Managing expectations to a great PodCast

This week's #twitlitsum breaks a basic rule. It's not a book. It's not an eBook. It's a website. And it's evolving. This week, I'd like to discuss CC Chapman's Managing the Gray... or Grey depending on where you're from. Don't worry, CC bought both domains.

I've had the pleasure of meeting Mr. CC Chapman a number of times. He's an amazingly real person. What the heck does that mean? To me, that means that what I hear on his PodCast, and what I hear when he speaks, and what I hear when I eat breakfast with him, and what I hear when he talks with my daughter, and what I see when I watch his Flickr feed are all the same thing. He's an emobidiment of transparency. I've had the opportuntity to listen and see and meet him over the last five years, and he's been consistently transparent. He's a good guy, IMHO.

It's my understanding that before CC got into PodCasting, he worked at Babson College yes, I checked his LinkedIn Profile to be sure of the spelling in a position in which he made the effort to get Social Media more deeply integrated. He went on to work with a company that was not only influential in the Social Media space, but had the first "office island" I'd ever heard about in Second Life. Penultimately, he started his own agency, The Advance Guard, that wrote one of the foremost white papers on Facebook. Currently he's working for Campfire NYC, runs Digital Dads, and is a member of another PodCast team that I'll be reviewing on another day.

So, what is this Managing the Gray?

In the first show I listened to, CC outlined what he wanted to do with the show. A manager of his had pointed out that there are no more black and white decisions in Social Media, "you have to manage the gray". He also consolidated another thought by using the term "no control PR"... and while I'm sure others may have said it, I heard CC say it before I heard other people using it. And CC has held to those tenets in his show. He wants to help people manage the gray, and he realises that we live in a world where we no longer control our message. Either our corporate's brand message or our personal brand... I know, I know, please don't harass me about the "personal brand" concept, I'm not being snooty, there's just no other way for me to describe it.

I've listened to the show evolve through at least three major phases, all of which have been useful to me, and maintain their usefulness. I'll describe these phases as I understood them. I don't have some secret input into CC's brain... although there are some days I wish I did, that'd be a trip. The new hit film, Being CC Chapman... but I digress.

The first phase of Managing the Gray was all about how hard it is to work in an organisation. CC had moved from Babson to a consulting firm, and he totally grokked what it meant to try and turn the ship. He talked about wrestling with the decision to stay or go, and he talked about how much good someone on the inside can do. The PodCast moved into a phase all about what CC was seeing in corporations. He gave examples of what good looked like, and the direction he saw some of the ships slowly turning. My favourite part of this phase was the way in which CC shared them. Having sat with him, I could easily imagine this being a conversation he would have been having with a group of friends... because CC loves and believes in the power of Social Media, and his passion comes through in those oral white papers of his. The current phase of the PodCast seems to have come full circle. A lot of his discussions are about what you can do to build competence, build understanding, establish your personal brand as you gird yourself to get out there and push the ship. Listening to the show, I get to hear what someone I trust is reading, what he's listening to, who he's talking to, what his new projects are. This is one of those shows where I feel the topics are evergreen. You can easily go back into the Managing the Gray archives, download an old show, listen to it, and feel as if the content is still as relevant now as it was when it was first recorded.

If you'd like to take some shortcuts to subscribing to the Managing the Gray PodCast, I've got the iTunes link, a Google Reader subscription, and even a Zune Marketplace link. Get it, listen to it, comment back to him, and let me know if you enjoy it. I'm curious.

Next #twitlitsum will be a real paper book. And I'll have a real paper copy to give away... an internationally open contest to give away. I'll have information on that, and will make sure to put it out in all the appropriate Social Media spaces.

Predictably Irrational an unpredictably intriguing read

Today's #twitlitsum is about an eBook I own. I didn't mark up the pages, though I could. When I read it again, I will most likely do some note taking and marking up, which I can do in my eReader app. So, not only do I carry my copy of All A Twitter in my bag with me wherever I go, but I also have my copy of Predictably Irrational with me all the time... but we'll get into how close I am to my favourite electronic devices on another day.

I am a big fan of Dan Ariely. I'll be up front about that. He's a dynamic speaker in his TED videos, his Twitter avatar includes him playing with some Bionicles, and he's got a good sense of humour, in my humble opinion...

The book site is a blog containing his thoughts, dicsussions, and PodCasts. Some of his content is even relevant specifically to Big Pharma. I should read it more often. Fear not, dear reader, today's post is all about the book... we'll put the blog review on the list to be reviewed.

Predictably Irrational discusses the types of behavious Dan Ariely has seen or created studies to find that seem intuitive but don't seem logical when they're reviewed or pointed out. This book, and his studies in general, began after he suffered a severe burn accident, and he explains that event in his TED speech and his book far better than I can. It's his studies about group behaviour that I'd like to briefly discuss.

Dan Dan Dan bo Ban banana fanna fo Fan... ok, we'll stop that talks about his groupthink studies he ran. The gist of the study is that he took a group of students who didn't know each other and gave them a test. The participants were broken into groups where they would either swap sheets and grade them, swap sheets and have the option to report the results and be allowed to destroy the sheets, or swap sheets and be allowed to destroy them before they even bothered to report the results. Based on their results, they would then be compensated. The amazing thing is that people didn't cheat massively, but based on the amount of control versus test group... they were all cheating just a little bit.

