Open up your mind and say, ahh...

The business press loves to create mythic heroes of industry
and we love it, too. To a point.

As much as we love a business visionary like, say, Steve Jobs–and we love him to pieces–we are not Steve
Jobs, and never could be. Nor should we. All leaders have their own unique talents, which they will use in different ways to bring out the best in themselves and others. Here are 5 ways to discover your own strongest qualities and put them to work in business and in life.

1. Don’t compare yourself with others–but do approach people who inspire, and even intimidate, you.
Are there people in your life who wow or even
intimidate you? Are you jealous of them? Go up and
introduce yourself, allow yourself to be a part of their lives, and even offer to contribute to their milieu if you are so inclined. If they have a quality you
are charged by, perhaps you have not given yourself permission to
explore and develop those sides of yourself? Consider aligning
yourself with people you feel competitive toward–it’s a
new world and we have much to learn from each other.

2. Don’t concentrate on weaknesses, do concentrate
on strengths.
First, find out what your strengths are. Go online and take
a Briggs Meyers test, an Enneagram test, or buy the Gallup Strengths
Finder 2.0 book. There are even more robust ways to discover your unique
talents, abilities, and ways of thinking by talking with a career coach. Or try them all and see what
works. Self-understanding and self-support is key.

Working on one’s weaknesses only brings misery and
self-doubt. Concentrating on your strengths brings a better sense of
fulfillment and forward progress.

3. Eliminate your weaknesses by partnering with others.
Albert Einstein was initially a failure who leaned heavily on his wife. Many now believe she
ultimately helped him devise his famous equation. Let’s be honest: He was a
dreamer with his head in the clouds (and thank goodness he was). He came to success in roundabout ways. His wife kept her head on straight and together
they accomplished greatness. That is the value of having a partner and team,
varieties of perspectives, talents, and skills to get the job done. How is your
team?

Do you have someone’s
back? Do they have yours? Are there complimentary skill sets
involved? If you have people who believe in you, you can go far together.
Whether it’s a mentor, employee, or co-worker, get their back and let them get
yours.

4. Use failure as motivation.
Things aren’t always going to go your way, no matter how well
you and your teams properly align with your goals. Sometimes we need a good
kick to get us going. Sometimes we need the pain of failure to reset, revise, and reassess. Are you taking risks? Are you
failing? If so, good going.

Winston Churchill failed grandly more than once, and was famously cast to the
political “wilderness” and then came roaring back to lead the British
resistance. Steve Jobs was fired from the company he
founded but through persistence ultimately came back to save it from
extinction. Hillary Clinton failed to win the presidency but then became a
powerful and respected Secretary of State. Each of them, in their own way,
failed, learned from their mistakes, and most importantly, persisted in the face
of failure. Phoenix rising is the way of the world today and we are in the
midst of its widespread occurrence.

5. Now is a time of pop-up engagement, leadership, and success.
Innovation demands the work of flexible teams who cooperate,
co-lead, and co-create. Mr. Jobs was a hierarchical leader in a time of radical
shift from singular creative to co-creative. Over time, he learned what he was
best at and how to use his skills, talents, teams, and life lessons to
contribute in the best way he knew how. As a hierarchical leader, he succeeded
in providing the tools you and I now use in this co-creative environment. Who
would have thought it possible? We believe he did, and that he did not do it
alone. We also believe you can do that too–on your own terms, with your own
teams, and in your own way.

Jody Turner and co-author Jerry Ketel are currently working
together, co-creating new business models and outcomes in concert with their
creative clients.

For more leadership coverage, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Image: Flickr user Stephen Poff

It’s extremely difficult to read a speech and sound as if you mean it.

For most of us, when reading, posture changes, the throat tightens and people can tell. Reading is different from speaking, and a different sort of attention is paid.

Before you give a speech, then, you must do one of two things if your goal is to persuade:

Learn to read the same way you speak (unlikely)

or, learn to speak without reading. Learn your message well enough that you can communicate it without reading it. We want your humanity.

If you can’t do that, don’t bother giving a speech. Just send everyone a memo and save time and stress for all concerned.

Brian Carter is author of The Like Economy: How Businesses Make Money With Facebook and co-author of Facebook Marketing: Leveraging Facebook’s Features For Your Marketing Campaigns. He is a keynote speaker, trainer and consultant.

Facebook, with its 800+ million users, presents a huge opportunity for business. But the first question people ask is, “Can it really generate money?”

