Please don’t call me a thought leader

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Please don’t call me a thought leader

There are certain words and phrases I find myself using every day that I wish I didn’t have to. ‘Thought leadership’ is one. ‘Community’ is another. Even ‘social media’ sticks in my throat it has become so overladen with misinterpretation, expectation and confusion.

But use them I do as they are still the established, recognised terms of today’s digital marketer. Clients and businesses talk about thought leadership so I have to talk about thought leadership. Clients and businesses are looking for social media consultants, so unless I use the words social media, they are not going to find me.

And so there is a feedback loop where these weasel words have become necessary. They are like a form of universally understood shorthand that, on rereading, doesn’t always make as much sense as it should.

Standing my ground by using more appropriate words or phrases hurts me more than anyone else, especially when you consider keyword SEO. More people search for ‘social media’ than they do ‘digital communications’ or whatever equivalent phrase one might adopt. (I’ll explain my irritation with the phrase in a later post.) And so the loop continues, encouraging more people to use the same words and phrases while simultaneously diluting them of any real insight or power.

I started thinking more about this when I was asked the other day how else I would describe ‘thought leadership’.

It is almost an impossible task. The phrase has adopted meanings, inferences and interpretations far beyond what those two words would have held the first time some bright spark in marketing (or more likely PR) put them together in order to wow a client.

What is thought leadership? Is it providing opinionated and informed editorial? Is it offering free advice in your content? Is it somehow developing the perception of being a leader in your field by the sheer force of will behind hundreds of tweets, blog posts and conference lectures — regardless of quality?

And so I open the challenge up to you. What could we replace the words ‘thought leadership’ with? And should we? Go on. Be a thought leader. What’s your best comment?

Social media: Movement & counter-movement

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Social media: Movement & counter-movement

I’ve always been pretty strong-willed when it comes to speaking my mind and have never been much of a pack-follower. But I know my behaviour isn’t necessarily the norm. My brother – and I’m sure he won’t mind me saying this – was always far more likely to be led into trouble when we were kids. He was the one caught smoking. I was the one who put up with being picked on because I didn’t.

Or was I simply following a different movement?

Yes, peer pressure. Kids are incredibly susceptible to it. But so are we as adults and it sits at the very core of social media behaviour. Human nature dictates that we rarely feel comfortable going against the pack.

How to start a movement

That’s why I really, really love this TED video from April this year featuring Derek Sivers on how movements start.

What I love about this video is how it wonderfully illustrates how, after a certain point, it becomes less acceptable NOT to join the movement by dancing inanely in a field. The same peer pressure or feelings of embarrassment that made it a risky proposition to be the first to join in, suddenly flips over. The risk to your social status by not joining in becomes greater than the risk of joining in.

I think Derek Sivers’ point is particularly important here.

The first follower is actually an underestimated form of leadership in itself. It takes guts to stand out like that. The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader.

But, surely, there’s more to it than that. After all, there is a simple decision here; “I want to dance” versus “I don’t want to dance”. That question was the same when there was no one dancing and didn’t change when there was one, two or ten people dancing.

What changed was a social consideration – not a personal choice. Prior to rushing in, each dancer was inclined to being a dancer in the right circumstances, but had yet to be persuaded to. The only change is a shift in the social environment in which the decision is made. If my friends are dancing and I’m inclined to dance, I’ll probably dance. Peer pressure.

This is why the first few followers are just as, if not more, important to starting a movement than the first instigator.

…new followers emulate the followers – not the leader.

Yes, the leader might be the trigger, but the movement is created, spread and developed by the followers.

Yet there is an interesting side-note to this behaviour that was illustrated on this very blog last week in the incredible reaction to my R U OK? – I’m not! post.

Movement & counter-movement

When I first decided to post my concerns about the #RUOK social media campaign, I thought it would just be me being my usual self going against the grain of opinion on the topic. I expected some people to agree but equally I expected a lot more to disagree. That was the goal – good open discussion about a social media movement.

In the first few days, I was inundated with messages and comments from people saying that they too had wanted to criticise the campaign but had felt that they were also alone. They didn’t want to go against the perceived wisdom of the crowd who seemed to be broadly supportive of the campaign. Jade Craven illustrated this behaviour to me in a tweet.

@Kimota I saw how the social media elite were rallying towards a cause. I didn’t want them rallying against me ‘coz they ‘knew best’.

