This is an American tale. Today I turn 30 and if you had asked me a few months ago what I felt about this in-some-ways arbitrary, in-some-ways significant pivot point, I would have told you that it was no big deal, that our age was a state of mind, that I felt younger now than I did when I was 25. But that is not the case today. I am buzzing and electric with a kind of rage. Not anger rage. Not exasperated rage. More like ELATION rage.

A little over 2 years ago I took the path less traveled, and even though I have never been the biggest Robert Frost fan, it seems that his words are so embedded in our collective unconscious that what I did then, and how I perceive it now, could  not be accurately described with referencing that old sage of American poetry. As some of you know I have written poetry for many years and can now see that I always will, just as I will always write essays, and book reviews, and notes on film, and art and music. And I will continue to blog because blogging is what I do and a very big part of who I am. The immediacy, the casual nature of it, sometimes even the looseness of the form, the fact that I can sit down without an argument or a point and just write and that somewhere, out there, there are readers, and fans, and followers, and colleagues and peers and people I respect, that might see it, and actually enjoy it. And not mind much that I sat down without a fig of an idea of what or how I was going to say it, but just that I wanted to express myself anyway.

I don’t have any major life pronouncements to make, predictions to gamble on, deadlines to hit, or any other obligations that I can see.

But I do feel the pivot happening. I do feel childhood and adolescence and young adulthood receding. There it goes. Like a wave in high tide that washes in, that slaps the sand with its crunch and its sleekness, spreading out among the particles, picking up stray bits of crab and shell, of sea weed and kelp and other marine vegetation, brooming across the beach, and then, hanging there, suspending for a second, it begins to pull away. To go back into the rolling blue ether of time. To join all the other childhoods and adolescences. To smash them together, rubbing their mass together, all the laughter and pain and joy and horror, the tragedy and the elation spuming together in a spray of foam and air and total complete effervescence.

Until that mass lifts and disintegrates into time and space and place.

Image courtesy of 96dpi on Flickr

If it wasn’t already clear, I don’t really believe in the traditional conception of careers and professions. I don’t think that humans were made to do just one thing, for a long time, over and over. Isn’t that what our conception of a career is? You enter an industry, you join a firm and what you hope for is to advance in that industry, slowly accruing more experience, respect, financial rewards and stability. This was the ideal of the Post-War era. It is what led to the amazing growth of the middle-class in America, allowing us to prosper as no other nation or society has ever prospered before.

That ideal is now breaking down. The reasons are as varied as: The loss of traditional manufacturing jobs and outsourcing, the growth of a knowledge and service economy, the financial engineering of large corporations that prioritizes cost-cutting among other factors. But I think the unwritten reason for the breakdown of the traditional professional career ideal is that we have evolved. We’ve evolved to the point where we know that what makes people happy is not to do one thing, but to do many things.

One of the reasons I left my career in the financial world was because I couldn’t imagine my life where 2/3 of my time was spent behind a coterie of blinking computer screens. No matter what the financial rewards would have been, I knew it wouldn’t be enough for me, and that before long I’d be regretting my career choice. But what I also noticed was not that I was just in the wrong profession, but that any profession that required most of my time, would not be ideal.

Now imagine how lost I felt in a country that prizes financial success above everything.

I guess I’ve got this feeling that the 21st Century is opening so many new doors to people, that, well, we won’t need to focus all our energies on just one specific profession. Now of course, the criticism of this is that when you don’t have just one thing, you end up making less money. For now, I think that is true. But I also think that is preferable. Especially coming off the crisis of confidence that our current system just spasmed through, frankly, I am happy to make less money doing the things I want to do. Because although my bank account won’t reflect it, I’ll be a happy and healthier person for it and money won’t be the only determinant with which I judge, and allow others to judge, my life.

Not gonna be easy, but in interest of continuing to provide a peek into my own life, lets review some of the “hats” that I wear.

1. I run a boutique consulting firm. I spend about half of my time on this part of my life. About 20 hours a week. If the need arises, I can always scale up those hours for the right kind of compensation or if a client comes along that really suits what I want to do. Those 20 hours include weekly client meetings, strategizing, monitoring campaigns, business development and responding to RFP’s.

