The Most Important Book You Will Read This Year

On March 8, 2010, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

You may be familiar with author Daniel A Pink (blog & Twitter). As a right brainer, I loved his book,  A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future and I just finished his most recent book: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. (Amazon affiliate links)

I downloaded the audio book for my last drive down to corporate headquarters in Portland, OR. I listened to the first half on the way down and the second half on the way back. Before my road trip was done I found a bookstore and bought two copies of the book. I’ve already given them away and will buy another two today. Maybe I should just buy them in bulk.

This is probably the most important book I can recommend for you to read this year. You will question every aspect of business management, your business model, organizational structure, parenting, schooling, even what you want to do with the rest of your life.

Most of us believe that the best way to motivate ourselves and others is with external rewards like money—the carrot-and-stick approach. That’s a mistake, Daniel H. Pink says in, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, his provocative and persuasive new book. The secret to high performance and satisfaction—at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

We have reached a level where work and knowledge can be and should be intrinsically motivating (doing it is its own reward). Not all jobs of course fit this model but as the economy rebounds there is no reason to do a job you don’t want to.  In my last post I talked about the parts of your business you are least likely to give up.

Social media has changed the landscape driven by our collective shift in motivation. In my opinion, we have entered a new economy, an economy where money is no longer the only capital. Money may no longer even be the most important capital.

Fellow New Comm Biz author, Jason has posted about companies sucking their wealth from the new Bourgeoisie. Maybe we have reached a point where, money is a commodity, easily obtained. Maybe not for everyone but for the western world where a college degree doesn’t mean as much as it used to money is no longer enough of a motivator.

I have a lot more to write about this topic but first I suggest reading Drive, then my posts will make a lot more sense. If that’s really possible :)

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Innovation and Disruption, What’s Holding You Back?

On March 7, 2010, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

I have stated before that, while I don’t know the guy and have never met him, Marc Andreessen is probably the entrepreneur of my generation that I most admire.

Today I came across a post on TechCrunch where Marc is quoted as saying that Old Media needs to burn the boats. I love this type of bold strategies. When Cortes came to Mexico he burnt the boats so they had no choice but to conquer, Marc says media companies need to do the same thing. The post is short and well worth your read but here’s my favorite quotes.

We got to talking about how media companies are handling the digital disruption of the Internet when he brought up the Cortes analogy. “You gotta burn the boats,” he told me, “you gotta commit.” His point is that if traditional media companies don’t burn their own boats, somebody else will.

Everyone knows this true (even if they don’t admit it). At some point physical media will be too cost prohibitive to create at the mass market level. Print will be the new vinyl.

Andreessen asked me if TechCrunch is working on an iPad app or planning on putting up a paywall. I gave him a blank stare. He laughed and noted that none of the newer Web publications (he’s an investor in the Business Insider) are either. “”All the new companies are not spending a nanosecond on the iPad or thinking of ways to charge for content. The older companies, that is all they are thinking about.”

And finally the part that will end any business discussion with any old media CEO:

Print newspapers and magazines will never get there, he argues, until they burn the boats and shut down their print operations. Yes, there are still a lot of people and money in those boats—billions of dollars in revenue in some cases. “At risk is 80% of revenues and headcount,” Andreessen acknowledges, “but shift happens.” You’d have to be crazy to burn the boats. Crazy like Cortes.

Radical strategies like this either get you excited or terrify you (or both).  Could you imagine the NYT or WSJ stopping all print publications and going digital only? Wow, that would be amazing. Lay off everyone connected to print and forge ahead. It won’t happen for years, maybe decades. Maybe they’ll always keep some niche print production, but eventually most printed papers will go away.

But it’s easy for us to criticize the media for not being willing to let go, but what about your business?  Every business has boats they’re holding on to. And it’s usually the part of their business that’s stopping them from being truly innovative. That’s the part of the business the startups love to attack.

In my world, agencies continue to submit to hourly billing even though it’s a pain, unproductive and not conducive to providing the best work. Marketers refuse to give up on the CPM advertising metric (cost per thousand rate advertisers charge). It’s broken and doesn’t prove any type of business ROI. These are two boats I would volunteer to ignite myself.

