If You Had To Start Again

Posted on July 16, 2010 by Scott Gould

I was having lunch with someone the other day who was asking about becoming an Active Authority – someone who uses social media to actively engage people in a particular subject by demonstrating their expertise and authority in said subject.

Think Olivier Blanchard. When Olivier talks about brand management and social media management, people stop talking and listen. When he’s finished talking, people start repeating adapting what he’e said. Why? Because he’s the authority on it.

Now I wrote sometime ago on 5 ways to use Twitter as an Active Authority, but a comment on Wednesday made me see this in a new light, and I’d like to open up the discussion.

On the discussion about the myth of the personal brand, Codi Spodnik commented:

I am re-entering this space after a 5 – 6 year stint as a stay-at-home-mom in a small metro area. I do want to start my own consultancy, sharing the experience I gained before motherhood, helping clients find the right fit for executing their products, helping them articulate their needs and strategize solutions….. still working on the details.

But I have found this space to be cluttered with this talk of “personal branding.” To me, it has the appearance of a cult of Self. After perusing my local “experts” and similar consultants all over the web, I am finding the same talk and catch phrases, regardless of their level of actual experience or competence. I was really struggling with finding a way to create my own genuine identity without engaging in this practice or having that appearance.

I totally feel where Codi is coming from, and so I wanted to get your feedback for her so that she can glean insights from the wealth.

What I want to know is this: If you had to start again, what would you do?

I know what I’d do: I’d create content on a focussed subject that provides people with very clear and practical takeaways, and then engage with anyone who interacted with me or the content at any level, and do my best to help them make the content work for them.

Your Leading Thoughts

How about you? If you had to start again, what would you do?

Photo courtesy of Emiliantha

The Myth of the Personal Digital Brand

Posted on July 14, 2010 by Scott Gould

I wrote on Saturday about The Fight Our Youth Face, discussing the problem that too much choice for our young people has a paralysing effect, and that there isn’t a strong focus on transferable skills.

We talked a while ago about ‘building the kingdom’ – looking at how a strong team is made up of individuals who strongly compliment one another. This is the type of thinking that I’m saying our youth aren’t getting so much of. It requires putting down your ego, and making others kings instead of yourself – being a kingmaker. Contrary to this, most young people want to be the king. Hey, I did, you probably did too.

My concern is, however, that the ‘be the king’ message is way out of hand, and I think it most subtly appears in the whole personal digital brand movement.

What I mean by this is that there is an inordinate emphasis on image and being ‘the social [insert area] guru‘, complete with logo, branded blog, branded avatar, slogan – and then complete lack of actual work. The idea of beefing yourself up is something that Jim Connolly is actually debating right now and is well worth getting in on the discussion.

Again, I’ve been here and made this mistake MANY times. For years I had the issue of having a better logo than actual business, and for years I made myself look bigger than I was. Thankfully, I’ve grown and balanced out somewhat through the mentoring of you guys and others.

But many young people lack this mentoring, and to be honest, we so focus on content online that it makes sense that it would be there starting point, rather than actually creating substance. It seems following is more important than delivering. Continue reading →

Gather what you Scatter

Posted on July 13, 2010 by Scott Gould

Note: this is a bit of conceptual peice today, based on things we’ve been discussing on this blog for a while. If you don’t quite get it, read the posts that I’ve linked to and you’ll get the full picture.

I’ve written a bit over the last months about spreadability being the way that people are marketing today. Spreadability vs Reach is in fact something I speak a lot about at events (you can see the slides here.)

One of the things we said in particular was that spreadability is like scattering seeds, in so much as every bit of your message that you put out, no matter how big or small, has a only a certain degree of predictability to it as far as a return on your investment goes.

Scattering is a volume game, and we play the volume game because we don’t know who is of value out there. We don’t know which relationships will end up returning the greatest to us, which tweets return the deals, which bits of marketing make the biggest difference – and trying to carefully plant our seeds rather than scatter them neglects all the potential relationships that we could have, that we’d never normally pick.

You can watch a video of me sharing a great recent example of that from Like Minds Conversation Helsinki.

What we can’t do is live in the volume game. This creates burnout, and means we have width but no depth, and it is in a deep, valuable relationship that we really begin building.

The conundrum is this: how do we go from a volume approach to a value approach? How do we filter all that we scatter, and know what relationships or opportunities to begin investing in with greater value?

The way that we go from the volume game to the value game is to go from scattering to gathering.

What do I mean? I mean that if I scatter my message by sending out a tweet, then those who are valuable to me are the ones that respond – they participate. I then begin the process of gathering those people to me at the level at which they are participating.

The best way that I can explain this is this: if a farmer scatters his seed, and some of that seed begins to yield fruit, then he doesn’t just leave the fruit out there – he gathers it.

If you want to read excellent insights into this, I advise you read this post on the subject last week, and in particular, the comments from Robin Dickinson on how he only follows those who he had a value-based relationship with. It is inspiring stuff.

Your Leading Thoughts

I’ve got a lot formed in my mind about this, but I want to get your feedback on it to balance it out.

Do you agree with scattering and then gathering? Can you see truth to this?
How do you go from volume to value?

Video: MC Hammer on Social Media

Posted on July 11, 2010 by Scott Gould

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfKCGRnjkTw&NR=1

If you can’t see this video, click here, or watch on YouTube.

This 20 minute talk from MC Hammer on Social Media marketing was an unexpected useful find this week for me. MC Hammer is quite the entrepreneur, so to hear a man who has been at the height of entertainment for over 30 years talk about Social Media was very insightful.

