The Wheel of Time Turns
Fall is coming around again, and as it does, the echoes of autumns past come with it. Nostalgia for times past are inevitable as the growing season ends and we buckle down for winter’s arrival; Halloween in older traditions is said to be the day when the veil between living and dead is the thinnest. This brings to mind an expression one of my teachers, Ken Savage of the Winchendon Martial Arts Center, talks about at the beginning of every autumn’s New England Warrior Camp.
If you look only at the calendar, time looks like a loop. It’s September again, it’s your birthday again, it’s this or that again. History repeats itself, and except for maybe feeling a little bit older when you blow out the candles, time doesn’t feel different.
If you look away from the calendar as a loop and see a day as a notch on a wheel, then you can look past the cyclical repetition that permeates our days (“Monday again?”) to a more broad perspective. Like the wheel of a wagon on a trail, the same day, week, month, or year mark comes around again and again, but we forget to look at the progress the wheel makes on the road behind and in front of it. We forget to take a moment to see how far we’ve come in one turn of the wheel, and to look ahead for what adventures await us on the path in front of us.
Take a moment right now to reflect on your journey so far. How far have you traveled and how much have you achieved in the last year? How much different is your life in one turning of the wheel?
Stephen K. Hayes has an especially powerful insight into the familiar Zen painting of a brushed circle. From a limited perspective, it’s just a circle, signifying completion and no end or beginning, but if you delve into it, you see that it’s a spiral being observed from the top down. The brush is illustrating your ascent up the spiral towards achievement, and though it may look like a circle, it’s so much more if you have the broadness of mind to see past the surface.
Life is all too easy to let slip away in meetings, appointments, and routines, only to wake up one day and realize the wagon wheel is at the end of its journey. Know now that though the wheel returns to the same notch every so often, it only travels on any given part of your life’s trail once. Be sure to enjoy the trip before it’s over.
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If marketing designed stop signs…
More truth than comedy.
Hat tip to Rachel Timmerman for this one.
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What is the future of podcasting?
Chris Brogan asks:
But now, think about podcasting. Where is THAT going? If you can guess that one correctly, get back to us all. It’s been a crazy ride so far.
Podcasting is going exactly where it should be going, which is away from “shiny object of the day, one solution will solve your problems” to useful platform in the right context. That’s why events around podcasting like PodCamp have evolved to include other forms of new media besides just podcasting, because podcasting is part of the mix.
Consider what podcasting is for a moment.
+ Audio or video
+ Consume on demand
+ Subscription based for push delivery
+ Some level of interactivity with content producers
These features give podcasting unique advantages and disadvantages. For example, podcasting is NOT a wonderful platform for delivering anything time-sensitive, because you don’t know when someone will tune in. Podcasting stinks at clickstream, because it’s very difficult to track where a user came from unless you’ve bought and exclusively use domain names just for people to remember.
Podcasting is terrific at delivering a lot of information in alternate formats. For people who prefer to listen or watch instead of read, or who listen at certain times of the day (on a commute, for example), podcasting is a perfect way for them to get content they want.
If you are trying to deliver material that doesn’t conform to the context of podcasting and the context of people who enjoy podcasts, your efforts will not be rewarded.
The sense of disappointment or disillusionment with podcasting that a lot of new media producers seem to have lately can basically be summed up as such:
Podcasting by itself is not enough if you’re looking to educate or promote. It’s one channel among many, and it’s not appropriate for every subject and context.
Podcasting is a LOT of work. There are many more companies, services, and ideas now to make things more streamlined than there were in its infancy in 2004, but it’s still a commitment of time and energy.
Podcasting is not a get-rich-quick scheme, any more so than Twitter, blogging, or real estate. This, by the way, is one of the key sources of discontent, as a lot of claims were made early on about podcasting being the way for you to quit your day job and solely be a new media maven.
Podcasting is a form of media, and one of the deadliest mistakes that people make in media is mistaking the medium for marketing. See this blog post for more.
