Justin Whitaker

Sometimes I think fear isn’t the mind killer, as the Bene...

Sat, 26 May 2012 18:40:40 -0400

Sometimes I think fear isn’t the mind killer, as the Bene gesserit were famed to say, but mediocrity.

Yes, nothing is ever perfect, but good enough can kill a project, a dream, or a business as quickly as being afraid.

Near-Earth Object: Facing Irrelevance

Fri, 25 May 2012 14:20:36 -0400

Near-Earth Object: Facing Irrelevance:

Paul Fidalgo poignantly wrestles with some very important blogging questions.

I’ve been there, so have you, if you’re honest with yourself.

I can’t answer for Paul, but I think blogging is an end to itself. A way of ordering your thoughts. A form of self expression.

There’s also a healthy dose of ego in there too.

The minute you try to measure success via numbers, that’s the minute that it starts seeming less like an outlet, and more like a job.

And because it’s now a job, with traffic stats, subscribers, retweets, shares, etc., our ego takes a hit when people fail to show up and see how awesome you are.

Really, the measure of success is not whether you are an A-list blogger, or making money on the blog, or have a distinct and well known personal brand, but by whether or not you fully expressed yourself.

If you’ve looked at the post and left it all on the page, could it ever be said to be irrelevant?

nearearthobject:

How many readers does it take to make a blog worthwhile? What constitutes a sufficient number of pageviews for a given post? The most obvious answer is that there is no line of demarcation; the act of writing is an end in itself. If I were to have a meaningful conversation with a single person, or…

Blogging For Short Attention Spans

Thu, 24 May 2012 21:06:12 -0400

The velocity of content creation is accelerating, while our free time remains fixed.

You need to understand this trend as a content creator.

The infographic I’m linking to below actually has it wrong…attention spans have slipped from 12 minutes a decade ago, to 5 minutes now, according to the Lloyds TSB study.

That decline also appears to be accelerating.

What are we going to do when attention spans ARE 5 seconds?

In the future, those 500-1000 word posts blog experts are so in love with are going to have to be microchunked, or summarized, if you want people to actually read, respond to, and share your thoughts.

Long posts help show your domain expertise, and help establish authority in your niche, but what good are they if they are met with tl:dr?

We’re going to have to learn to blog for short attention spans.

Or die trying.

Attention Spans Have Dropped from 12 Minutes to 5 Seconds - How Social Media is Ruining Our Minds [Infographic] (socialtimes.com)
Why Focusing on Blog Word Count Is Stupid (hubspot.com)

Jeremy Clarkson is absolutely right. Stopping is the killer. So...

Wed, 23 May 2012 20:22:25 -0400

Jeremy Clarkson is absolutely right. Stopping is the killer. So whatever you’re doing, don’t stop.

"Does it stand the test of time? Ponder this for a moment: the vast majority spend the vast..."

Wed, 23 May 2012 15:10:43 -0400

“

Does it stand the test of time?

Ponder this for a moment: the vast majority spend the vast majority of our lives sweating, suffering, and slogging mightily over stuff that’s forgotten by next quarter, let alone next year or next century.

Call me crazy, but I’d suggest: mattering means building stuff that’s awesome enough to last.

Maybe not forever, like Giza’s Pyramids — but surely more than a couple of months, before it’s absent-mindedly tossed into the dustbin of history along with the rest of the flotsam and jetsam of the age of disposable plastic junk.

”

- If you follow me on Twitter, or anywhere, and you’ll know that I’m a fan of Umair Haque.

He’s sort of taken up the role of the philosopher economist for the never ending recession age, in the grand tradition of John Locke, John Stuart Mills, and Adam Smith.

The quote above comes from “Create a Meaningful Life Through Meaningful Work”, and it really gets to the heart of the matter in our productivity driven work culture.

How many of us are doing work that doesn’t even meet this simple test?

I’d wager that even people that are cubicle escapees spend much of their time failing this test as well.

It’s long been okay at most workplaces to deliver what I call “minimally viable output”, a project, document, spreadsheet, or presentation, what have you, that’s just enough to pass our manager’s or client’s requirements.

What else can we really do? We have another deadline to meet!

And it’s because of this incessant drive to do more, with less time, that whole industries have arisen to help us maximize both our inputs (as time, attention, etc.), and outputs (as productivity).

