John Winsor

Why I Blog

I'm often asked why I blog and I really have no good answer. It seems like it's one of those things that's just a daily habit.

Reading Ann Althouse's article in today's New York Times, however, crystalized things:

Let life on the blog unfold like off-blog life.

I can understand the urge to enforce standards in the blogosphere, but my inclination runs the other way. Watching a video dialogue on the Web site bloggingheads.tv (where I regularly participate), I rankled when the columnist Eric Alterman said:

“I think it would be good if we had some sort of, you know, blogging — you know — council, where we could condemn people. ... You could still blog if you want. Nobody’s going to stop you. But ... everybody’s gonna know that you’re not to be trusted.”

What undermines my trust is that impulse to control. Those who want such things worry me as much as a candidate with too little body fat.

Eric, let it go! Just like in off-line life, people are full of deception, all too often self-deception. No amount of control will change that. It's sort of like saying, "When you meet a new person they should give you the results of a personality test with comments of their fellow community members attached." What makes a community, in this case the blogging community, so rich is that people have the freedom to be who they want to be. And that includes Eric.

I agree with Ann, what is scary is the inclination to control others.

I blog to think.

Kids as a Fashion Accesorry

As a father of two 5-year-olds I'm fairly new to this parenting thing. However, one observation I have made is that it's really hard not to impose your own fears and in-securities on your kids.

Hence, I had to chuckle when I read David Brook's commentary:

I mean, don’t today’s much-discussed hipster parents notice that their claims to rebellious individuality are undercut by the fact that they are fascistically turning their children into miniature reproductions of their hipper-than-thou selves? Don’t they observe that with their inevitable hummus snacks, their pastel-free wardrobes, their unearned sense of superiority and their abusively pretentious children’s names like Anouschka and Elijah, they are displaying a degree of conformity that makes your average suburban cul-de-sac look like Renaissance Florence?

Like their parents who embarrassed them by yelling and screaming at their little league games a generation ago, many of today's parents are living through their kids as little fashionista.

As a dad, one thing I'm certain of is that 5 year old kids don't really care what label they have on their clothes or what they T-shirt says. As my son Harry keeps asking me, "What's my t-shirt say?" Heck, they can't even read yet!

Rethinking Ourselves

To follow up on the Shift Happens post, it seems we need to rethink what it means to communicate and how we define ourselves.

(via ExperienceCurve)

Shift Happens

Karl Fisch and Scott McCleod remind us that the Information Age has a long way to go before it runs out of steam.

Is your brand ready for the radical shifts that are still to come?

Taking Control

I read this a few minutes ago:

Companies now recognize that “if you get people’s obesity down, cholesterol down, asthma down, you save a lot of money,” said Uwe E. Reinhardt, a health economist at Princeton University.

In order to control their own future, businesses need to take control of everything that affects them. Certainly, health care is a big one. Can the issues around sustainablity be next? Let's hope so.

Finding Success in New Media

As someone who grew up in the newspaper business, it's been sad to watch newspapers stumble by focusing on the distribution strategy of putting ink on paper instead of thinking about the relationship with their customers and delivering information the way they want it delivered. To that effect, last year I wrote:

Most traditional media companies take a tactical approach when thinking about the rapid changes that are occurring. Most media companies today are looking outward trying to figure out how to find new technologies, like podcasts or blogs, which can be bolted on to their current media products, acting defensively to protect their current business model.

Unfortunately, the marketplace is too dynamic for such a tactical approach. These times demand that media companies rethink their core values, being medium agnostic and focusing on strategically shifting their business models. Media companies must recognize that their mission is to facilitate a dialogue for their community members including readers, advertisers and retailers. In essence, setting a community table where all members of a community are invited to participate in the dialogue.

It is in these relationships where real value lies. With a community, co-creative perspective it matters not in what form the dialogue appears or in what direction the information flows.

In a world were there are too many sources of media all of us, as consumers, deeply desire a trusted editor that can make sense of the changing world and deliver the information we need to be a part of a community in a form that we want whether that be a magazine, website, blog, podcast, or vblog delivered via cell phone. The big question is: how can traditional media companies shift their paradigm to become a community facilitator?

I was very hopeful when reading Eric Pfannier's story about Shibsted.

One reason Schibsted might have been able to shift gears so quickly was that some of its top managers were from outside the newspaper business, including several executives hired from McKinsey, the consulting firm. Instead of being wedded to print, analysts said, they were willing to cannibalize existing businesses to develop new ones on the Internet.

Factoid of the Day

In January, the Golden Globes drew 20 million television viewers. And within a day of the ceremony, people.com, the Web site of People magazine, drew 39.6 million page views.

(via The New York Times)

Made to Stick

Check out Chip and Dan Heath's interview on NPR's Morning Edition. The Brother's Heath outline the six timeless reasons of what makes an idea sticky from their new book, Made to Stick: Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotional and Stories.

These six principles of making things stick seem to apply well to marketing yet, in this crowded marketplace it is very hard to stay consistent in applying them.

Are You Happy?

 

Guy points to the Happy Map. Here are the top ten countries: Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Iceland, The Bahamas, Finland, Sweden, Bhutan, Brunei, Canada.

Sadly, the US comes in at #23.

Seth on the Future of Ad Agencies

Seth always gets to the heart of the matter.

“What ad agencies ought to do, in my opinion, is not focus on selling ads anymore. And instead, focus on getting in deeper within the clients, and help the clients make products that people want to talk about.”

“The problem is that ad agencies have defined themselves as the people who take the mediocre products and add interesting ads to them, and washed their hands and say, we can’t do anything about what the factory brings us. And my answer is, of course you can, and the clients actually want you to, you’re just not working hard enough to get that piece of business.”

“Style and fashion spread through the ad agency business really fast. But they’re very bad at changing what they do for a living, they’re very bad at any form of new media, they’re bad at pushing clients to really dramatically, fundamentally reinvent themselves. What they’re very good at is adopting a new slogan or a new look or a new image. That’s deckchair re-arranging.”

“The way to get promoted in an ad agency is to get a new client who spends lots of money on television. Well, if that’s the way you get promoted, what do you think people are going to do all day?”