Fickle Findability

Yesterday my friend Sherry asked me if I would be interested in leading some discussions on personal branding at SoCon08.  Of course I was delighted and flattered, but it occurred to me that it might be useful to offer up a few thoughts to set the stage for the conversation:  What I wish to assert is that personal branding is something other than self promotion.  I don’t mean to be coy.  Certainly an increase in visibility is a likely byproduct of personal branding.  In fact, for many it is a highly desired outcome.  As a business person, I count myself in that number. However, the part that I find really interesting is the fact that it is getting harder to be invisible.   We don’t need to act like P.T. Barnum to be findable – findability is happening to us, and a little more each day. Being findable is not the same concept as being popular.  Many of the attendees at SoCon08 will be people who have embraced the idea of being findable, when popularity was never an overt goal. Being findable is part of how they build community, it flows from their desire to have and share a voice with those who would find that voice of interest.  Vlog, blog, or podcast, link profiles, or tweet@twitter and you are actively enabling your own findability, but it is happening passively too.  You shop online and leave a vendor a comment,  you’re spotted on YouTube by someone’s phone-cam while attending a conference, someone tags you and puts your picture on Flickr, or maybe a customer mentions you in her blog – you didn’t intend it, but you just got a little more findable.  Promotion, as I see it, is about trying to accelerate and control the findability, but the control is an illusion. (You might hang on to the bull for the whole 8 seconds, but are you really in control?) Personal branding is about choosing to participate, choosing consciously to add your voice to a chorus that may already be out there.  A chorus that is probably easier to find than any platform of your own.  So will you be in harmony?  Can you influence the chorus?  This I hope is an interesting place to start a conversation about personal branding.

Wrapping up that little art show

Well if you missed the opening reception, you can come to the closing. After a month on exhibit at the ASODA Gallery, my show will soon be coming down. If you missed the opening on that rainy Friday night between the holidays, then why not come out this Friday evening, January 25th, for the first Castleberry Hill Art Stroll of 2008 so you can stop by the ASODA Gallery (that’s Atlanta Studio of Design and Art), 238 Walker St. #18, and visit (or revisit) the eclectic mix of paintings by yours truly, David Cohen.

For more info about the Art Stroll, check out the Castleberry Hill neighborhood website. If you haven’t been, it is a fun way to spend an evening – lots of galleries, restaurant, bars and boutiques to explore.

I hope to see you there! Happy Holidays!

David Cohen at ASODA Gallery
Opening Friday, January 25, 2008

238 Walker St. #18
7pm – 10pm

Castleberry Hill Art Stroll
castleberryhill.org

Thanks again to Katrena Griggs for inviting me to show at ASODA!

Social Media is Already Inside Your Organization…

….you just might not know it. Sherry Heyl writes an insightful post, Social Media Affects Every Department Within Your Organization, which points to the ever-broadening reach of social media and its power as a resource for all disciplines within the modern corporation. I think this is an important observation, but the post also implies an issue that I think should be stated overtly: the social media contagion has already infiltrated your organization. Chances are, even in the most buttoned-down and security conscious corporate culture, that social media is gaining a foothold. Why? Because the vector for this infection is people. People recognizing the power of communication on their own terms, people increasingly aligning themselves to transparency and authenticity in their choice of community. People like the Generation Ys/Millennials who have made distributed communication their natural mode of interaction. You can try to shutdown the blogs, vlogs and podcasts, you can ban the IP addresses of every wiki, but you can’t change the fact that every day the people you hire, the people who are already in your organization, are becoming acclimated to a new set of communication tools and are hitting the reset button on their cultural expectations for integrity, immediacy and empowerment. I think the call for smart companies is to embrace this new connected, community-oriented, and empowered corporate citizen and do what is necessary to learn from the best of their skills, to nurture environments that will attract and retain the top talents, the most effective distributed thinkers. The challenge will be to adjust the top-down management styles and to educate this new employee on the ethics of corporate communication in a world where information is permanent.

You Can, SoCon

Just wanted to throw in a plug for a great conference coming up here in Atlanta:  SoCon08 February 8 – 9, 2008.  I attended SoCon07 and thought it was an awesome opportunity to meet progressive and innovative people shaping the social media landscape.  The “unconference” format attracted a broad array of practitioners, pundits, purists, theorists, and beginners to dialog on blogging, vlogging, virtual worlds, podcasting, and design for a connected world.  This year I would anticipate that the conversations will also include Enterprise 2.0 – issues surrounding the impact of social media technologies and culture on the corporate landscape, as well as plenty of discussions of best practices, anecdotes and lots of smart, community-oriented people to discuss them with.  I hope to see you there, but hurry registration is filling up fast.

Dark feathers, bright ideas

Last night we had the first meeting of our new book club, and I thought it was a terrific success.  We had chosen The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb  for our first read and the general consensus of the group was that it was a particularly meaty choice for an inaugural meeting, but the conversation certainly didn’t suffer for it. Taleb is definitely an ornery individual and not afraid to debunk conventional wisdom. The book can be a little tough to get through, in part because Taleb deliberately jumps from one stylistic approach to another, but I highly recommend it nonetheless. The central theme is that truly random events are unforeseen, unplanned-for, and they can and do occur, sometimes with tremendous impact. When they have this last attribute of tremendous impact, be it positive or negative (think plane crash vs. finding out that the painting in your grandmother’s attic is a Picasso),  then the author dubs them “Black Swans”.   This book is in part a warning, but I don’t think the author’s purpose is to keep us looking over our shoulders or otherwise acting with paranoia.  I think the takeaways are think for yourself, be skeptical of experts, and be humble: you and the experts may owe a greater debt to luck than you may realize.  I don’t spend a lot of time trading stocks so I won’t opine on the author’s “barbell strategy” for investment, but as an entrepreneur I was intrigued by the concept of aligning yourself with opportunities that can benefit from positive black swans, but are more resilient to negative black swans.  I interpret this as be nimble in your thinking and flexible in your tactics, which aligns well with launching a business.  I also thought Taleb did a great job of reminding us that we need to not ignore the consequence of outlying events even if (especially if) the event is not a black swan and, in fact, does fit within our statistical model.  Hence the example that I loved: don’t try to wade across a river whose average depth is 4ft.  The deviations in depths are accounted for, but easily glossed over in theory, yet they can drown you in practice.