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I have been interested in presidential elections since 1976. It was a little odd, but yes, I basically watched every minute of both conventions that summer. Ford and Carter. Over the years my interest has ebbed and flowed but I always try to keep an eye on things. The first election I voted in was 1980 having just recently attained voting age and I proudly cast my vote for John Anderson. I guess I was a contrarian even back then.

For me this year’s election, for obvious reasons, is more interesting than the past several. Over my 20 year or so career I’ve learned a lot about marketing, positioning, messaging and spin. I know about talking points, media training the importance of a memorable quote. And this year we have a bounty of back and forth.

But over the past week or so I’ve started to grow uncomfortable with the spectacle of the sport. Crowds yell, hoop, holler, laugh and happily applaud razor sharp barbs tossed at opponents. It seems the more personal, the better these days. For some reason it’s what we want to hear – a quick punch right in the kisser.

More alarming are the conversations I’m having with friends about the election. I’m curious to hear what people think, why they do, and what they make of each party’s ticket. Even in crowds I would not expect it, resentment and divisions in our country are alive and well. And it’s not that we only disagree with one another it seems we find another’s view inconceivable. I actually think there are people out there who really do hate this candidate or another. It feels personal and it saddens me. We also know the media is no better and often they love to fuel the passions.

After reading just about everything I could get my hands on these past two weeks of conventions and all the points and counter-points made by the candidates, parties pundits and reporters I am disappointed no one has made a rather simple observation: no matter who wins, no matter who, a historical barrier will be broken. In January we will either be inaugurating a person of African decent to the presidency or a woman to the vice presidency. Gender and race will be a big step.

When I think about the election in this way I don’t think any of us can loose since no matter what happens we all win.

As some of you already know, I like to dig into the numbers. Not financials and budgets per se, but demographics and adoption trends. For firstly a marketeers’ task is to persuade the audience of inevitabilities; not that the world can be different, but it will be. That success is inevitable despite insurmountable odds. It is simply the epitome of selling hope in a bottle.

One cannot ignore the ever growing adoption of Facebook, especially in the teen audience. When will it’s success become “inevitable?”

I’ve been following the age distribution of Facebook for the past few years and in particular the teen crown; given I have two kids in that demographic. One question that did intrigue me was geographic differences: what state have the highest per capita adoption of Facebook among? I did some digging and the numbers are surprising.

So which states comprise the top 10 in per capita usage of Facebook by teens? High-tech hotbeds like California, Texas, North Carolina, Washington or Virginia? No, the highest rank of these states is Virginia at #18.

The top ten in order are: District of Columbia, South Dakota, Connecticut, Missouri, Kansas, Massachusetts, Arkansas, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and New Jersey. The list above is Virginia (#18), North Carolina (#25), Texas (#37), Washington (#39) and California (#42).

Think things are weird? Per capita, Kansas has nearly three times more teens on Facebook compared to California. Think that’s a rural thing? Not so. Massachusetts boasts similar numbers compared to California.

The chart shows off the results. Darker colors indicate highest adoption, lighter colors lower. Enjoy. If you’d like the spredsheet with the numbers, leave a comment

While I like to think my personality is both delightful and charming, occasionally it seems people think I’m just being a rebel. Sightings happen both in my personal and professional life and although I am not always consistent with my demeanor I certainly don’t try to be difficult - at least all the time. So here are my tips on how you can be a rebel just like me.

#1 Be right. One could soften this and simply striving to be only opinionated but I don’t think that completely nails it; you must confidently and consistently be right. I normally (there are exceptions) mull things over privately for a long time. I play devil’s advocate with myself, try to see things impartially, view a situation from many different angles, reflect on what I’ve observed thus far and anticipate what might happen. Then I take a position. And once I’ve taken a stand I require solid reasoned argument to refute it. There are many times I can recall of admitting my error but I can also recount many far many more times where I stood alone and to this day know I was dead right.

#2 Ask people to pick. I’ve noticed this issue most frequently with managers I’ve worked for in my professional life. Very often in business you are faced with competing priorities and limited resources. My strategy for these situations has been to reassess goals and choose the objectives which can be achieved while deliberately choosing to not work those which are not achievable. More often than not, you have to pick, and it seems people don’t always like to have to do that. And worse, some have the habit of reminding me of the things not accomplished to which I remind them we made a conscience choice to not do them.

#3 Work for the company, not your boss. While we are on the topic of work, one of my favorite pieces of advice given to me during a performance review was, “Mike, remember you work your boss, not the company.” He was right but I have never been able to fully digest this concept. I always go back to “what would the shareholders think?” Being a manager is no assurance of right-minded thinking, clairvoyant nature nor sound decision-making abilities; I know, I’ve been one. I’ve only worked for a few command and control type managers and thankfully for all parties affected it was short.

