Business

Two related post subjects caught my attention last week and I’m trying to distill them here. The subjects are ideas (coming up with them) and mind-mapping. I began the post, How to find an idea (since abandoned) and also scattered a few comments on a number of blogs providing my own less than profound insight.

The more I trailed these subjects the more clear their relationship was and, despite my initial denials of having a particular process or an ability to mind-map, the more clear it was I did have a process and it was a kind of mind-mapping, albeit a chaotic one.

So this is me trying to distill and explain.

Finding ideas

I don’t find ideas, they find me. I don’t recall ever having consciously made an effort to find an idea. I have certainly been flat broke as far as ideas went and I’ve stared at either blank paper or a blank screen. But I don’t think I’ve ever gone out looking for an idea. It’s not because I have a rule about that or some distaste for it. It just never occurred to me.

To say, “I don’t find ideas, they find me,” is a cutesy little sentence and many people may have a vague sense for the accuracy of it, but it really doesn’t say anything. As with many clever sentences, it’s all style, little or no substance. So here is the substantive part that is missing. In a comment on Remarkablogger I wrote:

I think coming up with ideas has a good deal to do with state of mind, probably related to brain wave activity, and “getting away from my computer” is really about a mental reset.

I come up with ideas by walking the dog or buying groceries. Every so often I’ll write an idea down to work on later but the reality is that I rarely go back [to] it. I appear to be reactive to my environment so I’ll start scribbling about something that has been sparked by what I’ve seen online or in the news. Just as often, however, for reasons I can’t fathom, I’ll find myself thinking about something that apparently hasn’t been sparked by anything — at least not that I’m aware of.

This is why I say “ideas find me.” In some sense, it is a quest for ideas since when I do something like walk the dog it will be partly because I want a mental reset so an idea might find me. (Mind you, it’s largely because the dog is threatening to destroy the house.)

Something I did not say in the quoted comment was this: in almost every case I do not know what I really think until I have written it out. It’s one thing to have an idea, it’s another to have something to say.

Mind-mapping and process

This is where I get to the business of mind-mapping and process, process really being what mind-mapping is about. I had stated in another comment that I didn’t use mind-mapping, that whenever I tried it I failed. But as I kept thinking about it, I realized that was not true. I started thinking about process and then understood that is what is at the heart of mind-mapping. Strictly speaking, mind maps are graphical but in their essence they are about taking notes. (And notes themselves, in a way, can be considered graphical even though they are text, the traditional note taking method.)

I had confused technology (mind-mapping programs) and visual depictions like graphs, flow charts and coloured balloons with mind-mapping. They are simply tools people use. They aren’t, however, necessary to mind-mapping because mind-mapping is about process and clarity.

When I understood that, I understood that I had a process that brought me clarity. I mind-mapped without knowing it. My process is a ramshackle, chaotic amalgam of today and yesterday, technology and old school.

Often a post begins physically in a notebook with inked scribbles. Later, I transcribe it either in a Word doc or within Wordpress as a draft and continue writing. Later, I print it (back to the tactile). Printed, I read it and with pen or pencil start changing it: rewriting this, cutting that, moving this thing over there. There are arrows up and arrows down, ballooned comments in the margins. I see something is missing and, turning the paper over to the blank side, I begin scribbling again.

And then I take it back to my laptop, make my corrections and transcribe what I’ve scribbled. As the process goes back and forth, the paper side fades away and it is all done on the laptop.

As tedious as all this may seem it has an element that, for me, recommends it: it works.

For me it works though not necessarily for anyone else. I’m not usually the sort of person who can just sit down and pour out words that make a coherent post without any of that back and forth. It certainly doesn’t happen for something of any length. As an example of what I do and how and why it works, as I type this on my laptop I’m preparing to print it, sit down with it and a pen, read it over and orient myself as well as make some changes.

The word orient is key. Once I’m in the flow of writing I can go off on a related tangent. I need to go back and see what it was I wanted to say and if I’ve said it or if I’ve missed something or if I’ve inserted something unrelated to it. In other words, it helps answer the question, “What the hell have I been writing about?”

