The Speed Of Change

Only Getting Faster

The other night, I was driving back after a gym and grocery run with my youngest in the car. I had tried to do too much too quickly (yes, this is common), and we were going to be about 5 minutes late to pick up my eldest from her gymnastics session. So I dialed up my wife to try to arrange a pick up, as she was closer, while also trying to figure out if I could do everything I needed to do without stopping for gas. All in a neighborhood that I didn't know too well.

One dial, voice mail. Second dial, voice mail. Map application, not working. Now I'm going to be ten minutes late, because I've made the wrong turn. The low gas light is glaring at me, and my stress level is rising. Why can't the tech just work? My phone keeps having calls that don't go through, messages that aren't answered, routine dead spots in my day to day. How much do I have to pay each month for a phone that actually works when I really need it to?

Five minutes later, the mini-crisis was over, with my wife calling me back, having always assumed she was going to pick up the eldest. As my blood pressure went back to normal and the map application kicked in, with the ability to stop and get gas opening up, a few things became clear.

First, that all of that drama was self-inflicted, which was obvious even when it was happening. Just trying to do too much, and expecting to be able to get through a grocery store checkout too quickly. You'd think that I would be smart enough to give myself some leeway, but, well, I'm not.

Second, that this sort of experience was impossible not so very long ago, but that as soon as you get used to the tech working for you... it's intolerable when it does not. Even if you are old enough to remember a time before mobile phones.

Third, it's going to seem charmingly quaint in a very short period of time. Connection maps will improve, the Internet of Things will allow me to know where, say, my wife's car was (i.e., if moving towards the pick up for the eldest, no need to call), the map application won't fail, and even the older model of car that I was driving will have an exact calculation for the remaining gas.

Finally, that as savvy as I may think I am about my capabilities and how the world works, there's still really no hard and fast rule as to when it will all change. If you had asked me if I was going to have this experience an hour before I had it, I would have laughed. No chance! I had this!

How this all relates to marketing and advertising is a bit of a stretch... but there are parallels. The day job now is email, and the way that people interact with that has changed a lot recently, and will just keep changing. The call to action for a great deal of our work is to get the list to view videos, and that's been changing a lot as well. My field is prosperous, but also under a lot of scrutiny, and could change dramatically in the next couple of years. The shifting tech might change as much as the politics, really.

We are living in amazing, and very transitory, times. That's likely to be true for a really long while. What about your world is going to change soon?

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Five Tips To Avoid Blog Writer's Block

More wall than block

This week, several people in my network commented on the prolific nature of my writing... and the funny thing is, some of them don't know the half of it, in that I also write a blog about sports, to go with this one about marketing and advertising. As I am on target to post over 100 times in 2015 on both sites, in addition to holding down a day gig that also involves writing, and have been doing this for the better part of a decade, I know how to keep the fires burning. Here are five tips for getting yourself out of a sticking point.

5) Cheat with numbers.

I've talked about how a learning engine of analytics driving creative is an edge. It also works for writing. Your blog posts that get more traffic, retweets, likes and comments are all good for inspiring more thoughts. Or, darkly, less.

4) Don't give a block power.

Writer's block is like any other form of self-created drama; it requires fuel to burn, and that fuel is your own mind telling you that you are blocked. You can, and will, get unstuck any moment now, because you have every other time you've stopped writing. This isn't a matter of blind self-confidence; it's a matter of looking at past track record, and assessing the situation from an emotional distance. The next sentence will come, and more after that one. So write it already.

3) Be open to many sources of inspiration.

I've written about everything from my leisure activities (golf and poker), entertainment choices (Bridgett Everett, the Daily Show succession), dog (the rise of high-end services for pet owners), technology (the IoT), current events (Volkswagen and others) and war stories from my past gigs. I don't view everything in my life through an advertising and marketing filter, but the nice part of the subject matter is that it travels across a wide swath of experiences.

2) Fill the frame.

The late great Frank Zappa once described art as the stuff that's inside the frame, because without the frame, it's an open question as to who left that mess on the wall. (I am not quoting exactly, because Frank was wonderfully rude, and didn't say mess. You get the gist.)

