Two weeks after the last lot, the tube network was at standstill again because of explosions. Thank goodness they were smaller and relatively insignificant. Still enough to seriously put the wind up you if you were involved.
Here’s just hoping that this isn’t going to be a repeat of the IRA tactics when they found the way to bring London to a halt just about every week. That’s going to get really boring.
I came across an interesting discussion thread on the excellent Soflow network yesterday (you may have heard Robert Loch, founder of Soflow, admiring my t-shirt on the podcast).
A young lady in South Carolina was asking about advertising for theatre. It struck me as ironic – and I said so – that just as advertising and marketing folk are realising that they have to go for authentic emotional engagement and telling a good story, theatre people, for whom this is their stock-in-trade want to know from advertising bods how to go about it.
Obvious to me it is that a blog about the production would be a really cool way of generating and sustaining buzz. So I stuck my oar in.
These thoughts are where I’m at with it so far – I’m aware that my knowledge of the business is not what it was and that I’m overflowing with ignorance and prejudice in this area, but this is what I think:
I’m guessing #1 is derrieres on the plush velvet seats. Preferably derrieres belonging to people who will love what you do, tell their friends, become patrons of your little theatre, come to every show, tell their friends to become patrons of your little theatre, tell their friends to come to every show.
You also want some press coverage, maybe local TV and radio. The best of this will be persistent stuff on the web, so that whenever someone’s looking for theatre anywhere in SC, say, they see the glowing reviews of your baby and the really, really cool way you went about producing it.
Blogs build buzz. By talking everyday about what you’re doing with the production, and inviting people to comment and contribute, you’re giving yourself a platform for building a community of people who are already (positively, I hope) engaged with you before you even try to sell them a ticket.
What I was thinking was of a kind of collaborative production journal, where everyone contributes. This may be too much for you, especially with a small, poorly funded company that hasn’t been exposed to this sort of thing before, but think “The Making of…” fly-on-the-wall documentary style, only on the web, and released in chunks as they happen, day by day rather than being stitched together after the show has closed.
Who’s going to contribute? Ideally, (ie if I were running the project!) everyone would submit their own little diary pieces (or not) every day as they go along. Now of course a theatre project isn’t the same as, say an IT implementation project – you don’t have everyone working at a computer all day everyday. So it might be worth appointing someone as your blogger-in-chief, someone whose job it is to document some of what happens in the course of the day – maybe you could get a talented grad student from a nearby university who has a love of theatre and would do it on a kind of intern basis for the privilege of being involved. Maybe your PR person should be doing this and nothing else.
I think it will be richer the more people you can involve. I think it would be a mistake to just focus on the director’s view, or an actor’s, or the stage manager’s, or the wardrobe mistress’s – it would be great to see all the facets as they come together – but you might find the only thing you can get done is the diary of a struggling theatre PR assistant!
What media will you use? I think the barest minimum is text and pictures. You should also consider getting some video footage and some audio (rehearsals, performances or interviews with people who don’t like having a camera shoved in their face)
How much of the life-cycle are you going to cover? You could just cover rehearsals or from day 1 or rehearsals to opening night or all the way through from the initial commissioning meeting through to striking the set.
Will you allow comments? I’d strongly recommend that you do – this is where you start to engage with people and show them that you’re real people yourselves, just trying to make a piece of art. You may get abuse – we all do – how you deal with it will also be a measure of your success.
Who is already passionate and authoritative about this play, it’s subject matter, your theatre, the people involved in the production. These are the people that you want to draw into being involved. They may keep you on your toes from time to time, but they can also be a great help, because they already care. If they’re already online, where do they hang out? Go there yourself and politely introduce yourself – you know how to do this already.
You can set up a free or cheap blog at lots of places – typepad.com is popular, so are blogger.com and livejournal.com. They are all straightforward to set up – all you have to do then is start writing :o)
You can host photographs at flickr.com or buzznet.com You can host audio and video cheaply at libsyn.com
You can tag your content so that it can be easily found through technorati and other blog-based search engines. These tools will also help you monitor whether anyone else is talking about you.
