Micro Persuasion

What's the Future Like for a "Renaissance Man" in a Connected World?

Anyone who knows me well would never characterize me as a Renaissance Man, which from here on in I will call a Polymath to keep this post gender-neutral.

A Polymath is "a person with encyclopedic, broad, or varied knowledge or learning." It's an individual who knows a lot about a great many things. Leonardo Da Vinci and his famous notebooks, naturally, spring to mind.

I may know a lot about the digital landscape, but I could never be a Polymath. I blame the Internet.

Even though the web makes it easier than ever for an individual to stay reasonably informed about a great many subjects, my gut is that people go deep into their interests at the expense of being well rounded. The implications are significant for business and society overall.

The web is deepening specialization and giving rise to experts that become highly successful in a given domain. This is a trend that Seth Godin champions in his great book The Dip. In addition, it's what Markus Buckingham recently talked about with Oprah as a ticket to success in one's career and life. (For more, check out the podcast on iTunes.)

I have seen this vividly in my own life. I used to read three newspapers a day. I also never missed the local 11 o'clock news every night. I excelled at current events quizzes in school. No more. Since I started living in my feed reader, I became blissfully ignorant about the world, facing an ever-pressing need to stay current in my domain of expertise.

Case in point: when three New York City cops accused of killing a man the night before his wedding were acquitted it made national news. However, I had no idea that there was even a trial going on. Worse, I hadn't heard about the crime itself, which took place back in 2006.

So my question to all of you is - what is the future for the Polymath? Once this was a ticket to success. Now is it equally a way to fail in an increasingly specialized world? Do you know any Polymaths? They seem to be dwindling in number as we spend more time online.

Become an Expert with the Power of Deliberate Practice

Photo credit: "A-Rod taking a practice cut" by Dog Company

Recently, I was interviewed by Kellie Kass from Simply Communicate for an in-depth business profile called "How Did I Get Here." In the article, I share something I don't think I have ever talked about before: how I apply deliberate practice in my never-ending quest for insights into digital media, marketing and online culture. I decided to write about it now because I became more aware of my habits and because I believe it can help anyone become more successful.

Deliberate practice - at least as a concept - is relatively new to me. However, little did I know it's something I have been at for years. Perhaps the same is true for you. Regardless of your passion, it's something that - when applied - is surefire road to success.

The basic idea isn't rocket science. Basically, anyone with just even a little bit of natural talent in a given domain can master it in about 10 years by methodically practicing the essence of their craft two hours daily (including weekends) and measuring their progress from one day to the next.

The concept was developed by Dr. K. Anders Ericsson at Florida State University. It's becoming popular in sports and business. It's a big reason why Tiger Woods, Alex Rodriguez and Warren Buffet continually get better. They practice on building their strengths every day in a meticulous way. (The links on their names cite relevant stories. The best piece I have read on the subject is this one from Fortune.)

In my case, I've actually been applying deliberate practice in my work for at least five years now, perhaps longer. I have been an online junkie going back 20 years. However, I only started deliberately practicing my study of the web and online culture in 2003. It just didn't dawn on me until 2008.

Every day for five years I have spent at least two hours a day, seven days a week (usually early mornings and evenings) trolling through 500+ RSS feeds on business, marketing, culture and technology. I then parse these observations into insights that I share here but also through other venues you don't see - like content for clients and our staff. Here's my trend graph from Google Reader.

In the last few months I have become a lot better at focusing my attention and measuring my progress. For example, I often look back at my posts from the last four years to see where I was right or wrong so I can get better at what I do. Two emerging influentials who I believe take this approach are Louis Gray and Chris Brogan. I reference them both in my interview with Kellie.

The takeaway here for you is this: if you want to be an expert at something (anything really), you can! It just takes time. Here's the formula: a) follow your passion, b) practice the essence of your craft in a meticulous, measurable way for two hours daily (for years), c) learn from data and adjust as you need to.

Three Ways to Mitigate the Attention Crash, Yet Still Feel Informed

The following is also my column in next week's AdAge.

