Broadcasting Brain

Personal branding discussions are making the rounds of the social media, marketing, and PR blogging circles. Some people think “personal branding” is evil, others think it’s necessary, and others still don’t care about it.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about personal branding:

Personal branding is the process whereby people and their careers are marked as brands.^[1] It has been noted that while previous self-help management techniques were about self-improvement, the personal branding concept suggests instead that success comes from self-packaging.^[2] The term is thought to have been first used and discussed in an 1997 article by Tom Peters.^[3]

You might say that your personal brand is a collection of attributes that define you as a person and make you distinct from other people.

Thing is, a lot of people don’t want to be thought of as products like cars, MP3 players, foods, cleaning products, or sports teams. It’s demeaning.

On the other hand, anyone who’s ever gone job hunting, bucked for a promotion, or tried to sell ANYTHING knows that branding, which is based on perception and reputation, is real. Perception is reality and perception is everything. On a personal level I’ve spent many, many years fighting this idea, only to be forced to recognize it over and over again.

So, if you don’t want think of yourself in terms of a box with a fancy logo, there may be another way to think about personal branding that feels a little more human.

Don’t think of yourself as a brand - think of yourself as a character in a movie, play, TV show, or novel.

Perhaps you’re a hero like Captain Kirk, Superman, Luke Skywalker, or Aragorn.

Perhaps you’re a villain like Darth Vader, a Romulan, Lex Luthor, or Sauron himself.

Maybe you have the intellect of Mr. Spock, Data, or Sherlock Holmes.

Perhaps you have the surgical skills of Bones or House… and the acerbic personalities to match?

Characters are memorable. They have have attributes: qualities good, bad, or just… interesting.

In the right situations, people will want heroes, or villains. They’ll want a general, a drill sergeant, or America’s sweetheart.

Just remember the following:

Characters are defined in part by their words, in part by their appearance, but mostly by their actions.

If you don’t have actions to back up your words, things will eventually catch up with you. IMHO, of course. But it’s also true that perception is reality for people who don’t take the time to research, learn, and find the truth. But, if you believe, like many other people, that the truth eventually does come out, then if you want to be perceived like the character of your choice, back it up with your actions. It’s better that way.

Recent posts about personal branding

I don’t care about your personal brand

EDIT: Geoff Livingston has a follow-up article about personal branding on Nov. 12/08 that’s also worth checking out

Why you need to care more about your personal brand

How do you feel about personal branding?

Can you list your personal brand attributes?

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I don’t, despite the various article and posts on the topic of late.  Two more articles about the status quo and future of blogging surfaced from both Rough Type and The Economist magazine (I commented at the latter).

I read the articles, I considered them, and I still don’t buy the idea.

Blogging changes, evolves, takes some things, jettisons others.

However, self-published digital content still lives and it will continue to live for awhile.

How about you?  What do you think?

I feel like I haven’t said “thank you” enough lately.

Sometimes it seems like saying “thank you” too often cheapens the phrase and seems fake after awhile. And yet sometimes we never say it often enough.

So, I’m saying “thank you” to everyone on this list. These people have provided various measures of support, encouragement, advice, or otherwise have been swell to me. EDIT: the list is a bit biased to people I’ve encountered on FriendFeed, so I’m trying to broaden it out a bit over time.

I’m linking to every one that I can think of. I know I must be missing a lot of people and my sincere regrets if I’ve overlooked someone.

Here’s the list. I’ve tried to link to each person’s FriendFeed account where I could. That way, you get to see all of the websites and services they use, so you can get a good look at what each person does. Otherwise, I tried to find a key or important link for each person.

EDIT: Nov. 7/08 - I’ve been added more people as I smack my forehead and say, “Damn, how could I have forgotten…?!?”

Once again, thanks!

