To provide you with some holiday ammunition or just a little holiday humor, here are a few of my favorite stories from the comments last year.

Deanna Zandt:

“I often try to make a joke first, it takes the weird edge off for some reason.

Them: So what do you do?
Me: I don’t know…
Them: What?
Me: I don’t know. I get up in the morning, and there’s a laptop there, and I sit at it and type things… [drift off]
Them: Um…
Me: I’m just kidding. I’m a consultant who does online strategy and builds web sites. It’s a weird job and it’s a blast.”

Steve Robillard:

“Me: ‘I am a consultant, I work mostly with higher ed.’

them: ‘Oh, so you work for yourself, I wish I could do that. I would work so much less. It must be great.’

Me: ‘Yeah except every time I try to call in sick I get a busy signal.’”

Julie:

“‘Must be nice to get to sit in front of a computer all day and surf the web.’

‘Yeah, I used to have to commute to an office to do that, but it’s much better now.’”

Travis Chillemi:

My least favorite goes like this:

Them: ‘What do you do?’
Me: ‘I am a web designer.’
Them: ‘Oh! My dentist also does web design. He/She is really good with Frontpage and stuff. He/She even has their own web site. It has something to do with Geocities…’
Me: ‘Yeah. I do dental work on the side, too. I even have my own drill and chair.’
Them: ‘Huh?’”

Taylor Brooks:

“Knowing that the conversation is probably doomed for awkwardness from the jump, I just tell people I’m in the adult film business or a drug dealer. At least you can control (or attempt) to control the awkwardness.”

Jason Glaspey:

“I just tell people that I make the internets.”

Amber Case:

“My entire family asks me to teach them search engine optimization. I want to wear a T-shirt that says ‘No, I will not optimize your web site!’”

Desirea:

“I usually just say ‘I’m a computer programmer.’ It usually scares them off of any other questions. If I get too deep, their eyes glaze over.”

John:

“I do the internets voodoo!”

cbright:

“When I get the glazed-over look, I just say I’m a part-time rodeo clown/psychologist. I’m in marketing, so I’m not actually lyin’…”

What are your favorite answers to the question: What do you do?

Photo by Flickr user Ed Yourdon used under Creative Commons

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Instead, why not embrace my web working identity as a source of costume idea inspiration? These costumes may not be instantly recognizable by everyone, but those who do recognize them will make it all worthwhile, especially if you travel with a web-savvy crowd. Please note that any ribbing that follows is of the good-natured variety.

Idea #1: SEO Expert

This is the first thing that came to mind, and probably one of the easiest to do. It doesn’t necessarily require any special wardrobe, but dressing like an old-time traveling cough syrup salesman and giving yourself a silly name like Dr. Higgledy-Digg couldn’t hurt. Nor would printing up fake credentials, like a PhD in the field of “Findology.”

Be sure to also prepare a briefcase full of Google Search screenshots, charts and graphs detailing questionable ROI numbers, and brochures extolling the virtues of affiliate marketing. While you’re at the party you’re attending, constantly spout out high visibility keywords in a random string while holding up two header tags. Whenever anyone mentions the word content, laugh derisively and let on that you’re privy to the algorithms of both Google and Bing.

Idea #2: Tech Blogger

Dress in pajamas or track pants, possibly with a housecoat, and make sure your hair is unkempt. You may or may not also abstain from brushing your teeth. Carry a laptop with you at all times — ideally a netbook — and make sure to consistently utter complaints about the signal quality, wherever you are.

Pick a pet tech, like mobile, Apple, Microsoft, video games or whatever you can think of. Steer all conversations you have during the night towards that topic, and make ridiculous predictions about the future of said tech. Always cite “sources” for said predictions, but if anyone asks for more detail about the sources, change the topic or mumble something under your breath.

Make sure all the photos you take during the party are blurry and out of focus or of people’s cell phones and other devices instead of the people themselves, and make sure you get at least a few of your hand lovingly caressing their electronics. Sneak comedic references to “Star Wars” and “Terminator” into as many conversations as possible.

Idea #3: Social Media Maven

Wear a shirt that says “I’m Kind of a Big Deal on Twitter,” “Tweet or Die” or the name of your self-published book on how to achieve success through Twitter. Carry many copies of said book in a satchel or book bag and hand them out while winking and saying “review copy.” Every time someone wants to take your picture, try to recreate the pose from your Twitter picture. You know, the one that emphasizes your “good side.”

