Archives for October 2010

I know that a lot of adults have a secret problem, just like I do. We like to watch Pixar films and other kid movies. Come on, you can admit it! I am the proud owner of movies like Shrek, A Bug’s Life, and Monster’s Inc. I understand that I am not necessarily the target demographic for these films, but I find them charming. It is this little secret habit of mine that inspired me, a few years ago, to check out Over the Hedge. There’s a character (voiced by Garry Shandling of all people) who happens to be a turtle, and this character gets a “tingling” feeling whenever something doesn’t feel quite right.

Well, I sometimes get a tingling feeling when I feel like something is just completely hitting the mark. And right now, my friends, I am tingling because I just read Mark Dykeman’s new e-book called Unstuck, Focus, Organized: Using Mind Mapping.

Without giving away too much, I want to explain why this e-book resonated with me so much. Essentially, mind mapping is kind of like putting a freeze frame on your brain and capturing what is going on in there at any given moment. It’s possible that this kind of process wasn’t entirely necessary a half-century ago, but with 24/7 news, 24/7 Social Media sites feeding a fire hose worth of information on an hourly basis, and other stimuli besides, our brains are filled with ideas, thoughts, problems to solve, and we just don’t have the opportunity to catch everything before we move on to the next thing. This can leave us feeling stuck, frustrated, disorganized, forgetful, and other things. You know how it goes. You have a great idea when you wake up in the morning, and by the time you finally have a chance to put pen to paper, the idea has gone or it suddenly seems really dumb to you.

Now, with mind mapping, you still need to make a conscientious effort to sit down and actually do it, but what Mark outlines in his book is how you can do that and how it can be advantageous. Essentially, you diagram what’s going on in your brain as it happens.

Let me give you an example.

Let’s say I tell you I have a great idea for a new business. You say great, and you want to see my whole concept. Well, there are so many details that go into this idea that it seems overwhelming to tell you the whole story. Besides, it might result in creating a long, boring Word document. If you’re a grammarian you might get distracted by that typo on page 1,742 and miss the whole point.

Now, imagine if I could show you a single sheet of paper with a diagram showing my central idea, supplementary ideas branching off from that, and subdivisions of ideas branching off from those. Not only can you see the entire workings of my brain in one fell swoop (I know, that idea scares me too) but you can also easily and quickly give feedback. You can see with a glance that I have nothing about the location of this new business, which means I’m also missing everything tied to the location of a business. That’s what mind mapping can do.

Oh, I’m not doing anything that requires mind mapping

The one thing that really surprised me about Mark’s book is that he addresses mind mapping in such a way that you could really use it for any facet of your life, your Social Media presence, your business, or anything else. Since I just finished reviewing the 7 Habits as they could relate to Social Media, let me give you some ideas of how you could tie Mark’s mind-mapping ideas into updating your Social Media strategy.

1. Being Proactive: Habit 1 talks about the fact that “love” is an action, not a feeling. But deciding how you can be proactive while staying true to your mission can be kind of tricky. Creating a mind map could help you see how proactive tactics could stream off of and support your central goal

2. Begin with the end in mind: This one could clearly benefit from some mind mapping. What is your plan? What are your goals? How are you going to get there? You could literally map out your entire Social Media strategy on 1 sheet of (big) paper.

3. People come first: How do you want to lift other people up? What do they need that you can provide? Who do you want to lift up? Maybe asking for other people to provide you with their mind maps could help you integrate their strategies with yours.

4. Creating a win-win situation: Executing a mind map to strategize a win-win situation would be extremely helpful, not just in terms of mapping how you would create that scenario, but also in defining what the “win” would actually be. If you don’t know what’s going in the center of the chart, you already know you have a problem!

5. Letting others know that they have influenced you: In this case, maybe your mind map would be, “How can I let several people know this at the same time while also creating a “win” for other followers? Perhaps you could map out a series of blog posts.

6. Creating a community: This would be an interesting exercise. Would your initial inclination to be to put yourself in the center of your chart? That’s not really what the idea of community is though, right? The idea is that the sum is greater than all of the parts. In this instance, “community” would be the central point, and the goals of the community would be mapped out.

7. Sharpening the Saw: No one can become an “expert” at Social Media, which means that we all can constantly improve some aspect of what we are doing. Mapping out goals and objectives would be a great way to keep all of your teeth sharp and pointy.

As you can see, mind mapping could enhance your experience in all of these different ways, and that’s just in regards to the intersection of the 7 Habits and Social Media. Are you starting to see why this book made me feel tingly?

Now Mark, being the champion person he is, worked out a special agreement with me, and by extension, you. Should you decide to purchase this e-book (which you can do here), you can get a $5 discount if you enter the code SMSafety. Now again, this discount will only show up if you put in that special code. That just lasts till October 17. For every book that is purchased using that code, Mark will very generously donate $5 to the Social Media Safety project!

