Archive for the “working” Category

I used to work with a guy who was an excellent public speaker, as sales guys often are. Although I cannot remember any part of any presentation he ever gave, I remember very the time when he started off a talk with a joke that began, “A brunette, a redhead and a blonde…” After I got over the initial shock at the political incorrectness and the generally awful quality of the joke (it included the question, “how many ‘d’s are there in ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom”), I realized two important things:

1. He had used up almost five minutes of his presentation time
2. He had the audience completely and utterly in the palm of his hand

I resolved then and there to find or manufacture a joke that would do those two things and more: my presentation-starting ice-breaking audience-owning joke would be funny, and it would also be politically correct and vaguely related to the techy subject matter of most of my presentations.

It took a couple of years. Well, it took a couple of years to finally execute the google search that found me the raw material for the joke I needed. I practiced it, I tested it, and then I deployed it in the field, and it delivered for me. It even worked in France through a translator. It got a laugh in Germany - in English. In Asia, it also helped me figure out how fluent in English my audience was before getting to the meat of the presentation. This joke was almost as valuable as my wireless presentation remote.

Recently, my friend L successfully adapted the joke to her industry and bravely used it in front of a client on the first try. Brava!

And so, dear limereaders, in honor of the occasion of not having a better topic about which to write, I will share with you not only the joke, but also some important tips on how to deliver it and integrate it with your own presentations. I would be very interested to know if any of you have a joke or two that you use to open your talks.

It’s good to be here in [wherever you are, if you can remember - say something nice about the place and segue to...] The other day, I was walking around near the hotel and I passed a pet shop with a big sign, “we have talking parrots!” so I figured I’d check it out. Inside there was a huge cage with three parrots in it. I asked the shopkeeper, “so, how much do talking parrots go for these days?” [for some reason, I find this works better when you tell the story in the first person, perhaps because then its not immediately apparent that you're telling a joke]

The keeper pointed out a beautiful green parrot preening itself on the bottom perch, and said, “that one’s $895″ “Wow,” I said, “that seems like a lot.” “Well, that parrot can do telephone tech support” [pause here for a laugh, there should be one because this is the first sure sign that this is a joke. This is also where you might need to customize to your chosen industry and audience. If there's no laugh here, its going to be a long, dark 5 minutes]

OK, I say, how about that one, pointing to the yellow and orange parrot sitting above the green one and chewing on some leaves. “that guy’s $2,095″” Two thousand bucks? What can that parrot do?” Apparently, the yellow parrot is Cisco certified for both voice and data networks. [this is the tough part of the joke, if you get a laugh here, you're home free - it helps to ham up your confusion and skepticism about the talented parrots]

I can tell that I’m not in an ordinary pet shop, but I persevere and ask about the last parrot, the grey parrot on the top perch. [if you can stretch it out with a long-winded description of the parrot, it'll help.] “Ah, the grey,” says the keeper, “he’s a very special parrot. I hate to see him go, but you can take him for $4,995″ Now I’m starting to wonder about this guy, but I ask anyway, “what could this parrot possibly do to be worth that much?” [make sure you up the ante on your utter disbelief that the parrot costs $5k]

The guys says, “well, I’ve never actually seen him do anything, but the other two call him ‘boss’”

At this point, you are free to segue to whatever your real presentation was, with five minutes gone and a swelling of audience goodwill to carry you along. I usually make some pandering comment about how the people who do stuff in technology are not always the ones who get the big paychecks and credit, and use that as a springboard to talking about my company’s no-nonsense friend of the common network administrator positioning.

I’m sure you can see how this works almost anywhere except perhaps for an audience entirely composed of senior executives, the grey parrots as it were.  Pretty much everybody thinks that they know more then their manager.  Just fill in some technical details your audience relates to for the first two parrots. For extra credit, make some reference to “the third parrot” at some point in your presentation or closing.

