Stop doing it moment

If you don’t know why you’re doing something, stop doing it.

I’m not sure where or when that phrase came into my life, but it has stuck with me. Clear, simple and yet, not anyone’s motto or creed. We Americans, we do a lot, always doing more and more.

I came to my stop doing it moment recently with my job. I felt stuck and like I wasn’t making progress on my life. I wasn’t moving towards any goal I had – wasn’t building the skills for the type of job I wanted, wasn’t making enough money to have a nest egg or a house, wasn’t happy or healthy. I didn’t have any energy or drive to work on my personal projects. I was in a morass.

Ergo the stop doing it moment. I gave notice and walked away last week, without a new job but a goal to work for myself, for others, and on making my life and others lives better. Just up and away and I feel so much better. Already, I have more challenging work, more meaningful interactions with those I work with, the time and leisure to take a walk before work to brainstorm, to work a little Sunday night to take Tuesday afternoon off, to stop and make myself something delicious to eat and to take the time to eat, just eat, instead of shoving food with my left hand while mousing with my right.

I was lucky. I knew a place to give me freelance work, a partner who was supportive and could cover most of our bills, and saving enough to cover the rest. I also had the certainty of pessimism. I knew that I wouldn’t ever get those skills or make that money. If I waited for the economy to get better, I would stuck waiting. Thus the question, for me, was simply if not now, then when?

Most people don’t have that option, at least for their jobs. They know why they’re doing it – money, health insurance, stability. But I do think everyone has a stop doing it moment in their lives, waiting for recognition.

What would you do with that part of your life/time/energy/self that you got back?

Why freelancing is awesome (for career changers or earlyish career people)

So recently I’ve been doing a lot of freelancing.  And it’s been great.  Certainly there are the typical problems with freelancing- no guarantees about how long the work will last, crazy running around, the prospect of paying a ton of taxes, the inability to actually see any of the people I’ve been working with.

However, other than that it’s probably been the best thing I’ve ever done for my career and skill base.  Even if I had gotten the most perfect beautiful entry-level qual research job (which I would still love perspective employers) there’s no way I could have gained all the skills I have in the six weeks I’ve spent freelancing.  I’ve done quant in-store interviewing, I’ve done flow-counting, I’ve done shopalongs, I’ve done ethnographic documentation of shopper behavior, I’ve creating fielding documents, I’ve learned how to use NVivo, worked on qual analysis with a really talented researcher, and now I’m learning how to form a story for a client and create a deck while learning how to start the research process from the client call on.

In a word, it’s been awesome.  I have gotten such awesome experience.  Part of that is the great team I’m working with and their willingness to trust me and let me learn along the way while offering my good base skills as a trade off for that.  For someone who has been trying to make a career change, from academic research to market research, it’s exactly the kind of experience I need to prove myself to future employers and beef up my resume along with really challenging my brain.

Freelancing has also been helping with the worst mental aspects of being unemployed.  I don’t know about everyone else, but the constant rejection was really getting to me, and having people be so enthusiastic about my work has really helped my outlook.  That alone has been so valuable, but there’s also the mental challenge.  I feel like I’m really growing in a way that was impossible for me while simply being unemployed, even with all the classes, informational interviews, and literature reading that I was doing.  There’s just something about working with a team, rushing to pick up skills.

I know freelancing isn’t for everyone.  It’s certainly not even for me longterm, I crave the security of a day-to-day job and the ability to really build long-term skills.  I also know I’m really lucky that I do have a little financial security, living with someone who can pay most of the bills and not rely on my inconsistent income.  But if you can, even a little, especially if you want to make a career change or try to get into a field with a few solid skills under your belt, I definitely recommend it.

Tweet Ads?

I think at this point everyone’s written about the NYT article on advertising in tweets, but I want to highlight and add commentary to a couple of points.

