Alpha Mind Blog

Brett Favre today held a press conference to clear up the misconception that his signing with the Minnesota Vikings is “a done deal.”

“No,” said Favre, “There’s still an important condition to be met. I’d like the Vikings management to demonstrate that, if I play on their team, their fans will spell my name correctly when they discuss me on the Internet.”

“I loved playing for Green Bay, really I did,” Favre went on. “Those were great years. And I almost got used to my fans not knowing how to spell Favre. It’s a tough name, you know. I understand that. But when the morons wouldn’t even learn my first name, mother—” (Rest of quote redacted.)

P.S. Brett’s right not to expect Minnesotans to get Favre right. The world at large can’t seem to do it. Note Twitter’s trending topics from this morning:

What kind of legacy can you have if nobody will teach their kids where to look you up in the record books?

In the FIR FriendFeed room, Dan York asks:

Surprised to not yet see a thread about Facebook aquiring Friendfeed… Anyone care about it?

Most of the comments in reply to Dan’s question focus on what we as social media users might do given the uncertainty about the future of the two channels. In reply Andrea Vascellari (in the 9th comment on his own blog post) takes note of the engineering-heavy team at FriendFeed, but other than that this conversation hasn’t dealt much with the strategic implications of the purchase and the long-range possibilities they suggest.

I”m trying to tease out those implications.

I haven’t tried to study the issue in depth, but I’ll put forward some tentative conclusions anyway.

First, I don’t think facebook’s management are likely to merge the two channels into a single hybrid. In fact, I believe part of the strategy may be to let them live on as quite different tools.

Second, I do believe that the heavy hitters on FriendFeed’s development team may have been a juicy temptation to the acquirer, but I don’t believe this means any great change in the development paths of the two.

Why do I believe these things?

Mostly, my thinking focuses on key differences in the paradigms of the two channels. Facebook is a walled garden. Google does not crawl it and cannot deliver its pages. In response to the growth of Twitter, facebook’s management has taken some steps to make the channel more Twitter-like, but these steps haven’t generally been well received. For example, there’s been considerable annoyance expressed over the change that made the fully public profile the default. The purchase of FriendFeed may well arise out of an understanding on facebook’s part that the walls of the garden may be desirable. And not just because so many users say so, but, more importantly, because the walls, coupled with facebook’s phenomenal growth, mean that there’s an increasingly important part of the web which Google can’t reach, read, deliver, or monetize.

So, while Twitter with its openness threatens facebook with its walls, and while those walls themselves are valuable, what’s their owner to do? I think the correct answer is: Build its own open property, so that its closed property may safely be kept fenced. Only by keeping the walled and unwalled paradigms separate can facebook hope to take on Twitter while also claiming territory from Google.

Another clue to this is the APIs of facebook versus FriendFeed. I myself don’t know much about APIs, having given up coding years ago (beyond fairly simple Perl scripts). But I trust Dave Winer’s judgment on these things. Winer said, in the August 17th episode of Rebooting the News, that the FriendFeed API is far more approachable and usable than that of facebook. My thinking is that while this may in part be an accident of FriendFeed’s having a superior development team, it’s very likely that the difference falls out from the open versus closed paradigms that have been architected into the two tools from the beginning. Like Twitter, FriendFeed has established itself as a platform, while facebook is a closed channel. In keeping with these paradigms, the API for Twitter and FriendFeed will have been built with an eye toward application to be built around the platform, while that for facebook looks for applications to be built within the channel. The first sort of API has to be far more structured, robust, and flexible than the second, which can afford to be something of an afterthought.

So, like Meghan Keane, I believe the greatest value of FriendFeed to facebook is in search: but I go farther in believing that this value can’t be delivered unless the two tools are kept separate and different. This means that each must be faithful to its own paradigm.

Here is a first cut at a table of some features of the two paradigms.

