Before anything else, THANK YOU ANDREW for taking time out while pakcing to move and everything to give me some advice. Subsequent interviews have been much better.

So I’ve been struggling lately trying to get things sorted out for doing remote video interviews. The person who inspired me, more than any, to start doing these interviews is Andrew Warner. Over at Mixergy.com, he does terrific interviews with people who are crafting lives of their own design, mostly entrepeneurs. If that sounds interesting, head over there and poke around. If it doesn’t sound interesting, start with the interviews of Derek Sivers, Premal Shah and Yossi Ginsburg. If you don’t find those interesting and inspiring, I don’t know what to say.

Anyway, Andrew not only has interesting guests, but he really has the interview thing down and so, struggling with my own efforts, I asked him if he would consent to a phone call to help me out. Despite being in between his honeymoon and his impending move to Argentina, he found time to talk to me and here are some tips he passed on.

• Suggest a time in your initial email. This seems so obvious, but I’ve been wasting a lot of time getting consent and then going round about scheduling and waiting for replies. This way they can either say yes, no or suggest another time and that shortcuts the whole process.
• Transcripts. Andrew has transcripts of his interviews on his site and I asked him how he produces them. He said he uses Mechanical Turk and offers people $2 per 5 minute segment they transcribe. He said he thinks a good summary would actually be as good or better than a transcipt. That was my gut feeling, which is good news for me. Having paid my bills for 20 years by putting words on a page, I find the prospect of writing a summary of an interview a lot less daunting than chopping it into segments and getting it transcribed. Anyway, I don’t feel like I’ve really digested a conversation until I retell to someone else or I write about it (thus the current summary).
• I’m interested in interviewing skiers, ski instructors, ski mountaineering guides and folks like that. Not surprisingly, they’re not as techy as the web entrepeneurs that Andrew interviews, but I was stuck on the idea of Skype-to-Skype interviews or phone-to-phone interviews. He suggested just doing the interview over the phone via Skype, have audio only. Another solution that seemed so simple and obvious once Andrew said it.
• For audio-only interviews, show a picture with a play button so it sort of looks like video and gives people something to look at. This was huge because I was tearing my hair out about the video aspect and I couldn’t figure out how to get my telephone to record. I hadn’t thought I could just call someone on their home telephone using Skype and just record it. And I get unlimited long distance for $3 per month!
• Get a decent microphone. Andrew has tried mics up to $500. He recommended the Blue Snowball USB Mic, which I found at Amazon for just $69 ($139 list). It came two days later and the difference is huge — almost all the hum, hiss, buzz and other distortion dropped away. This is a huge improvement. $69 well spent. [update: the Blue Snowball came and I've recorded two calls with it. It's everything Andrew promised. HUGE jump in sound quality]

• Get a backup. Another tip that’s so obvious when someone says it. I had been experimenting with Pamela for Skype, which lets you record audio and video calls, but was having trouble with it quitting [update: this was a known issue and is now fixed], so I was afraid to depend on it. Andrew runs his call recorder (I believe Ecamm Call Recorder, which is Mac only), plus he runs a screen capture program (Screenflow, again Mac Only), so he is actually recording twice and if the primary recorder fails, he is automatically doing a backup. As obvious as it is brilliant once you someone tells you. I haven’t settled on a screen capture program, but there are some good free ones for Windows:
  • NCH Software has a whole host of free tools (with upgrades to pro versions, but generally the free ones do what I need at this point). For screen capture, I’m using Debut Video Recorder. The also have good audio and video file format converters, audio editing software (similar to Audacity).
  • Camstudio is a Camtasia competitor. Camtasia is the category leader and costs several hundred dollars. Camstudio does everything I could want.
• Webcams have lower quality than a real video camera, but allow you to see yourself. This is a good tip. I never realized how much I move around, look around close my eyes when I’m thinking, uhhhh rub my nose and eyes and lick my lips. I am not a TV presence and definitely won’t be the next Gary Vaynerchuk (another reason for me to like audio, even though I have a voice for print).

Maybe to people smarter than me, all of this seems obvious, but this advice cut through so many podcasting obstacles for me. It’s absolutely huge. Thanks Andrew!

