Sunday, January 31, 2010

What Let's Reflect Is All About

Tip to Change Your Life

"Change your thoughts. The thoughts, images and words you replay in your mind everyday are directly related to your happiness and achievements. What the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve. Replace negative thoughts with a positive affirmation. Expect success."
~Success Magazine~

Welcome to LetsReflect.com. We're a global social networking community centered on the idea of "Self-Actualization"...the desire to reach your Full Potential!

We come here to collect our thoughts, to set goals, to state the things we're grateful for, to list our favorite quotes, to document our success, and much more.

We will all make significant gains, and at times, take a few steps back along this journey. But we're all in this together. Everyone's welcome and no one's left behind. We come here seeking Support, Advice, Encouragement, and Inspiration. We realize that we're part of something bigger here; a Movement...and that together we can accomplish great things! So stand up...lift your arms victoriously! Today marks the beginning of your new life.

So what's the Secret? How do I reach my Full Potential?

It's simple! All you have to do is commit to these 7 things. They're the foundation for reaching your Full Potential!

#1. Reflect on your life.

The first step is committing to 20-30 minutes of quiet Reflection everyday. You don't have to sit still, close your eyes, and meditate. But you do have to get away from all the distractions in your life such as the television, cell phones, email, radio, family, friends, coworkers, school mates, etc. They're constantly clouding your thoughts and influencing your decisions.

So take a walk, ride a bike, turn the radio off while commuting to work, sit on your back porch, lie in the grass, go to bed a little early. Whatever works for you.

Now, open up your mind and just Think, Analyze, Consider, Ponder, Contemplate, Imagine, Visualize, and Dream. Think about your past, your present, and your future. Ask yourself questions like...What am I capable of? What are my strengths? Where do I want to be in 5 years, 10 years, 100 years? And so on...

During this time of Reflection you will come across great Realizations and Epiphanies. You will experience a new level of Understanding, Insight, Consciousness, and Awareness. The goal of this entire process is to capture these thoughts and preserve them on your LetsReflect profile. Compile your list and read it over and over again. It will always be there to keep you on track and heading in the right direction.

So get lost in thought...It will change your life!

"It's time to start living the life you've imagined" ~Henry James~

"Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions." ~Albert Einstein~

"At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want." ~Lao Tzu~

#2. Become an Optimist.

This is key. Every negative thought that you replay your mind is like an anchor holding you back. Liberate yourself from the negativity. Inside every setback lies an opportunity! Always find the positive in every situation.

"You can't direct the wind, but you can adjust your sail" ~unknown~

"What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise." ~Oscar Wilde~

"Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." ~Thomas Edison~

#3. Set a Goal.

Goals give your life direction and purpose. Without them you're just drifting through existence. Do something Bold! Set a lofty goal that stretches you outside your comfort zone.

"A goal is a dream with a deadline" ~Napoleon Hill~

"The more you dream, the farther you get." ~Michael Phelps~

"If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy, and inspires your hopes." ~Andrew Carnegie~

"Long-range goals keep you from being frustrated by short-term failures." ~James Cash Penney~

#4. Define who your role models are.

They can be in the flesh, on TV, or even audio books. Model yourself after them. Learn from them. If you don't, you'll pick up bad habits from all the wrong people.

"People never improve unless they look to some standard or example higher and better than themselves." ~Tyrone Edwards~

"The single most important influence in the life of a person is another person ... who is worthy of emulation." ~Paul Shafer~

#5. Be Grateful!

Be grateful for your opportunities. Be grateful for right now! Being grateful invites even better things to come into your life. So what are you grateful for?

"What if you gave someone a gift, and they neglected to thank you for it - would you be likely to give them another? Life is the same way. In order to attract more of the blessings that life has to offer, you must truly appreciate what you already have." ~Ralph Marston~

#6. Become a life long learner.

You don't have to be in school to learn new things. Commit to learning something new everyday. Have an open mind. Become a sponge. Grow!

"All the information you need to succeed already exist; the only problem is you're not exposing yourself to it." ~Jim Rohn~

"There is no wealth like knowledge, no poverty like ignorance." ~unknown~

#7. Embrace change!

It's impossible to reach your full potential if you're not willing to change. Become dynamic, adaptive, evolving! Realize that change is good...change is exciting!

