I’m partly kidding, but also partly serious… Read my last blog to see what I think I’m right about.

I read all the comments and I absolutely love debating with you guys (and girls).

Maybe I wasn’t clear enough in my explanation.  Maybe I’m wrong, who knows.  Let me try again to make my main point.  If you agree with me, great!  If you disagree, great!  Seriously, either way, please share in the comments below……

Here’s what I’m really saying.  I believe the internet CAN BE much more powerful than the way 99.999% of the people use it for currently.  If you aren’t great at searching, you won’t get what you need.  This is totally true.  And it’s true that most people are REALLY BAD with search and finding opportunities and information online.  They just don’t know how bad they are.

It’s not just the fact that the internet exists that is such a big deal.  It’s about what this means and what the net makes possible.

Reading articles and finding facts online is super basic.  I’m talking about what else the internet allows us to do that is so new to all of our human history.  Think about LinkedIn.com.  If you don’t already use it, you absolutely should.  It’s one of the most powerful sites ever.

Imagine you were back in 1995 and you wanted to speak with an expert in marketing at a particular large company.  How could you do it?  How would you even find the location of the company if you didn’t already know it?  It’s hard to remember life before the internet.

Now, you can go on LinkedIn.com, search for specific jobs and people in any company.  You can contact them and come up with a reason to call them, email them, or even take them out for lunch to ask them stuff (you just need to be creative to think of a reason they’d want a free lunch with you.  It’s really not that hard either)  You can meet with people all over the world in different companies and different job positions.  If you can’t meet them face to face, you can at least email them and set up a phone/Skype call.  I do this all the time.  Seriously.

This one thing is just ONE example of many things the internet allows us to do, IF we decide to take advantage of this.  Imagine how hard it would have been to even find the name of a person in the marketing department in Samsung 20 years ago.  How would you even do it back then?

This is such a game changer for sales.  You can now run an international sales department without leaving your office.  You can find corporate clients (other businesses), then call the right people on the phone or on Skype, send them your website and other documents via email, and close sales deals online.  You don’t need to meet in person.  Some people say it helps, but it’s unnecessary.

Imagine learning about sales in an MBA program that costs a ton of money.  Do you think they teach this new way of meeting clients and closing sales deals?  Do you think they recommend the option of selling huge sales orders while still in your underwear?  Of course not!  They are teaching what was true 20 years ago.  They pretend they are up to date, but they are lying.  Schools are a business, and changing what they teach takes so much effort and energy.

Ok, this school is known for being kind of a joke, but look at this.  It’s an online university.  Students pay thousands and thousands of dollars for their online business courses.   It’s super popular.  It’s INSANE.  That link was directly to their business program.  If you read it and believe it, then WOW.  I don’t know what to tell you.  I’m shocked anyone would think this is a good idea for the money. Shocked!!

The internet can change not only what articles we can read, but also who we can meet and how we can find them.  You can find a job on the other side of the world by researching companies and contacting them DIRECTLY with your ideas, even if they don’t say they are currently looking for jobs.  Then you can set up an interview.  It doesn’t always work, but it often does.  But people just insist on doing everything the old way, and getting pretty terrible results.  They go on job websites and send their resume all over the place; often for low paying jobs they won’t even get.

Even many new sales jobs will require 5 years work experience and a long list of contacts.  This made sense in the past, but why does anyone with talent need the contacts already?  If they are confident and hardworking, they can contact anyone they want in any company.  The internet makes us all have a huge network of business contacts if we are willing to use it properly.

I’m just talking about business and sales here, but this really applies to almost anything.  The internet can change everything if we are creative enough to know how to use it; and I’m really not just talking about reading articles.  I’m talking about in every way imaginable.

I hope I’m making more sense here… If not, let me know I’m a crazy madman in the comments!  I love reading it all, good or bad

Join Addy boy and I in the VIP room.  You’ll LOVE IT!!

Have you ever wondered why stuff gets more expensive over time?  I remember when my grandma used to tell me that she could remember when a can of Coke was a nickel (5 cents).  You could go to the store and buy 20 cans of Coke with one USD.  Hilarious.

We certainly can’t do that now.  Why not?  You would think that it would be easier to make Coke with all the advances in technology and worker productivity.  Why is it so expensive compared to the past?

And Coke is just one example.  Almost everything was super cheap before, and now it goes up and up and up.  Of course, people’s wages get higher too, but what’s the point in having a higher wage if you have to pay more money to buy everything?

