We came. We saw. We Spoke.

Editor’s Note: Spoke cadet and pixel farmer (literally) Josh Neuroth spins a cautionary yarn to help those who are considering Adventures in Babysitting (ahem, internet start-ups). It’s a stark reminder that with great power comes great responsibility, patience, foresight and intestinal fortitude.

In some ways, the rise of the information age has led to what some have called a 21st century Gold Rush. Unfortunately, the hype can be unwarranted. The internet can be a great business tool but basic business fundamentals still apply. Though many books, blogs, and tweets have been written on creating online businesses, we’ve put together five simple things to consider before launching an online business:

1) The internet values user experience. If an online business is to be sustainable (without continually spending a fortune on advertising), people are going to have to talk about it and spread the word to their friends. Online businesses need to create a user experience worth talking about for sustainability and growth. Mark Zuckerburg, the creator of Facebook, didn’t set out to “create the next Facebook”. Instead he focused on creating something great that he himself wanted to use.

2) The internet doesn’t magically reward great ideas. In one of his most famous quotes, Thomas Edison said, “Genius: one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” The big idea must be combined with execution to be successful. What the big idea needs does not so much depend on how young, old, or smart the founder is, but how much perseverance and self-education the founder puts in. There are no tools that make a better substitute than putting in the work.

3) Simple ideas with exceptional execution go a long way. eBay was not the first auction site but was the first to do online auctions right. Amazon was not the first online bookstore but was the first one to do it right. This comes back to putting in the hard work and creating an experience worth talking about.

4) A kick-ass half is better than a half-ass whole.* Business owners can get away with a less than stellar brick and mortar business because of physical location. With millions of websites online, users can pick a competitor with a single click. To effectively stand against the competition, it’s far easier and better to focus on being the best in the world at one thing. This increased focus makes you stand out to the rest of the world and makes it harder for competitors to compare against you.

5) Online success can be slow. One of my close friends started an online retail store in 2005 selling high-end consumer goods. It took almost six weeks before the first order rolled in. Today, the business is doing very well with thousands of world-wide customers. For the first few years, he built the business by himself, often working late nights, and relied on outside contractors and firms to help with the search engine marketing and web design. If this slow start is the case with most online businesses, then what about the “overnight” successes we hear about? These accelerated successes usually come in two ways without fail: 1) from people who already have experience building a previous online business 2) from those able to secure venture funding and receiving external experience from an investor.

If there is one thing that trumps all else, it’s starting a business that you’re passionate about, committed to, and willing to do whatever it takes to see it become the best. Evaluate opportunities based on this first. Would you still pursue this business in one year? Three years? Five? Most online entrepreneurs work for the goal of adding value and making the world better, not because they are trying to make money. If you’re trying to start a business solely to make money, it’s probably not enough motivation to create something amazing.

Further Readings:

• *Rework by 37 Signals
• Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh
• A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Building a Great Business by Ari Weinzweig
• Sober Entrepreneurship: Why Modern Entrepreneurs Won’t Succeed Under the Influence by Carol Roth. The comments on this page are insightful. And, in case you missed the link to Carol Roth’s e-Pub, it’s here.

If we blogged for a living, like some do, we’d have gone out of business long ago. Riding what we call “the hamster wheel” of blogging requires a time commitment that a small company as busy as ours simply can’t carve out. We’re willing to sacrifice a couple of months-worth of posts here and there in order to focus on real work, and January and February—as miserable as they've been—make it easier to stay in “head down” mode and allow a few more opportunities to post slip by. We don’t mind, but we wonder what others think when they visit our blog and see that the most recent entry is over two months old. After all, we’re just as guilty of raising an eyebrow at someone else’s freshness date as anyone.

All that said, we’d like to offer up some signs of life with this very overdue post. I mentioned we’ve been busy. We’ve also been spending time with some videos that have us rethinking our business and our client’s businesses:

• “The surprising truth about what motivates us.”
• “How great leaders inspire action.”
• “A Lesson In ‘Monkeynomics.’”

We’re not sure what exactly these videos will inspire us to do, but now, with spring approaching, it seems like the perfect time to emerge from our hole, check our shadow* and make some plans.

*Yes. Yes, we’re fully aware Groundhog Day was a month ago. Like I said, we’ve been busy!

