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Home About Archive Subscribe Learning Chinese When I first arrived in China, all I could say was “hello.” A year later, on my last day in Beijing, I found myself giving an entire speech in Chinese. I took a deep breath as I looked out at the familiar faces of nearly two hundred people with whom I had shared the most challenging yet rewarding experience of my life. As I had hoped, my audience laughed and cried along with me. During this moment, like so many before, I realized just how far I had come. In May 2004, I was on my way to spend a semester abroad in Paris. To pass time on the nine-hour plane ride, my father brought along a deck of Chinese flashcards. He patiently showed me how to use the flashcards to independently study Chinese, and to my great surprise, I was able to learn over sixty characters in less than an hour. A year later, during my first week of classes in China, my teacher wrote a character up on the chalkboard and I smiled in recognition. The character for “person” was my first friend among many strangers. During my year in China, I was always eager for every opportunity to speak Chinese. I would strike up conversations with taxi drivers, shopkeepers, waiters, and everybody in between. My Chinese rapidly progressed to the point where I was often mistaken for a native speaker, even though my physical appearance belies that assumption. But for me, studying abroad was not just about learning a new language: it was an experience defined by learning to live in a radically different part of the world. And I knew this particular learning experience could not be confined to a classroom, no matter where in the world that classroom might be located. September 28th, 2008 | View commentsComments The Inertia of Intent In life, I believe ambition can be boiled down to two different types of motivation: Having the intent to exceed the circumstances from which you came, or being content to stay where you started. My thinking is that the more you had as a kid, the more you have to have as an adult to feel successful in surpassing the standards that have been set for you.  And in turn, the less you had as a kid, the less it would seem you have to do to exceed the expectations. Yet, that’s completely unfair comparison. It’s proportional, right?  The bar might seem lower from somebody else’s point of view, but in reality, it’s just as difficult or challenging to reach. Because it’s still the same X amount beyond the starting point Y, which is a vastly different starting point relative to that of another person. Thus, it’s an unnecessarily frustrating exercise to compare ourselves to another person. But it seems natural that we compare ourselves to our parents, because that’s what we know best. For a person whose parents didn’t go to school, getting a college degree would feel like achieving success. For a person whose parents made a cool million dollars, maybe being successful means making ten million dollars.  Who knows?  More importantly, who cares? In terms of socioeconomic background, coming from less or more seems to be irrelevant. No matter where people came from, they will always struggle with and against what they had or didn’t have. Eventually, we all have to realize that the bar is not measured against our parents, but against ourselves. Point being, success cannot be defined by anybody else.  Not our parents, not our friends, and not our society at large.  Truly successful people are the ones who know exactly what success means to them as an individual.  Simply because the only person who can know whether or not you are truly successful is, well, YOU.  Only you know what metrics of success to use. Yet maybe this is why the people who originally set out to prevail over what they came from often go on to keep achieving. The inertia of intent stays constant even after it evolves from eclipsing their upbringing into surmounting where they are currently.  They are driven to keep working towards success, even as their definition of success continues to change. August 29th, 2008 | View commentsComments Addicted to Information “Hi, my name is Melissa, and I’m addicted to information.” “Hiiiiiiiiiiii, Melissa.“ What is the first thing I do in the morning? Check my Gmail. What do I do after I blow-dry my hair but before I get dressed? Check my Google Reader. What do I do while I’m eating breakfast? Chat on instant messenger, browse Facebook, and review the Google Analytics data from the day before. What do I do ALL DAY LONG? Read Twitter. RSS feeds feed my addiction. (No pun intended. Okay, intended.) But at the same time, they also quench it. Using a feed reader keeps a steady stream of information flowing in, so when I check in to see what’s new, I’m never disappointed. The problem is, I have trouble tearing myself away at the end of the night. I literally lose sleep over this. Not that I sleep much to begin with, but when I load Google Reader right before bed, it’s literally like opening up Pandora’s Box. It starts with, Oh, I’ll just have a quick click around. You know, see if any of my absolutely-must-reads have been updated yet. Open a link here, open a link there. But open tabs lead to more open tabs. Which inevitably lead to even more open tabs. And then suddenly, I start to suffer from The Curse of the Never-Ending Open Tabs. If the internet is a portal through which I explore the world, then a tabbed browser is like a black hole. Or a vortex. Either