Why can’t we keep prices the same and use productivity gains (the increase in worker performance) to make our stuff cheaper for us?

…OK

Now what about this question?  Why do so many countries owe so much money (huge debts) AND why do they have to pay interest on the debt they borrowed?  It makes perfect sense if they are borrowing it from another country, but often this is not the case at all.  Often countries borrow money from the central banks in their own country.  This central banks make them pay it back, and with huge interest.

And who pays the interest?  The people in the country, and they pay it all with their tax dollars.  This seems totally retarded if you think about it.  If the government is spending our own money (the people’s tax dollars) then why would we have a system where they borrow it from banks?  Why can’t they just create their own money to spend, and at least that way, they wouldn’t have to pay interest on this money.

It’s true that if the government just makes more money, then all other people’s money would become worth less than before, but that’s better than having the government (ie. the tax payers) pay it all back plus interest on the loans isn’t it?

From my research, I found out that this all has a very interesting history.  Powerful bankers are much more powerful than the people (and the government) in a country.  They “call the shots”.  ”Calling the shots” means to make the important decisions.  They are so rich and powerful, and most of this stuff is a secret to most people.  And they want to keep it that way.

It’s not a secret that banks are rich, powerful, and have a lot of money.  But it’s not at all very well known what the hell is going on “behind the scenes”.  That means “outside of public awareness”.

I’d love to hear your opinions on this topic of money.  Please answer:

A) Why does everything keep costing more and more money?  Is this a good idea?  Who is it helping and who is it hurting in your opinion?

B)  Why would a government have a system where they ‘borrow’ money from banks, instead of just making it themselves to avoid having a debt with interest that the tax payers need to pay off?  What is going on?

Even if you have no idea, don’t be shy, just take a guess and share your opinions with us.  We’d love to hear them.

And if you are interested in this topic (which you really should be, it’s awesome when you start getting into it “for both men and women”) then you should check out these 3 awesome full length movies “documentaries” that I have downloaded and put in the kick ass VIP community.  They are some of the best videos I’ve seen.  You will love them, and learn a lot of cool English too.  I guarantee it

When I was growing up, I remember everyone around me saying that I NEED a university education if I don’t want to have a terrible life.  I believed it.  Almost everyone I knew believed it too.

At that time, university wasn’t SOOO expensive.  Students could pay for school with a good part time job.  They didn’t graduate with a huge debt and crazy student loans.

Things are very different now.  University is unbelievably expensive, and more and more students are going to school.  It seems that everyone believes that having a university degree will somehow just “magically” give them a good job when they graduate.  Well, with so many people having degrees, the “good jobs” are getting harder and harder to find.  Students in the US are paying an average of $27 000 USD per YEAR just to go to school.  Some students are paying a lot more.  When they graduate, they have an insane amount of pressure to pay back a crazy student loan, and it’s harder and harder to find a high paying job just by showing people your degree.  A lot of employers now realize that A) too many people have the same thing, and B) It’s really just a “fancy” piece of paper.

With technology changing so fast as well, colleges and universities aren’t really able to “keep up” with it all, and really prepare students with the proper knowledge they will need for the jobs of the future.

Chinese students have been going to the US in HUGE numbers over the past 10 years or so.  They are growing so fast.  I just read in a really interesting article from the Wall Street Journal that about 70% of them return to China after graduating to find a job, and less and less of them can find a good job.  They’ve almost “wasted” their parent’s hard earned money, and it’s not their fault either.

The price of education is going up fast, the quality is going down fast, and more and more people are joining the workforce with the same degree, the same piece of paper.

They have a huge debt/loan to pay off.  It’s almost like they have a mortgage, but NO HOUSE!

Students in America owe a total of over 1 trillion dollars in student loans.  That is $1 000 000 000 000.  Insane.  Thousands and thousands of students in the US owe more money just in student loans, than the price of a pretty decent house!  I’m not joking.

REAL skills (like learning high level English, computers/internet, and networking) are becoming more important (and not expensive)

Anyway……  Do I think that it’s a terrible idea to get a university education?  Of course not!  But I absolutely think that you should really think about this carefully, and don’t just be a sheep and think that your insanely expensive piece of paper will just magically help you.  You need to think ahead and think “smarter” than most of the other people who just believe whatever they are told by society.

