10 years ago this month, I landed my first post-college job that didn’t involve retail.

In March of 2000, a Pittsburgh company called Multimedia Training Systems (which is still in business as I type this) was looking to hire someone who had experience with video production and animation.  As the lone graduate from The Art Institute of Pittsburgh’s Computer Animation & Multimedia program who also happened to take numerous video electives, I might have been the only semi-qualified applicant for the job within a 30 mile radius.

I was hired.

Although I would leave MTS five years later to forge my own way as a freelancer, the lessons I learned during that half-decade, both good and bad, have stuck with me.  Now, as our global economy has prompted everyone to reconsider what’s really important at work, some of those lessons are worth revisiting.

1.  Time management is the most important skill they never teach you in college.

Every project you ever work on will be made more complex by the byzantine communication and time management skills of everyone involved.  And since humans express themselves poorly as a rule, you’ll always need more time to fix those miscommunicated errors than you’d ever expect.

2.  Double the deadline.

If you can get something done in a week, tell the client (or your boss) it’ll be done in two.  Then strive to meet your original deadline.  That way, when something else comes up — and it always does — you’ll still be able to meet your declared deadline without feeling like you’ve been overstretched.

3. Next to cash flow, employee morale is king.

When employees enjoy their work, bond with their colleagues and feel comfortable in their workspace, they’re capable of producing amazing (or at least competent) work.  If not, distractions and resentments can make a seemingly innocuous work environment feel oppressive.

Find ways to make sure your employees are happy, healthy and engaged; everything else (besides payroll) is a byproduct of a positive workplace culture.

4.  Bonuses don’t make up for general misery (but they do help).

When business is swift, communication is clear and morale is high, bonuses are the icing on the cake of goodwill.

When business is hectic, communication is fractured and morale is unspeakably bad, bonuses are a last-ditch measure to keep the crew from jumping ship.

Either way, bonuses are appreciated — but, paradoxically, they’re appreciated more when they mean less.

5.  Organize every project as though someone else will have to finish it.

Because when someone else does have to take over one of your projects, they don’t want to spend the first half of their day decoding your labyrinthine organizational structure.

At MTS, we had a general procedure to follow for most video projects, with preferred conventions for naming files and organizing them within folders and sub-folders.  That way, even if various employees had to access the same files from different computers, there’d be no confusion as to which files belonged to which projects.

6.  Your sales and marketing team shouldn’t be doing anything else.

MTS is a small company.  I was hired as their fifth employee; they’ve never chosen to grow beyond ten full-time employees and a handful of part-time contractors.

As such, everybody works on more than just what their job description entails.  Our office manager wound up doing (and still does) everything from accounts receivable and booking employee travel to shipping packages and designing the labels for the DVDs.

But sales and marketing is the lifeblood of any company, and when our marketing VP was spending the bulk of his time filming video, that meant no one else was focusing on selling and marketing the very products we were producing.  Was it necessary at the time?  Sure.  But in hindsight, if there was one office I wouldn’t want to distract from its core duties, it would be the people responsible for making sure someone wanted to pay us.

7.  Backup clearly and constantly.

When an MTS project was completed, we’d back off all related files — finished video, audio, graphics, documents, etc. — on DVD.  We’d also keep a tape backup of each finished video, in case the DVDs got scratched (or in case someone needed a tape-to-tape transfer ASAP).

But while we were producing videos, we’d save our projects relentlessly.  Our office was in a borough that was notorious for power outages due to thunderstorms, and it only took a new employee one fried project to learn the lesson of paranoid auto-saving.  (Bonus points if you saved multiple versions of a file at once, just in case one of them became corrupted.)

8.  Meetings only matter if someone’s listening.

Every once in awhile, upper management at MTS would have an executive meeting, and the outcome would almost always be the same: someone would want to change the way we did something, and someone else would explain why we couldn’t.

Maybe it was money, or time, or equipment, logic or politics.  Whatever the case, change happened at a glacial pace at MTS, in part because the people responsible for making and implementing the changes were the very same people who were already stretched too thin by maintaining the status quo.  There was rarely any room to implement new procedures on a trial basis because, honestly, who had time for trial and error when the next deadline was a heartbeat away?

The solution?  If anybody did want to make the case for a new way of doing things, they had to implement that change on their own, privately, and then present their own results as proof that their idea could be adopted successfully.  Either that, or proposals would have to be made that no one else could reject — and that approach always leaves somebody feeling marginalized.

9.  Upgrading equipment isn’t always the wisest expenditure.

Nerds will always geek out over new toys, and bosses will always ask the age-old question:

“Do we need this?”

Bosses aren’t necessarily hoping you’ll say “no,” because bosses are usually more worried about what something’s capable of than what it costs.  But they’re not interested in tech specs; they’re interested in how this $4,000 investment can net them $20,000 in business.

