Ian M Rountree

Project Manager, Copywriter, Digital Marketer

How To Get the Most out of Training

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Stop talking so damn much!

I’m learning an entirely new batch of knowledge almost on a daily basis in the new job. Loads about the differing languages of writing (content, copy, creative, technical and so on) as well as, naturally, SEO and other esoteric processes. But one of the things I’m finding is that trying to give input during learning really ruins the entire process.

I keep trying to give feedback. And it’s not helping.

It’s difficult for a lot of people to make sure that their instructors know they’re paying attention, without settling firmly in the camps of either (a) unhelpful “yes” and “I get it” answers or (b) overstating their reactions, or trying to apply too much of their existing knowledge to what they’re being taught that’s new.

It’s a hard line to draw in the sand for yourself, but being aware of the gap between those two camps, and finding ways to navigate the gap in a manner helpful to both you and your instructor, so you both know where you stand, and where there’s room for improvement.

The key can’t be just finding the right sensei.

You’ve got to embrace your inner grasshopper in a productive way. There’s no magic black belt (or in this case black tie) that suddenly aligns you with your best learning and response methods.

Remember, your inner grasshopper is your friend!

By the way, thanks for all the help over the last couple of weeks promoting and supporting The Dowager Shadow, everyone. It’s been a great help – the next chapter begins March 1st, and introduces the majority of the remaining cast. At least, on one side of the story. Action to follow!

Why People Can't Use Social Media For Business

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Ring a duck on FlickrIt’s possible that social media as a whole could be the best thing that ever happened for entrepreneurs, but you can’t make use of it because you don’t know how. You’re not alone, though – just about everyone telling you they can use social networks to grow your business on your behalf is probably just winging it.

There’s a massive divide between how people act when doing something for their business and what they’ll do in a personal stream. It’s the difference between doing a job yourself, working on the same job in a team, or doing a piece of work for a client – there’s a motivation gap, an interest gap and, unexpectedly for most people, an understanding gap.

We all know what works best for us. In theory. But even for entrepreneurs, the person we are and what works in our personal lives doesn’t always translate even into hobbies-turned-jobs.

We all know we shouldn’t turn hobbies into jobs. Social media and networking is no different.

I’m fairly good at making connections, but the method by which I do this in my private life is nothing like the method I’d have to use if I were working as a Director of Community or some other like job. And the work I’d be doing in that role is nothing like the work I’d have to do as an independent social media consultant for varied clients.

The difference isn’t in the work itself, it’s in the target.

People don’t scale the way technology does, this is pretty well established by now. So what possibility is there that your sincerity, gusto and pluck will translate well from your personal brand to a global brand? Slim to none, that’s what. Part of the problem is that you’re no longer representing yourself. You’re trying to represent a complex ideal subscribed to by dozens, perhaps hundreds or thousands of people all by yourself. Behaving like a human is a nice thought, and necessary, but following the practices a normal person does is impractical and overly time consuming.

Is there a better way?

If there is, I haven’t found it yet. In my promotion of The Dowager Shadow, I’m trying some fairly faceless promotional techniques, everything from Twitter to a Facebook page and some other advertising soon, but so far it feels like diminished returns after only two weeks of concerted tracking. Much of this comes from the  book itself being a part of myself, my life, how I conceive of my world. Making the jump from a labour of love to a business is a big deal, and it’s not something every labour of love needs, deserves, or can stand the strain of.

Have you considered, in your zeal to self-promote, that perhaps there simply is no ROI in social media for your situation?

Amazing Things: Writing Books

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CC Chapman wants to write a book. I’ll probably buy it when it comes out. Not just out of support; I like the way he thinks enough to acquire the souvenir.

CC, very determined, put the intention out in the smoke on a recent episode of Managing the Grey. But why write a book? Why put in all that extra effort to create a souvenir for people to host dust colonies on, or download onto their kindlePads? Why expend so much effort on such a huge timesink that may, or may not, make you any money, or get any attention, or even succeed enough on the long tail to get a second printing?

I want to write a book. I hope people buy it when it comes out.

Not just out of hubris, I legitimately hope the work I do excited people enough to earn their dollars. Even if most of those dollars go to other people, the owning of the souvenir, the ability to say I did something that made a splash with people enough to garner a near-permanent spot on their shelf. And that’s just the souvenir version.

What about the other options? Are they less viable?

There’s not really one way to write a book any more. More people are publishing eBooks, free or not. More people are creating serialized blogs. Scott Adams released a collection of his blog posts as a book a while ago. I’m publishing The Dowager Shadow roughly three pages a day as a blog, mostly because getting the writing out there is more important – to me – than getting the publishing deal. I’m well aware of authors’ lack of wages just from published books.

So why publish a book? Hell, why write one in the first place?

Writing a book is a massive collection of effort. When I set out to do my first NaNoWriMo in 2008, I had no concept, no story, no idea what was ahead. I chose the Maredran setting which would eventually become The Dowager Shadow mostly because a bunch of the work was already done, and the NaNo project would be collating and expanding on very rough outlines and game posts from a forum community. It made a logical choice. But I still struggled, producing 2500 words a day for a month. I still struggle, producing somewhere around a thousand a day for this blog and others now, mostly because I limit my time to an hour a night. It’s a hobby.

Beware of turning hobbies into jobs.

Blogging is a hobby for me. It’ll remain so. Even doing creative writing for a job will not be blogging – the process is completely different. The same thing with fiction writing. I don’t know how I’d behave, having to produce on a deadline as contract novelists do. So I’m pumping out my work at my own pace, as it’s completed. The volumes will each get released as eBooks once they’re done publishing, as will the entire book at the end of the thing. Sure, I’d like to make money on it. Why not, right?

But, bigger than making money, I want my stuff read. Isn’t that why any of us writes in the first place? Such big work is a great way to start off a conversation with a bang.

Why write a book? Because the method of publishing is irrelevant, the work itself is an amazing thing.

The Dowager Shadow

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Forget this place for the day!

Forget everything you know about me!

In fact, forget you just read that!

Just remember to skip this post and run – don’t walk, RUN! – over to http://dowagershadow.com and see the prologue that just dropped there!

Bring your friends!

Tell your families!

Tweet it, blog it, SHARE IT LOVE IT!

Can you tell I’m excited?

Now go get excited too!

Has Blogging Left Its Own Sub-Culture?

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chameleon on FlickrThere’s a shift going on in the media, a swinging pendulum action towards new formats, new mediums and new procedures. In many ways, this change toward Say Anything, Publish Cheap behaviour is a good thing – but what is it doing to the community that started out here, back in the day? Are bloggers – those once-prolific mavericks who paved the way for the current layer of professionals – being abandoned because of their own success?

When I started on LiveJournal in 1999 as a lark, blogging was considered a downer idea, even among the group of supergeeks I hung out with at the time.

The entire idea behind the LJ – for me, for us – began as a way to gather up all of the work we were doing in collaborative fiction and drop it semantically into a self-organizing, self-publishing venue. There had already been, for nearly four years, a newsletter going out weekly (or sometimes monthly) with updates, but the sudden power to have everything in one place, not just the stuff that was big enough to make the Alamak News, as it were, was a trip all on its own.

But then blogging caught on. The power base shifted from the small group of very experienced players to everyone who the moderators let join the group. And once that happened, the players in some cases even forwent the group blog and published on their own journals, in some cases very elaborate parallelisms to the major game.

We all thought that was a problem.

Then, it got worse.

The trouble was, originally, that Alamak was very hostile towards role-players acting in public. Being that the site was a dominant online chat at the time, and supported nearly eight hundred people during peak hours (bear in mind this is 1999) many of whom were monetarily supporting the chat through subscription-based, privileged accounts, it was a big deal that this small group of less than fifty people were trying to change the way the chat ran, in certain areas. Those of us with Mod accounts (subscription accounts) in some cases ended up  under scrutiny for being players. It was frowned on. We were keeping the lights on, and being discriminated against.

