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My field is behaviors and temperament. If I write in that area you can pretty much trust that I know what I’m talking about. When I want to know something about Internet publishing I read the work of those who know what their talking about. Ted Demopoulos know what he’s talking about and he has put together a very nice list on building the traffic to your site.

My favorite stategy is his “Pillar” Post Articles (I added the “Post” part, it was too much to resist). It is number ten on his list and it goes like this.

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

Read the rest.

When you are in a confrontational conversation be sure to remember the five golden rules.

1. Iron clad statements and absolutes are not good ideas
   1. “I know“
   2. Always
   3. Never
   4. Won’t
2. Conditional statements are more effective
   1. In my judgement
   2. I think
   3. In my opinion
   4. It is my belief
   5. The rule/policy indicates
3. Avoid the use of slang. Slang indicates a loss of control.
4. Use clear, simple, reasonable directives.
   1. Stop
   2. You
   3. Here
   4. There
      1. Emphasize the directive with a firm gesture.
5. Threats are counter productive
   1. Identify the offensive behavior that needs to stop.
   2. State the penalty
   3. Enforce the penalty no matter what

You may also give some thought to your personal presence. There are some fields of thought which indicate that for every 10 pounds a person is overweight their presence or stature is reduced 10%. So, if two persons were of equal height and one was 40 pounds overweight that person would present a 40% less commanding figure than the leaner of the two.

It is extremely important that web based publications that are to be taken seriously maintain the delicate balance between providing useful information to those who visit and sharing personal information without becoming “preachy” or “whiny.” My personal tendency is to stray a bit too far into the rational detachment area. However, sometimes I experience (as do we all) personal circumstance that provide me the stumbling blocks which I can nudge into stepping stones for the use of others. My personal and professional life has been providing me just such fodder of late and I would like to share how I try to make the best of it with you.

Here, in list form (you know I love lists) are my strategies for overcoming adversity along with the shades of my temperament I rely on to help me navigate them.

1. Keep the problem in perspective. If you are still alive and actively seeking a solution you still have a chance. It could be worse. It will probably get better (Phlegmatic).
2. Don’t generalize the problem. It is a specific setback. Who knows what exciting change will happen next. Even the bible says, “It came to pass…” Nowhere does it say, “It came to stay…” (sanguine).
3. Use forward self talk. “Okay, that didn’t work. Not the best strategy. Retreat for perspective. More follow-through. Keep it lined up. Better. Better. We’ll try this strategy tomorrow. The overall plan is still viable. How you frame the problem in your mind is very important (choleric).
4. Seek the greater good. Realism is limited to the current atmosphere. Faith allows for possibility. Failing the cause isn’t an option (supine).
5. Hang out with sanguines. Hang around the dreamers, builders, positive influences. Their can-do spirit is infectious (melancholy).

Inspirational quote:

“… a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.” Jeremiah 17:7-8

flickr image 

In order to truly understand the nature of the Melancholy you must be familiar with the speech of Arestophanes from Plato’s Symposium.

The original human nature was not like the present, but different. The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three n number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two, of which the name survives but nothing else. Once it was a distinct kind, with a bodily shape and a name of its own, constituted by the union of the male and the female: but now only the word ‘androgynous’ is preserved and that as a term of reproach.

Terrible was their might and strength and the thoughts of their hearts were great, and they made an attack upon the gods; of them is told the tale of Otys and Ephilates who, as Homer says, attempted to scale heaven, and wold have laid hands upon the gods.

So, Zues smote them asunder. Well, of-course those that were singularly male and singularly female died from the wounds right away. But, those which were initially composed of the best of both were strong enough to survive. But, because they were rent apart, they spent the remainder of their existence seeking out that perfect opposite part which would complete them. And such is the origin of the Melancholy. Doomed to ever seek out the one with whom they may achieve perfect intimacy.

Yes, I know I ruthlessly butchered a perfectly beautiful poem. But, hey considering my pathetic understanding of the collected musing of Plato I think I made the point.

Intimacy is the most compelling desire of a true Melancholy. Many, like the split-aparts, will spend their entire lives on a quest for those they believe will be their soul mates.

Because of this the potential Social Media is ever more tantalizing to the Melancholy. They are thoughtful enough to realize that this medium exponentially increases their chances to come into contact with the symbiotic other they are ever seeking.

