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What happened to that “everything is waiting for me” feeling?

Published October 30, 2009 by Jo Jordan

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Lost: can’t see the opportunity

When I was young, I loved career choices.  The world was my oyster.  Choices were everywhere, and I was in command.

Some people aren’t so lucky.  They don’t feel like that.  Our somehow they’ve gone through a bad patch and they feel lost. As I have got older, that has happened to me a few times.

What can we do about that?  How can we get back that omnipotent feeling that “everything is waiting for you”?

There seem to be three key things to remember.

1. Look after your emotional health

Negative feelings feed on themselves.  When we are feeling down, lost or confused, we like to wallow.  This doesn’t make us bad or inadequate.  It is quite normal to want to wallow.  Physiologically, we are primed to focus on threat, and our worry captures 100% of our attention.

The corporate poet, David Whyte, talks of arriving at a ravine in Nepal and being scared witless by the sight of a rickety bridge.  Many decisions in life are just like this.  We arrive at a ravine.  We can see clearly that we want to be on the other side.  We are least wise enough not rush onto the bridge, but we are paralyzed with fear.  All our attention goes onto the ravine and onto the rickety bridge, instead of working out our options.

The funny thing is that we hang on to bad feelings, as if they are the bridge itself.  Yet this is the time to get a grip.  At the side of the ravine, we check our pockets and rucksack -knife (check), water (check), food (check), etc. etc.

In ordinary life we have to take the time out to exercise, clean the house, and think about what is going exactly as we want it to.  We must, we must, we must (!) sit down each night, write a short summary of the day, and then answer this question:

Why did I do so well?

I can assure you that you won’t want to do this.  You will want to worry and tell me how badly everything is going.  Just do it! and you will surprise yourself by what has gone well.

It is also more.  It takes our attention off the equivalent of the ravine and the long drop down. It focuses our mind on

  • What we can do
  • What we can do well
  • What delights us and
  • what the world finds delightful about us!

2. Start before you are ready

When we feel lost, we often feel very tired too. The idea of starting anything feels too much.  And anyway, if we haven’t sorted out our emotional health (#1), then we are enjoying our panic attack far too much to give it up.

But if you don’t intend to spend the rest of your life weeping and wailing and gnashing you teeth, you will have to begin to move out of the anxiety, before your are ready.

The way we do this is to focus in what we have at hand.  At the edge of the ravine, that is your water, your food, your map, your radio, etc.

In ordinary life, I look for what you love.  What brings the light to your eyes?  I can give you a magazine and ask you to flick through and point to a picture which represent what you want out of life. You’ll have done it in 1-2 minutes.

Or, I can ask you about when you have experienced flow – that feeling of total engagement where characteristically you don’t notice time, but you do notice being growled at when you were late for your next appointment!  That’s flow.  When do you feel flow?  When do you feel totally engaged doing something you just love to do?

Then we deal with the next thought that pops into your head which is  “I can’t”.  I have kids and a mortgage.  I can’t be an artist – I owe it to my parents to make a good living.  I have a student loan to pay off.  I don’t have the skills.  You are looking at the ravine again!  Hold the image of what you want to be, that makes your heart speed up slightly, that makes your eyes light up (you can’t see them can you, but I can). Hold that image.  Don’t let it go.

Now we aren’t going to do anything reckless.  We are simply going to look around our immediate circumstances for things relevant to getting to the other side.  So we take stock.  As we took stock of our map, our compass, etc. at the side of the ravine.  And we do sensible things.  If we were at the side of a ravine and had a radio, we would call in and say where we are.  If we are tired out, we’d work out if it is feasible to eat and sleep.  We secure everything we need to go to where we want to be.  At worst, we may retreat.

But we keep our eyes on what brings us alive?

3. Marshall resources and support

And now for the humdinger, are you the only person in the world who wants you to be on the other side?  Are you Rambo all of a sudden?

As soon as you have yourself secure and have established the all important “time out”, ask yourself who else benefits from you being on the other side of the ravine.  Who else will benefit?  Who else will be delighted?  Who else will enjoy getting you across (however you are going to do it – we’ll leave that bridge alone!).  These questions might make you feel anxious again.  That’s OK. That’s only because this project is something you really want to do and you are about to make it happen.

