If you’re keen enough to have noticed, this is a resource to learn about me and to act as my ‘home’ on the web. My old blog (devinreams.com) has moved to Mind Averse. If you’ve made it this far, congratulations, you’re extremely observant.
… I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. It seems like it was just a year ago I was celebrating the big 2-1. All four parties were great that year.
Jeremy Tanner tagged me: I need to chime in and tell the world, in all my infinite wisdom, what a “social media” best practice is.
Interestingly enough my knee jerk reaction was to say either:
At least, that’s the way I’ve felt in the recent months. In fact, it’s a new rule for me on twitter. If you’re a self-proclaimed “social media” guru, then you’re not.
That leads me to my point: to be successful in social media (or any media, I believe) you need to be authentic. It goes back to one of my personal favorite posts: my thoughts on transparency and honesty. If someone is extremely active across a variety of services and trying to connect with so many people (Linkedin, twitter, pownce, etc.) it sends the message that you’re convincing me I need to listen to you. It’s like trying to advertise your product after building it and calling that “marketing.” The biggest way to fail is to reach out to as many people as possible just to broadcast to your followship.
Instead, be an authentic person. Just be you and the right people will find you. For instance:
There’s my thoughts on how to do social media the right way. Agree / disagree?
Tag, you’re it: noah kagan, Andrew Chen, Ramit Sethi. (original link)
Lets dive right into them, shall we? I present to you, the websites that aren’t quite mainstream … yet.
I thought about adding a “how to fix it” to each of these but nothing about them is broken. They’re just different, unknown, and misunderstood websites that may just always maintain that “web2.0” charm.
But then again, only the “early adopters” were using these sites:
Now that I have a few spare minutes to collect my thoughts I figured I’d share a little about my professional life as of late:
If you’re not aware, I left my job of 11 months and 3 weeks (just barely a year) this past July 18th. I had been working at Ernst & Young* and made a quick decision to move on to my passion: the internet. The firm itself is awesome; they’ve definitely earned the many awards and recognitions (a top 25 employer for a decade according to Fortune). I learned a lot, worked with great people and clients, and I don’t really regret anything about my time spent at E&Y.
I’ve learned plenty from my other experiences and jobs but this one is a bit different. It was my first full-time job out of college (not an internship, not a part-time job); one where I had bosses, business cards, a phone number, responsibilities, performance reviews, etc. Some things may be obvious or things you’ve read about before–but this is the kind of stuff I finally learned from experience.
…and I could go on and on.
I’m now working for Crowd Favorite which is an internet company specializing in WordPress (the software that powers this website), custom web development and design, consulting, and builds some web products. Surprise surprise, I’m working on the web!
I suppose this isn’t new: I’ve moved around a lot and some people might look at that as being scattered or unfocused. But, guess what: all that moving around and dabbling paid off! I found something I really enjoy (and I think I’m good at it, too). How do I know? For starters, I’ve been excited to go to work all 10 days these last two weeks (and enjoy checking / responding to business e-mails during some of my spare time)!
My job is a mixture of things but I think we could describe it as a mix of the following:
So, that sums up what I’ve been doing and what I’ll be working on. Everyone I work with is great, I’m happy, excited and learning plenty each and every day.
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* Note: this is the first and only time the firm name was used on my site (for employment / search engine / opinion purposes). They were aware of devinreams.com and I was aware of their awareness.
I’m sure you’ve heard of it already. If not, a bunch of people have vowed to give up everything in their life except for 100 “things” (loosely defined). This isn’t a new idea, Leo from Zen Habits talked about it almost a year ago and it’s been circulating around the web in blogs and forums before that (but thank goodness we have TIME around to popularize it).
I started cataloging all the items I have around the house and was quite surprised; I think you would be, too. But first, here are some of my initial thoughts:
Now the point isn’t to simply remove things from your life (even though that’s a big part of it). The point of the (arbitrary) number, 100, is to keep a sense of value in mind. What is it that makes it into my top 100? What can I limit myself to? How do I prioritize the “stuff” that is tied to my name?
After a couple hours of rummaging around this morning I easily dropped my list down to 108 items. Thaaats right. There are only 108 things in my house. These things include:
Once you get into it, 100 is a very reasonable number. What are some of the things I’ve done to minimize my “thing footprint”?
Now its nice becuase, no, I don’t own my own place. My roommate is the owner of the plates, knives, forks, etc. But that’s fine, if you use the ‘collection rule’ you’ll see you’ve only got a dozen more things than I do.
I’m staring at my list. These eight things aren’t going to go without a fight.
Have you tried minimizing the ‘stuff’ in your life? How do you declutter?
I’ve seen, first hand, the challenges faced when trying to get a group of people together on the internet. I’m a member of a of a number of online communities. I’ve also helped found a few communities. They include:
And I’ve done tons of observation of popular online groups (FlyerTalk, Zen Habits, Get Rich Slowly, I Will Teach You To Be Rich). Here are my top three lessons learned.
When I say strong you need to have an extreme amount of quality or quantity. A little of each will not be sufficient.
Employee Evolution and 9rules attracted people because of the high quality–they both grew very quickly. On the other hand, yopos sought out to do the same and, I admit, consistent quality wasn’t there (and we didn’t have the numbers either).
