1. Google Analytics is the most popular Web Analytics tool in the world. Google Analytics is installed on at least 10 million websites, is used by 64% of the Top 500 US Retailers, 45% of Fortune 500 companies, and 55.9% of the top 1 million domains, as identified by Alexa. All of these metrics combine to give Google Analytics a web analytics platform market share of over 82%!

2. Germany banned Google Analytics. In May of 2011, Germany banned Google Analytics because of an EU cookie law. Websites are again allowed to use Google Analytics for tracking site visitors, but only if they follow a few guidelines set by Germany’s Federal Data Protection Act.

3. Google Analytics doesn’t share personally identifiable information. This fact is a common misconception. Because of user privacy concerns, personally identifiable information, such as IP addresses, is removed from the end user’s view within the interface and API.

4. In fact, they kinda frown upon it. To further protect the privacy of website visitors, it is against Google Analytics’ terms of service to integrate Google Analytics data with personally identifiable information in any online or offline applications.

5. Google Analytics has a premium version. In Q4 of 2011, Google launched a premier, enterprise level version of Google Analytics to further meet the needs of marketers who typically use Adobe’s SiteCatalyst or IBM’s Coremetrics.

6. Avinash Kaushik made Web Analytics (and Google Analytics) cool. In March of 2007, Google hired Kaushik as their Analytics Evangelist. Avinash played an instrumental role in transforming an intimidating, tech heavy industry into something sexy for marketers, which helped him become the “Analytics Rock God” we all know today.

7. There are currently 220 Google Analytics Certified Partners around the world. Partners are carefully vetted firms that have Google’s seal of approval for helping third parties with their analytics needs. View them all here.

8. Google Analytics is fluent in 40 languages. In February 2012, Google added 9 new languages, including Arabic, Hebrew, and Ukrainian to Google Analytics, bringing their total to 40.

9. Google Analytics is a Scorpio. Google Analytics was launched November 14, 2005, and is currently on its 5th version. Major updates are made every few years, but subtle improvements and new features are rolled out a couple times each quarter.

10. Google Analytics was originally based on Urchin on Demand. Urchin was a web design and hosting services provider started by Paul Muret and Scott Crosby in the late 90’s. In 1998, they decided to focus solely on their Urchin Software. Seeing the potential of data to create a better web, Google bought the company in early 2005, and the rest is history.

Google+, Google’s latest attempt to harness the power of social media, has become integrated into many of the search giant’s products, from AdWords to YouTube. Unfortunately, Google+ has failed to engage users mirroring the failure of Google Wave and Google Buzz. Will continuing to support a failing product damage Google’s reputation beyond repair or is Google+ simply too big to fail?

Our President, Adam Harrell, went head to head with Senior SEO Specialist, Brett Snyder, over the relevance and staying power of Google+. Below are a few highlights from the debate.

Socially inept or late bloomer? Google+ hasn’t been successful as a social media platform. But, will Google figure out a way to make it work?

Social media is the biggest area of growth in search. No one understands this more than Google. And no one is more sensitive to this fact, either. Google+, their best effort to harness the power of social media, has been slow out the gate, with no signs of picking up steam. Google, however, is prepared to pull out all the stops to make the social network succeed. There is a vocal minority that believes Google+ will eventually succeed, while there is an indifferent majority that still sees it as irrelevant. The truth about whether Google+ is too big to fail, and the effect supporting the social network will have on Google’s dominance of search, remains to be seen.

Mostly, the summit focuses on innovation related to digital marketing, including discussions about social media, search marketing, mobile, and usability. Some of the well-known companies represented this year include Twitter, Pandora, The Onion, Huffington Post, Google, StumbleUpon, Turner, CNN, ESPN, and Gilt Groupe. You’ll also hear from some of my favorite local companies including the startup impresario David Cummings of Pardot, the always entertaining Lance Weatherby of Half Off Depot, the brilliant Amy Ellis of MailChimp and many others.

If you would like to attend the 2012 Digital Summit, leave a comment below and I’ll share a discount code for the event.

The Atlanta Digital Summit will be held May 9-10, 2012. Register, and feel free to pass along and share.

