Archive for the 'How to Communicate' Category

• Institute for Multimedia Literacy » Multimodality in the Networked World: It’s Not Just Academia
  Virginia Kuhn of USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy made some cool comments: “From Twelve Horses to health care providers to technology-innovative start ups in San Jose, every CEO said the same thing: we need personnel who are flexible, who know how to be resourceful, who have tech skills but
  (tags: Twelve Horses Twelve+Horses TwelveHorses technology innovation communication communications multichannel multiplatform education socialnetworking socialmedia)

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• Presenters Failing the Social Media Communications Test | stuart henshall
  Perhaps one of the most remarkably well written/outlined posts on the art of presenting in today’s social media world. Stuart Henshall kicks ass.
  (tags: speaking presentation presenting public socialmedia interactive)

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“Here I sit my cheeks a flexin’ giving birth to another Texan.”

The men’s bathroom stalls of pretty much every ski resort in Colorado during the 1980s were adorned with that poem. Standard issue. And when AIDS became mainstream, we hung boxes of “Texas T-Shirts” in those same men’s stalls. Despite being the economic life-blood of the Colorado Mountain Ski-Town, by-and-large the Texan’s typically arrogant, loud, flashy and better-than-you we-got-helluva-lotta-oil-money attitude created a fueled our bathroom poet laureates. More often than not…with PLENTY of good cause! They could be horribly demeaning: “Do y’all even have schools here?” Action-reaction. JR Ewing was not an aberration.

I spent most of my youth working in my Dad’s shops at the ski resort waiting on those Texans that bought the “Knee-Deep Sky-High” T-shirts, I-Ski Sunglasses, Scott goggles, Smith no-fog-cloths and Playboys/Penthouses from us at a rate so frequent and high enough margin that our family could eat and afford ski. This was the 80’s. Big oil money. Texans in 10 gallon hats and dinner-plate sized gold belt buckles. JR Ewings in sheepskin coats doused in too much men’s cologne smelling like Scotch.

By and large I was treated like dirt working in the ski shop. And not because I was a punk ski-town kid looking to meet their daughters either! It was my age. I noticed they treated their own kids the same way, and their kids had tremendous contempt for them. ”Junior” was an idiot for not being old enough to drink or drive. Their interactions with my father, however, were quite the opposite. Dad was usually trying to grade P-CHEM 401 tests while ringing up customers in the shop. Professor-by-day-entrepreneur-by-night. After they learned he was a nuclear scientist-turned-college professor turned Dad-in-Crested Butte-outdoors-bum who hunted elk and flyfished the local waters since he was age 10 and was raising a 3rd generation of skiers, they couldn’t spend enough time talking to him. Apparently, age, intelligence and ‘intrestingness’ had a lot to do with how you were treated by adults.

“What kind of sunglasses would YOU wear?”

Every so often a Long Tall Texan would make a connection with me…the punk kid at the ski resort. They’d hang out in the store for 30 minutes longer and ask me lots of questions. “What’s the best locals hang-out? Who’s got the best steak? If I really want to get a good instructor, who should I ask for? What’s the scariest run? Where can I buy some cocaine? <got that a lot in the 80s>”

To my surprise, they’d often remember my name year-after-year as they showed up for their annual two-week family ski vacation. Sometimes they would give me a crisp $20.00, $50.00 or even a $100.00 bill for helping carry luggage, lug some firewood up to their condo, or sherpa their skis over to the shop for tuning. A crisp Ben to a 14-year-old was unforgettable. Most, it seemed, carried money clips with inlaid turquoise fat with what appeared to be $10,000 folded up. These rare-breed Texans asked me lots of questions and listened intently to my answers. They, in turn, often gave me some really great advice. They were simple. One in a thousand, and they stood out, and not because of the Willy Bogner fur-lined one-piece they were wearing.