So, let’s marshal help and resources.  If we were at a ravine, it might be helicopter rescue (do it in style?).  It might be a long trek around. You might be able to walk down and through some shallow water and up. In the morning light, you might realize you can reinforce the bridge. Who knows?  Start bringing together what you need and a plan will emerge.

Once you start to methodically and systematically work on the problem, the universe will conspire to help you.

This can’t be true, I hear you say.  This must be nonsense.  Well not in my experience!  Read on!

Damn the universe, it makes life so easy!

When I first noticed the universe helping me, I did feel nuts.  I felt superstitious and I didn’t like the feeling.  How can this be?  But it happened.  The universe kept helping me.  When I knew what I wanted, and moved towards it, it came towards me.  This doesn’t work if I am dithering.  If I start one thing and I am still doodling or daydreaming about something else, I don’t get any help at all.  I must be totally confident about my priorities and have ‘left all other worlds behind’.

I would get moving on a BHAG (big hairy audacious goal) and the phone would ring.  There it would be.  How could the other person know I wanted that?  It was freaky and just too easy!

Eventually I decided three things.

  • The world is a munificent place.  Stuff probably comes down my phone all day long, but I don’t notice when I don’t want it!
  • I have good judgement!  My sense of what is right or wrong is good.  I know which ravines are worth crossing and which ravines other people want to cross with me.

But sometimes I go through a bad patch when I am indecisive.  I dither.  Do I want to cross; do I not?  I am not ready to make a decision.    In part this is good judgment.  I don’t rush ahead before I know what I want.  But the reality is,  I am also frozen in fear.  Time to take “time-out” to de-clutter my emotional self and figure out what is going on. I know with a small investment, my head will clear.  I will keep my dreams clear, focus on what I have in hand, and be on my way again soon.

Everything is waiting for you

In poet, David Whyte’s words: everything is waiting for you, it really is (and would like you to hurry up!)

It is just that you have come to a ravine in your path.  You want to get to the other side.  You know you need to be there and you are rightly terrified by the rickety bridge and the long drop down.

The most important thing to do is to acknowledge your fear.  Don’t pretend you aren’t scared.  If you do you will either be paralyzed or you will be reckless.  Take yourself in hand, remember your goal  and focus your attention this minute on what you have in hand.

  • First, attend to your safety and the safety of everyone with your.  Take stock of my situation (maps, compass, radio, food, etc. if you were at a ravine), get yourself fed, watered and tell other people to where you are.  When your are physically able to think, focus your attention on what you want!
  • Then thoroughly enjoy exploring your options.  Bring in help if your need it and invite people to be part of the adventure if they want to be (which they probably do!)

Remember the three steps

1.  Keep yourself emotionally healthy: ask yourself daily – why did I do so well?

2.  Start before you are ready – tick off everything around you that is useful for pursuing your dream

3.  Welcome support – list everyone who will be enjoy watching and helping you pursue your quest

And do it for g…  sake.  It’s funny how the toughest of people are so bad at this.  Do it.  Whinging is annoying.

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Friday Week’s Review: 10 minutes of your life in this creative agency!

Published October 30, 2009 by Jo Jordan

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Oh the coolest of Friday lunchtime games:  join this creative agency and plot your direction with a red flag, give yourself a sugar-fix (once) and block the opposition with an umbrella (once).

Then evade Creative Directors of various characters and particularly avoid bulldozers which will demolish your work and make you stay all weekend to redo it!

Interactive salaryman!

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Who is the largest social media team that you know? How long have they worked together?

Published October 30, 2009 by Jo Jordan

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Academia and practice in social media – two different worlds?

Not many people I know in the social media world went to the Oxford Social Media Convention in September.   Actually, no one I knew went.It didn’t really market itself to social media practitioners yet it was replete with examples of social media work in both the USA and UK.

The essential character or soul of social media

My conversation with James Kemp from Nominet Trust and with Matthew Hindman, author of The Myth of Digital Democracy got me thinking about the professionalism of social media practice.

I like the ‘hacking’ atmosphere of social media. The hands-on try-it-out ethos is its history and its style. And for many of us, it is also its essence.

Would professionalism be counter to our ethos?

