HIT Piece 6.14.2016

What do you need from your blogging and your content creation?

Do you need reassurances and pats on the back?

Do you need more fans, audience members, and readers?

Do you need more clients, attention, and awareness that leads to revenues of referral, trust, and revenues?

I made the decision that I need to tell the truth: about conflict, about resolution, about reassurance, about the future, about technology, about fear, about progress, and about the future of a field I believe in.

I made the decision that the blog is an outlet for the drip-by-drip, daily opportunity, to convince, persuade, and cajole my daily readers into thinking that way that I think and believing the way that I believe.

In essence, I decided that my blogging (though not necessarily my YouTube channel or my podcast) was going to be a long-term, dedicated, committed and consistent trust building, argument building tool. Not a tool to force my “I’m right” on people who don’t want to hear my “I’m right,” but instead, it’s a tool to have arguments, work out ideas, and test myself against the market.

I recently told a participant at a conference who was interested in signing up for my blog, that “Stick with reading it. It’ll take you about six to eight months to figure out what I’m doing.”

Do you have six to eight months to build a following, convince an audience, persuade a reader, and do so without feedback, support, or much interest?

I do.

-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/

[Advice] Building a Subscription Model for Content

Being the last person standing is an underrated tactic in the world of online content creation.

But for the peace builder looking to create a subscription model for content, this may be the best strategy possible.

Three things are working in the peace builder’s favor:

the speed of the Internet and the ways in which content consumers access content is increasing, even as the cost of acquiring the tools is decreasing;
the rise of ad blocking is causing many organizations to either double down on advertising, or to simply eliminate it altogether as a driver for content;
the cost in time, emotional energy, and personal effort (number of “touches”) to acquire a paying customer online is about the same as it is to acquire a paying customer offline.

More content—written, audio, and particularly video—is being consumed by audiences via mobile applications, nested on mobile devices, and accessed via the cloud. This is being seen most visibly in the overlap between subscription based product services (i.e. Harry’s Razor, Dollar Shave Club, Birchbox (for men and women) Trunk Club, Casper Mattresses, etc., etc.), and the ways in which applications, URLs, and even QR Codes are being integrated into the content consumption experience around advertising those services. Peace builders must be aware of these trends to keep their content delivery systems current and updated to get in front of as many audience members in their long-tail as possible.

The rise of ad blocking as a driver for developing a subscription based business model for content development is a key point for peace builders to take in to consideration. Yes, putting content behind a paywall and encouraging people to either give an email address (or pay a fee) to access that content may knock the peace builder in a Google ranking. But if there is an abundance of previously “free” content (audio, written, or video) that can be nested behind a paywall, advertising and ad blocking become less worrisome, in spite of whatever changes Google attempts to make to its search algorithm.

The offline content acquisition experience and the online content acquisition experience are beginning to hew closer and closer together. In the past, both on and off line, there was tremendous friction between the consumer of content and the creator of content. Now, both online and increasingly offline, all of that friction is either being automated, “app”-ed, or otherwise disappearing from interactions. Content consumers in the peace builders’ long tail are still eating, sleeping, buying clothes, and purchasing content from a variety of both on and offline resources. Peace builders must be aware of this friction reduction and move to a world where the frivolous parts of the experience (i.e. signing up, giving an email, taking a payment, etc.), are becoming more friction less so that the actual engagement with the peace builder can happen.

The peace builders that understand these three trends and incorporate the reality of them into their content business model will be the last peace builders standing (and getting paid) even as others drift away.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] New Behaviors

Peace builders struggle with sales for a variety of reasons, but the most pernicious reasons are around behaviors.

There are three areas where behaviors can be changed for peace builders to close more sales:

Determine what kind of prospecting are you doing as a peace builder: active (networking) or passive (website development). The prospecting that you are doing as peace builder may come down to understanding that you have to leverage what you do like (passive prospecting) in order to mentally and emotionally address what you don’t like (active prospecting).
Determine what the one scary behavior is that you would engage in during the day. The scary behavior goes beyond just writing a blog post and hitting “publish” (although it may start there) and goes right to researching ten local companies and calling their human resources departments. Many times, the scary behavior involves collecting “no’s” as if they are going out of style.
Determine where you as a peace builder are making excuses to not engage in the act of selling. Whether you have decided to become an evangelist—or a champion—for an idea with clients, or if you have decided to use cold-calls as a way to collect informal information about the market, peace builders often make excuses to get out of doing hard work that’s scary and uncomfortable.

Many times peace builders struggle because the things that they don’t want to do (the scary things) are the very things they need to do to build the sales in their practices.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] How to Pay Your Dues in a Digital World

The nostalgia for the perceived security and safety of the Industrial-TV complex dominated world of work and human interaction, is almost deafening.

The nostalgia mostly comes in the form of complaints about the work ethic of the current generation by a generation feeling left behind, and discounted.

When work ethic (or nostalgia for an imagined time in the past when people worked “harder” than they do now) is discussed, it’s often framed in the context of “paying your dues.” That mythical state of working hard, being unnoticeable (except for the work that you do), making no demands upon the work structure, and showing appropriate deference to the life experience of people older than you.

In a communication world with digital tools that are reshaping everything from shopping to working globally, “paying your dues” can begin at the age of 15 doing things that

Don’t scale…
…will not appear on a resume…
…that an employer will never know about…
…and will bring the person passive income that can be leveraged after ten years…at the age of 25.

You know, at the moment when the “you should be ‘paying your dues’” conversation begins to happen, directed by superiors, co-workers, and others who didn’t have the digital tools that the 15 to 34 year olds have at their disposal right now.

Work ethic still exists. We just haven’t figured out a new way to calculate its value.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Curing a Spiritual Disease

Giving every working age member of a population a stipend of money per month, per year, for the rest of their lives, will do little to relieve the two states it’s designed to relieve: jealously and a lack of meaningful employment opportunities.

Jealousy and envy are human emotions that often aren’t addressed as motivators for people to work. Envy, vanity, jealousy, and pride (yes, all emotions grounded in negative storytelling) are typically at the root of many people’s motivations to chase money, status, titles, honor, and respect.

Lack of meaningful employment opportunities is also rarely discussed. The era of “make-work” is over; but the things is, we are at the end of the Industrial Revolution, so the era of “we make stuff just a little bit better” is also over. Meaningful employment is typically not found at the beginning of the employment ladder in minimum wage positions by many people.

Without addressing both a lack of meaningful work opportunities and the inherent built-in drivers toward accomplishing goals and earning money, all the universal basic income in the world is only going to exacerbate conflict, providing enough impetus for people to engage in conflict en masse.

Work provides spiritual, financial, and emotional meaning for many people. But because those outcomes don’t appear on a spreadsheet, they are either discounted as being meaningless, or not considered in the first place. Universal basic income does nothing to address any of these disparities, emotions, or drivers in people.

It really comes down to giving people money, hoping to cure a disease of the heart and the spirit without the uncomfortable surgery of examining deeper motivations, and instead opting for a placebo.

A sure recipe for increased conflict.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Here’s What’s Instructive…

There’s no other more instructive event for the modern communications professional than a national election.

There’s white space and absence, in the midst of all the noise and the presence. What people do say is almost as instructive as what people don’t say.

Challenge the premise of the question, create a reductionist argument without objective meaning, play to the crowd as if no one is there to watch.

Be a marketable commodity, while also being a unique niche value, all the while, doing the daily narrative dance with the media.

Here’s what’s instructive about all of this:

Who are you for? If you are for everyone, you aren’t going to attract the attention and awareness of anyone.

Who are you against? If you aren’t against anybody, then you better be inspirational or maybe a little insipid, but never both—and never, even at the same time.

Who’s all in? If you aren’t going for the “gusto” then you aren’t going anywhere. Halfhearted attempts peter out halfheartedly.

Communicate strongly, confidently, and incessantly to cut through the noise, but be prepared to have your bluff called, your desires questioned, and your rigor stressed.

The reason only one person can become the head of a party or a country, is that the outcome—at a communications level—is scarce; and getting there is monumentally hard.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The Dark Heart of Man

Let’s talk about the kind of communication we want to have.

In person communications have always been fraught with difficulty, misunderstandings, miscommunications, negative escalations, and conflicts. When people talk with each other face-to-face there is always the opportunity for confusion and conflict, particularly if the conversation in question is questioning deeply held stories around values, worldviews, and frames.

It takes a lot of emotional quickening to escalate from a conversation to a confrontation to a conflict to a fistfight to a war. There are many discrete steps in face-to-face communication that social norming has established, developed, and refined for thousands of years to limit such escalation. But, as is always the case, human beings’ tools for communication get better, friction and misunderstanding increases, even as the speed of communication increases, and conflicts flare up.

From carrier pigeons to riders on horseback to the telephone to mail by airplane to emails and now Twitter, there have always been people who would rather have a fight than share an idea. And as the speed of our tools has increased how fast we get a message and then react to it, (going from days or weeks to micro-seconds) there hasn’t been a commensurate increase in the heart of rational contemplation.

Thus we get to social media communication. Trolls, bad actors, spammers, and others use the immediacy of social communication tools to psychologically manipulate people on the other end of the message into reacting rather than thinking. And there’s really only two reactions such individuals are seeking: fight or flight.

They aren’t looking for a measured argument.

They aren’t looking for reasonable discourse.

They aren’t looking for knowledge or growth.

They are looking for either a respondent’s heels or their fangs.

In the case of the Internet, and the communication tools we have built on top of it, we have exchanged immediacy for escalation, and have confused passion for legitimacy of an assertion. This is particularly problematic for people delivering messages that are outside the “mainstream,” or that rely on dispassionate examination of facts, rather than passionate reaction to opinions.

Ease of access to digital tools also allows communication to be focused on the tawdry and the spectacle—which is short term—instead of the deliberative and the reasonable—which is long-term. The creators of these digital tools—the owners of the platforms—may be publicly or privately traded companies, but make no mistake: the platforms are private property and the Internet, while vast, is not a place where 1.6 billion participants need to (or deserve to) cast a vote on the operations of a series of companies that built the platforms in the first place.