My Student Loan Network CEO, Joe Cronin, recently pointed out in a meeting that he wasn’t sure about the Financial Aid Podcast’s growth prospects. The show is growing, but slowly, certainly not like its initial growth curve in the early days, when the show scooped up many of the early adopters. He asked if, in Seth Godin’s perspective, the Financial Aid Podcast was in a Dip or a cul-de-sac, and suggested one of Godin’s quotes that the podcast might not be worth continuing. Of course, Seth’s full of lots of good quotes, including this one – a woodpecker can peck 20,000 different trees and die of starvation, or it can peck one tree 20,000 times and get dinner.
Podcasting – and the Financial Aid Podcast – is still somewhere around peck 5,000.
We’re effectively nearly 4 years into podcasting’s life. Consider where Amazon.com was 4 years after its founding, in 1998. It was literally just starting to hit its stride in 1998, and Jeff Bezos had said in the Amazon business plan that he didn’t expect to be profitable for at least 5 years. Amazon finally posted its first profit in the 4th quarter of 2002, nearly 8 years later.
This is the kind of patient, long term vision you must apply to podcasting and any other new media platform. There are still hundreds of millions of iPods out there (the low hanging fruit) that have not tuned in, largely because people still don’t know how. We in podcasting and new media are too quick to give up on anyone who’s not an instant early adopter, and as such are leaving people – and money – behind in our mad, attention-deficit rush for instant gratification, instant results, instant fame.
So to Chris Brogan, Joe Cronin, and just about everyone else wondering what the future of podcasting is, stay tuned. There is far more yet to come, if you are willing to have the vision, commitment, and dedication to achieve long term success. If you’re not willing to make that commitment, that’s okay, but don’t expect the same results as the folks who are.
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Media is not marketing
One of the greatest mistakes folks in media – old and new – make is to mistake media for marketing, to mistake product for promotion.
Media is not marketing.
Media is the product.
Marketing and promotion are entirely separate from media, the product.
Consider: if media were marketing, radio and television stations would never need to advertise. Newspaper circulation would reach 100% of the population and the only battle would be for existing market share. There would be no such thing as direct mail or email marketing.
Media is the product. Media is the commodity. Marketing is what gets media into the hands of people who want it. Substitute media for anything else – screwdrivers, CDs, cheese, mortgages, orange juice, hybrid cars, and the lesson becomes obvious. Build it and they will come is long, long gone. Just because you make it doesn’t mean anyone wants it.
This is a lesson that new media especially still needs to learn.
Just because you make your blog, podcast, or video doesn’t mean anyone else is going to use it.
Just because you Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Facebook, or MySpace doesn’t mean anyone is paying attention.
Your new media efforts – your new media output – is the product, not the promotion.
If you want to achieve any level of success, you must master promotion as well as production.
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How your phone can make your email inbox more productive
I get a lot of email. When I came back from vacation this morning, I faced hundreds and hundreds of emails, from status reports to pitches and everything in between. How did I whittle this down to something manageable?
When I face a lot of email on the desktop client, there are a lot of choices – do I label it? Flag it? File it? Delete it? Archive it? Should I respond to this now? Should I put this on my calendar?
Too much choice can paralyze.
To solve this, I gave myself less choice.
It’s simple. I start by checking my mail on my phone. I never respond to email on my phone because frankly, that’s a pain in the ass. Even on the much vaunted iPhone, the keyboard is still too small to be practical for responding to stuff in volume. Instead, I use it as a first-pass filter and have four verbs to apply to each message based on what the GMail mobile interface lets me do quickly:
- Leave it alone
- Star it
- Delete it
- Archive it
Without an option to reply, without all the other clutter, and just four basic verbs, I can clean up my inbox very quickly and productively. This lets me prioritize as well, so that when I do get back to my desktop email client, I have a clear list of the stuff I want to tackle first and in what order.
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