[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-

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] 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-

[Advice] How to Deal with Less

When organizations want to justify budget cuts, workforce reductions, or a freeze on hiring, they often use the shopworn sentence “Well, we’re going to have to do more with less.”

At which point, in any organization, be it a nonprofit, a corporation, a small business, or even a church, the remaining employees, volunteers or members may feel as though they have one of two choices:

Leave

Stay and do more with less.

The fear and desperation that builds in these situations, serves to highlight, exacerbate or create, conflict scenarios. This is the exact opposite of what happens when an organization is doing “more with more” and everything is papered over “because everybody is getting ‘rich’,” or at the least, doing well.

Personal and professional reactions replace responses and when there is an environment of “doing more with less,” the set-up is perfect for conflicts, stress and disruption.

Compare this to something—a project, an idea, an organization—that is starting out. Much of the time at the beginning, the mantra “doing more with less” is really “doing more, creatively with what we have.” This is a much easier sell to employees, volunteers and members in the start-up stage than it is at any point in the life cycle of an organization, because starting is sexy and exciting.

But going through the middle with no more than what you started with–or less than that–can be disheartening, disempowering and disenchanting.

What’s the solution?

Abandon the “doing more with less” management mantra. Instead, switch to the truth. Whatever that may be about people, money, or other resources. This allows for creativity in the face of reality, rather than fear based responses.
Remember that fear, withdrawal and “hunkering down to weather it out” doesn’t engender confidence, creativity or faith in the organization, the mission, the values or the goals. Instead, erosion from the outside and corrosion from the inside will begin to destroy the organizational fabric.
Empower the people that care. These are not typically shareholders, external stakeholders or other individuals watching from the sidelines in the Coliseum, clapping, booing or calling for blood. The people who care are the people who have been in an organization since the beginning. They deserve to have their faith and hard work rewarded.

No one enjoys the fear, anger, frustration and resentment that can develop when having to do “more with less,” whether in a family, or a corporation.

But how we respond to the bad news of events that are out of our control, contributes more to the overall long-term viability of an organization, than doing the same thing that’s always been done, by everybody else.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Podcast] The Likely and the Comfortable – The Earbud_U Minute

There is a way that work realities are constructed that betrays a lack of understanding and acceptance of an uncomfortable, likely future reality; and betrays a comfort with creating a reality that is comfortable, but unlikely:

The comfortable reality is that employers keep hiring (albeit at a lower/slower rate) and that they keep on the people that they already have.
The comfortable reality is that college age students will continue to pile on massive student loan debt and the skills that they get in exchange for this debt will somehow be rendered relevant in the future economy.
The comfortable reality is that employees will continue to be compensated at current (and ever rising) levels as the technical skills that they exhibit continue to remain more relevant than the people skills that can’t be measured.
The comfortable reality is that all this technological and software advancement will remain nothing more than a meaningless side show with no value to a corporate bottom line, middle line or even top line.

Considering, pontificating and reassuring that “it’s always been this way and will always be this way” in the form of published bromides and policy assurances, calms the employee lizard brain (the cerebellum where fight/flight/freeze responses live) and such statements and actions soothe and serve to maintain the status quo in organizations.

The likely future reality is much, much more complicated. And scary.

The likely future reality is that technological and software changes in the industrial workplace structure and underlying economy will allow more advancement and innovation to be done with fewer employees.
The likely future reality is that employees will be compensated less and less (and at ever decreasing rates) until the gap in compensation between top individual organizational performers and the next employee down the line, will mirror the current growing wage gap between the upper class and the middle class in the overall economy.
The likely future reality is that college students with crushing debt will struggle to learn and integrate emotional and psychological lessons that the academic world did not see fit to teach them at $7.00 per hour jobs. Or that they did not deem important enough to learn in between the socialization and the outrage. All while paying back five and six figure loans.
The likely future reality is that employers will seek to replace people with algorithms, or computer programs, or software solutions and (at the end of the line) robots, who will demand no pay, no benefits and will have such incredibly high productivity that shareholders will be happy to fire humans as a reflex, even as their returns increase.

Writing, teaching, lecturing or even casually mentioning likely future realities activates the employer/employee/politician/administrator lizard brain and makes fear, avoidance and attack responses kick in at all levels of society, from the C-Suite of an organization to the office of the President of the United States.

True management and supervisory leadership requires clear eyed planning for likely future realities, as well as a sophsticated ability to persuade, cajole and even threaten employees, shareholders, and the public to face likely reality head on. Such leadership will create sustainable economic and social systems that will be antifragile, and able to sustain and evolve from unexpected shocks, rather than attempting to build redundant, robust systems, or constructing fragile systems that fall apart in a heartbeat when the next “it could never happen here” event, happens here.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Getting Out of the Ghetto

Human civilization doesn’t need another social network.