If we slowed things down a little, we might see that none of that MVO really matters in the grand scheme of things. We’d realize that we’ve bought into this idea of work as impermanent, disposable, dead on arrival.

Maybe we should be shooting for something a bit more, require more of ourselves, than what passes for work these days?

I don’t know what my “Work”, the big world changing, vital work that Stephen Pressfield or Seth Godin talk about, is, but I know that I’d much rather have work that stands the test of time than satisfies a deadline.

Wouldn’t you?

Related articles

Multiplying or dividing? (sethgodin.typepad.com)

Pattern Break (chrisbrogan.com)

Are We Thinking Big Enough?

Tue, 22 May 2012 10:13:00 -0400

mappa_blog (Photo credit: francescopozzi)

One of the things about following blogging expert’s advice is that it narrow’s your focus.

If you listen to them, you need to post every day, have a commenting strategy, a promotionnal strategy, and a blog business plan.

Which is all good advice, but because we are all busy people with limited time and attention, we quickly get bogged down in the tactics and lose sight of the big picture.

Big picture thinking, no matter what the market or nice, requires time, and attention. Time to consume related content, time to keep abreast of trends, time to digest and analyse them.

So, we settle for doing the minimum viable blog, shooting from the hip on whatever event the Internet is upset about that day, and calling it a day.

No wonder so few blogs make money, and so few blogs survive.

We aren’t thinking big enough.

Opinions are easy.

Reporting the Tech, Social, or Business events of the day? Also easy.

Anyone can pass news along.

Everyone has an opinion.

What’s rare is analysis. What’s rare is investigating the trends, connecting the dots, and filling in the big picture.

In The NOW Revolution , Amber Naslund and Jay Baer talk about “the fog of real time business”. For most businesses, that fog is real. For most individuals, with whatever problem your blog is trying to solve, that fog is also real. The future is always uncertain, and insight helps to dispel the uncertainty.

Analysis helps lift the fog obscuring the big picture.

Umair Haque has an interesting take on this.

A while ago, he discussed the difference between “Thick” and “Thin” value.

“Thin value” is anything that is disposable, easily consumed, and generally is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. In the blogging world, think TechCrunch, Mashable, Social Today. Whatever content they push is dead in an hour. It might inform, but it doesn’t enrich anyone’s life.

“Thick value” is anything that provides real and lasting value, enriches the reader’s life, help society or culture move forward, or generally makes some dent in the world. Think Copyblogger, Julien Smith, Seth Godin

You have a choice when you write about what sort of value you provide to your readers. You can either push content that has thin value, or you can push content with thick value. It’s really up to you.

My take is that in order to be a successful blogger, you need to think bigger. You need to take the time to analyze. You need to dispel the uncertainty in your reader’s future. You need publish content that has thick value, and not settle for thin.

You need to think bigger.

The Brilliant Content Strategy Everyone Gets Wrong (problogger.net)
Why the Size Really Matters (zemanta.com)
Solving the problem isn’t the problem (sethgodin.typepad.com)

Nice slap on the back of the head from Gary...

Sun, 20 May 2012 20:44:52 -0400

Nice slap on the back of the head from Gary Vanyerchuk.

“Listening to yourself always wins”.

Believe that!

You have to believe that. If you don’t believe what you’re gut is telling you, how can you turn around and sell it to the gatekeepers in your life?

Exactly.

Pattern Break (chrisbrogan.com)
Multiplying or dividing? (sethgodin.typepad.com)

"If you aren’t dying for it, it’s bullshit. If you die with any life left in you, you’ve wasted it...."

Wed, 16 May 2012 20:28:00 -0400

“

If you aren’t dying for it, it’s bullshit. If you die with any life left in you, you’ve wasted it. You should die entirely empty and spent.

That’s my view.

If there is anything I could wish upon you, that is it. I wish for you the ability to find work worth dying for, worth going to prison for, worth suffering for. It isn’t easy. But it’s worth it.

”

- From Julien Smith. I think that quote stands on it’s own, don’t you?

Riff: Promicroblogging

Tue, 15 May 2012 09:53:24 -0400

Riffs are posts from my notebook. They are more like talking points rather than a full blog post. They could be the basis of future blog posts. I stole this idea from WarrenEllis, in case you were interested.

The velocity of content is increasing.
More and more content is being pushed than anyone could consume in several lifetimes.
Yet our attention remains finite. Only so many hours in the day. Things compete for our attention.
How do you get people to consume your content?
The solution posited by marketing thought leaders is that you can rise above the noise by producing an exceptional, and targeted, blog.
Many exceptional, targeted, blogs languish in obscurity.
Is the time spent writing 500-1000 word blog posts that no one other than Google is going to read an efficient use of your time?
Shouldn’t you put your content where people are ready to consume it?
“Promicroblogging”: Content Marketing for Short Attention Spans?

Social Engagement is the Way Forward for SEO (problogger.net)
Why it Pays to Micro Blog [Lawrence Perry] (ecademy.com)
Search Engine Debate - Twitter a new way to find information (tfollowers.com)
Hard work on the right things (sethgodin.typepad.com)
“In reality, I think it’s much safer to assume that most people MISS our blog posts. Or really any…” (justinmwhitaker.com)

Awesome graphic from Sam Parker at Givemore, the Declaration of...

Sun, 06 May 2012 14:28:00 -0400

Awesome graphic from Sam Parker at Givemore, the Declaration of Contribution.

HT to Andy Sernovitz.

So, how are you going to contribute?

Go do that.

A simple antidote to a corporatized, unfeeling, profit-maximizing world (sethgodin.typepad.com)

ZeFrank is back. I think he’s already 8 or so new episodes...

Thu, 03 May 2012 19:09:11 -0400

ZeFrank is back. I think he’s already 8 or so new episodes out, but this Invocation is the one I keep watching.

“I don’t want to start…but I will.”

Are there any better words to live by for content creators?

futuristgerd: powhida: Twitter Notes. Graphite, colored...

Thu, 03 May 2012 19:00:29 -0400

futuristgerd:

powhida:

Twitter Notes. Graphite, colored pencil, and watercolor on clayboard. 2012. Courtesy of Postmasters Gallery.

“Never post jpegs of dinner (on twitter) unless you made enough for everyone”.

Absolutely classic!

Consolidation

Wed, 02 May 2012 22:47:48 -0400

Image via CrunchBase

I’m Simplifying.

Consolidating.

I sort of let my projects be fruitful and multiply, and they were starting to overlap.

So, I’m folding a bunch of them together.

Please pardon the dust!

Too Many Blogs? (wavemistress.wordpress.com)
Do you have a people strategy? (sethgodin.typepad.com)
The Most Effective (And Fun) Foundation for Your Business (copyblogger.com)
Where Should You Put Your Content? (chrisbrogan.com)

"“Economic growth occurs whenever people take resources and rearrange them in ways that are more..."

Tue, 01 May 2012 13:21:26 -0400

“

“Economic growth occurs whenever people take resources and rearrange them in ways that are more valuable.

A useful metaphor for production in an economy comes from the kitchen. To create valuable final products, we mix inexpensive ingredients together according to a recipe. The cooking one can do is limited by the supply of ingredients, and most cooking in the economy produces undesirable side effects.

If economic growth could be achieved only by doing more and more of the same kind of cooking, we would eventually run out of raw materials and suffer from unacceptable levels of pollution and nuisance.

History teaches us, however, that economic growth springs from better recipes, not just from more cooking. New recipes generally produce fewer unpleasant side effects and generate more economic value per unit of raw material.”

”

- Paul Romer (via pegobry)

On the back end of my prior post, it’s interesting to think about whether the economic and cultural recipes (growth/opulence bias, disregard of the poor) contain the wrong ingredients.

It’s like we are looking for growth, but if we only use high fructose corn syrup, then we won’t get the healthy, sustainable growth we are looking for…we’ll just get more obese.

Better recipes. Better stories. We need to be and do better.

Related articles

Worth Reading #1: Paul Romer: Which Parts of Globalization Matter for Catch-up Growth? (March 22, 2010) (delong.typepad.com)

Mike Dickson’s TEDxExeter (UK) talk on how we can all be...

Tue, 01 May 2012 10:53:48 -0400

Mike Dickson’s TEDxExeter (UK) talk on how we can all be Superman by living simply, so that others may simply live.

Combine that with Umair Haque’s recent post on “The Opulence Bubble”, and you start to wonder: are we part of the problem?

The magic 8-ball says: “All signs point to yes!”

The story of money is not a straight line (sethgodin.typepad.com)

Storyteller

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 14:04:45 -0400

Dr. Seuss Wooden Nickel (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The other night my wife, daughter and I were trading stories over dinner.

