BrandToBeDetermined

Social Media Optimization: Putting the Relations Back in PR

Essex House
Originally uploaded by eschipul

Presenting "Social Media Optimization: Putting the Relations Back in PR" tomorrow in Miami. Wish me luck!

What are you doing to build morale in a recession?

Eurasian Eagle Owl
Originally uploaded by eschipul

Question: What are you doing to build morale in a recession? People are worried!

Answer: Not much really. I no longer view it as management's job to entertain the troops.

Or to put it another way; whatever will be will be.

Whether the issue is the price of gas, the price of food, the electric bill, the war, the recession, the unemployed, the lack of health care, the broken government run by the boomers to be paid off by the millenials who haven't figure it out yet, the devaluation of our currency, well, there are just plenty of reasons to be in a craptastic mood as an American right now.

I've done this dance before. 2001 was crap even before 9-11 and it went down from there. And we were told to "go shopping" while we figured out who attacked us. (Rant: This time buy a smaller car. Carpool. Move closer to work (gasp!). Get a roommate. Save money. Meet the neighbors. Organize card nights to save money from restaurants and have a better time and get the kids playing in the streets again. Think.)

As a company we had an mini-exodus of employees in 2001 and went from 12 employees all the way down to 6 at our lowest point. As a leader I blamed myself for this. No longer. Maintaining employee morale and a sense of determination is far beyond the ability of one leader. Particularly given the inputs of so many outside of work.

The public for which masterpieces are intended

...as dead as O-Ren
Originally uploaded by eschipul

"Whom were these two seeking to please? Not the audiences of Lima. They had long since been satisfied. We come from a world where we have known incredible standards of excellence, and we dimly remember beauties which we have not seized again; and we go back to that world. Uncle Pio and Camila Perichole were tormenting themselves in an effort to establish in Peru the standards of the theaters in some Heaven whither Caleron had preceded them. The public for which masterpieces are intended is not on this earth."

- The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thorton Wilder, pg 77

The Post American World

BBC World News has a posted Fareed Zakaria Post American World. First

"the rise of the rest places certain limits on American power"

"The rise of the rest" is actually a pretty darn positive statement. From a study-of-power perspective it is no surprise that the vacuum formed, the monopoly formed by the USA being the sole-super-power, has a post-world that is hopefully more balanced.  Make no mistake, I am incredibly pro-America because, well, I am an American. I can't tell you how much I love this country.

Yet conversely I don't like our role as World Police. I don't recall applying for that job, and the fact we have been forced into it, leads us to an awareness of a lack of gratitude. This leads to email snippets like the one below.

5 Basic Rules of Negotiation

Reading  Harvard Negotiation Project: 5 Lasting Rules For Negotiating Anything on GigaOm made me send the list of five rules of negotiation to a client. First the rules:

1. Don’t Bargain Over Positions
2. Separate the People From the Problem
3. Focus on Interests
4. Invent Options for Mutual Gain
5. Insist on Using Objective Criteria

One side effect of the recession I have seen is clients getting into complicated situations, even some self destructive, almost as a diversion from the real issues. I don't have a solution. But I do wish folks would learn a little more about creative negotiation to get us all to a happy place. Just keep paying it forward I tell myself.

Ries: The Law of the Proper Brand Name

the real thing
Originally uploaded by eschipul

On the subject of rules for brand names.

For readers of this blog it comes as no surprise that I am a big fan of Ries and Trout's book Positioning. And since then a continued fan with The Fall of Advertising and The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding. They articulate thoughts that just make sense; logically, psychologically and sociologically.

Working in the tech sector and also being a fan of Moore's Crossing the Chasm I view brand names very much as a sociological pattern. The mavens, even if your biggest fans, must be able to COMMUNICATE that knowledge to the early majority. It is YOUR job to give them a strong brand name to communicate!

Recently rereading the 22 Immutable Laws, I found the chapter I was looking for when I wrote this post on brand naming. Here is a summary:

The Law of the Proper Name (pg 148)

1. The name should be short
2. The name should be simple
3. The name should suggest the category (flickr?)
4. The name should be unique
5. The name should be alliterative
6. The name should be speakable
7. The name should be shocking
8. The name should be personalized

So it hurts me when I see friends use bad brand names. Not my job to prevent the world from using irrelevant 10 syllable Russian sounding cryptographs on the basis of "Hey, IBM uses an acronym!", but if you must, you must. If however you have a choice, I am going to strongly suggest you follow Ries' Law of the Proper Name.

We did, which is why I love our brand name for Tendenci which one of our artists at the time, Randy Sarinas, came up with. Now if only we had a better positioning statement for Tendenci, but that is another blog post.

