The bank robber was convinced that lemon juice, when applied to the face, makes you invisible to cameras.

This is a leading example in a paper called “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments.” In essence, the paper suggests that this bank robber wasn’t just too stupid to be a bank robber. He was too stupid to know he is too stupid to be a bank robber.

The paper actually generated a term for this dynamic. Which I just love. When you’re too incompetent to know you’re incompetent, you’re exercising The Dunning-Kruger Effect. Here’s how they put it:

When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like [the bank robber], they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine.

This has to be my favorite research paper. It came back across my radar not long ago, but in a strange way. In a guest blog post, I casually used the term “agnostic” when trying to describe people who refuse to believe in personal branding: “I am not a brand, spiel the brand agnostics. Don’t commoditize me.”

I was slightly uncomfortable with this line, knowing somewhere in the back of my mind that I didn’t have a very deep understanding of what an agnostic really is, or how it’s different from atheism. So I did some casual searching about agnosticism and the paper turned up.

Turns out I was right about not knowing. What a gem of an insight for managing brands.

Let’s avoid going too deep into agnosticism and atheism (this is about branding, after all, and I’m by no means an expert anyway). You can read this fine agnostic manifesto by Ron Rosenbaum for more. To boil it down for our purposes, Rosenbaum says this about agnostics:

Our T-shirt will read: I just don’t know.

Turns out a Brand Agnostic would not spiel what I said they’d spiel. A Brand Atheist, maybe. But it’d be more scrupulous to say that a Brand Agnostic might spiel something like “I can’t ever possibly know all the permutations that my brand will take in the minds of people. And I’m cool with that.”

And the more I think about it, this perspective has become very helpful in thinking about authentic, enduring, sustainable brands. Especially in today’s social, deeply connected world.

We know that managers of brands must be comfortable with the reality that they can’t control their brand. At this point, that’s uncontroversial. We are fully aware of the fact that there are many, many ways that a brand will manifest itself in the minds of stakeholders that we can’t anticipate. But there are also many, many ways that we don’t know we don’t know.

And we gotta be cool with that.

Think about what happened to the Nestlé brand during the social media protests against their use of palm oil. It was clear that the Nestlé people didn’t understand the nature of the social web. They didn’t know how it worked, clearly. Their reaction was consistent with a belief that they controlled things, but there was more to their ineptness than that. They didn’t know they didn’t know.

Take one of their responses on their Facebook page during the melee. “Fans” were using altered versions of Nestlé logos as their avatars when commenting on the page, and Nestlé was deleting the comments that used them. Responding to the commenters’ outrage, a brand manager sarcastically posted: “Oh please… it’s like we’re censoring everything to allow only positive comments.” (Get the feeling that if you asked that brand manager why s/he said that, s/he’d respond “I thought I had the juice on?”)

When you think about it, good brands are agnostic. They have the kind of realistic understanding in the unknown unknowns that musters a certain flexibility, exactly what’s required in today’s connected, resetting world. When something unexpectedly wonderful happens to an agnostic brand through the work of customers or clients, managers capitalize without dogma. When the bad stuff hits, agnostic brand managers seem to take a humble step back, evaluate, and respond in a way that engages us.

This is an approach that, unlike our bank robber friend, builds a reputation of pragmatic competence instead of thick-headed arrogance.

Managers of brands should try to facilitate the kinds of impressions they’d like to see their brands take in the minds of their stakeholders. Just like an agnostic is comfortable with pursuing answers that they believe to be unanswerable, agnostic brands need to be at ease with the fact that brands are not ours once we release them into the world. And that’s okay.

To tear another quote out of context from another Rosenbaum essay, maybe we should aim to manage brands with a “profound humility before the mystery [they] confront.”

(By the way, if you’re uncomfortable with living in the gray area like this, grab the closest artist around you and ask them to help you. (Better yet, hire a few of them to manage your brand.) Releasing a thing into the world that has deep investment and deliberate crafting behind it, for anyone to form an opinion about, is a reality that artists live with every time they hang a photo on a public wall, publish a novel, or distribute a song.)

