Ian M Rountree

Copywriter, Project Manager, Digital Marketing

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Content Strategy

Creating content for a website isn't enough - making your ongoing content development work requires strategy. From editorial calendars to information architecture, strategic content creation increases the power of websites.

What If It’s the Only Way?

July 5, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

What if the only way to fix worldwide poverty is to abandon the idea of consumer credit?

What if the only way to cure cancer is gene splicing humans with animals?

What if we can’t escape, as a race, to other planets before our planet dies?

We never ask many of these questions, not because we don’t think of them, but because they’re incredibly hard to answer. But why? There have to be alternatives, we tell ourselves – there must be possibilities. There are unknown quantities in so many sciences, unknown variables in so many others – how can we possibly believe that there is ever a situation with only one solution?

Because we’re scared, most of the time, that we’re not thinking of things in the right way, and that there are blocks to our perceiving appropriate alternatives. Does this make us less valid as humans?

How about these:

What if social media is not the panacea for business we think it is?

What if democratization of media is a bad idea?

What if we can’t make every business survive?

What if you don’t have a future as a public speaker?

The best thing to do when faced with a question that amounts to “What if it’s the only way?” isn’t to accept an answer.

The best thing to do is to ask a different question.

Filed Under: Content Strategy

#ReadItAll Week 2011 – The Sequel!

June 13, 2011 by Ian 1 Comment

Last July, Justin Kownacki and I offered the Read it All Week challenge – to see what kind of effect forcing yourself to work through everything in your RSS reader queue would have on your personal media production, on your work habits, and on your life in general.

The question is simple; does consuming all of this media actually give you the benefits you think it does?

This year, in light of the fact that I’ve gained about 50 blogs over my pre-Read It All number last year, I’m going to suggest the same a little early. Starting now, I’m on an impromptu #ReadItAll experiment.

Want to join in? Thought you’d never ask!

Here are the guidelines for #ReadItAll Week:

Preparation:

  • Mark All As Read right now – This isn’t a week for catching up, it’s a week for staying on task, or getting ahead, with your reading.
  • Set aside some time every day to read. Maybe it’s an hour before work; maybe during lunch; maybe just before bed. Maybe all of these.
  • Assess which physical media you’ll be including in this experiment. Magazines, newspapers, news television – whatever you include normally, be sure to add that to your planned list.
  • Catalog your current content commitments. Even if its just a number, write out the amount of media you’re planning to attempt to keep up with. For example, my week will consist of [x] blogs in Google Reader, [x] hours of news television/radio, [x] podcasts and [x] print media.
  • Mark the time, if you like, by reposting these guidelines to your blog if you have one. Letting people in on the process is a big part of any experiment.

During The Week:

  • Actually read everything. Getting to “Reader Zero” is a noble task, but it requires that you actuallyread everything to assess its value.
  • Resist the urge to subscribe to new blogs, just for this week. Bookmark new sources for review later, by all means, but consider that adding the commitment to new sources in mid-experiment changes the nature of the work.
  • Take notes, if it helps. By all means, keep a running log of the experiment – I’ll be using #ReadItAll on Twitter to mark my observations.

Wrap-Up (Post experiment):

Examine the effects of the week on your reading. Did you keep up? Did you fall behind?

Mark your experiences with a follow-up post on Monday, June 20th.

And, of course, let people know! Tell us how the challenge worked out, how much you found that was useful, how many bookmarks you set. Now’s your chance to talk about your research process – or even just the experience of media consumption – with that critical voice you always avoid.

Welcome. And, good luck.

Filed Under: Content Strategy

Setting Expectations

May 12, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

Playground Ages 2-5 - Sadie Hernandez | Flickr

If you’re serious about keeping your business human in the face of social media, you need to set expectations.

Not just for yourself – but also for your clients, employees, and employers. Everyone functions better with expectations set.

Your clients need to know when you’re available – and when you’re not. This one’s easy; hours of operation are almost universally respected. Put them on your website, your Facebook page, your Twitter profile – anywhere they might be helpful.

Your employers need to know that when you’re at work, you’re at work. No personal Facebook or Twitter time, unless your personal brand is part of your job description. Your boss has a reasonable expectation that you’ll be mentally and emotionally invested wherever you’re physically located. Conversely, if you workshift, you need to keep your employer apprised of things that limit your working hours. Just because you’re on your computer doesn’t mean you’re working, ready to work, capable of working,or willing to work.

