Community Is Made From Two Words

Posted on July 13, 2009 by Scott Gould

The buzz phrase for the bloggers and online marketeers today is ‘community’, and has become the poster child for all things involving social media (a.k.a Facebook, to the average user). This, essentially, means for most of them: ‘create’ a community around what you want people to talk about.

Church – my first passion – is often made to work with this same principle. ‘Create’ community by doing church the way you want people to like it. Or how about small businesses that start out selling a product that they themselves are the ones, and the only ones, who’d buy it – and now are forced to ‘create’ an audience / community around this niche idea.

But, shock, horror, community is made from two words: Common Unity.

You don’t create common unity. You find it, and nurture it. For every wannabe blogger, engaging in the incestuous blogger-to-blogger economy, stop ignoring the massive internet audience that isn’t saturated with social media experts – the average internet user. Find out what unity you have with them. Find out what matters to them. Work with them to create change.

For every church member who wonders why they don’t have a full Sunday service – stop expecting people to turn up. Go and find out what common unity is shared in your community and get involved in it. Find the hurt, and heal it. Find the need, and meet it.

Finally, social media is changing the way we do this. If you aren’t a digitall but you’re a digi-not, ‘social media’ the snazzy word for Facebook / Twitter / YouTube – all media that is social. Start thinking outside of the ‘what are you doing’ box – and start thinking how you can find, or even be the one who brings common unity together online.

Life: It’s the Experience That Counts

Posted on July 10, 2009 by Scott Gould

Last night was the opening of Touch 09 – both our client and one of our church initiatives – and it kicked derrière. We’ve worked very hard, but the stars are all the volunteers who have tirelessly put time and effort into making this conference a success.

As I stood there, watching the whole thing play out in front of me, whilst enjoying my clean task list, I picked up a thought that I’ve been playing with for sometime. Tens of thousands of hours have been spent in preparation for this conference to provide the stage for experience. But why is a rich, compelling experience necessary?

I’ve come to consider that destiny is made in the moment of decision. One decision made with conviction can change the course of your life. “I’ll never do that again”, “from now on, I will always do this”, “I’ve had enough of this”. A quality decision will rouse that most precious human resource, action, and action will lead to transformation.

I’ve preached for years about quality decisions, but I am only beginning to understand that experience induces decision. A tragedy in your life will induce a decision. An trivial experience that illuminates your mind will induce a decision. A good movie or book will induce an experience. A friend, role model – an extended experience – can induce multiple decisions.

Understanding this helps us understand why an experience is staged and not made. A compelling experience will be multi-touch, providing many ways that, through the five senses, a decision may be induced. But you cannot make the experience. Experience is in the eye of the beholder, and we can only stage – like a theatrical director, carefully placing each part in order – in the hope that our audience will be inspired to make a decision, and act.

Has a compelling experience ever induced you to make a life altering decision?

The Measure Of A Man

Posted on July 9, 2009 by Scott Gould

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVp-5Zq9iJ0

Richard Branson posted this video at the beginning of the week and I immediately retweeted it. If you don’t know who Archbishop Desmond TuTu is, he was instrumental in the pulling down of apartheid in South Africa. I have all the respect in the world for this man who has stayed the course, and in his old age continues to speak out against Mugabe, was well as against the western countries that do nothing to intervene.

This video, whilst on one level speaking in regard to the much publicised Islamic treatment of Women in Sharia Law, for me speaks about the measure of a man, because multitudes have watched and will watch this video, and smile as they know they do not hit their wife, or hurt women, and therefore feel justified. But I want to ask every man in the world a question…

How do you treat women?

I know many who will not hit their wife, but they will cut her down with harsh words, belittling her so that this poor excuse for a man can have some feeling of power. I know other men who will not harm a women, but talk trash about her at the office all day and gossip behind her back.

Some men will treat their sister with respect, but treat any other women as if she were an inanimate object to attain and throw away. Our magazine racks and television screens overflow with women paraded as animals who live only to fulfill lustful desires, men ranking them solely on their ability to gratify their insatiable quench for pleasure, as if they lack any other inherent value such as personality, strength, tenderness and warmth.

I see and hear men talk about women like they are chickens crammed into some coop in some battery farm, harvested for their bodies, and their well being cast aside as collateral damage and an unfortunate side product. My own cousins tell me they have lost count of their ‘conquests’, laughingly and arrogantly confessing that somewhere, in all likelihood, is a child they’ve unwittingly fathered.

Oh, they don’t hit women, but the bruises left on the women of our nation are clear. The broken bones of our fractured society are not accidental. The nine and ten year old girls in miniskirts, hunting around the shopping mall for boys, are no coincidence. I’ve seen single mother after single mother come through our church, and despite all the hurt than men have inflicted her, cannot imagine any other way that men would desire her than for her body and what it can do for them. And I have seen with my own eyes that their children, in turn, grow up with the same impression.

And it is with unbelief that, that when I ask and seek to bring understanding, not one of these men considers they have done any wrong.

How do you treat women?