As I rambled in to college I  took many internships and jobs with the “local elite” and “national elite”. Mostly I worked for the National Judicial College where I met and mingled with thousands of the nation’s best and most respected judges. Again, like the JR Ewings, most could not be bothered to acknowledge someone many years younger than them. Maybe a “thanks” for holding a door open.

And yet this time, when the I observed the odd judge interact among their peers and later on with me I realized what natural leaders they were and how comfortable they were in any social setting. Mills Lane was one of those judges. (Maybe he spotted that can of Copenhagen in my pocket and we became friends over that.) Or maybe all that time he spent refereeing boxing matches with Mike Tyson gave him an affinity to hang out with people much younger than him. But he was genuinely interested in my perspectives when we talked and he would remember our conversations year-after-year. There were several others like that and over time I realized they were similar to Mills Lane in their communities. Very prominent, very self-confident and very passionate about their vision. They always transcended the age-barrier. It was as if they were ageless. They were simply comfortable hanging out with any age-demographic. I first met Chuck Alvey then. He was the GM for Channel 8 and not the EDAWN CEO he is now. He probably doesn’t remember, but he and I hung out many times chatting on the lunch patio at the Judicial College.

I interned at the Truckee Meadows Regional Planning Agency when Elisa Maser (then Erquiaga and the assistant director) was defining and implementing the Regional Quality-of-Life Factors. (Whole post on that someday!) I spent a year forming and holding these focus groups with every mucky-muck in town and once again experienced largely the same repeated pattern. I met the CEO of the Chamber of Commerce over 20 times for the “first time”. The then-Mayor verbally berrated me for not having ice for the sodas in front of 10 other local leaders when I had nothing to do with F&B. And then Max Page — a man I would later work for at Fitzgeralds — hung out with me and asked me a bunch of questions about what I thought about downtown Reno and what should be done.

The battle between the young, inexperienced and often idealistic versus the older, experienced, scared and more realistic generations seems to be forever-generations old. That sucks.

I intend to be the older dude  in the suit that holds the door open for the college kid instead of vice versa. I’ll think I’ll enjoy being a bridge between generations as I slide out of my 30s and in to my 40s. My parties and companies will be filled with both the young-in-age and mature in mind and the older in age and ageless in attitude folks. The self-important age discriminating can stay home uninvited and bitch about how the world is out to get them and why the age-demographic on the other end is holding them back. 

It shouldn’t be about the age of a person. It’s about the connections and the conversation between people. Age discrimination is a concern and practice of the self-conscious, the ignorant and the unethical individuals unwilling to remake themselves in to the human being necessary to gain access, acceptance and rapport with others.

…stay Tuned for Part II

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OK, take that swank bluetooth dangle-dongle berry outta your ear and read’up! That plan of yours to have you’re next professional Sears photo-session for your “Avery print-at-home business card” sporting that killa’ bluetooth headset of yours is a bad bad very very bad bad idea. Bad idea. True story. Bad idea. Here’s some other tips you should know/consider:

#1: ‘Get Yo’ Global Look On’ your business card

A 44-year-old unemployed ’seasoned senior executive vice president of sales’ person says to me, “Why’s there a plus sign in your phone number? Is that a typo?” Nooooo!

Business cards that are “global friendly” immediately communicate that you have a passport and are capable of surviving outside the US on your own. Or that you’re aware that the US is not the only place in the world that has phones. That maybe you actually know/interact with someone outside the US.

More than likely, you are experienced/capable of interacting with other professionals outside of the US and you do that frequently enough that it’s important to have a global-friendly phone numbers that include the country-code. I can run through a pile of 1,000 business cards from folks I’ve met recently and immediately tell you who has gold/platinum status on United and is capable of speaking in front of large audiences by this simple little trait alone. (For now, I guess. I just blew the secret!)

The international seasoned professional simply includes the mobile-phone friendly country code, i.e: +1.775.555.5555. The key here is to simply include the County Code (CC). Here in the US it’s “1″. +1 on mobile devices. We do this because phone numbers in pretty much every country outside of the US and Canada are totally f’n confusing. Want to send a txt to someone in another country? You have to use the +CC.86.311.456.12345

(BTW, seasoned globe-trotters carry ATT or T-Mobile phones. Sprint & Verizon largely don’t work outside the US.)

