[Advice] How To “Make A Ruckus”

There are two ways to “make a ruckus,” if you want to:

The first way is to be generous, give away your knowledge and spiritual wealth (and maybe even your material wealth if you are led to) and to collaborate with others to use the power you have gained to help others less powerful.

The second way is to race to the bottom on price and cost, worry about the corners and the fractions of an inch, to create/lobby for regulatory environments that favor incumbents, to use power as a weapon and to deny the human individual, and only look at the masses.

One way leads to abundance and an ownership mindset, no matter what environment or context you happen to be in.

One way leads to scarcity of resources and a perpetual employee mindset, no matter what environment or context you happen to be in.

Envy arises in individuals and groups of one mindset when they observe the physical, external manifestations of an internal set of choices. This feeling of envy, based in fear, clouds judgement, and leads to the false premise behind some conflicts. These conflicts—that are really about mindsets and values rather than about material resources—can almost never be resolved, they can only be engaged with—or moved on from.

If you want to “make a ruckus,” you have to make three decisions first:

What kind of mindset do you want to have?
What kind of environment or context will create the circumstances for acting on that mindset?
What kind of outcomes are you willing to advocate to advance, to protect and to reject?

It’s easy to say “I make a ruckus.” It’s not that easy to 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] On Distributing a Podcast

The issue with creating podcast content is the same issue that is apparent with all content creation: distribution is at the core of getting listener attention.

Just creating content is not enough—as is endlessly pointed out in blogs, essays and articles—there has to be a system created to make sure that the content gets from where it is, to the audience who needs to consume it.

Podcast content—or any other type of audio content—must have a distribution ecosystem arranged beforehand in order to be successful. In the case of The Earbud_U Podcast, our distribution system is as follows:

ITunes, Stitcher, The Blubrry Store, Player.FM and Google Play Music Store: These platforms are not places we built, but they act as locations for the audience to listen to the podcast, or subscribe.

The Earbud_U Podcast Page, RSS Feed, email list: These are platforms that are owned, rather than rented from other owners as the platforms above are, and as they are owned, they are the platforms that require the most attention from both the creator and the audience to grow.

Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google +, Instagram: These platforms are really for the marketing of the audio content, rather than acting as the location where content is located (similar to ITunes or Stitcher), or acting as the location where further “upselling” can happen (similar to The Earbud_U Podcast page). The content has to be marketed and driving the audience toward the content is the purpose of these social media networks.

Throughout any distribution system, is the possibility of feedback from the audience to the creator. Many podcast creators and producers have lamented the fact that there is little feedback available from the audience in regards to their content creation efforts (other than through downloads); though audience ratings on ITunes, and tracking page visits through Google Analytics, is a good start.

There are many issues with distributing podcast content. And with 250,000 podcasts, the distribution game is the one to be focused on after the content creation process is over.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Marketing for the Peace Builder IV

There are three questions that the savvy peace builder should focus on when developing a marketing plan:

Whom do we serve?

This question can be answered with surveys and other formal and informal means. The question is not focused on the peace builder’s skill sets and where they’re comfortable. Instead the question focuses on the target audience for products, services, processes and philosophies. The question seems simple, but when the answer in the peace builder’s mind comes back as “everybody” there needs to be a deeper, more disciplined dive into the question from the target’s perspective.

Why do we serve them?

This question focuses on the four areas that many peace builders (and many entrepreneurs, business owners, and other self-starters) forget, because it is a question that delves into the culture of the marketing, the branding and the project that a peace builder wants to develop. The four areas are mission, vision, and goals. The mission describes what you want the project to accomplish, vision describes where you want the project to wind up, and goals describe the ways you will get there. The last area is the trickiest, because values—if only written down and not lived—can act as a boundary or act as rocket fuel. Either way, if they aren’t articulated, the peace builder may forget them and grab at whatever revenue generating idea comes along, in effect diluting their brand promise, distracting themselves, and ultimately going out of business.

How do we delight them?

This question really is the one that focuses on the savvy peace builder as a person who can delight, rather than as a widget (or a cog) in an industrialized, productized process. This is the question where the peace builder’s strengths, interests and passions can freely reign, to create a product, process, service or philosophy that the target market wants and that they can deliver successfully and generate revenues at the same time. Asking this question (and answering it well) can make all the difference between a peace builder who “burns out” after sustained people work, and the peace builder who stays engaged with learning and developing year-on-year.