#4 Challenge conventional wisdom. In part due to the pace of modern life, to stay ahead of the pack it is an imperative to challenge conventional wisdom. I’d like to believe one of the reasons I have found a home in the technology industry is that the soul of this industry is about proving people wrong. The conventional wisdom is “it can’t be done” and all I can think is “like hell, watch this.” Go to nearly any meeting in corporate America and you can see the effectiveness of conventional thinking in action. Too often organizations do something based on the momentum of the group but I like to challenge commonly held beliefs.

#5 Playing the contrarian. It is not in my genes to be a lemming so instinctually I take to the opposite position of most groups. When there is optimism I can often be found to be pessimistic; where there is despair I’m the first to find hope. I don’t know why I’m like this, I just am. There is a method to my madness. I’d like to believe having protagonists in a group makes the group better.

So there’s my list. Do people think you’re a rebel too?

Let me start out admitting I’m a total Apple homer. I worked at the fruit company a digital lifetime ago but still consider it one of the better jobs over my 20+ year career. While I still haven’t broken down and bought an AppleTV I’ve certainly pacified my fetish for Apple gear most recently with an iPhone 3G. Over the past week I’ve started to ask myself the question, “has Apple done it again?” Has Apple reinvented the software business the same way it did for music?

We all know the story about digital music and the iPod. I’m sure there are many angles to take on this one; the piracy story, the compression story, the record-label view, the artist view, the consumer and on and on, but I think it’s easy to argue the iPod saved the music industry. Yes, musicians and their handlers hate to admit it, but I know more people who, after buying an iPod, have bought more music than they had on their own without an iPod for years - or in my case decades. A buck is easy and often times it’s an impulse buy. How else can I explain buying The Knack’s “My Sharona”? (If you didn’t graduate high school around 1980 you won’t get it). It also helps the model let’s you buy only exactly what you want – not the industry-preferred packaging of albums.

And another funny thing happened. Today, even a good many of the teens I know are going legal as opposed to downloading ripped music from illegal file sharing sites. Apple made it easy to be legal, provided value over a free download with things like cover art, and simplified the process with the iTunes store and gift cards. What’s the standard birthday gift for a teen these days? A gift card to the iTunes store.

I can still hear the music industry complaining – but I ask, “where would they be without the iPod?”

So let’s now turn our attention to the computer software industry. Today, MS-Office withstanding, most folks rarely buy software these days. More and more free shareware and web-based tools are becoming available online so dropping more than $20 on an unknown feels like a real gamble. I know the velocity of the packaged software industry of 2008 is radically different from a decade ago.

In some ways you can see parallels between the historical software and music industries: (1) their packaging strategy is customer-hostile, (2) market consolidation was bad for consumers and (3) they both have unnecessarily long (non)value-add chains. Let me explain.

Both industries have pursued a packaging strategy that is customer-hostile. To buy the single song we wanted, we had to buy the entire album. Similarly, in the software business to get the 10% of a program we really need we have to buy 80% we don’t want and will never use. Of course this strategy was pursued to increase margin through perceived value: the hardware delivery cost for one or ten songs was the same so why not bundle a bunch of stuff together and charge more?

More and more, there are only a few big record labels just like software vendors. Once you get past Microsoft and Adobe who else is out there? And what do they do about packaging? You can hardly afford to buy a standalone version of their products since bundling makes them more attractive. Fewer market-makers leads to fewer choices which means bigger profits for those who are left.

And finally, both industries built a wide chasm between the “artist” and the “buyer”. The infrastructure necessary to successfully run a package software business, or that of a record label are sizable. You have distributors and resellers to pay-off. You have gatekeepers to the market like radio stations and product reviewers. You need to market, sell and support these complex products and supply chains; and of course, everyone wants to get paid along the way. In the end the artist or developer got whatever was leftover.

Now, last month, we get the $0.99 software program – enter the App Store for the iPhone. It was an epiphany for me. Here on my phone, while I’m idling away a spare five minutes someplace I can find a little “one-hit wonder” of a software program, download and pay for it in a matter of seconds all for less than the price of soft drink at my local convenience store. If it doesn’t work out, so what? It was only a buck. Shamelessly I have to admit it, I have purchased more software (for me, not work) in the last week than I have in the last five years. And I love it.

Has Apple done it again? Did Apple reinvent the software business? We’re not even close yet but I see the signs pointing an interesting direction. What does it mean for ad-based business models? What does it mean to software development overall? Do we just go and build really tightly targeted apps and sell them for a buck with the developer keeping 70 cents on the dollar for each product sold? Why not? Hmmm… gotta run and go download the iPhone SDK.

