Clever Thinking

I read a blog post that asks “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”

It’s a great article that brings up lots of important points and research, but I think it misses an important point. Just because you used to talk with your grocer every time you went to buy a steak doesn’t mean you necessarily had a relationship with that guy anymore deep than the one you have with someone who happens to be a grocer–or a hairdresser or barber or librarian –you happen to know on Facebook.

The real quality of relationships comes not so much from whether you see someone in person every day as from having the courage to reveal yourself to someone–in other words, to be intimate on some level.

What’s missing isn’t more human contact… generally speaking, we know many more people in the real world than our parents ever did, not to mention the people we stay in touch with or got back in touch with because of Facebook. What’s missing isn’t human contact. Rather, it’s the courage to take a chance on people. Going to a therapist is so much safer, because after all, their job isn’t to criticize or blunder into territory you would rather avoid. They work to build you up, help you see how worthwhile you are and help you explore difficult subjects. It may be uncomfortable at times, but you’re supposed to know that you are in a safe space that keep you from realizing your worth and potential. Problem is, it’s not a real relationship…or maybe shouldn’t be. You’re paying them after all, so they have to like you…or at least pretend they do. If, by the way, they really end up liking you, it’s because they got to know you–you revealed yourself to them. You either pay to get someone to listen without judging, or you do it the old fashioned way and take a chance on people who seem likely to like you. One way or the other, you need to give humans some reason to connect.

I have always said to anyone who will listen that Facebook is only a tool, and social networking is only a means to an end. Truly, digital world or no digital world, it is still up to you to make and manage your relationships–and failure to do so well will no doubt leave you lonely and maybe even mummified in your apartment a year after you die.

Like so many things in the information age, the existence of loneliness and disconnection might be more apparent, but if people in the past reported less loneliness, who the heck were they…and who was asking? I can’t imagine anyone reached out to all those women who were stuck at home with abusive husbands, surrounded by kids and unsympathetic law enforcement, when what they really wanted all along was a career of their own. How many researchers in the 60’s took the experiences of the marginalized into account when they were checking on who felt connected and who didn’t? Did anyone ever ask the homeless, drug addicted, mentally ill, or reclusive how lonely they felt? Do the studies that site past measures of loneliness really correlate with the studies we have now? And even if they do, how likely would people back then and/or people of that generation have been to admit to being lonely. Back then, I believe admitting loneliness would have been seen mostly as personal failure or even weirdness. Nowadays, it is something society and the Internet are doing to us (a narcissistic view to be sure).

Which brings me to narcissism. I am intrigued by the study Marche cites about the rise in narcissism and the correlation between narcissism and Facebook. Certainly, you can see evidence of narcissism on the ground all around you. People wander in front of you on the street without even looking to see whether they have blocked someone’s path. Cars cut you off. Corporations feel entitled to take advantage of anyone because after all they are in business to make money, right? (They must answer to their stock holders after all.) Parents are statistically more involved with their children’s lives than they were in the past. More people work outside the home than in the past. This gives us less time to be involved with grocers and store clerks. No wonder those self-checkouts look good.

Marche points out that narcissists are more likely to feel lonely. This is understandable. I mean, after all, if it’s all about you, how can you ever have room for someone else, which would preclude having a real relationship.

Those who are narcissists would project that in their real lives as well as on the web, I’m sure. You are who you are, whether you’ve got Facebook or not. Maybe Facebook is like giving crack to an addict, but it’s like television…or crack, or alcohol. You can use it to avoid doing the hard work of being part of society, or you can use it to help enhance your presence in society.

How things turn out…whether we are lonely or not, or successful in any way or not… is largely a matter of the decisions we make day-to-day. I don’t think it’s lost on anyone that real relationships do not come from posting on Facebook. Real relationships do come from connections though, and as a tool for those interested in forming and enhancing meaningful relationships, Facebook is fantastic.

How else would I have stayed in touch with old work colleagues in Europe? How would I have reconnected with my old high school chums? Sure we post lots of meaningless stuff at times, but we also use Facebook to meet in person sometimes. Most important, we–well, some of us anyway–take risks with each other, sharing details of our lives our feelings and our ideas. It doesn’t always work out. Sometimes you find out things about people you would rather not know. Sometimes they disappoint you, or you disappoint them. Sometimes you stay together and sometimes you drift apart or the relationship explodes when something goes wrong.