However, they choose to explore social media in a manner that many do not even consider to be a portion of the spectrum. You will most often find your Melancholies involved in the entertainment realm of social media. They are the role playing gamers who spend hours developing connections with bands of virtual adventurers to overthrow some evil overlord. They will garner millions of points on Pogo as they share of themselves with other online gamers the revealed insecurities of their souls.

To effectively capitalize on the benefits of social media the Melancholy must view it as a mythic adventure designed to bring together those who are destined to connect.

Original article in the series.

If there ever was an arranged marriage that seemed ideally suited it would appear to be Sanguines and Social Media. But, you know, it’s not as perfect as it sounds. Once you get beyond the titles the divergence makes sense too.

Sanguines are all about interacting with people on an up close and personal basis. They need to see your face and touch your hand. They have an underlying compulsion to be with living breathing, carbon based life forms. Now juxtapose that with Social Media. By the very nature (at least at first) Social Media is technology based. You must spend a considerable amount of time building a virtual reality of jungle vine connections. Then you must employ your very best Tarzan/Jane skill set to navigate the highways of the canopy to reach your connection destinations.

You can see how the medium would be a struggle for the sanguine at the early levels of development.

If a Sanguine is to be successful with a Social Media platform it must have one indispensable component. It must be FUN.

No matter what the ultimate pay out of the work investment in building a network, if there is no immediate entertainment value the Sanguine is not interested.

With this information you can see how Sanguines would be more drawn to FaceBook, Flickr, and Showhype than to LinkedIn which is more for professionals who are looking for networking opportunities.

Original article in the series.

I’ve worked on several projects that have been connected in some way to Dr. Ghungsho Zhang. Most of the work has taken the form of his identification of a trend indicated in a numerical analysis and my development of a program to enhance or accommodate for that trend. For example, Dr. Zhang unidentified an over representation of males in discipline referrals and special education referrals in North Carolina. As a result, I developed a series of trainings for teachers which explored how male and female students have natural conduct differences that cannot be addressed in the same ways.

What does that have to do with temperament and social media?

Just this, just because something can be easily measured doesn’t mean it is important. For example, it was easy to measure the cycles of the moon (sunspots, comet proximity, tides, favorite ice cream flavors, etc) when incidents of misbehavior occur but that doesn’t mean the two are connected in any real way.

Again, so what?

That brings us to the numbers of Social Media. It is easy to measure (or at least estimate) the number of users of social media but without knowing the underlying temperament of those measured we will not understand the nature of their use of the medium.

Here are some of the numbers based on a study conducted by Raplief .

Bebo 5,806,867 members
” Bebo is a social media network where friends share their lives and explore great entertainment.”

Blackplanet 1,201,687 members
” BlackPlanet.com is your place to meet and connect with African Americans around the country.”

Classmates 3,051,761 members
“Find a friend or high school alumni from more than 40 million members in over 200000 affiliations at Classmates.com.”

Facebook 5,920,236 members
“An online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges.”

Flickr 2,068,097 members
“Flickr is almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.”

Flixter 17,647,399 members
” Flixster is a community for movie fans of all shapes and sizes.”

Friendster 5,260,380 members
“Friendster is focused on helping people stay in touch with friends and discover new people and things that are important to them.”

Hi5 14,679,615 members
“hi5 helps its members stay connected with friends, family and others that are important to them in a simple, fun and safe online environment.”

LinkedIn 841,209 members
“Our mission is to help you be more effective in your daily work and open doors to opportunities using the professional relationships you already have.”

Multiply 1,354,647 members
“Multiply gives you an easy way to share all kinds of digital media, including photos, blogs, videos, music and more, all in one convenient place: your own personal web site.”

MySpace 31,845,954 members
“Create a community on MySpace and you can share photos, journals and interests with your growing network of mutual friends!”

MyYearbook 2,449,251 members
Offers quizzes and a weblog section, as well as videos and free content from CliffsNotes.”

Perfspot 1,159,539 members
“Secure your personal privacy. Find old friends. Have unlimited uploads and much more. For more information, visit us online”

Ringo 9,770,151 members
“Photo and Video Sharing Made Easy”  As you can see Social Media evolves and devolves FAST! Between the time I drafted this article in June and July 6 Ringo went off-line.

