Musings

This morning, my Dad/boss and I attended the annual “Shelter from the Storm” fundraising breakfast for ACCESS Women’s Shelter. ACCESS is kind of like the little engine that could. Founded in 1984 exclusively to help single homeless women and their children (2 groups often neglected by other shelters), ACCESS has had to deal with continuing cuts in federal support and increasing demands on their time and facilities. At the breakfast this morning a video was shown that was simple yet powerful. The concept was based on a sight many of us are all too familiar with — a homeless person holding up a tattered cardboard sign. In this video, current and former residents of the ACCESS shelter held up a cardboard sign showing the challenges they were or are coping with, and then, the cardboard sign was flipped, and they proudly showed the progress they have made. Needless to say, there was hardly a dry eye in the room.

A couple of years ago, Josh Gippin (who happens to be a cousin of mine) developed a short documentary on ACCESS for the same event. In the documentary, and in general when you talk to current and former residents of ACCESS, you hear 2 things a lot. “I never thought it would happen to me” and the word community. Many of these women lost their jobs and their homes because they became extremely ill, didn’t have adequate health coverage, and just couldn’t cope. When they call ACCESS, they are feeling a range of emotions from shame to guilt to ineptitude to who knows what else. When they arrive at ACCESS, though, they feel welcome. They feel like they have been invited into a community. They are residents, not numbers.

Sometimes, “I never thought it would happen to me” can be good news

This talk of community wound its way through my brain and crashed into something that happened yesterday. Chris Brogan wrote a beautiful piece about my friend Suzanne Vara. He talked about Suzanne’s capacity for community-building. He talked about how smart she is, and even mentioned her love of the Mets and Jets. For once, Chris wasn’t telling me something new. However, the really amazing and mind-blowing thing is that Chris noted that he and Suzanne had mentioned me, of all people, as a friend and as a professional with potential. Suzanne wrote today that she considers me a part of her community. I never thought it would happen to me. Indeed, when I think about the people who populate my various communities — my Social Media community, my family community, my community of long-time friends, I ponder how it is I got so lucky.

Flip over that cardboard

I think that a lot of people associate building friendships and communities with sharing sad news, supporting each other during hard times, and always being ready to serve as the shoulder to cry on. These are all important functions, but it is only the sad part of the tale. The women of ACCESS have been able to build a community based on a shared will to survive and thrive. I have been invited into communities where respect, admiration, adoration, fun, and dedication march by perpetually in a ticker tape parade. Why don’t we try to build communities on the new side of the cardboard? Why look for the company that misery loves when we could look instead for the lifeline that leaves misery behind?

Since this is a marketing blog…

So what does this have to do with you? What does this have to do with marketing or business? Well, quite a lot, actually. You see, people are talking a lot about how business in the 21st century is about being human and developing one-on-one connections. But now, after thinking about this for a couple of days, I’m not sure that’s quite right. I think that businesses that will thrive in this new era will do so because they have built communities. Those communities won’t be built upon shared cynicism or shared angst. Those communities will be built on some central positive core that the business builds. I can’t tell you what the little nugget will be. It’ll be different for everyone. But people will latch on to that positivity. They’ll start talking to each other about how welcoming the house is that you have built. They’ll start talking about how nice it is that you provide whatever special thing you provide. You’ll listen when they talk, they’ll listen and talk to each other, much like people gather around a campfire.

Creating this community could begin with a simple change of wording. Many of us marketers write ad copy (and some experts in Social Media advise blog posts to be like this too) that is focused on a problem. What if we alter our focus to the solution? Everyone knows what problems there are. Our houses are always getting dusty. Roofs are always leaking. Kitties and puppies are always having accidents on new, freshly installed carpeting. We all know that stuff. It’s all part of the shared human experience. Can the message be changed? Can the creation of good feeling build a community as much as complaining about a problem?

“You know I love you” is not enough

The real glue in a community like this is showing appreciation. Verbalizing appreciation. Do your favorite customers know that they are your favorite customers? Do your top sales reps know that they are your top sales reps? Does that person you talk about at the dinner table know that you are really amazed at how they are kicking butt?

