Word supplied by Andrew Farmer – www.myoxygen.co.uk

Thankfully and not before time we have new networks, they’re the vibrant ones, they’re the life changing ones. Lets be honest if we are going to spend our precious time in one, they had better be full of intellectual, artistic, radical, maverick, engaging people! Encouraging debates around “what’s new?” not “What I have to sell?”

Open minded, open sourced minds that upturn the conventional, unlock what seems difficult and create a level playing field. The ‘grey suit’ networks, if they aren’t dead yet, soon will be. These myopic, ego driven, inert, mundane environments of the past can no longer survive. A huge disappointment to those professional service firms that used them as a reason to not go home.

Most networks are average. Survival will require a great shift to raising the game. And we wonder why social networking has taken off? It’s led to the abandonment of those traditional congregations, simply because the culture, the atmosphere was as stifling as being in a lift with your worst nightmare for 24 hours.

The new networks, and they do meet face to face are the ones to join. The ones that use imagination, let us connect, enable us to influence its evolvement, allow collaboration, shares new ideas and help us work across disciplines. They even expand our minds and, of course, they do lead to real business too. Before anyone says it, most of the physical ones do not!

Next time anyone walks into a room full of people speed networking (what the hell is that about?) and it’s not full of buzz and you can’t feel the excitement in the room, turn around and get out of there. Join me at the bar, that’s where I’ll be sitting! I just got there before you!

Phil Zimmerman was recently quoted as saying in the future we will all get our ’15 minutes of privacy’ rather than our Andy Warhol moment. Clever thought, and sadly, perhaps true. Both professionally and personally we are all going to have to manage our online reputations. We’ll even measure and score it. We’ll leave the personal element in the bottom drawer for now.

Measurement will evolve and monitoring is here already. I believe we will be measured independently based on the following five gauges:

Content – More work is online than ever before. With wikis and cloud computing, filing cabinets are becoming a thing of the past and it’s exposed, to some degree for everyone to see. In fact, it’s important that the content is accessible rather than hidden. The quality of that content will be critical. More of us will be publishing our work online, our ideas, knowledge and opinions.

Influence – This will be about your popularity. How many people are following you? How many fans you have? How often you are mentioned or referenced in other peoples content? It’s also about how well you are connected, who you are connected to and how you influence those networks.

Trust – Part of this will be how transparent, open and whether people respect your integrity. It will be about how you deal with the positive as well as the negative issues every business has. Included will be testimonials and case studies that clients quite openly communicate across their own online sphere not your website.

Community – Having a strong community around your brand will make online reputation management easier. A robust set of people full of influencers and passionate about what you do will fight your battles on your behalf. They are more ready to forgive if you deal with problems well. They will be engaged and assist you in managing your reputation over the long run.

How you use social media – This is perhaps as much about sourcing as marketing. The sourcing of innovative solutions, using social media to co-create, participate and share information. It will also involve seeking out top suppliers and partners.

If you want to hear more about this, I’ll be speaking at this event next week: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/509178968

It goes without saying that you earn reputation. If you don’t manage your online reputation someone else will and it isn’t that coffee induced, fast food journalist out to get you. Its not shameful promotion, its now the bedrock of managing your brand and developing a community. Expect to be measuring accurately soon…..

Deliberately forgetting stuff is actually quite hard to do. As Dee Hock, creator of Visa once said “The problem is never how to get new innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out.” Familiar? And, blimey are we having to forget things. We need to unlearn how we’ve been taught to market, how to treat people, how to do business, what aspects to focus on, how we make money, who is important. The trouble with all of this is that its rather unsettling!

Jack Uldrich outlines unlearning in his neat post below:

http://www.unlearning101.com/fuhgetaboutit_the_art_of_/2010/03/mix-up-your-mind.html

People often say that they don’t want to disrupt something thats good or works. I understand this, but is it working and is it good is my next question. This isn’t about reinventing the wheel, its about forgetting a lot of what we have been conditioned to do. If you want to stimulate new stuff, you have to accept you need to forget the old stuff.

We need to stick our necks out more, play more and forget more. What do you need to forget this week?

Word provided by Robert Pickstone - www.robertpickstone.com

The only reason we need to be adaptable is because we are moving to mass innovation. It’s critical because no two clients, projects or people are alike. As change perpetually gains momentum and things happen quicker, we will need business models and people that adapt seamlessly to new environments.

