I‘m doing a Webinar today on Surviving and Thriving in the Economic Downturn, along with Thor Muller from Get Satisfaction and Scott Wilder from Intuit, moderated by Bill Johnston from Forum One, who also manages the fantastic Online Community Unconference. Working on my thoughts around this topic has been a great opportunity to reflect on why SocialRep is still plugging along quite well, in the midst of all the economic doom and gloom.

There are a lot of factors at play. But when I stand back and think about the meta frame for why SocialRep is still tooling along instead of flaming out or getting pummeled, there’s a pattern that interests me. In Startup World, especially in the valley, the dominant imperative is speed. Organize quickly. Raise money. Get to market fast. Grow fast. Run, baby, run. But for us, the focus palpably shifted last August when we stopped chasing money to focus instead on customers and product quality. Sure, we’ve grown much slower, but today we have a much more solid product and a base of revenue, which is perfect for a slow economic environment.

In short, we’ve embraced the Tortoise. We’ve taken a long view of the market, and marshaled our resources to move deliberately and steadily, holding ourselves in check when hares seem to pop up and speed away in front of us. It’s nerve racking sometimes to see a new competitor jump up and sprint away, but by now we’ve seen a couple of those hares further down the road, flattened like roadkill.

What does it mean to Embrace the Tortoise? It means to find and focus on your vision, and find your own pace in the market by being true to your customers and your product. A long term vision is not just stringing short-term results together–if you’re always sprinting, you eventually run out of steam. You need a solid sense of direction you believe in enough to plod toward, without being driven to waste your energy every time a competitor makes a move. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

It also means to take a long-term view in understanding your market–and this is especially important in marketing and social media. If you want to make it further than the next turn in the road, you need some strategy to anticipate what’s beyond it. The best way to do that is to be a student of history, which is something in short supply in the marketing profession. I talk frequently about the historical context of the social media phenomenon and the bursting media bubble. If you want a synopsis, I wrote about here.

It’s been a busy few weeks, but I’m happy to say I’m finally circling back with Jonathan Knowles to continue the discussion on Social Media and Marketing ROI, and we’re launching a survey together to measure marketer’s experiences with social media metrics. If you’re a marketing professional, please join us and take the survey. We’ll provide the results to everyone who participates.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary. We were lucky enough to get away for a few days prior to our anniversary, but I wanted to do something special on our actual wedding date, which was mid-week this year. All I had in mind was a nice dinner in San Francisco, until I met Michael Hraba at the first SF Social Media Breakfast. Michael is a marketing consultant to hotels, and he encouraged me to think about doing a marketing event at Cavallo Point, a brand new resort right next to the Golden Gate on the historic grounds of Fort Baker. That sparked the idea of taking my wife away just a few miles from home, and launched what I’m certain will be our new anniversary tradition.

Since we would only be gone overnight, I didn’t need to tell my wife anything until the last moment. I set up a sleepover for my son at a schoolmate’s, booked a room and dinner reservation, and casually told my wife to pack for an overnight on the morning of our anniversary. After work, I picked up my wife and we drove 10 minutes to Cavallo, checked in to a breathtaking suite under the Golden Gate, and opened a bottle of champagne before the 101 commute was even underway.

I love to travel, but I have to say, local tourism has a big attraction for me now. We had none of the stress of dealing with major packing, or airports, or house- and pet-sitting. Everything–including our son–was only minutes away in case of an emergency. Instead of spending the better part of a day making flights and connections, we checked in and checked out to the rest of the world. And for a fraction of the cost of leaving town, we enjoyed a spectacular resort and an amazing dinner. The next day, although it was bittersweet to stay only one night, we shared a nice breakfast and slipped right back into our lives without the huge re-entry price you typically have to pay for being away. The unexpected result was the sense of relaxation you usually only get on the third or fourth day of vacation.

I suspect we’ll hear a lot more about local tourism as the recession grinds along. You’d be amazed how easy it is to get away for just a night during the week, and mid-week specials make it a steal, even for the best rooms. Not only is it a nice way to see home in a new light, the memory refreshes every time you drive past the places you visit as a “tourist”.

If you’re in the Bay Area, Cavallo is phenomenal–the food, the hospitality, the view–they’ve really made a magical place. It’s well worth such an easy trip.

I’ve been truly slammed for the past few weeks, with a new SocialRep product release in the works, new customers, and the San Francisco Social Media Breakfast coming up next week. But as they say, if you want something done, give it to someone who’s busy. And this week, I finally found a resolution to a problem that’s been bugging me for months.

If you’ve joined this crazy productivity revolution, where you can run a couple of companies, half a dozen blogs, and a string of online personas, then, like me, you’ve probably reached a point of virtual schizophrenia. I’ve been working for months on finding a strong thread of singularity and simplification in the things I do, without losing the rich variety of channels to connect and create value. I’ve noticed that just the fragmentation of logging in to various separate blogs, social networks and websites has created a very real psychological resistance. I forget which bookmark to follow, which site I’m posting on, which idea was supposed to go where, which means that instead of managing these things on autopilot, I have to actively think about the most mundane tasks continually. Which sucks.