The amazing thing about so many people I have met in the Social Media world, people like Suzanne and Chris and Maya Paveza and Stanford Smith and Lisa Alexander and Danny Garcia and so many others too numerous to name is that they aren’t shy about saying a kind word. It doesn’t have to be your birthday or a holiday. It doesn’t have to be a reaction to a tragic tweet or a funny Facebook update. They just lift you up because that’s what they do. That’s why they are great community builders, in the end. You know where they stand with you, and if you stand well, it’s an honor.

Translate that to all facets of your life. Lift your family up. Lift your friends up. Lift up your customers and your co-workers. Build community. Create in people around you that wonderful version of an oft-heard phrase. “I never thought it would happen to me.” What do you think? Can we do it?

2nd Image Credit: Image Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/leovdworp
3rd Image Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/spekulator

Dear Mr. James (Your Highness),

You said last night that when you awoke yesterday morning, you knew your decision. When I woke up this morning, the first thing that popped into my head was a scene from the movie You’ve Got Mail. Tom Hanks’ character, who owns a huge book store meant to be something like Barnes & Noble, moves down the street from Meg Ryan’s tiny little family-owned book store. She knows it will destroy her business, but he says, “It’s just business. It’s not personal.” “It is personal,” she says. “It’s personal to me.”

 LeBron, the decision you made may have been business for you and your “team.” It may be business to Miami. It may be business for LA and New York and Chicago.

It is not business to us here in Northeast Ohio. It is personal.

We know the areas where you used to roam as a kid. A poor kid who was lucky enough to get guidance from people around you. Akron people. We know the shelter that helped out your mom, a shelter, by the way, that is having a hard time providing service to women like your mom today because their funds have been slashed and burned. We drive by your school, LeBron, where your first chapter of dreams came true. We went to those games and we thought, “Could this really be happening here?” We watched one of our own get signed to our basketball team, our poor Cavs, who were best known for crinkling up like aluminum foil as Michael Jordan hit “the shot.”

Our Cavs, by the way, are now known as the team that suffered most from “the decision.”

Do you remember when you were a kid and the Goodyear blimp would fly overhead? It’s something all of us Akron people get excited about. Back when you were a little kid, the blimp was called The Spirit of Akron. It would show up on television, soaring above games. It would fly over our houses and we would soar up there in the clouds in the Spirit of Akron’s wake.

A few years ago, the name of the blimp changed. It was the Spirit of Goodyear. All of our ties to that little bubble of air were broken after years of gazing upward.

You were our new spirit of Akron, LeBron. You were our proof that good things can happen here. Good things can come from here. You made people familiar with a side of Akron that had nothing to do with all of the jokes and mockery. You were putting us on the map in a good way, LeBron. And in these really dark economic times, when businesses and stores are closing, when our libraries and schools are dying here, LeBron, you gave us something to look forward to, something to be really proud of.

When I was 25 I felt the big 3-0 pushing down on me. I had goals I wanted to reach by age 30, and I felt like I would be a failure if I didn’t meet all of those objectives. Granted, I didn’t have the spotlight on me like you do, but I’ll tell you something that you come to appreciate after you get through your twenties. You appreciate your community. You appreciate being surrounded by places and people who have been there for you your whole life. That’s not to say that people always come back to where they’re from, but you start getting nostalgic. You will miss that in Miami. It will never be home to you. But because of the way you handled this, I’m not sure your emotional home here, your spiritual home, will be waiting for you.

You said last night that winning has always been the most important thing to you. It broke my heart that you couldn’t say that winning in Miami would be less sweet than it would have been to win a championship for your hometown. You will learn, eventually, that winning a championship is not enough to fulfill you, LeBron. And winning can mean different things. To us, your hometown crowd, winning would have been taking less money, as you are willing to do, and saying that you would stay with us till you brought a championship home. That is the true definition of loyalty. Saying that you don’t care how hurt the fans are, saying that you hope we treat you with respect, is like spitting in all of our faces, LeBron. How could you?

