Let's Get Rid Of Airline Service & Car Audio.

Two things I've experienced this week are airline food/service and car audio. You know what? They have to change. Let me tackle Airline Food/Service first. I just flew to Reno, Nevada to run a series of workshops for a very famous retail company. I flew first class both ways — so I was quite comfortable. In retrospect, here's my opinion — many things need to change on most continental (within the US) flights:

1. Get rid of the food & drink service. This is a hold-back from the 1940's - being 'served' in your seat. Get your own food and drink in the terminal and bring it on-board or eat before you get on the flight. Why? The food is usually bad and the service is clumsy in close quarters. I don't need a drink either - no liquor. If you can't hold out drinking liquor for a few hours, you have a problem.
2. Get rid of flight attendants. Not all of them — keep one for each flight to handle emergencies and do garbage clean-up service. Think of other forms of public transportation - buses, trains, etc. — they usually only have one driver or conductor. Why do planes need a retinue of players to make the experience that much more memorable?
3. Give me room to work/read. Even in first class, when someone reclines their seat in front of me, I can't use my laptop effectively. I almost never use the recline feature - so I would eliminate it. I can sleep and relax just fine in my seat. Also, current legroom on planes is adequate (I'm 5'11") - don't know why so many people complain.
4. Give me an outlet to plug in my stuff. I don't want to buy an adapter that might not work on all flights or short out my laptop/iPhone. I want a PLUG until laptop/iPhone batteries last for days while watching movies/doing work.
5. Give me wireless connectivity for free & let me make phone calls. I understand the security issues — but I want to make phone calls from my phone and not pay college tuition to make one using the plane's phone service.
6. Ban all carry-ons. Except for briefcases that hold laptops (it should fit under the seat in front of you). Many of you might disagree — but I am getting sick and tired of the amount and size of luggage that people bring on. In addition, if you can't lift it over your head to stow it — it's should be checked. We would cut de-planing time in half if we banned all carry-ons. We can then eliminate the overhead compartments (that I hit my head on EVERY time I stand!).
7. Give me a second armrest between seats. Be honest, you don't like touching strangers (unless you're one of those types of people) - so why do they force us to share armrests? Give us a little more space and two armrests. Thank you.

My Car Audio rant is more concise. I spend a lot of time in my car (2003 Honda Accord EX) traveling to the office, speaking engagements, and client pitches. I have an iPhone and listen to music and podcasts (Adam Carolla & This American Life) exclusively. Also I use the phone too - but I try not to - so I can focus on my driving. Get rid of the sound system. Really.

1. I don't need a radio. AM/FM is not dying — it's dead. All the info I get from my radio I can get on my iPhone. Weather, traffic, school closings, etc. - all on my iPhone. I know - it's audio and I should concentrate on driving. So check it before you leave or pull over. It's that simple. But getting back to AM/FM — it sucks. The announcers/personalities are awful — they are from another generation. And even if they are good — there are 45 minutes of commercials for every hour of talk. Put radio out of its misery.
2. I don't need a CD Player/Changer. With my iPhone, I have my entire music collection (for the moment) in my hand. Not only do they break down frequently (and are expensive to repair), every CD that ever hit my car becomes unplayable because of scratches and sun damage (I have kids).
3. Just give me an basic amplifier with speakers (and a microphone). And a connector with a small display on the dash for info. I can then plug my iPhone in and get EXACTLY what I want to hear — for a lot less money. Don't get into the PalmPre/Android/Zune argument - until they hold a 30-70% share of the market (like the iPhone/iPod) — go away.

I know that new cars have this ability - but they are still installing radios with CD players. I also know that I can have my current car set up with a connection — but it will cost a hundreds of dollars to install.

Again, this is MY opinion. But if you disagree, think about it a bit — some of the things I say should have happened years ago. But let me know in the comments section.

Have a GREAT FRIDAY!

The Problem With Cable News Thinking.

Not only the networks of all political persuasions that come to mind, but the mindset they represent... By Seth Godin (my hero) at Seth's Blog.

When I was growing up, Eyewitness News always found a house on fire in South Buffalo. "Tonight's top story," Irv Weinstein would intone, "...a fire in South Buffalo." Every single night. If you watched the news from out of town, you were sure that the city must have completely burned to the ground.

Cable news thinking has nothing to do with fires or with politics. Instead, it amplifies the worst elements of emotional reaction:

• Focus on the urgent instead of the important.
• Vivid emotions and the visuals that go with them as a selector for what's important.
• Emphasis on noise over thoughtful analysis.
• Unwillingness to reverse course and change one's mind.
• Xenophobic and jingoistic reactions (fear of outsiders).
• Defense of the status quo encouraged by an audience self-selected to be uniform.
• Things become important merely because others have decided they are important.
• Top down messaging encourages an echo chamber (agree with this edict or change the channel).
• Ill-informed about history and this particular issue.
• Confusing opinion with the truth.
• Revising facts to fit a point of view.
• Unwillingness to review past mistakes in light of history and use those to do better next time.

If I wanted to hobble an organization or even a country, I'd wish these twelve traits on them. I wonder if this sounds like the last board meeting you went to...

Have More Fun.

Great viral videos are hard to come by, but Volkswagen appears to have hit the bullseye. Their new campaign “The Fun Theory” is a series of experiments, captured on video, to find out if making the world more fun can improve people’s behavior. This video, Piano Stairs, has achieved over 1 million views on YouTube – I can’t count how many times friends have shared it this week. Among the experiments: does turning a set of subway stairs into a real-life piano encourage people to use them (answer: yes, 66% more). Another experiment asks whether making a trash can sound like a 50ft-deep well will make people pick up their trash. An upcoming experiment, meanwhile, will turn a bottle recycling center into an arcade game.

The brand placement is as subtle as it could possibly be: a simple VW logo dropped in at the end. And yet the content carries that logo all around the web, as tens of thousands of people pass around the video, along with their positive associations for the VW brand. Isn’t that the definition of a perfect brand campaign?

Build a Social Media Hiring Strategy.

Jon Jordan got a weird feeling recently when he interviewed a candidate for a sales and marketing position. By Chris Penttila at Entrepreneur Magazine.

The applicant’s claim of double-digit sales at another company didn’t parallel with that company’s turbulent history. “It didn’t match up,” says Jordan, founder of Atlantic Business Technologies, a Raleigh, N.C. web development and marketing firm with 30 employees.

He went on LinkedIn and found a connection in the applicant’s network to verify his suspicions. The claim “was completely false,” says Jordan, 30. The applicant didn’t get the job.

Jordan’s not the only one cruising social networking sites during the hiring process. A June Jump Start Social Media survey of 100 hiring managers at small, mid-size and large companies found 75 percent go to LinkedIn to research job candidates before making a job offer, while 48 percent check out Facebook and 26 percent go to Twitter. When asked where they find talent for job openings, 66 percent said LinkedIn, 23 percent said Facebook and 16 percent said Twitter.

Social media sites have become an integral piece of the hiring puzzle; it’s how to leverage these sites most effectively as a recruiting tool that has companies scrambling. These sites are low-cost or free to join, but it takes time and effort to make them truly useful.

“Most companies aren’t doing enough,” says Veronica Fielding, president of Jump Start Social Media. “They think there’s an ROI that’s got to be associated with it immediately.”

Other companies are still trying to wrap their heads about the whole idea of social media. When Oklahoma City-based HR consultant Jessica Miller-Merrell gave a talk about social media at an HR conference this spring, some people asked her how to use “Tweeter,” while others believed social media was the domain of marketing and Generation Y, not the HR department.

“Most of the HR people there [were] not seeing the value yet,” says Miller-Merrell, who blogs about the social media/HR axis on her site, BloggingForJobs.blogspot.com.

On the other end of the spectrum are entrepreneurial firms like New York City’s 5W Public Relations, which is seeing a big payoff from its social media recruiting efforts. The 75-employee firm has a LinkedIn profile, a company Facebook page, a blog and a Twitter account with hundreds of followers. Founder Ronn Torossian, 34, posts job openings to Twitter and recently recruited a great hire with way. He’s recruited other employees through Facebook. “I think social media absolutely does work to help recruit [new hires],” he says.

Atlantic Business Technologies posts job openings on Twitter that direct applicants to the company website and the company’s Facebook page. Its LinkedIn profile offers a company overview and employee profiles. Jordan likes taking the company’s job openings viral on Twitter by “re-tweeting”-- that is, having his followers spread the word to their followers. “Many times it just takes a couple of ‘re-tweets’ to get potential candidates to review the job description,” he says. “Facebook and LinkedIn are great for networking and Twitter is better for broadcasting.”

Twitter is more than a form of microblogging; it’s also a real-time search engine. Miller-Merrell suggests using hash tags that designate a topic (i.e. #jobs) and simplify Twitter searches. “You can actually search for ‘#jobs’ and use advanced options to sort or narrow it down by zip code,” she says. Sites like TweetMyJobs.com and Jobshouts.com will let you post job openings that are fed over to Twitter. For best results, balance your marketing with links and trendy insights that position your brand as a valuable part of the Twitter community, Fielding says.

How to Build a Social Media Strategy This downturn is a great time to develop a social media recruiting strategy if your company doesn’t have one yet. Here are some basic tips for getting started:

Analyze your staffing needs. What kinds of jobs will you fill over the next year, and which social media sites will get you in front of your target applicants? If you run a small grocery, your potential workers are on the more casual Myspace and Facebook. If you need a director of sales, LinkedIn is a better bet.

Start where you’re comfortable. Some sites will feel more intuitive to you, and that’s fine. Dedicate 15 minutes to your favorite social media site a few times a week until you’ve got it down, and then branch out. Learn how other entrepreneurs use social media sites for recruiting, and don’t be embarrassed to ask other members on these sites for shortcuts as you’re learning them.

Remember your manners. Would you walk into a networking event full of people you don’t know and tell them to find the perfect applicant for you ASAP? Of course not; that would be rude. The same manners apply in cyberspace. Join some groups on social media sites and participate actively for awhile before you ask members to forward your job listings and so on. Good manners and common sense give people a good vibe about you, and your company.

Don’t do too little, but don’t do too much. Some candidates might think your company is in the dark ages if its social profile is too low, while others might get intimidated--even suspicious--if your company seems to be everywhere, all the time. Ponder the right level of exposure as you position your company.

Be consistent and responsive. Make sure employees have a uniform way of describing the company on these sites so job seekers aren’t confused, Fielding says. Designate an employee to check the company’s social media pages daily, too. If a customer posts a message to your company’s Facebook page saying the company is unresponsive, you’ll only further this perception if the complaint goes unanswered for weeks.

Realize that it’s a long-term commitment. Don’t expect a quick ROI from your social media efforts. It takes six months minimum to build relationships with people on social media sites “and that’s if you are hardcore,” Miller-Merrell says. Be patient, stick with it and be prepared to make a few mistakes as you poke around these sites.

What you do now will put you miles ahead of your main competitors in finding the right hires when the economy picks up. “If you don’t have good people, you don’t have a good product,” Jordan says. These days, you can’t have a good recruiting strategy without a good grasp of social media, either.

Chris Penttila is a freelance journalist whose work has also appeared in The Costco Connection, Oregon Business magazine, QSR Magazine, TheStreet.com and other publications. She lives in the Chapel Hill, N.C. area and covers workplace issues on her blog, Workplacediva.blogspot.com.

Harvey McKay: How To Negotiate!

I love Harvey McKay. From one of his first books, Swim with the Sharks, I saw a real professional who was not shy about revealing his tried and true business secrets. He is a one-of-a-kind leader! By Harvey McKay

I got a phone call from a Fortune 500 CEO one week whom I had never met. After decades of begging the government to relax their regulatory grip and let his industry experience the joys of competition, his wish had been granted—and his bottom line had plummeted. He wanted me to talk to his top executives for two hours and zero in on negotiating strategies.

A bit overwhelmed, I said, "I'm very flattered but, frankly, I don't know if I can talk for two hours on negotiating." Then I realized I was actually negotiating with myself. As my brain finally reconnected, I cut myself off. "Well, let me sleep on it and I'll get back to you."

Later that evening, I began to write down some of my negotiating experiences and saw that my problem was going to be holding the speech down to two hours. I'd already brushed up against the first and second laws of negotiating that morning in my conversation with the CEO:

1. Never accept any proposal immediately, no matter how good it sounds.
2. Never negotiate with yourself. You'll furnish the other side with ammunition they might never have gotten themselves. Don't raise a bid or lower an offer without first getting a response.

Here are some more negotiating rules and insights:

• Never cut a deal with someone who has to "go back and get the boss's approval." That gives the other side two bites of the apple to your one. They can take any deal you are willing to make and renegotiate it.
• If you can't say yes, it's no. Just because a deal can be done, doesn't mean it should be done. no one ever went broke saying "no" too often.
• Just because it may look nonnegotiable, doesn't mean it is. Take that beautifully printed "standard contract" you've just been handed. Many a smart negotiator has been able to name a term and gets away with it by making it appear to be chiseled in granite, when they will deal if their bluff is called.
• Do your homework before you deal. Learn as much as you can about the other side. Instincts are no match for information.
• Rehearse. Practice. Get someone to play the other side. Then switch roles. Instincts are no match for preparation.
• Beware the late dealer. Feigning indifference or casually disregarding timetables is often just a negotiator's way of trying to make you believe he/she doesn't care if you make the deal or not.
• Be nice, but if you can't be nice, go away and let someone else do the deal. You'll blow it.
• A deal can always be made when both parties see their own benefit in making it.
• A dream is a bargain no matter what you pay for it. Set the scene. Tell the tale. Generate excitement. Help the other side visualize the benefits, and they'll sell themselves.
• Don't discuss your business where it can be overheard by others. Almost as many deals have gone down in elevators as elevators have gone down.
• Watch the game films. Top players in any game, including negotiating, debrief themselves immediately after every major session. They always keep a book on themselves and the other side.
• No one is going to show you their hole card. You have to figure out what they really want. Clue: Since the given reason is never the real reason, you can eliminate the given reason.
• Always let the other side talk first. Their first offer could surprise you and be better than you ever expected.
• You must be fully prepared to lose a great deal in order to make a great deal!
• "Make every bargain clear and plain, that none may afterwards complain." - Greek Proverb

How to Go on the Offensive with Facebook.

I love Guy Kawasaki — his thinking is light years ahead of his contemporaries. I hope you enjoy his latest piece on Facebook - read, absorb, and act!

By Guy Kawasaki at Alltop

A friend of mine conducted this informal poll about what a person should do if she were asked to show a male interviewer her Facebook page. Only 12% said they would agree. Thirty-three percent said they would walk out of the interview or refuse. Fifty-five percent said they would ask why and then decide.

It’s time to “face” two facts: First, most organizations are either already looking at candidates’ Facebook profiles, or they are going to start soon. Second, people who are worth hiring either have a social-networking profile on some service or will soon—indeed, recruiters may already think that a candidate who doesn’t have a profile is hiding something, disconnected, or clueless.

Given these two developments, the defensive advice that experts are pedaling to “be careful what you put on your Facebook profile because recruiters may look at it” is ass-backwards. Instead, you should assume that organizations are checking you out (in fact, I blogged about a more efficient way to do this here) and use this to your advantage.

That is, rather than cleanse profiles in order to escape rejection, enlightened candidates will use Facebook profiles to market themselves—perhaps even asking to show their Facebook profiles in interviews. Think about what companies are looking for: bright, diligent, honest, well-rounded, socially-responsible, green, and connected people. Now imagine that you were giving a tour of your Facebook profile to a recruiter. Would you be able to make these kinds of statements?

“This is my graduation picture. I completed a four-year program on time while working full time." “This is one of my favorite professors. I took ABC from him (where ABC is a subject area relevant to the job).” “This is a photo essay of when I traveled throughout China. I was totally blown away by the entrepreneurial spirit of the Chinese, and I made many friendships that will help me in your position.” “Here’s when my hockey/soccer/basketball/whatever team won the championship. I learned so much about hard work, discipline, and team play because of sports.” “Here’s a bunch of my friends hanging out with me (this picture should contain people of multiple genders, ethnicities, religions, and sexual orientations) right before we went on a mission to build schools in Guatemala.” “This is the day that I got my iPhone/iTablet/iWhatever—I have to admit that I’m an early-adopter of technology.” Even better: “This is a picture of how I use what this company makes.” “Here’s when I went to Demo/TechCrunch50/World Economic Forum/G8/whatever in order to learn about what’s happening in the industry.” “This is the tweetup/meetup/faceup/whatever that I coordinated to help people network better.” "Here’s where I volunteered to work at SXSW so that I could attend all the sessions for free. This is the most amazing conference—have you ever been to it?" “Here’s when I met Robert Scoble/Mike Arrington/Charlene Li/Jeremiah Owyang/Chris Anderson/Steve Rubel/Ariana Huffington/Steve Ballmer/Steve Jobs/GRAMEEMBANK/David Pogue/Walt Mossberg/whoever.”

You don’t need to get all Forest Gump, but you get the point. Some folks might make the case that I’m missing the point of Facebook: It’s supposed to be one’s personal, “let my hair down,” silly world. Yes, you will lose some cred with your friends for selling out. Welcome to the real world—here you have to make tradeoffs all the time.

For a while, people who work Facebook like this will stand out from the crowd. Then recruiters will figure out that you’re playing them. Still, I would look at it this way: “At least this candidate is clever enough to work the system.”

The irony is that if enough people start doing this, recruiters may tire of looking at Facebook profiles, and then you can go back to showing pictures of when you barfed your brains out at a party while wearing no clothes.

09 • 09 • 09

The Beatles are the defining group of my generation and I might daresay — many generations. Today marks a date where they will release all of their music in a remastered state AND expand their presence into younger generations via a RockBand video game offering (there are also hints of their catalogue appearing on iTunes - so stay tuned!). If you don't know it already - when it comes to marketing - The Beatles are the BEST.

I remember the first time I heard them - I was five years old in my brother's room. On the turntable was Meet The Beatles and "It Won't Be Long" was blasting out of one single speaker on the floor (that's 60's high fidelity for you - Heathkit by the way!).

I instantly fell in love. My older brothers allowed me to stay in their room and listen to the whole album before I was again banished back to my room forever.

The funny thing is that as time goes on, other bands that I LOVED just fade away - U2, REM, Jethro Tull, The Partridge Family, etc. Their music still has meaning to me — unfortunately I just don't listen to their albums anymore.

But I still have the entire Beatles catalogue on my iPhone. There is something compelling, enjoyable, and fun about their music. I listen to it ALL the time.

Go figure.

So I will be asking for the entire remastered Beatles catalog for Christmas. And Santa, I've been a good boy.

P.S. What's your favorite Beatles' song and album?

Try Kindle for iPhone. It Will Change Your Life.

I have been reading books for over 42 years. I LOVE them. Biographies, business, novels, mysteries, scifi, horror, comedy . . . anything. I scare people with the amount of books (and the associated bookcases) that I own.

A number of months ago, I downloaded the iPhone version of the Amazon Kindle just to see how it works and if I would actually read a book on a small screen. Well, after a few months, I have 10 books on my iPhone and there is no end in sight.

The best feature of the iPhone Kindle (IMHO) is the ability to download a single chapter of the book to see if you like it or if it is actually lives up to its hype. Be wary — this is an addictive way to get you to try the book. I've bought all of my books this way.

Readability is not an issue. I know . . . I know — you're afraid of the small form factor. But don't worry. Remember when you went from Hardcover to Paperback? You lost 1/2 the size. The Kindle's form factor is 1/2 the size again - but you get to enlarge or decrease the size of the type, have a black, white or sepia background and read horizontally or vertically. Oh — did I add that it is back-lit? You can read in bed or in low light conditions.

The verdict? I read faster, can bookmark pages/ideas quicker, and carry my current library of books wherever I go. Not in my briefcase, backpack or purse — on my PHONE.

And it's free - you only pay (on average) $9.99 for the book (where the same physical book on Amazon might run you $20-$30).

Try it - you might like love it.