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Tribes and Tribal Leadership

August 24, 2009 | 1 Comment

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The book Tribes by Seth Godin is slightly larger than a CD jewel case. Yet the wisdom Godin shares in the book resonates on a MUCH bigger scale – and apparently with MANY people (the book has been the #1 bestselling leadership book on Amazon for nearly a year).

Godin suggests that anyone, anywhere can be a leader. The one thing holding most people back is the fear of failure.

Tribes isn’t a step-by-step manual about being a leader. Godin explains that:

Every tribe is different. Every leader is different. The very nature of leadership is that you’re not doing what’s been done before. If you were, you’d be following, not leading.

Tribes is about making a choice – to lead or not to lead. Using real world examples, Godin tells stories about how famous and not so famous people made the choice to lead and the amazing things they’ve accomplished.

The insights in Godin’s book are not profound – and maybe that’s the point. For example, Godin skillfully shows time and time again why management is not the same as leadership.

Management is about manipulating resources to get a known job done … Managers manage a process they’ve seen before, and they react to the outside world, striving to make that process as fast and as cheap as possible. Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating a change that you believe in.

Godin writes that it takes only two things to turn any group into a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.

So a leader can help increase the effectiveness of the tribe and its members by

  • transforming the shared interest into a passionate goal and desire for change;
  • providing tools to allow members to tighten their communication; and
  • leveraging the tribe to allow it to grow and gain new members.

Most leaders focus only on the third tactic. A bigger tribe somehow equals a better tribe. In fact, the first two tactics almost always lead to more impact.

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Twelve Awesome SXSW Panel Proposals

August 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment

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Voting has started for SXSW 2010. This is a great opportunity for people to vote on the sessions they would most like to attend (or hear about if they are unable to attend) at next spring’s conference in Austin. There are 2,213 proposals – and only 300 will be selected for the Interactive Festival. Many outstanding topics and speakers have been proposed. I spent some time looking at the proposals. Below are the twelve that I found most interesting (you’ll find another list of 10 good panels in Mike Samson’s post from a few days ago). Be sure to click through and sign in to vote for the ones you like.

Pulse of Branding: The Q&A Keynote

The question and answer portion of Gary Vaynerchuk’s presentations always tends to evoke the greatest emotion and best content. The ultimate in interactive presentations, Gary will field audience questions for this entire session. Indeed, the pulse of branding promises to

Why I like this panel: Gary is one of the best motivational speakers on the planet. His presentations are colorful, substantive, and emotional. If you want to understand personal branding – there’s no better person to learn from. And if haven’t seen Gary talk, there’s a good collection of his keynotes on his site.

Design Isn’t The Problem: Why Online Products Fail

Major media companies keep creating useless Web products. With all that’s gone wrong, there are simple lessons we’ve learned as well as some easy steps to follow to ensure you create a product/experience that people actually want. We’ll discuss why they get it wrong how it can be done right.

Why I like this panel: There are many bad and often useless products created every day. Even companies that make great products sometimes misstep. Learning from others’ mistakes is often better than making your own.

Seductive Secrets of the Brain: Neurodesign in Action

What does the human brain enjoy and why? What does it dislike (avoid) and why? How is brain activity measured during the audience/consumer experience? What best practices appeal to the brain? What are the most common design mistakes? Are there gender difference in brain preference and processing?

Why I like this panel: Last year’s presentation on how people perceive things was one of my absolute favorites. We often forget that there’s a science behind the art of design – and this panel promises to answer some very interesting questions.

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Welcome To The Social Media Revolution

August 17, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Did you know that it took television 13 years to reach 50 million users? Facebook reached 100 million users in only 9 months. And Facebook isn’t even the largest social network. QZone – a Chinese analog, has 300 million users.

If you still think social media is a fad – the following short video (4:22) offers some compelling arguments that could prompt you to reconsider your views.

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Are “Social Media Experts” Responsible For 40.55% Pointless Babble On Twitter?

August 13, 2009 | 2 Comments

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A study released yesterday by Pear Analytics analyzed 2,000 tweets in English, from U.S. users, randomly captured in half-hour increments between 11 am and 5 pm CST, over a two week period. Each tweet was categorized into one of six categories: News, Spam, Self-Promotion, Pointless Babble, Conversational and Pass-Along Value.

The results: 40.55% of the tweets were pointless babble. Conversational tweets (conversations between people) represented 37.55% of the 2000 tweets, and Pass-Along Value (any tweets with RT) represented a very distant third – at 8.7%.

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Anyone who conducts substantive original research deserves a lot of credit.  When the original research looks at the data in ways that others haven’t measured before – this credit is well deserved. Kudos to Ryan Kelly and his team on a job well done.

