As outlined over on the Epiphanies blog, Allen Voivod and I had an interesting conversation recently about ISMA and certification in general. Some of the things that made my conversation with Allen different than the knee-jerk responses that had been given in the past were perspective and a much more big picture conversation. Big picture conversations open up dialogue, and dialogue is how you effect change.

The perspective of someone who is not a part of ISMA, but who chose the course, was a valuable one to hear. It told me that while I don’t see this field as something ready for certification or even able to be certified yet, there is a significant subset of people out there who are not ready or able to think in such a dramatically new way, who are more comfortable with rules, regulations and guidelines and who feel a need for credentials that mirror traditional industries. I get that. This new and malleable adaptive media plane can seem scary, and is rife with underqualified people.

This is nowhere more evident than in the rise of full social media degrees or simple courses offered by colleges and universities, from Georgia to SNHU and UNH right here in NH. I think I’ll write a separate post next week on how to vet that professor or program to make sure the college is teaching best practices, but for now, we’ll just say that this rise in degree offerings showcases two things. One, that this field is here to stay (we as practitioners knew this, but the public is seeing the validity now). Two, that people really are clamoring for a better way to do due diligence and the tried and true degree method is one of the first places they turn, mentally.

The interesting thing to note about all of this is that when this new playing field is allowed to work in a thriving, rule-free environment, things sort themselves out. I don’t mean that in a kumbaya, “Twitter is Love” kind of way. I mean that people are smarter than we give them credit for, and that the online social world has an uncanny knack for sorting out the wheat from the chaf quickly and effectively (and publicly).

I can assure you, having a badge or certificate is not a guarantee that you won’t get scammed. Doing due diligence is the only way to choose who to ask for help. There are plenty of people sporting a “certification” that are fully unethical and underqualified (for what it is worth, I don’t think Allen and Lani are among those people). The same thing goes for lawyers, accountants, and many more professions, but you know all of this. I’ve talked about it before, both here and in person, and nearly everyone has at least one “I can’t believe I got suckered by…” story to tell.

One thing I admire about Allen and Lani is how they approached this as an education. New to the space, they went to as many sources as possible to learn as much as they could about this space that they wanted to work in. As evidenced by my continual integration of free and low cost learning opportunities for everyone (PodCamp NH, Social Media Breakfast NH, S•Cub3d Conference, Strong Women in Tech, the Pick My Brain Experiment, and many more) I am all about people who genuinely want to learn. While I’m somewhat disappointed that their quest for knowledge exposed them to some bad practices, if you look at the roster of places they sought knowledge and talk to their clients, they were able to get a level of balance through variety and it shows.

Has my opinion changed about the organization since that original post? No, if anything I think it may have solidified. But I like that Allen and I were able to open up a dialogue, and I’ll plan to continue going back and forth with him via blog post so we can keep the dialogue going and loop all of you into it as well. We can’t learn and grow and shape this space we’re in if we don’t listen to each other, after all.

How does the Gruen Transfer apply to social media? In two ways, I think. The first is the moment a new social media user sees the vast array of tools and techniques out there. It’s simply overwhelming, a kind of constant information dump. This combination of information flow and disorientation causes the social media version of the Gruen Transfer, and can make people susceptible to a wide variety of unsavory choices and potential bad decisions. Luckily the vast majority of people who use the tools are willing to share their knowledge and be helpful, which helps many avoid common pitfalls and choose the best tools to navigate the space (as an example: think of Friendster as the social media equivalent of that teal sequined shirt your best friend talked you out of at the mall).

The second way the Gruen Transfer applies to social media is seen in the rise of the new social media sales force. This encompasses not just those who use social media to market businesses and brands, or those who teach social media, but the very same people who would finance things like shopping malls and Vegas casino construction. This new untapped frontier is, to a certain type of person, ripe for social engineering on a grand scale.

