For the next few words, I am going to get a little Anthony Bourdain on you. That’s sort of a warning if you don’t like him, and an appetizer if you do.

Branding schools are wonderful. The VCU Brand Center here in Richmond is the best in the world. It is the Culinary Institute of America for aspiring chefs who want to cook ideas. But spending that kind of money doesn’t make you creative. I say that while having some of my best friends in the business teaching classes there. They are damned good at what they do. It doesn’t mean you will be.

When I got into this business, the training was simple: have big enough cojones to stand toe-to-toe with people who think your ideas suck and stare them down with better ideas until they think you’re a genius. You can train people to suffer through impossible situations (and if you get into this business, you invariably will), but you can’t educate someone into being talented or determined beyond the point of sleep depravation and moronic adjustments to brilliant thinking by people who are more likely qualified to be bussing tables than helping sauté concepts into char. I know this because I’ve ruined my share of ideas.

It’s not your education that will help you survive in this business for 30+ years. That diploma only gains you admission into the show where people whom you think are less talented than you can abuse you for more hours a day than you get to see your spouse. After you get your foot in the door and people start slamming, it’s up to you to take the pain until you have calluses the size of Shaq’s 23-wides. And here’s the ugly secret: it’s not just about great ideas.

You have to be able to routinely watch your great ideas die day-after-day and come up with more great ideas. And in most joints, you have to do it faster than the team in the next cube. In branding schools, you get two years to polish your best work. Be lucky enough to land a job working with clients who are on a tight budget and need to sell something yesterday and you’ll have two hours.

Bourdain’s colorful descriptions of his profession in books like “Kitchen Confidential” and “Medium Raw” are cynical, harsh, brutal and not far removed from branding. The difference between the two is, the menu and the equipment changes every three hours in branding. Oh, and the waiters, bartenders, customers and sometimes total strangers who wander in fresh out of a focus group like to come into the kitchen and help you cook the meal. I’m trying to imagine Bourdain, Emeril, Mario Batali or Bobby Flay working like that. Would Paula Deen bitch slap you into her convection oven if you tried to tell her how to do her job? “Y’all know it, honey.”

In this business, it’s all part of the gig. Unfortunately, I’ve never dealt with too many cooks in the kitchen very well. Those who have worked with me are nodding right now.

None of what you’re reading here means I’ve done it all right. I have seldom done any of it right. My resume is hardly one to envy. So what you read here is not wisdom, it’s that ugly stain called experience. Survive long enough in tough environments under great pressure and you get some of it.

I didn’t go to an ad school. There weren’t any at the time that I can remember. I barely had enough money to go to college, and lied my way into my first job, learning how to do it under fire from good and sometimes bad people who were willing to overlook my ignorance. I stayed too long in my first job. I stayed too short in several. It never got it just right. You won’t either.

Making a living (in this business or in any business, for that matter) is a bitch more often than not. I did nothing but radio and print for four years before I did my first TV spot. I did some strange digital and social media things that probably made sense to only a few people. I was an enigma – a Minotaur: part art director, part writer – misunderstood by both sides and ridiculed equally. What I know, I found out at the sharp end of a deadline, not in a classroom. We’re not talking glory days here. We’re talking 16-hour days, a habit that has few upsides, especially for your health and family. Perhaps it is why I don’t watch Mad Men – for the same reason I don’t look at Playboy. It all seems a hell of a lot more glamorous than reality.

Some call it talent. Others call it luck. It’s just storytelling and storylistening, however you do it or with whomever in whatever media or lack thereof. And until sitting down to write this post, I’ve never given it much thought. I was too busy doing it day and night to analyze the process – if there is a process, and I suspect there isn’t. Perhaps you should invent one. Then you can sell a book about it. And watch technology kill your process in three months.

To do well in this business you have to have both talent and luck, but never rest on either. And mostly, don’t put too much faith in guys who have done it forever and write stuff like this.

