How many of you know what a neighborhood watch is? It’s an old school idea – neighbors keep an eye out in the neighborhood for suspicious activity and report it to the police. It’s especially effective when neighbors know each other and are happy to look out for each others’ interests.
How many people know their physical neighbors well?
You should.
If you don’t, make friends, and soon. Why? Simple.
The economy is spawning more crime. The numbers estimated by the University of Arizona suggest that a 1% increase in unemployment correlates to a 1% increase in crime rates. Crimes begin casually, with opportunity crimes, and worsen from there if unchecked.
Kicking it up a notch
A basic neighborhood watch is effective, but now add in the capabilities of social media, of new media to the mix. If you have several social media aware folks in your neighborhood (or you can train them easily), when you meet with your police department’s crime prevention officer (CPO, the officer assigned to instruct Neighborhood Watch programs), introduce him or her to Twitter. Get your neighbors who are Twitter-savvy to create a hashtag for your neighborhood like #54&Pine or #7Gables and have members report mildly suspicious activity there (“scruffy kid, about 5’6″ with black backpack walking around block 5th time this hour”). Show your CPO how to use Twitter Search so that real-time updates can be casually viewed at the station.
Got a camera on your data-enabled mobile phone? You have an awesome crime deterrence tool. Use services like TwitPic to take instant shots of suspicious activity and upload them immediately to your neighborhood watch Twitterstream.
Own a digital camera with a decent lens and low light ability? Take photos and load them up to sites like Flickr so that your neighbors and CPO can inspect in detail things that you find suspicious.
Know someone talented at using Google Docs and Google Maps? Help your local police department geographically map crimes in your area and look for trends using freely available Google tools.
What other new media/social media tools can you think of to empower ordinary citizens to help local law enforcement prevent crime?
Note: in no way do I advocate unnecessarily putting yourself in harm’s way or taking the law into your own hands. As with all community-based initiatives, the idea is to work WITH your local police, not compete with them.
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Get rich quick! Quit your day job! Money while you sleep! All claims made of social media and virtually every other new technology, idea, or movement since mankind first created money itself. Can you make money in social media? Should you make it an aim?
To answer this question, we have to dig into the history and concept of money itself.
What is money?
Ask any child and most adults, and no one will have a coherent answer to this question. People know money by what it can do, but not what it is. The classical definition of money is a medium of exchange, a measure of account, and store of value. For the purposes of this discussion, we’re going to focus on a medium of exchange and a store of value.
A Medium of Exchange
Before money, we had barter. Let’s say I raised chickens and you raised cows. If I wanted some beef and you wanted some chicken, we’d get together and trade. We’d negotiate how many chickens equaled a cow, and vice versa. If all went well, I went home with some beef for my family and you went home with some chicken.
But… what if you didn’t want chicken? You had beef, and I wanted beef, but you didn’t want chicken? Suddenly, I have a problem. We couldn’t trade. No amount of chicken I had would be helpful to me if you didn’t want chicken. I’d have to find someone who wanted chicken and see what they had to trade. Maybe they had seashells, and you wanted seashells, so I’d have to trade chicken for seashells first, then find you and trade seashells for beef.
This got really inefficient around Greek and Roman times, which is when currency got invented. Suddenly, we have a neutral intermediary. I think chicken is worth 5 copper coins, and you think cow is worth 250 copper coins. Now, if I have chicken and you have beef, but you still don’t want chicken, that’s fine. I’ll find someone who wants chicken and trade with them for copper coins. Then I’ll come back to you and buy as much cow as I can with the same copper coins.
This is one of the core roles of money – instead of having to barter everything, you can trade in a generally accepted medium of exchange.
A Store of Value
Here’s another problem with barter. Let’s say instead of chicken, I have wheat. You have cows. During harvest season, we can trade. I’ll trade you a few bales of wheat in exchange for a cow. Everyone’s happy.
What about in the winter, though? I have no wheat. All my wheat either got milled into flour, sold, consumed, or… spoiled. Wheat is transitory. Wheat spoils, rots, molds, etc. if you don’t use it within a certain period of time. In fact, most consumables eventually spoil.
