Seth Godin on “just being human”

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The hopelessly clueless should avoid letting Seth Godin know:

“You can contact just about anyone you want. The only rule is you need to contact them personally, with respect, and do it months before you need their help! Contact them about them, not about you. Engage. Contribute. Question. Pay attention. Read. Interact.

Then, when you’ve earned the right to attention and respect, months and months later, sure, ask. It takes a lot of time and effort, which is why volume isn’t the answer for you, quality is.

That’s a great way to get a job, promote a site, make a friend, spread the word or just be a human.”

More Seth Godin: “Build trust before you need it.”

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“The best time to look for a job next year is right now. The best time to plan for a sale in three years is right now. The mistake so many marketers make is that they conjoin the urgency of making another sale with the timing to earn the right to make that sale. In other words, you must build trust before you need it. Building trust right when you want to make a sale is just too late.” [Full post]

The only sales I’ve ever done was in the form of affiliate relations for our networks. Whenever a new GM took over at a radio station, I felt like the clock started ticking. My challenge was to meet, get to know and earn the trust of the new boss BEFORE I needed something from him/her. There’s just no shortcut to building trust.

Clever use of Twitter by a Florida stop-smoking group.

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QwitterQwitter lets you keep track of how many cigarettes you smoke each day; keep a journal of your thoughts an feelings (“I’d KILL for goddamn cigarette!”); view your progress and follow and support other fiends.

All kidding aside, I can see how this might actually work. If I tweet, “It’s three o’clock and I have not smoked all day” …and my friends George sees that, it might help him hang on.

I could see this working for any number of support groups. “I’ve lost 5 pounds this week and had 3 Ritz crackers for lunch.”

Scott Adams: Money or Bombs

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“I don’t know how many nukes the United States has pointed toward China, but one would be too many. China isn’t going to attack its biggest customer. And in the unlikely event that some other country attacks China, we’d offer military assistance in a heartbeat. There’s too much money at stake on both sides.”

Scott Adams presents his “Money or Bombs” theory