I’d love to know where you are from, how old you are, and what your thoughts are about this topic.  Please share your thoughts about this important topic in the comments below.

I also just watched an AWESOME documentary about this situation and I put that video and the article about international students studying in China here in the VIP community for you guys to enjoy.  You will love both.  There is a lot of great stuff in there that is both really interesting AND will help your English.  I spend so much of my time looking for this kind of stuff for you guys.  I’m sure you’ll love it

Again, please let me know your situation, and your exact opinion on this.  If you completely agree or totally disagree with me, that’s totally fine.  It’s great practice for your English to get your thoughts down in writing, and it’s great for all of us (including me) to learn and think about different perspectives.  We can all learn from each other.

“The 1 %” is a relatively new and very popular term to refer to the richest 1% of the people in society. So, for example, if you had a small town of 1000 people, “the 1 %” of that town would be the richest 10 people.

This term is used a lot when talking about “rich people” in general, or people who should be paying more in taxes, or when talking about the “wealth gap”. That is, the large and growing difference between rich and poor people.

A “gap” is a space. I could say, “She went to the dentist to fix the large gap between her two front teeth. She looks much prettier now”.

So when we hear something like, “The wealth gap is getting a lot bigger.” That means that the rich people are getting richer and the poor people are getting poorer.

“The one percent” are the rich people. They also want to stay rich. Many of them will influence politicians (law makers) to make laws that help them keep their money (low taxes) and help them keep earning more of it easily.

They have been very successful in the USA over the last 30 years. The top 1% of the people in the US now own about 25% of all of the money. (In the 1970′s, the top 1% had only 9% of the money.)

The situation is getting more and more severe as well. Life is amazingly easy financially for the top 1% of the people, and it’s very hard for the bottom 25% of the people. Those people have a hard time buying enough healthy food for their families and clothes for their kids.

Many, but not all, people in the 1% make the argument that poor people are lazy and shouldn’t get any help from the government. They believe they already pay more than enough money in taxes. They believe that if the poor people want more money, they can just work harder for it. No one is stopping them.

I am personally somewhere in the middle. I do believe that people who work hard should be allowed to have a much better stuff than people who sit around doing nothing. I also believe that many poor people are in fact very lazy and believe that they should get free stuff for doing nothing.

But I don’t believe that the rules of the game are reasonable. It’s possible to work for 60 hours a week (ie. not lazy) and still not be able to feed your family healthy food and pay for health care and pay for your kids to play sports and have an education. I think that’s a bit ridiculous.

An economic system that allows for rich people to have their own private air planes and also allow for millions of poor people to not be able to afford a tomato sandwich and a visit to the doctor seems stupid.

I’d like to see economists work towards a new system that allows for a very large and healthy middle class. There would still be some rich and poor people, but the difference wouldn’t be as insane as it is now.

BUT…… Guess what. I really can’t imagine that happening. It seems like we’re in a world where greed is #1. The richest people have so much control of everything and they will do anything to make it stay that way.

So, no matter what you think or hope is true, we’re living in a world where it is important to try to get ahead and earn money. No one is going to take care of you, you need to take care of yourself. The difference between rich and poor is huge, and it is getting bigger every year. Having a good job will pay a lot of money, and getting a terrible job will pay almost nothing, even if you are working hard in both jobs. You need to be more competitive. You need to improve your chances to get a high paying job by doing anything you can. Your hard work now will make your life much better in the future, and your family’s as well.

If that isn’t an amazing reason to start getting more serious about learning English right now (so you can be more competitive and earn more money) I really don’t know what is.

Love to hear your thoughts below.

For the best ways to improve your English fast, join us in the VIP, AND in our high level community. These places are for people who really want to get ahead in life.

In Canada, you can play golf at a VERY nice golf course for under $200 per time.  Sometimes it’s much less than $100.  And I’m talking about really beautiful golf courses, not just average ones.

So why then, would any reasonable person pay $100 000 per year for a membership?  It made no sense to me before.  Now it makes perfect sense.

These guys aren’t paying for how nice the golf course is.  That is only part of it.  It’s a small part actually.  What they are really paying for is the community.  Think about the other people who go to those courses.  Most of them are also successful business people.  They pay for status and ability to meet these people.  They talk and do business together.  They make friends and get their children in this rich group of successful people.  In some ways, the whole thing makes me sick.  I wish the world were a more fair place.  But the reality is that it’s not.  It does make sense for these people to stay together, meet each other, and network together.

