the only options for cutting the cord are paying ridiculous overage fees, or changing your consumption patterns.

• I thought that cutting the code would be a simple financial savings each month for my family. Turns out that we could actually waste our time watching DirecTV content for the same price.

• The big warning to anyone cutting the cord is to check your rules first. Don’t think you’re guaranteed to save money each month. Research your usage, data caps, overage pricing…. all of it. Be informed!

The biggest decision facing me now has three options: 1) Watch far less streamed video content, 2) Keep watching the same and pay for the overages (approx $100 p/month), or 3) Turn DirecTV back on and go back to old consumption pattern (Hello Tara Perry).

I’m learning towards option 1. Not having cable/sat has helped me come to realize that if I could replace what we’d watched for years with little pain, what we were watching must not have been that valuable. It’s starting to sink in that “TV” is merely the most passive media experience we tend to enjoy. And while passive media has a purpose, I’d much rather my family spend its evenings and weekends reading, playing, and/or creating.

So what do you think? Do you have an experience cutting the cord? Been bitten by data caps or something else? Let’s year about it.

Did I Just Get Social Media “Script Raped”?

I spent some time chatting with my ISP yesterday about their services. I had a fairly simple question about available packages, and how I could increase my monthly data allowance (which I didn’t know existed until last weekend – more on that later). Evidently their rules, and the systems and social media policies that are dependent upon those rules, aren’t built to handle questions that challenge protocol. I honestly felt like the mouse at the end of the cats paw, being toyed with and tossed around. I just wanted an answer as to why I couldn’t subscribe to a more expensive package for a bigger data allowance, even though the speeds in my area aren’t the speeds that they tout alongside the higher allowance packages. The speed available to me shouldn’t limit the amount of data I’m allowed to use without paying a penalty.

Tell me what you think. Did I get “script raped”? Was the person at the other end of the conversation basking in the enjoyment of driving me insane, only to top it off with an insincere ”Have a great day!”? Felt like salt in a wound.

Being Productive

I’m a regular listener of the new(ish) podcast The Work Talk Show, hosted by Nick Westergaard and DJ Waldow. If you haven’t checked it out, go back and listen to a couple (iOS link). Nick and DJ approach their podcast from a different angle than most marketing professionals, by interviewing “wicked smart” guests like Seth Godin (I shouldn’t have to link that for you people) about how they work, not about how they market. It leads to discussion of and around marketing, but it’s framed differently and thus more enjoyable than the 600 other marketing podcasts.

The most recent interview (episode #23) at the time of this writing is with Julien Smith. I believe Julien to be one of the most productive individuals on the planet (just spend some time looking him up and you’ll think so too).

During the discussion, Julien lays out his workflow for managing his productivity. I was amazed that his take on GTD, which i don’t recall if he said is purely modeled around GTD or not, is very similar to my productivity system at home AND work. I decided to put my workflow into Visio so that you can see it in action. There are similarities between Julien’s and my perception of how to prioritize work each day.

Simply, there are three levels of priority:

1) Planned events on the calendar. These can be recurring daily activities, one time meetings, dedicated work time for a specific task, and everything in-between.

2) Tasks due today. These are the things that will label you as a failure if you don’t complete them today. They can be deliverables for clients, paying bills, or tasks in a project that future items on dependent upon.

3) Tasks due later (with a due date or not). There are the project tasks that aren’t due until later, longer term goals or tasks like “plan remodel of the bathroom”.

As I’ve tuned my productivity method, I’ve managed my buckets like Julien does too… with multiple apps. An app for my calendar (Sunrise), an app for my immediate tasks (Astrid), and an app for long-term tasks (Evernote). I have a different system at work using Lotus Notes (yuck), but it isn’t portable and can only be accessed via VPN (yuck again).

Something that is fundamental of the application ecosystem however, is consolidation. So when I hear someone say they use three apps to manage their workflow, I see BIG opportunity. I’ve actually doodled a recurring idea a couple times the last few months about a consolidated GTD app that’s built around my framework.

I know Mailbox right now is dubbed at the GTD/Inbox Zero champion, but I ditched it after a few days. It didn’t fit MY system, so the pretty overlay for Gmail only had to go. I know Astrid has a lot of the task functionality that I need, but it’s missing the input components from a variety of email providers (even though it does great with its Google Chrome integration). The last piece of the puzzle is document storage. Again, Astrid does this in the paid version, but I need it integrated into my existing doc cloud. Since most of my tasks have doodles and mind maps associated with them, along with multiple email strings, photos, and other items. Until a single app can handle the entire flow of my productivity system, I’ll likely stick with what’s working. Although it does look like Dropbox might be making moves in the space with its acquisition of Mailbox.

