In the medical profession, folks graduate from medical school, but they are not yet ready to go out and practice medicine- they need to do some more formal training- a residency- usually in some sort of specialty.  (Even family practice is a specialty.)  Yet in residency, the training and additional education young doctors need before they can practice on their own comes in two forms.  One is specialized reading- sometimes the reading is assigned, but most of the time, it is assumed you will use your “educational money” and buy the specialty text books you’ll need, not only as a resident but in practice, when you come up against something you might not have seen before.  The second is on the job practice, where you see patients but are supervised by another “attending” physician, who is supposed to help you learn and guide you, like a mentor.  Not all doctors teaching residents are good at imparting the art of their practice to others, as well as the base knowledge required to do the job.  Practicing medicine and teaching it are two different things, and not everyone is good at both.

Similarly, many teachers went into teaching because they love learning.  They loved being in school themselves.  They loved having a guiding path through all the cool stuff there is to know, and somewhere along the way, decided they wanted to do this themselves.  They mastered the whole school process, start to finish. They almost have a nostalgia for school- it is a precious place to them.   But the problem is often that the best students don’t always make the best teachers.

Teaching is a different skill set from learning.  While teaching and learning are clearly complimentary, they are not the same thing.  My dad, for example, was a brilliant engineer, and fantastic at math.  Yet when he tried to help me with calculus homework, I often ended up frustrated and in tears.  For me, the conflict arose because he largely couldn’t remember what it was like not to know all this math, and couldn’t explain it in a way a neophyte would understand- what the Heath Brothers call “The Curse of Knowledge” in their great book, Made to Stick. I think many teachers suffer from this problem as well-they love their subject matter and understand it so well that they have a hard time remembering what it was like not to know.

The skill of being able to be a guide through complicated material, all while making it an exciting and engaging process is a rare skill.  While I think there are methods and checklists and other tools people can use to help make what they know accessible to others, great teaching is an art form.  It requires not only understanding the subject area, but understanding it well enough and liking it enough that you can make it exciting for almost anyone.  It requires a bit of stage presence, improv skills, and being able to communicate with the students so you know what they understand and what they don’t.  Teaching at its best, is an interactive experience between teacher and student. (This is also why going to high school or college just by watching a bunch of DVD’s is not equivalent to being enrolled in a real school with real classrooms, but I digress.)

Sometimes the best teachers are people who are less interested in the one true path, but recognize there are many individual ways to get to the same goal.  They are good mentors, guides and parents.  They are interested in someone else’s success, and they get joy in seeing others succeed, and don’t worry that someone else may be smarter than they are- in fact, the best teachers are often looking for those smarter than themselves, so they can continue learning and growing themselves.

The essence of a great teacher involves being passionate about your subject area, and being a fantastic communicator, who can turn that love of knowledge into a spark of inspiration and curiosity in others.  It’s the reason why I think all teachers should learn a bit about marketing and the way people turn commercial ideas into what Seth Godin would call “an idea virus” that spreads on its own.  Using the tools the Heath Brothers talk about in Made to Stick, for example, can help anybody make their ideas and communications more effective and more memorable, by essentially hacking what our brain natively finds most interesting.  This can help business people end “death by powerpoint” presentations, but it can just as easily make you a better writer, a better teacher, and a better communicator across the board.

In the end, good teaching requires that people are personally invested in the process and look on it as mentoring as well as a delivery of knowledge vehicle.  The teacher might be driving the bus, but the bus can be an old school bus, a greyhound, a tricked out  tour bus, a local or express.  The bus comes in many sizes, varieties and with different amenities.  But unless the bus is responsive to the needs of the passengers, and can get them to where they need to be, it’s not very useful.  The driver, like a good teacher, needs to be aware of the road, the path, and the needs of the passengers in order to do the best job possible.

We need to make sure all of our teachers- at every level, from elementary through graduate school, training and beyond- understand not only how to make lesson plans, but how to meet the needs of kids in their classrooms.  And sometimes, it’s going to require “marketing” that science lesson, history or math to a group of reluctant learners, to get them on the right road in the long run.

Are you a good teacher?  What makes a good teacher to you?  Is it a skill or an art or a mixture of both?

This made me think about the longevity of digital media. Some things, like blogs and podcasts, are more durable. This information is stored not only on your website and servers, but by others, including the Internet Wayback Machine. Twitter, and to a certain extent, Facebook, relies more on real-time day to day content, rather than provide any sort of long term search-ability or archiving. Yet with more and more people sharing news items on Twitter, communicating with customers and the like, how much of this information will continue to exist in the future? What becomes “evidence” could be saved for later on, whether its for journalists researching a story, hisotrians, or even laywers?  Would this stuff be admissible in a Court of Law? I’m not sure whether or not we know the answer to any of these questions yet.

