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6 New Terms to Use When Measuring Social Marketing Efforts

I'm normally pretty disgusted when consultants (such as myself) make up fancy new hyped-up terms for well-established concepts in order to draw attention to themselves and create anxiety-based demand in their market. But these 6 New Terms to Use When Measuring Social Marketing Efforts actually seem pretty useful. Plus, they are not named in that annoyingly cutesy way that many firms use to glue the terms to their own brand and marketing. The six terms are Attractions, Participations, Interactions, Actions, Transformations, and Transactions. Not all of these apply to every campaign or program, but I encourage you to familiarize yourself with them. Using them will lead to better designed and managed social media efforts. Posted: 6/7/10; 5:20:31 PM #

New York State Cuts Off Funding to Tens of Thousands of Nonprofits
	The Foundation Center reports on a Wall Street Journal report on how New York State is Cutting Off Funding to Tens of Thousands of Nonprofits. I bet this is on the verge of happening all across the U.S. Posted: 6/7/10; 5:11:06 PM #

XKCD on Hiring Social Media Experts
	I'm on a roll with digging up relevant XKCD comics. It seems like nonprofits are all in the market for "social media" experts, "social media" being defined as anything on the upward scale of the hype curve that involves digital communication. Posted: 6/7/10; 5:07:22 PM #

The War for Control of the Story

The economist Milton Friedman caused a lot of harm in his time and his ideas will no doubt continue to do so for a long time to come. But he was also a man with some powerful practical insights. One of the most powerful being that when there is a major crisis, the ideas that get put into practice are the ones that happen to be "lying around." This insight is one of the secrets to the recent and ongoing wave of "disaster capitalism" that is rapidly realigning power upwards. In The War for Control of the Story Daniel Pinchbeck dives into why it's critical that civil society come together by developing the alternatives to the modern economic systems of value, particularly those built upon pyramids of debt. His examples draw from new economic models for video, but his analysis extends far beyond that. Posted: 6/7/10; 5:00:05 PM #

How I Learned to Become a Failure

A dysfunctional fear of failure is still a prevalent destructive dynamic is most of the organizations that I have had the chance to work with over the years. You don't have to go as far as I did once, in the office of an organization I ran, which was to put up a large sign that read "Fail Faster!" But I bet it wouldn't hurt. In How I Learned to Become a Failure, designer Rob Morris offers a personal perspective (and in the end it's all personal) on why failing early and often is a surefire path to success. Posted: 6/7/10; 4:52:41 PM #

Why Change Is So Hard: Self Control Is Exhaustible

Here's why consultants, organizational leaders, and other change agents need to carefully think out the pacing and landscape of choices when working toward organizational change. Change can be subverted by the built-in dynamics of self-control exercised by the stakeholders on which you're dependent. Dan Heath summarizes some research showing Why Change Is So Hard: Self Control Is Exhaustible. Posted: 6/7/10; 4:33:08 PM #