Leveraged Intelligence

We’re All Involved in a Great Experiment!

We have an acceleration happening of epic proportions and we are all involved, whether we realize it or not.  We are involved in a massive acceleration of information transmission.  The world is absolutely filled with it, but that isn’t the essence of the revolution that is taking place.  It really isn’t a question of the 500 TV stations you have available in your living room.  It isn’t a question of news online killing the newspapers.  It is a question of the direct involvement of the people all around you in actually influencing the news, instantly exchanging facts – and misinformation – at a rate unprecedented and from anywhere.  ANYWHERE!!  ANYTIME!!

Like all rapid evolutions (revolutions), this one can be looked at more than one way.  It is either a mixture of good and bad – or, it’s neither, it’s just the next step.  Have you seen how quickly kids can text one another?  And, how could they possibly think that is a good idea while they are driving?!  Do you really have to make something that seems that obvious specifically against the law?  Yes, because it is sweeping up a whole generation and they are hot after it.

It isn’t just their generation, though.  Last week there was  a conference in San Francisco, the Inbound Marketing Summit, attended by some very serious people determined to make a whole lot of money off of the developing phenomenon.  I was there, too.  Let me tell you why…

I blog.  You may have noticed that.  I use other Social Media tools, too.  Let me tell you about some of them:

Blog: Web Log originally, thus the name.  It was kind of going to just be people’s online logs, so I suppose Captain Kirk was the original. 

Star Date 2938.6: Sulu was roughed up by drunk Klingons this afternoon.

But, the blog has become much more than that.  It isn’t what I’m doing at the time, although that is an element of it.  It is my own personal op-ed piece.  It is my comment on the world around me.  It is a chance to see some of my family history recorded.  And, it is my chance to share a conversation with friends that I really enjoy.  Kind of like email on steroids.

Twitter: it is usually referred to as micro-blogging these days.  Each statement you make is 140 characters or less.  You send these “Tweets” out to anyone who wants to listen to you.  So you hear about other people and the things they say and that becomes interesting to you, so you FOLLOW them.  After a while, if you aren’t careful, it becomes a competition and no one can quite remember why.  It’s like your ego has a leash and pulls the rest of you around.

Yesterday, at the Summit, 5 guys were speaking in the front of the room on a panel.  Someone Tweeted to everyone that it was 5 white guys explaining the universe.  One of the 5 picked it up on the spot up there, read it and everybody got a good laugh.  Twitter people develop strange senses of humor.

Skype: our family originally began using Skype because it was a way to communicate with our daughter who is at college 500 miles away.  Set up a web cam and microphone – usually the same unit – hook up to a high speed connection on both ends, and you are in business.  It has become very, very good with current technology, in fact.  It is very much like having that Star Trek screen right in front of you and I am thinking of starting each session by saying, “On screen, Uhuru!”

But, and this is key, it turned out to have another use.  The progression went this way:

• First I started blogging.
• Then I hear about Twitter and start Tweeting.
• Then I send a few Tweets to CNN’s Rick Sanchez show while I am eating lunch, with no other purpose than to see if I could get it on the screen.
• They start putting some up, which I think is cool.
• So, they ask me to join a Skype chat.  I am now chatting with a bunch of other people about what is on the show.
• Two of us get to try it live on a show and it becomes this stream.
• Now, those of us in the CNN Chatroom are becoming friends and branching off into other co ventures.

In Christian and fishing terms, this is called casting your bread upon the water.  In the terms one of the white guys gave at the Summit, this is “acting and iterating.”  If something is established, follow good, proven business principles, consider and plan, build a good foundation, then implement.  If it is brand new, there are no good principles, because it hasn’t been done before.  That is when it is time to act and iterate, do it and correct your course as you go.

One of the things about new ventures and ideas: some of them are great and really work out – while others are really bad!  Also, I haven’t even covered other ways to socially network, like Facebook, MySpace, etc.  So, I leave you with three questions:

• Are you trying anything new in your life?
• Is anything really showing promise?
• What have you tried in Social Networking – besides reading this blog post?  And has it yielded anything personally rewarding?

How to Write a Conversational Blog… And Why!

This blog entry was submitted for GL Hoffman’s blog What Would Dad Say as a guest entry.  Since it hits so close to home here, I wanted to allow my regular readers an opportunity to comment – so I decided to submit it over here also for my readers to enjoy and comment on.  I would love to see you go over to GL’s joint, too.  Maybe tip him a quarter for a good cuppa Joe…

It’s not a generational thing. I use a cup of coffee as the icon to represent my blog specifically because of its tradition as conversational catalyst. As you can see above, younger people at the modern Café Babel in Seattle participate. Older participants at Manistee Bakery & Deli in Manistee, Michigan enjoy it. Starbucks practically recreates living rooms with couches and coffee tables at many outlets. Coffee shops go back further than I do – and I go back further than I ever have before!

