Conversation Agent

Why Owner-less Means Access More

When demand for experiences and convenience remain high, sharing takes a whole new meaning for your business.

A few years ago, I worked with a gentleman from Texas by way of Chicago.

He got on a plane every Monday morning to get to Philadelphia, then headed back to Chicago on Friday. I thought it was quite remarkable until I met someone else at a networking event who did exactly the same thing. In fact, they knew each other for being on the same flights regularly.

Why own when you can rent?

Renting an apartment in the area and going back and forth was a preferable solution to moving the whole family -- arranging for new schools, and a successful career for the spouse were not on the table. I also discovered that both he and his wife leased cars.

The experience of driving newer cars trumped owning older models for them. When the company assignment ended, it was fairly easy to move to another market. Low impact for the family not needing to move a couple of times.

Renting vs. owning was what we did in Italy, at least a few years back that was the case.

It was in the US that I noticed how much stuff people actually buy and own. I thought garages were for cars, used goods were for antiques markets in piazzas vs. private driveways, and only people who were moving unexpectedly rented storage spaces.

Certainly people don't accumulate things just for sport, there are advantages to owning -- convenience and choice being big ones, for example. Owning is not going to go away any time soon. And the economic system relies heavily upon people buying more and regularly, still. That is changing, though.

What if you don't have to give up choice?

In a market of abundance, like we have today, many of the advantages to ownership -- having something when you need it, choosing your own colors, fabrics, places, etc. -- thanks to ubiquitous nature of technology and digital tools, transfer to temporary use.

Owner-less has been a trend for quite a few years. First at the edges, and in environments that responded to the call for sustainability and conservation. Then becoming more mainstream for several reasons outlined by Trendwatching (emphasis mine):

• Traditional ownership implies a certain level of responsibility, cost and commitment. Consumers looking for convenience and collecting as many experiences as possible want none of these things.
• Fractional ownership and leasing lifestyle businesses offer the possibility of perpetual upgrades to the latest and greatest, the ability to maximize the number and variety of experiences, and allow consumers to access otherwise out-of-reach luxuries.
• Owning bulky, irregularly used items is both expensive and unsustainable, especially in dense urban environments where space is at a premium. With more consumers having mobile access to online systems, it becomes easier to book items whenever and wherever they are needed-- renting a place or an item can now be done also by sharing with other people.

Think about how much we rely on cloud computing and online storage for networking, sharing documents, and getting things done with virtual teams. 

As consumers, we are getting used to streaming videos on Netflix, TV programming on Hulu, and booking transportation with Zipcar. Last night you could watch the Oscars online, if you were willing to sign up for a few dollars at the .com site. Or you could read them on Twitter from peers.

Your customers may have decided to own less, however that probably means they are looking to experience more. What kinds of services and products do you have, or how can you rethink your portfolio and service pipeline to leverage your assets and provide more access?

[image of Velvet Rope] 

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The Problem with Assumptions

You're the boss. Now, do you like who you're working for?

It's a serious question. Take a moment to think about it.

I'm in awe of business owners. It takes courage to step forward and start a business. Many of my friends run a solopreneur, consultancy, or a small business.

Every single one of the people I know who started a business told me they wished they knew what they know now at the very beginning. It's not a play on words, it's a real desire.

To wit, I'm sure we all wished we knew what we know now when we started our career. Then again, I'm encouraged by the fact that the whole point then is to get started already. The energy and enthusiasm of the beginner carry you a long way. In many cases they help you push through the difficulties.

Gini Dietrich often collects articles and posts helpful to small business owners. This week's top five caught my eye.

The lead story is filed under "you're the boss" in the New York Times, and judging from the comments, it does an excellent job at raising your blood pressure if you're a communications professional, just like the recent posts by Fred Wilson if you're in marketing.

It seems that taking shots at the marketing and communication profession has become the way to get desired news coverage and reactions online -- a sport of sorts.