"One does not discover new lands without losing sight of the shore." ~unknown~

"An important guideline for effective individual growth is open-mindedness. A willingness and eagerness to consider new information, new viewpoints, new ideas, and new possibilities is essential." ~F. David~

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the things you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." ~Mark Twain~

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

How Group Think Rules What We Like

Clive Thompson

Wired Jan 2010

Illustration: Kelly Blair

Can you persuade someone to like a product by telling them that it’s popular? Do teenagers like Taylor Swift because she’s good or because everyone else they know likes her — so hey, she must be good, right?

Sociologist Robert Merton dubbed this tendency to base what we think we think on what other people are doing the “self-fulfilling prophecy” in 1949, and since then social scientists have tried to measure how powerful it actually is. Now, based on some studies conducted with the help of the Internet, it seems clear that we’re often just sheep.

A few years ago, Duncan Watts — a network-theory pioneer and scientist at Yahoo and Columbia University — wanted to test the strength of self-fulfilling prophecies in pop culture. The problem, he realized, was that to really explore the phenomenon you’d have to rewind history. For example, I could argue that Madonna is famous because she’s uniquely talented. You could counterargue that she’s just lucky: She got picked up by the right label at the right time, and enough people glommed onto her. But what if you could replay history with different conditions? If Madonna becomes famous each time, then her success is due to raw talent. If not, it’s just luck.

You can’t rewind history, of course. But Watts devised a clever way to simulate the effect. He and his collaborator, Matthew Salganik, created a music-downloading Web site. They uploaded 48 songs by unknown bands and got people to log in to the site, listen to the songs, then rate and download them. Users could see one another’s rankings, and they were influenced in roughly the same way self-fulfilling prophecies are supposed to work. That meant some tunes could become hits — and others duds — partly because of social pressure.

Watts and Salganik ran the experiment over and over — each time with a new group of people — until they’d gotten 12,900 participants. In essence, they rewound history each time: Every new group started fresh, listened to the same 48 songs, and made up their collective mind.

The result? Different songs were hits with different groups. A few songs frequently — but not always — hovered near the top, and a few at the bottom. But for most of the tracks, success — or failure — seemed random.

Or as Watts concluded, about half of a song’s movement could be attributed to intrinsic appeal. The rest was luck. Rerun history, it seems, and Madonna could be working as a waitress.

So what about advertising, marketing, and hucksterism? Can you browbeat people into thinking something is popular when it isn’t?

To figure that out, Watts and Salganik ran a deliciously devious experiment. They took the song ratings of one group and inverted them so bottom-ranked music was now at the top. Then they gave these rankings to a fresh set of listeners. In essence, they lied to the new group: They told them that songs that weren’t popular with previous listeners actually were.

The new listeners dutifully took their social cues from the bogus popularity rankings — they ranked the fake-high ones high, even downloading them, while snubbing the fake-low ones. Apparently, flat-out lying works.

But only sometimes. Eventually, some of the previously top-ranked songs began to creep back up, and previously bottom-ranked ones slid down. And people in the upside-down world downloaded fewer songs overall.

Maybe the participants sensed that the ratings somehow weren’t accurate and started to wonder about the entire system. If so, this strikes a small but happy blow for quality. It also offers a cautionary tale to marketers: If you lie about the merits of your product, you might suppress demand across your entire sector.

It will be exciting to see how this “multiple worlds” paradigm gets used to test self-fulfilling prophesies in other areas — like financial markets. Learning how to avoid a bank run or currency collapse could come in handy these days.

Email clive@clivethompson.net.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Brands on Twitter: 76% of Accounts Infrequent Users

Many Apply Traditional Marketing to Emerging Channel

Posted by Chris Perry on 11.17.09 @ 08:35 AM

from AdAge...

I often have a love-hate thing going with Twitter.

On one-hand it's a platform for the trivial. A time-suck. A platform to distract and, at the same time, isolate ourselves from subjects out of sync with our own world-view. On the other, it's a proven platform that carries incredible power to reshape how we learn, interact and share with communities online. For marketers and media-makers, it's hard to think of a recent innovation that's altered our landscape more than the simple 140 character platform. And for that I'm skewing to the love side of the spectrum.

