Young and Brilliant

Photo from Julia Mancuso’s Facebook.

I was slightly amused by the media this past Olympics. It was interesting to me. For several years now, Lindsey Vonn has spoken about her desire to be the “next Picabo Street,” to be the American woman ski racer. To that end, Lindsey has spent lots of time perfecting her image, refining her message, and generally allowing herself to be the center of the five-ring circus that is the Olympics. This sort of messaging is familiar and comfortable to the media: they know how to do interviews. They know how to construct stories and images around an athlete, an athlete that’s undergone media coaching, whose agent or PR person has sit down and constructed a story and image… It’s really not that different from dealing with traditional branding.

On the other hand, there’s athletes like Julia Mancuso. I love Julia. She’s done nothing but focus on having a good time and skiing well, and in turn, that focus has allowed her to win. But, her focus also means that she hasn’t spent a lot of time building her brand or media presence. Instead, Julia has been an avid user of Facebook and Twitter, using these tools to communicate with friends and family. When Julia uses these tools, she sounds like she’s talking to her friends, not the media. And, these facts, combined with her bubbly personality, the fact that she is the most medalled woman skier in US history (yes, even more than Lindsey - she won her gold in ’06 in GS, and two silvers here in Vancouver) and her interesting background (Julia lives in Maui!) have allowed Julia’s reputation to grow in a natural way. Julia has an image, but it wasn’t based on some set of things she wanted to communicate about herself. Julia’s brand is an emergent brand. And while some people are fascinated by this, the media just doesn’t know what to do about it. They quote Julia from her Twitter while complaining that she didn’t go through the media tent after her runs (says Wired: “After her first run of the GS, Mancuso didn’t come through the mixed zone. (Incidentally, this is a big no-no for athletes, who are supposed to have to come by the press, but what are you going to do?) … But about 30 minutes after her run ended, Mancuso posted on Twitter.”), they try to shadow her by Lindsey’s presence. It’s funny to watch Julia too - she doesn’t understand why the media can’t handle her. She told Sports Illustrated, “Why does the media have to have just one star? … It seems like a popularity contest.”

While the media is busy trying to figure out how to deal with Julia and Lindsey’s failure relative to expectations (you can see my view about this on my Society page), there’s another interesting trend. The younger generation is just not watching the Olympics. They’ve moved over to the world of action sports (OK, so they may have watched Shaun White win his gold in the Olympics). At an event like X Games, instead of shuffling competitors through media tents, they’ve first got to walk through the fans - the fans are front and center. Not all these athletes tweet and blog, but their sports are organized throughout to be more approachable to fans: summer camps and promotion events, competitions, and even action sports media. Media focused around action sports tend to encompass a broader range: it’s not just shots of them competing, but shots of them partying, traveling, and training. The athletes are in control of their development as a brand, in conjunction with (not controlled by) their sponsors. The focus is around the athlete as a person, not just a brand. This interaction forces them to be more transparent, and thus, more emergent. Their brand isn’t just what they say it is, but also what the fans say it is, too.

So why are kids attracted to this? Sure, it’s been painted as a “cool” thing to do, but I think there’s something deeper here. Even if you’re not a huge participant in one of these sports, it’s still possible to feel like a fan. These emergent brands feel authentic to the fans, they feel like they know something about these athletes that’s unique and personal. I’d say that it’s akin to being a fan of an indie band: the thrill of discovering something new and cool that no one else knows about, and being able to talk about it with authority. Ten years ago, there was a sense of shock and awe at all these crazy sports in the Olympics - man, have you ever heard of curling?! Can you believe that crazy downhill course the skiers are on!? Now, the power to follow these sports is just a Google search away, and it doesn’t feel that out there. If we want to engage the next generation in the Olympics, we’ve got to give them room to feel like an authentic fan of these sports and athletes. And while the media and misguided Olympians might focus on deriving an image and distributing that image through as many articles, interviews and TV segments they can, others will reach out directly to the fans, and make them feel like they really know what’s going on.

Oh, and speaking of emergent behaviors, dang! - those Canadians are really fans of the stadium-wide wave.

Lastly, a quick thank you to Michael Spencer of Ego Sports Management for helping to develop these thoughts; he is one of the smartest people involved in action and Olympic sports.

