Too Much Information

When is sharing your life online with others crossing over into  TMI  (Too Much Information) territory?

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.

Tags: Blippy, information, Leo Laporte, privacy, TMI

Cyclical Economics And Issues of Scale

Businesses have cycles of good times and bad times.  there also seems to be a larger trend of mergers and acquisitions, followed by splintering, spinoffs, and the rise of the small but feisty competition.

Back when I was an undergrad in the mid-eighties, the Wharton kids were all looking to join big Wall Street firms  and do mergers and acquisition work.  By the time we graduated, the heyday for this was coming to a close, and instead the recent grads had to readjust their expectations because the days of wining and dining newly minted graduates from one of the country’s most prestigious business schools had begun to dry up.

Mergers and acquisitions has always been about buying up smaller companies and acquiring talent you don’t have one your own.  It can be an extremely strategic and cost effective move.  But the bigger firms and businesses become, the harder they become to manage.  There are more and more moving parts.  Instead of trying to satisfy a niche audience very well, there becomes a push to satisfy the most number of people possible.  So instead of rabid fans of the special, businesses begin to play to the ubiquitous middle of the road.  And this works, sometimes for years.  But eventually, they become vulnerable to the small, nimble and risky competitor, which has less to lose by taking chances.

Seth Godin wrote about this in a recent blog post about the publishing industry.  What would happen if your profits dwindled?  What would you do differently?  Because that is the exact mindset of your competition.  They don’t need to clear millions of dollars of profit every year- they are perfectly happy just taking a small chunk of your business, until the point when you can no longer continue as is and they have sunk you, one small bite at a time.

Looking at retail, the big department stores have consolidated, in part, because there’s been a development of many brands with their own stores, own infrastructure, that no longer depend on the buyers for a big store for placement and sales.  In fact, with the internet, they can set up their own store for very little, and avoid placement in your big store at all.

Our local malls are experiencing a large amount of turnover, in part due to the failure of the anchor stores and their diversity, but also because of the rise of more and more small brands competing in the same niche you could find in the Department store.  Should I buy a Coach bag from Macy’s or the Coach Store, three doors down?  At this point, price only matters.  And Macy’s is no longer the only place to go to obtain this same merchandise.  Their shelf space has become more and more irrelevant in distribution.

My husband even remarked that health care is entering the same cycle we’ve seen in family farms.  Small individual businesses (independent doctors and their practices) are gradually consolidating and often coming under the wing of one larger entity (first large practice groups, or practices are bought outright by a hospital) for the sake of scale, the benefits of negotiating price and taking advantage of larger discounts, lowering administrative costs and the like, until very few individual small businesses will exist outside these larger entities, for good or for ill.

The problem with this consolidation/splintering cycle is that the large businesses become vulnerable to poaching by the specialty/niche providers, because the niche providers have less to lose.  the large firms can take advantage of economies of scale, but it also becomes easier for them to lose their way, lose their compass, manage all the different parts and cease to worry about pleasing the customer but instead become more interested in whatever they have to do to maintain themselves.  They start to think like sheep and less like scrappy entrepreneurs that are willing to take risks and try new things.

It’s the gradual onset of “This is the way we’ve always done it” that becomes the vulnerable Achilles Heel- the inability or unwillingness to take a look at what you are already doing, and imagine that it could be done differently, or better.

None of this is to say that big is bad or entrepreneurs get it right.  I’m trying to say that if big has its very clear advantages, is there opportunity for them to develop sections, departments, or even a think tank that has the task of looking at the business as a competitor might, but from inside the gates?  In there room to constantly challenge the status quo?  Or is there just a balance between big and small that can be managed the way W.L. Gore does, by not letting any one building or division grow beyond a certain size, because it eliminates the intimacy and flow of ideas that they value so highly?

As I see big industries disrupted by the way the internet is changing our decision making process, I wonder if what the big boys need is as simple as remembering what it was like for them before they were big.  And I wonder if the small guy, looking to become a part of something larger have to be equally concerned how to maintain their edge once they are in a safer harbor.

Sometimes security and safety is a panacea- an alleged cure-all that instead of solving all of our problems, actually creates some of its own in the process.  It can make us forget what it was like to be hungry and struggle, and we need just enough of that struggle to remain competitive and innovative.  Without it, we get lazy and complacent.  And striking a balance between these two extremes is not easy at all.

Tags: acquisitions, business scale, business size, consolidation, cycles, cyclical economics, issues of scale, mergers, Scale

Challenges and Victories

The Miracle is not that I finished, the miracle is that I had the courage to start. John Bingham

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.

