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Smartest Guy in the Room vs Teamwork

Scott Berkun has some amazing posts about managing Rockstars, leading the "smartest guys" and basically working with awesome teammates without pissing them off.

And sometimes the TEAM comes before the Rockstar.

Here's Scott's Teams and Stars essay on the subject and a short excerpt.
It’s hard to understand good teams until you’ve been on both good and bad ones. You can often find frustrated people on good teams and happy people on bad teams: they don’t have enough perspective to see where they are for what it is. Some stars, people of high talent, are poor judges of teams because they’re tempted by the desire to stand out rather than the desire to succeed. Despite this, a common managerial temptation is to hire big talents, challenging the balance of needs for a successful team.

I once was part of the Best Team in the World. And since then I know that at least two of my previous teammates and I have struggled to regain some perspective on our TEAM work.

Once you have been part of an Agile team it is hard, maybe impossible, to go back to a dysfunctional team. In the Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team the core foundation for TEAMing is TRUST. I assert that this issue is the same in social media, or collaborative communities online, where we must find tools and take risks to establish the trust between ourselves and our potential teammates. When the TRUST is threatened the entire TEAM is threatened.

Here is a graphic of Lencioni's hierarchy.

It's only through TRUST is the team willing to have CONFLICT. And without the ability to disagree the TEAM cannot work through difficult tasks.

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/teams-stars

• Scott Berkun's Teams and Stars
• Patrick Lincioni's Table Group

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A Social Media Strategist In This Economy? What's The Value Proposition? by John McElhenney

[Thinking how to frame a dialogue without overburdening the writing with punctuation and he said then I said, I'm going to use one color for my statements and another color for my friend's statements. Hopefully that will make it easy to read quickly.]

On Saturday night a good friend asked, "So what do you do?"

He was somewhat serious. And it got worse from there.

"You are the only friend I can think of who I have not given work referrals to. If I were to sum up what you do in one sentence what would I say?"

I tried a few ideas on him.

I am a Social Media Strategist. "Nah, you've got people like Brian Solis, Chris Brogan and Jeremiah Owyang doing that gig."

I can build communities. "Really? To what effect? To make money? To save money?"

I know how to guide companies to... "No. What's a guide? What does that get them?"

I can assemble the creative and technical teams to do social media projects. "Oh really? Like what kind of projects?"

Launching a B 2 B portal or a B 2 C portal. "What's social about that?"

Okay, so I know how to do online marketing programs. "Boooring. You and the other 100 companies in Austin. What's your value?"

I have these training sessions to teach businesses how to work within the various aspects of social media. "Great. What do you call that?"

Uh, the sessions? That's not very good is it? Hmm... "Not too good. I can't get a handle on that. When I have a client and they need what you do I can say... JMac he's the <insert cool name here>. And make the recommendation and you get the work."

How about a Virtual Chief Social Media Officer? "That's great. That's it. That's what <name of local dude> does. That's his job. Yeah, that's good. Nobody else is doing that. A VCSMO!"

Now I just have to figure out how to tell that story and put the "value" in that proposition. And educate my friend and my potential clients on what a Social Media Officer does, virtual or full-time. So I'm building the DECK on it. Maybe I'll do the book, the podcast and the video presentation on it.

Here is the hero slide of my presentation What Is A Social Media Strategist. Once I get that nailed I can move on to showing the ROI on social media projects that I've been involved in and how that success can and will translate into similar success for YOUR COMPANY.

I will share the entire presentation when it is done. But until then here is my tenant of what I do, or what a Social Media Strategist does:

1. The social media strategist must assume many roles during the course of a given project.
2. The project often needs to be presented/sold/green-lighted by several levels within the spans and layers of a company.
3. Being a master of process and agile methodologies helps a lot in driving projects forward in these multi-team environments.
4. And finally the social media lead has to maintain a supportive attitude across all of the teams that come in contact with various parts of the project. Because one naysayer can ruin the entire program. And you never know where or when that negative leverage might rear it's ugly head.

It is a lot to navigate. And depending on the size of the company the leadership or lack of leadership can get quite complex. But that is the task of the social media strategist at any level. Stealthy and effective, the winning social media ninja can move projects through the darkness and opposition forces to achieve victory. Victory with or without the support of the entire cast of characters involved in the process, but victory (launch) nonetheless.

