Defiance brings the opportunity to market your products and services to the largest base of gamers and television viewers in the world. With the storyline evolving based upon what happens in virtual reality and the TV show, interaction is always fresh and innovative. Unlike other social media about status updates or photos and videos, your actions in the game is your content and your reputation. The same is true of your clan, if various employees play for the organization.

If you missed out on Twitter or the current darling Pinterest, you’ll definitely want to get in on the ground floor with Defiance. Not only will you want to have a policy for Defiance with your staff, but a strategy on how to use all the great content with your brand. The possibilities are endless: logo and promotions on each Arkhunter, clan status updates to Facebook and Twitter of triumphs and good deeds, action videos from Defiance for your marketing on YouTube, and Defiance meme for your blogs.

Look for further details on this blog soon for this revolutionary opportunity to move your business to the next level.

Then several things happened at once: Internet bandwidth got exponentially faster, everyone had to have e-mail and a website just to say they had one, and Google made the Internet useful. Along the way, most forget that HTML is a publishing standard, so now you had to ditch the tables and follow the rules. When FrontPage Server Extensions died, I reluctantly started using Expression.

At first glance, it reminded me of screen output shown in the movie The Matrix. It really wasn’t that complicated, but because a startup outranked our 20-year-old firm in Google, I was committed to learning the new formatting of style sheets, divisions, and types. With Expression 3, our websites where converted to HTML 5 which most competitors haven’t done today. Now with Expression Studio 4, graphics are edited with Expression Design and video produced with Expression Encoder, along with web page updates with Expression Web. With virtually everyone using Microsoft products, the Expression brand had a comfortable feel to start helping the average person develop current web content.

Now Expression is being discontinued just a few years after release in 2005. While Expression Design 4 and Expression Web 4 are available for free download and will be supported through 2020, these tools will be sorely missed for their value of enabling great content creation while teaching important aspects of the web.

You see the world has changed again. It’s no longer about web pages, but applications and video or audio on various screen size devices. Microsoft is consolidating the Expression line into the development package Visual Studio 2012. I’m installing it while I wrote this post, but I wonder if the mainstream public will soon be forced to rely on professionals and pay regularly for their own quality content?

I’ve never met Mr. Obeng and have no affiliation, but he made me think with the premise that thinking rationally in an exponentially changing world no longer works - unless you look into the future and evaluate the impact of your actions.

I’m always asked “What would you do?”, so following Eddie’s lead:

1. Continue learning and know that you’ll generally learn much more from concepts outside of your industry. The approach of “Don’t tell me about technology. Just tell me how long.” died 20 years ago.
2. If you’re a small business, don’t buy Microsoft Small Business Server. All of those integrated products moved to the cloud nearly 5 years ago. Save yourself the inordinate expense on planned obsolescent hardware and the time of learning archaic infrastructure software concepts from a decade ago.
3. In the same vein, all of you mid-sized and large organizations should get out of the technology business by moving to the cloud and focus on your own. The concept of talking about your servers and being able to touch them sounds like Smiguel from the Lord of the Rings. How many of your other business processes are still valid since 1937?
4. If you were ever on it, get off the Apple bandwagon. Apple has no transparency and not even their own blog in the era of social media. There has been no new product type since 2007 (for a TECHNOLOGY company!) and only memories of a superior reputation to justify high price. What is the wisdom of following the RadioShack retail model of 1977?
5. Forget about Google ranking or advertising. Cash is still king, but you’ll have a much more prosperous next 20 years if you provide digital content that answers the questions for your prospects and customers better and differently than the competition.

A woman goes to the doctor. As soon as the doctor walks into the room, she immediately says “I’m deathly ill again. Can’t you do anything right?”

A man calls his attorney. “I’m being sued. You better know what you’re talking about and worth the money, because I already Googled the case law.”

A woman visits her accountant. ”You jerk! The IRS is auditing me. What did you do to my books?”

Most of you reading this would wonder about the wisdom of antagonizing the professional people you contact for help. If you see nothing wrong with the scenarios above, then this post is for you.

It’s just three months since Christmas and Easter is coming soon. Whether you are religious or not, there is still this thing called right and wrong – and most definitely a proper way to act. So why do you think it’s ok to act so rudely to your IT people?

Who do you think you are, saying you’ve lost time at work and blaming the IT people? It makes about as much sense as saying “I lost several hours of my day because my car broke down and the mechanic did it”. Google all you want. No telling if that information is relevant, you understand it, or like in most cases there are processes and procedures to follow before you even get to that answer. When you really want to inspire someone, gripe about how much they make and how you demand immediate assistance for something that you should know how to do.

Frustration and some venting are understandable. Outlandish statements and unreasonable complaints are not. Try googling the Golden Rule.

• My ISP e-mail sucks.
• Maybe I should do that Carbonite thing to backup my files.
• A new copy of Microsoft Office costs how much?

So let me give you an idea. Use Office 365 for your personal account. How many of you want to write a book or have a hobby or simply want a personalized e-mail address? Maybe you’ve already registered that domain name. If so, for $20 per month you can have:

1. Enterprise grade e-mail with 25GB of storage and unlimited archive storage.
2. 10GB of document storage AND disaster recovery that you can access from anywhere.
3. An always current copy of Office Professional that can be installed on up to 5 devices.

Basically for less than the cost of HBO that you rarely watch, you can have better technology and peace of mind. Try Office 365 free for 30 days.

Any sales person will tell you that it’s nearly impossible to contact someone with SPAM filters, voice mail, and gate keepers. Buying habits have changed and prospects expect to easily find you on the web, learn and evaluate, and then they will contact you. This is generally where the masses checkout and go find that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) company and buy some backlinks.