I was not familiar with Bruce Buschel, although I can appreciate his writing style from reading his blog. From the short Wikipedia entry, it seems he has a flair for incisive commentary. With fork in hand, now that he is a restaurant owner. No doubt, Buschel has received his fair share of pitches over the years.

Hard for me to know Mr. Buschel's intentions. However, if I were to take an educated guess, the post achieves a couple of goals -- it kills two birds with one stone, so to speak. It gets him nice coverage for the restaurant, it gives him an opportunity to get back at PR flacks, while it link baits traffic to the site.

It takes, without giving much back, just yet.

The problem with assumptions, of course, is that they are just that. I'm telling you a story based upon my interpretation of a situation. The problem with assumptions is also that they paint facts and people with a very broad brush, and once they gain the first mover advantage and get a reaction, the goals are met. The job is done, and so is the harm.

My own take on the situation described is that it takes two people to make a disconnect happen. It takes a bigger person to recognize one, acknowledge it, including the role they played -- hence why the answer on whether you like yourself matters -- and reconcile any balances upset in the process.

An opportunity missed in this case, it seems.

Not to worry though, Mr. Buschel announces he has a solution for his next post. A breath of fresh air, I'm sure. And a much needed change for an industry that doesn't know what it's doing. If only we had had a hero rescuing it. If only we had energetic writing to set the record straight.

The problem with assumptions is that they skip the whole critical thinking process in favor of just critical. Satisfaction, however, is hollow when it doesn't meet its own true motivation.

 

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Why Connections Happen in Real Life

A couple of years ago, when I spoke at a Mediabistro Circus conference at the New York Times Center, I met a roster of really interesting people.

Among the speakers were Tim Ferriss, the event keynote who geeked us up on search and evergreen content, and Anil Dash, who was on a panel later in the day.

The event was large enough and yet intimate enough for us to connect with several people between sessions. Kudos to those organizers for utilizing the venue and designing the program well.

I love meeting people in person, and do take the extra steps to stay in touch over time. You may be able to hide behind something you leverage online.

There's no hiding in real life. Your assets must be real. Just like in business, eventually you will be found. The good news is that once you make a connection real, you have it for a long time.

I was reminded of that this week when I had the good fortune of catching up with journalist and new media maven Alison Woo and reconnecting with a long time friend on the train back -- what are the chances someone would get on a train with several cars and see you?

There are many more of these examples I could give you going back in time. To me, the gold in relationships is still face to face, handshake-type promises. Which is why it is so important to learn to transform your presentations and interviews into conversations. So you can open that door.

It's not just the visuals on the deck, it's the delivery and your own availability to making those connections -- body language, and attitude. All great sales people know that (disclosure: my mother was in sales, the best I've seen, and I've worked with many).

Since I do not make a mystery of how I use social networks, I am always quite surprised when people send the standard LinkedIn invite when we haven't even crossed paths. Please, do not tell me that being a member of a group with a gazillion others qualifies as having something in common. Or that we have done business together at a company I have not heard about. You know better.

And you know that signing me up for your newsletter doesn't mean I was interested... yet.

Ripples and connections

What works on LinkedIn, as in real life, are personal introductions. The act of shaking someone's hand, looking them in the eye, taking in the non verbals within the context where you are, including the common contact, bind you in ways a social graph can only demonstrate *after* that connection is established.

When David Armano published the influence ripples graphic, we discussed how online was only a fraction of the connections many people had in real life. Although I have been using Twitter steadily for about four years, projects and opportunities are still flowing through a network you cannot see -- my address book.

If online we still conduct paying business through search, emails, phone calls, or in person meetings are the best conversion tools for individual connections. Stephen Downes wrote that influence is not a function of linkage. It's a function of:

1. Diversity - a person who communicates with a diverse audience will be more influential than a person who communicates with a uniform audience.

2. Autonomy - a person who is free to speak his or her own mind, and is not merely parroting some 'official view', will have more influence.

3. Openness - a person who writes in multiple languages, or who can be read on multiple platforms, or who is not limited to a single communications channel, will have more influence.

