Georgia Joseph

The Seven Deadly Wastes of Dinner Production

I'm reading a book called Implementing Lean Software Development. And stop saying it sucks to be me. 

I promise not to tell you any more about it than you absolutely have to know to get how I got from Toyota Manufacturing to feeding teenage boys. So here goes.

Long ago (by this I mean 1949) and far away in the land of the Samurai, the Toyoda family decided they wanted to build cars as well as those that were made in America. As you probably know, they were successful, and by the mid-1980s, we were eating Toyota's dust. The company did it by developing and implementing the Lean Manufacturing System which emphasized the elimination of "waste", defined as anything that the customer did not value. There are seven deadly wastes in Lean Manufacturing that translate into seven equally deadly wastes in software development: partially done work, paperwork, extra features, task switching, handoffs, delays, and defects.

That wasn't so bad was it?

I've been thinking about the wastes this weekend, which - in retrospect - probably wasn't the best idea because I've been cooking for my two perpetually hungry sons at the same time and watching one of the Jurassic Park sequels. The parallels are truly frightening.

Teenage young men are similar in many respects to ravenous carnivores of any epoch. They're at a disadvantage because their teeth aren't as sharp and their fingernails no longer do double-duty as knives. Yet...they still want to eat. A lot. On a regular basis. Quickly. And they prefer the flesh of something that has recently been alive. 

As I was preparing dinner last night, it occurred to me that I could have made the whole feeding process much more efficient, with no noticeable loss of value to my sons, if I had simply taken the Lean approach from the very beginning. Would you like to know how? Of course you would. Read and learn.

First, eliminate extra features. By extra features I mean anything besides meat, potatoes, cheese, sour cream and soda.

Second, reduce paperwork to an absolute minimum. Translation: no napkins. That's what sleeves are for.

Third, do not require them to switch tasks. In other words, eat in the living room so there is no need to turn off the X-Box.

Fourth, limit handoffs. Ideally this would mean allowing them to spear the meat from the grill and eat it directly from the fork but since doing that requires them to divert their attention from the X-Box (above), there is a trade-off to be made. Only you can make the decision that is best for your individual circumstances.  

Fifth, eliminate delays. The expectation here is that you anticipate when they will be hungry and ensure that the food magically appears at the appropriate time. And no, I haven't been into the cooking sherry. This is really how teenage guys think.

Sixth, forbid partially done work. Partially done work includes such things as an undercooked steak, potatoes that are not entirely covered by cheese and sour cream, and bread without garlic butter. You can avoid many needless trips to the fridge or microwave by keeping this simple principle in mind.

Seventh, monitor carefully for defects. Defects are things like diet soda, broccoli, and cold bread.  

See how useful this was? 

I love when I can take what I'm doing at work and apply it to life at home. Now, I can't wait to get to Chapter 6: Find Better Motivators than Money. I'll let you know how that works for me.

Step Away from the Customer

The story you are about to read is true. The names have been changed to protect the marginally competent.

Last week, due to a series of happy circumstances, I found myself both in need of, and with the means to purchase, a certain highly-longed-for technological upgrade. There are two major providers of this service. Our family is already doing business with one of them, making it my first choice for an add-on. A conversation with my son the geek confirmed that I was thinking along the right lines. 

So, on Wednesday, the day before I started my new job, I picked up the phone expecting to have a 5-10 minute conversation and an appointment with a technician in my near future. It didn't go quite that way. In fact, if it were a movie, it would have been either a satire or a horror flick. I haven't quite made up my mind which.

In all good movies, danger is foreshadowed early on. This was no different. After navigating through half a dozen voice mail selections - all spoken to me by an obviously underachieving robot - I was placed in the call center queue, told that I could expect to wait 45 minutes, and invited to complete my request online where I "might" receive a special internet discount.

I played my role true to type: the femme fatale who keeps walking down the darkened hallway towards the closed door which she proceeds to open in spite of the fact that everyone in the audience is screaming at her to stop. "Aha," I mused, "The problem is that I've called the residential service line. This is for my home office. If I were to call the business line, things would be different." I got the same slacker robot, but was encouraged to learn that my wait would only be two minutes and pleased when it turned out to be about 30 seconds. It was the last thing that would go right for the next hour.

The woman who helped me was very cheerful. Very, very, very cheerful. But she sure needed an awful lot of information, which I didn't understand because we were already customers. I thought it might be possible that she had gone to the same training academy as the robot, so I patiently answered all her questions - including very clearly stating my budget requirements. In a movie, the camera would have zoomed in on my lips as I made that statement, signifying to the audience that it would become important later.