In honor of this week’s NFL Draft, Nebo recently interviewed sports marketing veteran Jim Smith. Before stepping into his role with the Atlanta Falcons in 2004, Jim was President/General Manager of the Major League Soccer’s Columbus Crew, held sports marketing positions at Ohio State University and the World Wrestling Federation, and worked in minor league baseball. Jim’s impact on the Atlanta Falcons has been significant, ranging from creating a new standard for the Falcons brand to developing the award-winning “Rise Up” campaign featuring Samuel Jackson. Jim spoke to Nebo about the impact of interactive marketing on the Falcons.

You’ve been with the Atlanta Falcons in a senior marketing role since 2004. How has your approach to interactive marketing changed over that time?

In my eight years, I’ve seen a lot of change. I started with a digital staff of two – a webmaster and a copywriter. As the digital space has developed (and subsequently fragmented), we’ve evolved quickly. Today, you have to be in multiple spaces online to reach all segments of a growing audience. We’re now reaching different people compared to who we reached in the past.

We’re still very committed to website and digital message boards. It’s a great space to hear the concerns of Falcons fans and their overall frame of mind regarding the team. From a traditional marketing standpoint, understanding that frame of mind and being able to address our customer’s questions and concerns from a campaign and messaging standpoint has been quite positive for us.

So social media is probably a natural extension of listening to fans?

We’ve always used social from a listening standpoint, but we’re now utilizing it more to communicate back. We deliver a message, create posts, and engage, but primarily in response to what we’re hearing. Digital marketing has helped to evolve customer service and experience. We see the customer service and experience as a very important part of our brand, and it’s really part of our DNA. One of the core values of our brand is to listen and respond. Using these social platforms as a way to do that is fantastic. Part of an overall brand presence is to make sure traditional messaging is carrying through to social.

We use Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Google+. Today, we find ourselves needing to cover all social spaces. While there is some duplication, understanding where different segments of our target market are hanging out is crucial. People on Facebook are not necessarily the people on the Falcons message boards. We use the team’s website as a place to answer questions from season ticket holders. Through a service called Get Satisfaction and our live online chat feature, we are able to quickly and efficiently respond to our customers. That saves us time so that we’re not answering the same question from 400 different people, and we’re able to reach everyone with that question in one response on the right medium.

What are your online goals and objectives today?

Every year, we define what we want to accomplish online – whether it’s growing our digital presence, growing our interaction, or looking at other goals. Data is important, but what we’re really trying to do is enhance the engagement with our customers. Engagement happens while you’re developing fans. We have a limited number of tickets to sell, but we have a nearly unlimited number of fans we can develop. That is our ultimate goal. Engaging people using unique information and content is a way for us to engage deeper and engage longer in an effort to develop more fans.

How has the convergence of social and mobile impacted those objectives?

From a tactical standpoint, this convergence has allowed us to enable social more from mobile devices (e.g. using our mobile app). This is critical. We’re taking our core fan and giving that person a vehicle to express their experiences at our games as well as allowing fans who aren’t at our games to interact wherever they are. You can be at your kids’ baseball game or at home watching a Falcons game and still be able to interact with others who are live at the game.

The second screen at home and at the stadium is very important. We’ve seen the amount of time people spend watching games at home and simultaneously doing something else dramatically increase. For example, you might look up player stats while watching the game. Having the ability to provide that information to fans and deliver that information is critical. But here is the big challenge: If our customers can do all of that at home, how can we create a unique experience at the game for our ticketholders?

This challenge is something we are continuing to work on. Football has a tribal element to it. Team fans generally feel like they’re part of one big family. So, how much do we want to encourage the use of the mobile device at games, which takes away from the tribal experience of being with other fans? The real interaction at games is why many people go to games. If they’re interacting with other people on their mobile devices, they’re ultimately having an experience that they can have anywhere – one that is not unique to the live experience. As a result, we’re constantly refining our strategy to balance the mobile experience with ensuring that people still attend the games in “real life.”

How do you incorporate SEO and paid search into your advertising efforts?

We look at SEO and paid search more as micro-goals. We don’t invest a lot in paid search. From a brand perspective, our website is a destination in and of itself. However, we do look at SEO opportunities for our ancillary businesses (i.e. retail and physical therapy).

What interactive marketing trends do you feel will impact you the most this year?

I see four major trends – enhanced content creation, gamification, continued evolution of the second screen and data management – as major interactive marketing trends that will have a significant impact on our digital platform in 2012.

