[Opinion] Marketing for the Peace Builder III

There are three ways to connect with clients, customers, fans and audiences.

And in the world of digital communication, there is one basic principle that underlies all of these connections that the peacebuilder must keep in mind.

Original content creation starts with the blogging, but then moves to image creation (uploads to Slideshare), video (both live streaming and staged), audio (podcasts), webinars and more. Original content creation requires consistency, sweat equity and massive amounts of focus to get right.

Content curation starts with looking at what the Web already has as content out there, being produced by others, and then distributing that content to others in your network. Content curation requires and understanding of deep linking, mobile phone use, SEO rankings, keywords (yes, they still matter) and SEM (that’s Search Engine Management). Content curation requires an intuitive and analytic driven understanding of which platforms are just bullhorns, and which ones are targets for getting your audience’s attention, trust, and giving them value.

Content distribution starts at the intersection of content curation and content creation and requires understanding how those two intersect—and how they bisect. The fact of the matter is that many content creators are really good at distribution vial one platform (email, social, TV, direct mail, etc.) and really mediocre at many others. This is due to the fact that each distribution channel has its own rules, quirks and dramas that affect how an audience gets engaged and why, how long that audience stays engaged, and why that audience leaves.

The one basic principle the peacebuilder must keep in mind, is that creation, curation and distribution are the only ways that scale occurs in the digital realm. And when the persistent thought in a peacebuilder’s mind is “Is this doing any good?” the persistent answer, after developing in all three areas with strengths in creation, is…

“Yes.”

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Contributor] Indifferent Politics

Follow Alex on Twitter @AlexanderBGault

With the U.S. Presidential election fast approaching, it is time again for everyone of voting age in the US, and a few not yet of voting age as well, to sort out their political ideals and choose a candidate they feel will protect those ideals. And this year, as with every other year, a new crop of young voters is entering the pool.

And many of them don’t even know who’s running.

The young adults of this generation are less politically interested, at least in terms of big elections, than previous ones, and it’s not a new problem http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/dec/26/apathetic-disaffected-generation-may-never-vote

Many references to the political apathy of the new generation date back to 2013, and this specific one refers to the UK, but the problem is spread across many 1^st World countries and has shown itself in the current voting generation and the one just arrived.

There are many ways this problem could have arisen. In the US specifically, it could stem from the blatantly ineffective Congress, the lack of focus on the “little guy” in federal and state government, or the widespread disregard of the younger generation by the older.

The younger generation sees no reason to vote for the people who on the street refer to even the best of them as “self-centred and narcissistic”.

The political apathy could also be a product of how politicians and hopefuls communicate with the younger voting audience. When someone lives a majority of their life without Twitter or any other social medias, they tend not to see its relevancy or importance, and therefore disregard it or use it as an afterthought. And the growth of social media has revolutionized how people get their information.

For much of the 20^th century, people got their information, especially political information, from newspapers or television and radio. Rarely was the information straight from the politician or candidate themselves. However, today, the information in generally disregarded if it isn’t from the candidate or politician themselves. Twitter accounts run by “Mr. _______’s Management” are rarely given credence, and interviews with a big news corporation are outright ignored.

This new era of politics requires a more personal touch from the candidate, an interesting return to the roots of American politics that the big-business men of the 20^th century are not accustomed to.

Alexander Gault-Plate is an aspiring journalist and writer, currently in the 12th grade. He has worked with his schools newspapers and maintained a blog for his previous school. In the future, he hopes to write for a new-media news company.

You can follow Alexander on Twitter here https://twitter.com/AlexanderBGault.

[Opinion] Another “Uber of ‘X'” is not the Solution to Our Problems

“Uber of X” is not the solution to many of our problems with spreading, monetizing and deeeping the significance and reach of the Web.

One of the areas that demonstrates the lack of human imagination in developing the Internet for the service of people rather than in the service of commerce, is the human desire for the tool of the Web to work in service of leisure, consumption, marketing, entertainment and distraction. This desire, evidenced through the apps, tools and services we have designed and laid on top of it, caters to our base human desire for ease of solution, without being bothered by the intricacies and complexities of the chaos and complication, network growth brings.

Our tools–particularly our communication tools–should stand as objects that raise us up out of the muck of our inter/intrapersonal conflict biology and serve a Higher Purpose and our higher selves.

Another social media network isn’t going to do that.

Another selling, promotion or entertainment platform isn’t going to do it.

Any application, change or build atop the Web we have now, pitched and described to potential investors as “The “Uber of ‘X’” isn’t going to do that either.

