Surprise! Here’s a list of posts that I published in 2009 that were most popular in terms of overall page views.

Well, why not?  Lots of other people were doing it, too.  

Without further ado, in descending order of popularity:

1. The Reasons Why Other People Ignore You
2. Book Review – The Road Less Traveled – M. Scott Peck
3. What is a reboot and why do they usually suck?
4. Should you update your Facebook status using Twitter?
5. Worst Twitter bio in the world
6. Does brainstorming really yield good ideas?
7. Why social media is like playing slot machines

And that’s a wrap for 2009!  Stay tuned for more goodness in 2010!

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A number of bloggers are publishing the “best of 2009” lists for their blogs.  I was tempted to do that, but I decided to take a different approach.  I’m going to highlight posts from Broadcasting Brain that I really liked writing but didn’t seem to get a whole lot of traffic.  Unfortunately, traffic can be a bit fickle sometimes and timing can make or break the amount of traffic to a post.

Here are ten of my favorite posts from 2009.  None of them had even 10% of the page views of  The Reasons Why Other People Ignore You, which got a decent amount of search engine traffic this year.  Nonetheless, I liked these posts and I’m hoping you’ll give them a look.

Image by photo.buddha (no, this isn’t really Underdog, but it was tagged as underdog on Flickr, so work with me…)

Mark’s 2009 Underdog Posts

The blogosphere is as real as the public in public opinion – this post was a reaction to Paul O’Flaherty’s nearly radioactive post about the blogosphere (the collection of blogs and bloggers out there in today’s world).  I suggested that the blogosphere is not real because of all of the different types of bloggers and different points of view.

Rehearsal or redundant practice – where is the value? – put simply, in an age where we now outsource our memories and brains to electronic devices, is there any value in practicing skills when they are just a mouse click away?

The smirkability factor – your gateway to content creation success – OK, I was being a bit tongue in cheek/smartass when I wrote this post, but nonetheless I think that content that at least makes you smirk has some decent value.

The danger of letting your enemy define you – this post was inspired by various marketing posts which suggested that a way to define yourself or your organization is by selecting a target and positioning them as the enemy.

Is creativity in danger of becoming the new Web 2.0? – musings about how we tend to misuse, overuse, and downright abuse terms, focusing on the term creative.

The cost of keeping an open mind – the pros and cons of being open minded (or subject to whims, rash decisions, etc.) using the example of a (possibly fictitious) story about writer Douglas Adams and his “backwards writing” technique.

How to lighten your mind to create better content – how to scrub out and release those nasty surface thoughts that tend  to sabotage you.

The secret origin of blogging that no one discusses – how I believe that blogging and Web publishing was strongly influenced by zines, amateur presses, and publishing by photocopies.

Folk media – the roots of social media – the roots of public communication.

Top ten things to do while Twitter is hosed – OK, this is just pure snark.

I hope you enjoyed this retrospective as 2009 winds down.  I’m working on great content for 2010, so stick around, will ya?  And, since I haven’t made a point of asking lately, why not subscribe so that you never miss my different thoughts about thinking differently in 2010 and beyond?

This is a book review of The Social Media Marketing Book by Dan Zarrella of  Dan Zarrella.com.

How I got the book:

Review copy sent to me by O’Reilly Media.

Background:

Dan Zarrella is an inbound marketing manager for Hubspot.com.  He refers to himself as “The Social Media & Marketing Scientist” within his personal branding and on his blog.  He has written and presented a great deal of content concerning viral marketing, particularly viral marketing through Twitter as well as research concerning the content of Tweets (messages sent using Twitter) and ReTweets (the process of copying and sending another Twitter user’s Tweet, used to share information with other Twitter users).

The title of the book is pretty self-explanatory:  this book is a collection of information about using social media as a part of your organization’s marketing strategy.

The strengths:

This is a very good introduction to the basics of social media marketing.  It gives an overview of the basic building blocks of social media, including blogs; multi-media; microblogging; social networking; social news and bookmarking; and older but still valuable tools like forums.  Within each section, Zarrella introduces the tool, talks about its history, and describes the protocols for using each tool.  He provides examples of websites and applications that represent each category of tool.  Zarrella chose to go “wide” instead of “deep” in this book and it’s a good strategy for a reader who’s new to social media marketing.

