Look
at any line between two points from from far enough away it will look
like a long line. On the other hand, look at a small section and the
same path often looks erratic and scary.

Why should you care about The Long Line? 

Because it effects everything you do.

People who are good at running a
meeting announce the goal and then they don't worry to much about what
happens during the meeting, when necessary they just steer it back
towards the goal. They understand that the meeting is a long line.

People who are bad at running meetings spend the whole meeting reacting to things. They act like a day trader.

The same is true with a day…or a week…or a chapter…or a book…or a blog post…or series of posts…or your life.

If
you look at your life as a long line with experiences and adventures
and people to interact with then what happens in any one interaction
isn't life changing. But if you look at your life like a day
trader…what happens in the next meeting could ruin everything.

Seth Godin explained it to me this way, "Seeing
the long line doesn't just make you calmer, it helps you steer the
boat. When a plane takes off for Boston, it's on course. But then the
wind and other things put it off course. The pilot doesn't turn around,
land and start over. She just corrects, ultimately staying on the long
line."

Perhaps the best example of long line thinking is the
talented musician who makes a mistake but no one in the audience
realizes it because he "doesn't skip a beat".

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What We Do

We help businesses and organizations understand that new marketing is all about conversations…not the “conversation” where they, the marketer, shout out their message to as many people as possible, but the conversation where our client’s existing customers are talking to their contacts about our client.

We explain that there are two types of conversations. The first conversation is the conversation that’s happening some place else, because people are already talking about them. They may be saying good things…or bad. The question is, does our client know when the conversations are happening and, when appropriate, take part in them?

The second type of conversation is the conversation our clients host themselves. Who better to connect their customers? Often their customers naturally gather around our clients’ product in the real world. We help our clients facilitate that conversation.

We help our clients understand and implement a social media framework and create a place for their existing customers to connect with each other and prospective customers. We teach them not to try to control the conversation but to take part in it. What they earn by doing this is permission to deliver timely and relevant messages to the community.

We’ve worked with a diverse group of clients including The Acumen Fund, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Molson/Coors Canada, Saddleback Leather Company, Ransomed Heart, Max Lucado, New Leaf Publishing, Children’s HopeChest, Yates & Yates and Dan Miller/48 Days To The Work You Love.

If you think we could be a good fit please toss me an email.

Guy Kawasaki recently wrote a post where he makes the case that the best way to get followers on twitter is to 1.) follow everyone that follows you, 2.) have fake conversations with important people so you'll look important and 3.) tweet lots of links to things that "might" be interesting.  While his strategies are obviously effective if your goal is to "get lots of followers" I think what he's proposing is unhelpful and promotes an underlying misconception about the best way to use social media.

Let me start by saying have a huge respect for Guy and love his writing…I just think he's wrong on this point.

As Seth Godin points out in this video having tons of followers on twitter is worthless.  What matters are the real relationships…and the exchange of worthwhile ideas.

When you visit the twitter profile of Guy Kawasaki, Robert Scoble or Barack Obama and see that they're "following" thousands of people, you instantly know that they're not really "following" any of those people (admittedly Obama may be a little busy preparing to lead the free world).   Guy admits this in his post when he says that following his strategy you'll have to focus on messages sent directly to you.  This defeats the purpose of "following" someone in the first place…and I think points to a deeper misunderstanding of social networking.

Social networking is important when its real and it's a useless distraction when its fake. 

The question to ask is not "how many followers do I have?" but "Are there people out there who I would go out of my way for and I know
would go out of their way for me?"  The way that you earn that is by
going out of the way for them.

When I visit the profile of someone like Steven Bristol (of Less Everything) or Tim O'Reilly (of O'Reilly Media) and see them followed by hundreds or thousands of people while they only follow a fraction of that…I see someone that has genuine influence in the twittersphere.  People want to follow them because they say things that matter, not because they "return the follow." Rather than filling my tweetdeck with useless tweets just designed to attract followers, I know when I read their tweets I'm going to be reading content that's genuinely interesting to me.

So here's my plea (to all those folks that have started following me because I follow them or those folks who are ticked because I'm not following them after they started following me).  Let's not treat Twitter like MySpace.  Please, only follow the folks that are actually interesting to you, that you actually care about…and remember, if we see that you're following thousands of people…we don't believe you.

(In the interest of full disclosure…I follow Guy Kawasaki on Twitter…but I don't really believe he's following me…and I hope this post doesn't hurt my chances if I approach Garage Technology Ventures for funding of my next project)

I avoid moderation at all costs (I don’t moderate any content on any of¬†the social networks I manage, my facebook page, blog comments…none of¬†it).

The main reason you’d moderate is to stop people saying crazy things or posting inappropriate content.

The problem with moderating is that it makes your readers feel like¬†you don’t trust them…don’t you love the way they compare your receipt¬†to what’s in your cart at Sam’s Club as if you’re trying to steal from¬†them.¬† Moderation also robs your users of the instant gratification of seeing their content on your site.

I’d prefer to have the occasional comment that I have to delete after the¬†fact than to create a full time job of moderating comments (and askimet or disqus will filter most real spam¬†automatically).

If something does slip through the cracks, folks understand that it¬†wasn’t you who posted it…and I promise, someone will let you know¬†about it really quickly.

I’ve got thousands of people on social networks that I oversee and I receive about one¬†content complaint a month.¬† It’s not worth telling your readers you don’t trust them to prevent the one idiot who’s going to abuse the system.

I can’t wait to see the comments this post gets!

Update: A reader sent me this post from Guy Kawasaki: The Top Ten Stupid Ways to Hinder Market Adoption (check out #11)