Take Back Your Brain!

Dear Brain: What kind of ads will motivate me to exercise?

Lynn — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:03:03 +0000

Dear Brain,

I think the self-advertising concept is GREAT! I need to exercise more - conveniently, that’s what Lynn wrote about. But I have a question: would I be more effective to myself to have photos of me (noticeably overweight) doing things, having a good time, or photoshopped photos of my head on fit bodies having a great time?

Cate

Dear Cate

Great question! You’ve identified two of the the most important elements of a personal ad campaign in both versions you ask about:

Photos of me doing things
Having a great time

In addition, you mention a third very effective component:

Visualizing the outcome you want

In my experience, regularly exposing yourself to any photos of you doing something you want to participate in more often, such as exercising, with normalize that activity and make it more likely to happen. However anything you can do to engineer your photo so it looks like the outcome you want to achieve is already true will make it even more powerful.

Photos of me doing things

Putting yourself in the picture is critically important! A picture is worth 1000 words and all that. There is just no substitute for seeing ourselves doing the behavior we want to do. Even if you are noticeably overweight, seeing a picture of yourself exercising every day will to normalize your relationship to that behavior in a really important way. At various times I’ve successfully used pictures of myself swimming, rowing, biking, hiking, working out on the elliptical machine, and doing sit-ups. You can see some of those photos in our flickr set.

One caveat, though. It has to be a picture you have good feelings about or the ad can backfire. You’ll know in a day or two if you have a positive gut response to the photo. If all you do is cringe about how fat you look, it’s probably not going to work and you might want to try the Photoshop approach instead. Either place your head on a picture of a fit body, as you suggested, or perhaps crop the photo of yourself so it only includes the parts where you like what you see.

Having a great time

Ads like this are expecially effective if you can visually capture the feeling you want to get by doing the activity, so that seeing your ad reminds you of that feeling. For example I got myself to ride my bike to work for a while by figuring out I liked feeling awesome and powerful in my bike outfit. I amped up that attitude as much as I could in the photos for that ad campaign, and it was very effective.

So ham it up for the camera a bit. Figure out the real emotional pay-off for doing that activity and try to convey that feeling in your expression and body language when you take the picture.

Visualize the outcome you want

Most things that we accomplish happen first in our imagination, so I’m a big fan of engineering your photo to make it look like the outcome you want to achieve is already true.

Although I’ve not tried Photoshopping my head on another body, I have done a number of ad campaigns that visually stretched the current truth with great results. For example, this time last year I was not able to walk without crutches, so I had a friend take a picture of me pretending to walk on a trail near my home. I put copies on my refrigerator and bathroom mirror, where I would see them every day, and within a few weeks I was walking on that trail.

I think you have a fabulous idea. If you have the ability to Photoshop your head on a hot, fit body, go for it! Just remember to look like you’re having a good time.

Your turn

What advice do you have about making ads to motivate yourself to exercise? Have you ever used Photoshop to help yourself with something like this? How well did it work? Please share your ideas and results in the comments.

Ask Dear Brain

Would you like to receive advice about how to use personal marketing for a goal you have in mind? We’d love to hear from you! To have your question featured in a future edition of Dear Brain, please write to us in the comment form on the Dear Brain page.

Or if you’re interested in participating as a Dear Brain subject matter consultant please let me know on the contact form.

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Reboot your life

Lynn — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 20:36:27 +0000

Take Back Your Brain! has come full circle. About three years ago I set out to discover whether it was possible to influence my own behavior by advertising to myself. Apparently it is! In fact, one of those early ad campaigns motivated me to start this website a few months later.

At the time I felt concerned about how saturated our mental ecosystem has become with seductive multimedia images advocating for other peoples’ agendas, while our own noble intentions like getting healthier, smarter, more loving, and more successful languished on to-do lists.

I reasoned that advances in personal technology have made it so easy for ordinary people to create media that we should be able to make visually compelling “ads” for ourselves that are able to compete with commercial marketing for our attention. That same technology has also made it easy to deliver these images to ourselves repeatedly, without any thought or action after the initial set-up. Finally, I thought it might be possible to borrow some tricks from the marketing industry to make our ads more effective.

Since then I’ve written over 100 articles that demonstrate how you too can make ads to motivate yourself using both low and hi-tech methods. I’ve observed these techniques working for myself and others in a variety of situations. I’ve also written a page I call Ad-O-Matic to make it extra easy for you to print your own ads on household schwag. It’s a body of work that I’m proud of, that feels like a genuinely useful, if modest, contribution to the personal development movement.

About a month ago I erased the huge white board in my office and drew the ad you see above. I did this as an intuitive response to consistent inner stirrings for change, renewal, and reinvention. Good stuff. But it generated a response I hadn’t expected: within days I spontaneously stopped writing! Completely. Instead, I have rested more, played more, and paid more attention than usual to my health and home. Again, good stuff.

But I was a bit concerned about my sudden lack of interest in writing about personal marketing until a few days ago when I ran across the seed idea that grew into TBYB!

I think there are layers of exoskeleton for the self: body, clothing, tools, home, community. There are also layers that can be less physical but no less real - media (radio, tv), communications (phone, email) metaverse (blog, website). The immediate emotional environment is an important layer too. Some of the layers contain parasites. I think it’s really effective to tweak pieces of the exoskeleton to support internal change.

Take Back Your Brain! has explored a variety of hacks on the media layer of our exoskeleton, and documenting these experiments has claimed a large share of my attention since November 2006. I see now that while I remain fascinated by the core idea of tweaking the exoskeleton, my interests and energy are currently gravitating toward more physical layers. I feel enormous desire to design space and make stuff again after wrangling a keyboard for several years (hey, I probably should be making some personal ads about that!), and I’m finally working out almost every day.

So for the time being, I’m inclined to follow my instinct to direct most of my creative energy toward the physical layers and transition Take Back Your Brain! to more of a static resource that provides tools and inspiration for you to make personal advertising. While I still have enough ideas to keep posting new material on for quite a while, I’ve pretty much laid out the most important concepts: find an emotional hook, put yourself in the picture, set and forget your delivery system. So I envision posting new articles much less frequently, while continuing to refine the existing material to be as useful for you as possible.

There are over 100 free Articles containing tips, techniques and tutorials that show you how to make and deliver ads to yourself.
Or for those who can spare a few bucks to make this really easy, check out Ad-O-Matic - a tool to help you produce very slick personal ads on common household objects.
I’ll continue to answer your questions about applying this stuff to your own life in the Dear Brain series.
I definitely plan to continue advertising to myself and will tag the good ones “tbyb” in my Flickr account to share with you on the Examples page. I encourage you to do the same.

Of course when I do have something new to say about personal marketing, I’ll post it right here. Subscribe to the RSS feed to be notified about updates.

More than anything else, Take Back Your Brain! is a site about seizing your power to create the life you want. What is the desire that has been whispering to you for several months or years? I’ll bet you know what it is. Go ahead and write it down right now in a place where you’ll see it every day. Illustrate it if you can. Then let that “ad” encourage you to be a willing participant in whatever shows up for you next!

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Change your mind with a Belief Board

Lynn — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:59:32 +0000

Personal development guru Steve Pavlina recently published an interesting article about how he displays affirmations and other statements on a bulletin board to change his beliefs.

His “Belief Board” is hung on the wall in front of the desk where he works, so he exposes himself to the messages it contains for several hours every day. It’s in his field of vision, yet off to the side, so that it’s always visible but not usually the focus of his conscious attention. On the board are six sheets of paper containing one statement printed in a large font. Each statement is a new belief that he wants to “install”.

In the photo above you can see that my first experiment with this technique is an even simpler version with just one statement. It’s been there next to my desk for a few days and I already notice that I think of the statement “I fully participate” when I’m in situations where I might normally remain a passive observer. That’s always a good sign.

Steve’s board contains all text affirmations. Even though I recently extolled the benefits of showing yourself pictures, a text method like this works very well for intangible concepts, like beliefs, that defy photo illustration. Of course such a board could easily display pictures too. The important part is that it shows a new mental reality that you want to believe. As Steve says:

When you set a new goal, an important step on the road to achieving that goal is to gain the belief that you will get there.

Fortunately your subconscious mind can be conditioned to hold new beliefs. It is highly programmable. If you keep exposing it to certain inputs, it gradually learns those patterns.

One thing that’s great about this kind of technique is that you only have to create the “ad” one time for it to influence you every day. It’s so important that you don’t have to work any harder to receive your own advertising than, say, observing a Nike swish on a someone’s clothing as you pass them on the street.

