Internet Events, Facebook Advertising, Internet Marketing and SEO

I’ve been on mac for years now, through at least 5 computers. There is a spreadsheet I need to open, which only works with windows and excel for windows. So I installed Parallels which allows you to run windows on a mac. Then it came time to download the windows software.

All of a sudden everything came to a complete stop and it said something like it would take 24 hours to load. WTF? ROFL!

Jasmin sitting next to me who uses a windows computer says, “Welcome to the world of PC.”

What you are watching is a live streaming video.

I usually don’t talk about my “other” life on this blog, but most of my hard core followers know that half my week I am a chiropractor in La Jolla California. After all that is how I got started in internet marketing over 10 years ago. I have always been the internet marketer for Seaside Chiropractic.

With the recession, the demands on our marketing have been much stronger than usual, so we have had to kick it up a notch or two. In fact, it is time to get some more fingers on the keyboard besides mine. The things that have always worked for us still work, but maybe not quite as well, and we are in hard core testing mode. If you live in San Diego, you will see all kinds of crazy things coming out of our office as testing. Just for the record, chair yoga as a lead gen method does not work well, LOL, one of last weeks tests. I bet from this blog post I will get a ton more opt ins. If you fill it out, I am not going to send you the video, becuase we know you are not the target market 🙂

I have been pulling in all my favorite creative minds to come up with some new ideas to test, Ad Hustler has done some great work that we are testing, Dan Ryan the expert in lead gen has been working on things, and Roseanna (famous from the googling images for Roseanna0 has been firing away as well as myself. By the way I am constantly amazed when clients call me to try to market something for them how quickly they give up. I know to figure something that will work well will most likely take months, and months of testing to find a home run.

I obviously have more ideas than I have time to test, so today for the first time I had a job interview for a social media marketer. I never would have thought of hiring someone for this, since I am one!

It was one of the funnest job interviews I have ever had. In case you don’t know my history on this, I am about the most bad ass job interviewers in the world. If you imagine me interviewing people, you are totally wrong. Unless you have been there, you could never imagine what it is like. I actually get fan letters from people who have been to my interviews years later talking about how it was the turning point of their life.

Tonight was totally different. It was a completely different crowd than a normal chiropractic office group interview. It was mostly guys. They didn’t smile much. It reminded me of talking to groups at internet conferences. They were pretty intense. They knew social media, and used it. Some of them were working on it constantly. The funny thing was how different their daily experiences were. One woman spends her day on youtube and myspace, helping to promote bands. Another guy, is doing a lot of text advertising, another guy has a funny tshirt site. By text I mean, building up text message lists, the way I build email lists. Another one is building twitter friends like crazy to build his t-shirt business.

So we had a great group discussion on the subject of social media for small businesses.

We got to one point, and I asked them, how many of you have facebook accounts? Everyone.

Then asked them how many have twitter accounts? 10 out of the 12.

I paused, realizing the historicalness of the moment, then with a grin, asked them,

“How many twitter followers do you have?”

It was an odd moment, because I think to all of us we realized how odd the moment was.

Here was  verifiable statistically measurable method of evaluating these social media applicants.

One had 300, another 1,000, and so on, then one girl had 12,000 followers.

Then I asked them the tough question, what is your ratio?

Most of them were pretty close to one to one.

When I got to the girl, she was following like 40 people, and had 12,000 followers.

It turned out she had modeling shots in her bikini.

Somehow it always seems to come down to that. LOL

I also asked them how many of them had looked me up online?

All of them said they had.

I asked them what they knew about me.

None of them had found this blog, or the other stuff about me online.

Let’s see if any of them find it now. 🙂

One of my biggest goals since going online has simply been a good way to handle e-mail that works.

After years of screwing around with different ideas and set ups, my dream just came true.

My little blackberry 8900, my Mac Air, and my Gmail account are finally talking.

Before today I had to delete the e-mail off of my mac, and then off my blackberry again later.

Yesterday, no joke, I finally got around to deleting the e-mails off of my blackberry, there were over 10,000 of them.

Why don’t I use an i-phone? Can’t type on the thing with one hand. Can’t type without looking. Can’t carry back up batteries with me. Breaks when you sit on it or drop it which I do regularly.

Literally took minutes to set up and now my gmail pulls, pushes, does jumping jacks and the whole bit.

Full on stoked that what I expected back in like 1997 is finally possible easily.

So when do I get my waterproof watch phone I expected back in 1995?

Click the little icon below, download it, and you too can delete e-mails off your entire gmail system while waiting in line at Chipotle.