Conversations

I’m finished going through that process described above and, surprisingly, I think I’ve managed to maintain some coherence and say what I wanted to. However, I also discovered that, at the heart of all this, I think I really just wanted to state how it is I work. I’m sure other people work the same way. Let me add that while it seems tiresome and time-consuming and certainly not how everyone will work, it has the virtue of ebb and flow, back and forth. It is like a conversation with myself at the end of which I not only say what I want I also know what it is I really think.

If I may toss in one last thing on the subject of ideas, one aspect that really engages me and helps to define and inform an idea (for me) is a bit of online researching, sometimes of a simple word – like “idea.” You may have a topic, you may even know what you think you want to say, but a bit of online window-shopping of articles and blog posts can highlight aspects and details that may have escaped you. It may also show you what line of thought others are taking and that may be something you want to address, pro or con, or it may put the topic in a light you hadn’t seen it before.

In other words, it turns it into a conversation.

We sometimes think “conversation” in this context is about comments and tweets after we’ve posted. This is true, but the post itself is a product of conversation – one with ourselves as well as with the posts, articles and comments we’ve found online prior to writing it.

Note:

This lengthy ramble was prompted by posts on several blogs, including:

• Broadcasting Brain
• Remarkablogger
• Chris Brogan

Many thanks!

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I began thinking today about social media and all the tools we see. There is something of a digital cornucopia of “stuff”: Facebook, Twitter, iPhone apps, Twitter apps, aggregators and on and on. New ones pop up everyday.

Accompanying all of these is the hype. There is the marketing from the companies that bring them out, the reviews from the various “spheres” and the conversations we carry on about them, online and off. “You can do this with it.” “You can do that.” “You can also do these things too.”

It all sounds marvelous unless you are hearing from the contrarian perspective in which case the tools and apps are frivolous or any number of other negative descriptives.

What I was wondering about, however, was how we actually use them. Are we using them just because everyone else is and they are the distraction of the month? Are we using them to a productive end? How are we using them … or more to the point, I suppose, why? What, if anything, do we get from them?

I’m also thinking less about the business aspect and more about the general population that uses them. There are a number of ways we use them as far as business goes, some effective, some not so much. But how and why do people use them, that big consumer base that gets talked about so much? I’m sure there are a number of answers to this but I also wonder if they all don’t dovetail into one or two general answers, a theme that shows how those different hows and whys all relate.

Despite all the things that can be done with social media tools, from sending messages to playing games and grabbing weather information quickly, I think all the whys can be summed into a single word: people.

There are supportive words that follow from that one word: connection, communication and information.

Regardless of all the flim flam with video, audio, Flash and games, for people to find the Internet (and social media) to be of any relevance for them, those four words need to be considered essential: people, connection, communication and information.

Even a silly video involves those words since it is pointless without connection to other people which, when that occurs, communicates and even passes along information, at least to the extent that it says something about you. (Just as it says something about those who respond to it.)

Everything else, while amusing and entertaining, is just a passing fancy. In the world of social media, I suspect that if you don’t keep those four words paramount in your mind you run the risk of becoming quickly forgettable.

***

I should add that I don’t think I’m saying anything new here or something I haven’t either said or alluded to before. I’m probably repeating myself with this post. But repetition is not a bad thing since it is often through repetition that we best remember.

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I’ve been looking at a few sites offering web design and related services and I find myself puzzled, even a bit alarmed. This is not due to what I found (though in some cases it was) but by what I did not find.

I have seen absolutely no reference to content. Do the sites magically populate themselves? If not, who does it? If the client does, is there no consultative service to advise them on what and how to put the content in or maintaining it? If the client doesn’t handle the content, who does? If the web design company does, who handles the research, the writing, the editing? Have they a background in it? Are they good?

There were no references to social media other than “Follow us on Twitter” and/or something similar for Facebook. If a company is moving to or revamping an online presence, isn’t this a crucial aspect? Where do they get help, direction or advice on this?

