learning Archives | Ian M Rountree

Top 6 Best Ways How To Write Awful Headlines

March 22, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

Writing great headlines is one of the key elements of good blogging practices – everyone says so, right?

There are dozens of tutorials out there explaining what makes a good headline; numbered lists, using the words How to in the title, addressing a key fear a large group of people have…

That’s fine, but what happens when you write what you think is a great headline and it doesn’t seem to be doing it’s job? Feels like a complex problem. Feeling like you need to do some analysis, get some feedback?

This is one of those things where I know – I know – you’ll be mad at me for how simple this is.

It turns out there are some really simple ways to tell if you’ve written a bad headline, no matter how good you think it is.

If you;

make a joke your post doesn’t follow-up on
make it the wrong length (too long or too short)
don’t check the title to see if it fits once the post is written
include an inaccuracy in the headline as relates to the post, but not on purpose
imply something is new/old when it’s not (Even if it may be so for your intended audience)
give away the entire post in the headline

… You might have written an awful headline. And when you have a bad headline, it doesn’t matter how good the post is. No one will read it.

Just like when you have a great headline, if the post sucks, you’ve jumped the shark. No one cares about the great headline, unless it’s tweetbait, in which case if they have share remorse, they’ll be even more ticked.

Law Seven – There is no more obvious way to kill your blog than inconsistency of form.

It could be consistency of message, consistency of schedule, or any number of other things, but when you break consistency, you’re making people think for the wrong reasons and making a withdrawal from the bank of social capital.

Unless you’re writing research papers or case studies, you want people to expend their energy considering that you publish, not examining it for lumpy bits like titles that don’t fit, or bad grammar.

Reducing the emotional overhead on your work helps keep the investment people make in your work valid.

Writing better headlines – as relate to the writing they represent – is a good start.

Consistency is King

March 18, 2011 by Ian 12 Comments

It’s easy to write one awesome post on your blog.

It’s easy to spend five hours doing research, creating relevance where none existed before. It’s easy, relatively, getting an interview done with your hero.

It’s easy to write ten awesome posts on your blog.

What you can do once, you can do again, right?

What’s hard is writing ten awesome blog posts, in a row, on a schedule, and following that with ten more posts, on the same schedule.

That’s hard.

When you know how to create content, creating content becomes the easy part.

Whenever people say content is king, I feel the inexplicable urge to giggle like a school kid. Content, as king, is dead. Long live the new king, consistency.

Being on time, every time, takes a lot of practice and hard work. It means building habits you may feel challenged for building, and doing work that might not otherwise be up to your standards all in the name of hitting the almighty Publish button every time you say you’re going to. It means asking for help when you need it, and not treating failure quite the same way as you used to.

But, in the end, if you can become consistent, you’ve won.

Because, if for every ten blog posts you publish you only have one gem, publishing eleven posts is a great way to improve your changes of finding that gem.

Remember: Repetition is the motor of learning.

Repetition is the motor of learning.

Repetition is what?

3 Steps to Mastering Any Social Network

February 7, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

Great news! There’s a new social network, and the word is, it’s awesome!

Oh. But it’s fundamentally different than anything you’re using right now, and the first reports are that just about everyone is, as usual, doing it wrong.

Pop quiz, tough guy. Do you join the new network?

One of the biggest challenges when approaching a given platform is feeling like you’re actually getting your head around it. Are you publishing the right material? Are you making the right friends? Are you ticking anyone off?

Getting over the fear of diving in is difficult – but it doesn’t have to be.

Whenever I start making use of a new platform – whether it’s digging into Twitter, or changing my approach to Facebook or LinkedIn – there are three simple things I do before solidifying my strategy: Listen, Observe, Catalog. You might think these are similar activities, but they’re really quite different – and essential to do before actually taking any action on a new plan.

How does it work? Simple:

1) Listen to what other people are saying about locales, individuals, or artifacts on the new platform.

Granted, this is easier with open networks than closed ones – it’s easier to do sentiment research on what’s going on within Twitter, for example, than it is on LinkedIn. However, if you have any kind of network to start with, you probably have a buffer – a back channel – to help you navigate the initial onslaught of information.

Chances are there are some movers and shakers, no matter how early the days of the new network are. Who are they? Are they making splashes? Are people you follow mentioning the same things consistently? Listening, especially on purpose, can be a powerful first indication of what people are doing, why they’re doing it, and how they’re managing to get results. Listening will also let you in on what kinds of results people are actually looking for.

Now, I’m not saying this should be done before filling out that tempting, well-designed sign up form. Not a bit. But it is easy enough, with some tools like Google Blog Search, Google Alerts and (gasp) asking your friends, to get a sense of where to go next, where the movers are actually doing their shaking.

Listening should give you your first indication of whether or not a space is worth further investment of time and energy.

2) Observe what others are actually doing with their networks in the new space.

I know, radical isn’t it? Once you’ve found out what you should be looking for by listening to the noise surrounding a new space – and, bonus points, this is actually easier as the space ages; anyone listening for Facebook news would find a wealth of information these days – you’ll know what kinds of people to actually spend time watching.

Pay attention to what’s getting done. Take note of how it’s being done as well. Is auto-publishing of blog posts or Twitter feeds welcomed? Are there opportunities for leadership? Are the leaders in the space actively investing in others, or promoting themselves?

Where listening is generally outside-the-wall activity, observation is being a fly on the wall in the same room where the party is.

3) Catalog what you’ve learned and start breaking out your plan of action.

What did you learn during your listening and observation? By now, you should have an accurate sense of:

What gets done in this new space
How people are doing this work effectively
What kinds of behaviors are encouraged or accepted
What kinds of behaviors are expected, whether encouraged or invisible
How to get ahead easily
What tools are available to reduce emotional overhead and administration effort

This preemptive insider knowledge will help remove a lot of the thrash from starting out on a new network, and make even your first days there easier. When you have a sense of what’s accepted, expected and anticipated, you can live up to expectations – and manage them – far better than going in blind.

Don’t have that sense yet? Repeat steps one and two until you can hammer out at least a 14 day revolving plan.

It’s really that simple. Everything else is over-complication.

Yes, there’s detail involved. there always is. And sometimes, the new network may not be for you – or you may go for years using it in a certain way, based on your initial perception of where the value is. Above all; don’t be afraid to course-correct and make a new plan of action. But, if you’re making changes in your network navigation intentionally, I’d strongly suggest spending at least a day on each of the above activities.

Going in to any network with more information, and using aware observer skills in building your knowledge, is always a good idea.

Have you been in any situations where more information could have been helpful? Where later observation put a new spin on your initial perception? I’d love to hear about it – please do share in the comments.

How to Master the Power of Voice and Become a Blogging Muad’Dib

January 23, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

The Voice Must Flow!

The power to be in many places at once. Perfect memory. The ability to see the future. None of these count for anything without the power to inspire action with just a few phrases, delivered with perfect pitch, modulation, frequency and poignancy.

Anyone who knows anything about science fiction will know about Dune. In Dune, Paul Atreides – the heir to a ducal title – is cast out of his place by the betrayal of a lesser Baron (the piggish Harkonen) and goes on a journey of self-discovery, eventually learning that he is the Ultimate Power Embodied – the Kwisatz Haderach!

Voice isn’t only about displaying personality, it’s about directive communication.

Bloggers talk about creating a voice all the time, and in many cases, we’re referring to the same things;

Humour, or lack thereof
Opinions, or sets of beliefs
Passion, or clarity of desire
Engagement, or how easy it is to turn a statement into a conversation.

HOPE hard enough and you’ll get a certain kind of success – but to be a real master, you need more than hope.

All of these things matter, but they’re not the core of The Voice.

In Dune, the Voice is an arcana very few are trained in – and the fact that Paul Atreides is trained in even its rudiments is almost heretical. Masters of the Voice have the skills to control anyone they have face-to-face contact with, after just a few minutes of exposure. They must gain this power over each individual person they wish to control, and do so by keen observation of body language, cataloging of reactions to some initial prods, and above all else, listening to the words their subjects use.

By this process of pre-communicative observation, practitioners of the Voice can easily understand the motivations, weaknesses – and potential of a subject. So, when she finally does speak, she can use the entirety of subtle inflection, posture, micro-expression, tone, pitch, metre… Every verbal and non-verbal tool physically possible to such a high effectiveness, that the subject is helpless to argue or disobey.

As a blogger, you have more tools at your disposal than text formatting, multi-media, your usual level of eloquence, or your standard subject matter.

You’ve got more than just your words. You have the spaces between then-the long dashes creating suspense, the ellipsis… Hanging out and doing it’s thing. You’ve got direct address writing (which most of this post is written in), choice of gendered or genderless pronouns… All of these things, once you know how to go beyond vocabulary and work pacing, verbal innuendo, and inflection by way of grammar into your writing… There’s power, just waiting there.

Consider the following passage about a remote bystander observing the initial attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001:

When James burst into the room, yelling this and that about being under attack, I didn’t even know what to think. Who was attacking who? Had he been playing paintball again? I mean, seriously. It wasn’t even seven in the morning. I got a real shock when I followed him to the living room. He wasn’t kidding – one of the towers was falling on picture-in-picture, and not ten seconds after my eyes hit the screen, the second plane hit the other tower.

What sense do you get from the above paragraph? There’s information there. There’s a hook (the attack) there’s characterization (the remark about paintball), there’s narative (first-person). It’s concise, informative, and to the point.

How about this?

“Guys! We’re under attack!”

The door shook – great. James’d put a crack into it with the heel of his boot. A muddy crack. Double great.

“Seriously, guys, get up! One tower’s just come down, and they keep saying there are more planes! More damned planes!”

What was he on about, anyway? I levered myself up and threw on a shirt. If he’d found some new video game to spend his rent money on…

No such luck. One look at the TV left my mouth gaping. Under attack indeed. I forgot about the muddy boot crack in my door.

What’s different? The details are identical in form to the first paragraph – the attack, the two towers… You know exactly what both are getting at. But the two passages may as well have been written about different people. There’s the focus on dialog, the broken-up structure of the second passage, completely different use of timing…

And we’re just comparing two very short pieces, essentially stating the same facts; the narrator’s roommate bursts into his room, waking him/her with what seems like nonsense – but is very quickly proven to be terrifying truth.

While the examples I’ve used are semi-fictional, the same thing applies to blogging, or writing of any kind where format restrictions are loose. Journalists with word count limits need to be ultra-direct. Bloggers, authors and other writers benefit from other tools, like using the tonal changes that pacing and directive writing can create.

It’s up to you, young pup!

Using the power of Voice in writing is more than just what you choose to write about, and the words and phrases you use to express your opinion. Leaving it at phraseology and opinion may be enough for some – but if you really want to master your power of Voice, going beyond and asserting control over your very tone and inflection in writing is the next step along the Golden Path.

Being serious about the development and use of your Power of Voice is a good idea. Knowing how to produce tone, inflection… Even a little – necessary hesitation just with words and grammar can make your writing stand out as much more human.

Still. It never helps to lose the humour all together. Am I Right, Dunecats?

Top image: Modified screenshot from Sci-Fi Channel’s “Frank Herbet’s Dune” (well worth watching)
Bottom image: Dunecat. Source; the interwebs.

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.