Tickle 6,481,601 members
“Tickle is the leading interpersonal media company, providing self-discovery, and social networking services to more than 17 million active members in its community worldwide.”

In each provider the lion’s share of the users are between the ages of 17 and 35. With the major exception being LinkedIn which has is greatest percentage (nearly 25%) of members in the 35-44 year old age bracket.

Still, so what? If you don’t know how these people are using social media to help meet their needs for control, inclusion and affection you really don’t know what is going on here.

Tori Deaux and I are going to try and use this series of articles to explore that concept.

Original article in the series.

flikr image

Social Media is a current hot topic just about everywhere. People are scrambling to “join the conversations” on the various services, but also finding themselves frustrated (see Tori’s article “Why I suck at social media…” )

One aspect of that widespread frustration can be explained through personality temperaments (for an overview, check out this interactive graphic from MindTweaks, or this text overview here on Elemental Truths)

Each temperament and combination of has a different approach to technology, different needs when it comes to socialization.

Extroverts are happy to seek out new friends and contacts, while introverts are more hesitant, preferring to just observe, or to let others come to them.Some temperaments are quick to embrace change, while others prefer more familiar, consistent, and proven technologies. Privacy is also a personality driven issue, as some temperaments need to feel safe and protected, in order to participate in a social environment, while others would be happy with their own posse of cyber paparazzi. Also important is the level of control people have over their use of the service, including visibility, profiles, spam, and so on. We all use the services for different reasons, too - many of them related to temperaments: find customers, build a network of new friends, stay in touch with existing friends, share and inspire creativity, get and provide answers to questions, or just be generally social with strangers.

The frustration appears because most of the latest, greatest social technologies only address the needs of *some* of the temperament types, and make others distinctly uncomfortable, or even anxious. So being successful at social media means knowing which services are best suited to our individual personality, and how to participate comfortably even on services that aren’t well suited to our specific temperaments - otherwise, we run the risk of losing touch with our existing social circles made up of a variety of personalities, and winding up only with friends and contacts in a limited range of temperament - which is not a good thing. The best and most effective social groups (for any purpose) are made up of a variety of personality types.

It’s worth noting that while the older forms of social media (message boards, chat rooms, and instant messaging services) didn’t provide the networking or portability benefits of Web2.0 applications like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, they did better provide a comfortable space for *all* of the personality types. Hopefully the new services will resolve the conflicts in time - meanwhile, we’ll have to find our own solutions.

So over the next week Reg and I will be exploring the topic of temperament and social media, considering the pros and cons of each service for each personality, from Supine to Melancholy, as well as offering advice on how the various personalities can best use the services for our advantage. We’ll be posting a series of interlinked articles addressing the issue on MindTweaks and Elemental Truths, but you’ll also be able to come back here, and find a listing of all of the links.

We’re hoping the result will be fun, useful, creative, productive, and reduce frustration levels. And *that* should cover just about all of the personality types!

This is a checklist I (Reg) came up with that will give you a fair overview of what YOUR TEMPERAMENT might be.

Other articles in this series.

• Temperaments and Social Media - ET
• Interactive Temperament Graphic -MT
• Social Media and The 5 Temperaments - MT
• In Social Media Measurable Doesn’t Equal Important - ET
• Supines and Social Media - ET
• Surviving Social Media:The Supine Struggle - MT
• Sanguines and Social Media - ET
• The Social Butterfly Meets Social Technology: The Challenges for Sanguines - MT
• Melancholies and Social Media - ET
• In Search of Intimacy: The Melancholy and Social Media - MT
• Phlegmatics and Social Media - ET
• Qietly Participatory: The Phlegmatic and Social Media - MT
• Cholerics and Social Media - ET
• Control and Conquer!: The Choleric and Social Media - MT

Open Source social media platforms we won’t address in depth (in no particular order). By the way, open source just means that you can read the programming code, change the code, modify the code and redistribute the code, usually free of charge.