One of the most important skills executives need today is the know-how to manage and harness their personal information flow.

The Attention Crash is a crisis in global business that is getting worse every day. By 2009, the Radicati Group predicts that we’ll spend 41% of our time managing email. Now add to that the IMs, documents, Facebook pokes, RSS feeds, Twitter tweets and text messages coming at us and we’re officially way oversubscribed.

Unfortunately, the problem will not abate. Human attention is finite. It doesn’t scale. Worse, the pace of change today is so rapid there’s a huge need to stay digitally savvy.

The key is in wrangling your information flow. Here are three of my best tips.

Inbox Zero (www.inboxzero.com) - Blogger Merlin Mann has created a simple way to effectively manage email. His approach involves setting aside blocks of time for “email dashes,” quickly triaging messages and automating some of the processes with search folders – a powerful Outlook feature that most never use. Be sure to watch the video on Merlin’s site.

Invest in Search – When in doubt, let search tools - either on your desktop or online - do the work for you. The time you invest to set up these systems can pay huge dividends.

For example, I subscribe to around 500 RSS feeds in Google Reader. The great thing about my reader is that it’s searchable and acts as a personal database. So recently when my colleague asked me for March Madness online video statistics, was able to pull them up in seconds by searching my archive.

Make Unusable Time Usable – I read a ton. However, I have mastered how to stuff it into pockets of time that are normally “unusable.”

I get through about one business book a week by listening to them when I commute, travel and run errands. Most of the key books are available from Audible.com or iTunes. I am currently "reading" Groundswell by Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li.

In addition, I use Instapaper.com to bookmark articles I want to read. I can access this site from any computer or mobile device. I also keep a reading folder in my email nerve center that syncs up with my different devices. It’s even available when I am offline.

These are just a few of the best tips. For more “lifehacks”, check out my bookmarks.

Three Emerging Digital Careers to Watch

About a month ago, I wrote about three career tracks that won't exist in a few years - at least as I see it. Now let's take a look at three emerging digital jobs that will become increasingly important in the years ahead.

The Chief Customer Experience Officer (and those who work for her)

Want to know if a company is a good witch or a bad witch? It's easy. The web knows. Google, the media and online communities are littered with tales of companies that have exemplary products and customer service. However, it's often easier to find those that have been vilified for the opposite. That's the thesis of Pete Blackshaw's forthcoming book - Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000.

Here's an experiment. For fun, enter any company into this special Google search engine I set up and let me know what you find.

Brands are increasingly recognizing that customer experience is everything. They will follow the model that Zappos and others set in optimizing online and offline channels. Digital touch points, for many companies, will be the most critical. Since August 2006, customer experience job listings increased 57%, according to simplyhired. (User experience is directly related and equally important and I believe will increasingly become more integrated with the total customer experience.)

"customer Experience" trends

"customer experience" jobs

Digital Storytellers

Harvard Business Review last month noted that most executives cannot articulate the objective, scope, and advantage of their business in a simple statement. "If they can’t, neither can anyone else," HBR posits. That's not good.

Remember, much of the developed world is coping with The Attention Crash. If a company can't tell pithy, authentic stories in the right places at the right time to the right people, someone else will. For more on this, I highly recommend the book Made to Stick.

Search may change that. Google is downplaying SEO and increasingly rewarding those who create quality content. This includes the pros/media, amateurs and brands. Blended Search - which integrates noteworthy videos, news and images with web results - is winning over users, according to Jupiter Research.

Net, as Jason Calacanis notes, there is a big market for people who know how to create or cultivate compelling content that pulls in people. To that end my employer is starting up Edelman Studios - a virtual content house that will identify online talent and pair them with brands. Many in the Hollywood community, ex-journalists and advertising/PR creatives will orient their careers in such a direction. Don't be left behind. There's plenty of need here.

Super Crunchers

Here's another book recommendation for your summer reading list (sorry, I read a lot so my clients don't have to). It's called Super Crunchers. In the book, the authors explain through case studies how companies that are able to mine through mountains of data and make it work for them usually win. Another great book on this topic is Moneyball, which I have written about before.