This type of thing fascinates me. I’ve been doing some digging to see if research has been done to help consumers combat the Gruen Transfer effectively. If I can find reliable research, or someone who is actively conducting this research, it could help stem the tide of the social media sphere becoming just another shopping mall, slash and burn mentality and foster a continuance of true community, as well as reduce the drop off rate in social media use that it causes. It could also help foster this new economy that is trying to hard to grow and be different, because a true collaborative economy and a shopping mall-straight consumption economy can’t effectively coexist.

I’d love to hear your opinions on the matter, and to be pointed to someone doing great research in the topic.

What then, should the social media outreach for these companies include? So many social media consultants only preach content and persona, but that is a solution that does not work for every type of business. The particular company I worked with yesterday had decided to focus their initial efforts on Twitter (single platform deployment is not a strategy I often recommend, but in their case, fully appropriate based on their time constraints and resources).

In the case of a business that falls into this “uninteresting but useful” group, my advice is:

1) Be Helpful – make it a point to share your knowledge about your topic. In these cases, people may find unusual content increases your attractiveness to them as a destination site from your social media outpost, but it most likely isn’t what will get them there. Having resource pages for linking to and referencing and a willingness to have a human in your company answer questions and give helpful advice will work far better than funny videos or other content as the initial point of conversion. Then the “add on” content may help increase length of stay once you get people to click through to your site. The recommendation with this approach is a clear profile on your social media outpost that lets people know your policies (if there are restrictions on what you can answer from your industry, for example, or if you have a certain time of day you can make yourself available).

2) Be Honest – people are looking for companies they can trust in this tight economy. Be willing to say you don’t know something, be willing not to exaggerate or give false information just to land a sale. Make sure your information is accurate and your employees are interacting with integrity.

3) Be Human – much of the interactions with companies begin with customer frustration. That’s just the way of things – we should tell companies when we’re happy as often as we tell them when we, the consumers, are disappointed, frustrated or angry, but the tendency is not to do so (side note: Twitter is one of the few places where you’ll find more equal parts company satisfaction vs company dissatisfaction mentions). What this means for you is that even if your social media outpost is a message channel, a place for advice or a peer network for you, you will run into customers who will bring you customer service needs via that channel from time to time. Handle them in a way that leaves the customer with a god emotional aftertaste from your interaction, and make your company more human.

4) Landing Page – I can not stress the importance of a great social media landing page for all businesses enough, but especially businesses like these. You want to make all of your outposts easy to find, you want to make your reasons for being in social media clear, you want to integrate your offline marketing efforts clearly into the page, you want to tell people what you can do for them succinctly, and you want to have a site that is easy to navigate by a person who knows nothing about you or your industry.

5) Listen – set up monitoring sites and analytics trackers in as many places as possible. If you are on a site that offers analytics, like Facebook’s Insights on fan pages, make good use of those as well. Set aside time each day to focus on what people are saying about your company, industry and staff. Make sure you hear what they are actually saying – often a customer’s perception of a company is quite different than the company’s perception of itself! Then use your outposts to do daily outreach, always being human.

Ok, are you back? Good. This post is not about ISMA. I’ve been disgusted by the whole concept of ISMA since I read Olivier’s post and realized – I know these people. These people are in my state, messing with people that others (myself, John Herman, Christine Major, Amy Greenlaw, Monika and Jay McGillicuddy, and more) have worked hard to teach social media ethics based on our time in the trenches, doing the work. I’m appalled, yes, but not just at the concept of ISMA and how it takes advantage of people – I’m also rather appalled at myself. After all, the ISMAs and others like them are going to do what they do – the beauty of PodCamps and breakfasts and meetings like NHMM are that people can take what they learn and use it to make something of their own out of it – we can only hope that the knowledge is used for things that are good.