If you’ve read any of the Facebook marketing case studies over the last year, you’ve seen examples of small business profits and boosts in ecommerce sales via Facebook sharing.

If your business is ready to move toward Facebook profits, your next question should be: “What distinguishes profitable and unprofitable Facebook marketing campaigns?”

First, consider your revenue model. What steps will get your users to buy? How do you attract their attention in the first place? What does the conversion funnel look like? And how does Facebook fit with the marketing channels that already work for you, like email, text messages and affiliate revenue?

There are a number of strategies companies use to do Facebook business effectively. Let’s look at five of them.

1. Advertising-Based Ecommerce

Marketers can leverage the massive reach and highly customizable targeting of Facebook’s ad platform. They can create ads that take clickers straight to an ecommerce site, bypassing fan marketing entirely. The ads-direct-to-websites option is often overlooked, but can be immediately profitable. If you’re not 100% sure about committing to the time and creativity required for fan marketing, then test direct-to-site ad traffic first.

 

The Golden Globes are right around the corner and the Twittersphere isn’t much interested in the movies and nominees that will be vying for top prize. No, Twitter users are more likely to talk about the controversial host and funnyman Ricky Gervais.

NM Incite, a social media tracking and analysis company, found that “Excitement for Ricky Gervais” took up 26% of the conversations around the 69th Golden Globe Awards, airing Sunday at 8 p.m. ET.

Gervais habitually stirs up conversation with his pull-no-punches humor at the industry’s expense. Gervais’s return to the show is driving some serious Twitter traffic to the Globes. “Excitement for Gervais” ranked just behind “General Excitement” for the Globes (28%) and well ahead of the next largest topic, “Support for Celebrity Nominee” (10%).

The results were taken from more than 7,000 Twitter messages posted from Jan. 10-11. Gervais ranked again on the list with 8% of the Twitter conversations about “Ricky Gervais’ Humor.” There were no other specific nominees or celebrities that made NM Incite’s list.

Take a look at the full results below and let us know in the comments if you’re more likely to watch the award ceremony because Gervais is hosting. Scroll to the bottom for a little NSFW treat.

 

If you’re like most Mashable readers, you know plenty about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its sister bill in the Senate, the Protect IP Act (PIPA). And you’re probably plenty outraged about it, too. And rightfully so.

If enacted, SOPA/PIPA could have disastrous consequences for the basic infrastructure of the Internet. It would afford the Federal government and copyright holders excessive and far-reaching powers to take down sites they deem to be hosting protected content with little regard for the definition of “hosting.”

If a user of a news site leaves a comment with offending material, that could be grounds for a takedown. And YouTube could be in hot water should it fail to promptly detect a user who uploads copyrighted material. The same problem exists for all community-based websites, which, let’s face it, are the vast majority of our favorite sites.

It’s the punitive actions which SOPA/PIPA call for that are the most troubling aspect of the bills. They take an offending website off the Domain Name System (DNS), a sort of phone book for the Internet. For more on DNS, watch this excellent explainer video posted on The Guardian. By interfering with DNS, the bill could destabilize the foundation of the Internet. And dedicated pirates would find work-arounds.

This week saw the launch of what could be seen as a revolutionary cell phone service in France. Contingent on a couple of rules, Free.fr is offering an all-but-free cell phone service that promises truly unlimited data, voice, and SMS monthly tariffs. At the very least, the disruptive innovation is seen likely to kick off a price war with existing carriers, which is good for consumers. But recent news developments suggest Americans shouldn’t hold their breath for the same sort of innovation any time soon–the existing carriers would strangle it.

Free.fr is an established broadband provider in France, but it’s got expansionist plans that leverage its network to produce a wholly new service: Cell phone connectivity. Founder Xavier Niel, as GigaOm notes, has been working on the plan for a while, starting with a flat-rate broadband service with IPTV and free wired phone calls on the top of its core data system (essentially because all these things strapped onto a notional “Internet service” are all but identical sorts of digital data). Free.fr was largely seeing its services as a clever vanilla data pipe into user’s homes, with additions like TV as a deal-maker for its millions of subscribers.

