I have been resisting Twitter for a good year now, but finally had to give in.  When Oprah speaks, people listen.  Last year when she had Jeff Bezos from Amazon to talk about the Kindle, sales for the Kindle skyrocketed, and it was out of stock for months.  So when I walked in the room and saw my wife watching an Oprah episode with Evan Williams,the CEO of Twitter, it was obvious that it was about to blow up even more, if that is even possible.  Well, it sure was possible, as some are suggesting that maybe over 1,000,000 people have signed up for Twitter within days of the Oprah episode. and as much as 37% of visits to the home page in days following episode were new users.

I guess in my mind, I didn’t care too much to hear what Ashton Kutcher was eating for dinner, or that one of my random friends were ‘going to the gym’.  However, in this period of over informing everyone, I decided to jump in.  You can follow me on Twitter right here.  I plan on using it as a vehicle for random thoughts, really the same as this blog but on a much more condensed level.  I’ll be posting snippets on business, the economy, sports, and breakfast customs.  I will say, that in my life I have never seen just hype for a product or service that Twitter has had over the last two months.  The buzz has been incredible, especially for something that is not hot off the shelves, but there is no doubt that the “Oprah Effect” helps.

We are in the middle of the second ‘Great Depression’.

The world is collapsing as we know it.

Capitalism is dead!

I think we have seen an interesting change of sentiment over the last six weeks or so.  It seems that the United States as a whole is sick and tired, of being sick and tired.  The economic quagmire we are currently in is going on its 18th month.  In our fast paced society, that is an extremely long time.  Since March 6, the Dow has been up over 20%, and is currently in the middle of a six week up streak.  Is everything great?  Of course not, but we are seeing plenty of signs that things are beginning to level off. Not to mention, I was extremely excited to find a picture of what appears to be a happy stock broker.  It sure beats the pictures in this FaceBook Group.

Of course you could look at standard economic measures, such as mortgage applications coming back to life, the banks are actually showing profits, we had the first successful IPO in over a year last week, and there have been ten M&A deals in the last two weeks alone.

You could also look at it from more of a high level perspective.  I spent all of last week in Florida, at our home on Anna Maria Island.  I have been visiting there for six years now, and I have NEVER seen it as crowded as it was last week.  I spoke to people at restaurants and they indicated that it was the busiest they have been in five years.  I saw a line of 30 people waiting outside of an ice cream shop just to get in.  I guess you could be cynical and say that many of these people were driving to Florida for Spring Break in lieu of a more extravagant trip, or “going to visit the grandparents”, but in the end, people were out vacationing and spending money.  The government has infused hundreds of billions of dollars into the banks, and companies like AIG, but there is no question that consumer spending, which accounts for two thirds of our overall economy, is what is going to get our economy back going in the right direction.

Yes, millions of people have lost their jobs in this downturn , and millions more will in the remainder of this year, but signs of recovery are beginning to pop up in many places.  We as Americans are quite resilient and it will be exciting to watch us crawl out of this and get people working again.

I am well aware that we have too many financial problems to list in this country right now, and saying that the Blackberry generation ruined the market was over the top, but I strongly believe that it has played a major role into the events that have transpired over the last six months.  Even before you bring technology into the equation, the stock market is a vastly different place than it was 30 or even 20 years ago.  At that time, the majority of workers in the United States relied on pensions for their retirements.  As we have shifted away from pensions to the now standard 401K vehicles, there has been a cosmic shift in the percentage of people in this country whose financial lives are directly tied to the financial markets.

Until the internet boom, people received their investment statements in the mail every month, some people every quarter.  Now it has come to the point where one click of a button on your phone and you can get up to the minute stock quotes.  With the plethora of cable channels dedicated to the markets, you can watch coverage 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  The media has always been big on trying to put fear into the public, which in my opinion as a lot to do with why we got into the war in Iraq, but that is another post for another day.  The bankruptcy of Leman Brothers on September 15 and subsequent coverage created a fear in this country, unlike anything I have ever seen.  It is difficult to have a conversation with anyone out there without the economy being brought up.  It is being constantly beaten into our brains.  Last week, I was at the grocery store, and for some reason I hear over the loudspeaker, “Times are tough, in this difficult economy, you can find deals at Kroger”.  You simply cannot escape the negativity.

