Turns out he’s a pretty skilled crisis communicator, too. He just didn’t realize it until today.

Tapper wrote a piece about the back-and-forth in the Romney/Obama camps, but something happened on the way to Google News:

. @jaketapper piece on Obama’s childhood dog eating has a hilarious Google news headline. twitter.com/ByronTau/statu…

— Byron Tau (@ByronTau) April 18, 2012

The headline was not the one ABC put on the post — but that’s not how everyone saw it.

@trianglman i had nothing to do with that headline, something wrong with Googlecode

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) April 18, 2012

@michael_r_smith it’s horrific

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) April 18, 2012

@cwarzel i believe it was Google

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) April 18, 2012

@jason_howerton Google’s algorithm is a pernicious beast. we have asked Google to fix it. i have no idea how this happened + am horrified

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) April 18, 2012

“Google’s algorithm is a pernicious beast” might be my favorite description of how the code operates. It works so well most of the time, we just assume it never fails. The scarier aspect is how often we might be besieged by covert errors instead of overt ones.

Good for Jake for being on the spot and accessible, even though the engagement probably took a large chunk out of his busy day. But it’s what you have to do when your reputation is on the line.

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

I am going to be one of many speakers at Explore Nashville on Friday, April 13 — a traveling roadshow of digital marketing expertise led by the Chief Social Media Explorer himself, Jason Falls.

The lineup is a powerhouse, and I would stack it up against anything:

• Jason Falls – keynote (link)
• Amber Naslund - keynote (link)
• Scott Gulbransen – lunchtime “chat” (link)
• Nichole Kelly – No Fluff Social Media Measurement (link)
• Zena Weist – Operationalizing Social Media (link)
• Mark Schaefer – The Future of Digital Engagement (link)
• Tom Webster – Drowning in Numbers: Turning Social Data into Insight (link)
• Courtney Seiter – Break the Rules of Social Media (link)
• John Morgan – Building Your Brand in a Digital World (link)
• Dave Delaney – Social Networking in Real Life (link)
• Tim Hayden – Mobile Marketing: Turning Passive Customers into Advocates (link)
• Eric Boggs – Addressing Niche Social Networks (link)
• Kevin McGee – How Can Big Brands Go Local (link)
• Sam Ford – Creating Spreadable Social Media (link)

…and, amid all those rockstars, I’ll be contributing some thoughts on “How to Make the Unsexy, Sexy.”

The Skinny

So, here’s the deal.

Jason is a Louisville guy, but he left a part of his heart in Birmingham from his time in sports information. He would love nothing more than to create a traffic jam up I-65 for the Explore event.

If we get 25 people from Alabama to come to Explore Nashville, Jason will give $500 to the Red Cross in Alabama. Another 25 after that? Another $500. That simple.

Oh — and be sure to use the promo code IKESEXY. That cuts the price in half.

Speaking of “Cutting in Half,” that’s part of the genius of the Explore format. Each speaker is given just a half hour. Half their usual time. You’re getting concentrated doses of social media expertise without the filler. The extra time will be used for networking with people who came from cities not as cool as yours, but are worth knowing anyway.

See you there.

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

And, of course, those blessed with kinesthetic gifts may have little use for language.

There’s no excuse for this, however, pulled from the site for Dancing with the Stars:

The problem comes in the lower right corner of that screen capture.

Take the Season 14 Cast Trivia Quiz

• Which star did stand-up comeday?
• Who was a beauty pagent winner?
• Who’s writes children’s books?

Yes, I can understand that a professional dancer might not have lifelong career regrets from a failure to master spelling and contractions. But this site wasn’t built by dancers. Apparently, it was built by interns inturns.

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

• You have a great message, but it matters little if no one reads it.
• You have a huge audience — but why again, exactly?
• You reach people with great teases, but do you convert them into purchasers?
• You have all of the above — so why not goose it further with like-minded people?

So what could possibly go wrong, if a bunch of people with similar aims and tastes decided to help each other out? This is what I saw in my Twitter stream tonight:

Yes, “It Takes Just One,” so why did I see a cluster of four of them at one time?