I found a few web design/web services companies with URLs that required the www preface. Personally, I never use it anymore. I just type in something like writelife.net. No http. No www. I suspect many people are like me. If so, there are a lot of people going to a “page not found” message when they type in the web company’s address. I can’t believe that builds a lot of confidence in a web design company’s awareness of how the web works.

I also found quite a few companies using dated language. In the world of business, marketing and technology, terminology changes almost daily and if you rely on today’s clichés you become tomorrow’s anachronism. Surely “offering solutions” is at least ten years old. I believe current terminology should be avoided at all costs but I do realize it is often unavoidable. But this puts the onus on you to continually assess your site and see where and how it requires revamping. In the online world, static means death.

None of the above is true of all web design sites. Hopefully, I just stumbled on a few that skewed my perception. It is worrying though. On the other hand, from my perspective, maybe it holds the promise of some work. :-)

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I’ve completed my Saturday morning project which was to go through my posts from 2004 and find the ones I most liked. They aren’t necessarily written as well as they should but such are the hazards of blogs.

It was fascinating for a few reasons. First of all, I was interested to see how much more I was focused on writing, presumeably the reason for a blog called Writelife. I think that is why I have fifteen posts there even though I want to try to keep each year to ten or less.

The second thing I noticed is how focused I was on blogging whereas now my focus is social media (blogging being a subset of). But that was six years ago when blogging was really taking off and there was so much discussion about blogs and what they were, as well as the criticisms — more or less the same as now with social media.

Two posts were of particular interest to me. One of them was 12 rules for Web writing which was actually a repost of something I’d written around ten years ago, about 2000 or so. Back then I was a bit anal about the word web and capitalizing it. Now, I don’t care. The rules, by the way, are more or less obvious ones — there are no great insights, I think. What I find interesting, however, is that by and large I think they’re still valid. (Now that I think of it, maybe some of them weren’t so obvious back in 2000.)

The other post is Language as a communication barrier. For a very long time it was my most visited post. What is of interest in that is where that traffic was coming from — outside of North America to a great extent. Africa, Pacific Rim etc.

Finally, many of the posts from back then have character set problems due to the many Wordpress updates and the importing of the blog from another location. (That importing business is also why some of the internal links go nowhere. It is simply too time consuming to go through and fix the URLs.) Although I tried to clean up the fifteen posts here, my posts from back then often show code rather than an apostrophe, quotation mark and so on.

If you’re at all interested, you’ll find the fifteen posts on my Highlights page, just below 2009. Other years will hopefully be coming soon.

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I’ve recently started a project that requires a certain amount of reclamation work. By that I mean my memory is pretty awful so I’m doing some work to reclaim my memory by going through my various blog archives. It’s been something of a revelation.

I have three blogs: this one, another devoted to movies and a personal blog that is currently on an extended hiatus as I decide what to do with it. Writelife (ostensibly about writing, social media and so on) and the movie blog both have a specific focus (and sometimes not so specific). To some degree, they are self-censored in that career-related people, companies and whoever else can see them and I don’t want to come across as too much of a raving blog lunatic. (I’m not always successful in that regard.)

The third, the personal one, is pretty much me uncensored. In fact, it’s on hiatus right now as I consider the wisdom of this, consider the wisdom of trying to manage three blogs and I try to figure out what to do with the blog name, which is a stupid one I dreamed up at the spur of the moment a few years ago. But all that’s an aside …

Here’s the thing: Of the three, the most interesting is hands-down the personal one. It is the one where, when I’m on my game, I have the best writing. It’s easily the funniest. And when I use the word “censor” in connection with it I’m not suggesting there is anything that needs censoring. I use the f-word more frequently there, in the older posts, more so than I would now. But other than that, it’s largely tame stuff. The censor business was simply considering how I appeared to others online, at least in the first impressions sense. From a career perspective, was it a good idea?

Going through the archives (and those of the other blogs) I see certain themes recurring. (That is my diplomatic way of saying I’m repetitive.) And I see that there is one thing in particular I’m interested in above anything else: people.

Why is the personal one more interesting than the other two? Because it is specifically about people: me as a people (obviously) and others as people. That’s also why it’s funny, at least to me.

