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.

I use Erika for two reasons. One, I try my hardest to avoid the banal and not-very-helpful examples of Apple and Starbucks. And two, because she’s the perfect example of being remarkable.

Here’s the slide from the section of my Leading in a Social World presentation. You tell me if Erika isn’t a shining example of a leader who demonstrates characteristics of remarkability:

When I talk about Erika in presentations – her f-bombs, her sex columns, her bitch slapping – I often get quizzical looks from the audience. Love or hate her brand, I say, she’s authentic to the end. Everyone knows what they’re gonna get, they always get it, and they know exactly how to remark about her. And remark about her we do. A lot.

Kudos my friend. Looking forward to having you up in my business for a long time to come.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think brands need to expand their understanding in a number of ways. Carlos Miceli posted some excellent thoughts on the nature of self promotion in our new social web landscape. At a tactical level, brands also need to think broadly about spamming.

We’re all marketers now that we have access to the tools, but we’re all potential spammers as well. It’s not unlike how the desktop publishing revolution gave non-designers a naive courage to design. And like we were forced to think about design in ways we never did before the early 1990’s, it’s worth some time rethinking what spamming means today.

I’ve come to believe that when brands self promote it isn’t about the latitude a brand has somehow earned from time spent sending links or commenting on blog posts, like some kind of Value Bank from which a brand can make deposits and withdraws.

It seems to me that we’re all patient with self promotion—in fact, we sometimes welcome it and want to support it—if (a) we have a history with the promoter and (b) what is being promoted is perceived to somehow add value.

Value Exchange has become as key a marketing concept as any other in today’s social web landscape. Not only because of the rise of social media’s importance and ease-of-access but also because of mobile marketing’s rise. Mobile marketing isn’t a place over which to salivate because of the eyeballs, great in numbers as they may be. Quite the opposite, brands should move deliberately into mobile marketing because, as Freddie Laker put it in a great post, our mobile devices are “a place of great privacy and perceived intimacy.”

And since a great percentage of our interaction in the social web sphere takes place on our mobile devices, brands have to be even more careful not to be perceived as spamming.

It logically follows, then, that the convergence of relationship building with ease-of-access technologies requires a deeper understanding of what it means to add value to our various communities and how we connect our other activities to build trust. Call it integrated personal branding. Call it authenticity or consistency. (But please don’t call it Karma.)

Are you a spammer? Here are four questions I’d suggest a brand ask itself to determine if it’s spamming. Would love to hear from you: What am I missing?

1. Does your perceived value correlate to your historical value?

The problem with spamming is not so much in the lack of value it promises to add. I’m sure yours is the best deal on the web. Perhaps we will get rich together. It’s conceivable that I actually want thousands of new Twitter follows each week. You actually might hold the secret to public relations in the 21st century. Maybe I will want to attend your free seminar that will blow the doors open on my FaceBook marketing strategy. I suppose I could use thousands of new highly qualified sales leads delivered straight to my inbox every Monday.

It’s not the potential value. It’s the complete lack of value that has been added before the promotion. You know. The stuff that builds trust.

2. Do you know how to recognize a Pollyanna?

If you can’t recognize the affectation in an update like “I love what I do and I hope you do too – follow your heart! Income will follow. God Bless” then might I suggest that you spend some time with the Read Head. Learn how to focus on you, avoid mediocrity, and stay away the small stuff without pretension.

There’s an extremely high level of potential new value in the above update (the promise of divine intervention, especially) but the authentic value factor correlates terribly.

It’s one thing if you’re a cheerful person behind a brand. Be that. Just don’t add any more airs than you need to or chances are good that you’ll be called out as a fake. As fake as… well, Spam.

3. Do you re-post compliments?

This one might be a personal pet peeve, but I think thank you’s should be sent as a direct response. An @ reply, a comment to an update. But not a retweet or re-post with your thank you imbedded in it. This is spam in my stream.

It’s a recurring meme that in my mind is a blatant attempt to self-gloss – self-promote your value – as opposed to letting it happen socially.

4. Could you say what you want to say in a physical networking setting?

This is an easy one. Say your update out loud. Better yet, in a mirror. Look yourself in the eye, say it, and then ask yourself how you’d respond if someone said it to you at a real-life networking event.

This was well put by Alli Gerkman in her blog for lawyers: “Would you really walk up to someone at a reception and say, “I OFFER GREAT LEGAL SERVICES FOR SMALL BUSINESSES–SEE MY WEBSITE FOR INFO!”?

—————

Image credits

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:

1. I don’t or won’t always take the time to explain that I’m not necessarily good at the best practices I write about. An idea, study, or belief might be something I’ve observed or am learning from as much as something I’ve actually practiced to any degree of consistency or with brag-able results. Does this matter? I don’t think Seth Godin actually practices all that he preaches and I don’t mind his definitive attitude. Still, it bothers me that I don’t always directly address this dynamic. I explain it fairly well here I think. But re-reading this post I think I came across more self-righteous than I intended.