For me, I often share information and links on Facebook, sometimes for me, sometimes for friends. I’ve opted to share many things through Delicious, and to Facebook through Friendfeed. This means I have a tagged list of blog posts and articles, creating my own clip file, my own library and encyclopedia that grows over time. But if I only tagged this stuff and shared it out through Twitter, it would likely be gone.

How much of what you are creating online is meant to have a lifespan?  How long to you want to be held responsible for opinions, tweets, snarky comments, etc.?  How much is intended to be in the moment alone?

A case in point is the LD Podcast.  I have had the show on hiatus, and I’m working hard to put it back into production in the near future, spurned on by recent emails from a number of sources who are discovering the content for the first time.  I’m realizing that the content I create has a lifespan far longer than my attention span, and it continues to provide value to others, long after I have taken it for granted.

I hope this provides a little food for thought- Where are you putting your digital media energies?  What’s providing the most real time versus long tail value?  And, what can you do to create both?

Most of all, don’t forget that sometimes, creating content with longevity might actually create the most long term value.

(1) unless they have been stored, archived or otherwise placed in different formats…

A friend of mine had an issue with a local coffee shop, that I happen to love.  There was an issue with credit card numbers being harvested, most likely by an employee, and this caused a headache both for the customers and the business.  My friend now has a vendetta against the shop, because she felt they did not act fast enough, or seem to take it seriously enough from her perspective.  From an outsider’s perspective, I see the notice in the shop about the incident and why they no longer accept credit cards.  I’ve always paid in cash, so I am largely unaffected, and feel like the business has done what it could to make the situation better, and solve the problem.  Yet, when I check in on Foursquare at the location, I receive a warning text from my friend not to trust this business.

I get that my friend is irate and sees this as an opportunity to both protect others and send a message to the business that they should treat their customers better.  But I wonder when this bad experience becomes slander.  When is it a vendetta?  What can the business do to show my friend that they made a mistake?  That they get it now?  That they have done what they can, and need to move on?  When will my friend decide that they have done enough electronic mayhem and decide that it’s okay to let go now?  (Side note- What’s the difference between a pit bull and a REALLY pissed off customer?  A pit bull will eventually let go.)

In social media, we openly acknowledge and encourage everyone we know to use the platforms out there to talk, both good and bad, about the experiences you have.  We tell businesses to listen to their customers and respond, because a quick response to bad stuff is primarily good customer service, and secondly, tends to minimize the “I hate (insert business name here) and will do everything at my disposal to let the world know- and aren’t you unlucky that I know how to make this part of your digital footprint???”

From my own perspective, I make every effort to resolve any issues I have locally first.  Then, if it’s a chain or franchise, I may escalate up the ladder.  If I am not getting satisfaction, I may take it to my blog or twitter to see if I get a response.  But mostly, since I know the ‘net is a powerful tool, I save it as the last ditch response to problems, rather than the first.  I try to be someone who is all about building good relationships, especially since you never know if you’re going to need that bridge you’re about to burn later on.  I basically always want to solve the problem, forgive and move on, because frankly, anger takes too much of my time and energy, and does more harm to me than good.

The plain truth is that we’re never going to be perfect.  We’re going to make mistakes.  Acknowledging them early, and doing what you can to solve the problem and save the relationship is optimal, but sometimes, it’s just too far gone to repair.  Asking what you can do to make it better or help make amends goes a long way to dampening down the fire in the belly that happens when people are mad or disappointed, but sometimes, nothing will work and the relationship, like with that old boyfriend or girlfriend, is simply over.  If you can both part and go on about your business- that’s the best for both parties.  Turning someone into Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and creating a stalker, set on doing you harm, is far from optimal.  But the more you can do to help that person let go and move on, the better off everyone will be in long run.  Preserve everyone’s dignity.  Acknowledge mistakes.  Acknowledge their feelings, and that there’s little you can do to make it up to them in a way that will be satisfying.  And agree to move on, as best as possible.

The metrics we use to repair relationships with friends, family members and coworkers work the same way with business relationships.  Treat everyone- your customers, your business partners, your suppliers, your bosses- everyone- with respect, and the likelihood and frequency of the irreparable relationship will go down.  And that’s for everyone’s benefit in the long run.

