I speak a lot about the value of perpetual beta or the need to emphasize process over product, so this maybe an entirely hypocritical thing to say. But… Judgement is better than feedback sometimes. Knowing in an absolute sense that someone hates your idea can be preferable to having any number of people try and help you make it better. Sometimes getting an objective kick in the pants or pat on the back can galvanize passion in a way that the incremental process of working toward a goal never can.

And, very soon I will be looking for judgement. Not, from my network, but from the outside, from people I have never met (online or otherwise). Very soon, I will be demonstrating an idea in the hopes that people will tell me that it sucks, unequivocally. I want them to be rabid about it too. I want them to be so mad that it doesn’t work the way that they want it to that they will challenge me to think about it differently.

I also want other people to make the judgement call that it is worthy of their time. I want them to believe so much in my ideas that they will be willing to back it up with funding, connections, and full throated support in everyday conversation. I want their judgement to be absolute, not dependent upon the next version forthcoming.

And when the judgements come, they will be swift. It will be a moment of consideration and then a decision. People will pronounce fate, and do it based upon evidence I have provided. They have the control, and yet, I am the one putting myself up for such a judgement. I am submitting myself to being graded for the first time in a long time.

And that is why I think it is special, and it should stay special. Grading and this kind of judgement on what you have done, should be something that only comes along once in a great while. It should hinge upon you being ready to stand up to criticism and believe that you have put the best possible version of what you believe forward for review.

That is why I believe in defending dissertations. It is why I believe in writing grants. It is why I believe in applying to schools. It is why I believe in the interview process.

And for the same reason, it is why I do not believe in standardized testing. It is also why I do not believe in many versions of performance review (the kind that is based on progress, not a culmination or an application for something new).

I believe that moments of judgement should be based on individual achievement, not measured against a standard. A test cannot measure what an application can. A review based upon Smart Goals will never be as good as a review that requires a person to rewrite their job description and apply for that new job. A judgement means that you have done something worthy of esteem. A feedback loop means that you can never take a step back and pronounce something as good.

So, as I head on into my next judgement. I hope people like what I am doing enough to tell me, and I hope people hate it enough to do the same. Either way, Judge me.

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I have created my communities wrong. Or at least, I have done it while ignoring a huge element of what makes a great community stick together: its values. On the one hand, I have been running away as far and fast as possible from any kind of value-based community, afraid that whatever I create would turn into a “Tea Party” kind of organization that really can’t stand on anything except for the values that the members share.

And so I have pursued people specifically because of what they are passionate about. I have pursued tech people and education people and startup people because they are the ones that I can have a conversation with. They share the same interests as I do and we can speak without fear of leaving someone behind. We are the same brand of geek.

I kind of took it for granted that we would all value the same things too. I took it for granted that we would all value married life and children and balance. I took it for granted that we would value getting things done and reading a whole bunch. I thought we would all respect women and respect our environment and respect love, truth, and inquiry above all else.

But as much as these values are ones that I find in my communities, this is not what my communities are based upon. While a great many of the people that I gravitate towards are capable of being both passionate about my passions and valuing the things I value, there are many people who are simply in it for the passion.

And this has caused some of my communities to fall apart or languish. When I look at many of them, I see nothing but a series of individuals and individual interests. There isn’t a cohesion that comes from a mix of passion and values. I think the main reason for this is that passions are much more in-flux than values. While I have not always been interested in starting a company, I have always valued truth. While I have not always been a blogger, I have always valued the creative process.

One of the things that value-based communities get right is that their values bind them closer together than any set of interests ever could. In that sense, they are incredibly accepting of differences. So long as you value the same things, your background and approach doesn’t matter.

So, I guess I am advocating for building communities that do not ignore our values. I am looking for communities that see the whole me. I am a husband, a dad, a musician, a writer, a geek, an optimist, a truth-seeker, and a hand-holder. I value those things, and I want those things to be a part of the conversation just as much as term sheets, VC funding, EdTech, Collaboration, or Learning.

In fact, I want to be able to search based upon those values and not just the passions or topics that people have going around in their heads all day. I want to be able to find those other individuals who believe. If for no other reason than I feel as though I will be able to take that kind of a community with me wherever I go. No matter what I become passionate about, so long as the people I have with me value the same things, they can come too.

