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Guy Kawasaki is the original technology evangelist. After championing Apple products from the inside, Guy has gone on to a career that recently includes co-founding Alltop and founding partner at Garage Technology Ventures. He was also a featured speaker at Gnomedex in 2007.

His recent book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions explains how to influence what people will do while maintaining the highest standards of ethics. The book explains when and why enchantment is necessary. It outlines the pillars of enchantment: likability, trustworthiness, and a great cause. You can also learn about launching your product, overcoming resistance, making enchantment endure, and using technology. And for those of you who want to avoid the spell of enchantment, there’s a chapter on dispelling the magic of great products too.

With all the new businesses and startups around these days, it sure seems as though there isn’t any evangelism going on. Many people simply feel overwhelmed and have no idea where to begin. Guy’s book will speak to you on a deep level, and show you how you can be an evangelist for your own business – or for anything you may believe in.

So many companies claim to be excellent when they simply aren’t. Why aren’t more people stepping up to the plate and truly BEING excellent? People have to be trustworthy. There’s a potential disconnect between what PR is claiming about a company and those of us who use the product or service.

What’s the best way to deal with the negativity in life? Guy said you simply ignore it and plow ahead towards your goals. Enchantment isn’t an event – it’s a process. As more people realize this, the easier it will be for them to actually BE enchanted.

The people who will put your book, conference or business over the edge are those who will watch this video. If you get enough of those people, the “A-listers” have to follow you according to Guy.

Guy and I couldn’t help but have a chuckle when remembering the beginning of Twitter five years ago. No one wrote about the service as being the next big thing. No articles exist from back then which talk about how amazing this website would become. Oddly enough, Guy joined Twitter after Dave Winer talked about it during Gnomedex in 2007. At the time, Guy couldn’t figure out why he would care to take the time to DO this. A few weeks later, Guy figured out that once again Dave Winer was right.

To me, transparency is as much a part of enchantment as anything else, including how good a product or service is. Transparency is the key to having people trust in you and your brand. You’re not going to sell yourself in any capacity if no one has faith in you.

What are your thoughts? What do you feel it takes for a business or person to show true enchantment?

Guy Kawasaki Wants You to be Enchanted

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When you open up your Web browser, what is your home page set as? I know that many of you will answer Google or Yahoo. Some of you may be using a site like Facebook or MySpace as your main page. Mine is often just blank (on purpose), but when I do use one, it’s the Mac page on Alltop. This is a Website that launched a few months ago, and is largely funded by our friend Guy Kawasaki.

The idea behind Alltop is to really aggregate top resources and collections of information into a consice format, and target it to a specific audience. My homepage is set to the Mac section, as I mentioned. Just guess what’s on there? There’s links to Mac news, Mac Websites, and even Mac programs. It’s a great way to get the latest news from several places at once. If you hover your mouse over one of the story links, you’ll get a small preview box with the beginning of the article in it.

When Guy first started talking about this, there were some naysayers. They didn’t see the point of it. However, I think it’s great. I like it so much, it’s my home page. What else is there to say? I haven’t had any issues or problems with it whatsoever. They’ve done an excellent job with it so far. They’re constantly launching new ‘divisions’ of the site, such as the Mac page I use.

We help you explore your passions by collecting stories about “all the topics” on the web. We’ve grouped these collections — “aggregations” — into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as environment, photography, science, Muslim, celebrity gossip, military, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, and Macintosh. At each Alltop site, we display the headlines of the latest stories from dozens of sites and blogs.

You can think of an Alltop site as a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet. To be clear, Alltop sites are starting points—they are not destinations per se. The bottom line is that we are trying to enhance your online reading by both displaying stories from the sites that you’re already visiting and helping you discover sites that you didn’t know existed. In other words, our goal is the “cessation of Internet stagnation” by providing “aggregation without aggravation.”

So what’s your home page? Why did you choose that one?

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What is Your Home Page?

Guy would never hire me. And you know what? I’m fine with that. I stayed up all last night crying my eyes out – wondering why Mr. Kawasaki never talks about my chest. Today, those prayers were answered in tip #11 of Everything You Wanted to Know About Getting a Job in Silicon Valley But Didn’t Know Who to Ask:

Confess your sins. If you did something stupid in your past, the company will find out, so it’s better if it finds out from you rather than from a search on the Internet. A tech entrepreneur once told me how he rented out his chest as a billboard and made $2,500 (it’s a long story). A woman that he met on Match.com found this out, and it was an issue. If a date can find this stuff from your past, you can bet an interviewer will. Hopefully, this makes you think twice about the stupid things you’re tempted do on MySpace.

Yes, it was stupid – but I refuse to take my chest off the Internet until someone pays me a million dollars to do it. Guess we’ll just have to live with the horror, eh? Guy is right about thinking twice before you put something (anything) online. Wanna know the truth? There’s a happy ending. I started renting my chest years before Ponzi and I met.

She found my profile on Match.com late one night and sent me a response almost immediately. It took me a day to get back to her, but I was sure to pass along my AIM handle for quicker correspondence. It wasn’t too long before we started to blast messages back and forth on IM. Within the first ten minutes, she asked an innocent question:

You don’t have any naked pictures of your chest online, do you?

WTF?! Did she know me? I really didn’t want to date someone who watched me on TechTV, read Lockergnome, etc. She asked this question because (apparently) a lot of guys upload “studly” photos of their greased-up chests to dating sites. I, however, didn’t realize this – as I never peruse male profiles. To her query, I responded:

Do you know who I am? :)

Now, Ponzi took this question differently than the way I intended – as if I was asking: “DON’T you know who I am?” She said she didn’t know who I was, and so I sent her a link to RentMyChest.com. If she didn’t laugh, I’d have to throw her back into the sea. Long story short: we met the next day and have been with each other ever since.

If someone doesn’t like my chest, then I don’t need them in my life. Guy referenced my chest without naming me, specifically – but I’ve had ten friends send me the link in the past half hour. Are there really that many tech entrepreneurs renting their chests online?! I think Guy was afraid his Technorati ranking would dip if he made the correlation. No matter, I’ve cleared about $10k with my chest so far – and that number is steadily climbing. Not so stupid, eh?

Oh, by the way: Guy might be speaking at the next Gnomedex…

My Silicon Valley Chest