Jeremy Bullmore of the WPP Group said Brands are built the way birds build nests — by the scraps and twigs they chance upon. There are flaws in this concept, as he himself writes about here. One of them being that birds don’t chance upon anything. They deliberately seek out the materials they need, just like we build brands by deliberately seeking out information across our connected social network of information, opinions, and experiences.

But the image is a very good one. My nest is mine. Yours is yours. And the business of trying to anticipate or control how anyone forms an opinion isn’t branding. It’s something altogether the opposite of trying to engage someone to believe in a vision.

As Nestlé can now tell you:

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

—Donald Rumsfeld
Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

I am quite sure the author of that famous poem had intentions fully different from how I’m choosing to use it here. But it’s mine now. Too bad for Rummy.

What better place, I figured, to write a bit more about personal branding. Because what Erika does can be called Personal Branding, but it might be something more.

You can check out my post here. And by all means: add Readhead Writing to your RSS feed. Rants writing and musings that will make your day better. And maybe make you re-think about what authenticity really means. I know she did for me.

The post is a reflection of my ongoing interest in bridging the left and right-directed minds. I try to use the trumpet and improvisation as a way to illustrate how even in creative pursuits, we all deal with context and in fact it can create greatness. This is something the creative mind understands very deeply. But sometimes when context is presented in a business setting, creatives find the constraints instead of the inspiration. Or least mine did for long time.

Thanks for checking it out. Consider adding Sundayed to your RSS feed: a good site to feed the brain.

Albums - not just for the music.

I’ll say it: Effective participation in the social web is hard. Damn hard.

It requires strategic acumen more akin to leadership (valuing social capital and investing in the necessary competencies to build and leverage it) and execution skills more akin to in-person networking (add value to those you want to reach and do it all the time) than any kind of marketing and communications discipline.

It isn’t free. It isn’t fast. And the worst time to build your social web presence is at the beginning of a campaign, a crisis, or any other time when you want to broadcast and promote.

It’s exactly the same as this truism: The worst time to build a real-life network is when you want a job. Or a sale. Or anything at all. Social systems sniff out those who are out for themselves. They can detect them like a gas leak. And they’ll leave your house posthaste.

So how do you demonstrate the value of the social web in a culture with competing priorities?

Make no mistake about it: Building an effective social web presence is big change in many organizations. It’s hard work to change a culture into one that values online time to listen, converse, and add value for free. It’s also hard to make the kind of sustainable change necessary to do it again and again and all the time.

It’s a cultural issue as much, if not more, than an execution issue. The questions that need to be asked aren’t tactical: What Shall We Tweet or What Shall We Post. They’re strategic: How Shall We Connect and What Shall We Give Away.

For many, that’s a big cultural change that represents a disciplined approach to something very new.

Culture of Discipline: Disciplined people who engage in disciplined thought and who take disciplined action — operating with freedom within a framework of responsibilities — this is the cornerstone of a culture that creates greatness.

- Jim Collins, Good to Great. Stage 3 Input Principle

So it’s best to find small wins when developing a social web presence, and build on it (yes, another leadership principle.) Have a grandiose goal, but start by finding a purpose that adds value to your organization and build on small wins. This is a sustainable approach based on your strategic context.

It seems to me that one of the most potent small wins for an enterprise lies in the very nature of social web itself: You can use the social web to connect. Forget forward facing campaigns, forget ROI. Use it to connect to people doing stuff in your space, and learn.

We forget about this, I think. But it can be just the toe-hold into the social web that enterprises can use to demonstrate value and build upon.

Boil it down even further than large-scale listening. Approach it simply. Like we use album liner notes.

Remember albums? Time was that we’d buy an entire collection of music from an artist who caught our attention via a single song. The album would include liner notes about other projects the supporting musicians, producers, engineers, or others had been involved with. We’d read these liner notes, and we’d buy another album based on what we learned from them. This process would branch us into all kinds of related but ever-growing experiences.

