Once upon a time, there were two baseball teams, the Red Sox and the Yankees. Each team did its thing, and the owners made money, the players made money, the advertisers made money in the stadiums and on the televisions, and all was more or less well. Fans got to root for their teams and enjoy $7 hot dogs and mediocre beers while cheering from the seats. Occasionally someone even hit a fly ball into the stands and made everyone happy.

Then a rivalry developed between the two teams. Each team’s fans became more ardent supporters of their team and detractors of the opposing team. Red Sox fans didn’t like Yankees fans. Yankees fans didn’t like Red Sox fans. The rivalry grew intense over the decades, but strangely, it didn’t drive people away from the stadiums. Quite the contrary – people flocked to see their teams and cheer for their teams more than ever.

The owners made more money. The players made more money. The advertisers made more money. The fans still got $7 hot dogs and beer, and started to express their dislike for the other team using words like war, traitor, and hatred. Fans even started to murder each other over the rivalry. But instead of trying to cool heated heads, we are content with the owners, players, media, and advertisers fanning the fires ever higher, even if the consequences of doing so are more dire, because the folks running the show (literally) are making a lot more money.

This in the world of propaganda is known as a granfalloon, or minimal group paradigm. We create a largely meaningless distinction and divide people along that distinction until we’ve created two or more ardent camps that will do actual physical harm to each other.

Now let’s port this idea over to the realm of politics. We have two large teams in the United States, the Republicans and the Democrats. We have owners – the campaign funders who benefit from the decisions made by lawmakers of each party. We have players – the elected officials we put in office and their appointees. We have advertisers and media who benefit from the enormous sums each election cycle. And we have the fans – us, the citizens.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the bitter rivalry between the two teams in politics has the same outcomes as the bitter rivalry in baseball and is thus encouraged by the establishment for their benefit. The owners make a lot more money. The players make a lot more money. The advertisers and media make a lot more money.

And the fans – we, the people? We get the equivalent of $7 hot dogs and beer, get to root for our teams, get to be divided into our respective camps and incited to violence for the benefit of the owners, players, and other interests running the show. One nation, indivisible? Hardly.

The next time you have a knee jerk reaction to someone or something because of the political label on it or them, take a step back and recognize that you’ve been played by the moneyed interests and transformed from a rational human being into a rabid fan. Mentally remove your team jersey, put away the meaningless bluster you’ve been asked to recite by your team, and give some actual critical thought to what’s in front of you.

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How secure are your digital assets? With the massive database compromises of sites like Gawker and its associated properties, both individuals and groups are finding that passwords aren’t enough. But what’s a realistic alternative or supplement?

Here’s one. Do you see this little gadget attached to my keychain?

It’s a World of Warcraft authenticator. It’s a little device that generates a random number bound to my Warcraft account every 30 seconds or so. To log in to play, I sign in with a password and type in the current number. It takes literally seconds to do and ensures that my Warcraft account is harder to hack as you’d need both the physical device and my password to get in.

Now explain this to me: why is my video game, my leisure activity, more secure than everything else I use in my digital life? I swipe my credit card at stores and the bored minimum wage clerk doesn’t even bother looking at the signature. I log into my bank account online with just a password. I used to work in a credit union data center a little while back where passwords for the system were mandatory – but they were four digits only and if you compromised them, you’d have access to literally billions of dollars.

The technology to add strong security – or stronger security at any rate – isn’t especially difficult for users to add to their routine. That’s a baseless fear- millions of Warcraft players like me use a strong security system daily. Database disasters like the Gawker incident highlight just how fragile and easily broken the simple text password  is, and should be a wake up call to us, the consumers, to demand more security out of the institutions we deal with daily. 

Want to get a jump on institutions? Change your passwords now, and change them in such a way that no one password works for everything. At a bare minimum, add a word for password groups so that password sets can be remembered but are different from major network to network.

