June 12, 2012

Do What Matters: Minimize Pop Culture

I’m often asked when I have time to sleep. It seems from the outside like my work and social lives are all-consuming and demanding of unimaginable hours.

The truth is, they’re not. I think I’ve found an incredibly solid work/life balance, and generally get plenty of sleep (when I get less, it’s almost always my own fault).

How? In large part, the key is a ruthless and constant attention to the things that really matter to me. But the more universally applicable theme is minimizing engagement with pop culture.

Pop culture encompasses a broad spectrum of media designed to engage a large audience, and make those who aren’t engaged with it feel left out. Therein lies the biggest challenge to minimizing engagement with it: making yourself okay with feeling out of the loop on certain topics.

Do you need to see every movie at the theater that’s designed to appeal to your demographic? Do you need to read the news story about the drug-related murder five states away (which, incidentally, was published two days after another drug murder, making you want to talk through a possible perceived trend — don’t think for a second that isn’t highly intentional)? Do you need to watch that video of the cat playing the piano with his laser beam eyes?

The answer is no. You will lose the ability to voice your opinions in ten seconds to three minutes of discussion in group conversation on occasion, and one in a hundred times that conversation will convince you to go back and engage with that piece of pop culture. There’s your social curation at work.

Instead of voicing your opinion on pop culture, you’ll be able to voice your opinion on far more fascinating subjects, where your contribution will be more than an interjection starting with “remember that part when…” You’ll be able to introduce people to new ideas, or engage with them on a more honest, personal, emotional level.

In the time you save from engaging with pop culture, you can study and create things that speak more personally to your own interests. The Internet has given everyone the tools to do both, and there’s even a whole world out there beyond media (gasp!) waiting to be explored.

I would encourage you to first believe that you can have an impact on your own life, then start paying attention to the things you love, then go deeper with those things. Ignore the things other people (and companies) tell you to like.

If you focus ruthlessly on what you love, I think you’ll find that pop culture naturally falls to the periphery of your life, and you’ll feel dramatically happier and more productive.


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June 6, 2012

The Societal Need For Creativity

I like email. Maybe not all the time, but as a medium, I really like it. Unfortunately sometimes that means I feel free to write at length to people who may have expected no response at all. I often think that those rants might be better suited for blog posts, so my poor friends can choose whether to be subjected to them or not. This blog is derived from last night’s email to my poor friend Willo.

I had written to her previously about my girlfriend’s excitement over painting something beautiful herself. I asked: how do we bring the magic of creation to more people who might benefit from it? I mean it as a larger question for anyone motivated along those lines, which I believe deep down is significantly more people than are experiencing it today. How do we get more people over that first hump of creativity?

I’m hugely confident that the iPad (and all mobile devices) can help. It’s not the be-all-end-all, but things like Paper and Instagram (and heck, even Draw Something to some extent — I met a suburban East Texas housewife Santorum supporter who was more proud of her (rather solid) Draw Something screenshots than anything else we discussed in two full days working together in a county fair box office) are huge steps. By reducing options, and adding some math and computer wizardry behind the scenes, they’ve made it tougher to fuck up photography and drawing. And that is an incredibly powerful step.

People are diverted (sometimes permanently) by failure. Particularly when there’s the risk of public judgement. Instagram especially has inverted that paradigm by adding a like button that has virtually no importance beyond social feedback. It doesn’t affect what other content shows up like it does on Facebook or Pandora. It’s a low-risk way to say “oh, neat” or “good job” without saying “yes, I want more of this please!”

And despite that flying directly in the face of what I believe the next decade or two will completely hold on the content digestion experience side of things (all based on interest graphs built on implicit engagement data, with social as one input), it’s still incredibly powerful. We all love receiving those digital “likes” — they keep us coming back.

And coming back is exactly what more people need to do, to creative pursuits. We can’t have people trying something creative once and never coming back because of fear of fucking up.

