Zane Safrit

Social Media: Rules and Rules ... and Rules

I feel like Granpa here, talking about the good old days when we wrote what we wanted, from the heart, in the moment ... the hell with rules. That’s why we wrote, so we could write the way we wanted to write not like some damn press release or corporate website.

I started writing in this thing called a ‘blog’ back in 2004. I started a blog in 2003 but never got it, never understand where ‘it’ went when I hit publish, how people found the blog or what to write. 6 months later after all traditional advertising and marketing resources failed or let’s put it in the positive because that’s one of the rules of blogs now, traditional advertising and marketing generated fewer results than if I donated money to the Red Cross. For my donation I at least get a little endorphin rush. But with the donations I made to Google Adwords and Yahoo and MSN and direct mail and event sponsorship I didn’t even get that. And they generated no leads.

So I spent a Day with Seth Godin. He explained the power of a blog to connect directly with the audience, speaking in my voice, writing my way, sharing my thoughts how and when I want to share them about any topic I wanted. That was how to cut through marketing clutter. A unique voice talking in a unique manner about unique topics. So, as CEO of a small company I wrote about business, about life, music, sports, back to business, even politics where the issues were directly related to our business. I never marketed our services or products. And I made stronger connections, deeper connections, more connections. Those conversations turned into lasting relationships that yes translated into revenues, immediate and long-term. But as important it translated into a community of people willing to share ideas and debate.

A few years later I saw reports about writing and reading habits for blogs. Their messaging power was confirmed by these ‘experts’ who prepared the reports and offered tips on how to generate more readers for your blog based on those studies. Based on our research, if you do X or y, you’ll get more readers. They were sincere in their intent and professional in their research. My point is how tips become rules and rules become bureaucracy and bureaucracy well it's never social is it.

List posts were suggested back in 2008-ish. Made sense. We’re all time-starved, so offer a reader a list with three items like tips or reasons or to-do’s or don’t do’s. Some offered 100. I just offered one with twelve. I have a book out with 52 tips. I offer tips or steps to take at the end of posts as a reward for reading my rant.

Overlooked in that tip and rule-making conversation was this: list posts with the highest readership numbers were thoughtful, original, passionate ... useful. Useful means utilitarian and inspirational. Those of mine that generate the most traffic, modest as it is, fit that description ... for others.

Then came the rule that said every post needs photos and images. Pictures engage the whole mind, igniting the endorphins and neurotropins, making people smile and want to share it.

I thought Okay, I’ll get me some cute pictures royalty-free photos and images from iStockPhoto (great resource). As I did, a doubt began to nag me:

How are stock photos, okay fake photos relating to my post, adding value to the reader? How are stock photos aligning with the intent of a blog post written in the personal, authentic, voice of the author, the best ones being written with passion, energy, taking clear stands. Stock photos are great for ... corporate websites, void of life and spontaneity. 

That doubt only nagged me because now  every post has a photo. Most of them are stock photos with beautiful models bearing happy-crappy smiles. Does the author think we can’t see through this ruse? If so, they should join corporate communications or PR firms stuffing press releases and websites with business buzzwords around more stock photos.

This rule, a photo in every post, makes either a bad writer worse (‘Hey, I can fill a blog post with cliche’s or bored buzzwords and then add a stock photo. And presto! Buzzworthy or at least I followed the rules.) It demeans the strong writer into thinking their content cannot stand alone. It’s insulting to the reader, like we need pictures to keep us entertained.

Then there is the rule about schedules. You need to have a schedule. Every day. Three times a week. And follow it. Like your readers won’t come back if you skip a day. Like your readers won't leave you if you post something just to post.

How about this schedule? Write when you have something YOU want to say, something YOU ... HAVE ... to say. They’ll come back. And read it. And share it.

Yes, I capitalized YOU and HAVE to shout it. It’s impolite but I want to make the point.

Don’t waste our time writing what they say you need to write or when they say you need to write it. Write when you have something YOU want to say, something YOU ... HAVE ... to say. And when you don’t. Listen. Read. Go for a walk. Move away from the digital devices.

Then there’s titling for maximum SEO. That’s the same thing as writing for algorithms and bots not people. I guarantee no one recommends a post for its outstanding manipulation of the latest SEO rules by the formatting of its title.

Now, I’m not going to ask what you think. That’s a violation, I know, of the latest rule that says you need to engage and you need to ask What do you think? or How’s this work for you, etc. And now, every post seems to have that added. A great post then ends on a sour note. I'm not saying this is a great post. But I'm not going to patronize you with this stock phrase. 

I have a comments section and I shared my thoughts on a public forum and being here in the US of A where the freedom of speech is often considered worthy of protection so what more do you need? Time, okay. A post worth commenting on. Okay. Well, I did my best. But I didn't hide behind a stock photo. 

I find I’m less likely to leave a comment when I see a post like that. It’s usually a list post, written for traffic - not for debate or expression.

Chris Brogan wrote a few weeks ago that there’s more promoting and less sharing. That’s true and sad. It means the brave frontier of social media has been co-opted by the beast it sought to flee: corporate media where it’s all promotion all the time.

I'm going to share three tips on how to take control of your web presence. (Freedom’s just another word for being able to write what you want, when you want, even in a format that contradicts your earlier admonishments.)

Write About What Moves You

If it doesn't move you to write, then don't go through the motions of writing. Don’t regurgitate an idea that’s been spewed over the net by hordes of mewling sites and twitter feeds. Share an idea, a feeling, an emotion that moves you to share it. That’s what we need more of. We need more of you and your feelings.

Write When You Need to Write

If you don’t need to write, don’t. They’re are enough writers paid to write. They work in corporate media, drowning us in their tsunami of empty corporate slogans and press releases saying A is, B is A or oil and water do mix, the beaches are open and safe; c’mon down or collecting our phone records - all of our phone records - is not an invasion of privacy; it’s a sign of interest, love.

Take a Stand for Something in the Life Around You.

Could be Coca-cola in the water fountains as Bobby Silver promised us when he ran for President of our elementary school in 1966. It was brash, bold, irreverent. That was Bobby. We all know it was a joke - the election, his promise; we loved him for promising it, for bringing fresh air into that boring assembly. We knew he’d stand up ... for something. I still remember him.

Your Readers Are Adults. Write for Adults.

We don’t need stock photos of gleaming, shining models, smiling and happy. We need you, your thoughts and ideas and plans and dreams and inspirations and failures and successes ... all shared in your words. We need leaders, communicators, stand-takers, bold enough to be right or wrong. Bold enough to make us laugh, cry, shake our heads, slam our phones down so we can leave a comment even when it’s not requested.

* 6 Billion People.

Somewhere out there is a huge audience for YOU. You need them; they need you. You won’t find each other if you’re hiding behind some else’s writing following someone else’s rules.

My work is done. Well, I've written what moved me to write.

Engagement's First Encounters Can Be ... Eye-Opening

The NYPD is the latest organization to have its eyes opened with a Twitter outreach campaign. #MyNYPD is the hashtag for their program asking visitors and citizens of NY City Do you have a photo w/ a member of the NYPD?

Sounds great. I have seen authors do the same for readers of their book. Fantastic results.

Not so fantastic for The NYPD.

