GerardMcLean.com

I think companies need four basic things with their online presence,

1. Design
2. Host
3. Market
4. Measure

Right now, all of this is scattered all over the place. Companies are going to various places and duct-taping their needs together. They don’t know how social media fits into it all and they can’t get their heads around the fact that social media is the mortar that holds all the bricks in place. They keep confusing the mortar for bricks.

No bricks, no business.

Social Media falls into that Market and Measure tubes.

Jacqui Cheng wrote a blog post in which she posits:

Twitter may be gaining new users at the speed of light, but more than half of those users aren’t actively participating in the service. With no tweets, no followers, and no one to follow, do those users even count?

Some brands/companies don’t tweet and don’t follow, but they are probably searching, compiling and engaging behind the scenes.

The best twitterstorm is one that doesn’t gather enough clout to bring you to have to act in a public way. We will probably never see the number of mesocyclones that never become tornados because a brand was listening.

I was reading ChrisBrogan.com this morning and one of his readers dropped a reference to a video by Louis CK about the age we live in. I posted it below to save us all a trip to YouTube. (more irony here than you could find in 100 years, but that is another post.)

This is a dead-on perspective on flying and all this technology we all now take for granted. I think sometimes we are all driving a metaphoric Vespa on a freeway and complaining it doesn’t have enough horsepower. But, it’s cheap and all we could afford.

Airlines can’t afford to fly routes with the service levels passengers expect, but passengers are unwilling to pay enough for a ticket to support the costs. Same with all this free stuff on the Internet, including Twitter. So, you get back ups on tarmacs and fail whales. We did it to ourselves. And we keep doing it.

I know that is not the point of the Chris Brogan’s post, but it was the context in which the post was framed. Eventually our expectations of now-now-now, cheap-cheap-cheap will yield no “southbound runways” to choose and no cookies to hand out.

As a side note, some airlines do hire smarter, better people USAir, KLM, SAS and British Air (I Love BA.. that accent makes even bad news sound pleasant) Of course, eventually, there will not be enough profit to attract evan marginally good people for these airlines (TSA anyone? ;-( )

I was reading this article on Media Post regarding state services suffering because people were not playing the lottery as much and I remembered this blog post from January 2009. It applies still.

Enjoy.

This post originally appeared on DogWalkBlog.com

I was listening to NPR on WMUB this morning about the freshman Ohio senators starting their terms and how hard their jobs will be dealing with the State having a $1.9 billion budget deficit, GM, Delphi, DHL and other large companies pulling out of Ohio and various other things.

Many of the in-coming senators went on and on about how they need to cut government waste and hunker down and spend smarter, blah, blah, blah.

And then it occurs to me: Shouldn’t government be counter-cyclic to the marketplace? When things are going well, the free market tends to create goods and services it needs without help from the government. When the economy is doing well, shouldn’t government be pulling back on services, conserving revenues for a down economy?

When the economy is not doing well, that is when we need government help. That is when the government should ramp up the spending, not pull back. Government waste during fat years is a lifeline to average folks and small business during famine years.

As an owner of a small business, I only heard that the various Ohio Revenue departments are going to start going after every single penny it feels it is entitled to. It will asses property values higher, it will send out random letters declaring I owe this penalty or that missed tax payment, whether real or not. It will extract and extort money from the down and hurting at a greater rate than normal. All in pursuit of “responsible budget balancing.”

And they will further spiral the economic crisis downward and wonder why the budget will never balance. When the Ohio Statehouse policies put people out of business, tax revenues dry up and no matter how threatening the letters are, you can’t get money from people you put out of business and kick out of their homes.

I know it is really hard for elected officials to act responsibly during the fat, happy party years but when we out here on Main Street are doing well, Columbus and DC should be saving for a rainy day, not joining in the party and buying the booze for the drunken puppies.

Am I wrong?

I’m going to be a contrarian here and say that I long for the good ol’ days when we didn’t see the warts on our celebrities, our presidents weren’t shown in frailty and we didn’t see how sausage was made.

Chris Borgan wrote this blog post and every Gen Y, business consultant-wannabe (and some real ones, very scary) jumped in and offered affirmations that failure is part of the process and yea, Chris! After reading this AND listening to a speech at my daughter’s high school graduation “celebrating failure,” it was just too much. My late-Boomer head was filled with visions of shining faces all beaming up at me with that expression every 2-year-old has when they have made a poo-poo.. “yea!, Johnny made a poo-poo!!”

It is a bit scary that we have created an entire generation that has been rewarded for every mistake, every failure, every effort as an accomplishment. We gave trophies for just showing up. And the only thing we have produced is a bunch of folks who feel lost without getting an affirmation that their pooping is good.

I am getting very tired of having to acknowledge effort with the same weight as accomplishment. I don’t want to clap at your guitar tuning; I want to save that for your performance. Of course every success is lined with failure, but quit redefining the failures as successes. Yes, I know that makes me an intolerant geezer, but it really is for your own good.