4. Connectivity - a person you can communicate with, and who will listen to your point of view, will have more influence than a person who does not.

Because I grew up and completed my studies in a country, in three languages, then moved to a different country, where I worked in five industries, and also attended university and many industry accreditation programs, built a social network with live events, traveled extensively for work, and am a very curious and interested individual, I know a lot of different people in many fields. As for the question of influence, I let the influenced decide that.

We are very lucky to live in a country where we can speak freely, be open, seek diversity, and think critically. A good reason to stop seeking links, and start making connections.

 

[image by David Armano]

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#sxsw-influence

In a little over two weeks, we will visualize, talk about, and experience why everyone is wrong about influence, except your customers. I will use simple language and examples to describe my thinking about this topic -- there is nothing contrived about true influence.

I've done a lot of research on this topic over the course of my career. I have found influence not to be attached to gender, nationality, scores, or tools. Although the external environment and internal organization of each of these data points affect relevance.

Attention and permission also have a role in influence. My friend Peter offered another insightful comment about yesterday's post (emphasis mine):

Audacity is almost a modern virtue. Though, in my experience, those who seek unsolicited counsel seldom know what to do with it nor realise what it signals about their character. It also misunderstands the modern professional. At the top of our game we sell clock speed not memory. Memory is cheap. It's even given away. Clock speed, the ability to make connections with meaning, is what matters. And they're never going to get access to that by treating me like a search engine.

A remark that helps me highlight one of the things that cannot be copied easily, according to Kevin Kelly -- interpretation. My interpretations of this conversation covered a lot of ground in the last couple of years.

Some highlights:

• In forget influentials, in viral marketing context matters, I concluded (from evidence presented in the post): Let's say you are trying to build some buzz around your product or service:
  
  1. Focus less on who people influence and more on how people are influenced.
  2. Think more about networks, and network structure, rather than treating everyone as behaving independently (group dynamics).
  3. Move away from the idea that buzz can be engineered to achieve some pre-established outcome, and get better at measuring and reacting to buzz that arises naturally (observation from context).

• Asking what really affects behavior? I shared some informational guideposts and social influences to consider, given that what behavioral economics says is that emotion, context and situational factors influence our choices.

• In an early post unpacking Klout, true measure of influence? I wrote that true impact, of course, is the ability by someone to change someone else's attitude, opinion, or behavior. Pull is based on context.

• A post you may not have noticed about Fast Company's true influence at the time of the Influence Project storm. it was the first kernel of what became my proposed session for #SxSW-influence.

• Like it or not, you want influence speaks for itself

• Connecting with real influence in your communications was an invitation to reflect on whether you connect with it in the way you hire, form partnerships, and choose mentors and teachers

• The conversation about the Influencer Project, with ThoughtLead CEO Sam Rosen, gave us the motivation behind the shortest ever marketing conference

• My comments on a Forrester paper around why being a meaningful specific to build influence. How do you get to the care part? I suggested taking a look at what organization behaviors are sought and appreciated by your buyers. Things like: constant innovation and experimentation, like Apple; re-imagining the world, as in what if everyone took better care of themselves? what can you do to deliver a necessary message about health through entertainment, for example?; aligning around good, the ultimate universal meaning; presenting products as stories . And building meaning into your interactions -- whether they be with a person representing your business, or what your business does. For example: communicating deeper meaning people can opt into beyond a product or service; creating alliances with other products and services as part of a market ecosystem; sharing information and knowledge; being a true representation of your brand, believing in it yourself

• Earned media and influence and how to harness influence

• Why and how influence works gets a little bit more into the details of our upcoming discussion. While the question of how you measure influence is interesting and valid. As an attendee, I'd wonder, how do I get there in the first place? How do I create/identify/harness/enroll influence? What role does it play in my mix? 

• Klout: you don't know what you don't know has a deeper meaning or layer -- you'll just have to remind me to tell you the story when you see me next.

