Ian M Rountree

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Archives for February 2011

No One Cares Unless You Hit Publish

February 22, 2011 by Ian 1 Comment

You care as much about how many draft posts I have in the pipe about as much as I care about the colour of your pocket lint.

Until I hit publish – until I ship – those posts are vapour, meaningless.

“It’s easy for you to blog,” you tell me. “You’re a blogger.”

So what? Tautologies are almost uniformly excuses. It’s easy for a Black Belt to kick ass, she’s a Black Belt! It’s easy for Darren Rowse to make money blogging, he’s a professional blogger!

Bullpucky. Just hit the button.

Yes. Sometimes, it won’t work. Some ideas aren’t for everyone. Some analogies won’t make sense. But until you publish, how can you learn what does work? Instructive failure it better than phantom success. It’s incredibly freeing to know how much you suck – it’s a great platform to build success on top of.

In other words, Reductio Ad Godinum – Ship it or fail.

Got it? Good. Now go publish something.

Filed Under: Content Strategy Tagged With: Blogging, godin berry, publish, seth godin, social media, writing

The Future of Media – Dowager Shadow

February 21, 2011 by Ian 2 Comments

I’m writing a novel. But it won’t be Tor, Orion, or Bantam Press publishing my work; it’ll be me.

Chris Brogan just dropped a perfect opportunity for me to hold myself to account here. You see, I’ve missed my deadline for having the promotional site for the book up. It was supposed to be finished on February 2nd, with some content available to act as a teaser for the actual volume coming in summer. Nearly a month late, I still have 10 hours of work to do on the promo site, and no time budgeted to it.

Before you finish reading this, jump out and read/ watch Chris’ video post, The Future of Media.

Back? Good. Now I’ll explain.

The Dowager Shadow Promotional SiteThe Dowager Shadow, which I’ve spoken of before here, is a fantasy fiction parallax that has been where I’ve put most of my energy for the last four years. It started making its way from ongoing roleplay to novel with 2008’s National Novel Writing Month – my co-author Leila and I smashed the 50k word barrier easily, and immediately had what amounts to a full first volume of book.

Last year, I began publishing the novel as a serial – you can still read some of it on dowagershadow.com until I get the new site up, but I warn you, the manuscript has seen a lot of editing since then.

Here’s what you’ll see once the new site is actually up, and I’ve got the manuscript finished and produced:

  • The first volume will be available for purchase as an eBook, with built in interactivity like an appendix, maps, and other information.
  • In addition to each volume, there will be a few rounds of shorter stories available for free through Pay With a Tweet. This will take care of some of the promotion of the book.
  • Each subsequent volume will be released in two ways: stand-alone purchase, or bundled with the previous volumes, each of which will have been updated with information pertinent to the new volume.
  • There will be a print version, produced through a self-publisher, which can be ordered alongside the eBook. I’m aiming to have two production runs per year for the physical artifact.

It sounds like a lot, but it’s really no more work than this blog.

Building interactivity into a book is a very new media thing. It’s the kind of thing that’s going on all over the place. Usually, though, it’s products like Digging Into WordPress. However, given the success of products like DigWP, and the many thousands of well produced eBooks out there, I can’t help but see this kind of thing as the future of media.

We’re going far beyond the entrepreneurial journalism that blogging has been for the last decade, and moving into an era of entrepreneurial publishing of all flavours. That, I believe, is the future of media.

Filed Under: Content Strategy Tagged With: books, business, chris brogan, dowager shadow, fiction, media, media production, publishing, the-web, writing

Your Klout Score Means Nothing

February 19, 2011 by Ian 8 Comments

It’s not that it doesn’t mean anything – it’s that it actively means “nothing”.

For something to have meaning, you’ve got to be able to use it. Meaning, strictly speaking, applies to what’s done with a thing, or a piece of knowledge. Anything with ‘meaning’ must directly apply to something else. So; a score, made by an algorithm, has no strict meaning until applied. This is as true of Klout as it is of your Twitter follow count, the number of Friends you have on Facebook, or the number of recommendations you get on LinkedIn. Meaning requires application.

Sure, according to my Klout profile, I’m a 58. That’s nothing to sneeze at… Or is it? Could it be that, even in this semi-limited, pseudo-meaningless platform, there are some indicators of how a person behaves, how they prefer to communicate, and how you can learn how they do their work so you can better yours?

Now, this week’s #usblogs topic is supposed to be about online and offline klout, but I want to focus on a few meaningful uses for the Klout score and it’s associated meta-data first, before we talk at all about offline klout (which is far less well documented, and thus harder to quantify). Offline clout may come later, or may not. Partly because real-space communities have far different parameters to online ones.

When I look at a Klout score, I see an aggregate that equates to the curtain behind which hid the Wizard of Oz.

When I look at a Klout profile, like my own for example, I see:

2011-02-19-KloutBreakdown

Klout displays a graph of activity to go along with the Score metrics it displays.

This is the base range of information that comes beside a Klout score. Most people pay attention to the three numbers beside the Score itself – I almost never do. Under these, the badges, are much more informative regarding a person’s real activity. Number of list memberships, unique retweet count, total retweets, total comments – these show not only the wattage of a person’s activity online, they show the depth and consistency of that activity over time.

Yes, these numbers contribute to the aggregate of the Klout score, but the mix of badges you see matches strongly the kind of person you’re looking at. For example, this graph shows an even level of “Total Retweets” and “Unique Retweeters” – this tells me that the individual messages I’m sending are getting some traction among a broad range of people, but that traction has little depth.

Based on this graph, and the information relationships within it, I can adjust my actions in the future, if I want to (for example) learn how to create messages that gain depth as well as width of interaction. In this way, my score means nothing, but my profile is a learning tool.

2011-02-19-KloutMatrixIn addition to the activity graph, Klout displays an Influence chart.

Take a look at the people on this chart. Do they match who you’d expect to be influencing me? Better still, do they match who you’d expect me to have influenced? I mean – yes, Mark, Chris, Amber and Matt have an effect on me. They legitimately influence me. But David McGraw? Really? An outlier, clearly.

Klout believes I’ve influenced my web host, MediaTemple. That interests me. In part because it’s an outlier, like David is. In part, because it’s amusing.

It also tells me where on the social chart I fit against my peers. The little orange dot on the graph is me. I’m a socializer. If I got a little more broad in my topics, I’d be a thought leader. I take issue to the idea that thought leadership is measurable on a chart, but these are the terms they’ve chosen to represent people – and by and large, they’re accurate.

The Influence chart can be used to give you a sense of what kinds of relationships the person whose profile you’re reading has. Do they interact with highly professional people, or highly social ones? Is there a broad mix of specialties represented, or a wide mix of opinion? Is there a tendency to focus solely on their own area of expertise, and disregard anything else coming into the mix?

At the end of the day, what you do with any of this data is what gives it meaning. A 60 Klout twitterati is not automatically more influencial than a 45 Klout socializer – unless pure wattage is all you care about. And, honestly, if all you care about is a bigger megaphone, you’ve lost the social media game already.

Keeping focus on what’s important is a good idea when conducting research and analysis, whether you’re doing so before, in the midst of, or after any marketing or business activity. Focusing on the wrong data, like a Klout score alone, can lead to terminal myopia.

No matter the numbers you’re looking at, making sure the numbers match the need is important. Do yourself a favour and look beyond that big orange number at the top of the screen.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Blogging, blogs, commentary, community, klout, online, social media, sociology, the-web, usguys

The NOW Revolution – A Guide For New Businesses

February 18, 2011 by Ian 13 Comments

Viewing this on a feed, or having trouble seeing the video? See the original article, or watch the video on YouTube.

The NOW Revolution is one of those books that’s approachable by a broad audience, applicable in a wide variety of situations, and instantly appealing from page one. These three qualities alone make it worth buying.

