Last week, Ian M. Rountree and I started Read It All Week, a challenge to read everything we were subscribed to — especially all the blogs we so easily subscribe to, but never actually absorb.  We did this for two reasons:

• To reconsider why we subscribe to certain kinds of media, and
• To learn how long it would take to actually read everything we’re committed to.

What I Started With

My goal was to read every post published to the 63 blogs I subscribe to in Google Reader.

I wasn’t sure how long it would take, but my guess was around 15 hours.

So, What Happened… and How Long DID It Take?

Here’s how it worked out for me:

• Total # of items read (or, when uninteresting, skimmed) in Google Reader: 560
• Total # of those 560 items that had been shared by others: 235
• Total # of those 560 items I then felt compelled to share: 32
• Total time invested reading items in Google Reader: 496 minutes (or 8+ hours)

In other words, I spent more than one entire workday reading.

About 2/5 of that reading load were items suggested to me by others.

And yet, in that time, I only felt compelled to share 1/18th of what I found.

Sounds like my incoming signal-to-noise ratio is a bit excessive…

What Else Did I Learn?

Well, in no particular order, I came to the following conclusions:

1. I read more deeply when I break my reading time up into smaller sessions.

On days when I made time to check Reader two or three times, I felt more able to really read each post.

On days when I only checked Reader once, I felt more compelled to just get through it.  This led to much more skimming and much less sharing, since I’d invested less time emotionally in what I was reading.

On the days when I felt pressed for time, I also found myself resenting longer posts and highly prolific publishers, which seemed like obstacles between me and “done,” rather than the valuable sources of information I recognized them as during my more leisurely reads.

2.  Most of the information people share is useless to me.

But it’s not the information you (or I) might suspect.

Initially, I presumed that the social media-specific posts shared by the people I follow on Reader would be enriching.  Since I was subscribed to only a dozen social media blogs, I knew I had to be missing something interesting.

Not really.

It turns out most people in the social media field read the same major news sources and share the same information, or variations thereof.  Plus, anything relevant or popular from these channels is usually retweeted endlessly throughout the week.  (For example, I learned about Flipboard from a shared item in Reader, but I would have also learned about it from any of the 2 dozen tweets I noticed about that same article.)

The other thing I realized?  Most social media-related articles are crap.  Some are rehashes of things I already know (which, obviously, is not what you already know, and I get that).  Others are so niche-specific that I’d never make use of the information.  And still others are such common sense sub-101 blather that reading them wastes my time.

So… what information did matter to me?

3.  I need to subscribe to more interesting blogs.

Again, “interesting” in this sense means “interesting to me.”

In my case, I’m drawn to posts about art, literature, culture, science and history.  These are the areas I want to learn more about, as opposed to social media, a field in which I regularly feel overwhelmed by sameness.

Which means I need to adjust my subscriptions.

4.  Consistency is key.

Writing one good blog post is easy; writing good blog posts regularly is rare.

Often, I’ll read one or two good posts by an author and then subscribe to his / her blog.  And then, over the ensuing weeks, I’ll realize one or two good posts may be all they have to offer.

If so, I can’t wait around forever for their next great idea.  My time is precious, and I’d rather not step through a minefield of oysters in order to find your few buried pearls.

(This also explains why some of the blogs I consider most indispensable — like The Rumpus — are group blogs curated magazine-style from the contributions of many.)

Although writing good blog posts is hard, finding good blog posts to share shouldn’t be.

And yet…

5.  I’m confused by people’s motivations when sharing items.

I follow some potentially interesting people on Reader, because I presume they’ll find (and share) articles I won’t.  But again, the social media field is crushed by redundancy.  For example, I follow Chris Brogan, Chris Penn, C.C. Chapman and Steve Garfield (among others) which means I often see the same information shared several times.

In addition, some people seem to share everything they read, which makes me wonder if they’re confusing the act of sharing with the act of glorifying.  It’s as though they can’t separate what they personally consider “useful” or “interesting” from what they feel obliged to help promote because of their relatively impressive reach and influence.

However…

6.  You can learn a lot about people from what they share.

Chris Brogan is a social media maven, but what he shares in Google Reader reminds me he’s also deeply interested in theology and spirituality.  Mike Sorg is a veteran podcaster, but his shared items are a snapshot of comic books & general geekery.  And Mary Hartney is a journalist by trade, but her shared items lean heavily toward art, culture and food.

As such…

7.  I learned to share information more consciously.

On one hand, I want to share information I’m personally interested in.  And because my aforementioned interests exceed the limits of *just* social media, that means people who follow me on Reader are likely to see a lot of shared information about books, racism, economics and underwater sculpture.

On the other hand, Read It All Week made me highly conscious of the way each shared item encroaches on a reader’s available time.  It made me more reluctant to share items, because I didn’t want to sabotage the time & attention of the people who follow me.

Ultimately, I still did share items (because I would have whether it was Read It All Week or not), but fewer than I would have if I hadn’t been thinking about my time and yours.

8.  Believe it or not, I actually learned things.

My Reader, like yours, is full of information both great and pointless.  The trick, I learned, is to skim past the duds and invest in the quality — and, very often, that quality tends to bottleneck in a few sources.