Developing a marketing plan can seem like a waste of time, but answering these three questions places the core of the plan under the peace builder’s control and make the development process smoother. In addition, commitment, consistency and persistence become reinforced through an engaging plan for marketing peaceful solutions to conflicts.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The Other 95%

The people who start a project and eventually have the ability to finish a project—whether it’s a project to build peace in their lives, their neighborhoods, their families or their organizations—are in the low numbers.

This is because starting is easy (we celebrate starting school, starting a new job, starting a marriage) and comes with great fanfare, but finishing is hard and comes with…somewhat less fanfare.

The numbers of people who start and then finish are staggeringly low:

95% of people never start anything. They are your traditional organizational followers, employees, managers and supervisors. They are useful for scaling the project, managing the tasks, keeping the project in a static place, and creating just enough friction to keep everything interesting.

5% of people are starters. They are the traditional entrepreneurs, founders, visionaries and they exist in all realms, from academia all the way to religion. They are the “ruckus makers,” the risk takers, the adventurers, the explorers and they are the ones that the 95% laud, but are also secretly envious of.

However, of the 5% who start a project, 99% of that 5% fail, and their definition of failure will vary along a continuum, extending from “The idea was too early” to “The idea was too late” and every gray area in between.

1% of the people who start a project, succeed to the end. Again, definitions of success will vary greatly along a wide continuum, but the people who built, explored, started and finished, have created the opportunities and spaces for the other 95% to succeed to their own level.

There’s a lot of talk about the gap between the “wealthiest 1%” and “the 99%” in America (and worldwide) these days. There’s a lot of concern that the gap will grow and millions of bytes of data are being created to cobble together arguments, theses, and proposals about what to do to “fix” this gap.

But the fact of the matter is, the gap that no one wants to address is the motivation gap—the gap that exists between the 95% who never start and the 5% who do. A gap in motivation, discipline, courage, acknowledgement, support, belief, discipline and drive.

And addressing the presence of that gap requires 100% of us to answer the question: “What motivates me to start, or not to start, the project I’ve been dreaming about?”

Only individuals can answer that question, person by person, quietly, deep in their own hearts.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] The Temptation at Mass

When you build a product, create a service or develop a process, the temptation (whether at scale or not) is to pursue the acceptance of the masses and be for everybody.

When building, (and planning to build) the discipline is to be targeted and to pursue the special and the narrow—the long tail in essence.

The primary drivers for pursuing the acceptance of the masses at scale are fear, desperation and greed:

For money
For prestige
For status
For power

The fact of the matter is, the myth of mass acceptance as being the “golden ticket” to profitability over the long-term has been exploded by the presence—and the influence—of the most dominate communication tool yes invented by man—the Internet. Sure, there will be blips of products, services, and process, that will appear to catch the masses attention, but in reality, the mass effect is dying a hard death. As audience attention becomes harder and harder to contain and obtain at mass, the benefits of a product, service or process being for “everybody” erodes under the weight of mediocrity, ineffectiveness and banality.

For the peace builder, if the processes, services, products, and philosophies that you provide are not for “everybody” in conflict, the real discipline is in developing your own emotional and psychological responses to what that means, and then methodically acting on them.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] 3 Stages to Launch – Part 2

There are three hard parts to launching any peace building project:

The first hard part is attaining technical knowledge (i.e. getting a degree, getting experience, phoning a friend, etc.).

When launching a peace building project, the savvy peace builder often doesn’t think too hard about the first part. In peace building fields from mediation to law, attaining technical knowledge is considered a rite of passage. Which is why peace building is so dominated by the presence of volunteer labor at one end (mediation) and highly paid labor at the other end (litigation) and there is a squeeze in the middle. As a result, many peace building practitioners continue to fund a self-perpetuating economy of training and certifications, rather than doing and experiences. This is a hamster wheel for another reason: The training and certifications are to reinsure that the peace builder continues to remain proficient in old skills they already know and practice (i.e. mediation skills) rather than training and certifying them in new skills that might be uncomfortable fro them to learn and practice (i.e. marketing, sales and business development).

The second hard part is getting the hardware together and attaining a certain level of comfort with it, particularly if it is new.

When launching a peace building project, learning new hardware (or software in the case of many entrepreneurial peace builders) is the second hardest part. Admittedly, there are ton of applications and software solutions that can be cobbled together to create the operational infrastructure for a functioning business model. But too often peace builders (as do many other entrepreneurs) become so focused on avoiding learning the new application (or fiddling with it constantly) that they miss completely the third hardest part of developing and launching a peace building project—sales.