Keeping Your Head When Everyone Else Is…

Posted on July 8, 2009 by Scott Gould

This week is busy. We have two new interns in the office at Aaron+Gould, and Women In Touch (my client and church initiative) big yearly conference this week.

It’s weeks like this, where you have to manage multiple things at a high stress and time pressure, that easily break your daily routine and to-do system. Normally at this point I’d have scrapped my system in favour of trusting no one with any delegated tasks and therefore working 48 hour days to get everything done. The house becomes messy, the office a tip, and I obsessively cut out everything else in order to check off every last task.

Not this year. Thanks do an integrated GTD system, and more specifically, Remember The Milk.

A big part of GTD is context. The idea is to create lists based on context – office, home, phone calls. Now because I list every project with a hastag and then the task, i.e. ‘#Touch – Print off posters’, I have set up a smart list that searches every task with ‘#Touch’. The result is I have a list dedicated to every task for this project, rather than sifting through my ‘Next’ or ‘Waiting For’ lists. I can see everything I have tagged as ‘delegated’, who I’ve delegated it to, as well as ‘video’, ‘dtp’, etc, so I get a great 20,000 to 30,000 foot view on the project.

Along with Evernote as my external mind, I have found my system (I’ll share more details with you later) has stayed solid and helped me delegate and manage far better. Did I tell you I’m also writing a viral campaign proposal this week?

Experience: Today’s Currency

Posted on July 3, 2009 by Scott Gould

When you go into Starbucks what are you buying? A product? A good? A service? Or are you indeed buying something far greater than coffee?

The idea of experience in marketing is not at all a new one, and indeed the general public can now observe that more often than not, the notion of experience is being used to sell a company’s goods or services.

But today it is no longer sufficient for a company to use experience to sell. Experience is itself the offering that consumers want. Experience is today’s currency. In a desperately over saturated market, an experience sets one brand / company / product / person apart from all the others.

Starbucks does not produce a quality bean (far from it), nor are its drinks made with the accuracy of an artisan local coffee shop or its pastries fresh. But, none of those matter. When you walk into Starbucks you’re paying for the experience of firstly ordering a drink exactly how you like it, waiting at the bar in anticipation as the barista makes your drink (not someone else’s), adding a range of condiments, sugars and milks, and the experience of walking out holding that green emblem in your hand and participating in the tribe of Bucks drinks all around the world. For that experience, you pay a premium price that is above that of any other coffee shop in sight.

Nor are Disney’s rides the scariest, customer service the best, or food great quality. But the experience is incomparable and the reason why it is the gold standard of family holidays. How about the trailer, ”Cinema, it’s the experience that counts”? What makes ordering a Philly Cheesesteak at Pat’s more than just eating a cheesesteak?

Or consider the iPhone. Many of the groundbreaking features (Touch screen, map, app store, VOIP) have actually been around for a good five, six, seven ten years on mobile devices (Palm, Vodafone Live, Nokia Communicator, etc). But these features appear to be new because whereas previously it was so hard to use and work those things out, the iPhone gives you the experience of exceptional ease. The whole reason why I have an iPhone is because from slide to touch to pinch there is an matchless user experience. It’s like Seth Godin’s tale of sliced bread. The thing was invented in the 1910s but no one knew about it for 15 years until Wonder created a user experience for slicing bread.

Consumers are cutting back… Yet… An experience is still part of the budget. Cinemas are packed this summer. Starbucks paper cups can be seen in bins everywhere. Apple sold over a million iPhone 3G S units in a week. Sure, the holiday might be scaled down, but the experiences that people’s days or weeks hinge upon are so compelling that they have become integral to their routine, and are pretty much non-negotiable.

Shift your thinking from using experience to sell, and instead customise your goods or services into rich, compelling experiences.

Experience The Exeter Twitterati

Posted on July 2, 2009 by Scott Gould

Innovation. Pressureless. Accumulation. Restraint. These are the lessons I’ve learnt from the Exeter Twitterati.

There is a another lesson I want to add, which is illustrated by the list below. A list full of people who have connected with me, each one in a unique and memorable way. This is not a list of ‘social media power users’ or ‘geeks’. These people are mums and dads, musicians, students, housewives, small to medium business directors and bored professionals to name but a few. These are people from various walks of life who are using Twitter to connect with real, everyday people.

Hence, the new lesson is Accessibility. Being on Twitter isn’t really about what you had for breakfast, or having to retweet a hundred news articles a day so you can get tens of thousands of followers. Twitter is about being accessible, allowing others into a little of your world, and those same people allowing you access into theirs in return.

It is because of accessibility that I have the pleasure of unveiling this list below.

This is not a role call of Exeter and area Twitter users, it’s a list of memories from accessible people.

The List of Exeter Twitterati

@andjdavies - Andrew Davies – It always astounds me what talent lies in Exeter that you never know about. Andrew is a smart and well connected guy in London with his work, but has plenty of time to sit and talk things through with anyone who asks. I’ve got all the time of the world for this man who has given me sage, timeless advice.

@atlanta7 & @anotherplanet - Julian & Suzie Hoad – My first real life meeting with someone I connected with on Twiter (aka ‘Tweeting’) was back in the spring with this husband and wife design team. A big step to new things for me. Weird thing was, their daughter went to school with my much younger brother! You don’t forget things like that.