For example, Atlantic Monthly columnist Ta-Nehisi Coates was on vacation during Read It All Week, so he asked three of his most trusted commenters (Brendan I. Koerner, Hua Hsu and Cynic) to fill in for him.  The result was the most compulsively readable blog of the week, covering ground from Shirley Sherrod to LeBron James, what happens when “fringe” cultures are assimilated into America’s mainstream and whether Jack London’s racism should mar his literary genius.

Had I ignored Reader (as I so often do), I would have missed these and dozens of other enlightening and captivating essays (like Kathleen Alcott’s masterpiece from The Rumpus), all because I was “too busy” doing… whatever it is I usually do.

Speaking of which…

9.  I did not go broke while reading.

On the contrary, last week was quite fruitful, business-wise.  I pitched a potential client, spoke at a live event and conducted a social media workshop, knocked out a guest post for Jim Kukral (peppered with knowledge I gleaned from blogs I rediscovered in Reader), and locked down two more business meetings for next week, all while executing the tasks I’m already contracted to do for my existing clients (and having a real life).

So if I can do all that while spending 8 hours reading blogs — which is only half the time I’d originally expected to invest — what am I usually doing that prevents me from staying up to date on the media I’ve subscribed to?

Probably tweeting.  In fact…

10.  What did I miss on Twitter?

During those 8 hours I was reading blogs, I kept a Twitter window open so I could chart how many tweets whizzed past me.  Turns out I missed over 2200 tweets.

That’s more than 2200 conversations I could have weighed in on, but didn’t.

Would engaging in some of those conversations have left me any better informed, connected or enriched than my time spent reading?  Possibly.  But I’ll never know.

And I’m okay with that.

What Happens Now?

Now I clean up my feeds.  (As opposed to Amber Naslund, who prefers to blow hers apart.)

I’ve already dropped from 63 blog subscriptions to 44 — that’s a 30% reduction.  However, most of those were blogs that hadn’t been recently updated.  (Imagine if they had…)

I’ll also reconsider how I follow people on Reader.  Since 2/5 of my time was expended on their recommendations, I need to ensure that their expertise is worth my time and attention.  But the quality and relevance of the items people choose to share is wildly unpredictable, so I can’t judge too quickly.

And, like Bryan Person, I may ultimately subdivide my subscriptions into two camps: what I should read, and what I could read (time permitting).

Because not everything I subscribe to is worth reading, but there are always pearls among the oysters.

The trick is to find them without losing my time… or my mind.

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On Sunday nights, Mack Collier runs a Twitter-based group chat called #blogchat, which I highly recommend to anyone who wants to learn more about blogging while hobnobbing with their peers.

But, based on the defensive reaction to some of my comments from several of the #blogchat participants, I’ve realized that #blogchat is strictly a place for sunshine and puppies, and I rarely come armed with either.  So I thought I’d take the time to do some much-needed bubble-bursting here, rather than continuing to ruin the #blogchat vibe.

NOTE: If you cry at the sight of anything other than unicorns, hugs and kittens, please close this window now.  You’ll only depress yourself, and you’ll spend the next hour telling me why I’m wrong, when I don’t really care.

Still here?  Great.  Because…

1. There’s no rule that says you have to be nice in social media.

I know, all the important people are.  But I’m not important, so I don’t have to be.  And even if I was important, I’d probably still be an asshole.

(In fact, most people become assholes after they’re important, so the fact that I’m an asshole before becoming important means my assholishness is actually authentic.  And isn’t authenticity one of the social media cornerstones?)

2. All social media is not created equal.

Yes, the tools are “democratic,” inasmuch as anyone with an Internet connection can use Twitter.  But you are not Chris Brogan, nor are you Sara Schaefer.  You are you.  And you matter exactly as much as you matter, to whomever is counting.

To say that there’s “no social media hierarchy” or “no social media pecking order” is ludicrous.  Just because there isn’t an officially accredited list of A, B, C and Z-list bloggers doesn’t mean we don’t all know who they are, give or take a rung.

(And yes, you can be a Z-list blogger and still produce A-list work, and vice versa.  Quality and reach are two separate factors.  In the end, we’re judged according to other people’s criteria, not our own.)

3. I am not required to help you for free.

Granted, some people do it really badly, but yes, social media is a business.  Not for everyone, but for some people.  And no, they don’t have to help you, or give you free advice, or even be nice to you (see above).  Some of the nicest ones do; others don’t.  (Hell, I charge $200 for a lunch.)

Being nice is wonderful, but to anyone for whom social media is a business, what matters to them is paying the bills.  If they have time to be nice, or if being nice is part of their brand — and, therefore, their business — they’ll do it.  And, in general, social media people tend to be overly nice, almost to a fault (usually because they want you to talk about them).

But if you’re waiting for Seth Godin to write a guest post on your Blogger blog that has 2 subscribers because “helping people is the right thing to do,” don’t hold your breath.

Your two readers will be heartbroken if you asphyxiate.

