Finding new value in old notes

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One of the journals I keep is a Daily Q&A journal, which asks the same question each calendar day every year for five years. It’s a great exercise in seeing what’s changed in your life and what’s not; where I’m moving toward my goals and where I’m stuck.

That ability to better understand the present in context of the past is one of the many things that’s valuable about old notes. I’ve thought for some time that if I was going to start another company right now, it might focus on re-surfacing new value from old notes. I love thinking about how old wisdom or information sheds new light on new circumstances. That’s a phenomenon I’d like to think about a lot more. For now, some specific examples.

Today my daily Q&A journal asks “what was the best thing you read today?”

On this day in 2014, I said it was a Chomsky interview in The Sun. Incidentally, I’m reading a wonderful Chomsky book right now that I got in a Free Library walking down the street. (I live in Portland, there’s Chomsky just laying about here.) Why did it take me four years to get back to reading Chomsky? Because the interview wasn’t that good. The book is great though! It makes me think that a great author shouldn’t be judged from one piece.

On this day in 2015, the most interesting thing I read was my own Evernote file of important thoughts recorded in the month of May. I still keep a file like that and I still review it regularly! One difference is that I now transfer those thoughts to a flashcard app called Anki for review and I record them in the first place in a private wiki instead of Evernote. My beloved personal wiki turns one year old next month, in fact.

In 2016 the most interesting thing I read on May 30th was an HBR article on five key steps for building support for your ideas: show up face to face to describe them, give a good speech about them that frames the discussion, have strong allies, have strong moral beliefs, and be persistent. That’s been in my flashcards ever since then but it’s something I could really use right now. Thanks for another reminder, old journal entry!

Last year on this date I was reading Eric Barker’s incredible book Barking Up the Wrong Tree. He tells a story about how comedians experiment with all kinds of jokes at small shows on the road, often telling jokes that fall flat, but taking note of those that land well. Then when they do a national show, that quantity of experiments provides enough proven wins that they can put together a show that’s 100% funny. That’s inspiring!

Have I produced enough content over recent years that I could piece together a really solid presentation or piece of writing where I know every item would make an impact? Not formally, but perhaps informally. That seems like a smart thing to make a wiki page about: points made that made an impact.

What did I record this year in response to the question, “what’s the best thing you read today?” I said, “my own note I took down some time ago that said, ‘when you say something powerful, stop.'”

Why you shouldn’t rely on social feed algorithms alone

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“We run the risk, with social news algorithms,” Czech media philosopher Vilém Flusser wrote, “of losing our human capacity to select information, an essential part of making decisions, of being free.” (From the Society of the Query Reader: Reflections on Web Search)

That’s a powerful  way of saying it.  Making decisions is the essence of freedom, and selecting which information to focus on is a particularly important kind of freedom in an information-dense world.  As is the case with so many other forms of freedom, it’s also overwhelming and frightening.  Exercising it is a skill that we (hopefully) build.  (Mortimer Adler defines a skill as “a habit of following a set of rules,” in his great book How to Read a Book (video summary).)

I like to exercise my information freedom through source selection (following specific people, subscribing to RSS feeds), source categorization (making Twitter lists, folders in my RSS reader), reading the most recent updates from those sources, AND appreciating social news algorithms that bring selected updates to the top.  Today I retweeted my wife for the first time in a long time, because Twitter’s “You may have missed” algorithm made sure I saw her post.  I appreciate that.

Flusser’s exploration of the implications of these algorithms goes into more detail.  “For example,” he says, “redundant info isn’t removed, but highlighted, creating pressure to conform.”

If freedom is important to you, looking outside the boundaries of the algorithmic stream is important.

3 good tactics for building a platform ecosystem

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‍Building a platform ecosystem can be a great way to build community and energy around what you’re doing. Three best practices I’ve learned from software developer platforms are as follows. These aren’t the only things to focus on of course, but I do like these three tactics.

(1) Provide some free level of access that people can immediately begin experimenting with at any hour day or night (Mashery taught me that before they were acquired by Intel).

(2) Make sure you tell people what types of functionality you want them to build on your platform and what types of things you intend to build yourself, even thematically (Several years ago Twitter published the quadrant diagram below and told its ecosystem which of those quadrants it wanted outside developers to focus on and which ones to avoid. The upper right was one to stay away from, they said.)

