Michael Martine (aka Remarkablogger) has a great group post on his blog this week where a number of his readers weigh on in ways to come up with ideas for blog posts. The post is called Open Discussion: How Do You Come Up with Ideas for Blog Posts? I weighed in in the comment section.

Another way to come up with ideas for posts (or any content) is to try the Content Idea Matrix that I wrote about earlier this month.

Just as a note on the final weekday of January 2010: this has been an AWESOME month at Broadcasting Brain.  Traffic, comments, engagement, etc.  have been the best they’ve been in over a year.  This, folks, is very heartwarming.

I hope you all stick around for the months and years ahead!  (And feel free to invite some of your friends, too!)

This is a book review of The Whuffie Factor – Using The Power of Social Networks To Build Your Business by Tara Hunt of HorsePigCow.com.

How I got the book:

It was a Christmas present, on my list. I’m serious.  You’ll be seeing me repeat this phrase for awhile.

Background:

Tara Hunt is a marketer and an entrepreneur who has been blogging for a number of years.  This book captures her thoughts about how to build social capital (or reputation or goodwill or karma…) at the organizational level.  Whuffie is the term coined by writer Cory Doctorow in one of his novels to represent a kind of currency, derived from reputation, good deeds, and favorable public opinion.  In his novel, whuffie permits the individual to enjoy a higher standard of living depending on how much whuffie they have.

Hunt takes the basic concept and uses it in the real world.  She also extends it to businesses as a concept for them to use as a means to build up goodwill with customers, members of the communities they participate in, and the general public.  If done right, the book suggests, whuffie can help drive business growth.

The strengths:

Tara writes in a warm, conversational style.  She manages to work in her personal experiences without being boastful, merely presenting them as living examples of the concepts that she’s writing about.

The book intermingles both whuffie and community management, which provides the bridge to the enterprise being able to accumulate and use whuffie.  There are a number of examples of companies doing things to build whuffie/goodwill from the very beginning, as well as companies like Dell that weathered a storm of negative opinion and used social media tools to help win back the confidence and trust of its customers.

The table which gives examples of how to build (and lose) whuffie is a practical tool, as is The Entrepreneur’s Whuffie Checklist.

The areas for improvement:

One thing that I think would have served this book well was to reference Seth Godin’s The Purple Cow (which I highly recommend if you are into marketing, spreading new ideas, and generally trying to do amazing things) and his concept of “remarkable” in the section where Tara writes about being “notable”.  To me it’s the same thing and I think it would have been a good idea to acknowledge where Seth Godin had already gone with this concept.

Another thing is that I found that the book rambled a little bit, bouncing back and forth between personal whuffie building and community building.  It felt like the book was charting a path between two similar but ultimately different subjects.  I still see whuffie as something individuals, not businesses, accumulate.

Other points of interest:

I particularly enjoyed the anecdotes about Moleskine, Threadless, and Ma.gnolia.

Verdict (out of 10): 8 (recommended; some good ideas to help companies to grow a heart and a soul)

My methodology for book reviews and affiliate links: I’ll provide an Amazon.com affiliate link (or other related affiliate link) for content if I think it’s worth buying and reading. If I don’t, I won’t provide an affiliate link. The affiliate link helps fund my content creation activities.

If you would like me to review YOUR eBook, book, or other content, please send me an E-Mail at markdykeman@gmail.com to get instructions on how to send your book or content to me. You’ll get my honest opinion about your book, either publically or privately.

Sometimes clarifying metaphors or terms just add more confusion.

I remember the first time that I heard the term full court press in a business context.  I’m not a basketball fan, so I hadn’t heard it used before.  In the context of the E-Mail in which I discovered the term, I deduced that this was a metaphor for sustained effort to achieve a business objective.

Obviously somewhere in my education I had forgotten to brush up on  (let alone play) sports as a means of business communication.  Every industry or even business function develops its own shorthand and constructs acronyms at a speed that multiplying rabbits would envy.  Businesses model themselves after the military or competitive sports teams, so it’s natural that terminology carries over from one realm to another.

One sport that I do (or did, haven’t followed it for awhile) know something about is baseball.  (Aside:  I don’t know much about hockey, though.  I worry that the government will revoke my passport and transfer my citizenship to some other country, but so far they haven’t.  After all, Canadians have the hockey gene, right?)  I know a bunch of terms about plays, statistics, tactics, and so on.

