For those who don’t know what it is, negative advertising is the criticising of your competition’s products/services in your own advertising. Ryan Air learned a tough lesson yesterday – they had to pay damages to the founder of rival airline EasyJet for lying in an advert that criticised their rival.

But is negative advertising a good idea in the first place? It always seems to me that you should advertise your products/services based on their strengths. Conversely, just because a competitor’s offering is deficient is some areas, that doesn’t say anything about yours.

On the other hand, some negative advertising has been highly entertaining – Apple’s adverts lampooning Microsoft were very funny. Contrast the Apple adverts with the Windows 7 “I’m a PC” adverts. It just goes to show that even large corporations make big mistakes when it comes to advertising campaigns. Apple’s were successful and funny; in my opinion, Microsoft’s were naff and cringe-worthy and smacked of “Me Too!”.

And if you are going to use negative advertising, then heed the lesson Ryan Air has been taught: make sure your facts are indisputable!

What do you think? Is negative advertising ever justified and if so, when?

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The Media is Different, the Message Stays the Same.

Facebook, LinkedIn, ecademy, Social Media Tribes are all new. Even if you look at their ancestors, the Compuserve Groups, it’s all a phenomenon that has emerged only in the last 20 years.

As ever when something new arrives and survives long enough to be more than a 5 minute wonder, some of the early adopters become perceived as, or actively seek the role of, experts. But experts of what?

I can happily accept that there are experts in the installation, customisation and integration of the various applications and platforms. This blog and its comments are not addressed at them.

Social Media is Nothing New!

What I am confused about are the many people who describe themselves as “Social Media Experts” in their Twitter profiles and elsewhere, offering advice on how to use Social Media or on how to succeed in Social Networking. The reason for my confusion? I just don’t get what the expertise is based on or on what they offer that is new.

Let me explain. My main sport is hockey. Let’s say I move to a new area and join a new club. I’d connect with people, engage with them share with them and build relationships. We’d have a common interest, the sport, and I’d establish by my actions what I can offer my new club. Perhaps my reputation would precede me but I’d still take it slowly, easing my way in, doing a lot of listening and asking of questions.

When I wrote on a well known business networking site about the keywords Connect-Engage-Share, to describe the stages we go though when building Social Networks, this was seen by many as something new and exciting. I don’t get it. They are second nature to most of us, why do we need “experts” to explain how to do it, just because the context has changed from “off-line” to “on-line”.

Emperor’s New Clothes

The idea that there are separate rules for communicating and building relationships on-line as opposed to offline is a modern day version of the emperor’s new clothes. The context may have changed, but the core skills have not. In fact I’d go a stage further and say that any distinction between our on-line and off-line lives is at best arbitrary and at worst an illusion peddled by those wanting to make money!

Just because I am using different tools doesn’t mean it’s a different “life” or “world”. For example, I may go out into the garden and use a spade, fork or lawnmower. My gardening is not a different life or world, it’s just me doing my thing. How is it any different when I use a PC to access the internet?

Well, Maybe One Thing Is New

There is one way in which social media offers something new: businesses are used to communicating with customers, with staff and with suppliers. Social Meida opens up a very important new channel: customer to customer. Organisations need to find ways to monitor and respond to the information in this new channel without coming over as being “big brother” or defensive.

Have I Missed Something?

Perhaps I’ve missed something and someone will help me to dispel my confusion… anyone?

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It’s so easy to get wrapped up in our work and neglect our personal relationships. For the self-employed, this is a real danger; we spend as much time as we can chasing and delivering work and forget the reasons why we are doing it. It’s so easy to neglect the personal; growth in the business is little satisfaction if there’s no one to share it with, if our “significant others” leave us because they feel neglected.

Do you have a balanced definition of personal success? Take a moment and decide what success means to you – if you achieve all of your monetary goals but you are distanced from your children and your partner has left you, have you been truly successful? Or if after working years and years of 18 hour days, you finally achieve your material goals but you have had 3 heart attacks and are on blood pressure medication, is that success?

From the “Golden Age of Greed”  of the Thatcher years until now, the focus has been on material wealth, consumer greed, living on credit that can barely be afforded. We’ve seen the results of that with the collapse of the financial sector, but it’s time to look at ourselves. From the ancients like Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, to the father of modern science, Sir Isaac Newton, our great leaders of philosophy and science thought about the total being: Mind, Body and Spirit.

What are you going to do this week to help your body overcome the excesses of the Noughties, to fuel your Spiritual Needs and most important of all, to tell those important people that you love them and how important they are in your lives?

