You worked hard in high school and you got into the best local college. You had a good time in college, but you also spent a fair amount of time studying while many of your peers drank themselves silly.

You’re a few years out now. You have a decent job and you make an okay salary. After a long day, you complain to a friend and they remind you that the economy isn’t very strong right now and that you should be thankful you have a job.

You know that on some level they’re right, but you still can’t help feeling unfulfilled. This is especially true when you check your Facebook feed and some of those idiots who spent four years half drunk and skipping class on Fridays seem to be loving their job and earning a great salary.

First, stop comparing yourself to other people. Half those people are still partially drunk, $50,000 dollars in debt and want you to think they’re happy.

Second, some of those people that you thought were clowns and asshats really are happy and they really are earning more than you. How’s that for a reality check?

So what do they know that you don’t?

Let’s come back to that.

First, let me tell you a story…

I’m good at school. Really good. In fact, here’s the transcript of my final semester, including my final GPA in undergrad:

I made 2 B’s in college.

As a result, I’d advise against living with someone who encourages you to drink a 6-pack of tall boys every night and to refrain from disagreeing with your professors in religious studies classes. The combination is a recipe for B’s.

I don’t want this to sound obnoxious, but college was really easy for me. Professors gave you a syllabus at the beginning of the year with exactly what they wanted you to read and learn. They usually gave you a rubric or some other documentation that let you know exactly what you needed to do to acquire that elusive “A.”

Let’s get two things straight:

1.) For 95% of jobs, your grades in college don’t matter.

2.) Your boss doesn’t give you a rubric in the real world.

Here’s the truth: You have been indoctrinated. Go to a good college, make good grades, follow the rules and companies will take care of you.

Psssst… The industrial revolution is over. The fortune 500 company that your Dad works for is almost assuredly going to try and fuck him out of half his pension.

And he worked his ass off, 55-60 hours every week. You’re an entitled brat who values work/life balance. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with that, BUT if your Dad poured 55 hours a week worth of sweat into a place for 30 years and is getting fucked over, what do you think they’ll do to you?

Let’s go back to the question I asked earlier…

What does the collegiate underachiever now making six figures know that you don’t?

She knows that it’s not about asking for permission. He  knows that it’s not about memorizing the most facts or being handed a map.

They know it’s about confronting the things that scare them. They know that failure is temporary and part of the process.

Don’t ask your boss for a template. Take your best stab at it.

A buddy of mine, Ryan Holiday, put it better than I ever could: Find and make canvases for other people to paint on.

It’s a different mindset than making other people look good, an approach that tends to imply a lot of ass kissing and ceding credit. Instead it’s finding the direction someone already intended to head and help them pack, freeing them up to focus on their strengths. The canvas strategy involves actively finding outlets for other people – in fact, actually making them better rather than simply looking so.

 Stop waiting for someone else to pick you. Stop making excuses. Refuse comfort. Refuse stagnation.

Most importantly, stop waiting for someone to tell you what an “A” looks like, what success looks like. Trust me, I get it. I still find myself wanting someone to tell me exactly what to do so that I can meet their expectations.

The problem with that is that you never exceed their expectations. Understand your bosses challenges, anticipate their needs and deliver solutions before they ever ask for them. That’s how you get promoted.

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You’ve made eye contact with that cute girl across the bar three times tonight. She smiled at you the second time, but you know she’s getting impatient. And yet you’re not going to walk up to her tonight.

You’re going to get in a cab two hours from now and ask your buddy, “Hey man, did you see that smoking hot girl across the bar? I’m pretty sure she wanted me, man.”

You’ll never see her again.

Fast forward to Monday morning. You have an innovative idea for a marketing campaign. Maybe you have a new way to optimize an outdated process. Either way, you won’t speak up because that might mean more work for you.

“Why should I push myself?” a friend asked me the other day. “They’ll be happy to give me more work, but they’ll never promote me. I get paid the same either way.”

It’s easier NOT to talk to the girl.

It’s easier NOT to raise your hand at work.

It’s easier to read blogs all day rather than start your own.

It’s easier to come home from work and plop down on the couch instead of starting a side business.

And that’s fine if that’s what you aspire to get out of life. But if you want more… If you want to talk to the girl… If you want to get promoted… If you want to start earning some income on the side then it’s time to start re-framing the way you think about things.

And if you want a foolproof way of re-framing… one that will help you start overcoming fear and complacency in your life so that you can start achieving your dreams, then I encourage you to invest 18 minutes into your future by watching the video below.

Maybe you wouldn’t have watched that video if you had a buzz, but now that you have – what are you going to do? What are you going to start? Who are you going to connect with?

