Most of us delude ourselves about time. Our planning is wishful and then we get anxious and frustrated because everything takes longer. My Time Card is a cure for this universal malaise. It’s a great little piece of software available for PC and Mac.

I use it to track all my time, from the moment I sit down to my computer to when I stop. I give each project or activity its own “job” designation, including breaks and chores. I simply choose the job and hit “start” till I change. Then I hit “stop” and switch to another job. It’s a discipline, of course, to maintain that practice. But after a while the power of habit makes it easy. And if I mess up I can easily go back and edit the record.

The payoff is huge. With a few clicks I can generate Excel spreadsheets and total my time on different jobs, or groups of activities — by the week, month or whatever period I like. This amounts to a really powerful reality check.

The software cost me around $20. It’s saving my sanity.

Who would have thought that the local Shell gas station could support the local knowledge marketers?

Yesterday I was filling my car with gas, and above the pump was – yes – a TV monitor – all wired in to cyberspace giving me real time updates on local traffic, weather conditions and news. Of course there was also the ads cycling through – many of which had an easy to remember domain name for me to go to later.
Did I remember to visit this new domain-name-in-my-head? Nope. (I’ll pay more attention next time when I go back for episode two!) But it did strike me as a smart way to keep me engaged for the 4 minutes it took to fill the tank. 4 minutes is a long time in this A.D.D. world — a lot longer than the four seconds you have to engage someone’s attention when they visit your Web site home page. And also a lot longer than the average time QVC has viewers watching its shopping channel, which is just 8 seconds!

It got me thinking…

• Where else can we take advantage of a captive audience – and add value to them?
• If you engage someone with useful and relevant information they will stick around for more. (I’d like to know if Shell sells more gas this way.)
• It is tough to get someone to remember a domain name – unless they really need to.
• Is your elevator pitch ready?
• Maybe filling the gas tank should be just a quiet zen moment anyway – with no TV!

If you want to know what really happens when people visit your web site, invest in this remarkable service: UserTesting.com At a surprisingly low cost you get a handful of smart people to go over your site and give you candid feedback.

Specifically, you get a video that shows the user’s cursor moving around your site, while a voice quietly feeds a stream of (probably devastating) comments. You will never see your site the same way again — guaranteed. Here’s a synopsis of what I learned about web site visitors:

• They do NOT read copy. They SCAN the page and grab bits of information
• They will MISUNDERSTAND anything that isn’t spelled out in the simplest terms
• They DON’T KNOW what you think they know
• They will COMPLETELY MISS important information that isn’t thrust at them front and center

You won’t get this from my saying so. You have to experience the reality of watching people crawl your site. Be prepared for some knock-you-off-your-chair education!

There’s a growing recognition in the marketing community of the power that flows from a “maven status”.

Something about human nature is at play here. We all tend to place our trust in “experts”. Given the choice, we’d prefer to have our heart treated by the cardiology professor and our stocks managed by the TV investment pundit and our marriage counseled by the woman who wrote the book.

The marketing implications are that as you build “maven status” in any field of business, your perceived value to potential customers rises.

So where to start? Publishing a book may still bestow the ultimate kudos, but Web 2.0 allows you to jump into the maven game at a much lower level, and still make waves. One baby step is to become a prolific contributor to the various “Answers” services on the Internet.

Here are three to consider: LinkedIn, the burgeoning business network, has one of the most active and valuable “Answers” programs around. Yahoo Answers draws huge crowds from a wider demographic, and then you might take a look at WikiAnswers for more opportunities to play.

There’s really nothing to lose. Go looking for questions pertinent to your field, and seize the chance to flaunt your expertise. You’ll be on your way to a reputation as The One Who Knows.

That’s good for your brand, good for traffic and good for sales — no matter what business you are in.

