Is this conference worth it?
One of the most common questions asked of conference organizers goes something like this:
“How do I justify this conference? Why should I attend it?”
This was asked of me recently about PodCamp Boston:
The short answer is: there is no justification. None. A conference by itself is just a gathering of people, and while it would be amazing to deliver everything to everyone, the reality is that a conference is more like a mirror than anything else. What do I mean?
There’s a story Stephen K. Hayes tells that in the innermost shrine of the Togakure village temple, there’s a source of enlightenment and power like no other. Every year, the priests of the temple conduct exotic rituals to honor this holy power, and aspirants come from around the world to catch a glimpse at it. When the pilgrims are all assembled before it, the doors are opened and the power is revealed: a simple round mirror, reflecting that we are our own sources of power.
The question about conference justification is the wrong one. It’s too vague. The better question is, do you have a burning question you need answers to, and if you do, does this event move you closer to answering it or further away? If you don’t have a burning question, the blunt and honest truth is that you should expect to get nothing out of a conference or any other event. On the other hand, once you have a burning question you need an answer to, figuring out whether the speakers and attendees of an event are likely to help you move forward towards an answer will be relatively straightforward.
What burning questions are you currently seeking answers to at conferences?
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Influence and the Ninja Long View
If there’s one thing the jonin (heads of ninja families) had in spades, it was the long view, the perspective that spanned more than just now or the next battle, but the next decade or two. The most successful jonin leaders made decisions that might have seemed counterintuitive or foolish in the short term but paid substantial rewards in the very long term. In one of Stephen K. Hayes’ groundbreaking works on the topic, he mentioned that jonin leaders would often try to get field agents into positions of power decades in advance so that they would be ideally placed and free of any suspicion when needs arose.
This is exactly the opposite of most models of influence today. Today, we look for Klout scores or follower counts to tell us who is influential in the here and now. Today, we try to recruit for marketing campaigns in the moment, hitting our mailing lists as furiously as possible, all the while wishing we could spam just this once.
Understandably, our circumstances dictate this to a degree. Shareholders demand quarterly profits or they sell off the stock and the board of directors cleans house. Companies hire and fire with the mercurial temperament of a 6 year old having a tantrum as soon as profits slip. Having a mindset that is only in the here and now, in the “just survive another day”, is perfectly understandable, but can be disastrous for you in the long term, because you’ll never have the power or capability to grow beyond your current circumstances.
Let me give you an example of where influence and the short term falls down. If this were a biography of someone that you were considering to include in a marketing campaign, would you use them?
Chances are, your average marketing specialist seeking the biggest influencers would pass this person by. Boring. Uninteresting. No influence. Low Klout score or non-existent Klout score. If you would have made the same choice, you would have missed out on this:
Yes, that’s Chris Brogan, from right around the first PodCamp and today. If you take the long view, building out a network for the very long term, there’s a good chance that some of the people who are nobodies today will be chart toppers down the road. The thing is, you can’t accurately predict this because change happens so dramatically and so rapidly now.
Here’s a second example. This past week I threw a free webinar on social media job search. In terms of influence, job seekers are probably at the bottom of the pile because they have none of what most marketers want in the short term. But if what I shared is helpful and allows some of those folks to get jobs, then do I have seeds planted for the long term? You bet.
Do you need to be paying attention to what we call influence now in the short term, with outreach campaigns and their like? Of course. But alongside the short term, in order to be seeding your success for the future, you need to embrace and begin taking the long view, too. Here are a couple of things you can and should be doing to build for the long term:
1. When networking online for the long term, ignore influence measures entirely. As long as someone is in the same field as you, accept them into your network and treat them civilly and professionally. You don’t have to be their best friend or drinking buddy, but you shouldn’t be a jackass either. Today’s intern is tomorrow’s marketing director.
2. Build up your database and mailing list. I don’t do a personal newsletter purely for the entertainment value. I do it to stay in touch with people and stay present of mind, and I’m always working on building and growing it every day. It’s an incredible long term asset and after 5 years of constantly growing it, it’s at a size where I can make it useful. The plan for the next 5 years? Keep on growing it.
Neither of these long term actions should in any way impede the short term work that you have to do now to keep the lights on. Include it into your marketing rotation until it’s second nature and when a need arises years down the road, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how powerful you can be in addressing it. That’s the ninja long view.
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Black Belts and Social Media
There’s a curious phenomenon that occurs in Japanese martial arts where a master teacher will sometimes promote a student to a higher rank before they’re ready, before they’ve earned it. In Japanese culture, honor and pride then dictate that the student work even harder to be worthy of the honor their teacher has given them, to truly earn the rank. It’s partially a sign of respect and partially a test by the teacher to see how self-aware the student is; in some cases, less self-aware students tend to believe they have earned their rank instead of understanding that they’ve been promoted as a means of motivation.