What are your business boats? What would be the hardest thing to give up?

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Social CRM is the First Step Towards Social Business and World Domination

On March 5, 2010, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

What is Social CRM? Is it a sales tool? Is it a support tool? The answer depends on your company and your business objectives. I can tell you this, Social CRM is not a Twitter key word search juxtaposed next to CRM data. (Sorry, personal rant.) And if you’re wondering about the title, everything with me is about World Domination (more at the end of the post).

This morning Jeremiah Owyang and R “Ray” Wang of the Altimeter Group, released a report (which I’ve embedded at the bottom of this post) on the state and future of Social CRM. It’s a great report you should all take the time to read. I also want to give Altimeter props for the use of Creative Commons and a bold new approach to analyst reports and their business model.

I particularly liked these 3 points from Jeremiah’s blog:

  • For companies, real time is not fast enough. Companies need to be able to anticipate what customers are doing to say and do, in order to keep up. Although Motrin responded to angry mom’s within 24 hours –it was too slow.
  • Companies are unable to scale to meet the needs of social. No matter how many community managers Dell and ComcastCares hires to support, they’ll never be able to match the number of customers happening.  They need tools, and they need them now.
  • Customers don’t care what department you’re in they just want their problem fixed. Dooce’s support problem with Maytag quickly became a PR nightmare –had the support group known she was an influencer (and what it means), they could have serviced her better.

Altimeter sees 18 use cases for Social CRM. I think we’ll eventually see more than this but for now this is more than any company can handle.

This is a topic that has been close to my heart for several years now. When I was at HP I started doing some very early Social CRM initiatives with our enterprise sales teams. The below image is the slide that Rob Brooks proclaimed was the most confusing (yet interesting) slide ever shown at Social Media Breakfast Seattle. This is the slide that shows a use case for Social CRM geared towards sales.

Social CRM and Sales

By pulling in CRM data, matching that with direct marketing and Web analytics data I could identify the enterprises that were most responsive to our marketing and potentially interested. I would then use LinkedIn to identify the key IT decision makers and the people in the org and from there try and find them on Twitter and blogs to see what they were saying about HP, our competitors or the industry.All of this was very manual and labor intensive but the size of the contracts were worth the expense. The tools didn’t exist then and still don’t, to do what I was trying to do.

This report gave me a very robust report I could give to our sales teams. Before they ever walked in the door they knew what we had sold them in the past, what offers or products they had showed the most interest in and what their sentiment was towards and or our competitors. Early tests showed a decrease in sales time an increase in renewal rates (for existing customers) and increased upsell of additional products and services. And this is only one use case of Social CRM, #6 of 18 identified by the Altimeter Group.

Social CRM has been widely discussed for years now, Social Business is starting to gain more attention. To me Social CRM is the first example of a Social Business application. One of the things I found most interesting about the Altimeter report came in the executive summary. The definition of Social CRM is surprisingly close to the definition I gave for Social Business last month.

As the “Godfather of CRM,” Paul Greenberg notes, “We’ve moved from the transaction to the interaction with customers, though we haven’t eliminated the transaction – or the data associated with it… Social CRM focuses on engaging the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment.

Now look at my definitions for Social Business:

The Social Business will be fully realized when social technologies are leveraged to build collaborative relationships across all company stakeholders. By leveraging social technologies in an open and transparent way businesses will also regain and build more trust among stakeholders. This increased trust will will result in greater knowledge creation, which the same social technologies have the ability to capture, organize and distribute at a yet to be seen level of efficiency. By building collaborative relationships with all company stakeholders using social technologies, businesses will be able to quickly create and capitalize more innovation.

I went even further and qualified Collaborative Relationships further:

Collaborative Relationships: Open transparent and mutually beneficial relationships between companies and its stakeholders.

Social CRM is being driven because it has real measurable impact on ROI. It also provides the first real opportunity to demonstrate the power of a fully functional Social Business. Social CRM is just the tip of the iceberg.


Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management

View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.

