Archives for December 2012

Your Social Media Blog Is My Favorite Cure For Insomnia

December 7, 2012 by Jack Steiner 16 Comments

Bored Beyond Belief — Your Blog Is More Effective Than A Dozen Ambien.

Mom always said I shouldn’t post anything that I am unwilling to say in person. It is good advice but I think she forgot that I had my filters surgically removed.

Yeah, I am the guy who is willing to look you in the eye and say “”Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.”Â That is because a bunch of you suffer from the same myopic view of the world that Vizzini did.

Remember him? He was the guy from The Princess Bride who used to shout “INCONCEIVABLE” because he couldn’t believe that someone as smart as himself could be outwitted.

“Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line!”

Vizzini’s failure to conceive of the man in black’s ability to outwit him is the source of his death. It would be obnoxious and rude for me to use the names of the bloggers who remind me of Vizzini so I will refrain.

However I can assure you this is not a case of me making anything up. I am not exaggerating my distaste at all.

That is because some of you write these “how to be an expert blogger” and or “how to become a social media expert” posts that make me want to hit myself in the head with a baseball bat.

Sycophants, Followers and Likes

There is no single path to social media success and there are no shortcuts. Unfortunately some of you have forgotten the difference between having real discourse in your comment section and that which comes from having 3000 sycophants leave nuggets of gold like “you are so smart” and “great post.”

It is not hard to game the system. You can buy followers, fans and likes. It is not hard to run contests and giveaways that generate hundreds of comments on your posts.

But that doesn’t mean that you are wearing anymore clothes than the emperor.

Substance and Success

When I read one of these how to become a better blogger posts I look for a number of things:

Substance- Are you part of the echo chamber parroting old ideas or are you offering something new.
What Is Your Definition of Success- Are you talking about generating revenue? Book deals, Pageviews, Users, comments etc. What is your goal and what is your plan for achieving it?
Who Are You Writing About- Does your post consist of a hundred “I think this” or does it include others in it.

A reader once complained that I update too frequently and told me that no one had time to read all of my posts. It was an egocentric view that never took into account that what worked for them might not work for others.

A blog should be updated as frequently as necessary to satisfy the writer and their readers. That means the number will vary from blog to blog. No one is holding a gun to anyone’s head. If they don’t find value they can go elsewhere.

Value is subjective. When I read posts about becoming a better blogger I want substance. I don’t want to read something about providing great content.

That is not just because I have been doing this for almost nine years but because it is obvious to everyone including the rookie bloggers. Write about useful plugins or great sites to get pictures and you lend weight to your post.

Tell us what your definition of success in blogging is and you’ll have happier readers because they will know whether they are in the right place.

Passion and Personality

You can write about the same topic as everyone else but if you don’t put your own voice into it you hurt your blog. When there is no passion or personality in a post it shows. Don’t be a sheep.

Don’t be Vizzini. Put yourself into the post and stop worrying about whether people will like it because some won’t. They will hate your writing because your words grate on their nerves.

Others will love you.

This is ok. It is natural. It is normal.

Have fun Storming The Castle

More than anything else, have fun with this. Let go. Be willing to push the envelope. Tell people about how their last post is like the worst sex they have ever had.

It started out with such good potential and left you feeling unfulfilled, unsatisfied and wondering how they managed to talk your pants off.

You Rush A Miracle Man, You Get Rotten Miracles

Blogging is a marathon and not a sprint. Don’t worry about hitting a home run with every post. Just do your best to provide good content consistently and don’t fear to make mistakes.

And then one day you can share a snarky post in which you announce that your traffic has quadrupled since you received that obnoxious and myopic email from the person who said you update too frequently.

Stay tuned because the greatest blog post ever written by a dad blogger who writes about social media/sex/business/fiction/SEO/IBM/Intel/Steve Jobs/Brad Pitt/Ehud Barak/Bicycles/Movies/Disneyland/Richard Nixon/Triberr/Twitter/Men Who Bake and how I wanted to be Steve Austin the Bionic Man is coming soon.

P.S. There is another 150 words written in invisible ink. Members of my fan club can read those words with by using the secret glass that came with my 8×10 glossy.

My Favorite Smartphone- The Samsung Galaxy Note 2

December 6, 2012 by Jack Steiner 6 Comments

listen to â€˜My Favorite Smartphone- The Samsung Galaxy Note 2â€™ on Audioboo

The One Word That All Women Hate

December 6, 2012 by Jack Steiner 10 Comments

Many years ago when I was a wee lad of twenty something or other I attended a wedding in Houston, Texas. It was a very fine affair and filled with more its share of mirth, merriment and laughter.

