Someone on Twitter was talking about how to celebrate a big Tweet number- 25,000 tweets. Some people have chosen to try to raise money for their momentous tweet, but what struck me was what might have been said in those 25,000 tweets. Does that equal a novel? A Book? Since Tweets, for most purposes, disappear after about two weeks (1) much of the content created is history.
This made me think about the longevity of digital media. Some things, like blogs and podcasts, are more durable. This information is stored not only on your website and servers, but by others, including the Internet Wayback Machine. Twitter, and to a certain extent, Facebook, relies more on real-time day to day content, rather than provide any sort of long term search-ability or archiving. Yet with more and more people sharing news items on Twitter, communicating with customers and the like, how much of this information will continue to exist in the future? What becomes “evidence” could be saved for later on, whether its for journalists researching a story, hisotrians, or even laywers? Would this stuff be admissible in a Court of Law? I’m not sure whether or not we know the answer to any of these questions yet.
For me, I often share information and links on Facebook, sometimes for me, sometimes for friends. I’ve opted to share many things through Delicious, and to Facebook through Friendfeed. This means I have a tagged list of blog posts and articles, creating my own clip file, my own library and encyclopedia that grows over time. But if I only tagged this stuff and shared it out through Twitter, it would likely be gone.
How much of what you are creating online is meant to have a lifespan? How long to you want to be held responsible for opinions, tweets, snarky comments, etc.? How much is intended to be in the moment alone?
A case in point is the LD Podcast. I have had the show on hiatus, and I’m working hard to put it back into production in the near future, spurned on by recent emails from a number of sources who are discovering the content for the first time. I’m realizing that the content I create has a lifespan far longer than my attention span, and it continues to provide value to others, long after I have taken it for granted.
I hope this provides a little food for thought- Where are you putting your digital media energies? What’s providing the most real time versus long tail value? And, what can you do to create both?
Most of all, don’t forget that sometimes, creating content with longevity might actually create the most long term value.
(1) unless they have been stored, archived or otherwise placed in different formats…
Tags: creation, creativity, facebook, ld podcast, longevity, media, podcast, twitter
Posted by Whitney on May 21, 2010 in
Uncategorized I started talking to a friend the other day about this idea of “finding your voice”. To many, it sounds like a fortune cookie, and doesn’t seem to make very much sense at all, and to others, there’s an instant resonance. So to bridge this gap, let me explain what i mean by Finding Your Voice.
When I first started to write a book, I wrote episodically. I’d write in long spurts, put the piece down, and come back days later, maybe adding some, maybe starting over. When I reread the pieces to edit them together, it became apparent I had a problem with tone or voice. The mood I was in when I first sat down, or what was exciting to me at the moment colored the tone and the “voice” of what I had written, and it sounded like two different people had written sections of the chapter. This change made the piece harder to read and pay attention to, because it felt choppy, like too many people were talking to me at the same time.
What’s interesting about this, is that if you look at some of the work of Vygotsky and other developmental psychologists, they talk about our development of our “inner voice” as a dialogue between us and the outside world. For example, as you read this blog post, you “hear” the words in your head, as if I were sitting beside you, talking. Our “voices” go from being external when we’re children to gradually becoming internal, although in moments of stress or difficult problem solving, we may still find that we start talking to ourselves, trying to work things out. (This is why you can often find me asking out loud, “Where did I put those stupid car keys?” even if no one is around to answer me.) This inner voice is real- it’s our narrator, so to speak, and this carries over to all of our modes of expression, even writing.
So back to editing- When my writing got disjointed, it was like several different internal voices were speaking at the same time, and the flow of the work became harder to follow. The internal voice, the narrator in our heads, was no longer one person, but several. In order to make the piece flow and make sense, it becomes incredibly important to find that voice- that one person, so to speak, so the writing feels like a whole, not like different sentences in various typefaces, stapled together like a ransom note.
If you think of writing like music, there’s a big difference between playing the notes on a page and “making music” which requires both a flow of the notes, but an emotion as well behind the playing. It’s why we can hear the same piece of music played by different people, but get something new out of every variation. There’s a fluency that develops, like a child going from reading one word at a time to reading whole sentences, to then reading with expression. It’s the difference between reading a play and seeing it come to life with a performance of the same work. The fluency and flow of the expression, the voice that develops, makes all the difference in whether your writing works or whether it seems like a collection of disparate ideas with no common thread.
