Ms. Adverthinker

Jessica Hagy, of Indexed fame, wrote this fun little book: How To Be Interesting, In 10 Easy Steps. It is an advice book, encouraging you to pursue what interests you, break out of your comfort zone and be yourself. But in Hagy’s typical way, she incorporates charts and graphs to get the point across, making the book a more interesting read (no pun intended). This is a book that you can read in one short sitting, but that you will want to pick up and peruse again and again weekly for inspiration and motivation to get out do something different. Here are some of my favorite pages.

I am an introvert. This is no surprise to those that really know me (who are few). But my job doesn’t allow for introversion: I present on a regular basis, interact with clients and potential clients, and collaborate with agency teams daily. I’ve learned to show extroverted tendencies when needed, then recover with alone and quiet time when I can think and reflect and be at peace.

I prefer small groups of friends having deep conversations rather than big parties having a lot of small talk. But almost all of my friends are extroverts. We complement each other.

I listen more than I talk. I like to think about what I am going to say carefully before I say it, making me a less-than-ideal participant in brainstorming meetings. And I communicate better in writing than in speaking.

These are traits that I have always worried about keeping me from having friends and fitting in to my environment, but I have learned to cope over the years as I experience life and learn more about myself each day.

As it turns out, I am not alone. According to the book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, author Susan Cain says that approximately one-third of the population is introverted. I felt like I was reading a biography of my life as I read her book. She explains how introverts feel in a world that prizes extroversion. She provides advice for introverts to fit into this world. She provides advice to extroverts for working with introverts and highlights the benefits of having introverts in life and in work. She provides parents advice for nurturing introverted children. In all, this is a wonderful book that covers the psychology of introversion that I recommend anyone that deals with people on a daily basis. And hopefully, that is all of you.

I’ve been reading a lot of books about sketchnoting as I have decided to make this one of my things to learn and do this year. Sketchnoting is about capturing the concept and big ideas in a conversation or presentation rather than recording every detail of a meeting. So there are times when it will be appropriate, and times when it will not be, depending on the context and content of meetings and presentations. I’ll share some of my sketchnotes here as I deem them worthy and after I have had a bit more practice. This is one of my firsts:

Notes from this Gary Vaynerchuk presentation (and yes, I am aware I spelled his name incorrectly in my sketch).

The books that I have read on using sketching and drawing to communicate are:

1. The Sketchnote Handbook: The Illustrated Guide to Visual Notetaking. This was by far the best read with great examples and tips for approaching visual notetaking.
2. The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. This book really picks up where the first one in this list left off (though not intentionally; these are two different authors) and talks about communicating ideas through drawing.
3. Blah, Blah, Blah: What To Do When Words Don’t Work. This was not my favorite read. It is by the same author of The Back of the Napkin and I felt like it was a lot of talking for a book about drawing.
4. Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rule-Breakers and Changemakers. This book is a great resource for jump starting ideas and thinking in brainstorming meetings. Many of the recommendations include drawing to communicate, and even provides tips for getting participants past that “I can’t draw” resistance.

Looking back at my 2012 year, I realized that I completed 60 books in those 12 months.  I do love to read, but I didn’t realize I read that many books this year (and I have to admit, I am proud of myself). I thought I would share my top five reads in each of three categories. The links are to my reviews on Goodreads.

Business books (or, what I consider books that I can apply to my business):

1. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
2. Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer
3. Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon
4. The Sketchnote Handbook: The Illustrated Guide to Visual Note Taking by Mike Rohde
5. The tasti D-lite Way: Social Media Marketing Lessons for Building Loyalty and a Brand Customers Crave by BJ Emerson

Other non-fiction books:

1. Fearless: The Heroic Story of One Navy SEAL’s Sacrifice in the Hunt for Osama Bin Laden and the Unwavering Devotion of the Woman Who Loved Him by Eric Blehm
2. Townie: A Memoir by Andre Dubus III
3. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright
4. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed
5. Mississippi Mud: Southern Justice and the Dixie Mafia by Edward Humes

Fiction books:

1. Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan
2. Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
3. Canada by Richard Ford
4. Maine by Courtney J. Sullivan
5. A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers

If you follow me over on Goodreads, you can keep up with the books as I read them. I am thinking I will set a goal for 75 books read in 2013.

