davidroberts

http://www.jeffbullas.com/2011/08/30/11-social-media-marketi...

As anecdotal evidence, both of my late-teen/young adult sons have started using Old Spice deodorant since that campaign started.

Edit: I think Barak Obama's campaign would be another example of well-spent social media dollars.

First, the decline in sales in the sugary soft drink industry is only remotely connected to their social media advertising. It is a widely reported phenomena that is usually attributed to a more health-conscious society and a widening array of beverage choices.

Second, Pepsi's intention in offering contributions to non-profits based on social media recommendations was probably seen as a way to boost corporate image in a domain far beyond potential soda drinkers. It probably was meant to influence investors, journalists, regulators, and people like Mayor Bloomberg in New York who would portray soft drink vendors as an evil in our society. When you are a big as Pepsi, directly influencing buyers is only part of your advertising outreach.

Still, I agree with the article's overall conclusion. Social media advertising is typically not a very efficient way to convert advertising dollars to revenue. But it can be. With any advertising method, you have to devise a way to measure the results of a campaign, whatever your goals are. Otherwise, you are just throwing money in the air, hoping it lands somewhere useful.

It's a huge change from ten years ago when I would anxiously await the day when I could afford a new rig because I was already pushing my three-year old one to its limit. Desktop PC technology has clearly reached the point where its capabilities far exceed the needs of ordinary users.

It's important to remember that business relationships only work when both sides benefit. You have every right to refuse a deal where you don't benefit. Everybody in business understands this.

I remember reading a "Miss Manners" advice column back in the 90's where someone asked her how to deal with improper questions about age, weight, and other personal matters. She suggested firmly saying "I beg your pardon???!" in a way that makes it clear the other person has stepped beyond the bounds of appropriate behavior while still maintaining one's own dignity. I supposed the modern equivalent would be to say "I'm sorry, WHAT did you say????" You say it in a way that makes it clear that you must have misunderstood, since up to this moment, your opinion of the person would never have included that kind of behavior. It gives them an out too.

You mentioned that you were considered "motherly." You have to be careful you don't end up having the same difficulties with your own children (if you are now or eventually become a mother) that you are having in your business relationships.

So often I see mothers that don't know how to say "no" firmly, but lovingly to their children. The mothers end up resentful of being taken advantage of, and it teaches the children that being annoying and demanding is the path to success. Teaching them right from wrong over the long term is much more important than satisfying their short-term desires.

Another point I would mention is that final success in life is not measured by being rich if the meaning of that word is only financial. A successful life is one filled with health, good friends, a loving family, enough money to be financially secure, and something interesting and fulfilling to do until you die. The money is just a means to the other things, and it doesn't take being rich. Unfortunately, many people think that money solves a lot more problems than it actually does.

Finally, please ignore mistermann. He has demonstrated his own ignorance about courtesy.

Courtesy makes you likable and smooths human relationships in everything you do. It gives you a huge edge. I don't understand why people don't do it. Maybe they grew up in an environment where courtesy is taken as weakness. Or maybe they are so convinced of their own merit that they feel there is no need to be nice to the "little people." Either way, they are seriously handicapping their future happiness.

Courtesy offers so much gain for so little effort. From smiling and holding the door open for someone at the supermarket to giving a considerate reply to someone who went to the trouble to come in for an interview, courtesy makes life better for everyone. The return smile and sincere thank you from the person at the supermarket brightens your whole day. The rejected candidate who received your thoughtful message might be the exact fit for a later job.

Similar to the quote in the original article, I believe you can learn a lot about a person by how they treat the hired help, whether it be at work or in a restaurant or hotel. If someone has no power of retribution, even if you are a selfish jerk, and you still treat them kindly, it's a pretty good sign you aren't a selfish jerk. On the other hand, if you are considering a future spouse or employer, and they treat servers and underlings like trash, someday they will treat you like trash too.

Courtesy is karma. You give to others, it always comes back to you.

There were some bad effects though. If my immediate task wasn't engaging (a boring task or speech for example), I had to work really hard to stay awake. My typical daily cycle of alert and productive in the morning, and dull and sleepy in the afternoon became much deeper. I felt more creative and congenial during the high points and much more lethargic during the valleys.

After a few months, I began to realize another downside. Although I was able to function well tactically on moment-by-moment tasks that required constant attention, my ability to make good strategic decisions really began to suffer. It was as though the effort to deeply think things through long-term went totally down the drain. This began to scare me after a while.