The same thing is true for businesses, economics, families,you name it- as it’s true for bacteria or lemurs. If you find a niche and can exploit it to your advantage, you have a strategy for success that will carry you far. That is essentially the whole basis for great books like “Blue Ocean Strategy” (Amazon Link) that talk about finding markets where the competition isn’t fierce, or just isn’t there yet- you have the ability to own the niche.

One way businesses achieve this is by creating their own ecosystems.  Apple is brilliant at this, with iTunes and the App Store- it has created a whole economy that it owns.  It lets others play in the sandbox, helping diversify the entire ecosystem, making it more robust, and letting others compete to fill in the niches of best song, or best movie or best work productivity App, all the while taking a percentage, like an agent, as owner of the ecosystem or world.  Amazon has done this, as has Ebay.  All of these ecosystems compete at points of overlap- like a town encroaching on an animal’s habitat- but for large swaths of the ecosystem, there is less competition and life goes on pretty happily.

Finding your niche is difficult for a lot of folks, in part, because it starts with the very hard question of who YOU are, what you do best, and what you love to do.  Sometimes, we can fill a niche because we are perfectly suited for a job that’s available, but if it doesn’t make you thrilled or excited to go to work every day, how are you really going to have the heart required to maximize the opportunity day after day?

Another spot of friction is when you know your talents and strengths, how do you communicate those to others is a short, coherent, easy to grasp way so they can help you find a niche that works?  Some people refer to this as a lobby or elevator pitch- what is your tag line that inspires other people to be interested in you and hire you?

For example, on Twitter, I am largely known as LD Podcast, for the podcast I’ve done about learning and learning disabilities.  But the important part there is really the Learning part- that transcends people struggling in school or work with things like dyslexia and ADHD.  I feel I’m all about learning and teaching, and trying to find the most effective ways to make your message clear.  I read business books and marketing books because these fields are all about making messages clear in order to get someone to buy something.  I take all these ideas and concepts and apply them to help businesses, medical education, and other clients/niche owners to make their ideas and talents more easily understood.  When you understand, quickly, what someone or some business is about, you can quickly decide whether you need that service, and you can convey that information easily to others- making the idea a virus, as Seth Godin would say.  The principals are the same whether we’re talking math facts for middle school kids or marketing plans for adults or social media tools-  you’ve got to be able to make a case and sell your ideas for anyone else to understand them and do anything with them.  And that, in a nutshell, is about good, precise communication.

Which brings us back to science.  In science and technical writing, precision is really important.  I’ve spent hours struggling over a sentence or two in an abstract, trying to get the exact language as concise and accurate as possible.  Likewise, in law school, your ability to win a case or argument depends on how you use language to communicate your client’s position to another, and use supporting information to convince the decision maker you are correct.  In business and marketing, you have to do the same thing- use language to convince someone your product or service solves a need or problem- maybe even one they didn’t know they had. (Just ask Ron Popiel, or read about him in Malcolm Gladwell’s “What The Dog Saw“.)

In the end, it’s all about finding your unique niche where you can thrive.  You need enough resources (which includes money and customers for business, often money and students for education) to make the most of the niche, and you have to be constantly willing to adapt and change with the environment.  If you can’t adapt and evolve, you will likely suffer, decline, and possible even go extinct, or at least out of business.

It’s easier said than done of course.  But the process starts and ends with you, not with the shiny new objects or social media tools or anything else.  I’d love to be able to say Get Twitter and life will be perfect, but that’s not true.  Like monkeys figuring out to poke a stick in a log to get food, it’s all about how you use that tool to its greatest effect that will bring you success, and it often involves experimentation, failure, and reinvention time after time.

I know my life is one great experiment.  I think I know something, and that knowledge gets challenged.  I can stick to my guns, or adapt to the new conditions.  I have to apply what I know.  In reading The Checklist Manifesto- How to get Things Right, they talk about two distinct kinds of mistakes we make all the time.  There are errors we make of ignorance- we don’t know what we don’t know- and then there are egregious errors-  when we know the right thing to do, but we just can’t seem to execute as we’re supposed to, leading to disaster.

For example, I know easily 20 different diet plan that promise to help me lose weight, but it’s not a lack of knowledge, it’s the consistent implementation over time that causes trip-ups.  Part of it is programming the environment, and making doing the right thing easier than doing the self-destructive or ignorant or convenient thing.  Part of it is keeping simple rules forefront in your mind, and avoiding the infinite shades of gray.

Success will be measured by how well you can adapt to the “rules” or metrics of your environment, or control the environment to your advantage. It’s how well you can fill your social, cultural or economic niche.

And that’s why studying biology and evolution is essential to everyone.  Period.  Know your niche and optimize it.