Throughout the night, give a preachy, self-important tip as to how to tweet successfully every five or 10 minutes. Once in a while, repeat exactly what someone else just said if you found it particularly insightful or funny. When people ask you about your credentials, start listing important people you know and have talked to once or twice, then just provide a total number of how many people you know in total.

While talking with others, mention Facebook, LinkedIn and FriendFeed, but never go further than speaking about them offhand. Make sure to tell everyone you’re available for speaking engagements.

There you have it — three easy costumes with little or no preparation required. And I suspect many of you, like myself, already have many of the necessary components on hand. Happy Halloween!

What costume are you wearing this Halloween?

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The goal is for participants to write an entire 50,000-word novel, from start to finish, within the space of a single month. Sound challenging? It should, unless you’re Stephen King, who seems able to match that kind of production without even meaning to. It’s free to enter, although donations are encouraged to help the organization pursue its charitable goals.

For the rest of us, that’s a tall order, hence the benefit of giving it a shot if you’re a writer working online, or even if you’re not and you just have some writerly tendencies. NaNoWriMo may seem like an immense distraction from work, and it is, but that’s part of what makes it such a unique and valuable opportunity for those for whom the written word is professionally relevant.

For one, it puts you under an extreme deadline, but one that’s distant enough from the project start point that you can actually create a workable, multi-parted plan in advance to tackle the task. Having a definite start and definite finish isn’t something that you’ll always have when you’re working for a client, but being able to work within those kinds of strict confines comes in very handy.

It also gets your creative juices flowing. If your job is to write about one thing day after day, it can be pretty easy to fall into a rut, and who could blame you? Participating in something fun like NaNoWriMo will not only help you escape from the monotony of the daily grind, but it should also have a positive effect on your writing as a whole, both personal and professional.

Have you participated in NaNoWriMo in the past? Do you think you’ll take part this year? Do you think creative writing is a valuable tool for professional writers?

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Playing with applications on an Android phone got me thinking about how I use applications on my iPhone. I’m always interested in seeing what applications my friends are using on their phones, so I thought people might be interested in reading about the iPhone applications that I use.

PDXBus and iBART: While I work mostly in an office in my house, I do have the occasional meeting or event to attend, and I enjoy taking public transportation instead of driving because it gives me a chance to catch up on email, Twitter or RSS feeds. I mostly use the PDXBus application to pick my route based on when the next bus will arrive, but when I’m in San Francisco, I use iBART to find times and fares for getting around the city.

TripIt: When I’m traveling, I keep track of all of my travel details using the TripIt application. If you travel and haven’t used TripIt, you should give it a try. You forward all of your email confirmations from hotels, airlines, car rental companies, etc. to TripIt, and it puts everything in a nicely formatted itinerary that you can share with other people. The iPhone application lets me quickly and easily review the details of my trip.

Evernote: I take notes from meetings or events or just jot down ideas on my computer, but I hate it when I can’t access them while I’m on the go. A few months ago, I started using Evernote to take notes because I like having my notes automatically synchronized between my laptop and my phone. When I jot down a few ideas on my phone, they appear in Evernote when I get back to my MacBook, and if I need to access my notes, I can read any of my notes from my phone.

Tweetie and TweetDeck: Although TweetDeck is my primary Twitter application on my computer, I mostly use Tweetie on my iPhone. Tweetie is fast and it does a pretty good job of handling multiple accounts and searches in addition to all of the basic Twitter functionality that you would expect in a Twitter application. However, I do occasionally switch over to the TweetDeck iPhone app when I want access to the groups that I’ve defined in TweetDeck. The main limitation in TweetDeck for the iPhone is that it’s a little unstable and not as fast as Tweetie.

Motion-X GPS and DailyBurn: We’ve written quite a few posts here talking about the importance of fitness for web workers who sometimes spend too much time sitting and not enough time moving. I use Motion-X GPS to track my outdoor running and hiking with times, distance, altitude and maps of where I went. I also use DailyBurn as the one place where I keep track of all of my workouts: outdoor running, walking, cardio machines at the gym, weightlifting, etc. Let’s face it, I just like to keep track of stuff. It helps me stay motivated when I can review my progress over time.