Here’s where money comes in again. I go to the market and trade my wheat to someone who wants it. I get copper coins. Unlike wheat, these don’t spoil, decay, or rot. (yes, they do oxidize, but that’s a different conversation) If I sell enough wheat, I amass a large pile of coins and throughout the non-harvest season, I have copper coins to buy things with.
This is money’s role as a store of value. It takes the fruits of my labors – wheat – and stores it in a form that’s less subject to spoilage. Also, it’s a lot easier to carry around a pile of coins than a bale of wheat.
What does any of this have to do with new media and social media?
If you are a social media practitioner interested in earning money for your skills, you have to deeply understand money first.
First, money is a medium of exchange for other goods and services. Money doesn’t solve the value equation – that is, what you do must have value to someone. Money only makes trading value easier. If what you do is of no value to anyone, then like the farmer facing no demand for chicken, no matter how skilled you are, no one will trade with you. As a social media practitioner, your work has to have value.
The most successful social media practitioners recognize that social media in and of itself is of relatively little value. It’s a communications channel. What is of value is what you deliver to your audience. I deliver, for example, financial aid information on my Financial Aid Podcast. The fact that it’s a podcast has no inherent value; what has value is the quality of the information.
If you’re considering offering up your services to someone else as a social media practitioner, make sure that they have something of value to offer their customers, or both you and your client will fail to generate any business. Your own track record must demonstrate that you understand underlying value and how to present it in a social media context.
If you’re considering engaging the services of a social media practitioner inside your company, look to see how adept they are at understanding value. Forget how many friends they have or how often they blog – look to see if they can communicate their own value and the value of their clients’ goods and services to others. Examine their other work and see if it conveys well the value of the client’s goods and services. Most important, recognize that a truly skilled social media practitioner will decline to do business with you if your offering has no value.
Second, money as a store of value is vitally important to social media practitioners. Like all industries, social media, new media, online media, etc. all have trends. There’s a new shiny object every day, and that presents new opportunities for you to demonstrate your skills and earn some money in doing so. You have to not only capitalize on trends, but sock those earnings away. You have to be able to store the value of a trend so that when it cools – and it always does – you have a strong base of capital to operate with.
Equally important is your ability to recognize value and trends ahead of time so that as a platform matures – as blogging has – you’re ahead of the curve and in new spaces. This is the often referenced blue ocean strategy, where there’s virtually no competition in any vertical in a new area. Blue ocean was podcasting in 2005, blogging in 1997, Twitter in 2006, Facebook in 2004 and so forth. As a social media practitioner looking to earn a living at your craft, you need to be able to spot new blue oceans and move in long before others do, while recognizing that it will be some time before that space is highly desired by a large population.
For companies looking at social media, recognize that the store of value means you need operating capital and strong revenue streams today from your social media efforts, but you need to be investing for the future as well. Your internal financial health will dictate how you prioritize investing for the future vs. banking on what’s hot today.
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I’m very happy that Barack Obama won the presidency of the United States.
Here’s what I wonder. His campaign amassed millions of emails and addresses. Just his campaign for announcing Senator Biden as his Vice President brought in millions of SMS numbers. His campaign brought out millions of supporters to canvas for him, to put him in office.
I hope and wonder if he can continue to use those assets, that massive database. To keep the mailing list active as President of the United States, to text us when he needs to engage us. To drop a line on Twitter in addition to a White House Press Secretary. To podcast the radio address and blog from the Oval Office.
Most important, I wonder what an America would look like if the Obama campaign’s supporters become the Obama presidency’s volunteer corps, millions of Americans being directed and taking guidance from the White House as they were from campaign headquarters, cleaning up rivers instead of canvassing for votes, feeding the hungry at soup lines instead of voting lines.
I’m more than willing to continue hearing from President Obama on Twitter, on my phone, and in my inbox. I’m more than willing to join up and volunteer, too.
Perhaps this is the start, as Gradon Tripp put it, of a Digital New Deal. Count me in.
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The ninja clans of old were fundamentally a mix of esoteric practitioners of mind sciences mixed with samurai who were on the losing sides of battles and didn’t feel like killing themselves for their overlord’s strategic screw-ups. Many were just young kids – Daisuke Nishina, the founder of the Togakure Ryu lineage, started out life as a ninja at the ripe old age of 16, having been enlisted in an army that lost to a neighboring overlord.
