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I kept checking our mail all day (working from home with pups) until I just realized it’s President’s (Presidents’ ?) Day.

Running a business certainly turns you into a strange person.

Jealousy

I’m jealous that my wife has such a great domain (her firstname .net) name. I can’t complain, of course, but still…

Followed by rearranging the schedule for Wednesday nights in order to postpone what was going to happen on the canceled service at another time and rearranging the other Wednesday nights to accommodate for the made up service that had been canceled.

via Day 1 of Icy Conditions as a Pastor | Merianna Neely Harrelson.

Don’t Make Any Plans During This Window of Time

Good luck getting Comcast to show up for the closing [CARTOON] | ITworld.

I can’t say I’m excited about the impending deal in which Comcast buys Time Warner, but things couldn’t get much worse.

Ultimately, I’m still hopeful we’ll get either Google Fiber here in SC soon or a cable provider will give me the “dumb pipe” I want in particular since I’ve been a “cord cutter” for eleven years now.

Either that or T-Mobile just allows me to use its network for data.

via JR Raphael on Twitter

ZeroScope Launch

zeroscopecontact

I’m really excited that Harrelson Agency is helping out with the launch of ZeroScope this month. We’ve been working hard on this project for the past six months.

Here’s a little info:

Stethoscopes should not be a cause of the spread of disease by healthcare providers. ZeroScope is a one-use and easily applied device that attaches to the drum of a stethoscope and provides immediate and complete barrier defense between the instrument and the patient receiving care.

We’re looking to raise the money needed to help us launch ZeroScope as a cost effective and ubiquitous device to solve the problem of hospital acquired infections that lead to more costly treatments or even death.

via ZeroScope Stethoscope Barrier Protection for Patients | Indiegogo.

If you can, go help us out with the manufacturing and shipping costs. If you can’t do that, spread the word on your favorite social networks of choice.

Many thanks!

Here’s the official IndieGoGo widget:

http://www.indiegogo.com/project/zeroscope-stethoscope-barrier-protection-for-patients/widget

ZeroScope Stethoscope Barrier Protection Fund Raising

http://www.indiegogo.com/project/646883/widget/2785874

We’ve spent the last six months working hard with Jack Krupnick and Fred Heys to launch ZeroScope. To say this has been a labor of love for Jack and his family would be an understatement. I’m so excited to see this project get its wings and move from pre-planning to production to full on launching this month.

Today, we’re launching an IndieGoGo campaign to help fund the manufacturing costs of the ZeroScope devices.

This is a very worthwhile cause and here’s a little info from the campaign page:

“Your doctors and nurses wash their hands, wear gloves, sometimes wear a mask, and cover or seal many of the instruments they use to provide you with healthcare. But why are stethoscopes not included?

We aim to solve that problem.

Stethoscopes should not be a cause of the spread of disease by healthcare providers. ZeroScope is a one-use and easily applied device that attaches to the drum of a stethoscope and provides immediate and complete barrier defense between the instrument and the patient receiving care.

We’re looking to raise the money needed to help us launch ZeroScope as a cost effective and ubiquitous device to solve the problem of hospital acquired infections that lead to more costly treatments or even death.”

We’ve made some huge leaps and bounds over the last 182 days since our first brainstorming session. We’ve had our first large batch of devices designed and manufactured and invested so much of our own personal time and money into the project. So, we’re looking for help to get the costs of manufacturing and shipping lower in order to provide more ZeroScopes to hospitals, clinics, burn clinics, urgent cares and physician practices.

It’s been an amazing ride, and we’re hoping you’ll help us reach our goal!

My Grandfather’s Name

When I was seven (maybe eight) years old, I decided that I was going to start my own company one day. I come from a long line of entrepreneurs and DIY’ers. My dad has run his own business my entire life. My grandfather before him did the same and dabbled in a number of areas. I blame my dad and “Grandpa Frank” for my compulsion to have my own business, and to dabble myself in many different areas of entrepreneurship from marketing to publishing to racing to a music label to a few things I haven’t made public.

When I decided to make my own business at that early age, I knew I needed a good name and a good logo. I had notebooks full of drawings for imaginary baseball teams and comic book characters that hadn’t found their homes yet, so I knew my company logo would need to be something special. One Sunday morning, I remember seeing a piece of crystal in my family’s china cabinet in our living room that had a very calligraphic “H” etched into it. I decided that the logo would be an H and I would name my company “Harrelson Corporation.” I didn’t know what Harrelson Corps was going to do yet, but I had a name and a good idea for a logo.

Decades later, I sit in my office in downtown Columbia and look over our company’s client list. Things are going well. I was right all those years ago.

When I’m in my hometown of Mullins, SC I like to visit my Grandpa Frank’s grave. He passed away when I was only three and I’m sad to say that I really don’t remember him as a person. However, he’s been a large presence in my life and I always use his name when I get that silly “Who would you want to have an hour long conversation with if you could talk to any human – living or dead – for 60 minutes?” question. I think we would have much to talk about and I know he could give me some good advice on running a company / companies and what it takes to tread down the untrodden path of starting your own business/es.