Just for fun: I also have quite a few apps that I use just for fun that don’t really impact my work productivity.

• Yelp to find nearby restaurants and Forkfly see if they have any deals available.
• Games and Sudoku for when I need a little diversion.
• Shazam to find the name of some random song playing.
• Facebook to see if my sister has posted any new pictures.
• Rimshot for when you need an annoying sound effect.

These are just a few of my favorite applications out of the many that I have installed on my phone.

What are your favorite smart phone apps?

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Time is our most precious resource, and how we spend it ultimately determines how successful we are in life and business.

There are many things that we can do in a day’s time — check our email relentlessly, scour the news and blog feeds, surf the Internet, browse the latest Twitter updates. Most of the things we do eat away at our time in small increments, almost undetectably. We begin doing one task, and before we realize it, an hour (or three) has passed.

We must find ways to firewall our time and, at all times, guard our attention. But how?

First Line of Defense: Two-hour Full Guard

I like a tip from Julie Morgenstern’s book, “Never Check E-Mail in the Morning,” which is to “earn your paycheck by 10 AM.” At least for the first hour or two of the day, completely guard your time (100 percent, no interruptions). Close your browser, do not open your email, and do not visit the social networks. Turn off all alerts, as well as your phones. For just one or two hours a day, you’re on attention lockdown.

Next, write down the most important three tasks that you absolutely must, at a minimum, accomplish today. Then, within this guarded block of time, try to get through those tasks as completely as possible.

Now, if the rest of the day is a wash, at least you’ve had some really focused time and, hopefully, checked a few things off the to-do list (ideally, the things that pay the bills).

Second Line of Defense: Email Guard

When you come out of lockdown, ideally, you shouldn’t immediately jump full force into the major distractions (email, social networks, feeds), but you may need to respond to a few important emails, so you can make an exception here (a quick exception, say 15 minutes). Check your email, but only open those that truly need your attention (quote requests, customer inquiries, important emails from clients/assistants, etc.). Leave everything else to be read later. Shut your email program again. It’s time for another focused work session.

Third Line of Defense: Protect the Mothership

If there’s one thing we all tend to neglect, it’s our blogs. The content we put on our own sites is what helps search engines find us and what new visitors explore when they’re first deciding whether or not to follow us (or give us their precious time and attention). It’s important to add high-quality content to our sites on a very regular basis if we hope to move up in the Internet world.

For the next hour of your day, focus on writing something timely and relevant that will help your target audience. If nothing else goes right today, at least you’ve posted one good article to your blog. (If you do that every working day, assuming you work five days a week and 48 weeks a year, and you’ll post 240 new articles to your site over the coming year.)

Final Line of Defense: Set a Wrap-Up Alarm

This is another tip from Julie Morgenstern, and I’ve found it to be especially helpful for maintaining balance between my personal and professional lives. Set an alarm (on your computer or cell phone) to go off an hour before you want to be out of the office. When it goes off, it’s time to start shutting it down. Respond to any last-minute important emails, write your upcoming to-do list, check your calendar, clear your desk and do any other quick tasks that will set you up to succeed tomorrow.

That’s it! The rest of your day can be used however you’d like, and no matter how you spend your remaining time, you can feel good knowing that you’ve made some progress toward your goals.

What lines of defense do you have in place to safeguard your time? In a time when our attention is being pulled in a thousand different directions, how do you make sure the important things get done?

Image from Flickr by snappED_up

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VAs have been very effective in helping me get things done, while freeing me to focus on other, more important, areas of my life and business. Here are a few things to ask yourself before hiring a VA.

Can I Afford It?

The first thing to consider is whether or not you can afford to hire a virtual assistant. I’m actually starting to believe the advice given to me many years ago: you can’t afford not to hire one. As small business owners, we simply have too much to get done each day, and we’re very prone to overworking and not taking enough time for other aspects of our lives, especially taking time for ourselves.
On top of that, if you charge $100 per hour, as an example, and are doing tasks that can be outsourced for $25, you’re not really making the best use of your time. A good rule of thumb mentioned in a previous WWD post suggests using half your hourly rate as a guide, so if you charge $100 per hour, outsource tasks that can be done for $50 or less.