It really makes me think about a major point that someone made in the research I did for my MA.  Trust online is contextual.  We were talking about if someone had lied to her about their gender and she said – if Martha is Mark and we talked about fandom, then I don’t care but if Martha is Mark and we talked about being pregnant, I would be furious (I’m paraphrasing here).  So what does this have to do with the Twitter advertising case?

First social media is about connection and connections have a certain base of trust.  That trust is that you aren’t misrepresenting what you are to a level where our connection feels false.  This can be difficult for some people to understand because the connection is completely contextual.  I can follow Henry VIII on Twitter, know that of course it’s not really Henry VIII, but have a level of trust that I will receive quality information and that information will be from the perspective of what if Henry VIII had a twitter account.  I wouldn’t want either non-Henry info or even information presented from say, Anne Boleyn’s perspective.

Along with that is the idea of self-consistency.  When you follow someone on Twitter you expect consistency of self-presentation.  That is, when you follow @mannysdeli, you expect to get information about Manny’s Deli, related deli or food information, and maybe local Chicago related information.  You don’t expect information about oil changes because not only is that not relevant, it’s not consistent.  Delis =/= oil changes.  When it comes to the Twitter accounts of individuals that are assumed to be based on the lived reality of an actual person (henceforth referred to as “personal accounts”), there’s more flexibility.  We automatically know that people are complicated and have complicated lives.  So we understand if someone who usually posts about say, SEM practices, might one day ask for information about oil changes.  That is, we give a lot of wiggle room to personal brands and that actually helps make personal accounts seem more human.  It gives us a more multifaceted view of the person that we are connecting with.  We can identify with their oil change issues and that makes them more than a stream of SEM information.  This is also why we don’t generally see this as irrelevant information aka spam.  As long as it’s kept to a certain percentage of information, most of us actually see it as relevant.

That’s where the problem with paid advertising comes in.  If it’s not relevant to our interests and it’s not based on the lived reality of our connection, it seems fake and, potentially, a break of trust.  Advertising can be relevant and specially targeted advertising that is considered in regard to followers needs can be appropriate (e.g. specialty SEM software in the above example) but should always be considered in terms of quality.  If it’s not a good product, that can also break trust.  Additionally, some people may find paid advertising suspicious no matter what- which is why you should always honest about the nature of a recommendation.  Meanwhile, if advertising isn’t relevant, the idea of connection becomes even more prominent.  In essence it is a Martha becomes Mark situation.  If you suggest a product and I am interested because of our connection and find out that your motivation isn’t sharing knowledge with me but making a profit off of our connection?  I’d be surprised if people weren’t annoyed.  You don’t usually go around making money off of your personal contacts if there isn’t a good reason and you certainly don’t do it without being clear about what you’re doing.

Additionally the level of advertising to real content mentioned in the article seems high enough to seem spammy (1/4); the ads seem particularly not targeted; and the individuals don’t seem to be portraying their tweets as an income stream (an example of this outside of Twitter is Dooce- she makes it very clear that her website is how she pays the bills.  Even with that disclosure, she still gets a lot of angry mail about it).  This post at GoingSocialNow also had some good points about the risks to those who tweet for cash.

 

Exposition, conflict, resolution?

It’s been a crazy crazy week, but I wanted to share this one insight about myself that I figured out while running around.

Last week I took the world’s longest personality and cultural report, ostensibly to get at my true competencies.  After finishing, I went through the results nodding “good at communication” of course,  ”weak in selling” agreed,  ”high in conflict management” oh- wait what?  I hate conflict.  I come from the WASPiest family ever where annoyance was expressed by a crook of the eyebrow and complaints were never ever said out loud, merely implied.  I hate arguing with people, have never understood the idea of debating politics for fun, and always listen and try to understand where other people are coming from to minimize upset feeling as possible.

That last point is probably why I got ranked so highly on conflict- I’m willing to listen, apologize, and work with others.  However, while working on a group project this week, I realized something else.  I’m a group pusher.  I don’t argue with people but I do keep pressing them- to form their ideas into an actual actionable plan, to think through the consequences, to just make a decision already.  And, without really realizing it, when I push I manage to get my own way pretty often.  If I have a good idea, I never have to sell it directly, it just ends up in the end plan.  So maybe that’s why I’m good at conflict, because it just doesn’t happen if I can do anything to stop it and yet still manage to get my influence felt.

