The team at Viralogy needs your help. We are currently looking for venture capital in order to hire on some of the staff full-time and pay our operating expenses, as our product continues to grow. We now have a prime opportunity to pitch our product at JuicePitcher, a networking event for seed and early stage founders. It’s a chance for our founder to present in front of investors and key media sources. The only way for us to get a chance to pitch is by finishing in the top 10 in votes in a Vator.tv competition (we’re currently 3rd).

So what is Viralogy? We’re a company dedicated to measuring and tracking social media reach and clout. While some companies like Alexa and Compete measure a website’s traffic, we try to measure all of a social media influencer’s key assets from number of comments and participation to web traffic to number of Twitter mentions and retweets. Rather than measuring websites, we measure people. Because a blog and a personal website are no longer the sole measurement of your online influence. Seth Godin pointed out the value of this measurement in a recent blog post of his:

what if, Google-style, someone took all this data and figured out who has clout. Which of your readers is the one capable of making an idea break through the noise and spread? Bloggers don’t have impact because they have a lot of readers, they have a lot of impact because of who their readers are (my readers, of course, are the most sophisticated and cloutful on the entire web).

If you knew which of your followers had clout, you could invest more time and energy in personal attention. If we knew where big ideas were starting, that would be neat, and even more useful would be understanding who the key people were in bringing those new ideas to the rest of the world.

Our goal is to provide marketers with useful information that they can then use to make informed decisions. With easy ways to manipulate them, simple traffic numbers are not good enough anymore to define an entire market. We have the ideas and the team to drive a new way to measure and look at social media influencers, but could use some help getting the resources to make our goal a reality.

Can you help us by taking five minutes to 1) register on Vator.tv and 2) vote for Viralogy in this competition? We need your votes by September 30th.

Not convinced by my post here? Jun, Yu-kai and Joseph have also written about what we do.

I recently came across a great comic (shown below) from Abstruse Goose that breaks down the “average” human life into 936 little blobs, each spanning a month. In this drawing, each line spans 36 blobs, or 3 years. It’s interesting to think of one’s life in terms of 936 months. When you think about it, for the entirety of those first two or three lines, you probably don’t have a single milestone (unless you count learning to speak, walk, etc).

Unless you’re a child prodigy or someone who figures your path in life early, there’s a good chance that you won’t have anything truly useful until around the 6th line (applying to college!). The next line and a half encompasses your college experience and may include an internship or two and perhaps a life-changing experience if you’re lucky. For me, I found my fiancée early into the 7th line. Toward the end of that line I interned at Sports Illustrated, and on the 8th line I moved to Seattle and started working for Xbox.

After that, your career starts. Each line represents 3 years of your career. Plenty of people spend 3 years in the same position, some even a half dozen. Some go through 5 jobs within that same 3 year line. Your personal milestones might also be much different than your career milestones. Maybe you’ll realize that a chart of your personal milestones is much more fulfilling than your career milestones, or vice-versa. It’s just something interesting to think about.

Though an entire line could pass by without any true landmark passing you by, at the same time, each line could have a great number of huge milestones. Especially if you record not just you, but a company’s achievements. Google launched a little over 4 lines of blobs ago. Think about that. In just over 144 month-long blobs, Google went from NOTHING (behind search engines like Lycos, Excite, Altavista, Yahoo) to an 80% market share-holder in internet search. In fact, at that point, 4 lines ago, you were still probably on 56k. Your phone loads websites as fast as your personal computer did then. However, though their 4 lines of blobs are immensely packed, I bet that first line was extremely slow going. In fact, the first third of a line must have been grueling, competing for slivers of market share. Yet now look at them.

At some point, I’d like to plot out the past 21 years of technology graphically like this. I imagine it would be absolutely fascinating. I think this all goes to my point of why you need to act quickly if you want to change the world. Time flies quickly when you’re having fun. Use your time wisely or life’s little beats might easily, and quickly, pass you (and your opportunities) by.

What did your most recent “line of blobs” look like? Was it mostly full, or mostly empty?

This past week I took a trip to Ikea. For those of you who’ve never been, it’s an absolutely astounding facility. Daycare for your kids, sprawling parking lot, a warehouse of display items (adjacent to) a warehouse of display items for sale, (next to) a warehouse of items displayed in the first warehouse… Ikea is a modern marvel. You can learn a lot about great customer service and marketing by spending a little while at Ikea. You can also learn some pitfalls of opening such an enormous warehouse as well. Here are a few things I noticed during my trip:

1) Presentation matters. If you’re going to Ikea, you’re going for a shopping experience. Though there are easily thousands of products available, Ikea presents each in a clean and uniform manner exactly where you expect it. Unlike a supermarket, where items may be laid out irrespective of their surroundings, the atmosphere at Ikea is extremely important. Looking for a coffee table? You expect to find it in the living room section, complemented by a sofa and a TV stand. Your nightstand can be found in the bedroom next to a matching dresser. Also important, as with any retail store is cleanliness. For the thousands of products available, you’ll rarely find clutter or a mess. The store is kept up in a nearly immaculate fashion.

2) Keeping a customer’s attention is great… up to a point. Ikea is an experience that engulfs you. It’s like an amusement park at its best, or an airport at its worst; there’s no escaping it, and if you want anything from a bed sleigh to lunch, you’re buying it there. In some ways, it’s paradise: you can purchase pretty much anything and everything you see in the store. However, after a couple hours, you’ll feel like you’ve been there for days and you’ll do anything to find your way out. It’s like a casino – no clocks, no easy path to the exit and you just keep hemorrhaging money.

3) Pictures help avoid confusion. The beauty of Ikea’s building instructions is that they’re picture-oriented. Whether you’re from Sweden or Asia, it’s easy to comprehend the directions given for furniture construction. On occasion, pictures can certainly be ambiguous, so concise wording is helpful on occasion. However, nine times out of ten, pictures are the perfect way to demonstrate an example.

Some people hate Ikea. Some people despise putting together their own furniture. But it’s impossible to argue with Ikea’s success and ability to create a uniform experience for shopping for utilitarian furniture. Whether you love it or hate it, make sure you learn from it.