Will It Help Me?

Money doesn’t have to be the only consideration. You can also outsource those tasks you simply do not like to do, and this is a highly personal decision. You have to do what works for you. We don’t all have the same needs, income levels and likes/dislikes. I know people who actually enjoy doing laundry and others who send it all to a dry cleaner. There are those who think it’s wasteful to pay someone to clean their homes and others who prefer to work extra hours just to avoid household chores. The good thing about outsourcing is that you can use it as you need it and as it fits with your resources and demands. Mostly, it’s about finding the mix that’s right for you.

How Will I Use a VA?

This is the best part of outsourcing. If it needs to be done, chances are, there’s a VA who can do it. Virtual assistants can help with lead generation activities, like blogging, publishing newsletters, submitting articles to directories and maintaining social network profiles (Twitter, Facebook, etc.). You can also get a VA to help with administrative tasks, like responding to routine emails (you create the canned responses, and the VA customizes them; this would work especially well if you routed all responses from web forms to your VA), compiling quotes for your services, requesting guest posting opportunities with other bloggers (incoming and outgoing), etc.

It’s important to keep in mind that not all tasks are well-suited for outsourcing. There are certain things that are simply easier to do yourself and would actually take longer to complete if you attempted to delegate them. Generally, these types of tasks take too long to teach someone else how to do them, are too complex to outsource completely, or require too much oversight on your part to justify the cost in time and money.

The most important consideration when thinking about what to outsource, as mentioned in the Julie Morgenstern book “Never Check E-Mail in the Morning,” is this: “Is this close to the ‘revenue line’?” Your role in your business should be to do those tasks that most directly contribute to your income. At most, try to stay within one or two steps of your revenue line and outsource everything else.

Are My Expectations Realistic?

Don’t expect your outsourced efforts to be perfect right out of the gate. You’ll need to plan for a trial period and gradually inch your way into outsourcing over an extended period of time, say twelve months. Then you’ll need to communicate clearly and often with your VA and make adjustments as you go.

When you first sign up for service, let the VA know that you’re just venturing into it, as well as your goals for your business and how you intend to utilize his or her services to best support your needs. I also like to let my VA know if my needs will fluctuate from month to month so that we stay on the same page at all times.

If you are considering hiring a VA, make sure to give yourself enough time to plan for the effective use of virtual assistant services. When I decided to start delegating again, I sat down and listed all of the writing I have to do each month and decided to outsource 50 percent of my blog posts on two of my sites. I let my VA know the range of topics or subject areas to cover, how often to post, and the average length of each post. I also let her know that if I had ideas for topics, I would email her. Otherwise, she could use her discretion when it came to selecting topics.

Although it can seem really intimidating at first, start small, and you’ll soon see how liberating it can be to solicit help when it comes to your business. You’ll start looking at your business in a whole new light and imagining the possibilities for growth and improvement (or simply enjoying some much-needed time off)!

Here are the VAs that I use (and refer clients to):

• VirtualFreedom4You
• Ghostwriter to the Rescue
• LongerDays

How do you use a virtual assistant to help with your life or business? What types of activities to you delegate, and how has it freed you to do other things?

Image by Flickr user daniel spils

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I pulled the plug completely and took a couple of weeks off the lead generation hamster wheel. The result? My incoming leads and my revenue actually increased. Was it that my energy had improved? Maybe. Was it that I was focusing more on the right things? Possibly. Either way, I wasn’t going to stop a good thing. I started cutting back in every way imaginable, and my work schedule was the next thing to take a hit.

I’m currently in the middle of a “staycation” (you know, when you take a vacation without really going anywhere), and I’m limiting my work time to two to four hours per day. Amazingly, I’m still getting roughly the same amount accomplished. Except I’m not checking my news feeds several times per day, only once for five minutes by quickly scanning the highlights, so essentially, I’m having to cut the fat from my day.

Before I started my week, I went through my planned schedule and jotted down the most important four or five tasks that should be completed by Friday. I also solicited the help of a virtual assistant to help with a lot of my regular (and necessary) tasks. Everything else got the boot.