I like the fact that Zarrella links blogging back to journaling and notes that the practice has been around for (literally) thousands of years.  At the same time, though, he rightly points out that blogs have evolved to be powerful content management systems.

Twitter is clearly one of Zarrella’s strengths and he packs a lot of useful information in a small number of pages.

I think it’s very good that strategy, tactics, practices and measurement are discussed in the book, although I think they don’t get as much emphasis as the tools themselves.

There are loads of interesting and useful tips in this book.  Zarrella also provides anecdotes from various social media gurus and notables to share their wisdom.

The areas for improvement:

I have a couple of quibbles with this book.  In the greater scheme of things, they are  minor, but I still want to mention them in case they are useful.

This book is written in first person, but the author isn’t properly introduced until the end of the book.  Yes, we know the author’s name by looking at the cover of the book and a tiny bit about him by looking at the back cover.  But we don’t really find out who he is and what he does until we read the About The Author page at the back of the book.  It’s like the book is written by a faceless, anonymous individual who we’re supposed to assume that we know, although hints and clues are dropped throughout.  However, if this book is really designed as an introduction to social media marketing, chances are the reader probably won’t have heard of Dan Zarrella.  They also might be wondering why there are several references to his employer and their offerings in the book if this is a generic guide for the social media practitioner.  I know this is being really picky, but I found the effect to be jarring, even though I know who Dan is and what he does.  By contrast, in Trust Agents, Chris Brogan and Julien Smith take the time to introduce themselves early in the book to establish a somewhat more personal touch.  I think Chris has a higher profile than Dan, but Chris made the point of assuming that the reader didn’t know who he is.  It would have been a better move for Dan to properly introduce himself at the beginning of the book when the book was being written in the first person.

Second, I think that a better title for this book would have been The Social Media Marketing Tools Book.  I say that because I think there’s a whole side of social media marketing that Dan doesn’t discuss in much detail:  the social or human side of social media marketing.  I’m not a marketer and I’m an amateur (but reasonably experienced) social media user, but the thing that should distinguish social media marketing from traditional marketing is the human element:  interaction with consumers, clients, and potential leads through social media tools.  Traditional marketing tools are largely one-way using older media like print, television, and radio to send messages from the producer to the consumer.  Social media tools facilitate and encourage communication between both parties when used correctly, with the classic examples of companies like Dell’s websites and Twitter presence, Comcast’s Frank Eliason, and Zappos.  And, to be fair, Zarrella references these examples, as well as other examples of how social media tools can backfire (e.g. embarrassing YouTube videos).  In short, this is a tools-centric book and a bit lacking on the social or human side.  That’s why I have a problem with the title, but not a huge one.

Other points of interest:

Zarrella makes a point of including the HTML code for embedding YouTube videos into a blog or other web page, which I thought was a useful tip.

I think this book should be included as a “starter” pack of several other books about social media and web presence.  At this point in my reading, I’d couple it with Friends With Benefits, which goes in more depth on some of these topics.

Verdict (out of 10): 8  (recommended; good overview of the field with plenty of useful tips)

My methodology for book reviews and affiliate links: I’ll provide an Amazon.com affiliate link (or other related affiliate link) for content if I think it’s worth buying and reading. If I don’t, I won’t provide an affiliate link. The affiliate link helps fund my content creation activities.

If you would like me to review YOUR eBook, book, or other content, please send me an E-Mail at markdykeman@gmail.com to get instructions on how to send your book or content to me. You’ll get my honest opinion about your book, either publically or privately.

I’m not a regular listener of This American Life (with Ira Glass), but his radio show clearly resonates with many people.  I came across this interview with Glass somewhere in my information streams and I found it quite intriguing.

