Lee Aase | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Required Reading: Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers

As your Chancellor, from time to time I offer book reviews. And most of my reviews are really book recommendations. In other words, I don’t write a review unless it’s a book I think you would find worthwhile.

With Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success, we reach another level: beyond review or even recommendation.

It’s a Requirement.

You really need to read this book. I downloaded it last week through Audible and listened to it while doing some work around the house and yard. It’s absolutely riveting.

Gladwell’s subtitle for the book is, “The Story of Success.” His aim is to look at wildly successful people and to evaluate what sets them apart…what makes them “outliers.”

He disappoints the rugged individualist by showing how cultural history and accidents of birth (even the month of the year we are born) play huge roles in our opportunities for success.

And with his elucidation of the 10,000 hour rule, he dispels the myth that there is such a thing as a “natural talent” that can be extraordinarily successful without sustained practice and skill development.

Along the way, Gladwell provides surprising, interesting (and compelling) answers to perplexing questions, such as:

Why are Asians so much better at math than westerners are?
Why did Korean Airlines have such an abysmal safety record?
Why were the mountains of Kentucky home to so many notorious family feuds?
Why do so many of the most successful corporate lawyers in New York City have amazingly similar biographies (born in the 1930s to Jewish parents who worked in the garment industry) and how did those factors contribute to their success?

Outliers is both humbling and motivating. It’s humbling because it reminds all of us that for any success we have, we can trust that factors and background beyond our control (and perhaps even seemingly random, like the month in which we were born), have played a role. And it’s motivating because the 10,000-hour rule emphasizes that hard work is an indispensable ingredient for success, though it offers no guarantees.

Gladwell is a fantastic storyteller, as he demonstrated in The Tipping Point and Blink, both previously reviewed (or rather recommended) here. Any of his books would make excellent Christmas presents.

By definition, the vast majority of us won’t be outliers. But everyone reading this post has access to a computer with power far beyond what Bill Gates had as junior high school kid in 1968. He and Steve Jobs were born at the right time, and had extraordinary access to computers as youngsters that enabled them to put in their 10,000 hours and be in position to take advantage of (and help create) the personal computer revolution. But because of the legacy they have left, we have amazing opportunities our ancestors couldn’t have imagined.

In the scope of human history, we’re all outliers. Based on our SMUG enrollment figures, it’s highly likely that within 24 hours of this post being published it will have been read by at least one person on virtually every continent except Antarctica.

Fifty years ago, no one had that kind of power – not even the richest or most powerful rulers on earth.

But today, if you’re reading this post, you do.

I’m not suggesting that you spend 10,000 hours learning and practicing social media skills. But in just a few minutes a day you can work through the entire SMUG curriculum, taking advantage of the Jobs/Gates computer revolution, the Internet and Google to develop a whole new set of skills that you can use practically in your work and in your avocational pursuits.

I hope you will make becoming proficient in social media one of your New Year’s resolutions. (And for tips on keeping your resolutions, see this post.) If SMUG can help in your learning, I’d be honored to have that opportunity.

But meanwhile, get Outliers and read it. It will change the way think about success and its causes.

Update 12/29/08: Seth Godin has a thoughtful take on the 10,000 hour rule and its application in newer or niche markets.

Social Media 110: 7 Ways to Shrink URLs

After exploring a couple of alternatives to the granddaddy of URL shorteners, TinyURL, I had been planning to write a post about why these services are important and what are the advantages and disadvantages.

(By the way, I think it’s kind of funny…a sign of the rapid innovation in social media, really…that a service like TinyURL, which was started in 2002, could be considered an “old-timer.”)

When I found out yesterday that Ragan.com had an article (including a video interview) from a presentation I did in October at SAS in Cary, NC as part of Ragan’s corporate communications conference, I saw a good opportunity for a real-world, practical demonstration of how these services work.

Here was the URL to the Ragan article:

http://www.ragan.com/ME2/Audiences/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=

MultiPublishing&mod=PublishingTitles&mid=5AA50C55146B4C8C98F903986BC02C56

&tier=4&id=86C724C3E1794BA8ACD9D7CC55BC6DE5&AudID=3FF14703FD8C4AE98B9

B4365B978201A

And of course, when you paste a link like that into an email, for instance, what typically happens is that the URL is broken, so that when the recipients of your email click the link they get error messages.

Not a happy outcome.

That’s where TinyURL and similar services come in. Using the browser bookmarklet for TinyURL, I got this message:

By reducing a 215-character URL to 25 characters, it meant I could paste the shorter version into an email (or into Twitter) without worrying about a broken link.

How does this work?

It’s brilliantly simple, really. With a six-character string of letters and numbers, TinyURL can create over 2.1 billion URL options. So when you submit a gigantic URL, TinyURL generates a random six-character code and links it to that URL in a table. Then, when users click that TinyURL link or enter it into a browser, they go to the TinyURL site, which looks up the longer URL and redirects them to the original longer URL.

See the Wikipedia article on TinyURL.

Here are six other link-shrinking options:

BudURL – This service has a free option or a paid upgrade that gives you access to statistics on how many times your BudURLs are clicked. I’m just using the free option, which I think limits me to 25 BudURLs. It also has a browser bookmarklet, which I will describe in the SnipURL discussion.

SnipURL – Also goes by Snurl or Snipr if you want to squeeze those last two characters out of your 140-character Twitter limit. It has a javascript bookmarklet you can drag to your browser’s toolbar (at least in Firefox and Safari):

So that when you are at a page and want to create a SnipURL, you just click the link and it automatically creates one for that page:

Here’s the sequence when I clicked the link from the main page of my blog. This window popped up:

And then I had an opportunity to decide where I wanted to share it (or whether I just wanted to copy to my clipboard)

And when I selected Twitter, it opened a new window with some text pre-populated (and which I then completed):

Adjix.com – This is an interesting one in that it is ad-supported and offers revenue share. When people click your adjix link, a new browser window opens with a narrow ad banner. I think it’s relatively well done and the ads aren’t annoying. Here’s an adjix.com link for this post (which will create a recursive loop). What do you think of the ads? Annoying or OK?

