Before I owned my own business, I worked in-house for a large real estate brokerage. If you want to learn about sales go work for a real estate company. Apart from a handful of support staff most are completely run by sales agents. I learned a lot about sales and business while working there. But the two lessons that stuck out the most were:

Pep talks are awesome aren’t they? Heck, I watched the one above 6 times yesterday and I don’t even like football! A good pep talk can inspire people to do amazing things. We see them all the time in sports, political campaigns, marketing, and sometimes even in our churches!

Yay! Today is Thanksgiving! FEED ME TURKEY!

Ok so I know what you are thinking, Um Joe, Thanksgiving was two days ago! But, you are wrong, and in this post I am going to prove it to you. Your thanksgiving may have been two days ago, but mine is today. You see, in my family we all have different places to go on Thanksgiving which means that usually we end up celebrating together on the Saturday after. I know it sounds crazy, but if you have ever met any of my family, you would see that crazy works for us!

Oh, and tomorrow is Thanksgiving as well! YAY More turkey! And the day after that, more Thanksgiving! In fact I am not going to stop with Thanksgiving! I am not sure how long the turkey will last, but I guess I can always buy more.

When I first read about Siri I was instantly intrigued. Mainly because back in 2002 I wrote a similar piece of software called Sivle. Now of course Siri is much more sophisticated, but both applications rely on natural language processing for their conversational interface. But Siri takes this a step further by leveraging the cloud to continually improve. As you can see, I am excited about Siri, which is where my current hipster angst is sprouting from.

The other night I posted the above video on Google+ with the caption, “What an idiot.” Shortly after, the amazing Melanie Phung responded with:

It’s a matter of framing the assumptions. If you assume he wanted to come in, then, yes, he’s an idiot. But if you understand that he just wanted to sit on the deck and stare at his reflection in the window, then he’s just a chill dog. (And he doesn’t appreciate his owner filming him and trying to make him look like an idiot, thankyouverymuch.)

Wow Melanie! Bring out the wisdom!

The other day I saw someone Tweet about MC Hammer starting his own search engine. And I laughed. I mean seriously, who would ever expect this guy as being an innovative tech entrepreneur? I honestly thought the tweet was a joke about silicon valley hype. A little later I went and actually looked at the supposed site, and again thought it was an evolving joke. This is because the site (that hasn’t launched yet) currently consist of a sign up page and a poorly done logo. And then later, I stumbled upon the above video.

Wow. Looks like Mr. Hammer knows a thing or two about tech!

Last week I had the honor of attending and speaking at Search Exchange in Charlotte NC (along with the likes of Andy Beal).

My talk was about building brands social media. As I was preparing for my talk I felt kind of weird about the topic. The truth is, to build a brand in social media effectively you have to do a lot and spend a lot, and I mean a lot, of time doing it. True brand building in social media is an ongoing effort that entails content development, brand managers, monitoring, and strategy just to name a few. Which is why some are starting to realize that for many small businesses social media is a waste of time and other valuable resources.