All of these voices that were too intimidated to go against the pack suddenly felt able to speak up. What this created was a counter-movement. After the first couple of people commented on the post and retweeted it out, more and more people joined the counter-movement until it grew way bigger than I ever expected.

So I was surprised to then receive another comment telling me that some people who were in favour of the campaign now felt intimidated against expressing their support because of the backlash following my post. This was exactly the opposite of my intention as I wanted both sides to openly and freely debate. But it shows that the counter-movement had the same ability to influence an observer’s decision to join in or go against.

The peer pressure and group wisdom had been completely reversed.

I don’t want to recycle the RUOK discussion here. Save that for the original thread. But I find it interesting to observe how a movement and then a counter-movement both had the effect of making it feel less acceptable to voice a contrary opinion.

Proportional backlash

Just like Newton’s law, the scale of a counter-movement or backlash can probably be calculated in some kind of proportion to the initial strength of the movement. It might not be quite an ‘equal and opposite reaction’ but we see it all the time. The iPhone is a great example of a movement that has incredible momentum. But this momentum also amplifies the the potential counter-movement – as happened with the release of the iPhone 4 and the signal strength issues.

Steve Jobs was quite right to complain that the media and consumer backlash was far out of proportion to the nature of the issue – particularly in comparison to issues with competing smartphones. But the scale of the backlash was not related to other smartphones or the seriousness or otherwise of the fault. It was dictated solely by the scale of the initial iPhone movement itself.

Movement and counter-movement

The initial action or trigger that starts a counter-movement empowers those who felt less able to criticise before – those who had been primed against the original movement. It does this by giving them an issue to focus on as a rallying point and a sense of validation in speaking up. The bigger the original movement, the greater the number of people who become exposed and may become primed through various means for a counter-movement.

People are waiting to say their piece. They’re often waiting for the ‘permission’ or endorsement or the opportunity to do what they already want to do. Once the first person starts dancing, or the first blog post starts to criticise, or the first mention of an iPhone signal issue is made, observers suddenly feel able to admit that they agree or that hey, they too want to dance like an idiot in a field.

So many movements are just waiting to happen if the right trigger can be found. The same can be sad of the counter-movement as well. We see it all too often when a celebrity suddenly goes from cool to despised or a product goes from hyped to ridiculed.

The trigger is immaterial – if enough people are primed, it’s just a matter of time.

Social media at war: Strategy vs tactics

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Social media at war: Strategy vs tactics

All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Last night’s Digital Citizens event in Sydney certainly ignited a lot of discussion about what constitutes “strategy” and whether the word should be defined differently to “tactics”. Sadly, marketers appear to be far from any kind of consensus, if today’s Twitter conversations are any indication, which I see as rather scary.

If marketers don’t understand the difference between strategy and tactics, what hope our clients? How can we possibly assess the effectiveness of the strategy pitches that were the focus of last night’s event when no one can agree on what the definition of a strategy actually is?

This debate also touches on another hot topic in Sydney social media circles this week. There has been some debate about what constitutes a social media expert, our attitude to those who claim to be one, and even whether it is possible to be an expert in such a field?

At the risk of throwing a grenade into the middle of both debates; of course, there can be experts in social media, even if it is a constantly shifting chaotic mess. And the answer lies in strategy.

As Sun Tzu pointed out at the top of this rant, the confusion between tactics and strategy is certainly not new. Tactics and strategy are both military terms, so looking at them in these terms can shed a lot of light on how we should use them.

Side rant …

Before anyone suggests that war is not the same as marketing – and therefore the definitions should be open to personal interpretations that should be respected – Sun Tzu’s book is more commonly shelved under Marketing or Business in any bookstore, and not military theory. Create your own definitions of words if you must, but then I reserve the right to redefine any words that don’t fit my current viewpoint as well. No one person can decide or have an opinion on what a word means any more than I can decide how Twitter’s terms of conditions should be applied to me. So no, this isn’t a debate where we can respect each other’s personal opinions of what strategy is. It’s a word. It has a meaning – one that is rather important to our day jobs. Therefore there is a clear right and wrong.

I just happen to be right … 😉

End of side rant.

Mastery of war through strategy

Sun Tzu was a master of war. There have been many others over the centuries; Hannibal, Napoleon, Wellington and more. And there have also been many other generals and military leaders we don’t talk of in history. Because they lost. History is told by the victors.

