Not only that, I’ll be also presented with the localized search results.

This means that when I do search on Google, I am no longer seeing all possible or best results available on the web. Google intentionally pushed to the top of their search results only the results from sites (businesses) that have geographic location similar to mine.

This is called Geographic Targeting, (or Localization), where Google tries to determine user’s geographic location, based on their IP address (and/or their location settings in Google) and then try to match the user with the sites that also have Geotargeting setup to the same location.

Google’s goal is to return the most relevant and useful sites in response to a user query. As a result, the results we show to a user in Ireland may vary from the results returned to a user in France. ~ Google on Geotargeting

In theory, this sounds like a great idea, especially, because all this is done in a name of proving users with “the most relevant and useful sites”. On practice, it doesn’t work all that well.

Here is why I think Geotargeting is Evel

From Users’ Perspective:

• Google is effectively altering our reality, and for the most part, we are clueless about that.
  Not all users are web-savvy and realize that their search results are localized. Most users probably think they are looking at all available results on the web. After all, we search the Web and not local directory of business listings.
  If you ever observed users 60+ using web or Google search specifically, you’d notice how little they know about browser or Google search settings. This group of users probably never changes any default settings that their computer comes with. So they definitely have no clue what information is pushed at them through altered search results.
• In addition to that, web users are usually in a hurry and don’t always pay attention to the details, so they may never inspect the results that Google is presenting to them.
• Google on other hand, is not making this apparent to the users that they’ve omitted or pushed down thousands (possibly millions) of other relevant results, because those results didn’t match user’s geo location.
  And as we know, if something doesn’t appear on the first page of Google SERPs, users move on, assuming whatever they are looking for, is not there.
• Web was suppose to be this truly global tool, allowing us to reach far corners of the world. Localization seems to be putting an end to that. We’ll only see as far as our postal codes allow us to see.
• Google relies not only on users’ geographic location, but also on site’s geographic targeting, assuming both are setup correctly, which is not always the case. For those reasons alone, users won’t always get the most relevant search results.
• To me, the whole idea of Localized Results only works in situations with implied local intent, when I am explicitly stating that I am looking for a physical location or a business nearby. But what if I don’t? What if I am looking for the best places in the world to buy Celtic Jewelry? How does Google’s localized search results help me with that? I should be able to buy online from international businesses, if I choose to, right? Yes, only if I could see them! But with localized search, local business listings will push down more relevant international results.
• Here is another situation. What if I am on a vacation in UK, but searching for Canadian content (both in English language)? Google would still favour results from UK sites, even if it’s not as desirable for me, as a user.
• There is no way of turning off location-based customization.
  I personally find this appalling. So as a user, I have no choice, but to see what Google thinks I should see!  Isn’t that censorship in a pure form? What about offering options and letting users decide for themselves what’s best for them?

  The customization of search results based on location is an important component of a consistent, high-quality search experience. Therefore, we haven’t provided a way to turn off location customization, although we’ve made it easy for you to set your own location or to customize using a general location as broad as the country that matches your local domain. ~ Google on Location Customization

• Google says you can set your own location, as broad as country, using “Location” link under their Search Settings tab.
  However, if you try, most likely, you will not be able to break from their auto-detection, even if you enter correct address from another country. I tried many addresses from UK with no luck.

  You can only specify a location within the country of your current Google domain. For instance, it’s not possible to set a U.S. address on www.google.es, the Google domain for Spain. ~ Google on Location Customization

  Hmmm… but if I am always automatically redirected to my country’s Google domain, this means I’ll never be able to change my location to anything else anyway. So this “Location” option basically would let me narrow down my results to a Province or a City within the country that I am already associated with, but never to another country.

  
  

From Site Owners’ Perspective:

• How many site owners (millions of individual bloggers and small business owners) are even aware of Geotargeting?
• Google assigns Geotargeting to your site’s content based on different factors (domain type, link profile etc.), even if you haven’t specifically set Geotargeting for your site. And it doesn’t let you, the site owner, know what that Geotargeting is or how your content is displayed in different search results. So its possible for you not to know that your content is showing up in wrong SERPs or not showing anywhere at all.
• If you’ve purchased a country-specific domain, like domain.ca or domain.co.uk, you are stuck with Geotargeting the country with which your domain is associated with. And if your business moves to another location or if you realize that you don’t want to have Geotargeting associated with your domain at all, you can’t change that. In fact, you are are screwed!There is no way to remove Geotargeting for non-generic TLDs.

  Why is it such a big deal? Well, because if your business is not geared to a specific geographic location, your site will be virtually invisible in Google International (Google.com) and your business will be losing a ton of organic traffic, no matter what you do. Even if you’ll add amazing content and do great job marketing your site, Geotargeting will always drag you down and limit your visibility in Google SERPs.

Google has been criticized in the past for possible misuse, manipulation and censorship of search results. That’s exactly what they are doing with Geotargeting (or location-based customization) with no option to opt-out.

If you search for “Geotargeting”, you will notice that this topic is highly connected with “Ad Conversion” topic. So that’s probably the real reason why Google introduced Geotargeting. It gives them a more precise way of serving ads to Google users, whom, after their latest controversial privacy changes, they pretty much know by name.

This is coupled with Google’s disturbing announcement that they’ve switched from free Google Product Search to paid Google Shopping model.  And again this was done in a name of “better shopping experience”.

It looks like until Google is in the business of selling ads, they’ll keep altering search results the way that serves them best (making money).  So what happened with Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ manifesto, I wonder?

“Absolute power corrupts absolutely” ~ Baron Acton

What can you do to Bypass Google’s Geotargeting & Localized Search?

• Install Google Global- a Firefox extension that allows you to see what Google search results look like from different geographical locations, including Google International (not localized results).
  This is a great tool for SEOs and site owners as well, allowing them to check their site rankings in different Google domains.Once you install this extension, right-click within your Google search results and click on different Google domains from Google Global options menu.
  You can change the list of Google Domains, if you click on “Show Options” and then on “New Search”.To add Google International, put .com as “Extension and leave the rest of the fields Blank.

  

• Site owners that have Generic top-level domains (gTLDs) can remove or change their Geotargeting through settings in their Webmaster Tools.
• Site owners that have country-specific domains don’t really have many options available to them.
  One option is to get some local listings for their domain and gain some backlinks from the sites in a desired geo location. Though this is not going to solve the problem with traffic completely. It’s like swimming against the stream. You’ll always have to work twice as hard to get the positions that .com sites get without all this work.
  Another (better) option is to move their site to a generic TLD, like .com or .biz,  if they want to have any presence in Google International and to grow their traffic.However, this is a costly option, especially if you can’t purchase exactly same domain with .com and have to completely re:Brand their site, and then set up million of permanent redirects to the new domain. It’s a Branding and Marketing nightmare. I am speaking from experience. I’ve learned this lesson the hard way.

