horsepigcow

So as any of you who visited HPC yesterday know, it was attacked by a malware hosting site. I’m not sure how they do it, but somehow they get in and implant iframe code to serve up malicious software for unsuspecting visitors. I think it may have been a security hole in WordPress combined with my own laziness around passwords (now fixed). Either way, it wasn’t a good day and I spent many hours cleaning out this bad code and trying to figure out what the heck was going on. Many hours were also spent by Ivan Storck (of Sustainable Websites – my host), William Dodson (from OBX Designworks) and my friend Mathieu (developer in Montreal) in helping me through this. By the time we got all of the malware attack cleaned out, Google had blacklisted my site (which led to a series of blacklisting by all the sites using Google’s indexing API). Yuck.

I wasn’t attacked personally. This happens randomly all of the time. Somehow there is money to be made in ruining the internet. However, I find it very odd to think that one would wreck the very thing that provides them with a steady stream of income. I compared the action to the self-replicating Smith on the Matrix. (spoiler alert) Imagine if Smith would have won – he would have taken the machine down and everyone would have died. There would be no point in him existing anymore.

Which brings me to my point: where did we go wrong in the world to encourage the Smiths? The malware hosts? The scammers, spammers, frauds, grifters, etc? Those that would pollute the very environment they need to exist in? These people are obviously gifted with the ability to problem solve, code, think up elaborate schemes and strategize. If they used this talent for good and not for evil, imagine how AWESOME the world would be!

It’s a tragedy of the commons, where selfish thinkers abuse the common space for their own gain. Of course, this thinking – if truly strategic – assumes that not all will follow the selfish path. The tragedy occurs when everyone thinks selfishly and the commons is ruined and unusable, leaving nothing for anyone to exploit any longer.

If instead human beings thought truly strategically – and this is the basis to my favourite book in the universe The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation by Matt Ridley – and contributed to the commons, we would all thrive! But this selfish, short-term thinking hacking away of small pieces of the pie happens and we all suffer…including the hackers themselves eventually.

This happens because – as Ridley says in The Origins of Virtue – the system is set up to encourage such selfish, short term thinking. Narrow view competition, multiple times removed culpability and a focus on short-term rewards have encouraged this. For instance, there are corporate structures, with their quarterly reporting (short-term view) and lack of social responsibility (the responsibility is with the shareholders who are far removed from the decision making as well as the consequences of that decision making). Copyright and patents also contribute to the attitude. I would argue that almost everything about surviving in modern society has to do with removing ourselves from responsibility and giving us the individual task to survive one day at a time (but that is a different post).

Thus, we encourage a great deal of tragedy in the commons themselves, costing billions of dollars in security, fraud protection, insurance and damages every year to those who try to live their lives on the up and up.

So, how do we stop this insanity? Like Peter Parker in the picture – whose tragedy was focusing on his own selfish needs resulting in the loss of his uncle – we aren’t recognizing the long term consequences of our actions. I really think this needs to be forefront in our discussions around this stuff. We also need a good dialogue and understanding of the butterfly effect – how one action leads to effecting so many others. It may seem small and insignificant to cheat here and there, but it adds up and changes the system we are part of. And finally, and I know this type of thinking isn’t popular amongst Americans, we have to imagine how we can contribute to the commons to mutually benefit (instead of one or two people benefiting, leading to the suffering of others). It’s not socialism, it’s smarter thinking. Just think of the costs we will save on our taxes alone when we don’t have to pay for the inefficiencies of a system full of people trying to cheat it.

We do have great power here. These tools can be used for great things. Solving hunger, poverty, creating peace, boosting economies (in countries where most of the spammer/scammer stuff comes out of), finding cures for bad diseases and all of the other social pitfalls we’ve created by thinking too short term for our world. So…where do we start?

The most common conversation I have when I go to an event goes somewhere along these lines:

New acquaintance: “Tara, I see your name everywhere, but I still don’t quite understand what you do.”

Me: “Well, I make a living as a marketing consultant, specializing in online communities and strategy, but I spend more of my time these days as a community organizer and armchair economist. I also have a book coming out in April of 2009, which also makes me an author, and I travel around the world speaking at conferences on the online marketing and strategy work that I do.”