If Barack Obama could be compared to the iPhone, then it might seem that John McCain is the payphone. But before I get any further in this post, I should disclaim that I have yet to decide whom I might vote for this November and I am a huge Apple product fan and love the iPhone. Now for some fun…

Why do people like the iPhone? Lots of reasons. I think we can characterize it as something that feels genuinely new in the already tired category of smart phones. It screams “change!” like no other product in the category. No keyboard, beautiful and elegant user interface, modern base operating system and what looks to be an unlimited potential.

But … it also has it’s short-comings. When you dig deeper, with a level-head, you see a product that not until next month will get 3G, a technology that has been shipping in the rest of the world for years. The camera is nice but lots of phones already have movie capability. Push mail, a hailed new feature of the next iPhone, has been a pervasive standby of Blackberry for years. So while the iPhone is very new, when you look closer at some of it’s most herald features it’s not very new at all.

I will not bore you with all the numbers of the payphone market in the US. Suffice to say, it’s pretty dismal. What was once a common street corner companion now has become an endangered species by the mobile phone. Today there are less than one million operational payphones in the US. A decade ago there were nearly three million. I cannot remember the last time I used one myself. They will soon join the train and horse-drawn buggy as popular modes of transportation in the US.

But wait. There is a resurgence of payphones in the developing world. And not like you might think – imagine GSM-based payphones. I saw a similar phenomenon on my trip to Phnom Phem in 2001. The poor cannot afford their own phone so like the party-lines of the 1940s in the US, small groups of people use one GSM phone as a community phone. Today in China they are installing mobile phones (without the need for wired infrastructure) that include a card reader and change depository.

So when we superficially evaluate the iPhone and payphones we cannot see the full truth. On the one hand, anyone can see payphones are literally an aging idea from a technologically distant past. They are tired and old – much like how many might characterize McCain and his politics. But when you look harder you can see the concept is still very much alive and is of great value to many around world. The iPhone has been celebrated as a change agent in a slow moving industry – much like the moniker of the junior Senator from Illinios. But, as we’ve seen, when you dig deeper much of it really isn’t that new after all and in someways it isn’t much better than other products on the market.

Like I said, I have no idea whom I am going to vote for in November. And analogies aside, I still love the diea of an iPhone. That is, at least for a test drive.

This year is the 10-year anniversary of both Bluetooth technology and the Cluetrain Manifesto; probably the two biggest influences in my professional life over this past decade as well. It got me wondering, “which one has been more successful?”

Most of you likely already know about Bluetooth and my role with the trade group. Certainly a very successful wireless technology as measured by radios shipped in products, but perhaps not so much in the way of customer usage. The dream that was Bluetooth was no less to become the universal low-power wireless interconnect for electronic products. Arguably, today it is solely a connection method for headsets and mobile phones. A gigantic market to be sure, but a far cry from it’s original aspirations.

Some of my old colleagues in the Bluetooth market will take issue with my assessment saying there are dozens of other use cases for the technology and so while I agree there are lots of use cases, today there are few uses. Stereo music, until embraced by Apple, is a complete full stop. The computer industry is a sad hodgepodge of limited usefulness and frustration. Imaging? Printers, cameras and the like have yet to materialize in meaningful significant numbers. So while you can technically use Bluetooth to make these connections both manufacturers and consumers have yet to do so in measureable numbers.

The Cluetrain Manifesto (cluetrain.com) is likely less known by most but I can make the argument, unlike Bluetooth, it’s pervasiveness and influence continues to accelerate. In its 95 theses the manifesto (and book) describe the direction of marketing in the digital age – that new technologies will make marketing a bidirectional interaction not a passive receive phenonemun. In fact, the first of its 95 theses are: “Markets are conversations.”

We can see the explosive adoption of participatory engagement marketing all around us. It is ridiculously easy for any delighted or disgruntled customer to share their experience with others: though online social networks, discussion forums, blogs, and even on your Facebook Wall. Feedback is instantaneous, direct and often shared with others. And the long tail can assure vocal customers will find an audience.

Customers can now talk amongst themselves about which is the best product. Corporations no-longer own the message about their product. Before recent technology, corporations controlled when, how and what you knew about new products, problems and policies. Today a college kid can host a wildly successful blog just speculating what your next plan might be.

Cluetrain encourages us to participate in the conversation. It’s happening anyway; and most would rather be a trusted source of information in the discussion as opposed to a helpless bystander.