The department responded on Tuesday night with a statement saying that it considered the Twitter effort successful, if, for nothing else, as a way to provide a space for New Yorkers to communicate their feelings about the city’s police officers. Still, it’s hard to imagine that the department intended for this social-media-outreach attempt to be one that would challenge it to change its standing among out-of-power New Yorkers. via www.newyorker.com

I see many commentators say the program was flawed from the start. They list four or five lessons learned like Conflict is King.

Which is more interesting, a photo of two people shaking hands or someone’s face being shoved into a sidewalk? This question was either not asked, or answered incorrectly, by the creator of #myNYPD. Link

If conflict is king then why are kittie videos so popular on YouTube?

The creator of #myNYPD could have asked that question of everyone in the NYPD and never heard an accurate, in-touch, situationally-aware answer. Why can I assume that? Read the response of NYPD Commissioner: 

“I kind of welcome the attention,” Bratton said Wednesday as the negative tweets kept coming nearly 24 hours after cops invited the cyber-submissions. “We really broke the numbers yesterday.”  [Huh?]

“Most of the pictures I looked at, they’re old news,” Bratton said, tossing previous NYPD administrations under the patrol car. “They’ve been out there for a long time.”

Bratton offered one more caveat: “Often times police activities are lawful, but look awful.” - New York Daily News

Hello.

“They’ve been out there for a long time.”

If pictures tell a story, then these stories have been out there for a long time, simmering and waiting to be shared.

Being fair we have to recognize that part of the role of police is to enforce limits and that always makes a percentage of people unhappy. It is a tough job. I admire them for their restraint and professionalism, day after day, in tough situations.

But this disengaged attitude of the Commissioner, the top cop, the one who sits at the top of this command-and-control hierarchy, radiates through the organization. It says We have the power; you don't. We make the rules; you follow them.

Again, I get it. Police. Enforcement. Not always pretty. Often times police activities are lawful, but look awful. That's where the pictures come in, telling the awful stories, over and over, for a long time.

They're not alone.

JPMorgan tried a similar campaign just after it helped take Twitter public. The hashtag was #askjpm. The purpose was to elicit career questions from econ majors among Twitter's users and Jimmy Lee, JP Morgan's Vice-Chairman, would answer them.  The balloon of their arrogance or disconnect with the public was pierced by thousands of tweets. Here's a few favorites from this New Yorker article:

• “Did you always want to be part of a vast and criminal enterprise or did you 'break bad?'

• “Did you have a specific number of people’s lives you needed to ruin before you considered your business model a success?”;

• “What section of the poor & disenfranchised have you yet to exploit for profit, & how are you working to address that?”;

• “Why aren’t you in jail for sending a literal ton of gold bullion to Iran in violation of sanctions?”;

• “When Jamie Dimon eats babies are they served rare? I understand anything above medium-rare is considered gauche.”

Their Twitter hashtag campaigns may expose the divide with its stakeholders in a more raw fashion but they reflect the same top down, we have the power; you don't. We make the rules; you follow them attitude radiates through U.S. companies.

Imagine your organization. If it's an average organization then 70% of you and your colleagues are considered disengaged from your work, sleep-walking through the day. Your going-through-the-motion performance telling your managers and executives Yeah, they're your rules; we have to follow them. That's all we'll do. Nothing more, nothing less.

Now, imagine asking your customers to share their photos using your product or service. Maybe we'll put them on our Facebook page, you promise. What kind of photos would you see? Maybe no bloodied faces, shrieking in pain, but how many would end up on your company's Facebook page?

Their settings and context may be different but they will share the same theme: that's the same enthusiasm and engagement and passion and delight that you experience, are allowed to experience, as an employee.

These stories are already told in your financial reports in items like:

• customer churn rate rising,
• conversion rates dropping, employee turnover and hiring costs rising,
• revenue growth slowing
• COGS rising
• cash-flows dwindling

But you're cutting back on training 'cause that's an expense we can't afford if they're just going to up and leave ... so you retain the ones you don't train. Their stories are captured in the reports showing declining market share to a brassy startup whose employees are excited, making things happen every day.

Before you go boldly where most organizations, brave or not, should fear to tread, look at those stories being told each month and each quarter in your financial reports. Ask why. Then ask your employees why.

Granted, this may require an investment in time. Rome wasn't built in a day and neither is a corporate culture of acquiescence and subservience and disengagement and lagging results. And it will take almost as long to transform that culture into one marked by engagement, ownership, participation ... passing and leading results.

The first time you engage with an employee or a group of your employees will be an eye-opening experience. You see, their stories stored in mental snapshots and saved emails and anecdotes, have been out there for a long time. They earned the right to share them, once. You've earned the right to listen to them, once.

That's part of the engagement process few are willing to discuss. You can't move forward until you've acknowledged the past. Acknowledged not wallowed. And with the average company's disengagement scores at 70% ... there's a lot of past that must be acknowledged, quickly, if companies are to move ahead, grow and lead our economy forward.

 

Related articles

#myNYPD Campaign Draws the Wrong Kind of Twitter Engagement

NYC police head: We won't quit social media

#myNYPD Campaign Inspires Global Awareness Of Police Brutality

NYPD Push for Tweets to Continue

Employee Engagement: Twelve Things It Isn't

Employee Engagement Percentages Point to Imminent Upheaval

#myNYPD: Social Media Fail?

Recognize Your Employees on Social Media

With social media, all day every day is prime-time.

Why not leverage the reach of social media to recognize to the world those who build and deliver the brand? That’s right. Use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, your company’s website..Pinterest, Instagram, WhatsApp, LinkedIn to recognize all the achievements of your brand evangelists...for the world to see. Just. Use. One of them.

First off, your employees deserve that your recognition be shared publicly.

Second, it offers a person for your customers and prospects to connect with...personally.

Third, it shows you care. It shows the world you care enough to put in your own words how you care about your employees.

Fourth, it will cut through the clutter of cliche’s about ‘we care’ or ‘world-class customer service.’ (Especially if those cliches are backed with stock photos of happy, smiling, nameless models.)

Fifth, you position your brand as a leader showing your peers how to use social media in a personal and meaningful manner aligned with personal and corporate missions.

We follow people, not brands or logos. Make it easy to follow those who build and deliver that experience: that's your employees.

Here's how Patrick O'Keefe* handled it on his Facebook page.

Consider the impact on Danielle Williams when Patrick recognized her to the world and his community members.

That's called leadership by example.

Thanks, Patrick.

* Patrick O'Keefe is founder of the iFroggy Network, author of Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run successful community Boards. And he was also a guest on my radio show. You can listen to our conversation here.

 

Blog Like She Dances

Via Woman Secretly Filmed at Bus Stop Lands Prestigious Theater Gig.

Blog like she dances, moving and grooving in her own steps, to the rhythm and melody in her headphones.

Blog like that. Blog to the topics and passions and rhythms in your life, the stuff you care about. Blog like no one's gonna read it.

Blog where you want to, when you want to. Blog to your own songs.

That's how she danced, thinking no one's gonna see her, at a bus stop, to the tune of her choice.

Look what happened. One person noticed. One person noticed...what...the innocence, the purity, the genuineness...the (gag) authenticity...She inspired one person to share her story. Where? On YouTube, where else? How did they share it? Like she danced.