With social followings on Facebook and Twitter on the same scale as traditional web properties, the importance of creating compelling, unique and channel-appropriate content has never been greater. Brands are best served treating these new social mediums as content and engagement channels, rather than advertising zones. Any high profile brand is well beyond the establishment and experimental stage when it comes to social. To that end, our focus this year is on further engaging and retaining our existing audience.

We’re embracing the “gamification” trend this off-season, creating programs on Facebook and Twitter that reward those fans who are most active and invested in the Falcons. From their inception, social platforms have provided a way for us to quickly gather real-time feedback on ideas and products, but we’ve seen the tools for managing and measuring this type of data dramatically improve over the last year. To that end, we’re able to be much more granular with our monitoring, and we’re able to create regular “buzz” reports for many different aspects of our business.

The second screen definitely has our attention. Somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of our overall online page views now occur via mobile devices (phones and tablets). Any new piece of content we create for our web properties must be optimized for viewing on the major mobile operating systems. With some recent studies suggesting that 86% of tablet users and nearly 80% of U.S. smartphone users use their devices while watching television, we have to adapt to this type of consumption. We’re exploring ways to integrate the social conversation within our preseason games via our local broadcast partners this year. And our mobile app offering will be upgraded to cater to this “companion-viewing” type of experience, both from a content and advertising/promotion perspective.

Finally, with many of our fans consuming our brand via social and/or mobile platforms, we’re actively involved in trying to unify our data and understand how metrics (e.g. on a social site) compare to more traditional dot-com web metrics. We’d love to be able to consolidate our data into a “digital dashboard” that gives us a wide-ranging snapshot of our online reach.

They claim to be marketing. But they are litter. Garbage masquerading as marketing.

The AJC Reach is a color booklet of advertising, coupons, and discounts wrapped in a plastic bag and thrown on lawns and driveways in the metro Atlanta area. It’s branded by the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, which outsources its production to a company called American Circulation Innovations (ACI). Companies can buy ad units and inserts, and it’s distributed with the AJC’s Sunday newspaper and to “non-subscribers.”

ACI works with a variety of other newspapers across the country. Where ACI is involved, complaints start to arise (e.g. Springfield, Mass., Dallas, San Diego) about their litter. People have also complained about advertising circulars in Philadelphia, Providence, Rhode Island, and Tacoma, Washington. ACI’s “unique operating efficiencies” along with the practices of similar print media companies have left a trail of disgust around the United States.

To play devil’s advocate for a moment, the business case for the AJC Reach would go as follows. In Atlanta, the AJC Reach claims to deliver to 1 million metro Atlanta households – 216,000 through their Sunday newspaper, and 875,000 through “household delivery.” Their sponsorship rates to reach 1 million people range from $1,600 to $4,800 for one interior placement, to about $18,000 for one exterior placement. That’s a lot of money to be made for so many ads every week.

However, that “household delivery” to reach 1 million people is the AJC throwing their litter, their garbage, on the driveways, lawns, and streets of metro Atlanta. It is also tossed onto people’s property whether they want it or not. (People who have tried to opt out mysteriously start getting it again, and it appears only the weight of a neighborhood association can stop you from receiving it.) Even worse, if you’re traveling and the AJC Reach piles up over a few weeks, it handily demonstrates to burglars and robbers that you are not home. In fact, the AJC is helping you advertise – letting a target market of criminals know when you’re away.

People have complained about this litter for many years, especially when the AJC switched strategies a few years ago and started throwing the AJC Reach onto property (rather than delivering the circulars through mailboxes) in order to cut their costs of delivery. The AJC has repeatedly claimed First Amendment protection and acknowledged that customers can opt out. ACI also claims to offer a variety of more targeted marketing methods with clear ROI.

But none of this still addresses the impact of 875,000 “non-subscriber” AJC Reach circulars bombarding metro Atlanta every week. When searching for the keyword phrase “AJC Reach” in Google, the first 16 out of 20 results are negative – all protests and citizen complaints against these flyers as litter and trash. And in a world where interactive marketing is not only better for the environment but also smarter in its use of advertising dollars, the AJC Reach appears more obsolete and wasteful every day.

There is no excuse for the AJC Reach. Their activity is unconscionable.

