The Business of Life - a blog by Alan Eason

Search marketing - that amazing ability that the Internet brings to us to allow the smallest entrepreneur, advocate or person selling anything, to be found, continues its powerful advance in our society. 

I am very glad.

I wrote already about John Battelle’s book “The Search” and his use of the phrase “database of intentions” to describe what Google and other search engines both offer and garner.” That phrase keeps working on me as I think about what is happening in the marketplace today.

We are able to now match ‘intentions’ with amazing acuracy, across the country, across the world, and across town.

Think about it: I ‘intend’ to sell my car. I know its strengths and weaknesses. I also know its value. Someone else ‘intends’ to buy a car, with a value in mind similar to that of my car. They also ‘intend’ to get a car with similar strengths as mine offers. If I am honest and transparent in my post, I also communicate its weaknesses and the person on the other end decides if they are sufficient to thwart the other matchup of ‘intentions.’  A deal is made and sealed. It may well have cost me little or nothing. The buyer had access to an amazing array of information, both from me and thousands of others.

There was a lot of help in matching up the ‘intentions,’ thanks to the incredible power of the “Databases of intentions,” the search companies.

Compare that to traditional small marketing. I want to sell my car. About my only choice to do so myself previously was to buy a limited space small classified ad in a newspaper or shopper. I cannot describe much due to the cost of the space. The available people to buy, those with possibly-matching ‘intentions’, are far fewer. They have to scan hundreds of used car ads to find out if there is a possible match. It was a much different, and poorer, marketplace.

Multiply this effect by tens of thousands of industries, hundreds of millions of people and many  billions of dollars. You get an idea of what the power of “SEARCH” and the matching of intentions has and will have in our business world.

And as the databases get better - the people learn to use them more efficiently, both buyers and sellers - our economy is becoming a much more efficient fullfiller of intentions.

It is happening at lighting speed.

Nothing like saying you are going to write again and then staying mum for two weeks.

I guess that is the world of blogging. The amazing thing is that people keep coming back to read - according to my stats and my user- location finder (yes I can sort of see where you are! scary, eh?)      

[ It is a fun guessing game to guess who might be reading, and hard to resist. Sort of like putting the ear to the train tracks to listen for ringing in the rails, though. Can't stay there too long and one might not really want to know what is coming!]

So easy to divert. But back to my theme - business and life.

I think about it every day. Starting a new job - at Nutramax Laboratories as Internet Marketing Manager - helps keep the thoughts fresh as well. (It is also much of the reason I have not had time to write - a lot of new stuff to learn).  But it is amazing, no matter how large or small a business is - it still boils down to one thing: It is about people. And life.

Well - let me amend that. It is also about animals - as I am learning at Nutramax. Many of our products are for pets, horses and other wonderful living beings. Let’s just say “Life.”  Business really is about life. 

As we continue to explore the new marketing possibilities of the Internet, mobile, digital communications and whatever else is out there on the horizon, I can’t get away from the fact that the most fascinating part of it all is the way people (and pets) are connecting with each other - across continents. It is absolutely fascinating. I guess that is what always drew me to the Internet, from the beginning, because I am a people person. I had pen-pals in Europe when I was in 5th grade (yes back when people actually wrote with a pen and sent letters).

But now it is not just about meeting people and talking to people all over the globe; it is actually possible to make money doing it! Businesses are discovering that as never before. In fact, it seems that just during the  year, a great number of business people I have talked to have come to the realization that this is not a sideline thing any more, but will soon be the predominant way most companies do business. 

And to some the realization is also dawning that there are new rules and new paradigms involved in what that business looks like. As I have pointed out in precious posts - that more closely resembles a middle-eastern bazaar than it does a crisp bank lobby. People all over the place, laughing, shouting, crying, yelling and many just watching. That about sums up the Internet marketplace. It also sums up “Life.”

Can that be so bad? To do business in a totally, technologically-new way that is really much like an old-fashioned way that goes back to the dawn of history?

Dunno.

But I love it.

Of course, I have a penchant for drama.

It is time to start writing again. 

The posts have been scattered and a little shot-gunny,  aiming all over the place - but I’d like to focus now back on where I started this series - dealing with Business and Life.  I’d especially like to get back to the theme of the entrepreneur - the smaller business, and the changes going on in our culture about how people interact and conduct business.

There are a lot of unfinished posts to finish up like the page about my background , the “take on what is going on‘ and others.  There is also a lot more to explore concerning the place of search, collaboration and networking online with regard to the entrepreneurial and open business spirit we promote.