I like the belief board because it’s completely passive. It takes only minutes to create one, and I don’t have to adopt any new daily practices like reciting affirmations. I don’t even have to consciously remember that it’s there. It’s essentially a fire-and-forget technique.

I was especially interested in the “Optimization and tweaking” section of the article. I too have noticed that my subconscious mind gives me immediate feedback when I don’t have the message quite right for a personal ad. It also lets me know when it’s time for an ad campaign to be finished. It always seems very important to follow through on these intuitive promptings to change my advertising — almost like the subject matter becomes aversive if my message is a few degrees off.

For those of you who are not familiar with his work, Steve’s website is well worth a read. You may want to also take a look at my review of his book, Personal Development for Smart People.

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A picture is worth 1000 sticky notes

Lynn — Fri, 22 May 2009 18:06:46 +0000

There’s a reason we see so many pictures in commercial advertising: they work.

Several people have told me lately that they’re really excited about the material on this site and plan to immediately start using Post-It notes to influence themselves. Of course I’m very happy they’ve decided to try personal marketing, but I always want to tell them that it works even better — much, much better — to use pictures.

Seeing a picture of yourself doing the thing you want is just incredibly effective. It takes the tried and true technique of visualization to the next level because rather than having to construct a mental image each time you think of your target result, you make a real picture once and then show it to yourself many times. An added benefit is that you see it automatically, over and over, without having to remember to do your visualization.

I find that my mind gets accustomed to the reality in this picture with repeated exposure over time — first as familiar, then normal. And as that happens I become increasingly likely to take advantage of opportunities to make it come true.

In order to use a picture for your personal ad there are two steps to figure out:

1. How to get the picture in the first place

Sometimes getting your picture is as easy as asking a friend to snap a photo of you performing an activity you’d like to do more often. This works especially well for physical activities like walking, swimming, dancing, or lifting weights.

Other times a little more effort may be involved when the target reality doesn’t exist yet (You on a tropical beach, perhaps? Or maybe working at a new job). But creativity combined with advances in personal technology can overcome that problem quite easily. Depending on your skill level and the equipment you have available, you can either stage a fake scene and take a photo of it, or compose a picture from parts with an image editor like Photoshop or even scissors and glue.

The guiding rule is try to make a picture that looks like the result you want is already true.

2. How to show it to yourself

When deciding how to display your picture the most important thing to keep in mind is that you don’t want to have to remember to do anything to see it often. So place a copy someplace you spend time every day. For example, you could put a printed version on a mirror, cupboard door, bulletin board, bathroom wall, or a picture frame near your desk.

If you spend time at a computer every day it works well to set an electronic version of your picture as the desktop wallpaper. Automated electronic slide shows are really effective, too. Use your screen saver, Vista Sidebar Slide Show, Google Photos, or a digital photo frame to create an electronic slideshow that runs all the time, then slip a couple of personal ads into a collection of other photos you’ll enjoy seeing frequently.

Yesterday I parked next to a car where someone had taped a list of mundane appointments they need to remember on the steering wheel. Apparently that person has found that messages in their car work well to remind them about what’s important. What if, instead of an appointment schedule, it had been a photo that helps them visualize their most cherished dream coming true on that steering wheel? Just saying…

My guess is that people default to the Post-It note method because it’s very quick and easy. So do I sometimes. But advances in personal technology have made it so easy for people to make media there’s really no reason to avoid adding pictures — especially when the ad is about something important to you. Remember, you probably see several thousand ads about other peoples’ priorities every day. Make sure yours have a fighting chance to compete for your attention!

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Dear Brain: How can personal marketing help me stay clean and sober?

Lynn — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:34:03 +0000

Dear Brain,

I’ve been struggling with a drug addiction for 7 years now. I have quit several times only to find myself coming right back once I’m starting to get comfortable in my own skin again. When I read your articles I realized this is most likely what I need to get over this hump. I was finding myself writing personal messages about quitting on pieces of cardboard and placing them around the house as reminders and inspiration. Seeing this site helped me realize just how close I may have been coming to my goal only to undermine all my hardwork by relapsing once again. Currently I have been clean for 26 days and feel really pretty good, though not quite what I once was. I feel as though I am very susceptible to advertising yet I am very aware of it as well. Along with maintaining sobriety, I’m looking to deepen my spirituality, via buddhism and meditation. Any ideas or thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Seth D.

Dear Seth

I think we’re all susceptible to advertising, because we’ve been conditioned to be so our entire lives. I started experimenting with advertising to myself because I wondered if I could take advantage of that susceptibility to support my own goals. It does seem to be very effective.

It sounds like you were indeed very close with your cardboard reminders. The tips I can offer are to make sure to frame your ads as affirmative, rather than negative statements, and to include pictures if possible.

You always want to avoid using negative statements because the part of your mind that processes this stuff seems to leave those words out, which reverses the meaning. So for example a statement like “I want to quit using drugs” might get processed as “I want to use drugs”. Or “I don’t want to lose my wife and job” might turn into “I want to lose my wife and job.” Not the messages you’re looking for!

So be sure to say what you DO want. Also pictures are very, very powerful. I think they tap into an older part of our brain than language.

Keep in mind that commercial advertising always seeks to emphasize benefits, and to tailor those benefits to the target demographic. So think about what’s important to you, what you enjoy, what you love - and then shamelessly exploit how well you know yourself as you craft your persuasive messages.

I can think of several kinds of advertising messages that might be helpful:

Messages that affirm you’re savoring life on its own terms as a sober man, comfortable in your own skin, etc. If your drug of choice numbs you out then maybe something like, “Feeling is how I know I’m alive.”
Ads that promote the benefits of alternative behaviors. Show pictures of yourself enjoying new habits like going outside or exercising (fake it for the photo shoot if you have to). Those images will normalize the new you.
Messages and photos that remind you about the things that are precious to you, that make it all worth it. Sooner or later if an addict keeps using he will lose everything that’s important to him. What are those things for you?
Photos that show in advance that you’ve made it to a milestone goal. For example, if you’re participating in a 12 Step program (or even if you’re not) you may find it helpful once you’ve reached 30 days to take a picture of yourself looking happy and proud with a 90 day chip, so you can visualize how that achievement will feel. Then when you’ve reached that goal take your picture with a 1 year chip, etc. (If this suggestion violates the one-day-at-a-time rule in a way that feels problematic then please ignore it.)
Reminders that support your spiritual practice. For example in a recent article I wrote about a very simple mindfulness exercise I’ve been doing. It makes me feel much more centered, and the frequent reminders really help me remember to do it.

Congratulations on your 26 days, Seth. I know how tough it is to get clean and sober, and wish you much courage and patience on your journey.

Ask the TBYB! readers

What about you? Have you ever used personal marketing to help you with a difficult personal change? What methods did you use to advertise to yourself? Did it help? Do you have any other suggestions about how Seth could use advertising to help himself stay clean and sober? Please share your advice in the comments.

Ask Dear Brain

Or if you’re interested in participating as a Dear Brain subject matter consultant please drop me a note on the contact form.

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Remind yourself to be present

Lynn — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 21:39:37 +0000

I’m currently reading The Not So Big Life: Making Room for What Really Matters (which is excellent, by the way). Much like TBYB! applies the principles of commercial marketing to our own growth, The Not So Big Life uses architectural patterns from Sarah Susanka’s famous Not So Big House series to suggest ways we can relate to personal issues like our relationship to time.

In one exercise Sarah suggests stopping every 15 minutes to just observe what’s happening in your mind and body. She calls it “Planned Pauses.”

If you slow down your body but find that your mind is still racing, you may want to implement the following practice. … Every fifteen minutes, take ten seconds to pause and simply notice what is happening in your body and in your mind. You’ll need some sort of timer with a repeat function to notify you every fifteen minutes. … Although this exercise sounds deceptively simple, its effects can be profound because it will bring you into the moment over and over again.

–Sarah Susanka, The Not So Big Life

Most of us have at least one device nearby that knows what time it is, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find out when 15 minutes have passed. In my case, I use two computers and carry a Windows Mobile-based phone. You might also have a watch or a PDA. Since my phone is with me all the time, I decided it would be the best device to take on the task of measuring 15 minute intervals.

A bit of searching turned up a Windows Mobile application called Chronos for PocketPC. I’m sure there are others, but Chronos fits my purpose very well as it can be set to either chime or vibrate on the quarter hour.

