By Roger Ewing

Google Personalized Search examines your web history and assigns sites you have visited a high ranking. If you visit a particular site frequently, it will be ranked higher than sites you may not be visiting on a regular basis.  This ability is known as 2nd and 3rd Generation Search.

Amazon’s “people who bought your product also bought…” is an example of this kind of technology.  Amazon’s Jeff Bezos refers to this technology as Discovery-Based Search.

Search 4.0

Taking Amazon’s example a step further, requires a computer to get social and personal with you in the search process.

Google is pushing the search envelope.  Using your personal search history, and combining those results with search histories of people you know, as well as search histories from people you don’t know, gives Google the opportunity to finely tune your search results.  From a marketing point of view, this is powerful stuff.

The point is, Google now has the ability and the means to review your personal search history, thereby defining your individual digital stream of consciousness.

The Semantic Web

For computers to perform the tedious tasks involved in Search 4.0, images and symbols must be presented in a format that the computer can understand and evaluate.  Creating platforms where computers recognize and combine this information and then act upon it, is at the very heart of the future search process.

Computers must be capable of  processing knowledge itself.

Instead of merely recognizing text, the computer must rely on processes similar to human deductive reasoning and inference, resulting in more meaningful search results.

Discovery-based Search promises to revolutionize the information gathering process.

Home Search

In the near future, when you begin your online home search, you may be greeted by ads for homes tailored to your taste and preference.

Vacant homes may even be digitally staged, complete with furniture and decorations that you have previously investigated online.

Before Digital Staging

After digital staging

Digital staging photos courtesy of California Image Maker CIM.com

Some may feel discovery-based search is an invasion of privacy, while others will view this kind of search as a tremendous convenience. We can either embrace this technology, or hope it goes away.

By Roger Ewing

Second and third generation search is in hot pursuit of the modern consumer.

Knowing what a buyer desires, without them actually telling you is the ultimate prize in search engine technology.

Currently, we are in the first phase of paid search, which is dependent upon matching text ads with the intent of a search query.  This is the way Google, Yahoo, AOL and other search engines monetize their business models.  But now second and third generation search models are emerging that promise to monetize the consumers clickstream in new and exciting ways.

Behavioral targeting

One example of second generation technology tracks your search and browsing history to display product results before you actually initiate a search for them.

Jeff Bezos, of Amazon, refers to this kind of search as Discovery Based.  Amazon’s “people who bought your product also bought…” is one of the company’s most profitable divisions.

Ever feel frustrated and impatient that your specific search result is not precisely on target?  Of course.  Do consumers really want to be found in the search process?  I believe the answer is a qualified YES.  A quality search result is at the top of our fantasy desire list.

The “search funnel”

According to Google, “Search Funnels are a set of reports describing the (your) ad click and impression behavior on Google.com…”

This means that Google now has the capability to see how many clicks and what different keywords were used in your historical clickstream, prior to you initiating a new search.

Funnel + landing page history + keywords + ad viewed history = Your Profile

Just in case this conversation is a bit too technical, simply put, it implies Google now has the ability to essentially read your online thoughts and anticipate your desire as a consumer.

People visiting a food site can see ads for financial services, cars or any other interest they have shown elsewhere in their online travels.

As consumers we hunger for quality search results.  The Internet will soon allow us to find the products we desire with little or no effort on our part.

What a concept!  I am in the residential real estate business.  If, by applying a simple algorithm (recipe), I can determine your home preferences, prior to your inquiry, I can present properties to you that meet your individual needs even before you begin your home search.

In the near future, when you begin your online home search, you may be greeted by ads for homes that are tailored to your taste and preference.  Vacant homes may even be displayed digitally staged, complete with furniture and decorations that you have previously investigated online.

Spinning The Gold

A plethora of “digital straw” is readily available to any public search engine.  The technology already exists to begin the spinning process. Stand by creative marketers, the gold standard for search is only a few clicks away.

Like it or not, your clickstream represents your individual online stream of consciousness.

Some will argue that is an invasion of your online privacy.  While others will say it is the natural evolution of the search process and represents a benefit to us all.

What’s your opinion?

By Roger Ewing

What Are We Searching For?

According to Piper Jaffrey, a U.S. investment banking firm, the global internet search environment looks something like this.

• 20% of all searches are for entertainment information.