Sadly one principle of Cluetrain that has yet to have the adoption I would like to see concerns transparency. Corporate spin is alive and well. Some still carefully choose to hide secrets that arguably could make products and the markets they serve more efficient with higher velocity. Consumers are saying “tell us where you’re going and we’ll be glad to tell you if that’s what we want.” They are also saying, “tell us the truth when things go wrong, tell us when you don’t know and just be honest and open with us.” Sounds pretty simple to me.

It’s been a wild ride these past ten years. In my book, I’d have to say over the past decade hands down the winner is the Cluetrain.

Ever since 1991 I have dreamed of running a software company. You know the drill. Couple of folks working insane hours in a no-rules, no-stupidity environment to deliver an insanely great product that will be the talk of the industry. And for me the point of doing it was to just to just do it, not to focus on the big IPO or buyout for untold riches. No, it was my dream simply because it sounded like a load of fun.

Over the past 17 years I have written up a dozen or so business plans, forecasted businesses over four year horizons, developed pitch decks and tried to excite investors or partners. There was the electronic calendar to-do list manager in 1991 all the way through the relevant news readers in 2006. Along the way there was a Bluetooth switch product, a mobloging product, and a precursor to the SurfWatch products today that ensure a safe online experience. Even over the past two years I’ve shared and heard some great ideas that I have yet to go to the effort for the eventual disappointment of developing a business plan that no one found of interest.

But this past weekend I decided that’s it, I give up. Uncle. It is not suppose to be and me fighting it only makes me miserable while facing tremendous life opportunity costs. I’ll never say never, but I’m not going to actively pursue this dream any longer. I’m going to follow that road that unfolds before me. This was the epiphany I had over the weekend that has led me to this decision.

In 1997 I temporarily abandoned this idea of running a software company and just followed the river downstream. What happened? I got a great job that landed me in California. That one led to an even better job in Geneva that despite a shortened stay led to an even better job working on Bluetooth at Intel. That one ultimately worked it’s way into the most enjoyable job I’ve ever had, running the Bluetooth SIG. And then I got the itch to start a software company. I won’t go into the details but I made decisions to help me back onto that path and now I can see how it failed spectacularly.

When I was letting the plan unfold before me I was following my life path. When I tried to make it go the direction I wanted it didn’t work out. When I wasn’t pursuing my dream to run a software company I learned I was a great pragmatic strategist who could develop innovative plans that moved markets. When I wasn’t pursing my dream to run a software company I learned I was an incredible evangelist for new ideas who could easily hold his own with the toughest of analysts, customers or editors. When I didn’t pursue my outdated dream I came into my own and found respect, empathy for others and greatness. This is why I must abandon my dream of running a software company; it withholds me from my path.

So watch out, I’ve given up my dream. Who knows what might happen next.

A few months ago I got an interesting note in a fortune cookie. It read, “Hold onto your most cherished dreams.” As usual, this fortune was authored as a generality and therefore would apply to most anyone but for some reason it really stuck with me. And the questions I started asking myself were, “what are my most cherished dreams?” and “how would I prioritize them?”

I wrote, re-wrote and then re-wrote them again. Only after a few weeks was I happy with the results. So while I know I need to get better in directing my daily habits and actions to achieve them at least now I have a list:

1. Be at peace with my healthy body, calm mind and charitable soul
2. Raise responsible, caring and inspired children
3. Enjoy loving relationships while living in a warm, nurturing home
4. Have prosperous, invigorating work that leaves a positive impact

Being at the top of the list, my most cherished dream is to be at peace. I need to have a healthy body to chase my dreams so I need to exercise, eat well and (occasionally) get plenty of sleep. I need to keep an uncluttered mind and strive to be calm and emotively disconnected with the outcome of events in my life. What will be, will be. I also need to find ways to soulfully respond to events and challenges in my life in a kind and loving way that helps others.

Certainly as a father I want my kids to be happy, but I also want them to grow into respectable adults. I think to do that they need to be responsible, learn empathy for others and find something they are passionate about. I am a firm believer that much of this world’s sadness comes from people who don’t pursue their own dreams and passions. Like the saying goes, do what you love and you’ll never work another day of your life.

It is important to have caring relationships to encourage and care for us on our journey through life. Healthy ones go both ways as friends carry you a few steps after you’ve carried them. For much of my life I’ve felt home has been too hectic and seclusive. My habits contribute to the current state of affairs and I know why my life was like that when I was younger.

