ZaggedEdge.com

Internet phenom Julia Allison has truly designed her life.  Wired Magazine wrote an incredibly detailed cover story on her success.  It hasn’t been easy and it did NOT happen overnight like it may appear.  Here are some key pieces to the story:

“In late 2004, Allison moved to New York to break into the Manhattan media world and — as she wrote on a list of goals she brought with her at the time — “become a cult figure.” It wouldn’t take long, and she would accomplish it using the same strategy she employed to become the Medstitute: Discover a niche, position herself at its choke point, and stay there until people start to notice.  (Wired Magazine”)

Julia set a goal and moved forward with it.  Goals are even better when they are measurable.  She stood her ground and said this is my goal and I will do anything it takes to achieve it.

“…Meatspace party-crashing may sound like a low tech way to meet the online cognoscenti, but Timothy Ferriss, whose skill at reaching bloggers helped turn his book, The 4-Hour Workweek, into a best seller, says it can be effective. “It’s a matter of ensuring you have the channel with the least competition,” he says. “Email is by far the most crowded channel, followed by phone. The least common is in-person….

This is absolutely key.  I have sent hundreds of professional, polite emails to people I didn’t know and rarely hear back.  People just can’t see your content through the clutter.  Muster up the courage to track these people down in person.  It’s genuine and it takes more effort.  This will be evident.

“…And so a complicated symbiosis was born. Allison befriended Gawker’s writers, dropping by the office in Chelsea or sending instant messages with passive-aggressive story suggestions — an upcoming date she was looking forward to, or the fact that Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz used to babysit her, or some faux humiliation. “She’d send these notes and say, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I posted this, it’s so personal, please don’t link to this,’” says Emily Gould, who wrote for Gawker at the time. “And I’d say, ‘Are you sure? Because now I kind of want to.’” The writers, facing an unrelenting 12-posts-a-day workload, couldn’t resist the easy productivity of a quick Allison item, although they usually took great pains to layer each story with a healthy coating of snark. Gawker’s readers ran up the pageviews, even as they filled the comments section with requests to please, please stop covering Julia Allison. And Allison grew an ever-thicker skin, clinging to the freude and eschewing the schaden. After a few laps around this feedback loop, Allison could cross “become a cult figure” off her to-do list….”

Julia made it easy for writers to succumb to her requests.  She knew they were busy, so she might as well have written the story for them.  This also took lots of effort, but it made someones life easier.  This took some careful analysis of her subject, but she got into the mind of the writers and eased her way in.

A piece from her story from her story “Top 5 Ways to be an Internet Success“:

“Ultimately, ask yourself: Are you a consistently effective distraction from work? Yes? Sweet—you have a built in loyal audience of Web-addicted procrastinators who want something to click on in the middle of writing TPS report No. 384….Your stunts must have a hint of rawness—ideally, they shouldn’t be obvious as stunts at all, instead serving only to get you a little attention and remind the viewer to come back into your fold, where you have the real attraction: your [whatever it is you do]. That—unlike the stunts—can be entirely genuine, although that’s not a requirement (cough, cough, TMZ)….(Time Out New York)

Being a consistent distraction from work is one surefire way to get famous.  Celebs, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, etc., they all involve humans and are huge distractions from work.  Social media is about being interactive and being real.  Lonelygirl15 got famous because people could talk about her right under her videos!  She was a real person, not some paid actor or a doctored up MTV reality series.  Lonelygirl15 could then respond to her viewers in her next episode. It’s interactive reality TV!

Although Julia’s path is certainly not for everyone and being famous for being famous sometimes seems a little counterintuitive, she is a living example of someone who set out on a path and didn’t give up.  She might have cried for 3 days after being slandered, but that’s part of being a self starting entrepreneur type!

I truly admire people who “think different”. Apple’s slogan has brought them fame and fortune, Seth Godin and the idea of the Purple Cow.  If you set yourself apart from the pack you will truly reap the benefits whether in business or life in general.

Marketing condoms “virally” may seem a bit strange.  Off-color and ironic? Yes.  Different?  Most defintely.  But with 35million views of the Trojan Games, I’d like to introduce my readers to The Viral Factory the people behind the commercial.

Amazing use of viral marketing can be viewed here: http://www.trojangames.co.uk/ (18+ please)

Check out www.theviralfactory.com

I’m still in shock!

Olympic Champion Shawn Johnson told Bob Costas that before her gold medal on the high beam, she was not feeling well because as expected, she pushed herself to her “physical and mental limit”.

Being the best in sport or business takes serious sacrifice and discipline. Whether it is eating 12,000 calories a day like Michael Phelps or eating peanut butter and jelly for weeks like some entrepreneurs– it’s all about hard work.

These athletes have set their goals, created a plan of attack and had coaches and trainers pushing them to stay on track. Their schedules and discipline allowed them to raise to the become the best in the world.

If you want to be the best in the world in business, it too takes coaches to keep you on track. A board of advisers, mentor, or personal assistant can keep you on track just like Johnson or Phelps’ coaches–but the only person who can really make you achieve your goals is you.

Are you pushing yourself to your physical and mental limit?

Twitter is an excellent tool for engaging in conversation with like minded people on the ‘net.  Pose a question, give a recommendation, tell your followers what your reading, post a helpful link, hear what your customers are saying about you, get engaged in the conversation with the market–this type of microblogging can prove extremely helpful in your business—@ZaggedEdge

WANT TO JOIN THE BEST SOCIAL MEDIA TWITTER CONVERSATIONS?