Bad Dog, Part I

Gap commercials of the 80’s used to sign off with the baritone-sung jingle, “Fall into the Gap.” Well, Gap Inc. has certainly fallen into something with the not-so-silent release (belly flop) of its new logo. The mark, comprised of Helvetica type and a fading blue square, has become the logo everyone loves to hate. Which begs the question: Is this some sort of joke? Or is this some genius move to stir interest in the flagging brand of a company that can’t find anyone to buy its stock let alone locate a decent graphic designer?

Adding insult to injury is the company’s bait-and-switch to rally a Facebook crowd-sourcing project to… what? Save the company from itself? Keep the Gap name in the spotlight through the all-redeeming holiday shopping season? If the whole thing was a ruse to lift sales, Gap is going to need to sell a record number of flat front khakis. If, however, the brand was realigned without a trace of guile then the retailer giant’s days are truly numbered because there’s a gap at Gap between management and perplexed patrons.

If there’s a silver lining in any of this it’s that the Pepsi logo is no longer the poster child of identity crises. Still, both brands (among many) leave us wringing our hands over the dearth of good corporate brand designers, and the lack of common sense of the people who hire them.

Woof.

Bad Dog, Part II

A Microsoft-Adobe marriage? Holy Matrimony, Batman! What’s the world of monopolist software coming to? If the rumors are true that the Rednecks of Redmond are considering a no-bullets shotgun exchange of vows with the Blushing Bridezillas of San Jose then “Mazel Tov!,” we say.

*breaks glass*

This is a match made in M&A heaven. Both companies lost touch with reality and customers long ago, and neither has had a breakout release since 2003. We wish them all the best as they drive—and fade—into the sunset.

*flings unopened AOL registration CDs at limo*

Quick hit: XTC intoned that the smell of burnt books “is not unlike human hair”— a macabre lyric that reminds us of the destructive force of philistinism on human expression, freedom and life itself.

Today marks the beginning of Banned Books Week. A time to celebrate the writers, teachers, librarians and readers who defend the First Amendment at the ISBN level, and shine the light of reason (read sanity) on those who would impose their benighted morality on the rest of us. One hopes there are enough adults in the world to help young people navigate the perils of forbidden knowledge.

So, this week, thank the defenders of truth who understand the imperative consequence of an open mind. Better yet... be one.

Speak. Read. Know.

Quick hit: If there’s any correlation between the capitalization of a company and its online brand presence, it boils down to: “We can afford to look ugly.” At least that’s the conclusion we drew during a study of websites of the Fortune 100 we conducted while stimulating thought for a new project. The web is awash with sites that showcase design in order to inspire pro and amateur alike, but they never display the inspirational work of/for large multi-nationals, because, well... there isn’t any.

Sorta.

Kudos to those Fortune 100 companies who dare to be different (noted by an asterisk in the list below) and push the rest of us to think harder about what a website should be.

1. Wal-Mart
2. Exxon Mobile
3. Chevron
4. General Motors
5. ConocoPhillips
6. General Electric*
7. Ford*
8. Citigroup
9. Bank of America
10. AT&T
11. Berkshire Hathaway
12. JP Morgan Chase
13. AIG
14. Hewlett-Packard
15. IBM
16. Valero Energy
17. Verizon
18. McKesson
19. Cardinal Health
20. Goldman Sachs*
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Home Depot*
23. Procter & Gamble
24. CVS Caremark
25. United Health Group
26. Kroger
27. Boeing
28. AmerisourceBergen
29. Costco
30. Merrill Lynch
31. Target
32. State Farm*
33. WellPoint
34. Dell
35. Johnson & Johnson
36. Marathon Oil
37. Lehman Brothers &mdash Bankrupt, 2008
38. Wachovia
39. United Technologies
40. Walgreens
41. Wells Fargo
42. Dow Chemical
43. MetLife
44. Microsoft
45. Sears Holdings
46. UPS
47. Pfizer*
48. Lowe’s*
49. Time Warner
50. Caterpillar
51. Medco Health Solutions
52. ADM
53. Fannie Mae
54. Freddie Mac
55. Safeway
56. Sunoco
57. Lockheed Martin
58. Sprint*
59. PepsiCo
60. Intel
61. Altria Group
62. Supervalu
63. Kraft Foods*
64. Allstate
65. Motorola
66. Best Buy
67. Walt Disney*
68. FedEx
69. Ingram Micro
70. Sysco
71. Cisco Systems
72. Johnson Controls*
73. Honeywell International
74. Prudential Financial*
75. American Express
76. Northrop Grumman
77. Hess
78. GMAC
79. Comcast
80. Alcoa
81. DuPont
82. New York Life Insurance
83. Coca Cola
84. News Corporation
85. Aetna
86. TIAA-CREF
87. General Dynamics
88. Tyson Foods
89. HCA
90. Enterprise GP Holdings
91. Macy’s
92. Delphi
93. Travelers
94. Liberty Mutual
95. Hartford Financial Services
96. Abbott Labs
97. Washington Mutual
98. Humana
99. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
100. 3M

