virtualDavis

Photo via copyblogger.com

Brian Clark (@copyblogger) had me at, “confidence is compelling and downright sexy… I’m not talking about arrogance. Arrogance is an indication of fear, not assurance.” If you agree, you might want to read another one of his postings in which he proposes three helpful hints for bloggers, writers, etc. Don’t take criticism/disagreement personally. Finish each writing project. (Get it done!) And push yourself!

I heard Brad Inman give a speech at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference, and he said trying to get stuff done in book publishing is like trying to swim through a jar of peanut butter. I nearly stood up and screamed “EXACTLY!” I have had the good fortune to work with a lot of entrepreneurs and tech people, and they are doing circles around my publishing colleagues because they don’t put up the roadblocks and draw the lines in the sand. If I had to guess, the peanut butter people have no idea what that means.

Here are 10 signs you might be……….The Peanut Butter:

1) You can’t think of anything to show for your work in the last six months.

2) You think your job is to prevent mistakes from being made.

3) You believe that the more people invited to a meeting, the more successful the meeting will be.

4) Meetings take months to schedule.

5) You would rather be “politically correct” and “cc everyone” than make something great happen.

6) You’re paralyzed by the concept of “scalable.”

7) You think you have the upper hand in nearly all business dealings , but deep down inside, in those quiet moments late at night, you know you’re losing “control.”

8 ) You resort to bullying tactics to get your way without ever considering what might benefit everyone.

9) You spend your days trying to figure out how to gain control.

10) You’re an information hoarder.

via theharperstudio.com

This is a great posting by Debbie over at HarperStudio. I’m especially drawn to numbers 8 and 10. Tip: Consider what benefits everyone, and share (don’t hoard) information. Win-win!

Google graphic via OPEN Forum

If you’re a Twitter “power user” (i.e. you update your status frequently; monitor your brand, business, etc. on Twitter; and/or leverage Twitter’s massive userbase to search for prospects) you should read John Jantsch’s article at OPEN Forum. Here are the highlights:

1) Target by occupation: “you can create a search that plows through Twitter and gives you a list of all the users” that include your specific keyword (attorney, quarterback, etc.) for their username and/or real name in their Twitter profile pages.
2) Target by biographical information: If you want to scan more than just usernames and real names, Google can hep you search for key phrases in Twitter users’ intext attributes.
3) Target by location using http://search.twitter.com
4) Use Google Alerts to track new Twitter sign ups

Learn more about these smart Twitter search techniques and three more at OPEN Forum.

“How can I explain the never-ending irrationality of human behavior? We say we want one thing, then we do another. We say we want to be successful but we sabotage the job interview… The amygdala isn’t going away. Your lizard brain is here to stay, and your job is to figure out how to quiet it and ignore it.” ~ Seth Godin

Aaahhh yes… This was too good to pass up. I’m going to pass along a Talk to the Newsroom snippet from New York Times Executive Editor, Bill Keller’s response to a reader’s complaint about badly written news leads. Read. And then re-read. And then print it, pin it up next to your desk and read it again every day. Am I speaking to myself? Perhaps.

Q. The colorful lead is the bane (or at least one of the banes) of my time spent with The Times. So often, I have tried quickly to get the gist of a story (this happens in the Sports section more often than in the news sections) only to find that I must read something like ‘it was a dark and dreary night’ before finding the point, or the score, or even a notion of what the article is about.

Whatever happened to the inviolate rule that a lead was 35 words or fewer, telling us where, why, what or who? (Peter C. Boulay, Bronx, N.Y.)

A. As the sun blazed above the snow-lacquered peaks of the Hindu Kush, the weary editor flipped down his clip-on sunglasses and booted up his laptop.

It had been a long week, a soul-sapping, disorienting and yet strangely satisfying week.

Past the simple campsite where he awaited his digital connection to the modern world flowed all the human mystery of the East: the women shrouded in burqas of azure, or possibly cerulean, he was not too good on blues; the camel-borne warlords draped with belts of bullets; the shoeless boys in filthy ‘I Heart New York’ T-shirts; and all the rest, all separated by semicolons and swaddled in colorful clichés.

The computer flickered to life. The keys clicked. (Bill Keller, New York Times Executive Editor, Bill Keller)