As such, ninja battle strategies focused a lot on influence, stopping problems before they became problems (because you didn’t have the resources to wage all-out war), stealth, espionage, influence and persuasion from afar, using force multipliers, and above all else, an emphasis on the practical. Much of this is still transmitted in the essence of the ninja martial arts taught today by students of Hatsumi sensei’s Bujinkan method, especially those who are students of Stephen K. Hayes.
One of the timeless lessons learned very early on is this:
You will probably only get one shot.
Whatever your strategy is, whatever your goal or game plan is, the world is changing too fast. It’s a moving target. You can’t waver or hesitate, because in the time it takes you to make a decision and stick to it, you’ll get run over by your competition in business, and you’ll lose your life in battle.
Think about it for a second. If you’re facing someone else, both of you have three foot razor blades, and both of you want to go home. In all likelihood, one of you probably won’t. If you’re especially unlucky, neither will. You have just one shot, because in sword fighting, there’s not a whole lot of parrying or dueling. A sword fight between skilled swordsmen lasts a fraction of a second.
So commit. Pick one of the strategies that Chris mentioned, or one of the many other plans or strategies you’ve got out there, set out your battle plan, and then do it. Don’t walk into your office or your boss’ office in a week with completely different plans or whatever the fad of the day is, because that’s the equivalent of trying to change up as your opponent’s blade is headed for your neck. Waver, hesitate, question yourself, fail to commit, and your opponent wins, in swordfighting and in business.
Trivia: did you know there actually were ninja pirates? It’s true.
Shameless plug. If you’re in the Boston area, and want to try your hand at learning actual ninjutsu, visit:
It has become depressingly apparent that no leadership, no guidance, no inspiration will be forthcoming from any of the traditional sources in our society. Our politicians are locked in partisan bickering with each other, fighting like junkyard dogs over scraps. Our financial leaders are in a tailspin. Our heroes are largely fictional now at best.
This creates a void and sets our society adrift. There is, however, a new source of leadership, of wisdom, of inspiration.
How many of you have blogs?
Podcasts?
MySpace & Facebook accounts and groups?
Twitter accounts?
How many of you have at least 10 listeners/followers/fans?
100?
1,000?
If you have reach that exceeds 10 people, then you can step up to lead. If you have reach that exceeds 100 people, then you may be asked to lead. If you have thousands who follow you and call you a leader whether or not you feel like one, then you must, here and now, accept that mantle of leadership. You must don the cape and boots even if you feel as though they were made for someone else.
You have been called.
Here is what your followers need of you. They need not only to be pushed away, but to be pulled towards.
It’s not enough to say what to avoid; you have to provide your followers with something to do. A mission. A calling. A focus that will let them in their passion and intensity drown out the voices of panic around them so that they can generate momentum with you. Pick your cause, pick your battle, and engage your followers.
Direct them towards a mission, towards a goal, towards something that provides tangible benefit so that they can get the ball rolling in their homes, neighborhoods, and communities. Give your followers missions and tasks towards the goal you are united for, and you will help them to realign themselves away from chaos and panic towards growth, progress, and even prosperity. Ask them to give and give double what they do. Lead through example.
Despair thrives in confusion and inaction.
Despair withers under the heat and light of passion. Despair dies in the face of confident leadership.
You have the following. You have the crowd. Your community and the people who respect you need you now more than ever.
Step up.
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Early this morning, someone filed a CNN iReport (citizen generated content) saying that Apple (ticker: AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs had a massive heart attack.
Apple’s stock immediately dropped 5%.
Apple PR responded to mainstream media inquiries denying the rumor, that Jobs was perfectly fine. (hat tip to the Unofficial Apple Weblog for breaking it on Twitter first)
If you were going to short a stock, spreading a false rumor about the CEO’s health would be a great way to cause a panic, long enough to make some serious money. The brilliance of this tactic is that the rumor was done using CNN’s brand. Early “viral” messages said the report came from CNN, not CNN iReport. CNN, in other words, had their brand and credibility hijacked.
What would you do if you were Apple? What should you do?
Apple: get on Twitter. Get in the blogosphere and the new media world. You need to have a point person in the fast moving channels of citizen news to immediately knock down crap like this.