way, once I go in, I never seem to come out on the other side. On that note, I’m consciously choosing to ignore the 27 tabs I currently have open in my browser and am going to bed instead. Night night. August 4th, 2008 | View commentsComments Calendar Calibration In the past, I’ve never been very big on using calendars, because I’ve always found the most reliable, accurate, up-to-date schedule was the one in my head. That opinion hasn’t changed much over time, but currently, I find myself using my Google Calendar to calibrate with the calendars that don’t reside in my head. I share my schedule with my friends and keep track of all of their schedules, too. I check it almost religiously, largely for the same reasons I am addicted to Twitter: I just like to know what everybody is up to. I no longer live in the same city as the majority of my friends, so It’s important to me to retain a connection to their day-to-day lives. Having access to their calendars helps me do that. Yesterday evening, I asked John Erik Metcalf to remind me to book my plane tickets to Austin for the upcoming holiday weekend. When I was absentmindedly perusing my schedule for the day, a 2PM appointment on John’s calendar caught my attention: MELISSA IS GOING TO BOOK HER TRIP. RIGHT MELISSA? The novelty of this got me thinking about way I use my Google Calendar and why. I began using calendars for the first time in my life when my best friend Meredith began her first year of law school last fall. She simultaneously works full-time at a law firm, so as you can imagine, getting a hold of her became quite challenging. In order to streamline the process of finding time when we were both free to talk, she shared her Google Calendar with me. Meredith’s calendar tells me when her law school classes are, when she has a massive research project due, and when her final exams are happening. A quick glance helps me decide when I should call her to catch up. Most importantly, a shared calendar lets me pencil myself in. When I see that she’s got a rare block of free time, I might schedule some time for us to talk on the phone for an hour or two. Funny enough, her boyfriend started doing the same thing as me. Instead of wasting her precious study or sleep time by verbally discussing date details, he goes straight to her calendar, finds some mutually free time, and proposes dinner or coffee or a movie. Disclaimer: If you didn’t already know, I’m a huge geek. It should come as no surprise that I think it’s positively adorable when he asks her out on a date via Google Calendar. And so does Meredith. She is gleeful when she wakes up in the the morning and finds an invite for definite, definitive plans waiting in her inbox. But beyond coordination, sharing your calendar has other interesting advantages in personal relationships. For one, it has the potential to change the “Hey honey, how was your day?” “Oh, you know, fine.” conversation at the end of the day, which is a ritual that often becomes empty and meaningless after enough time is spent with another person. Why is that? Well, broad, open-ended questions can seem tiresome and intrusive after a long, trying day. But if I looked at your calendar and saw that you gave a presentation to your most important client, I could ask you specifically about that. That was one small part of your day, sure, but somehow, the level of specificity makes it easier to grapple with. And it effectively opens the door of communication, making it more likely for you to go on to describe the rest of your day in its entirety, too. The bottom line is, technology is not only changing where our relationships begin, but also impacting the nature of the relationships we have with other people, whether they be romantic, friendship, or business-oriented. June 19th, 2008 | View commentsComments Textual Innuendos People seem to believe that text is an emotionless medium, and I, frankly, disagree. If you spend enough time speaking through textual mediums such as email, instant message, or text message, you start to pick up on other people’s typing habits. Particularly after I spend significant amount of time talking to one person, I find my familiarity with their typing habits allows me to notice when their style or tone changes, and thus quickly and easily pick up on information about their emotions. With all public-facing and/or indexable communications, like blogging, Twittering, or Tumbling, I always use proper capitalization and punctuation. On Facebook, it depends on whose wall I’m writing, but I can go either way. However, in all personal and work-related email, whether it be for my place of employment or my own projects, this applies as well. I used to type properly while instant messaging, but have since regressed into being an all lowercase type of gal, while still maintaining perfect punctuation and grammar. I type extremely fast and am usually exceedingly accurate, but I use instant messaging all day every day, so I figure I’ll save myself that many extra keystrokes in casual conversation. I would say the majority of the people I talk to over instant messaging also subscribe to lowercase, with one notable exception, but even he sometimes has a lowercase kind of day. And I always notice. Unless I am making a point or being stern, I rarely use a period at the end of a sentence. When I use three dots, I’m still thinking and I’m not quite done with the thought… and if I use two dots, it’s because I’m hesitating or trailing off for other reasons.. and