See, the more I read Olivier’s post, the more the name ISMA and the names of the founders Mark and Mari nagged at my mind. I puzzled over it for a while, but in the end I’ve been busy with several companies and events this past year and I just couldn’t place why I was getting that prickly neck feeling. Then it came to me – one or both have attended the Social Media Breakfast NH I founded over the past months. This means they’ve fully been exposed to good, “do no harm” social media practices and chose to ignore them. Then the big realization hit – at PodCamp NH we were $400 away from being fully sponsored, and I was about to pay it out of pocket (after all, it’s my event and we’d raised $5600 in a week to keep it free, I was more than happy to pony up). Then Mark came over and said he wanted to be a last minute angel sponsor. I took the check, promoted the crap out of his very generous gesture during the weekend, wondered what his organization did, and then… got busy with PodCamp NH logistics and forgot all about looking into it.

How does this pertain to ethics, you wonder? Let me tell you – this pertains to my ethics. There are a lot of people out there doing social media bad instead of social media good. It’s become a caveat emptor world full of fauxrganizations like this one. It’s up to me, and other established and practicing consultants that have been doing this for a long time, to police the scammy people in our local areas and in our national space. If I was on the ball, I would have taken a moment on one of the many laptops around at PCNH and looked up the company I was taking a check from for my event. I would not have encouraged validation by association.

To that end, in keeping with my own ethics, I think I’m about to rethink the PodCamp finance model for 2010. I’m not sure just yet what will change – I sense a team meeting coming on earlier than expected so we can decide as a group what change will look like. All I know is, from here on in, I’ll be vetting the sponsors long before the events. I’ve already turned down a few panel appearances this year because I didn’t want to validate bad information by association, I’ll have to treat the rest of what I and my team do as far as event with the same rigor.

Update, March 3, 2010:

Recently it was called to my attention that someone I really, really like was an ISMA “founding member” (ISMA term). My initial reaction was one of blunt disappointment. I try very hard to hear both sides of everything, and since this is someone I think of as a really nice person (or people, actually, it’s a two person company) to boot, I talked to them on the phone extensively about ISMA, and, more specifically since they own their own company, about why they choose to try ISMA out (as well as other teaching tools, including some of my events and Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing University, plus other tools).

I wasn’t surprised at their reason, though they were not able to change my opinion about ISMA, the organization – like I said above, the people behind it seem nice enough, I can only comment on what I think of the ISMA practices. Perhaps what I like about the person I was having the phone conversation with is reflected in how many learning experiences they tried – with so much variety it seems to have tempered the influence of one misguided group and given them a base to be a better company, and knowing their personalities, I’m not surprised they wanted as much info from as many people and organizations as possible.

So, Allen, thanks for taking the time to explain your reasoning, as a separate company from ISMA, on why you saw some value in trying their program out, and thanks for understanding that while I still have to agree to disagree on the whole ISMA concept and execution, I like the more balanced overall thing you’re doing with your company in spite of that.

If you are a business, being on the leading edge of geolocation and mobile technologies will be key to your success. I wish someone would explain to me why on earth the grocery stores (VRM) have not banded together to make a cross platform mobile app for WinMo, iPhone, Droid that lets me tell the app which store I’m in, have it know my reward number, and then let me photo-scan barcodes for discounts and easy check out. We have the technology, stores just fear data sharing. Trust me, consumers WANT the ease of not having 20 store cards in their wallet. An application like Blippy that tweets your purchases could make the experience even more fun for shoppers who opted in to it, and meanwhile I could go to Stop and Shop for groceries, Body Shop for makeup, Irving for gas and PayLess for shoes in one day and only need to remember my phone, instead of a wallet full of store cards or a keychain so big it won’t fit in my pocket because of the keychain card version. If you are truly tech savvy, you are getting your business listed on mobile and geolocation applications proactively to take it to the next level.

End users have different concerns. No matter who you are, having geolocation settings turned on can make your life interesting if you try to, say, call in for work sick and then pop up at home online. But “how to get fired” jokes aside, If you are a woman, or a minor, geolocation technology has inherent drawbacks for you. If you are, for example, a woman who is fleeing an abusive relationship, you need mobile technology in the form of a cell phone to ensure your safety. Most abusers don’t honor restraining orders, should you be able to even obtain one, and you need a way to call for help. But if your abuser is tech savvy, you can see how geolocation can also come with inherent risk (this is true of many social web tools for women and children in this situation, by the way, but geolocation is the topic today).

