Alpha Mind Blog

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.

I still mean to write, one of these days, about why I love Andrew Cline’s Rhetorica blog. Meantime, I’ll just use the blog’s sixth birthday as another excuse to recommend it.

By way of Execupundit, I discovered the Damn Interesting blog today. The article about the Nazi spies (follow my link to find Execupundit’s link) is interesting indeed.

But just now I’d like to mention that Damn Interesting did a piece earlier this month on The Extraordinary Astrologer Isaac Bickerstaff. I love the story, and I covered it on my 2nd episode of Build a Better Podcast, the short-lived experimental podcast I did in 2005.

In that episode, I also mentioned the somewhat mysterious relationship between Jonathan Swift and his great and good friend Stella. And I did a reading of Swift’s exquisitely ridiculous love poem “On Stella’s Birthday,” which might leave one wondering why, if Stella was capable of shooting a man to death (which she did), she didn’t choose Swift himself for her bullet.

Check out the podcast here

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I’ve had prospective clients tell me they find it refreshing that I don’t gloss over any of the difficulties of blogging. The challenges are real, and I always point them out.

But I generally put things in a positive light. The way I see it, some of the hardest things about blogging are also the very best reasons to do it.

Prime among these is the openness it engenders. Simply put, to succeed at blogging, one must establish oneself as trustworthy. Notice I didn’t say “gain trust.” One must really be worthy of it.

My friend Robert Levering has made a career out of teaching one simple fact: The greatest single determinant of workplace quality is trust. And if corporate blogging can teach a firm or its manager a thing or two about trust, the entire organize benefits.

So I encourage companies to think of blogging as a tool, and not just a tool for marketing, for PR, or for ego-gratification. But as a tool for teaching one of the great corporate disciplines: authenticity.

I’ve been wanting to write the above paragraphs for months. I was spurred to do it by two posts on other blogs today which, I believe, form a pair.

1. Matt Cutts points to a Q&A with Udi Manbur, and quotes exactly the part of the article that also grabs me:

At Google we do not manually change results. For example, if we find for a particular query that result No. 4 should be result No. 1, we do not have the capability to manually change it. We made that decision not to put that capability in the algorithm—we have to go and actually change the algorithm. That is, we have to find what weakness in the algorithm caused that result and find a general solution to that, evaluate whether a general solution really works and if it’s better, and then launch a general solution. That makes the process slower, but it puts a lot more discipline on us and makes it more unbiased.

2. And Andrew Cline suggests that news organizations start calling each other out on published inaccuracies.

I’m sure you see the common theme. What Google does, and what newspapers generally don’t do, is set themselves a hard row to hoe. A row that, if you dare to hoe it, will have the long-term result that you’ll do more things better.

I believe the practice of blogging is a lot like both of these examples. Doing it will compel you to develop methods, not for giving good search results, but for designing micro-messages on the fly. And it will also invite the scrutiny of others, including one’s rivals, which will teach you habits of honesty and diligence.

Both disciplines–crafting messages well and cultivating those messages in the soil of authenticity, are important for any company. And the key fact of social media is that, for every organization, sooner or later, these skills will be not simply what differentiates the best, but matters of outright survival. Because the key fact of social media is that scrutiny is coming. Organizations of all kinds will need to learn to deal with it.

So why blog when it’s so hard? Because sooner is much better than later.

I started a new blog yesterday. Or maybe it was the day before; blogging does that to my sense of time.

I’ve decided to convince restaurateurs in greater Sacramento how easy and valuable it is to blog. I’ve started a pretty bare-bones site, Eats4Sacramento, which I intend to invite others to participate in. We’ll see how it goes…

… because his time would be better spent writing books.

Somebody, wish I could remember who, once said something to the effect that

Writing is a faucet in the attic. Talking is a fire hydrant on the street. Open the latter and the former goes dry.

Sounds like Hugh’s discovered Twitter is a lot like talking.

del.icio.us Tags: gapingvoid twitter hugh macleod hughmacleod writing

My last post included 2 YouTube videos. I created the post using Live Writer and Wordpress.

Since it was a nightmare, and…

since I spent an extra hour on the post, figuring out how to do it, and…

since ShandyKing’s post (which comes up first on when you Google “wordpress embed youtube videos”) doesn’t solve the problem, at least for me, and…

since I love Wordpress, and…

since I love my fellow bloggers and want them all to succeed…

… I’m going to tell how I did it.

1. Create the post you want, absent the videos. If you are using a posting tools other than WordPress itself, do all you want in that tool and then send it to WP as a draft.
2. In WP’s post editing page, click “Save and Continue Editing”
3. Click “Preview”
4. On the preview, make a note of exactly what words you put last in your post.
5. With the preview window open, get the page source.- In FireFox, that’s ctl-U (or alt-V, O).
   - IE7 it’s alt-V,C.
   - In Opera it’s ctl-F3.
   - In anything else you’re on your own.
6. Paste the entire page source into a text editor (Notepad or something better), unless your browser already put it into an editor for you. (Opera has its very own editor, how cool is that?)
7. Go to YouTube and get the source code to embed the video.
8. In the editor, paste the code exactly where you want the video to be. (I always put it between a <p> </p> pair, having intentionally left a blank line in my post to insert it in.)
9. Now, (still in the text editor, NOT in WordPress) select all the code from
   - just after <div class=”entrytext”> to
   - after the last closing tag that encloses the last words
   of your post. (Sorry that’s vague, but for example, if your
   last words were part of a link, the “last closing tag” may
   be </a>, while if you ended with plain text, the last closing
   tag is probably </p>.)
10. Copy this text.
11. Go back to the edit-post window in WordPress. Switch from Visual to Code.
12. Select everything in the editing window. Delete it and paste the code you copied from the editor.
13. Click Save and Continue Editing.
14. If it looks right, go on to the next step. If it doesn’t look right, you have something to figure out that I can’t help you with. But my 1st guess would be that you copied too much or too little code from the text editor. 2nd guess: you didn’t get the WP edit window completely empty before pasting.
15. Back in the WP edit window, again select and delete everything. Again paste (your paste buffer should still contain the correct code, right?)
16. Now Publish.

The key was making sure you re-paste the code into the edit window immediately before publishing. Because when you previewed, WP made a hash of the code, and what it put there must be eliminated.

I didn’t say it was easy, right? You have to be comfortable enough with HTML tags to know just how much code to copy from the text editor. But with that caveat, it’s really not all that hard. And it works, at least for me. Whereas WP messes it up pretty much every time I try to do it differently.

WordPress is updating fairly often. I imagine WP will have this problem figured out in another version or 2 or 3. Meantime, this is what works for me.

BTW, I’m using WP 2.3.1. My browser is FireFox 2.0.0.11, running on Windows Vista

del.icio.us Tags: WordPress,YouTube,embed,videos,how

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