Follow your favorite author, journalist, CEO, or idea person on Twitter (you’ll be surprised who you’ll find on Twitter using Google). Watch those people’s re-tweets, then follow the people attributed. Watch their links (the things they’re finding value in) and subscribe to those blogs. Follow the links in those blogs and subscribe to those podcasts. Start small and manageable, and before you know it you’ll be sending company-wide emails with a relevant piece of industry news, competitive intelligence, or inspirational thinking.

At a former job I used to send out weekly internal email blasts called “Competitive Flash Reports.” It was a simple thing with blurbs and links to relevant industry and competitive news. It became very popular. People referenced bits of information from it in all kinds of meetings and planning sessions. If the social web was around then, it would have served as a veritable advertisement for the power of the social web. If I did it today, I’d put the source (or source-of-the-source) with the blurb. Demonstrating the social web’s value in this way could change the conversation from “I don’t care what people are having for breakfast” into something meaningful.

Small win. Value to the enterprise. Building blocks based on your strategic context.

I wanted to point people to this one in particular because (a) I love it, and (b) I agree. Big kudos to you, Maureen Johnson. (And you should have whispered it, btw.) We are not brands. We are, indeed, weird. And layered. And multitudinous.

I’m actually working through a brand platform for a client that pivots around an eclectic, multi-layered experience. I turn to New Belgium Brewery as a model for this – a great brand that captures their layered experience. It can be done.

But people aren’t experiences. We experience. People aren’t work. We work.

And people aren’t results. People aren’t products. People aren’t services. We make, and yes, brand those things.

Is branding really worth saving?

Branding (not product branding, but that enterprise-level notion of name and reputation we’re still wrestling with) is dying because we’ve run it into the ground. If you asked anyone or anything to wear as many hats, mean as many things, or be a placeholder for so many musings as contradictory (think tactics promoted as strategy), impertinent (think one-size-fits-all-contexts theories), and importance-inflated (the genocide in Rwanda is an element of a brand? Really?) as we ask of branding, it’d die too. From sheer exhaustion.

It’s not the years (to paraphrase Indiana Jones). It’s the mileage.

Branding started as a notion of something you could control. If you had the resources to overcome the complexity of making fires and casting iron, you could mark something with a fair degree of inspiration, but without much thought of listening to anyone else’s opinion on the matter. Here it is. Our brand.

Branding today is obviously different. So much so that it’s sort of turned inside of itself. It’s lost its way. What branding has become in the last five years or so is actually a re-brand of good leadership practices. Let me make that case.

A brand, in my view, is a set of coordinated activities that facilitate the telling of a story, all pivoting around a clear understanding of what that story is, intended to inspire action.

An enterprise story is deeply contextual within its prime function and those of the stakeholders engaged with it (strategy). The story drive decisions about choosing the most effective ways to facilitate the telling of it (tactics).

And especially in today’s social, connected world where the audience is also the producer (”the former audience” as Jay Rosen put it) a brand must inspire a shared vision. Not the other way around. Which means an enterprise must find ways to listen to stakeholders and understand their values, align those values with the enterprise’s, and steadfastly communicate that their vision is in fact shared.

Agree with that? Then you agree with crusty old leadership concepts like those of Kouzes and Posner, Jim Collins, James O’Toole, and John Kotter. These concepts aren’t so crusty anymore. They’re more relevant than ever as it turns out. These guys were ahead of their time you could argue.

(By the way: Those activities – the work of strategy and tactic planning – are the work of groups of people within enterprises and groups of people outside it who have an interest in the outcome. When individual people do this, they aren’t engaged in personal branding. There’s no such thing. They’re expressing, as the always spot-on Doc Searls put it, their humanity and integrity.)

I’ve been playing around with the notion that brand management in our social world requires more leadership acumen than any kind of marketing smarts. What’s required is the ability listen, understand values, align values, and demonstrate that alignment to inspire a shared vision.