It took place long before I was married and well before most of the boys slipped a ring upon the fingers of the girls that would one day become their brides and later the judges of their lives.

Since it was our first wedding asÂ grown upsÂ we Â tried to do what we thought was appropriate for weddings. That included a ridiculous bachelor party, copious amounts of alcohol and silly declarations about which one of the bridesmaids we hoped to get lucky with.

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It was also the event where I learned that the police will pull you over for speeding in Bellaire, Texas and then ask you why you think it is funny to imitate their drawl. I can neither confirm nor deny whether the officers will laugh about this. All I can say is that we were NOT required to appear in court nor asked to pay any fines.

Since we were young, single, footloose and fancy free we did our best to extend the festivities throughout the entire day and night. Sometimes when I think about what life was like before kids I think about that week and remember the joy of waking up with a bad hangover in a dark and quiet room.

Truth be told I think the California kids shut down so many bars we were gifted with certificates of excellence that say we filled every nook, cranny and cavity with booze and lived to tell about it.

It is the kind of moment you look back upon and wonder why you were lucky enough not to get alcohol poisoning while simultaneously praying your own children are never as dumb as you were.

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In the midst of spreading joy and laughter throughout the land we tipped back a barrel of Shiner Bock and tried to impress the aforementioned bridesmaids with our wit. Now it may surprise you to hear that I might have told a couple of tall tales there but I am sure you won’t be shocked to hear that I told the guy who tried to start a game of naked Twister to get lost.

It is not a game you’re likely to see me play…ever.

And it was only made worst because we didn’t know the guy. He wasn’t a part of the wedding party or an invited guest. He was just some random dude who was trying to cut in on the action we weren’t getting.

Anyhoo, one afternoon we sat at the hotel pool exchanging embarrassing stories about the bride and groom and the conversation took a turn. I can’t tell you how it happened because I don’t remember.

What I can share with you is that until that moment she had been very quiet and almost unnoticed, she being the bridesmaid who told us that there was a word she hated to hear.

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Naturally we decided we had to figure out what word it was and set about asking for more details.

“Can you tell us what it rhymes with?”

“Is it animal, mineral or vegetable?”

“Can I say it to my mother without getting in trouble?

Eventually we learned that it had to do with a body part and that led to some moments IÂ shan’tÂ recollect here. I can tell you that we all laughed (men and women) and that it was a bonding moment that I remember fondly.

In certain company all I need to do is start reciting “tipple, ripple. stipple” and people will laugh and say “Texas.” Alas, a good inside joke is almost never funny to outsiders and almost guaranteed to sound stupid.

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Our formerly quiet friend blushed when we figured out what word it was she couldn’t stand. We promised not to keep saying it, but only after we had used it for a solid ten minutes or so.

And that is when another stranger chose to interrupt our gathering. This time it wasn’t naked Twister guy coming for a second round. Nah, this time it was a woman who interjected “there is one word that all women hate and it isn’t ‘bitch.'”

I suppose I could share said word with you but this is a family blog and I fear just sharing it would scald your ears and cause your eyes to bleed. It would be the equivalent of crossing the streams and like every good Ghostbusters fan I know that it is a very bad thing to do, so I won’t.

What Happens When You Get Bored With Blogging

December 5, 2012 by Jack Steiner 29 Comments

"A Workman's death"

There were three priests, five rabbis and a Buddhist monk and myself standing at the bar in Downtown Los Angeles. We were gathered for the Interfaith Social Media Smackdown and the bar made for a nice place to hang out in between sessions.

It might sound like an odd sort of combination to you, but social media is being used by everyone these days so it made sense for us to schedule a chance to talk about the most effective tools and platforms for the various clergymen to use to look after their respective flocks.

All of that made perfect sense to me. What I couldn’t reconcile was how my ex girlfriend had also dated not just one, but two of the priests. Of course back then the “fathers” hadn’t been pledged to god, but that wasn’t what threw me. What I couldn’t figure out was how I fit in the equation.

How did a nice Jewish girl turn two nice Catholic boys into priests and not have any impact upon me. During two years of dating I might have called out the lord’s name once or twice but it was never tied into a thought about becoming a rabbi.