We have enough faux dance steps in blogging, smoothly crafted, bland and meaningless PR agent written masterpieces of safety and innocuous meaningless. Write like them and you'll blend into their porridge of boring.

Write she dances at your own bus stop, listening to the songs in your heart.

 

 

Advertising on Social Media Comes Up Against...Wait, What?

Facebook learned that the hard way last week. After failed attempts to get the social network to remove pages glorifying violence against women, feminist activists waged a digital media campaign that highlighted marketers whose ads were found alongside those pages. Nissan and several smaller advertisers temporarily removed their ads from the site.

Amid mounting public pressure, Facebook acknowledged that its systems to identify and remove such content had not worked effectively and promised to improve those processes. The company began removing the pages in question.

The episode underscored a conundrum for social media sites forged from the philosophy that free speech should thrive on the Internet: will they be able control content created by their users, so that advertisers are not embarrassed by material beyond their control?

“Certainly advertisers have a singular purpose, they want to reach consumers in a positive way,” said David Reuter, the vice president for corporate communications at Nissan Americas. “It is up to the social companies to create an environment that provides that level of support and safety for the companies.” Advertising on Social Media Comes Up Against Free Speech

The title of this article has since been changed to: The Distasteful Side of Social Media Puts Advertisers on Their Guard.

I saved the link and the text, waiting for the confusion to clear before I posted my thoughts. Here I am, five or six days later and either the confusion hasn't cleared or I was right the first time I read this article.

Facebook's claim to fame was its ability to generate ads. Anyone on any site can generate ads. Facebook carried its claim into Big Brother targeted accuracy by mining all the data we, its members offered for free, to Facebook as we shared it with each other. A treasure trove of likes and dislikes and conversations and threads and pages and fans and members and inter-related conversations...all for free. Behind the scenes their vast array of coders and algorythms would churn out precise targets for advertisers who would pay premium dollars to display their ads in front of Facebook subjects, er members, who met very precise criteria.

A whole new world awaited us all: advertisers and consumers. The promise, if delivered, would be mutually satisfying. Sure, as consumers we would continue to be interrupted; but we would be interrupted with ads for products and services meaningful to our lives. Advertisers would find the holy grail of advertising, highly-qualified leads whose quality was based on...scientific data, gathered relentlessly and scrupulously.

But, we ran into a glitch. All of us, see. Facebook censors seems unable to discriminate between pictures of breast cancer survivors (bad, pornographic),  breast-feeding mamas (bad) and glorifying violence against women (good, good for advertisers too. For that matter, so too did all of their coders and algorythms. Judging from the ads I see on my FB page, they have no clue and neither do the advertisers, where they are sending ads. 

The irony here is that it's social media users not the social media sites that: 1) alerted the advertisers that their ads appeared on pages glorifying violence; 2) the social media sites refused to either remove the sites glorifying violence against women and even continued to place ads on those sites, implying... some connection between the brands and those messages of misogynistic violence. ( That is the implication, right? What advertiser wants its ads displayed on a site whose values it does not share?)

That is the power of social media, to better align advertisers with the values of their consumers. That changes the dynamic a bit, frankly I'm surprised smart and savvy columnists struggle not to understand that change. Consumers and our organizations are driving the message, not brands and advertisers.

If the columnist and their editor understood this better they would change the title of their column to Social Media Users Help Advertisers Understand Where Their Ads Appear.

Social media sites thrive and grow to the extent they understand that dynamic. Facebook's stock performance, described as infamous in Forbes, indicates it continues to struggle with that understanding.

 

 

 

Related articles

Facebook bows to 'hate' campaigners

Facebook to crack down on hate speech - Los Angeles Times

Silicon Alley Insider: How Much Is A Facebook 'Like' Worth To A Brand?

Social media mutes coaches, takes fun away from game?

When asked to explain why he called then-Missouri coach Norm Stewart "Francis the Talking Mule," Oklahoma coach Billy Tubbs "apologized" thusly:

"I got Mr. Ed, the talking TV horse, mixed up with Francis the Talking Mule from the movies. I meant to say, 'mule,' because a mule is not a thoroughbred. A jackass is a thoroughbred, but a mule is a cross, I think, between a jackass and a horse. I think a mule is worse than a jackass."

Told he was likely to be fired during the season, little-known Southwest Minnesota State coach Pierre duCharme once had his team carry him to the bench in a casket.

John Chaney, as we all know by now, threatened to kill John Calipari. And Bob Knight did, in fact, murder a chair.

And Pete Carril, lit cigar in hand, once waddled over to James Taylor and impolitely asked the singer to "shut the [heck] up," since his sound check was interrupting Princeton's practice.

Those, my friends, were the days, the days when characters -- uninhibited, unafraid and unapologetic -- ruled the sidelines. They were a little kooky, a touch controversial and a lot entertaining, adored for their showmanship, yet still revered for their principles, interesting even if they could be, at times, alienating.

They made the game of college basketball just that: a game.

We never realized their days were numbered.

When, in 2006, Chaney quietly rasped Frank Sinatra's "excuse me while I disappear," it wasn't just the Temple coach who was headed off to retirement; he was taking his era into the sunset with him.

It was an era of fearless and unfiltered coaches, men who could be a little controversial without fear of recrimination or termination; men who could be a lot off color without worry of a social media firestorm.

"I couldn't wait to hear what was going to come out of Lefty [Driesell]'s mouth or see what was going to happen with the family feud between Wimp Sanderson and Sonny Smith," said former Tennessee coach Bruce Pearl, who once memorably painted his chest orange in support of the Lady Vols basketball team. "You'd go to a banquet with Johnny Orr and you'd be bent over laughing, but every other word out of his mouth wasn't a household word. Can you do that today?"

And that's really the essence of it all.

It's not that there aren't characters in the game anymore. There are plenty. It's just that their personalities and their convictions have been muted.

The combination of high stakes and social media has robbed the game -- and maybe the world in general -- of some of its fun. There is too much to lose to risk offending anyone and too many Internet highways to burn the politically incorrect trespasser.

"If those guys then had social media monitoring their every move and every word, just think about that," West Virginia coach Bob Huggins said.

Just think about that. That's blaming the messenger media, the means used to deliver the message. Literally.

Social media merely serves our purposes; a rorsach test, if you will, of our community's mores, values, prejudices, wondrous moments and inspiring leaders.

Blaming social media for taking the fun out of the game is like blaming phones for taking the fun out of dinner, delivering robocalls from political parties.

Blaming social media for 'taking the fun out of the game' is like blaming the post office for taking the fun out of mail, delivering spam to our mailbox spam.

Same thing for blaming email for spam.

Social media's a tool. Our tool. We use it, for our purposes, in our language.

Those salaries? Yeah, they went up because more people watch. More people watching means more advertising and sponsorship revenue.  Why do more people watch, well, because more people engage more, with more, all compliments to social media tools like ...Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc.

The real issue comes to this:

"I just think," Pearl said, "there are less people who can take a joke anymore."

Behind every joke is the truth.

Here's the Big Truth:

"I think sometimes people are just afraid," said Coppin State's Fang Mitchell, who proudly considers himself a Chaney disciple. "Jobs are so scarce. We are in a field that has [338] Division I jobs. To keep your job, it's easier to just be politically correct."