When I started to see the term inside baseball being used a lot by some people on Twitter (largely used by PR, communications, marketing and social media folks), it took me a little longer to pick up on what they meant by that.  I eventually did figure that out.  Inside baseball originally meant a kind of baseball strategy which focused on keeping the baseball in the infield (if the three bases and home plate of a baseball field form the shape of a diamond, then the infield is the area within that diamond shape) so that various players who had positions in the infield could collectively work together to prevent the other team from scoring runs.

But look at this:

Inside baseball – a description of this metaphor from Wikipedia:

The expression “inside baseball” is sometimes used as a metaphor for details or minutia of a subject so detailed that they generally are not well known by outsiders.

You would conclude, then, that inside baseball is used when people catch themselves speaking in the jargon of their industries and need to use more generally known language to make their point to outsiders.  As in:

“Talking about conversions, PPC, whuffie are too inside baseball – we need to speak to the general public.”

I find this amusing, though, because a number of people will just use the term inside baseball and then not explain it.  Therefore, outsiders like me have to figure out what they really mean.

In an ironic twist of fate, the term inside baseball becomes, in fact, inside baseball.

Next up (someday) on Broadcasting Brain:  moving the needle.  Is this a term used by:

• dentists
• race car drivers
• social media marketers
• heroin addicts
• audio engineers
• or accupuncturists?

Don’t touch that dial!

In business terms, taking stock means to perform a count of your onhand physical inventory to make sure nothing’s lost, ruined, or stolen.  It’s all about keeping the (financial) books balanced.  The mental equivalent of taking stock is to examine your thoughts and feelings about anything and everything to gain clarity, perspective, and an ability to refocus.  Hence, I’m taking stock with this post.

This post on writing (arguing that most bloggers really aren’t writers) has stuck in my mind like the linkbait that it probably was (as per Jonathan Fields’s assessment of the post).  On the one hand, many bloggers are not fiction writers (or maybe they are, especially the ones that are scraping content or putting together content solely for the purpose of selling ads).  On the other hand, some bloggers are great essayists, analysts, journal writers, and entertainers.

I care a bit less about skill than I do about the ability to tell good stories that ring of authenticity and feeling.  I admire people who are willing to put their egos and feelings on the line to tell the world about important things, even if they’re only important to the writer.  I love it when people dig deep into a subject to find the gold.  I especially dig people who engage with their communities and the people that they read about.

I am also fascinated by the idea of timeless, enduring writing.  I’m not convinced that it has to be the product of hours of hard, sweaty, nervewracking work that requires five edits and a legal team to help it see the light of day.  Nor do I think that spewing your surface thoughts onto a screen is the key to enduring prose, either.

I am getting tired of formula, though.  I use it from time to time:  carefully constructed headlines, gripping opening statements, categories, tags, keywords, images, headings, subheadings, etc. to make sure that your content is scannable and easily understood when getting fleeting glances of your iPhone screen as you dash madly to catch your bus or taxi on the way to work.  After all, attention is scarce and we want to focus on relevant content with as little effort as possible.  In a world where we can go numb from exposure to so many choices of opinion, content, and topic, we’ve got to make it easy, right?  Formula provides the road signs, familiar positioning, and fits within existing patterns of perception and cognition and allows the content to slide in with minimal friction.

And then it occurs to me that I don’t like some of my favorite blogs as much as I used to.  Part of the reason is that they’re mature publications in maturing niches, so it can be hard to bring forth new and interesting content.  There’s more of a focus on the quantity of content that’s being produced, of bringing in new voices, of starting to focus more on products and services.

You know what I miss?  I miss some of the thoughtful analysis, deconstruction, and hypothesizing that I was seeing in some of these blogs a couple of years ago (I wrote about some of these kinds of posts here (about paper) and here (about the rise of microblogging) .  I miss the feeling that I felt when some of the stuff I was reading about was new to me and it opened my mind to new possibilities.  Maybe these more meaty posts are out there elsewhere, waiting to be discovered.

If only I manage to retrain my own attention span to watch for them and actually read them through.

Maybe I need to start writing more of them myself.