Seth has asked people to read it, think about it and give a thoughtful review.  I couldn’t wait to tell you about it until I finished the book- I’ve found myself quoting concepts in the first few chapters to friends  already, so I thought it was time to share.

Seth starts out the book by talking about how the old American dream and template we’ve all been fed is history.  There are tons of people who still believe all you have to do is follow the rules and you’ll get a job where you then follow the rules and get rewarded.  But the bottom line that many folks are finding out is that following the rules has ended up being a sucker’s deal, a bait and switch bargain.  The safety and security of jobs and pensions and retirement at a reasonable age, in reasonable health, where you enjoy a permanent vacation until you die is history, and we just have to accept that.  It sounds harsh, but I think we all know that’s true.

As someone with young kids, I know I have to prepare them for a very different world than the one I grew up in, and  that is both scary and challenging.  They’re going to need flexibility, maintain those qualities of being curious, being creative and innovative problem solvers for the rest of their lives.  With schools still programmed, in many sectors, to produce widgets for giant “work”  machines, how can I counteract this effectively?  Certainly, my kids are growing up exposed to innovative thinkers making their own game every day, but I know I still have to find more opportunities for them to flex these muscles on their own now, so they are willing to do so as they get older as well.

Seth encourages all of us to be creative, to be artists, to become remarkable and indispensable.  I wanted to find an exception to this rule, but I found I can’t.  At first, I thought- well, you know the professions- Doctors, Lawyers- we need those folks to make everything else work- how much real creativity do you have as a physician?  Well, and then I took a closer look at what my husband does every day.  Sure, he’s an OB-GYN, but he’s involved with research, working on projects including looking at fetal growth curves, how they can eventually eliminate prematurity, and other projects that at the heart of them require this creative problem solver mentality.  He has to take everything he knows, figure out the problems that are still there, that cause problems big and small every day, and design research protocols to try to make them better, so each patient coming through his clinic gets the best care possible.  It means getting the doctors and nurses and patients in the practice to consider different schedules, to try new clinics like “birth control before breakfast” and step out of their own comfort zones and potential myopia.  He has to ask people to try to do things differently and make a difference- not just by bringing new people into the world (which is pretty amazing in and of itself) but to be able to do so in a constantly changing environment, with financial pressures, with each patient having their own unique set of problems, and being able to improvise on the fly.  The best doctors do this well, and do become linchpins, not only to their patients, but to their colleagues and institutions where they practice.

I wanted to find some exception to Seth’s rule, being a believer that education and formal college educations are not worthless, but have value beyond memorizing facts. I want to believe we do teach people things in school that matter and its not all about grinding creativity out of people.   But I think becoming a linchpin is not about whether you’ve had any formal training or education in anything- it’s ultimately about taking your cumulative knowledge and experience from every thing you have ever done, and be willing to use all of it, at any time, as tools to solve the next problem.

For example, I started reading Seth Godin and a bunch of books in the “business/management” section of the bookstore, not long after my husband introduced me to Marcus Buckingham and the Strength-based approach to, well, everything.  I rapidly found that all the books in the education and parenting section of the book store, where I frequently spent time, were missing the boat.  The really interesting stuff about managing people, developing them to reach their full potential, and the like were all sitting in the business section.  I realized that running a family is exactly like running a small business, and everything I knew had infinite applications outside of the box one might put them in.  “Pediatric logisitics”- managing kids/people, schedules, activities, performance (grades), camp, and keeping an eye on the larger issues at the same time are all the same skill sets I use in my business, in running Podcamps, in every other aspect of my life as well.

The main point here is this- you have to be a person who strives to make a difference in everything you do.  You have to care.  You need to look out for yourself, but you also can’t afford not to look out for others as well.  You need to be able to use all of your experience, no matter where it’s from, and weave it into a new solution to try and make a change for the better.  There are no more silos.  There are no more boxes.    It’s all about bringing all your resources to bear to try to solve problems big and small, and not being afraid of having a “crazy” idea.  Those crazy ideas in the hands fo the right people, shared with other people who care, mean all sorts of resources can be marshaled and then moving the needle becomes easier than ever.

Thanks, Seth, for the jolt of espresso to my creativity, and for reminding me how important it is to care .  Thanks for the reminder that we have  to be willing to try the “impossible” (which turns out only to be a bit difficult) and can be accomplished if we just try to see the possibilities rather than shut down because it seems risky or scary.

I look forward to the chapters to come.