So, what’s the attraction? Is it the coffee? Well, in part, but I’ve tasted some pretty rasty coffee at some of the old greasy spoon coffee shops where I’ve spent time with friends – yet we returned. Is it the ambience? Closer. Is it the friendship? Now we’re getting hot! Wait, I’m getting it…it’s the conversation between friends. Sometimes, it’s not coffee at all. Sometimes, it’s beer. Sometimes, it’s tea and sushi. But, it’s always conversation! And, it’s always friends. The long running TV comedy Cheers was fully based on it without ever depleting the topic pool. Seinfeld milked it forever and the meeting place was either Jerry’s apartment or the coffee shop. Friends went to Central Perk.

So, we’ve got two elements essential so far. You need friends and you need a conversation. But, bigger than the elephant in the room is the room itself. You need that traditional meeting place. That’s where the Conversational Blog comes in, a place where people keep returning to converse on different topics, to reminisce about their days and developments of their lives. To reflect. To encourage one another. And, what’s the beverage of choice that everyone sips from? The Blog Post itself. It is the daily special offered by the proprietor. Yet, though every blog has offerings and though many of them are extremely interesting, some of them yield very little conversation. Even some blogs with a huge amount of traffic! Why?

I have some ideas and part of the weight behind them is because there is so much conversation on my blog. I offer fewer ideas about generating traffic, because my traffic counts aren’t very high – though the people that do visit tend to read multiple entries. Also, I have to offer the true humility of a guy who’s only been blogging for two months. But, I get conversation and I think these may be some of the fundamental reasons behind that:

• Daily offerings are a surprise. I don’t know what I’m going to write about any more than the readers.
• I try to always enjoy the writing and have fun. Fun doesn’t preclude serious reflection and thought. Fun doesn’t preclude research. But, fun translates to a light touch, to brightness and to passion!
• I always include a piece of myself in the writing. Note this requirement, because I’ll return to the importance of this shortly.
• After publishing the post, I genuinely look forward to the responses. Some writers don’t invite response and are HUGELY successful, like The Magnificent Bastard and Seth Godin. They are brilliant and I love to read their blogs. I think about their blogs. But…we aren’t conversing. They have so much traffic, I don’t think they could and they don’t even allow comments. They are more like great leaders speaking to the masses and I have huge respect for what they do. It just isn’t what I do.
• When the responses start, I don’t stand behind the counter. I go to the table and sit down with the guests. I drink with them and listen to their stories. And, this is probably the most important part: I respond to each and every comment individually. My responses aren’t sound-bite knockoffs, they are often multiple paragraphs. I respond like I would were we face-to-face over a cup of coffee.

The key to understanding what to respond to is to realize what I learned working with mentally ill children, that every statement a person makes is autobiographical. What they say about my post is only peripherally related to my post. It is a statement of themselves, of their hearts, of their yearnings. So, I do them the justice of listening, absorbing and responding to their individual offering of themselves with myself.

My blog leaves me vulnerable. And, because of that, it leaves me surrounded by friends. I’ll always toast that!

What’s your take? I’m listening…

The Problem With Time

Some of you are sending me encouragements after my last post, concerned about the state of my mental health.  I wasn’t meaning it as a serious problem that I am experiencing, because nothing could be further from the truth.  I am simply experiencing what every creature on the face of the Earth learns, mainly that time itself often doesn’t work the way we want it to!

Ideally, what I would like to see time do is function to separate events.  Bring Relativity into play and it would become spacetime should separate events.  Instead, what we see is that events are clustered, as though they have a gravitational attraction to one another.  I go for months with very little business activity, so I spend a quite a bit of time developing a blog.  In the meantime, I am becoming more and more broke, of course, but I can sure focus on that blog.

Then, all kinds of business comes in at once.  That is what has happened and we as a family are simply clearing the deck so that Dad can bring home some bacon.  You may see skimpier offerings on this blog because of it.  Or, you may see ballistic blogging, where I just blast in some entries (like this one!), happening while I work on all these projects.  I intend to keep the keyboard warmed up, though.

I have a rainy day fund untapped, though.  On a little voice recorder, I have stored 58 ideas for blog posts.  I won’t have to think for weeks!

Take that, TIME!!!