#   #   #

Somewhere between the lands of business oriented blogging (ultimate goal to sell products and services, although not directly at times); news or journalism (just the facts, man); and personal journaling, I think there’s a realm of debate, exchange of knowledge and ideas that makes us all smarter, more thoughtful, and hopefully generous enough to share without trying to wring every last unit of money out of it.

That’s where I’ve built my treehouse, where I survey the world, and from where I share my thoughts here at Broadcasting Brain.  I don’t have many answers, but I do have lots of questions.  And, of course, you’re always welcome to visit.

What do you think?  Has the larger social media sphere (including blogs, of course) lost something during the past couple of years?  Or am I digitally myopic?

I haven’t conducted many interviews recently on Broadcasting Brain.  I used to do E-Mail interviews under the banner “Catch The Brainwaves” and I found myself wanting to try them again.  This time around I’m calling them the Thoughts From series.  This is the first interview in this new series.  The format is still the same, though:  I E-Mail the questions to the interviewee and have them respond.  It works very well.

Terry O’Reilly is the mover and shaker behind the award-winning audio production firm Pirate Radio & Television.  He also hosts the insidiously insightful CBC Radio radio series The Age of Persuasion and co-authored the book of the same name with writer/producer Mike Tennant.  Disclosure:  I am big fan of The Age of Persuasion, so this was a real treat to do.

How much of your daily information fix comes from “old” media (newspapers, radio, TV, magazines, etc.) vs. “new” media (blogs, E-Mail lists, websites like Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, etc.)?

Daily, I get info from online news sites, blogs, websites, Twitter, etc. I also devour magazines and I love newspapers, but like to hold them in hand. They pile up all week, and I read them all on Saturday mornings with a big cup of coffee. My wife laughs at my habit of even reading old newspapers, ones that I didn’t get to, that may be three weeks old. But I read everything. Big reader.

Assuming that you are a person of a certain age (but we won’t pin you down to which age, despite what Wikipedia says), have you found the changes in technology over the past 20 years to be easy to adapt to or have you experienced any challenges?

That is a very good question. I love the distinction between “digital natives & digital immigrants” – which I use in my speeches a lot. Being a digital immigrant, I must say, overall, it’s been easier than I thought. Some speed-bumps in the early days, and I have to admit that I do call on our Pirate tech guys fairly frequently, but when I take a big look back, it’s been a surprisingly smooth transition. (When I started in advertising, faxes hadn’t even arrived yet. We sent everything by cab in those days. Everything. Edited radio by razor blade, used White Out in typewriters. Ah, the good old days.)

Do you find that the speed, ease of use, and reach of new media have introduced sloppiness and inaccuracy into communication, are things just about the same, or has communication improved in the digital age?

I do think there is an increased level of sloppiness and inaccuracy now. I went to see Malcolm Gladwell speak recently, and he said his expertise, his unique advantage, was his ability to research in a library. He could do it better than anyone else. But now, with the internet, anyone can find anything. So it’s no big accomplishment. Technology has made his unique ability somewhat pedestrian in this day and age. But – but – so much of what is available at our fingertips is inaccurate. And those inaccuracies spread like wildfire on the net, so it’s even difficult to find the original thinking, because the same documents have been embedded in site after site.

Could you survive a day without a cell phone or PDA?  A week?  A month?  Or is it irrelevant to your daily routine?

Ha! I’d like to say, yes, of course I could go a week without it. That would be a lie. My cell phone has become an incredibly important part of my daily routine. Even as a director who is locked up in recording studios for hours, it lets me check emails and respond, and keep my business going, instead of a Tsunami of emails building up, looming at the end of the day. It is homogenizing us all to an extent. For example, in a studio the other day, we were all looking at our cell phones at the same time, and I asked what time it was. Everyone said 3:41. Interesting, that all our phones had exactly the same time, because all cell phones get fed the exact same clock time now. It’s a small thing, but we all see and hear the same things now due to PDAs and the net. Someone said there is no “local” anymore. We’re all one big community now. Not sure yet if that’s good or bad.

Does Seth Godin really know what he’s talking about when he says that the mass media are dying (or dead)?  He seems to be on the mark when it comes to newspapers.  Or does mainstream media (particularly television) still have a future, especially in the realm of advertising?