I just loved the service on keyword airlines!

Source: Skymall catalog on a recent Delta flight.

I’m sure this testimonial is 100% legitimate. I mean, your typical loving family peppers their speech with “keyword” when they can’t think of the exact word, right? And a company would never reuse a testimonial would they? Of course not!

I was really bored, so I picked up the in-flight gadget catalog and they had this ad for the coolest keyword ever! The family in the testimonial for the keyword made it sound so good, I just had to have one!

A friend recently asked me to test Aardvark (vark.com) advice network (not to be confused with the amazing Firefox Aardvark extension, the developer’s best friend). Essentially, you upload all sorts of information about yourself, your knowledge and interests, and somehow it connects you with friends of friends. When they have a question, it sends you an email, chat or SMS message. It may be that I’m just simply not in their target audience, so some of my thoughts may be off base, but I do think that vark.com is missing the boat on some of the basic prerequisites for a social netoworking site. They say they do a lot of user testing, so they must have tested all this, but it seems like there’s a lot of testing yet to be done.

The Audience Problem

Like I say, not sure how much my thoughts are worth, since clearly they’re aiming at another audience. As in: I don’t do chat, IM, text messaging or any of that. I have long since trained my friends that I don’t often answer emails the same day I receive them (and long before I heard of Tim Ferris). The only immediate response thing I do is phone and skype and I only give my skype address out to family and a few friends and try to limit that. So it’s a bit hard for me to see how I would participate in Aardvark.

Conceptual level. The Big Idea level….

Here’s where they fail to make the sale to me and once they fail to make this sale, it’s an uphill battle for them to build trust through the rest of the process. The thing that is difficult for me to get around is that in my view there are personal and impersonal channels of communication.

• Personal: email, chat, skype, Facebook personal messaging, Twitter direct messagings. These are all messages from someone to me specifically and nobody else.
• Impersonal: Twitter posts, forums, Facebook wall, etc. These are messages that go from someone to the wide wide world. They’re not to me personally and uniquely.

I try to keep my personal channels free from impersonal messages. I have spamcatcher email addresses I use for things that blur the line, such as newsletters, mailing lists, signing up for accounts with BestBuy, Amazon and such. It strikes me that Aardvark is trying to use a personal channel (chat, email) to deliver an impersonal message. Yes, it is personalized — I only get messages that are supposed to be appropriate to me — but not personal, that is only to me. So that’s an adoption hurdle for me just as a concept.

The Registration Problem

They could overcome the personal/impersonal problem by using the registration process to allay fears and make the sale, but in my opinion, they do the opposite. Aardvark actually asks for quite a bit of information just to get started. I’m always skeptical of that and if I’m going to give away a lot of personal information about where I live and what I like, information that marketers will kill for (or worse yet, pay for). To give away all that information, it needs to meet one of two conditions, and preferably both:

• I need it. I may be a little uneasy about a site, but they have something that I absolutely need. I can’t do without it or I don’t want to do without it. They’re asking for personal details, but they’re offering something of great value.
• I trust them. There are a few sites that I trust implicitly with my information. I don’t give Amazon more than I have to, and they have only my spam catcher email address, but over the years they’ve built up great trust by not abusing my information. Often not-for-profits ask me to trust them because they have a great mission and are inherently good. Just like the government, if you catch my meaning. And if you don’t, that is to say that the government has been a poor steward of my privacy lately.

Typically, when I sign up for a new service that I don’t necessarily trust, I start by giving a spam catcher address and often a fake name (and almost always a fake birth date). If they want personally identifiable information,they need to build my trust either before, during or after the registration process.

I actually went all the way through the Aardvark registration process because I was asked by a friend to test it. I found it much too intrusive for a site that I had never heard of and knew little about. They have detailed information on how it works in theory, but nothing at all on what happens with my data, who can see it, and what control I would have over contact from people I know and don’t know.

