Views of a Modern World

Everything else Rick writes

Why you need to outline and edit your blog posts

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I often write in a prolific burst when starting a post, rushing to get the thoughts out of my head and onto the screen. But, in looking back over many old posts at ThoughtStorm  or rickcolosimo.com, I see that I have sometimes, or often, failed to edit them as well as I could have.

The bad expositor may, and often does, provide an impressive volume of published work. It may contain a valuable record of profound thinking. But yet it will fail to be very effective.

–Reginald O. Kapp, The Presentation of Technical Information 5 (1948; repr. 1957). 

So here’s to a new habit for a new year!

 

HT, once again, to Bryan Garner.

Is my future locked away in a cabinet?

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I wrote this a while ago while describing my transition to the new Airbook (aka Macbook Air) and some new software, all of which necessitated and facilitated some significant changes in workflow.

I really want to write a lot, lot more. I feel like it’s the crowbar I can use to open my future.

What advice would I give someone who said this to me? I’m not really sure. Something I read earlier today was this line as a repetitive inquiry to get to fundamental needs/desires: “And if you had that, then what?”

So if I was writing a lot, then what? People would read it, I would make money doing it, I like sharing ideas, it doesn’t seem like work to write stuff (as in not boring-drudgery-uninspiring work), I could rearrange my schedule more to spend time with my boys and train for the Ironman. Hmm. I think that’s a good start in terms of giving me some things to ponder.

Quote – my writing style

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I wonder if there’s a WordPress plugin to count all the parentheses in my blog posts.

Quotation of the Day:

A picturesque talent will express itself in concrete images; a genial nature will smile in pleasant turns and innuendoes; a rapid, unhesitating, imperious mind will deliver its quick incisive phrases; a full, deliberating mind will overflow in ample paragraphs laden with the weight of parentheses and qualifying suggestions.

G.H. Lewes, “Sincerity,” in Foundations of English Style 64, 65 (Paul M. Fulcher ed., 1927).

This quote is from Bryan Gardner’s OED word of the day email list. You can subscribe. The nice thing about this quote is that it frames each type as positive rather than setting one model up as the best.

Are you a thought leader?

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At some point, and I’m not sure I can remember why, I started subscribing to Scott Ginsberg’s blog. About now, you’re thinking “Who?” Scott. The Nametag Guy? Oh, now you remember. *That* you’ve seen.

Anyways, he writes some good stuff. My personal opinion is that there’s a lot of chaff in the wheat, if I can deconstruct that metaphor.

I can generally do without the too-clever turns of phrase, and the rehashes of the same sayings in three or four different blog posts.

But.

There has to be a but, right? But, sometimes he comes out with really great, great stuff. Actually profound and meaningful instead of just rambling and space-filling noisemaking.

This definition of “thought leader” is by far the best thing I’ve seen from him. It’s just great.

So short and sweet that it’s like a nine-word poem:

A trusted source who moves people with innovative ideas.

He breaks out the six key themes (trusted, source, moves, people, innovative, ideas) and distills his message down to just a sentence or two. It’s really that good.

So, of course, I’m going to create the entirely opposite effect and write six separate posts, one on each of these themes, to dig deeper into discovering and communicating, living and expressing, your (and mine) thought leadership platform.

  1. Trusted
  2. Source
  3. Moves
  4. People
  5. Innovative
  6. Ideas

(I’ll link each post back here so you can get the full effect if you’re so inclined.)

What experience led you to recognize any of these traits in yourself? What did you do to clarify your message on one of these themes?

Can you share an experience in which you saw the benefit of one of these traits or the harm from its absence?

Email tips? Really?

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One of my favorite authors, Seth Godin, recently posted another little list of email tips.

Of course, they’re pretty much all useful and accurate. I mean, it’s hard to write a “tip” that is flat-out wrong. But I was thinking about it more in the sense of why, in 2010, do high-profile people with things to say get caught up in “email tips” or other minutiae of their fields?

For Seth, email is no more specially relevant (in the sense it’s discussed here) than it is for pretty much anyone. (He does have special things to say about marketing emails to customers and how to dance the tango with that one; but that’s really about marketing, not email.) For Fred Wilson, partner at Union Square Ventures, the basic, undergrad level stuff about finance that he’s been posting as “MBA Mondays” is far below the level at which he’s presumably operating (assumption based on: Wharton MBA, co-founder Flatiron Partners, investor in Twitter, Foursquare, Etsy, Meetup, Return Path, Del.icio.us, Feedburner).

So two questions: first, why don’t we know how to use email yet? Is it really just that everyone my parents’ age is emailing all the time now? Really? For work? They’re in their early 60s. I don’t think there are many folks that age just starting to use email in the workplace, but I could be wrong. Show me, and I’ll believe it.

What should experts write about?

Second, if you’re a hotshot guru, if you’re an actual expert at something, even if that’s being an expert in communicating about something that seems mundane or even unimportant or at least non-mystical to many people (Blogs about wine? Gardening? Cooking? With a waffle iron?), what would drive you to spend time on these types of seemingly low-value questions? Is it just about sharing what’s free?

