Although career coaching is not my forte, I’d agreed to this meeting at the request of an Apple colleague who thought I could offer some useful perspective and thought-provoking questions. Before the meeting I forwarded Alice some web links just to get her creative juices flowing. That set a great context for our conversation.

When Happily Ever After Doesn’t Last Forever

It’s the kind of situation you see here in Seattle (or the Silicon Valley, Austin, etc.): Alice retires early, thanks to an IPO from a famous Seattle success story. Marries, has kids. Happily ever after — or for as long as the stock holds its value. A fairy tale come true, or so it seems.

Fast-forward 5 years, Alice’s kids are now in school, boredom sets in, perhaps money is no longer stretching as far as it once did.

But what’s really motivating Alice is the emotional need to re-engage with what she calls “a tribe.” Reconnecting with adults, away from the playground with the nannies and other moms. Forming bonds with other like-minded professionals who love to do great work, with and for others. Learning new skills, testing oneself in the challenges of the work environment. Helping “the tribe.”

Alice had been an accomplished experience (UI/UX) designer for a local company with global brand recognition. She has some important accomplishments on her resume, but no professional achievements to speak of for the past 5 years. Her time was invested in being a mom, volunteering at the preschool, and so on.

A lot has changed technically in the world of digital experiences, online marketing, social networking, etc., since Alice left the workforce 5 years ago. For designers it’s been a virtual tsunami of change…

The First Step on Her Journey

Alice knows she has a lot to learn, so the question is where to start, where to focus her time and energies. What to do to refresh her portfolio, her personal branding, her “show and tell” materials. Should she go back to school, get an advanced degree or professional certificate, or find an entry-level role and essentially start over…

Alice’s self-esteem is somewhat fragile; she’s out of practice with “selling herself” to a prospective employer or client. She’s heard that employers or clients prefer kids fresh out of school, who command lower payscales than experienced designers like Alice. (And let’s not even go down the path of the higher value placed on developers versus designers these days…) It’s hard for Alice to imagine how to sell herself against a younger person with more up-to-date technical skills — 5 years being a virtual lifetime in the web world.

Sadly, age bias in the workplace is very real, even in liberal places like Seattle. As a Boomer it’s painful to see age bias rear its ugly head as an employment issue even for relatively young women, people in their mid-30’s like Alice.

So we talked about ways Alice could seek opportunities that might value her strengths, rather than focusing on her near-term skills gaps. Some of these areas, like the “visual thinking movement,” were off the radar screen when Alice was still working. Some offer real promise for talents like Alice’s.

At the end of a long conversation, I was able to steer Alice toward some opportunity areas that might value her strengths, wisdom and career experience. It felt good.

But what was most rewarding was seeing Alice light up, excited by notions about where she could still make a difference, even if in different forms or media than 5 years ago. I hope she finds her new tribe.

One of my friends has just had a big promotion. An expert in personal branding, she’s in the process of changing all of her online profile photos to be more consistent with her new role as a worldwide executive for a major software company. Personal branding is also an issue for my brother and his daughter as they plan how best to market their book and increase the audience of potential readers.

Given the “Big C” subject of their story, their book’s credibility could be undermined by their physical beauty. The authors have chosen to work with a photographer who earns his living shooting fashion models for glossy magazines. This makes handsome people downright glamorous.

But fortunately, for the sake of marketing his book, my brother’s face hints at the story he has to tell. He has blogged extensively about his fight, and has begun mentoring others who confront similar battles. The book is his response to his fans’ requests to hear more about his story.

At least to those of us who know and love him, his face reveals some of  the pain of his battle with head and neck cancer (caused by a virus). In many of her photos, his step-daughter’s face seems less marked by her bouts with cancer. The blessings of youth, perhaps?

I’m glad they chose a photo that reveals some of the anguish they’ve suffered. Had they not done so, had their photo been “too beautiful,” it might have raised questions about the authenticity of their story.

It’s a beautiful story, and one that could help many others when their book is finally published. Beautiful faces, beautiful story, but scary subject matter.

Much of the hyperbole comes from agencies and consultants who have seized upon social media as the next wave; their motivation is self-serving, of course. Promoting their credentials as social media experts enables them to attract clients, launch new projects and grow revenues. Still more hyperbole comes from pundits seeking to grow their audience for blogs, speaking engagements, books they’ve authored, podcasts, etc. (You know who I mean.) These are all classic examples of early hype cycles.

So much of the rationale on why this matters still comes back to audience size (expressed in terms of new social media metrics that replace the old-fashioned “eyeballs” and page views of the early Internet days). Here’s a great example of this argument:

But all this attention on numbers makes it all too seductive for marketers to do the same old things in a new way. Where’s the conversation?

I Love the Concept – Now Engage in Conversation

Don’t get me wrong: I love the idea of conversational marketing between brands and customers – I just haven’t seen much evidence of it.

Outside of email or phone, I’ve not yet had a single “digital conversation” with any service provider to my business or any brand whose products I buy. Most of what I receive from vendors is predominantly email marketing (this is true in both my personal and business life).

Most of the activity I observe in the social media world today is the result of people who earn their living via social media and who actively promote it as the next new platform for marketing or company-customer-brand interaction.

