A very special thanks to Garr Reynolds for featuring this TED presentation today. I would love to have Benjamin Zander as an instructor, or a mentor. This morning, during coffee, when I usually catch up on the things that have already happened, I spent the 20 minutes or so learning about the things that MIGHT happen. I was so inspired by how he worked with his student to break apart music for Cello and actually begin to look at the parts, and place between the notes, and the connections between not only the pieces and the parts and the spaces, but connections those things have to each other AND to the audience. Benjamin also included the connection to the artist, a 15 year old talent named Nicholi, and inspired him to change his interaction with the music as well.

I am sure you will all take away a different nugget or two of wisdom, or inspiration or whatever… but I am so fully inspired to look at those parts of the whole, the spaces between the notes, and see if I can not add a different sense of beauty, of perspective, or of interpretation with the new work I am doing (more on that later).

I also hope to bring you a review of Benjamin’s book, The Art of Possibility. I am still reading Guy Kawasaki’s new tome Reality Check and will move on to Zander’s book after that. Special thanks to Guy and his people over at Penguin Group who sent me an extra copy of Reality Check for our readers. Tell me what inspired you about the Zander presentation from TED in the comments, and I’ll send Guy’s book to one of you.

With the economy going south, pink slips raising their ugly heads, and the weather turning cold on the Left Coast, sometimes its the small things that really warm you inside, like keeping cash in your pocket and listening to some of the brighter minds in the changing landscape of that pre-internets invention known as television.

On November 13th, in San Francisco, NewTeeVee Live will feature such luminaries as Reed Hasting, CEO of Netflix, whose recent announcement that NetFlix will offer video delivery to my TiVo has me ready to renew my NetFlix membership after a two year absence, as well as Jason Kilar of Hulu fame, and who to me represents all the things great about the internet delivery of television style programming.

NewTeeVee Live will sure to be a major stop on the “events for the in-crowd” tour for video entrepreneurs and influencers and may also be a great place for you to bring some resumes or reels in case the downturn of the economy has you on the hunt for a better gig. And the good folks over at GigaOm are offering a $200 discount to our readers to join me at the event. Follow this link to register for the event on November 13th. And then DM me on twitter so I can look forward to meeting you in the City By The Bay.

And a special shout out to the great folks at Marketing Alchemists who have arranged for us to blog from the event in case you are stuck in Philly, reminiscing about The WIn, but wishing you were at NewTeeVee Live. We will bring you updates and insights from the event so be sure to check in with us on the 13th.

Slide:ology - Quite possibly the best book ever written on presentation design.

I met Nancy Duarte many years ago. We were both working for agencies that supported Apple. I was at Web Associates as a strategic account manager, and Nancy was at the company that has her name above the door - Duarte Design. We took a few meetings together, explored ways that our companies could work together, and even had dinner with her family at their home. More recently I stopped by her office to chat about emerging media, and her new way of building teams and planning the future of her business. She had mentioned that she wanted to be sure that everything was ready before her agency was moved into a more visible market role. Kinda cryptic, right?

About a year or so later Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth began to make the world stop and take notice about the issue of Global Warming. We also noticed the work of Duarte Design for the first time on a global scale. Nancy’s team worked with Al Gore on the presentation deck he used, the one that won him a couple of Academy Awards as well as The Nobel Prize. And with that, the world of presentation design changed overnight.

And then Nancy wrote the book. Slide:ology is without a doubt the best book written about presentation design. In fact, it is so much more than that. Sure, she talks about the “tools” and the “techniques” as do many authors in this space. She also talks about the passion, and the art and the truth and all those other things that make a presentation great! Her book examines not only the “hows”, but the “whys” through a series of case studies and first hand knowledge from working with some of the most compelling presenters in the world.

As I mentioned in my video piece - just go buy it. If you read this blog, at some point in your career you will be required to make a presentation deck. This book will show you how to do it well. As for me, I am a month or so away from beginning to re-examine how we present at MediaTrust and I can’t wait to tear our slide deck apart and utilize the things I have learned from Slide:ology.