Related Articles

The End Of The Global Internet? Google’s Blogger Starts Using Country-Specific Domains To Permit Local Censorship
Geotargeting And The Slippery Slope To Fragmenting The Internet With Localized Censorship
Google Dials Up Localization Big Time
Webmasters Feel Hurt By Google Shopping Move To Paid Placement
Google Quietly Drops Its ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Motto
Google’s Broken Promise: The End of “Don’t Be Evil”?
Google On Difference Between “Don’t Be Evil” vs. “Do No Evil”
Is Google Evil?
Google Is Evil

That’s what Game Designer Jane McGonigal (@avantgame) heard over and over again from complete strangers.

Apparently, young people now spend about 10,000 hours playing games by the age 21. So when we are on our death bed, will we regret all that time playing games? Jane took this problem seriously and decided to find out if there is any truth to that. 

I saw her presentation at the UX Week 2012 Conference in San Francisco. She shared some research done by the Hospice Workers, people that take care of us when we are literally on our death bed, on what people regret the most at the end of their lives.

Top 5 Regrets of the Dying

1. I wish I hadn’t Worked so Hard
2. I wish I Stayed in Touch with my Friends
3. I wish I had let myself be Happier
4. I wish I’d had the Courage to Express my True Self
5. I wish I’d lived a Life true to my Dreams, instead of what others expected of me

Nobody actually said that at the end of their life they wished they’d spent more time playing games. However, Jane said, when she hears those top 5 regrets of the dying she also hears 5 deep human cravings that games help us to fulfill.

“I wish I hadn’t Worked so Hard” means to most people “I wish I’d spent more time with my family and my kids when they were growing up”.

Playing video games has actually tremendous family benefits. Research from School of Family Life shows that parents that spent more time playing games with their kids have stronger relationships with them, and the kids are more likely to go to their parents to solve their real world problems.

“I wish I Stayed in Touch with my Friends”
Games are actually incredibly effective relationships management tools, helping people to stay in touch with their real life friends on a daily bases.

“I wish I had let myself be Happier”
Clinical trials that have been conducted by the East Carolina University in the past 2 years showing that Casual video games demonstrate ability to reduce depression & anxiety and outperform pharmaceuticals in treating clinical anxiety & depression.

“I wish I’d had the Courage to Express my True Self”
A 5-year research from the Stanford University documented that playing games with Idealized Avatar (idealized version of who we could be) actually changes how we act in real life – it makes us more confident, more ambitious and more committed to the goals we set in real life.

Jane also talked about her difficult experience of being in bed for 3 months after getting a severe concussion. Things didn’t heal properly after her accident 3 years ago, so her doctor said to her that in order to get better, she needs to rest the brain and to avoid everything that triggered the symptoms and pain. For her that meant – No Reading, No Writing, No Emails, No Running, No Alcohol, No Caffeine and No Video Games. After 30 days of this she didn’t see a reason to live. So she said to herself – “I am going to kill myself or I am going to turn this into a game.” And she did. She developed a game called “Super Better”, that helps people to build their personal resilience against health ailments.

Why a Game? Because the physiology of games research shows that when we play a game we tackle our problems with more creativity, more optimism, more determination and we are better at reaching out to other people for help.

Post-Traumatic Growth

Jane also talked about the Post-Traumatic Growth phenomenon. There is a research that suggests that some people actually get stronger and happier after a traumatic event.

“A traumatic event doesn’t doom us to suffer indefinitely. Instead, we can use it as a springboard to unleash our best qualities and lead happier lives.” ~ Jane McGonigal

Here are 5 things that people say after they experience a Post-Traumatic Growth:

1. My Priorities have Changed – I’m not afraid to do what makes me happy
2. I Feel Closer to my Friends and Family
3. I Understand Myself Better, I know who I really am now
4. I have a New Sense of Meaning and Purpose
5. I’m better able to Focus on my Goals and my Dreams

If these sounds familiar, it’s because the top 5 traits of Post-Traumatic Growth are essentially the exact opposite of Top 5 Regrets of the Dying. It looks like somehow undergoing a traumatic event unleashes our ability to live the life with fewer regrets.

So how does that work? How do we get form trauma to growth and better yet, can we get benefits of Post-Traumatic Growth without actually going through a trauma? Apparently, Yes!

There are 4 different strengths or types of resilience that could increase your odds of experiencing Post-Traumatic Growth.

1. Physical Resilience
2. Mental Resilience
3. Emotional Resilience
4. Social Resilience

To increase Physical Resilience – do not sit still for more than an hour at a time.

Mental Resilience is your ability to focus on your goals. Will power works like a muscle. It gets stronger the more you exercise it. So tackling even small challenge, without giving up, will boost your will power.

Emotional Resilience is your ability to provoke positive emotions, like curiosity or love. To increase your Emotional Resilience – look up outside the window or imagine your favorite animal.

It turns out if you can increase your emotional ratio of positive to negative emotions 3:1, it will dramatically increase your ability to achieve your goals, as you will be more optimistic and will have more energy. People will also want to help you more because of that positive energy and optimism.

You have to get at least 3:1 ratio in order to unlock this ability. However, there is a cap. If you go higher than 12:1 it all collapses on itself and reverses, as other people start hating you -  nobody likes someone that happy all the time!

Social Resilience - your ability to draw strength from your friends, your family, your neighbors and your community.
It turns out if you shake someone’s hand for 6 seconds, it will boost the level of oxytocin, trust hormone, in your blood stream. You will then  become more inclined to help someone for the next 24hrs.

People who regularly boost their 4 types resilience, live 10 years longer than everyone else.

Lasting Impact of Playing a Game

Jane also talked about the lasting impact of playing a game.

Those who have cancer have to take their chemotherapy pills for 2-3 years, and its really hard to make kids to take pills regularly for that long.  80% of cases of cancers that returned were in kids that missed the dosage. However, those kids that played Re-Mission, a video game for teens with cancer, for as little as 2 hrs had a lot more consistent chemotherapy adherence for the next 6 months, compared to those who didn’t play the game at all.  And they didn’t see much difference between people who completed all levels in the game and those that just spent 2 hrs playing this game.

What’s also interesting that these kids that played the game felt that they had more control and more power to beat the cancer.