It’s MUCH more likely that you will meet someone worth doing business with on one of these super expensive golf courses than if you were to try to meet these types of people at other places where “regular” people can go.

I was thinking about this because I was thinking about a social networking website for English learning.  These aren’t the exact same thing, but you’ll see what I mean in a minute…

People who speak English as a second language and are actually serious about improving their English, their business, their lives, etc, don’t have anywhere to go to meet each other online.  There are a lot of garbage websites that allow anyone on there.  If you want to speak with someone to “practice your English”, you can absolutely find a partner on a million free sites.

But the problem with this is HUGE.  These sites that allow anyone to join, attract people who aren’t really serious about learning English or really serious about anything at all.  Why?  Because most people in the world are not serious about anything they are doing.

If you want to meet a partner to speak English with, share ideas, share stories, share culture, you will want to meet someone who is at or above your level.  You want someone who can challenge you and you can learn from.  It’s not easy to find these people, but they exist.

Imagine for a second that you wrote on your Facebook page, “I am looking for someone to learn from, talk about business and life, and really challenge each other to improve our English skills”.  I can’t imagine you will find anyone.  Maybe, if you are lucky, someone will say “Yes” to your offer, but they probably won’t be the type of person you are hoping for.

As you probably know, Add and I have been making a new free video EVERY DAY at www.LearnEnglish232.com  

We are hoping to get people to get in the habit of going there every day for the new lessons.  We want to grow that site to 50 000 visitors per day.

But many of the people who find this site or that site aren’t super serious about learning English.  We also want to find the SUPER SERIOUS people and provide an opportunity for amazing English, business, and life learning that does not exist anywhere else on the internet.  That’s our goal.

The people who are not serious will not pay a small monthly fee to join the membership part.  And that’s great.  Our plan is to build a membership site for serious learners.  Everyone will have a great profile with an awesome photo, bio, linkedIn page, Skype number, where they are from…  A lot of stuff.  Then these people will be able to search through the other serious members and we can all have a really high level and private conversation.  Also, the members will be able to contact each other and set up high level language exchanges and other things.  It will be a real community.  I’ll be on there providing reading material, movie talk, technology stuff, and a bunch of interesting and high level topics for group discussion.  We’ll all push ourselves to get better and better in not only English, but in life too.

I want to have a lot of great free English learning content for everyone to enjoy, and a high level SUPER VIP program that is connected to this one and also adds a lot more.  We’re still talking about how we want the site to be.  And since some of you guys who are reading this right now will be interested in joining it, it would be great to hear your ideas now.  We are building it for you and other high level people like you.

What do you think of this idea?  What would you like to see in that program?

Help us design it with your ideas and then it will be much better that way!

And by the way, don’t worry, it won’t be expensive like an elite golf course!  It doesn’t need to be.  The only reason I used that example was to try to make a point.

Love to hear your thoughts guys.  By the way, does anyone here already have the great habit of going to www.LearnEnglish232.com everyday yet?  What do you think?  Have you shared it with your friends, students, or teachers?  What do they think?  We’re still in the beginning stages of developing this, and we’re sure this will be the best yet!

It will be connected in some way with China232.com VIP membership, so don’t worry about that.  We’ll take care of you guys and make it kick ass!  There will be tons of amazing free stuff for everyone and an insanely awesome high level private English learning VIP club.

Sounds like a win/win to me!  What are your thoughts on this whole topic?  Even the part about rich people paying so much for golf.  Does it make sense to you too?

Your comments are always appreciated.  You guys have been great lately with that.  Keep it up.  I read EVERY one!!

I hope this is going to be amazing for you!

Add and I have been working a lot on making our program better and more helpful.  We get a lot of great emails from you guys, but we got a really “heart warming” email that we’d love to share with you.  When we see that this program makes a real difference in real people’s lives, it makes us keep going.  I hope you find this story as inspiring as we did.  It was a great Christmas and New year’s present for us here at the 232.

It’s from a 26 year old Korean girl named Yoon Ji.  (Thanks for sharing this with us Yoon Ji!)

Here is what she wrote to us a couple days ago:

“Hi Andy and Add,

I hope you get my email so you can know what a help you have been for me.  Please don’t feel you should respond to me, I just hope you read this.  I have been listened to your podcasts for about a half a year while in my car.  My good friend recommend them to me so I tried.  I listened to many free ones and I enjoy them and learn many things from you.  I can feel it was slowly helping me with my speaking, listening, and confidence.  Like many Korean people, I learned English in a boring way in school.  I did not have any foreign friends so my speaking sucked before you guys entered my life.  

