“And relationships are more powerful, when you think of them in terms of what you can do for other people, rather than vice versa. Most successful people i know seem far more concerned about the good they create for others, and how, than what the world can do for them. That’s what this cartoon is about. What can YOU do about not only your journey, but the journeys of others.”

David Allen urges us to mentally regurgitate the small details of our busy life into a manageable system so that we become more accountable for the things we promise to others and ourselves and get them OFF our mind and into an actionable system. In his own words he will, “show you how to manage your bigger vision while tracking the small details.” I am a big proponent of doing what you say you will do, in fact, it is one of the most important elements of business. Allen’s approach at its core helps us get ride of the inconsequential details of life so that we can hold some space for the the bigger visionary thoughts about how we want to live.

Active Inbox is a Google email plug-in that uses GTD principals to organize your email and to create actionable items.

I use it, I love it, get it—you’ll be glad you did!

Guy Kawasaki

Now that I got that out of the way I really liked the book, he touches on a plethora of topics from smiling to social networking. The title, enchantment, is the theme of the book and as you can imagine is essentially what Guy’s life has been about. Guy talks about how to enchant people, I watched an interview with Guy the other day on Mixergy (you should watch it but the way) and I was really impressed with his candor and likability—yea, he enchanted me for sure.

Get the book, it will enchant you too, and you’ll learn a few things along the way.

About six months ago I was at a conference in NY and I was going through the schedule of speakers and I came across a presentation by Gary, so I went. It was just like his video series and I came away with some solid recommendations on how to make my own business (and life) more marketable. Good on ya, Gary!

Gary’s main message is that we have entered a new paradigm where everything is out in the open and information about everyone and everything has become ubiquitously available, and this shift has given all of us the ability to share views and filter information for each other. The age of the information DJ, he calls it. He is right: I Googled my name the other day, which I encourage you to do, and I found my phone number, email, and a picture in a number of listings. I am surprised my blood type and medical records weren’t there also–give it a few years. When I want to buy something, I Google it and read customer reviews, not corporate advertising copy, before I make my decision. The bottom line is that we care what other people think and we want the truth about a product from those we trust.

Gary’s marketing mantra is rooted in passion and expression, he suggests that everyone is a walking brand and that one’s energy should go toward building the individual brand by caring about something enough to share it with others–build enough brand equity in yourself and then say goodbye to your corporate job. He also talks about ‘DNA’ as being a huge factor in what we do and how we do it. Gary’s success is a result of video and he doesn’t really care which form of media one chooses to get the message out–written word, audio, or video. Just start something, he recommends. Be consistent, be patient and become an expert in your chosen subject, which must also be your personal passion or forget it.

I highly recommend the book, but I was disappointed at the retail price of $19.95–it is priced too high for its volume. I was in the bookstore and had Crush It in a pile of new titles that I wanted to purchase, but when I saw the price, I was discouraged and removed it from the stack. A few days later I ordered the ebook for my Kindle and I was happy to pay the $9.95 price.

Check out more of Gary’s message at http://winelibrary.com, or Gary’s personal site at http://garyvaynerchuk.com. Get the book here.

However, uncovering the greater meaning of why we are doing what we are doing has immense value and deserves attention. I’d like to propose that you find out what motivates you to do what you do. If your investigation leads you to the almighty dollar or to a desire to impress others then one day you will wake up and look around and wonder who hijacked your life.

What is at the inner most core of ourselves? Yes, this question will lead you down a rabbit hole into yourself and hopefully once you get to your hidden onclave you’ll find that your business is aligned with what resonates most deeply within youself—and if it doesn’t, get out and get into what does.  Life is too precious to waste it living someone else’s dream—those of your parents, friends, or society—what is unique in you needs, deserves, must be set free—your life depends on it, literally.

True success in life isn’t measured by the amount of money you have in the bank nor the number of possessions or toys that you have accumulated, success is a result of letting that passion that lies at your heart of hearts into the open where the sprouts of yourself can be set free to dance among humanities song of uniqueness.

Go back to the flip chart of yourself before you sit down and pour over those spreadsheets and sales leads and ask yourself a few fundamental questions.

• Why did I start this business?
• What am I most passionate about in life?
• Am I doing what I truly want in life?
• Is my most authentic self alive in what I am doing?

