As I sat there in Starbucks flipping through the first 40 pages or so, I came across this passage:

…it is quite possible for people who have never met us and who have spent only twenty minutes thinking about us to come to a better understanding of who we are than people who have known us for years. Forget the endless “getting to know” meetings and lunches, then. If you want to get a good idea of whether I’d make a good employee, drop by my house one day and take a look around.

This made me pause. I’ve read this before, but it was years ago. Now that I’ve had a little more time to develop a better sense of self and of who I actually am, I started thinking: could someone really understand me by looking around my room? Perhaps more relevant today, could someone really understand me by looking at my online profiles–my Twitter account, my Facebook profile, my LinkedIn?

The online profile is a unique beast. It’s can create or destroy reputations, make or break careers, build or ruin friendships. But is that online profile really you? Does that Facebook profile picture present who you want to be? Who you really are? Do you even know?

As with many of my blog posts lately, I realize I’m posing more questions than answers here, but bear with me. I think back to a conversation I had with the Jill Foster (@jillfoster), founder of Live Your Talk, among other things (she basically rocks). We were talking about how it looks when someone has a drink in their hand in their profile photo. Is that an accurate representation of how they live their life? Does it mean they’re a prolific networker, or a drunk? Does it mean they’re irresponsible with alcohol, or something else entirely?

Personally, I do my best not to make judgments on profile photos alone–I scour the Web for more information on a person, trying to take in their entire online persona before I make any calls on their character or whether or not I might like to get to know them. But I also recognize that I’m one of the few who do this. For the rest, that profile photo might be the only thing they need to make that judgment call.

So sitting on that couch in Starbucks, I began to look around and take in the people around me. One guy with his kid, in particular, caught my attention and I found myself listening in a little on their conversation. In perhaps the five minutes of conversation I witnessed–and only brief snippets (I was reading, after all)–I learned a lot. I learned that he’s divorced and his kid visits on the weekends. I learned that his ex-wife and he probably don’t get along that well, given that he called her a “liar” multiple times. I learned that neither he nor his kid understand much about technology, as they struggled to get a flash game to work on his laptop.

But most importantly–and what I’ll never know–is what they thought about me. Sitting there, peacefully reading my book, sipping my iced coffee. What did they learn about me? Anything?

What do I know about myself? That’s a bit too existential for this post, but all these questions are worth pondering, aren’t they?

• My first USA Today blog post is online! In it, I write about how George Friedman’s book The Next One Hundred Years has changed my perception of leadership as I enter my senior year of college. Go read it, and go “like” USA Today’s Facebook page while you’re at it–they’re doing some awesome work.
• The American University chapter of SMCEDU (Social Media Club for Education) is getting up and running, founded by yours truly. We’ve been recognized as an official student organization, signed on our faculty advisor, begun building up our faculty advisory board, and are submitting our first budget and rolling out our first advertisements in less than two weeks. Soon I’ll begin blogging on AU Professor Matt Nisbet’s blog, Age of Engagement, on the subject as well, and I couldn’t be more excited! Lots more on this topic coming soon.
• Class is moving along smoothly. My six classes this semester are keeping me busy, but haven’t become overwhelming yet (and hopefully they won’t!). It’s a refreshing change of pace from the past, since all of my courses this semester are major or minor related, with no general education courses. I feel like I’m enjoying them more, learning more and actually able to get my work done more efficiently. It’s nice.
• My computer is still dead. But being resuscitated as I type this (I hope). Finally got an Apple “genius” who seemed to know what he was talking about and it sounds like my hard drive is dying on me. It’s odd I can still access files, but he talked like there was basically something fatally corrupt about it that won’t let me boot the OS normally. He promised if replacing the hard drive didn’t fix it they wouldn’t charge me for it, so I let them go for it. Plus, they’re upgrading me to a 250 GB from a 160 GB, and I could use the extra space anyway.
• Work is still crazy, and squeezing in CEA work with TechChange work, and now my assistant editor duties at Technorati, is keeping me busy, busy, busy. I love them all though, and I wouldn’t trade these experiences for anything.

Anyway, there’s your quick update. Hoping to get some good content written up in the next day or two and keep you guys thinking over the next week.

Chapter 5, “Kenna’s Dilemma,” in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, is a fantastic bit of insight into market research and the challenges there are in really figuring out what people think—because often they don’t really know what they’re thinking either.

