Archives for April 2010

 There’s not a whole lot I lament missing when it comes to The Middle Ages. That whole “the more you enjoy yourself the more you will burn in hell” thing must have been, well, not very enjoyable. Unless you were lucky enough to be born into royalty as a man, life pretty much stunk for you. But there is one thing that I do wish we had preserved from The Middle Ages — an appreciation for craftsmanship.

Not to paint with a broad brush, but it seems like many professions are being affected by the mantra of “Heck, I could do that!” It shows up in insidious ways. For example, a friend of mine is a teacher in a struggling school district. The district is struggling so much, in fact, that the teachers were asked if they would be willing to teach one day a week without getting paid. Now I happened to know my friend back in college when she was pursuing her degree in education. In addition to her classwork, she had to wake up at ungodly hours to go to classrooms and basically train on the job. She did a ton of student teaching, which is not a walk in the park. She studies, she cares. Just like 90% of the teachers out there. They were not willing to teach for free. Teaching is their job.

The parents in the district attacked the teachers for this and said they didn’t care about the students. It does not register with them that teaching is a paid profession and one that requires craftsmanship in order to be truly good.

Our society is filled with examples that make us think we can just go ahead and do something. Television commercials for Lowes and Home Depot  give you the confidence you need to paint your house or build a brick wall. Google offers a suite of services that can assist anyone in doing really anything he or she wants online. There are kits for teaching yourself a foreign language. There are even kits that claim that they make you paint like a Monet or a Cezanne.

There’s a key differentiation missing in all of these examples. Yes, you CAN just stand in front of a group of people and repeat what you know and call that teaching. Yes, you can go to some template house and build a functional website. Yes, you can buy a kit and feel like you’re the next Picasso.

But should you?

There are people out there who spend a lot of time, money, blood, sweat, and tears to learn a craft, whether it’s masonry, teaching, or yes, even things related to marketing. I might know the mechanics of teaching and I might even know some best practices, but I don’t know enough to know what I don’t know. I think that’s probably true of a lot of people. I know about Google Analytics but I’m not Avinash Kausik. I love doing Yoga but I’m not Suzanne Deason.

Is it easier to become expert at some things now? Probably. Through a lot of experience in painting walls,  you learn what works and what doesn’t, and pretty soon you can start a blog that offers pointers. By doing a lot of studying, you yourself can become a good teacher or a marketing expert or whatever you want to be. But I am worried about this wave of thought that makes people think that because they can do something, not only should they do it, but it will be just as good as what a craftsman would do.

As for me, I’m off to paint the Sistine Chapel.

Image by John Nyberg. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/johnnyberg

Lately, it seems to be my fate to delve into the minds of villains. Or at least perceived villains.

A couple of weeks ago, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC used her time slot to show a documentary about Timothy McVeigh. You can read about it here. The week after that, American Experience on PBS aired one of the most amazing documentaries I have ever seen. Focusing on the My Lai Massacre of 1968, the documentary covered every possible viewpoint equally, from the villagers to the soldiers of the Charlie Company to the prosecutor. You can check out the documentary here. Next week, American Experience is going to focus on James Earl Ray.

Why explore how these people think? There’s a level of cruelty that people reach where it doesn’t seem worthwhile to wonder why they did it. Their actions are their legacy. In the case of Timothy McVeigh that would certainly seem to be the case. In the case of the 9/11 hijackers that would certainly seem to be the case. Why bother? They did what they did.

I think it is absolutely essential to explore these things. Is it uncomfortable? Sure. But what does it reveal? Why is it relevant? What can we learn?

In the case of Timothy McVeigh, we could use his case to shine the light on PTSD and depression which so many of our military men and women are suffering from, often with no assistance, no understanding. How many of our military men and women have come home and committed suicide or beaten their spouses? More than we hear about, I can guarantee you. I’m not saying that we should feel sorry for McVeigh. I’m not saying that he was right in the head and he just had a sad time in Iraq. But maybe all of that pent up anger after he reentered civilian life was part of something that is affecting a lot of other people in a lot of different ways. Maybe we can learn from him for the future.