After trying this for a few days I must say it is quite a nice little practice. The default sound for Chronos is a very pleasant zen-like gong, and its simplicity is a good match for this message. I’m learning pretty quickly to stop my racing mind whenever I hear it and get more present. I’ve always had trouble meditating, but it seems that even I can pay attention for (almost)10 seconds.

The whole purpose of personal marketing is to devise ways to automatically remind ourselves of things we want to think about. Most of the time I’ve oriented my ad campaigns toward thinking about things I want to do. This one is more focused on being, and it feels good.

Other ways you could prompt yourself about a mindfulness practice:

Set an hourly chime on your watch.
Place a reminder object in a frequently visited location like the bathroom or your car.
Set up your Serenitext account to deliver randomly-timed text messages (up to 10 per day).

How do you remind yourself to be present?

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Guest post: Find Authentic Happiness with personal marketing

Guest — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 03:31:15 +0000

Our guest author, Dr. Laura S. Brown, is a clinical psychologist and director of the Fremont Community Therapy Project. Some of her clients use personal marketing to reinforce the insights they discover in therapy.

Unlike much of the field of psychology that has traditionally attended to people’s distress and dysfunction, Positive Psychology focuses on helping people to identify their strengths, and grow past their challenges so as to achieve what its founder, psychology researcher Martin Seligman, calls “Authentic Happiness”.

The techniques of personal marketing have always seemed to me to be tailor-made for individuals trying to enhance their happiness in life. This article demonstrates how to use one of the main ideas of Positive Psychology — Signature Strengths — to generate ideas for ads designed to make you happier.

Signature Strengths - what’s that?

Seligman has identified 24 of what he calls “Signature Strengths.” A Signature Strength is a “strength of character that a person self-consciously owns, celebrates, and exercises every day in work, love, play and parenting.” Examples of Signature Strengths are:

Love of learning (my favorite)
Prudence (not necessarily a strength of mine)
Curiousity (yep, me again)
Hope (not my strongest, but I try)

There’s a nice list of all 24 Signature Strengths with short descriptions at Goodlife Zen.

Take the test

The first step you’ll want to take in order to identify what your top strengths are, and which ones you could do better at, is to take the VIA Signature Strengths Questionnaire (it’s about mid-way down the page). Unlike lots of online tests, this one was carefully developed based on research about people who embodied each of the 24 Strengths.

The test takes about half an hour to complete — well worth your time, because at the end you’ll have a rank-ordered list of your strengths, from strongest to least strong. I suggest that you print it out and save it to take again later, after you’ve done your personal marketing campaign, to measure the results.

You have to register for the site, but I promise that they won’t spam you. Or you can take a shorter version of this test in Marty’s book Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment.

Develop your marketing campaign

Okay, now you’ve got your results in hand. You see that a character trait that you’d like to have more of is Play, but it’s only at about the middle of the range. So Play could be the target for your Authentic Happiness advertising campaign.

What can you do to advertise Play to yourself? Some ideas I’ve suggested to my therapy clients who are using personal marketing techniques:

Think of people in your life who exemplify this trait. Take pictures of them if you don’t already have some. Make a slide-show of their pictures in your Google or Vista sidebar, or put their photo into your cell phone or computer wallpaper.
Go to Serenitext and create text messages to send to yourself. You can get ideas about which messages will communicate which strengths to you by reading pages 140-158 of Authentic Happiness, where you’ll see self-statements that are associated with each strength. You can use those, make up some that are similar, or use some of the ones that Serenitext has in stock.
Put yourself in the picture by Photoshopping a picture of your happy self into a group of playful people, pets, or kids, then put it on the refrigerator.

You get the idea. There are a wealth of personal marketing strategies you can employ to increase a strength from lower to higher on your list. Try this for a few weeks, and then re-take the test to measure concrete results from your campaign.

If you’d like to know more about Positive Psychology, Martin Seligman’s website is a great place to go. He has a number of different on-line tests, things to read, and information about Positive Psychology resources. You can also read his Authentic Happiness book to learn much more about the research that underlies this field of psychology.

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Pardon our dust

Lynn — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:41:54 +0000

Sometimes a remodeling project happens when you finally can’t stand it any more.

For two-plus years I’ve heeded excellent advice to concentrate on writing quality content for TBYB! instead of fussing over aesthetic details. The result is an archive of over 100 substantive articles that explore and develop the theory and practice of personal marketing.

Each week during that time I have:

Gone to my day job
Researched and written these articles in my spare time
Hated the look and feel of the site, but sucked it up and attended to other, more pressing matters
Assumed I would spiff up the WordPress theme when I “had the time”.

Meanwhile TBYB! has sometimes felt like an intellectual fairy princess trapped inside a hideously ugly, rusted, double-wide tower parked up on blocks. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s kind of embarrassing when you’re a web developer.)

I’ve finally decided to quit waiting for a “good time” and just go for it. In a perfect world these changes would have occurred discreetly, behind the scenes, and been rolled out gracefully when they were ready for prime time. Hello, (imperfect) world!

So I’m going to fire up big, fun, destructive power tools, and let the chips fall where they may. It won’t be pretty. You might even want to grab a hard hat in case a rogue CSS selector or HTML blockquote falls on your head.

When things basically work again and the WordPress theme doesn’t make me cringe any more I’ll get back to writing articles about personal marketing. In the meantime you might enjoy reading some of the best material from the last two years that you may have missed:

If you have any questions about how to apply personal marketing to your own life, feel free to submit a question any time for Dear Brain, who is wisely riding out this whole remodeling thing at a luxury web 2.0 condo.

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Dear Brain: How can personal marketing help me save money?

Lynn — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 17:55:20 +0000

Dear Brain,

How do I remind myself of the long-term value of saving money when something I want RIGHT NOW is begging to be bought?

Liz

Dear Liz

Thanks for the great question, Liz. I think you remind yourself about goals like saving money the same way the advertising industry does, only in reverse. Whereas they constantly show us and tell us about the short-term value of wanting things right now, our personal marketing campaigns aim to be just as aggressive about returning our attention to the LONG-TERM goals begging for our attention.

For example, a smart campaign identifies why you’re saving the money, so you can associate that behavior with something really important to you. Then it relentlessly reminds you about that. Such a campaign can build both familiarity and desire:

If you literally see yourself having the thing you want every day, it will soon seem normal.
And frequent reminders about the benefits of your goal can fuel a deep desire in you to have it.

Below are several strategies I’ve used with great success. Check out my RV ad campaign for specific examples about how I put three of them into action, and my recent fall marketing campaign to read about how I discovered and implemented a powerful emotional hook.

Save the money FOR something. You probably don’t want to save money for its own sake, but because of something else it can secure for you. What is that?
Find an emotional hook. Why do you want that thing? What is it about it that motivates you? Remind yourself about that.
Help yourself visualize the outcome. Bombard yourself with images of yourself already having it (ideally with fun, attractive friends…).
Be relentlessly aggressive. Use multiple modalities and repeat often. Adapt the campaign as you go along.

Keep in mind that you don’t have to do anything to see a Nike swish several times a week, year after year. It just shows up. Ideally your ads should let you be a passive recipient of your messages just like that. Aim to set up reminders that prompt you frequently to remember your important long-term financial goals — especially when you’re not already thinking about them.

What happens to the RIGHT NOW stuff you asked about while a personal marketing campaign is going on? All of that stuff may keep begging, but I find it has far less pull on me when I’ve truly stoked my desire to save for a long-term goal, and my belief that I can get there.

Our subject matter consultants weigh in

Dear Brain thanks all of our personal finance and frugality consultants for contributing some really great ideas:

J.D. from Get Rich Slowly

One problem, I think, is that often the things that demand to be bought RIGHT NOW are someplace where we cannot advertise to ourselves. Long-term, the self-advertising is the right approach, but what about coping with the urge to buy when you’re actually in the store? Are there ways to employ TBYB! techniques “in the wild”? For example, someplace on Flickr , there’s an image of a wallet. The photographer has wrapped something around his credit cards as a physical reminder not to use them. Are there things we can put in our wallets and purses in order to advertise to ourselves at the point of temptation?

Brain says: What a great idea, J.D! Liz could wrap a picture of her long-term goal around her credit card or put it in the photo flap in her wallet. Or fasten something that represents the goal on her keychain or purse, or print a reminder on a custom wristband.