• 15% are commercial.

• 65% are informational.

Much of the informational searches could easily be considered commercial.  BIA/Kelsey, a leading provider of strategic research, analysis, data and competitive metrics, indicates that 25% to 35% of all searches are local, and most of those are commercial, looking for a restaurant for example.

Interestingly, internet penetration in the United States is somewhere north of ten times the average for the rest of the world.  However, far more searches are done internationally than in the US, by a factor of about five to one.  What does this tell us?

When the entire world has complete access to the internet, Search may well become the most important activity involving humankind.

The Speed of Information

Researchers Hal Varian and Peter Lyman, two economists at UC Berkeley, calculated our total global information production for one year. In their study “How much information?” they measured the total production of all unique information channels in the world for two different years, 2000 and 2003.

Their research revealed a mind numbing 66% rate of growth in information per year.  Roughly 3.5 exabytes!

According to Wikipedia as of May 2009, the size of the World’s total Digital content has been roughly estimated to be 500 billion gigabytes, or 500 exabytes.  There is clearly no shortage of digital straw.

What’s An Exabyte?

In case you were wondering, an exabyte is a unit of information, or computer storage, equal to one quintillion or 1 followed by 18 zeros (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) bytes.

Let’s just say it’s a really big-ass number, but not as big as a googol, which is 1 followed by a hundred zeros.  Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin took creative liberties when they named their company Google.

So much for the straw in our spinning analogy.  In Part Two of this blog I will focus on winning the GOLD.

Guest blog by Stephen Roesler, Director of Social Media at Ewing & Associates Sotheby’s International Realty

What’s in your digital arsenal?

By: Stephen Roesler

Similar to the buildup of military weapons by the Soviets and U.S. in the mid 20th century, there is a hot pursuit to win the race to the top of Google. Regardless of industry, SEO (search engine optimization) is the name of the game. Embracing a marketing initiative that aims to promote exposure via organic search engine traffic may qualify as an organizations biggest hurdle. The heart of our online marketing efforts revolve around the concept of an online community. Let me explain.

If things are going ’social’ as I’ve advocated in the past, the goal then becomes utilizing our social power in a medium where the majority of people spend an unconscionable amount of time; the internet. Given that 85% of real estate searches begin online, we can assume our community relentlessly searches this diabolical machine named Google, which accounts for 65% of real estate searches alone. Therefore, we need to capture our audience on their terms. What are they looking for? How do they find it? What do they search? How do they think?

Answering these questions requires some research on Adwords and thoughtful website analytics tracking. But, that’s only one aspect of finding a community. Next, providing useful content becomes integral. EwingSIR has taken a unique approach which has doubled our organic traffic. We use a strategy that provides news to micro community’s in attempt to grow participating communities. By publishing online news that remains relevant to specific communities, we cultivate a community based on location. Not only are we highly targeted, we are personal and social. Therefore, we find specific buyers and sellers coming to our site, looking for services we offer. Not only does this community effort add to our arsenal of SEO tools, it builds an online community.

However, choosing to harness one SEO effort will only result in limited exposure. Winning the arms race requires a full scope of social media efforts rooted in a strong SEO crusade. Go forth, soldiers.

As Director of Social Media, Stephen Roesler manages the extensive blog platform at Ewing & Associates Sotheby’s International Realty. He is responsible for all aspects of the companies cascading blogosphere, including the creation of community blogs, as well as the design and implementation of social media tools and the development of strategic initiatives on the web.  He can be reached at stephen.roesler@sothebysrealty.com

By Roger Ewing

In his book Leviathan, English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes said, science is reason, and “Reason is nothing but Reckoning..”.  Hobbes was describing either a computer and/or the human brain when he wrote those words in 1651.

Thomas Hobbes

Reckoning is computation and isn’t that what brains and computers do?  And isn’t thinking just another term for computing?  Artificial Intelligence has been described as the quality of a machine to have a mind, consciousness and a mental state.  How to make a machine exhibit these qualities is the question on the minds of Google engineers as they steer the starship Google into the next decade.  The magic of the search and the man-machine interface has become the new frontier of computer science.

John Battelle, in  his book The Search, writes of the “Database of Intentions”.  Batelle says search is the force driving the web forward and the ability of machines to understand what people are looking for is critical.

