Violate Your Schema:

Sounds dirty. It’s not.

When I say, “Violate your schema” what I really mean is, “Make you rethink what you thought to be true”.

A schema is an outline or model of things. It’s short for schematic, which is a blue print of something. Everything has a schema. For example, our schema for soup is a liquid or semi-liquid with vegetables or sometimes meat in it. Our schema for work is getting up early, traveling to an office and helping a company make money for 8 -10 hours. Our schema for driving a car, in the US at least, is to drive on the right side of the road.

When you violate a schema, you no longer follow the blue print. If a car drove itself, it would violate our schema of driving. That’s why Google’s driverless car is so fascinating. It makes us rethink our concept of driving a vehicle. Our schema is broken, and we need to form a new one. To do that we usually look for trusted input from others, which prompts conversation and dialog. After we create a new schema, we have an urge for others to adopt the new schema as well, so we tell others about it.

A Few Examples:

What would you do if you saw a homeless man trying to give away money?

How about a company who cares more about employees than profit?

A world champion sumo wrestler that weighed 100 pounds?

You would probably tell others about it. Any type of content that violates a schema has the potential to be shared. The more extreme the violation, the more people will talk.

The Right Headline is 90% of the Battle

Consider the headline I used for this post, “How to force an article to go viral”. It in itself violates a schema. You can’t “force” content to go viral. But you clicked on it, because I created a gap in your knowledge. I claimed that you CAN force content to go viral, and I promised to show you how.

Unanswered questions are painful. Even if you don’t care about Kim Kardashian, if someone says, “Did you hear what happened to Kim Kardashian?” You’re going to want to know. There’s a gap in your knowledge, and even if the knowledge itself isn’t important, the fact that there is a gap in it is bothersome. We long to find answers to unanswered questions. Hence, we click.

There you have it:

Attract a click by creating a gap in the reader’s knowledge, then violate their schema, and make them rethink what they thought they knew. Last, give them an easy way to share their new schema with others. Below are a few buttons if you would like to tweet and share the post. I’d appreciate it.

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I woke up to several emails alerting to me that Triberr was down. This sometimes happens when the database backup times out, but it’s usually resolved by the time I get up. Today was a little different in that the server was still offline.

My morning routine is very tight, and I don’t have minutes to spare, so I hopped in the shower and considered the best way to get the server online. I decided to give Rackspace a call as I walked to my morning train – which is exactly what I did.

As I stepped outside my door, I called Rackspace and began explaining what the problem was when I heard it – the train. The train was early, by almost 10 minutes! I started to make a run for it, but I had Rackspace support on the line, so I could only give a 3/4ths speed jog to try and catch the train while trying to remember my Rackspace customer ID.

I arrived at the train just in time for the doors to close in front of me. As I walked back to my apartment in defeat, Rackspace explained how serious the server failure was, and the site was not coming back online soon. In fact, it’s been almost 12 hours, and they’re still working to get things restored.

It was a miserable day all around, but that’s just part of running a business. It doesn’t matter what size company you are, there will be highs and lows for the rest of your company’s life.

If you’re a startup you’ll have downtime, hacking attacks, founders leave and investors decline meetings.

As a medium  sized company you’ll have hiring freezes, disgruntled employees, lost clients and bad press.

As a large company you’ll have law suits, PR nightmares, recalls and stock price drops.

It doesn’t matter how small or large your business gets, there will always be bad days. The question is whether those days simply delay you reaching your vision, or if they crash and burn your plane.

If it’s a simply delay, then you can always make up time in the air (raise a big round of funding, hire a superstar employee, announce a new feature at a big conference, etc). If it’s a crash and burn day, then put on your parachute and jump. If you make it out alive you can always fine a new plane, preferably one with better auto-pilot.

It’s been 24 hours, and some people are still not able to access the site. So I came up with this little workaround.

1. Go to http://triberrmirror.com/signin_help
2. Enter your email address
3. Check your email for a link
4. Copy the link and replace triberr.com for triberrmirror.com and
5. Paste the edited link in your browser

Hopefully you should now be able to access Triberr through that temporary domain we setup.

Our guest poster Amado Candelario is the SEO Manager for Apartments.com, living on the line that separates web development and user experience. He uses data analysis to drive SEO initiatives that maintain and increase organic search traffic to both Apartments.com and RentalHomesPlus.com.
No blog post in the month of January is complete without talking a little about 2012, and I won’t disappoint. 2012 was full to the brim with gifts from all the search engines, and not just the mighty G. Never before has the inbound marketing community been so directly involved with influencing changes in algorithm updates and, to some extent, linked to products created due to the impact of these algorithm updates. Before you start attacking, give me a second to elaborate. I only ask for you to mentally detach yourself from any emotion associated with a site you may have worked on that was negatively impacted in 2012 (this will only hurt for a minute, I promise).

