It’s a BIGG Network and A Real Pleasure

This is a guest-post from Mary-Lynn and George of the Bigg Success Show where she and George share their life, their interviews and years of expertise to their audience/listenership/readers. Yup, they have talent AND good things for folks to grok on – a radio reality check.

It is with great appreciation and respect that I post this piece, which well – made me blush and Emily is always reminding me that real people are just as valuable as “friends“, if not more valuable.

This post is really timely, since I’m posting this right now from the cabin overlooking a great morning valley view, getting back to basics – people, family and the outdoors.

Thanks for the post, the reminder and kind words. I did decide to put a couple of reactions inline, in bold/Italics, which could be considered editing, but thought I should share a little bit my reaction and Emily’s for y’all.

Merging Your Networking Worlds


We sure are social! Social networking and social sharing sites are among the most popular on the internet. We can make friends all over the world. Yet some people haven’t jumped on the social networking bandwagon.

At the same time, business networking groups are also growing. We crave interaction with other people and we’ve realized that there is tremendous power in our network. Yet some people have abandoned traditional networking for the most part.

We think it’s best to use both methods because each of them has its own significant advantage. (@emmyeg: “Told you so Jon”)

Social networking is more transparent


Social networking offers a significant advantage over traditional networking – networks are more transparent. For the most part, we can see each other’s friends.

With offline networking, you may see someone you know with a few friends or colleagues. However, short of a significant event (e.g. a wedding), you usually don’t see his or her extended group.

With social networks, you can browse your friend’s entire list of connections. You know all the people they know within that particular site. You can grow your base of friends much more quickly than you may offline.

Traditional networking offers fuller communication
When you’re online, you can LOL. You can :). There are ways to communicate who you are, but your true personality doesn’t fully come out.

If we talk on the phone, more of “you” comes through. Even better, when we meet in-person, your full dynamic is on display. That’s the richest form of communication.

We have a great example of this. We subscribe to Jon’s RSS feed for Spatially Relevant. We read every post. While a lot of Jon’s personality comes through, we’re glad we’ve met him in person and witnessed him giving a great presentation. (JG: Thanks for the feedback, I was completely nervous as it was my first social media pitch in public, but it was good to have both George and Mary-Lynn from a confidence perspective)

That’s where you truly see how energetic he is. You get the full sense of his fun-loving spirit. You see how truly brilliant he is (JG:blushes, not quite sure about that). Blogs, e-mails, instant messages, social networks, and all other forms can’t duplicate the experience of meeting someone in person.

Merge your networking worlds


Our point is this – merge your networking worlds. The real power in a network comes when your online and offline efforts work seamlessly together. You may be part of a virtual group that organizes a meeting in the real world. You can easily stay in touch with people online that you met offline.

Don’t stick your head in the sand … explore a social network or two. Don’t hide behind a computer … get out where the people are.

Because that’s the bottom line – networking, whether online or offline, is about people. It’s about building meaningful relationships. The richness of the human experience lies in experiencing humans.

(Emily: “Yup, so glad we met them, good people without a doubt”)

August 2, 2008 by
(2)

Less fluff, more value?

So I’ve spent a good deal of time talking to some people I respect and the input they have around the Social Media Club. Some great input for Sherry and Aaron and some other input that made me get more introspective than my ego likes, but ultimately that is required to get a little better and understand more.

So while doing my outreach around input on how to aid in the standards efforts for SMC, I just got smacked in the head a couple of times about my blog fluff. The problem with friends, they have no shame in calling you out… careful what you ask for…. but it made me think more abstractly about the fluff in general.

Conclusion-ish: Social media is a little fluffy – everything is fluffy clouds, rainbows and unicorns – just a little right? Just how much fluff is there in the whole social media thing? Depends on where you are I guess.

The fodder which fills my blog on my lazy days is definitely adding to the fluffy perceptions of social media. Since most of us marketers have those “ah – maybe I’ll do X today” days, we don’t need any more fluff to be added to the stereotype.

C’mon – we all get the marketers malaise. You know the one….the one that settles after the “basics” are done. It’s that whole phoning it thing that marketers get to sometimes which doesn’t help the perception of marketers. “Lazy Roboto Marketer” executing on a check list:

  • Logo – check
  • Tagline – check
  • Customer presentation – check
  • Sales needs yet another sales tool for a single account which will never be used again – check
  • Half hearted review and formatting of customized off message corporate presentation – check
  • Discount not approved – check

Oh the life of Riley indeed as a marketer. …right up until you are on that checklist treadmill again for another brand. The curious thing is the checklist for social media folks appears to be an even lazier checklist on the surface:

  • Tag some stuff – check
  • pitch cluetrain concepts again – check
  • blog post – check
  • at least 12 tweets – check
  • write the 3 comments of the day – check
  • respond to most of your email – check
  • turn grammar check on – overdue

So with all this busy work, social marketers must be doing good things. But I think there is just a bunch of filler material which is part of the social media noise out there. A good deal of this filler is from folks who are “creative commoning” their way to content and expertise. That just makes “give-away” selection look like work.. Then you look at how often do social media folks just push out fluff?   How often do you?

David Meerman Scott thinks voice is an imperative and so is focus, which is what started this post in the first place. Plus, to ROUGHLY paraphrase Carfi – “can you just give me another yonder Mountain video, it saves me time searching YouTube”. Subtle…

Well, I won’t do the ADD dance on this and take full accountability of fluff contribution to the social marketplace. As a marketer that kind of hurts my soul to type/admit, but integrity counts.

Come on feel the NOISE!