And what about the My Lai massacre? Like McVeigh, the members of the Charlie Company did the unthinkable. They killed women, they killed children, they killed the defenseless elderly. And killing is an understatement in this case. The people, we know now, were mutilated, abused, killed slowly. You might think that there could be no way to understand how these men committed these atrocities, and indeed, the documentary showed a couple of men who categorically refused to shoulder any blame or feelings of remorse. Why? They were military men. They’d been trained to do what they were told, no questions asked. They were told, so the story goes, that everyone in the My Lai village was either a Communist or a Communist sympathizer. Did that rationalize the gruesomeness of the killing? No. But what can we learn from this? Think back a few years ago to the atrocities we learned about in Baghdad prisons. Those soldiers also said that they were doing what they had been told to do.

And I guess that’s why I think it’s absolutely essential that we try to learn from these tragedies. I can’t get to a place where I think like a James Earl Ray or the murderer at Virginia Tech. But I want to understand what fed that darkness. I want to learn how we can avoid these things in the future. I don’t think it’s impossible. But we have to be willing to put ourselves in a place where we are willing to look at cruelty, our most base human instincts, and ask the question why. It’s not easy. But I encourage the trying. A little discomfort now would be a small price to pay if we could use our knowledge to stave off future tragedies. Don’t you think?

Photo by “Salssa” http://www.sxc.hu/profile/salssa

How egotistical is it to say that my post yesterday inspired me to write this one?

Well, it’s my blog, and I’ll be egotistical if I want to.

Anyway, in addition to hearing a lot of grumbling about how Twitter could never be useful for a company, I often hear a lot of questions. To a newbie on Twitter, the homepage can look like gobbledegook. It can be very intimidating, as a matter of fact. I know this because I was there not so long ago.

Straddling knowledge and ignorance as I now do, I thought I would try to answer some questions that I often hear or that I had when I first started out. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask me. I’ll do my best to help ya out. First, a question I don’t hear a lot but should:

How can I pick a username? You want to try to pick a username that describes what you are about but that is not verbose. Full disclosure: My Twitter username (@RealLifeMadMan) is really longer than it should be. Remember, when you post, or when people respond to you, your username takes up valuable characters.

What does the @ mean or do? I like to think of the @ symbol on Twitter as a pointy finger. If you want to say something to someone, you use the @ and then their username (no space in between) and that tells them you are talking to them. If you are retweeting (I’ll get to that in a minute) it shows everyone that you are pointing to the person who actually wrote what you are posting. Without the @ we’d all be talking to ourselves.

What is this RT I see everywhere? Okay, RT stands for retweet. When I first started using twitter I thought everyone was a fan of Richard Thompson. Anyway, Retweeting is kind of like legal plagiarism. If you really like what someone has posted and you want to share it with the people following you, your post would look like this: RT @smartperson blah blah blah. The RT tells your followers that you did not come up with this gem yourself. The @ symbol tells everyone who actually did come up with the gem, and it also lets “smart person” know that you are quoting them. Pretty good multi-functional use for 2 letters, right?

What’s the difference between the homepage and the profile page? The homepage on Twitter is like the homepage on Facebook or LinkedIn. You’ll see posts from the people you’re following. If you go to a person’s profile page, you’ll see everything they’ve posted, and you’ll also probably see a lot of @ symbols. That’s because anytime that person has talked to or responded to someone, it shows up on his or her profile as well as out in the open. That’s why monitoring what you say on Twitter is SO important!

What is a direct message? A direct message serves the same purpose as a Facebook message or a LinkedIn email. It’s a way to communicate with someone without the whole world seeing what you’re saying. Characters are still limited, however, so if you really want to quack at someone, you might want to *gasp* send one of them ole antiquated email thingies.

How can I find out who is talking about me? Along the right-hand navigation is the @ symbol followed by whatever your username is. By clicking on that (over and over again every minute) you can see who has mentioned you or who has retweeted you. It’s all right there.

How can I build my base of followers? The easiest way, of course, is to convince people you already know to join your Twitterhood. Other ideas, failing that, including doing a search for keywords that interest you and see who is talking about those things — follow them! You can also start to follow some of the recommended Twitterers that Twitter will prompt you with. This can include everyone from the Huffington Post to The Onion. You won’t necessarily gain a rapport with any of the celebs on Twitter, but you can build a reputation by posting to their page or following other people who make posts you like.