If you made every decision about new expenditures the same way a small, hungry company has to consider those same decisions, you’d buy only the new toys that your clients need you to have in order to fulfill their desires.  And you’d keep a lot of vintage equipment alive much longer than it has any reason to exist, simply because you can.

10.  Your clients are always people first and revenue streams second.

MTS had a habit of bending over backwards for its clients — sometimes admirably, and sometimes unnecessarily.  But because the field we specialized in — safety training for the steel industry — was such a close-knit niche, it was in MTS’s best interests to monopolize the medium because losing our foothold could have resulted in a domino effect of dropped accounts.

Instead, MTS developed a reputation for going above and beyond the call of duty.  And while that might have cost us money (and sanity) in the short run, it also created business relationships that remained fruitful even when the steel industry was reeling from consolidation and global downsizing.

I doubt that would have happened if we were simply seen as a line item on someone’s budget — or if everybody else was just a line item on ours.

Seeing the World Through Blue-Collared Glasses

Like anyone at any job, I had my ups and downs at MTS.  But I also had the opportunity to see things, go places and meet people that I never would have thought to notice otherwise: real, hard-working, down-to-earth and kind-hearted people, whose fortunes were tied to a once-vital industry that everybody believes is now past its prime.

And as a native Pennsylvanian in a globalized world, that kind of underdog, blue-collar mentality is an asset I’d never trade.

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Before I made a living in social marketing, I made social media.  (Yes, there’s a difference.)

In 2003, I launched Something to Be Desired (or STBD), a creative outlet that eventually became the web’s longest-running sitcom.  The series remained active until 2009 when I moved to Baltimore and the cast remained in Pittsburgh.

Despite its critical acclaim (including a nomination for Best Series in the 2008 Yahoo! Video Awards), the show was never a household name by Internet standards.  The reasons we never quite “made it” are numerous, and since the topic of creating meaningful content has been on a lot of people’s minds lately, I think those lessons are worth sharing.

While STBD remains indefinitely on hiatus, awaiting the right opportunity to be rejuvenated and / or properly concluded, I hope the lessons I learned during the show’s first 6 years of existence can help other content creators avoid the pitfalls that so often lead to frustration, disappointment and failure.  (Not that failure is always bad; but I digress…)

10 Tips for Creating Successful (and Sustainable) Web Content

1. Keep It Simple.

When STBD began, it was derived from a 60-minute script I’d written, which we subdivided into 5 shorter chapters. It was the story of Jack Boyd, although he was primarily a passive observer in his own life. The show had 8 recurring characters, a few extras, and was filmed exclusively in locations where we had direct and unquestioned access (with one huge exception; see tip #3).

By 2009, we were producing a new 5 to 10 minute episode every week, drawn from a cast of 15 recurring characters and another two dozen veterans who’d left the show but still made occasional guest appearances.  We filmed all around the Pittsburgh area, at all times and days of the week, which made scheduling so many (unpaid) actors a nightmare.

Despite the increased breadth of the show, many longtime viewers still cite our first few seasons as our most narratively coherent years, partly because the show was then focused on a smaller cast and a simpler plot.

Growth can be good, but don’t grow faster than necessary or you’ll lose time, energy and focus.

2.  Tell the Story That No One Else Can.

As a former college radio DJ, my experiences on-air and behind the scenes were the inspiration for the creation of STBD.  Jack Boyd was a radio DJ, and the success or failure of his ever-struggling station was the overarching catalyst behind many of the show’s plot twists.

But I also knew that by offering viewers a glimpse inside a world they themselves would rarely experience — even something as seemingly mundane as a radio station — it would keep them interested in seeing “what happened next” in a social circle they’d never otherwise be able to peer into.

When you consider other forms of media, from TV and movies to podcasts and blogs, ask yourself: which media do I consume because it invites me into a world, a job, a topic or a personality that I wouldn’t otherwise have access to?  There are plenty of reasons why creations like Mad Men, Achewood, Homestar Runner and Dooce have been so successful, but part of their charm is their inability to be replaced by inferior imitations.

Be original, because anything less is replaceable.

3.  Adapt.

STBD began as the story of Jack Boyd, his workplace, his friends and his city.

Then a funny thing happened: the actor who played Jack left the show (and the city).

So we adapted the concept.  We shifted the focus to Jack’s closest friends, and told their story of “life after college.”  As long as we still had the radio station as our anchor, we had a subtle branding element that would tie the various themes together.

Then, three years into production of STBD, the radio station we filmed at came under new management and we were informed that we were no longer allowed on the premises.

So we adapted again.

STBD now became the story of Jack’s sister Caroline and her roommate, Dierdre, each of whom got new jobs (in new, more reliable locations) to open the show’s 4th season.  The central theme of “life after college” was still intact, but now we’d lost all tangible reference to the show’s initial concept.  And yet, as long as we had a past, we knew the show could have a future.

