If you meet someone more than 2-3 times and they don’t remember your name, they may be bad at remembering names. (But it’s telling that you didn’t make an impression.) If you meet someone 2-3 times and they don’t remember meeting you, walk away, you don’t have anything they want and they aren’t interested in anything you have. Your experience/story/expertise doesn’t resonate with them for whatever reason. Perhaps your story is not really your story but rather a reporting of information that is neither focused nor personal. Telling a potential client who won the game or that a new study came out shows that you are in the know but it tells a very surface level story.

The line between customer, service provider, job seeker and brand evangelist gets more blurry by the tweet. (How the hell do you effectively follow 4,356 people on Twitter? And if you do, what else do you do all day?)

As we invest more time in social media strategies our end goal is to get more “subscribers.” More sign-ups, more connects, more touch-points both inside and outside of our natural network. But 70% of the updates/tweets I get are not stories in the authors voice but instead a message or story forwarded from another site. Often this information is useful but I don’t always remember who sent it. I too have forwarded relevant information straight from the source without commentary but it is all about balance. Make sure your client’s know your story first, and then back that up with sourced content. Don’t let the balance go more than 70/30 unique content to sourced content.

I used to climb—a lot. Mountains. In the Rockies. It’s very hard work. The air is thin. The weather is often lousy. Gravity is unrelenting.

One of my favorite things about mountaineering, though, is that you have a lot of time to think. This can be a mixed blessing for the novice climber because you often spend much of your time thinking about how tired and miserable you are.

When I was off the rocks, I spent plenty of my free time reading the classics of alpine literature and realized that the best mountain philosophers had discovered ways to focus their discomfort and flip the pain into something positive. It was one line in particular, and I no longer recall who uttered it, that really resonated with me:

Rather than think about climbing the mountain, think of being lifted up by it.

OK, so it’s a bit of a Zen koan, but that’s what makes it helpful on an eight-hour uphill slog. You keep thinking about it and not the burning in your quads or the pounding in your temples.

No matter how heavy my pack, no matter how deep the snow, no matter how slippery the rocks, that simple phrase kept me going and still serves as inspiration today.

So the question of the day is this: With the economy in the tank, the Dow flatlining and jobs being shed by the thousands, what inspires you to keep going when the going gets tough?

— Jonathan

(Photo of Parry Peak by Gregory Younger)

Americans love a good story. We’re the home of Hollywood. We invented the television. We just elected Barack Obama—a man with a most improbable, and breathtakingly American, backstory—president of the United States.

Click on the “about us” link on virtually any website and you are likely to be greeted by a couple of dull biographies that were written from people’s resumes and, if you really aren’t lucky, a calendar filled with grim milestones like “1977-Gray Jeans Company moves headquarters from Spokane to Topeka.”

Avoid this at all costs. No one cares.

Have some fun. Tell a story. And it does not have to be the CEO’s story. It can be some guy in customer service or that woman in sales, but somewhere, at your company, there are people with great life stories to tell. Let them.

Maybe you have an expert spelunker, a bat biologist, a tropical explorer who’s battled sharks and crocodiles to reach an isolated spring before he died of thirst, a mountain climber who prefers to go without a rope and wearing Birkenstocks, a world champion scarf knitter, a skier who never met an avalanche-prone slope she would not plunge down, a competitive Yahtzee player,  a pilot who flies relief supplies in after natural disasters, someone who can complete the New York Times crossword in less than 30 minutes or maybe you have a person who’s done something else remarkable and compelling.

Let them tell their story and let who they are be more a part of who you are.

—Jonathan

Guy Kawasaki, author, VC and all-around internet marketing genius, recently included the Eat Media blog into his cadre of Alltop sites—check it out here. The Alltop brand consists of vetted content across a blizzard of topics. Not quite an RSS and not quite Google Reader but a wonderful mixture of the two.

Thanks Guy.

Check out—Facebook Ad Battle

Another example of “lots of people probably thought of it, but someone executed it.” Do you have a drawer full of ideas you can’t get to because you’re busy with________?

Content-Branding-Design: In that order, for a reason. Open that drawer—the busy work will always be there.

-Ian

“MANAGER OF FREELANCERS. Find and hire and manage the best outside talent in the world. If it can be defined as a project, and if great work defeats good, seriously consider having the MOF get it done.” Click here for Seth’s entire article

Just so happens I know a some folks who specialize in this.

-Ian

The Farmer’s Market
—There are some who come for the produce.
—There are some who come for the patchouli.
—There are some who come for the politics.
—There are some who come for the experience.

A “Farmer’s Market” that is more bad watercolor paintings and politics, than produce, attracts a very different audience than the back of a truck filled with fresh turnip greens. Everyone wants a community these days. But everyone also wants to service their prospective marketplace—to sell. The trick lies in setting up reasonable, sustainable expectations that ring true, balancing both community and marketplace.

Too much community and you face a challenging revenue model. One that (Facebook) focuses on the growth of a community’s user base, backed by a “figure out the revenue model later” mentality. Too much marketplace and branding and your content/message doesn’t ring true.

Your customers know where to find you, the content you feed Google is going to bring them to you. But promising them community and providing them marketplace is a bait and switch that consumers have no patience for—they are too savvy and too much information is available. When the perception of relevance begins to lean more toward marketplace/marketing than community/information you have a problem.

No one wakes up on Sunday and says, “I need fresh radishes and a didgeridoo.”

The economy is in a ditch and if you are working in traditional media or financial services, the ditch is deep and scary. Another American industry that is in dire straits is automobile manufacturing.

The auto industry has suffered one paroxysm after another in the past decade with General Motors killing off its most venerable brand—Oldsmobile, Chrysler being bought and later sold by Mercedes Benz, and Ford ending up being run by someone without that iconic last name. All of this came before the current economic slump that has Wall St. and Main St. reeling.

The latest news out of Detroit—where each of the Big Three is going through between $500 million and $1 billion in cash each month just to stay open—is that GM is pursuing a merger with Chrysler, which, in essence, would leave us with the Big Two.

If completed, this won’t be a merger of equals; GM will simply absorb and dismantle Chrysler. Of the 26 model lines now offered by Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep, a mere seven are expected to survive.

Now those seven models may reflect 56 percent of Chrysler’s sales, but they also represent something else—icons of the automotive world. Pegged for survival are the Jeep Wrangler/Wrangler Unlimited and Grand Cherokee, Dodge Ram pickup, Chrysler 300C/Dodge Charger sedans, and the Chrysler Town & Country/Dodge Caravan minivans.

Which brings us to today’s questions: what is iconic about your business and what are you doing to promote and protect those core assets? Creating, displaying and managing superior content can help reinforce a positive public image and can combat a flagging public image. Icons can’t be created through marketing; there has to be an organic component. And the organic portion is what must be nurtured.

What are you doing to support your icons?

— Jonathan