Ironic. As more people find more outlets for their opinion, we see more people being afraid to voice them.

"What's our game lost? It's the same as what our society has lost," Huggins said. "Think about it. It used to be that the leaders of the country said what was on their mind regardless of whether it was popular. Now we're all so guarded in everything we say. Nobody takes a stand. We've become a very vanilla society. Why would sports be any different?"

And there you have it.

And social media merely reflects that. Fairly transparently, too.

Infographic: The evolution of customer empowerment

via www.selfserviceworld.com

Interesting. Some points on this timeline were new.

I'm not sure I equate self-service with customer empowerment. Self-service is a pretty transparent strategy to push more of the costs for customer service on to the customer. You replace the 2nd party of 'customer' with the first party term of 'self'. And (Presto!) you push all the costs and responsibilites for that customer's experience  off your balance sheet, income statement and onto those of the customer. Now them and their selves are responsible for it, not you.

Neat. Cheap, too. Sometimes better, but always cheaper.

Social Media remains far more important than Mobile Payments for either customer empowerment or customer service. Customers now have a very simple, effective, tool to make their needs heard, globally and collectively, instantly and repeatedly, to brands of any size. That makes them a partner, a co-creator, a very important stakeholder. And you never push the costs of maintaining that account onto their 'self'.

Kashi Cereals and The Razor's Edge

Brands, personal and corporate (well, businesses are people, too, my friend according to the Supreme Court), are being pushed, pulled and inspired to cross The Razor's Edge ever faster by the power of social media and the voices of their customers who expect...well, they expect the brand to live up to the promises they, their customers, have understood the brand to make.

Kashi Cereal received a harsh contemporary experience of The Razor's Edge recently. That experience was delivered to its doorsteps, real and virtual, by its passionate customers and their use of social media. Maybe you read about it. If not, there are some links at the bottom to this story.

But, first, let's back up.

The Razor's Edge was written by W. Somerset Maugham and published 'back in the day' back in 1944.

Its epigraph reads:

The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard," taken from a verse in the Katha-Upanishad.^[1][2]

The Razor's Edge was twice adapted into movies, once in 1946 and then again in 1984 with Bill Murray. I liked reading the book...after I saw the first movie adaptation from 1946.

Maybe, I liked the 1946 movie best of all three versions. That was my first exposure to The Razor's Edge so I came with little or no expectations or biases. Tabla Rasa, so to speak. Then, I was surprised by how well Bill Murray played the lead character, Larry Darrell, through his journey to 'happiness' in 1984.

Now, to Kashi Cereals. I like Kashi Cereals. I like their Autumn Harvest. That's the one my wife says tastes like cardboard . As luck would have it, that's the one Kashi product that also carries the magic seal of USDA-Certified Organic. More on that later.

I didn't buy the cereal for that organic label. I never noticed it until after this brouhaha with Kashi happened. I bought Kashi's Autumn Harvest because A. I wanted cold cereal. I like cold cereal. It's like a glass of milk with crunchiness.; B. I liked the shapes of Autumn Harvest; C. I trusted Kashi. Kashi for me meant organic, natural, high-quality, healthy. D. Finally, I liked its price. When you compare it to its other brands, priced cheaper but in smaller packages, it's a great deal.

Kashi was organic in my mind. All of Kashi is organic. Organic means no GMO...anywhere. Organic means...natural, not man made, not man-manipulated liked GMO ingredients are man-made, man-manipulated. So....with reasons A-D satisfied, I think I made the assumptive, fill-in-the blank decision: I'll buy Kashi.

Look at Kashi's Meet Us page:

Passionate people, 25 years, healthy, all natural foods.

Look at Kashi's marketing copy from their our foods page:

Passionate about good, all-natural foods.

On the back of my box of cereal was an opportunity to Meet Our Farmers. In my case, on my box, were Mark and Marcy Jones.

Marcy and I have been in business as organic farmers since 1985...we now raise organic peas, milllet, flax and amaranth to complement our beautiful waves of wheat...

1985 is...wait for it...over 25 years.

With that marketing copy how would anyone assume all-natural meant that Kashi might use GMO ingredients in some of their products.

And, any rational reader and/or consumer would assume the definition of natural, especially when used on a cereal box or website of a company that sells cereals, would exclude man-designed and manipulated and manufactured GMO, genetically-modified organisms.

But...you know that old saying about assumptions and what they make out of their holder. Turns out my assumptions were wrong about Kashi. I had a lot of company with my wrong assumptions.

Ingredients in some products from Kashi might be defined as GMO, genetically-modified organisms. And no one believes GMOs are natural.

Were it any other brand, almost any other brand, a high percentage of non-GMO ingredients (even possibly not organic) would be a cause to celebrate.

Hey, this glass isn't half full...it's 70% full of good, healthy, non-GMO ingredients for you and your family.

That brand would plaster that message on every surface.

But this is Kashi. Kashi said for 25 years they've been passionate about all-natural. Not all-natural with a smattering of GMO ingredients, you know, filler stuff, make it taste better'n all that. You won't notice it. Much. 

But this is Kashi. Kashi had to know its promise included only natural ingredients as their customers defined natural. And, their customers said Hey, your cereal box is 30% full of GMO stuff. You said it was 100% full of natural ingredients. GMO's aren't natural.

And when some grovery stores discovered this, they posted notices that informed their customers. And those customers shared those notices with each other. And they used social media to share the story that Kashi's commitment to natural was a bit unnatural in their eyes. So, they pushed Kashi, with their voices and digital and social media, to cross The Razor's Edge...and honor their promises. That's the promises their customers heard, not the promises offered with opaque, possibly translucent, but conveniently misleading marketing copy.

Here's where the real pain for any brand arises when it's pushed across this Razor's Edge of openness, transparency and partnership by its customers. The real pain begins when it pushes back, when the fear of exposure and loss of control of their message forces a reaction and not an embrace. The brand drags itself across this razor multiple times.

When pressed about their percentage of GMO ingredients, as much as 30% in some brands, their General Manager said their definition of natural was:

...food that's minimally processed, made with no artificial colors, flavors, preservatives or sweeteners.

Ah. If any of their customers were asked if that definition met theirs, how many would raise their hands, nod their heads north and south to say 'yes'? Any hands? I don't see any.

Disengenous brand responses count as one more trip across the Razor's Edge. Ouch.

Persistence in disengenous responses count as another.

Kashi has done nothing wrong, says David DeSouza, Kashi general manager. "The FDA has chosen not to regulate the term 'natural,'

Well, he's right. Technically. Legally, too. Painfully, you might say, in this narrative.

But, when it comes to terms and their definitions in the areas of organic, natural, food safety the FDA has little interest in...commitment. It has little interest in consumers, many would say, too. From the FDA's page:

From a food science perspective, it is difficult to define a food product that is 'natural' because the food has probably been processed and is no longer the product of the earth. That said, FDA has not developed a definition for use of the term natural or its derivatives.

What?

How many consumers are aware that the FDA cannot define natural...? For that matter, how many need the FDA to do so?

Most consumers have neither the time nor the patience to enter the world of corporate cognitive dissonance and PR spin. We're disgusted by it, really. Quibbling over the term 'natural' and its definitions and use to then side-step or overlook, conveniently, the inclusion of GMO ingredients is the act of ...companies we don't trust and agencies with whom we've long lost faith.