When your success hinges on the whims of your audience, your sponsors or your collaborators, always remain flexible.

4.  Provide an Entry Point for All New Visitors.

From TV shows to comics, whenever I first dive into a new (to me) serialized creation, I always start with the episode or issue at hand.  I like to know how interesting the creation is now, and then I’ll backtrack as necessary to figure out any plot holes or character questions I may have.  For me, half the fun of exploring a long-running creation is understanding how it’s changed over the years, and experiencing plot twists and character growth out of order.

Evidently, I’m a rarity.

By an overwhelming margin, new viewers of STBD almost always decide to begin at the beginning.  Never mind that we’d been online for years, or that we’d produced more than 25 hours of content over the course of 150+ episodes, or that our most recent episodes bear scant resemblance to anything from our early days; humans are apparently hardwired to begin at the beginning and work their way forward.

This was always a problem for us, because our series is so different from season to season.  Newbies would poke their heads in, get confused, then overwhelmed, and flee.  Or they’d wade in at the beginning, be underwhelmed by our creative juices from 6 years ago, and leave without bothering to fast-forward to the present and see how we’d improved.

When producing content for the long-term, always make sure that your roots remain relevant. Otherwise, you’ll need a fresh introduction that brings people up to speed quickly, or perhaps an entire re-brand to divorce yourself from your history.  Because online, time is precious and playing catch-up always feels like work.

5.  “Not Starving” Isn’t the Same Thing as “Selling Out.”

We never made a dime on STBD.  Yes, we earned a few dollars off donations, t-shirt sales and other incidentals, but the sum total of that income was never more than a few hundred dollars.  Over the course of those 6 years, the only things that kept the show afloat were my own invested income and the graciousness of the cast to labor without pay.

Granted, making STBD was (usually) fun, which helps alleviate the sting of working for free.  But not paying a cast means not being able to complain when their schedules get complicated by paying work.  And not actively pursuing advertising revenue, sponsors, partnerships and merchandise sales meant that we’d never generate enough independent income to pay anyone — or to replace damaged equipment, purchase props, license music, or do any of the things we’d like to have done in order to keep the show growing.

You don’t have to say “yes” to every monetary offer that comes your way.  But you do need to budget for success, and pursue avenues of revenue that will ensure your creation can stay afloat on its own power.

Trust me: there’s no shame in not starving.

6.  Be Consistent.

Audiences want quality media delivered to them in a timely fashion.  Ideally, they want the same thing at the same time in the same place, for as long as they find it interesting.

“But this is the web,” you may think to yourself in a moment of misguided anarchy.  “Time is irrelevant; Google is always.”

Yes, Google is always.  But Google needs to find something when it goes looking for you, and so do the people who enjoy your content enough to subscribe to it.  If you miss enough self-declared deadlines (as we did), it’s an excuse for your audience to take you less seriously, and to make them think twice before recommending your work to someone else.

7.  Get Ahead.

Once you master the art of producing quality on a regular basis, you’ll want to get ahead.  The more free time you have away from production, the more effort you can invest in promotion; otherwise, you spend all your time producing work that never gets seen.

On STBD, we were rarely ahead in any capacity.  We frequently filmed Monday’s episode on Sunday night, and I was up overnight editing it before passing out on the couch.  Not a good way to instill self-discipline, much less to keep enough energy in the tank to promote the show adequately.

If I’d been smarter about producing STBD, I would have written multiple scripts (or even an entire season’s worth) in advance, and then filmed and edited the bulk of the show before any of that season’s episodes aired.  Then we wouldn’t have been at the mercy of weekly schedules, we wouldn’t have had plotlines that dangled for months on end while we tried to sew them up, and I wouldn’t have lost sleep patching holes in plots and coverage that wouldn’t have existed if we’d had more lead time.

If you love something, do it right.

8.  Promote, Promote, Promote.

If you’re spending all your time producing media, you’ll never have time to promote it.  That means everyone’s investing their energies producing content that’s unlikely to be seen, because you don’t have the same dedication to sharing your work as you do in perfecting it.

Despite a healthy following on MySpace (yes, MySpace), the occasional front-page recommendation by YouTube or Yahoo! Video, and a dedicated group of longtime fans, we rarely promoted STBD with any efficiency, urgency or consistency.  I always knew what I would do if I had the time, but then I perpetually failed to provide myself with the time I needed.

Yes, ideally, your content is so amazing that it speaks for itself and the world becomes your word-of-mouth oyster.  But realistically, you’re producing media that’s roughly as good as anyone else’s, give or take.  Your work won’t succeed unless people are talking about it, and the first person who needs to talk about it is you.

Repeatedly.

9.  Listen, Listen, Listen… to a Point.

When your fans and trolls speak up, you should listen.  Just make sure you strain their praise or criticism through the filters of their personality in order to find any real, actual, objective information.  Your goal here is to discover what is or isn’t working for your audience and why, not to be told you’re wonderful or horrible.  (You do that yourself already.)