@jmacofearth (socialmedianinja.net)
permalink to uber.la: http://bit.ly/socialmedianinja

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Getting Real with Delicious - an advanced guide to social bookmarking by John McElhenney

Delicious [used to be del.icio.us before Yahoo bought them and paid for the real domain] is a powerful social bookmarking tool that's great for organizing your bookmarks and making them available online from any computer. But its functionality goes well beyond what you would normally call bookmarking; Delicious can provide an unequaled collaborative research tool for business, and as a social networking tool, the service uses tagging to make it easy to find bookmarks that others have saved. The following is advanced guide to getting the most out of Delicious.

Please contribute to the discussion by adding your own tips to the comments. From the Delicious home page you use the search window to find other pages that users have tagged. And the results are ranked by number of times the page has been tagged. So on a term like "facebook virus" Delicious returns 336 results.

However unlike Google, these results are handpicked pages from other Delicious users. The top listing was tagged by 51 other users. And from that one result you have a lot of options beyond clicking the link. Clicking on the 51 returns a list of all of the people who tagged that page. Clicking on any of the tags in the listing repeats the search on Delicious for that tag. And there is a "save" option to add the page to your bookmarks. And finally, the user name of the first person to tag the page is also clickable to view that person's main page.

Google search on the other hand returns 10,100,000 results. While the top results might be useful, the sheer number of results and the known gaming and SEO techniques used to drive listings to the top of the search pages might not necessarily give you the most useful results. If you think of Delicious as a filtered search result, 336 actual listings were tagged by actual people with the tag "facebook virus." It's like a hand-human selected search engine. And often the information on the delicious pages are more useful.

Notice ReadWriteWeb is the #1 listing on Delicious. You can bet that RWW has a well-researched deep discussion of the topic as opposed to PCWorld or CNET [no offense guys] that are covering the topic as a media event not as a real-world issue requiring solutions. The Google top results are written by journalists who are hoping to attract your eyeballs and sell you some anti-virus software, as opposed to working-solutions-writers for RWW who are hoping to attact your eyeballs and sell you some anti-virus software.

The difference is that on Delicious your peers thought the RWW article was worth bookmarking. On Google, some SEO folks and some media conglomerate folks decided to jockey their "Facebook Virus" story up to attact your attention.

In the simplest terms, you can use Delicious any time you would use your browser to bookmark a site. Delicious provides buttons for Firefox and Internet Explorer that allow you to access the bookmarking info page remaining on the site you are interested in. Clicking on the "tag" button pops up a window over the open page and allows you to add a Title (pre-filled with the page title information), a description and any tags that make sense to you. There is also a check box "Do Not Share" that allows you to keep any of your bookmarks private. Clicking on the TAG button brings up the following screen.

You can see there are also Recommended Tags (tags that you have used previously), Network Tags (a simple way to share the link with others in your network) and Popular Tags (tags that others on Delicious have used on this page). So in simple terms I can bookmark a site using Delicious in the same ways I would use the browser to bookmark the page. But there are a lot of other things I can do now that I've added a piece of content to my Delicious site.

1. Bookmark and share the link and your description and tags with others. [You can even set Delicious to post your links to Twitter or Friendfeed.]
2. Find everyone else on Delicious who has bookmarked the same page.
3. Send your bookmark to a network of other "trusted" Delicious friends. [I can send a technical link to my dev friends and not to my entire Delicious network.]
4. Make a tag for a specific brand or product I am interested in and see what everyone else is bookmarking with that same tag.
5. Create an RSS feed of my links and tags to be read by others or used by me in a different program, like FriendFeed.

So having used Delicious since SXSWi 06 I have developed a large number of links. [949 953 1046 as of this article.]

And it is hard to even imaging what that number of links might look like if I pulled down my bookmarks menu in FireFox. I don't know but something tells me it might choke. But with Delicious I have a bunch of ways to access, sort and retrieve my collection of links. [I sometimes refer to my Delicious site as "my brain on the internet" because if it's of major importance to me I will either blog about it or add it to my Delicious page and come back to it later.]

1. I can view my links as various tag clouds. [Tag clouds were just gaining popularity when Delicious was launched. Here is a post I recently wrote explaining Cloud Navigation as opposed to Cloud Computing]
2. I can "bundle" or create groups of links using their tags.

An example: I might have an educational website that I am interested in for both my kids to learn from but also from a programming or interface aspect. Using tags and bundles Delicious allows me to create a flexible and dynamic taxonomy of my links as I'm going along. So I collect "links" as I roam the web and easily add tags like "UI" and "education" and "math" to the pages so I can find them later. And then with bundles I can add the example page to both my "developer" bundle and my "kids" bundle.