This fear causes people to make irrational decisions.  So many people have just taken their losses and gotten out of the market, taking 40%+ losses on their retirement savings, saying they will get back in when the market stabilizes.  So when it goes back up 20%, you will jump back in and just sacrifice all those losses?  Fear isn’t just a problem for the everyday investor, more and more companies are laying off workers, and much of the time you hear the team ‘precautionary’.  I’ve heard this time and time again, companies are letting people go because they are afraid of what MIGHT be down the road.  Its a self-fulfilling prophecy that is taking over our country.

The technology boom of the last 10-15 years has been truly amazing, almost another industrial revolution, and it has changed the way we live our lives.  I’m rather confident that the volumns of the Encyclopedia Brittanica on people’s bookselves aren’t being utlizied as much with the birth of the internet.  Through social media platforms, you can keep in touch with just about anyone you have ever crossed paths with.  The fact that I haven’t gone to a mall for Christmas shopping in five years due to ecommerce is something nobody could have fathomed twenty years ago, so I don’t want to be perceived as saying that technology is a bad thing, but I do believe isn’t all good either.

I’ve read plenty of articles that say we need to get out and work harder and do more to take it upon ourselves to restore this economy.  While I can agree with that to a certain extent, I also think that everyone needs to take a step back and understand that we still live in the greatest country in the world and buying into the information overload that is upon us right now is adding on to this snowball that has been created.  Times are tough, it is going to take some time to get through it, but the ‘hype’ that has been forced upon us since September is quickly making matters much worse.

I will admit I didn’t follow our financial markets too closely until around June of 2007.  Prior to that time, I would passively see how things were coming along, but being in New York, and having close ties to the credit markets, caused me to start obsessively reading about the markets every single day since.  The biggest item I’ve learned is that nobody really has a clue what tomorrow holds!

I’m been blessed to be in a great position, started a solid company, worked hard to build it up, and took some risk off the table by selling TLA in November of 2006, and received a substantial payout for it.  However, today, the market is down almost 30% from its high in November of last year, so much for taking that risk off of the table.  Its not about me though, my portfolio has plenty of time to recover.  However, it is about my generation’s parents.  My parents are closing in on the age of 60, not a great time for your retirement fund to lose 30% of its value.  It is a major problem to all Americans, and certainly not just Wall Street.

Fear is spreading like wildfire across the markets, with unheard of sell-offs this past 30 days.  I think to the normal American, there is more anger than fear, but the combination of those two can be lethal.

There is no doubt that the problems started with greed, but to me, the problem is, that is what capitalism was built upon.  Greed is not necessarily a bad thing.  When we were growing Text Link Ads, I was constantly working my tail off to increase our revenues.  In all honesty, it wasn’t so we could make more money, it was the competition of it.  I wanted to build the best, most successful company.  That’s what this country was built upon, and why they call it the American Dream.  What we are learning now, unfortunately, is that we need to have some form of regulation in place to protect us from that same greed.

The lending practice over the last 5-10 years is astinine, people buying homes that they could not even come close to affording.  Lenders didn’t see this as a big risk, because home values were appreciating so quickly, that even if these people couldn’t afford their mortgage payments, they would be able to refinance and do it all over again.  When the housing market began to deteriorate in 2005, that plan of lax lending practices wasn’t looking so good.  It all started coming to a head about 15 months ago, and now for the last three weeks, we keep hearing the comparisons to The Great Depression.  So where do we go from here, and how can we make sure that it doesn’t happen again?

1.  The constant comparisons of “Wall St.” vs. “Main St.” are becoming tiresome, as we are all to blame.  The average US salary is roughly $48,000.  That same average US citizen has over $10,000 in credit card debt.  The average downpayment on a home in 1989 was 20%.  Today, less than 20
years later, the average is 9%.  For first time home buyers, the
average downpayment is just over 2%.  We have turned into a society that requires instant gratification, and we are too quick to make purchases that are not within our means.  The same holds true to people not doing their homework before agreeing to these outrageous adjustable rate loans.