What you’re looking at is one of the various methods by which marketers can reach full extension of their message. A gaggle of them can sign in, and then auto-post to each others’ accounts to direct interest to a page (ideally their own.) The downside seems low, as most of these people would likely be highlighting each others’ material anyway — this just ensures they do so in a way that doesn’t allow items from the tribe to fall in the gaps.

This isn’t personal – it’s impersonal

I know Danny and Eric and Ann Marie and Mark and Allen. They are all top-notch communicators and networkers, each in their own right. I really would trust each of them, implicitly, if they told me that something was worth reading. (For that matter, Danny Brown seems incapable of writing essays that aren’t worth thinking about. Add him to a list with Geoff Livingston, Jeremy Pepper, Olivier Blanchard,  Shelly Kramer or Amber Naslund.)

Notice that word: “seems.”

None of us are perfect. We’re all capable of laying a big stinker every now and again. And when we do, we deserve to get called out on it. (I think most of those named above will tell you at least one story about me tussling over something they wrote. Lord knows I’ve had enough people disagree with me.

I also know there is very little reputational risk involved in merely linking to someone else’s content — and it creates additional activity for the participants’ streams, which only makes them that much more valuable as a resource. But what happened above? What would an outsider think of seeing four consecutive tweets highlighting the same thing? How would that not look like spammy behavior? How does that diminish the personal recommendations, by revealing them as automated and impersonal?

Rat races are rarely for anything but rats

I know why these confederations have developed — and it’s noble, in a way. It’s a survival mechanism.

The Internet has never (despite rhetoric and egalitarian nonsense to the contrary) been about fairness and meritocracy. Those are concepts that exist within a particular silo of the internet, or a community, or a forum. Early adopters always have an unfair advantage in reach and exposure, which they exploit right up until honest-to-goodness Celebrities swoop in and add three digits to the end of the benchmarks.

“Online influence” means very little when people with no credibility within a given topic have such large platforms. (Want to know how to make the next Kony video? Seed it with a select group of people with massive audiences, like Jason Russell did.) The people with true and genuine contributions stand little chance with a magnitude-Four disadvantage, so they do what comes natural. They adapt, and they survive. But it’s still just cursing the wind and hoping you can repel it with your hand.

I don’t know what the answer is. I imagine it might look like some sort of diagnostic tool that lets us really target our messages. Aggregate audiences are only necessary when you don’t know who you’re aiming for. We need the sophisticated media targeting tool that’s akin to Seal Team Six — one that walks into town with nine bullets, because there were only nine sanctioned targets.

It’s time to stop thinking about influence and audience in the aggregate. That’s a rat race we’ll never win. Of course, we can always win at the level of the human individual, her knowledge, and her personal network. But that doesn’t scale when applied to the outer limits of our ability to “know” people.

I wish I had the answer. There might indeed be several. But it takes just one…

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

I’ve been too busy to write here on a consistent basis, certainly without the pace that I maintained in 2010. Several posts a week for an entire year, compared to a trickle for 2011.

So, what happened, hotshot? Yes, I was busy, but it was more than finding time (or sacrificing family time) to be able to sit and write. I changed some habits, and for the better. Here’s what I did.

Less is More

As someone tasked with figuring out how to cultivate an audience, there’s the notion that more is always better. Anyone who understands strategic communication realizes this isn’t the case. Simply put, I spent less time in public places on the web.

Last year at this time, I was part of an invitation-only private group on Facebook, all made up of accomplished communicators. It ballooned to a population of around 140 or so, with just a little trickle of in and out. The conversations there were liberating and stimulating and educational and addictive. They were just as uncensored, and it was a jolt of inspiration straight to the veins of the brain. The group started in the middle of November and everything was just cruising right along. It was like being at an amazing conference every day. I knew I needed to quit.

And not only did I need to quit, everyone else did, too.