Notice anything missing? We made this list in late 2008. It takes time to rework a list of this length in HTML, and we only dust it off on rare occasions. Someday we’ll get around to doing that, but until then, please note that Apple (by far our favorite Fortune 100 site) is now #56 on the 2010 Fortune 100 list after only reappearing the prior year.

So, what do you think? Why are the websites of so many of these companies so embarrassingly bad? *ahem* General Dynamics.

Editor’s Note: Halloween. All Saints Day. El Día de los Muertos. The last three days of macabre celebrations have us contemplating not just our own lives after death, but the fate of our digital lives as well. What happens to our electronically connected self when our physical one, well…disconnects? Spoke friend and Vice Mayor of Cloud City Digital, Stephen Jenkins shares some practical advice to help ensure your data is handled with care, post-mortem.

It is a precious few of us who ponder life’s only truly inevitable milestone — its end. And of those there must be even fewer who think beyond the immediate needs of our families upon our untimely demise (is there such a thing as a timely demise?).

The scene is typical of television dramas: A grieving eldest son distributes the prized possessions of a beloved father recently deceased. The collection of fine paintings, bequeathed to William Jr., the rare books handed down to sister Elizabeth. But what of the iTunes collection? Will the blog be shut down? What about the Twitter followers? The Facebook friends? The LinkedIn connections? Can you bequeath these kinds of things?

Made for TV movies aside, informal observation reveals that most of our personal effects are less likely to be kept in a safe or a security deposit box, and instead take the form of digital assets like emails, chat transcripts, research documents, multimedia files, and financial records.

The importance of these various digital sundries varies of course, from the mundane yet practical (car insurance renewal confirmation), to the amusing (self portraits with an iPhone), to highly personal items replete with sentimental value (personal emails). Regardless of their practical value, these items were part of someone’s life, and should be treated with the same care and respect that their physical belongings would be given.

The recent rise in a viable marketplace for digital assets also raises some interesting questions. An MP3 collection may potentially possess some sentimental value, but it may also possess a sizable monetary value. Assuming the purchase of one album or movie per week from Apple’s iTunes Store, a person who had been purchasing music for 5 years would have amassed a collection worth nearly $3,000. Upon their death, what happens to these files? Can ownership be transferred to a family member, or does the collection remain intact but locked away in perpetual silence under a thin layer of DRM?

Similarly, in a world where we belong not only to the community that we live and work in, we increasingly belong to online communities that mirror in many ways the personal interactions and affiliations of the physical world. In the event of a community member’s death, what happens to their persona? One day they are posting their list of ten best foreign films or photos of their vintage typewriter collection, and the next day they are gone. Presumably their friends and family in the physical world (I’m avoiding the word “real”, which implies a lesser experience online) will have knowledge of their passing, and begin the grieving process, but in their online worlds has the person simply disappeared? In case of high profile members, the online community at large may know their real name and begin a search for them via traditional channels, but many community members remain essentially anonymous and their sudden disappearance leaves many questions unanswered. Would the deceased want the community notified? Is there a final message for them? Should email accounts be closed down, or left active, set to bounce the email back to the sender with a startling yet informative message?

Are there any practical answers, or are our digital existences destined to a life in limbo when our bodies have been laid to rest? I would suggest the following steps to ensure that your preferences are respected:

• Take an accounting of all your digital assets and online accounts, note any applicable logins and passwords.
• Decide who you’d like to have access to these things.
• Decide what you’d like done with them after you have died. Deleted, updated, shared, etc.

Once you have decided these things, you can proceed in a few ways. First, you can draft a physical document, which could be appended to your will. This document could specify the particulars of the three steps above, but more importantly, it could name a digital executor who would be responsible for carrying out your final wishes. This individual should be both technically competent and trustworthy, as you will be granting them access to your digital world in absentia. Your instructions to them could be as simple as shutting down all accounts and erasing your hard drive, or it could detail which email folders were shared with whom, and which photos be made available on Flickr as a final goodbye.