Obviously this joke - or any other - won’t save you if your main presentation is lousy or if your delivery is bad or if your audience is hostile, or comprised of zombies, or both. Also, be aware that you may be heckled or confronted by people who actually know something about parrots and who want to correct any technical parrot details you might have used or abused. It’s from one of these folks that I learned that the prices in the original joke were actually quite low for parrots of any kind.

Giving credit not quiet where it’s due, you can find two variants of this joke here: http://www.plannedparrothood.com/jokes.html (gotta love that domain name) one for the legal industry and another closer to my high-tech version. This isn’t where I first found the joke, but I can’t find that link anymore. Sorry.

Disclaimers and credits completed, I just want to say that a joke is one of many ways to establish audience rapport, and that’s something that not enough presenters even attempt to do. So, take my parrots. Please.

When you run a web-based business and your site is down for maintenance, you might consider not doing what Linkedin did last week.   Here’s the screen:

Let’s leave aside the question of the wisdom of doing this maintenance or upgrade or whatever on a weekday evening and concentrate on the elephant in the room - there’s a big fat cartoon wizard up there.  What’s up with that?   Pointy hat, curly shoes, baseball on top of his staff?  He’s not the Linkedin mascot, at least I don’t think I’ve seen him before, although the has a big “in” on his chest.  I guess he sort of reflects Linkedin’s brand colors, but Linkedin is not in the magic business.   And I’m pretty sure that people into LARPs are more likely to use facebook.

Site maintenance is no excuse to deep six your brand. In fact, it’s just about the worst possible time to monkey with your brand, since while your site is down, that page is all there is in the world to represent you.

Take a look at Linkedin’s post-maintenance main page:

OK, I’m not wild about the flaming lunchbox either.  But why couldn’t this basic information about the purpose and benefit of Linkedin have been included on their “back soon” page? Even if the core engine of Linkedin’s functionality is down, can’t they make some useful static pages available?  Maybe take email addresses and send a message when the site is back up?  There seems little excuse for a lame page for planned maintenance.   Everybody knows that downtime is deadly to an online business; why add more injury to this injury by putting up a lousy temporary page?

Last week I took the train to New York City to attend a board meeting for a non-profit arts center I work with.  A lot of interesting things were discussed, but the one that stuck in my head was, “our database still stinks.”  That’s a Microsoft Access kludge I helped hack together maybe ten years ago.  They’re limping along with it, but everybody recognizes that it’s got big problems.

Back in Boston, doing a project for a similar organization, I saw it again, “our database sucks!” Another MS Access project half done half right.  I fixed a couple of small things, but the bigger issues will take some doing.  When somebody sets up a database using the wrong data type for some key fields, it’s pretty tricky to fix.

Two points determine a line.  Maybe this isn’t a trend, maybe it’s not even a market, but it sure looks like something to me.  Membership organizations of a certain size don’t seem to be very well served by the database software market.  Sure, they’re non-profit organizations, so they may be priced out of lots of solutions, but they do have money, and they have a need.  Markets abhor a vacuum, don’t they?

In the course of doing some work at Firstgiving, a for-profit company that serves non-profits by enabling them with online fundraising, I stumbled on some stats.  There are over 9,000 non-profit arts organizations in the US with annual revenues similar to those of the examples with which I started this post.  Looks a bit more like a market, doesn’t it?  Expand beyond arts organiztions to all kinds of NPOs at that revenue band, and there are 200,000 organizations.

If any enterprising software developers are tuned in, here’s a high-level spec for what I think these non-profit membership organizations need from their databases:

• a contact management system that
• handles members of various levels, lapsed/expired members, and prospects
• tracks donations and gifts, and participation in various events
• generates demographic and finacial reports
• creates merged letters and emails on demand and on a schedule (such as renewal letters for expiring members)

This doesn’t sound too much like rocket surgery, does it?  I would venture to say that a salesforce.com-style hosted approach would further save the NPO customer money on hardware, backups, and perhaps most significantly, Microsoft Access licenses and consultants.  Charging per member might also be appealing, as these organizations derive as much as 30% of revenue from membership.