I thought recently about why I answer basic questions in my field — it’s because my clients are not experts in the field and these seemingly basic questions are not basic for them. So it’s my belief that these readers get value disproportionate (hopefully in their favor!) to my cost to provide it. It gives them a chance to learn about my way of approaching problems, a sense of my depth of of knowledge on the real issues, and maybe even an introduction to me when we wouldn’t have met otherwise. So sure, the Five-Minute General Counsel series is marketing. But it provides value because it’s me talking about topics on which I am an expert.

I am worried about the viability of my potential client base, however, if the pool of startup candidates for Fred’s attention are so far down the learning curve in terms of business planning that they don’t understand discount rates, CAGR, or the law of large numbers. Conveniently for many of them, I’m well-versed in finance too. Financial models and ranger-level attention to detail? Match made in heaven (twice).

Front-line management (which is the starting point for most leadership development) has had its share of tips from me, which I think of as different, but maybe that’s not true. And I’ve written about email and productivity too. Part of the productivity dance is sharing what works for me, a version of the mobile professional: I’m a lawyer and strategic advisor who works with relatively small teams on any particular engagement or matter. My advice is  (not the same as having 75+ people working on a software beta launch).

Email tips? Really?

So back to the main point: really, do we still need email tips? Even people of my generation (early 40s, or what I like to call “mid-30s”) who didn’t see email commonly until after college (for me, it was law school in 1994 at Cornell that introduced email as a common tool), have still had 15+ years of experience with email.

If we keep working at this level, if we don’t expect some kind of improvement, we’re going to be telling people every year for the next 50 years about how to write emails, how to read email, and how to save money for retirement.

We can’t have our smartest guides, our best communicators, teaching remedial classes. Not if we want to make any progress.

Why sharing orphan ideas works

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This BoingBoing post by Cory Doctorow briefly introduces a site/tool created as a result of a tweet he sent just a few months ago.

Mekki and a friend ran with an idea I tweeted last October: “Who’s got a web-based service that will take a huge pastebomb (300K of text) and smarten all quotes, turn — into em-dash, etc?” They created something called Cleantext. I just pasted in the entire text of my next short story collection (written as plain ASCII in a text editor) and out came something that was beautifully formatted and ready to be pasted into a layout program for further massaging. I’m delighted by this — how useful!

I’m really excited by this: it shows that there are people who can execute on an idea and create something. I’m also very encouraged that Cory doesn’t seem interested in getting his “piece of the action.” Of course, given his writing and his recent approach to publishing his books as free ebooks, that’s about what you’d expect.

Congratulations to Cleantext and a hearty well-done to Cory for providing inspiration without no strings attached. Even better, he just gave this site scads of good great word of mouth.

Maybe I’ll finally break out my comp (fka Senior Comprehensive Project) or my not-quite-finished note from law school and give this a try.

I started the orphan ideas category of posts because I wanted to accomplish three goals: first, get these ideas out of my mental baggage list, second, maybe give someone else a little spark, and third, maybe, just maybe, see something get built or done.

Twitter: “What is it good for?”

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As someone who’s only more recently adopted Twitter as a tool, building on top of multiple blogs, Facebook, and LinkedIn, I’ve been consistently faced with two questions:

  1. Is there a specific model for using twitter that makes the most of the tool?
  2. How can folks following hundreds (thousands!) of people get anything done other than read tweets all day?

Question 1

Geoff Managh, of BldgBlog, writes on question #1 and answers the pre-complaint: who wants to read that stuff?
He urges us to separate the tool from the work; that ballpoint pens and twitter are just as capable of capturing (NB: not “producing” like some robot Bartleby) quality writing as moleskines and MS Word. That said, he defaults to a simple position: twitter is a note-taking tool and you can write what’s important to you. There’s less difference between me reading a WSJ editorial that I disagree with and a tweet that bores me; if the content isn’t interesting, we’re supposed to stop reading it, the same way we do with books, magazines, articles, editorials, blog posts, and emails. Notice a trend?

I have recently decided that the microblogging description of twitter might be the real secret sauce here. Once upon a time, there were these things called weblogs, and many of them were like personal online diaries or journals. Eventually, as people are wont to do, some of these weblog-ers started writing more interesting things, and people liked to read those posts. And then it continued. And some of you might have even recognized that we now have blogs and bloggers and no one automatically things that these are a fortiori silly things to do. We now note that well-written blog posts are closer to newspaper columns than the online “dear diary.” Since twitter works over SMS as well, and many people don’t have full-fledged blogs or even carry laptops and smartphones with them everywhere, maybe democratizing access is an important piece of the story. People will find their voices. That’s not a bad thing.

Question 2

I’m hoping to get a mini-interview with Darren Rowse of Problogger to expand on his recent tweets on how he manages the 37,828 people he’s following and his 57,965 followers (as of 1445 Eastern Time on 4/28).

That post will be part II of this mini-twitter series.