if I use an excessive amount of dots, I’m usually being sarcastic or otherwise calling attention to something……………. I don’t use other end-of-sentence punctuation, unless I’m using it as an entire stand-alone line. Generally as a way of following up a statement with excitement (!) or prodding somebody with an extra window flash if they’ve taken too long to respond to a question (?). Additionally, just about everybody knows there is a notable difference between using “haha,” “hehe,” “heh,” “ha,” “hah,” or any of the other variations of expressing amusement. Of course, there is no golden guide to what all of the small, nearly impercetible alterations to style or tone might actually mean, because it’s different from person-to-person. But I know that there is definitely a rhyme and a reason to what I type and how I type it. June 17th, 2008 | View commentsComments Being a Relater At the Tumblr event on Sunday, I met Bill Cammack while standing with a group of friends. In his recent post, he talks about how he didn’t recognize my Twitter name or my real name, and therefore was unable to place me in context. He also mentions that’s he when he tried several times to draw a connection between us, and found none. Now, to be fair, Bill did a very good job at facilitating our initial conversation. However, it’s easy for me to tell people what I “do right now” with any number of simple answers — marketing, advertising, search marketing, digital media — and much, much more difficult to explain what it is that I “do.” Because I do a lot of things. And to his credit, he did a very thorough e-stalk on me, and emailed me with all sorts of comments and questions. Yes, I am in advertising. But I’m also a geek, a writer, a blogger, an author, a photographer, a photojournalist, a restaurant reviewer, a programmer, a world traveler, a public speaker, a fluent Mandarin Chinese speaker, an entrepreneur, a web and graphic designer, a videographer, an inline speed skater, and probably a lot of other things that I’m forgetting. And I have a VERY wide range of interests which are arguably even more varied than my background. The point here is not to brag. The point being I have a *very* diverse background, and thus am usually able to contribute an experience or some knowledge to most any conversation that is happening. This makes me quite good at small talk. But it still doesn’t mean I enjoy it by any means. I’m still fundamentally an introvert who happens to possess some SERIOUSLY STRONG extroverted qualities. Bill is obviously a good conversation starter. And he’s a fantastic networker for this reason. I’m also good at networking, but I use tend to use a different approach to conversations. As a keen observer, I prefer to move around a room, watch how people are interacting, overhear a couple of conversations, and then find one where I can jump in. This is my way of finding context, when it isn’t possible to know something in advance about the person standing in front of me. Plus, the participants in the conversation are already more interested in talking to me than if we had all started cold, because I’ve made myself relevant to what they’re already talking about. I’m a relater. In my experience, people aren’t interested in “you.” They’re interested in how “you” are interesting to them. Being a relater is a good way to efficiently and effectively establish common ground, and skip the whole awkward “Uh, so, yeah, what do you do? Uh huh. And how is that?” And that’s the part that I dislike. Not the getting to know you part. Being a relater makes me highly proficient at virtual networking, because I have a wealth of information at my disposal. You might not know me yet, and you definitely do not yet know that you want to know me, but when I make initial contact with you, I will demonstrate by relating my experiences and knowledge to your own. I find that people come across an article which inspires them, they’re likely to think to themselves, “Well, man, the author of that article is obviously inspiring himself and he must get a bajillion emails a day with people telling him how inspiring he is. Yeah, it’d be nice if I sent him an email and told him how inspired I was, but it will be one of the bajillion that he gets everyday and there is no point because why would he respond to mine over all of the other ones?” Uh, helloooo, self-defeatist. Not to say that this internal monologue isn’t EXACTLY correct. Because it absolutely is. But nobody is forcing you to be boring and normal like everybody else. WHY was it inspiring to you? WHY did you find it interesting? WHY was it more on-point than anything else like it? Chances are, the author wants to know. Maybe it’s just because I started using the internet when I was so young, and I had not yet had a chance to develop the attitude described above. But when I come across something or someone who inspires me, I always reach out. I’ve made it habit. I’ve gotten to be an ace at writing self-introduction emails. I think it’s a good skill to have. However, that doesn’t mean that “real-life networking” is any less important. Apparently, Bill wasn’t the only one who didn’t get a full impression of who I am. I also gave my stock “Oh, I’m in marketing” answer to Marco Arment, one of the founders of Tumblr who came up to me and introduced himself because he recognized me from my Tumblr. In an email exchange this week after finding out more about me, he wrote “I completely underestimated your geek level.” So, what