Rarely is the worst case scenario as bad as you think it will be. Nobody will remember your mistakes a year from now. Most people won’t remember them tomorrow. We’re too wrapped up in our own lives.

Stop letting fear hold you back. Take a smart risk today!

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In 2011 I failed at every *BIG* goal I set out to achieve and yet I had one of the best years of my life. (You can read about it here.)

I went into 2012 with no expectations.

My hours increased at my 9-5 as I took on more responsibilities. I worked hard to balance work with reading, my fitness goals, hanging out with friends and growing my relationship with the “incredible woman who somehow tolerated me near the end of last year.”

On August 1st, she became my fiancée.

I could not be more grateful for her love and support. This is especially true since I added a community management/consulting role to the list of things I try to cram into 24 hours. (See: It was a great opportunity to continue learning from intelligent and successful entrepreneurs while simultaneously increasing my breadth of skills and supplementing my income).

By now, I hope that you’ve forgiven me for neglecting this space.

So, what’s next!?

By most people’s accounts, I’m successful. I work for an organization I believe in that Glassdoor recently named the #5 place to work for in the US.  I like most aspects of my job on most days, I earn a solid amount on the side, I have zero debt and, thanks to my frugality, (I only spend on food, drink, travel) I’ve saved significantly more than most people my age.

And yet I always find myself unsatisfied and reaching for “what’s next.”

I tell myself I’m preparing for the future, but I worry that sometimes I’m not appreciating the present enough. From my vantage point, it seems like the people I know who stayed in small town America (or returned to it), work less stressful jobs, drink beer, watch TV, go hunting and hang out all the time are consistently happier than I am. I often joke that I want to a buy a cabin in the woods, get a nondescript gig, run everyday and read 2 books a night. Sometimes I’m not sure I’m joking.

2012 wasn’t sustainable. My insatiable desire for more money, knowledge, time and freedom leaves me perpetually unsatisfied.

A friend of mine, Charlie Hoehn, recently penned a post entitled, “The Perils of Personal Progress” the other day and it really stuck with me. I recommend you read it in its entirety.

Someday, you’ll have the right amount of money, you’ll have the right job, you’ll have the right possessions and the right body and the right thoughts and the right skills and the right accomplishments and the right spirituality and the right love and the right marriage and the right kids and the right life.

Someday, if you keep working hard and playing our games, you can win.

You can be better than everyone else.

This is the reality I subject myself to every morning when I wake up. It’s why I read 20-30 articles before most people are awake. It’s why lunch breaks are spent studying neuroscience, behavior psychology, influence and persuasion. It’s why evenings are spent working, writing, thinking. And it’s where I invest too much of my limited cognition.

In the comments of his post, Charlie writes:

I’d been plotting something to establish dominance and become Charlie 2.0, rather than doing things out of a genuine spontaneous desire to do so. It’s kind of tough to explain. But that constant push to be “better” than our old selves and other people can become isolating and unhealthy, no matter how much humility and poise we do it with.

Penelope Trunk argues that you can either be interesting or happy, but not both. “I think the things that make life happy have to do with complacency, and the things that make life interesting have to do with lack of complacency,” she writes.

I guess a big part of me hopes that isn’t true, because I spent a lot of 2012 exhausted and constantly asking myself, “How much is enough? When does it become okay to slow down and appreciate what you have and spend a Sunday afternoon watching Game of Thrones?”

That’s what I hope to find out in 2013.

In 2013, I want to focus on BALANCE. I want to focus on strengthening my gratitude muscle.  I want to stop “time traveling” to the future and spend more time living in the present. 

If that sounds interesting to you, then I hope you’ll join me in my journey. And selfishly, I hope you’ll chime in along the way. I do miss the discussions we had here when I was more active in 2010.

In the meantime, here’s what you might’ve missed in 2012:

5 Ways to De-Stress in the Office -  If you’re doing important work, work that matters, stress is inevitable. You can hyperventilate and complain all day or you can take a deep breath and leverage these 5 ways to de-stress in the office.

How to Find Your Passion in the Workplace – Like so many other things we try to categorize and nail-down, passion is fluid. Your passions are going to change so find something that makes you happy right now and do the best you can at that until you’re ready for the next logical progression.

10 Ways to Fool Your Boss into Thinking You’re Working Hard – We all know these co-workers; that’s why this post was so easy to write.  Take a gander and see if you know anyone in your office that employs these tactics.

The Only Interview I Ever Bombed – This is a true story in which I’d spent countless hours preparing and thought I was more prepared for the interview than I had ever been before. I was dead wrong. You’ll have to click the link to find out why.