Hardly the work of art-and-copy alone. Yes, engaging content is critical. But where will your enterprise find the capacity to understand what is engaging without the ability to listen, understand values, and recognize what it will take to inspire action based on those values?

There are parallels all over the leadership corpora that illustrate this. Here’s one slide from a presentation I give on this topic:

In the context of today’s social world, a brand passes through several passages of maturity. It starts as adding value to a single type of person (or market segment, if you must). Once this is achieved, it transitions to adding value to many different kinds of people. Which is nice, but things really start popping when you inspire people to recommend it or remark about it. From there, a truly mature brand starts to set a standard in its space: it generates copycats and tail-riders. The most mature brands then transition into system-shifting movements – something that creates a new way of doing things.

A clear example of this is Flickr. Flickr started as a simple feature within a game in response to users who wanted to share photos while playing. As this feature matured into a clear value to many, the game was scrapped altogether. People started talking about it, signing up, and asking their friends and family do the same. It became clear that shutter-heads were highly social (who takes a picture for no one to see?) so it grew. Before long, as Flickr’s social capital grew, its ability to tag images became a standard for image sharing and organizing on the web.

And now? If you believe people like Clay Shirky, Flickr has fundamentally changed the way we store and access information, shifted our thinking in terms of how we wish to be informed as a society, and even disrupted traditional theories of institutions vs. collaboration.

Agree with this model? Then you agree with Ram Charan and his model of leadership maturity.

Today, branding is about how we inspire and intervene in our social networks – leveraging our social capital. That’s a leadership issue more than a marketing one.

It’s social capital that matters — an area of constant concern for any leader since the beginning of time. It isn’t about content capital.

Branding is leadership.

Thanks, Erik.

There are new bedfellows in the world of communications.

I had an interesting week of facilitating workshops and guest lecturing. Standing in front of people and trying to add value – acting like (as my late uncle used to say) I knew what I was doing.

Two key takeaways from the week of acting like I knew what I was doing:

People know this stuff. Let them uncover it.

I co-facilitated workshops on creating a communications plan for a leadership summit of some 200 people. The context of this group is one of tackling an enormous, multi-year endeavor with a dizzying landscape of stakeholders – deep government involvement, private industry engagement, for- and non-profit group alignment, complex technology requirements, countless values competing, and all within an industry in the midst of very real disruption.

In a world where the web is social (thus communications to inspire action and change is all about building trust) the summit was a powerful reminder that much of what we’re dealing with is actually common sense. Appealing to the audience’s intuition of developing relationships and the kind of leadership acumen it takes to succeed in today’s interconnected world was surprisingly straight-forward.

Ask a few questions, get a few folks to share an experience or two and you’re on you’re way to inspiring a shared learning moment. Much more effective than imposing something outside of their context.

This is also how we built our template for a communications plan: we let the members of the audience who’ve done this work before share their best practices. Then we continued to share the peer-developed plan template and best practices throughout the day. I think it was much more effective than if we had stood up there and tried to decree something.

When I guest lectured a few days later, I did the exact opposite. I made assumptions about the audience from past experiences in similar settings. Then I promptly preached.

About a third of the way through, when I sensed some disengagement, it occurred to me that I never polled the audience to better understand their level of understanding (head slap). And it was difficult to recover.

Why didn’t I apply what I know to be true and effective for the guest lecture engagement, especially after I saw it work so well in the workshop setting a few days before? Dunno. I had some new speaker-support stuff that I was excited to show. Maybe that exuberance (hubris?) led me astray. But the difference was clear.

Surround yourself with smart people who don’t do exactly what you do.

I co-facilitated the workshops with Judah Thornewill. A brilliant guy (and fellow creative-mind, frustrated musician). He’s one of those rare combinations of researcher and professional-world doer who has some exciting things to offer in the domain of social capital. He’s developed a method for measuring social capital and collaboration, and he’ll doubtless set the world on fire with his new entrepreneurial effort. His time is now, I’m convinced.

