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.

This is a three-part series written with Dr. Paul Kosempel, leadership faculty member, Assistant Director of the Pioneer Leadership program at the University of Denver. Paul also wrote his dissertation on the topic of mentoring.

Please join the discussion. (Jill Montera, we’re talking to you.)

————

Spring in Colorado is a reminder of an important life dictum. Just when you think you’re finished, ya ain’t. Life and work is a process.

A few weeks ago we had a 70 degree day on Thursday, and six inches of snow and a 60 degree temperature drop by Friday night. The parks were packed with energetic runners and smiling dogs on Thursday. Friday afternoon was a commute from hell. Wake up call.

Spring is also the time when undergrad and grad college students in their final semesters start waking up to the reality that it’s almost time to get a job. Some will start seeking internships, others begin realizing what their mentors meant by building a network before you actually need it. Damn. Shoulda done that.

Having worked at a university I still get asked the occasional favor to sit down with a student and chat about their careers. Not any more than any of us, I’m sure. But there are some things that really matter, in my opinion, but aren’t exactly easy to categorize and teach someone in a college career center. Tough-love stuff. Stuff that needs to be said but often isn’t.

To avoid the predictable and banal kids these days rant, I thought I’d turn to a former colleague, friend, and expert in this area to help me focus a few thoughts toward something productive. Paul Kosempel (Dr., if you please) has been in higher education for 15 years. He’s a faculty member in leadership studies at the University of Denver as well as Assistant Director of the Pioneer Leadership Program. He used to work in a career center and the topic of his dissertation is “Mentoring dialogues: An investigation of the dialectical tensions and management strategies in mentoring relationships.”

I’ve long admired Paul for many things, but one of them is his sustained, individual work with his students. He cares. Cares enough to know (like anyone who’s ever managed someone knows) that there are no favors in subtle and soft. In fact, it can sometimes enable. It does no one any good to beat around the bush.

So we worked together on the following three-part series. Think of it as the stuff that the career counselor wants to tell you but can’t.

Part One

The ramp up: Get your act together

You get your skis tuned before hitting the slopes. You put gas in your car before a road trip. You study before a test (meh….). So you gotta get ready before diving in to the process of finding a job.

First, stop spending money. You might feel like you deserve it after all your hard work in college. But you don’t have a job. Free yourself as much as you possibly can from financial obligations so you can focus on finding the right job, not just the right-now job.

As important, financial restraint is also a sign to those that will help you that you’re taking this seriously. That you know what it means to make a sacrifice. Why would someone want to give up their time and network to someone who doesn’t have any skin in the game?

Ditch the cable T.V. Stop worrying about your hair to the tune of $75 stylings. Park for free a few blocks away and walk. Go to coffee to network, not lunch. Do NOT get a new car. (By the way, once you get a job, you shouldn’t get a new car either. Do you really want to send the signal that your first financial decision is to buy something that loses half of its value right away?)

Then say this to yourself out loud every morning: No one owes me anything. If you think you already believe this, try it anyway.

Then come to peace with the fact that a valuable favor isn’t always what you think it is. If someone introduces you to someone else instead of helping you with the immediate, they have a good reason. It isn’t necessarily putting you off (although that will happen to you, too). It’s finding the right place for you to learn and get ahead.

Next, stop working on your To-Do list and make a To-Be list. This is a blatant rip-off from a line written by Amber Singleton Riviere in a WebWorkerDaily post. Read it.

People who want to help you can’t unless they know where you want to be. They can’t give advice about the tactic you put in front of them unless they have a sense of your bigger plans. And most importantly: people want to help people who are going somewhere, and are turned off by wanderers. They have better things to do with their time.

If you can’t articulate a basic sense of purpose, then be transparent and ask people to help you with that instead of helping you find a job.

Transition your social web imprint. Right now. Delete your party and vacation pictures. Set your privacy settings so only friends see pictures of you, especially those that were uploaded by other people.

Remove anything you possibly can that you wouldn’t want to see on the news. Or anything you wouldn’t want a creepy HR recruiter looking at.

Start dumping social media friends. In the post-college world, no one cares about quantity. We care about quality. Remove friends and followers that you even remotely don’t trust. The guy that will keep reminding everyone of your night in Vegas? Dump him. The enduring booty-call person who sends updates about their recent special friend? Gone.

Here’s a succinct post on this topic from a – let’s call him a well respected thinker – if you don’t believe us.

What did we miss? Please let us know your getting your act together tips.

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Up next:

Part Two

Networking: There are actual people behind your contacts

Then:

Part 3

Tactics: Finding a job is hard work