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In January, I started bookmarking articles and videos I thought were exceptionally insightful, entertaining or relevant.  Reviewing them all at the end of the year would be too daunting, so here are some of the highlights I stumbled across in the first 3 months of 2010.*

(NOTE: I expected to summarize January through June here, but even that’s too much to plow through all at once.  Thus, I’ll be doing this in 3-month chunks.)

The Articles

Kurt Warner, The Great Unknowable Freak of the NFL

Will Leitch’s pitch-perfect assessment of Kurt Warner, the NFL quarterback who never should have existed:

I’ve seen Kurt Warner get angry on the field, I’ve seen him frustrated, I’ve seen him in pain … but I’ve never seen him nervous.  Warner plays like he knows how this story ends. Kurt Warner makes me want to be a better person. He makes me want to try to figure it all out. And he makes me want him to win, win, win, before it’s over, before the mystery vanishes, in a wisp, gone.

Ira Glass on the Creative Gap

Pete Michaud interviews This American Life host Ira Glass, who shares a great anecdote about how long it takes any creative person to stop being “good” and start being interesting.

A Short Collection of Unconventional Ideas

At The Art of Nonconformity, Chris Guillebeau posts a stark, inspirational, (admittedly pro-capitalist) real-world rundown of common sense observations designed to help you rethink who you are, what you’re doing and where you’re going.

A year after you leave college, no one will care what your GPA was.

Once you fully understand what you want, it’s not usually that difficult to get it.

Potential is good when you’re 15 years old. After that, you need to start doing something.

Less Talk, More Rock

Boing Boing urges a return to action instead of text.  And while they’re talking about video games, they could just as easily be talking about your life.

Go right from the inspiration — the vision — to actually making it. Don’t think it through. Don’t talk about it. Don’t plan it. Dive in and start making it happen. If you do that — if you can start rocking — you’ll get some momentum, and when you have some momentum then the project has a chance, because now you’re into it. It’s going somewhere, it’s tangible. Sure, you’ll still run up against problems to solve and decisions to make, but you’ll approach these in the moment and solve them in the moment. You’ll solve them so you can keep moving.

The Collapse of Complex Business Models

Clay Shirky on why the simplest solution to overcomplication isn’t “fixing it” but “blowing it up and starting over” — and what that means for businesses, governments and lives.

When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

Vintage Posters for Modern Movies

Brain Pickings highlights some modernist-retro movie posters that don’t actually exist… but should.

Everywhere You Look, There You Are

One guy, a cigarette, and a story he just had to tell.

Last night Tyler and I met this odd guy at the eastbound MAX stop outside my apartment who I find strangely lingering in my mind today. Or maybe it’s not so strange…

Hard-Wiring Happiness

Brain Pickings features a video and quotes from Srikumar Rao’s talk about happiness at Columbia University.

You have spent your entire life learning to be unhappy. And the way we learn to be unhappy is by buying into a particular mental models. [...] The problem isn’t that we have mental models, the problem is that we don’t know we have mental models, we think that’s the way the world works.

Drive-By Culture and the Endless Search for New

Seth Godin makes a case for “deep experiences,” and explains why they’re so hard to find.

Mass marketing used to be able to have it both ways. Money bought you audience. Now, all that buys you a mass market is wow and speed. Wow keeps getting harder and dives for the lowest common denominator at the same time.

How I Retired at Age 25

Pete Michaud explains how a leap of faith and a surprise realization helped him quit his day job and never look back.

If I could offer only one piece of advice, this would be it: it doesn’t need to be perfect. Save perfection for your aimless hobbies. What you need to succeed is “barely passable“.

At First, I Was Like…

*NOTE: Not all of this media was created in 2010, but I first encountered it in 2010, so it was “current” to me in that moment.

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I don’t know anybody who loves pop radio.

I know people who listen to it ironically, as though they’re not comfortable admitting they don’t entirely hate Lady Gaga.  And I know people who admit to liking just Lady Gaga, or just Usher, but still insist they “hate the radio.”

But why do we (claim to) hate pop music / pop media?

Why are we so eager to distance ourselves from “the norm?”

Let’s All Be Different Together (Because Being the Same Together Sucks)

We self-identify with people who dislike the same things (and in the same ways) as we do.

That means deriding the musical merit of Ke$ha is as much a prerequisite to being “taken seriously” by our peers as actually liking Spoon or My Morning Jacket; maybe even moreso, since individual opinions are more easily accepted by the fringe than popular appreciations are.  (In other words, you can spend the entire $1 draft night railing against MGMT as “sell-outs,” but you’re only allowed to play “Tik Tok” on the jukebox if you agree to sing and dance like a self-aware parody of someone who’s actually happy.)

Happiness also plays a huge part in this shell game.

As I’ve mentioned before, the ’80s were the last time pop culture was allowed to be happy without angering the intellectuals.  In the ’90s, grunge made joy obsolete.  In the ’00s, the left’s perception of the Bush administration was akin to a country being held hostage by its leaders; to enjoy life would be to give up and blindly accept all the shit Bush was shoveling.

Misery is serious business; only intellectual plebians with no understanding of the long term impact of their actions could possibly find anything to be happy about.

