Thursday, March 27th, 2008
“The purpose of a business is to create a customer.” - Peter Drucker
“I skate to where the puck is going to be.” - Wayne Gretzky
“Getting fit is about nutrition and exercise.” - Everyone
People, and especially us Internet businesspeople, seem to forget fundamental concerns of the things they care about. They get so wrapped up in these complex ideas, and want to do these complex things, simply because they can.
The interesting thing is that when you look at what works and what succeeds, it’s when everything you do relates directly back to the fundamental concern of your objective.
I see this happening all over the place, and especially with social media marketing. The problem is that people get lost in the gliss (that’s not even a word, but it sounds like it should be and it sounds like the kind of word I’d like to use. So I’m keeping it) and forget why they’re on Twitter, Facebook, or even have the business that they have.
What fundamental concerns does your business address for your customers? Do you reach out to them in ways that resonate in those areas 100%, or are you farting around, exploring new opportunities without the fundamental concerns of your business at the top of your mind?
This applies to everything. For example, in rock climbing, everyone who has climbed more than once knows it’s about your finger strength and shoulder strength. Everyone who has climbed more than twice knows that climbing is all about your footwork and balance. But few people focus solely on these things. Ultimately, the ones that practice yoga to improve their footwork and balance, that exercise their grip to improve their finger strength, and practice pull-ups until their shoulders are burning, succeed much more quickly than others.
If you’re trying to succeed at something that is seeming overwhelming, take a step back. Outline the fundamental concerns of the action (hint: it’s usually 3 things), decide which practices will most quickly develop your skill in those areas, and start practicing them more than anything else.
Monday, March 24th, 2008
So, I don’t really like sleep…other than the fact that it’s nice after significant physical exertion. But still, it kinda cramps my productivity. So I’m going to try and do less of it.
Those that know me, know that I’m fairly particular about sleep. I usually keep uncommon hours and often have no sleep schedule whatsoever other than “when I’m tired.”
This year, I’ve been trying to hack at the system of sleep a bit more precisely. I’ve done a fair amount of research and have discovered that, simply put, sleep is a series of chemical reactions in your body. I’ll explain more about what those are and what they do in a later post.
I’m definitely not up for polyphasic sleep in 20 minute cycles. It’s just not socially convenient in any way, shape, or form, and I can’t even imagine not getting into a longer flow-state.
However, 3 hours of sleep at night, with a 90 minute nap, like this guy, seems plausible. It would also fit in with my natural sleep habits.
So, my question to you all is this: What sleep experiments have you done? What research do you know about that I may benefit from?
I’ll be putting together the results of my research before next week - which is when I plan on starting the new sleep habit.
Friday, March 21st, 2008
Last week, I went over the elements of nutrition and macronutrients for a lean body composition. This week, it’s about fat loss.
Fat loss is fairly simple, but most people have incomplete or inaccurate ideas of what it takes to actually cut body fat from their body composition.
I’m going to talk about the three most effective ways for fat loss with exercise:
- Exercise to the extent that body fat, rather than food, is used as energy.
- Increasing your metabolism through cardio shortcuts.
- Increasing your metabolism through increasing muscle mass.
Exercise to the extent that body fat, rather than food, is used as energy.
The first option is pretty simple…basically, exercise long enough, and hard enough, to so that food energy is no longer sufficient to sustain performance. When food can’t be used for energy, fat is then turned into energy.
This is typically accomplished through a state called ketosis (remember, ketosis isn’t scary), where body fat is converted into energy. This is also accomplished through things like endurance cardio (bike training), strenuous sports like hockey, etc.
Increasing your metabolism through cardio shortcuts.
The second option is a shortcut with your cardio. Actually, two shortcuts.
High Intensity Interval Training, or HIIT, is the first shortcut and has been shown to increase your resting metabolic rate for a much greater period of time than much longer cardio sessions. In effect, you can often get more out of 20 minutes of HIIT training, than an hour on a bike.
The structure of a HIIT regimen is that you interval between intense aerobic activity, and moderate aerobic activity. This is done instead of a consistent ride on a bike or tradmill, for example. This study here, says it all:
After a 5 week conditioning period on a recumbant cycle, The High Intensithy Interval Training (HIIT) group perform sprints while the Endurance Training (ET) group performed a more traditional aerobic protocol, throughout the remaining 15 weeks. Both groups progressed in intensity. At the conclusion of the study, the HIIT group lost over 3 times as much subcutanious fat as the ET group despite expending less than half as many calories. For every calorie expended during HIIT, there was a nine fold loss of subcutanous body fat, as compared to the ET group.
Some ways that I’ve found to work best are alternating sprints with brisk walks, alternating jumping rope with crunches, or riding a bike on hilly terrain. As well, most of the newer exercise bikes have an interval training option.
The second shortcut is to exercise first thing in the morning, before breakfast. In essence, when you wake up, your body hasn’t had food (or food energy) since the last meal which may have been 8-12 hours prior. By this time, food has mostly been digested and any sort of intense activity would require energy. This energy comes from body fat.
So, doing HIIT first thing in the morning will work wonders. A couple/few pounds of fat loss a week, with a good diet, is not unreasonable.
Increasing your metabolism through increasing muscle mass.
Finally, one of the relatively unknown facets of fat los, is that muscle mass increases your metabolism, thus burning more calories. A number that I’ve heard is that each extra pound of muscle mass that you have burns up to an additional 50 calories per day.
So, how do you increase muscle mass quickly? Resistance (weight) training, and lifting s.l.o.w.l.y.
Despite the fact that it’s weight training, women will get toned with this kind of lifting, not bulky. Men can get noticeably bigger, depending on the intensity of the training regimen.
How it works is that by lifting weights slowly, you tear all of the various levels of muscle fibers. The way that most people lift relies on inertia and actually doesn’t stimulate the entire muscle. Lifting slowly get all of these layers and is actually much safer for you as well.
To maximize the effects here, you need 20-30 minutes of weight training, twice per week. Rest periods are crucial with this in order to give your muscles the time they need to rebuild themselves, hence only two workouts per week. In those 20-30 minutes, lift and lower weights with a count of 5-10 seconds up and 5-10 seconds down. Use a series of 6-8 compound exercises to hit the most muscle groups at a time, and do each exercise with an amount of weight that brings your muscle to failure after 6-8 reps.
The most common books for this principle are The Power of 10, and Slow Burn exercising, and strict research can be found here.
Friday, November 10th, 2006
I’ve been planning on writing about this in the next couple of weeks, but after reading Bruce Prokopets at Social Caster vent his frustration (Stop Yapping and Show Me The Results) regarding the lack of real performance data showing the value of Social Media Marketing, I decided to get some of it out now.
As a self-proclaimed SMM Evangelist, my instinct is to quickly defend social media as a marketing strategy. But, instead, it lit a fire under my butt to at least put this problem out there, sooner rather than later, for people to start crunching on.
But, alas, defeat must be conceded. For now…hint, hint.
Show Me the Data
One of the largest problems that I see with SMM becoming more widely accepted as a viable marketing strategy is that performance data hasn’t been disclosed by those who are having success with it. I have seen sites such as The $15k Challenge which disclose strict performance data directly tied to ROI, and HitWise has some great data that they disclose (though this is mostly in regards to inward and outward traffic).
If SMM is going to become a widely-accepted practice, people need proof. They need evidence. People need to know that the time, energy and resources that they are going to devote are going to be worth it.
Quite frankly, while it’s a risk that I’m willing to take with my career, I don’t blame others for not taking the same risk. If a newspaper called me tomorrow asking me to advertise with them, I would certainly expect hard performance data. Plus, when it comes to business and marketing, in the end, it is about the performance.
Make it Valuable to Me…oh, AND my boss.
I sense that part of the reason that numbers haven’t been released regarding successful campaigns is that people aren’t quite sure yet what to measure. We saw this with search marketing 5-6 years ago, when all of the independent affiliate marketers were screaming about the value of search and raking in cash, while everyone else blew them off.
It wasn’t until the right tools came along to make it easy to measure performance that search became valuable.
It wasn’t until metrics were defined and the tools to record these metrics were made accessible that search marketing became valuable. Until this happens with Social Media Marketing, it, too, will remain unnoticed.
The point is that until the perception of value is easily accessible and understood, that anything is worthless.
It then becomes our responsibility to define what these metrics are to become. “Engagement,” “Attention,” etc, those measurements are crap. They’re marketing speak for marketers who lack a focus on results.
What is needed is something that outlines how each social media tactic, Social Networks, Blogs, Messageboards, etc, should be measured. Then the tools need to be put into place to measure and present this information in a clear and compelling manner.
Stay tuned for updates on what should be measured and how you can measure performance of your social media campaigns. It’s a lot more fun to talk about marketing when you have numbers anyway. ;-)
Monday, October 30th, 2006
So, my submission for the Marketing Pilgrim SEM Scholarship Contest is up and ready to go. :)
What I’ve found is that Social Media Marketing/Optimization is such a rogue discipline at this point, that there’s very little structure for how people are discussing its philosophies, principles, strategies and tactics.
In The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing, I discuss the five key forms of communication with your marketplace and how those conversations transpire.
The first three are:
- Declaration of Identity
- Identity through Association
- User-initiated Conversation
I’ll let you read the full article for #4 and #5 (it is a contest, btw :-P), as well as specific channels for creating a conversation with your market in these 5 ways.
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