For example, if the password you want to use is CheeseBurgers!, then create CheeseBurgers!Banking as a password for financial services, CheeseBurgers!Social for networks like Facebook and Twitter, CheeseBurgers!Email for mail services, etc. You’ll still mentally have “one” password but it won’t work for everything. (the added length is also a minor increase to security since longer passwords are harder to guess) If another Gawker media incident happens where millions of passwords and email addresses are stolen, perhaps only your CheeseBurgers!Blogging password will need to be changed.

Security is and will be only as strong as we demand of the companies we work with. Demand better of everyone and everything you work with!

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Much has been said about personal branding, about establishing an unmistakeable identity in the online and offline worlds. Some judge it to be essential, while others call it the height of narcissism. That said, there’s an overwhelming tide racing to the shore now that only things like personal branding can endure: a tide of enforced mediocrity.

Take a read of this article about West Potomac High School all but removing failing grades as part of the educational process. By effectively removing the ability to fail, the school blurs the line between those students who are capable of doing good work in a timely fashion and those students who do mediocre work whenever they feel like it.

Here’s the problem: under this system, there’s no way to tell a B or C level student who works hard from a B or C level student who has no discipline. Changes such as this effectively make things like GPA (which were already fairly skewed and not terribly useful measures) and academic records useless measures of quality. As trends like this spread (and they invariably do), we remove more and more ways to judge a person’s capabilities.

Who would you rather hire? A hard worker or a lazy, undisciplined worker? Under models like West Potomac’s, you can’t tell the difference from academic track record. The diploma looks the same.

This is where personal branding comes in. This is where personal branding transcends being an exercise in self-congratulation and becomes a useful tool. As we continue to enforce mediocrity throughout our society in the name of self-esteem, those people who invest the time and effort to build credible personal brands will have the advantage when it comes to being hired, being promoted, and being valued. This is especially true for new college graduates, since they typically don’t have a track record of achievement and experience to point to, making one bachelor’s degree as good as the next.

So what should you do to build a personal brand? What should you advise your kids, your coworkers, your friends to do? Start obviously by stacking up achievements and doing great work. If you have no latitude to do interesting things in your current workplace, volunteer somewhere to put your talents to use in unconventional ways. Reinforce your great work by building out a strong content presence, blogging about what you’re doing, connecting and building a strong network as quickly as possible, and finding more opportunities to add to your track record of achievement.

Who would you rather hire? A B or C level student with a diploma and nothing else, or a B or C level student with a diploma, blog about your industry or vertical, well connected network, maybe even a magazine article or two, and a pile of LinkedIn recommendations praising them for their hard work as a volunteer? It’s a no-brainer if you’re looking to hire talented people.

No matter how much we neuter academic achievement or homogenize education for a consistently mediocre result, there is no way to disguise hard work, dedication, focus, and achievement in real world results. Your personal brand is your single best method for communicating that to the world, and as more and more signals of quality get diluted for the sake of poor achievers’ self-esteem, building a credible personal brand should become higher and higher priority for you.

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Yesterday, I was walking along the streets of Boston, and noticed the biannual dumping of perfectly good stuff by college students on the sidewalks and streets. Mind you, this isn’t just the dorm room poster collection or something – we’re talking furniture in like new condition, clothing, lights, etc. – things that people with less money could use in their homes.

The problem is, most students don’t want to go to the trouble of hauling stuff like this to a charity. I can understand that, having been a student – the last thing on your mind as you’re moving out or in is moving yet MORE stuff somewhere else.

I’d like your help in spreading a simple message to every college student, to everyone and anyone who has stuff in still usable condition. There’s a charity I support called the Vietnam Veterans of America that has a charity donation system that kicks ass. Here’s how it works: you visit ScheduleaPickup.com and pick what you’re giving away, and most importantly

WHEN A TRUCK FROM THE CHARITY CAN COME TO YOUR PLACE AND PICK IT UP

That’s right: no hauling. No moving. No schlepping. A truck magically appears on Wednesdays and takes your still perfectly good stuff away. They leave you a receipt for tax purposes, too.

If you live nearby some college students who are throwing away perfectly good stuff, please consider corralling it to your yard or doorstep and then calling in the charity air strike yourself. There’s absolutely no reason that this stuff needs to take up space in a landfill when someone else can get some good out of it.