We can’t survive as an assembly-line culture anymore, and that means we need more folks willing to take even the slightest creative risks.

I believe in technology’s ability to help empower those risks.


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May 9, 2012
Design: Web vs Print Last night I attended my first Skillshare class: an Editorial Design workshop led by Laura Miner. While we never got to the workshop portion, I still found it incredibly valuable. The first step to becoming a designer is recognizing what you like and dislike about existing design. Laura had us page through some popular magazines, identify their use of the common elements of editorial design (header, deck, images, captions, etc), and share how we felt they both accomplished their purpose and made us feel. Fellow student Zach Klein asked a poignant question about the differences between web and print and how they were influencing each other today. Laura noted that a lot of web design was borrowing from print, and print was beginning to reject the elements that the web has adopted. I found this fascinating, having never designed for print before. I decided to put myself through an exercise when I got home: take one hour (timeboxed mostly for my own sanity) and try to translate something I had communicated over the web into something fit for print. I selected my latest tywhitelifeupdate (a note I send a few times a year to some of my favorite people, updating them on the nonsense of my life). Traditionally, I send these out via email. They’re littered with links to other content, for those who are interested in learning more on any given subject, but don’t have any visual styling whatsoever. I decided to try to make a print-ready version using the exact same content. The result is above. I made a lot of mistakes that I would have corrected had I not been timeboxed (frankly, the design sucks, pretty badly). Most notably, I would have spread the content out over more than two pages — the sheer quantity of text made it very difficult to do anything interesting with the photos. But the experience got me thinking more about the differences between web and print, and what valuable hooks that print has established could be better leveraged online. Print media has loads of points of entry into articles, many ways to capture your attention if you flip a magazine open to a random page (as most newsstand readers will). Web articles rarely do — they’re increasingly reliant on headlines alone to capture your attention. This, to me, is a tragedy, and one that I hope will be rectified as we move towards a post-PC (/”mobile”) world. That said, there’s little equivalent in a digital world to flipping to a random page. So much of the focus of written content on the web to-date has been around publishing often and monetizing views. I’m hopeful that as “advertising” becomes more content-aware (see Wordnik as a great example — tap a word in an article to get more info and/or purchase info), the focus of content creation can come back to quality over quantity. When quality comes back into play, so too can scalable content-specific design that makes that content more engaging.

Design: Web vs Print

Last night I attended my first Skillshare class: an Editorial Design workshop led by Laura Miner. While we never got to the workshop portion, I still found it incredibly valuable.

The first step to becoming a designer is recognizing what you like and dislike about existing design. Laura had us page through some popular magazines, identify their use of the common elements of editorial design (header, deck, images, captions, etc), and share how we felt they both accomplished their purpose and made us feel.

Fellow student Zach Klein asked a poignant question about the differences between web and print and how they were influencing each other today. Laura noted that a lot of web design was borrowing from print, and print was beginning to reject the elements that the web has adopted.

I found this fascinating, having never designed for print before. I decided to put myself through an exercise when I got home: take one hour (timeboxed mostly for my own sanity) and try to translate something I had communicated over the web into something fit for print.

I selected my latest tywhitelifeupdate (a note I send a few times a year to some of my favorite people, updating them on the nonsense of my life). Traditionally, I send these out via email. They’re littered with links to other content, for those who are interested in learning more on any given subject, but don’t have any visual styling whatsoever. I decided to try to make a print-ready version using the exact same content. The result is above.

I made a lot of mistakes that I would have corrected had I not been timeboxed (frankly, the design sucks, pretty badly). Most notably, I would have spread the content out over more than two pages — the sheer quantity of text made it very difficult to do anything interesting with the photos.

But the experience got me thinking more about the differences between web and print, and what valuable hooks that print has established could be better leveraged online.