Helen Sventitsky Dobromir Hadzhiev Akiva Moskovitz, Atul Arora

Neal “thePuck” Jansons David Cook Jay Tannenbaum

Comrade Steven Perez manuscrypts

embee edythe Gregory Lent

Roberto Bonini Mathew A. Koeneker

RAPatton Derek Coward Yolanda Trent Olson

Charlie Anzman, Vishy

BeeLing, Abby Martin, Mattb4rd, Lindsey, Mark VandenBerg

ChangeForge | Ken Stewart, Ladybug Heather, dkb Michael J. Cohen (mjc)

Susan Beebe, Shey, Alex Scoble CISSP, Stupid Blogger (aka Tina),

Bora Zivkovic, Ekin Acar, April Russo AJ Kohn

Adam Singer Mark Trapp Tanath

Mike Fruchter Rob Diana, Franklin Pettit, Phil Glockner Hutch Carpenter

Aurelius Maximus, Colin Walker, Sally Walker Julian Baldwin

Laura “Pistachio” Fitton, Chris Brogan, Ann Handley, Guy Kawasaki, Liz Strauss

Mathew Ingram, Yoni Greenbaum

Jason Falls, Kat French, Connie Reece

Louis Gray, Robert Scoble, Darren Rowse

Corvida, Sarah Perez, Wayne Sutton, Rahsheen

Jennifer Van Grove, Jeff Pulver, Jamie Grove, mousewords

Lisa Rousseau, Rowser, David Alston, Sabrina Harnish, Carman Pirie, rjleaman

Mona N., Steven Hodson, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins

Jason Kaneshiro, Adam Ostrow, Jesse Stay, Duncan Riley

Amy Guth, missrogue

Michael Martine, Sonia Simone, James Chartrand, Harrison McLeod, Naomi Dunford

MadLid, Dave Martin, SuzeMuse, DHinman, MCarvin, Homaid, Skellie

Zaibatsu, 0Boy, Tamar Weinberg, Muhammed Saleem, 1Only

Jeff Quipp, Jennifer Osbourne, Tom Tsingas, Ruud Hein, Shana Albert

Steve Spalding, Kimberly Bock, Merlene, Marifer, Pamela Weir, Martin Bowling

Brian Wallace, Jonathan Fields, decepticrat, badgergravling, meghnaK, digidave

SexySEO, SEOSmarty, Toecracker, Shannon York, FastFastLane, Barbara Doduk

CGT2099, Reem Abeidoh, SilentJay74, Maki, Nick James, Wayne Smallman

Amy Derby, Amber aka SDA, Jay Cruz, Jay White (one of my first big breaks!)

Kristen Munsen Cath Lawson Tad Chef David Harry bemyax Darrell Macrae

Brynn M Evans Caleb Elston Brian Reeder Sterling “Chip” Camden

and

Sturgeon Surgeon for being a creative and artistic inspiration for 25 years

This post is an experiment. I took comments that I left on three different blogs and tried to find some way to tie them together and see what pops out.

This blog post idea comes from one of my older posts called Ten uncanny blog post ideas - this is idea 8:

8. Find at least three of your best comments that you left on other blogs. Use them to write your own blog post. Find a way to tie the three comments together.

Blog post #1

The first comment was left on a post at the Spark blog (CBC Radio) in reference to a podcast entry by Merlin Mann of 43Folders.com who wrote about managing readers expectations when blogging:

(it would probably help if you listened to the podcast first)

Here’s my comment:

My own blogging experience suggests that Merlin’s idea of expectation setting is right on the mark. It’s like any product: Coke should always taste like Coke; hockey games should always have at least one fight (not that I condone the violence, it’s just a fact of hockey); and babies need people to change their diapers. If you change the product, some people won’t recognize it and others will despite the change.
If I ever start blogging about Coca-Cola, hockey, or diapers, I would expect my audience to vacate almost immediately. Unless, of course, I found creative ways to talk about those topics within the context of my blog.

It’s worth noting that some blogs and writers are successful at having a melange of ideas and topics, but that’s what we come to expect from them! It would be disappointing if, say, Boing Boing always talked about the same things over and over again.