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1. Think about your audience – Many years ago I was given a great bit of advice: don’t think about what you want to write, think about what the audience needs to read in order for you to meet your objective.
2. Plan – It’s so tempting to just open up the word processor and start writing but even with short pieces, it’s better to spend a few minutes planning. Decide on your objective and list the points you must cover in order to meet that objective. In a longer piece, you can expand the list to include those things you should cover (less important than the musts), and those you could (the anecdotes etc that give colour to the piece).
3. Use short sentences and everyday words– Expertise is not demonstrated by using long, complicated sentences. Rather, short sentences using everday words to decribe complex issues in simple ways is the hallmark of a true expert.
4. Avoid the passive – Keep to the structure subject, verb, object unless you are using the passive to create surprise. If I write “At the end of the conference the President was interviewed by a  school girl”, this creates surprise because of the unusual end to the sentence. Writing “A school girl interviewed the President at the end of the conference” loses the surprise element.
5. Write from your heart – people often tell me that they’d love to write a blog but aren’t good at writing. If you write from your heart, with honesty, sincerity and passion, people will forgive you the occasional grammatical error.
6. Be careful with superlatives – they are overused and often unnecessary. An occasional superlative is acceptable, peppering your piece with them is not.
7. Make impact at the start – this will entice people into wanting to read more. If you can’t think of a way to do it, beginning by asking the readers a question is often a good tactic as it draws them into your piece.
8. Be Direct – People often write as if they are trying to emulate Sir Humphrey in “Yes Minister”. Don’t pad out your sentences, it casts doubt in the readers’ minds. Being direct also adds impact to your work.
9. Check your Spelling – readers know that writing software comes with spellchecking, so use it or you will lose credibility.
10. Use examples the readers can relate to – it’s usually more elegant to use examples than to attempt to write something that is theoretical.
11. Edit your work – when editing, keep the ABC of effective writing in mind; accuracy, brevity and clarity. Cut out unnecessary words, go though the piece again, and cut again!

And the most important rule:

12. Never, Never, Never be boring!

What tips would you add to this list?

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For example, from my observation of those who are successful at building on-line relationships, I’ve distilled the following list.

Connected and accessible

Successful relationship-builders make themselves easy to find and to communicate with and happily engage in two-way communication. They are often very good at asking the right question at therigh ttime to move things on. They believe that it is important to understand a situation or a person before stating their own needs. Gary V, for example, still tries to answer every e-mail he gets!

Generous

Successful relationship-builders are givers first, takers second.  They understand that the key to success is helping others to meet their needs. In the words of BNI, “Givers Gain”.

Positive

Successful relationship-builders know that they will get criticised, that sometimes others just wont accept the truth in what they are saying. They refuse to let other people’s negativity become their own. They know that what they post on the internet is pretty much there for all time and choose most of the time to accentuate the positive.

Inspired

Successful relationship-builders have something important to say, believe in their message and can back it up. Their inspiration is contagious, leaving other people highly-inspired and motivated.

Focused

Successful relationship-builders know where they are heading and what it takes to get there – they don’t allow themselves to be distracted from their purpose. They know that building relationships is a process that takes a while, as Gary V is forever saying, it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Hard-working

Successful relationship-builders are not afraid of hard work; they refuse to buy into the concept of a fast fix or a quick buck.

Resourceful

Successful relationship-builders are highly-skilled reframers, capable of looking at challenges from a number of different angles until they find the solution. they will accept responsibility for their actions and will work hard to make something work whilst at the same time refusing to engage in games of blaming others.

Connector

Successful relationship-builders are happy to connect someone with just the right person in their network who has the knowledge, skills or experience to be able to help.

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Social Media offers a huge opportunity for collaboration, for synergy, for output that is far greater than might be suggested by an examination of the individual components. Let’s look at an example from an era before Social Media and examine the lessons we can learn from it.

In pre-music download days, it was usual for a recording artist to bring out a single to accompany the release of an album. It was also common practice for the ‘B’ side to feature a track that did not appear on the album as added value for the fans.

In 1988, ex-Beatle George Harrison had an album coming out and wanted to release a song from it, “This is Love”, as a single. The problem was, he had no B-Side. However, Bob Dylan, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty were all spending time with him in LA and they quickly put together a song called “Handle With Care” and recorded it in a casual, no-pressure manner.

When Harrison played the track to key people at Warner Brothers Records, everyone realized that this was far too good a track to be a ‘B’-side. They wondered if the same team could create an album of similar quality.

The challenge was that Dylan was due to set off on a long tour in two weeks time! Nevertheless, using a borrowed studio, they wrote and recorded all of the tracks in those two weeks. No time to worry about polishing it, about doing lots of takes. Instead, they just went for it!

They collaborated ideas, arrangements, lyrics, pushing each other hard and just had a great time. The result? An album, “The Traveling Wilburys”, that Rolling Stone Album named one of the “100 Best Albums of All Time”. It’s a mixture of creative genius, distinctive musical voices and relaxed delivery. It’s certainly not over-engineered or polished so much as to lose any distinctiveness!