Quick Hit

I thought this quote about Jon & Kate was spot on:

“It became a show that was completely suited to a multi-platform world,” says Ginia Bellafante, TV critic at The New York Times. “You can’t just watch Jon & Kate on television and understand it anymore. You have to participate in it on all these different levels—tabloids, news shows, talk shows, the blogosphere. Jon & Kate became unintentionally brilliant because it demanded so much other consumption to find out what was ‘real.’” From here.

If you believe evolutionary psychologists, which I do sometimes, people are hard-wired to try to find out social information.  It was imperative to get along with the people around you to survive.  We still have that urge now- think about how pervasive gossip is.  So it makes sense that as the story becomes more and more complex, it becomes more intriguing to us.  We like the challenge.  This also addresses the nature of “realness” – logically we know we’ll never actually know the ‘truth’ but we still want to try to scavenge up enough facts to guess- like a celebrity gossip version of Clue.

Steven Johnson’s book Everything Bad is Good for You also addresses the issue of the intellectual challenge of TV and I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand the evolution of media in the U.S.

The Twubble with Twitter

Ah Twitter.  Everyone I meet either adores it or thinks it’s an abomination on Earth.  Honestly, I’m ambivalent.  I love that I can be in contact with people who I would never otherwise be able to talk to.  I love that it encourages people to talk about the mundane and the challenge of getting an idea into 140 characters is great.

That said, I hate the amount of ‘noise’ on my tweet stream combined with the pressure to be on it all the time.  It’s always there, with ever more information piling up and yet, 90% of it I don’t want.  Even the stuff I want, like links to great articles, there’s simply too much of and I’m speaking as someone who is: a. unemployed, b. a really fast reader, c. spends most of her free time online and d. a strong believer in creating connections through social media.  If I’m feeling like there’s too much noise, I’m certainly not the only one.

When you think about it, that level of noise feels like spam, is spam, because, really at the base of it, spam is things that don’t fit your wants or needs trying to demand your attentions.  And especially in a time and place when there are a LOT of demands on people’s time and attention, that’s not always ideal (see the amount of complaining on Facebook both about the new feeds and applications for how vocal and upset people can be about having to filter out extraneous information).

This can be a huge problem for Twitter because the culture encourages the creation of ever-more information.  Retweeting (RT) or the practice of copying a tweet with a citation is considered good manners (because you’re helping someone spread their ideas and/or brand) and a way to make friends/gaining attention from people who you’re retweeting.  It’s also a great way to “create” more content.  However, it’s a ton of useless when say, 20 or 30 of the people you follow are all sending RTs and thanks for the same information. Twitter is also so fast that to stay relevant you have to keep on tweeting constantly.  That can also be a lot of noise.  And, when it becomes bad enough, noise becomes spam, Twitter itself become spam.  Noise drives people away from Twitter.  I was talking with a friend this weekend and she fully admitted that the amount of noise (constantly piling up information that had no value to her) is one of the major reasons why she quit Twitter.

One of the major factors of social networking stickiness (people staying with the particular network) is the actual social network.  This is one of the reasons why I don’t think Facebook is going anywhere.  Even if young or tech-savvy people move somewhere else, they’ll still come back to Facebook because everyone is on it- from Grandma to your coworkers.  That’s a lot of pressure to keep coming back.  For a lot of people, Twitter doesn’t have that, at least not yet and so it’s easy to drop.