It is a sign of the limits of our present level of creativity and value addition, that the top websites on the Internet right now, tend to be ones that are focused around two areas:

Sharing, collecting and curating information to a wide sphere of government officials, corporations, communities and individuals, who have their own motives and desires.

Shopping and engaging in commerce for the express purpose of either paid consumption of products and services (Amazon.com) or free consumption of products and services (anything in the Google family).

Shopping and sharing dominate the internet, and thus create values in the stock market, because the first generation of totally Internet savvy entrepreneurs, visionaries, creatives and others has not yet come of age.

The current crop of adults (those 21-64) creating the Internet realities with which we all live, are digital immigrants, trapped in the ghettos of their own making—walled gardens of apps, physical mobile technology and bandwidth controlled by companies built on the old, Industrial Revolution models of corporate formation.

But, there is a future coming where the digital immigrants will be left behind. The true digital natives, who will live their entire lives of communication, education, entertainment, consumption and creation in the digital space have yet to come of age.

When they do, they will leave the walled gardens and ghettos that appear so shiny to all of us now, because we lack the imagination—and the courage—to head West into the vast space of the Internet and pioneer something different.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Podcast] Virtual Ghettos – The Earbud_U Minute

Ghettos are popping up all over the virtual place.

In the physical world, the ghetto began as a way to segregate Jewish populations from other populations in Italy and all throughout the rest of Europe. Then, if Wikipedia is to be believed, ghettos came to the US, first as a way to segregate the Irish and Italian immigrants, then as a way to separate African Americans from predominantly White populations.

With that in mind, look down at the screen of your smartphone. How many apps do you have?

How many different neighborhoods, or ghettos, do they represent?

In the virtual space of the Internet, information may want to be free, but people apparently want to be crowded into virtual cities and neighborhoods—with all of the separation, regulation and virtual social norming as informal policy.

As we innovate further—and as digital natives move further and further away from the ghettos that digital immigrants seem comfortable in—the question we must ask ourselves is: Which comes first, the regulation or the innovation?

We have to figure this out as a global culture, because physical ghettos lead not only to segregation, biases and prejudices (which may prove to be minor annoyances in the virtual space) but also to poverty, lack of access to resources and reduced opportunity (which may prove to be even more damaging in the virtual space that in the physical world).

Conflicts between those in the virtual ghettos, those in the virtual suburbs and those on the virtual frontier need to be addressed by people who have experience with emotional intelligence, active listening and strong facilitation ability.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Contributor] Future Physibles

Follow Alex on Twitter @AlexanderBGault

Perhaps its bad form to use a word coined by a website dedicated to pirating digital products, but so far, physibles is the best way to describe the next wave of items that exist in the digital and physical worlds.

Physibles can best be described as objects created on a computer and formed in the physical world by computer equipment. While this may sound like another way to describe the production in any mechanized factory, physibles are more akin to a 3-dimensional printed object.

Physibles are the next big thing in consumer goods.

Through a combination of high end printers that more closely resemble the mechanized arms that assemble cars, and programs that feed the proper information to these printers, one can “print” out almost any item they would want. For the most part, this technology doesn’t exist in the public sphere, but it has achieved some major breakthroughs.

For example, the 3D printed car.

But the ability for one to forgo the mainstream manufacturing process entirely, and get the same goods they would have through such a channel, doesn’t bode well for the current economic configurations. Every economic idea that operates in the industrialized nations is created with the idea that people will have to get their goods from somewhere other than themselves. The distinct process of supply and demand governs almost every aspect of the economy, down to the resource-gathering sectors.

If one can shortcut around all of those, with only minor interaction with their computer, their printer, and the resources to create the items, then jobs and businesses will inevitably fail. And depending on the abilities that this technology may reach, perhaps even the resource-gatherers will find themselves out of a job.

Suddenly, at least 27% of the United States GDP is erased.

This lack of jobs, created and furthering the issue that nobody will be buying anything on the traditional market, will pose many issues. Productivity will drop in all sectors, because why would people be working if there’s no value in what they’re earning?

Infrastructure will fail all over the planet, resulting in the failure of almost every device that depends on the electric grid and Internet to create these goods. We’d be back to square one, and depending on the amount of people who decided to remain on and maintain the infrastructure, coupled with how long it will actually take between the start of this process and the failure of the electrical grid and Internet services, it may take years to reestablish ourselves to the previous state.

This being said, physibles becoming a reality isn’t all bad, and the dooms-day scenario previously described is very avoidable. Simply put, for a world were major manufacturing is no longer relevant and people can create all they need from their home, strict limits on home production must be maintained, and access to the forms for the home-printed goods must be put behind a pay-wall to maintain the relevancy of working.

This must remain so until maintenance and construction can be mechanized to such a degree that minimal human interaction is necessary.

As with all major changes to the way people interact with their goods and those who make them, a certain degree of caution and planning must be implanted to ensure that the change is smooth and does not result in any major catastrophes.

The future is bright, but humans must always tend that flame to ensure it doesn’t burn out of control.

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.