Ready?

2012 saw the emergence of a new paradigm, one that calls for a slightly more transparent world in relation to search engines. Smaller search engines have been doing this for some time and I want to highlight Blekko for really bringing transparency to the forefront of their search experience. The difference between what the smaller search engines did and what the top search engines did is simple: The big guys gave us invaluable insight into their thought process and gave us access – however cryptic and shrouded in code names – to what they think a better internet looks like. From this, we saw the ever popular Panda and Penguin updates as well as greater importance in the role of UX and information architecture. The latter changes opened the flood gates to a richer web experience for both humans and bots.

Structured data keeps a website protected

Love it or hate it, Google’s algorithm has catapulted over our SEO moat, through the rickety 30 foot walls of Link Building and past the watchtowers of Keyword Research, crash landing atop our perfect castle made of sand. In order to defend ourselves from this assault, we must fortify the information architecture in a way that can withstand the constant barrage and ever changing assault from search engines. The simple, yet underutilized, option is to add HTML markup to the website. So the million dollar question is: Why are websites not using it?

2012 saw the emergence of a new paradigm, one that calls for a slightly more transparent world in relation to search engines.

I think that 2013 will be the year that structured data is incorporated into the make-up of fundamental SEO. This concept is no longer theoretical and, with the ever encroaching mobile threat, it will become increasingly vital to have data and content organized. I am not implying that once markup is added to the HTML rankings will instantly rise or that this is a cure-all for a poor SEO foundation. Structuring the data in a meaningful way reinforces the site architecture by sending clear and concise signals that the data being crawled can best be organized and classified as a schema. The idea here is not to think of structured data as a way to leap frog competitors, but as a tactic to prove a website’s valuable and unique data. After all, we are not talking about investing in unoriginal, shallow content.

How does one get started with structured data?

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I can say with certainty that it’s a big deal to me when the top search engines agree to support a schema for making the worlds information easier to crawl and in return, classify. I want to highlight a simple approach that I took to change the process of how pages are built at my company.

1)      Get your best developer on board

This is a no-brainer and, frankly, if you are not best friends with your top dev(s), then there are bigger problems to solve before tackling structured data. Getting this first piece in place will not only provide insight into the realities of marking up the HTML but also carry a lot of weight in the organization when that person is seen in your corner.

2)      Evangelize structured data

This second important piece keeps structured data top of mind even when you are not around. This means dropping recommendations in reports or tying the value of HTML markup in meetings (when the topic is relevant, of course) and having conversations about the great attributes available and how they tie to your business. Basically, incorporate markup opportunities into your daily jargon.

3)      Find real examples in the wild

This piece ties directly to evangelizing in that you should be taking notes and reporting on examples of competitors or other industries that are utilizing HTML markup. It differs in the sense that this is research driven where evangelizing is all about planting the idea that developing a webpage is incomplete without the inclusion of markup.

4)      Keep it fun and pain-free to implement

Don’t be a dictator about implementation by making it all or nothing. This is the last piece of the puzzle because ideally you have collected all the information in the first three steps. Let your developers do what they do best and advise where to best retrofit this idea into legacy code. Most importantly, give them the freedom to get creative and experiment. This is new territory so nothing should be off the table.

Please keep in mind that these are not rules by any means, just a framework that I used to help with the adoption of structuring data on our pages. Depending on the organization, steps 1 – 3 are completely flexible. The only one that doesn’t move is the fourth step, which is all about deliverables.

Case Study: Implementing Schema.org

I want to highlight an example of the fourth step that comes from my own experience of implementing schema.org markup. A developer and I were meeting about the pros and cons of implementing the code on a certain page when he had an idea to create item properties specific to the data we display. I had absolutely no problem with this, and I felt that this is one of the few ways that we could contribute to a better web. I reached out to Duane Forrester via Twitter to ask, in his opinion, would it be worthwhile to add schema tags that do not exist in the main document. To my surprise, he responded and said that the bots would crawl it, but until it is widely used throughout the web it will not be incorporated into the schema family. Nonetheless, the developer wanted to go full speed ahead and we ended up releasing three completely new schema.org item properties for our pages. With Searchlight, I was able to monitor the pages [full disclosure: I am a current Searchlight customer] and I have noticed a small increase in rankings over a few weeks’ time and most importantly, much less fluctuation of said rankings. This has led to an overall incorporation of schema markup on all newly created pages as well as guidelines to retrofit existing code to include schema markup.

Now what?

