Buffy the Articulated Implementer

I recently read one of Peter Kim’s blog entry talking about the five-tool employee, a post on how to be both accountable and brilliant. The post drew comments that he received in response to this entry – many pointing out that perhaps the 5-tool employee is best utilized in a start-up or self-employed setting, where both workload and work variety would require such an individual to exercise all of their talents.

On the other hand, the same “inspired” individuals may be seen as upstarts and loose cannons in a larger company, where employees are valued for how dependable they are in executing a limited list of complex or tedious (often both) tasks. This is similar to the role that corner crack dealers play, as described in the 2005 NYTimes bestseller, Freakonomics. The corner cracker dealers, being assigned the limited task of selling dope, aren’t asked to take unnecessary risks that comes with “growing the business,” a job designated for made guys who are higher up on the food chain. Like “inspired” corporate team players, crack dealers attempting to upset the established order are seen as “upstarts.” In other words, in well established managerial chains, an individual would be ill-incentivized to be 5-tool employees. So, the question facing us is, how to find constructive opportunities to be a 5-tool contributor to a team?

I believe that the answer lies being the “Articulate Implementer.” In my tenure as corporate peon, I have gained much respect for this type of individual in their power to maximize the impact of their limited resources to gain positive exposure within an organization. These AI’s seem to often favor the following list of actions:

- Address existing bottlenecks – whether dealing with technical fire drills or strong personality clashes, AI’s method towards resolution involves easily communicated and measurable actionables. AI’s prefer to initially tackle a series of “easy wins” in order to gain momentum/support for dismantling tougher, more entrenched large-scale issues.

- Provide scalable solutions – AI’s are experts at ID’ing and persuading partners to try out beta version (limited scope or duration) of their solutions, then finding more opportunities to repeat (and thus vet) these solutions. Once enough iterations of the solution has been implemented, best practices and insights are in place to expand the solution in scale.

- Ease tension – in ego management, the AI’s are dedicated in finding common grounds and shared motivation, and share a passion for keeping a positive (and even optimistic) yet realistic overview of the ego-landscape.

- Optimize resources – this group makes it look effortless of course – but the Articulate Implementers live by the “under-promise and over-deliver” motto. Their daring solutions are founded not on fantasy but built on existing system constraints.

In a way, these individuals are like vampire slayers – they are fairly limited in resources and often inefficient tools (last I checked, a wooden stake kills one at a time); when faced with overwhelming number of issues (vampires), they put aside their egos and deploy tried and true methods to battle the closest threats, then repeat until they neutralize the dangerous situation.

Yep, try calling them them Buffy, some of these AI’s even have a sense of humor.

Death by “Uh…” – An Observation

A friend of mine, Arvind Narayanan, pinged me this past week to check out the newest iteration of his pet project watchuwant.tv. It’s a neat little app that lets you input a keyword – using the keyword, the app crawls thru YouTube and pulls up user-submitted entries that contains the keyword, pretty much, Pandora for videos. I am personally in love with this app since for the background noise addicted, like myself, this gives me hours of interesting back chatter without me having to thoughtfully put together a playlist. So a quick shout-out on this blog.

Anyway, enough chit-chat, onto today’s mixer pick-up line.

Today’s Mixer Pick-up Line: “I really feel like we’ve met somewhere before, but I’m not quite sure where…“

Best used: In line waiting for something, like for a drink, or for a book signing, something you can’t get out of. This line give you an excuse to exchange some context clues about each other, seek a little common ground, find out what the target does for a living, where he/she lives, which social circles he/she moves about.

Target: person of comparable age group, someone you’re likely to have met in a previous function somewhere.

Pitfall: you discover that target is dull, and conversation grows boring. (in that case, bring in an interested bystander.)

Escape technique: bump into the person behind you accidentally, then apologize and start a new conversation.

So onto the rest of this blog entry.  Wednesday I attended an Randall Munroe book signing for his new XKCD book.  “A webcomic of romance,sarcasm, math, and language,” I started following XKCD in 2006.  While in-line to get my books signed, the “tech x life” nature of the web-comic caused me to reflect on the change in the cadence and texture of my life in the past 3 years as a result of emerging communication technologies and impact of such technologies to media and life in general — in the form of ubiquitous and ever growing presence of  the SocialMediaNetwork (SMN) Everywhere Initiative .

In Malcolm Gladwell‘s 2002 book “Tipping Point,” I was first intro’d to the limitation of human being’s ability to form close relationships. As I allow SMN higher penetration into my life, I am often under the illusion that it helps me form more/deeper relationships.  In reality, what I observe is that as the number of SMN increase and incorporates more technological mediums, the radii of my social and professional orbits are quickly shrinking as the contacts along theses orbits beacon out signals with ever increasing frequency and intensity.

As a marketer caught at the intersection of technology and media strategy, I am compelled to filter the ever-present torrent of information into various buckets, and when possible, I aim to understand the nature of the emerging tools and services, and recognize the potential impact of these new objects on the various industries.  For example, it is one thing to comprehend that Twitter allows us to live-transcribe the unfolding of our daily events, and another to smoothly introduce this comprehension into the “knowledge reservoir” and have this new piece of knowledge empower the decision-maker, instead of crippling him.

The ongoing irony of the emergence of SMN, and all the technology contemporaries of SMN, is that they are the very tool invented to prevent such crippling; and yet, judging by the research demands I receive each day at my job, marketers are facing more obstacles in becoming empowered decision-makers they strive toward, due in part to the sea of mostly-trivial-but-occasionally-groundbreaking info all being projected at them at the speed of tweets and blogs. They live in a state described in precision by futurist Alvin Toffler’s famous term “future shock” – “too much change in too short a period of time.” *

This phenomenon isn’t limited to decision makers, of course. Recently, in following one of Ted Leonsis’s tweets, I was introduced to “The Best Part of Everything,” a short film on the subject of the Empty Nest Syndrome. Part of the film examines the trajectory of the Boomer generation and overlays the timing of their major life decisions with that of their children. I think perhaps the most impactful moment for me occurred when one of the parents being interviewed admitted that for the first time in her life, she is having a hard time seeing where her future will hold for her in the next 10 years.