Stop Running to the Front of the Pack – There’s a time and a place for being first, but many top performers don’t know how to turn that switch off. This is a quick video that explains why always running to the front of the pack can be detrimental to your career.

Playing the Game – We all have (or have experienced) co-workers that “play the game.” They do some things well that can be perceived by bad management (or perhaps busy management) as valuable. Rather than worry about co-workers intent on “playing the game” I encourage you to leverage the advice in this post instead.

7 Things You Should’ve Learned in School - I asked seven wicked-smart under 30 professionals what skills they wished they would’ve learned in school. This post details their answers.

Some Mistakes I’ve Made – Life isn’t made up of the things you’ve done wrong. It’s made up of the things you’ve done right. Check out my list; don’t make the same mistakes. Or do, but make sure you learn from them.

The Right Way to Gamble on Yourself  - We have to go beyond the “failing fast” mantra and leverage deliberate practice to take the right risks. You need to know where you’re headed and be ruthlessly selfish with your time on things that don’t take you there.

Female Leadership & Work/Life Balance Collide – Anne-Marie Slaughter’s article in The Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” was one of the more balanced, nuanced and thoughtful articles I’ve read on female leadership and work/life balance ever, but it didn’t have any male commentary. I stepped outside my comfort zone and offered my insights on some of her most interesting passages.

What Baseball Taught Me About Business – This was a fun post that explored leveraged the game of baseball to explore decision-making. Most businesses need a combination of reliable data and the intuition of experienced professionals.

Life’s Treadmill – It was in this post that I first tried to really unpack the idea of “what constitutes enough?” It’s a raw post that reveals my internal dialogue surrounding some of my doubts, fears and insecurities.

Jason Fried’s “Why Work Doesn’t Happen at Work” – An idea that’s resonated with me for nearly 3 years now, I extract some of my favorite takeaways from Jason’s TEDxMidwest talk (embedded in the post).

18 Things I Wish Someone Would’ve Told Me When I Was 18 – Regular readers here know how I feel about modern day education in the US and how a model that promotes fitting in, a fear of failing, and mediocre obedience as keys to success is painstakingly flawed. With ballooning debt and high unemployment rates saddling my generation, I shared some of my “what I wish I would’ve known moments” with the hope that it would help even one person.

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In 2012 we really started seeing the proliferation of social/mobile into healthcare. This disruption will be critical in addressing the challenging economic and social issues that loom over the healthcare industry. If you fancy yourself a healthcare employee (or you’re just interested in where this space is headed), I hope these articles will provide both strategic insights and a foundational landscape for further learning. These conversations are important.

Please use the comments section to recommend/share other healthcare posts you found useful and/or your best healthcare post from 2012.

[Infographic]: Growth of U.S. Physician Internet/Mobile Device Use -  (Manhattan Research)

Manhattan Research’s annual market research study focused on how U.S. physicians use the Internet, digital media, mobile devices and other technologies for professional purposes and patient interaction.

Telling Patient Stories can Pay Off with Social Media – (Kevin Cary)

It’s easy to avoid all the complications that come with showcasing patients in social media. Those limitations have scared away many health care companies but they could be missing tremendous opportunities. In fact, 41 percent of patients (I’ve seen different #’s quoted here – both higher and lower) use social media to gather health information. This article includes three ways that senior care companies can showcase their patients through social media.

Empowering Healthcare: Howard Luks, M.D. – (Sarah-Jayne Gratton)

“Important changes are taking place that will forever change the way the physicians and patients interact. Shared Decision Making principles, the concept of Informed Choice versus Informed Consent and the desires of the Participatory Medicine movement will dramatically alter the health care landscape.”

[Infographic]: The Future of Healthcare is Already at Your Fingertips – (Neha Prakash)

The mobile healthcare industry has made significant strides within the healthcare provider community. Rock Health found 75% of small and medium size medical and dental offices will purchase tablets within the next year. And almost 40% of physicians use medical apps on a daily basis. The digital healthcare field is also alleviating the costs of patient care and increasing the scale at which doctors and nurses can help people. The healthcare industry is already strained and a shortage of primary care physicians in years to come will only exacerbate the problem. Mobile apps can bridge that gap.

How Seattle Children’s Hospital Went Outside the Box with its Facebook Page – (Shell Holtz)

The more we can change the way we look at the social tools at our disposal, the more we’ll be able to apply them to problems, processes and innovations that can genuinely help people while shining a light on the compassionate care the hospital delivers.