Another route would be to leverage technology to achieve the same result without the need for a lawyer’s involvement. Deathswitch.com is a web site that offers a service they describe as “Information Insurance”. It works as follows: One enters their list of desired contacts along with their email addresses, then they create a message containing the kind of account information discussed above. Next, a time interval is set. It could be once a day, it could be once a year. If the user does not log into the site during the specified interval, indicating that they are alive, the system will automatically send out their message to the people on their list. I cannot vouch for the security or functionality of this service (now that I think of it, can anyone?) which costs $20 a year to maintain, but in theory it is a practical approach to the dilemma of sharing information in the case of an unexpected (or perhaps expected) death with friends, family, and co-workers, all of which can receive custom messages. Just don’t forget to log in, or you, very much alive, may find yourself having to explain why half of your work email consists of fantasy baseball updates and why the password to your Facebook account is “ihearttwilight”.

Regardless of the approach you take to safeguarding the future of your digital life, it is important that you give some thought to it. Get organized, make a plan, and then live your life to the fullest, knowing that your digital afterlife is safe and sound.

Editor’s Note: Spoke friend and multimedia virtuoso (think modern Renaissance man, truly) Steve Mockensturm sidesteps the usual “shop talk” in lieu of existentialist thoughts on the machines that use us, er… we use. These ideas resonate and compel us to ask deeper questions about the often perverse marriage between our real and virtual worlds. The answers are hard to come by, let alone (at times) uncomfortable to consider.

When not tending his garden, Steve cultivates wisdom as @boonhogganbeck on Twitter, and digs in the dirt daily at Madhouse.

“When you come to a fork in the road... take it!” — Yogi Berra

At a most fundamental level, our computers are simple and not smart at all. They can only do one, solid thing; make a determination as to whether something is true or false. That’s all a computer has ever been able to do. It’s a binary, boolean world where everything is, at its core, a decision between a one and a zero, on or off, thing or not-thing.

Furthermore, this sophisticated Difference Engine can only make these logical decisions one-at-a-time. Though the speed of decisions is impressive and things may appear to happen at the same time, the basic event stream of any given protocol cannot proceed until a decision — the only decision — is made: Does this request evaluate this way or that way?

The beat, the drummer, the traffic cop that keeps all these decisions organized is a simple clock running at a ridiculous speed. Choices are made between the ticks. For example, this piece is being written on a device that can make roughly 5.6 billion logical decisions per second. That’s how it works.

We can think of life this way sometimes. Though we are not Vulcans and we often hear, “It’s not a black and white world,” it sort of is. You are not here, you are there. Light is not dark, hot is not cold, good is not evil and Marvel is not DC. Our entire planet is quite literally bipolar and as technology marches apace, it is no small coincidence the human condition seems more and more polarized. We don’t appear to get along with each other as we used to. Our differences dictate behavior more than our similarities. Us and them. Binary logic.

Luddites and other critics of technology might argue the economics of dominion that technology facilitates, but the bigger fear may as well be: Are humans losing the capacity to determine shades of gray? Nuance seems dead as we begin to emulate — though at a comparatively sloth-like pace - the devices we cannot seem to live without. You must either be for something or against something, but you cannot be both.

Apparently — even with crazy-fast computing — concepts of kindness, fear, belief, wisdom and love are impossible to discern with simple true or false decisions. But this may not always be so. Though the brain is mysterious and complex, it is — logic would dictate — of limited capacity. There is only so much stuff up there making decisions, and — just like the difference engine — we can really only think of one thing at-a-time.

Enter the world of quantum computing, true asynchronous processing and circuits that communicate with light rather than crude, charged electrons running through a piece of silicon. Someday — sooner than later — logical decisions will be evaluated persistently and at the speed of thought.

It appears the gap is closing from both sides. As computing power increases and creeps toward analogous thought through quantum physics and light speed transactions, human power seems ever nudged toward simple binary transactions. Science Fiction has posited more than once that existence is merely an extremely advanced digital experience.

Maybe that’s why we have a tendency to anthropomorphize everything. We are shocked when hearing that robots have learned to lie. Delighted when a houseplant posts a comment to a blog saying it needs water. We tend to make comments like, “My computer thinks...” when, in fact, all these things are just devices doing what they were programmed to do.

Perhaps binary logic is an ancient part of human nature just now being thrown into the light and we are more like the difference machines — and they like us — than we’d care to admit. Doing what we’re programmed to do. We might do well to re-examine choice and free will and what makes something right or wrong. Life is nothing, if not perpetual observation and processing of data and no decision we can ever make is more fundamental than a yes or a no.

