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I’m a bit late in posting this, but as many people know, July 16 is the 40th anniversary of the incredible Apollo 11 mission.  America is still the only country on earth to have put a man on the moon, and even 40 years later this is an incredible achievement of engineering and the human spirit.

As a commemoration of the event, the JFK Library commissioned wechoosethemoon.org, an incredibly rich online experience in which a user can follow multiple aspects of the historic mission in real-time as they occurred 40 years ago.  With links for social media sites, non-linear navigation, and so many different ways to experience the event (photos, video, audio recordings, etc.), I think this site is a fitting tribute to the brave men and women of the Apollo programs.

I also believe this site represents the current pinnacle of what an online experience can be – totally connected in every sense of the word.  So enjoy this site from a historical standpoint or from a modern technology standpoint, but be sure to check it out because it’s pretty amazing.

UTOPIAN Coffee Co. founders Patrick Smith (left) and Brendon Maxwell.

I’ve been writing a lot about social media lately, and I decided to have some Q&A time with a good friend that is actually using it to help power his business.  Patrick Smith is the co-founder of UTOPIAN Coffee Co., and an overall great guy.  He and business partner Brendon Maxwell (insert obligatory cheap coffee aside here) employ no full-time social media guru or consultant, and are bootstrapping most aspects of their business.  Social media presents a key marketing opportunity, and like most small business owners, it’s an avenue that they must navigate on their own.

As the coffee expert so astutely articulates, the very basics of product marketing (start with a genuinely good product) and relationships (be nice to people and they will be nice in return) are the foundations that are propelling UTOPIAN Coffee Co. forward. That and lots of caffeine.

The following is our exchange about social channels, the coffee business, and the ethics of underage coffee consumption.

Tell the readers a bit about your business.  What do you sell?  How are you selling it?
UTOPIAN Coffee Co. is a web-based quality-oriented specialty coffee micro-roaster.  That’s the official answer.  What does that mean to the average Joe/Jane?  We are uber-picky about the green/raw coffees we buy, meticulous in roasting, and we bag and ship straight out of the roaster.  This way the coffee arrives on your doorstep (anywhere in the contiguous 48) within 4 days of roasting.  Crazy fresh.

At a time when McDonald’s is undercutting more expensive coffee brands such as Starbucks, Seattle’s Best, etc., with the McCaffe versions, why do you believe your more upscale, niche product will be successful?
Great question, Andy.  I’ll answer anecdotally then more substantively.

When I was in college, I drank lots of coffee.  Knowing this, a buddy of mine bought me a freshly-roasted pound of Sumatra as a gift.  I noticed immediately that this was far superior to anything I’d ever had.  The curse came when poor, tuition-drained Patrick tried to revert to Chock-Full-o-Nuts.  NO WAY.  I literally skipped meals to ensure that from that point forward I would have good coffee around.

Driving through a coffee shop (or McDonald’s) on your way to work will cost you $2 to $5 each day five days a week.  That’s a monthly habit of $40 – $100 for 20 cups of coffee.  If you were on a myUTOPIA membership receiving 2 pounds a month you would save between $7 – $67, and it would yield 80 cups of coffee!  You’d have more money, more time, better coffee, less stress, heck I bet you’d even live longer!

On the objective end, Google Analytics allows us to simply track the sources of our traffic.  Additionally, any coupon codes we generate are always specific to the outlet through which they are disseminated.  This allows us to carefully track the effectiveness of any such campaign.

People are using social media for everything….obtaining news updates, getting shopping leads, and let’s not leave out socializing.  It leads to a smaller world, but also a smaller attention span.  In order to successfully utilize these channels, we need to remain specific, concise, and relevant.

Any plans to enter the brick and mortar retail market?
Not if I can help it!  The hours are rough, overhead is higher, & managing hourly employees is difficult.

What are the things that social channels can’t help a small business with?
Product quality.  It is one of the pillars of our business.  Social media can help with marketing, and if you’re really clever distribution, but never product quality.

Who should quit their day job and start their own business?
Anyone with a good, somehow original idea, the expertise to make it a reality, a high stress threshold, low sleep requirement, good marriage (or none at all), strong work ethic, optimistic outlook, and billionaire parents.

What advice do you have for closet tea drinkers like myself?
Switch to coffee.  It doesn’t stain your teeth as badly and is more readily accessible stateside.  No, honestly, I don’t know a load about tea.  Give some serious thought to the science of extraction when you’re tooling around with tea. You might have some fun results.  Play with variables like water purity (RO or tap), water temp, contact time, and agitation.

I know you have small children.  How early do you plan on letting them have their first cup of Utopian Coffee?
Been there. Done that. Calvin is almost a year.  He’s not super keen on coffee.