• Then you'll also find out more of why everyone is now talking about Klout and many other tools I've listed in the post, and the 5 influence traps to avoid -- I put them in a post, so we can focus more on what you do to create and identify influence during the session.

• I also outlined some ways to up your score, double entendre included with the price, and how do you influence the influencers? Along with some hints as to why do people do what they do?

In the end, it's all open to interpretation. These are just highlights of what I've written about influence in the past couple of years. The best, as they say, is yet to come.

Tools provide useful data points, people provide useful information. I wanted to take the opportunity to thank a few people for their participation and encouraging remarks here. Specifically:

• Joe Fernandez, CEO, Klout
• Azeem Azhar, CEO, PeerIndex
• Gary Lee, CEO, mBLAST
• Jeff Katz, product manager, Twitalyzer
• Pierre-Loic Assayag, CEO @traackr

No need to draw complex charts or bring in the algorithm gurus. A corollary of "it can't hurt to ask" is "it can't hurt to share" -- my take is it depends on what is being shared. Trust your own observations and thinking. Come as you are, and we will have all the influence we need to have in the room to make the session stimulating, enlightening, and fun.

 

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Real Time and Attention

A couple of years ago we had an interblog conversation about free. Remember those? With links and all that. It was about relevance -- right place, right time.

Attention is very much about being relevant. Signal, on the other hand, is also about permission. Two sides of the same coin.

Get only one right, and you're not connecting.

I'd like to pick up the thread in that post that talked about media. As I wrote almost two years ago, the digital age has transformed how things are made, distributed, and sold in such a way that there are no set rules anymore.

Normally these cycles take a while to work their way into the business lifespan.

However, we live in a time where the very tools that were going to set us free have accelerated the pace of change not just on our time and attention, but on the nature of the very things that used to consume or employ our time and attention.

Media companies are now wrestling with this issue. Individuals are wrestling with it, too.

My take on the whole media conversation is that things are reversed now. With more and more channels or ways to get the word out, that is not the problem anymore -- it's not scarce.

Instead, the scarcity and value is in getting people to care.

You should put more money up front -- in figuring out your motivation, or strategy, planning, and putting thought into designing the organization and business to deliver against that. Identifying the people who want that in the process, and figuring out the best co-creation work to make that connection happen.

Creative in not the big idea as much. It's a series of ideas that have connective tissue built right into them to be in real time. You can start by goofing off with something fun, and gain permission for another kind of conversation, one that leads to a deeper connection.

It was Seth Godin that reminded me about this conversation with his post on asymmetrical mass favors. I get requests all the time from people who want hundreds of hours of free consultation with well meaning questions.

Godin's example about spamming 10,000 or a hundred thousand people with your resume or plea for help is a home run in the psychology of favors. “It can’t hurt to ask,” is almost never true in the context of an already uneven exchange. He is right, it's taking.

Somehow, I'm thinking the same twisted logic is at play when it comes to approaching professionals like me who have blogs and are sharing hundreds of hours of experience and learning freely with the community.

Because one's feeling is "I am giving my attention now," there is an expectation that favor will be returned by answering a question in real time, even when not in any kind of relational mode, like commenting, or building a dialogue with the writer over time.

And I'm not even talking about a simple "what did you have for breakfast" question, there's Twitter for that. I'm talking about audience research methodology kind of questions, business strategy kind of questions, which you would never dream of answering yourself for free. Or asking a professional to their face, in an office setting.

Yet, they are posed under the "it can't hurt to ask" scenario, when mutual permission and relevance have not been established.

As Godin wrote, the internet is making things that look like favors (but are actually asymmetrical takings) more and more common. It's putting pressure on people who are usually open to a favor to do the difficult thing and just say no.

There's plenty that is free here, the rest is called billable time. Real time and attention are getting mixed up with permission -- and that applies to both individual and businesses -- and making those requests asymmetrical takings.

What's your take? Would you expect to just pop an email to someone and get a few hours of free consultation with you?

