MackCollier.com

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Come Join #Blogchat Tonight for OPEN MIC and Our 3rd Anniversary!

The first #Blogchat was held on March 22nd, 2009, so tonight’s OPEN MIC #Blogchat will also be our 3rd Anniversary!  Many people have asked how #Blogchat came to be, and that link explains a lot of the origin.  Additionally, the inspiration for #Blogchat came from something called Plurkshops that were started on Plurk in 2008.

But beyond that, I’ve always held a belief that most people are smarter than they give themselves credit for.  The core underpinning I wanted for #Blogchat was to create an environment where the discussion was created by the many, instead of the few.  This is why #Blogchat has a strict ‘no experts allowed’ policy.  The message is that everyone’s opinion has value, and they should feel comfortable sharing their thoughts.  Because that’s how we all learn.

Thanks to everyone that has participated in #Blogchat over the last 3 years.  I appreciate and love each and every one of you, and thank you for helping to create what I biasedly feel is the best chat on Twitter.  Your dedication to growing the conversation every Sunday night is inspiring, and I’m looking forward to expanding the #Blogchat brand in 2012, and look for some announcements soon on how that will happen.

See you tonight at 8pm Central for OPEN MIC!

PS: New to #Blogchat?  Here’s what it’s all about!

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Here’s What I Believe…

…that companies need to stop focusing on the tools, and start focusing on the connections that the tools help facilitate.  It’s not about understanding Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, it’s about understanding customer behavior.  Anyone that tries to tell you differently is selling something.

…that companies will get the biggest benefit from emerging digital technologies if they work within the framework of the customer’s existing behavior.  Figure out why you customers are spending their time with these channels and tools, then you can figure out how to connect with them in a way that creates value for them.

…that participating in a conversation changes that conversation.  Don’t like the conversation happening around your brand?  Then start participating in that conversation, and change it.

…that buzzwords are a hurdle to understanding.  Speak in as simple terms as possible to explain your ideas.  If you use too many buzzwords and jargon you risk limiting understanding of your message.  Or worse, you may convince me that YOU don’t understand the concepts you are discussing.

…that customers don’t want to be mouthpieces for brands.  Stop viewing Social Media as a ‘new and exciting way to let customers tell our story!’  Your customers have their own stories to tell via Social Media, and they are far more interesting than yours.

…that Twitter isn’t a Social Media Strategy, it’s a Social Media tactic.  Tactics are what you use to accomplish a strategy.

…that Steve Knox was right, victory in marketing doesn’t happen when you sell something, but when you cultivate advocates for your brand.

…that customers deserve more than companies are giving them.  They deserve brands that understand them and embrace them and give them a reason to fall madly in love with them.

…that Marketing is ultimately a tax that brands pay for not speaking in the voice of their customers.  Understand your customers, speak in their voice, and you’ll win their loyalty and money.

…that we need fewer conversations.  Brands have two distinct conversations happening around them, the internal conversation they have about themselves, and the external one their customers are having.  The further apart these conversations are, the more trouble the brand is in.  The more aligned the conversations are, the stronger the brand.  Hugh was right.

…that the customer’s ability to smell bullshit is greater than your ability to sell it.  So please stop.

…that companies need to stop selling the product, and start selling the benefit.  Make your communications customer-centric.  Think about WHY I would buy your product and how I would use it, and you just might convince me that I need it.

…that companies need to stop worry about ‘acquiring’ new customers, and focus on delighting their existing ones.  New customers cost 6-7 times more to acquire versus retaining an existing customer, while fans spend more than the average customer, and refer business equal to almost half what they spend.  Yet marketers everywhere want ‘new’ customers, even at the expense of their existing ones.  This is madness.

…that Rockstars have figured out that they’ll get new customers tomorrow from delighting their existing fans, today.  And they won’t pay a penny in ‘acquisition’ fees.  I’m amazed that more brands aren’t learning from this approach.

…that if you believe in your customers, they will believe in you.  Stop treating them like anonymous numbers, they are real people living real lives every day.  Just like you.

…that brands need to stop putting the spotlight on themselves.  Put the spotlight on the people that make your brand amazing; Your customers and employees.

…that customers are more connected and empowered than ever before.  So are the brands that embrace them.

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How Do We Create a Fan-Centric Company?