Yet the great generals and the bad all had their cavalries and infantry and cannons and battleships and whatever. So what did our successful generals know that everyone else didn’t?

Why – and here you’ll begin to see my point – were these generals expert at conquering lands in the chaos of war?

Katie Chatfield discusses on her blog the idea that no one can be a social media expert. She suggests – supported by Dave Snowdon’s Cynefin framework – that because social networks are disordered, and cause and effect are only identifiable in retrospect, it is impossible to become expert in an environment that is so unpredictable.

I have to disagree. Sorry Katie. If social media is considered chaotic because of disorder and unpredictable behaviours, then war multiplies that chaos many times. Sure, you may have control over your own troops, just as a marketer has control over their own social media tools. But the enemy can be unpredictable. You don’t get to see their battle plans in advance. You don’t always get to inspect the terrain or analyse their weaponry first either.

Generals can’t predict an enemy’s attack with any more certainty than a business today can predict how many Facebook followers will like its new campaign. They can estimate, sure. They can use prior experience, certainly. They can even use spies (or market research) for some indicators. But, once the plan is put into action, anything can happen. And often does.

What generals do have though – as Sun Tzu points out – is strategy. It is strategy that separates the expert general from the cannon fodder. Forget the battle, it’s the war that counts.

Onto the battlefield

Why did the Nazi’s invade northern Africa when their goal was the suppression of Europe? Strategy. A successful invasion of Egypt would have propped up Mussolini, a valuable ally. The strategy was spearheaded by Rommel who was adept at planning tank battles in the desert and knew how to deploy his resources effectively. Tactics.

Why did Hannibal take his historic route across the Alps with a staggering 38,000 infantry, 8,000 cavalry and 37 war elephants? To move his army into Italy ready for battle without being intercepted by the Roman force marching towards him from the Mediterranean coast. Strategy. How did he manage to get his forces through such a difficult route? One approach was to get past rockfalls by using fire and vinegar to literally dissolve the boulders which were high in calcium. Tactics – and clever ones at that.

But the tactic only makes sense if you understand why Hannibal was taking such a difficult route in the first place. Many other armies could choose to cross mountain ranges with large casks of vinegar – the tactic is difficult but not impossible as Hannibal demonstrated – but unless you were avoiding a large Roman army heading for you, it would probably not be wise. Strategy dictates tactic – never the reverse.

Strategy is therefore more than just an idea, as some have suggested. An idea would be the annexation of Europe or the invasion of Rome. It is also more than a conceptual goal, such as Hitler’s new world order or Hannibal’s defence of Carthage against the advances of the Roman empire. A strategy is a choice, a decision to go one way rather than take any of the other various routes to your chosen goal, based on an understanding of the challenges.

Your goal combines with your previous experience, along with your knowledge of the battlefield, the strength of the enemy you face and your predictions of their behaviour, to create a strategy that accounts for all of these things. You want to invade Italy. The barrier is that you predict the Romans will attack from the East as you approach. Therefore, you move your army South over the Alps where they don’t expect. The strategy then dictates what tools should be used.

Therefore, listing a lot of social media tools and some basic engagement techniques is merely a scattergun set of tactics rather than a strategy. A detailed strategy might help identify the one or two tools that could be the focus of a concerted campaign with clear expectations.

Every battle has a loser just as there are many social media campaigns that have tanked. Saying that the disordered nature of social media is to blame, or losing sight of the difference between strategy and tactics, is tantamount to surrender.

Rock DJ part 3: The show must always go on

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Rock DJ part 3: The show must always go on

Strobe lights and headaches don’t mix.

Stomach bugs and beer don’t mix.

But taking the night off and still receiving a pay packet don’t mix either.

I don’t think I ever missed a night in all the years I DJed both in the UK and Australia. At certain periods I was DJing up to three nights a week and holding down a full time job, so there was very little time to be sick. DJing can be a rain, hail or shine type gig, particularly when you’ve carved out that niche for yourself.

Social media is no different. Blogging requires constant attention, otherwise the audience will drift away. Quite often, I find myself forcing myself to produce a couple more posts even though I don’t feel particularly inspired, awake or even well.

