What I was taught in business school was that setting and following goals was the critical path in establishing the direction needed to accomplish great things. One quote that was recited at events was something close to: “Set your eyes to the moon, because even if you miss you’ll be among the stars.” It sounds good and is a great visual, but it’s the sort of crap that confused undergrads fall for.

Before I start discussing what triggered my shift in perspective, I want to just talk a bit about some problems that a goal mentality can cause:

• People don’t know what goals to set, and waste years of their lives hunting after the wrong ones.
• People think they will be happy in the future after they achieve their goals.
• People pass up the opportunities they should be taking because they don’t align with the goals they’ve already set.
• People aren’t happy with what they are doing in the present.
• Goals negatively affect people’s behaviour.

Let me expand on last two points:

People aren’t happy with what they are doing

In some cases people are holding out being happy for what they are going to achieve. They set their goal, do all the work it takes to achieve the goal even if it makes them unhappy because they convince themselves “I’ll be happy when I’ve done it and it’s all over.” After they finally achieve the goal, they might be happy for a few minutes, hours, or days, but in the big picture happiness should be ever-present. Goals work against that.

Goals negatively affect people’s behaviour

I’ve seen people commit themselves to doing what they didn’t enjoy. A big bunch of students get the idea that they want to achieve some an accreditation after graduation, like an accounting or financial title. It’s big achievement, and takes a lot of hard work and dedication.

Yet two years down that path into taking the courses needed, and with all the burdens that those course cause, it’s common to see people give up or burnt out. Had they not gave themselves those goals they could have maybe enjoyed those university years so much more. To refer back to another point, they would have also been much more open to other opportunities that they came across.

Just something I’ve been thinking about. These ideas come from Leo Babauta and his mnmlist blog. The post speaks volumes.

Minimalism’s logical extension: Break free from goals

Instead of trying to provide a translation of this post, I’ll quote from the post some of my favourite passages.

“The problem is, when we achieve the goals, we don’t achieve happiness. We set new goals, strive for something new…
…I do what excites me. Each day. I wake up, and work on things that I’m passionate about, create things that I love creating.
I don’t worry about where I’ll be (professionally) in a year or even six months, but where I am right now…
…I don’t force things, but do what comes naturally.
And I focus on the present, on being happy now.” – Leo Babauta

I think the biggest challenge in convincing people to live a non-goal driven life, is getting them to understand, and relate to the “do what makes you happy everyday” idea.

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You can talk about innovative solutions and bright futures as much as you want, but if it’s still more attractive to stick with the status quo nobody will follow you. You need to drive up the cost of the status quo.

It’s more ‘innovative’ to talk about bright, shiny, new sustainable systems, but before we can even work on the right side of the change equation, we need to drive up the costs of the unsustainable systems that represent the dead weight of the past. – Alan M. Webber

The Year That Matters is a series by Malcolm Bastien that goes through the ideas and concepts presented in Seth Godin and Friends’ ebook, What Matters Now. Each day a new  idea from the ebook will be reviewed and discussed. Subscribe to Open Mode to get the entire series.

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On others more so than yourself, for what you teach others will ripple out and effect more and more people. Understand how education is important in enabling people in our own communities and around the world in less fortunate situations.

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now – John Wood

The Year That Matters is a series by Malcolm Bastien that goes through the ideas and concepts presented in Seth Godin and Friends’ ebook, What Matters Now. Each day a new  idea from the ebook will be reviewed and discussed. Subscribe to Open Mode to get the entire series.

The following quote is pretty enlightening in it’s decoration. Not only will working on our strengths in the end give us a higher level of expertise than we would achieve by working on a weakness, but the belief is that since you probably love to do what you are already great at, you’ll enjoy working on your strengths much more than you would your weaknesses.

That being said, I’m a pretty firm believer that you do what makes you happy. So if you enjoy what is comparatively a weakness, you go and work on that. Explore that part of your life and don’t trust anything for what it is. In reality your strength isn’t necessarily a predictor of long-term happiness.

But my strengths – ah, I love my strengths. I’ll work on them till the purple cows come home. When we love what we do, we do more and more, and pretty soon we’re pretty good at it. – Marti Barletta

The Year That Matters is a series by Malcolm Bastien that goes through the ideas and concepts presented in Seth Godin and Friends’ ebook, What Matters Now. Each day a new  idea from the ebook will be reviewed and discussed. Subscribe to Open Mode to get the entire series.

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Set your goals high. Being good enough isn’t good enough. Be the most of something (e.g. The most colourful, the most responsive).

Gary Vaynerchuk would say that the key to winning is being the “most caring”. In most if not all cases that probably is true because no matter who you are, unless you consciously want to be treated badly in order so save a few bucks, everybody live to feel appreciated. Since all businesses in some sense or form has customers, then they all have an audience that they can care about. In that sort of environment it’s about out-caring the other guys.

At the same time Gary would probably say why stop there? Best care, best price, best product. (Now like Gary or not, I think no matter what anyone says he does a good job of representing himself not only as loud, and obnoxious, but as the most caring. Hence why I bring him up so much in this post).

Today, with so much change and uncertainty, so much pressure and new ways to do things, the middle of the road is the road to nowhere. – William C. Taylor

The Year That Matters is a series by Malcolm Bastien that goes through the ideas and concepts presented in Seth Godin and Friends’ ebook, What Matters Now. Each day a new  idea from the ebook will be reviewed and discussed. Subscribe to Open Mode to get the entire series.

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Set standards for yourself, and make them as Steve Jobs said, “Insanely great”.

Effective listening: Strategic advantage number 1! – Tom Peters

A beautiful time to reemphasize the point, that all the internal lessons of What Matters Now are deeply personal, but drive the greatest change when they impact the world around us.

If not excellence, what? – Tom Peters

What happens when you face yourself with the question of: “Why haven’t I expected the best out of myself?” Whatever emotions that come up or doubts that arise as a result you need to get rid of. The only thing to do now is to make a choice going forward.

You don’t need to make false “commitments” to yourself or “try harder”. This is not a action and reaction problem. It’s a daily challenge. Every moment where you suddenly become conscious of your level of commitment and effort, you need to make the decision again and again to being insanely great.

The Year That Matters is a series by Malcolm Bastien that goes through the ideas and concepts presented in Seth Godin and Friends’ ebook, What Matters Now. Each day a new  idea from the ebook will be reviewed and discussed. Subscribe to Open Mode to get the entire series.

We all need a severe lesson in understanding the state of the world right now. Without understanding the entire picture we can only have a perspective that is driven by blindness and ignorance.

That’s the way I feel about this idea of being able to use open source collaboration methods in building something real. It’s just so alien to me. It’s also something that large publications will be able to do better than niche content providers. Discovery. Niche blogs can only ever by definition help you get better or learn more about any one particular thing. Being bigger gives you the freedom to bring in the new, and to cover the revolution as it happens.

Peer production, open source, crowd sourcing, DIY and UGC – all these digital phenomena are starting to play out in the world of atoms, too. The Web was just the proof of concept. Now the revolution gets real. – Chris Anderson

The Year That Matters is a series by Malcolm Bastien that goes through the ideas and concepts presented in Seth Godin and Friends’ ebook, What Matters Now. Each day a new  idea from the ebook will be reviewed and discussed. Subscribe to Open Mode to get the entire series.

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One of the strengths of What Matters Now is that the ebook will affect everyone who reads it differently. At the same time, while the messages are personal and introspective, they all encourage taking action that affect your environment and the people around you positively.

One thing that stumps a lot of people as they start building off their passion is that they often rely on their close circle of friends for support and guidance. The problem is that your passion is not always the same as what your friends and family are committed to. They won’t understand it, they won’t accept it. You’ll come off as annoying or missing the point, being lost and looking for validation of your ideas.

Those people are supposed to react that way. It’s not their passion, it’s yours. What your friends and support group needs to do is understand what your passion is and tell you when your actions are not aligned with it.

Then, you can go back to annoying them at all the time you spend talking about it.

Be honest, be authentic, and speak from your passion. Yes, it means taking a risk. But the results might surprise you. – Mark Hurst

The Year That Matters is a series by Malcolm Bastien that goes through the ideas and concepts presented in Seth Godin and Friends’ ebook, What Matters Now. Each day a new idea from the ebook will be reviewed and discussed. Subscribe to Open Mode to get the entire series.

Again, it’s this megaphone idea. Drop the megaphone on the floor, and go find the few people who really give a damn. It doesn’t matter where you find them,  it might in fact surprise you.

The truth is these people are not going to be your quick ticket to reward and stardom, it’s slow and difficult. The important thing to understand though, is that the slow and difficult way is the only way to grow community. Fast and furious won’t get you there.

Once you do find that one percent that really cares about your work, you then have to care about them 5x as much in return.

The One percent are not the usual suspects of name-brand tech bloggers, mommy bloggers and or business bloggers. The One Percenters are often hidden in the crevices of niches, yet they are the roots of word of mouth.

This year your job is to find them and attract them. – Jackie Huba

The Year That Matters is a series by Malcolm Bastien that goes through the ideas and concepts presented in Seth Godin and Friends’ ebook, What Matters Now. Each day a new  idea from the ebook will be reviewed and discussed. Subscribe to Open Mode to get the entire series.

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In the famous words of Steve Jobs “Netbooks are just cheap laptops” and “Netbooks aren’t good at anything”.

Completely not true when you think about it for two seconds. Netbooks are useful tools. They have their purpose in specific tasks that make them attractive devices: Email, writing, video, programming, things with flash…

If the iPad is supposed to be presented as this ultimate “third” device that can offer a better experience than both the iPhone and the Macbook into something that is really only unique in it’s ability to do reading, pictures, video, and web.

