Welcome back! It's good to see you again. Please note that I am now publishing all new material at my hub site: In Context Blog

Hugh McLeod is working on re-creating the “Thresher” virus in a new campaign to promote Stormhoek wine. My UK readers will appreciate this:

Download the Thresher Coupon here

You’re it, man, you’re it.

By Now many of you will have read about the new advertising system over at http; SquidOffers. If not, here is the scoop from The Mighty Godin (long may he reign):

So we invented SquidOffers, which I hope will work for us, and which I fully expect will show up in other places soon. The idea is to combine the voting mechanism of Reddit or Digg or Plexo with the text ad mindset of a Google ad. But instead of an ad, it’s an offer.

Make an offer. Pick a category. Pay a small fee ($100 a month). Then, our users vote on the offers. Get a lot of votes and you rank more highly, which means more clicks. And you don’t pay for the clicks.

Now there’s an incentive to write better and better offers (but they need to be genuine or we boot you). Offer a free sample or a free issue or a consult or an ebook. Be generous. Get permission to follow up.

It was intriguing enough that I set up an offer as soon as I read about it. The offer went live Monday. See it here. What do I think?

* It was easy enough to create and pay for my offer (paypal).
* Choosing a category is hard, and I made a mistake with the category my offer is displayed in but there is no mechanism to change it
* Initially our paid-for offers were competing against entrenched place-holders, they have been zeroed now
* Offers are not particularly visible, only the top 5 display at all, and the best screen real estate is given over to adsense. The bottom offer will be below the fold on many monitors.
* There is not much voting action. I am lucky my offer is (was?) among the most popular but I had to ask for votes on Darrens blog comments to get them.
* I can’t see any incentive for people to vote up offers. It might be an idea for a vote-down button for people to junk spam, of course this would create its own problems.
* You should be able to see who voted. Right now it is way open to abuse.
* The advertiser screen is hard to find and pretty much useless. It only shows your offer, run dates and a delete link. Where are the visitor, page view and click-through stats?

This post at Gaping Void is a must see:

Edelman have kindly asked me to come to their London office today and give a talk about blogs and post-Cluetrain reality for one of their clients. Here are my notes:

SETUP:

1. I’m not here to tell you about your business. You already know it’s a jungle out there. You already how hard it is to fight out there, just to earn a few pennies on the dollar. You don’t need me reminding you of that. What I would like to do, however, is pass along what I’ve learned from blogging, and explain where I think it can help your cause.

2. To me, The Cluetrain is the most important book about the internet ever written. Why? Because it was the first book that talked about the internet the way it REALLY is- i.e. people talking- as opposed to the way business and the media pretend it is- i.e. people buying.

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.
I’ll be blunt: In marketing terms, I don’t think anyone can truly understand the internet until AFTER they’ve read The Cluetrain. Highly recommended.

3. Nobody cares about you. That last sentence terrifies a lot of corporate types. We grew up thinking corporations and the media was all-powerful. That all a guy in a suit needed to do was snap his fingers, buy some TV commercials, and suddenly the masses would line up in droves, begging to buy your product. Seth Godin calls this old world the “TV-Industrial Complex”. Those days are over. We’ve got too many choices. We are over-programmed and oversupplied with great choices already. In the future, the companies that will win are those that can rise above the clutter. To rise above the clutter you have to offer something remarkable; something worth talking about. A great, award-winning TV ad campaign for a lousy product won’t cut it any more. People have gotten too smart. And like The Cluetrain says, thanks to the internet, they’re talking to each other.

4. You’ve already done “efficient”. We’re living in a post-efficiency world now. We already know how to make things better, cheaper and faster than the previous generation. We already know how to squeeze our suppliers till the pips squeak. We already know how to build systems that maximize profits at every stage of the production and selling process. We’re already outsourcing our stuff to China, and so is everyone else. Been there. Done that. So where does the growth need to come from? What needs to happen, in order to save your job?

There is a lot more, go read it all. Then print it out and carry it around with you. If you are not familiar with the Cluetrain Manifesto, the 95 Theses are here, and the rest of the book is here.

This is a very important book for the knowledge worker, possibly the most important.

An amazing connection exists between a book written in the early 17th century and the philosophy of Getting Things Done. The Book of Family Traditions, written by Yagyu Munenori is sometimes called a companion volume to Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings. Focusing on the technical and spiritual elements of swordmanship and martial arts, these books provide strategies for those who wish to learn about the elements of conflict in order to succeed. The Taoist and Zen aspects of these works are secondary to their nature as manuals in training your mind and body to be in harmony.

As David Allen writes in Ready for Anything, “You Have to Do Something to Know Something”:

The development of real knowledge requires intentional activity…as you faithfully move your body, your thinking, and your spirit, things will unfold that would be inaccessible in any other way.

This very same approach is described clearly by Munenori in the scroll known as The Killing Sword:

…Mental preparation is essential. If you do not think of your adversary in the aggressive mode, the techniques you have been learning all along will be of no avail once you are attacked with great vehemence the very instant the duel starts.

Once you have faced off, it is essential to put your mind, body, and feet in the aggressive mode. You should be sure to pay attention to what is there. This is what is meant by the saying “Take what is there in hand.” If you do not observe with the utmost calm, the sword techniques you have learned will not be useful.

A s for the matter of “hearing the sound of wind and water”, this means being calm and quiet above while keeping an aggressive mood underneath. Wind has no sound; it produces sound when it hits things…Water also has no sound when it is falling from above; it makes a frantic sound down below when it comes down and hits things.

The techniques of Getting Things Done are of no use if you do not approach them with the proper frame of mind. Remain calm, prepare yourself mentally and physically, and let the system guide you into accomplishing what needs to be done. Like the martial artist, poised to strike, you can look at your Next Actions “in the aggressive mode” and make a choice. You can have confidence that your choice is made with integrity and that what you are doing right now is exactly what you should be doing.

Technorati Tags: gtdgetting things done