Work Stressors and How to Respond

the blight
Originally uploaded by eschipul

Stress. Sucks.

Much has been written about stress invoking the limbic brain, which while effective in dealing with saber toothed tigers, isn't so great at dealing with the complexity of the modern world. Add on top of that the recession, inflation and our mind's dubious relationship with money and you have a mess. A mess of stress.

So to break this down I did some reading and The Stress Experience at work comes, according to researchers, comes from:

1. a person's perception of the situation;
2. the person's past experience;
3. the presence or absence of social support; and
4. individual differences with regard to stress reactions.

(source: Organizational Behavior, Hellriegel, Slocum, Woodman, pg 199)

Attacking these one by one can and will reduce stress. Perception. For example the people a person hangs out with and the content they put into their brain frames their perception of the world. Cliff changed the way I think about the post office. A character? Yes. But a real change in perception based on fiction.

Renaissance Generation Panel Tomorrow after Patricia Martin

Looking forward to being on the panel with the Houston Arts Alliance tomorrow following Patricia Martin's presentation on RENGEN; the Renaissance Generation.

So what is the RENGEN and what is this about?

Patricia Martin , the author of RenGen, and a panel of Houston business leaders, new marketers, artists and arts institutions will define the rise of Houston's renaissance generation - the RenGen - an emerging demographic of enlightened individuals and communities that are dramatically changing the society in wish we work and live.

Registration is here but may be closed soon.

Update: Read Patricia's recap of the presentation on her blog here.

Variable Pay and the Tournament Theory of Economics

Differentiation is something we talk about a lot. Yet there are subtleties that as a leader are very hard for me to wrap my brain around. On Differentiation Welch says:

“I just don’t like quotas in the boardroom or in the office.  Winning companies are meritocracies.  They practice differentiation, making a clear distinction between top, middle and bottom performers.  This system is candid and fair, and it’s the most effective way for an organization to field the best team.” – Jack Welch, Winning, Pg 346

I tend to agree with that statement. Yet the word "meritocracies" even with the given Rand overtones leads us to believe people are paid fairly for the work they do. That just sounds right, doesn't it? Pay people fairly for the work they do. ?

But economics suggests otherwise. Specifically the tournament theory of economics. In the Forbes article Why Your Boss is Overpaid Tim Harford explains:

The ugly truth is that your boss is probably overpaid--and it's for your benefit, not his. Why? It might be because he isn't being paid for the work he does but, rather, to inspire you. In other words, we work our socks off in underpaying jobs in the hope that one day we'll win the rat race and become overpaid fat cats ourselves. Economists call this "tournament theory."

Or to have it explained by an economist, because that always clears things up, we have:

This explanation of wage differences in terms of relative performance is often called tournament theory. One place where this explanation should work is in contests with winners and losers. For example, consider two almost equally able gladiators fighting in the arena of ancient Rome. Small differences in ability (or luck) could result in a huge difference in reward--one could die and the other live.

Though gladiators are no longer part of our world, there are still cases in which winners matters a lot, and as a result, small differences in ability (or luck) can cause large differences in reward. The sports world has many examples.

Having started the company on 7k, for years I made sure I demonstrated the "boot strap" nature of business. I lived in a small house. Drove a civic. I am not of the personality to discuss my latest golf vacation to big sur (I don't golf and I am not sure where big sur is, or if they have a golf course.) This works against me as a leader.

The theory goes that if you have a motivated employee. They believe in the company. They like what they are doing. And they look at the managers and the CEO and see them living below their means, driving sensible cars, that in fact this hurts the company. Good people will leave because they do not see the just rewards of the tournament.

The Time It Takes to Build a Brand

Newer brands are more newsworthy. This is great for PR.

But conflictingly it takes “10 years to build a brand”. This comes from two sources. And of course there is a creative tension between these objectives.

1. News is by definition bringing you NEW information. Hence news. So it is more likely the paper will write a story about the somewhat controversial Dr. Sketchy’s than it is the Art and Social establishment that hosts it and has been around for 10 years! New is just cooler in America. Young is better than old. Etc.
   
   1. “While a new brand name is a liability in an advertising program, it’s an asset in a PR program. A new brand name tells the media that the product or service is new and different. Exactly what the media wants to write and talk about.”- pg 257 Ries and Rise in The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR
2. Brands on the other hand take “10 years” to form in the mind of the consumer (Positioning, but these quotes are from “Rise of PR”)
   
   1. “The real barrier is the human mind. It normally takes decades to build a brand because it takes decades to penetrate the gray matter in between your ears.” - Pg 224
   2. “Successful brands get into the mind slowly. A blurb in a magazine. A mention in a newspaper. A comment from a friend. A display in a retail store. After a slow publicity buildup, people become convinced that they have known about the brand forever. – pg 228

The way I phrase it is an amalgamation of sources and comes out as

"it takes 10 years to form a brand in the mind of the consumer."

This is a depressing statistics for a marketer. But for every Google, there is a Wal-Mart that took decades to get off the ground, or Nike that took decades to get off the ground. Or the slow moving Red Bull that took forever to enter the US market but everyone thinks just appeared.

Wal-Mart,  Nike and Red Bull are the tortoises. It is helpful to remember that when building your brand strategy.

Friedman's NYT Op-Ed - worth a read

A must-read. From Friedman's Who Will Tell the People:

Our president’s latest energy initiative was to go to Saudi Arabia and beg King Abdullah to give us a little relief on gasoline prices. I guess there was some justice in that. When you, the president, after 9/11, tell the country to go shopping instead of buckling down to break our addiction to oil, it ends with you, the president, shopping the world for discount gasoline.

and continues

We need a president who is tough enough to tell the truth to the American people. Any one of the candidates can answer the Red Phone at 3 a.m. in the White House bedroom. I’m voting for the one who can talk straight to the American people on national TV — at 8 p.m. — from the White House East Room.

Who will tell the people? We are not who we think we are. We are living on borrowed time and borrowed dimes. We still have all the potential for greatness, but only if we get back to work on our country.

Completely worth your time to read it. Regardless of you politics, we can, likely, agree that the current situation is unacceptable.

Emergency Simulation - learning from exercises

  VIEW-MASTER: EMERGENCY 
  Originally uploaded by HoldThatTiger

Currently as I type this we are in the last few hours of our emergency simulation exercise for the second quarter. I do know that I have already learned a HUGE amount. Good and bad.

What is interesting about running exercises is how your adrenaline actually rises. And how obstacles you ignore for years become OBVIOUS. Which is the point of running an exercise I guess.

So will they complete by 5? Not sure yet.

I'll post a write up in a few days. It will  have great commentary on emergency simulations like

"telemarketers who call on unknown numbers keep beeping in and you can't tell if they are part of the simulation or not. So you have to answer. And it is very hard to keep your cool. This is compounded by the fact that they were calling on an IP phone from India and had no idea what I meant when I said "I am in an emergency simulation and can't talk right now!" (they called back three (3) times)

Guy Kawasaki at the Houston Technology Center

Guy and Walter
Originally uploaded by eschipul

Kudos to the team at the HTC!

Guy Kawasaki and Walter Ulrich enjoy the opening remarks before Guy's presentation at the Houston Technology Center in April 2008.

View the full album of Guy Kawasaki at the Houston Technology Center here.

Social Media Optimization presentation from PRSA SW District

From my talk on Friday at the Public Relations Society of America's SW District conference in Little Rock Arkansas.

| View | Upload your own

I did enjoy meeting a few folks in particular, although the whole group was awesome. But a definite twitter shoutout to some new public relations pros on twitter:

1. http://twitter.com/bonnieann
2. http://twitter.com/samsims/
3. http://twitter.com/margieJ11

and of course I am on twitter here causing the usual amounts of trouble time permitting.

People Imitate Their Leaders

Ah leadership, so much a balance. While reading Execution, the Discipline of Getting Things Done by Bossidy and Charan, I came across this excerpt about Dick Brown and EDS that explains a conversation I sometimes have with managers on our team.

Starting at the highest levels, Brown [Dick Brown, EDS CEO] created new ways to drive accountability and collaboration. In the monthly “performance call,” ….

The talk isn’t always about numbers. At one of the first meetings, Brown recalls, “one of the executives made the statement that he was worried about growing anxiety and unrest in his organization, worried about rapid and dramatic change. His people were asking, ‘Are we moving too fast, are we on the threshold of being reckless? Maybe we should slow down, take it easy, reflect a bit.’”

Brown turned the issue around – not incidentally, creating a forceful coaching lesson. “I jumped all over that. ‘This is a test of leadership,’ I said. ‘I would like anybody on this call who is really worried about where we are going and worried about the fact that we will probably fail, tell me so right now. Don’t be afraid to say you are. If you think we’re making a big mistake and heading for the reef, speak up now.’

“No one did. So I said, “If you’re not worried, where’s the worry coming from? I’m not worried, and you’re not worried. Here’s where it is: some of you say one thing, and your body language says another. You show me an organization that’s wringing its hands, listening to rumors, anxious about the future, and I will show you leadership that behaves the same way. People imitate their leaders.”

- Execution, pg 49

Of course the counter point is that Mr. Brown was ousted in 2003. But his words still ring true for me as a leader. And I added the emphasis.