But, again, this is Kashi, even if it's owned by Kellogg.

Kashi is a brand we trust because...well because we've been led to trust them. We've been led to believe them. And they say all the right things, for over 25 years, and by now they should know that...'natural' does not include GMO except in the alternative universe of government agencies who are perceived to have close ties to corporate interests.

25 years to build the image of an organic powerhouse. And it's not undone, but it's tarnished, ok, scratched and cut, left bleeding...with but a few revelations shared by a few thousand or more customers and prospects who discovered our definition of 'natural' is so unnatural to Kashi. Maybe, inconvenient is more accurate.

That two step, back and forth, between customers' passions for organic, natural and healthy food and the impression that Kashi conveniently uses an unnatural definition of natural to allow it to use unnatural GMO ingredients and then fail to inform its buying public, conveniently, and then bunker in with obscure definitions and its own fine-print...is The Razor's Edge for Kashi Cereals. And the ouch of their slip and fall on one of those steps was delivered by social media in the hands of Kashi's customers.

In a broader sense, this is the business world's version of The Razor's Edge. Once you say you share your customers passions...once you say you're committed to delivering a product, service, brand experience that honors those passions....for over 25 years, well customers tend to believe you. Not your expectations. Not your promises, not your terms as you define them. No. It's the expectations you created using the terms we understand and which we then embraced and made it our own. You see we're part of that process now. It's our understandings now that you seek to meet and exceed. Not yours.

See?

When a brand meets our expectations, speaks our language, that creates a powerful relationship of trust, of blind purchasing decisions. That's a good thing. Until we realize that um, we're not speaking the same language. In Kashi's instance they used terms that were hot buttons for us, their customer. But they defined and used them in ways that were convenient for them, not us.

Technically...you are correct. But, as I said before ....that's irrelevant.

In these days of instant global reach, a 'technical' misunderstanding drags you once over the Razor's Edge. Defending your role in that misunderstanding, justifying it, using arcane and obscure definitions of widely-used terms...only drag you over that razor, back and forth. And each time you're dragged farther and farther...back and forth. That's what Kashi just discovered. And of course, a different story could have gone viral, too.

That's part of The Razor's Edge for business now. They want customers to be passionate, lay 'claim' to their brand, tattoo the logo somewhere visible. But what they struggle with is the reality that customers now have a place at the table where the decisions are made.

I'll keep buying my Autumn Wheat. Why? Well, ironically it has the label of USDA Organic. You see the irony, don't you? The trust challenged governmental agency is now the seal of approval for what had been a trust-rich brand.

In fairness to Kashi, a salve for my dragging it once more across the razor's edge, it is announcing its commitment to organic foods through its support of the  NONGMO Project.  NONGMo is a 3rd party confirmation of ...non-GMO ingredient claims.

And here are Kashi's claims for the future with that project:

And they have 7 brands whose contents are already verified as 100% non-GMO.

Funnily enough, we have a company in my current home town of Fairfield, IA which has been involved in 3rd party verification of GMO/on-GMO ingredients. It's name is GeneticID. Guys, you have competition now. I mentioned the idea to them a few months ago that wouldn't it be great if the gold seal of approval on retail consumer packages was not the FDA's little logo but theirs? No response.

The Razor's Edge ends with this:

For all the persons with whom I have been concerned got what they wanted: Elliott social eminence; Isabel an assured position backed by a substantial fortune in an active and culture community; Gray a steady and lucrative job, with an office to go to from nine till six every day; Suzanne Rouvier security, Sophie death; and Larry Happiness. And however superciliously the highbrows carp, we the public in our heart of hears all like a success story; so perhaps my ending is no so unsatisfactory after all.

For this story, I would end it like this:

For all the persons with whom I have been concerned got what they wanted:

• Kashi social eminence, a leadership role in bringing change to our global food supply;
  
• Kashi, a vital growing community of passionate suppliers dedicated to a shared goal of producing organic, natural, healthy food;
  
• Kashi, again, a vital and growing community of passionate customer evangelists who volunteer to share with their friends and neighbors their experience with Kashi's products;
  
• Everyone else, a real-time example of a corporate brand who embraced their partners, customers and suppliers, and accepted their help in crossing their Razor's Edge. 
  

And however superciliously the highbrows carp, we the public in our heart of hears all like a success story; so perhaps my ending is not so unsatisfactory after all.

Links:

USAToday

The Northwestern.

Bliss Tree

Business Week

One Green Planet

Cash, Not Clicks, is [Still] King

Publicly traded companies in the US sit on a pile of nearly $2 trillion in cash. And that pile of cash only grows. Link. That makes them not only king of their domain, but king of the credit markets, kings of their industry, their marketplace, and...our economy.

Wanna know where the jobs are? On their balance sheet in the Current Asset item labeled Cash.

For now, anyway.

That's not what inspired me to write this post.

What inspired me to write this post was the continuing series of articles and blog posts about the power of social media as measured by interesting metrics like: clicks, like followers and likes, like views and visits and RTs, trending topics and mentions and Klout. Oh. And my favorite is members. Members, not customers. members pay nothing....which as the members of Instagram found out was the ultimate sucker pitch. They paid with their digital, personal lives when Instagram sold all of them to Facebook for about a billion dollars. (And now, Facebook's secret advertisers harvest the details of those lives for their gain. Psyche! )

Those are all important. Temporal but important. They are stepping stones to what, class? Cash. That's right. If all those metrics don't lead to an increase in cash on your balance sheet....those metrics are meaningful only to the agency who showed you have exciting they can be....temporarily (they whispered that).

Now in defense of ad and social media agencies, they cannot control what you, their client, do with clicks and members, likes and RTs, followers and comments. They can only control how those are generated, through their campaigns they design and administer. And which you pay for. And which they then tout as signs of their power. So, of course, they'll discuss those metrics.

I bear no grudge, understand it, understand it's fair. That's what their paid to do. Would do the same in their place.

But, if they cannot explain how those metrics ...cold hard cash for your business, to make you King of your domain and all it includes, then their advice is....not worth a dime. They may be great people, incredibly smart and creative and chock full of awards from their successful campaigns...as measured by those metrics. But, if they cannot help you see how to translate those treasured relationships into cash....those treasured relationship are probably only a treasure for them and their reputation. Not yours.

Clicks are nice. Conversions are even better. Conversions generate cash flows and cash on your balance sheet.

Cash is [Still] King. Cash flow keeps you King. Remember that.

Which Companies Increase Their Use of Social Media?

Only those included in the annual Inc. 500 listing of American's fastest-growing companie.

In recent report by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth social media use among America's largest companies is losing steam.

Specifically, less than a quarter of the nation's top 500 companies as ranked by Fortune magazine now have a public-facing blog -- the same percentage reported in last year's study. When UMass Dartmouth began counting blogs within the Fortune 500 in 2008, that figure was 16 percent, growing to 22 percent in 2009.

The use of Twitter and Facebook among Fortune 500 companies was similarly stunted. This year, 62 percent of those corporations took advantage of the Twittersphere, up just 2 percentage points over 2010. Also this year, 58 percent of firms manage Facebook pages as compared to 56 percent last year.

