Mike MacLeod

I’m Not Going To Be A Fat Dad

// February 22nd, 2010 // Comments // Journal

We all know that the modern world is getting fatter – and I have been leading the charge.  I have been fat my entire life.  I have no memory of being a healthy weight. This, despite the fact that I lived a very active lifestyle for my first two decades.  Through my youth I played hockey, baseball, basketball, volleyball, lacrosse, and yes, even a little soccer.  I also played varsity football in college.

However, as I moved into my twenties and then my thirties, I became more sedentary and with that, I became fatter and fatter.  Yes, there were times when I would get on a program and maintain a healthy eating pattern.  I would lose 20, 30, or 40 pounds.  But like millions of others, I would gain it all back and then some.

While I have many painful memories related to my weight, they were just that – MY memories.  This was my life. My weight was my cross to bear.

But that is no longer the case.  I am a dad.  I have a beautiful 11-month old daughter and the coolest 6-year old son around.  Everything I do and everything I am directly affects them.  This absolutely includes the fact that I am fat and the reasons why I continue to be.

I am not going to allow my kids to live my life.  They are going to live a healthy life and in order to do so, they will have healthy role models. This includes their father.  Additionally, they are not going to miss out on having their Dad around.

So in the middle of 2009 I decided to take a serious, permanent step towards improving my health.  I was going to have weight loss surgery.  Specifically, I was going to have a gastric bypass.

This is me pre-surgery. 357 pounds!!

On November 16, the day before my 38th birthday, Dr. Clarence Holland performed the procedure on me at St. Luke’s Hospital in Allentown, PA.  Everything went extremely well.  I was discharged the next day and two days later I was back at work.

I know many people think that weight loss surgery is “the easy way” to weight loss.  Well, let me be very clear that there is nothing easy about the way I currently live.  My entire relationship with food has changed and sometimes, I have been kicking and screaming the entire way.

However, I still consider this the best decision I have ever made.

90 days later - 275 lbs

Along with my new eating patterns, I have hit the gym harder than ever before.  I have taken up running – something that I have hated doing my entire life, even when playing competitive sports.

After 90 days, I have lost 82 pounds!  The feeling is incredible.  I still have a ways to go before I reach my goal weight, but I am 100% positive that I will reach it and that I will maintain a healthy weight for the rest of my life.

I will be making future posts about my progress and experiences.  But for now, I am confident that my kids are going to have a healthy Dad who, God-willing, will be around for a long, long time.

Bill Gates – “New” Nuclear Will Move Us To Zero Emisisons

// February 20th, 2010 // Comments // Video

At TED2010, Bill Gates unveils his vision for the world’s energy future, describing the need for “miracles” to avoid planetary catastrophe and explaining why he’s backing a dramatically different type of nuclear reactor. The necessary goal? Zero carbon emissions globally by 2050.

This is incredibly exciting and it’s encouraging that someone of the stature and capabilities of Bill Gates is behind this.

People Browsr

// July 8th, 2009 // Comments // Thought

Have you seen the new tools on PeopleBrowsr.com? Their marketing people must suck. Why else would @PeopleBrowsr not be used by everyone?

Evan Williams (at TED) on listening to Twitter users

// July 6th, 2009 // Comments // Video

Evan Williams on listening to Twitter users (February 2009)

LoveStats’ Theory on Declining Response Rate

// July 5th, 2009 // Comments // Quote

The solution, though simple, is long term. Let’s improve surveys. Shorten them, improve the quality, make them real. The most incredible thing is that we already know how to do this. Over time, people will begin to see the change. They will start to appreciate marketing research surveys again. A new generation of responders will see what we are offering and choose to be a part of it. It always feels good to know that you’ve made an important contribution. It feels even better when that contribution was fun to make.
Annie Pettit

Windmill farm on route 476

// July 5th, 2009 // Comments // Photo

I know I shouldn’t take pics while driving but these are so cool. There is a line of about 20 of them.

Catching Up..

// July 4th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

So, I’ve been helping coach my kid’s T-Ball team.

We got a new roommate three months ago.

And I’ve been putting in 75 hours a week at the office.

Living in the northeast, baseball season finishes early.  Lexie is now sleeping through the night. Things are still pretty insane at work, but at least I have some time to string more than 140 characters together.

I have a list of about 125 topics to write about, so there will be a lot of new things coming soon.