Finally I wanted to offer a word of warning and talk a little about the use of World Domination in the title and the use of the LEGO picture (which I’ve been using a lot lately). If you know me, I talk about World Domination a lot and if you know me I think LEGO’s and Star Wars are together better than peanut butter and jelly, but Social CRM and Social Business do have a potential dark side. Just because you can track more than you ever thought possible about your customers doesn’t mean you should. With this rush of data will come a customer backlash. Proceed, but proceed with caution.

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Passing Bucks: NYU/NYTimes & Sucking Wealth From The Bourgeoisie

On March 3, 2010, In Biz, By Jason Moriber

100 years after the industrial revolution the pendulum has swung back perversely. Instead of working class predicaments forging the assembly lines and construction-crews into the engine of low-cost employment (and the engine of our greater economy), with the recession, short-term profit-taking schemes, and slash and burn tough-medicine inside media empire board rooms, the flood lines have been moved higher up the wall.

These factors have cut a new channel in the riverbed our economy. The “owners of industry” have crafted a new way to pull the wealth UP from the bourgeoisie; through the unpaid labors of well educated, elsewhere-funded, “workers” who aim to move up the long-gone notion of the career ladder. The career ladder is mothballed in the same museum as pension plans.

The children of the bourgeoisie are the new assembly line. They’re working within the belief that the un-salaried benefits of “Social Capital” will lead to greater rewards, careers, and fortunes.

This transference (or value-suck) is happening all over as businesses, organizations, and the government (“we the people”), collectively try to move the economy forward without really spending any money (as money is both harder to earn and harder to come by). Whether this specific manifestation of Social Capital will bear a worthy ROI is being played out, in real time, but on whose dime?

Take the recent case of the New York Times and NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute partnership. The NYTimes and NYU in their joint effort to build a local online blog/paper/zine staffed by journalism students (who will set out to cover New York City’s East Village, once heralded home to punk-rock, poets, and a whole bunch of heroin), is a good example of this type of value-suck. The equation is this: if the newspaper can no longer make thriving revenues from their former steady market, they’ll shift focus and gain the value THROUGH the children of their market.

The monies of parents are being transferred to the owners through the un-paid intellectual labors of their children. The parents “invest” in their children (the unpaid) by paying for tuition, housing, and food. The parents are instilling their children with “potential” that is ideally compounded through education and life-experience. This stored potential is then (ideally) spent over time, leading to upward mobility and the reward of financial self-dependence. Instead this potential is being released prematurely, sucked-out, in the form of unpaid labor for entities that have decreasing future-prospect (or intent) of hiring these children in the future (when they’ve graduated).

In the case of the NYU/NYTimes partnership the students’ parents are transferring their wealth to the NYTimes through the labors of their children. It’s revenues in reverse! BUT, I have to admit, it’s an incredibly scalable opportunity. There are thousands of students who would be thrilled to add the NYTimes to their resumes. Local blogs will blossom all across the country like thousands of flowers. These kids grew up with the “grey lady,” gripped firmly and crinkly between the clenches of their parent’s wrists. The brand is super-strong in their minds even if they themselves don’t read it. Choire Sicha of The Awl, a local NYC blog/zine, argues this “trade” leads to a diminishing value within the journalism profession, causing the market to drop and drop. It’s a bit ugly for sure. I was never fond of crafty abstract algebra.

I’ve been offering-up my own social capital for years now, mainly through my blog posting, writing, analysis, even this post now, all with hopes that it develops into new opportunities. It’s a risk I leverage through allocating revenue from my company, speaking gigs, etc. But what about the people without revenues? What are they leveraging? If they’re leveraging Social Capital then they’re leveraging someone else’s money. Whatever rationalization any Social Capital utilizer wants to posit, either you have the funds or you don’t. Those with funds can support and partake within an ether-market of deeds and favors, but Social Capital without self-generating revenues is a proxy for other people’s money.

So what about these students? Are they shells for the transport of wealth? Carriers of potential that they themselves can’t attain, but eagerly release in their dire determination for a successful future? What’s their ROI?