I have heard the skeptics, and agree to some extent that structured data sets up websites to be scraped more easily or that search engines are using our precious time to do their jobs for them. Without getting too sidetracked, I want to make the point that if webmasters are complacent with the way search engines interpret their site, then those webmasters should not be surprised when other sites, who put in the work, are rewarded with higher levels of ranking. Gone are the days of “I set up a WordPress site; Google is smart enough to do the rest.”

Chipping at small sections of the site has proven to work the best and doesn’t burden engineering resources as much as doing one large code update. There is no need to markup every single piece of data either, just the important bits that matter the most to your business. Last, boost the benefits of structured data and the security it provides by future proofing your site to your stakeholders.

Everyone’s website is different and companies vary, but hopefully there is enough here to help you start down the path of organizing the most important data on your site. Here’s to another year in the exciting world of inbound marketing…Cheers!

Please note: All guest posts are the opinion of the author and may not be reflective of the views of Conductor.

This is a draft excerpt from the upcoming book, What’s Your Green Goldfish? Beyond Dollars: 15 Ways to Create Employee Loyalty and Reinforce Culture:

Basics

1st inch - Onboarding

2nd inch - Food & Beverage,  Shelter / Space, Transparency / Openness

3rd inch - Wellness, Time Away, Modern Family

Belonging

4th inch - Recognition

5th inch - Team Building

6th inch – Flexibility

The seventh INCH

The seventh inch on the 9 INCH journey to the heart of your employees involves Training and Development. Let’s look at a Baker’s Dozen of companies that go the extra mile to build employees through T+D:

Taken from an NY Times interview by Adam Bryant with CEO Phil Libin,

We recently implemented something called Evernote Officer Training (#83). I got this idea from a friend who served on a Trident nuclear submarine. He said that in order to be an officer on one of these subs, you have to know how to do everyone else’s job. Those skills are repeatedly trained and taught. And I remember thinking, “That’s really cool.” So we implemented officer training at Evernote. The program is voluntary. If you sign up, we will randomly assign you to any other meeting. So pretty much anytime I have a meeting with anyone, or anyone else has a meeting with anyone, very often there is somebody else in there from a totally different department who’s in officer training. They’re there to absorb what we’re talking about. They’re not just spectators. They ask questions; they talk. My assistant runs it, and she won’t schedule any individual for more than two extra meetings a week. We don’t want this consuming too much of anybody’s time.”

Chicago-based online advertising buyer Centro LLC (#155) focuses on the manager-employee relationship. Centro spends a lot of time training managers.

Let’s face it: People leave companies because of their boss. We try to remove the typical obstacles (between bosses and employees) by sharing more information, by providing great training and by making sure those bosses have the right skill sets.” – Scott Golas, VP of Human Resources (Source: ChicagoBusiness.com)

Ecumen’s (#316) Velocity Leadership program is another major way Ecumen honors and empowers achievement. Each year, up to 25 emerging leaders are selected for a very thought-provoking leadership development program that includes visits to other innovative companies to learn from them, guest speakers on innovation and leadership, and other learning and personal growth opportunities. It allows employees to step outside of their daily work and lives and focus on their personal growth as a person and leader. (Source: Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal)

Submitted by Eva Lipson. In Eva’s words,

One thing at Squeeze In (#780) we do every year is a 3-day off-site management retreat, which we call Format. We get all our Managers and Owners together to review reports and numbers, discuss management styles, refresh our techniques, review our menu and hear suggestions to make it better, and most importantly bond and team build. We encourage self development and management growth by offering up books to read (including your book: “What’s Your Purple Goldfish”) and then we have them write short book reports. When they turn in their book reports, they get a cash bonus. This year we had a number of books on their list to read, and when they finished them all (and wrote reports on each), we presented them with free iPads! Also, during the 3-day retreat, we take them out to eat at restaurants (always interesting for a group of servers to go out and be served), and imbibe in a few cocktails too. We know that our Format retreat increases camaraderie, reinforces our company culture and helps with employee retention. It’s a great way for us to show our Managers how much we love them and care about them, both professionally and personally.” (Source: Squeeze In)

Training as a Competitive Differentiator

Colliers University (#5) was founded in 2002. It was truly a novel concept within the commercial real estate industry. Built on the premise that learning is a competitive advantage, CU has grown to include more than 1,000 classes and has helped accelerate the professional and personal success of more than 7,000+ Colliers professionals. The curriculum offers a 360-degree approach to learning with courses in commercial real estate, business and personal development.

CU is not only a culture driver for the company internally; it is an outwardly competitive recruitment tool, raising the bar in terms of the expertise of our professionals. This expertise directly benefits our clients and their success through better results and memorable experiences. ” (Source: Colliers)

MyLearning, the global online learning portal for Accenture (#237), boasts 20,000 learning courses that range from core training to technical training. Accenture Learning BPO Services and Accenture work together today to annually serve more than 125,000 learners through more than 200,000 classroom learning days and more than 1,000 virtual learning sessions. The team discovered that for every dollar Accenture invests in learning, the company receives that dollar back plus an additional $3.53 in measurable value to our bottom line—in other words, a 353 percent return on learning.