I really want most to learn Business English because I want to earn a high salary in my job and have a more interesting work experience.  I did work in marketing in Seoul for 3 years already.  I sometimes need to speak on the phone with native English speakers and I often need to write business Emails.  That’s why I was so interested in your email writing course for business English.  I wanted to tell you my true story.  I bought your VIP lessons about 6 weeks ago.  I think the big reason was not only for the VIP lessons but also for to get the email course you mention on your business English page.  I read all of it in 3 days and practice all the advice you gave me.  I can’t believe it!  Last week 2 customers were very happy with my communication with them.  They told my manager and I got a good raise in salary.  They think my English is getting better fast because I am working hard to study.  They don’t know the truth.  I want you to know the truth.  You deserve everything!  I took your advice and changed my writing style.  It worked so well.  I am 100% sure this is why I got my raise.  My new job is more exciting and much better pay.  I love this email course and I love your VIP lessons.  Please keep going.  I will always stay member of this wonderful site and I will never forget this!  Thank you so much and have a great new year for both you guys!  I am excited for American Accent program too.

Your huge fan,

Yoon Ji Kim”

Well, first of all Yoon Ji, that is so amazing to hear such a sweet story.  We are so happy for you!  It’s so inspiring to see you have achieved your goal and improved your life!  We have received many very kind emails about this website and the free business writing course you were talking about:

Business Email Writing Course

Your email is the best one so we wanted to share it with everyone.  Sometimes a success story can inspire other people to try harder to achieve their dreams.  You are doing an amazing job with your English learning and your writing is very good.  I can totally see why your boss would give you a big raise!  That’s awesome!  It’s wonderful to give us so much credit for your success, but it’s really you who did it.  Congratulations!  If we were any part in helping you achieve your dream, that is the biggest gift of all for us.

Thanks for sharing this!  I hope all of you read this story and get excited about 2013!  Let’s all do amazing things this year!  We can do it!

I will love to hear your comments and plans for success in 2013 below.  Thanks for reading guys.  Thanks for sharing Yoon Ji!

Andy

We’re going to keep doing the podcasts of course, we’re just going to add a lot to what we’ve been doing.  I have a lot of things that I can think of teaching you guys off the top of my head.  Here are 3 of them:

1.  How to negotiate to earn more money in your current job

2.  Modern and effective ways to look for a better job

3.  How to totally kill a job interview and make sure you get the great job you found.

Those 3 things above are about making more money and getting a higher paying and more interesting job.

I’d also like to make some bonus courses about lifestyle things like dating and relationships.  Add was thinking about making some cooking courses (possibly with video)  Add is a great chef.

Before we get too crazy with making this bonus material, we’d love to hear from you guys about what you’d like to see the most.  We can really make any kind of courses that you guys want.  It just makes sense to get your advice first before we go too wild.

We did already make a first course, however, on Email Writing for Business.  I think it’s an extremely important topic.  I haven’t seen any good information on this stuff either, so we decided to go ahead and make our first bonus course.  This is going to be the first of many to come.  Please help us out by saying what YOU would like to learn about and we’ll do our best to make what you want.

By the way, I love the comments you guys keep leaving on these blogs.  I hope that you keep leaving more.  It helps your writing, and it helps us see some common writing errors.  I’m considering making another course about correcting the top 50 common mistakes non-native speakers make when they write general comments.  What do you think about that?

Our entire goal is to improve all areas of your English to as close to the “native” level as possible.  I KNOW this really CAN happen.

Again, here is the first course:  Business Email Writing Course

Looking forward to your comments.  Thanks!

Add and I were thinking about this question today when we were shopping for groceries and other basic stuff we needed.

We realized how important marketing was when we were thinking of which toothpaste to buy.  Shopping for something like toothpaste is interesting when you think about it.  I imagine that most people don’t care at all about the brand name in terms of “coolness”.  It’s not like BMW, LV, Apple, or even Starbucks.  People won’t judge you at all in terms of which toothpaste you use.  They won’t even know.

I also imagine that most people are looking for the same things when they are shopping for toothpaste.  I think we all want toothpaste to:

1.  Make our teeth clean

2.  Make them extra white

3.  Taste good

4.  Not be ridiculously expensive

I also guess that most people don’t spend any time researching toothpaste brands.  I know I don’t.  So, how do we make our decision?  We all buy toothpaste so our decision must be based on something.