Especially “popular” music.

So we all hate it.  Together.

You Suck Just Like I Do! Let’s Be BFFs!

It doesn’t help that Ke$ha, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and most other modern multi-platinum musical phenomena benefit from:

• criminally simplistic lyrics
• monotonously propulsive rhythms, and
• a studied amateurishness that teases the public into believing that we, too, are just one Auto-Tune squiggle away from becoming international superstars.

In the ’80s, Madonna and Janet Jackson were personae that women aspired to be like; in the ’10s, Ke$ha and Gaga are women you probably already are like — or, if you’re a guy, they’re women you think you actually stand a chance of sleeping with.  No one had those illusions about Madonna, but reality culture means our stars seem touchable, so supporting them is a lot like supporting our friends.

We don’t think of Gaga and Ke$ha as being part of the system; they make us feel like they rely on us to help them reinvent the system.

Gaga earned her audience on YouTube.  Ke$ha made her name on MySpace.  They didn’t need labels to convince us they were worth paying attention to; now their fans are patting themselves on the back because they told the labels who they wanted to support and the labels listened.  (Never mind that this just makes us complicit in the system, only from the inside-out.)

The Last Overnight Sensation I Felt Required a Tissue

50 years ago, pop music took weeks or months to sweep the nation, much less the globe.

50 years ago, a popular film might stay in first-run theaters for more than a year.

Today, all media is hyper-compressed into a mash-up driven culture where identifying, judging, assimilating and reinventing a piece of media happens in the blink of an eye.  Today, Lady Gaga has to perpetually shock us, because the impact of each shock wears off much more quickly than the last one did.

Perhaps those of us who maintain a love-hate relationship with pop culture feel this way because we doubt the long-term survivability of memes and media that sweep the globe overnight.  History will be history when we get there; for now, we’re just waiting for the next Black Eyed Peas album.

But something has to be pretty damn good — or at least pretty damn effective — to become popular… doesn’t it?

Maybe not.

Bludgeon Me Until I Care

On a recent weekday, I was subjected to just over 2 hours of pop radio in Baltimore.  (Disclosure: this was in a cafe where I was working remotely, so I had no control over their radio choices.)  In that timeframe, I heard:

4 x Lady Gaga songs (though never the same one twice)
3 x Ke$ha songs (one repeated)
2 x Usher “OMG”
2 x La Roux “Bulletproof”
2 x Jay-Z “Young Forever”
2 x Justin Timberlake “Carry Out”

… and so on.

Are these songs worth hearing once an hour?  Are they the best songs the record labels can provide us with right now?

Probably not.  But they are the ones the record labels have decided to promote.  And if they’re promoted enough, they become popular by sheer force of marketing will.

So perhaps what people hate isn’t the pop media, but the subconscious realization that the media conglomerates can afford to bludgeon us repeatedly with the same songs, movies and messages until we recognize them, which breeds, if not appreciation, then at least familiarity.  Safety.  Comfort.  Approval by association.

We don’t hate pop culture.  We hate being programmed.  And we hate ourselves for submitting to it, or for not having the knowledge or the means to avoid it.

Although…

… the more I hear it, I do have to admit that one Lady Gaga song is pretty good…

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If you write, speak or perform for a living, you need an audience.  Without one, you don’t get paid.  (Hell, online, you still don’t get paid even with one.  But I digress…)

Your audience is one way to validate your success as a communicator.

But your audience is also a trap.

If they love you, their adulation becomes addictive.  You learn what they like, what they respond to, and what makes them appreciate you more.  Naturally, you’re inclined to pursue those reactions because they make you feel good, and that means you’re less likely to experiment with anything outside your audience’s comfort zone.

Which Begs the Question…

What’s more important to you: how your work makes you feel, or how your audience makes you feel?

If you want to grow as a creator or performer, you may need to push your own boundaries.  You may need to say and do things your audience won’t like / understand / appreciate, so you can learn from your own experiences — whether your audience enjoys it or not.

Do you worry that your audience may not follow you down every rabbit hole you want to investigate?  Don’t be.  The fewer people  you have paying attention to you, the freer you are to innovate (and learn from your mistakes) without being judged.

And if your audience complains, derides or discounts your divergence from “the norm,” relax.  They’re only people, just like you.  In fact, there are plenty of…

Reasons NOT to Listen to Your Audience

… including:

• Your audience doesn’t always know what you know.
• Your audience doesn’t always know what THEY know, either.
• Your audience has different goals than you do.
• Sometimes your audience is your competition.
• Your audience is afraid to look stupid, needy or uncool.

History is filled with the tales of innovators who were initially (or repeatedly) ignored or disparaged by their audiences, from Vincent van Gogh to Dr. Seuss.  For every film or book we now consider to be an influential classic, there are dozens of reviews that disregard it as amateur, ineffectual or just plain bad.

And those are the successes.

Sometimes, your ideas really aren’t all that great.  Sometimes they’re half-baked, incorrect, premature or — yes — just plain bad.

But if you don’t pursue them, and learn from the experience of your hard-fought victories and spectacular misfires, you’ll forever be clinging to the safe bets.

And that means your audience, fickle creatures that they are, will eventually abandon you anyway, transfixed instead by something newer, shinier and more compelling — something that pushes their boundaries, even while you refuse to test your own.

Of Course, There IS a Catch to This Advice…

If your audience isn’t always right when they disagree with you, then they’re not always right when they idolize you, either.  Their judgment is just as flawed, mercurial and subjective as yours is, rain or shine.

So yes, by all means, absorb your audience’s feedback.

Just make sure you keep their notes in pencil.

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I just finished the first book I’ve devoured in more than a decade.

Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution details the making of the 5 Best Picture nominees at the 1968 Academy Awards, from their initial concepts through their critical and public reception.  Two of those films, In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, centered on race relations during the year when Sidney Poitier became the country’s most bankable star and Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated.  Another of those films, Doctor Dolittle, was a money pit that bought its Oscar nominations through old-fashioned studio graft and bribery.  And then there were Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, the two films no one in Hollywood wanted to make and the ones that wound up redefining Hollywood, filmmaking and America itself.

Not since Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls in 1999 have I inhaled a book so quickly.  Not coincidentally, both books detail the seismic shift between the vintage Hollywood studio system and the “new Hollywood” influenced by New York, television and theater.

The films made during this era — Chinatown, Shampoo, The French Connection, The Exorcist, The Last Picture Show, Taxi Driver, etc. — relied on unconventional actors, complex narratives, location shoots, sexual freedom and moral ambiguity.  They reshaped the way films are made, judged, consumed and remembered.  And perhaps more than anything else, they expanded the world’s expectations of what an American film could be.

In short, an entire generation got excited about movies.

All of which makes me wonder…

What Could Web Content Be?

Whenever I think about our evolving media forms, I’m reminded of something John Herman told me (and everyone else in the room) in 2006.

At the very first PodCamp in 2006, John — who is a many of many titles, including “video instructor” and “Pac-Man” — intended to lead a session about the do’s and don’ts of web video.  But after sitting through numerous sessions prior to his own, and hearing how everyone else does what they do, John scrapped his original idea and spoke instead about something even more useful:

Not following the rules.

John had recently bought a DVD set of vintage films made during the early days of cinema, and he’d been amazed at how many of the “rules” we take for granted in modern cinema — shooting establishing shots, filming two people in conversation at opposing angles, etc. — were completely absent from these films.

John realized he’d stumbled across media that had been created before we all agreed on how that media should be created, and he was worried that web media was about to enter a period of “rule-making” that might rob us of our creativity.

That Was Four Years Ago.

Since then, we’ve had precious few “breakout” web creations, and what does succeed online remains mostly confined to the web itself.  Those of us who can’t understand why web content hasn’t been embraced by the mainstream should first admit a harsh truth:

In our rush to monetize social media, we forgot to create experiences people want.

If you want to see a movie or a stage play, you buy a ticket.  If you want to read a story, you buy a book.  And if you want to listen to the radio or watch TV, you need to buy the device in question.

But the Internet just comes with your computer.

Yes, you have to subscribe to the web.  And yes, the web costs money to access.  But you’d do that whether people were creating original web content or not.  You’d do it just for email, news, peer communication and streaming media.

You pay for the Internet because you need it, not because you want what’s on it.

Blogs? Podcasts? YouTube?

Those Are Supposed to Be Free, Right?

People don’t pay for what they don’t need or want.  And no one needs or wants web media that’s a cheap approximation of the same stories and experiences they can obtain better elsewhere.

The reason The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde shocked Hollywood is because they spoke to America’s youth.  Sure, these films were groundbreaking on a technical and narrative basis, but that’s film buff talk; what these films did was connect with, represent and empower an entire generation’s point of view.

And people are always willing to pay (repeatedly) for the opportunity to see, share and absorb an experience that excites them.  (Fun fact: By the end of 1968, The Graduate was the third-highest grossing film ever.)

Unless we start creating web-based content that electrifies audiences — content, I should note, that’s specifically designed for the experience of the web, rather than shoehorning old media forms into new media tubes — we’re squandering a golden opportunity to define ourselves through the stories we tell.  It means we’re really just waiting around for someone else to make the rules, because we don’t think we have anything to say.

And maybe we don’t.  Which could explain the whole conundrum.

But there is a bright side.

See, the studio collapse of the 1960s led to the Hollywood upheaval of the 1970s, which in turn spawned the era of blockbusters like The Godfather and Jaws.

So, by that rationale, we’ll all be swimming in money any day now.

We just have to change the world first.

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What if our newspapers were filled with articles on how to write for newspapers?

What if the only books we printed were books about how to sell books?

What if TV shows consisted solely of monologues about TV?

I doubt we’d have much use for them at all.

So why do we accept it in social media?

The Three Pillars of Social Media Content

If you blog, podcast or otherwise create media for web-based distribution, you probably talk ad nauseam about one of three topics:

• How to create web content
• How to monetize web content
• Yourself

Notice that you probably don’t talk about the subject matter of your content, because your content is its own subject matter.

Crazy, isn’t it?