Please spread the word LOUDLY about ScheduleaPickup.com and solve both a waste and charity problem at the same time AND with little to no effort on the donor’s part. Everyone wins.

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I’ve been shopping around the past few days for a terrific lead automation system for the day job, looking at all of the different vendors out there. One thread that’s been common among all of the comparison discussions on LinkedIn, on blogs, etc. that baffles me is this argument:

“We’re better because we have 42x more customers than any of our competitors, which shows that clearly we are the LEADER in our space!”

This argument makes no sense to me. More customers doesn’t make you a better company. More customers just means you have more customers. In fact, it might make you a worse company. If you and your competitor both have 60 people on staff but you have 42x more customers, all that means is I’m 42x less likely to get customer support when I need it.

If more customers were the benchmark of excellence, we’d all shop only at Wal-Mart for everything in life. They have more customers than anyone, right? Are they the best? If absolute numbers of customers were the mark of truly excellent service, logically wouldn’t the IRS (which has every taxpayer as a “customer”) be the best organization in the country to deal with?

What’s at work here is a bit of Robert Cialdini’s bandwagon influence techniques (Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion Amazon link). The hope of these marketers, I suppose, is that by seeing lots of people doing business with a company, I’ll be persuaded that it’s somehow better, in the same way that social media “experts” try to convince you that because they’ve got 20,000 followers, they’re somehow more knowledgeable about social media.

Sorry, gang. I’m not buying it. In this day and age when service, support, and care is needed more than ever, more customers as a sole metric of your worth means you just have less time for me.

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While in the airport yesterday perusing a variety of marketing materials (aka billboards as I walked to my gate), I saw a bunch of different advertisements by companies about how much they care, from facility maintenance to oil to the airlines themselves. This inspired a late afternoon tweet:

If all your marketing materials insist that you care, you probably don’t.

Within a few minutes, Sophia asked the very on-point question:

brightwings: @cspenn curious. what would demonstrate “caring” to your way of thinking & satisfaction?

Caring is one of those terms that falls under the same category as cool. Saying that you care is far less impactful than actually caring.

What is caring? It’s hard to define but easy to spot. Take your pick of any of the things that people at companies do, from your local favorite restaurant server remembering the way you like your martini to an airline flight attendant doing the mandatory preflight announcement slightly differently:

Not caring is even easier to see. It’s business as usual, paying lip service to the idea that the people giving you money as customers might actually matter, and putting yourself before your customers. I worked for a company once where I watched as a customer service representative was told – in all seriousness – to care less, answer the phones more quickly, get the customer off the phone more quickly and get them to buy something online, and avoid helping them in order to maintain call volume, because phone calls cost money.

Caring isn’t a corporate directive that marketing can create from thin air, much as we might try or want to. Caring comes from a company’s corporate culture at every level, from the CEO to the janitor.

Maybe you’re in charge of a company, a department, a workgroup, and you want to evolutionize (note the missing letter R) the culture into one that cares. How do you do that? Take whatever it is you’re doing and reframe it as a mission. Not a B-school mission statement, but a real mission, a holy cause, a calling. Find or create a noble aspect to whatever it is you do, something that you can truly be passionate, even zealous about, and recenter your focus on that.

Sales will get easier because you will exude the subtle, powerful confidence that comes from speaking about something you believe in. Customer service will get easier because your customers will align to your beliefs or choose a different company to work with. Marketing will get much easier because you will rarely have to question whether the work you are doing is effective or not – you just have to determine if it is in line with your mission. Running the company itself will get easier because you won’t have to browbeat workers into coming to work or doing good work. The cause and the passion it fuels will do that for you; you need to maintain, encourage, and foster that faith, remaining true to your mission.

What demonstrates caring? When you have something to believe in and something worth fighting for, caring demonstrates itself.

What’s your mission?

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There is no secret sauce

If there’s one expression I’ve heard over the years that demonstrates an executive’s lack of understanding about how business works, it’s the idea of secret sauce, the concept that your company has some secret methodology or recipe that makes you incredibly successful and powerful. Everyone’s questing for this sauce. What’s the right mix? What are the ingredients? The truly paranoid obsess over the theoretical secret sauce of other companies.

