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 because the gatekeepers are gone.  Take a crack at starting a podcast regarding a subject you love and move as quickly as you can to creating a set of content that multiple groups of folks want to listen to.  Crazy things can happen when you simply put yourself out there so stop being self-conscious and live the life you deserve to live.

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 for his notes because I was focusing on the girl next to me in class I wasn’t good at getting what I wanted.

What’s the potential downside of asking in reality? Very, very small. Get over yourself and out of your own way so you can get the things you want in life.

Case in point: A project that I’m sure I’ll be blogging about this month is my “Meet My Followers” podcast that will launch later this week.  I tweeted out on a lark,  ”I’m seriously considering doing an audio podcast with my twitter followers being guests. Likely 20 minutes an episode. Would you be a guest?” In minutes I had several friends and business colleagues say yes either publicly or privately.  I went a couple steps further and began asking people who I admire and are good acquaintances but aren’t folks I would call friends.  They said “yes” as well.  I was somewhat amazed to by my own ability to get a “yes” from them but upon further reflection it made sense that they would help me out here.  I’ve supported a lot of these people, promoted their work and even sometimes pointed out opportunities for them to step into a new market.  This is their opportunity to take part in the thank you economy and pay me back with a bit of their time.  Plus a little promotion for themselves probably didn’t hurt in sealing the deal.

Now I look at it and I think I have only 3 days in August where I don’t have a guest lined up for the show.  Two days ago I didn’t even have a show.  Maybe it is the greatest time ever to be an entrepreneur.  Nah. I’m excited about this opportunity and it’s entirely because I was willing to be someone who just blurted out a question and allowed people to answer it for themselves.

Are you making the first ask?  If so, what good has come of that?  If not, what’s preventing you from doing so?

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 of the challenge at hand is almost perfectly in line with your skill set in that arena.  Athletes have spoken about it for years. So have writers and students.  Things just come easily when you get there.  I’m amazed at how many people don’t know what to do to help create their own flow zone for the tasks.  I’ve become obsessed with this recently.

If I need to do house chores, I’m listening to an audio book.  Typically for 15 minutes just sitting at my desk or even on my couch and then I’ll start.  I’ll look up and 90 minutes will have gone by and my house is all but vacuumed.  It’s an awesome feeling.

If I need to write, there’s a small select section of my iTunes collection that seems to get me in a spot where typing becomes almost like I’m playing along with the song.  I have to keep pressing keys to stay in time with the music.  (Or as Jana has said in one of my favorite tweets about me, “Watching @Kadedworkin drive a laptop reminds me of a lyrical piano player.#smaz” maybe I actually am.)

If I want to plan something out, it needs to be almost completely silent and I need a huge white board.  For some reason that first pass has to be done by hand on a wall.

I don’t really care about how peculiar my needs are.  I’m focused on getting results.  I know for me, sound and the lack thereof is a huge part in my being productive.  I’ve had to make a large effort to figure out what exactly works best in which situations.  I had to experiment and I had to trust my gut some times.

Do you know how to create a flow zone for yourself so you can be your most effective or happy or relaxed? What tactics are you using if you do know?  If you don’t know, what do you think might help you get there for the various tasks you have to get done? Try some different things out and get back to me about what has worked for you and what hasn’t.  I’m always interested in learning from your experience.

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.  Marketing is Social Media’s uncle.  Close relationships between the two exist and there’s some clearly shared DNA in the content creation and analytics.

So that begs the question, who are the parents of how companies should approach social media? Short answer: Business Development and Sales.

Both Biz Dev and Sales teams pride themselves on being able to talk with anyone and more importantly connect with each individual in a different and appropriate way.  This is identical to the core of what social media “marketing” has been all about.  Creating one-to-one relationships that begin to build trust and move closer to the phenomenal type of marketing every professional is after: word of mouth.

It’s extremely important that the folks handling the day to day on a company’s social media campaign have real names and faces because it’s this familiarity with users that engenders trust.  Think about the frustration of calling in to a call center for assistance with an ongoing issue and receive a different representative each time. Each time you have to re-explain most of the situation and if the rep isn’t fully engaged in their job you’ll be asked to repeat normal resolution steps even when they didn’t resolve the issue the first time you tried them.

If you’ve been given a higher status, through either large purchases or the potential for making them, most companies will assign a single person to answer any questions you might have.  These concierges cost more to hire, train and keep on staff but their customer’s happiness can be a big difference in a company’s bottom line at the end of the year.

Social media offers plenty of opportunities for business development as well.  Content redistribution deals (podcasts, retweets and blog articles), affiliate linking, online ad purchases and joint ventures are available pretty much everywhere in this space.  The individual or team running social media must not only be capable of spotting these opportunities but also must have the authority to negotiate and sign deals with only a quick review by legal and top executives.

Overall, marketing is a good start for social media as copywriting and certain style guidelines across all mediums are set up but after that point I think by moving these operations into sales and business development is more in tune with social’s DNA. What do you think?

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 service like Delicious so they can see what I’m reading and what I like.  Unfortunately the social bookmarking tools have never made it into my regular every day use.  I find Google’s Share feature to force me to go back and share items after I fully read and process them and even that is a bit of an annoying process. However, Instapaper has entered my workflow in the “river of news”.  It’s ability to intelligently grab URLs and put them in specific folders (through the use of their Safari bookmarklets) makes me marking something for review a piece of cake.  I treat my google reader like a triage station; figure out which pieces are valuable as quickly as possible, mark for review and move on.

So do I publicly advertise those Instapaper URLs?  No, because even some crappy articles get in there and there’s no opportunity for me to comment on them.  Create a blog? Too much work to create individual entries even with something like Tumblr’s reblog.  I decided to go with a tried and (somewhat) reliable tool in Twitter.  I always have it open, it automatically allows an RSS feed to be created and most of all after the headline and a bit.ly link I can give some kind of commentary.  You can follow the @KadeRead twitter account or you can see the most recent 20 or so posts on the KadeRead’s page here on the blog.  

Fair warning: I have a bit of backlog in there right now so you may see comments on postings as old as December 16, 2009.  Give me a week or so to clear them up.  My hope is that me playing digital article DJ will allow you guys to use my obnoxious obsession with RSS feeds to your benefit.  

Anyway I got to go crank and make things happen with the crew.

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 next time you race off to Amazon (or even a real life book retailer) don’t hesitate to pick up a book on perception or education because you never know how important seeing someone else’s frame and pitching content to them in the way they can most easily process it may make a huge difference.

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 extremely dollar driven, it’s not the dollar I’m after. It’s the experiences that money can provide.  If it means anything, you have my permission to go buy the tools to help you live out a dream or simply gain some new experience.  It’ll be worth it, I promise.

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

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:

1. Research on all the players in the field is absolutely required and is key to success
2. Your business goals are typically entirely different then all the parties you care to work with….hide your own goals, make each of their’s appear to be paramount
3. Keep negotiating until the final deal is done

These three things could be applied to college internships, first jobs or even massive deals.  The skills that the GoDaddy team and books like 3D Negotiation by David A. Lax & James K. Sebenius and You Can Negotiate Anything by Herb Cohen proved to be immensely rewarding. I feel grateful for having had the time and mentors to teach me how to get a business deal done with grace and humility.