What are trending topics? Actually, trending topics are another good way to look for people to follow and potentially get followers yourself. Topics or conversations are marked by the hashtag symbol: #. A lot of times, if you are attending a seminar or especially a webinar, they’ll tell you to tweet your questions to #webinarname. That’s because people can then search for that specific subject and see all of the posts related to it in one fell swoop. When major world events happen, you’ll often see them over on the right hand of the site. #TigerWoods was there for quite a while. #HaitiEarthquake would be another example. By scanning trending topics that you’re interested in, or by contributing to the conversation, you can build your network.

Do I have to use my phone? No! I just go to Twitter.com on my computer because I fear that using Twitter on my Blackberry would lead me into a dark vortex of no return. There are also numerous ways to manage your Twitter account, like TweetDeck. I’m keeping it simple, at least for now 🙂

Hope this helped. Maybe it convinced you to give Twitter a try, or if you are on Twitter but don’t really get it, maybe it gave you some ideas. Or maybe I muddied the waters and you’ve lost what little interest you had. In any case, happy to be of service, and like I said, I’ll be happy to answer, or at least try to answer, any other questions you might have!

Photo by Stephen Eastop. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Eastop

I’m going to be honest. When I first heard rumblings about Twitter, I had a single and instantaneous, from the gut, instinctive, ancestral, no doubt about it reaction.

What a stupid idea.

Yep, it’s true. I was a non-Twit-liever. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to read 120-character updates from millions of different people all at once. More than that, I didn’t understand why anyone would want to post updates about their life in rapid succession. If grocery shopping was meant to be a spectator sport, one of the big television channels would be all over it. Believe me.

There’s a lot about Twitter that is ideal for those of the younger crowds. They’re used to texting, so tweeting isn’t that much of an adjustment. It’s kind of like how us old-timers (but I’m only a 30-something!) used ICQ and AOL IM. Boy, some of the conversations I had with those tools should totally have been preserved by the Library of Congress. Heh.

Anyway, I’ve drunk the Twit-Aid, as it were, and I now see a lot of value that it can offer. So here are my ten reasons why Twitter is not just for kids.

1) Verbosity Stinks! As a person who tends to write in a Dickensian fashion (pay me by the word, PLEASE!) I can tell you that updating Twitter in 120-140 characters is a real challenge for me. But it’s good. It’s kind of like a verbal Sudoku. How can I fit words together so that they convey my point?

2) News Abounds: Because so many people have taken to the fair lands of Twitter, there are great founts of knowledge just tweeting away, waiting for you to dive in and grab what you want. In my own little world of Twitter, I follow sources ranging from The Drudge Report to MSNBC to the Wall Street Journal. I can always read more, but it’s a great way for me to keep updated on what’s going on in the world.

3) Your Crowd is Out There: While tweens, kids, and teens come to Twitter with a merry band of friends already set up a lot of the time, it’s definitely possible to stick yourself to groups and individuals who are on your same wavelength. I can post about how great a documentary is and have people say “Darned right.” Through these kinds of engagements, it becomes apparent who you might jive with and who you might not.

4) Professional Development: This might not be true for every profession, but as a marketer, Twitter is kind of like the mixer that keeps on giving. There is so much information, useful information, posted every day that I often feel overwhelmed. And in a world that often seems vacuous and just full of bad news, seeing a fire hydrant of information splashing towards you that will actually help you swim in the waters you like is a nice change of pace.

5) Humor: Some people have the gift to write literal one-liners on Twitter that are so subtle and brilliant that it just blows me away. I can’t do it. I am lucky if I can get away with a 1-pager most of the time!

6) There but not there: People are increasingly tweeting live from seminars or conferences. While this might anger the person whose presentation is being peppered with beeps and clicks, it’s great for busy pros who can’t make it out of the office. The essence of the experience is capture, conversation can still happen, and it’s all right there, easily accessible.

7) Voting: I don’t necessarily mean voting in the traditional sense, although that kind of works. With every tweet, a person really has the potential to vote. A mention of a product, positive or negative, can be a vote. A retweet of someone else’s post can be a vote. Expressing anger about a law or injustice, expressing support for a cause or candidate, all can be done in a setting that is mined constantly by Google. What could be a more powerful vote than that, other than actually going to the polls?