Oh, wait, I forgot about something, Apps.

That’s the only thing I’ve been excited about with the iPad. Hell, Apple could have done a 2 hour presentation all about how all the iPad does is let’s you create and use 10 inch large apps and not do anything else at all, and I still would be thinking about the same things. All the different App possibilities. All my excitement for the device now is for apps.

Apps was a big reason in me buying my iPhone in the first place, and I think it’ll be enough to get me to buy the iPad.

So the chances are that in six months I’ll be sitting there, typing out an essay on my iPad, less quickly than I could on my netbook, then the feelings of regret will start to flow over me for buying the iPad as I start to play Commander Keen on the beautiful 10” screen.

How else am I going to get to use 10″ tablet apps though? A Kindle?

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It’s maybe been over a year ago already that I was listening to the TWiT podcast with Leo Laporte, where Jason Calacanis made the comment that in a recession, “Invest in yourself.” It was a clear message that for students with not a lot of responsibilities, like myself and a few friends, were able to understand easily.

For people like us, students familiar with technology and business, with a decent income, the idea of investing in ourselves was easy. Buy some books, attend some events and conferences, build our network, and put in the effort to grow our online footprint and reputation in the area that mattered to us.

That was the best advice for us to hear at the time, and to hear it from a successful entrepreneur was all the validation we needed to know that it was the correct path to take. The only part that was semi-difficult was realizing that we didn’t exist in isolation from our environment.

Investing in yourself is not a goal, and consuming is not a sustainable behaviour in the long run. The point of the advice we got was to use the down time of the economy as a sort of summer break. Nothing else was going on, you knew the chances of finding work weren’t good, but you had to make the most of it, until something better came along.

Invest in yourself until it comes time for you to put that energy into something better. Not necessarily through an opportunity that presents itself that you wait on, but that you create for yourself. Create that opportunity for yourself to put all that self-investment to work.

When times are tough, vision is the first casualty. Before conditions can improve, it is the first thing we must recover. – Michael Hyatt

The Year That Matters is a series by Malcolm Bastien that goes through the ideas and concepts presented in Seth Godin and Friends’ ebook, What Matters Now. Each day a new  idea from the ebook will be reviewed and discussed. Subscribe to Open Mode to get the entire series.

That’s about it from Setty. Now for my own ideas…

The problem I’ve seen the same people locally struggle with over and over again is that when want to help people, they communicate the desire to make an effort that’s along the lines of “I want to dedicate myself to helping others and positively effect lives” But from start to finish they are insincere.

Don’t get involved with people who want to “help” you for their own personal or professional gain. Seek people who wish to add meaning to your life where enriching their own is enough for them, because meaning and enrichment exist beyond material gains like professional or social status.

Through choosing to enrich other people’s lives, you add meaning to both their life and your own. – Rajesh Setty

In addition to obtaining enrichment through helping people, there is another level of enrichment that we can all experience day to day simply through the way we choose to communicate with others.

Communicate candidly. Tell people what they should hear rather than what they want to hear. – Rajesh Setty

This quote on communicating candidly is something that makes a lot of sense to me. Much like a lot of the other points that contributors are making in the ebook of What Matters Now, after I read these passages like theses I ask myself “Well ya, why would you do it any other way?”

The Year That Matters is a series by Malcolm Bastien that goes through the ideas and concepts presented in Seth Godin and Friends’ ebook, What Matters Now. Each day a new  idea from the ebook will be reviewed and discussed. Subscribe to Open Mode to get the entire series.

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Thinking back to where this all came from:

Web 2.0 -> PR 2.0 -> Marketing 2.0 -> Enterprise 2.0 -> Capitalism 2.0

You can fit government 2.0 and collaboration 2.0 in there as well. The point is that for those of us who started at the beginning of the chain, at the base of the mountain, it’s almost impossible to see how far up the mountain goes without developing a new set of eyes and without radically changing our perspective.

We need to all take a step back and expose ourselves to the fact that anything not carved into stone is going to change the ways it works because of these trends, and those things have already have changed are going to go through the process all over again before we even realize it’s happening.

Information technology will be the basis of the emerging “digital native” economies in the 21st century – Chris Meyer

The Year That Matters is a series by Malcolm Bastien that goes through the ideas and concepts presented in Seth Godin and Friends’ ebook, What Matters Now. Each day a new  idea from the ebook will be reviewed and discussed. Subscribe to Open Mode to get the entire series.

Minimalism in real life, not only online.

I started to approach the idea of minimalism digitally at first. I had read a few different book on Zen Buddhism, and many many many blogs and posts on minimalism in a digital sense. These posts included guides on clearing your desktop, achieving focus in your work tasks at the computer, how to sustain focus over long periods time, and how to make the distinction between important and urgent tasks.

From this I:

• Adopted GTD systems and started using new software
• Put on a simple desktop background (From Simple Desktops)
• Started using minimal software like WriteRoom and OmmWriter, Tumblr.
• Followed even more minimal blogs whenever I could find them.

All of those approaches to improving my digital behaviour were only moderately successful at improving what it was I was really after. Being able to sit down, focus, and get shit done.

That was true for a long time until I had made a real commitment to get some real life “minimizing” going on.

I threw out old textbooks, I reorganized my environment, and got rid of as much as I could. After a bit of time invested in this, getting my digital experience to the most minimal it had been for a long time was easy. Getting rid of Twitter following count, friends on Facebook, and other digital distractions became not only easy, but very quickly became the only acceptable way of using the tools. The minimal environment I created for myself affected my minimal attitude, which in the end made all the digital changes I had been doing for so long real.

Productivity went up.

But more importantly,

Minimalism became real.

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Just give me minimal computing.

That’s what I really want out of my technology now. Something with simplicity and focus built into it. Something that doesn’t even permit distraction.

Computers the way they are designed lend themselves to messiness. Different files and folders, downloads, documents, application crashes, multiple windows. These all evolved out of desktop computers. Huge machines that sat on your table and that held all the information in your life. The funny thing is, those were the norms during the age where the computing experience was primitive.

But for a mobile device, or for simple and beautiful computing, what is the norm? Is it the same as what our desktop systems?

This singular experience, what comes as a result of being in the trawls of work, is what all the minimal blogs are after; You have your work, and nothing else.

In experiences like these there is only one way to read mail, one way to browse the web, and one way to interact with your documents or media. One way to jump into these systems, one way to experience them, and one way out of them.

With only one way use each of these applications, the room there is for us to obsess over plug-ins, or productivity hacks rapidly decreases. Because it’s clear when you are doing productive work. You might have WriteRoom open for instance, and when you aren’t being productive, you might have something like Tweetie open, but never both. Without the ability to have both open at the same time it’s clear the context and the mode you are in.

For example, as I write this post. I have exactly 10 applications open. I like to think that I’m being pretty productive now as I type these words, but during the past 10 minutes I’ve browsed to different websites, spent some time getting familiar with Notational Velocity (a new application I’m using as it now supports sync with SimpleNote) and have performed maybe another half-dozen unproductive tasks.

The benefit of being able to switch between all these applications and contexts so easily is that I have the flexibility to  quickly change the context of my system. My productive state suffers though as it’s that much harder to maintain over the long run.

Give me WriteRoom. But more importantly give me that solid unwavering context.  No pings, no updates, no multitasking.

Think there’s not a demand for this? Look at applications like Concentrate. People pay money for this.

The Concentrate application is a software solution. The concern when we move onto a hardware solution is to ask yourself how often do you want it? The nature of having a device that controls the focus at a hardware and OS level is that it can only be built in one way or another. There is no going back and forth.

Is focus through simplicity something you need enough that you’re willing to pay for it?

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My focus even for the past week on getting this project developed has done a great deal to change my attitude towards distractions, and putting up with things, or people. This has maybe been the first thing I’ve worked on in a long time that’s not a school project, or something which I do to try and make a buck. The point is it’s really lowering my patience for distractions. Let me explain.

I’m in the subway now on my way home from a class I left after only an hour of sitting through. “Enough of this,” I thought to myself “I could be working.” So a moment later. Boom. Up and out.

Walking away from something that is a waste of time is the best feeling in the world. Being the only one who walks away just as good.

Do I care about this? No. Out.
Is there something else I’d rather be doing? Yes. Out.

Most if not all of the time there’s a small mental checklist I’d process through. Benefits vs loss on the potential action I’m about to take. I’m sure you’ve asked yourself the same sort of questions on whether you should do something or not:

• Will my boss or the prof start to dislike me?
• Will it damage my long term prospects?
• Will it make my resume look bad?

But even that is gone in this case. It becomes a much more pure process.

I only care about what I’m doing, and what I could be doing instead.

It’s the same feeling I got when I eventually started to get tired of my job, but in that case the equation was “What do I spend 8+ hours of my day doing now? What could I be doing?”

When I was younger and felt myself being stuck in a shitty situation because of school, mostly caused by the politics that occur, I always thought to myself: “It sucks now, but it’s for the big pay off, nobody else is getting this experience.” Eventually that led me to think everyone else that didn’t put themselves through that trouble was at a disadvantage because they weren’t getting the same experience. A year after that, I quit everything, then I changed my thinking which became “All these people, no matter what side they’re on are getting it wrong.” Both of these ways of thinking are inferior though.

It was the hideousness of business school (like a fucking Frankenstein monster)  that started my thinking in the first place about what it takes to be successful,  things you have to do, which values are good or not, etc…

Stage 3 thinking: “Work hard, be nice”

Conan was being very Zen when he said that a week ago. Though in the Zen case of things it doesn’t really matter whether “amazing things” as Conan put it happen or not. You just work hard and be nice because there is no other way.

