Yayoi Kusama’s “Obliteration Room” at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art is the latter. Definitely worth a look.

Can Online Socializing Replace In-Person Interaction?

“The Third Place is a concept of Ray Oldenburg, urban sociologist and author of The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. The First Place is your home, and the Second Place is your office. You have assigned roles and tasks at each place, and you know nearly all the people in each. The Third Place is where you meet with people you don’t know that well, or maybe at all, and you exchange ideas, learn about other people, and, as Oldenburg sees it, enrich society and yourself.”

December has arrived, which means a host of internet entities will be dropping end-of-the-year data on us as the month rolls toward its inevitable conclusion and into 2012. Twitter has been fairly quick to the draw, and is already on the third of five entries in its 2011 Year In Review.

The first two pieces cataloged the major stories that flashed through its stream and the deluge of new high-profile users the service has taken on in the previous eleven months. Both of these lists are interesting to at least a fleeting degree, but the good stuff is in the third entry, Hot Topics, which was released today.

The trendiest food topic this year? McLobster. World news story? Mubarak’s resignation. And then there’s the top hashtags for the year, those indicators of Twitter power-use. We were given the following:

1. #egypt
2. #tigerblood
3. #threewordstoliveby
4. #idontunderstandwhy
5. #japan
6. #improudtosay
7. #superbowl
8. #jan25

Not everyone needs to be a leader.

Forget what college ad campaigns have told you, society has convinced you of, and your parents hoped you would be. We’re not all cut out to be leaders (at least not all the time), and that’s a good thing.

Disturbing, I know.

It’s been drilled into our heads that true success is largely the result of leadership capability. The thing is, if every person were to be a leader, we would go nowhere as a society. Personal agendas would govern each individual’s actions and teamwork would be impossible. And with the absence of teamwork, we lose the capability to achieve truly important goals. The saying goes “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” I’d add that Rome also wasn’t built exclusively by Caesars with big egos doing their own thing.

I can guarantee that there were a lot of exceptionally smart, talented, and successful future Romans who knew how and whom to follow. Those people may have been leaders in their own right, given particular situations. That’s what makes good teamwork so dynamic—if leaders are willing to follow team members who are more qualified to lead particular tasks, the probability of overall success for the greater objective is bound to be higher. Being a good leader is often about being able to be a good follower. It’s about having the flexibility—and the reason—to step aside and let someone else take the reigns when it benefits the team.

Pretty simple, right?

Yet in business, we inevitably stumble when it comes to how we approach leadership. How many people would rate their “leadership skills” as “high” if their boss gave them a survey on the topic? I’m guessing nearly everyone. But why? We rush to be team leaders when the “opportunity” arises—regardless of how well we know we would lead a given project—because we believe that showing leadership (or at least the willingness to lead) is what will propel our careers forward. As one can imagine, this propensity and eagerness to be a leader in any situation can be extremely detrimental to a team. Aside from the inevitable animosity and jealousy fuming from the team members who also wanted to show-off their leadership abilities, chances are pretty high that the eager volunteer just isn’t the right person to lead in that situation.

It’s an unfortunate side-effect of how we’re indoctrinated in much of Western society. How many college brochures say something to the effect of “We help build the leaders of tomorrow”? We’re told from a very early age that leadership is what “makes a man” (whatever that means) and that if we fail to be great leaders at some point in our lives, we’re not all that important in the grand scheme of things.

That’s a load of bull.

Next time you’re in a team situation where a leader must emerge, think critically about the role before you push everyone aside to take it. Should you be the leader? Is the team better served by your skills if you are not burdened with that responsibility?

Sheep photo courtesy of mouton.rebelle.

Susan Kare was the icon designer for the original Apple Macintosh. Her designs literally changed the face of personal computing.

A couple of years ago, I got a great deal on one of the best guitars I have ever played. It wasn’t a Gibson. It wasn’t a Fender. It wasn’t a Paul Reed Smith, Music Man, or an Ibanez. In fact, it wasn’t any of the brands you would expect to find at a Guitar Center or your local boutique guitar shop.

It was a First Act.

A brand traditionally found at such esteemed musical instrument retailers as Walmart and widely regarded as a manufacturer of cheap toy guitars.

However, unlike the guitars you would find at Walmart, which are made in China with the requisite mass-production specifications and quality control, my guitar was hand-crafted by a master luthier in First Act’s Somerville, Massachusetts workshop from premium wood and high-end parts. It was purchased from First Act’s Guitar Studio on Boylston Street in Boston (which has since closed, but they still operate online)—not in Walmart or another brick and mortar shop. It’s a professional-quality instrument that plays like butter and sounds like a dream. And it carries a price-tag that reflects that quality and workmanship.

But to most guitarists I talk to about it, it’s still just a First Act…a discount store kid’s toy. A piece of junk. No self-respecting musician would play one, let alone drop that amount of money for one. Despite the quality of the instrument, the brand has a terrible reputation with the typical purchasers of premium guitars.

And that’s why I got it for 50% off of the retail price. These guitars just aren’t selling.

The company has certainly put forth an effort to eradicate this misconception—my guitar is part of series of premium limited edition instruments, it heavily promotes the fact that a number of well known artists play its custom guitars (including Brad Whitford from Aerosmith, Rick Nielsen from Cheap Trick, and Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs), and it makes guitars that have been promoted by the likes of Adam Levine (Maroon 5), Paul Westerberg (The Replacements), and Slash. But it just can’t shake the stigma attached to its name.