Jim from Bargaineering

Brain’s response hits on all the things I always try to recommend to people who are struggling with this trade-off. The goal aspect is crucial; no one makes decisions in a vacuum so trading short term spending for a long term goal really focuses people. One thing I can recommend is that you have a cooling off period for every single purchase. Even if it’s an hour or a week, just go do something else and if you are still interested then you can buy it (and trade short-term for long-term).

Brain says: So maybe the wristband could say “Think” or “Cool off”…

Lise from Frugal in the Fruitlands

This is a tough — but good! — question. To be perfectly honest, it’s still something I struggle with myself. But here are some creative ways I’ve used to put a dent in my impulse spending.

The first step in beating impulse spending is knowledge. Before you step foot near a store, you have to have a plan:

You need to know what your financial goals are. It’s hard to use personal marketing against spending without knowing what you’re saving for. Presumably there’s a reason why you think you shouldn’t be buying that new phone, pair of shoes, bottle of perfume, or whatever your indulgence is. Is your goal getting out of debt? Is it taking a vacation? Is it building an emergency fund?
You need to figure out how much money you will need to achieve that goal. If you’re in debt, you need to know how much debt you’re in. If you want an emergency fund, you’ll probably want enough to cover three to six months expenses. If you want to take a vacation, figure out what you’re going to do, where you’re going to stay, and what you’re going to eat - and what it’s all going to cost you.
You need to figure out your real hourly wage. This is a concept from the book Your Money or Your Life that helps you to value how much “life energy” each purchase really costs you. I recommend MSN’s Time Value Calculator for the quickest way to calculate this.

Okay. Now you have the tools you need to fight impulse spending with personal advertising. Let’s put them into action:

1. Advertise your real hourly wage to yourself. I recommend starting with a step from Millionaire Mommy Next Door: take a post-it note (we sure do love post-it notes in personal advertising!) and write something like this on it:

Price / $12.75 (your real hourly wage here) = # of hours it will cost me!

Now here’s the important part: stick this note to your credit card. Every time you need to use your card, you’ll have to remove it, which means it will be a real obstacle to spending money.

Now go further: take a picture of the note with your cell phone, and…

2. Advertise your goals to yourself. If you’re saving for a trip to Tahiti, it’s easy to find attractive pictures to motivate yourself on Google or Flickr. Print these out and put them in your wallet. Wrap them around your credit card. Do any of the methods you’ve learned on this site to advertise that “carrot” that will remind you why you’re not spending. If you have people who motivate you to do better - your children, your spouse, your parents - include them in this imagery, as well.

Advertising is tougher with intangibles like getting out of debt or building an emergency fund, of course. Here, I suggest playing with fake money — just print out the amount you need as determined by your goals and put yourself in the picture:

Take a picture of yourself stuffing that last $100 payment into the envelope from your credit card company
Take a picture of yourself counting out stacks of bills that represent your emergency fund.
Go into your online accounts and pretend to deposit the amount you want into your emergency fund, taking a screen capture and closing out before you complete the transaction.

Do the same with these images as you would with the Tahiti pictures - feature them prominently using the methods you’ve learned here at TBYB!

Now it’s your turn

What about you, TBYB! readers? Have you ever used personal marketing to interrupt impulsive behavior or save money? How well did it work? What advice do you have to help Liz make better choices about her shopping? What other methods could we use to advertise to ourselves “in the wild,” at the point of purchase? Please share your suggestions for Liz in the comments.

Ask Dear Brain

Or if you’re interested in participating as a Dear Brain subject matter consultant please drop me a note on the contact form.

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Take back the Marketing Mix: The Four P’s

Lynn — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:00:54 +0000

Product, Price, Place, and Promotion — known as the marketing mix — are the four classic variables a marketer controls in any exchange. Each contains opportunities to shape a proposition so well suited for the customer that selling it doesn’t require much persuasion, because it meets a genuine need in a way they want to do it. Commercial and social marketers pay a great deal of attention to each of these areas in order to craft attractive offers for you.

Why should personal marketing be any different?

When you’re trying to get yourself to do something, take a page from the big guys and use the variables in the marketing mix to anticipate problems and solve them for yourself before you concentrate on execution. If you get the Four P’s right — especially the first three — iron-willed discipline is seldom necessary. It’s well worth it to plan strategically like this for important goals, because of course others do it to you about their goals all the time.

The Four P’s

You’re planning a marketing campaign because you want to do, be or have something. In marketing terms, the thing you want is your Product. It will cost you something in terms of time, resources, and hassle, but that cost will be balanced by receiving both tangible and intangible benefits. That’s its Price. You’ll perform the behaviors necessary to reach your goal in some location. That’s the Place. And finally, TBYB! readers make ads to automatically remind ourselves that this is a priority. That’s Promotion.

You usually have several choices about each of the four elements in the marketing mix. The smart marketer will make every effort to get the first three right before launching a Promotion.

Product

Product has two main dimensions in personal marketing: what do you want, and why do you want it?

What, exactly, do you want to do, be, or have? Be as specific as possible describing both your goal and the behavior you’ll need to do to get there:

“Swim for 30 minutes three times a week” is more specific than “Exercise more”.
“Put $100 in my savings account every time I get paid” is more specific than “Save money”.
“Save $400/month toward a down payment on a house” is even better.

Do you have confidence that doing this activity will get you to your goal? And if so, is it a goal that’s important to you? I love Stephen Covey’s reminder to make sure the ladder you’re climbing is leaning against the right wall. Do a gut check at this point. Have you chosen your goal well? Does this goal have heart? Do you believe in the path you’ve chosen to get there?

Once you’ve accurately identified your goal, look honestly at the reasons you want it.

The core product … consists of the major needs that will be fulfilled, wants that will be realized, and problems that will be solved by consuming this product. It is the real reason the customer is buying the product and is determined by the customer’s answers to such questions as, “What’s in it for me to buy this product?” You’ll want to keep in mind that people don’t buy drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes. They don’t buy a cosmetics. They buy hope. They don’t buy a room they can rent while away from home. They buy a good night’s sleep.

–Kotler and Armstrong, Principles of Marketing

What are you really “buying” here? What is your quarter-inch hole?

A product is not just a physical object; it is a bundle of benefits or values that satisfies the needs of consumers. The needs may be purely functional, or they may include social and psychological benefits.

–Belch and Belch, Advertising and Promotion

The article Create a brand for your goal: decide how to position your change suggests all of the following as possible motivations for saving money:

A loving and responsible way to care for your family
The ticket to a lifelong dream, such as owning your own home
Getting ever closer to fun, such as saving for a vacation or expensive toy
A way to keep score in the competitive game of business and/or life
A strategy to achieve financial independence so you can control your own time
Putting something away for a rainy day, to provide for your own security

What reasons might you might have for reaching your goal? Each of them will combine differently with who you are to evoke an emotional response. None of them are “right” or “wrong”, just different. Your job as a personal marketer is to figure out which of them are true and will work best on you, and then intentionally amplify those feelings to leverage their power.

Price

The customer in any exchange weighs benefits vs cost in order to make their decision. This is as true for personal marketing as it is for commercial marketing. What will you gain from doing your target behavior compared to how much of a hassle it’s going to be for you to do it? Your job as a marketer is to increase the benefits and reduce the cost of performing the behaviors necessary to reach your goal.

Is the target activity something you enjoy, or do you find it distasteful? If it’s something you basically like to do how could you make yourself like it more? Would a new outfit help? How about a ~~bribe~~…ah, I mean reward? An activity you hate is going to be a tough sell, so if you don’t like it and never will what other activity would you enjoy that could meet the same goals? Perhaps your effort would be better spent figuring out how to make that possible for yourself. A smart marketer is always looking to create an exchange that the customer wants to do because the benefits outweigh the cost.

For example, I tried for years to make myself get up and exercise before going to work. I’d do it for a little while, but since I’m not even remotely a morning person, I never got much traction with that approach because it was genuinely painful. But I also resisted doing it after work, because I hated to use up the little bit of daylight when I got home on what felt like still working. Finally I listened to myself, gave up on both of those times, and started exercising later in the evening. That’s been working really well for several months.

Another strategy you can use related to price is to remind yourself about the cost of the alternative path. Emphasize the evils of the road not taken: health consequences, delayed financial goals, etc. But be careful with this one, as negative statements can backfire (your mind may delete the “not” part of the statement).

Place

Where will you perform the behavior necessary to reach your goal? Is that place pleasant and convenient for you? Is it available when you want to be there? Does it have the tools you need to do the task? Analyze every aspect of Place and do whatever you can to tweak it to your advantage. Anything you can do to make it work better will make it that much easier to reach your goal.