Niel applied for some mobile phone spectrum during a process back in 2007, and has now rolled out Free.fr’s newest and most disruptive offering. By using the install-base’s home routers, which are both Wi-fi hubs and set-top boxes for each subscriber household and free-access wireless hubs for nearby roaming users (similar to Fon’s model, or other systems in other countries like Portugal’s Zon boxes), and by issuing new boxes which are also cell network femtocells, Free has a wireless network that has potentially very broad coverage and an impressive flexibility and redundancy: Data is routed over Wi-fi for preference, but then the femtocells are also present for improved accessibility. The complex, layered system lets Free offer, for an impressively low fee of €20 ($26) a month (less if you’re a Free subscriber), free phone calls to tens of countries and both unlimited mobile data access and SMS sending. And it’s “sans engagement”–without contract.

There are plenty of potential blockages ahead on Free.fr’s roadmap to success, and some are even questioning how on Earth it’ll wrangle a profit out of its offers. But it’s so very clever and devastatingly cheap, it’s bound to push bigger established cell phone carriers like Vodafone to compete on at least some sort of pricing or facilities-offered basis. And that’s great for French cell phone users.

If you’re a U.S. cell phone subscriber you may have to pick yourself off the floor at this point. In an environment where U.S. providers (apparently with Sprint as a bit of a stand-out exception) are reneging on promises to unlimited mobile data, where SMS fees are still a wicked add-on to everyone’s monthly bill–just as the U.S. is going text-crazy–and even giants like Verizon try to nickel-and-dime every customer, Free’s model is contrarian. Could a model like Free’s ever work in the U.S.? Technologically it’s entirely possible, although coverage may be an issue in some of the more so-called “remote” regions of the U.S. where even broadband penetration is weak. But it seems unlikely. Not least because of recent revelations about Google’s and Apple’s plans to totally disrupt the cell phone industry.

For example: Steve Jobs, in the early days of the iPhone project, imagined that Apple could blanket the U.S. with a cell phone network all of Apple’s own. It would’ve been Wi-Fi based rather than GSM or CDMA (recognize that from Free.fr’s model?), and Jobs tried for three years to negotiate, bully, and finagle it into existence. It failed. Instead Apple forced AT&T to accept some very unusual terms as part of its exclusive deal–like zero AT&T branding on the Phone, and no modifications of the OS…and then rolled these terms out across the world to challenge accepted carrier practices. It’s not as revolutionary as a carrier-obsoleting wireless grid, but it’s a start, and Apple’s been trying similar apple cart-upsetting plans since.

Google too, it’s now known, had planned for its original own-brand Nexus phone, sold via its own carrier-independent online store–to be a super-cheap disruptive device, perhaps even offering zero costs for the device and some of its uses thanks to deeply-embedded social-informed advertising. Would you accept frequent ads in your cell phone experience in exchange for a zero-fee, or at least dramatically smaller, monthly bill? Our money is on about 50% of the public saying yes to that. But reports suggest that Google’s efforts were stymied in no small amount by the cell phone carriers themselves, reluctant to cede any sort of variation on their business model.

Since then Google has seemed to play along with the carriers much more than you’d perhaps expect for an open OS, and has caused recent headlines like “Why I hate Android” due to the seemingly broken promise of the supposedly unrestrained OS from a company who’s motto is “Don’t be evil”–no matter how awkwardly Google tries to defend it.

Are the carriers really that wicked? You may be tempted to think so when you consider that Verizon is blocking Google’s Wallet on its version of compatible Android phones, citing security issues–but really it’s because it’s in a consortium to promote a different model for the future of digital payment (a revolution that could actually change your life more then you think). More grist to this mill comes from fresh revelations from Motorola’s CEO Sanjay Jha, who this week noted, “Verizon and AT&T don’t want seven stock Ice Cream Sandwich devices on their shelves … The vast majority of the changes we make to the OS are to meet the requirements that carriers have.” In other words, rather than supporting a stock, uniform edition of Android–which would enable much better cross-platform compatibility, better apps and a more consistent high-quality user experience–the carriers are forcing makers to tweak and customize Android to suit their (not necessarily technical-minded or user experience-forward) agendas, which explains all those own-brand carrier apps that smatter your home page.

Nokia, desperate to make a comeback into the smartphone world with its partnership with Microsoft, is also promising unique phones to each of the U.S. carriers it’s doing business with. Is that a good thing? You may argue yes, because it means the phones could be tailored to the special sweetner offerings of each carrier, tricks like a music service, app store, or what not. But if you take a broader view, this is rather odd. Nokia and Microsoft are spending countless millions to hone, refine, and polish their phones–from both a hardware and software point of view, because it’s the synergy and user experience that’s important as Apple’s proved and as Microsoft has agreed with–and they’re about to let a mere datapipeline operator dictate how some of that will work.