PS - No, this is NOT aimed at anyone in particular, just an observation that YOU are the leader and are frequently the source of limitations.

PPS - In fact, with my concerns about the recession of 2008, you could even argue this behavior comes from me. So there is that to consider. But I don't think so much that is the case. Not so much.

Prediction: Ad Agencies will be Purchased by Web Marketing Firms

Ad agencies will be purchased by web marketing companies in the future.

Starting now. Position yourself for this.

Why? Well we know in a recession that advertising budgets and public relations budgets get slashed. Drastically reduced. From big ad budgets to nada asap.  Staples is one obvious example of cuts:

From the looks of things at Staples, the recession is upon us.

and

So, the Framingham retailer is trimming costs everywhere it can, reducing advertising, delaying new hires and renovations, curtailing employee travel, and saving gas with devices that limit the maximum speed of its delivery trucks.

See that first item on the list? Ya, that one? It is *advertising*.

Advertising is almost always the first thing to get slashed in a recession. You CAN live without advertising in hibernation mode. Should you cut your advertising budgets? Well, let's ask those in the business of advertising. The magic-eight-ball says about cutting advertising budgets in a recession.

Guy Kawasaki Coming to HTC April 24 2008

As seen on Chron.com  - Kawasaki is coming to Houston!

  guy kawasaki 
  Originally uploaded by eschipul

Guy Kawaski:  The Art of the Start
Guy Kawaski
Thu 24-Apr-08 6:30 PM to Thu 24-Apr-08 9:00 PM

Having seen Guy's panel at SXSW, he is an entertaining speaker with plenty of great content. I am looking forward to attending!

Note also this is an evening program. Hopefully we can walk over to a local restaurant after the talk.

Register to see Guy Kawasaki at HTC on the HoustonTech site (yes a Tendenci client - woot!)

Caroline Collective - The Early Days of CoWorking in Houston

  Caroline Collective Front Door 
  Originally uploaded by eschipul

I am super proud of @organ_printer and @kned for taking the plunge, and responsibility, of starting the Caroline Collective CoWorking Space. The CC is a coworking space being started in Houston. Right now Matt and Ned in the very early stages of signing the lease and working with the contractors. Currently the space is not inhabitable, yet already leaps to life.

Also a huge thanks to @Cosmopolitician for arranging a tour for @groovehouse, @imelda and me yesterday. And for doing the web site. And for promoting the Caroline Collective! I am pretty sure Monica doesn't sleep. So anyway, more on the CC:

From the Caroline Collective about page:

Combining the relaxed working environment of the home office with a dynamic
social atmosphere, Caroline Collective strives to positively impact the cultural landscape of Houston by fostering community, collaboration and creativity across all artistic and technological disciplines.

Coworking is both a global and unique to Houston phenomenon. As the global marketplace continues to free the worker from his/her physical location, more and more young professionals work as either “digital nomads” or as home-office based independents. Houston, as the preeminent global city is a the ideal location of the effect of market forces on the smallscale work-force. The coworking model encourages the free flow of projects and ideas and is founded on the belief that working together is working smarter.

This is exciting for the city of Houston!

It should also be mentioned that there is no doubt in my mind that Tara Hunt was instrumental in influencing the coworking movement both here and throughout the US. So thanks for the thought leadership Tara!

Regarding the economy of the United States on March 22, 2008

Regarding the economy of the United States on March 22, 2008.

I noticed that many people are reluctant, or "were" reluctant, to use the word recession as the economy spiraled down in 2007. Yet in my eyes the recession was late and it annoyed me when people denied it's arrival. Stockdale suggests we don't keep our head in the sand if we want to survive.

"Every good-to-great company embraced what we came to call the Stockdale Paradox: You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, AND at the same time have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be."

- Good to Great, Jim Collins

The fact that the US economy is in a recession, and may go into a depression, isn't rocket science. It is common sense.

You have malaise at best in America. From that previous link ArabNews says:

The United States remains the sole superpower, but its dominance is challenged by an economic and cultural shift toward Asia and the impact of globalization, which Americans do not yet fully comprehend.

Add to that a few more items. Oh I don't know we can start with high energy prices. The debt and deficit growing. The irrational exuberance of the housing market dropping. Overdue. Baby boomers buying more meds on less money because they "spent their children's inheritance" (so sayeth bumber sticker wisdom). And bought condos in Florida they can't afford. A crazy unpopular war but no way out without breaking commitments to allies.

Happy St. Patrick's Day - so sayeth the muppets

Happy St. Patrick's Day y'all. And now from the muppets. Who knew Animal could be so sad.