Watch this video clip and then we’ll discuss it after:

This clip is part of a series of videos  where he discusses the creative process and how to develop your skills as a writer or storyteller.  Glass makes the excellent point about the importance of taste:  the ability to discern good quality work from poor quality work.  He plays some of his earlier radio work and dissects it briefly during this video.  He’s critical of his older work, even after eight years of working in radio (he’s been in the field for much, much longer, I think).  I think that anyone who’s trying to improve their work over time feels the same way about their older work.

He brings up another excellent point that many of us don’t recognize.  The process of honing your craft and producing sub-standard work is OK.  In fact, it’s normal, as long as two things hold true:

• you’re trying hard
• you recognize that your work doesn’t meet your own high standards

This is where the importance of taste is invaluable.  If you are able to judge the quality of your work reasonably fairly and realize that it’s not where you want it to be, then that’s OK.  The process of despising your own work is normal, according to Glass.  It’s a natural stage of the process of creative development.  Glass counsels the viewer to have some patience with themselves and realize this is going to happen to most creative people.  Dedication, coupled with the ability to evaluate the quality of your work against high standards, can carry you through if you can just keep trying.

I don’t know about you, but I felt a bit better about myself and my writing after I watched this video.

You can learn a lot from trying to break into your own car.

Small personal crises can be excellent opportunities to gain knowledge, learn new skills, and perform with grace under pressure.  Let’s look at the example of being locked out of your own car and needing to get in quickly due to external factors.  You learn a lot about the car, problem solving techniques and, most importantly, yourself.

The purpose of this post is to recount a potentially embarrassing personal experience in the hopes of preventing other people from making the same dumb mistakes that I did, although I do think that my solution was pretty creative.

No facts were harmed during the writing of this post.  Thank you.

How to get yourself into trouble and in need of a solution – fast

It was a Wednesday night and I had just finished my last day of work before Christmas and New Years vacation.  I had my laptop bag and backpack with me as I trudged through a snow-covered parking lot towards my car.  Several dozen people were doing the same thing.  Free at last for a good holiday break.

My black Toyota Yaris was completely covered in over six inches of wet snow.  It wasn’t the light, fluffy stuff that blows away easily with a light breeze.  This now was damp, the kind that squeezes together into snowballs, sections of snowman, igloos and snow forts.  I didn’t have gloves or an ice scraper with me, so I would use my thick winter coat to help brush the snow away.

I started my car and left it running as I cleaned off the car.  I went around the sides, windows, and front hood and truck, wiping the white stuff off with minor effort.  I left the front windshield for last, since it would need to defog and the heat from that activity would make it easier to clean.

When everything except the front windshield was cleared off, I opened the passenger’s door to adjust the heater.  No, actually, I didn’t.  I couldn’t – it was stuck.  I tried again.  The door was slightly ajar… but it was locked.  The car’s engine was running, all doors were locked… and I couldn’t get inside.  It was a stormy night and I needed to get home to take my family out for supper.  This was bad.

The door was still open a crack:  that was my only advantage.  That and being parked beside an office building.  But I was late for an appointment.  I was paranoid that the car was going to run out of gasoline, stranding me there.

Naturally, I panicked.

Problem solving – moving beyond problem to solution

After a few tugs and tries, I established very quickly on that the car door wasn’t going to open without mechanical force or breaking the window.  The gap between the door and the car body suggested break and enter (do they call it that if it’s your own vehicle?) was a possibility.  I went into the office in search for tools or anything useful in order to get into my car, fast.

I looked for long, thin rods in the office – nothing.

Everyone know that you can use a wire coat hanger to break into a car, right?  That was my next idea.  I found two wire coat hangers in the building’s cloakroom.  I removed the colored yarn wrapped around one of them, and then unwrapped the end of the coat hanger from the neck, near the hook.  I bent the coat hanger in half, slipped it into the crack where the door was slightly ajar.  I was able to touch the door lock button with the hanger, but it was flimsy and I couldn’t marshal enough force to press the button.  It was a lot like trying to press a button on an elevator panel with a rubber band or a wet noodle.

Ultimately, it was a useless idea.

