Before:

After:

Fail

While attending an event last night with the FashionHP organization (website coming soon) here in Dallas, I was pleasantly surprised to discover how overwhelmingly open the models were. When discussing design work or other web work with actors, I seem to come across a basic need to put head-shots and reels online... and that is about the extent of the demand. Fashion models (at least in this case) seem to have a much wider interest in art, design, social media, and collaborative ideas. I wonder if the Model Mayhem-type sites are just working so well in this industry that photo and video storage is just sort of old news, but it was refreshing nonetheless.

Tech note: Like many other talent industries, the need for better e-mail marketing, networking, contact management, etc. offering is never filled. Also, models are all essentially micro/small-business owners in one stage of development or another. Their needs for marketing coaches, business guidance, and administrative automation is very much like the traditional business sector -- maybe with a smaller budget. But then again, the models seem very open to collaborative services which might involvement several independents or non-traditional mediums. The conversation I had was certainly more open than closed to ideas that work.

The other nice aspect of the fashion space is that their events are well sponsored. Liquid budgets are available, if only in smallish chunks, from liquor, car, clothing, food, sports, and other youth-focused companies. This makes obvious sense on the surface (models make a real pretty event in the foreground or the background :), but from a marketing standpoint there is a consumer audience through and through in nearly every aspect of output from the fashion industry. I would have never noticed the relevance without spending some good social time with these talented people. Thanks FashionHP... you will see me more often.

Reflecting on my day yesterday at 360Flex Indianapolis, I am happy to have attended all of the regular 360Flex events. This has been the most consistent conference I have been able to maintain. It might also be because it is my favorite.

The Flex Show was kind enough to sponsor my way to this event and allow me the opportunity to be an onsite reporter for their ongoing podcast. After doing live interviews with about six people, I think I am getting comfortable hearing my voice outside my own head (well maybe not). At the very least, I am meeting some very cool developers and becoming even more jazzed about how the community is growing and moving forward.

Michael Labriola with Digital Primates did a session on arrays and ArrayCollection in Flex that was my favorite session so far. But Degrafa (w/ Juan Sanchez) was worth the look; and I am happy to see the new licensing model for products (Licensing and Encryption for Flex).

The Charity Code Jam seems to have gotten launched with good attendance. There were like 20 people in a little room giving their time away to help the The Leukemia & Lymphoma society. The particulars are all here.

We ended the day after mingling with lots of great people at Rock Bottom Brewery (and playing Rock Band) for the second night... some of us were here Sunday for the pre-show training (very cool)... in the hotel restaurant with some scintillating conversation on ColdFusion and Universal Healthcare (??). Almost like real people and not just a bunch of geeks, no?

Well, I'm off to another day of sessions and interviews for The Flex Show. It just doesn't get any better than this!

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When your chiropractor and your local coffee shop have both begun using Twitter and Facebook, I'm not sure what to think. I guess Facebook makes sense since the chick on the news is using it. Twitter, though, just makes me a bit sad, because I had it in my own head that it would be this haven in the social networking -verse which somehow stayed dry from all the corporate rain. But if the small biz guys are using it (and I'm hearing it all abuzz in the business networking groups), we can certainly expect Twitter to go mainstream in no time as well. I just don't wanna see social networking go the way of the Yellow Pages in 1/10th the time. The ability to be a "Fan" of my coffee shop on Facebook at least seems to have some promise in terms of separating my personal relationships and my business ones (who might otherwise use Facebook for junk mail). Maybe Twitter will find a way to sub-class itself as well.

Working from coffee shops and cafes and other public places has been a mainstay for developers and designers ever since wifi became so popular. Here in Dallas, a pretty cool concept is capitalizing on this behavior. I was slow finding out about it, but Cohabitat seems ultra cool. At $35/mo for Community Membership, there are a bunch of grass roots type presentations and meetups that could make for useful networking opportunities. People from out of town looking for a cool place to do a ColdFusion or Flex event should look at this. I hope the place succeeds!

This is not an eMarketing topic. It is a traditional marketing topic. It just seemed so niche, especially as coffee shops have become so prevalent in our communities that I thought I would include my notes.

I have been forming some theories on the strategies around using bulletin boards for local marketing. Small businesses are my target audience. Small businesses often use bulletin boards in coffee shops and restaurants and small stores, etc. Therefore, I am attempting to use bulletin boards to network with those businesses.

My initial thinking was that the bulletin boards would speak to the consumer who might see the bulletin board. This would have rendered my participation useless. But this myth has been debunked after a few conversations with business owners and independents whose cards I retrieved. The micro-business especially (like me) is interested in this medium. In fact, the basic demographics of the shop where the bulletin board is found seems to speak some generalized information about the smaller business owners themselves.

I haven't figured out how it would apply to my goals, but I found an interesting article on bulletin board anthropology. I am out to discover if this applies at all to a larger metroplex and its suburbs individually.

I will also be posting some loose statistics on successes or failures from different business card designs. Logos and/or print that can be seen from 6-8 feet away, colors and the type of person that calls, etc.

It should go without saying, but the more sites that link to your site, the more web of your own you create and the more hits you might drive to your site.

Have you googled yourself lately? The evolution of social networking and the spidering of those indexes has made a lot of people less anonymous than they thought they were. Additionally, if you are trying not to be anonymous and want traffic to say, your website... you might want to take notice of all the places you have signed into and decided to leave a blank profile.