Historically, radio didn’t kill newspapers. TV didn’t kill radio. The VCR didn’t kill movies. So when you look at it in that context, the answer is no, mass media will just re-adjust and re-calibrate. Just saw some new research yesterday. It asked adult Canadians what their favourite ads were and where they saw them. 79% said on TV. Only 5% could recall seeing anything on the internet. Kind of shocking when you see such a huge migration of marketing dollars moving online. Interesting. The big question, of course, is “Will it be different this time?” Is something more profound going on. Time will tell.

How do you deal with the contradictions and differences of being both a media maker (Pirate Radio and Television) and a presenter/host of a nationally syndicated public radio program (The Age of Persuasion)?  Or are there any?

I don’t feel any contradictions. Our radio show (and book) is all about looking at advertising from the inside out. Mike Tennant and I are both working ad men. We’re not journalists, or academics or pundits. We’re in the trenches. We just wanted to bring the public on a fun and wild ride through the hallways of advertising. Show the public how we think, why we do what we do, and how marketing decisions are made. That’s the platform of our show, so it’s no secret.

One thing I’ve noticed about radio broadcasters or people who normally work in audio format is that many of them tend to hold their faces very still (e.g. Don Imus) while they focus on using their voices – pitch, tone, volume, speed, rhythm, enunciation, etc.  You do voice work but you do presentations and speaking.  Did you ever have to consciously work on body language and facial expressions as part of your public speaking work or conversely have to “tone it down” when doing radio?

Yes, a little. You do have to stay very still while sitting in front of a microphone. But when public speaking, you want to be more animated. I do notice that when I’m recording Age of Persuasion, I use my hands a lot, to gesture. So the leap to the stage was a small one for me. Remember, too, that all ad people have to be good presenters in a boardroom, and that takes a lot of animation and theatricality. So the job makes me expressive as a rule.

Were there things that happened while writing your book with Mike Tennant that completely surprised you?  Put differently, did the process of writing and publishing a book meet your preconceived notions of book writing and publishing?

Learned a lot through that process. First, we had to create a “spine” for the book, whereas the radio show doesn’t have one, per se. As well, our editor would sometimes say, “That sounds like a radio line, make it a print sentence.” Mike and I would bristle at that a lot, because we wanted our jump to print to capture the sound, pace and style of the radio show. So sometimes we listened, sometimes we stamped on our hankies to keep the writing intact. We had no idea that the author is responsible for getting all the quote permissions and pay for them. We had no idea that the authors had to gather all the photos and pay for them (that’s why there are none in our book, too expensive). We had no idea we had to pay for someone to create the index at the back of the book. So, the writing was a joy, but the mechanical part of putting a book together was definitely a learning process. The book tour was a great experience. Meeting fans of the show is the very best part.

Pretend you wake up one morning and you discover that the Internet was destroyed overnight and won’t be restored for a long, long time.  What’s the first thing you do?

Save and store all the information I’ve pulled from the net over time. Then renew my library card and call Malcolm Gladwell.

Do you have any wisdom or advice that you’d like to share with our readers?

More than anything, I believe in trusting your gut feelings. The day I started doing that, my entire career changed. When you’re young, you have to pay your dues and learn. But there will come a time when you will start to hear your gut feelings, and the trick becomes to “trust” your gut feelings. Hard to stick your hand up in a room full of senior people and say you completely disagree with the prevailing sentiment in that meeting. But that day will come, and it will be your coming-out party. Your career will change that day for the better.

Thanks to Terry O’Reilly for spending the time to respond to this interview!

One of the cool things about travelling to different parts of the world is meeting people you wouldn’t normally meet.

In photo (from left): Glen Allsopp, Mark Dykeman

Glen Allsopp is the driving force behind the Viperchill and PluginID blogs.  He’s doing some impressive work in blogging, internet marketing, etc. including a successful eBook and tons of guest posts.  Smart guy.  We met for a beer and a meal in some nameless pub in Amsterdam in January 2010.  We talked shop for awhile and had a great chat.

Glen’s originally from the UK, but recently spent a year living in South Africa.  After a brief return to England he moved to Amsterdam and I think he has other destinations in mind.  It sounds like he’s got even bigger plans in store for the remainder of the year.  Unfortunately, to keep a lid on security, he mindwiped me before I left the restaurant and so I can’t actually recall the details of the conversation (OK, at least part of that last sentence is untrue).

He’s a great writer with great ideas and Glen is definitely one to watch in the years ahead.