In college, AKPsi was one of the largest groups in the business school (100+) and because of that it kept attracting more and more people (network effect). Once our numbers started to drop off we had to quickly focus on quality or else we’d get stuck in mediocrity. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened. We had generations of mediocrity in the group, as the numbers diminished even they left. By the end of my college career the group dropped to a quarter of it’s original size. The same happened with two other groups–when the strength dwindled, the community failed.
Without the quality or quantity it’s very hard to do anything. You could take five very talented people and create something amazing. If you have 100 people, odds are you will find some great, active, and interesting people worth sticking around for.
It must be how we are hard-wired as humans, but no matter what your group is–people will want to meet in person. People will try to organize and coordinate these events but they rarely happen. Even in college, where we met as a group every week, it was challenging to have people commit to anything outside of something we’ve already structured for them.
Lucky for the internet there are groups like the SXSW coordinators who will put on an event for everyone to go to. But even with 9rules we never saw any official “get togethers” no matter how often it was brought up. I’ve seen the same start over at Brazen Careerist and I question what will come from the discussions (I have a good idea, though: nothing).
Some obvious exceptions to the rule are groups like BarCamp. These still usually require a big investment from one or two people (and that’s it). If you want something to happen you have to take the initiative yourself at first. Then, make sure you have the strong community to help in the future (see previous point). People usually need to see value first.
Now, the inverse of this is also true: people love to participate a lot in the beginning. Say you open up a forum: people will chat about anything and everything they think of on day one. By day ten they have less to talk about, less to reply to. The challenge here, depending on your group, is maintaining participation and having people come back (quality and quantity help).
No matter where you go, one will notice the “key” players. Especially in a discussion environment like a forum. Within five minutes of surfing FlyerTalk it was clear who knew what they were talking about and was respected by the group. When I started yopos there were a few guys who were very eager and I didn’t have them time to focus on them and empower them to help with the community. Lesson learned.
CommunityNext had a ton of people show up and a lot of it was due to key figures. Get them involved, get them in your group and make sure people know about them. One of my favorite stories was watching Hiten Shah try to fix the wireless network at Stanford. People noticed him working on it and one or two people stopped and offered to help.
What about you? Do you agree or disagree? Have you learned anything worth sharing?
PS: I’ve been working on updating and consistent-ifying my look. Click through to devin reams and let me know what you think. Oh, and be sure to tell your friends about my services.
Here again are some of the cool things I’ve found, done, or learned this past week:
Monday
For you iPhone users, MobileScrobbler will scrobble (send data to last.fm) straight from your jailbroken iPhone. A bunch of other features include: lyrics, playlists and recommended tracks.
Tuesday
I’m a huge proponent of telecommuting. I hate spending a half-hour getting ready in the morning, shining my shoes, packing a lunch and then driving / riding the train maybe an hour each morning. That’s 2 – 3 hours each day I could just as easily work from home! Sun did a study on how much a day or two each week could save in energy.
Wednesday
I’ve started making fruit smoothies in the morning which is probably the best thing to happen to my routine (I wrote about how important morning routines are). It’s as easy as buying some bananas, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries–then mixing it (in The Magic Bullet of course). Heck, make a pitcher’s worth for the whole week. Thank me later.
Thursday
My Man in India (my virtual assistant from GetFriday) has done some fun tasks for me lately. For a few weeks I had him go into Facebook on Friday, see who had a birthday in the past week, and then send them a message. I love to send people these messages — just to say hi — but I figured it was a simple enough task to outsource. It went well, I had a few conversations with long lost friends. But! Noah Kagan was wished a happy birthday… a few months early.
Friday
Watch out for Linkedin address book imports. I accidentally (or was it meant to be?) invited my entire contact list to connect. But, again, I re-connected with some long lost friends (including an ex- from two years ago). I should get an award for most people ‘recruited’ to the darn site, though (at least 5 sign ups a day for a few days in a row).
Haha, that’s all for this week… I’m off to Colombia by the time you read this. See you if / when I get back!
It’s a tricky question but the jerk we call Steve Jobs has made it so easy for me to say no:
But seriously, as great as the devices are it’s so hard to keep doing this to people. Steve is evil and people love him. Microsoft is trying so hard to be nice and people still hate it….
UPDATE: If you’re looking for a free copy of the book, head on over to okdork.
I finished reading an awesome book that’s about to come out: Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior. These book comes from the same guy (and his brother) that wrote The Starfish and the Spider.
Ori and his brother take another Tipping Point slash Freakonomics approach to this book which is very successful and very good at communicating complicated concepts. By using stories I’m able to quickly grasp the idea, and then I have a vivid application of the concept that I can turn around and use to share with others. This is the kind of book you read today and talk about with everyone you run into for the next three weeks.
The main point of the book is that we are often drawn to doing dumb (irrational) things and making decisions that make no sense… but in reality, they do. These are some of the concepts that can help us understand why people behave irrationally:
Go read the book and you’ll realize, yes, this is what is going on all the time. It helps explain so many behavioral (and economical) decisions that, hopefully, the understanding of ‘sway’ can help you make better choices (about yourself, your products, your approaches, etc.).
Book Website: swaybook.com*
Amazon page: Sway goes on sale June 3, 2008
* Another book with an online (video-based) trailer. Very cool, and much better at explaining the book than I can. Check it out!