I guess it’s safe to say that when you decide to blog, you have to be comfortable to some degree positing an idea every now and then that you won’t take the time to fully explain your experience and results with practicing it. But to what degree exactly? I’m not sure.

2. Taking the time to credit and tell the story behind those that have influenced a post. Mentors, friends, partners, my wife. The list of influencers on my perspectives, practices, life is endless. This entire post could have been written almost entirely by my wife. Practice fields, something I’ve written about more than once, is another good example. A former colleague/boss and now friend/client introduced me to the concept a long time ago, and I’ve gotten a ton of mileage from it. And literally anytime I write about the social web I really should tip my hat to my friend Glen Turpin. He’s my technology compass, guiding me to what’s new, important, and meaningful.

But I’m not always going to take the time to credit folks who aren’t, I guess, directly attributable to what I write about. That’s a really big squishy gray area that I wish I had a better handle on.

There. I feel a bit better. Maybe I’ll release some of those in-limbo posts now.

Still, I wonder. Like communication shortcomings in emails, to what degree does brevity in blog posts leave the wrong impression of our brands?

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*My posts are actually pretty long mostly because of my inability write succinctly. I’ll get better at that.

Update: Just after publishing this, I noticed that a tweep that I dig guest-blogged about this very topic. He links to it from his blog, and I wish I would have seen it before I published this one. (And it should come as no surprise that I’m pretty sure I found this guy on Twitter from Glen Turpin.)

Unfinished Inscription: Richard Dorrell / CC BY-SA 2.0

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.

Have you ever been asked to sit down with someone for a general-purpose networking meeting and the person spends the time you’ve given them talking about themselves? And when you chime in with your perspective they offer a statement about how it relates to them? A lost opportunity at best. A lost relationship at worst.

Ever had a client give you feedback and they never stopped to ask what your thought process was in creating the deliverable? Or have you ever given feedback to a contractor, agency, or direct report without asking them the same question? It’s very likely that they, like you, thought deeply about what they delivered. Not attempting to understand their process risks missing great ideas. And disengages them for the next round of execution.

For me, listening is a skill and talent that requires constant work. I’m not a natural listener and need to continually monitor myself by asking “have I learned something yet?” I set this as a kind of minimum requirement to earn the right to chime in with an opinion or a validation.

As those who know me will tell you, I’m far from perfect. But my best interactions have occurred when this monitoring technique is operating well. And what I’ve found is that the minimum requirement becomes mute: I listen better throughout the engagement and forget all about what I want to say or offer.

I can’t help but wonder if this might help others.

• What would the much-maligned Social Media gurus call themselves if they listened and learned from the new media buzz about what it is they claim to do?
• Online monitoring is one thing. Learning from it is quite another.
• Will those who listen-to-learn emerge from the Great Reset better than those who don’t?
• Would you rather hire a listener who learns or someone who claims to know what’s best for you?
• How much more effectively will you inspire people to follow your ideas, non-profit plugs, and activities if you view them as someone to learn from, rather than a receptacle for your own thoughts?

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):

• Find communities that are right for you.
• Be nice, ask questions, and be authentic.
• Look to give more than you receive.
• View it as collaboration, not promotion.
• Do it even when you don’t feel like it.
• Do it even when you don’t feel like it.
• Do it even…etc.

The same applies to companies struggling to understanding how to leverage it while afraid of the possibilities if they do. The same questions companies deal with in other areas of their operations apply to the strategic approach they should take to social media.

Culture

• How do we view customers?
• How transparent are we?
• Do we want to have discussions?
• How do we use information gathered?
• Do we believe we can control messages?

Public Relations

• Do we look to add value above and beyond what we charge for? Is everything billable?
• Do we believe that we control messages?
• Or do we believe that we facilitate discussion?
• Do we believe that 5,000 views of a blog is as valuable as a New York Times placement?

Risk Tolerance

• Do we try things to develop context, or do we exhaustively plan before getting involved?
• Do we reward failure?
• Do we have recovery acumen?
• Is believe ever a part of our planning?

Diversity

• Do we seek to incorporate differing backgrounds into the status quo?
• Do we recognize the value of different cultures?
• Do we have a servant leader approach to finding ideas?
• Are we humble enough to listen?

A friend of mine made the point that in the 90’s, companies were worried about what would happen if they allowed anyone in the organization to have an email account. The new tool, it was feared, would generate widespread power of communications, making it impossible to control corporate messages.

Social media isn’t anything new from a strategy perspective.

Apple helps make this point with these two ads.

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.

Plenty of others have already done the heavy lifting on this topic. @olivermarks digs in and suggests that all of this is just too messy, too noisy, and too many amateurs are involved. He aptly alludes to the desktop publishing revolution, suggesting to me that there’s a learning curve to overcome and metaphorically we need to stop using so many fonts.