There is no secret sauce.

None. The recipe for Coca Cola was derived using gas chromatography decades ago. The Colonel’s 11 herbs and spices have largely proven to be a myth, again thanks to food laboratories. Go read William Poundstone’s Big Secrets if you want the actual recipes.

Your business doesn’t have a secret sauce, either. Unless you’ve got a product that absolutely no one else has, your “secret sauce” is probably in use in some form or fashion at every one of your competitors. The only exception to this might be if you’re deeply incompetent, in which case there are probably ingredients in your sauce that no one wants.

In the grand scheme of things, how much does the secret sauce matter? Let’s take it literally:

• If your restaurant is open for business only on Tuesday nights from 1 AM to 2 AM, your secret sauce won’t save you.
• If your servers are surly and abusive to your patrons, your secret sauce won’t save you.
• If the food that the sauce is placed on is substandard or infected, your secret sauce won’t save you.
• If your financial management makes the entire restaurant a failed investment, your secret sauce won’t save you.

The secret sauce matters much less than having staff that can serve patrons well, having the restaurant open when people want to eat, having a chef that can cook competently, having prices that patrons are willing to pay, and having a product of good quality.

The reality is that if you or your management team are obsessing over a secret sauce, you’re basically asking for a magic wand to fix problems in your business that you’re in denial about. If you’re obsessed over your sauce and someone else’s sauce, you’re probably going out of business soon.

Stop obsessing over secret sauces and start making sure your business is performing the basics well. You’ll sleep better at night, your business will run better, and who knows? With all that stress relieved, you might feel creative enough in the kitchen to one day invent a new, secret sauce.

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I read quite a bit of feedback and writing on a daily basis, from moderating forums to emails to blogs, and there are two word misuses that top my list of minor annoyances:

1. Ironic.

2. Tragedy.

Just as quick review, in case your mom wasn’t as diligent about English as mine was…

1. Ironic is the opposite of what was intended. For some reason, folks use it as a synonym for coincidence. As George Carlin pointed out, a diabetic getting hit by a truck is an accident. A diabetic getting hit by a sugar truck is poetic coincidence. A diabetic getting hit by an insulin truck – now that’s irony!

2. Tragedy isn’t something sorrowful or disastrous. We have words for that – sorrowful and disastrous. In its original form, tragedy is a specific calamity that’s the direct result of a character flaw, usually hubris. A death isn’t tragic unless the person brought it on themselves through a character flaw that led them to die. An airplane crash isn’t tragic unless the pilot, in his hubris, was saying in the cockpit, “I’m such a good pilot I can fly blindfolded! See? ”

Does anyone care about the misuse of these terms? Besides standup comedians (we miss you, Mr. Carlin), probably not. However, when I’m reading (particularly blogs and web sites of prospective future employees or other folks who I’m asked to evaluate), you certainly accrue bonus points if you’re using the language well.

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South by Southwest (SxSW) is a fairly large conference that offers attendees the opportunity to learn more about movies, music, and interactive (online) content at its weeklong festival. It’s become something of a giant party and simultaneously for a lot of people, a way for them to validate their projects and causes by being selected to speak.

The process for choosing who will speak at SxSW is partly open to the public, where speakers propose panel discussions on the voting web site, then encourage friends, family, and anyone who will stand still long enough to vote for their panel. Panels that receive lots of votes have a greater chance of being selected for public performance at the festival.

Competition is fierce, with over 2,200 proposed panels and about 10% or so will make it through (if I remember correctly).

The consequence of this is that every proposed speaker has been shilling like mad to get their panels selected. Sonny Gill asked if there was a better way than this, than making it effectively a popularity contest, and I think there is.

Make the content stand on its own.

Here’s how I’d approach it. Speakers complete proposed speaking session topics, the same as now, except that they are forbidden from attaching any personally identifiable information to the topic. These are then loaded into the system, validated to ensure speakers followed the rules (anyone who didn’t, obviously, is disqualified outright), and then displayed to voters.