If you are a minor, mobile tech is part of your daily life by now at nearly all income levels, in some way. This is helpful, and a fantastic tool for the future, but adding in geolocation creates another risk issue. That of predators (of all types, not just sexual predators) who can monitor a minor’s location if the minor does not take the proactive stance of a) turning off geolocation whenever the option is allowed b) having parents or a guardian who will take the time to check and make sure the feature is off and c) avoiding the use of tools that utilize geolocation and don’t offer an option to turn it off.

Communities online can offer their own inherent challenges when it comes to geolocation and mobile. Take popular yet frivolous internet game Foursquare for example. In this case Foursquare allows you to enter a new location with as much or as little location data as you’d like. This is fantastic – it allows people to play the game and to include somewhere like their office, without being in danger if they work alone. Sure, Foursquare also offers a way to check in and not show anyone your location at all, but a) what fun is that? and b) the users we’re about to discuss will eventually complain if you do this too often.

In Foursquare’s case, a few weird, over zealous users can really spoil the bunch. They (not the application creators) act like the app police, ordering take downs of frivolous locations like “My Couch” all over the country, and reporting any location with a vague address (like “corner of Vine and Temple St”) all over the country. Never mind that this is something Foursqaure allows, that it is a game and is supposed to be fun, or that for some it’s a matter of safety – they are the hall monitors of the internet. To remove the ability to be vague when needed, or to have the application be fun, is detrimental to the application’s success and can have adverse consequences for the user.

Foursquare is just an example of how users of the technology can contribute to the problem overall. In the end we are in charge of our own safety online, yet for some the knowledge of how to be safe just isn’t there. It is my view that application providers need to make it default to opt out of geolocation as this becomes the norm, need to make sure the settings are obvious to change privacy levels and the rules of use are clear, and need to do a little policing of overzealous or bad-apple users whose tactics may put other less savvy users in challenging positions.

This is not a “fear this technology” or “scary scary internet” post in any way. I advocate caution online and offline, but in the end this is a “how can we make this cool new frontier safe for everyone?” post. Because in the end, this technology is not coming, it’s here now, and we need to work together to make sure it is safe and easy to understand and useful for all.

Think for a moment about the words we have used for the last three years as we early adopters and teachers forged ahead in this “social media” iteration of the internet and relationships – the words that those who follow then take into mainstream conversation: compartmentalizing, limiting and isolating what should be free flowing and connective.

For example, words like authentic and transparent were quick and easy ways to convey a tricky idea to businesses in the beginning, but how do they hobble you now. Have people and businesses online become so concerned with the concept of personal brand that they’ve lost sight of how important it is to be real, both as businesses and people?

Don’t lose yourself or your clients in buzzwords and mumbo jumbo. Here are some concepts I think should change for 2010, starting now:

1) Using words like authentic and transparent

These words obfuscate the desired effect. They are distancing language that puts the real business or the real person behind a smokescreen of “trying” (As in “I’m just trying to be authentic here”). “Trying” can last indefinitely, and doesn’t require the person or company to ever accomplish much or share anything. Much better to first be ok with who you or your company is, then simply: Be Yourself – Be The Best You. The real you will fail, fumble, and occasionally show the world your imperfections, but in the end, you will create a stronger foundation to grow from.

2) Personal Brand

Why on earth did we ever start using this phrase? It’s marketing speak that means so little. Go forth and attempt to own your name. Go forth and be consistent and identifiable in your photos and logos and profiles. If you aren’t an early enough adopter to get your name, handle it with grace, pick a close one, and make it yours. If you are following #1 above, people will have no trouble knowing who you are. If you have done it well, you can even change your name or handle mid stream, or get a new logo, etc, and the people you interact with online will get it without a hitch.

