There’s a lot of that in self-improvement, in motivation, in marketing.

We say similar things a different way, working away at what’s inside you. When I think about you, and all the confidence hiding below your surface waiting to be pulled forth, I think about what we could accomplish if it were coaxed out. You’re confident in some things, and very uncomfortable with others. Imagine if more of what came out was the confidence, the conviction, the passion (which I recently heard described as the intersection of anger and love).

People say that I write about business the way others write about relationships. That’s because business is relationships. That’s how I see it. Who do you deal with? People. Who do you sit around with all day in office buildings? People. Everything you’re doing in your nonprofit to raise more funds, to get more awareness, to build a following is human-based.

We’re all looking for ways to sink the meanings in deeper. We’re all looking for tools to equip us. You came here for that today. You come here for that all the time. You trust me to say something that will spark an idea, and you will then take that idea and make some value of it. I shared with you the difference between recipe and restaurant, and maybe you got value from thinking of how you process (and then APPLY/EXECUTE the information).

But it’s all 100 words for snow, and we’re all talking about talking, and that’s how it’s supposed to be, and you saying “that’s nothing I haven’t heard before” means that the universe is saying back to you, “Yeah, but did you DO anything with it?”

Photo credit kevindooley

I was invited to spend a little time at the River Valley Charter School in Newburyport, MA, thanks to Christine Cohen. We knew each other by Twitter, and she was responding to my post about how new ideas could change education. Christine wanted to show me that charter schools offer one potential solution for rethinking education. She introduced me to Jeanne Schultz, and Bonnie Bowes, who were equally passionate about the school (which has been around for 10 or 11 years).

Quick note: I have no idea what arguments exist between public school advocates and charter advocates, between Montessori learners (which the River Valley Charter School practices), and I’m not interested in that argument. What I want to talk about is what I heard from the kids.

We stopped a girl in the third grade in the hall and asked what she thought of the school. She was pleased to report that math and writing are her favorite parts. The classrooms are multi-age (after Kindergarten) and it was clear that this was a useful well to help a child go from learning to execution to mastery (and teaching).

To say that the way Montessori folks learn in ways quite different than mainstream US public school methods is like saying, “there were kids in the rooms of both places,” and that’s about it. They learn from experience sharing. They learn from tactile situations. For instance, one classroom was growing their own salmon from eggs so that they could be released into New Hampshire streams when they were ready. They’re also sharing the project with a sister school in Ireland, so that there’s a lot to share and learn from both groups. I don’t remember doing this in fourth grade (or any grade). You?

Where I really got excited was when I talked to the 8th graders. They were in the spot where they were about to transition out, to graduate, and then land in the mainstream public school system (mostly). Here’s the part to take note of, for I feel it tells the most about our business world, our higher education world, and how we have to retool:

• In all cases, the five 8th graders in talked with were smart and VERY interested in learning from their mistakes. Getting by wasn’t their goal. They wanted to excel.
• In all cases, the very first concern they raised about what would happen in high school was social. They wanted to feel they were around people they know.
• In all cases, they were concerned that they’d have a less intimate relationship with their teachers. These students felt that a strong relationship with their observers (that’s how Montessori folks teach).
• My new friends were very much interested in the classroom sizes, citing that smaller sizes really helped them feel engaged, helped them feel seen, and helped them feel like they were making a difference.

What I learned at the River Valley Charter School was that the way I was raised, in the old public school system (I can’t vouch much for today’s system, though my kids are in it), is quite different than what these kids are learning. They will have a chance to work in different ways, will have a bit (lot?) less of that “industrialist training” flavor of public school intact. It’s going to be an interesting world where kids are actually raised to handle the kinds of jobs that exist out there right now (multi-faceted, multi-team, smaller system, etc).

I’m curious to know your experience with all this. Your thoughts, your feelings. Have you sent your kids to a charter or Montessori school? What will you take from this? What do you think about education today? (From the non-US is very welcome on this, too. I just stressed repeatedly the US perspective because I know even less about other culture’s education systems.)

Education.

Kenny, or rather MTV, has partnered up with some folks to work on GetSchooled.com. Essentially, the site hopes to work on the problem of the school dropout rate, and secondarily, the college admissions rate. The stats that Kenny gave me were staggering (and as I immediately forget numbers, they were something like 30% of all kids who enter high school don’t finish or some similar – you can correct me). They made my head fog up as I thought about what it’d mean to try and solve those problems.

Evidently, our education problems cost us something like 350 Billion US Dollars a year in lost revenue (or similar – again, I don’t remember such things well). That’s crazy. So essentially, just fixing a few bits of education, just improving a few parts, would change the way this country works.

