Social web

A remarkable person has just landed a guest columnist gig with Entrepreneur Magazine.

Erika Napolefuckintano. The Readhead.

I say Entrepreneur is lucky to have her.

For anyone who’s attended one of my presentations – Branding for the Rest of Us or Leading in a Social World – you’ve probably heard me talk about Erika. I often use her as an example of remarkability – a section where I mash-up Jim Collins and Seth Godin to talk about declaring and being that thing that sets you apart.

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True story: A guy robs several Pittsburgh banks fully undisguised. His face is recognized clearly on video surveillance, and he is caught. When asked by investigators why he didn’t wear a mask, he said “I wore the juice.”

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.

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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?

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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:

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Spending time with a Hindu or two has helped me question a few things. Our society’s surface-notion of Karma is a big one. I don’t know what Karma is, probably never will. But I’m beginning to understand a bit about what Karma is not.

Karma is not a bank where you deposit good actions so you can make withdraws during times of selfishness. There’s also no parking Karma. And a tip jar is not a place to work on your Karma.

Most importantly, Karma does not operate independently: it’s connected with many other ways of approaching life that I’ll likely never understand either.

I connect to this the way brands – product, service, or personal – build relationships in networking spheres (traditional or virtual). Aplenty are the opinions about our new media landscape giving anyone the ability to build relationships, market, brand, sell. But brands need to think more broadly about what’s behind the promises.

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You’re supposed to keep these blog posts short. Cut ‘em down, keep ‘em succinct.

I recognize there are those who’ve refuted it. But as someone who scans online content like a Labrador scarfs a snausage, I appreciate brevity.

I’m sitting on posts that seem incomplete – even disingenuous – because I’m trying to keep them brief by leaving some of the context stuff out*. And I’m concerned that the context stuff that gets cut in service to brevity might hurt my brand.

I’ve decided to create a post to act almost as a standing disclaimer about this blog. An ever-present justification about the stuff I leave out.

The stuff I leave out in service to brevity tends to fall into two big buckets:

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This is by far the best quote about listening that I’ve ever run across.

Ordinary listeners only listen until they have an opinion about what they are hearing or until they validate what they already know. Great listeners listen until they learn something they did not know before.

(I wrote this down many, many moons ago and lost the attribution. If someone knows where this comes from, I’d very much appreciate knowing the source.)

It’s one of those seminal thoughts that gets to the simple side of complexity. I’ve found I don’t have to think much about active listening or appreciative inquiry if I simply try to learn something from a conversation, online or in person. For me, this has crossed time, technology, my career path, and my personal growth. It’s applied to virtual and physical networking. It’s served me when managing people and when being managed.

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This video is a slide from social media and personal branding presentations I give.

It supports points I make about social media being new tools that require the same fundamental strategy and approach we all know how to do in traditional networking spheres. Namely (and simply):

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Right around the time Dave Mathews Band broke through with their huge hit Satellite, a friend of mine attending a hippy jam-band show told me about a bumper sticker he saw in the Red Rocks parking lot. It read: “Remember when Dave didn’t suck?”

A recent article from a farmer makes no bones about Michael Pollan and his dilemmic omnivores acting as “Agri-Intellectuals” with no moral authority: one-book experts who think farmers are “too stupid to farm sustainably” and “too careless to worry about their communities, their health, and their families…Enough,” he writes. “Enough. Enough.”

Crocs, once “the quintessential American success story” with their staggering IPO giving a windfall for fashion laymen in Niwot, Colorado is facing a series of oddly brash predictions of their demise. Crocs is “toast,” and needs to “do the right thing” for shareholders and sell. The ugly shoe we love has somehow become the ugly company we hate.

Today, the jam-band festival of the internet, the gathering place for media-intellectuals, the promised land for laymen content creators is under attack. People are happily pointing out the cracks in social media.

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North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith said Michael Jordan wasn’t the greatest natural athlete he’d ever coached. He said he was among the hardest working. Miles Davis regularly skipped classes at Julliard to practice his horn, eventually dropping out to play every day in the New York bebop scene. Musicians and artists spend almost all of their time practicing to get ready for small windows of execution.

It’s a simple concept: repeat as many skills within as many contexts as often as possible so when it comes time to execute, you aren’t thinking. You’re fully in service to the prime function of the enterprise and its mission.

It’s precisely the opposite in business. We’re executing all the time with hardly any practice. The results are obvious. Time and again we see gaffs far more destructive than an MJ missed dunk. And we blog about it and pass it around the social media sphere, fingers pointed.

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