True?

© 2009 Stephen Mockensturm, some rights reserved.

Quick hit: Kodak recently posted its own guidelines for navigating the sometimes treacherous waters of social media. Titled “Kodak Social Media Tips — Sharing lessons learned to help your business grow” (PDF, 3.5MB), the 14-pager covers tips submitted by Kodak’s Chief Blogger, Jenny Cisney, as well as helpful information to get you up and running with a solid corporate socmed foundation.

Perhaps most importantly, the piece offers pragmatic advice for establishing a social media policy for employees. This is refreshing compared to the often Machiavellian smack-downs that some other companies have resorted to (we won’t name names).

Looking for examples on which to base your own social media policies? We suggest you start here. And, as always, let us know what you think.

“We have our work cut out for us.”

“Nine women can't make a baby in a month.”

“Rome wasn't built in a day.”

These are humorless expressions (Well, somewhat. Pregnant women always seem to bring a knowing smile.) we use to describe seemingly insurmountable and often humorless tasks. We stare in reticence at the challenge before us then quickly turn our attention to other work of no less importance. Some call this “constructive procrastination.” We call it “fear of the white canvas.”

Will it be good enough?
Will people like it?
How do we balance our business requirements with our personal tastes?
Should someone else design it for us?
How will we get this done in addition to client work?
Are we out of coffee filters again?

These are questions that plagued us in March as we set out to define our online brand. We knew what we didn’t want. We didn’t want to create something that appealed to just anyone. No, we wanted to create something that allowed visitors to quickly assess whether or not we were the right partner, collaborator, supporter, prospect, follower or friend for them. “When you’re all things to everyone, you’re actually nothing to nobody.” This is something we tell our clients and once we admonished ourselves similarly, we set about laying the foundation for our ‘Circus Maximus.’

Work on the site progressed quickly and evolved organically (“What if we..?”). Along the way, we made some friends who took an active role in shaping the site. We felt a little like Dorothy collecting Tin Man, Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion along the Yellow Brick Road. Fortunately for us, our fellow collaborators brought plenty of their own heart, brains and courage along. We’d like to acknowledge and thank them for helping us find our online ‘voice.’

Mary Gilmore
Mary answered a tweet we posted in April. We were looking for a ‘hero’ image for our homepage with very specific subject matter and qualities. She searched and found the image you see today and sent us the link — five weeks after our initial request. How she remembered that tweet is a mystery only Dr. Robert Langdon could solve. We’ve never met Mary, but we hope to someday.

Thank you, Mary.

Koen Smits
Mary’s link lead us to the photographer of said picture. We contacted Koen in Belgium (which isn’t terribly far from Rome, we should mention) and offered fame and fortune for his perfect image. He refused both and graciously offered it in exchange for a photo credit. We consider Koen’s photo to be the jewel in the spokehq.com crown. We’re a tad embarrassed, actually. Holy Toledo, we get to use this for free? On our homepage?!

Thank you, Koen.

Matt Braun
We met Matt during a charity event we did with the Toledo chapter of the AIGA. Matt was on our small but scrappy web team and we were in awe of his charm, his cool demeanor and his prowess with ExpressionEngine (EE). When it came time to develop our site, we chose the EE framework and invited Matt to steer us through a rather steep learning curve. There is no other mention of Matt on the site (yet), but his DNA is most certainly part of it.

Thank you, Matt.

Mark Pannell
We met Mark on Twitter some time ago. We were taken with his humor, his writing and his undying passion for social media. We were also impressed by his ability to grok what Spoke was about and mesh his online brand with our own. Before long, we were making up reasons to work with him. Mark crafted the Twitter survey that appears on our site. He did an amazing job and we hope you take a moment to complete and submit your own answers.

Thank you, Mark. You’re a better ‘Voice of Spoke’ than we are.

Scott Radcliff
Scott was completing his degree at Davis College when we met. He has quickly shown himself to be a gifted developer, strategist and writer, and we’re working with him on projects as we speak. Scott played no active role in the site, but he kept several plates spinning in the air for us while we worked to complete it. This launch would have been delayed considerably if it hadn’t been for him.

Thank you, Scott.

Finally, this extensive “thank you” wouldn’t be complete (and wouldn’t read like an Oscar acceptance speech) if we failed to acknowledge our families, friends, clients, vendors, partners and fans who have helped put the wheel(s) of Spoke in motion.

Without you, we’d still be trying to build Rome in a day.

Thank you.

Gene & Mark