The third hard part is developing content—and allying with partners in that development—and getting that content distributed to the right audience to genrate a lead, create a relationship and to close a sale.

When launching a peace building project, content development—books, articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, workshop/seminar content, and on and on—is seen as the most overwhelming aspect of launching. At the core of most content development practices are three objectives for the peace builder to consider:

What do I want my content to do? (i.e. drive brand recognition, drive sales, create actionable leads who will pay, etc., etc.)
Where do I want my content to be distributed? (i.e. from a workshop, from a blog post, from a podcast, etc., etc.)
Who do I want my content to target? (i.e. women with children, business owners with conflicts, men in divorce, judges in arbitration, etc., etc.)

Unfortunately, many peace builders get caught in a spiral of focusing obsessively out of fear on “how to make money” rather than focusing on “how to make a difference.” To be successful as an entrepreneurial peace builder, the things is to manage thinking about how hard the three hard parts might be to accomplish collectively, rather than avoiding actually taking the concrete steps to think (and act) differently about at least one of them individually.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] The 10 Year Overnight Success IV

We laid out for them, at one point in the meeting (a meeting that we had scheduled for, pushed for and planned for, by the way) all of the projects in which Human Services Consulting and Training is currently involved.

When we were done talking, we admitted to feeling—and thinking—that we have been in a bit of a long-term dip, since last October.

They (the other party on the other side of the table) laughed and told us that we had been “very busy” for being in a dip.

In another interaction we had, we were talking with another up and coming podcaster. We were talking about how long it takes to create a blog following versus creating a podcast following, versus creating a video based following.

We talked about how you need at minimum, 1000 raving, dedicated fans, gathered from the long tail, to make this work in the long-term.

Our fellow podcaster raised his eyebrows and said something to the effect of “It takes ten years to become an overnight success.”

Someone else, about a year and a half ago, said the same thing.

Stories of success (and the pornography of failure stories) litter the Internet, entrepreneurship, small business literature and, the truly American section of the local bookstore, the self-help section. But what is never pointed out in those stories, is that for at least a decade before you read the story on the Internet, became a fan online, watched a TV show with a “shark” in it, or even picked up that self-help book, the people that made that were toiling away in anonymity, just like you.

The path to both success and failure takes a decade of commitment and consistency, trial and error, tears and joy. Dizzying heights and terrible dips.

And whether you’re building a product, a service or some weird, wonderful hybrid, you better be willing to commit to a ten year long journey of ideas that might not work, people that might not like you all the time and projects that might fly, or crash and burn.

What separates the employees, from the risk takers, and the owners from the entrepreneurs is the willingness to go on a ten-year long walk.

Just keep walking…

-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/

[Advice] Content Commitment

The thing that destroys most content creation efforts is not lack of talent, ability, or innate skill.

The thing that destroys most content creation efforts is not lack of resources, lack of time or lack of money.

The thing that destroys most content creation efforts (from live streaming via Periscope and Meerkat all the way to writing a blog on a daily basis) is the lack of a will to consistently commit to a course of action.

Whether it works, or not.

Whether it attracts attention, or not.

Whether it scales, or not.

The lack of a will to commit to the process, regardless of outcome, seems foolish and pointless when stacked against economic metrics that have dominated content production for the last 100 years.

We still run into professionals who either own businesses, who have built projects, and who are accomplished at wringing a profit margin out of the world, who are shocked that we blog every day, or that we have a podcast with only one advertiser–at this point in its development.

Then they are even more shocked that we plan to do more things that do not produce revenue right away.

By doing things that do not produce revenue now, enable us to do all kinds of things that will produce revenues later on.

If more thinkers, builders and doers would adopt this mindset (by the way, it is the only mindset that works in the world of the digital, the automated and the algorithmic) the long tail would become fat, the economic value of consistency and commitment would experience exponential growth, and the level of the quality of content being created would increase.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Access to the Means of Production

There is a growing chorus from the progressive parts of the US economy, concerned that many historically marginalized race and class groups may not be benefiting from the fullness of the revolutions occurring in high technology, economics, and communications.

This chorus centers in the world of high technology startups of Silicon Valley and their media/opinion outlets. Ironically, this call is coming from a world that has historically been dominated by the mostly male, mostly white (or Asian) and the mostly highly educated.