But, maybe the Web in its voracious expansion out of the corral of the digital/virtual world and into the desert of the lived real, will never become the edifying, higher purpose technology we all thought it would be in the 90’s—maybe it’ll never be more than a glorified telephone/television system.

In the sci-fi dystopian novel Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, the citizens of a reality, not far removed from our current one, have limited choices outside of consuming, learning, and entertaining themselves in an elaborately constructed virtual world. Meanwhile, in the real world, people line up to enter the virtual world in a zombie like, Walking Dead, fashion, as the means of commerce and creation have abandoned the old, real world leaving it to rot and die on the vine.

We are at the beginning stages of this transformation of our world.

But only if we don’t try to challenge the inherent assumptions, expectations and disappointments around the architecture of what we have built atop the Web we have now. These challenges must push us beyond socializing and commerce and move humanity toward transformation and edification.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Two, Episode # 3 – Dr. Joey Cope

Earbud_U, Season Two, Episode # 3 – Dr. Joey Cope, Questioner, Conflict Resolution Practitioner, Dancer with Disputes, A Peacebuilder of Many Colors

Some people are soft spoken and you get the wrong impression about them.

They tend not to get visibly frustrated, and in my experience, enemies tend to believe that they are pushovers…or worse…

When I first met our guest today, I made a joke about how he “was shorter in person than he appeared to be on the Internet.” I waited a beat, and then, Dr. Joey Cope, laughed.

When I think of people in my field—the field of peacebuilding—that are “go to,” I think of Dr. Joey Cope. When I was a young graduate student, I was taught by him directly and, I wasn’t always sure that he was sure about my character on a regular basis.

Character counts in the field of mediation. As does age, wisdom and moral rectitude.

However, we are in a field that is being challenged on all sides by technology, the media, the changing nature of politics and many other areas. Technology levels all things and will continue to do so, but character has to count when we deal with the one area that software can’t touch: the human heart.

Dr. Cope is young in thought and energy, but he is an old hat in the area of wisdom, expertise and “been there, done that.”

He is on social media and he is using the new tools we have to spread old wisdom as well as to ask some questions about forgiveness, social justice and the ways in which we choose to communicate.

I hope you have as good a time listening to this interview as I did recording it.

Connect with Dr. Joey Cope through all the ways that you can below:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/joeycope

Dr. Cope’s Blog on the Web: http://joeycope.com/#sthash.83T8uJO0.dpbs

Dr. Cope’s 2nd Blog on the Web: http://peacebytes.org/

Connect with Dr. Cope on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/joey.cope1

Connect with Dr. Cope on LinkedIN:https://www.linkedin.com/pub/joey-cope/3/521/74a

[Advice] The Antifragile Ethic

The fundamental ethical issue of our time is how to engage with a world where situations and systems, are fundamentally indecent. And sometimes the people inside of these systems and situations choose to behave and respond indecently—and to do it repeatedly.

The issue is not whether or not historical past situations, peoples and systems were better or worse than current ones, that argument only serves as a distraction from addressing our current age of indecency. The real, core issue is how to manage the increasingly interpersonal conflicts that come with dealing with indecent situations and people in the world we have built for ourselves today.

This requires us to do the hard work of actively building new systems, and engage in situations by developing and maintaining an antifragile ethic:

Coming to grips with the idea that there will always be indecency (and this definition of indecency is individual, granular and personal, rather than institutional, democratic and systemic); and, the idea that individuals will have to make an active choice to address this indecency in behavior and choices head-on, rather than making the active choice to avoid, is the first part of the core of developing an antifragile ethic.

The second part of developing antifragile ethic is the idea that individuals must do the hard, emotional labor of engaging with themselves first and then others. The strongest antifragile ethical systems have at their core, a strong understanding and acknowledgement of the foibles and problems of the self first—before getting around to managing other people.

The last part of maintaining the antifragile ethic is to recognize that the choice to lead or follow is a daily, granular, choice-by-choice, day-by-day struggle that will lead to failure, disappointment and wrong decisions. But having that knowledge doesn’t allow us to abdicate the responsibility and accountability for making the hard choices (and accepting the consequences) granularly on a day-to-day basis.

Our need for ease (aided by our rapid technological growth and scientific knowledge) has led us to exchanging the hard work of being decent and building an antifragile ethic, for the faux immediacy of the unsatisfying search for an “easy” button, for addressing the difficult intricacies of interpersonal conflict.

There is no guarantee than this ethical development will work.

To search for such a guarantee is to ensure that the hard work of building an antifragile ethic will never happen. This is a fearful and childish search, doomed to never bear the fruit we so desperately need, to address our current, deepening, interpersonal conflicts.

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 08.25.2015

I am a live streaming video fan in general and a Meerkat partisan in particular.

You probably haven’t heard of the mobile application Meerkat, though its two more popular cousins, Blab.im and Periscope.tv are getting a lot of attention from tech bloggers and online magazines. The Meerkat app “blew up” at SXSW this year because of some shenanigans with the Twitter API, which you can read about here[link]. Part of this is because live streaming video is popular right now as a way to immediately connect with public events and personalities. The other part of this is because live streaming video is the next step in the continuing disassembling of television as a content delivery mechanism.

I like the Meerkat app for many, many reasons. The top two are:

The app integrates seamlessly with Twitter and you can publicize your Meerkat streams to your Twitter followers to grow your audience on two platforms.
The app also allows you to invite others onto your stream to either “host” a show with your viewers or to be interviewed by the host of the “show.”

Now, if you are a peacebuilder in any of the conflict management spaces—from facilitation to coaching to mediation to negotiation—you can probably already see the benefits of live streaming video to grow your business practice, develop a niche following and to grow your brand.

Here are a few thoughts I have around this new intersection between peacebuilders, marketing and technology:

Live streaming a mediation or coaching session to your Twitter/Facebook followers and fans might not be the best way to ensure client confidentiality and build trust, but you might have some clients who would be willing to have their lives placed on view for you to showcase what you do in real time. This would work particularly well if those clients are connected to you as a peacebuilder online.

Live streaming samples of you working (i.e. “This is what a session looks like,” “This is me explaining my philosophy and approach to peace,” etc., etc.) would be a way to immediately get feedback from potential clients and customers around tone, approach and other areas, rather than the one sided bubble of blog writing. There’s already a person on Meerkat who streams his Tai Chi sessions and talks to followers as he’s performing.

Live streaming to build a brand presence requires maintaining the same habits that you have to in order to blog daily: Show up on schedule, on time and engage effectively. This is easier (and harder) with live video than with the more controlled spaces of Youtube, Vine, SnapChat video or any other service that allows you to edit your presentation before uploading the content. With live streaming, it happens as it happens. However, this can be a way to schedule time with another peacebuilder and build an “Oprah” type show via Meerkat that goes on the air everyday and builds a sense of consistency and relationship with viewers.

These are just three ideas I have after messing around with the Meerkat app and researching live streaming video for the last few months. I am sure that some enterprising and entrepreneurial peacebuilder will use this platform (or Blab or Periscope) to begin to explore the possibilities of live streaming for peace.

If not, maybe I’ll host my own show on Meerkat….

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] On Predicting the Future

You can’t do it.

Neither can we.

Human beings (all of us) spend a lot of time generating a lot of anxiety, about what will happen tomorrow, what will happen next, or when this thing we’re doing now will all be over.

We can’t help it. Our biology has us wired for fear and anticipation of the next thing over the horizon. But, we believe that the work of conflict is for human beings to overcome their biology.

In our modern, conflict ridden culture, we have the tendency to mythologize the past, as if the people who lived then were somehow less intelligent, less forward thinking, less analytical, and less worried about the future. This orthodoxy of nostalgia is a poison, particularly in the context of a conflict. When we mythologize the people and situations of the past, because the future is unknowable—and thus scary—we hand over power to the worst impulses inside of us.

However, there is a way out, but we have to do a very scary thing first: We have to jettison the orthodoxy that mythologizes and infantilizes past decisions, people, and situations and realize that we will, in turn, more likely than not, be mythologized and infantilized by future peoples as well.

Pride and vanity—in our accomplishments, our technology, our knowledge—are pathologies of the current age. In the age of the present, people elevate themselves over the populations of the past, and become anxious and fearful about how they will be judged and categorized by people yet to be born. The humbling thing to realize is that such pathologies are no more pervasive in people now than they were in people of the past.

Pride and vanity—along with a courage deficit and a need for safety—go a long way toward ensuring that conflicts we thought were over—in our families, our organizations, our societies, our cultures— continue on into the future.

Humility in the face of past, faith in the face of the future, and peace in the situations of the present, lead to not worrying about the future, rather than expending mental, emotional and spiritual energy on trying to predict it, control it, or prepare for it.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Managing Reality

Changing expectations of outcomes corresponds to changing our assumptions about other people in conflict–and out.

This is difficult, because assumptions are grounded in pattern seeking behavior that our human minds engage in, to make stories about the behaviors of other people in the world.

When those stories don’t match up to the expected behavior, people often experience disappointment.

Then the stock price goes down.
Then the family erupts into disagreement and conflict.
Then the organization begins the long, slow, traumatic process of firing an employee.

Disappointments are based in having unrealistic expectations about the behaviors of other people; but, since other people also have a skewed view of one another, the disappointments coalesce into conflicts, hurt feelings, and eventually, unrealized expectations.

There is no way out of this cage as long as human beings create narratives about the world, based primarily around the way that their unknowable inner lives either match up (or don’t) with the outer reality.

The thing about reality though, is that it’s relative.

Emotions drive expectations, disappointments and assumptions. They lead us to build and manage narratives about how we’d like the world to be, rather than how the world actually is structured. This structural process leads to far more conflicts than the actual conflict issues at hand.

Leaning in (to borrow the phrase) comes from addressing the hard things repeatedly, rather than just erecting new expectations, based in old assumptions, which lead to seemingly fresh and new disappointments.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Well, That Was Difficult…

“Well, that was easy.”

Actually, no it wasn’t.

And the expectation that it should be, raises more problems than it solves for many organizations, institutions, and even individuals.

If the resolution to the expectation of how the conflict should proceed, results in an outcome that seemed “easy,” that outcome—and the process to get to that outcome—should be reexamined.

Expectations around finishing—or resolving—a conflict, a pain point, or a problem, are often characterized as needing to be “easy” in order to be sold to the skeptical party on the other side of the negotiation table. But the expectation that resolution shouldn’t require anything of one party (and everything of another party) is a childish assumption that many adults act on in very sophisticated ways.

The expectation of an “easy” resolution to conflict leads to poor organizational storytelling around a conflict narrative (particularly in a customer service complaint context) as well as poor organizational dealings with employees who may (or may not) be “pulling their weight.”
The expectation of an “easy” resolution to conflict leads to policies, procedures and laws that lack common sense, hide devilish details in meaningless language and public pronouncements by organizations that should be trustworthy, but ultimately come off as satirical and farcical.
The expectation of an “easy” resolution to conflict leads to disappointments, which deepens dysfunctionality, creates a cycle of more conflict (not less) and allows individuals to hide behind fear, avoidance of accountability and accommodation of unethical behaviors.

The marketing of the “easy” button was genius from a marketing perspective. However, tangled geopolitics, organizational ethics problems and individual ennui are not resolved with a button.

The expectation of difficulty in resolving both simple and complex conflicts—coupled with the courage to do the difficult thing anyway—leads to long-term resolutions, deeper engagement and real, genuine relationships.

“Well, that was difficult. But it was worth it.”

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Change Frames 2

Expectations, assumptions, disappointments and the actions that come from all of those areas are poisonous at the negotiation table.

The emotional and intellectual states around expectations, assumptions and disappointments, allow individuals to create frames inside of their intellect and emotions about the other party at the table. Then, parties act upon those frames, generating predictable responses from the other party. Then, there’s a “return to normalcy:” dysfunction continues, people get frustrated, innovation stalls, and the stock price of public companies (or the public credibility of private companies) goes through the roof.

To really innovate though, the first thing that has to happen in a conflict is that those frames of reference based in assumptions, expectations and disappointments have to be broken by at least one of the parties in conflict. This takes courage and is part of the core of emotional labor that is starting to define workplaces and organizations of all kinds in the 21^st century.

At the individual level is where all of this breaking of frames has to begin, but if the individual is unwilling to do it, then they are accepting the status quo. The hardest thing to realize is that piece right there, but once it is realized, then there is a diminishing of disappointments in either the other party, or the situation. This happens because one party is now seeing the other party as a human being, rather than as a conflict construct.

After the ability to be disappointed recedes, then the next piece to go are the assumptions about the conflict, it’s nature, or even the outcome of the negotiations at the table. This is a critical middle step that many parties in conflict seek to skip over because it’s not “sexy” and it’s hard. But, without abandoning assumptions, the other party is still trapped in a cage (or a frame if you will) not of their own making.

Finally, the last piece of the frame to be broken is the one created by expectations. This one seems line the hardest to break, but in reality, it’s the easiest to break once the other two are abandoned by either party. However, many parties in conflict seek to start the process of change by breaking expectations, rather than by addressing and breaking disappointments; this leads to more, not less, conflict.

Breaking frames created by expectations, assumptions and disappointments can feel like escaping from an emotional Supermax prison facility. But, breaking those frames and destroying those emotional prisons is required for the success of emotional labor at the negotiation table.

-Peace Be With You All-