 

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Ten Reasons Why Your Content Strategy Fails

This is another post that is back by popular demand, with several changes and additions. In the last two years, content marketing has matured, and many more voices have joined the conversation.

There are a content marketing institute, an Alltop category, and now a content strategy conference, Confab2011. Why is everyone all of a sudden talking and writing about content?

First the definition - content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience -- with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

Many more interactions with products and services take place online today. Individual and social search are both becoming an important way of finding and filtering relevant information.

When you create content, you need to keep in mind what attracts customers and prospects, and their friends. Educating, informing, and creating with them are all ways to engage people in a conversation with you. 

It should therefore not be surprising that the Top Ten reasons why your content marketing strategy fails are:

(1.) You don't have one -- you think fulfillment just means you stick all you've got on that landing page, mini site, or newsletter, and pray something will stick. 

(2.) You don't understand the difference between interruption and content marketing -- you think that because you have something to sell, you can push it out there and get people to but it because you say so.

(3.) Your content does not provide value -- the worst offenders will ask for information on customers and prospects to give them something that doesn't really tell them anything new, just to get people's email address.

(4.) Your in-house experts think it's marketing's job to write it -- while we agree that marketing professionals need to be in the content business, it's a very bad idea to assume that they need to be proficient in every kind of conversation, even those where they'd be clearly not the experts.

(5.) You think that changing the title to last month's paper will work -- this is akin to starting a brand new relationship on the wrong foot. Will your customers believe you next time, after experiencing this kind of stunt?

(6.) You invite people in for one topic, then you give them something else entirely -- another dangerous assumption is that people don't pay attention. They won't if this is the kind of treatment you reserve for them. It's like starting a conversation with a great opening, and then putting absolutely no substance behind it.

(7.) Your call to action is not clear, or you have multiple ones -- the main reason why you don't want to do this, of course, is that you won't know what works among the many messages you put out there. When you're focused, things have a way of working out much better for all involved.

(8.) You want too much, too soon -- there's no relationship and you're already asking your customers and prospects to give you something substantial.

(9.) You don't get the anticipated and relevant part of it -- you think integrated and all matching means you're not interrupting. You missed the the opportunity to write custom content specifically to address the needs of the audience you are hoping to engage.

(10.) Your content is all about you, not your customer -- the surest way to bore someone or to become irrelevant quickly is by not being relevant to them.

Your goal is to reach the people who will buy your products and services. Whether your content marketing strategy is fulfilled through marketing or public relations activities, you should think about providing value and worry less about measuring clicks and hits.

Will your customers and prospects find you on the Web when they're looking for what you provide? Will your articles, bylines, white papers, eBooks, blog posts convey that you understand the issues -- from their pain points -- like no one else in the market?

Does your newsletter provide timely, relevant tips, commentary, and information that reveal industry or industry vertical knowledge? Do analysts and third parties pick up your thought leadership in their articles and amplify what you know?

If the answer is no, those are still great places for you to start.

 

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Many Brands Continue to Act "Me First"

Going direct with customer conversations means that organizations can connect with the source of their bread and butter. This is a tremendous opportunity to gain contextual insights, understand when your brand is relevant, what to listen for, and what people respond to.

The upside is selling more to your current customers.

It's marketing at its best. Where the product may have little that sets it apart from that of other providers, responsive communication and dialogue earn you attention, and share of wallet. People will make the effort to switch with that upside.

Intellectually, we all know the best recommendation comes from a satisfied customer.

Online recommendations also come from a non (or not yet) customer who is impressed by seeing your behavior and actions toward customers. Yet, many businesses are still waiting around until something goes wrong. Even then, they hold out getting involved or show they don't care about your situation, until after the damage has occurred.

What's worse, customer relations and support groups are working against your marketing programs by demonstrating the slogan really means "me first."

Fake caring until you can do, if you must. I recognize that many internal structures need to be fixed, processes simplified, and the right people hired and put in place -- indeed, you get what you pay for and what you encourage, too.