Now, I’m actually considering making these cuts permanent. When I return from my little hiatus, I’m thinking of temporarily dropping the bottom 80 percent of the tasks I do each day and then monitoring the results for a month or so.
I should be making the best use of my time. By forcing myself to ruthlessly cut away any excess, I’m getting down to the truth of it: much of what I do each day is a complete waste of time and is absolutely unnecessary for the success of my business. I’m willing to bet the same is true for you!

How much of your daily activity is actually revenue-producing? How much of it is really necessary for your success? Is it possible that you could trim even the bottom 20% of your daily tasks and still accomplish the same results?

Photo by pocheco

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But how do you know if your clients are abusing you? Here are a few telltale signs and tips for how to fix and avoid these situations.

The work keeps creeping in. Scope creep is the bane of many freelancers’ lives. You start with one description of what is to be done and end up doing something entirely different, or something that’s way more involved than the original task.

How to Fix/Avoid It: Have a contract and a clear and agreed-upon scope and schedule for each and every phase or project. Outline exactly what is to be done and when it’s due.

The client expects immediate responses or complete availability. Occasionally, you’ll come across clients who want 100 percent undivided attention. They expect emails to be responded to within an hour and work to be completed at an unrealistic pace.

How to Fix/Avoid It: Set expectations from the start. Explain when you’re available to clients, how quickly you tend to reply to communications, and how you prefer to communicate. You may also wish to explain how you work. For example, do you generally devote a set amount of time to each project or client per day? If so, explain this to clients up front so that they know what to expect.

The client expects to be able to chat with you frequently. Some clients prefer to communicate by phone, others expect to chitchat at the start of each call, and occasionally, you’ll even find those who expect to have multiple calls per day. In any case, these clients can be a serious drain on your time, making it next to impossible to stay on schedule with your work.

How to Fix/Avoid It: Make it part of your policy to limit phone communications altogether. It may seem harsh, but phone calls and excessive meetings are actually counterproductive. Keep all phone calls to 15 minutes or less and require all calls to be scheduled in advance. Finally, let clients know your preferred communication methods so that they know what to expect.

The client frequently goes back and forth over decisions or nitpicks with minor changes. When a client is indecisive, it can make working with him a nightmare. He wants things one way one minute, the complete opposite the next. Round and round you go, until you are completely confused and way outside of the original scope.

How to Fix/Avoid It: Clearly specify the number of revisions that are included in the project, as well as the deadlines for each set of revisions. Then communicate frequently about pending deadlines so that clients understand that they must turn in all changes by that point and that any subsequent changes will fall within the next set of revisions or will require additional revisions (at a predetermined and contracted rate).

The client expects free consulting and advice. Many times, this type of client has “friends” working on things for him or her for free, so if you hear this hint early on, you might want to consider this a red flag and run the other way. Unfortunately, it’s quite common to come across bargain hunters, so you’ll have to be firm and stick to your guns if you don’t want your bottom line to suffer.

How to Fix/Avoid It: Again, the contract and scope can be a real lifesaver here. If you clearly outline what’s included in a project or job (including the number of phone calls), it will be much harder for clients to negotiate freebies.

By preparing for these common situations in advance, you can often avoid them altogether, saving yourself time, profit and sanity. Put your policies in place and then stick to them without fail so that your clients know exactly what to expect.

How do you handle difficult clients? What techniques do you use to stay on track?

Image from Flickr by ritwikdey

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While a fire hose of notifications and feeds can be too distracting when I’m working on things for client, if I’m looking for inspiration for a new blog post or new venture of some sort, I want to see as much information as possible in the hope that something will catch my eye and provide the inspiration that I need.

Here are a few of my favorite tools for embracing information overload. Please beware that these tools are known to sap productivity and suck up precious hours that can never be regained! Use these techniques at your own risk.

FriendFeed Notifier will send you pop-up messages every time one of your friends posts something to FriendFeed or comments on a post. For maximum information overload, make sure that you select the following options: show updates when someone comments on my posts, show updates from my home feed, and show posts and all comments. For the wimpier among us, you can choose to show updates only from a small list of friends or show posts only.

Tweetdeck or other Twitter clients with notifications turned on at full blast. I’ve talked about using reduced notifications with Tweetdeck to get targeted notifications for groups and searches, but for the full effect, you can also get notifications for the “all friends” feed (in other words, notifications for every single tweet). If you set this up right, you can get duplicate notifications for all of the tweets posted on FriendFeed and the tweets coming in through your Twitter client. I’m joking! I suggest only using one of the two options presented so far at a time, unless you really are a glutton for punishment.