Here’s the catch: voters only see the panel topic and description. No speaker name or bio. No information at all about who’s delivering. The URLs themselves are randomized each time you enter the voting process so a speaker can’t find their panel in the pile and tell people to vote for it or even link to it. Voters vote for 5 at a time, ranking them in order of preference, and at the end, votes are tallied and the schedule is revealed.

This eliminates the popularity contest. This eliminates gender or race bias. This eliminates everything except what the panel is ostensibly about, which is the content, the discussion, the conversation.

Will this ever happen? Not likely. SxSW would never get nearly the same number of voters registering under an anonymous system, which means a smaller database to work with, nor would it create the same kind of buzz that the current system does, so don’t expect it to change. Every potential speaker is SxSW’s marketing department, unpaid. Every potential speaker is generating ridiculous Google Juice for SxSW’s web site. Why would you as a conference organizer ever give that up?

But, that said, if there ever were an opportunity for conference organizers as a professional conference to democratize their voting system, this would be the way to do it.

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The following post is rated PG-13 for adult language.

I went looking for some decent affiliate marketing blogs to read and subscribe to this morning. Being the Googling sort, I searched for affiliate marketing blogs and popped open the top 20 results in a series of tabs to see what I’d found.

Of the top 20 sites that came back in my search, 2 didn’t load, one was flagged by Google as containing malware harmful to my computer, and 11 of the sites, before any content could load, popped up a whole-page, content-obscuring ad. Some of the ads were for newsletters, blogs, or other “freebies”, while others promoted the author’s latest books, DVDs, webinars, seminars, and other swill.

The very thing that would convince me to buy your book, CD, DVD, etc. is your content. How helpful is your blog? After all, if I quickly scan the first five posts of your blog and I learn something just from a quick scan, you can bet that I’ll think you’ve got even more stuff to offer. You taught me something in 30 seconds, and I’ll stick around much longer to see what else I can learn. I’ll bookmark your site. I’ll tag it and store it for future reference. I’ll subscribe and opt-in, because I love learning, and I love any site, blog, or outlet that helps me learn more.

However, when you obscure your content with piles and piles of ads, guess what? The value you present to me is absolutely zero, and you get put in the bin of perpetual ignorage. I don’t care how well ranked your book is on Amazon or that your book is on the Peoria TImes Bestseller List for the 213th week in a row. Endorsements don’t mean anything to me. Reputation matters very little to me. What does matter is the content, the goods, and if you block my ability to read your content with your ads, then you’ve effectively decided I don’t need to get any sense of your value.

Here’s the ultimate irony, you Internet marketing masters. (yes, one pompous jackass billed himself as such) One of the areas we cover less well in our Marketing Over Coffee podcast is affiliate marketing (with the quality of the blogs I surfed this morning, there’s little wonder why), so I was doing some homework, putting together a list of actually useful affiliate marketing blogs for our master blog list that we’ll be distributing in the next Marketing Over Coffee newsletter.

If you hadn’t blocked your entire site with tons of useless shit, you might have made the cut and had your blog included in a list that will be distributed and subscribed to by thousands and thousands of marketing professionals. Instead, you lose out on me, you lose out on someone willing to voluntarily endorse your writing, and you lose out on a ton of exposure, all in the hope that you could scrape up a buck with your ineffective ads.

We’ve all been beating this meme to death recently, but for good reason: be helpful. Be helpful in what you do and your work will practically market for you. Be helpful and useful in your writing, in your blogging, in your content production, and you’ll have won me over immediately, made me subscribe, and made me mention you to the folks who enjoy seeing what’s on my nightstand and in my blog reader.

Go take a look at your top five blog posts right now on your personal or professional site. If at least one of your blog posts doesn’t contain something helpful, something actionable, something useful, fix that. If you do have something that I can learn, take away, and make useful right away, then I congratulate and salute you, and know that your audience deeply appreciates what you do.

Updated: I posted the counterpoint perspective with data over on Marketing Over Coffee.

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