Hudson is 2 and a half.  He loves coffee.  If you ask him his favorite kind, he responds “mytopian.”  He apparently thinks that the first syllable of the word “UTOPIAN” is the pronoun “you” and than “-topian” is a separate word.  Naturally since he is referring to himself and not to you, he calls it “mytopian coffee.”  I have a photo somewhere with Hudson at 2 years old with a crema mustache from having a sip of my espresso.

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Thanks Patrick, and if you ever get a hold of some high quality imported teas, I’ll be first in line.

You can follow UTOPIAN Coffee Co. on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/UTOPIANcoffee

Photo Credit: Johnathan Beard

Disturbing, but not at all surprising.  That’s what I think of the story featured on the Associated Press titled, “Do “I’m on vacation” posts pose security concerns?“.  In it, the author describes an Arizona couple who own two home-based businesses.  As part of their promotional efforts, both individuals Twitter regularly, up to and including their detailed vacation plans where they would be out of town for an extended trip.  The couple Twittered when they left, where they stopped, and most conveniently for the felons who burglarized their Arizona home, how long they would be gone.

It was, as far as I know, a pretty isolated incident.  But I’m not sure why.  How do celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s #1 user with over 2 million followers, feel safe with that many people being able to know so much about their whereabouts?  Last month, Kutcher, Oprah, and several others’ Twitter accounts were hacked precisely because they were high profile users with massive followings.

Even in the tamer blogosphere , where authors generally consider their posts more carefully than a 140 character Twitter post, there was the high profile stalking of Kathy Sierra in 2007.   The author of the popular (top 50) marketing blog Creating Passionate Users felt compelled to leave the blogosphere and lecture circuit after some bad people posted her name, home address, disturbing images of her, and death threats online.

Maybe it’s just simple math.  Most people are good, but a certain percentage will always be bad.  And in America, it is generally accepted that the price of fame is a lack of personal privacy.  The more followers you have, or visitors to your blog, or Facebook friends, the more likely it is that someone you don’t know so well (or at all) could be using your full disclosure to their advantage.  And if you don’t believe me that there is full disclosure going on in social media, check out some high school kid’s myspace page.  Any of them.  You’ll see what I mean.

The last thing I want to do is to throw a wet blanket on the social media movement.  After all, I blog (putting my name as the URL!), Facebook, etc., and see the tools as very powerful to me personally and professionally.  Some of our clients are experimenting quite successfully in social media, and I think the best is yet to come.  But I also keep my family blog, with pictures of my kids and the details of our comings and goings, private and only open to people who have registered on the site.

What do you think?  I’m really curious here.  Does increased visibility always mean increased risk?  Should I unplug my computer from the wall at night just to be safe (I know someone who actually does this)?  Should I stop worrying so much and make all of my profiles totally open and broadcast my every move?  Let me know in the comments.

Thanks Meeker for the tip.

[EDIT] – I just found out that Kathy Sierra is on Twitter.  Interesting.

Let me start out by saying that I love being a “vendor” working for a “client” 99% of the time (a good vendor is usually called a “partner”).  If you are a good match for your client, you get to do great work, shake things up a bit, and everyone, vendor included, will see valuable returns on their investments.

But being on the agency side, you also get exposed to the occasional bad apple, the type that wants you to itemize every dollar spent on an inexpensive  project and then spend a half-day meeting nitpicking every detail to see if any individual item could be “done cheaper” (and yes, that was a very painful, personal experience).

Selling services is always a tough gig, because no matter what your industry you’re always selling ideas and time, rather than widgets.  At an interactive agency, the great ideas and time produce a deliverable, but if you are in the business of selling “websites” rather than creative, engaging experiences, your product is very easy to commoditize.

But I digress.  What I love about this video is that it pokes fun at what the bad (or let’s just say inexperienced?) client is prone to do – try to get something for nothing, or try to devalue the service after it’s rendered.  True negotiation, on the other hand, is an everyday part of doing business.

A colleague of mine forwarded a great article to me called “Beware the Social Media Charlatans” by Robert Strohmeyer at PC World.  In it, Strohmeyer cautions against spending resources on the burgeoning social media consultants popping up all over the country.  The problem, as he sees it:

Combine a rapidly growing trend of social media adoption with an economy that has forced hundreds of thousands of workers to reinvent themselves as entrepreneurs, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for consultant overload.  Since nobody seems to know what the hell’s going on with Twitter anyway, nearly anyone can pass themselves off as an expert on the subject. So suddenly all those poseurs who might otherwise have bilked the hapless with offers of life coaching services or Feng Shui consulting have jumped on the social networking bandwagon. You can hardly swing a stick on the sidewalk nowadays without smacking one of these guys in the head.

