I would kill for. . .

• The understanding that critical thinking is not the same as education (we are in dire need of the former).

• Sexy and substance co-existising (more often than it does).

• Design thinking that creates something of affection, that can be shared, and shifts how you and I would understand one another.

• The poison that's running through the veins of our political system, to be drained into the city sewers.

• The understanding that building a business is not the same as building a brand - there is a difference.

• Advertising to reinvent itself. Huge chunks of it is crap (not to mention sucks).

• Passion and reason burning like a 1,000 degree fire, in the hearts of women and men.

• More substantive conversations around how social media is a tactic and not a strategy and why understanding this absolutely matters.

• The understanding that content is pointless without a story, and that a story truly impacts the soul in the presence of a powerful narrative.

• The recalibration of our thinking on what capitalism is, and create something that has yet to exist. 

• The convergence of creativity and commerce in much more radical ways.

• The world believing in more impossible things.

In my opinion this is one of Wendy's best advertising campaign's ever. The message is pretty straight forward. 

In today's networked world, where digital is the seemingly uncontrollable beast stomping on and devouring everything in its path, I'm asking the exact same thing. There's a ton of content out there, but the content has no real meaning (countless diggs, retweets, facebook updates, etc).  Saaay maan. . .where's the beef?! 

You can find it when you dive into the intersection of business, technology and culture. This allows you to swim in the maket ideas of Kogi, Threadless, Apple, and NIN music that people want, where lots is being offered and customers are actually willing to pay for it.

When you just focus on technology (i.e current social media "darlings" like twitter and facebook) you address only one dimension of a mult-dimensional world. It seems that, when it comes to the pundits, the conversation is about social media, as the big picture, instead of the big picture and how social media fits into it. It's mostly about how Twitter rocks instead of a rockin' idea and how to use twitter to spread the word. 

So when I came across the below Ad Age article by Alex Reiss I clenched my fists and said "yeesss!"

Rock on Alex. . .

Why I stopped Tweeting By Alex Kriess

I've never been great at sharing a constant stream of fresh content online. I have a personal blog that's been updated a handful of times in the last year (maybe longer, I don't even remember). I don't have a Del.icio.us page nor do I Digg things. I probably have dozens of online accounts that haven't been updated in years. And if you look at my Twitter page you'll see tweets from the beginning of December.

Ask any "social-media expert" and they would probably tell you I'm doing it all wrong. And maybe I am. But I can't help but check my Twitter feed every few days and see the majority of those I'm following doing nothing but retweeting each other or posting links to other people's opinion. Sharing is caring and I love to learn new things, but I've come to a breaking point. It seems like the majority of the content I subscribe to is repurposed and watered down. There is so much noise out there that it's hard for me to find the source. Where are the original ideas coming from?

This is why I've had a slowly decaying online presence. I started to catch myself becoming one of the many who were sharing the ideas of the few. In my opinion, quality should trump quantity and a stale online presence may be exactly what some of us need to cultivate.

I've since resolved to the old-fashioned means of sharing ideas in person, via e-mail, or among friends on Facebook. The common thread is that I'm now stumbling upon new information, learning new things and sharing my ideas with people with whom I have relationships, rather than the faceless masses.

When looking for a job, it's absolutely valuable to have a presence online and to naturally share the fresh stream of content I'm so terrible at keeping up. However, you should be careful of over-sharing and retweeting just to expand your online footprint. Doing this may just water down those nuggets of wisdom that come only once in a while, and when employers can't tell the difference between your opinions and the ideas of others that you're merely sharing, then it all becomes pointless.

When writing this post, I deleted and re-wrote my thoughts several times. Because I couldn't think of the perfect way to get my words out, I now have to temper my thinking. Here's the catch: I still believe in the mass broadcasting of ideas and sharing of information (after all, you're reading this blog post). In fact, I still learn a lot of new information in the very manner I'm advocating against. So, like I said at the beginning, maybe I'm doing it all wrong.

But I stand by my words when I say that we've had enough "Top 5" lists. Our sharing of ideas and information should be purposeful and well thought out. Our opinionated blog posts should show how we really feel.

Redesigning The DNA Of Your Life And Your Organization

The Three Laws of Performance reconstructs how we look at problems, challenges and solutions that impacts, as we should be looking at it, the intersection of our personal and professional lives. Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan, performance experts, go right to the heart of the matter: how to achieve extraordinary, lasting results.