Everything changed when I took a new job in a distant city and simultaneously decided to stop playing poker for a while. I lived by myself in a tiny room in the suburbs and rode my bike to work seven miles each way. The new environment, exercise and huge lessening of daily commitments caused me to take things a lot slower. I began reading a lot, reflecting about things, and started sleeping around seven hours a night.

I became less manic, definitely healthier, and more peaceful and introspective. I didn't instantly fall asleep when I was bored, but slept very soundly at night. Of course a lot of that could be the result of a simpler, more active life. But I think the increased sleep had a major influence too.

I started playing poker again, and I found that I was consistently doing better than before. I started reacquainting myself with math, and could think much more deeply about it.

I wonder how this applies to Thatcher? She obviously had a very engaging job, and she seemed able to keep up with the details of her work. But if she had slept more, would she had been less radical, perhaps more conciliatory? Would that have dulled her edge and reduced her achievements or helped her bring more people on board and be less polarizing? Would she had made better long-term decisions? Did the extra hours of wakefulness really help her get more done or was she just trading weekday hours awake for weekend hours asleep?

In my own life, I've decided to keep to a longer sleep schedule for now. I'm always tempted to go back to the exciting mania the previous schedule, but for me, the benefits are uncertain and the costs are pretty scary.

Indeed. What is he talking about?

Teaching coding to high school kids in under-performing schools is great, and may help some of them find an excellent career path they might never have thought about. But I think Carson is raising false hopes in many of the kids by exaggerating the potential impact of the program in their lives.

He seems to have totally forgotten the reality of supply and demand. It may be true that right now entry-level developers can command $40,000 a year. However, whenever it becomes well known that workers in a certain field can command high salaries, it motivates many more people to enter that field in anticipation of earning those salaries themselves. This tends to cause a glut in workers, and salaries fall as the competition for jobs increases.

One sign that this is already happening is the rapid increase in enrollments to computer science undergraduate programs over the last several years.[1] Adding thousands more to the pool of available workers will only bring salaries down farther.

The more high schools this program is successful in, the more this effect will come into play, especially if the program gets "rolled out to every high school in America" as mentioned in the article.

Also, companies naturally seek to minimize costs by looking for cheaper sources of labor through outsourcing to other countries or by bringing workers from other countries here on H-1B visas. This is already happening.[2] As time goes on, these efforts will likely be increasingly successful, and will impact entry level jobs the most.

I think it would be much fairer to the students to tell them this is one skill they might be able to base a successful career on, if they have an aptitude for it and are willing to put in the effort to get really good at it. Otherwise, he's placing unrealistic expectations that might eventually hurt the students if they don't become reality.

[1] http://cra.org/govaffairs/blog/2012/04/undergrad-computer-sc...

[2] http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2013/03/30/visa-program-h...

I need your assistance. I did go ahead an buy a new laptop. I like the machine but am suffering on account of Windows 8!

Still, he'll still show up as Windows 8 in the market share statistics.

This is how the University of Chicago does it (from their website):

Thanks to an extremely generous gift of $100 million from an anonymous alumnus, we are now able to offer an even more competitive financial aid package to many of our students. The Odyssey program has allowed more students from modest backgrounds the ability to pursue all that the University has to offer without the worries of working to pay off loan debt. For students with family incomes below $75,000 a year, all expected federal student loans are replaced with Odyssey Scholarships. For students with family incomes between $75,000 and $90,000, half of their expected federal student loan obligation is replaced with Odyssey Scholarships. You must apply for need based financial aid in order to be considered for this need-based University funded scholarship.

The OP is right about the recruiting efforts of the private universities. It's not just the rural schools they skip. My son went to a high school near San Diego that straddles the border between an middle class area built in the 50s and a low income area. The student body is about 40% suburban white, 25% Hispanic, 10% recently moved from Iraq (Chaldean), and the rest African American, Native American and other minorities. It has a 7 out of 10 California high school rating, so it's not that bad.

There were no recruiters from "elite" private schools. The best students typically go to University of California, either USCD, UCLA, or Berkeley. The next level goes to the other UCs, especially Irvine or Riverside. Many go to San Diego State University, and the rest who continue their education go to community college.

My son loves economics, and got it early in his head that he really wanted to go to University of Chicago. We were pretty poor at the time, as I was changing my career and working my way up in from the total bottom in a new field doing mainly freelance work.

My son worked really hard to get to UChicago. He attended a recruiting event in a downtown hotel he found out about on the internet. I borrowed money and we flew to Chicago for an interview, staying in a sketchy hotel on the South Side. He applied for early admission and got accepted last year, the first student ever from his high school. They offered a financial package that pays almost everything.