However the same study indicates that smaller corporations -- specifically, those included in the annual Inc. 500 listing of American's fastest-growing companies -- host twice as many blogs than their bigger, better-known brethren. And 71 percent of Inc. 500-listed companies have Facebook pages, while 59 percent use Twitter on a regular basis.

via www.entrepreneur.com

You decide why that is, what that means for the future.

Me? Those who talk with their customers keep their customers. Those who keep their customers engaged and inspired, see more word-of-mouth testimonials and more referrals.

Those are very cash-flow friendly marketing programs, by the way.

Eventually, the customers of those companies who are too busy to engage with them, will hear or see or read the blogs or tweets or FB posts, from those customers of companies who do choose to engage, every day and every way.Their customers, soon to be former customers,  will choose to be part of that party.

This ain't rocket-science. It's just human nature.

 

Top 5 Uses for Twitter...Here They Are

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

I left them blank to illustrate a point.

How many times have we seen a post titled:  TOP 5 USES for TWITTER...or some such list. And we scramble to quickly self-assess and add a to-do item to start doing...number 5 on that list. Ok. I have. Twitter's powerful and how doesn't want the results described along with that list of quick and easy steps...

That's the point.

The top 5 ways to use Twitter don't come from me. My list of ways I use Twitter is precious and wonderful for me, sure. But ultimately irrelevant in this conversation.

The top 5 ways to use Twitter don't come from another post published by another social media expert, maven or guru, agency or firm.

They never have.

The top 5 ways come from...you.

What are your top 5 ways that you use twitter...*?

That is the power of a resource like Twitter or blogs or posterous or tumblr or flickr...You can discover and develop YOUR top 5 ways of using...Twitter. We can do this together. That has been the power of social media from the beginning.

You remember 3-4 years ago when there were no social media experts or agencies? 3-4 years ago before everyone and their mother and their mother's mother heard that list posts were a great way to generate traffic. Not ideas. Not conversations. Not discoveries.  

Be like everyone else and follow these 10 steps on social media and presto!

Presto, you're just like everyone else. True confession: I bought into it. It seemed an effective way to learn and help others. Then one day the lists seemed rote, redundant, repititive...and pretty soon everybody was doing it. Like AutoDms on Twitter to new followers. (Ok, I never did that.)

The power of social media has always arisen from this:

We, anyone, can use them, explore them, master them, make a mistake or two with them, at our pace. As we decide. That individuality, that freedom to explore and learn and fail and succeed as decide has always been the viral power of social media.

What was missing...back in the day...were experts or institutions assigning one way and enforced with bored and tired rules, which they administered. There were no standardized tests. No rules. No policies. Like kids we joined this playground and learned and fell down and got back up by ourselves or with others who helped.

See what's missing? No experts.

Like kids in a playground we all played together. Sure, our skills are ours alone. We mastered them: running or climbing or organizing a game or talking quietly off to the side or watching a butterfly or running out in the field by ourselves or competing or cooperating. We learned together. Together we all watched and learned and experimented and became masters ...together.

The power of social media is the power to run around on a playground on our legs as fast as we want in the direction we want. As often as we want. As fast as we want. And...with whom we want.

To say this in marketing vernacular we have the freedom to speak in our own voices. To share and showcase our own voices. As a marketing media there is no message more powerful than that of unique. Sure, you can browbeat people, you can bury them with an onslought of paid media. And as soon as that onslaught stops so does your message stop being shared.

That makes us all leaders. As Rajeev Peshawaria said during his interview with me:

We call someone a leader when they create something that does not yet exist. Or when she significantly improves something that already exists. And this comes from original thinking, not copying.

By copying behavior you can become an expert at something. But you cannot become a leader.

Back to the title. Fill in those blanks. What are YOUR top 5 ways of using Twitter? Or Posterous or your blog or Tumblr or YouTube or Google Reader or Google +. Find those. Use them. Speak in your own voice. You'll be heard. You'll hear others. Like on a playground. You will lead others on your, collective you, playground. And likewise you can be a co-leader on someone else's.

And what a playground it became with no one volunteering to be adults and no one claiming....they are an expert. Then we are all leaders and together we are co-leaders.

 

Social Media's Impact: Positive Change or Deep In-Breeding?

 Dr. Hal Gregersen co-author of The Innovator's DNA - Mastering the 5 Skills of Disruptive Innovators was a guest on my radio show recently. You can listen here.

Towards the end of the interview I asked him about social media and its role with these 5 skills. I asked him:

Let’s talk about social media. As I read your book and thought about the five skills, particularly associating, I thought about social media. I find it a great tool to feed this habit. Others think it’s fiendish devil breaking down our associations with each other.

What’s your thoughts?

And here's his answer and our conversation:

Social media has the potential for innovation if we use it carefully. And it has the potential to crush innovation if we use it the it is systematically set up for us to use.

So, it’s like when we buy a book on Amazon, Amazon is smart enough to figure out what are some books that are like that book that we just bought and:

“ Might you like this one, too?”

Well, what social media does is it basically says:

“Who are some people like the people you already know that you might like?”

And we start building these networks more often than not that are like us. And when that happens, instead of becoming a mechanism for great social and positive change in the world it often becomes a mechanism for deep in-breeding and self-centered thinking that leads to catastrophes.

For me, social media has a double-edge. It could be used for something quite incredible or incredibly good. Or it could be used for something that actually is incredibly destructive.

For me, it is being conscious for what am I using it for? Am I using it in a thoughtful way? Am I using it in a way that taps into different ways of looking and seeing the world. That might be somebody from a different company, somebody from a different country, somebody from a different community or background. When I use social media to connect me to into places I normally wouldn’t connect that’s when it becomes fun and interesting. I think we could create some positive social values.

A couple examples. One is an early guest on this show: Bill Davidow who is the author of OVERCONNECTED: The Promise and Threat of the Internet. He talks about the threat of creating self-reinforcing echo chambers.

Sometimes in my frustration, I see social media and particularly Twitter as a high-school popularity contest. It’s easy to fall into it. Who doesn’t want the validation of thousands of people saying:

“Hey that’s a great thought you had.”

On the other hand, it’s a great opportunity to connect with other people around the world. I’m fascinated with the democracy movements in the Middle East and northern Africa using social media to get their story out in an environment where diversity of thought is maybe, perhaps, not encouraged. And I’m beginning to see the common thread of innovation and community and the need to connect and ask questions is as common in these democracy movements as it is here in corporations trying to find new ideas to reach out to consumers who are in effect their voters.

I’m an American. I grew up in the US. But, now I live in several countries. Part of the year I live in Paris, France; part of the year I live in Abu Dhabi and the United Arab Emirates in the middle of the Middle East. I can empathize with what you are talking about.

Many times in the Middle East the approach to innovation there is buying innovative things vs building innovative people.

One of the great by-products of the democracy movements in the middle east is that it is fostering these Innovator’s DNA skills that will help them. They have a deep need for incredibly creative people to create systems and solutions in a world that is turned upside down in the last 12 months.

When you present it like that it seems there is such fantastic potential there that awaits them. The potential for growth that is going to come from allowing all of these voices to participate in exchanging ideas that will bring change in their daily lives.

**********

This part of our conversation is transcribed in Part Three of our conversation.