Learning at Accenture is changing people’s lives; it’s giving them more reason than ever to stay with us and grow both personally and professionally.”  — Jill Smart, Senior Managing Director – Human Resources, Accenture (Source: Atlanta Business Chronicle)

The Container Store (#460) puts an emphasis on training. Employees receive on an average 160+ hours of training per year. Typical annual turnover in retail is 100%, but at Container Store it hovers around 15-20%. (Source: AchieveMax.com)

Wegman’s (#507), a popular grocery store chain that started in upstate New York, trains their employees 2-3 more times than other grocery stores. In turn, turnover at the chain is only 7% compared to 19% industry-wide. (Source: Jeanne Bliss)

Tuition Reimbursements and More

Hoar Construction (#56) puts an emphasis on personal and professional development. Employees receive up to $10,000 in annual tuition reimbursement, plus Hoar offers employees a variety of courses through their internal university ranging from money management and stress reduction, to tips on building a nonprofit. (Source: greatplacetowork.com)

Boeing (#327) pays for college degrees pertinent to position and provides stock awards for degree completion. (Source: St. Louis Business Journal)

Monsanto (#481) encourages ongoing employee development with generous tuition subsidies (to $10,000), financial bonuses for some course completion and subsidies for professional accreditation. (Source: eluta.ca)

The Canadian crude and natural gas company Nexen (#668) invests in ongoing employee development through generous tuition subsidies (to a maximum of $35,000), financial bonuses for some course completion and subsidies for professional accreditation. (Source: eluta.ca)

Staying Current and Curious

Nina Hale (#284) strives to create a culture of curiosity and passion, even going out of its way to encourage employees to share information with each other. As part of that push, the company hosts weekly “shared education” meetings where an employee picks a topic to discuss.

There’s a lot of new and different skill sets, so each person brings a new area of expertise to the table,” Senior Account Manager Leslie Gibson said. “Everyone’s willing to share what they’ve learned, and no one ever makes anyone else feel stupid.” (Source: Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal)

One program at Automation Direct (#704) is called Wake Up and Learn. Between 8 and 9 a.m. four times a year, the company hosts a variety of speakers to discuss personal and professional development topics including budgeting, managing stress and healthy eating. (Source: Entreprenuer.com)

Horizon Media (#747) has introduced the “Knowledge Café,” an educational series inviting media and tech executives to talk to employees and clients. Recent speakers include Hulu CEO Jason Kilar and Pandora CEO Tim Westergren.

We program our space in a way that’s meaningful to employees. We’re always trying to figure out how to stay current with the evolution of the business, but in a timeless way.” (Source: Ad.Age.com)

Visual Training

Twice a month for two hours, employees at XPLANE (#709) meet to discuss various topics of personal and professional interest and work on collaboration, storytelling and presentation skills. “The Visual Learning School is about using pictures to help people better think about complex issues, solve problems and communicate more effectively,” says XPLANE creative director Matt Adams. “The most valued result is team building and the strengthening of relationships through learning, spontaneity and improvisation.” (Source: Entreprenuer.com)

Training while Bouncing Around

There is one program at Semco (#787) that allows people to act like entreprenuers at the company.  Called ‘Lost in Space’, it assumes that young recruits don’t know what they want to do with their lives. The program lets them roam the company for a year. They do what they want to do, move when they want to move, go where their interests take them; work for one, two, or six different units. At the end of the year, anyone they’ve worked for can offer them a job, or they can seek an opening in an area that interests them.

If neither happens… we thank them for the year.” (Source: Ricardo Semler, The Seven Day Weekend)

A Funny Take on Training

About six years ago, Steve Cody, one of Peppercomm’s (#846) founders and a managing partner, started taking stand-up classes for fun. He worked with (Clayton) Fletcher, a touring stand-up comedian, to build his chops.

“As he started doing more and more stand-up, he started to recognize that, although he was very good at client meetings and presentations, he was getting a lot better” says Deborah Brown, Partner and Managing Director, Strategic Development.

It wasn’t long before the entire management committee at Peppercomm was taking comedy training. Soon after that, everyone in the company was involved, all the way down to interns. ”For the past five years, it’s become part of our culture,” Brown says. In fact, comedy training is now mandatory at Peppercomm. (Source: Matt Wilson, Ragan.com)

Today’s Lagniappe (a little something extra thrown in for good measure) – SCUBA is an acronym for Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. Chesapeake Energy (#78) provides employees with the opportunity to get certified for scuba diving for free. (Source: The Daily Finance)

All of the examples in this post were taken from the  Green Goldfish Project. The Project is a quest to find 1,001 examples of marketing lagniappe for employees. Green goldfish are the little signature extras given to employees. They help differentiate a company, reinforce culture, increase retention and drive positive WoM. The book, “What’s Your Green Goldfish?” will be published on March 29, 2013.