The digital space is the most addressable media and marketing platform ever. However, most marketers are not “quants” and data is largely under utilized by many companies.

Data mining and visualization tools reduce risk, make business more efficient and measurable. Great rewards will come to those who know how to dig into data and make sense of it all and can parse that into insights that help companies optimize the dollars they put online. Be that guy or gal.

Those are three emerging careers on my list. What's on yours? The one topic I did not cover is developers, who I suspect will continue to remain in high demand for years to come.

A Few Tips for Managing Information Overload

Last week I appeared on the Brian Lehrer show talking about my role with Edelman Digital and how I track trends. We cover marketing pollution and tips on how to manage information overload with desktop search, RSS, simplified GTD and the Gmail Personal Nerve Center.

This topic of "Information trapping" is one I plan to write about more. This is becoming the most critical skill that information workers need to survive overload and The Attention Crash. This is especially true for all of us who are addicted to the social web. Enjoy. If you're scanning this in a feed reader, the video is here.

Marketing Guru Steve Rubel Talks with Brian About Info Overload from Brian Lehrer Live on Vimeo.

An All Too Convenient Truth: Many Marketers Pollute the Web

Photo credit: Copenhagen Industry Pollution #1 by Miguel A. Lopes "Migufu"

Earth Day is around the corner and a lot of marketers are thinking about the sustainability of our planet. Some are recognizing that doing good also helps business. Edelman's Good Purpose study found that 73% of consumers are prepared to pay more for environmentally friendly products.

However, it's not just the environment that is endangered by toxins. The atmosphere we breathe online is too is being threatened by pollution - from marketers. The all too convenient truth is that it's very easy for advertisers to pollute the web with their garbage. Most often, that's not their intent. But it's the end result and it's reaching an epidemic proportion. Now business needs to take the same approach online as it has done offline through corporate social responsibility (Jason Calacanis echoed a similar theme recently.)

First let's look at the the obvious ways marketers poison the web. These all intend to game the system ...

• Spam: 94% of all email is spam (Postini)
• Splogs: 53% of all blog pings is spam, including 64% of those in English (UMBC)
• Click Fraud: Increased last year by 15% (Click Forensis)

Still, there's more. In subtle ways marketers are contaminating the Internet without even knowing it by spewing millions of meaningless messages across thousands of sites. This may be contributing to the slow down. They're not adding value to your experience or working to help you meet your goals in a very meaningful way.

Consider these popular techniques ...

• Banner Ads: A lot of money is going here but click-through rates remain abysmal and their overall branding value is being questioned. Many of them just litter the web and get in the way of what you want to do. Eye-tracking studies in the past have revealed "banner blindness."
• Social Network Advertising: eMarketer predicts advertising on social networks will reach $2.2 billion this year. However, traditional display approaches to date have not performed. As Ian Schaffer from from Deep Focus noted, marketers need to dig in and figure out how to make the experience better. This means what does work is creating authentic content, widgets/applications and more that people pull because they add value to the community. (Note: MySpace, a major social network, is an Edelman client.)
• Social Media Optimization: This needs to be watched like a hawk. As I have said before, if you participate and add value you are rewarded with Google Juice - and so much more. If you just set up sites and spam social nets to get links, then I am sorry, you're bad.

Despite all the money that's flowing online, most marketers completely miss the boat on what the web really can do for them. As I have talked about before, the Internet isn't just a communications medium. It works best when it's used as a platform for open collaboration. This means taking a PR-centric approach.

This means companies and consumers need to partner toward shared outcomes. This can be as simple as "we want to be entertained" to "we want to find the best world-changing idea." The latter is what American Express will unleash again later this year with its Members Project.

The web is facing it's own global warming crisis as marketers continue to pollute it. Consumers are voting with their clicks and eyeballs by engaging with authentic content that adds value, while ignoring the rest. That's good news that shows maybe we'll solve this crisis, even as business continues to tackle the larger issues that impact our planet.