We blog about blogging.  We market about marketing.  And, when we’re not selling our expertise, we sell ourselves.  It’s the equivalent of painters forever painting portraits of themselves painting their own self-portraits.  I can’t imagine another medium that would exist solely to justify and perpetuate its own existence, and yet that’s precisely what we do here.

It’s ugly.  It’s desperate.  It’s solipsistic.  (Look it up.)  And it makes for one anemic defense of an industry.

It’s almost like social media labors under the suspicion that if it stops talking about itself, it’ll cease to exist.

Which begs the question: does social media exist?  Or are we making the whole thing up?

If a Tree Falls in the Woods and No One Retweets It…

The social side of social media revolves around techniques meant to get others talking about you.  The media side of the equation is less about the form of the content and more about its distribution.  Mobile, web-based, downloadable, subscribable…  These aren’t media forms.  These are means of distribution.

What we have is people using multiple channels to convince you of their own merit, mostly so you’ll talk about them — and, specifically, so you’ll talk about their vast array of expertise, in subjects like…

• creating content,
• monetizing content, and
• themselves

Is it any wonder that people believe Twitter is a wasteland of people discussing airports and breakfast cereal?

Are you shocked when the level of social media discourse reported by CNN or Nightline amounts to the same uninformed, knee-jerk reactions we already ignore when we scan through blog comments, but which the mainstream media somehow thinks represents America’s profound and timely wisdom?

Of course, it aggravates those of us who believe in the potential of social media, and it motivates us to prove the naysayers wrong.

But here’s the catch:

What if they’re right?

Does a Computer Know It’s a Computer?

If our entire medium did exist solely to justify its own existence, surely we’d recognize that lunacy and abandon it for something legitimately meaningful.  Right?

Only if we can diagnose our own insanity.

Look at the blogs you subscribe to, the tweeters you follow and the podcasts you download.  What percentage of those sources focus on something other than social media itself?

Look at your own output.  What do you write or speak about most often?  Is it a topic that has to be explained to anybody who hasn’t heard of Chris Brogan?

Odds are, those odds aren’t good.

So why do we do this?

And what would happen if we didn’t?

I Wrote a Play About This Playwright Who Writes Plays About Playwrights Who…

What if you spent more time writing and reading about a topic other than the web itself?

Who’s creating dynamic media that happens to be online, rather than media that only matters online?

How can you use social media to teach others about a subject besides social media?

(You do have other interests, don’t you?)

Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to perpetually explain what you did to people (and why), because the value of what you do would be obvious even to people who don’t own smartphones and who think Amber Naslund was the bassist in Jem?

I know, it’s a scary idea.  The first rule of Fight Club was “don’t talk about Fight Club,” because if you did talk about Fight Club, then Fight Club might cease to exist.

With us, it’s the opposite: if we stop talking about social media, then we cease to exist.

Or, more specifically, we cease to exist in our own little fishbowl.

But if we’re only special to each other, we’re not really special at all, are we?

We’re just people with make-believe jobs and titles, who invent our own conferences and pay to hear each other speak about speaking about talking about blogging about ourselves.

And call me a cynic, but I think we can do better.

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Writing a blog in the hopes that you’ll get noticed — or hired — is extremely passive-aggressive.

Most people who’ve made money have made it by pursuing it.  Therefore, they respect what they recognize, which is a desire to achieve.  So, by pursuing work and striving to get their attention, your actions resonate with them.

Meanwhile, posting amazing free content to your blog on a daily basis, and then hoping someone will someday think, “Gee, I wonder what he’d do if I paid him,” is the antithesis of go-getter moxie.

Consider the guy who claimed to land a job by manipulating Google.  He didn’t just get hired because he was creative; he got hired because he got noticed.

He could have also written a blog post about how great he was, and then hoped that his six art directors of choice would find that post while Googling, read it, realize he was a genius and call him for an interview.

But that would have been stupid.  And desperate.  And passive.  And failed.

Stop being all of those things.

Does That Mean I Should Self-Promote Endlessly?

No.  No it does not.

Look at that Google guy again.  Did he spam the world with his joblessness?  No.  He targeted six art directors he knew he’d like to work for, and he got his message in front of them.

That’s the other difference between being aggressive and being passive-aggressive: identifying the target.

If you believe in yourself, then you’ll be confident in walking your message directly to the right person’s doorstep.*

If you don’t, you’ll spraypaint your desires all over the web, in the hopes that someone — anyone — will notice you, and take pity on you, and drag you home to their quonset hut to nurse you back to health.

Do you want a specific result, or any result?

Skip the hut, and find the right doorstep.

The 5-Step Process to Get Hired Using Social Media

1.  Know what you want to get paid for.

2.  Do that work for free.  (This is called practice.)

3.  Become better at doing it for free than the people who currently get paid to do it.

4.  Figure out who pays people to do it, and show them what you do.

5.  Tell them how much you’ll do it for.

Repeat steps 1-5 until you find yourself gainfully employed.

But Wait!  There’s a Bonus Step!

6.  Write a book about how you landed your dream job using social media — and sell it.

Wasn’t that easy?

