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The Future Buzz

Adam Singer on social media, marketing, PR and creating buzz online

How To Be The Jack Bauer Of Your CompanyYesterday

The fictional character Jack Bauer of 24 was indispensable as an agent for the Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU). He ignored orders. He went off protocol. That didn’t matter, he was critical to the success of the agency and the safety of the country as a whole within the context of the show.

You should seek to be equally valuable to your organization and your industry – that is, if you want to have the same impact in the real world as Jack does fictionally. But while his character and actions are fiction, his personality and actions hold key lessons if you’re serious about changing the world around you.

How can you be the Jack Bauer of your company?

Break process when necessary to get things done

Processes are well and good for many things, but not much remarkable was ever done as part of painting by numbers. If you see opportunity to do something amazing outside your processes, do it. Don’t waste time asking permission, just do what needs to be done. If you break a process to achieve your objective and succeed, the right management team would never be upset. If they are you’re with the wrong team.

Believe in what you’re doing (and bring emotion to the table)

A lot of people check their emotions at the door when starting their day.

Modern Marketing And PR Pro Fluency MatrixAugust 30

Recently, Eric Friedman published an EarlyStager approval matrix I found quite interesting. Taking inspiration from that I decided to create a modern marketing and PR professional fluency matrix. See below for a breakdown of my perspective on the current state of marketing and PR pros. Since this is, of course, a view from my own experiences – I’m curious what you think?

image credit: Hugh MacLeod for the “self-proclaimed experts” graphic and Shutterstock for the stock photo images.

Modern Marketing And PR Pro Fluency Matrix is from The Future Buzz, a Blog Covering Digital Marketing

Bing Is The “Official” Engine Of Early Adopters…According To BingAugust 25

While at the SES conference in San Francisco last week, I noticed the above sign in the front of the session hall. And I had to stop and snap a picture to share with you here – because I think this messaging is misguided.

I understand Bing is trying to target techies, geeks, early adopters & “super-nerds” (whatever they mean by that last one). Except advertising isn’t the way to reach this crowd. It never was. The reason Google owns this audience is simple – Google deserves them. They deserve them through a remarkable product, through a focus on experimenting, delivering a high quality experience, market innovation and creativity. And then sharing those stories in a compelling, real way. Not because they proclaimed themselves “the official” search engine of the audience. Official? According to who? In this case, themselves.

Not to totally knock Microsoft, Bing as a search engine actually does deliver a good experience. But their advertising to this audience (many of you reading this) seems to try to tell us what they want to be vs. what they actually are. Maybe one day, but not yet. Actually, from discussions with a few marketers at the conference, this messaging m

Search Engine Strategies San Francisco 2010 LivebloggingAugust 24

Last week I was in San Francisco for the Search Engine Strategies conference covering the event for Online Marketing Blog. Last year we put together the different digital pieces, from creating a web analytics culture to turning the social web into real ROI. This year was no different, and I tried to liveblog a variety of sessions that cover the spectrum of digital marketing. Be sure to check them out:

If you don’t already —

The Absurdity Of Yielding Your Presence To The StreamAugust 23

You would have to be crazy to completely yield your digital presence to services owned by other people. There are so many reasons you should maintain an independent presence, and most of those who have been active digitally well before the popularization of privately (vs. independently) owned web services know this.

Yet still, there are tech-savvy people who get caught up in the hype and forget the benefits gained by maintaining an area all their own. Leo Laporte recently succumbed to this, as noted in a recent post at his blog. What happened is his content accidentally stopped being imported into Twitter from Buzz for 16 days (he stopped using Twitter and was just bringing content over from one service to the other). And not a single person noticed. Not one email or comment to Leo about it. Even Leo didn’t notice.

It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves.

Indeed. While there are many reasons to maintain an independent presence (as linked in graph 1) Leo is experiencing the poor