As a sort of super-readings, I’m presenting you all with a complete list of books that I read in 2009. I’ve been working on this for a couple weeks, it’s taken me longer to get together my comments and whatnot than I thought it would, so I apologize for that. Enjoy.

Read More

My notes from TED, session 1. Click on the photos to get to the flickr page. (For those of you who don’t know, then you can click on “All Sizes” to get to a larger size). See all the notes here.

It seems like everyone and their mother was a little underwhelmed by the iPad. I’m in the same boat, but something in particular was really gnawing at me. Something that indicated Apple seemed to be losing touch with the audience, losing that magic intuition for what people need and want. Windows.

Not windows in the sense of Windows, Microsoft, etc. but windows, as in overlapping, tiling, click and drag, close and resize, etc. More than anything, that’s what I wanted to see on the iPad. After the ‘ghee whizz!’ of being able to surf the web on my iPhone, I found that I barely ever used it for surfing the web. Ok, so I was refreshing Engadget like all the other Mac fanboys earlier today, and I look up movie reviews or restaurant numbers, but other than that, I don’t really use it as a content browsing machine. The biggest issue is that so much of the content I find worthwhile ends up here, on this blog, or bookmarked and saved for later, or at least saved to my list of “Things I’ve Read.”

I was about to resign to the old, “This isn’t aimed at me,” “I’m a power user,” justification, but then I stopped and thought about it for a minute. Is that really true?

The classical desktop metaphor spawned the idea of “paper” lying on a desktop - the original idea was that these windows could be shuffled, and like the edge of a piece of paper peeking out from under a pile, we could pull those “papers” to the front. This is an interesting metaphor, and one that was very successful in getting the masses “used” to using a computer.

But as the years have gone by, I think it’s impacted our work flow. Certainly, as I wrote this, I jumped around to look up the windows (computing) page on Wikipedia, jumped around a couple of those pages, opened up a few of those sources, and then hopped on to a Google search, before switching back over here. Whoops, let me go hop back to Wikipedia to get you guys a link to that… Part of the wealth of the web is the ability to quickly hop around and educate yourself in a ten minute stretch about something you previously knew nothing about. And you can leave what you were doing open and waiting for you. Sure, Nicholas Carr blames this all on Google and wonders if it’s making us stupid and psychology professors freakout about our multitasking brains (see: Gary Small, Clifford Nass), but the fact remains, this is something people are choosing to do. Steve Jobs surfing the web on the iPad was not how I surf the web. There’s less of linearly hopping about the NYT, and more rabid Levy flights - I find myself opening five of those articles on the front page, letting them load, and skimming them before finding one interesting enough to read.

But enough about me. Is this how other people use the web? I suspect so, though I don’t know. But what I can say is that for the majority of people, the web has gotten a lot more social. What does this have to do with the iPad? Well, essentially, people might not be hopping between web articles or trying to post it to Tumblr, but they’re certainly flipping between the content they consume and Facebook (apparently, a more popular medium than email). Even something simple that we don’t really think about is IM: I always have Adium open, and I suspect that’s true of a lot of young people. Check out this Pew Internet Report from 2004 that says 46% of internet users use IM. Forty-six. In 2004, no less. And what about iWork for iPad? When was the last time you made a slide show without importing statistics, quotes or images from the web?

And that’s when it hit me: the overlapping windows thing, it’s less about me, and more about an effect of computing: it’s all networked together. That email I send has to do with the IM conversation I’m having, which is turning towards the webpage I just clicked on, which I found on my Twitter client, that just compelled me to change the song I’m listening to… Apple made the decision to make a machine that is a great multimedia device. A beautiful screen that let’s you focus on what you’re looking at, without all the other “distractions.” But those “distractions” are part of the modern day viewing experience. And while Steve is leisurely strolling through the NYT, clicking page by page, keeping his audience holding their breadth as the page loads (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 seconds of staring at a white page), all the Apple fanboys were surely furiously clicking “refresh” on Engadget while flipping back and forth to Twitter and IM.

Oh, and did I mention the thing doesn’t even do Flash?

