I love the song If I Had A Million Dollars by Barenaked Ladies.  When I watched these very cool/funny/clever videos I got jealous of TheLadders marketing budget, and thought, indeed, if I had a million dollars this is what I would want to come up with:

And,

More here.  Props to Cheezhead for turning me on to this.

I’m a strong advocate of having an email signature that helps me know who you are.  I want you to know who I am, and what I can offer you.  Thus, I created and have used this email signature for a long, long time:

In Outlook (with html):

In Gmail (no html):

After getting a comment on my LinkedIn blog (it’s pretty funny), and another comment on Young PR Pros (in jest, of course), I decided it was time to try something else.

So here’s my new signature:

I could only do this since I redesigned JasonAlba.com (it used to just be a blog, but now has a landing page with all my other stuff).

I worry that people won’t know about all the cool stuff I do, and not know what I’m about.  It’s kind of scary.  However, I wonder how many people previously sifted through my other signature… how many JibberJobber signups I got because of my sig, how many book sales, blog readers, CEO Webinar purchases…

It’s kind of like when you come up with your 30 Second Commercial… you feel like you are leaving so much out, and how in the world could you cut stuff out??  But you have to.  And so did I.

It’s a new day, and perhaps I’ll regret it, but I doubt anyone will suggest I shorten my signature.  Scary but good… that’s my gut feel right now.

Yesterday I had a pretty rough day. More on that next week on my JibberJobber blog.

To end the day, though, I thought I’d carve out some time and put together a powerpoint to try slideshare.net. I’ve been wanting to do it for a while, but really wish I had a really creative person to do it for me, or at least check it out. Someone like Armano, or Geno (both of whom I’ve met in person).

It’s not that I don’t like to pretend I’m creative. But something happened two years ago that made me stop and think harder about what I was doing.

I put out a press release.

It was uber-successful.

And that success scared me.

Scared me into thinking I had to be more thoughtful, more careful, with these types of things.

And I stopped. No more press releases. Nothing that an ad agency, or a PR firm, should do.

I scared myself into non-action.

And that was dumb.

So a few weeks ago I sat down at the computer to buy some ads on Yahoo’s network. I went through their process doing it as quickly as I could (which is hard) because I wanted to be done before the kids got up.

Towards the end I put in my credit card number:

1111111111111111

it was rejected (!) … so I did it again, and again. I double/tripled checked the numbers – I was getting so frustrated! I just spent some valuable time putting this together and now it was rejecting my card! I pulled my personal card and the same thing happened. Dang – why were both of my cards being rejected??

For some reason I thought I’d try it with the spaces, like this:

1111 1111 1111 1111

Guess what – it worked! My thoughts? Why doesn’t a pioneer in the Internet world allow both ways? Why is the spacing such a big deal? Have they tested this??

(of course now I have to go and test my credit card pages and see what’s acceptable – and I realize there are bunches of JibberJobber things that can or should be polished – but we’re working from different budgets here (how’s that for an excuse).)

I bet if I had a Yahoo credit card it wouldn’t have happened… right? Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.