Our lives have always been complex and complicated, and yet, in an age where the social orbits are set up to provide real-time responses and instant feedbacks, we find ourselves in a state of reality shell-shock, as the blitzkrieg of new technology rages on with no end insight, tech companies scramble to absorb them into the existing suite of services,  communication mediums rush to incorporate them as standard, and  consumers immerse and adopt in panic, or face the prospect of becoming redundant.

Recently thru the magic of Reddit, I was introduced to a strip of webcomic that compared and contrasted Aldous Huxley and George Orwell’s view of the future as represented in A Brave New World and 1984, their most famous work, respectively.  The most memorable comparison the comic made was this:

“Orwell feared the truth would be concealed from us… Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”

No doubt, we live in an age of trivial irrelevance now.

This quote underscores the importance  and necessity of the modern day marketing strategists.  Recently, Faris Yakob, EVP Chief Technology Strategist at McCann Erickson, made the connection that brands are the myths of our days.  If that is the case, then allow me to equate the role of market strategists to that of the traveling bard. True, the stars and signs which inspire these myths are visible to everyone, and yet, only the wandering bard can weave lasting and impactful tales from that which shines one moment and diminishes the next.

*Note: This reference to Alvin Toffler should be credited to my boss at work, who pretty much inspired the seed-thought behind this entire post by reminding me of the concept of future shock, which in the past I’ve only associated with economics and industrial revolution.

Inaugural Post

Hello World!

Today’s Inaugural post is brought to you by Maxfield’s House of Caffeine, located along the border of SF’s Mission and Castro district.  In many ways, this is pretty appropriate, since I am starting this blog to address the cross-section of several insanely hot topics that are colliding in today’s Interweb-media-ad space. Yes, I’m talking about social media, online brand advertising, localized news, and mobile applications.

Yawn, you say? Why does the world need another blog about this? Do we really need a younger, cuter femme-ier, Guy Kawasaki-wanna-be, with no money, and a fistful of observations and opinions powered by caffeine, ego, and a bit of critical thinking skill? Do we really need another irreverent blog focused on commentary re: Deus ex Internets?

These are yawn worthy points! But you’ve stumbled upon this place somehow, and I promise this:

- entertaining entries.

- pick-up lines you can try out at your next start-up/hob-nobbing’free-drinkup mixer. I’ll put these in red, so you can walk away with something in a pinch. They’re not all good, but at least they’re 100% roadtested.

Today’s Mixer Pick-up Line: “Did I miss anything?“

Best used: when arriving late, while the representative for the drink-up sponsor is speaking to a roomful of people not really paying attention.

Target: a stranger in a fringe group of 2 or 3.

Pitfall: said-stranger is just there to get free drinks, and doesn’t work “in the industry.”

Escape technique: “I’m gonna get another drink.”

About Me, or “A Short History of What Motivates Me”

About a year ago, following the acquisition of TACODA by AOL, I joined the  AOL Ad Sales Research team. Armed with a couple years of account management experience, a seemingly useless B.S. in engineering, and absolutely no talent for small-talk, I found myself thrown in front of the tsunami wavefront of the “online advertising industry.” *

I soon discovered that I’ve discovered the happy ending to my on-going quarter-life crisis, and somehow landed in my personal dream job; something that made good use of my left and right brain AT THE SAME TIME. Eat your heart out, interdisciplinary over-achievers!

So what do I do? Well, in my Twitter profile (and this is just as good of a time as any to name drop Twitter). I described myself thusly: “1-Woman Peanut Gallery; Data Sherpa; Geek Whisperer; Junior Miss Spin Doctor; Media Jargon Babelfish; Busker Patron; Reality Wrangler.“

While these are the roles I feel most comfortable in, and they all essentially boils down to one word: a translator. As far as my job title goes, I’m a market researcher, specifically researching the “online advertising” market. My job covers mostly three areas:

1. Tapping into syndicated sales research. This satisfied my daily requirement for nitty-gritty data on various target audiences. Some asked for by various RFP’s, other simply because I’m curious;

2. Developing vertical-specific ad success measurement solution, (i.e. having a counter argument ready when people tell me, “but I never click on an internet ad!”) This aspect of my job encourages me to stay abreast of analysis techniques and maintain a healthy addiction for new technical advancements;

3. And finally, my own specialty – synthesizing behavioral dissection/analysis (a.k.a “a girl, a lot of data, a brain – DOES IT BLEND?”) There’s an old fairy tale where this chic is asked to spin a siloh full of straw into gold thread, or she gets executed in the morning, yeah, it’s exactly like that. Except instead of translating one useless heap of material into a heap of commodity goods, I translate a mountain of data into digestible, “actionable” insights, often on a deadline.

The role of the translator is not new to me. Being bilingual, I’ve translated between Chinese and English for the past 20 years; Being an engineer student in a past life, I navigate comfortably between technical details and business value propositions; and at my job now, I often joke that I’m the go-between for modern day nerds (data geeks) and jocks (sales).

Someone’s gotta figure out how to monetize those smart ideas coming out of silicon valley, and it might as well be me.

And this is why this blog must be started.I hope you enjoy the entries.

Notes:

*At the time, it was simply known as “the twenty minutes I spend trying to explain to my parents what I do in exchange for health care and rent..”