That’s sort of it in a nutshell. But my background is varied and so are my interests, so I believe that leads to a great deal of confusion for people as to what exactly I ‘do’ for a living. Even though my ‘about’ section as well as my resume outlines my experience and expertise in the area of marketing strategy (both online and off in less ‘traditional’ types of marketing), I admit that I spend more time reading, thinking and writing about a much broader array of subjects.

I’m deeply interested in social issues and how economics underpins much of our social world. That is what got me into the study of social capital. The current understanding of economics tends to be pretty simplistic and focused on personal wealth – that is, what is in my bank account at any given moment and what the damned government is taking out of it at the end of each year. I think this is a most unfortunate situation as economics is complex and cash money isn’t the only wealth we accumulate or distribute over our lifetimes that is of value. Certainly, we cannot pay our rent or eat if we don’t have cash money in the bank, but how we get it in there and how it supports us is what interests me a great deal. I also think it’s changed over the years, especially with the advent of the internet.

So, what I ‘do’ for a living – marketing consulting – is made possible because of my social capital, which is the culmination of my:

• connections
• reputation
• influence
• bridging capital – the number of connections you have across to different industries, social strata, etc.
• bonding capital – the depth of your close connections (how close and how much you could ask of your connections)
• access to ideas and talent through your connections
• access to resources through your connections
• “potential” access to further resources (more distant, but very legitimate)
• saved up favors (reciprocity is huge – which is why doing good stuff matter alot with social capital)
• accomplishments (slightly different from reputation, it is the more fungible form of SC – resumes, awards, etc.)
• and the Social Capital of those who you have relationships with (Bordieu’s ideas on the French elite talk about this)

Added to this is my accumulation of cultural capital, which “is the knowledge, experience and or connections one has had through the course of their life that enables them to succeed more so than someone from a less experienced background.”

Both my social capital and my cultural capital are intimately woven into my economic capital. All three types of capital support and foster the growth of one another. I meet people (social capital) and learn things (cultural capital) which help me meet potential clients who see my experience as an asset (social capital) and hire me (economic capital), which produces more experience (cultural capital) and, if I do good work, opens me up for new lucrative relationships (social capital), which turn into more work (economic capital).

I think it may be tough for some people to understand the diversification of work, but I know very few people who can sum up their careers in a single word. Personally, I don’t believe humans were designed to be singularly focused, I believe we were designed to be innately curious and questioning of how the world around us works. And those of us who push the boundaries around the definition of work help innovate and pioneer new paths for new job definitions.

In regards to what I do NOT ‘do’ for a living…well, I don’t consider myself a social media consultant, the new term for someone who uses the online tools well and helps spread buzz through online communities (I think that’s accurate). Of course, that is part of my function, but I consider myself more of a strategist. When setting up Citizen Agency, I thought long and hard about how to define what we offered and came up with the idea of the tripod of strategy: environment (that’s where research comes in – understanding the market well), product (product development, innovation and designing for what you know about the market and where it is moving) and community (mostly the customer community, but also how you fit into the wider business community). Once again, all three of these, like the legs on a tripod, have to be balanced and working together towards a solid strategy. So what does Citizen Agency do? An organic strategy. I won’t take on projects where I’m asked to come in and slap together social media band-aids. I won’t advocate for a client until I believe they will be beneficial to my community of followers and friends. But I will help them get to the point where a social media strategy and community advocacy is part of the overall plan.

So, what do I ‘do’ for a living? Well, mostly I think too much about stuff and produce loads of content that, I hope, helps others come to positive conclusions and helps create a smarter marketplace. But if you want to boil it down to a pitch, I am a marketing strategy consultant.

The other day, I was in a meeting with a group of very smart people and we were talking about how to discern a ‘great’ social media consultant from a ‘mediocre’ social media consultant. I’ve never really considered myself a social media consultant, though. I’ve always thought of myself in a more integrated way, since I’ve spent my marketing career working online AND offline and being part of product development as much as promotional campaigns. Even the term ‘community marketing’ that I usually use to describe my practice falls short.