While I haven’t personally been in a position to hire a social media consultant, I am ocassionally annoyed by the risible amount of self-promotion through social media channels these folks seem to require to keep their businesses going.  And I’m sure that if my livlihood depended on teaching businesses how to Twitter, I’d be pretty miffed about Mr. Strohmeyer’s article.  But then again, the term “consultant” has always been a loaded one, and I’m sure that most consultants have already come to grips with that in their own businesses.

The truth is, even at our agency, which is filled with a lot of very smart and creative people, social media has yet to be proven the panacea and/or the gold mine that a lot of marketers want you to believe.  It’s an important component to consider for some businesses and certainly valuable for individuals who want to take control of what the Internet is saying about them, but the metrics just aren’t there to support some of the radical positions I’ve heard at conferences and in the blogosphere.

But here’s my favorite part of the article:

The truth is that there are almost no rules in social networking that don’t already apply in just about any other social environment. A great many smart people have already written worthy perspectives on how to be a good citizen on Facebook and Twitter, and I hardly need to reiterate here what amounts to general common sense. Just as in life, the only rule that really matters is the Golden Rule. All the rest is either derivative, or flat-out nonsense, and you really shouldn’t be paying big bucks for either. [emphasis mine]

This is true.  Think about it.  Let’s say you went to a party where 10% of the people you knew intimately, 20% were best friends, colleagues, etc., and the remaining 70% were acquaintances, important people from another time in your life that you didn’t keep up with that often, and some people that you admire from afar as potential business connections.  I’d say that probably approximates the Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn profiles of many.  During that party, which let’s just say lasts an entire day, you update everyone you can about the fact that you’re speaking at a conference.  That’s normal, and good, right?  But here’s the thing – you probably wouldn’t tell everyone things like, “I just woke up,” or, “THESE ARE MY FIVE FAVORITE THINGS”, or “according to a survey I took, I am most like the Sex in the City character Gandalf the Orange” multiple times.

And you certainly wouldn’t want one of the people at that party to be a smooth-talking salesman for a company who’s product you might use but you don’t care much about, like soap, or paper, or maybe even an interactive agency or social media consultant!  If they had something valuable to say that was directly beneficial to you or interesting, that’s one thing, but you’d never invite a broadcaster of unwanted content to your party, at least not on purpose.  Your time is limited, and you don’t appreciate it being wasted.

Facebook recently included a “Hide” feature for removing status updates from those people that you want to stay “friends” with but are sick of hearing from.  I don’t know about you, but I welcomed the opportunity to shut out some of the noise so that I could spend my time keeping up with people who were interested in having an actual conversation.

A social media strategy for a company, or for an individual, requires the thoughtful guidance of someone who is skilled at building relationships.  And I like Robert Strohmeyer’s advice – the first rule to think about is the Golden one.

Sandisk recently launched a new campaign to boost its mini, micro, and standard size SD card sales for cell phones. And while I’d love to wax poetically about the viral nature of the flash-based site and the obviously well-researched and finely targeted campaign, I’m too busy playing around with the super cool ringtone generator.

Boasting an interface similar to that of a high-end audio editing application, but designed with stylized and easy-to-use controls for the average millenial, the ringtone generator is a lot of fun to play around with. The generator has over 30 high quality music samples that a user can mix and match on a 5 track timeline.

I’m sure that Sandisk spent a lot of money on the generator, which is a part of the site S.L.O.T – Serious Load of Thrills – site that anyone could at first glance mistake as a microsite built by MTV. The site, and the generator, are authentic and relevant enough to capture the attention of the millennial crowd. Most importantly, the site and generator offer legitimate entertainment and informational value to a generation with a lot of purchasing power and very sensitive BS detectors.

Bravo, Sandisk.

It’s usually a lot of fun for me when a new client website launches. There is so much that goes into it, from the initial sales effort, to ongoing consulting, creative work, development, quality testing, etc., etc., that when it finally goes live one gets an incredible feeling of accomplishment (and sometimes a healthy amount of relief). For the past several months, I’ve had the pleasure of working on changehappensindegrees.org – a funky site that is the beginning of a campaign focused on saving energy and money for a lot of people. The site is targeted at homeowners, who can reduce the amount of money spent on annually on energy bills by up to $500 simply by using their ceiling fans and thermostats correctly.

Hunter Fan recently commissioned several independent studies that confirmed with facts what many assumed to be the case – you can raise your thermostat in the summer, and lower it in the winter, if you’re properly using a ceiling fan to keep yourself comfortable. This saves energy and money while you feel basically the same level of comfort in your home. These studies caught the attention of celebrity environmentalist and successful actor Ed Begley, Jr., who agreed several months ago to endorse the campaign and who has begun a media tour in support of Look Up. What Ed, and everyone else involved in this project, is excited about is that unlike installing expensive solar panels, or reinsulating your home, using a ceiling fan and thermostat is something that most people can do with little trouble. It’s a small step that most can take to positively impact the planet and to save themselves some money.

