Ian M Rountree

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Education and Social Media

May 19, 2011 by Ian 3 Comments

Graduation 2008 - Thirty30 Photography | FlickrThere’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…]

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: business, college, commentary, education, on-the-web, qualifications, rant-alert, reaction, social media, sociology, statistics, teaching, the-web, university

The Future of Media – Dowager Shadow

February 21, 2011 by Ian 2 Comments

I’m writing a novel. But it won’t be Tor, Orion, or Bantam Press publishing my work; it’ll be me.

Chris Brogan just dropped a perfect opportunity for me to hold myself to account here. You see, I’ve missed my deadline for having the promotional site for the book up. It was supposed to be finished on February 2nd, with some content available to act as a teaser for the actual volume coming in summer. Nearly a month late, I still have 10 hours of work to do on the promo site, and no time budgeted to it.

Before you finish reading this, jump out and read/ watch Chris’ video post, The Future of Media.

Back? Good. Now I’ll explain.

The Dowager Shadow Promotional SiteThe Dowager Shadow, which I’ve spoken of before here, is a fantasy fiction parallax that has been where I’ve put most of my energy for the last four years. It started making its way from ongoing roleplay to novel with 2008’s National Novel Writing Month – my co-author Leila and I smashed the 50k word barrier easily, and immediately had what amounts to a full first volume of book.

Last year, I began publishing the novel as a serial – you can still read some of it on dowagershadow.com until I get the new site up, but I warn you, the manuscript has seen a lot of editing since then.

Here’s what you’ll see once the new site is actually up, and I’ve got the manuscript finished and produced:

  • The first volume will be available for purchase as an eBook, with built in interactivity like an appendix, maps, and other information.
  • In addition to each volume, there will be a few rounds of shorter stories available for free through Pay With a Tweet. This will take care of some of the promotion of the book.
  • Each subsequent volume will be released in two ways: stand-alone purchase, or bundled with the previous volumes, each of which will have been updated with information pertinent to the new volume.
  • There will be a print version, produced through a self-publisher, which can be ordered alongside the eBook. I’m aiming to have two production runs per year for the physical artifact.

It sounds like a lot, but it’s really no more work than this blog.

Building interactivity into a book is a very new media thing. It’s the kind of thing that’s going on all over the place. Usually, though, it’s products like Digging Into WordPress. However, given the success of products like DigWP, and the many thousands of well produced eBooks out there, I can’t help but see this kind of thing as the future of media.

We’re going far beyond the entrepreneurial journalism that blogging has been for the last decade, and moving into an era of entrepreneurial publishing of all flavours. That, I believe, is the future of media.

Filed Under: Content Strategy Tagged With: books, business, chris brogan, dowager shadow, fiction, media, media production, publishing, the-web, writing

Your Klout Score Means Nothing

February 19, 2011 by Ian 8 Comments

It’s not that it doesn’t mean anything – it’s that it actively means “nothing”.

For something to have meaning, you’ve got to be able to use it. Meaning, strictly speaking, applies to what’s done with a thing, or a piece of knowledge. Anything with ‘meaning’ must directly apply to something else. So; a score, made by an algorithm, has no strict meaning until applied. This is as true of Klout as it is of your Twitter follow count, the number of Friends you have on Facebook, or the number of recommendations you get on LinkedIn. Meaning requires application.

Sure, according to my Klout profile, I’m a 58. That’s nothing to sneeze at… Or is it? Could it be that, even in this semi-limited, pseudo-meaningless platform, there are some indicators of how a person behaves, how they prefer to communicate, and how you can learn how they do their work so you can better yours?

Now, this week’s #usblogs topic is supposed to be about online and offline klout, but I want to focus on a few meaningful uses for the Klout score and it’s associated meta-data first, before we talk at all about offline klout (which is far less well documented, and thus harder to quantify). Offline clout may come later, or may not. Partly because real-space communities have far different parameters to online ones.

When I look at a Klout score, I see an aggregate that equates to the curtain behind which hid the Wizard of Oz.

When I look at a Klout profile, like my own for example, I see:

2011-02-19-KloutBreakdown

Klout displays a graph of activity to go along with the Score metrics it displays.

This is the base range of information that comes beside a Klout score. Most people pay attention to the three numbers beside the Score itself – I almost never do. Under these, the badges, are much more informative regarding a person’s real activity. Number of list memberships, unique retweet count, total retweets, total comments – these show not only the wattage of a person’s activity online, they show the depth and consistency of that activity over time.

Yes, these numbers contribute to the aggregate of the Klout score, but the mix of badges you see matches strongly the kind of person you’re looking at. For example, this graph shows an even level of “Total Retweets” and “Unique Retweeters” – this tells me that the individual messages I’m sending are getting some traction among a broad range of people, but that traction has little depth.

Based on this graph, and the information relationships within it, I can adjust my actions in the future, if I want to (for example) learn how to create messages that gain depth as well as width of interaction. In this way, my score means nothing, but my profile is a learning tool.

2011-02-19-KloutMatrixIn addition to the activity graph, Klout displays an Influence chart.

Take a look at the people on this chart. Do they match who you’d expect to be influencing me? Better still, do they match who you’d expect me to have influenced? I mean – yes, Mark, Chris, Amber and Matt have an effect on me. They legitimately influence me. But David McGraw? Really? An outlier, clearly.

Klout believes I’ve influenced my web host, MediaTemple. That interests me. In part because it’s an outlier, like David is. In part, because it’s amusing.

It also tells me where on the social chart I fit against my peers. The little orange dot on the graph is me. I’m a socializer. If I got a little more broad in my topics, I’d be a thought leader. I take issue to the idea that thought leadership is measurable on a chart, but these are the terms they’ve chosen to represent people – and by and large, they’re accurate.

The Influence chart can be used to give you a sense of what kinds of relationships the person whose profile you’re reading has. Do they interact with highly professional people, or highly social ones? Is there a broad mix of specialties represented, or a wide mix of opinion? Is there a tendency to focus solely on their own area of expertise, and disregard anything else coming into the mix?

At the end of the day, what you do with any of this data is what gives it meaning. A 60 Klout twitterati is not automatically more influencial than a 45 Klout socializer – unless pure wattage is all you care about. And, honestly, if all you care about is a bigger megaphone, you’ve lost the social media game already.

Keeping focus on what’s important is a good idea when conducting research and analysis, whether you’re doing so before, in the midst of, or after any marketing or business activity. Focusing on the wrong data, like a Klout score alone, can lead to terminal myopia.

No matter the numbers you’re looking at, making sure the numbers match the need is important. Do yourself a favour and look beyond that big orange number at the top of the screen.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Blogging, blogs, commentary, community, klout, online, social media, sociology, the-web, usguys

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.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: amber naslund, blog measurement, Blogging, blogs, follow-the-linker, internet, learning, metahuman, practice, rant-alert, social media, sociology, the-web, Theory

Forget the Niche – Identify a Craft First!

November 18, 2010 by Ian 18 Comments

Longing for Summer - FlickrAll kinds of people are creating these days. Bloggers are getting book deals, recording fantastic videos to post online, becoming speakers… Consultants are becoming brand advocates, agency leaders are going freelance – in addition to moving business online, individuals are also moving, across not just subjects and genres within their industry, but across entire industries.

But there’s something missing.

Where are the authors? The writers? The journalists are in the caravan, playing sheepdog as they always have. Some would argue the writers are there, that we call them bloggers now.

They’re wrong. Bloggers aren’t necessarily writers.

Everywhere I look, bloggers are publishing books. But are they authoring them, or concatenating ideas?

I had a good chat with Dan Perez during this past Sunday’s #blogchat, and for once we agreed (I know, I know, I immediately looked for horsemen in packs of four) – the writer, the author, and the blogger are not always the same. Increasingly, the same platforms (words, public presentations, etc) are being used in more diverse ways than they have been traditionally. A video producer on YouTube may not be able to make a feature film pitch to save her life, just as a big name director may not be able to properly leverage YouTube’s power for making content human.

Who’s to say there’s one best way to create?

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being a writer, but not being a blogger. Similarly, not every YouTube phenom needs to become a major motion picture actor/actress. It’s not always in the cards – and that’s not a bad thing!

Bloggers talk about niches all the time – what’s your take on a subject, where’s your perspective, what’s your unique value proposition. What if part of that is the kind of media you create, as well as the way in which you create it?

I say, stick it to the blog. I say, stick it to the book. I say, don’t cross the streams!

We’re not all meant to be multiplied-media superstars. Some of us are meant to be the puritans of the blogging world, others use journalistic savvy to cross the boundaries and write columns for newspapers.

Some of us? Are just bloggers. And that’s ok, too. Do what you do best. Go ahead – get on it.

Image by Per Ola Wiberg.

Filed Under: Communication Tagged With: Blogging, blogs, the-web

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