This is How You Do a Video PSA About Childhood Cancer – (Xeni Jardin)

This video from City of Hope, a large cancer research and treatment center in Los Angeles, documents the story ofa young patient. I found the author’s insights re: “battling cancer” (i.e. being very cliché & not fitting the experience) very interesting.

[Infographic]: Smart Phones and the Future of Mobile Health – (PocketHealth)

• There are currently more than 13,000 health and medical apps.
• The global wireless health market is projected to be worth more than $38 billion by 2016.
• Thirty-eight percent of medical professionals with smartphones use medical apps daily.
• Consumers use health apps for medical purposes, sports and fitness and tracking calories and nutrition.

Health Care and Social Media Cheat Sheet – (@SignalsCA)

This infographic will be pretty basic for most of you that read here, but it has some solid reminders on developing comprehensive strategy that aligns closely with your organization’s strategic communication plans.

Healthcare CEOs Weigh in on Technology and the Growing Importance of Social Collaboration – (Mohamad Naraghi)

The CEOs think using social media, both to glean new insights and to communicate with individuals, is likely to transform many aspects of health care. One U.S. health care CEO said “social media and interactive Web sites will become new Channel Partners for communicating with our patients.” Today, 25% of the CEOs rank social media as one of the three most significant ways they reach out to customers. But 68% think it will be one of the top three methods within five years.

Peeling Away Health Care’s Sticker Shock – (Andy Grove)

The health care business is about patients. But the patient population has been largely powerless and remains so even as the members of the medical community—hospital chains, nationwide insurers, large employers—have become much more powerful. Over time, the patient—the raison d’être of the health care business—has been reduced to merely another raw material. What technology can do is change the game—change the basis of competition, change what it takes to win in the health care marketplace. (If you’re a healthcare marketer, it’s critical for you to understand the business you’re in and the mindset of patients/caregivers. I think this article sheds light on both.)

The Reputation Economy Driving Healthcare Innovation: Crowdfunding and Data – (Angela Dunn)

Less than seven months ago, Medstartr was just an idea itself. Officially launched in July 2012 it now boasts a 68% success rate in funding new ideas in healthcare. The reputation economy is growing and becoming increasingly important in ways many might not have imagined–how funds are raised, which companies are started, whom do you refer, who refers you, referrals from professional and personal networks—and now open data on the relationships between doctors. These are all new measures of reputation coming from new sources, becoming more and more transparent, and driving innovation and the economy.

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Social business and digital marketing is an ever-changing space that is tough to keep up with. I read a ton and do my best. And this summer I started saving some of my favorite and most interesting posts and shipping them to colleagues and friends in an effort to keep them abreast of best practices, changes in the space and other things that I hoped would help increase their knowledge and incrementally improve our (and their) social business efforts.

I’ve curated many of those posts below for readers of this blog. I hope you’ll find them useful in your own business endeavors, especially as you plan for 2013.

Please use the comments section to recommend/share other posts you found useful and/or your best post from 2012.

Social Business

The Definition of Social Business – (Peter Kim)

Social business draws on trends in technology (e.g., powerful mobile devices, widespread availability of high-speed Internet access, low cost of data storage), work (e.g., always-on culture, globalization), and society (e.g., propensity to share). Social business stands for what companies need to become—not a description of an incremental feature or business function.

A Roadmap for Brands for Combining Paid, Owned, and Earned Media – (Shell Holtz)

The fact remains that your advertising department can’t launch a standalone campaign without considering the digital and social implications; they’ll converge, whether you planned it or not. The silos in which communication functions are cloistered present all manner of obstacles to convergence, according to the report. Each department has its own perspectives on social. Each department is working toward departmental objectives, which are often in conflict with their communication cousins on another floor. Not many companies maintain any kind of superstructure that binds the various communication departments with a unifying strategy.

Three Social Business Mega-trends for Brand Marketers in 2013 – (John Bell)

This is a good read that discusses content marketing, community management and big data. It offers examples from Intel, Coke and others who are leveraging “content factories” successfully. It also covers challenges like turning data from monitoring vendors into actionable insights and business advantages.

How Social Intelligence Can Guide Decisions – (McKinsey&Company)

“Today, many people who have expert knowledge and shape perceptions about markets are freely exchanging data and viewpoints through social platforms. By identifying and engaging these players, employing potent Web-focused analytics to draw strategic meaning from social-media data, and channeling this information to people within the organization who need and want it, companies can develop a “social intelligence” that is forward looking, global in scope, and capable of playing out in real time.”

