the hurricane inside my brain

photo: mrbill

I’ve heard it said that you need to try a brand new food five times before you really like it. (Try this, it’s a fun experiment!).

And I’ve also heard it said that it takes five impressions for an individual to actually internalize an advertising message.

So I’m wondering if the idea of “5 times” is applicable to how we engage with people in Social Media. If it takes 5 times connecting with other someone else before we trust them, say. Or 5 encounters before we are truly engaged with them. Or 5 times hearing someone’s name before they are “on our radar”.

What do you think? Would that change anything for you if it were true?

photo houseofsims

Dash Chang had written these five things in the comment section of this blog post. I asked if I could use what he said on my own blog, because every one of them got me thinking about the future of digital. Yes, it’s all shifting fast. Yes, it’s impossible to predict where things are going. But does that mean we shouldn’t try?  What does the future hold? I’m up for the challenge of trying to figure it out. Anyone want to join me?

The five things:

1. The web is morphing faster than anyone pundit can comprehend. Think blind men and the elephant. The Software Platforms supersite crowd-sources and tracks over 200 platforms like Google Apps, AJAXAPI, MapAPI, etc. That’s probably 10% of the available platforms on the web.

2. User attention is shifting fast. One report shows that social networks, with all its variations like Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, disqus, etc has passed email for user time and frequency.

3. Analytics quickly lose relevance. If you can’t see the whole, how can you program the algorithms to track what’s relevant?

4. Without relevant data, how do pundits forecast the future?

5. Intuition rules in this state of chaos. But with millions forecasting the future state of the web, the chances for anyone to be right declines. As a past econometrician, we had a saying. If you don’t know the answer, forecast often. If you’re right, tell the world. If you’re wrong, forecast again.

Comments, as always, are welcome.

I said to a friend of mine yesterday “Well, the good thing about being kicked off twitter is that I finally got my Flickr strategy firmly in place.”

And she said “What’s a Flickr Strategy?”

So in light of making my “private conversations public” and sharing my strategies with the world, here’s what I told her.

One thing I’m always telling my clients is this: “Social Media is not JUST about brand awareness. However, done right, that’s a huge added benefit. Happens every time.”

In fact, I keep hearing the words about my own personal brand “Lisa, you’re everywhere”, a comment which has led to more than one proposal.

So my Flickr strategy is, partly a “be everywhere” strategy. But it’s also the following:

1) It’s a way to create a collection of original imagery I can use for my other social media channels.

I love great photos. I’m not a great photographer. In fact, I never bring a camera unless it’s a wedding or graduation. But guess what I discovered? With my camera phone and Picnik, I can create cool looking web-friendly photos with only a smidge of effort.

Picnik is like “photoshop for dummies.” My kids showed me how to use it in about 10 minutes. (And yes, you design purists out there: I KNOW. I KNOW. I KNOW! It’s like telling someone it’s okay to use desktop publishing even if they don’t know the first thing about design. But. Still.). You can create all sorts of effects, fix flaws, colors, etc. Your photos are saved at the correct resolution to use on the web. And they can be stored directly to your Flckr photostream.

So now, part of my strategy is to take pix with my cell phone – “visual observations of life”, I like to call them — “picnik them”, and then store the images on Flickr. Then they are available to me – to use when appropriate in blogs, Facebook, twitter, etc.

2) It lets me share with others.

Oh right! Social media is about sharing, lest we forget. : )

So now my images are also available for other bloggers or anyone to use, as long as they link back to me. I also have a strategy (go figure!) for how I license my images through Creative Commons. Most of my images are available for anyone to use, for any purpose, even commercially. The pictures of my kids, I’m stricter about how they can be used. The licensing part is great. It spells out exactly what your intentions are. Take the time to figure out what you’re comfortable with.

Oh, and here’s a good article by Chris Brogan on how he uses Flickr as a blogger to find images for his site.

3) It reinforces the fact that I am a visual thinker.

I love design. Love love love it. I like nothing better than seeing a brand who has great design sensibilities. It makes me go “Ahhhhh…”
And the thing that took me a little while to get about Social Media is that design can and should still be an integral part of any social media strategy.

So part of my Flickr strategy is to use this as a proof point for myself. How does great design get used in Social Media? What do images say about you, as a person, as a brand?

Even to the point of having part of my design strategy be this: I write “headlines” which speak to my view of the world. Design them so they look cool. Post them on Flickr. Brand myself as a visual thinker. Ahhhhh….

Anyone else out there with other strategies? Other sites that they use for “visual social media”? Other thoughts, ideas? Would love to hear from you.