They are being defined by the market as “revenue-unattractive” (I don’t want to pay them and I don’t have to) and as “revenue-poor” (their potential is in transference, not productivity). Their worth is valuable to outlets that seek to suck the potential right through them in trade for corporate branding. This is a scary economic scenario. Can outlets such as the NYTimes be so out of revenue ideas that they’ve decided to suck up the potential of students, and not even theirs really, its the parents’ potential, it’s their dime, it’s their investment! In trade for what? The potential of the diminishing brand.

As this plays out, here is how could this trend go horribly wrong for all parties…

For the brand, the more they seek these potential-trades the more they will appear to be in dire straights (which they undoubtedly are) and the tone that will resonate within the market is that they are squeezing young sponges for cash. For the university or the bourgeoisie parents, it appears as if they’re passing the buck (literally, through the children). For the students it’s worse. This paradigm could spiral down quickly into to a pure pay-to-play model.

When more students (and the underemployed) become hip to this trend the market will become flooded with all types of eager potential-releasers who will, and can, work for FREE. The value of potential will therefore diminish to nil as it is nearly limitless. The potential will then be swapped out for hard currency (cash) or greater subservience (yikes!). You want a job here? Pay up! Those with financial backing, as displayed throughout history, will survive this wave. Which leads to another spiraling-down (or winding-down of an era), who needs universities anymore if they don’t lead to gainful employment?

Imagine if the parents invested within the NYTimes directly to gain their children the opportunity (quid pro quo)? Should the NYTimes bypass journalism schools and have their own education division, a guild system? Do these students need NYU? What if the parents got together and pooled their resources into an investment fund that required investment-recipients to hire their children (once again, quid pro quo)? What if the students took their loan disbursements and tuition payments and on their own built this new blog/zine as a joint partnership, circumventing NYU and the NYTimes altogether (now that’s exciting!)? Do they really need NYU/NYTimes as much as NYU/NYTimes needs them? Would that provide a better ROI on their future employment, to make their own fortunes in an economy bleeding jobs? Isn’t that what they’re after? A position that pays well enough to provide them their own livelihood. Can the university journalism department offer that type of job security when they’re hawking a model based on the absence of revenues within a declining industry?

These students want to work, and I applaud their enthusiasm and efforts. Pay them. OR pay the professional journalists who should be the first consideration to begin with and give these students true internships (the legal ones). Don’t make the system suck the potential right through them all. It will bring us all down as the media balloon implodes.

As Dominic Polumbo, a master heirloom-varietals farmer (a potential-laden profession if there ever was one) once told me, “Price always needs to be driven up, or else you won’t survive.”

Creating businesses that grind the price of employment down will be a drag on the rising economy. We need more innovative thinking to build businesses that see the whole picture and continue to add value to the market for long term sustainability versus negating it for short-term draws. If the value-suck on the students of today spreads across the market it will become a virus that diminishes us all.

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I’d love to hear your comments and questions. Please feel free to add them to the comments area below and I’ll answer them ASAP.

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Special thanks to Sheila Shidnia and Sara McGuyer for their editorial assistance.

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Geeks Tolerate Apple Hypocrisy Until They Mess with Porn

On February 24, 2010, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

I’ve posted  several times about Apple’s continued hypocrisy and my love/hate relationship with their products. Like most people, I love their design and I’m glad they’re pushing the industry but I have always hated their closed culture and hyper controlling attitude.

Full disclosure I used to work at HP (who is now a client). Microsoft, T-Mobile (who sells Google’s Android phones) and HTC are all clients. But my wary feelings towards Apple have been around long before I worked in tech. I’ll take choice and glitches over design and limitations.

MG Seigler, TechCrunch’s editor and self proclaimed Apple fanboi, has a post about Apple’s latest move to block porn from the app store. I think this is a fascinating move by Apple. My personal stance on morality is that first I believe everyone has their own free agency to do as they see fit and it’s not my business. Second I personally dislike anything that’s addicting. This goes for drugs, alcohol and pornography. (Yes porn’s addicting). So while I want to applaud Apple for this move, it’s not any type of moral victory, as MG points out.