Just because I only joined LinkedIn to connect with that one manager that might give me a good reference (for example) doesn't mean that my LinkedIn profile might not be ranked higher than my own site for many searches that should find me.

Remember to put your website URL in your social network profiles. Then you might want to link to your profiles from your own site to complete the round trip. Google likey!

If our products and services are greatly conceived, fantastically marketed, flawlessly positioned, and all the right resources are in place, why would we care about consumer opinion? We should be able to hold tightly to our vision of excellence and stay true only to the course which is inherently dictated. After all, consumer opinion is wild and unpredictable, and we rely on metrics and science and proven measures to ensure our success!

Candy is one of my new favorite people. She did a preso at Refresh Dallas the other night. I was pretty impressed with the group in general. It was designer-heavy, but that was why I went there... to keep my breadth and stretch a few muscles.

In (I think) the 17th slide of her presentation she stated concisely what I have essentially been saying to my customers for a long time: "Consumer opinion (trust) depends on your business being transparent, coherent, and genuine."

I cannot claim originality, since some great ColdFusion evangelists have taught me this idea for many years - and I am grateful. But the statement was just much more packed together than my usual inspirational tirade about personal voice and consistent honesty, and how your customers will know the truth, etc. But all this bears the scrutiny of the initial question. Should we care? And if so, why?

I posit that consumer opinion is OUR own opinion. Specifically, it is an evolutionary and dimensionalized version of our opinion. Have you ever had an opinion that didn't evolve? Every sensation, testimony, and experience that we have characterizes the weight of our opinions. If we are selling it and someone is buying from us. - or potentially doing so - there is an inherent dynamic between consumer and producer (us). The resulting opinion is always a collective, though (and most likely) we may be unaware of the recipe. In the end, our opinion of our own product and our trust in its value must effect our ingredients. We either catalyze or react. We might call this strategy for instance, or maybe inspiration. In the end, it is simply our part.

The true impact of the consumer's contribution may be as clinical as a force of finance or much more sticky involving layers of social and administrative variables. Each of these pathways does have a beginning and an end point, though. And somewhere the opinion of the consumer and the producer will tally up to complete the overall content of the "pathway". So knowing whose part is which should give us better information to produce and operate with clarity, and reduce overhead and maximize profits from the consumer, right? Some people think so. I can't see it though. I think the analysis gamble is far too complex. I don't want to be a better card counter.

I think we should care about OUR collective opinion. Exercising our strategies from an ethical or values basis, we can find patterns. These vectors (patterns) will look a lot like the pathways that exist in and around our markets. I see this as market astronomy. Like following the stars and their movements to learn about how we fit into the larger universe. We definitely collect a lot of data and create concrete formulas to maintain consistency. We just do so with care for the larger opinion, realizing that ours is only one pathway.

This values-based approach shines light on the idea of "being transparent, coherent, and genuine." It turns concepts like transparency into a necessity for information flow. Coherence becomes the effort of giving and sharing and listening. And being genuine... well, that is the mother load! I'm sure a google search would be blogtastic on the subject. Mostly, I think genuineness is where caring about a consumer opinion comes into play. The rest is just mortar. And being genuine is as much about perception as it is projection.

I guess I will leave it there for now, but I think a much longer analysis of being genuine is in order. Stay tuned.

Since I am moving to Seattle, WA this next year, I have become more interested in the broader real estate market and the implications it has on my future $$.

It seems that Dallas has felt a much softer impact from the housing depression of recent months than many markets... I call it a "false" market. Texas in general has a much lower inventory cost for houses than both the east and west coast cities. I have seen so many people lately come from San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, etc. who were able to sell there houses - sometimes at a loss - and get more house for the remaining money than they had originally. Add that to Texas not having a state tax and Dallas being like second in the nation for number of corporate headquarters. This has given us a steady influx of residents to the state even while the housing market has declined.

Tools like Tifosity's MLS search has also been taking off as the traditional human real estate agent is not always contacted before the newer eAgent model is given a chance. I'll talk a lot more about lead capture as time goes by, but http://www.tifosity.com is a good example of how it works.

For longer than I can remember... ok not really, for about 10 years... I have written form after form after form to essentially accomplish CRUD. Every site just about seems to require a page or multiple pages which basically serve the purpose of reporting on the records of data in specific tables. Then a form is required to update this data, add new records, delete records, or changes related lookup data in response to this data's status changes or the site's requirements.

The thought occurred to me that a widget or control or panel or whatever you want to call it could be useful to allow any page the basic functionality of displaying, editing, and interacting with the data in a given table or "selected table" w/o re-writing the interface to this purpose. A form would have to be dynamically built based on the fields of data in the chosen table. The widget would have to have an understanding of field datatypes, so that UI controls could be shown in the form to given relevant perspective. Boolean fields would show as radio buttons. Lookups fields could be select boxes. Dates could prompt a calendar control. etc.

Well, time has rolled by and I got further into Flex development and kinda don't wanna do this in CF anymore. I love ColdFusion and I thought of doing this project in both, but after careful consideration, the Flex platform will simply allow me better options. ColdFusion will handle the configuration and database access portion of the project. Flex will handle the UI for both the widget and the admin for widget configuration.

I should have more details on this project in the coming weeks and will post some links as they are available.