Even so, I believe the job of Social Media Consultant entails using the online social media tools available to spread the word – much like PR does for traditional media – to pick up steam for the brands they represent. This, of course, is a very smart business to get into, especially during these turbulent economic times. Social media tools are inexpensive and are quite easy to measure impact for. I particularly like tools like HubSpot and Google Analytics for measuring impact of social media campaigns, as well as tracking word of mouth through Twitter’s search and Google Blogsearch. There are many other tools available, as outlined here by my colleague, Jeremiah. This makes a Social Media Consultant a sound investment as an adjunct to any other form of marketing you are embarking on. It’s also a safe bet when budgets get cut back as it is more cost effective than many other types of marketing.

Still, how does one know who is a ‘good’ consultant and a ‘mediocre’ one? I think it all comes down to Whuffie.

Much like a PR person worth her weight in gold has many contacts and a good reputation in the traditional media circles, a social media consultant (SMC) worth her weight in gold has many contacts and a good reputation in online communities. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the SMC has the MOST contacts, either. It’s how people talk about her, how she interacts and how the things she posts are spread around. A good SMC will have high Whuffie on the web. People will trust her opinion. Other influential people will value her expertise. The reason that quality is as important as quantity is that her Whuffie will rub off on her clients. If she is trusted for what she talks about, her connections will be more likely to check out who she is representing.

Anyone can be a SMC, really. There are millions of people of all ages using the online tools and hundreds of thousands of them use them effectively. But to be a kickass SMC, you need to be an influencer yourself. This isn’t much different from PR. And, in both cases, it matters who you represent.

Social media, just like any other type of marketing, is only as good as the response you get from customers. A good SMC knows her stuff and understands what the market will respond to. She will be honest with you in early meetings if she knows your product needs work to delight potential customers. You deserve that. You don’t want to spend a bunch of money and energy on a campaign that goes nowhere. You should be spending that time and money on building a really awesome product. And, a good marketing professional, social media or not can help you in that realm as well. I’ve actually spent more of my career working on product development and innovation than I have on the promotion of it. The truth is, great products need less promotion and ‘stick’ when you do promote.

Lastly, an SMC you want to hire practices ethical marketing. Much related to the point about having influence in a community, ethical marketing practices maintain and build integrity within communities. Anything that smacks of lying or tricking people will be found out and both your company and your SMC will pay the price Whuffie-wise. Future campaigns will be looked upon as suspect and time and money spent will be for naught.

I take great care in working with clients – who I’m working with and how I’m promoting them. I make sure that what I’m delivering is of value and that my connections won’t feel spammed or get tired of the type of media that I’m sharing with them. If my own quality slips, the interest from my connections slips and I become less useful to current and future clients who deserve the positive word of mouth. There are clients I have taken on who have potential, but were not ready for promotion – so we focused on product and getting to the point where we could both be proud of what we were sharing with our connections. Other potential clients who wanted the promotion, but wouldn’t do the work to make sure people I introduced to their products would be delighted, had to be passed over. In today’s competitive landscape, I was sorry to see them pass up the opportunity.

Thus, if you want to have your SM campaigns go further, assess your SMC on these three measurements:

• How much influence does he/she have in online communities?
• Does he/she understand market trends? What kind of feedback does he/she give on your product? Are there good ideas in there?
• Does he/she practice ethical marketing? If he/she suggests that you can pay people to digg up an item, probably not.

Other than that list, an SMC has to understand how to use the tools, know how to measure impact and how to get creative to get through the noise that is the thousands of campaigns already inundating people in online communities. But it isn’t necessarily getting through that counts. It is how that message is received on the other side. That outcome is going to mean results or rejection.

I know I need to approach this topic with kid gloves because there are many of you out there that either perform good deeds entirely selflessly or many of those that truly believe that you do. I used to be part of the latter group. Then I read The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation by Matt Ridley and realized something really significant:

Just because a good deed is performed to someone’s benefit, it doesn’t make the deed any less good.

In fact, as Ridley points out, in the absence of personal incentives to positively contribute to a community, the majority of people would not contribute at all. And there are incentives, even if indirect, to performing good deeds. Even if all of you are in the 0.01% of people who perform good deeds entirely selflessly, think about all of the people you’ve met in the world you could only convince to give more, do more and care more. Those are the people need incentives – for better or for worse.

