The World According to Mitch Fanning

Being a marketing guy, I’ve spent a lot of my time understanding how to get your attention. I think it was Seth Godin who once said, “In an attention economy, marketers struggle for attention. If you don’t have it, you lose.”

It’s true.

Modern life is overloaded with demands on your attention. Right now you’ve got: people trying to sell you stuff, work to do, people to call, new messages on Facebook and Twitter to read, people trying to sell you MORE stuff, e-mail to check, TV to watch and errands forget about. Everyone has too many things to do, and too little time to do them all.

So what’s my point, right?

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Total reading time – 2: 27 seconds

Hey Tim,

I’m responding to the question you posted on Facebook.

“What can I do to make this next book (The 4-Hour Chef) my best book yet? I really don’t want to let you guys down.” [Tim]

First of all, it’s my cheat day so after eating [insert your choice of protein here], legumes, veggies, and salsa for a week I’d rather be stuffing another Oreo in my mouth instead of thinking about the slow-carb diet.  However, since you’ve been so helpful, I’ve decided to slowly put down the Oreo and give you my “two cents.”

Show Me the Variety

Being a slow-carb convert, I desperately want need variety in how my meals “taste.”  Tim, like you, I love salsa. In fact, I’m a sauce prostitute. Unfortunately, after eating salsa for six months straight, I’m about to go *&%! “postal.”  If it wasn’t for cheat days I probably would have already.  I’ve actually been experimenting with a few sauce alternatives but feel they don’t cut it when it comes to helping with fat loss.

Natural Elixirs That Boost Energy and Concentration

I’m a recovering energy drink / caffeine addict. I’ve been experimenting with Yerba mate tea with great success.  Any more ideas I can try?  How about a mixture of Yerba mate with foods that boost energy?

For Slow-Carb Newbies

The biggest myth you need to address is that eating “healthy” is expensive. It’s not. My average meal costs me $1.42 CDN, including cost for supplements and buying groceries for a family of four.

The 80/20

Overall, the above is my uber quick “80/20 analysis” for your new book.  If you focus on giving us slow-carb veterans more ideas on variety and perhaps even a few natural energy boosters, while reinforcing how cheap it really is, you’ll have another winner.

In fact, I’d even buy a copy (as long as I get to contribute a sauce idea or two – kidding, well sort of ☺)

Now, where did I put that *%&# Oreo?

P.S.  Haven’t read Tim’s book The 4-Hour Body?  Follow the link to read the 48 customer reviews on Amazon who gave it an average rating of 4-stars.

Update: Here’s another blogger who got inspired by my idea and wrote their own personal blog post to Tim providing them with some ideas for his next book.  Love it!

Photo credit: Writer’s Block by Drew Coffman

RIP Steve…

Photo credit: Apple.com

I’ve been dying to share this news for weeks and now that it’s official I can.

Fruition Interactive has been nominated for a Toronto Board of Trade‘s Business of the Year for 2011.

The Toronto Board of Trade Business Excellence Awards honours Toronto businesses that have demonstrated outstanding leadership, growth and innovation in business.

Fruition has been nominated in the “Transition” category, which recognizes a business that has successfully experienced a transformation from a traditional business value or process.

At this point, I think its only fitting to introduce you to Kent Wakely, founder and managing partner of Fruition Interactive (and someone I’m proud to call my colleague and friend), to share his thoughts on being nominated in his own words.

Enter Kent Wakely.

______________________

This nomination is a big deal to us because it reflects and validates the tremendous changes that we’ve made here at Fruition in the past couple of years. It’s happened gradually, so many of our clients haven’t noticed, but looking back it’s quite a change.

In our early days, we were positioned primarily as a technology services company. It took a while, but it finally dawned on us that most of our clients were coming to us not because they felt they needed technology but because they had goals for their business that were going un-met. And 9 times out of 10, that business goal was to generate new leads and sales to grow their businesses.

So, on top of changing how we communicated about our already-successful Web design and development practice, we added some new capabilities towards becoming a full-service Internet marketing company.

We added world-beating Pay-per-Click (PPC) advertising services, fine-tuning and increasing ROI from clients’ Google Adwords, LinkedIn and Facebook advertising campaigns.

We added an innovative package of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services that help to rocket our clients’ sites to the top of relevant search results and generate business-building traffic to their sites.

And we added social media strategy consulting to help retain and engage the leads that clients have worked so hard to get.

But most of all, we’ve taken our own advice. We launched our blog in 2009, and layered on a social media strategy not long afterwords. And we also launched PPC and SEO campaigns to reach new audiences with our message.

And, while we’re content just to see our clients’ satisfaction as they use our help to generate new leads and create new business for themselves, it sure feels great that someone — the Toronto Board of Trade, no less — noticed what we’ve been up to behind the scenes.

______________________

Win, lose, or draw I’m proud to be part of the family at Fruition.

Onward.

Groceries Heather Twining bought for the YWCA Niagara food bank with a $100 in donations.

Earlier this week, I received the following messages from friend and web developer Trevor Twining via my Facebook News Feed:

Simple and to the point, but most importantly, it reminded me that making a difference (and helping others) doesn’t have to be hard work.  It doesn’t have to be time-consuming and you don’t need to be a millionaire philanthropist with your own foundation.

Back to the story…

24 hours later, 7 people (last time I checked) had agreed to make $10-$20 pledges to help the YWCA Niagara with their food bank (including me). Including Trevor’s matching pledges the grand total for the day was $210.

Sending Trevor the pledge was actually the easiest part.  Trevor sent the following message with 3 options for giving your pledge (Paypal, Interac Email money transfer, arranging a “physical” exchange in person):

I chose the “lazy” option, Paypal.

And the point of it all, drum roll please…

The point of this blog post is not to “toot my own horn,” but a gentle reminder (mostly to myself) that doing something good for others takes less time then we often think.  To make a difference, you don’t need to set-up a robust online donation system, spend months planning a large social media outreach campaign, or donate thousands of dollars.

All it takes is you, 7 other people, and a laptop!

Honourable mention goes out to Heather Twining for her mad shopping and coupon ‘skillz’ to ensure the pledges received buys the maximum amount of food for YWCA Niagara food bank.

Photo credit : Trevor and Heather Twining