Facebook

3 Common Facebook Ad Mistakes Everyone is Making – (Jason Keath)

Facebook ads are a very powerful tool, but for many Facebook marketers we are having to learn how to create good Facebook ads by creating a few bad Facebook ads first. But there are plenty of best practices and lessons to take note of to help improve that learning curve a bit.

Mobile Facebook Ads Generate 13x More Clicks than Desktop Ads – (Pamela Vaughan)

According to new data from 3 of Facebook’s biggest ads API partners (who help companies purchase ads) mobile Sponsored Stories are generating more than 13 times the click-through rates of all Facebook desktop ads.

What Facebook’s Embrace of Real-Time Bidding for Ads Really Means – (Joe Zawadzki)

With 25% of the web’s page views, and the prospect of integrating social into the whole marketing funnel as opposed to existing solely outside of it, Facebook entering programmatic buying portends much.

105 Facebook Advertising Case Studies - (Jason Keath & Calbe Gray)

Most of the Facebook ad case studies are summarized, list some of the campaign’s results, and have a link provided for a few more details. As many brands and small businesses continue to invest in Facebook ads, this should be a great resource of what others have done.

10 Examples of Facebook Ads That Actually Work (And Why) – (Dan Slagen)

The main difference between Facebook and Google is that the messaging strategy is push versus pull. On Google, users are actively searching for something and then browsing the search results to find the content that best suits them. On Facebook, users are there to check in on their social lives, which means that the element of disruption comes into play. Your ads now need to be louder and grab the attention of a user so they stop doing what they had initially set out to do on Facebook, and change their course of action to pay attention to your ad.

Is Facebook Anti-ROI for Brands? – (Nichole Kelly)

By removing the ability to have a default landing page tab, calls to action in cover images, and forcing brands to deploy offers and contests to tabs that mobile users can’t see Facebook is making it difficult for brands to prove ROI.

Facebook Advertising / Marketing: Best Metrics, ROI, Business Value – (Avinash Kaushik)

Increased investment in Facebook as an engagement/acquisition channel has translated into requests from CEOs, CMOs and other CxOs about the return on that investment. As Facebook is a very young channel, it is not surprising that everyone’s struggling with the answer. Avinash explains that we (marketers) don’t understand what is unique about Facebook and that as a result we fall back on sub-optimal old world metrics. He uses the rest of the post to correct one of the foundational flaws about how we think about marketing/measurement and Facebook, then clearly identifies two things we have to do to prove Facebook’s ROI, diving really deep and identifying specific ways to measure each effort we undertake on Facebook.

Mobile

5 Mobile Marketing Questions Every Business Owner Needs Answered – (Jason Falls)

There are now 5.9 billion users of smartphones and other mobile devices, representing 87 percent of the world’s population. The ICU also reports that 1.5 billion people are using the mobile web. That’s a huge business opportunity. But where do you start? Here is some insight on five mobile marketing questions every business owner wants answered.

[Infographic]: 10 Reasons Why You Need a Mobile Site – (Alex Matjanec)

With smartphone’s taking the majority share in mobile phone usage in America this year, it’s easy to see that the future of Web is mobile. No one can afford to ignore it. Astute advertisers, developers, and brands are creating experiences that connect, convert, and engage their audiences before the mobile revolution consumes them.

The Future isn’t About Mobile; It’s About Mobility – (David Armano)

Getting something launched on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest is easy, but building an engaged and meaningful following isn’t. And the same will happen in the rush to mobile if companies take a “channel” approach vs. a behavioral approach. In short, it’s not about mobile as much as it is about understanding mobility. Mobility means information, convenience, and social all served up on the go, across a variety of screen sizes and devices. Mobile itself is the nuts, bolts, and infrastructure, while mobility is the context which determines if it all works together or doesn’t.

AdAge Releases First Mobile Marketing Fact Pack

If you’re still wondering if it’s the year of mobile, you’ve already missed it. While the medium pales in advertising dollars spent — just $6.4 billion worldwide in 2012 — it occupies an outsized place in the marketer’s consciousness. Why? The smartphone, now carried by nearly half of all Americans who own a mobile phone, is a computer, a camera, a map, a compass and, for a small-but-growing number, a wallet.

Mobile Marketing 2015: Rethink Customer Acquisition, Intent Targeting – (Avinash Kaushik)

Using Skullcandy and TripIt as examples, Avinash walks us through the future of mobile marketing, including re-thinking four key success factors that make will make any business successful in the future.

