At TEDGlobal in London, Tim Brown talks about how design got small — and why it’s becoming big again. Design is moving beyond the sculptural object displayed in lifestyle magazines or on pedestals in museums of modern art. It’s returning to its roots, when design thinkers like Isambard Brunel created innovative breakthroughs.

It’s time to begin thinking of design as a process for problem-solving, rather than merely for the creation of products.

About gary vay•ner•chuk

Nobody has succeeded at utilizing social media to create a personal brand like Gary Vaynerchuk. After primarily utilizing traditional advertising techniques to promote his family’s local wine business, Gary rapidly adopted and leveraged social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to promote Wine Library TV, his video blog about wine.

As his viewership swelled to over 80,000 a day, doors opened to a book deal, several national TV appearances, and a flurry of speaking engagements around the world. Gary’s dual identity as both a business guru and wine guy has made him the “Social Media Sommelier.”

About the book…

This book is a 90-minute read, and weighs in at just 140 pages. The tone and pace of the book is not unlike listening to Gary speak, and it’s simply loaded with practical advice, step-by-step instructions, and real-world examples. In addition to a complete, 21-step outline for building your personal brand online, Gary even “threw in” about half a dozen phenomenal business ideas for anyone with the ambition to go for it!

Because this book primarily addresses folks who are relatively new to internet-based business and social media, there wasn’t a lot of new information in this book for me. But keep in mind, I’ve been creating web sites and utilizing social media for more than a decade. Gary’s book is simply a gold mine for newbies, and is the first book I can honestly say that I will recommend to anyone everyone who is considering moving their business into the online arena.

While I didn’t take away many new strategies from this book, there was still plenty of material that challenged me on a personal level. Gary’s “three simple rules” to which he attributes his success challenged my to take a fresh look at my own priorities:

Three rules:

1. Love your family.
2. Work superhard.
3. Live your passion.

“I measure success by how happy I am, not how big the business is or how much money I’ve made. And thanks to following those three rules, I’m 100% percent happy.”

Don’t believe him? Listen to him talk for 5 minutes and you’ll become convinced. Very few people share Gary’s level of passion for what they’re doing.

What does it mean to live your passion?

According to Gary, “it means that when you get up for work in the morning — every single morning — you are pumped because you get to talk about or work with or do the thing that most interests you in the world. You no longer live for vacations because you don’t need a break from what you’re doing — working, playing, and relaxing are one and the same. You don’t even pay attention to how many hours you’re working because to you, it’s not really work. You’re making money, but you’d do whatever it is you’re doing for free.”

When you start thinking about how to live your passion and create a livelihood from it, have the following conversation with yourself…

“Is     this     my ultimate passion?

“Yes.

“Okay. Am I good enough to be the best blogger about     this     in the world?

“Uh…”

If you can’t answer both of those questions with an emphatic, “Yes!” you are not going to win.

Summary of the book from Amazon.com…

Do you have a hobby you wish you could indulge in all day? An obsession that keeps you up at night? Now is the perfect time to take that passion and make a living doing what you love. In Crush It! Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion, Gary Vaynerchuk shows you how to use the power of the Internet to turn your real interests into real businesses.

Gary spent years building his family business from a local wine shop into a national industry leader. Then one day he turned on a video camera, and by using the secrets revealed here, transformed his entire life and earning potential by building his personal brand. By the end of this book, readers will have learned how to harness the power of the Internet to make their entrepreneurial dreams come true. Step by step, Crush It! is the ultimate driver’s manual for modern business.

This was probably the best 11 bucks I’ve invested in my business, as I’m sure I’ll be recommending this book to all of my clients and friends. Click here to check out the book on Amazon.com [affiliate link].

When you’ve read it, I’d love to hear your thoughts. What stood out to you? Post your thoughts in the comments field below. Looking forward to the dialog!

Over the past several years, I’ve tried just about every contact form plugin out there, including cforms and Contact Form 7. I was frustrated with the apparent trade-off between functionality and usability. It seemed that the more flexible the plugin, the more confusing the UI. This is where Gravity Forms simply blows away the competition! They’ve managed to create an incredibly flexible plugin, adding innovative features while still maintaining a drop-dead-simple AJAX interface that feels more like a desktop app than a web plugin.