So what you say, Twitter is cool and I love it and all you technophobes can go hang out on MySpace.  Problem is, Twitter is the new marketing frontier (or represents it, my guess is it’s just the frontman for a particular type of mobile marketing) and unless your target market is, well, marketers, social media gurus, and celebs, you can’t talk to people who aren’t there. And you’d have to provide a pretty big benefit to get people to come back and stick around.  (You might entice people with discounts as the newest Razorfish report finds, but unless you keep giving them people will leave.  They’ll also ignore you when they’re not in the market for whatever you sell).  You’d also really have to work on trust- proving that you aren’t just using Twitter to spam people and that goes for folks already on Twitter as well.

So what can you do?  1.  Talk to your fans where they are.  If they aren’t on Twitter, don’t try to talk to them on Twitter (this seems obvious but you never know).

2.  Figure out what the needs of your consumers are and follow them.  Do they want a large volume of information?  Are they already feeling overwhelmed by everything else in their lives?

3.  Don’t intrude on privacy, especially if you can’t bring huge value for the intrusion.  A lot of people feel really overexposed by the internet and value being left alone highly. DMing people who mention your brand or adding everyone who tweets one of your keywords is just more noise and does not endear them to you.  Comcast helps people, I’m talking to you.  Asking people what is wrong after they tweet “Comcast sucks” only works if you can easily and perfectly solve their problem.  Creating more bad customer service is counterproductive.

4.  Don’t use social media as a unilateral channel.  Twitter (or Facebook or any other social media for that matter) isn’t about telling people simply to buy.  It’s a way to create relationships with people.

5.  Add value where value is defined by your consumers.  Special deals and discounts are great, but also are purchase driven.  If you can add actual value to their lives (digital or otherwise) than not only are you potentially selling your brand, you’re creating a deep and meaningful relationship.  And that’s the exact oposite of spam

Cover Letters

Cover letters, I hate them.  Some weird amalgam of college application essays and those weird formal letters you learned how to write in your sixth grade computer class, cover letters are little packets of desperation and salesmanship wrapped in a reiteration of key terms.  And the advice that is given on the proper writing of cover letters is just, well, crap.  Use your own voice!  But use their language!  Be detailed! But cover everything they mention in the job description!  Tailor for each application! In three paragraphs! (My major critique is that I tend to be too formal.  But I’m a proper kind of girl- I send thank you letters and don’t start eating until everyone at the table gets their food – informal cover letters just horrify that tiny bit of me that one summer read every manners book the local library had).

I was mired in the middle of an All New ™ cover letter and anxious over opening and concluding sentences so I decided to go for a run to clear my head.  Halfway into the second mile I started to compose this blog entry instead.  Really, it’s not a surprise.  Cover letters and more “formal” blog entries are very similar.  They’re both fairly short pieces designed to be both sell your ideas and knowledge while remaining very readable.  An impressive tidbit; an amuse-bouché for the mind as it were.

And in and after a summer of cover letters, of trying to find a new way to say that I was smart and a team player who really could do research, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised I stopped blogging, finding other projects instead to take my time.  I was burned out in trying to differentiate  my one little bag of thoughts and skills from everyone else’s and then pushing them out into the big bad world.  Both the job market and the blogging/thoughts on social media/etc field are stuffed full of people.  Full of good people, bad people, connected, un-connected, cocksure and lost people.

I certainly didn’t know how I fit in and then, then I went for a run.  When I wrote my master’s thesis, I worked on it in three places: in a carrel at the UofC library with piles of books and notecards, on my living room floor with CSI playing in the background, and on the Lakeshore running trail, feet pounding frustration.  The carrel made me feel smart and productive, the floor was mainly organizational and editing, and the trail?  The trail was for letting all the pieces slide around until they started to work. Until I started to work.  If this were an after school special, this is the point where the inspiring montage would happen.  Me training for some race, running up the corporate ladder.  Neither of those is me, but I’m going to try to go clear my head a little more often, write a little more here and a little less there.

Now, if you’ll excuse me I have a cover letter to finish.

 

On Being Real on the Internet (part one of fiveish)

Realness.  On the surface, what is real is so simple.  You instinctively know what is real and what isn’t. But the internet, the internet seems to trip people up.  Suddenly, people seem to lose their gut connection that tells them what is real.  (Leading to the dichotomy of “real life” versus the internet).The lack of sight (as well as other senses) bothers some folks.  