If one of the biggest companies in the world, Apple, and the global giant of search engine tech and owner of the most-prevalent smartphone OS, Google, can’t break the stranglehold of the U.S. cell phone carriers on the market, let alone chip away at their armor-clad business models, then you’re allowed to sadly consider that it’s unlikely that a model ilke Free.fr’s would ever manage to shake up the U.S. industry in the near term.

Image: Flickr user greyloch

Chat about this news with Kit Eaton on Twitter and Fast Company too.

Guest post by Dan Zarrella, author of Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness

The key to applying science to marketing is being prescriptive. Calculating and analyzing data that is interesting is fun, but information becomes useful when it tells you how to achieve a specific goal. Throughout my career, one of the goals I’ve focused on is the engineering contagious ideas. I’ve worked for years, using science and data to understand how to craft content that spreads like wildfire.

Humans have been spreading ideas for thousands of years, telling each other where to find the best hunting ground, what dish detergent to use and what god to worship. The web provides unprecedented access to these conversations, allowing researchers to analyze millions of ideas to reverse engineer what it is about them that makes them spread.

Generally, when you ask someone why certain ideas go viral, the best answer you’ll get is “because they’re good.” That video I sent you last week was so funny, I had to share it. Any more than a few moments of thought reveals this to be entirely untrue. There are plenty of good ideas that go nowhere and lots of bad ideas that spread like crazy. Clearly there are some other factors that determine how contagious ideas are. And it is exactly those factors I’ve devoted my work to studying.

If you’ve been to enough social media conferences, or read enough books or blogs about modern marketing, you’ve undoubtedly heard a ton of what I call unicorns-and-rainbows advice. Feel-good stuff like “engage in the conversation,” “hug your followers,” and “have a personality.” It’s hard to disagree with this kind of stuff, because I’m not going to get on stage and tell you to punch your customers in the face, but it’s generally not based on anything more substantial than what sounds right, or makes the listener feel good.

Unicorns-and-rainbows advice is kind of like the snake oil and magical cures peddled before the rise of real, scientific health care. No real doctor would treat his patients with a certain procedure simply because it “sounded right.” It’s time for social media marketing to move beyond the dark ages and embrace the deluge of data now available to us.

One of the biggest problems with the superstitious approach to social media is that success is considered luck. Under the hegemony of unicorns-and-rainbows it’s black magic to make a piece of content “go viral.” The only things those myth-based marketers use to guide their efforts is gut feelings and anecdotal (and often misleading) “experience.”

I for one, don’t like to base business decisions on luck or gut feeling. I prefer to use science and data to create reproducible and reliable results. To accomplish this, I crafted a model for understanding how ideas spread and I’ve studied how marketers can optimize for success at each step of the process. I call this model Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness. It’s what my latest book is all about.

While the name is reminiscent of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the actual model draws on two other concepts: AIDA and OODA. AIDA is a sales methodology that describes the steps in the selling (or buying process): awareness, interest, decision, and action. Each of those steps must occur if someone is going to buy something. OODA comes from military strategy and describes the decision making process in a confrontation: observe, orient, decide, and act.

My framework describes the 3 steps that must happen if someone is going to spread your idea for you:

1. The person must be exposed to your idea. They have to be following you on Twitter, subscribed to your email list or “like” your page on Facebook.

2. They must actually become aware of your idea. I follow 8,000 people on Twitter, so I don’t see every tweet. Your target must actually read your Tweet, open your email or see your wall post in their feed.

3. Something in that content has to actually motivate them to spread your idea. Once I’ve read your tweet, it has to make me want to retweet it. Your email has to make me want to forward it.

At each step of this process, marketers can optimize for success. My book goes into detail about each of these steps and provides data on how to do the best, but here’s a run down:

1. To increase the number of people potentially exposed to your ideas, you must increase your reach. Get more followers, email subscribers or Facebook likes.

2. You have to learn to be heard over the noise of social media. By being more attention grabbing or using contra-competitive timing.

3. Your content must include motivation-raising features. Combined relevance, calls-to-action and us vs them are examples of contagious “hooks.”

For more social media science like this, pickup Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness on Amazon.