Your experience will be completely different than mine or that woman over there or the dude sitting across from you in that traffic meeting. Besides, this business changes so fast you don’t have time to read the new software manual. It changed from when I wrote the first sentence up there because this post is too damned long. But some things haven’t changed. One of them is change itself. Embrace change. It always changes. Grab change like a skunk and wear its smell like perfume. And know this while you’re trailing the vapors: You will work 16-hour days. Your brain will never really rest. And there will be days when you will have more fun than anyone should be allowed to have and get paid for it. Those days are why we do this.

Going to a great brand school is the cost of entry. Having killer ideas is expected – hourly. But selling those ideas will help you make enough to pay off your loans. Learn to sell your ideas. If you don’t learn anything else in brand school, learn that.

I’m not bemoaning this reality. It is just the way things are. It is no different than art directors who cannot draw. AD’s now live in an Illustrator/InDesign/Photoshop/After Effects/CS5 world of electronic hues and strokes. Try to find a pencil or pen. You’ll find a stylus instead. Again, this is the nature of change.

I’ve heard some old schoolers complain about this onrushing future, their bitching drowned out by the roar of technology and the next release of an iPad that will write for you and a Droid that will read it back to you. The traditional media has lost it’s former advantage to banners, micro-sites, pop-ups, web videos and 54,000 other versions of things that used to come in 30-second spots or printed pages in a publication.

Who is a copywriter in a social media world? Everyone. Hell, I wrote two entire novels on Twitter last year, 140 characters at a time. I’m not defending either of those works as fine literature, but unlike Faulkner, who needed a publisher, today’s Hemingway only needs access to the Web. You can publish anything on Amazon’s Kindle for less than the cost of a Big Mac. And you can get a book about that very subject from Amazon on your Kindle.

Perhaps this is a good thing, forcing writers to think about good ideas more than just words. We have enough words in our lives already. We don’t have enough good ideas.

The 1970’s era icon used to be $42 million. Now if you want to ride the rocket (or rather just sit in it in your backyard) the price has been reduced to $28.8 million. 

This fall, the old orbital workhorses will go on sale once they quit flying. So far the space agency has gotten 20 responses. That was before they went on sale. The Smithsonian will get Discovery, but you can still pick up the Atlantis and Endeavour for nearly half off. I went to my bank and asked about a loan. They said I didn’t qualify.

I can see what a museum would do with the shuttle – duh – but what would, say, a Wall Streeter who made out like a bandit (literally) do with one of these things?

I can see one renovated into a yacht or an RV. I guess the RV would be a little big for the highway, but hell, that’s half the fun. Sink about 30 big V-10’s in the belly, crank it up and head to the Grand Canyon with the family.

Perhaps you could plant it at the end of a cul-de-sac and put shutters on the shuttle and have a space party every week. It’s a shame it takes so much power to make it actually fly. It would be so much cooler to see the shuttle cruising over a stadium, painted with the Goodyear logo than a blimp.

Me? Being from Alabama? I’d slap some big, knobby tires on it and turn that beast into a monster truck and hit the circuit. The shuttle would bury Gravedigger, crush Big Dawg, flatten Bigfoot and bite Black Widow simultaneously. Can you see King Crunch or Goliath looking in the rearview mirror at the space shuttle bearing down with thrusters redlining?

If Jan Gabriel, the man who’s voice made the echoed phrase, “Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!” so popular, had not died on January 12^th, imagine what he could have done announcing ads for the shuttle?

Whoa, dude. Who doesn’t want those side effects? Unusual dreams? It sounds like Woodstock. What is a usual dream? Being chased by snakes on skateboards? Your neighbor parking the space shuttle in your front yard? Going to work naked, but not realizing it until you are there? Flying through walls and hooking up with aliens? Eating a pizza the size of my house? My dog talking to me and sounding like a guy I worked with at Chiat/Day? Sigourney Weaver from Ghostbusters asking me if I am the key master? Outrunning bad guys wearing black robes and brandishing brass knuckles in the restroom at Grand Central Station? I’ve had all of those dreams, yet I have never taken this medication. Damn.

My dreams are normally so unusual, I wonder what kinds of dreams I would have? What is unusual for me? I can see the dream now. I’m sitting in a chair. The light is on. That’s it. That’s the entire dream. Just sitting in a chair with the light on. For me, that is an unusual dream.

 At first, he looked at me like he didn’t understand the question. I explained what I meant. He smiled.

“Credibility? You mean doing what you say you’re going to do?” he asked.

“Yes, that’s part of it,” I said.

“No,” he said. “That’s all of it.”

It was my turn to smile.

“I think big companies get caught up in their own underwear and lose sight of who will be using their products,” he said. “When I build a chair, I want to see who will be sitting in it most of the time. Are a big, skinny, a sloucher? Is it a chair for personal use or just for when visitors come over?”

“You are building a pretty customized product compared to most companies,” I said.

“Your product is your product,” he said. “Customized or not. They make it. You make it. I’m not talking about who makes it. I’m talking about who buys it. It’s about the customer. That’s the only credibility there is.”

“Have you ever advertising your product?” I asked.

“Oh yeah. Every day,” he said enthusiastically. “Everything I do is an ad for my product. That chair over there is an ad. That table is an ad. My word to my suppliers and customers is advertising. Every dowel, nail, screw and cut I do are ads for my company. Every varnish stroke, every delivery, every single thing.”

In his simple explanation, there was more truth about credibility than most MBA’s learn in years.

All of this is a huge duh. So why aren’t more companies concerned about credibility?

They give the word different definitions in different situations. They make it conditional. Like so many other aspects of corporate machinations, management often puts credibility into silos. When it comes to marketing, credibility means one thing. For manufacturing, credibility has another definition. For distribution it means something else. Same for customer service. Of course (and sadly), inside the company, among employees, credibility may have no meaning at all. It is an external-only message to be spun and manipulated into whatever fits this quarter’s earnings goals.

We believe that if we organize and plan our credibility into charts and PowerPoints and bulleted lists, we will have captured it and can store it for future use. But if you have to explain your credibility, you probably don’t have any. That is why real credibility is so sticky – and why manufactured credibility is so slippery.

I don’t have to get up in the morning and decide what my DNA will be today. It is an inherent part of me. It is woven into my fabric and built into my genetic coding. It is who I am. That is how credibility should be. You can’t put it on and wear it around and then take it off and wash it and wear another version tomorrow.

You don’t have to create credibility for your company any more than you have to create DNA in your body. You just have to find it and understand it and not screw it up. Credibility is a lot like breathing. In and of itself, it isn’t too exciting, but the simple act keeps you alive – and as such, it can be smothered.

Finding your credibility and making it sticky is not just the job of branding and marketing. It is everyone’s job, from the CEO to the regional manager to the person answering the phone in customer service. Credibility is not 9-5, it is 24/7 hard work.

Several years ago we worked with a transportation company. They had all kinds of mission statements and mantras and internal branding and external messaging. Far down the line fro the C-suite, one of the truck drivers, however, didn’t talk about his commitment to the mission statement; he lived it. He took care of his customers like they were members of his family. He would personally deliver an important package on his day off or at night. He even used his own vehicle once to bring a package to a customer stuck at the airport. He did what said – and he did a lot more. His passion was so obvious, his customers began to invite him to family functions and he became more than a delivery guy to their business. He was a problem solver. He made his company’s credibility stick to everyone he came in contact with.

He didn’t always follow the rules. He refused to fit in a corporate silo (and there were plenty inside this company). He didn’t sit in management meetings. He never gave a presentation. He didn’t talk about credibility. All he did was put proactive action to work solving customer’s problems. He never talked about the future. He was too busy delivering the now. He also outlasted several CEO’s.

