Ian M Rountree

Copywriter, Project Manager, Digital Marketing

How To Start a Global Business in 2 Simple Steps

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1. Set up a website. You are now global.

2. Make money. You are now a business.

What? It’s simple, right? The trouble with simple is that it often fails to be anything that human endeavour is; simple is rarely interesting, attention-getting, or successful. I’m not saying it’s impossible to be any of these things with simplicity – but it is rare, and it’s never easy.

It’s not just about getting clients, securing contracts, or delivering… well, deliverables.

It can’t just be about doing the business for a while, developing a professional speaking career, and retiring into consultancy.

It should never be about the money – insofar as we always need money, anyway.

It should never, ever, be centered around the transaction and nothing else.

A global business needs to be about communication; anything with that kind of intended reach has to be. And if it’s about communication, it’s also about community – and by extension people, socialization, and relationships.

If you can figure out how to build global relationships that make money, you can figure out a global business. There’s just no other way.

Go ahead. Tell me I’m wrong.

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?

Relating By Narcissism

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Ian's Avatar
Gosh, that looks like someone we know.

I retooled my Google Profile recently because it felt barren and devoid of any purpose other than being a placeholder. I’ve gotten a bit wary of leaving accounts this way. Outposts are one thing, but building my own ghost town? No, thanks.

The experience was a bit weird, and it’s not really finished. I need to write a better self-bio, but it’s slow going because I don’t write much copy. Also because I’m very unused to writing about myself (hello, meta) as much as I do self-reference here. It’s a totally different feel, doing something from a purely outside view, rather than telling a story like I would on my blog, or just about anywhere else. It feels empty, unemotional and, above all, narcissistic. But then, I thought, isn’t all sharing this way?

We can bash all we want on the idea of people using social media and social networking to get themselves out there, but it’s one of the most common, misunderstood behaviours we have. If you tell me you broke a finger, I’ll tell you I stabbed myself with a screwdriver. It’s not being self-centered (unless it is, which is less common), rather it’s a great way to make sure you understand that I’m not just spouting platitudes. It shows, if not a common experience, at least that I understand what you’re saying and have been through a similar trial.

It really sounds like I’m making it about me. But I’m not. I’m proving to you that I know what you’re getting at. Where it falls down is if I fail to stop at the end of the example, and continue with the whole story, totally derailing yours. That’s narcissism for you. If I’ve been good enough to relate and stop, and let you get on with it – trust me, I’m using relational proof, not turning the tide of conversation.

I’ve decided to be a bit more sharing, despite the obvious “Go Me” undertones. I don’t really do Delicious or Digg, but if you use Google Reader, go ahead and follow my shared items. I made them public during the writing of this post, and they’re going to stay that way. I’m very picky about what I share, so expect scarcity for a while as I build up my list. I promise I’ll try not to annoy you.

I’d also like your advice (because we’re in this together, and I just told you a story – it’s your turn to tell me one of yours). In addition to social bookmarking, are there any tools you use for not just getting yourself out there, but for getting the things you think are worthwhile and interesting out to the people who follow you?

We can’t talk about ourselves all the time. But we can’t talk about other people all the time either. There’s a happy medium. Have you found yours yet?

A Definition Of Value

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Anyone for tea?Everything has a price tag these days. How do we decide what has value? In a culture where anything can be acquired for a sufficient amount of money – land, real goods, art, ideas and other intangible objects, even integrity – how, or perhaps why, do we insist on assigning a flat numerological factor to anything?

Anil Dash asserted yesterday that having a million Twitter followers isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. How Kim Kardashian gets paid $10k per tweet, I have no idea, but it seems to me this is where the entire followers system falls down.

Commerce demands an objective sense of value. There isn’t a lot of bartering going on in western culture, at least on the business scale. Set prices help us get some indication of what went into the production of a product, or what will come from the hiring of a service. We look at ten nearly identical computers and decide value based on brand and price tag. We look at quotes from contractors and decide based on price and reputation. Often, we can trick ourselves into thinking it’s entirely a play for getting the most value out of each dollar we spend, but again, by what method do we demarcate the value of each dollar we spend?

Think about this: You have some vacation coming up, and you’ve got a few options, assume you have the budget for any of these following, and for the sake of argument, let’s say they all cost the same amount of money. The less pressure here the better. Here we go:

  • You can spend a few thousand dollars going to an all-inclusive resort with your partner, have an excellent week of recovery and recouping from the stresses of a busy season at work;
  • You could instead rent a car and a digital SLR camera, take a road trip across the country, load up on breathtaking pictures and souvenirs, and fly back home loaded with more booty and less of a headache;
  • Or, you could fly to another continent (assume there’s a seat sale) and backpack for a week, stay off the grid, maybe take a few pictures and enjoy some exotic food.

How do we decide between these three obviously appealing options? With a lot of consideration, if we’re smart. But it requires something western culture often fails to train into us; a sense of relational value. Which one of these three dream trips gets our vote requires a lot of bartering with ourselves. Perhaps I don’t like taking pictures. Maybe my partner has a desperate yearning to see Spain. Or maybe we’ve done one or two of these options, and all we’re left with is the third.

How we make these decisions relies heavily on personal value, and that’s the kind of thing business and commerce is simply not set up to handle. Here’s the kicker; neither is much of what we do online.

There’s a pendulum effect we can see clearly when we’re dealing as a society with new modes of communication. Just like learning a language, adapting to a new process goes through a number of stages; incomprehension, misunderstanding (or incomplete knowledge), savvy, exploitation, and fluency. We go through various fields of “I can’t do this” to “Others can’t, I win by default” and settle in the middle on “everyone can, hooray!” – but it takes time, and critical mass, to get the pendulum to stop, and a lot of interference to ensure it stops in the middle ground. That’s objective value, that’s where we are right now. Everything online is a transaction. You follow me, I follow you. I tweet, you retweet.

It’s not conversation. It’s not bartering. It’s exploitation, and it’s right in the middle.

Oddly enough, incomprehension, savvy and fluency are all on the side of socialisation. Incomprehension and misunderstanding fuel exploitation, and demands objectivity to be corrected; this is a good thing, because objectivity is great for commerce, but very bad for people. It doesn’t leave any room for personality. And with all of the hype around the human business and personal brands – all of this oomph moving us away from the middle, away from mediocrity and towards individualising the world, we need room for relational thinking. Without which relationships are transactions, and transactions are nothing but ephemeral.

On a bizarre side note, this happens to be entry number 100 on this blog.

Photo by Richard0