Google: The Meaning of Mobile

“We know a lot about WHAT people are doing in the mobile space: when they use their phones, what activities they do with their phones, how many times a day they use their phones, etc. But what is missing in the marketplace is a deep understanding of the WHY the mobile space is so powerful. That is, what is the emotional relationship people truly have with the mobile space and how they make meaning there? To answer this, we conducted an anthropological study to gain a better understanding of how people feel about, relate to and find meaning in the mobile space. And ultimately we learned how brands can engage their consumers in more emotionally resonant and impactful ways.”

5 Flaws in Your Mobile Marketing Strategy – (Scott Forshay)

The hyper-connected consumer of today has little patience for clutter or noise. Her smartphone is the compass with which she engages the world, the persistent interface that guides her through the ever-evolving digital landscape. How then, as marketers, do we evolve in order to not only keep pace with the mobile revolution, but also to utilize it as intended?

What Makes Mobile Ad Campaigns Work? – (Say Media)

We also analyzed key campaign metrics from more than 100 recent mobile campaigns to better understand what mobile creative elements are most effective at capturing consumers’ attention. Among the findings: Mobile ads drive consumers into the marketing funnel faster, with three to five times higher click-to-site rates than online campaigns, and campaigns that use a device’s native features had three times the average click-to-site rate. You can read more and download the white paper on the study here.

Guide to Mobile Advertising Networks – (mobiThinking)

What’s the Best Mobile Ad Network for You?

I believe the two resources above are an excellent primer to continue thinking more about mobile, mobile advertising and the ad networks many vendors recommend. The latter is outdated, but I thought the “10 important questions to ask” are smart things to consider for a strategic road map and/or to ask agency partners to keep in mind when making recommendations. Also of note, if you click on any of the mobile ad networks there is an extensive profile for each.

Branding

Branding and Interactive Spending: Are We There Yet? - (Kathryn Koegel)

Mobile is the area with the greatest growth potential, as consumers are now spending 10% of their time with mobile, but marketers are only spending 1% of their ad budgets there. Print is the most likely to lose, with consumers spending 7% of their media consumption time with print, but marketers spend 25% of their ad budgets in print.

The early money went to direct response, but that was the low-hanging fruit. Branding just takes longer. It’s harder to do. There are new standards and new channels. For direct response marketers, it’s all about math, but very simple math. For brands. when they look at data, it’s all about integral calculus. But it’s still data. Measuring awareness, purchase intent, these are all shades of gray.

Coke Revamps Website to Tell Its Story – (Stuart Elliott)

Coca Cola is refreshing their website to adopt an approach and attitude that is more akin to a consumer magazine than a business portal. They’re giving the site a makeover that executives describe as the most ambitious digital project they have undertaken. The intent is to re-present their corporate website as an online magazine.

Measuring Digital “Brand Strength” – (Avinash Kaushik)

A lot of digital analytics focuses on direct response (conversions, leads, etc.). But there is an additional valuable focus of our marketing we don’t give enough analytical love: Branding! It’s elusive because brand strength is, at its core deeply qualitative and none of us measurement types can really see inside your hearts and draw charts of the evolution of what’s in your heart over time. So we use proxies, and we do the best we can. Avinash walks through how he uses insights for search to measure unaided brand recall.

Big Data

Own the Experience, Own the Future: The Big Data Arms Race – (Peter Kim)

“Owning” the user experience is easier said than done; these platforms require massive capital investment in platforms and brand building. Three early leaders exist in today’s race to own the experience ecosystem and its underlying big data assets: Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Each company has created pathways to offer hardware and software, the platforms of digital value creation. Competition is evolving around six key platforms: browsers, operating systems, peer-to-peer messaging, mobile devices, inquiry data, and personally identifiable information (PII).

Big Data is the Future of Marketing – (Jeff Dachis)

This fundamental shift in marketing can only happen with the use of big data to foster engagement at scale. The world of brand marketing has shifted from brands communicating at people through mass communications, to a world where brands are created, built and amplified to communicate with people through a mass of communicators. Ultimately, big data will enable brand marketers to genuinely understand, measure the impact of, and effectively target investments against their efforts to engage in social; and thus allocate meaningful brand marketing dollars to social engagement initiatives amplified by paid media support.

Other Business & Marketing

Time to Marry the CMO and the CIO – (Giselle Abramovich)

A new IBM survey found that 60 percent of marketers point to their lack of alignment with the company’s IT department as the biggest obstacle to reaching today’s consumers. CMOs stated that the biggest challenges they face in digital are mobile and social. Yuchun Lee, vice president of IBM’s enterprise marketing management group, explains the implications for brands.

[Video]: 5 Things Every Presenter Needs to Know About People – (Dr. Weinschenk)

This great short animated teaser offers five of the most essential secrets to a great presentation, whatever your discipline or topic.

