Can you adapt to radical social media marketing change?
May 29th
The other day I was enjoying a warm spring and decided to eat my lunch outside on one of the many public plazas in New York City. Pigeons strutted around me waiting for a speck of food to drop. As I was balancing my plate of chicken and rice, a pigeon dive-bombed my plate, sending half my lunch to the sidewalk … and into the beaks of his swarming cousins.
After my initial pissed-offed-ness, I marveled that this stupid little bird had learned a highly effective new behavior to gather food. It had adopted to its urban environment and surely was setting itself up to be the founding father of a race of hawk-like super pigeons.
It was a lesson that in any environment, those with the ability to adapt to changing conditions will win. I think with the frenzied rate of change we are now seeing on the social web, this will be an important lesson — and life skill — for marketers.
A hypothesis: Personal “technological networking and adaptability” is going to be an increasingly important characteristic valued by corporate recruiters. The ability to use the web to network, improve productivity, and find answers will be a highly-prized part of a personal skill portfolio. In fact, there is some research to back it up
A few years ago, I was in a graduate leadership program at Carnegie Mellon University and took a class from a talented educator and author named Robert E. Kelly. Dr. Kelly had just written a book called How to Be a Star at Work: 9 Breakthrough Strategies You Need to Succeed
We all know that certain people tend to rise to superstar level at work. They may not be smarter or harder working than others, but they have a certain “something” that seems to push them up the corporate ladder.
Dr. Kelly had a research grant to determine the factors that these high-fliers had in common. After all, if you could actually test for these factors, wouldn’t that have a powerful impact on corporate recruiting and training? Turns out it wasn’t that simple, but after years of investigation he eventually found the magic formula.
According to Dr. Kelly’s research, one of those key characteristics of a corporate rock star is an ability to effectively network and find information quickly. Let’s say you had two employees — Tom and Tammy — equally well-educated, enthusiastic and nattily-attired. But Tammy had just one advantage — she knew how to use technology to rapidly find the people and resources she needed to accomplish a task while Tom picked up a phone and started calling people in the company directory. The research showed that Tom had no hope of ever catching up and the more complex the task, the further Tammy would outshine him.
It makes a lot of sense.
Dr. Kelly’s research seems to indicate that expert networking skills like an ability to navigate the social web can also be a crucial differentiator in your career.
So there. Now you can explain to your spouse that all that time you’re wasting on Twitter is actually a career-advancement opportunity! You may be just 140 characters away from the tweet smell of success.
I would be interested to know … how are you seeing this play out in your own workplace and your own life? And if you agree that this ability to adapt to technological change is important, how would you measure something like that?
University students speak out on Twitter (video)
May 28th
This is a cute little video some University of Louisville students put together splicing an interview with me and their Twitter views. Was glad to help with this class project!
I’m not sure why they originally called this video Lady Gaga #fail. It’s the strangest thing … people are constantly confusing me with Lady Gaga. I’m sure when you read {grow} you get this uncanny feeling that I am channeling Lady Gaga and of course the physical similarities are striking, especially when I wear my fembot flame-thrower bra.
Sure, it was fun for awhile. But then I was mobbed in Manhattan last week. And the paparazzi are driving me crazy. So I guess the students also just made their own conclusion that I am so Gaga-esque. Any way, I was glad to help out with this class project!
Twitter for Monkeys
May 27th
OK. We’re going to plow some new ground here. In fact, we’re going to go bananas as I proudly present “Twitter for Monkeys” by Mazarine Treyz.
Mazarine is a social media teacher, author, and artist living in Austin Texas. She said she was inspired to write this by The Tao of Twitter, and drew the pictures at 2 a.m. with a bamboo pen. So without further delay, let’s get our Monkey On.
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Our Digital Footprint. When a Friend, and a Network, Dies
May 26th
This poignant post comes from {grow} community member Jenn Whinnem …
Remember Friendster? The social network that predated even MySpace (or am I showing my age?)? At any rate, it shuts down at the end of May, and I’m having a hard time with this.
See, Friendster is my last connection to Curtis, a friend of mine who died nearly eight years ago. That’s why I haven’t been able to bring myself to delete my account, even though Friendster stopped being a truly viable social networking service in 2005 (I think).
I never met Curtis – he was someone I knew through a message board and chat room. This was how I amused myself while I attended a rural college nearly ten years ago. Many of the people I met online became friends in real life.
Curtis was in his early 20s and very, very into music. In fact, he ran the site rantcore.com (no longer available), and it was pretty well known in punk circles back during that different world that was the internet in early 2000′s.
Curtis and I bonded because we were sickies. I have cystic fibrosis and Curtis had something called demyelinating polyneuropathy. This meant his nerve sheaths were destroying themselves, and he was becoming weak enough that he had just started walking with a cane. He was in pain every day.
At one point, he confided in me that he had found a blog (a newish thing, at the time) by a guy with an advanced case of the disease. The post that got to him was the one where the guy purchased a car for the handicapped that would load his wheelchair into the car for him.
When you have a fatal disease, you have these moments where you realize: this is going to happen to me. You feel your mortality. This was one of those moments for Curtis as he realized what his disease was going to do to him. If he did attend one of his beloved punk shows, it would be in a wheelchair. That was, of course, if he could even breathe. Curtis and I talked a long time about what this would mean for him.
And yet, this never happened.
Curtis slipped in the shower and hit his head. He lived alone, so he bled to death. We found out because his girlfriend logged into chat one day to tell us he had died. A friend verified this with the county coroner.
I can’t tell you what this felt like, to grieve for someone I knew but had not met. I talked to Curtis everyday for almost a year. He sent me a .zip file of The Bangs to cheer me up once; I told him stories about my job taking care of the elderly. You can’t tell me that that’s not a friendship.
Curtis died November 25, 2003 – just a few months after Friendster started and we joined. Every year I get a little reminder about his birthday, and I log into Friendster, see his photos, read the funny comments people wrote about him. Friendster shutting down means I lose one more little piece of Curtis.
It’s something that many of us don’t like to think about, but I’m going to ask, because what I learned from Curtis is that it can sneak up on you way before you’re ready for it: what’s your digital legacy? How will we remember you after you die? What do we do when the comments are gone?
Jenn Whinnem is the Communications Officer for the Connecticut Health Foundation (www.cthealth.org). In this role, she is in charge of the web and social media for the foundation. You can find her on Twitter www.twitter.com/jennwhinnem.
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-Mark SchaeferFollow Mark
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