Like it or not, we make judgments about people based on the integral of all we know about them.  The baseball player who bets on sports in Vegas is assumed to have a vested interest in tailoring his own play to affect his financial bets, whether or not anyone can prove that that’s true.  We assume Tiger Woods credibility as a spokesperson for various corporations is called into question because of what he has done, or hasn’t done in his personal life.  Bill Clinton apparently had a long reputation of “being a dog that was hard to keep on the porch”, but somehow, he still manages to be a brilliant guy and a pretty great president, overall.

We learn about friends and family these days, not just by our own experience, but by the deluge of information available about them on the web.  Before I meet with a client or speak to a group, I do a Google search to find out a bit about them in advance.  It helps me feel prepared, have a sense of who I think they are, and a chance on meeting in person, to match that preconceived notion, based on web data, with what I see in person.

This is why I try to teach my kids and constantly remind myself that everything I say or do online is the most public of records.  The DM’s I get on twitter, the text messages sent to my phone, my email- all of that- has an illusion of privacy, but it is still discoverable by others, in some way, at some point in the future, legally or illegally.

If you note the recent media discussions about controlled leaks from Apple about the upcoming tablet computer, and rumors of similar controlled leaks in government, you’ll note that these conversations all occur over the phone or preferably in person, aren’t taped or recorded, and provide both parties with plausible deniability because there’s no documented paper trail.

The clear lesson here is that if you want to have a private conversation, clearly don’t leave a voicemail message and don’t put any of it in writing- don’t leave a web or digital or actual paper trail.

This brings me to the point of this post, which is a new service called Blippy, where you can share your recent purchases (and the amount spent) on various sites, including Amazon.com, Netflix, Threadless and iTunes.  You can link a credit card as well, so every time you make a purchase at the convenience store, that, too, is posted to this social network.

Here’s a list of the accounts you can link to Blippy:

iTunes	Amazon	Zappos	Audible
GroupOn	Threadless	StubHub	GoDaddy
Netflix	Blockbuster	SeamlessWeb	Wine Library
Credit card (Visa, MasterCard, AMEX), debit card, or bank account

I am all for living life out loud.  I know people can find almost an infinite set of information out about me- but this crosses the line into kind of stalker-ish territory.  It’s one thing to get pointed to cool apps , books, and music that your friends are buying.  In fact, when looking around Blippy, I found a bunch of great things my friends had purchased, especially books and iphone apps,  that makes it almost certain I will purchase the same, which I am sure is Blippy’s whole marketing attempt.  After all, if you can find out, passively, what your friends are up to and what they’re getting, what better way to keep up with the digital Joneses?  Or even better, find out what your friends are into when it comes to birthday times, or for marketers doing blogger outreach?

However, it’s another thing to be updated every time they buy milk or cigarettes at the convenience store.

And let’s talk about the judgments people make about our private spending habits.

Say I get an account and share with my friends and co-workers.  How long before my boss finds out I rent weird films from Blockbuster?  Or am ordering books on how to develop a side career on Amazon?  How long before a health insurance company figures out you never did quit smoking like you swore you did on those forms?  What if they never see me paying for a gym membership?  What happens if you are buying books on how to make a career transition or how to pad your resume?  What if you ordered books about medical issues?  Or your bill from Wine Library TV seems to indicate you have a serious drinking problem?

Yeah, I don’t much care if all my friends learn I have an old school Tretorn addiction and Zappos is my favorite supplier, but does my husband need to know every single penny I spent there?  What if he gets notifications of things meant as gifts for him?

While it’s great all this information can be aggregated in one spot and I can see it being useful even for companies to track what employees are spending on Company credit cards, this is the first social network in a long time asking us to share information that has long been isolated in your credit card bills, email accounts and the sanctity of your ipod and cell phones.  (I’ve long thought you can learn a ton about someone by seeing the contents of their ipod alone- often leading me to be a bit cautious about giving mine to friends and seeing the plethora of various kid tunes (What? an addiction to Trout Fishing in America?  Really?), my secret like of old school hip-hop, and other music that leads to raised eyebrows in some social circles).

After only a few minutes of poking around, I’m getting more information than I planned about my friends.    Not only did I find out about a great analytics app, but the same person also downloaded the  Playboy app as well.  Clearly  information I probably didn’t need, even if it’s clearly nothing to be prudish about.  Likewise, a recent troll through the people my friends are following led me to Leo Leporte’s account, and the multiple $1,500 purchases he made in a short period of time at the Renaissance in Vegas.   People commented on the site about whether he was paying for his team’s hotel rooms or having a bad night at gaming tables,  but is this information everyone should have? Should Leo have to justify what he was buying to everyone on the internet, or his sponsors?   Likewise, Ev Williams bought a Pregnancy Tracker app for his iPhone.  Does that mean I should offer my husband’s services as an OB-GYN?  Should I start knitting a baby present?  I don’t think so, and that’s why I think Blippy, while a marketer’s dream, is a privacy nightmare.

