July 29, 2010
Before you create your first video you’ll need a place to put it – and the king remains YouTube. Even if you don’t have your own videos to upload yet, it’s nice to have a youtube account/channel that you can use to comment on, favorite, or otherwise interact with videos created by others.
To create your youtube channel, first to go to http://www.youtube.com and click “Create Account” in the top right corner. Remember that you’ll be stuck with your username and it will be visible to everyone, so make it some variation of your name or your business name. Next, youtube will ask you to create or link to an existing google account. (This is a change since google purchased youtube.)
After you’ve finished creating your account, start playing around with your settings. I often get asked the difference between a regular account and a channel – every account has a channel built right in.
You can modify your channel by clicking on your username in the top right corner (this will appear once you log in), and clicking on “My Channel”.
The settings you will see across the top of the screen are Post Bulletin, Settings, Themes and Colors, Modules, and Videos & Playlists.
Post Bulletin allows you to post an update on youtube that will be seen by your friends and subscribers (kind of like a twitter update).
Settings allows you to modify your channel title, type, visibility, and tags. (Don’t foget to put a few juicy keywords in your channel’s title and tags!)
Themes and Colors is where you can get creative in showing off your channel to the world. Choose one of youtube’s pre-made color schemes or create your own by clicking on the “show advanced options” link.
Modules lets you choose what you want to display on your youtube channel, and what you want to hide.
Videos and Playlists is important, among other options it allows you to choose the largest main video that will be displayed to your channels visitors. Pick your best one or choose “use the most recent video from my featured set” to update your channel with your latest video.
That’s it! Now it’s your turn to get crackin’. For inspiration you can see my youtube channel here.
July 26, 2010
Guest post by Siddhartha Herdegen
When I was an undergraduate studying economics I got the impression people made rational decisions by weighing the costs and benefits of every option available and making the choice which was most advantageous for them. When I examined the behavior of those around me however, this theory seemed to explain only a small percentage of actual decisions.
I later studied leadership theory and I began to see an explanation for this behavior. People often make meta-decisions which eliminate the need to make numerous smaller decisions. The decision to follow someone else can be used as a shortcut to making complex decisions. This saves the follower time and effort but also gives the leader a great advantage.
In this dynamic, both parties benefit. The follower struggles less with decision making and the leader gets to set the agenda. Both are maximizing their efficiency; one by conserving energy the other by focusing it.
If you are reading this blog it’s likely you see yourself as a person who has a lot to accomplish, a person with drive and ambition. An energy maximizer rather than an energy conserver. If you want to be a leader rather than a follower there’s one characteristic you must develop to increase your odds of being successful: you need to develop vision.
What Does it Mean to Be Visionary?
To be visionary is to have a distinct view of how the world could be changed for the better. A person with vision can improve our lives by reorganizing the living room furniture or by reordering social norms.
While there are many things a visionary person can accomplish on their own, the best reason to be visionary is to inspire others to help you accomplish your goals. Leadership is a way of leveraging our collective abilities, of focusing the energy of many people to create a better world.
Dwight Eisenhower famously said, “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.”
While many people have recognized the benefits of leadership, not everyone can effectively get other people to want to accomplish their goals. When most people study leadership they focus on communicating effectively and creating a connection with others, on being the kind of person others will respond to.
While these are the nuts and bolts of leadership training, the real key to success begins much earlier, with the vision you are working toward. If you have a vision that is compelling you have a tremendous head start on those who are merely focusing on the mechanics of leadership.
The Secret to Finding Followers
The secret is, people actually want to follow you. (Well, maybe not you specifically, but they want to follow someone.) When you provide an inspiring vision you are helping them because you are fulfilling their need for leadership and the desire to be engaged in communal effort.
Everyone has a desire to be part of a group; it’s a basic human need. Whenever we find ourselves in unfamiliar surroundings we begin looking for a group with which we can associate, searching for likeminded people and developing a community. A leader provides the mental satisfaction we crave; it’s like a drink of cool water to a thirsty soul.
We all have this need to find leaders but we’re not just going to follow anyone. As leaders we need to provide a compelling vision that will resonate with potential followers.
How To Create an Inspiring Vision
It’s not about pretending to be something you’re not, it’s finding what’s unique about who you are.
We all have a distinctive worldview or a way of interpreting how the world operates. This worldview contains both our understanding of how the world currently operates (e.g., rich people don’t go to jail, or it’s not what you know but who you know) and how the world should operate (e.g., all people should be treated equally, or merit gets recognized).
Our worldview is what motivates us to behave the way we do and inspires us to act altruistically. The people we follow are those who connect with a part of our worldview and who say, let’s work together to make this happen.
The secret is finding a unique piece of your worldview others can connect with. The more this resonates with them the stronger the connection will be. Much of our worldview revolves around ourselves, about how the world should operate in order to make our lives happier. But while this is motivating it’s not really inspiring.
There are a lot of people who use flattery and an appeal to our selfish nature to promote their agenda. If you’ve ever seen a headline that says “You Can Be Rich” you’ve seen this kind of self-interested appeal.
We all know people are first and foremost concerned about themselves, but people also want to see themselves as generous and kind. Being self-serving is socially discouraged; we’d rather see ourselves as helpful. Everyone wants to be part of an admirable cause.
So while people may respond to your message out of self-interest, they will share your message with others when it benefits people besides themselves. And whatever you’re trying to do, you can do it better by enlisting the help of supportive followers.