There’s a lot about this book I liked. However, there was one thing that stuck out as a little weird. Throughout the book, there are an array of Microsoft Tags – proprietary QR codes – which direct the reader to further meta-data about the book. While I think this is perfectly appropriate for the book’s subject, it’s a choice made on behalf of the audience; to get everything the book has to offer, you’ve not only got to be savvy enough to understand how, when, and why the Tags are there (they are explained in the beginning), but also be willing to install an app on your smartphone to read the tags themselves. I delayed doing so, in fact, in order to finish the book quickly and not rabbit-hole in the meta data.

Despite this hiccup, The NOW Revolution picked up the ball where other, more theoretical books left it off.

The book really begins to shine, though, around Shift 3. By the time you’ve built the bedrock of your new business, and found some talent you can trust, you’ll be prepared to organize your new armies to do good in the world.

You should go buy The Now Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business. It’ll help you really dig into setting up the scaffolding you need in order to make the most of the current, super-connected business landscape.

If you’re still struggling with the idea, read Six Pixels of Separation and Trust Agents first, in that order. Once you’re done those, and have the NOW Revolution well studied, read Inbound Marketing.

Disclosure: I got the book through the authors’ blogger review promotion. I was sent two copies of the book, on the proviso that I review the book (good, bad or ugly) and give one copy away in an interesting way.

How you can get my second copy of the NOW Revolution…

I believe in using social tools for social good. So, I want to see how much good can be done by means of social media.

Leave a comment here. I’d like to hear your ideas for how we can make businesses smarter, faster, and more social. In particular, I’d like to know what you think of using social business for social good. Is your business involved in charity of any kind? What do you think of using your wattage as a business to benefit social causes? If you’re in a position to make this kind of action through your business – will you? Or, if not, why?

The winning comment will also have a donation made for the cost of the book, to the charity of their choosing. Now. What can we do with this social media thing?

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: amber naslund, book review, books, connected commerce, jay baer, now revolution, social business, social media

#TEDxMB un-Wrap-Up

February 16, 2011 by Ian 2 Comments

I had the extreme honour of being part of the Modern Earth Tweet Team covering TEDx Manitoba yesterday – Susan Hurrell and I spent 12 hours yesterday with our duelling laptops doing the platform journalism on Twitter for the event.

Susan Hurrell and Ian M Rountree - Modern Earth Web Design Tweet Team - TEDxManitoba
Susan Hurrell and Ian M Rountree – Modern Earth Web Design Tweet Team – TEDxManitoba

But, I can’t talk about it. Not properly. Not yet. My head is still swimming a bit, from lack of sleep, 12 hours of extreme Twitter goodness, and a number of fantastic talks.

If you want to get a sense of how it went, though…

The Modern Earth Facebook page has some pictures from the event in a #TEDxMB Photo Album.

Check out the What The Hashtag stats and see the transcript. We owned the trends in Manitoba, were number 2 in Canada for the majority of the day, and got into the top 40 trends in Canada according to Trendsmap. More than 1200 tweets were sent with the tag #TEDxMB on the day, from more than 200 participants, from 5 countries on 4 continents. We’ve got tweets from Canada, the US, Hong Kong, Ghana, and Guatemala.

To put that in perspective, that’s fully one third of this week’s #blogchat activity, or two #tweetdiners, with a very niche audience, a closed attendance list, and a livestream. Very little non-new-media promotion before the event, and mostly guidance from the Tweet Team and those on the volunteer crew who were digging in as well. Not too shabby.

The Winnipeg Free Press’ Melissa Martin wrote up a pair of great recaps, as well as an article about “Fast Flying Ideas at Conference” relating the nature of the event’s speed.

UPDATE: I don’t know how I forgot to mention, but I also met Kevin Hnatiuk, Leanne Havelock, Lisa MacKenzie, Ryan Caligiuri, Matt Shepherd, Kevin Glasier and Erica Glasier at the event, and made a point of saying hi to David Pensato again – all of whom I follow and most of whom I’ve spoken to for some time on Twitter. I’ve met many people I’ve known online before, but never so many at a single event.

I’ll say more when I can. Promise.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: #blogchat, #tedxmb, event notes, events, journalism, modern earth, new media, notes from, platform journalism, tweet team, work

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