The other two blogs come at the subject of people sideways. Here, on this blog, by discussing marketing, social media, marketing, communication and so on. On the other blog, via movies which, when they are good movies, are always good because they are good stories and good stories are always about people.

I found it interesting that among the posts in the personal blog archive there were a few that sounded very similar to recent ones posted here. The critiques of social media today are very similar to the critiques of blogs from several years ago, prior to the proliferation of social media tools and when personal blogs were either at their height or beginning to fall from that height.

What is most interesting to me, however, is the writing (to me) is so much better. I don’t think it relates to the writing as writing but to what the writing was about and how it went about it. Posts about events and topics that, on the surface, were utterly trivial, were actually the most engaging.

So once again, as often happens for me, I’m rethinking what I rethought a while ago.

As for the project I referred to above, my fingers are crossed that I have the tenacity to complete it. That is always the hardest part.

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Our world, particularly business and technology, is peppered with metaphors and analogies. An article in the Harvard Business Review, The Next Evolution in Economics: Rethinking Growth, uses a biological analogy in discussing how we view business growth. It drew a response, Science, analogy and ecoliteracy, from pathways questioning the accuracy of the analogy and suggesting another would be more appropriate.

In some sense I agree, but I disagree more. My argument is simply this: 1) while there may be similarities, things compared are never the same and, 2) the key point to be communicated is better done with the biological analogy.

In this instance, it is likely true that the biological comparison only goes so far and that, in order to go further, an ecosystem is a better analogy. However, I don’t think that analogy does what the initial, biological analogy does nearly as well, which is to convey the most important idea informing the analogy’s use: constant growth is death.

To use an analogy (no joke intended) … Let’s say I’ve made a movie. I’m asked, “What’s it like?” If I answer, “It’s sort of like Casablanca,” almost everyone will have an idea of what that means. Of course, it won’t be accurate – it may even be misleading, especially if I leave it at that.

But if I answer, “It’s sort of like The End of the Affair,” some people will have an idea of what that means having read the book or seen the movie, but others will not. Casablanca communicates far better than The End of the Affair simply because more people are familiar with it.

Getting back to the biology/ecosystem analogies … The biological one communicates more broadly and with much more impact than the ecosystem one, particularly if you bring in the idea of cancer as a malignant growth. Many, many people have been touched by cancer in one way or another.

The problem with my argument is that, once you establish the idea of constant growth as a negative, you run into problems. But I don’t think it’s a problem specific to this instance, it’s a problem with all analogies. They are always inaccurate because no two things are ever the same. Their use is in communicating a key idea. Their flaw is in our nature, which is to simplify and not think things through and realize they are inevitably inexact. Ecosystem may be more exact but it, too, will only go so far.

From what I’ve seen in the business world, however, at the ground level where middle-managers and executives are engaged in daily business activities, the idea of constant growth is very deeply rooted and unquestioned. I think the only way to shake it loose is with an analogy that has the kind of impact of the biological one. I just don’t think the ecosystem analogy would do the same. It’s also a more complex analogy, I think, at least compared to the biological one.

I suppose my quibble is dependent on defining what it is that is to be communicated and to whom. But it seems to me, at least as far as a broader, general audience goes, you won’t be able to communicate anything until you create the conditions to so, and I think that lies in freeing people from the traditional growth, growth, growth-at-all costs mindset to one where growth is seen differently – as not necessarily a good thing or, growth is good but a different kind of growth.

As I often do, I agree and disagree simultaneously. There must be a metaphor for that.

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Allow me to inebriate some sober numbers … When we talk about Facebook and Twitter, cars and bikes, business and the arts, we are always self-referential. We think a certain way, we use something in a certain way, we believe this may occur in a certain way … and we forget that the world doesn’t always think like us. It’s a cliché, but everybody is different and just because we see something one way or use something in a particular manner, it doesn’t necessarily follow that every one else will.

I was thinking about this when I read the post, 10 Sobering Twitter Statistics. Some people see Twitter as a marketing tool, some as a tool for news, some as way to enhance their real estate business (yes, another marketing view but perhaps also organizational). And there are some who use it for non-commercial reasons and some who just use it for silliness. The tool itself has no inherent purpose beyond what each of us brings to it. For many, there is no purpose.