Blog posts follow a template, and a rhythm, that is fairly consistent. It's not like we're cranking out rivets in a factory, or blind to quality or flights of fancy, but let's be realistic about this. I'm writing three posts a week, I'm turning in the post after so much time writing it, and killing myself with over-editing and perfectionism is just a way to waste time, and not get to the next item on my to-do list. Fill the frame, then move on.

1) Live your story.

All of us have any number of other things we can do with our time. I could pull out my guitar, work on my stand up comedy, clean the house, play golf or poker, run some miles, toss the frisbee for my dog, watch a game, and so on, and so on.

But the story that I tell of my life is that I am, more than any other hobby or avocation, a writer. Writers have deadlines, and need to meet them, or they are not writers. (Yes, I know, there are other kinds of writers, and you can be a great one without a deadline... but this is my story, and I'm sticking to it.)

So my story is never that I need time off, or that I'm sick, or over-committed, or can't function unless a certain amount of sleep happens at a certain time of day. The saving grace of all of this is that writing has strong elements of craft to it, and you get better at craft the more you do it. (Also, thank heavens, faster.) I am infinitely happier when I am being true to the story of my life; most people are, really. So I write.

What's the story of your life, and are you living it?

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Reputations For Sale

Your Money Or Your Stars

Ratings are an increasingly important aspect of the way people use the Web, not just for products, but also for people. From Peeple's horrible model and PR disaster to Uber's get ratings or don't get work, not to mention AirBnB's approach, traditional management of project employees is getting outsourced to the wisdom of the crowds. This isn't even all that new, given the relative maturity of eBay in the marketplace, and the presence of power buyers and sellers on that site. But it is becoming more pronounced, and noticeable on a greater amount of buying decisions.

At first blush, this just seems inevitable, because it's just something that's under the hood of a disruptive technology. But just because something is inevitable does not mean that it's desirable, especially for the people without leverage, which would be the contractors. Rankings don't just put the power in the hands of the customer, they also create the potential for abuse that would be illegal in a traditional workplace, without the potential for counter-measures like unions or collective bargaining. And it's not as if you, as the provider, get more work or a better rate from glowing reviews. All you get is to stay in consideration.

As a consumer, the power of prior ratings is undeniable, to the point where low marks will more or less eliminate a product or provider from consideration for the vast majority of us. But as a provider, on a personal level, the change is very worrisome. I've spent decades going the extra mile for clients and co-workers, all to make sure that my network -- the only aspect of an individual career that can give you any degree of real job security, especially in careers in start-ups and other high turnover fields -- is large and eager to work with me again. But no advertising and marketing pro hits all the time. I'm sure that I've been on the wrong side of enough people to ensure that if my profession was rankings dependent, I could be a risk to not get future gigs, just from the actions of a handful of people. And sure, we're just at 1.0 in terms of this technology, let alone how people use it, but sometimes, v1 is all you get. I could easily see de facto blackmail from buyers who become aware of the power of a one star review.

So what happens next in a situation like this? Well, in other aspects of too much power being in a single metric, to put it bluntly, fraud. Advertising contracts that are purely cost per click inevitably led to black hat coding that produced fraudulent clicks. Five-star ratings and glowing reviews for products are already something you can buy from compromised people, with Amazon even going so far as to sue to try to maintain the integrity of their system. It's going to be even harder to police that sort of thing when it comes to a services provider, but just as fraud is inevitable, so are policing measures.

As consumers, what's going to happen is that ratings aren't going to be enough to make an informed decision. We're also going to have to become detectives and skeptical hiring managers, reading reviews with an eye for veracity, questioning a ranking if it has a suspicious amount of positive rankings for the amount of probable business, and maybe even doing a second pass through a more rigorous approach, like maybe checking references on LinkedIn, or looking at someone's Facebook or Twitter before giving power to their review. This will also be a time management problem, since some purchases are more important than others. Just taking the shortcut of lots of stars equal automatic purchase won't cut it.

That's the thing about disruptive technology. It disrupts more than just a single market. We haven't seen all of the ripples and impact from this wave yet.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.