However, if you can manage the expectations of an audience over time and introduce change gradually (or immediately if the readers demand it, I guess), then most will stay along for the ride and others will join up.

Great series by Merlin, looking forward to more.

Blog post #2

The next comment comes from a post at Io9.com, a blog devoted to science-fiction and fantasy. The post was called Comic books are the new stock market, talking about the collectible nature of comic books and how some are good investments:
excerpt: Where should you put your money in these uncertain financial times? Once-prudent investments in housing and the stock market no longer provide safe financial refuge for your hard-earned dollars. But some suggest that, when searching for a stable place to invest your money, you need look no further than your comic book collection.

My comment:

Alas, there’s so much quantity vs. quality with comic books that the only “sure things” are few and far between. The vast majority of the comic books published in the past two decades don’t even hold their cover value and go for pennies on the dollar. Silver and Golden Age are the only real investments with a hope and even then that could be subject to fickle fate. In 20 years even the “blue chip” comics will likely lose value as the comic book audience continues to shrink in size while gravitating to TV, movies, video games, YouTube… you name it.

Blog post #3

The third comment was left on Shel Israel’s Global Neighbourhoods blog on a post called Online Tribalism and the future of social media
exerpt: A couple of weeks back, I wrote a piece on the future of social media. It was not my best-received post. It is one of the few times that I have ever been criticized for brevity. But the issue was that I had a thought that has not fully developed, one that has been coming out in drips and drabs for several years.
The key thought is that while tools keep changing people don’t. We behave, for the most part, the same way we did when we were cave dwellers. The online tools we use today have allowed us to scale out conversations and eliminate many barriers such as geography, allowing us to build global neighborhoods whose members sometimes reside thousands of miles apart. The relevance of social media is that it allows us to interact in the world increasingly more like we behave in our own physical neighborhoods.

My comment:

The only thing that bothers me (and not that much, really) about the concept of the tribe is that it implies that there must be a leader or leaders of some kind. Difficult organizations and different cultures use different leadership models (autocratic to democratic; centralized to decentralized; individual vs. group). If we’re going to persist in maintaining the leadership concept, I’d like to see humanity evolve more to the point where members can disagree with leadership but somehow resolve those differences with less waste and hard feelings than most of us appear to be able to do these days. In other words, disagreements shouldn’t be perceived as threats to leadership.

This is going a bit off track, I guess, but those are the kinds of thoughts that pop into my mind when the term “tribe” is used.

So how do I tie this all together?

All three comments deal with human expectations and behavior:

• If the blogger deviates from the persona and presence they’ve established for their blog (or their writing in general), they risk confusing and alienating their readership (note:  hope I don’t do this too much) by defying expectations.  It’s almost like breaking a promise.  We like change, except when we don’t.  If I start writing about hockey, Coca-Cola, or diapers, I’d better have a darned good reason for it!
• People are always looking for ways to hoard value in objects that can be extracted later on.  Comic books were once seen as a way to do that.  However, during a massive supply-demand imbalance that really came to light in the 1990s when too much product was produced, comic books essentially became worthless.  Now, the only stuff that really holds value, with a few exceptions, is from the Silver and Golden Ages of comic books, which is stuff that’s normally 40 years old (or 50 or 60 or 70…), but even then the market values can range widely based on scarcity, the comic book content, the people who made the comic book, and the condition of the book.  A lot of people who hoarded comic books in plastic bags with backing boards in the 1990s now find that we can’t get our original investment back because, although the physical quality of these books is great, there’s too much supply and the content isn’t as revered as the older stuff.  In a weird way, this may have foreshadowed the mass-popularization of digital media and the amazing glut of content, paid and free, that’s out there today. The sad thing about the comic book industry, however, is that it’s (mostly) not free and there’s such an emphasis on getting the reader to buy so much content that it’s almost as unappetizing as the parts of the music industry that still want you to buy CDs.
• The “tribes” concept in social media, which is gaining a lot of attention through Seth Godin’s new book Tribes, has a lot of value in it.  One part that I’m struggling with is the perceived need for leaders and ownership.  I like the aspects of social media which focus on communication and connection.  The leadership part within social media I struggle with, in part because in a way it reminds me of the political process (timely, what?) where we often expect our leaders to do great things and think for us.  Except, of course, we know that ultimately our leaders are normal human beings with flaws and quite often they are not much more advanced when we are.  As I get deeper into Godin’s book I believe that he’s talking about a kind of leadership that’s more leadership by example, but there are other things that I’m still trying to sort about that don’t work so well for me.