The Post Really Starts Here

If you have made it this far I must confess that I made up the part about the Interfaith Social Media Smackdown and virtually everything that goes with it.

What I didn’t make up is having spent time in bars with some rabbis and that is because I have friends who are rabbis, but we are not going to talk about that now.

Rather we are going to spend a few moments talking about what happens when you get bored with blogging. It is far more common than many people might realize.

Causes

There are multiple causes for boredom in blogging but I would suspect that most of the time it happens for one of the following reasons:

You don’t know why you are blogging and consequently you are sort of wandering around the blogosphere without much purpose.
You have pigeonholed yourself into one niche and reached a point where you can’t come up with new material.

Blogging can be a grind. This is a marathon and not a sprint. The best and most successful bloggers are almost always those who able to sustain their efforts over the long haul.

When you lock yourself into only writing about one small niche and are afraid or unwilling to move from it you have to work harder to maintain your interest level. It doesn’t matter how much you love writing about the great woolly weevil and it’s exceptional weaving because sooner or later you’ll reach saturation and feel like you have said almost all there is to say.

Boredom Is Bad For Your Blog

Boredom is bad for your blog because it impacts your writing and your readers suffer. You won’t always hit a home run with every post but boredom will make it much harder to get a hit.

Part of the reason I mix things up here and get “creative” with headlines is because it helps prevent boredom and because I am ever curious to see what impact my words have.

Sometimes I stir it up just to see who responds to things like How To Use Your Oral Skills To Please Others. A while back I wrote a post called 69 Reasons Why Fathers Make Better Lovers and got a boatload of traffic and emails from it.

It was real engagement and many of the conversations were about social media. I found it to be interesting.

But Does It Add Value

I have to tell you I hate reading 1,933,432 posts about your content must always add value. You must always educate your reader or make them laugh, blah, blah, blah.

I hate it because it leads to sterile posts that have no passion or personality. Sometimes you have to shuck that aside and suggest that the reason the person you are writing about is so uptight is because they haven’t been laid properly in a decade.

Sometimes you need to ask your reader to imagine their grandparents having sex because you need to wake them up. It is not done to disgust them. It is done to make them wake up because they have just read 1,933,432 posts about how to be a better blogger and they are bored.

The Bottom Line

To me the bottom line is simple, have fun. If you have fun with blogging it will come out in your posts and your comments. This is a good thing.

People want to see your personality and to feel your passion. They like being around happy people. Any time you can make people smile and feel good you are providing value that is immeasurable and important.

And now I have to go think about writing more about the Interfaith Social Media Smackdown because that has real potential.

Almost 12

December 3, 2012 by Jack Steiner 3 Comments

The boy who made me a father is almost 12 now. He tells me he wants to know how long it will be before he is my size and I shrug.

“I don’t know. If you grow like I did it will be another five years before you can look me in the eye and close to eight before you fill out enough to wear one of my suits.”

He nods his head at me and smiles. I smile back at him. We are wandering through the car show and enjoying a moment.

That is an Aston Martin DB5, the same model James Bond drove in Goldfinger. It doesn’t do a good job of showing off the ejector seat, machine guns or any of the other tricks that car hid inside.

Nor does it show you the smile my son gave me when he asked why I was so excited to see the car and I told him about what it was like when I was 12.

He is growing up in a different world than I did so he won’t appreciate why I can look at that car and remember how “advanced” it was and how we rode our bikes and pretended that we had all of the cool tools too.

But he knows me well enough to recognize my moods, even when disguised by a poker face and that was enough to help accentuate the moment for him. “Dad is excited, maybe I should be too.”

The Auto Show

I spend vast amounts of time trying to generate new business and to do what has to be done to keep things going here. It often translates as my walking around the world with my “business face” on and my eye searching for opportunity.

That happened at the show, but most of the time it was relegated to the background. That is because the big guy at my side kept me grounded.

He kept me from getting lost in thoughts about what I would do if I were in charge of marketing for the show or for brands. It didn’t stop me from noticing who used social media to help promote their vehicles or what companies did the best job of trying to create a relationship with the people who wandered by their booths.

We looked at the Bentley above and talked about how much it would cost to buy one. His eyes grew wide and then expanded when I explained it wasn’t the most “expensive” car at the show.

Later on we wandered over to look at a Ford Fusion hybrid and I asked him to figure out how many Fusions you could buy for the price of the Bentley.