This happens by employing the three laws to your personal and professional environments:

Law 1:  How People Perform Correlates To How Situations Occur To Them –The First Law rejects the concept that people do what they do because of a common understanding of the facts, and instead takes the view that people do what they do because their actions are correlated to how situations occur to them.  When people understand that situations occur differently to each of us, then other people’s responses and actions suddenly make sense.

Law 2:  How A Situation Occurs Arises In Language – How situations occur is inseparable from language.  Untying the knots of language begins with seeing that no matter what is said, other communication is carried along with it.  The unsaid – but communicated – includes assumptions, expectations, disappointments, resentment, regrets, interpretations, and more.

Law 3:  Future-Based Language Transforms How Situations Occur To People – This Law rests on an important distinction:  there are two different ways to use language.  The first use is descriptive – using language to depict or represent things as they are or have been.  The second is future-based.  It has the power to craft vision, and to illuminate the blinders that prevent people from seeing possibilities.  

Ok. . .now I'll be the first to admit that I'm a huuuge fan of sexy. Sexy clothes, sexy cars, sexy ideas. If it's sexy, there's a good chance that my radar will pick it up, I'll check it out and give it some love. Good or bad, for better or for worse, sexy gets our attention, time and time again. The only problem though, is that often (and not neccessarily always), sexy is temporary, fleeting and surface. On many occasions sexy is the draw, with no main feature.

For the last eight years, social media, on a sexy scale from 1 to 10, has been a 12. Books have been written, gurus have staked their claim, and magazines have declared how it will change the way we live.

Now digital media is affecting how communication is beginning to be shaped here, early in the 21st century, but let's not get carried away.

Technology is great, but just because you're sexy today, doesn't mean you'll be sexy tomorrow. Being a media darling means nothing. What needs to be understood is: sustainability. Today's "products" of technology cannot exist in a vacuum.  There needs to be an understanding of how they relate to business, and culture and how they impact, feed off, and converge with one another.  The web 2.0 echo chamber/hype machine is so loud about you needing to get on the train (before you get left) that being savvy, knowing what actually drives business, and understanding what real value is, gets lost somewhere in the shuffle. What can happen is that after it's all said and done, what you're left with is, a bunch of sexy tech fluff.  

A few examples:

Friendster - not successful (financially) until it was purchased by a South East Asian company, seven years after it was founded and used in conjunction with an e-commerce platform. The social part didn't generate revenue. The e-commerce platform probably will.

Myspace - Last year, in June, the Rupert Murdoch owned outfit slashed 30% percent of its workforce.  Additionally, traffic has been constantly declining and revenue (as of November 9, 2009) was down by 26 percent .

YouTube - Purchased by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion dollars, has yet to get much bang for all those bucks. As stated by Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research, "YouTube has ended up being a management, operational and legal overhead and a drag.”

Twitter - Now last year in June I wrote about how Twitter was definitely being hyped above and beyond what it really was. I could have been wrong (it happens on occasion), but just a couple of months ago RJ metrics did their own twitter data analyis. A few conclusions:

• A large percentage of Twitter accounts are inactive, with about 25% of accounts having no followers and about 40% of accounts having never sent a single Tweet.
• About 80% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than ten times.
• Only about 17% of registered Twitter accounts sent a Tweet in December 2009, an all-time-low.

Now online social networks aren't going anywhere. They will continue to impact us and affect the market landscape, but it's time that the wheat get separated from the chaff. Spending time and resources on sexy is cool, no problem. Just keep in mind, if you've got an Aston Martin DB9, but with no gas. . .well that's an easy equation:

Sexy + Empty = Going Nowhere

Electrocinema

It's always interesting when folks are discussing "brands", "marketing" and "how to" tips. I often read and just shake my head thinking to myself "hmmm. . .close but no cigar."

It's like stating that a BMW is the ultimate driving machine by expressing how awesome the tires are, but not speaking to or understanding the significance of the engineering that makes it go.

I was especially thinking about this when I was reading  a blog post by Jackie Huba, discussing Lady Gaga and the "secret to her success". Now from a documentation perspective she does a great job in laying out some of the tactics that Lady Gaga has used to help her connect with her fan base in a very successful way. I think she misses the boat completely, though, by saying "There's a lot marketers can learn from artist and musician Lady Gaga."