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Very few objects are special to me. They exist in my life because they are of use, but they are replaceable in a huge way. Even my cross pen, the kind that I have had for over 10 years in my right pocket, get’s used to open boxes, pick things out of window sills and kill spiders (you wouldn’t think it would work, but it is quite effective once they are in a corner). It is another tool, utilitarian in nature, even if it does have sentimental value to me. Even if I love it because my wife gave it to me, it is still just a pen.

And that is all normal. It is normal that I am not overly attached to my shoes or my movies or my phone. While I would probably care if they were gone, they are the everyday stuff that my life is filled with. I encounter them each day and I don’t think anything of it. I do not contemplate their existence because they are a reliable part of my own. They will be there when I need them, and that is reassuring.

Yet, all of my new stuff isn’t that yet. New gadgets that I buy aren’t normal yet. New software that I use, isn’t normal yet. New ideas, too. All of these things aren’t utilitarian in their existence for me; they are novel and unique in my everyday life.

And yet, new is pretty much all that I want other people to do.

I introduce them to new software, new gadgets and new ideas on a regular basis. I gather new information and talk about new tools daily. None of this is normal. It is not ordinary. It is not useful in the way that my pen is. It cannot be relied on for everything. It is just too new.

Things that have crossed over from new to normal for a good portion of the population:

• Google
• Digital Cameras
• Cell Phones
• Powerpoint
• Social Networks
• www. and .com

Things that are just new:

• Foursquare
• Augmented Reality
• Screencasting
• Video and Web Conferencing
• Easy to use Video Cameras
• Multiple Web Browsers
• Open Spokes

I’m not saying there is anything wrong with New. What I am saying, is that no one using the things I have labeled in the latter category to skill spiders. The things in the New category must be thought about during every use. The things in the Normal category are just a fact of life.

So, how do we take things from the non-spider-killing category, and get them to exist within the spider-killing-category?

By framing them that way of course. In order for FourSquare to become a household name, it must start telling stories of how to kill spiders. It must be framed by images, video and experience that show it to be one of the places that has such a utilitarian use that it seems unfathomable that it didn’t previously exist. Google has attained this status. We can’t imagine not being able to search the world’s information. It kills our spiders on a regular basis.

So it must be with Open Spokes. It must become the way that we ask our questions of our family members and friends. Not as a poll or a quick form, but rather it must be the way in which we think to send out a request for feedback on an idea. It must become the way in which people record their thoughts online and develop them over time. And at the risk of restating the obvious, it must kill people’s spiders. It must squish all of the doubt out of a decision and allow people to take a sure-footed step into the unknown.

If people can send an e-vite without thinking or do a google search on the fly, they should be able to ask an Open Spokes question with that cerebral instinct.

The is no lack of branding going on in the twittersphere or on any of the social networks that have built huge organization promotion services (Yelp, FourSquare, Facebook). Once a company or non-profit has seen potential to get more eyeballs on their product, they have launched head first into the arena. It is just unfortunate that so many of them have no idea what they are doing.

It has become an expectation on any webpage to see your affiliate Facebook or twitter presence mentioned. It has become even more of an expectation that people will be talking about your brand on those services. So, the logic goes that if you put up a twitter account, a blog or a facebook page, you have secured your right to guide the conversation and (hopefully) the people to your corner of the internet.

And yet, I see mostly this:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

When, I should be seeing mostly this:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

The Difference I see is that restaurant highlighted in the first image opened without a person behind the brand (2299 W. Littleton Blvd, Littleton, Co by the way… awesome coffee shop and wine bar) and the second opened with huge fanfare from the twitterati of Boulder, Co. There were nothing but people (and burgers, I suppose) behind this brand. They give away food because of twitter, they have conversations with others because of twitter. They have even gotten other people to take photos and post them on twitter, just because they have engaged the audience with people, instead of merely products.

It just isn’t enough to have a Facebook page or Twitter account, you actually have to have a real person behind it. There needs to be a man (or woman) behind the curtain if you are going to be the great and powerful Wizard. And you need to go out and have a conversation if you want people to start talking about yourself. Go out and get early adopters who talk about your stuff. Follow people who matter in the community. Start commenting on their ideas. Be a person in a community, not a brand among other brands. (Offering free stuff, access, or learning is never a bad thing as well).

