[Opinion] Marketing for the Peace Builder II

Peacebuilders spend a lot of time in the non-digital world, at the conflict resolution table, making connections, reframing ideas, challenging the status quo and creating the space for resolution between parties in conflict.

There are tools out there right now, blogging, podcasting, video creation, content curation tools, and many more that make it easy for the peacebuilder to do all of these things in public, in real time, creating change right now.

The issue is not the tools, or even serving the clients through using the tools.

The issue is shifting the field based mindset, philosophy and thought processes around personal/brand self-promotion, client self-determination, putting an idea “out there” and standing up for it.

Even if the client, the audience, or the peers disagree.

The issue is fear.

The issue is courage.

The issue is in the self, rather than in the tools.

Digital = fearless.

Who’s ready to be fearless today?

-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/

[Strategy] Getting Resolution to Conflict When the Other Party Would Rather Not

There are always two sides to every conflict.

There is always a third side to every conflict as well.

But each party (or sometimes all parties) have little to no interest in getting to that third side. They like the feelings that being in conflict gives them—righteousness, powerfulness, attention and validation.

The party who moves past these desires and feelings and who longs for resolution may never achieve it with the other party. This can lead to feelings of frustration and sometimes even giving up altogether on the process of resolving the conflict.

There are a few things for the party that’s ready to remember, when addressing a party who’s not ready:

Forcing the conflict towards resolution disempowers the party who’s ready and empowers the party who’s not. It’s the same concept as the one behind forcing a screw into a hole where it doesn’t belong. The screw doesn’t fit, the person who’s forcing it gets more frustrated, the hole gets stripped (or broken) and nothing changes.
Before being at peace with the other party (the one who’s no ready) be at peace with yourself. Self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and spiritual growth are all required for the next step.
Be patient. The most unused resource in our world today is rock-ribbed patience. Ghandi had it, his followers didn’t. Jesus had it, his followers didn’t. Those are just two examples, but the point is, sometimes waiting on the other party to change involves just that—doing what you need to do to attain peace with yourself first and letting the other party do whatever it is that they are going to do.

Empowerment through patience, wisdom and personal diligence does not come overnight, nor is it a “get resolution quick” scheme. But it’s rewarding and life affirming, whether or not the resolution that comes about is the one that either party expected.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] We Built This City

There are systems in place inside of corporations, nonprofits and even families to manage everything, from the finances to the logistics of getting groceries.

Human beings create systems, in response to growing external complexity, which creates conflicts, friction and disputes. Think of Dunbar’s number, or the number of people you actually interact with on Facebook.

As the Internet has exploded all around us, the demand for a digital solution to almost every problem has increased, accompanied by the promise of decreased complexity, chaos, friction and disputes.

But this promise is a misnomer at best and a lie at worst, because the solutions to most conflicts lies in gaining greater awareness of self, moving past the need to rely on a system to solve complexity, and moving toward doing the hard work of discovering something about other people inside of ourselves.

There’s no digital solution for human problems, and with complexity of systems increasing, and with human beings outsourcing more and more of that complexity to algorithms in exchange for the ease of leisure, we have no choice but to start down the road of learning about ourselves.

Or else, the interpersonal and intrapersonal conflicts between and within people will only grow more pronounced as man’s search for meaning and mattering becomes more and more acute, inside of the systems we’ve built.

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 07.28.2015

With the seemingly overwhelming flood of content, voices, opinions and “takes” in the social media world, there are two common responses to the feeling of being drowned in mediocre content:

Throw up your hands, declare the Internet “dead”, and retire from the space…

Throw more content out there in a never-ending “race to the bottom” for attention, trust and money.

Both choices are false, for me.

Content is a passenger for success, not the driver (or the gas) in the car of any business. The people who are doing the best in the content “game” are those who combine the development of content with the material fact of doing something else (creating, collaborating, consulting) in another area that complements what they do online.

Am I going to develop the next great content management system? Probably not. Am I going to keep workshopping, writing, speaking, collaborating, connecting, and meeting with people off-line, while my online content grows and grows?

Yes.

And that’s the way out of the bind for many people.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Original Intent

Whether people are debating the significance origin stories found in documents, or critiquing where innovations and progress ends up once other people (with other ideas) get involved, the search for “original intent” shows up.

The first reason that determining original intent is a fallacy and—to a certain degree—a way to either shut down conflict and force accommodation with whatever the new idea or innovation is, or it serves as a way to critique progress without really having any skin in the game.

The second reason that original intent is fallacious as an argument against progress, is that no one—and particularly not the initial founders or designers of an idea, a concept, a product or an innovation—had any idea what the future would hold.

Which is why many arguments for the continuation of the Second Amendment (or any other amendment in the Constitution) tend to be ignored. The original intent of the founders who wrote the amendment in the first place, was greatly influenced by their immediate past—and their current situation, which is now shrouded in the past of US history. The writers of the Constitution couldn’t have imagined steam power or railroads spanning the country, much less the Internet, AR-15’s or the specific geopolitical strife that lead to the decision to go to war in Vietnam.

Instead of focusing on original intent and trying to determine how that intent matches up to situations that did not exist in the past when that intent was originally developed, perhaps focusing on original principles–mission, vision, values, goals–would be a better route to success.

This is a particularly salient point as we begin to really think about what kind of Internet we want to have, even as the Internet changes into something that it’s original founders, designers and developers could never have imagined.

-Peace With You All-

[Advice] How to Read an Analytics Report

If you don’t measure it, it hasn’t happened.

At least that’s the clarion call for many in the worlds of Big Data, analytics and the growing field of measuring content marketing.

But for the blogging peacebuilder, just the mention of the term “analytics” can generate beads of cold sweat. The same term can bring on a cold sweat in others as well.

But there are three simple types of reports that, when accessed, can make the peacebuilding blogger understand better what is going on with their posts, their curated content and their social distribution efforts.

Social Distribution Analytics Reports—Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and many other platforms, allow any user to look at how their posts, likes, and updates are tracking across the platform itself. These reports are very insular, and only reveal what happens with an audience member, a customer or a client inside the platform of choice. For instance, in the case of Facebook, if a blogging peacebuilder is posting regularly from their blog to Facebook, they can track the organic reach (free) and the paid reach (paid) of each item that they post. And the data on it’s users is so extensive, that any peacebuilding blogger could spend days staring at the data.
Blog Platform Analytics Reports—No matter what content creation and distribution platform the peacebuilding blogger uses, from WordPress to Typepad, each platform measures how often each post is opened, read and even what times during the days of the weeks this action happens. In WordPress and Blogger platforms, the data tracking users and readers comes bundled with access to Google Analytics (which we’ll talk about below). Where the platform based analytics reports really come in handy, are when the peacebuilding blogger wants to launch a plug-in that might serve to provide more functionality for her user/audience member.
Google Analytics—The 800 lb gorilla on the analytics block for many, many bloggers, marketers and others, are analytics provided by Google. The reports, measurement, trends and other tools inside of Google are deeper even than the data offered through Facebook. It’s relatively easy to get either a plug-in for a WordPress site or get access to Google Analytics by setting up a blog in Blogger before had, with a unique tracking code that stays on your website. When reading a Google Analytics report, the amount of data provided by Google to the peacebuilder can be incredibly overwhelming. The two areas initially that we would recommend the peacebuilding blogger to focus on would be the Audience Overview section and the Uses Flow report. Audience Overview in Google Analytics provides the peacebuilding blogger with analysis and tracking around from where audience members are accessing their content (mobile vs. desktop), how long they are staying on the site before they leave (bounce rate) and whether the website visitors are “new” or “returning.” Report generation is relatively easy (just set up the ability to get a report based on specific parameters (new vs. returning/mobile vs. desktop inside of Google Analytics) and Google will email the report to you.

Getting analytics reports is not the main problem in reading an analytics report. The main problem for any blogger, is figuring out how to best convert visitors to your site and your content to actual sales. Analytics reports that measure marketing efforts (video creation, blogging, ads, etc.) provide data that the peacebuilding blogger can use to determine where to best place their time and energy.

If it’s not being measured, it hasn’t happened. The follow-up to that statement is that if it hasn’t been acted on after it’s been measured, then all the measurement in the world is just thrashing and hiding.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] How to Curate Content

There are—literally—millions of blogs, covering everything from news to entertainment.

99% of those blogging efforts generate no revenue for the creators and publishers of the content.

With all this noise—but seemingly no fire—what are the two ways that a peacebuilding blogger can drive traffic to their blog, without seeming to “sell out” in the process?

Advertising is the first and easiest way. But the battle over banner ads is not yet complete, and the click through rate on Internet advertising in general is beyond merely abysmal—it’s downright laughable. However, there are some benefits to advertising and allowing ads to display on a peacebuilding blog: The revenue generated through clicks and eyeballs has generated some revenues for bloggers in the past.

But they got in early on the advertising game and now the distance between them and the peacebuilder currently looking to generate revenues after three years of blogging, is the same as the distance between Google (0) and it’s nearest search competitors, Bing and Yahoo (1).

Curating content from others is the second and not so easy way. Curating content from other sources can be fraught with legal (and ethical) conundrums, but the fact of the matter is, with the definition of content having now expanded to audio (podcasts) and visual (images and videos) the amount of content both siloed on platforms (i.e. Facebook Video or Tumblr blogs) has exploded exponentially. This offers opportunities for the savvy peacebuilder to access a wide variety of content based on her audience’s interests, and to offer that content as an intermediary.

A gatekeeper, if you will.

Here are four platforms to begin the process of content curation:

Flipboard—We personally use the magazine and article aggregator, Flipboard to create magazine based content off of what we have on our blog already and to share what is being published other places. Check out what we’ve done by clicking here. The platform is easy to use and we’ve even turned others onto it…

Twitter—Far from being merely a cesspool (it can be) or a noise factory (it can also be that) Twitter serves as a place to share links and engage with content creators around their content. With the current changes to the platform around retweeting and sharing, the ability to truly engage effectively with shared content has exploded.

RSS Feeds—Yes, we know that Google killed its RSS reader and everybody lamented. But for curation, particularly blog based curation with no middle man of another platform, RSS feeds can be a goldmine of sharing others content. Every blog has an RSS feed, but the readers of the feeds are few and far between. The savvy peacebuilder has two choices: Either go out to every blog individually and crawl the sites for the best content to share, or get a reader service such as Feedly (free) or Buffer (paid) and add websites with active RSS feeds.

WP plug-ins—If the savvy peacebuilder with a WordPress blog wants to develop curation on their site directly, then there are a couple of plug-ins to consider. WP RSS Aggregator is the most popular one by far, followed by Super RSS Reader. Both of these solutions to content curation require the savvy peacebuilder to be in the backend of her website, ensuring that the blog theme integrates well with the plug-ins and that the posts, feeds and pages are all delineated properly. But once set-up, this solution offers the most value, as it drives readers of the content the savvy peacebuilder has selected back to their website, rather than the original content creator’s site.

Content curation is not for every blogger (or peacebuilder) and the benefits in increased credibility, trust and value don’t accrue immediately (unlike the risk of advertising, which may create frustration as an assured hit, turns out to be a regular miss) but when they do, there is great benefit.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] How to Make an Image Quote

Then, there are visual quotes.

One of the few remarked upon trends in social media (started on Facebook way back in the good old days of 2006-2007) is the overwhelming presence—and virality—of visualized quotes attributed to famous (and not so famous) people.

As we stated on Monday, the Internet is evolving into a medium of seeing and hearing, versus reading and as such, the words of a person (preferably a famous one, we might add) strike a cord with individual followers as visual images.

Many peacebuilders, bloggers and others don’t even think that a quippy line in a blog post can gain some sought after viral traction through the process of creating an image based quote.

There are three tools that the typical peacebuilding blogger can use to create these images:

Canva— For the peacebuilding blogger with an intermediate level of comfort and brand knowledge, Canva.com is the best resource right now on the Internet. The platform is the web based photo editing and design system that allows anybody to upload a photo, slap some text over it (or next to it) and then download it as a JPG, or PNG, file. There are about 50 different fonts inside of Canva, along with vector images, different color backgrounds, and even preformatted text images. Plus, it’s backed by the venture capitalist and brand evangelist Guy Kawasaki.
Adobe Photoshop—For peacebuilding bloggers with a little more range in their toolbox (and the time to get image manipulation done) the old stand-by is Photoshop. Now exclusively subscription and cloud based, Photoshop is so deep and so rich with tools for photo editing, layering, filtering and designing that we can’t describe them all here. Plus, with Adobe’s move to being all cloud based, storage of large image files just became less cost prohibitive along with increased security and access for the end-user. Just go check them out.
Powerpoint + Stock photography—For the peacebuilding blogger who looks at Canva and gets overwhelmed, or for the peacebuilder who can’t even begin to imagine navigating the intricacies of any programs in the Adobe Suite of products, there is the wonder of Powerpoint. Now hear us out: Inside of Powerpoint, one has the ability to upload stock photos, edit out backgrounds and add in other backgrounds, and to add text. It’s a simple and user friendly addition to the Powerpoint list of tools, and with Office 365 being web-based now, as well as Windows 10 coming, Powerpoint is only going to get richer as a tool for designers.