The lessons for Social Media.

1. When people come together in the same place, they can inspire and feed off each other to produce new and exciting solutions. Social Media can be used to circumvent problems of location, creating virtual groupings.

2. People who are the ‘rockstars’ of their niches can be brought together without ego clashes if a common goal, and a common desire to achieve the goal, can be agreed.

3. You can be really creative and produce wonderful results in a short time without having to over-engineer the solution.

4. There are several Cloud-based applications that allow documents to be shared so that they can evolve organically as people collaborate, bounce ideas off each other and push each other in the way that the Wilbury’s did.

If you use the Cloud for spontaneous creativity, what tips and tricks can you share with others?

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Smile at someone - do it now!

How often have you said “I wish I had done that, but I didn’t have the time?” I’ve certainly done it and wrote at length about some of the lessons I’d learned about this in the article 10 Things I Wish I Had Known And Stuck To From Early On. Here are 14 tips to help you to put an end to procrastination.

Have you told that special person lately that you love them? If not, do it now!

Have you set aside quality time for yourself so you can address those issues that are holding you back but are personal? Development requires action, do it now!

Have you given a smile to that stranger who looks sad? If not, do it now!

Have you done something to make the world a better place today? If not, do it now!

Have you organised a special surprise for that special person? If not, do it now!

Have you said a kind word today to your colleague with the low self-esteem? If not, do it now!

Have you said a prayer for your sick friend? If not, do it now!

Have you made a phone call to someone you know is lonely? If not, do it now!

Are you sitting on the couch, hoping everything will turn out right? Take action, do it now!

Are you hiding behind self-limiting fears? Face your fears and do it now!

Have you given a hug to someone that needs one? If not, do it now!

Have you exercised today? If not, do it now!

Have you done something today to nourish the key relationships in your life? If not, do it now!

“But I don’t have time!” Stop procrastinating. Do it now!

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As well as being inspired by the lyrics of that song, this article was also partly inspired by reading this article at ecademy. In it the author writes a lot of statements beginning with “You must…”, all of which are social media “imperatives.”

Yet one of the great opportunities offered by Web 2.0 and 3.0 when it arrives is that is that it’s all about choice. You choose how you want to carve out a presence, if any!

Or to put it another way, to ” embrace it in my own way and own good time and in a way in which I feel comfortable.” Ruth EdwardsStand Out

School, university, work – they all encourage conformity to the point of often stamping out creativity. We’re encouraged to follow the herd, be safe.The flip side of this is that people feel frightened when asked to do something out of the ordinary, or when faced by someone else doing it. They all focus on efficiency, doing things right by conforming. The corporate world depends upon it. Yet we’ve los focus of the more important word, effectiveness, which means doing the right things in the first place. Conformity may have been the right thing to do in the past, but not any more.

In the new decade, conformity and being average won’t cut it any more. There’s a sales and marketing cliche that urges companies to find their Unique Selling Point. This is becoming increasingly important at an individual level. There are millions of blogs; there are tens of millions of networking site profiles. There are often hundreds of people competing for the same jobs. Differentiation is becoming an important word.

How do you Differentiate Yourself?

Look around you – people have been seduced into a “wish a few positive thoughts and you’ll get all you desire” stupor. You will immediately differentiate yourself if you are prepared to:

1. take action to achieve what you want, put in some effort

2. accept  responsibility for your life rather than blame everyone/everything else

3. take time to optimise your social media approach. This means having a clear message, being consistent, being true to yourself and taking time to learn how to get your message heard. It also means connecting, engaging and sharing, three interpersonal skills we all use in our face-to face relationships which are just as relevant on-line.  Possibly out of habit, so many blogs are clones of each other. So many articles say much the same thing, just adding to the social media noise. Be different!

4. be yourself – I’ll write it until my grey hair turns white: sing your song with your voice! If you are not sure how to do this, take time to read  Personal Growth the Benjamin Franklin Way!

5. get a distinctive hair cut and wear clothes that stand out! Sorry Nick, couldn’t resist it, but there is a serious point here. Differentiation comes from within. If Nick didn’t have the congruency, experience and results to back up up his distinctive personal image, it would be meaningless.

What tips would you give people about how to differentiate yourself?

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On  Wednesday I looked at material simplicity.  Today I want to use the same principles to look at the importance of focusing on simplicity of communication.

Complexity.

Look at the following example. It comes from  the UK’s Department of Health for a definition of a container in the Medicines for Human Use (Clinical Trials) Regulations 2004:

“‘Container’, in relation to an investigational medicinal product, means the bottle, jar, box, packet or other receptacle which contains or is to contain it, not being a capsule, cachet or other article in which the product is or is to be administered, and where any such receptacle is or is to be contained in another such receptacle, includes the former but does not include the latter receptacle.” All that to describe a simple container for medication!