As I'm preparing for our conversation about influence, I continue to come across examples of the negative kind.

Take for example the disconnect between what people are saying about Virgin Mobile on the company's site, and elsewhere about its service. As he says in his bio, Greg Sterling is the founding principal of Sterling Market Intelligence (SMI), a consulting and research firm focused on the Internet's influence on offline consumer purchase behavior. On the phone with Virgin Mobile, he is only a customer. 

It is easier than ever to identify where the process and people problems are today. Organizations must want to take care of them to solve issues. As you can see from the video I included with this post, there are people who are worth having in your organization [YouTube link 10:03']

If you watch the video, you'll see a reverse engineered version of what customers see and experience when they call brands that continue to act "me first." Are you noticing and rewarding those people who are doing right by customers? Do you see how that is also marketing?

 

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Does Your Story Convey a Point of View?

The point of view in the American novel was an assignment I relished during my course on American literature at the University of Bologna. I started the paper by describing a scene from Hitchcock Rear Window: A man in the semi-distance looking inside the apartment and yard facing him.

From the activities taking place in his view, he develops a narrative -- piecing together clues made of body language, and action. Third party observational narrative ends up feeling real to the moviegoer who becomes immersed in the sequence of events as seen or described by someone else.

We're quite used to talking about storytelling in branding, the signs and symbols that speak to us. Those products and services we develop an affinity for have a strong point of view. Having a point of view is also an innovation principle, according to Diego Rodriguez.

I did the same exercise with the people, objects, and ideas that connect with me in the image above.

What you believe in

When you have a point of view, it's much easier to tell your story. Although it takes time and effort to figure out what you stand for, what you believe in, once you get there, it becomes incredibly easy to stand by your story. And that will help you stand out.

It will also help those who want to stand alongside your product and service.

Think about the products and services that connect with you. They represent something, they convey meaning. That is a choice: Wanting to be something for someone and choosing to not be all things to all people.

Therefore, you will attract those people who are really passionate about that point of view, that lens.

Words matter, too

It's not the symbols and the actual product and service experience. Words matter as well. Just because we're no longer chipping our thoughts into stone, we shouldn't assume their lack of permanence or effect. Why shouldn't our communications convey a story, with the same forceful a point of view of the product or service itself?

Why are PR firms still formatting press releases as if no decision, no choice had been made? Why are news items written in the stodgy language of ages past, still? It's not exclamation marks at the end of the sentence that make something exciting -- you can enroll the words themselves to carry that message.

Which brands succeed online? Those that have the ability to speak from the voice and point of view of the product or service, either directly, or indirectly, through their fans.

Being engaged

One of the conversations I have most frequently when I work with interactive marketing and communication groups is about the brand being engaged. We can bring love and passion back into the way we talk and write about product news.

Why not? Who makes the rules? The PR industry? Mainstream media? Have you noticed lately the kind of news that gets coverage? Do you suppose they got the information from dry press releases?

Colbert Nation and the Daily Show get talked about because they inject a different kind of storytelling in news sharing. I know, you're going to tell me their lens is comedy. Focus on the point of view, that's what's attracting viewers.

Online we have the Onion, the Oatmeal on the fun side, and also some company blogs pull that off nicely -- 37 signals, Rackspace, JetBlue, and Patagonia, for example. More often than not, I get my news about those companies at their blogs.

Stop taking yourself so seriously. Start thinking about what matters most and how to convey your excitement for a piece of news so you can show you are engaged with it.

You will find you're much more engaging to readers and fans that way.

The problem is not sharing news in social streams. As many of the recent events have shown, people are hungry for news to read and share. The problem is putting your passion and love back into it. Poetry matters, and so does your point of view. It will allow to say no to the excess language.

 

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Don't Expect, Connect!

On January 24, a story about Harvard Faculty voting bold changes to the MBA program caught my eye. It did for a number of reasons.

