One thing that bugs me about Twitter is that the term followers, the people who elect to see your microblogging updates, sounds like a cross between a group of zombies and a collection of cultish fanatics that you might want to keep at arm’s length. We use other terms like friend, contact, colleague, and buddy to refer to these different kinds of people who pay attention to what you do and say.

Still works for me.

A lot of people (including both you and me?) like the idea of building up these follower numbers for several reasons. It can come across as being selfish, ego driven, or manipulative. Or, with a more positive spin, maybe you’re just looking for a group of great people to share stuff with. Maybe you feel you’ve got important things to say THAT THE WORLD NEEDS TO KNOW.

Many social media users (including bloggers) are looking to build up an audience, composed of these same friends, followers, contacts, etc. You will almost inevitably build up an audience of some size by creating decent content (if not better) AND by networking or socializing. The better you are at one or another of these skills, the bigger your audience will become.

Today, I have a different point of view on audience building.  Many, many people are trying to build their own audiences/followings.  At the same time, they are joining other people’s audiences in growing numbers.  The net result is that without:

• serious filtering of social media inputs
• heavy marketing
• or providing indispensible content,

noise is overwhelming signal at an ever increasing rate.  There’s too much out there for more most people to try to follow.  I see fewer people clicking on links on blogs or in Twitter streams, etc.  I don’t think my overall quality of content is changing much.  In fact, I’m probably passing on few links that I did a year ago.  I honestly think that there’s just too much stuff out there and that most people just can’t be bothered to track it all.  And why should they?

Indeed, why should they?

Audience sizes in social media are too tricky to guage accurately.  There are too many fake accounts around to spam or else market stuff for them to count as real people.  RSS subscription numbers are inflated because the same RSS feed gets published multiple times.  Tweets are automated to the point that we tend to ignore them when we know the source.

You can’t assume that progress is happening just because everyone’s audience seems to be getting bigger.

I’m not out there chasing followers by the pound anymore, although I did at one time.  I’m more interested now in building high quality relationships with interaction, not just filling seats.

What is the real purpose of an audience, though? What makes us worthy of attracting the attention of dozens, hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people?

The short answer is value, but in a way that’s a cop out. Value is something that’s important to someone. If I deliver value by writing a blog post, I’m delivering something to you that is important to you. That value can come in many forms:

• monetary wealth
• productivity
• useful knowledge

For the purposes of this post, let’s put value into three categories, based on the recipient of this value:

Knowledge: I can deliver raw knowledge to you in the form of facts and undocumented links or I can put additional intelligence behind this data to make it more meaningful for you

Entertainment/experience: I can try to make you laugh, cry, angry, horrified, or just plain try to make you think about something that you’ve never thought before. All the blog’s a stage with a shifting cast of performers and portrayers, after all.

Acts: I can go beyond the above by giving you something tangible in the form of a tangible product or a service which I put effort and other resources into to achieve some result.

If a content creator isn’t delivering any of the above, then they really have no right to an audience.

I still believe this is true.

How do you deserve an audience?

You serve the audience. You provide service. You do things for that audience.

You can receive things in return for this service and that’s perfectly fine. You can receive attention, goodwill, gifts in kind, even financial renumeration. You’ve got to provide service (the method for delivering value) to the people who sign up to pay attention to you.

You don’t serve me; I serve you. I try to have fun and to get something from the experience, but my focus has to be on you. I make the best decisions that I can about how to serve you at any given point in time wherever I’m a social media user. I won’t always be right. Occasionally I will indulge in one of my favorite interests, but I will always try to make that valuable to you in some fashion, either through:

• increasing your knowledge about a topic
• creating a rewarding experience from you
• performing some act of service

If I can stay on this track, then I think things will be fine here.

I’m of two minds about this now.  Growth can be rewarding and it always feels good to help people.  However, you can’t appeal to everyone and you can’t please everyone.  I’m more interested in creating content that I can feel good about and that will stand the test of time.  At the same time, I find that my interests vary enough over time that if I try to get too specific on this blog, it will no longer be enjoyable for me.  So sometimes I’ll write about things that are interesting to you and other times I won’t.  Sorry, that’s the way I need it to be.

I’m going to continue to work on growing the audience size here and in other locations. Despite whatever personal satisfaction that I get out of it, I’m really just trying to make my corner of the world a little better.

If you are a content creator and you’re struggling to get an audience, or make it bigger, are you sure that you’re providing value? Think about it.

By the way, I think this is a key to success at almost anything you do.

I’m embarrassed by these last three paragraphs.  I’m not actively growing the audience (not much, anyway) although I try to help as opposed to harming.  The “providing value” comment is so Blogging 101 or Business 101 that anyone with an ounce of common sense should realise it.  I think Homer Simpson would get it.

As for the last point, it’s so, so, so… Seth Godin that I should never have written it.  He should have sued me for copyright infringement, seriously.  He can get away with writing things like that:  it’s closer to his style and he’s got the experience to be able to use that phrase in a more intelligent way.  Bleah.

In conclusion:

I can still support the main point, but some of the details don’t work so well for me a year later.

What can I say, other than that deconstructing a blog post is much less messy than dissecting a foetal pig to see how that organism works.  Don’t need to wash my hands, either.

Onward.

Images by choking sun and psd

Hello class. Today’s lesson is about how to communicate poorly while trying to give a humorous speech.  Pay close attention, this could be good for you.

As I’ve mentioned before I’m a member of Toastmasters.  Today was meeting day.  I’m working on one of  my Advanced Communicator designations and I’m finally trying to complete all of the requirements.  It’s been dragging on for far too long. 

I had an idea for a humorous speech where you’re supposed to tell a couple of funny stories while trying to make a serious point.  So, naturally, after procrastinating unduly, I came up with the idea of working in two of my travel stores (I used to travel a lot).  Both of my stories involved my misplacing (OK, losing) something at an inopportune moment.  I quickly put together an outline in my head and mentally rehearsed it a bit.  I needed a speech title with an opening line.

The speech title was “I’m A Loser”.

I tried to inject some humor and surprise into the speech.  I decided to start the speech in a seemingly self-denigrating way, just like Beck’s first hit, “Loser”.  However, I wanted to convey the idea that I’m actually a loser (i.e. I lose things, possessions, etc.) not that I’m, um, not a winner.

After I gave the speech and got my evaluation (you always get an evaluation of your speech at a Toastmasters meeting), I reflected a bit and came to the conclusion that maybe, just maybe, no one got the joke that I was trying to make.  You know, that I’m a loser, not a loser.  A misplacer, not a non-winner.

Hindsight’s 20/20, as they say.  In retrospect, I either should have prepared much better for the speech or, even better, tried a much less ambiguous joke.  I think I try to be too sly in my humor, sometimes.  I also feel like I try to be a bit too sly in my writing, but for some reason I think that my readers can pick up on it.

So, clarity is the key.  Repeat.

How about you?  Do you have any funny miscommunication stories?

1. I decided to retire the classic Broadcasting Brain avatar from my Twitter account, at least for now. I’m now using a real picture of myself.  I figured it was time for a change – may as well go with my real face.
2. I changed the blog’s tagline from “Using cognitive surplus to create uncanny content” to “Different thoughts about thinking differently”.  The new tagline describes this blog better than the old one, I think.  I still like the old tagline.  The new one fits better.

Change can be good!

I’ve categorized this entry under creativity because I think there’s a valid point here about creativity and innovation.  Sometimes new ideas come from careful analysis of existing data or else from asking the right questions.  It’s a good story.

Here’s the video:  it’s definitely worth checking out.

I chose to do this response because Chris disabled comments on this particular blog post.  Perhaps it’s a thought experiment he’s trying out.  I took the bait.  Cheers.

EDIT:  so much for conspiracy theories.  It appears that Chris disabled comments by accident, which kind of negated part of the point of this video post.  Oh well.

Update:  Ian Roundtree has his own take on Chris Brogan’s post at WingsofWax.ca:  The Evolution Inherent In Conversation.  It’s worth reading.

His tips are definitely worth checking out.  As you go through them, you’ll probably note that changes in social media and the tools of blogging will make some of them seem a bit out of date.  When you read through Barger’s article, a lot of what he’s describing is about the best ways to link back to original content.  However, his ten points are definitely worth reflecting over, even if they don’t dwell much on content creation..

Barger’s Ten Tips

Here are the tips from Jorn’s Wired article, with my own thoughts added below each one:

1. A true weblog is a log of all the URLs you want to save or share. (So del.icio.us is actually better for blogging than blogger.com.)

This tip reveals the origins of blogging.  The weblog concept predated newer tools like social news, social bookmarking, and social browsing.  Barger’s point is well taken in terms of accuracy:  social bookmarking is a simpler tool that does what the original weblogs did.  Blogs have evolved over time to provide more narrative and original content and Barger points out that deviation from the concept’s origins.

2. You can certainly include links to your original thoughts, posted elsewhere … but if you have more original posts than links, you probably need to learn some humility.

I appreciate the sentiment behind this tip, but I don’t buy it.  The blogging platform is now a content management system – it’s a way to publish to the world.  It’s designed to let you publish original content.

One argument that I can buy is the following:   if you exclusively post your own content without acknowledging authoritative sources, you’re doing it wrong.  In some circles, it would be called plagiarism.  You’re trying to build authority without paying your dues if you continuously present information as fact without:

• proof
• showing your readers where you got your info.

I don’t think that the stipulation about “your original thoughts, posted elsewhere” needs to apply though:  many people don’t have an “elsewhere” to post their thoughts.

3. If you spend a little time searching before you post, you can probably find your idea well articulated elsewhere already.

This is so very true and it’s one of the most frustrating things about being a blogger or a writer in general.  There is nothing new under the sun, just variations on a theme.

Taken in context, Barger’s point is that it may make more sense to link to someone’s article than to write your own because it’s very likely that someone else did a better job than you can.

4. Being truly yourself is always hipper than suppressing a link just because it’s not trendy enough. Your readers need to get to know you.

This tip is pretty hard to detect; after all, you’ll never know for sure which links I thought about posting, but chose not to.

Barger’s right, though:  if you think a link is important, post it.  It doesn’t matter what the rest of the world thinks.  You don’t need to blindly follow the crowd and try to please them.

Barger himself is not necessarily a trendy or politically correct person to link to.  He has some political views that don’t mesh well with several prominent groups around the world.  Nonetheless, his advice is still good.  ’Nuff said.

5. You can always improve on the author’s own page title, when describing a link. (At least make sure your description is full enough that readers will recognize any pages they’ve already visited, without having to visit them again.)

Very good point.  There’s two pieces to this, too.  There’s the descriptive text about the content that you can create to help your reader understand what the content is about.

There’s also the anchor text (the text contained within the link as it appears on your webpage, like this link back to this very post).  The anchor text has the added value of working a bit of search engine magic when it’s done correctly.

Actually, there’s a third piece:  the headline.  Although you don’t control the original headline, you could use these guidelines to create your own spiffy anchor text back to the original content.

6. Always include some adjective describing your own reaction to the linked page (great, useful, imaginative, clever, etc.)

See my comments about point 5 above.  Barger seems to be writing from the point of view of scarce resources:  limits on the ability to publish descriptive text.

Today’s commonly used blogging platforms (including Wordpress, Blogger, and Moveable Type) allow easier, flexible types of web page management that are more similar to journaling software than the original weblogs, which started as customized web pages.

7. Credit the source that led you to it, so your readers have the option of “moving upstream.”

This is the most important piece of advice in Barger’s article, IMHO (In My Humble Opinion).  Respected bloggers like Jason Falls, Chris Brogan, Valeria Maltoni, Louis Gray, and anyone with at least an ounce of integrity realize that we should link back to the original source of content.  It’s also good to acknowledge someone who turned you on to something as well.

Here’s a very recent example that illustrates this point: Chris Higgins at Mental Floss posted an article with a link to a John Cleese video about the creative process.  I was surprised to see a paragraph at the bottom of the article that provided hat tips (acknowledgements) to Merlin Mann, Jay Cruz, and myself.

I contacted Chris to let him know where I found the video (Ewan McIntosh).  Chris then took the initiative to track the references back further to this blog and this blog (and who knows how Benjamin Ellis originally found the video) and to document them all.  That’s a whole lotta links.

The advantage of doing this kind of linking is two-fold:

a.  Giving credit where credit is due, which is always appreciated and builds good will.

b.  Exposing your readers to other cool blogs.

The benefits can be much greater than the ten minutes that it takes to create and publish these links.

8. Warn about “gotchas” — weird formatting, multipage stories, extra-long files, etc. Don’t camouflage the main link among unneeded (or poorly labeled) auxiliary links.

It’s a good practice to try to find the appropriate starting point if you’re trying to link back to a source that spreads over multiple web pages.  It’s good for your reader and for the original author.

I have noted that a number of people still put cautions in their posts for things like large file sizes, software and version compatibility, and so on.

9. Pick some favorite authors or celebrities and create a Google News Feed that tracks new mentions of them, so other fans can follow them via your weblog.

This isn’t just limited to Google News Feeds:  many social media websites, including Twitter, FriendFeed, Delicious, etc. have easy to use widgets to share the content and links that you publish via your activity.

I’ve chosen to use the FriendFeed widget on Broadcasting Brain because it combines activity from several social media accounts into a single stream.  It’s less automated than a Google News feed, but it provides a similar function.

10. Re-post your favorite links from time to time, for people who missed them the first time.

I do this from time to time, though it’s mostly links to my own content.  I think this is a good idea, though:  your audience can change daily, weekly, monthly and I don’t think it’s wrong to put new pointers to old content on occasion.  I’ve been doing it more and more lately; see this example of  a Remembrance Day post.

And, of course, this very post is a good example of that.  I’ve linked to Barger’s article before in different places, but never in this blog.  So now I’m taking the opportunity to show it to you here, especially for your benefit if you’ve never read it before.

In Conclusion

Looking at these tips, two years after they were written, I find that some of the underlying logic behind them doesn’t apply, especially the reasons driven by technical limitations.   However, the essence and key lesson in each tip is still valuable to all bloggers and social media users.

What do you think?  Does Barger’s article still make sense two years after it was written, twelve years after the term blog was coined?

Image by Robert Sanzalone

Just thought I’d include a link to last year’s post about Remembrance Day.  I like that post.

Lest we forget.

Image by striatic

EDIT:  I went to my local Remembrance Day service this morning.  Simple and short – just the way I like it.  I’ll try to keep remembering.

Mitch Joe

These are the people who take the time to express their opinion, in public, that a particular book has no new content in it, or that someone’s blog post is just a rehash of old ideas.

There are various reasons for taking the time to damn something with faint praise, including:  self-promotion; attacking an enemy; or truly altruistic reasons for wanting someone to avoid spending their time material that’s better covered elsewhere.  Let’s look at the altruistic motive.

Mitch offers the following argument:

… you can learn something new from anyone at any time. The trick is in leaving yourself open to this experience. The trick is in always being a student.

This is a very good point!  You never know where you’re going to find a good story, a new technique, or inspiration, pure and simple.  It doesn’t seem to matter if you are a novice, a master, or anywhere in between. The danger to us is when we get stuck in execution mode or when we suffer from tunnel vision.

• In execution mode, we are focused on getting certain things done within a certain timeframe.
• When we have tunnel vision, we only look in a certain direction.  We don’t think to look in different places for new ideas in order to improve ourselves.

It doesn’t help that most organizations generally don’t encourage looking outward.  They encourage, or force, most employees to maintain an inward focus on repeatable execution for predictable results.  There’s no carrot or no pot of gold at the rainbow for you in these places if you stray into the outliers.

Sometimes this same tunnel vision occurs outside of a formal organization.  Peer pressure, or “common wisdom”, influence our behavior as well, don’t they?  If your friends, colleagues, or family tell you not to waste our time on something, you’ll often do what they say.  This is a concern that I have as we seem to move towards more of a recommendation mindset instead of an exploratory mindset.

Our (seeming) lack of free time  motivates us to efficiently use the spare hours and minutes.  I read a lot of content that talks about respecting the reader’s valuable time.  This type of respect is a key success factor for many content creators.

By placing your trust in a content creator (or curator), you are choosing the recommendation path.  You are letting someone else choose for you, just as if you were following along the suggestions that Amazon.com offers when you place an order, or if you follow the related posts generated by a tool like Zemanta.  You trust them to make good choices for you to use within your scarce free moments of time.

You sacrifice freedom and serendipity when you come to rely on recommendation.  True, there’s a lot of content out there, so you could waste a lot of time, or go insane, by trying to discover everything yourself.  It’s perfectly logical to follow the recommendations of a trusted advisor.  But it’s also good for you to explore on your own and find something new to share with your community.

It doesn’t have to be something completely new, either.  You can still find value in common knowledge that’s presented in a fresh and exciting way.  One person’s common knowledge could be your Next Big Thing.

I’m not saying that it’s wrong to review something and give an honest opinion.  It might be presumptuous, however, to say that something’s a waste of time even if it seems to be too basic.  We all have to make choices about how to use our time, and thinking that we don’t have time to do something, like exploring or refreshing ourselves on the basics, is ultimately a choice.

What do you think?  Is there good stuff to be found even in basic information?  Or should we be trying to shield people from mediocrity?

Image by Daisuke Shirako

I may be unobservant or naive, but I can’t really say that I have an arch-enemy, not a person anyway, especially since the little red headed guy from elementary school left the country a few years ago.  But I digress.

Villains don’t need to be people, though. They can be organizations, places, concepts, etc.  Attitudes can make great villains, too.  It’s easy to hate someone who likes things that you hate.  And it helps when you want to come up with material for blog posts.

There are times when I’ve been tempted to try to pick out a villain, an arch-nemesis for this blog, and use it to help refine the focus of Broadcasting Brain.  Ignorance, manipulation, arrogance, greed, hatred itself  - these are all worthy targets.

Here’s the thing, though:

Defining yourself by your villains, your nemesis, your arch-enemy is too easy.  It weakens you and empowers them.  Look at Lex Luthor:  his sole claim to fame is that he chose Superman as his arch-rival.  Despite his genius and riches, the fact that Superman continues to thwart his schemes continues to define Luthor as an incomplete shadow of a person who exists to get rid of his rival.  J. Jonah Jameson pushed his newspaper to tabloid rag status by defining Spider-Man as a public enemy.  The political right portrays the leaders of the political left as demonic spawn and vice versa.

There’s no doubt that picking a target makes it easy to hit.  But maybe it’s better that the target is a constructive goal or achievement instead of something to destroy.  It could be a harder path, fighting to create instead of destroying, but it could be a whole lot better.  Even if you’re just trying to publish a blog.

Image by purpleslog