*Not someone’s face, mind you.  Their doorstep.  And recognize when you’ve been ignored vs. when you’ve been invited in.  Adults respond to confidence; teenage girls respond to bravado.  Unless you want to be employed by a teenage girl, understand the tonal difference in your delivery.

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There’s a gentleman’s agreement in social media that needs to be debunked.

We’re always supposed to judge ourselves by the quality of the conversations we have, rather than the sheer volume of our reach.

Even Gary Vee, who has more Twitter followers than anyone else who’s not “mainstream famous,” preached quality over quantity at #140conf last month.  He believes the number of Direct Messages a person sends on Twitter — thereby implying a true 1-to-1 connection — is a more accurate arbiter of a person’s influence and power than how many generic followers that person blasts with her impersonal messaging.

What Gary wants to know is, how many people are you making time for?

But it’s easy for Gary Vee to say that numbers don’t matter; he already has them.

You don’t.  (Not like Gary does.)

But you want them.

And that’s okay.

Here’s why.

In Our Minds, We’re All Lady Gaga with a Slightly Smaller Wardrobe

First, let’s establish one truth: everybody wants to be heard.*

If we didn’t want to be heard, we’d never open our mouths.  The act of engaging in social media — whether you’re a pro, an amateur or someone who simply tweets to your five actual flesh-and-blood friends — is the act of declaring that what you have to say is worth being heard by someone.

From there, the only place to go is up.

And while it’s true that numbers alone are meaningless, numbers are never alone.  Numbers are indicators.  And in terms of audience, numbers are indicators of your potential.

Dan Zarrella created a graph he calls Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness, which says that in order for a message to be successful, it must be:

1. Noticed
2. Considered interesting, and
3. Acted upon

Obviously, far more messages are noticed than acted upon.  To improve your chances of success, you want to maximize each contact point on Zarrella’s graph — and that starts with maximizing the number of people exposed to your message.

Take iJustine.  She’s followed by over 1 million people on Twitter.  That doesn’t mean everything she tweets is noticed by all 1 million people, but it does mean that what she tweets is, by definition, noticed by more people than what you tweet.

Does that mean iJustine is more important than you are?  No.  It just means she has the potential to be more influential than you do.

But that has more to do with who’s following her, or following you — and why.

It’s Not How Big Your Audience Is, It’s How You Use… er, Inspire It

Let’s say you have a message you believe is worth sharing.  So you broadcast it.

If no one notices your message, you lose.

On the other hand, if everyone notices your message but no one cares… you still lose.

The question is: how likely are people to be interested in what you’re saying and act on it?

That likelihood depends on numerous variables, including:

• What are you saying?
• How are you saying it?
• How reputable are you?
• How difficult is the action you’ve requested?
• What’s the payoff for the person taking the action?
• What’s the payoff for you?

The world would be far more profoundly impacted by three scientists listening to your advice and solving a disease than it would be by all one million of iJustine’s followers donating a dollar to the cause of her choice.

But you probably don’t know three scientists, nor are you likely to provide them with actionable data and convince them to make use of it.

On the other hand, iJustine can direct her thousands of followers to take any number of mundane actions.  And if the composite effect of those mundane actions amounts to something noteworthy, it simultaneously elevates her own public perception as an influencer — which, in turn, extends her reach via expanded awareness.

Thus, although the volume of your reach actually is less important than the quality of your reach, the quality of your reach is dependent on the nature of circumstances.  Yes, your three scientist friends may be able to cure cancer, but they might not be able to help you land a job.  Your million connections, on the other hand, just might.

In which case… why are we all so quick to denounce our desire to amass a large audience?

Everybody’s Jealous of a Size Queen

The bigger a person’s audience becomes, the more likely they are to become demonized.  Not because of what they actually say (or don’t say), but simply because they get noticed.

Getting noticed is the first step toward getting what you want.  And when someone else is getting noticed, it usually means you’re not.

The truth is, you don’t actually envy Chris Brogan, Gary Vee or iJustine because they’re popular; you envy them because the size of the audience they’ve amassed provides them with better odds of achieving their goals than yours does.

And while I’m sure Gary would be every bit as helpful, engaging and invested if he “only” had 10,000 (or even 100) passionate fans of his work, I’m also quite sure that if he “only” had 100 fans, he would want more.

Badly.

Because it’s who we are.

We talk because we want to be talked about.

But why?

That’s your own question to answer.

Maybe you want to make a living doing what you love.

Maybe you want to help others.

Maybe you want to meet interesting people, or go interesting places.

Maybe you just want to know that someone thinks you’re interesting.

With larger audiences comes more potential for interaction.  By default, Chris Brogan knows more interesting people than you do, simply because he knows more people than you do.

Ultimately, the size of your audience is important, but it doesn’t matter; what matters is what you want to do.

And the more people you have paying attention to you, the greater your chances of accomplishing your goal.

So: you want to be successful?  Meet more people.

(And then spend at least some of your time listening to them; you might learn something.)

*NOTE:  Maybe “heard” is the wrong word for you.  Maybe it’s “listened to.”  Maybe it’s “influential.”  Maybe it’s “admired,” “respected” or “appreciated.”  Regardless of your specific motive, any action that can be taken by the masses is an action most of us would like to evoke in as many people as possible, until we grow tired of the response.