Idea For My Unemployed Friends

// March 23rd, 2009 // Comments // Journal

Ok, this idea isn’t just for those of you that are unemployed.  It could be for those of you that are sick of where you are right now in your career.

Most of you are looking for your next position in another huge company.  I know because many of you have asked me for help finding you that position.  I’m glad you did ask too because nothing is better than helping a friend, especially when they are feeling pretty low. I’m keeping my eyes and ears open for all of you.

But why not take this time in your life to try something scary? What have you got to lose?

Go out on your own. Or call a few colleagues that are in the same boat as you and start your own partnership.

You don’t know anything other than your specialty? Perfect.  Work at specializing the hell out of that specialty and outsource the rest. Everything can be outsourced today – data collection, tabs, coding, translations, even report writing, if that’s not your thing.

So maybe you need one (yes, just one) person to oversee the outsourcing while you’re impressing the hell out of your clients.

Now just think of your part.  What can you do differently from what you were doing before?

You can think beyond the next 90 days because you don’t need to worry about the stock price.

You can follow your own processes that fit you and your clients and not the ones that have been homogenized for 1,000 other employees and hundreds of other clients.

You can do way more for a lot less because your overhead is close to zero.

You can focus on a small niche and be very successful – you don’t need to get 60% of Microsoft’s business.  0.6% will probably make you very happy.

If you really want to work for a huge company, that’s not bad and I’ll still help you as much as I can.  I still work for a big company and I’m happy.

But think things through.  What have you got to lose?

91% of Tech Decision Makers Use Social Media

// February 24th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

Forrester has recently released a report titled “The Social Technographics of Business Buyers.”  Here are some highlights of the results:

click to enlarge

91% of these technology decision-makers are Spectators.

Your buyers are reading blogs, watching user generated video, and participating in other social media. 69% of them said they were using this media for business purposes.

55% of these decision-makers are Joiners

Your buyers are members of facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks. They are on Twitter too.  Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the only people on such networks are college kids and stay at home moms.

43% are Creators and 58% are Critics.

Your buyers are making their own blogs. They are uploading videos and articles.  If they are not creating their own, they are sharing and commenting on others.  How many of those articles are about you? How many are about your competitors?

Are you too late?

Marketers continue to do a better job using social media to reach out to consumers. Similarly, researchers are starting to find ways to use this media to learn about consumers.  But not much is going on in B2B.

If you’re a B2B marketer and you’re not using social technologies in your marketing, you’re late. But most of your competitors are probably late too. Take advantage of this. Go find out where your buyers are hanging out online and join them. Talk to them. Learn from them. Share with them.

The full report is available for purchase here.

Leaders Discuss Future of Social Media

// February 22nd, 2009 // Comments // Journal

During Social Media Week 2009, Abrams Research surveyed over 200 social media leaders from across North America. Here are some interesting – but not terribly surprising – results.

• A whopping 40% of respondents picked Twitter as the number one social media service for businesses. LinkedIn came in a distant second (21.3%), followed by YouTube (18.8%), with Facebook an even more distant fourth at 15.3%.
• When asked which social media service they’d be most likely to pay for, 32.2% chose Facebook – followed by 29.7% choosing business networking site LinkedIn. The contrast of Facebook’s bells-and-whistles features (photos, status updates, newsfeed, tagging) with the bare-bones networking functionality of LinkedIn suggests that many people find social networking most valuable for making professional connections. Twitter – the top pick for business use – came in third, with 21.8%.
• A paltry 1.5% said they would pay for MySpace – in a category where Facebook was the runaway winner – and only 2% said they’d recommend it for business. It came dead last in both categories – where it used to be the runaway leader.

You can see the full results of the survey here.  In the meantime, here are my personal responses to the questions:

1. Which social media service would you be most likely to pay for?

LinkedIn. Facebook would be a close second but I believe that a very large percentage of Facebook users would move elswhere if it became a pay service.  LinkedIn would maintain a much higher percentage of users.

2. What social media service would you advise a business pay for?

Twitter. The intmacy that can be gainedwith users (customers) is unmatched.

3. Which social media service will be the first to die?

Bebo.com.  Actually, it’s impassible to pick the death of any such sites.  I can’t believe anyone still uses MySpace, yet they still have millions of active users.  Bebo however just seems to want to be a little bit of everyone (facebook, YouTube) but they aren’t as good and don’t have any differentiators. But they will likely still be around several years from now.

