[Opinion] Podcasting to the Masses

A product has reached its peak in the early adopter stage on the classic distribution curve, and is ready to slide into the masses attention, when three phenomenon happen:

The product catches the attention of regulators, lawyers, and policy makers (Uber).

The product catches the attention of the mass industrialists who remain powerful at the top of the economic ladder (Tesla).

The product catches the attention of the mass of creators and they begin to give interviews and hold conferences about “What is to be done about this new thing we underestimated/ignored” (podcasting).

The lawyers haven’t shown up at the door of the “big” independent podcasters (read “the 65% or so of podcasts not produced, spun – off, or derivatives of NPR radio shows”) but the legalistic thinking employed by the corporate regulators and policy makers is already appearing in conferences and conversations–and the hand wringing has begun.

We haven’t yet hit peak podcasting. That won’t happen for about another decade, based on how quickly electric cars and integrated mobile phone devices have an impact on the market overall. But the signs are on the horizon that podcasting is about to reach its peak of the early adopter stage and begin the long-slow ride into public acceptance, and into the mass consciousness.

Will every niche podcast do well as this gradual swell of acceptance begins? No. If a podcaster (or podcast network) began two (or even five) years ago, the chances that the show will gain mass acceptance are still under 50%. But, if a large podcast content creator (such as a personality like Marc Maron or Adam Carolla) and distributor (such as NPR) can “port over” their audience from other channels (i.e. live comedy acts, other content on a network, etc.) there’s a better than 50% chance that those creators and distributors will survive and become dominant in the coming years.

Podcasting is riding the slow wave toward mass acceptance. For those creators who have waited for this moment, now is the time to begin sharing your digital voice.

-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 Focus Past the TL;DR World

In a world of seven second attention spans, and stimulus reward systems based in electronic tools that update with vibrations, beeps and blinking lights, believing in the efficacy of the multitasking myth is mentally and emotionally deadly.

The organizations, teams, and even individuals who will “win” the future, who will be the most successful in the long-term, will be those that can focus on one thing at a time. They will also be the ones that allow their employees the ability to mindfully focus on tasks to accomplish goals and reduce the friction engendered by interruption, conflict, and poor communication. This is the place where our new tools can take us, such as artificial intelligence, data analytics, and even the internet everywhere and in every physical thing.

It’s going to take more than a few new tools to reverse the evolution of the human brain: A brain wired for stimulus, reaction, giving into impulse, and desiring the illusion of safety and stasis at the expense of everything else. Sure, mental and tool-based “short hand” may fool our brains into thinking that we are avoiding chaos and indecision, and encouraging stasis and security, but in a world where the short-hand for absorbing ideas we’re too impatient to deal with is “too long; didn’t read” we need more focus, not less.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Three, Episode #5 – Anne Sawyer

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Three, Episode #5 – Anne Sawyer, Executive Director-Southern California Mediation Association,

Passionate Mediator, and Entrepreneur

[powerpress]

The real trouble with mediation is capitalism. But our guest today has a way around that by using collaboration, mentorship, and an animated adherence to the core principles of mediation.

Peace builders of all stripes need larger fulcrums to move a conflict ridden world. Championing peace at the earliest stages is the hard work. The hard work comes because Peace builders must persuade, convince, and sell to a skeptical, conflict comfortable public.

Marketing and business development, mentoring and networking, and training beyond just the academy, will grow the filed organically over the next few years.

But there’s one area that mediators—and all peace builders— struggle with (and sometimes mightily) and that’s in getting the “ask.”

All sales are relational in nature, but, in order to “sell” peacebuilding, the peace builder must become a champion of peace. This requires a changing in the thinking of the peace builder around the sales process. The second step after marketing then becomes, not the “ask,” but the process of building a fulcrum to demonstrate value, and then leveraging that value to grow the revenues of relationship, trust, and money.

The only way for the peace builder to sell ethically is to build a fulcrum (from Seth Godin and his book Free Prize Inside) and to become a champion for peace. Through such a process, the peacebuilder becomes the “free prize” inside the value they add to the client.

The practical steps in building a sales fulcrum involve:

Determining if the customer you’re selling to as a peace builder thinks the work of building peace is worth doing.
Determining if the customer you’re selling to as a peace builder thinks that you are the person to build that peace.
Determining if the customer you’re selling to as a peace builder believes that the outcomes of work of building peace are actually an added benefit to them, their organization, or their lives.