The chapter takes on a number of different case studies where market research has failed to beat the experts and where consumers have simply been wrong about their very own preferences. This is all framed around the story of Kenna, a young musician with a unique sound that the critics loved, but listeners couldn’t quite wrap their heads around. While everyone from Fred Durst to U2’s manager loved his sound, he didn’t test well and suffered because of it. Gladwell puts this in context, comparing his situation to the “Pepsi Challenge,” the development of the Aeron desk chair, and even a couple classic TV shows. These were products that never tested well and no one expected to succeed, but beat the odds because research failed to capture the market’s feelings accurately, or because companies failed to interpret that research correctly.

There is one line in the chapter that I think really sums up the lesson to be learned most succinctly: “The problem with market research is that often it is simply too blunt an instrument to pick up this distinction between the bad and the merely different.”

Without a doubt, this is the most important and interesting insight to take away from this chapter for marketers, and for anyone who wants to understand how revolutionary products often succeed. Whether it’s the disaster that was New Coke, jam tasting, or Kenna getting screwed over by the record companies, market research is by no means an exact science, despite its appearances.

I think one of the most fascinating applications of market research today is with regard to social media. Take Facebook, for example. If research is to be believed, everyone hates Facebook. According to all the polls and surveys, its brand value is practically worthless, privacy concerns outweigh all its benefits, and users are threatening to quit in droves. The user interface isn’t as smooth as it could be, the privacy controls are too confusing, they’re selling private information… the list goes on and on of complaints people have about Facebook.

But this isn’t a new phenomenon—people have been complaining about every single thing Facebook has ever done to improve its service, all the way back to the advent of the newsfeed, which is now one of the most iconic features of social media as we know it today, and instrumental to the development of entire industries of new products, services and marketing. And Facebook’s user population is still growing tremendously. Only recently they passed up 500 million users, making them far and away the largest social network in the world, ever, and their growth and revenue shows no signs of slowing down. But if market research says they’re in such trouble, why are they so successful?

It’s because they haven’t listened to their customers. They recognized that every single change they make is going to be looked at unfavorably, because everything in the social media world is “merely different” for the average user. As I quoted above, market research, polls, etc. can’t detect the distinction between bad and different, and everything in social media is different—in fact, revolutionary. So we’ve got a cycle: people hate it because it’s different and they don’t understand it, and they’re wrong. Facebook goes ahead and does what they want anyway, because they recognize that consumers don’t understand their own behavior—not to insult their (our) intelligence, but it’s simply true—and then the feature gets gradually accepted and molded into part of the social media standard that we all know and love today. Facebook reaps the rewards and continues on its way to becoming one of the most important and successful companies of our generation.

As Gladwell points out, this isn’t new. Market research isn’t a secret weapon now, nor has it ever been. There have always been products, services, and people who tested poorly but went on to succeed, and consumers who misunderstood their own interpretation of different and revolutionary products. Is market research still important? Of course, and I don’t think Gladwell means to suggest that it isn’t. But it also should never be relied upon solely and without context, and that’s a lesson we can all learn from.

Consumer behavior is unpredictable and hard. It’s never the same and consumers can react one way to one industry and just the opposite in another. Tastes and culture change, personal beliefs and lifestyles change (such as the rapidly evolving attitude towards privacy in the U.S.), and especially in the past two decades, technology changes. Market research plays a key role in understanding how to market products in every industry and to every kind of customer, but it’s certainly not infallible.

I forgot them. All of them.

I literally left my apartment with my suitcase, my Chrome bag, laptop, DSLR, clothes, and everything I would need… except my books.

Why is that I can’t make the time in my life to sit down and enjoy some of the literally hundreds of books on my reading list? There’s so much knowledge there, and so much to learn, yet I constantly find myself consumed with something else. By the time the thought of reading a book enters my mind it’s often one or two A.M. and I’ll read about half a page before I fall asleep with the book on my lap.

Am I the only one with this problem? Here’s hoping I can start making more time for books in my life when I get back to D.C.

First, D.C. Media Makers! I attended my first event on Wednesday evening at NPR’s headquarters here in Washington, and it was fantastic! Got to see some very cool people I’ve gotten to know over the past few weeks, and got to hear the amazing Jen Consalvo (@noreaster on Twitter) speak about her photography work, how to get into photography, and some tips on how to get better shots–even on an iPhone (for what it’s worth, she recommended CameraBag as excellent filter app, pretty cool!).

