It is interesting how Apple’s brand has become synonymous with the personality of Steve Jobs. Like it or hate it, this makes Apple as a brand very rich and real.

It is also interesting how it is often in times of difficulty that the true beliefs and values of a person/brand are revealed. And without a doubt Apple is in some difficulties at the moment around the iPhone 4 Antenna Gate issue, given their public responses to it and the responses to those in turn.

Apple as a brand has absolute integrity! They have always behaved congruently with who they are (and who Steve Jobs is). They act consistently with their values and beliefs – the beliefs about their place in the world, their customers and their competition.

Sure, some people like myself may dislike their attitude and values towards the handling of product build failures and customer care; the denials, blame shifting, and excommunication of anyone who dare complain. But none of this actually matters from a brand relationship perspective!

When a brand (or a person) has clear integrity, they become a powerful entity around which strong, and very often highly emotive, relationships can be built. It is in our nature to be drawn to real personalities, as opposed to the shallow shadow puppets manufactured by brand agencies and PR firms.

The Apple fans will continue to offer up their unquestioningly cult-like loyalty, where all PR is from the mouth of God. The detractors will continue to celebrate gleefully at each stumble or blunder. Either way, Apple gets top-of-mind presence with both supporters and enemies alike! Brilliant!

Compare and contrast this with many other businesses who have personalities and values that are as weak as anything only a committee can throw up (barf!). How many of those businesses generate this level of chatter?!!!

Right now, social media is boring. Just like normal media is boring.

Most human chatter IS boring most of the time. Try and listen in on conversations at cafes and restaurants. Keep your ears open at functions and family events. Social media is primarily a giant gossip pit. Very human. Just as we have been for millennia. It is gossip and fluff. See the screengrab here. Being inane (as a collective) is being human. Take FourSquare for example. Yet another narcissist’ playground.

Most media is boring. Because they are not targeted at my specific interests, or they are not available at the times that suit me (eg TV), or they are not available on the channel (eg TED talks are inaccessible on a Blackberry).

It is also boring now because every business is scrambling on the bandwagon, desperately grasping at it as the next magical easy answer to marketing PR and advertising (which are increasing viewed as disingenuous, forced and annoying.) But most businesses still don’t get it. (That’s ok, this stuff, like websites, takes time to understand.)

As with the early days of the web, social media today is still too focused on the tools, the conduits, the pipes and faucets.
You can no more do social media than you can do popularity. Social media is not the new snake oil to cure all your business ills.

Providing the conduit is easy. Starting conversations is hard.

Some topics naturally lend themselves to chatter – celebrities, sport and porn for example. But generally, social media is still hard to directly monetise. And most frighteningly for some businesses, it equates to giving up control over your marketing and PR. (Isn’t it interesting that Apple, a company increasingly known for its paranoia and control, does not directly leverage social media?)

So what IS interesting?

The extension of geography-agnostic and distributed memetic tribalism (!), the instantaneous fleeting yet still enriching connections, transparency (and thus “enforced” authenticity), the combination of anonymity and public airing of laundry.

What we need is not more tools. We need more understanding an exploration of the motivations that drives us to seek out communion, the psychology behind community building (especially the organic spontaneous genesis of communities). And of course the mechanism therein: socialising, bonding, acceptance, excommunication…

So why would anyone want to sit down with your business for a great night out? Would they want to talk about you behind your back? Be real. Do what you love. engage with people openly. Everything else is bollocks – like secretly paying people to spread word-of-mouth! Gag!

The following is a collection of somewhat related thoughts I found on my Blackberry:

Empathy requires active involvement and constant flow of information. So as to help us stay in character. Trying to stay in someone else’s shoes without this stream of input (the active and present engagement with someone) is hard!

Second-guessing is working from a position of minimal info. It is making assumptions about what someone is thinking and feeling. And the assumptions are often (necessarily so?) based on simplistic stereotypes.

Remember the age-old adage “assumptions is the mother of failures?” It applies here as well. It means less fulfilling relationships (business, social, and personal.)

We second guess because there is not enough information, and none is forthcoming. The person we are trying to engage with may be unwilling to open up, or the information may be erratic because they have a personality disorder.

Leaping into assumptions is also closely linked in with being judgemental. We make rapid “diagnoses” about someone, because we are so accustomed to trying to fix it.

Empathy is valuable when done right. but it goes against much of our default patterns. There is a lot to be said for hearing and accepting what others are telling us. They are voicing their truths – and that’s probably ok in most situations.

This is a quick snip snip of the choicest bits, the bits that stood out for me as I was reading this article, “Nice and nasty does it: Shirky the ‘net guru’ on what the future holds” by Decca Aitkenhead in the Sydney Morning Herald:

“And to put it in one bleak sentence, no medium has ever survived the indifference of 25-year-olds.”

The business model of the traditional print newspaper … is doomed …

… the popularity of online social media trumps all our old assumptions about the superiority of professional content, and the primacy of financial motivation.

… people are more creative and generous than we had ever imagined, and would rather use their free time participating in amateur online activities such as Wikipedia – for no financial reward – because they satisfy the primal human urge for creativity and connectedness.