Here are the links I promised - Click here to go to the blog post about Nancy’s work with Guy Kawasaki, and click here to purchase the book from Amazon. Enjoy the read. Trust me, you will become excited about presentations again, especially your own.

Over the past couple of years we have been bringing you insights and updates from a variety of events including New Media Expo, Affiliate Summit, ad:tech, and of course SXSW. We have spoke with many of the thought leaders in social media, brand design, advertising and technology. Well, it’s time that we step out from behind the camera and up onto that stage. Scott Parent, MediaTrust’s VP of Emerging Media, and our resident expert in social media and social influence marketing, will be presenting a discussion surrounding a look at the social media strategies for the enterprise. As you know by being a viewer here, social media has had a tremendous impact in C2C and B2C interactions, but many think the Holy Grail is the efficacy of social media in the B2B marketspace.

Scott will be joined by Christopher Smith on this panel, and they will share with you strategies for success including brand management, channel development, meaningful interactions and impact on revenue with social media for the enterprise.

You will need to vote for this panel here. You will also need to sign up to vote, but that is a pretty simple process, and one that would be greatly appreciated. Voting ends August 29th, so please vote early, and tell your friends to vote as well.

So last night I dusted off one of my favorite movies, the 1973 classic martial arts film Enter The Dragon. While watching it I began to see some great marketing wisdom in the dialog and found it be extremely timely and quite relevant concerning a current project I am engage in. I thought I would share with you the highlights of Enter The Dragon: Competitive Marketing.

“Do not concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory”

Too often we have tight timelines, many moving parts, multiple contributors, and general the general chaos and distraction of life surrounding us while we are getting our go to market plans ready.It is very easy to focus solely on the tasks at hand with out stepping back and looking at the big picture. Often that picture is pretty fantastic, even while the current project you are working on may be a pain in the ass. Don’t forget that you are part of a team, and a business unit, and company all striving for the same thing - success in business and a great quality of life, however that is defined by both your industry, your company, and your family. Look up from your desk, take a walk, talk with a colleague and acknowledge the goodness in your efforts.

“Boards don’t hit back”

Practice. Practice. Practice. and then practice some more. Run your presentation by a group of peers before the keynote. Double check that persona one more time before running the scenario. Go back through notes, your email, your gut checks. Because there comes a time when you will be faced with real competition and must respond in real-time, to real threats, and must fight real battles in your market space, or at a closing meeting with a new client, or with the CMO of your company about how you think that a solution based positioning isn’t really an advantage for the market pentetration of the product and wont differentiate it in an already over crowded…. anyway. I digress.

Han: “Your style is unorthodox”
WIlliams: “But effective”

Many times we have to look deeper than our established bag of tricks, especially in a market that is fast moving, constantly changing, and that requires creativity, confidence and stamina to win. And not just win once, but to win repeatedly. I have always considered myself to be a bright guy, and the smartest thing that I do is to surround myself with people smarter than me. (or is it I. Smarter than I.. have to call my wife on that.)

Anyway, the point that Williams was making is that one should strive to be effective no matter what the method of action may require. I call on those around me to shake up my snow globe of ideas and see if they find patterns or data or insights that I may have missed. The way we finally get to a result may be a little odd, but those results are not.

“Never take your eyes off your opponent, even when you bow”

You never know the exact moment of opportunity and must be ready to either strike or defend in real-time. Defensibility in the market space is a one of the primary reasons certain startups don’t get handed their lunch by the fourth week of school. Great companies are constantly looking to defend and strengthen their position at every opportunity. And its not so much the “best offense is a good defense” mentality. It’s more to the point of be aware of your surroundings. If you are looking to gain a position in the market, you are damn certain your competition is looking to do the same. Just be sure not to get caught looking. Be prepared to act.

