Michael Arrington at TechCrunch points out the radical difference in answers from two CEOs to a simple question: "What is [your company]?" First, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz:

What is Yahoo?…Listen Yahoo is a great company that is very, very strong in content for its users, uses amazing technology to serve up what increasingly we think is going to be the web of one. For instance, on our today module in the front page, every 5 minutes we have 32,000 different variations of that module. So you don’t even know what I’m seeing in fact we serve a million different front page modules a day and that’s just through content optimization. And that’s just the beginning…Customized because we know the things you’re interested in. Maybe you don’t like light entertainment maybe you like a certain sports team, etc., etc. And our click through rate went up twice. So the point is, people come to us to find out what is going on with the world in a very nice quick fashion to do their communications, email, messanger, check-in on their teens. We all know about Yahoo finance. It’s a places where you can just get it together. It’s collated for you, it’s all the things as you’re moving, you can even get your social information there. Everybody moves through many websites in a day, Yahoo is one they always stop at.

Yikes. Now, here's AOL CEO Tim Armstrong's answer:

AOL is planning on being the largest high quality content producer for digital media.

So, which of these companies would get a $1,000 investment from you if you had to choose? Which company conveys a sense of purpose and confidence to customers, employees and shareholders -- and which is throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks?

The media has been in full-on pack coverage on the tar balls turning up in Key West. The stories have been of the mail-it-in variety:

1. Here's a reporter standing on a beach next to a tar ball.
2. Now let's speculate without good information. Is it from BP's spill?

We now know that the tar balls are not from BP’s spill. But no matter. The damage is already done. BP oil washing ashore in Florida would be controversial and tragic. People will watch. So the media can't wait to start telling the story, even when there's no story to tell.

But in its haste, the media is feeding the tourism damage along all of Florida's beaches, including Tampa Bay:

The oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is hundreds of miles from Pinellas County beaches.  But already, local hotels have reported 778 room/night cancellations from nervous tourists.

Tar balls happen on Florida's beaches. But because of what happened in gulf, any tar ball that washes up is "news." Even though it wasn't. So a state already in economic meltdown takes additional hits.

There is no BP oil ashore in Tampa Bay or anywhere else in Florida. If you canceled a May vacation because of the BP spill, you blew it, big time. May is a beautiful month for the beach; it's warm and dry and the rainy season remains off on the horizon. And the Gulf is well over 80 degrees at this point. Florida's beach conditions are ideal.

That's the real "news." Those are the facts. Standing on a beach next to a glob of tar and speculating about its origin is neither news nor fact.

UPDATE: Once again, officials state that the oil is not expected to impact Florida's west coast:

''The likelihood remains low that we will be impacted," said Capt. Tim Close of the Coast Guard in St. Petersburg. "The threat remains fairly low on the west coast of Florida."

That means that people should to continue to enjoy the state's outdoors.

"Come to the beach, stay in the hotels, enjoy our coastline," said Timyn Rice of the state Department of Environmental Protection.

 

World traveler and dominator Chris Guillebeau on leadership:

Few leaders are appointed anymore. Instead, leadership comes through influence—when you influence someone, you’re an instant leader. If you look around and can’t figure out who the leader is for something that bothers you, step up! Followers need leaders. We’ll follow you when you give us a direction and an action plan.

It really can be that simple.

So, Tampa has been awarded the 2012 Republican National Convention. Local economists are excited about conventioneers bringing something our area is in dire need of: hot air.

I’m kidding, of course. Economists are excited about the influx of tourist dollars.The convention is in August, which means hot air will already be plentiful. Hot, stagnant, humid, lightning-pierced air.
 
To help you enjoy your stay in Tampa Bay, I thought I would pass along a few tips that, if they don’t improve your stay, are completely unlitigatable in any way.

August does tend to be warm, in the same way that we think of molten lava as tending to be warm. If you plan to walk from your hotel to event venues, official visitor recommendations include bringing three 12-ounce bottles of water, four ounces of sunscreen and seven changes of underwear for every ½ mile you plan to walk. 

If you plan to stay in downtown Tampa and would like to dine later than Florida’s constitutionally-mandated dinner hour (3:30 PM), a diverse array of restaurants stand ready to accommodate you with late-night hours. You will find these restaurants conveniently located in Miami.

If you plan to rely on mass transit during your stay, please make your way to the Tampa Bay Visitor Mass Transit Center, which is also referred to as "Hertz Rent-A-Car." Tampa is a little light on mass transit options. We do have this yellow trolley thing, which transports riders between three popular tourist locations. At one end of the line, we have Ybor City, with its historic cigar factory buildings and many restaurants and bars. Near the route’s center point is the Channelside district, which includes shops, restaurants, the cruise ship port, the Florida Aquarium and two empty 50-floor skyscraper monuments to the condo building bust. At the other end of the line is some sort of non-descript trolley turnaround area. I guess that’s only two popular tourist locations. Apparently we were a little short on those along the trolley line. 

So we in the Tampa Bay area look forward to your visit. Don’t miss out on the experiences that make summertime in Tampa Bay unique, including Cuban sandwiches, Busch Gardens, fine cigars, great beaches, heat exhaustion and mosquito wrestling. See you soon.

