From 0 to podcast in 2 days
03 August 201072 hours ago I was a normal guy with a ton of audio and video equipment in my apartment. Several friends and even a few family members made fun of me for the obnoxious set up I had. Over the course of the last 3 days I blurted out an idea I had for a podcast and got such a supportive reaction from the community that I think that they would be upset if I didn't produce the podcast. Now I have 21 interviews lined up for the month of August and I've started the conversations with potential sponsors. There's something about great, simple ideas that people gravitate to. My recommendation for folks is to take their original idea, even if it's a different version of a currently respected and known idea, and boil it down for a while until it becomes so simple that anyone can understand it in under a tweet. 140 characters is all you need to get a concise and complete idea across. As my friend and role model Gary Vaynerchuk communicated in his 2008 speech circuit, if you think you have a feel and you know you have the knowledge you have to take a shot now ...
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The importance of making the ask
02 August 2010Most people are scared to ask for what they want in life. Some people are fearful they'll get it. Some fear that they'll be laughed at for even asking. I've had several conversations over the last few months where people who are well known and well respected in their industries have said to me something to the effect of "I wish I could help more but I don't even know where to start." These are people who get consulting fees for thousands of dollars a month. They want to help people because that's genuinely who they are and they had folks who helped them along the way so it was time to pay it forward. You could be one of those folks they choose to help free of charge simply because you asked. But you didn't. Making the ask is something that I wish I had learned to do earlier in my life. I used to avoid asking for anything as long as I possibly could. There are several occasions where things were downright awkward because I wouldn't make the ask. Be it the pretty girl in class next to me for a date, an employer for a raise or a friend ...
Find how to create your flow zone
01 August 2010A funny thing has happened over the last 8 months. I've starting walking more. A lot more. It started with the FitBit. It is now a constant companion and will be for the foreseeable future. I stopped driving to my job that was a 12 minute walk away. In May, when I was really at a loss for what to do about work, I would go for walks and successively longer and longer walks. Now I've had walks that have come in at almost 8 miles and most weeks I'm putting down more than 30 miles. Why am I telling you this and how will it help you? There's been a very funny result of my even minimal exercise: after about 2.5 miles I get an idea flow that is amazing. I don't know exactly why it takes 2.5 miles (typically about 45-50 minutes) to get there but it's consistently there. It's where some of my best ideas for clients and potential clients have come from. Also, it's begun to give me some clarity on my own personal situation. I've always believed that the so called "flow zone" is a very thin elliptical area on the chart that is where the level ...
Marketing is not the father of Social Media
20 May 2010Given the types of blogs I subscribe to I get a lot of "Social Media Marketing for your small business" posts in my feed reader. I am starting to believe that if you're treating social media as an additional channel for your marketing that you simply don't get social media. Before the hater-pants come on, I'm not saying that you can't market your business using these social platforms but rather that it's not the most effective way. When I first learned about marketing in my undergraduate program all the methods to speak to a potential user base were one-way: company to consumer. All was well in the world of TV, radio and print since companies got to keep control of their brands. Social media was in it's infancy right as I was graduating. It's been chronicled on many blogs that social media has allowed customers to now define any company's brand as they see fit. These consumers have the capacity to create more content online than a Marketing department ever will. A couple weeks ago I began looking at social media's DNA and where it would fit inside an organization. I've come to the conclusion that Social Media isn't the child of Marketing. ...
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@KadeRead – an experimental twitter account
15 February 2010Given all the news with Google's Buzz this week and the subsequent land rush of the new adopters racing to it as if it were a panacea I decided to take a peek at it. To be honest it like a lot of technologies doesn't strike me a game changing. Interesting, yes. Stolen features from two long dead micro-whatever platforms (Pownce & Jaiku) mashed together with a little bit of Twitter and Friendfeed envy baked in and you have an idea what the service actually provides. The big play here though is the install base. I get that this is an eyeballs play and that Google better than anyone can monetize eyeballs. There are just too many issues with the service and a few things I don't quite frankly grok which will prevent me from using it. I really had hoped that this platform had finally provided a solution to a request I get pretty regularly. I subscribe to over 250 RSS feeds and about a dozen blog alerts for specific terms. More than a few folks have asked me to give them the list (and I have after some slight modifications) and even more have asked me to use a ...