Sometimes, credibility comes down from the company’s executives. Sometimes it comes up in a truck.

Few people respond to what a company says anymore. They respond to their friends and family. And why not? Look at corporate messages foisted on the public leading up to and through the economic downturn. It seems the more truth people want, the less they get. It is a self-fullfilling Nostadamus-ian prophesy. Obfuscate the truth; talk genuinely and act disingenuously; say one thing and do another. It only takes a tweet for a brand to get outed in this digital environment. You may fool all of the people some of the time (balloon boy, Enron, investment companies), you may fool some of the people all of the time (political leaders and religious zealots), but you will not fool all of the people all of the time. People like you and me break almost every news story on Twitter or other sites long before any official news source. We are all Wolf Blitzers.

How will you get your message out when the only listening that happens is between people who know each other and don’t trust you or the way you choose to communicate? Alex Bogusky and John Winsor (in their book, Baked In) suggest we will have to make our products carry the branding – bake it into the product itself. Some do it. Some think they are doing it. Many don’t and don’t care. Others would like to, but are just dumbfounded by this new world where the top speed is 500 mph and they are only comfortable cruising at 55.

Even though most Fortune 100 companies are on Twitter (73, to be exact, up from 54 in August), few of those companies use it in any meaningful way to engage people. And the only meaningful way is determined by your followers.

Web development companies are working on assignments from businesses that want to compete in a landscape gone digital. But those businesses are rooted in analog management, and the two grate against each other like mp3′s assaulting CD’s. It is old school thinking butting up against shifting reality. We use quaint references that Millennials see as a foreign language. We don’t even relate to past sacred institutions anymore. Church membership is down, while personal belief is up. Fewer people are getting married, yet just as many are falling in love. Employer loyalty (diminished by layoffs) is a wistful memory and has been for years. Why? Perhaps people feel that these institutions (and others) betrayed them. There is no lack of affirmative evidence.

We are all going to be doing more with less, considering value more, becoming more self sufficient and less trusting of what anyone says except our trusted network. In many respects, those are behaviors our grandparents would recognize. Some things change and others repeat. We will change, whether we like it or not. From walking to horses to wagons to cars to ships to planes, from oral storytelling to print to broadcast to the Web, from fire to ovens to microwaves, we have adjusted to every move forward. That is what people do.

What are you doing?

http://www.slideshare.net/dachisgroup/social-business-design-web-20-nyc-2548310

Below, I have framed some of my thoughts around his wonderful presentation.?
The trend is toward Social Business that goes far beyond just media and marketing. It is a network economy and our business models must evolve from the old Industrial Age silos and hoarding to a structure of collaborative hives and sharing to survive. That means breaking down department barriers and relationship barriers. It means that the walls between your business and your partners’ and customers’ businesses will be torn down and replaced by conversation and engagement and interaction. Entire industries may merge with other industries to create a mobile, multifunctional work/society. Will you work for Google or Apple or Microsoft or Amazon or Zappos – or all of them at once? Will you be a supplier to them and a customer of them? All of the above.

Accounting will have to change to accommodate this radical shift in how business is done. The numbers will be more organic, less structured, more measurable, and possibly less competitive (at least in our traditional definition). If that sounds like heresy, it is. It will take unorthodox change to create a new system of beliefs. And those beliefs are already becoming standard equipment.

Society and work are merging through technology. That’s hardly news. We all have friends online. But how much client contact do you have through Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn now? If you say, “not much,” that will change. It has changed. Many people talk more with clients through these mediums now than they do face to face. Why? Because that’s where everyone is. It is where everyone will be as well – except the dinosaurs. Like it or not, it is just a fact. So embrace it or find a new line of work – which will also be hard to do without those social networks.