This must be out there somewhere already, right?  Send me a lifeline if you’ve seen it, or if you think you can build it.

I was starting to worry that the market for paid search was getting as crowded and overheated as email marketing has become. People were subjected to my “reaching out vs. being found” lecture (PPT slides available on request) several times per week. When new budgets were approved, I saw the price of many keywords jump up on the first of the year. Then I saw these ads, and my faith in the mediocrity of most marketing was restored.

Nothing sets my teath on edge like lousy writing, especially marketing writing. It’s not just any word they got wrong, it’s the thing their product works on! I should go back and click on that ad to make them pay. In fact, I encourage all limeduck readers to click on bad search ads whenever possible. Just make sure you don’t buy anything or fill in any forms.

In any case, my point, such as it is, is this: even if the search market is overheated and the click prices inflated, nobody’s going to get much out of this if the ads are not appealing, and if the user experience after clicking delivers on the promise that the ad made. Short ads like these are like email subject lines, conversation hearts, magic 8-ball answers, fortune cookies and haiku — they have to get a lot across with very few words. As this turgid post affirms, it’s easier to write a lot at low quality than to write a little at high quality.

In semi-unrelated fortune cookie news, it turns out that the Japanese invented them.  Who knew?  (For extra credit, note the reporter’s middle name)

I was sitting in Andala Cafe eating amazing hummus while watching the sky turn from blue to white and I had an idea. I know, you’re stunned. This doesn’t happen often, and even less frequently outside the thinking room. So I grabbed an index card and just when I was about to write it down, I looked at the humble index card and thought, where have you been all my life, and promptly forgot the idea.

Where have index cards been all of our lives? Mostly, they’ve been right here and we are better off for it. I can’t believe I’ve only recently rediscovered what’s been around for ages. Over at 43 Folders, Merlin Mann praises his “Hipster PDA” and links it to all kinds of GTD (Getting Things Done) systems of organization.

The Hipster PDA (Parietal Disgorgement Aid) is a fully extensible system for coordinating incoming and outgoing data for any aspect of your life and work. It scales brilliantly, degrades gracefully, supports optional categories and “beaming,” and is configurable to an unlimited number of options. …

1. get a bunch of 3″x5″ file cards
2. clip them together with a binder clip
3. there is no step 3

Actually, step 3 is where things get challenging, but at least you’ve built your PDA and you’re ready to start getting things done. And by “beaming” I suppose you mean “flinging”? For the less frugal and more stylish, there’s Levenger’s cult of 3×5 cards for about $26 for 500 truly deluxue cards, described by the company as delivering these benefits:

• Convenient vertical format
• Easier to write on than standard 3 x 5 cards
• Cards come in ruled, plain, grid and window styles
• Printed on both sides
• Made from the highest grade of white card stock
• Made in the USA

It’s easy to make fun, but the cards - and the snazzy leather wallets and wooden “bleachers” - are truly premium quality and make writing on the cards a joy and tearing them in half a somewhat guilty luxury. And there must be something to it, since Staples has been seen hawking Levengeresque 3×5 card wallets under the “M” brand at a rate somewhat above the usual Staples price points.

One of the great benefits to index cards for organizing your thoughts is that you can stack them to focus on just one or array them to prioritize or sequence them. And there’s great satisfaction to just throwing a card away when the task is done. Although I have mixed feelings about Agile Development, I can say (and did - in this Ipswitch blog post) that the use of cork and cards has yet to be eclipsed by fancy computer technology. I’ve been a huge fan of the whiteboard, but I’m starting to wonder if the cork board - or at least the pile of index cards - isn’t starting to win me over. I might even crack and make a visit to the Levenger store.

One more note on index cards - if you haven’t already discovered the off-center geeky humor of Jessica Hagy and her blog Indexed - available soon in book form, oddly enough - you should check it out.