Where this system breaks down is when people who don’t share Japanese cultural norms get involved. If a non-Japanese person has the same experience, there’s a good chance they’ll end up believing they are better than they actually are, to the point where they become dangerous to themselves and others. They believe they have capabilities that aren’t really there. The more self-aware non-Japanese students will figure it out and fit into the cultural norm, working to be worthy of their rank. The less self-aware tend to self-destruct pretty spectacularly.
What does this have to do with social media? In any medium, especially new ones where the trail isn’t obvious, we tend to look for leaders. We tend to look for people to follow. We tend, in other words, to promote people in our heads and in our words before they’re ready. We may not do it for the same reason as a master teacher in the dojo, but the net effect is the same.
So what should we do about it? If we’re the ones doing the “promoting”, then call into question the results that we’ve gotten from following a person’s advice. Look carefully at the goals you’ve set down for yourself and if you’re not getting the juice you’re looking for, perhaps the person you’re following got promoted a little too early in your own head. Be aware of that and start searching out other people who are getting the results you want to achieve.
If we’re the ones being promoted too early by our peers, take the Japanese route. Be aware of what your “promotion” ahead of time is. Redouble your efforts to learn more, to grow more, to explore more, to eventually become worthy of the various labels that your peers have chosen to give you. Like in the dojo, there’s a very good chance you’ll be the last person to get the memo that you really are the black belt someone else has claimed you to be.
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Managing vs. leading
The difference between managing and leading is starkly simple. Imagine you’ve got a patch of woods that’s brambles, thorns, trees, and brush.
Leadership is being the girl or guy in front, hacking away at the foliage, making the trail.
Managing is being the team behind the leader that’s maintaining the trail, keeping it clear, keeping it free of the obstacles the leader has removed, for everyone else to use.
You cannot do both well.
If you’re leading, it’s counterproductive to go back down the trail and manage. If there’s no one else to do it, there’s no one else to do it, but every second you spend managing the trail is a second you’re not moving forward.
If you’re managing, it’s irresponsible to forsake your charge, wander off, and attempt to lead. You might not know where you’re going, and more importantly, the trail behind you will fall into disrepair quickly.
Neither is better or worse. Both are vitally important. If you want real success, know the difference between management and leadership, know which better suits your personality, and know which you’re more talented at.
Inspired in part by Ken Savage and New England Warrior Camp, which is where the photo was taken.
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Understanding Your Marketing Basics
In the martial arts, the basics are everything. Refining the basics isn’t just a matter of doing them over and over again mindlessly, but looking at how to tweak and improve each basic technique. Last night at the Boston Martial Arts Center, I was learning from one of our master instructors about more basics using the six foot staff (bojutsu). Talk about a mind-expanding experience – basics I had been practicing for years got tweaked and improved immediately. Obviously, it will take lots more practice to get the tweaks embedded into my habits, but it got me thinking: the ability to be powerful and effective isn’t just about having the recipe. It’s also about being able to tweak each little piece of the recipe.
For example, I can list out the basic steps of the kata (routine) I was working on last night:
- Hit the opponent in the body with the stick.
- Then hit them in the head.
- Then hit them in the hands.
- Then back up.
- Then hit them in the head again.
Sounds simple, right? Except that each step is a rabbit hole that goes very, very deep. You can’t do the technique from reading that. There are a myriad different ways you can do each of the steps above incorrectly or not optimally, and as I found out last night, there are also lots of ways to improve on what you’ve already go. Now compare this to what you typically hear about marketing and social media:
- Find your audience.
- Be active on Twitter.
- Have a Facebook Fan Page.
- Join the conversation.
- Use good analytics software.
Pick up every marketing and social media book published and you’ll find similar lists. There will be a lot of talk about each of the areas, possibly listing some case studies and other fluffy stuff the publisher needed to pad out the required number of pages, but at the end of the day, you’ll have basic skills that will lack all the tweaks needed to be powerful.
Here’s the kicker, the reason why picking up Marketing Expert’s Latest Book still won’t do a bloody thing for you besides make you feel better for a little while: many of the tweaks and tricks are experience-based. My teacher last night could have given me a laundry list of things to improve with my technique, but that would have been useless. I had to actually experience them in order to understand what I was supposed to be doing.
The same is true for a lot of the stuff in marketing. There is no substitute for experience. There is no substitute for trying stuff and having it explode repeatedly until you find the tweaks you need to make in your own basics, because your marketing basics are broken in ways that are different from the ways my marketing basics are broken. This is why there is no cookie-cutter approach to marketing that works 100% of the time, any more than there is a cookie-cutter way to get a black belt at the Boston Martial Arts Center just by following a list of techniques.