It’s a risk, but one that you have to be willing to take. Otherwise, you end up doing what you want, free from apparent judgment, but most likely alone, surrounded by things and a computer that allows you to have shallow encounters with people you hardly know.

So the point, I think, in all of this, is that one way or another, we are not victims of the tyranny of Facebook by any means. We make the choice, not only of whether to use Facebook, but also how we will use it and what risks we are willing to take–on the Internet and off.

I read a post in Jay Rosen’s PressThink Blog that pointed to a Gallup Poll that showed a dramatic drop in the public’s trust of mass media. Rosen asked for comments on what could have caused such a drop, particularly at a time when journalists were becoming better educated and the reverence and resources being given to journalists were increasing.

It wasn’t the blog alone though that prompted me to answer Rosen’s call. Just moments before reading the post I had returned from a talk by HBO Co-president Richard Plepler who told us, among other things, that HBO had suffered in the early 2000’s due to hubris. As he put it, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” The point he made was that no matter how much HBO said they wanted to be the channel that gave viewers what they couldn’t find anywhere else, there was no way for them to be that…or to continue to be that… unless they had a corporate culture that allowed innovative ideas to be taken seriously.

Plepler recounted how HBO had knocked it out of the park when they chose to produce The Sopranos. But, he admitted that it wasn’t some magical knowledge that allowed them to pick a winner. Rather, Plepler said, it was an openness that went away once HBO began enjoying their subsequent success. That was when they started believing, he said, that maybe they were magic, and therefore didn’t need to listen to artists who came to them with passionate pitches for new projects. Hubris, according to Plepler is what allowed them to pass up some amazing projects that ended up elsewhere, most notably Madmen.

They learned their lesson though, got off their high horse, took some chances, and are producing some real winners as a result.

What I put into my comment to Rosen and what I believe is that there is a correlation with what happened at HBO and the trends toward mistrust of mass media.

Sure, journalists wanted to be professionals and as a group, and since the 1970s they did the work to earn professional status. Media outlets wanted to encourage professionalism, too, and credibility, which is why they built bigger news rooms (as Rosen points out) and promoted their journalists to celebrity status. Like HBO, I believe big news organizations started believing they were all that special and therefore didn’t need to listen, only tell.

This is not to say that I don’t think the reporting was done well, because I believe it was. I think though that fair and unbiased reporting didn’t take into account that there were lots of people with maybe unfair and unbiased views who didn’t feel like they were being heard or in any way represented by mass media.
I liken it to what happened to HBO because I think media outlets believed that they knew best and therefore didn’t question whether there were voices that needed to be represented in some way.

Eventually though, this all led to hubris: journalists being sure they knew best and therefore, discounting what much of their reading public had to say, or the fact that they should have any say in what mattered in the world.

Meanwhile, the public was also getting more educated. There were more college grads than there had been in the past. At the same time, there was technology. Things started happening…and very fast. Even before the Internet arrived, technology was making it easier than ever to print and publish documents, record sounds and music, capture people and events on camera.

And then, there was the Internet and suddenly everyone had a voice. Not only that, if you used that voice, you could attract followers: like-minded people who lent credibility to the idea that you were worth listening to. No matter who you were then, you could find like-minded people who would stand with you and tell you that what you thought did matter and had validity in the public sphere as well.

The wisdom of crowds does prevail though in that it didn’t take long before people realized that without the power and professionalism of mass media, there was no way to count on the validity of anything on the Web. This meant that along with the privilege of being heard we had the responsibility of figuring out what was true and what wasn’t.
The good news is that things will never be the same. The voices are out there and we know now they exist. However, I don’t think we’ve reached a place where things won’t change…a lot.

As I said in my previous post, I believe there is a need for professional journalists. I believe there is a need for editors and all kinds of gatekeepers. I see people moving more toward a model where journalists—real journalists that is…professional people who get paid for what they do… will increasingly look to crowdsourcing for their information, and where they will develop expertise around interpreting, validating and reporting on what they find as a result.