Creators of the Re-Mission actually teamed up with the Researchers from Stanford University to use fMRI so they could see what’s actually happening with the kids’ brain when they are playing re-Mission. What they saw is that the brains of the kids that were playing the game were lit up a lot more compared to those who were passively observing the game, but not playing it. So its the actual interaction with the game that led to those regions of the brain to be lit up like that.

Those brain regions Caudate & Thalamus are called Reward Centers. They are responsible for addiction, like addiction to cocaine or gambling. What we know about these reward centers is that when they are lit up, we are more likely to stay engaged and not to give up. We also hang on to our goals longer! Which is not a good thing when we are losing money gabbling, but a good thing when we are fighting cancer.

Another brain region that was led up is Hippocampus, which is associated with memories and long-term learning. This means that people who were playing games were committing to their long-term memory their ability to stay engaged with something and not to give up, even if its difficult. They were creating long-lasting habits! That’s why playing a game for just 2 hrs altered people’s behavior for 6 months.

“Researches concluded that a carefully designed video game can have a positive impact on health behavior in young people with chronic illness and that video-game–based interventions may constitute a component of a broader integrative approach to healthcare that synergistically combines rationally targeted biological and behavioral interventions to aid patients in the prevention, detection, treatment, and recovery from disease.” ~ Wikipedia

To me this means that its possible to control what we get addicted to and what habits we create by playing certain games, or I suppose by doing any other activities, that activate those brain regions. Now I just need to figure out which games will get me addicted to exercise, eating breakfast and doing taxes. Lol

Another interesting thing about this study is the exact moment when peoples’ brains lit up. It wasn’t at the moment when they succeeded in the game. It lit up in the split second between people taking an action and waiting to see the impact of their action. So it’s not the success, not getting what you want, but the moment of hope, the moment of anticipation of seeing your own power that made an impact on people. It’s not the success, but the act of pursuit that makes us happy! Even when we are failing, we are still getting rewarded.

I really enjoyed Jane’s fascinating talk. You can see her similar presentation “The game that can give you 10 extra years of life” on Ted.com. I actually bought her book “Reality is Broken” before I knew I’d see her at the Conference. Definitely going to read it now!

I think we are already surrounded by so much technology, but for the most part, its a stupid technology. It needs humans to perform the tasks and it doesn’t question humans when they make mistakes. Your cell phone is useless, if you forget to recharge it. Your food will over-cook, if you set the wrong time in microwave by mistake.

But what if everything around us, every single object and every environment, was super smart and super intuitive to human needs?

What if all gadgets were connected and shared information to make suggestions for us or would prevent accidents, without any human involvement?

Scientists already envision a future in which microchips are embedded in nearly everything. Here is a cool video from 2008 by the ScienceChannel “Visions of the Future – Ubiquitous Computing” where they see that in the future intelligence will be everywhere and in every object, like our clothing, our walls, our furniture, seamlessly integrated into our daily life and connected to everything, yet invisible to the human eye.

“Ubiquitous Computing (ubicomp) is a post-desktop model of human-computer interaction in which information processing has been thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities. In the course of ordinary activities, someone “using” ubiquitous computing engages many computational devices and systems simultaneously, and may not necessarily even be aware that they are doing so… More formally, ubiquitous computing is defined as “machines that fit the human environment instead of forcing humans to enter theirs.” ~ Wikipedia

Ubiquitous Computing, sometimes also called Pervasive Computing, which “enables everyday objects to recognize our needs and react to them in an intelligent manner” is not something out of a science-fiction. “The requisite hardware is already available. What’s needed now is new software and global standards” – according to 2004 “Developing a Digital Aura” article on siemens.com.

“We already have a critical mass of devices and wireless networks. The next step is to make those devices aware of how humans work and to get them to adapt to their habits.” ~ Bo Begole, a ubicomp expert at Xerox PARC

Wearable Computing devices, like medical monitoring devices or those that allow people to track their fitness as they exercise, are becoming more and more popular now.

“Sooner rather than later you’ll have a computer attached to your face, and for some, it’ll happen as early as next year.” – says David J. Hill in his recent article 2013 — The Dawn Of Wearable Computing?

Ever heard of Google’s Project Glass? Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin was Spotted Wearing Project Glass in April of this year.

A dress that tweets, by Microsoft. Its made of paper and was stitched together completely by hand. A custom keyboard, which resembles and old school typewriter allows the wearer to send her 140-character message, which is then displayed on the dress through a projector.

There is also a lot of discussions around Human ID Chips, like VeriChip or VeriMed, a first FDA-approved injectable identification chip that can be inserted under the skin of a human being to provide biometric verification – means by which a person can be uniquely identified by evaluating one or more distinguishing biological traits. Human ID Chips are about the size of a grain of rice. They can be programmed to open doors, switch on lights, pay for purchases and to log you on to your computer.

But the most valuable functions of Microchip Implants are probably those that could potentially save your life, as they can provide doctors at a time of a crises with your medical history, list of your medications, allergies, and your contact information.

Imagining the Future

I am not a morning person and I hate when my sleep is interrupted by the sound of an alarm. So I was thinking – wouldn’t that be nice if you’d wake up every morning at the time when your clock calculated the best time for you to wake up.

It would monitor your sleep and know exactly when the optimal time for you to wake up on Monday morning, given your age, your medical history and your sleep patterns, without making you late for that Monday meeting. You’d wake up rested and ready for the busy week ahead of you. (Yes, I’ve heard of the Sleep Cycle alarm clock)

The wall color would now be adjusted to a brighter shade and you’d hear some upbeat music in the room.

You leave washroom at the time when your toothbrush and your toilet are sending urine and saliva tests to your family doctor, as part of the routine medical evaluation. Why waste valuable health information, if it could be used for early detection and prevention of deceases?

As you open your closet, certain items in your closet would light up, suggesting you should wear a jacket and bring an umbrella with you, as it’s suppose to be a cold and rainy day today.

You dress and go to the kitchen to have a quick breakfast. Your coffee and your cereal are ready, just as you enter the kitchen. Everything is timed perfectly. You also see a sign on the water bottle saying that your doctor recommends you start taking iron supplements & multivitamins, as your last tests indicated that you are low on those.

As you eat your cereal, you notice a message on the fridge letting you know that you need milk and bread and that the order has been placed already, though you now have to make a choice to A) pick it up at the same time you pickup your dry-cleaning on Wednesday (It saves you money) or B) it can be delivered tonight, if you can’t wait till Wednesday (It saves you time).

