Posts Tagged ‘Humans’

When people get together

I had lunch this week with John Haydon (@johnhaydon) whom I follow on Twitter. We’ve chatted back and forth over the months about music social media and other things and we realized sometime this spring that we live fairly close to one another. We set up our meeting completely via Twitter, never sending a single email nor calling on the phone. I think that neither of us had any real notion of what to expect from the meeting, though, as I mentioned to John during the lunch, I approach all such opportunities with the attitude “who knows what happens when you put two intelligent folks together to talk.” We swapped stories about our social media adventures, shared tips and tricks and generally just talked about things relating to starting a business, fatherhood and the like.

I think that we both learned something from talking and laid a solid foundation from which to explore possibilities down the road. Also, importantly the meeting drove home the very real, and very awesome fact that behind the avatars and handles are people — actual, identifiable, physical people — not just demographic and psychographic distillations of types. Technically, I may not use twitter correctly (I’ve blogged about the “rules” of usage in the past) but I use it in a way that suits me. I’m not just an entrepreneur. I’m not just a family man. I’m not just an art history guy. I’m a lot of things and I follow many people. Some may help my business. Some I may help. Some I follow just because I want to see different perspectives from people of different nationalities, genders, politics, interests, ethnicities and regions. I frequently start chatting if something that someone says piques my interest. Often, I listen. I view Twitter as a line directly into the universal brain to which I hopefully contribute and from which I learn a tremendous amount. Back in December 2008 as I was pulling myself together and starting this company Twitter helped me feel a part of something bigger by looping me into  the idle chatter, the keen insights, the silliness, the mundane-ness and beauty of many people talking to one another.

It is this concentration of people that make social media the “It” channel in the minds of marketers, right now, but I think that too often the reality of the people who make up these communities gets lost. Marketers of all stripes count people as “eyeballs,” “traffic,” visitors,” “followers,” “leads,” “acquisitions,” “conversions,” “potential revenue/income/sales” and “friends.”Perhaps, CMOs and social media directors and CSMOs need to come off of their perches and interact with folks. Perhaps, a bigger part of their job should be real-world interactions with people who are passionate enough about their company and product to follow and interact with them in various channels. Social media is a start, but there’s no replacement for siting down to a pizza and a Greek salad and some good old fashioned conversation. It bears repeating: it’s amazing what happens when people get together and talk.

Please read John Haydon’s take on our meeting: The most effective social media tool in the universe

Tweeting

The past week has been a busy one at exUrban Inc. As a result I blew last week’s deadline for publishing to this blog. One thing that took a bunch of time was my effort to overcome my own social media anxiety. Now, I probably shouldn’t admit this in public, and certainly not to people who might be reading this blog in the interest of working with exUrban Inc. Yet, honesty is one of the traits on which I pride myself, and to be completely honest, social media can be mildly anxiety producing — though beyond the glow of my monitor, I’m not at all socially anxious.

For one, in the social media space, you are putting yourself out there on a daily basis, and let’s face it, we want people to like us and to like what we say, or write. Second, social media blurs the line between the personal and the professional in ways that are really remarkable. The personal becomes public, and the public is personal. Since I got onto Twitter before I started this company my tweets tend to be truly of the micro-blogging variety — observations about the world, weather, running, and some mention of my business when appropriate. I’m not one to put out constant tweets about my company because we’re still in start-up mode and though it’s possible to be a shameless self promoter on Twitter, and other social communities, that’s not my, or our, style (I’m exUrban Inc’s Twitterer, though I’m working on Nancy).

My general approach to social media is to be myself, to demonstrate a variety of interests, and over time expose enough of myself to the world (but not too much, I still do value privacy and will not put pictures of my kids into the public, for a totally personal example) that people will come to trust me and perhaps recommend me and/or look to work with me. I haven’t proven yet that this works, though I have recently met with a Twitter acquaintance in the real world and hope to meet with more in the future. 

Such meetings don’t need to be for my profit or theirs though connections initiated in the virtual space of a social media community yield interesting opportunities. It’s what happens when humans come together. One major thing to keep in mind is that what you are doing on places like Twitter is creating real relationships that require nurturing over time. Just as in the real world, you can’t have a relationship with everybody you know, but pick out some interesting folks with whom you are connected and work on building rapport. Be yourself. Be honest. Be polite and respectful of others (just like in the physical world). Put your picture on your accounts, let people know there is a person back there. Finally, remember that these things cannot be rushed and require effort. Be patient. Define what you want from the medium and work to achieve these goals by focusing on communication, sharing and openness.

Thanks to the folks I follow on Twitter for imparting these lessons to me.

A clean shave

A colleague wrote me recently and asked me if I knew anybody who did development for a certain open source platform. I was not overly familiar with it and despite a seemingly robust community of supporters it is not a huge community. I put out a tweet, and put out some direct notes to some of my developer friends and unfortunately, got nothing back.

This incident has proved educational to me: beware of the bleeding edge. When producing work, and executing projects the availability of talent to help you finish the job must be taken into account. Now the circumstances around this situation were fairly extreme, but all projects are a human endeavor, and when dealing with humans there is no telling what situations may arise.

I once had a client, a true innovator in their sector (the innovator in their sector, actually) but when planning marketing campaigns, and discussing the technology to use for them they preferred that their units work — both technically and from the perspective of ROI — rather than be technological feats (I still agree with this, if it makes sense for the brand and its goals then go rad, but never do cool for the sake of cool). We used to joke that they wanted to be first as long as someone else went before them. All jokling aside we did do some bleeding edge campaigns for them, but we worked closely with our vendors to ensure success. I commend my colleague and his company for their use of this young, cool, interesting platform. They were hamstrung at the last moment by a one in a million scenario. Unfortunately, that’s the margin for error on the bleeding edge.

Maria Montessori

My children attend a Montessori school. I have to admit that we didn’t know much about it when we first enrolled them there except that the classrooms were open, children could work on what they want, when they want, and that the woman who founded the method was Maria Montessori.

What we learned, though, is that Montessori was developed as a system to teach institutionalized children life skills starting with grooming, cleaning etc., and proceeding to reading and writing. Montessori then took the system out of the institution and taught developmentally-able, but underprivileged, children similar skills. In a Montessori classroom the child learns through doing, and is free to explore the class room and its activities as he or she sees fit. The teacher guides them and there are steps to each of the activities. There is a right way and a wrong to do things, but by making mistakes the child develops necessary life skills.

I attended two classes with my two Montessori-attending children last week and I started thinking how the best agency processes mirror their classrooms. I’ve been around agencies a long time and almost from the day I started everybody within the organization fretted about “process process process.” Sometimes, there was no process and chaos ensued. Other times process was a thick manual, or required regimented, and required, online classes and chaos ensued.

The best processes evolved organically from within teams from the individuals themselves and as a result suited the personalities and working styles of the team. This is not to say that there was no process, there was. It just was not the be all and the end all — the work and the people doing the work were. A framework — cogent, clear and consistently applied — was in place, as in a Montessori classroom — but team members were permitted to work in their own way to reach the goal, within defined parameters. Adults, like children, will perform when given an environment in which their individuality (their humanity, really) is respected and neither forced to conform to some mathematical model of efficiency, nor allowed to wallow in anarchy. Provide a framework, set expectations, be consistent in them, permit people to be people, and wondrous things happen.