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Dec 14 2009

Capture and Share Your Experience to Become a Leader: the Blogging Path

Category: career,social media,tech opinion — jmacofearth @ 6:47 pm

mountain pathNobody is going to share or care about you in the social verse unless you are expressing yourself.

"Do I need to start blogging?" I am asked frequently.

"I don't know," I say. "Do you think I'm going to dig into your Facebook posts or Twitter history to see what you are interested in?"

The barriers to entry are low. Free services are plentiful and make it easy to look good. Heck they even do the search optimization for you if you hook up the right plug-in.

The path to blog relevance is long. But it IS a path you cannot afford to ignore. If you are already SET in your life and career (Mr. Jobs, Mr. Dell, Mr. Trump) then perhaps the view from your mountain top is already complete. For the majority of us who are still working to pay for things, I'd say sooner or later you have to start up the hill.

You can pause and contemplate your voice, niche, or reason for blogging for a little while. And perhaps I should've paused a few times before I hit "publish" in the past. But you cannot brood or postpone starting the journey forever.

Remember that this social media thing is a journey and not a mountain top destination. The steps up the path of engagement and self-discovery are likely to be fruitful and illuminating.

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/blogging-path

photo Path to Putukusi Mountain courtesy of Gerry and Denise Aitken

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Dec 08 2009

16 Ideas to Define Your Social Media "Thought Leadership"

Category: about me,social media,teaming & leadership,tech opinion,trust & reputation — jmacofearth @ 10:33 am

Thought leadership without the doing is just thinking.

The I've been trying to answer the question what makes a thought leader? What is "thought leadership?" How does someone become a thought leader?

Here are 16 ideas of how to contribute your thinking. Leading is a bit more of an audience participation thing, but you CAN focus on yourself and refining your message.

  1. Blog -If you are not putting your "thinking" and "doing" down in writing, Google is not going to to know you exist.
  2. Twitter – It's fine, but make sure you know what you want from twitter, to me, Twitter is about establishing a "voice" rather than shouting a sales message.
  3. Participate – Where do you spend time online? What sites do you visit frequently? What is it about Facebook that has made it the 2nd largest destination site in the world? (Do you know who is #2? Hint: The site is owned and operated by a telecom and they don't speak English anywhere on it.)
  4. Infuse your imagination – a. read (rss feeds, tech magazines (wired, fast company, inc), b.follow some interesting tweeters (who do you look up to?), c. play the game (and games online), d. share your "thoughts," e. get experience by doing some work.
  5. Go mobile – How does your phone influence your online experience, how do you share with your phone that is different than wifi-accessed computer sharing? (80% of Tweets are generated via mobile apps and mobile sites.)
  6. Set goals – It's easy to say "be everywhere" but harder to make decisions about where to spend your time online.
  7. Embrace the long view – You can't gain 1,000 followers in 10 days, and if you could would they be followers that you wanted? Your linkedin profile is developed over years of experience.
  8. Beyond Facebook – How do you stay in touch? Where do you go to catch up on what your friends are doing? LinkedIn weekly updates? LinkedIn Groups? Friendfeed?
  9. Celebrate the amazing – The iPod and iPhone were industry changing products – study what made them special and what keeps them ahead of ALL the competition. (Can you envision a competitive advantage that RIM has over the iPhone? What will Google do with Android to make it succeed? What will iPhone v2 be?)
  10. Smart friends – gather with other online thinkers, find ways to do it differently within your peer group, your company (How would you have WCP do things better on the INTRANET? What do you want to see on the WCP Intranet? Where would you see the most value from a company intranet?
  11. Network with new people – Blast beyond your close network and force yourself to attend a Tweetup, a BarCamp, an industry conference.
  12. Learn, study, build – There is no excuse for not expanding your toolbox. (Lynda.com / Inbound Marketing University / classes and workshops)
  13. Be fierce with your competition – "New business is not about fairness." (What are they doing that we are not? What do you need to do better? How will you stand out in the crowd of smart companies, or in a company of smart people?)
  14. Connect in Real Time – The online world of social media is expanding the reach and influence of every one, time online, emails, chats, tweets are all good examples of connecting online, but don't forget, often business is done with a handshake and a face to face meeting. Look to add one personal meeting per week to your schedule (lunch, coffee, tennis, tweetup).
  15. Lead – Don't do anything tentatively. If you're going to get involved, do it with passion. If you don't have a passion for what you are doing you cannot fake it. In Seth Godin's Tribes he says, "Nobody forwards a boring email." Make sure you are injecting energy and thought into your participation.
  16. Write – If you are not capturing it, no one is going to do it for you. And how will you remember all that you learned and all you've yet to explore?

I look forward to hearing more ideas for this list in your comments or emails. And I look forward to hearing (reading actually) you getting out there and leading.

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/16-leading-ideas

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Dec 01 2009

What Is Social Media Thought Leadership? And My Next Gig!