The time is clearly upon us to better understand social capital now that the way we connect and communicate is social. There’s plenty of work on this subject already in the milieu. Chapters are dedicated in just about every leadership book. And there are leaders and their books that focus on the topic exclusively like Bowling Alone, The Hidden Power of Social Networks, The Whuffle Factor, and Connected to name a few (Nicholas Christakis actually spoke earlier at the event – a brilliant mind who’s time has also obviously come).

As communicators, we need to understand how to intervene in the construction of social networks like never before. This is not a branding, marketing, or communications issue. It’s a systems thinking issue. It’s a leadership issue. If marketing people are able to adapt to our new-world reality, people like Judah and Nicholas will be key to our understanding of this new landscape.

Take market segmentation as an easy example. It’s almost intuitive that our social networks affect behavior. But Judah and Nicholas convincingly demonstrate that the way a network is constructed truly matters. This, without hyperbole, redefines market segmentation. It presents a much more complex challenge than what we believe to be true about distinctiveness, homogeneity, response to market stimulus, and reach-ability.

It so happens that my new friend Judah has a market segmentation background. He’s combining this experience with his work on measuring social networks and collaboration effectiveness. He’s the perfect example of the kinds of minds that need to lead marketing and communications professionals today. He broadened my thinking, to be sure.

Judah also demonstrated the kind of leadership style that is called for in our social times during our facilitation: he knew when to pull back, support, and jump in to comment or get us back on track at just the right time. Our workshops were better for it. He kept me from rolling too fast downhill as I’m sometimes apt to do.

The guest lecture? I went it alone. Lectured. Spoke. Presented. I rarely connected and too infrequently looked for the peers in the group to help create a shared sense of learning. I don’t think it was a bad experience overall, but it wasn’t great.

Now that our world is connected and social, the degree to which we can communicate effectively within it depends on understanding its social constructs. Collaboration rules. How we build and intervene in networks is paramount.

And winging it alone simply won’t cut it.

Lesson learned: Facilitate learning. And do it with great people.

—–

Your network is made of people. People who are not sitting around waiting to show you unconditional love.

Now that your act is together, it’s time to get thoughtful about networking.

We shouldn’t have to tell you this, but you won’t find a job without help, and you won’t get help without a network of supportive people. If you think landing a job happens with resumes and cover letters, check out this study. Or this one (PDF).

Remember this: rare is the contact in your network who will actually hire you. More common is the person who puts you in touch with someone in your target company. Or asks a hiring manager to put your resume at the top of the pile. Or simply gives you an insight to the job you’re interested in.

The gold in your network is found in relationships, and the expansion that happens when you build those relationships. Not in the immediate.

If you’re just now building your network, here’s the bad news: The most enduring networks are built when you don’t need one. Why? Because you can spot a person building a network with their own aims in mind a mile away. It’s exactly like spam in your social media stream. When someone is out for themself, they stink up the joint.

We’ll say it again: Networking is about relationships. There are people with feelings and limited time behind the contacts you make. If you’ve ever heard the adage “if you want something done, find the busiest person,” a similar truism applies for the people who will help you with your job hunt. If they’re the type of person who’s taking the time to help you, they’re doing the same for other people. It’s their nature, but it keeps them very busy with these types of activities. Honor that by developing trust and adding value.

Here are our tips for building network relationships. You won’t find the typical tips on clothing, smiling when you meet someone, or where to go to do it. These are the things that build relationships.

——

Learn how to demonstrate value. Without question, we see this as the toughest corner to turn for would-be working professionals. Changing your mindset from “why I’m great” to “why I’ll be great for you” can take some time and experience. But it’s everything. If you can’t translate your value into something meaningful to the person who’ll help you or hire you, you’re at a disadvantage.