Brand advocates, fans, brand advocacy

Last year, my friend Liz Strauss challenged me to think about how companies could better connect with their fans, and vice-versa.  I wanted to think about how this process would actually take place inside a company.  How would a company identify and connect with its brand advocates?  How would it create and continue a connection with that group?  How would it facilitate a flow of communication from the company to its advocates, and vice-versa?  How would it act on that information internally, and who would handle it?

Some of these same questions have been rolled up into the thought-process of what a ‘Social Business’ could be and we talked about it yesterday, although not in the detail I was hoping for.  But last year when I started trying to wrap my head around what this framework could look like, I realized with the events I would be speaking at and attending in 2011, I would have plenty of opportunities to talk to some pretty big brands and companies about how they are connecting with their fans.

So that’s what I did.  At almost every stop in 2011, I made it a point to set up meetings to talk with companies about how they were connecting with their brand advocates.  We’re talking VERY large companies, and usually the people I talked to were CEOs or CMOs.  After probably a dozens or so interviews in 2011 with big companies about how they were systematically connecting with their brand advocates, I came up with this answer:

They weren’t.  The closest would probably be Dell’s DellCAP program (Disclosure – I had a very limited role in helping Dell flesh out some of the initial ideas behind it and executing them), which I obviously think is a fabulous program, but I don’t think it’s accurate to say it’s solely based on connecting with Dell’s brand advocates.  All the companies I talked to saw the importance of its brand advocates, and several were doing things like monitoring for positive brand mentions and responding, or maybe highlighting fans on a Facebook page, but for the most part there wasn’t a formal process in place where the company regularly connected with its advocates.  Several expressed to me an interest in taking that next step, but they wanted to know what that process would look like.  This is why I kept harping on the need for more detail around ‘Social Business’ for the same reason in yesterday’s post.

But perhaps the biggest roadblock to companies adopting a formal process for connecting with their fans is they don’t understand who they are.  My friends at Brains on Fire call this figuring out the identity of your advocates, but I think of it as asking ‘What’s the heartbeat of your fans?’  Whats the one thing that binds them together in a love of your brand?  Even at the DellCAP reunion last year, at one point I was talking to a Dell exec and we were looking at the attendees and going around the room and we realized that they all loved Dell, but for very different reasons.  Some loved the product, some loved the people, some loved the service.  But they were different people.  You had the hard-core gamer that professionally competes in contests over here with his Alienware laptop, and the mom who writes a blog on tech for other moms over here.

Yet understanding who your fans are and why they love you is a step that cannot be overlooked and skipped.  I honestly think this is why Brains on Fire is so successful because they invest the time and energy for their clients in helping them understand who their fans are and what their identity/heartbeat is.  We all love the Fiskars/Fiskateers case study, but remember that it was made possible by Brains on Fire doing a LOT of research and figuring out how Fiskars’ customers were using its product, and realizing that a passionate scrapbooking community existed that loved the brand.  Without investing that time and energy in research, the resulting movement wouldn’t have happened.

I’ll wrap this post up now cause I see it’s starting to resemble a thesis, and we haven’t even gotten into what the formal process would/could look like.  I’ll dig into that in the next post on this topic.

But for now, if your company wants to really connect with its fans, make the starting point understanding who they are.  What’s their heartbeat?  What’s the ONE thing that unites them in a love of your brand?  To put this in music terms to help you understand, Lady Gaga doesn’t have fans, she has Little Monsters.  The Grateful Dead has Dead Heads.  You need to find that one thing, because that’s their passion point.  And in doing your research to better understand your fans, don’t rely solely on online research.  Look for ways to get feedback from your fans in an offline setting.  If you only hear from your fans that are online, you are getting an incomplete view of who they are and why they love you.

What are some examples of brands that you think do a great job of connecting with their fans?  Which ones do you think have found the heartbeat of their advocates?

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Subscribe to My Social Media Marketing Newsletter!

Social Media Marketing Newsletter

Starting next Wednesday, I’ll be running a weekly newsletter in addition to (almost) daily posts here.  The content focus will be slightly different, however.

Here, I cover Social Media primarily, but a blend of content that can benefit the individual, as well as those that are using Social Media for their company.  But this newsletter will be aimed solely at marketers and anyone using Social Media within their company or organization.  Each week the newsletter will feature original content that’s designed to do 3 things:

1 – Help you solve an existing Social Media Marketing issue you are having.  One week we might talk about building a better blogger outreach program, the next look at getting a better handle on our blog’s analytics to increase leads.  A case study here and there will be examined.

2 – Give you tips and advice for improving your day-to-day tasks and routines as well as managing your workflow.

3 – Keep you up-to-date on where I will be speaking/appearing, and giving you information on how we can work together.

I cannot stress this enough, the content in this newsletter will be original content.  Some of it may eventually make its way here to the blog, but it won’t be that often.

So if you’re working for a company or organization that wants to learn more about how to better use Social Media to connect with your customers and/or activate your brand advocates, please do subscribe to my newletter by filling out the quick form below.  You’ll input your email address then be sent an email to confirm your subscription.

Thank you so much, see you next Wednesday!


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We Need to Stop Marketing ‘Social Business’ If We Want to Start Selling It

social business, blueprint

You ever get the feeling you need to just drop a topic?  I am completely there when it comes to  ‘Social Business’.  Even to the point that I’m pretty sure I’ve started pissing off friends and people I respect in this space.

To set the record straight, I like what I think is the generally accepted definition of a ‘Social Business’.  Most all definitions seem to be build around the need for an increased flow of information.  External information from the customer being utilized and distributed internally so smarter business decisions can be made, and more communication from the company back to the customer.  I am a HUGE believer in the benefits that businesses will gain as a result, and I’ve been blogging about these concepts here for a while now.

But the majority of the discussion around the concept of a ‘Social Business’ has frustrated me for a while now, and I couldn’t quite place my finger on why exactly.  Then it hit me: This doesn’t feel like a discussion, it feels like marketing.  Almost every time I read a post/article about Social Business, I feel like I am reading a brochure at a car dealership.

A far more interesting discussion in my mind is to talk about exactly how a business would transition to becoming a ‘social business’.  Let’s talk about the specifics:

What happens internally?  Do we need to hire new people for newly-created positions?  If so, which ones, and what would their roles be?  How will we better connect with our customers?  Do we need to create a new infrastructure to better facilitate the flow of information internally about our customers?  And what information do we need to distribute and which departments need to get what?  Then how do we create a way to get information back to our customers?  Do we create an internal and external committee to facilitate that information flow in both directions?  How many people do we need to staff for that?

Those are the type of discussions I want to see, because I think we need more blueprints and fewer brochures if we want to speed business adoption of this process.  And granted, there’s obviously no ‘one size fits all’ solution, but we should at least have plenty of scenarios in place where we can determine more definite numbers based on a given business reality.

I think at this point the discussion is still a bit vague around Social Business because we are ‘selling’ a concept that’s not often seen ‘in the wild’.  But I think if we want to speed adoption of the concept, we need to move the discussion away from wordy definitions and more toward actual business realities.  Even if it means we need to at some point add ‘I think’ to our explanations cause we don’t have real-world examples of what our ideas being executed would look like.

And to be fair, we are seeing bits and pieces of what the larger picture could look like.  A community ideation site here, an internal socnet for employees there, a brand ambassador program in the corner, but we really don’t seem to have a view of what the whole picture could look like for an organization.

We need that.  Or at the very least we need a discussion around what it looks like.  And if we aren’t sure what it looks like, then we definitely need to have that discussion.

One of the things I loved about the blogosphere when I first joined it in 2005 was that many of us adopted a habit of asking ‘what if?’ when it came to our discussions about how companies could utilize and benefit from social media.  We threw stuff against the wall, some of it stuck, some of it didn’t.  But we all learned in the process.  We helped each other flesh out the concepts of how businesses could utilize social media, and even some of the concepts that have now been rolled into the idea of what a ‘Social Business’ is.

But I think we skipped the ‘what if?’ stage with Social Business.  It’s like we adopted our own definitions for what the concept is, then immediately started trying to sell it to companies.  Literally.

If we want to speed up understanding and adoption of the concept of a Social Business, I think we need to back up a bit and stop selling the concept, and start debating it more.  We need to stop saying ‘here’s what it is’, and instead say ‘here’s what I *think* it could look like’.

And to clear the air:  I keep railing about this topic because I believe in the concept of a ‘Social Business’.  Granted, I’m not crazy about the label, but I like the thinking.  If I didn’t, if I thought this was all bullshit soaked in snake oil, I wouldn’t waste my time.

I think we need to elevate the conversation and dialogue around the concept.  And I think in this case, we can start by offering fewer definitions for what a Social Business is, and instead more discussion of how we recognize one when we see one.  Fewer buzzwords, and more questions.

Understanding speeds adoption, and understanding comes from asking questions you don’t know the answers to.  I don’t know what the exact framework for a Social Business is.  I know what the definitions say it is at 30,000 feet, but I want to know what it looks like on the ground, in practice.  So do the companies that are being sold the concept.

What do you think a Social Business would look like?  If your company was going to start today on the road to becoming a Social Business, what changes would need to happen?

 

UPDATE: As long-time readers know, I am pretty obsessive about my blog’s stats.  ‘Social Business’ isn’t a topic I write about often, in fact this is only the 2nd post I’ve ever written about it, the 1st coming a month ago.  In the last month, search engines have sent 6,617 visitors to this blog, and 3 of them have looking for information on ‘Social Business’.

Pic via Flickr User Will Scullin

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Social Media Gives Companies a New and Exciting Way to Make the Same Boring Marketing Mistakes

There’s a scene in the movie Liar Liar where the movie’s main character (a lawyer played by Jim Carrey who’s been ‘cursed’ with an inability to tell a lie) is given the phone by his secretary and told that one of his clients has “knocked over another ATM, this time at knife-point.  He needs your legal advice.”

Carrey’s character grabs the phone and offers this advice: Stop breaking the law, ASSHOLE!

Recently I saw this quote from an emarketer article: “Marketers are abuzz over “Big Data” for its promise to deliver a more complete understanding of each customer, who can then be targeted with advertising tailored exactly to the individual.”

And this quote from P&G’s Head of Global Marketing on finding the ROI of Social Media: “What will revolutionize the industry, what we’re working on an industry basis, is to define EGRPs [electronic gross rating point, a measure of audience reach]. You can look at what an impression from Google, or Facebook or Twitter is actually worth.”

This is the exact problem with how 99% of companies are using and viewing Social Media: As a new channel to more effectively market to its customers.

Are you serious?

Let’s take a step back and remember what Social Media is: Tools that allow us to create and exchange digital content.  The vast majority of us use Social Media as personal communication tools.

Companies, do you not realize the significance of this?  For decades, you’ve been struggling with how to better understand your customers.  The problem has always been, how do you really know what customers think about you, your products, and who they are?  What they want, etc.  The only options available to you were highly inefficient.  Surveys, focus-groups, and other forms of feedback.  At best it can give you a small sampling of your customer base, but connecting with individual customers just doesn’t scale.

Yet with Social Media, suddenly you DO have a way to better understand your customers.  Because all the interactions they were having before in an offline setting (where you had almost no access to them) have moved online.  Now you can see what your customers are saying to each other, and about you and your products!  What’s better, you now have a way to directly connect with them and they with you!

And your key takeaway from this fundamental change in how we humans connect with each other is that you see this as a great opportunity to turn your customers into digital marketing channels?!?

Companies if you want to be successful at utilizing Social Media, here’s the most important lesson I can give you: Learn how your customers are using Social Media and for what reasons, and then work within that framework.

Recall Sunday’s post on X-Box’s Twitter account hitting 1,000,000 tweets.  X-Box was smart enough to realize that its customers are on Twitter, and complaining about the problems they are having with the console.  So instead of trying to leverage Twitter as a channel to shoot them marketing messages, the brand instead leverages Twitter as a channel to provide individualized customer service.  The customer benefits from getting personalized attention and help with their problems.  The brand benefits by deflecting calls away from its CS call centers.

This is what we call in the real-world a ‘win-win’.  But it happened because X-Box saw how their customers were using Twitter, then worked with that behavior, not against it.

Would it be awesome if your customers put aside how they want to use Social Media and instead agreed to let you use them to broadcast your marketing messages via their Social Media accounts?  Of course it would.  Right after you teach your pet unicorn how to pee rainbows, you can get to work on that.

For now, we live in a world where we ALL act in our own best interests.  That’s just as true for your customers as it is for you the company.  If you can use Social Media as a way to provide value to your customers, then you will be acting in THEIR best interests.

And you’ll get their business.  Try it and see.  Oh and if you need some social media training to get started, call me.