A quick doodle of my dream app (if designed by a well to-do middle schooler [because that's my skill level with app development]) would look something like this:

Note: There would be actions for each email allowing for deletion, archiving for search, add to calendar (new or append to existing), add to task list (new or append to existing). Tasks would have a complete, view archive, and add to calendar button. The calendar would list scheduled items, and reference back to task lists during free time.

Emails from Mom and Wife feed the urgent task to confirm the trip, which leads to the new task connecting with old buddies. The other email feeds a long term task for a client project, which will eventually end up in the calendar with links to the email string and any pertinent docs, It’s not the most well thought out app I’ve ever concepted, but hopefully it makes sense.

I don’t have the coding chops to make any of this happen, but maybe there’s a dev out there that will see this post and try to beat one of the current leaders in the space to the punch… or maybe there’s someone who will build it just for me. What say you Tim Hibbard (creator of EnGraph Software)?

Netflix Won’t Replace “the cord” Until It Does This

I turned off DirecTV in January. So far, six weeks in we’ve gotten pretty used to antenna TV and Netflix. But there’s something that I’ve noticed that I miss with Netflix.

You know that feeling on a late Saturday afternoon when you turn on the TV without a specific purpose? There’s no new episodes of your favorite show on, and you’ve burnt through your DVR (assuming you still have one)…

You end up surfing.

Aimlessly punching the up and down buttons, riding the cable elevator. When I do this, I usually end up with the same result. Rather than discover something new, I end up landing on something like Happy Gilmore, say, during the part where he’s learning to put at the mini golf course.

You see, that works for me. I know the back story. I’m caught up, and immediately engaged. I might only have 10 minutes, but it’s an easily invested 10 minutes. No figuring out the characters, or the guessing the plot. And I don’t have to worry about leaving after 10 minutes, because I know what happens.

So how does Netflix mimic that? Easy. They toss up a button that plays a random movie (one of your highly ranked favorites perhaps) at a random spot. Don’t like? Try again. This simulates changing channels, which might seem like an unnecessary pastime, but it’s a behavior that’s engrained in us.

They could do something similar for series that I like. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted a ” Play a random Arrested Development” button. It’s commonly asserted that a person has a hard time choosing between more than three options. Well then choosing from five seasons with 14 episodes each is nearly impossible.

I’m sure some people would argue against aimless channel surfing, but then, you’d have to argue against human nature. We like to sit in the comfort zone of the content we know, why not make that a single click process?

BONUS – Two more things Netflix should do:

1) Enable a social sharing function that would allow you to drop a video in a friends queue.

2) Let me use more than five devices. With 12 smart devices in the house, I’m constantly having to authorize one device, only to unauthorize another. I’ll even pay extra to have this option.

Clever or Deceptive Email Trick from JCP?

I received an email from JCP Rewards moments ago that caught me off-guard. Just by opening the email I “opted in” to their rewards program. Is that deceptive, or streamlined?

Note: There was an easily accessible opt-out in the body text.

A Graph Search Thought for Brands & Page Owners

For a long time, a Facebook like has been a public demonstration of someone showing that they value something. And for years, people have clamored for a Dislike option as well. Facebook has never given in though, and has avoided much “Troll”ery on the site. However, the problem is that by focusing solely on the the Like, Facebook has subconsciously created a false dichotomy of either Like, or Dislike.

Alternatively, one’s value in a product/service/brand (pbs) is almost always scalar, and deserving of additional categorizations; Like, Dislike, Impartial, Inexperienced. Simplifying categorizations down to Like/Dislike eliminate any measure of magnitude, and grays the lines between dislike/impartial/inexperienced.

The problem I see with today’s announcement about Facebook’s Graph Search is that emboldens the line between Like and everything else. As it’s adopted, users will limit their consideration sets of products/services/brands to those that show up in “my friends based” Graph Searches. Thus, if your pbs isn’t Liked (or liked enough to push to the top), it’s perceived that you’re NOT liked or, worse, don’t EXIST. Yikes.

There are similarities to plain old search rankings and “If you’re not on the front page, you don’t exist”, but with normal search there’s still a chance that someone will go through a few pages and notice you. You’re not omitted. With Graph Search, if you aren’t liked in a circle of friends, you will not show up. Period.

That creates even more necessity for page owners to generate and maintain Likes, and could detract from the even more important responsibility to build relationships with your community. It’s paradoxical if, like most others, time is a limited resource for you. You end up prioritizing campaigns to generate Likes against those the build community and strengthen relationships. Kind of feels like we’re going back to 2011.

As a user, I think Graphl Search will be useful and enlightening. As a Page Owner, i think it will create even more headaches for managing and deriving value from a presence in the Facebook ecosystem.