Finally I want to have impactful work for my days. I’m trying to use the term “work” generically but yes, I also mean the work for which I draw a salary. I believe my skills are mixed in a rare and valuable way so I hope I can find fiscal prosperity. My work should challenge my thinking, my skills, push me and help me grow nearly every day – and not just in the obvious ways but also put me into situations that push me out of my comfort zone and into a better understanding of my life. All this, while looking to make a positive lasting impact. I’m not so sure dedicating my life to an I.P.O. moment makes the impact I’d like to leave. This is not judgmental, simply my view of the type of footprints I want to leave when I’m gone.

So there’s my list. What’s yours? I know it’s a rough one and I’ve got some work to do, but even at 45 it’s okay to have dreams, right?

While I’m less of a “toys for boys” kind of guy these days I am staring at five years on my current notebook and have been thinking about the new MacBook Air. You know, the one they slide out of a manila folder in the ad? Lots of cool ideas but in a lot of ways I’m actually disappointed.

Let me first tell you, over the past twenty-five years the best computer I’ve ever used was a Powerbook Duo in 1994. It was fast, light, small, and highly focused on the mobile experience … and it had a great docking solution. I always had all my stuff with me and I had only what I needed where I was. It didn’t have a PC Card slot (standard in it’s day), a floppy drive (standard in it’s day). Nor did it have a CD-ROM drive or wired ethernet. Those features were in the dock. Interesting.

So when I look at the Air I see the Duo with 14 years of speed improvement with a little wireless neatly tucked inside. Pretty cool, but in a way a sad statement of how slow we have innovated the conceptual design of a notebook computer.

What would break the mold and demonstrate real innovation in the market? Basically an oversized iPhone. So before you chronicle the sad efforts with pen based computing let me explain how this one could be different.

Firstly, the primary UI would be the iPhone Launcher. Windows is a crappy operating system for a pen interface. It always felt bolted on and clunky. The TabletPC too often tried to be everything to everyone - a useful desktop computer, notebook and tablet. My next mobile computer would be the ultimate digital notebook. What I am imagining is a flat (thin) device like the iPhone about 8×10 and less than an inch thick. There is no “cover,” only the touch screen like the iPhone. Perhaps Launcher could be modified to have dynamic icons that would be more like Dashboard widgets with mini views of your calendar, your notes and content on the web.

But what about a keyboard? First, you need to understand that my tablet would really be a portable display in disguise. The “dock” would be a stand for my tablet on my desk so I could use a standard keyboard when tapping away all day long at the office, connect to power and other interfaces. But … when I’m ready to go I just grab the “display” and I’m off.

Come one, what about a keyboard? When I’m on the plane or in a meeting, I would be able to invoke a software defined keyboard that takes up 30% of the screen (with transparency so it’s floating over your desktop and documents). In fact there would be several different versions of keyboard, one for landscape, one for portrait and one for two-hand gripping - the iPhone keyboard broken in two on each side of the display. And having a software defined keyboard would solve a tremendous problem in international markets - since they keyboard could easily be configured to be vastly different from English-centric QWERTY.

But alas, the breakthrough here is the observation that you don’t really need a keyboard for most of the stuff you do when you’re mobile. Think about it. When you’re away from your desk you do some typing but often we’re just surfing to a web site, peaking at e-mail or when on a plane, watching a movie or listening to music. Oh, and that bigger display would be sweet for watching videos when I’m away from my desk. And when I return I drop the display into the dock and in about an hour I’ll be ready to head off to my next appointment.

So there you have it. The first innovative notebook since the Duo.

After about 20 minutes of fun it was clear that I could write dozens of posts about the demographics of Facebook. But it’s getting late so for now I’ll only focus on a few fun facts. Thanks to Vince for encouraging me to check out the link - http://www.facebook.com/ads, it made my day.

So all of my readers likely have heard the well documented success of Facebook; and it’s darling status as THE tool people need to exploit for their latest marketing endeavor. What is pretty remarkable is how much data folks are offering up about themselves that Facebook can use to target marketing back to the users. I suppose it’s a lot less than what Google has on it’s millions of Gmail users but it seems everyone’s forgotten about that privacy issue for now.

But there is dark side of Facebook data: it is certainly not clean data. Today I was visiting the page I mention above and it was fun to play with the form that dynamically updated how many Facebook users would see my advertisement. Starting with just over 22 million folks I could slice and dice to my hearts content.

For sometime I have been critical of user-supplied data and the reliability of that content, but nothing prepared me for this: 5.4% of U.S. teenagers 13-17 years old are married. That’s right, about 220,000 of the 4.1 millions folks on Facebook in that demographic chose the “married” relationship status. And 7,200 of them are college graduates to boot.

I also dug into some other interesting aspects of the data. Based on figures from the US Census bureau, it seems that nearly 40% of all 13-17 year olds in Kansas are on Facebook compared to less than 9% for the same group in California. In fact, the per capita subscription of Kansas teens is 4x compared to California. Surprisingly New York had the most teens on Facebook. What happened to the Golden State’s high-tech lead?

