MackCollier.com

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The In-Person Renaissance Is Coming

Back around May, I saw a video on Facebook. It was two cousins, both around 8 or 9. They were standing about 6 feet apart, and giggling. A parent of one of the children explained that the cousins hadn’t been able to see each other for weeks due to covid restrictions, and they were about to get to hug for the first time since. They looked at each other and the mom said “Go ahead!”, and they sheepishly started inching toward each other, and then finally their eyes met and they tackled each other in a big hug.

And at the same time, both children started sobbing uncontrollably. It was honestly heartbreaking to watch, and it perfectly illustrated the loss we are all feeling of a human connection right now. I’m introverted, so not being in social settings hasn’t hit me as hard, but I know a lot of my extroverted friends have been struggling this year. Just as introverts feed off solitude, extroverts feed off contact with others. There will be many studies and books done on how this country handled dealing with coronavirus in 2020, but one aspect that cannot be denied is that being locked up at home has had a devastating impact on the mental health of this country. And some experts believe its actually made the spread of the virus worse, not better.

So when the country fully reopens, there will be a great desire to return to normalcy. But the realty is, we have all adjusted our lives this year, and some of those adjustments will become permanent changes. I can see two big behavioral changes that we will adopt as a society moving forward:

1 – We will do far less in-person shopping for food. Trips to the grocery store will more often be to pick up an order that we placed online, instead of going to shop for food while there. We will also use delivery services more both for meals from restaurants, and to order from services that offer meals we can prepare at home.

2 – Many companies will decide to make remote work from home permanent for their employees. This year has been a trial-by-fire for many companies in embracing remote work, but many companies will find out it makes sense for them and their employees.

 

So think about how that will change our behavior. A lot of the trips out to ‘run errands’ like grocery shopping, picking up dinner, etc, will now be handled via delivery services.  So fewer trips away from the house. And more of us will be working from home, so that will eliminate even more trips away from home.

But, spending all this time at home will also greatly reduce the amount of in-person contact we will have with friends and co-workers. So I starting in 2021, we will see many of us placing a greater emphasis on leaving the house in order to meet with friends, co-workers and family members. A greater percentage of our trips away from the house will be of a social nature to connect with others.

And I think this will go beyond just heading to a bar or movie with friends. I think you’ll see more deliberate thought put into our social gatherings, and they will be considered more special and meaningful. For example, for Halloween 2021, I could the return of community hayrides, maybe school Halloween carnivals, community-wide trick or treating that incorporates ways for parents to have social time together as well. Activities that were normally aimed at individuals could be promoted as group affairs. For instance, more guided tours for groups at museums, giving you a chance to sign up to join a group instead of going alone.

For companies, I could see a greater emphasis on trips for employees, and in-person team-building exercises. Maybe the annual company retreat becomes a bi-annual event every six months. Conferences could begin to incorporate fun social events in the evening rather than just telling attendees they were on their own at 5pm, ‘See you tomorrow!’ And conferences are going to come back in a big way starting I think in Fall of 2021 moreso than in the Spring. So those of you that are about to start planning for next year’s events, focus on building time into the schedule for attendees to interact with each other. We will want and need that time.

Human beings are social creatures. We need contact, we need to interact with each other. We were not meant to live our lives in fear locked up in our homes. This is not healthy for our bodies or souls. Starting in 2021 I believe you’ll see us yearning for more in-person contact and social events. The smart companies are the ones that will provide more social options for us.

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Why We Worry and How to Stop It

I think most of us can agree that one of the biggest sources of stress in our lives is worrying. For the most part, we worry about the future.  We worry about tomorrow. We worry about how we will deal with something that is either coming in the future, or that we suspect will happen in the future.

And that’s important to note, because often, we find out that what we were worried about happening, never did.

I recently linked to an interview that Kobe Bryant did shortly before he passed away. It’s a great interview on many topics, one of which was playing for legendary NBA coach Phil Jackson. Phil is known to be pretty quirky, and Kobe was discussing some of the ‘odd’ things that Phil would do during practices, teaching breathing exercises, having meditation sessions, holding certain poses to release stress, etc. Kobe said that at first he thought all this was crazy, but then he noticed that Phil had completely bought into these teachings, so he decided to give it a try. Kobe said that he eventually realized that what Phil was teaching the team was how to live and play in the moment. Don’t worry about what will happen in 5 minutes, focus on running and executing the current play to the best of your ability. Kobe added that if you watch Phil’s Lakers teams or his Bulls teams with Jordan, that they never get rattled at the end of the game. They are always focused on the moment and they don’t let what could come next overwhelm them.

These comments reminded me of what Alabama football coach Nick Saban says he always stresses to his players. He says that he tells his players that “every play has a life of its own” and to never look at the scoreboard. He teaches his players to execute each play to the best of your ability, then immediately drop it and go to the next play. By doing this, he’s teaching his players not to focus on the last play or what they need to do on the next play. Focus on THIS play.  Focus on the moment.

My uncle has a condominium near the beach, and every time I visit, I always look forward to walking on a nearby beach. It’s incredibly relaxing for me. In thinking about what Kobe and Saban said about ‘playing in the moment’, I realized that when I walk on the beach, I completely focus on the water.  Watching it come in, watching it go out. In other words, completely living in the moment. So I’ve been trying to do more of that in my day to day life, focusing more on what I can do today, versus worrying about what will happen tomorrow if I don’t do what I need to do today.

So that’s what I plan on doing from now on, focusing more on the walk on the beach, and worrying less about how I will get home.

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Diversity Just For the Sake of Diversity Doesn’t Help Anyone

Whether its the speaking lineup at a marketing conference, or the executive team at a company, you’ve seen instances were there has been calls for more diversity in that group. “We need more…” people based on their race or gender or some other criteria.

What is often missing from the diversity discussion is making sure that the people selected are qualified to perform the tasks.  Too often, simple choosing someone based on a pre-determined criteria is more important than choosing the most qualified person.

This approach does a dis-service to everyone. It rewards people for meeting a certain criteria, and punishes talented people.

Picking the most talented people to perform the job should always be the first consideration. Talent is more important than hitting a desired ‘diversity’ goal every single time.

The goal shouldn’t be to pick a more diverse team, the goal should be to pick the BEST team.  Now if you can pick the best team and also address diversity, then fine.  And to be fair, in certain cases having a more diverse team can actually be a better team by default.

For instance, let’s say a conference has decided that it wanted an equal split of 5 male speakers and 5 female speakers. What happens if all of the male speakers are qualified to speak, but only 2 of the female speakers are?  That means 30% of the speaker lineup will be subpar which means the quality of the conference will suffer.  And it could just as easily be the opposite; maybe only 2 of the male speakers were qualified to speak at the event but the organizers pushed for 5 male speakers, so they signed 3 more who were unqualified.

This is why you push for talent before diversity.  Now some will argue that having a more diverse team IS having the best team. In some scenarios this is absolutely true.  But often, simply making a team more diverse (based on whatever criteria you think that means) doesn’t make it better.

If you can make your team more diverse without sacrificing talent, then go for it. But you should never place diversity above talent. Hire for talent first, diversity second.

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The Magic of Being Second and the Spontaneous Hillside Dance

Years ago I saw a video from an outdoor music festival. The video showed a crowd of fans sitting on a hillside enjoying the concert. After a few seconds, one guy stood up and started dancing. By himself. He continued dancing, awkwardly, by himself for a minute or so. A few people nearby watched him but for the most part he was ignored.

Then after about a minute, a nearby person stood up and ran over to him and started dancing, awkwardly, next to him. When this happened, everyone around them started looking around at each other like “what is happening?” After a few seconds, a third person jumped up to join them, then a fourth, then a fifth. Within a minute or so, the entire hillside was dancing, awkwardly, together and enjoying themselves.

This spontaneous hillside dance wasn’t triggered by the first guy that got up. It was triggered by the SECOND person. When there was just one guy dancing, it was easy to dismiss them as simply being that weird awkward-dancing guy. But when the second person joined, then they were a group. Suddenly it became much easier to join them if you wanted to. Then when a few people started joining, the dynamic flipped from being weird to being cool.

I was remembering this spontaneous hillside dance yesterday when I re-watched Simon Sinek’s brilliant TED talk on the power of why. You have likely seen this talk, but even if you have, it’s worth another view:

If you think about how most companies can tell you what they do but struggle to talk about why they do it, it seems to be rooted in this desire we all have to promote ourselves or talk about ourselves. This is what’s important to me.

But the ‘why’ gets to the heart of why your idea can hold importance for OTHER PEOPLE. That’s where the magic happens. When other people see the value in your idea, they become invested shareholders of that idea. They help nuture it, they help grow it. They share it with likeminded people and invite them to nuture and care for it as well.

When you think about companies, who they are and what they do and WHY they do it, can you more easily describe the WHY or the WHAT?

I can describe the WHY for Red Bull, but only the WHAT for Monster Energy Drinks.

I can describe the WHY for Patagonia, but only the WHAT for Columbia Sportswear.

I can describe the WHY for Pedigree, but only the WHAT for Alpo.

 

But at the heart of all this, we are talking about what’s important to the customer, and putting that first, and putting ourselves second. As Sinek has said “People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.”

Which goes against human nature. We want to tell others how they can help US first, and after they do, we then ask “Ok how can we help you?” But the magic lies in putting yourself in second place and putting the person whose money or attention or time you want, putting them first.

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Why I’ve Decided to Blog More and Spend Less Time on Social Media

Adversity doesn’t create character, it reveals it.

Over the last few years, there’s been a growing sentiment that social media has become more and more toxic, especially in regards to the discussions happening around news and politics.  I’ve heard many people say they have left Facebook completely because they were overwhelmed by the constant arguing and finger-pointing.

Since 2020 is an election year, we all knew it was going to get bad on social media.  What none of us expected was for covid-19 to happen. The election, plus much of the country being on lockdown for most of the year has understandably put all of us under a huge amount of pressure.  We are worried about how to deal with a real or likely loss of income.  We are worried about the health of ourselves and our families. We are worried about the future.

What troubled me, and I especially saw this on Twitter, was how people reacted to the spread of covid. Many people became judgmental, shaming people for not reacting in a certain way or for not taking certain issues or developments in the way that they felt was appropriate. Instead of being understanding and compassionate. I saw too many people judging and attacking.

And what stunned me, was that many of these people were in my Twitter network. Some of these people were friends I had followed for years. On the one hand, I would tell myself that they are worried and scared and rightly so. On the other hand, we are ALL worried and scared, and rightly so.  Being scared and worried doesn’t excuse you from being an asshole.  And a lot of people I followed on Twitter were exhibiting this behavior.

So I decided to ‘de-tox’ my Twitter network. I effectively unfollowed 60% of my network over about a month.  But I started thinking about this, and realized this isn’t a Twitter issue, it’s a social media issue.  People are being jerks on Facebook just like they are on Twitter.  Every community has its jerks.  If they are in the minority, it’s easy to ignore and overlook them. But when the jerks become the majority and start creating and dominating the conversations, I want to opt-out.

That brings me back to blogging.  Literally.

The one thing that I’ve always loved about blogging is the power it gives you to share your voice. It gives you the ability to have a say, to share your thoughts with the world. Today’s social media world is based around the soundbyte. 140-character missives designed to spark instant engagement. Often emotionally-charged attacks and insults that people are compelled to immediately respond to.

It’s the complete opposite of a conversation. It’s yelling in 140 characters, the person that yells the loudest gets the most Likes and RTs.

Blogs are different. Blogs are where you can have your say fully and completely.  You can use 140 characters, or you can use 140,000 if you want.

I’ve talked before about the 4-step process for creating advocacy; Interaction leads to Understanding leads to Trust leads to Advocacy.

On social media, we often never have those interactions. We yell at each other and talk at each other instead of to each other.

With a blog, you have a chance to have your say.  You have a chance to state your opinions and make your case with as many or as few words as you need. You can then respond in the comments, or via email or even on your own blog.

But more than anything, I’m tired of the yelling. We need less yelling and more listening. We need less judgment and more empathy.

We need to be better people. That’s what I think, and it’s a lot easier to say that here, than it is on social media.

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Why I Turned Off Comments

The short answer is that I want to focus more on my writing for the time being. The longer answer is that conversations about and around blog posts are incredibly fractured, and have been for about a decade. One of the great things about blogging from 2005-2010 was the amazing conversations that could happen in the comments section of a post. Blog comments are typically more in-depth and fleshed out, than comments you see on social media, which tend to be more like soundbytes. Before social media sites like Facebook and Twitter went mainstream, blogs were where the commenting action was at. And great comments led to more great comments, and before you knew it, there was a long discussion happening in the comments section that ended up being more valuable than the post itself. In fact, in the early blogging days I always had the goal of writing a post that led to a discussion in the comments section that was more interesting than the post itself.

I’ll write about this more next week, but I think in many ways, social media has hurt our ability to communicate more than it has helped.  And I think that’s readily apparent when you look at the comment section of most blogs. The volume of comments is down sharply across the board. Yet the funny thing is, spam comments keep chugging right along.  So if you are a blogger, you begin to realize that a lot of your comment moderation time is now spent just dealing with spam, whereas a few years ago, it was quite easy to lose a couple of hours a day responding to wonderful comments on your blog. Many prominent bloggers have already dropped comments for this reason alone.

Another reason why I’ve decided to turn off comments is because when I decided to recommit to blogging, one of the promises I made to myself was that I would give myself permission to write about more topics that I want to write about.  It won’t all pertain to marketing, business or anything related, as I talked about yesterday. I quite honestly want the freedom to write about what I want to write about without having to worry about some person who has never read this blog before commenting and saying I am an idiot simply for taking a stance they don’t like. Once I’ve been blogging again for a few weeks, I may decide to reopen comments, we’ll see how it goes.