Oh, and surrounding yourself with people who also feel like this is a great thing to do. But you have to remember to sometimes walk away from them.

Steve Rubel also said recently in an interview with Social Media Explorer that social media builds three things: Engagement, Reach, and Reputation. These are the “ladders” as Steve called them, to creating trust.

More megaphones is the 2010 version of interruption marketing. It still exists, it’s even easier to do now, but it works just as bad as before. But we’ve all started to learn the lesson. Social media tools over the span of three years have reminded us about how much the social connection and the connectedness between people matters in business.

Soon enough with what we’ve learnt, we’ll move beyond the tools that exist and move back to connected businesses supported by technology, rather than enabled (in so much as Foursquare enables me to have a certain type of relationship with my friends on that service, but it does not necessarily do a good job of supporting an actual in-real-life relationship).

The market to create and support pseudo relationships will always be there, such as through “social-objects” as they are called, but there’ll never something that you should rely on in the realm of real relationships.

This sort of reflection is a good thing. How many people see their iPhones as tools to connect with things? Games, content, notes, tasks, pictures etc… And how many really see it as a tool to connect more with other flesh and blood people. Maybe if businesses, and us thought about this we’d all be a bit better off.

“More megaphones don’t equal a better dialogue”. – Howard Mann

The Year That Matters is a series by Malcolm Bastien that goes through the ideas and concepts presented in Seth Godin and Friends’ ebook, What Matters Now. Each day a new  idea from the ebook will be reviewed and discussed. Subscribe to Open Mode to get the entire series.

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Do less. Work less. Worry less. Just take it easy. Practice appreciation.

I don’t have many friends from the west coast, but when I do talk to people from that area I always get that clear distinct message that life on the east coast tend to spend a lot more time worrying about work than we do spending time relaxing and enjoying life. In school the message to take it slow and enjoy what you’re doing is not a loud one. In that sort of environment everyone is measured, and some unfortunate souls measure themselves, on how much money you can make, how many connections you can build, the title of your job, or which company you work at.

We are influenced by these environments and they shape our goals, what we commit time to, and how we measure ourselves for the very big reason being that we don’t take a break from it all. We don’t step away from this environment, don’t take enough breaks from all the urgent – not important – work that we find ourselves doing everyday.

Sitting down somewhere, a cafe, your couch, in a park, and just doing nothing for 2 hours can be a great thing to do once and a while. Me and a few friends are coincidentally discovering the benefits of making this a regular habit as we dedicate 2010 to being a year of minimalism and removal from what we’ve considered important for the past 5 years, but really wasn’t.

I recommend you do the same. Removing yourself from everything, even just for a little while, can really change the way you see and think about things.

Cease Participation, if only for one day this year – if only to make sure that we don’t lose forever the rare and vanishing human talent of appreciating ease. – Elizabeth Gilbert

The Year That Matters is a series by Malcolm Bastien that goes through the ideas and concepts presented in Seth Godin and Friends’ ebook, What Matters Now. Each day a new  idea from the ebook will be reviewed and discussed. Subscribe to Open Mode to get the entire series.

Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity – Hugh Macleod

I have a feeling that people are recognizing 2010 as being that year where things are not slowing down for new media and new businesses, and 2010 is when they are will either shift the way old business function, and in some cases will pass them. The new technologies will finally disrupt the old business models, and the new values will disrupt the old mindsets.

So much what what Hugh includes in his slide are ideas to live by to guide the decisions you make as you progress professionally and try to define your place in the world. At a macro level he breaks down different novel ideas and makes clear what is a waste of time, and what matters.

What Hugh’s slide also exposes is the fact that there are still just so many awesome ideas out there that we have to be exposed to, study, and make choices about if we want to implement their message into our lives or not.

Getting overwhelmed by extremely insightful and sticky content like Macleod’s slide in What Matters Now also makes me think about how much curation will really matter in 2010. In a time where so much garbage is being produced everyday, getting a whole bunch of information in one spot that is valuable to you will be an increasingly difficult task to accomplish. Mixtures of machine automation and aggregation, supported by the human curation point towards interesting trials of what systems may emerge in the coming year. Curation of content through premium services, communities of interest, machine learning of your habits are all possible.

The Year That Matters is a series by Malcolm Bastien that goes through the ideas and concepts presented in Seth Godin and Friends’ ebook, What Matters Now. Each day a new  idea from the ebook will be reviewed and discussed. Subscribe to Open Mode to get the entire series.

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On slide four we get into another introspective idea, this one is dignity. Our lesson on dignity starts to introduce us to a common theme in What Matters Now of the relationship between positive personal qualities and the positive actions you take in the world.

Dignity is more important than money – Jacqueline Novogratz

We’ll see this theme later on in the ebook in all sorts of varieties. What becomes obvious is that this “enabling others” happens in a lot of different ways depending on who you are. You could be an individual, a company, government, you could even be a writer or a developer. In the last two years we’ve seen so much happen directly thanks to the openness of software, of ideas, and thanks to collaboration that creating solutions for others has never been possible or more needed than now.

In a world where everything is connected, the most important thing we can do is treat our fellows with dignity. – Jacqueline Novogratz

There are some different models I keep conjuring up in my mind that I keep seeking new inspiration for. In a world where everything is connect, just how much is your position in society or the change that you are able to accomplish a function of being able to work with others? Before having expertise and a strong “take no prisoners” attitude meant a lot, but is that still the case?

If this is an economy of connected and networked value, how much value can others in attribute to you, as you are only ever one of many people or node in their network. If your value is only locked up in your own node, and you horde your knowledge, refuse to share it or help others, your value can only ever be tied up to yourself. It’s going to be through helping, and giving respect to others that value can spread in this networked world.

Creating ways for people to solve their own problems isn’t just an opportunity in 2010. It is an obligation. – Jacqueline Novogratz

The Year That Matters is a series by Malcolm Bastien that goes through the ideas and concepts presented in Seth Godin and Friends’ ebook, What Matters Now. Each day a new  idea from the ebook will be reviewed and discussed. Subscribe to Open Mode to get the entire series.

I was watching Gary Vaynerchuk on Jason Calacanis’s podcast, TWiST, the other night and Gary talked about when he was younger and just starting up he got advice from people in the wine business on how he should run his parent’s wine business. They told him “Service, Price, Selection. Choose two out of the three”. Gary then said to Calacanis on the podcast, “I thought to myself ‘those guys are idiots! I’m just going to do all three, then nobody will have a reason not to shop at my store!’”

Everybody “knows” what works and doesn’t work on the Internet. Everybody “knows” how to make money online and what the difference is between a good blog and a bad blog. The only way to get successful is to do it the way everyone else has done it before.

Think of that as your biggest opportunity to disrupt.

The Year That Matters is a series by Malcolm Bastien that goes through the ideas and concepts presented in Seth Godin and Friends’ ebook, What Matters Now. Each day a new  idea from the ebook will be reviewed and discussed. Subscribe to Open Mode to get the entire series.

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• A conversation with Gary Vaynerchuk (beingpeterkim.com)

You must have read or heard successful people talk before about how fear can help you, and how having a small amount of it can lead to better thinking and better decisions being made. To put that idea in the context of the following quote:

Until Fear is gone, … make the decision to be courageous. – Anne Jackson

If our fear was gone we wouldn’t be able to behave in that enhanced state of mind that a bit of fear is able to give to us. In that sense we always want fear, thus, we’ll always need to make the decision to be courageous.

In fact, it could be that it’s not our fear ever stops us from making risky decisions, but it’s only our courage to be able to break through the fear really stops us.

What Matters Now also goes on to talk about great stories are usually the ones about the people who do things that go beyond their fear. We connect to those stories so much because we in fact share the same characteristics as those people.

The Year That Matters is a series by Malcolm Bastien that goes through the ideas and concepts presented in Seth Godin and Friends’ ebook, What Matters Now. Each day a new  idea from the ebook will be reviewed and discussed. Subscribe to Open Mode to get the entire series.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Is there a fear shortage? (sethgodin.typepad.com)
• Disciplanner.com – Get Disciplined And Succeed (killerstartups.com)
• What If? (tastelikecrazy.com)

Some posts will be longer than others, and I’m not going to cover every slide from the ebook. A few of the slides I just found a bit too abstract or covered I topic I could say nothing about.

The following is the start of my notes from What Matters Now, and some ideas about how you and I can apply the lessons from to my our own actions:

Generosity

The connected economy respects generosity. What you can do is be generous with your time and your art. Doing this, according to What Matters Now, will encourage people to gravitate towards you and give them the opportunity to be more involved in your life and what you do. Not a bad deal.

Since 2010 is going to be the year of what matters, usually things that matter are not trivial to execute on. Creating good designs, good content, deep relationships are all pretty difficult. Don’t also discount the option of asking for help at the same time that you offer it.

Some people are going to read into this though and relate it to the idea of Wuffie, other will read it and think they can ask people for whatever they want and expect to get things or services for free. Focus on your own generosity. The mentality is that of the artist or coder who releases their work under creative commons copyright licenses. Having generosity is the motivation behind that decision and not expecting anything in return. To expect that you’ll be rewarded is misguided.

Art can’t happen without someone who seeks to make a difference. – Seth Godin

Be generous with what you can give and help people who are also trying to do meaningful things with their time? Why not?

The Year That Matters is a series by Malcolm Bastien that goes through the ideas and concepts presented in Seth Godin and Friends’ ebook, What Matters Now. Each day a new  idea from the ebook will be reviewed and discussed. Subscribe to Open Mode to get the entire series.