Now, if we apply this same concept to social media, I think companies and individuals are most successful when they find their voice. Different people can contribute to the whole, but the common purpose needs to feel like it aligns together. This is why when companies not known for cheeky ads try to pull one off, sometimes it succeeds, because it seems in line with the personification of the brand, and other times it fails miserably, because it runs counter to what people expect as an authentic voice of the company.
For example, Apple can get away with the “PC v Mac” ads because the personifications seem to ring true- it lines up with people’s experience and it matches what Apple has positioned itself as- an outsider. It’s also why the whole controversy about the new iPhone is causing a stir, because it makes Apple look more like the mean establishment guys, and betrays the cool dude factor. In contrast, the “Im a PC and Windows 7 was my idea” while it seems very Microsoft, makes no sense to me whatsoever. I do not believe for one second that that girl in the french cafe had anything to do with Windows 7, so the ad leaves me puzzling over what message I’m supposed to be getting here, because it seems disjointed and the meaning is lost for me.
In writing, in music, on Facebook, on Twitter, or in marketing in general, you need to find a comfortable voice that the company can use and emulate. People have to be able to have a sense of who the company is, a personification they can identify with. This is what makes each company unique, and why mimicry is so hard- even in real life, few people can pull off pitch perfect imitation of others. By being ourself and finding your voice, you find why your are special and what you have to contribute. Without this voice, you’re still like a confused teenager, trying on different personalities until they find one that seems to fit.
Don’t be that kid.
Tags: "Windows 7 was my idea", apple, children, flow, fluency, Microsoft, music, social media, voice, vygotsky, writing
Posted by Whitney on May 14, 2010 in
Uncategorized When we were out shopping recently, I found a copy of The Long Tail by Chris Anderson in the discount bin of audiobooks and picked it up. The Long Tail had a profound effect on my thinking when I first read it, and it seemed time to revisit this book again. So this morning, while out and about, I started listening, and thinking about how the reduction of information from physical form- books, albums, CD’s, DVD’s and more- into digital form- downloads of audio, text and more onto portable digital devices- is a huge factor in not only how we distribute knowledge, but how we value it and the “sweat equity” it takes to create something.
For example, Chris Brogan wrote a post about A Perfect Dichotomy, in his search to find a logo. In a nutshell, Chris went to a site that business people love- because they can get great work inexpensively, and designers hate, because they think it cheapens the work they do. The problem here is essentially that as a business-side person, we know we want something, but we have no idea whatsoever what the process of creating that something is. We have no easily accessible yardstick that tells us how much education, labor, passion, experience or more goes into one design over another- we’re only interested in the end product and pricepoint. And at times, things like design, art and other important, yet less physically tangible goods and services can seem equivalent from a seasoned professional and a beginner, and the purchaser has no clear way to understand the difference between cheap and expensive. (The ethics of buying work on spec is important, but you can’t eat ethics, so that argument alone will only get you so far.)
When you look at a car, for example, you can see lots of parts. Heck, my Toyota Highlander has so many buttons and nobs it feels like I’m driving the space shuttle. It looks complicated, and I can’t put the thing together myself, so I must be prepared to pay not only for the cost of materials that went into making the thing, but the designers, and workers who riveted the thing together, and the computer nerds who make the thing operate, and probably a share of that purchase price also goes into the marketing that made me want the thing in the first place. There is obvious value on display, and we feel like we’re making an exchange of cash for value add that’s clearly tangible. Likewise,when I buy shoes or clothing, I know that I am exchanging money for physical items I can’t make myself. The same with food at the supermarket. The value held in the physical items seems real.
When an author has their book in their hands, it feels like all your ideas and thoughts are now real. My book on Public Assembly Facility Law (yes, esoteric and boring, to be sure…) sits proudly on my shelf, a reminder and a memento of hard work and writing. It stores that value. But take the unpublished book projects that sit on my hard drive. They have value in terms of my time, my passion and more, but as long as they sit “in the drawer” they have no value to anyone other than me. Even if I put them in PDF format and make them available to everyone, where is the value exchange? Does anyone appreciate what went into that writing, or do they even care? If I put a tip jar on the site, is the value of the work based on the money I receive? What if I get none? Does that mean I wasted all my time?
What I’m trying to say here is that as we start to digitize information, information that has some value, even if dictated by arbitrary price points on Amazon and iTunes, I think we start to value it a little less than we did when it was harder to access. The intellectual work is the same whether the book itself is printed on paper or is merely bits and bytes, but the printing, distribution, marketing and other middle man expenses seem to act as a value filter and as a value add to make only the “best work” to make it into print.
Or at least that’s what I think our monkey brains believe, because that’s what has been true up until this point. Only a select few got to write for a living, and got paid for it, so therefore, if you were an author, that meant something. Just like being a journalist meant something special, and why the editor of the local paper was someone to be revered and even feared- he was the gatekeeper to the community’s sense of importance. I don’t think we’ve really figured out how to value the digital information we get, because we get so much of it. While some is fantastic, much of it is unimportant, so the general supply of information and ease of access overwhelms demand, and price plummets.
Bill Gates once said that Open Source was the enemy because it was essentially relying on people doing things for free and while it was creating value, it wasn’t distributing any. He felt this meant that sooner or later, people would stop contributing to open source, because in the real world, there is still rent to pay and kids to feed. (I’m clearly paraphrasing here.) Yet Open Source and blogs and more exist because people want to express themselves. This need will never go away. There may be no more HUGE hits the way there once were, because people can find and feed their niche tastes, and the choices are close to infinite. We no longer have restricted choice, dictated to us by what only a few people running the three major networks thought we should see, like when I grew up. (Except, maybe for Law & Order, but even that franchise may be reaching its end.)
All of this choice sometimes means we get overwhelmed and decide to make no choice, rather than risk making the wrong one. It means we can’t always see, know or appreciate the difference between an original designer purse and the knock-off that’s “good enough” sold on the street corner. The ubiquitous nature of choice makes it more and more difficult to determine actual value, and as a result we either make no choice or make choice based on reputation, convenience and price. This means if you are choosing someone to work with on something largely intangible like design, logos, even consulting work, you are forced to vet them by reputation, and then by judging whether the value they add to the project or the relationship you gain is worth the premium you pay as a result.
(Just as an example, there are a gazillion people who call themselves social media experts on twitter, but you can probably sort out the wheat from the chaff not just by followers, but by checking the date they started using the service, and those with more experience are probably more valuable to you than the folks who joined up yesterday.)
It also means from someone working in an “intangible” digital arena, you’ve got to make your value proposition real. You have to be able to explain why your work, your company or your stuff is so much better and deserves premium compensation. You have to have a track record, and you have to master those relationship skills that make working with you so simple and so enjoyable, people will come because you constantly exceed their expectation.
This is what Chris Penn refers to as “You have to not suck” or as I would say simply- The first rule of business is to be the best at what you do, and to be the exception, not the rule. Otherwise, you do end up being one of the multiple choices out in the long tail, with only a few hits of business over time, and probably not enough to sustain yourself long term. Independent musicians know this, actors know this, and now other people in creative fields are learning this: When you do something artistic, you have to find an outside source that values you and will support you through good times and bad, just like Michelangelo and Da Vinci had the de Medici family. You need to offer them something they cannot do themselves, and makes their life or reputation richer in the process. Otherwise, you are merely a struggling and starving artist, and will still need to wait tables to eat.
Finding your value and articulating it, unambiguously, for all to see is the challenge everyone faces is a world of infinite choice. I’m working on this for myself- are you?
Tags: chris anderson, chris brogan, chris penn, digital information, law & order, the long tail, value
Posted by Whitney on May 11, 2010 in
Uncategorized I’ve been thinking about risk, and how we make the decision about the cost/benefit of our actions.
Having gone to law school, I think and act like a lawyer in much of my life, and that can drive some people crazy. You think you’re asking a simple question, and I give you a balanced assessment, and then let you choose the path you want to take. Yes, people want to be told what to do. Sometimes the path forward is crystal clear and being definitive is easy. Other times, multiple paths are available, but each has its own upsides and downsides, and as long as you are prepared for the downsides, each path is viable, reasonable and worth pursuing.
Sometimes, folks think I am risk adverse. The opposite is actually true. I’m happy to take chances. I’m happy to roll the dice. But when I do take a risk, I will fully admit I’ve almost always considered the consequences first. I’m risk aware. I’m not afraid, but instead, I realize that there’s always downstream rewards and potential consequences for choices you make, and I go into situations aware of as many of those as I can be.
Seth Godin has been talking about this sort of thing recently, in his posts on Surfing as a New Career and Are You An Elite? where its clear that taking chances is no longer optional but required. The point, of course, is to take risks, and not spend too much time in the worry or flailing stages, and instead get on to the doing and shipping stages of a project. You have to figure out when it’s a good time to bet the farm, and when it’s a good time to diversify your holdings, so to speak. I’ll always be surprised, from time to time, when the upside far exceeds my expectations, or circumstances make the downside a little more painful that we predicted. But 9 times out of 10, results come within spec.
