What’s Wrong with Simplicity?

A recent criticism I received of some of my graphic design work is that it’s too… simple. But, what I can’t wrap my head around is – why would you make anything more complicated than it needs to be? What’s wrong with simplicity and minimalism in not only design, but in other facets of life? I’ll always go by the old adage “keep it simple, stupid“.

If there’s too much going on in your life, simplify it. Simplify your tasks. Simplify your goals. If you get too complicated, you risk being caught in a web of complexity that will impede any progress you want to see on your goals. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t rise to the challenge and go above and beyond; the opposite, in fact. The human race has an odd tendency to view life in a far more complicated manner than it ever should be.

Keep it simple. Don’t listen to criticism for the sake of criticism. You’ll see success.

“Love, live life, proceed, progress.” – Lil Wayne (didn’t think you’d be seeing wisdom from him, did you?)

Show Some Love

To start off, I don’t mean romantic love – I mean showing love. If someone does something good, worthy of praise, the best option is to show them love and appreciation for what they do. However, this “love movement” is almost entirely lost in some groups – not with the purpose to offend, but because it’s simply overlooked. People tend to under-appreciate the workings of other people; it’s just human nature.

But, we can work to make things better, to show people appreciation, to show that what they do matters and dramatically and dynamically affects you as a person. It’s as simple as a RT on Twitter, comment on Facebook, or a short e-mail. People are fueled by praise and recognition, humble or not. People that are shown love will always produce better work, and I don’t think I need to provide droves of numbers and data to prove that.

RTs, tweets in general, and other public comments (I believe) will yield greater results in attitude and overall atmosphere. Not only will people feel a greater pride in the work you are showing love for, but others on the outside will have the opportunity to see that these people are worthy of their attention.

So, today, I challenge you: if you see someone doing great work, show them some love. Tweets, RTs, Facebook comments, e-mails, whatever; if they are doing a great job, make it known. Show some love.

Twitter Adds Ability to Follow Yourself (Satire)

In response to Facebook adding the ability to like your own comments, Twitter has done the unthinkable: they’ve added the ability to follow yourself. This was done to attract more Facebook users into the vast Twitterverse by increasing the amount of useless things users can do to give the user some feeling of “interactivity”. This came as a shock to many Twitter users (or “Tweeps”), who’ve seen rapidly increasing fail whale sightings while surfing the world wide web.

Onlookers of the ongoing feud between Facebook and Twitter have speculated that soon enough, Facebook will implement the much clamored for idea to add yourself as a friend, opening up a virtual world of what “could be” in social media.

</satire>

Facebook adds the ability to “like” your own comments on your own statuses? What purpose does this serve, exactly? I think some people will argue that this advances something-or-other regarding social media, but I believe the opposite – it’s a blatant, further degeneration of Facebook.

Facebook is a sinking ship! All aboard the fail whale into the Twitterverse!

That’s another thing I hate – the term “Twitterverse”. Another term I hate even more? “Tweeps”. Stop using it. I don’t want to be your “Tweep”… I’m not even sure if I fully grasp what that means.

As for now, I’m weaning off Facebook – gonna keep ridin’ the fail whale.

Thanks to Austin Hutchison for the idea for this post – make sure to visit his blog @ http://blog.austinhutchison.com

3 Ways World of Warcraft Can Help Social Media & Business Understanding

For roughly 3 years between my sophomore and senior years of high school, World of Warcraft (WoW for short) wasn’t simply a game – it was my life. To help hit this point home, when I quit, my level 70 Dwarf Hunter had about 50 days played on it. That’s 1200 hours of me physically being at the computer (at least I didn’t make myself seem like a total loser </sarcasm>). But, much like Twitter, WoW required some pretty simple, yet demanding things in order to truly succeed.

1. Relationship Building & Networking

Towards the latter end of your leveling days, 70 was the max level at the time, you almost HAD to find a decent group of individuals that you could tolerate, but more importantly could tolerate you. If no one on your server liked you (you were pompous, ridiculous, etc), the ability for you to find this group of individuals (a guild) was slim to none. You needed this group to foster in the ability to raid in the end-game, or basically continue playing after you’ve hit the maximum level. If you weren’t good at networking, you were effectively dust in the wind – even more so if you weren’t good at your role. World of Warcraft has several networking features, including but not limited to:

• Friends Lists – ability to add people you like to a list and see if they are online or offline.
• Groups – ability to get in a small group in order to tackle obstacles you can’t do solo.
• Raids – ability to get in a large group (of up to 40) in order to overcome more difficult obstacles.
• Guilds – ability to be included in a group of individuals that shares a specific chat channel (guild chat), where you can talk, network, plan raids, etc.

Just like in social media, networking is the lifeblood. If you can’t connect, you will fail (or, in the case of WoW, become bored and quit).