3) Social Media

I’ve been on a bit of a crusade against calling it social media for a while now. I seem to recall writing a post about it last year. All social media amounts to is another new layer of the internet, coupled with new technology that is more fluid than ever before. This new layer allows us to broaden our horizons in business and life. It makes it easier to connect. We also bandy about engagement marketing, but not all of these connections have to fully engage to be effective (although the more you have real engagement, the better your efforts will turn out). This culmination of connection, possibilities and technological advances is so much more than just social – why do we limit it to that?

4) Curate

This one tries to inflate something (or someone) into more than it is. For example, you “curate” a museum full of gorgeous art and national treasures or history. You “keep” or “make” a Twitter list in order to better see the people you need to see online, or sort a busy stream into categories to make it a bit easier to read if you happen to be forced to use the web interface. By using words like curate (and expert – don’t get me started) you deceive by implication, and end up limiting yourself here as well, as it is a kind of language use that can put people off from you or your company.

5) Next

On the one hand, people like me think about the big picture and what is coming next and how we can shape it all the time. It is our job, after all. For the person in the trenches for a company however, your job is to (most likely) get sales, gain audience, increase your company’s reach, etc – not to theorize about tools and techniques and the future and my advice is to focus on your foundation first, then what’s next will follow. Without a foundation, solid knowledge of your own “now”, you will flounder and flail when trying to follow someone who’s been studying and doing this longer into “next”. This is part of being the best you – mastery of your present before tripping over it to get to your future. Building blocks. You’ll be surprised how naturally “next” comes if you give “now” a little attention first.

I’m sure there are more, but those are the words most on my mind as we embark on 2010 and the new crop of fakers and dittoheads saddles up, and the old crop finds new ways to pull the wool over client eyes. It’s pretty hard to find a great person or company to help clients navigate this vast, connected space online, but I can tell you buzzwords and inflated language aren’t the signifiers that someone knows their stuff – happy clients and success stories are. Keep it real.

(H/T @michellemmm for opening the curate discussion)

(Twitter friends will see an auto notify of this twice)

I have written a bit about this before in a tongue in cheek manner, but I’m thinking about it in a larger perspective these days. Look for some posts expanding the concept further.

If you follow me on Twitter, you will receive an auto-notification about this twice: once directly from Utterli and once from this blog notification.

(if you follow me on Twitter, you will see this twice – once direct from Utterli and once from the blog)

What’s an Achilles heel list? It’s a list I keep of personal things I need to work on that changes often. Everyone can use improvement in something. Last year the top of my list was my phone manner – being much more comfortable with writing or in-person communication, I couldn’t wait to get off the phone, and it came across to the people on the other end loud and clear. So I worked on it, and it got better. The phone is still my least favorite method of communication, but I don’t want to run screaming after five (or even 50) minutes on a call anymore, and the people I talk to know I really want to hear what they say. I learned to focus and listen in a better, more active way on the phone.

Basically, I just like to confront issues I have head on – I’m a no-nonsense person like that. You can’t improve if you don’t self evaluate (or at least I can’t). So, this new issue to tackle is email. More specifically, rushed email. So, I’m retraining myself. I’m no longer replying right away or under any sense of urgency. If I feel rushed, I’m trying to make myself get up and do something else, then come back to the email later. I’m also reading the email out loud to myself. Recently an email I sent that was intended to offer help came off as critical, and made the person not want to work with me! That sucked, as it was a genuine offer of assistance (and hit me in the bottom line, so to speak), but when I went back and read that email out loud, it was easy to see how it had hurt their feelings. What sounded “efficient” to me in a hurry, sounded “brusque” at best later on and was absolutely deserving of apology.

It pains me that this is an issue, because I love people, and normally, writing is my strong suit and that passion for people comes through. So whatever the reason behind this very recent issue, no one deserves to receive a rushed or insensitive email. Hopefully I can nip this weird issue in the bud quickly with a little retraining and few deep breaths. And occasionally the help of my friends, who aren’t afraid to call me on my horse-crap if they see it.

What’s your Achilles heel? What are you doing to make it better?