Today’s Practice Is Rarely Conversational, With a Few Exceptions

In the B2B world webinars are often effective conversation starters. The Q&A that follows webinars is a good example of conversation, one that’s triggered by a digitally hosted event that’s happening in real time. But these conversations are heavily dependent on human voices engaging in dialog.

I see lots of examples on Twitter of employees talking up their company’s products or services – especially when something new is being launched. For example: You should have seen the noise in the Seattle area as the Windows 7 launch neared! It was obvious Microsoft’s PR team had initiated a concerted effort to galvanize the employees to talk up the launch. Local tweet-ups abounded…

But on a day-to-day basis Twitter is loaded with examples of self-promotional messages or personal brand building. (I have engaged in this myself.) Who really cares what I’m cooking for dinner, or that my high-tech cats know how to turn on my Mac?

When I’ve found tweets to be most useful is when someone points out a helpful resource they’ve found on Slideshare or someone’s website. This is what I call the “signpost” form of tweet… It’s rarely conversation.

The Medium Limits the Message

As for conversation, the 140-character constraint on tweets means that at best each message is a quip or a retort. Maybe it serves as a conversation starter, but I’m still looking for evidence of real conversation happening in the Twitter world.

There are a few highly talented people who’ve mastered this medium, but in general what you see on your Tweetdeck sounds more like cacophony.

Blogs Still Rule

The best examples of online conversation take place in good-old-fashioned blogs: when someone writes a provocative post, and lots of people respond with interesting commentary or alternative points of view.

Conversation occurs when someone speaks, people listen, the speaker responds, and multiple parties engage. Yes, conversation of a sort takes place when lots of people speak all at once, but it’s ineffective if no one is listening. Or if so many people are talking that they drown out each other’s voice.

Blogs are the best online vehicle I’ve seen for asynchronous online conversations. They also offer the benefit of allowing late arrivers to benefit from the conversation after it has taken place.

Late arrivers’ role is generally limited to listening because the active conversationalists have moved on… Archived webinars can perform a similar function, but are often closed to the general public or to nonpaying subscribers.

Social Networks?

I also see occasional signs of conversation within LinkedIn’s network, sometimes sparked via Q&A; more often by the conversations that take place privately when LinkedIn enables former colleagues to find each other and reconnect over email and then phone.

Plaxo seems less effective at this – perhaps because of its hybrid mission as address book updater and personal news flash publisher. (I’m finding Plaxo more and more annoying, and have had to turn it off because it causes  Outlook to crash on a daily basis.)

Facebook fans rave about the conversations they have there. Due to social media fatigue and too many other demands on my time, I haven’t yet found the time to invest in building a Facebook presence. So I don’t have enough personal experience with Facebook to comment.

Conversations with the People Who Matter

Perhaps due to our New England upbringing, my family has found more value in a “gated community” we’ve established for private conversations and memory sharing using 37Signals’ Basecamp. It has proven to be a wonderful  platform for re-uniting a distributed family and enabling very thoughtful or even tearful conversations. This has been a true cross-generational conversation – but it’s not conversational marketing, as no brands are involved. There’s no opportunity for anyone to monetize what’s taking place.

And as for my real friends: we talk in person or by phone; occasionally by email, but always as a prelude to a real-world conversation or get-together.

So, yes, call me a Baby Boomer. Even though I’ve been using computers and email for literally decades, my conversations still tend to take place “off the grid” and face to face.

But I’ll be happy to engage in a dialog with my favorite brands, once they have mastered the art of conversation.

Right now the tool is in the fun and exploratory phase, but it offers food for thought. Have you ever wondered what your digital fingerprints might look like, if there were a way to represent them?

For example, here’s an expression of the digital persona for Christine Thompson (courtesy of Aaron Zinman of MIT Media Lab):

This visualization conveys the impression that there are many facets to Christine Thompson – too many to be credible, or relevant to me. The specific facets of the persona shown here result from limitations in this beta-stage tool, which casts too wide a net.

Why? The digital persona shown above is actually a composite of the many people who share the name “Christine Thompson.” This composite set of impressions becomes very clear when you watch the data mining process in action (assuming your name is not unique to you). It’s amusing to see references to many other people who share your name, if not your persona.

The persona looks a bit different when further qualified by the name of my consulting firm:

But this representation is still not accurate, due to the relative importance of news and music as key dimensions of this fictitious persona. Because I’m neither musical nor newsworthy, this must be a consequence of my firm’s use of common English words in the company name.

I wish there were a way to calibrate and focus what drives MIT’s data mining persona tool. If results were more accurate, it might be interesting to track progress over time to changes in your digital persona. These changes might reflect shifts in the relative importance of key aspects of your online persona, based on the footprints you leave through blogs, product reviews,  newsworthy activities, online comments, tweets, what other people say about you, and so on.

But for now, it’s just amusing.

Source (Creative Commons license):

She encourages people to think through:

• Their person vision
• Their fundamental purpose or reason for being
• Their values
• Their passion

and then develop a personal brand plan that will help them recognize wonderful opportunities as they arise.

I forget which philosopher said this, but I’ve always found this to be true:

Chance favors the prepared mind.