I don’t always drink my own Kool-Aid but I think I have a good reason. I don’t have time to wait for certain aspects of social media to “Take-Off”. That’s a mistake on my part and I need to remember that social media  is labor intensive.

I’m guessing you might not be drinking the social media Kool-Aid either. Or eating the dog food for that matter. You have to do what you have to do, and do it quickly, right? I get that. Believe me, I get that. You see, I’m fighting as hard as I can to stave off the creeping vines of an area hit hard by the recession and subsequent mortgage fallout. We all are. It’s hard; and never has the value of what you do and what you propose ever been more under the microscope. So the notion to abandon social media has not been lost on me.

You see, chances are, if you have game, you are not the only game in town. I know I’m not.  So even though I know my stuff and I know social media can do wondrous things for companies, that’s not necessarily an automatic “win” for either one of us. I have to compete with those that can do it and those that are pretending to do it. Because of that, I have to prove myself and prove success constantly, and show I’m drinking the Kool-Aid. All of it. And you have to do it too.

Wouldn’t it be nice if companies had the time, the patience and the resources to do it right? And to implement what I propose and for the dollar amount that I suggest? You betcha, but they don’t and neither do I. Neither of us has much time. Do I tell them what they want to hear? No. As much as I want to, I can’t.

So how do we ride out this storm? How do I ride out the storm?

• Keep drinking the Kool-Aid
• Work harder
• Work faster
• Think differently
• Listen more
• Do more
• Do more with the resources you have
• Eliminate the “Why’s”
• Increase the “Why Nots”
• Focus
• Don’t cut corners
• Go the extra mile
• Over deliver.
• Exhaust the possibilities.
• Fish where the fish are.
• Think.
• Strategize.
• Give more
• Share more
• Give back
• Believe the harder you work, the luckier you get.

And remember…

Don’t just drink your Kool-Aid. Make the Kool-Aid.

I met Sue Spaight through Twitter. She’s one of the smart one’s but she won’t tell you that. But what she will do is call bullshit on you if she has to. She’ll force the one’s who are smart, to think about another box and not just the one they’re currently thinking outside of.

I had the pleasure to meet Sue a few months ago and even though our conversations were too quick, I was glad to see that she was just as genuine in person as was her written word.

For that reason, another really smart and genuine mutual friend of ours,  Tom Martin of  Zehnder out of my home town of New Orleans, turned me onto Sues’  “Realist Guide to Successful Social Strategy”.  After viewing it I asked if I might embed it. Sue gave me permission to share it and I think it’s worth sharing.

I’m going to guess that for a majority of the people out there, the answers that they seek are not in social media. Nor is social media the answer for a lot of businesses that have fallen on hard times. But damned if they are not looking.

They lift up the hood and they see this

Yet the number of searches going on for the term “social media” per month hover close to half a million. So for most, when they get those search results, and try to make heads or tails of them, it looks like this:

Yet people are wanting to know what it is and how they can make it work for their business. They’re searching for the answer. And the answers they find come from people who have never done it.

They are social media virgins

What social media has done for a lot of small businesses and large ones as well, is it has provided hope at a time when there is not a whole lot of good news to hang your hat on these days.

Hope is not a bad thing because it’s closely aligned with dreams, and right now for a lot of people, that’s all they can bank on. It’s why they wake up every day. Except hoping social media is going to change your business, it’s culture, and the people using it, and ultimately save it, is crazy. You’re looking for a quick fix and sadly, social media is not a quick fix. That doesn’t mean however, that it doesn’t work, because it does.

But there are people out there claiming that they can make social media work for your company and save your company quickly. Be wary. be very wary.

Social media is not the solution to what is ailing you. In fact, there is a strong likelihood that what is ailing you, is completely out of your control. But you are looking for ways to break out, to try something, anything that will turn the tide in your favor. So you’re looking at social media, looking at it hard.

The ripple effect of a bad economy if you will, causes you to look at everything in a different light. Including social media.

Yes, Social media is transformational, it just doesn’t happen over night. I wish it did, but it doesn’t. Chances are, the more you can wrap your arms around what social media can’t do and what it’s not, the better off you will be.

If you were to look at the following image, what would you say the expanse of your social media exposure, involvement or engagement would be?

Let’s assume that  we all start off as seedlings in social media, and as we learn more, we grow. As the tree grows, so does our comfort level. Eventually we branch out and we all go in different directions, yet we all come from the same seed. We all have the same background and the same foundation.

It should all start with listening, learning, lurking and laboring. Lurking? Yes, lurking. Call it passive participation, but we all have done it. We watch the conversations, wondering where we can insert ourselves into them. If we don’t we lurk, we hover if you will.