@geoffliving points out that the allure of social media is innovation. Not the end state, not the result of the activity, but rather the process itself. And now that the technologies have matured, social media is disinteresting him (in fact, it’s dead to him). Without “What’s Next” there’s “Not Much.”

Increasingly there’s Not Much in social media for younger demographics. If against-the-status-quo campaigns are any barometer younger participants are clearly resisting Facebook (or if you prefer, there’s actual data). And have you checked out Urbandictionary.com’s definitions of Twitter? Here’s the entry with the most Up’s:

A stupid site for stupid people with no friends, who think everyone else gives a s**t what they’re doing at any given time. Also lacks the functionality of other social networking sites, not that it matters because just like Twitter all those sites suck anyway.

(So if I’m on Twitter and Facebook, is my brand Bermuda shorts and black socks? Yikes.)

Yes, the backlash is in full swing. Spam is pervasive. Snake-oil salesmen are accused. Charlatanism warned. Value questioned.

But what does a backlash mean? How and why do backlashes occur? And why is it happening to social media?

Pulitzer Prize winner Susan Faludi wrote a manifesto about a backlash against feminism in the 1980’s. In Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women she suggests that backlashes aren’t coordinated conspiracies “with a council dispatching agents from some central room.” Nor are the elements of backlashes equal in their significance or power, and they aren’t always intentional.

Some manifestations, Faludi suggests, are “generated by a culture machine that is always scrounging for a ‘fresh’ angle.”

Certainly an apropos thought for the social media backlash. Once a brand or idea is perceived as breaking free from the margins (Dave Mathews Band) early adopters flee like frightened sparrows. Once the pragmatists take over, you’ve entered the Early Majority stage. Good for brands looking to scale, but not so good if your core market segment’s identity is on the margins.

There’s another possibility for the social media backlash. Quoted in Faludi’s book, Dr. Jean Baker Miller says backlashes occur when an existing power structure feels a threat. A backlash, Dr. Miller suggests, can be an indication that a new movement is actually having an effect, “when advances have been small, before changes are sufficient to help many people….almost as if the leaders of backlashes use the fear of change as a threat before major change has occurred.”

Do Pollan-ites pose a threat to the agri-business structure? Do small entrepreneurs who break rules and make millions with simple shoes upset the fashion status quo?

We clearly don’t know what kind of effect social media will have on the revenues of Bermuda-and-black-socks media giants. Or exactly what effect it’s had on newspaper closings. But if you’ve even heard of Manufacturing Consent, it isn’t a reach to suggest that there’s more than a little power under more than a little threat.

Systems have a way of casting out agents that aren’t in service to their prime function. All you have to do is come down with a cold to understand how this works. Or watch a few episodes of The Wire.

Or see the power that 140 characters and a YouTube video can have in the midst of a disputed election.

The new age of collaborative information: a threat to power structures or just not cool anymore?

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.

As several recent blog posts have illustrated, discussions about your brand are prototypical examples of unpracticed behavior in the marcom discipline. @chrisbrogan has a nice post in response to Best Buy CMO Barry Judge (with a nice twist that looks at the back side of the issue). @stevetobak turns some problematic statements from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer into productive advice on how to speak about your competition.

(These are the positive examples. Big kudos to these two for providing us with something to learn instead of the too-typical banal jeer.)

For me, there’s always a little voice in the back of my brain telling me these folks know better. That it was poor execution. That maybe they just didn’t practice enough.

And that I need to find more practice fields so I don’t make the same mistakes. Or invent entirely new ones for people to blog about.

There are several leadership thinkers who have written about the concept of practice fields for leaders. Heifetz, Linsky, and Grashow come to mind. As does Kouzes’ advice for finding practice fields in everyday meetings. And the practice field experience is often cited as a key benefit by enterprises offering leadership training programs.

So where to find practice fields for branding and marketing folks?

At first glance, the repetitive nature of new and social media is numbing. How many times can we be expected to read a post about brand monitoring through social media? Sit through a video about search engine optimization? Hear advice about the still-illusive practice of viral campaigns?

I’m beginning to think that new/social media is my practice field. That maybe I can never read or view or hear this stuff enough. That I shouldn’t be so quick to skip a blog post or a snappy quote in my Twitter stream. Maybe the repetition in the new/social media domain is my practice field. Maybe this is where I can hear, again and again, best practices that will make my execution more effective.

And if I involve myself more in discussions instead of glossing over a topic I think I’ve heard before, my assumptions will be challenged. I’ll dig a little deeper. I’ll practice.

Another apropos @chrisbrogan blog post: Five Tasks in the Morning. Seems to me that he’s scheduled time for practice. And he does it every day.

From what little I know about him, he doesn’t miss many slam dunks.