social media Archives | Ian M Rountree

Grudge Purchases

October 10, 2014 by Ian Leave a Comment

I often wonder, riding the bus home, whether its intentional that all the advertisements I see on the bus are for “grudge purchases” or services.

Debt relief. Chewing gum. Public service messages about abuse. Last choice jobs.

I’m certain the collection of sentiments isn’t intentional at all, but it is curious. After all, with all the sexy businesses like web services, marketing agencies, and real estate moving into the social web – there’s a gap that has to be filled, and these businesses are taking the opportunity where it exists.

Wait… Why aren’t these businesses doing social media again?

It’s an opportunity thing. Where’s the space to talk about insurance – a grudge purchase if there ever was one – in the midst of all the Occupy Wall Street furor? How could a debt relief agency find the air time to make a dent in people’s awareness as anything other than yet another tag-along subject?

So, if you can’t do social or inbound marketing, what do you do?

You find captive audiences. On the bus – or any other public transit – you’re a certain kind of captive audience. There isn’t much to look at if you’re used to your city. The road might be too bumpy to reliably read a book. Your eyes end up wandering – you people watch, you try to look out the window, but eventually you’ll probably catch sight of the ad banners just overhead.

Their job isn’t to make insurance look sexy – grudge purchases never are. Their job is the same as the simple (and occasionally described as insipid) app Yo – a weak smile and wave from across the street, just to remind you these services exist.

It can’t be tracked. ROI’s hard to calculate. So why do they still exist?

Stab in the dark? Even when your business is based on reliability and pacing – and not explosive profit and innovation – remaining in motion and maintaining that pace is important.

Because “what else would we do?” is still a valid argument, and similarly, doing nothing is not an option.

Posterity

July 27, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

Everything we do on the web must come from a view of posterity. How else are we going to avoid putting drunken college photos up on Facebook, leaving something embarrassing on our work computers’ web history, or continually attacking others?

The largest part of this is that the net is nothing but posthumous in some ways. It’s an archive of past activity. The current trend of real-time computing, instant collaboration, and social media has changed how swiftly things become the past – but everything on the web is a past action. You liked this. You tweeted that. You blogged this. Everything is past-tense. Everything is posted – it’s placed into the record, upon publication.

When I write, I always consider how a given post will look next year, the year after – five years out, ten years out, and so on. I didn’t always write this way; when I was journalling, rather than blogging, I often wrote for the moment. For the ephemera. The unfortunate consequence of this is dissatisfying publications, arguments with friends, being misunderstood – or worse, professional consequences later in life.

You don’t even have to go out that far. Not everyone can, or needs to, plan on a lifelong scale; few people need to live their lives more than a few days in advance. In which case, think of posterity anyway.

How will what you do online influence people an hour after it’s posted?

How will your tweet be perceived two hours from now?

How will your industry see your blog entry after you’ve been picked up by a major aggregator?

What does your legacy look like now, with you at your most active?

What would it look like if you took a month off, starting right now?

When you hit publish – and don’t get me wrong, I want you to hit publish – consider… What will you think about what you posted, immediately after you’ve posted it?

Delete’s always an option. But then, are you participating in revisionist history?

No More Drafts

June 1, 2011 by Ian 4 Comments

I deleted fifteen drafts from my blog this morning. Some of them, I’ve been keeping around for nearly six months. Clearly, I would never write them.

It’s liberating, every now and then, to ditch the expectational debt of having too many unfinished drafts and move on. I don’t think we give ourselves enough chances to do that.

Drafts have their place, certainly. Setting things in motion, marking down ideas – these are good practices. However, living perpetually from drafts seems to make reacting to live events hard. How can we talk about news, if our post for today is already in the queue, and we’re unwilling to shuffle the queue back because we have a schedule?

In doing the editorial and SEO work for Hard Refresh, I’m now finding that working a draft from start to finish effectively takes practice. Nic and I are getting a decent queue of articles there, but we do still have some drafts – they’re not bad things by nature, but they do suck up a lot of cycles unintentionally. Being able to call something finished shortly after starting it is important; letting your brain stew on a half-formed idea while at the same time trying to keep the original idea’s form is not.

When considering your editorial calendar, drafts can save your life. Or, they can make you completely bonkers because your half-finished ideas starve the rest of your creative process.

Some practices I’ve found to help when dealing with drafts:

Keep a list of topic ideas separate from your in-blog drafts.
Only create drafts when you have well-formed ideas, but don’t have time to write.
Write the finished article within a set period of time, or delete the draft itself.
Be willing to push the schedule of drafted posts for reactive blogging.
Mark posts in a series where appropriate, especially if you can title them as such.

Doing this for my project blogs has helped keep me significantly less stressed over publishing. While it’s led to less writing here, it’s certainly led to better writing there – and better writing is what the job’s all about.

How do you keep your sanity without completely ignoring the idea of a draft?

Education and Social Media

May 19, 2011 by Ian 3 Comments

There’s a lot of discussion in professional social media circles – from publishers, to consultants, to agencies – about education. Clients need it, businesses need it, the public needs it – but so do the professionals working in these very complex, highly unorganized fields.

There’s now very little stringent education directly related to social networking as a business communication tool; while there are plenty of dyed in the wool professionals, the building of a knowledge base accessible through higher education seems slow in catching up. This isn’t even a theory versus practice problem – I think it’s an educational system problem.

How can we create education for new kinds of professionals, when education itself is failing?

This article from MENG Blend on May 17th tells a strong story about the state of education in general:

[…] even though the real ROI of college over time is well-documented, college completion rates are falling rapidly. On average, four year public schools graduate only 37% of their students within four years. The story at community colleges, which account for 46% of all undergraduates, is even worse: just 25% of those at 2-year colleges graduate within three years of the time they start.

Damning, isn’t it? [Read more…]