Build credibility by writing your own posts

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I recently saw an article with some tips on writing blog posts more quickly. They were all decent tips, but one caught my eye as being either completely misguided or crazy like a fox. Tim Scullin wrote:

Outsource Your Posts

Currently I write all my posts because I am very interested in my topic. However if you can’t keep up or are just not interested in writing about your topic anymore then outsourcing your posts could be a great opportunity for you. You can get quality posts from English speaking writers for as little as $10 a post. Make sure you test out your writers skills before you pay and even then only pay for a few posts at first. If you find their style is horrible or doesn’t fit with your target audience then you can change.

Now, I write all these words with an occasional advance read-through of topics on “Simplifying Complexity.” Blogging is about conversation. It’s about voice, your voice and my voice. We can’t discuss issues, I can’t present information, if you can’t trust that they’re even my words.

Well, some people can. They’re called companies. To me, the only time when “outsourcing” the writing makes any sense is when you are merely putting up blog posts to sell stuff or to create an apparent mountain of content too hard for a DIY competitor to climb. And that’s a race to the bottom.

Outsourcing blog posts is not much different than celebrity ghost-written twittering, or gwittering (that’s ghost-twittering, and yes, I just made it up; TwitterProxy seems like the right word for Obama’s folks – see below). A fellow in the NYT article complains that it’s okay to “ghostwrite” for brands but not for celebrities who are brands. It’s simple — one is sending updates about X using twitter and the other is X sending updates.

For example, we had a PR firm pitch ThoughtStorm, and while we liked their PR activity proposals, the offer to create social network profiles, updates, and so on was definitely a slippery slope for us. Now it’s easier for us to draw a line because we know that there are few people who could create actual content related to what we do as opposed to posting news-ish updates and links to other people’s writings. And we would have simply identified these sorts of updates by labeling them as from a different user/team rather than from me or my partner.

Finally, although I’m unlikely to use the President as an example in many circumstances (and the stories seem to indicate that Obama’s tweets are indeed ghost-written), the Whitehouse blog doesn’t claim to be written by him, when it could be. Any President adopts the words of speechwriters, and there are those heads of state who control their own messages (Churchill is a personal favorite of mine in this regard).

If Winston Churchill could find the time to write his own speeches during WWII, you can respect your audience enough to find the time to write your own blog posts. If you can’t write all the time, just write better when you do.

So, you tell me: Is Tim giving misguided advice, or does he secretly know that only the “inauthentic” will use this tool, get presumably less interesting copy, and thereby cease being in actual or potential competition with so-called “real bloggers?” Or to make a more pointed question: would you be upset if you found out that your favorite blogger was faking it?

Why I work to prototype ideas – C2B

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A recent NYT Bits post describes Genius Rocket, a website that fits my early recognition of C2B (customer to business) business models as a likely future for the Internet.

The first incarnation of thoughtstorm.com was for a business that, in modern terms, facilitated the crowdsourcing of advertising ideas for companies and ad agencies looking for fresh sources. The VC client with whom I spoke at the time, seeking feedback and funding, said that the idea would not really do well because of the inherent risk for buyers: not the IP risk but the knowledge that a baby commercial was the idea of a child molester, or something similarly awful from a PR perspective. I took his advice and continue to respect his opinion and knowledge; the only reason I won’t link to him now is to avoid appearing ungrateful for his honest opinion or casting aspersions on his advice with the benefit of hindsight; I certainly didn’t take the alternative route and followed his advice of my own accord.

Seeing these sorts of articles, about crowdsourcing in general and advertising in particular, has nevertheless always been a bit of a sore spot for me. I’ve always thought that I’ve had a succession of good, even very good ideas, and I’ve apparently done poorly at getting them executed, at creating something substantial that exists in the world.

So this self-awareness is part of the genesis of the “orphan ideas” tag on this site and even on the “official” ThoughtStorm blog. My goals are to:

  1. Release the old ideas from my brain and to-do lists so they’re not cluttering up my thinking and draining my energy, particularly if I’m not actually likely to do anything about them now. GTD advocated moving these to “Someday.” I’m accepting that “Someday” is closer to “Never” and doing something, however small, in taking that step.
  2. Gain psychological credit for having ideas before other people; not really worth much, but it’s a way to help myself accept #1 and points me to #3.
  3. Encourage me to pursue ideas in some tangible format, whether rapid prototyping of a social networking website or actual writing related to a book idea (and then a follow-up with a proposal). Executing is all that really counts; ideas really are a dime a dozen, but people who can turn an idea into something, anything, even an ugly but functional website, are rare.
  4. Recognize value that I’m just not that interested in pursuing and so revealing it for someone else to work with or build on. It’s like seeing a bag of returnable cans in the garbage; I’m not really likely to take it out, but I’ll gladly tell someone who’s collecting cans about it. What’s the harm to me of benefiting society in that tiny way? What have I lost? Nothing, and if you think about the gains from #1, 2, and 3, I’m actually better off.

So the history of ThoughtStorm is now revealed. I’ll try to update that old c2b page into a post so it’s legible and more accessible.