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

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

Robin Wight said in his insight at Like Minds that brands exist to make the purchasing process easier. This was an eye opener for me because I realised how it is indeed the case that a brand reduces my need for original critical thought and makes me rely on what Robert Cialdini calls fixed action patterns – fixed ways of reacting based on certain mental shortcuts.

Certainly for the majority of brands that you’ll see at a supermarket, that’s their role. But what most of the Friends reading this will be in the business of doing is moving beyond brands that merely make it easier for us to purchase or align with. We are interested in making maning, in aspiration, in purpose, in challenge. Our ideal brand is one that people derive identity from.

The brand on three levels

In an exceptional video entitled Rethinking the Idea of the Brand, Umair Haque talks about three levels of brand. (Thanks to Brian Driggs for emailing it to me.)

• Functional brands seek to differentiate one product from another by targeting a particular demographic. This is what Umair describes as the base level of branding.
• Aspiration brands emerged as status symbols: I don’t buy a Samsung MP3 player, I buy an iPod. This is where Umair says we’ve been for the last 3 decades.
• Meaningful brands are, paraphrasing Umair, where a brand has a tangible output on the consumer’s life in terms that matter for them. He says furthermore than meaningful brands are the opposite of egocentric demand, which he calls alocentric. The general thrust is that a meaningful brand contributes to the human race, not just me as an individual.

(Side note for another discussion another day: I would understand Umair’s description of meaningful brands to be highly linked to community and we could also label them as social brands.)

Overcoming indifference with purpose

The power of the meaningful brand is that is overcomes indifference. With functional and aspiration brands saturating markets left, right and centre, a meaningful brand taps into something deeper than a brand meeting my immediate functional need.

In actual fact, I see meaningful brands as tapping into Maslow‘s top hierarchy of self-actualisation - or as I say – purpose.

Recently I was talking to someone who unites a community of people around an event. They wanted to know where to take the event, and my response was that they needed to go beyond entertainment (uniting people around a good time) and instead unite people around purpose. In other words, make meaning by helping the community make meaning.

As a church pastor, community builder, mentor and with Like Minds, I’ve always seen the direct benefit of basing the orgnisations purpose in the helping of others find their purpose.

How can you be indifferent to something that has helped further you on your quest for purpose and meaning?

Making your brand meaningful

We’ve covered enough ground for today, so tomorrow we’ll discuss just exactly how we make a brand meaningful. And what we need to discuss that is your feedback on this post now. The conversation has begun – now add your thoughts:

• How do you move a brand from aspirational to meaningful?
• What the meaningful brands in your life?

Question: doesn’t this just get you right back to the basics of:

• Identifying passions
• Identifying influencers
• Targeting online and offline to create word of mouth
• Delivering an exceptional product / event
• Creating multiple levels of participation within the product / event
• Providing some memorabilia / takeaway to build advocacy for next time
• Keeping the community alive

I think I’ve got myself a new framework right there?

So my task to you: boil this down to the simplest framework and let’s discus.

Luckily, I believed that you could learn leadership, that you could learn people skills, and that what one man can do, another can do. So it is that the connected, engaging, Like Minds uniting person you see before you is actually a result of nurture more than nature.

So today I just want to quickly distill HOW for me I learned to become a people’s person, and it’s wrapped up in what are the 4 ways to focus when you meet new people. What that means is this: there are 4 ways that you can focus upon meeting a new face, and each focus is where you put your energy and attention.

As it happens, these 4 lessons are very applicable to our digital selves, and also to brands and businesses:

1. How You Feel About Yourself

This is where many people are when they meet new people – they are so self-consumed that they don’t actually take good notice of the other person. I think we all are here sometimes when we are particularly distracted – perhaps we’re stressed, have received some good or bad news, that type of thing. But some people just live here all the time.

I might add here that online, this is where I think a large number of bloggers and tweeters live. They write from a very condescending perspective, only ever talk and link to their own stuff and so on.

Likewise, a lot of businesses market at this level. They brag about their features and their product without much regard to how others might feel about it.