You can get free statistics on how much traffic you’re getting and who is looking at your site. I use statcounter.com for this.
If you’re new to all this and your head is starting to swim, you might enlist the help of a friendly, experienced blogger who doesn’t mind sharing what they’ve learned (if you’ve ever come across someone like that).
There will doubtless be people who are negative about this, both within the company and outside. There’s the whole technology kills art thing. And then there’s the simple fact that this opens people up to some sort of scrutiny and that can be uncomfortable. If you’ve worked in theatre for long, you’ll already know how to deal with grouches – don’t imagine that they’re any more powerful just because they’re online.
Whatever you do, it must support and facilitate both the creative and the commercial processes. I’m sure that, done well, it would add to the overall success of the production, not just the PR side.
There are, of course, no guarantees – this is a new area and it might all go horribly wrong – I’ve only done some quick googling, but I couldn’t find anything like it straight away so you’ve also got the advantage of not having to live up to any expectations.
Anyone in the UK doing anything like this? Anyone want to?
tags: theatre & theater & blogging & PR
Photograph by Bev Sykes on flickr
Johnnie Moore puts out a great podcast conversation with Chris Corrigan and Rob Paterson about “unconferences”
David Wilcox asks “Why aren’t events about engagement more engaging?”
And Doug Kaye announces his intention to extend IT Conversations
I put all of this together with what I’ve experienced in presenting my part of the results of BARC, LesBlogs, the Geek Dinner and this post that I wrote almost a year ago, not to mention what I said the other day about RTS2005 and there’s a picture beginning to form. A grey, mussy, cloudy and unclear picture but a picture that starts to look like a business opportunity nonetheless. What’s needed after all this talk is action, but which actions to take first aren’t immediately obvious to me.
Which again, is why I blog.
tags: events & facilitation & km & unconferences
There’s actually something else I want to say about this “why I blog” thing. Blogging and podcasting have something really useful buried within them. They’re about ‘dialogue’ and dialogue is a (perhaps the) great tool for unlocking creativity.
When I blog or create a podcast, I’m initiating a dialogue on a couple of levels.
I’m conducting a dialogue with myself, usually with the motivation of understanding better what I think, what I’ve been doing, who I am, who all the people around me are. Regardless of whether anyone else reads/hears/sees what I’ve written/said/erm…y’know video’d, the process of deciding what to say, saying it and reflecting on what’s said has a great value in it for me as a personal knowledge management activity (let alone the emotional or spiritual benefit) – I know better what I know. Importantly, but often forgotten, I’m talking to myself in the future – tomorrow, next week, next year, on my deathbed (btw hopefully that’s way after next year) and I give myself the opportunity to commune with myself in the past to think about what I was thinking then to talk about it, and if I’m brave let it go, let it die so that I can give life to what I think today.
More obviously, I’m conducting an asynchronous persistent dialogue with a self-selecting, global group of people (blimey, now I know why I feel tired after a hard day’s bloggin).
Why is asynchronous important? Well, there’s a difference between a conversation I have face to face with someone and this, where I leave a message for others to find. I don’t get immediate feedback (which can alter what I’m saying as I say it) When I do get feedback, it is usually in the same asynchronous form (except when I meet readers/listeners face to face). This gives us both the chance to step back from the subject-matter, from the message, and to think about it before responding…or not.
Persistent – this stuff stays around, we can pick up the dialogue at any time, because all the bits are still there (Murphy willing) and interlinked. They can accumulate interest and value over time just by sitting there.
Self-selecting? You choose to listen to me or to see my words pop up on your screen. I don’t choose you. I try to encourage you to continue to look at my messages by what I write or say or how I say it. I invite you to engage with me, sometimes provocatively, but the decision rests with you. And if you’re like me, the decision is rarely explicit. And there are no criteria for membership of this group, except the willingness to accept my bitstream in some form.
Global? Well duh! Here though there are some barriers to engagement. No internet connection? Makes it difficult. Can’t read English? Difficult. Your government thinks I’m a dangerous radical lunatic? Unlikely but understandable – and it would make it difficult. Nonetheless, I have the opportunity to engage in dialogue with a hugely diverse range of people – this helps my thinking grow and be richer than was ever possible before – people who say I’m wrong, or who point out the cultural assumptions that I’m making nourish me just as much as those who smile and say “Yes! You’re right.”