Then have your legal department file a complaint with the SEC and ask for a formal investigation.
Apple shareholders: if you lost money on Apple due to the rumor, is CNN responsible? Is CNN liable? Are they a media outlet or a content distributor. If they fall under common carrier, then who is liable besides the original rumor spreader – and are the shorts, if there were any, profiting with no liability?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Bottom line: if your company is not participating in new media, especially in news channels, you’re going to get run over. Get going.
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In a variation of a Financial Aid Podcast blog post this morning, here’s a brief economics 101 explanation of how you can monetize your blog, podcast, Twitter lifestream, or other social media outlet.
Economics 101
Supply and demand are inversely related. When demand exceeds supply, you have to pay others to take your stuff. When supply exceeds demand, other people pay you for your stuff. Value comes from demand. Here’s a simple monetization chart:
If your social media outlet is in high demand, you can get paid for it. If your social media outlet is not in high demand, you have to pay others to take your stuff. If supply and demand are in equilibrium, you’re at totally free.
This is why advertising is the main method of monetization for most social media. Your social media outlet in and of itself has very little value, sorry to say. What has value is your audience. They’re the commodity that you have to sell, and you do sell them, whether or not you want to believe you do. You can sell the actual audience in the form of renting or selling an email list, or more likely, you sell access to your audience in the form of endorsement, sponsorship, or ads. Your audience is the value to the advertiser, and in turn, your content is the value for your audience.
See the entry on the chart where it says your blog, podcast, and twitter stream? See how it’s actually in the you pay others section? It’s true. Statistically, you pay others for your content. You may say that you’re blogging for free or giving away your content, but the reality is that you’re paying others, in hosting fees, bandwidth, in domain name purchases, in your time and energy to create and market your content.
You’re paying others.
Social Media Metrics That Matter
How do you know when you’ve become a true social media success?
When everyone pays you.
Advertisers pay for access to your audience. Your audience pays for access to your content – perhaps in cash, perhaps in inbound links, perhaps in word of mouth marketing on your behalf. Major media outlets pay in time and energy to cover what you’re talking about.
Most important of all, checks arrive in the mail or by direct deposit that are sufficiently large enough for you to meet your expenses and then some. At the end of the day, whether or not you can afford to eat and put a roof over your head is the only metric that matters.
How To Monetize
How do you get there? Back to the chart.
You’re fighting an uphill battle if you think you can reduce overall supply, so you have to be a specialist, an expert in something that is in short supply. Ideally, it should be something in short supply but high demand – like insider stock tips, or financial aid information.
As I’ve said in the past, I’m not a podcaster. I’m a financial aid expert who has a podcast.
So let’s assume you’ve got basic supply solved – you’ve found a niche, a place where there’s market demand for your supply. Then it’s up to you to market your content. Marketing, as I’ve said in the past, is about sharing ideas, which is a kind and gentle way of saying marketing is creating demand for your ideas.
Marketing is the creating of demand for your supply.
The more you effectively market, the more demand there will be for your content. That in turn will drive audience growth, which you can monetize directly (audience pays) or indirectly (advertisers pay), or both.
As my friend Whitney Hoffman says, you can’t outrun Adam Smith and the laws of economics. If you’re currently being paid for social media, enjoy that you are, and realize that if your monetization model doesn’t conform to the basic laws of supply and demand, your model is not sustainable and sooner or later, the money will stop.
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Perkins.
Uno’s.
Marie Calendar’s.
Fresh Mex.
Bennigan’s.
Steak and Ale.
Who killed these brands?
Private equity. Over the past decade, private equity funds have bought up popular brands and essentially stripped them of assets by issuing debt, borrowing heavily against them, then keeping the proceeds.
Imagine dating someone, maxing out all their credit cards, keeping the cash or goods, and then dumping them.
That’s the corporate equivalent of what’s happening to a lot of brands that we know and love in America. As the bills for the debt come due, the brands and their associated companies go under.
The lesson for new media folks and social media folks is this – be VERY careful who you work with, who you allow to leverage your personal and media brand. As the economy trends ever downward, the need for our community to police itself grows ever greater. Rough times bring out rough characters. Just as there are large corporate raiders who strip companies and leave the husks of their brands on the side of the road to rot, there are equally predatory companies and individuals in every space. Do your due diligence, know what you’re getting into, read and understand EVERYTHING before you sign, and watch your back and the backs of your friends.