The AJC and ACI can change their approach. More people now use mobile devices than personal computers. 800 million people are on Facebook. Social and mobile integrate and become more seamless everyday, especially with younger generations. Dropping trash on people’s doorsteps and lawns will no longer be acceptable in a short period of time. The AJC can decide to embrace the change now and begin to more smartly interact with and engage customers. Or they can continue to piss people off until the little bit of money they still make from AJC Reach dwindles down into nothing.

Embed this infographic:

<a href=”http://www.neboagency.com/blog/art-of-garbage-marketing#bc”><img title=”The Art of Garbage Marketing: As Perfected by the AJC Reach” src=”http://www.neboagency.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/ajc-reach_info_1200.jpg”></a>

Embrace Your Sophistication and Authenticity (Joni Mitchell)

Because it’s business, and the temptation is always to make money, it’s easy to dumb yourself down because you believe your market will not understand something more sophisticated. Volume and quantity often rules over substance and quality. But the most interesting business case studies we read all show that sticking to your guns and staying true to your authentic talent ALWAYS pays off better in the end. Skimming through Fast Company’s most innovative companies of 2012, we see Apple, Google, Life Technologies, SolarCity, Tesla Motors, and many others that have broken through into their respective markets by sticking to their sophisticated guns.

Joni Mitchell was a unique talent from the start and saw mainstream success from the late 1960s until the mid-1970s. However, David Crosby once said, “…the industry has never known what to do with her. It’s not an easy world for someone that sophisticated.” Her albums after Court and Spark became more uncompromising, jazz-oriented, and un-pop. She sold less albums. But her stature rose. And rose. Today, she is considered by some to be (along with Bob Dylan) probably the most important 20^th century singer-songwriter in terms of impact and influence on modern popular music.

Like the dime-a-dozen popular music that Joni Mitchell set herself against, many businesses try to be like everyone else. They chase markets that have already emerged. They copy trends. They try to get a piece of an existing market. They may get some business but no more success than a B or C rock band getting some gigs and a record deal by riding on current trends.

An authentic business is passionate about what they do. It sticks to its guns. It develops products and services because of their value, their sophistication, and their quality. It does not dumb down or water down its business. Instead, it seeks to educate its audience, raise the bar in the industry, and truly deliver value to customers. An authentic business shares new innovations and insights with customers, even if the customers have not yet shown signs of understanding or comprehending these innovations.

Challenge: If you are riding high on some success, could you do what Joni Mitchell did and follow a more authentic path? Or do you simply imitate what others are doing?

Be the Best – But Don’t Take Yourselves Too Seriously (The Beatles)

The Beatles are arguably the best AND most popular band in all of rock history. The amazing thing about watching any Beatles footage is that, while they were being the best, they were also not taking things seriously. They laughed, they joked, they had fun. They worked hard, but they also had an awareness of how fun life could be. And that fun fed back into their music, and made it better.

We all work hard. That’s good. But we also work too hard. We spend so many hours working, thinking that what we do is life and death. It’s not. Yes, we got hit by a bad recession. Yes, if you have a job you might be luckier than many Americans. Yes, we have a Protestant work ethic that courses through our veins. But we work too hard – too many hours, too much imbalance.

The Beatles are a reminder that you will be the best by both working hard and also playing hard. Have a fun work culture to keep morale up during the day. Have lunch to talk business and life. Enjoy your evenings. Enjoy your weekends. Travel. Pursue hobbies. Create art that has nothing to do with business. In interactive marketing (and any business), all of that fun will feed back into your hard work. It will help spur ideas. Your subconscious will be working when your conscious is not. You’ll feel well-rested while working. You’ll feel happier. And your work will be better.

Challenge: Watch the above trailer for A Hard Day’s Night. Does your life feel like that?

Talk About Your Products Like It’s a Performance (Steve Jobs)

What? Steve Jobs? An entertainer? Hell, yeah.

Plenty has been said about Jobs’s business skills and success in growing Apple (both in the 1980s and in the 2000s). He not only had a masterful sense of marketing, but also performance. When he debuted products, his presentations did not mirror normal business presentations in any way whatsoever. In fact, do you find it ironic that few people introduce new products and talk about them the way Steve Jobs did? Think about the last conference or vendor presentation you attended. Were you excited?