2. How You Feel About The Other Person

If you’ve ever met someone and immediately there’s something about them that is our of the ordinary – either their appearance, their attitude, something they said – and you couldn’t get it out of your mind, then you’ve experienced this second way to meet people.

You do get some people that continually exist here – they are very much about how they felt about a person and their reactions to meeting someone new are only based on their own feelings. So it logically progresses that anything they say in meeting this person is to change how they feel themselves about this person.

I find that online we get people doing this in comments a lot. They respond to someone based on how they feel about what they said in the comment (normally a criticism, right?) You can spot it a mile off.

I’ll be quite honest with you – I’ve spent a lot of time here and sometimes regress when I face criticism myself. It’s an easy thing to do, and I would continue to do it were it not for my knowledge of these two better ways:

3. How The Other Person Feels About You

I would say that I spent a lot of my life here. I desperately wanted to be valued and so I would be focussing on what others felt about me. You know what this is like: saying things you think they want to hear, making your actions about how they’ll perceive you and so on.

Needless to say, this is a very, very taxing approach. And digitally it causes burnout. I can’t tell you how exhausting is it blogging and tweeting endlessly so that people will perceive you as some kind of Robert Scoble. I remember in July of 2009 and I was desperately trying to get into FriendFeed so that people would perceive me as an expert and hire me. I spent countless hours saying a lot of stuff and got nowhere with it. Why? Because I was all about how people felt about me, and not about:

4. How The Other Person Feels About Themselves

I wrote sometime ago that Social Media 101 was making people feel special. There is a saying in our church that people don’t remember what was said, they remember how they felt, and this is true for life. Scientifically, if you meet someone and make them feel great, they’ll remember you in a great light.

I remember when I learned this principle at 18 or 19 years of age, and it turned my life around. I began to focus on other people when I met them – being interested rather than seeking to be interesting – and it made a world of difference. Not only did it help me meet more people and more quickly connect with them, but it also changed my whole outlook on life. I now no longer try to ‘meet people well’, I just love finding out about them! It’s not a trick, it’s a genuine desire to find out about people!

When we use Social Media in this way – focussing on how people feel about themselves by encouraging them, providing them with utility and things that enhance their life (rather than getting us click throughs) you’ll find that you engagement goes through the roof. Your numbers might not, but then numbers don’t matter so much when you are adding real value to people.

This is something that my friend Robin Dickinson is exceptional at. He has spent hours helping and valuing me, and I have found so much energy and strength from our relationship. I’ve got his back whatever he does! In fact, you can check out his Sharewords post which is the perfect example of how to use social media to focus on others feel about themselves.

Your Leading Thoughts

• Where do live on this scale? Where is your focus when you meet new people?
• What lessons have you learned that could help the rest of us with meeting new people, either digitally or physically?

It’s with a hat tip to Jonny Rose who coined this phrase that I wanted to thank YOU all for embodying this very idea.

YOU – the friends who participate here on this, our blog – are a breed of people who have turned ego aside to find value in each other and bring that the front for the benefit of all.

In the face of digital narcism and online celebrity which has lured people into promoting the gospel of self, it’s my joy to have this last year enjoyed some incredible conversations with you all, many of which have blossomed into friendships and collaboration.

Last year I was afforded some incredible opportunities and from my travels across the world, my digital engagement around the web, and in particular through the Like Minds community who travelled to join us in Exeter, London and Helsinki, I’ve become more convinced of the truth and value of the following saying:

Seek to be interested, not interesting

It’s all about people, and the greatest joy in this world is to get to discover an individual. Within every person you’ll find experience, understanding, wisdom, pain, hope, inspiration and more. And with every person, the mix is different and the story unique.

I want to encourage you that this year, your growth, your answers, your solutions – they aren’t in helping yourself – they are in helping others.

So as we truly get into 2011 and might forget to look back from here on, I just wanted to pause and say that I thank you, I appreciate you, and I love you.

Scott

I’ll admit it if you will – many times I’ve been the person you don’t want to meet at the cocktail party.

You know, that person, the one who talks at you the whole time about their job, dropping names like they are going out of fashion with an exciting story that always trumps anything anyone else says, and finally topping it off by getting your name wrong, if they are able to remember any of it that is!