When you start looking into the celebrated “high growth” segments of Facebook you can really see the reach is pretty low. With less than 1.2 million users over the age of 36, Facebook users in this demographic represent less than 0.8% of the U.S. population for this age group. Considering that same week, syndicated reruns of “Everyone Loves Raymond” was seen by 5.9 million viewers it would seem if you’re trying to reach old people you might want to keep looking.

Okay, throw me from the bus! Yes, you can highly target ads on Facebook. Yes, they have a TON of eyeballs and yes social networking is hot … and yes I have a Facebook account I visit everyday. But all this demographic data is in the end quite worthless. What Facebook really needs is what I call “intentional data” - information about what a user is planning to do. Knowing I’m 45, married, living in 66224 isn’t very interesting. Yes, as an advertiser I can infer lots of things about a person with those demographics but it pales to intentional data. Knowing I read Treehugger.com and am in the market for a new car is quite another and far more valuable to advertisers.

Someday in the future it won’t be about who you say you are, it will be about what you plan to do.

UPDATE: Yes I’ve heard from a few of you that teens play around with relationship status. I know that my teenagers’ peers, when in a serious relationship, set their status to married. My goal was to highlight the potential weaknesses in believing user-generated content and the limitations of any demographic data when marketing a product. When it comes to technology there are many who praise and celebrate it’s newness. You would think that with social networking tools we could transcend the 1950’s way of seeing people - as nicely sliced demographic faceless trolls.

If you’re out there looking for a job and would like to get in with a moderate to large company here’s a trick you might want to give a try. After endless hours plowing the web and job sites, after filling out mountains of forms for each job you’ve found interesting and countless calls trying to network; why not try this idea?

Pick where you want to work and advertise yourself to that audience on Facebook. No guarantees - but it might just might get you noticed.

Here’s how you do it. Visit Facebook’s advertising site. Create an ad that links back to your resume or blog. When you define your audience, enter your dream company into the “Workplace” field. Estimate how old your hiring manager would likely be to narrow the hit list. Interested in working for Apple? There are about 960 people on Facebook who live in California, work at Apple and are over the age of 29. Set your budget and date range (maybe run for a couple of days to test) and see what happens.

Not sure how effective this approach might be … you are approaching someone for a job in a very off-hours social context but you never know. And be forewarned this clever idea might get old fast. If you pay for clicks, limit your exposure to $5 a day, the weekly expense isn’t so bad.

The timeless Parachute job searching book had a quote that I think is timeless and helped sustain me through one such search: Remember that all those “no’s” just get you closer to the one “yes” you need. And who knows? It just might work.

In a previous post I outlined my “another bad idea” for a startup. I had to explain to a few readers that I was being sarcastic as I thought it was actually a very good idea. Since then I’ve heard some were intrigued by the idea but weren’t totally sold on the concept. Here’s some more detail on how the re-branding should be part of your next startup.

One of my friends thinks the market needs a simple authenticated online directory. I totally agree and it’s a perfect idea that can illustrate how the rebranding of software concept would work. For those who don’t know, basically we’re talking about an online address book that you have to have a password to use. It would be accessible from any browser on the web and would let you look up phone numbers, email addresses and the like. It might even let you send a quick email to everyone on the list - not as sophisticated as something like a listserv, just some simple group mail stuff.

So who needs such a product? Well, basically any organization that prints a directory. The first candidate I can see are churches. Every church would like to make it easy for members to connect with each other. There is an entire industry around printed pictorial church directories. The branding of this site would appeal to the connectedness offered by an online directory. Pricing would be set for groups sizes that were common in this market.

Now take that core code base and use it for something completely different: family group email addresses. In this application your group might only have one household of members, maybe even just the parents. But with some basic email redirect functions you could set up a parents@ or everyone@ email address that when a message gets sent it is copied and sent onto everyone on the list. I have this at our house and it is great. We use the parents@ address for schools, doctor offices, church, everything - now my wife and I can get mails at the same time as opposed to asking if each other if we saw this or that. Of course this is an entirely different sell and totally different pricing model. Your branding focuses on the hurriedness of everyday life and how this keeps your family organized.

You could do a different version for scouting troops, athletic teams, and even small company affiliate clubs and the like. Each one has different branding, different pricing and a slightly different feature set. And for a lot of reasons they don’t have to be connected in any way in the market. When you’re not connected in the market your branding can stand alone, and more importantly you don’t have to come up with sensible pricing plan that makes sense to all markets; churches pay by the number of members on an annual basis, while families might like a small monthly fee - or free for very limited capabilities.