I do not find it a coincidence that Steve Jobs was also a huge Beatles and Bob Dylan fan. When you put those two artists together, you get the best of storytelling and the ability to generate excitement all rolled into one. A typical “Stevenote” presentation would tie together market analysis and product features into an exciting story. Jobs would reveal things to you that you kind of already knew, but distilled and simplified in an interesting, fascinating way. He would pose a problem, an opportunity, to you. He would create suspense by letting the problem hang out there for a few moments, and then he’d solve it for you.

While Steve Jobs’s charisma would often be exaggerated both in praise and in criticism (e.g. reality distortion fields), he really just did what most entertainers do every day. Maybe the iMac, iBook, iPod, iPhone, and iPad weren’t the most innovative products ever in human history. But damn if he didn’t make you believe it – just like KISS or Garth Brooks made people believe through the power of their performance that you were hearing some of the best music ever. (You weren’t.) Jobs would also wow you by tapping into your psychological needs, similar to how musicians and entertainers really don’t create anything new per se but instead shape sound and words with a new twist to tap into your emotions and desires.

In other words, Jobs put on a show.

Challenge: How much storytelling and flair do you bring to your sales meetings, client meetings, and presentations? How much fun are you having while still getting across the substance of your message?

Authenticity breeds success in your particular path. It also breeds confidence, which serves as a feedback loop that leads to more success. And ultimately, if you consciously communicate your journey to others with a sense of storytelling and fun, you not only create a foundation for success in whatever you do, but you also have a hell of a fun time doing it.

I’ve often estimated that I have 6 hours a day of “good” work time – solid time that I can devote to a project. But is that really accurate? I tried tracking my time in 15 or 30 minute increments, either manually or with some program that prompted me every 15 minutes to find out what I’d been doing. But that quickly became annoying. (The last thing you want when you finally sit down to work on a project is a pop-up every 15 minutes asking you what you’re working on.) The incremental tracking also doesn’t capture the 3 minutes you spent answering an email, the 2 minute IM conversation with a co-worker, or the few minutes you spent on Facebook.

What would be better is something that silently tracked everything I did and let me look at it – to see how much time I’ve actually spent on productive tasks for every given day. A few months ago I discovered RescueTime via a Highgroove blog post. You install a small program, and it keeps track of what programs you use, what websites you visit, and how long you spend on each of these.

The most crucial aspect for me is that it can track the websites where I spend most of my time. (For example, knowing that I spend 6 hours a day in “Google Chrome” doesn’t help me figure out what I was actually doing.) You can also assign each program or website a rating from 2 to -2, based on how productive it is for you.

The end result are some fun graphs and tons of stats that show how productive you are:

You can also see how much time you spent by category, or by applications and websites:

So this week, I spent almost 15 hours on software development, and just over 7 on communication and scheduling. I had several in-person meetings this week, so those aren’t captured here, but they certainly wouldn’t fall in the “software development” category, which is what I want to maximize.

I can also see how efficient I was – how much of my time was productive:

So how accurate was my back-of-the-napkin estimate of 6 hours a day of good software development? Not very accurate, unfortunately. I averaged only 3 hours a day of software development this week. In the last 4 weeks, my best week was 19 hours and 2 minutes of software development – still only an average of 3.8 hours per day of development. I think it’s time to adjust my estimates. Maybe it is for you, too.

(My “quick Facebook checks,” by the way, took 27 minutes this week.)

(Photo Source: Linda Cronin)

As content marketing becomes more prevalent, there is a tendency to view it simply as a commodity. But think about the content that has an impact on your life and business. Why does that particular content matter to you versus all other content?

In Hey Whipple Squeeze This, Luke Sullivan explains that good content should be useful, beautiful, or entertaining. It’s a simple, elegant explanation that reminds us why we create content in the first place. These principles have withstood history, technologies, and trends, and they can be used as a litmus test for all of the content you create.

Useful

Does your content actually help someone do something? Learn something? Convince or persuade them about something? Great content will teach and educate your customers not only about your products and services, but about the market as a whole. Great content may provide industry insights or guides that navigate a customer through a complex purchasing decision.