But I’ve begun to wonder – are we ready for more?

Are we ready to manage ourselves as professional units? Could we retain an ‘A’ team like quality – flexible, inventive, supportive and with specialized roles?

Who would be Faceman – smooth talking marketer? Who is B. A. Baracus, the man who can solve any technical problem? Who is Vin, the guy who can land a plan anywhere even though he is nuts? And who would be Hannibal? Who would strategize and adjust our prioities as the plan meets the enemy?

I sometimes get the impression that we all want to be in charge of everything and at the same time, work exclusively on parts we love.

We can’t really do both.

How can we build strong teams of social media specialists?

But if we are to build up teams and have the professional strength of working together, what would the first step?

No one discussed the formation of social media firms at the Oxford Social Media Convention.  I want to discuss the formation of social media firms.

Maybe we can have a session at the Social Media Mafia unconference in London on December 17?

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Wanna be a positive manager of the 21st century? Lose the idea of a gap.

Published October 29, 2009 by Jo Jordan

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If you are interested in contemporary management or what is called positive management, or positive psychology, or positive organizational scholarship, and if you have had any training at all in “old school” management, there is an important habit of thought that you will have to give up.

Gap or deficit models have had their day

Almost all ‘old school’ management, and ‘old school’ psychology, works on a ‘gap model’.

Take “training” for example.  A manager decides someone isn’t doing what they should.  The manager asks whether they have done the task before or not.  If not, they are sent off for training.

The idea is that training will help the employee bridge the gap – between where they are know and where they should be.

Obvious, hey?

Well, we are going to kick that idea into touch.  Gap models and deficit models have been trashed.

What is the alternative to gap or deficit thinking?

But how can we define what to do if we can’t say where there is a gap?

Let’s take the greatest change champion of our time: Barack Obama.  How does Barack Obama propose change without saying there is a gap?

In January 2008, quite early on in the campaign, Barack Obama gave what I think of as his deficit speech.  It uses the word ‘deficit’ a lot.

Isn’t that a gap?  No, not really.  Because Obama talks about our deficit.  Not someone elses.  He talks about what we will do. Not what other people are going to do. And he talks about processes that we do and do well and will do more of.

The guiding rule in positive organizational scholarship is to talk about “the good and the true, the better and the possible” and DO MORE OF IT.

If you are new to positive management, begin with this speech

If you are new to positive management and still trying to get your head around thinking about change and forward movement without defining a gap, begin with this speech. It is a good example of contemporary positive thought.

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For an inspiring 20 minutes: JK Rowling @ a Harvard commencement

Published October 29, 2009 by Jo Jordan

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Just in case you don’t know, JK Rowling wrote the Harry Potter books. She was also invited to address a Harvard graduation day (they call it commencement on that side of the Atlantic.)

JK Rowling tells her life story and she is very very funny. She also illustrates positive psychology. You will be inspired

One and two: Twenty minutes together.

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3rd of secret social media that is being kept from you

Published October 28, 2009 by Jo Jordan

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Save the cost of the carpets

And the 3rd well-kept secret of social media is that it saves us the cost of wearing out the carpets.

In short, the story goes like this. Social media attracts more ‘window-shoppers’. The window-shoppers hopefully include surprise visits from people outside our target market. We have more people wearing out the carpets and not buying anything. They are also people who are different from our typical customers. To extend the analogy, let’s say they bring mud in on their boots too.

So is social media a good thing. If we have more people who look-see but who don’t buy, do we want them? Aren’t carpets rather expensive?

Yes they are. But in the virtual world, carpets are fairly cheap. But that is not the real point.  In the virtual world, if you are smart, people make carpets for each other.

Let your customers weave the carpet

In a conventional company, we’d be most unhappy if people came to our shop just to party with their friends. That’s because they are using facilities that cost us money. We figure it is cheaper to advertise “off the premises” in magazines and TV than in the shop itself.

In social media, hosting a party costs as lot less. Sometimes it costs us almost nothing per person because the first person invites the second and the second the third, etc.

Let your management report reflect the carpet weaving operation

It is so obvious to anyone in social media but our reports don’t always make this clear.