Then there are the different dimensions to the contact or engagement. You read my post. How do you react? Regardless of whether you explicitly, consciously react or not, you are in some way changed by reading it. Perhaps this is the post that makes you decide to unsubscribe and never go to Perfect Path again. Maybe it adds to your prejudices about English people. Maybe it adds to your prejudices about Welsh people (not realising that I’m not Welsh). Maybe it stops you from taking another bite of that sausage roll. Maybe the words just crawl across your retina and are instantly forgotten, on to the next post. A hugely complex range of reactions – the sum of your experience and mine, touching for a few moments.
What is unusual about this engagement is that you hearing me has no direct and immediate effect on me until you respond. And I have absolutely no control or influence over how you react, I don’t know how you’ll react and neither do you. However, all of these reactions are part of the dialogue – they will influence how you respond, whether you do it by posting a comment or mentioning, when we meet, in twenty years time, that you found it very difficult to understand what I was going on about on 30th June 2005.
The fundamental point here is that dialogue is a creative act and that the act of creation is near-impossible without dialogue. Individuals and organisations need access to their creativity. Whatever business you’re in, you need to be thinking of new ways to do things, different things to do, to be constantly asking: Who are we? Why are we still here? What do we do? Who are we? And if that’s whe we are, what choices are we making today about who we’re going to be tomorrow?
These activities, blogging, podcasting, videoblogging are all ways of asking those questions and getting the answers, whether you’re 1 person or 1,000,000.
tags: why i blog & km & creativity & dialogue
Johnnie, Paul and Gia have all been very kind about my earlier post on why I blog.
I have to admit there’s even more to it than my personal lifestance. This same reasoning applies to my cheerleading for organisational blogging, whether it’s inside the firewall or across it.
The questions are the same for any organisation, particularly those whose primary functions are the creation, nurturing, collation and dissemination of ideas, aka knowledge-based organisations aka the greater part of the ‘developed’ economy.
“Who are we?” and “Who do we choose to be today?” “Who do we think we are?” and “What do other people see in us and the things we do?”
This is day-to-day strategic management. There is a textbook view that success depends on developing vision statements and mission statements and cascading management by objectives. Most managers have a different experience. The comply with the performance management systems, because that’s part of their job. But when it comes down to it, these are the questions they really have to answer day in, day out.
What are we trying to do here? Why do we do it? How do we do it? How don’t we do it? How do we know when we’re doing well? How would we like to be seen by our customers, suppliers, competitors and collaborators? How do we measure up to that ideal? What can we do that gets us further towards that ideal?
As a manager, these questions ring truer than any checklist in a management handbook, but how do we answer them? For the brave organisation and the brave employee, blogs can answer these questions, by allowing people to engage in a conversation that goes “This is what I think we’re trying to do here”, “Well I think that’s baloney, it’s like this”, “Hey, perhaps there’s another way of looking at this”. Now in the past, those conversations have gone on in people’s heads or gathered around the water-cooler/coffee-machine. But to deal with the fact that physical proximity to one’s colleagues is no longer a given, we need new ways to do this, to chew the fat, to check ourselves out, to work out what to do today. That’s what you can use blogs for – whether the person who thinks it’s baloney is ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ your organisation.
And just as personal blogging requires an ability to deal with the anxiety of putting yourself on the line and the maturity to accept others as they are, so corporate blogging requires levels of honesty and tolerance that most organisations just just aren’t used to having out in the open. Trouble is, the best way of encouraging these quailities is to explore our own dishonesty and intolerance and gently expose that of others – and that’s really, really hard – it’s going to take a while.
Can you tell, I’m having a slack work period at the moment? Hire me! and get this brain working on your knotty problems.
tags: km & corporate blogging why i blog
Over the last couple of weeks (particularly on those occasions when I’ve stood up in public and identified myself as a blogger) I’ve been asked the same question several times:
“Do you think I could have a blog?”
