I’ll admit it.

Three years ago I thought Twitter was a complete waste of time. I hated it and couldn’t figure out why people were wasting so much time there.

But that’s changed.

Today I think Twitter is mostly a waste of time. Despite what all the Social Media gurus are saying about it.

Don’t believe me? Check out the trending topics. As I write this, they include: #verysexy, #notsexy, and #thatssexy. As you can imagine the thousands of tweets with those hash tags range from offensive to silly. No value, in my opinion.

Also trending are #uncleleo and #lenlesser. Mr Lesser, who played Uncle Leo on Seinfeld, just passed away. Sad. Unfortunate. But not exactly useful or actionable information.

#BluCantrell is also trending, which means that tens of thousands of people are tweeting, “Why is Blu Cantrell trending?”

So like I said, Twitter is mostly a waste of time.

But I’m on Twitter. And I check it just about every day.

Here’s how I get value from Twitter:

First, as a broadcast channel. When I post to my blog, I usually add a link in my Twitter feed. Other than Google and direct type-ins, Twitter drives more traffic to this site than any other source. Occasionally someone will retweet my links, driving even more traffic (thank you!). And, from time to time, I’ll link to other stuff I find interesting, usually things to do with branding, story, and business strategy. I don’t tweet every day, and you won’t ever read about my lunch in my timeline.

If you’re interested, you can follow my Twitter feed here.

Second, I use Twitter to find interesting and useful information. I don’t follow very many feeds. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just that I can’t possibly keep up with the stream of information produced by so many people. Nothing personal, I just don’t have the time.

So in addition to a few friends and local news feeds, I follow authors that I admire, business thinkers who impress me, and occasionally a comedian or personality I find interesting.

When someone follows me, I’ll immediately open their twitter feed and read what they’ve posted recently. If there are lots of foursquare check-ins, tweets about their Starbucks orders, or news about the latest badge they’ve earned, I don’t follow. If their tweets are protected so I can’t see them, I don’t follow. If they don’t tweet in English, I don’t follow (I wish I read Portuguese, Italian, German, and Chinese, but I don’t—and there’s not much point in reading tweets I can’t understand).

Again, it’s nothing personal. That stuff just crowds out what I’m looking for.

But if they post interesting ideas, links to articles and information that I can learn from, I’ll follow them back because it looks like they won’t waste my time.

I don’t expect anyone to follow me (even if I follow them). But if you do, I hope my tweets are useful and not just more spam filling up your timeline.

I know that many social media experts would argue that I’m using Twitter wrong. It’s a communication medium, a way to reach out and connect. And that may be true. But the 140 character limit makes real conversation nearly impossible. Others make it work. But it doesn’t work for me.

How do you use Twitter?

I recently came across an interview with David Neinimeier Hansson from Stanford’s Entrepreneurship Corner. David is one of the partners at 37 Signals and the creator of Ruby on Rails.

He shares a few of the things he has learned over his career and what he learned in business school that has no application in the business world. The first 20 minutes or so is David’s presentation, followed by about 30 minutes of Q & A.

Worth a listen if you have about an hour.

Or download the mp3 here.

A long time ago, in third grade, I think, I did a little experiment in school. The teacher passed out paper, then asked everyone in the class to draw a mark on the left side of their paper.

Then, she helped us measure about eight inches and place a second mark on the right side of the paper. She then asked us to close our right eyes and focus our left eyes on the mark on the right side of the paper.

By moving the paper closer or farther away, the mark on the left would disappear.

I had discovered my blind spot.

The mark was still on the paper, but I couldn’t see it—even though it was right in front of my eyes.

Try it for yourself.

At the right distance, the mark on the left moves into a space that your eye isn’t able to see.

…

Blind spots are everywhere.

Michael Lewis’ fantastic book, The Big Short, tells the story of bond traders who created credit default swaps out of incredibly risky mortgage holdings and yet almost no one could see the risks.

It was right there in front of everyone, but everyone was making so much money that almost no one saw what was really going on. This blind spot cost financial companies trillions of dollars and took the American economy to the brink.

(Another of Lewis’ books, Money Ball, is about blind spots in baseball management—also an excellent read).