Laboring? Even passive participation takes work. It takes effort and you have to put forth effort.

As we progress and grow, we become more comfortable in our need and desire and ability to contribute to the conversations around us. It’s a natural progression. But to make the leap to creating content is a bit more longer and takes a little bit more growth.

On the surface and by the looks of the tree, it almost seems that we all should or could be part of the yellow on this tree. However even those that are most comfortable with social media right now are not part of the yellow.Yet the desired or expected outcome from participation and creation lies in the blue areas of the tree.

Yett if we look at Forrester’s Social Technographics results, surveys show that when it comes to social content 21% of online US consumers are Creators, 37% are Critics (those who react to content created by others), and 69% are Spectators, meaning that the majority of people in Forrester’s survey would find themselves more at the root level of the social media tree.

Look at Jake Mckee’s model. The 90-9-1 Principle where 90% of users are the “audience”, or lurkers. These people tend to read or observe, but don’t actively contribute.

9% of users are “editors”, sometimes modifying content or adding to an existing thread, but rarely create content from scratch. and 1% of users are “creators”, driving large amounts of the social group’s activity and  driving a vast percentage of the site’s new content, threads, and activity.

If we look at it from that standpoint then the tree will be inverted, where it’s all about how “rooted” you are and how deep your social media penetration is. The deeper, more involved you are, the more rich the experience is.

So which version of the tree are you? Where do you see yourself? Should the tree be a 100 year oak or a common weed?

In professional sports, there is the unwritten rule of keeping your dirty laundry in the clubhouse, or in the locker room. By that, if you, as an athlete or a coach, have a problem with a teammate or a coach, you addressed it internally and did not air it with the press or the public.

But this is the age of social media and full transparency…

Yesterday, after the NFL Kansas City Chiefs got throttled by the San Diego Chargers 37-7, Chiefs running back Larry Johnson decided to air his dirty laundry. Via Twitter!

Though his Tweets are protected, this came via NBC Sports and thus I have no reason to doubt that this has been fact checked:

Johnson’s first tweet:

“My father got more creditentials than most of these pro coaches, “Google my father!!!!!!!”

Then this:

“My father played for the coach from ‘rememeber the titans.’ Our coach played golf. My father played for redskins briefley. Our coach. Nuthn.”

So now what? An employee is slandering his boss via social media. The employee, not on company time, is slamming the organization. Perception, whether it’s true or not, is now being shaped by a disgruntled employee’s tweets. What does a company do? What do the coaches do? What does an employer do when someone does a hatchet job on the bosses and the organization? Does social media change the playing field? Do protected tweets mean that the tweets are now safe from public consumption and thus are off the record? Can the employee say, I didn’t say that?

A lot of gray area here. But the fact of the matter is the damage has been done and the Kansas Chiefs have to do something about it. Do the Chiefs have a social media policy? At the moment the NFL policy on tweeting is pretty weak and I’m wondering if that might change because of something like this.

More questions need to be answered but consider this a case study in motion here.

Last week I talked a lot about pushing the envelope in how we approach social media leadership. And with good reason. If we’re to get to that next level, we have to quit talking and start walking. Quit repeating and start leading. Raising the bar if you will.

For a lot of you, you have the 101, 201, 301 and 401 classes down, and it’s now time to graduate. You don’t need any more proof and you don’t need to talk about it any longer. It’s time to put rubber to the road. But I have a feeling a lot of you are going to miss the critical underlying point of all of this.

You’re going to miss the point about how much work it takes.

Whether it’s your “personal brand”, your company, or your client, there is still a lot to be done on the “roll up your sleeves” side. Case in point, Chris Brogan, who most of you should know or heard of, is not an overnight success. Before Chris became the face of the social media industry, speaking everywhere and seemingly showing up at every major conference, I knew him as just a content producing madman providing direction in the nascent world of social media.

Today, he still cranks it out, but there is even more on the plate than ever before. Yet he has more than put his time in, and yet he still has not relaxed or let up. He even says as much in the below videos. To that end, Chris even managed to host one of our Hashtagsocialmedia tweetchats!

He’s reaping the rewards of his efforts just now.

In his 3 part series Chris doesn’t so much give you the secret to his success, as much as he he merely lets you know that he is far from being an overnight success and that he has been busting his ass for the better part of 11 years. The secret sauce? The harder you work, the luckier you get. Enjoy the videos.

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You know how movie pitches go? Boy meets girl, girl falls for boy, girl meets another boy, boy leaves, they fight, etc. etc…These movies usually have someone like Jennifer Aniston and Tom Hanks in them or someone like that right?

Well I have another similar story for you. It happened last week. It’s a little better, a little different, it’s quick, and has a good moral in it to boot!