Whilst most people who are reading this are now recalling the last experience they had with that person themselves, it might well be the case that – shock, horror – you are that person to those around you at cocktails, and the digital drink that we Twitter.

Are You That Klingon?

As I sit here, I’m watching an episode of Star Trek in which a Klingon is asked to be the first officer on the Enterprise for an intergalactic exchange programme. (It is related – stick with me!) The tension and the moral of the story is that the Klingon assumes that is disciplinarian leadership style is just what the humans on the Enterprise need, and thus struggles to adapt himself in a way that will get the crew behind him. In short, he’s expecting his environment to adapt to him, without any thought to adapting himself to his environment.

So let me make my not so subtle point: when you don’t adapt to your relational environment, you’re that person. Some call it having a low EQ, some low emotional intelligence, others self-consumed, and others just call it anti-social or plain due.

Whether online or offline, when someone disproportionately talks or tweets about themselves it leaves them appearing as self-centered. Yesterday we discussed the “horns and halos principle” in which the tiny sample that someone sees of you in 140 characters or with a handshake is used to ‘fill in the blanks’ and give your horns or halos based on the sample.

Our Self-Centric World

If I try to work out the reasons why I’ve been that person, especially online, it’s because we’re so crowded that we feel we have to beat our chests in order to get heard. And in our content-driven online world, it is the easiest thing to get sucked into the gospel of me, me, me, me.

But when we feel we have to ‘big ourselves up’, what is it we are really trying to achieve? It’s actually an incredible simple human motivation that we all share and is right for us to feel:

How To Really Be Remebered

If we really want to leave an impression – whether it’s a re-visit to our website, another tweet to engage us, or a phone call after you left someone your number – the trick is in engaging the feelings of the beholder.

Making someone feel special is the most powerful way to have someone remember you, and when it comes to making someone feel special, it’s not even necessary to speak a word. I’ll tell you how I’ve learned how to do it:

To make people feel valued, talk to them about themselves.

• Use Twitter to ask people questions and find out more about them. Ask people what their interests and passions are rather than just what their jobs are.
• Use Facebook to ask questions that people can comment on, allowing people to engage with each other and add to each other’s ideas.
• At dinner and cocktail parties, seek to be interested rather than interesting. Hint: people remember you better if they find out what you do by asking you, rather than you volunteering the information yourself.
• Use your blog to add value to people rather than just push content. The master of this is Robin Dickinson, whose Sharewords post and the comments that follow are a revelation in actually helping people.

Your Leading Thoughts

I’m keen to hear from you: how have you learnt to not be that person? Do you have any tips to share with the rest of us? (We could all use your help!)

Scott

Do we really know how powerful our words are? I’m not just talking about thinking and speaking positively – which has benefit and we need to do for sure – but on an even more powerful yet everyday level that can impact the world around us.

I’m talking about encouragement.

We seem as a society a discomfort with expressing encouragement and also receiving it. How often does someone praise us or communicate their thanks to us and we sidestep it and say “Well, it was nothing” or immediately returning the praise with a compliment of our own, rather than squarely receiving the thanks?

Or how often do we fail to communicate to others our own thanks, love and appreciation, not through a text or email, but by sitting someone down and telling them directly face-to-face how we value them? (And, hopefully without them squirming to sidestep the praise as above!)

The Power Of A Word

I mention this because I was recently contacted by someone from my Feedback days 5 years ago who I hadn’t seem in as many years. This young man had once been part of the Feedback youth organisation and regularly attended our church. He had, as most did, a troubled family life and struggled with insecurity, rebellion, ego, fear and the usual teenage emotional cocktail.

One night all those years ago, I was praying for him and I looked at him and told him “You’re a warrior.” Saying things like this to people isn’t something unusual for me, and really it wasn’t anything that I thought was life changing – it was just something encouraging I said to him – but what happened next is something amazing.

This young man had moved away years ago and, as I heard from someone else I happened to bump into from the Feedback days, had just moved back to Exeter. He sought me out just the other week – the first time we had seen each other for years – and we went out for lunch that week.