First among them is that I have been working with a dedicated team of faculty and advisers from the local business and VC community on a program that resembles Harvard's proposed direction for the past five years. It is offered by The Fox School of Business at Temple University.

The site really doesn't do the Enterprise Management Consulting Practice participants enough justice -- these are exceptionally well run programs, both for the caliber of the professionals on the Advisory Board, the consulting projects, and the caliber and engagement of the students.

Which brings me to the point of this post -- staying hungry.

Starting off

The students I have met and counseled are definitely cut of a resilient cloth -- they will need it. We need them. Starting off can seem thrilling or daunting, depending on one's viewpoint. You can choose to feel  intimidated, or confident enough to know what you want and also who you need to enroll to help you.

I remember an entrepreneur a couple of years back who was completing his international MBA while building a company, and with a 2-year old at home. The perfect storm. He transmitted a calm energy, yet make no mistake, he was going to succeed -- because he wanted it enough.

A good start gets you more that halfway there. You show up, do something, and get things in motion.

Keeping at it

This part is a bit less sexy, although it can be very interesting. Your resilience will be tested. If your idea is big enough, people will wait it out while secretly hoping you fail. When you start to gain traction, they will work hard at copying what they see.

Keeping at it often means finding new mentors, or a better fit with investors. In some cases, hanging out with a different crowd, one more interested in supporting you -- people who will tell you the truth when you need to hear it, even when you're not ready.

To go from start to success, you inevitably pass through strategic quitting. That's what got me through the dip with the social network I birthed and curated (the link in this paragraph). And believe me, every birth and growth phase comes with its share of blood, sweat, and tears.

What comes next

Then things seem to level off a little at first, and a bit more every week, month, and year. Some businesses scale, others change, others yet seem to have been built to flip. What comes next may surprise you, especially if the return on investment in your business is not going as expected.

Something else happens here. People become complacent. Processes and systems are put in place -- to varying degrees of success, depending on your business -- and routine sets in. Business as usual becomes a mantra. Except for it's no longer business as usual in the market, it never was.

It just was never this fast in pace of change.

Don't believe the "business as usual" lie especially if it's in a press release. I've authored some of those earlier in my career. Fought with management to avoid putting those three treacherous words in -- business as unusual was the new catchphrase for "you should pay attention, now."

Because often those three words mean something is going to change pronto -- insane is the new normal, in some circles.

Staying hungry

Which brings me to the point of this post, staying hungry. Every professional faces a plateau eventually. I've talked with solopreneurs, free agents, entrepreneurs, small business owners, and general managers for lines of business in large corporations.

Plateau is the business person Sirens' Island. Surround yourself with trusted advisers who will spring forward and hold you to your vision, even as the allure of a comfortable position in the market is strong and you struggle to get loose into it, and beg to be released from accountability.

They will save you from actions and decisions that would cast the company you built in a sea of destruction.

Don't expect, connect!

I've been writing about connections for a long time and for many reasons. First among them is that the key to our success is making connections -- between people and with ideas. We need to keep vigilant about our habits. The moment we feel "settled in" should unsettle us.

I'm seeing evidence of a way of thinking I've seen before, circa 2000-2001. As Collins wrote in his seminal article at Fast Company:

Built to Flip. An intriguing idea: No need to build a company, much less one with enduring value. Today, it's enough to pull together a good story, to implement the rough draft of an idea, and -- presto! -- instant wealth.

No need to bother with the time-honored method of most self-made millionaires: to create substantial value by working diligently over an extended period. In the built-to-flip world, the notion of investing persistent effort in order to build a great company seems, well, quaint, unnecessary -- even stupid.

Don't expect, connect! Let's learn from the past. Let's stay vigilant and hold each other accountable on discovering the full weight of the real costs of each decision -- especially to ourselves.

 

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Open to Interpretation

People use words differently. This is something I verified first hand as a linguist, and especially during my 1,200 hours of simultaneous interpreting work. And people interpret information differently. This I learned through my years in the field of business strategy and communication.