Later:: Bryan Person asks if clueless PR pitches are part of the problem. Heck ya.

Now Can We Please Kill the Phrase "Social Media"?

On December 28, 2006 I wrote...

"As we conclude 2006 and head into the new year it is my conviction that the phrase 'social media' is moot....In 2006 all media went social. Pretty much every newspaper, TV network and publication has wholeheartedly embraced these technologies."

I followed this up a month later by saying...

"With the democratization of media we've come to rely on a bunch of terms that are now completely unnecessary. These include "social media"... Do any of these matter any more? ... The reason is it's ALL media. The lexicon will hopefully change."

Flash forward 15 months and I was beginning to give up. However, finally, people seem to me coming around to this idea, which is hardly new. Eric Schonfeld, a former journalist and now TechCrunch blogger (we need a white paper to describe "the difference"), writes...

"Some people question whether TechCrunch is even a blog anymore rather than a professional media site. But that distinction is becoming increasingly meaningless. The truth is that we are both."

Amen! So true. Tons of journalists are pulling double duty as bloggers. So, now can we kill the phrase "social media?" It's irrelevant. Another moot phrase is "the social web." The web has always been social because that's how people operate - as Chris Brogan notes. It's just that the Internet can scale such social connections more than the offline world ever could.

Alas, there are no more boundaries any more between such "species." On the Internet, a cat is a dog is a Snuffleupagus. It's all inbred. All media is social and all social is media. End of story. Whether content is created by the Pros or the Joes it all has influence, even if it's small.

Follks, it's time for all of us, especially "The Joes," to give ourselves the self-respect we deserve by calling all of this work "media." Otherwise, by continuing to propagate the term "social media" we're just reserving our seat at the kids table for our little cut up pieces of chicken. it's time to feast on drumsticks like the adults do. Google doesn't delineate. So why should we?

Book Excerpt: Online Marketing Heroes

On March 10 WIley & Sons is going to publish a new book by Michael Miller called Online Marketing Heroes: Interviews with 25 Successful Online Marketing Gurus. The book features interviews with a host of digital marketing experts, including yours truly.

Wiley has graciously approved the posting of the chapter that features an interview with me. It covers my background, thoughts on blogging, PR, digital marketing and my work at Edelman. You can download it here as a PDF.

Sound bites...

* Technology works best when it takes on a do-it-yourself character—and when it becomes free

• Google’s free search has replaced the PR professional’s traditional paid research tools.

• Generation Y is abandoning earlier technology, such as email, in favor of text messaging, instant messaging, and social network communication

• To take advantage of social networking, figure out where you andyour community overlap and how they want to communicate

• Going forward, the concept of community is the common element running through all online media and technologies

An Experiment in Lifesourcing

What if you could tap into your social net (or even strangers) and ditch time intensive information tasks that you have to do in favor of the higher value stuff that you're best at? After an experiment in "lifesourcing" some work to India, I believe such a scenario might become common in the business world or even more widely - one day. Here's my story and where I think this could lead.

I first heard about lifesourcing - e.g. personal outsourcing - last summer when I read Tim Ferriss' runaway bestseller, The Four Hour Workweek. His mantra is to free yourself up to do the stuff you and only you are best at. Seth Godin covers a similar theme in The Dip.

Though it's very early, my gut says that it's conceivable that as people cope with the Attention Crash, they will zero in on their core competencies and seek to offload the rest in order to become more productive and remain competitive in the workplace. There are several forces at work here: the massive and independent-thinking Gen Y workforce, big time disruptions in IT, the growing ubiquity of social networking and peer-to-peer platforms and the rise of a giant talent pool in Chindia.

Back when I read Tim's book, I didn't see an immediate fit for lifesourcing in my day-to-day as an executive at Edelman. In fact, given that so much of what I deal with is confidential client information, it's darn near impossible.

Still, I remained extremely intrigued to run a pilot. It seems to bridge to a growing "digital nomadism" movement. For more, check out what my former colleague Mike Elgan and folks like Lea Woodward and Skellie are writing about.

My blog seemed like a natural place to dabble in lifesourcing since since pretty much everything I do here eventually enters the public domain. So, on Tim's recommendation, I posted a job on Elance. I searched for someone who could take my raw reader survey data and convert it into percentages and nice charts. This was a rather trivial assignment. However, for an Excel-challenged dude like me it was a major timesaver.

Even though the job was small, I was stunned when dozens of bids flowed in within the first few hours. The bidders seemed extremely aggressive and hungry for the job. After 24 hours of fervent bidding, I selected Sri from India based on his feedback rating, correspondence, experience and price. I also selected him because I was eager test a project with someone based in India.

After some back and forth and a bit of clarification in what I was looking for, Sri got to work. The amazing thing is that almost all of his emails came during my workday, not his. Sri turned around the job quickly and professionally and it cost me all of $50 - the Elance minimum. (I will share the charts in a subsequent post.)

Granted, this was a very simple assignment that probably anyone (but me) can do in an hour or two. Still, I was impressed. And it gets me thinking about where this might go when you combine lifesourcing and social networking - especially if the costs come down.

Social networking and online real-time communication/collaboration tools are a way of life for many Gen Yers. They already use these systems to get stuff done both inside and outside the enterprise.

Over the next five years I believe that lifesourcing will become a core part of every social network, be it b2b or b2c. Like IM or corporate blogging, social lifesourcing will start as a bottom-up movement as workers tap into the Net to get work done in the most efficient way possible, no matter where these resources may be. A groundswell may build as word spreads and workers try hard to compete with those who are farming out work elsewhere.

Still, there are big pitfalls. It's a guarantee that companies will try to put the kibosh on such activities as their information seeps beyond their virtual walls. This is already happening on social networks. Many employees have water cooler groups on Facebook. Others are dabbling in using LinkedIn to get questions answered.

It's conceivable that these interactions will migrate from simple collaboration to peer-to-peer transactions over the next few years. The implications here - if this happens en masse - are huge. People will focus on their core competencies. This in theory will make everyone more productive and prosperous. However, it remains to be seen if this will become a mass trend given all the inherent risk.

Could the Interruption Economy Sack Prosperity?

Sensory Overload by dav

Conventional wisdom says that technology - and nowadays the Internet - will always continue to advance and bring with it productivity gains and prosperity. That's certainly been the case for years. However, historically there are pauses. After the benefits of the Industrial Revolution were fully realized it took awhile for the next big era to begin. I wonder if we're about to enter a similar lull now that the Information Age is arguably almost 30 years old.

Mark Cuban argues that the Internet is now becoming a hinderance to our productivity. Idris Moote makes an even stronger case. He notes that productivity growth has gradually slowed since 2004. Moote cites statistics showing that interruptions from e-mail, cell phones, instant messaging, and blogs take up nearly 30% of each day; on an annualized basis, this represents a loss of 28 billion hours for the entire US workforce.

The United States - and other pockets of the developed world - are hooked on two drugs: information and busyness. As I've written many times, our rush to keep up with inputs can't scale and this may cause a sizable number of people to eventually cut back on info-crack, perhaps drastically.

The runaway success of my good friend Tim Ferriss' book, the Four Hour Workweek, is a direct manifestation of a desire that millions secretly have. If enough people get the willpower to say "enough" then spending on gadgets and time spent online could decline. In a worst case scenario, companies would retrench R&D spending and slow innovation. That's just one possibility of many, of course - and the most extreme (and unlikely).

The X factor here is actually a Y factor - Generation Y. They grew up in an age of information saturation. Gen Y'ers crave what psychiatrist Edward Hallowell calls screen sucking. The Internet is in their veins. They know no other way.

I am hopeful that as every successive generation emerges that never knew a world without the Net, the possibility for such a doomsday scenario decreases. That's not to say there won't be pain however. An informal digital divide has emerged between geeks and those who are blissfully and decidedly low tech. However, it's clear that we need new tools for managing interruptions - and they may not be technological, but social. Our prosperity may depend on it.