Guys like Michael Arrington -> Jason Calacanis -> David Crow, they are all doing technology usage audits, seeing what they use and what they want to use more of. I never knew how much of a popular thing it was to do. The truth is though that technology changes (duh), and we do as well. Sometimes the two are in alignment but most often times not so much. If you know anything about social media you’ve been conditioned to sign up to new services as they come, to try out new apps to see if they’ll be useful for you etc… The problem is the times where your tools support your short and long term goals are quite rare, but that doesn’t stop us from keeping all these apps with us, checking up on all these websites everyday, and distracting ourselves.

The evidence of change on a personal level is easy to spot. I used to visit Digg several times a day, Facebook more often, and even Reddit sometimes, but now I try to think back to the last time I discovered something valuable from these sites (either useful information or a meaningful social interaction) and I can’t come up with anything. Now that’s not a problem besides the fact I still waste 10s of minutes each day popping into Facebook then right back out. Over the course of a year this takes up a lot of time and overall adds a lot of distraction to my day. Time to delete Facebook? It’s an easy problem in reality, but probably just more of a big social hurdle that needs to be overcome.

The one thing that I unsurprisingly keep getting the best value out of?

Blogs.

No matter what seems to happen as far as usage trends and the state of the blogosphere, blogs still gives me the best value. As a sign of the times I find more great blogs from Twitter than anywhere else now, and as a result my time and my attention shift.

It’s sort of like if you’re walking down a trail in the park and there are all these other paths that break off from the main one. As you find new paths you get curious and start exploring paths you haven’t taken before. Some paths lead you to new and interesting areas of the park you haven’t discovered before, while other paths lead you in circles, putting you back the path you were just on. After a while you know which paths lead you to where you want to go, and which ones waste your time, so you stop taking them.

Do you think you do a good job of focusing your attention on the places and people that offer value and that contribute to your goals? Or do you still struggle with distraction?

Bonus: For great minimalist reading check out the new mnmlist blog by Leo Babauta of Zen Habits.

Photo Credit: Metrix X

Cable Cranes Laptop Skin

It’s been a long while since this site has seen much action. It feels good to write something with some thought to it again. I want to take a bit of time tonight and a bit of journaling, a bit of reflecting, and a bit of looking forward on to ideas that matter.

I really got a nice and positive feeling again after reading two different blog posts, by two people I’ve never met, and have never heard of. One wrote about the design process he went through while trying to get his new Wordpress theme just right, the one you see here now on Open Mode. The other blog post was, like I mentioned to a few friends I shared it with in an email, the best thing I’ve read in all of 2009. I’ll go through what I was thinking while reading each post.

When I was reading about how the Basic Maths theme was put together, I was pretty nostalgic and thought back to 1st and 2nd year university when with a light school schedule and no financial worries I would spend days reading about design, blogging, and web development, but not just from “design sites” or “development sites” but from the blogs of great developers and designers themselves. Guys like Jeff Croft who are over all, well rounded smart people and good at what they do.

I read through the blog post, not being able to understand how he was making the decisions he did in the adjustments to the theme, doing so with that designer’s eye that comes from those years of experience (the work kind of experience give and not the have fun and socialize on twitter kind). It was also cool to experience a different kind of story telling that I haven’t had the drive to read recently, a story of a work in progress, going through refinement, tests and iterations, then finally reaching a level of completion that the designer was happy with.

Man, that was cool. But I didn’t pull out my credit card just yet. It took another piece of blogging brilliance before I realized just how much I needed to put down cash and invest in my blogging again. Which I more or less did as a sign of commitment to the general public as much as to myself.

The second post I read that really was a great push towards this end-of-year-reflective-motivator was shared by someone on twitter, which linked to Nick La, posting a link to www.drawar.com and his eye-opener post titled Smashing Magazine Killed the Community (Or Maybe It Was Me). Read the post. Because I admit that I thought the post was almost speaking to me. Bashing the development of what these communities on the net have become and the vicious circles they promoted.

I’m a IT Manager by education, but as far as real world experience goes I’m a digital marketer more than anything else, and when you’re still in school that balance is sometimes something to deal with as you explain it to people. What you do, what you’ve done, what you are being taught to do (or replace “do” with “think”). So even though this post had very little to do with social media, it just made me regret how much attention I paid to things versus how much effort I had committed to working at a higher level than an advanced beginner. On that note I have to also reference a worthwhile 30 minute monologue by Merlin Mann that covers all sorts of usefulness.

In the end of all this consumption over the period of four days I got a wonderful sense of motivation having to do with returning to a time on the Internet like I’ve shared with other people, where people worked hard at their blogs and comments, not because they wanted to sell ads or build a brand, but because they cared about the topics being discussed and what that meant for their profession, or their industry.

I mean, over the past year I’ve seen people blog about their industry and the work that they love and that writing gets no lift, but their posts about some social activity which carries no critical thinking gets shared and commented on like everyone’s at a party. It’s just a bit unfortunate people have lost their appetite for that sort of thing.

Anyways.. How to tie this back together. This is a good time in life, lots of different things going on that I like being involved with. Things that don’t bring in any money but, that hold my attention and give me creative outlets for doing what I like to do, what I want to get better at doing. And as much as I talk about my opinions on the actions of others, it’s rewarding to build bit by bit relationships that mean something, with people who get it.

Uuh…. And it’s fun to lock yourself away in Writeroom (or PyRoom in this case) and not care about clicks, tweets, links or anything else besides letting things go.

The skin I recently bought you can pick up from Toronto based Gelaskins through their online store.

I’m going to bring it way way back and say that there are some services that are providing us already with a very valuable type of augmented reality we should pay attention to.

While web apps for year already have been giving us the power to interact with content in different ways than ever before imagined, for along time they’ve only applied to one or two different types of media. Flickr took our photos and added a bunch of new stuff on top of the photo itself. YouTube did this with our videos. Where we used to have static media objects, we then got these great social objects that we could comment on, share, send around and post in all these different places online.

A problem then developed of there being too many places do interact with these objects. One site for each type of media didn’t cut it. Keeping all this information locked up on our computers was also a bad solution. They had to be in the cloud and work on all the devices we use.

So these solutions on over ever provided part of a solution. Through a deep analysis that I’ll skip for now we might be able to see what exactly was missed, but I think we should move straight onto what’s being done now.

Now we have two services which don’t seem very close, but that I think share some thing very interesting in common. Evernote and Posterous. One handles notes and capturing personal information, the other handles sharing content and media files with others on a blog. The one thing I think they have in common is the fact that they are both marketed somewhat in being able to used to either capture or share many different types of media.

Text, audio, video, documents and various types of files, maps coordinates… These are each types of content that each service is able to capture. As each tool progresses, we’ll soon find it hard to think of something that they can’t integrate with.

What this has to do with augmented reality is that they work on broad levels, enhancing the capabilities of anything that exists in our reality. Unlike Flickr which enhances our photos, Posterous and Evernote work with almost anything you throw at them.

When you think of Evernote, you can almost imagine the tool working through an augmented reality type lense, where each location you used to capture an item, or an idea, is displayed. This wouldn’t make sense usability wise, but it provides an example that this is an application much closer to augmented reality that I think people consider it to be.

So again, these tools work with anything that exist in our world, and transform it into a digital media object, and then add to that object. Posterous adds to objects by transmitting things we see or hear to digital locations or by transplanting files from our hard drives into social blog posts, and Evernote captures things with less of a social transformation occurring, but one more aligned with knowledge and memory management.

One adds more social elements to media, another adds more memory elements. Whenever I think of it like that I always think that there is a lot more opportunity for real world capturing.

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• Augmented Reality Wiki (thelastminuteblog.com)
• Deaugmenting Reality: When Less Is More (socialmediatoday.com)
• Nokia’s take on augmented reality (francescofederico.net)

What we’ve seen Posterous be able to do, and we’ve seen what I see as it’s key differentiator, the power it now gives users to communicate using different forms of media instead of only just video, image, or text. This is the way we already consume media on a daily basis, that’s been supercharged with a layer of social potential.

An example of how things worked before the social layer:

Before where a conversation I had might be the inspiration for a great blog post, the extra layer of work in getting it online involved writing a recap of the conversation, posting it to my blog, both adding to the time needed, to the reliance I had on different tools (in working how I needed them to work, and being accessible where I was), and it added to the chance of me to forgetting key quotes from the conversation, or accidentally changing ideas discussed due to my imperfect memory. Afterwards, users would consume the recap of the conversation I produced, through a medium that makes it difficult to hear the emotion, or emphasis of the many different points covered.

Now imagine this example applied to video, presentations, or essays, and you see the sort of problem Posterous has been able to solve. The fact that I can post everything from wherever I am using email is also a great part of the tool. Email itself is not anything special, but the sheer portability I have with email (from my smartphone or from my laptop) makes it great for putting content online in a speedy manner.

What does this sharing of many types of media do for blogging? Being able to share different types of media is key in being able to communicate ideas more purely. As heavy media consumers we all consume many different types of media daily, being able to share that experience of consuming a particular type of media itself, and not the telling of our story of consuming a particular type of media is a new way of thinking about creating or sharing content online.

What the sharing of different content objects in their original media formats also does is transform these media objects that we are consuming into “social objects”. Like Flickr turned photos into social objects and how YouTube turned videos into social objects, the freedom to share content from a wide variety of media formats directly is giving us the power to create experiences, ideas, and conversations from powerpoint decks, pdfs, mp3s, and other formats more reflective of the author’s original intent.

How are your media sharing habits changing now that you can finally share many different types of media in an easy and beautiful way? How has that changed the way you can communicate ideas with others?

What I had always thought of life-streaming consisted of websites that aggregated your online activity feeds from other web properties into a single website. The one model I framed all my thinking around what life-streaming was had been the application SweetCron, a tool that you host and that displays the feeds you give it.