Image credit Reg Saddler

I had yesterday off. I’m not sure why some companies consider Martin Luther King Jr. day a national holiday and others don’t, but ours did, and I made good use of it.

I woke up around 8 o’clock to a panic stricken doorbell slamming followed by obsessive pounding on the front door. Our over-zealous maintenance lady wanted to check our apartment’s heating system. I left our super a voicemail last week about the heat not turning on consistently, and I specifically said, “DO NOT COME BEFORE 11 O’CLOCK!”. Whatever.

Regardless of rude awakening, I was up, so I decided to get an early start on some web development work for my startup, Triberr. Dino Dogan and I have been building Triberr for almost two years now, and the time has come for a massive redesign.

We completed the graphic design portion last week, and now we’re move on to connecting the interface to our database so things actually function. My goal for the day was to get the new Tribal Stream working, and I did, but it took me 12 straight hours of coding. For those not on Triberr, the Tribal Stream is similar to Facebook’s news feed. It’s the core of the site that has to be great, or people won’t use the site.

At about 10 o’clock at night, Dino hits me up on Skype. He’s very excited about a new idea – a completely reimagined Tribal Stream. Now you could probably imagine how I felt about blowing up the Tribal Stream I just spent my day creating. Needless to say it didn’t bring a huge smile to my face, but I heard him out, and we ended the call with his usual, “Just sleep on it” closing argument. “Fine” I thought, now back to the task at hand – finishing the Tribal Stream.

An hour later Dino pings me on Skype again. He’s got a few more reasons why we should implement his new re-imagined Tribal Stream. At this point I was like, “Look, your excitement level for this is a 9 right now. Mine is a 2. We need to get within 2 or 3 points of each other for us to continue the conversation”. It’s true, I just wasn’t in the frame of mind to objectively evaluate a new, crazy idea. To me it was solving a problem that didn’t exist, and I had real trouble trying to visualize what this might look like on the site. I was the drill bit, Dino the butterfly.

Critical vs Creative

People are usually typically critical or creative thinkers.
Critical thinking is a very deep, focused way to think about problem. It involves precise, persistent analysis of the issue at hand. For example, artists who need to either write a lot of music, or perhaps finish their novel, tend to take a writing retreat where they leave behind the distractions of their current environment to a cabin or something where they can emerse themselves in their writing. Often publishers or music labels will give deadlines to their artist to raise their stress which helps produce critical thinking.

Creative thinking on the other hand is more shallow and broad. When you’re thinking creatively you start with a problem, then you move outward to look at the problem from a variety of perspectives. It’s the typical, “Brainstorming” process where no idea is a bad idea, and the goal is to get people to throw out as many ideas as possible. This usually works best with a larger group of people with diverse backgrounds, because each will have slightly different perspective.

Drill Bits and Butterflies

Critial thinking is like a drill bit, and creative thinking is like a butterfly. A good company has both drill bits and butterflies. The creative thinkers who dream up innovative new ways of doing things, but left alone they’ll have a drawer full of great ideas that never see the light of day. Critical thinkers who are great at execution and incremental improvements, but lack really ground breaking innovation.

Steve Jobs Was a Butterfly

Take Apple for example. Steve Jobs was clearly a creative thinker, and Woz was the quintessential critical thinker. Together they built an amazing company. When Jobs left Apple, they failed to innovate, and the company almost closed. After his return Apple came out with the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, iTunes and other amazing products that disrupted entire industries. Now Steve is gone again, and the company is back in the hands of a critical thinker.

Butterbits and Drillfies?

It is possible for one person to be both a critical and creative thinker? Yes… just not at the same time.

I can see this in my own life. During the day I’m a Director of SEO Innovation butterfly. I’m responsible for coming up with new, innovative ideas for our agency.

Outside of work, I’m a tech founder and lead programmer for a startup. There are bugs to fix, customers to support, and a redesign to implement. Site’s don’t improve themselves, and there is a lot of pressure to make Triberr better.

After I finish my work day as a butterfly I have an hour train ride home. I try to read a book or watch a movie in an effort to clear my mind and switch thought modes. When I get home I eat some dinner and start coding. It’s a daily metamorphosis.

Creative Thinking Environments

If you need your team to get creative, first remove them from their current task-based environment. Make sure they are well fed, stress free and in a good mood. Focus on creating fun, encouraging laugher and building trust. This type of environment is a petri dish for great ideas.