It's almost as if Kobe were conducting a "how to make fans go wild" workshop with a session on doing between the legs, around the back dribbles, that turn into a fade-away, nothing but net, jump shots, for an audience of NBA coaches. Now coaches help to make teams successful, but they're not skilled at making crowds go wild with athletic, and creative abilities on the court.

Marketers cannot learn any lessons from Lady Gaga because:

#1. her success is because of her, and the connection that exists between who she is and her own creativity. It's the internal gravity she has with her own "space" in the entertainment world that has allowed her the success that she has, and that creativity, on so many levels, is what's compelling. As mentioned in an Ad Age week article . . ."as all parties who work with her on her label, management and marketing teams cite Gaga herself as the ultimate brains behind many of her creative and social-media ideas and tactics."

#2. Marketers are not Lady Gaga. I've read, I don't know how many times, marketers say things like "want to present like Steve Jobs?...here are ten steps to be a great presenter (grrrrrrrr). You're not Steve Jobs. I'm not Steve Jobs, so you and I will never present like him.  Nobody is Lady Gaga except Lady Gaga so what she does will NOT work for you.  Find your voice, your skills, your creativity, and do you. 

The single biggest issue with brands is that there is very little creativity in terms of how they exist in the market or how to understand creativity with the right orientation. So the goal isn't for your brand to be creative in an "artist way", but to create and present, interestingly, the value of what you offer, in your own unique way.

The problem isn't with the fact that we consume.  The issue is with why we do it.  If we begin to challenge the premise behind why we consume, and begin thinking about the idea of "consumption" in different and unconventional ways, then we can begin to pursue truly innovative thinking about how to dig ourselves out of the recession we are in. 

If all we continue to do is consume, consume, consume (for the sake of consumption) and just do and act as we always have in the past, then we will not be able to position ourselves in a place where we really want to be: participating in an economic system that is truly sustainable. Because as Einstein said "we can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Brands today need to think about who they are, the intent behind their actions, and the "value" they bring to the table, in radically different ways.

For at least the past 30 years the U.S. economy has been one built upon the act of consumption: seek, get, and buy more stuff. 

Now is this a problem? Well that will more than likely all depend on who you talk to. One thing that can't be denied is that we are in the midst of one of the most challenging economic times since the great depression, and the "value" in consumption is changing as we know it.

Just a couple of weeks back I went to visit my mom and dad in Las Vegas, (we moved there in the late 70's and for the last 25+ years personally witnessed it becoming a beacon of financial success) and had the opportunity to have in depth discussions with my dad (an entrepreneur and business man there since the mid 80's) about how the recession has both affected Vegas and his business.  Serious stuff. The Las Vegas unemployent rate is 13.1% and Nevada has the second highest state unemployment in the country. I also visited L.A where California's unemployment rate is 12.1% about 3% points higher than the national average. I had the chance to hang out with a few good friends of mine who had either lost their jobs or were working with organizations that were being TIGHTLY squeezed by the state's budget crunch.  It was cool hanging with my friends, but sobering seeing the predicaments that they were in. 

Now these two cities are famed for their glitz and glamour and as I was on the plane back to DC (where I live) an article I read, almost a year and half ago by Noreena Hertz called The Death of Gucci Capitalism, came to mind. Probably one reason is that nowhere is Gucci, Prada, and Louis Vuitton more popular than in these two cities that were the backdrop to my growing up.

Now Noreena is an academic (and ivory tower types I have mixed feelings about) and I tend to lean more in the direction of the school of Hard Knox (in the trenches is where the real learning goes on) but I respect what they do.

Even though I have some issues with a number of her assertions, I do agree with her premise that she opens up with in her article:

"We are witnessing the death of a paradigm. As is usual at moments of mourning, the new reality is being met by denial, resistance and anger from the initiators and defenders of the old faith."

She then wraps up her diatribe by stating that "The next phase of capitalism will combine policies of localisation with an understanding that there are problems we share - such as carbon-dioxide emissions - that cannot be tackled alone. And it will actively seek to redefine what is valuable, so children growing up today do not make the mistakes of this generation in confusing success with the ability to purchase another pair of Nikes or a Gucci bag."

I definitely agree with her.  Today, right now, we have to begin thinking in radically different ways about how capitalism in this country needs to re-define and re-interpret itself and be sustainable in the 21st century.