Last night I finally finished the biography of Steve Jobs. I have been laboring through this book for months and months, but I am so glad I stuck with it. Jobs was a man that I have always admired and this book started by making me not like him, which was difficult for me. However, as I plodded my way through this great story, I began to appreciate that he was complicated and difficult and truly great and worth the admiration again.

It occurred to me as I was nearing the end of the book that this man’s life is a lesson in designing user experience. While this may seem to be an obvious conclusion, as I have been reading a lot about user experience design lately this conclusion struck me particularly hard.  All the experts in UX really boil it down to a single point: make it simple and easy while keeping it beautiful.  And that is what made Jobs a great innovator and visionary: keeping his products simple, easy and beautiful.

I’m still an Apple loyalist.

The book Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrated SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing teaches practical strategies and tactics for optimizing website and social content for search engine display. Though it is dry in parts, the content is extremely useful. This is essentially a step-by-step manual for SEO and well worth reading for anyone looking to better understand the magic behind search engine optimization.

Throughout the book, the author explains how to optimize sites and content for each stage of the purchase funnel and acknowledges that content optimization will not garner immediate results but will help build credibility and relationships throughout that purchase funnel until the customer is ready to buy. The author argues that all digital content should be written with two things in mind: (1) the target audience and (2) the search engines.

“Savvy online marketers don’t see content as a shortsighted substitute for social strategy or simply as an SEO tactic but as a proxy to creating better customer experiences. Content is the mechanism for storytelling, and if social and search optimization are also involved in a qualitative way to aid in discovery and sharing of those stories, then all the better.”

This book is full of practical advice, points the reader to free tools and provides recommended approaches for creating, curating and distributing content. And as a bonus, it also covers measurement tactics for ongoing tracking and optimization. Brand managers, website managers and social media managers need to read this book when planning strategies for generating traffic to their sites and engagement with their digital content.

The Social Animal, by David Brooks is a book about the unconscious mind at work in our lives and in our life decisions. The story is told using two composite characters that Brooks creates to demonstrate the behind-the-scenes work of our brains. It is another book that reminds me of the style that Malcom Gladwell uses to explain the complicated psychology of decision-making using stories. The book was fascinating in general as it explained human behavior, types of people based on how they are raised and their influencers to decision-making. Through the story, almost every major life decision is covered from choosing a college and selecting a career, to finding a life partner and making a commitment, and life’s major wins and major losses. (Note: Brooks teeters on the line of his politics too. It is near the close of the book, not integral to the story and not-so-subtly shows his leanings. The book is still good.)

From a marketers point-of-view, however, the book can almost serve as a guide for understanding the wants, needs and desires of the people we are talking to a bit better. For example, in one section of the book our female character is studying behavioral economics. Brooks uses this passage to educate the reader on heuristics and choice architecture: the unconscious set of structures that help frame a decision. He walks through these “rules” and how context influences decisions:

• Priming
• Anchoring
• Framing
• Expectations
• Inertia
• Arousal

This is just one example. Learnings like these are spread throughout the book. Read the book to get the full explanations of each and to understand your customers better. And read to book just to understand yourself better.

I recently read that Jack Dorsey–an entrepreneur who inspires and awes me–provides every new employee at Square with a copy of the book  The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Done Right, among a few other things. Which meant I had to read it immediately, of course.

The book is an easy read because the stories are truly engaging, even though they are literally stories about how checklists save lives, time, effort and in general the missing of stupid oversights.  The author’s approach to making his point felt very much like the approach Malcom Gladwell takes in his books The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers (all great reads, as well). The stories demonstrate the thesis: checklists matter, even for those that think they are too good for checklists.

“It somehow feels beneath us to use a checklist, an embarrassment.” The author, Gawande, addresses this core resistance to using checklists throughout the book. He says that people fear checklists because “They imagine mindless automatons, heads down in a checklist, incapable of looking out their windshield and coping with the real world in front of them.” But in fact, “The checklists gets the dumb stuff out of the way, the routines your brain shouldn’t have to occupy itself with, and let’s it rise above to focus on the hard stuff.” Basically, you are smarter when you use a checklist; not dumb because you have to use a checklist.

This was an interesting and inspiring read. Check it out.

The Tasti D-Lite Way: Social Media Marketing Lessons for Building Loyalty and a Brand Customers Crave is a book at social media from a brand that has actually used social media successfully and continues to innovate in the ways that they use it. It seems that most books about social media are from consultants and agencies, and are highly theoretical. The Tasti D-Lite Way gives examples of specific tools and executions that worked for the brand (I took a ton of notes while reading).