After a half-an-hour, we appeared to be winding down when she mentioned - as an afterthought - that an additional feature would cost such-and-such, but if I wanted to go with a greatly reduced plan, they could cut that in half bringing the grand total to 50% more than I had already told her I wanted to pay. After an agonizing round of Q & A, I learned that I could avoid purchasing the extra feature by signing up for residential service. Then she cheerfully transferred me to a residential representative after warning me not, under any circumstances, to say the words "home office".

What this second agent lacked in cheerfulness, she made up for in efficiency. Her questions were short, to-the-point, and spoken very quickly. All of this would have been excellent, except that her first language wasn't English, making it a twisted version of the classic "bilingual dialogue trope". She had a much shorter list of questions, but repeating each of them v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y meant that I was in conversation with her for nearly 30 minutes as well.

Then, in a thinks-she's-learned-her-lesson-but-hasn't scene, I attempted to confirm the last minute cost-and-billing details. It was not supposed to be complex; however, I was put on hold five times while she checked with the man behind the curtain. Each time she apologized before putting me on hold (I'm very sorry), and after she returned to the phone (I really am very sorry). When she came back for what would turn out to be the last time, her apology was three sentences longer than normal and ended with the words, "I'm going to have to transfer you to that department". 

Cut to the character who stares impotently at whatever danger is headed her way. My mind was blank. All I remember thinking in those last fateful seconds was "N-O-T-H-A-P-P-E-N-I-N-G..." I may have sputtered. Possibly called for my mother. Perhaps even said "please" in the high, squeaky voice of the doomed. Whatever I did it was useless. The next thing I remember hearing was the voice of remedial robot giving me three options, none of which fit my situation.

I pressed "0" to speak to a live person. Instead I heard a recorded voice say, "We're sorry, we can't help you." Then silence. Visualize a slow motion shot of the character reaching forward and mouthing the word "N0-0-0-0-0".

On film, this is where the screen goes dark. Then after a couple of seconds you hear the sound of silverware clinking and a table appears, revealing a silent family eating breakfast and an empty chair. As the absent mother's photo comes into focus, the credits roll to the tune of Janis Joplin singing, "Take another little piece of my heart now baby".

Don't worry. I didn't jump, lose my ability to form coherent sentences, or run away from home. What I did do was call this company's competitor. Ten minutes later I had an appointment with a technician. He arrived on time, was polite, did his job quickly and - this is the best part - within one hour of the time he left, I got a phone call asking to know how everything went.

The moral (come on...you know all predictable movies have a moral) of the story is this: if you do not serve your customers well, someone else will.

Switching to Mac

Change is the new black.

My life is full of it right now. I no longer have a kid in elementary school. I'm not at my old job. I start a new job next week. My office will be at home. I'm switching to a Mac.

Yes, you read that correctly. I, Georgia Joseph, who have only ever used a PC, will begin using a Mac on July 1, 2009. If you're reading this and have given me grief over the years for not being part of the "hoodie" tribe, shut up. You have no idea how distorted your face becomes when you're thinking, "I told you so." If you're one of my "just because you're wearing a hoodie doesn't make you cool" children, you can also zip your lips. Nobody - meaning me - cares what you think about the superiority of PCs.

Okay...so...I'm a planner. The think-ahead, ooh-there's-a-problem, yay!, now-what-do-I-do, give-me-information kind of gal. And I've been told that there is a Mac learning curve.

Insert quarter, start worrying.

What if it takes me eight hours to open up Word on my first day on the job? I think that's called a career-limiting move. Something needs to be done in advance of such a potential catastrophe, but what? I know, she thinks, I'll google "switching to a Mac" and see how other former PC poppers have done it.

What a waste of time. Not to point fingers, but some of my favorite websites (coughlifehackercough) give tedious, overly long lists of pointers incorrectly labeled as "quick guides". After getting to the bottom of page-one of the search results (SEO specialists take note), I lost patience with all the words, words, words and decided it would be infinitely more practical to drive the 30 minutes to the nearest Apple Store and ask a real live person. I'm not getting back to work a day too early, that's for sure.

Gone are the days when the Apple Store was empty an hour before closing on Sunday. I think the iphone had something to do with that. Now - if you haven't scheduled a face-to-face shopping appointment in advance - you can stand around looking like you're dying to talk to a sales person until the cows come home and nobody gives a rip. There are just too many prepared, knowledgable customers with their credit cards already out to worry about someone who wandered into the store without SMART goals. Car dealers, take note.  

I figured if I started playing with the most expensive Mac Book in the store, that would do the trick. Nope. Still invisible. But it didn't matter. Before I knew it, I was engrossed. This thing was cool. After about 45 minutes, I had run out of things to do on a computer that didn't belong to me, including discovering the undeniable superiority of Keynote over PowerPoint. Sorry Microsoft.