I think about how current incentives work. I was chatting the other day with another Matt, Matt Langdon of the Hero Workshop. He was saying to me that he was setting up the Hero Workshop as a non-profit because he would feel bad about making a profit off of this work. Really? Why, I thought? There are plenty of people getting rich off of doing nasty stuff like making cigarettes and selling drugs and lobbying governments to keep us oil dependent. And there are even more people making millions from just producing a load of crap we don’t need. Why should the people contributing positively from the world have to take the martyr road? My second thought was, “No friggin wonder it is an uphill battle to get people to do stuff like Matt is doing!” Matt’s are rare. Dedicating your life for the betterment of others is a beautiful, amazing thing, but if you can’t pay the bills or provide financial security for your family and your future, you will probably end up getting burnt out really fast.

There is no reason for us to be holier-than-thou about our contributions (not to mention the very essence of holier-than-thou points to the fact that we want recognition, which means the act itself is not, after all, selfless). Good for those of us who have sacrificed ourselves for the benefit of the wider community, but we should never become martyrs because of it. We should, instead, be thinking of ways to create more of us to do the work…’cause at the end of the day we have to make a living…or at least I do.

I’m personally overjoyed that people are making gazillions off of the green movement (as long as it’s not a hoax). The fact that you can do good AND do well is an amazing incentive and, I think, the tipping point for people to actually start giving a damn…through consumption, yes, but if that’s what it takes, I’m all for it. This is America after all. We vote through our consumption…that we have a choice to vote for positive change is awesome.

I’ve been thinking a great deal about incentives and I think that people like Jane McGonigal and Austin Hill are doing amazing work in this area, incentivizing acts of kindness through gaming techniques. Ethically, people may have a problem with gaming human nature, but I don’t. To game towards the good is helluvalot better than to incentivize people towards acts of exploitation, waste, corruption and greed. And, believe me, the long-standing dominant atmosphere favors the greedy.

For the upcoming HeroCamp, I’m going to be concentrating on incentives. Having a 15 year-old who is not in that 0.01% has been eye-opening for me. He’s a good kid and very talented and I love him, but whenever I speak of heroism or positively contributing to the greater good, he rolls his eyes at me and calls me lame. What incentivizes him? Well, money is the biggest thing unfortunately, but he also plays games like World of Warcraft, where I watch him sacrifice himself and his points constantly to move his tribe forward. And when I asked him to come to HeroCamp and be our Lame-Meter, he agreed. I incentivized him with a voice…a chance to influence an outcome…a chance for him to shine. Okay, and a few days off of school, too, but that was less of an incentive than the rest. I asked him to be himself and told him that would be a key role in what we’re working on. The incentive is ego.

I believe that raising Whuffie is also good incentive that encourages positive contributions. However, I am not so blind as to ignore the way that people exploit this as well. There is an upside and downside of everything. We need to figure out better ways to reward those that are doing good in the world (and sometimes this means that they need to make money from it) and remove the incentives for people to exploit influence in the networks (by making it harder for them to make a living – refusing to buy their goods or read their blogs).

So, in conclusion, I believe that making a better world comes down to building in positive incentives (beyond ‘it’s the right thing to do’) for good deeds and removing the incentives for bad deeds.

The last couple of times I’ve come across the border to apply for my TN1 Visa (NAFTA Visa between Canada and US), the border officers have Googled me. And, to my surprise, have actually told me that the results were good enough to back up the resume I handed them. One official actually said, “You should state on your resume that you are very Google-able!”

This isn’t new, really, and it has certainly been the practice for many savvy recruiters over the years. I worked for a spell at an HR organization in Canada and met many who ended up hiring the candidates with the most impressive online presence…especially when it came to more senior positions at organizations. The more results one has that points to professional accomplishments, the easier it was for them to determine if what was in the resume was accurate. It helped even more if those accomplishments were from websites and blogs other than the candidate.

I believe Google is probably the closest thing we have today to a Whuffie meter. Whuffie, for those who are new here is (and this is my definition):

The sum of the reputation, influence, bridging capital and bonding capital, access to ideas and talent, access to resources, potential access to further resources, saved up favors, accomplishments (resumes, awards, articles, etc.) and the Whuffie of those who you have relationships with.

