Member-to-Member

On Leadership

Jamie Notter accidentally started a meme on leadership for association executives which I've enjoyed reading. He didn't tag me but as I was reading people's entries, I realized that while working with executive teams, I've developed a few "themes" that - while grounded in my social media marketing view of the world - are applicable to organizational leadership more broadly. This advice is pertinent to commercial companies, non-profits and associations; it is targeted at CEOs and their direct reports but any leader should find it useful. Here are my three pieces of advice for leaders:

1. Lead Towards a Vision Impossible 
2. Try to Put Yourself Out of Business
3. Be the Best of Who You Are.

Expert Advice: Humble Thyself Before the Paradigm Shift

Got an exec breathing down your neck wanting to know the ROI on your social media budget while you scramble around trying to develop monetization schemes and explain why social network ad revenue is down? Don't show her this video. Instead, grab yourself a big cup of something steamy, sit down, and watch it yourself. Watch it to be reminded that behind the curtain of the social media revolution you are monetizing your career on, is a cultural paradigm shift so fundamental that there is absolutely no way an expert or anyone else today can know what the marketing plan of the future really looks like.

Watch the video while anthropologist Michael Wesch (KSU Asst. Prof) takes you on a hour-long insightful and entertaining tour of the dynamics of social networks' popularity through the example of YouTube. The social media maven will laugh but the true expert will see that behind the fun Dr. Wesch is explaining how the social revolution in communication (not media) is building new models of human interaction and even self-identity that promise to shift our definition of community as deeply as the shift from tribe to nation state did thousands of years ago, but along entirely new dimensions (he doesn't' go that far, but I do).

=

=

And after you've watched the video - all the way to the end, past the silly teenagers and babies spawning viral fun on a global scale to where the crotchety old man reveals his many selves and the people cry and feel betrayed to where the man who lost his child talks about how YouTube helped him live again - reflect on your own social media experience that makes you so sure you're an expert (ever mindful that even experts can disagree).

How Will Business Socialize: Exploring the Social vs. Collaboration Conundrum

A CMO friend and I were having lunch and she asked me about Twitter*and whether I thought it was a decent solution for helping her sales teams communicate real time at conferences where they're trying to track down prospects and partners and such. I had to tell her "no" because Twitter is so open and she didn't want all her competitors seeing who their top prospects were on her sales teams' tweets. I knew it was just a matter of time before someone figured out how to capitalize on this opportunity, and sure enough I later tripped over Yammer, which appears to have jumped on this market opportunity to create private TwitYam networks. I've shot it off to my friend and hope her sales teams will soon be yammering away. Yammer makes me hopeful that we are now entering the phase of social tech where businesses will weigh in with some cash and legitimize and invest in our budding industry. That being said, I think it may be a rough transition because social tech is just really complicated.

Being old now, I've seen this cycle so many times in the communications space. I'm generalizing a bit here but new communications tech waves, from telephone/telex (ok, I'm not THAT old, but I started my career in telcom), email (I AM that old), SMS/txt, IM and now Tweets and LinkedIns - they all get frothy attention in the public network space where innovation thrives and viral usage can explode to prove the validity of the medium. But then they run smack into the business model problem.

Organizational Identity in the Age of Social Media

I’m very late in picking up a conversational thread with Ben Martin that I dropped in Feb(!) about how organizations can and should participate in the social web. I need to set the record straight if nothing else that Ben and I are in strong agreement on the problem – if not the solution.  

In short, Ben and I agree that, as he says so eloquently, organizations are becoming "conversationally impotent in today's marketplace" to the extent that they don't let their employees and customers champion them in personal and individual ways from within the social web (and in the real world as well). Where Ben and I may not be in agreement is that I do not think the solution is to send these employees and customers forth unprepared, unmonitored and unchecked to shape the public image of the organization according to their own personality because there are very real downsides to the organization in doing this, and because some of the potential upside may be missed as well.

This fundamental dilemma - how to enable an organization's broader audience to carry forth its identity while still maintaining some level of control over the dialog and "company line" is the essential challenge for strategic marketers in the days, months and years ahead; and how we handle it will render us either essential or irrelevant to our organizations' success in the marketplace. Personally, I plan to be on the side of "essential."

Branding in the Era of Social Media

Pundits and hacks alike have been pondering the impact of social media on the mysterious yet powerful discipline of Branding. I am no different and am cooking on a truly brilliant theory of my own (really, I am - stay tuned) about this multifaceted subject. But before I get to brilliance, I wanted to point to a dialog going on among ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership members on its marketing list serve because - thanks to Ben Martin and his insightful blog response to the discussion - it illustrates a specific and yet important example of what modern 'brand police' are having to deal with.

Automating Serendipity via LinkedIn: Quantifying Social Media Efficiency

A few weeks back I sent out a question to my LinkedIn network asking if people found value in Facebook and/or LinkedIn and inviting them to join my Facebook network. The answers were really interesting and I made some new Facebook friends (see below), but I found a little gem in them that proved LinkedIn can be more efficient than serendipity (the occurrence of accidental fortune, not the open source blog system). One of my contacts helped her husband find his job through a LinkedIn contact, thereby demonstrating the potential for huge networking efficiencies that this service and other social media have to offer. Who would have thought we could ever have automated serendipity to achieve tangible business value?

Here’s the anecdote: My friend’s husband had sent in a resume for a job and waited two weeks. Nothing. So she got on LinkedIn and found someone in her network who knew the CTO of the company. She asked her friend for an introduction to the CTO. Her contact was happy to make the introduction to the CTO, who checked to find out the HR department had no record of the resume. Her husband submitted his resume through the CTO, got an interview and was hired.

This happy sequence of events could just as easily taken place through a serendipitous meeting at a business lunch or happy hour, except that it didn’t. And that’s what’s intriguing.

The serendipity of the happy hour was essentially “automated” via the wife’s LinkedIn search, making LinkedIn serendipity’s not-so-little helper. And, according to my analysis, if her husband’s new job was truly meant to be – the fates bound and determined to help him get it through LinkedIn or through a happenstance social encounter - the LinkedIn approach could still be as much as one day and 13 minutes more efficient. See my analysis below. :-)