Heroes and Villians.

The world needs more heroes. Sure Batman, Spiderman and Ironman are doing their thing in the movies but is Ironman going to get you through your week, including important meetings with the boss, that gym session you've been dreading, the senior management presentation or the family dinner with Uncle Joe that always ends in tears? We are constantly looking for role models, mentors and people to admire, making our sometimes humdrum dailies bearable and giving us the power to carry on through periods of stress and anxiety. More often than not, when it comes to our heroes, we look in the wrong places and more often than not, we are be disappointed.

So it came as a shock to read that Tom Hanks had been arrested for strangling and murdering five people in a drunken rampage, on his way to escaping into the Hollywood hills in a stolen Mercedes. A stolen Mercedes that had already been involved in a school crossing homicide, where Hanks ran down three children and a crossing guard. Who is left to admire if Tom Hanks has sunk so low, who is left to look up to if Tom Hanks is capable of such atrocity and how do we find another Tom to admire? People in Hollywood and as far afield as San Diego were aghast, commenting they had no one left to admire and respect, now that Tom had fallen from grace. For many, Tom was their last hope for a role model for their children, their relationships and their daily interactions at work.

Lance, Oscar, Lindsay, Tiger, Charlie, OJ, those guys from Enron and Opes Prime, not to mention Bernie Madoff, Martha Stewart, local boys like Alan Bond and Craig Thomson and a host of others, who have risen to power and money on the back of our trust and belief, are either facing charges, in jail or trying to live through the disgraced state of their past indiscretions. So who's left, who do we look to, who we admire, who do we approve of when it comes to bench marking attitudes, behaviour and social commentary. Now the last Hollywood hero has been debunked and we are left in limbo, in a vacuum when it comes to the archetypal example for our kids to admire, for us to deify as upstanding and courageous in the face of daily challenges.

Before Hollywood, before the Kardashians and before mass media became the beacon of societal mores, we had role models closer to home. We had role models in parents, work colleagues and high achieving friends. The problem arose when Mum and Dad became less exciting than the current high scorer in your favourite sport, or your work colleague just wasn't doing it for you like Lady Gaga was doing it for you. Sure the local models may not have been as shiny, as popular or or even as gifted when it came to texting inane messages to fill the tweetosphere but they had one important advantage over Lance and the rest of the fallen.

They were here, they were real and they cared about you. Time to flick the Who magazine and have a chat with your Dad, talk with the people at work who are making a difference to others and look closer at your inner circle. You'll be surprised who you can look up to.

PS. For the trusting, Tom didn't do all the bad things mentioned, although his next movie Cloud Atlas doesn't make up for all the previous good work.

Every picture tells a story.

The seminal 1971 album from Rod Stewart was all about painting pictures with music but it was much earlier we worked out pictures have the ability to convey abundantly more than what can be written on a page. The feelings a picture can convey is limitless and the phrase, "a picture is worth a thousand words", was given first accord to newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane when presenting to the Syracuse Advertising Men's Club in 1911. The saying was a mash up of many quotations attributed to advertising men, Confucius, Russian literature and old proverbs about ,"one timely deed is worth ten thousand words", "the drawing shows me at one glance what might be spread over ten pages in a book" and "that tear, good girl, is worth, ten thousand words".

Today research tells us a picture has the ability to position truth and trust when used with text, even when that is not the case. The theory behind this thinking has our brains more fully engaged and processing content more deeply because we connect the pictures to the words adding memorable learning and adding a layer of credibility. The theory behind the picture, is a complex idea can be conveyed with a single still image making it possible to absorb large amounts of data quickly. This sets up what the researchers call a "truth bias" in our brain, giving more credence to the text regardless of its content. University researchers have shown statements about celebrities being dead were considered more accurate when a picture of the celebrity was included, regardless of the accuracy of content. Samuel L Jackson can attest to this theory as he is often cited as being dead or dying, creating a Facebook out pouring of grief, as long as the story has his picture attached. Researchers pushed the "truth bias" beyond Hollywood when they stated "turtles are deaf" and found this was judged to be true as long as the text was accompanied by a picture of a turtle.

The influence of pictures on text cannot be denied and even neuroscientists have been tricked when a specialised case study given to the scientists was shown to be more credible with images of brain scan photos, even though those scans were not related to the conclusions. Words are commanding and the "pen is mightier than the sword" when it comes to literature but add an image and communication and messaging can be manipulated. So the take away from a neuro-marketing aspect, is all about adding credibility to your statements with images, especially if that imagery supports your claims and unfortunately, sometimes even when it doesn't.

So the next time you are in the supermarket or browsing a magazine, consider the text and images and judge if they really are aligned in message. Anti wrinkle cream with beautiful faces, unlimited Internet or phone access showing happy people chatting, hamburgers so big you need two hands to eat them, you can't trust them just because the "picture is worth a thousand words".

A cog or a lever?