“Provide your customers with products they need and, uh, charge a little bit to stimulate your market and before you know it customers come to depend on you, I mean really need you. “

Ok, so in the flick they were talking about drug smuggling and corruption, but its the classic case of creating a need in the market, fanning it with desire, and capturing the trust of your clients. During my storied career as a tech sales guy I never really sold the product (which might be why I eventually was fired.) What I did sell though was need - need for the product or service that we could provide. And I would compare that to my competition, noble warriors all, but just not quite as good as what we had to offer. And then I would show them how they could trust me, and that I had our mutual best interest in hand. Oh, and if they bought now I would take off an additional 12% on signing. Need + desire + dependency. Its not just for romance novels anymore.

“You must attend the morning ritual in uniform.”

Come prepared. Most reasons we miss that window of opportunity is that we don’t recognize it as it is coming toward us, see it only as its passing by, or see it early but just cant get ready to anything about it. Come to work ready to work. Go to a house party ready to party. Be present and appropriate and provide both context and content for whatever you are doing. And that goes for your marketing plan as well. A key word here is ritual. Practice, reverence, and habit can be key to developing a winning marketing strategy.

Enter The Dragon is only one of many examples of films that provide nuggets of introspection and learning within the dialog. Now its up to you. I would love to hear about your movie insights and how they align with your industry. Post them in the comments. If they are especially good, I’ll send you the movie of your choice as a “thank you”.

Bonus points if you can define Market Readiness from The Big Lebowski. Have fun.

[Updated - Want a private beta invite code? Read on and see how]

So I was watching the roll out of Twitterfone the other day via Twhirl and tossed out a request for an invite to the private beta. Within moments, I received a direct message from @patphelan, one of the creators of Twitterfone, with an invite code, and my promise to write about the service.

What Twitterfone does is allow me to dial into a unique phone number and speak my tweets. This is extremely important to me as I tend to be on the road often, and will be great when I want to tweet out to my peeps about a event, a meeting or just a shout out where hands free is required (driving) or when the 140 character limit of Twitter isn’t reasonable to capture what I want to say.

After the prompt, I speak my tweet, hang up and in typically less than a minute my message appears in my Twitter stream with a TinyUrl that links back to the original message. This link is beneficial in many ways. I can see using this to capture an idea that i need to archive and share, which as a designer happens frequently. Sometimes I feel like Bill Blazejowski from Night Shift: “What if you mix the mayonnaise in the can, WITH the tunafish? Or… hold it! Chuck! I got it! Take LIVE tuna fish, and FEED ‘em mayonnaise! Oh this is great.” [speaks into tape recorder Twitterfone ] “Call Starkist!”

One of the coolest things to me about Twitterfone is that it is all tech driven, as pointed out by Socialized, a social media PR consultancy. The call into Twitterfone is handled by sophisticated AI that transcribes my message into text and posting to my Twitter account. Below is the another Tweet with Twitterfone. It properly transcribed Pomeranians, even knowing to capitalize it, yet choked on the word Guinness (which to me is sort of comical as he is from Cork, Ireland.)

This morning, I called in again to create a Tweet for this article, but was met with mixed results. It could be that a.) Madonna’s new record is on repeat in the studio here, or that b.) the service is still in private beta and the kinks are getting worked out. I would image that the folks at Twitterfone have been working night and day to tweak the intelligence. Just don’t forget what happens when the perfect AI is running the ship.

My call can be heard here, and what I was saying was “I heart Twitterfone and I would say that even if I was paid to.”

But these small items aside, I would say it has been a very successful launch for Twitterfone, and I intend to use it more often in my bag of social media tools and services as I can see the value, both today and in the future as Twitterfone continues to evolve. Congrats goes out to the whole team, who I understand built this application as a “side gig” while running other companies.

I am going to talk with Twitterfone today and see if we can’t wrangle up some hard to find and much sought after Twitterfone Beta invites.

[UPDATED: Shortly after posting, Pat from Twitterfone sent us a couple of invite codes to the private beta. We will pass the codes on to whom ever posts the most insightful comments on any blog posting here at Relevantly Speaking. We will monitor the comments throughout the day, and Scott and I will choose at close of business today (well, since its Friday, we will review it over a happy hour beer or two. Good luck, and we look forward to reading your comments.]