Faith, it turns out, has all kinds of knowledge about the education system and she and Kenny started riffing on all the cool projects. She told me about GetIdeas.org and TeacherTube, and how Cisco is working on 21st Century Schools iniatives. Kenny and Faith told me about Big Picture Schools and Green Dot SChools and Marc Ecko’s Sweat Equity enterprises, and several other great projects.

The question remains:

How Could New Ideas Change Education?

In a way, I’m already noodling with this. With Whitney Hoffman and Christopher S. Penn, I started PodCamp as a way to teach about media making with alternative methods. This is the unconference model, but it’s started me down a path to learn more about the DNA of Disruption, and what I could do by applying alternative education models to other situations.

I’m not interested in becoming a teacher. In fact, I’m not much interested in the existing systems. I’ll let others figure out how to fix those from within. However, I am more than interested about what else can be done outside of the boxes. I’m curious what we could do to change the laws, change the rules, make new games, and create success from cradle to grave.

Think about this: my 3-year-old boy knows more about navigating the web than most school computer programs. My 7-year-old daughter’s fascination with the Titanic would give her a great springboard for learning engineering, forensics, and many other sciences, though the original assignment was simply to read a few books for the sake of reading. Neither of my kids are being taught leadership (directly), nor are they being taught entrepreneurial studies (directly). The old system, make factory workers, is still firmly in place, and we’re trying to patch that. I don’t think that’s how I want to roll.

I was talking with Dr. Lynn Dorman tonight on twitter, and as she nears 70, she’s facing the same fate that lots of people fall into: younger generations don’t understand how to learn from the body of work of their successors, even if their only learning is in which systems have failed in the past. How can we marry up all the great resources of people who know something great to those of us who could stand to learn more?

I’m also interested in educational models for business workers. We’re in a society where HR is less and less about career development and more and more about benefits management. Companies are no longer the stewards of your development and career. How can I help those of us who lived in the cubicle farms, and what can I do to share that information in a way that will empower others?

I’ve no idea where I will go with this in the larger context. I just wanted to put the thoughts out there. I’m curious as to what you’re thinking about it.

How can we build new learning models? How can we equip our youth and/or our students and/or our business professionals? How do we share what we’ve learned with these new tools? How do we equip our kids to do something with all we’ve learned from social media?

What’s your take on all these kinds of projects? If Kenny Miller’s working on it, I know it’s important. I’m also wondering what else would could do with our combined knowledge. We’re the smartest people around supposedly, right? How can we help?

Part 1: The Landscape of Social Media – this is the section showing case studies and explaining the larger strategy.

Part 2: Examples of Good Marketing – showcasing some of the great business success stories out there.

Part 3: The Down and Dirty (here’s where I need the help).

I’m going to show participants in these events how to:

• Register a domain with a host.
• Install WordPress or Movable Type application.
• Add plugins, themes, and other customizations.
• Implement basic SEO improvements, and use Website Grader to test and re-test.
• Register the blog in the appropriate directories.
• Implement Google Analytics.
• Claim the blog on Technorati.
• Build a simple listening station using Google Reader. (add appropriate sources to it).
• Build “passports” on the appropriate networks and sites (digg, stumbleupon, twitter, flickr, yelp, etc, etc).
• Find the right “complementary sites” for that blog using services like Alltop. Compile contact info for such.
• Basics of profile building for social networks, including best practices, relevant business information, linking/outpost strategies.
• Build one or two profiles to start the company off on the right track.
• Tagging and metadata usage across platforms (diff between tags in Twitter and Flickr, for instance, and for blogs).
• Basic blog technical skills, including how to link appropriately, how to add pictures, how to embed 3rd party information like YouTube videos.
• Perform basic online etiquette, including the importance of commenting, the value of linking back, the conversational nature of Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks.
• Content marketing basics and starting strategies.

What am I missing? What else haven’t I touched on that I’m just assuming people know, or that I haven’t given enough credit in this layout?

More to come on the Bootcamp events.

Thanks for your help.

I just gave the morning keynote at the Stamats Higher Education Marketing conference in St Petersburg, Florida, and I decided to go totally away from slides, and just speak from passion. To do that, I kept a single sheet of paper with some notes so that I didn’t forget what I wanted to say. (I did the same thing in my making money isn’t evil presentation – remember, that one had lots of cursing.) I wanted to capture some of what I said as part of my presentation: Turning ROI into Return On Influence. I’m sure I’m missing a lot of what I said, but here are the main points.