I really don’t know how exactly I make my choice.  First of all, I don’t really want to spend much time thinking about this decision.  It’s not like I’m buying a new car or a new house.  I won’t spend more than 30 seconds thinking about it.  I won’t even look at all of the options or all of the prices.  I guess most people are the same, or similar.

I quickly look at all the boxes of toothpaste and just grab the box that looks like it would be the best one.  If it says “tooth whitening” and costs a bit more money, I’ll probably buy it, especially if the box looks and feels good.  I know that I’m probably wasting a bit of money on buying the nice box, but for some reason I don’t care.  Part of me feels more relaxed when I buy a better looking box of toothpaste.  Part of me believes that the toothpaste in the prettiest box is also the best in quality.  Logically, I know they are all almost the exact same product in different boxes, but I willingly allow myself to almost get fooled.

After I chose the toothpaste I wanted, I realized that I make almost all of my shopping decisions based on marketing.  I have almost no other information to make a choice on most of the stuff I buy.  I just buy the one that looks clean, fresh, and good.  A nice package made of nice coloured stuff makes a huge difference when you have no idea of how else to make a choice.

In many ways, I absolutely hate marketing.  I wish it didn’t exist.  In my little dream world, I wish that people bought only the best quality stuff.  Then companies could focus all of their time and energy on making the best products.  The best stuff would win and the terrible products would lose and those companies would fail.  The unfortunate reality, however, is that marketing is too important to ignore.  If you totally forget about it, you won’t make enough money to eat or turn on a light, even if you have the best product in the world.

Add and I found out how important it is with this website.  Our original plan was to only focus on making the VIP section as good as possible.  We hoped that just making a great product was all we had to do.  We really want this website to be the world’s best for learning English.  We don’t want to just say it is, we want it to be TRUE.  (We actually believe it is by the way).  Anyway… The problem is that we need to focus some of our time on marketing.  There is no way to totally forget about image, even if we want to.  That’s my experience anyway.  I’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject.

I also want to thank everyone who has been writing comments on these blogs.  They are really interesting to read, and great practice for your writing.  It’s awesome to see your ages, countries, and jobs.  It makes the comments come alive.  It reminds me that this website is for real people.  That sounds kind of stupid but I think you know what I mean.

I’d love to read your opinion on a couple things:

1.  How much do you think marketing affects your buying decisions in your own life?

2. Does good marketing matter more for certain types of products?  Which ones?  Why?

3.  How do you think we could improve the marketing of our VIP page?  (We try our best on making the actual product as good as possible, we’d just love to hear if you guys have any marketing ideas too.  You guys are smart and we take your opinions seriously.

They were in a courtroom and Tom yelled out: “I want the Truth”, and Nicholson replied with “You can’t handle the truth”. The reason I loved that line so much is because that’s how I feel in this world. People can’t handle hearing the truth about stuff unless it’s the truth that they want to hear. It’s unbelievable.

If someone says, “I want your honest opinion, do you think I am pretty?” and your honest opinion is “Actually no, you are one of the ugliest people I’ve seen in my life”, you can’t say that even if they beg you for the truth. Actually, I can kind of understand that one. People have feelings and that would be hard to hear. But in the business world, where people should be less sensitive, they are not. It is so fake.

Add and I were at a conference yesterday in Shanghai. We went there with a company we are consulting for. They are small and super cool. Anyway, the topic was about the internet and social media (Facebook, Twitter) etc. (We have a hilarious podcast coming out next about the real story there). We’ve been sharing more of our “real opinions” in the VIP room because it’s a private place where we don’t have to be shy. We can be free and say whatever we want in there without having to worry too much about weird comments.

Anyway, the conference sucked (The lunch was not bad at least). The speaker was from a large multinational PR company. He was basically saying a bunch of obvious things about the internet and making everyone believe that “viral marketing” is easy if you go through his company. It was a joke, but most of the audience actually thought it was pretty good. Many of the people there were from other large companies that had nothing to do with the internet. They “bought into” his long and stupid presentation and I’m guessing his company will get a lot of business from that.

There was a question and answer period at the end of the conference. Anyone could ask the speaker anything. I started getting nervous and my heart was racing. I wanted to say my honest opinions. I wanted everyone in the room to know they were being tricked.