We will be adding several interactive modules, including a region-specific home energy savings calculator, throughout the year, so I’ll keep everyone posted.

I’ve been MIA for a while now, because my wife just gave birth to the latest member of our family, Kaela Ruth. Our new daughter is incredibly beautiful and keeping me very busy.

I started this post a few weeks ago, and decided to finish it today while in the Atlanta airport. I watched this great Google Tech Talk video in which Merlin Mann of 43 Folders fame talks about how to better manage your email. The upside of me not blogging for a month is that I’ve had 30+ days to put these habits into practice, and let me tell you, it’s changed my digital lifestyle for the better.

The video is excellent, but it’s 60 minutes long. If you’d like the highlights and my opinion, then read on.

Here are seven philosophical points about the “whys” of controlling your email, rather than letting your email control you.

1. Knowledge workers make money by turning knowledge and information into value. You can’t effectively do this if your time is all tied up in pointless emails.
2. Where you decide to put your time and attention says a lot about who you are.
3. “Time and attention are finite, but demands on your time and attention are infinite”. You have to filter out what gets attention and what gets ignored.
4. Never check your email without “processing to zero” – actually doing something with the email you receive rather than merely “checking it”. In sum, you have to look at every piece of email in your inbox whenever you check your email, and you have to decide what to do with it. Not necessarily respond to every piece, but you have to make a decision about each and every one.
5. Once you’ve gotten the info that you’ve needed to from the email, it’s useless to you. Get rid of it!
6. Make your system as simple as you can stand it.
7. If you’re not in customer service or some other extremely time-sensitive email situation, then turn off your email app and only check your email once an hour, or less if possible. As much as you can, try to reduce the number of times you check it.

Mann then asserts that there are most 5 options that you have for processing a given email:

1. Delete it! (or archive it if it’s really something worth saving).
2. Delegate it. If you tell someone else to do it, set a reminder to yourself to ensure that it in fact took place.
3. Respond to it. This is a tough one for me to follow, because I’m a writer. But email isn’t the place to debut my next philosophical tirade. Mr. Mann suggests placing a line in your footer that states, “I will not write any email longer than 5 sentences”. If nobody reads long blog posts anymore, certainly in a business context no one reads long emails anymore. If it’s that long of a response, then schedule a meeting.
4. Defer it (will need a response, but could take additional time). I don’t know if I like this one. At least in my world, I can respond to most emails fairly quickly.
5. Do it. If something requires action from you, just get it done. If you can’t do it right now, schedule a meeting or reminder for it, and then it’s taken care of.

This has truly helped me to tame my inbox and to stop using it as a reminder system. I was very guilty of reading the emails when I didn’t have time to respond to them.

Anyways, it’s good to be back. I still have no idea why Google still refuses to index my blog, so I may go ahead and move it from a Wordpress platform to something else, or redesign it and see what happens. At any rate, it’s not like I’m selling ads or anything, so I’ll keep writing for now.

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May 22nd has been a deadline that has been staring me in the face for the last 7 weeks, starting with the signing of a proposal I wrote. Today is the launch of the “reskinned” HunterFan.com. It has been an ambitious journey, reskinning an entire site, plus completely designing and building 3 micro-sites for the same customer, all in less than 2 months! I’m proud of the work our excellent creative team has done, and I truly get fulfilled watching a project go from conception to completion. It was also cool to witness some hardcore legerdemain (YES! I used that word in real life!) by our programming staff to resolve server-side issues I won’t even pretend to comprehend.

The new homepage is much, much cleaner than the old version, and it has a variety of ways that a customer can navigate to the same information. As you can see, our client is really making a move to embrace the new green color, which I think works very well on the live site.

All we had time to do in this phase is redesign the homepage, add a few features, and add a new look and feel to the interior pages – still a huge improvement over the previous site. Of course, now comes the real work: Phase 2. Phase 2 will bring this site up to a new standard. Stay tuned!

Someone on LinkedIn asked the question, “What are the top 5 things you are thinking about in eMarketing? I responded to her, and I thought I’d share with you the top 5 things on my mind:

1. Valuation of Social Media users – how can you determine their worth to an organization?
2. Engagement – how can you ensure online audiences are genuinely engaged with the brand, both on- and offline?
3. Analytics – eMarketing is unique in that with the proper analytics one can easily measure true ROI on a campaign, rather than nebulous “impressions”
4. Permission-based mobile marketing – mobile marketing is great, but without gaining the permission of the users, it’s just expensive spam and an ineffective marketing tool.
5. Convergence – no, not the buzzword of the late 1990’s, but the idea that people’s lives and technology are becoming increasingly inseparable and in some cases, wholly integrated. A marketer can take advantage of this by facilitating conversations and interactions the user is already interested in.