2.  The banking industry looked at itself and thought, ‘How can we make more money…provide more loans’.  Well in order to do so, they resorted to predatory tactics and attempted to confuse and manipulate a large part of the American public.  Now banks are stuck with trillions of dollars of bad loans, and we are seing large banks fail due to it.  People put so little money down on their homes that have decreased in value, that it actually might be their best option to just walk away, and that is just what people are doing.

It has gotten so bad that banks simply aren’t lending money to true eligible people and when credit markets aren’t flowing, all business will begin to suffer.  It is quickly becoming a world wide crisis.  I am hopeful that the $700B bailout package which the House passed October 3 will begin to help, but since its passing the markets have decreased by over 6%.

The simple fact of the matter is that this is going to be a long painful process.  We need to flush out all of these bad loans and get the system back in order.  Americans have always come together in tough times, and unfortunately, it appears that this one is going to be with us for awhile, so we all need to look in the mirror and do what we can to get our great country back on track!

Coming off of the 15 inning all star game that dragged on until around 2:00 am, I felt it was about time to look at the reality of what baseball has become.

I grew up watching/playing baseball probably from just about the moment I was born. I sat on my dad’s lap and watched the Chicago White Sox game every single night each summer. it must have been quite often, as I sang the Star Spangled Banner at my preschool talent show only because I knew it from singing it with my old man before every Sox game.

My uncle took me to a bunch of Cubs games where we sat in the bleachers and showed up two hours before the game to watch batting practice. The seats were a whopping $3 back in the mid 1980s, they are now $45 for weekend games, which a bit more accelerated that our supposed current 5% inflation rate. When the Cubs lost to the Padres in the 1984 NLCS, it was as if a member of my family died. I can still name the entire starting line up of that team.

Sadly, it seems that baseball is now taking a back seat to the NFL in this country. I attribute it to many things, but mainly it is due to the short attention span that we have developed as a society. I’ll be the first to admit, that I can’t sit still for 15 minutes without looking at a Blackberry. We now have hundreds upon hundreds of television channels available to choose from, not to mention the internet as another diversion. To be a true fan and attempt to at least somewhat follow a 162 game season is a daunting task. The NFL is 16 weeks, the games are mostly at the same time, and it can be planned as an event each week.

In the past, you could expect a game to be two to two and a half hours. In 1945, the average baseball game lasted one hour and 58 minutes. The 2007 playoffs averaged three hours and 52 minutes per game, almost doubling in duration! To be honest, in the last ten years, I can’t remember the last baseball game I attended in person and stayed until the last out. Two main items could be blamed for the current snail’s pace of the game.

The game of baseball has changed over the last 30 years. There are now middle relievers, set up men, closers, etc. An average game has six pitching changes between the two teams, which probably takes on average ten minutes per change. This does not even include random mound visits by managers or pitching coaches. It is now customary to step out of the batter’s box after ever single pitch. The guys adjust their gloves, take 12 practice swings, David Ortiz has to spit on his batting gloves between each pitch, it takes forever!

Advertising also plays a major role. The commercial breaks become longer and longer each season. Commercials were on average three minutes and 15 seconds last year. If you have a commercial every half inning (18), then six pitching changes, you are up to 24 commercials, multiplied by 3:15, you come to 78 minutes of commercials in the average baseball game. Not to mention the times that games come on. Of course advertisers pay a premium for the prime-time slots, and the 2007 world series started at 9:00 pm est each night. The games would be on until 1:00 am, therefore minimal school aged children are even watching the most important games of the year.

I love the game of baseball, always have, and always will. However, with the fan base shrinking, MLB needs to think long and hard of a solution to make their product something other than the equivalent of taking an Ambien.

The sky rocketing fuel prices have been rough on the entire world here in 2008, but for web businesses I think you could argue a positive spin. With the increased cost of traveling anywhere, it appears that people would be prone to spending EVEN MORE time in front of their computers. Yes, disposable incomes will be decreased, but more and more people will opt to purchase items online instead of driving all the way to the mall, etc. Someone like Amazon should see an increase in business as cost conscious shoppers elect to find companies with free shipping options for essential items.

You could also attempt to say the same thing about the virtual workplace. I am in a great situation with having a commute of one flight of stairs to an office in my house, but it would appear that more and more people will align themselves to attempt to work remotely, even taking a paycut to do so. With the communication avenues of email, instant message, and that archaic phone, working out of the home has never been easier.

If people do spend less time in their cars, it should add to additional time eyeballs will be looking at the computer, so if you are a web merchant, try marking up your goods 10% and offering free shipping. People are are really looking for deals these days!

The online world has had all kinds of controversy over advertisements within content. The Kontera product has been mentioned a lot, as well as other products even closer to home. It is an interesting debate, and I can see both sides of the argument. Publishers want to do everything they can to monetize their site, while at the same time, the user wants a clean experience, and be able to discern the difference between actual content and advertisements. I feel that sometimes people within online advertising become a bit pigeonholed and it sometimes helps to take a step back and look at other types of advertising.

That being said, the true growth of in content advertising has been on television. it has gotten to the point where it makes me laugh when as an example, you sit down to watch a sporting event. Much of the NBA playoffs were on TNT, and I am guessing the have a show called Tyler Perry’s House of Pain. I had never heard of the show, as I don’t watch much television, but I felt like I was life long friends with the characters on this show after the one hundred commercials and in game promos the showed over the course of each NBA playoff game. I thought to myself that TNT might be better served showing commercials for their other shows, but I guess they felt that pounding this show into the heads of NBA viewers, was the best choice of that valuable air time. I can appreciate that to an extent, but what they did next, really blurred the lines of content and advertisements. During the Western Conference Finals, TNT decided to show the celebrities in the crowd at the Staples Center coming to watch the Lakers and Spurs. They show Jack Nicholson, David Beckham, Eva Longoria, then “Tyler Perry, from TNT’s Tyler Perry’s House of Pain”. I couldn’t help an out loud laugh when they did that. I’m sorry, but it was an egregious use of self promotion. I think Fox started this fake placement of their own network stars back at the World Series a few years back when the entire cast of “House” was scattered at different parts of the ball park so the cameras could pick up on them and plug the show.

The other new fad is the endless amount of logos on the screen while a show is being televised. All of my examples go back to the NBA because it has really all I have been watching on television, but during game four of the NBA Finals, I was watching it on ABC HD. I happened to look up at the screen and noticed that there were three separate translucent logos on the screen at once. What makes it even worse is that the logos are not even in the corners of the screens. I did a little research and it is because many people don’t know how to properly use high definition and put the TV in 16:9 mode, and if the image is put out in 4:3 mode, the logos would get cropped off. My television was then covered with the upper somewhat right being the ABC HD logo, bottom right side being the Cincinnati Channel 9 logo, and the topper was on bottom left where it read “Save Money on Gas, News 9 after the game”. It is hard for me to believe that ABC allows the local affiliates to do such a thing, but it was rather comical. Pretty soon our television screens are going to look like the side of a Nascar.

Endless advertising within all mediums is here to stay, so we better get used to it. If it wasn’t for the insatiable need for companies to be advertising their products, I wouldn’t be where I am at today. The world is forever evolving, what will be the next big advertising vehicle?

This might come off as a no-brainer, but I have found a secret to keeping employees happy…PAY THEM, and pay them on time! It is shocking to me how many times you see employers just let people walk away over a small amount of money. I am proud to say that at TLA, we did not lose a single full time employee from 2002 to 2006 when we were acquired and moved the office to NYC. You don’t have to shower employees with money, but paying people a fair wage is not only going to keep them at your company it is going to make them feel valued and go the proverbial “extra mile” for the company.

Now as a company grows, it gets to a point where you can’t keep everyone happy, but compensation is a top factor for company morale. If an employee does not have an ownership stake in the start-up business, lets face it, they have no reason to be as driven as you might be. When someone is paid well, they quickly develop a sense of value, and need to continue to do their part to make themselves valuable to the company. It also creates a much better environment and a real team setting and makes the late nights palatable when they are necessary.

Another issue is the value of experience. I will never understand how a business owner could let a solid employee walk over a 5% salary increase. It is hard to put a price tag on the experience someone develops while working on a project. The learning curve certain positions could be six months to a year. Is that loss of time and required training really make any business sense when it comes to that 5% raise?

To keep it simple…Take care of your people, and they will take care of you.