Well, it’s not called SEO any more. Those companies have to figure out how to change their name and throw away manipulation tactics. If you want to win more customers and beat the competition today, you’ll have to take some queues from the Oscars:

1. Schedule like clockwork. Sure, the Oscars are just once a year, but movies are released around certain holidays or seasons of the year. Social media updates should be daily, new blog articles weekly, website changes no less than monthly.
2. Show some glamour. Always add a graphic. Put some extra flair to all of your content. Look at what others are doing and decide not to be boring.
3. Take some risks. Not everything you do will be well received. Avoid offensive or distasteful, but think out of the box and try different things.
4. Publicize with content. A funny one-liner or provocative update now and then is fine. However, you should really have a teaser sentence with a link to your article, event, video, or podcast.
5. Have a hero or story. We all have our favorite actors or storylines. Give your audience a cause or entertain and your approach will be much more memorable.

No journalist wants to rubber stamp your press release. It’s definitively not news and the formulated template couldn’t pass for real writing: intro of a leading whatever from where ever, some new product or award, obligatory quote of an authority, filler with a couple of unverified facts, end with a value statement, and 4 bland sentences about the company afterward.

The whole thing is simply a brag and about as sexy as your grandmother’s girdle. It’s tired duplicate content that only has a link to your website by the company name or URL, rather than any keywords. Duplicate content means SPAM and noise. Sure you get links from a lot of places, but Google doesn’t place much value on those paid links to the press release services. Oh and unless you make time machines for Martians, USA Today will not be inspired to do a puff piece about your company.

Instead of doing a press release, make an article about what your announcement means to customers. The title will likely draw more interest, you have a great timeless give for your audience, and you can link by keyword. The article link may be publicized to a dozen high value sites versus copied verbatim to 100 different unknown and potentially damaging, garbage web outlets.

During this time, a network administrator from Memorex Telex (bankrupt in 1992) would start a training company for NetWare and eventually become a prominent regional Microsoft Certified Training Center. Soon MicroAge would decide to buy out the Tulsa franchise and almost immediately begin to fail. In tandem, key employees from both Robert Half and ePartners would begin to put out their own shingles. The ensuing vacuum created an ultra-competitive and vicious technology channel:

• Today, the Oklahoma technology channel is dominated by nearly a dozen staffing firms virtually all spawned from betrayal and bitter battles with Robert Half.
• Technology support has the most sorted stories: sales people and consultants fraudulently signing employment documents with fake names and invalid dates, theft of client files and contracts, and blatant copying of brands.
• Certified Trainers from NET would break employment contracts and bloody each other to the point of Chapter 11 with current viability even further challenged by Community Colleges.
• ePartners eventually collapsed under its own weight nation-wide as key employees broke away to start their own financial software services firms – four of which are in Oklahoma.

The true stories of the Oklahoma technology channel could fill a library. The above bullet points have been greatly sanitized and loosely summarized. The losers in this story are Oklahoma customers, who unwittingly may hire unscrupulous characters and firms.

While tens of thousands of postal workers lose their jobs even as the Post Office sinks further into debt, how many millions of people will lose their jobs over the next five years as e-mail slows to a trickle? Would you pay someone to only do half the job and how much better would the U.S. economy be, if we all used that extra time for more meaningful and productive tasks?

If e-mail is the lifeblood of your daily routine, you need to become more self-directed rather than jumping every time there is an e-mail alert. You can Google various articles on e-mail etiquette and management, but the biggest step is eliminating the noise. If you use Outlook rules, you’re likely doing it wrong. By default, you can right-click on a message and create a rule to move to a folder, but you can end up with dozens of confusing rules that basically do the same thing making your mailbox slow to load. What about if instead you created a handful of key rules and then just added new senders?

Anything I don’t want is of course trashed by the junk mail rule, but the news or offers of the day are automatically moved to corresponding folders. This same tactic is used for automated notices like Google Alerts for marketing. Instead of hundreds of e-mails hitting my inbox, I get a couple dozen that are resolved throughout the day. I run my inbox down to zero in less than 15 minutes each morning. I spend no more than 15 minutes scanning stuff for filed for later, which must be extremely compelling, relevant, or unique for me to stop and read.

While your competition slowly goes out of business wasting half their day on e-mail, go do something more interesting and helpful to others.

While there is a radical school of thought that you should start a business in a down economy, quitting your job with the current economic turmoil to start a new venture is just plain crazy. In the late 80′s, I traveled the nation implementing bar coding and scores of data entry personnel went on to do more meaningful, better paying jobs like inventory analysts. Even at that time, much of the Northeast was littered with massive, empty buildings. It’s more than ironic that someone from Wall Street would just now notice causal vacancies. Not to mention that failed, huge government, welfare states like New York have forced the average person to work multiple jobs for the last 30 years to stay in the middle class.

Today, I help business owners and their management escape broken legacy thoughts about technology in order to improve profitability. Smart IT people don’t lose their jobs to managed services. They are happier doing brain work moving their organization forward, rather than worrying about mundane updates and backup. The rank and file employees also embrace cloud computing and other new technology, knowing their worth only improves. Any lost counterparts that throw up their hands in resistance and confusion quickly land in unemployment.

Improvement is the harsh reality of the world and has been forever. Live every day, improve your skills, learn new things, and follow your dreams. However, I’d be wary of Altucher’s message to choose yourself for success and escape the job prison. I envy him because he’s made it to the show. Unfortunately, it’s not from self-publishing books as most books sell less than 250 copies per year and 3,000 copies in a lifetime. Once you start with that fact, I wonder how Altucher was able to quit his job and don’t you then question the rest of the article?