Posts from: March 18, 2011

Published on March 18, 2011 by Scott Gould

The 4 Universal Social Gifts

Every wondered what the 4 categories of things that you can do on Twitter, or say to a friend, or provide to a team as a leader?

In their book First Impressions (aff link), Ann Demararis and Valerie White (an exceptional read on the subject of making first impressions), they list four universal social gifts that we can give to others at anytime:

Appreciation – showing your gratitude and thanks to people, from yourself or on behalf of others. People like to be appreciated!

Connection – finding where you intersect with someone, this is like saying “I’m like you.” It makes people feel understood and gives them a sense of belonging.

Elevation – people are drawn to those who make them feel uplifted. When you encourage people, challenge them to go on bigger and better, you elevate them.

Enlightenment – we are curious and like to discover new things. Bearing the gift of englightment makes you a stimulating person to be around.

So go forth with these social gifts and give them generously!

Photo courtesy of kevindooley

Published on March 16, 2011 by Scott Gould

What you learn in 4000 comments

Today we hit 4000 comments exactly. I only mention it because I’ve never noticed it being dead on a thousand before, but it got me thinking about what I’ve learned from 4000 comments:

That the Friends who comment here are like a family to me; that even though people may be thousands of miles apart with no knowledge of each other, if you give people room and allow them to shine with the light that is often brighter than your own expertise, then like minds will always come together.

Thank you all,
Scott

Published on March 14, 2011 by Scott Gould

Keeping A Good To-do List

I used to think that keeping a to-do list was a common thing but actually it is very uncommon. What’s even less common is to have a to-do list that isn’t just a numbered list of things to be done one day.

Stress is produced in our lives when we don’t know what to do. The pressure of having a big project is different to stressing about the project. Pressure is a challenge that draws us up to higher levels. Stress is when our minds are overloaded because of that pressure – but I believe you can have pressure without stress! Stress comes when you don’t know what to do with your project.

The most common mistake with a to-do list is to just make a hope list or a project list. While you should keep a project list of things that you are working on, and a someday list for things to be done one day in the future but not necessarily to be done, the main to-do list is where your very next actions go. This is also called your “Next List”.

For example, “Clean the car” is not a task, it is a project, and therefore writing that down in your to-do list isn’t helpful, it’s daunting. Rather you should write down “Pick up vacuum cleaner to clean car”, and “Purchase car cleaning products.” This way you have the next action and relieve stress.

A to-do list is at it’s most powerful when every task:

Is the next tangible and achievable action on the project (how do you tick “Go on holiday”, except when you’ve come back? Rather have “Investigate flights to Spain”)
Is actionable and begins with a verb and thus is an action (this forces you to make it an action, “Investigate flights to Spain” and not just a statement, “Flights”)
Is measurable and has a due date (setting a deadline for the task to be produced, like “Investigate flights to Spain by Tuesday” as opposed to it lingering in production perjury)

Tasks without these things are less likely to be done and more likely to be procrastinated over because they require extra thought before they are done (meaning you still don’t know what to do.)

The to do list is the backbone of your day. It is your runsheet that your day is played off. You will keep four lists that your tasks are organised around:

Next List. This is where all your next tangible, actionable and measurable actions go.
Project List. Here you keep a running list of the projects that you are actively working on, as opposed to projects that have been archived. If you have too many projects here then your alarm bells go off.
Someday List. All the things that you want to do one day that don’t require a deadline.
Waiting For List. Finally, you have a list for all the things that you are waiting to hear back and/or have delegated to others.

Having these four to-do lists means you really need a to-do manager that you can access online, on your phone, on your iPad, on your computer and so. I use Action Method which organises my tasks either according to the project that they are in, or in a flat Next List view. Action Method also allows me to delegate tasks from within the programme.

Labs

What practical help do you need right now with running a to-do list? Let us know so that the Friends here can help.

Photo courtesy of Ebby

Published on March 11, 2011 by Scott Gould

Keep it Simple, or you’re Stupid

Have you ever made the mistake of making something too complex?

I remember when I was about 12 years old at school and we did a project called “Make a Million.” The idea was the children had to team up in pairs and then run a project that, during break times, would create revenue. Looking back, it was a great way for the school to instill some business and entrepreneurial skills into us as kids.

However, my project didn’t go down so well. Whereas some teams sold posters of clipart that they printed from their computer, or sold a set of 5 penalty kicks, or charm bracelets that they had made, my business partner and I decided to make a complex game which was a mix of snakes and ladders fused with monopoly. Suffice to say that when break time came, we normally sold one run on the game as it took the whole break to play it. But even then, people were reluctant to play because it was, well, just so complex! It was easy to buy a poster or kick a ball, but this was just too much.

Thus it was here that I learnt my first business lesson. Keep it quick, simple, and scaleable. I’d like to tell you that I learnt my lesson there and then, but my perfectionist mindset has struggled with this one for a long time as I have often defaulted back to building the perfect system as opposed to a profitable one, or even a useable one!

The simple one wins. Ask Dropbox.

I read a similar, more grown up version of the same story on Quora. Isaac Hall, co-founder of Syncplicity discusses why Dropbox is more popular than other tools that have similar and often better functionality. What he boiled it down to was simplicity. It just works. No tweaking necessary. (You can read his answer here, just click on “change log” to see his full response.) The most pertinent part of it was this:

In the end, it really came down to one incredibly genius idea: Dropbox limited its feature set on purpose. It had one folder and that folder always synced without any issues — it was magic. Syncplicity could sync every folder on your computer until you hit our quota. (Unfortunately, that feature was used to synchronize C:Windows for dozens of users — doh!) Our company had too many features and this created confusion amongst our customer base. This in turn led to enough customer support issues that we couldn’t innovate on the product, we were too busy fixing things.

After I left Syncplicity, I ran into the CEO of Dropbox and asked him my burning question: “Why don’t you support multi-folder synchronization?” His answer was classic Dropbox. They built multi-folder support early on and did limited beta testing with it, but they couldn’t get the UI right. It confused people and created too many questions. It was too hard for the average consumer to setup. So it got shelved.

I like this – Dropbox could have multiple folders, but they don’t, because people just don’t get it.

Making things simple is about making sure people get it. It’s realising that too many options paralyzes people (which one should I do?), that asking for settings scares people (what if I get it wrong?), that an unclear benefit deters people (why spend my time on this?)

Starting with simple

My friend Darren Smith is an expert in user design and experience and he tells me that when it comes to design there is a general rule to ensure that no matter how advanced a design gets its core remains simple, ensuring that any further levels of complexity advance the feature set without compromising the simplicity of the core.

This useful point helps us with something that Brian Driggs and I have been discussing on the subject of making meaning and also writing SMART email. When it comes to building a platform for people to live their lives on, it needs to be simple with optional further levels of complexity. As to how that looks, I’m not sure – but I’m up for discussing it.

5 ways to keep it simple

So what are the main lessons here? My main points, in contrast to my failures with my efforts to make a million at school, would be:

It can be explained in a sentence. My game couldn’t.
You can look at it and know what it is. You can look at a poster and know that you buy it. But when you look at a peice of card with directions scribbled on, it’s not that obvious.
You don’t need a manual. What is good about the iPhone is when you get it, it’s ready. No configuration. This isn’t the case with many phones that I’ve tested!
It’s quick. The great thing about Dropbox is that you install and it’s done, and you can use it right away. Again, no more configuration.
Any complexity is guided step by step. I loved playing this pinball game that I downloaded on my iPad a while ago that taught me how to use it step by step in a test run. This isn’t anything new, but it’s amazing how many platforms lack this and just expect you to figure it out through trial and eror.

So those are my 5 lessons. Now over to you:

Your Leading Thoughts

Thinking offline, how do we take the platforms that we are building and ensure they are simple, with further levels of complexity?
When does simple harm you?

Photo courtesy of visualpanic

Building, Marketing
branding, marketing, meaning, platform, simple
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Published on March 9, 2011 by Scott Gould

How to Write SMART Emails

Perhaps the largest time suck in the world of emails is responding to emails to get more information. This is unfortunately because most people’s emails stink. We save all of us time and energy, and focus our own minds too, when we write smart emails. Poor emails are rude – they are forcing others to make your badmin their admin. SMART emails are:

Specific. They make a specific request or provide specific reference information. They are also brief and to the point, without wonderings and meanderings. No mind farts, which is when you’re only thinking for the first time while you’re typing. If the email is your thinking space, then you must re-read it to ensure it is short and to the point. Aim for no more than 5 lines.
Measurable. They use numbered points so that each point can be responded to if further information is required, the same points providing a way to measure the set task or reference.
Actionable. They highlight what is expected of the reader with this email. If a response is expected, it is made clear with: who needs to do it, what they need to do, and by when with a due date. If it is for reference, this is made clear and for what reference it shall be needed.
Readable. They use double spaced paragraphs because the eye needs whitespace, use bold to highlight main points, use numbered points, use plain fonts in black to make them universal, use correct English – not text language - to save people having to be ghetto to understand what they are saying (this is plain politeness), use a different email for each subject and use the subject as a subject, not the actual body of the email.
Time-aware of others’ time. They only respond to the people who need a response, respond to every email that is received to confirm receipt so that people aren’t waiting to hear back from you while you mull it over, make decisions where decisions need to be made rather than long chain emails, and follow the rule of three – only three emails on a topic or it gets deferred to a phone call or meeting.

Make it your policy that if your email will be going into someone else’s inbox, that they aren’t demotivated when they receive email because it’s lame, but are please to receive it from you because they know that you write SMART emails that give them all they need. Keep people happy by writing SMART emails.

Your Leading Thoughts

As you know I love a good framework – so perhaps I’ve missed a vital point by trying to be too smart. What points would you add?

Published on March 8, 2011 by Scott Gould

Buyology Lesson 1: The Logo is Broken

Every wondered how you know an advert is for a product without seeing the logo or the product?

One of the hot new trends in marketing circles at the moment is neuromarketing. It’s the science of marketing in the sense that it measures people’s brain activity when they are looking and engaging with marketing messages, and thus seeks to deliver a quanitfiable answer to questions like “does engaging senses make a difference?”, “are logos effective?”, and “do anti smoking signs make people stop smoking?”

The leading book on this right now is Buyology (aff link), by Martin Lindstrom, which is a very well written journey through Lindstrom’s vibrant mind that debunks traditional marketing methods.

Of course those of us who are part of the social revolution know that traditional marketing is becoming more and more ineffective, but this book not only says in a way that your boss will listen, but goes one step prover and scientifically proves it (to a degree – the samples are small.)

Buyology

Over the next weeks I want to look at three or four of the main learnings that I drew from this book, along with adding the others things that I’ve been thinking about at the moment that extend his ideas further.

Each one is a lesson in how marketing, and indeed communication, has changed – or rather, has always stayed the same and only now have we realised how wrong our methods have been.

So without further ado, lesson one.

The Logo is Broken: how Association is the new Branding

Something I’ve been saying more and more to our sponsors for Like Minds is that I want to embed them into the narrative of our events. I’ve always known that banners on stage or logos on a website were not just cringy, they were ineffective, and instinctively I’ve always tried to make our sponsors the same companies that provide us with something that is used in the very fabric of the event. Starbucks provide our coffee, Ooyala provide our video platform, Optix provided a social media survey, etc.

According to Lindstrom, my approach is actually correct with the science of association. In fact he goes as far as to say that the association of a product, like the shape of a Coca-Cola bottle of the red of the Coca-Cola brand, neither with the logo in sight, is more powerful than seeing the logo. What Lindstrom did was wire people up to his MRI machine and scan their brain activity whilst showing them various images, videos and sounds. More brain activity meant more success, less meant failure. So this is what he found:

In measuring the effectiveness of Coca-Cola’s, Ford’s and Cingular’s sponsorshop of American Idol, Coca-Cola came out trumps and Ford didn’t get much benefit at all. Lindstrom says this is because Coca-Coal was part of the actual story of American Idol. The judges have Coca-Coal red glasses and seats that are modelled after the shape of their bottles. Contestants are interviewed in a Coca-Cola red room, and the song tracks can be downloaded courtesy of Coca-Cola.
Ford however are not involved with the contestants or judges at all – they only get an advert played at the beginning of the commercial break. What Lindstrom says is that the product or brand must be critical to the storyline. So he’d say that that one-off shot of the Sony Ericsson phone in Casino Royale wasn’t best placed because it wasn’t pivotal to the plot.
When measuring smoker’s reactions to cigarrettes, they reacted more strongly to the red of Malborro against a desert sunset (their branding) than they did to the logo. He did numerous other experiments that said the same thing. This is why he says we know when an advert is for a brand when we don’t even see the product – it’s all the associated feelings, colours, sights, sounds, storyline, etc. This is why Marborro do a good job with sponsoring Formula 1 – apparently when he showed people Forumla 1 images, the same part of the brain that craves cigarettes lights up because this association with the brand is so strong.

His conclusion is that our minds are so bombarded with logos all day that when we see a logo or know something is an advertisement, our guards go up automatically.

Smashable Brands and Strong Assocations

The marketer’s response, he says, must be to then strengthen the associations that we have with our brands. He calls brands that have very powerful associations smashable brands, as you could smash the brand into tiny pieces, pick up one of the those tiny pieces, and still know that it was the brand.

So in the case of Coca-Cola, if you smash a Coca-Cola bottle, you still know it’s Coca-Cola. Likewise you can tell a Mac OS X icon apart from a Windows one. Or take the image of the Ferrari at the top of this page – or is it? We think it’s a Ferrari becuase it’s bright red, but it might not be. That red on a car is so associated with Ferrari that we think it is. And also when I look at it I also think

The conclusion that I draw from all of this is that I need to far more aware of all the elements that either people already associate with my brands, and also what I want to associate. I think that whilst I’m keen on design and love branding, I actually haven’t been thinking enough about association.

I’d say most people take association as far as a logo, a font and a colour. We should be thinking about associating much, much more.

A critical part of this is knowing what to associate with. A association has the potential to harm our brand if it doesn’t have positive connotations and reinforce the values of our brand.

Your Leading Thoughts

I’ve chucked out a few thoughts here and certainly haven’t followed the thought line for long, because I think we need to discuss it here.

First of all, what are you comments on this? Have you seen other brands do association well? Have you experienced it yourself?
Second, what are some of the ways that we can be better at association? How do we ensure we pick correct associations?
Thirdly, given that many of us are knowledge workers with our own “brands”, how can we use association on a personal level?

Image courtesy of kaneda99

Published on March 4, 2011 by Scott Gould

Productivity vs creativity and the creative’s problem

We need to get things done. And there was a point in my life 2 years ago when the book, Getting Things Done literally saved my life.

I want to break down the 5 pillars of productivity in preparation for a seminar I’m given on this on Sunday at The River Church. (If you’re in the neighbourhood, you are welcome to come – 2:30pm this Sunday.)

Before we begin: productivity vs creativity and the creative’s problem

Ahead of discussing the 5 pillars, I want to make an observation on the problem that we are trying to solve. Most of us have too much on our plate. We are inundated with ‘stuff’ and struggle on a daily, weekly and yearly basis with getting the things done that we need to and/or want to.

Of course, in the end, most stuff comes about right. But I wonder whether we reach anywhere near the potential that we could if we were more organised.

Further more, whilst everything might be alright in the end, the stress levels that we are living at with the weight of responsibility that most of us have crushes and paralyzes us. So whilst we might get to the end of the year with the stuff done that we needed to, it is with the price of exhaustion and the neutering of our creativity.

Yesterday Esko Kilpi challenged me that we should not use the word productivity for humans, but rather the word creativity. My good friend Robin Dickinson also talks about developing a strong NO and not filling out time with so much that we aren’t focussed on the present. Both of them would say that productivity – trying to squeeze more and more out of your day – is a foolish and inhuman pursuit and we should rather seek to have creative whitespace in our days.

Whilst I certainly don’t fall into the other side of the ditch – working 18 hours a day is not working smart – I am working in an environment where I have a lot to do and oversee and my days are on the fuller side as opposed to the free side.

Furthermore, anyone who is ‘creative’ knows that creativity requires discipline. And productivity requires creativity. The two are intrinsically linked and I wonder if it isn’t just a semantic game playing them off against each other.

The 3 values of this balanced life

Thus my premise for productivity, revolves around some core values that are a healthy balance of creativity but also reality:

Integrity. That you become a reliable person, to others and to yourself, and that you do what you say you will do.
Efficiently effective. That you become efficient, giving the time to tasks that they require in order to give you time for creativity, and that your creativity and thinking time is effective. This also denotes control and mastery of what of you do.
Healthy. That you have balance between work and play (not just work, not just play), between enjoying rights and managing responsibilities, and that you enjoy a clear mind. This is freedom.

I think that whether we call it productivity or creativity, these three are good qualities that span all spectrums.

Published on March 3, 2011 by Scott Gould

How to make Meaning

Yesterday we asked whether our brands are making meaning after examining the progression of brands from functional, to aspirational, and now to meaningful.

Today: how on earth do you make a brand meaningful?

Guy Kawasaki, when he discusses the Art of Innovation (exceptional videos – 10 minutes long), says that you must make meaning with your offering. He explains that products that go deeper than entertainment and touch at purpose at the ones who are making meaning – that their existence in the life of their customer is one that helps the customer define their world.

There are two core parts here for me that I would say we could distill “making meaning” down to:

Help people understand and define their life through your offering. Deliver offerings that empower people to make sense of where they are today, and where they were yesterday.
Move beyond entertainment to purpose. Provide people with direction, help them to discover their reason for being, where they want to be tomorrow. Make your brand something that people can derive identity from.

So we’ve got yesterday and today, and tomorrow. Understanding yesterday and today, and directing tomorrow. I believe that offerings and brands that do this are meaningful to me on the most fundamental level.

For example, my church, The River, is a meaningful brand to our community. We help people through teaching resources understand where they are and where they’ve come from. And our events, our community, and our strong emphasis on life application and living life on purpose provides direction.

Labs

So how do we go to the lab and make meaning? If our two key words are understanding and directing, then we must take what our offering is and adjust it to provide these two. Some ideas:

Deliver tools that help people categorise themselves. This categorisation helps them define the world within them. Note that this isn’t boxing people in. For example, the book “Now Discover Your Strengths” by Markus Buckingham was meaningful to me because the large set of skills that it assigns you with via the online test helps you better understand yourself. The label increases self awareness with restricting me. Apple do this with their product types – “Are you a MacBook Air or a MacBook Pro – or are you an iPod Nano?”
Deliver tools that people can build on. The idea of building platform is what Apple did with the App Store. Because of it, other developers have an income, therefore Apple is meaningful to them. Guardian also did the same with their Open API.
Deliver tools that help people define the world around them. The power of faith is that it gives people a decision making framework through which they can understand their life. Decisions are powerful and when we help people make them and define their worlds, we are meaningful to them. Consider here how powerful youth tribes are in that they provide slang that defines what is part of their tribe, and what isn’t. That slangs defines their world.
Deliver tools that help people direct their life. Or perhaps more pertinently, helps people make their next step. If your offering is making the next step for someone easier, then you matter to them. I’m doing courses with my wife on how to breastfeed, change nappies, give birth, etc, and the fact that these courses are preparing us and helping us make decisions about our life is meaningful to me. They are helping direct us.
Deliver tools that people can use to help others. The power that I’ve seen in affiliate and networking marketing programs is how they give their distributors all the tools in the world to get others on board. And guess what? That type of assistance directs people to do it more, and the original distributor draws value and direction out of this.

More?

For a more in-depth and academic approach to making meaning, read this article that I found on “developing meaningful brands“.

Otherwise, I’d like to hear your thoughts: how do YOU make meaning?

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