And if having too much exposure is a problem… let’s cross that bridge when you get there.

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This past week, I attended #140conf in New York City.  Every session was recorded for posterity, so if you weren’t there, you can see what you missed at your leisure.

Instead of recapping the event with a play-by-play, I’d rather share one key observation I made during the event that, I soon realized, applies to conferences as a whole:

Always deliver more in person than you deliver online.

More of what, you might ask?

Exactly.

Whether you’re a conference organizer, speaker or attendee, your goals may differ but the same rule applies: You always want to get more from the people you’re staring at than what they make available to you digitally.

But in order to do that, you first need to give more of yourself.

Web time is compartmentalized; face time is linear.  Face time is worth more.

We have to earn the benefits that come with face time.

Here’s how you can do that.

10 Tips for Conference Organizers

1. Promise attendees, speakers and sponsors one specific payoff; then deliver it.
2. Start on time, stay on time, stop on time.
3. Make it easy for attendees to network before, during and after the event.
4. Don’t enforce your event’s brand at the expense of your audience’s experience.
5. Nourish the attention spans of your attendees.
6. Sponsors deserve better than being chained to display tables and ignored.
7. Provide more value than the ticket price would suggest.
8. Would you pay to attend your own event?  If not, add value until you would.
9. Be conscious of homogeneity; sexism, racism and cronyism damage when implied.
10. Promoting your event doesn’t stop when the event itself stops.

That last point deserves some explanation.

Having organized several live events myself, I’m very aware that the core team of organizers is generally exhausted by the time the event is over.  The last thing anyone wants to do talk about an event they’ve already been talking about for months.

But you don’t have to.  Instead, assign one person from your promotions team to cultivate and curate the best of what other people are saying about your event.  This includes:

• Finding the most revelatory blog post recaps from attendees
• Seeking out the best photos from the event
• Identifying the most important videos filmed at (or about) the event
• Interviewing the sponsors to obtain their immediate feedback
• Asking the speakers for a list of their favorite event sound bites

Then, the week after the event, post your curated summary of conference-based media on the event’s website and email it in a final e-blast summary to all sponsors and attendees.

Why?

Because the buzz surrounding your event will now be shrinking, just as your attendees have finished recuperating from their live experience.  They need a reminder of who they just met and what they just learned.  Plus, those who couldn’t attend this time around will need proof that your next conference is going to be a can’t-miss event.

And if you don’t do it now, everyone’s memory will turn to mush.  (Trust me, without documentation, all live events quickly become either legends or lost weekends.  And no one wants to pay top dollar only to immediately forget why you matter.)

10 Tips for Conference Speakers

1. Stop repeating your bio; we can find that on our own.
2. Don’t thank the organizers for inviting you; save that for the VIP room.
3. Tell me a story.  Data without context is just numbers.
4. If your entire presentation consists of information I already know, you’ve failed.
5. Ditto presentations comprised of things I could discover by Googling you.
6. The auditorium is your bedroom.  Dazzle us.  We paid for it.
7. Everyone in the room should want to hear you speak again.
8. Always leave time for a Q&A.
9. Don’t make your entire speech a Q&A; the audience paid to hear you, not itself.
10. Leave us with an action item, so your revelations will live on beyond your exit.
11. Bonus points if you rejoin the audience after your presentation; it reminds us you’re human.

10 Tips for Conference Attendees

1. You paid to be there (with your money, time or both).  Use it.
2. Don’t come to sell; come to help.
3. You’re not required to listen.  If the stage is dry, seek wisdom in the gallery.
4. Every conversation you have could change your life.
5. Spend less time documenting the event than experiencing it.
6. A speaker is more (or less) than a sound bite; anoint your saviors accordingly.
7. Nobody wants to hear your pitch; they want to know why you matter.
8. Identify one interesting thing about yourself; when in doubt, talk about that.
9. Always make time for the after-party.
10. Always leave the after-party before you can’t.

And one bonus tip for everyone:

Time Stops at Live Events

At least, it should.

Online, our attention is perpetually assailed by more information than we can process.  As such, any interaction that lasts “too long” automatically starts to feel “wrong” because we feel compelled to look elsewhere for input.

At a live event, we have the luxury of turning off the endless stream of stimuli and really focusing on the human beings staring back at us.  We can have one-on-one conversations without the obligatory multitasking.

Enjoy this.

For me, one of the high points of #140conf was a late-night conversation I had with C.C. Chapman and Matthew Ebel in C.C.’s suite at the Roger Smith Hotel.  We talked about family, technology, business, theology, sex, money and the future — essentially, everything but Twitter.  (Which, at a Twitter conference, is impressive.)

That’s not the kind of conversation that fits into 140 characters, or a blog post, or a series of emails.

That’s the kind of personal connection that makes all the digital work we do worthwhile.  It reminds us that our machines connect us to complex humans with more to say to one another than we can ever squeeze into our momentary sampler platters of partial attention online.

And I have no idea what time it was when I left.

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