It’s never too late to change your life—in fact, nothing in life is static, learn to move with life, learn to embrace change, and when you get comfortable you’ll find that life has its own rhythm and will knock you out just when you thought the bell had wrung. Get up, brush yourself off, smile, and charge ahead towards the unknown with courage, positivity, and humility.

Creating an opt-in page in your sales process is perhaps the most important aspect of on-line marketing. Check out this video of the Master Mind System  that details the importance of the opt-in page in a simple—yet informative—way.

The reality is that we all have different groups of people that we virtually touch each day and you might want to create multiple twitter accounts (or profiles) to feed various forms of information to different groups (recipe to grandma and a bikini shot to your beer drinking friends should go out on different profiles). Here are a few software tools to help you manage your tweets, broken into two type: (1) on-line tools (which you can access from anywhere) and (2) downloadable tools (that you need to run on your machine):

(1) Online

Easytweets: lots of tools, stats, keyword search, dashboard
Hootsuite: simple, keeps all accounts on one page, free (my personal favorite)
Matt: clean and basic, but does what is needed, tweet to multiple accounts
Netvibes: easy plug-in to admin twitter accounts, and mash up lots of web stuff

(2) Download

Splitweet: for mac and pc, follow contacts and monitor your brand
TweetDeck: nice interface, slick and effective (resource heavy)
Twhirl: connects to multiple networking accounts and manages various profiles

Ok, that should be enough to get you started, download or sign-up for a few and take a test drive. I like Hootsuite the best among the online applications, mostly becaue it keeps all my accounts on one page and I can scan and manage my content  easily and blast off a tweet to the profile I want with a quick tick of the icon. TweetDeck is my choice among the downloadable applications, it has lots of bells and whistles and allows for filtering ‘out’ or ‘in’ feeds so that you can follow lots of people but perhaps only interact with a selected group.

Your work tools don’t have to be super complex to be useful either and this  post is about a tool that I started to use a few weeks ago that I have found to be MOST EXCELLENT.

Like most people in today’s world I am on-line constantly and I use multiple computers daily in several locations and thus everything I do and record needs to be accessible from, well, everywhere (pray to the gods that the connection doesn’t go down). My virtual tool chest includes a cornucopia of on-line software programs, as an example I use many of 37 Signals  software including Highrise CRM to track customers (see “What is a CRM” ), Project Path to manage an assemblage of projects, Vitalist to organize my GTD matrix—the software manifesto goes on and on—my problem had been that I needed a place to easily capture information quickly (while on a phone call, tidbits of emails, jott down a quick thought, etc) that I could later feed into the appropriate tool—like virtual post-it notes.

Of course someone has created virtual post it notes and I’ve been using them for a few weeks now and I love the interface and simplicity. They are called Webnotes and signing up couldn’t be easier (you actually don’t even sign-up, the owner just lets you use the service for free—don’t you love the internet?). Create a workspace with a unique word and start using your custom url in seconds, access it wherever and whenever you need—simple and sweet. You can also share your notes with others by providing the workspace name (or url) to a friend.

At the end of March 2009 Google launched Google Voice, which does the same thing for their current Grand Central Accounts (Grand Central is a Google phone service that Google bought a few years back, it makes a digital file of all messages and drops them in an in-box for review).  I love Google Voice, the transcripts are much cleaner than Jott’s and have less errors, the interface and dashboard are designed in that classic no nonsense approach (which screams functionality and simplicity, or maybe whispers it)—but the best part is that it is a free service. Here is some Googlespeak from the GV website:

“Google Voice is a service that gives you one number for all your phones, voicemail that is easy as email, and many enhanced calling features like call blocking and screening, voicemail transcripts, call conferencing, international calls, and more.”

Google Voice has some other cool features too, like listening in when people leave a message or recording a call and saving it online, “you didn’t say X, in fact I’ve got it recorded, you want to hear?” You can block numbers (nasty creditors, old girlfriends), create SMS,  and even route calls to multiple numbers (including your Skype number (ditch that landline). In a digital nutshell, Google Voice is the future of communication and is one more reason to love Google.

If you don’t have a Google Grand Central account you can sign-up to be INVITED to Google Voice here.