By definition, all of these practical steps are hard for the peace builder to answer, because they are based in assumptions, ideas, and a worldview that is unproveable, unknowable, and unquantifiable, until after the work of building peace is already in progress—or already completed.

But Anne has a plan for all of this. And she’ll talk about laying the first steps toward building a fulcrum with the help of the Southern California Mediation Association in the podcast today.

Check out all the ways below to connect with Anne, and the Southern California Mediation Association, today:

Anne’s LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annesawyer1
Anne on Twitter: https://twitter.com/annesawyer
Anne’s Website: http://mediate2resolve.com/
SCMA’s Website: https://www.scmediation.org/
SCMA’s Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/scmediationassn/
SCMA on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SCMediationAssn

[Advice] Projects for the Peace Builder I

It’s not easy to do what I do, if you’re a peace builder—a negotiator, a lawyer, a social worker, an educator, or an executive director.

It’s not easy to manage social profiles, blog regularly, connect with clients, fans, audience members, and event participants in ways that can grow your brand.

It’s not easy to keep up with changes in marketing, digital content creation, traditional marketing, and the worlds pf publishing, podcasting, privacy, and security.

It’s really not easy if you’re a peace builder that is struggling between the poles of “I just want my business to work” and “I just need my clients to pay me.”

Well, I’ve got some projects that are upcoming that might be of help for the peace builder:

The book, Marketing For Peace Builders: How to Market Your Value to a World in Conflict is coming out in March. I am taking pre-orders for the book right now and will send people on the list a pre-order copy if you send me your email address at jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com

As a follow-up to the book, I am designing a series of workshops that will cover the material in the book, and provide updates, interactions, and engagement opportunities for peace builders. I have not decided how this series of workshops will be facilitated—in-person, online, etc.—but if there is enough interest, it’ll happen.

As another follow-up to the book, I am redesigning the HSCT website to reflect the importance of the book and it’s materials. I am launching another podcast the Marketing For Peace Builders Show, in late 2016. This will be a podcast featuring interviews from marketers, business development experts, and others who have taken their peace building brands and businesses to the place of connection and engagement.

Finally, I will be launching a LinkedIn Group—Marketing For Peace Builders—that will be a place for peace builders, marketers, and others to connect, engage, ask and answer questions, and to promote services, products, and processes that will plug-in to the peace building community in a positive way.

And that’s just the start.

I don’t believe that peace making and money making should be mutually exclusive.

I don’t believe that academic programs in the fields of dispute and conflict resolution can continue to churn out graduates who can’t pay down their student loan debts.

I don’t believe that the fields of peace building can continue to be a rump, human resource process—considered only after litigation, but almost never before—in organizations and societies in the Western world, even as disputes, disagreements, and fights continue to escalate.

I believe that the fields of building peace are at a zeitgeist moment right now, at the intersection of marketing, content creation, relationship building, and the only way forward to our future as a field is to grab the marketing moment, right now.

Would you like to join me in this moment?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Manipulation, Deceit and Disagreement in the Digital Age

When most information can be known about other people via the swipe of a finger, the click of an Internet search, or through scrolling through a social media feed, how is it that so many people can still be deceived?

This is not really an information based question, this is a question about one of the key components of persuasion in the digital age, the dark side of it, if you will, deception and manipulation.

When only a few people and organizations used to hold the keys to both Truth and Power, it was hard to find out facts that disagreed with whatever the dominant narrative happened to be. Speaking truth to power was not an exercise for the faint of heart, either in a family, a community, or even in a municipality.

But, after over 25 years of commercialized Internet access to the masses, information (about people, ideas, processes, services, and on and on) seems hard to come by, rendering many people suspicious that they are being deceived but no quite knowing how. This feeling leads to the creation of various digital “tribes” that do battle to “correct the record” and “make the facts known.” But, at the end of the conflict, everything seems murkier than when the disagreement initially began and the residue of mistrust and anger lingers in the air.

Are we more deceived, or more informed?
Are we more oblivious, or more “tuned in?”
Are we more selective (“owning our own facts”) or are we more open to hearing and contemplating the “other side.”
Do disagreements and disputes have more weight online than they do in “real life” and if so, why?
Does anonymity and privacy lead to manipulation and deceit, or are they the only tools the powerless have to call the powerful to task?
What is the middle ground?

There are no easy, quick, or definitive answers to these questions. And after 150 years of “The Industrialization of everything” from education to social services, we in the Western world have been inculcated to believe that quick and definitive is the “new normal,” rather than being aware that, for many questions, there is more ambiguity than there are answers.