The capability of a computer to intuitively interpret our intentions is the Holy Grail of search.  Search is becoming less about finding something, and more about understanding something.

The Turing Test

Simply stated, the Turing Test is the ability of a machine to demonstrate intelligence.  Alan Turing in his 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, contemplates the question “can machines think?”  The test goes like this. A human interrogator engages in a conversation with another human and a machine, each of which tries to appear human. All participants are separated from one another in different locations. If the interrogator cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test and is therefore deemed intelligent.

The Loebner Prize

Hugh Loebner of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies sponsors a contest each year in which he offers a cash prize of $100,000 to the first computer that can pass the Turing Test.  Thus far, the Gold (audio and visual) and the Silver (text only) have never been won.

However, Loebner has awarded the bronze medal every year for the computer that demonstrates the “most human” conversation among that year’s entries.  Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity (A.L.I.C.E.) won the bronze award three times (2000, 2001, 2004) and AI Jabberwacky won in 2005 and 2006.

Space Odyssey

Lets cut to the chase.  Can a machine have emotions, self awareness, creativity, benevolence, or hostility?  Can a machine have a soul?  Do we need to be concerned that some day a computer like Hal, from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, will take control and attempt to extinguish our life force?  No, the answer is much more benign.

Battelle believes search will become intelligent as a result of clever algorithms that leverage the multi-millions of daily transactions, behaviors and links that compose the foundation of the web, The Database of Intentions.

What does the world want?

Google is determined to find out.

Copyright © by Roger Patrick Ewing, all rights reserved.

Imagine a room full of people, and in that room there is a Victim and a Rescuer.  The two will find one another and hook up.

By Roger Ewing

Aniston and Schwimmer of TV's "Friends"

Drama is not inherently “bad”.  Drama is very entertaining; it’s just not a good means of managing ones life.  Here is a summary of what we have discovered about drama so far.

1.  At any given time, 60% of the adult population is involved in drama.

2.  Drama is both seductive and addictive.

3.  Drama does not get anyone what they want.

4.  The primary drama roles are Victim, Rescuer and Persecutor.

5.  The pivotal role in any drama is the Victim.

6.  Victims believe they have no options.

7.  Victims use specific limiting language that easily identifies them.

8.  Rescuing is all about the Rescuer, not the Victim,

9.  Persecutors empower Victims.

10.  Victims don’t really want to be rescued.

The relationship between each of our drama roles can be described as an inverted triangle, where the Victim takes the primary position of control.

Remember, while the roles in a silent movie are well defined, in real life drama the role of Victim, Rescuer and Persecutor are assigned by the other players in the drama.  Role reversal is a common occurrence and is important for the drama to gain traction.

If Victims don’t really want to be rescued, what do they want?

Victim’s involved in drama only want one thing from a Rescuer, support.  That’s it.  Simple, don’t over complicate the situation.  If you are involved in a drama situation you want to remove yourself from the triangle.

All Victims truly want is support.  Offer support, not solutions.

Here is a quality response to a drama Victim who is desperately seeking a Rescuer.  “I am here to help you in any way I can, tell me how to do that?”  Remember, Victims don’t view themselves as having options.  Therefore, Victims are incapable of making decisions.

By forcing a Victim to make a decision you are actively interfering with the drama process.

Victims will fight to stay engaged in the drama.  Regardless of how much the Victim may beg you, do not offer solutions.  Victims will make decisions if forced to do so and this is the only way you can achieve an effective solution to a dramatic situation.

Drama is an inherently immature response to life problems.  One of the best ways to view real life drama is to watch the behavior of young teenagers around the age of 13 or 14 years.  Their social interactions involve a lot of drama, “she said”, “he said”, “they said” is a typical conversation.  They live in drama nearly 100% of the time.  It’s almost as if the onset of puberty activates some sort of drama gene.

Mature adults, on the other hand, are interested in discovering how they can create and achieve goals, realize their dreams, and effectively manage their business and personal relationships.  This is mature thinking and is the basis for achieving self actualization.

At any given time, as much as 60% of the adult population is involved in drama.

By Roger Ewing

When those around us act out in ways that are overly dramatic, the end result may very well be a problem in our business or our personal life.  By managing the potential for drama in our lives, we can bring dissatisfied parties to common ground, and constructive results to our business and personal relationships.