2. 7 P’s and Strategy

In the end-game, WoW is very strategy intensive on the occasional raid boss. Some of them require very specific strategy and timing, or else the rate of failure is high. For instance, one boss, Chromaggus in the Molten Core raid instance, required to be tranquilized (or tranq’d) by a hunter, or he would enrage and go into a frenzy, greatly increasing his damage output and putting your chance of survival very low.

This is similar to the social media/business spheres – without strategy, your likelihood of failure is great. This is very much like the 7 P’s – Prior Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance. You prepare piss poor, your results are piss poor. It’s as simple as that. If you do plan properly, your guild or business could see success against a raid boss, like these guys:

3. Recruiting & Maintaining Guild Members (or Employees)

In end-game raid situations, the guild/raid leader is effectively the employer, whereas all the guild/raid members are employees. If you do what the raid leader says (assuming they’re not a complete moron), you will achieve GREAT SUCCESS! If not, prepare to do pretty awful. Anyways, in order to constantly see raid progression without significant time sinks and road blocks, a constant flow of new blood is necessary. Employers must look for the next, best, and greatest talent in order to achieve success. If people couldn’t perform their duties well in raids and refused to fix it, they would be replaced by someone more willing to do the work. If you were willing to do the work, you would consistently raid and be rewarded in rare armor, weapons, etc. It’s really a difference between looking like a total bum or looking like you’re the shit (virtually, of course).

Do you want to be a badass, or do you want to be a bum? The choice is yours.

Listen (Better Business by Creeping)

Keep an ear to the ground.

This is of course an idiom meaning “pay attention to what’s happening around you/pay attention to rumors“. Your greatest enemy in social media can also be your greatest ally – the open forum (Facebook, Twitter, etc). If you’re not doing well in social media spheres, it’s easy as hell to figure out why. All you have to do is creep. Creeping consists of following updates on groups (and individuals, but that’s a bit stalker-esque), not interacting with it/them, and taking note of what they say. For all intents and purposes, it’s like producing a poll about your products; however, you don’t have to goad people into answering. They’ve already answered without you even producing the question. Of course, you must at some point supplement these with polls to truly get a grasp on the direction your market is heading. The search boxes on Twitter and Facebook are officially your best friend and companion.

Happy creeping.

(image obtained via scientificamerican.com)

Networking? 3 Things I’ve Learned

Do you network effectively? I know I’m not the best at it, and it’s something I’ve struggled with – but it’s something I’m working on. These are three quick bits I’ve picked up over the last couple months that have been invaluable to me in the quest for an ever-expanding network, to be that one-in-one-thousand that knows more people than any person rightfully should.

1) Don’t sit on the sidelines.
When you’re in a networking situation, don’t stick solely to those you know and feel most comfortable around. I know a lot of people tend to beat this extremely vague and general rule into the ground, but it’s incredibly important and vital that you follow it.

2) Continually open doors for everyone.
One would logically be lead to believe that those you’ve known for a long while would be the most likely to open doors for you. However, in reality this tends to work out in the opposite manner. Those we know the least tend to open the most doors for us. I think this seemingly broken and illogical system can be repaired if you continually find and open doors for old friends and acquaintances alike. Stay frosty and don’t be overcome by the status quo (and it’s so easy to get lazy in the summer).

3) “It’s not who you know, it’s who knows you.”
In any industry, it’s great that you know a lot of people – you can ask favors, yada yada. However, if people know you and recognize you, they are more likely to do business with you. For example, if you were a soccer coach and you had two choices of uniform suppliers for your team – Nike or Diadora – which would you choose? I’m goin’ with Nike. It’s all about brand recognition baby, whether the brand is personal or a company. If people know you and like what you offer, business will be simple.

(obtained via cis.cornell.edu)

Does anyone have anything to add?

Do spam and buzzwords equal success?

<rant>

With the ever increasing usage of social media websites like Twitter and Facebook, does the use of buzzwords in your blog posts and the spam of said blog posts via Twitter actually enhance your success, or hinder it? Let me answer that for you in simple, 3rd grade picture form:

The biggest pitfall in this whole “web 2.0″ (buzzword!) business is that marketers think they will achieve instant success because they’ve 1) conformed to the new “social marketing strategies” and 2) abused the living hell out of them. You know, it’s fine is people are going to be conforming/adapting to these social media websites and it’s understandable that marketers are going to chase after that audience as a way to circumvent advertisement costs and generate greater traffic on their websites/for their product.