Feel free to make your own conclusions, but for now, for better or for worse, I think I’ll be keeping my purchases to myself.

This has been a big week for me.

After organizing Podcamps – digital media community unconferences – for the past few years, we were asked to organize the Open sessions at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City.  This was a tremendous experience that felt a bit like graduation day.  I think we found that you can create intimate learning and sharing spaces within a big conference- and how to engage, even as others found the larger conference colder and less friendly than they may have hoped.  For those that attended, it was a smaller and more intimate podcamp-like experience with some of the most compelling content, ranging from Augmented Reality, Eric Skiff and Bre Pettis talking about NY Resistor and great projects like the Makerbot coming out of it, to talks by Julien Smith of Trust Agents fame, Mitch Joel, best-selling author of Six Pixels of Separation, JC Hutchins, Dave and Lynette Young- and more- I could list the whole schedule here, every session truly worth every minute of your attention and time.  (Special thanks to Li Evans for pinch-hitting at the last moment…)

Then, on Sunday, November 22, I walk/ran the Philadelphia half-marathon.

Having been a desk jockey for quite some time, starting to get in shape and train for this event began in August.  I started working out with a trainer twice a week, and walking almost daily on a treadmill.  I’ve made a lot of progress in a short period of time.  Today, the day after, I am reaping the benefits in any and all shortcomes in my training.  And this is all my fault, of course- not doing enough course-like road work in advance, not doing enough distance, not realizing that all the signs about “pain is a sign of weakness and fear leaving the body” would have infinitely more meaning to me today than they did when I saw the signs along the course at mile 8 or so.

At 43, the fact that I took on this challenge at all is the real miracle, as John Bingham said.  I certainly don’t expect that I’m going to become a world class runner any time soon.  But I am working my way now through physical as well as mental challenges in ways I could not have fully predicted or appreciated beforehand.

And what I’m learning from all of this is that friendship and community is REALLY important, online and offline.

Friends came to NYC under their own steam, paying for their own hotels, to speak at a conference because I asked them to.  I am grateful to all of them, because the success is the sum of everyone’s effort- I just got the opportunity to provide the platform.

The success in finishing the half marathon also had a large amount to do with friends.  Elizabeth Stitson and Letisha Baldwin were also crazy enough to sign up to do this with me, and make it to the end.  Elizabeth was bleeding through her shoe like Curt Shilling in the World Series, but still made it happen.  Jen Yuan let me stay with her in Philly and was out there to cheer us on throughout the course, which was just terrific!  I tweeted out my progress which also went to my Facebook page, and a huge variety of friends from across the country sent on encouraging messages that I got when I needed them most- those times where the temptation to sit down, to stop moving were like a siren’s song.  It’s amazing how that cheering and encouragement, from friends online, and even from strangers on the side of the course- the high fives and more- really make a difference when you are fighting pain like you have never felt before.

I have a suspicion that like childbirth, the pain I feel now will soon recede into a memory.  But the support of my community when I needed it most won’t soon be forgotten.

Like John Bingham, for me, the finishing and doing well were all about keeping momentum going once I got started.  Taking on these challenges in the first place, and the audacity to dream that they could be accomplished took more courage and replacing fear with optimism.  (Okay, sometimes also with a certain naive-ness and not knowing how difficult or painful it would be when I decided it was a great idea…)

Bu t whether the challenge has been physical, mental, or largely a combination of both, the strength to get through has been helped tremendously by my friends and community.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart.  I truly have so much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving, and will be thinking of you all on that day when we count our blessings.  More than ever, I feel truly grateful and thankful for a community that is so supportive, giving, kind, and a fountain of possibility and encouragement.  That’s a lot to be thankful for.

Over these past few days, I’ve met a new group of amazing people, with skills and passion in over-drive.  People who have brilliant ideas, projects and powers to make things happen.  It’s been truly inspiring.  Instead of the Web feeling old hat, it feels like a place where magic can still happen, and it’s becoming less and less about just the shiny objects and more about using tools for self-actualization.  We’re moving up Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, and it’s beyond looking for food, clothing and shelter, and more about who we can become.

On many levels, the Web2Open was also about the evolution of the unconference as well.  It’s about giving people a platform to share their passions, to meet people they might never otherwise run into, because of geography, or cultural reasons, or any of the reasons we sometimes shut ourselves off from what’s truly possible.  For example, I had a truly amazing dinner with JC Hutchins last night, discussing creativity, valuation of creativity, and how we decie between doing the easy thing and the hard one, and the strength it often takes to say no to people who are really looking out for their best interest, not yours.

