Ian M Rountree

Freelance Copywriting and Digital Marketing

Grudge Purchases

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Grudge Purchases
Not trendy, but probably effective.

I often wonder, riding the bus home, whether its intentional that all the advertisements I see on the bus are for “grudge purchases” or services.

Debt relief. Chewing gum. Public service messages about abuse. Last choice jobs.

I’m certain the collection of sentiments isn’t intentional at all, but it is curious. After all, with all the sexy businesses like web services, marketing agencies, and real estate moving into the social web – there’s a gap that has to be filled, and these businesses are taking the opportunity where it exists.

Wait… Why aren’t these businesses doing social media again?

It’s an opportunity thing. Where’s the space to talk about insurance – a grudge purchase if there ever was one – in the midst of all the Occupy Wall Street furor? How could a debt relief agency find the air time to make a dent in people’s awareness as anything other than yet another tag-along subject?

So, if you can’t do social or inbound marketing, what do you do?

You find captive audiences. On the bus – or any other public transit – you’re a certain kind of captive audience. There isn’t much to look at if you’re used to your city. The road might be too bumpy to reliably read a book. Your eyes end up wandering – you people watch, you try to look out the window, but eventually you’ll probably catch sight of the ad banners just overhead.

Their job isn’t to make insurance look sexy – grudge purchases never are. Their job is the same as the simple (and occasionally described as insipid) app Yo – a weak smile and wave from across the street, just to remind you these services exist.

It can’t be tracked. ROI’s hard to calculate. So why do they still exist?

Stab in the dark? Even when your business is based on reliability and pacing – and not explosive profit and innovation – remaining in motion and maintaining that pace is important.

Because “what else would we do?” is still a valid argument, and similarly, doing nothing is not an option.

Absence Explanation and Going Forward

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I like mountains
I like mountains

Why hello there. It sure has been a while.

The last time I wrote anything substantive here was over two years ago, and while I don’t expect that  most of you have hung on the silence waiting for some grand return, I have had enough questions from friends about “that blog I used to run,” that I feel like I should explain what happened. I won’t bore you with a lot of details, but it should explain a bit about why I’ve been so quiet.

There’s a TL;DR at the end, if you’re impatient.

The amount of free time I had changed.

The last two years have been very turbulent. Between changes in my family situation, living arrangements, falling out with some valuable people – leaving one job, not having a job, working for myself, then (recently) being brought on with a new agency (Hello Websites), there’s been very little time to constructively research my work, keep up on trends, and – overall – develop commentary that I felt would be of value here.

My relationship with social media also changed.

While my experience getting attention, growing a readership, and communicating with movers and shakers was valuable, it’s lost a significant amount of luster. I look back at the frantic pace I tried to keep, between managing twitter, Google+, a Facebook page which never ended up with traction (mostly because I barely cared about it), and so on… And none of it is terribly attractive.

I’ve lost my itch to get noticed as a person, to have a following. Because of this, my work is evolving in a positive way.

What does that have to do with this blog?

I used to feel as though I was making commentary here that was valuable to some people, and with all the many changes in priority the past two years have required, that commentary dropped right off the radar. I would expect this of anyone having a reasonably full life suddenly double in workload. Without expecting it, planning for it, or adjusting to it, the volume of things I needed to do elsewhere was vastly superior to the amount of care I had for keeping up with this blog, and balance my other social media involvement fell by the wayside as well.

My needs have changed, it’s as simple as that.

Does that mean I’m done blogging? Well, clearly I haven’t been – so I don’t think I can comment there. You’ll probably see some posts here and there, but they’re far more likely to focus on personal interest than business.

Does that mean this site will disappear? Not a chance. The archives here have entries more than a decade old, that’s nothing to sneeze at. However, changes will be happening.

Going Forward.

  • This site will be getting an overhaul, far more than just getting the new theme I threw on it today. I expect to put more emphasis on Page content than Blog content.
  • My other social media properties are getting some review. My old Facebook page has come down, and my Twitter account will probably get some attention. Others, such as LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google+ will get looked at as well.
  • You will be seeing new content here. In line with this site becoming a lot less about “my work” and a lot more about “my self” – there will eventually be a change in direction for posted content.
  • I’m happy to chat about the changes and the past year. Hit me up on Facebook or Twitter, or send me an email – I’m always here.

TL;DR:

If you’re subscribed, connected, following, favoriting, or what-have-you-ing this blog because I used to talk marketing and SEO, chances are the future will disappoint you. There’s a lot of commentary in those areas going around already, and I’ve simply lost interest in adding to the pot. My effort on that side is remaining with my daily work.

If you do feel like sticking around, however, even after this massive chasm of a sabbatical – thank you! I’ll probably start commenting on my field again eventually, but it won’t be the core focus of my personal website.

That’s all I’ve got. How have you been doing this year?

My Three Words for 2012

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It all Starts with the Foundation! - Armchair Builder - FlickrThis is my second year of intentional planning – last year around this time, I meditated on three words to live by, in the spirit of Chris Brogan’s personal planning regime.

