'80s Fabrese shampoo commercial
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"Facebook isn't helping you make new connections, Facebook doesn't
develop new relationships, Facebook is just trying to be the most
accurate model of your social graph. There's a part of me that feels
somewhat bored by all of this."
- — Sean Parker
Dear readers, I have a request to make of you. As most of you know, this blog's purpose is to promote my new book, "A Survival Guide for the Traveling Techie," which has been for sale on Amazon.com since late last year. Perhaps some day this blog will have a gazillion readers, but for now I'm pretty sure that all of you are one or two "degrees of separation" away from me — in other words, you either know me or someone who does.
Meanwhile, the latest report from Amazon tells me I made three sales in November of 2014, and one sale in March of 2015, for a total of four. One of those was me; I bought my own book just to see how the buying experience went. I know who two others were. This is not exactly "going viral" so far.
If you're worried I'm going to ask you to buy the book for charity's sake, rest you mind at ease. I want happy readers, who will recommend the book to associates. No, I'm just going to ask you to pass along a link to this blog to anyone you know who might be a good fit: someone who travels on business, and/or does technical work, or perhaps a student graduating soon who plans to go into a related field.
The reason I am doing this is because of something I read about the mathematics of social networks a few years back. Since the onset of the internet we have much better data on social networks, and so theory has been improving quickly. The fact that jumped out at me is: most successful networking is done through weak connections. If you're looking for a job or customers or even a date, the people closest to you probably are already aware of this. It's the friends-of-friends who are most useful for finding new opportunities in such a network.
$10 Rebate Offer
Alexander Hamilton
And why am I doing this? Well, I don't know much about marketing, but I've been trying to learn, and I asked a coworker who I thought did it well for advice, and she recommended "Marketing for Dummies" (1997) by Alexander Hiam.
- ( ISBN-10: 1118880803 )
From this book I learned that you must be able to measure the effectiveness of a marketing effort, in order to be able to learn from it. I am paying this rebate to find out how effective it is to ask you all to promote this blog entry for me. We shall see.
And one more promise: I will make sure to report here how this turns out. Maybe we can all learn something.
So, you might be wondering, why should I care about this book anyway? Here is a short explanation from the Foreword, called "WHO NEEDS THIS BOOK?"
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You need this book if you travel on business in the United States and Canada as a technical expert, or if you are a sales person or other representative for a small company and must function as your own technical expert.
You need this book if you have ever been faced with a demo on your laptop and a projector in some other company's conference room that wouldn't work with it.
You need this book if you've ever had a sales prospect tell you, "We have to make a decision in three weeks or we lose our money."
You need this book if you've ever run a long phone cord down the hall to the nearest FAX machine and hijacked its phone line so you could dial out to the Internet from a conference room — or, if that's too old school for you, if you've ever pirated a WiFi signal from a business next door to a client site to get a demo working.
You need this book if you've ever spilled a latte on the carpet of your company's brand new, beautiful trade show booth.
You need this book if you've ever missed the last exit to Cambridge and ended up on the causeway to Revere, or gotten off a freeway "temporarily" in Oakland and discovered there was no corresponding onramp, or gotten stuck in a severe traffic jam on the Hollywood Freeway and then seen a "Haz Mat" vehicle passing on the right shoulder, or been caught in a torrential downpour trying to get to your car at the Orlando Convention Center, only to be unable to tell your rented red Cadillac from all the other rented red Cadillacs.
Whether they call you a Systems Analyst, Systems Engineer, Sales Engineer, Customer Engineer, Consulting Engineer, Consultant, Chief Architect, Chief Scientist, Vice President of Software Development, or the owner of the business, you need this book if it's ever been your job to show up somewhere and make something work.
- — "A Survival Guide for the Traveling Techie" (2014) Alan B. Scrivener
- ( ISBN-10: 0974996815 )
P.S.
If you'd like more detailed information of the branch of math called graph theory which applies to social networks, see the article "Excursions in Graph Theory" in my e-Zine "Cybernetics in the 3rd Millennium (C3M)" Volume 10 Number 2, July 2012.
( www.well.com/user/abs/Cyb/archive/c3m_1002.html#sec_2 )
Disclaimer
I receive a commission on everything you purchase from Amazon.com after following one of my links, which helps to support my research. It does not affect the price you pay.