So while I always want to know a chunk of the risks associated with, say, a new medication or surgery, I understand the math enough to know when to play the odds. Sometimes, people will focus on a quoted risk of 5% of extreme downside, ie. death, dismemberment, etc. and decide not to do something. But if you understand the math, often you find that the real attributable risk to you is so far below that, spending time worrying about it is not even worth the energy to consider the question in the first place.
Knowing and acknowledging risk can make some people to afraid to act. For me, it emboldens me to take the jump. I’m an optimist, and once I know what I’m facing, I take the challenge head on, and have confidence I can win. Even with odds stacked against me, I’d rather swing for the fences than never try at all.
We all know that “no good battle plan survives contact with the enemy”, which means we’re always going to have to improvise and tweek things along the way. There’s always something that changes, but by acknowledging that upfront, and having thought the plan through at the outset, improv off the planned path is so much easier- you rarely get totally lost in the rough with no map out.
Planning and thinking something through isn’t everyone’s style. It can seem plodding from time to time. It can seem boring. But I promise it’s rarely wasted time. Just like a business plan or a book proposal lays out the pathway for the finished product, thinking things through and acknowledging risk up front makes all the flying by the seat of your pants less panic inducing. However, if you love panic and adrenalin, by all means, please ignore this post and have a great day.
Tags: advice, attorney, balance, chris penn, decisions, risk, seth godin
Posted by Whitney on May 9, 2010 in
Uncategorized Back in early 2001, I heard about something called the Audrey by 3Com. This was the first “internet appliance” meant for different parts of the house, like having the internet on an intercom system of sorts. It was not fancy, heavy at 4.5 lbs, and it never took off. I wanted one for a long time, but since they were made and then gone before they were really widely available, it never happened for me.
So let’s look back at why the Audrey didn’t succeed. At that point, the internet was still growing, and social networking still consisted of meeting friends, in person, at a pub, where the message went out over email or- gasp- by phone call. The need to have the internet in every room, for $500, no less, seemed like an expensive luxury and not all that useful.
Flash forward roughly a decade, and the iPad, bringing the internet to every room (and more) at the same $500 price tag, is taking off like hotcakes! The iPad is certainly, at best, a kissing cousin of the Audrey, which was like a big palm pilot. The iPad is likewise a big iPod Touch, but the differences are what makes the device. The additional screen space, along with the apps and vivid color touch screen make the iPad a dream to use. Whenever we get in the car, a kid seems to have already grabbed the iPad before I can even locate it for the trip. It’s only a pound and a half, so instead of sitting on a counter, taking up space, the iPad can be used on a lap, in a holder, and taken just about anywhere with us. It’s simplicity is its largest virtue, and while I tell folks it’s not really a replacement for a desktop, it does a good portion of the daily chores I used to do on the laptop just as well, in a more portable, more social fashion. (Heck, when I chaperoned a school dance recently, kids were coming over and playing the two person air hockey game instead of roaming the halls.)
Others are reporting the general social nature of the iPad and how easily people fall in love with its ease of use. I can attest to similar findings in our own house, where the iPad is well loved, and by the crowd surrounding the iPad not only at the local Apple Store, but at the local Best Buy as well. It’s not a desktop or a netbook. It may, however, be one of the first social object computers, where people can share one screen, touch and interact with it, and get things done in a very zen, simplistic way that meets many needs.
I know my brother-in-law, for one, is thinking of using one to show pictures of the boats he sells to clients, since pictures on phones and ipods are simply too small to be worth much. Like with real estate agents, the ability to show pictures and videos of perspective boats/property is vitally important to finding the right fit for the buyer. The ability to do that on the fly, with email immediately available for inquiries, just might be the ticket to more sales, or at the very least, meeting and exceeding client expectations. (If anyone needs a yacht in Florida, Gregg Somerville is your man. 
)
We’re on a jumping off point for what mobile computing is and what it will be. We’re also at another crossroads for what it means to interact with data, as I’ve talked about before with Jeff Han’s amazing multi-touch screens and the programs that allow visualization and manipulation of large, complex data sets. I’m really excited to see where all of this goes, and I think we’re just at the beginning of a new way of working with technology, rather than having to work around it’s quirks and limitations.
I know having one gadget instead of many is a blessing for our household, especially since they all work on the same charging system.
What do you think?