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When things go wrong…
28 January 2010Today I got a random phone call that really made me angry. I worked incredibly hard to make a business deal happen and got everything all tied off....delivery made at the dock....ready to be trucked over to Vegas. For reasons unknown, 500 copies of a book never made the truck. In typical Kade fashion I got the books and resolved the problem my own way. Issue resolved. Anyway I got to go crank and make things happen with the crew.
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Psychology: a key to getting what you want
26 January 2010Psychology was one of my passions in my undergraduate program at Arizona State for several reasons but Dr Marek Wosinski definitely helped fuel that fire. It was an astonishing arena where studying people and the way they interpreted situations you could understand how to change and present information in a manner that made it highly likely to get what you want. Some people may view this as manipulative but I simply see it as playing to the human OS. There are a number of books in this space that I could have (and may subsequently do) written reviews of. Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely and Influence by Robert Cialdini were key to my studies outside the classroom. That stated I look time and again at the content I regularly consume and except for football (yes, the European version) psychology plays a huge role in what I watch. I mean seriously how many times can I watch episodes of Dragon's Den (or Shark Tank) or The Dog Whisperer and not see the changes being made. Here's the interesting part: even though I know the game it doesn't mean I'm not susceptible to it. And now for the shocking part, neither are you. The ...
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- blog,Business Skills,General,Introspective
If equipment is the only thing stopping you from an opportunity…
23 January 2010buy it and simply start executing. I've had three conversations over the last 24 hours where folks have said that they would love to do something but can't because they don't feel like they have the proper tools. Seriously, if that, and not fear, is stopping you go buy the tool you want and move to do what you want to do. Buying my Rode Podcaster, shock mount and swing arm two years ago was huge for me because I stopped thinking of my computer as textual medium. Add on top of that I could use it for things I enjoy like writing and recording parodies and now recording podcasts it was totally worth the $300 investment I struggled over weeks about. Like most things in life, I think that you simply have to try it and that money should not be the ultimate determinant. If you're scared about the cash for brand new equipment, buy something used or rent it for a few days if you can. If you end up loving it how much is that joy potentially worth? If you haven't picked this up from me yet in a conversation or here on the blog, while I am ...
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Things get busy and that’s when you find out how good you really are
21 January 2010Today has been a whirlwind. It's moments like this that I begin to completely believe in Parkinson's Law. (For those of you who don't know what this is it basically states that the more time you have the greater a task will seem. If you have to complete it you'll focus on just the essentials and get it done in amazingly short periods of time.) I've edited now 4 videos, done graphics on 3 of them, responded to a ton of email, assisted in a couple meetings and had two awesome conversations between 8 and 10P. That's entirely the reason why this post is going up so close to the bell. Anyway announcements on a lot of different things will come out over the next 10 days, so stay tuned. Wish I could post something more, but I got more hustlin to do. #crushit
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Making business deals happen
20 January 2010Some of you know that before I was the social media community manager at Vemma that I was many different things at GoDaddy. One of those many positions I filled was as a sounding board to the Business Development team. In that time I gained a mentor (seriously, Rocco, I wouldn't be the young man I am today without your guidance and incredible patience) and a boat load of experience through the team that did the deals. I played the role of outsider as best I could learning the maneuvering skills and how business and ego need to be balanced to get a deal done on all sides. Today I completed my first big end-to-end deal where I feel like I really internalized and used the skills that the BizDev team at GoDaddy taught me. Sure the amount of cash wasn't as big as the deals I've played support roles on but overall this was my deal that got through political hurdles, suppliers, and shipping schedules. While incredibly stressful it was an amazing experience that bordelines on addictive. That stated, here's what I want you as my readers to know: Research on all the players in the field is absolutely required and ...
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