So what happened? A small splinter of the players actually went and began their own chat, called Winds of Change. You’d think this was a good thing, but it wasn’t. The break actually caused a schism between a number of the veteran players, because the rules at WoC were so very communist in the Stalinist sense, that some newer players never had a chance of acceptance. WoC meant no harassment for those of us serious enough to play – but it also killed community growth, because the only way in was referral, and if you didn’t have the chops to be a good player from the get go, you were effectively shunned, or worse, humiliated.

WoC died. It became a nepotistic echo chamber with very little innovation. Add to that issues with the admins, the developers who closed the site down eventually – the whole thing became such a crapshoot that those of us who weren’t invested in it left with little protest. When those who remained until the final days tried to reintegrate themselves, the entire community seemed to jump the shark as a whole.

Fast forward.

Some of us still entranced by collaborative fiction have done some things with it. One of my fellow players and I are launching a blog-book in February called The Dowager Shadow. I still roleplay, when I get a chance – I’m hoping to organize a reunion game for the old Alamak crowd sometime this year – but I’m a little distressed by what I see when I go into any of the now many roleplayer-centric chat sites there are on the net. I see a lot of the behavior that caused WoC to fail, only on a much bigger scale; what used to be five uppity vets bashing twenty uppity newbs is now a few dozen uppity vets bashing a few hundred uppity newbs. It’s not just ten to one scale, here either. It’s happening on every site out there. It’s fifty, a hundred, a thousand to one the level and volume of pride, wickedness and cruelty that was present eleven years ago in the original games.

The same thing might happen to personal publishing!

If you watch the trends, the schism began a long time ago, but there’s no cultural commentary on it yet because the culture hasn’t caught up to itself. Speaking in the analogy, the blogging equivalent of WoC doesn’t even exist yet. But the trend is there, the behaviors that those of us who watched saw in the small group of vets is beginning to show up again in the blogging culture.

Make Us Better, We’ll Pay For It!

First, there were the bloggers – the unshaven basement rats, eviscerating people who wronged them in the darkness of their parents’ basements. Then there were the journalists and the analysts, the Clay Shirky’s of the world who saw the trend for what it was and got in on the ground floor. Fast forward a few years, and now we’re seeing tutors, gurus, veterans of all kinds popping up and using whatever tools are at their disposal to help or hinder everyone they can lay their hooks into. Just like what happened with Winds of Change, the business has begun to underscore the culture, and if we’re not careful, the business will eventually tire of us, and move elsewhere. And where will that leave those vets who changed with the winds, who followed the money and did nothing but the new, shiny thing?

Before the Business Leaves You, Leave the Business!

There’s an opportunity for us to learn from past mistakes and adjust the model as we’re going, rather than abandoning the pleasure yacht and moving on to the Titanic. As Liz Strauss recently said in an interview with Mitch Joel for the Six Pixels Podcast, the major difference between hiring a fresh, fast-texting digital native and a dyed in the wool expert isn’t scale of skill, it’s the ability to make decisions because of a habit of success and appropriate self-scrutiny that can’t be bought in college, and must be earned through real world trauma and experience. (I may be paraphrasing you there, Liz, but there we are, that’s what I heard.)

Many of the bloggers I know are intensely dedicated professionals. Not necessarily as bloggers, but I’ve seen an approach to technology and its impacts on our culture that visibly, palpably feels like dyed in the wool decision making experts. So I’ll put it to you this way, any of you who are getting in at the beginning of the business:

Are you going to ride out the storm without preparing for the wind to leave your sails?

Or are we going to effect some change and kill the buzz, replacing it with something appropriate, useful, and over all, enduring?

Photo by tibchris.