A lot of the value of Delicious to me is using it as a capture and retrieval system. And I occasionally go into my account and clean up old tags, outdated pages and reorganize bundles and tags. And when I am done, I have a dynamic database of "my hand-selected information" that I can use myself or share with others. And finally, Delicious as a whole is an amazingly powerful search engine for any topic that you are interested in. So rather than worry about "your" bookmarks, you can jump on Delicious and type in random tags like: "iPod, software, reset, troubleshooting" and Delicious will bring back results that actual humans spent time cataloging and creating. So the usefulness of the results are often much more accurate than a Google search, for example. And the search results are ranked by how many times a certain page was actually hand bookmarked by others using Delicious.

And that is the power of Delicious for crowd sourcing, dynamic information gathering and retrieval, and leaving a trail of bookmarks behind you as you travel the web in search of what's next. And the search engine within Delicious might have a good handle on "what's next too!

@jmacofearth
permalink on uber.la: http://bit.ly/real-delicious

Additional Information: Getting Real is about getting your work done, having fun and doing it with as little extraneous effort as possible. A tip of the hat to Scott Berkun, GTD, 37 signals and 43 Folders. Without your pathfinding, where would I be? 

• Getting Real with Twitter is the forthcoming book on Twitter Business and Twitter Etiquette and Keeping It Real on Twitter. 
• Getting Webwork Done is a process I am documenting about finding tools and techniques to get the internet done more efficiently. See also Speed-the-web and Twittertools tags. 
• Seeking the Uber App was the initial quest into efficiency and getting things done with an ultra SocialMedia-eCommerce-Browser app.

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Creating Passionate Teams - Managers Hold the Spark

"More than anything else talented people want to be in environments that both appreciate and cultivate their talents." --Scott Berkun

Collecting two key thoughts about teams and empowered project management. These two folks have changed my entire perspective on teams and management and passionate leadership. Even when we are not "managing" anyone, we are all project managing each other in our work. We manage up to get what we need from the executive leadership. And we cooperate across disciplines and business silos.

“What do you need from me in order to kick ass on this project?” -- Kathy Siearra, Creating Passionate Users

From Scott Berkun: How to Manage Smart People ...managers have many undocumented, unsaid, but incredibly important, functions. They have more to do with enabling the happiness and productivity of the people that work for them than anyone else in the organization. ...he created an environment where good ideas rose to the top, further encouraging smart people to want to contribute. The bossman made working for him feel like a proper relationship: he got something from us, and we got something from him. I think that this kind of management style requires more skill and savvy than a more hierarchical drill sergeant type of manager.

More than anything else talented people want to be in environments that both appreciate and cultivate their talents. Any successful manager of talented people has to come in every day, in every meeting, and directly work towards making this happen. This doesn’t mean coddling people, or denying the team’s goals in favor of making someone feel good. Instead it’s about making actions and decisions that both clarify how people’s talents apply to the team goals, and working to keep the team happy, motivated, and focused in that application.

One practical way to overcome this [lack openness] starts with a meeting. The manager sets up a meeting with the employee and opens a discussion about how they like to be managed. The manager should explain the purpose of the meeting, and asking clarifying questions about what the other person says. Generally, the manager should say little about their own opinions. Zero. Zilch. Zip.

Instead, their job is to listen, help clarify the other persons thoughts and then go away and think about what they said. First acknowledge that you have weaknesses, both in skills and in knowledge. Second, admit that you’re ignorance hurts not only the product or website, but the team itself. Third, get help in hiring experts for roles you are not familiar with, and go out of your way to involve them, and their perspective, in your decision making process.

Deliberately hire first rate strong willed people to represent disciplines that you tend to undervalue. Force yourself to be on the top of your own game, and to make sure it’s not bias and ignorance that drive you, but good judgment refined by divergent perspectives.

references
Kathy Sierra: BrainDeath by Micromanagement
Scott Berkun: How to Manage Smart People

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/team-leadership

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The VIEW - A quest for the "evolved web browsing experience"

"The evolution of social media depends on the evolution of the browsing experience."

Open Source Collaboration is about Virtual Teams using web tools to manage and communicate asynchronously while still maintaining priorities and quality of communication. The first step on any new project (open or closed) is to define the goal. This post is only part of the challenge, but the goal of FFoFF has morphed into a process I refer to as The Cloud >> The View >> The App. And that process or workflow is the basis for a conversation I am intending to have with other simliar minded seekers.

