[Strategy] Platform Assumptions

Distribution platforms are for more than just flooding an audience these days. They are now said to be forums for two-way communication and engagement, rather than one way alleys.

However, this assumes a couple of things about the nature of both distribution and engagement:

The first thing it assumes is that every person to whom an article will be distributed will have an interest in being engaged with.

The second thing is that it assumes that all forums are inherently social and designed for the back and forth that engagement implies.

Both of these assumptions are false on their face and limiting, both to the content being distributed as well as the level of engagement from the audience in question.

Just as every conflict does not need to be mediated, every distribution platform does not need to be a platform for the back and forth of engagement, commentary and opinion.

-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: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Opinion] Who Will Hire the Bigots: Sigma Alpha Epsilon Edition

In a world where proper outward social conformity is often conflated with the presence of internal, moral character, what’s a young man in a fraternity to do?

Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity members, who are students at the University of Oklahoma have been either suspended or removed from school, for creating a chant with racist lyrics, and then having it filmed and plopped on the Internet and TV.

These students are about to have their future employment fortunes changed, because, the Internet neither forgets—nor forgives.

Should we be surprised that students in this fraternity seemingly happily chanted along with lyrics that might not have been above board?

No.

Social pressure to conform to group norming is still more powerful at the human, physical, person-to-person, individual level, than Internet shaming ever will be at a larger societal level. And ignorance of history and facts is not merely the provenance of the young and impressionable.

But, here’s the thing: These students have now been impacted far beyond the actual impact of their words and enthusiastic chanting in the video. Yes, it went viral. Yes, many people have played it, talked about it, linked to it, and written about it (heck, even we are). But has anyone asked the larger culture what the societal impact of such an outburst actually was?

No.

No, we haven’t.

Opinion polls are gradually being replaced by instant reactions through immediate outlets (like Twitter, YouTube comments, etc.) to stimulus events. This rarely commented upon cultural shift has created a “firebombing” mentality that has scorched the personal, business, emotional and financial earths of many people, both public personalities and private individuals. All the way from former Mozilla Firefox CEO Brendan Eich and former LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling, to the two police officers who were shot in response to the death of Eric Gardner and shooting of Michael Brown.

Forgiveness and grace are gifts to be given out of a sense of compassion and empathy (are the fraternity members at OSU not human? Do they not bleed?). But the larger social desire for lockstep conformity prohibits this. And when proper outward social conformity is linked exclusively to the assumption of character, forgiveness and grace are hard to come by.

We are sure that the OSU students who have been suspended (or removed from school) as a result of this incident, will attain employment in the future and will move on to living as full lives as they possibly can, but what deeper lessons have they learned from this incident, from culture, society and from institutions of higher learning, about race, character, conscience and forgiveness?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Build Your Own House

When living in a house that someone else has built, there is always a sense of something that could be better, roiling around underneath the veneer of “being comfortable.”

Walking around in that house, the renter (or person paying the mortgage) always notices nails sticking out, annoying rough edges and corners of door jambs and knobs, cabinets that are the wrong height and colors of the walls that are “off.”

But, most people put up with those irritations in a house, because…well…it takes a lot of technical—and emotional—knowledge, to design your own house, to your own specifications, that’s comfortable for you.

It’s the same thing with the houses that we have built on top of the virtually property space of the web: social media platforms, apps, websites and many, many other items.

Too many clever people in the web space complain too much and too loudly, about the houses they are paying rent to live in. And as clever as they are, they are not picking up a pen, a ruler and sitting at a slanted desk, to design and build something of their own.

In order to develop the web past where it is now, we need more clever people building houses, versus renting houses.

And the amount of real estate is always expanding…

-Peace Be With You All-

Seduced by the ZMOT

There is a zero moment of truth.

Google researched this a few years ago, and the upshot of the idea is, that, due to the amount of content we are consuming on a daily basis, the modern Western consumer has so many more options to try and research before they buy.

There are other elements that tie into this, including the brand being what customers says that it is and advice to brands on how to avoid interruptive advertising, but the idea remains relevant for us in the conflict fields.

For practitioners and participants in the process of conflict, the nature of change and attaining the skills to be successful at managing conflict and change, there is a zero moment of truth as well.

We talked a little bit about that in this post here, but it remains indicative of our modern day that the zero moment of truth—the moment at which we decide to pre-shop our notions, read and get advice from others, watch a conflict video on line, or ask questions of other individuals—for conflict practitioners, is a moment of great impact.

But for participants in conflict, there seems to be a dearth of materials and resources, leading to the ultimate moment of truth, where conflict participants attempt resolution themselves, and may succeed, fail or just surrender.

-Peace Be With You All-

‘All right. All right. All right.’

We laugh at movies featuring the 35 or 40 year old who won’t leave the parents’ house and get a life.

We believe that the current Best Actor recipient once starred in a movie centering around such an animating theme.

But failing to launch (or even failing to recognize the oncoming signs of failing to launch) is not just the provenance of Hollywood scriptwriters and actors, it is a real occurrence in the real world of corporate boardrooms and small business back rooms.

Typically, this failure coalesces around an idea, an innovation or a project that doesn’t get enough organizational political support, organizational money or organizational time. This most obvious failure to launch shows up on the cover of the industry magazine, or as a hit piece on a blog or social media.

But failure to launch also happens quietly, under the radar, lurking like a submarine beneath the conflicts between people in the workplace. And it’s a moment that is so fleeting—so ephemeral—that it’s missed almost all the time.

The failure goes something like this:

Sharon and Bill have a disagreement about a project in which they are both invested. Sharon can’t see Bill’s point of view. Bill thinks Sharon is being obstructionist on purpose. But before Sharon and Bill can really get into it, they both pause—maybe at the water cooler in a conversation with another person, maybe in traffic on the way home—and they have a moment where the thought “Maybe I’m wrong here,” flits across their minds.

Like gossamer.

And just like that, it’s gone. Along with the twinge of regret and disappointment—as well as an oncoming sigh—accompanied by each parties’ resolve, hardening to “Do what is right. For the company.”

The question that makes consultants uncomfortable to ask—and employees and employers uncomfortable to ponder—is the question that on the face seems confrontational and too direct, but underneath is probing. Aiming at the dark heart of what happens in—and out—of the cubicle:

“Have you ever failed personally at resolving a business conflict?”

Or put another way, “When was the last time you failed to launch?”

-Peace Be With You All-

Build Your Own House

For some people, renting is the way to go.

It removes the hassles of having to do yard work, deal with snow removal, or fix the things that invariably go wrong with a house.

For some people, ownership is the way to go.

It allows the person (or couple, or family) to feel psychologically, financially and spiritually grounded in a world of impermanence.

The same parallel can be drawn with organizations and their use of marketing tactics through social platforms.

Some organizations would rather pay the rent to get to eyeballs that the landlords of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pintrest, Instagram, and on and on have decided to charge.

Some organizations are choosing to opt-out and go back to doing the work of building their own platform through the use of their website, their blog and their email distribution lists.

Which strategy is better is really a matter of whether an organization is looking to persist and remain relevant in spite of the changing winds of social platforms, or if an organization is just looking to “make some noise.”

However, never forget: The social media landlords of Facebook, Twitter, et.al., already put in the hard work building a really, really, attractive space for all those tenants whose eyeballs you want to show your content to.

So, are you a renter or an owner?

-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: http://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

The Crack-Up of The New Republic

Watching old industries get disrupted is a painful thing, and nowhere is this more evident than with established media companies.

From the New York Times to the New Criterion, everyone is feeling the pinch from digital disruption and “vertically integrated” media companies, such as Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post, who rely on click-bait articles to justify the spending of advertising dollars.

And all of this is happening in a world of declining audience attention spans, increased distractions and with the ever present specter of “content shock” on the horizon.

In case you missed it, The New Republic, recently purchased by Chris Hughes, is cracking up. The media driven articles about the methods and responses to this change, serve as another sign that, what was once thought secure and assured in an open market, is now not so much.

This is what happens, when digital replaces physical, all methods and modes of communication have to change in order to adapt to the new market realities.

In other words: It had to happen.

Content distribution channels remain the ultimate arbiter of content market value. They are—as they always have been—agnostic on the substance of that content: uplifting or entertaining; progressive or conservative; educational or vapid.

Look, digital disruption is taking out everyone, even the old gray lady is offering payouts to journalists who want out because they can’t adapt to the new rules. Say what you may about the direction of The New Republic, and about whether or not it becomes “vertically integrated,” the underlying hand-wringing for “educational long form content” getting out to “the masses” is misplaced.

Content, is content, is content. Long form, investigative, journalism has never been immune to forces of digital market disruptions.

This is a time for excitement, not dread. A time for hope, not fear. A time for response, not blind, reaction.

-Peace Be With You All-

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

[Strategy] Changing Our Approach to Facebook

Remember the days when it was still “The” Facebook and all of your friends’ information, pictures and stories scrolled up right away in your newsfeed?

We got involved with Facebook a couple of years after its inception at around 2006. Since then we have had, admittedly, a “love/hate” relationship with the platform on both the personal and the business side.

Since launching the HSCT page in late 2012, we consciously decided to leverage Facebook strategically to gain an audience, and drive traffic to our blog. For the most part, this approach has worked well. About 44% of traffic to the HSCT #Communication Blog comes to us through Facebook. The remainder comes through email connections, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social distribution methods. And that Facebook driven 44% is almost 100% organic traffic.

Even as our dependence on Facebook to drive traffic has increased, we have noticed that conversion among our live audiences (the people who come and see us) has fractured, mainly along age lines. Those between the ages of 35 and 55 are connecting with us through Facebook, but the younger demographic (i.e. 18-35) are connecting with us through Twitter.

So…in 2015, the question becomes: What are we to do about social distribution through Facebook?

Well, this is a larger puzzle that many brands are working out in 2015, but for our money, the best approach is to change our thinking taking the following two points into consideration:

Facebook is now a billboard service on the digital highway. And, just like billboards on the physical highway, certain people see the billboards if they drive on that highway and certain people don’t. Physical billboard space has become pricey in the “real” world. In the digital realm, Facebook Ad spend, and Boost Post spending in an era of zero organic growth has also become pricey for a small, one-person shop.
The gamification of the SEO process on Facebook continues to yield dividends. We have to tag our friends on our personal page, whenever we post a blog article, in order to bump up our numbers of content views. This is unsustainable, to say the least, because the cost-per-click of ad spend on Facebook is only going to increase, even as the dubious benefits of gamification become less viable.

So, what to do?

Beginning this week, and for the remainder of 2015, we here at HSCT are going to pay for fewer posts, less often. The posts will be mostly image based and will always link back to blog based content.

The other thing that we will be doing is posting fewer links back to our original, blog based content. Instead, we are moving in the direction of creating newsletters and beefing up our distribution model directly to—and through—our website.

So, for those of you who have liked and consumed our content via Facebook, we’ll still be there, just less often.

To join our email list, please, head on over to http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com/hsct-offers page and sign up today. After you do that, download our two FREE offers, our [download id=”2414″] and our [download id=”2390″].

And have a great 2015!

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The Center is Holding

The signs of the post-American (some would say post-empire American) world, are all around us, from Trayvon Martin to the latest corporate hacking issues at Sony.

The center is holding culturally and economically, in “flyover country,” where—outside of a very few areas in the economy—failure is still not tolerated, taking risk is still frowned upon, and steady, 40 hour a week values, are still being inculcated into the young.

At the edges though, things are fraying and the Sony hack is the latest example of the fraying edges. Data illegally obtained and then released to the tabloid journalistic community.

And Sony isn’t the only one. JP Morgan Chase, Home Depot, Kmart, and now Staples have all experienced this phenomenon.

For the people at the cultural, political and even economic center, this represents a watershed shift from the America that they knew—and that they still want to believe in—to an America that they do not understand.

We have said before that the large looming 21st century conflicts will be between those who have access to technology and software and those who do not, or even between those people who seek to define the future through search (Google) instead of connection (Facebook).

At a global level this will be true, but in the US, the battles coming are between those who believe and seek to shape the culture in post-empire ways, and those out in “flyover country” who are still raising children and inculcating them to believe in the values of empire based thinking: God, family, country.

The role of the peacemaker at the policy table, the entertainment industry, and even in the digital space, is now more important than ever.

-Peace Be With You All-

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

[Advice] In The End is Not Soon Enough

Mapmaker William Smith and Mennonite Wilma Derksen were recognized for the impact they created with their projects, their perspectives and their approach to life.

They “got their due in the end.”

Depending upon your frame of reference, their due came either too late or way too late.

It used to be that elites ridiculed innovation because the pedigree from where innovation came wasn’t “right.” Once mass media and mass culture really took off in the middle of the last century, the middle masses began to exhibit the same ritualistic cultural shorthand of dismissing self-belief. The masses also rejected the counterintuitive nature of becoming uncomfortable in order to do the right thing.

Now however, in the midst of the ongoing fracturing of mass media and mass culture, ridicule of innovation has splintered, emanating from multiple areas simultaneously.

People in the field of software applications like to talk a lot lately about “unbundling” and about how “software is eating the world.”

We believe that this is happening, but the real revolution will come when fractured audiences start giving all innovators their due—attention, respect, relationship, revenues—before they are ready to shuffle off this mortal coil instead of after they are gone.

To join our email list, please, head on over to http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com/hsct-offers page and sign up today. After you do that, download our two FREE offers: [download id=”2414″] and [download id=”2390″].

-Peace Be With You All-