Critical Thinking Environments

If you need your team to get things done, create a critical thinking environment. Remove distractions like TV, meetings, email and IM. Outline goals, set objectives, prioritize tasks and give short, firm deadlines.

Make sure they have the proper resources to get the job done. This means things like food should be abundant and accessible. No need to leave the office for lunch, bring it in. Make sure their tools are top of the line so they don’t run into any blue screens of death. Be available to answer questions and give guidance. Nothing is worse then waiting on someone to get back to you with an answer.

Most importantly…

If you want creative and critical thinkers to work together, don’t put them in a room until they are within 2 or 3 points of each other. Switching between being a butterfly and drillbit is exhausting, and can’t be done well on the fly.

If you need people to switch gears, first evaluate the situation. Try to identify which type of thinking is best for the problem. Once you know if critical or creative thinking is required, adjust the environment to facilitate it. Introduce your team to the adjusted environment, and slowly bring the room to a boil, so to speak, so that everyone is on the same page with what they need to accomplish, and how you’d like them to think about the problem at hand.

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I’ve read them all at least once myself, and I enjoyed them so much I’ll reread each of them again this year. (NOTE: A few links are REVERSE AFFILIATE links, meaning I pass the commissions to you if you buy something. More details given near those links.)

Shark Tales

– Barbara Corcoran

I’ve long been a fan of Shark Tank. I’ve watched every episode, even the UK and Canadian versions on YouTube. I couldn’t get enough of the sharks, so I’ve taken to reading each of their books (that’s right, they’ve all written at least one book).

I started reading Shark Tails by Barbara Corcoran over the holiday break, and I finished it on the train to work this morning. Let me tell you… this book is the most fun I’ve had reading a business book in a long time.

She takes an entirely different approach by telling stories of major milestones in her career, from the very first business loan she took to selling her Real Estate Empire to getting a seat in ABC’s Shark Tank.

The structure of the book takes some getting used to. She’ll start out describing a predicament she was facing in her real estate business, then she’ll flashback to a lesson she learned from her childhood, then jump back to the present to tell you what decision she made in the predicament and how it turned out.

The 2nd half of the book is a little different. It’s more or less a recapping of the investments she made during the first season or two of Shark Tank. If you’ve seen the episodes, you’ve got the gist of it, but it is interesting to hear what she was thinking about each entrepreneur as they pitched the sharks.

I don’t usually take the time to email authors after I read their book, but I enjoyed Barbara’s book so much that I wanted to send her a thank you note. I sent my email in the morning and a few hours later I had in my inbox a friendly and warm response that made me smile.

I know Barbara doesn’t invest in many technology companies, but she is one investor that I would love to work with.

Buy Hard Cover Version -> Shark Tales: How I Turned $1,000 into a Billion Dollar Business (REVERSE AFFILIATE)

Buy Kindle Version -> Shark Tales: How I Turned $1,000 into a Billion Dollar Business (REVERSE AFFILIATE)

Venture Deals

– Brad Feld

More of a field guide than a business book, Venture Deal sheds some much-needed light in the dark tunnel that is VC funding.

The entire book is a break down of the term sheet a VC will offer you when they are interested in investing. What’s great is he comes at it from an entrepreneur’s perspective so following each complicated topic is an easier to understand explanation, and a brief note as to why it matters to the entrepreneur and whether it’s worth fighting for. After all, everything is negotiable, but you wouldn’t want to try and negotiate every single term.

The book is a must have if you’re raising money for the first time, but let me just tell you that it’s a dry read. It’s like a college textbook you know you need to read to do well, but not something you’d readily give up your Friday night for. After all, you’re basically reading chunks of legal documents, which are than explained in layman’s terms.

Don’t get me wrong, Brad is well known for his amazing writings on startups, and this book IS A GIFT in it’s own right. Just go in with the right expectations.

Buy Venture Deal on Amazon

ReWork

– Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hannsson

It’s a bit of an exaggeration, but reading ReWork is like watching the Matrix for the first time. Everything you thought about how tech startups should be run is wrong. All the rules that made big companies successful can, and perhaps should be broken. They do everything backwards and they show that it’s worked successfully for them.

What I liked the most is how the whole book is filled with new perspectives that make you rethink the way you run your startup. In fact, I would have named it, “ReThink”, but I guess that’s not as catchy. Either way, if you’re a fan of mind blowing business ideas… grab a copy.

Buy ReWork on Amazon

The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup

– Noam Wasserman

I’ve only just started reading this book today, but it’s so good that I already know I’m going to read it again.

From what I’ve read so far, the book analyzes thousands of startups and lays out reasons why they’ve failed and succeeded.

