I have put this picture up named "Aaron Burke" in a shameless ploy at increasing my google ranking for my name.

When I started this site, it began as an experiment for me: I wanted to register the name Aaron Burke, put up a Wordpress web site, and mess around with finally having some sort of web presence. I called it Aaron Speaks! because, frankly, having no idea about what I wanted to talk about I figured that name would just about cover any potential topics.

I had no intention of having the website be anything that anyone outside of my close friends would discover. In fact, I didn’t use my last name, refrained from posting any pictures of myself, and avoided putting up anything that could directly link the site back to me. I even registered the domain name www.aaronburke.net anonymously.

But, things change…

This site is now the hub that connects all things me. (Or at least it’s moving that way. I have too many damn accounts all over the internets to connect them all. There are a lot of internets, you know.)

And as the site began to be connected to me, I discovered that I wanted people to be able to find this place, and by extension, find me. Somewhere in the last few months, I noticed that when you google “Aaron Burke” this site was coming up pretty high in the rankings. Of course, being competitive, I decided that I needed to be #1. I hovered up at #2 for while (behind a pesky UCLA law professor), and then last week I noticed “tada!” I was #1. Sweet!

It lasted 1 day.

And then aaronburke.org took the top spot, and we’ve been switching back and forth since then, in a little google rankings dance. Now, I don’t mind dancing, but I like doing it with women, so aaronburke.org, you are going to have to take a seat. I want my top spot back. I figure I will try to put some of my learnings regarding keyword optimization to good use and see if I can more permanantly get #1.

Wish me luck.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Reading this book made me want to go out and run… every single day. Ok, I must admit that I already am somewhat of a runner, but this book changed my perspective on why we run, how humans are built, and most of all changed my attitude about running. I now smile when I run, and notice the beauty of the world around me much more. Great stuff, great book.

Oh, and don’t worry. This book is not just for runners. It has an engaging storyline, colorful characters, and plot twists. Highly recommended.

from www.zeromotorcycles.com

I’m finally putting some effort back into updating MotorcycleNewsGuy (my motorcycle news site) because, despite what seems to be a difficult economy for motorcycles, there really is a lot of innovation going on out there. I especially love what we’re seeing in alternative-fuel motorcycles, which don’t get nearly as much love here in the US as alternative-fuel automobiles do. And that’s a shame, because a 2-wheeled vehicle tends to get even better mileage per whatever than a 4-wheeled vehicle, and they tend to release even less carbon as well.

So today I’m saluting Zero Motorcycles for bringing out a colorful new 2010 product line of all electric motorcycles for both street and off-road riding. I’d love to get a test ride on one of these soon.

Oh, and you can take a look at my (admittedly weird) MotorcycleNewsGuy post on Zero Motorcycles if you like. MCNG has an odd voice, but I definitely enjoy writing as him.

Among the promising clean energy alternatives is an algae photo-bioreactor that grows algae in municipal wastewater to produce biofuel. Developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the bioreactor consists of large plastic bags made from a permeable “forward osmosis” membrane. The bags hold the algae and waste nutrients in place while allowing cleansed water to pass through. The bags could potentially be deployed in contaminated and “dead zone” coastal areas, removing excess nutrients while growing algae for biofuels. NASA’s Ames Research Center licensed the patent-pending photo-bioreactor to Algae Systems, LCC, which plans to develop and pilot the technology in Tampa Bay, Florida. The company hopes to integrate the technology into biorefineries to produce renewable energy products, including diesel and jet fuel…

for the full story check out bioenergy.checkbiotech.org

The Benefits of a Facebook Fan Page

With over 500 million users, Facebook has firmly established itself as the king of social media. And with that comes the ability to reach, connect with, and communicate with a ridiculous number of people. You can find fans all over the planet and have interactions and conversations with them nearly instantaneously.

And that really is what Facebook gets you: the ability of your customers to directly make comments about you, about your product, and about anything that you say on Facebook. You can get instant, free feedback (good or bad.) If you have a great Facebook fan page, updated on a regular basis with interesting content that grabs a person’s attention, people will want to comment on your page, and want to interact and be involved. The ability to quickly comment on a product image, of give a thumbs-up to a status update means the barrier between you and your customers is very low. Effectively using a Facebook page can be an amazing way to create and maintain customer loyalty. And after all, as a business, keeping and maintaining customers is our main goal. Facebook can be a fabulous tool for that. (A great example is lululemon athletica.)

However, if you treat your page like a traditional one-way communication (like a commercial, just shoving product info and self-promotion spam at people) no one will be interested, people will tune out, and you will get nothing back from your customers. (As an aside, I just looked up the General Motors Facebook fan page, and while they have over 100,000 fans, they have ZERO photos posted! What a missed opportunity to put product photos up there!)