8) Spreading the Word: Whether you are a company, an artist, or just a concerned individual, Twitter is a tremendously powerful tool for spreading the word, not only because of the retweet feature but also because it’s so darned open. I follow PBS, the New York Metropolitan Museum, UNICEF, and the ACLU, among others, because I think it’s important to help them maximize their use of Twitter. I can assist them in getting their messages out, and that makes me feel like I’m doing something useful with my time.

9) Twitter is a car, and you’re the driver: If you are a budding artist or a Fortune 500 Company, Twitter can help you drive people to a hub, whether that’s a blog, a website, a Myspace Music page, or something else. Teaser posts, enticing questions, maybe even controversial comments can get the ball rolling. They don’t use the word “follower” for nothin.

10) It’s FUN! That’s right. I said it. I am thoroughly enjoying seeing up-to-date posts about what PBS is going to be showing, what the News Hour is going to be talking about, or what’s on the radar of everyone from The ACLU to Simon Pegg. I enjoy analyzing what posts people find interesting and what kills off 20 of my followers in one fell swoop. I enjoy trying to make every word meaningful. It makes me feel, well, like a kid again.

When I was a kid, nothing made me happier than to sit down with one of the Little House books. I found them entrancing for reasons that I can’t really explain other than to say that learning how people lived a century ago was just endlessly fascinating.

“Pioneers,” as we now call that massive amount of people who settled the lands from the Ohio River to the Pacific Ocean, were an odd bunch of people. It seems like when you read about pioneers, the challenges they faced were always huge. Their victories were also always huge. They defined self-sufficient, after all.

Pioneers are on my mind today because of a really good question that came up at the PMPA IT Committee’s session on Social Networking, of which I was privileged to be a part. The question was in regards to a boss and that boss’s marketing director. The boss had posed the following question: “I know that we need to get involved in Social Media. How can we make enough money to justify getting someone to run a successful Social Media campaign?”

This is a real “chicken and the egg” kind of question, and it’s haunting companies around the world, big and small, b2b and b2c.

I sort of wondered, as I searched for an answer to this question, how the pioneers would have responded to similar questions in reference to the famous “Go West, Young Man.” See, the pioneers had heard that “the West” was this great new frontier. They saw all kinds of studies showing that wheat and corn could grow in Nebraska just by planting seeds and singing a song. They were hearing stories about gold and silver and all sorts of other valuable and wonderful things. That’s not too dissimilar from the way a lot of companies are hearing about Social Media I think. Facebook is the land of gold. Twitter is a wide open field just waiting to be planted. The sky’s the limit and the horizons are endless.

The amazing thing about the pioneers, it occurred to me, is that they didn’t have the time or the luxury to ponder our modern-day “how are we going to do this?” questions. Even though the West seemed limitless, everyone knew that the land would have to run out eventually. A farmer in Virginia or a struggling merchant in New England couldn’t wait around and see how his buddies were doing. He couldn’t flounder over whether the risk would ultimately pay off. He had to go and hope for the best.

Today, we have the ability to do research, but it’s a right that often isn’t taken advantage of. We have the opportunity to learn about problems that could be comparable to a Summer of grasshoppers…say, a Facebook “like” page that isn’t attracting any likers (I still like fans better, sorry). We could do some detective work and find out that sometimes there are really big raging prairie fires, something like the story about a guy that went into a town to meet with a big client, tweeted that he had arrived in a town that totally was crap, and then met with the client to find that everyone had seen his tweets.

I think it’s kind of sad that we can’t, or at least shouldn’t, carry our pioneer heritage with us into efforts to market our companies and products and brands via Social Media. We all want to be trailblazers. Even if none of our competitors are on Facebook or Twitter yet, there’s that gnawing desire to squat on the land, build a sod house of a fan page, and kick everyone else off when they come a’knockin. But factually, jumping into Social Media these days without doing the advanced footwork and planning can be downright dangerous. It can be like taking one of those shortcuts through the mountains that weren’t clearly mapped out and actually ended up being dead ends or long ways around. None of us want to be the Social Media version of the Donner Party, right?