54 Quotes from Start-Up Leaders on How to Improve Conversions – (Zach Bulygo)

54 companies sharing the one thing that they did that had the strongest positive impact on conversions.

“We Need A Fundamentally Different Way To Create A Brand”: An Agency CEO Sums Up The State Of Advertising – (Andrew Keller)

The entire Internet has been re-architected around people and people-systems. Social media has pervaded our life and in the process its created a new social contract for people and brands. This new condition has changed the expectations for how consumers experience brands. The expectation of the relationship has become far more intimate.

8 Steps To Knock Out An Impossible Punch List – (Kaihan Krippendorff)

An 8 step summary to push people past complacency, steer clear of destructive urgency, and land in the constructive urgency zone.

20 Principles of Good Writing (from Ogilvy & Mather) – (Lawrence Creaghan)

From How to Write Better: the Ogilvy & Mather guide to writing effective memos, letters, reports, plans and strategies, an agency document written by Ken Roman and Joel Raphaelson in 1978. (And still very relevant today).

34 Enlightening Statistics Marketers Should Know About Multi-Screen Usage

Last week, Google published some interesting data based on research into how consumers are using different devices together, called “The New Multi-screen World: Understanding Cross-Platform Consumer Behavior.” The article explores some of the statistical highlights of Google’s research and concludes with 3 important marketing takeaways.

50 Ways To Seduce Your Web Visitors With Persuasive Landing Pages – (Henneke Duistermaat)

With tons of great visuals, this article looks at how to make each element of your landing page more enticing. And make your conversion rates go up. It covers: commanding attention with headlines, writing compelling copy, becoming trustworthy, creating persuasive calls-to-action, leveraging good design and more.

The Rise of Visual Social Media - (Ekaterina Walter)

Forty-four percent of respondents are more likely to engage with brands if they post pictures than any other media. Pictures have become one of our default modes of sorting and understanding the vast amounts of information we’re exposed to every day.

[Video]: The Neurochemistry of Empathy, Storytelling, and the Dramatic Arc, Animated – (Charles Melcher)

Even the simplest narrative can elicit powerful empathic response by triggering the release of neurochemicals like cortisol and oxytocin, provided it is highly engaging and follows the classic dramatic arc outlined by the German playwright Gustav Freytag 150 years ago. The amount of oxytocin released after watching/listening to a story predicts how much money someone will donate to a person or a charity. (Whether you’re shooting video or developing a cause marketing campaign, the future of storytelling is something to keep in mind.)

The Reality of the Impatient Customer – (Jason Falls)

Velaro recently commissioned a single-question survey of over 2,500 Americans 12 and older to ask, “For customer service, how long are you willing to be put on hold?” And six in 10 said one minute or less. One third of American social media users who have tried to contact a company on social media for service or support say they expect a response from a company within 30 minutes. The simple fact is that as real-time marketing and responsiveness proliferate, our audiences are going to be more and more conditioned to want it here and now and right.

The Pressures of Content Creation – (Scott Monty)

Spreading existing assets across the web is the antithesis of targeted marketing and provides his observations on what impacts the process of creating content in today’s always-on world. His emphasis on content coordination and transmedia stood out to me.

Is Your Brand Magnificent at Digital Marketing? A Diagnostic Framework – (Avinash Kaushik)

This article explores six questions you should ask yourself to ensure that you have a magnificent digital marketing strategy. It explores the importance of  “renting” and “owning,” adding value vs. shouting, proactively capturing possibilities, reactively creating demand and the importance of mobile, including executing utility marketing via mobile platforms.

Building an Effective Digital Mission Control Center: 5 Key Considerations – (Tickr Team)

• Let purpose be your guide
• Move beyond buzzwords like “monitoring”
• Plan for scale
• Plan new collaboration and approval processes
• Consider your monitoring, collaboration, analysis and management software carefully

The 10 Best Marketing Infographics of 2012 – (Aaron Fletcher)

This is pretty self-explanatory. Excellent resource, especially for visual learners.

5 Things Likely to Shape Social in 2013 – (Ciaran Norris)

As we approach the end of another year, it’s a good time to think about what we, as marketers, hope to achieve in the next 12 months. But to do so, we also need to think about the things that are likely to have an impact on our businesses, and the products and sites that they increasingly rely on. So, let’s think about what the key factors are likely to be that will impact how social platforms and technologies are used for marketing in 2013.