His friends who are still at the school said that this year, for the first time, a recruiter from UChicago showed up. It is like my son put the school on their radar.

One thing we noticed as part of the process is that taking the PSAT is really important. It only costs about $20 and it's free in some schools. There might be something similar for the ACT.

My son did well on the PSAT and he got multiple letters from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and other Ivies trying to lure him in. Also from elite private four-year colleges. So there is an outreach by those schools in this way. Often those letters would mention the possibility of almost full support for students that needed it.

I think the Ivies are trying to reach out to poorer students. It's just that it's hard for them to think out of the box created by their own privileged backgrounds and understand how to reach that demographic. But our experience is that they are sincerely trying, and if a student makes the effort, he can definitely get in.

I think one of the biggest barriers is that counselors in schools like my son's or the OP's don't even consider these schools for qualified students (are they uninformed? lazy? incompetent? complacent?). If they pushed harder, both to the Ivies and in guiding the students, it would help a lot.

Executive: What can he do?

Spouse: He's really good at programming. He took a class in it in high school five years ago, and I'm pretty sure he didn't fail. He even has his own web page.

Executive: Hmmmmm. I think we have something he can work on....

When you do get the karma to downvote, you'll discover that it doesn't work on links, only on comments.

I suggest going for a moderately-priced decent-quality imported steel-string acoustic like a Yamaha or Sigma (low-end line of the Martin Company, made in Korea).

It's good to start with acoustic even if you plan on mainly playing electric. It's the common denominator of the guitar world, and you'll be so glad you can just pick one up and play something cool on it at will.

You might want to consider starting with lighter gauge strings than the ones that come of the guitar while you are developing calluses and learning bar chords.

The only programming class I ever took was taught by an unmotivated teacher who only taught programming because he needed the money. That was in high school. I started out excited about the amazing power programming gave me to bend the computer to my will and make it do cool things, but the teacher's lack of enthusiasm covered the class like a dismal fog, and his intensely boring lectures and make-work assignments totally dampened my enthusiasm. I finally dropped the class.

I didn't go back to programming until years later when I was taking grad school in an entirely different subject and I rediscovered programming on my own. I taught myself C and ended up spending all night coding and debugging and loving it, to the point where I neglected the actual subject I was supposed to be learning.

While I've never taught programming to others, I spent several years teaching technical classes to engineers in the semiconductor industry. I also taught English as a second language for five years. From these experiences, I've learned the following:

Learning to program is really fun. Because programming is really fun.

Teaching any subject is fun if you enjoy the subject matter, have a passion for teaching, and if you teach people who want to learn and have aptitude in the field.

So if teaching programming is hard (instead challenging, but fun) it could mean you either don't enjoy programming, you don't have passion or aptitude for teaching, or you need to find motivated students with an aptitude for programming.

If the problem is that you don't enjoy programming, you need to find a different subject to teach.

If you don't have passion or aptitude for teaching, you need to get out of teaching as soon as possible, because you are likely ruining your students' first experiences with the subject matter.

And if your students appear unmotivated or lack aptitude, you should consider deeply the possibility that this could be because you have one of the two issues above, and repeat until the problem is resolved, or until you are really, really, really sure the problem isn't you.

If you are absolutely sure the problem isn't you, then you need to consider finding a teaching situation where students are motivated, and you need to discover methods to gently encourage those who genuinely lack programming aptitude to focus their learning in areas where they do have aptitude.

But before doing that, maybe it would be good to take one more round of considering if maybe the problem isn't you.

The idea that a college education automatically leads to a better life than preparation for honest skilled labor is pretty elitist in my opinion.

I was shocked to discover that there were no Applied Arts at my kids' high school, everyone was being prepared for college whether they liked it or not, and my kids considered college prep as classes for dummies. It seemed like a typical modern euphemism intended to make people feel good without actually improving anything.

I feel sorry for the kids who might have enjoyed metal shop, wood shop, auto repair, graphic arts, or other applied art classes, and who would have gained skills that could bring in decent pay, but who instead drop out of the totally useless (for them) college prep classes and go into low level service jobs or become single mothers.

They still have the tracks, they just have different names. College prep is for students who likely drop out or barely graduate with no skills and be miserable, honors is for students who will likely go to a state college, and AP is for students who will likely go to University of California or a quality private school like Stanford or Cal Tech.

The only change is the names and the fate of the lowest academic track. They are the losers in the current system.

Plus hordes of amateur photographers and urban explorers will be trying to sneak into the place, radiation or not.