Email is old-school, move on up to a communication device that delivers your messages to a select group of peps in a way that is easily seen, effectively used, and way cool—welcome to Yammer.

CEO of Mahalo Jason Calacanis describes Yammer as an opt-in time sheets without the guilt/pain, not for big brother reasons, but for true sharing and understanding between team members.

Jason is right on target, transparency is such a crucial element of any organization and workgroups can increase their productivity by simply letting each other know what is happening. It is amazing what synergy happens when we just open up.

Creating an account is easy, here are three simple steps to getting a yammer accout:

• 1) Go to yammer.com
• 2) Sign-up for a FREE account (quick and easy)
• 3)  Send email to your peps telling them to log in

The one trick is that your group will need to have the same suffix email, i.e. @myjob.com. Once people sign-up email alerts are sent whenever something new is posted. You can upload files, images, and also use tags to organize your posts—getting organized is so cool.

Yammer is one of the best online tools to come around in a long time, give it a try! I got to run and get back to my yammer, and my tweats, and my facebook, my ‘x’ whatever is next.

Let’s face it, business is about relationship and you’ll need a tool to help you maintain, track, and organize those relationships. A friend of mine recently wrote an article on business relationship and he defined it as having three key components:

1) Personal Touch    2) Regular Contact    3) Credibility

A CRM will help you remember the information you need to make and maintain (1) a personal touch; a CRM will allow for tracking of when, how, and why you made contact with a person, i.e. (2) regular contact; and lastly when your contacts realize you remembered details from their life (because you recored it in your CRM) it will lead to credibility. “You remembered my birthday, how sweet!”

Finding a good CRM can be quite daunting, there are so many on the market these days and each one has its own strengths and weaknesses. My core CRM is made by 37 signals, called highrisehq. Highrisehq has a simple interface, user friendly search capabilities, and a task-to-contact structure that helps you build in your next actions with ease. The best thing about highrisehq is the ability to attach emails to individual records—which I just love—additionally you can forward emails to your account to create new contact records on the fly, say goodbye to hand entry.

Highrise is basic and doesn’t have all the bells and beeps of the more mature CRM platforms like Sales Force, which is one of the most popular CRMs on the market. You’ll need a PhD to figure out how to use SF, its interface is complex and its not cheap either. But if you are a sales guru and don’t mind taking the time to learn about all it’s functions then it is worth checking out. I signed up for a test account and the Sale Force sales rep wouldn’t stop calling me, worse than a bill collector—I didn’t like the hard sell, let me try the software in peace is my mantra.

Free is about as cheap as they come and one excellent CRM that is free for up to three users is made by Zoho. This is a nice platform and the developers at Zoho are making it better and better all the time, it isn’t as complex as Sales Force and is a bit more user friendly. You can customize many of the features, it has a more sales feel to it than its cousins with capacity for leads, forecasts, campaigns, potentials—the reporting function is very slick. If you need something a bit more sales oriented than Highrisehq but not as complex as Sale Force it is a nice fit. Zoho also make an entire range of other online goodies, online word processor, spreadsheets,project coordination—if you want to take your computing online Zoho provides all the tools, though if you are a Google user it’s hard to compete with the Googlisious applications.

Get yourself a blog and start writing/posting consistently [defined as marked by harmony, regularity, or steady continuity]. Let people know that you are spreading the seeds of wisdom throughout the virtual universe and invite others to be part of the journey. I’ve tried most blog platforms and I would recommend WordPress for it’s versatility and functionality—it just gets better and better!

Another wonderful platform that I like is Joomla, this is a CMS that can be pimped out through custom templates and other plug-ins, a plug-in is like an added feature. Joomla describes itself as, “the dynamic portal engine and content management system.”

You’ll need some web skills to get the Joomla package up and running, it can be overwhelming in the beginning but I’d recommend hanging in there—create a dummy site and tweak it to your hearts content and don’t worry about breaking it. When you break it just start over.

Use a thesaurus when you write to help spice up your vocabulary, there is nothing worse than using the same undescriptive words over and over, “that thing he used to fix the other thing that . . . .”

Spell check your prose and be unique, reading the regurgitated words of others is . . . boring! Excite, ignite and challenge people in your writing, entertain, educate and facilitate a path to leaning.

Welcome, stay tunned for lots more great posts.