Since the store was going to close in 15 minutes and was still crowded, I decided if I was going to get face time with one of the color-coordinated t-shirt crew, I'd have to ask. I did, and got queued via blue-tooth. No lie. Five minutes later, someone who could be my son came over to answer all my questions. I know this would have been the moment to be humiliated, but I only had 10 minutes left to save my career and didn't have time to stand on pride. 

I said, "I need to use a Mac in three days and hear that there's a learning curve." I left out the part about not knowing how to redeem food stamps, but I think he could smell the fear because he said, "Don't worry. I was 90% there in a week and 100% there by the end of the month."

It's a good thing I've learned not to always say the first thing that pops into my head. I'll spare you too. What came out of my mouth was, "Can you tell me how?" 

The first five minutes covered everything I'd already figured out. There was now five minutes left between me and a shove out the front door, so I decided it was time to confront my greatest fear. "I hear there's no right-click", I said. "Yes, there is", he responded, and proceeded to introduce me to a touchpad that could be controlled in distinct ways depending on how many fingers you chose to place on it at a time. I had a ton of questions. He had an answer for every one of them. At the end, I'd learned everything I needed to know to face Wednesday undaunted.

And the most important thing I discovered? If you engage an Apple geek on one of his or her favorite topics, the store won't close until you are ready to end the conversation. I got an extra five minutes and wasn't even the last one out. Score one point for face time.

From the User's Point of View

This last week I had a rare opportunity for a marketing person - the chance to be a member of my audience for a day.

I do a lot of web marketing. My mantra - the boring, stale, predictable question that I repeat constantly - is "What does the user want and need?" Followed-up by the equally boring, stale and predictable "What do we want the user to do?" Since I say it so often, I've come to believe that I really want the answer. But I had an experience this week that caused me to realize that I mostly just want to ask the question.

I also do email marketing and we have a system at work that is inadequate for our needs and downright frustrating to use most of the time. I've known for awhile that it needs to change, but it always just seems so much easier on email day to stick with the familiar. It's the devil you know vs. the devil you don't.

Finally, after trying to send a couple of urgent emails, through VPN, while on the road, I reached the end what I was willing to tolerate and decided to move to an independent online service provider. Which is how I found myself - on email day - with a commitment to launch something new, and neither the time nor the patience for anything unexpected or difficult. In other words, exactly like just about everyone who will ever use any of my websites.

I had become my audience.

This is what I learned through down-and-dirty, first-hand experience:

A website needs to be referrable. I didn't have time to research the best email options. That task had been on my list for months, sitting there at the bottom, leering at me. One of my colleagues just started using Constant Contact and loved it. She saw the trouble I was having and recommended it. I was willing to give it a try based on her say-so alone.

Users really are completely and totally impatient. It's one thing to know this intellectually and another to experience it for yourself. The day I decided to give Constant Contact a try was in the middle of a four-day week, I had the same amount of work as if it were five days, and I had an early evening appointment which meant I couldn't hang around if things went badly. This site had about 10 minutes to show me I could be successful, or I was done trying.

An online purchase needs to be risk-free. In an economy where everyone is watching expenses, I didn't want to commit any of my employer's money without knowing that the product was going to meet our needs. The link to the "Free Trial" was one of the first things I saw when I went to the home page. In two seconds, I knew I could at least take the next step and see what happened. So I did.

A website needs to be ridiculously easy to use. Customizing the Constant Contact templates was the easiest thing in the world to do. There were dozens of suitable choices, so I didn't have to settle for anything that wasn't just right. By the time I was prompted to make a purchase (because I had exceeded the image allotment for the free trial), I was sold. After purchase, I found that uploading my large email list took only a few seconds, the email was sent without a hitch, and the analytics were giving me the feedback I needed, but hadn't had before. If the service had failed on any of these points or even if it had caused me just a little frustration, I would have left - never to return.

So, the next time I ask anyone "What does the user want and need?" or "What do we want our visitors to do?", I'm going to remember my own experience take the time to get the right answer to that question.

What I'm Reading: 5 Posts Worth Your Time

1. Read Michael Hyatt on Creating a Life Plan

Michael says, "I have met very few people who have a plan for their lives. Most are passive spectators, watching their lives unfold a day at a time. They may plan their careers, the building of a new home, or even a vacation. But it never occurs to them to plan their life. As a result, many end up discouraged and disillusioned, wondering where they went wrong."
Note: This is not a recent post, but Michael has been tweeting some of his older posts as a way of repurposing content.

2. Read Rohit Bhargava on Untangle Your Brand: 4 Marketing Lessons from Lost

Rohit says, "The show's unique format of taking you into the backstory of each characters builds an emotional investment from the viewer in a way that many other shows never manage to do. You believe in the characters because you know about the situations that make them the way that they are. There is a marketing lesson in that, as there is in several other choices the show's producers and marketing teams have made."