The gender/sexual discrimination case of Ellen Pao and her plight as CEO of Reddit, has brought the issue of “women in technology” to the forefront of tech Twitter. Missing in this discussion (or maybe floating around the edges of it) is the fact that discussions around the core issues of class and racial advancement and economic development continue to employ the language of the past to define problems of the present; and, to frame discussions of the future. This framing (or storytelling, if you will) has to shift in three areas for there to be more participation from those currently existing exclusively in the space of the historically discriminated against:

Access to technology, content creation mechanisms, and the knowledge of how those systems work (and why) needs to be framed as a social justice issue, rather than as a technology/economic issue.

The challenging and uncomfortable question that no one asked (not the NYPD, not the Mayor of New York’s office, not the multiple variations of protestors, not the progressive pundits) about the entire Eric Garner incident is: “Why was Eric Garner on the sidewalk, selling “loosie” cigarettes, and having continuous issues, run-ins and arrests with the NYPD in the first place?”

Think about that question for a moment and then think about this, equally challenging question: “If Eric Garner had sufficient access to technology, content creation mechanisms, and the knowledge of how those systems work, would he have had to be on a sidewalk at all, or could he have fed his family, from his home, by using those mechanisms?”

These are two questions that need answers, advocacy and more noise behind them, because access to the means of production is the social justice issue of the 21^st century—regardless of race, culture, class or creed. And let’s not even get into dissecting the background of other lives and how they could have been positively impacted by a greater knowledge and access to technology that could bring them—at minimum—the beginnings of an income and a better life.

Creating (and co-creating) rather than constantly consuming as a means of understanding how new technological and economic systems will work in the future.

Even with 1.5 million pieces of blog content being created every day and 175 million blogs being out there (along with all the videos on Youtube, live streaming, podcasts and other image based content) there is still a dearth of quality, meaningful content. Particularly, content that reflects the lives that are lived by people other than a thin stratum of wealthy, North American and European peoples.

As the Internet expands globally, many young, African Americans run the risk of being left behind on a global web, full of aggressive, young focused content creators. Understanding the how and why of content production allows people to co-create their lives with others. This is an idea that’s an easy sell when a culture leapfrogs the desktop computer; less so when a subculture is historically marginalized and suffers from the results of educational disparities for a wide variety of reasons.

Changing mindsets around the possibility of owning and building something requires telling a different story about what risks matter—and which risks don’t matter.

As the risks that used to matter begin to matter less and less, appropriate preparation through role modeling and education is important for everybody in the US culture. However, for those people who will be left behind as the perceived security of employment becomes more and more a thing of the past (“In my experience as a black entrepreneur, I saw the majority of my family take the government job route, while I always had the itch to pursue a self-made career.”) there will be no gentle landings as circumstances change. Just sudden, violent bumps.

As the Singularity eventually arrives, the solution is not to ameliorate the impact of these bumps through the creation of Universal Basic Income systems, or micropayments and micro-lending schemes. These are band-aid solutions at worst, and recipes for negative social disruption at scale at best. Instead, the long-term solution is to begin to teach future generations what the real risks are. The mindset and attitude that causes success to have many fathers and failure to be but an orphan, still reigns in many sectors of this economy, but that shouldn’t prevent our society from investing in education about the risks that matter: emotional labor, collaboration, and building credibility and trust through the long tail, rather than relying on the short mass.

In the end, there are disruptions that have to happen in education, economics, finance, real estate, and other areas, not to level the playing field—this is an impossibility—but to create new fields, with new rules for new participants that may have been historically disenfranchised by the past.

Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, he’ll eat for a lifetime. But teach a man to build and sail a boat, and he’ll go to the furthest horizon and teach someone else. Isn’t it time for us to advance the access, technology and discrimination battles past the language of 20^th century battles, and frame them instead in the language of the 21^st century, that we’re already 15 years into?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Ok…So Ad Blocking is Here…

Ok…so ad blocking is here….

From browsers to mobile hardware, the drive is on (whether from the creators of ad blocking software or just from us all talking about it now) to empower consumers of content to block advertising they don’t want to see via software based means. This advertising, small and large web publishers argue, is part of a fundamental principle of mass media, going back at least a century. The principle comes down to a deal, which—like many deals—can be renegotiated and changed to reflect shifting values and principles:

We (web publishers) create content without charging you for the creation of that content, and in exchange you (the content consumer) give us attention and we charge a third party, the advertiser, to put ads in front of, and around, our content.