But the people who love (or hate) your work aren’t always able to articulate why.  Maybe they’re too busy, or too disinterested, or too embarrassed to engage you directly.  This is where surveys and forums come in handy.  This is why metrics, analytics and data need to be reviewed, and choices made based on the unspoken habits of your audience.

And yet, in the end, you need to create media because you enjoy the process of that creation.  Success is something we’re always pursuing, but the external validation of a raving audience pales in comparison to knowing that you produced something you’re proud of, traffic and ad rates be damned.

10.  Know When to Quit.

When you first start creating a new piece of media, it helps to have an idea of what “the end” might look like.  If it’s a self-contained story or experience, you know when it’s over.  If, like a blog or a podcast, it’s a living, breathing, ongoing experiment, the end can be a bit less definitive.

Maybe it’s over when it becomes too hard to continue.  Maybe it’s over when you’re out of money, or when no one else is listening.

When you no longer enjoy the act of creating something, it’s definitely over.

I often wonder if we shouldn’t have ended STBD years ago.  For us, it could have been over when Jack left, or when the radio station was written out, or when the process of organizing and executing a weekly episode took more effort to pull off than our day jobs did.  And it absolutely could have ended when I moved to a different state, four hours away from the rest of the cast.

But it hasn’t.

Not yet, anyway.  And when it does, it won’t be because anyone else has decided it’s over.

That’s the one lesson you have to learn for yourself.

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As you may have heard, the Mid-Atlantic US (in which I currently live) got hammered by a massive snowstorm this weekend.  Weather reports had been sensationalizing the potentially apocalyptic effects of the storm for days, warning that we could see a record snowfall and complete paralysis of city functions.  And if you doubt that people still take the media seriously, you should have been in any east coast grocery store on Thursday night: everything was wiped out.

Saturday morning, Ann and I awoke to the full brunt of the destruction.

Rufus needed his morning walk, and there was no way around it: we had to go outside.  Armed with a shotgun, a lantern and a blowtorch, we opened our front door with a mix of soul-rending trepidation and a sudden resurgence in our childhood beliefs in God — because when the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse arrive wearing ski masks, you can never be too careful.

Amazingly, all the buildings on our block were still standing.  The cars had not caved in beneath the mountains of precipitation.  There were no sirens, no wailing children trapped beneath the rubble, and no marauding gangs of anarchists raping and pillaging the survivors.

So we dug a little walkway midway down the block so Rufus would have a place to poop.

Then we went back inside, and we turned on the news, and IT WAS INSANE.  Somehow, the same morning news anchors who are on TV every week had managed to get to the station!  Neither of them looked like they’d had to cannibalize their loved ones in order to get out of the house. In fact, one of them was laughing at a picture someone had sent in of a dog in a snowsuit.

HOW WAS MASS COMMUNICATION STILL WORKING??? WE WERE SUPPOSED TO BE PARALYZED!!!

Too confused to function, we went back to bed, mostly to conserve our strength in case we needed to light flares on the rooftop later and help guide the evacuation planes.

But by noon, we once again ventured outside (this time with only a pistol and a hatchet, in case we needed to run) and discovered that our neighbors were not only not dead or eating their own young, but they were shoveling out their stairways, sidewalks and cars.  They were even talking to each other, which never happens.

By this afternoon, a full 24 hours after we were supposed to have borne witness to the final sub-arctic battle between good and evil, Ann and I were digging our car out from its snow tomb and romping in the park with our dog.  Other neighbors were sharing shovels and helping one another chip away at their icy vehicles or sidewalks.  Our next-door neighbors, who never speak to us, even managed to find the time to blatantly ignore us while walking past us!

If they have time to be petty and vindictive over perceived slights, how much of can Armageddon could this possibly be?

And that’s when it hit me:

We got through it.

The world was supposed to have ended (at least by modern meteorological standards), but it didn’t.  Somehow, despite all advertised odds, we were all still functional.  One guy was even going to work, which is as American as you can get during a crisis of biblical proportions.

And that got me thinking…

The country was supposed to have collapsed during eight years of Bush tyranny.  But we got through it.

The country could have collapsed during our current financial meltdown.  But we’re getting through it.

And Obama could still turn this nation into a socialist collective, unless the GOP outwits him and turns it into a fascist dictatorship first.  But we’ll probably get through that too.

In fact, there’s never been anything that’s happened in this country — and, in broader terms, on this planet — that the bulk of us haven’t gotten through.

Yes, we’ve had disasters and war and terror and plagues and homicides and genocides and secessions and depressions.  Yes, we’ve been inconvenienced and had to sacrifice.  Yes, we’ve abused and taken advantage of.  And yes, we’ve been trained to believe that things can only ever get worse.