You choose to ignore that message letting the fridge to make that decision for you. You don’t even need to press any buttons. You simply need to think about your preferred choice or react to a message in some way, like frown. That would be enough of an input for your fridge to calculate a proper outcome – dismiss the message and settle on an option B.

You grab your purse and look for the shoes. Suddenly, a few pairs start to glow in the corner.

In-Context Recommendations are part of your everyday life in this Smart Space. You don’t have to search for information anymore. Your surrounding environment and all objects around you constantly do calculations and predictions for you, based on your past choices and your satisfaction with them, as well as current weather conditions, your mood and your state of mind, the latest research into human behavior etc. All objects become useful beyond their intended use.

For a second, you think of your elderly parents and feel good knowing that they can’t leave their house without a wallet or without taking their medication on time, as their house monitors that 24×7. Outside their home, their watch, their jewelry or their clothing do this job.

Your attention is now brought to a countdown on the front door, informing you that the elevator is arriving on your floor in 12 seconds. You rush out the door.

At the elevator you bump into your neighbor, an old friend. You haven’t seen each other for a while. She says that she is fine, but you hear a message in your headphones, interrupting your music, that your friend’s skin analyses suggest that she hasn’t slept in a while and that her speech exhibits signs of distress. You are very busy, but you decide to take a few extra minutes to find out how your friend is doing and learn that she is going through some difficult times.

As two of you are making plans to go for drinks on Thursday night, both of your Calendars are already communicating with each other trying to find best time for both of you to meet, checking your favorite restaurants’ availability and creating a list of potential options, ranking each one against various criteria, like proximity to home and work, specials on that day, food preferences for both of you etc.

When you get home from work that day, your apartment is transformed again to create a relaxing atmosphere for you with dimmed lights, calming wall colors, candles and a slow music playing on the background, just as you like it at this time of a day.

You don’t even notice it, but there is a fresh milk and bread in your fridge…

You live in a world that doesn’t have traffic jams, accidental deaths or lies, as they are easily detectable, so nobody bothers to lie anymore (Imagine how it would change Politics or News Broadcasting! Lol). You never do duplicate work, make same mistakes twice, forget appointments, have a need to keep receipts or make uninformed decisions. Those concepts simply don’t exist anymore.

This is what I’ve imagined, as an ideal life with computers in it. What’s yours?

Good Reading

• Defining Ubiquitous Computing vs. Augmented Reality
• Ubiquitous Computing – Up close by The Economist
• Toronto researchers among MIT’s 35 top innovators
• Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin Spotted Wearing Project Glass
• Move over, Ubiquitous Computing – Transparent Computing is here
• Intel predicts ubiquitous, almost-zero-energy computing by 2020
• Ubicomp 2012 – 14th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing
• An Architectural Framework for User Mobility in Ubiquitous Computing Environments by CMU
• 2013 — The Dawn Of Wearable Computing?
• Wearable Tech Makes a Fashion Statement
• Human ID Chips Get Under My Skin

Photo Credits: Ubicomp image by blogs.parc.com, Handmade Card from iCraft.ca, Dress that tweets photo courtesy of Microsoft.

Social Media Fails

We know that Social Media is all about Engagement. Not all of us can get away with a one-way rant, like Kanye West. Lol

Kanye West asked his followers a question (let’s just ignore for a moment what he is asking) and then didn’t respond to anyone, and just kept talking to himself. And I assume there were a lot of responses from his 8+ million fans. Btw, the only person he follows on Twitter is Kim Kardashian.

However, the fact that social media is a two-way communication seems to elude many companies.

McDonald’s #McDStories is a good example of that. Their promotional #McDStories hashtag (which btw they paid for to be trending at the top of Twitter searches in January 2012) was highjacked by Twitter users to share fast food horror stories, turning their campaign into an epic #McFail!

The same thing happened to Wendy’s with their #HeresTheBeef hashtag last year. Many Twitter users responded with their pornographic versions of Here it is! And others responded with equally graphic imagery of cruelly penned, industrially-raised livestock.
To make things worse, Wendy’s ran their campaign on #MeatlessMonday. Lol

It looks like Twitter is favorited by Fast Food Restaurants. Subway also generated a lot of negative buzz with their hashtag #SUBWAYAllStarBBQ

On January 3rd, Volkswagen UK asked on Facebook for advice for 2012. More than 2 thousand people responded asking Volkswagen why they are lobbying against environmental laws and why their boss Martin Winterkorn refuses to meet Greenpeace.

The thing is if you ask people to talk about your company or your products, they are not going to say only nice things about you.

Consumer research shows that bad to good feedback ratio is about 5 to 1, meaning users will five time more likely share their bad user experiences than praise the good ones. (On a side note -  we rarely remember neutral moments. And according to the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Daniel Kahneman, each day we experience approximately 20,000 moments, each a few seconds long, in which our brain records an experience.)

Taco Bell was slammed for its offensive reference on Martin Luther King Day in their tweet, asking people – “Have you ever dreamed of eating @Taco Bell and then woke up and made that dream come true?”. What a better way to honor one of the greatest figures in American history, who fought segregation, by comparing him to a taco, probably served by an underpaid employee?

Coca-Cola was also in the middle of the social media crises in 2010 and forced to apologize when a complicated social media contest for Dr. Pepper resulted in them being accused of using porn to target children on Facebook.

However, there are some Success Stories too

Barack Obama, America’s First Truly Social President

Barack Obama have been embracing social media since he decided to run for the office in 2007 and can credit social media tools as a big part of his success. According to techpresident.com, in 2008 Obama’s online efforts included 13 million emails, 4 million digital donors, and 2 million members on My.BarackObama.com, a social network that inspired grassroots campaigning on a scale never seen before in the United States. And the momentum has carried through his term: On September 6, 2012, During Democratic National Convention, Obama’s nomination-acceptance speech set a new record of 52,000 tweets a minute.

Re-tweetable Messaged by HealthyDoseofImagination.com

This is a smart way to create an awareness and to promote the cause (Health Inequity) – by creating educational and inspirational content (“Now Imagine” messages) that could be easily shared using social media tools (Twitter and Facebook in this case).

Instagram & Pinterest “Hotel Noir” Campaign for Grey Goose

This is an interesting multichannel social media campaign execution. To promote Grey Goose vodka marketers from Chicago’s R/GA commissioned four smartphone photographers to snap shots for its own Instagram stream – and share with their own followings, which total in the hundreds of thousands.

The digital component – which launched August 23rd and is rolling out in a series of six chapters, also includes a Pinterest page. Why Pinterest? “It really gives us an opportunity to insert our brand and our cocktail recipes into an environment where people are looking for that type of information,” – says R/GA account supervisor Michelle Roberts.

Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice Campaign

Burger King customers were given incentive (a free burger) to do something they already wanted to do – improve their Facebook experience by purging their non-friend friends. Burger King developed a simple FB widget application that allowed people to remove undesired FB accounts. It was a win-win for customers. On the flip side, Burger King was able to drive customers into its restaurants & up-sell them – “Would you like fries and a beverage with that?”. They were also able to track a myriad of business metrics to prove return on investment.

Unfortunately, it was a short-lived campaign, as Facebook didn’t like the idea of people un-friending their friends – it conflicted with their monetization model! Apparently, improved user experience is not the top of their priorities.

McDonald’s Mommy Bloggers Program

Not all McDonald’s social media campaigns are huge #McFails. Back in 2010 McDonald’s reached out to “mommy bloggers” to get help in shaping their image in a more positive way. They flew 15 bloggers and their families to Chicago, putting them up in a nice hotel and giving them the grand tour of their operations, hoping they’ll like what they see and then telling their readers about it. That was a smart move. People trust someone else’s opinion more than they trust ad campaigns from big corporations. And those mommy bloggers are Key Influencers for the McDonald’s brand, especially when it comes to their skeptical demographic (parents). Apparently, the posts that followed – each accompanied by a disclaimer noting their sponsorship by McDonald’s – were overwhelmingly positive.

“Will It Blend?” Viral YouTube Videos

Blendtec’s hilarious viral videos demonstrated the effectiveness of blenders by blending everything from Golf Balls to iPhone, were so effective that orders for their blenders jumped overnight, increasing company’s sales by 700%.

UK Jewelry Store gets publicity from YouTube How-To Videos

Small UK jewelry business owned by a father and son have used How-to videos to build their brand awareness. First posted as part of a school project, videos on how to craft precious metals into works of art, became instant hit on YouTube and gained them new customers across the world. The most popular clip – having been viewed nearly 200,000 times – is one which explains how they made two wedding rings from scrap gold.
I like this story because it shows that even small companies and unknown brands have a chance of getting a lot of exposure from social media without spending a lot of money.

Domino Pizza’s Response to their Social Media Crises

Back in 2009 Domino Pizza didn’t didn’t even have a social media presence, but they already had a social media crises on their hands when two of their employees in their Conover N.C. franchise uploaded a Youtube video of themselves doing disgusting things to customers’ food. That video went viral in a matter of days.

Instead of ignoring criticism, the company launched smart social media campaign, including opening a Twitter account that provided regular updates on this incident and issuing a video of their own using the same channel where the crises broke out on, optimizing it in such a way so it appeared alongside the offending video.

They apologized and openly admitted their past shortcomings. This kind of incident could’ve easily brought their brand down. Instead, Domino’s immediate and regular response to this massively severe crisis through social media humanized their brand and the situation, and gained them loyal customers. So in my mind this is a success story.

Want to see more Success Stores?

Check this great article on Mashable – 5 Surprising Social Media Business Success Stories or Case Studies of Successful Use of Social Media on socialmediaexaminer.com. Here is another good article actually questioning social media success of companies by examining their ROI – 101 success stories: yes. 101 examples of ROI: no.

What are the social media successes and failures that you remember the most? I’d love to hear your stories.

So Is It a Success or a Failure for most Companies that use Social Media?

A study published by the Social Media Examiner “2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report” unveiled several interesting statistics.

• 58% of marketers who have been using social media for more than 3 years report it has helped them improve sales.
• Even with a minimal time investment, the vast majority of marketers (85%) indicated their social media efforts increased exposure for their business.
• By spending as little as 6 hours per week, 61% of marketers see lead generation benefits with social media.
• Nearly half of those who spend at least 11 hours per week on social media efforts saw a benefit of reduced marketing expenses.
• A significant 74% of participants found that increased traffic occurred with as little as 6 hours per week invested in social media marketing. And those who’ve been doing this for 3 years or more reported substantially
• Nearly 65% of marketers found social media to be a helpful tool in understanding the marketplace. Of those with at least 1 year of experience, 70% or more found benefit.
• Of those who have been using social media for at least 1 year, 65% found it useful for building a loyal fan base.

Want to know How You Are Doing?

Check 4 Ways to Measure Your Social Media Success on Forbes.com
Toughest to track: How to measure social media success on theglobeandmail.com
How to Perform a Social Audit [Infographic] on socialnomics.net

So here is how our Vision works:

• We See with our Brains.
• We trust our vision to be 100% accurate up-to-the minute representation of what’s out there. The reality can be slightly different.
• We see what our brain guesses is out there. 
  “The brain is actively deconstructing the information given to it by the eyes, pushing it through a series of filters, and then reconstructing what it thinks it sees. Or what it thinks you should see… It makes a gazillion calculations, then provides you its best guess.”
• Our brain is doing all these guessing because it doesn’t know where things are. In a three-dimensional world, the light actually falls on our retina in a two-dimensional fashion. So our brain approximates viewable image.
  
• Our brain devotes a lot of thinking resources to Vision, in part because it has to process input from both eyes, which give our brain 2 separate visual fields, and they project images upside down and backwards.
• Actually we trust Vision more than any other senses because “our brain insists on helping us create our perceived reality“.
• What’s even more fascinating is that our “Previous experience plays an important role in what the brain allows us to see“. To me this means what we see and perceive is highly individual, as our individual experiences in life.

Now, if you’ve heard about the rule of 7 (the number of objects an average human can hold in working memory is 7 ± 2), you’ll find this interesting. According to the new research, most of us can hold about 4 objects at a time in our visual working memory, and as the complexity of the objects increases, the number of objects capable of being captured drops.

People remember and recall information better if its presented visually, and “the more visual the input becomes, the more likely it is to be recognized – and recalled.” It’s called Pictorial Superiority Effect, or PSE

“If information is presented orally, people remember about 10%, tested 72 hrs after exposure. That number goes up by 65% if you add a picture.” ~ John Medina

“Tests performed years ago showed that people could remember more than 2,500 pictures with at least 90% accuracy several days post-exposure, even though subjects saw each picture for about 10 seconds. Accuracy rates a year later still hovered around 63%.” ~ John Medina

Text is Inefficient Compared to Images

It actually creates bottlenecks for people trying to consume information.