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Case Study: How Fed-Ex Responded to a Customer’s Viral Video…With Its Own Video

It really is the doomsday scenario for a big brand, in this case, Fed-Ex.  One customer has a horrible experience with a delivery.  A computer monitor is ‘delivered’ when the Fed-Ex driver casually tosses the monitor over the customer’s gate.

Even though the customer was at home.

And the front door was wide open.

And the customer filmed the delivery.

And yes, he posted it on YouTube.

The video has been viewed over 8 million times by now, and was seen on numerous TV stations and shows.  Now if this was your company, how would you respond?  Would you respond?

To its credit, Fed-Ex responded 2 days later with its own video.

Here’s what I love about the video and the post on Fed-Ex’s blog:

1 – Fed-Ex admitted the problem and apologized for it immediately in the video.

2 – Fed-Ex detailed what was done to correct this problem.

3 – Fed-Ex detailed what will happen moving forward.

4 – Fed-Ex responded to the customer video with its own video.  Using the same tool as its customer.

 

Now, the original customer video and Fed-Ex’s response has been dissected on many other blogs in the last 3 months.  But I wanted to focus on the comments this post has generated.  A big reason why many companies do NOT want to use social media to make a response such as what Fed-Ex did here is because they are scared to death that it will simply draw attention to the company and make them a lightning-rod for detractors.

So far, Fed-Ex’s apology post has 181 comments, almost 120 comments more than the 2nd most commented-on post.

Here’s what I thought was interesting about the comments (and I read every freaking one to get these stats):

57% of the comments were positive.

25% of the comments were neutral.

But only 18% of the comments on this post were negative.

Does that surprise you?  It shouldn’t.  As often happens when a company responds appropriately in a crisis situation, Fed-Ex galvanized its employees and brand advocates with this post.  Remember that The Red Cross had a similar episode this time last year with its ‘rogue tweet’ about #gettingslizzard, and the organization’s timely and appropriate response rallied its brand advocates and actually sparked a rise in blood donations.

There is a very salient lesson here for companies about using social media: Participating in a conversation changes that conversation.  By creating a video response to the customer video, apologizing, and detailing exactly how the problem would be fixed, Fed-Ex changed the conversation that was currently happening around its brand.  Prior to this video, the conversation around the brand was decidedly negative and dominated by the customer’s video, because Fed-Ex hadn’t responded.

When they did, the conversation changed.  The company’s response was fast and appropriate, and that not only changed the opinion of the company from some observers, but it also served as motivation for customers and employees to come to defense of the brand.

Always remember this:  Social Media backlashes aren’t created by the initial trigger event (such as the customer’s video above), they are created by HOW the company responds.

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X-Box Support’s Twitter Account Hits One Million Tweets

microsoft, xbox, x-box, twitter

They’ve already been named Most Responsive Brand on Twitter by Guiness World Records, now it looks like X-Box has become the first major brand to crack the 1,000,000 tweets milestone.

The 18-person team churns out an average of just over 1,000 tweets per day.  And I thought my hitting 60,000 tweets after 5 years on Twitter was a big deal!

How X-Box is using Twitter is a wonderful example of the potential of the tool as a channel to deliver near real-time customer service.  Customers having an issue with their X-Box know that all it takes is a tweet to @XBoxSupport, and an answer is coming.  Usually within seconds.

There is a serious limitation to this approach though, and it’s a limitation of Twitter really.  But I’d be curious to know if Microsoft has given any thought to a way to possibly catalog the questions and answers exchanged via the X-Box account?  No doubt the team is constantly answering certain questions repeatedly, but I’m not sure how you could get around that issue.  This issue is easily solved by another tool like a user forum, but that requires customers to come to your site, whereas X-Box is using the same tool its customers are already on: Twitter.  Not sure there’s an answer to this problem, but would save both the company and its customers a lot of time if there was one.

BTW even with sending out hundreds of tweets a day, the team still has time for a sense of humor, it seems…

xbox, twitter, microsoft, support

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CMOs Say Social Media Spending Will Surge 46% in the Next Year

Catching up on feed-reading and I found a couple of articles I wanted to share.  The first was this one from Duke University that found that CMOs predict a healthy surge in Social Media spending over the next year, by 46%.  These same CMOs said that integrating social media into its existing marketing efforts is still a challenge.  More on this in a minute.