And yet, regardless of what life throws at us, we’ve always gotten through it.

Which, finally, makes me wonder one last thing…

What If We Didn’t Spend Our Entire Lives Worrying About “What Might Happen?”

If we weren’t always petrified about rain, snow and murder, our local news would have to find something else to report.

If we weren’t entirely convinced that one of our political parties was going to drive our 200-years-young nation to ruin, our national news (and, perhaps, our politicians) would have to find something more useful to do.

And if we weren’t perpetually preoccupied with our immediate concerns about our own health, wealth, relationships and social standing, we might actually find the energy to move forward in the direction we’re so certain someone or something “out there” is preventing us from reaching.

In the end, what prevents us from being amazed at our own resiliency is just how commonplace the act of survival really is.  The world isn’t perfect, and neither are we, but we always manage to find a way to scrape by — and sometimes, we even make the future better than the past we grew up in.

Just ask your parents, or your grandparents, or anyone who’s fled to where you’re living now from a homeland they simply couldn’t bear to live in anymore; they’ll tell you that tomorrow has at least a 50% chance of being better than today, and unlike we modern cynics, they’ll believe it.

And if tomorrow happens to be worse than today?  Trust me:

We’ll get through it.

Whenever friends from Pittsburgh ask me how I’m adapting to Baltimore, I tell them the truth: Baltimore and Pittsburgh are so similar on so many levels that “adapting” hasn’t been necessary.  It’s more like I’ve just moved to an extremely remote Pittsburgh neighborhood, and now it takes me 4 hours to get to the nearest Crazy Mocha instead of 15 minutes.  (Also, people wear a lot more purple here.)

But there are significant differences between the cities, and it’s those “little things” that add up to one big problem: Baltimore has a negative self-image that impacts the way I, a new resident, choose to invest myself (or, more specifically, not invest myself) in my new home.

What Your Labrador Retriever Has to Do with the City’s Murder Rate

The most obvious difference between Pittsburgh and Baltimore is the latter’s epic homicide rate.  In 2009, Pittsburgh had 38 homicides (as of December 21), down from 73 in 2008.  In the same year, Baltimore had 239, up from 234 in 2008.  That’s 6 times as many murders in a city that’s barely double the size of Pittsburgh.

So what makes people kill other people?  And why are Baltimoreans so much more likely — or more willing, or more accepting of other people’s homicidal inclinations — to kill each other?

According to at least one analyst, it all boils down to Baltimore’s lack of a shared citywide identity.

The current issue of Baltimore’s Urbanite magazine includes an excerpt from Ohio State history professor Randolph Roth‘s American Homicide, which suggests that murder rates escalate when citizens lose faith in their social and political hierarchies.   If we no longer feel like the system we live in is fair, we don’t believe that respecting even the most basic rules will in any way improve our quality of life, so we’re more inclined to institute our own “survival of the fittest” mentality, pursuing what we believe is achievable rather than striving to “succeed” in a corrupt system.

All of which means that solving Baltimore’s homicide problem requires more than “just” tackling the issues of poverty, education or politics.  It requires that the people care enough about themselves and their city to redefine their own accessible future, together, and shape new politics and polemics around their own unified identity.

So what does all of this have to do with dog shit?

For Want of a Poop Bag, the Battle Was Lost…

I live in a neighborhood rife with dog owners, including me.  I walk my dog at least 5 times a day, and those jaunts give me lots of face time with the area’s sidewalks and tree boxes.

And they are, invariably, covered in shit.

As a random sample, I walked Rufus on Sunday afternoon and counted no fewer than 20 piles of dog shit left along the sidewalk in a 6 block radius.  Included among these roadside treats were deposits made in all but one of the tree boxes outside a nearby elementary school.  That’s right: out of nearly a dozen tree boxes located at the entrance to a gradeschool, all but one was home to a pile of shit.  Not one.  Not two.  All but one.

It says a lot about the character of a city when its people can’t be bothered to NOT leave steaming piles of dog shit at the doorway to their children’s schools.

Baltimore: Get Your Shit Together

Maybe I’m expecting too much of people.  Maybe because I clean up after my dog (and because it’s a law), I presume everyone else is naturally as interested in keeping their own neighborhood aesthetically pleasing (and free of health hazards).

Maybe I’m also being too reductive.  Surely a city’s societal woes can’t be encapsulated in the respect it shows to its own streets?  Perhaps I should look at other statistics, like Baltimore’s impeccable driving record.

Oh.  Never mind.

But don’t worry.  I get it.  I know life is hard and people are busy.  And maybe expecting you to take responsibility for what you do is elitist.  There is a recession, after all.  If it comes down to affording food or poop bags, I understand that feeding your kids trumps scraping your dog’s shit off your neighbor’s front steps.  We all have priorities.