Some people seem to think that expertise is demonstrated by using long words and creating complexity. In this way, they attempt to show the superiority of their knoweledge by seeming to understand things that others cannot. In addition, complex, convoluted and opaque writing creates an opportunity for others “in the know” to nod their heads wisely (“I’m part of the hip crowd!”) and even to create the role of “interpreter” of the “words of wisdom”. Little wonder then that in some quarters, simple communication is frowned on. It removes the  apparent superiority of the orginal communicator, membership of an in crowd and the need for an interpreter.

Simplicity.

More and more organisations are embracing social media as a means of communication with their customers. This should mean that more focus is placed on the need for clarity and simplicity. Because of the pressures of work, organisations are too quick to accept the first solution that seems to be about right. Or they give important communication tasks to subject experts, who write for people of similar levels of expertise, rather than for the end user. Just look at Micosoft manuals to see an example of the end result of that philosophy!

We need to be committed to the belief that there is a simple way of communicating to customers and the public in order to keep on searching for something better than the first solution. Organisations have to enshrine simplicity as an important corporate value in order to encourage everybody, from top down, to put effort into achieving simplicity.

But don’t ever confuse “simple” and “simplicity” with “easy”. If you make that mistake, believing simplicity is easy to achieve, you will be tempted to give up too easily when it turns out be harder to achieve than you had anticipated. One of the reasons it may turn out to be hard is that simplicity comes from knowing your subject well. At the ecademy birthday bash on February 18th, Nick Tadd, Vanessa and I discussed social networking and the various social media tools for about an hour. Thinking about it afterwards, one of the things I really enjoyed about the discussion was that no-one felt the need to try to impress by using long words.

Another reason why simplicty and clarity may turn out to be harder than you had first thought is the danger of soming up with a solution that is either simplistic or and over-simplification.

Simplistic.

A solution may appear to you to be appealing in its simplicity but turn out to be simplistic, failing to deal with all of the elements of an issue. The question is: “How do you know if a solution is simple, or simplistic?” The answer is that you will not know unless you have a good grasp of the subject being communicated. If you are the communicator, you need to make sure that in finding a simple way of describing a phenomenon, you haven’t  underplayed the complexity of the situation.

Over Simplification.

Over simplification is not quite the same thing as simplistic. Whereas a simplistic solution underestimates the complexity of a situation, an over simplification misses out some important aspects. A simplistic solution is usually wrong; an over simplification is incomplete.

In conclusion, in order for you to communicate with simplicity,  you have to have a good understanding of the subject being discussed. That way you can avoid falling into the traps of being simplistic or of delievering an over simplification. If you want to do it consistently I believe that you have  to embrace simplicity as a permanent habit, as a way of thinking. But that’s just my belief. How important is it for you and what tips would you add?

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Is it Time to be Ditching Traditional Marketing? by Karen Skidmore
Karen argues something dear to my heart – that traditional marketing is still a very important part of the mix.

Leverage What You Have and Take Your Blog to the Next Level by Darren Rowse
Mr R. looks at what makes blogs grow.

Building a successful business blog by Jim Connolly
Discusses the often forgotten point that if you try and do everything yourself, the success of your blog will be limited to your expertise in a wide range of specialist areas.

No More Websites. Only Publishers by Mitch Joel
Mitch Joel looks at the need for businesses to rethink the role of their website

Social Media Misconceptions 2 : “I have profiles on all the main sites/networks, so I’m using social media” by Nick Tadd
Does exactly what it says on the tin in the title.

Should a Blog be Your Social Media Hub? by Jay Baer
Jay Baer looks at possible alternatives and ends up answering his question with a “yes”.

What Every Blogger Should Know About Design When Buying a Theme by Seth Godin
Getting a new design for your blog is both time consuming and expensive. Seth Godin looks at the key issues involved.

How to Be a More Relational Blogger [Tips for New and Established Bloggers] by Darren Rowse
More from ProBlogger, this time discussing the idea that a relational approach and community feel are still one central aspect of many successful blogs.

Wake Up! You’re a Blogger Not a Crackhead by Seth Godin
If the article was poor, I’d still have included it for the title. But it’s not. It exposes the danger of being adicted to blogging, and explores 3 areas of potential addiction.

Points of Contact by Chris Brogan
Make a very important point – we can have so many points of contact that we end up neglecting people.

Massive Traffic 101 by Court
There’s so much sense in what Court writes here and it is in the same spirit as Seth Godin’s post on “Crackheads”.

Other posts you might like:
Social Media Superstars’ Greatest Hits – Week 3
Social Media Superstars’ Greatest Hits – Week 2
That was the week in Social Media Blogging

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