But above all I would like to write again, and often, about the sense of freedom that comes when people follow their dreams, produce good stuff and offer it to a needy world, however cynical and jaded that world may be. To me that is what life is all about.

I am reminded of what a poor farmer with a large family once said, in the heartland of America. When asked a question by a self-important and slightly disrespectful questioner “Well, what do you GROW on that farm?” he spoke the stunning answer - “We grow people, son.” 

This makes a lot of sense to a kid like me who grew up reading stories of Abe LIncoln learning to read, write and think by the shallow light of a candle. I could always imagine him poring over  The Bible, Shakespeare and Blackstone’s Law again and again in a prairie lean-to and later in a small barely-surviving country store.

As one who travels several times a week through a city filled with marble monuments and symbols of hope and vision, many of them decorated with the inspiring words penned by that same country boy who later became president, I can think of nothing better to do in life than to “grow people.”

And it is not an easy thing to do.

But behind all the talk here about communications, entrepreneurship, new media and new opportunities - that is the heart of this blog.

OK we all know the famous Barak O’Bama video that all the stars made and put on YouTube back when the campaign was really interesting (gosh - it seems like a year ago already!). 

Well, I came across something really good. I rarely delve into the front-end of political campaigns, preferring to go after foundational stuff and basic principles rather than criticize sound bites and grimaces on some tired stumper’s face.

However, if it is really funny, I am sorely tempted; and if it showed how HUMAN (silly) politicos are, I can no longer resist.

This one is a RIOT.

The other day my two-year-old came walking into the room chanting “YES-WE-CAN!” with an enthusiasm and coherence that startled us (mostly the coherence thing). Our jaws dropped and we both stared at each other. Was he an Obama fan? Had he been watching political speeches? Incredible! This was too much; we had to get to the source.

Upon interrogation (difficult with a 2-year-old) he pointed to his little DVD player. He started it up and we heard a crowd chanting “Yes we can!” On HIS DVD player! Peering more closely, it was a crowd of 2-10 year-old’s in an audience at a Bob the Builder live stage show.

Here’s a good video of a Brit talent show where a bunch of people (looks like a school group) does their own rendition - has the stage group chanting “Can we fix it?” and the crowd shouting back “Yes We Can!”  (I’ll tell you, even in this group, especially in this group - I see hope for the human race. If I were a presidential candidate, I would consider stealing this momentum as well!)

This was too much! I had gotten him the DVD but never listened to it. Could it be, after all the plagiarism ‘non-scandals‘ of the past 6 months, that Obama had ripped off a kids’ show for his famous phrase?  I couldn’t believe it. What even pales beyond that is that the press mostly missed it!

It seems the part of the video where Obama says “three words that will ring from coast to coast and from sea to shining sea - ‘Yes We Can’” are a little presumptuous. Those words were ALREADY ringing from coast to coast - thousands upon thousands of kids 2-10, responding to Bob the Builders chant: “Can We Fix it? YES WE CAN! Can we build it? YES! WE CAN!

Searching my memory, I recalled the thing about O’bama admitting some borrowing from other people, but never heard of him borrowing from Bob.

Think about it: If Obama could preface another use of a catchy phrase with  I’m stealing this line from my buddy Deval Patrick, why on earth could he not have also said “I’m borrowing this infectious chant from my buddy Bob the Builder - Yes we can fix it!” or something like that?

And since the media was in such a frenzy after the so called plagiarists (they attacked all three front-runners) why did they largely miss this one? Not to mention all the celebrities who helped make the Obama YouTube video which freely used the phrase - the very same celebrities who are so picky when anyone ‘borrows’ any of their words from their shows or songs - how could they so blithely ride on poor Bob’s powerful words with not one iota of credit given?

It just shows what the world has come to. Why not fix the basics? The KIDS HAVE IT RIGHT! Give them credit! (Honestly, I have HOPE that kids could fix Washington! - sorta like the kid who cried out “That emperor has no clothes on!” Did not the ancients say - “a little child shall lead them.”)

Well, it seems I was not the first person to catch the unheralded plagiarism. Some really creative souls even did some YouTube work. Here is a brief overview:

Someone did a remix here that put the Bob the Builder footage into the superstars clip and ended up the whole thing with what looks like a 4-year-old who says “Yes We Can America! Obama 2008″ This one is already spinning the possible scandal towards a pro-Obama twist! Hire that guy for campaign PR!

Here’s another one more satirical and more artistic! You have to go all the way to the subtitles with this one!

This one is a real hoot! It starts with the Bob The Builder theme and has Obama driving a backhoe over the political roadbloacks (people) in Washington to FIX IT! Actually my favorite.