Oh and by the way – Chris Brogan, Michael Martine, and Chuck Frey have audio files tied to the book that you can access when you purchase. And Dave Navarro supplied Mark with a special Q&A.

Mad kudos, Mark. You’ve created a FANTASTIC product. I think you will alter how a lot of people approach situations where they feel stuck.

1st Image by Nate Brelsford. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/runrunrun

2nd Image by Kriss Szkurlatowski. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/hisks

The final habit in The 7 Habits is “Sharpening the Saw.” This means that in life, once you have worked on the 6 other habits, you need to keep on working on them. You’re never done. To quote one of my favorite lines from Parenthood, “It never ends. It’s like your Aunt Helga’s butt…it’s twice as big and just as scary.”

In life, you can’t really be an expert at “living.” You can lead a good life. You can leave a good legacy for yourself. There are life coaches out there, but really they tend to focus on motivating you to life your life in better ways.

Well, I don’t think you can be an expert at Social Media either. There are a few reasons why I say that.

The technology is changing too much, too fast

Just like in life, things change in Social Media on nearly a daily basis. Heck, just Facebook alone changes hour by hour, right? If you say you are a Social Media expert, you need to be able to respond intelligently to any question that comes up about any of these changes. And by the way, Social Media experts (so-called) also need to keep their eye on things like SEO and search engine wars. You need to know everything about “new Twitter,” new Facebook groups, the new Google URL shortener, why people are mad at the bit.ly URL shortener, and more. There is not, I am fairly certain, a way to keep our arms around every single thing going on anymore. It’s like life. You grab what you can.

Social Media is about people

Can you be a people expert? That’s different from, say, a relationship expert. It’s different from what Dr. Phil does. What I mean is, can you always predict 100% what someone or groups of people will say or do at any given time? This is not a shortcoming on your part so far as I can tell. I’m definitely not a people expert. Well, Social Media is run by a people engine. It’s a people-technology hybrid. You can’t really know what people will say to a certain post or tweet. You can’t really know when the backlash against auto-direct messages will really come and knock you upside the head. A Social Media expert would have to be 100% right about how people work all the time. Now there are people who can read people pretty darned well – but would they want to take a quiz? I’d bet not.

The environment of Social Media changes

I’ve blogged about this before, and I’ll very likely blog about it again, but Social Media is an evolving creature by necessity. The Twitter that exists now is very different (so I hear) from the Twitter of 3 years ago. The people who are rising to the top of the pops now may not have done so a few years ago. The expertise that people gained five years ago may be mostly useless to them in many ways. In short, one must always analyze the environment anew. There are always new people joining. There are always people leaving for whatever reason. You can never perfect a flowing stream because the water keeps moving. So it is with Social Media. The stream, Twitter and otherwise, just keeps on going.

This is not to say that the people who are really really talented at using Social Media as a tool are fakes or anything like that. They are really really good at what they do. But one might note – they don’t refer to themselves as experts. They might, at most, say they have some expertise.

So what does this mean for us ordinary folk? It means that there is no reason to try for perfection. It can’t be done. You can’t keep on top of everything. You can’t be an early adopter of everything. You can’t know the ins and outs of everything. But what you can do is set goals based on the other habits and develop yourself how you see fit.

If experts don’t exist, what categorizations do I see in Social Media? Here are a few.

Community Builder

Educator

Business Person

Company Representative

Where do you want to grow in Social Media? What do you want your “sweet spot” to be? Work on that. Tend to it like you would tend a little garden. Maybe you could even become an expert at community building or an expert at teaching people how to use Twitter. Sharpen your saw.

And don’t worry about the folks who call themselves experts. The more I learn about Social Media, the more I realize that people who call themselves experts are actually pretty far behind the times.

What do you think?

Image by Päivi Rytivaara. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/paivimkr

I am just getting used to my new home here at my first ever self-hosted site. I have been nudged for a few months now by folks like Stan @pushingsocial to buy my own domain and move my blog over here, but truth be told, I just found this whole concept to be extremely intimidating.

When I changed my Twitter handle from @RLMadMan to @MargieClayman, I realized that my WordPress.com blog site, which was RealLifeMadMan.wordpress.com, no longer made sense with my new branding initiative. It seemed like all of the signs were pointing me in the direction of building my own site at my own domain.

Last night I went through the process, which was a bit tricky at times, and a bit nerve-wracking at other times. In trying to do the research, there wasn’t one single source that answered a lot of my questions, so I decided to use my experience and create a MyBrainshark tutorial on how to migrate a blog from WordPress.com to a self-hosted site using WordPress.org software. I hope you find it helpful. Let me know what you think!

How to Migrate from WordPress.com to a Self-Hosted Site

Thanks for popping by my new home! I think I’ll be staying here for awhile.

