Author Archives: Jason

The broad hippo

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broad_hippo.pngYesterday I was reading a book to my kids and came across “the broad hippopotamus.”  I asked my 6 year old son what a broad hippo is.  It went something like this:

Me: What is a broad hippo?

6 year old boy: A hippo with bras?

after a few seconds for us to digest it, we all laughed for a while.  I grew up with all boys (my sisters are quite a bit younger, and were still very young when I moved out of the house), so I would have never thought about a hippo with bras!  Alas, my son is with mom and three sisters all day – he’s growing up quite a bit different than I did!

Plaxo is…

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a “networked address book” and a precursor to social networks. As per an interview with John McCrea, VP of Marketing for Plaxo. Thanks to Thom Singer for the interview, you can check it out here.

McCrea says that Plaxo did indeed ask itself (or themselves) if the world really did need another social network. I’m surprised that their conclusion was yes… except that they did have an amazing foundation to start Pulse.

Says that next few months will be really exciting (because of the open social web – I’m guessing this is the API stuff that we’re seeing from Facebook). Sounds exciting but (a) it’s social networking, and I’m social networked out, and (b) aren’t marketing directors supposed to be excited about the next few months?

It’s a really interesting 30 minutes, worth your time.   I would like to hear what McCrea’s position is on LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Salesforce, etc. as competition.

Dear Skype, You Failed Me :(

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but I still love youToday I had a very cool radio interview. Well, it was a recording and essentially a podcast… it was being recorded, and it will be linked to from a newspaper in central California.

But about 10 minutes into it Skype hung up the call.

DUDE. Seriously, what the freak?

I love Skype, and I use it all the time. But for “mission critical” stuff, like live or recorded interviews, I’m gun shy. Make that, skype shy 🙁

I have an elevator crush on…

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door_close_button.pngSee, Pete Johnson has the “nerd crush” market cornered. This is like asking Michael Jordan who he thinks are awesome basketball players… so if Pete has a nerd crush on someone, then I do too.

But I can’t really follow Pete in declaring who I have a nerd crush on. And being the junkie blogger that I am, I figured I needed to have some kind of crush on something. So, after my recent trip to Savannah, I figured out what that was. I have elevator crushes.

The best, funnest, coolest elevator that I had a crush on was at the Caribe Hilton. This elevator went up about 22 floors… and it was fast… and fun. For an eleven year old chump, this was one of the thrills of living in temporary quarters (we would go sneak in the resort, ride the elevator, go to the tidal pools, etc.). I will never forget this elevator.

But in Savannah, I experienced an elevator that trumps this one. It only went up six floors. And I can’t say that it was speedy fast. But it had something that no other elevator has (at least, no elevator that I’ve every stepped into). The “door close” button actually closes the doors – immediately!

Don’t you hate pushing the door close and then waiting seconds for it to begin shutting? It’s like it never really did anything, just made you feel like you were doing something.

But in Savannah, as soon as you push the door close button, it started to close.  Yes, I have an elevator crush on that elevator.

The world would be a better place if all elevators had this neat little feature.

(yes, I really am this weird. I just had to blog about it. If you aren’t a blogger, you wouldn’t understand :p)

MarketingProfs.com rocks

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I knew about MarketingProfs.com… but didn’t really know how powerful they were. My first introduction was when Kirsten and William wrote an article about personal branding and included a link to JibberJobber. I can’t remember how many dozens of people signed up for JibberJobber that day, and the trickle of signups in the next couple of weeks… it was definitely enough to turn my head.

Recently, I was invited to write an article related to my book, I’m on LinkedIn — Now What??? Today I learned that the article is being cycled on their front page of main articles. HUGE thanks to MarketingProfs for the opportunity and visibility!

MarketingProfs is cool!

File under “great ways to describe…”

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On an e-mail list, talking about job search tools, I wrote something about JibberJobber, this is one snippet that I wanted to store for later use:

“It’s not a job board (although you can search jobs), it’s not an advice/article repository (although the blog has been mentioned by the Wall Street Journal’s Career Journal), it’s not a social network (although you can take your contacts from various social networks and manage the relationships in JibberJobber) …. it’s just … JibberJobber!”

I’m For Hire (not what you think – read on)

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bicep.gifI’ve been thinking about this for a long time… and don’t want to send the wrong impression out, so please read on.

First, just to squash any rumors, JibberJobber is still #1 for me. No doubt about that. Big time #1. Things are going fast and furious with the business.

Now that we got that out of the way…

I’m also a new author (the book just hit Amazon yesterday). This book has been making its way through the blogosphere, and career experts have given enthusiastic thumbs-ups on this, and I’m excited about it. In fact, I just bought 200 because I’m going to 3 conferences in the next 6 weeks and figure I can move them all. There are a number of reasons I wrote this book, but notice that it’s directly related to the career/networking space I’m in, and I didn’t find this to be a deviation from my strategy at all.

So now, down to business. I’ve been doing Internet work for about 10 years. All kinds of stuff – I’m good at some stuff and not into other stuff (I’m not a graphics/layout designer). Here’s what I’m offering:

1 hour phone consultation – I’ll spend an hour with you talking about whatever you want. Usually this is geared around what I’ve done with JibberJobber (getting it from zero-to-market in 2 months, and/or marketing, blog marketing strategy, etc.) . I’ve done this a number of times in the last year and feel pretty confident that this will be an hour packed full of good information. You can record the session as long as it stays private. $250/hour.

3 hours of website analysis – I love checking out your website/blog strategy and giving feedback. This usually takes about two to three hours, as I go through the entire thing, and some extra stuff (to see how it’s marketed, possibly checking out the competition, etc.). If I don’t take the entire three hours I’ll spend the remainder with you on the phone if you want. $500

If you want to hire me, let me know – Jason at JibberJobber dot com

The Tuthe Fairee, the dawg and my wife

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Last night was awesome. My wife asked me to get the tooth fairy stuff ready for our six year old, feeling bad that we missed it the night before (nothing like a six year old feeling neglected by the tooth fairy!). She was busy with the baby so I got to do it. I printed the following and gave it to her before I tucked it under the bed (note that he wrote a letter asking what the tooth fairy’s name is, and what the TF does with all the teeth):

Yo Dawg! Don’t you brush your teeth enough? You only have so many before you are using dentures, like (someone’s name)!!

My name is T.F. – that’s short for Tuthe Fairee.

I take all the teeth I get and put them in a blender, to mix them up. And then I sell that to the Elmers Glue factory.

Enjoy your quarter Dawg!!

Nasty Tooth Fairy :(

So I go up to the bedroom and give her this cool letter, with fancy writing (that the blog doesn’t recognize) and I had to turn away or my face would give it away. She’s reading it and saying “noooo, noooo, noooooooooooooooooo” … I had her going for about five minutes, she really thought I was going to give it to her. At one point she says:

Are you serious? You really want to put this under his pillow?

and I respond with a manly:

Honey! He’s six years old! He’s not a girl (our others are all girls, so this is a plea to help “him be a man!”)

It was a riot – she really believed I was serious. Those precious five minutes 🙂

Here’s the real letter I put under his pillow:

(his name), wow, another tooth? I was just here a few months ago! Sorry about last night, I was caught up with about four million other kids that lost their teeth – September is kind of a busy month for me 🙂

I take all the teeth I get and put them in a secret, special place – it’s so secret, and so special, I can’t even talk about it!

My first name is Tooth and my last name is Fairy. But it sounds kind of weird to call me “Tooth” …so most people just call me The Tooth Fairy! Cool, huh?

See you next time!

Your Friend, the Tooth Fairy 🙂