Benefits of a Traditional Email List

Email, while limited compared to Facebook in terms of customer interaction, has a few distinct advantages for a traditional small business or retail store. First, you can sign up your customers immediately while they are in your store. It’s as easy as having someone write down his name and email address. You can input it into your listserve later or do it right then. Simple and easy, and you know your content will be delivered to the customer. Additionally, content delivered to an inbox is much less likely to be missed that an update in a Facebook news feed, which can be drowned out by dozens of friend updates. As long as you limit your emails to no more than about 1/week, most people won’t remove themselves from your email list and if you are delivering useful offers they will look forward to your emails. Part of the beauty of the opt-in aspect of email is that open rates can be very high – 30% is not unreasonable to expect to achieve if you have a well-designed template and information your customers want. Clickthrough rates can even approach 10% for some emails. (Data based on the Epsilon Email Trend and Benchmarking Report show average open rates to be 22.2% and clickthrough rates to be 5.9% – very good numbers!)

Adding clickable images, html, and tracking what your customers do with the information in an email can also be very easy to do, and extremely powerful. There are so many email management services and pieces of software out there vying for your business that finding one that suits your needs (and budget) is not difficult. Of course, inexpensive is not free, and that is one of the advantages that Facebook has over email.

Shortcomings of Facebook

One of the main drawbacks of Facebook for a small business is the need for your customers to opt in from their Facebook account. Rather than being able to take their information in the store, you have to hope that your customer will go home, sign into Facebook, and remember to go to your fan page and click to become a fan. (Or, you can hope they have a smartphone and pull it out and fan your business then and there.) But Facebook does require a greater level of action on the part of your customer, and it is up to business owners to find ways to encourage their customers to take that action.

Within Facebook, it is also important to remember that your photos, updates, and news items will be competing with all the other feed items that come flowing to your customers. Friend’s updates, other business page updates, and photo tags all flow into the news feed and dilute your content, reducing the chance that your information is read and digested.

Drawbacks of email

High open rates are a huge benefit of well-composed emails. Lack of interaction is definitely one of the main drawbacks. Email by itself will only serve as an opt-in commercial; to truly be effective at retaining customers you need to be driving your subscribers to an offer or page that is compelling to them, and that will encourage them to take action. As a retail store, that could be store events, sales, customer appreciation and loyalty events, images and copy of new products to whet customer’s appetites, etc.

And to maintain an effective email campaign and list, you’ll likely want to use an email service or program to create image-filled emails with tracking metrics. Without the ability to track clickthrough of specific items, you’ll never be able to judge what is effective and most important to your customers. Email services do cost money, and you want to make sure that your money is well spent and is increasing your revenue. And you need to be pushing for email opt-ins in store to maximize the reach of your list, and decrease cost per customer.

So How Do We Maximize the Potential of these Two Forms of Promotion?

Ideally, these two ways to reach customers will complement each other, and be part of a concerted strategy to connect with, and maintain or grow your customer base. With Facebook, some of what I have seen that is incredibly effective are special offers that only reach Facebook followers. Let your Facebook fans know that an offer is for them only and they will feel special and more likely to be more aware of future updates. Contests or giveaways that encourage users to post their own photos involving your product are also amazing at generating fan response and loyalty. And if you have your fans tag themselves in photos they post to your wall, their friends will see those photos and you can draw in and reach many more potential fans.

If you do any sort of event in your store, take photos of the event! Include handouts at the event with your Facebook url and let your store guests know they can go to that page and they’ll be able to see photos from the event. Nearly everyone loves seeing photos of themselves at events and this is a great way to get people to visit your page for the first time or come back to it and comment on (or tag) photos.

To maximize the potential of an email list you first need to be mentioning it to every customer in your store or business that shows interest for your store or products. Make sure you mention that you promote special offers and sales, and never share email addresses. But there has to be incentive for someone to want to be on your list. Once you do have an established email list, establish a consistent email format (include your store web page and a Facebook link in every email) and keep the emails to a regular frequency that doesn’t exceed one email per week. Make sure there is new information (new products, and new special or offer) in every email so that your customers will look forward to seeing that email in the inbox – they open the email because they want to know about what new special offer/product/event is that week.

Both email and Facebook can be amazing resources in reaching your customers and maintaining their loyalty – if used effectively. Just understand the strengths and weaknesses of each, create a plan of attack for both, and follow through with your plan. Remember though, the ultimate goal here is to connect with your customers, have them feel loyalty to your store, and make them want to be a part of your organization and what you are doing.

Good luck!

And that’s what happened when I found Zero Motorcycles. They’re hiring for their marketing department, and holding a position like that for a company like Zero Motorcycles would be one of those jobs that would be more than a job – it would be something I would wake up every morning looking forward to. Here’s why:

Zero Motorcycles is pretty new company based in Santa Cruz that designs and manufactures electric motorcycles. They’ve got off-road bikes and now a street-legal motorcycle – and the bikes are light, quick, cost almost nothing to power, and are absolutely part of the future of transportation and of motorcycling. And the company embodies much of what I’m passionate about – 1) motorcycles, 2) new technology, 3) a startup with the opportunity to create a premium brand, 4) green technology, and 5) fun! This is a company creating a product for people to love, play with, enjoy, and experience the world in, and they’re doing it in a forward-thinking, environmentally friendly way.

I would rock a job with Zero Motorcycles. There is just so much potential there to be absolutely amazing, and to bring a stunning product to the world.