For example, if you want to exercise more you have several choices about where to do it. You could work out at home, at a health club, or outside. Which do you prefer? Do it there if you possibly can. Even so, there may be elements that are a little awkward. If that’s the case, go ahead and get the stuff you need to make it work well, such as a lock and a gym bag.

Maybe you want to meditate regularly. Have you set up a quiet pleasant corner for yourself? If not, take a couple of hours and see if you can figure something out. Then attend to Place on an ongoing basis by caring for your special corner - for example, you could dust or bring fresh flowers.

Or say you want to save money. Set up the Place to store that money, whether it’s a bank, an online savings account, or an envelope. Then think through the actual steps you’ll have to do to put money in that Place and solve any problems that make it inconvenient.

Promotion

Ideally, Promotion occurs only after all three of the the other “P’s” have been addressed. If you follow the marketing process in this order you’ll not be trying to persuade yourself with trickery or willpower to do something you really don’t want to do. Rather, you’ll set up a Promotion to remind yourself to meet needs that are important to you in a way you’ve designed to be pleasant or even fun.

Advertising to yourself is one form of Promotion. TBYB! has published lots of articles about advertising techniques, so I won’t go into that here. Check the article index and Your Ads page for dozens of examples, including how to further associate the behavior with things you like.

Other possibilities for Promotion include support groups, rewards, and commitments. I have a friend who motivates herself to exercise with a written commitment she’s made to another person. In this contract she’s agreed to donate money to the political party she disagrees with each day she doesn’t meet her exercise goal. That promotional strategy seems to work well, because so far the amount she has donated is a big fat (unlike her) $0!

Marketing 101

To quote myself from Marketing 101:

Advertising is a subset of marketing, which is a much larger endeavor that involves strategizing about every element of the process by which you and your customer trade something of value. Marketing includes deciding exactly what you’re selling, honestly assessing your strengths and weaknesses, sizing up the competition, learning as much as you can about your consumer, and strategizing about how to position your product to appeal to him. It includes deciding how to manipulate the four classic variables over which you have control: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Promotion, in turn, is divided into many possible persuasive activities, one of which is advertising. Other elements of the “promotional mix” can include direct marketing, interactive marketing, sales promotion, public relations and personal selling. In other words, advertising is just one tool in what is often a carefully planned and well-orchestrated campaign to convince you to do something.

If you feel like you’re working too hard to make something happen, you can probably make things easier on yourself by getting real about who you are and adjusting one or more element in the marketing mix to match. Do everything you can to make the behavior attractive and low-cost for yourself, until you find a way to make it something you actually want to do.

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Automate text messages with Serenitext

Lynn — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 17:16:53 +0000

Serenitext is a service that sends you text messages at random times throughout the day. You can write your own messages or choose them from a list, then Serenitext delivers them to your cell phone or email address.

I really like this service. It’s very easy to set up and use, and it works well. I especially like the complete randomness of both which message I receive and what time it arrives. That surprise element seems to be really effective in retaining my interest, and is one of the things it does better than other message scheduling systems I’ve tried like Backpack.

There’s also a nice social dimension to the site. You can choose to share any message you write to the “Community List” so others are able to use that message too. I picked a few messages from the Community List to get started, and they gave me good ideas for writing messages of my own.

How to get started

This video does a good job of describing how to set up the service:

You can configure the number of messages you want to receive every day, and also the earliest and latest times you want them to arrive. You’re also able to pause delivery any time from the website control panel.

One note of caution: be sure to be aware of the terms of your data plan for text messages and set the message frequency accordingly, so you don’t get surprised by extra charges. If you prefer, you can choose to receive the messages via email instead.

I set up my Serenitext account to send only one message per day because I pay for every text message on my phone. I think that might be about the right frequency anyway, because it doesn’t work very well for an ad campaign like this to get too “noisy”. Right now one a day is a sweet spot for me.

Evaluation

So far I really like receiving these messages. I feel a happy little burst of curiosity when I see one arrive, because I wonder which one it’s going to be. Since they’re all about thoughts I want to reinforce, they feel welcome, and whenever possible I pause for a few moments to mentally let it in.

It’s very easy to add, delete and edit your messages on an ongoing basis. When I write a new ad slogan or read a short piece of inspirational text, I login to the Serenitext control panel and add it to my message list. Or if I receive a message that I don’t feel an unconditional positive response to, I just go to the website and change it.

The website does have a couple of cosmetic irritations. It presents a markedly religious flavor in many of the examples, and the Community List contains far too many spelling errors. However both of these are easy to ignore since you can write your own messages. The underlying service is neutral, straightforward, and technically solid. It works exactly as advertised.

More importantly, I do find these messages influencing my behavior. I’ve already noticed myself recalling some of them at behavioral decision points and then making better choices.

Bottom line: Serenitext is a really convenient way to advertise to yourself. If you can throw a little money at personal marketing to make it easy, Serenitext should probably be on your short list of tools to consider. They offer a free 7 day trial for you to check it out.

(Full disclosure: Take Back Your Brain! has an affiliate arrangement with Serenitext, so if you sign up for a paid account when the 7 day trial is over I will receive a few dollars from your first month’s fee. That being said, I would not ever recommend a service unless I try it first and really believe there’s value in it for you. I think Serenitext is a great tool.)

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10 easy ways to advertise to yourself

Lynn — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:11:22 +0000

TBYB! wants to inspire you to DO personal marketing, because this stuff seriously rocks your life. Here are ten very effective advertising techniques that you can implement in just a few minutes.

Several of them use a picture to make your ad more powerful. Use Flickr, Google Image Search, or magazines to locate photos to illustrate your ad.

Set your home page. You see the website you choose for your home page every time you open your browser. Does it feed your mind and remind you about a goal you have or send you off on distracting tangents?
Change your password. Most of us have at least one password that we key in every day. This is a great place to embed a slogan for your ad campaign.
Change your desktop wallpaper. If you’re anything like me you spend many hours a week staring at your computer screen. That makes it one of the most effective locations I’ve found for images that inspire me to take action.
Subscribe to the RSS feed, podcast, or magazine. Make sure fresh content related to your goal is being delivered to you automatically on a regular basis. This not only reminds you about your goal, but it also provides a steady stream of new ideas about how to get it done.
Set a welcome phrase on your phone. Many cell phones and Windows Mobile devices offer the option to display a short text phrase on the screen. It’s a great place for a short affirmation or your ad slogan.
Take a picture with your phone, then set it as the background. Want to read, write or walk more? Have a friend snap a photo of you doing that. Then switch your phone’s background to that picture, and you’ll see yourself doing what you want every time you answer the phone.
Put up a picture on your bathroom wall/refrigerator/bulletin board/locker, etc. Our brains are wired to respond to visual input, so seeing pictures really works.
Tape a picture to an envelope. Want to save money for something? Put a picture of that thing on the envelope where you’re saving the money. Check out TBYB!’s recent guest post on Get Rich Slowly for detailed instructions about how to use this method and a great discussion by GRS readers in the comments.
Put a picture in your wallet or calendar. You know that little flap with the transparent pocket? Perfect place for an ad!
Carry a prop. Find an object that represents your goal to you and carry it everywhere you go. The more people ask you about it the better!

Finally, this list would not be complete without mentioning the humble sticky note. Of all the material on this site, the Post-It note ad seems to be the method people implement the most. Which makes sense because it’s fast, familiar, you already have the stuff, and it could not be easier:

Write your slogan on a Post-It note. It’s quick, it’s easy, and you can put it wherever you want. Be sure to write whatever you want to achieve as an affirmatative statement, in present time.

What quick and dirty methods do you use to advertise to yourself?

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Optimize your media input streams to support your goals

Lynn — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 07:08:54 +0000

What you think about is what happens. Or at the very least is much, much more likely to happen than something you never think about at all. This is the fundamental idea behind personal success classics from Think and Grow Rich to The Secret, and it’s also the engine that drives commercial advertising. If advertisers can get you to think about fabric softener and diet pills you’re more likely to spend money on those products than if you don’t think about them. Period.

TBYB! believes we can and should exploit the same strategy to advance our own agendas. If I see a picture several times every day that reminds me to go for a walk or save money, I’m more likely to take action on those goals than if I don’t think about them. That very simple idea is the principle that underlies everything we do here at Take Back Your Brain!.

Your mind will receive a staggering number of messages in 2009 that you mostly have no control over. TBYB! suggests that you take a look at the input streams that you do control, to make sure their content is in alignment with your goals.