It goes like this.

Mom and infant son go to airport, Mom and son go through security, Mom freaks and claims TSA agents separate her and son, Mom blogs about it in excruciating detail, story goes viral, community up in arms.

Except that… the plot thickens

Apparently, that same day, that’s right- the same day, that the Mom writes her post, the TSA fires back…On their own blog no less, and refutes EVERYTHING that is said. Essentially saying that none of what she had written was true. Not only do they refute it, they have 9 cameras to prove it. Not good for Mom, no matter what might have happened. Video has a way of revealing stuff.

So what are to you to learn from this?

From the woman’s perspective:

1) Don’t ever underestimate the power of what you produce, what you write, where you write it, who it’s about, and its viral capability. Be prepared to get hit from all sides once you hit publish.

2) When it involves social media, don’t ever sell something as the truth when it’s not. Especially when there are others who can call bullshit on it. That is blood in the water. Again, be prepared to get hit from all sides.

3) Your credibility and your reputation and your name are all you have online, make better decisions. The erase button hasn’t really been perfected yet for content that shows up in search.

4) If you make a mistake on the social web, don’t run away from it. Take it head on and then move on. It’s all you can really do. Time to repair the damage, don’t make it worse. Remember, we are the county of second and third chances!

5) Don’t ever, and I mean EVER assume that the stuff/content that you create is not being seen, read or consumed by someone, somewhere. That would be your biggest mistake and the one mistake that could ultimately take you down when you decide to push out something wrong, inflammatory or defamatory.

From the TSA’s standpoint, this was a great exercise in crisis management, customer service and PR. Why?

1) They immediately investigated the claim, they didn’t wait 24 or 48 hours.

2) They didn’t wait to respond. They tried to reach out to the woman with the complaint, that same day. And not only that, it wasn’t just an admin calling her, it was the TSA’s Atlanta Federal Security Director and the TSA blog team. They took it very very seriously.

3) They started to do their homework immediately. After doing so and finding some major discrepancies, they realized that if they did not respond in a timely fashion, their reputation, already tenuous at best, would be worse. They moved swiftly. As well, they should have. Why wait?

4) Their swift response comprised following up with THEIR OWN blog post (fire with fire),  and also posting video elements from 9 cameras backing up their claim that they DID NOT do what the woman claimed that they had done.

Conclusions and the moral of the story

Now I’m not going to get into a pissing match here of what actually happened between the woman and the TSA. And I’m not going to declare a winner either since the reality is that there are no winners here. My point is simply that we have 2 instances of where 2 parties used social media to bolster their case. Both sides had detractors and supporters. Both took their cases to the social web and let public opinion and sentiment decide who was right or who won. Not the best usage, but what would have you done differently?

However, the bigger picture here and the moral of the story is the valuable lesson(s) that bubbled up from this on both sides. These include:

• How to properly deal with crisis using the social web
• Reputation management using the social web
• PR using the social web
• Customer service
• Full on transparency in a very public setting using social media as a primary means of communication.

Lessons abound people. Let’s learn from this stuff. Here’s the link to the original blog post TSA agents took my son

Here’s the TSA’s response

Yesterday Peter Kim tweeted the following:

140 characters are for passing thoughts, not thought leadership.

On Monday, Beth Harte and I spent a solid 15 to 20 minutes on Google chat talking about leadership in social media and the best way to push the thinking further. The reasons why were myriad, but the gist was the seemingly attractive proposition of repurposing other people’s stuff as your own and then passing one’s self off as a thought leader.

Which leads me to this. I love when people in this space are like the following image:

But when they pass themselves off as social media thought leaders based on the accomplishments of others and their content and ideas, then we have a problem. You see the term thought leader in and of itself is innocuous.  It implies so much and yet defines so little. And that just may be the problem. Too many self appointed or even anointed social media thought  leaders and not enough social media leaders.

This space needs leaders

Beth and I have had many discussions on this topic and interestingly enough those discussions have occurred on the phone, via twitter, on Google chat, on the comments section of some of her blog posts, and in the comments section of other people’s blog posts. It obviously is something we both are thinking about and passionate about. I’m not saying there are no social media leaders or thinkers for that matter. But it’s just time to move things forward and let the trolls fight over the scraps that fall on the floor.

So what’s your point Marc?

My point is, I’d like to see more of a focus put on people and ideas that are reshaping the social media landscape rather than a focus on people repeating what they hear or see on the social media landscape. Those are not thought leaders. They’re thought repeaters.

In closing, think about this quote by Deborah Schultz via Twitter:

When authority is defined by influence – popularity beats knowledge…

We need to change this…

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