Suck it up, become an adult and move on. Adults know when a failure is a failure or the next step to becoming a success. That is what makes us adults. And adults do not need constant affirmations that they done good by going poop.

Save the poop affirmations for your kids. Grow up.

I sometimes think the happiest people are those who have found a pigeon hole for themselves, something that specifically and entirely defines them.

I am not one of these happy pigeons.

Staring at life from the other side of 45, I can not give you a succinct definition of who I am, what my company does, what my hobbies and interest are or what I do for a living. I also can not tell you truthfully where I see myself in five years or what my retirement plan is, though this has possibilities.

I am not in a pigeon hole, partly because resisting that pigeon hole allows me to have varied interests, to do things outside of what people expect me to do and remain flexible enough to accommodate and affect change.

But, this resistance to being pigeon-holed comes at a very steep price. My blog is hard to keep on focus, my résumé does not sort neatly by sorting software, speaker introductions are always being re-written to remove irrelevant material, warranty cards are tough to complete and on and on. The world has not yet labeled a pigeon hole “Gerard McLean” as the target population of pigeons is negligible. Ok, only one.

Simple questions like “So, Mr. McLean, what do you do for a living?” at a party becomes a very difficult question to answer truthfully without becoming a bore. I sometimes make up stuff like, “I launder money for Columbian drug lords” or “I’m a licensed bum,” both of which stop a conversation cold, causing the conversation-initiator to look uncomfortably for the soonest break to get away. In the event it actually does start a conversation, it becomes a lively one that could lead anywhere, but mostly truthfully about who I am and what I do. And most of the time, it is with someone else who is also not a happy pigeon.

Simply put, from the outside looking in, my life appears to have no focus. I am not a teacher, doctor, plumber or construction worker. I don’t have a sound bite occupation like “Joe the Plumber” as I am simply “Gerard the… ummm.. well..” though I do frequently hear people refer to me as “that guy who walks those two dogs every day.”

The fact that I am not in a pigeon hole hits me every time I sign up for a newsletter or Digg an article. The industry choices are not quite what I do. The Digg topics* are never quite the topic of the blog entry. Yet, I sense that there are a lot of folks for whom the topics and titles work perfectly. They are the happy pigeons.

Why am I sharing this? I dunno. Partly because I find a ton of irony in being in an industry that purports to support the randomness of varied interests, yet constantly asks you to define yourself through the values of a drop-down menu. Partly because I needed an excuse to write off-topic. Partly because I needed to justify changing my tag line above. Mostly because I needed an entertaining, interesting and authentic article for this blog.

I hope you enjoyed the ride as much as I enjoyed driving.

*My choices for this? Offbeat, animals (pigeons and dogs), lifestyle… see what I mean? It just doesn’t fit.

Ok, not exactly what you think, but I needed a catchy title for this blog post. Why? I have not posted an article here in the last eleven days, so hence the title, “I have been sober for eleven days.”

Social Media, as it turns out, needs constant fuel to keep it running, sometimes hourly, more often than not, daily and in far too many cases than I care to admit, hourly refueling. When you let eleven days go by without posting anything, the page views go way down, your friends and followers start drifting off to other conversations and even Guy starts to wonder why he is listing you on Alltop.com.

The truth is my analog life has been very, very busy and I have not had time to devote the fuel-time to my Social Media life. Actually, to state that more accurately, I have not had the time to finish a number of blog posts that are sitting in my draft folder.

My name is Gerard McLean. I am addicted to Social Media and it has been eleven days since my last blog post. When I hit “publish,” I will have fallen off the wagon and will have reset the counter.

My company used to sponsor a lot of things in our community and in the industries we service. I had long believed that we should give back to a community that was generous with us in buying our goods and services. Over the past several years, however, I began to feel that our sponsorships were being taken for granted — and worse, simply not appreciated.

For 2009, I decided I was not going to sponsor anything. I was not going to buy jerseys for soccer teams, drop in “break a leg” wishes for the local high school play, sponsor a hockey team at a local college, sponsor several indoor soccer teams, give to my alumni association, buy ads in the high school yearbook and newspaper, ante up membership fees for several trade groups, etc, etc. I saved more than several thousand dollars from my marketing budget and sales haven’t suffered.

I thought maybe I would get a call from at least one of these appreciative groups.

I got nothing.

Nobody called to ask why I stopped sponsoring. Nobody sent a letter or an email, asking if the economy was a factor in my decision not to support their group.

It really got me thinking about how local groups treat local businesses and how little it takes to keep sponsors. I quit sponsoring because I suspecting that nobody at the benefitting organizations really cared whether or not I was there. The only time I ever heard from these groups was when they asked for money. And, when I failed to respond, they didn’t reach out.

The solution is fairly simple; talk with your sponsors. Involve them in your success. Make them feel at home with your organization. Let them know what is going on. Most often, they sponsor you because they want you to be successful and they want to be a part of that. In this age of connection and explosion of Social Media tools, not communicating with your sponsors just indicates apathy, carelessness or arrogance.

In the meantime, I am saving my money. I am more than willing to sponsor worthwhile causes, but only those that truly appreciate my sponsorship.

Imagine a presetation of a company CEO telling his board of directors that they shouldn’t put an office in a certain large city because there is crime, that scary people live there and worse, people who don’t agree with us or care about us also live there.

And imagine that over 50% of the companies’ clients have offices in that large city or do business there. How long do you think this CEO would last?

Not very long.

Yet this conversation goes on all the time in conference rooms and board rooms about Twitter, Facebook and blogs. The number one objection I hear about not being on Twitter is it is a waste of time because our company doesn’t really care about “someone eating Cheetos® in their underwear” (no offense to Cheetos®, they are delicious) The same logic we applied to our scenario above is the same argument for NOT being on Twitter. When you look at it in its metaphorical nature, the argument seems silly.

Just because the naked-Cheetos®-eating Twit is in the same city as you, doesn’t mean that you will run in the same circles. Just as you don’t have to respond to everyone requesting information about your organization in real-life, you don’t have to accept every friend or follow request. You don’t have to entertain folks who clearly have no interest in joining your organization or contributing to it. Just as you would an office is a large city, you control who comes in the front door and with whom you speak.

The metaphor seems simple enough. Twitter is a very large city, with a very diverse community. And your clients and members are probably already there, just waiting for you to hang out your shingle.

At the suggestion by David Rich, I am reading A Whole New Mind; Why Right-Brainers will Rule the Future by Daniel H. Pink. (please don’t buy the Kindle version as it would negate my argument below.)

I find myself asking this big question:

If the MFA is the new MBA, why are we trying to push everything worth holding to a digital screen? Things like books, newspapers, paintings, magazines and human contact via Social Media.

Newspapers and books are much more than the news they contain or the words that tell a story. They are physical things that create an experience. The smell of the ink, the rustle of paper, the curl of the page in the wind. The annoying die-cut on the front cover that catches the edge of the covers as I try to read New Mind lying on the couch, the alternating page colors between the text and the portfolio (so very Steinbeck in Grapes of Wrath.) I know the preceding sentences are fragments, but I thought I would exercise some creativity.

I could read New Mind using my Kindle for iPhone, but then it would look and feel like every other eBook or RSS feed from every other Web site. And reading about how creatives will shape the future while swimming in a sea of sameness somehow seems wrong.

Marketing budgets are being slashed to whack out printed pieces in favor of posting stuff up on a Facebook page. Companies are rushing to use Twitter to send out their marketing message. Blogs are all picking up the same ideas everyone else had and writing about the same stuff. In a rush to “save money” or capture the audience in the next space, companies and brands are stripping out exactly those things that create differences. The smart ones will realize the kids are now seeking experiences outside the digital space while incorporating it, not replacing it. Analog is the new black.*

There is really something wrong about Twitter showing us “trending topics” as if finding out what the majority is saying is a good thing. I Twitter to find out exactly the opposite! I want to discover the eclectic, the offbeat, that lone opinion whispering in the corner, not the deafening drumbeat of stuff I am already being fed ad nauseam by the cable news industry. I want to be the un-crowd, not hiding in it.

I picked up my car from the shop yesterday. It is a late-model Subaru. I didn’t know what was wrong with it and had no way of finding out as there are computers and electronic this, that and the other thing. As I was walking out, someone pulled his 1970 Chevelle into the bay and popped the hood. I had to stop and take a look. And cars all made sense again; a carburetor, engine block, heads, exhaust manifold, lots of room to work around the engine, fenders and quarter-panels; the kind of car that makes driving an experience, not just something that gets you from here to there.

Eventually, though if the digital folks have their way, we won’t even need cars. We’ll all be telecommuting through our flat screens, digital microphones and video cameras. We may even have a “hand shake” machine sitting on our desks that simulate a handshake during a teleconference. I think that the pendulum will swing back away from digital-only, but hopefully not before we can save some things that give life texture.

I have not finished New Mind yet and I am probably a bit premature talking about the concepts. Most things look more clear at 10,000 feet than they do at 10 inches. But those things that are worth holding onto are those that create the most lasting experience. I have not yet seen anyone recall a sense of place or relationship based on a Web site they have experienced like they can with smell or music.

Time will tell.

*Really? Oh, yeah. Why is the 35-55 crowd increasing dramatically on Facebook and Twitter, while the 15-30 group is not? Why are vinyl LP sales going up? Kindle sales are mostly going to the 45+ crowd. Explain Susan Boyle.