I’ve learned from writing this post is that I need to get better at delivering my “personal” elevator speech. Because otherwise, I leave the person feeling befoogled. June 15th, 2008 | View commentsComments Domain Names For me, a project always starts with a name. A name of some sort, whether it be a title, headline, or a domain name, before I could start doing work. The name didn’t always have to be final, but I needed some name to start with. I don’t know if this is a bad habit or a good habit, but these days, it seems like a useful habit, at very least. I never start a new project without a name and a corresponding domain name. I can think back to the mid-90s, when I first started using the internet and designing websites, I had the chance to register melissa.com. But being that I was only 10 or 11 years old at the time, I decided it was far cooler to have a domain name that used my handle at the time, so I registered melissa976.com. Big mistake, it would seem. Well, they do say that hindsight is always 20/20. I like to believe I’ve made up for that gaffe with the purchase of awesome domains like gee.ky, which, in the circles I run in, is just about as cool as you can get with a domain name. But either way, I’ve certainly learned my lesson. I always check to see if the domain name is free before I choose a name. And oftentimes, I buy several domains before I actually settle on a name. Currently, I own over 20 domain names. Seems like a lot. But thinking back to the domains that I’ve let expire over the past few years, that number would probably be more like 40. I’m not the only one, either. A quick poll on Twitter last week, and I realized that my friends own anywhere from 1 to nearly 100 domain names. Wow. Cliff Spradlin is a friend of mine, with whom I work on nearly every project. Since I’m rather preoccupied (read: obsessed) with domain names, I usually end up being the one who purchases them for our projects. Recently though, when I was about to register a new one, Cliff said to me, “Hey, you’ve bought the last several domain names. Let me get this one.” Making it seem as if it was as commonplace as a round of beers. Nice. May 31st, 2008 | View commentsComments Data in the Wild In the Boston BarCamp session called Public Data, one of the opening statements stood out to me: “Data in the wild is dirty.” There is an overwhelming amount of public data that could and should be processed and analyzed, however there is, as of yet, no real set of standards for organizing the data into a machine-readable, parsable format. Wikipedia, is, of course, everybody’s favorite example of an enormous amount of data that is meticulously maintained. Who would have ever expected Wikipedia to work? Yet, in general, truth is up-modded on the internet. This means that Wikipedia is self-healing. Literally. But does our society have the capacity, as a whole, to participate in this self-healing process? Better yet, is our society willing to participate? At dinner on Saturday night, @mattknox told us that Americans took all of the time they spend watching television in one year and put those hours towards editing Wikipedia instead, we would be able to create 2,000 Wikipedias. In one year. Alas. So much public data is freely available, yet we (yes, the big, collective, internet “we”) need to be figure out ways to harness the power and acquire the knowledge contained within it. May 19th, 2008 | View commentsComments On Viral Marketing The viral marketing session at Boston BarCamp was led by Matt Peters of Pandemic Labs. His basic premise was that the field is too new, meaning there are no real “experts” yet. I wholeheartedly agree, but I believe that this sentiment isn’t limited to viral marketing. In fact, it seems to extends to most new and emerging forms of digital marketing. Which basically includes everything except straight-up online media buys for banner-ads, homepage take-overs, and the like. In addition, much like SEO, viral marketing is primarily based on theory. You work to learn, understand, and use the principles, but no matter how hard you might try, there remains a certain element of luck and timing involved with any success in viral marketing. Next, most people misunderstand what viral marketing actually “is.” They definitely know it when they see it. They recognize the OKGO video, the End of the World video, or the “Charlie bit me” video. But being able to identify the great successes doesn’t necessarily translate into being able to facilitate their own success. Viral marketing refers to the method of dissemination, not the results. People don’t understand that you can’t simply “pay” for a video to turn into a wild success and garner 27 million views practically overnight. Why? Because viral marketing is basically a new version of the oldest form of marketing: Word-of-mouth. Or, as Matt put it, “word-on mouth on crack.” Matt keenly explained that viral marketing can be simply defined as getting in front of a massive amount of eyeballs without actually paying for the eyeballs. And since you can’t pay to get in front of the eyeballs, the objects used in viral marketing must have intrinsic value, which could be entertainment, informational, or otherwise. Moral of the story? Instead of spending tons of money trying to game the system, invest your money in creating content. Engaging, valuable content is absolutely the most vital element of viral marketing. There it is. The secret to viral marketing is out. However, it