As a side note on DCMM, this semester I’ve obviously been trying to get out in the city and meet people, go to events, hear speakers, get involved in unconferences, etc. It’s already paying off, and in a big, big way. I’ve met some absolutely amazing people and developed some good friendships already. I feel like I can go to any event now and usually see someone I know. This city is huge, but the community is smaller than it seems, and everyone has been so incredibly welcoming! I can’t encourage my fellow students, and professionals, enough: get out there and take advantage of this amazing city. Meet some of the incredible professionals out here and say hi, get to know them. I know I’ve learned so much just in the past few weeks from these people, and I couldn’t be happier about it. Thanks so much to all of you who’ve taught me, even indirectly, and I’m already looking forward to the next event!

Now, in a more general life update, things have been pretty crazy for me lately. School is piling on the work and the reading, and unfortunately that still has to be pretty much priority number one. However, there’s a couple cool things happening in my life:

• Soon I will be contributing my first post (of many, hopefully) to shamable.com. Seeking to be the no-B.S. guide to social media, it’s a new Web site being developed by some of the best people in the business. I’m seriously honored to be a part of it and I’m hoping I can make some valuable contributions from my perspective as a student here in D.C. during this social media revolution.
• I’m hard at work on my communications honors capstone. The first of two (I’ll do my business honors capstone next year), I’m really excited about the project and overjoyed that I have an absolutely amazing professor advising me with it. The project will ultimately be a social media case study in digital form, and will be appended to this Web site. Expect plenty of updates on that throughout the semester, especially towards the latter end of it.
• Internships, scholarships, awards, oh my! Yes indeed, it’s already that time and applications are littering my desk. This weekend I hope to make a fair bit of headway into scholarship applications for my senior year (gasp, can’t believe it’s almost here already) and internship applications for the summer. Speaking of which–do you know of any opportunities (preferably paid) for a young communications professional to work over the summer? Location not a factor, let me know! All tips are sincerely appreciated!
• It looks like it’s going to be a busy Saturday for me, as I’ve already got several things on the docket. In the morning I’m hoping to get down to the Washington Auto Show, especially since it’s garnered so much buzz this year. At 1:00pm I’ll be heading over to Politics & Prose bookstore here in northwest Washington for an event with one of my former professors, Robert Lehrman. He just had his book on speechwriting published (it’s amazing, by the way) and I’m eager to say hi again! Finally, Saturday night at 5pm the AU PRSSA (Public Relations Student Society of America) will be holding a networking event at American University. If you’re a communications professional in the area and would be interested and coming to network with some eager public communications students, please let me know! We’d love to have you (and there will be free food).

And alas, I think that’s all I have time for this morning. I hope everyone has a fantastic day!

Work today was good. I won’t delve into that much more because before too long I’m going to be writing blog posts for the American University Career Center about my internship experience, which I’ll crosspost here. After work, I attended my very first ever Social Media Club DC event, and it was fantastic! The event was held at the Consumer Electronics Association headquarters in Arlington and featured two speakers from the CEA, Megan Pollock and Joe Gizzi, as well as Frank Gruber, entrepreneur and co-founder of TECHcocktail, shinyheart and thankfulfor, among others.

But enough links and name-dropping–what did they talk about? Well, fresh back from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, they talked about tech of course! And, naturally, how it all fits in with social media. Joe Gizzi, especially, had some really interesting things to say about the CEA’s social media strategy to build buzz and deal with attendee complaints/suggestions at the conference. He talked about software they use (namely, CoTweet) as well as how they keep track of much of their dizzying analytics (mostly Google Analytics and CoTweet). For the next few days, you can see some of the livestream from the event here on Twitter. Needless to say, it was enlightening and fun, and I’m already looking forward to the next SMC-DC event (which just so happens to be a Social Media Breakfast next Monday morning!).

Anyway, one last thing I’ll leave you with–an entry from One Day At A Time In Al-Anon. No, I’m not crazy. I just picked it up for free at the Social Justice Camp last weekend (they were giving out free books–all in the name of literacy!) because it looked like a fun thing to have on my bookshelf. It provides some inspirational little passages for each and every day of the year, and today’s seemed particularly relevant given my hectic schedule as of late. Here it is:

No matter what the problems are that we’re trying to cope with, a major source of frustration is trying to encompass too much at once. We forget that we need to deal with only one day at a time, and try to crowd too much into the waking hours of that day–or we even extend it beyond the point of weariness. We can get more out of each hour–and accomplish more–if we try to cope with only as much as is possible in that one day.

Appropriate, no? Always learning.