Blind spots hold us back.

They keep us from seeing vital information.

Even though it’s right in front of us.

I like this example of a blind spot shared by Roy Williams in his Monday Morning Memo a few months ago:

My partner Peter Nevland recently bumped into the owner of a bottled water service who asked him for some free advice.

Peter asked, “Why should the customer of another water service switch to yours?”

“We’re locally owned.” “Ten percent of our profits go to charity,” blah, blah, blah.

Peter was unimpressed. 

Exasperated and grasping at straws, the man mentioned his water had recently been voted “Best Tasting” by the readers of an obscure, local business journal.

“Why do you think you won?”

The man hung his head, “We cheat.”

“How?”

“Our water is saturated with dissolved oxygen, twice the amount found in regular water.”

“What does that do?”

“Dissolved oxygen is what makes water taste good. It’s why cold water tastes better than warm water. Cold water contains more dissolved oxygen.”

“You’re saying your room temperature water tastes like cold water?”

The man nodded his head.

“Do you always saturate your water with dissolved oxygen?”

“Yes, why do you ask?”

SAD ENDING: Peter was unable to convince the man to promote his better tasting water with dissolved oxygen. I swear I’m not making this up. The man remained convinced his ads needed to say, “We’re locally owned and give ten percent of our profits to charity.”

Blind spots can keep us from telling the right story about our brands. They keep us from seeing things from our customer’s perspective. Or from our employee’s point of view. Instead, we think we need to be like everyone else.

What are you doing to identify your blind spots?

Earlier this week, Robbin at the Brains On Fire Blog, wrote about a presentation by Steve Knox, CEO of P&G’s Tremor Unit, noting that the ultimate victory in marketing is cultivating advocates for your brand. Interesting post, you can read it here.

Mr. Knox suggests that one way we create trusted advocates is through disruptive experiences. He talks about how the brain is programmed to create models of how the world operates (called schemas), then uses those models as shortcuts to help us quickly analyze and assess the world around us. As long as experiences match the expectations of the model, we don’t think much about them.

Disruptive experiences don’t fit the models and require the brain to power up and try to understand what is happening. They refocus our attention and get noticed. Which is why disruption is such a powerful branding tool.

As long as the disruption is true to the brand ideals, it stands a good chance of being noticed, processed, and talked about.

Which got me thinking about a few brand experiences that break expectations:

• The enormous bag of fries you get from Five Guys (don’t order the large unless you’ve brought several friends).

• The way you are entertained while standing in line at the Magic Kingdom (compare that to all the other lines you waste time in).

• The unexpected overnight upgrade you get from Zappos (versus waiting for days or weeks for orders from other vendors).

• The Coca-Cola Happiness Machine (free Coke—just push the button).

By creating experiences that are unexpected, they break through our models of how the world works and get noticed. And we tend to share them with our social networks.

How are you creating disruptive experiences so your customers notice and share your brand stories?

Check out the basics of the presentation, here.

I have long been a fan of Harvard Business School professor, Clayton Christensen, having read several of his books: The Innovator’s Dilemma, The Innovator’s Solution, and Seeing What’s Next as well as many of his personal essays on his website. A few days ago, Dan Pink tweeted a link to this an article from the Harvard Business Review by Dr. Christensen called, How Will You Measure Your Life?. It’s a reworking of a speech that Dr. Christensen has given in a religious setting. This particular version is directed at recent graduates from Harvard Business School. It’s excellent advice and worth reading. Here’s a sample from the article:

Allocate Your Resources

Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your life’s strategy.

I have a bunch of “businesses” that compete for these resources: I’m trying to have a rewarding relationship with my wife, raise great kids, contribute to my community, succeed in my career, contribute to my church, and so on. And I have exactly the same problem that a corporation does. I have a limited amount of time and energy and talent. How much do I devote to each of these pursuits?

Allocation choices can make your life turn out to be very different from what you intended. Sometimes that’s good: Opportunities that you never planned for emerge. But if you misinvest your resources, the outcome can be bad. As I think about my former classmates who inadvertently invested for lives of hollow unhappiness, I can’t help believing that their troubles relate right back to a short-term perspective.