Just got back from Alice in Wonderland. After Avatar and now this, the bar is way up there. I thought we were going to need holograms at the movies to create this type of reality. No need. Give it another 5 minutes and there will be no more need for actors, our computer screens will be 3D, and the movie will change based on our choices and reactions. Wow. To keep up is requiring us to to be faster and smarter than ever. Just WOW.

If all the text below makes you dizzy, follow the upcoming link to see pictures of your internet friends drinking with hot girls.

Summary of below:  Buy a Mac.

I am by no means a hard core programmer, but I have been using computers since you needed punch cards to enter the data. (pre-keyboards).

I bought my first PC around 1990, an IBM XT clone, then an AT, and then it seemed I got a new computer every year or more often.

It got to the most bizare crazy strange point when I decided I was sick of my computer crashing constantly, so I bought a brand new Dell, and then with the usual business needs whizzing toward me at a gazillion miles per hour, my new computer would not work, and I ended up on hold for over and hour, then to talk to a guy in who I couldn’t understand, only to have to send in my brand new computer.

Even after that I suffered through a few more PC’s. I got sick of my computer crashing constantly, and always needing to reboot which took three or four minutes.

I posted a thread at webmasterworld asking what people thought of alternating two machines, moving my data back and forth, and re-formating the hard drive each time and re-installing windows.

After the thread made the front page of Webmaster World, and the banter had gone on a bit, the Mac guys started speaking up. Their comments often went like this.

“Or just use a Mac”

At first I just dismissed their comments because real programmers don’t use Macs or Macs are more for artists or people learning computers. I am a real computer geek so need a real computer that can do complicated things! Like crash.

Then someone mentioned that a Mac has at its core a Linux type operating system. I knew that Matt Cutts used a Linux box, so I started investigating. Shoemoney told me that he uses a Mac. Then I started noticing that most of the guys I know, who are really in the know, use Macs.

So I went to the Mac store and got an Airbook.

I ran into a real snag trying to get it to run Windows, so left it sitting on the dinning room table for a few months.

Recently Outlook crashed and crashed hard. Apparantly the file size had gotten too big, but Windows would not let me open it to delete anything inside. After about 8 hours or work, I was able to figure out a way to handle the file. That was it, 8 hours wasted, “See ya Bill!”

Instead of trying to use Windows inside of my Mac, I just went to the Apple store a half mile from my house. When was the last time you went to a Windows store? I just bought the Mac version of all of the software I use. F the costs, let’s just get a machine that works.

The learning curve was a little painful. It has now been almost two months since I made the switch. The only programs that didn’t work easily were parallels, which was simply complicated to install windows inside of, and the Apple version of Excel called numbers. That program is beutiful with the graphics, but even with simple spreadsheets it can hang up and take 30 seconds to copy a set of cells from one place to another. So I ended up sucking it up and buying Office for home and students which works just great.

On average I bet I am getting well over 30% more done now on my computer, simply because I am not constantly fixing things. It may even be double what I used to.

You know how you will get a question about Windows and then spend the next 2 hours searching, and still never get it fixed, so you come up with some complicated work around using a freeware program you get on two cows? With Mac if I don’t know how to do something, I get on my bike with my Airbook in my backpack, and roll over to the Apple store. Some 22 year old kid with a mohawk and a pierced lip will smile at me and say, “Hi! Welcome to the Apple store”. I then bust out my Airbook, show him the problem, (It may be a girl with a pierced lip and eyebrow also), and then they say, here, just click on the Apple icon and then hold down the command key and press the smiley face! Then it works. In the words of Marcus Tandler that I have stolen lately, “Wow!”.

They have a genius bar that you can schedule an appointment for at no cost, and bring your problems to also. They got sick of me bringing so many problems there, so I was asked to sign up for one on one training. It costs $100 and you can get an apple geek an hour a week for a year to teach you private lessons on anything with an apple logo on it. I did manage to stump the guy on a few more advanced questions, but on my first lesson yesterday I covered so much material so fast in the same amount of time I would have been on hold waiting for someone at Dell to pick up.

One other amazing example is that I have decommissioned a few of my Windows computers the last few weeks. Removing a program in Windows requires opening a program to do so, waiting for it to populate removable programs, selecting one and waiting while the uninstall program for that program opens, then you click through removal options, only to wait while it tries to uninstall the program. Then you are greeted with an option of some of the files being shared and you can delete them if you want, but it warns you may crash another program in the future. Then when you are all done, it lists the files it was unable to delete because they were locked. And god only knows what still lurks in the windows registry when you are done that will crash your system in the future.

Want to uninstall a program in Mac? Click on the program. Hold down the Command key, and press delete.

I don’t know where Apple stock is at the moment, but I predict that in the coming decade they will dominate the market and it is too late for Microsoft to do anything about it.