While it may be more obvious to some of my friends than others, 2011 didn’t turn out as planned.

I intended to center the year’s work around the ideas of Platforms, Themes, and Seekers. Central to all of these was discovery; finding out what matters to me, how I can best work with it, and move forward. Unfortunately, finding out what matters also means deciding what things don’t matter, and why.

It’s been a turbulent year, for a lot of people.

While normally I’d let a statement like that stand – it bears saying that no one expected the year to be as it was. As a result of family changes, I quietly let my blog stagnate for the summer, electing to focus on more important things. When I tried to return in the fall, I was greeted by two suicides (Trey Pennington and Bruce Serven) which sharply affected both my view of “Winning at Social Media” and changed how I perceive a number of supposed leaders in the field. Both of these things told me quite clearly that higher volume often means lower clarity.

My aim for 2011 was building a bigger megaphone. For now, I’m glad I didn’t.

I’ve lost people. Important people. Not because of my work here – not because of any of you, be assured of that. However, it’s put into perspective exactly what I have been missing this year; attachment.

Less than a week before Trey Pennington took his life, I was diagnosed with depression. The message doesn’t get much sharper than that; begin fixing a problem, and immediately get shown what not fixing said problem can result in. Part of my absence from the online world has been because of a mid-year resolution to figure out the list of things that were causing my lack of engagement in my own life, and sequentially pick them all off. This is where the three words came in handy.

Bad themes mean having a good platform is important when seeking out problems.

Amazing how, even when we’re not expecting it, having a tool at our disposal makes the work easier. I was expecting to be highly productive, and well organized by way of my three words for this year. However, having the core ideas to fall back on in adversity made finding lessons a less daunting task.

I expect the same, or more, of my three words for 2012:

Relentless, Effective, Foundations

If 2011 was about uncovering areas for improvement, 2012 should follow as making those improvements. Once you’ve found the lessons, climbing atop them becomes a much more interesting challenge. So;

  • Foundations – Where it all begins. Reshaping any structure means looking at what the existing foundation can hold, and making changes where possible and appropriate. Without a solid foundation, Up simply isn’t possible.
  • Relentless – Lots of great work, sadly, ends after foundation building. Once you reach ground level, it’s easy to say – “There. My work is done. Let others build upon this.” There’s a place for this kind of thought; sadly, foundations are most often invisible (unless they begin to crack), so having the persistence to keep going – behaving as though you are unassailable and relentless in your pursuit of an ideal end result – makes vertical progress possible.
  • Effective – Once you’ve built yourself up, you don’t want to worry about how far you’ve come. Just as having a strong foundation, and making sure you continue the work is the beginning of progress, ensuring the work you do is effective is important to prevent sliding back into the morass of “starting over once again.” Personal effectiveness is difficult, but intensely rewarding.

There we have it. My goal this year is to make all my obstacles look bad.

What’s your goal for the year – and how can you sum it up in three distinct words?

The New-Clear Option – Scrapping my Google Reader

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Google Reader - Blank SlateI’ve done it, people. I’ve nuked my Google Reader. I just deleted 238 feeds, in less than six clicks.

Why?

Because I was tired of the noise.

Blogging often calls for a delicate balance of signal and noise. With more and more diverse bodies broadcasting, I’ve collected a long list of subscriptions over the years; from educational blogs to business feeds, web comics, architectural blogs, and more. Diversity, I’ve always thought, is important. After all, the secret of the universally interesting person is that they are universally interested.

I’m no longer sure this diversity serves me.

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been absent from my blog for most of the summer. A lot of things contributed to this – a move, a change in family situation, focus on my work and health over personal interest. But as the lions of summer calm, and I get back to the pace I’m comfortable producing at, I’m finding there’s very little to comment on any longer. Nothing in the feeds, as I’ve been working my way back into them, has inspired me to action. It’s not that everything is being said already – I’m slowly conquering my imposter syndrome – it’s that so many people are speaking so much, and saying so little.

Google Reader used to be my haven, my arc of knowledge. I dedicated fifteen to twenty minutes twice per day – on the commute to and from work – to chewing through every article I possibly could, skimming or starring for later reading between three and four hundred items. I’ve always been a voracious reader; this is what happens when you come from a highly cerebral family.

Unfortunately, with the shift in attitude the year has brought me, I’m now seeing the old list of rags as a hindrance. The noise has killed the signal.

So, where Read It All Week failed me (twice) – because I was working from a subtract-off model – I figure going blank slate on my Google Reader might save the experience. It’s fortuitous happenstance that I’m doing this the same week Google announced they’ve removed the social aspect of Reader. I’m hoping to treat the product the way I treat anything new I engage in; with measured optimism.

I’ve missed reading, and writing, in a significant way. While it may seem unfortunate that coming back to both means stress and adjustment, I can’t help but see this as a sharp opportunity to examine a habit I took as read for so long, and build better practices out of the work.

The questions then become; How are our habits serving us? What are we getting from them? How can we do things better with the tools we have?

What do you think?