When I started my MA project a couple years ago, my advisor had a particular time of it.  ”How will you tell if they’re telling the truth,” she asked, repeatedly.  Yet the questions that I was asking- about self-identity and self-presentation- are intrinsically internal.  We can see the outside, the final product of self-presentation: clothing, attitude, maybe social networks.  However, the process to getting to that point, how individuals feel about themselves, can only be found out by asking and comparing what the respondents say.  Insert blog text and comments for clothing and attitude, and you pretty much have my project, yet it continued to be a difficulty for her.

However, I don’t think it’s quite as simple as getting over not being able to see people.  The nature of being online is that there are different norms about reality.  Simply, different things matter.  The ways we divvy up people- men aged 16-25 for example, are less important online.  Race, gender, and age can often not matter at all, as long as the things that connections are made on, such as shared beliefs on tiny details* are solid.  

In addition, people who are used to online presentation are also better at understanding multiple presentations of self all given at once.  Off line there is situational social geography- that depending on our situation, we give a slightly different presentation of self.  All of these presentations of self are valid, just keyed to be appropriate for the situation.  Online, we can see all of one’s presentations in a way that we rarely see offline, collapsing ones identity. It’s also more appropriate to play with presentation online and there is space for visibly fake presentation that perhaps there isn’t in “real life”.

My goal for this series is to start to tease apart how these things work and also to explain how corporate organizations can change their expectations of norms to better interact online.  The current schedule (always open to change and suggestion!) is:  norms of realness online, the politics of unmasking people, how to incorporate both on and offline realness, and then some sort of brilliant conclusion (and citations- would anyone be interested in offline citations?).  This is definitely a working project, nothing I say is the one “way things are” and I would love to hear feedback, other research etc.

 

 

* The intrinsic rightness of a slash-pairing, the gut hatred of dpns, love of Papa Lohan gossip.

Something Else We Can Learn from Al Gore*

As those of you who follow me on Twitter know, I had the pleasure of seeing Al Gore speak at the Chicago Theater last night.  It was a little crazy- there were several distinct groups of protesters outside- and I had no idea what he was speaking on, but I was so excited.  You see, I love Al Gore.  The 2000 election was my first election, the first one I could vote in, although I had been doing political work after school for a while by that point.  I postered, phone banked, and went door-to-door for Al.  I had an ongoing fight with my next-door neighbor about a giant Al Gore for President sign (he would take it down and lay it on the ground every morning on his way to work, I would pick it back up on my way to school).  In short, I was an Al Gore flunky, but not just because he was the dem.  I thought he was super smart and I adored his environmental chops.  Anyhow, he didn’t win, I was devastated, I’m sure he was devastated and some eight years later, there we were, with Sir Harold Evans asking him how he got over it all.

It was a topic both he and the first presenter came back to- how did you get over the 2000 election?  When they* were asking about it, it was kinda dumb to be honest.  But Al Gore’s response was brilliant and, I think, good for anyone who is currently unemployed, searching, or just worried (I wish I had video).  He first said that everything he had been through was no worse and probably a lot better than what most of us and America was going through.  He followed it up with the idea that he viewed it as an opportunity to really think about what he wanted to accomplish and another way to do so, which was, of course, An Inconvenient Truth.  I think I’m missing a lot of the passion of his words, but it really inspired me.

The problem is that, for most of us, a primary goal of a job is to make money.  We maybe don’t have the luxury to have a goal of saving the planet from people, at least not as our main goal. So how can we take Al Gore’s advice to heart?  By trying to think past the money to our goals.  Maybe it’s not a job itself that moves to your goals (we can’t all work for non-profits/charities) but a job that lets you work on them (good work/life balance, ample time off, educational funding).  Or a job that will lead to a job working on your goals.  I know it’s hard, it’s hard for me as well and I was really lucky to come upon the idea that thinking about people and their behavior made me happy and that I could find that in market research.  Then again, even with all of his cash and contacts, who would have thought back in 2001 that Al Gore would win an Oscar?

 

*The first being that we all need to be way way more ecologically friendly.  As much as I love Al Gore and that he was being very funny, it is so depressing to hear that we are five years away from not having summer North Pole ice caps (and he didn’t even mention starving polar bears).

**Sir Harold gets a pass from me, however, for the best kiss-off ever.  Somehow there were protesters in the theater (against the idea of global warming I think), and he kept yelling back “go and write a book”.

What’s the Problem With Twitter?

I’ve been in the middle of a big series of posts, so there are a lot of things I haven’t written about, but I think the, for lack of a better term, Twitter-knowledge cavern, is something I really want to talk about.

There’s been a lot of chatter about Twitter by non-Twitters (inspired, I think, by the uptick of Twitter-talk in the MSM, especially the NYT here and here).  This discussion has been, in general, not so positive.  At best, it seems that people unfamilar with the idea think it’s another version of the Facebook status feed, at worst, unbridled narcisism.  After all, who are you to think that people care about your every move? (as epitomized by Current TV’s ‘Twouble with Twitters“)

And yet we live in a society both where we are constantly fascinated by every detail of famous/semi-famous people’s lives (how many pictures of John Mayer getting his dry cleaning do we need?) and that is constantly engaged in the over-share.  We have an entire genre of TV that exists so we can see normalish people make fools of themselves losing weight, trying to get a man, and actively coniving to get their friends to eat bugs.

So what’s with the Twitter hate?  Some observations on types:

*Unfamiliarity with the form.  You haven’t seen that many tweets and from what you’ve heard, it’s just a giant group of people all sharing that they had ham and cheese for lunch.  You don’t know about @zappos and @comcastcares or you don’t care.

*Base Snobbery.  You think you’re too good for Twitter.  This can be based on some unfamiliarity with the form or just that you think that you’re better than the average Twitterite.  You will occasionally acknowledge a good and/or interesting use of Twitter, but in general, don’t like it.  Often, you will insist it’s really about some pathological and sad need to over-share.

*Low Interest in (random) Others.  You aren’t that interested in people as a mass and don’t really see the point.  Like the haters of social media (below), you’d rather call or hang out with the people you do like than interact with them virtually.

*Social Media Overload.  You have no time to think about Twitter because you already have issues keeping up with email, Facebook, IM, and the like.  Possibly, you also think that there is absolutely nothing more you can learn about people that you know after all of those sources.  Unlikely to try Twitter unless it seems like little or no effort is needed.

*Hatred of Social Media.  You hate Facebook.  You’d rather call someone than email them.  You hate chatting online.  Twitter is probably not for you, unless you really really like your phone/texting.  You may also find it creepy that people you don’t know can invade into what you’re doing by following tweets.

*Hatred of Social Media as a Performance.  You feel that somehow internet based interactions or certain ones aren’t authentic.  This may be linked into the idea that people are somehow performing or crafting their identity (I want to play with this idea next week).  Your feelings are not being helped by the publicizing of all the Twitter ghost writing going on.  You may be convinced to try Twitter if close trusted friends are on it and seem to be genuine (or you may stop being their friends if you’re curmudgeonly enough).

*Dislike of Popular Things.  Either you’ve already Tweeted and now you’re over it, or you’re tired of hearing about it and have no interest.  Possibly you throw things when CNN tries to use Tweets as some substitute for actual news.

 

My observations are from a whole lot of conversations, but most recently from this Jezebel post.  I would love to hear other types/be lead to other conversations on Twitter.  Personally, I like it.  I really love how it’s a constant stream of social science research, particularly on media, into my lap.  I also really like using it as an on-the-go notepad, but I do often worry that I don’t have knowledge-dense enough posts.

Edit:  Another good source of anti-Twitter talk, thanks to Meg.