What I particularly enjoyed was Mr. Hammer describing how the music industry “goes from grass roots from mainstream”, and how when he is in the moment writing a song, he is already thinking about how the music video will go, how the tour will go, etc. This “long term view, short term execution” is something I learned from my friend Yann Gourvennec, Head of Internet and Digital at Orange Business Services, at the Like Minds Summit in February, and I think it rings very true with Social Media.

We are in an emerging industry that is still quite immature (as you know, Social Media is very distinct from Broadcast Media, and therefore I consider a new industry within the creative industry), and this video reminds us to have our eye on the bigger picture and the end product in a rapidly changing arena.

The skills of an entrepreneur are to see the opportunity and ability to create value here, keeping an eye on the overall landscape, whilst adapting to the ever shifting tools, methods and trends.

So, for your Sunday watching, take in this 20 minute talk and ponder it as you go about relaxing today.

Your Leading Thoughts

What is your number one take from this video, and why is it pertinent to you right now?
How are you with “long term view, short term execution”?

Cheers,
Scott

Video: Unmarketing

Posted on July 3, 2010 by Scott Gould

[vimeo 12743658]

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

I watched this video this week by Scott Stratten (regularly known as @unmarketing), which is an hour long presentation on what Social Media is really about: social – a.k.a. relationship.

You know I don’t do this often – so given that I am posting this with little more than what I think, I thoroughly recommend you watch it.

My favourite bits:

The opening story that Scott tells. N0 matter how advanced we want to get with Social Media (you know, my frameworks and all), we have to remember so many businesses still are getting the most basic customer service horribly messed up.
Automated tweets and other Social Media fails because it is pretending to be present - and the most important thing about Social Media is the reply – which you can’t do off an automated tweet or cross-platform status update. Very good insight here.
His example of getting people to understand how powerful Social Media is (9:30 in.)
“Social Media doesn’t change the fact that relationships take time.”
“People still use videotapes… Holy monkey nuts.”
Scott’s admission of denying digital sales of his book in order to get better New York Times Best Seller List ranking, as they only count physical sales. Authenticity is a big thing to him – which I like.
Every line of information you ask for on an online form decreases the chance of someone filling it from 10% – 30%. (Wow.)
His story of learning that the volume-play from the early Twitter days was just over the top and doesn’t work. (And now understands value is where it’s at.) He now regrets following everyone back.
Increase people knowing you, liking you and trusting you (always good to hear again.)
Create great content on Twitter. In other words, craft useful 120-character tweets, rather than just sending updates. (This is what I call being an Active Authority.)

And yes, I so liked the keynote that I pre-ordered his book (my affiliate link – commission for sharing this with you

Your Leading Thoughts

My question for you – what is your favourite bit, and why?

Enjoy.
Scott

Transparency in 2012

Posted on June 10, 2010 by Scott Gould

This week began interestingly when I commented on a Telegraph article on the iPhone 4, which had it’s ‘10 reasons not to buy the iPhone 4‘, none of which were factually grounded.

I commented saying that it was poor journalism considering it was false information, but the shock came when my comment was promptly deleted. What followed, as you can imagine, was a storm in a tea cup of accusation to the writer of the article and the Telegraph when it was clear they were not just deleting but actually EDITING a large number of the comments that people were making.

Of course, we all know how poor this behaviour is, but I want to look at it in the light of another post by Vikki Chowney at Reputation Online the week before, looking at a recent example of crisis management from Starbucks.

Starbucks’ Facebook page was jacked and a large number of offensive messages were broadcast to it’s 7.5m fans. Starbucks got to work and deleted the comments (which took a long time), but then received criticism for removing all presence of these messages without acknowledging what had taken place. Vikki asked me for my insights, but I think our friend Olivier Blanchard made a great comment in which he said what I was quoted as saying better:

Deleting a comment because it is “inconvenient” is a big no-no. You can’t do that in this space, as Nestle found out. However, deleting (or not approving) a comment because it is purposely offensive and malicious is absolutely fine. I wouldn’t bury the deletion though. It doesn’t hurt to state that one or several comments were deleted because they were offensive and violated the the rules of acceptable behavior on the community page. That takes care of the transparency issue. Starbucks shouldn’t sweat it, though. They did the right thing and acted responsibly in this instance.

Here’s my point: Transparency in 2012 will mean documentation of every action.

You can’t just change anything anymore. The Wikipedia model, that every change (no matter how miniscule) is documented is going to become the standard.

For the Telegraph, this means that if you really must moderate and eject comments that touch your brand, then you need to put them in an ‘eject section’ that can be perused if users so wish. (By the way, watch this and tell what is difference between Nestlé and Telegraph?)

For Starbucks, it means and me and Olivier pointed out, you need to acknowledge the incident at the least.

Your Leading Thoughts

How do you think this will effect bloggers like myself? Like editing pages and posts?
How do you think this translates into deleting tweets, etc? Does this mean we have to think a lot more before we tweet?
Most importantly: Why is transparency becoming a big deal?

Spreadability and Guidance vs Governance

Posted on May 28, 2010 by Scott Gould

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gRvtVSMB0E&feature=player_embedded

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

I had a great chat with Sam Ford from MIT yesterday about spreadability. Turns out he and Henry Jenkins are writing a book about it, with the same ideas that I’ve been having over the last 6 months – and we didn’t know about each other until very recently. Funny to see how that happens.

One of the things we talked about is that for something to spreadable, it has to be guided not governed. Reason being that if a peice of content is governed, then it is so heavily guarded and restricted that it can’t be taken into new channels and filter into new areas that are beyond their reach.

This video, with Ben Huh – the maestro of spreadability who runs ICanHasCheeseburger, is excellent as Ben talks about what makes media spreadable – lower barrier to entries and the lifting of restrictions. He’d know about that.

The lesson? If you want things to spread, you have to let go.