When people who have a high need for achievement—and that includes all Harvard Business School graduates—have an extra half hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they’ll unconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible accomplishments. And our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’re moving forward. You ship a product, finish a design, complete a presentation, close a sale, teach a class, publish a paper, get paid, get promoted. In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.

If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification. If you look at personal lives through that lens, you’ll see the same stunning and sobering pattern: people allocating fewer and fewer resources to the things they would have once said mattered most.

The rest of the article is today’s Friday Inspiration. You can find it here.

Contrary to what Tom Peters wrote more than a decade ago, being the CEO of You, Inc., does not make you a brand.

Back then Tom encouraged everyone to think like a brand manager. How do you stand out from your competition? What makes you different? What benefits do you offer (that no one else does)?

All good questions.

But people are not brands.

Brands aspire to stand for one thing (or more correctly, brand managers aspire to associate their brands with a single idea or story). Volvo = Safety. Kodak = Memories. Nike = Achievement.

But you stand for more than one thing (I hope).

You are multi-dimensional. Depending on the role you fill, lots of things change. You may be the boss at work, a partner at home, a helper at your daughter’s school, a coach for your son’s football team, a competitor on the squash courts, and a confidant to a friend.

You can be tough or patient or funny or enthusiastic or frightened or delirious as the situation demands. You change as needed.

Brands have a tough time making that pivot. Just ask BP. Or GM.

And if people treat themselves like brands, when situations change, they can’t easily go from one position to another.

Take Tiger Woods for example.

He is a huge brand, right?

He was an incredible athlete. A devoted husband. A trustworthy spokesman.

And then we learn that maybe he wasn’t all that.

But because he is a brand—a tightly controlled image—when it’s time to pivot from incredible athlete to contrite and apologetic husband, he can’t do it.

At least, not without appearing to be insincere.

And insincerity is the death of a brand.

There’s a lot to be said about managing your career and reputation as Tom Peters recommends (I wholeheartedly agree with this advice):

“… there are four things you’ve got to measure yourself against. First, you’ve got to be a great teammate and a supportive colleague. Second, you’ve got to be an exceptional expert at something that has real value. Third, you’ve got to be a broad-gauged visionary — a leader, a teacher, a farsighted “imagineer.” Fourth, you’ve got to be a businessperson — you’ve got to be obsessed with pragmatic outcomes.”

But that doesn’t make you a brand.

You have a bigger story than that.

It was always Steve Jobs’ mantra: “Let’s make a dent in the universe”.

I liked that phrase so much, I incorporated it into theHughtrain Manifesto:

Whatever you manufacture, somebody can make it better, faster and cheaper than you.

You do not own the molecules. They are stardust. They belong to God. What you do own is your soul. Nobody can take that away from you. And it is your soul that informs the brand.

It is your soul, and the purpose and beliefs that embodies, that people will buy into.

Ergo, great branding is a spiritual exercise.

Why is your brand great? Why does your brand matter? Seriously. If you don’t know, then nobody else can- no advertiser, no buyer, and certainly no customer.

It’s not about merit. It’s about faith. Belief. Conviction. Courage.

It’s about why you’re on this planet. To make a dent in the universe.

I don’t want to know why your brand is good, or very good, or even great. I want to know why your brand is totally frickin’ amazing.

Once you tell me, I can tell the world.

Really, is there any better way to spend one’s working hours? I don’t think so…

The above was shamelessly lifted (with creative commons license) from one of Hugh Macleod‘s recent daily emails. You can subscribe here.

In 1998, I stumbled across Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto for Growth for the first time. I remember downloading it to my Palm Pilot so I could refer to it whenever I wanted to. I shared it with many of the creative people I have worked with over the years. In the time since I first discovered the manifesto, it has been posted to hundreds of websites, sometimes in very unique ways (like this and this). It has been plagiarized and satirized. But what Bruce wrote 12 years ago, is still applicable today. If you are interested in personal growth, this is a good place to start. And it’s this week’s friday inspiration:

1. Allow events to change you.
You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

2. Forget about good.
Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you’ll never have real growth.

3. Process is more important than outcome.
When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child).
Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

5. Go deep.
The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.

6. Capture accidents.
The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.

7. Study.
A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.

8. Drift.
Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.

9. Begin anywhere.
John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

10. Everyone is a leader.
Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.

11. Harvest ideas.
Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.

12. Keep moving.
The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.

13. Slow down.
Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.

14. Don’t be cool.
Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.

15. Ask stupid questions.
Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.

16. Collaborate.
The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.

17. ____________________.
Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.