#2: UPPER CASE EMAIL ADDRESS IS BAD. lowercase everything communicates way emo-hip-startup-with-not-a-lot-of-revenue

You’re email address should always be all lower case. BAD: DAVID@IMADORK.COM. Weak: David@ImADork.com. good: david@imadork.com. Punctuation still matters on everything. Typically well designed business cards that are in all lower case shouts: Hey! I work at a small start-up where we jobbed our corporate collateral to an emo identity designer/we’re trying waaaayyyyy to hard to be hip and cool!!! Companies over 10million in revenue largely care about proper punctuation on their business cards. Startups that are too cool for school are less than 1 million in revenue.

#3: No mobile phone number on the business card.

This guy interviewing with us sporting a sweet Motorola Star-Tac said to me: “I’m sorry, I keep my mobile phone number private and only give it out to my close friends and family.” That was in 1994.

Sorry to bust out the big news on some of you: <cough> It’s 2007. If you still have a land-line, you’re getting kinda weird. I absolutely think it’s quaint of those folks that still think of their mobile phone a private luxury only to be used to call AAA for a flat tire or to let their honey know they’ll be late for dinner. Yeah, back in 1992 when I paid CellularOne $1.25 a minute with “no free anytime minutes” (yeah, shocking!) I was kinda stingy too. Now I chaw down 2000 minutes, 3000 sms and an all-u-can-eat data plan for ~$100.00/month. And guess what? You can too! 

Seriously, get over it. Give it up. There’s nothing gained by being stingy with that mobile phone of yours. And guess what, it get’s stranger: I actually don’t want to call you! I’ll be more likely sending you a text message.

No text messaging plan? Great! I can’t think of a better way to nonverbally tell someone, “Hello. I stopped evolving as a functional part of the professional business world in 1999 and please consider me to be unemployable. Dude, let’s trade voicemails and faxes!!!” C’mon. 33% of the kids 12 and under are more freakin’ connected than you. Get with the ’00’s.

#4: Print-at-home says “Unemployable”

Word.

#5. Kill your FAX number.

Get rid of the fax. Shoot it. Blow it up. And PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don’t put it on your card business card unless you’re a lawyer who still uses Word Perfect 5.1.

Fortunately the folks who still send/receive fax’s don’t read blogs so I don’t need to hammer down this point to much. I’m pretty sure I’ve “faxed” two people in the last year. One was a practical joke. I typed up an email, printed it, and then faxed it to a friend who works for a prominent US Senator who employes interns to print his email for him and then called him and left a long voice mail asking him if he got my email. hahaha!

In a world where we send/receive hundreds of email, + txt, IM, facebook, myspace, do we really need to send/receive faxes? Replace that with your Yahoo!, AIM, Skype, Gtalk!

#6. Holy-mother-of-all sweet receding hairlines/sick vertical bang factor 10x! Dump that photo!

This is rather narrow nit and aimed particularly at my black-turtleneck-wearing real-estate/insurance/human resources bro’s. Leave the photo off the business card. Seriously. That Sears model look you’re sporting ultimately does you more harm than good unless you moonlight at Tao in a bathtub. Replace that photo and reclaim that space with links to your facebook/MySpace/LinkedIn/Flickr/Tumblr/WordPress/Typepad/etc. so we can see some better photos of you and your family/friends and validate you’re not a total dangleberrier freak.

Oddly enough, not having an online avatar/profile photo on the social networking sites says “I’m a freak/lurker.” Again, it’s 2007. Something’s wrong if you don’t have a digital photo of yourself at all. One that’s semi pro looking or minimally visually complimentary says a lot about to the degree to which you clean up and care to function professionally.