Sowing the Seeds

The great thing about conferences is you meet so many great people, and you share incredible ideas and insights. The next best thing about conferences is you get to go home and apply what you’ve learned. You leave that amazing hive and return to the real world, where experience and application temper theory and expectation.

Imagine going to a conference, and never coming back.

Sounds like fun, except real work isn’t getting done… and after a while, those really cool people you were hanging out with start to show annoying tendencies and foibles. You want to learn from their best, without getting sucked into their drama. The claws and the negativity were starting to flash forward. Familiarity was breeding contempt.

Those Facebook Private Groups are very powerful and sticky devices. So I left.

The Offshoot

I ended up in a different group, one formed as a reaction to the negativity. Almost a year later, it is still strong, and has not succumbed to the same fate as the first one. Why?

I think it has everything to do with size. Instead of 140 people, there are only 40. The volume of the conversation is manageable enough that you can actually keep up with what’s happening. With 100 more people, you have a lot of opportunities for side-drama and cliques to form. (“Ninety percent of the world never leaves high school — they just leave adult supervision.“)

One failed as a community, and one succeeded. It could be as simple as that. Or maybe not.

I mentioned that I changed some habits. One was being more deliberate about what I wrote, and where I put it. I once had a nice sized audience for Occam’s Razr, but it was never going to blossom into the most awesome force of nature. I am too fractured. My interests aren’t focused enough to build a sustainable following, because after a while you’re just feeding the beast to keep content flowing to the inbox. And I certainly wasn’t going to write about one thing, and just one thing only.

I was going to be intentional.

• What am I writing?
• Who will be reading this?
• Will they really care, or just pretend to in order to humor me?
• Will this have lasting significance?

As a result, many of my pithier observations or short notes ended up elsewhere on the web, and much of it went into that private community.

Applied Lessons

That was a long way to go to get from there to here, but it was worth it. I was able to refine an idea and put it into practice.

Too much of our communication is unintended.

I’m not talking about the non-verbal communication of posture and gesture and tone. I’m talking about what we do for conveniences sake.

• We send an email right now because we needed to check off the to-do reminder… but did the recipient need to get it at that exact moment? Was there a better place to send it?
• We post pictures or links without a thought about who might need to know, or why.
• We tie our updates from Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, as though those very different audiences all cared about the same things.
• We re-share content from people that we haven’t even read as a gesture curry favor, but without any real awareness of what we have just endorsed.

There is already too much noise. We can either keep fighting the losing battle of trying to manage the streams that are foisted upon us, or we can do our part to stop junking up the streams of others. And I am not talking about “don’t post funny things on Facebook,” but rather “who are you posting that to?”

Let’s say you find a neat link with a story about a cancer survivor. Instead of sharing it blindly, tell people what moved you. Tag specific people in the note, flag them to the existence. Because now you’re communicating with intent, and also fulfilling a much needed role in personal networking: you’re curating people.

By tagging Jennifer with the story about the survivor, I might find out that Tom (who doesn’t know Jennifer) has his own connection to that story — and in the process Tom and Jennifer discover each other. The act of imparting additional people-centric information makes this something more than a broadcast message — it’s a personal communication that others may eavesdrop upon.

Intentional communication is being aware of the needs of your recipient. Not just their need to manage their information, or to have their time respected — but to be discovered. Organic discovery isn’t as easy as it used to be — and it needs our help to curate it and move it along.

The value of Intentional Communication comes from understanding yourself. The more mindful you are of your Purpose, the more focused you will be on accomplishing it.

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Clout is the ability to influence, and get things done.
Klout purports to be a measure of your online influence.

Presumably, the more Clout you have in real life, the more Klout you’ll have online. And just like in real life, it turns out that we’re all influential in different things.

(Post now updated to include video)

What Klout is trying to do is admirable, in a way. But at times the execution will be off.

Because of my online connections, Klout seems to think I have sway in the areas of communications and social media. As such, I qualify for the occasional “Perk,” a freebie that I can try out with no strings attached, with the hopes that I might write about it or review it favorably.