Category: about me,community building,executive learnings,social media,teaming & leadership,tech opinion,trust & reputation — jmacofearth @ 2:54 pm

Screen shot 2009-12-01 at 1.54.30 PMIt's easy to point at Chris Brogan, Seth Godin and a handful of others and get the idea of "thought leadership on social media." And in this tender young enterprise the definition would be spot on. Both Chris and Seth WORK it and then they THINK about and LEAD conversations for the rest of us. But what about "the rest of us" hoping to add value and make some insightful observations about social media? What does "thought leadership" mean exactly?

By exploring and actively participating in social media, the practitioners begin to get some ideas of how things could be done better, ideas about what would make the social media for business proposition more fruitful. Does that make us social media thought leaders? Simply by writing about social media I would guess we are trying to "become" thought leaders, but what if the observations are proven false? Is it better to put it out there and get it wrong, to engage in the discussion about social media and then watch as the crowd goes another direction?

Brogan is great because in addition to evangelizing social media he practices what he preaches. He has WORKED in the business of social media for years. Perhaps now he is speaking more than participating. Perhaps he's even "thought leadering" more than he is helping companies execute on refined social media strategies. But a certain amount of time in the trenches trying to figure it out, trying many different things, learning from failures, does, in my mind, qualify Chris Brogan as a thought leader on social media.

So what about the rest of us? I certainly have spent 4 – 5 years working to build "communities" and add "web 2.0 features" to corporate websites. Heck I even got to work within the famed Dell Global Online team and work with the Communities and Conversations group to define, build and launch Telligent's Community Server platform. And boy did we learn a lot in that process.

So maybe I AM a social media thought leader. Or maybe I'm just a social media thinker. And perhaps the "leadership" part of my thoughts comes from insights that are echoed, challenged or refined by others. It's in the doing and the participating in social media that I have learned my greatest lessons. And I continue to attempt to lead by putting these ideas out there, on uber.la and several other blogs where I contribute.

What I do know is that I am a social media participant. An excitable learner, early adopter, a vocal advocate and critic. I am attempting to put it out there by being real and being involved. If this is leadership then that's great. but that's not my goal. My goal is to continue growing and learning. And my business is to help companies and colleagues try and get the communities and conversations part better.

I am excited announce that I will be joining Bob Pearson on his social media team, as part of WeissComm Global. For as Bob lead the majority of Dell's social media programs, and guided me on several projects, he is a voice for rational business objectives and how we can better accomplish them using leading edge technologies and innovative community ideas.

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/weisscomm

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Jul 09 2009

Sooo, You're the Leader of a Social Media Team…

Category: about me,career,executive learnings,social media,teaming & leadership,tech opinion — jmacofearth @ 7:36 am

If you lead you must participate. Demonstrating your understanding of social media is a simple matter of being a part of social media. There are too many academic "social media" leaders who think about social media but don't participate in it.

Having never participated in a Facebook game you may never have any creative ideas about how to harness that medium to the advantage of your client. If your Twitter participation is superficial, your learnings about Twitter will also be superficial. And there are a whole lot of superficial Twitter folks out there. So I guess you can blend, you can talk the language, but you don't lead like that. And you certainly don't guide and mentor a team without being a participant yourself.

Seriously at one or two tweets a week, this thoretical team leader shows up in my twitterstream about 30 seconds a week. If I'm not watching at that time, I miss it. It's as if this person feels an obligation to use Twitter, to show their participation. But they don't really want to "participate."

twitter growth graph Sooo, Youre the Leader of a Social Media Team...

an average of 13 tweets a month for a former manager

You know I had the same problem with a former manager. A lack of desire to participate. There was always the "next meeting" even if it did not exist, that this person had to rush out of our meetings to get to. I never figured out what was so much more important than connecting with your staff. Even in meetings where the discussion was around topics to make the manager's performance review successful as well, it was as if there was ALWAYS something more important. Minutes later, when we returned to our cubes, we could hear this person on the phone, and we joked with each other about the how "busy" we ALL were.

Note to former colleagues with no blog and daily tweets of 1 or less.

  • If you aren't participating then you don't get it.
  • If you think you get it and are not participating then you are ignorant.
  • If you are ignorant and still think you know better but are not participating you are delusional.
  • If you are delusional and still managing a 'team' then I pity them.

To Social Media Managers out there, "Get in the game. Use the tools. Follow your people. Engage in the community not just the idea of the community. And here's the kicker: your community begins with your people. How you treat your people demonstrates your participation with the social media sphere as a whole.

If you don't care, it shows. Up the management stream you might have opportunities to demonstrate your fluency. But your team wants to connect with you. And if you can't, won't or don't know how, you and your team are in a poor position to effectively lead any social media efforts. First and foremost, social media is social. If you are not, you might move your career path more towards metrics or financial analysis.

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/socialmedia-leader

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future posts

∴ A Collaborative Space: WebEx, Go-To-Meeting, Skype, Basecamp (Teaming/Meeting Tools)
∴ Twitter Problem: How do you find enough interesting people to follow? Then how do you keep up with them?
∴ The Agile Mind: Construction, Evolution, Care, and Feeding Instructions for Mental Flexibility

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