goes deeper than that. You still cannot simply “buy” your way into having great content. Sure, you could pay somebody a lot of money to do it for you, but it will feel empty and contrived. Viral success can’t be had with just smoke and mirrors and really cool special effects. Sure, all of that might get a decent amount of views, but it has to amount to more. This is because authenticity is paramount. Internet users, particularly savvy ones, have a highly tuned, sensitive meter for bullshit. Trust me on this one, you cannot easily fool them. So stop trying. Quit wasting your money, and put some brain and heart into your efforts instead. And if truth is important, then truth of origin is imperative. You might be doing an unbranded viral marketing effort, but once people start figuring it out, own up. Claim it. Whatever you do, don’t deny it. News travels far too fast on the internet. Worst of all, alienated evangelists turn into enemies. And evangelistic enemies are basically your worst marketing nightmare. Furthermore, with viral marketing, there is no end-all-be-all, one-size-fits-all solution. So instead seeing it as a means to an end, view it as an multi-level, multi-stage experiment instead. The bottom-line is that viral is cheap. Try multiple approaches instead of binding yourself to one. You can afford it. On a related note, Matt upheld that viral marketing is not the right fundamental approach for everybody. A company needs to carefully evaluate if it’s the right approach for them. To make this assessment, you must examine the value being created for your potential users/customers/clients. Matt gave a good example: With respects to database management systems, there are probably better ways to get the brand or product out there. I agree with to a certain extent, but then again, who knows? Maybe there is a way to make viral marketing work unexpectedly well in seemingly strange applications. Maybe viral marketing for database management systems will work simply because it is so completely out there. If they really want to give it a shot, then more power to them. In any case, any success in viral marketing must possess that intangible, mission-critical element of ’stickiness.’ It has to make me want to watch it again. It has to make me want to come back for more. And most of all, it has to make me want to send it to my entire network of people. Hence the newest buzzword compliant term for what is, again, basically word-of-mouth 2.0: A “viral loop” refers to an application or service where the first step upon downloading and/or signing-up requires you to recruit other people. Prime examples of this phenomenon include essentially all of the most annoying, worthless Facebook applications like Zombies and Vampires. You obviously can’t prey on people when you have no people to prey on. Duh. Finally, one of the people in the audience asked Matt a great question about viral success in the area of mobile advertising. He truthfully (remember: truthfulness is key) admitted that there really had yet to be single stand-out “great success” in mobile advertising. Meaning? It’s still a wild frontier folks, so get out there and own that space. May 19th, 2008 | View commentsComments Boston BarCamp Wow, what a weekend. I woke up on Saturday morning at 4:30AM in order to get ready in time to shower, get ready, pack, and leave to make the 7AM Chinatown bus with @ChrisRicca. It was actually the first time I met Chris in real life, but given that we’ve been Twitter buddies for awhile, we were able to immediately launch into an interesting, lively conversation. And then the early morning rise caught up with us, and we promptly passed out for the remainder of the bus ride. We accidentally took the scenic route (read: got hopelessly lost) from the T-station to the location of BarCamp3. We ended up appreciating our little excursion, as it was an absolutely gorgeous day in Boston. Upon arriving, we jumped right into the sessions. ______ My favorite part about the entire event was the way the session schedule was put together. Basically, they put a huge piece of brown shipping paper up on the wall, provided a stack of huge Post-It notes, a handful of Sharpies, and let people just go at it. A very smart mob-like approach.For the people who were unsure there would be enough interest in the topic they wanted to present on, there was a separate board where you could stick up an idea, and let people up-mod it. My personal favorite was all of the responses written on the “Who is the last Cylon model?” But uber geekery aside, I noticed that quite a few topics that started on the idea board migrated over to the schedule board. From my standpoint, the best sessions of the weekend were ‘Viral Marketing Q&A’ by Matt Peters of Pandemic Labs and ‘At The Intersection of Everything: Social, Virtual, Mobile, Semantic, WWWeb’ by Jay Neely of Social Strategist. However, I found that all of sessions were interesting in their own right. And I have lots of notes, so I plan to write more very, very soon. All in all, it was an incredible weekend. A huge thank you goes out to the people who took the time and effort to organize such a great event. I have a great number new smart, savvy hacker-friends with whom I hope to collaborate in the future. Oh, and my business postcards were a hit. May 17th, 2008 | View commentsComments « Older Entries Melissa Sconyers Twitter Tumblr Flickr Yelp (c) 1994-2008 Melissa Sconyers

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