Drama is seductive and addictive.

Psychologists tell us that at any given time, as much as 60% of the adult population is involved in some dramatic situation. Garden-variety drama can be compelling and for those of us who naturally lean toward the dramatic, it can also be consuming.

In the past, the classic example of drama’s popularity was the success of televised soap operas.  But this source of traditional drama is now being eclipsed by real life drama played out on social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and cellphone texting.

We all experience drama at some time or another.  Drama could involve a serious life challenge,  or it may be a simple chain of events gone wrong that leads us toward feelings of despair. Causing us to ask ourselves, why me?  Recently, I experienced a simple morning drama that demonstrates what I mean.

I was headed for an important morning meeting and had difficulty finding the correct tie, shirt, jacket combination.  Once dressed, I headed for the kitchen and found I was out of coffee.  Feelings of frustration were building already and I hadn’t even left the house.

I stopped for coffee at Starbucks and, while getting back into my car, I spilled the coffee on my shirt and tie.  I head back home, more than frustrated.  Changed my clothes, with the usual decision difficulties, and got back into my car.

Entourage's Johnny Drama

Low on gas, I had to stop, and realizing I was late, I cranked up the fan on the air conditioning and made an incomplete stop at the corner.  You guessed it, ticket time.  Do I really have to go on?

My normal morning routine had been disrupted.  I was late for my meeting and speaking to a police officer about my driving habits.  How did I feel at this moment?  I felt I was a victim of some sort of bad karma experience.  Life was being seriously unfair to me.

Drama never gets anyone what they want.

The most important defense against dramatic situations is to actually identify that we are involved in a drama situation.  Sounds quite simple, unless you are the one that is struggling with the lousy cards life has dealt you at that particular moment.  Take a deep breath and observe the drama that is unfolding about you.  Recognize you have a role in your personal drama and understand that it is an immature feeling.  Snap yourself back to objective adult thinking.

We all know people who seem to live in drama nearly 24-7.  These people are constantly involved in emotionally charged situations.  When you take a close look, you begin to recognize this dramatic person is emotionally immature.  It is very difficult to achieve success and experience self realization while living in a constant state of drama.

Not that drama is a bad thing.  You just don’t want it to determine the course of your life. So, if you feel the need to escape reality and allow your inner child to play, go to the movies or log onto Facebook and soak in some entertainment.  Meanwhile, don’t allow drama to determine your role in life.

In part two of this three part series, I will describe the roles we play in drama and explain how each person, Victim, Persecutor and Rescuer participate to make sure the drama is a frothy and unproductive experience for everyone involved.

A great deal of debate is occurring online about how to measure ROI for social media marketing.

By Roger Ewing

Those of us who have spent lavishly on print media over the course of our business careers are empathetic towards our digital new-age friends who struggle to justify investing in social media.  This is particularly true now, given our recessionary cost control environment.

If the Tweeters, Bloggers and Diggers could measure the effectiveness of their social media platforms, would the management team finally stop harping about the amount of resources in time and money that are being applied to these strategies by the marketers?  Probably.  Consider this.

Only about 30% of traditional marketing has demonstrable ROI.

Then why did we spend all that money on traditional print media in the past if there is so little measurable result?  I, for one, did it primarily because my competitors were doing it.  And my competitors did it because I did, and so on. In the past, advertising wars involved keeping a body count of pages published in specific publications.  If my competitor was at ten pages, how could I not commit to at least eight pages to remain competitive?  It’s a lot like a legal battle where the lawyers get all the money, and the clients slowly go broke.

The marketing wars have begun anew, but this time the field of battle is digital.  There are several aspects of our battle strategy we will need to consider if we want our enterprises to prosper.  The first is, our old nemesis, print media.  Second is the awesome power of branding.  These two weapons combined with an intelligent social media platform, will conquer the competition in record time.

Sorry techies, print media is critical and necessary.  The marriage of print and digital marketing, when managed correctly, is the formula that produces spontaneous combustion.

There is a tipping point of web visits that is achieved, when targeted print campaigns support developing web based marketing strategies.

Traffic to your site needs to be substantial, if it is going to achieve traction and grow organically.  The quickest way to do that is to market your web site via traditional print vehicles targeted to your particular industry.

