Todd Sattersten :: Astronaut Projects

Boom Goes The Resume

Seth has a great post up titled Why bother having a resume?

There is something comfortable about the standards of a resume. You know how to fill in the blanks. The format has already been worked out. The only question left is if you are going to send it in a Rich Text Format or Word Document.

If you blow up the resume, the questions are wonderfully endless.

• What I am going to say?
• How I am going to say it?
• Is this really what I want to do?

I was describing my career to someone last week and realized the textbook method doesn't really explain who I am or what I want to do next. Today, I was looking at the description at the top of my tumblr blog and came to the same conclusion.

Every person is a sum of their experiences and certainly my mechanical engineering degree and the time at General Electric is important, but there are a whole set of new things that show better what I can do and want to do with my time.

This image is from a document I turned in for a chance at an internship with Ben and Jackie from Church of the Customer. I always liked this representation, experiences overlaid and fading with time. That collage is three and a half years old and would look quite different today.

As I look at the things that I am interested in now, there are seeds in those past projects and positions, but they would be hard to see through bullet points and required corporate speak of a standard resume.

This post should not be considered by anyone reading that I am looking for a new corporate home. Seth's post just made me think about the stories we tell other about what we do, both in form and content.

Flat Fee MLS Blog

Milan from Flat Fee MLS Marketing was nice enough to post a comment, so I thought it would be nice to point you all to his great blog on flat fee MLS listing services.

First Real Evening in Austin

I had all sorts of trouble getting into Austin on Friday, so the only thing I could do was make the Blogher meetup.

Last night, I hung out with John Moore of Brand Autopsy. We talking blogging and business books. You might have seen allusions to his upcoming book Tribal Knowledge and I am sure see his many reviews.

After dinner, he took me to some great spots. Whichwich is a really interesting sandwich place. John wanted to make sure I saw this place. You can read his post on why he thinks they are so cool. I agree wholeheartedly with his conclusions. My only addition would be that this is designed to scale.

Our next stop was BookPeople. It is an outstanding independent bookstore here in Austin. I really enjoyed the experience. The story of store owner Steve Bercu and his campaign to Keep Austin Weird is a great story. It has been told a number of places, most recently in Starting From Scratch. Bercu managed to expose and rally the community here against a $2 million economic package that was being given to a developer. The development included a Borders bookstore. You can read Bercu's letter to the editor at Publisher's Weekly. It might scare you to know that we stood in the business book section for about an hour talking about titles.

We then walked over to Amy's Ice Cream. This is another Austin original. Each store has it's own culture and the employees are themselves. Each person behind the counter was wearing a different hat and all of them were spending time with customers. There was a line out the down and employees didn't start hurrying people through. Notice that the last thing I am telling you about is the product---the ice cream was good. Again, I will give you another book reference if you are interested in finding out more. You can check out Donna Fenn's Alpha Dogs.

The last stop was Gingerman. It has a great atmosphere and an amazing selection of beers.

Thanks John for hosting!

SXSW - Kathy Sierra

Here are streaming thoughts from Kathy Sierra on Creating Passionate Users:

It is not about the product--it is about helping them do.

What can we help people kick ass doing?

If you help users be passionate you get the some of the spillover passion.

You need to get past the brain's crap filter.

Chemistry---people need to feel something, think about how you are communicating...weird, novel, different...keep the brain thinking that it is something important...the brain likes the unresolved. Funny..faces...beautiful...sexy...scary

Conversation beats formal lecture.

Talk to the brain not the mind...

Get people past the Suck Threshold and the Passion Threshold. There is an image of experitse, a meaningful benefit, and a series of steps to get there.

To get people to remember, you need to use emotion.

Need to balance challenge versus knowledge and skill.

How do we keep users in flow?

Get There Attention
Challenging Activity
Payoff

You need levels to keep people going.

Levels don't need to be obvious.

Hero's Journey

• Life is normal
• Something happens to change that
• Things really suck
• Hero overcomes bad things
• Return to the new normal

Create Playful Work

T-Shirt First Development - people want to identify themselves with you

Give them something to talk about? Make it ambiguous. Coldplay, Fair Trade, and the two black rectangles...