I needed something sturdy, but relatively thin to get through the crack in the window.  It wasn’t hard to find white board markers, but I quickly discovered that they were too fat to fit through the crack between the door and frame.

Then I found these.  I like to write with them and they’re thin.

I tried duct-taping together a bunch of these pens (about ten of them in groups of two) to make a long, thin rod.  It was long enough and it wasn’t too bulky except where the duct tape was holding them together.  I got them through the car door… and then the pen rod fell apart as I attempted to shove it into position.  I got blue ink all over my hands.  Phooey.

I was feeling very desperate – I had been trying to do this for over thirty minutes and I was failing miserably.  Virtually everyone else had gone home except for the cleaning lady and she didn’t have anything useful.  There wasn’t even anything useful in her trunk.  And the gasoline was slowly running out.

Finally, in stages, I taped the following things together:

One two-prong barbeque fork (about 18 inches long) – like the one pictured above, only with a much shorter wooden handle that was too thick to get through the crack between door and frame

A normal table knife

Two of those pens

And two more of those pens.

Just picture all of those things duct-taped together into a long misshapen rod that looked like something out of some whacked out barren earth nuked civilization movie (think of Star Wars surplus) and then you can picture what I’m talking about.  I wish I had a picture of it.

The cleaning lady helped me wedge the door open a little more and I was able to stick my MacGyver-ish contraption through the crack.

And finally, success!  I unlocked that darn door by using my improvised, duct-taped rod to press the unlock button.  I opened the door, grabbed the keys, and breathed a sigh of relief.  Fifty minutes had passed and I still had plenty of gasoline in the tank.

Missed opportunities – the downsides of tunnel-vision during problem solving

My vestigial reptile brain was in control as I tried frantically to break into my own car.  I fixated upon finding my own solution to breaking into my car and didn’t think of all my options.  Here are things that I didn’t do during this mini-crisis that I really should have done.

Ask co-workers for help – honestly, I had plenty of time and opportunity early on to ask people for help.  There are over 250 people who work in my building – I’m sure at least a few of them had experience with being locked out of their car.  Unfortunately, I spent so much time messing around with the coat hanger trick that I lost my window of opportunity.

Ask my wife for help – I really didn’t want to go this route because we live close to thirty miles away from my office building.  It was snowing hard that night and I didn’t want my family on the road in those weather conditions just to bring me our spare key.

Call for a local locksmith or car garage to help me get into the car – this never occurred to me at all.  That darned reptile brain.

Call the car dealer – probably would have been useless as I’m sure they would have been closed for the day, but still.  Maybe someone would have been there.

And, of course, the biggest mistake was to lock my keys in the car in the first place. I should have at least left the passenger door wide open.  Unfortunately, these mistakes do happen.

My MacGyver tool was kind of neat.  I should never have had to use it, though.

What did I learn?

There are a few things that I should have learned many years ago, but I find them very hard to internalize and action:

• Ask for help earlier rather than later – I could have saved myself a lot of grief at the very mild risk of looking like an idiot – I looked like a bigger idiot later on.
• Stay a bit more calm and think through all options, not just the one that seems to be quickest.
• Think twice before thinking that a door that’s slightly ajar won’t be locked.

So, there’s my embarrassing story.  I’ve shared it with the hope that other people might avoid making a similar mistake.

How about you?  Do you have any good problem-solving stories?  You can comment on how you successfully solved a problem with or without looking like an idiot.

Images by ernie_c, tinyfroglet, ellievanhoutte, oskay, and others

Yes, it’s a new blog header.  Yes, I created it myself.  Yes, it’s… well, it’s OK for now, but I expect to do better over time.

Still, thanks to @mattsearles, @miragi, and @bhc3 for their honest and relatively painless feedback.  I really appreciate that.

Oh, and if you’re a whiz with graphic design, blog templates, and you’re willing to work for less than peanuts, I’d certainly appreciate any help you have to offer.  I’ll do my best to make you famous if you decide to help me. 

EDIT:  Dec. 29/09 – the blog header was replaced by a much better logo created by Pamela Weir of Market To The Moment.