[Advice] Changing Our Approach to Distribution

Content distribution is hard.

Really hard.

Here’s why: It’s really difficult to research content, write content and edit content without a commensurate plan to “get it out there.”

Here at HSCT, we looked at the distribution part of creating content as secondary to the problem of generating enough content to actually be of value in the virtual space that we occupy.

As we have learned more and more about the process of writing, we have had to learn more and more about distribution systems. In our estimation, for the conflict consultant, seeking to make a dent in the conflict space, there are a few distribution mechanisms for getting attention (and eyeballs) on their content:

Social media—Everyone knows that social media is a place of content curation and content creation, but many people (not B2B/B2C brands) don’t think about Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or even Pinterest as being 2^nd party distribution mechanisms.

Email—Everyone knows that email isn’t “sexy,” but it keeps right on moving along. Email as a method for B2B content distribution drives around 4% of all traffic to the HSCT blog, with over 75% of that traffic being new visitors.

Curation Options—Many peace builders (and other content creators) don’t focus on curation tools such as Flipboard and StumbledUpon, as well as Quora. There are also secondary content creation options out there from Medium.com and LinkedIn publishing.

The “dark” Web—Sharing of articles, reposting and republishing of articles into private newsgroups (yes those are still around) and chat rooms (yes, those are still around as well) can be powerful connection drivers for the development of a peace builders’ content. We have found this is a growing area for our content, our approach and connecting people to our philosophy and business model.

Here at HSCT, we are using all of these methods. Our strategy is simple: Keep learning and researching, keep writing our articles, keep distributing our perspective and keep growing through distribution.

-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/

[Advice] Business Mentors II

Business mentors are not the most important parts of your business, but they are definitely an integral portion of the game.

Good business mentors can provide three things:

Sound, positive feedback that is both constructive and developmental
The space to know when to let you fail, and when to push you to succeed
Emotional distance from your “next great idea”

They can’t prevent you form making the next big mistake, nor can they really help you launch and iterate. But they can form the basis of a potential Board of Directors, and sometimes, they may take on a role that’s even more important for the savvy peace builder:

Fans.

-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/

HIT Piece 3.31.2015

What do you do when you’ve been asking the right questions in the wrong way?

And you’ve been doing it for two years.

I’ve been thinking about this project, Human Services Consulting and Training that I’m building. I have been thinking deeply about marketing, branding, connecting, publishing and—ultimately—scaling.

Continuing to do what got me here, isn’t going to get me any further than I already am. And when the right questions have been asked in the wrong way, two years is long enough for that kind of self-involved navel gazing.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve laid the foundations for the beginning of something else. Something great. Something enterprise-level, C-suite level and above. But to get there, it’s time to pivot.

Away from end-users and toward buyers
Away from social engagement and toward deeper relationships
Away from frivolity and toward more focus

And, if you’ve been paying attention, day-in and day-out, for the last couple of years, you will note that my approach has become sharper and narrower, even as my options have increased to do work that really matters in the space that I am building.

Conflict resolution doesn’t scale, but engagement, relationships and products do.

It’s time to start asking the right questions in the right way….

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Business Mentors I

Business mentors for the savvy peace builder are just as important for the development of long-term success as are other elements of building a project.

No peace builder can truly “go it alone” but too many get trapped in silos, or behind clients, believing that they will just “learn the building of a business on the fly.”

This never works.

Our recommendation: Design a personal Board of Directors. This should consist primarily of professionals with industry experience who have no emotional investment in the success or failure of your venture.

Then, meet with them once a month (at minimum) and treat them to coffee. Listen to their ideas and expertise, but also keep your own council.

A great resource to begin this process (that’s free) is your local chapter of SCORE (link here).

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Who’s Afraid of Blogging?

We are “out here” all the time.

In our professional capacity, we have served (and do serve) as consultants and “advice providers” in multiple areas: marketing, conflict entrepreneurship, Big Ideas and some other areas.

However, whenever there is a discussion about social media/online marketing, and we mention that the core of marketing should be a blog presence, our clients (or trainees) get very, very nervous.

Who’s afraid of blogging?

So, we called up a good friend of ours and he provided some insight that we hadn’t previously considered. In a nutshell, it came down to three things:

Blogging is hard because the voice that a person (or organization) writes in, may not be the voice that shows up to do the presentation, make the pitch, address the customer or close the sale.
Blogging is hard because there is the possibility that, while “no one reads long form content anymore” someone actually might. And if they do, how does an organization (or individual) “walk back” something that they wrote and distributed.
Blogging is hard because it’s a constant challenge to keep up with distribution platforms that “change the rules” every day, the ever shifting eyeballs (we’re looking at you Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn!), and the attention and nature of audience interaction.

