The Electronic Engagement Blog

I’m in the middle of preparing a spring course on innovation for students in our Masters of Information Systems Management program and as I’ve been researching current thinking and actions, two interesting things have come up.

First, most courses on innovation are taught by professors who have researched innovation best practices, rather than by people who innovate for a living. And while there’s great learning to be had by studying what practitioners do, it would also be great to have more practitioners teach what they know, and what they do. Especially in all things electronica (both systems and products), since these things and systems surround us every waking (and sleeping) moment. So if you’re a practitioner, I’d love to hear from you, and discuss your approaches, thoughts, successes, and cautionary tales.

The second interesting thing was an offer I received from a colleague to brainstorm course content. It was a kind and earnest offer from a good and very experienced guy (former CIO who now teaches) who put it this way: “I’d be happy to talk about this and brainstorm with you. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years and I can tell you what works and what doesn’t work as far as innovation is concerned.”

How many folks think of innovation this way, I wonder? The word “innovate,” according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, comes from the Latin
“in” (into) + “novus” (new): essentially, to “go into new” ideas, territory, thinking etc. And yet many people think of innovations as a list of what we know works and what we know doesn’t work.

And as we all know, it’s hard to be innovative (or appreciate innovation) when your top of mind list is “what we know works and what we know doesn’t work.”

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Purely aside from the fact that I love this song, the question raised is increasingly important, and increasingly broad.

It used to be that you were the sum of what the people in your sphere of experience knew of you. And while that hasn’t essentially changed, the sphere has expanded, and now what people know of you isn’t just what they see when they see you, what they hear from you and about you, and what they know from those who know you. Now you’re everywhere, digitally.

Google yourself. What comes up? Is it right, wrong, not enough, too much? We worry a lot these days about being too electronically visible, but chances are that in some respects, you’re not visible enough. You’ve probably done more things, and more important things, than any of us know.

Seth’s Godin’s blog today makes an interesting observation: maybe resumes are old school, passe, irrelevant, last generation’s way of painting the hire-me self-portrait. His point: extraordinary people don’t have just a resume. Google them, and you find multiple points of electronic engagement with them: blogs, personal web sites, papers, photostreams — many electronic facets of who they are.

How about you? What’s out there? And is it what you want, what shows that you are extraordinary? If it’s just your Facebook page, it ain’t enough.

I won’t argue that resumes and CVs aren’t important, but as Seth says in his post, they are more reasons to reject you (the right keywords didn’t come up in our ResumeDigger software) than they are reasons to be wowed by you.

To borrow from Tom Peters, the WOW factor is huge, not just for your projects, but for your Self (in both the existential sense and the hire-me sense).

Make sure that your WOW is findable.

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A million years ago (well, 1978) I was at the Museum of Modern Art in New York enjoying an exhibition put together by then-curator John Szarkowski entitled “Mirrors and Windows.” The thesis of the exhibition was that photography was either a mirror of what was around the photographer or a window into the photographer’s or subject’s reality or worldview. It was an extraordinary exhibition of some of the greatest photographs by some of the greatest photographers (Dorthea Lange, Gene Smith, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander; you get the idea).

As I check popurls every morning (one of my morning rituals), I’m always a little taken aback by some of the images on the flickr feed. Many are very good photographs, but the thing that often strikes me is how intimate some of them are, and I’m not speaking just conceptually. Some of them are almost exhibitionistic; many are striking windows into a person’s life. Which makes me wonder: is this part of electronic engagement good or bad? And (I’m almost ashamed to admit this) the marketer in me wonders if there’s any part of this that impacts marketing? Is it too private? Or are these people who really want to share bits of themselves with the world and would be happy to be points of marketing foci? Are these the iJustine’s of the world and are doing it for art? Or are they doing it for attention? And then, how far away is the idea of doing it for commerce (and Justine, for example, may be all of the above.)

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Look around. What are people doing? If you’re at work reading this, chances are pretty good that you and all those around you are banging away on a keyboard, that you’re interacting more digitally than you are humanly. Admit it: when you’re in a meeting, how often are you more focused on checking your email from your laptop or Blackberry than you are on the meeting? In a presentation, how often is the presenter (and often, the audience) more engaged with the Power Point than the humans?

If you’re in Starbucks, chances are that the same kind of thing is going on: people are having coffee with each other, but with a measured amount of Blackberry use.

If you’re at home, odds are you and your family members are connected: not to each other (although I hope that happens too), but electronically to the news, the weather, friends, games, or God-knows-what.

And everywhere, people are talking or texting on their mobiles.

It seems that people now have more of a Digital Life than a real one. And the consequences are profound, in both human and marketing terms.

Philosophically, are we (bad:) giving up more of our ability to connect with other humans because we are now in an era of what former Microsoft VP Linda Stone has dubbed “continuous partial attention?” (Some great notes on that here.) Or, (good:) actually enhancing our ability to connect with everything as posited by Robert Kalin (etsy.com) in his observation that younger generations have grown up with so many digital demands for their attention that there is no sense of “loss of signal:” they can easily manage multiple inputs.

I’m as bad as anyone. I wake up, check three different email accounts, Carnegie Mellon news and info, check the news online, check popurls for the latest, synch my iPod to the latest podcast downloads, check homework and event info on my son’s school website, check what’s going on at the other two’s college websites, listen to my iPod in the car far more than to the radio…and that’s all before the day really begins.

So I’m thinking…how would I reach me? How would you reach me? How would you reach yourself?

Please share your thoughts. Let’s connect humanly and as digital marketers.

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