The main thrust of the study focused on that group norm. If people felt WE did that sort of thing, they were likely to participate. And that the cheating happened ever so slightly outside the norm of monitored behaviour, highlights that people do in fact know where the boundaries are:

When the students could shred both their papers, dip their hand into the money jar, and walk away, every one of them could have claimed a perfect test score, or could have taken more money (the jar had about $100 in it). But none of them did. Why? Something held them back - something inside them. But what was it? What is honesty, anyhow? (Ariely, 532 iPhone)

I find it interesting that there's that slight bending of rules that seems to happen at all levels. Dan finds some interesting statements around the way in which a corporation can behave a lot like all the people who make it up. His big example is Enron, and the ways in which the corporation spun more and more out of control as the norm just kept moving. I found it really comforting, though, that the studies that Dan ran also pointed out that the more groups were reminded of ethical behaviour, the more likely they were to reset their behaviour to the accepted norm. But what about Big Pharma? Can it learn anything, or hope to learn anything from Dan?

It's my personal belief that these studies reinforce the need for clear enforcable guidelines with regard to the use of marketing and honesty that is under the purview of the main federal agencies. If there are guidelines, people will know where they are, and where the limits are. It also has everything to do with having a reasonable organisation that can help create and implement those guidelines. That organisation will have to give clear measurements for successfully following those guidelines. They're also going to have to help everybody who might ever have to follow those guidelines understand them by making them clear. As the year is progressing, we're all waiting with baited breath for those guidelines... my hope is we're also waiting for the opportunity to demonstrate how well we can follow them.

I'm not sure what my next book will be. I think we'll do a PodCast review next week. There are several that I listen to, but we'll start with CC Chapman's Managing the Gray. If you want to listen before I get into telling you how it's made of WIN, go for it. Then you'll have the context to give me feedback about whether or not I'm being too much of a fanboi.

CITATION: Ariely, Dan. Predictably Irrational: the Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. New York, NY: Harper, 2008. eBook.

It's a new week... and it doesn't feel like the last week ended yet

So, it's the start of the third week and I'm spinning... in a good way... but spinning nonetheless. In the last two weeks, I've been in three cities, and started learning how to do this whole marketing thing officially.

No, you're not going to learn any secrets here, I won't be giving you any neato insights into programs, or objectives, or timetables. I'm not that dumb. I will be talking about the things I've read in Twitter and blogs and listened to in PodCasts hopefully with a better understanding of the language and context. I don't think I'm going to learn the secret handshakes of the Marketing world anytime soon, but I have been issued my soul-ar powered Blackberry, so I think that makes me a level 1 initiate... or something.

What do I hope from this experience? At this point, I'm just hoping to learn if the ideas I've had about marketing, and engagement, and the future of "no-control pr" are attainable or just an idealistic pipe dream. Or maybe they're somewhere in between.

I've been pleasantly surprised to see that Big Pharma is beginning to engage in Social Media the way that the community has been expecting it to for the last few years. There have been missteps and corrections. There have been surprises sprung on Big Pharma by the community. And now, I get to play a part in helping the transition keep going.

All right. The learning is calling my name, and my Blackberry is buzzing, and my email is dinging, and my phone is ringing... and I think I'm late for a meeting...

How many bites to the center of a crunchy data set?

Today's #twilitsum is my long-delayed report on Super Crunchers, by Ian Ayres. I generally stay away from hardcore biz books, as you guys have seen, but this one was about new uses of data analysis. Since I'm such a big geek, we shouldn't be surprised that I liked this. Surprisingly enough, my cursory search returned an authorsite and a book site but no real active community... as always, though, I'm here to talk about the book I have in my grubbby litle paws.

This book discusses data, lots and lots of data. It also discusses managing more data than we're used to. With all of the data sources we have access to, Ian Ayres good old Ian ponders the intelligence of using tried and true methods of data analysis currently used by experts in the field. Why aren't we using all the computing power to analyse the massive quantities of variables and potential data we have instead of guessing.

One of the examples that sticks out for me is one Ian used early in the book no, I won't spoil the ending, that not what I'm here for in his discussion of wine sales data. A lot of wine experts identify what a good wine is, but Orley Ashenfelter developed a data analysis model that took total rainfall into account. His resulting model:

But number crunching lets Orley predict the future quality of a vintage as soon as the grapes are harvested - months before even the first barrel taste and years before the wine is sold. In a world where wine futures are actively trade, Ashenfelter's predictions give wine collectors a huge leg up on the competition. (Ayres, 4)

Impressive. I mean, any time you can use accurate data analysis to beat the experts, it's a good day.

Reading this book did make me question what decisions I'm making solely based on my beliefs and perceptions rather than the data. There are several examples in the book that break down beliefs by their comparable data sets. Ian also discusses evidence based medicine - 100,000 Lives Campaign, Offermatica's web page optimisation strategies, and the use of data in calculating a "Rapid Risk Assessment for Sexual Offendor Recidivism". Each example hammers home his point that much deeper. Data is useful. Data is everywhere. Use your data.