An example

And then there are parts that I didn’t do anyway, even if invited by my friend…. Example: in general, I block all Facebook apps. I find all those snowballs fights, mafia, pirate stuff absurd and just a distraction to keeping in touch with family and friends. And I don’t collect Facebook friends. I try to keep it a personal channel as much as possible. If you we don’t have personal history together, you’re not on my Facebook list. When Aardvark offers to connect to Facebook, it’s still not clear to me exactly what’s going to happen, how it’s going to show up on Facebook, what my friends will see, and what exactly my benefit is. Ideally, exactly next to the Facebook connect button there should be a "what’s this?" or "how this works" link to a video that shows how it shows up in Facebook, what my friends will see, what benefits it offers and what hassles, if any, it imposes on my life. For me Facebook is a semi-personal channel and and I don’t want to annoy my friends and family that I keep in touch with via Facebook. Before I connect other data, I need to know that it won’t annoy my friends or affect my reputation.

A Broken Interface Erodes Trust

If I start setup, I can’t get to the welcome/home page any more or at least I couldn’t figure out how. It always brings me to the last spot I was in during setup like a pitbull that won’t let go. Clicking on the Aardvark at the top should always take me to the home page (a web interface standard that must not be broken), but it took me to the Facebook Connect page. So I’m not on Facebook (though I am) and it took me to the Add Categories page. But do I want to add categories? Again, are my categories and demographic info being shared with marketers? This type of behavior once again erodes trust. It makes the user feel trapped.

A recommendation

Think about every possible hesitation and catch me exactly at my hesitation point, like the suggestion to have an explanation about effects on privacy and such right next to the Facebook Connect button. I know of marketers who say they get much higher conversions when they have a popup link to their privacy policy right on the registration or order form, for example. That would help a lot.

Aardvark needs to think a bit more about the registration process if they want easy adoption beyond social networking true believers: what trust and social proof barriers might people perceive, figure out what the choke points are by keeping track of exactly where people abandon the process, figure out why, and take steps to fix it.

Online, trust is everything. In person, we have the idea that if something goes truly bad, we can go down to the business or local animal shelter or whatever and picket, protest, call the police, walk in with a lawyer. It doesn’t mean I trust those businesses. They often ask for a phone number at transaction time and I simply say no. But I do have the assurance that I can come down and find these people.

Trust is harder to build online and must be cultivated carefully and persistently at every possible occasion. There is no such thing as paying to much attention to building trust, and Aardvark needs to pay more attention.

Seth Godin recently wrote about what you give up when you let someone else drive, literally and figuratively. That got me thinking of everyday wisdom — the little things you learn from life that you forget were learned at all. In particular, it reminded me of some lessons I learned from hitchhiking that seem so obvious to me now, that I all but forgot learning them.

Back in the 1980s, I hitchhiked thousands of miles to find work, go rock climbing and visit relatives. After working the fish processing plants in Alaska, dressed in worn military surplus clothing, toting a large backpack and sporting a beard, I was not optimally groomed for hitchhiking success. I spent over eight hours by the side of the road waiting for a ride on many occasions and got picked up by a variety of somewhat unstable characters, including a nice old grandfatherly man who at one point was waving a gun about complaining about all the Californians invading Oregon. I never had a really bad ride, though and was only conditionally threatened with death ("If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you"). That seemed fair (I wasn’t planning to fuck with him) and he turned out to be quite a nice guy for someone only six months out of prison.

Over time I figured out some rules for successful hitching that turn out to be some pretty good rules for life, though I think I might need to remind myself of the lesson a bit more forcefully.

1. The slowest, most dangerous way to hitchhike is to stand by the side of the road with your thumb out hoping someone takes pity on you and stops to help.
2. The fastest, safest, most effective way to hitchhike is to go to places where travellers are already stopped, and pitch your case.
3. Looking dangerous puts you in danger.

If it’s not obvious why this is so and how it applies elsewhere, let me just ask this:

• Is buying from your online store as difficult as stopping a speeding car on a road without an adequate pullout for a total stranger who looks dangerous?
• Did you get your last job by waiting around for someone to post a position that matched your qualifications?

Some Commentary for Slow Learners

Let me explain a little more about how this works. Rather than standing by the side of the road, find a place like a gas station right off the highway. Approach someone and say "Excuse me, sorry to bother you. I’m trying to get to SomeCity. I’d be happy to help with the gas [unless you're really, really broke] if you’d be willing to let me ride along."