There are still plenty of ways to be pioneers in the business world and/or in the marketing world. You can still pave the way to new and exciting ideas. You can still try other things before your competitor tries them. But Social Media is not something we should jump into just because we heard it has worked really well for somebody else. Not everybody struck gold in 1849. Not everybody found an oil well in their back yard. Being methodical and asking the tough questions may not be quite as romantic as being a swashbuckling adventurer, but it’s far more preferable than the alternative.

Riding on a wave of euphoria after deciding to keep some of my favorite VHS tapes (I wish I could quit them) I decided to watch Being John Malkovich, one of my all-time faves. One of the previews was for Unbreakable, written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan.

It got me to thinking.

When Sixth Sense came out, everyone was convinced that Shyamalan was a complete genius, and you have to admit, that was a pretty good movie. But from my own personal perspective, Shyamalan didn’t really ever top that. Signs was okay but a little too fatalistic for me. Also, as has been pointed out many times, why would aliens who hate water come to a planet that is 78% water-based? Ehem. The Village wasn’t all that bad, but you were just waiting for “the twist” the whole time. The fact that the twist, again in my opinion, wasn’t nearly as awesome as the one in Sixth Sense kind of was disappointing. The twist had been Shyamalan’s big idea, but he set the expectation that everything would try to top that or at least meet it. And again, according to me, that gamble didn’t pay off (feel free to disagree).

Thinking about the career of M. Night Shyamalan got me to thinking about ideas in general. In another movie (not nearly to the level of Sixth Sense but still pretty amusing and one degree of separation away because Bruce Willis is involved), Over the Hedge, the phrase “enough is never enough” is oft repeated. I think that’s how we’ve gotten not just regarding material objects but regarding awesome ideas too.

Think about Google. Google started as this amazing way to organize this burgeoning internet, and everyone was amazed. Information accessible at your fingertips. That’s amazing!! But that one huge idea wasn’t enough for Page and Brin. We all know where Google is now…at war over the Chinese interwebs.

A few posts ago, I talked about how Facebook is starting to concern people because of privacy concerns (with a touch of “crap, are THEY taking over the world too?!?). Facebook started primarily as an online yearbook. What a great idea! And when I first joined Facebook, I was stunned that it hadn’t been thought of before. Well, okay, Orkut and Friendster had kind of been there, and MySpace sort of. But Facebook seemed different. It was easier to talk to friends and family spread all around the world. There were a few games to play. Fine. But look at how much Facebook has changed just in the last couple of years! Zuckerberg is looking for another idea as innovative as his initial concept of Facebook, but I can tell you from my own individual experience, all he’s doing is freaking me out!

I think this needing to top a great idea is not just a symptom of celebrity and power. I think we all have this problem. Success is no longer an end-game. Wealth is no longer an end-game. Look at these athletes of ours. Do you really need a raise from $50 million to $75 million A  YEAR?! I mean, really? That $25 million is just keeping you back, right? If your business succeeds or has a good year, you want it to make the Fortune 500 list. If you get a promotion, you feel the next stop should be CEO. Anything else is unsatisfactory.

I’m particularly worried about this when it comes to the arts. How are we gauging success? I think some of our artists and actors are getting tired. That’s the only explanation I can find for Chris Rock involving himself in a re-make of Death at a Funeral, a movie that was hilarious in its own right and, more to the point, is less than 3 years old. Surely he has more talent than that. Surely he has more original ideas. Is music going to continue to suffer because being a great artist is no longer enough? Are singers going to feel like they have to re-make the music industry with every song, every album in order to truly be a success?

There are some folks out there who don’t seem to get paranoid about having the next revolutionary idea. The Coen Brothers keep cranking out masterpieces. Each is somewhat similar just because its them, but you don’t really feel like they’re trying to revisit old ideas. No Country for Old Men couldn’t possibly be more different from say, Raising Arizona. Stephen Hawking keeps on writing and exploring, but you don’t feel like he’s trying to top A Brief History of Time. He just loves what he is doing.

Let’s face it. Most of us are not going to have any world-changing ideas. But if you do…if you are able to think of something no one else has ever thought of, and if you are recognized for that accomplishment, will that be enough for you, or will you spend the rest of your life just trying to top it? Will enough be enough? Now there’s a revolutionary idea for ya.