Given that we live in a data-soaked Social Media world, using heavy data analysis should result in better brand decisions. What's required? In my humble opinion, what's required is a broader understanding of sentiment, both automated and human-interfaced. These tools such as Radian6 or Nielsen's Buzzmetrics combined with something like Clarabridge combined with somebody who groks the community, the disease, the conversation should ...again with the should... give better decisions. Of course, the key is to have that last step of intelligent human interfacing that will search reasonable spaces, gather reasonable conversations, and analyse them with reasonable filters. In conjunction with my recent #mondaymorningthoughts post about outsourcing Social Media, Super Crunchers makes a great read. I really feel like this book is a must read for people who want to build a business case for a team of Social Media Ninjas.

Super Crunchers is also an interesting gateway drug to books and videos about behavioural economics. Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational takes this concept of data analytics and drills down into the why a lot more. Let's put that book next on deck for a #twitlitsum.

FULL TRANSPARENCY: I was given this book as a gift by a work colleague, along with about 100 of my closest work buddies. I think when you get a lot of these mass book gifts, nobody ever expects you to read the whole thing. Nor do they expect you to praise, laud, or lionise the author. No such expectation was placed on me, either.

CITATION: Ayres, Ian. Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart. New York: Bantam, 2007. Print.

Blogwell. An intriguing introduction into my world of Marketing.

I'll be using the Post Conference Wrap-Up Template developed by Steve Woodruff. You can let me know via comment or in Twitter if you think I've done a good job.

This last week, I had the occasion to take a day and head over to Blogwell, Seattle. In reality, it was in Redmond, on the Microsoft Campus. The space was fabulous. I also met some awesome people who are undergoing some of the same problems I am. Now, you may think that a regulated industry has entirely different problems than an unregulated industry, and from an advertising perspective, that's probably true. When it comes to how corporations are accepting Social Media into their organisational structure, though, Big Pharma is not unique.

The folks at Gaspedal certainly know how to keep things moving. They did a really good job of organising speakers. All my check in materials were extremely well organised. The staff were ultra-responsive and nice. And massive thanks to Jive, ICUC, and Strongmail. No sponsors make for a very difficult to afford space.

Molly from Nokia gave me one of my big learnings for the day. I captured the thought in a Tweet on the day, "It's easier to get ur employees to understand how ur customers are using Social Media if ur employees understand Social Media #blogwell". That idea pointed out to me that we're still having this conversation. Our staff, our marketers, our sales people, our customer service people, still think that a person's ability to be sitting in a doctor's office and pick up a phone and let the world know, "I'm here because the doctor says I have gruphuphunism and I have to take GruPlex to deal with it. Anybody else taking that?" is irrelevant. Be it in a blog, or a social network, a microblog, a video post, or a social FAQ site, these ideas are being shared. That statement from Molly really made me realise that we're light years behind from a business perspective... all of us.

With all the laptops, and iPads (and they were legion), and iPhones, and Droids, Andy Sernovitz shook me to the core with his choice of tech. I looked over and saw him using a Moleskine Cahier Journal and a pen. He was jotting down his notes and eschewing all the tech to capture his learnings of the day. Truly awesome.

We met on the Microsoft campus. Deep in the heart of Redmond. The Mixer is a very cool space to meet in. Not only were there about 8 different restaurants in the building, but the XBox 360s, the Pool table, and the walls of white boards ripe for idea generation gave me a feeling that we could all just break out in thought any second. There was even a bicycle shop on the premises... a bicycle shop... The day ended with an awesome dinner with Amybeth, Bridget, Nathan, and Brian. I'm sure there were very cool dinners had by other members of the conference, but I think I ended up with the best dinner companions of the whole group.

The ghosts of Chris Brogan and Julien Smith were haunting me all day. Almost every speaker talked about the importance of being human and being actively engaged appropriately in Social Media. While there are many in the Web 2.0 world may think that this is a drum whose skin is beaten loose, I think we all need to be reminded of this simple truth as we look to find ways to participate in Social Media Marketing.

I didn't have much of a chance to talk to the team behind @starbucks, but I did see them after their well-received Blogwell discussion. I did get to talk to @homedepot. That was awesome. I had the chance to share my thanks in person, and was surprised that they did remember dealing with my tweets. Wicked awesome. Did have a couple of sharings with @tprophet. He seemed to feel that his job was to call out that the emperor had no clothes... an intriguing set of thoughts into the #blogwell stream. If I don't make it back next year, you have the authority to virtually kick me @tprophet, this was well worth the red-eye flight back.

All in all this was a wicked cool conference. Andy Sernovitz' questions, Molly's reminder that we needed to integrate our Social Media offerings, Bryan Rhoads' keeping us all active and providing interesting content at the last talk, truly inspiring. I've got a couple of Enterprise Social Media idas to share back with the group. It's time to put our shoulders to the wheel and turn the Big Pharma boat a little more.

I'm sure next year, I'll still be able to say, "I Love My Job"... all the better with my special gift, eh, gang :)