RonAmok!

My High School graduation occurred on a football field on a warm Spring New England morning almost 30 years ago. As the graduates left the field that day, so did the connections that many of us held with one another. Some of us went to college; others went to work; and some got married. But none of us had a mechanism to stay in touch automatically.

My son’s High School graduation occurred on a football field on a hot Southern California afternoon almost three months ago.  As the graduates left the field that day, their connections to one another remained unchanged. Just like the generation before them, some went to college; others went to work; and some are planning to get married (yikes!). But unlike their parents, all have an automatic mechanism by which to stay connected. It’s called Facebook.

After college, I stayed in touch with people the old fashioned way…we exchanged annual Christmas cards with “Family Letters” stuffed into them:-) My son, on the other hand, receives daily updates as to the who, what, when, where, why, and how his friends are doing. Instead of the annual highlights that I receive, he sees pictures of friend’s roommates, hears them complain about their professors, and rolls his eyes as they root for their new favorite football teams.

The difference between his social interaction and mine is that my son’s network grows after every life milestone, whereas mine always shrunk. This phenomenon is something that companies need to start thinking about NOW!

Your future employees are building powerful networks that will follow them into your company.  What are you doing to prepare for it? Are you making the adjustments necessary to enable those networks to help your business? Are you changing your employment profiles to hire young talent that is not only comfortable creating content online, but who also has access to a deep network of individuals who may be able to help you achieve your corporate goals?

Most companies are simply wrestling with Social Media from a marketing or PR perspective. The thought process can’t stop there. Management must look beyond these simple first-order connections and start recognizing the second-order affects of Social Media. Those who can harness the power of these second-order affects will thrive. The rest will remain disconnected, just like the graduates who walked off of that football field almost 30 years ago.

Photo Credit: Robert Crumb

Tags: Beyond Marketing and PR New Networks Graduation New Media Management Ron Ploof New Media Evangelist

There’s a concept in engineering called the time constant, a relative unit of measurement that describes how long it takes some event to happen. We have the same concept in colloquial language when we ask questions such as: How long does it take a car to go from zero to sixty? or How long will it take me to “come up to speed?”

For the past year, I’ve been working under the assumption that I could help shorten the Social Media time constant–helping those new to Social Media come up to speed that much quicker. But I’ve learned something during the process–that there is a limit to the Social Media time constant.  No matter how many examples that I create, no matter how many analogies that I perfect, the time it takes takes for someone to become proficient in Social Media cannot be shortened indefinitely.  I call my discovery the Natural Law of Social Media.

Natural Laws are nothing new. Long ago humans learned that the only way to reap a harvest in the Fall was to plant their crops in the Spring. The seeds needed to be in the ground for a specific length of time and no amount of extra tractors, fertilizer, or ranch hands could change that fact. To use a term from consulting: “You can’t hire nine consultants and have a baby in a month.”

Social Media too has it’s own gestation period–one that is split into three different phases: Conceptual, Internalization, and Proficiency.

Phase I : Conceptual

This first phase requires a person to have fundamental grasp of Social Media and what makes it different from traditional media. They have the ability to look at the advances in technology to see the impact that they’ve had on the state of communications.

• The ability for anyone to publish content and distribute it around the world for a cost of nothing is a game-changer in corporate communications.
• Traditional communications devices such as press releases and obsequious marketing collateral don’t work well in an environment where the content consumer controls the channels.

Phase II: Internalization

There’s a big difference between understanding concepts and internalizing them. Just as reading a book by Dr. Spock can’t make you an expert in parenting, simply understanding Social Media concepts without hands-on experience will not help you become Social Media proficient.

The only way to advance beyond a conceptual understanding of Social Media is to use the tools. Write a blog, use Twitter, or connect with your friends on Facebook. Participate in LinkedIn group discussions, upload photos to Flickr, or create and distribute a video via YouTube.

By doing so, you open yourself to nuances that you can’t experience by observing from the sidelines. Unfortunately, I know many people who don’t use the tools but profess to understand Social Media. They do understand…but are stuck in Phase I.

Phase III: Proficiency

There are no shortcuts to Social Media proficiency. Just as hard work helped you become proficient in Sales, Marketing, Public Relations, Customer Support, or Management, it takes the same commitment to become proficient in Social Media channels. Significant time must be spent listening to the online chatter, creating compelling content, and participating in online communities. By doing those things consistently, you will build an audience that you can interact with. Interacting with the audience is the “Social” part of Social Media. How can one master Social skills without having people to speak with?

Are you willing to perform the work necessary for Social Media proficiency?

Photo Credit: Library of Congress

Tags: Natural Law of Social Media Time Constant Proficiency RonAmok! New Media Coach New Media Evangelist Ron Ploof Read This First

In 1985, my college economics professor taught that wealth is created through the strategic allocation of scarce resources. The theory being that if you controlled a scarce resource, you were on your way to building wealth.

A few years later, I read a book by Paul Zane Pilzer that not only disagreed with my college professor, but its concepts helped shape every career decision that I’ve made since.  The book, Unlimited Wealth: The Theory and Practice of Economic Alchemy, helped me understand that the pursuit of controlling scarce resources was futile because the technology-of-the-day defines what a resource is.

For example, oil was an annoyance until someone figured out that it was a rich source of energy. In an agrarian society, land was considered a scarce resource, until we developed new methods for significantly increasing the harvest per square acre. And if the laws of supply and demand proved correctly, sand, the most plentiful material on earth, should have no value at all–that is until someone discoverd its semiconductive properties and built an entire valley in Northern California based on the discovery.

The concept that yesterday’s scarce resources can become abundant today creates huge challenges to those who’ve built their businesses on the obsoleted resource. If technology determines what a resource is, and the rate of technological change is accelerating, then anyone in the business of controlling resources faces real-time financial ruin the moment someone invents a technology that transforms that scarce resource into an abundant one.

Fast forward to 2009, with a book that picks up where Unlimited Wealth left off: Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price.  Twenty years ago, there was no Google, Wordpress, iTunes, Youtube, Facebook or Twitter–all technologies that transformed publishing from a scarce resource (printing presses and transmission towers) into an abundant one. Anderson takes a look at the ramifications that online technologies have had on driving the marginal cost of information delivery so low as to make it too small to measure.

While many businesses morn what has been lost through the cost marginalization of information delivery, Free focuses precicely on the abundance of opportunities that businesses have to choose from. The question (which I have posted in this blog on many occasions) is:  do business leaders have the intestinal fortitude required to reap the benefits of those opportunities? Anderson sums up the sentiment on page 233:

Free is not a magic bullet. Giving away what you do will not make you rich by itself. You have to think creatively about how to convert the reputation and attention you can get from Free into cash. Every person and every project will require a different answer to that challenge, and sometimes it won’t work at all. This is just like everything else in life–the only mystery is why people blame Free for their own poverty of imagination and intolerance for possible failure.

Every now and then, a book comes along that needs to be read multiple times to completely absorb its concepts. Not only have I’ve read Unlimited Wealth at least a half-dozen times, but I’ve purchased it at least that many times, as my copy always seems to be on someone else’s bookshelf.  More than likely I’ll be dong the same thing with Free.

During the next few weeks, I’ll be discussing specific things that companies must do (or avoid!) to benefit form the disruptive power of abundance vs. scarcity-based business thinking. Stay tuned.

Tags: Free Chris Anderson Paul Zane Pilzer Ron Ploof Abundance Scarcity New Media Evangelist Business