To quote Gary Vaynerchuk, you have to give give give till your face falls off.

If you go into a relationship and you just start asking for favors, people are going to think that you’re a douchebag.

Before you ask for something, you first have to ask how you can help others?   Isn’t this super basic stuff?  Yet, I hear it all the time!

Find a need that you can serve, jump in, and fill it.

Hey guys, I have some personal news. I’ve recently joined the DC-based online financial guidance startup HelloWallet as their new Marketing Manager. When I first met with the team a few months ago, I was blown away by what they were doing with not only providing top-notch tools for online financial tracking & management but also financial guidance.

Starting at the top with CEO Matt Fellowes and throughout the company, HelloWallet is employing top financial minds and have built personalized recommendations right into the online application, with the goal of maximizing your financial wellness. I’m excited by the opportunity to lead the effort in telling HelloWallet’s story.

Wanna learn more about HelloWallet?  Holla. Email me up. – justin@hellowallet.com

Oh and here’s an overview video for the product.

Also, would recommend watching this preso that our CEO Matt did at Ignite DC about “Our Future Path to Prosperity.”

Back in the 1980s, American chemical company DuPont had a marketing slogan “better living through chemistry.”  Of course, it was then adapted to mean other not so nice things.

In today’s Internet age, I think we’re seeing the rise of better living through data.

Businesses are already pretty used to using data to improve how they operate.  It’s common for a business to hire a business intelligence analyst, who analyzes the data that your company creates to help you identify ways improve efficiency of sales or operations.  The online advertising world is seeing a data revolution.  With the wealth of data being produced online, advertisers can target their ads to the people that would benefit from seeing them.

But I’m not talking about businesses, I’m talking about the onset of a personal data revolution.  We’re seeing the start of using technology to better track, analyze, and improve various parts of your daily personal life.

Here’s a few apps that I’ve used or am fond of…

I’m a HUGE fan of the iPhone app RunKeeper. If I carry my iPhone with me when I go for a run, it’ll track how far and fast I ran automatically.  I can also take it with me to the gym and manually enter it.   They’ve also recently made it possible for third party systems to send in health data.  Everything is then stored in their master database.   Their website will then help me understand my progress achieving my health goals.

One app/gadget that I haven’t tried but want to is FitBit.  It’s a little gadget that you can attach to your clothes.  It’ll log your movement and sleeping patterns and visualize that data for you.  It can also pipe that data into RunKeeper database

Also in the health space, there are apps like WeightWatchers.  It assigns a point system to foods based on it’s nutritional facts.  You then subtract points from your daily allotment based on what you eat.  It helps you see what you eat and learn to keep things in better moderation.    It’s cool but I haven’t used it.  *sigh*  I should. I wish there was a way that you could do this automatically.  Can’t they stick a little computer in my stomach that’d auto-log whatever I eat.

More in the social media space, there’s Klout which I’ve actively been using lately.  I give it access to a number of my social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Foursquare.)  It then assigns a Klout score to me based on how often I influence the people who follow me (clicks, re-shares, retweets.)   I can then start to figure out what I had done over certain periods of time to figure out how that effected my influence (or Klout score).  For example, when I went on my honeymoon, I didn’t post to my social networks and thus my Klout Score dropped.

Similarly, I use HootSuite as the tool to post links & updates to all the various social networks (Facebook & Twitter).  HootSuite will automatically generate a report to tell me which links were clicked, how often, and what social networks they resonated with.  Compared with all the links about the professional topics that I share, links about my wedding or honeymoon got 10x the number of clicks.

So… these apps are great!  They’re starting to give us data that allows us to wrap our heads around the activities that we do on a daily basis and how those activities affect of our lives.   The next step is helping us to better take that data and using it  to improve how we do stuff going forward.   For example, I should run/exercise different.   For social media, I need to tweet more about these type of stories because it’s what my audience cares about.

Do you use any of these tools?  What are other tools that you use to better understand the data that you produce in your life?   What do you think of the tools?  How could they improve?

For far too long, the West Coast — primarily Silicon Valley — has held a monopoly on headline-grabbing tech entrepreneurship. The singular reign of the Valley, however, may soon be eroding, thanks to the efforts of a vibrant, young, and visionary coalition of technologists and investors in and around the nation’s capital.

The pace at which Washington, D.C. is evolving into a capital for reasons other than politics is astounding. My own Google Calendar is constantly being populated with new tech happy hours, networking events, developer conferences and incubator pitch sessions. Weeks without at least one major tech-related event are an endangered species.

This Sunday, he had GigaOm founder Om Malik and All Things D‘s Editor Kara Swisher on.  These are two tech journalists that I have a tremendous amount of respect for.  They both write well thought out smart blogs.

Well, around 1 hour and 15 minutes into the show they get into this great discussion about new vs. old media and how it’s not about the medium for the content and it’s about the content itself.

Om gives a fantastic quote, which I thought was worth calling out and I think speaks a lot to the success that he’s seen. He says…

I’m in the business of making my customers happy.  My customers are my readers.  If they’re happy everything else will follow.

Right on Om. You pump out great content and thus I keep on reading.  It’s a good word for all of us.  We need to keep the main thing, our customers, the main thing.

Well, I went to the website to email the shop and let them know about my experience and that it would greatly influence our interest in coming back to the shop.

So, the manager wrote back and mentioned that we got there right amidst the shift change.  It’s a process that isn’t a smooth as it should be and is what caused the massive delay while we were waiting in line.  She  said that they even had thought about closing the shop for 30 minutes during the shift change.  Additionally, the delay in us getting our pie was from the fuse blowing because of a new machine that they had in the back.  Their staff needed to attend to the issue right away.