Who’s afraid of blogging?

We’ve also been thinking about the idea of content creation vs. consumption, active and passive audiences and how there is “so much noise out there,” which is a constant lament for some of our clients in this area.

The answer to the question is that only a few organizations, people and entities are not afraid of blogging. Everyone else either blogs, tweets, facebooks, or distributes to their own level of comfort and desire to be either an active participant in the social space—or not.

Are you afraid of blogging?

-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/

[Advice] Who Matters When Building Your Platform

For the peace building consultant, getting myopia in the pursuit of success, becomes a natural outgrowth of the work.

But there are people who matter, inside and outside, of all of this:

Family Members
Team Members
Business Mentors
Partners
The Customers/Clients/Buyers
The Audience

We listed those in our order, but other orders will differ, and certain pre-conditions may apply.

The savvy peace builder digs deep when building her project and makes the list. Without the list, there is no forward movement, and then myopia descends into noodling over email for half of the day.

We put the audience at the end of the list for good reason. The savvy peace builder knows that the people who applaud (or don’t applaud, or jeer, or deride, or ignore the project altogether), are not necessarily the most important people in the life of the business.

The savvy peace builder also knows not to confuse the noise of the applause (or the jeers, derision or silence of ignorance) with the importance of the project.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] 10 Year Overnight Success – Vol. 3

“Well that was a waste of time.”

How often have we either said those words, thought them or wrote a variation of them down?

In the pursuit of mastery, there are no such things as “wasted” hours, days, minutes, or even moments. There are only the things that did work and the things that didn’t work.

The painter, sculpture and architect, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni , saved very few of his drawings. When he stared at a block of marble, he saw the material that he would have to strip away in order to release the object trapped inside.

The inventor Thomas Edison said “I haven’t failed. I’ve just discovered 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Or, at least the Internet claims that he said that.

The casual consumer of life, though, often associates failure with waste, and addition with success. We associate subtraction with loss, and “no” with rejection.

But subtraction AND addition both must happen for success to occur. And energy, no matter how we look at through our temporal, corporeal frames of reference, can neither be created nor destroyed.

If Michelangelo, Edison and the Universe can get on board with both addition and subtraction, maybe then we should stop focusing our casual conversations just around waste alone.

-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/

[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-

[Strategy] Leading Through Obligation

If you are a manager in an organization of any size, with any mission or scope of responsibility, it is your obligation to lead.

Now, obligation is a loaded word, filled with the stresses of accountability, responsibility, and eating last in a world where everyone wants to eat first.

Obligation comes along with the word “honor,” which, as a verb, means to “fulfill (an obligation) or keep (an agreement).

There is a tacit agreement between leaders and followers: Leaders set a tone, provide a secure space for initiatives to be implemented and then codify action through words and deeds. Followers implement the initiatives as they are proposed, rally behind the leader in times of stress or conflict and promote the tone of the actions.

At least, in a perfect world.

Unfortunately, we live in a world of imperfection, mixed motives, lies and deception and selfish pursuits.

In this world, leadership is even more critical and, at the core, requires human leaders to sacrifice resources (material, emotional and even spiritual) in order to accomplish a greater good for their followers—even when they believe that the greater good is wrong.

This ability to sacrifice marks the difference between politicians and statesmen.
This ability to sacrifice marks the difference between role models and celebrities.
This ability to sacrifice marks the difference between leaders and followers.

A leader’s responsibility is not to chart a course for the followers and then blindly lead them there, in spite of everything.

A leader’s responsibility is to chart a course for their followers (after actively listening to their followers) and then convince, persuade, cajole and move the followers toward accomplishing those goals.

This process requires an understanding, and an acceptance of, the definitions of obligation, honor, responsibility, accountability, character and honor.

-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] The Project Work Trap

The savvy peace building consultant looks at project work as another version of the golden handcuffs scenario, they started their project to avoid in the first place.

Work for time is the consultant’s version of not scaling. And, in order to effectively scale such transitive and necessary products as peace, honesty, good faith and courage, project work has to be the minimally viable product.

Developing books, developing processes, developing software applications, developing “train the trainer” processes and more are ways around, through and over the project work trap.

And the savvy peace builder knows this…

-Peace Be With You All-