• Take control of the decision. If you stand by the side of the road with your thumb out, you have turned over the choice of whom you’ll ride with to random psychopaths passing in cars. Don’t let the psychopaths decide. Ask for help, rather than waiting for someone to offer. Donate to a political campaign early, before the big money psychopaths have chosen someone who meets their needs. Aside from his first job out of college, my brother has convinced every company he’s worked for to create the position they hired him into. I pretty much liquated everything and took on debt because the most important thing to me was to become a historian. Within two years I was eeking out a living and getting paid to do exactly the sort of research I wanted, despite only taking one history course in college. Lately, though, I’m disappointed in myself. I feel like I’ve been doing too much standing by the side of the road and not enough going to parking lots. I signed up to give a talk way outside my field in November. We’ll see how that goes.
• Make it easy for people to help you. I see a lot of people hitching where traffic is moving fast, there’s no decent pullout and I don’t get a long look at them. If they’re already stopped, you’ve taken away one impediment to letting you onboard. How hard is it to keep my foot on the gas compared to stopping? How hard is it to go back to Google for another search instead of trying to navigate your impossible website?
• Make a connection.You might think, "They can’t know I’m not a psychopath just by one sentence at a gas station." That’s true, but they can sense normalcy, they can see you up close, they can tell you’re not stinking drunk. Or just plain stinking. That’s already a huge boost over someone that they’re trying to glimpse by the side of the road at 50mph. Your one sentence is a chance to show you’re polite and respectful ("Excuse me, I’m sorry to bother you") and your chance to persuade ("I’d be happy to help with the gas" powerfully invokes the principle of reciprocity — you’ve offered to help, so they’ll want to help too). That may not be enough to overcome their resistance to letting a stranger in the car, but it’s a lot more persuasive than sticking your thumb out. This is universal. Nothing makes people feel as good as helping someone out. Studies have shown that over the long term, most people get a bigger boost in happiness by giving gifts than by receiving them. If you make a connection, people will want to help you, and that could mean giving you a ride or buying from your store. I just made an unplanned purchase for $78 in the store next to the ice cream shop, because the people in there connected to me.
• Dress for Success or Birds of a feather flock together. If you look grungy, dirty and dangerous, you’ll get picked up by people who see that as normal. Your goal is to appear normal to the people your prospective ride. That doesn’t mean you necessarily want to look like your clients. You want to look like someone they can trust in this situtation. People in suits and ties don’t want mechanics in suits and ties.

I’ve often heard "Knowledge is power," supposedly first coined by Sir Francis Bacon. Bacon was an interesting guy, but in this particular case he was wrong. Knowledge is not power, it’s leverage. If I know something, but choose not to act, I’m powerless. If I have no persistence, courage, and motivation to couple with my knowledge, nothing happens.

In physics, power is work per unit time. Knowledge increases efficiency, but it doesn’t do anything all by itself. If I have only knowledge, nothing great happens. But as I increase my knowledge, I add a little more length to the pry bar. If I have enough pertinent knowledge, I have a huge bar. Perhaps with that lever and enough effort and persistence and courage, I can move the world. But with just a big lever, nothing happens.

I’ve spent most of my life as a scholar, believing it was the lever that mattered. It took me until my 40s to figure out that lever is just one piece.

When I was about ten years old, my mom and I ran into a problem at the ski area where were skiing. This problem was 100% the fault of the ski area and was the result of what might be called incompetence. We had to go to some office and ask for help. The person in front of us was screaming at the customer service rep who stonewalled him until he left upset. My mother walked up and said "I’m sorry, but I have problem and I’m wondering if you can help me." The surly customer service rep who resisted the screams of the previous guest said "What’s the problem?" and then proceeded to go out of her way to fix it. Not only did we leave happy, but the employee was happy too.

As we left, my mother gave me a lesson that has resulted in me getting my way more times than I can count in the intervening 36 years. She said "Most people naturally want to help you and the trick is to make that easy for them. You can always yell later, but you start with a yell, you can never take it back."

Sometimes, though, it’s just satisfying to yell, even when you know it’s not in anybody’s best interest. I did it yesterday for the first time in a very long time. I’m still trying to decide whether or not it felt good.