Inventory all of the sources you’re using to feed your brain. What are you consuming now?
Consider deleting sources that are not either excellent or directly related to your goals (Or both). Prune fearlessly.
Add new sources that feed the areas you want to think about.

Below are several areas to consider. I found it fascinating to actually write down the content I consume for each one: which blogs I subscribe to, which TV shows I watch regularly, etc. Seeing them all in one place gave me an appreciation for how many of these input sources I make choices about. I’m sure I’ve left some out. What other media sources do we consume?

Print media: Newspapers, magazines, and books. What do you read?
Online media: Desktop wallpaper, screen saver, browser home page, blog subscriptions, usernames and passwords, listservs, groups. What do you see when you look at your screen? What’s in your feed reader?
Audio media: Podcast subscriptions, play lists, radio pre-sets, streaming radio, etc. What’s on your play list? How about the radio in your car?
Video media:TV, TiVo, NetFlix, YouTube. What do you watch regularly?
Educational media: Classes, workshops. etc. What will you learn this year?
Physical media: Bulletin boards, pictures, clothing, objects, etc. When you look around what do you see?
Sentient media: Who do you spend most of your time with, either face-to-face or online? What themes do they talk about?
Social media: Who do you follow? Have any of them achieved what you want? (Should I get on Facebook and Twitter? If so, how should I do it in a way that feeds me rather than distracts?)

As you inventory the many information sources you consume, ask yourself if each one is helping you to think about the things you’d like to see happen in 2009. What patterns do you see? Are you mostly feeding yourself information about politics, entertainment, sports or personal growth? Is that what you want to think about? How many sources are currently feeding the topic areas where you want to expand? What could you let go of without missing it?

Of course there’s nothing wrong with entertainment, and a healthy information diet will include some items from this mental food group. However, as you take a few minutes to inventory your information streams you may decide to make some gentle tweaks to make sure you’re also including regular input that is nourishing your thoughts about the life you want to create this year. Perhaps a modest approach would be to delete one low-priority item from each category to make room for a new, high-quality source.

We are all constantly building our neural networks. How will you fertilize the network that is you in 2009? How can you proactively choose input for your brain rather than just passively receiving advertising?

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Ask the readers: Which digital photo frame do you recommend?

Lynn — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 22:10:12 +0000

We’ve discussed several methods for delivering ads to yourself in slide show mode, such as the screensaver slideshow, Google Photos gadget, and Windows Vista slide show. Each works great, but all of them require you to be sitting at your computer.

Wouldn’t it be great to have another tool that sits in a space where you spend a lot of time and which automatically shows you dynamically changing images that program you to do things? (Hmm… what does that remind you of?!)

A digital photo frame may be the perfect tool for delivering advertising to ourselves. Why?

It’s easy to load
It can sit wherever you spend your time
Most will rotate your photos automatically
You can “set and forget” while your ads keep on working
They are accessible to both technical beginners and digerati

I’ve been wanting to buy a digital photo frame to use for personal advertising for quite a while. Of course I want to experiment with displaying my own ads, and if it works as well as I think it will I’d also like to be able to recommend a good one to TBYB! readers.

I’ve looked at these frames many times both in stores and online, but have frankly been stumped by the baffling array of choices and features. They’re just expensive enough that it feels like it matters to make a good choice, and so far I’ve not been able to find one that truly feels like the “sweet spot” between price and performance.

These are the feature I think are necessary for personal advertising:

4:3 aspect ratio (normal digital photo size)
Decent screen resolution
Slideshow mode
Easy user interface
Memory card for convenient photo transfer
Not ugly

These would be nice to have:

Selectable viewing hours
Battery mode (so it doesn’t have to be near a power outlet)
Price point under $50
5 star Amazon rating

Some flashy stuff that would be cool but adds expense:

Video player
Wireless mode and/or RSS (for Flickr download)

I don’t think we need:

16:9 aspect ratio
Fancy transitions between slides
Photo editing
Bluetooth file transfer
Music player

The Amazon Digital Photo Frames Knowledge Center is a pretty good resource to learn more about the features mentioned above.

What do you think? Which photo frame should I buy? If you have a digital photo frame what do you like about it? Are there any features you wish it had? Which one would you buy if you were going to get another photo frame today?

Has anyone used your digital photo frame for personal advertising? If so, please let us know how it works! I think this is going to be one of the best methods ever for delivering our ads.

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Guest post: How to deliver tagged Flickr photos to your desktop with the Google Photos Gadget

Guest — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 07:49:11 +0000

Learn how to automatically deliver themed photos to your desktop in the second part of this tutorial about how to use Flickr photos to illustrate your personal ads. TBYB! thanks Lise of Frugal in the Fruitlands for contributing this excellent series. Be sure to check out part one, too: How to use Flickr to find pictures for your ads. Here’s Lise again:

Lynn showed you how to install Google Desktop and how to rotate picture ads with the Google Photos Gadget. Turns out, you don’t just have to use your own computer as a source of images for the photo gadget - you can use photos from the web, as well. The gadget will accept online photos in two formats:

1) Regular URLs. I have a directory with pictures of my cats on my personal website. I can enter in the URL http://electric-monk.net/cats/KittyWebpage.html and the photo gadget will cycle through my cat pictures.

2) RSS Feeds. Don’t know what an RSS feed is? Darren at Problogger.net can give you a brief introduction - but basically it’s a special link which is updated every time the website is updated. RSS is especially useful for blogs - if you subscribe to Frugal in the Fruitlands or Take Back Your Brain! in an RSS reader like Google Reader, for example, every time a new article is published it will pop up in your reader, kind of like an email.

So where does Flickr come in? Turns out, many Flickr pages can be turned into RSS feeds, and then added into Google Desktop’s photo gadget.

How to set up an RSS feed in your your Google Photos gadget

Using last week’s example about learning tango in Argentina, let’s say that not only do you want to download images having to do with tango and Argentina, but you want your photo gadget to be automatically updated every time someone on Flickr posts a new image. What to do?

Let’s start on the search results page we talked about last week:

Click on an image you like. You’ll be taken to that image’s individual page.
Look on the right-hand side of the page for heading called “tags.”
Select one of the tags, such as “tango.” This will take you to all photos that this user has tagged “tango.”
To see all images on the site tagged “tango,” click “see all public content tagged with tango” (upper left hand corner).
Scroll down the page until you see the orange and white RSS symbol and the text “subscribe to stuff tagged with tango.”
Right-click on the “latest” text and select “Copy Link Location.” The URL has been saved to your clipboard.

Now go into Google Desktop’s Photo Gadget:

Scroll over it until a menu pops up in the upper right hand corner.
Click the upside-down triangle to select the menu.
Select “Options.”
Select the “Photos Online” tab.
Paste (Ctrl - V) the URL of the RSS feed into the top box and hit “Add URL.”

Within a few minutes, images from the “tango” feed should start showing up in your photo gadget!

A Brief Introduction to Clusters

Caveat: using the method outlined above, you can’t have an RSS for the intersection of two tags, i.e. “Argentina” and “tango.” HOWEVER some very clever people have put together relevant “clusters” that combine these elements.

For example, if you’re exploring the tango tag, you’ll see in the left sidebar a link that says “tango clusters.” These are user-created clusters based on specific tags. The “argentina/buenos aires/dance” cluster is probably closest to what we want.

You can add a cluster to your photo gadget the same way we talked about: by pasting the URL into your “Photos Online” options tab. Unfortunately, this will only display in your photo gadget the thumbnail-sized images you get on a typical search results page. However, these human-organized clusters are still a good launch pad for creativity.

In Closing

What is your current personal advertising goal?
Can you set it up so that themed images about it are displayed automatically on your desktop - all without your constant input?

Lynn says

This is a technique I had not tried before, and I really like it. For starters, it’s dead easy. Once I set up a theme feed other people literally do all of the work. You’ve gotta love that! Another great thing is that variety and novelty are built in. For example, I currently have photos tagged “water polo” streaming to my Photos gadget, since that’s something I want to focus on this year. Every time someone posts a new photo on Flickr with that tag, it’s automatically delivered to my desktop, so I’m always seeing new pictures about water polo. That keeps my interest level high, which causes me to pay attention to the ads. And using personal ads to keep our attention on the things we want to accomplish is what personal marketing is all about!