You know, the more I think about this, the more I ask: Why steal it? Why not just attach it? Obama is still searching for the perfect VP - running mate. It seems clear - the real momentum is with Bob the Builder!

What a dream ticket!

Lately I have been working a good bit on a project and proposal for The Newspaper of the Future. The whole thing started with the work on the project for Garrett Graff as part of his Social Media and the Digital Disruption class at Georgetown University in Washington DC.  Having just completed two years in the newspaper business as Internet Director for The Capital newspaper in Annapolis (I am now back in full-time Internet Marketing consulting) I realized first-hand how much pressure the newspaper industry is under as we speak.

The pressure is coming from all sides. Newsprint costs are rising, advertising revenues are falling, readership is falling and the age of the average subscriber is rising. Media attention by the average American is increasingly being carved up into smaller segments for traditional media, such as newspapers, TV, and radio, and larger segments for new digital channels. 

Some of these are exploding in popularity and, more importantly, in time invested by millions of users: social networking (The MySpaces, YouTubes, FaceBooks of the world), increased connection through individualized feeds, syndications  and interfaces (RSS, Twitters, SMS messaging, vlogging) and other user-directed content and self-publishing channels, simple SMS messaging on cellphones which is so common you see people punching the little keys everywhere (my thumbs are too big). When time and attention gets soaked up by all these new things, there is not as much time or interest left to spend on the older things. A law of nature - or physics - or thermodynamics or something like that!

Anyway, you get the picture. The times, they are a’ changin’.

Speaking of Bob Dylan ( I know - terribly dating myself here) listen to those words again:

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again…..

For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’

Well nowadays the ‘prophesizin’ done by the writers and critics may still be done on a word processor - they are late to Blackberrys, but everything else is right on - the loser now will be later to win and the times are changing dramatically. It is a ‘digital disruption’ but more than just a digital or technological thing . 

There is a cultural revolution going on.

My opinion? It is not at all a bad thing. In fact I think it is a good thing. Many earlier posts on this blog talk about why. Above all else, it is bringing a voice to the common person and bringing thousands into the great debates of our day. It is helping us rid ourselves of this monstrous ‘hitmaker’ culture we grew up with. It is empowering the small publisher, the unconnected writer, the self-thinker. It is extending the freedom of the press to those who previously had no press. People are getting involved and are no longer satisfied just being passive listeners or readers.

But whither the newspaper? I grew up in a town where most read three newspapers a day; a morning regional paper, an afternoon regional paper, and an afternoon (then 5-day) hometown paper. Our family took 2, plus 5 major news and photo-journalism magazines. It was great, fascinating and instilled a life-long passion for news, good photography, community affairs, poignant essays, world-wide interests and much else good in me. There is something to be said for the sponsored professionalism and excellence in storytelling that has marked American media for the past 70 years.

I hate to see that all go away.

That is why I started writing this project, which is actually turning into a business proposal. I believe newspapers have to dramatically change their business models. I am not sure there can be enough modifying or tweaking done with 100 year old business models to accommodate the cultural upheavals in communications taking place. Was it not said 2000 years ago that “you cannot take new wine and put it in old wineskins, else they will burst the skins and the wine be lost? New wine should be put in new wineskins”

This is a new wineskins project. It is a fascinating one and has me excited. It develops an idea for a grassroots newspaper that starts where social media is now - and where it might be in two years. It takes the dynamic of people doing self-publishing (specifically in social media and social networking),  keeps that lively force, and works upwards to a solid, semi-edited, credible mass market / cross-channel communications platform that can again represent the soul of a community.

And yes, it does also involve newsprint and ink at some point.

Stay tuned… 
 

MPPR850 is history as a class - but one has to wonder - is the same to be said for the community which grew up around it? We could all agree that a graduate level college class is a micro-community. Classes end on a pretty linear schedule. We’ve all been through the experience many times - last class - hang out together a little longer - stay in touch with a few people a while later - see others around campus at times etc.

Interesting thing though, this class. It was all about building a virtual, non-linear, online community. There was the physical community of a class meeting on M street in Georgetown, and then there was birthed a virtual community meeting online and through digital twittering whenever and wherever people were.

The physical community had an agenda, which was also the agenda that birthed the virtual community. That agenda has ended. But other agendas emerged - some about business plans to go 2.0, some about personal experiences of entering a new world of identity through new media, and some about age-old things like just enjoying hearing stories. There is that fascinating dynamic of hearing other points of view from people you respect - because you know them as people first with their worldviews coming second. What a concept - in Washington DC these days!