“One of the reasons that text is less capable than pictures is that the brain sees words as lots of tiny pictures… Instead of words, we see complex little art-museum masterpieces, with hundreds of features embedded in hundreds of letters. Like an art junkie, we linger at each feature, rigorously and independently verifying it before moving it to the next… My text chokes you, not because my text is not enough like pictures,  but because my text is too much like pictures. To our cortex, unnervingly, there is no such thing as words.” ~ John Medina

If you’ve ever done Usability Testing, you probably heard comments from users that the page is text-heavy. Now you can understand why that’s a problem.

According to John Medina, no matter how experienced we are as readers, we will still stop and ponder individual textual features as we go through text.

“Our evolutionary history was never dominated by text-filled billboards or Microsoft Word. It was dominated by leaf-filled trees and saber-toothed tigers. The reason vision means so much to us may be as simple as the fact that most of the major threats to our lives in the savannah were apprehended visually. Ditto with most of our food supplies. Ditto with our perceptions of reproductive opportunity. The tendency is so pervasive that, even when we read, most of us try to visualize what text is telling us.” ~ John Medina

This might explain why in the experiment determining “usable” homepages, designs that were judged to be the most usable showed high graphics-to-text ratio.

Are there any Exceptions to these Rules?

I’ve heard a few times now that Lawyers is the only group that tends to like text-heavy documents and prefers non-visual communications. Apparently, images for lawyers add to the confusion and destruct them from consuming information. I wonder if there is any truth to that in light of what the brain research tells us.

Testing Tools

• Online Screenshot Testing Software
  Chalkmark is an online tool for testing site’s first impressions and top tasks, brought to you by OptimalWorkshop. I also use it for “Bucket Testing” site’s navigation.
  

  “Bucket Testing” City’s New Navigation shows where most people will click when asked a specific question, like “Where would you go to Pay Parking Tickets?”.

• Online Card Sorting Software
  OptimalSort is an easy-to-use online Card Sorting Tool from OptimalWorkshop. It’s a great way to get an idea of how people would group your content, because you can share URL and get quick results. However, it doesn’t allow you to create hierarchies (sub-groups) of content. So you can only see first level groupings. 
  
• Information Architecture Validation Software
  Treejack is an online tool for testing site structure (IA) also brought to you by OptimalWorkshop. Tree testing is done on a simplified text version of your site structure – without the influence of navigation aids and visual design. It helps you to learn where people get lost in your content. (I haven’t tried this one yet, but it looks like a very useful tool too.) 

Social

• Check for Fake Twitter Followers
  Fake Follower Check, a tool from social media firm StatusPeople that analyzes a sampling of a Twitter account’s followers and checks for telltale signs of fake followers. Fake accounts are those thought to be created for the sole purpose of sending spam, while inactive accounts lack recent updates. (Was mentioned on Mashable in regard to Obama’s 70% fake or inactive Twitter Followers) 
• How to Locate Your Twitter RSS Feed
  Use this code below and replace xxxxx with your Twitter username to use your Twitter RSS Feed:
  http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=xxxxx (Where xxxxx is the username.)

• How to Find Your Twitter Favorites RSS Feed
  Your feed for only the favorites: http://twitter.com/favorites/xxxxx.rss (Where xxxxx is the username.)

I have to say I was blown away by his work – striking images of landscapes with vivid colors… all I could say is “wow, I love his work!”

Very quickly the sales guy found me and started telling me why I should purchase his work. I was about 15 mins away from catching last tour bus from the Fisherman’s Wharf back to downtown San Francisco, where my hotel was, so I wasn’t ready to make a purchasing decision at that time.

Naturally, I asked for the photographer’s website, where I could see more of his work and maybe purchase online later.

The sales guy gave me his web address, but warned me that all artwork online is priced 3 times more, compared to the prices you can get in the gallery. He even showed me a scale of how artwork is priced. “Why?” – I asked, surprised. Well, you see, the sales guy continued, “we want to discourage people from buying online”. “Why?” – I asked again, now completely shocked, but very interested in his answer.

Basically, they don’t do returns and if you buy online, they believe, you might not really understand what you are getting and then would want to return it.

I’ve noticed even before that conversation that artists have an interesting take on everything web.

Arts and (No) Crafts

We hear this phrase “Arts and Crafts” a lot and we assume that that the two “Arts” and “Crafts” go together. Well, as I discovered, there is nothing further from the truth – Arts and Crafts don’t go together, and Artists and Crafters don’t mix. In fact, the two groups want nothing to do with one another!

Since I started my business iCraft.ca 4 years ago, which was suppose to be an online venue for selling arts and crafts, I was trying to convince local artists to join the site. Nothing worked! Free accounts, special promotions etc. Even today, 4 years later, we only feature about 400 items of original artwork, which is nothing compared to about 3,000 of handmade jewelry and other items posted on the site. Even good friends of mine, who were into painting and photography, would not join the site.

What it boiled down to is artist’s reputation! Artists are very particular where you showcase their work. They had difficulty agreeing to placing their work in the same company with knitted baby booties or laptop bags made of recycled seat belts.

So big name artists would definitely not sell on sites like Ebay. They need their own space and a lot of attention to their art. Some even say they wouldn’t sell their art on the site that features other artwork at prices lower than $500.

This kind of thinking actually applies to the offline world as well. Many artists selling at the “One of a Kind” show in Toronto are not thrilled showing their work next to crafters. The two groups, apparently, don’t interact much with each other at the show and artists pretty much look down on crafters. At least, that’s what I was told.

Selling Online is Selling Out

Many artists I spoke to over the years, don’t even have online presence, which is mind boggling for me. They just don’t believe in online!

Some believe, you have to see their work to buy it and that online photos would not give their work any justice. Others don’t want to bother with the online and see it as too much work. They are doing ok selling their artwork through galleries and rely on art shows to sell their work the old-fashioned way.

As Joanne Latimer said in her post Would Picasso have sold online? – “The Web is shaking up the art world. But some see it as selling out.”, referring to artists who believe that selling online is “a shopping mart for the masses. High art is relationship selling,” says Barrie Mowatt of Vancouver’s Buschlen Mowatt Galleries. “Online sales is for the Costco and Zellers market.”

I wonder if it will take the whole generation to change this kind of thinking. What do you think?

I designed the site pretty quickly, in less than a month, I think. I also coded all pages myself in HTML using old-fashioned tables, as that’s what I knew and because it was easy for me to do it that way (tables are gone now). At the end of 2007 the site was up and running and people were registering and setting up their stores.

I was counting members every day. We started with as small number as 5 (friends & family members mostly), then 10, 20, 50, 100. (Today we have over 2300 Sellers on the site)

It was somewhat easy to attract people to the site initially, even though we didn’t have many features built yet, like the shopping cart, because we were giving away free accounts.

