Warning signs

The other night I had an "I Love Lucy" moment – I found myself desperately, and ultimately unsuccessfully, attempting to stem the tide of about 75 PSI of water shooting from what had been the stem control of an upstairs bath.

I had been ignoring a persistent drip for weeks.

Together with a client, I was speaking yesterday with a lovely woman who runs the Diabetes Education Center at a local hospital. The topic soon turned to preventative medicine, and the number of people who discover they have diabetes only after entering the ER with blood sugar levels in the 700s (that’s really high).

They were ignoring the frequent urination, constant thirst, weight loss, fatigue and other warning signs of diabetes.

Last month a neighbor had to be rescued from the side of a busy highway during rush hour when her transmission gave out and she slowly glided to a permanent stop on the gravel shoulder. The car had been recently detailed, however, so it looked sharp as it was hoisted onto the back of the battered tow truck.

She had been ignoring the thump and jolt from the backend of her foreign sedan for months.

And of course, we can all point fingers at the politicians and bankers and brokers and others who ignored the warning signs that have led to the current world financial credit crisis.

What are you ignoring? What are the warning signs in your own business that need attending to?

Are consumer complaints increasing? Is innovation fading? Are too many of your receivables over 120 days out? Do your employees fear the next 'all-employee meeting'? Has cash flow become the dominant topic over the water cooler, instead of tactics and strategy?

None of these scenarios are uncommon in a weakened economy. But what are you doing about it?

There are no easy answers to these problems. But analyzing the problem for weeks isn't helping. The quicker you act and the more decisive the action – any forward action – the greater the likelihood of preventing the situation from truly getting out of, that is, beyond your, control. Once a problem is beyond your control, it is too late and the options for a remedy, such as they are, are never good ones.

Okay, so this post doesn't say much that hasn't been said before. But if you've ignored the same reminders before, here's your chance to act.

Regardless of the specific corrective action required for your company's circumstance, the immediate requirement is communication. Internal and external communication to explain the company's circumstances to employees, partners and customers; reinforcement of company values and vision, and each individual's role in fulfilling the company's mission; the long term and near term future for the organization. And communication is a two –way street as well, that is, remaining open for customers to become real-time sources for feedback and product ideas, perhaps seeking out suppliers willing to extend finance terms, and listening to employees for suggestions regarding improving operational efficiencies.

The important thing is not to ignore the constant drip, drip, drip of market erosion and declining revenues, blindly hoping that a sudden macroeconomic recovery is around the corner, a rising tide that raises all boats. Don't ignore the warning signs. Take action now, because like my plumbing, the 'pressure' to take corrective action now is only building.

Marshall McLuhan and Social Media

Skype, Facebook, MySpace, Match.com, Vonage, eBay, YouTube, Craigslist… the connection between them is the connection between us, and all rely upon the Internet – or IP protocol – to operate.

It occurs to me that a few years ago the promise of the Internet was in the democratization of content and the free exchange of ideas. So today I'm not certain the cause of the hand-wringing over the growth of Social Media. Cynically I could suggest that our collective hand-wringing is simply in the fact that we don't accept Social Media as a valid tool (or proper use of our time) because we haven't yet monetized it properly. (44% of all web visits are to Social Media sites but only 5% of all revenue from the internet is driven from them.) All things, it seems, are accepted in time as we learn to make money with them.

While I understand the concerns regarding the lack of privacy of our youth's postings and the banality of photos posted by exuberant parents, it seems to me that Social Media – and similar applications of the medium – are simply the latest stop on the train to Marshall McLuhan's Global Village. It is, after all, the goal of an increasing number of projects such as One Laptop Per Child to bring the information and interactivity of the global web to remote, more impoverished parts of the world.

A JPMorgan survey from last November revealed that half of online social networkers were there to connect with old friends, while still more were there to interact with their current friends, sharing music and photos. There is a big time-waste with Social Media, say the critics – yet it is important to note that it is at least an interactive medium, unlike television.

The ultimate realization of the promise of the internet will be in its social aspects – connecting, sharing, even buying and selling. Whether in twenty years it will look like Facebook or appear more as holographic avatars in a room of mirrors is incidental. The thing that matters is that we all continue to communicate, regardless of the media.