Watch your back.
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In the last blog post, I shared the old-school Japanese martial arts analogy of apprentice, journeyman, and master as it relates to social media. Here’s the quirk in that particular analogy: because social media as a field is new and evolving, there really can’t be any lifelong masters yet. So what’s a social media practitioner to do, and how does one become an expert?
Again, looking to the past to see into the future, there was a practice called musha shugyo, loosely translated as a warrior’s quest. Typically, after a samurai learned everything he could from a teacher, his teacher kicked him out of the school and forced the practitioner to go wandering the countryside, looking for opportunities to test his skills. The practitioner would look for warlords to serve, other schools to spar with, opportunities to put to use the skills he had learned under the tutelage of his teacher.
After the warrior quest ended, the practitioner would have a deep knowledge of their skills, tools, and contexts in which they could be helpful. The insights they gained during their years-long quests would serve to inspire them, and would eventually transform them into masters.
For social media practitioners, that’s more or less where we are. Once we’ve learned the basics of social media – blogging, podcasting, presence networks, etc. – we can pursue a few different options for our future.
Fishbowl
The most common and unfortunate option is to stay in the fishbowl, to continue talking to each other only, patting each other on the back for being cutting edge, and stagnating as we wait for the next shiny object to appear for us to flock to. In the process, we accomplish nothing and make an awful lot of noise. We fail to make any difference in the world, but think we do by talking constantly about it.
Arbitrage
Some practitioners choose the route of pursuing additional disciplines outside of social media, looking for knowledge, practices, and ideas to bring back into social media. This includes studying other forms of marketing, systems, operations, etc. so that the practices and ideas from other disciplines can be adapted to be useful in social media, something that Jay Moonah alluded to in yesterday’s blog post.
Musha Shugyo
The most productive of the practices a social media practitioner can do after learning and becoming competent at the basics is the musha shugyo, the testing period. Take the skills you have and apply them in real world contexts, for real world results. Look for opportunities to volunteer with charities, non-profits, or other organizations if your own company won’t give social media a try. Above all else, put the tools of social media to work, so you can see their power and limitations, what works, what bombs, and in what contexts each tool is appropriate.
The road to expertise, the road to mastery, is a long one, but a worthwhile journey. As social media continues to unfold and grow, the ability to do productive, useful things with the tools we have will continue to grow as well, if only we have the will to apply ourselves.
One final note. In Japanese culture, you never take the title of master – it’s culturally inappropriate. What happens, however, is that your students apply the title to you as their acknowledgement of all you have shared with them, and proudly refer to you as a master, an expert, etc.
In the West, in the 21st century, our obsession with branding and labels means that we often make bold claims we can’t back up, like social media expert, social media guru, etc. How do you know who is the real deal? Look to what their students and peers say about them, not what they say about themselves.
Ultimately, you’ll probably be the last to get the memo about being an expert. You’ll look back on your journey and see not social media, but lives saved, lives changed and improved, products and services bought and sold, brands built, communities bettered. The measurements that count most to you will likely have nothing to do with friends, followers, betas, or invitations, but with differences and positive changes made, accomplishments logged.
When you reach that point, I can only hope and work to be there by your side.
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A basic neighborhood watch is effective, but now add in the capabilities of social media, of new media to the mix. If you have several social media aware folks in your neighborhood (or you can train them easily), when you meet with your police department’s crime prevention officer (CPO, the officer assigned to instruct Neighborhood Watch programs), introduce him or her to Twitter. Get your neighbors who are Twitter-savvy to create a hashtag for your neighborhood like #54&Pine or #7Gables and have members report mildly suspicious activity there (“scruffy kid, about 5’6″ with black backpack walking around block 5th time this hour”). Show your CPO how to use Twitter Search so that real-time updates can be casually viewed at the station.
Here’s what I wonder. His campaign amassed millions of emails and addresses. Just his campaign for announcing Senator Biden as his Vice President brought in millions of SMS numbers. His campaign brought out millions of supporters to canvas for him, to put him in office.
This creates a void and sets our society adrift. There is, however, a new source of leadership, of wisdom, of inspiration.