Surprisingly, many people were interested to be on the ground floor of the new site, as they wanted to be directly contributing to how the site was developed. At some point, traffic to the site grew so much that it crashed our server and we had no choice, but to move to a more expensive (and more reliable) hosting.

The first few months were probably the most exhausting and the most exciting for me. I was working like a mad person, fueled by pure enthusiasm, leaving my laptop only to sleep. Even in my sleep I was still thinking of the website and of all the new and exciting things I could do when I got up.

I remember how everyone at the beginning was supportive and expecting a huge success in a matter of months. That, of course, didn’t happened.

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
~ Thomas A. Edison on inventing a light bulb

I guess it all depends on your Definition of Success.
I knew why I started my own site, so I felt I was still succeeding, even though the site didn’t make me an instant millionaire. Actually, monetary rewards weren’t my main motivation.

My motivation was more professional in nature

Working with clients or within large organizations, I often felt too restricted, like my wings were chopped off. I was putting a lot of energy into convincing others of my ideas, but at the end, I was losing too many battles and was never really satisfied with the results.

Decisions for the site are often made by the Committees – a group of people who have very little understanding of the User Centered Design or what makes websites user friendly. The decisions are often based on their understanding of what users want.

I really wanted the opportunity to make all those decisions myself, at least, on one project.

So I was eager to build the best possible Social Networking & eCommerce site that would have a Community feel to it, be easy to use and offer quality handmade products. I also wanted to improve online shopping and make it as easy and enjoyable, as possible.

I think after a second year, that’s when I realized that I didn’t have many supporters of my project any more. My mom decided to surround herself with a puppy and a kitten, realizing she might not live long enough to see her grandchildren. My boyfriend at that time started saying that I am an addict, who needs an intervention, and was acting as if he was in a direct competition with iCraft. I’d often have to choose between working on iCraft and whatever he wanted to do. Actually, I stopped mentioning iCraft at home not to irritate him. Eventually, we broke up because of this situation.

I was pretty heart broken, because I was expecting people around me to be more supportive. I went after my dreams and was doing something I was passionate about. So if I didn’t succeed according to someone else’s definition of success, was I a failure?

Some people were saying to me that I need to know when to give up. I think it depends on the situation. If I was trying to do something that I knew very little about or if I was trying to sell a product that nobody wanted, I’d probably given up a long time ago. But I felt like my situation was different.

I knew a lot about designing and putting together awesome websites before I stared iCraft. I’ve learned even more in my 4-year journey – an experience I wouldn’t have gotten working for someone else! I know I am on the right track, even though I am moving slowly.

Plus, we have a lot of loyal users, who stayed with the site from the beginning, and whith whom I am in a close contact. So I know iCraft a good product that people like. It just needs a bit more exposure.

I can’t explain this, but I have this new found confidence now that I can succeed at anything. Maybe it’s because I feel like I’ve come a long way – I  lived through so much building my own online community from the ground up. (And I can tell you that wasn’t easy!)  … or maybe it’s the result of 10,000 hrs spent designing and perfecting websites (from “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell) – if you put 10,000 hrs into doing something, you’ll become an expert at it, even if you didn’t have the talent to start with… or maybe I am just too stubborn. I don’t know. All I know is that I am not going to give up, no matter what others are saying.

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
~ Winston Churchill

“The current incarnation of the Internet — portable, social, accelerated, and all-pervasive — may be making us not just dumber or lonelier but more depressed and anxious, prone to obsessive-compulsive and attention-deficit disorders, even outright psychotic. Our digitized minds can scan like those of drug addicts, and normal people are breaking down in sad and seemingly new ways.”

Internet “fosters our obsessions, dependence, and stress reactions,” adds Larry Rosen, a California psychologist who has researched the Net’s effect for decades. It “encourages—and even promotes—insanity.”

Jason Russell had a public meltdown after extensive use of the Internet.

Here is one example of such insane behavior.

Jason Russell, 33, a film director of Kony 2012, a short documentary film, had a very public meltdown when his film went viral in the beginning of March 2012.

He slept only two hours in the first four days, producing a swirl of bizarre Twitter updates and then was found running naked in public, ranting to himself, dropping F-bombs and shouting about the devil. He was eventually hospitalized for brief reactive psychosis brought on by extreme exhaustion, stress and dehydration.

Russell’s outburst — caught on camera and widely discussed online — came after intense scrutiny of his 30-minute film about brutal Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. The video garnered more than 84 million views worldwide — and was criticized by some for being factually inaccurate.

“Because of how personal the film is, many of the attacks against it were also very personal and Jason took them very hard,” said wife Danica Russell in a statement, adding that Jason Russell wasn’t on drugs.

The worst thing is – doctors say that no-one is immune from the sort of public meltdown experienced by Jason Russell. It could occur in anybody, if the stress is severe enough.

Tony also provides some interesting stats in his article:

“In less than the span of a single childhood, Americans have merged with their machines, staring at a screen for at least eight hours a day, more time than we spend on any other activity including sleeping… Texting has become like blinking: the average person, regardless of age, sends or receives about 400 texts a month, four times the 2007 number. The average teen processes an astounding 3,700 texts a month, double the 2007 figure.”

So why can’t we resist Internet and Mobile Technology?

Probably because Internet is Very Addictive.

• It’s Easily Accessible
  It’s everywhere. We can access Internet from home, school, work, airports, coffee shops. We also carry smartphones in our pockets.
• It’s Easy to Use
  UX Specialists, like me, make sure of that.

  We are addicted to Simple
  If the desire for new, surprising, social information has not already made your brand addictive, consider the power of simple. The simpler something is to do, the more likely we are to do it, regardless of the rational costs or benefits.

  Consider life versus death.
  British health officials were shocked to discover that switching sleeping pills from a bottle to a blister pack led to a 20 percent decline in suicide rates. The “hassle” of individually extracting pills from blister pack led many to choose life over death. ~John X. Kenny

• It’s Always Connected
  Especially with smartphones, that some people keep within an arm’s reach.
  Actually, sixty-six percent of smartphone owners sleep with their phone next to them and more than a third of users, including me, get online before getting out of bed!
• It’s always full of New Stuff … All the things we, humans, can’t resist.
  