So, there you go.  This was a fun experiment, trying to find common ground in three apparently different blog post comments.  Maybe you should try it sometime.  There’s nine other uncanny blog post ideas in the post as well if you’d like to try them.

Other fun references: Social media blog posts for desperate people

That might be the worst title I’ve ever written.

Anyway, Broadcasting Brain was down earlier today but it appears to be back now. My hosting company needed some time to do some work on their server.

I wrote today’s post at my old blog if you’d like to have a look there.

Actually, forget that, I’ll just bring it over as a quote. Here it is:

Creative Infrastructure, the concept used by magician Stewart James to help him develop magic routines, has three subsystems, as we discussed in the previous Broadcasting Brain post:

1. A mental and physical state that fosters creativity

2. A system for storing, retrieving, and sharing information

3. A system that encourages mentorship

Creative Infrastructure 2.0 augments the above sub-systems using social media and other Web technologies to help you collect valuable and interesting information, communications, and other contacts from around the world to help fuel your creative fires.  It can be a great step along the road to self-actualization.

Now we’ll unpack these concepts into some more detail for you to consider.

Read the rest of this entry »

Where does the information needed for creativity come from? How do you get your hands on it? And how do you make it easy to get this information? Today’s Web technologies are providing the next level of idea generation tools and environments in order to excel. We’re going to start looking at something that I’m going to refer to as Creative Infrastructure 2.0, inspired by the work of magician Stewart James.  Climb Maslow’s hierarchy!

Image by jderuna

There is no shortage of demand for great ideas

Unless you intend to survive off the stories that reverberate through the echo chambers of the blogosphere, you’re going to need help and inspiration.

If you want to create good creative content you’re going to need to find new material, new ideas, and innovative ways to combine facts and thoughts into meaningful output on a regular basis. New ideas, unknown facts, and the ability to connect these things together are crucial to the content creation process.

Note: talent and skill are crucial, too, but they can be improved over time.

Using magic to create ideas or ideas to create magic

We can look at professional magic as a possible model for the process of generating ideas. One of the most interesting books that I’ve read on creativity and idea creation is Advantage Play by magician David Ben. Ben uses techniques of magic (illusion, slight of hand, etc.) to try and provide inspiration to business leaders in his book. He spends a significant amount of time on idea creation by focusing on the methods used by one of his mentors, Stewart James. Ben gives us an idea of the incredibly productive methods used by James to come up with magic tricks:

Stewart was the most prolific inventor of magic in the twentieth century. Where most magicians invent a handful of magic routines during the course of their lives, Stewart created over one thousand. His prodigious output has been recorded in two massive publications totaling over 2,700 pages.

Put another way, imagine creating over 1,000 astonishing posts, articles, images, podcasts, or video blogs. Or, considering how science and technology have advanced over the years, consider an output of 5,000 pieces of content. Or how about ten thousand?

Creative infrastructure

Stewart James used a concept that called Creative Infrastructure to help himself create magic routines.

David Ben refers to creative infrastructure as:

… an organized repository of personal and professional resources that creates an inventory of experience from which one can generate ideas and evaluate options.