Realize that even with the best knowledge, best resources, best experts writing, blogging, tweeting, and dumping content on you, none of it will make you a better marketer until you try it. Ideally, have a mentor, someone who has walked the path ahead of you and can show you where their rookie mistakes were, but recognize that you’ll probably have to make those same mistakes to understand why they don’t work.
Finally, if you feel frustrated as a marketing professional that you’re not making progress, go back and carefully study your basics. Pull them apart and investigate each little piece to see if there are ways to improve how you do each tiny piece. For example, if Twitter isn’t delivering the goods, look at who you’re following. Who should you be following? How do you select who you choose to follow? What you’ll find is that each little tweak you make won’t be the magic wand that makes your abilities explode, but the sum of them will do exactly that. Tweak and improve everything a little bit and unseen synergies will bring all the improvements together for you, making you far more capable than your peers and competitors. That’s the path to mastery, both in the martial arts and in the marketing profession.
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The essence of anger
As part of the 2011 theme at the Boston Martial Arts Center, I was doing some digging around in my brain today about anger, especially after a learning experience this morning at the dojo. (a learning experience, as my college political science teacher once quipped, is what you get when you don’t get what you want) This year’s theme is all about looking in the mirror, looking inside, and freeing ourselves from ourselves. As a result, I spent a lot of time rooting around in my head about my anger, how I value it, and some ways I make it useful. I hope it’s useful to you.
In Buddhism, all unhappiness begins when reality isn’t the way we want it to be. Your cake falls in the oven, your kid throws a tantrum, your department misses its numbers, your Twitter followers abandon you – whatever the case is, reality and what you want are not the same thing.
Fear is when you have an unwanted reality that you want to run away from. Fear of losing something, fear of heights, fear of a tiger trying to eat you, fear of rejection – all of these things we try to run away from. Fear’s a vital component of our survival and always will be. It’s a primordial emotion that keeps us alive in times of true danger, and when it serves its purpose, we are grateful.
So what does that make anger? Anger is an unwanted reality that you want to forcefully impose your will upon. Anger at a child’s temper tantrum, anger at an insult, anger at a spouse’s seemingly unreasonable point of view, anger at a company’s treatment of its employees – all of these things we want to impose our will on. If only they would do it our way, everything would be all right. If only they would stop doing what we don’t want and start doing what we want. If only they would submit and surrender, our anger would be sated.
Anger’s a vital component of our survival, too. Think about it for a second. If fear makes you flee from something, anger makes you rush in to conquer it. If you’re fighting for your life and retreating isn’t a possibility, anger keeps you in the fight. If you’re starving for a meal, anger lets you conquer the animal, kill it, win over it, and have something to eat. Acknowledging that anger is as much a part of us as fear and other survival instincts is vitally important. Far too many people try to demonize anger, theirs and others, to claim that it simply shouldn’t be there. To deny anger’s existence and usefulness in the right context is to deny something incredibly basic that’s wired into us, something that is there to help us in the right context.
If fear chills, anger boils. If fear is about avoiding a loss, anger is about winning a victory at any cost, and that’s the key right there to taming the beast. If you can have the presence of mind during an anger experience to ask yourself if there’s anything worth winning, you can very quickly short circuit it and pull the rug out from under its feet.
If a child is throwing a tantrum, ask yourself what’s left to win by expelling your anger on them. Not much to win, is there? Tears, a runny nose, and some parental guilt – some prize, huh? If a supervisor at your company is doing something callous and uncaring, ask yourself what’s left to win by getting fired up at her or him. Is getting on their bad actors list a worthy prize? Is losing your job a worthy prize? Not much left to win there.
Sometimes there is a very worthy prize, and when there is, anger is absolutely called for and appropriate. If someone is trying to harm your family, there is a very worthy prize at stake. With focus, direct your anger to win that prize. If someone is trying to rape you, there is a very worthy prize at stake. With skill, channel your anger into winning over them. If someone is malevolently destroying your company and your livelihood by extension, there is a worthy prize, especially if you have a family to feed. With cunning and cleverness, harness your anger to be effective in neutralizing them.
Try this perspective the next time you’re angry. Ask yourself the honest question: is there anything worth winning? If you have trouble maintaining presence of mind even during anger, write it down somewhere you can see it in situations that make you angry, or hold a contest with yourself to see how quickly you can distract yourself so that you can think again and ask yourself what’s left to win. If the prize isn’t worth it, you may find that the angry simply fades away as the rest of your body, mind, and spirit figure out that there’s no point fighting for a valueless prize and that there are better opportunities for victory ahead.
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