I’mn learning that community is not just a bunch of people, but it’s people you can call and they not only pick up the phone, but they are happy to sign onto your plan or idea, because they trust you.  Your community can have many layers and the strength of the connections may vary, but the best stuff happens when you say “I have this opportunity for you- what do you think?”  and there seems to be very little pause before they say “You bet- count me in.”  That’s priceless.  That’s people voting with their feet, their voices, their wallets, and they do it in part because they know you will deliver and make it worth their while.  And when time, attention and money are tight, that kind of opt in is priceless.

It’s going to take some time to fully process everything that’s happened, let alone dig out of my inbox and send the PDF’s I owe people, links, etc.  What I can say for sure is this memory will be with me for a long time.

Thank you to O’Reilly Publishing, Brady Forrest, Jen Pahlka, Sara Milstein, especially Meghan Reilly who helped us pull this all together from the TechWeb end;

Christopher S. Penn, the Marketing Ninja, Michelle Wolverton, the best VA and friend ever, for their support and assistance;

All of our great volunteers to who helped man the desk- more on these superheros in my next post;

All the speakers, attendees and everyone who participated in any way in the Web2Open.  You made it the event that it was, and I feel incredibly lucky to have been a part of it.

There’s a chapter looking at Altruism in the new Super Freakanomics book. (There seems to be some controversy around, especially regarding the chapter on global warming, but the most relevant chapter to me was about altruism.)  In this chapter, the authors discuss how part of altruism and doing good things for others that may not always serve you the best, is the side effects of being seen as a good and trustworthy person.  The warm feeling you get from helping other people is one of the benefits of altruism, and it’s why most people who volunteer will say things like “I get as much out of it as I put in.”

On the web, trust, authority, search engine optimization and the like are all geared towards measuring whether or not your business/blog/website is relevant to people searching for information.  The more links, tags, keywords and the rest on your site, the more the search engines can parse whether your site is a good match for people searching for “dog food” “specialty gifts” or even “consultants.”  The more other people consider you an authority, the more authoritative by default you become.  It’s a positive (or negative) feedback loop, that you grow by being generous with others.

This is a concept at the heart of Chris Brogan and Julien Smith’s Trust Agents- how you can build your “juice” online by being someone worthy of trust, by becoming an authority, by helping other people.  This is the old “bread on the water” strategy, that often you help other people without charging, with a tacit if unspoken understanding that if you are asked for a favor in return, it’s more likely than not someone will help you out in return.  It’s “paying it forward”.  It’s the old cliche of “you get more flies with honey than with vinegar.”

And if you want to get down to the neuro- and behavioral science, people remember positive experiences- positive reinforcement is the greatest tool to help alter behavior, where negative reinforcement or bad experiences tend to cut off a behavior, but doesn’t necessarily replace it with a new behavior.  So for example, if I want my kids to clean up after themselves, small amounts of praise is more likely to get them to comply next time than yelling at them ever will.  Likewise, if I want people to come back to my website, I better offer them useful information, a product they can use or take advantage of, or share  resources- something to make it worth their time and attention.

Personally, I use Google reader and Delicious, a social bookmarking site, to save and share blog posts, websites, and other online information sources for myself, but also offer it up for others who are interested.  I tell people in seminars that if you really want to know what I am up to, a check of my Delicious site will give you an idea of what I’m finding new and notable and what I’m researching.  I check on the sites of friends for the same reason, because usually I find something there that I haven’t come across on my own.  Rather than keep these bookmarks private on my computer, these bookmarks are web based, meaning I can access them from anywhere and use this information more efficiently than if it’s locked up at home on my machine.

Likewise with Google Reader- there are gazillions of blog posts everywhere online.  Using my friends as a filter, I get pointed to some of the best stuff around, on topics I may be interested in, that I might not have found on my own.  Over time, these tools build my personal library of information, making it more useful for me, but also to everyone I know.

Keeping this information a “secret” helps no one.  When we’re taking about information out there on the web, we can’t possibly keep up with it all, yet it’s all public, so how “secret” can it be, anyway?  By taking a sharing mentality, I help myself, but I help others at the same time.  I become a resource for information, which helps my reputation and consulting business.  This “looking to help others” mindset therefore also pays off for me personally, creating another positive loop.  It also has the side benefit of just being good karma, which I can live with as well.