… the internet’s capacity for “an unlimited amount of zero-cost reproduction of any digital item by anyone who owns a computer” has removed the barrier to universal participation, and revealed that human beings would rather be creating and sharing than passively consuming what a privileged elite think they should watch.

—

Shirky concedes that the web’s ability to connect people with a common enthusiasm, however obscure or deviant, can create a dangerously distorted impression of what is healthy or normal.

“And it seems to me that the net trade-off of lessening society’s ability to project a sense of normal that no one actually lives up to is a good thing.

—

The neuroscientist Susan Greenfield produced a report last year which suggested that the popularity of online social media was damaging children’s brain development, in particular their capacity for empathy.

“But the alarmism around ‘Facebook is changing our brains’ strikes me as a kind of historical trick. Because we now know from brain science that everything changes our brains.

—

If the web has unlocked all this human potential for generosity and sharing, how come the people using it are so horrible to each other?

“So, there’s two things to this paradox. One is that those conversations were always happening. People were saying those nasty things to one another in the pub or whatever. You just couldn’t hear them before. So it’s a change in our awareness of truth, not a change in the truth.

“Then there’s this second effect, that anonymity makes people behave more meanly.

“What I think is going to happen there is we are slowly going to set up islands of civil discourse.

A beautiful, short, fun and thought-provoking animation about mirror neurons, empathy, the future and the world. Challenging the assumptions about human nature, the assumptions that many of our institutions, like education, are based on. Eg we are hard wired for sociability, attachment, affection and companionship. Not aggression or self interest.

“We are soft wired to experience another’s plight as if we are experiencing it ourselves … The first drive is the drive to belong … there is no empathy in heaven … to empathise is to civilise .. we have to rethink the human narrative …”

The dangers of repressing empathy through our institutions and systems – wow!

“Preparing the groundwork for an empathic civilisation!” Where do I sign up?

Well worth a watch. Thanks to Joyce for sharing this!

Beware the people your passion attracts!

When I first read what Hugh MacLeod wrote in his book Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity, it struck a deep deep chord:

“…as soon as they get a foothold inside the inner circle, you soon realise they never really understood your idea in the first place… And the weirdest part is, they don’t seem to mind sabotaging your original idea that got them interested in the first place, in order to maintain their new-found social status. … it is amazingly common.”

Had I not experienced this first hand with an ex-business partner, I would not have believed it could happen. It scared me that Hugh described this sort of behaviour as “amazingly common.” Ugh!

As people, we more often than not do irrational things in the service of our ego. And we justify these with constructed rational reasons afterwards. We all do this to different degrees. The difference is, some of us are aware of this tendency and can take steps to moderate it. Others are oblivious and seem to be blindly carried along by it.

The trick is to sort the genuinely like-minded ones from the crazies. My personal litmus test kit: Do they have integrity? Are their actions consistently aligned with their words? The more outwardly charming someone is, the more I will pay attention to their actions. Do they hold themselves to the same rules they apply to others?

Buy now from Amazon:
Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity

This is the hoarding of a soon-to-come Wendy’s.

I can’t help but wonder, how many people walking past this will:
(a) notice the tagline, and
(b) read the tagline with minimal or zero cynicism?

The problem with status quo systems is that there is a huge inertia against change – whether this is externally imposed (change in an environmental factor) or internally driven.

Any change (variation or disruption to the status quo) is quickly absorbed by this inertia, and the status quo is reinstated quick smart. The more disruptions and change a status quo system absorbs, the more resistant the system appears to become. The people in the system become more complacent, or even arrogant. “It won’t happen to us.”

Unless the change is super catastrophic.

I see the current global economic crisis as a disruption to conventional business beliefs and practice. But is this catastrophic enough? Will this disruption simply be quietly absorbed back into the status quo? Have we collectively learnt anything? Or are we still sticking to the same old systems that lead to the problem in the first place – because changing is too hard?

If the global economy has (or is very much entrenched in the process of) returning to the status quo state, as many analysts seem to believe, then we have simple postpone the coming catastrophe. It wasn’t catastrophic enough yet.

Only one room burnt down. The cardboard house is still standing. Let’s find some more cardboard…

Interesting post by the Comfort Queen Jennifer Louden – “about learning how to declare what will satisfy you.”

I see so many clients and friends who aren’t enjoying their lives or having the success they want because they don’t have way to measure their progress.

Clients who are so incredibly talented it boggles my heart. But because they are so damn smart, and interested in so many damn things, they judge themselves too harshly for not accomplishing more faster, and then give up before they have a taste of confidence sustaining success.

Via Andrew Lightheart’s tweet.

Nurturing creativity is a form of individual empowerment. It requires first and foremost the removal of fear. And fear-based controls and limits on curiosity, expression and thinking.

Individually – the fear of being wrong, loosing face, not fitting in. not belonging, and of ego damage.

Collectively – the fear of challenges to the status quo, change, growth and evolution, non-conformity, and the (imagined) possibility of chaos.

It’s ok to colour outside the lines.
It’s ok to ask the difficult questions.
It’s ok to be who you are.
It’s ok to think anything.
It’s ok to try something and fail.

It is amazing how much fear these statements generate.