What kind of communication do we want to have?

The answer to that question, at least as is evidenced by the numbers of people using these communications tools, seems to be that we want friction free, painless, non-relational based communication when we want it, how we want it, that allows us to do what we want, when we want, how we want. But this is an inherently selfish and vain position, based in our perception of want, rather than a relational need.

Online communication will always be fraught with difficulty and no amount of changing a name policy, policing speech we don’t like, or building walls and doors into platforms, is going to prevent than difficulty. This is because the tools we use to communicate are the problem because of the assumptions and expectations built into them.

We’ve got to figure this out though, because at a global scale, there won’t be a positive outcome from communications wars between people. We are already seeing the beginnings of skirmishes around the edges of platforms such as Reddit and Twitter. We are also seeing responses to such skirmishes from companies such as SnapChat and WhatsApp, which promise to build platforms with more friendly assumptions around safety, conviviality, and trust built into them, rather than welded on from the outside as an afterthought.

More special interest groups meeting with Facebook isn’t going to solve this communications problem.

More governmental lobbying at scale by Google isn’t going to solve this problem either.

More closing off, disengaging online, or demanding more censorious penalties for people we don’t like, saying things that make us feel threatened, abused, or bullied (the aforementioned trolls, bad actors, and spammers) isn’t going to solve this problem either.

The solution to all of this, as with most things, lies in changing the motivations toward selfishness, vanity, and revenge that lie deep in the heart of man.

And, to borrow from Einstein when he was talking about the outcomes of the development of nuclear weapons, I’m going to bet that the founders of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and many, many other chatrooms, message boards, and email systems since the web was democratized, secretly wish, deep in their hearts, that they could go back in time, and instead become watchmakers.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Will You Read This?

There are a lot of tips, tricks, “how-to’s” and hack based articles, blog posts, and columns, everywhere. And there always have been.

Partially, this is because the people reading the articles want the easy out. This is evidenced in corporate training where attendees will say “I don’t want the theory, just give me the practical tips.” Or, ask “Is there a silver bullet for this?”

The silver bullet.

The easy answer.

Cheat codes in video games.

Will this be on the test?

What’s the shortcut?

I don’t want to hear your story.

I don’t care about the theory.

I want to work smarter, not harder.

[Advice] 10 Year Overnight Success V

People tell themselves stories about success and failure.

Most of those stories overlap with cultural stories that may, or may not, be factual. Cultural stories overlap with success and failure stories carry an impact. Success stories range from stories about hard work to stories about perseverance, patience, and tenacity.

What often gets missed in these stories is a discussion (or even a curiosity) about the individual and corporate moments that lead to the successes: The moments of gossamer when someone made a decision—or didn’t—and the consequences that resulted from that decision. Very rarely is decision making viewed through this lens as a series of deliberate and coincidental acts, complete with a dizzying array of textures, and moments.

The other thing that is often missed in all of these stories is the acknowledgment of the presence of a moral component in decision making. It is a sign of how far our post-modern world has come, that stories of success are tied more to the presence or absence of psychological traits, than they are tied to the presence or absence of spiritual traits.

The change really shows its colors when we either express guilt at the perceived underserved outcomes of our success—no matter how hard we know we worked for them. And it cuts particularly deep when “so many other people around me didn’t have the same success.” We compound our problem when we lack the commensurate humility in attaining our successes and are arrogant around the impact of our failures, exhibiting both a lack of a higher moral code and even more, a lack of an understanding of the limits of our own individuality and freedom.

There are no overnight successes: Parent work to ensure that their children have advantages that they did not have in their experiences. Adults work, experiment, try and fail, and neither the rewards, nor the failures, are equally meted out. People tell themselves stories about themselves (or repeat the stories they have been told by others since birth) and in repeating the narratives of success, failure, ennui, or moral uprightness, they continue to perpetuate myths that harden into legends, and become lived truths, echoing on down through the generations.

Nothing “bad” and nothing “good” happens overnight. It takes years (some would say at least 10,000 hours) to get to the epicenter of mastery of success and it takes just as long to get to the center of failure.

And the tenacious, and the patient, are rewarded, each to their own ends.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Engagement-As-A-Service

Imagine if engagement with customers, clients, and others could be measured as a trackable KPI of success in your organization?

Imagine if you actually engineered your organization at all levels to compete not in a race to the bottom on price, product, or service, but instead if you engineered (through reward and recognition) for engagement through failure, risk-taking, and decision making?

Imagine if the digital tools you have laying around that you don’t know what to do with, were engaged in actively and intentionally increasing engagement, rather than just selling?

Imagine if engagement were the service your organization offered, and the product (physical, digital, or another form) was actually an afterthought?

Imagine if quality engagement with your employees through open-book management, pay transparency, and treating adults as if they are adults, were the “new normal” rather than a “radical departure.”

We don’t have to imagine. There are organizations at scale that are doing all of these things all around us in all areas of the global economy.

The only question your really have to ask (and answer) in your organization is: Do you have the courage to go past imagining to acting?

-Peace Be With You All-