This could mean something like what is portrayed in the Guardian’s Three Little Pigs video, but I think it could also be something very different from that. I think of Wikipedia and how that works better than anyone could have thought. I think of the Huffington Post, a news aggregator. I think of blogs that are well put together and take time and effort to build credibility and build a following, and I think of the Patch and how AOL is trying to build trust by working with community members as their editors. I don’t think any of them has hit it yet…what “mass media” might be in future… but I think we are getting there step by step and eventually will arrive at a place where we feel we can trust big media outlets of some sort once again.

photo by Simon

This morning I was in a workshop run by Megan Garber, a staff writer at the Atlantic Monthly. Before going to the Atlantic, Garber was an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab. She has great credentials, and so, I went to the workshop hopeful that she could answer all of our questions about the role of the author in the new paradigm of digital media. Instead, I heard her say that she doubts that the concept of authors will live on, and that instead there will more of a free form sharing of information she likened to a starburst…with information spreading from lots of ideas and then overlapping and interacting with other ideas.

I know she is right about the starburst thing. Information does spread like that and always has. But as far as authorship going away, I’m just not convinced.
Sure, it could be misguided optimism. After all, I am a writer and I would like to think I might someday be revered for that. But Garber is also an author, and one who is not so pessimistic about the demise of that profession. Still, we see things in a very different way.

When she was at the Nieman Journalism Lab, Garber wrote:
Possibly. Or, definitely, if you subscribe to the theory of the Gutenberg Parenthesis: the idea that the post-Gutenberg era — the period from, roughly, the 15th century to the 20th, an age defined by textuality — was essentially an interruption in the broader arc of human communication. And that we are now, via the discursive architecture of the web, slowly returning to a state in which orality — conversation, gossip, the ephemeral — defines our media culture.

The thing is that orality was not only conversation, gossip, and the ephemeral. In fact, there was fear when the new technology of writing…which is what writing was when it came on the scene…would destroy youth because they would no longer be able to remember the stories that had been passed down for generations. The old technology…because yes, speech was also a technology that was once also new technology…involved wandering minstrels who would go from town to town actually singing…or sing songing… the news and stories of the past. They were not authors, per se, but they were the experts…the keepers of information, the storytellers. They weren’t so revered for their new ideas, but they were valued for the role they played in listening, and aggregating and conveying information to the masses.

Then there was writing and scrolls and eventually books that contained all that knowledge. As Garber rightly points out, much of that knowledge was locked into those books. There were educated people still, who paid attention and compiled knowledge, but since most people were illiterate, there was no longer a means of sharing that information as there had been in the past when minstrels roamed.

That was the Dark Ages, when people, in their very human need for communications, depended largely on rumor and gossip, but also, still, on stories that, due to the lack of the old knowledge locked in books, was often fraught with misinformation.

And then there was Gutenberg and books became more available. That meant we could be less ignorant (although ignorance still existed and will continue to exist for lots of reasons…but we’ll talk about that another time).

When Newspapers were young in this country, people published them and sold them to like-minded individuals, forming cliques of various political persuasions. And then came the two World Wars and an overwhelming need for simplicity and peace, and there was also television and mass communications suddenly, and so began the advent of the “expert.” We all fell in line with what Walter Cronkite had to say about the world…or so we thought. In fact, just as before, there were lots of people who disagreed. They just didn’t know how to spread their ideas…or maybe they didn’t care enough to do so. They thought what they thought and it might be annoying to not have people in the media know that or give voice to that, but they put up with it somehow… for a while anyway.

Even before the Internet though, those people without a voice figured it out. Political Conservatives and the Christian Right in particular finally had had enough of not having their needs met by a largely liberal press (not my idea…I think I heard David Gergen say this…or I read it somewhere recently), and so a lot of smart people from that side of the fence decided to do their own media and that was really when you started to see political camps rallying around media points again… just like those newspapers of old.
And now there is the Internet, and it’s huge.

Information travels fast, and supposedly newspapers are all going to die. But I see that differently as well. The New York Times launched its paywall, and rather than shrivel up and die, the newspaper found that it was actually bringing in cash immediately…in fact, more cash than all their studies had predicted.
To me, this says that people are willing to pay for expertise and that the idea of authors and experts has not died at all. Sure people can go out and find all that information themselves, but they could also build a house if they really wanted to do that, too. You know, the instructions for doing so are on the Internet…or in a book somewhere. But who the heck has time to build a house… or research every idea that comes along.

What we are seeing, I think, is not just a phenomenon where new technology is creating a situation where everyone gets to become an author of sorts. What we’re seeing I think is a collision between people reacting to feelings of being disenfranchised by the media giants along with the advents of technology that makes it possible to play at being an author for a while.

In the end, though, what authors do is not just write. They pay attention. They ask questions. They think about things… a lot..they check facts… and then they put pen to paper. And once something is written, it doesn’t end there. Writers also have to find connections…to editors and publishers as well as the experts. Some writers do it themselves, but then, they have to market their ideas, find audiences, and get dialogues going on topics. Some authors write junk; some write great stuff, but it isn’t necessarily true. People aren’t stupid though…not en masse anyway. Sure, certain crazy ideas will rise, but they will also fall. Bad things will happen as the result of misinformation, and maybe happen faster and bigger than they ever did before because of the Internet, but in the end, the wisdom of the crowd will prevail. Bad ideas will lose popularity. People will learn hard lessons. And maybe, just maybe, all that fast moving Internet information will move us quickly back to a place where people are paid for being authors…because authors really do matter… a lot.
Just like constructions contractors and so many other professionals, writers have a certain expertise and if they’re good, a certain professionalism that takes times to acquire. Yes, maybe anyone can learn to use all the tools available to writers and become authors themselves. But saying authorship won’t matter anymore, I think is like saying that builders won’t matter because Home Depot exists.

Please don’t get me wrong. I think Megan Garber is very smart and has a lot of great ideas, but like I said, on this point, I just disagree….totally.

It’s tough taking pictures at an event. Too often you capture that split second when someone is mid-sentence, making a funny face that you wouldn’t notice normally because it is just one of so many faces one makes when expressing a thought. People walk in front of the camera, turn to smile at you, or abruptly look away.
This photo was a gift–a single shot when everything came together. The right people, the right place, the right colors and action, and no funny faces. And so I chose it as the photo I would use on the homepage of the website I was editing.

Of course, life is never all that simple. Everything needs to be approved by someone. One person says the head scarf is too political. Another says the setting is boring. Someone else says it is too crowded.

Do they not see what is there and how perfect this picture is—how it captures the essence of the work the owners of the website do? Or is it that I see something that really isn’t there for anyone except me?

Photography is not my life I reason. Perhaps I will never get it right.

Then last week, I saw a presentation by a professional war photographer–a very good professional photographer. His favorite image was one of man who was obviously dead. What struck him about the photo was that beside the naked corpse, were a set of clothes neatly folded and a pair of shoes with socks tucked into the openings. He said he felt the photo showed the incredible bravery of the man who was probably aware that he would die there at the hands of his executioners and yet took the time to fold his clothes and place his socks into his shoes.

It was a moving story, but something I would never have gotten from the photo if he hadn’t pointed it out. I mean, really, there was a dead body there, lying in the brush. I didn’t see the shoes or anything else until he drew my attention to the man’s things. I thought about it a lot afterwards–the story and the fact that I hadn’t seen the picture as one of his best or one that was particularly moving in the context of all of the other photos he showed us.

It makes me wonder whether people can see the story you are trying to tell in a photo, the specific story I mean. Yes, you can work to capture the right image, but the story itself will always be seen through the lens of the viewer. I suppose it isn’t much different with writing, but with writing at least, I have more experience and therefore feel somewhat more in control.

Okay, call me a cynic, but watching this piece done by Brian Williams I couldn’t help but wonder how real it was.

Certainly, I believe that Obama has this no-nonsense, everyman side to him. I’ve seen the Meetup group he started when he was running for the U.S. Senate, the way he spontaneously shows affection to his wife… and how many photos are there of him with his feet up on a desk (one even has him with a hole in the sole of his shoe). I always bought all of it hook, line, and sinker. This video though, really got me wondering. Yes, I did question why the leader of the free world would have a hole in his shoe, but I excused the inconsistency by saying, well, maybe he just likes the comfort of the shoes and who is going to tell him he has to give them up even for a day to have them fixed if he doesn’t want to do that. Still, it stuck in the back of my mind.

Then, this past week, a piece about flipfloppers that aired on NPR also pointed out to me how likely I would be to believe Obama given that I am a fan and a registered Democrat. You can check that out here: Inconsistency the Real Hobgoblin .

All that possible prejudice aside, I am a journalist and a professional communicator with a particular interest in propaganda…which is why I find this video so interesting.

On the plus side, it provides an intimate portrait of the president. The content, of course, is great, but also the funky, unprofessional quality of the piece–the way it was apparently thrown together–adds to its believability. What also works in its favor is that it was put together by a respected journalist, who apparently was with the president to do a formal interview on a completely different topic. Lunchtime rolled around and the President decided they’d do burgers, and he took time out to collect orders from his coworkers, buy the burgers himself (or at least order them…it appears he was not the one who actually handed over payment), and deliver them, grease and all, to the “hungry” staff.

Right. That would never happen.

What would happen is that Jay Carney or someone in that team would have a conversation with the president and plan and schedule such an event to coincide with the presence of Brian Williams.

But then, like I said, I am a cynic, and not necessarily representative of the voting public, most of whom would see this very intimate moment in the life of the president, where he shows his true character as a man of the people, someone who likes what they do and goes out with no warning to grab burgers for himself and his officemates, and–because he is the President after all in the end–takes time while the burgers are cooking to meet some ordinary citizens, who, of course, are absolutely delighted to see him showing up in their ordinary and somewhat mundane lives. (I mean how perfect is that.)

Also playing into the effectiveness of the piece is Brian Williams himself, who is so prim and proper that he seems absolutely flummoxed by the whole affair. (If he is out of sorts, it must be real…right?…I mean, he’s a professional who is used to handling curve balls…)

All that said, and knowing that I could be totally prejudiced, I have to wonder…so what? Suppose it is fabricated? Suppose it is a PR manuveur? It works beautifully…exactly as any press person would hope. Even knowing how it probably came about, as a citizen, I love it. Obama no doubt knows why he is doing this, but he does it better than anyone I’ve ever seen…like maybe he really wants to be out buying burgers as a means of escaping work for even just a little while and rubbing elbows with the real people out there on the street. As a communications professional I love it. It’s simple, fun, effective, and accessible…because it is on YouTube. I probably would have cut it a little shorter, which I think might have actually helped it appear more believable, but that’s my opinion…

I wonder though, what do Republicans see in this piece? What if you don’t like Obama much? Is it believable and effective? I’d love to read comments.

I remember the first moment when I realized its power. My older brother found an old clock, the kind you wind up with a key. I must have been about 9 years old at the time. He was tinkering and the clock spring let loose. The noise was deafening: a sickening, screeching whirr. My mother stopped it somehow. She warned us she would have to let it go. I thought it would be fine, but when the sound started it up again my brother, sister, and I were just as terrified as when it had first gone off.  It struck me then that it was only a noise, and yet it penetrated to my core, rattling my sense of security. Maybe it just tapped into fears that were already there. Let them loose.  Anyway, I survived the onslaught of the sound. I also realized that that sound could not hurt me, but was still terrifying.

Years later, I was a young adult, living in my first apartment. It was an old tenement building. The floors were oak, the walls coated in horsehair plaster. One night, out of nowhere, there was a sound like broken glass. In my mind’s eye I could see some big guy hitting a window with a baseball bat. I jumped up, called 911, and tried to figure out the best place to position myself until they came.I lived in a small, troubled city. The police came fast, within minutes actually. They looked around inside and out, but couldn’t find a thing.When they left, I found I was too shaken to settle down. I decided to wash the dishes I had left in the sink. That’s when I found the source of the sound. A metal colander that was hanging on the wall had fallen onto the marble countertop, and in doing so knocked over a glass. The combination of sounds had synthesized into a very convincing imitation of the mayhem I had imagined.I laughed at myself for being fooled, laughed at how sounds had frightened me many times in my life. I also realized the power sound held over me. Whether a single noise coming from an old spring, or some sort of combination, sound had the ability to dig deep into my emotional storage center and pull out fear, or sadness or excitement, or well being. I thought of those moments at school dances, rallies, and in church when songs and chants had worked their magic on me.

After that, I was hooked. I was working as a video producer and so had the opportunity to experiment with sound. I would sit with headphones on listening the rich snaps, crackles and pops we picked up in recordings. I giggled over the sounds made by random items that I learned to work into soundtracks. I even loved the voices I recorded—the way they filled my ears. I started listening more, searching with ears for details in the sound and using those to add richness to the pieces I produced.

I became an NPR junkie, too, marveling over the way producers their build sound in layers to fill out the details of stories, reignite interest, or punctuate a moment.If you can hear, it is easy to take sound for granted. But when you recognize the power it holds over people, it’s just as easy to harness that power and put it to work.   

Okay, I know. I’m supposed to have started a blog and kept writing faithfully every day, or at least once a week…but always on a regular schedule. I get that. What I’m also getting though is that many people with many good things to say are terrified about starting to blog because they know that messing up is a very public act.

I say, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. If you don’t experiment, you don’t learn…or at least I don’t.

Perhaps I should be more worried about my image. After all, it’s been a couple of years since I last posted to this blog, and that does look pretty lame. Of course, I could say I meant to do that and to stay tuned for my next biannual creation…but that would be untrue. In fact, I’ve been busy.

Yeah, aren’t we all.

Well, yes, we are and that is not excuse. But I haven’t been falling down on the job either because what I’ve been busy doing is purusing the web, reading blogs, commenting a lot, deciding who to follow, watching how people I like following hold my attention, and then figuring out where everything fits into my business plan. I’ve read some books, taken some classes, talked with lots of people and just generally tested the waters. I also started a second blog, bedfordtowntaxi.com, which was more of a news site…an experiment in grass roots, hyperlocal journalism, and I wrote for an actual tree-killer local newspaper, managed a couple of websites for a big university career office…plus did lots of other things I won’t get into here. 

What I didn’t do, was lose sight of my goal: to be part of the conversation that goes on everyday on the web…and more and more, I am part of that conversation. 

And now, I’m also back here at my blog as I intended to be all along…only now, a little smarter, a lot more confident, and hopefully worthwhile enough in people’s minds that they will come take a second look, or a first look maybe…but will actually read the stuff I write and maybe even comment and share my stuff. 

What I’d really like people to follow though is my example. The web is an enormous churning beast, filled with all kinds of people. Some make a great impression, but if you watch them closely, reveal themselves as less worthy of your time. Others are consistently great and worth keeping on the top of your list. Still others struggle to stay in, or just appear and then disapper like spring snow.  The only way to see where you might fall in the fix is to take your chances. If you want to up the odds that you will be successful, it is just like anything else: you must continue to learn and grow, and also recognize that you are another imperfect being tapping those keys and trying to make your mark on this big messy networked information phenomenon.

I saw this video again this morning.  Brilliantly done, it captures the power of social media and to me, puts to bed all of the notions that social media will not last.  It does seem to promote another myth however…that social networking is a young people thing.  I disagree.

It is true that I meet lots of Baby Boomers who see no relevance to Facebook in business…or think it is just a fad that will cool in time, but that statistic about 100 million users added in less than 9 months is not hard to see in action…especially among Boomers and people even older.  In fact, many of the same people who don’t believe social networking is not a business tool, are using it to stay in touch–without ever getting the connection.

It’s what the video says.  Success isn’t about advertising anymore, it’s about being part of the conversation…a vital member of the community.  If, as a business or even just a business person, you have value, then people will see that, not just in what you advertise, but in dealing with you on lots of different levels, and personal conversations are…or at least can be…part of what makes you valuable as a business person.

Social networking allows you to be involved in lots of different ways, and to reach large numbers of people all at once, upping the chances that you’ll be seen and recognized as someone with value.

I think the secret of success with social networking isn’t about age or technical savvy so much as it is about just being interested and involved…like so much of life.  A big part of success is just showing up and social networking…and Facebook specifically…are all about that.

What makes that hard to see and accept is that it isn’t cause and effect like advertising.  You don’t show up on Facebook or even LinkedIn and then get a call a week later with that big job offer or some lucrative contract.  Rather, it’s like being a starlet at the soda shop.  You show up…you’re part of the fabric of the place…and eventually you may be in the right place at the right time.  Beyond that though, for every starlet who is discovered, there are lots of people who develop lucrative careers because being there put them in touch with the shop owner who took them under their wing and convinced them to become a pharmacist, or even a soda jerk who wanted to start a food stylist business and needed a partner and knew you had skills that might complement hers.

Things happen all the time.  Being there makes it so much more likely that you’ll be a part of it that why wouldn’t you show up?

Why outsource when you can do it yourself?

All the tools are there for you to do your own marketing, for example.  Social networking, analytics, word processing, web design packages.  There are even logo generators that let you buy a logo for cheap, cheap, cheap.  With all that computer intelligence, who needs to pay?  And yet, just last month, I heard a woman talk about growing her own marketing firm from a one-person operation, to a fully formed company that was ultimately acquired by another, larger company.  Her secret?  She said she got serious, first by getting out of her basement and renting office space, and second by hiring a marketing firm to do her PR and communications for her.  I asked how she could justify that since that was her business.  She said her business was building her business first, and that bringing in another firm to do her PR especially was important to helping her identify her real strengths and promote those.

 So is knowing how enough of a reason to stop you from hiring someone to do your marketing and communications for you?

Pros:

It’s cheap

It’s easy…or so you might think

You know your business best

It’s a great diversion from your regular work

Cons

It’s not free (your time is money)

It’s not efficient

It’s not as effective as having a pro do it

You may never get it done because it is for “fun”

You may never get your real work done because you’re messing around with stuff that is not your work

 So, what do you think?  When do you bring in an expert for marketing or anything else?  And when do you do it yourself?

Jenny Spadafora is a cool human being.  She takes pictures, writes, thinks a whole bunch…I mean even her job is cool…her title is Web Evangelist at Intuit Software.  I met Jenny a couple of months ago at a networking meeting…(where else?!)  Being a web evangelist, she is all about networking…especially online networking through all those social media sites.

Jenny wrote a slide presentation called, “Should I be on Facebook?”  There’s a link to it here…   http://tinyurl.com/ygz5ton .  It’s worth watching because it is so so simple and so personal and it really gives you a sense of why you probably do want to consider Facebook, or if not Facebook, then one of the many other social networking sites out there.  Lots of people feel that Facebook in particular is not a place where they want to be.  They feel it is risky, will give people too much access to their personal stuff, and might work against them in business.  Like Jenny, I feel Facebook, and all other social networking tools, are really what you make of them.  She talks about a continuum that involves the private, personal, work and public realms.  If you think about your presence in these ways, Jenny says you can choose how, whether, and where you see certain social networking tools fitting in your life.

So, why would you want to fit it in?  Well, Jenny points out that social networking online is actually good for introverts.  It can put you on a level playing field with others in your office, too, even if you work in a remote location.  I would go a bit further.  I think Facebook and all social networking is important, because in a way, it helps you compress time.  Consider all you have to do in a day.  It is really hard to keep up.  That bit Jenny says about helping to put you on a level playing field with others even if you don’t show up in the office…that works in lots of different ways.  Suppose for example you don’t have an office you go to, but are a freelance writer like me, or a consultant or contract worker.  Part of my job is really letting people know I exist, working to keep them aware of me, but also the things I do.  I suppose that’s always helpful whether you are inside a company or out.  You want people…busy people…to know you exist, that you are interested in what goes on, and that you are part of the conversation.  Social networking sites help keep your face in front of people, even if you never set foot in their physical space.

What conversation you ask?  Well, it doesn’t matter.  That’s where your private, personal, work, and public realms come into play.  If your interest is photography (like Jenny), then you get involved in websites and blogs that talk photography…you read, you learn, and you comment as you are comfortable.  If you don’t have time to devote to doing that, then maybe being part of that conversation is not something you really care about.  Maybe what matters to you is smart growth, or town politics, or schooling your children.  Whatever it is, there are social networking sites and groups and connections that will put you in touch with people who have similar interests but maybe very different thoughts.  Sharing thoughts is what it is all about.  Even if you don’t feel comfortable adding your ideas to the mix, you can learn a lot.  Still, getting involved is best because it does help you form connections and have a presence that matters…that shows you matter.

No time you say?  Well, Jenny addresses that, too.  She has a routine she follows everyday that takes her to each of the sites where she participates.  In her case, social networking is a specialty and so something she has to do as part of her job. She budgets time for visiting her sites and does it first thing every morning. But even if you’re not Jenny and consider social networking a luxury or leisure-time activity, think again.  A social networking habit of even 15 minutes a day can allow you to go to a site or two, scan updates and inputs, and make your presence known somehow.  This is where I think Facebook is great because even clicking a “like” icon shows you’re noticing what goes on…you are there and like so much of life, it is showing up that matters most.  Depending on the site you choose and how you set things up, you can have access to industry experts, thoughtleaders, customers, and constituents.  And what’s amazing about it, is that they can see you there, too, showing interest and eventually getting in on the conversation in ways that make sense for you.