This same deal drove the development and growth of platforms, such as television, radio and newspapers, and the development and growth of content on those platforms, for the last 100 years.

But, the Internet was supposed to be a different content delivery platform.

Right?

Apparently not.

Now, consumers—instead of just choosing to ignore interruptive ads like they always have (and because measuring audience engagement is difficult (but not impossible) there are more intrusive, interruptive ads, not less)—content consumers are choosing to block everything.

Seth Godin wrote with hope fifteen years ago about permission marketing. Cory Doctorow writes with abandon about the anarchy of the web. But both of those writers and thinkers assume a fundamental point about most content, whether it’s on the internet, on the radio, on television, or in a magazine or newspaper, that must be written down and repeated out loud:

Most content on any platform isn’t good enough, interesting enough, relevant enough or entertaining enough, to act as the glue binding the audience of content consumers to the content creators in a “revenue for value” exchange based relationship.

This is why there are millions and millions of cat and baby videos on Youtube, but only a few breakout “stars.” This is why Vogue magazine (or Burberry on Instagram) will be fine with ¾ of their magazine content (or their social distribution feed) being ad space, but Mother Jones or The National Review might just wither and die with ad blockers. This is the reason there are 152 million blogs on the Internet, publishing 1.3 million pieces of content a day, but no blogger has risen to dominance on the web in 15 years.

Thus advertising.

There are a few ways out of this bind, but before we get to that, the question of “What kind of internet do we want to have?” must be answered. We (and we are including ourselves in this group as a content consumers) have not answered this question in any kind of meaningful way. Content consumers have to be a part of the conversation before the endpoint of plopping and advertisement in front of our eyes is reached. Content consumers (to build trust and get their permission) have to be engaged in the building, creating and disseminating of a product from start to finish—or not at all.

The first way out of this bind is by crowdsourcing content development. There are some sites on the web that do this well; there are many more that do it badly, or not at all. Crowdsourcing journalism, entertainment, and other forms of content may lead to less ad blocking—and higher revenue—rather than more by content consumers who feel emotionally invested in the product.

The second way out of this of this bind is by creating more subscription-based platforms. For subscriptions to work, there must be a consideration (and a careful one at that) by the web publisher about what kind of content is being created. Long tail philosophy should be ruling with brand-based content, but many are still stuck in the 1950’s. By the way, this is the only way that data gathering, analytics and implementation based on the data is useful as a tool for content creators and publishers, as well as the incorporation of micropayments via cryptocurrencies. Don’t believe me? Ok. What’s in your Netflix queue right now? And have you paid for a reSnap recently?

The third way out of this of this bind is by rethinking distribution systems. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and even Google and Apple are going to war with each other to decide who controls the ad space of the mobile phone screen and the app walled garden. This war has to be fought (I guess) but thinking of these platforms less as content delivery systems, and more as content broadcast systems, would free many creators from the false choice of “Do I or don’t I put an ad in front of my content?” Email and RSS feeds circumvent broadcast systems and go directly to the audience content creators want. This is also the reason that creators on Meerkat and Periscope who are live streaming events (and their lives) are going to have trouble monetizing their content if the platform ever has to respond to the vicissitudes of Wall Street shareholders.

The fourth way out of this bind is by rethinking all the assumptions underpinning the web. The Internet has moved over the last 25 to 30 years, from being a niche communication channel to a worldwide, glorified telecommunications delivery system. What if the Internet shifted from being a global mass bullhorn, to being an individualized, personalized content delivery system? Mobile phone, tablet and app development is pushing the Internet in the direction of this development, but frankly, not far enough. Which is where blockchain technology really comes to the forefront.

The fifth way out of this bind is for content creators to make conscious choices—and stick to them—about how and where to monetize their content with ads. We are not naïve enough to think that advertising will disappear; there were ads broadcasting the services of prostitutes painted on the walls of buildings in Pompeii and Ancient Rome. However, when everyone can publish (but not everyone will publish) everyone has the choice to run a Google ad (or not) in front of specific content, they produce. We run ads in front of The Earbud_U Podcast, but not on the HSCT #Communication Blog, for a reason.

Ad blocking will not be the end of Internet publishing, nor will it serve as the death knell for advertising on the Internet. By defaulting to the opposite of these five alternatives to advertising on the Internet, many content creators will wither away, and die, on the web.

-Peace Be With You All-