In recent weeks I’ve been following the work of Chip Lambert, a business development consultant and LinkedIn maven. A recent post on his blog, which happens to reference people I know, makes a powerful case for the connective power of the high-end network. My name for this kind of thing is “Leveraged Serendipity”. When you go networking online, there’s an element of chance in what shows up — in fact, that’s where the fun lies. The power of the new media is that you can amplify this random factor in quite extraordinary and beneficial ways. The challenge is that because you can’t predict the outcome, online networking can seem like an extravagant use of time. The message from Chip’s blog is that the investment is worth making. From my own experience, I heartily agree.

The 2008 election is a serious matter, politically. We can only hope that every eligible voter will get involved. The result will impact not only America, but the whole world.

Meanwhile, the whole thing is a ton of fun to watch if you’re in the marketing business — which you are if you’re in business at all. The current nomination battle is a massively expensive personal branding exercise that has two virtues: extreme transparency, and rapidly visible results. There is little you cannot learn about brand positioning from watching the candidates duke it out in state after state.

For anyone interested, I’m running a commentary — professional, not political — at my marketing blog. Take a peak, and share your thoughts!

Tapping into the new waves of social conscience, FreeRice.com proves that a great idea can travel fast.

Raising awareness and resources to fight hunger, this site motivates game players to make a difference as well play and learn at the same time. This smart PIP has become a worldwide phenomenon.

Here we see how words get around - in more ways than one.
Even my 82 year old mother is an enthusiastic game player on FreeRice.com. “I need to keep my brain active” she says.

Precession occurs in many remarkable ways - and usually it takes some attention to see the effects that are occurring all around us.

I’m asked whether to use Blogger or WordPress.

Short answer: WordPress, with your own URL.

There are so many creative minds putting energy into WordPress, you don’t want to miss out on the possibilities growing there. I just adopted a template for my Marketing Action Journal which has a “blogsite” character — a blog that feels more like a web site. It was created by Cory Miller, who has some great input on WordPress.

Blogger is nice and easy to use, and I still have my first blog there, which I am copying piece by piece to the Journal. No question, though, WordPress is the way to go.

A question comes to ne about “the importance of social media in the greater scheme of things in the world of media.”That’s such a big question, I may be missing the intention behind it. Taking that risk, here are a couple of thoughts.There’s a constant subtle ju-jitsu between marketers and consumers. Marketers seek a kind of crowd control — to influence behavior to their own benefit. Consumers seek to escape this control and make choices free of influence.TiVo was a huge win for consumers: watching TV programs without the ads. Social media looks like another huge win: unbiased discussion on the merits and failings of products. But social media is a two-edged sword. The more consumers talk, the more they reveal themselves, and the more they reveal themselves, the more easily they can be targeted by marketers.The recent hoo-hah about Facebook’s Beacon technology (sharing with advertisers the offsite behavior of members) shows how rapidly the forces switch back and forth.If you grasp this dynamic, you will never expect anything to stand still for long. As soon as the marketers seek an advantage, the consumers will seek to overturn it. And when they do, marketers will discover in that very reversal the seeds of new marketing advance.Marketers are challenged in two quite different ways as this process accelerates (and it will). First, you need to stay nimble. Second, you’ll have to watch your ethics, which will be put on the line like never before.

Working with the wonderful participants of the Blaze Your Name training, I have learned that most of us need to focus on the basics of social media. There is so much exotic new stuff coming out every day, if you don’t master the fundamentals, you will simply get overwhelmed and give up.

I’ve been posting on the private Blaze Your Name class site for some weeks, and now I’d like to share those thoughts here.

First, a little blogging 101:

The first step in blogging is NOT to start your blog, easy though that is.

The first step happens offline. It is to write your blog strategy, which can be half a page long. Start here:

• Who is your tribe?
• What do they care about?
• What special knowledge can you share that meets their interests?

Answer these three questions in a few simple words, and compose your first blog post — yes, write it off-line. I don’t know why, but this practice sharpens your blog writing. Review your post, and shorten it!
Now you are ready to go to WordPress and create your first blog.