There were probably about 150 people in the room. About 95% were wearing suits. I was wearing jeans, a golf shirt, and a pair of sunglasses to give you an idea of what was going on.

Everyone was polite, in a fake way, and it was so annoying. I get this feeling every time I’m in one of these situations. Time moves slowly. I hate it. I have so much to say but I end up saying nothing. I feel like I’m cheating the world or something. Even if people don’t agree with my opinion, I somehow feel it’s evil if I don’t at least share my true feelings.

One thing I hate about business is that so many businesses just try to sell their stuff to everyone. There is just so much lying involved. The truth is that most people should NOT buy most products. When I look around at the English learning market for example, I see a lot of businesses just trying to sell rather than teach. Of course they teach something, but they don’t care if a student pays $2000 USD at the beginning of a course and either learns nothing or doesn’t go to class. Actually, them paying and not going to class is the best situation for the school. They just get free money and can get another paying student to fill the classroom. It’s sick.

It’s really funny when it’s B2B (Business to Business sales). Huge companies pay so much money for the weirdest things. A friend of mine who works for a major market research company says that many of their business clients pay over 10 million USD every year for their market research. It doesn’t mean it’s a bad product, but he told me that they will sell it to any major company who wants it.

His job is to wear a suit and make the research sound a lot better than it is. A lot of the business is about creating an image that you think the other person will like to hear. It should be about making great products and services but it’s just not like that in the “real world”. Small companies can be different. It really depends on who is running them. Huge companies need to make sure they are making money for their investors though. They don’t care where the money is coming from. They just want more of it.

Of course we are “free” to say whatever we want, but the reality is that people don’t. Anyone else who felt the same way I did just kept silent. We knew that if we said what we wanted to then we would look like terrible people.

The honest question in my mind was, “Do you know that you are selling services to many companies who don’t need them or do you actually believe every word you are saying?” I really wanted to know but I couldn’t ask.

I’d love to hear your comments on this and about my last blog about a cool kind of high def video camera sunglasses.

Commercials are usually seen as just an annoying interruption of what we are trying to watch. We use this commercial time to get something to eat, go to the bathroom, or at least see what else is on TV. If we are watching TV with a friend, we use this time for talking and not paying attention. Companies pay so much money for these commercials and many of them don’t work as well as they hope. They might work a little bit, but often not enough to justify the cost of the ad. Companies have been doing this kind of advertising for so long that they have become addicted to it. Smart companies are doing something else that you might not even be aware of. This is the best kind of advertising. Pay attention to it next time you are watching a TV show.

The idea is called “product placement“. Apple is great at doing this kind of advertising. If you watch a lot of movies and TV, you will notice that a lot of the characters use Apple products. We don’t think about this as an advertisement. It seems very natural. This is perfect for trying to sell something. If a character on a show is using some Apple product, it seems like the character really likes Apple stuff. That might be true, but often it is not. Companies pay a lot of money to get their products used by cool characters during the show or movie. They understand that people are such followers and “copy cats”. They want to be cool too.

I was watching a popular American TV drama today. The show is about a bunch of good looking rich high school kids in California. They all live a kind of “dream life”. People watching the show kind of fall in love with the characters and somehow want to be like them. They are the “cool kids”. People always want to do what the other “cool kids” are doing. Usually the characters use Apple products. Have you ever noticed that? Pay attention next time and let me know.

Today I noticed that one of the kids was using some new Android phone. They showed the phone ringing for about 4 seconds and you could easily see the Android logo. I don’t know for sure, but I really think that Google (They own Android) must have paid a lot of money for that. I think it is much better than any kind of regular TV commercial. When product placement is done well, people don’t even notice that it is an advertisement. It just gives us the feeling that real people are actually choosing this product and loving it.

Imagine that there was some really cool guy using an Android phone on the TV show. Imagine that on the show, all of the prettiest girls liked this guy. This creates an image that the phone is a good choice. A part of our mind thinks that if we have that phone, our lives will be better and cooler. That’s what regular commercials are trying to do too, but product placement is often a lot better. This is because we don’t know that a company is paying for this. It “tricks” us into thinking that the phone is really cool.

If we see the same type of cool guy using the phone during a regular commercial, we are smart enough to realize that it is fake. If we see it during a show or a movie, we are much more likely to believe it. Watch for this kind of thing next time you are watching TV or movies and let me know what you think about all this.