I was also thinking about statistics and surveys and all the data we collect. Often, maybe more often than not, the information they best provide concerns how much more we need to learn. They highlight what we don’t know. And they are usually interpreted from a particular point of view, at least at street level.

I saw a tweet, followed by a retweet, for that posting titled, 10 Sobering Twitter Statistics. Use of the word “sobering” suggests there is something not very good in these numbers. But I thought, what if there were? What if there were other ways of seeing these? So I’ve put together an alternative — 10 other ways of seeing sobering Twitter stats:

• 94% of Twitter users have under 100 followers (which may suggest quality has more meaning than quantity)

• 90% of tweeting is done by 10% of Twitter users (Which is very much like the real world: 90% don’t call radio stations, 90% don’t write letters to the editor, most don’t speak out at town halls, etc. Also, some people don’t speak because they are listening.)

• 60% of new Twitter users fail to return the following month (But since we don’t know who they were we have no idea whether they would have brought anything of value to the Twitter streams nor do we know why they didn’t return.)

• 50% of Twitter accounts are inactive (Haven’t tweeted in the past week) (See the previous item)

• 40% of tweets are “pointless babble” (As opposed to … TV? Blogs? The street? Boardrooms? Sounds like it reflects the real world.)

• 35% of Twitter users have 10 or fewer followers (Personally, though I have loads of acquaintances, that is about how many really close friends I have. Maybe I’m tweeting for reasons other than to pitch something?)

• 21% of Twitter accounts are empty placeholders (And what would the percentage of domain names as placeholders be? Have these accounts been abandoned? Are they in place to reserve for a future presence as a company stream, a person’s stream, a campaign stream or to prevent others from getting a name that might have an impact on theirs? Do we have any idea? For all we know it could be one obsessive compulsive guy trying over and over to open one account that is “just right.”)

• 11% of Twitter users interact with brands on Twitter (The world, unfortunately, will always have a certain percentage of really stupid people. As I’ve written before, we don’t follow brands. We follow people. If you find a brand with a lot of followers I would hazard a guess that they aren’t interacting with it but with each other.)

• 9% of Twitter users don’t follow anyone at all (Maybe they have lives beyond the Internet? Maybe they have no interest – just took the name because its theirs and they didn’t want someone else to have it? Maybe they haven’t found anyone worth following? Maybe they don’t know how?)

• 3% of followers click on links tweeted (Does this include retweets? More to the point, how many links do we come across in a day – on web pages, in emails, on Facebook and so on? How many of those do we click? Is 3% about average? High? Low?)

And that’s it. Accurate assessments? Probably not. But you never know! But it’s worthwhile questioning the assumptions we bring to topics like these.

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“… It’s nice to know that if I do post about my dogs or something, it’s not a total faux pas.”

That is from a comment left yesterday by Tzaddi, from ThriveWire, to my post I wonder what she’ll say? And I thought, yes. Dogs are a great example of what I’m trying to get at.

From the perspective of career, from the position of being a business or part of one, you would not think that tweets and status updates and blog posts about your dog would be appropriate and, strictly speaking, they are not. But …

As I tried to suggest yesterday, the seemingly trivial and inconsequential are a part of what humanizes what you put online because, online, life is no different than life offline and people aren’t any different either. The primary connection you make with people online is not what you put online, it is you.

And it is them.

Let’s go back to the dog and an example. I do occasional work with a guy and his company from Michigan, the Detroit area I believe. We met (online) through a mutual acquaintance about some potential writing work. He was looking for a writer. I was the writer he went with. Why?

The truth is, he could have gone with any writer. It’s not like we are in short supply. And no matter how big an ego I might have there is no getting around the fact that lots of people can write, lots of people can write as well as I do and many of those people can probably write better than I do. I am good but the reality of the world is that as good as you may be, there is always someone better. So why pick me?

Because, at a certain point, how good you are isn’t an issue. How comfortable someone feels working with you is. In this case, there was some sense of ease because someone he knew, the friend who introduced us, had given me a thumbs up. But what sealed the deal, in my opinion, was my dog.

We communicate primarily via email, though occasionally by phone. In our first phone contact, I had to apologize because my dog had started barking at something.

“You have a dog? What kind?”

He had a dog too. Since that call, almost all our communications make references, however briefly, to our dogs. Through the dogs he was able to get some sense, verbally by phone and in text via email, of who I was. And as minute as it may be, it was some degree of comfort. The way we communicate, about our dogs, gave him some sense of me as someone he could work with.

Walking with my dog in the park twice a day, I meet people and talk with them. They are people who would walk by me and that I would walk past with, at best, a nod of acknowledgement except … we have dogs. So we stop. Our dogs sniff each other. And we talk about our dogs and get to know each other. Because of my dog, I have friends I would not otherwise have.

Dogs are simply an example of the seemingly inconsequential elements of a life that opens doors, dismisses barriers and allows for people to communicate with ease. Another example? How about Star Trek? You wouldn’t believe the number of people I’ve gotten to know simply because we both like Star Trek.

Dogs and Star Trek. They have nothing to do with the work I do. But they do facilitate the relationships necessary to allow for the work.

So every so often I tweet, update and post about my dog, about Star Trek, and about a million every day mundane, banal, trivial things because it is who I am and being who you are is what lets people in. Taken to excess, yes, it definitely shuts down all those doors. But excluding it means they never open in the first place.

It may be digital but social media is about people and people don’t change. You have to have the skills to do the work but it’s who you are that gets you the work.

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The headline could also read, “You are what you tweet.” If you put something out there on the Internet — it’s out there on the Internet and anyone and everyone can find it and see it. And as far as the world is concerned, it’s who you are.

I bring this up because on one of the Twitter feeds I manage there is a young woman who has interesting, worthwhile tweets. But she also has the usual trivial tweets as most people do. The thing is, she often uses profanity. In fact, she uses it a lot.

I could write a long post about four-letter words and, who knows, maybe one day I will. To be brief, they don’t offend me. Having worked in radio for a while, there is little I haven’t heard. I also use those words myself. Sometimes with frequency.

Still, I often find them annoying, at least in writing. They seem to be wasted words. It’s kind of like, “I get it; you’re upset. Could you please get to the point?”

My real reason for this post, however, is this: when you use those words online, on Twitter and so on, do you ever think about who may see them? There are few people who haven’t heard them and, really, only a small percentage of people who are truly offended by them. I think at worst you would find people like me who find them tiresome and unimaginative.

But there are also people out there who could potentially employ you, or get involved in some way that is beneficial to your career or life generally. Maybe a web designer recommends me to others as a writer. Or maybe I suggest a designer to someone and that designer is you. There are a lot of business people and government people online, especially on Twitter, many of whom have the potential to be of benefit to you – jobs, recommendations, tips and so on.

The thing is, when it comes to this area of human activity — business and related matters — regardless of whether someone is fine with the language or not, there’s a good chance they’ll be a little uneasy with you because when you are working for or with them, to some degree you represent them and their business.

If the person they find in their Twitter stream has a foul mouth, odds are they’ll prefer not to take chances and so avoid you. While you may not need a job or recommendation or anything else right now, one day you will. Increasingly, who you are on the Internet will be the person the world sees you as. Whatever song and dance you do in an interview or in a resume will mean nothing compared to what is in your Twitter stream, on your Facebook pages or on your blog.

If they’re full of profanity, that’s who you will be seen as and, for most people and companies and governments, that’s a no-no because it means bad branding. They’ll avoid you.

How your blogs, Twitter streams, Facebook pages and so on represent you goes beyond potentially naughty photos. It’s all your content, including words. Maybe words more than anything else. Despite images and video and all the other web developments, the Internet is still primarily a text medium.

You probably don’t care about how your friends see you – why should you? They’re your friends, they know who you are. The problem is, your friends aren’t the only people who see you online. Everyone else can too and all they have to go by is what they see and read.

So … who are you online?

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