Poster for Indie Night at Whisky's nightclub in Bournemouth, circa 1990

There are many times I’ve DJed dosed up on flu tablets or chomping on Immodium with one eye on the CD countdown and the other on the gents room door. Yet my worst experience of ‘suffering for my art’ dates back to my time working in club in Bournemouth, UK, circa 1990. Whiskey’s was the name of the nightclub, and again I was the Thursday night fixture with a strong local following of goths, rockers, indie shoe-gazers and punks.

I had a migraine. It was a thumper. Pills weren’t shifting it and there was no way I could cancel the gig. Firstly, there was no DJ in reserve who could play the same music. If I didn’t turn up, the club would be forced to bring in one of their mainstream DJs and the crowd would go somewhere else. Secondly, if I didn’t turn up I didn’t get paid, and there was rent to pay.

So turn up I did. Pump up the volume, flick on the lights, on with the show.

Anyone who has ever suffered a severe headache knows that flashing lights and loud music is like salt on an open wound. My girlfriend at the time (oh god, don’t ask me her name, please don’t…) was the only one to know I was in pain in the DJ box, running to the bar to fetch water for me and giving me pitying looks as I switched the strobes on again.

You might be thinking; couldn’t I just have avoided certain flashy lights or lowered the volume just a little? Sorry, not how it works. The crowd doesn’t know or care how I’m feeling. They’ve paid their money, bought their drinks and are looking for a good night. How can I place my own comfort above a couple of hundred or so others expecting a show of a certain standard? I was being paid to put on the best show that I could and that’s about pride as much as it is about money.

Social media works exactly the same – it is about the audience and not yourself. You can’t switch off when it becomes uncomfortable or inconvenient for you. If a particular social strategy turns negative for whatever reason, you can’t decide to sit it out, only coming back on board when it’s fun and positive again.

Once your social media strategy has created expectations – for example, prompt replies or regular blog posts – you had better be on your death bed to muck around with that schedule. Once lost, it will be much harder to get the crowd back.

How many blogs have one of those posts that are all about “Sorry I haven’t posted much lately. Been ill, work’s been tough, family issues getting in the way. I promise to blog more regularly.” Do readers ever care when reading something like that? Usually, whenever I see a post like that, the blog doesn’t become more regular. If anything it is usually one of the last posts ever to appear on the blog and signals the end – a loss of interest and commitment.

Commitment is the key word here. If you have a social media strategy, either a personal hobby or a business marketing campaign, you need to be able to carry on even when it isn’t fun. You need to push through the pain barrier. You need to deliver and keep delivering. After all, that is the implicit promise you made when you invited others to follow, subscribe, friend, fan or whatever.

So stiffen up. Have a backup plan; some posts in reserve or someone else capable of moderating the Twitter feed or Facebook page seamlessly on your behalf if you fall under a truck. Otherwise grin and bear it, because the show must go on.

Rock DJ Part 1: You don’t build communities

Rock DJ Part 2: Free is better than a cover charge

Rock DJ part 2: Free is better than a cover charge

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Rock DJ part 2: Free is better than a cover charge

When we first started running The Pit out of DJs Nightspot in Gosford, it was free entry. Thursday nights had always been notoriously quiet in Gosford – crikey, even most weekends resembled a ghost town – so there were no high expectations and we were on a trial.

The club was packed. That first year was the best we ever saw in five years of running The Pit and it became the place to be every Thursday night. We weren’t the only free venue, but we were the only one that provided that particular music. Free just helped the new night grow and spread that much quicker.

After a year or so, the manager wanted a change. He had noticed that some were coming every week but weren’t buying drinks. He wasn’t making any money off some of the crowd that came through the door and they were enjoying dancing to a DJ he still had to pay. Remember, he’s never made so much money off Thursday nights before, but the thought of some people getting a free ride was too much.

Poster promoting The Pit nightclubSo the manager added a door charge. Two dollars at first, it had grown to five dollars by the end. It might not seem like much, but it was enough to see the crowd start to drift away. Those who would casually come in on a Thursday for a free bit of fun – cashless students and bear-footed hippies – no longer came. And so their friends who had been buying drinks didn’t either. Less people in the club meant less atmosphere and buzz meant less people came back every week and less new people discovered the club.

The difference wasn’t huge and it wasn’t overnight, but the door charge was the clear before-and-after point that marked the downturn. As the crowd declined the door charge increased to offset the difference and eventually the night was finished.