I led with a quote.

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.- Ralph Waldo Emerson US essayist & poet (1803 – 1882)

I went on to tell everyone in the room (marketers) that they are salespeople. They might not think they are (more than 50% raised their hand when I asked them about it). I say this because marketing is about moving a behavior forward from one state to another, and especially in 2009, it’s even more important that marketers feel and believe just how tied they are to the sales cycle, and for that matter, to the PR and customer service cycle.

I mentioned that marketers have to think like media makers, like CEOs, like salespeople. they have to OWN the process, the experience, the business of moving people from a to b. (Yes, this is a mix of Seth Godin and Tom Peters stuff.)

I talked about the five steps of media as an influence tool, but I think I forgot to tell them all five in detail. Here’s the five phases of it, at least.

1. Awareness. – People become aware that you’re out there.
2. Attention. – People actually open their eyes to what you’re saying.
3. Influence. – People start thinking about what you’re saying and map it to themselves.
4. Reputation. – You become known for having good information/ideas/whatever.
5. Authority. – People consider you the top voice on the matter.

Where do YOU want to be on that continuum. I know.

Beyond that, it’s all a blur. If someone recorded it, I’m sure it won’t sound nearly as good as it felt coming out.

Mostly I shared that folks must atomize their marketing. Break media into bites and throw it all over the place. Don’t focus on a newspaper. Focus on getting two way conversations started everywhere. Get things out to the places where people are. That kind of thing.

What would YOU have told them?

Photo credit, FoundPhotosLJ

We talked about a lot of things, from the ways in which traditional PR must thread with the new stuff, to the ways in which students will find themselves challenged in the coming months. We talked about the importance of your personal database, and how to better annotate (post coming about this on Mashable shortly).

One question that Steve raised at the very beginning that we didn’t touch on nearly enough, but that floated around in my head after we’d long since departed the campus was this: in modern public relations, there’s a stronger sense of maintaining your personality, your personal views, and a level of ethics that doesn’t square with how things got done in the old days. Sure, there were ethical practitioners in the old days, but there were plenty more people just taxed with getting a result for a client. My thoughts on this couldn’t fit into the remaining minutes. Here, Professor Quigley’s class, are my answers:

Ethics in the World of Social Media and New Marketing

First, my simple measure of what is ethical and what is not, as told to me by a professor in the late 1990s: “If you don’t want to talk about it with your family at the dinner table, and you don’t want to read about it on the front page of the Boston Globe, it’s not ethical.” Seems easy to me. (Essentially, ethics are our guideline of what we consider right and wrong.)

In public relations and marketing, the primary goal is that those acting as an agent for an organization, their professional communicators, move the needle in some way. In PR, that might be press mentions, or blog posts, or publicity through speaking at conferences. In marketing, the projects can be more complex, or more indirect, but all relate to getting some other lever or number somewhere to move. There are nuanced and personable ways to do this, and then there are heavy-handed, let’s just call them SPAMMY, ways to do this.

You could do that. You could spam 10,000 people to get 100 positive results to show your client. But, as Todd Defren pointed out in the class, in the old days, those people used to have no voice, no real recourse that mattered or could be seen. Today? Everyone can blog. Everyone can put the word out that your organization is spamming them. Not only would it be less ethical to attempt to gain customers this way; it would be bad business.

Here’s the thing: Google remembers everything. And by “Google,” technically I mean the web at large (by which, I still mean Google, don’t I?). So, by extension, pretty much ALL business you do in social media can be “remembered” by anyone interested in what you’re doing, and where you’ve been, and what comes next. This, by the way, features heavily in Trust Agents, my forthcoming book with Julien Smith, but that’s a tangent for another time.

In a world where the entire space around you “remembers” your choices and your actions, do you have much in the way of an alternative but to operate ethically?

You Can Hide it For a While

There’s an entire mechanized side to the web. If your firm gets my site onto the Digg home page, I’ll get tons more traffic than I normally get. If you orchestrate a complex way to build all kinds of links to my site, I’ll gain rank or authority or whatever system you use to measure relevance. All of this happens and can happen such that people can’t see it easily.

But people who understand these schemes can figure out if that’s what happened. There are trails back to actions. It can eventually be uncovered that your organization architected a false Digg campaign, a doctored Wikipedia entry, another stuffing of the votes in some Internet-savvy way.

We already have stories of people doing things wrong. Most of you in the space already know them.