Now if you excuse me, I need to research how to make money with Twitter…

Related articles by Zemanta

• 20 Ways Facebook Can Make Billions (allfacebook.com)

Phelps, Personal Branding, and 'These Kids Today'

Michael Phelps' recent stumble simply serves to underscore the critical requirement to actively build and protect one's 'personal' brand – especially online where a poorly lit photo from a lousy angle can become a sensation and tear down one of America's heretofore greatest athletes – not to mention the personal financial cost to Phelps in endorsements - as Kelloggs has already abandoned their multi-million dollar endorsement deal with Phelps.

Marketers have long recognized that with the growth of the Web 2.0, the term 'brand management' has proven oxymoronic, as the control over the perception of a brand is now more than ever before in the hands of the consuming public. Yet what of the impact on our personal brand? Those of us experienced enough to understand the importance of our personal brand (or 'reputation' to use an old-school term) are now leveraging social media to enhance it. And while readily evident to my generation, our youth appear not to understand or worse, not to care, that the consequences of their actions will appear today on more than their dreaded 'permanent record' –a manila folder in the principal's office – but rather, a new permanent record - another regret posted on a MySpace or Facebook page.

As recently as only a few years ago, an outlet for narcissism this dangerous was limited to the realm of celebrities and reality television. Yet today the explosive growth of social media (one of every twenty web hits is now directed at a social media website) has essentially created a world where we are all stars in our own reality show.

In a line I wish I had written, Lakshmi Chaudhry, writing in The Nation last January, derided the YouTube generation with this pithy line: “When it is more important to be seen than to be talented, it is hardly surprising that the less gifted among us are willing to fart our way into the spotlight."

In fact, I'm predicting that in the not-too-distant future we'll witness the advent of video capability on headsets so that we can stream our lives directly onto our own websites and Facebook pages. (Ironically I've determined that for some social media addicts, this will amount to a nearly 24/7 feed of them viewing their own pages.) SEE UPDATE

“Our character is what we do when we think no one is looking,” observed author H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Absolutely true, but in a world where everyone is looking at everyone else, all the time, where is the room for such contemplation? When there are no dark spaces left for self-reflection, self-control or self-consciousness, is the movement toward this ever-increasing comfort in exposing our thoughts, our desires, and our backsides lowering the bar on what is considered ethical and moral, or just lowering the curtain on what we all knew was there all along?

In spite of recent growth in adoption of social media for the over-35 crowd, I'm still on the upper end of the age demographic for the technology, so my age may account for my views on the subject. Yet even forgiving for a moment my parental angst over what might simply amount to a generational gap in the way we view technology, the need for young people to be taught the basics of branding – particularly personal branding – is more urgent than ever before.

I had an email exchange about a year ago with an old friend whom I've known from high school, and a large part of the on-going discussion was non-specific regret over things said, fights fought, and hearts broken when we were 17. Nothing we did was ever beyond the pale for a typical American teenager, but the minor mistakes we made in high school never really impacted the men we became. It has always been that way. Except today, when seventeen year olds are codifying their spontaneous thoughts and actions in such a way that it will soon impact their lives and defining – essentially restricting – the person they will become.

As I use Facebook Facebookand LinkedIn to get connected and reconnected with colleagues from my early corporate roles here in Dallas, advertising years in New York, friends from high school and even junior high school (!), it is the branding wonk in me that is grateful that as an adolescent extrovert I was spared the consequences of access to social media. Yet regarding today's generation, I pause to consider the impact of a future web search that might bring up an intelligent byline they've written – alongside a photo of the otherwise respected author passed out at a 'kegger' years earlier.

Personal branding is as critical a skill to future generations as reading, 'ritin, and 'rithmetic. Yet unlike trigonometry, a working knowledge of social media's impact on personal branding will be relied upon again and again in their future. Adolescents today make choices that are under greater scrutiny and a harsher light than ever before, therefore discussion of ethical and moral choices needs to be highlighted at school and at home – along with the new visibility of these choices and their online 'permanent record'.

UPDATE, Aug 2010: www.looxcie.com 'Nuff said.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Phelps apologizes over bong picture (cbc.ca)

No excuses

I recently re-discovered this quote from the inimitable Sir Winston Churchill and inspired, tried to build a blog entry around it, but in the end nothing I wrote seemed to add anything to his brilliant quotation that it didn't say on its own.

Apply it to marketing, selling, the economy, the environment, your marriage, the body politic or your now-fading resolutions; it all boils down to this:

"It's not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what's required."
Sir Winston Churchill