And my answer is always the same and unequivocal:
“Yes, not only that, but I think you should”
Increasingly, I’m adding:
“in fact, you really ought to, it’s your duty!”
The model of communication enshrined in national newspapers and magazines is a 20th Century phenomenon. It was born of an industrial world, one where we were coming to terms with mass production, transportation and electrification. National newspapers used the very latest ideas to create a modern system of communication where suddenly people all over the country could read national stories everyday. Combined with education for a vastly increased proportion of the population, news, national (even…gasp…international) news became popularly accessible and with increased supply, the appetite grew. The successful products that emerged were those that mirrored the great idea of the day – centralisation.
Now things have changed again.
We (in most of Europe and the U.S.) no longer live in a predominantly industrial society. We now primarily deal with knowledge, ideas and information. We have created very powerful computing machines; software for recording words, pictures and music and then connected all the machines together so that we can talk to each other. Education has continued to increase and improve. In the UK, Government has a target of getting 50% of young people leaving school each year to go on to Higher Education. According to DfES, 539,900 qualifications were obtained by students at Higher Education institutions in the UK in 2003/04.
So what are these half-million newly qualified people supposed to do with their improved ability to think and learn for themselves? Well according to the established media, they should just sit back and open wide. Carry on taking the medicine; accept the status quo; continue to live with a hundred-year-old system of communication that was invented for a very different society, because we’re too scared to do anything different. Yes, perhaps it means that we’ll have some brighter journalistic stars and more intelligent readers who can critically appraise what we produce, but they should stay in their place and we will stay in ours.
No. People have a voice, they’re taught to use their brains more and how to express themselves well. They are given tools to express themselves easily and to communicate globally. So now the term ‘mass production’ can have a new meaning. Instead of meaning that a few produce for the masses, it can come to mean that the masses produce for themselves and for each other, thank you very much. The successful products will be those that support today’s big ideas – decentralisation and disintermediation.
So do you think you could have a blog? What on earth is the point of taking three or more years out of economic activity getting yourself educated at the expense of your family and the rest of society, developing your thinking and critical faculties in ways that your grandparents would have killed for and then sitting and watching Big Brother for the rest of your life?
How about we create something better? You can, you should and it starts with writing “Hello world, well here I am with my little blog – who’d have thought it!? lol”.
tags: blogging & msm & knowledge management & higher education & mass production & disintermediation
I guess my years at the Audit Commission created an intolerance in me for stuff that looks like it restricts people’s creativity in the search for premium efficiency or effectiveness. My initial prickliness when reading Euan’s piece More is Less has subsided with subsequent readings.
For me, my podcast is more about art than efficient communication – it is no more an attempt to become a radio star than my blog is an attempt to get a job writing full-time for a newspaper. But doing anything in this interconnected world means doing it in public. And doing art in public means there are mistakes out there and stuff I wish I’d never done (no I’m not going to link to examples!), stuff where I’ve struggled to express myself clearly, as well as the bits I’m really proud of.
As I said (with my ranting trousers pulled right up to my armpits) the other week when it was suggested that podcasting is a “bad idea” (with additions for emphasis in square brackets)
Let’s look at this in another context to try to show you what I’m talking about. why do I bother getting dressed up, travelling into the city and pay a lot of money to sit in a theatre for hours on end to see some people “act out” stuff that Shakespeare wrote down [very effectively] 400 years ago. I mean, I even have his complete works on my bookshelf – I can read all of them [with extreme efficiency] without leaving my house, in fact I can read some of one play and then skip over to another – this stuff’s all on DVD anyway. Hey, even worse than that, I hear my kid’s school is going to do Hamlet next year – how crap is that going to be ?!? – those kids should just stay in and read.
That said, it’s also about me learning to use a communication tool for which I see organisational applications – where efficiency and effectiveness of communication are important – but as with other learning, one has to do the inefficient in order to see the efficient, to do the ineffective to truly see what will be effective.
If you’ve ever done a workshop or an awayday with me, it’s highly likely that you’ll have played “Same or Different” It’s a generic classification game we play about all sorts of subjects to clarify how people think about a particular question.