While this post is most focused on companies who do a bad job of promoting their brand on social media, I believe that all organizations need to be doing a better job of placing people on the front lines of defending their brands. Non-profits should not let the conversation out of their sight just because they have always promoted with traditional methods. Schools should not just be pushing out information from their online presence, they should be using it to listen and to engage everyone. And for all of those organizations who can’t find the time or the personnel to manage a Twitter or Facebook account. Here is the easiest way to create a good conversation:

1. Sign up for a twitter account using someone’s gmail address, but instead of putting the regular gmail account use the + sign, like this: orgname+twitter@gmail.com. This will allow you to filter all incoming mail from that address and forward it to as many different people that are managing the account as you want.
2. Set up those filters immediately after setting up the account.
3. Go to http://tweepsearch.com/ and search for some folks with similar interests. Follow them.
4. Go to http://tweepi.com/ and look up some of those folks that you just followed and then follow their follower that look interesting (you can follow everyone on a page in a single click, which is awesome)
5. Have everyone on your team sign up at http://hootsuite.com and have them add the twitter account to their Hootsuite.
6. Have everyone monitor the account, post interesting stuff, and start to talk with the people that have already been followed.
7. Set up a few twitterfeeds so that your account is always posting something interesting (Go to http://delicious.com and search for something in your brand’s area of interest. Grab that rss feed and put it into an auto-tweet system like http://twitterfeed.com so that any time that someone posts a really good link to delicious in your topic, you automatically post it to twitter and gain followers by having relevant information about your topic).

All of this can be done in an afternoon. As long as you care enough to have the conversation about your issues and passions, people will be there to have the conversation with you. While I am not a marketing guru, I do know when I am talking to a real person. I know when they are trying to engage me in a conversation, and I know when they are trying to sell me something.

I will state this as plainly as possible: I want more people on Twitter and less brands.

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I do a decent job of staying in touch with my friends and co-workers. I answer e-mail, IM or Skype, call, and even occasionally talk to them in person. I can do that without much effort because these people are well known to me. They are the ones that make the most sense to contact on a regular basis because they start conversations as well as engage in them. They are the ones that share the same space with me, whether physically or not. I don’t worry about not following up because I know that they will call me on it. They will get up in my face (physically or not) and force me to take part. That is a good thing.

I do worry about the people who are content to let opportunities pass them by. I worry about everyone who mentions me on twitter but expects little in return. I worry about the people I meet at meetings and after work events who are engaging enough to talk with, but not so much that I will remember them the next time I see them These are the folks on my periphery.

I am pretty terrible at following up, and continuing to follow up with those people. I am terrible at taking notes about who certain people are and what they may have to offer any given conversation I am having. I just default to the people directly around me whenever I have a new idea, rather than going out and really thinking through who the best people are to comment on it. This is not a good thing.

I should be able to see into my periphery as much as I can see those people at an arms length. But, I can’t.

First, I am terrible with names. Even worse, I am terrible with faces. Worst of all, I don’t have any idea what most people’s names are or what their faces really look like becauseTwitter and other account names obscure this information exceedingly well.

I don’t have any way to take notes on who people are, nor do I have a way of keeping track of who I should follow up on and when. There is a universe of products that aim to help with this problem. But, whether it is sophisticated CRM software or a new social startup called Gist, there really isn’t anything that allows me to truly visualize who I have talked to or who is most interesting (the Gist People page is the best version of this to date, but it still needs to be better).

Even if I can get alerts on who to contact or create a network of information around me to help access everyone I need, I still struggle with the idea that my friends are easy, my contacts are hard.

I don’t want checklists or tagged items. I don’t want tasks or customer service workflows. I simply want a way to monitor the activity that I should be monitoring. I want what a Face Book used to be, a single source for pictures and connections that are most important to the work that I am doing right now. I want different volumes of this book for every type of need I have. I want my periphery to come close and huddle around the task at hand when it is required, and then I want them to go back to being on the outside of my network because I don’t have the energy or the time to maintain friendships with all of them.

The question is, who are in these books? What do I write in the margins to give me more information about them? How can I come back to the sticky notes I leave on a regular basis?

I feel like this is the future of the contact. If anyone figures out how we can really keep all of our information about people at arms length without putting in a lot of effort, they will have solved the problem of the connected world. I could see a future version of the iPad or smart phone doing this well, but as of yet, our friends are as good as we are going to do. That is okay, but I’m not sure that will be okay forever.