But if you can’t clean up after your dog, don’t own a dog.  It’s that simple.  It’s about responsibility, accountability, leadership, good stewardship and being an adult.  It’s about understanding what you can handle vs. what’s beyond your grasp.

Most importantly, it’s about how you see yourself.

And as long as Baltimore continues to be a city that doesn’t mind being covered in shit, I’ll continue to be a resident who refrains from investing emotionally in a city that refuses to love itself.

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Last week, Tami Dixon wrote a raw, emotionally honest appraisal of what it feels like (and, socio-politically, what it means) to be left off someone’s “Best Of…” list.  As a counterpoint, I’d like to offer why none of that shit matters.

In Tami’s case, she’s one half of the creative muscle behind Pittsburgh’s Bricolage Production Company, one of the city’s newer, riskier, “outsider” live theatre groups.  (You and I have also previously offered her some social media advice right here on this blog.)  And because of that “outsider” status, the established powers-that-be in Pittsburgh’s theatre community seem obliged to keep Bricolage in its place.

Last year, Bricolage produced a relatively new work by Jennifer Haley called “Requisition 3: Neighborhood of Doom.”  The play itself is actually a video game (or is it?) about teens playing a networked computer game that may or may not be altering their own increasingly isolated realities.  Despite (or perhaps because of) the play’s unconventional subject matter and presentation, the theater was continually packed, the reviews were effusive and the public’s awareness and appreciation of Bricolage was obviously on the rise.

Or so it seemed.

As Tami later learned, despite all of its accolades and its well-attended run, the play failed to make even one mainstream Pittsburgh critic’s year-end Top 10 list.  And in a field where public (and peer) perception so directly drives the financial success of those employed therein, Tami took this not-so-subtle rejection personally.

All of this, I’ll argue, is the best thing that could have happened to Tami — and it’s the best thing that could happen to you, too.  Here’s why.

Lists Are for People Who Need Hugs

No one does anything exclusively for their own benefit.  Whether you’re an author or a heart surgeon, everyone craves validation.  The question is, who are you allowing to determine your self-worth — and why?

Writers, musicians and artists of all fields solicit feedback from their audience, criticism from their peers and patronage from those who can afford to support them.  They want to matter aesthetically, influentially, socially and financially.  And as such, they’re required to seek this validation from multiple sources, each of which applies their own criteria (and their own backroom politics) to their decisions about whom they choose to validate.

“Best Of” lists are just one mechanism sustained by this culture of validity, but for some reason they seem to carry more psychological weight in the minds of the included (and the excluded) than they’re worth.  Perhaps this is because the comparison of contenders and the bestowing of praise happens so publicly.  Those mentioned or omitted from these lists naturally presume that everyone who reads them is as interested in what that particular critic thinks of their work as they themselves are.  (Call that a fault of hubris, but no one would commit their private work to public consumption without a slightly inflated ego, even if that inflation doesn’t double for insulation.)

I know I can’t negate your urges to feel validated, and I know I can’t tell you you’re wrong for wanting to feel loved.  (Besides, Woody Allen said it better than I would.)  But at least I can offer 4 Reasons Why Lists Don’t Matter:

1.  Everyone has their own motives. Maybe a listmaker has a vendetta against a certain type of art / product.  Or they owe someone a favor.  Or they have an unwritten set of criteria about whom and what they consider “worthy” of their consideration, and aspects like popularity, market success, influence and aesthetic quality may or may not be part of their formula.  If you tweaked any one element of your own work, you might have made the cut — but then you wouldn’t have produced the work (and learned the lessons) you did, would you?

2.  No one else has your frame of reference. Your painting / essay / blueprint / prized pig is the product of your own endeavor, balanced against what you consider to be “good” and “bad” (or whatever value system you consult when making your own choices).  But no one else is you, and everyone else is looking for their own version of perfection.  Maybe that film you’ve produced is something cineastes would drool over, but if you’re looking for high fives from your school’s A/V club, you may be expecting validation from people who are empirically unable to provide it.

3.  If you can please everyone, you’re doing it wrong. The world is diverse, and people develop emotional reactions to stimuli that affect them personally.  That’s why people create personal works — they polarize their audience and help us understand ourselves.

That’s also why no one likes pop radio.  It isn’t because it’s all bad; it’s because it’s all mediocre.  If you produce something so unremarkable as to be accepted unblinkingly by everyone who encounters it, you haven’t created a life-affirming work of art; you’ve created a napkin.  And unless you’re in the napkin business, you’ve failed at your larger goal of exploring yourself.

4.  Accolades make you complacent. Being told you’re wonderful is an excuse to stop growing and a warning to start protecting what you’ve already done, for fear that someone else will chip away at your perceived excellence.  Like all things, success is best enjoyed in moderation.  And as I’ve said before, prior to attaining your career-defining success, I sincerely hope you fail.