There’s a lot of talk about friends these days. What is a “real” friend, and are online friends real or not, and oh, what about brands, could they possibly be your friend?

And at one point I had tweeted “A friend is someone who would show up at my funeral.”

Which is close, but hey, my friends in Singapore and Australia got a little nervous, and I *really * don’t want to exclude them.

So here’s an even more radical thought: “You are my friend if we treat each other like friends.”

I don’t care if you’re someone I’ve known forever, or hugged in real life, or only had a couple of online conversations with. I don’t care if we have shared interests, or for the most part, even shared values. And yes, you can be a brand, and no, you don’t have to come to my funeral. You don’t even have to send virtual flowers.

How does someone treat me like a friend?

I’m pretty easy. If someone doesn’t want anything from me except for friendship and doesn’t talk badly about me behind my back, they’re in.

Think about this for a moment. One thing I’ve noticed about some online friendships is that, in the end, there are a lot of people out there who really do want something from me. They ask me for something that I just can’t give them at that moment in time and poof! They disappear. It’s not that I mind the asking. I mind the disappearing. Because, truly, I will help ANYONE if I am physically able. But I can’t help everyone, all the time, for free, and still survive. And I certainly can’t buy everything everyone wants to sell me.

And my friends know that. They simply never care if I’m unavailable at any moment in time. Because they know me enough to know I’ll be there when I can be there. Always.

My account on Twitter has “been suspended for suspicious activity.”
SIGH! We all hate spammers don’t we? And apparently, at least in Twitter’s eyes, that’s what I’ve become. If you get too many followers too fast, you are viewed suspiciously. Unless you’re @britneyspears. Of course. : )

The good news is – my plan has always been to make mistakes with my own brand *before* I make them with a client’s brand. I think it’s called “object learning” – the school of thought that says you can only *really* learn something if you make a mistake while doing it. So yes, I make mistakes. I fix them best I can. I move on.

If anyone out there does consider me spam, I’m really really really sorry. I absolutely did not mean to be annoying. I was just saying “hello”.

And thanks to everyone else who thinks that what I have to say has some value. Learn from this along with me!

Cheers!

Quick! Who’s on a US ten dollar bill? Do you know? If yes, congrats (and you can stop reading now). But if not…think about why you don’t know. After all, assuming you live in the United States, you’ve probably seen hundreds or even thousands of those bills in your lifetime.

The reason is this: you don’t remember what doesn’t engage you. In fact, you barely even *see* something that doesn’t engage you first. If there’s no story, or message, or context or relevance to you, something you see almost every day might as well be invisible. So marketers, advertisers, writers, information pushers – why does so much of what you do not have any effect on people? Just ask Alexander Hamilton.

Photo credit: wjklos

I heard a story about Christopher Columbus when I was about 6 years old. It had nothing to do with crossing the ocean, or the Nina, Pinta, or Santa Maria, or with the world being flat. I do have some vague jumbled memories of all those things, but this is the story that has stuck with me for 40-odd years

Columbus is at a dinner party when he holds up a raw egg. “Can any one of you guests,” he says, “make this egg stand on end using nothing more than your wits and what’s on this table?” The guests puzzle over it, try it and fail. After they give up, Columbus pours a pile of salt on the table, and stands the egg up in the pile. When he blows away the salt, the egg remains standing. “But that’s easy!” protests one of the guests, indignant. “Of course it’s easy,” states Columbus mildly. “Once shown how.”

I use this story in my own life two different ways. Often, there are times I don’t know how to do something. Once someone shows me how, it’s easy. Getting over my fear of looking stupid before asking is often the hardest part of the process. But the other way I use the story is for those times when there is no known solution. What to do? Forge a path, figure it out, come up with a solution that has beauty and elegance and looks like it was the easiest thing in the world. Then blow away the salt, and watch what happens.

When my son was about six years old and learning to read, we were huddled in bed, looking at a book. He pointed to a picture of a boat. “What’s that?” he said. “That’s a boat, Johnny.” “No, it’s not Mommy.” I squinted, looked again. Was I wrong? It looked like boat to me. “I can’t sit in that boat, mom.” He grabbed the book from my hands and tried to sit on it. “Will it float? Can I take it to the bathroom and put it in the tub? It’s not really a boat, is it mom?”

For years after that happened, I told people that my insight from this story was that boys were more literal than girls. Which could be true, but perhaps misses the point. I think a better insight might be this: Sometimes people just need to have one more piece of information than you are willing to give them.

After all, Johnny just wanted me to tell him it was a “picture of a boat.”