Snackr gives you a scrolling RSS ticker with news from your feeds. You can even import everything from your RSS reader and have huge quantities of information scrolling across the bottom of your screen all day. I admit that would probably be a bit much. I took a subset of my feeds with my favorite tech news blogs along with a few interesting people, and I imported that subset into Snackr.

What are your tips for embracing information overload?

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At the same time, I still managed to finish all my work, and spearhead new initiatives and innovative corporate programs. And I won’t say that I did it in spite of goofing off. Actually, I think distraction is a crucial part of productivity, especially if creativity is part of your job. Which is why I think that there’s a certain danger in the zealous work ethic that manifests with most freelance workers once they shrug off the corporate yoke.

While I don’t avoid work with the tenacity that I did when I was still wearing a suit and reporting to an office downtown everyday, I still take the time to screw around with a fair degree of frequency. Here are my usual work avoidance tactics, and why I think they actually help me work better in the long run.

Blogs

Yes, part of my work involves writing blog posts on a daily basis, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still enjoy reading other people’s, too. Some of my daily routine includes browsing the blogosphere for information and article ideas, but I also read purely for pleasure. Specifically, I generally have Kotaku open in a tab pretty much throughout the day. The fact that I don’t blog about games professionally is enough to make reading about them a satisfying distraction.

Of course, at the same time, because I’m very much a stylistic sponge when it comes to writing, I’m also soaking up some valuable influence. While the Kotaku style may not be exactly appropriate for the subjects I cover, it’s never a bad idea for a writer to read as much as possible, especially from others in the same type of media.

Comics

Even in my procrastination efforts, I’m a creature of habit. One of those habits is a regular round of checking webcomics for updates. My list is much smaller than it used to be, with only two remaining that I check with any regular frequency, and others that get only the occasional catch-up visit.

The usual suspects include John Allison’s incomparable Scary-Go-Round, which is all the more addictive because it follows story arcs and devotes a lot of time to developing characters. If you’re not familiar with it, catching up via the archives is a great way to kill a few weeks’ worth of spare time. I also follow Penny Arcade, again, to scratch that gaming itch that isn’t addressed in my professional work.

Comics are uniquely positioned to help you with writing, too, and creative work of any kind, really. Graphic designers will benefit from observing layout and design, while writers get comedic timing and clever turns of phrase. Of course, you have to read the good ones to get the benefit, but there’s no shortage of quality work on the web.

Twitter

Every day, I spend an awful lot of time between writing using Twitter. Not mining it for leads, or reader feedback, or any of the other professional purposes I use it for, but instead, when I want to relax for a few moments, I use Twitter to have actual conversations with friends and acquaintances I enjoy keeping in touch with. Lately, in fact, I’ve been unfollowing people who just link-feed all day and, instead, just keeping up with folks with whom I most often have interesting dialogs.

Twitter is a great promotional tool, but if you use it for that exclusively, you’ll decrease its effectiveness immensely. Plus, chatting it up with other tweeple will help keep web worker cabin fever at bay, so it’s a win-win situation.

That’s not the only time-wasting I indulge in, but it definitely is what I spend most of my downtime during the work day doing. I also play the occasional video game (probably not surprising, given the things I’ve listed above), and catch up with the few TV shows I actually follow (“Southland”, anyone?).

What less-than-productive activities do you pepper your work day with, and what about them helps you make it through the work week?

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Slightly reminiscent of In the Motherhood (minus the hardcore mom-oriented product placement), Project Rant draws its source material from audience-submitted rants on the most arcane of subjects. These submissions are then performed by a talented cast of actors, who manage to craft characters from these stories with no background information. (Project Rant submissions are anonymous.)

Because these rants are by frustrated human beings, the language is often coarse and inconsistently bleeped, but the cinematography is great, and the editing is tight and sharp. Dear Honda Owners probably wasn’t written originally by the Little Old Lady from Pasadena, but when it’s a grandma-type complaining about lame Honda owners challenging people in minivans to drag races, the results are charming. Meanwhile, Crappy Bacon‘s discussion of badly cooked pork products is hilariously delivered by a man whose passion is taken to an almost sexual level. (To paraphrase The Truth About Cats and Dogs, you should love your bacon, but you shouldn’t LOVE your bacon.)