How to use Flickr to find pictures for your ads

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Guest post: How to use Flickr to find pictures for your ads

Guest — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 07:17:47 +0000

TBYB! thanks Lise of Frugal in the Fruitlands for writing this excellent two-part tutorial about how to use Flickr photos to illustrate your ads. In this first installment, she walks you through the process of locating and downloading images about your topic. Those of you who are working on a New Year collage should find this material really helpful for locating those hard-to-find pictures of your dreams for 2009. Here’s Lise:

Last year, Lynn introduced TBYB! to the Power of Google (*light descends from on high*), showing us Google Image Search and Google Desktop and their applications in personal advertising. Today, she’s asked me to write about how Flickr can be used for similar purposes.

What is Flickr?

Flickr is an online, photo management and sharing website: “almost certainly the best,” if you believe their About page.

You can sign up for a free account and start uploading your photos immediately by simply selecting a file from your hard drive. Once uploaded, you can tag them, submit them to groups, share them on your blog, all with just a few clicks. You can also select whether you want the image to be visible to everybody, only yourself, or some combination of your friends, contacts, and family.

Not ready for that kind of commitment? Nothing of your own to share? Well, that’s okay, too. You can get the best personal advertising benefit without even opening an account. Let’s discuss those aspects of Flickr that make it so flexible, starting with tags.

What Are Tags?

“Tag your photos?” you say. “What does that mean?”

Tags are simply labels. They are key to how many sites, including Flickr, organize content. Tags are a little different than categories - one might think of them like key words.

On Flickr, a user can ad up to 75 tags to EACH of their pictures to identity what it’s about. For example, I recently posted some photos from my vacation to New Mexico in May. I tagged all of them “new mexico” (and categorized them all in a set called “New Mexico May 2008″), but I tagged some “taos,” some “santa fe,” some “rio grande,” and some “garnet” (I spent a lot of time gazing longingly at garnet jewelry in Santa Fe), depending on the subject of the individual photos.

Once you’ve tagged a photo, and you’ve made it public, other users can use those tags to find pictures relevant to them.

Find Images for Your Ad Campaigns

By now one way to use Flickr is becoming obvious: you can use it, similar to Google Image Search, to find content for your ads. If you imagine yourself learning tango in Argentina, Flickr can help.

Why would you choose to use Flickr search over Google Image Search? There are two compelling reasons:

1) Different results. Google depends on the text that surrounds the image to define the search criteria, and it covers a wider universe — commercial or not-for-profit; amateur or professional; drawing or photography. So often when using Google Search, I find a lot of irrelevant images. Look at a similar search on “argentina tango” on Google Image Search: sure, I get pictures of couples tango-ing, but I also get a picture of a Buenos Aires hotel room, a type of wine called “Argentina Tango Soul,” and a lot of CD covers.

When you search Flickr, however, you’re searching images that have been tagged by a human being. There’s no commercial content, or irrelevant text to throw you off course.

2) The licensing is clear. One problem with using images found on the internet is that you have to be careful that you’re not inadvertantly using images that belong to someone else. Professional photographers may post their images to the web, but that doesn’t mean they want everybody using them free of charge.

Everything that is uploaded to Flickr is clearly labeled with its license - that is, who can use this photo under what circumstances. By default, all images uploaded are “all rights reserved,” but many users choose a Creative Commons license for their work - as I have done. My photos are licensed under an “Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike” license, which means that others are free to share and remix the work so long as they attribute the source to me and they don’t use it for commercial purposes. (Example: the photo on this page was taken by Petezin.)

Especially if you will be modifying the images, or if some of your personal advertising will be in the public eye, I recommend using the Advanced Search features on Flickr to search for Creative-Commons licensed content.

So let’s get starting searching!

Starting on the main page, click on the pulldown menu next to the search box, and select “everyone’s uploads.” This will take you to Search page. (Note: you have to be logged in with your free account to see the pulldown menu)
Select “Advanced Search.”
Enter your search terms and select “tags only” — this will search only the user-selected tags, excluding any text accompanying the image. I find you get better results this way.
Scroll down to the sections labeled “Creative Commons” and check “only search within Creative Commons-licensed content.”
Click “search” to start your search.

Once you find an image you’d like to use in the search results, click on it to get the full Flickr page for that image. Before downloading the image for your personal use, check two things:

Is the licensing model what you expected it to be? Look under “Additional Information” on the right side of the page.
Can the image be downloaded? Regardless of licensing, many Flickr users do not allow downloads of their photos. If, when you right-click on the image and choose “save,” the name it wants to save the file as is “spaceball,” then the image has been set to not be downloaded. The “spaceball” is just a stand-in one-pixel image. Don’t bother downloading it; move on to the next search result.

If the licensing looks OK and the file name is something other than “spaceball,” then go ahead and save the image to your computer to use for your ad.

In Closing

What is your current personal marketing goal?
Is there a visual component to it you could use Flickr to illustrate?

Lynn says

Thanks, Lise — this is really helpful. Next week we’ll run the second article in Lise’s two-part series, which teaches you how to automatically stream tagged photos from Flickr to your desktop with the Google Photos gadget to continuously remind you about your goal.

And speaking of Flickr, if you tag any of your photos “tbyb” they will show up in the photo stream on our Your Ads page. If you come up with a great ad for yourself, please consider sharing your idea with the rest of the TBYB! community in this manner. Personal marketing is certainly a case where all of us together are smarter than any one of us alone.

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Rock 2009 with a New Year collage

Lynn — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 04:36:49 +0000

Here’s an arts and crafts project that’s fun, powerful, and dare I say a reasonable alternative (or addition) to football for New Year’s day. It’s especially fun to make collages with a group of friends; everyone can bring old magazines and help each other find pictures for your goals. Even better: meet with the same group again next year to find out how everyone’s goals turned out.

Collection phase

1. Collect your goals

This step sounds like something you just sit down and do (and sometimes it is), but it’s often a more organic process than that. It certainly varies from year to year how formally I engage in goal setting, but I do find it helpful to do some kind of thinking that evaluates results from the previous year and projects my intentions for the next one.

I encourage you to write down the themes and goals you identify if you’re so inclined. There’s a fair amount of documentation that the mere act of writing a goal makes it more likely to happen. Plus we’ll be referring to this list throughout the year for other projects.

In terms of the collage project, we’re looking for a list of the topics that you want to focus on for the year — your top three or four goals — plus perhaps a handful of other things that you’d also like to see happen.

2. Collect some pictures

Next you’ll gather pictures that illustrate each of the themes you identified in the goal phase. You’ll get most of your pictures from three sources:

Cut out pictures from magazines, newspapers, brochures, etc. It can be fun to assemble text phrases from headlines, but make sure you also get plenty of images.
Download and print pictures from the Internet - Google images is a great source, and next week we’ll feature a guest post that also shows you how to find pictures in the public archives on Flickr.
Photos of yourself - this is really, really important! Scan or photocopy pictures you already have, or perhaps you and a friend can take pictures of each other for this project. You get bonus points for wearing outfits that are appropriate for your goals.

Notice how the mere act of looking for pictures is already causing you to pay more attention to those goals, causing them to grow stronger in your mind. Great, it’s already working!

3. Collect supplies

Poster board (foam core board is especially elegant but inexpensive plain poster board is fine)
Scissors
Glue stick
Extra magazines and newspapers
Optional: crayons, stickers, glitter, beads, etc.

Assembly phase

Now for the fun part - assemble all of the images you’ve collected into a visual map that illustrates your intentions for 2009. There are no rules, except to try to make it visually appealing to yourself. Here’s how I go about it:

1. Start in the center.

Include one or all of the following: “2009″, a picture of yourself, a picture of yourself with your family, your summary slogan for the year, a short written statement about your most important goal, a picture of your most important goal.

2. Map out zones on the page

Choose areas of the page that correspond to your major themes, sort of like a mind map. You may label them with cut-out words, or not. Trim the images you’ve collected for each theme and lay them on the page in their respective zones. Often this will stimulate you to go find a few more pictures to fill in some gaps. Experiment with your layout until you like it.

3. Add decoration

Here’s where you get as artistic as you want to. Or not. Just make yourself happy. It makes me happy to overlap pieces of my collage in visually interesting ways. Your results may vary.

4. Glue all of your material to the page.

When your composition feels done, start gluing. For minimal disturbance to your layout gently lift up a corner of each piece to tack it down with the glue stick. Take your time. How often do you get to play with glue these days?

Delivery phase

There’s only one step in this phase, but it’s the most important of all:

1. Display your finished collage in a prominent location.

By prominent, I mean very noticeable for you. It’s fine if it’s invisible to everyone else, as long as YOU see it every day this year.

