New Blog: Catalyst

I have finally succumbed and moved to WordPress. I hope you join me at my new Catalyst blog.

Romance Me First

Imagine you're at a party. Great music, fun crowd, festive atmosphere; open bar. Then someone walks up to you and says, "Hi, I'm Chris. Wanna screw?"

Hmn. I don't know about you, but the first thing I'd think is, "Sounds like Chris does this for a living. I wonder what this is gonna cost me." Followed up by thoughts such as, "They don't make latex that thick or penicillin that strong." I don't know about you, but these thoughts would lead me rather quickly to, "No thanks, I'm trying to quit."

There are a whole lot of marketing types who don't get this, though. They hear about Social Media and they gloss over that first word, instead focusing on the second. "Great!" they say, "Another medium for me to exploit!" Then they get frustrated when their broadcasting doesn't bear fruit, and they report to their CEO that Social Media is all about Farmville and Angry Birds and drunken status updates, and has no application to business at all.

...And what does the CEO know? He relies on his wife to let him know what his friends are up to on Facebook. He believes John Stewart's dismissive jokes on The Daily Show. CNN's bizarre Twitter-checking makes him change the channel.

Over the next couple of weeks, we'll be exploring some of the ways to make Social Media work for your company and for your career. The next such discussion will be tomorrow night, on Lolly Daskal's #LeadFromWithin Twitter chat, where I am the guest. Our topic will be Total Transparency. I hope you can join us!

Where: Twitter

What: #leadfromwithin chat

When: 8:00 Eastern Time (US)

Host: Lolly Daskal

Guest: me

VIP: You!

Why: Lolly puts the Social in Social Media. This is a must-attend event!

Overnight Social Media Success (in just 2 years!)

I've been tweeting daily for two years now. Over that time I've built up quite a network of interesting contacts, but I've never tested it to see what it could do: until this weekend, I was content to build and maintain, and more than anything to learn and to help others who could use an introduction or whose brilliant blog posts deserve a wider audience, that kind of thing.

Well, something got me going, and Saturday morning I posted a call for CIOs and their direct reports. That something was a simple fact-finding question: do top IT leaders, especially in the largest companies, use Social Media? The person asking this thought not, and I decided to gather some facts.

I set myself a goal of 100 CIOs and vice presidents. I figured 100 IT leaders out of 45,000 or so followers - that's probably about right.

Wow, shows you what I know!

Within minutes, I had not only a collection of several score CIOs who were already following me, but also several links to the lists that others had already compiled. Within two hours, I had gathered more than 750 CIOs and top IT leaders. I took yesterday off, but I'm still pushing 1,000 when last I checked.

Lessons:

1. Your hobby just might bear fruit for you in ways most of us don't even dare to imagine.

2. The power of a robust network goes far beyond the participants in that network themselves. Think about my 45,000-or-so followers. Are two percent of them CIOs? Well, possibly. But more likely, the folks in my network know where to find a lot of CIOs. And that makes me wonder: who else can my network help me find? (Jaguar drivers? Hmn... hear that, Lexus?)

3. You have a network too. Even if it isn't tens of thousands large on Twitter, your network spans the globe in six degrees or less. Prove it with this ultra-cool tool from PeopleMaps.

4. CEOs: if your current Social Media leaders aren't getting you results that prove Social is a must-have investment, you need better leaders. I found my CIOs with very little trouble, and I have never billed myself as a marketeer of any stripe. (Strategist? Yes. Mad Man? Hardly!)

5. As for that last one: I may not be a Mad Man marketing genius, but I sure know plenty. I'm happy to introduce you. Just let me know.

Social Media Monday is a once-weekly focus on some aspect of Social. Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed to have it delivered to your inbox each week.

*****

And now for something completely different.

If you're a fan of customer service, as I am, or interested in how to run a company much better than best (as in "best practices," which suck), you may already be very familiar with icon-in-hiding Tony Hsei, CEO of Zappos. Either way, you owe yourself the pleasure of reading this article from The New York Times.

Calling all CIOs!

This is entirely opt-in: if you are an enterprise CIO or top IT executive who uses Social Media, or if you know one, I'm compiling a list to make a fact-based business case that yes, Social is a great way to reach IT decision makers.

So far, I've identified about 750 in the last two hours. But I know there are more. So here's my call-to-action:

1. If you are a CIO, please reach out to me.

2. If your boss is a CIO, please reach out to me.

3. If you know someone from 1 or 2 who is active on Social, please introduce us.

The surest route is http://twitter.com/tedcoine

Five-Star Bureaucracy

I hope the title of this post made you laugh. It was supposed to - although I'm afraid quite a number of you will be laughing ruefully, thinking to yourselves, "Wow, that's my company (or my former company)."

I use five stars as mental shorthand to measure all sorts of things. Customer service, of course - I wrote the book on that, literally. But also Leadership. Culture. Innovation, as in, "Apple has a five-star ethic of innovation, while Burger King is probably closer to two."

We leaders are what we build. Company cultures don't happen by accident, although it certainly may seem that way in many instances. The leader's words and deeds, his priorities and the C-level staff he chooses to support him, all contribute to his company's culture either consciously or by default. Zappos' and Disney's cultures are built very consciously, and have been since they hired their first employee. Bank of America? I can just about guarantee you that was by default, although I haven't had to dubious pleasure of working closely with their top leaders.*

Rapid growth is a big problem: believe it or not, it's actually much harder to manage than stagnation or even contraction. So I suppose I can understand a CEO's urge to build a bureaucracy that is scalable, a complex system that will keep things the same as the firm grows from $1 billion to $10 billion, or from 1,000 employees to 20,000 employees.