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In general, advertising is incredibly derivative. Promotion forever copies the next new thing in the hopes of creating buzz or catching the latest wave of popular opinion.Guerrilla Ads are ones that are, by definition, completely unique. They work by breaking through everyday noise and recreating the mundane into something completely discontinuous.

Here are some of my favorite examples from the above link:

And yet, these ads are ones that take an incredible amount of thought and execution. They require just the right person to use just the right space to create the powerful message that is required to break through the noise. Because they are looking to establish something that makes you think and sticks with you, they can’t be done all of the time. They have to be created, spend their time in the limelight and then fade away. Otherwise, they just become more noise.

Even with all of their drawbacks, this kind of advertising is what I a most drawn to, other than word of mouth and networked recommendation. It is the kind of work that makes me think that there is hope for the art of persuasion in every day life. Each example of this type of advertising takes a real place and then introduces something authentic, experimental, and transformational out of it. It asks that our spaces be more than what they were designed for. It asks us to mix real life and fiction in a way that only great pieces of art can do. And that is what I would consider many of these ads: great public art.

And yet, I want Guerrilla marketing to make itself. I want it to grow organically out of the spaces that exist in our world. I want this kind of art to be the collaboration of thousands of people descending on public places and reworking the objects that have so much potential. And I want the ads to be about more than products too. I want them to be about ideas.

I want education to have guerilla advertising. I want kids to be running out of brick buildings. I want the words “School” posted on every public space so that we know that learning can happen anywhere. I want teachers depicted as writing shakespeare graffiti on walls. I want the stuff that goes on inside of our learning institutions to be incredibly visible everywhere.

I want thought to be displayed as virtue. I want idea bubbles to pop out of subway stops. I want moving walkways to have story starters on them. I want ears to be on walls, ready to listen to whatever people have to say.

I want guerilla ads for collaboration. I want large scale puzzles being put together with parking lot spaces. I want pictures of people helping one another climb up steps. I want hands reaching out from walls ready to shake and share information (and for that matter, I want contact kiosks where you can get information sent to your phone from anyone who decided to “bump” their phone into the kiosk or input their information and share their interests).

And that is just me. If we stopped taking for granted that we can only draw in designated areas or make statements on our own, then we all become guerrilla advertisers. I believe it is time that we stop letting products make the best statements in our society. Large companies can’t be the only ones to break through the noise. Little ideas and collections of people need to be able to do that too. Right?

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We are never so crass as to boil down a person to a dollar amount. To do that would be to establish the idea that a person could be purchased, rented, or otherwise commodified. And, we don’t do that.

Instead, we valuate ideas. We put a price tag on companies and contributions. We create elaborate systems for payment by the hour or contracts that seemingly stretch on forever and bind us to a given bank account in perpetuity.

Even then, we are a little squeamish about what we are worth. Everything is a negotiation about where the scales should actually end up. We press down hard with our thumbs on one side sometimes and other times we lift up that side just to show how fair we can really be.

So, what if someone was going to invest in You? What if they said that you needed to look at your own projections for the next 10 years and come up with a number of just how much your ideas and contributions are going to be worth. Then, they were going to buy a percentage stake in you and give you a term sheet for their rate of return.

Would that make us more comfortable with the process of figuring out what our first round of funding should really look like?

Many times we obfuscate our worth by eschewing a simple cash valuation of what we have to offer. Now, I am not referring to net worth or liquidity, but rather taking a good hard look at all that I have created and the things we are yet to create. We could easily make projections of this kind and garner support in the form of investors. But we don’t, at least not in any systematic way.

We ask people to invest in us as social beings. We ask others to work with us to raise buy-in capital. We even seem to be quite adept at establishing worth in salaries and benefits. But, many of us would not equate our salary with our worth.

So, perhaps there is another way to determine our worth, while still preserving the sense that we cannot possibly know how much a human is capable (in a monetary sense). What if everyone took the time to valuate their best idea (and keep on assessing it over time)? What if we all could pitch this idea to those with deep pockets and ask forinvestment? What if we got that investment and actually put that money toward making that idea come true? What if we didn’t hide behind being a non-profit, public, or altruistic institution (or even a business with overly optimistic projections), but put the ideas out to be bid on and get provide real dividends to anyone willing to participate.

So, I guess I will put this out there as is:

I believe my best idea is worth $550,000. I am looking for a $250,000 of further investment. Anyone interested?

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I’m in over my head.

I claim to know more than I do.