One person who attended a collage party came back a year later and reported that nothing on it had happened. That was puzzling since she had made made a great collage and others from the same party had gotten good — even stunning — results. When we asked where she had displayed it, she admitted she had leaned it against the wall in a seldom-used back bedroom, and had not looked at it again. Now we understood why her results were less than optimal! You must display your collage where you’ll see it often.

You’ll be exposed to over a million commercial messages in 2009. All of them are important to someone; just not you. As is true with so many of the techniques we use at Take Back Your Brain!, the New Year collage makes sure you are also regularly reminded about the things you want to think about, to create the life you want. Happy New Year! Have fun.

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Winter Solstice

Lynn — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 06:28:25 +0000

Peace.

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Goodbye Schmu, hello SPK

Lynn — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 07:42:11 +0000

TBYB! is focusing all of our attention where it belongs, attending the passing of our family’s wise, strong, hilarious, adorable, playful, affectionate, lion-hearted (wolf-hearted?) little canine friend, who is the light of our lives. We’ll miss him terribly. So no column this week, while we’re helping him find his way to the off-leash area.

Instead all of you smart TBYB! readers could do me an enormous favor by helping to welcome SPK to our thought community. SPK is a 17-year old student who wrote the following comment on Is advertising evil? a few days ago, along with a link to this video clip, which is well worth watching.

On the first day of school my Sophomore year, as an introduction to our first Unit, my English teacher asked us to write down our ideas on a topic: she asked us what we thought should be mandatory subjects in school.

Most of the students didn’t think very far into it, they just listed classes that are already required. But I proposed that we should have a class for analyzing media - (Understanding advertising, learning how to distinguish quality products from crap, being aware of our power of choice, etc etc.) My idea was promptly discarded, laughed off. Not only by my peers, but by my teacher as well, who claimed I was being off-task. I attempted to elaborate on my reasoning, but she made me be quiet.

Perhaps it is because my peer group is made up of teen-agers that I believe our nation is in such a sorry state. I don’t know how you adults are faring, but I’ll tell you what, kids these days are fucking brain-washed to the max, and it frightens me. School is a miserable place, now, where it seems always we are being trained to be mindless consumers.

I agree that advertising its-self is not an evil concept. But when the motives behind the advertisement are meant to mislead, cheat, and create unwarranted profit, it becomes a matter of morals. True, we should not allow ourselves to become victims (it is in essence our own fault if we are taken advantage of, yes?) But what of it if we are not being equipped at an early age with the proper tools for thought? What about defenseless children who have no concept of value? To me, this is all fishy business and I am thoroughly angry.
What’s worse is the vast amount of information these advertisers are ‘innocently’ gathering about us without our knowledge. Its sickening, to say the least. I’m 17, by the way, and not a single person in my school cares to discuss this matter with me; I think that says a lot about our problem here. We’re becoming a population of dip-shits.

I find it outrageous that his teachers won’t engage with him about this topic, and share his worry about his peers. SPK, I’m so glad you found Take Back Your Brain!

What do you think? How are we adults faring? Are young people getting slammed harder by commercial advertising than the rest of us? What do you think it would mean for kids to steal the tactics being deployed against them, to mold them into “a population of dip-shits,” and use them instead to power their own dreams? Please use the comment form (RSS readers can use the comments link) below to let SPK know there are intelligent people out here who think about these issues.

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Dear Brain: How can personal marketing help me change my career?

Lynn — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 08:08:39 +0000

Dear Brain,

I am starting to make a career change from accounting to human resource management. My ultimate goal is to obtain a Certified Human Resource Professional designation. I have enrolled in a HR Mgmt. course and joined the professional trade association and local chapter. Should I look for a position in HR now or wait until I have completed another course? I do have some HR and other transferable skills.

Many thanks!
Gail

First let’s hear from our guest subject matter consultant

Katherine is a teacher and educational researcher from the UK who “loves to help people reach their potential, and to investigate ways to do this effectively.” She consults to Dear Brain on the subjects of learning, preparing for jobs, and preparing for college. Here’s her advice for Gail:

Dear Gail,

It’s great to see that you’re already taking positive actions towards your goal! You’ve already shown commitment to your goal through joining a course. And the good news is that all the personal marketing techniques in Take Back Your Brain! are powerful learning techniques - so you can use tools like text messages and visual adverts to help you remember, understand and apply what you are learning, as well as to motivate yourself to learn.

My advice would be to start looking for jobs straight away - not necessarily applying for them, but finding jobs that inspire you. So job adverts are a good place to start, but you might also look for profiles of successful HR professionals in career guides or the trade magazines and journals. Once you’ve done that, take note of all the ways you are already succeeding, all the skills you have already mastered. Take time to celebrate that success, and find more ways to use those valuable skills in your everyday life. (This is a sneaky technique called Appreciative Enquiry, where you build on existing success. Imagine how great it will feel when colleagues, friends and family compliment you on the skills you know you’ll need as an HR professional.) Also, reflect on what you’ll need to learn to get and succeed in those. This will help you to set out an action plan which are the concrete steps to your goal - and you can create a marketing campaign for each step of your action plan.

You can use personal marketing to support you in reaching your goal, as well as to motivate you through all the steps you want to get there. Also remember the power of informal learning - such as spending time with the people in roles you aspire to, through professional events, conferences or your classes. They are the best possible adverts for the success you are seeking.

By the way, you might want to set your home page to my favourite website for changing careers: www.careershifters.org It’s a UK-based site, but has a lot of relevance for changing careers anywhere in the world.

Best wishes for meeting your goal!
Katherine

Brain responds to Gail

Dear Gail,

I’ve found that surrounding myself with “advertising” really helps my unconscious mind make the shift from an identity I’m ready to move away from — such as being an accountant — to the new life I want to create for myself. Once that internal shift has occurred, I seem to notice and take advantage of all sorts of opportunities which cause my external reality to rearrange itself to match my new identity. I know that sounds a bit woo-woo, so let give you a few concrete examples about how you could apply personal marketing to support your career change:

Convince yourself with evidence. It’s great that you’ve joined the professional trade association. Did they send you any kind of certificate or membership card? If so, I suggest that you post it in a prominent location where you’ll see it every day. If you’re feeling ambitious you could even download a logo from the HRCI website and make yourself a fake Certified Human Resource Professional certificate with your name on it. Then frame it and hang it in a location that is discreet but very visible to you, like your dressing room.

Subscribe to the magazine.

HRCI website

Put yourself in the picture. Put yourself in the picture to get a job describes a very fun ad campaign we made for a friend who wanted to work at a specific organization. We drove to the office on a day the company was closed (so she wouldn’t seem like a stalker) and took pictures of her appearing to arrive at work, park in the employee parking lot, walk into the building, etc. Then she set up a couple of ways to automatically show herself those photos. She soon landed a responsible position managing a project for that organization. Although there were some issues about compensation (it was a volunteer position), she could have easily tweaked that with another ad if she had chosen to do so.
Dress the part. What will be different about your life when you have the HR job you want? For example, do you think you’ll dress differently to go to work? If so, start making those changes now. When you prepare for work in the morning, dress and think like someone who is going to a HR job, not an accounting job (The framed certificate in step one above will help).
A few years ago I wanted to change careers from carpenter/orchard worker to computer programmer/IT pro. I saved money and bought a computer, took a class, and studied programming in my spare time. All of those things help build the skills necessary to qualify me for my new job. However the event that really tipped my identity toward an IT career occurred when I needed to buy eyeglasses. Instead of choosing frames that were appropriate for the blue collar jobs I currently held, I selected a pair that I imagined a computer programmer would wear. This turned out to be a great ad because I literally saw myself looking much nerdier in the mirror every day. It wasn’t long before I secured a new job in the computer industry.

So the answer to, “Should I look for a position in HR now or wait until I have completed another course?”, is that I suggest you consider asking yourself a different question. Ask yourself instead how you can methodically construct an environment that reflects the inevitability of that career change, whenever it occurs. Surround yourself with reminders that in your inner world it has already happened. In Brain’s experience, it won’t be long before the external details about the job you go to every day adjust themselves to match your ads.

Thanks for your question, Gail!
Brain

Now it’s your turn

What advice do you have for Gail about her career change? Have you ever used personal marketing to help yourself with something like this? How well did it work? Please share your ideas with Gail in the comments.

Ask Dear Brain

Or if you’re interested in participating as a Dear Brain subject matter consultant please let me know on the contact form.

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