NotifyURL.com – Similar service to some of the others, but you get an email the first time someone clicks your link. More recursive fun.

DwarfURL.com – Not very politically correct, but workable. Here’s the DwarfURL for this post: http://dwarfurl.com/01e3a

Linkbee.com – an ad-supported platform like Adjix. I like the way Adjix incorporates ads, as opposed to Linkbee, although Linkbee does give options. The interstitial ads show up for a few seconds (with the option to skip like some of the newspapers use), and there also is a banner option. What do you think?

TinyURL, SnipURL and BudURL offer browser bookmarklets, which makes the URL shrinking much faster and easier. TinyURL is actually automatically incorporated within Twitter, but I’ve found that it doesn’t always work. Adjix says it has a couple of bookmarklets (and even has video demonstrations of how to use them), but I can’t find the bookmarklets anywhere on its site.

Any of these seven tools will do the job for you. One potential downside of them is that if you use them instead of your long URL you may not get the Google/SEO benefit of links, because the link is to an intermediary site instead of your own site.

I’d appreciate hearing any thoughts you have relating to these services, or others like them that I haven’t reviewed. Please add your thoughts and reviews in the comments, so all SMUGgles can benefit from your experience.

Blogs Twice as Trusted as Congress

Josh Bernoff, a Forrester analyst and co-author of Groundswell, has issued a new report and has written a new blog post, entitled “People don’t trust company blogs. What you should do about it.” As people ranked sources of information, “company blog” came in dead last, at 16 percent.

I don’t trust it.

Don’t get me wrong. I have immense respect for Josh, and I think his post does point out some useful takeaways about how a corporate blog can be successful.

But I think the question that was the basis of his research was essentially meaningless.

It’s like asking people for their approval or disapproval of Congress. Before the last election in the U.S., the approval rating for Congress was at an all-time low, I believe. Something like 9 percent.

But people don’t vote in their local elections based on their opinion of Congress as a whole; they vote based on their local member of Congress and their perception of his or her record.

As Matthew Grant said in the comments on Jeremiah Owyang’s post about this study said, what’s really interesting is that the trust rating for personal blogs was only two points higher.

“Blogs” in general have negative connotations, just like “Congress” as a whole does. But a blog is just a type of Web site; one that enables interaction. I ‘m sure lots of people go to blogs and don’t even realize they are on a blog. They just perceive it as another Web site.

People are distrustful of companies in general and politicians in general. And they’ve had good reason, as demonstrated yesterday by the Illinois governor’s arrest for trying to sell Obama’s seat in the Senate. Rod Blagojevich’s trust level is probably around 3 percent today. Even after the recent vice presidential campaign, I’m betting Sarah Palin’s approval rating in Alaska is at least 20 times that.

People make distinctions among blogs (company or personal), just as they do among members of Congress. Or governors. The Blog Council (of which Mayo Clinic is a member) has a post discussing the Forrester findings as well.

As Shel Holtz put it nearly two years ago:

I trust certain people, and some of them have blogs. Therefore, I trust their blogs. It’s the person I trust, in other words, not the medium.

So as Josh says, be different. Be one of “the good guys.” If you’re going to have a company blog, don’t make it a regurgitation of the company line. Provide useful information and an opportunity for interaction. Let people make their voices heard on your site. And listen.

Trust me!

You can pass this along to people who trust you with the handy buttons below:

Winter Wonderland

Here’s part of the fun involved in living in Austin, Minnesota. With 7″ of snow so far (and the local public schools canceled for the day – although SMUG is still in session), I got to spend a half hour in some really productive exercise before catching the bus to Rochester.

At SMUG, the Chancellor also is in charge of Environmental Services.

These lights are called “icicle lights,” mainly for the visual effect they create. In our case, because our new garage doesn’t have gutters yet, we give that term a literal interpretation.

And after a half hour of shoveling, I had tamed the rugged driveway, much as my ancestors tamed the prairie. (OK, forget that. They didn’t get to go in and take a warm shower after they went out to chop wood.)

They also didn’t have wifi on the bus to work (or a bus to work) that they could use to share their morning experiences with the world.

So although we sometimes grumble about having to get up early to shovel the driveway and dig out after the snow plow has passed, we have a wonderful life. We’re blessed with a theater of seasons, and an opportunity to get out and become actors in the play.

4 Steps to Keeping New Year’s Resolutions

This post is from the SMUG Department of Philosophy. It isn’t about social media as much as it’s about personal growth. But in keeping with the rest of the SMUG curriculum, it’s based on my practical experience, and what has worked for me. In writing it I’m mainly reminding myself to apply what I’ve learned, so that in the coming year I might repeat my occasional successes instead of my more plentiful failures. If it helps you, so much the better.

In other words, it’s SMUG philosophy, not smug philosophy.

More often than not, January 1 has essentially taken me by surprise, like I didn’t even see it coming. As I overdosed on college football and enjoyed what was typically the last day of a break from the office, I suddenly realized I was at the start of whole new year and that I should think of some things I want to change. And without exception, those New Year’s resolutions have been shoved to the back burner within the next couple of weeks, and usually much more quickly.

But I have had some instances in which I was able to make meaningful long-term changes. So as I reflect on them, I want to draw some insights and tips that will help me as I look to mend my ways in 2009. You might consider applying them, too.

Continue reading “4 Steps to Keeping New Year’s Resolutions”