Here is a link to Part One and Part Two.

Social Media: London Calling

Social media. Digital media and devices. You see them at work with the recent London riots.

One group of users organize riots and arson.

One group organizes cleanups from the riots and arson.

Both groups of users connect with their neighbors and peers, shareholders if you will, in their common experience and outlook and hope for the future or...not.

Their message spread because of the experiences they each shared again and again, the meaning those experiences created in their lives. And all this was done long before any user picked up their phone and tweeted or FB'd or texted a message.

What's interesting to me is less the use of social media by either group. However, it was inspiring to see cleanup operations organized and rallied by community members who wanted to persevere, protect and preserve their neighborhoods. That's cool.

What's interesting to me is what happens now.  Both communities can see and even participate now in the conversations of the other.  Will the members of both communities reach out to the other? What's interesting to me will be if they do. 

For that matter, would I? Would I want to engage with a crew of folks who burned my neighborhood or community center down? I don't think my love of humanity is that unconditional. But we never know until we listen. When we don't listen, we don't engage. When we don't engage....looting can be the result.

Imagine a company. And you have employees and customers, management and partners/vendors. With social media, they each can see the conversations of the other. With social media, they can listen, they each can connect and participate in those conversations. They can learn. They can find common ground. Common ground is a darn fine basis then to celebrate the differences. Differences are what make employees unique, make them strong, are how their talents are showcased. Differences make for market niches, for brands that stand out, stand alone, stand without competition.  But, then again when we don't listen....brands are consumed as communities are by anger, frustration, lack of recognition, lack of opportunity, lack of change.

 

 

 

Infographic: President Obama's Twitter Town Hall

via www.webinknow.com

Thanks, David.

Do you measure these 3 social media metrics?

Marty O’Neill’s latest book, The Power of an Internal Franchise shows you, the reader, how to lead, engage, inspire and empower the members of any organization to embrace that complete and total dedication to the success of their organization. Marty has laid out the argument with data and case studies, profiles and analysis. Then he has taken it a step further to offer tips and how-to’s to make that transition.

Marty O’Neill, is founder and CEO of Corsum Consulting, a firm focused on building enterprise value for mid market companies. Marty has been an operator and consultant in the technology services and software industries for 25 years. He has started technology based services companies, led two IT Services firms through successful acquisitions and ran a business unit for a Fortune 50 company.

He was a recent guest on my radio show. You can listen to our conversation at this link.

I asked him about some interesting financial metrics he encouraged corporate leaders to consider regularly. I asked him:

You listed 22 components a service company should have on its financial dashboard. Most of them seemed standard: EBITDA, Revenue, Overhead as percentage of sales, etc. But three caught my eye:

• Hires via referral
• Cost per hire
• Resumes in pipeline.

Why are they important?

And Marty answered:

Well, you know, if you think of a services company that there’s really two major functions of a service company. And they have to be aligned.

• Talent acquisition and talent growth.

• Business acquisition or business growth.

Those two rocket-engines of growth have to be aligned. And on this one, the side we’re talking about here is the talent acquisition and talent growth.

How do you bring them in at a cost-effective manner?

And it gets back to that whole thing of creating a workplace brand. When you’re hiring via employee referrals then that’s telling you that you’re internal brand is credible. You’ve been able to claim it because your employees are out there acting as recruiters or owners.

When your cost per hire starts to go down, when you’re no longer paying recruiters to convince people to come there then, again, it’s the same sort of alignment.

Back to that statement that you want to create a line-of-sight between what people do every day and the performance of the company. One of the things even the most junior person in a company can do is refer people in to the company. That lowers the costs per hire. Chances are they will have referred somebody who’s worked with them and they trust them and know they’re going to do a good job. So, they’re able to, the actions they do every day is able to impact the financial performance of the company.

Then the resume’s in the pipeline...they just have to know, again the alignment of the acquisition of the business and the development of talent and the acquisition of talent, they have to be aligned.

Think in terms of sine waves, right. One sine wave is the staff, adding staff to your company. the other sine wave is business development. In a perfect world, those two sine waves are aligned. Right?

The shift is one way or the other. You have opportunity costs where there are not enough people to do the work. Or you have too many people to do the work and you’re losing money.

So, a services company has to have that alignment. On the talent acquisition/development side these are three indicators that you should be able to share with everybody.

• How are we doing with referrals?

• How are we doing with keeping our costs per hire down?

• How many folks do have that want to come here? How many resumes in the pipeline?

And as I listened to his answer, one of his many great answers, I heard him answer for those same corporate executives:

What are metrics we can use to measure the success of our social media?

Think about it for a minute if it's not obvious. Social media agencies and gurus, go ahead and fire away. 

Your company's use of social media  reflects the conversations you inspire first within your organization. Those conversations in turn inspire your members to tout or celebrate or promote their workplace (operative word is their). Three of the key metrics you would use to measure the effectiveness of your social media then are:

• Hires via referral
• Cost per hire
• Resumes in pipeline

So. When you measure your results with social media...do your measure these three metrics?  If you're not, you're probably wasting both your investment in social media and the potential of your most important resource: your people.

Want more from Mary O'Neill?

• Read his blog.

• Follow him on Twitter.

• Buy his books!

• Read the full transcript of this conversation here.

Gail Z. Martin! What Are You Reading?

Gail Z. Martin is the creator of The Solopreneur Survival Guide, the host of the Shared Dreams podcast and the author of 30 Days to Social Media Success: The 30 Day Results Guide to Making the Most of Twitter, Blogging, LinkedIn and Facebook. Gail is an international speaker on marketing and social media, and in her spare time, she writes a bestselling fantasy adventure series of books. She founded Dream Spinner Communications in 2002 and now works with clients through the US and Canada.

She joined the show recently to talk about her great new book: 30 Days to Social Media Success: The 30 Day Results Guide to Making the Most of Twitter, Blogging, LinkedIn and Facebook.

You can listen to our conversation here. You can read highlights from our conversation here.

Gail's a leader. I asked her:

You’re a leader. You’re an avid writer, also. Jim Rohn says that Leaders are readers. What are you reading in business or for fun?

And she answered:

I’ve been doing a lot of reading on speaking. I’ve been reading a lot of books on how to be a better professional speaker.

I re-read Michael Port’s book Book Yourself Solid now for about the 6th time. I’m constantly reinventing my business so that book and his sequel to that are very valuable.

I’m also always reading books about social media and the internet...because it’s always changing.

**********

Leaders are readers.

That is how you create a culture of learning as Gary Harpst talked about in an earlier show. That culture of learning is critical if you want to continually learn new tools and resources and skills and master more talents. That is how you discover new solutions for the new challenges that your growth will bring. That is also how you develop a culture of leaders. Learners are leaders. Reading is one way you learn. Reading what leaders read is one way you accelerate that learning, accelerate that leading for yourself and your company.

 

President Obama: 3 Tips to Avoid The Dangers of Being Overconnected

Bill Davidow has been a high-technology industry executive and a venture investor for more than 30 years. He continues to act as an active advisor to Mohr Davidow Ventures, a venture capital firm

In his latest book, Overconnected: The Promise and Threat of the Internet , he explains how the almost miraculous success of the Internet has also engendered a unique set of hazards and challenges for government, social institutions, business, and economies.