In fact, this plugin is so good, you’ll wonder why it doesn’t just come standard in WordPress! (hint, hint)

Just a few of the innovative features…

1. Seamless Integration with WordPress 2.8+ – If you know how to use WordPress 2.8, you know how to use Gravity Forms. From the colors to the way it functions, Gravity Forms looks and feels like a part of WordPress.
2. Visually Create Forms with Our Sleek Editor – The visual form editor enables people with no HTML skills to create complex forms in minutes. Just add fields, choose field options, and drag them into the desired position.
3. Prevent Spam with Built-In reCAPTCHA Protection – The reCAPTCHA field will shield you from spam by preventing from submissions from automated scripts. You will also be helping in digitizing books for online use.
4. Allow Users to Automatically Create a Post – Let your users help with data entry. When added to a form, our Post Fields create a post when the form is submitted. Great for user submitted stories, job postings, directories, etc.
5. Manage Entries from the WordPress Admin Panel – Search, edit, delete and keep track of all entries from the Entries page in your WordPress administration panel.
6. Easily Export Form Entry Data to CSV Format – Need your entry data for other applications? Easily export all or part of your entries to CSV. Our export tool makes it a breeze to export only the fields that are needed.

Gravity Forms also sends automatic emails to users in response to a submission, enabling you to create professional and personalized messages.

If you’ve been searching for a simple way to create custom forms for your WordPress pages and posts, look no further than this plugin! Honestly, Gravity Forms is unrivaled when it comes to creating custom forms for WordPress.

Ready to learn more? Why not jump over to their site and take a look at the video tour?

But wait! There’s more…

Thanks to the good folks over at WooThemes, you can use the coupon code: WOOFORM20 when you purchase Gravity Forms, and they’ll give you a nice 20% discount. So what you waiting for? Go check it out already…

CLICK HERE TO CHECK OUT GRAVITY FORMS FOR YOURSELF!

During a recent conversation with one of my clients, he raised these concerns and asked me if I thought Twitter was just an “overhyped trend” that would soon disappear. “Why is it,” he asked, “that so many businesses have had poor results using Twitter to promote their products or services?”

In my opinion, the majority of these negative articles reveal either poor practices, a gross misunderstanding of the purpose of social media, or both. One may as well write an article about the fundamental flaws of a hammer when used to brush one’s hair. You’re either using the tool incorrectly, or for the wrong purpose!

Twitter Facilitates Meaningful Relationships

In short, Twitter was developed with the simple purpose of building relationships. It is NOT a platform from which to repeatedly broadcast your products or services, announce your latest sale, or drive traffic to your website.

[Please re-read the paragraph above.]

It IS, however, a simple and effective tool to facilitate legitimate, meaningful, two-way communication.

The businesses and individuals who understand this basic premise are experiencing tremendous success in building their brand, reputation, and interaction with their readers. Those who are truly using social media to build relationships with their audience are discovering its incredible—and relatively untapped—power to supercharge their businesses.

Oh, and those same folks rarely—if ever—mention their own products or services outside the context of a conversation. Instead, they ask questions, solicit input from their readers, respond to customer problems in real-time, and share only relevant information—often from other sources outside of their own offerings.

Thankfully, the good folks at Twitter have just released a brand new tool for businesses seeking to make the most of Twitter (and other social media) to connect with their audience. In addition to a “Twitter 101″ primer on the basics, this microsite also includes pages of case studies and best practices for businesses. A brief excerpt follows:

How to measure the value of Twitter

Before you set up measurement tools, focus on the quality of your engagement, and use your gut to check how things are going. How’s the feedback and interaction with your followers? Are you responding to most or your @messages? Are most tweets about you positive? Or if they started out largely negative, are they coming around? Are more people beginning to engage with you and mention your company?

Next, think about quantifying your experience. Although it can be tricky to add up the value of relationships, Twitter does lend itself to measurement in a few ways—especially if you’ve already defined what you hope will be different for your company in three months, six months or a year if you succeed on Twitter. Tactics like these can then help you assess your progress in meeting that goal:

• Keep a tally of questions answered, customer problems resolved and positive exchanges held on Twitter. Do the percentages change over time?
• When you offer deals via Twitter, use a unique coupon code so that you can tell how many people take you up on that Twitter-based promotion. If you have an online presence, you can also set up a landing page for a promotion, to track not only click-throughs but further behavior and conversions.
• Use third-party tools to figure out how much traffic your websites are receiving from Twitter.
• Track click-throughs on any link you post in a tweet. Some URL shortening services let you track click-throughs.

Check out the Twitter 101 for Business microsite for more information, helpful tips and resources, and inspiring case studies…

Visit the Twitter 101 for Business Site

Those now-famous words were first spoken by Stewart Brand at the first Hackers’ Conference in 1984, in the following context:

“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

Or, as Chris Anderson puts it in his latest book, Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business…

“Abundant information wants to be free. Scarce information wants to be expensive.”

Such is the premise of the compelling new book by Wired Magazine’s Editor In Chief, Chris Anderson. But tell that to the poor CIO who just shelled out six figures to buy another rack of servers. And what of the notion that “anybody can make money on the web?”

Today, the underlying technologies that power the Web are fast becoming too cheap to meter. Just as Moore’s law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.