The real question, of course is “What if I don’t have anything inspiring, quippy, or even relatively smart to turn into a quote for my audience to spread around?”

The answer to that question is, “Then don’t create an image quote.”

But, here’s the thing: Eventually, after about 6 to 8 months of steady blogging, we absolutely guarantee that you will turn a phrase worthy of being put next to your face and worthy of being shared around social media platforms.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Two, Episode # 1 (a) – Neil Denny

Earbud_U, Season Two, Episode #1 (a) – Neil Denny, Mediator, Collaborative Lawyer, Author, Grudge & Forgiveness Expert

Neil Denny’s perspective and approach to peace starts where most people think that the path ends—at forgiveness and reconciliation.

But don’t get us wrong, he’s also a peace building entrepreneur who understands the need that all mediators, negotiators, attorney mediators and others have to do to get other people to walk along the path to peace.

Building a business and keeping your equanimity are not mutually exclusive. When the money doesn’t come in and when the doorbell (or phone) isn’t ringing, what else is the peace builder to do? Well, applying principles of marketing and development can help, along with understanding how partnerships really work between people in business.

Neil is involved in a tom of projects, developing new niches for peace. Feel free to connect with Neil in all the ways that he’s differentiated below:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/neildenny

LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/neildenny

Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Neil-Denny/e/B005HSOTNY

Youtube: https://youtu.be/WTmUDGib-VQ

Get Artisan: https://getartisan.wordpress.com/

The Conflict Specialists Show w/Dave Hilton: http://www.conflictengagementspecialists.com/blog/collaborative-law-and-the-get-artisan-movement-with-neil-denny/

By the way, this is our first two-part episode here on Earbud_U. So listen to the first half (released earlier this month) by clicking on the link here!

[Advice] How to Write a Blog Post

It begins and ends with writing.

Yes, we live in an overwhelmingly visual culture, dominated by ads, images, videos, emojis and other vehicles that serve to entertain, inform, persuade, convince and convert.

But making an argument, and taking a stand still matters.

As does commitment and consistency, and the ability to be alone, (a la Virginia Woolf) and take some time to contemplate, think and formulate.

Blogging—long form content creation—still matters, even in a visually choked world. Many professionals would like to write, but are still trapped by the image that they have of writing from grade school.

Here are 5 steps to actually writing a blog post:

Come up with an idea—“I have nothing to write about” is the worst phrase in the English language. Or possibly any other language. With the rare exception, people do not think in images (unless we are counting the actual visual alphabet of a language as an image itself) and so words must dominate. When you can’t develop an idea, what you’re really saying is “I don’t want to think.”
Write down a few key words—We are avoiding the term “outline” but visual cueing and memory are still based in words. Write down a few and save them for later.
Go back to the key words—Before opening up that Word document, or the lid to that Mac Book, go back to the key words you wrote. Begin to craft a story around them. Yes, “Once upon a time…” is an appropriate opening, but a better one is more metaphorical. Comparisons work, because the human mind needs to analyze the world of the unknown, against what it already knows.
Don’t procrastinate—The biggest writing killer is procrastination. Typically based in fear, procrastination sneaks up and robs ambition, the desire to do better, and the will to put words on paper. Nike’s motto rings true here.
Step back from what you’ve written—Trust us: Never hit the “publish” button right away. Yes, blogging has some credibility issues, but that has more to do with how the process is used and what the process is used for, than the actual process itself. Writing builds ideas, and a platform, but the audience wants to be treated with a semblance of trust. Misspelled words, poor comma placement, and on and on, distract the audience. Plus, the heat of the writing arena has to cool so that soem ideas can be killed, and resurrected, if need be.

Writing a blog post is not difficult. The underlying meaning behind writing, publishing and distributing that blog post is diffcult.

Writing represents a commitment to the written word. Writing represents standing in a place and owning up to an idea, a concept, and a story that others may not agree with. And without consistent writing, we don’t know how you develop all those other shiny platforms, from podcasting to YouTube videos.

-Peace Be With You All-