#7. Serif Type Face or an ignorant use of MS Comic Sans, Hobo or Arial Black

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of serif types that kick-ass and I love it and it looks awesome. But on a business card that will more-than-likely be scanned, serif gets hard to read and is totally the civil engineer, tax attorney or banking/finance look. That’s OK if you’re one of them kind of folk. If you don’t know why using Hobo is like writing “I’m a dumbass” on your forehead and hanging out in front of Hot Topic at the mall with an OrangeJulius in your hand then go right ahead and use it. Or hire a trained professional identity designer. Best case: copy as close as you can that card from Deloitte.

#8. Test Drive that sucka on Card-Scan and make sure it scans 99% accurate.

Word.

#9. Quality says quality

Business cards printed on nice recycled stock with a matte/gloss finish say “I’m a clean, contemporary and professional.” Some people complain that gloss scratches. That was back in 1992. They fixed that. Now it protects that card. 

If you’re coated cards are getting bent/scratched then you don’t give out enough cards/party/meet people. Certain businesses can get away with rough, uncoated stock — like a concrete manufacturer, dog-groomer or the carrot-juice supervisor at Wild Oats.

Anything that can easily be confused with print-at-home stock is simply a business card personal branding death sentence. If you can’t be bothered with getting professionally printed business cards, you’re killing your professional brand. C’mon, there’s like 5,000 places on the Web (Flickr has a cool service) that can do this in 1 week or less and you won’t look like a total goober dangleberry!

#10. Some random nits for people looking for employment or a sales pitch appointment beyond the business card but related enough for this post:

• Got a sooper slick resume and absolutely no Google Juice? You’re either spooky, strange, of no social relevance or just plain out-of-date.
• Don’t be stupid. Get your Google on. Google me. See what Page 1 looks like. I own my Page 1. And Page 2…
• Google yourself before you go meet a potential employer or sales prospect. What you see (or don’t) is what they see (or don’t).
• Research who you’re talking to! I have pretty much laid out my whole personal life online; you should be able to find something to talk about/have in common.
• Resume’s are dead. Don’t send me a resume. Point me to your Facebook/Myspace/LinkedIn/ClaimID/OpenID/etc.
• I had a 55 year-old former CFO/business executive complain I was hard to reach. hahahahah! I had a 17 year old high school kid reach me out of the blue about an internship in 60 seconds flat.
• If you want employment at my company, it’s not my responsibility to conform to how you communicate best.
• Don’t EVER EVER EVER EVER be anything but sweet, humble, gracious and courteous with anyone at the Company — especially my assistant or the receptionist. Here’s how they relay your message to me: “Some total ass-wipe dickhead just called you from Wall Street Mergers & Acquisitions. Do you want me schedule him to call you in January of 2032?”
• Talk to the people who talk to me. Talk to the people who talk to the business leaders. It’s not so important that you talk to me more than anyone else…or even exclusively. Do you honestly believe I walk out after meeting with someone and give a unilateral order: “Hey, you in that cube. I just hired this guy. He reports to you know.” hahaha! I look to my team to be the social filters. How someone interacts with my team is 99% more important than how much they interact with me. It really doesn’t matter if I like you. If my team can’t like you, that’s an insurmountable problem.
• I ultimately look to my team that I trust to filter and opine their impressions of anyone. Getting a glowing recommendation from Steph at the front-desk is worth more than an hour my time telling me your five-year plan and your summa-cumma-humma claude thingy you did in college.
• Overt attempts to hide your personal life and go for the Sears model look work against you these days. Businesses are more than ever not interested in homogenized drones with no personality. Birds of feather flock together. Everyone at my company is sooper cool. I love hanging out with everyone at my company. They’re all cool. You’d better be too! We want real people with really cool/interesting personal lives that make our lives richer and more interesting. But don’t tell us how cool you are, show us!
• What are you hiding that can be all that negative today that Google can’t find? By the way, we do a standard 10-year background checks on pretty much everyone. The HR Scare-mongers of the 80’s got everyone all screwed up on union-driven fear. All the old hangups (you’re gay, you’re divorced, you’re a single mom, you’re pagan, you like to go to burning man, you have tats all over you, you accidentally voted for GW, you were in a Sorority, you hunt, you support PETA, it’s not your natural hair color, you drink soy milk) have soooo little bearing on what really matters. Great companies are filled with great people who could largely give a crap about whether any of that. What matters? (a) Are you congruent with the company’s brand? (b) Do you present any significant HR issues/risks? (c) Will you attract other good people to the team instead of driving good team members away? (d) Are you really good at what you do and willing to learn to do other things? (e) Are you socially conscious and willing to invest in and give back to your community?
• Get a Gmail account for personal email and get it out of the work email. ’nuff said.

