Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Books as Personal Media, Most Interesting Titles for Reading

  Every season has its books. Winter seems to have come early in the Northeast this year, which means curling up with a good book. I love learning through reading. Reading is the most intimate conversation we have with an author. So in this sense, books are the highest form of personal media.

    This reading list is based on personal interest, not pitches from publicists. It includes a variety of works with upcoming release dates, and also some older and worthy titles. The books we haven't read yet represent untapped potential.

    All progress begins with an idea someone expressed, others discussed, some acted on and more built upon. I'm grateful for the ideas (and work) the following authors have put forward for us to discuss, act on and build upon with our own ideas and work.

    In no particular order, some of these books I mentioned in Learning Habit, our community of thinkers and doers, others are in my antilibrary:

1.

Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

We talk a lot about transformation and not enough about transition. Transition is part of life, says William Bridges. Think of the change of seasons, for those of us who live in places that have them. This book deals with the complex inner psychology of periods of change in our lives. The most valuable aspect of the book is that it can help have a conversation with your feelings. Transitions take a longer time than change, which is more like a trigger. Becoming more aware of the process can help us support those around us who are dealing with change.

2.

Savvy: Navigating Fake Companies, Fake Leaders and Fake News in the Post-Trust Era

Out January 2019. Can you tell a fake? Drawing upon principles from psychology, real-world business experiences and with a peek into some of the technology advances taking place in innovation hotspots like Silicon Valley, this book explores how we get through this muddled state and what we all need to do to succeed in tomorrow’s world.

3.

Rule Makers, Rule Breakers

I'm a huge fan of understanding culture. If you've ever wondered why some cultural groups are so lax while others are so stringent or why working-class parents often tend to be stricter than middle-class parents, this book holds the answers. It provides a useful framework to interpret world events and human behavior.

4.

The Art of Gathering

Have you ever wondered why sometimes when you go to an event, you don't feel welcome or it doesn't feel worth our time? I have. The book focuses mostly on business, but the advice is useful for any kinds of gatherings and events. Getting into the holiday season, we're probably doing a bit of both — attending and hosting.

5.

The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success

The title sounds gimmicky, the focus is on the science of networks and how success is the product of collective work. Barabási puts some meat behind the statement, “Your success isn't about you and your performance. It's about us and how we perceive your performance.”

6.

Humans are Underrated

In a world were technology is taking over so many jobs, including the more sophisticated like automated anesthesiology, our roles will shift. The skills of deep human interaction are still needed and even more valuable. This is the main theme of the book. While technology continues to eliminate some jobs, it creates the need for new ones. It's been happening since the dawn of time. We're moving from the Information Age to a new Relationship Age. The value is relationship-building, collaboration with others, brainstorming and leading. To remain relevant, we need to master these uniquely human abilities.

7.

Brave New Work

Out February 2019. Anyone can create positive change in their organizations, regardless of where you sit in the org chart. This book is a practical guide on how to create meaningful change in all organization types. It includes case studies on new ways of working and tools to make it happen.

8.

Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

This book exposes the cultural gap between what we say and what we do. We keep saying we cheer for the team, but we end up praising and enriching the individual for accomplishments. People put tasks and achievements ahead of relationships, without a second thought to the damage to colleagues or families. Curiosity and questions are good in theory, yet we keep elevating people who appear to / have the answers. Our culture hails “tellers” not questioners.

9.

Rebel Talent

We all tend to default to what we should do instead of asking what we could do. The rules say one things... but things change fast, and staying open to trade-offs may lead to better solutions. We also tend to shy away from conflict ― including internal conflict. Yet tension introduces constraints that could help us become more creative. Francesca Gino includes references to Osteria Francescana in Modena. But that wasn't the reason why I got curious about it. The message about breaking the rules did. Do you want to follow a script—or write your own story? 

10.

Never Stop Learning

Learning is not a theoretical exercise, it's a practical one. Bradley R. Staats is a behavioral scientist and operations expert and he's spent fourteen years figuring out the principles of dynamic learning. Operations is about improving outcomes. Which means you look at processes ― how inputs convert into outputs ― to make them better. To deconstruct processes you want to figure out the parts, but also how they fit together. Behavioral sciences explains how the fundamental properties of human nature affect a person's ability to learn. Combine the two and you have three steps ― what you need to do to become a dynamic learner, why you don't do those things, and the steps to take to overcome the challenge.

Bonus:

Won't You Be My Neighbor?

Something to watch about the work of Fred Rogers. For when you're in need of inspiration... and even a good cry. A business example of humanity. To avoid cuts that might have ended public television early on, Mister Rogers went to Washington to testify before the Senate Appropriations Committee, headed by Rhode Island Senator John O. Pastore. The senator has been described as “cynical, caustic, and outrageously sarcastic.”

    Rogers’ widow Joanne in an interview reveals the nervousness and fear her husband felt that day.  But the footage shows a firm and carefully deferential demeanor, a quietly modulated voice resembling the tones and cadence Rogers used to communicate with preschoolers. In contrast to the Senator's tone, Rogers recites the lyrics to a song he composed for an episode of his show, highlighting the importance of people helping others. It's a six-minute presentation. Senator Pastore looks down at his hands and says, “Well, it looks like you’ve just earned $20 million.” 

+

Write your own ending.

Find past reading lists here.

Brand Building Toolkit, Personal is the Best Form of Personalization

Personal is the best form of personalization and is stronger than a faceless company brand today. Connection is a result of interactions that over time leads to trust and often love of the kind you cannot bribe.

    We respond to knowing whose hands or thinking have made something. Influencer marketing is hot because it's about human impressions. Friends and people we trust are our closest influencers. Facebook's organic reach continues to decline.

    While many mainstream brands distributed through retailers are declining, many direct to consumer products are connecting with people. Publishing on your own domain is still the best way to build relationships with your customers.

    My web hosting company is offering a sweet deal this week — up to 75% off on new shared hosting plans and upgrades. I switched to SiteGround two years ago and have not looked back.

    If you're in the market for a fast, affordable WordPress hosting company, take a look at SiteGround. If you sign up, I get a small referral fee. I don't recommend many things, and I waited two years to have enough experience with three different domains on this service to tell you.

    So if you're going to be a publisher in 2019, I cannot think of a better way to start than with a low risk commitment to a hosting company that makes it easy. Get your account now until end of day on Cyber Monday to take advantage of the 75% off special.

 

Our Attention Filter has Ten Instinct-Shaped Holes in it. Learning What They Are Helps us Deal with Risk.

 We manage to ignore all the noise, including much potentially useful information and data on the facts, yet we pay attention to stories and snippets that trigger our dramatic instincts. That's because we get an emotional high from them.

    Our filter has ten holes in it. Hans Rosling named them in Factfulness. Fear is the most used among them — the others are gap, negativity, straight line, size, generalization, destiny, single perspective, blame, and urgency. Fear is hard-wired into our brain, we fear missing out (FOMO) and we have a strong fear of failure, making a mistake.

    We should learn to distinguish something that is “frightening” from something that is “dangerous”. One is perceived, the other is real risk.

Why trends are useful

    Trends help us create a framework around variables we track over the long term. In Megatrends, John Nasbitt says that each new technology, to be successful, must be coupled with a compensatory human response. Thirty years later, we can tell the trends because they endured in our culture.

    The three main categories of fear: are fear of physical harm, fear of captivity — as in loss of control or loss of freedom — and fear of contamination. They distort our worldview and lead to horror of things we don't fully understand or deal with in every day life, like infection and poison.

   When stories combine two fears, like that of a plane crash and kidnapping — tapping into fear of harm and captivity — we're pulled in. Then we get programmed by hearing it over and over again seemingly everywhere. This is a distraction that keeps us from learning the deeper data behind the story and taking action, if appropriate.

    Context helps us allocate resources as needed, including emotional energy. “Now is the time to understand more, so we may fear less,” said Marie Curie. Yes, there are still terrible and painful things happening to people and we should help and empathize.

    Yet the predictive story points to a larger trend that is cause for optimism. That is the story we want to let in our attention filter.

Mimicry and unknown unknowns

    The majority of the stories we get in the media are the local and familiar kind. They merge facts with anecdotes to share things that are of potential human interest, that connect with belief. They trigger us by appealing to our dramatic instincts.

    Sensational headlines draw attention, but distort reality and keep us setting apart what we know from what we don't know. Multiply by the avalanche of similar articles chasing attention, which include many containing false data, and pretty soon it becomes hard to tell a mimic from the real thing.

   Batesian Mimicry# is a form of mimicry where a harmless species has evolved to imitate the warning signals of a harmful species directed at a predator of them both. For example, we should avoid the venom of the Texas Coral Snake while the Mexican Milk Snake and other types of snakes that look similar# are not as bad. 

    Beyond the things we already know, there are things we don't know we should know about. But once we're aware of them, we can learn those things because they're knowable. We can learn to tell the snakes apart, for example. Known known and known unknown are two instances of certainty.

    There are also things we know we don't know, we've identified we don't know them and others we don't know we don't know. The diagram from the Project Management Institute# calls out the nature of risk — uncertainty creates the need for understanding risk.

You can't manage what you don't understand

    Recently, I had a meeting with a group of executives who were looking to evaluate a number of approaches to deal with a situation that involved risk. They had created a brief that called both for preparation and optimization.

    After some conversation I realized that they already had some kind of expectation of what the approach would need to look like. Yet, by their own admission, they did not have a full understanding that the brief and the expectation where not on the same page. There was also domain knowledge uncertainty.

    Their attention was focused on short term tactics, yet the request was for a strategic long term approach. When the focus becomes not the topic but the expectation, the results is a disconnect. The hole (or more than one) in our attention filter leads us to confuse perception with reality.

    In Rosling's definition, risk equals actual danger times our degree of exposure. It's very hard to evaluate something when we have a hole in our knowledge and don't know we do. Said another way, risk is the possibility of suffering loss or harm, not the loss itself. 

    When we learn to manage the sources of exposure to risk, including our own reactions (for example, fear) and experience with uncertain situations, we can begin to benefit from the opportunity brought about by change and creative problem solving.

    To manage risk appropriately, we should remember that if the nature of an occurrence is certain, it is more like a fact or knowledge, If it's uncertain (probability of is less than 1, for example), the impact can be uncertain as well. 

    Evidence and data are useful in decision-making, they also keep us from stressing out and feeling helpless.

    

We Have two General Models of Storytelling. One is Ancient. One is New. It is Only a Matter of Time Before they Collide.

 

We're all storytellers with an audience. Telling stories is how we make sense of our lives.

    Stories have an infrastructure of data and information. When things change in the data — we have more, or different inputs — the story gets updated. Whoever is able to find more accurate information that is up to date and reliable and can connect the dots and see the hidden patterns has an advantage.

     The essence of all storytelling is the way events change, says Christopher G. Moore#. Whoever owns the digital storytelling platforms wins. He puts forth an interesting thesis.

    Today we have two general models of storytelling, he says:

1./ the ancient model familiar to many is local, personal, based on low information, on sharing personal reports, it's anecdotal, it focuses on actions that changed behaviors and lives, talks about things like courage, or warns about disloyalty, etc.

    Typically the storyteller is a member of the community, we're audience and storytellers at different times. There's a a psychological safety and payoff in this model. We merge facts with anecdotes to share beliefs, dreams and aspirations, light the imagination. These kinds of stories helped weave the community together.

2./ the new model started developing after WWII with the advances in computer science. Hence began a model of storytelling based on scientific inquiry and Methods. With the ability to process large data sets, we have been able to discover new patterns.

    Some industries like banking, medicine, and transportation have invested heavily in this model of storytelling. We call this model predictive. This kind of story is not really personal, it's about a larger number of people like you who share your fears and needs.

    Algorithms are better at digging and finding patterns in large data sets. They don't need to worry about the necessities of life.

    The two types of stories are like oil and vinegar, they repel each other. Says Moore:

We have a generation who are getting their stories from the global library, and the international group of story-tellers are transmitting stories that may conflict or contradict what they learned at home or school. As storytellers compete for the attention of an expanded global audience, the stories essential to sustain local cultures are threatened. Stories that inspire are no longer exclusively based on local elites, celebrities or events.

[...]

The statistical story has disrupted and threatens to displace the anecdote.    

    But at the same time we have a hard time shedding the subjective story. Because it feels more real. This is interesting because since the early days of social media we've been noticing how people relate more readily with a person — a representative of a company — through their subjective voice vs. a brand or company.

    The reason why we feel more connected to a subjective story is that it influences our emotions. The statistical story keeps changing based on updates and fixes. We have a hard time connecting to that. But the statistical story can make us more efficient, improve our decisions.

We’ve never had a period where the global population has been under intense pressure to shift their identity and reality from myths, legends, and fables and embrace a radically different kind of storytelling with a new rank of story-tellers.

    Which is why we're resisting and retrenching into the personal and local. Imagine telling your children a story bout probabilistic outcomes! The one thing anecdotal stories teach us well is the topic of being human.

    We're witnessing the clash between the two storytelling models. I found the article stimulating, I had not thought about story in this larger context.

 

The Relationship of Value and Influence

When we think about the future of social media, it's natural to think about future generations as well. Research firm Ampere Analysis found that people aged 18-24 had significantly changed their attitudes in the last two years#. Generation Z are considering quitting social media, that was also the result of half the people U.S. marketing firm Hill Holliday surveyed.

    Surveys respondents say they'd like to give a more realistic representation of who they are. Social networks are a showcase of lives that don't exist. To gain likes and followers people need to position, trick, and lie. Migrating from Facebook# to Instagram# provides little relief#, in social media, it's easy to be singled out.

    A new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults finds that a majority of Americans across a wide range of demographic groups use Facebook# (except 65 and older). The findings however highlight conflicting attitudes toward social media — harder to give up, say some; not hard to give up, say many others.

    Beyond analytical evidence, each of us is somewhere on the scale — weighing the value we receive and give on one side, and the influence we exert and (maybe) how we're influenced by others on the other.

The attention problem

    While social media has enabled anyone to reach anyone else on the planet, the truth is that we tend to pay attention more readily to people who think and act like us. Nature has given us a compelling reason to do that — nobody survives alone. Humans band together, it's our instinct.

    But it's also a necessity. The complexity of modern life requires collaboration for success. Research has demonstrated that diversity enhances our ability to explore new ideas#, allowing us to see a problem from different points of view. More variety in how people think about an issue is a strength.

    However, a meta-analysis of 108 studies and more than 10,000 teams# found that diversity hinders consensus. When we're trying to get things done, we want to put away our differences, and work together. Convergence is more useful to the final output. The answer might be to have moderate diversity#.

    Moderation is compelling to businesses. Amazon's principle number 8#, “Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking.” But what about the public at large? It might depend on their bias for action. 

    Quick reactions to what looks and sounds different, not in a funny way, happen when a bias for action is compounded by our natural tendencies to pay more attention to people like us. Why go with like, we shy away from different.

    But impulse is only half the story. Social networks algorithms exacerbate the problem. They serve up what we're supposed to pay attention to, and send us down rabbit holes before we have time to reflect. it all happens seamlessly.

Social networks' dilemma

    Social media has made it easier to find people to friend and follow; it's made it harder to identify people who deviate from what we already like and favor. Within the inevitable echo-chamber, it takes extra effort to include new perspectives in our reading and learning. Not impossible, it just requires more work. 

    The New York Times published a less than flattering profile# of Facebook's role in exacerbating the problem. The story, one of many in the last couple of years, seems to have hit a nerve. That's because it records a pattern of behavior at best described as shocking.

    According to people present, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg yelled, “You threw us under the bus!” at Alex Stamos, security chief for sharing information about the social network's failure to contain Russia-linked activity on its site.

    No leader would relish being called out for delaying, denying, and deflecting in a crisis. The NYT calls attention to a consistent pattern of allowing the use of its algorithms to target ads. It's a pattern that started raising questions 10 years earlier.

    Our dilemma is do we use social media or not? Do we throw away the potential benefits of getting the word out on our work and business, meeting new people, discovering resources, with the bad aftertaste of privacy concerns, tribal behavior, and time wasters?

The impact of social media's business model

    Humans pay attention to patterns, and awareness of the drawbacks of social networks is reaching a high point. Social networks are starting to pay attention — loss of users means potential loss of revenue. But loss of reputation can have larger implications.

    Nice words are a weak substitute to action. Apple CEO Tim Cook says, “We’re not going to traffic in your personal life. Privacy to us is a human right. It’s a civil liberty.” Apple's product has always been a closed system. The company's privacy statement says:

We’re committed to keeping your personal information safe. That’s why we innovate ways to safeguard your privacy on your device, why we’re up front about how we personalize your experience, and why we equip developers with the best tools to protect your data.

    In 2011, security researchers found that the iPhone kept records of everywhere you go#. They even set up an open-source application to let users check what location data is shared#. But as Cook said in Brussels earlier in the year#, Apple's business model doesn't depend on selling customer data.

    Zuckerberg says, “We Get It,” in an internal memo, but acting on it may be more challenging for the company. Facebook's brand is about “Making the world more open and connected”.  The majority of Facebook revenues are generated through advertising, monetizing attention is the product.

    Facebook leverages Aggregation Theory#, a concept by analyst Ben Thompson. As Thompson says, “Aggregation Theory is a completely new way to understand business in the Internet age.”  The Internet enables zero distribution costs, zero marginal costs, and zero transactions costs.

    Which means that “the most important factor determining success is the user experience”. Social networks operate algorithms that make it easy to share, taking away friction and taking advantage of the reward mechanism of human psychology. Their business model, where the suppliers are also users, demands increased levels of engagement.

    The attempted conservation of attractive profits bleeds into the rest of the web through programmatic advertising. The habits of language, speed, and volume of one-dimensional avatar interactions bleed into real life.

    Social media impacts not just our online experience anymore, it impacts our experience of the world. So much so that we've come to expect quick results and scale, without a thought as to the network effects that need to be in place for it to work that way.

Why social media is not going away any time soon

    Facebook is still well-established in the habits of many, including businesses large and small. The recent revelations about the social network are a tipping point for more individuals and some businesses that were on the fence. They raise questions about the frequency and intensity of social network use.

    Taking a break from social media because it's distracting has also become a common explanation. 44 percent of the young people Hill Holliday surveyed quit or considered quitting social media to “use time in more valuable ways”#. Some say social media causes anxiety, but they also fear missing out on their friends.

    The answer may be using a combination of messaging platforms, niche social networks and subscription sites and email updates. People want to connect with like-minds on topics they're passionate about. Topical sites like NextDoor and Houzz, for example. Highly-curated information is viewed as valuable.

    On Facebook, while the Pages reach continues to go down, Groups are thriving. They numbered 620 million in 2010#. It makes sense, with a focus on community they invite more frequent interaction and discussions. New moderation tools support the work of community managers/group administrators and help keep the interaction civil.

    Social media has brought about many changes. What doesn't change is our gregarious nature, which compels us to want to be part of what is happening. Twitter's evolving tagline# is an interesting window into the phenomenon. “What are you doing?” became “Find out what’s happening, right now, with the people and organizations you care about.”

    We want to know what's going on, and add our 0.2 cents. Why secrets, gossip, and rumors are still going strong. Everyone predicted that the rise of social networks would decrease the number of events and attendance would thin out. But the opposite has been true. We have even more events on more topics now.

    People want to meet in person. There's no substitute for being physically in the same room. The value of rubbing shoulders with each other, learning through experience are as old as humankind. Hard to compete with the energy levels and value of good events and the influence of membership communities.

... but demand is changing

    Increasingly, those communities are built on the Web (and not on Facebook). Social media is not going away any time soon. But demand is changing. The Washington Post reports that Facebook lost 4 million users in Europe in the last six months and growth has plateaued in the United States#.

    We are changing how we view the relationship between value and influence. When what we value is based on our values, behavior changes. When enough people make the change, they form a new community, find a new hangout.

    In a community, you're a person again, not an avatar. User sentiment, not regulatory action, is a more effective instigator or change, says Thomson#. “Never underestimate the power of a small group of people to change the world. In fact, it is the only way it ever has,” says Margaret Mead.

    A few million users might be a drop in the bucket for Facebook, but just enough for making a change. If we want a better future, we'll need to create it. We do it by solving human problems. Community is a good environment for collaboration.

 

[image via Pixabay]

Customer Lifetime Value

 There's a reason why you've been on hold with customer service for an hour says the Wall Street Journal, that company may have decided you're not profitable. It's one of the stories I shared in the most recent Learning Habit issue.

    Algorithms determine Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) by keeping a tally of how much money a customer spends. It's important to remember that CLV is about profit and not just revenue. Companies determine the CLV of a person as a score. The score may include geography — the zip code of where we live — and the number of returns we make.

    What else could be part of the score? Some algorithms may include website and customer service interactions, social media activity, marital status — many of the things marketers asked for years in warranty cards and contests, for example — in addition to transaction records.

    In theory, CLV is a prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer. But is it not missing something?

Crippling flaw in CLV

    Michael Schrage says#:

Innovation must be seen as an investment in the human capital and capabilities of customers.

[...] serious customer lifetime value metrics should measure how effectively innovation investment increases customer health and wealth. Successful innovations make customers more valuable. That’s as true for Amazon, Alibaba, and Apple as for Facebook, Google, and Netflix. No one would dare argue that these innovators don’t understand, appreciate, or practice a CLV sensibility.

    In other words, what has the company done lately to keep customers coming back for more? This is the value of a brand to a person or fan. When done well, companies can partner with customers in creating value. Cost reduction, advocacy, product ideas, feedback and data sharing are just some of the upsides.

    Part of the brand reinvention of a business where we grew revenues to position it for an acquisition included partnering with the ultimate users of our products to gain insights on the state of the market. That qualitative information helped us shape our forecasts and quantitative tracking.

    This kind of valuable personal involvement tends to get lost in all the talk about engagement in social. An overlooked yet effective marketing tactic continues to be making the customer better. In fact, investing in customers increases their value to the business.

Other dangers of CLV

    What happens inside the organization should not be discounted from CLV. It's not a number plucked from thin air, it's the result of a calculation we make based on the business we run.

    Bill Gurley addresses other dangers of overly focusing on customer lifetime value for Internet businesses. My observation is that once we find a formula, we typically become enamored with the formula and forget where it came from and that the point is not the formula but the behavior we're trying to predict.

    Data looks back, we're terrible at making predictions, especially when emotion is involved. Gurley# has “reasons to avoid worshiping at the LTV altar.” Some of his points are useful to seeing a broader definition of customer lifetime value:

• It's a tool, not a strategy — confusion of output and inputs. Things like average revenue per user (ARPU) and customer acquisition costs (CAC) are outside our control.
• The model to calculate CAC is confused and misused — for example, customers who seek out a business on their own or as referred by others should not be calculated as a cost. Many discount “revenues” rather than marginal cash contribution. All future variable costs of supporting the customer should be part of the equation to estimate future contribution.
• Business is not physics, the formula is not absolute — complex adaptive systems cannot be modeled with certainty.
• CLV variable tug at one another — imagine a balloon. When you squeeze in one area, the air moves to another. Raise prices and you increase churn, increase customer service support and cost goes up. The problem keeps moving because it's very challenging to have cheaper, faster, and better all at once.
• Purchased customers underperform organic customers — this is almost on every metric. Once businesses are done pampering the top customers according to their definition, they'll likely need to buy more customers to replace those that have walked away because they were treated poorly (as in not deemed valuable enough).
• Marketing dollars could go to the customer — in servicing the customer, giving the customer a better reason to buy more. This is value left on the table when a business follows the premise that CLV is entirely the responsibility of customers. Jeff Bezos says, “More and more money will go into making a great customer experience, and less will go into shouting about the service. Word of mouth is becoming more powerful. If you offer a great service, people find out.”
• An obsession on formulas is blinding — effective public relations, social media, and word of mouth require more creativity and an open mind. They reward businesses with some of the best reach money can't buy, the spontaneous testimonial and recommendation of customers.
• Tomorrow never arrives — focusing overly on the past, as in data about purchases, and the future, as in lifetime value, discounts the potential value of a simple single action and decision today.

    The problem includes timing. Which is as much art as science. Few things in life are certain. While CLV can be useful. What's the lifetime cost of getting value wrong?

 

Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Turnover in 2018

Any change at the top of an organization impacts the group and the company as a whole. The trend on rapid change has affected the marketing group faster than other groups. Spencer Stuart has done some research# about higher CMO turnover in 2018.

    A few of the key takeaways resonate with conversations I've had with peers:

• Poor alignment between the CEO and CMO on the mission (and the timeline) of the marketing organization’s output.
• Too little time spent defining clear priorities for the CMO, which can lead to flawed or incomplete assessment criteria, as CMOs’ roles vary depending on the industry.
• Mismatch between the talent and the needed skills around the corner. The opportunities and challenges CMOs have historically been dealing with are not necessarily the same ones they will face in the future.

    These seem to apply across industries as well.

    As all senior leaders, marketers have two imperatives — develop value and communicate value. This means focusing on internal as much as external audiences and outcomes, connecting marketing to the business strategy, and building credibility with consistent results.

    In addition to domain competence, all professional knowledge workers should constantly evolve a set of skills that include:

• communication — the ability to craft a compelling narrative
• continuous learning — a commitment to updating domain skills, but also to understand the nature of change and technology and its impact on human behavior
• leadership — it's a tired term, but the idea of inspiring and building a team of continuous learners is still useful

     As I look at the chart above, I cannot help but think that there might be a changing of the guard as well. Curious as to your reactions.

 

New Ideas for Our Social Media Future

This is the topic of a breakfast conversation I will lead on December 6. If you're in the Greater Philadelphia area, you can sign up here. Since my role will be that of shining a light on ideas and strategies of local B2B professionals, I'll add my two cents here.

    My work in social media predates many of the social networks that have come to dominate many lives today. I've gone from enthusiastic early adopter building community to cautiously optimistic user. Social media has impacted our work and our lives in ways we may not have fully anticipated back in 1999.

    It was hard to imagine how much the algorithm and the constant flow of stuff happening would come to dominate our lives. The stream seems to be an irresistible and unmissable part of our days. Even as rationally we know how much it cuts into our productivity and increases our expectations.

    For businesses, social media has gone from darling for organic reach to foe within the span of a few short years. Our plans of instant fame and popularity (if not virality) were crashed along with the illusion that content and staff's time were free (vs. paid media).

    What will the future hold? Part of the answer depends on what we decide to do — individually and collectively. Here are a few themes that have not gone out of fashion over the last twenty or so years.

Impact to communication

    The biggest impact of technology in our lives is cultural, specifically due to how we communicate.

    Social media doesn't change culture, it reveals it. At times in similar ways as alcohol consumption, screens dampen or remove inhibition and norms. Behind screens, humans show their tendencies for the world to see. The tools magnify the effect — in good and bad ways.

    All social networks are under scrutiny for making it easier to spread misinformation and fake news. There's room for improvement at algorithm level, say many, as the tools are configured to remove friction, capture and aggregate attention, and are inherently biased.

    But we're actors in the system and we should not be so ready to give up our power to be part of the solution. Ease and velocity of communication puts a premium on what we say and how we say it. That includes whose agenda we further when we share what others say.

    This broader context of how people communicate with each other today has repercussions for businesses. We are humanizing everything through our participation. What stories do we choose to believe? How do we engage? 

    Risk communication is a useful concept here. It can help avert a PR crisis in social. More on applying its principles here. Learning to listen better is an integral part of communication, and practice in social media can be extremely useful because culture shows up differently in different social networks.

    Messaging apps are valuable as forms of social media as rapid communication tools to get things done. Take away the public nature of a message, and you restore utility (when used judiciously). Direct messages in social networks in the early days became stand-alone apps with the broader adoption of smartphones.

Effect on brand and relationships

    Marketing's value to the business includes the outcomes from what is essentially communication to existing and future clients. Brand is still one of the most effective tools organizations have to cut through the noise and build direct relationships with people.

    Businesses that cater to other businesses are not an exception. Buyers and partners are still people. The bad news is that many businesses are unable to outspend their competitors or build more convenient tools than the technology giants that aggregate so much of our attention, and commerce. Technology has reset customer expectations for good.

    Where technology does outpace us, we can win on the people side of business. People and relationships are a valuable aspect of brand. Defining purpose and setting a clear strategy of who we are and what we stand for allow us to identify the best stories to represent our work. Over time, consistency and coherence in how we communicate our story build reputation.

    Narrative clarity is the one thing that is easy to admire and extremely difficult to imitate. It sets an organization and brand apart from the rest. “Your brand is what people say when you're not in the room,” says Jeff Bezos.

    It takes time to build a brand, but not as long as many organizations think. The most common mistake companies make is to be all over the place, to try and capture mass appeal. A better strategy is to identify an issue or problem someone needs solved (within the area of competence) and to focus on addressing it.

    We don't need more content to consume, we already have an avalanche. But we do need answers to specific issues and better questions. For example, how do we know the value of digital communications for manufacturing or SaaS companies? Is it the same or how is it different than retail businesses? 

The future looks a lot like today

    Only more of the same, or more extreme. When we try to imagine what the future of anything will look like, we end up conjuring extreme cases of what's going on today. Imagining new ideas or use cases, even simple ones, is the hard — yet rewarding — part.

    Today we're taking for granted that the current social media networks will continue to grow and capture our attention, that the trajectory of business will stay the same. Except it may not be and likely won't. So we should ask a different question — what is the potential value of social media to communication and relationships?

    Desire for connection drives so much of our actions and our lives. Connection drives innovation. All the tools at our disposal have not helped us feel more connected, yet. Will solving this problem be part of the future of social media?

    Ideas have value when they open the door to problems we're not seeing, or understanding properly. If we want a better future, we'll need to create it by solving those problems.

    Are you in the Greater Philadelphia area? Join me and fellow B2B marketers on Dec 6 by signing up here.

 

[image via alphacoders]

The Difference Between Fulfilling and Initiating

Some agencies use the term fulfillment to describe the process of delivering some aspects of a service. Companies tend to use the term execution or implementation instead. The word evokes the process of stuffing envelopes, or operations like selecting items off a pallet and putting them in the box ready to ship.

    There's a beautiful, more generic meaning to the word — the state of completion, or realization. As in a dream. Fulfilling therefore is more broadly the act of completing — rather than simply handling and executing customer orders, as packing, shipping, or processing checks.

    Initiating means to cause or facilitate the beginning of something. It can also mean to introduce something, or someone to a new situation or reality. For example, think of initiation rites, or being instructed in a new field.

    Every job is a combination of both — fulfillment of existing and/or new insights, projects, programs, products or services, and initiation of ideas, activities, initiatives, and so on. The very definition of a job is a form of fulfillment request, and the candidate selection determines the percentage of initiation and fulfillment in the role.

    Wisdom and experience may impact the quality of both, rather than just skew in the direction of one or the other. Whether we fulfill or initiate we still need a combination of critical thinking, tested action, and creativity in interpreting evidence to communicate value.

    Often, the very act of fulfilling a dream or a promise creates the premise for the initiation of a productive week, good relationship, or brilliant year.

 

What's Next

After decades preparing others for what's next, I'm working on this very question for the forthcoming leg of my journey. When I came to the U.S., my dream involved helping people with different cultures (and languages) work together toward a better life.

    The journey started with wellness and answering the question of what makes a child a fully functioning human being and charting a path between current and desired state. Over a short period of time, I've witnessed and supported impact affecting hundreds of lives. What a privilege it was to serve those families.

    My ability to learn rapidly and effectively and my training and experience in systems of communication were tested time and time over through the harsh operational reality of nonprofit work. I was very fortunate to be in an environment that never stopped, where marginal improvements made the difference between life and more difficult alternatives.

    I carried that drive and desire to affect change positively to the business world. Marketing, communication, and a passion for the impact of technology on human behavior have been the common thread in the last fifteen plus years.

     I've helped several mature organizations evolve their brand to realize ambitious growth objectives. In some cases an acquisition, in others the fine tuning of a new story and direction. Many of the roles I've held throughout my career were fixed descriptions I brought to life with a growth mindset.

    This meant flexing in the direction of the business problem to solve with no concern over who took the credit and an eye firmly focused on excelling in customer and user experience. I worked in collaboration with teams inside and outside the organization, soliciting and welcoming contributions and becoming a mentor and coach even as I often missed having one.

    My introduction to the power of publishing and storytelling predated the digital tools we take for granted today. I learned digital community building starting in 1999 and I've experimented with online communication through the evolution of everything that came after that — I'd been writing online since 2000 and my first post here was in August 2006.

    As I've said often in the last three years, I'm an accidental consultant. When my father was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, I did not hesitate. It turned out to be a prescient decision made without much to go on, one of many in my life that turned out to be appropriate. He/we had 60 days in total.

    I chose to spend time with him and forego the career progression I had built so far in corporate and agency roles. It wasn't a simple choice, but it was easy to make. Family comes first especially at a time when community is such a vanishing concept when not followed by commercial value.

    So here I am three years later, an accidental consultant.

    It's been a good run, working with clients in some cases several months at a stretch to develop and communicate value for growth and transformation. It's always easier to see how far we've come when looking back, and I know this is true regardless of the question and journey.

    I'm currently exploring a variety of different directions — the product of a very interesting career in five plus industries with depth in a few areas, including business to business commerce, risk management and communication, and brand reinvention. Throughout, I've been lucky to learn from engineers, scientists, and financial and operational gurus on whose shoulders I've built my experience.

    There are a number of opportunities I'm discussing at the moment for the next step in my career. I don't see yet where these conversations will lead, and I don't know where and when things will land. I'm curious and excited to find out.

    This is the principal reason why I haven't been as active posting here and in social — with the exception of my new passion project ItalianStyle.me (you'll see the visual storyteller in me on Instagram.)

    My goal is to begin my new adventure starting January 2019.

    Here's how you can help in the meantime. Please take a moment to consider if you can do one or more of the following:

• Consulting Referrals

    I'd welcome any referrals for consulting work — brand strategy and positioning, digital communication, content strategy and publishing are some of my most requested programs. I play well with others (partners, agencies, and other teams) and hit the ground running.

    I've written a staggering number of words online and offline. I'm equally comfortable with a blank page and with drafts you'd like to see evolve. Professional writers and writing coaches have used my services.

    We're approaching the end of the year and maybe you have a project you've been unable to get to, or to get off the ground as quickly as you'd like. Maybe you're one or two people short in your team — many I talk with have lost colleagues and are behind in their hiring process. Or maybe you could use ramping up or sharpening digital skills.

• Speaking Referrals

    In the last couple of years I've done more panel moderation. I'll be moderating a panel for the Business Marketing Association of Philadelphia breakfast event on December 6. I'm planning to do more speaking in 2019.

    This means I'll also update my site and LinkedIn profile. I've been advocating the importance of value to brand, memorable experiences, and culture in digital environments at prominent conferences and events around the world for more than a decade.

• Bridging Connections

    If you know people I should meet for a conversation, please reach out. Most of our activities require a combination of bonding and bridging. I've been an avid connector of people and ideas throughout my career because I believe in this mix. But I also believe in right place, right time.

    Many often volunteer introducing their LinkedIn connections. But here's why that's not the same as making proactive introductions. Even when I make an effort — as many of you do — to get to know social connections, we're often not as personally connected as we'd like to think. Serendipity needs frequency of contact to work in our favor.

    Relationships take time to develop, and luck favors compounding effects.

•     Opportunities

    We don't know what we don't know. Even as I'm discussing a few opportunities, I'm fully aware that there are unknown unknowns in the mix of life. So I'd like to encourage you to connect with me if you think you'd like to explore an opportunity, or if you know of a business problem I can help address for an organization.

    I typically attract organizations at an inflection point — high growth startups, mature businesses in reinvention mode, consultancies that want to become more agile in how they approach purpose and execution, and brands that want to tell their story with new intensity.

    I'm system- and process-driven, resilient with a bias to balancing action with thinking and evidence. I worked in highly regulated industries and have held the confidence and received the support of CEOs and the most senior executives in organizations.

    My experience includes global work — French, British, Swiss German organizations and global clients, including APAC and Latin America. It would be fabulous to help an Italian company that wants to do/is doing business in the U.S. or vice versa. I have a natural love for the made in Italy.

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    Asking is hard, yet necessary because we're not islands and our best work is a result of a group effort. Consulting has been rewarding, yet it's a (mostly) alone activity. In the last three years I've invested heavily on my continuing education — subscription-based models, publishing and writing, developing well thought-out frameworks and models. I've even completed a Barre instructor training (a conversation for another day).

    In the next few articles, I'll share some lessons learned at different organizations and working on various programs to give you a deeper sense of how I work. I also sense that my reluctance to toot my own horn has held me back.

    This is a conversation. So I'll also be reaching out to smart people in my network to offer their thoughts and ideas on the impact of technology on business, culture, and human behavior. You're welcome to suggest people in your network as well. Conversations have been part of this site before.

    Finally, I believe that value is rooted in values. Our values change in different phases of our lives based on our goals and direction. My current values are — sincerity, beauty, trust, acceptance, intelligence and reason, curiosity, connection and empathy, impact, and fun and humor.

 

P.S. I forgot I was also a bartender in a club during the summer and on New Year's Day. It was an interesting exercise to think about jobs I've had beyond titles. I can see direction and patterns there. What would you see if you did your grid?