• spree
• iSocial
• Mahara
• Yogurt
• VMukti
• The PeopleAggregator
• Appleseed
• Mugshot Project
• GetBoo
• Akarru
• Scuttle
• SemanticScuttle
• AROUNDMe
• Clonesumating
• BeWelcome Rox
• ICEcore
• Memephage
• InteractOLE
• Elgg
• CommunityNews
• OpenPNE
• MonkeyChow
• NewsCloud
• Feed Me Links
• WorldSpace
• Social Networking POC
• Zoints
• earth-life-simulation
• PHPizabi
• OzcodeOzcode
• TallStreet
• Jamss
• Dolphin
• Ospo
• AstroSPACES
• FlightFeather
• SNOSS
• OpenSocialNetwork
• S3B
• Facelift

No matter how careful you are with your selection of a career path you may at some point find that you are no longer happy with your work. Often this has nothing to do with how you feel about the actual job you signed on to do. In our ever evolving workplace leadership changes on a very regular basis. And every new leader who comes to an organization feels compelled to leave his or her mark.

Nearly every day I run into someone who is thoroughly disgusted with their job situation. I call it the Willie Loman syndrome.

This can be a temporary setback due to high stress, overwork or burnout.

The circumstances can also be so severe the individual requires a complete career change. Sometimes the only solution they see lies in the autonomy of entrepreneurship.

In these situations I recommend the following questions for self assessment.

1. What do you like to do?
2. What are your interests and hobbies?
3. What are your areas of expertise?
4. Do you have any special skills?
5. What industry are you most interested in?
6. What are your financial needs?
7. How much financial risk are you will to expose yourself to?
8. Would you be more comfortable operating a small business with a few employees or a large business with many employees?
9. How many years do you want to work?
10. Will your current physical condition withstand the pressures and stress associated with starting a business?
11. Where will you live and work?
12. How many hours per week are you willing to work?

The key is to takes the results of your desires assessment and match them to a compatible business venture.

I recently went through the long and drawn out process required to move from my current position across the country to another organization involved in a very similar field of behavior interventions. In the end the core team at that organization felt that my own experiences were too divergent from the model they had in place.

I must admit I was annoyed. I had invested very valuable time and a lot of travel days and hundreds of miles in preparing to shift my location to the new position. After two initial meetings I was led to believe that the only hold up was budget approval for an additional position. In fact, I was invited to come to a “casual meeting” to become acquainted with the behaviors team and work out final coordination details.

Much to my amazement, a few days after the meeting I received and email (yes and email, not a telephone call or a letter) letting me know they had decided to “continue to interview candidates for the position.” First and foremost, I you are in a position to work with potential staff members don’t do that. Don’t send an email saying your going to continue to look for a more philosophically in line candidate. It is extremely poor etiquette, and communicates a very weak message. However, when you find yourself on the receiving end with similar experience (and you will if you are aggressive in your career choices) here are a few touchstones I relied on that may help you along as well.

1. Hold on to your humility.

2. Have an enduring impact.

3. Don’t look for the quick, shoddy, flashy fix.

4. Measure your success by the integrity of your work product.

5. Seek to find the lesson from adversity rather than the absence of adversity.

6. Expect the best but don’t be thrown if you encounter less than wonderful events.

We are a nation ever seeking greater productivity. You will rarely pick up a leadership publication that does not speak to the topic. Unfortunately, though many bemoan the low productivity few offer you help for increasing your own productivity.

Here are a few mental nudges that you may incorporate to improve your own personal productivity. 

1. Procedure Streamlining: Procedures (you may be more familiar with the term Standard Operating Procedure, or SOP) tend to evolve without focus on efficiency or effectiveness. Bottlenecks develop that interrupt work pace and slow down work turn out, thus increasing costs. Procedure Streamlining reduces lost time costs, improves efficiency and optimizes quality.

2. Focus Workshops: Few of us enjoy workshops but if we provide ourselves and staff members with the proper training productivity will improve. Focus workshops and success coaching help us to reach and maintain goals. Such programs are also known as in-service training or continuing education programs. They are especially prevalent in professional fields.

Focus trainings also provide:

- Quality control measures

- Uniformity of procedure implementation

- A comfort reference source to rely on

3. Productivity Quotas: Quotas need not be evil or arbitrary. In fact creating realistic productivity quotas involves measuring work time requirement and using those times to project completion rates.

- improves the sense of ownership on your program

- creates a “bar” for measurable improvement

- provides an opportunity to calculate productivity for other functions

4. Operation Productivity Report: This report is based on the collecting data from each component within the process. This provides  data for effectively planning personal productivity goals.

This data is usually, presented by:

-Time of day

-Location

-Equipment

-Specific task

Embracing and implementing these four nudges will improve your productivity and free time for other pursuits.