I can understand it, but I can't respect it. You can't mandate something like that. Cultures scale. Rules and systems? Yikes, they scale too, but in all the wrong ways.

And most importantly - because this is always most important to me, because I'm smart - the last thing you want to do is build a company that sheds or repulses innovators, leaders, and risk-takers the way a five-star bureaucracy is guaranteed to do. You know who likes rule-based cultures? Rule people. People who are so happy thinking inside the box that they actually still use the phrase, "Think outside the box."

If you want to win, build a culture that attracts winners: people who ask, "What's a box?" ...the kind who ask that but then don't wait around for the answer, because they're too busy winning to really care.

If the notion of a five-star bureaucracy isn't instantly funny to you, because it's an oxymoron, then you probably need a job at the public library sorting the card catalogue. You know where you don't deserve a job? The corner office.

* And now I never will. Oh well.

Don't be a Twit.

Imagine you're at the store, and a mother with two tiny kids is struggling to navigate the door with all her bags while keeping her children with her. You hold the door open, just like your mother taught you, but rather than thanking you she stops dead and holds out her iPhone. On it you read, "Bonnie uses TrueTwit validation service. To validate click here." The link takes you to a page where you have to type out two Catchpa words before she'll walk through the door you're holding for her.

Huh?!?!

This happens all the time on Twitter, and just like the mother episode above, I just don't get it!

Say you notice a person interacting with a mutual friend on Twitter. You go to their profile page to check them out. They seem pretty interesting, so you take the plunge and click "follow."

...and the first thing they do is ask you to jump through a hoop. "[Person] uses TrueTwitvalidation service. To validate click here" followed by a link that takes you to a page with two of those Catchpa security words.

How is this okay? Whose mother would say, "Oh, yeah, that's good manners right there. Good going, Sonny!"

Are you with me on this? When you follow me, you are showing me a courtesy. My only appropriate response is "thank you," although I'm sure some people prefer to say "no thank you" for whatever reason. Allowing someone to follow me - that doesn't take me any effort at all. It doesn't detract from my Twitter experience in any way. A person can have a million followers, and so what? None of those followers take anything from the person they follow.

Now, if you spam me, that's a different story. And if you're a bot, there's at least a chance I'll figure it out. If I do, I'll unfollow you and block you with extreme prejudice.

Folks, you aren't doing anyone a courtesy by "allowing" them to follow you on Twitter, any more than that mother is doing you a favor by walking through the door you've opened. Saying "thank you" - that's polite, and expected, and maybe we'll take umbrage if you don't. But let's not confuse the two.

If you use TrueTwit, please stop. It's rude. Your mother raised you better than that.

*****

See you here at the start of every week for Social Media Monday! I post a bunch throughout the week, as well, so don't be a stranger. And if you like what I write: thank you for commenting, and for sharing it with your friends. Don't worry, I won't make you validate your humanity before extending those thanks. ;)

Don't Spam Me, Bro!

Auto DMs = Auto Unfollow*

A number of us in the #usguys Twitter tribe were sharing how obnoxious auto-Direct Messages (DMs) are on Twitter.

To summarize our chat: auto-DMs are obnoxious.

Here's the thing. You follow someone because you like what they tweet, or maybe because they follow someone interesting, so you figure, "Hey, we have this third party in common. Maybe this is a good match for us to get to know each other, too." I've found many of my favorite people on Twitter this way, a second or third level in.

So you reach out, and what do you get in return? A spammariffic message in your email inbox saying something inane such as, "Thanks for the follow!" Um... you're welcome ...-ish. I don't need another computer-generated email, is the thing.

The Shameless Self-Promotion

Even better, though, is the auto- shameless self-promotion. "Thanks for following! Friend me on Facebook, too (with link)." Or "Visit my website to learn all about ____ (whatever it is they're selling)."

Come on, folks! You can do better than that. Would you walk up to someone at a party and say, "Follow me on Facebook!" or "Check out my website!" Isn't that how people catch social diseases?

It could just be me, of course, but I'm a little slower off the mark. How 'bout we start with some polite chit-chat. Let me learn about you before we take it to the next level, huh? Just sayin'.

My friend @LewisPoretz has even gone so far as to create a LinkedIn group whose only rule for exclusion is shameless self-promotion. He tells me he's already had to exclude 3 of his LI pals in accordance with this one simple rule.

Folks, no one's perfect - some of us far less than others. (That would be me!) We're all trying to feel our way through the exciting new world of Social together, and it's going to involve all sorts of missteps - I've made more than most as I continue to educate myself, so I'm not just saying that. The more you fail the more you learn, as the saying goes.**

But really. Show some shame - and some tact - when you self-promote.

Next Social Media Monday, we'll discuss TrueTwit. As the ironically completely un-ironic name suggests, it takes a true twit to think this imposition is acceptable.

For earlier Social Media Monday posts:

You Can Run, But You Can't Hide

The Three Roles of Social in the Enterprise

My Follow-Back Policy

Introducing Social Media Monday!

* I wish I could remember who tweeted this piece of wisdom this weekend on #usguys. (Was it @starry_girl?) If you know, I'll amend this post. Sorry!

** Maybe it's just me who says this. If so, please make it your own. It really does work.