You always say that you are a big fan of the Yankees. So you probably know all about Lou Gehrig and the amazing speech he made when he had to retire. Lou Gehrig was from New York. He started out in tough circumstances but found that sports gave him a way out. He got to play for his home team, and he stayed there. You could say that it was easier for him to stay because the Yankees won. Maybe. But I think Lou Gehrig valued the reward of playing in front of his family, his friends, and all of the people that cheered him on from the very beginning. He wasn’t the luckiest man in the world, at the beginning of a crippling disease, because he had won championships. He was the luckiest man in the world, LeBron, because he had forged a powerful bond with his fans, with his teammates, and with history. That is a winner.

Business is not always something that is without emotion. Decisions cannot always be made separate from the results. The way you handled this process, the way you announced this, the way you so rapidly “moved on” last night, away from Cleveland, away from your home, and towards a city that only knows you as “the king,” may have all been good for your franchise. But when you retire, when your boys are ready to go to high school and college, when they want to see where your glory days were spent, where they were born, you will have to explain how and why that all ended. And that’s why I’m not angry with you, LeBron. You might not see the ramifications of your actions now. You might win 15 championships. You might become the King of Miami. But eventually you will have to explain to yourself and your boys and your grandkids that you left the hometown that you claimed to love because of business reasons, because it’s what the 25-year-old you thought would make you happy.

Good luck with that, LeBron.

A lot of people over the years have taken note of what I like to call my efficiency, my organization, my neatness, my punctuality, and other fine traits. They don’t necessarily call these traits out by name. They might say things like, “Geeze, loosen up.” Still, I feel like I have some pretty good insight on how to manage one’s time effectively. Since it seems like this week is National Time Management Week, I thought I would take the time to list my ideas here for your reference.

1. Early is the new “on time.” “On time” is late. I was at an appointment yesterday and the person helping me noted that the receptionist wasn’t there. It was 8:15, or close to. “I like to get in early so I can see what I’m dealing with,” said the woman who had helped me out. She is right. By the time you take off your coat, check the 20 blogs you read, get your coffee, go to the restroom, eat your granola bar, and check Twitter, you are officially starting your WORK day late.

2. As new things to do pop up, write them down on a list. It might seem like this takes time, and it does, but having a single place to find everything you need to do cuts down on time, increases efficiency, and makes you feel more productive as you cross things off.

3. Use your favorite website as a carrot. Everyone has a favorite website we like to visit, whether it’s ESPN.com, a shopping site, or something…else. Part of the work day has been delegated specifically for checking out the site. Don’t do it as soon as you sit down. Promise yourself you’ll finish a project or send a certain amount of emails (work related only). Then reward yourself by scanning your favorite online destination.

4. Work ahead. We all have times, whether it’s an hour or a whole day, where things lag a little. Use that time to write blogs. Just don’t publish them yet. Do prep work that’s hard to get done when you’re crunched for time.

5. Do not post to Facebook about how busy you are. You know that we all have done this. Or have seen other people do this. Yes, that’s better. I’ve heard rumors that sometimes a person will try to be funny about it. “I wish someone had told me to bring my shovel to work.” “I didn’t know I’d need a submarine to see my desk.” If you are thinking of these little gems, you are either not really all that busy or you are really going to be stressed out when deadlines are coming down the pike.

6. Do not post to Twitter about how busy you are. See above.

7. Keep your work area clean and organized. How much time do you spend in a day looking for a job jacket or a stapler or a paper clip or a note your boss taped to your computer screen 2 days ago? Keep things organized. Take a little time to put things away. Save time in the long run.

8. Do not complain to a co-worker about how busy you are. You’re not only taking up time complaining, but now you’re also throwing off your kind-hearted peer.

9. Do not freak out. When I was in high school, I had a lot of homework to do every single night. Being a teen, I thought this was completely unfair. I wanted to watch Seinfeld. I didn’t want to study Geometry. Had I not spent the half hour freaking out, I could have had my half hour of Seinfeld. There’s a moral for ya!

10. Hide your phone. Sometimes it’s hard to make people in your life understand that you have a job and tied to that job is stuff you must get done to keep that job. You love your friends, you love your family. But you don’t need to talk to them every 10 minutes via phone or text. Give select people your work phone for emergencies. Let your iPhone or Blackberry or flip phone rest during the day. It’s tired.