  • Attracting window-shoppers has negligible cost.
  • If we are smart, we looking out for unusual newcomers. We are using the window-shoppers to help us understand how our market morphs and mutates. We are in business when we understand our market as it is, not how we want it to be.
  • And if we are really smart, our ‘window’ morphs and mutates with the market so people see what they want to see and find what they want to find.

That’s what our reports and metrics should be reflecting.

  • The cost per visitor
  • The changing nature of the market
  • The way we are responding spontaneously to changes in the market and those of our goods and service that our window-shoppers find attractive.

Now, I told you the secrets for free. I’d be happy to know what you think of them!

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2nd secret of social media. Find more lucrative niches

Published October 28, 2009 by Jo Jordan

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Think change in your market, not growth

The 1st opportunity that marketers have kept to themselves is that we can change with our markets.  Markets flex and morph quite naturally.  If we are fixed on growth, or grabbing market share, we are sadly missing the point.  Our reports need to be about change.  How is our market changing?[!]  When we closely in touch with the heaving, sighing, pulsating, shape-changing nature of the market, then we are in the game!

The 2nd opportunity marketers don’t tell us about is that we can move up the value chain. We can expand the margin in each hit.

Noobes and margins

Now I know that when we are new in business, we are obsessed with getting any hits, making any margin!

Please don’t be distracted though. Psychology comes into play here.  Getting started is fundamentally linked to getting finished!  If there is one thing that psychologists know, it is that when we know what we want, we ‘go like a train’. If we are not ‘going like a train’, if we are procrastinating, we don’t know what we want.  It is really that simple.

And how do we know what we want?  By getting out there and trying out the choices. We humans think better when real experience is in the mix. We don’t get anywhere when we are going against the flow or when we are telling people that we want one thing one day and another thing the next day. We confuse them and ourselves.   So we get out there, to learn how the world works, and to be clear about the parts we want to be part of.

That’s why noobes are no different (except psychologically) from people who have been in the game a while. We are constantly learning the market and figuring out what part we want to ‘play in’.

Low cost or high differentiation

Business strategists will tell us one of the first things we must think about is whether we are going to “buy them cheap and stack them high” or “do something very special for a few people and charge a lot”.

Obviously, in real life, there are permutations on the theme. The point is to be clear in our own minds what we are doing and experiment wisely so that we get clearer and clearer as we take small steps to get experience.  When we are unclear, we muddy our offering and our customers are unclear what they are buying and unsurprisingly, don’t buy!

Use social media to figure out whether to be low cost or high value

Now social media, doing business in virtual space or via the cloud, gives us opportunity for experimenting safely in the ways we can’t in real life.

We get window shoppers in the real world.  In the virtual world, we get a lot more. If we are wide awake, we might notice slightly different people arriving to have a peek.

Real life is so constricting

Let’s take an example.  Let’s imagine that a granny comes and peeks in our teenage store. In the real world, we have limited choices. We can’t run down the street and talk to her – who will mind the shop? We can’t drop what we are doing to entertain her – we have other customers. We can’t change the entire shop’s display to answer her questions.  We have teenage customers who come to do teenage things.  The real world has constraints – real constraints.

In the virtual world, it is dead simple to add another room!

But in the virtual world, we can add another “room” quite easily. Granny can look around our teenage store and we can lay out another page that allows grannies to talk to other grannies about their concerns. We don’t have to shut them out or exclude them. We also don’t have to demand that they pretend to be teenagers with teenage concerns. Any social media site like Facebook, Ning, etc. allows them (and us) to set up new pages, new groups and new activities.

We can also ‘run down the street’ after some who just peeked and didn’t stay. Google Alerts give us some idea of where they go. We can go and look and ask them, or people like them, what they are looking for. Herein lies the possibilities. Our peekers may be shy but we can get them to open up!

Stay clear by keeping your ‘virtual bundles’ clear

How does this relate to being clear, you might ask?  Teenagers and grannies? Aren’t we getting mixed up. Quite possibly. We can mix up anything.

I want you to remember that we didn’t begin by being all things to all people. Grannies arrived in the normal way that markets morph as their that underlying social networks twist and turn, shrink and replenish.

Our teenage store brings grannies to see.  People explore the world more readily online where they can window shop discreetly. Rather than shutting out unexpected visitors, we can draw them in.  In the virtual world, we can do that without watering down our offering to our primary market. Virtual real estate is very cheap compared to real shops rentals!