(3) If you can, it’s great to offer a high-touch preview of your roadmap. Salesforce regularly does a registration-required live video walk-through of what they’ve got coming over the next months.

Those are some of my favorite tactics. Anyone have anything else you’d like to add?

5 ways to find people, the ultimate source of insight

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Let’s say you’re working on something that would benefit from the perspective of a really knowledgeable person in addition to yourself.  In fact, you probably are.

I think people, especially smart ones focused on particular fields, are the ultimate source of knowledge and insight because they are dynamic.  They just keep going.  Books and articles and such are great – but there’s nothing like finding a really great person for taking your understanding of the work you’re doing to the next level.

I’ve been in the people-finding business for almost a decade now, but today online a friend asked me how to find people who aren’t on social media.

I came up with this list of 5 ways.  What am I missing?

Ask people who are on social media

Social media is the easiest way to discover relevant people, either based on what they’ve published or based on who is connected to them.  The easiest way to find people is on the internet, and one of the best ways to find people who aren’t on the internet is to ask the people you find who are, who else you should talk to.

Search news

It would be great to extract this automatically, but just for a fresh test: I searched for “artificial intelligence” and “social justice” on Google News and the first result that wasn’t a TED Talk was an article about a conference and the first name in it was of an important college professor who has no Twitter account, 9 contacts on LinkedIn, and a blank avatar on Facebook.  He’s got a big CV though.

Search books (try Google Talk to Books)

Google’s new semantic search engine of books, called Talk to Books, is a pretty great way to explore around any topic.

Go to events

You know who the king of going to events and finding incredible people is? Kent Bye, host of Voices of VR and Voices of AI.  Thats where he gets his interviews.  And he has done hundreds, if not thousands, of interviews.

Leade.rs

Loic Le Meur’s new startup Leade.rs is a great looking way to find public speakers on hot topics.  It’s a directory. Is it social media?  Maybe.

 

Also: From the remarkable new Pew study titled “The Future of Well-Being in a Tech-Saturated World,” based on responses of more than 1,000 experts, some perspective:  Stephen Downes, a senior research officer at the National Research Council Canada, commented, “The internet will help rather than harm people’s well-being because it breaks down barriers and supports them in their ambitions and objectives. We see a lot of disruption today caused by this feature, as individuals and companies act out a number of their less desirable ambitions and objectives. Racism, intolerance, greed and criminality have always lurked beneath the surface, and it is no surprise to see them surface. But the vast majority of human ambitions and objectives are far more noble: people desire to educate themselves, people desire to communicate with others, people desire to share their experiences, people desire to create networks of enterprise, commerce and culture. All these are supported by digital technologies, and while they may not be as visible and disruptive as the less-desirable objectives, they are just as real and far more massive.”

One key step in effective influencer engagement: A good system for seeing opportunities

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When it comes to cultivating long-term relevance and quality relationships with industry thought leaders, showing up is key.  Here’s my advice on how to make that easier to do.

I’ve been engaging with influential people online, building relationships, learning from them, and collaborating when it makes sense, for more than a decade. The number one tactic I always recommend is this: set up a really easy way for you to see the updates that your people of interest are publishing throughout the course of your day.  Not all of them, just some of them, regularly.

This should be something you can’t help but trip on as you’re looking at your email inbox, or you’re visiting Twitter, or when you’re opening a new tab in your browser. I have a VIP Twitter list I’ve organized and I’ve dragged the link to that list’s tweets down to my browser toolbar. Whenever I want to visit Twitter, that’s where I start. That’s pretty casual, for my heavyweight business needs I use enterprise software from Sprinklr of course, and it is the best interface for influencer monitoring I’ve ever seen. But the point is, you’ve got to have the opportunity to engage right in front of you.

Now once you’ve walked past your email folder full of influencer newsletters, or your Facebook Group you use as your Facebook landing page, or your awesome social media listening dashboard, don’t just rush past that point to get to where you intended to go. Linger a little. Make a habit of slowing down to look at a few recent updates from the influential people you’re monitoring. You don’t have to read everything, but you won’t engage with anything you don’t read. There are probably 1 or 2 opportunities to reply, reshare, or otherwise engage with something in the first 3 to 5 items you’ll scan over at the top of your list.