I cannot better illustrate the importance of disconnected branding than the Disney Company, which of course owns ABC and ESPN. Essentially they find programming and air it through their “channels” with different pricing models (ABC free, ad sponsored, ESPN subscription paid by cable operators - with ad sponsored too). Imagine SportsCenter’s audience reaction if it were branded “Disney”; no one would watch it. Okay, I know it was an acquisition but you get the idea.

Another great example is the household liquid soap market. At my grocery store I counted three different manufactures but over a dozen different brands of soap. Basically the only difference was the packaging, the price and the scent. There is another reason why they do this; to consume shelf space thereby locking out more rivals. The internet conceptually has unlimited shelf space but here too I would ask, how many bookmarking sites can you name off the top of your head? If you make it to a dozen you’re doing better than the grocery store and soap.

Sadly we are nearing a point where marketing (and branding) will be the single most important thing to get right in the success of a startup. Why not hedge your bet? I say, build it once and sell, resell, resell and resell.

Recently I was asked what’s the difference between a network-based effort like my experience leading the Bluetooth SIG compared to a normal type of company. Here were some of the thoughts I shared about their differences and what is the best way to approach making the former successful. I’ll start with the list and give more detail below:

• Find 2-3 iconic companies and personally sell each one to get involved
• Enable discussions by developing/publishing draft guidelines
• PR, PR, and more PR. Create momentum that the train will soon leave the station
• Build compromise into your culture
• Give folks a way to show they are still a work in progress
• Branding solves the education problem

Iconic companies. Needless to say, having big players endorse an effort instantly establishes credibility in the market. While the pre-incorporation period of the SIG pre-dates me, I know that early on the Bluetooth effort was a company-to-company affair. There was a conscience effort to reach out to the iconic companies in the relevant industries and encourage them to get on board with the effort. In some ways Bluetooth had an advantage because many of the engineers initially involved in the effort were very experienced in the IEEE standards process. So proposing a company-to-company standards idea was familiar to them. Unfortunately, most folks outside of the standards effort see everyone the market as competitors. It might not work all the time, but get the big folks on board and the smaller ones will follow and cross your fingers contributors will see past their hyper-competitive natures.

Enable Discussion. In a network-based effort there has to be something to talk about to get engagement and the easiest way to do this is to publish draft specifications and encourage comments. Live with as much transparency as you can tolerate. Open up email lists and invite and facilitate feedback. Arrange for weekly conference calls and get strong folks to lead groups with a set of deliverables and a timeline. Set up quarterly face-to-face meetings and schedule when your group will publish final standards. Deadlines create a sense of urgency.

PR, PR and PR. Selling a cause (yes Bluetooth was a “cause” for me), is different than selling a widget. I found it to be much more gratifying since you were trying to get people to believe as opposed to buying. When you talk to editors and analysts about a cause you have more freedom to give an honest portrayal of the situation of the market. You have more credibility since you’re not selling a product; take advantage of this fact. Educate the market about the problem you’re trying to solve, what the challenges are and use examples of how companies are making solutions a reality. You have the freedom to cherry-pick; do that too. Defend your cause from poor corporate efforts to do it right. Do your job well and it will be easy for companies to tell their story later about how they fit into the solution.

Compromise Culture. Jokingly I like to observe that the definition of a good compromise is when no one is completely happy. I think compromise is a necessary component of a successful network-based effort. No set of players can hold all the cards. There are many forms of governance that make this possible. Resist the temptation to invest a lot of power and benefits in a small number of players. If you do, you ultimately limit your reach and success. I’m not saying you can’t overcome this challenge if you start heading down the wrong path but once you do you might not ever get back. Case in point: the lack of success of Bluetooth in the stereophonic audio market.

Hey, I’m a work in progress! Make it easy for people to initially get involved and show they are making an effort. They shouldn’t have to take a oath of office to admit they would like help. Give companies a way to show they’ve started down the path to success. Most of the companies that build Bluetooth end-consumer products did not participate in designing the initial radio designs, but they were members. They joined the group (for free) and bought designs from others which they integrated into their own products. Make it a five minute effort to sign up and try to keep the lawyering to a minimum.

Branding and education. Doing branding well is a rare art. It is the indirect sell, the cat and mouse game used to educate the market about a product, service or cause. If you do it well, the initial investment is high but the long term future value is invaluable. If I can get you to associate a brand with an attribute, say “overnight,” when you want to ship something quick you will first, on your own, think of FedEx. The beauty here is the consumer thinks of using FedEx as their own idea; not something you had to sell them on. I see a lot of push back on the sustainability/renewable story from people who feel insulted by the message or messenger. We need to remove that - and a brand could do this. And of course the huge win for network-based efforts is a strong brand makes it easy for a tremendous diversity of players to contribute to the market since the ground work has been laid when it comes to market education.