Print media has loads of points of entry into articles, many ways to capture your attention if you flip a magazine open to a random page (as most newsstand readers will). Web articles rarely do — they’re increasingly reliant on headlines alone to capture your attention. This, to me, is a tragedy, and one that I hope will be rectified as we move towards a post-PC (/”mobile”) world. That said, there’s little equivalent in a digital world to flipping to a random page.

So much of the focus of written content on the web to-date has been around publishing often and monetizing views. I’m hopeful that as “advertising” becomes more content-aware (see Wordnik as a great example — tap a word in an article to get more info and/or purchase info), the focus of content creation can come back to quality over quantity. When quality comes back into play, so too can scalable content-specific design that makes that content more engaging.


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April 17, 2012

Building Communities Effectively

  • A recent entry into Instagram’s weekend hashtag contest #vacantplaces

One of the hottest jobs today is the Community Manager position. With the growth of social media in the last decade, more and more companies are realizing they need to have open relationships with their customers and fans.

Enter the Community Manager.

Right?

Maybe?

There’s an inherent problem for most companies hiring a Community Manager — they’re hiring someone to tweet, pin, like, and comment, but the hiring manager rarely understands the value, strategy, or tactics in the job they’re hiring for.

Worse yet, there’s a line around the block of seemingly qualified candidates — folks with resumes touting their writing skills, personal skills, and Klout scores (bonus points if you only include a Twitter handle as contact info).

What to do? How do you cull through all these exceptional folks to find someone who would be good at something you don’t understand?

There’s no easy answer, but I’d like to offer what I see in quality Community Managers.

1. Embodies the spirit of the company

This is crucial beyond all else. Social media channels change. Methods of communicating change. Situations requiring many different types of communication come up constantly. You want someone who will communicate publicly every few minutes, so they need to embody the values and spirit of the company.

Traditional PR has a microphone and podium to hide behind. The Community Manager is on the street talking to people on their level. There’s nowhere for them to hide behind rhetoric.

There is also no way to coach this later. You cannot hire a Community Manager based on their skills and hope to educate them about the values of the company. It has to be so baked into their nature that every statement out of their mouth could sound like it’s coming from your company — to many people in the community, it is.

2. Is a member of the community themselves

The concept of dogfooding your own product/service is crucial to a Community Manager. They need to be able to relate to the challenges the folks they’re talking to face. Empathy is key.

Eventbrite, Yelp, and many others have some form of local community managers. Eventbrite’s Evangelists throw events about once a week, always using Eventbrite for ticketing. They also attend 3-10 additional events per week, and are in constant communication with their local organizers.

Jess Zollman (@jayzombie) of Instagram is another incredible example — she is an avid photographer herself, and posts some of the best pictures on Instagram.

Perhaps more importantly, she understands that great photography of everyday life often requires an impetus of something to look for. Thus, she created Weekend Hashtag Contests, where the community is encouraged to take photographs that fit a given theme (eg - #soloparking, #twoofakind, or this past weekend’s #vacantplaces) in the hopes of appearing on the Instagram blog.

I have no idea on the traffic to their blog, but I’m sure the reward for winning is tiny in comparison to the reward for being part of the community that are all contributing our interpretations of the theme. If Jess wasn’t part of the community herself, she might not understand how to engage us that deeply with such a small explicit reward.

3. Doesn’t suck at communicating

I put this third and worded it that way on purpose. Communication skills are often the first thing people look for in a Community Manager, but they’re amongst the least important on their own. If a candidate has #1 and #2 nailed, they just need to not suck to get salient points across to their peers in the community.

A Community Manager is not just a blog editor. They don’t need to be novelists in their spare time. They don’t need to give TED talk style presentations. They just need to be able to communicate to one or more people on a personal level about the company or related topics.

—-

So who am I to talk about this stuff? Why does a product guy care?

Because I’ve seen the value of community building first-hand. I did some time as a Community Manager (without the title) at Topspin. We had a product that wasn’t ready for mainstream use, but hundreds of people clamoring to use it based on the vision alone. When I joined Topspin, I was asked to send everyone who inquired via email a polite note declining their access. I evolved this note to send them to valuable related resources.

A few weeks into doing that, I realized it was silly to push our biggest advocates away, and created the Green Room — an email listserve where folks could discuss topics related to being a DIY musician (eg - without a major label). We had hundreds of people sign up immediately, and were up to nearly 1000 when I left. We averaged 4.5 new posts per day, with most of the posts coming from the community themselves (we would seed ideas or share results of some of our marketing experiments, too).

When we were able to open our platform to more users, the Green Room was our first source of customers. We had built a community and positioned ourselves as thought leaders in that community, even without a product, when the default behavior would have been saying “no” and pushing them elsewhere, and had done so by following those three guidelines above. 


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October 7, 2011

My Life Without Voicemail

It all started accidentally. I bought my first iPhone in January, and it was a lemon. I had to go back to the Apple Store a couple days after my initial purchase, and my pimpled male Genius was decidedly less interesting than the cute girl from Phoenix who sold me the dud. As a result, I was beyond the “ooo new cool toy!” phase and into the “jeez, this thing better just work” phase of ownership.

I thought I was done. My contacts had switched (the cute girl thought I was popular ;) ). My Google Voice already knew my cell number, and that hadn’t changed. I had to redownload the first ten or so apps, but so be it — I wanted to give a different company the “first downloaded app” data point, anyway (for those who aren’t nerds, this is where bragging rights come from).

It wasn’t til a couple weeks later when a friend called me, didn’t get through, and texted me to say I needed to set up my voicemail did I realize I had cut it from my life. And frankly, the realization felt amazing — it was only by that accident that I realized anyone I wanted to have calling me could: a) text me if it’s urgent, b) email me if it’s not urgent, c) set up a time to Skype if they just wanted to chat, or d) perhaps get a call back from me at my convenience if I recognized their number.

But why is that so liberating? Is voicemail all that bad? My argument is yes — I am no longer beholden to the most awkward form of communication in today’s age. It’s not so much that talking on the phone is bad — it’s more personal and conversational than writing, and convenient for everyone at this point — it’s the interruptive nature combined with the awkwardness of the medium.

David Foster Wallace ridiculed the video phone because it destroyed the happy notion that the person on the other end was paying attention. But the truth is that those people weren’t paying attention, and it made life less efficient and conversation less effective to pretend they were. Luckily the sheer availability of video over the internet and its coupling with text-based chat (a crucial distinction) have dictated social rules whereby it’s frowned upon to call someone without chatting with them first or scheduling the call in advance.

The only problem with the video phone in DFW’s world was that it was tied to the phone paradigm, for lack of instantaneous communication to check if a chat was convenient for the recipient of the call. Voicemail is a vestige of the same problem — it was more convenient than sending a letter to let someone know that you’d like to speak with them.

Now you’ve got Facebook creating a single identity for us all, tying it to our existing email addresses and phone numbers — if you have one, you can find the others. That’s why Facebook Messages is such an incredible concept: the distinctions between email, text, and any other form of communication are blurred when they can happen instantaneously and across any platform.

So, if you have my phone number, you have more methods than just that one to get in touch with me. You can prioritize based on immediacy of the need. It may sound pretentious, but it’s an exercise we almost all go through today. We just leave voicemails out of habit and laziness. Have you listened to yours lately?

My guess is they fall into one of two categories: “hey, call me back when you get a second” or “I have all this important stuff to tell you and I want to know your reaction.” The former is implicit in the call, or could be noted by a text. The latter implies a desire for conversation, and 9 out of 10 times the caller winds up saying the same thing all over again when they get a call back — they want to hear your reaction to you saying what you’re saying, not just to what you’re saying.

I know not everyone thinks they have the luxury of shutting off any form of communication with their friends or networks (my guess is you’re also still on MySpace ;) ), but I encourage everyone to try going without voice mail. At least think twice before leaving one. Methinks we’ll all be a tiny bit happier.


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