The term, itself, was coined by Cory Doctorow in his amazing Sci-Fi book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, as the currency of the future. The generalized definition gleaned from this book is:

Whuffie has replaced money, providing a motivation for people to do useful and creative things. A person’s Whuffie is a general measurement of his or her overall reputation, and Whuffie is lost and gained according to a person’s favorable or unfavorable actions. The question is, who determines which actions are favorable or unfavorable? In Down and Out, the answer is public opinion. Rudely pushing past someone on the sidewalk will definitely lose you points from them (and possibly bystanders who saw you), while composing a much-loved symphony will earn you Whuffie from everyone who enjoyed it.

So, you can gain Whuffie through being nice, networked or notable. This is not science fiction. It’s becoming more and more relevant today.

Competition is fierce in the world. There are billions of people working to get ahead. Hundreds compete for jobs. And that is just the individual. When it comes to starting a company that provides a service or a product, you will also be in a position of competition: customer attention. Without differentiating yourself somehow, the battle to make ends meet gets tougher.

This is where you figure out that you CAN eat Whuffie…just indirectly.

Google is powerful because companies and individuals alike know that if people find them online, they will have a better chance of getting the business or the job. And, if they find them in a positive light reflected through the eyes of other customers and contacts, they will have even a better chance than that. Online tools that help customers voice their satisfaction with your product will help boost your Google ratings and instill a sense of confidence in a potential customer making a decision. This is no different than pinging someone’s Whuffie, as Cory describes it in his book. When you get that new customer or you get that better job because of your positive online presence, the money to buy that food follows.

I’ve been thinking of this ever since Michelle Greer posted “No More Whuffie Please” on her blog. I totally see where she is coming from. She has added up a great deal of Whuffie in her social capital bank account, but hasn’t found a place to spend it yet. I certainly hope that Michelle doesn’t give up the amazing work she is doing to make a name for herself in the community, but raising Whuffie without spending it is also a mistake. I generally don’t work for people for free unless I see an opportunity to cash in my Whuffie at a later date. This isn’t mercenary, it is smart and it is definitely part of the reciprocity that ties community together. ‘Cause if valuable community members like Michelle aren’t able to pay the bills, we lose them and nobody wins.

So, Michelle, you are totally right. You can’t eat Whuffie, but it is getting harder to eat without it, so keep up the good work and look for opportunities to raise Whuffie where you can cash it in at a future date. Pick events to work on where potential clients or employers can see the good work you are doing. Let your expertise shine through the content you are producing. People will notice and then you can cash in that Whuffie and pay the bills.

:: Very cool…Dean (@thedudedean) Bairaktaris showed me his post where he pretty much directly cashed in his Whuffie for a new MacBook Air!

Enjoy this fabulous discussion with Matt Mullenweg of WordPress.com and WordPress.org who told me the story of the birth and evolution of WordPress as well as his ‘secret’ to success (hint: it’s right at the end).

Thanks Matt!

I had the chance to sit down with the awesome people at Threadless in December in a very snowy Chicago. They are so brilliant. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

I heart Zappos.com muchly and Rachael and Tony made me heart it even more. I really enjoyed talking with them about the core values that makes Zappos rock so much.

(p.s. Sorry Rachael for my misspelling in the video. I’ll get Alyssa to fix it asap!)

Oh…and btw…I finished my book. Yay me!

I sat down with Patti and Perry of Timbuk2 to ask them about their views on customer service, quality and community. Their answers are pretty cool.

Bonus link: If you think this is cool, check out the amazing video on the Timbuk2 Artist Workshop series by Jennifer Myronuk and Paige Bierma.

I was fortunate to be able to sit down in December with the amazing Austin Hill, Canadian VC and multi-time entrepreneur, to talk to him about the oldest form of economics: The Gift Economy and how Akoha.org (coming soon) fits into this. The video (embedded below) is well worth your time. Austin is a totally good soul and I’m really looking forward to the release of Akoha.

(I don’t know if you can see the video below in a newsreader, sorry if you can’t!)

(thanks to Alyssa Contreras for the editing)