Habit Six is called “Synergize.” You’ve heard a lot of athletes at least pay lip service to this concept. As a Cleveland Cavaliers fan, of course, I am hearing a lot about how the Cavs as a team are much more than just the part that was LeBron James. Well, we shall see about that. In Social Media, it’s easy to get distracted by the individual parts. Especially our own individual parts. However, like in real life, if we can synergize – or to put it another way, if we can create a community – we are on a path towards effectiveness.

A synergistic community. Exit, stage left.

Sometimes, it’s hard to visualize a community when it comes to Social Media. This is especially true if you haven’t met a lot of the people you talk to  in real life, I think. For the most part, if you think about it, Social Media is about you, crouched down on a bus or on a train or in some room of your abode, typing. Your lips aren’t moving. Your ears aren’t engaged, or if they are, they are engaged with something that supplements your communications. So how can you synergize if you aren’t really of the people you are surrounding yourself with?

First, let’s talk about some easy pitfalls that can prevent this from happening.

Hi, I’m an expert: If you present yourself as the all-knowing, perfect, beyond reproach expert, you are not sending out a vibe that your community consists of more than you. You are saying that your head takes up so much space there might not be room for anyone else. As previously mentioned, the same holds true if you fashion yourself a guru, a lord, a Jedi Master, or anything else that one might tie to the idea of dominance.

Hi, you’re probably better than me in every way: This one is really easy to fall into when you first enter this space. There are so many people who are up there in the clouds, and you’re sitting there with your 67 followers thinking, “OK, well, this is what an ant feels like walking down the path to the Big Top. I would say this would be an accurate description of how I was when I first started my blogging and Twitter journey. I did not perceive that I had anything to offer a community because certain individuals seemed like they were communities all by themselves. The mountain seemed unclimbable.

Hi, I’m going to argue and be mean to get attention: I have seen a fair number of people who try this approach. It might be through blog comments, through Facebook comments, or through Twitter. Maybe they donate a whole blog post to the cause. One thing Stephen Covey talks about is that synergy revolves around avoiding distractions and not being discouraged by those that disagree. These folks inevitably wind up in that category.

So, what does a community look like if you’re living by Habit 6? What does it look like if you believe that your community, as a combination of people and personas, is more valuable than any one of the individuals?

If you think about it, there aren’t a whole lot of examples where you can see this kind of philosophy borne out, but let me tell you some examples that crossed my mind.

Brass Tack Thinking: It would be easy, I suppose, for Amber Naslund and Tamsen McMahon of Brass Tack Thinking to have ego fights when one or the other blogs. They could easily go down the road of, “Well what I *think* she meant to say was blah blah blah.” But they don’t. Each post builds into the community they are building at Brass Tack Thinking. No one post aims to overshadow another, but if you took out one or the other contributor, the community feel of the blog would suffer.

Chats: Notice I keep coming back to chats? That’s why I have become such a proponent for people to try chats, especially if you’re new. In a chat, if it is done right, nobody is made to feel like the whole chat would collapse without them. Even when folks like Beth Harte, Ann Handley, Chris Brogan, and Brian Clark co-host #Blogchat, there is not the feeling that the chat would just disintegrate if they left (though it’s awesome when they pop by). A chat is a community, and everybody’s contributions matter. There is never going to be a single person who can carry a whole chat by themselves. The sum is more important than all of the parts, and disagreements, if handled with civility, just add to the interest (or that’s what I think anyway).

MENG Blend: Like Brass Tack Thinking, the MENG blog is a community effort. No one blogger is spotlighted as the ultimate member of the community. Everyone is important. Everyone’s post is important. The essence of the blog is that there are multiple, great bloggers involved in the project. No one tries to outdo the others.

Lose your ego

When you first enter into the world of Social Media, it’s easy to think that it’s all about ego. In fact, some of my friends who are anti-Facebook say that folks who post on Social Media sites are just acting out their narcissism in 21st century ways. Some people might fit that description perfectly.

However, if you apply habit 6 to your Social Media world, what you are really talking about is easing your way into a community – into a finely tuned set of gears that works to share, network, teach, and learn all at once. Now remember, this does not mean that you have to flagellate yourself if you do anything that slightly resembles self-promotion. However, you come to realize that your community, while it exists around you, does not exist because of you. That’s a key difference, and it completely altered my perspective. Your community can value you. The individuals that comprise the community can think you’re awesome. But if you have truly found yourself as part of a synergistic community, it can go on without you (are you hearing Celine Dion singing yet?).

Take a look at your Social Media landscape. Have you worked on becoming part of a sum total rather than just being an amputated part?

What are some other ways that one can synergize with others?

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

1st Image by Marcus Beltman. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/MBeltman

2nd Image by Robert Aichinger. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/raichinger