4. Which corporation has done the best job of using social media?

Burger King.  Even though facebook quashed it, their plan to give away free Whoppers in exchange for the sacrifice of  friends was pure genious.

5. What’s the best way to monetize social media?

“Freemium” use, i.e. a free basic model followed by a fee for advanced options (i.e. storage, analytics).  The “free level” maximizes the size of the universe and also gets the die-hards hooked, wanting more that they are willing to pay for.

6. What’s the biggest challenge facing social networking services?

Developing something that is new (niche, application, technology) and keep things fresher than the eventual copycats.

7. What social networking feature is the most critical for everyday users?

Tie – Status / Newsfeed.  I guess technically, status updates are part of the newsfeed.

Seth Gets It

// February 17th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

I’m starting to feel a little more confident these days that more people are getting it. From Seth Godin’s blog:

Five tips for better online surveys

1. Every question you ask is expensive. (Expensive in terms of loyalty and goodwill). Don’t ask a question unless you truly care about the answer. This means that a vague question with vague answers (extremely satisfied…acceptable…extremely dissatisfied and no scale to compare them to) is a total waste of time. What action will you take based on that? It’s smarter to ask, “how much would you say lunch was worth?”
2. Every question you ask changes the way your users think. If you ask, “which did you hate more…” then you’ve planted a seed.
3. Make it easy for the user to bail. If you have 20 questions (that’s a lot!) make it easy to quit after five and have those answers still count. If you waste my time and then don’t count my answers, see #2.
4. Make the questions entertaining and not so serious, at least some of them. Boring surveys deserve the boring results they generate.
5. Don’t be afraid to shake up the format. Instead of saying, “Here are ten things, rank them all on a scale of one to five…” why not let people compare things? “We had two speakers, Bob and Ray. Who was better?”

Bottom line: before you let the survey guys run a survey of your loyal customer base, make them pay you with resources you can use to reinvigorate those users you just bothered.

Market Research Room in FriendFeed

// February 12th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

I’ll write more soon about how much I love friendfeed. 

For now, just go check out the Market Research room I created.  It currently agregates news and information about MR from 17 different sources (new suggestions welcome). The room includes blogs, news sources, and even twitter feeds.

You don’t even need to join friendfeed to enter the room.

Watch New Super Bowl Ads Today. It Will Be A Relief

// January 29th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

Do you hold off on any sort of pee breaks during the 6-hour spectacle of the Super Bowl because you want to see all the new ads? Then you and your bladder will thank me.

Adweek is showing previews of many of the new ads that will air on Sunday.  Jump over there now to see.

Who Decides What News Is Important?

// January 22nd, 2009 // Comments // Journal

Not long ago, CNN.com was the first site I’d visit every morning to get my fix of national and international news.  I then started migrating to Google News.   I figured that if one news source was good, then many news sources must be better.  Google aggregates stories from over 4,500 news organizations.

Now I never visit Google News. Or CNN. Or any traditional news organization.

Now I get most of my news from the people I follow on Twitter. Or friendfeed. Or from a ranking site like popurls. Or Alltop. Or Techmeme. Or Twitturly.

These sources aren’t investigating or reporting the news. But they are telling me what I should be paying attention to and where to get more details.

Are my new sources of news better or worse than my old ones? Should editors with journalism degrees tell me what the day’s headlines should be? Or is that decision better left to a much larger group of civilians?

Why Twitter Followers Don’t Matter

// January 19th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

Twitter is not a broadcast medium.  So, there is no need to make an effort to gather as many followers as possible.

If you try to broadcast your marketing message via Twitter, a few things happen:

• Only a small percentage of your followers will see an individual message.
• Some of those will be turned off and stop following you.
• To account for the above, you could broadcast more marketing messages and increase the frequency.
• You’ll reach some more followers and some of them will again be turned off.
• You will be seen as a 24/7 commercial. Followers will see less benefit in following you and stop.

Twitter is best used as a conversation agent. As in any conversation, it’s better to listen than to speak. You learn more that way.

Use Twitter to gather information. To do this, you will need to focus on following, not gaining followers.

Use Twitter to share useful information. “Buy my product” is not useful.

If you do this, followers will come on their own (I REALLY wanted to use a “build it and they will come” quote here, but deemed it too cliche) and your ego can be satiated.

