Ian M Rountree

Copywriter, Project Manager, Digital Marketing

On Self-Censorship (Or Why We Need Diverse Stories)

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Many of us who work in media – whether as publishers, producers, marketers, or evangelists – create stories around the work that we do. It’s our job to create tales to interest people, to gather attention and, in most cases, sales or contracts.

As creating media becomes easier, businesses – and business owners and employees – are creating more of their own media. Many don’t have the background that professional media workers do, and as a result, are prone to mis-step.

We perceive these mis-steps most easily as inappropriate disclosure, poor personal judgment, or a lack of self-censorship.

But we also counsel businesses that talking only about themselves, about their business, and the benefits of their work is a bad idea. Why?

Watch this video. Award-winning novelist Chimamanda Adichie speaks about the danger of the single story.

The single story is dangerous from any angle. If your single story is a drunken photo on Facebook, you fail. If your single story is a mis-step with sensitive information, you fail.

If your drunken photo is one story of many – well, you still might want to rethink where you leave your camera. But people are a lot more likely to take the detail in stride at the value of what it is; a detail, not a whole picture.

It’s not just about how you tell your story. It’s about what stories (plural please) you’re telling, as well as how.

What stories are you telling? How are you telling them?

Video from TED Talks on YouTube. Hat tip Justin Kownacki for sharing the video.

The #ReadItAll week Challenge Begins Now!

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Today marks the beginning of the Read It All week challenge Justin Kownacki and I talked about last week. For more detail see either my post from last Monday, or Justin’s post about the challenge.

Here’s how it’s starting for me. At 9:47pm Sunday night, I marked everything in my reader as read.

I currently subscribe to 191 blog feeds through reader, as well as follow 24 people’s shared posts. Considering I hit Reader Zero on Saturday, and had to mark 49 entries read to begin the challenge, this may mean I have to read between 175 and 250 entries between now and the end of next Sunday. It’ll be a trip.

Are you participating? Let us know. It’s a big task, but it’s not about eliminating useless feeds. It’s about examining habits and necessity.

“Read It All Week” – An Open Challenge

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How much time do you spend actually reading blogs?

Yeah, self-serving question – hear me out here.

Justin Kownacki and I are offering a challenge, between July 19th and July 25th, for anyone interested to measure the size of their personal libraries. this came out of a discussion we had about why people share, what they share, and where the perceived benefit is in being in either position; the sharer and the receiver.

We subscribe to blogs almost on an autonomic basis now – last time I counted, before this challenge, I had about 60 blogs on my reader, only three of which I could identify immediately. Why did I add them? What process have I used to flush low-value streams in the past? How can we streamline our intake, and not miss out on high quality content that comes up every so often in the more esoteric feeds we’re aware of?

More appropriately, how much benefit to our weekly routine is the act of consuming all of this content?

In order to measure this – or at least to bring attention to it, even if measurement is difficult, we’d like to offer you a challenge. Here are the guidelines:

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.
  • Catalogue 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 actually read 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):

Now is the time to anti-curate your findings. Which sources turned out to be most useful? Consider promoting them or sharing their content. Which ones turned out to be more detriment than benefit? Unsubscribe immediately. Which ones showed mixed results? Unsubscribe, but bookmark for later review.

Mark the fall-out from your experiment. How many blogs did you start with, how many have you kept? How many bookmarks did you make, finding interesting streams for review? What has this experiment revealed about your reading – and sharing – habits?

Mark your experiences with a follow-up post on Monday, July 26th.

The real goal of the week here is two-fold: to increase understanding of how much we can reasonably consume in a week, and to ensure that we’re consuming media that we both want and need during that time, rather than what we feel we ought to.

Bonus round: Self-examination.

Part of the methodology behind this experiment comes from the patterns Justin and I agreed on noticing in how, and what, people share with others. We’re not trying to discourage sharing, or speculative subscription. That said, what’s beneficial should stay around to provide lasting improvement and information, while uninteresting, or less useful items piling up and frightening you away from your reading should be discarded.

What do you think? Are you in? Join us in examination for #ReadItAll week!

Update: Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins posted a very insightful explaination on SiliconAngle about why #ReadItAll isn’t for him – go check it out!

Should your blog be wearing a tie?

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People treat you different when you wear a tie.

For five years I wore khakis and a button-down shirt, open at the collar, with no tie. I got along with everyone, which was my job, and was mistaken for management wherever I went because I learned early on to walk with intention and assess everything I came up against with attention to detail.

Then I got a job in marketing and communications, and put on a tie.

My last week at the old job, I wore the tie along with the same uniform shirt I had for the previous five years. Starbucks barristas began treating me with retaliative scorn, and my customers divorced themselves from me fairly swiftly. I had, by adopting a symbol of formality, become something they could not properly associate with a retailer, much less one with tattoos and a bright smile.

Now, however, I wear a shirt and tie (I’m at my desk too much of the day to bother with a sport coat) and it helps me to fit in and raise the bar at the office. It makes sense, it’s the proper arena for attention to professional details.

In the mall, shirts and ties belong to customers, not salespeople.

Brian Levy, who was president of InterTan (RadioShack Canada’s parent company years back) famously said “The guy with the shiniest shoes sells the most.” It feels like a true statement, and might apply quite well to actual sales, but retailing is the wrong arena for that level of professional decorum. Or, at least it is now, because it’s no longer expected. And when you’re in customer service, managing expectation is a big deal.

What does this have to do with blogging?

Like any print communication, the frame has as much merit as the gallery. I’ve been experimenting with themes over the last few weeks as I develop a new one for this site, and doing some research on the visual and user experience aspects of well known blogs, and unfortunately it feels like many sites, themes and presentations fall into a number of predictable categories.

The Golf Shirt – You’ve got to love this one. Just like a gas station attendant or lowly clerk, the golf shirt class is the lowest common denominator of the blogging world. Whether it’s the default wordpress theme or a Thesis basic install, the Golf Shirt stands out for one reason; it’s the minimum possible effort made to fit into the most categories available. It’s always out of the box. And it’s disappointing.

The Elegant Pink Buttondown (with optional patterned scarf) – I used to have one of these. Dark, artsy, the kind of site design you just know is backed by a struggling writer spending his evenings in a coffee shop nursing a latte, reading Kafka over a pair of teeny tiny sunglasses – when it’s dark out. Unfortunately, unless that’s the feel you’re going for and the material you’re writing backs it up, this is going overboard, and is totally unnecessary. Besides, dark backgrounds with insufficient contrast create usability issues, which can alienate readers.

The Three-Piece Suit – This is where the tie comes in, and it’s where the most consideration goes. Professionals with custom-build Thesis deployments, high power pundits and marketers who know exactly what it takes to get information into anyone’s hands in a language they understand. This is the kind of blog worth blogging about.

But how do you choose?

I know, it looks like I’m being a downer and oversimplifying. Chris Brogan’s blog is a three-piece, but he never wears them. It still fits. Justin Kownacki wears sweater-vests, but his blog has a golf shirt on. Mine used to be the pink buttondown, but eventually will be a suit-lacking-a-jacket, because that’s where I am and it fits. Seth Godin’s blog – hell, shirt and jeans. And sneakers.

Which one of these guys has the shiniest shoes?

If you answered at all, you answered wrong. The point is, your look – whether it’s a golf shirt or a tuxedo – has to suit the work you’re doing and the environment you’re doing it in. Blogs wearing ties make sense for marketers, but if you write about comic books, the pink buttondown is probably your best friend. Or even a graphic tee-shirt and jeans.

At the end of the day, your audience has to be able to identify you before you get the chance to speak. Otherwise you just end up looking like a slump, or a suit.

Photo by JCardinal18.

What Hairspray Taught Me About Activism

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Sometimes it’s the smallest things that can get your mind spinning.

Last night, I saw Hairspray. I wasn’t terribly interested in the movie – musicals only get so much mileage with me, as much as I love to sing (it’s the same reason I don’t watch football; I’d rather be on the field). However, a number of things stuck out, especially since the story is set in Baltimore, and that area’s come to my attention a few times in the last few weeks.

Anyone who reads Justin Kownacki’s blog knows he doesn’t pull any punches when there’s a point to be made. He wrote something a few days ago about how dissatisfied people in Baltimore seem – it stands for him out because he recently moved there from Pittsburgh. Apparently, Baltimore has quite the murder rate, and Justin links to an analyst who suggests this is because of a lack of shared community identity.

What the hell do these things have to do with each other?

The idea of shared identity is, I think, bigger than just Baltimore. But that’s not what stood out about Hairspray. Right near the end of the movie, Nikki Blonsky’s character drops a line something like “I can see that fair isn’t just going to happen. You have to work for it.” The Baltimore in Hairspray was struggling to integrate black and white communities, a process that’s become a shibboleth for all social problems in the last century. It really has very little to do with Justin’s blog, except that the attitude he brings to everything is far more pragmatic than what’s possible. And, unfortunately (or not) because I tend to agree and super-associate, I go pragmatic on social commentary, and the lesson Hairspray is trying to teach falls down.

We’re already doing the work. And it’s not enough. That doesn’t mean stop, it means start planting trees where there isn’t already a forest.

I have this problem with missionary work. I see bright young people disappearing to locales halfway across the world for a year, then coming home and going to work, and ceasing to volunteer in their own communities. I don’t mean by this that missionary work should stop necessarily, but I think community involvement is missing in a big way. It’s not enough to rally and march any more, those things get done all the time. It’s not enough to just donate to a cause, there’s utility in causing a spectacle.

It’s not enough. But who am I to speak?

Winnipeg’s no Baltimore, but we’ve got our share of problems. I can recall the words “murder capital of Canada” being spoken in reference to multiple years. There are massive epidemics of drug problems. Child and Family services is overwhelmed all the time, and people abuse the welfare system hand and foot. Almost everyone I speak to outside of my own faith community – and a number of people in them (schism schism apoplexy) – have a very adversarial attitude to their neighbours.

The work isn’t getting done here. We’re acting as the outsourcing for those elsewhere who need it.

Make no mistake, the web hasn’t just changed how we build relationships, it’s changing how we contribute to the global community. I do wonder (and this is the real point here) how that global involvement is reducing our ability, or our want, to deal with issues in our backyard.

I really enjoyed the producing of Book Review for a Cause – Six Pixels of Separation, because it was something different and, regardless of how small, was designed to cause a splash in a cause by being different. But it happens upon me now that I realize it’s still remote aide. That won’t stop me from doing more of them – Linchpin and Trust Agents are up next in the series, so I’ll have to make contacts quickly for those – but still, I feel there was a missed step.

So I want to do more work at home. I’ll let you know when I’ve figured out how, where, and when.

What do you want to do? Be a trouble shooter and fix the world first? Or clean your own back yard, so maybe the neighbours will ask for help because they like what you did, not take the help because it’s offered blindly?

Who’s with me? Any Winnipeggers out there feeling like helping organize a volunteering camp over the summer, un-unconferece style?