The second article came from the Wall-Street Journal, who interviewed Proctor and Gamble’s Chief of Global Marketing, Marc Pritchard.  Mr. Pritchard said that P&G is dangerously close to determining the true ROI of its social media efforts and that it involves defining “EGRPs [electronic gross rating point, a measure of audience reach]. You can look at what an impression from Google, or Facebook or Twitter is actually worth. Once we get that, we will start to get a common platform measurement…that the [Association of National Advertisers] is working on.”

There’s a reason why companies continue to struggle with finding the ROI of their Social Media efforts and in integrating them into existing Marketing efforts.  It’s because they are wanting to turn these personal communication channels into marketing channels.  They are attempting to measure their Social Media efforts through the lens of their existing marketing efforts and using the same metrics.

Social Media TODAY gives companies plenty of value that can be measured and extracted, but for most companies, it’s not the value they want.  Most companies want to turn their customers into marketers, and see Social Media as the channel in which to do this.

They are struggling with how to do this because, shockingly, most customers don’t want to be marketing mouthpieces for brands.

And yet, there are enormous opportunities for brands to leverage how their customers are using social media that many aren’t pursuing.  In the rush to figure out how to generate sales via Social Media by turning its customers into marketers, most brands are totally overlooking how their customers use Social Media can offer great potential for brands to save money.

For example, in 2008 Pitney Bowes created a User Forum for its customers so that they could help them with their customer service issues, and in turn, they could help each other.  By February of 2010, the company determined that at least $300,000 worth of calls to CS centers had been averted thanks to the user forum.

That’s a very basic example and it works cause Pitney Bowes in this case accepted how its customers were creating online content, instead of trying to force their customers’ actions with Social Media into a preconceived marketing funnel.

Social Media ROI, Customer service, Customer research

The issue isn’t that most companies don’t understand Social Media, it’s that they don’t understand their customers.

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Suck it Up, Buttercup: The World Does Not Owe You a Like or a ReTweet

“I won’t write those types of posts, they are beneath me”

“I don’t have all day to spend on Twitter, I have a real job”

“There’s no way he writes his own posts, can’t be”

“Did you hear what she charges to keynote? No way she deserves that much!”

“Yeah if I didn’t have any work to do I could probably spend all day on Facebook too”

 

The last four months of 2011 were my busiest ever since I started consulting on social media marketing in 2006.  I spoke at several major events, and did three Live #Blogchats in September alone.  In addition, I had regular consulting work for my clients plus a few other projects that were ongoing.

I was hella busy, but it was also the happiest I’ve been in years.  But around August of last year I made a choice which I now regret greatly.  I knew the last few months of the year were going to be insanely busy, so I decided to spend more time on my work and presentations, and less time on my blog and Twitter.

Big mistake.  While my work and speaking was very well received, not posting as often here or on Twitter meant my visibility suffered.  Referrals shrank, as did speaking and other opportunities.

But it was my choice.  Even if it was the wrong one, I have to own it and learn from it.  So after things calmed down a bit after Blog World last November, I began to realize that things were calming down TOO much.  That was when I decided that I needed to rededicate myself to my blogging efforts and time spent on Twitter in 2012.

So I got back in the swing of things in January then really kicked it up a notch last month.  Now, traffic is up, and I’m getting more referrals and work requests, even interviews.

The truth is, if I had my way I wouldn’t blog here everyday.  I’d write maybe a post a week, if that.  It wouldn’t be ‘5 Steps to….’ or ‘3 Reasons why…’, it would likely be ‘here’s what I think’.

But I don’t do that because I know that this blog is a tool I am using to build my business.  We are all responsible for our own actions.  This blog was in a bit of a tailspin in late 2011, and I own that, just as I am responsible for why it’s now doing better.

My point is that there comes a time when we all need to stop worrying about what everyone else is doing or saying, and accept that we are the masters of our own path.  ‘I don’t have time for that…’ is an excuse.  You have the same 24 hours in this day that I do.  We both decide WHAT we will spend our time on, and we both own the results.  Whether they be good or bad.

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” – Thomas Edison

If you don’t have as many blog readers or Twitter followers or BUSINESS as you want, you can either find a scapegoat, or you can roll up your sleeves and do something about it.

UPDATE: I had some fun with my pal Chris Brogan in the picture above, so I wanted to include one of his videos which really ties into the theme of this post: