content

Nothing is as easy as it appears – even talking.

We’ve likely all encountered variations of this comedic scene: someone looks like one thing but their voice doesn’t fit our expectations. Let’s say there is a huge football lineman who towers over us yet his voice is high-pitched and squeaky. He may even have a lisp. So we laugh or chuckle.

It’s politically incorrect and socially inappropriate. Worse, it’s unkind. But it’s a natural response to the gap between expectations and reality. Comedy is all about setting up expectations then delivering the unexpected.

How we sound has always intrigued me. I’m always surprised when I meet someone who, should the conversation turn to the subject of radio, has a kind of dream of being on the radio. Seriously, there are a lot of them! I suppose it’s understandable but I know that there is a huge difference between the idealized, fantasy image of being a radio announcer and the reality.

To begin with, it’s one thing to talk it’s quite another to say something that is listenable. You can talk, but are you saying anything worth hearing (the content)? You can talk, but do you have bad habits like a chuckle, the same chuckle, preceding every pause? Do you have to script everything you say or can you talk off the cuff and be sensible? Can you talk and naturally work in all the announcements you’re required to: weather, ads, promos?

Here’s an example: I have a moderately listenable voice. But if I were on the radio and had to talk off the cuff it would all be gibberish punctuated by the odd profanity because, unfortunately, you have to actually think about what you’re saying and my brain works slowly. It’s sad but it’s true. It also goes off on unanticipated tangents.

When you talk, do you sound like yourself or do you sound like a completely different person? Some people, I found, sounded like “announcers.” We use to have a term for that – “Ronnie Radio.” (In other words, there are announcers and there are people who trying to imitate what they think announcers sound like.)

Let’s say you are reading something, a news story or an ad or an introduction – do you sound like you’re reading or can you sound natural, as if you aren’t reading?

Some people have the skills and talent required to be on the radio. Still, they fall into a couple of types. There are some people who are great announcers but no matter what the situation, always sound like announcers. For example, if you have an ad that requires a character voice, let say the average Joe talking about his car, they can’t do it. Put in different terms, they can be a narrator in a film but they can’t be one of the film’s characters because they can’t act. They do one thing, do it very well, but that is it.

And some people can do those character voices but couldn’t be an announcer to save their life. A few can do both.

All this voice business, by the way, doesn’t even touch on all the other requirements, such as public appearances, community involvement and radio station functions they may have. (Maybe they have to also sell ads, or manage the music, or produce commercials.)

On the outside, being a radio voice appears easy and fun. It can certainly be the latter, fun, and for some it can be both. But talking on the radio involves a lot more than talking on the radio.

That is why it is something I never tried. Years ago, when I first started in radio, I saw what was involved and gauged it against what my skills were and my personality was and it was clear to me that it would not be something I’d do even remotely well.

And so I write.

(Yes, today was a bit of a tangent.)

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I’ve been following Seth Godin’s blog for years. I’ve been reading his books for years. (I think I started with Permission Marketing.) However, as he himself describes in a different context, we often experience a dip and so, as with anything that goes on over a long period of time, it waxes and wanes. Thus I read his blog almost daily for a while then other things get my attention or I get too busy and I go through a period of not following his posts, or seeing them only occasionally.

And then my interest renews and I start following daily again. I get past my “dip.”

Why do I read I him? I asked myself this question today while drinking coffee and freezing my butt off as I paced around my deck. (The pacing was about keeping warm; being outside was about waking myself up.)

I think I know the answer. Although often referred to as a “marketing guru,” and strictly speaking I suppose that is what he is, I don’t think that is what he is or does. What he does is observe and describe human behaviour – and that’s why I find him interesting.

You could probably say all marketing is about this, as well as using what we learn from it to create interest in products or services and ultimately stimulate sales. But it’s often at a distance, as if we’re speaking of something that is “other,” of which we aren’t a part.

From what I’ve seen, when the various aspects of marketing are discussed there is a degree of detachment. Maybe it’s the way we speak of it, maybe it’s because there is a heavy focus on numbers and charts. It’s a cerebral way of seeing it.

With Seth Godin, I sense the visceral. While the head may agree or disagree, it is the agreement or disagreement in the gut that is strongest. I’ll read something that he is describing, such as The Dip, and I know it’s true because I’ve experienced it or seen it in others. Often, he’ll describe something we’re already aware of, if only intuitively, but we’ve yet to formulate or articulate it. But there is an element of recognition we experience in what he says.

I came across one of his posts today, Random rules for ideas worth spreading, and it was the same thing. There is a list and much of it might be called common sense, even obvious in some cases, but each item resonates in one way or another with what we observe either in ourselves, in others or both. My favourite was this one: “Are you a serial idea-starting person? If so, what can you change to end that cycle? The goal is to be an idea-shipping person.” Yes, I know that one.

In his books Seth speaks of being remarkable, of tribes and now, in his latest book, of being a linchpin (Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?). Regardless of the words used, each term (and the ideas contained in the books in which they’re found) are born out of the observation and understanding of human behaviour, something we recognize as true in our guts.

I think that is the key to his success and, while I don’t know this to be true, I’d suggest at the core of what he does is a love of and fascination with people. I suppose someone could achieve success without this but I can’t help feeling that to do so would require so much more effort.

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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 saw a rather disturbing comment in the letters area of the local paper (Fredericton’s Daily Gleaner). It went thus:

“The average New Brunswicker is not qualified to make the final decision concerning the sale of NB Power. We do not have access to those in the know and the massive amounts of information required to make a sound decision.”

The letter essentially argues for the need for experts. And I certainly agree experts — their knowledge and opinions — have value but if I may take a tangent for a moment …

If I recall correctly, in the 2005-2006 NHL season the experts said the Detroit Red Wings would win the Stanley Cup. They were the team that placed first overall in the regular season. As it turned out, they were turfed in the first round, 4 games to 2, by the Edmonton Oilers who squeaked into the playoffs just ahead of the Vancouver Canucks. The Oilers, who the experts said would have their butts handed to them by Detroit, went on to the Stanley Cup final where they lost in the 7th game to the Carolina Hurricanes.

My point? Experts are fine but I ain’t bettin’ the farm on what they say. I’d also like to add what I left in the comments area of the online letters area. It reads:

“The NBPower deal involves many things such as economics, the energy industry and legal aspects and ideally we would all be experts in every area required to make an informed decision. However, it is a false argument to say that expertise leads to a correct decision.

“To the best of my knowledge, we have many economic and financial experts throughout the world and yet we are in an unprecedented global recession. This would not be the case if we could depend on experts to always get it right. Experts, like all of us, make mistakes so it is appropriate to ask questions such as: how did it come about, what will its impact be, what are the legal and economic ramifications, long term? The average person is also qualified to decide whether the answers to the questions are sufficient or ring of obfuscation.

“Much of this NBPower debate could have been avoided, I think, had any of the experts consulted had a background in communications but I guess that’s the one area they just winged it.”

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I’ve been going through my posts from 2009 trying to identify the ones I think are the better ones. I suppose was making a kind of Top Ten list, despite my recurring griping about lists. It is not a “best of” list, however. It is a list of the ones I liked, though some may not have been all they could or should have been. It’s a favourites list, I suppose. It goes like this:

1. What Star Trek did to me
2. The class system is alive and well and now online
3. Readers have responsibilities too
4. I wonder what she’ll say today
5. Generations, transitions, moving pictures
6. Literacy is a prerequisite for independence
7. Monetizing meaning: what is content anyway?
8. Is usability kaput?
9. Who are we not hearing from?
10. The first draft is the outline

It has been an intriguing exercise. As I go through the posts I see the themes that have preoccupied me. I’ve been aware that there was some redundancy to my posts as I keep returning to certain subjects but I think this is likely true of anyone with a blog.

Here are some of the themes, observations and comments I see popping up over and over:

• What I perceive as a belief among many that social media, and the Internet generally, is ubiquitous and of a democratic nature and how that is a false belief.
• Sometimes the act of communication is more important than what is communicated.
• Social media is not tactile. We’re all in touch with each other online but we never touch each other – there is no physical contact to technological connections.

Those are the three big ones I keep seeing myself writing about. As far as the topic of writing went, my focus was a bit generic. I seemed to write more about that vague thing we call content – what is happening to traditional news, how blogs have evolved, managing social media content and so on. I was all over the map which is not unusual for me.

As an aside … I rarely make lists like the one above. I decided to do so this time as a first step in a process of going through all my posts, back to 2004, and identifying the better material. In my inept fashion, I’m trying to do a bit of online housekeeping.

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Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance. – Kurt Vonnegut

It amazes me that so many organizations don’t understand branding. They think branding is their logo, their TV ads, mailouts and handshakes for the cameras. Your brand is everything associated with you.

Like the websites you don’t maintain. Like the information you don’t update. Like the branding that is actually unbranding.

There are lots of examples but I’m not going to say or link to specific organizations because they are simply examples of what too many others are also doing – or, rather, not doing.

One site currently has a mention on its home page about a “planned maintenance period.” There are no dates referred to and, to make matters worse, it has been up there for about a year. That’s some long maintenance period!

I’ve tried contacting some organizations (using contact page information that is online). Very few respond, even with an auto-response. I wonder what impact that has on your brand?

One site spoke of a being in the running for 2009 award then linked to a page with information about the 2008 award. Again, what does that tell your customers about you?

I know of a newsletter that had major issues (meaning it was a waste of time and money) but at least had the benefit of taking only about an hour or less to set up and send. Now that it has been “rebranded” it takes eight or more hours to set up, has all kinds of special links to track usage and so on (which replicate a system already in place that does it more easily and quickly) and is primarily made up of old news content and products, products, products.

Utterly useless as an effective newsletter for either the business or its customers, it requires even more work and money than before and it all goes into the digital garbage because the branding is all about looks without substance.

In other words, the branding is really unbranding. It makes the company look bad.

Who dreams up this stuff? Who thinks their web presence isn’t important?

Why do they think that spending oodles of money on revamps and other marketing ventures is more important than maintaining the areas where customers actually go and try to use?

Myself, I would pour the money into anal-retentive people – the kind with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) – and let them be as nit-picky has they can be about what is out there representing me and making sure it’s accurate, updated and, most important, useful for my customers.

And I’m pretty sure if I did, I’d cut my marketing budget in half.

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If you follow discussions about social media, journalism, “Web 2.0″ and all that other related “stuff,” a number of terms pop up over and over. Content. Value. Monetization.

There is also a lot of “what if” that goes on. I kind of like that sort of thing. It’s fun to imagine how change will be manifest. (I grew up reading, and loving, science fiction and that’s all about “what if.”)

But as with all things, sometimes you want to call a timeout because it becomes excessive. Sometimes you get so caught up in imagining and speculating about one thing, you forget to think about another. In this case, I think the thing that’s missed is meaning.

Content

We refer to content but, when we do, we refer to it as a product. As if it is a number in a column in a spreadsheet that will be in a formula (probably the formula that allows us to determine “value”). While for cost purposes I suppose that’s a good way to look at it, that isn’t what content is. The term “content” is probably not a very good one to use because it is one that is, psychologically and emotionally, divorced from what actually constitutes “content.” As terms go, it is a kind of dispassionate third party.

Content is meaning. Sometimes as a film, sometimes as a song. Sometimes as a news story, sometimes as an image. Be it a painting, movie, song or whatever – even software – content is always meaning. When we like these things, it is because they mean something to us, even if we can’t articulate it. And vice versa. When we don’t like something it can be because of its meaning or maybe the fact that it has no meaning to us. It’s gibberish. Lack of meaning is itself a kind of meaning.

Value

When we refer to value, it usually concerns how much we (or some group) want something. The demand side of the supply and demand scale. Once again, we speak of it as if it’s a number in a column in a spreadsheet waiting to become an input in a formula. (Or maybe it’s the output of a formula.) As with content, we speak of it dispassionately, as if we can separate it from ourselves and consider it objectively. But like content, value is about meaning. It is not itself meaning (that’s content) but it’s the significance of the meaning to us. If something means a lot, it has a high value. If it doesn’t mean much, it has a lower value.

Value is the significance of something’s meaning to us.

Monetization

The third term, monetization, is related to content and value and is also about meaning, though in a somewhat different way. It’s the conversion of meaning into money. In this context, monetization is what we will pay for meaning based on its value to us.

Monetization is meaning as money.

Meaning

A problem I see with all these terms is their dispassion. Content, value, monetization … they all seem to separate us from the core of what they are about, which is meaning. If you’re like me, you probably feel one way when discussing content and quite another when discussing movies or books or journalism. There is an emotional attachment to the latter; there is an emotional disconnect with the former.

At times this is good but there are also times when it is not very good. I think, currently, when I see these many discussions in blogs and Twitter, it’s not very good because we are so focused on that word “monetization” that we forget what we are talking about monetizing. (All things are already monetized – the discussions are really about monetizing “content” differently.)

By discussing content almost exclusively in business and marketing terms we lose sight of meaning and focus almost exclusively on the money.

Questions

It may be true that the value of content, the significance of its meaning to us, has lessened but, if that’s the case, shouldn’t we wonder why and also wonder about the consequences of that? The current discussions often remind me of discussions of style versus substance (meaning). It strikes me that we are currently heavily focused on style, by which I mean we’re caught up in the means of delivering content, almost to the point that we’re indifferent to what that content might be.

And, oddly for a pretty secular world, we seem to have a blind faith in the idea that “things will work themselves out.” It’s the argument that the market will correct itself. That may be true but we say it and believe it as if no other possibility exists, that that’s simply how it is, end of discussion. Blind faith.

Content will always be generated. Human beings have an infinite capacity for it. That has been an idea behind much of the thinking behind Web 2.0, bloggers and evolving media. The generation of items of meaning is endless. But what happens to the monetization aspect when the value goes down because meaning no longer means much to us anymore? When algorithms and findability (ease of locating content) and cost dilute the significance of meaning?

The money aspect aside, what happens if or when the value of meaning approaches zero and we’re largely indifferent to meaning or, perhaps, lose the capacity to distinguish the value of something because it doesn’t matter anymore?

Put in a vernacular way, what happens when content that might have great significance to us is lost in a haystack of meaningless crap?

I’m not suggesting we install some old school custodial approach to managing content, to preserving someone else’s idea of what has value and place it behind some secure, walled city of “preserved meaning.” I think all protectionist approaches to what is occurring are, to put it bluntly, idiotic.

I am saying I believe we need to spend time discussing what is occurring from something more than the delivery/money side. We should revisit the style vs. substance argument and think equally about both (the delivery of content vs. the significance of the content). How something is said (delivery) is as important as what is said (content). Focusing on one without attention to the other risks conclusions that are unbalanced.

(An aside: With the way Internet technology is evolving and particularly with the way we are using it, could it be that content is no longer about depth but about breadth? And if so, what does that mean? What’s gained; what’s lost?)

Maybe the question I’m asking is, how will we value content in a world where there is so much of it? How will we distinguish what is of value to us and what is not? And how will we ease the nagging problem of not knowing what we don’t know, of never having any sense of assurance that what we have found is what we needed or wanted?

And where will art live in all of this?

My own guess is that old professional classes (journalism would be a good example given the current discussions) will be replaced. But replaced doesn’t mean arbiters will be gone. It means we will have new arbiters. Maybe they’ll be Google algorithms. Maybe it will be “the wisdom of crowds” via various social networks.