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When I look back at all the books of fiction that I’ve read, there’s a few that absolutely stand out as being totally congruent with me personally and my developing worldview. Of course, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is right at the top of the list.

Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and Neal Stephensen’s Snow Crash stand out dog-eared and above the boxes and shelves countless Bruce Sterling, Phillip K. Dick’s, Isaac Asimov, Verner Vinge, Carl Sagan, Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson novels.

But I still remember reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer as a junior in high school in 1987 and thinking, “This is cool. This is a world I could live in! This world will exist one day.”

This is the book that really started it all for me. Why I do what I do. Sure, a snowball effect. But a tremendous connection was made in my personality that I didn’t know existed.

This is the book that led to a ‘couple hundred other books being read…and I believe this book led to the Web as we know it. Minimally, we owe the Matrix movies to William!

“They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin. Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours.The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective. For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall.” - Neuromancer

Neuromancer went on to win all three major science fiction awards: the Nebula, the Hugo, and Philip K. Dick Award. I didn’t know then how much recognition it would receive. I just knew that my love for technology how it impacts human social behavior OK someday in the not to distant future. That this guy Bruce Sterling was not a writer of fiction…he was a seer…a social economist…a person with a gift to follow trajectory within the human spirit and paint a vivid photo of where we’re all headed.

So it was with some dismay that I caught this quote from William Gibson (thanks Bruno Giussani, you have the best del.iciou.us feed on the planet right now IMHO):

“The trouble is there are enough crazy factors and wild cards on the table now that I can’t convince myself of where a future might be in 10 to 15 years. I think we’ve been in a very long, century-long period of increasingly exponential technologically-driven change.

We hit a point somewhere in the mid-18th century where we started doing what we think of technology today and it started changing things for us, changing society. Since World War II it’s going literally exponential and what we are experiencing now is the real vertigo of that - we have no idea at all now where we are going.

Will global warming catch up with us? Is that irreparable? Will technological civilisation collapse? There seems to be some possibility of that over the next 30 or 40 years or will we do some Verner Vinge singularity trick and suddenly become capable of everything and everything will be cool and the geek rapture will arrive? That’s a possibility too.

You can see it in corporate futurism as easily as you can see it in science fiction. In corporate futurism they are really winging it - it must be increasingly difficult to come in and tell the board what you think is going to happen in 10 years because you’ve got to be bullshitting if you claiming to know. That wasn’t true to the same extent even a decade ago.”

Should we be troubled by this? Is there a new class of science fiction writers ready to take this task up? What’s next? Should we be scared that when our best science fiction writer gives up we’re in trouble? Is this DOOMSDAY? hahahaHA!

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So I’m posting this transcript of an AIM between Ryan Jerz and David Torch (whom I’ve not met as of yet however he wants to meet with me, we traded a ‘couple txts). I received this transcript from a Flickr email he sent to me earlier this week, however, I’ve had such a jacked-up week of meetings I’m just now seeing it. No matter. This dude hunted down my cell phone and sent me a text message while I happened to be at the Imperial Bar & Lounge with my whole senior management team having dinner. With some degree of irony, the purpose for our get-together was to lament our recruiting woes and why it’s so easy for some people to connect and for others its so hard.