First Act is clearly missing a critical insight regarding its target consumer. The scores of nay-sayers commenting on YouTube clips of people playing First Act guitars should be enough to clue its marketing team in to this. So what should it do to convince serious musicians that it makes a serious product?

Create a new brand.

First Act is a fantastic brand for entry level instruments of all kinds. It includes school band instruments, the entry-level guitars I mentioned, and an array of other instruments, electronics, and toys. The brand speaks to a very large market who are in need of exactly those things: inexpensive, beginner instruments. It does not, however, resonate with “real” guitarists.

This could be for a number of reasons. As a guitarist, there are definitely words other than “first act” that I would like to associate with my music. I was also not initially keen on seriously considering what I had known as a “Walmart brand.” In fact, I never would have known about how great the high-end guitars were if it weren’t for the Guitar Studio opening a block down the road from my wife’s office (I can’t pass-up going into a new guitar store).

So what would happen if First Act renamed its premium line to something more appropriate for professional instruments and started selling those guitars in Guitar Center or (even better) boutique guitar stores?

Guitarists aren’t afraid of new brands, but they do rely on historical experience with brand names.

Gibson built an empire on top of a name they made famous more than 75 years ago; Gibson guitars are certainly not as good as they used to be, but they still sell extremely well at a premium price due to the cachet attached to the name. Fender capitalizes on its historic brand name as well. Newer brands like Ibanez and Schecter have been very successful despite not having their guitars in the hands of musicians in rock’s golden age. I know I would certainly try a new, high-end guitar brand if it was readily available to me (that’s why musicians go to guitar stores). And I would sure as hell purchase it if it were a quality instrument in my price range.

In summary, if you make a product that meets my needs and the price doesn’t scare me away, I’m probably going to buy it.

There are enumerable brands out there that have the same problem (quality product, bad reputation). A great example would be Hyundai cars. Another would be my alma mater and employer, Boston University. It also extends to categories like punk rock, pit bulls, and American beer.

There are, of course, many brands that manage to break free from the prejudices they face due to their history. From the mid 1990s to around 2001, Macintosh computers developed a poor reputation due to their aging and increasingly incapable operating systems. Macs went from being the computer to have in the 1980s to being absolutely crushed by Windows-based PCs in the 1990s. With the creation of Mac OS X and the return of Steve Jobs—and the sheer brilliance that seems to spread through some strange osmosis to his marketing and product development teams—Macs (and Apple products in general) are once again some of the trendiest, best selling computers on the market.

Despite our preconceptions of how much marketing plays a role in selling a product, it still comes down to quality and consumer need. Brands like First Act have a quality product, but consumers are confused about their need. They don’t need what they think the company offers; they need what the company actually does offer. First Act just has to figure out how to make them realize what that is.

New content is on its way!

1. Banners draw attention and contribute a useful visual focal point
2. Grayscale is inherently easy on the eyes and contributes to readability
3. Great typography also is easy on the eyes and contributes to readability
4. Sparing use of color in a grayscale environment is visually exciting and draws the reader more easily than it would in a colorful site
5. It’s clean and modern, but has a ton of subtle character

Of Twitter’s 100 million active users, only 13.88% use the Twitter website.

That means about 86% of Twitter’s users are using applications to access the service (these numbers are pulled from @twitstat). While overly simplistic of an assumption, I think it’s fairly safe to guess that very few of the people who do not generally use the website will see your profile there. Furthermore, based on my own use habits and those of the few people who I polled regarding this, even those who do use the website will only occasionally click through to a full profile, especially now that Twitter gives most of the important information in the sidebar when a user is clicked in a stream.

I have about 700 followers. I admit that’s not a ton, but they’re all organic and that number is more than 50% higher than the number of users I follow. Regardless, 700 is actually a pretty good number to demonstrate with. If I apply those percentages to my followers, only about 97 of them use the website. This is actually fairly significant, but it is fairly startling how low the number seems. And seeing as how the number appears to be relatively low compared to the other 600 who follow me using Tweetdeck, Twitter for iPhone, Hootsuite, etc., should I even bother with the minuscule chances that my profile will be seen?

For me, that answer is “yes,” with no reservations whatsoever. There are two big reasons for this. 1) Of those 100 web users, there very well could be one (or more) who might be instrumental to my career somewhere down the road (or important to me in some other valuable way) and 2) it’s so easy to customize your profile to better show your personality and deliver key information for the few Twitter users who actually find it.

The best way to customize your profile, of course, is to use Photoshop or another image editor to create a custom background with visuals that highlight who you are in terms of personality and perhaps profession. Additionally, it’s a good idea to include your blog/website’s URL and a sentence or some keywords that describe who you are. My background image consists of the same three photos of me that are on the home page of this blog, along with the URL and keywords. I used a very faint gradient across the background so it didn’t appear too flat. The font is clean and simple (Google’s free Droid Sans). If you’re not handy with an image editor, a quick Google search turns up a number of simpler (including free) options, such as TwitBacks.

I’ll finish up with this: it may seem to be a waste of time to bother with creating an appealing and informative Twitter background when it’s almost a guarantee that very, very few people will see it. But the risk one runs for not bringing their personal branding to this oft overlooked element is possible missed opportunities. The cost of creating a custom profile is nothing more than a few minutes of time—the payoff is the comfort of knowing that you won’t be seen as lazy or clueless by those who actively seek you out and giving those who just happen across it a chance to know you just a little better. Relationships of all degrees emerge from barely observable, often incremental value consumption. Making it easier for Twitter users to understand and find you is considerably valuable.