We now as individuals, organisations’ and communities have to display chameleon like qualities. Perhaps we will need to change our attitude to business significantly in order to become more adaptive? Adaptability will demand that we understand how our business is going to transform itself from a current to future state as we try to build specific things under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

It will specifically involve solving problems creatively and adapting to dynamic changing environments. Dealing with uncertain work conditions where people have to adapt to novel situations. From that we must continuously learn so we can keep up with the rapid pace of technological advancement and cultural changes this will bring. We are going to have to attain interpersonal adaptability, being able to produce incredible outcomes in fluid work environments with a project led business. Whether we like it or not cultural adaptability, we live and work in a globalised world. We will become one tribe and we will have to learn how to perform well in different cultures, surrounded by people who do things different to us.

“Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative. “ HG Wells. Some of us will have to be able to work well in uncomfortable and strange climates. Adaptability is no longer an emphasis on just technology and processes but about people and processes coming together through technology.

Our lives have been invaded by technology, that’s not a bad thing! However, it does present a paradox; we can work anywhere, anytime. Conversely, it means little escape from work. We tweet, blog, email and talk all the time. Next time you go for dinner, count the number of people who pick up during one of the courses!

We live in a world of interruption. First, it was advertising agencies intruding into our homes, now it’s via a little device that’s in our pockets. We must restore order over our time. Time has lost its boundaries which makes it even more excruciating to manage as we have little of it. We have ultimately lost control! It means that we are not often ‘there’ when we have conversations. We concentrate on several tasks at once rather than one or two that we do truly well. We answer our mobiles, become distracted by emails and faff about far too much. We have given technology permission to control our time not the other way round. For some it gives a sense of being important, but all we are doing is ‘biting off more than we can chew.’ It results in us living fast when actually being able to chill is far more appropriate and conducive to results.

We all need to find ways to control our time. Only opening emails three times a day, switching our phones off when we are at a dinner party, focusing on the people we are having a drink with and finding a little balance. You are dodging the issue if you think other people are controlling your time. It’s about learning to say no constructively. Controlling our time is not just about being more effective, it’s actually more about enriching our lives, enhancing our relationships and adding true value to what we do.

Controlling interruption gives us the opportunity to intensely focus on important, meaningful activity not the sheer volume. Time isn’t to be messed with; we let it pass us by far too easily without feeling it and enjoying it. We only get one shot at that moment in time, that day, that meeting, that client, that dinner party. Rushing through it, slightly dictated by interruption doesn’t add anything, it just really takes away.

I’m bemused. Read most of the literature on managing reputation and they talk about defending and protecting. A rather negative stance, dressed in traditional PR and pessimism.

Managing reputation is surely just as much about celebrating as well as protecting. Reputation, after all, is about your integrity and credibility. As we move from a position of reach to reputation, trust, transparency and success are as important as protecting our ass. Lets just get over ourselves for a moment.

There is a simple three step model: (I will be talking more about this here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/509178968 )

1. Monitor – your brand, products, company and key people. Make connections in the right places. Follow the appropriate people.
2. Optimise – I mean more than SEO. Optimise the relationships and connections you have made. Connect people to other people who may be interested and where is synergy with their products.
3. Engage – contribute in the spaces and places your brand and products are being talked about. Participate in the conversation. This is where prevention is better than cure. Here you have opportunities to push reputation to new levels.

Managing your reputation offline and online is about building trust to encourage a value exchange. Future measurement of influence will be based on your popularity, engagement and value to a network of people who you have a relationship with.

That’s where your reputation strategy should start, not on protecting your back. That just says a lot about your culture and attitude to business.

The second word from the forthcoming eBook “Hang On.”

It’s about taking the conversation beyond price. Conversation is no longer a distraction at work, it is central to its existence and a leader’s job now is to start those conversations and invite people to take part. Conversation initiates new rules, new ways of engaging. They spring up everywhere. We can’t stop someone from being part of the conversation. Our people are talking to customers, our customers are talking to US and most importantly, our customers SHOULD be talking to each other. We can’t beat them so we’ had better find a way of joining them.

David Weinberger in the book ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’ states “We treasure our conversations most of all because they are ours, the way marketing speak never was.” The conversations we are having right now are so important. They can spread ideas, solve problems, gain agreement, build trust, remove barriers, encourage laughter and promote enjoyment. In the future, the conversations people are having in and around companies will be the essence of success. That means allowing it, encouraging it and facilitating it.

Most managers are terrible at conversation, they are too busy directing, making decisions, controlling budgets and keeping order. If you have ever walked onto the proverbial shop floor and killed the conversation you know what I mean!

Conversations are intimate, they are free, and they are open. They flourish when there is trust and a common commitment. Conversation is equal, it’s diverse, it generates the unexpected, and it’s participative and informal. They are actually quite liberating whilst at the same time conversation gives people a voice.

Conversations though do take control and power away from us control freaks and puts it right back where it precisely belongs with our customers, our community and our people. Charlene Li succinctly puts it this way “Campaigns begin and end, but conversations go on forever.” It’s interesting to sit down for a few moments and reflect on what conversations we are having right now……

The first Word from ‘Hang On’ the new eBook provided by Phil Rees @ www.defacethis.com

Being distinctive defines us. Distinctive is about people (there is that word again) having a distinct idea of us in their mind. For a lot of companies, it’s easier to remain indistinctive than to become distinctive! Our product, even service is probably not as distinctive as it used to be. It’s possible its competitive edge has been backed into a corner by the plethora of new products in the market place, or, the bad ones just caught up.

Tom Peters said years ago “Ask yourself what on your turf (local and global), is clearly unusual about the services you offer.” For me, if we can’t answer that in five bullet points, we’ve lost the right to be a great business. Look at the worst bit of your sector, even your closest competitors and change the customer experience; it at least gives you a stab at the five points of distinction.

We need to almost forget about our product. It’s great isn’t it? Cheaper certainly is distinctive but how is being mediocre? Being distinctive now is about how we use design to differentiate, by building a community from our clients, being recognized for meaningful work, the passion we inspire in people, how we engage and build relationships. Get used to it. Don’t get me wrong it is about developing a sense of currency and curiosity in parallel, however, the biggest barrier to us identifying what makes us distinctive is internal not external.

Little question; is your business more like a circus or the waiting room at your doctors? We really can’t afford to be ignored by the masses and silent to the few. Don’t be known for everything but something! Distinguish by identifying your tangibility.

A shift is a shift only if it sits in reality and that’s what’s happened in marketing. Mass marketing is redundant. It used to be about reach and recognition accompanied by the blind faith that some customers would drop out of the bottom. Marketing these days is all about reputation and credibility. Let me simply explain:

Reach – Your companies profile, its market share. Broadcast was used to reach and hit millions of customers. It was about casting the net as wide as possible and occasionally you’d catch something. Sprat to catch a mackerel was the term.

Not only is this just not affordable anymore, its intrusive and interruptive. It sends a message but the wrong one. Reach is not about banging out something anymore hoping its right, where’s the economic sense in that. Reach is the complete opposite, its focused. Focused on your influencers. Its not hitting the millions. It’s the 10’s, 100’s or, if you’re fortunate, 1000’s of people in your community. The people who are fans on your company Facebook pages. The followers you have on Twitter and, just as importantly, those people on the database that are your advocates.

Recognition – You’ve heard the old saying; everyone knows the Ford brand but not everyone wants to drive one. The worst situation you can be nowadays is if people think indifferently about your brand. In essence recognition can engage the many but impact the few.

Recognition is approaching that influencer list in bite sized chunks by communicating your values, ethics and distinctive way of doing things. Its better to have a small group of people attuned to your very brand’s soul than have lots of people who are absent from you.

Reputation – The real differentiator. Influence a number of influencers and your marketing strategy is not just powerful but well on its way to being tremendously effective. Reputation is about making a remarkable impression on the people that matter.

Reputation is closely linked to credibility. You do not gain credibility by mass marketing anymore. You gain it by being transparent, trustworthy, open and by sharing. Powerful marketing now comes in having a freemium model.

I’ll be talking more about this in Exeter on the 27th May. Book here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/509178968

But can you bring yourself to do it? Pushing the boundaries is something some of us are good at. However, never before have we been asked to push them even further. As well as learning something everyday, we are having to unlearn stuff too.

There seems to be a lot of hype around how things are changing say some. Its not hype, its reality. If you’re feeling it then its real. And, if you’re not feeling it right now you will be soon.

1. A database does not create a community around your business that faithfully loves what you do.
2. Relationships are the strength that drives a business forward both with customers and employees.
3. Its no good being recognised (profile) if you’re reputation (integrity) doesn’t back it up.
4. Move from us believing we want to control to the participation of sharing.
5. Removing aspects that are exhausting and revitalise/introduce those elements that focus on passion and purpose.

The emphasis has changed. Old models are dying and new ones emerging. Decision making, innovation, customer and performance processes are being overturned in order to cope with a new paradigm.

Its fascinating to watch, but I guess that’s my job. However, its hurting people, its hurting businesses that are not responding. Too many people following, too many businesses ignoring. If there is one last thing you do this week, seek out someone who can help you see your way through these shifts.