TechCrunch details the social media themes emerging from the Smash Summit:

[...]

representatives of Twitter, Facebook, Salesforce, Google and others offered social media tactics for businesses (Techcrunch was a media partner). The keynote speaker, Jeremiah Owyang, a Partner of the Altimeter Group, offered four laws of social business: don’t fondle the hammer (don’t focus on the specific tools, think about your broader marketing agenda), live the 80% rule (get your company ready for social media, that’s “80% of success”), customers don’t care what department you’re in, and real time is not fast enough.

This sentence stuck out to me:

Cisco already has 25 blogs and more than 100 Twitter accounts (sometimes there is such a thing as too much of a good thing).

And therein may lie the next critical challenge for companies engaged in social media. Lots of companies have established a presence. Many have defined who they want to reach and how they want to converse. But now comes the problem of complexity.

How will companies set an overarching strategy and then execute, monitor and measure with so many levels of communication in play? It's a challenge individuals already face in trying to keep up with Twitter and Facebook and all our other communication and content streams. Now, it's coming to the enterprise on a larger scale. The struggle for simplicity -- in execution, in measurement, in response times and methods -- is a key issue as social media further ingrains itself into companies.

I was in the for iPhone 4G/HD even, most likely, at full price. I have curtailed my gadget and technology purchases over the years, but dammit, my smartphone will remain top of the line. I'm an iPhone addict and OK with it.

So this made me happy:

When the next iPhone comes around–I don’t know anyone who’s predicting a release date later than this July–AT&T presumably wants to avoid the confusion, bad publicity, and need for backpedaling that accompanied the 3G release. And Greg Kumparak of MobileCrunch has an interesting post noting that some AT&T customers are seeing their upgrade eligibility dates moved to June 21st, as if AT&T is prepping to let them buy new iPhones at full discount from day one.

My date for full discounted upgrades has bumped up to my one-year anniversary date. Nice move, AT&T. I'm in.

The Tampa Sports Authority is developing a new Strategic Plan:

A strategic plan being drafted by Hill­borough County's main sports governing agency contemplates it playing a role in development of a new baseball stadium.

Officials with the Tampa Sports Authority say the agency is simply making sure it is prepared for anything that may come its way in the future. They say they are not and won't be making a pitch for any new stadiums.

[...]

It says, 'If asked, we stand ready to do whatever is necessary, whether it's baseball, soccer, tennis, other golf courses,' " Sports Authority spokeswoman Barbara Casey said. "It has absolutely no plan for anything to build a stadium or be involved with it — nor soccer or tennis or golf."

Wait -- did she say there is no plan to build a stadium for golf? I'm not sure. I am sure "golf stadium" sounds like something funded by federal stimulus package dollars. By the way, the previous sentence is the only known sentence in human history that included the phrases “golf” and “stimulus package” that didn’t also include “Tiger Woods.”

But I digress. Really, idle speculation about a baseball stadium in Hillsborough County is misguided. Clearly, when a team schedules a Bret Michaels concert as an actual strategy to increase attendance, all is well. Nothing to see here.

The consumption of this muffin offers almost maximum waste while completely destroying the ability of discerning and non-starving persons to enjoy it. Mindless waste or sinister brilliance? You decide.

I do a lot of reading, but struggle with how to share a book review that isn't exactly like what you get on Amazon or eight jillion other places. I'm going to try this format, expanding on three of my favorite quotes from a given book. And there's no better place to start than Seth Godin's Linchpin.

Linchpin is awesome, maybe my favorite Seth Godin book to date. Seth writes that Linchpins are organizationally unique and indispensable. He then spends the rest of the book cajoling you to challenge yourself, to do the hard work to create real value and not simply go through the corporate motions. Now, onto the quotes:

1. You don't become indispensable merely because you are different. But the only way to be indispensable is to be different.

Seth always pushes people to be and to create something unique. The worn path is worn out. But sometimes, I think people can be paralyzed by that. Be unique in the world, but also understand how to define "world." The world is big. You're probably not the only person with a particular skill or interest on the planet. So narrow your world. Are you the only person in your company with that skill? Your department? Your town? Often, that can be enough to increase your value to the "world" -- when correctly defined.

2. The person who leans forward the most wins the race.

Seth wrote that he learned this from Olympic cross-country skier Matt Dayton. But it applies to every challenge in life, right? I work with someone who leans into problems harder than anyone I've ever seen. He turns over every rock, crunches every number. And he almost always figures it out. He's really bright, of course, but he also just leans harder. It works.

3. Being productive at someone else's task list is not the same as making your own map.

If you've read Tim Ferriss, you know that he advocates outsourcing tasks to overseas personal assistants who work on the cheap. If you're organized, on top of the details and productive, you're highly outsourceable (if that's a word.) You have to figure out how to bring more value to the party -- value only you can provide, in your unique way, in your world.

I read Linchpin on my iPhone, as I do pretty much all my books these days. I must have highlighted 50 quotes and these three don't even come close to doing the book justice. Linchpin is a quick and easy read that is jammed full of inspiration and challenge to push you past your comfort zone so you can really deliver your unique value. Just read it!

Just ahead of the national relocation conference, Cartus releases its 2010 corporate relocation survey. Among the nuggets:

Young and/or single: There is a strong trend toward relocation assignees who are young and/or single, with the under-30 group increasing substantially from 19% in 2007 to 29% in 2010, and single assignees increasing even more from 29% to 42%. This newer profile matches the emerging extended business travel policy type, which requires less financial support than those that encompass married assignees with accompanying families.

Companies want to cut relo expenses, so they are moving younger employees and/or single workers with less stuff (and less family members) to move. Yet another positive trend for containerized moving.