Nothing good happens after midnight

Before anyone leaves the house, my grandpa tells us, "Remember, nothing good happens after midnight." As a teenager, that quip meant I had to get home way before the party was over and I didn't like it. I mean, midnight? Really?

Paying that piece of wisdom a little attention now, though, proves once again that my grandpa is a pretty smart guy. (Rule of thumb, yours probably is too. Pay the guy a visit). The pay off on that advice is 3:1, let's unpack some of that brand and personal value. Here are 3 less cliched lessons from my grandpa's warning.

1) Set deadlines

If you have to be home by midnight, your day can't start at 11:30 pm. By setting a deadline for when work will end, you realize how precious your time is and begin to find ways to streamline your life to make all of it count. When we value time appropriately, we become more present in each moment and make wiser choices on where we spend our minutes. Dale Carnegie advocated the power of deadlines to minimize the time we spend worrying and maximize the time we spend living by encouraging readers to meet life in day-tight compartments. Set a deadline, you'll be happier for it.

2) Start early

We've heard enough about the bird and the worm (although that's another cliche seeped in wisdom), but there is plenty to be said for getting an early start on that project coming down the pipeline, signing up for a gym membership, or making time for coffee and great conversations. Instead of looking to others for an idea for the pace your life should move, how about listening to that nagging pit in your stomach. You know better than anyone else what needs to happen today to get life into balance. An early start gives time to course correct and anticipate changes rather than reacting to them. Also, see above. If you've got to be in the house by 12, an early morning is your best friend.

3) Rest when you need it

The plan after midnight is to get to bed. To bring our best self to each day, we've got to recuperate. Recuperation doesn't have to happen after midnight either. By setting deadlines and starting early, there's time to recharge throughout the day. The birds are chirping, the grass is green on your side of the fence, and your great big, beautiful tomorrow can start today!

Take a little time to unpack some of those old cliches. Your personal brand and company's performance might be better for it. To start just remember, nothing good happens after midnight. 

Earning your own respect

As marketers, we devote hours to promoting brands, we fill white boards to shift perception, and tweet, post, and pin to rally fans of our brands. We focus on reputation. We might benefit by paying more attention to character. 

In middle school, I only wore Abercrombie & Fitch. My classes were filled students in neon polos, tattered jeans, and plastic flip flops. We wore a uniform to compete a piece of the popularity pie. Following cues from the media and each other, our behavior, appearance, and self-identities followed the herd. We focused on reputation while overlooking our character, and it didn't make us happy or achieve the outcomes we desired.

My role models now act nothing like middle school adolescents--and they still stand out because of it. They're noticeable because they don't wear the uniform and act like the herd. That's the value of devoting attention to character. We are drawn to the folks that have "figured it out," who spend time and devote attention to know and accept themselves. They earn their own respect first and our attention follows. 

Maybe consumers react the same way to the brands who have developed character rather than reputation. Those brands articulate a promise that reflects a core set of values, set operational benchmarks to consistently fulfill those promises, engage with their community authentically, and celebrate not their own success but the success of their customers.  They act boldly because they have earned their own respect. We want to follow brands, and people, like that. 

Live like a Freshman

As a rising fifth year student at UGA, I have freshman envy. Even if they don't know it, freshmen are blessed. Each freshman steps onto a campus of peers that will challenge them, professors that will champion them, and curriculums that will propel them. Not to mention they sleep until noon, lay out on campus lawns all afternoon, and party like it's 1999 every night. I'm likely jealous of the life they live because I didn't realize the amazing legacy I inherited when I started my first year at UGA. As I start out to make this final year my the best of college, I reflect upon a few lessons I've learned from my first year.

Don't Lose Sight of the Silver Lining Among the Clouds

When I settled into room 913 in Oglethorpe Residence Hall (O-House Penthouse), I didn't leave my door open to meet the 50 other students on my hall or play Mario Cart until 4:00 AM with them in the lobby. I didn't plug in and explode into the college experience because the dorm was cramped compared to my house back home—I lost sight of the amazing forest I was in because I wasn't accustomed to the trees.