The best rants are the focused ones, targeting specific entities — a crappy date, the dollar store. But one rant by a paper delivery man, directed at his customers, hits a sour note; the delivery man hasn’t been wronged, but is instead ranting about how good it feels to be cruel to others. It’s that episode that reveals what makes this idea work. For when the audience identifies with the speaker, there’s a sort of second-hand catharsis that occurs. Just because it’s not our frustration or embarrassment, it doesn’t dull the vicarious thrill of finally getting to let it out.

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Cocktail Match

Okay, confess. You work hard for hours on end, never budging from the keyboard, and then, you digress. You get distracted. You find a blog or a site or a Web app that is nonsense, that is fun or funny, that has absolutely nothing to do with your work.

Well, I’m here to say that you are not alone and to prove it, every month or so, I’ll post a new blog, site or app that will truly waste your time. I should know. Because I’ve been there and gotten sucked into the vortex of distraction and lost precious time. But I truly believe we need those occasional distractions or we will go absolutely mad.

Presenting…Cocktail Match

Adhering to the theory that “You are what you drink,” Cocktail Match allows you to create your own virtual bar (VBar) based around your cocktail preferences and invite friends to socialize. Talk about niche social networking. And I thought social networks for cats, dogs and hamsters was really niche.

On your profile page, you can update your status, add personal information including your top 5 favorite alcoholic beverages and top 5 non-alcoholic beverages. You can upload photos, music, and video as well as widgets. You can publish a blog. You can friend people or join their VBar. Think of Cocktail Match as MySpace for grownups.

And according to CocktailMatch.com site creator Al Escamilla, the site was created for adults to encourage social networking with friends and family. His wife started the Yoga Wine Mom VBar for women who like wine and yoga and happen to be moms. There’s a sports oriented VBar, a poker one, and other VBars covering a variety of topics and affinity interests. And yes, I’ve created my own VBar that I’m calling SocialMediaMavens. Stop on by for a virtual drink!

Escamilla says the Cocktail Match members enjoy music, fashion and a social lifestyle.

“Our goal is to become the Nordstrom of social networks,” says Escamilla meaning he isn’t setting out to have a site that is all things to all people. You must be 21 to join, and he says the company emphasizes great customer service, great products, and a great user experience.

Escamilla is also hoping to tap into luxury good and beverage companies as potential advertisers on his network because of the site’s more upscale member demographic. Your time wasting could turn into profits for this Texas-based Web worker!

So what are you waiting for? Time’s a’wasting.

What is your favorite online time waster?

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Those are positives for both Google and Verizon, which has the most robust 3G network in the country. However it appears that Verizon is stuck on the same issue that surprised me about the deal: the ability for Google to save information from searches. Google stores requests generated on PCs for 18 months; the same practice would be extended to mobile devices. Today, Verizon’s primary value (after the network itself) is its locked-in subscriber base, but in a few years after it opens its network, that advantage might erode. Aside from any personal privacy concerns, the information Google plans to store is what Verizon could one day find most valuable.

But in exchange for a cut of the Google ad revenue, Verizon may cave. Carriers are trying to figure out how to avoid being “dumb pipes” and get a hand in the lucrative content and advertising plays out there. I do find it hard to believe that Verizon would roll over on a deal with the company that caused it such angst during the 700 MHz auction, but perhaps the lure of mobile search dollars is too strong.

Update: We got some data from Nielsen talking about the mobile search habits of U.S subscribers and those from Verizon in particular (for data on mobile search ad spending, check out my comment below). Nielsen estimates that at least 50 million U.S. mobile subscribers search for things using their phone, and Verizon Wireless subscribers make up 26 percent of the active mobile search market.