I can’t promise you’ll read it through in 1 or 2 sittings, I do think you’ll have a lot of great “ah ha” moments. Like the times when you look at a chart of data and finally realize what the problem was all along. That’s what this guy is doing, but he’s analyzing tech startups, and the takeaways will probably make you think twice about the next big decision you make for your new company.

Buy Founders Dilemmas on Amazon

Rich Dad’s Cashflow Quadrant

– Robert T. Klyosaki

I like reading Robert’s books when I feel the need for some inspiration. The same goes for Gary Vanyerchuck, but the Robert is more of a storyteller than Gary, so it makes for a lighter read.

If you’ve read any of Robert’s previous books, you know he tends to repeat himself a bit. It’s a little annoying, but it’s also an effective way of remembering things.

I’ll also add that his “Rich Dad” series is a little dated, especially his first book (this is the 2nd in the series), but the principles about wealth management are timeless.

This also isn’t much of a business manual book as much as it is a self-help book. That’s just fine for me though. Running a startup brings along with it some pretty low points, and the occasional self-help book is instrumental in getting me refocused and energized.

Buy the Cashflow Quadrant on Amazon

Your turn:

What business books will you reread this year?

I was greeted by a friendly front desk receptionist who checked me into my room. As she was processing my information she asked if I had a computer with me. “In fact, I do” I told her. She went on to explain how the Sheraton Hotel has free wifi in the lobby. “That’s great” I said, “but I don’t sleep in the lobby. What about in my room?” She responded with, “Wifi in your room cost, $12.”

“Why not give me free wifi in my room?” I said, a bit upset that the Sheraton doesn’t offer complimentary wifi. You know what her answer was? Simply, “The Sheraton doesn’t do that”.

Guess what… That’s a huge problem for me. I don’t want to watch your TV, and I don’t want to talk on your phone. I bring my own computer, tablet and phone, but in order for them to work well, I need Wifi, and I find it unacceptable that an industry built around convenience and lifestyle accommodations doesn’t consider Internet access as part of the room package.

INTERNET IS NOT A LUXURY, IT’S A NECESSITY!

Especially for bloggers! By not including Interntet in our stay you’re either taking advantage, or you don’t recognize Internet based business as legit. Either way it’s disrespectful for those who need the Internet. I’ll repeat it… Especially for bloggers!

Will Social Media Save the Day?

The very first thing I did when I got into my “disconnected” room was tweet @sheratonhotels from my room. They were quick to respond, and a few interactions later they located my reservation and asked for my email address to follow up. Great, except I never got an email.

Influencers, Your Time Has Come!

I’m not joking when I say, “Bloggers are the celebrities of the Internet” And the thing about celebrities is they have the ability to influence the behavior of others. Just ask President Obama if Clooney and Oprah played an important role in his elections.

Now when you have influencers using your service, you (Sheraton Hotel) need to take the time to understand who they are, and what their needs are. In my case, I need Internet access, and shouldn’t have to pay $12/day ($4,380) a year for it. You want your hotel rooms to resemble a night’s stay in my house, then include Wifi. Take away your tiny TV with it’s confusing remote control, and your antique telephone, and give me Internet access so I can use my laptop and tablet to get work done.

How hard is it to cross reference your guest information with their Facebook account to see if they are a blogger, or if they work an online industry like SEO, or maybe they love sharing pics on Instagram. These people need Internet more than they need a sample of body lotion.

Repent and Change

1. Pay attention to who your guests are and what they need
2. Monitor social media outlets
3. Follow through with customer service
4. Identify influencers and treat them special

Use your voice

If you agree that companies like Sheraton need to get real, and stop adding fees for Internet access, join me in a tweet:

These thoughts are my own, and in no way reflect those of my employer.

If you’ve got thoughts of your own, feel free to leave them in the comments below.

Tumblr is cool.

• It had the “retweet” function before Twitter. Tumblr calls it a ReBlog
• Comments travel with every instance of the ReBlogged post
• And, Tumblr has it’s own ecosystem of content creators and content consumers (readers and writers)

So, I think Tumblr has the right idea. Here’s why:

• The ReBlog function establishes Tumblr as its own ecosystem independent of Google, Twitter and Facebook.
• When you have multiple instances of the same post across multiple blogs the comments should be visible on every instance. That just makes sense to me.
• Being independent of stupid SEO optimization tricks, and competing for attention against big media properties on Twitter and Facebook is a battle small bloggers are not going to win.

The Problem?

Tumblr is for kids. Gross overgeneralization, I know.

Authority bloggers, and biz bloggers, who are creating amazing content and building real audience are NOT on Tumblr. They are on Self-hosted WordPress.

So, why can’t WordPress bloggers get all those cool Tumblr-like features? Well, they can. How?