Problem number one is that while Apple is removing most of these sexy apps from the App Store, it’s not removing all of them. So who gets to stay? Big publishers like Sports Illustrated and Playboy. In fact, not only is Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit 2010 app not being removed, it’s being featured in the App Store. Both it and the Playboy app clearly violate the new rules of the more prudish App Store, yet they get to stay.

The TechCrunch post has well over 100 comments as I write this and is trending on many news aggregation sites. Apple has struck a nerve. Now anyone who has studied technology adoption understands tech’s dirty little secret: Porn

VHS, BluRay, broadband adoption (what pictures and videos do you think people so desperately wanted to look at in the late 90’s), and search can all thank their success, in very large part, to the porn industry. That’s why Apple’s stance against porn seemed so interesting.

Google and Android have no such qualms about porn and several commenters to the opportunity to proclaim their “love” for Android. I also have to doubt Microsoft’s Windows Phone Marketplace will follow Apple’s lead here. It is still in it’s infancy and won’t really see it’s potential until Windows Phone 7 comes out and Microsoft typically takes a hands off approach to content and partner development.

Ultimately I have to think this is a move towards Apple to placate publishers. As MG points out Apple hasn’t removed Apps with similar types of content from Sports Illustrated and Playboy.  Again from TechCrunch we see a hint at the future in Apple’s response?

As Apple VP of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller explained earlier to the New York Times, it’s because they’re well-known companies known for that content. Yet, he also cited women being upset about feeling degraded and parents being upset about kids having access to sexy apps as the main reason Apple is cracking down on them. The omission of the fact that parents probably also don’t want their kids downloading the Playboy app, or that some women might also find the Swimsuit app degrading is laughable.

I imagine that Apple users will get their porn, especially with the iPad coming out. It’s just going to come from established (and struggling) publishers.I just wonder how much longer developers and users will put up with Apple?

[UPDATE] Yep, thought so:  New “Explicit” Category in App Store Could Herald Return of Sexy Apps

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Will Technology Drastically Change the Agency Business Model?

On February 19, 2010, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

Adam Singer has a post about the challenges in building a consultancy/agency in the digital world. I shared this post on Twitter and instantly had replies from Marc Meyer and Jason Moriber. Marc couldn’t agree more and Jason totally disagrees. I don’t know exactly why Marc and Jason feel that way, maybe they’ll share their comments here, but I love it when a topic sparks polarizing responses.

I’ve been an individual consultant. I’ve helped grow a 4 person agency startup into a 12 person million dollar agency over 2 years and an acquisition of a web dev shop. (I then left 6 months later before it all imploded.) I’m now at a 800+ person global agency that’s growing like crazy. Technology scales, people don’t scale. You have to grow and develop talent. The only other option is to acquire talent and I’ve already talked about the challenges of social media talent acquisition.

When I was on my own I did a lot of consulting. Consulting pays the bills but the only way to grow is to hire people. People are expensive. As an EIR at Highway 12 Ventures I saw a lot of people that wanted to build agencies or service firms of some sort. Here’s your free tip for the day, if you’re trying to build an agency that is technology enabled don’t bother talking to a VC, an Angel investor maybe but not a VC. If you’re a technology company that also offers consulting that’s something different. That’s why Mark Hurd spent so much money for HP to buy EDS.

I personally think all agencies will become a hybrid of consulting and technology. This still isn’t scale, it’s just market demand. Publishing, measurement and workflow tools technologies are just a few areas agencies are developing. Many agencies are partnering with technology providers, we’ve seen a lot of that over the last year and we’ll see a lot more.

In addition to partnerships some agencies <ahem> are quickly developing internal technical capabilities to create their own technology solutions. This is also going to increase significantly.

The work agencies are doing has been changing drastically but I also think the agency business model is going to drastically change.

What about you? What additional changes is technology bringing to the agency model?

Will Technology Drastically Change the Agency Business Model?

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Don’t Be A Sucky Presenter

On February 18, 2010, In Biz, By Jason Moriber

On Twitter I follow hashtags for presentations (example #TED) of all types, to learn how I can make my own presentations better. I dip into the flow of the conversations and see what I can filter out. Both the positive notes and the complaints tend to trend similarly, either people are psyched to be there and see their peers OR they list the ways the presenter or the presentation sucks (in a nice manner of course, but you know what’s up). Based on my ongoing Twitter filtering here are some bullet points to help make your presentations better.