I read Brian Oberkirch’s blog LikeItMatters. Yesterday he brought up a point that I have been pondering for quite a while, and it has stuck with me to the point that I felt I should continue the conversation.

Where is Apple in the social web game, and why isn’t .Mac the hub of all things Apple? As Brian points out, to the Mac faithful they have everything already: my phone, my music players, my calendar, my music, my email, my photos, my TV habits…hell, with a little attention recording they have all my browsing habits as well. And yet none of this is tied up in a neat package supporting or enabling my social web.

Of course I have many accounts at many places for many services, and some have even become my best of breed service or social aggregators, but so far I am still required to cast a wide net to establish my ID, my services and my social web. And yet Apple is the big missing piece in the “Hub of my digital life.”

The saddest part of all of this is that I would happily provide my digital life to Apple as a key demographic influencer and help them create that “Hub” for their entry into the social web in a fashion that could be disruptive and, as is typical of Apple, fairly successful. But without a social media presence I don’t even know who to talk to about this. Could you imagine the increase in loyalty and product penetration Apple could gain if they had a social media following the likes of Zappos? I am not suggesting that Steve take time to send Twitter invites to cocktails with Apple fans, similar to the invite I received yesterday from Zappos, but I do know that if I have an idea or a comment I can get to someone at Zappos through their giant footprint of Zappos employees on Twitter - including Tony, the Zappos CEO.

As an aside, I own the domain whatsonyouriPod (dot) com. I purchased it before iTunes had the ability to create shared playlists or iMixes. I spent months trying to speak with someone at Apple about buying the domain from me. All I wanted was some new equipment and the ability to go “yeah, I gave that to Apple.” After months of emails, phone calls and the like, I gave up. I still own the domain btw if anyone wants to contact me about it.

Anyway, back to the point I was trying to make. Apple, where are you? When are you coming to the party? Fashionably late is one thing, but it feels like a party that was tailor-made for you. And if you are throwing your own party, send my invite to csmith at mediatrust dot com. I would love to bend your ear a tick.

I ran across this video that is making the rounds on the interwebs this morning. Moserious, the “Poetic Prophet” of SEO is a marketing specialist from Pop Labs. He has taken the time to lay down a track about conversion closing. It will be interesting to follow this across the affiliate marketing social networks to see how quickly the prophet (profit?) expands his reach.

“Money don’t grow on trees, at least not it my yard.” Word.

ad:techSF is just around the corner and we will be there again this year after successful events with adtech SF and NYC last year. MediaTrust VP of Social Media, Scott Parent and I will be conducting interviews from the show floor with many of the companies and industry leaders during April 15-17. We also wanted to give you the opportunity to speak with us about your company or your perspective regarding the state of Digital Marketing. We are interested in where you think the  media and advertising industry is heading.  We would love to know what trends interest you in the emerging tech sector and how you think it will impact online marketing. And as SnoopDogg would say, come spit your rhyme about the impact social media is having on your brand.

ad:techSF will be held at The Moscone Center, SF from April 15-17. This years theme is brand strategy and the expanding world of digital marketing. I am looking forward to the keynote with George Klaivkoff, of NBC Universal. He has a pretty cool title, Chief Digital Officer, and oversees digital products across a large variety of media channels.

If you are interested in speaking with us and get your point of view or product featured on this blog, please contact me at csmith at mediatrust dot com. Here is an interview from last years ad:tech with Joseph Giraldi, Director of Marketing for HBO, as he discusses HBO’s podcast strategy with our Chief Marketing Officer Trip Foster.

SOAP? XML? WSDL? Acronyms abound in the world of technology, and the layers of the programming onion continue to get peel back so that individual marketers are required to have at least a high level understanding of what “AJAX” means, and how “web services” impact their success in online advertising.

Internet marketing consultant Carsten Cumbrowski has republished an older collection of resources for affiliates marketers who are interested in understanding the latest developments in internet development topics to include some of the newer methods and technologies that may impact their industry.

You can read his article here.