Every year, like some sort of magic clockwork, massive banks of servers churn out more and more data for less and less, bringing the marginal costs of technology in the units that we individuals consume closer to zero.

Just last year, Yahoo announced that Yahoo Mail, its free webmail service, would provide unlimited storage. (Just in case that wasn’t totally clear, that’s “unlimited” as in “infinite.”) So the market price of online storage, at least for email, has now fallen to zero. And the stunning thing is that nobody was surprised; many had assumed infinite free storage was already the case.

Virtually every product Google provides is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411. And yet, somehow they have created a $220 BILLION dollar global empire around their “free” products.

A new kind of free…

The idea that you can make money by giving something away is nothing new. But until recently, practically everything “free” was really just the result of what economists would call a cross-subsidy: You’d get one thing free if you’d buy another, or you’d get a product free only if you’d paid for another service.

Over the past decade, however, a different sort of free has emerged. The new model is based not on cross-subsidies — the shifting of costs from one product to another — but on the fact that the cost of products themselves is falling fast. “It’s as if the price of steel had dropped so close to zero that King Gillette could give away both razor and blade, and make his money on something else entirely. (Shaving cream?)”

A taxonomy of free

This new kind of free is forcing companies to adopt new business models, leveraging opportunities around the falling cost of doing business in a digital age. Chris identifies six broad categories:

1. “Freemium” – Web software, content, and services, free to users of the basic version, made possible by the more expensive, premium “pro” version of the site or software, usually with more features than the free version (think Flickr and the $25-a-year Flickr Pro).
2. Advertising – Content, services, software, and more, free to everyone, due to pay-per-pageview banners, pay-per-click text ads, pay-per-transaction “affiliate ads,” and even site sponsorships.
3. Cross-subsidies – Free products that entice you to pay for something else, one way or another. “It’s a free second-gen Wiii! But only if you buy the deluxe version of Rock Band.”
4. Zero marginal cost – Free items that can be distributed without an appreciable cost to anyone, such as online music. Between digital reproduction and peer-to-peer distribution, the real cost of distributing music has truly hit bottom. Some artists give away their music online as a way of marketing concerts, merchandise, licensing, and other paid fare.
5. Labor exchange – Free web sites and services, if you rate stories on Digg, vote on Yahoo Answers, or solve a few CAPTCHA codes. Users knowingly (or not) create something of value, either improving the service itself or creating information that can be useful somewhere else.
6. Gift economy – Free, or “open source” software or user-generated content to everyone. From Freecycle to Wikipedia, we are discovering that money isn’t the only motivator.

The economics of abundance…

Forty years ago, the principal nutritional problem in America was hunger; now it’s obesity. Forty years ago, charity was dominated by clothing drives for the poor. Now you can get a T-shirt for less than the price of a cup of coffee, thanks to China and global sourcing. So too for toys, gadgets, and commodities of every sort. Enabled by the miracle of abundance, digital economics has turned traditional economics upside down.

But money and physical resources are no longer the only currency in the online world. “Attention” and “reputation” are now very real metrics for determining potential value. How many eyeballs are on your site? How many followers do you have on Twitter? What’s your PageRank? If you can consistently convert those metrics into cash, they become a form of currency itself, and Google plays the role of central banker for these new economies.

A new generational reality…

During the course of researching the material for his book, Chris shares that there were broadly two different camps of skeptics: those over the age of thirty and those below. The older critics, who had grown up with the 20th-century version of free, were suspicious: Surely “free” is nothing of the sort—we all pay sooner or later. Not only is it nothing new, but it’s the oldest marketing gimmick in the book. When you hear “free,” reach for your wallet!

But younger critics had a completely different response: “Duh!” This is the Google Generation, and they’ve grown up online, simply assuming that everything digital is free. As this generation comes of age, they will discover entirely new ways to convert zero-cost technologies into meaningful ventures, transforming the world in the process.

So what does it all mean?

There is both good news and bad to be found in these new realities. First of all, the cost of doing business online is dropping by the day. Last month, I provided streaming video tutorials to more than 3,000 visitors to my WordPress tutorial video site. All that bandwidth cost me just $2.58, thanks to Amazon’s S3 distributed storage network. The cost of delivering HD-quality streaming video to my clients has effectively become a no-brainer.

However, the expectations of readers are changing just as quickly as the falling costs. Because the average internet user comprehends the zero-cost margins involved in the delivery of this content, they expect to read content and even receive online services for free. The challenge now is to provide relevant, quality content and services online, while exploring — and possibly creating — new models for making money online.

What do you think?

If Chris Anderson (and many others) are correct, and $0.00 is really the future of online business, what does that say to you? How will your own business model need to adapt to leverage this new reality?

Do you offer any goods or services for free? If so, are they merely “bait and switch” techniques of yesterday, or are you genuinely providing value to your clients and customers? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic! Weigh in below…