It would be easy to dismiss all the hard work and effort that Tasti D-Lite did for social media by saying that they were already beloved, had a cult following and even a celebrity following. The book’s authors admit this was the situation right at the start of the book. However, throughout the book they talk about building a culture, putting a strategy in place, engaging their community and striving to be on the forefront of technology. You can quickly see that their success in social media cannot be attributed to their pre-existing cult following (though starting with a great product or service is going to be a “must” for any brand to be successful today).

And being a franchised company, they had to work even harder. Franchisees are brand owners, too, but they have so many other things pulling at them as they are running their businesses that it is a challenge to get franchisees educated and engaged in social media. Though each franchisee’s local presence and voice is increasingly important in social media. Tasti D-Lite saw how important it was that those franchisees be involved and created ways to make it happen systemwide, consistently.

This franchisee involvement ties into a key message woven throughout the book: the people behind the brand make the difference. The authors talk a lot about building the internal culture at Tasti D-Lite to support the social media efforts and striving to have a truly authentic voice behind the brand. The recognition that transparency, honesty and building trust were first and foremost in their messaging was an important aspect to the Tasti D-Lite social media story. In the authors’ words: “you can’t fake caring.”

I was most impressed with the ways that Tasti D-Lite took social media and technology into the store environment, bridging the digital world with the physical world. From the socially-friendly Tasti Rewards program to the in-store iPad guest book and live digital displays of Yelp reviews, Tasti D-Lite has been truly innovative in digital communications.

I definitely recommend this book for any brand looking to learn more about how social media can work for them.

We will be talking more about this books and its lessons over on the Stone Ward Waiting for the Elevator blog in the coming weeks. Be sure to check in over there to join the conversation.

After reading this book, I hope I never have to interview for another job. If these are the types of questions interviewers are asking these days, I am scared. To be fair, the book focuses on Google and other technology companies hiring for engineers and programmers. To that end, it makes sense that the logic questions in this book as examples be heavily math-based.

The book, “Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?” by William Poundstone is equal parts narrative with embedded logic questions and answers to those logic questions as the second half of the book. It reminded me of one of those logic game books you buy because you think it will be fun, but that fun is short lived when the games get hard.

The author and the people he interviews acknowledge that the series of questions and tests that some companies put their job candidates through still can’t accurately predict a new hire’s success at a company; it is merely a way to narrow the field a bit. Some of the best pieces of advice from the book are:

Some questions test “something rarer than education–the capacity to ignore what you learned when it isn’t helpful…Google doesn’t want people who instinctively do things the hard way because they can. They want those with a knack for intuiting simple solutions that work.”

“Google likes answers that scale up.”

“One of the oft-cited mysteries of creativity is that revolutionary ideas often come from non experts with an outsider’s perspective.”

“Logic puzzles are like poems or code: the good ones don’t contain the inessential.”

“Like jokes or golf courses or haiku, logic puzzles aspire to a certain form of cleverness and play by certain rules to achieve it. By reverse engineering this structure, you can come up with a three-part process that applies in broad outline, to the solution of most of these puzzles. It goes like this: (1) Distrust the first answer or line of attack that pops into your head. It won’t work because if it did, the puzzle would be too easy. (2) Decide what feature of the question’s wording doesn’t ‘fit’ and take that as a clue. (3) Look for a solution that’s surprising in some way.”

If you are stumped: “…it’s better interview etiquette to keep trying to answer the question until the interviewer cuts your off. Interviewers ought to know that innovation takes persistence, intuition, and luck. You can at least show you’ve got the persistence part covered.”

The bottom line is that the book has some good interviewing advice and is worth a review (maybe not a cover-to-cover reading) for those currently in the market for a new job. My key takeaway from the book was to be passionate about the company, products, services, and position for which you are interviewing, and if it is truly the right fit, things will work out for you.

Maybe I am just jealous of the author, but I didn’t love this book, The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. I have heard good things about this book for years and finally got around to reading it over the last few days. I would sum up the thesis of the book as this: outsource busy work. There is a lot more to it, of course. And there are many good tips for de-cluttering your work life and in general living lighter, many of which I may employ. Ultimately the goal of the book is to get you to a position of full productivity with less office time so that you can essentially travel full time.

Ferriss is obviously brilliant and amazingly talented, but his tactics for achieving his success are less than admirable, in my view anyway. Perhaps I am just jealous and can’t get past that to the value of this book.