I was listening to a friend tell me how, for Christmas, he had bought a Kindle for his father. His father was an avid reader, and traveled a lot, which seems like a pretty ideal user for the Kindle. His dad decided that he wasn’t likely to use a Kindle, and chose to return it. The story struck me because this is the same reaction from friends I had tried to get Kindles for, and when I asked people whether they were thinking of getting a Kindle - “I just don’t think I’ll like the feel of the pages,” “I just find it a little annoying to use.”

I initially wasn’t incredibly excited about my Kindle, but after trudging through the first half of the book I was reading on it, I found myself really excited about the Kindle, and really into the fact that I could get all my books on such a tiny machine, and instantly get new ones. I’ve often told people, if they just got through one book, they might find that they actually like the Kindle. A lot of it involves acclimating our expectations of what our reading experience is like.

Which leads me to another idea: Why isn’t Amazon creating 14-day rentals for the Kindle? It seems like a lot of people would be way more willing to rent a Kindle for a while to try it out. Plus, with a time period of 14 days, people could take the machine on vacation. And that’s not a bad proposition - borrow this machine for two weeks, take however many books you want to take and get more instantly when you get there. If I were traveling, even if I didn’t think I would want to use the Kindle regularly, that’s an offer that might be worth considering (Amazon could even subsidize the price of the books bought on rental machines somehow).

Many people who are avid readers may have had the chance to play with a Kindle for a couple minutes, but I know that at least for me, it took reading half a book to get used to the basic features of the Kindle. I’m still figuring out how to make more advanced features work for me. I remember always having to flip back to the page I was reading because I’d press the ‘next page’ button too quickly, a relic of reaching over preemptively to the page’s edge to get ready to flip it. A rental program like this is easy because renters can say to themselves, “I can put up with this machine for a week or two,” and hopefully that would be a gateway to acclimating to using the machine.

In terms of logistics, the biggest problem would be in figuring out if it works economically. The machines could be recirculated throughout all the renters, which means that the rented Kindles could even have specialty software on them that helps Amazon subsidize the price of or deal with ownership issues of these ‘rented’ books.

If Amazon believes in their product, they should be willing to take a bet on the fact that if people get it into their hands, they’ll like it.

“The power of influence is ever present in this discussion, which is what social media tools add to viral marketing. The crowd mentality is heavier within a social-media community, which makes it easier for viral marketing to do its job. Honestly, it seems like marketing through social media is the new form of viral marketing. That’s the wave of the future in marketing, a new and improved marketing platform.” - Organized Chaos: Viral Marketing, Meet Social Media by Curtis Silver

The power of social media for viral marketing seems to be the “it-statement” these days. We trumpet the power of the hot combination of social media and viral marketing, trumpet something about creating content that doesn’t suck, and then go about tweaking and refining our metrics and viral loops.

Woo-freaking-hoo. Thank you captain obvious.

In our rush to start virally marketing our wares and messages, I think we’ve overrun one crucial step. We’ve started to refine our implementation without solidifying the theory. For all we know, we might be like the astronomers, refining and refining equations describing the planet’s movements around the earth and then, wait, oh shit, nevermind, the earth’s not the center of the universe afterall. So, if we were going to take a step back and look at the theory, where would we start?

I think it all starts with augmented intelligence. Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse, was preoccupied with this idea. While computers and Google have opened up an entire new world for us, social media has also grown into this tool of augmented intelligence – augmented social intelligence. Social media has allowed us to develop a new view of our social landscape - instead of being on the ground floor, we’ve gone to the top of the building. Newsfeeds, Tumblr dashboards, Twitter lists and other streaming tools help us get a general view of the conversations going on around us. And, individuals can regularly and easily communicate ideas to tons of friends at once. Our messages and thoughts can be broadcasted more aggressively (this is precisely what makes social media so enticing to marketers). And now that we’ve had this fundamental shift in social circumstances, we need to ask what the basic impact shift is having on us: How has this augmented social intelligence changed and inflicted our behavior pattern?

As we become more intertwined with our tools, it’s impossible to separate our social interactions from these social tools, which means that these tools are increasingly important for viral marketers to understand.