There, sat at the table, he told me that for all these years one of the things that he had held onto in the good times and the bad was that single word I’d said to him – warrior.

Opening Our Mouths, Closing Our Discomfort

I don’t know why we get some uncomfortable about expressing ourselves like this. But what I have found is that as we become more secure of ourselves, we become more secure about others. I can directly correlate the support and encouragement of my wife with my ability to support and encourage others.

What I have learnt through all the people that I mentor, and the interns that I praise on the last day of work, is we have to open our mouths and shut up our discomfort. The way that I learned to encourage people at first was to literally write down what I wanted to say and then find a movement to sit someone down quietly and encourage them. At first it was very uncomfortable, but having it written down meant that the discomfort didn’t stop me from saying what I needed to say.

The worst thing is when we have the encouraging words right there in our mouths, but our discomfort keeps them closed.

We Need Your Encouragement

The main point of what I want to say is that in the instance of this young man, he needed encouragement. And today, we need your encouragement. You need mine and I need yours. So let’s not let our pride or discomfort hold it back.

Equally, we need each other to speak plainly into our lives when it comes to correction, and if we haven’t developed the maturity to encourage without discomfort, we certainly can’t correct without discomfort.

So here’s to an encouraging 2011. Now, open your mouths.

Scott

It’s hard for me to posit why showcasing is so rare, as it’s been at the center of my online activities for 15 months, now. I’d tend to agree with you that it’s an ego thing for many. After all, the essence of the blog is sharing one’s opinions, so if those opinions draw an audience, isn’t that reinforcement of self-worth? Paging Ego to the white courtesy phone!

Our core focus at Gearbox is interviewing others, sharing their stories, publishing their opinions on the issues directly affecting our community. With so many people sharing across social technologies these days, it can be easy for some voices to get lost in the din.

We simply give individuals a moment in the spotlight to introduce themselves, share the high and low points of their journeys, and get their voices heard over the others, one at a time. We’re trying to make responsibility, effort, and “doing it right” more popular, hopefully inspiring conversations surrounding what works, how it works, and why it works, all while gently suggesting we’re all part of a diverse, global community without boundaries.

The things we have in common make it easier for us to accept (even understand) our differences. As gearheads, we generally come together in pursuit of building high performance machines, but our goal at Gearbox is to empower people to build high performance lives.

It’s my life’s work, actually.

Your Leading Thoughts

• Why go most blogs miss out on the greatest value they have?
• How are you tangible showcasing your community?

A recent one that I found that is in the vein of the Old Spice campaign is a set of personalised videos from Ford. Here’s a small sample:

Showcase Strategy

If scattering your message is about pushing it everywhere and anywhere, gathering your message is about uniting people together and pulling them into the same place.

One way to do gather people is quite literally to showcase them – to put them in the show – as it not only gets their interest and participation by the virtue that you have showcased them, but they will also bring their crowd with them to watch them perform.

Reproducing This

We don’t all have a budget to create videos talking to individual people. But we can involve people quite easily in what we do. The most basic form is a tweet about someone else or a blog post highlighting someone else’s work. Taking this deeper, we can actually ask people to contribute to our production. I learnt this when running a youth organization and quickly realising that when I asked bands to play, they brought their fans. Not only that, but when I asked young people to volunteer and be part of the organisation, they brought their friends to watch what they had made.

The trick really is to ask yourself “how can I involve someone else in this?”, from the small parts right up to the big parts. If you sell paper as a B2B business, for instance, you could showcase a business by naming a particular product after them because they buy so much of it, or asking them to demo a new product for a week free of charge and video what they think of it.

Social Media is supposed to be about co-creation, but we regularly find ego takes over and thus the blog becomes about the blogger, the show about the producer, and the church about the preacher. If we can lay down our ego and seek not to be interesting to be interested, then we can begin seeing the fruits of showcasing individuals.

Your Leading Thoughts

• Why is showcasing so rare? Is it that when we showcase one individual we alienate others?
• How practically do you showcase others?

P.S. I explain Showcase and two other social strategies in this article.