I’m standing on the shoulders of giants, and I don’t even know their names.

The current expectation is that I am knowledgeable about everything that is put in front of me. It has been this way for a number of years now, but I’m not sure when that transition occurred. I used to be able to simply learn from others and not have to know anything. But now, it is getting harder and harder to say, “I don’t know.”

I must come up with answers or be able to produce them without much of a head start. I like the challenge that is posed in this assumption and the level of respect I am afforded, but it is just so hard to give advice or proclaim truth when I literally just looked up the answer or tried out a new solution 5 minutes before responding to your e-mail.

While I am huge proponent for the fact that a degree does not mean that you know anything, I also see the paradox that I have created. By stating that claim, I am forcing myself to credential each act of speech I initiate. I am saying that I can know everything that someone who has a degree does know. I am belittling their accomplishment, while ridiculously inflating my own.

I sometimes feel like I sit atop of a knowledge pyramid scheme. I feel as though, I am trying to gain as much of other people’s knowledge by reading their work and networking with them so that it makes me look important and valuable. I keep on bringing more people on because I feel as though someone is going to find me out and call my bluff. But, no one has. They just keep on feeding me more information and connections.

The pressure is pretty incredible to know and to do. It is exhilarating most of the time, but sometimes it feels hollow and overly ambitious. Resting on laurels (what laurels I can actually claim as mine) sounds nice from time to time.

The one way I keep rationalizing sitting on top of this pyramid is that I believe that others are creating pyramids of their own and I am on the bottom of theirs. Hopefully, they are not relying on a foundation (me) that will crumble, just as my pyramid may crumble at any moment.

I cannot be the oracle or the prognosticator of everything in my field of vision, whether that is startups, technology, or education. These things are fluid and, in the grand scheme of things, I know nothing about them. While I may be able to rely on others to let me do my job, I cannot exist without them. And, I need to. At least to the point of making sure that I have earned the respect I have been given, that I can cite my own experience rather than someone else’s as proof that I know what I am talking about.

So, here is the deal:

Call my bluff. Please. Tell me that I don’t know anything and make me look like a fool. Show me just how little I have done and how much I have to learn. I need that. I need to not be an expert for a while. I need to just be mentored and molded. I need someone to ask me questions for a change. And I need to not take those questions as an invitation to garner respect because of the answers I come up with. If you do this for me, I promise I will do it for you as well.

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Groups seem to be the holy grail of social networks. From Linked-in groups to the newFacebook communities to the millions of people self-organizing in Ning networks, groups have become the default setting for communication and collaboration. When you are in doubt about the effectiveness of your web application, throw groups in, and you will have a winner. When there is nothing left to hang your hat on, set up a team that will send out e-mails to everyone multiple times a day.

And it makes sense. People want to organize around an idea. They want to set themselves up to answer the problems that a single set of people have. Where it all goes wrong is that people start to believe that by simply setting up a team, they have solved something significant. They work so hard to organize themselves that the energy for action just isn’t there. Even in the ease of grouping within a hashtag, very little seems to be done that isn’t in the effort of maintaining the grouping rather than moving it forward.

Teams are meant to change, to be modified, to evolve. And yet, we are creating teams and groups online that have no ability to become something different than what they once were. Once you are a “fan”, the group doesn’t change. Once you are a member of a Linked-in group, the members are mostly stagnant. And that is sad.

I want teams with iterations. I want the ability to change the purpose for any given group that I am within. Restating our hypothesis continually is the only way that I know to create rather than persist. And that is why Friendster is dead. That is why Ning networks grow and die. It is why people can leave behind entire bodies of work online when they are no longer interested in having those same old conversations.

So, why not let groups evolve. Why not allow ideas to branch naturally, one from another until you are working with only the people that are as invested as you are in solving the problem at hand. Why does the process of self-selection have to be the last democratic act that you can contribute to a group?

Here is what I am proposing:

• Self-select into a group.
• State your bias and interest in associating with the group.
• Establish a great schism within the group because of either disagreements, reevaluation of needs, or interest in solving different problems.
• Split groups, rename both, and reestablish bias and interest for the new groups.

With this in mind, teams never become bloated. Lurkers don’t outweigh participants. People aren’t cc’d because they exist, they are informed for consent in decisions. People have ownership in their group, because they are continually in the process of remaking it. They need it, because it needs them to thrive.

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