Check it out-

So then, my thoughts for the day:

I have become increasingly convinced that development in life is not a linear path. For many people, the most important learning and growth is not a gradual and continual process. Oh sure, as we age we gain experience and from this comes a certain kind of wisdom, but it does not necessarily impart significant growth as a person. I have come to believe, through what I have been taught and from my own recent experiences, that we as humans often can shift into a kind of pupating process of growth. What I mean by this is that often the most significant and important changes that can happen in life do so throughout a process that is not outwardly noticeable.

Humans are capable of shifting into extended periods of deep personal reflection and introspection, during which no major personality or behavioral changes take place. However, there is a certain point at which the internal change and growth is complete, and a very rapid outward transformation then occurs.  My own experience in this aligns quite well with what I have been taught regarding the four phases of growth and change in a person’s life.

Briefly, they are: 1) the doldrums. You have reached a point where you feel lost, bored, or dissatisfied with the direction in your life. You decide that a change is necessary. So you 2) cocoon, and spend a period in self-reflection looking at values and examining your emotional feelings on things and what makes sense to you. People often develop mission statements or core values at this point, and achieve a much greater understanding of who they are as a person and how they can impact the world. After a period of doing a lot of internal growth and change, you’re set for 3) getting ready, experimenting, and trying out new things. At this point, you may not be fully committed to one goal, but are instead feeling out different paths and seeing what makes the most sense to you and what aligns best with your core values. And finally, once ideas have been tested and a clearer picture is in place of motivations, drives, and what really feels right to you, you’re ready to transition into the 4) go for it phase. You may create a set of 1, 5, and 10-year goals, and may develop your own personal hedgehog (which is a guide to aligning your passions and talents into an effective economic engine.) With these goals in place, and this great personal knowledge, a person can really produce some amazing results both personally and career-wise.

I have been fortunate enough to be able to move through those phases as I’ve been undergoing a pretty intense career and life path change. My experience with this is that it hasn’t been easy, and many people won’t or don’t understand it – after all, our traditional societal values don’t exactly put much emphasis on nonlinear growth. But overall the experience has been really positive for me and I hope I can move into the go for it phase with greater confidence, some new skills, and a newfound drive and motivation for what I’m doing in my life. It’s something I would encourage to anyone who feels lost or stuck in their life.

The old adage “information is power” is no longer relevant in today’s world. Right now information is not power. Everyone has information. In fact, a valid case could be made that too much information is less power, because as more time is spent on reading and parsing information, less time is available to act on that information which could have had the most impact.

So in our times, it is more appropriate to say “the right information is power.” (And, no doubt, someone far more forward-thinking than me has likely said this very thing years ago. But let’s just gloss over that for a moment.)

My point here is my realization that the ability to sift through mediocre and good information to find the really great information, and the ability to filter out that which is not important is a skillset which is becoming increasingly necessary. I suppose much of this line of thought was prompted by a search on Amazon for books on social media. The stack of books that was thrown at me by Amazon’s “relevant titles” was ridiculous. What really freaked me out was that all the books actually looked good, were written by fairly prominent authors, and had been published in the last year. I instantly wanted to buy and read about a dozen of them. Ridiculous. “Choose one or two Aaron,” I thought.

But which ones? Is there one which will be best for me in my situation right now? So I looked through the reviews, read the excerpts, and whittled the list down to 2. I have absolutely no idea whether I made a good or a bad choice. But I did am slowly learning about the value of processing and sorting information into what will allow me to be more effective.

Is it possible that in the future, information processing and sorting systems will be so powerful, and have gathered so much specific data on us that they will be able to deliver with amazing accuracy the information and data that is perfect for us in each moment? Will we be living with predictive models so sophisticated that a search for tennis rackets will deliver those models suited specifically to my skill level based on knowing that I played on my high school varsity team, but have been an infrequent player for several years? And will we even want to live with so much about ourselves known and stored in massive data factories? Ok, that was just my Skynet/scary robots/evil computers nasty thought of the week. Apologies.

But really, about the dealing with massive amounts of information effectively thing. It’s important.

Movember. Wow, who would have thought growing a mustache would be so frickin hard? About halfway through I was seriously wishing that I was training for a marathon. I mean, I got a lot of grief from women. Maybe they would be been nicer if I was raising money for breast cancer research instead of prostate and testicular cancer research. But hey, cancer is cancer and any time you’re raising money for ANY kind of cancer research, it does have benefits overall for every type. And given that 4 of my grandparents and 1 of my parents all died from different forms of cancer, it’s something that’s pretty important to me.

So a huge thank you to all who supported me or donated money. It was actually a pretty cool experience, topped off by a gala party last Thursday night with a whole lot of other Movember participants (and Mo Sisters.)  I didn’t know what to expect, going to a party in SF with a bunch of dudes sporting staches, but it was actually a blast and hilarious to boot. People were going all out for the costume contests and for the “Man of Movember” grand prize. The crowd was good, everyone was into the whole thing, and for a Thursday evening it kicked ass.

But wow, does it feel nice to be clean shaven again.