@banksy6 - Alastair Banks – I have spent more physical time with Al than other people I’ve met through Twitter. As a successful company director, he extended the olive branch to me to see how we could collaborate on projects. You just don’t get that at networking events. The first time we met I was late, and now we always jokes about Starbucks being my real office. That’s memorable, albeit at my expense!

@Bluegrass_IT - David Thomas – I knew David a little on Twitter, but on the eve of a presentation he was giving on social media, he asked to call me and we chatted on the phone for an hour. Trust. We met for the first time the following today, and have seen each other a few times since. What I can tell you is because of the lesson of innovation, I trust him.

@drewellis - Drew Ellis – Another example of the unknown talent that lies in Exeter. Drew spends most of his time in London, so even though he was the first person I arranged a tweet up with, I only got to see him in June this year! A man of many accomplishments, I was humbled by the way he asked me what I thought about social media and valued my opinion.

@ExeterCCM - John Harvey – A man who epitomizes innovation, he has incurred the support of the whole Exeter Twitterati. We’ve had coffee and met a few times – but what makes our interaction memorable for me are the kind words that he has spoken about me to others.

@jamesmb - James Barisic – One of Exeter’s funniest tweople. Saying that I would “hunt him down” if he didn’t come to a tweetup was the crossing of the rubicon in our relationship. Again, it is accessibility, not only to speak to people, but also being able to say certain things to people.

@KristenSousa - Kristen Sousa – A partner in crime (but not in love) with Alastair Banks, I’ve been really impressed by this smart cookie who I’ve met twice thus far. I wrote last week about those people who posses that certain something else, and she is a shinning example of someone who exhibits the quality of observation. Be careful what you say around her, she will remember it – I would know!

@nibby01 - Lesley-Ann Simpson – I’ve yet to meet Lesley but our interactions on Twitter had been such that she warrants a mention. As an agent of change, she has this great encouraging streak about her that has encouraged me no end. When I need a little pick me up, I drop a tweet to her. I can’t recall our first interactions, but this is the lesson of accumulation in action.

@rc55 - Ruairi Fullam – We go back 12 years, when Rauiri was an early innovator online, playing with HTML 2. The rekindling of our relationship was over coffee talking about GTD a few months ago. The humility among our Exeter Twitterati always astounds me – everyone has the attitude that they can learn from each other, and Ruairi’s inquisitive and humorous nature make learning from him extra fun.

@Rokkster - Adam Stone – I would never have called his office and said “Can I speak to the managing director” – but with Twitter the protocols and loops to jump through are minimized, and connections can happen that traditionally wouldn’t. We had a coffee soon after and he taught me some valuable pointers for Twitter and follower growth. The joke was on me, of course, when my wife had taken my wallet and I couldn’t pay for the drinks – graciously Adam only brings it up every now and then

@SophyNorris - Sophie Norris – I met Sophie for the first time at the trans-atlantic tweetup I hosted with @treypennington . We haven’t seen one another’s faces since but her humour, as well as her constant question “how does this apply to the average person” make me smile and think. She’s already sent a little business my way, and I’m always looking for ways to send it back.

@vmcconville - Vince McConville – Vince and I met back in the spring and was amazed at this Gladwellian example of a social connector. He knows everyone. Literally, everyone. But as I was drinking coffee and he was drinking water, he made me feel like I was the one who knew every0one. Textbook connector! I left that coffee shop feeling far taller than I did walking in.

Why Only These People?

What each of these people have exchanged with me is an experience. Whether they thought through what that experience was going to be before hand or not, they marketed themselves to me in a memorable moment. I encourage you to start thinking more about what experience you are giving to those who are connecting with you. It should preferably be one that won’t be forgotten.

P.S. Thanks go to Beth for the photo.

The Most Precious Human Resource: Action

Posted on July 1, 2009 by Scott Gould

Content is a commodity. Take your pick of entertainments, places, ideas, tinned foods, holiday destinations. The thing with content is it can be digested very easily – most often like soft porridge oats that require no chewing – and requires little action.

Action. The most precious human resource in the world. It is the people who have acted upon social injustice that have changed our world. Those who started with doing just something that have shaped our history. It those who acted upon a dream, a vision, who pulled what was previously thought impossible into the realm of realirt.

Amidst the commoditisation of content, the measure of clarity is its ability to provoke this invaluable resource.

If I could say one thing to every person (and particularly, every blogger) in the world, it would be this: you are educated above your level of action, and before you learn or blog another thing, I want you to simply use the information you already have and unleash your actions.

But because I can’t, I’ll share with you how I have learnt to help those around me activate action. It’s all about an IDEA:

Inspire – show them what part they can play, not necessarily in the whole world, but in their world.
Decision – help them see it starts with a decision to do.
Example – point them to a great example. Better yet, be the example.
Action – ask them write down right there and then the next step… and commit to do it.

As one wise man succinctly put it two thousand years ago, “don’t merely listen: do.” Here’s to a generation of acters.