A Google search bar would appear to help Verizon subscribers search faster and perhaps more frequently. Eleven percent of Verizon data users use the carrier’s portal to navigate to search, while 9 percent of Verizon data users go to the web to search. Only 6 percent of Verizon data users search through a branded carrier portal.

image of search bar on the Blackjack phone courtesy of Google

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“Leadership’s Online Labs” by Byron Reeves, Thomas W. Malone, and Tony O’Driscoll is based on the authors’ research into the leadership and management skills required by fantasy/sci-fi MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and Eve Online. In those multiplayer games, the hardest-to-achieve goals (such as killing the demi-god dragon, wiping out a competing space corporation, and so on) often require dozens or even hundreds of players working together in concert, so the skills required to lead a successful mission, the authors argue, are very much like those needed to run a profitable business.

The theory is hardly new; venture capitalist and hardcore WoW player Joi Ito has been talking about this for years. But the HBR team bolsters it with extensive interviews and observations to turn out an article that could help revolutionize business management in the digital age.

So what are some of the main managerial lessons they learned from the worlds of orcs, elves and battle cruisers? Below are the three that stand out most to me — call them the habits of highly effective half-elf managers:

Embrace Failure As a Rung on the Success Ladder

“In one incident that we recorded from EverQuest,” Reeves, Malone and O’Driscoll report, “seven guild members prepared for a brand-new quest that required them to get their team across a large lake protected by a gruesome and hostile creature.” They did this despite knowing they were likely to drown, which they very nearly did. But when the team failed to make it across, it was simply viewed as a learning experience, and after re-orientating themselves, they went right back to try it again. (The classic corporate response would be to simply cut the failed program’s funding, as opposed to re-launching with a new strategy.)

Rotate Individual Managers to Individual Goals

The authors were also surprised that guild leaders often became followers, letting temporary leaders come forward to direct specific sub-goals:

Put another way, leadership in games is a task, not an identity—a state that a player enters and exits rather than a personal trait that emerges and thereafter defines the individual.

It’s easy to see how that principle would apply to real-world business; of course, it would require a managerial culture in which personal pride is attached not to a job title, but to getting the job done. This could be why MMO guild leaders rarely seem to be managers in real life. Indeed, Joi Ito once told me that while his We Know World of Warcraft guild includes top Silicon Valley execs, when it comes to WoW, they’re not always good leaders. One of its best commanders, he said, was an EMT worker.

To Get Better Management, Change the Game

The authors went in expecting to learn managerial wisdom from MMO’s top guild leaders, interviewing them as though they were virtual Jack Welches. But the players suggested a different approach: “If you want better leadership,” they said, “why not change the game instead of trying to change the leaders?”

Quite literally. Online games are highly structured, and successful gameplay is determined by the amount of virtual treasure players have in their possession and the amount of game information of which they’re aware (player stats, enemy capabilities, etc.). The authors suggest a number of ways business data can be given a game-like structure, which would then shape how the company runs. For example, what if your CEO assigned value, in virtual currency, to your company’s internal email?

Attaching a large amount of the scarce currency to a particular message would draw attention to it or even serve as a feedback mechanism: You send me an e-mail you value at 100 units, and I respond with one valued at 200, giving you a credit of 100 units to validate the usefulness of the information you sent. One experiment showed that the currency, as a marker of information importance, in fact influenced how quickly colleagues opened and read different messages in their inboxes.

With online gaming so mainstream (World of Warcraft now has 10 million subscribers), many people in the tech business world have already learned these lessons. The Harvard authors note an IBM survey of its managers who were also gamers, and the results are striking:

Three-quarters of the respondents said that environmental factors within multiplayer games could be applied to enhance leadership effectiveness in a global enterprise. Nearly half said that game playing had already improved their real-world leadership capabilities, particularly for managing teams whose members didn’t fall under their formal authority.

At the same time, the business leaders also worried that implementing what they learned in games would require drastic changes to the companies’ existing corporate culture. Which is why I think we’ll see these invaluable ideas put into practice not by established firms, but by startups eager to level up into world-conquering profitability.

Image credit: harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu. Hat tip: Virtual Worlds Review.

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We’ve covered Pandora a number of times before but the quick recap and reason why we love it so: it analyzes the songs and artists you like to determine what audio attributes are appealing to you. Pandora plays songs that have similar attributes which in turn means you end up hearing songs that you enjoy listening to. It’s an amazing service that just became more mobile with the Sprint deal; for Sonos music owners: Pandora is coming to your home too, joining Rhapsody, Napster, Zune Marketplace and other streaming music services.

(via TechCrunch)

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