Olivia started off with a story about a monster, a princess, and yogurt. Hey, she’s three. It was a good story.

Elisabet dove into a story about a princess, and how much Mommy and Daddy loved her.

We just were trying to convince Olivia to take a bath, so I told a story about “Princess Ophelia the Stinky” who no one wanted to play with because she never took a bath. One day she decided to take a bath, and she became the most popular Princess on the playground.

It was a great family moment, and I hope I get to to trade stories with the two of them for a very long time! (You know, health willing)

It also got me to thinking about what I do for a living.

Everything we do produce is a story. Everything. Yes, even that spreadsheet you’re slaving away on.

Okay JMW, explain yourself.

Last time, we talked a bit about the primary, Paleo, modes of communication. Those modes of communication have storytelling embedded in it.

Take the first mode I outlined: “There’s danger!”

What type of danger? Predator? Fire? Flood? Storm?

Once you have language to communicate the danger, the natural evolution of that is to go into more detail about that, to tell a story. The story allows others to absord and recommunicate that information.

Similarly: “I’m a good mate!”

In the natural world, there’s a load of ritual, posturing, dancing, and preening all to communiate to the opposite sex that you’re a better choice of mate than another option.

Again, it’s a form of storytelling.

Fast forward to today, and we find that pretty much everything we do is a story.

The ad we ignore on our way to work tells a story about the company that paid for it, the culture we live in, and the type of people that purchase that product.

The spreadsheet we produce allows us to tell a story about our business, our project, or our clients, depending on what’s being analyzed.

The status updates that we put up on social media sites give insight into our background, our hopes, our fears, and allow us to share our story with others.

The problem is, so much of the stories that we tell, or consume, or are surrounded by are not worth telling.

So much of the content we put out on the web isn’t consumed because it’s not worth anyone’s attention. Blog posts get no comments. Status updates do not get responded to.

There’s tons of advice on how to attract traffic, or how to find the right audience on social networks, but no one asks if the story behind the content is one worth telling?

I spend a lot of time reading books to my daughter. Every single one of these stories has all the attributes of a story that you’d expect: beginning, middle, end or alternatively, a hero, a conflict, a resolution.

There’s usually some sort of message embedded in the story because…well…these books are how we normalize our children to the culture.

Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham” is at it’s core about keeping an open mind.

Angelina Ballerina is essentially about making your dreams reality by doing the work.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

These are simple stories. Worth telling. Worth retelling.

Why?

I think it comes down two really two things: one, the story gets to one of the primal modes of communication, and two, the way the story does so makes it worth retelling.

The image in my mind is early people sitting around a fire, swapping stories. They were telling each other something important, about a source of food, or danger, or about something they learned that day. The stories were retold, honed, handed down, embellished, mythologized over time.

Prior to the advent of writing, all we had as a culture were these stories, handed from storyteller to storyteller. It was important to not only retell what had been told, but add to the body of knowledge with your own interpretation and experience.

Can you say the same of your content?

Much of the content we produce now will never get that treatment, largely because it’s doesn’t get to one of primal modes of communication, and as a result, it’s ephemeral.

A post like “Five Ways to Use Pinterest for Your Little League” is disposable. Probably not even worth the time taken to create it. If you were sitting around the campfire, telling a story, would you tell that one? Similarly, if you were in Chavet, would you dip your hand in the paint to put that on the wall?

Probably not.

Now, this probably isn’t the only test of the value of content. Probably isn’t even the best one. But as a rule of thumb, if your content isn’t getting any sort of attention, it’s not a bad one.

Be a storyteller. Tell simple stories. Worth telling. Worth retelling.

Go do that.

Don’t expect applause (sethgodin.typepad.com)
The Art of Storytelling (joanneguidoccio.com)

Modes of Communication, or Paleo Marketing

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 14:58:00 -0400

Lions painted in the Chauvet Cave. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A long time ago, I was chatting on Twitter with Tresha Thorsen about communications.

Tre was tweeting something about whether the first words communicated were ones of wonder for the universe.

I just finished reading about how bird songs are basically equivalent to gangster rap, so I had a little more realistic (in the natural, not cynical sense) take.

And then I just forgot about it.

Until I was digging for something in my notebook, and found it again.

So, here goes!

If you think about it, at the animal level, there are really only four modes of instinctive communication.

There’s danger.
There’s food here.
I’m a threat, go away.
I’m a good mate.

When you break down most animal and human communication, doesn’t that get to the core of it?

We’re in danger! There’s food! Don’t mess with me! Hey Ladies!

As we become more conscious of our surroundings, then maybe we start to think more about abstractions.

I think early on there’s a desire to express “I am here”, like the artists who dipped their hands in paint and left a print on the cave wall in Chauvet.

We’ve seen that desire repeated in prehistoric art and artifacts from Australia, Asia, and Africa.

That impulse can only be acted upon once the basic biological needs have been met and satisfied.

I think the modes of communication above, plus the fifth (I am here) are far more likely to be communicated via language before we turn to, and begin to express, wonder.

Maybe Tre is right, but I’m skeptical (as always).

Now, you’ve gotten this far, and wondered “Okay, Justin, that’s great, but what does that have to do with marketing?”

Everything.

I think every act of communication can be traced back to one of these core modes of communication.

It’s hardwired into our DNA, so we might not even be aware of it.

A photo published to Instagram is no less effective in communicating “there’s food here” or “I’m a good mating material” or simply “I am here” than a hand print on a cave rock. Even if the bits and bites might be more ephemeral.

Similarly, a status update about your latest blog post, your businesses services, or about what you are doing surely isn’t that far removed from the Sparrow proclaiming his genetic fitness when you strip the communication to it’s essence.

If you step back, and think about why we communicate, then you start to realize that despite the massive amounts of text, graphics, videos, and audio we create and release into the ether, we really haven’t fallen that far away from the genetic tree. The volume of communication hasn’t really changed the modes of it.

We’re in danger! There’s food! Don’t mess with me! Hey Ladies! I’m Here!

I’ve been wondering if despite the advances of technology, we might be focusing on the wrong modes of communication.

It might be worthwhile to take a step back and think about why you are communicating, and whether or not what you want to communicate is something which connects on the instinctual, or on the abstract, level.

We might be talking about things like content, and engagement, but maybe we are producing the wrong sort of content to engage people at these instinctual levels.

You’re message might be far more powerful if it connected with the modes of communication that we aren’t even aware we still operate on.

Try marketing on the Paleo level.

We’re in danger! There’s food! Don’t mess with me! Hey Ladies! I’m Here!

Is the internet making us more lonely or less lonely? Yes. (gigaom.com)
Earning Attention (chrisbrogan.com)
Advanced Communication Skills (prmarketingcommunication.com)

action leads to clarity. #ambergram heyamberrae, instagr.am The...

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 21:53:09 -0400

action leads to clarity. #ambergram
heyamberrae, instagr.am

The path to clarity starts with action? Interesting. I always put clarity before action. Maybe I should try it the other way around?

"The industrial system (and the marketing regime) adore the mindset of ‘a little bit more,..."

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 23:34:18 -0400

“

The industrial system (and the marketing regime) adore the mindset of ‘a little bit more, please’, because it furthers their power. A slightly higher paycheck, a slightly more famous college, an incrementally better car—it’s easy to be seduced by this safe, stepwise progress, and if marketers and bosses can make you feel dissatisfied at every step along the way, even better for them.

Their rules, their increments, and you are always on a treadmill, unhappy today, imagining that the answer lies just over the next hill…

”

- Seth Godin on questioning your concept of happiness, and on who sold it to you.

It’s important to question your goals are coming from.

Are they yours? Your family’s? Society’s?

If you’ve bought into someone else’s vision of what success looks like, then you’ve given control of your goals to someone else.

Food for thought.

Related articles

If your happiness is based on always getting a little more than you’ve got… (sethgodin.typepad.com)

“The TED Imperatives: Be interested. Be generous. Be interesting. Connect. ….These…” (justinmwhitaker.com)

How to Change Your Life: An Epic, 5,000-Word Guide to Getting What You Want (inoveryourhead.net)

Impressive infographic on how to make money on the...

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 22:34:00 -0400

Impressive infographic on how to make money on the internet.

We’re going to be coming back to this, so you might want to download or *heart* this.

Infographic Explores How Social Sites Make Money (socialtimes.com)
Infographic: Google+ for Business (chrisbrogan.com)
22 Ways to Create Compelling Content When You Don’t Have a Clue [Infographic] (copyblogger.com)