It doesn't matter what they think about you...it is about how people feel about themselves.

If spend more time in flow, they have happier lives

Tags: sxsw2006

Lucky You

I bought my brother a gift card to iTunes for Christmas.

The Apple Store At Mayfair made the experience as simple as could be. I did not know buying something in a store could be made more simple and enjoyable.

There was a special iPod desk in the front of the store. I walked up and waited in a very short line (because it moved so quickly). Most folks were dropping $250 without blinking on Nanos. I grabbed the card I needed. The clerk scan my credit card in a Symbol handheld unit. He confirmed my email address (which he already had from my past purchases) and told me my receipt would be sent directly to my mailbox. People buying hardware were told the receipt was already in the box.

The nice man placed a sticker on the top of the card to confirm my purchase. It wasn't a sticker dot or a roll of tape with repeating Apple logos. No, it was a rectangular sticker with the Apple logo that said "Lucky you."

Brand Loyalty Start At A Young Age

This from Money Dec. 2005:

At what age do children start to develop "brand loyalty"?

A. Six Months Old
B. Two Years Old
C. Four Years Old
D. Seven Years Old

Answer: B. By the age of two--really, two--kids can recognize a favorite brand on store shelves and let you know they want it, with words or gestures, says James McNeal, a former marketing professor at Texas A&M. (In fact, his research shows that babies as young as six months are able to recognize some corporate logos and mascots.) Once the brand lightbulb goes [on], children quickly learn the art of the nag: Kids ages four to 12 influence-- that's putting it nicely--an estimated $300 billion of their parent's purchases annually.

Attention Economists: People Are Not Rational

Forbes profiles economist Sendhil Mullainathan in the current issue. His specialty is the growing field of behavorial economics, the combination of psychology and economics. Mullainathan did some work with a bank in South Africa in developed a direct marketing campaign for short term loans.

They varied the interest rate and also varied a number of cues designed to trigger psychological responses such as a smiling photo in a corner of the letter and table that provded more- or less-information and choice. The sample was large, more than 50,000 letters, and the study was randomized and controlled.

The impact of some the small, nonfinancial cues surprised even then study's authors, though it probably wouldn't have been a shock to creative types on Madison Avenue. It turned out that having a wholesome, happy female picture in a corner of the letter had as much positive impact on the response rate as dropping the interest rate by four percentage points.

As they said, I am not sure marketeers would be surprised to find people are irrational.

Links

I finally shut down the BizLinkBlog and got everything moved over to my del.icio.us account. Here is the RSS feed.

There is alot of good stuff over there and I thought I would highlight a few.

• Small is the new big
• More on small
• Can we change the world one small thing at a time?
• An introduction to using patterns in web design
• EPIC 2014
• How To Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams
• The Great Oral-B Sampling Campaign
• How to pitch the Long Tail News Curve

History Supplying the Stories

McMenamins is a chain of pubs located in the Pacific Northwest. Brothers Michael and Brian have knack for buying properties no one wants, restoring them, and turning them into "historical theme parks". Restoration involves historians finding stories about prior residents and artisans painting murals of the found 'characters'. The 50 locations will often cross-promote each other through brochures and beer coasters.

I just love the use of story in their customer's experience.

[source: For Fun & (Minimal Profit); Forbes - 8/15/05]

Look for the Growth

I enjoy the Catalog Critic each Friday in the Wall Street Journal. This week they looked at [sub. needed] a particular type of knife known as the santoku. The business side of story was equally interesting:

[Santoku] knives have been available in the U.S. for more than a decade, but only recently have they really started to take off. Knifemakers give some credit to chef Rachel Ray, who praised the knives' handling and sharpness on the Food Network two years ago. Knifemaker Wusthof's santoku sales have increased tenfold from three years earlier, replacing the chef's knife as its best-seller and now make up 10% of the company's total revenue. While houseware sales nationwide are flat, cutlery sales rose 5% last year from the year before thanks in part to a four-fold increase in the number of santokus sold, according to the marketing-information company NPD Group.