11. Prioritize. This comes back to a list. Despite what we believe at any given moment, everything does not need to be done NOW. There are projects tied to deadline, there are projects that are just pesky everyday things, and there are projects we’re looking forward to doing. Get the deadline stuff out of the way, then switch off between other types of projects.

12. Get little stuff done, then focus on big stuff. This is a matter of personal preference, but I find this works really well for me. If I have a million little things to do, I can’t seem to concentrate on the 2-3 huge things I need to work on. Set out a block of time and get as many little things done as you can. Then set up larger blocks of time for pure concentration.

13. If you know you’re going to talk for 2 hours, hold off on calling. We all have work contacts that we love to talk to. These are the people we have long and winding conversations with that might begin with the family, travel to current events, and then at an hour and 45 minutes get to the reason for the call. If you know that you have that pattern of action with a person, email them or wait until you have time to talk a marathon.

14. Take care of your ducklings. If you work with other people, and if these people often need information or insight from you, call a meeting. Review projects, try to answer as much as possible, and then say, “Give me a couple of hours. I need to work on X project.”

15. Set realistic goals. It would be great if we could all start our work day with one mammoth goal, like “create world peace,” cross it off, and then be done. Sadly, this is not so. Set small, reasonable goals. We all know that there are going to be fires to put out, unexpected events, and who knows what else. Build in some fluff to absorb those distractions.

16. Stay away from Twitter and Facebook altogether. I don’t know if some people know this, but you can actually log out of sites like Twitter and Facebook. Or you can navigate away from them. Try to go an hour without logging into your account. Compare this to an hour where you have 1 or both sites open. Publish your results.

17. Repurpose. If you are blogging or tweeting or facebooking for your company, repurpose. Tweet the same link that you post to your Facebook page. Use a blog post as an e-newsletter story or try the reverse.

18. Delegate. This is something a lot of us are terrible about. So many people now feel obligated to do everything tied to our jobs, from the mundane to the huge. Don’t be afraid to delegate if you have that ability. Just make sure you don’t get into a habit of delegating, then jumping on to a Social Media site to chat with friends. That’s abuse of the system!

19. Multitask. Listen to an important podcast while answering emails. Cross things off your list while talking on the phone. We’re getting trained to wire ourselves this way. Scary but true.

20. Refine the company process. If you work with and for others, you should all work together like a well-oiled machine. Everyone should know where everyone is and what everyone is doing. Avoiding the time it takes to track down people and projects is a HUGE time saver. Communicate now, save time for later.

These are some of my ideas. Do you have anything to add?

Image by Jonathan Natiuk. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/jnatiuk

As I’ve referenced before, my educational experience includes a Masters in Library & Information Science and a Masters in History. I often joke about the fact that those two degrees explain perfectly why I ended up working in and loving marketing. However, if I may be so bold, I would like to say that my experience is one that could be helpful to people right now. A lot of people, because of the financial realities of today, are being forced to take jobs that they might not like or that they might view as beneath them or not ideal. I thought about my journey of transitioning my head from academia to business, from History & Library Science to advertising and PR. I think it can broken down into three steps. And here they are.

1. Dedicate yourself to your job. Sure, you might not want to even consider the possibility that you could be in this thing for the long haul. But you are not going to feel good about your experience until you take the bull by the horns and say, “I’m going to do the best I can.” Standing out and performing well is a challenge no matter what job you have. The less familiar you are with the job, the more interesting this path can be. But you will not be able to feel like you are living the dream until you take this first important step. As a sidenote, dedication also means learning. Learn everything you can about your job. Why were you trained the way you were? Why do people do things the way they do?

2.  Look for things you love. No matter how unlikely it may seem, if you look, you will see traces of things you love in your new job. But you do have to look. I thought that I had wasted all of my time in school because I didn’t see how there could be any remnant of Library Science or History in my marketing job. However, as I familiarized myself with my job and really dug into it, I realized that a key facet of marketing is understanding not only how to find things on the web but also to understand how people generally look for things on the web. Guess what a primary focus of the MLS degree is? I initially didn’t see how my research skills could come in handy, but I found that I could enrich my experience as well as that of our clients if I brought my research skills, based on academia, into the business environment. You might be saying that that’s all well and good. Maybe you’re having to work retail or fast food or some other job that you just don’t see how you can get any use out of. But look for things. Do you love dealing with people? Embrace that. Are you interested in business? Study how your managers delegate and do business. You never know what might pop up.

