Remember when you were a kid and you stayed up really late that one Saturday night to watch that one really scary movie that your parents didn’t know you were watching? Remember laying in your bed that night afraid to roll over on the off chance that you would find yourself face-to-face with Freddy Krueger? (Or in my case the little stuffed clown from Poltergeist. Creepy.) Do you remember what that fear felt like? It was literally paralyzing, wasn’t it? Can you imagine being any more scared than that?

Wait a minute. Hold on. Let’s think about that for just one second.

We Know All About Fear

Whether or not that scary movie was in fact the scariest thing you’ve ever experienced — and if it is, then you likely lead an incredibly boring life; but I’m not here to judge — I’d wager that you’re able to imagine being as terrified as you could possibly be. And if in the next hour you were to actually experience that kind of fear, chances are the experience wouldn’t be all that dramatically different from how you imagined it. Fear is a relatively simple beast, however awful. We can imagine it’s full spectrum, from mild anxiety to full-blown panic.

That’s a problem, isn’t it? We sometimes avoid situations not because they are uncomfortable, but because they could make us afraid. And we know that we’re likely to act differently when we’re afraid, don’t we? Maybe even inappropriately. Maybe in such a way as to cost us a piece of business — or even our jobs. We avoid certain situations not just because they make us scared, but because of what that fear might make us do. We’re afraid of being afraid.

You Are Not Helpless

It’s easy to believe that we can’t help but be afraid, knowing fear as well as we do. It’s easy to trick ourselves into thinking that fear is just around the corner, waiting to grab us and burrow it’s way into the hollow of our chests. It’s easy to believe we are each of us subjects to King Fear, that to know him is to be subservient to him.

The first thing we have to do is to stop worrying what we will do when we are afraid. It’s amazing how quickly fear unravels itself once we accomplish that.

We are often told that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. I don’t buy that. I think we have to fear a bunch of things, not the least of which is complacency. We have to fear indifference. We have to fear those who encourage resting on one’s laurels. The stagnation of progress, of innovation, of industry — these things we must fear, and more, must defend against while there is still breath in us. To fail at this very basic and very fundamental objective is, to be frank, unacceptable on any level.

How Sure Are You?

But the key to all of these is confidence. We accept stagnancy because we are certain of it’s outcome. We worry about calculating The ROI of a marketing campaign that could pass as a campaign for just about any product or service on the market. We do market research because we want to be sure we’re talking to the right people. We’re deathly afraid of our boss asking us a question and having to respond with, “I don’t know.” Not knowing is unacceptable these days.

But what if “I don’t know” was a perfectly acceptable answer? What if we replaced “let’s do this because…” with, “let’s find out if…”? What if we stopped relying on what people “knew” and started relying more on our own imaginations?

A business based on dreams. How scary is that?

Not very, when it comes right down to it. At least not as scary as a stuffed clown to a five-year old. And when that’s your frame of reference, it’s really hard to be scared of anything.

A Thing You Can Do:

Here’s a homework assignment. The next meeting you go to, be the person who calls an established fact into question. I literally want you to stop the conversation by saying, “Says who?” Let’s find out how that changes things.

Two days ago I made a pretty significant presentation to a client. It was a presentation that I had spent literally months working on; in fact, the first day I walked into the office, one of my bosses jokingly asked me if I had finished the strategy yet. Eager to impress, I walked back to my desk and got started on it. That was October 4th. I presented it on February 16th.

Looking at the folder where I store them, I count eleven iterations of the presentation. That’s how I work — I version out documents so I can go back and see how my thinking has changed as the end product evolves. The fact that there are 11 versions of this Powerpoint deck means that it went through at least ten rounds of revision of varying levels of formality.

It also means that there were a lot of people who helped shape the final presentation. Six team members made significant contributions on the agency side, and a handful of people on the client side gave their input as well. It was an amazing team effort, and I’m really happy with the end result: 80 amazing slides that we were able to power through in 45 minutes, laying out our strategic social vision for the next 12-18 months. Great stuff.

But getting there was hard work. And even though this project was my baby, and I was the one who presented it to the client, it felt wrong somehow to take all the credit for it. So I wrote a quick thank you note to all the people who had helped, both on the client side and the agency side.

But here’s the thing. Back in October, I had this vision of me crafting this thing on my own, presenting it to the client, knocking off socks, and being carried out of the conference room Rudy-style. I wanted to be the hero. The whole thing was my idea. Dammit, didn’t I deserve a little glory for all that hard work?

Well, not really. See, the deeper I get into social media, the more I’m coming to understand that what I’m suggesting isn’t really original. It’s common sense kind of stuff, once you start thinking about it. It’s really my job to tell the client what they already know: that we should be finding more effective ways to communicate with people, and that social media presents an opportunity for us to do that.

And once people stop thinking about social media as a collection of properties and start thinking about it as a set of behaviors, the work going forward becomes much easier. The hard work comes in getting people to believe that social media has more to do with the people who use Facebook than Facebook itself. And, as it happens, getting people to believe something is the part I’m not yet terribly good at.

Recognizing your shortcomings is not always easy, and it often takes a humbling experience to confront them. Fortunately for me, I have a team who was more than capable of crafting a compelling story from the elements that I supplied. That’s the value of working with a team — no one person is a complete package, and you need other people to fill the gaps.

I sent the thank you note because I know that in order to do great work, I have to work with the right people. Showing appreciation for people who do the work that makes “your” work truly shine is a great team building exercise. Now I know that the next time I need to ask one of these fine folk to work with me, I know I’ve done my best to leave a good impression about our last collaboration experience. That means we’ll all approach the work with a brighter outlook, and hopefully do better work.