-Peace Be With You All-

[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-

[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-

[Contributor] New Content: The Future of the Internet

Contributor – Alexander Plate
Follow Alex on Twitter @AlexanderBGault

It’s no surprise that the internet has drastically increased the amount of content, of any kind, that people with access to it consume.

In the past 2 years, 90% of the worlds’ content has been created and shared via Internet based platforms. That means that every book, movie, and television show from the nascence of humanity to 2013 accounts for only 10% of the worlds’ content today.

Who is taking in all of this content?

Where is all of this going?

There are many platforms, and nobody can really know what they all are. New platforms are created and revised almost daily, and so many come and go without a real following that they’re only a memory in someone’s server banks by the end of their first month.

Here, we will talk about 3 main platforms: YouTube, Twitter, and Tumblr.

Youtube is a Google-owned video sharing website, where people upload self-made videos to their “channel”, or profile, and gain “subscribers”, or people who will get updated on the videos posted. YouTube has proven to be one of the most important platform for internet content ever created, and this is shown by how much content is uploaded to it.

There are 300 hours of video content posted to YouTube, on average, per minute. That content comes in the form of vlogs (video blogs), original music, short films, and personality-driven videos and channels. YouTube has become, to the new generation, what television was to the older generations.

Now, instead of sitting down to one 45-minute show with four commercial breaks, people sit down to multiple 6-8 minute videos with only one ad per video. This actually has increased the visibility of advertisements to these watchers, as now, instead of only four or five commercial breaks where people lose their focus after the second ad, if that, now people are seeing a shorter, more interesting, advertisement, and there is only one per video, two or three for the longer 40-50 minute videos that sometimes appear.

YouTube’s gives viewers a sense of connection with the content creators, because in most circumstances, the video was written, filmed, edited, and advertised by the person performing in it. There are very few channels with multiple people, and those that do have multiple people generally have all of them in front of the camera lens as well, giving a sense of familiarity between the viewers and the creators.

The next big platform we’ll talk about is Twitter. Twitter is referred to as a micro-blogging platform, in which people create text or image based content and share it to an ecosystem of other people doing the same exact thing. Twitter has power by virtue of its simplicity. You don’t have to create and design a personalized homepage, there is only one design that everyone, from the most followed person on the platform to the newest person to make an account.

Twitter allows posts of at most 140 characters, including spaces and punctuation, so most posts, or “tweets” are somewhere between one and two short sentences. The image side is relatively similar, and the max amount of photos you can post is four. The platform has power as a connection agent between a creator and their audience, and is used by every popular YouTube creator with an active account. Presidential candidates have been using it since, in the US, the 2012 election, and individuals use it to connect with their friends, but strangers as well.

While the older generation likes Facebook for its long form capabilities, and its basis on connecting people to their already-existing circle of friends and family, the younger generations enjoy Twitters openness, as anyone can see an account and its tweets, unless that account owner has set their account settings to private, and its short-form simplicity.

Finally, there is Tumblr, known as a social blogging site. Tumblr functions similarly to both Twitter in that it is a blog platform where those that follow you are not necessarily people who know you. Twitter rounds out the group of content types we have listed here. YouTube functions for video, Twitter for short text, and Tumblr works very well for images and longer text. Through a system of tagging posts, where you give a searchable subject to a post that anyone can find, and reblogging, where one blog decides to post your content (appropriately sourced) on their own with the click of a button.

Tumblr is not as popular as Twitter or YouTube, however, and in some ways is exclusionary. Many blogs on the platform are very progressive-thinking, and more traditional individuals occasionally find themselves as the target of abuse on the platform for fitting into the “patriarchy” or being “cis-normative”, or unaccepting of those individuals that to not identify as either male of female only. Despite the faults of a relatively small, but very vocal part of its user group, (which exists on both YouTube and Twitter, but with far less success), Tumblr is a powerful way to connect to your niche groups, and appropriately tagged posts on the platform can reach millions of eyes.

The internet of today offers more ways that one can count to give and receive content. Individuals can use it to boost their own careers and build a brand, and companies can use it to revolutionize their methods of advertising and reach a whole new audience. But to effectively use these tools, you must recognize the strengths and weaknesses of each platform, and optimize accordingly.

Alexander Gault-Plate is an aspiring journalist and writer, currently in the 12th grade. He has worked with his schools newspapers and maintained a blog for his previous school. In the future, he hopes to write for a new-media news company.

You can follow Alexander on Twitter here https://twitter.com/AlexanderBGault.