2. I write! Book, film, music and art reviews, usually for publication on my own blog, although I love guest posting on other blogs (and getting myself in front of audiences different than my own) and just recently I’ve begun writing articles for a pretty cool magazine. Most of the time this writing is unpaid, though I have been compensated in the past, and will be in the future as I continue to do this kind of thing. You see, I write because I love to and because I need to. Not because I expect to get paid for it. Or because I need to. I think the best writing comes when it is done not out of financial necessity, but out of creative and spiritual necessity. And writing is the best thing I can to sharpen my skills for my consulting business.

3. Collaborator, Eater, Friend, Dilettante

I work on fun projects, I eat at lots of good restaurants. I spend a lot of time with my friends, and I get to indulge all my interests. If I want to take a morning off and go to a movie, I do it. If I feel like biking around New York City on a beautiful summer day, I do it. This, I am convinced, is the right way to run life. And yet I am always fighting off the feeling that somehow I am being naive. That I won’t grow up, that because I like to do lots of things, that I won’t have one thing that will provide balance or stability throughout my life, that I won’t ever earn enough money to support myself, a family, a retirement. Honestly? I’ll figure all that stuff out as it comes. I don’t believe in coldly calculating my way through life. Call me reckless if you will, the truth is I’ve been called a lot worse.

I think I realized long ago that, just as I could not follow my path in the financial sector, I could not expect to pursue a career in journalism or creative writing full bore. No, that wouldn’t do at all. Not only is it impossible to make a living this way, it just doesn’t suit me. Perhaps there will come a time when it will, when I will want to wake up and just do one thing and only one thing and I’ll want to do that one thing so well that I will expend as much energy as I have at achieving success however it should be defined at that time.

But that time is certainly not now, and with all the opportunities open to me, and to all of us, I just can’t operate with a single goal in mind. There may come a time when I want to go full-bore on a project. For instance, startups interest me greatly and the thought of building something that can effect culture, that can change people’s lives interests me greatly. For that reason, the entrepreneurs I meet are really my heroes. The guys and gals behind firms like Twitter and Foursquare, basically the entire company at Google, and hundreds of more firms and operations that I simply respect.

But the time is not quite right for me to do that kind of thing. And for now, I am happy to wear a lot of hats. I’ve got the space in my closet anyhow.

Image courtesy of Theodore Scott on Flickr

[fblike layout_style='button_count' show_faces='false' verb='like' font='segoe ui' color_scheme='light']Ah with fond (and hazy) memories do I recall freshman year at college. A whole new city to explore, hundreds if not thousands of new people to meet, class schedules to manipulate in order to sleep as late as possible. It occurred to me recently that Twitter is actually a lot like your freshman year in college. One of the great things about heading off to college is the opportunity to meet so many new people. And the thing is you don’t meet everyone all at once. In fact, I continued to meet people throughout my freshman and even sophomore years.

Constantly Meeting Your NEW Best Friends

Interacting on Twitter is basically the exact equivalent of Freshman year. Think about it: you are constantly meeting new people, finding the communities you are interested in being a part of, introducing yourself to any number of people. One of the things I remember most clearly about freshman year was how often I had to introduce myself. Even towards the end of the year, having been at school for 8 or 9 months, I’d still come across someone that I had yet to meet. This is one of the pleasures of being in a place with so many people around you.

How many introductions did you make freshman year? How many times did you deliver your life story?

By then end of freshman year I had my schtick down cold. Going to a school in the heart of the Deep South, people would find out I was from New York and instantly be mesmerized. They wanted to know! Everything. What’s it like in New York? Was growing up their fun? Was it dangerous? What about the museums and the Broadway shows? The restaurants and the shopping?

Don’t you have the same experience on Twitter? Someone finds your tweets or your blog posts and introduces themselves, wanting to find out more. Maybe something you wrote, or a link you sent out, or a conversation you were involved with registered with them. Struck the appropriate chord and BAM, just like that, you’ve made a new worthwhile connection.

Figuring Out The Clans and Tribes

Twitter is a big beast of a service. Over a billion tweets sent, 50 million users, and 5 million active users. What this means is that you could spend inordinate amount of times on Twitter and never discover everyone you needed or wanted to, no matter your purpose. It is obvious but its important to remember that Twitter is a social network, and if you look at it this way, you can easily see how college itself is a bit like a social network. A bunch of people of varied backgrounds and interests all dropped into a pool together.

And just like in college, tribes and clans soon form. Human beings are immensely tribal. There are the frat guys and sorority girls who immediately cling to one another and begin to form social hierarchies. The studio artists and theater majors go in one direction, the history nerds join up, the poets head off to the English department and the hippies organize extensive drug trafficking and tape trading syndicates.

Just like with Twitter we only follow so many people. And they follow others. So occasionally we see people we don’t quite know or follow in our streams as someone we DO know interacts with them. Although its a futile task, we tend to construct maps or architectural diagrams of all our connections. Is this any different than how we behaved in college? As we continued to meet people, we placed them in our brackets and connected them to others we knew. Did we meet them at a party off campus, or in a live chat on Twitter? Were we following the same hashtag?

College Is Where We Go To Discover Ourselves

It may be a cliche, and it may not even be true, but for better or worse, college is for many people the place they first begin to discover who they really are, who they spend their time with, how they spend it. Before college, we are too busy dealing with teenage angst, hormones, and the limited size of our high schools to actually discover what we expect out of life, and how we are planning on going about getting it.

Twitter is similarly a place where we discover ourselves, where our real interests lie, who our friends and connections are, what we share, what we keep private. There is something so simple and elegant about Twitter, the limited bursts of thought, the opportunities to both mask and fully expose yourself.

In the end, Twitter forces the real person to emerge. I think that is the great and often overlooked power of Twitter. We celebrate its ability to precipitate conversation and interaction. We find the information we want and need. We find audiences for our products or content. But what about what Twitter does to the self?

Well…thats a topic for another post, but for know, go do a keg stand or something.

Image courtesy of Kenneth Hynek on Flickr

The Ups and Downs

The twists and turns of independent consulting right now are dramatic and severe. One day we are absolutely essential and urgent RFP’s flow in. The next we are as unnecessary as can be. The hot and cold nature of clients can throw even the most stable consultant into a tizzy. I’ve had clients pepper me with questions until both they and I are blue in the face. And then come back for another round. I’ve had potential clients ask me for proposals only to tell me my services won’t be necessary and sitting back and watching them institute every single one of my ideas.

As more and more companies get familiar with social media and convince themselves they need to engage, the temperature and intensity of client interactions and pitches is heightening. And so much as independent strategists like myself desire this, there are some pitfalls to watch out for.

Most of all is the tendency to react to quickly to client overtures. Personally, I get way too excited by consults that go well. I even get excited by meetings that don’t go so well. This a form of arrogance that needs to be tempered. Because people on the bleeding edge of social media interaction, those that are well-informed of trends and developments in the social space, who know how to use the tools, who have programs worked out ahead of time for their clients, believe themselves to be more than necessary. And you know what, in a way we are. But just because we feel this way, doesn’t meant the rest of the world does, especially those that we are pitching.

Yes its true that many managers and those holding the purse strings are taking social media much more seriously than they were even a few short months ago. I spent most of the fall explaining to potential clients why they need to engage with social media. I no longer need to do that. Great! But with this added businesses comes another level of scrutiny that social media marketers need to adjust to. We are often faced with people who only have a tentative grasp of the issues and the tendency is for people to act like they know more then they do. It then requires time for us to parse through exactly what we are dealing with.

The Twists and Turns

The twists and turns that social media marketing can take are varied. I’ve had consultancies start with a specific set of goals in mind only to find two weeks in I am knee deep in issues that were never on the table. Often this is because clients don’t have the necessary infrastructure to carry out our pre-approved goals. This is one of the most fraught situations to face because everything gets pushed back, and then the client, often looking for reasons to believe you aren’t worth the trouble, time or money, can point to lack of progress. It’s not fair, but life never is! And we are the ones who have to shoulder the burden, because after all, we work for the client. It’s their dime.

The rapid nature of social media marketing, and the entire world online forces strategists to constantly be on their toes. Not only do we need to effectively service our current clients, we have to perform due diligence on future projects, pitch new clients. On top of all that we have to remain completely up to date with developments in the social space.

What new apps or applications or social networks are launching?

How will these effect my current or future clients? What about client’s that have already been serviced? Do we have to go back to those clients and ensure that they are up to date with these new developments.

For instance, right now I am watching the controversy over Facebook, which I wrote about yesterday, and how it may effect marketing on social networks. At the exact moment that many of the businesses I know are getting ready to finally engage Facebook in a serious way, it may be that Facebook is on its way out. Yes that is exactly how serious this controversy is. Facebook may be on its way out. And right now businesses are out there making plans to dominate what could very well be a defunct or at the least a highly compromised service.

In short, social media is a roller coaster ride of emotions and actions. The best we can hope for is to hold on tight, trust in the integrity of the system we have in place, and even try to have a little fun! Throw your hands up in the air! I know that after a tough couple of weeks here I am pledged to try , sit back, trust in the integrity of the system I have built over the past 9 months, and simply enjoy the ride.

Image Courtesy of flatluigi on Flickr

Kerfuffle is the only way to describe the latest controversy over Facebook and its new stance towards its user’s privacy. The truth is that Facebook can’t believe in privacy anymore because if it does, it doesn’t have much of a future. The future of Facebook (and of every other social network) lies in its ability to monetize its user base. The best way to monetize your user base is to collect and organize that highly detailed and targeted information and sell it to marketers. Or package it in a way that marketers can deploy it using the internet’s ingrained and sophisticated form of advertising.

From today’s Financial Times:

Facebook is thus important not only to investors but to everyone interested in the future of the internet, which is practically all of us. If it decides, in Google’s phrase for deceiving or messing around with its customers, to “be evil” then millions feel the effects.

Unfortunately, Mark Zuckerberg, the 25-year-old who founded Facebook as a private social network for Harvard students, has recently been displaying a disregard bordering on disdain for Facebook users’ right to maintain control over personal information.

This is the dilemma facing social networks. If they go too far with their user’s data, then they run the risk of losing the trust of those user’s (perhaps the most important equity there is in the 21st century). But if they don’t go far enough, then they aren’t of much value in the long run.

I think what we are missing in all of this is that our definition of Privacy is shifting. Not for everyone, in fact, some are calling for stricter standards and default settings. I have to say that these people have a point, even though I fundamentally disagree with it. The truth is that the goal posts have shifted. Privacy is certainly not what it was a generation ago. The problem our culture seems to have is even recognizing that the shift is going on, and then overreacting when it hits us in the face. Here is the dirty truth about privacy: most people don’t care.

Mr Zuckerberg was at least speaking plainly, unlike last December, when he wrote in an open letter that “our work to improve privacy continues today”. He failed to mention that, eight days later, it would turn six aspects of each user profile, including gender, location and the friends list, into “publicly available information”.

If Facebook users were allowed a free choice, they might well tick the box to accept anyway. His vision of the “open graph”, in which Facebook’s users engage more with websites they visit and applications they use because the services are tailored to them, has allure.

Facebook’s Social Graph API

I spent the better part of last week going over the extensive documentation for Facebook’s new social graph API. Discovering just how OPEN the default settings were was pretty shocking. It allows a website to access not only a person’s name but their email, address, birthday as well as their entire list of friends. That’s pretty dramatic. If only I were a savvy sick manipulating marketer I could have a field day with all that data.

And here I am looking at this radical approach to openness and privacy and realizing that we’ve now reached the crossroads between marketing and privacy. Marketers have spent the better part of a century trying to get the very same data that networks like Facebook and Foursquare now have on us. Who we are, who are friends are, what we like, what we consume, where we are, where we spend our money and how we do so?

I mean this is the holy grail of marketing segmentation. And yet, I couldn’t help but be turned off by the thought of that data being used for the wrong purposes. And yet knowing what I know about human nature I know that is exactly what will happen. I think people are in for a surprise in the coming months. They will soon be targeted with advertisements in ways that are so personal and so relevant that it is going to be severely off-putting.

But I think what bothers me most is our society’s total inability to actually have the conversation that we need to have about privacy. Let’s just talk about it: let us talk about what should and should not be off-limits. From my perspective, I actually have no problem with my privacy settings being wide open. That is because I am analyzing how I am marketed so that I can turn it around and help my clients think strategically about how to do it better. Or differently.

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Image Source: alancleaver_2000 on Flickr

So now that you are properly focused on social media and are retreading your business’ tires to operate in the powder-fresh snows of social media, what other work do you have before you? I mean isn’t that enough? You’ve been reading all the best marketing blogs, set-up listening stations to monitor your corner of the world and you’ve even taken steps to do some website redesign to incorporate your social networking profiles. And your developing content for the blog and locating the people within your organization who can handle these new responsibilities. You may feel like you’ve done enough.

I am going to be the messenger of ill tidings then when I tell you all those good intentions and hard work are not enough. Shoot me if you must. But I speaketh the truth, because for all the good that adopting social media into your business or brand operations will get you, the more important wook is in the philosophy behind this switch.

Is Social Media the Tools or the Philosophy?

Social media is more than just a shiny new toolkit. Social media represents a whole new way of thinking about business, about communication, about sales and marketing, about customer service, about technology about human resources. The tools of social media surely touches all of these silos. But what binds them together is the underlying philosophy that vivifies, that gives life, to social media.

1. What good is Twitter to you if you haven’t learned how to have authentic, real-time and highly personal conversations with your customers?
2. What benefit does Foursquare have for your business if you’ve simply slapped on some mundane mayor offering, but don’t really care about location-based marketing?
3. What’s the point of loading Google Analytics into your websites if you aren’t sitting down with them once a week and listening to what your traffic is telling you?

The point is that adopting the tools of social media doesn’t make your business ready to succeed in a world of social media. You are going to have to dig deeper and make the particular connections between the philosophy behind things to the tools that make them work. For instance:

What is your policy on public complaints or queries about your new service or product? Who is going to handle those mentions? When and where will you compromise and admit when you are wrong? Similarly, at what point along this continuum will you hold the line? How committed are you to your blog features when the metrics are telling you they aren’t hitting your goals?

The Philosophy Behind Social Media

The philosophical underpinnings of social media do not have anything to do with the tools or networks that animate social media. The posture and stance that animates this ethic is perhaps the biggest shift that brands and businesses are going to have to make. Which is why social media has been so quickly and more productively employed by individuals. Individuals have the flexibility to change on a dime. We can rebrand in an hour. Trust me. I’e done so about 25 times in the past 6 months. I can be anything I want to be.

Businesses though? Not so much. You can’t change the direction of a big fat oil tanker around in five minutes. It takes an hour. Or the better part of a day. How are you supposed to shift the entire philosophy of your business around while at the same time negotiating a recessionary environment, the fact that you are trying to do more with less (employees, budgets, time). Not exactly the time to be making deep changes to the philosophy behind your business. You need a tugboat. You need someone to help you negotiate the twists and turns of the Port of Call you want to arrive safely in.

Which is why it is crucial that businesses focus less on adopting the tools of social media and spend more of their time talking about the 21st Century. What does new mean to your business? What does breaking with the past mean? What does sustainability conjour? How are we going to communicate better (and no this doesn’t mean more emailing)? How are we going to move past the jealousies, the politics, the bureacratic obfuscations that prevent your business from actually changing? How are you going to retrofit your business?

It’s only going to come from the top. This can only be done through the illustration of true leadership. Motivating your employees not just to buy into what you are selling them but in believing in even more than you may, and providing them the freedom to be nimble and to go off and motivate others on their own. This is how the 21st Century requires you to adapt.

How are you going to talk about competition without sounding afraid? I know of some businesses, even new media enterprises, where even mentioning the name of their chief rival in the office can get you nasty stares? How preposterous!

It’s stunning to see how many businesses are talking the talk with social media, saying all the right things, making gestures in all the right directions, and ABSOLUTELY FAILING at learning the lessons behind what makes social media work.

What makes social media work is the lubricating influence of an entire new set of eyes. How’s your vision these days?

Image Courtesy of Dan Kamminga on Flickr

What follows are my notes from the luncheon that Bryce Gruber and I held last week for public relations professionals:

The Real Opportunity for PR Firms Right Now

Businesses and brands know they need to get acquainted with social media marketing. But they aren’t keen on hiring untested and unproven social media marketers. PR Firms already have the client relationships. They have trust and experience. Yet they have so far failed to wrap social media into their services in any tangible way. At the most they’ve paid lip service.

The reason for this is because they don’t know social media marketing themselves. They don’t know the tools, the services, the networks, the protocols; one could argue that most of all they don’t understand the philosophy behind social media. This is because social media operates in almost diametric opposition to what they do know which is controlling the message, broadcasting a brand surgically, and using their access (to journalists, tastemakers, cultural arbiters) to promote their clients.

But as more brands and businesses get comfortable with social media, with their needs and budgets and time constraints, they want guidance. PR firms are much better situated then someone like myself to service their clients. And anyway, I don’t want to take clients away from anyone. I am not good at PR. You are. But I have skills that you need. So learn them. And let me teach you.

The New Tools of Public Relations

Managing the needs of clients has never been easier with some of the tools that have been developed. Tweetdeck, Social Mention, Klout, Seesmic, HootSuite, Co-Tweet. All of these services didn’t exist two years ago, and now they are here changing the way millions of people interact with technology. They make everything from work flow, to brand monitoring, to identifying influencers to marketing incredibly easier.

On top of that, there are great open-source blogging software that enable anyone to have a blog up and running in about 20 minutes. It’s really that easy. And it’s free. WordPress is by far the easiest blogging platform that businesses can use. And yet, in order to get the most out of it, it does require some new knowledge, basic HTMLand CSS to start. This is going to require PR firms to bring in open-source developers or at the very least liaison with them frequently.

Search enging optimization is a no-brainer and yet people frequently throw the term around in a way that lets you know they don’t really understand what it is or why its important. SEO, as the term is referred to, is nothing more than optimizing your content so that it can indexed and found by people looking for it. That’s it. In practice, it is as simple as spending two minutes adding keywords and tags to a blog post or video or image. The results are fantastic.

Your clients will soon be getting the hits they are looking for. And there are even some new tools on this end emerging that literally tell you what keywords and tags to use. Scribe SEO is the best out of these.

Community Managing and Social Media

PR Firms are well-organized and optimized to run the digital and social efforts of their clients. One of the things I have repeatedely run up against is the inability of many clients to handle their social media needs. They few it as something that can be done for ten minutes a day. It can’t. But it doesn’t and should not dominate your schedule either. PR firms are working with their clients anyway to work on corporate copy, press releases, working on placements; it makes perfect sense for PR firms to also handle all social copy.

A few collaborative blog posts a week, the managing of a Twitter account, and synchronization of the brand identity across social networks: Facebook, YouTube, Foursquare, Flickr, etc. Community managing takes time, and it takes a person who has the freedom and creativity to represent a brand, to develop that internal voice as blogger, tweeter and customer service rep. PR firms need to start offering this, NOW. They will find lots of new business if they do.

Social Media as Crisis Management Tool

Social media is one of the most natural crisis management tools available. Imagine a restaurant getting a mediocre review in the paper. With a fully functional social media platform embedded within the businesses strategy, client and PR firm can activate their community to protect themselves. They can leverage their relationships and BYPASS THE CRITICS.

You can highlight your successes and positive reviews. You can point potential customers–who if they didn’t know about you before the crisis, surely have heard of you now– to specific areas of your organizations. If you’ve been blogging for awhile and building up a lengthy list of dynamic content, then when people start googling you to find out what this is all about, they’ll find your content. And lots of it.

And if a client has been engaging social media for awhile, they’ll have found and fostered their native community, that group of fans and clients, who will come to their defense, pointing to their own positive experiences. This can deflate criticism before it grabs a hold of a business.

Social Media Measurement and PR

PR firms are better exhibitors of metrics. They talk in the client’s language. Have you ever tried to talk to a social media consultant about metrics? Page views, uniques, absolute uniques, retweets, shares, mentions. It never stops. And the reason is never stops is because measuring success in social media is nascent. You can have all the page views in the world, but if it doesn’t translate to more sales then what good is it? Not much. But what about brand equity? Sure, that counts, but businesses and brands are going to continue to build brand equity where and how they know how. But PR firms also need to get in the game and start offering social media measurement as part of their analysis, whether internally or client-side. Don’t spend a lot of money on flashy software. There is no point. The free tools are just as good and reliable. Everyone else is using them as well.

Conclusion

Right now PR firms are exquisitely positioned to capture a lot of new business and add-value to existing business. No one doubts that social media has changed the game. It has, and increasingly, online spend is where the growth will be. PR firms need to be in that space, about ten minutes ago. If you aren’t yet, get on it. If you need to know how, if you need to craft a strategy, you know where to find me.

The best way for a PR firm to start adding in social media marketing into their portfolio of services is to start one for themselves. That is, they should be blogging, they should be on Twitter and Facebook. They should be communicating on social networks as a firm. Identify people in your organization who can and want to do so and let them take the lead. Then rotate different people into the community managing role so that as many people as possible get some exposure. When blogging and tweeting becomes part of your job description, it is that much easier to convince a client to do so, and to point them to your own successes.

Would you trust someone with your social media who doesn’t do it themselves?

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Image Source: The Cleveland Kid on Flickr

There is is, just over the horizon, off in the hazy, foggy distance: social media success! Just a few more Twitter followers, some more Facebook fans, more page views on our website. Oh what is that, a few blogs have picked us up and are linking to us? We must be getting close. We just hit the front page of a viral marketing site? We made it onto Digg’s front page? Yes!

Except, that social media success you are chasing is all just a mirage that we have as a culture bought into, helped along by the tens of thousands of social media evangelists who spend their days hyping, reading, sharing and producing content about how revolutionary, about how all-important social media interaction is. Ask anyone for proof of social media success and you’ll instantly hear a lot of hemming and hawing, a lot of throat clearing. I am right there with them. I was interviewed on the phone today for social media-related job and the HR person I spoke to asked about specific projects I have worked on and how I measured the success. Whether it is the first or hundredth time I have been asked the question, and despite the fact that I have both prepared answers and have actual results to discuss, even talking about social media success is impossible.

What is Social Media Success Anyhow?

Social media is still so fresh that trying to agree on an industry-approved definition of success is unlikely. Everyone has different measurements, as they should. I mean, sales is still the ultimate measurement right? But some clients don’t want sales, or at least that is not their primary goal with certain campaigns. Some are just intended for building brand equity, crisis management or some other tertiary goal.

Which is why I think it is important that we stop looking for something that doesn’t exist yet. That mirage over the horizon is a mirage and nothing more. The closer we get to it, the farther from our grasp it will be. Right now we are in the interstitial. The time before the time when social media success is not only attainable, but recognizable from as wide a perspective as one cares to employ.

Social Media Is Still Worth the Effort

Engaging with social media, crafting a strategy, successfully implementing it are worthwhile efforts even if, for the time being, success as we need to define it, isn’t attainable. We are soon approaching the period when social media marketing will have a terrific ROI. But that is not now, and the ROI is thin.

As marketing and advertising professionals continue to wrap their creative heads around social media and understand deeply the way consumers interact and behave with brands and businesses with social media, they will undoubtedly figure out how to monetize those fans and followers. Right now we get to enjoy everything for free and very few people are buying. That is why the ROI is thin. We are used to getting our fun for free, whether it is videos, or blog posts or contests. If we don’t get it for free, or if we are asked to pay something for the effort, w’ell just migrate elsewhere.

Market Me And I’ll Hate You Back

In fact, this brings up a delicate point, a psychological one. We begin to hate the brands and businesses that have the gall to market to us so blatantly. In a world of free content, where the next helping of free is but a click away, firms that ask ANYTHING from us, get shafted. Well, I just don’t know what to say about that.

What this means is that for the time being, firms are going to have to accept that their social media efforts will not produce direct ROI. Brands and businesses that engage social media, that provide exciting content in innovative ways (well designed blogs and other outlets) will see loyalty increase. They will see sales increase. But being able to tie it to their social media is not going to be easy. How far we off from the days when a comment card at a restaurant asks how the customer heard about them, and lists their blog or Twitter account as an acceptable answer?

No one goes it alone. No matter where you live, what work you do, how you spend your leisure time, you are not alone. But who are your partners in life? Who are the people that you look to for inspiration? The people who complement you in some way. Who are your partners in life?

Look around you. Look at the last few people you have spent time with. Are they your partners? Do they build you up? Do they allow you the space to imagine better a better world? Do they make you want to be successful?

I am lucky to have amazing partners. My clients, my designers, my developers, my community online. My friends also, those who I spend the great majority of my free time with, are all fantastic. But it is a constant struggle to stay abreast of leechers, and sycophants and emotional vampires. They are out there folks, and often they are right in front of our eyes. Orwellian wisdom time:

To see what is in front of one’s nose requires constant struggle

So true. We are our own worst enemies. We often find ourselves doing damage to ourselves, our careers, our relationships. And we don’t often know it until it is too late. Until situations devolve into a lowest common denominator and the TRUTH that Orwell was alluding to, which was staring us right in the face, becomes painfully obvious.

What does it mean to work with good partners?

It means that you are going to meet a lot of people. It means that you will make a lot of friends. And it means you will lose a great deal of them. To surround yourself with the right people first means that you must surround yourself with the wrong people. The people who bring you down. The people who steal from you. The people who take and want and need. The people who even allow you some comfort. By associating with these people, you are giving yourself a free pass to behave beneath yourself. To behave in a way that is easier, requires less effort, but which leads us to unfulfilled miserable places.

I make friends quickly, but I lose them even faster. This has been true for me for a long time. It isn’t funny nor is it meant to be. It is actually quite sad.

I don’t want to be alone. But I do require being surrounded by good people. The people who make me imagine a future where I am better, where the world around me is better, where anything is possible, even if its not possible. That peering into a better universe is crucial to our growth. The ephemeral glances we get at a better world, a world where we are more WE than we have ever been. This is the reason to look for only the best partners in life.

Image Source: Foxtongue on Flickr

We hear a lot about digital storytelling as the next wave in the evolution of online activity. Storytelling is seen as the way to break through with your readers, activating them to become customers, fans, even evangelists for you and your products. But, it serves more practical purpose too. Today’s data glut will probably continue growing quickly. Users will increasingly need help contextualizing all this information. Narrative will be the key.

As the information piles up, it will become less and less plausible for us to digest it all. But, the more information we see, the more unquenchable our thirst becomes. And, the greater our shame and guilt at leaving our heaping plates uncleaned.

Missing something important has become one of our greatest fears, even as we recognize the impossibility of the task set before us. It is a tension we all have to come to terms with.

Anthony Townsend at The Institute for the Future recently wrote a series of compelling blog posts on the future of social networking being narrative driven. Here is the crux:

What’s intrigued me about web publishing, since long before it was called blogging, is the empowerment of the author to assemble information into a unique point of view. Maybe its because I fancy myself a writer, but I think the web empowers everyone in that way. The excitement around video today is an amplification and extension of that empowerment to new media. But its still storytelling.

So, this half-baked thought experiment leads me somewhere, I’m gonna throw something out there and see if it sticks. My forecast is – social networks and the real-time web are either a) going to morph into storytelling media that provide tools to construct narrative on top of the update stream, or b) are going to stop growing as people seek out a different set of tools that are better for communication and storytelling than social networks, which do a mediocre job at both. (italics mine)

Location-based apps are some of the important tools that can be used to construct these rolling narratives. As we jump from story to story, tweet to tweet, and place to place, we don’t have the ability to tie everything together. Look back across the last week; you’ll find a jumble of conversations, thoughts, ideas, blog posts, business innovations. But try to dig down deeper and unless you’re Samuel Pepys, good luck accessing them in a helpful way.

Townsend again:

Let’s start with location-based applications. Foursquare, which allows people to clock their visits to virtually any public or semi-public venue is starting to layer storytelling capabilities through the use of tip lists and badges that are awarded as placeholders for past behaviors. Combined with public displays of users’ check-in histories, these actively and passively user-created markers provide the first elements of a story – stories about me, stories about my neighborhood, stories “about last night”.

As we mix our location into the recorded stream, we can go back and access the people we were meeting with, the places we visited. As Townsend says, this the first layer of storytelling. Will you a remember a specific conversation you had last week? No, probably not. But if you can add in where that conversation took place, and with who, and at what time, (all things enabled by services like Foursquare) then the fog begins to lift.

Not only does it make recollection easier, but you can begin to parse together the wisdom gleaned from the experience. “Ah yes, my friend and I were at that Think Coffee on the Bowery talking about new bands when X walked in and joined us. And I have to follow up with him about those bands I wanted to check out.” Now, because the basic elements of a story are in place, the time of day, the place, the people we were with, we can contextualize a portion of that data.

These are only the first steps of socially-enabled storytelling. Certainly new tools will need to be developed before we can create the kind of rich tapestries that we’ll need to make sense of our lives. The stories of our lives are about to be remade. We are about to be activated to get so much more out of our lives. What will we do with this new found depth and insight into our own experiences?

Image Source: paintMonkey on Flickr