Ask First: Before you prepare your presentation gain a list of the attendees and see if you  contact them via email. Ask them what they expect from the presentation. If you can’t email them, research them. You want to learn as much about who you are presenting to and what they seek to gain from your presentation in advance. Sure, stick with your game-plan if you feel your presentation is solid, BUT salt and pepper it with data, notes, and tidbits that answer the needs of your audience. Plus this builds a pre-realtionship with the audience and relieves their anxiety to ask questions. Know your audience.

Go Outside the Lines: We are accustomed to preparing our presentations using a linear deck of slides. It’s a logical way to present. My suggestion is to envision a few paths through your slides (even from front to back); a choose-your-own-adventure progression. Maybe a question arises from the audience about a topic you planned on covering later, instead of waiting, jump to it, shift your flow, and be prepared to work your way back. Be loose, don’t be a stiffy.

Un-Word the Slides: As you build your presentation think of ways to reduce the amount of texts on your slides. You don’t want to speak over a text-loaded slide, or even a complicated diagram. As example, consider offering a slide that has the base elements of a diagram (a matrix, a cool illustration) and using a pointer or your arm speak-out the data vs. displaying it (this corner is good, this one bad, things are pointing to the good). Speak the data.

Don’t Be Afraid of the Eraser: Say your audience isn’t feeling your topic that day, they seem dozy, or are chatty. Stop what you’re doing, shake it up. Yes, you’ve spent that past four days going over your presentation, but if it’s not working for you with this particular audience, seize the moment, be your best editor, and change the tone and tempo of the presentation in order to gain their involvement. Be actively presenting.

It’s Them, Not You: Don’t talk about  your product, service or company, even if you feel your product is the best answer to the question being raised. You’re not there to sell them services, you’re there to impart useful information to help THEM succeed. They all know where you came from, it’s on the website, in the hand-outs, in the emails. Do your best to speak about them, to offer them value, to provide for them. No one wants to feel like they are captive to a sales pitch. Just don’t do it.

Please, don’t be a sucky presenter.

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Corporate Social Media Backlash: The Virtual Firewall

On February 9, 2010, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

In December I predicted that over the next 5 years we would see intranets begin to integrate with social networks. I’ve seen some signs recently that this might take longer than I anticipated (but trust me it will happen).

Tora! Tora! Tora! - BREAK!The intranet is a metaphor for corporate control.

Intranets are secure networks of communication. Employees can safely share information, trusting that it won’t find its way out into untrustworthy hands. With the exception of email sent outside the network almost all communication stays behind the firewall. The firewall works both ways to keep information in and information out. Intranets are siloed and, as they exist today, make it difficult to share information across a company. Just over 10 years ago the Cluetrain Manifesto hypothesized:

the cluetrain manifesto

Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It’s going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in.

Social media tools have shown an incredible ability to tear down those walls. This has caused a lot of pain and consternation among executives. My last post covered a disturbing email I received from a friend of mine in the financial sector that was being forced to delete their LinkedIn profile because it was considered an individual, professional website.

On the WE Studio D Thinkers and Doers blog I also posted about Forrester forcing all of their employees to shut down their personal blogs if they overlapped with their area of focus at Forrester and would only be allowed to blog about that topic on the forthcoming Forrester blog.

What we are witnessing is the corporate extension of the “firewall” into social media. While this is not an actual firewall it is the way companies are trying to control what would normally happen within or through their firewall.

Shel Holtz has started the Stop Blocking blog to address the problems employees face when their employers flex their firewalls to stop employees from accessing social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. With the ever increasing capabilities to access these sites via mobile phone that just seems ridiculous. You can’t stop my smart phone, even if I am at work.

All of this seems like a sad attempt to stop the inevitable. Why not work with your employees to reach a win-win instead of trying to stifle them? It just doesn’t make sense to me.