When I play the role of design researcher, these are the types of questions I ask myself. To do this, I usually choose to narrow down this broader question into more focused questions that can help me construct an answer. Here’s my jumping off point:

What are the social media networks, tools, and apps that we use? How do we use them?
Why do we use social media? What advantages do we perceive?
How does this new type of interaction make us feel?
How do we choose to portray ourselves in social media?
How do we use social media to augment our interactions in real life?
How do we use social media to create a shared cultural narrative?
Has our “standard” for messages we distribute changed? If so, how, and why?
How much importance do we assign our friend’s “messages”?
What are the ramifications of the new tidal wave of relevant information available to us?

Housekeeping: I turned on answers for this post, but anyone not using Tumblr should also feel free to give me feedback in the comments. Thanks!
Also, a huge thanks to Doug for helping me formulate my thoughts into this post! (:

After the post a couple of weeks ago on Trusting Process, a furious debate ensued between myself, Crazy Nut Job, MJ Hoy, and Ben Kraal (all of who have fantastic Tumblrs, by the way!). After that conversation, I decided that it might be time to talk a little bit about goal-setting.

As many of you know, when I was in high school, I was a competitive skier. During this time, I studied goal-setting fairly extensively, reading into the psychological literature, trying to understand how I should set my goals. I combined what I read with the strategies that actually worked for me - you will find there’s lots of contradictory literature and opinions on the subject. Combining my more “academic” and hands-on experience, I have a well-formulated view on goal-setting that I’m going to share with you today.

Ok, so now, all of that aside, let’s get into it.

What is goal-setting?

Goal-setting is an attempt to answer the following questions, depending on the type of goal you set:

• What do I hope to achieve? Goals are really all about what you want to achieve. Whether that achievement be an outcome or an action, however you state the goal, you need to have an idea of what you want to achieve.
• Why am I doing what I am doing? If a goal doesn’t explicitly state what you are going to do, it should state instead why you are doing what you are doing, in the form of an outcome you would like to achieve. Then, every action should be a step closer to bringing about the outcome you want to achieve.
• What am I going to do? Whatever goal you set should either mandate what you are going to do as part of the goal, or provide a clear set of criteria by which to decide this (this being an interaction of what you hope to achieve or why you are doing it).

There are two main types of goals: Short-term and long-term goals. I’ll be focusing mostly on short-term goals, but I will take a second to write on long-term goals.


Why is goal-setting important?

So, first thing’s first. Goal-setting is essentially a problem statement. It forces you to evaluate the current state of things, attempt to understand where gaps exist between how you would like the world to be, and the way it is right now. Once you’ve identified that, coming up with specific solutions (actions) that one can take to bridge that gap becomes the goal. And, similar to a problem statement, goals should be carefully thought out and worded.

Goal-setting is generally spoken of for its amazing performance benefits - by creating a goal, we find ourselves closer and closer to bridging that gap between what we wish and how it is. In addition, goal-setting informs our actions, meaning, that goal-setting dictates the actions we do and why we do them. Lastly, goal-setting becomes a frame of reference for our thoughts. We now can evaluate ourselves against our goals, evaluate the world against these goals.

Lastly, I’ll add as a caveat that sometimes, we don’t even need goals. Letting ourselves explore and play a little can often lead us to a better understanding of our own motivations, that then leads to better goals, and often, better outcomes. I’m a big believer in intuition, and if you feel like you want to do something aimlessly, you can learn a lot. That was the way I originally learned to use Photoshop and Illustrator. I didn’t have a goal, I just aimlessly played around and saw what I could do. For many people, not being under the pressure to set a goal, and instead being driven by curiosity, can actually cause them to set a goal subconsciously (and these subconscious goals often follow a good framework).


What makes a good goal?

That all sounds wonderful, but the only real problem is, goals are actually really hard to set, particularly in the short-term. Most people believe that you can simply state what you want - “Higher sales for the third quarter” - and call that a goal. I’m here to say, sorry guys, it doesn’t really work that way. 

The key to understanding what makes a good goal is to accept one uncomfortable remark.

You cannot control outcomes.

At some point, an outcome becomes about luck. Suppose you decide that you want to beat a competitor. Even if you did every single thing you could possibly do, and do it all well, that is no indication of whether you achieve your goal or not.  Your competitor could unexpectedly become much better, much faster, or could benefit from a well-timed wind burst or better course conditions. You could suffer from injury, suffer from bad course conditions, etc. Although these seem like they’re dramatic, they do bring to the spotlight the central truth: you cannot control your competitor, you cannot control the environment around you. What you can do, is control what actions you take to achieve that outcome.

So, instead of focusing on that outcome, I believe you should make a goal based on process instead. Process means, you should focus on the things you can do, the actions you can take to make that outcome more likely. No amount of focusing on the outcome will magically make it happen. No matter how hard you stare at a clock, you cannot make it speed up or slow down.
Actually, these things can hurt you: by focusing your attention elsewhere, it reduces the effectiveness of your actions and thoughts. It can lead to frustration and stress. In skiing, focus on going “faster” for many people led them to make stupid mistakes, lose the finesse in their skiing, and ultimately go slower.

Start by paying attention to the gaps you see, the things you’d like to outcomes you’d like to bring about. Be careful of the breadth of your outcome - it shouldn’t include a “teaser” to the type of action that would achieve it. For example, “Increasing [accounting] profit” is a better goal than “Reduce costs,” “Increase revenue,” or “Increase sales.” Increasing profits is the end outcome I’m hoping for, but reducing costs, increasing revenue or increasing sales are all actions that I can take to achieve that outcome. From there, you can then look at the full scope of options you have - increasing revenue or decreasing costs - and have a much larger set of actions available to you.

Remember, when you set your goal, the golden rule is: 

Goals should focus on process, not outcomes.


How do I decide on metrics for evaluation?

Metrics is one of those hot things right now in the start up world. Everyone is always talking about how you should be using metrics to evaluate your progress.

But I’m not so warm to the idea.

Using metrics is, as always, dangerous. Our initial goals can be muscled out by the goal of achieving better metrics. Read that sentence again, folks: Our initial (process) goals can be muscled out by the (outcome) goal of achieving better metrics. All that work that you just spent on formulating the perfect process goal has become a waste. Be aware that oftentimes, what you measure becomes what you optimize, so always always always pick your metrics wisely. If you measure traffic information, you may find your website getting lots of visitors, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get more sales. Your process could actually be the best thing for you to be doing at the time, but the metrics may not reflect that due to external circumstances.

Measure what matters.

And, be careful of how much attention you pay to metrics. Do not sit there and stare at the clock, as I mentioned above. Use the metrics to establish the validity of your own process goal - if you are achieving your process goal, but your outcome/metrics aren’t improving, then it may be time to consider a different process goal. However, use common sense. If your metrics are sucking, do a quick check on external sources that may be affecting the metrics. Imagine for a second that you make MMO games. If your users drop, it could be for any number of external reasons: It’s Thanksgiving, so folks are visiting family. Another game company has just released their game, and people are checking it out. Your servers are lagging, so people got frustrated and stop playing. Depending on their permanency, you might have to deal with these problems in separate plans of action. Similarly, be careful of establishing false positives, either. Players go up? Maybe it’s not because of your viral marketing campaign, but rather, a magazine covered your game recently. Play-time increase? Might not be your awesome new feature, but rather that summer holidays just started.

What is a good long-term goal?

A long-term goal, of course, is a different thing all together. A long term goal becomes a mission statement, a dream, a wish. Make sure that your long-term goal is an act of passion, above and beyond all else. A long-term goal is a purpose, something that we spend much of our days attempting to achieve, however removed we are from that in our day-to-day work.

Another way to understand the longer term goal is, generally, that gap which we identified and wanted to bridge. Proper goal-setting should include a long-term goal, but shouldn’t focus on that long-term goal. Instead, focus on your short-term, immediately actionable goals in order to achieve that long-term goal.

Sitting around, thinking about how you want to make the Olympics isn’t going to help you make the Olympics. Instead, you might decide you need to make the Junior Olympics first. But thinking about that isn’t going to work either, it’s still too broad. So you might say you want to get your time under a certain number. But that’s just the bridge you want to gap - you’ll have to focus on specific parts of your technique, mental game, or fitness in order to bring that time down. Those are the action goals that should occupy much of your time. Set your “actionable” goals instead, and make sure that each smaller goal is working up to your long-term goal.