Where this gets complicated is as a leader.

Leadership – yes, you, you’re a leader somewhere – needs to be responsive to the needs of client and employee alike. Leaders need to know when their people can work, and when they cannot. We get that, right? But what about the subtle problems of being a leader who perhaps works more than their troops?

Leadership needs to not set the bar at 2am email flurries.

Leadership needs to not set the bar at retroactive enforcement.

Leadership needs to live by the same rules of engagement that everyone else does.

Even if you tell your people you don’t expect them to work as hard as you do, they’re going to try. They’re going to feel like they’re inadequate sometimes when they can’t spend sixteen hours on a project in one sitting.

Until they understand that their work habits are theirs, and your work habits are yours, your excellence has the hidden opportunity to make people feel like they are less.

And that’s a bad situation to be in. So, please, ask for an end of day response with that 2am email. Tell your people to go home on the weekends. If there’s a shower in your office, turn off the water on holidays. Convince your people that you expect them to take care of themselves.

Or not. Maybe your people work harder than you do. Do they? You’re so lucky. Oh man are you ever.

Unless they worry that they’re working harder than you, and you’re slacking off like a boss. That’s not a good place to be in. Do something about that.

Being awesome has a lot of requirements. One of them is making sure people know when and how they can be awesome too.

Let’s all be awesome together. Who’s with me?

Filed Under: Content Strategy, Social Media Tagged With: community, courage, futureproof, human business, human cost, human resources, human talent

Blogging With Rock Skis On

May 6, 2011 by Ian 4 Comments

Rocky Mountain Chills - Zach Dischner | Flickr

When I was learning to ski for biathlon in the mid-nineties, I didn’t start with expensive, awesome tools.

My first skis weren’t full-capped Rosignols, my first boots weren’t high-end Solomons. My skis, boots, and poles were hand-me-downs. We called these hand-me-downs rock skis because they’d been chewed up with use, and having lost bits of their undersides to rocks on the nearly off-season tracks at the end of the previous year. They sucked – but using them convinced me I was worth better tools.

I spent the first season on that hand-me-down set of equipment, struggling through every foot of snow. Don’t even get me started on my rifle – cadet issue vostock .22 caliber rifle, the only left-sighted rifle the squadron had. It was a pain to sight in, and had a single-shot action, which meant I lost time reloading for each shot manually.

Learning to succeed without the benefit of skill-enhancing tools is important. I worry that not as many people go through this process as used to  especially for creating media.

When bloggers are new to the game these days, they’ve got access to ways to make themselves immediately awesome, like;

  • Premium themes
  • Self-hosted wordpress blogs
  • All the tutorials you could want
  • Expert advice in a plethora of LinkedIn communities, Facebook groups, and paid areas like ThirdTribe and Blog Topics
  • Plugins like ScribeSEO to handle their editorial foibles
  • With just a couple hundred dollars, today’s media creator can look like they’re launching the next Problogger or Copyblogger – whether they can back up the awesomeness of the design and platform with their content or not.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing.

Being able to set ourselves up to create excellence from day one is awesome – however, it’s incomplete as an experience. Some of the best bloggers out there have been around for a long time – experience counts for some of their innate awesomeness, but there’s another part that comes from having started with rock skis.

When I started blogging in the late nineties, all we had was LiveJournal. What we now call RSS, back then was LJ’s friends system. Those of us who spent a lot of time creating content created what we called a ping-free environment; because computers weren’t that great at running a lot of programs, we’d turn on Winamp, and turn off our messengers, and just write. By having nothing but our soundtracks and our text boxes available to us (we didn’t even have tabbed browsing back then – the horror), we were blogging with rock skis on. We were working with the best tools available, and gaining very specific skills because of that.

We can sill blog with rock skis today, if we try!

Some of the best new bloggers I’ve seen began on wordpress.com or blogger, before moving on to bigger and more extensible platforms. Working with these very tightly specified tools is like learning to write with the AP guide – you’ve only got so many chances to look awesome without artificial reinforcement, and you have to take every opportunity to be recognized as doing good work.

Blogging with rock skis on these days has to be intentional – the way not going out and buying a brand new set of Solomon boots is for new biathletes.

I’m not advocating for every would-be blogger to deprive themselves of great tools. However, there’s only so far those tools can take us without knowing what their functions are, and where the enhancements are actually coming from.

Every so often, turn off all the perks – write the hard way, ping-deprived – and see how much you can improve your practices with some rock skis.

How far can we take this improvement? What do you think?

Filed Under: Content Strategy Tagged With: blogger, Blogging, history, history lessons, livejournal, ping-free, rock skis, tools, training

4 Important Blogging Voices (And When to Use Them)

May 2, 2011 by Ian 1 Comment

Bearded Lady by Steve Jurvetson | FlickrOne of the debates bloggers suffer under is the debate over Voice.

If you work for a company, do you act the company puppet, and portray yourself as all business, all the time? Do you go rogue and make yourself heard as a source on the inside lines?

What we forget is that each blog post is its own entity – less like chapters in a book, and more like articles in a magazine.

Whether we think of ourselves as journalists (and have/have not the training to back such claims up), we’re writing serialized, informative, timely content. Whether it’s journalism or not makes no difference; we’re serializing our information. Serialization means we have an opportunity for granularity that authors of books do not.

We can make our voice anything we want, every time we hit publish.

What’s important is not just the overall purpose of your blog – as a corporate tool, as a customer service or announcement vehicle, as an industry-improvement vector… All of these are important and valid purposes to have a blog, and all of them have best-practice voices to go along with them. However, that doesn’t mean every blog post must read the same as the last. We, unlike reporters and classical journalists, aren’t tied to the AP Guide (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

What’s more important is knowing the varieties of voice available to you, and choosing the ones that work for each post – and for each author’s writing style.

Not every blogger has the stunning clarity to write the Voice of Record the way a historian would. Creating a Voice of Record article takes fact-checking, research, attention to detail, and a declarative bent to your prose that we’re not all comfortable with. However, sometimes it’s necessary. If you’re announcing a change in pace for your blog, a new product or service, or otherwise managing expectations, the Voice of Record is an important skill to own. However, it’s also the most misused; bloggers attempt to be authoritative by writing in the declarative voice, often making statements unsuited to being taken as fact. While this isn’t a sin, per se, it’s a bit like using a hammer to put a screw in place; it’s a misuse of a powerful tool, and might cause damage if not finessed just the right way.

Similar to the Voice of Record is the Voice of Opinion – which is what most bloggers default to, if they’re conscious of their place as knowledge leaders in their fields. Even if they’re not on a leadership track, the use of Voice of Opinion is a good way to make it known where you stand on an issue. When used well, it allows you to connect with your reader, to encourage agreement and subdue dissent – and, over all, displays your informed bias towards a practice, product, or platform. Opinion is powerful, but when expressed too strongly, or without a disclaimer of bias, can be mistaken for the Voice of Record. The challenge is not to confuse the two, or to allow one to sound as if it’s masquerading as the other.

Making statements in an authoritative voice isn’t the only way a blogger can become an authority.

One of the less-used styles, the Voice of Instruction can take your readers on a journey to better knowledge, while declining to make statements over preference or declaring value. By acting in the teacher’s role, a blogger has an opportunity to foster innovation and interest in a subject, passing on enthusiasm as much as knowledge. One side-effect of this is unconscious acceptance of the blogger’s word as authoritative; while learning, a reader must accept the teacher’s statements, even temporarily, as writ in stone. The unfortunate counter to this is that if a reader is inherently critical, all instruction will be lost, and skepticism can turn public very quickly. Instructive Voice can be a great boon, but it can be hard to recognize. Look to tutorial blogs for this; the writers in spaces where instruction is necessary almost all become successful because of their passionate, yet non-biased portrayal of hard-won knowledge.

The last bastion of the blogger should be the Personal Voice. Not just because no one needs to hear what your dog had for supper, but because if you write in appropriate voice most of the time, your own personality will come through. People will get to know you based on the information you share, and the way in which you share it. If you’re an extroverted, dynamic person – write like your hair is on fire if you don’t get people excited. If you’re an introverted, introspective person – rely on fact and detail as your greatest road to achievement. Not everyone has to be excitable.

Personality is more than writing structure.

Changing things up is good. If you catch yourself in one-too-many catch phrases per week, or even per month, it’s probably time to change up your voice. We can’t all become a blogging Muad’Dib overnight, but with practice, you’ll get the hang of intentionally wrapping a voice around any subject you choose to write about.

Filed Under: Content Strategy Tagged With: Blogging, blogs, practice, the voice must flow, voice, writing styles, writing voice

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