Life is full of different environments and the change from one to another can be jarring if we don't see all the possibility around us once the dust settles.

Mine Resources

In high school it was cool to procrastinate, slack off, and push back against teachers. Life doesn't reward that attitude and college is a great teacher of that lesson. Though I wasn't a bad kid in high school (in fact I was the stereotypical AP nerd), I didn't cash in on the mentorship my teachers were willing to provide and that pattern unfortunately carried over to my first year of college.

Lesson? The students that plug in succeed—they learn something, become better people, and gain some fans in their corner. No matter what stage of life we're in, resources are available to help us along the way and it's plain dumb to ignore them.

Figure out the Plot 

I started college with an English major but it wasn't until long after jumping to Marketing that I put literary analysis to action on myself. I spent a semester and some change at UGA looking for the popular crowd before I realized it didn't exist. The time looking was a waste because I could have spent it finding out who I was and making that person as best I could rather than shoving who I thought I could be into an imaginary mold.

Most of us labor to make a compelling what, when, and where—what am I going to do, where am I going to do it, and when will it happen? The people that are the most alive (and the most fulfilled) spend significant energy finding out the plot elements that matter. Those happy people take time to first discover who and why—who am I and why am I here? They derive the rest of the plot from the answers to those two questions and live lives the rest of us read about.

Always be Beginning 

When I walked back to that dorm from my first day of classes, I could have noticed the vibrant student body at Georgia, the gorgeous campus I walked upon, or the over 600 organizations awaiting my interest. Instead my major takeaways of the days were that UGA had too many hills and that it was a million degrees outside.  Now that I'm a little older, the most energizing part of my day is the beginning, the most exciting stage of a project is the launch. Starting is energizing.

The best part is that by being present in every moment, we can take hold of our action and mindset so that we're always at the beginning. College freshmen aren't the only ones for whom the world is an oyster, they just believe it is more than the rest of us. Once we get hyped for beginning, we lose focus on the boring parts of life and see the pearl in our stories again.

At the intersection of realizing these three lessons sits the real magic of college and the first year experience. College freshmen who understand that when they walk onto their campuses are wildly successful both on campus and after it. I can't help believing that success in any stage in life lies somewhere near that intersection as well. 

Eco-social

When does a brand that does social media change into a social brand? When an ecosystem is born. A single marketing team, especially a lone social media intern, cannot drive enough connection with consumers to make a brand social. Once every department in a company works to be socially innovative, the parts become greater than the whole and multi-platform energy creates measurable synergy. The most successful firms earn their reputation through pervasive innovation, let's take a  quick look at Nike as an example. 

Nike's brand is undoubtedly powerful because the company as a whole works diligently to innovate and connect new media to new products. Its FuelBand is a totally social product that turns every user into a brand advocate on and offline. Nike's work with Twitter campaigns, Facebook conversations, YouTube user experiences, and its own website traffic work with the FuelBand to advance its central brand message that everyone with a body is an athlete. 

The functionality of the FuelBand integrates social beyond the tried and true platforms. A partnership with Microsoft's XBOX platform's Kinect system makes possible social gaming with the FuelBand as centerpiece. The product team was obviously thinking social throughout the entire development cycle. The FuelBand is making a real impact, selling out within minutes, because it works upon a dynamic ecosystem. 

Social isn't something your firm does, it is what your firm must be. Companies that internalize that can change the world. 

The Branding Game

Whoa. I just witnessed the ending to maybe the best video game I've ever played—BioShock Infinite. The game topples the typical stereotypes of the entire video game genre; it doesn't dull the player's mind, it doesn't divorce them from reality, it doesn't incorporate obvious game structure. Infinite steps out of the gamer box and digs a flag into the ground declaring itself a pioneer legitimizing the art form games can be. What makes BioShock so great are the same things that make social brands remarkable.

The basics are done so perfectly that they get out of the way. Players don't notice load screens, glitches don't freeze the game, the environment looks realistic, the physics makes sense—the fundamentals for a believable world are so sturdy that the game actually delivers a universe that immerses the player. Similarly, a socially active brand should master platforms and strategy so well that the customer doesn't even notice them and gets to business falling in love with the brand.