So after searching for more complex ways to simplify–like multi-tenant blog networks, and complex syndication routines–I finally came across a less perfect, but vastly simpler solution. Instead of trying to centralize everything, what if I could create connection “pods” that would segment and automate many of the connection tasks? And I’ve figured out how to do it with Firefox.

Here’s the skinny, and a disclaimer. I’m describing a conceptual routine that I’ve successfully implemented on my computer. I’m not offering a service or technical support. Proceed at your own risk. 🙂

The premise of this concept is simple.

1. I want to segment various common web connections and routines: Blogging, Networking, Business, Finance.
2. I want to be able to click on one icon, and have all the related connections opened in browser tabs, ready to go.
3. I want to customize each browser for each segment so that the working environment is visually distinct.
4. I must be able to have multiple segments open simultaneously.
5. Sorry, bookmarks won’t cut it. Not even close.

My solution is based on an aspect of FireFox that Web developers rely on–the ability to run multiple instances of the browser, under different user profiles, at the same time. If you have a home computer you share with your family, you might already have separate profiles for logging in to FireFox so that your bookmarks and history are yours alone. But if you take this concept up a notch, you can turn it into the solution I’m running now. The idea is to create a separate profile for each segment you want to manage (e.g. blogging), but then to use an obscure FF parameter to allow that profile to run simultaneously with other profiles. Each profile saves its own preferences, including bookmarks, themes, and session data, so you can customize a work environment for each group.

The result is a set of distinct icons on my task bar. When I click the “blogging” icon, an independent instance of Firefox with a slick Aero Theme opens, and automatically pulls up the admin pages of all my blogs in separate tabs. I use a password manager that assures that all I have to do is click “login”, and I’m ready to post on any blog in seconds. I’ve also customized the admin screens of each blog so they look like their respective blogs. When I click on Finance, a completely separate instance of Firefox opens, in a conservative theme, with my banking and accounting sites automatically opened in separate tabs. It’s awesome. I feel ten pounds lighter.

Here’s how to do it in Windows XP. Other systems may vary, but the concept is the same.

1. Click on Start, Run, and type in “firefox.exe -ProfileManager”
2. This brings up the Profile Manager. Create the Profiles you want. (Not sure how scalable this is, so be prudent.)
3. Unless you want to be forced to select a profile every time you run FF, check the box “Don’t Ask at Startup”
4. Now go to your desktop, right click on the desktop and choose “New > Shortcut”. This will be your launch icon.
5. Right click on your new shortcut, and choose “Properties”
6. For your “target” you need to enter the path to your “firefox.exe” file, probably in your Program Files, Firefox directory.
7. In the same text field after the path to “firefox.exe”, type “-P Name” (replace “name” with the name of your profile, e.g. Blogging), followed by ” -no-remote”. The “no remote” part allows you to run simultaneous independent instances of Firefox.
8. For clarity, you should “Change Icon…” in order to easily distinguish your launch icons. You can find lots of free icons on the web.
9. Drag the icon to your task bar.
10. Customize each instance of Firefox to suit your segment. I’ve made sure each theme is a different color, so I know immediately where I am.

Once you have your instance of Firefox up and running for different profiles, use the Firefox preferences tab to establish the pages you want to load when you launch Firefox. If you want to simplify things, just open each of the pages you want in a separate tab, and each time  you reopen Firefox, choose to renew your old session, and all of those pages will reload. You can use Firefox password manager to remember logins to simplify it even further.

I’ve also added some Tab add-ons from Firefox to color and organize tabs, but that’s a whole playground unto itself. The bottom line for me is that I now have a set of buttons to launch dedicated working environments in a way that clarifies and automates many of the mind-numbing tasks that I shouldn’t be wasting RAM on. I hope you find the same result.

Here’s my dedicated blogging instance of FF, with the slick Aero Theme, with all my blog admin sites ready to go in separate tabs.

I don’t know about you, but I have a mental ledger of the dumbest things I’ve ever done. It’s been under a layer of dust after I somehow survived my twenties: evading arrest on a motorcycle; walking into Kingston’s Trenchtown alone, white, and carrying a camera; stashing my emergency cash in the sole of my shoe, only to learn on the outskirts of Marrakesh that a few months of humidity and abrasion under foot will wipe the ink clean off the faces of twenties and hundreds, leaving them worthless.

Well, last week I had to dig up the ledger and add a new line. I left my backpack in a New York taxi. It was late, I was tired and in a rush, so when the cab pulled up to my hotel, I paid in cash and didn’t wait for a receipt. By the time I realized what had happened, the cab and my backpack were long gone. In horror, I inventoried everything that was lost. A laptop, a camera, a digital recorder. Costly but replaceable. The real losses could never be recovered. The pictures of our family Christmas that I hadn’t had time to download. A journal with years of writing, including poetry I wrote about watching my father die. A 1908 translation of the Bhagavad Gita that I treasured for its amazing lyricism. And of course, countless hours of work in the form of business documents and presentations created since my last backup.