However, what’s not fine is the fact that I see businesses (large or small) repeatedly posting the same article you wrote 15 days ago on your Facebook and Twitter pages like it’s something new. Everyone stop the presses, they’re re-posting the same article from March… again. It’s another text book example of taking traditional marketing techniques (e.g., beating the hell out of us with TV advertising campaigns) and trying to apply them to marketing via social media. And make no mistake, in this case, “text book” doesn’t denote anything good… it’s something everyone should avoid like the plague. Spam didn’t work in e-mail and I’ll be damned if it’s going to work on Twitter and Facebook. Learn your lesson, please, before I have to make a personal visit to your offices.

The rapid re-posting of these articles on Twitter and Facebook does nothing but get me, the potential consumer, annoyed as hell. However, some people might feel differently. How do you feel? Do you feel it (the spam on social media sites) has a negative or positive effect on their ability to do business? Most of all…

What’s the solution?

Oh, and just for the record, just because you use buzzwords doesn’t mean you know what the f*** you’re talking about.

</rant>

To foursquare or not to foursquare – that is the question

This is something I’ve been internally wrestling with for a couple weeks after my recent introduction to foursquare. For those of you who don’t know what foursquare is, it’s a location-based social media service where users “check-in” at venues and can earn badges and become the “mayor” of venues with enough check-ins. I’ve tried to tell friends about it, but the only reaction I’ve gotten is, “Dude, telling people where you are over the internet? That sounds really creepy.”

At first, broadcasting where you are over the internet does sound creepy to me. However, with the increased emergence of social networking tools like foursquare – Google Latitude, for example – is this type of behavior becoming more and more popular? Being constantly plugged-in? To quote a recent tweet Nate Riggs left me about this subject, “@adambudd – no, you are right [about 'creepiness']. But there’s a lot of people that think twitter is creepy. I’ll bet people thought email was creepy too…”

I guess it’s kind of like when the TV was first invented, there were those who were against it, saying it would never catch on. But, look at the TV now – it’s where nearly all of the population gets all of its information and entertainment. In this sense, is foursquare the new TV? Will it truly catch on, or is it a passing trend? Only time will tell, but for now, let me know what you think of foursquare. Do you use it? Why do you use it (or not)? Will it catch on (or has it already caught on)?

Talk TO me or WITH me?

This is a short post I thought about while exchanging e-mails earlier today.

Does it slightly (and I mean that in the most minimalist sense possible) bother anyone else that some people insist on saying “I’ll talk TO you later” as opposed to “I’ll talk WITH you later” when concerning a collaborative effort? I definitely admit it’s something I’ve done in the past (maybe even today!) and something I’m looking into fixing.

I know it’s not necessarily something people do to purposefully offend (and I can’t say it truly offends me). My question is, is this just a subconscious extension of the “me, me, me” complex that is prevalent in many people, across all industries and professions? This thought kind of goes along with the widely used idiom “I’ll let you go”, as if talking one-on-one is some kind of conversationally-imposed imprisonment; however, that’s just a side-note.

ANYWAYS, back to the point:

Don’t talk TO me. Talk WITH me. Listen. Collaborate.

Just a thought.

(obtained via adjustafresh.com)

Social Media + Traditional Marketing = Misguidance

It’s a simple equation. You try to apply traditional marketing techniques to social media, you get a misguided and ineffective attempt at increasing your brand reach, visibility, and ROI (return on investment). This is investment isn’t necessarily money – it’s something far more important: time. The current of new media is gonna keep on flowin’, and if you don’t learn to swim with the current, you’re going to be swept away.

You can’t think of social media (Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc.) in the same manner as traditional business/marketing/advertising/etc. If you try to apply these to your personal/professional accounts on Twitter, for example, you’re going to end up looking like this guy, scratching your head thinking, “This ‘social media’ I’ve been hearin’ about seems pretty useless.”

(obtained from icis.com)

How can we prevent ourselves from looking like this (not just from a wardrobe perspective, that’s another story)? Contribute content, and not just any filler crap content – meaningful content. Talk about things that pertain to the audience you are trying to reach. Get your audience interested. Engage your audience.

If you can’t get your audience interested, you can’t even begin to engage them. If you can’t accomplish that, then why even participate in social media practices? It will all be in vain, a misguided attempt. Social media is not like ‘traditional marketing’ and media where you simply put a up sign, billboard, or run a TV ad and hope for the best. It’s quickly becoming a two way street – a marketing highway, if you will. This is a chance to improve yourself personally and professionally, to obtain feedback and then react to that feedback in real time.

Don’t do it because you feel you have to just to stay up to date – get involved with communities and contribute. Go to friends blogs – post feedback, get your name out there. If people retweet your posts or mention you on Twitter, show that love back. People appreciate all things genuine. Finally, the more readily available your “brand” is (from posting blogs, commenting on blogs, tweeting, etc), the greater your return on investment from a time standpoint will be. You can’t simply make a blog and say, “Hey, we have a blog, we have a Twitter – here it is.”

Why should I read it? Give me a reason to visit it once and cause me to be a repeat offender.