So spend some time with a friend or mentor in marketing and sales, and ask them how they’d translate your Me First declarations into something that’s meaningful to the person that’s helping you. Again: It doesn’t matter that you’re great. It matters that you’ll do great things for them. Since this isn’t always second-nature to people, you should find someone whose living depends on the ability to do it and ask them how they’d sell you.

They’ll likely spend some time also challenging you to talk about results. Another hard thing to get your arms around, but critical. All the great stuff you’ve done or are capable of doing are – without hyperbole – decorations around the tangible results of your work. Even if you think it’s small and meaningless.

“Managed the student union coffee shop” sucks. “Served an average of 1,500 students every morning” shines.

“President of the Students Against Bad Things” is lame. “Launched the first social media campaign for SABT, generating an online following of over 1,000 fans” is nails.

“Studied a semester abroad in Zambia” is stale. “Contributed research to an NGO in Zambia for clean water projects” is heavy.

Always – always - follow up with the contacts made for you. The people helping you value their network too, and if they’ve gone out on a limb to make a connection for you, it damages their network if you don’t follow through. Always take the meeting (or at least try). If it doesn’t lead to something valuable for you, it was valuable for the person who set up the meeting. Send your thank you note and move on, but always take the meeting.

Find the right person to help you. Stop wasting your time casting wide nets. Focus on developing a strong relationship with a few key people who see value and will invest in you. And in order to develop that relationship, get to know that person beyond their work role. Knowing their hobbies and interests will help you provide something of value to them. Be creative and think of the ways you can be of value. Offer to help them with work projects. Watch their dog when they take vacation. Introduce them to someone who doesn’t need anything from them. Share a resource with them about one of their interests. Find something – anything – that will make your relationship mutually beneficial.

Get someone to invest in you and stop scattering your business cards to hundreds of people who forget your name (if they ever noticed it in the first place).

Don’t forget the people that are helping you. Don’t be afraid that you will bother people who have offered to help you.  Most job seekers have one meeting with a contact, send a thank you note and then write it off as dead. Realize your value and follow up with your contacts. People who have offered to help have already seen your value and are beginning to invest in your success. Show them that you are treating that investment wisely by keeping in touch and following up consistently.

Stop networking and start volunteering. Instead of paying money for expensive networking events that are hard to make impressions in, volunteer to sit on a working committee for that same organization. Meet people more regularly and develop relationships. Add value, demonstrate what you can do. Get mentioned and thanked in front of the rest of the suckers at the event that you just saved time and money avoiding.

Learn and practice this: when networking, don’t say anything about you until you have learned three things about the person you’re talking with. This will force you to ask questions, understand, gain insight, and develop a relationship. How many people do you consider friends who only talk about themselves? Same principle applies in the professional world.

Up next:

Part 3

Tactics: Finding a job is hard work

But what stood out was his reminder that “people want to play in the fun sandbox.” That sustainable solutions to business and our world should be joyful. Think of the innovation that’s going on in this space, he challenged us. The amazing technology. System-changing ideas. Massive shifts in the status quo. The wondrous problems about to be solved. The human spirit and joy behind it all.

If those interested in sustainable development focus on the doom-and-gloom, the catastrophic problems looming ahead, who will want to play with us?

An excellent thing to remember when managing a brand. Collaboration, partnerships, and action happen when it’s exciting to be a part of something. It’s something I learned a long time ago during college when I worked for an environmental group. People want to be a part of something that’s working, that they feel is making a difference, and is solving something as opposed to bringing attention to a problem.

Same in business and the brands and leadership tactics we use to mobilize people. And not just in the creative, messaging-driven myopia that we often associate with branding and leading. Think of the left side of the brain, too. What can be measured can be managed, obviously. But data and demonstrable results also demonstrate momentum. Momentum begets engagement. Engagement: collaboration, partnerships, change.

And if you don’t have the data right away to demonstrate forward movement, turn to the right brainers for help. If you don’t have data, you’ve got a story. Work on your story from the very beginning. And then when you do gather the data? Aw yeah.