Ian M Rountree

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Embracing Practice and Theory in Social Marketing

January 10, 2011 by Ian 5 Comments

In a typical paroxysm of brilliant insight, Amber Naslund posted what she called “one of those pensive posts [that needs a lot of thought]” on Sunday evening. The crux of the post was how theory can play a role in such highly action-sequence oriented fields like marketing – especially social media and content marketing.

As Amber says in the post, current social media advice is largely prescriptive; How To and 3 Steps To, and so on. This is beneficial to a point, but is it all we can do to move the work forward?

From her post – Elements of Knowledge and Embracing Social Media:

And in many ways, when you’re starting something new, that’s exactly what you want. The what and the how. Some understanding of what the established and familiar rules are, some guideposts to meter your own activities and behavior, and some reassurance that you’re headed in the “right” direction, or at least one that makes sense to you.

But when it comes to comprehension, there’s more than just the instructive side of the equation. There’s also understanding.

This is an important point, and one that I think needs some more elaboration and consideration.

The Case for Theory Before Practice

If school has taught us anything, it’s that there’s a use for having domain knowledge before practice begins. Just like we teach our kids (or try to), if something’s too hot to touch, there’s an effect from touching it regardless of cautions. Learning anything early that we can apply before negative happenstance can be helpful.

There’s also the possibility for analysis-in-the-moment, for anything we have knowledge of before practice. When something beneficial comes from what we might otherwise perceive as a negative action (for example, breaking up a flame war by making an explosive remark yourself), a theoretical understanding of human motivation and debate habits can be really helpful; with a theoretical knowledge to guide us, we might understand why that explosive comment worked to diffuse the situation, and another one might have made things worse.

The ability to understand the effects our actions might have can be hugely beneficial. The question is not whether theory has a place, but whether or not it should come first.

The Case for Practice Before Theory

In the Karate Kid, when Ralph Macchio is being taught to wax cars and paint fences, he spends a lot of time being annoyed that he’s not really learning karate. His sensei, Mr Miagi, smiles and fails to explain until much later. After weeks of labour and practice, finally the lesson becomes clear; the Kid was building muscle memory for the activities relevant to his required expertise.

Of course once the purpose of the practice is explained, there’s a blossoming of understanding. Having the muscle memory for the work that needs to be done makes the actual doing of the work so much easier. All that needs to be done in each instance is decide which skill to apply in which circumstance. This makes activity of any kind highly strategic – counter follows block follows jab and so forth. Natural progression and rhythm of action becomes easily apparent, for reasons entirely different to the in-the-moment analysis that those who learn theory before practice take advantage of.

But Which Should Come First?

And should it always be that way? Matt Ridings (@techguerilla) almost immediately responded with a question about why linear thought about theory and practice were such a big deal. It’s a good question; not everyone needs the muscle memory that comes from preemptive practice, and not everyone else can apply theory to their initial exploration of a task or domain.

I think there’s a case to be made for both directions, but it’s a case that has to be made on a per-instance basis. Some of us are polymaths, able to learn a huge variety of things easily. Some of us are intuitive learners, others kinesthetic. There is a huge variety of learning style out there – and it’s on the teachers, the instructors… The sensei among us to look for the signs that a student (hello, fellow grasshopper) can benefit better from one style of teaching than they can from another.

Before we can decide which style of teaching to employ, however, we need to define our theory. That, I think, goes far beyond just deciding who learns what better in what form.

Me? I’m going to do some more study. I’ve spent the last year playing karate kid – and I know, from how the year turned out, that I need more of that. My muscle memory isn’t as strong as it should be in some areas. However, I know I can’t survive on practice alone. Part of my work this year, I think, will be building some core theories out of observations of my own habits, and tending to the things that have succeeded.

What do you think? Where are you on the scale of theory vs practice?

Image by Woodley Wonderworks.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: amber naslund, blog measurement, Blogging, blogs, follow-the-linker, internet, learning, metahuman, practice, rant-alert, social media, sociology, the-web, Theory

Are People Actually Searching for Buzzwords?

January 8, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

Ever worry that Twitter is overtaking the blogosphere?

Well, it is. If you look at Google Trends and compare “blog” with “twitter” for search (like the screenshot below) you may think that Twitter has indeed taken over the search volume. However, looking at the numbers with a little more scrutiny, it’s entirely possible that searches containing “blog” are just as strong as it ever was, with Twitter accounting for more of the remaining available search statistics. This is probably a case of “everything is with, not instead of” (hat tip to Mitch Joel for that phrase).

Google Trends - Comparing Blog to twitter - Screenshot taken January 8th, 2011
Google Trends - Comparing Blog to twitter - Screenshot taken January 8th, 2011

Concerned that we’re too worried over Return On Investment?

This time last year, “Social Media ROI” was a massive idea – the concept of measuring the business value of human interaction is very appealing. but – was this because social media was on the rise? Or because people were more concerned with ROI itself?

Again, Trends gives us what we needed here – comparing Google Trends for “social media” with “roi” for search terms shows us that the latter saw very little overall fluctuation; our awareness of all things social media, however, increased very strongly. This of course must include ROI, as the social media ideal began to enter the business world.

Google Trends - Social Media compared to ROI - screenshot taken January 8th, 2011
Google Trends - Social Media compared to ROI - screenshot taken January 8th, 2011

It’s good to be aware of trends – but it’s also important that trends get some perspective. Scale, volume, and capacity don’t always mean the same things.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: analytics, blog measurement, Blogging, buzzwords, google trends, hack analytics, mitch joel, never mind the buzzwords, perspective, roi, social media, statistics, twitter

SEO for Bloggers – Simple Discovery Tricks

December 21, 2010 by Ian Leave a Comment

One of the things analytics nuts love to obsess over is the effectiveness of our posts.

Which ones have the most clout, where did they get it from? Is it better to have more comments, or more tweets? Does traffic help?

The answer is yes; all of this helps. Comments, traffic, tweets, inbound links – there are a lot of things that give pages weight. But, as our sites get more traffic and tweets and so on – how do we tell, in an ongoing way, which of our pages is doing better than the others over all?

Here’s a trick; do a google search for the headline of your blog. In my case, it’s my name.so I searched, no-caps, no-quotes. Here’s what I got;

Google search snippet for "Ian M Rountree"

Interesting, yes? A post about Google Buzz (which happens to be riddled with musical references) that got a sidelong mention on an industry podcast, followed by one about Facebook which has seen a decent amount of mentions, followed by the most spam-addled article on my site.

What’s missing; the most mentioned post I’ve ever had, the most commented post I’ve ever hard, and the most linked-to post in my archive.

Then, I tried something different. Because we’re looking specifically for my site, rather than the various higher-powered social media sites carrying my name through my profile, I searched for my name – and added my domain behind it.

Google Experiment - "Ian M Rountree" ianmrountree.com

Notable: the layout is much the same, but now carries some additions; namely, the Screwdriver article which is still my top search driving piece, my most recent non-throw-away post (this review of the awesome Standard Theme 2), and a very thoroughly-commented on post about Google and China. All of these have seen strong authority signals – but none of them have had the same mix of reaction.

By searching your way through your Google Analytics (you DO use an analytics program, right? Don’t make Uncle Avinash angry), and your blog’s admin interface, you should be able to pick out the weight and mix of things lending authority to the top pages these kinds of searches return.

Verdict? The mysterious ether powering your page ranks relies on a clearly diverse mix of authority signals.

The things we bloggers think of as clear indications of “victorious posts” are not the same as what search considers a winning mix of authority. Taking advantage of easy metrics and hacking your analytics are both important to figure out what’s working from more angles than just the social media connection.

Now – grain of salt time. A one-off experiment like this tells is very little, other than that some unexpected pages have high authority metrics. What will prove more interesting is, in 2 months, I plan to repeat the experiment with some better recorded metrics about the posts I’ve written between now and then. If the same unexpected results appear again, then we’ll really have something to think about.

Your assignment; replicate my experiment, report what you find. You’ll probably be surprised.

Filed Under: Content Strategy Tagged With: blog measurement, blogs, ego search, google, google analytics, hack analytics, search engine optimization, seo, seo for bloggers, success

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