Be Human or Else

This space will remember. That can feel a bit daunting, but please realize that there’s a world of difference between doing something out of ignorance, or in a weird situation, versus gaining a reputation as someone who performs unethically. If you’re someone on the rise and learning and you twinge someone the wrong way, that’s one thing. If it turns out you’re “that guy” habitually, it just won’t really fly well this time around.

I’m grateful to Steve Quigley for turning over his classroom to Todd and me. I had lots of fun, and I look forward to the opportunity learn from the rising stars of PR and Marketing, and to share what little I know in return. And besides, Steve bought us noodles for lunch afterwards.

And, for further reading, check out Steve Rubel’s post on ethics in social media marketing. Seems it was in the air today.

Part of my energy around this post comes from a great speech by mister Gary Vaynerchuk I attended yesterday. Gary is nothing if not passionate, clear about his plan, and focused on his next steps.

You MUST do the basics.

If You Are A Business

1. Be as professional as you can be. If you’re looking to help these businesses, realize that they need you to be reliable (something I wish I could do better). They need you to be there.
2. Educate people from their side of the fence. If you’re providing advice and training, don’t talk about your tool knowledge. Talk about their business challenges.
3. Study the market. Don’t just do your own thing. Learn how other people are selling. Learn how other people are marketing. Learn how other people are educating.
4. Know your price. Know how much you need to make to do business. This is so important. It also relates to how people value you. Be sure you value you.
5. Be clean and clear about selling. If you’re selling something, like consulting, like a service, like design work, whatever, be really open and clear about what you sell.
6. Ask. Ask for referrals. Ask for the sale. Ask for advice from lots of people. Make sure that asking is part of your DNA.
7. Be personal. Be real. Be who you are. It won’t last long if you try to be other people, or try to be something you’re not. This includes admitting when you’re wrong.
8. Know what’s next. Always have a plan. Always have a sense of where you’re going in your business, and what you need.

Why are these the basics? Because this is the baseline price for entry to doing this work. It’s what people are expecting from you, especially when you get the opportunity to work with them.

What have I missed? What do you know about?

Photo credit, Brian “I have every web person’s photo and you don’t” Solis

It looks like Margarite has added more YouTube videos to the video section, and Franklin has written a blog post about the town’s historic water cooler. Jeremy has already commented that Franklin forgot to cite a source, saving Dharmesh the effort. He eats a breakfast bar, and hops in his car for the commute to work.

On his iPod, Dharmesh listens to last week’s book reports read out by the students. The quality of their work has improved a great deal since switching to the audio requirement. The second report, by Kelly, is a little loud and the audio clips a bit. Dharmesh makes a mental note to show Kelly how to level the audio in Audacity.

At school, the first period media students are all frustrated. They’ve built a media room in FriendFeed, but haven’t figured out what they’re going to use to present their collected information. Dharmesh lets them discuss the benefits of a blog versus just adding a group to Ning. He asks if they’ve tried Scrapblog yet, which makes simple pages in a primarily drag-and-drop interface. They agree to check that out.

Period four is right before lunch. Dharmesh has special permission to mix the two time frames, so he takes his class out on a walk, asking them to snap pictures with their cell phones’ cameras. Only one student doesn’t have a smartphone, and Dharmesh gives him a Flip camera, instructing him to shoot some video of the student’s collecting their photos. Now there’ll be a documentary to go along with the photo walk project.

There’s only one fast computer in the class room. The others are horribly out of date. But Mister McBrian has done a great job of keeping them updated, and their browsers work well enough to be mostly useful. Because the school has opted to use only web apps instead of buying software for each computer, they were able to use some money to improve memory on the machines. It’s not ideal, but classrooms are rarely state of the art for long.

Before the end of the day, Dharmesh has recorded a quick video on the fast computer, giving the next week’s assignments audibly. He’s already sent the assignments as a forum update to their Ning group, so the class doesn’t have to write anything down to remember. It’s already in their RSS feed.

On the commute home, Dharmesh listens to more podcast book reports and thinks about what he can do to raise money to get just a few more good computers into the class room. Before these kids get to fourth grade, he figures, they should know that not all computers take two minutes to load a page. Maybe a fundraiser, he think, as he drives home to meet up with his family for dinner.

What do you think? Make sense? Was it surprising that I have this as a 3rd grade classroom? It’s not inaccurate. My daughter is entering first grade and she knows how to navigate a browser, iTunes, and various websites.

These posts are made for sharing. Feel free to repost all or portions of this (as long as it’s not for profit). If you do post it, please make sure you kindly link back to [chrisbrogan.com] and give me credit. Thanks!

Photo credit, LizMarie