Whoever they are, in some quarters there is an assumption they will be better. In other quarters, there is an assumption they will be much worse. Myself, I’m undecided on this. One minute I think one way, the next I think another. While not cynical, I am a skeptic and my worry is best expressed by Pete Towshend:

“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

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I find the “newspapers dying” debate often misdirected (as in the CBC Sunday Report’s take on the topic) by focusing on means of delivery – print dying, everything going online. I also think the focus on print a bit misleading. I believe newspapers are the canaries in the coal mine. (Preceded by music, actually.)

The real issue is money. How do we pay for journalism in a digital world where everything online is expected to be free? (How do we pay for any kind of content, for that matter?) I saw a stat at the beginning of the Sunday Report piece that in 2008 more people got their news online than from newspapers. The show passed over the fact that the newspapers were something people paid for, the online news was free.

If content is expected to be free, what happens to TV, radio, novels, movies etc.? How do these things get funded? Ads can provide only so much revenue and, even where they can, it’s an iffy proposition.

Online audiences, particularly younger ones, have been habituated to paying little or nothing for all kinds of content (like music). Content has been commoditized at the level of “free.”

How anyone makes money in that world is the real question. That a change is unfolding is clear. What no one seems to know is how to fund the infrastructure (like journalists, producers etc.). And few people seem to talk about it.

Many are finding news with a community focus (hyper-local) a way to go and it certainly appears to be having success where its happening. But where it exists, is it successful enough to generate enough revenue to pay for itself?

And more to the point: If hyper-local models (niche models to put it another way, working the long tail), are the way news is going, how do they talk to one another? Is each isolated in its own bubble? You do a great, successful job of reporting on your community/region, but where do you connect provincially? Nationally? Globally? And how is that funded?

I think everyone is like me: we want our cake and we want to eat it too. I want news etc. online and free. I want there to be enough revenue coming in to support that news on all levels. I don’t want to have pay for any of it.

So, how’s that work?

(Sorry, I don’t know why but I seem to be obsessed with this issue these days.) 

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Two thoughts on the hubbub around Facebook’s terms and conditions and the backtracking on the revised version:

1) What if Facebook users wrote their own terms and conditions and include in it an assertion that not only do they own their own content, they own Facebook? Surely that would be as valid as Facebook’s attempt to own the user content.

2) If all of Facebook’s users started posting porn, and if Facebook makes a claim to own all content posted on the site, could we make Facebook the world’s biggest pornographer?

Okay. They’re rather silly thoughts. But then, the Facebook revised terms and conditions, and the rather sleight-of-hand way they attempted to put them in place, were rather silly too, albeit in a dangerous way.

I confess I’ve never really give a lot of thought to the question of ownership online, so I’m not entirely sure what my position would be, but I think it would circle around this: I don’t think I have a problem with others using whatever content I might put online unless,

a) someone other than me claims ownership of it,

b) someone other than me claims authorship, unless they actually are the author (unlikely since I write everything I post, for good or ill), and,

c) someone is using the content and generating revenue from it.

That last one would be a really big deal, for me. If you’re using content I’ve created to generate revenue, or to support the generation of revenue, I expect to get paid. In the case of something like Facebook, yes, people are posting content and, yes, Facebook is generating revenue. But I think the scenario is different in their case because what they are is a platform, that is what they own. There is an unarticulated assumption by users that they own their own content (pictures, posts etc.) and they are using the platform to share that content with others (their “friends”).

One of the reasons the ownership of content is a big deal is because if someone else claims to own what we create, and they can make such a claim stick, we have no control over how it is used. As for the revenue generating aspect, that’s a hot button for me. On the other hand, I have to admit that content (writing, design, art, film, music etc.) has essentially been commoditized and, in income terms, ain’t worth much any more.

But that’s another blog post.

(Hint: supply and demand applies. Lots of content plus absence of time, attention and critical thinking equals decreased value. You can work your butt off creatively but you’ll give it away for a song.)

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