Harris Poll Chairman Stands Up to The Economist

// January 19th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

Cheers to Humphrey Taylor of Harris Interactive for defending online research in his letter to The Economist:

SIR – Your article about the accuracy of opinion polling in America’s election stated that “online surveys are notoriously biased” (“Poll, baby, poll!”, October 25th). Their track record says otherwise. In the almost 80 elections in the United States and Britain where we can carry out a comparison, the final forecasts of online opinion polls have on average been somewhat more accurate than telephone polls. What’s more, they include most of the “cellphone only” population.

You also wrote that “most experts” consider as “sloppy” the weighting of surveys to compensate for biases in the sample. As the raw samples in all opinion polls contain biases, whether the data are collected in person, by mail, on the phone or online, it would be very sloppy not to weight them. Who are these experts?

Humphrey Taylor
Chairman
The Harris Poll
New York

Rubel v. Scoble: Text v. Video – Which is Better?

// January 14th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

Steve Rubel says that text is still the King of the interweb. His reasons:

1. It’s scannable
2. Search engines like text
3. Cubicle-dwellers can surf quietly
4. Mobile video sucks
5. Cut and paste

Scoble says video is godly.

You take 1,000 words to explain to me what the next game from EA looks like. I’ll do it in a minute or two of video. The video will beat your blog every time. Every time!

It’s a silly argument as they are both right.

Video wins out when video is needed. But it is not always needed. Would Rubel have made a stronger case for his argument if he was on video (as absurd as that sounds)?

When both formats are done well, video is often superior for the obvious reasons.

But video is not often done well.

And text is not often done well.

There is more of a commitment on the part of the reader/viewer when watching a video. If I know there is one good article out of 100 blog posts, I can scan them quickly and find what I’m looking for in a couple minutes.  If I start scanning for one good video out of 100, then I’m giving up after the fifth bad one.

So no one wins this one. It’s not even a tie. It’s a no contest.

Twitterize Your Market Research

// January 12th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

Best Buy’s CMO, Barry Judge (@BestBuyCMO) has reached out to Twitter users to get a quick assessment of his new ad spots.

Should this replace the formal ad testing that most companies perform? Of course not.

But it will give Barry a pretty good estimate of what’s good and bad.  If a specific ad gets a brutal response from the Twitterverse (ugh, that’s a bad term. I promise to come up with something better) then he could save some research dough by trashing it early.

Use all the information you have available to you – especially if it can be obtained quickly and cheaply.

The Research Industry Needs More Experimentation

// January 11th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

Mr. Heretic gets it.

Other people get it too.

So why are few people using everything the internet has to offer the world of market research? Why aren’t you pushing the boundaries? Why aren’t you taking risks?

Don’t tell me that risks are too expensive. Don’t get silly and bet your company or your clients on a single new approach, methodology, or process.

But you can take many smaller risks and compare the results to past experiments. Afterall, we are a research industry, right?

So why do the instruments used in 2009 look almost identical to those used in 1959? Did we get it perfect back then?

How To Organize Your RSS Feed Reader

// January 7th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

I currently have 326 feeds in my reader (I use Google Reader but there are many other good ones). To some, that many feeds is scary huge. To others, it’s not many at all. Whatever.

I’ve talked to others that follow a lot of feeds and many of them have very complex folder schemes that include subject matter, rankings, and the lunar calendar. They also spend way too much time processing them.

I usually review my feeds between 5:00 and 6:00 in the morning. My dad used to read the newspaper. I read my feeds. And I keep it simple.

I only have three folders – Essential, Trial, and Occasional.

My Essential folder is the first one I go through every morning. It contains the feeds I enjoy the most and they are all updated quite regularly.  I have 122 feeds in this folder.

When I first start following  a new feed, I put it in the Trial folder. This is the second folder I read in the morning – if I have time.  If I find myself enjoying the feed on a regular basis, I move it to the Essential folder. If I don’t enjoy it, it gets the boot. I have 95 feeds in this folder.

My Occasional folder contains feeds that are either updated less often or are about subjects that I don’t want to read about every day. This includes Photoshop tutorials, new releases on Netflix, and some guilty pleasures. There are 111 feeds in this folder and I generally read them once or twice a week.

That’s it. Nothing complicated. Sometimes, being too organized slows things down.