The goal is not to create the next killer app, or uber browser, the goal is to define what that evolved web experience might look like. And then, using free plugins, apps and browsers (0riginally FFoFF or FriendFeed on FireFox) to get as close to the goal as possible. Through this discussion [preferably not a monologue] the intention is to articulate the needs and challenged of the next generation web experience.

The evolution of social media depends on the evolution of the browsing experience. Things like secure transactions anywhere, on-the-fly translated content, consolidated profile management (across all of your networked sites) and public and private personas are all part of the puzzle that will drive the next generation of social media connections and networks.

THE VIEW (an invitation to dialogue and collaborate to build the requirements and demo of the UBER UI for the "social web.")

1. The project
2. The tools
3. The rationale
4. The solutions
5. The view
6. The team
7. The genesis

1. The project

Defining the Evolved Browser or Uber App for Social Media

2. The tools

• FireFox 3 is the development platform and interface.
• The tools are widgets, social media sites, online apps, clouds of data and on and on.
• And FriendFeed is my current choice for uber aggregator of social content.

3. Rationale

• I believe we can iterate an Uber Interface (a VIEW) that will have amazing flexibility and require a ZERO DOLLAR dev budget.
• My Firefox bookmark bar is already a sort of streamlined UI. It is not good enough, and constantly changing and evolving. But it is FREE.

4. The Solution - Usage models for the solution.

• The uber social master VIEW
• BrainTraining and Teaching VIEW
• The newbie VIEW

5. The VIEW

A view is a design and grouping of FFoFF elements. A view is an iteration. A view is a proof and hypothesis.

6. The team

John McElhenney

7. The genesis

• First I posted a Question on LinkedIN. http://tinyurl.com/firefox-plugin-question
• Read a post by Steve Woodruff on his StickyFigure blog. And posted my comment to his One Interface to Rule Them All post. http://tinyurl.com/uber-search
• Next as I was contemplating Steve's question I was inspired to put together a PPT slide of what I imagined the uber app to be.
• Next, I created a room on FriendFeed http://tinyurl.com/globalsocialmedia
• Next, I built a feed of the GSMC room and invited most of my smart friends to join the room.
• Somewhere along the way, I read someone's post containing a reference to FFoFF as a joke. But in my mind it stuck.

Note: I am searching for that initial FFoFF person and will post the link here poste haste. And if it's you, please jump in and put yourself on the TEAM.

Also please see Socialwiki and Wikisocial for an evolution of this process to an open source directory project.

[Initial wiki page created 7-15-08]

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/theview-exploded

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THE new Formula for Social Media Success - Available Now

-- This post is a response to Larry Hawes post: The Seven “C”s of Social Interaction --

Humor me for a sec, I'm going to think out loud for a sec...

Conversations - well this is the topic, so I'd cut it,
Continuum - like the word, I'm not clear what you mean.
Container - don't like the word, but okay on this one.
Community I think this is the topic, so I'd scratch this one.
Currency - "one person desires something that another has" [let's come back to this one in a sec]
Credibility - the biggie to me - I use the word TRUST
Connectivity - nice, multiple meanings [physical connection via internet; connection to another person via the conversation]

I'm going to take a shot at simplifying the "framework" if I can. Platform People Trust or at a start up I once labored at we rallied around the forumula to "make it scale": People Process Software In order to evaluate the power/value of a social interaction I think the focus is on the "connection." And when I think of major connection I think of looking in someone's eyes and evaluating what I call the "connect." [Nice how that fit together.]

Online of course, we will be interacting and trying to connect with folks we have never met and may never meet. At the heart of this tension is trust. The software/platform can help, a skype connection could help, but at the end of the day, even my "friend" will have to ask themselves, "what's in this for me?" I think that's our basic instinct. And certainly as things have tightened up financially, the "how does this impact the bottom line?" question is becoming more urgent.

So to summarize a simplified formula I would express it like this. People [multiplied by] Platform [divided by] each Individual's ability to express themselves during the connection [minus] Misses or clash of style that degrades the communication.

So a simplified social media equation might be written like this: P x P / I - M = T [trust ratio of a connection/community]

[Oh, hey, I've got to get out of here, I need to get some t-shirts printed with this new formula on them. I'll send you the link to the order form when I'm done.] So, Larry, thanks starting the dialogue. And if I get any money off these t-shirts I'm working on, I'll give you 9.7% of the profits after tax.

[based on the above formula and this interaction that we've just had]

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/socialmedia-formula

Now available at cost ($10.99) as a t-shirt from Cafe Press.

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