Why do business this way? Will the tremendous time it takes to manage such a system bring commerce to our coffers? It will because the biggest shift in business is toward people. Any business built on processes and functions and profits alone will begin to unravel. Only businesses built around people will survive. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, most businesses are built around marketing to a target and selling that target a product or service. People are refusing to be targets. Will continuing to treat them as such work in a world where your intentions can be outed on Twitter faster than CNN can break a story about a balloon boy above Colorado?

In this social business world, everyone has a voice – you, your people, your partners and your customers. Even you competition is friending you. As this happens, your org chart will flatten. Meetings will become organic Google Wave-type affairs. But how do we measure business in this networked environment? New systems will have to be installed to do that. Initially, it will be trial and error (like Edison creating thousands of lightbulbs before finding one that worked). But the measurement system is out there. It just may be different for some transactions than others.

Look at Zappos. They’ve found a way to make a beta version of this social business work to the tune of over $1.2 billion a year. In these open cultures, customers are giving companies great ideas that are profitable. Starbucks is turning their business around doing this. The old days of constructing a building on the street is giving way to building your business between people’s ears – a much more valuable piece of real estate.

I have made the radical case that your best website just may be your Facebook page. Your best customer service may be delivered through your Twitter page. You best customer may be someone you have never tried to even talk with before – on their mobile device. In the new network, customers control the transaction. They don’t come to you, you go to them. Technology makes that much more affordable than luring them with traditional marketing.

In the end, how will we make money doing all of this? The real question is: how will we make money if we don’t?

The sky dropped like a liquid metal blanket. It rained horizontal for two straight days. Water Street earned its name. Winds topped out near fifty mph. It deterred neither the Marines nor us from doing what we came to do.

The recently renovated Hilton downtown, its bunker-like fortress bathed in purple light, its thick walls hugging the Cape Fear, was home to our small crew and the larger force of Marines most of the week. The management and staff of the hotel seamlessly accommodated every request and were so helpful to our shoot, not even Los Angeles could have matched their understanding of shooting schedules and the sometimes extreme customer service required. The same can be said of Wilmington in general. No one looks oddly at you when you pull out a camera and start cranking shots. They smile at you. Perhaps it’s because 11% of their economy is fueled by film. Or just maybe it’s their wonderful attitude that fueled the film business to begin with.

The reflections of window lights, lamp posts and neon glowing across water-sluiced streets interrupted by hurrying patrons dipping in and out of the businesses leave a holiday-like memory that stays longer than the soaking grayness of the weather. Some rain is an intrusion. Some, however, we wear like a coat that embraces us, and while it doesn’t keep us warm, we desire its company.

What you say is picked up and reposted and spread like the flu on a subway. What you do is passed from friend to blog to Facebook to Twitter to your bottom line. People believe people, especially their friends. Social media has not just leveled the playing field of credibility, it has plowed it up and planted a whole new crop where your brand used to grow. A new farmer is tilling the land: your customer.

If you are a great plumber, someone will Tweet or blog about you. If you are a jackleg carpenter, they will do the same and tell their friends on Myspace. If a quarterback is cocky before a game and predicts a big win for his team, then goes out and throws 5 interceptions and loses by 4 TD’s, it carves a little shine off of his credibility.

When CEO’s of investment and mortgage firms take government bailout money, give themselves fat bonuses, then foreclose on homeowners who basically did the same thing as they did with derivatives, credibility takes a beating. The entire economy gets a cheese grater run over it.

To barely survive these days, you have to deliver at least what you promise. To win, you have to deliver more than you promise. The cynical shell of unbelief is ten feet thick. Oddly, many companies worked hard to earn their uncredible reputations.

We cut the quality of the product to make a few more cents on each transaction. We followed that with slacker customer service. We finished it off with a successful advertising campaign that drove millions of people to buy and then hate our product even more. Then we raised the price just as people were leaving us behind on their way to a better experience.

Credibility has value. Talking about it doesn’t. So read the research readily available on the Web. Read the obits of businesses every day. Then ask yourself, “Are we credible with our customers?”

Your customers have already answered the question.