If the folks at the pie shop would have been like, “Hey, we’re changing shifts right now.” or “Hey, we have a problem in the back. One of our new machines just blew a fuse.” We would have totally understood.  They just needed to be transparent about what’s going on.

Problems happen.  When something goes wrong at work, we’ll throw up a blog post or a tweet so that our users know that we recognize the problem and that we’re working to resolve it.    We’re transparent about what’s going on.   We apologize for what’s happened.  We may have to hand out the proverbial slice of free pie but usually we’re able to get things back to where they were with minimal damage to the trust we have between us and our customers.

When there’s a problem (and yes, there’ll be a problem), let folks know about it.  I think the first reaction is that folks will be shocked that you’re not perfect.  I think everyone realizes that problems happen.  Customers will understand.  Just own up to the problem.  Apologize for it.  Learn from it.  Rinse and repeat.  You’ll be better off for it.

In a follow up he mentions…

I totally left out customer service. That is possibly the single best way to do marketing for startups. It allows you to connect to your early users, learn from them, and turn them into advocates for your product or service.

Right on!

We get in the front door and we’re waiting in line to take our order.  And… we just sit in line.  Doesn’t feel like it’s moving at all.  We get up a little bit closer and the guy at the register is changing out the money, which is fine but he doesn’t acknowledge the people in line at all.  He just goes about his business and is totally oblivious to the fact that we’ve been waiting in line for 10 minutes.

We order our slice and are getting excited by the smells of freshly baked pie wafting from the back of the store.   We sit down at the bar by the counter and we wait… and we wait… and we wait some more.

At one point, the woman was like “Oh your slice will be up in just a few minutes.”  They had just popped a bunch of slices in the warmer.  Assumed, they were heating it up for us.

We wait a little bit longer.  We both start getting really annoyed.  Where the H is our pie?   And we get the increasing feeling that they’re completely oblivious to the fact that we were still waiting for pie.

So, I mention it to the guy behind the counter.  He doesn’t seem to do much.  We wait another what seemed like 10 minutes.  Still no pie.  We mention it to someone else behind the counter.   She takes action.  We finally get pie.

By the end of the night, Lauren and I were happy to have gotten pie but annoyed that it took forever and even just more generally unhappy that the folks at the store didn’t seem to care about us at all.

Now, if they would have been packed, I would have been more forgiving but it was mostly empty.

So… what’s the moral of the story?  You always need to be aware of what’s going on.   Are you being perceptive to the situation around you?  Is there someone who you could do a better job of serving?

There are always going to be ways to improve and there are always going to be problems that need to be solved but you don’t want to just let them fester.  You want to address them as quick as possible so the customer know you care.

My experience at the pie shop was a total customer service failure.  What are some customer experience failures that you’ve experienced?

But… how effective has it been talking using channels like Facebook & Twitter?  Are users paying attention?

Unlike an email inbox, in the world of fast paced news feeds, it’s hard to figure out if someone actually took the time to read what it is that you’re saying.   There’s no notion of an open rate, like in email marketing.

Well, I find it easiest to measure the success of my Facebook & Twitter messages when those messages contain an action that I want a user to take.     There needs to be some kind of link that I want to get people to click.

So… whenever I have a link that I want to post to Facebook & Twitter, I first take that link and shorten it using bitly.  I then post it.  From there, I can start to see in real time whether anyone is clicking on my links and engaging with my messages.

From there, I start asking questions.  Why are people clicking links?  Why are they not?  Is it the content?  Is it the time of day?  Is it how I described what I posted?  Is it who posted it?

Then, it’s time to experiment.  Is there a time of day where you can drive the most clicks?  Is there a way you can write your content which drives the most clicks?

I’ve been experimenting a lot at work.  Hope to draw some conclusions and post some results soon.

Additionally… the ladies, who manned the front desk of my childhood dentist, were always super abrasive.  They more so resembled prison guards then someone who was there to be helpful and provide service.

You’d also inevitably have to wait an extra half an hour on top of your scheduled appointment time because they were never running on schedule

So… when I moved to DC, I hesitated getting back in the groove of getting my 6 month checkup.  Well, 4 years passed and I still hadn’t gone.  Lauren encouraged me to check out her dentist, Modern Dentistry in DC and had mentioned that she had really positive experiences.  So, I thought I’d give it a shot.

Well after two appointments, including yesterday’s filling, I have to say that I’m a total convert.  It is possible to have a positive experience going to the dentist.

Yesterday, at Modern Dentistry when I got the front desk for my at 8am appointment, they greeted me by name.  I was offered a bottle of water and I sat in the waiting room for 5 minutes.  I was quickly brought into the room.  I was out the door and with my filling done by 8:35am, which is probably the fastest filling I’ve ever had.  I felt like the NASCAR drivers who had stopped in the pit for a quick oil change and set of new tires.

You could really tell that the doctor and all of his staff really respected me and my time.  I left the office with a smile on my face, albeit a numb smile from the Novocaine.   I’ve already told a handful of folks about my experiences and probably made a few referrals.

So… what’s the moral of the story? Regardless of what business you’re in or whether you’re not in a business at all, customer service is important.  Caring is important.   Thinking about what you do and how it affects the happiness of your constituency is important.

I think this experience also underscores the importance of listening to your customers.  Lauren found out about Modern Dentistry originally from the online  service ZocDoc.  I’m sure if Modern Dentistry had a lot of negative reviews she would have never gone.  And… not only would they have missed out on her business, they would have missed out on mine too because she would have never made the referral to me.

Social media has amplified the voice of the consumer.  If you don’t do right by them… if you don’t leave them with a smile on their face, not only will they not come back but they’ll tell their friends and affect your ability to do business going forward.  Welcome to the new world order.

So… what kind of experiences have you had going to the dentist?  Good ones? What did they do?