18. Stay up late.
Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you’re separated from the rest of the world.

19. Work the metaphor.
Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.

20. Be careful to take risks.
Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.

21. Repeat yourself.
If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.

22. Make your own tools.
Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.

23. Stand on someone’s shoulders.
You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.

24. Avoid software.
The problem with software is that everyone has it.

25. Don’t clean your desk.
You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.

26. Don’t enter awards competitions.
Just don’t. It’s not good for you.

27. Read only left-hand pages.
Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our “noodle.”

28. Make new words.
Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.

29. Think with your mind.
Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.

30. Organization = Liberty.
Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between “creatives” and “suits” is what Leonard Cohen calls a ‘charming artifact of the past.’

31. Don’t borrow money.
Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.

32. Listen carefully.
Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.

33. Take field trips.
The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.

34. Make mistakes faster.
This isn’t my idea – I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.

35. Imitate.
Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You’ll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.

36. Scat.
When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else … but not words.

37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.

38. Explore the other edge.
Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.

39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms.
Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces – what Dr. Seuss calls “the waiting place.” Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference – the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals – but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.

40. Avoid fields.
Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.

41. Laugh.
People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I’ve become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.

42. Remember.
Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.

43. Power to the people.
Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can’t be free agents if we’re not free.

Two unrelated quotes from advertising genius Bill Bernbach:

“Human nature hasn’t changed for a billion years. It won’t even vary in the next billion years. Only the superficial things have changed. We are “concerned with unchanging man…what compulsions drive him, what instincts dominate his every action, even though his language too often camouflages what really motivates him…if you know these things about a man, you can touch him at the core of his being.”

And…

“The magic is in the product… No matter how skillful you are, you can’t invent a product advantage that doesn’t exist.  And if you do, and it’s just a gimmick, it’s going to fall apart anyway… Getting a product known isn’t the answer.  Getting it wanted is the answer.”

Something to think about…

I was at dinner last week, reminiscing with a friend when he asked me if I knew a certain person. “You remember,” he said, “he’s the kid who had the bloody eye.” I immediately knew who he was talking about. Lots of kids had bloody noses, but only one had a bloody eye.

We could have talked about “the kid who wrecked his dad’s car before he got his driver’s license” …or the “kid who kept a goldfish in his locker at school” or “the kid who had that huge afro.” Each of these descriptions (stories) is a short cut that immediately describes a particular person. There is no ambiguity. No question who the person is. There was only one who fit the description.

Consumers do the same thing when thinking of brands. In fact, creating a short cut for the consumer to remember your product is one of the primary reasons for developing a strong brand.

That’s the brand that…

Luke Sullivan, author of the excellent book, Hey Whipple, Squeeze This, defines a brand like this:

Brand = Adjective

Luke’s simple formulation demonstrates the association of a particular product with a single idea (much like Scott = kid with goldfish in locker).

Nordstrom = phenomenal customer service
Mountain Dew = Extreme refreshment
Volvo = Safety
Southwest = Low cost air travel
Papa John’s = Better pizza

And so on.

What is your brand’s thing?

What simple idea represents the core of who you are and what you do? Does it immediately help your customers remember something important about your product? And does it help you tell your brand story? Geek Squad? They’re the ones who drive black and white VWs and wear skinny black ties. Subway? They’re the ones who helped the fat guy lose more than 100 pounds eating hoagies. Fox News? They’re the ones who report the news from a right-leaning viewpoint. No other brands fit these descriptions.

If your product or service doesn’t own a particular idea, you’ve got work to do.

Successful brands need to be more like the one unforgettable kid with the bloody eye, not the dozens of forgettable kids who had nose bleeds.