Beautiful

Beautiful web content can range from wonderfully designed HTML5 animation to stunning videos that emotionally capture some grand idea about your company. It may mean lovingly selected typography or collections of beautiful product photos. It can even mean aesthetically crafted prose that has literary or emotional value such as gut-wrenching testimonials or stories about how a company positively affected a person’s life.

Entertaining

Sometimes content is just meant to engage on a gut level. Making people laugh or smile, or drawing them in with a story, can cut through a lot of noise and chatter. Nebo often uses entertainment as a way to communicate about its brand, and we find it just as important sometimes in engaging our audience as more “serious” content. And sometimes an entertaining take on something as boring as a blender can turn a commodity into something interesting again.

It’s easy to treat content like you’re just shoveling dirt into a hole, especially if your content demands are significant and voluminous. But if you don’t use this litmus test, what good is your content? Raise the bar, and your content will connect better with your audience.

Meeting Conflict with Conflict

This is how most fighting in the world occurs, physically and verbally. Someone attacks you, you attack back, all hell breaks loose. While the aggressor might feel good in the moment, it never turns out well in the end.

Meeting Conflict with Submission

Whether taking a punch, accepting verbal abuse, or allowing your self-esteem to be trampled, we all know people who respond to the world’s arrows and slings by accepting it as their fate. That is as unhealthy as fighting back, since you are allowing negativity and violence to have its way with you without taking a stand.

There is a third way. Disarm conflict. Dispel its energy. Return to a state of peace.

While this post could go on for thousands of words if I discussed the nuances of T’ai chi ch’uan martial arts techniques, I’ll instead jump in to some principles that stem from T’ai chi ch’uan’s philosophy.

Always Take the High Road First

It may seem more gratifying in the short-term to yell, threaten, and lash out. It may seem to give you power. But anger and negativity throws you off balance. Instead, always be positive, helpful, supportive, peaceful, and loving. Even if you’re being attacked. The goal of T’ai chi ch’uan is to be in a state of peace. Another person’s anger or bad manners should not rattle your peace.

Come Prepared to Every Encounter

An often underrated cause of conflict is lack of preparedness. Even if you’re at peace, if you don’t know your fundamentals and arrive to an encounter unprepared, you are off balance and open to attack. Whether it’s a meeting, presentation, or business conversation, make sure you understand any background, agenda, or materials. Anticipate every question that might be asked and every path a conversation could go. This mental preparedness lessens conflict and shows respect for others.

Debate and Discuss

Attack a problem, not a person. Treat a “battle” intellectually, and have true respect and love for the opposition. A whiteboard is often a great tool for encouraging this kind of objective debate. Writing down issues and ideas on a whiteboard helps objectify a problem. People attack the ideas on the whiteboard, not you. True intellectual engagement – the ability to do battle without humiliating or attacking another person – requires much discipline and shows high respect for your colleagues. It’s fighting with honor.

Don’t Argue. Clarify.

It is difficult to empathize with another person’s point of view, but this path leads to greater harmony. Even if you’re listening, it’s easy to just wait for a person to finish speaking, and then talk as if you were simply on hold. Instead, as you listen, understand the other person’s motivations, concerns and feelings. Then help them understand yours. Present the facts, assumptions and logic behind your stance. Argument usually involves emotion, which leads to lack of clarity. Instead, always work to simplify and clarify the heart of your communication. That process tends to reduce conflict.

Don’t Take Anything Personally or Seriously

T’ai chi ch’uan masters seem to laugh a lot. Life is life. It’s kind of amusing and funny. It’s not death or cancer. Laugh more. Even your most horrendous business problems and complex personal issues are nothing in the face of the history of the world and the universe. Lighten the hell up.

Build Relationships

Building relationships goes way beyond business networking and extends philosophically and spiritually toward deflating conflict over the course of your entire life. Selflessly reach out to people along your life’s journey – family, friends, acquaintances, colleagues, networking contacts, strangers, people in your community, etc. A few years ago, President Bill Clinton said in a Daily Show interview that the root of a lot of modern bitter partisanship in Congress stems from a shift in Congressional culture. Members of Congress don’t spend time with each other like they did in the 1950s and 1960s. If you don’t know people well as human beings, you are more likely to attack them. If you interact and know many people in your life, you are less likely to attack others – or be attacked.