I thought that this was such an excellent transcript of the resourcefulness of using social networking tools to make a connection that I couldn’t help but post it.

AIM IM with ryan jerz <mrjerz>.
2:51 PM
hey ryan… hows the job?
solid
2:55 PM
word. you like it?
yeah i do. i’m currently rewriting the stuff that’s on the website…not too bad so far. i’ll get a chance to do some fun stuff
cool. working at the office now?
yes
know anyone hiring?
can you do design?
web? what i learned in teh master’s program. which means i could probably fake it pretty well.
places like 12 horses are always looking…the rgj is hiring a business reporter
eh, already worked at the RGJ.
plus, they just sent a photog to the grad program
yeah, that’s right
i saw
12 horses… do they need photographers?
designers
any photo work?
photographers i never hear about
dave laplante, right?
yes
maybe i’ll flickrfriendrequest him. i’ve seen his name on there. isn’t he friends with nick van woert too?
i have his mobile…text him
“sent from my iphone”
totally
that reminds me, i should probably change my outgoing signature on that thing.
i’ll check to see if it’s ok to give it to you.
say, my buddy jerz said you guys are hiring…who do I talk to?
ok, really?
3:05 PM
ask about jobs…yeah, i’d do it
there may be nothing he can do, but he’ll know your name.
and flick friend him too
this will be fun.
well, when I wanted to meet him to go over thisisreno, he had me text him to set a time…i had never really done it. it’s how he communicates
he sounds like a cool guy. ok, i’ll do it. i’m going to bombard him with media.
he doesn’t like email as much
you have nothing to lose
amen
4:10 PM
k, doing it now. i should probably send him my websites, though i guess he can just find them through flickr. for the text, what’s a good one liner?
good question. what’s your site again?
davidtorch.com
and
thesupermarket.us, but that’s more of a collaborative thing with nick and i.
wait! actually, i think i’m just going to copy this text and send it to him. (with your permission, of course)
what text
3:15 PM
this ichat conversation. don’t worry about it. if it gets me a job, we’ll both be stoked that things like this actually work. if not now, it seems like a good way to get a job in the future. you know, the kind of thing you hear about…
did you say anything you regret? anything you wouldn’t want him to see?
heh, no
k, this conversation is pretty long - his phone might explode if i tried to text it to him. i’ll sms and flickr just to be safe….
i’m not going to fix the typos
adds more mojo.
here: i’ll type out my phone number so he can atleast text me back with a heartbreaking “no.”

this conversation will be a record of social networking realized. it’s pretty much our graduate project from last year, right?
at the very least, we could use this to supplement the research paper:

“Example of Social Networking and Job Application at 12 Horses, appendix C”
cool, i think we have another week to turn it in.

Technorati tags: ryan, jerz, ryan jerz, davidlaplante, davelaplante, Twelve Horses, 12horses, 12 horses, interviewing, networking, social networking

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• RGJ.com: Communication taking turn toward technology

  Dave LaPlante, CEO of the Reno-based marketing firm Twelve Horses, embraces new technology, and uses his cellphone to do everything from communicate with clients and co-workers, to updating his blog. He said the type of communication is less important tha

  (tags: davidlaplante david_laplante David+LaPlante davidlaplante.com mobile phone cell text messaging communication tips style)

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As I am writing this post, this video (below) starring Bender of Futurama with Al Gore promoting Gore’s new movie — An Inconvenient Truth — has been viewed ~800,000 times on YouTube. I bet it will surpass a million by Friday. It’s hilarious.

Asides from the fact that Bender is in (my opinion) his better-than-the-Simpsons-near-perfect-post-modern-sarcastic-humorous form ripping on Al Gore is that Al Gore is a willing participant. And this, my friends, leads me to the primary purpose of this post:

Despite your political leanings (folks this ain’t about R vs D which is too 1.0 for my taste anymore), if you look at what Al ” I invented the Internet” Gore has accomplished and recovered from since his stoic Veep days, he has absolutely and without a doubt won my vote as the Personal Brand Makeover winner thus far this century. (I know…too soon to call and I won’t be around to call it in 94 years!)

