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?

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

My ultimate framework for Social is based on ‘Scatter, Gather, Matter’, a three step proces to becoming more and more social by socialising channels (scatter), then content (gather), and then culture (matter). These are the three social strategies that I consider exist today.

What you might not know is that this framework comes from Mark 4, something that I spoke about at The River Church, Exeter earlier this year. You can listen to the podcast episode on iTunes by following this link.

Scatter

In this podcast I go through the Parable of the Sower in Mark 4, which Jesus tells as an analogy for how the gospel message is spread and also received. Scattering is the act of spreading your message without discrimination. Some seed will be eaten up, some won’t take root, and other seed will be chocked by thorns, but some seed will take root and grow, and the point is that it is dangerous to custom pick which seed you sow in which location because you don’t know what will prosper.

Most people when it comes to spreading a message like to carefully plant their seeds. They narrowly define who they want and focus on a very small number of people (normally people just like them) but expecting their message to get mass attention. It’s like fishing with a fishing rod, carefully planning which fish you want and how you want them, but then expecting to pull in a boat load.

We’ve all had times when the ones we thought who would come through for us didn’t, and the ones we didn’t expect did. In fact, this isn’t just some of the time, it’s all of the time. We have to continually readjust our expectations.

Gather

Seed becomes wheat that needs to be harvested else it will dry up, and this the act of gathering. When, out of the seed that you’ve scattered, some begins to participate back with you and bare fruit, you have to draw it to yourself.

The key here very much is to participate at the level to which you are being participated with. This is where volume becomes value. The volume play is in scattering the seed, in not limiting who follows you, in posting your content in various places, in putting your marketing where people are, in getting your organisations message slogan to become a mantra that everyone shares. The value play is then participating with those who participate with you – gathering.

The trick of gathering is that you don’t draw them to you as much as you respond to their first step towards you. You must provide a place for people to gather.

Gathering means you know who you have, and provides a way for you to increase your relationship with those people. In church we have many “gathering points” and these serve to increase the involvement of someone in church and increase their spiritual life.

Matter

What do you do with the harvest? What happens with the seed that is planted in the ground? A harvest feeds people and a tree bear fruits that feeds poeple.

The whole aim of this is tied up in mattering to people, because people matter. It’s not enough to say “add value”, we must matter to people by helping them matter for others. This is the two folds of the point – mattering to people, in order for them to matter to others. Thus the crux of this third and final stage is empowerment.

I had a very valuable conversation with Catherine White and others over the weekend about social media campaigns. It appears the end of many is just awareness. They would get far more long term return if instead they focussed on empowerment. What use is an aware person if they do not build upon that awareness and become empowered? Then, they can help themselves and help others.

Listen to this

Again, You can listen to the podcast episode for FREE on iTunes by following this link.

Your Leading Thoughts

• How can you apply the Scatter, Gather, Matter framework to your projects?

Photo courtesy of Pandiyan

The interview came at just the right time, as I’d written about communities in a number of recent posts, with regards to Facebook Groups, and again with regards to Warmth and Light in Church.

Thanks to Dan for conducting the interview. I gained a lot from the discussion and it’s really helped me frame some of what I was thinking.

You can watch the video of our interview here.

Your Leading Thoughts

• What points in this interview resonant the most with you?
• How would you define ‘community’?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdspKNEzH54

If you can’t see the above video, click here, or watch directly on YouTube.

This video convicts me as a Christian, as a marketer who understands that what should drive us is a genuine love for people, and finally as a human who wants to do the right thing, even if there’s no return. There’s no telling what someone can do when they don’t care who gets the credit.

Your Leading Thoughts

1. Let’s crack open the discussion – we know each other well enough – how does this video inspire you? As a marketer, as a person, and what about as a believer in something?
2. Lessons we can draw – what are they?

Photo by Leland Francisco

The conversation was the latest in a range of interviews at Imperica, a smart new project by the renowed Paul Squires which “tracks a number of disciplines, wraps them all together, finds the interesting angles, then talks to the people behind them.”

The conversation began with a discussion of how accesible ideas are today, which made me say that I think ideas are harder to actualise because of the false confidence that an abundance of them creates, and ended up touching on many things including education. Here’s an extract:

Are we seeing a shift from intellectual rigour to the more technical display of “doing things”?

AP: During my lifetime, the number of young people that go through university has increased enormously. When I was an undergraduate, it was 10% of the population. Now, the target is 50%. That change implies a change in what university education, is. So, if you pick the cleverest 10% and tell them to sit around for three years, they can very probably go deeply into something. I studied Physics. If you just pick half of the population and say that “We’ll give you an education”, then education is going to be something else. The ratio of students to teaching is much higher, so you can’t give people that kind of personal attention and engagement.

Education itself has been reconceived since Mrs. Thatcher’s day. Now, it is seen as a way to fit people into the economy – to produce useful cogs for the industrial machine. Learning for itself is not a priority of the Government. So, higher education becomes industrialised, and produces an industrial product.

SG: The irony in that, is that we’re a knowledge economy – we’re not even in an industrial economy. And, yet, you’re right, the industrialised approach, turning out people who then become knowledge workers…

AP: It’s an industrialised conception of knowledge… not for its own sake, but “useful knowledge”. Physics isn’t all that useful, but engineering is. I don’t think that’s anything to do with the Internet, but the Internet feeds into this trend that already exists. The same goes for research; funding is made increasingly conditional on producing useful knowledge. How are “users” going to benefit from this knowledge?

Read the whole interview between Andrew and I here.

Your Leading Thoughts

• Are ideas more accessible today, in your option? And if so, what are the repercussions of that?

It’s my wife’s birthday today. Happy Birthday my sweetheart – hope you’re enjoying the holiday! (She gets my blog in her email

(BTW you can wish her a happy birthday on her Facebook profile.)

The reason why I bring it up is because she is a woman who supports me unfailingly – the kind of support that I can’t even begin to describe. I don’t mean that she supports me blindly. If you’re looking for the woman is straight and direct with me and doesn’t pull any punches, this is her.

Your Leading Thoughts

I would expect you have people like these in your life too. People who mentor you, support you, speak directly into your heart. Who are they? What are the greatest lessons that they’ve taught you?

Last week he wrote a post that I knew I’d love the moment I saw the title: “You Don’t Sell To A Community. You Support A Community“. You guys know I love a good strap line, especially when there’s aliteration. The great thing was that the post delivered.

It’s hard to pick a central quote (you can guess what the post was about), as it was one of those almost poetic pieces where each paragraph builds incrementally on the previous one, but perhaps the best part to me is this very accurate description of the latest marketing fad which is “build community”:

A brand should be careful about approaching social media as a sales funnel: to establish connections, build ‘trust,’ encourage a ‘community,’ and then market products and services to them. That’s not a community strategy, that is a marketing plan. And there is a difference.

This really rings home because recently I was having a leadership discussion in a venture that I’m involved in, and the painful point came up that whilst I was trying to explain we needed to build community in order to serve the community, the reality was that we were more interested in building the community in order to serve ourselves.

Turning it around is hard – we’re still in the process of doing it – and I’m learning some key lessons as I go.

Dan goes on to say that “building a community” for business is furthermore a hard and an expensive thing to do. It seems a stock answer at the moment to tell publishers in particular that they should “build community”, but I watch the people who say it and often they have never built one themselves. Dan actually argues that you don’t build them anyway – they already exist, and you help it grow.

My Experience with Community

I’ve nurtured many a community in the last 13 years that I’ve been ‘doing this’, but I think my most pertinent example would come from Like Minds.

I’ve said many times that my original intention for Like Minds was to show the local businesses that I was good at marketing, so that they’d hire me as a consultant. I was desperate to be accepted (many of the people who support me now didn’t back then), and I thought that if I could pull off a good event, they’d see.

After the success of the first Like Minds in October 09, a community – a tribe – was born in a day, but I still in mind saw that as a means to an end for getting work. Sure, I supported the community, but I didn’t see it as being a place that would be my main focus and income. I wasn’t selling to them – it’s important to clarify that – but I did see them as a way for me to secure more consulting.

It wasn’t until April this year that I realised how dearly I loved the community that was growing, and that if I focussed on serving that community, that would be far more fulfilling and rewarding. The irony is since I made that decision to not pursue consulting, consulting work has started to come in, and I turn a lot of it down in order to focus more fully on Like Minds because that’s where I’m seeing people really effected, which has always been my aim in the beginning anyway.

When a community really clicks (which I’ve been a part of many times), you know there’s no way that you can sell to them anyway. The things that they need from you, they’ll get without you blowing your horn, and you won’t given them anything but the things they need anyway, even if it’s not your thing that they need.

Your Experience with Community

1. Have you been on the receiving end of support and/or selling in a community?
2. Are you aware of any communities that actually grow based on a ‘selling’ mindset? (I don’t)
3. If supporting is what you do, how have you monetized that if you are nurturing a community?

Photo of Like Minds 2010 courtesy of Paul Clarke

Chris discusses how Amazon went from book distributor to pretty much anything distributor, and how he suggests that the Kindle could do the same thing. He talks about how the Kindle also isn’t just a phyiscal device. You can have the Kindle on your iPhone, iPad, desktop, etc. It’s a distribution platform that lives on other platforms, something we talked about recently with Your Business, Ubiquitous.

That’s a big discussion there. Then Chris goes deeper into what is my favourite part of the post:

Don’t look at the device. Don’t fret about the device. Think of it as yet another way to gain ground in distribution. Keep your eyes on this, and also think about how this impacts your business. Think further on whether there are ways you could do distribution differently (better, partnered) and what that would give you.

This immediately makes me think of ecosystems. Consider Apple’s App Store and iTunes ecosystem. The devices that they can plug into this are potentially numerous, and as Chris suggests, it’s not really about the device – it’s the distribution of the ecosystem.

The way I see it, ecosystems are about flow of the river, the devices are the boat, and the person is the person. A good ecosystem means that a number of different boats can be on it in order to get people where they need to be. iTunes and the App Store is an ecosystem that allows many boats – the innovator boats, the late majority boats, the home boats, the work boats, etc.

I’m now seeing what were boats now become ecosystems in their own right. Consider Evernote, which is the handy note tool that remembers everything. Evernote created an API, and now with Evernote Trunk, serves as an ecosystem to boats that now ride upon it.

Facebook is an ecosystem, and so is Twitter. They are rivers that boats can flow on. Applications can be built for them. Communities live on them. You get the idea.

Riding on The Wave

The trick for startups and new things now is to use these ecosystems – to ride on their waves – in order to get our users to where they need to be. As Chris said in starting, the Kindle is about distribution. Why create a new ecosystem when a perfectly good ecosystem already exists that can distribute your boats where they need to be?

This is where socialising channels comes into play. Socialising our channels means getting your content to the places where people already are – the water coolers. If Facebook is where your people are, use that. If it’s Amazon, use that. If it’s the Kindle, use that. Ride the wave that gets your content distributed.

Creating Waves

The other option is to be the one building ecosystems – buliding the distribution channels that others can use. I’d be careful here. I’d only build an ecosystem where one doesn’t already exist.

That’s what we’re doing with Like Minds. I’ve noticed that the communities which are the most useful are the ones that become an ecosystem for others to sail on. The community and the events attached to it become enablers for the lives of others.

But the trick here is that we have to do it in a unique way – one of which being the Like Minds Club, something that I don’t know of any other event / community doing. The aim of the working club is to be an enabler for others to ride their  boats along – whatever business, endeavour, need, etc, they might have.

I would say therefore, if was trying to define an ecosystem in a digital way, I’d say they are a platform that enable third parties and users to build and live from in a way that enhances their productivity through synergy with other users and shared benefits.

Your Leading Thoughts

As a leading and thinking person, your input here is valued and adds to the discussion and to this blog. Focus in on ecosystems right now, and use these points to help the discussion:

1. On a smaller scale, are blogs working as ecosystems?
2. What are the prerequisites for calling something an ecosystem?
3. What are the ecosystems that you are tied into?

Photo courtesy of Storm Crypt

This is the premise that most of the digitalls on Twitter follow. They share links all day long, because by being active in their area and telling you where to go, the idea is that you’ll look to them as the authority. Beyond that, there’s a bit play in open innovation with co-creation too.

An Open World

It does, however, go a lot deeper than this. The idea of open platforms is one of open source, of creative commons, of open innovation. This isn’t giving information away in such a context that people can directly see where the source was – like a ReTweet – it’s a place where you are giving people to take your work and use it, and there’s no guarantee people won’t use it for their own gain without attributing you as the source.

It’s one thing sharing someone else’s content and then getting a kick back if someone likes the link. It’s another sharing your own content for free and not knowing what’ll happen with it.

I can tell a story from both sides of this fence. Being honest with you, I’ve been the one who has ripped the work off of others (back in my HTML days), and I’ve also been the one who has been too afraid to share my creations for fear of it being ripped off.

Last Saturday, on our discussion of “Together“, a friend I made in Helsinki, Johanna Kotipelto, made an exceptional statement with regards to people being too afraid to collaborate together. Joanna said, in what I think is a highly quotable phrase, “Sharing is still a threat: it’s like taking a Mona Lisa to an exhibition – unsigned.”

Johanna wrote more about it in her post on Man 2.0 where she examines some of these themes more – it’s well worth a read.

The thing is – do I agree? Do I believe that sharing is a threat?

The Fear is Laziness and Ego

I think the ultimate display of this fear (in the blogging world at least) is when bloggers never link to other blogs but there own (or rarely do it), and keep writing about their experience, their ideas, and never our experience or our ideas.

I consider this fear to actually be laziness and ego. When I read a feed for a few weeks and find they never link out and talk about anyone but themselves, I think that they are too lazy and too self consumed to actually focus on others and curate conversation for others.

This same laziness and ego, in my opinion, is also what stops people from sharing – because you know what – if you talked about what you consider to be your intelectual property enough, you’d be generating so much discussion about it that people would know you’re the source. I’ve started to see, for example, a lot of the ideas that we’ve discussed here talked about on blogs I’ve never heard of and from people I don’t know – but they know where the source is, and the conversation keeps coming back here. (Also, we need to loosen up a little – we often think our ideas are better than they actually are!)

And I think the people on the other side of the fence – who take other people’s work and pawn it off as their own – it’s laziness and ego on their own side, but it says I’m too lazy and too good to work hard and get this myself.

Your Leading Thoughts

1. First of all – which side of the fence are you on? Where do you sit on this issue?
2. What is the FIRST example that you think of where ‘giving it away’ has caused a win? (Mine currently is Guardian’s Open Platform)

Photo courtesy of Thomas Hawk