Wash, rinse, and repeat. Regular engagement with influencer content isn’t sufficient to build a relationship, but I’d argue that it is one essential part if you’re really focused on building long-term relationships and learning from these top thinkers in your industry.

A fun advanced tactic: sometimes I like to pretend I’m at a party offline and someone walked up to me and said the first thing I see on a list of tweets, right to me personally. What would I say if they said that to me? I think about that a little, and then I say it on Twitter.

If you like podcasts, you should try the Breaker app

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Discovering a great new podcast is a real thrill and a relatively new app called Breaker makes it easy to do. It uses your friend list from Twitter or other social networks to tap you into a stream of podcast listening activity. And the interface is beautiful.

The social discovery is awesome – I’m finding new shows and new episodes to listen to that I really enjoy. It also prompts me to listen to popular things I’ve never bothered to listen to before, like The Daily from the NYT. Everyone likes it and so it was easy for me to give it a try once. There are far more shows and specific episodes being published now than anyone can listen to, it’s really overwhelming, and this is a good way to filter.

This is what sharing your social data like your list of friends with third party apps can do for you, by the way. This is the upside of that kind of capability, ways it can improve democratic values for a change.

I’ve used Huffduffer for years for podcast discovery but it’s web based, nerdy, sparse, and not nearly as popular. It’s still cool though, as is the HuffDuffVideo bookmarklet that strips audio from YouTube videos and puts it on AWS for 30 days, then pushes those audio files over to HuffDuffer to listen to on my phone or Sonos. Biggest bummer at Breaker? My Huffduffer feed didn’t get imported, for some reason.

Also disappointing about Breaker: I don’t see a privacy option for specific shows. There are some podcasts I listen to that I don’t want all my friends knowing I listen to them.

Further critique could be offered of the less useful push notifications. Some of the push notifications are amazing, like “your friend X was a guest on this podcast!” But other ones say things like “many of your friends like popular things” – and that’s just annoying. I’d also like it to do downloads a little differently so it supported the Sonos “on this phone” feature beter.

So that’s four things I don’t like about Breaker – but there are far more that I like a lot. I think you’ll like it too.

 

The Rise of Influencer Listening

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I’ve been doing “influencer marketing” for more than a decade, and calling it that for more than 7 years. I’m not a big fan of what you’re probably thinking about when you hear the phrase “influencer marketing.” What I’m really excited about is not so much outbound marketing and promotion – but inbound value capture through listening to market influencers and thought leaders. Listen to them and learn from them! That’s far more valuable than asking them to share links to what you’re selling!

I did a webinar about it with the American Marketing Association today and I was thrilled that 600 people registered, more than 200 attended live, and almost all of them stayed through the entire hour – not dropping off until we were done. You can check out the presentation on demand here. Related: AdWeek ran a contributed article I wrote on the same topic the next day.

That attendance and the responses we got suggest this to me: the market is ready for this. Marketers are ready to go beyond influencer marketing 101, the presumption of shallow last minute paid endorsements. I sure hope so!

What is strategic, listening-powered influencer marketing? It’s really a two-way conversation and it goes far beyond driving traffic to your company’s website. It does do that, in small part through the advocacy and sharing of “influencers” and in larger part through increased relevance for your more-informed brand, but it does a lot more than drive traffic.

As super smart marketer Leah Kinthaert puts it: “True digital transformation requires new ways of thinking and doing marketing, rather than simply enhancing and supporting the traditional methods. Social media – and more specifically two-way conversations on social media – is a crucial part of it.” Yes!

Below: A network map of the AI thought leadership space on Twitter.

Interested in Artificial Intelligence? Who isn’t these days? If you’re creating content and ever mention AI, you should make sure you know about Andrew Ng and Yann LeCun. They will probably never talk about you. But you’ll be a lot smarter if you spend some time listening to them. Everyone in AI does.

If you want to see some great examples of network-savvy influencer marketing by marketers winning the right to be trusted advisors to their customers, discovering emerging trends early, researching the heck out of their named accounts, targeting ads based on past wins, and yes even smart paid influencer engagements – come spend an hour with my recorded voice and a pretty deck on this AMA webinar.

I hope we’re seeing the beginning of a big change toward smarter, more informed, and more authentic marketing.