He’s absolutely been a brilliant example of diligence and recovery. [Update: Shortly after I posted this I quite by accident stumbled on a wonderful story posted only a few moments a go by Renee Blodgett. Seems we're thinking real similar tonite!]

[Side note: Unfortunately I predict that too many folks who will read this post will have their default (R) or (D) glasses on and it will distort the merit of this post and miss my point entirely. So if you think with your Partisan, click away now!]

While we all know Al Gore didn’t invent the Internet, he sure knows how to use it to market himself! Releasing this video is brilliant. Self-depreciating humor is the #1 way to gain trust. Entertainment is the best form of maintaining attention. And surrounding the whole concept with a near perfect (almost wrote text book LOL!) Web 2.0 marketing initiative is brilliant. The Web site is great purely from an execution perspective.

One of the reasons I blog is this Web 2.0 initiated environment of “connecting” with people by being honest, forthcoming and personal. As a CEO of a business, a 1.0 attitude would be for me to take excruciating pains to build a personal brand that is perhaps “not who I am” by diverting people’s attention from “the real me” and building an alter-ego.

Today, however, I am quite comfortable being a CEO that leverages his personal blog to publish my honest and forthright dialog (uncensored by my PR agency) in the public blogoshpere and display proudly my affinity for cheap beer, fat skis and thin expensive Tablet PCs. The 1.0 expectation of old is that I would minimally fake a rant and rave about my wine cellar, Lexus or my golf game! In fact, I prefer to rant and rave about a lot of very non 1.0 CEO things like publicly adoration and prioritizations of my family over my business (shudder!) and even go as far as to admit to playing hooky on a powder day!

But that’s really better left for another post on personal branding in the 2.0…back to Al Gore:

It’s unfortunate that the R’s get branded as being environmentally unfriendly all the time and that the D’s are by default all tree hugging hippies. I certainly hope that Al Gore rises above the typical (and expected) R vs. D slam-fest cycle and keeps this dialog above “partisan politics”. I don’t think that the R vs. D debates of old will survive the online social communities of the 2.0 world. R vs. D is a very “binary” dialog and ultimately a dead end. The reality is that the world is very gray and that the MySpace Generation may be the first generation to become adept at Fuzzy Thinking.

I often joke that ” Nevada made the Internet“. The fact is that 87% of the US’s gold production comes from here and pretty much every mineral necessary or essential to make a motherboard, cell phone, router, laptop or PDA comes out of the ground here. Demonizing the mining industry for supporting the demands of the technology industry is — and always has been — lame.

Nevada is a mining state and we unfortunately bear the burden of being depicted as an “environmentally unfriendly state” because of that. Making the Internet is a mineral and natural resources intensive business and if you’re reading this then you owe a bit of thanks to Nevada.

Mining IS dirty. ‘Them ‘thar minerals are in the dirt. But my recent experience is that nothing could be further from the truth at this point with regards to the motivations of the mining industry. I don’t think that there isn’t a mining company in this state that isn’t eyeballing the opportunities to participate in the alternative energies/fuels/resources business in some fashion. In fact, I bet more-than-our-fair-share of investment capital and federal incentives ( Reid/ Ensign) raised/appropriated on alternative energies, fuels and resources ends up being directed here to-wards the “Silver State”. In other words, there’s gold in ‘them ‘thar hills and it’s in the form of Al Gore driven demand for keeping this planet alive and healthy and the Adam Smith-loving investors seeking returns on their dollars. (I liken the Biodieselmania to the Moonshine economy of the Prohibition.)

Here’s my prediction: from a state branding perspective, expect Nevada to emerge over the next five years as the the most environmentally relevant state in the nation! As long as the mining companies don’t think like Amtrak and think more like Microsoft we’ll see some interesting innovation soon…

Your thoughts?

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