You can do this by following these two guidelines:
1. Turn your vision into an inspiring story
2. Make it about others
People respond better to stories than to concepts; whenever possible express your vision as a story. Intellectually believing in equal rights can cause us to be committed to it as an ideal, but hearing about someone’s personal experience being denied a basic human right creates an emotional reaction that is visceral. This is what motivates us to action.
While a story about yourself can be touching, endearing, even emotionally appealing, nothing inspires people to share a story with others like being part of a worthy cause. When people feel their efforts will make a difference for someone else they’re much more likely to share it with their friends.
This doesn’t mean you have to operate a charity, it just means you can’t be blatantly rapacious. Find a way to make your needs correspond with the needs of others.
So Why Should You Be Visionary?
You need to be visionary if you want to:
Become a leader
Inspire followers
Leverage the efforts of others
Give people something to believe in
Get people to spread the word
Siddhartha Herdegen is a philosopher and economist who teaches leadership at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. He writes for the blog Principles of Failure.
July 19, 2010
Guest post by Mark Silver
In the spring of 1984, I was ducking out of yet another high school pep rally. I had somehow managed to get the master key to all the classrooms (how did I get that again?) and was hiding out in the school newspaper’s computer lab.
I never made it to a football game—did run cross country, though, but consistently came in last. I got up the nerve to ask a girl out that I had a crush on and she said no. I took refuge in computers, in punk rock, and in stage crew for theater. I was even known to play Dungeon and Dragons from time to time, or suit up and go hit other people with padded weapons.
I was a geek and not in the cool sense we use that word today. Shy, awkward, lacking confidence, I may as well have been living on a different planet from all the popular kids at school.
When I first tried out social media through blogging a few years ago all of that stuff came up again. Ugh! Painful!
I’m not young enough. I’m not cool enough. I’m not whatever enough. I basically used my blog as another place to publish our newsletters and did nothing else with it. I avoided Facebook. Twitter didn’t exist yet, but I would’ve avoided that, too.
Just frickin’ painful, people. Ugh.
Much easier to write my ezine, answer emails, and hang out with friends outside of work time. Besides, did I really need to spend another 20 hours on the computer?
Any of this sound familiar? You may be an old geek like I am. Should we just give it up and forget about social media? Are we just not cool enough?
It might be helpful to understand why social media has made such an impact.
Where Social Media Came From
For most of the last several hundred thousand years humans existed in tribes and extended family units. Everyone could talk to everyone else who mattered just by, you know, opening your mouth and talking.
Then along came the printing press in the sixteenth century, bringing to life the first easily duplicated broadcast media where one person could speak to many, many people.
Literacy rose and communication began changing very quickly. Newspapers, radio, television.
These have all been marvelous means for communicating. That is, in one direction. Although technology has improved over the last 400 years, broadcast communication has stayed one-way.
Finally, though, in the last fifteen years, there has been a breakthrough. People being broadcast to can talk back!
That little 400 year aberrancy in human history, and especially the last century, had been acting like a dam. In all the years people have been zoning out in front of the tube (remember when they really did have tubes?), there has been loads of pent-up self-expression, responses with nowhere to go.
Enter Stage Right: The Internet
In hindsight, we can now see how letters to the editor, published in newspapers, and local-access cable shows foreshadowed the breaking of the dam. Blogs! Facebook! Suddenly, the medium, a screen, that had been only one-way, has become two-way. People can now speak to one another through it.
That’s all that’s really happening in social media. People are waking up from a century of zoning-out and swallowing their half of conversation to find that they can speak to one another from nearly anywhere. The ability to call up a friend without having to show up on their front doorstep, has been multiplied a million times simultaneously.
Not bad, eh? But, maybe we’re not cool enough to participate?
Everyone Is a Dweeb
We’re all lacking in confidence. I have a friend with several best-selling books, the epitome of cool, who still has moments of being wracked by doubts. It’s not uncommon for me to sit down in the morning, before my spiritual practice and have the zapper thought: “No one cares about you or what you do. Just go watch videos.”
It’s hard to realize it, but everyone has feelings like this. And what does that mean?
It means that all of our hearts are aching to be seen, to be acknowledged, to be loved. It means that we’re sick of feeling isolated and alone and disconnected. We’re so wanting appreciation and recognition that we’re lovable despite everything.
I don’t mean to say that the mass of humanity is a steaming pile of sobbing neediness. I do, though, want to suggest that when you’re feeling all dweeb-i-fied, to take a moment to breathe and remember that the super cool people you’re comparing yourself to have moments of self-doubt. They need the same things you need:
Love. Appreciation. Acceptance.
Laura, who has been kind and generous enough to invite me to write this guest post, has lots of easy ways for you to engage in social media. She’s teaching you, for instance, that you don’t need to spend more than ten minutes a day on Twitter.
What I want you to realize is that social media actually represents a return to some of the most nourishing impulses in the human heart: the desire to connect and give to one another.
You don’t have to be cool. You can talk about the weather. But be sure to ask yourself: Do the people your business is meant to serve use social media? If so, show up for them with your full heart. Use social media simply as another place for your human heart to do what it naturally wants to do: give and receive love.
Mark Silver is a business tenderizer and Sufi spiritual nut. He founded Heart of Business nearly ten years ago to help people who ended up with a small business to make a difference in the world and found that they really needed to make a profit, too. He and his team have worked with thousands of small business owners, helping combine grounded spirituality and the nitty-gritty of business. Follow Mark on Twitter and grab his FREE Business Heart Toolkit, here.