What had life-streaming changed to? Here’s my perspective: As the main issue in the social web drifted away from developing an aggregate view of your participation in it, it moved towards the goal of filtering the noise and of changing the consumption online from pages to streams. This created a new opportunity to create a stream like media channel, designed for you to consume and engage around the pieces of meaningful content which you and your friends shared.

As much as blogs provide good signal, their posts are generally, too long, or for some blogs fluctuate too much between quality content and filler posts. Meanwhile, most micro-blogging solutions have all encouraged putting all manner of irrelevant content online, they’ve also encouraged the duplicate spreading of ideas, links, and announcements such as news headlines.

What there was a need for, and will become popular beyond the scope of a single application or network is a habit of content production that balances high quality content, bite-sized length’d posts, and an open network system of following particular users, and of participating with them in discussions.

What’s left to be discussed is the idea of taking advantage of different types of media in sharing content and ideas of quality, the way this media rich format integrates with the different ways us as consumers are exposed to and discover interesting media pieces, and finally the sorts of ways that people can gather around a media format of this configuration as they have done for blogs and Twitter.

Easy, the business.

Who controls social media?

The business? Customers? General stakeholders?

How much should a business’s concern be focused on the activities that are in the domain of its control? In one way I think a big part of what businesses should focus on improving is providing as good an experience as possible to their customers. One way it can do this is by trying to remove as many of the barriers for that customer in the way of a good experience. These barriers can take the form of low value for money, shoddy customer service, or a low quality product.

If we bring social media into the picture, in some ways, the business’s goals are unaffected by that. It’s main responsibility is still to provide the best experience possible.

One thing I’m observing is the intention of some brands to try and move into, and control the social channels of it’s customers, without providing any actual benefit to the customer’s experience.

What would happen if instead of trying to own social media, companies used the channels as a way of obtaining information to better improve the customer’s experience? And used that information from thing like the design of new online ordering platforms, to the in-store shopping experience?

Companies are trying to control people through social media instead of using social media as a method to better understand the problems their customers are facing, and using that new information to improve what they do,  and can control.
I though this up as a new approach to social media as one where the different areas connect and flow well from one to another for an organization. I’m not sure how valid it is, or if there are any companies that might be taking a similar approach. If there are, let me know in the comments.

It has one flaw during listening though.

High engagement posts might only ever make up as much as 5% of total discussions, and tools still don’t have built in methods to correctly measure where your audience is on a whole. Social media listening tools might be able to tell you which posts, forum threads, or tweets have the highest engagement, but they don’t do a good job at communicating how much conversation about your brand is happening in the “low engagement” space.

Firstly, audience impact. Say (out of 100 posts) you have 4 high engagement blog posts during a certain time period and 96 medium to low engagement one. It’s too difficult as it is to understand what that equates to in terms of engaged audience as of now. We know that 4 posts were high engagement, but in total what does that mean as far as number of commenters across them all? Same thing goes for the total of our medium or low engagement posts.

Let’s assume that across our 4 high engagement posts 800 comments and retweets were created (the retweets might have been viewed by another 5,000 twitter users). That might be a lot, but when we think about the idea of the long tail, our 96 other medium to low engagement posts might have reached 4x that audience.

So tools give us numbers that explain a posts grade or level of “engagement” but it’s still too difficult to use tools to understand the real reach and impact of content online.

Secondly, if we forget about this issues of real reach of content using engagement scores, what we see each month as being the high engagement posts related to our brand, and how much of a share of conversation high engagement posts make up as a total of all social media discussions should be trended over time. Comparing the difference of the different share of high engagement-conversations between different segments of either audience or brand features as well.

I must admit that I’m still working on the problem of “what does it mean” with regards to comparing share of high engagement conversation. If you have any ideas or answers to that question I’d be thankful if you left your thoughts in the comments.

Some people do a lot, and it doesn’t really mean anything.

Other people think a lot, but really don’t do anything.

How did I get this from science fiction? The idea I was taught was that you’re only really free when you don’t have complete knowledge. The two extremes were between being and meaning. If you have one you can’t have the other.

Social Beings

What I see people fall into is two similar traps. On the one hand you might see people blog every day, post messages non-stop, participate and interact at a fast pace, or go to event after event. But in a way it’s all just noise. At a certain point in time to achieve more activity, meaning must be removed. In this argument I take “Social Being” as meaning one who takes action, participates, and that someone who completely embodies the social being necessitates doing a lot, but who says anything useful less and less. Here are some examples of this:

• As you increase the frequency of your blog posting, the amount of original thinking or meaning they could possibly have in order to meet that volume decreases.(You end up with filler posts, “best of” posts, linking to single videos while excluding any commentary on them).
• The more conferences and social meet-ups you go to, the less you might actually have to contribute, and eventually you end up going just to be seen, or two make the rounds. You may shake 400 hands, but how could you possibly develop any deep relationships with 400 people?

Media Meaning

Thoughtful content. There’s a market for it, but thoughtful content isn’t powerful enough to move a pebble without some sort of action. People might very well understand and agree with the thoughts, but the lack of physical presence by the author or commitment to take action can alienate them. The great ideas shared, may well be great, but it’s difficult to be socially relevant until they, or their author develop real physical presences, reputations, or reputation.

In the end, to be effective your actions need to mean something, and your ideas need to be executed.

Quotes is a good start to this area of social media listening, no matter what you’re listening for you’ll be able to rely on people talking about it with certain emotions, or in the context of certain frames (e.g., I like this but not that, I wish this did that).

Another way we can use frames in our social media listening is to think from a product perspective what is the life cycle of the product across the users experiences, and what are the discussions that take place at certain points in time, such as initial research, time of purchase, taking the product home, or when it comes time for users to sell it.

Product life-cycles are another good frame to use for social listening, because just like frames of discussion, they are inseparable from the consumer, they will always be there. Some products will progress different than others though; buying a house is different than a laptop, which is different than deciding what university to go to. On a more granular level, the frames that your product will occupy in social media discussions will depend on consumer demographics: Age, income, geography, etc… This is important when realizing that the same product may occupy many different frames in social dialog for your different customers or stakeholders.

Just like the enemy of web analytics is measurement of page views and visitors, the enemy of social media listening is listening only for brand mentions.

Social media listening and framing social discussions gives you the opportunity to measure and understand social dialog from a point of view much closer to your actual customers.

Basically I’m feeling some momentum in the community that is forward leaning, and feels like the start of a real quickly moving time in Toronto. Just today there are three different meet ups going on at the same time. I remember when we still had to wait every couple months for a meet-up to come around. Things are moving ridiculously fast.

On top of keeping up with the general community that’s developing in Toronto, everyone has their own personal interests and goals that take even more time and effort.

Not before long it’s easy to feel like your moving in seven different directions, and it’s impossible to move forward at all in any one front. The difficulty of keeping focus is one nut I’ve yet to crack.

So how is it we can keep up? Not keeping up in the sense of consuming information, but of making sure your online footprint, wasn’t last worked on, developed, or even though about 4 months ago.

Keep at it, and be persistent.

Continue to blog.

Do good work.

Don’t get stuck in any one tool, platform, or media.

Explore new ways to communicate.

Always be listening.

Always be responding.

Build relationships one person at a time.

By doing this, and staying focused, you’ll build up envious momentum.

Why should brands be any different?

I know to know where are the examples of, again, the…

Brands, the ones I trust, that have built up their reputations over time, through activities such as blogging, and podcasting. Continual engagement over a long period without any abuse of that relationship. And because of their long term commitment, they have my trust.

You could follow people for other reasons, as I’m sure many people do. I like to think though that this is a system that people follow, and it’s a system that works.

Instead brands try to “cheat” the system, taking shortcuts to the top of the relationship ladder (for one reason because they can afford to). Companies may pay top bloggers to do reviews and market their products, so that the marketing comes from the people that you already “trust” (see paragraph one). Sometimes they sacrifice that long term trust equity they’ve built up, just to make a buck.

If brands were people, how would this look in the real world?

What if brands were made up of people? Well, this is the view I increasingly like to subscribe to, and I think others do as well. If that were the case then every brand already at some level, has the means, and ability to build trusted relationships with it’s customers. Since they’re made up of people as well, marketing practices that seek to ‘take advantage’ are out of line with the trust building methods that already work for people.

My point is that this system is good, and it’s built into the way we as people interact and form relationships with one another.

Don’t fuck with it.

What the metrics of sentiment and engagement tell us, can be thought of as the only indicators we have as to the measures of trust and influence that brands have.

Trust and Influence

Trust and influence are not currently measurable using the standard social media listening method of pulling information from the Internet based on brand or topic mentions. It’s difficult for “trust”, or “influence” to embed themselves in samples of text.

The goals of online/offline marketing campaigns, would it make more sense to say that their goals should be to increase the sentiment consumers have with the brand? The engagement our key customers have with the brand? What if we stated the goal as being to improve the trust that consumers have in our brand?

Of course sentiment, the equivalent of “do people like me” can provide information on the effectiveness of your different efforts, and how people are reacting to the different elements of your business or campaigns, but who seays that sentiment or engagement are really business drivers over the long term. Would not the improvement of consumer trust, and the increase of brand influence over time be real drivers of business?

But as much as we can measure sentiment and engagement, if this is true these two metrics can provide insight into trust and influence, then how exactly do they do it?

Well we can imagine some different ways to group these ideas together and create a model that might create dependencies. Without engagement with a brand (either directly or indirectly), then there is can be no possibility of influence. Or maybe sentiment, and the part of having an emotional connection with a brand, is necessary for any trust to be there (I’m conjecturing here that in order to trust something, you have to have emotions towards it).