So if voice is important and so is focus, what do you do in a crowd? Well just as in real life, you find folks you know and like and strike up a conversation, regardless of how noisy it is. If you think about the core metaphor of conversation the challenge is to participate, not to monitor or metric. I spent the better part of a day this week in a Pragmatic Marketing course searching for a process, a new way to look for a return in social media and how to just plain feel good about my world view. I didn’t get it during the class, but fast forward 14 hours or so-ish……and a couple pieces fell into place….

I spent the next couple of days working on conceptualizing messaging themes, throwing concepts away, bringing them back, understanding priorities and action plans which resulted in a fairly coherent way to look at social media. What I realized is that noise is the norm, no hard metrics (yet) and no way to engage with out setting a tone/establishing a voice. Ultimately so long as your voice is heard, it doesn’t need to be accepted or even appreciated just be present and reasonable in the conversation. On many levels if your are active, responsive and REAL good things just might happen as a marketer. The voice of your brand, the voice of the customer and market are all out there, but you can’t listen if you aren’t there.

Ty Webb: Just be the ball, be the ball, be the ball. You’re not being the ball Danny.
Danny Noonan: It’s hard when you’re talking like that.

The Message is the Medium

Social media isn’t about the strategy so much as it is being part of the medium, tactics. Prior to social media marketing was far more a spectator sport. With an inside out brand reality emerging, the traditional investment and measurements just aren’t going to work. So the perceived need to relate social media to revenue, to tangible metrics or share of voice equivalent is not the right to approach it from a business perspective. Customer might be a reasonable measuring stick…

Social media’s value is sorta binary – you’re either in or you are out. Not being in the game is a clear loser. It has that old school carny “You can’t win if you don’t play” reality. So with that baseline, I was able to get over the hump mentally on metrics with 3 questions:

  1. What is the downside of participation
  2. What is the upside of NOT participating
  3. How can you remain relevant without contributing to an industry

silence is golden?

Meander to Your Message

So while I on a personal level will be reducing the fluff around here by at least 64%, I’m still going to meander around the areas interest I would like to cover. Just like in any given business process or market activity you just need to find your “flow“.

I’m still gonna do the random Wilco or Panic video on occasion, but I’m just going stop the link posts. While I don’t know yet where this is going to go and never really have, I think meandering towards a message is more important that randomly meandering to a post.

So there it is – stop the links, relax a little and communicate ideas. I’ll try my best and not contribute to the noise and make this whole social media thing just a little better. What are you doing to reduce the noise and increasing the meaning of your message?

feeling less light and airy already with my Postalicious plug-in inactive….

July 24, 2008 by
(8)

Principles: Shading strategy, execution and interactions

prin·ci·ple [prin-suh-puhl] –noun

1. an accepted or professed rule of action or conduct: a person of good moral principles.
2. a fundamental, primary, or general law or truth from which others are derived: the principles of modern physics.
3. a fundamental doctrine or tenet; a distinctive ruling opinion: the principles of the Stoics.
4. principles, a personal or specific basis of conduct or management: to adhere to one’s principles; a kindergarten run on modern principles.
5. guiding sense of the requirements and obligations of right conduct: a person of principle.
6. an adopted rule or method for application in action: a working principle for general use.
7. a rule or law exemplified in natural phenomena, the construction or operation of a machine, the working of a system, or the like: the principle of capillary attraction.
8. the method of formation, operation, or procedure exhibited in a given case: a community organized on the patriarchal principle.
9. a determining characteristic of something; essential quality.
10. an originating or actuating agency or force: growth is the principle of life.
11. an actuating agency in the mind or character, as an instinct, faculty, or natural tendency: the principles of human behavior.
12. Chemistry. a constituent of a substance, esp. one giving to it some distinctive quality or effect.
13. Obsolete. beginning or commencement.

—Idioms
14. in principle, in essence or substance; fundamentally: to accept a plan in principle.
15. on principle,
a. according to personal rules for right conduct; as a matter of moral principle: He refused on principle to agree to the terms of the treaty.
b. according to a fixed rule, method, or practice: He drank hot milk every night on principle.

The funny thing about principles is that not only is the construct so nuanced that it supports 15 different dictionary use cases, but we often forget iT shades most daily actions. I was reminded of this throughout the week based on three different interactions within multiple settings – professional, social and familial. The trifecta of situational proof points that principles could be seen as an individual’ personal acceptable use policy.

Each situation for each participant is shaded by not only personal experience/biases, but constrained to the context of one’s principles. A friend has told me time and time again, your “world view” impacts your reactions and others reactions to YOU. For example, my view of productivity and follow up is not the same as others or vice versa. which while circular logic is the recursive spiral many interactions get into because of core DNA differences with folks. At times you just can’t connect your idea, emotions or actions toward what may or may not be common goals. Ultimately, how does an individual internalize a strategy, a brand or an action plan in the marketplace or in a cohort group is often the common thread of miscommunication between folks, as least that’s my lesson of the week around principles.

To effectively lead, manage or interact this is a baseline reality is often forgotten and overlooked, MYSELF included. I find myself not asking enough questions, but instead interpreting reactions and actions within how I would see/feel on a given topic which is more of an anchor than way to move forward and drive change. So my personal and career challenge to myself of week is to use my ears more than my mouth and to ask questions as to why something isn’t as effective as I thought it would be, rather than to make assumptions based on my own understanding/filter.

I think with this approach then perhaps I can avoid the pitfall of the best laid plans going awry. So now I think I have 101 things to be thankful for.

I really get excited when life hits you in the head with a blunt object and make you realize the best thing is that we are all different and bring different view, strategies and tactics.

For me it’s those situational reminders which provides clarity on things. I think I’ll read the 4 agreements again.

July 20, 2008 by
(5)