Interestingness - Looking at how we use tags to describe ourselves and our audiences

I am in the middle of helping a new client build a set of words (tags) that will be used to drive our matching engine and help them match talent to tasks within their organization. In setting the tone for the challenge of picking the right words I am constantly looking for metaphors and analogies that will help them understand.

I was just reading the forward to Malcolm Gladwell's new book, What The Dog Saw, and he spoke of 'interestingness' - which reminded my of that term as it applies to images, and how Flickr has a search term: interestingness. This got me to thinking that maybe the best way to help my client understand that the best tags for their audience would be those that pass an 'interestingness' test.

In the networks that we build, we have a set of tags that are presented to each user during the profiling process. These words are considered by the user, then selected by them - each word being given a weight, or importance. The collection of selected words shown on the persons public profile and used by our matching engine to match them with others of similar interests, passions, values, experiences, skills, strengths and objectives. You might think of the tags as brand characteristics. And in this particular client's case, I am strongly suggesting that they should consider them exactly like this, as developing brand identity is something this client is very familiar with.

Which brings me back to interestingness.

When you complete an online profile, you typically are not thinking about this dimension - "What of this profile makes me more or less interesting?" Why would someone want to get to know me better as result of the tags I have selected?

If we believe that a population can be defined by the language they use (Kevin Kelly says that communication is the heart of our culture) and that language in today's' Everything 2.0 world can be distilled into a set of tags or keywords, then is it logical to conclude that you can come up with a set of tags that can be presented to an audience, and if the tags have been considered correctly, they in fact will resonate deeply with the audience and in fact describe them nearly perfectly.

Maybe.

My counsel to clients to date has been literal and encyclopedic. Give them words that make a lot of sense, that describe them in detail, that challenge them to think deeply about the choices they make, to think about how they are seen by others. Yet, today, with this notion of interestingness in play, I wonder if my counsel to them should be:

Are they interesting enough?

Using your network to find answers to those pesky day-to-day problems - three recent examples

I had occasion the past two days to reach out to my network to get quick answers to some questions. The process was so effective I thought it would be good to share, as it illustrates the power of your network.

I used two networks this week for my questions, one, LinkedIn, the other, Twitter. I have 500+ in my network on LinkedIn and another 1000+ on Twitter (yeah I know, I'm a slacker). So, it seemed like someone ought to have the answers. What was interesting was that my questions were extremely different from one another, so I need to reach a diverse set of people.

The first question: "What have you seen as an effective way to market Webinars? (Then I gave a list of what I am already doing). I posted this on LinkedIn Answers (go here to see). Once you have posted your question (note: I think it is odd that it's called Answers, when what you post are Questions), you then select people in your network to be notified that you have posted a question. 

So, in this case, I looked at all of my contacts in Marketing, selected their names and sent the question along. It was also cross-posted on the main Answers site and within 30 minutes I was getting some really good feedback. Best answer and one that I implemented immediately was Tell A Friend. I added a button on our Webinar website and will be monitoring it to see how well that goes. 

When someone answers your question, you get an email, so you don't have to keep checking LinkedIn, and you can reply directly to the person (etiquette suggests that you at least say thanks). Once you have the question answered, you can close the question, it auto-closes after a week I believe.

My second question was, "I am building a map of all of the Marketing Communication companies in the known universe - I know there are more than 2500 subsidiaries to the 8 big holding companies, does anyone have a map, graphic, listing or pointer to help me in this project?" 

I received my first answer (and the best one) within 1 minute after posting - seriously, one minute. Within an hour I had several more pointers to roughly the same information. Seems that AdAge is famous for producing a map of the big companies once a year and it just came out last month, so was fresh in everyone's mind.

Again, the network came to my aid better than Google did, as I tried and tried and couldn't get my search terminology correct and was wasting valuable time.

I thanked all of my (new) helpful friends and it was even suggested that the Map I am creating become some sort of Creative Commons shared resource, as there really isn't anything out there with the completeness I needed for this project.

Finally I had a question today about managing my TODO list and I turned to Twitter as an experiment. I posted this:

@marksylvester Struggling with massive TODO list - tried tons of tools, none really worked. What's working for you? Stickies are threatening to bury me

Within 5 minutes I was sent plenty of suggestions of ways to deal with my list, and pleas from other followers to share the answers. It was interesting also to see that people who follow me on Facebook also posted replies (comments), as my Tweets are cross-posted to my FB account.

So, what's this all mean? Your network is a great place for informal learning and in that learning an ancillary benefit is that you get to meet new people and grow your network even larger.

I gave back to the community this afternoon by posting a fix I found to a troubling problem with Snow Leopard on my Mac and my HP Scanner - seems that tons of people have this problem and all of the fixes were tragically difficult, I was able to find something simple, sweet and tweetable. 

What goes around comes around.

How are you using your network to learn - what are you teaching your network?

A Communication Framework

How well do you communicate? Here are the 6 steps I use nearly every day that help me be more effective.

Fifteen years ago I learned from Andy Blum of The Trium Group how to craft an effective communication. I can honestly say that I use this technique several times each week and it has become 'embrained' in me (note: this word comes from an email exchange between myself and @monster344 Stefan Bucher)

So, what's the secret? First, you have to want to improve your communication skills. Seeing as how everything I have been reading lately speaks to being able to communicate, with peers, employees, partners, clients, the markets - it's a part of 'being social' that we could all become better at. I thought I would share something that has helped me tremendously.

Here is the framework. You can use this on any communication, to any audience. I will give an example or two at the end.

• Context (of the communication): The overall purpose, what you are trying to acheive
• Vision (of the communication): A clear and compelling picture of the future situation you are trying to create through the communication
• Strategy: How you propose to get to your desired future state, specific tactics
• WIFY (What's in it for you, the audience): How the purpose and vision will benefit the person receiving the communication?
• WRFY (What's required from you, the audience): Specifically, what you are asking the person recieving your communication to do, to get to the goal
• Next Steps: The most immediate and specific next steps that will be taken to move toward the goal (including by whom and when)

I guarantee that if you were to outline your next letter, sales brochure, employee newsletter, speech at the Chamber of Commerce, etc and used this technique you will get kudos for your well-prepared content. This technique really performs.

Simple example.

• Context: I am really hungry, I didn't eat breakfast or lunch and it's almost 3pm
• Vision: I am thinking that a Salmon Ceaser Salad at the Harbor would be perfect right now
• Strategy: How about we finish our meeting offsite and strategize while enjoying a salad
• WIFY: You have been really helpful during this session and I want to buy lunch
• WRFY: It's a bit chilly outside, so why don't you grab your coat and tell your team you're out
• Next Steps: Let's go, I'll drive

Simple, to the point and covers everything a communication should, but let me put something a bit more business-like out there as another example:

• Context: I think that we need to have a more 'socially focused' marketing plan for 2010.
• Vision: We ought to be able to attract 5x more qualified propsects if we did this right.
• Strategy: I have 'to-do' lists from several reputable books that I have just finished that would give us a great roadmap.
• WIFY: Sales wants more qualified leads and these 'social' strategies seem to be specifically geared to helping us in this area.
• WRFY: For the next week, we are all going to talk with our existing clients, and current prospects and find out how 'social' they are. What blogs, groups, twitterati, forums they pay attention to, this will help us in our targeting.
• Next Steps: We will have a kickoff meeting this afternoon, followed by a series of workshops all week to layout an action plan to get our marketing much more social.

Notice that this was not a lengthy process, it's simple, to the point and easily communicated. In fact, looking back over it, you could almost tweet it  ;-)

I would love to hear from you about your communication tips and tricks. I can always learn a new one.