5.  Stop slapping your loved ones in the face. Complaining about who doesn’t appreciate you is insulting to those who do.  Rejection and legitimate criticism can spur you to improve, and by so doing, you may garner new fans down the road.  But the ones who love you now are the ones who love you for what you’ve already done.  To ignore them is to admit that their appreciation isn’t as important as the appreciation of someone you respect more, and audiences don’t react well to being told they’re temporary stepping stones on your road to the people who do matter.

Tami’s right to be aggravated by Bricolage’s lack of industry support.  But instead of getting frustrated, I hope she gets motivated — to produce more work that packs the house, keeps her employed and grows her fanbase naturally, rather than clamoring for the withheld affections of the people who couldn’t care less.

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Yesterday, I explained why I think Microsoft sees its customers as idiots — an opinion that sparked a debate about the very nature of advertising.  Like politics, war and most other conflicts, advertising boils down to the challenge of convincing other people that YOUR worldview (or your client’s) is the most valid.

So does that mean we can save Detroit by rebranding it?

TIME magazine thinks so.  That’s why they’re sponsoring a major contest to rebrand the city, hoping it will cause Americans to see Detroit as something other than the crater at the bottom of the American dream — and to once again invest their time, money and talent in the region.  In short, TIME believes Americans should be proud to call Detroit home.  As Time, Inc.’s editor-in-chief, John Huey, wrote on October 5th:

“No city has had more influence on the country’s economic and social evolution. Detroit was the birthplace of both the industrial age and the nation’s middle class, and the city’s rise and fall — and struggle to rise again — are a window into the challenges facing all of modern America.”

Revitalizing the city is obviously a priority for the people of Michigan, as well as those directly affected by the area’s economic woes.  And that TIME is willing to take such an active interest in the region should be inspiring.  But judging by some analysts’ reactions to TIME’s efforts as “crazy and futile,” it seems that not everyone believes Detroit can — or even should — be resuscitated.

We Hate Me

As a former Pittsburgher and current Baltimorean, I can appreciate the uphill battle that once-great industrial cities must fight to rescue their self-image from the wreckage of a collapsed economy.  Detroit was cars, and our car culture has failed us, and so it must seem justifiable and cathartic to blame Detroit for the mess we’re in.

But Detroit is people, just like Pittsburgh and Baltimore are people.  When industries erode, the character of the cities that fueled those industries is disrupted — sometimes for decades.  (Hell, Pittsburgh’s been voted America’s Most Livable City and you still can’t get people to take it seriously.)

So how is it that Americans can write off whole sections of their own country, and delight in their fellow citizens’ struggles?

How do we not yet understand, in the 21st Century, that our nation is a composite of its best and worst, its brightest and dimmest, and that every city is caught somewhere in the cycle between prosper and collapse?

How can we sit back smugly while a city implodes and say “I told you so” or “They had it coming” or “Thank God I don’t live there”?

You don’t want to save Detroit?  Or Pittsburgh?  Or Baltimore, Cleveland, Youngstown, Buffalo…?  You’d rather write them off, and let the people you think were too stupid to escape while they had a chance now play catch-up for the next few years, or decades?

No worries.

Detroit will bounce back.  The blue collar cities have a backbone, and the people who live there take pride in who they are and what they do — even if what they do changes with the rise and fall of industries.  They’ll survive.

Artists will see a story in Detroit, and they’ll move there to create.  Investors will see opportunity in Detroit, and they’ll build there because it’s affordable.  Families will see their futures in Detroit, and they’ll lay down roots there because they want their children to be from somewhere with a history and a horizon.

Say what you will about the plight of the Rust Belt, but it was there before you were, and it’ll be here after you’re gone.

And if you can’t get behind that image of America, convincing you might not be worth the effort.

When Something to Be Desired was in regular production, we created a pair of Halloween specials.  For a show that revolved mostly around people talking, these exercises in stunts, squibs and decomposing makeup were a nice change of pace.  If you’ve never seen them before, indulge yourself — zombies, vampires and sarcasm, oh my!

Having now fully recovered from PodCamp Pittsburgh 4 (including two additional days of travel), I can finally sum up the entire experience in one word: necessary.

If you’re like me, you spend more time online every day than you’d like to admit (or than your significant other thinks is sane).  You create media, you consume media, you share media and you form tenuous “relationships” with people you’ve never met.  You develop a cabal of fellow Twitter users or Facebook friends, and you spend your weeks commenting on one another’s lives, actions and opinions, leading yourselves to believe that you’ve formed some kind of meaningful bond in the process.

And then, when you close your laptop, you return to your own four-walled reality without any tangible proof that anything you’ve done made a damn bit of difference to anyone.  Including you.

If Only These People EXISTED Outside of This Magic Electric Box!