Identifying Trust and Influence

How would these dependencies be acted upon and how do the four properties of sentiment, engagement, influence and trust interact with each other? Well again we can pay attention to the different manifestations of community and communication online, each of which creates new behaviour patterns that it’s users must follow.

In a few examples I would think that behaviour patterns are the types of things our social media listening platforms will need to evolve to. Posting a message on Twitter might be an instance of sentiment, and sharing a link might be an example of engagement, but posting a link, and having a large percentage of your followers follow the link could be a pattern that demonstrates your influence over your followers.

This is the beginning of my thinking of the connection between what we are measuring, and what is the best demonstration of a successful brand.

I would appreciate any feedback on these ideas as they are now.

I felt a bit schooled. Thankfully it just goes to show how little I actually know about things like Net Promoter Score… in that, I didn’t know about them.

The report, of which I have not read in it’s entirety of 48 pages, included some insights such as the proposal of a “SIM” score, which turns sentiment scores into an sentiment index that can be used to more effectively measure sentiment between brands of a particular industry while taking into account volume of postings.

From a general sentiment perspective, Brand A with 1 positive post for every 10 with 500 mentions would be more accurately compared to Brand B with 1 positive post for every 5 with only 200 mentions.

Index scores like these mentioned in the report, as well as more to come from the likes of Ogilvy (“conversation impact”) make me think that I was wrong on one very specific idea in my previous post, sentiment can be creative and strategic. We just can stay at the “sentiment” level, creative and strategic uses of sentiment, as well as engagement, are both going to require some smart thinking.

I have some better thinking jotted down and waiting to be blogged about sentiment and engagement and how the two relate to some more important, immeasurable qualities of relationships online.

Though what do you think of sentiment and engagement? Do these hold all the answers?

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• Fluent, the Social Influence Marketing Report (socialmediatoday.com)
• The Net Promoter Score and the value of Promoters (futurelab.net)
• Only 33% of Us Trust Our “Online” Friends; Barely More Than Trust in Banner Ads! (myventurepad.com)

• Teaching English in Korea
• Doing marketing for green-tech in Sweden
• Working at a top 5,000 web property
• Building a new start-up
• Building an existing start-up
• Leading dozens of university business students
• Working at a brewery
• Moving to a new country to find work
• Trying to find their passion after university
• Running a small business
• Trying to find work after university
• Working with web analytics at a non-profit
• Creating a new organization to help high school students
• Starting a career in one of the worlds biggest companies
• Starting new charities
• Learning web development

My question: How can blogging help these people?

Well one thing that blogging could do is provide exposure that would be very difficult to do any other way.

If you work at a brewery, the chance of developing a following are low. You would have to have amazing charisma, great looks and do the job amazingly. Those requirements are very strict and create a high barrier to getting that following. So this is what blogging can do.

Blogging can help give exposure to these people, without there having to be the absolute best, or without having to work an extra 20 hours a week. Not that blogging gives credit away for free to those who don’t deserve it, but I see it as almost a more efficient use of resources when trying to do these things like build reputation.

In university, to get a 80% grade in a course might take a student 60% work effort, and to get that last 20% might take that student’s 40% remaining effort. The more you move up the scale from 70->80->90->100, the more effort it takes to move up one more grade. If we assume that one way to get a good job after university is to get a 100% grade, then the student would have to use 100% of his available effort.

But if that same student was to go out and network, and meet people in the industry or have extra curricular activities, then that student might be able to get the same job by only using in total 80% of his available effort, with 20% remaining.

This is what blogging does for entry level workers. Through blogging and alternative means (and not just putting in 100% or more at the job itself), there’s the possibility to get the same sort of recognition, experience, and knowledge, without effort left to spare.

The best is that there’s even a lot than just blogging that these people could be doing, and there’s the potential to accomplish the equivalent of using %130-%150 (I’m purely conjecturing here). The only requirement to accomplish this would be to take a creative approach to your goals, and always keep your eyes open for better opportunities.

This is really my perspective on things like blogging and social meet-ups overall.

I’m absolutely certain we can do more with engagement than that!

Why Engagement is Under-Emphasized

• Reasons for why engagement is more important than reasons for sentiment.
• Unlike sentiment, engagement doesn’t include the people who are just “talking about” something, because you can be an outsider and talk about a brand, but insiders engage.
  • Though on the flip side, doesn’t having a measure of your wider reach act as a positive? You can understand the viewpoints of your yet-to-be customers.
• Engagement provides leverage. what does sentiment provide?
• A post with high sentiment might go completely un-noticed, but something with high engagement, by definition means more activity and visibility.
• What should these be though of as? Answers? Signs? Opportunities?

Engagement and Sentiment From a Strategic Perspective

• Under what conditions is it possible to integrate sentiment or engagement with strategic plans or decision making?
• What kind of questions can you answer with engagement vs. sentiment?
• Does one give insight into the other?
• What makes the news?
  • -1.5 million people don’t like your product (not news worthy)
  • 1.5 millions people watch a particular video on YouTube (makes the media, seen as a social media success story)
• While doing social media listening, we have to deal with a lot of noise and spam, but it seems to me like engagement as it is the result of social activity, is less likely to be spammed. It might be gamed, orchestrated, or it could be flame wars, but it can’t blatantly spammed.
• What better identifies trends and the market opportunities that exist?
• How well can we connect engagement or sentiment with business drivers like sales?
• In some parts of the business it might make a lot more sense to equate sentiment with business metrics, e.g. high sentiment surrounding customer service, while a metric like engagement might not make sense in the same situation.
• Sentiment only tells you what you already knew (a bad product is disliked), but you get things like magnitude
• Engagement is an influencer -> more engagement something gets, the more it influences.
• We can do segmentation with each metric and yes, find cool info, but what data set gives us the possibility for insights as well?
• With engagement we can identify insights like measure different posts/products engagement over different networks (it’s tendency to be shared), and useful metrics for out reach such as best time to engage with users (when they are in a mood most likely to share and engage with you)

Either or?

• Should these 2 compete against each other? Of course not.
• Each metric, through segmentation, can provide some interesting perspectives on the data.
• But where could we drive more insight?

Engagement Spreads

• Sentiment stops once it’s created, but engagement is infused with many different properties, depending on the channel.
• A post from an engagement perspective gets: voted, includes links, gets shared, generated by users.
• Sentiment, look across messages at pos/neg…. but 90% neutral
• Engagement is a quality that is infused with content and actions. It’s bits are infused with everything.
• Posting to twitter with links = sharing
  • Here we see a simple action + a quality of engagement, create a new action of engagement.
  • Engagement patterns and behaviour analysis is possible
  • These two are simple and insightful qualities of measuring engagement
• Posts on the same channel, combined with different qualities of engagement opens the possibility for the same channel to contain different types of “engagement actions”
  • Examples with Twitter:
    • Broadcast messaging (normal)
    • Sharing links and information
    • Promoting topics (hash-tags)
    • Chatting, and creating associations (@ replies)
• Engagement is easier to measure, and we can piece together connections and actions better with engagement from across the web
• It would be almost impossible to measure the resulting effects of a negative sentiment post on others (but you can track the sharing of engagement.
• Engagement is something. Things that are something – online – can be tracked, analyzed, recorded, segmented.

Engagement and Sentiment As Methods

• While not only are engagement and sentiment the result of actions (interesting blog posts, hateful statements), because of the systems that have been created online (Twitter, Digg), there is now almost a system to create content that recieceves high engagement or sentiment.
• Systems (Digg, Twitter, Reddit) have of created new structures, and in effect, rules for engagement.
• Engagement stops being only a property of things, but it now becomes a method of production.
• So on a bit of an aside from the discussion of engagement vs sentiment, we should also pay attention to the strategies of creating the two.
• If low sentiment = low engagement then:
  • What creates high engagement?
• Engagement, Influence, & Sentiment
  • Are these the three pillars/fundamentals?
  • If there is a method and way to create engagement or sentiment, what are the qualities needed, or what is the process to come up with that?

Again, this post reveals some of the raw thoughts I’ve been coming up with around this idea. But in this case the breadth of possible angles is so broad that the point form method seemed like the best way of communicating it all.

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Social media listening can sometimes be very easy. If you make a decision to go out and look for something in your data, you’ll always get a result, and it will either be expected, surprising, or sometimes even insightful.

Should your social media listening or analysis tool generate and provide insights for you? Is it even possible to? I think improvement in our ability to do advanced segmentation, to experiment with data, and to move towards the edge of known discussions is the real key to pulling insights from social channels.

The zero in the image, is possible in the LCD display of many calculators. If we were to not look for this particular combination though, we would never find it because the calculator never displays it to us.

In social media discussions there’s a 2×2 model of the discussions happening online, and it’s a balance between knowns and unknowns.

• The discussions we know they’re having
• The discussions we don’t know they’re having
• The discussions we know they’re not having
• The discussions we don’t know they’re not having

What social media listening tools are able to do is give you access to each of these realms, but not much else. Without a good listening tool you are practically shut out completely from identifying or exploring this entire set.

At the same time, it doesn’t get much easier when you have a social media listening tool. Without a good tool with the ability to perform advanced segmentation analysis, you also don’t have any way of understanding these realms.

So why are things still so difficult with advanced social media listening tools and segmentation abilities? Because, the tools can’t tell you what to look for, they can only make it possible, and make it easy. You’ll only notice deep insights after you make the decision to find them, and platforms that enable you to move and manipulate data are your only tools.