But I do want to hear from you, and my email is always open, and you can always find me on Twitter.  Although I will admit, I am spending less time there. Again, more on that here in one week.

 

BONUS:  I’ll be joining my good friend Kelly Hungerford tomorrow at #SEMrushChat on Twitter to discuss matching your content creation to your marketing funnel.  Hope to see you there!

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Individuality is Fine, as Long as We All Do it Together

I was going through my WordPress app on my phone (BTW if you publish with WordPress, you really need this app, it’s great to keep up with your site, especially when you’re mobile), and came across this world map while checking my stats. This shows every country in the world that sent a visitor to this site in 2017. As you can see, almost every country in the world had at least one visitor come here in 2017.

I think we sometimes lose track of just what an amazing communications tool a blog can be. When I first started blogging in 2005, one of the very first people that linked to my blog (tracked with Technorati, anyone remember them?) was a 13 year-old girl in China. That opened my eyes to the enormous power of a blog to spread your message on a truly global scale.

The reality is, we’ve given up on the promise of blogging. Blogs give everyone a voice. As long as you have access to the internet and the blogging platform, you can share your voice with the world.

But over time, instead of sharing our unique voices, perspectives and personalities, we’ve become better at sounding like everyone else. We study blogging ‘best practices’ and try to ‘improve’ our writing to increase engagement, stats and visitors. It’s enticing, but if you aren’t careful, we all end up sounding like everyone else.

I’m just as guilty of it as anyone. I tell myself I can’t talk about certain topics here or in a certain way, because I always have to be mindful of who my audience is, and what they want.

But lost in that, is the fact that your audience wants to know YOU. They want to hear your unique take, your personality. They want to see something different, that’s how you catch attention. And if the content is good, then you hold it.

I love reading business success stories, learning how a particular company came out of nowhere to stand out in a crowded marketplace. More often than not, the founder or CEO’s explanation for what worked is simply “I zigged, when everyone else zagged”.

Here’s to more ‘zagging’ in the year ahead.  And a gold-star to whoever can be the first to tell me what TV character said the title of this post.

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Buzzwords Are Ruining Careers and Destroying Companies

Have you heard of the latest buzzword, ‘Emotional Intelligence’? I hadn’t either till I saw marketers using it all over Twitter last week.

What is ’emotional intelligence’?  Or rather, what other idea or thing has been co-opted by this buzzword?  As soon as I heard the term, my first thought was ‘Wait, they mean empathy, right?’

So I looked up the buzzword ’emotional intelligence’. Google tells me it means: “the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one’s emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically.”

Now apparently, this buzzword has been around for at least a decade or so, but it seems marketers are now discovering it and it is the latest ‘it’ concept that companies, and the agencies that consult them, are rushing to. Marketers do this every year or two, they rush to the latest buzzword/concept in an effort to better connect with clients and position themselves. I get why it happens, I just get irritated that we sell buzzwords over concepts. Years ago it was ‘social business’ then it was ‘digital transformation’, now it is ’emotional intelligence’. I even got some industry peers upset with me years ago when I said they needed to stop marketing the buzzword ‘social business’ and actually start educating companies on what they think the concept is, and how it would impact a business.

As we did with ‘social business’ and ‘digital transformation’, we will now start to see a landrush of consultants branding themselves as offering to teach your company how to leverage ’emotional intelligence’ into all facets of your organization. And we will no doubt begin to have many executives that will start to see all these articles about the importance of ’emotional intelligence’ popping up and think they are missing the boat if they don’t get them some of that ’emotional intelligence’!

Look, I get it. It’s a tough world out there for consultants, agencies, and the executives they want to work with. Those of us on the services side need every advantage to stand out and get noticed. It’s not enough to just be talented, I know that better than anyone (#humblebrag #buzzwordbingo). And for executives and even mid-level managers, you don’t want to miss the next wave. You see your peers suddenly talking about a buzzword like ‘digital transformation’ or ’emotional intelligence’ and you think ‘Is this something I need to know about?’

It’s not about the hype, it’s about the solution.

Seriously, if you were a VP of Marketing, which sounds more interesting to you?

A – “I’m going to show you how to improve your marketing efforts with #emotionalintelligence

B – “I’m going to show you how to improve your marketing efforts by better understanding your customers.”

 

I’ve been blogging for 15 years. I think I can safely say that I can count on one hand the number of posts I have written about ‘social business’, ‘digital transformation’ and ’emotional intelligence’. Because I think discussing concepts and solutions has more value than discussing buzzwords.

Hype or solutions. Which is more important to you?