I was back in Mullins for just a few minutes on Tuesday and stopped by his grave where I took a picture of that H above. His gravesite has four H’s at each corner and it matches the font on his tomb. I think it’s a great stylistic choice and I was taken aback for a moment when I realized that Grandpa Frank still has such a large role in my own professional and personal life as to inspire me with the font on his grave.

When you start a company, you have to know the starting point. You might never get to the end point or finish line, but you have to have a point where you know that this is what you’ve decided to do and understand that after this singular point in your life, nothing will ever be the same. That realization came at an early age for me but has been an extended realization over the last 25 (or so) years.

You also have to know where you come from in terms of your own identity and backing. Even though Grandpa Frank has been dead for some 32 years, he’s been there (in my own head at least) coaching me on the way to starting this agency and helping me to find people to surround it and make it into something that will last so that my children will one day be able to work with us (if they hopefully choose to do so).

So start your business. Go out on a limb. But don’t forget where you come from and don’t let those 3 A.M. panic attacks keep you from hearing the still small voices of your biggest supporters.

Finally, Basecamp Android App!

Basecamp has a native Android app now! Fantastic… big part of what we use at Harrelson Agency to do what we do.

Basecamp for Android was designed from the ground up to work great, look sharp, and take advantage of the capabilities of your recent Android phone and tablet. Create new projects on the go. Open links directly in the app. Jump to any project from a shortcut on your home screen. You can attach or save Basecamp files in Dropbox, Google Drive or wherever you store them. You can even start a new message with text you wrote in another app. Basecamp works the way you do on Android.

via Basecamp Announcements.

ThinkingDaily: Being a Divorced Dad

Challenging but good podcast to do today. We’re raising some pretty amazing women and I can’t wait to see how they change the world…

Sam talks about being a dad after divorce and how tools like Google Hangouts, Dropbox and Google Drive make all the difference despite the geographic differences.

via ThinkingDaily: Being a Divorced Dad | Thinking.FM.

ThinkingDaily 25 mp3 is here or you can click above to play in your browser (and subscribe in iTunes etc).

Don’t Do Branding First

Here’s my daily podcast from today where I explain the differences between marketing, advertising, branding, and public relations (at least in my opinion):

Today, Sam evaluates those differences with a number of warnings and suggestions about how to do your marketing better and spend your money more wisely (and how to avoid the chutes and climb the right ladders).

via ThinkingDaily: Don’t Do Branding | Thinking.FM.

It’s a point I like to make with clients and always a fun discussion.

Simple Websites and Expected Formulas

I’ve built hundreds of WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal sites over the years for clients (and a few for my own endeavors). One of the most frequent conversations I have towards the end of these builds when we get to the aesthetics and flow of a site is how design decisions impact not just “branding” but also user experience.

Websites are not only meant to be representations of a brand or a company. Sites are meant to be the front door of whatever experience a company is trying to express. Or more succinctly, sites are for marketing, not intranets.

Communicating this with clients is something I really enjoy doing, because it involves a bit of give and take. It’s not a one sided conversation by any means and every company or person has their own preconceived notion of what a website in a given category should look like.

Turns out there’s some science behind that and visitor experience to the site…

In a study by Google in August of 2012, researchers found that not only will users judge websites as beautiful or not within 1/50th — 1/20th of a second, but also that “visually complex” websites are consistently rated as less beautiful than their simpler counterparts

Moreover, “highly prototypical” sites — those with layouts commonly associated with sites of its category — with simple visual design were rated as the most beautiful across the board

via Why “Simple” Websites Are Scientifically Superior | SoshiTech – Social Media Technology – Soshitech.com.

The two part conclusion here is important for marketing agencies and companies looking to have a “better” website to consider.

First, overly complicated websites are junk. If Henry Ford had asked people what they had wanted to see in his car, they would have wanted a faster horse. If Steve Jobs had relied on “user expectations” for the iPhone or even iPad, we’d have a physical keyboards and lasers with giant stylus’ attached to our devices.

Building a website isn’t the same as building an iPhone, but you have to manage what you expect users to want with the simplicity of choice (I talk about this more deeply in a ThinkingDaily episode here). It’s easy to think that in 2014, a visitor to your brand spanking new spiffy site would want to be able to click dozens of “sharing” buttons or to see “what’s related” on the web because you see a competitor (or worse, Buzzfeed) doing those things on their site. It’s not true. Keep your site simple and keep your powder dry. Make the visitor convert to whatever you’re preaching with the power of your message and not with overly complicated designs and tons of drop down menus.

Second, users have an expectation of what a banking site, a garden site, a medical site, a social sharing site, a tech site, a lawyer site, a church site etc should look like. If you’ve hired a good developer or designer or agency to help you with your site, they should know this.

What that doesn’t mean is that you know what visitors actually want. There’s lots of research on this, and many of us spend considerable time staying on top of that research. Hiring a website developer, designer or agency should mean more than asking “which young person do I know can build me a website?” for this reason alone.

Sites are important. They are your front door and your exit. They are your first line of marketing and turning a potential visitor into a conversion or they are your worst enemy.

Tread lightly and do your homework.