While tools tend to keep you in the realm of discussions that are happening, our own biases keep us in the first realm, of conversations we know they’re having. That’s why I like advanced listening tools with segmentation abilities. These segmentation abilities are the best method that we can use to start to approach the other 3 regions of social media discussions.

Inspiration for this post taken from Spotto!

From where it stands things are looking good. In our Toronto social media community we have folks of all types:

• Social change
• Marketing
• PR
• Entrepreneurs
• Start-ups
• Students
• Agencies
• Developers
• and more…

Well wait a second, that list looks pretty good, and these are only people from the community mind you. We already have here a diverse group of people. The problem is that when we come together, what are we talking about?

All the same thing usually. Social media this, or social media that. And we’re talking about it as if it’s the first time we’ve ever chatted about social media, using simple metaphors, and failing to dive into real substance.

What would happen if we took the best minds from each category we could come up with, and held different events themed around their industry? Not more events just to chat about mildly interesting social media things that each has experienced, but as an opportunity to teach others some forward thinking, and critical ideas from their industries.

Social media could still be the thread that connects and relates concepts between PR professionals and developers but I see there being so much more we could learn from each others professions, straight from the experts, that in the end could broaden our overall understanding of things like social media. We are not diving deep enough as it is right now, sessions have the risk of becoming repetitive because of it.

Both RedWire and Refresh Events has done a good job with different themed events, trying to touch on different issues at each event. Though I’ll say stop short at saying that they’ve been perfect because more than a couple of the presenters there have did nothing more than pitch their businesses.

To further understand where I think our real strength as a local community lies, re-watch this video by Chris Anderson, curator of TED, where he lays out his vision for what the TED conferences could be. We completely have the same opportunity on our hands.

Have you ever thought about what gets valued more between content and actions?

In many marketing blogs there’s been so much great discussion about how what content produce affects people’s perceptions of you and your personal brand. From blogs to micro-messaging to this recent revival and shift to life-streaming by some big names like Steve Rubel.

What is it about content that makes it so compelling? And important for our perception?

It goes against that one so common phrase we all heard while growing up, “Actions speak louder than words”.

Maybe I’ve missed it, but when is the last time social media experts have dove in to how to best take action to help your brand?

Epiphany: Good content creates action.

Creating good content does speak volumes, because online we since we can all “make stuff”, making great stuff is appreciated and it stands out. Not only that, what makes content so fulfilling online is the power that we as information consumers now have over content.

Our ability to share content is what makes it so important, and powerful. Our ability to share content,  and I don’t think it goes much deeper than this, be them stories, experiences, or the opinions and ideas of others, is what makes content so powerful.

Through the sharing of content we can inform, create ideas, create action, or we can change beliefs and behaviours. We do all this coupled with the intrinsic benefit experienced through sharing (our sharing with our readers, and their sharing with their friends and so on).

From this perspective we can see that the content you create, the blog posts or comments you write, contribute only a small amount to things like your brand, and that the bigger truth of it is that you are represented by your impact on other people.

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Photo credit, Reverend Aviator on Flickr

To start off, bringing up the issue that some people have with events that deviate from their regular schedules. Is it the deviation of the schedule that bothers people, or is it the fact that the event is changing and growing? I put it out there that the problem triggered by deviation of a schedule, but actually a connected to the idea that when events grow and change, they have the effect of alienating people because of a loss of ritual that participants feel.

The focus shifts from the attendees of an event and their ability to socialize and discuss, to what celebrity the event is able to bring to their conference from one month or the next, or how many attendees they can bring in. But even though it might be the growth and change that alienates people, growth and change are also natural processes in an improvement.

So do people want an event that improves? Or do they really only want what they feel comfortable with: An event that stays the same?

Now, Third Tuesday Toronto should be at the front of your mind right now, but don’t get the impression that I have anything wrong with the event or its organizers. I am only using it as a reference in order to make these ideas easier to relate to reality. The ideas are however inspired by the problems I see other people having with the event. I feel like if I don’t bring up Third Tuesday, then the absence of mentioning it will give the impression that I am secretly trying to bash it. Not the case.

I have a couple thoughts, prompted by the recent discussion on the introduction of fees for Third Tuesday Toronto, on what might start to happen in the not too distant future. These ideas are taken from the open source world, and how developers deal with differences of opinion in software projects. I don’t want to repeat and do another blog post on what’s already been discussed, but look a bit ahead at what I see on the horizon.

In open source projects, once a project’s user base grows, more developers join the development team, and the software seeks to solve more difficult challenges. During this time, the risk increases that the wants of individuals will begin to differ from those of the majority of the project. In cases like these, what often happens is that projects will “spin off” from each other, and a one or more developers from the original project will take the existing code and start a new, separate project. The new project will then move in a different direction than the original, using different approaches to solve different problems for different people. This act of branching off can be messy and emotionally heated, but usually the end result is more choice for developers, and different products that better solve users’ needs.

During this time of branching off, what is created by both sides is a redefinition of what each project stands for. Each project will take a look at what their story is, such as Debian’s slogan “The universal operating system”.

When an event gets too big you might not get the same out of it any more, and the only way to be fulfilled is to branch off and start a new one that better suites your needs. But as much as everybody has their own opinions and personal preferences that might lead them to think of branching off and creating a different event, for how many of us are those feelings outweighed by fear of creating conflict in so local of a community.

In the end, how could there ever be a strong community without this sort of renewal?

At the same time I want to make my blog a better place for you. I want the content to be interesting for you, for you to get value out of, a place for you to get new ideas and new perspectives.

… But is that what you want?

Help me understand what I can do to make this blog a better place for you, the visitor, the reader, the commenter. There are so many different questions I want to ask, but I know that there’s some different that you want to say.

Leave your feedback for me in the comments, or using Rypple (Don’t worry, it’s anonymous): http://www.rypple.com/malcolmbastien/openmode

Thank you.

Malcolm

In traditional marketing, sales figures and metrics are your post marks, as well as your guides, but in the world of social media and discussion marketing, the currency of word of mouth is different. New articles get posted, new tools and new trends emerge, and it becomes more of a challenge to measure the success of your product or service. I leave out “campaign” because in this world, a short term campaign is too, short sighted.

Image via Wikipedia

One idea I’ve come across recently is that the unique and notable features of a product or service get discussed online, and also to no surprise, cut corners on quality and negative experiences get talked about with exponentially greater volume. All of these different conversations revolve around the brand. When it comes time to measuring, getting an idea for the “Share of Conversation”, or “Share of Discussion” of each topic can reveal how successful you’ve been if you planned for a campaign to focus on feature X, it can also reveal emerging issues that your community has deemed as important and discussion worthy topics.

For whatever quantitative or qualitative terms emerge from your social media listening, the actual terms and connections that emerge, are only as important relative to their contextual relationship to you’re goals.

It should be no surprise that how people talk about your brand and products, goes a long way online to actually defining them. At the same time these conversations are under your control just enough, that investing and planning in them through the setting goals and benchmarks is a fairly controllable way to actually control the democratization of the brand. The difficult part is that this planning into what online discussions will look like in the far future, need to take part in the early stages of experience design, and product design.

An extension, or bonus, to controlling your brand online through share of conversation (when I say control, I really mean “just hanging on”), is that another opportunity appears to extend this control in the responses to the customers initial reactions. Your response and engagement with users in online discussion, as much as it is an opportunity to fix issues or address user needs, is also an opportunity to shape the resulting conversations that get conducted online.

If we relate share of discussion to Groundswell measures, then it’s easy to see how we can relate share of discussion and tie it to: Customer satisfaction benchmarks, social bookmarking, user promoted material, professional review scores, user reviews, user ratings, etc… If possible, splitting share of discussion one level deeper into positive or negative sentiment can help us even more accurately measure our progress for Share of Conversation for a topic.

For this sort of analysis having a word cloud, or similar type of tool tool provides a good starting point to the analysis you can do. This is crucial for being able to see “bigger picture” ideas contained in a single graph, that stem and revolve around your product. If your listening tool is good, you should also have the ability to quickly examine and understand anomalies that appear in discussions, related to context and have the ability to segment your data.

Again I’ve laid out some rough ideas, I’d love to contribute your thoughts to develop this idea further in the comments.

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There’s a lot more land to conquer for the net generation in the world of big business.

While having a nice lunch with some of my friends from school over the past weekend, toiling over a school project, and discussing the ways that the net generation are changing business, one of my friends brought up the fact that no matter how ‘radical’ the changes they are forcing corporations and the world of business to go through now, it pales in comparison to the shift in corporate culture and leadership they will trigger in 10 years time as they move their way up the ladder to the C-level of organizations.

In the entry level jobs of organizations, we can think of a certain set of changes they are forcing those companies to make.

• They have a need to be more connected while on the job
• Net Geners have some fundamentally different ideas concerning work/life balance
• They are also able to manage working while at the same time interacting with many other people through various online media

These qualities of Net Geners are driving some pretty big changes in business as it is. Anybody who has done actual reading on this topic (I should do more), maybe by reading Don Tapscott’s book, Growing Up Digital, can come up with a much better picture of how the coming of the net generation is affecting business.

But these are shallow waters when we realize that in 10 years, these Net Geners will be “Net Geners/senior executives” and the changes that companies find themselves going through now to take in and adapt to Net Geners in the work force, can’t possibly compare to how they will be changing on a strategic and leadership level. This is something they also shouldn’t leave for 10 years in the future to deal with. Companies would be greatly advantaged to take a proactive approach at understanding how their companies will be changing.

It seems like this is the likely outcome as well. Because Net Geners will either adapt to existing corporate cultures over the next decade (unlikely) or they will drive cultural change in the organization all through their way up. You should be expecting it.

What will those changes look like?
What would you change?