In Overconnected, Davidow meticulously — and counter-intuitively — anatomizes how overconnectivity can create systems with excessive amounts of positive feedback, making those systems extremely volatile, accident prone, and subject to contagion.

I loved the book. I found his presentation was...meticulous, concise loaded with examples of companies and even countries who suffered from excessive amounts of positive feedback...And while I initially disagreed with his premise, by the end of our conversation he showed me our common ground.

I asked him about the power and threat of being overconnected and its role in our nation's current challenges.

We’ve reached the imagination moment in the show. Being a venture capitalist you have been exposed to imaginative enterprises, so this may be the best part of the show.

Let's imagine President Obama calls you right after we finish. He says:

David, I'm sorry I missed you at my dinner out in Silicon Valley a few weeks ago. Mark and Steve are so pushy, I had to give them those seats next to me. But look, I got elected from the power of connections. But now in power, I'm a little ambivalent. Still, we're a fractured country. How do we realize the promise of the internet in being connected and avoid the dangers of being overconnected.

What are three things our country can do and come on up to DC and I'll take you to dinner next time your in DC.

And Bill answers:

I’m afraid President Obama wouldn’t like my answers. One of the things I would point out to him is that the internet enables you to arbitrage everything.

And of course that’s an exaggeration.

But a slight difference in wages and you can arbitrage it. A slight difference in policy and you can arbitrage it or taxes and you can arbitrage it. I don’t like the financial regulation in the US and I’ll go operate where they don’t have those regulations. I don’t like the labor laws in Iowa, I’ll go elsewhere.

I would say to President Obama that:

Suddenly we’ve gotten into a world where we have to be competitive in everything we do.

We cannot tolerate any inefficiencies whether it’s in government or business or education.

We can’t afford to run a grade-school system and then have the high-school act as a backup.

And connectivity is forcing us into an extremely competitive world where we’re all having to do our best every single day.

And, I don’t think the US has faced up to that today.

**********

Some may say this is inappropriate.

This is politics! And you never discuss politics at Thanksgiving Dinners, backyard barbecues and on a business radio show.

I disagree. As long as only politicians can discuss solutions for our country then those solutions and their interested audiences will remain off-limits, political, for those who make this brand, our country, run.

And only politicians, these days that's only career politicians, can discuss those ideas and spoon-feed solutions to the public.

I see our times as an all hands-on-deck opportunity and not a crisis. That opportunity is for each of us to lend our hands, our conversations, our ideas to find and share solutions. In our absence those challenges are left to ideologues, vested interests and politicians of all stripes and partisan persuasion. We...are the only ones with vested interests. And now we have, with social media and the urgency of today, the opportunity to reclaim our place at this table and discuss our ideas to solve our challenges. At the very least, we can listen to a discussion until we are ready to speak up.

Want More from Bill Davidow?

• Read transcripts of our conversation here.

• Listen to our conversation here.

• Follow him on Twitter

• Buy his books.

Social Networking: It works...even for health professionals

Social networking allows doctors, nurses and other health professionals to deeply connect and engage with the community and their colleagues.

“We are standing at the precipice of a new online revolution in health care. As more and more health experts embrace the Internet and increase their social media activity, health information seekers will undoubtedly benefit in profound ways.” [Source: Mashable] via healthin30.com

Let's try this and see if we can broaden the audience for this insight:

Social networking allows [any organization]  to deeply connect and engage with the community and their colleagues.

“We are standing at the precipice of a new online revolution. As more and more [organizations] embrace the Internet and increase their social media activity, health information seekers will undoubtedly benefit in profound ways.” [Source: me w/ a little help from Mashable] 

 

Happiness and Why Your Business Could Use More of It

Once your basic needs are met, the correlation between money and happiness or satisfaction is relatively low.

So our behavior patterns are often misaligned with being happy in the long run.

Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately for those who wish they could just buy the Happiness app and be done with it, we do know what correlates with happiness in the longer run – meaning, a sense of purpose, a sense of connectedness.via blog.web2expo.com

I like this article a lot. ( I think you will, too. Click on the link and read it) 

I liked its discussion about happiness and meaning. Period. Business context, personal context, social media or not, I liked the points shared.

But what really stuck out for me in a business/social media context was this:

...we do know what correlates with happiness in the longer run – meaning, a sense of purpose, a sense of connectedness.

I think about how this correlates with key metrics of business like... customer retention, conversion rates, and customer churn and employee engagement, which in turn tranlsate into higher profits, faster revenue growth, higher conversion rates, higher EBITDA, higher shareholder value....

And, how the nature of sustainable engagement with your key stakeholders all comes down to happiness.

Do you, do we, create a culture, a social network, an opportunity, where happiness can be found, created, expanded, shared, made-our-own? If you do then you have a sustainable community of ...customers, prospects, employees, families, communities, friends.

It's happiness as defined by the members. That's the connectedness. It's the conversations you allow around the happiness they experience, create, share, turn back and experience/create/share again and again.

Serve their happiness. And don't worry; be happy. If you do, if you serve their happiness you will be too busy serving, being happy, and that will leave you no time to worry.

These 3 Key Metrics Measure Social Media Success?

Social media marketing has entered a new era. Brands are no longer content to simply experiment with a Facebook page and a Twitter account and “hope for the best.” With social media marketing budgets on the rise, marketers need their social campaigns to drive bottom-line sales, measurable brand benefit, and improved customer lifetime value. via searchenginewatch.com

This is a good post. It starts off with a promising first paragraph.

On the other hand, what I thought was interesting was the absence of the key metric that would be used by any brand that hopes to be a sustainable brand.

The author touches on the key metric when he mentions bottom-line sales in that opening paragraph. But that is the last mention of bottom-line sales in this description of the 3 key metrics. And no mention of that old-school metric: costs.

There lies the rub, the disconnect, between business and social media...agencies. They don't speak the same language. Social media ...experts...create and use terms that are really cool to bandy about at conferences and with each other. Terms like sCRM and sTraffic and sMI. Business decision-makers, on the other hand, use terms that have long-standing reputations within the business decision-making community. These are terms like: cash-low, revenues, profits, costs, ROI.

If a social media...solutions-provider...cannot connect sCRM and sTraffic and sMI...to cash-low, revenues, profits, costs, ROI then what they describe is not really a business solution.

I find it annoying, almost disingenous, for those who make money promoting social media tools and their use in the business community to say:

The maturation of the social media space has created the need for simple, standardized measurement techniques that clearly show whether social campaigns are working to deliver real brand impact and actual sales. Unlike the online advertising industry, which has standardized on a few key metrics (CPC, CPA, and CPM), social media success measurement is still in its infancy and continues to suffer from a lack of common metrics standards.

Simple, standardized, measurement techniques and metrics already exist to show how a social media tool can deliver brand impact ( whatever that means) and actual sales. If a brand's efforts cannot deliver actual sales...it has no impact; well, at least one that has an impact on its consumers and an impact that is sustainable.

Social media is a tool used by business to achieve business goals. The same key metrics and the same key terms to identify those metrics still stand.The same business language and terms and metric apply. I would suggest that the maturation of the social media space means those in that space can now wear big-boy pants and talk the language of adult decision-makers. They are after all the ones who write your checks if you speak their language.