Branding has such awesome firepower that smaller entrepreneurs are often swept aside by the sheer magnitude of it.  Brands are the nuclear missile that atomizes the competition.  Look, you don’t have to be a genius to know what a well-known brand represents to the consumer.  Brand identity implies, “It may not be perfect, but at least I know what to expect”. Why else would you drive around a strange town searching for a Subway Restaurant at lunchtime?

The Internet has given entrepreneurs strange powers.  With a lot of SEO work and a very small investment, an enterprising young business can create brand awareness in a short period of time that rivals the larger brand labels.  In fact, there seems to be a group of consumers out there saying, “I like micro brands, they make me look hip and contemporary”.  Of course, a strategy built around the concept of pretentiousness won’t go very far if the product is not rock solid.

In practice, I don’t believe we can expect to know for sure what the actual result of our investment is in marketing.  However, we can directly measure our web traffic and extrapolate a return. Many sources of analytical information exist to measure the effectiveness of our internet marketing strategy.  Google Analytics is probably the most popular source of web traffic information.

Summary:

1.  Lay your hands on a sold brand name, or in the absence of a great brand, work really hard to create online brand awareness for your business.

2.  Spend judiciously on a print media campaign.  Advertise your brand and your web site in direct mail, newspapers, or anywhere else your target audience may see it.  Important rule: don’t do any advertising that is not memorable.  You are better off sending 100 post cards with a great design and a compelling message, than sending 1,000 that will not be read or appreciated.

Once you have achieved a critical mass of visits to your web site, you can begin to wean off the print media, slowly. Do so carefully, and only after Google Analytics demonstrates your number one source of web visits is the result of organic search engines.

Happy Hunting!

]]> http://rogerewingblog.com/print-media-supports-web-marketing-strategies/feed/ 14 http://rogerewingblog.com/you-googlin%e2%80%99-me/ http://rogerewingblog.com/you-googlin%e2%80%99-me/#comments Thu, 24 Sep 2009 14:39:07 +0000 Roger Ewing http://rogerewing.wordpress.com/?p=105

Nearly everyone is Googling, Tweeting, Facebooking, and Digging.  Just about no one is talking.

By Roger Ewing

In Martin Scorsese’s 1976 classic movie Taxi Driver, a deranged Travis Bickle, portrayed by Robert De Niro, asks his own reflection this now famous question, “you talkin’ to me?”.

De Niro’s character is a troubled and conflicted New York City taxi driver who has isolated himself from society.  His aloneness allows Bickles’ demons to get the better of him and he lashes out at the decadence he sees in the city.  Travis Bickle is emblematic of the struggle we face in our modern lives.  Anonymity has become the desired posture.  And like Bickle, we have created cocoons of privacy around ourselves.

Problem:  How do we develop new business relationships in an environment where our customers and clients are demanding more privacy and seclusion?

Nearly 85% of all my business transactions are the direct or indirect result of someone recommending me.  Sound like a large number?  Do some research into the specific sources of your successful business transactions and you will discover, as I have, that developing and maintaining relationships is probably the most important aspect of your business.

At the end of the day, we are all in the business of relationships.

In a rapidly expanding web based world, privacy has become a scarce commodity.  Modern man seeks paparazzi free space.  The development of filtering software, and mechanisms to ensure our separateness, has become big business.  No one wants to hear from anyone they don’t already know and trust.

The irony is that your business enterprise, regardless of the category, is probably dependent upon the continued expansion of your sales base.

Solution: “Micro Community Blogs” that provide meaningful, quality information to people on a neighborhood level.  I have found this to be a simple and effective marketing strategy that gives me permission from individuals in the community to communicate directly.

Information is the drug of choice in our modern civilization.  In an effort to satisfy their desire for information, modern humans Google everything and everyone.  If information is King, then Google is surely Emperor.

65% of all inquiries on the Internet begin with Google.

Lets put that in perspective. According to marketing research company comScore, in the United States alone, some 14.3 billion Internet searches were conducted in May 2009.  comScore estimates there were 9.3 billion searches on Google for that month, representing an astounding 299.83 million Google searches per day!

Micro Community Blogging involves an Internet strategy that provides valuable information to individuals in their cocoon like sanctuaries.  Reaching out to people, community by community, will prove to be the successful approach for enterprising marketers.

Here are the basic rules of engagement.

1.  The information we share with the community must be in the first person.

2.  This information must be relevant and topical on a neighborhood level.

3.  Never sell anything in the Micro Community Blog.

Blogging is the preferred means of communicating in a village-like environment.  Blogging has replaced the chatter we used to share with our neighbors and it has become a replacement for the party-line telephone that served as the internet in our parents ancient analog world.

You Googlin’ me?  Hope so, because I already Googled you.

The Title Of A book by John Gierach

By Roger Ewing

Part sport and part art, with a little Zen wisdom thrown in, fly- fishing imitates life, and is a good allegory for business.  In his well-read book, Sex Death and Fly Fishing, Gierach shares insights on mayflies, men, fishing, love, and the meaning, or lack thereof, of life.

When I visit Rick’s Sporting Goods in Mammoth Lakes, I am in awe of the quantity and variety of gear that is available to satisfy my fishing addiction.  Everything I crave is here.  I see a staggering array of colorful flys with names that a nail polish marketer would envy.  There are floating lines, sinking and tapered lines, weighted tippet, forceps, waders, float tubes, knot tying tools, and beautifully crafted willowy fly rods.  This, I think to myself, must be heaven.

The businessman in me makes the B2B connection to fly-fishing.  I have determined there are three important similarities between fly-fishing and marketing that the careful fly fisherman and the enterprising marketer should consider.

Choosing The Correct Fly

Fly fishermen never refer to the fly, a small bit of steal, feathers and thread, as bait.  This would be a sacrilege.  Likewise, in business it’s best to avoid the temptation to offer “bait and switch” strategies.  Success in business, as in fishing, requires that we be real, genuine and always truthful.

Marketing efforts are best described as initiatives.  We research our target market and manage our product to ensure that we have created a strategy that will likely succeed.  When fishing, I like to nymph the stream.  Using a small net to collect insects at various levels of the stream, I match the insects I find with a fly from my fly box, dramatically increasing my chances of success.

In business as in fly-fishing, the correct product for the correct audience is a sure fire recipe for success.

Presentation

Fly-fishing appeals to me because it is esoteric and provides a level of intellectual stimulation that I find very satisfying.  Trout on the other hand are much more pragmatic.  They are attracted to my fly because it is mealtime in the stream.  It’s a sort of dance.
The perfect cast will present my fly in such a manner that it will not occur to the trout that this is not a swimming Callibaetis, or a floating Caddis about to dry it’s wings and lift off the surface of the water.

Similarly, marketing pieces must be compelling, memorable and eye-catching.  Will my message be framed in the correct context and arrive at just the right moment to cause the client to react in the desired frame of mind?

For example, my goal is to deliver direct mail that has a valuable and worthy message.  I want my print ads to resonate with the reader and cause them to think about themselves in a way that is in concert with their lives and my product.  I have found that basic human needs and desires are the best means of getting a buyers attention.  The more exciting the better.  Sex, as Madison Avenue reminds us, sells.

Fly Line Management

Once the trout has taken the fly, the way I manage the fly line becomes very important.  All the gear, preparation and careful planning in the world will not result in landing a beautiful trout unless I keep my wits about me.  The line must not have too much slack, but it must not be too taut either.  I literally fish with my hands, feeling the trout’s energy in the rod and the line.

I’m careful not to tire the trout to exhaustion. It is important to me that I keep this trout alive in the stream to help maintain the precious fish population. A barb-less hook, a gentle net and underwater handling will ensure the fish swims away healthy.  For me, releasing the trout is the most exhilarating part of the fly fishing experience.

In the world of business the analogy of fly line management is obvious.  Managing the client relationship is the most critical aspect of ensuring that our clients provide us with quality referrals and then return to us for service in the years to come.

There is a fine line between appearing to be a stalker in a business relationship and actually being available when we are really needed. Staying in touch, and keeping our clients informed will make our clients feel valued and make us look professional. Accurate, quality information is important to our clients, and to us, if we want to make sure the net is filled at the end of the business day.

Summary

Creating a mutually positive end result for both parties is the active goal of any fly fisherman or entrepreneur.  Whether you are finalizing a winning marketing strategy or wading in a trout stream, remember these simple rules.  Choose the right fly, make the best presentation and manage your fly line well.

The Zen part?  We’ll leave that to John Gierach and the trout.