So in the end, I honestly believe sharing information online helps you more than it hurts.  While you might not share a secret pharmaceutical formula or the 7 secret herbs and spices on the web (some things are industry secrets), anything available on the web, openly, you might consider sharing- you become an aggregator, a reference source, and a trust agent, just by sharing a bit of what you know and think.

Plain and simple- people you like you more and pay attention- and that’s not something that you can discount these days.

There’s a small downside to personal branding, though.  When some web personalities become really successful, like Robert Scoble and Guy Kawasaki, they become not just a personal brand but a brand unto themselves.  They become a product.  And people expect different things out of products than they do people.

Products are supposed to be available on demand, whenever we want them.  For example, I am in the process of replacing the “twitter van”- my old Toyota Sienna minivan with over 197,000 miles on it, with something new.  The old girl is just sad looking at this point, and my husband has declared enough is enough, so I am updating my “personal brand” with a new car.  We’ve been shopping for cars for some time, but I was disappointed to find out the brand and model we wanted were sold out of 2009’s so I have to wait for a 2010.  Dealers were surprisingly blasé about selling me a car.  I would have expected them to be a bit more enthusiastic about the prospect, but only one dealership did any sort of work to really see when the models would be available, see what they could order, and give me a great deal.  When I took this offer to another dealership closer to my home to see if hey would match it, they seemed incredulous that any of this was possible.  Yet, here I sit, with the VIN number of the car in hand, awaiting its delivery in the next few days.  The bottom line in terms of branding is that I expected with this brand that the Company as a whole should be happy that I want a car from them, that they should have them ready for me unless I want something really unusual, just as if I were buying a bottle of ketchup.   And as a brand, I expect they should be willing to do at least a little to make sure I don’t go off and decide to get the large purchase elsewhere.

But when people become brands, they can never be exactly like a car or a bottle of ketchup.  They can produce great books, like Trust Agents or Six Pixels of Separation, (both written by friends of mine), that act as products or souvenirs of the people and their ideas.  But the people themselves don’t scale the same way.  They still have lives and families and friends; they need to sleep and eat and have private time.  But some of this gets murky once personal branding and actually branding start to merge.

Think about this in terms of celebrity.  I think it really started with the Beatles.  The band became more than just records and music.  They became icons, they became lunchboxes and action figures and now even video games, many years after their initial fame for just being musicians and song writers.  Now you see the merchandising of fame and celebrity being as important as what ever someone did to become famous in the first place, but what gets lost in the hype are the people themselves.  A quick trip to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame will bring this all into relief, as you see how many people get chewed up by the fame machine, and see the few that have managed to survive it.

We don’t always consider how weird and difficult a childhood someone like Michael Jackson or Lindsay Lohan have had.  We don’t think or look at them empathetically, as people.  We look at them as side shows, as entertainment, and when they seem to crack up, we say “Well, they asked for it, what did they expect?”  On some level, they just did what they did best, acting or signing or writing or whatever.  The rest became the business of being a celebrity, which has its privileges and up sides, but has just as many down sides as people take random pot shots at you, or think you have some magic you can lend them, or give them a big break so they can be just like you, or whatever.

Celebrity, the height of personal branding, breeds a certain amount of expectation and neediness in others.  We expect our celebrities to be the bottle of ketchup we can get a fix of whenever we need.  We expect them to keep on delighting us with every new project and we’re more than happy to express crushing disappointment when our appetites aren’t fed.  And the media, professional and amateur, seems only to happy to find something to criticise at every turn.  We think “Oh, what a big head they have now that they’re big shots.”     Or “Well, you don’t seem to remember that you used to be just like us before you got lucky.”  Or “Why should I feel sorry for them?  They have it easy.”  Or “Well, they’re snobby now- I can’t even seem to talk to them anymore- I guess we aren’t really friends.”

All of this is ridiculous, of course.  All that’s happened is that a greater number of people constantly want the personal attention and adoration of the person whose “made it”, and that the person can’t scale like their product can.  All this drama is happening on the side of the audience, not from the person on the pedestal, and the person can’t do much other than watch it happen, because the cat is out of the bag, and there’s little hope of getting it back in.

I don’t think there’s any easy answers here.  I think part of it is for all of us to realize that personal branding is a great thing, but once you reach the product stage, there are hidden traps along with the benefits.  And I think this is meant as a wake up call for all of us who have friends with strong personal brands, to remember that our friends still need the same love and support and attention they always got from us, even if it doesn’t always come back reciprocally- they are trying to scale, but they’re finding themselves trying to be people in a product loving world.  And that seems like a busy but pretty lonely place to be.