Well line up and start following.  Here’s the comprehensive list of top twitter social media analysts

These guys love web 2 stuff like twitter, so join their conversations about conversations

Further reading on the use of twitter:

Being Peter Kim

Web Strategist

I want to help announce the launch of MindFrenzy.com it’s a supercool online thinktank, where you can come with your business ideas and get advice on them.  It’s really simple, concise and has huge potential. Take a look and browse through people’s interesting ideas, comment on them, and network!

Founder Jared O’Toole wrote a blog post on the MindFrenzy Blog here’s what he had to say:

Where Do You Go For Advice On Yours Ideas?

My first reaction to this is a simple one, friends.  However I realized that there isn’t really another place I can go for advice.  Sure family isn’t a bad option but all to often they don’t have the right mindset.  What fellow entrepreneurs see as creative/fresh, family will see as odd/risky.

Don’t get me wrong, going to friends with my ideas is a great resource.  They generally have a lot of great input and begin that process of shaping and shifting that idea into something great.  But there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to access more people that think like this online.  There’s forums for entrepreneurs and maybe you have a lot of contacts on twitter that are entrepreneurs.  But I feel it’s hard to get some fresh input from people I have never met or contacted.

Now I’ve used sites like HalfBakery.com and CreativityPool.com which are open idea forums.  The problem is that these sites not only generate responses to your idea at a crawl but provide no other platform to take your idea or relationship with someone on the site.

This is one of my reasons for creating MindFrenzy.com.  With the hope that down the road we can combine a vibrant community of innovative thinkers with a way to form relationships to bring ideas to life.  Join the community to help us reach these goals.

Where do you go for advice or input on your ideas?

There should be a better place for your ideas. MindFrenzy.com

Remember the first time you saw this ad? It’s hard to look at it, it struck a cord, you wanted to help.  They first started running this 10 years ago on television.

Today, I saw the above ad as a banner, and didn’t even flinch.  This proves that consumers are becoming totally immune to traditional advertising.  This ad worked on TV the first few times we saw it, but fell of quickly after that.  TV provides a captive audience, who are forced to watch commercials.  Of course we usually mute them, talk during them, fast forward them with tivo, or change the channel.

Banner ads are even worse!  Nobody is immune to a snapshot like that, but with all the garbage on the internet, we drown this stuff out.  This ads effectiveness is wearing off because:

1. I’ve seen it before
2. I don’t look at banner ads, my attention is focused on the content of the page
3. It’s hidden amongst the clutter off my monitor, under im windows, popups, streaming stock quotes, skype conversations and itunes.  TV ads are fullscreen and you have nothing else to look at while banner ads are the last thing you look at.

Check out the difference, when you maximize this commercial below:

Traditional advertising is dying.  We are immune and the non profit behind these ads needs to rethink where they are spending their funds.  They should steal a page out of smoking’s Truth campaign creative advertising…

Why not have volunteers go to Times Square wearing masks to raise awareness and hand out fliers.  Video tape onlookers reactions and put it on YouTube.  Arrange for news crews to cover this. This type of advertising is less expensive AND get’s people talking…I hope this post does too.

Digg and Stumble this in hope for donations to Operation Smile

Hip Visions follows the Brand Hijack Manifesto:

Let Go of the fallacy that your brand belongs to you. It belongs to the market

Co-create your brand by collaborating with your consumers.

Scrap the focus groups, fire the cool chasers, and hire your audience.

Facilitate your most influential and passionate consumers in translating your brand’s message to a broader audience.

Be patient. Your brand initiative could take years—or weeks—to take off.

Be flexible. Carefully plan every step, but be totally open to having the story rewritten along the way.

Lose control. Free yourself to seize sudden opportunities that only last for moments.

Resist the paranoid urge for consistency. Embrace the value of being surprising and imperfect.

Respect your community. Draw the line between promotion and the adbusting trinity of manipulation, intrusion, and co-option.

Let the market hijack your brand.

The Duct Tape Marketing Blog has released an e-book on how to use Twitter for business.

You might think you know how to use twitter but this goes really in depth tips on:

• How to find the right people on Twitter
• Where to listen about your industry
• Wordpress plugins
• Twello and other tools

Even cooler, to my surprise on page 6, John inserted a screenshot, and ZaggedEdge was featured as I posted today about BMW’s super cool viral campaign www.rampenfest.com

That made my day– GET IT HERE

Google has a new competitor to Wikipedia the knol. Google the word “knol” and try to find knol.google.com

HOW DOES A WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE ON GOOGLE KNOL POP UP BEFORE THE HOMEPAGE FOR GOOGLE KNOL?!

If Google Knol is supposed to be the competitor to Wikipedia how can they let Wikipedia beat them at their own game? Search results are supposed to be organic, but come on Knol’s are supposed to be optimized for google search results!  Where is the Knol on Google Knol?! Not on the first page.

A simple google query of “Knol” google’s new competitor to Wikipedia is not so pretty.  Sure, Google has bought that adword from its self, but maybe Knol wasn’t such a good choice for a name.

Whenever you name something, you always need to google it first, see what’s out there, how hard it will be to get to the top of the search engine results.  When i chose the header at the top of my blog, i figured “lifestyle experiments” was an under used keyword, and now here I am #3 on google right after Tim Ferriss. If anyone should know this it would be Google!

Knol pops up as the sponsored link, which we often overlook, then we see the stock quote for KNOL, then we see google’s blog, then WIKIPEDIA on a knol and finally knol.google.com

WAKE UP GOOGLE!