When I initially read the study, I wondered whether the sample of 2,000 tweets was statistically significant. I asked Ryan (on twitter). Ryan said that his team knew that there were 3 million tweets per day on twitter, and that a “inferences of a billion is estimated with data of a few thousand.” Ryan also added that the trends were pointing in the same direction, so it was not necessary to sample more data.

I hope Pear Analytics considers slightly expanding its analysis in future studies by assessing how their measured data is impacted by some or all of the following:

  • Five percent of Twitter users create 75 percent of the tweets (according to Sysomos). It would be interesting to compare the five percent to the other 95 percent, and categorize the results. Maybe we’d find that the pointless babble is created primarily by the thousands of “social media” experts on Twitter. Or the 24 percent of Twitter users who are bots (and presumably, also social media experts).

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We Cannot Change The Past, But We Can Change The Future

August 11, 2009 | 2 Comments

3565828392_5dbd6b9000_oA few days ago, I watched an episode of The Simpsons.

In that episode, called “In the Name of the Grandfather”, the Simpson family travels to Ireland so that Grampa Simpson can visit a pub where he had the best night of his life. In one scene, the pub owner is watching a  horse race and is screaming madly for one of the horses to go faster and win. When the horse loses, the pub owner takes a video tape out of the VCR and mumbles that the horse can’t win the darn race (which took place in 1979!).

I laughed. How could the horse win? The pub owner was watching a recording of a 30 year old race that the horse lost. But after laughing, I started thinking. We all think about the past. We hyper-analyze our decisions and the consequences of those decisions. We assess what would have happened if we took made different decisions. We dwell on our mistakes.

It’s both necessary and helpful to learn from mistakes. But some of us obsess about the past – just like the pub owner (I’ve certainly done that at times). And in our obsession with the past, we often lose sight of the fact that we cannot change the past. Ever.

But we can change the future. We should obsess about that instead.

image credit: fragmented

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There’s Only One Cinderella

August 10, 2009 | Leave a Comment

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Most know the classic folk tale Cinderella. It’s a story about a young woman living in obscurity and neglect who unexpectedly finds love and happiness.

Cinderella’s story illustrates something that we often forget. There’s only one Cinderella.

Why should you care?

In our efforts to achieve success (in whatever we do), we often try to emulate people who are successful. Basketball players want to play like Michael Jordan, movie directors want to make movies like Steven Spielberg, authors want to write books like J.K. Rowling. But at the end of the day, there’s only one Michael Jordan, one Steven Spielberg and one J.K. Rowling.

Perhaps we are overly obsessed with emulating and understanding how/why others have succeeded?

Seth Godin was right that most people spend all their time on trying to understand tactics to get things done and to change minds. But in the search for that perfect strategy, we lose sight of our goals, we stop making good decisions, and we forget that ultimate success is measured by our ability to earn the trust and respect of people around us.

Each day, we have an opportunity to write our own unique story. What will you do today to earn the trust and respect of people around you?

image credit: Joe Penniston

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Do We Hold Social Media To A Different Standard?

August 4, 2009 | 4 Comments

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I read an interesting post written by Lauren Fernandez a few days ago – “Social Media Hypocrites: How genuine is this platform?”

In her post, Lauren asks whether social media provides people with “too much leeway for hypocrisy” and whether some involved in social media abuse that medium. The post was written to spur conversation – and it has.  In her post, Lauren writes:

Question. Are we all social media hypocrites? Ok, not all of us, but definitely a few. How genuine is social media? I read blog posts of a stance someone holds, then they speak a different opinion if someone disagrees. They network with people based solely off their profession, not off what they stand for, like, etc. They tell me one thing to try to “build” or “connect” with me, but tell my friend Bob something else. Guess what? Bob and I talk.

The questions Lauren asks in her post are both appropriate and legitimate. Yet, I wonder whether as a group, we’re holding social media to a different standard than other forms of media – or better yet – other forms of communication.

Lauren’s post reminded me of an excellent panel at SXSW this past March led by Russ Unger and David Armano – “Friendship Is Dead”. That panel explored “how the word ‘friendship’ came to be and … how our online social networks have begun to erode away at what friendship has meant.” I had the same reaction to Russ and David’s panel – that in assessing the purported erosion of “friendship”, we’re holding our online activities to a different standard than our offline activities (and friendships).

I suspect that many of us would agree that there are plenty of hypocrites in social media (starting with the so-called “experts”). But hypocrisy is hypocrisy – whether on Twitter or in a face-to-face conversation. There’s real value in exploring the questions such as those Lauren asks in her post. But in exploring such questions, shouldn’t we hold all of our relationships, interactions and communications to a common standard?

image credit: assbach

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