I won’t belabor the anguish or self-loathing. Suffice to say I don’t need much help beating myself up, especially for something monumentally stupid. The real story is how I got everything back. Miracles happen.

The first mistake I made was assuming that I would never do something so idiotic. When my backup software started bugging out a few months ago, it wasn’t a top priority to get it fixed. I remember thinking before this trip that I should back everything up, but I was in too much of a rush setting up meetings and writing presentations. It’s amazing how much of the essentials of our lives we carry around with no safety net. If you travel with a laptop, backup should always be a top priority. In fact, my strategy now is to turn my laptop into a thin client, and avoid storing any permanent files on it.

The second mistake I made was failing to put a blindingly obvious tag on my pack with my contact information, including my contact while in New York. I had a big stack of business cards in the outside pocket, but they weren’t obvious, so they were useless. Tag your bag. Label your laptop. Put your name on anything you want back.

The third mistake I made was failing to get a receipt. A taxi receipt in New York carries important information, like the taxi medallion number, that will help you track down the taxi and driver if needed. If I had a dollar for all the people I called along the journey of tracking my stuff down who said “What? You don’t have a medallion number? [You poor fool!] I can’t help you.”

Okay, so I’ve lost a pack with thousands of dollars of electronics in a cab in New York, with no receipt, no cab number, no nothing. What are the odds of getting it back? Where do you even start? It took me a week to figure it out, but I’ll cut to the chase and tell you what to do if this happens to you.

1. Immediately write down everything you can remember about your cab ride. It’s crucial to figure out exactly where you were picked up, where you were dropped off, the pick-up and drop-off times, and the amount of the fare with tip. Any other details are good, but you need times and locations within a block or two and a 10-minute window.
2. Immediately Dial 311 to reach the Taxi and Limousine Commission of New York and file a report. The TLC is your best hope of recovering property, and you can’t do anything without a report.
3. The TLC has a list of police precincts in NYC. Precincts are the drop-off point for property lost in cabs. Unfortunately, as I learned, many immigrant cabbies don’t want to deal with the police if they don’t have to. So this is hit and miss. Also, some cab companies collect lost property at their office, and only drop it off at the precincts once a week, so you have to call back daily.
4. Get a list of the taxi brokers in New York City. There are 13,000 taxis in New York, but there only about 75 brokers that manage the vast majority of independent drivers. I called every one of them and got their fax number.
5. Fax a reward sheet to every broker, with a picture, if possible, of what you lost, a description, and contact information. Many brokers will reflexively say they can’t help you without a medallion number, but when you offer to send a reward sheet, they’re always responsive.

That covers the bases, but it wasn’t enough to get my stuff back. The next step I took was to track down the vendors of GPS payment systems in the cabs. It turns out that every licensed cab in New York has a GPS system that tracks the basic details of each fare. I found out there are three main vendors of GPS systems for NY taxis. A company called DDS, a company called CMT, and Verifone.

They’re not set up to do customer searches, but I weaseled my way through the phone tree and operators to find a technician that could do a database search. And this is where having the details of your cab ride are crucial. I was able to pinpoint my pickup and drop-off locations to specific addresses. I was able to pinpoint my pick-up and drop-off times to within 5 minutes. I knew the fare and tip give or take a couple of dollars. The technician can look the data up, narrow down the hits to specific records with cab numbers. It can take hours to do one of these searches, so you have to be exceedingly nice when you connect with someone in a position to help. I struck out the first two times, but on the third try I hit gold. They found the fare, found the medallion number, and the TLC called the cabbie and connected me.

I was incredibly lucky. The cabbie had my backpack and everything in it. He was an independent driver, not a native English speaker, and it turns out he works two jobs back to back, and hadn’t had the time to track down my contact information in the pack. He put the pack in the trunk and figured I would find him. He was kind of enough to drop the pack off at a UPS store, where I’d arranged packing, shipment and payment with the manager. I’m sending a reward to the cabbie, and a letter of thanks to the supervisor of the technician who helped me recover the pack.

I’ve learned a lot from this experience, other than my capacity for doing dumb things and the tactics of navigating the taxi system in New York to access data. Even while diligently tracking my backpack down, mentally, I wrote it off, assuming I wouldn’t recover it. How was it even conceivable? In that process, I mourned for what I’d lost, but realized it didn’t define me as much as I thought. I’m a writer, but I’m not what I write. A mountain of writing can be a trap that’s hard to escape.

I also learned, again, that people are far more helpful and honest than we’re conditioned to believe. I made more than 200 phone calls to track my backpack down. I talked to cabbies, policemen, administrators, technicians. I remember only one person who was somewhat less than pleasant, but even this person provided the little information and help that they could. I’ve learned that far more people will help you than won’t.

Finally, I’ve learned that miracles happen. But sometimes you have to help them along.

Photo Credit: Fiat Luxe