People don’t change. Contrary to what we would like to think, it takes quite a bit to get people to really change. So much so, I would argue it is very, very rare that people change over the long run. I can look back over my own life and see some very constant personality traits that despite my best efforts I cannot or choose to not change. It is my nature, it is how I am wired, it is how I am. I think we are all like this so we need to get over it.

Without a plan, every idea is a good idea. Boy have I been hit with this one a lot this past year. More often than not I’ve been good about annual planning. This might be for work, my personal life or moonlighting projects. There is something about writing a plan that focuses your attention on the “big boulders” and not on the “little pebbles” that I find refreshing. It is so easy in the rush of every day to knock off the little items feeling like you’re getting something done so you just never get around to the really important ones. A plan, with dates, helps control this temptation, and more importantly helps you evaluate new demands on your time as a conscience decision to not complete other important tasks.

Education doesn’t work. Too often folks think that if people just had all the information about a topic, they would get it. People just don’t have enough time and in reality we all prefer to figure it out on our own instead of being told how to think; we have to discover it ourselves. This is one of the best uses of branding. Spend your energy on both building affinity for a brand and its attributes and people will find your product. I think this will be very important today in the “green” market. There is so much confusion and false promises that a reliable brand vendors could use would be a major step in the right direction. And yes, it will also help us tell the story to people who didn’t vote for Gore in the last election.

Things happen when they are suppose to happen. I’ve been reading too much eastern thought lately but I find a lot of wisdom in allowing the universe to catch up with our whimsical desires. I’m not saying we can all be passive couch potatoes and things will fall in our laps, I’m just saying with some things trying to hurrying them up just leads to personal emotional misery. A while back I was struggling to get a screw out of difficult to reach place on something at the house. I was getting increasingly frustrated when I just told myself, “the screw isn’t ready to come out yet.” I sat the task aside, took a deep breath, waited about ten seconds and easily removed the screw with my next twist.

Fear is more motivating than hope. At a recent meeting we discussed the question, “What will the 21st Century be remembered as?” Now of course we are less than 10% done but an interesting question to ponder. I think it will be remembered as the Century of Fear. Governments, politicians, news editors, civic leaders, and even some corporate executives have learned we are naturally more motivated by fear than hope. Don’t believe we’re all scared? Do your kids walk to schooI? The traffic jam every morning and afternoon around our schools are absurd. But of course, something might happen on the way to school. Call me an old fart, but it wasn’t like that when we were kids.

What did you learn in ‘07? Drop me a line.

A few weeks ago Facebook removed the mandatory “is” from a person’s profile status; and while I, like many, welcomed the change I’m here to say, is was so then. Over the past two decades, our interconnected digital lives have been a direct assault on the notion of is. I’m glad today’s tech darling has finally got with the program.

So much of the web, and certainly email, is a store and retrieve medium. I write and send an email but as the sender I don’t have any idea when you might read it, what mood you’ll been and if the environment you’re reading it is predisposed to your understanding it. And when it comes to website content one has no idea when or where something will get read. Is had a tense; it was now. Not an hour ago, not yesterday, it was now. Using present-tense language on the web implies a sense of immediacy that simply doesn’t really exist. Even on Facebook my status updates are sporadic and driven more by events in my life than the immediacy of it.

Sometime ago I read a doctoral dissertation exploring the cultural impact of mobile telephony. One of the observations that has stuck with me is the fact that through mobile telephony, our work and home life have even fewer boundaries. Each of us can be reached by coworkers during off-hours like our personal friends and family can reach us while at work. The doctoral candidate went so far as to discuss that our current separation of work and home life was largely a twentieth century phenomenon brought on by the rise of the factory worker. Furthermore, the cultural shift which were were now experiencing could, if we were to allow it, return us to a lifestyle where the lines of personal and work time weren’t so quite as discrete.

Short messaging services like text on mobile phones and instant on personal computers further help to blur these lines. If you are sitting at your desk at work and are instant messaging with a friend are you still working? Likewise if you’re talking to a work colleague on your mobile on the way home from work are you still working? I think most businesses have welcomed the intrusion of technology into our personal lives as a way to keep us accessible; but are completely unprepared to deal with the reality of a two-way street.

So farewell to is. Technology had given us the allusion of is; it was not so. I’m looking forward to the loves, hates, needs, wants, has, should’s and will’s. Is was so then.