There have always been threats of someone taking your job and doing it for less and there have always been threats your job could be outsourced overseas. These threats come from bad managers, inept companies, economic circumstances and a commoditisation of tasks. So you knuckle down, work hard, please the boss, don't take lunches and constantly look over your shoulder, in case it comes true. You wish you worked for one of those companies constantly on the best employer list, you day dream about winning the lottery and sometimes you turn the system on its head, using the threat as an opportunity.

Such is the case for a software developer working at Verizon, who we'll call Neville, as no doubt Verizon would want to keep his name out of any more media stories. Not one to be anxious about the Chinese threat to the developer world, Neville who was earning several hundred thousand dollars, decided to use some of his income to secure his employment record built on flawless performance reviews. He outsourced his job to a developer in Shenyang for $50,000 a year, giving Neville ample free time at work and still enough cash for a lucrative lifestyle.

Seems Neville enjoyed web highlights of cat videos, shopping on eBay, longer than usual lunches, connecting with his friends on Facebook and supporting the new capitalistic approach of a developing China. At the end of each day, having sat at his desk and given the impression the sweat off his brow belonged to the company, Neville would dutifully send through immaculate reports on what he had accomplished that day without his superiors knowing it was coming all the way from China. If this all sounds like a movie plot, that's just the way Verizon Risk Team member Andrew Valentine felt when he discovered irregularities on Neville's computer containing hundreds of invoices to a third party contractor in Shenyang. Seems Neville was clever enough to set up this system across several companies at the same time, allowing him to garner flawless feedback on work accomplished by his Chinese alter ego.

Unfortunately Neville is no longer employed at the telecom company but his legend lives on and he is likely missed, for his scintillating lunch time stories accumulated from hundreds of hours on the net, his ability to find time to help out others in the office, all the while maintaining work of the highest calibre. About now, many are looking around at others in the office, wondering at their capacity to produce vast amounts of work without raising a sweat or complaining about the work load. Is Joe in the corner all on his own or does he have accomplices in computer sweatshops?

Instead of thinking the worst and bringing out the worst in employees like Neville, companies need to foster office collaboration along the lines of Tony Hsieh and Zappos, who work hard on making everyone in the organisation responsible for working with everyone else. One of Hsieh's mantras is collisions, community, and co-learning, bringing his staff as close together as possible, even making things a little cramped and not hiding them behind partitions. He thinks this will ultimately make them smarter, happier and more productive and never ever have anyone considering their job is at risk of outsourcing or that they need to do a Neville.

As Seth Godin notes in his blog today, make your job individual so the thought of outsourcing never occurs to management, "the only alternative is to humanise our work. To create something that only you could have made, or said, or conceived of. When it looks and feels like you, when you are the trusted source, then you are on the spot, under pressure and deservedly valued".

Verbification.

We used to Xerox, we used to Hoover, we used to Superglue, we used to Whiteout and we used to Windex. Now we Google, now we Skype, now we FaceTime and we Photoshop. The "ubiquibility" (I've already used verbification, so why not keep making em up?) of brand names to enter the lexicon as everyday verbs has long been the aim of marketers everywhere who see this as the pinnacle of success. When a brand name becomes synonymous with a clearly defined use or action, the passage from noun to verb becomes complete. With thousands of brands created daily, it becomes more difficult to stand out and this is where marketing departments concentrate action on trying to "verbify" but sometimes no matter how much marketing you throw at the public, it doesn't add up, when was the last time you Binged something?

Today there are opposing arguments about the benefits of brand ubiquity to the extent of being "verbified" (we continue to play with the English language). Certainly the ability to become omnipresent helps the bottom line via sales of the product but if you lose control of your intellectual property, "genericide" ( losing the legal power of a trademark), can be an even bigger risk. Just because you say you will get some Kleenex or Windex or Aspros at the supermarket, doesn't mean you'll come home with those particular brands, after all how many tissue products are there and what is the difference between the dozens of headache tablets on display?

This is the problematic consequence companies like Xerox, who ran campaigns for publishers asking them to use the term "photocopy" instead of the brand name, have had to content with. Even Google, the fastest company to be "verbified" and admitted to the Webster dictionary as a verb, has maintained its "trademark is to be used as an adjective only, never as a noun or verb, and never in the plural form. Always to have a generic term following the trademark, example: Google search or Google web search." In its approach, Google is trying to make clear that the action of "Googling" cannot be made without the proprietary product being used.

This now becomes the pinnacle of marketing success, where the brand verb gives you no option but to use the product. Some have success because they are market leaders and "I'll Facebook you" has no alternative but to use Zuckerberg's site, while others like FedEx work hard to differentiate themselves from the opposition so that "FedExing" can only mean using one service.

The discussions that lead on from brand ubiquity to individual marketing, so important in today's social media, have similar challenges and it is even more important to keep your intellectual property safe guarded, so your name, your brand doesn't become synonymous with something you don't want to stand for. "To do a Bradbury" has long been in the Australian vernacular, a verbalisation of being the unlikely winner of a contest and has come to mean more about keeping going and never giving up. Such is the power of individual "verbification". What are you good at?