For years, Def Leppard has been my all-time favorite band. They’ve risen above tremendous and unusual struggles. They’ve sold over 65 million albums and performed for over 50 million fans. I’d be willing to bet that your music collection has at least one of their CDs in it (most likely “Hysteria” - and if it doesn’t, run out and buy that, stat).

As an avid fan, I’ve watched many interviews where they have repeatedly told the media to stop considering them to be a hard rock band (they’re not - never have been infact) and that they are no where near “done” with their careers. Today, they launched the latest proof of that: “Songs from the Sparkle Lounge.”

Why am I talking about them on this blog? Because I often talk about the importance of marketing and communicating a clear, concise message. Def Leppard knows how to do that.

Albums like “Slang,” “X” and “Yeah!” all have unique sounds that still preserve the melodic rock and catchy hooks they are known for. Each of these albums demonstrates that they aren’t afraid to take creative chances and pay tribute to their own musical influences - but most importantly, each album’s style proves that their music is relevant to a modern audience. (Although I’m the first to say that there are many hits on each of those albums that deserved to make it big and never got enough air time.)

With messages like that (and knowing that radio stations will give them only a brief moment on air), marketing becomes key. Not only does the band embrace all the things we expect from modern bands (social networking, websites, blogs, microsites, etc.) but they clearly understand how to tell the world about their product. In the last week, the band released their new CD (which comes with comemorative guitar picks), scheduled a performance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” performed twice on ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars” (see section about NOT being a heavy metal band) and announced new songs available on Guitar Hero 3.

Now that’s marketing!

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My iPhone continues to amaze me. I’ve had it literally since “day 1″ and I still discover new uses for it. For example, I learned this week that it can be used as a boarding pass.

I also learned something it can’t do: send address book entries via bluetooth. My new car will store these entries in its memory and allow me to call them through the car’s interface (including voice command). However, the iPhone doesn’t support this.

No worries though… my contacts are in my Mac address book and sync’d via .Mac, which also syncs to my wife’s computer, which syncs to her phone, which is also connected to the car. So… in an extremely roundabout way… I’ll still get that info into the car without typing it all in!

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I’ve finally started to get sick of the standard Mac desktop backgrounds (probably because I set them to cycle every 30 minutes). Today I wanted to add some new ones and had a tough time finding where/how to do this.

If you want to pull pictures from iPhoto, then you can easily do this through the System Preferences menu. However, I store my photos on an external drive that isn’t always connected. So, to put new images into my Mac’s default image folder:

1. Open Finder
2. Open the “Library” directory off your hard drive root
3. Find the folder called “Desktop Pictures” and drop in the new stuff
4. Go back to System Preferences, then Displays and choose which one(s) you want.

———-

I also noticed this extremely handy new tip from TUAW today.  To open multiple tabs on inspector windows, simply hold down the Option key when clicking on the tab!

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Wait a second, I need to make sure that title makes sense… yeah, that’ll work.

I’ve been talking about my struggles with the Mac Notes 8.5 beta for some time and then I got quiet about it. I’ll admit now that I just stopped opening it and went into Paradows (Parallels + Windows) for all my Notes client needs.

But then I started to run into odd things with the Notes 8.0.1 client running a current mail template as well. First, it was slow… especially using the Outlook preview pane layout. Second, there were a number of odd behaviors, like deleting a message in the inbox and watching the highlighted message jump to the top of the list instead of the message just before the one you deleted.

So I downgraded. I went back to my Mac 7.x client and continued to run the 8.0.1  mail file. That actually worked quite nicely, until I worked off my local replica and noticed lots of inconsistencies between read/unread marks. There were a few other minor tweaks as well, so I restored my mail file back to the 7.0.3 template.

For the first time ever… this downgrade feels like an upgrade. I’ve never been so excited to go back to the way something was even though I know I’m missing out on new features, UI, etc.

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If there’s one single product I’m most excited about from Lotus, its Quickr. Our company, like many others, can always benefit from better tools that help us collaborate with one another, and Quickr looks to be a strong tool to do just that.

However, our Quickr launch efforts have been slow-going to say the least. Previous versions had plenty of bugs that frustrated end-users (read: “gave them an easy excuse to give up”). The latest version has a MUCH improved UI. Yet, I just can’t seem to get past some of the goofy bits about the product that just shouldn’t seem to be there. For example:

• You can’t add users to a room when you use a Domino Directory only. You have to use LDAP. Yes, a Lotus product won’t use the Lotus address book to add new users to a room unless its via LDAP. — Now, that’s an easy fix and let’s face it, if you’re not using LDAP you probably should start. Still, its just goofy.
• The personal edition is there, but not. You can issue a console command to create personal spaces (or mass load them via an XML file) but there’s no UI piece to do so. Again, not a big deal, but goofy.
• The UI has been improved quite a great deal … but there’s still left-overs. You’ll run into a few areas where old (as in “from quickplace”) buttons still exist. Again, not a big deal, but its goofy considering how much the UI has been improved overall.

For the record, all of this has been confirmed through Lotus support.

None of this is going to prevent me from pushing Quickr as a possible tool in the organization. However, when you don’t dive into a product very far and start to run into odd things like this, its often not a good sign of things to come. — I’m just going to assume that the list above is the complete list of goofy things and move on. 

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One of my favorite websites lately is BNET. The site is a great tool for anyone in business but is especially helpful for managers. Their articles are well done and extremely well laid out. You can easily work through lots of information in a short period of time thanks to their executive overview style layout.

This week, they’re featuring a short video that couldn’t be more up my alley! Its all about how to present like Steve Jobs. They also have an additional article recapping some of the details on the video, incase you prefer to read. Incase you’re really under a time crunch and want an even shorter run-down, let me help by providing the bullet points I wrote down while watching it:

• Headline - Start with a memorable headline to provide a theme that will carry through the presentation.
• Outline - Tell people what you’re going to talk about briefly. Then, open and close each theme to help transition from topic to topic.
• Enthusiasm - Be passionate and excited about what you’re talking about. Use words like “best,” “biggest,” “exciting” and “cool.”
• Sell an Experience - Numbers and stats are meaningless unless their in context and relative. Jobs talks about how many iPods are sold in a quarter and then quickly breaks it down into how many are sold per day, or hour. — Its easier to envision yourself in an Apple store, watching that number of iPods be sold before your eyes vs. the entire quarterly total.
• Visual & Simple - Use as little text as possible in your presentation. Use images. Don’t use more than 2 or 3 images on a slide.
• Dramatic Flair - Make it a show.
• Identify and build up to the most memorable moment
• Reherse
• One more thing… - Probably Jobs’ most well-known line, it gives people a bonus or an encore to the event.

I thought these were all great suggestions. I’ve implemented some of these into my presentations lately and its been met with lots of success. I have stopped short of wearing a black turtleneck and jeans … but that didn’t change the fact that I felt very Jobsian during the presentation. That’s a good thing for me because he’s one of my favorite presenters of all time!

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