I smiled as I watched him figure it out in his head. His math skills are really strong and the day will come where I won’t be able to help him with his homework. It is not a question of if, but when.

Are You Going To Write About This?

We stop to take more pictures and he asks if I plan on writing about our experience. I smile and nod my head. He smiles back and I ask him if he is tired.

He says no, but I see he is starting to fade. It has been a busy day, two soccer games were played earlier and it is a bit after 9 PM.

For a moment I can see hints of the baby and the toddler in his face and I remember how I used to scoop him up and carry him.

I can still carry him but he is about 85 pounds now and that gets heavy much more quickly than it used to. For a moment I wonder if he would be willing to let me do it, or if he has reached the place where he is too cool to be carried.

It is an odd juxtaposition of my feeling proud of how big he is now and a moment of sadness at the passing of the time that was.

This is good. This is ok. This is natural and expected, but I feel like the countdown is almost beginning.

In a year we’ll have a Bar Mitzvah and then life will really begin to accelerate. I don’t mind waiting a while before that happens.

Could You Be Steve Jobs?

December 3, 2012 by Jack Steiner 12 Comments

The boys and I try to make a point to find time to gather together so that we can be “the boys” and nothing more. It is our chance to set aside the other titles we wear (father, husband, son, brother etc) and just be us.

Sometimes the conversations are serious and sometimes they move into areas that are..silly. Other times they wander into areas that you can deem as “what if” or “what would it take?”

For example we have a bet about whether I could tackle Pittsburgh Steeler Quarterback Ben Roethlisberger. He is 13 years younger than myself and only about six inches taller.

The guys think I am nuts to believe that I can take down a pro quarterback who is big, physical, tough and I say, why not. Why can’t I. What is stopping me other than I don’t play pro ball and am unlikely to ever have the opportunity to do so on the playing field.

Opportunity and Resources

Flip through the pages here and you’ll see a post where I wrote that it was unfair for Thomas Edison to get the credit for inventing the light bulb because I could have done it. It is not my fault he is a 100 years older than I am.

And that my friends brings us to another question the boys and I talked about, Could We Be Steve Jobs?

Was he really that different from the rest of us? Was he that much smarter and or creative or did he have greater access to resources and the opportunity to make something from them?

It is the sort of question that intrigues me as a person and as a father. How much of what we do is tied into our beliefs about our capabilities and access to the tools that help to develop them?

How much of our creativity is stifled because we listen to what others say or question ourselves?

Illusions of Grandeur

I had a teacher in high school who used to lecture us about how his job was to crush our illusions of grandeur and make us into people who assumed realistic expectations.

I didn’t like it then and now I want to plant my size 12 boot in his ass and ask him what made him think his job was to repeatedly dump cold water upon our dreams. What made him the arbiter of what we could or could not do.

Yet I concede that there is a need to pay attention to those dreams and figure out what is possible and what is not. Sometimes resources aren’t enough.

The greatest basketball coaches can’t teach height. They couldn’t have made me into another Shaq or Kareem. Go down the list of sports and there will be more than a few that require certain physical skills/characteristics that I lack, but brainpower is a different deal.

Remove The Physical

That last line isn’t supposed to sound as arrogant as it does. It is not supposed to sound as if I am suggesting I am the smartest man ever. Rather it is a question of what happens when we pull out the physical and focus on the mental side, not just for me, but for all of us.

Does that begin to level the playing field and make it more likely to find common ground between the “great thinkers” and us.

This isn’t supposed to be a post in which I share research or links to some scholarly works on the topic. You won’t find any sort of scientific support here for for either side, primarily because I am sharing thoughts and not trying to sway your opinion.

I am comfortable saying that I think resources have a real influence on what we do. If I didn’t have some of my existing financial concerns there is a lot more that I could do.

But I am also comfortable saying that is not an excuse not to try to do some of these things or find ways to adapt and overcome any shortcomings.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that we can’t do anything unless we choose to make the effort. We aren’t all going to be Steve Jobs for lack of effort as much as lack of resources or vision.

So the question I ask myself is what sort of vision do I have for my future and what do I need to do to make those things happen. And more importantly, what can I do to help my children overcome or avoid some of the hurdles we have talked about.

My takeaway here is simple, I still believe that I can do most of the things I dream about. All I need to do is figure it out and there is a world of difference between knowing you can and feeling like you can’t.

What do you think?

Your Social Media Blog Is My Favorite Cure For Insomnia