What live events like PodCamp — or like this week’s BlogWorld Expo — allow us to do is transfer those intangible relationships we’ve developed online into the physical forms of friendship that we’ve come to expect and understand from our pre-web days.  Suddenly emoticons are replaced with actual smiles and sneers, body language and inflection supply the missing context from our tweets, and human beings prove themselves to be more than a collection of blog posts and Flickr tags.

We realize we are talking to human beings every day, and that we’re not getting the whole story online.  People we disagreed with turn out to be more like us than we thought, and people we look up to are revealed to have the same flaws and idiosyncracies that remind us all that we’re human.

It’s deceptively easy to think you know someone online.  And it’s even more tempting to think you can form an accurate opinion about them based on your electronic interactions.  For example, I didn’t know Steve Klabnick or Eric Williams very well “in real life” before PodCamp Pittsburgh 4, which sometimes made it difficult to keep a level head when we’d be debating politics, theology or intellectual property on Twitter.  When all you know of someone is his avatar, it’s impossible to understand who he is and why he might believe what he says.  And it’s this type of snap judgment in a world of decreasing focus that leads us to believe we know people better than we do.

And then suddenly, when you’re face to face with someone at a live event, it hits you:  we really are all in this together, and our differences are mostly a matter of opinion.  At the end of the day, we’re all just a long walk and a 649 shot away from seeing eye-to-eye — or at least from agreeing to disagree.

Because there’s more to life than snap judgments and ironclad theories.  There’s the timeless value of sharing a room with people who all have at least one thing in common, and then discovering the depth and degree of the differences.  Which is why the electricity of a live event beats the online equivalent every day of the week.

Three years ago, Pittsburgh became the second city (after Boston) to host a PodCamp.  Now, with PodCamp Pittsburgh 4 happening this weekend, I’m proud to announce that the event I helped to create has just sold out for the first time.*  But by “sell out,” I mean in terms of capacity, not ethics.

As you may have noticed recently, I have a big problem with people exploiting social media channels (as well as exploiting people) to make money and build reputations through dishonesty.  The basic tenet of social media is that “your voice matters.”  But, at the risk of coming off like an elitist prick, I’ll add one caveat to that statement: “Your voice matters as long as you’re not a valueless asshole.”

Hence, if we’ve done our jobs as organizers properly, here are 10 Things You WON’T Be Learning at PodCamp Pittsburgh 4:

• Hate Speech: The Internet Makes It Easy!
• How to Be an Anonymous Racist Douchebag
• Sexism: It’s Okay!
• How to Steal Other People’s Work for Fun and Profit
• Why You Should Join a Multi-Level Marketing Scheme
• Death Panels Aren’t So Bad: Why Old People Don’t Belong Online
• How to Organize a Fringe Group Militia Using LinkedIn
• Gaming the System for Numbers So You Can Feel Loved
• Who Needs Literacy When You Can Have a Blog Instead?
• Stalking Your Ex: How Social Media Can Bring You Together (Again)

Granted, PodCamp Pittsburgh is an open-source “un-conference,” which means people can sign up to host whatever sessions they’d like.  But we do have a quality control process in place that’s meant to ensure two things:

• The people who are speaking know something about their topic, and
• Their topic won’t do more harm to the world than good.

If you feel we’ve failed in our mission to weed out the bastards, let us know.  It won’t happen again.

Thanks for caring, and I’ll see [some of] you at PodCamp.  (And if your socializing skills need a jumpstart, fear not: just remember this.)

*  Technically, because non-VIP tickets to PCPGH4 are free, people can still attend as walk-ins.  But since The Art Institute of Pittsburgh does have a maximum capacity of 500, and since all 500 spots have been claimed, this event is a “sell out.”  Get cozy.

Yesterday, I got an email alerting me to a new resource for entrepreneurs in Pittsburgh — something called Pittsburgh Business Builders.  They meet twice a month and give fellow entrepreneurs the opportunity to:

• Network with like-minded entrepreneurs
• Meet professionals in your neighborhood
• Learn about a wide variety of business strategies
• Discover new ways to market your business

Sounds like a great idea, right?  I thought so, but I no longer live in Pittsburgh, so I Twittered about it instead.

Shortly thereafter, Pittsburgher Jami Broom DMed me on Twitter to point out a questionable aspect of the PBB.

NOTE: The remainder of this post has been removed, as requested (via threat of legal action for defamation) by Andrew J. Cass.  After researching his request, I’ve come to two conclusions:

• Truth and opinion may be two legal defenses against defamation claims, but
• Andrew J. Cass certainly has more time and money than I do.

So, as interested as I may be in hearing which elements of my original post he considered libelous, the near-complete absence of any negative commentary or criticism whatsoever concerning Andrew J. Cass online leads me to believe he’s either a far better human being than I am or a far more effective litigator.  And, either way, we each have better things to do than sit around in a stuffy courtroom debating the intentions of words — for example, he digs paddle-boarding, while I dig sarcasm.  And you don’t often find room for either of those in a court of law.