Breaking a Leg in Dubai

It’s one thing to be up-to-date for an upcoming speech in familiar territory. It’s quite another thing to be ready for a speech halfway around the world. Just ask Fred Berns.

Fred is a honcho in the interior design business - and we’ve written about him before in “What This Guy Knows about Making Money Can Help You Make Some, Too.” And, while Mr. Design does speak all over the planet, even he doesn’t travel to Dubai every week.

One sure way for Fred to please his audience is to show that he understands design industry issues in their part of the world. Tall order - there’s lots going on in Dubai.

In fact, searching the “news tab” in a popular search engine like Yahoo or Google will reveal tens of thousands of stories about Dubai (see the photo at the beginning of this article).

But, Fred’s no dummy, and he knows enough to throw in a word or two that will reduce the number of stories he gets - and better target the ones that might be of interest to him.

That’s still a lot of stories (475 in Google). If you read much of this blog, you’ll know that limiting your search with phrases is the way to go. After all, good searching is all about getting less results, not more results.

But, if Fred limits his search too much - for instance, if he does a search for dubai “design industry” - he’ll actually get too few results, and miss some really good stuff.

Hidden treasure worth it’s weight in gold

Here’s a pretty cool strategy - and you can use this tip when you’re doing any search on the Internet - whether it’s in news, blogs, groups or just the general web.

When you are getting too many results for a topic, just add a phrase like “new ideas,” “latest developments,” or “innovative approaches” to your core search phrase.

By doing this Fred will come up with the most recent, innovative, and inspirational stories that will resonate with his audience. (If, by chance, he still has scores of results he can “sort” his stories by “relevance” or “date“).

In fact, one of the stories he would find by searching this way is a story about an architect commissioned by Fortune Magazine to design the skyscraper of the future.

But wait, there’s more! More than just a great article. Look closely and you’ll see that this article came from AMEInfo, which modestly bills itself as “The Ultimate Middle East Business Resource.” Do you suppose someone traveling to Dubai might want to keep that web site marked as a favorite bookmark?

In Fred’s case, though, it seems he already knew about AMEInfo, judging by the article pictured below. But, hey, how are Sheryl and I ever going to teach one of the “biggest international names in the business of interior design” anything?!

Good luck, Fred, and break a leg.