The plot thickens online. Online you're all words -- often disembodied from context in micro blogging and social graphs -- and information -- often separated from fact-based research in the hurried nature of longer form content.

Why? Pre-emptive participation strikes. Not everyone has the luxury or time to think these days, especially after a long day of devoting thinking to client work, where it rightly belongs. Thus what you see, is not exactly what you get.

Relationships between things and people provide context; data-driven insights drive relevance. People say one thing, do another. Influence is open to interpretation.

Where words and information come alive

Words and information come alive when they come together within the construct of story. Narrative is the brain's way of remembering, thus the shortcut to being remembered. Writers know that. Some do think they check the facts and then weave them into a narrative.

We are deluged by all kinds of data these days. We measure everything, yet we take what is conveninet to shape a story. In the case of influence, numbers are often used to convey an impression of causality, thus making the world more complicated, not simpler.

Stating "we don't know why that happened" would be simpler. The fallacy in the current conversation is a constant source of costernation for marketers and communicators who so want results: Why aren't people with high scores just repeating my message? Why aren't I getting the results I was promised?

Because 1) that score is a data point, not the driver; 2) it's their story, your customers'.

Want a voice? 

I propose that whenever you want to say something important, the first thing you need to develop is a voice. Many do stop there, at voice development. If you're familiar with acting and performing you do know that voice is expression. The meaning of the story comes across through a combination of things.

The difference between good actors and great actors -- yes, even in the online and offline world -- is credibility. When you see Meryl Streep in a movie, you're not thinking "look, there's Meryl Streep doing Margaret Thatcher."

You're watching The Iron Lady, and believe what many thought of her -- one of UK’s most influential prime ministers. According to the Daily Mail:

The film is billed as examining power "and the price that is paid for power.

It is, according to the makers, "a surprising and intimate portrait of an extraordinary and complex woman" who "smashed through the barriers of gender and class to be heard in a male-dominated world."

Streep's interpretation is the proxy that will carry that message to modern-day audiences. So while you watch the movie, you re-live history and get acquainted with Ms. Thatcher from the point of view of the movie director and writers.

They create a context for transporting you there. All made of relationships and clues in the most tiny details -- some of them true to the times, others true to cinematic narrative -- you are familiar with the treatment of time and narrative in movies, right?

I love using Ms. Streep as an example. We talked about honing your craft without chest thumping, and how you should have her play you. She is so good people don't really notice she's playing you, said Ephron. And at the end of the day, you discover it was one of the best days you ever had.

That is the power of a good story. A good story has both context and details. And you can watch people as they see themselves transported in it. Which is one of the reasons why video is such a powerful medium.

Interpretation influences

People join a story when they can make it theirs. When they identify elements they see themselves into, when they respond to the narrative emotionally, when it serves their interests and agenda. They will interpret and bend data to tell their story.

If it's true of history, it is true of all human thought and expression. Now we make sense of things out loud, and there's a record of it somewhere -- the new publicness, as Jeff Jarvis says.

The brain's way to cut corners on remembering things is to package them into neat stories. Consider this: Why do you know what you know? Because you either 1) read about it from someone you trust; 2) experienced it, and potentially romanticized it afterward.

Your measure of influence is open to interpretation. What you see is not exactly what you get. Numbers are often used to convey an impression of causality. People say one thing, do another.

Organizations are still looking for cheap ways to enroll influence, rather than actually taking the time to understand what the market wants. There are no shortcuts to narrative. A story -- anything from the tale of Creation to what makes your product different -- requires a setting, characters, a problem to be solved, action, and ultimate resolution.

It's really up to your customer to write this last part from their own needs and experience. But once this happens, the story will become memorable in ways that turn customers into the next tier of storytellers.

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When you think of influence as ingredients in a meal, then all of a sudden the task may not seem that dauting -- or to require special pixy dust and magic powers. What's your interpretation? Submit your take here for a chance to be featured in our conversation at SxSW.

 

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