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.

Mike Masnick asks: Is Copyright Law Killing The Documentary? The answer is in this video on YouTube. Titled “Eyes On the Fair Use of the Prize,” it tells how an outstanding documentary from the 1980s has been effectively disappeared by copyright burdens:

Winer asks why the world is so quiet after Bill Moyers’ interview with Rev Jeremiah Wright.

A while back I said I’d like to see Dave do some longer, DaveNet-style posts. Today’s piece is what I had in mind. Kinda mellow, it’s the side of DW that really cares about what happens to the world, and says so with a minimum of snark.

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.

Someone discusses leadership, and Jim Stroup dissects that discussion. And in the process gives a fine quick overview of one of the prime rhetorical stop signs:

The thing that struck me about this particular presentation was its unapologetic brandishing of the “of course” debating technique. This, actually, isn’t properly debate at all, but rhetorical intimidation. One preemptively dissipates any doubt detected stirring the audience about one’s claim with a half-surprised, half indignant bark: “of course.”

From Mark Driehorst, a fine post about a problematic issue in social media: lynch mobs.

I saw things get ugly on YouTube this summer, as a virtual lynch mob formed against LisaNova, one of YT’s most popular directors.

Here are two of my responses…

…the serious…

…and the silly (but not a lot less serious than the other, really):

As you can tell from looking at the videos on my YouTube channel, I got way too involved with LisaNova this summer. But it was the quality of her best videos that got me involved with YouTube in the first place. And she and I had had a pleasant exchange of emails before she became YT’s most notorious “spammer” (in quotes because although she spammed I can’t think of a word that really says what she is). So I was quite distressed when she got so much hate thrown at her that she took more than a month off.

I don’t like spammers. Not at all. But I like lynchings even less.If “thought leader” has an opposite, I think “lynch mob leader” is probably it.

Thx to Kami Huyse for the link to Mike’s post.

And, oh, if you haven’t discovered LisaNova yet, here are two of my favorite videos: Teenie Weenie RAW & UNCENSORED, and Breaking News!!!

People get just plain crazy around the famous. Especially the famous-and-opinionated. Around, say, that guy who writes Scripting News.

Today Winer’s explaining why he deletes some comments from his blog. And my question is: Why should he even have to defend himself?

His blog is his. Period. He can shut it down if he wants. He can erase the whole thing. As I can do with mine, as you can do with yours.

The reason he’s defending himself is that the same trolls who leave the vacuous-nasty comments he deletes will also go elsewhere on the web and say the same vacuous-nasty things about him there, except that elsewhere they have the added ammunition that “Winer deletes comments Mommy, make him stop!”

Damning Scoble by faint praise of Winer

Some vacuous-nasty stuff can be pretty nicely dressed up as thoughtful commentary.

Submitted in evidence, this post, seemingly in sincere praise of Winer, but primarily effective as a knock on Scoble. The post (to which Scoble’s reply in the comments pretty well nails the matter), would be in the running for lamest blog post of November, except that the author realized the lameness of his communication and was big enough to apologize for it.

But still, what was said was said, and it was lame as all get out. The post didn’t just knock Scoble, but did so on truly laughable grounds. The message was that Scoble doesn’t do that which, as far as I can tell, Scoble absolutely lives to do: find new cool things and people, and bring them to the attention of others. And he does it pretty effectively. If anything, he overdoes it—when he’s at his hottest, reading Scobleizer + his link blog is like drinking from two fire hoses.

Both Dave and Robert have done things I’ve questioned. I’ve complained about one of Winer’s behaviors publicly (I know: to say that blogging here is public is something of a stretch. But it wasn’t here, it was on the For Immediate Release podcast.)

But I’ve never seen him really disrespectful of anybody who hadn’t earned it. And I’ve never seem him try to disappear anybody who was offering substance, even in disagreement, and who was truly willing to own his/her words.

BTW, the reason this topic exists at all is that Dave is trying out a new commenting tool on Scripting News, and he wasn’t 24 hours into the trial before he had an obnoxious troll. He may have had more since, and deleted them while I was looking the other way.

PS. I’m trying out a different commenting tool here from what Dave’s trying out there. By all means leave me a comment and check out Intense Debate.

PPS. I’ve never done a post about both Winer and Scoble before, but I’ve wanted to. I was appreciating DaveNet when Radio Userland wasn’t even a gleam in his eye. I sometimes wish he’d go back to doing longer, Davenet-style essays. And one of the reasons Dave is cool is that he gave us Robert, who would be doing heaven-knows-what if he hadn’t done marketing for Userland.

PPPS. I mentioned longer, DaveNet-style essays. But my all-time favorite wasn’t very long at all.