Triberr, of course

Triberr provides all of the Tumblr functionality and benefits to WordPress bloggers.

Let’s check it out.

Triberr ReBlog

Let me take you through a simple process of getting awesome, new content for your blog.

Jessica’s post is now live on my blog, AND you can also see the original right here.

Traveling Comment Section 

Like Tumblr, Triberr mirrors the comment section across all instances of the ReBlogged post.

In fact, I can leave a comment inside the Read-window in my Tribal Stream, like so:

And that comment will be visible to:

• Everyone visiting Jessica’s blog
• Everyone visiting my blog
• And everyone Jessica is tribed-up with on Triberr

Check it out:

In fact, I encourage you to see this for yourself, in action. It’s like magic.

Leave a comment on Jessica’s instance of the blog post, then go to see that comment on my instance of that same blog post.

How fucking cool is that?

The Ecosystem

The problem is, the minute you take the self-hosted route you’re on your own.

You’re not part of any ecosystem but your own. And yet, the ecosystem is where the magic happens. This is why Tumblr has built all these cool features for its self.

WordPress bloggers are the most original and hard-core content creators, and yet, they had no such ecosystem. Until now.

Triberr’s mission is to tie the blogs together into one giant social organism independent of Twitter, Facebook, or Google. And we will do it transparently, and with blogger’s best interests in mind. Because we are bloggers as well. And this is only the beginning.

Add to that the fact that Triberr is the fastest, most reliable method of getting relevant eyeballs to your blog, and that leaves us with only one question. Why are you still here? Go sign up.

This concludes your emergency broadcast message. You may now return to your regularly scheduled revolution.

At work I was faced with a task… Get 5 top notch SEO articles written in 7 days. I could write them myself, or have others write them, but one way or another I was responsible for getting the task completed.

My first reaction was to write them all myself. I was mentally prepared to sit down and start pumping out articles when I realized there was no way I could write that many high quality articles in such a short time without either killing myself or churning out crap.

So I changed my approach and decided to have others write them instead

But how am I going to get 5 co-workers to write these articles on top of their current workload? Sure, I could just say, “Hey, you have to do this. Make it a top priority and get it done.” But is that really the best approach? I can guarantee it won’t be their best work, and I’ll probably strain a few relationships in the process. What to do?

Focus On The Input

What inputs would I need to write the best article ever?

Well, sleep for starters. You can’t drop nuggets of awesome on the page when you mind is wishing it were back in bed.

A chunk of uninterrupted time is also a crucial input. I can’t write a masterpiece in between meetings. I need a quiet area where I know I won’t be distracted for at least a few hours. Someplace I can put on some enjoyable background music while I convert ideas to words.

These next 4 come from my good buddy, Dino Dogan.

1) Personal experience – You’re never going to write something that hasn’t already been written about by someone else before. But what you can do is share your personal perspective on the topic. You can share your experience, and what you learned from it. You can communicate it in a new and fresh way.

2) Inspiration – It is easy to tell the difference between content that’s inspired vs. required. If you’re not inspiried to write, chances are it’s going to be bland.

3) Impact – It’s no fun writing for an audience of one. If you knew that hundreds, maybe even thousands of people would read and be impacted by your words, you would approach it with a, “Better bring my A-game” attitude.

4) Recognition – A job well done deserves an applause. Recognition is a powerful motivator, and although it comes after the output, just knowing that there’s a very real possibility of getting recognized for outstanding work is a strong input.

Make It Tangible

I looked at these inputs and decided to package them into something tangible I could give someone who would write an article for me. If sleep is an input, then let them come to work late. If interruptions are a problem, clear their schedule for a few hours and give them an office or reserve a meeting room for the day. If inspiration is necessary, setup an interview with an expert or leader on the topic. If recognition is important, I’ll figure out where the recognition should come from, and setup the process ahead of time.

By focusing on the input, I’m not just sucking the life out of co-workers. I’m investing in them. I’m giving them the tools they need to create the type of output I’d like. Now of course I’ll need the proper approval and help from others to make this package a reality, but the important thing here is the that focus is on the inputs.

Output Will Never Be Greater Than the Input

If the only input is a salary, you’re only going to get 8 hours of work. Nothing more.

Invest in your employees minds, and they will come up with creative ideas.

Invest in their emotional state, and they’ll happy and proud to do their job.

Invest in their life outside of work, and they’ll never clock out.

Invest in their success, and they’ll invest in your customers success.

Want More?

If you liked this post, you should join my tribe. When you’re in the tribe, all my posts are emailed to you. You can manually or automatically share my posts with your social networks, and I’ll share exclusive thoughts and musing that I don’t share on my blog or anywhere else. Check it out.

And leave a comment on an input/output. For example, “Want better tasting food… Use better tasting ingredients.