This post expresses an opinion loosely held. I put it forward because I believe FriendFeed and facebook are both important tools (or channels, as I’ve called them here), and that their future matters. I believe strategic use of them in marketing and PR will depend on the user’s theory of their future, and I offer this as the beginnings of a framework for building such a theory.

I’d love to hear what others think.

Twitter hashtag chats are wonderful. A little overstimulating, but hey.

Problem is, when a chat is really lively and brisk, serious untruths can fly by and not get corrected.

Example: in Beth Harte’s #pr20chat of August 5, @brandingexpert inserted this tweet:

Don’t EVER forget that branding is purely about generating more revenue, no matter what any “guru” preaches.

I’m not a guru, much less a “guru,” so I suppose I could have avoided getting on this guy’s wrong side just by keeping quiet.

But he’s wrong.Very emphatic, he is. And wrong.

Branding is about effectiveness.

Branding is about effectiveness. No matter what any “expert” preaches.

First, not every entity which (or who) might develop a brand is a for-profit entity. While it’s true that Amnesty International is very effective at fund-raising because of its brand equity, funds are only a part of what it gathers in order to be effective. AI can collect thousands of signatures on a petition in very short order because of its brand. The persons saved from disappearance and torture are the measure of AI’s effectiveness, and its brand leads to that effectiveness.

Ralph Nader is a brand. He developed his brand equity by doing exactly what he wanted to do and doing it well. Like AI, he can mobilize vast support for a cause. That he’s done pretty well financially is perhaps a side effect; it’s not his primary aim. If he made it his primary aim, his brand equity would help him achieve it. In short, his brand can help him be effective at anything that doesn’t contradict his positioning.

Of course, most participants in #pr20chat do most of their work for for-profit companies, so the above might seem a minor quibble. But @brandingexpert’s dictum is untrue for those companies as well.

Choking on revenue.

I believe the following is true although it’s seldom talked about:

When Congress set out in the early 70s to restrict cigarette advertising, the tobacco companies protested. On the principle that they needed to protest anything that challenged their freedom of action. But the legislation was passed that forbade TV advertising. Big tobacco lost that battle. And on that day, in the privacy of their boardrooms and C-suites, they were all grins.

Why? Because they’d been engaged in rent-dissipating advertising wars. Rent dissipation: that’s the economists’ schmancy term for throwing away profits. And all those squandered profits had been lost because the players had been brand-building in pursuit of revenues. And they kept doing it despite the huge portions of those revenues that were required to keep them on the brand-war treadmill.

They were in a bind. With little real product differentiation, their branding was driven and defined by advertising, and with lots of competitors, they had to pour major resources into branding. But they weren’t really happy about it. Not nearly as happy as they’d be after their hands were tied and their profits soared.

Other companies aren’t necessarily in the same bind. They can squander profit not because they’re forced to, but simply because they’re naive enough to believe “experts” who tell them branding is about revenue. They can take their eyes off profit long enough to lose a good deal of it.

How to correct while agreeing

Two people retweeted @brandingexpert’s tweet. I assume that means they agreed. Most interesting, though, was a tweet from Kathy Moore (@kathy_moore), to whom @brandingexpert had directed his wisdom. She corrected him even while seeming to agree:

@brandingexpert righto! good branding should ultimately deliver bottom line results

So [scratches head], does Kathy actually think that revenue and bottom-line-results are the same thing? Or was she correcting brandingexpert, knowingly and slyly?

Life is full of enigmas. In the twitterverse, they fly by so fast one might not even notice they’re enigmas. It takes a pretty fat fast canary to catch them.

So I resisted Twitter for as long as I could. Then after I got through resisting, I still didn’t use Twitter because I was too busy to use social media at all. Just when I thought I was ready to launch my podcast in earnest, I discovered my house needed massive rework in order to provide me with a usable office. I had a recording studio, but the office was more important.