Placing any obstacle to admission, no matter how trivial, can dramatically reduce numbers. David Meerman Scott talks frequently in books and talks of how Mailer Mailer multiplied downloads of their ebook – The Email Marketing Metrics Report – twenty times, merely by removing the need to enter an email address. That’s right, even entering an email address – significantly less hassle than paying two dollars – is enough to prevent people from accessing your content.

The Mailer Mailer website is now listed at number one in Google for the valuable keyword phrase email marketing metrics, their industry. Now, you can’t tell me there’s no financial return on being the top listing in Google for your industry.

Free is the greatest acquisition tool you can have. Even if you can’t convert a return out of every crowd member you acquire this way, chances are you’re still making more than if you charged a couple of bucks at the door.

Rock DJ part 1: You don’t build communities

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Rock DJ part 1: You don’t build communities

Throughout the ’90s, I worked as a nightclub DJ. No, it wasn’t all duff-duff and techno. My realm was underground and alternative rock, with plenty of black, studded leather. Beat mixing The Offspring into Joy Division isn’t easy, but it’s possible!

I lived for the decks and strobes and bass bins. I lived for the smell of stale beer in sticky carpet and tales of bouncer trouble from the door. I lived for the too-loud music and the crush on the dance floor. Sure, my hearing suffered (I was apparently too cool for ear-plugs) and I now have mild asthma from all the then-legal cigarette smoke, but it was a fantastic period of my life.

DJ's Nightspot, Gosford

My longest continuous gig was at The Pit, a regular Thursday night dedicated to alternative music, in the imaginatively named DJ’s Nightspot in Gosford. It might only have been a mid-week night in a small club in the ‘burbs, but it had a bigger impact on the people who came than a few hangovers and ringing eardrums.

The Pit was responsible for a number of meetings that later became weddings. Bands formed over beers and would have their first gigs in the club a few months later. A community formed around those Thursday nights that lasted long after the final CD faded out. Many of the regulars continued swapping photos and stories and arranging reunions via a Facebook page for at least another ten years. Yeah, that’s pretty cool.

2020 Update: The final reunion took place in the same venue – now a bar – in 2014.

I learned many things in my ten years as a DJ; from the novice being taught how to beat mix vinyl in my UK student days to the club DJ looping CDs, sliding faders and flicking lightshows without missing a beat. Yet it has occurred to me that some of those lessons are relevant when talking about online communities as well. So I thought I’d share some of those lessons over the next few days.

Here is the first and most important of those lessons.

1. You don’t build a community

Communities already exist; you don’t make them. They already know what music they want or how they want to entertain themselves. Before The Pit came along, the same people were meeting in smaller groups at each other’s houses to listen to music and drink beer.

What The Pit did was to provide a location that brought all those small communities together to form one big one; but it didn’t create the communities in the first place.

To place ourselves at the centre of those communities, we need to provide the content they’re looking for – even if it isn’t always what we want to produce. And we need to do it better than anyone else. There’s another nightclub just around the corner – another blog, forum or Twitter feed a mere click away.

Providing the right content that will bring those communities to you requires a few things:

  • Understanding the content. In the case of a nightclub, you need to be across and knowledgeable about the specific music choices the crowd wants.
  • Ensuring the content isn’t already provided perfectly well elsewhere. Is there a need? If there were already other local clubs providing the same music, it would have been much harder for me to break in. Niche is always better.
  • Providing the content better, and more efficiently, than the competition when it eventually comes along (and it did).
  • Being consistent. For me, that meant being in the DJ booth every Thursday, no matter what. Or blogging regularly. Or replying promptly on forums. Once you’ve set expectations and a schedule, stick to them.
  • Ensuring the right people know how to access the content. As the heyday of The Pit predated mainstream home internet, I had to do a lot of leafleting, sticking posters on poles and placing print adverts in Drum Media. It also involved a large amount of word of mouth, without which no community can survive.

This may all seem pretty obvious to many, but I saw too many DJs, nightclubs and bands over the years unable to grasp how to build a community around themselves.

How many Twitter feeds have you come across that are just too self-centred but still wonder why no one follows them?

How many businesses start forums or blogs to preach their products and their own agendas, only to watch them whither and die because the community never came (and may not even exist) that might be interested?

How many campaigns fail to grasp that word of mouth is the most important component, and a massive advertising blitz means nothing if you can’t harness buzz?

Not as easy as it sounds, is it!

Rock DJ Part 2: Free is better than a cover charge

Rock DJ Part 3: The show must always go on