Google’s Zero Moment of Truth book review.

The Like Economy, by Brian Carter is subtitled “How Businesses Make Money with Facebook.” The crux of the book is that if you build a relevant fan base of those who are open to your message, then craft your message appropriately for conversions, you can drive sales of your product or service.

While this book had a huge focus on Facebook advertising (I felt a bit like I was in a 250-page sales pitch to use Facebook advertising), the book did have some fascinating statistics on Facebook, great advice on analytics and measurement, interesting comparisons of Facebook to email and Twitter, several general marketing 101 pointers, and a lot of ideas and direction on content generation. And all of this stuff made the Facebook advertising selling parts of the book tolerable.

The bottom line: you can get as many fans as you want through advertising on Facebook, but they won’t see your posts if you don’t deliver engaging content from the first day they fan your page. And here is why:

• If you don’t get your fans to like and comment on your posts, they’ll stop seeing them in their news feeds due to Facebook’s EdgeRank system.
• Most fans never return to a page after they like it.
• Most posts by pages are seen by less than 10% of their fans.
• Many fans will never see your welcome tab.
• When fans create new posts on your Facebook page, other fans don’t see them.
• Posts from pages with 10,000 fans reach 30-40% of their fans.
• Posts from pages with 100,000 fans reach 20-30% of their fans.
• Posts from pages with 1,000,000 or more fans reach 10% of their fans.
• The 1% Rule: only 1% of people will do what you ask them to do online.

I recommend picking up the book to learn more about how to use Facebook as a marketing tool, though I don’t necessarily agree that Facebook advertising is the only way to drive fan “likes” to your business pages.

And other favorite lessons and advice from the book “Steal Like An Artist,” by Austin Kleon.

{You Are What You Love}

{It Is Not Really Stealing}

{Constantly Keep Notes}

{Read Voraciously}

{Google Everything}

{Do What You Love}

{This Might Be My Favorite}

{Challenge Yourself With Constraints}

{Recommended Reading}

I recently completed the book “The Accidental Creative” by Todd Henry. It is not a self-help book; at least, that is what I am telling myself to feel better about loving it so much. But it kind of is a self-help book for those with creative pursuits, specifically in the advertising business. The author has a background in agency business and it felt like he was talking directly to me and only me, the experiences and stories were so dead on.  And, I am a not a “creative;” I work in account management.

As the readers here know, based on an epiphany and an encounter I had in April, I have taken on a mission to recreate the account management department at our agency to act, and be perceived by their peers, as more than notetakers and communications conduits between clients and creative teams. There are a lot of aspects to this shift, but one major piece is that the account managers have to think of themselves as creative and thereby contributors to that creative process and output. To quote the book:

“While a designer will solve a problem visually, a manager may solve it by developing a new process. But they’re both using the same creative tools and wrestling with many of the same obstacles.”

I have been doing a lot of work against this effort, mostly in the form of research and notes, without much implementation yet. I believe this  book can explain to my team how important their creativity is, that they are all creative, and they just need the right attitude, approach and plan to be creative in their contributions to the agency, their teams and their lives. To that end, I am going to ask everyone on my team to read this book. (Don’t worry, I’ve learned none of them read this blog, so I am not spoiling any surprise for them by posting it here. Although, if my boss wrote a blog about our business, I would definitely be reading it regularly. Perhaps that is a post and vent for another day.)

The book starts by walking through the hinderances to creativity, especially those in an ad agency. Then, it takes the reader through recommendations for overcoming those obstacles. I am not going to outline them for you here, you have to read the book. Some of the recommendations seems so obvious, but none of us our doing them, making the time to even attempt to do them or thinking twice about skipping over the obvious steps to creativity just to check something else off our to-do list. Other recommendations are easy to accomplish, it is just a matter of setting out to do them and getting them on the calendar.

So, why is this book my new “life guide”? “The Accidental Creative” it also about leadership, team work, time management and life happiness. To quote the book again:

“It is more and more difficult in today’s world to segment your life into buckets like ‘work,’ ‘home,’ ‘relationships,’ hobbies,’ and so on. Every area of your life affects every other, and a lack of engagement in one area will quickly infect the rest. As you implement these practices, you will find that your newfound creative energy will infiltrate not just your work life, but other areas of your life as well. A rising tide raises all boats.”

This book is a definite recommend.