Personal Branding

At the very first Podcamp Boston, CC Chapman and Mitch Joel did a great presentation on Personal Branding that altered the way I approached my web projects.  Instead of always staying in the background, I learned how important it was to own your blog and podcast, add your personality into the mix, and give your projects a human face and voice.  This is still excellent advice, for businesses or individuals.  Without a sense of personality, of humanity to our writing and work, we lose the most compelling aspect of it, and what people want the most- connections and affinity with others. (I’ll save the diatribe on Maslow’s Heirarchy of human needs for another post.)

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.

Tags: CC Chapman, lindsay lohan, maslow's heirarchy, michael jackson, Mitch Joel, personal branding, rock and roll hall of fame, seth godin, six pixels of separation, trust agents

The How To Myth

A couple of my friends have recently come out with fantastic books- Mitch Joel wrote “Six Pixels of Separation“  and Chris Brogan and and Julien Smith have come out with the New York Times best selling Trust Agents.  Both books discuss how people are connecting for business over the web and how these new relationships work, but there’s been some critique that the books aren’t “How To’s” of  internet success.

This got me thinking about the whole concept of the How To.

How To permeates every aspect of our lives.  As a parent, we have a major role in teaching our children everything from appropriate social behavior to self-care – how to eat politely, how to tie your shoe, how to brush your teeth, how to get good grades- it goes on and on.   From the kid’s side, our parents and our teachers are constantly giving us the recipes to follow to learn stuff we’ll hopefully need later on in life.

After being indoctrinated in the How To all of our lives, we seem to want others to provide us with the fool-proof formula to win at whatever decide we want to do.  How many books, for example, promise us 5 easy steps to instant fame and fortune?  8 steps to flatter abs?  & habits of highly effective people?  Somehow, if we can just get the recipe right, everything will be perfect, and we’ll look better, smell better, and have the easy life of a Hollywood star, with all the fame and fortune we can imagine.

I don’t know about you, but I have found the following things to be true:

• To get what you really want, and the satisfaction that comes from attaining a goal, hard work is necessary.  It’s never handed to you.
• The Rules, the How To, the Recipe for success may seem simple, but the devil is always in the details.  Take the 10 Commandments.  Think how many pages of interpretation and commentary have been written about this simple list of things to do and not to do, at least two thousand years ago.  Clearly, it wasn’t that simple.
• I love to cook, and I love to knit.  In both of these areas, success can depend heavily on following a recipe or pattern.  Even in directions that allege to be “foolproof”, I can assure you, I can find a fool (usually me) who will make some sort of mistake executing this simple set of directions.  Let’s not even discuss the infamous Beer Cheese soup or the sweater that was about 2 inches too short, shall we?
• The Genius is always in the customization anyway.  Take a given recipe- adding a touch of your favorite herb, or adding nuts, chocolate chips and raisins into those brownies- and you take the generic “just like the picture” meal from replication of someone else’s idea to your version of the same idea, with unique elements that make it all your own.
• Customizations of the prototype to fit your own life, the hacks we all make to get the generic product to fit our needs-this is what takes things from being just “stuff” to being a part of our own creative process and learning.  You don’t learn much about painting by doing a Paint by Numbers- you may learn basic technique, but it’s the application of those techniques to your own project where genius lies.

We all want How to’s because they are comfortable, and we hope that if we see behind the veil, we’ll automatically harness someone else’s creativity and hard work, harness their insight, and somehow, leverage that to make ourselves equally as successful.  Yet we don’t need more imitations, copies and echos of the original, as much as we all yearn for that one, unique, purely special moment, great idea, or original insight of our own.

I’m currently working on a project that is a How To- but the critical element is to try to let everyone know that in using this book -1) it’s only a guideline, a coaching tool- your own milegage may vary  2)We’ll give you templates that work for us, but you have to customize it towards what you think will be best for you and 3) Never be afraid to try something new, to fail, to try again, and fail better the next time.

We only learn from making mistakes.    Some mistakes you only ever need to make once. Let me help you avoid a big one- never put dish detergent in the dishwasher, thinking it’s an ok substitute unless you want to flood your house.

Some mistakes you make more than once.  I still insist, for example, I do not need to “swatch for guage” ie. make a small sample before knitting a huge project, hoping that the knitting gods will protect me.  I am frequently wrong on this account.

But the biggest lesson is this:  even the best how-to’s only provide guidance and suggestions based on one person’s experience and what they have researched about the experience of others, trying to shine a light on frequently encountered difficulties.  This is what Parenting books are all about.  But only you know yourself and your own unique situation, and applying these ideas to your life will require mass customization to obtain the results you want.  Lockstep copying won’t get you the best results, only customization of the recipe will.

I still get suck ed into the promise of the How To, but at least my expectations now are that it is nothing more than advice.  I will learn and master things only through trial and error, making better guesses and spurring different ideas based on what the book or expert offers, but I can’t expect that these books and lectures will fix my life- that’s my job, and mine alone.

Tags: books, chris brogan, how to, julien smith, Mitch Joel, six pixels of separation, trust agents