Where do companies fit on the spectrum? Is it on the collective corporate radar? How is it being used? And in an age where advocacy carries the day, is it being used as a way to truly engage customers and other important stakeholders to the brand?

Our firm, Weber Shandwick, analyzed the Twitter phenomenon this fall, specifically into how Fortune 100 companies use it as a barometer to share with our clients.

The take-away: Most companies fail to realize Twitter's full potential as a market engagement platform. While 73% of Fortune 100 companies registered a total of 540 Twitter accounts, effectiveness based on level of activity, interaction and engagement were off the mark. Brand-squatted accounts, as reported last week in Ad Age, remains an issue for many companies. For those that are on board, many more are largely tepid accounts with limited activity and interactivity (76% of accounts tweet infrequently). Even more telling is how companies apply currently traditional marketing practices to this new media channel, including:

Twitter as a newsfeed: 26%
Twitter as brand-builder: 24%
Twitter as direct marketer/sales channel: 16%
Twitter as thought-leadership channel: 11%
Twitter as customer service channel: 9%

Clearly there is much work to be done to cultivate an engaging brand presence through Twitter. It starts with a clear, company wide-strategy for using the medium to its full advantage, then following through with consistent and meaningful presence that engages relevant communities of interest.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Ten Things Social Media Can't Do!

A Healthy Reminder for Setting Expectations

Posted by B.L. Ochman on 11.02.09 @ 10:23 AM


B.L. Ochman

Amid the endless pronouncements about social media -- often shortened to "social" these days by consultants trying to sound like they know what they are talking about -- is the reality that social media is not a solution, or a sure bet.

Social media can't:

Substitute for marketing strategy.
A Twitter campaign or a Facebook page that announces your weekly specials is not a marketing strategy.

Succeed without top management buy-in.
Social media requires a way of thinking that includes willingness to listen to customers, make changes based on feedback and trust employees to talk to customers.
The culture of fear (of job loss, of losing message control, of change) is ingrained in corporate cultures. Top management has to want to change.
Be viewed as a short-term project.
Social media is not a one-shot deal. It's a long-term commitment to openness, experimentation and change that requires time to bear fruit.

Produce meaningful, measurable results quickly.
One of the complaints about social media is that it can't be measured. But there are many things that can be measured, including engagement, sentiment and whether increased traffic leads to sales.
Those results can't be produced or measured in the short term. Like PR, social media marketing often produces its best results in the second and third year.
Be done in-house by the vast majority of companies.
A successful social-media campaign integrates social media into the many elements of marketing, including advertising, digital and PR. Opinion and theory are no match for experience and the best social media marketers now have more than 10 years of experience incorporating interactivity, blogs, forums, user-generated content and contests into online marketing.
You need strategy, contacts, tools, and experience -- a combination not generally found in in-house teams, who often reinvent the wheel or use the wrong tools.
Provide a quick fix to the bottom line or a tarnished reputation.
Social media can sometimes provide quick results for a company that's already a star. When a well-loved company like Zappos or Google employs social media, its loyal fans and followers pay attention.
However, there's a lot of desperation in a lot of corporate suites these days, and many companies seem been convinced that a social-media campaign can provide a quick fix to sagging sales or reputation issues. Sorry, nuh, uh.
Be done without a realistic budget.
Building a site that incorporates interactivity, allows user-generated content and perhaps also includes e-commerce doesn't come cheap from anyone who knows what they are doing.
Even taking free software like WordPress and making it function as an effective interactive site, incorporating e-commerce and creating style sheets that integrate with the company's branding, takes more than time. That takes skill, experience, and money.
Guarantee sales or influence.
Unless your effort can pass the "who cares" test -- and most simply can't -- your social media efforts will fall flat.
And unless you know how to drive traffic to your contest, video, blog, event, etc., you'll have little more than an expensive field of dreams.
Be done by "kids" who "understand social innately"
You can climb Mount Kilaminjaro without a sherpa guide, but why would you? Experience and perspective can make the trip easier, or even save your life.
Companies trying to run social media without experienced consultants waste time, money and reputation on their efforts. And then, sadly, many decide that this new-fangled approach doesn't work.
Replace PR.
No matter how great your website, video contest, blog, Twitter strategy, etc., you still need publicity. Or you may end up with a tree falling in the forest and nobody hearing it.

Friday, October 9, 2009

President Obama Awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize!

Keep Moving Forward!

(CNN) -- President Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.

Less than nine months into his presidency, Barack Obama has been awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

The first African-American to win the White House, Obama was praised by the Norweigan Nobel Committee for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."

"Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future," the committee said. "His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population."

What do you think of the decision to award President Obama the Nobel Peace Prize? Sound Off below.

The committee also said Obama has "created a new climate in international politics."

The announcement came as a surprise -- Obama's name had not been mentioned among front-runners -- and the roomful of reporters in Oslo, Norway, gasped when he was named.

In his short time in office, Obama has acted on a wide range of issues from the economy to terrorism and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Obama also lobbied unsuccessfully to bring the 2016 Olympics to Chicago, Illinois. After returning from Denmark, Obama expressed no regret about his trip, saying it is "always a worthwhile endeavor to promote and boost the United States."

Former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, last year's Peace Prize laureate, said it was clear the Nobel committee wanted to encourage Obama on the issues he has been discussing on the world stage.

Don't Miss

"I see this as an important encouragement," Ahtisaari said.

The committee wanted to be "far more daring" than in recent times and make an impact on global politics, said Kristian Berg Harpviken, director of the International Peace Research Institute.

Wangari Muta Maathai, the Kenyan who won the 2004 Peace Prize, said Obama's win will help Africa move forward.

"I think it is extraordinary," she said. "It will be even greater inspiration for the world. He has shown how we can probably come together, work together in a cooperative way."

The award comes at a crucial time for Obama, who currently has administration officials dispatched on global peace missions.

Obama's envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, has returned to the region to advocate for peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. Mitchell met Thursday with Israeli President Shimon Peres. He plans to meet Friday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before talking with Palestinian leaders in the West Bank.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton starts a six-day trip to Europe and Russia on Friday. On the trip, the secretary will discuss the next steps on Iran and North Korea, and international efforts to have the two countries end their nuclear programs.

The centerpiece of the trip will be her visit to Moscow, where she will work toward an agreement to take the place of the Start II arms control pact, which expires December 5. She will also address the new bilateral presidential commission that is working on a broad range of issues, from arms control to health.

Obama became the third sitting president U.S. president to win the prestigious prize. Jimmy Carter was the fourth American leader to win, but he was long out of office when he was recognized in 2002.

This year's peace prize nominees included 172 people and 33 organizations, the highest number of nominations ever. The committee does not release the names of the nominees.

The Nobel recipient receives a prize of about $1.4 million.

Thursday, October 8, 2009

7 Reasons Why Your Marketing Plan Doesn’t Work

(Duct Tape Marketing)

Sep 03, 2009 -

Every business NEEDS operate with a set of plans – a plan for the business, a plan for cash, a plan for growth, and certainly a plan for marketing. Opening a business with no plan is kind of like driving somewhere you’ve probably never been without a map or GPS device.

A marketing plan is commonly accepted as standard fare, but still,few businesses operate from any semblance of one. In my experience it’s not because they don’t think they need one, it’s because they’ve either never gotten around to creating one, or worse, they’ve created a marketing plan only to check it off the list and shove it in the bottom of drawer somewhere.

I’ve worked with many small businesses, created many marketing plans, and I can tell you that a big part of the problem is the current plan mindset. Marketing plans are essential mind and stress freeing tools, and you can and should lean very heavily on yours - if you can avoid these marketing planning pitfalls.

1) It’s not about the plan

People think plan and immediately envision the document. I’ve seen people spend more time making the cover of a marketing plan look pretty than they take to make something meaningful inside.

It’s a lot like Lance Armstrong’s book title – It’s not about the bike. The plan is a vehicle, but it’s the planning steps, stages, meetings, questions, and inputs (training for Lance) that create marketing plans that work.

If fact, I’ll go a step further and state that a marketing plan, like a marketing system, is just a start, it’s a systematic marketing planning approach that makes a marketing plan a living tool that can power and guide your business.

To have an effective marketing plan you must have an effective marketing planning process and that, as you’ll discover in the next set of steps, never ends

2) Deal with today’s reality

Almost every business (start-up to mature) wakes up one day and decides to create a marketing plan. What usually occurs is that they create a plan from scratch – as though nothing has occurred in the history of the business to date.