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Ice Floes Over Magnetic Poles

On January 29, 2010, In Biz, By Jason Moriber

There were two seemingly unrelated news stories this past week: 1. Apple’s new iPad, and 2. that lucky dog rescued from an ice floe in the Baltic Sea after drifting for over 100 miles. (Ice Station Zebra, the spy thriller yarn with a story centered around the ice of the North Pole was also on TV this week, which is relevant in a way too.)

Here’s the connection:

We are all living & working on ice floes, super wide ice floes that define our trends, generations, and zeitgeist. The floes are so big and contain so much on the surface that we can’t tell we’re moving UNLESS we pay really-really close attention to their incremental shifts by perceiving the low rumblings of the currents below the ice. I believe this is why the world requires consultants and strategists and why (even though I myself am a strategist/consultant and might sound like I’m tooting horns) their enterprises are immensely productive. Objectivity is the ROI of listening deeply. If you’re not listening deeply, you might miss the shift in currents and become stranded on a sliver of ice far beyond the horizon in the Baltic sea.

Apple is a master navigator of ice floes, but in truth they are fighting handily to stand still. They have found the “confluential” spot in the water, a magnetic pole, where the cultural forces of price-point, want, demand, luster, and design meet and form a robust wellspring. In 2007 they planted a flag in the floe above this magnetic spot and announced, “the iPhone is here! It’s the most important device of all history!” and sold a billion-trillion units. Immediately the floe shifted, and the iPhone was no longer the most important device. But floes move slowly, so Apple had the time to capitalize on their new product. As the floe continued on its path down current, pulled by forces of economics, necessity, bubbles, and nature, new versions of the iPhone were launched, and software updated, but Apple was sliding away from the wellspring. The Apple navigators went to work to keep their crew above that pole. They trudged through the ice, climbed a few bergs (from the top of one they looked over their shoulders and saw the jagged line of their former flag-plantings poking out from the snow, all the way back to the Apple IIc) and then turned their vibrant faces to the future and hiked it back to that confluential spot. This week, they arrived. Boom! A new flag planted in the ice! “The iPad is the most important device of all time!…”

You get my drift (all puns intended).

You can find these floe-navigators in many arenas. As an example, 80’s pop star Matthew Wilder (Break my stride, 1983) produced No Doubt’s 16-million-unit selling record Tragic Kingdom (1995) and recently worked with Miley Cyrus. He’s hovering over the wellspring of teen angst, clear diction, catchiness and a whole lot of revenues.

Many consultants will suggest that businesses need to be remarkable, or to resonate, or jump to the next curve. All are true and are immensely helpful bits of advice. But the above describes a specific, more intense, approach that I suggest you take as well.

Realize you’re on an ice floe and listen very deeply. Then seek to find, and remain affixed to, the confluential spots below the ice.

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Social Media is not a Telephone or Pants

On January 27, 2010, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

You’ve all the heard the arguments about measuring social media:

How do you measure the ROI of your telephone?

Or my other favorite:

What’s the ROI of putting on your pants in the morning?

Seriously?

Man, this ain’t my social media, this is a cell phone. Duh!

The ROI of putting your pants on:

In all seriousness, having a phone at work and putting on your pants is a cost of business. At one time having phones at everyone’s desk was something that had to be justified. Now having a phone is a cost and managed accordingly. Do you really want social media to be managed by cost and not by return? Guess which gets more budgets?

BTW: Unless you work from home the ROI of putting on your pants should never have been a question.

The greater risk here is that the people who are resistance to measuring social media are well intentioned and for the most part “get” social media. While we’re sitting around debating the merits of measuring social media, marketers and advertisers are calculating the ROI of Facebook fans and followers.

Facebook Develops Conversion Tracking Tool: What’s A Fan Worth?

Boland also served up advice on how to calculate a cost-per-fan metric to determine the campaigns return on investment (ROI). Not only the cost to acquire a fan, but the fan’s worth.

If you walk into a meeting preaching that social media shouldn’t be measured because you decided to put on pants and the other group walks into the meeting showing the ROI of individual Facebook fans and the cost per acquisition, take a wild guess who’s going to get the budget and guess who’s going to loose their pants?

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