The characters are meaningful because they develop, they are round. BioShock only introduces characters it intends to develop and even the most shallow characters within the story are fleshed out with back stories that fit perfectly within the overall narrative. Likewise, we should imagine company a an imaginary person, a brand is their personality—the character customers will get to know. The most powerful brands are like characters within an epic: they reflect and ultimately impact the cultures in which they develop, they celebrate the legend of their founders, and they champion a core mission. Turn a brand into a character that interacts consistently with customers among social and traditional media and watch consumers fall in love. By the way, customer love doesn't just echo across Twitter, Facebook, Pintrest, and other social media—it puts dollars on the balance sheet.

The story is extraordinary because it is about the player, as a person, in the real world. BioShock is remarkable because it challenges the player to reconsider their own decision making and moral barometer. Its story is always about the player. Seth Godin mentioned that the central character of the brand's story isn't the brand itself, but the people who interact with it. To relate to my above example, the customer could be the hero or the damsel in distress, but they should never observe from the sidelines.

A Great, Big, Beautiful Persona

There's no one in class. My rhetoric of written communications class is more like a scene from a Western saloon than a coveted class section at UGA. I'm almost certain a tumble weed just rolled across the front of the room. I bet the same is true of the workplace—nobody wants to get down to work.

Why are so many of my peers playing hooky? I blame the weather. Georgia is thawing from an extended Winter and people across the state are fleeing conditioned air for the warm sunshine and soft grass. Behind the indoor exodus is the assumption that work is intrinsically boring. But that's only  true if students are shackled to a desk and employees are caged in cubicles to perform mundane tasks and satisfy social constrictions. A quick step outside our work-time paradigm introduces us to a new reality in full bloom.

We can unlatch ourselves from work we hate if we redefine our jobs. Instead of a student in this classroom, I consider myself a keeper of secrets—the sole surviving scribe of a forgone people set out to preserve knowledge upon this Earth. Likewise, a public accountant could redefine her job to be a champion of fun in the office. A marketer would realize these redefinitions as new personas. Give yourself a more exciting persona, cultivate it, and see if it doesn't improve the quality of your life. 

Similarly, every brand should have a strong, identifiable, and relatable persona across online media. Just as you give yourself an upgrade with a well defined persona, consider your brand a person and give him or her a persona promotion. Users will love it and your boss will love your engagement. 

End It

Is social media the place to get your acquaintances to adopt sweeping social change? Is it the forum to  advocate human rights and environmental awareness? Should we really tell Facebook everything that's on our mind?

Social media lobbyists within the EndIt movement and the same sex equality camp argue yes to all of the above. They envision a bright tomorrow in which the collective shout of social statuses whirl the gears of Congress to action. But do social campaigns hurt or help their parent cause? How should human rights activists inform an unfamiliar public or how should gay-rights supporters encourage their peers to relax their views on traditional marriage?

As social media allows everyday interpersonal and group dynamics to enter a huge stage, the choice for x-rights movements to take that huge new audience by storm and at little cost seems obvious. The councern is that the social space cheapens their meaning.When seventy five red equal signs pop up on a news feed within an hour, sure they get our attention but do they get our respect? And when our friends silence their online activity fro a day with a blacked out profile picture but still "like" a Spring Break album, do we really take their cause seriously? We don't because we assume that hey don't either.

As easy as it is or social movements to take well formulated and heartfelt stances upon new media, it is just as easy for the uniformed and minimally involved masses to adopt their slogan. These late-comers may not care about the issue enough to do more than change a profile puictue and post a status—while that does plenty for the campaign's reach, those individuals' personal brands and haphazard social advocacy could create negative sentiment for the previously respectable campaign.

So Dr. Seuss's old message is again made clear—"be who you are and say what you feel. Because the people that mind don't matter and the people that matter don't mind." As social movements ebb and flow through social media, we should resist the urge to "like" them or adopt their slogan unless we are real advocates. Those causes deserve informed support and if we instead give indifference, we cripple their brand.