Well, the house is redone. The office is pretty usable. And I’ve almost mastered using my iPhone as a PDA, and I’m reasonably productive again. I have enough client work to keep me fed and not enough to break my back. So, no further excuse exists not to use Twitter.

Except that Twitter drives me mad.

But now I’ve used it enough to love it, so I need to do something with my madness other than avoid Twitter.

Solution: CCCHHHIIIIRRRRPPPP!

Given that what drives me mad is the infernal terseness of it all, I’m reserving to myself the right, starting today, to make enormous tweets here on my blog, and then use Twitter to point to them.

Actually, the concept is a little more refined than that. My hope is that, about once a week, I’ll take a single tweet of someone else’s, and riff on it here in a way that 140 characters wouldn’t permit.

My next post will demonstrate.

Some good weekly Twitter chats have arisen that draw public relations pros. I want to take part in them when I can.

I’ve found that looking up their starting times takes a little longer than I think it should.

To resolve that problem, I’ve made a simple list of PR-related hashtag chats, showing nothing but the hashtag, the day, and the time (Eastern Time).

Please let me know if there’s anything I should add or correct.

If a public apology to Christopher Penn and John Wall is necessary, this is it.

Chris Penn has written a good response to my last post. John Wall (in a comment on both Chris’s post and mine—same comment both places), has gotten a little defensive, but then perhaps I was a little offensive.

Look, folks, these guys are not Nazis, or neo-Nazis, or Nazi sympathizers, or anything of the kind. They’re marketing gurus of the first rank. And one of them got a little careless in how he worded a recommendation—the same recommendation I would make—that we understand fear-mongering in its worst form.

Most of the impetus for my post was simply how weird it was that Chris Penn mentioned Goebbels the same day I recorded a podcast that talked about both Chris Penn and Nazism.  (Not to mention that I listened to his podcast within 24 hours of reading Drucker’s scary book on totalitarianism.)

In addition to Chris’s post, he and John devote a goodly chunk of this week’s Marketing Over Coffee podcast to discussing the importance of understanding Goebbels, not so we can emulate him, but so we can see through those who do. Chris definitely gets it.

It’s almost as if some spy went and told Seth Godin and Christopher Penn what I was saying about them when I recorded Episode -2 last week. Each of them seems to have gone out of their way to underscore my point.

Seth talks about the importance of standing for something.

And Chris recommends Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels as a marketing guru.

In Seth’s case… his post aligns with what I said fairly neatly. When he writes about standing for something, he doesn’t talk about being ethically upstanding, merely consistent. But the simple fact is that the kind of consistency he recommends is a hallmark of the ethically mature. And the extreme of inconsistency is the mark of the shyster.

And as I said in the podcast, Seth doesn’t make his point as if from a position atop some “Mr. Ethics” pedestal. But this particular post is perfectly consistent with the theme of respect for the customer, a leitmotif running through all Seth’s work.

Then there’s Chris Penn.

Oy!

My point about Chris in the podcast was that I don’t see in him the sort of broad concern for the human condition that I detect in Godin and see epitomized in Drucker.

And Chris didn’t merely reinforce my point, but almost parodied it, recommending Goebbels as “your go-to guy” for how to do fear marketing.

Here are Chris and John Wall in last week’s Marketing Over Coffee:

Chris: …it’s one of those things in the marketing world people really really really don’t like to talk about, because it’s almost taboo, but if you go and read the works of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist, and stuff like that and stuff like that, and go back and read what he did and how he did it and stuff like that, he’s basically the almost the father of fear marketing. In the sense that you know you need to pick, you need to artificially divide people into groups, you need to pit those groups against each other, you need to have a villain and a scapegoat of some kind so that you get these archetypes of drama that work incredibly well for motivating people to do what you want them to do. And if you’ve decided that’s part of your marketing strategy, Goebbels is the go-to guy if you really want to take those tactics on. If you obviously if it comes out that you’ve been using Nazi propaganda books as the—

John: —foundation of your marketing strategy—

Chris: —exactly, you may have some backlash there. But—

John: —that’s the kind of information your competitors will get about you and so—

Chris: Exactly.

