What a refreshing, inspiring and motivating speaker he is. Straight-forward would be an understatement. I’ve yet to experience a speaker who was that ‘transparent’ and open about their success. I thoroughly enjoyed – not only the great food at the Intercontinental Hotel – Jeff’s presentation and style.

In true celebrity form, his introduction was followed up by another introduction; in video format. The 3ish minute video talked about the transformation of the Kodak brand and company itself. It was hilarious. Very well done and entertaining. Kudos Kodak!

After the into(s) Jeff started right into his presentation. What made this even better for me is that Jeff presents in a way the Kelsey Ruger is currently posting about. He presented a story, with emotions and humor and a feeling of really connecting with what he was sharing.

I jotted down some key points I took away from his storytelling/presentation. One thing that really stood out was the Kodak, a company built on capturing our memories, uses the phrase: Kodak creates emotional technology. Wow – that’s deep and so true!

Recap:

• 40% of commercial printing is touched by Kodak.
• Kodak’s online photo-hosting service has more high-resolution pictures than anyone. Anyone. He noted that if you’re using services like Flickr or some such – you might be loosing out in the end.
• Every Best Picture winner and nominee for the Academy Awards® was shot on Kodak film.
• 70% of their digital business is B2B.
• Kodak’s transformation is the largest turn-around in business history.
• Kodak has 13 products with account for 80% of their revenue. Half of which didn’t exist a year ago.
• Being trustworthy and reliable is their main focus. As should it be for other businesses.
• Quote: “A brand is a promised delivery”
• Kodak’s social media practice uses the 4 E’s: Engage • Educate • Excite • Evangelize
• When Kodak started using social media, they encountered 43% complaint traffic. It’s now down to about 7%
• Business owners/Executives need to understand social media ROI isn’t Return on Investment, rather Return on Ignoring.
• Email Tom@Kodak.com for a free copy of Kodak’s Social Media Tips. I’ll save Tom’s inbox and give you the link.
• What Kodak tries to do – and does well so far is – link the science to the soul (creating emotional technology)

Jeff, if you ever come across my humble blog. Thank you! You get it!

If you get the chance to hear Jeff speak, take it! You won’t be disappointed. Have you been to a Jeff Hayzlett presentation? What did you think?

Note: Banner image is from the Kodak website featuring screenshots of this years Oscar nominees hand-picked by the movies cinematographer’s.

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The monologue was from William Shakespeare’s As You Like It.

“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lin’d,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

We’ve heard life is game and you have to know the rules to play. I think Shakespeare had it more well-defined as a play; and the world is our stage. We’re all merely players on stage, making our entrances and exits. We go through our stages of life, playing the roles assigned to us.

I’ve played the whining school-boy, the lover and now in the soldier phase. I’ve been a soldier literally and figuratively, based on his monologue.

What part are you playing right now? Do you think the world is a stage and you’re a player?

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Let me say I’m rarely a fan of getting inspirational quotes from management. My belief is that quoting leaders, doesn’t make you one. And I’ve had my share of timelines being filled with endless quotes. I like to think for myself, ya know? I digress.

This morning I got the quote above from management. It hit close to home with my recent changes. Through my experiences, both professional and personal, I feel I’ve become a strong, productive plant. I think it’s a good quote.

It reminded me of something a read last night. If you follow Kelsey’s blog, he has some really good lessons on creativity, business and right now he’s doing a series on storytelling.

This is a quote from his former employer way-back-when: Smart, confident, employees make for better results all around.

The more we empower employees to learn on their own, fix their mistakes without belittling them; we’ll have people who are truly passionate about what they do and will do the work internally and externally to build the company’s reputation.

How are you treating your employees? As assets or indentured servants?

Photo by: Selkovjr

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1. Keep Moving Forward…

After that we took the kids to the park for a little while. The boys and I rode our bikes around the neighborhood and had some races. Good family time.

As we were riding back to our house a beat-down, blue pick-up truck with two men inside approached us. The conversation went a little like this:

Driver: Hey! You like eating good steaks?

Me: Yea, of course.

Driver: Take a look at what I got in the back (There was a large freezer in the bed of the truck)

Me: Oh sorry man. I don’t do any business on Saturdays…we’re Jewish.

Driver: (long pause) How do you buy stuff??

Me: (Annoyed face) There’s six other days in the week to buy stuff…

Driver: I’ve got Jewish friends that buy stuff on Saturday.

Me: Well….we don’t sorry, bye!

They continued driving around going door-to-door trying to sell meat off the back of their truck.

A) I would never buy anything from a guy wearing a wife beater, driving a pick-up truck, selling meat in a freezer.

B) We’ve had that same question so many times: How do you buy stuff? What if you need to eat, buy gas, etc.

Well folks, like I told the guy waiting to be on an episode of Cops, there’s six other days to buy stuff. As for eating, well gee – we eat what we have in the house – duh. Buying gas – c’mon, I can fill up Friday. Think this through.

