Theory

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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As a student and user of social media, and the power of the networks one can forge with it, I am constantly asking, how can I use this power to get something done?

We have an excellent example right here in the public relations community. In my post today at Communications Overtones, I mentioned that we now have 446 feeds in public relations social media community.

Moving Away from Early Adopters

It seems to me that the use of social media by public relations and communications professionals is just past the early adopter stage and quickly moving toward the early majority stage, as explained in Everett Rogers’ theory of diffusion.

Part of the problem is simple information overload.

Rule of 150
According to another interesting theory, called the “Rule of 150,� social networks are usually an average of 124 people and a maximum of around 150.

Breaking Into Smaller Groups

According to another interesting theory, called the “Rule of 150,� social networks are usually an average of 124 people and a maximum of around 150.

Just last year, the PR feed community was only 160 strong, a perfect size for the community to feed on each other and “know� each other. However, with the explosive growth, things are shifting.

It is the problem of scale that many A-listers have complained about and drawn scorn for mentioning. The problem is that once an “audience� for a blog exceeds about 150, it seems the person writing the blog becomes more of a broadcaster and less of a conversationalist. You simply can’t “know� more than that number of readers and excessive communication starts to feel like noise instead of constructive ideas and recommendations.

I suspect if we analyzed the public relations network of social media feeds, we would probably track three or more loosely associated, but distinct, groups that consume each other’s material and comment on each other’s sites regularly. Steve Rubel recently called the groups in which we read and travel the blogosphere, blog ghettos. A negative take on the concept, perhaps, but an apt one nonetheless.
The issue would make a fantastic graduate-level study, for someone willing to undertake it.

Examples of Spontaneous Groupings

One example of these social networks forming is when groups suddenly and unexpectedly form a coherent group. We have just such an example in the formation of the International Association of Nobodies (IAN) over the past several days.

With 20-plus members and growing, this group has done amazing things in five short days. Including starting a Website, Wiki page at NewPR, a squidoo lens, creating a membership badge, a logo, merchandise and a shared blogroll (see RSS) that members can add to their sites directly.
(Full Disclosure: I am a nobody too)

And Allen Jenkins, who was the inspiration for IAN, posts today about another organization, the the SEA-EAT blog, that formed spontaneously to help tsunami and earthquake victims. That network grew quickly to encompass 200 volunteers, with a core group of 50.

As people try to make sense of the social media network and how it can assist them in daily tasks, I expect more (instead of less) of this activity.

What do you think?

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