Some virtual bundles will allow you much better margins per hit

To continue the example- I have no idea what grannies will spend in your new store, or spend in the next door store buying gifts for their grandchildren, but you get the idea.

Your business will morph naturally with the morphing of the market – if you decide to dance in step with it.  If you try to make the market dance in step with you, you’ll get nowhere very fast.

Social media allows business opportunities to find you .  .  . if you want to be found

My message is this, by looking out for change you may find opportunities to increase the margin per hit.

It is a big mistake just to look at your numbers. At the end of each evening, also ask yourself how you were surprised. What was unexpected?

Are opportunities arriving at your site that you aren’t seeing because you have developed the tunnel vision (of greed)?

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1st secret that social media marketers have been keeping to themselves

Published October 27, 2009 by Jo Jordan

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Welcome to the first of the secrets social media marketers don’t tell you. Your job is not to get bigger. Your job is to change your market entirely!  Read on, and tell me if you agree that social media marketers have been oddly silent in this regard!

Conventional marketing requires massive numbers

The industrial age works on size. To make things cheap, we must make a lot. To make a profit from things that are cheap, we must sell a lot.

Competition is fierce. Look-a-likes are everywhere and the consumer is dazzled by choice and confused by the advertising that is in their face where ever they look.

It’s a vicious circle. To be noticed, we must get out there and compete with other advertising. So we add some more. And the competition is ramped up.

In the end, consumers learn to blank out and pay no attention to us.

Marketers are smart; they look for qualified customers

Marketers are on to this problem and they try to find ‘qualified customers’. They try to pay attention to people who have self-selected in some way.  So they sell us a loyalty card and once they have our email address, they bombard us with emails for ever after.

Google gives us free email. Then they serve adverts to match the content of our messages.

Both Google and Marketers are very numbers oriented and they very clinically track the number of ads we click and the emails we open (did you know that?). Google is happy with a 0.5% click through rate (CTR). They are happy if 1 out of 200 partially qualified customers responds to an ad and clicks on it.

It seems we open 2 to 3% of marketing ad that are sent to us. The rest are deleted unopened.

Social media marketers are even smarter; they know we listen to our friends

Social media works on a simple principle. We are more likely to open an email sent by friend than by a  company. Our open rate might even go up to 10%! (Do you leave 90% of email from friends unopened? It seems people do.)

Even with this ‘unopen’ rate, the increase from 0.5% to 2% to 10% is large enough to make the social media effect, or echo chamber effect, very interesting to marketers.

Why these tactics aren’t the whole story

These three tactics

  • Do more. Get more
  • Talk to people who are interested. They buy more
  • Get people to bring their friends. Half the selling is done by a friend’s recommendations

are good, but not enough. This is why.

We have worked hard to get more people. We carefully talk only to people already interested in us.  And they bring their friends.  I am all for focus and specialization but our market is getting smaller and smaller.

And it will continue to get smaller. Our personal networks and habits are changing continually. Slowly, but continually. We shed friends and gain friends the way we shed our skins. Slowly, but surely.

Social media marketers are oddly quiet about the way we replenish and refresh our networks.  This is where I think we should pay more attention.

An example from classical marketing

Coca-cola, the masters of classical marketing don’t change their product from decade to decade (lest its consumers revolt as they once did).  Nonetheless, they continually renew their relationship with the market.

Long before we we gave Gen Y a name, Coca-cola had worked out their character and formulated their market response.

They also continually look for new channels. I remember the day they put a cool box onto the mini-buses that work the streets of Johannesburg. Coca-cola have people whose sole job is to find new channels. That’s what social media should be doing!

What we learn from classical marketing that social media marketers have kept quiet

Yes, it is cool to expand our current customer base. Yes, it is cool to strengthen our market with connections between customers. Yes, it is cool to listen to what our customers are saying and to give them what they want.

It is also smart to add change to constancy. We should also ask whom of our visitors are new – not only in name but in character and need. We should challenge our social media analysts to come up with something like a new channel – something refreshingly surprising about the market.

  • What do we understand that we never understood before?
  • Who has come window shopping who never came before?

Social media marketers have been holding out on us. Our job is not only to get more customers – tough as that might be.  Our job is to map the changing landscape. I haven’t seen any metrics yet that report change.  That’s where the value is.

Next of the three secrets tomorrow!

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3 opportunities that social media marketers don’t talk about

Published October 27, 2009 by Jo Jordan

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We don’t want them to wear out the carpets

There is an old saying in business: we don’t want them to wear out the carpets.  We want inquiries, but only from people who actually buy something.  Here endeth the lesson on selling. We will sell far more to people who are genuinely interested and who have a means to pay.

Social media shock: we need to supply carpet for 200x our customers

And there beginneth the lesson on social media.  Social media specialists, beginning with Google Alerts, concentrate our attention on the numbers.

  • How many people did we reach? (Hits)
  • Did they pay attention? (Time on the site)
  • Did we invoke curiosity? (Did they explore the site?)
  • Did we get them to take an action that shows interest & intent? (A goal in Google Alerts-speak)

Getting hits is hard and getting people to stay and explore is hard.

Conversion – taking the first step to a sale is even harder.  It is shocking the first time we realize that 0.5% of people click on an advert.  That is 1 out of 200 of people wearing out your digital carpets are actually looking for something to buy.  And those 1 out of 200 don’t necessarily buy anything.

Maybe we need carpets for 1000x our customers!

Social media is advanced window shopping

Social media is advanced window shopping.  Surf.  It says it all.  It’s like going to the mall with no money and no credit card. Well, people do.  I don’t understand.  I assume they have nothing else to do.  Or maybe they have cunningly cut costs on the gym by doing their surfing on foot.

But to my point:  marketers have brought their finely-tuned focus to the web.  It’s great to have Google Alerts, to drive up our hits and get people to read and explore our content. It’s real cool when someone transforms from lurker to commentator and contacts you.  It’s rip-roaring-fantastic when they suggest some collaborative action.

Thank you marketers.   Because carpets are  expensive we must try to get the people on them to buy something!

This is all a bit industrial age, isn’t it?

What marketers don’t seem to talk about is this:  if the same people come day after day, and the same people look (very nice, welcome!), our business will never grow.

We can get more hits, and in theory as we move from 200 to 400, we should go from 1 enquiry per day to 2. Fine.   Good prediction. Throw in some natural variability and some days we get none and others more than 2.

We can confirm all of this with some elementary high school statistics.

The point is that the underlying dynamics stay the same.  Getting bigger to get richer is the thinking of the industrial age.

What marketers don’t tell us

Social media gives us three new opportunities.

1.  Reach different people. Completely change the market.

2.  Move up the value chain.  Get a higher margin per hit.

3.  Cut out the cost of replacing the carpets.

Come back tomorrow if you want more.  See you then!  The Welcome mat is out.  I’ve still got carpets!  At least for a while!

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4 “get your head arounds” of the new science of psychology

Published October 26, 2009 by Jo Jordan

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Today, a very useful though long blog post on the new science of psychology popped up on my Google Alerts.  Blogspot was acting slow, so here are my comments.

#1 Formal differences between classical science and new science

For 20 or so key terms describing the difference between old fashioned methods & stats in psychology and new methods that are consistent with new forms of management

#2  Phase states illustrated with examples from psychotherapy and neuroscience

New science doesn’t look for incremental improvements, it looks for the sudden change of state – a bud bursts into bloom, an egg hatches, a baby is born.

#3  Procrastination is acknowledgment of pending self-re-organization

Going from wish to intent, from planning to procrastination – crossing the Rubicon – is a matter of “bearing the unbearable”.  We resist – we apply negative feedback – out of fear of who we will become – or a prolonged goodbye.

We are unwilling to be successful because we cannot “bear the unbearable”.

#4  The supportive psychologist is an active player in the change process

Psychologists aren’t ‘objective’.  We have to be sufficiently bold to be part of the change process and for the change process to change them too.  That is the essential ingredient of empathy.

Leaders require the some capacity but provide the empathy in the hurly-burly of life.  We work in more protected settings and with a promise to put the interests of our client above our own.  A leader puts the interests of the group above his or her own and includes our individual interests in so far as they strengthen the group.

A good article but blogspot, fail.

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