Ask Questions

It’s amazing how so few people use this simple conflict deflator. Part of it is information collection, but I also do it to establish rapport and show respect. People like to be asked questions and open up. By not asking questions, you shut others down and build up resentment – which later leads to conflict. It’s also a way (like T’ai chi ch’uan teaches) to draw out any negativity, tension, and hostility up front.

If the Worst Happens…

Despite all proactive attempts at reducing conflict, sometimes you will be attacked – full on, unexpected. In those moments, I always recall T’ai chi ch’uan’s handling of attacks and apply the following tactics that tend to disarm most conflict thrown at me.

Let Your Opponent Expend All of Their Energy

It takes a great deal of energy to attack and fight. In martial arts, it often helps to let your opponent expend that energy and tire themselves out. Aggressiveness and anger place your opponent at a disadvantage. Just let them yell and rant, and give them the space to expend that energy until they stop. Don’t yell or rant back. If you do, you add fuel to their fire and place yourself at the same disadvantage.

Disarm by Agreeing

To help your opponent expend their energy, agree, agree, and agree some more. You need a thick skin, but take all of the criticism. Even ask for more. This might go against any instinct in your body and mind. (“But they’re WRONG! I can’t agree with that ***hole!”) It doesn’t matter. There is always a grain of truth in any criticism you receive, so just listen and agree with it.

The key here is that a person cannot fight long with someone who agrees with them. Eventually, they’ll calm down and feel like they’ve had their say. At this point, you have a rich store of information, you know where their mind is at, and (if you’re disciplined and prepared) you can win without fighting at all. Simply thank them for telling you everything, apologize where you went wrong, explain where you agree, and then bring up any points where you disagree. Unless you are in an unusual situation, it’s hard not to make progress when your opponent has put themselves so off balance.

If they decide to interrupt or go on another tirade, their behavior only shows at this point that they are too unprofessional or grossly incompetent to communicate in a peaceful fashion. However, in most cases the person will listen to you and consider your points in a way you probably did not think possible going into the conversation. I have had miraculous conversations occur with people labeled “aggressive” or “difficult” as a result of this technique. Often, “difficult” people warm up if you listen and empathize with them.

Even in the worst life and business scenarios, nobody can really attack you if you have the proper mindset. If you master the fundamentals of communication, listen, and redirect any negative energy, you leave no room for conflict to happen. You starve the conflict of oxygen and deflate your opponent. In a world where stress leads to so much bad health and unhappiness, the principles of T’ai chi ch’uan are worth examining in deciding how you approach conflict and communication.

I recently read the short, concise, and brilliant Read This Before Our Next Meeting by Al Pittampalli. In it, he distills some of the ways that meetings are run badly and inefficiently, and he describes seven principles and standards to which a modern meeting must adhere. The goal is to free up time, use meeting time more efficiently, and find alternate methods of exchanging information so that people can be more productive.

At Nebo, we prize our time and view the traditional meeting as a waste of time. Rather than plagiarize or repeat Pittampalli’s already great points, I wanted to share how this book struck a chord with me by identifying five Meeting Vampires. While I’ve worked for some great organizations, companies, and volunteer organizations, I’ve unfortunately met some of these vampires along the way. Many times, they’ve even had their way with me. Now, as a veteran “meeting vampire eluder,” I would like to warn you about these villains in case you see them coming for you!

The Bureaucrat

Typically seen in large organizations, government entities, and educational systems, the Bureaucrat holds lots of meetings because that is the protocol. These meetings are largely run on automatic pilot, and I’ve found that the Bureaucrat is excellent at feigning progress and productivity without anything really getting done. The Bureaucrat tells you, “It’s just how we do things.” The Bureaucrat is hard to avoid in big organizations, but I’ve often seen go-getters who must operate in such environments battle this villain by gathering champions for specific ideas (more political support for an initiative weakens this vampire), pilot testing ideas whether they are approved or not, and bringing data and evidence to meetings to shortcut the “we need more information” dilemma that the Bureaucrat uses to put off decisions.

The Politician

These are meetings where you “have” to include the Politician. Like a movie where a character must bow to the villain, I’ve often had to sit in meetings where I go over a decision that’s already been made, justify something that’s already been approved, or even tap-dance about an approved strategy or budget so that certain people can approve or disapprove…something. Often, these are ways the Politician to exert power, vent without repercussions, and meddle with work to justify their own jobs. The way to battle this vampire is to build a case for your work that is airtight, like a lawyer’s. If you can’t avoid these meetings, answer any needed questions as succinctly as possible and refer to documents and data that the Politician should already have read.