Reports & EBooks

2012 Social Marketing Intelligence Report

This Marketing Intelligence Report will supply you with everything you need to know about social media management software and provide you with key questions and considerations to keep top of mind as you evaluate the right SMMS for your team’s social media needs:

This report includes the following plus more:

• Key characteristics of Social Media Management Software
• Questions you should ask yourself and your potential vendors
• Profiles of leading Social Media Management Software providers, like Adobe Social
• Industry trends including the rise of mobile, the growth of social media networks, and the impact of marketplace consolidation

[E-Book]: 4 Ways to Thump Your Competition with Better Facebook Analysis - (Jay Baer)

Full disclosure: I have not read this ebook yet; however, Jay definitely knows his stuff and with an increased focus on metrics and conveying the value of marketing contributions, I thought this would be useful to explore. From Jay, “Managing a Facebook page is a major part of many companies’ marketing and communication programs, but the data we use to measure the effectiveness of those efforts is sorely lacking. Facebook consistently changes what’s measured and how, adding complexity and incongruence to an already squirrely data scenario. For example, People Talking About This is the mathematical coin of the realm these days, but is a steaming gumbo of aggregated data that rolls together 13 different behaviors into one, catch-all metric.”

“Digitally Mature” Companies Make More Money – (Tonya Ries)

The report measures companies along two dimensions:  1. digital intensity – investing in technology-enabled initiatives that  change how the company operates, and 2. transformation management intensity – creating the leadership capabilities needed to drive organizational transformation. Companies that do well in one of these two dimensions out-perform their competitors. The “Digirati” are companies that are mature in both dimensions — and they have the highest financial performance by far, on multiple financial measures.

What seems to be key is developing excellence in both customer-facing processes (social media, mobile, the customer experience) as well as the operational processes needed to support those (analytics, data integration, process digitization, internal collaboration).

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The post 45 of the Best Business and Marketing Posts from Second Half of 2012 appeared first on Ryan Stephens Marketing.

I’m a Seth Godin disciple. And I had been long before I interned with him in the summer of 2008. I read most of his books. “Linchpin” might be the most important career book you ever read. That’s why I’m not quite sure how “The Dip” fell through the cracks.

After a great friend, Jenny Blake discussed living for the dip  on her blog, I knew I had to add it to the mix, but it wasn’t until recently that I finally snagged a copy. Thanks KevinEspiritu!

Some will argue that the prescription is too simple. They’ll say that Godin is stating the obvious, but if that was the case then how come so many people are dissatisfied with their jobs? With their lives?

If you don’t want to spend 45 minutes reading the book, here’s the gist: The people that succeed escape the dead ends. They quit the things that won’t get them to the top and they endure the barriers and the obstacles that most people won’t in order to get to the top of their respective niche and/or field.

Technically, that’s probably all you need to know, but here are some of my favorite antidotes:

 On quitting:

Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time.

The biggest obstacle to success in life, as far as I can tell, is our inability to quit these curves (things that won’t benefit you in the long run) soon enough.

Quitting the Cul-de-Sacs (dead ends) frees up your resources to obsess about the Dips that matter.

On enduring the dip:

Extraordinary benefits accrue to the tiny minority of people who are able to push just a tiny bit longer than most.

Quit the wrong stuff.
Stick with the right stuff.
Have the guts to do one or the other.

Real success goes to those who obsess. The focus that leads you through the Dip to the other side is rewarded by a marketplace in search of the best in the world.

The marketers who get rewarded are the ones who don’t quit. They hunker down through the Dip and galvanize and insulate and perfect their product while others keep looking for yet another quick hit.

The opposite of quitting is rededication. The opposite of quitting is an invigorated new strategy designed to break the problem apart.

Short-term pain has more impact on most people than long-term benefits do, which is why it’s so important for you to amplify the long-term benefits of not quitting.

When you start over, you get very little credit for how long you stood in line with your last great venture.

Short-term pain has more impact on most people than long-term benefits do, which is why it’s so important for you to amplify the long-term benefits of not quitting.

Simple: If you can’t make it through the Dip, don’t start. If you can embrace that simple rule, you’ll be a lot choosier about which journeys you start.

On being first:

You’re not the only person who looks for the best choice. Everyone does. As a result, the rewards for being first are enormous. It’s not a linear scale.

The truth about selling:

Selling is about a transference of emotion, not a presentation of facts.

On job-hopping:

The time to look for a new job is when you don’t need one. The time to switch jobs is before it feels comfortable. Go. Switch. Challenge yourself; get yourself a raise and a promotion. You owe it to your career and your skills.

You can check out other business book reviews here.

The post The Dip Book Review appeared first on Ryan Stephens Marketing.