John: —as part of their campaign.

Chris: Best to keep those books at home, guys.

John: Or read them at the library when, and don’t check them out. These days I think there’s no security left on that… once it makes your list it’s on the list.

Chris: exactly…

To his credit, Chris has responded to an email he received from someone who had the same concern about all this that I have. But sadly, his response doesn’t convince me he understands the gravity of recommending Goebbels. In particular, both the podcast and Chris’s response suggest that John and Chris fail to see the distinction between marketing segmentation and the “artificially dividing people into groups” that was the linchpin of Goebbels’s work. Distinguishing between cost-conscious and style-conscious consumers is hardly the same as dividing humankind into a master race and a people worthy to be stuffed into ovens.

Somehow four or five days elapsed between recording last week’s episode and uploading it, which happened only a few minutes ago. (The delay was mostly due to a lot of experimentation with post-production techniques, and some Vista hassles.)

In Episode minus 2, I introduce Peter Drucker as a guiding light of the Alpha Mind Podcast. I also introduce the alternating-episodes approach I’ll be taking in the ‘cast, modeled after Drucker’s career-long alternation of management books with ones on broader social issues.

I also compare Seth Godin and Christopher Penn to Drucker, and one of them comes out looking pretty good.

Drucker was passionate about management because he cared deeply about the human family. He had also seen (up close, very close) that perfectionist political systems were deadly. He believed that the organizations that make up a free and pluralist society can do much to further human happiness—if run well. And so he loved teaching us how to run them well.

When I started the Alpha Mind blog over three years ago, my goal was to have a podcast join the blog within a few months. In reality, my service to the church and some other constraints kept me from launching the podcast.

Now, I find myself ready to do it, and am counting down the 4 weeks until launch.

I’m not just counting, though. I’m making preliminary and somewhat experimental episodes. There will be 4 of them, numbered from -3 (minus 3) up to 0 (zero). After that, of course, comes Ep. 1 and the real launch of the podcast.

Episode -3 is about the Galveston Flood of 1900, and about how the city got its present seawall, but got it a bit late, after 6 to 8 thousand people died in the 1900 hurricane.

The episode also mentions the Pig War, the last armed conflict between the U.S.A and Great Britain, and without doubt the jolliest, happiest, shiniest war in American history.

And amid all that compulsive story-telling, there really is a how-to lesson in being a thought leader, which goes something like this:

If you’re going to influence people, and they’re going to make important decisions, it helps to be right. History will be nicer to you that way.

Hey folks. A recent inbound link from Lee Hopkins gave me my 41st inbound link.

That is a pathetic number. So I’m here to let you in on a little secret.

C’mon a little closer so I can whisper it.

[puts mouth near ear, cups hand]

My blog is a lot more interesting than 41 links indicate. Pass it on.

So, ahem [away from ear, speaking aloud now]… my count of feedburner subscribers is also pathetic.

Even more pathetic is the count of subscribers to my Comment Feed.

And that’s the little secret I want to share with you.

My own writing may be drab or daft or vacuous. But in just the last week, the following august personages have left comments here at The Alpha Mind:

• Kami Watson Huyse
• Seth Godin
• Shel Israel
• Shel Holtz (of FIR fame)
• Chris Carfi
• Bryan Person
• B. L. Ochman
• Martin Kelley

Even if I’m not worth reading, those folks are!

So, to get the real juice out of the Alpha Mind Blog, all you have to do is subscribe to both my feeds, but especially the Comments Feed. It’s an undiscovered gem, just waiting for you to be the first non-Max-Hansen to unearth it.

It’s right up there at the top of the sidebar. There on the right.

Unless you’re on the permalink page, so just in case, it’s also right here:

Click it, go ahead.

You know you want to…