The Visionary

The Visionary loves generating new ideas. It makes this vampire feel like they’re starting off on a new journey…again. Unfortunately, once ideas take off and become part of the actual business, they lose that initial magic. So the Visionary keeps coming up with new ideas, over and over. I’ve worked with such vampires who drain hours and hours of time, often during deadline-heavy stretches where I needed to be 100% productive. The vampire attacks you with brainstorming meetings about ideas with no business plans or strategy, or even any feasibility of happening soon. Watch out when these idea meetings include vendor representatives, “experts,” and other vampiric minions who seem to stop by for free coffee and lunch to help the Visionary brainstorm.

While it’s difficult to avoid these meetings when the Visionary controls your time, you can often try to minimize the vampire’s effect by requesting a hard stop time, asking for an agenda (or you won’t attend), and asking clear, tough questions. It also helps to explain the business impact of your time spent brainstorming versus a metric such as billable hours lost.

The Parent

This may be the most difficult meeting vampire to avoid. You are beckoned by the Parent when you have a concern. The vampire always says, “Let’s meet about it.” These meetings always feel good, supportive, and even fun. The Parent may greet you with a smile, address your concerns, address other concerns, ask you about your workload, relate an anecdote about something that happened that day…

Yes, that’s the problem. The Parent makes day-to-day work seem easy and fun. “Wow, the day flew by,” you say. That’s because you’re not really doing work. Often, the Parent feels comfort in meetings for these very reasons. Without scrutiny, these meetings appear like work. “Discussed Big Project,” “Reviewed Super Big Initiative with Management Team,” or “Met with Boss about Really Important Thing.” Who is going to argue with that? Without vigilance, your time will be sucked away needlessly.

I’ve seen co-workers deal with this problem by pushing back on the need for having a meeting, demanding an agenda, and demanding a hard stop at a certain time. It’s okay to get aggressive with the Parent, since they are usually pushovers, but this aggressiveness to protect your time needs to be constantly maintained.

The Dining Companion

Probably the worst of them all – the Dining Companion. Their vampiric weapon of choice? The Lunch Meeting.

True, in the world of sales or CEOs, lunch meetings are often a way of life if the goal is networking, connecting, and referring. But if you are a billable worker, serving clients or producing day-to-day, Lunch Meetings can suck away massive amounts of time. They tempt you like candy. “Lunch! That sounds nice. I’m still being productive by listening to the Dining Companion talk about an important area of my business, I can expense it, and I’d love to get out of the office for a bit.”

But what happens? There is more on your plate than you expected that day. And then, the routine. Getting there. (Maybe 10 minutes. Maybe 30 minutes.) Small talk. More food than you usually eat. Maybe 30-40% actual talking about business. The Dining Companion’s products or services have a minimal, vague, or absent value proposition. You learn much less than expected. One hour easily turns into ninety minutes (especially if service is slow). Getting back to the office. You just killed two hours. Now you’re sleepy and you have to pick up at 2pm what you left off doing at noon.

Since lunch meetings are usually instigated by vampires (especially vendors) from outside your office, you can battle them by better vetting their value proposition ahead of time, scheduling a short 10-15 minute phone call (rather than a meal), or – if their value proposition seems legit – challenging their discipline by scheduling an early morning coffee that goes no longer than 45 minutes. If they cannot get up early (like you do), then they must be afraid of the sun – a classic sign of a vampire! All kidding aside, I’ve learned over the years that a person who cannot meet me early for a quick coffee to talk about something of value is usually not disciplined enough to also share a strong value proposition.

Fighting these vampires does not mean that all meetings are bad, or that everyone is a vampire. Sometimes it’s good to follow process, include multiple stakeholders, brainstorm ideas, resolve tension or conflict, or grab an occasional lunch – all through meetings. But you need to be fully conscious that the time is well-spent, and that you’ve fully justified that the time will be worth it. A truly productive person works – and only meets to help prod work along. Meeting vampires want to drag you into their workless world. You must fight them, and remain vigilant!