  We are addicted to New and Now
  Our brains give primacy to new information over old information, hence our nervousness when we hear our phones buzz when we are speeding down the highway.
  Whatever has just arrived, our brains are hard wired to crave, regardless of what we already now, or the risk in glancing at that screen.This phenomenon, known as “recency bias,” indicates our proclivity to treat new information as inherently better. ~John X. Kenny

• It’s Full of Rewards
  

  We may appear to be choosing to use this technology, but in fact we are being dragged to it by the potential of short-term rewards. Every ping could be social, sexual, or professional opportunity, and we get a mini-reward, a squirt of dopamine, for answering the bell. “These rewards serve as jolts of energy that recharge the compulsion engine, much like the frisson a gambler receives as a new card hits the table,” MIT media scholar Judith Donath recently told Scientific American. “Cumulatively, the effect is potent and hard to resist.” ~ Tony Dokoupil

  Here is what’s happening inside drug addicts brains.

  “Persistent activation of the nucleus accumbens (reward centre of the brain) leads to the development of drug addiction, primarily due to persistent changes in the level of dopamine, which leads to an alteration in how people respond to otherwise rewarding stimuli. Put simply, after disruption of the dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens, people get less satisfied with things that aren’t their drugs of choice. Furthermore, people derive progressively more pleasure from the drug in question, exacerbating the effect.” ~ Dr. Paul, PhD in Neuroscience

  “The brains of Internet addicts, it turns out, look like the brains of drug and alcohol addicts. In a study published in January, Chinese researchers found “abnormal white matter” — essentially extra nerve cells built for speed—in the areas charged with attention, control, and executive function.

  A parallel study found similar changes in the brains of videogame addicts. And both studies come on the heels of other Chinese results that link Internet addiction to “structural abnormalities in gray matter,” namely shrinkage of 10 to 20 percent in the area of the brain responsible for processing of speech, memory, motor control, emotion, sensory, and other information. And worse, the shrinkage never stopped: the more time online, the more the brain showed signs of “atrophy.” ~Tony Dokoupil

• Plus our Chronic Exposure to Internet - staring at a screen for at least eight hours a day! – fuels our addiction even further.

Canadian Mobile Usage on the Rise. ~techvibes.com

In his article “Mobile addiction: Why we cannot put down our devices and 7 ways brands can tap into the fix“ John X. Kenny provides a lot of good reasons for our Internet and Mobile addiction, some of which I listed above. Also, here is a fun Infographic on mobile addiction or How is Facebook Addiction Affecting Our Minds? Infographic from Mashable.

We even start exhibiting similar patterns of behaviour to drug addicts:

• A compulsion to seek the drug
  (A recent study found that it is harder to resist a new text message than a nicotine fix and one in three consumers would give up sex rather than give up their mobile phones)
• An inability to control the amount of drug consumption
  (80% of vacationers bring along laptops or smartphones, so they can check in with work, while away) 
• A negative emotional state when subjected to periods of withdrawal

There was the University of Maryland’s 2010 “Unplugged” experiment that asked 200 undergrads to forgo all Web and mobile technologies for a day and to keep a diary of their feelings. “I clearly am addicted and the dependency is sickening,” reported one student in the study. “Media is my drug,” wrote another.

At least two other schools haven’t even been able to get such an experiment off the ground for lack of participants. “Most college students are not just unwilling, but functionally unable, to be without their media links to the world,” the University of Maryland concluded.

“One of the early flags for addiction was spending more than 38 hours a week online. By that definition, we are all addicts now, many of us by Wednesday afternoon…” ~ Tony Dokoupil

Those who do consulting, like me, know that a lot of that work comes from placement agencies. Also, in order to get a government contract, you have to work with a large agency. There is no way around it.

We, as Consultants, depend on them for doing their best representing us to their clients and for finding contracts to keep us busy.

So I was totally at loss when I learned that my agency (not going to name names) screwed up  - they missed the deadline for submitting my resume!  They missed it by 2 minutes, but that was enough to get me automatically out from the pool of people to be considered for one particular government contract.

Closely reviewing my contract, that I signed with the agency, was an eye opener. There was a lot of information outlining my responsibilities towards them, like non-disclosure and non-competition. However, there wasn’t even a single line stating their responsibilities towards me.

After weeks of emails and phone calls asking them what they are going to do to help me out and how they plan to make things right, I finally got a phone call from their Vice President. He said that he is very sorry and that he is personally monitoring my case, but they are not going to pay me for the lost income, even though it’s their negligence that got me in this sticky situation.

Meeting with the lawyer didn’t bring much good news either.
“Yes, you can sue them.” – he said. “You can sue anyone for anything really. However, even if you will be able to prove negligence on their part, you’d have hard time proving that that contract would’ve been awarded to you for sure or proving any damages.”
Then he asks me if I want him to keep working on my case at $400/hr. Hmmm… probably not.

This is definitely not a typical situation in a consultant’s life. Though I am wondering if something like this happens more often, than we think. Normally, you wouldn’t even known that your agency screwed up. They could’ve easily said that I was not chosen for the job, and normally, I’d have no idea that they forgot to submit my name to their client for consideration. It just happened that in my situation they couldn’t hide that fact.

Moving Forward

“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.” ~ Helen Keller

As a frequent reader of self-help books and a true believer in the power of Positive Thinking, I decided not to focus on the Negative. However, finding Good in Bad situation and Staying Positive consistently proved to be more difficult.

With the exception of Barganing, I seemed to be going through the famous Five Stages of Grief - Denial, Anger, Barganing, Depression, Acceptance – getting stuck not so much on a Depression, but Sadness, and then dealing with the returning Anger.

People around me were saying ”When one door closes, another one opens”, so I shouldn’t worry and just look forward to the new opportunities. And I was trying to do exactly that, but there was something still bothering me. I guess the best I could describe it as a sudden loss of control.
Apparently, it’s the worst kind of stress for our brains and our mental health.

“Loss of control has been shown to greatly increase the probability of the brain slipping into an anxiety or clinical depression.” – from The Biological Threat of Stress: From the Jungle to Wall Street by John Medina.

Knowing how bad stress is for us, I had to dig deeper this time to stay positive and stress-free by creating some coping strategies to manage the stress in my life.

So what Good is there in this Bad situation? More Free Time! 

Waking up in the morning (and finally getting enough sleep!) I now try to do things that I like the most, like enjoying a cup of coffee on my balcony or reading a good book that I had sitting on my shelf for too long, playing tennis or going for a long run through my neighbourhood.

I think it’s important to know what makes you happy and do as many of those things every day, when you feel stressed.

Life always offers you a second chance. It’s called tomorrow. ~ unknown

John Medina also offers great tips on How to Cope with Stress.
Image credits: Notsalmon.com and Jokeroo.com