Same or Different is at the base of all sorts of things we do in the knowledge economy. We’re always asking, is this thing the same as this other thing or is it different? And the answers is usually, it’s both, they’re the same in these ways and they’re different in others.
In restructuring an organisation or setting up a project, which bits go together and which bits are apart? How is that sameness actually manifested in people’s day to day activities? What does it mean to be different? Under what circumstances might it change?
What happens when people disagree about sameness or difference? What happens when I think I’m the same as you but you think we’re different? How might I convince you of my point of view? Do I need to? Is it important? Should I just accept that we differ on this point?
I blog. Perhaps you do too. You may consider my blog to be the same as yours. I might agree. Or disagree. Other people might lump us together – we might be the only ones who perceive sufficient difference for it to matter.
I podcast. Perhaps you do too. You may consider my podcast to be the same as yours. I might agree. Or disagree. Other people might lump us together – we might be the only ones who perceive sufficient difference for it to matter.
So you might say, “What does it matter? We’re similar – isn’t that enough? Surely that’s a much better way of putting it?”
To me settling for saying “similar” avoids asking (and answering) the important questions, it’s hiding in vagueness. It might be the best and most accurate answer in the end, but it’s not nearly as productive as delving deeper in to sameness and difference.
As it says up above, Perfect Path is a knowledge management consulting practice. So what’s with all this stuff about blogs and podcasts?
Well to me, knowledge management (see the sidebar for why I think it’s just management) is about how organisations and the individuals working in them:
This site is my way of exploring those things for myself on a daily basis. And it’s becoming a cool showcase for how such things work – if I can get my ideas out to loads of people then maybe I can help you do it too.
My experience with clients is that some of the big problems come in the “spread ideas about” bit and I think blogs and podcasts are great ways of doing that (and above all they are sooooo much cheaper to implement than the gazillions you may already be spending on other IT systems).
So if you’re having difficulty with getting your ideas heard, whether it’s called “knowledge management” or “internal communications” or “personal development” do give me a shout and lets talk about how I can help.
Dave Winer gets to do a podcast that will be broadcast on KYOU in San Francisco. In his latest Morning Coffee Notes and on podcatch.com he talks a little about the differences between podcasting and broadcasting and he’s also asking for thoughts about what he should say.
This is what occurs to me:
1. Dave starts with a description of the difference in terms of form, explaining that the main differences are that the constraints of time and geography are lifted – broadcast generally means you can only listen if you’re within range of this transmitter (arguably less so with internet radio/webcasting) but more importantly everyone has to listen at the same time. I think this is an important distinction to make when trying to explain what it’s about – talking about RSS feeds and Podcatchers is a bit like explaining a blog by saying it’s an online journal presented in reverse chronological order – but I think there are more important things to say about the social, cultural and political implications of the ability to do this.
2. That there’s something interesting to say about the different societies and economies that these two ways of disseminating ideas spring from. Radio, as one of the initial means of broadcasting was born in a world where manufacturing industry was the dominant, expanding bit of the economy to be in, and the distribution and application of electricity was the exciting new technology that was radically changing the world. Radio was born in a time when people were working out what that all meant and how they wanted to organise society in that context. Hierarchies, a small number of people working out what a large number of people should do and then getting them to do it, was an efficient way to do it and radio mirrors that. The similarity with today and the rise of podcasting is that we’re figuring out how we want to use a new technology that is changing our world – but in the world where the use of information and knowledge is the dominant part of the economy we’re finding that different ways of organising business and society are more effective than hierarchies and this, I believe, is reflected in podcasting.
3. Building on what I wrote the other day about the podshow type of thing, I think the important benefits that podcasting has over a broadcast model are that:
Much of this could also be said about blogging and that’s where I think they’re the same (why podcasting isn’t just audio-blogging is the subject for a whole ‘nother post.
4. I think it’s important to not describe podcasting as a child of radio or in some other way that implies a difference in standing between the two – they are two ways of moving sound, both just as worthy as each other but useful for different circumstances and applications.
tags: podcasting & broadcasting
Perfect Path 