The work we do is often made possible by the work that others do. Take a minute today to thank someone who makes the work you do really shine. Who will you thank today?

Read an interesting (and all too brief) article over on B2CMarketingInsider.com about the lack of social media mentions during Super Bowl ads. The article was penned by Liz Sweezy who, apart from having the most amusing name I’ve ever spoken aloud (go ahead, try it), is also in possession of a very common and very incorrect way of thinking about social media. (That’s not a criticism, I’m just using her article as an example — I hope she forgives me for it.)

Sweezy writes the following:

[The Emerging Media Research Council’s Digital Analysis of Super Bowl XLV] mentioned that a total of eight ads pointed to companies’ Facebook pages. Wait, only eight?  Does this surprise anyone else?  For all the hype that has been building around social media over the last year, wouldn’t you think that every commercial would promote a company’s social media presences on Facebook, or Twitter or YouTube?  At a going rate of $3 million for 30 seconds of ad time, this seems like a missed opportunity for companies who have put serious effort into developing their social presence.
(Emphasis added.)

A couple of key points here:

Hype? What Hype?

First, I wonder what “hype… around social media” Sweezy is referring to. Sure, there might have been increased attention paid to the ways in which we interact with people online this year. There are new tools available to us, and people are innovating constantly with those tools. But the point is that we are achieving a greater understanding of what digital natives expect when they come to the internet – not creating hype. Hype was that thing that happened when Facebook was made available outside of Harvard. What’s happening now is something completely different. All of our social behaviors – from shopping to gaming to knitting – now have online components that are, to some, inextricable from the behaviors themselves. “Offline gaming?” my then-teenaged friend once said to me. “What, you mean like Monopoly and stuff?”

Social is the Default (Usually)

Second, it’s just plain ignorant to think that the mere act of buying a Super Bowl ad wouldn’t drive social media traffic – especially to YouTube channels. Social media are so pervasive that it has become unnecessary for major brands to remind people to go to Facebook for more content. If I paid $3 million for 30 seconds, you could bet your last Whuffie that I wouldn’t spend a second telling people to do something they already knew how to do – and likely would do anyway.

Social Media Augments Marketing

And third, remember that brands develop their social presences as an augmentation to all marketing efforts, irrespective of media type. Social media is not marketing; it’s a behavior. So this couldn’t have possibly been a “missed opportunity” – unless, of course, one of these brands launched a Super Bowl ad without an existing social presence. (See how absurd that sounds? That tells you something, doesn’t it?)

The Takeaway:

We need to stop thinking of social media as a property to which we can drive traffic. It’s not. What social media represents is the ability for a brand to become a part of the always-on digital habitat in which people are increasingly finding themselves. People see their online selves as an extension of their real selves, their online conversations as facilitations of real conversations, their online environments as continuations of their real environments. In short, people didn’t spend lots of time and money on social media because it was the thing to do this year. They did it because, irrespective of their target demographics, they would be guaranteed to miss opportunities to connect if they didn’t.

Sorry if I’m a bit long-winded on this, but I just want to make sure we’re all in agreement that we can’t rest on this kind of stale thinking anymore. We all fall into this mode of thought once in a while – I’m certainly guilty of it at times – but we all need to stop. What are other, healthier ways of thinking about social media? I’d love to hear from you.

I started playing guitar when I was thirteen. Since then, there has rarely been a day when I haven’t picked up a guitar and played for at least fifteen minutes. And although I have some fond memories of playing, I’ll never forget learning how to play guitar.

Because it sucked. A lot.

When you’re a kid, few prospects are as alluring as becoming an Effing Rock Star. The standard teenage dream is this: you form a band that plays awful music in your parents’ garage, thinking that someday a record executive might just happen to roll through your neighborhood, demand that his limo driver stop the car to investigate that intoxicating music coming from the white Colonial across the street, and sign you to a multi-million dollar record contract on the spot.

That kind of crap doesn’t happen in real life. No, friend, what you’ve signed up for is six months of finger-crippling pain the likes of which you haven’t experienced since you wrote four whole pages for the long answer portion of your American History midterm.

I’m talking about building calluses – literally hardening the skin on your fingertips so that you can press the strings firmly enough to play properly. Calluses are essentially scar tissue, tissue you build by slowly shredding flesh on metal guitar strings and letting it heal up again. Bryan Adams famously sang about playing guitar until his fingers bled. That likely wasn’t hyperbole.

Calluses are difficult to build, and not just because they hurt. See, for some people (people like myself), playing guitar is addicting. It’s a form of expression. There are so many rhythms and melodies out there, and we want to learn how to play them all. This is especially true in our early years, roughly the same time we find ourselves susceptible to finger fatigue. We want to play for hours at a time – but our fingers hurt too much to play. So we have to wait until our fingers heal, thinking the whole time about becoming an Effing Rock Star.

And that’s the part that sucks the most.

Building a career starts with shredding your fingertips. It starts with doing the mundane administrative things that make someone else’s job easier. You’re not going to be very good when you start, and you’re going to get hurt for doing something incorrectly. You’re going to have great ideas, and the hardest part of your job is going to be having to sit on them because “they” don’t want to listen, or don’t have the money, or don’t want to take the risk.

But you’re building calluses. And at some point your calluses will have built up to the point that you’re impervious to the pain of failure – or as impervious as a person can be. And when that happens, you’ll start to realize that you’re more prone to taking risks, to putting yourself in high-reward situations. And if you keep plugging away, eventually you’ll wake up one day and realize that you’ve already achieved what you set out to.

You’re an Effing Rock Star.