3. Read Jeff Stibel on 7 Ways to be Happier at Work

Jeff says, "Smile. Turns out, smiling is directly linked to happiness. It may have started as a correlation but, over time, the brain linked the two. Don't believe me? Try this: smile (a nice big smile) and attempt to think of something negative. Either you will stop smiling or you won't be able to hold the negative thought."

4. Read Stephen P. Anderson on In Defense of Eye Candy

Stephen says, "What we are discussing here is how our brain interprets the meaning of things such as color, shadow, shading, and other natural occurrences. Just pick up a piece of paper and watch how the shadow changes as you bring the page closer to you. It’s these kinds of natural occurrences our brains observe every day in the real world. When we use these cues on a screen, they carry with them the same real world properties."

5. Read Tyler Denis on Make High Impact Backgrounds for Your Designs with Photoshop

Tyler says, "When visually designing websites, the little things are what make a design stand out. In this tutorial, I’ll show you a few ways to enhance the way your website looks. We will also look at some examples of people that have applied each one or a combination of these techniques."

Georgia's related post value-add: Read Seth Godin on Why Aren't You (Really) Good at Graphic Design?

When Words Are Many

In the beginning there were words...and they were spoken. Then some time later came writing, then the printing press and books and newspapers and then eventually advertising. So much for the continuous improvement of mankind. Throughout human history, for the most part, our writing and speech have been similar to each other.

Until recently that has been a good thing. Not any more.

Waaaay back in 2002, the BBC warned, "The addictive nature of web browsing can leave you with an attention span of nine seconds - the same as a goldfish." Last year, Nicholas Carr of The Atlantic wrote, "What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation... Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."

They're right and you know it. Don't believe me? Eavesdrop on a few conversations over the next week or so and you'll see what I mean. We all talk like web pages. Our sentences are short, our words lack syllables, we talk in bullet points, and when we lose interest we click to the next person. If the web is all we read, it's no surprise that we will begin to adopt it's vocabulary and speech patterns.

So what? So our conversations are shorter. What's the big deal?

Three words. Search Engine Optimization.

Keywords are the skeleton and sometimes the meat and fat of web pages which have been optimized to rank high in search engine results. More and more people and organizations are employing search engine optimization (SEO). Since most of us don't  look past the first three or four results on page one, it's ever more likely that the majority of the pages we encounter have been written to rank well for certain keywords. Meaning there's lots and lots of them on the page.

So, how long before we all start to talk like optimized web pages because it's all we ever read?  If it's a typical week, I will be out of milk and bread and whatever my kids want for their lunches at some point. We'll have to go to the store. Is this what the conversation will sound like? "Let's go to Smith's Grocery Store. Smith's is the store where we do our grocery shopping. Shopping at Smith's grocery store is what we will do. After we finish at the grocery store, we will drive out of the Smith's grocery store parking lot and go home with our groceries from Smiths."

Can you imagine what our historical documents would sound like if the founding fathers had lived in the digital age?

"When in the political course of human political events it becomes politically necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the political powers of the earth, the separate and equal political station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent political respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the political causes which impel them to the political separation."

Or...

"We the united and just people of the United States, in order to justly and unitedly form a more perfectly united union, establish a just justice, insure a unified and just domestic tranquility, provide for the united common defense, promote the general welfare and justice, and secure the united blessings of justice and liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do justly ordain and unitedly establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Or even...

"Now we are engaged in a national great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so nationally conceived and so nationally dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great national battlefield of that war. We have come as a nation to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final national resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live."

Thousands of years ago, King Solomon - who was very wise - said, "The more words that are spoken, the more smoke there is in the air. And who is any better off?" That's not exactly what he said, but it's a really good translation. We in the 21st century could rephrase it this way, "The more words that are used over and over again, the more likely you're reading something on the web that someone else has decided you should read. And who is any better off?"

I don't know the answer to that question and I don't have time to think about it anymore right now. I need to do some keyword research for a couple of sites I'm working on. Don't worry. I'll use my powers for good and not evil. Trust me.

Will Work for Counter Space

This weekend, I made a better trade than the Angels did with Jim Fergosi for Nolan Ryan.

A few months ago, my friend, Barbara, invited me to lunch to talk about something that was on her mind. I figured it would be the usual kids/husband/body stuff. But no. She was ready to expand her business and she wanted my help. For a long time, she has run a grain selling enterprise. It includes cooking classes, product demonstrations and sales of related equipment such as grain mills. So far, her business has grown primarily through word-of-mouth and her attendance at shows.

As we sat down - at Panera Bread of all places - she described her vision over tomato soup and turkey sandwiches. A key part of her strategy, she explained, was developing a brand and an online presence. As I listened, and began to understand the potential and opportunity for success, I became as excited as she was. By the time she asked for my help with marketing, I was on board mentally and emotionally. Practically and physically, however, it would have to wait. I was already committed to a couple of other projects, including ferinstance my job, that would suffer if I took on anything else.

I explained the problem, and could see a shadow come across her eyes. I wouldn't be available until the end of April and her deadline for spring orders was before that. I suggested that she go ahead and buy her domain names and use blog software as an easy way to get online quickly. Then we talked at length about brand and marketing and growth and tactics. And about the time and effort it all was going to take. Somewhere between the end of the tomato soup and the beginning of the turkey sandwich, Barbara proposed an exchange.

Now, it's no secret to anyone who knows me that I do not have time for housework. All right, that's the excuse. The unvarnished truth is that I despise housework. Mostly what I hate is cleaning up after people who are perfectly capable of cleaning up after themselves. So I don't. Really don't. Not at all. Even a little bit. And my house is a mess which I also hate because at heart I'm a neat freak. So I come home from work every night and get all depressed the minute I walk into the door because there are dishes in the sink and spills on the counter and food and juice and boxes out everywhere because somewhere, someone got the idea that cabinet doors were just too much trouble to open and close. Sound familiar?

I've long forgotten what the color of my counter tops is and Barbara knows this because she's at my house often enough to see. She was prepared. At the point where the conversation turned to the amount of work that would be involved in creating and optimizing her site, Barbara suggested a trade: housecleaning for marketing. What I thought was, "Do I have this correct? Is she really giving me the chance to trade doing what I hate for doing what I love? All I have to do is create things online and I can have a cleaner house?" What I said was, "Sure."

Which is how - this Saturday - I found myself spending the afternoon helping her get her blog the way she wanted it. We picked out some photos, a color palette and a template; and I set about customizing it for her. The only glitch, and it was a biggie, is that blogspot doesn't allow you to put pdfs on the site. Stupid blogspot. But in the end, she was happy with it and so was I. The afternoon flew by and I had a good time...except for the pdfs. Stupid blogspot. I learned a lot about what she likes and the look she eventually hopes to achieve, which (by-the-way) includes linking to pdfs. Stupid stupid blogspot.

Here is the best part. As she left, she took a key to our house with her so she can come back during the week and help me out with the bane of my existence - housework. I'm sitting here, as I write this, wondering how I managed to get such a great deal and itching to get to work on the logo so I can have it finished by the time the counters are covered again. I have a couple of ideas and may even work on them a little after I post this.

In case you're interested, my friend's business is called Barbara's Breadspot and you can learn more about it (and see the blog) by clicking here.

Better Than Beauty?

"It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness. " So said Leo Tolstoy.

Pam Belluck of the New York Times agrees. In an article titled, "Yes, Looks Do Matter", she says, "For more than a week now, people on both sides of the Atlantic have been using the story of Susan Boyle - the dowdy Scottish spinster who sang her way to fame on 'Britain's Got Talent' TV show - as an example of just how shallow we've become." She goes on to present the sociological research that sheds light on why we stereotype. Originally it was to figure out who is safe and who is not. We women have our own special category. We are "subdivided into 'traditionally attractive'...who 'don't look dominant, [and] have baby-faced features." This makes us not threatening.

Tell that to Michael Douglas.

Like everyone, I watched Susan Boyle's performance and was wowed. I've been less wowed by all the discussion about her looks. Even after reading the article above, I still don't get it. There have been a whole lot of words written about the supposed contrast between her appearance and her talent. Without the constant stream of "analysis", we could all at least have pretended not to be shallow. Every article or commentary that's written about the subject is evidence that we're worse than even we realized we were. Another nail in a coffin that will only be buried a foot deep.

So here's the question. If you could have any one thing in the world, what would it be? Solomon chose wisdom. Most of us would choose a fabulous appearance because that is what our culture rewards.

Not long ago, the young woman from our church who is working with teachers in a very remote part of Sudan came home for a couple of weeks. We had the opportunity to hear about her adventures. In Sudan, she had been completely isolated from most of modern culture - and its pressure to look good - for six months. On the flight home, she decided to watch a couple of movies. She said that by the time she got off the airplane, she was concerned about her looks, her weight and her value as a woman.

A long time ago, when I was very pregnant with my daughter, we met a couple who would later become our good friends. Somewhere along the way, the wife confided that her husband had said about me, "It's better to be smart than pretty." That comment has always entertained me and I repeat it every time I have an audience who hasn't heard it. I know what he meant, know what I look like when I'm pregnant, and know that if I ever was attractive - I won't always be and had better not come to depend on it. Besides, how often to you have a self-deprecating punchline handed to you on a silver platter?

Appearance is not something I've spent a lot of time thinking about, probably because I fall in that middle ground of being neither exceptionally attractive nor exceptionally unattractive. I've also learned that most of the truly remarkable people in the world like to go about the business of doing remarkable things unnoticed. As hard as it may be to believe, when you're in the presence of someone like that, you really don't think about their looks. 

Last week, I was in Texas visiting one of our Partner offices. The women in the office are having a weight loss contest. While I was there, I set up shop at the desk of one of their colleagues who is on medical leave battling cancer. They stay in close touch with her and visit regularly. When she's had a bad day, she can call and talk about it. They raised money to help her with expenses. I applaud their determination to lose weight, but I've got to tell you; when people - like these women - are willing to enter into another person's trouble that deeply, looks really don't matter.

Twitter's Not Cool. It's a Tool.

Twitter's not cool. Have you heard that? I have. About a hundred times. From my kid.

So he was here tonight with a bunch of his friends and I saw the opportunity to do a little bit of research. Just as they were all heading out the door to somewhere else, I stopped them, blocked the door, and refused to let them out until they answered this one simple question, "Why is Twitter not cool?"

Garrett: "Because everyone's using it."

The chorus: "Yeah!"

Robert: "Because grown-ups discovered it before kids did.

The chorus: "Yeah!"

Erin: "What's Twitter?"

Reid: "There you go, mom. That's why. Twitter is uncool because Erin doesn't know what it is."

The chorus: "Yeah!"

All exit stage left.

There you go, all you adults out there with your millions of followers...being on Twitter makes you a dweeb in the eyes of anyone under twenty. So what else is new, I say. If you can't embarrass your kid, why survive parenthood?

My son and his friends are missing a key point that I suspect a large number of adult Twitter users are missing as well. Twitter is not supposed to be cool. Well, maybe its creators think it is. But to the rest of us hopelessly uncool adults, Twitter is a tool. If you're using it to be cool, you deserve to be known as a dweeb.

The way I see it, there are only three reasons to use Twitter.

First, you have enough friends who use it and who are obsessive about knowing what's going on in your life, and each others, every minute. If that's you, at least try to pretend you don't care who has the most followers.

Second, you actually have an interesting life that other people who don't know you, and never will, want to know about. I'm working with people like that right now. Twitter is going to allow them to get updates - that their supporters want to read - posted in places where it will be easy to find and read them. Maybe that's you. If so, you'll know because having this interesting, productive life means you don't have time to do anything on Twitter but post updates, and will probably have way more followers than those you follow.

Third, it's your job to help other people and organizations get their message out, so you have to know about any and all options available to achieve the stated goals. That would be me. So far my head is fascinated by the technology and all the ways to use it. My heart thinks it's lonely. That's because nobody I know really uses it much.

So, I guess you could say for me, Twitter is not cool. But it is a great tool. And that's why I'm going to continue figuring out how it works and what can be done with it. Unless it tanks. Which is always a possibility until you have a broad base of users across a diverse geographic area. That could be entertaining. Not the tanking part necessarily, but watching to see how soon the next uncool application would rise to take its place.

After all, what would the kids do without some way of heaping disdain upon the older generation?

Why I Will Never Be Famous

In the movie, The Devil Wears Prada, publishing powerhouse Miranda tells lowly assistant Andie, "If you want this life [fame and presumably fortune], those kind of decisions [the self-serving ones] are necessary." Andie isn't sure. She says, "What if I don't want this?" Miranda replies, "Don't be silly. Everyone wants this."

Even the most shallow, cursory look at our society provides plenty of evidence in support of the statement that everyone wants fame. In my profession - Marketing - it's an axiom. Not long ago I read a blog post that began by stating the assumption that everyone using Twitter wanted to be the one with the most followers. What would be the point otherwise? I remember thinking, "What if I don't want that?" To which the absent blogger replied, "Don't be silly. Everyone wants that."

I don't. In this brave new world - where achievement is measured in connections, friends, subscribers and followers - I'm a slacker. By choice. It's not that I go around randomly unfriending people on Facebook in order to maintain a predetermined level of mediocrity, it's just that I pretty much let it take care of itself and have what I have. The same goes for Twitter, my blog and LinkedIn. Why? Because the number of connections, friends, subscribers and followers is not at all related to why I use those applications and would not be an accurate measure of success for me.

I use social media applications for two reasons. First because they are fun. Well...with the exception of LinkedIn. Second so that I can learn the technical aspects of their implementation and see how people with creative, effective profiles and posts accomplish that. The former is for me. The latter is for my vocation.

What most people don't realize is the amount of time it takes to be a popular, successful author of social media content. For the people who do it well, it's their job or a large part of it. I had a conversation with the writer at Telling The Truth. She was asking me questions about my blog - the same one you're reading now - and I explained that I only posted once a week on Sunday. I talked a little bit about how to make blogs successful and then told her that I didn't do any of it because if I did, I wouldn't have time for the project that I was working on with them or any others like it.

Over 3000 years ago, a man named Solomon was king over the nation of Israel. King Solomon is well known for his wisdom, wealth and many wives. It also seems that he died a disillusioned, bitter old man. In the book of Ecclesiastes, he enumerates his many accomplishments: "I made great works. I built houses and planted vineyards for myself. I made myself gardens and parks and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees...I also had great possessions of herds and flocks...I gathered for myself silver and gold and the treasure of kings and provinces...so I became great and surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem." Then he says, "I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended doing it, and all was vanity and striving after the wind."

That's depressing. Solomon had everything we think is cool even today. Wine. Women. Song. And at the end of his life, he called it meaningless. And you know what? I bet he's not the first or the last to feel that way. He's only the most well known and widely quoted. Didn't he have anything positive to say at all? Sort of. He continues, "What I have seen to be good and fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of his life that God has given him...for he will not much remember the days of his life because God keeps him occupied with joy in his heart." From a 21st century perspective, that's a little better, but not much. Why? Because we don't look at work as something that should bring us joy, we look at it as a set of numerical objectives to achieve.

That's our loss. I feel very blessed to be able to do work that I love most of the time. Everyone, everywhere in the world has to do some kind of work. In Sudan, that might mean pounding grain or carrying water. In Cambodia, it might mean sewing apparel, which is better than some of the alternatives, including sexual slavery. This knowledge gives me a profound gratitude for the blessing of satisfying work. However, as Solomon says, eventually I will die, leaving all that I produced for someone else. As will every single one of you reading this. How is it possible to go through life knowing that and not become cynical? 

I think Solomon missed something very important. The most significant, eternal things happen in the context of personal relationships. Think about it. If that's true, one of the most important decisions we ever make will be who is to be the beneficiary of our intellectual, spiritual and emotional capital. To whom do we communicate our ideas, our love and our essential self?  To strangers? To people who may or may not understand it, feel it or be changed by it? Or to those who are closest to us? Those to whom we are in some way irreplaceable - perhaps because we are family, or friend, or even the only person willing and able to do an essential job. I believe this is where, even in a time bound world, we move past the temporal and into the eternal.

I am passionate about the idea of bringing the best of 21st century communication to people and groups who work with the most persecuted, deprived and needy people in our world and helping them to connect with the people who are willing to support them in some way. I want to find ways to do this, even if it is just one person and one ministry at a time. When I am dead, if I am to be rescued from the obscurity that is the lot of nearly every person who has lived and died in this world, then I hope it will be through the success of those I served because their success brings the possibility of life-transforming change to those they serve, and so on. It's the proverbial pebble in the pond. It disappears the moment it is thrown into the water. By the time the final ripple reaches the shore, it's no longer possible to tell where the stone first entered, or that it was ever there, but its effect has spread across an entire pond.

I believe that influence is more important than fame. And not just any kind of influence. Skin to skin influence. The kind that comes from the life you live and the example you set through your actions. If I don't have that, the skill with which I communicate and the thoughts in my head and the size of my audience are meaningless. If I do have it, I don't really need the rest, do I?

It's possible that some day I could become well known. Not very likely, but if it does it's going to be like buttermilk and butter - the by-product, not the goal. I have no desire to have the most followers on Twitter, the most friends on Facebook, the most subcribers to my blog or the most connections on LinkedIn. I don't want to be the next great novelist or a world famous writer. What I do want is to "to be joyful and to do good as long as I live...to eat and drink and take pleasure in my toil [as] this is God's gift to man." And to be as great at my work as it's possible for me to be. That's all.

Twitter Page Upgrades: Not for the Faint-hearted

I spruced up my Twitter page this weekend. What? You can't tell? Neither can I.

That's because the image upload feature isn't working. And Twitter...bless its little heart...has one of the more polite ways of telling you that you just wasted an entire afternoon that I've ever run across. They tell you that something is wrong, and then thank you for noticing. Heavy sigh. So for now, you can see a modified version of my future Twitter background image below.

This all started because I have a meeting on Tuesday with Telling the Truth as part of its web redevelopment process. We want to (hopefully) incorporate a Stuart, Jill and Pete Briscoe Twitter feed on the home page. I say hopefully because I'm experiencing a little bit of trepidation at the thought of explaining to Stuart that he will be "tweeting", and because I've been told by the Director of the Ministry not to expect them to be as excited as I am.

With that in mind, I decided to spend this weekend getting a little deeper into Twitter cool. You have to understand that I occupy two Twitter worlds: late-comer and early adopter. That's because I live in the Midwest. When Twitter debuted a couple of years ago, I was having a tired day...or days. I remember reading some of the first posts about it and thinking, "Nah. Not right now. Maybe later." This from someone who was given grief in the late 90s for using a search engine with the name "Google". (As if Yahoo! is dignified.) I finally signed up about six months ago because I was attending a conference on Sudan and wanted to post real-time updates and information. By that time, every blogger and his mother had written a beginner's guide to Twitter. Even so, only four of my friends had profiles.

I didn't do much with Twitter at first. I decided to follow a few people. Some others decided to follow me. It took me awhile to get in the habit of posting. It wasn't until I started having updates sent to my phone and responding to other people's tweets that I learned why Twitter has been so sticky. It's really a whole lot of fun. Not only that, it's practical. And it will be a perfect platform for Stuart and Jill as they travel the world ministering to pastors and Christian leaders. So, In preparation for our meeting, I decided to poke around the network, looking for great page ideas. In the process, I discovered that my page sucked. I needed a background image and a bio and a much better variety of posts.

I decided to tackle the bio first. 160 characters. How hard could it be? Impossible, it turned out. A short bio is like a tagline; it forces you to think about who you really are. 

I'm a marketing/communications person. A traditional storyteller with both feet planted firmly in the digital world. But what I really want to do, what I'm really passionate about, is putting my skills and knowledge to work in places where they would make a difference and where no one has tried yet. And how can you write about something, in 160 characters or less, that isn't the way you envision it?

My church supports a couple of Sudanese national pastors. When they are in Sudan, they are completely out of touch. I'd like to fix that. They each do amazing things in a very difficult environment with no resources. I'd like for others to know about their stories and their work. There isn't a best practice guide for that kind of work. It's kind of like looking for a light bulb in a world of candles. Finally, after writing and discarding way too many choices for a Sunday afternoon, I decided I had the right thought the first time, “Light bulbs weren’t invented by exploring candles." So now that is my bio.

The good news is that my weekend was not a total waste. I now have some ideas for Telling the Truth and feel very comfortable that I won't forget where the "upload image" button is. The bad news is that I now have to move on to creating a better variety of posts.

Facebook "Pages": No Longer a Newb

I created my first Facebook Business Page two weeks ago. My life is turning into Sundays with Facebook. At least its not the Facebook Horror Pages Show. Not yet anyway.

I work as a volunteer consultant for an organization called Telling The Truth. I'm having fun. We're in the middle of a web redesign which is going to take almost a hundred combined years of Bible teaching, free it from under internet lock-and-key and make all of it visible on the search engines. We've chosen a talented local company - Ascedia - and will begin the design process next week. Defining the site and selecting a vendor has been a long, time-consuming project, particularly since the Director of the Ministry and I each had more than full-time jobs before we ever started. But we're there now and it's exciting.

One of the "value-adds" about being involved in a project like this is that it is so easy to put off everything else that needs to be done, because...of course...the website is the priority. However, in planning meetings with the TTT team, the conversation often turned to social media and how to leverage it. It's a first for the ministry. We talked about having a Facebook page and what we would do with it. Finally, I had nothing more important on my list than that page. It was time.

One of the things that makes me very happy is that my day job and my volunteer projects feed off of each other. The work that I do after work makes me better at work. And vice versa. Best of all, the volunteer work gives me the opportunity to try my hand at things I wouldn't get to do otherwise. One example is the e-store that will be part of TTT's new site. We're not ever going to need one of those at my job, so having the chance to develop one in an untraditional setting is a huge opportunity for me.

Another example is social media. We may make a few small efforts at work, but it's not a priority because of the type of business we're in. At least not formally. It's going to be a big deal at TTT; which is how I found myself, sitting in front of the computer, logged into Facebook, and trying to decide what to name the new page. You gotta crawl before you can walk, right?

Thankfully, the Director of TTT is willing to take baby steps and see what happens. However, he did not want to let anyone know about the page until it was perfect. Okay, I can live with that a little. He's the content guru, I'm the tools guru - or newb, depending on the tool. So we had about a week-and-a-half of adding some fun stuff to the site, with me emailing every day or so and asking if we could at least tell our friends. Nope. Not ready yet. 

In the meantime, guess what happened? People started finding it. I went back a few days ago and we had actual fans. So I suggested it to some of my friends who I thought would appreciate it. And tonight, without actually doing anything, we have almost a hundred fans. That feels pretty cool.

That's the good news. The bad news is that I spent hours yesterday, unsuccessfully trying to figure out how to make the very groovy apps I found show up in the Boxes tab. If you can do that, the Boxes tab makes a great landing page for click-through ads. No matter what I do, it just doesn't happen. I emailed Facebook for help and got an automated response telling me pigs would fly before I heard from anyone. If any of you already know how to make this happen, I'd love to hear from you. What I want to create is something that looks like the pages below:

Doctors without Borders
PBS
World Wildlife Fund: This organization has the biggest collection of neat apps. In fact, I like the way they do their whole page...including the copywriting on the info page.
NPR
Greenpeace

And finally, here is the link to Telling The Truth's new Facebook page, if you want to take a look. Next stop. Twitter.