It’s a though the plan architect attempts to simply add on rooms and floors and markets and products without regard for retaining walls, foundations, - maybe even budgets. Anyone who has remodeled (an appropriate analogy I think) knows what a disaster this approach can create.

It’s okay to have a plan that’s a stretch, maybe even taking you in totally new directions, but you’ve got to deal with where you are now and plan transitions that make sense for your culture, customer, and message or you’re destined to fail.

3) Look for the right questions

Everybody wants the magic answers (I’ve written a marketing planning software tool and the #1 request is for sample plans.) The problem with someone else's answers is they are almost undoubtedly wrong. Throw on top of it that, even if they are right today, they will be wrong tomorrow.

The systematic planning approach suggests that instead of the right answers you should be focused on finding the right questions. Answers, like a system, are rigid. Questions, or a process of using key questions to produce answers, are an approach that will yield the right answers no matter the current circumstances.

Southwest Airlines simply wanted be known as the low-cost airline – period. There’s a well worn story about how Southwest Airlines founder, Herb Kelleher, used to ask his executives when they posed some innovation whether it contributed to Southwest being the low cost carrier or not. If they could answer yes it got looked at, if no, it was scratched from consideration.

4) Simplify meaning

A marketing plan isn’t sufficient unless it starts tilting towards the 50-60 page mark, right? Actually it’s far tougher, but far more useful generally, to create one that stays in the 4-5 page range. That way you might actually do it and potential readers might actually view it.

The quicker a prospect can make an important & meaningful distinction of how your message is different, the easier everyone’s job will be. The only way to do that is to work very, very hard at creating simple, metaphor-like, messages that make it very easy for people to understand instantly what you’re about.

Tear everything in your business to shreds and find ways to tell a very simple marketing story about your products, services, people and processes. Make it so simple that anyone can tell it.

5) Monitor friction

Marketing planning and implementation is mostly about doing the things that slowly build momentum, it’s not about hitting it big next week. When you dig in and look closely at every marketing action, measure specific results of each campaign, landing page, or direct mailing, you can begin to spot the places that are causing friction and thereby slowing momentum.

If you don’t hold every initiative accountable you can’t make your plan work – it’s also a great way to waste a lot of money. Failure to monitor, analyze, and measure marketing actions is the single greatest factor holding businesses back.

If you don’t know what’s working there’s a pretty good bet you don’t know what’s not working either. (Metrics work for best-in-class businesses...globally.)

6) Take out the trash

You don’t have to do something just because it’s in the plan. I’ve seen so many businesses so tied to the plan document that they commit time and resources to things that are clearly counterproductive once released into the real market. But, hey, it’s in the plan.

Of course this goes hand in hand with point #5, you’ve got to know what is and is not productive, but once you do, you’ve also got to take the steps to cut your losses.

This one’s a bit tricky because some things don’t work as planned right away. I’ve seen an advertising program bombing until the organization started to receive some favorable press, then all of a sudden, the advertising took hold.

7) Guess again

People don’t want to admit it, certainly consultants don’t, but a marketing plan is a set of (albeit, thoughtful) guesses, hopefully based on some knowledge, but no matter what, you need to commit to correcting the course.

I suggest that you meet at least every six weeks to renew your questions, assumptions, results, goals and objectives with an eye on using your flexibility to make real time adjustments based on real time results.

The main point is that you commit to a schedule so that your plan never has a chance to decay. There will be things that work better than expected and those that don’t, but having a group, or even all staff, check-in on the marketing twice a quarter you can keep it alive and driving while you make the adjustments to take advantage of new found opportunities.

Saturday, October 3, 2009

65+ Must See Resources...

Especially For Designers To Discover The Best Of The Web (Sep09)

source: http://smashingapps.com

October 2, 2009

We are always in search of great free resources, tips, tricks, etc. for our readers. Every day we work hard to find new resources and inspiration for designers like you. Today, we have another great post, “Discover the Best of the Web” on SmashingApps. In this, we made a list of 65+ Must See Resources Especially For Designers. We obviously cannot cover all the best from the web, but we have tried to cover as much as possible.

You are welcome to share if you know more best of the web in the month of September which our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed you can follow us on twitter as well.

Design Tips, Tricks and Tutorial
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82 Earth-Shattering ZBrush Tutorials