Creative infrastructure includes at least three complimentary sub-systems:

1. A mental and physical state that fosters creativity
2. A system for storing, retrieving, and sharing information
3. A system that encourages mentorship

Stewart James died in 1996, just as the Internet and the World Wide Web were starting to become ubiquitous and affordable. In his day, his creative infrastructure was limited by:

• cruder, weaker methods of communication
• a lack of automation
• a much smaller amount of free, easily accessible information than we enjoy today

Nonetheless, James created a huge amount of work with what he had. He was probably one of the greatest creative geniuses of his time.

We have the potential to tap into a much greater collection of information, storage, and communication capabilities than James may ever have imagined. Creative Infrastructure 2.0, powered by the Web, can help you do amazing things and self-actualize in ways that our ancestors could not conceive.

More on this in the next post (which you can find here).

Stay tuned and don’t forget to subscribe by RSS reader or E-Mail updates (assuming you haven’t already) so you won’t miss what comes next.

Happy Halloween, Samhain Eve, or whatever you celebrate!

CBC Radio’s Spark, hosted by Nora Young, interviewed Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and it’s really good. An edited interview aired in May 2008 but the full interview can be downloaded here in MP3 format.

Shirky describes his cognitive surplus concept in more detail. Put it this way: if you look at the millions and billions of hours of television watching time and could take a fraction of that to some good, interesting, or worthwhile work, you could do some amazing things.

Previous generations never had the benefit of a cognitive surplus, which comes from having more leisure time. They were too busy working to live.

If human brains were better at performing background tasks like the SETI data processing initiative, where your PC can be used to help crunch some of the data, I’d say this concept could really go a long way. It appears that we need things like:

• Wikipedia
• Project Guttenberg

where a lot of effort goes into building a work environment and dividing work up into smaller chunks, to really take advantage of this.

Awesome concept, though.

Image by nightthree

Writing continues to transform into a rapid-fire burst of characters that spew out without filters or second thoughts. Get it out, include a link or two and BAM! Your words are on the Web faster than a thundering Emeril (don’t click on this; it’s kind of dumb).

Is this the future of writing?

Fifteen bloody rewrites? Are you a loony?

One thing that stuck in my mind after listening to a recent John Cleese podcast was the idea of drafts or versions of a document. He mentioned doing fifteen (!) drafts on a script. The number of drafts that the episodes of Fawlty Towers that he and Connie Booth went through for each episode is legendary.

In all seriousness, can you ever imagine yourself writing FIFTEEN drafts of a document (unless, of course, you are a professional writer)?

Can you imagine washing your car fifteen times in a row? Making your bed?

Cooking a meal?

OK, bad examples, but do you know what I mean?

Professional writer AND blogger - contrast

Andrew Sullivan, author of The Daily Dish, is a prolific blogger who focuses on short, focused posts including links and quotes to other web pages. I don’t know how much time his average post takes to write, but it doesn’t seem that it would take a long time. These are likely one-draft posts. Blog and go. Apparently they are only 20 minutes apart at times.

By contrast, Sullivan recently provided a well-crafted and thoughtful article about why he blogs. How many drafts did it take him to write that, I wonder?

[Note: podcast with Andrew Sullivan discussing this article is here - MY POST CONTINUES AFTER THE VIDEO]

It takes a village of rewrites to grow a battlestar

Meanwhile, from the Colonial podcast zone, I get the impression that virtually every single episode of the new Battlestar Galactica went through no less than ten drafts, not including scads of minor changes that occurred during filming and editing. Granted, the process of developing screenplays is much, much different than standard documents, mainly because you have to deal with changes that occur when you finally see what your creation looks like in three dimensions.

But still. That is a whole lot of writing.

That’s too complicated for me to write - how about a blog post instead? OR A TXT MSG FTW!

QUESTION: if more and more people keep blogging short bursts of prose on a continual basis, are we gradually going to lose the ability to do the research, analysis, and deep thinking to write traditional long form prose?  [EDIT:  are we losing the knack for revising, proofing, and editing documents into world-class material?  Or are we dealing with a new generation of content creators who don't appreciate the need to EDIT?]

What do you think?