May 2006

A number of events caught my attention this week and my thoughts immediately turned to the gentle seekers of knowledge and wisdom here in your very fine establishment.

One such event was another great post by that PR practitioner from the northern climes of England, Stuart (the) Bruce from Leeds.

Stuart reckons that most of the really popular blogs suck and that the best blogs lie outside of Technorati’s Top 100.

Traffic, page rank etc are absolutely the worst way to do this [relying on popular PR bloggers to instigate standards for PR blogs]. They are merely an indicator of popularity - not of quality, authority, expertise, knowledge, experience, ethics, morality, honesty or any of the criteria that I would use in deciding who to listen to.

Stuart is, of course, absolutely right. Stuart’s ‘must read’ criteria includes:

a) I learn from - people who demonstrate knowledge, expertise, experience or insight

b) Are ‘niche’ and cover topics that I’m particularly interested in

c) Are enjoyable - fun, witty, whatever the reason they appeal to me

d) Are well-written - carefully crafted copy is a joy to read

To which I ask the question of this wise and perspicacious readership: what determines what YOU pay attention to on the web. Is it an image, well crafted text, a subject that hits your buttons?

Think about what really grabs your attention — sometimes it’s not what you intuitively think. Sometimes I find myself clicking on a link or a banner or a graphic that is ‘off topic’ from the page that I’m on, only to find myself meandering down an altogether different path.

And if ‘authority’ on a particular subject matter is important, what are the key determinants for YOU of that authority? Peer approval? Personal knowledge of them (as in, you ‘know’ Robert French but you have never met me face to face)? A nice looking user interface?

Technorati : Stuart Bruce

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I was fortunate enough to be invited to attend the American Marketing Association’s National Leadership Summit this past weekend. This is an annual conference that brings together participants from every American Marketing Association (AMA) chapter in the United States and Canada to share ideas, discuss what’s working in each chapter, etc. (As you may or may not recall, I am on the Board of the Oregon Chapter.)

Anyway, the Summit kicked off with an outstanding presentation by Merrill Dubrow, president and CEO of MARC Research. The topic was – you guessed it – what it takes to be a leader.

Now, Merrill structured his presentation in a somewhat unoriginal format in that he used the letters of “leadership” to emphasize the qualities he believes make a good leader. However, he spiced it up by making members of the audience try to guess the “correct” adjectives out of a broader list.

Think you can do it? Okay, then select which words out of the following Merrill used to illustrate his point (only one word per letter, folks):

Learn, Laughter, Listen, Long Hours, Loyal
Evolve, Excite, Endurance, Evaluate, Education
Adjust, Attitude, Align, Agitate, Anticipate
Decisions, Dedication, Determination, Daring, Desperation
Exact, Enthusiasm, Execute, Experience, Embrace Change
Reward, Radical, Results, Risk Taker, Rowdy
Set Goals, Supervise, Spirit, Sharing, Satisfy
Heart, Horizon, Happy, Healthy, Hire Well
Industry Knowledge, Independent, Integrity, Insanity, Improvement
Powerful, Playful, Polite, Persevere, People
 
If you picked the following, you and Merrill are on the same page:

Listen
Evaluate
Anticipate
Decisions (as in, a good leader has to make the tough ones)
Enthusiasm
Risk Taker
Set Goals
Hire Well
Integrity
Persevere

Initially, I stumbled on a few of these – for example, is “evaluate” really more important than “evolve”…? And perhaps the A should stand for “accountability” instead of “anticipate.” (If you are wondering why, pick up last month’s issue of Business 2.0 and read the article on accountability/leadership. I don’t think it’s available online yet, otherwise I’d link to it.)

But Merrill made a pretty good case for his choices. Now, I know it’s a little harder to do this without the benefit of Merrill’s presentation, but my question for the students (or any other readers) is: do you agree with his choices?
 
 

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