3. Strive to bring what you love to your job. Whether or not you find things already in place that you can love about your job, try to figure out ways to bring your own thumbprint to your work. Use your training and experience and make them relevant. You can’t just do this to do this. It needs to make sense and it shouldn’t end up creating any problems or more work for anyone else. But the possibilities are also endless. Bring your passions into your new job. Don’t view them as mutually exclusive, but rather see how the jigsaw puzzle fits together.

If I hadn’t actually pursued these three steps on my own and had some success with it, I might be sitting here saying what you might be saying. “All well and good, but…” Well, as Pee Wee Herman says, “Everyone has a big butt.”

What do you wish you were doing right now? What elements of that job you had or really want are most appealing to you? How can those fit into what you are doing now?

We’re all struggling to cope with this massively evolutionary environment we are in. We are all, in some way, either supporting someone who is having to settle in some way or having to settle ourselves. But this is not a dead-end path. It can be a fun path. A challenging path. A path of ambition and passion.

Try it out. Think about it. Let me know how it goes.

Last weekend, I sat down in front of my television to unwind a bit from a busy week. I happened upon a show that was about a woman who was really struggling in her life. Her boyfriend of 26 years had passed away suddenly and she just could not pull herself out of her despair. She was asked what she was hoping for in her future. She had no answer.

If you’ve ever gone through a life-altering experience you probably have felt the same sensation, and life-altering does not have to mean the end of someone else’s life. I look around at the news I see every day and all I can imagine is the people who are being affected. Every person that HP let go recently – they may be in a state of despair. The fishermen in the gulf and their families are in a state of despair as their entire world changes. I saw a story yesterday that this Summer may have the lowest job availability since 1970. What does that mean for this year’s high school graduates who are dreaming of going to college in the Fall? It is a poor season for dreaming, it seems.

Dreaming does not mean doing

A lot of people find themselves spiraling ever downwards because they feel like dreams are a to-do list. My friends and I are entering our 30s now, and we all had dreams of what that would mean. The pressure to see all of those dreams come true is palpable. That is the way dreams are killed, though. Dreaming comes from the heart and soul. Dreaming is imagination and wishing and hoping. If you can’t make a dream happen right away, you can still hope that it will happen later. But if you stop dreaming, it can be very hard to rebuild that little light that looks ahead and paints pictures for you.

A company can dream

Just as dreaming may be coming hard to individuals, companies may also be struggling to get back to a place of dreaming and hope. These are hard times, and dreaming may seem like a luxury. Who has time to dream, anyway? But for a company, dreaming is where big ideas come from. Dreaming is how you “make your own game,” to quote Trust Agents. Wishing for things makes you act in new ways, which in turn can lead to newly opened doors that you didn’t even know were there.

Do not despair

It’s hard to uncover good news these days. I read an article in Fortune Magazine this morning that said that our unemployment rates may never bounce back to normal. Our society is going to have to readjust itself. Readjustment is hard. Change is hard. Change alters what we dreamed before, which can cause us to despair. But rather than sink into a swampy marsh of disappointment, find the path back to dreaming. Maybe there are other dreams that you haven’t even thought about that you could return to. Maybe the loss of one opportunity could pave the way for a brand new, better one. Dreaming is the drumbeat we follow to the best future we can create. Dreams are our building blocks. Dreams are our foundations. Keep them coming.

Image credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/rosaria31

So I have a lot of my own opinions about the new Facebook (obviously). But I thought that it would be interesting to see who agrees, who disagrees, and why.

The question is whether you like the new Facebook model, including the “Open Graph” capability to link to external sites and interests now linking as pages.

Yes, Love it!

No, Hate it!

Indifferent

What is Facebook?

I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts!