• “The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life.”
• “The basic capabilities of tools like Flickr reverse the old order of group activity, transforming ‘gather, then share’ to ‘share, then gather.’”
• The Internet is allowing amazing things to happen: “Large decreases in transaction costs create activities that can’t be taken on by businesses, or indeed by any institution, because no matter how cheap it becomes to perform a particular activity, there isn’t enough payoff to support the cost incurred by being an institution in the first place.”
• “The Web didn’t introduce a new competitor into the old ecosystem, the Web created a new ecosystem.”
• “In the same way you do not have to be a professional driver to drive, you no longer have to be a professional publisher to publish. Mass amateurization is a result of the radical spread of expressive capabilities, and the most obvious precedent is the one that gave birth to the modern world: the spread of the printing press five centuries ago.”
• Regarding Wikipedia: “If even only a few people care about a wiki, it becomes harder to harm it than to heal it.”
• On forming groups: “The net effect is that it’s easier to like people who are odd in the same ways you are odd, but it’s harder to find them.”
• “The most profound effects of social tools lag their invention by years, because it isn’t until they have a critical mass of adopters, adopters who take these tools for granted, that their real effects begin to appear.”
• “What is likely to happen to society as a whole with the spread of ridiculously easy group-forming? The most obvious change is that we are going to get more groups, many more groups, than have ever existed before.”
• “The dramatic improvement in our social tools, by contrast, means that our control over those tools is much more like steering a kayak. We are being pushed rapidly down a route largely determined by the technological environment.”
• “Anything that raises the cost of doing something reduces what gets done.”

Changes are happening at a breakneck pace; we can either embrace them and use them to our advantage, or ignore them to our peril. If you want to gain a much deeper understanding about how society adopts new behaviors, Here Comes Everybody is a must-read.

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The Product Management Perspective: What can you say when your boss walks in and throws a new book on your desk? My answer was something like “sure, I’ll read it when I have some time.” And soon after I started, I found the time. Shirky’s book is an excellent read for product managers. He challenges assumptions such as how you make money on products: “If a large enough population of users is trying things, then the happy accidents have a much higher chance of being discovered.” He causes you to dig a lot deeper to find answers to your perplexing product problems: “In business, the investment cost of producing anything can create a bias toward accepting the substandard.” He tells us (something we already know of course) about our product: “it must be designed to fit the job being done, and it must help people do something they actually want to do.”

Too often we deal with the symptoms of a problem instead of dealing with the problem head-on; Seth Godin calls this “bear shaving.” If you are spinning your wheels and not making the progress you desire, perhaps you are focusing in the wrong place. Take a look at Bear shaving for more insight.

You need to look at your situation and determine whether you are progressing in the direction you want to go. If not, make the changes necessary and start moving in the right direction. The following quote by Frederick Williams provides additional insight: “Progress always involves risks. You can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first.” Don’t be afraid to take calculated risks that will help you move forward in the direction you want to go.

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The Product Management Perspective: As a product manager you need to focus on your products’ direction and success; you need to collect the right market input and turn it into great products. At the same time you also need to focus on your career and your personal progress. With the right attitude you can do both at the same time.

• Bad work: A waste of time, energy and life. Doing it once is one time too many.
• Good work: The familiar, useful, productive work you do and do well.
• Great work: The work that matters, inspires, stretches and provokes.

Michael Bungay Stanier offers excellent tidbits of wisdom in his book Find Your Great Work. The book is written in an accessible format to illustrate that many great ideas were born on a napkin; it is about the size of a common napkin and has notes and illustrations drawn on napkins. The author uses maps to demonstrate how to find your great work, understand it and pursue it. He starts by stating five foundational principles:

• #1: Things only get interesting when you take full responsibility for the choices you make.
• #2: Changing your focus changes what’s possible.
• #3: You need to make two choices: what will you say yes to? And what will you say no to?
• #4: To do great work you must be willing to take a stand, ruffle a few feathers and reset an expectation or three.
• #5: Great work is not a solo act. You need to welcome others on your journey.

After establishing the foundational principles, Mr. Stanier sets you on the path to finding great work by showing 12 maps. The first three help you figure your Greatness and clarify where you are now. The next three look at the choices you need to make and help you better weigh those choices. The next set of three helps you understand what possibilities you have before you, some of which you already know and some of which you do not. And the final cluster of three moves you to action, taking the next step forward towards your great work. Each map is illustrated in a simple format in which you can insert your own experience and information and it will lead you to understand and develop your work from — good to great.

The world is full of good work. If you want to make a significant contribution, you need to do great work. Finding Your Great Work is an excellent guidebook to help you move in that direction.

Ideas need development to become strategies. The development of ideas is not an easy undertaking. In fact, most of the great ideas took a long time and a lot of hard work to develop into the useful products they are today. This is the primary responsibility of product managers.

Yahoo’s new CEO Carol Bartz has shown the need to drive ideas to strategies from the highest levels of the company. In the Fortune article Yahoo’s taskmaster, John Fortt describes Bartz as one who has “shown she can jump-start ailing companies.” At Autodesk (where she was CEO for 14 years) she delivered annual sales growth of 13% and increased the stock value more than eight times. She’s accomplished this through, among other things, focusing on product management:

Bartz transformed Autodesk through a series of smart acquisitions and by encouraging new product development. Autodesk’s software and applications became must-have tools for designers and manufacturers alike, thanks to Bartz’s insistence that the company methodically roll out new features based on customer feedback.

She also wants to prevent more space debris [Bartz's term for ailing products] from launching in the future. ‘Yahoo was amateur hour in the past when it comes to product management,’ she bluntly told business partners last month; groups haphazardly released things without a clear sense of whether customers wanted them. From now on, she has promised, products will arrive on a schedule so that customers can offer feedback, with the best ideas appearing in the next version – a formula that worked well for her at Autodesk.

So how do you go from idea to strategy? One step at a time. This topic is, of course, way too broad and deep for one blog post. I’ll leave the deeper discussion to the many books and blogs written on the subject. The point is to get you thinking about the ideas you have and hopefully encourage you to do something to develop them.

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The Product Management Perspective: As a product manager, you share responsibility to develop ideas into strategies. You have a great opportunity to become the strategic link from nascent ideas to full-blown product lines. Never discount your ability to make a major difference in your organization. I recommend Stewart’s blog for more details on becoming a strategic product manager.

• Nobody cares about your products (except you)
• No coercion required
• Lose control
• Put down roots
• Create triggers that encourage people to share
• Point the world to your (virtual) doorstep

“You can trigger a World Wide Rave too — just create something valuable that people want to share and make it easy for them to do so.”

Without explicitly stating it, David demonstrates these ideas in a recent post. His books, videos and ebooks provide vehicles for spreading his ideas. Take a look at the video David created for his book launch:

How are you spreading your ideas?

Bonus: Can you find me in David’s video? (Hint: look for triggers)

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The Product Management Perspective: David’s work (books, videos, ebooks, blogs, etc.) demonstrate many great methods to spreading ideas and inviting people to fall in love with your products. If your marketing teams are not using viral marketing and World Wide Raves, do your company a favor and spread these ideas internally, then work with your teams to spread your ideas to the world.

Yesterday I had the singular opportunity of participating in a podcast with David Meerman Scott. The podcast is part of Dr. Paul’s series called Live on Purpose Radio. We had a great conversation about the old rules of marketing, the New Rules of marketing, thought leadership, viral marketing and other important concepts such as making valuable content available for free. It was fun to participate and a great opportunity for me to ask questions and learn from the thought leader in viral marketing. Thank you David!

I encourage you to listen to the podcast and leave your comments about your successes with the New Rules of Marketing. You can download the podcast on iTunes or listen to it here:

Most organizations also have leaders. They are often the founders of the company or are in positions of high visibility. They are the innovators and the people who are up on stage at conferences talking about new ideas and new ways of doing things. They have a long-range perspective.

Can the manager and the leader be the same person? I found a post by George Ambler that discusses the topic of leaders vs. managers…are they different? George has compiled a compelling list of ideas and information that helps to clarify leadership and management.

In Accidental Branding, David profiles the leaders of several companies whose brands took off seemingly out of nowhere and succeeded in different, but amazing ways. The people he profiles include Gary Erickson of Clif Bar, Julie Clark of Baby Einstein, Roxanne Quimby of Burt’s Bees, John Peterman who created the J. Peterman brand and Craig Newmark who founded Craigslist. David qualifies an Accidental Brand as one that has three tests:

1. An individual who is not trained in marketing must create the brand.
2. This individual must experience the problem that the brand solves.
3. The individual must control the brand for at least 10 years.

The great news for all of us is we can create a great brand regardless of whether we came from a wealthy family or attended an Ivy League university. Some of the people profiled did not even go to college. In his research, David discovered six rules that were keys to creating accidental brands:

• Rule # 1 – Do Sweat The Small Stuff: Make sure you understand every way a consumer will interact with your brand, and choreograph all of those interactions.
• Rule #2 – Pick a Fight: Accidental brands take real risk by going against the status quo; they reap rewards for doing so.
• Rule #3 – Be Your Own Customer: Successful entrepreneurs are their own products’ consumers.
• Rule #4 – Be Unnaturally Persistent: Most brands profiled took between 10 and 20 years to reach the $20 million mark.
• Rule #5 – Build a Myth: The trick is selecting the facts that you want to tell people and deciding how best to share them.
• Rule #6 – Be Faithful: Figure out who really supports you and keep listening to them. Don’t be distracted by all of the other people who end up coming along for the ride as you become more successful.

To take an idea and make something great requires determination and focused intention. The people profiled in Accidental Branding offer great examples of how anyone can, by following sound principles, create something great. I highly recommend you add Accidental Branding to your reading list.

Disclosure: Other than receiving an advanced copy of several pre-release chapters of Accidental Branding, I have no affiliation with the author or the book.

My view of the future of social media was changed yesterday afternoon. I am at the Von.x conference in San Jose this week and attended a panel discussion about the future of social media. With Jeff Pulver, founder of Von.x as the moderator, the panel discussed their views of where social media is headed. The panel members included Robert Scoble, one of the foremost bloggers who is now running FastCompany.tv. He recorded the entire panel discussion on his video phone and streamed it live to qik.com.

The part that fascinated me the most about the discussion was watching them record live video that was streaming live to a blog, and they were receiving live chat / feedback during the presentation. They talked about showing things their kids were doing live to family all around the country. Seeing them record video, and get feedback, all in real-time was impressive. You can watch the panel discussion from Scoble’s perspective to get a feel for what I’m talking about.

In some ways the new social media scares me (I know people put bad things online every day that I don’t want my kids to see). However, these changes are happening whether we like it or not, so my take is we embrace them and use them to do great (responsible, upright, productive, etc.) things.

What trends do you see in social media?