How much of that agenda might endure and cause parts of the community to endure? It will be interesting to see. It is obvious that the social media world we were immersed in and have swum in for three months will be a huge part of all business and organizations of the future. Professionally speaking, there is great value in continuing the swim.

Another thing I found myself in amazement at is part of the reason I decided to study at Georgetown. We were surrounded in our class by some phenomenal writers. To me our class was like a writers club on a metronome. Now the metronome is gone but I hate to see the writing stop. Maybe some of it won’t.

Garrett Graff’s goal was to get us totally immersed in Web2.0. It is fair to say that he did that. Might it be that the most enduring legacy of that experience is a community or communities that keep going?  Our own micro-community has become a marketplace of conversations that could possibly endure.

But hey, there are no rules for bloggers!  (Except for Scoble’s of course!)

Just pondering here.

It’s fascinating to sit in a class taught by one of the online team that catapulted Howard Dean to a leading position in the presidential race of 2004. Whether one liked Dean or not, we must admit that this team did something new, unprecedented and enormously portentous, not only for politics, but for many other forms of human organizational activity.

Garrett Graff, Howard Dean’s original webmaster and a member of the presidential campaign team in the 2004 campaign, has made some very significant points about what the campaign showed us.

1. The team did not know what would work - they tried a lot of things. Most did not work, but when something did, they capitalized on it - immediately. There is nothing new in this basic strategy. What is new is the speed with which a group can try things, find out what works and adjust and try another thing. In traditional marketing/campaigning that takes weeks or at best days. Online it can be done in hours or minutes.
2. The resulting ‘buy-in’ from many of the ‘crowd’ online taught the campaign quickly that they had to adjust and accept the crowd that showed up, not the crowd they imagined. They had to really become the representative of those who elected to be a part - and there were many.
3. The meet-ups were powerful, and the Internet and cellphones were able to organize a throng of people to a meeting virally, within a very short time. It was one of the first practical uses of an emerging phenomenon in use today around the world to organize rallies, protests, and marches.
4. The viral nature of the Dean campaign was huge. According to Zephyr Teachout, of the campaign, quoted in Edward Cone’s report: “The Marketing of a President“: “The Internet is moving from information technology to organizing technology,” she says, sitting in a windowless conference room at the campaign’s offices. “I e-mail you that I like Dean, maybe you’ll tell your wife. If I tell you face to face, you’ll tell everyone.”

All of these lessons are something of a picture of our future as a society. Chances are we will be mobilized quickly, wirelessly and digitally, to meet or move personally and actually. Things will speed up. Our reactions will be tested much more quickly and re-engaged much more quickly.

And when we do show up in mass, those who call us will have to accept us - as we are.

Online virtual reality is pretty strange. I may be saying that because I am a word person and prefer to sculpt my online personna more with the words I write and what I say than with some outlandish costume or body armor I might design. But I can see the benefit of both.

Playing Second Life and games such as that still leave me a little bit clueless when it comes to  choosing Avatars to express one’s online self.

Maybe that is because I am old fashioned, but I am not sure that is all of it. I was an early-adopter of online social communications.  That was way back in the days of BBS’s and The Source, then Academic networks, CompuServe, and finally the Big Internet.  It was usually about words in those days, just trying to get a 300 baud modem to buzz a little bit faster so your poetry circle can read your latest poem in something close to real reading time.  Or maybe phrasing a post just right to get the really geeky board membes to answer your question and figure out why your computer is squealing when you turn it on.

I remember the first time I ever heard of an Avatar. I was on the Excite boards, where they had lots of chat rooms, interest groups and even white boards. Then they had a place where they had these things called “Avatars.” I went there and there were these figures moving around, with little balloon voice containers coming out of their heads (like in the nespaper cartoons).  So I sat there and watched a ‘talking head’ of Brittany Spears (then still in her early years) flaming someone who had just entered the room.  

Didn’t make a lot of sense to me so I left and never came back to that.

There might be some Freudian purpose to adopting a lot of of costume jewelry online - I would imagine there is. And perhaps one can really express some important parts of their pesonality with strange outfitting. Dunno.

All I know is I make enough Freudian slips as it is with plain ole’ English. I have to get that figured out better before I think of moving up to Avatar status.

As a kid I was enchanted with the life of Andrew Jackson. Growing up in Tennessee, he was a ‘national’ hero. When I was a kid I saw the movie about him and Rachel. It showed him duelling, fighting for her honor, trying to protect her from her fierce critics and critics of their marriage.  When the ‘Battle of New Orleans’ became a country hit I memorized the words “In 1814  ’took a little trip, ‘long with Genr’l Jackson down the mighty Mississipp’ .”

I read kids books about Jackson and our family went to The Hermitage in Nashville. He was a hero.

Strange, because our family was Rebublican and if the Civil War had broken out in our lifetime, I would have been one of the many East Tennessee Whig boys who would have fought for the Union (as almost half did). 

But there was something about Jackson.  He truly was a man of the common people. He was not an elitist. When he was elected president, he threw open the White House. On inauguration night there were street people with muddy boots or no boots crawling all over the carpets and boozing it up with moonshine on the South Lawn.  No wonder Tennesseeans loved him! He appointed no-names to many high offices in Washington. He turned the bureaucracy upside down.  He stood for what he stood for and he stood for the common man and woman and kid.

Jackson was no saint, and he made many mistakes - among them the policy he led against Native Americans, especially the noble Cherokee.

But beyond that it might be argued that he brought a truly popular meaning to the American experiment and removed it from the hands of the elite and the highly educated.

Fast forward to 1990.  Look in The The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House, by Garrett Graff.  There is a chapter called “Web 2.0 Meets Campaigning 3.0″ in which he describes a convention in which bloggers, ultimate outsiders (called ‘pajamaudheedeen’ by the cynics) were meeting in Las Vegas and and contemplating the powerful force they had become in poitics. No insiders they, the talk was all about grassroots politics of a new kind - the power of the amateurs, and the incredible things happening online to influence the real power in the country - the voters.

As I read that, I thought of Jackson. One of the thngs that has been so disappointing to me over most of my lifetime has been the turning of the Democratic party toards a sort of ‘educated-elite-we’re-smarter-than-mainstream-America’ mentality. Even though I never voted with the Democratic party I took no joy in seeing them make that movement. Now, out of the blue, comes the Internet, the new media, complete with its conversations and peer-trusting-peer paradigms, and the Democrats are understanding it and opening it up to the masses. 

Good for the country. Somebody needed to turn the snobs out! I don’t care which party they come from!

Garret writes: “The truth is that few of the political elites in the country are comfortable with the new power being exercised online through blogs, social-networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, grassroots multi-media endeavors like YouTube, and the power of cell phones, which allow almost anyone, anywhere, to snap a candid photo and beam it around the world). (p. 250).

Amen! And one might add - neither are the media elites, the business elites, the academic elites, the health industry elites, or the elite elites comfortable either!

It is time for a new day and truly a day of the people.

The old Jacksonians were messy. They were muddy. They tore up things and a lot of the new bureaucrats that came in didn’t know a thing about management. But they might have saved us from a British-style aristocracy. And that alone is worth a lot.

I may still not vote Democrat - we’ll see - Whig runs deep in my blood -but I sure want to see what happens.

This post is a direct response to Rosiethethird’s post: Should I keep blogging after Garrett stops counting? The answer is an unequivocal yes! Why do I say that? First of all Rosie’s posts have been very genuine. She and Becky (Beckblogic) have both pushed the edge of transparency and ‘real-ness’ in this medium. Not to say others haven’t. But these two have been a particular encouragement to me, because they show the validity of what we have been reading as a group - that openness, transparency and honest communication are extremely inviting to readers - especially in this new communications era.

People want to see real people. Games aside. Sure it is scary, and difficult, but it is the best hope of this entire cultural revolution we are in, in  my opinion. And make no mistake about it - it is a revolution.

Every blogger thinks - as does every person who starts writing anything - “what if no one reads what I write?” Well that is always a writer’s dilemma. It’s sort of a catch22 because if one does not write anything, no one will read it for sure.

I had a professor who solved it for me a long time ago. He was Stan Lusby, a brilliant professor of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee.  He had us writing and writing, all the time.  “We write to learn” he would always say. We write to learn. 

I came to appreciate those words so much over life’s course. I still go back and read some of those papers I wrote for his classes and am thrilled - not that I was brilliant - I wasn’t - but at the concepts and the emotions and the swirlings of life that came out in those papers. It keeps youth in my mind - the youth I had then and carry in what I wrote.

I don’t think anyone has read them except for him and me. He encouraged me to publish a couple but I was not interested in that, because at that age I felt the people I wanted to read them would not read them.

Now, years later, it doesn’t matter. I write for the sheer thrill of it. And I write to learn. When someone else by chance reads it, great. If not, I feel just as good. Blogging opens up an avenue where, when we write to be who we are, there is an easier way to share who we are. And if someone else see us as we are and is better for it, or appreciates it, or even responds to it, so much the better.  

If not, it still is life itself spilling out in words and becoming even more lively - to us- as we write it and then as we read it again some time later.

Rosie - keep writing.