Speaking of the dark side, check out this video:

As a former project manager of web development projects, I see a ton of TRUTH in here! I thought the statistic that 50% of web development projects launch on time was a little high (trust me on that one!), but most of this is pretty cool.

Also, the statistic about 75% of decisions being emotion-based… I would also disagree. I think it’s more like 100% (according to psychologists I’ve talked to anyway). The final purchase is rationalized with logic and reason, but the actual decision is entirely based on emotion.

Anyway, definitely some fun things here.

Disclosure: I am employed by SEO.com.

I will be working at SEO.com, a search engine optimization firm in Salt Lake County and one of the fastest growing companies in Utah. In March 2011, Website Magazine named SEO.com the best SEO agency in the world (ahead of hundreds of competitors). I consider it an honor to have been offered a position, and it has been a pleasure accepting that position.

What does that mean for the company I founded in 2008, YEA-NAY Marketing? Part of the reason I took the position I have is because I’m burned out doing my own business these past 3 1/2 years, and it is time for a change for me. I was struggling to keep up with YEA-NAY, and revenue never grew at a fast enough pace to keep up with the mountain of work to do. YEA-NAY Marketing will effectively shut down. We’ll be writing to individual clients within the next 24 hours to let them know what is going on to make sure we don’t leave anyone hanging.

As for what the partners of YEA-NAY will be doing… I was the last full-time hold-out at YEA-NAY, so we’re now all employed full-time at various companies. We’ve been developing some content sites for over a year, including a couple directories and blogs. We’ll continue developing those web properties generating revenue on advertising and affiliate networks. It will be a more relaxed and less risky outlet for our entrepreneurial ambitions.

If you or anyone you know is still looking for marketing services, feel free to email me and I can send you to amazing companies with whom I have worked. I love to connect people together and make sure people get what they’re seeking.

Thanks for your support (whoever you are reading this) over the years! Don’t worry, I’ll keep blogging here, and maybe even a little more frequently now.

I realize many of them are probably produced by the same company or group of companies, and one person sees one they like produced by someone and copies the concept/format, but they are becoming so boringly (yup, it’s a word) predictable, it really is starting to be painful to me.

Here’s the format:

<engaging, somewhat personally focused- question describing a fairly common problem “Have you ever…?”>

<sometimes: “What if ..(insert ‘imaginary’ solution to problem)..?”>

<”welcome to ________(software name)”>

<________(software name) makes it easy to ________(particular activity)>

<”to get started create an account….”>

<next, _________ (first step in configuring software)>

<sometimes:  additional setup steps>

<now you’ll be able to _______________(solves problem)>

<brief overview of the cool things you can now do…>

<short statement why this software would benefit you>

<usually a short, specific call to action telling the viewer to try the product (free no-obligation trial, etc.)>

This model is getting really old, however. I still think one of the best videos I’ve seen is the Dropbox intro video. It’s simple, tells a story rather than only explaining details about the product, and it’s original and interesting because of this story format. If more commercial video producers looked at producing stories, the internet would be a whole lot more interesting and engaging.

Some friends and I were just discussing today (originally written 2 months ago) the fact that English classes in school were really a joke. We discussed one particular high school teacher we all had, and the ‘joys’ of poetry analysis (she was ALWAYS right, by the way… there is NO other interpretation).

Here’s my beef: over the last several decades, we’ve dumbed down our population by teaching students facts and figures, but not how to think. Well, I don’t actually know that it’s been over the last century, because I don’t know if the educational system was ever what I might envision. As a nation, our educational system is an assembly line producing the ‘factory’ workers for the next generation of corporate conglomerates. This is a sad, but very real, reality.

What do kids do in school these days? Math problems. Worksheets. Spelling tests. Geography maps (memorize all the state capitals, because that’s useful!). They learn how to follow directions, answer questions with a, b, c, or d, and the chemical makeup of water. But what do kids learn about creativity? Problem-solving? Communication? Debate? Civics? I could go on. So I will…

Going back to my middle school and high school days, I was in the ‘advanced’ classes, but unfortunately, most kids don’t get that opportunity. They are never challenged with something that interests them. They are told to sit down, shut up, and do their homework. What does that teach kids? It teaches them to be a factory worker (read: 9-5 desk job, warehouse worker, aka most jobs). In short: we are raising kids to be robots at work, taught to do routine tasks repetitively.

Systems: the greatest innovation in business since the wheel. Systems are great for businesses and the bottom-line (duplicitous, scale-able, economical, reliable), but not so much for people. Why? Because I believe, from my own experience as well as the experience of others that all people have an element of creativity, a genius, which gets squeezed out of them through their educational experience. By implementing robotic systems in business (and school), this natural creative genius doesn’t get used, and as a result, I believe people are not as happy and productive as their potential might suggest they could be.

So how did I survive? And how do the many creative minds out there make it through this labyrinth of crudely-architected mental death traps?

I’m not sure, but I think it has something to do with my stubborn streak. I’m naturally very creative. I naturally think ‘outside the box.’ I naturally resist systems if I feel they are inferior methods for accomplishing a specific task. I think there are many people with similar personalities, but in comparison to the rest of the population, we are few and far between.

What do we call this group of people who resist inefficient systems and authority? Entrepreneurs of course. Why? Because they dare to break the mold of the corporate assembly line.

I started my marketing company in 2008, in the middle of a recession because I didn’t want a job in corporate America. I could have had one, but I rejected it. The thought of working for an inefficient conglomerate of wasted talent and creativity to create profits for someone else’s pocket doesn’t sit well with me (and worded that way, probably doesn’t with you any more!). I realize not everyone can or should be an entrepreneur, and not everyone’s personality works the way mine does (I know it’s rather rare: I’m an INTJ on the Myers-Briggs scale, by the way, aka ‘the Mastermind’).

But somewhere along the way, businesses need to ask themselves if they are systematically destroying their businesses by mentally abusing their employees by keeping that creative genius smothered under the robotic arms of corporate America. How do you break that mold? I’m not saying systems are bad, because they are in fact brilliant. But I am saying that inflexible systems which do not promote the human being ahead of the product and profit, will eventually be the downfall of both product and profit.

To illustrate this point: look at consumer goods today. ‘Made in China’ connotes something inexpensive and of low-quality. While this is not always the case, it is by-and-large mostly true. The trend among consumers over time is to choose quality over price every time. Any good marketing professional knows this, although the proverbial Walmarts of the world appear to defy this principle (that could be another post entirely- because that is really a fallacy). This pattern of quality over price is measurable and historic. So why does the price question come up? One word: commiditization. As a product becomes more mainstream, copycats arise. A price war ensues, and then a new product comes along that blows them all out of the water. This cycle continues indefinitely as technology progresses. When a company is in a price war, innovation (read: application of creative genius) ceases or severely slows, because the company cannot afford to innovate at low profit margins.

So the inevitability of a company going out of business by going the route of strict systems, lower prices, and no risk is less innovation and a very real likelihood of going out of business or at least fading into complete and utter irrelevance in the market (recent memory: Circuit City, Hollywood Video, Blockbuster, Eastman Kodak, AOL, Kmart). Yes, innovation is a risk, but a necessary risk for the survival of any company.

Yet executives don’t want to pull the trigger. Why? Because all through school we’ve been ingrained with the idea that failure is not an option. Failing a class, or a test, or a project, or just about anything, means you’re ‘not good enough.’ People give up. Those who keep going do so by ‘playing it safe.’ I knew kids in my school who took easy classes so they could get high grades to get the scholarships they needed. I hated that idea, so I took the lower grades, worked harder, and didn’t get some of the scholarships they did. But the path they chose seemed inefficient to me.

Most people look at education and work and see only the money and the things they can do with the money. They rationalize: if I can’t play in the NBA, or be a rock star, or be a fashion designer, then I’ll just give up on those dreams. When giving up those dreams, they give up the will to keep dreaming, and put on a hard shell to ‘go to work.’ Kids lose the fire they had, because it’s extinguished along the way by well-meaning teachers, parents, and friends.

My attitude has always been that I want to enjoy the journey. I want to be challenged along the way. I want to learn. I want to learn everything I possibly can. I don’t particularly care if that’s in a university, a high school, a library, or in nature. It may be on the internet, at a church, with friends at a movie, or hiking in the mountains. People who have a ‘learning attitude’ are constantly observing and noting their surroundings, and learning from the experience.

Sometimes those robotic factory workers I mentioned take off their hard shell after work and become learners, but they can’t reach their full potential with that shell on every day. It stunts their personal growth at least 8-10 hours every day, yet they continue on that path, not realizing the potential they could have attained.

This, to me, is a tragedy. I want everyone to enjoy the freedom of imagination which I enjoy. I want everyone to think they can do things, and try it! If we all expect someone else to innovate, where will that put us next year? In 5 years? Innovation and learning is the responsibility of our entire society, which is why I’d like to come back to my first point: our educational system isn’t doing what it should be doing: creating life-long learners, thinkers, and creators.

How can we alter our educational system? The answer is simple, yet complex: one child, one school, one classroom at a time. Easily said, but specifically, much more difficult to do. This is already happening in many schools around the country– in classrooms,

First: teachers must be taught to learn and work with the strengths and weaknesses of each child. I think they should all have some training in childhood psychology, and psychology in general. Teachers must learn to ‘go with the flow’ a bit and improvise when necessary; to allow children to be expressive, make mistakes, and get messy (as my favorite after-school cartoon teacher did: Ms. Frizzle). Understanding that personality, tendencies of the child, and learning aptitudes gives the teacher an edge on engaging each student in the class. Of course large class sizes make it difficult, but even in states with smaller class sizes, many teachers aren’t doing very well. Why? Because teachers are ingrained in the same old system.

To be clear: everything is NOT lost in our educational system. Many universities are working hard to keep their teacher education programs at a high level, and often some of the best teachers are the newest ones. This topic could be it’s own post too, so I won’t go into this too much, but I do believe there is a disconnect in what teachers learn and experience at the university, and what happens ‘in real life’ when actually teaching classes. If we can close that gap from the lecture hall to the classroom and get real implementation, not just talk, we’ll see the progress we need to start seeing.

Education reform is a process, and we are already in that process. Teachers, parents, and schools and districts across the US are reforming education, a little bit at a time. That is wonderful– but we need more of this. I realize this post has a lot of statements which many consider platitudes, but there is a lot of truth in there. I just hope anyone who reads this might do some small part in education reform: even as small as studying the issues and voting in your local school board election makes a difference!

Huntsman isn’t afraid to stand up to the big institutions (like too big to fail financial institutions, which he would like to break up), and isn’t afraid to suggest cuts, even though uncomfortable, are necessary.

I don’t agree with him on ALL issues, but definitely most. We need someone who isn’t going to approach the office like a politician- we need someone who will approach that office as a leader. And leadership is one of Jon’s best qualities.

Jon Huntsman for President 2012

Gotta love Dilbert. It is funny though how many people ask for SEO because they recognize the need for it, but don’t realize what it involves to implement and manage properly. That’s why this comic really speaks to us marketers on so many levels…