I guess ignorance can be bliss, oy vey.

Photo by: Jetalone

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Over the last few weeks, my (very pregnant) wife has been telling me to get her some of her favorite girl scout cookies; Samoas – or Carmel Delights, as they were once known. Since I don’t make it point to go to the grocery store every day, we waited till the weekend to do a little shopping with the ulterior motive being; find us some Samoas!

I took to Twitter and Facebook before venturing out to 10 different places that had some girl scouts posted in the front. No luck there, unfortunately. Luckily, Dreyer’s also makes limited edition flavor of, you guessed it – Samoa!

This brings me to my plea to both Girl Scouts of America and all you awesome Application Developers – I’m a Mac, so iPhone in this case.

I would love an App that allows Girl Scout Troops to ‘check-in’ – much like FourSquare – and then the app itself plots their location and you, as the user can search based on your location. This would be a great tool during this time of year to help frustrated husbands, fearing for their lives, find girl scout cookies on-the-fly.

What do you think? Can this magic I speak of become reality? I sure hope so. And, if it happens..I sure hope I get a little credit

Photo by: Rex Roof

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Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths

Felt appropriate as I close out this chapter in the book of life and move forward to the next. Changing jobs is never an easy thing to do. You leave behind the people you care about, professionally and some personally. I’ve made great friendships that I hope to carry on in my journey.

I won’t look backwards very long because you don’t win the race by looking back. New doors have opened for me. I owe so much to G-d, my family and all those who have mentored me along the way.

I’m the Chair for Houston’s largest marketing conference. Apart of some really good organizations that are and have helped me grow. As this new chapter begins, I hope to be an inspiration to my peers. A guide to those looking for more knowledge.  I used to think I had little to offer in that respect. But I’ve learned people don’t always know what I assumed they do and are seeking mentors as I once did.

To also quote another great movie, Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, “Your life is an occasion rise to it”. And, “Be the block..” Hat tip to a great thought leader, Kelsey Ruger.

So here’s to moving forward and not looking backwards!

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Dear Google Apps admin,

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

That’s one small step for man. One giant leap for web developers! Soon will be the day where we don’t have to worry about PNG hacks, stacking list items that don’t know how to float. Thank you SkyNet…er…Google!

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February 2nd season 6 of one of the best written shows, LOST, returns. I finally have ONE good thing to say about Obama. He didn’t schedule his State-of-the-Union on LOST day!

According to Matthew Fox, the series finale will be incredible. I believe him. I trust him. I tried to grow a scruffy beard like him once. I want to be rendered emotionally incapacitated and weeping with tears for a week straight when the finale show airs.

I kinda like LOST. If you don’t like it, you’re not a happy person I bet.

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I follow a good amount of people on Twitter and when that timeline gets bombarded with play-by-play tweets, it gets a little annoying. “Stop following them!”, you say. Not really necessary in my opinion. I’m not going to stop following someone because of it; it’s just an annoyance. Most of the time these tweets are verbal outbursts that are then reiterated on Twitter or Facebook for all the world to see. Great! You’re watching a game, now I know. Is it necessary update everyone that XYZ player made a great pass or Team A should have done this? I understand the potential to strike up a conversation is there and that people may comment on your post/wall. I get that. Again, it’s just an annoyance. Same thing could be said about ‘live tweeting’ at a conference. Put it in a post!

Am I innocent of tweeting non-important, mundane rants? No way! Who is? I simply feel that a simple “I’m watching Team A vs. Team B right now” will suffice. Maybe even a follow up like “That was a great game! My team did great/sucks” so we all know your team rocks/sucks.

Telling people how and when to use the Twitter is a touchy subject. I am, by no means, telling people what they should/should not do on their social platform of choice. Just sharing one man’s opinion. As one person put it to me: “Half those people didn’t even go to [name of school]. The bandwagon fans are what piss me off”.

I know I’m not the only person who feels this way, right?

*Required since I was in marching band(football)/Choir(basketball).

Photo credit: kerryvaughan

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I stayed away from doing the fall-back top [fill in the blank] list of the year that past blog post. Mainly because this year has gone by so quick I couldn’t tell you my top anything list of 2009.

So you’ll be happy to read that this isn’t a top anything list of last year or even my 2010 resolutions. I’m not really a fan “New Years Resolutions” because it’s a set up for failure. Most people do the “I’ll lose weight” or “I’ll do this or that” and then they fall off the wagon, gain 20 pounds, smoke even more and say “I’ll make it my resolution for next year”. Why wait? Just do it already. I digress.

So what does “The year we make contact…or connections” mean for me? It means I want to do more personal brand development. Speak at more events (on social media, leadership, religion <gasp>) and share more ideas. I want to make more contacts and connections to better not only myself but to help our community grow.

Here’s to 2010, where’s my flying Delorean?!

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