Klout is very careful to communicate the complete lack of a quid pro quo, so this isn’t a complaint about that. They are also very responsive. I got a defective Weather Channel umbrella in the mail, and within a week they sent a working one.

No, this is a cautionary tale about using Klout to promote.

Gadget Geek

If you know me at all, you know I love gadgets. And I have been particularly intrigued with what Microsoft has been up to with its new Windows Phone platform. It is stunning in its beauty, simplicity, and functionality. As far as I am concerned, you can keep your iPhones and Androids. I’ve even talked friends into trying Windows Phone out — one bought a unit off eBay and probably would still be using it, but his company IT department wanted everyone on iPhones.

I am a Windows Phone enthusiast.

That’s why I was excited when my friend Joe told me about what was on his Facebook wall:

Apparently, my influence in the realm of Technology and Gadgets was high enough to warrant a nice Perk. I was looking forward to checking out a new device, and either getting my wife onto a Windows Phone, or using it as a loaner to friends who want to try one out. I was excited to log into Klout, and after accepting the perk and entering in my home address, I saw this:

Then, the details for claiming it:

Notice that it says that my phone is on the way, and then to be sure to RSVP for the party.

(I blacked out the URL and the code, as I don’t want to cause problems.)

Wires Crossed

Well, a few days later I received this:

I can understand that.

But boy, the whole process seemed rather poorly-worded. They took all of my information, only to then determine that I was not eligible?

I can forgive that.

Dropped Connection

I do have a problem, though, with the way it was pitched to Joe. My friend Joe got a notice on his wall that said I had earned the Perk — they used my name and my reputation to make a pitch to a friend of mine. They never did their homework about residency requirements, either. (I mean, I know I live in Alabama and everything, but I have many hip and trendy friends in New York City who actually turn to me for advice about technology, communications and social media. Or at least I thought I influenced them…)

I certainly hope Klout learns its lessons — the notion of Online Influence is an important one as traditional advertising models assumptions continue their implosion. If Klout doesn’t get it right, someone else will. Klout’s first-mover advantage in the space can be spoiled if people get the idea that they aren’t people anymore, but instead are just an arbitrary computation of tweets, retweets and engagements.

Clout means being able to influence, to inspire.
Clout means having the assurance you can gather others to get the job done.
Clout means never having to say you’re sorry, but doing it anyway because it’s the right thing to do.

I have received the following from Klout:

• Weather Channel umbrella
• 6 bags of Pop Chips, with coupons
• A DVD of “Men of a Certain Age”
• A $10 card for Subway

Update:

The incredible Rich Becker referenced a video from the Wall Street Journal blogs. I present it below, for as long as they’ll host it.

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

The History of Steve Jobs will forever be clouded by the Mystery of Steve Jobs.

He will go down as an irreplaceable force of creative vision, and years from now, people will still be wondering what would have happened if he’d just been given a few more years. In doing so, they will miss the truth about the man.

1. His professional achievements were a product of his desire to finish. He knew his health better than anyone, and has known for years that his days were few. He ought to be celebrated for maximizing that time, and bringing so many projects to completion.
2. His “secret sauce” is not unique. His Mystique was. Steve Jobs the Persona was bulletproof and undefeated, capable of turning imagination into reality like no one since Walt Disney. Steve Jobs the man was just like everyone else, with one exception: a gift for self-actualization — being able to squeeze the most out of the available resources, and not stopping until the cup was filled to overflowing. He made a lot of money through the merchandising of products and services, but what he really sold was The Illusion of Completeness. You bought from Apple because of your belief in him that nothing more could be done, that each parcel was a pinnacle. And next year, with cheaper parts and faster processors, that pinnacle was moving higher and you weren’t Complete until you had upgraded as well.

The biggest irony of his passing is the true vulnerability of Apple. The better he did at inculcating the above qualities in the rest of Apple culture, the more people there looked up to him. Which makes his passing even more acute in perception than it is in reality. “Apple” will be just fine, but it will never be Jobs’ Apple again. (Another pitfall of Personal Branding.)”

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.