Just a quick update tonight with a rapid-fire overview of what my weekend has been like. Friday and Saturday I devoted purely to Social Justice Camp DC, which was absolutely incredible. I met a ton of amazing people, learned a lot of amazing stuff and well, got inspired. But I really hate skimming over so much important information, so I’m going to do a great big write-up of the experience tomorrow or Wednesday and get that up here and out for all of yall to read. I’ll probably highlight a few of the causes I’m really excited to get involved with (probably this summer, when I have some more free time) and explain some of my own, personal, key takeaways from the (un)conference–I’ll explain the “unconference” part later too.

In addition, I got to spend some time with two of my best friends in the world who just recently moved back to D.C. In kind of an odd coincidence, they both moved away (one to Seattle, the other to Tampa, Florida) shortly before I left to go abroad. Now that I’m back in D.C., they’ve moved back as well! I couldn’t be happier about it. We had a great time hanging out and needless to say, I really missed them. I can say with 100% certainty they are going to make this semester much more fun and hopefully a little stressful than it might have been otherwise. Thanks guys, glad you’re back!

Finally, on my desk right now I’ve got no less than five post-its screaming at me with variations and extensions on my main to-do list. It’s long, diverse and about half-fun. Unfortunately some of the things on my list are pretty tedious: “update résumé”, “sort through Twitter favorites”, “finish AU merit awards profile”, “scholarship applications”… But others are pretty fun, things like: “evergreen column for The Eagle“, “make cookbook binder”, “write blog posts!” You get the idea.

After that we walked over to Capitol Hill Books and geeked-out wandering around stacks and stacks of amazing old books. They also have hysterical signs. And try as I might, I can never resist books–I picked up a copy of “The American Presidency” by Clinton Rossiter, published in 1956 (I believe I’ve got a 1959 edition–awesome). I don’t know when I’ll have time to read it, but I read the intro right there in the bookstore and I’m already engrossed.

Finally I wound up in Peregrine Espresso which is a fantastic little coffee shop with pretty lattes AND they have a Twitter account. I’m sold. I’ll be going back. I did a little reading and then biked back to Union Station so I could be a wuss and metro up the hill instead of having to bike up Massachusetts Ave. (it’s rough, okay?!).

Anyway, next up will be two exciting blog posts:

1. A good, thorough recap of Social Justice Camp DC (#sojuca!)
2. A look at the power of public relations as it can be related to the dissident media of early civil rights movements in America and the current news cycle + social media (that’s a little broad and vague yet, still working on it)

Keep your eyes peeled. Also, I’ve got my first story (story, not column–as in I’m playing the “reporter” role this time) coming out in The Eagle this Thursday! You’ll know it’s online when I do.

My sister is an author. And she’s amazing. Her name is Cherie Priest (many of you may already know her) and not only is she awesome but so is her cat Spain (who totally dominates her YouTube feed), her blog and her books.

Her most recent book is titled Boneshaker and I think it’s her best one yet.

Boneshaker is set in an alternate-history setting of the United States, around 1880. Cherie explains it best herself on her Web page for the series (Yes! There are more coming set in this universe!):

Here, it is 1880 (or thereabouts). The Civil War is still underway, drawn out by English interference, a different transportation infrastructure, and a powerful Republic of Texas that discovered oil at Spindletop some fifty years sooner than real life allowed.

The competition of war has led to technological progress and horrors unimaginable, and many people have fled the combating states, hoping for an easier life out west.

Some of them have found it.
Some have found something else.

Now clearly, any opinions I give are ridiculously biased, given that I’m her brother. But at the same time, I know a good book when I see one, and Boneshaker is damn good fun to read. It’s got steampunk galore, zombies, hardcore characters, and plenty of action to keep you hooked. It’s paced well enough that it hits that perfect balance at the end where you’re satisfied with the ending, yet dying for more.

The premise is this: Briar Wilkes is a controversial enough figure in the alternate world Cherie has created, but when her son ventures into the walled-off, poisonous-gas-filled Seattle in seek of information about his dubious family’s history, she gets dragged into an adventure she’d never expected.

It’s got plenty of nice twists and turns, and enough detail to let you feel immersed but without dragging down the pace (I’m looking at you, J.R.R. Tolkien). And although the end is a little bit predictable, the details make it lots of fun. In fact, when reading the book I’d turned out the lights with about 30 pages to go. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so I turned the lights back on and finished the book before I could fall asleep. Yea man, it’s that good.

Anyway, enough of my blathering. Go read it! You can get it on Amazon.com or if you want a signed copy, Cherie’s put instructions on her Web site on how to get your hands on one of those.