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It’s four months since I began using the Colemak keyboard layout, what was supposedly better than either QWERTY (no contest there) as well as Dvorak, which was where the real question lay.

Well I’m still using Colemak. There have been some real positives I’ve experienced while using this keyboard, and still some questions and concerns I have about it. I’ll explain my experiences here, hopefully other people looking for reasons to switch from QWERTY to Dvorark, or from Dvorak to Colemak will find this useful.

It took me a while to move from Dvorak to Colemak, longer than it would have from QWERTY, which I found out to be really because of the switch from an alternating hand layout (typing left hand, right, left, right) to one that put less effort on alternating keys and more on these keyboard roles. What a pain they were to learn. Because that’s just it, while alternating hands isn’t something you have to learn to do efficiently (as long as you know the key placements) even if you know where the key roll keys are on Colemak, you still have to remember to key role them.

On Colemak you might spell the word “cars” (“casd” on QWERTY), but typing ‘ars’ is different than rolling it. After enough repetition and practice, it clicks in with the muscle memory and the roles do start to come naturally. But, I have sometimes made typos because those role came naturally to me and I made them when I shouldn’t have. This might be a fault of rolling versus alternating.

There are some words in Colemak which are horrendously lopsided in Colemak, and while they don’t happen often in Colemak, it’s hard to think of when they ever happen. Which makes me wonder if there aren’t some real advantages that Dvorak’s quality of having all of the vowels on the left side of the keyboard. Even if the entire layout isn’t optimized for alternating keystrokes, might not it work at least for vowels?

Also on the topic of balance, since we know that the right hand is generally stronger than the left, I really grew to like the fact that Dvorak moved the punctuation keys ( “,”,  “.”, and “/”), to the top row of the left hand, which makes sense given that it’s a less power hand.

The shifting of the backspace key to the Caps Lock key in Colemak is sheer genius. No questions about it. After you stop yourself from reaching for the Backspace key each time, it’s very easy to notice how much smoother and easier it is to delete characters with the Caps Lock key.

One of the non-keyboard layout issues I wasn’t sure was going to be an issue or not, was that Colemak wasn’t a default layout option on Windows machines. I’ve found though that the install process to get Colemak working on both XP and Vista were flawless, and in neither case did I have to more than install a single executable. On Linux though, even though Colemak is included as a layout option, the auto-repeat of the backspace key is disabled by default. Not a hard fix though, as their are other people who have discovered the same problem and provided good walkthroughs to fix it.

So clearly there were somethings about Dvorak I sound more appealing, and at the same time, Colemak has really helped me out in a lot of ways as well. One thing I wish I did do though, was during my transition period not take the cold turkey approach, because I’ve now lost basically all of my Dvorak abilities, which I could have easy avoided by taking a more balanced approach.

It’s also been hard to find a really good tool for measuring and comparing the effort involved with each layout, but by doing some googling you’ll find a lot of info out there that should leave you with the conclusion to give Colemak a serious try.

Go and try it out now at www.colemak.com

I’d love to hear your experiences of using Colemak, the things you’ve liked or disliked.

Image by spo0nman via Flickr

Everyone can criticize a Dell, a Rogers, a Bank, or any large faceless organization. But try and criticize the startup down the street. Criticizing your friends is harder than a big organization.

But even so, there is absolutely none of it going on. Even if it is harder, we need to do it.

Even if you write a whole blog post or a comment with the most appropriate ideas and in a critical manner, it’s a different game when someone you know is on the receiving end of it. We’re much more used to using our social media influence to bash the failures of the big guys, the Walmarts, Microsofts, and Pepsi’s. But what is it we lose by not criticizing, and by not giving feedback to the people we know?

Mistakes are still being made. Is it just taboo to point out the mistakes made by people standing on top of pedestals that the community has placed them on?

This may sound very anti-social or something that would be a stain and negative element of the community, but I disagree. Without it, we risk developing a culture of permissiveness. An environment where things without any control don’t improve, they just get bigger.

Feedback, continual improvement, and renewal (I’m tempted to use the term “refresh”) are fundamental to positive growth. Hell, it’s why Rypple exists (Though in my opinion Rypple is difficult to use in open feedback situations).

As no exception myself, I have a couple of people and companies I could criticize, sure, but the bottom line is that my own opinions matter much less than a change in the mindset of even just a few people,

Definitely just some incomplete thoughts on this. I hope we can continue the conversation though.

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Getting out of the mindset of advertising and direct promotions is important. Neither activity are enough to move customers online. One thing I am seeing that looks promising is the creation of experience centric blogs. Blogs created for, and blogs written by, the people that live and breath the brand experience.

These blogs don’t need to written by company employees, and they don’t need to be blogs about products. The idea of experience economies comes across strongly in experience blogs, that products and services both take a back seat to the economic power available to companies that deliver customer experiences.

Two examples I’ve seen include Dell’s Digital Nomads blog, and Citrix’s Work Shifting Blog.

There’s a couple neat things that these blogs do, that would be a good example for others to take note of for in the future.

Instead of blogging about the companies products, create blogs for the experiences created by the companies offerings for their different customer segments. Just like a laptop company enables businessmen to work on the go, the same tools also enable students to take their learning with them outside the class and into the real world, or how a webcam company enables different customers create more rich connections with others online.

The blogs don’t even need to be written by people at the company. Sure you can give the impression that your corporate culture, or employees care about the products or experiences delivered, or in connecting with customers, but often there’s overhead. What seems to give these experience blogs a running start is the identification and acquisition of already blogging, community figures that live and breath the experience delivered. Get them to blog, get them to be ambassadors of your brand experience. They come, batteries included with an audience, and the skills needed to blog successfully.

Even if blogging is considered an older piece of social media, there’s a lot of opportunities for companies’s products and services to communicate with their customers, and not be pretentious, by exploring this space. There’s a lot of space that companies share with their customers, but not many of them have begun take advantage this higher level of connection they already share.

Are you trying to promote your products or service? Or have you begun to celebrate with your customers the experiences you are providing? To what extent are you even giving your own customers a platform to express their own love for those very experiences?

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Funnily enough, what I do for most of my time at my job is listen to the conversations of millions of people, all going on at the same time. And thanks to the power of social media listening tools, I have the ability to get in and examine these conversations on so many different levels.

So far what it hasn’t helped me to do though, is to realize that a lot of the time the influencers can get it wrong, and that a single conversation by a random person could hold the insights needed to develop a solution or a strategy, or to unfold the whole reasoning behind a movement. Even though it makes sense to have visibility to what the most influencial and followed people are saying, the single guy or girl without much expertise or following might get it right on the first shot.

They might verbalize what everything means on the first try, they might spark a different idea within you to pursue, or they could shed light on a whole new way of thinking, that while you haven’t come across it yet, people are following. There’s so much discovery to do everyday while listening.

For me, while listening to the thousands of conversations, I forgot how powerful the voice of one could be.

Sometimes it’s hard to pay attention to individual voices because of how much volume and attention gets placed on the sentiment of the crowd, how customers as a whole are responding to events or to news. For a large part, the top influencers and sources do all move in the same direction, for as much good as it does. It gets predictable, and when that happens, the listening that provides the most value, or the comments that reveal the most about the situations are hidden away. Sure comments can tell you what most of the customers are thinking or feel at that point in time, but it’s amazing to see a whole possible strategic plan and approach unfold from a single comment, or even a single conversation you over hear on your way home from doing your “real” listening.

There’s this whole idea of listening not as targets to be measured upon in a traditional analytics sense, or in the sense of optimizing like in SEO, but of social media listening also being a key to unlocking new perspectives, concepts and ideas.

So even though listening to two conversations in real life is still hard, and even though we can now listen to 100s of them online, sometimes you only need to pay attention to one.

Image by greatseth via Flickr

If you expect them to talk, then you, the ones who create the product, need to understand the exchanges that take place to enable me to talk about you favourably.

Because so far, most of the exchanges the other guys are doing have been dead wrong.

I was going to originally dive this post into how advertising is dead, but since I don’t know advertising very well, I’ll write about what I do know: Advertising is dead when it comes to driving online engagement.

Advertising, doesn’t lead into organic online conversations, discussion, or any sort of engagement. Maybe I’ve been looking at only a select few sources, but the last dozen or so times I’ve seen any reports published discussion ROI, either financially or in a social media metrics sense, the reports and news have covered the effects of advertising on those gauges.

It’s my observation that the actual elements that drive online conversation, as well as general customer satisfaction with goods or services in this day and age are twofold:

Product Design, and Customer Service.

Maybe there’s a whole lot of other things that drive it as well. But I remember hearing a long time ago something along the lines of, “For every dollar invested into product design (or customer service for that matter) revenue increases 3 times that amount.” Sweet! Where the hell did all the discussions and reports about these insights go?

It’s ridiculous how much attention advertising gets, either in the print medium, or the online. Isn’t the quote “advertising is the cost of being boring” still true? As good as your advertising is, it may get your customers to make a purchase, but it doesn’t help them in any way engage in positive discussion. All those dollars that could have gone into making a good product were taken out and put in advertising. So they tweet about how crummy your products are. And when they call your company for support, they tweet about how crummy your customer support is!

The discussions are fueled by their experience with the product, and their experience with the support.

Examples have already been around for a while that support these ideas: Zappos with its excellent customer service is “Viral” like DHH sarcastically called it, even though they only make “F*cking shoes“, because they have amazing support and show care towards their customers. Hopefully people can comment product that come to mind that have been successful in merit to exceptional design.

To leave off with a nice retweetable comment:

Conversations are ignited by the customer’s experience from your product, and kept ablaze by your support.

Remember that product design and customer service are ongoing engagements between your brand and the customer.

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