Ira Glass on storytelling
Ira Glass at Gel 2007 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.
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Steve Spalding
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Steve Spalding
On disclosure.
I thought I’d share my response to an interesting question raised by Ted Murphy of IZEA. Ted runs an advertising network that deals primarily in “sponsored conversations.” The idea is that they match brands with bloggers who want to write about them. Money is exchanged, which raises the hackles of the blogopshere.
The question at issue wasn’t about that though. Ted is also a firm believer in disclosure for anyone who accepts payment for their opinion, and he posed the following –
Every post done through SocialSpark has standardized machine readable disclosure and automated disclosure audits. You can’t get paid through SocialSpark without having a disclosure badge.
What if all marketers and bloggers played by these same rules? What if we defined disclosure together and enforced it through an independent third party service run by a trade organization? I believe we can. Standardization of our practices through software automation and validation is the ultimate answer. I hope that one of our trade organizations takes the lead to make this happen.
Here’s what I had to say . . .
I think we are all playing in a gray zone and I am, as always, happy that you have decided to meet this charge head on Ted.
Why gray?
People still don’t seem to have a clear definition of what “compensation” means. With SocialSpark/IZEA it’s pretty cut and dry.
Company approaches blogger to write about a product/service.
Blogger accepts/rejects companies offer.
Blogger writes a post, and discloses his relationship with the company.
Company pays blogger for his participation.
For a situation like that, it’s obvious that this type of solution would function. However, let’s change things a bit.
Let’s say that a large tech conference wants to get coverage, so they offer a group of bloggers free passes to the event (something that happens all the time). The bloggers aren’t required to cover the conference, but they mostly will.
What type of disclosure should be required here?
They aren’t being “paid” for their voice necessarily, but they are being compensated for it. I can see a -lot- of people balking at the idea that a free conference pass is the same kind of thing as being paid $100 to review a Mino. Even though when you scrape away the layers, it is.
As a blogger, I believe that any time it could be construed that you would have a bias, you should mention the source of that bias. We make a lot of hard decisions around the type of advertising to accept and the only way to give credence to those decisions and your audience for accepting them is to clearly disclose.
I do worry that something like this will primarily serve to “punish” people who do disclose, as those who don’t care to will skirt around it while those who do will be branded.
My 3 1/2 cents.
What do you think?
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Steve Spalding
A little context on this one. Julia Rocchi was looking for a roommate and put out an ad on Craigslist. What she uncovered and described beautifully were some surprisingly general rules about personal communication and crafting your pitch.
Refer to details in the ad. The strongest responses played up how their interests aligned with mine and Jacob’s. Most people shared what reality shows they like to watch, or talked about what dishes they liked to cook. But the most fascinating people were those who built off my very simple list of interests, and wove it into a story that showed insight into their personality. The clear winner of my heart: the girl who told us how she had just hiked the Inca Trail and loved her travels in Peru … not even knowing that I’m planning a trip to do exactly that right now.
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Steve Spalding
“Why is a raven like a writing desk?”
It’s a line made famous by a certain Mad Milliner in a novel about a little girls trip to Wonderland. What’s the answer? Well, read a little further and you’ll get this,
“Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.
“No, I give it up,” Alice replied. “What’s the answer?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter.Not satisfied? Louis Carrol won’t be much help either,
Enquiries have been so often addressed to me, as to whether any answer to the Hatter’s Riddle can be imagined, that I may as well put on record here what seems to me to be a fairly appropriate answer, viz: ‘Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front!’ This, however, is merely an afterthought; the Riddle, as originally invented, had no answer at all.
- Louis Carrol, Alice in Wonderland, Preface
. . . or maybe he is.
I think Mr. Carrol inadvertently pointed out a lesson, one that all of us would do well to remember — sometimes the right answer, the only real answer is that there isn’t a right answer and the correct thing to do is to smile, discontinue beating your head against the wall and move onto the next question.
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Steve Spalding
I’m working on a project for Crossing Gaps (93 Studios), and it’s teaching me something about Twitter profiles. I’m looking for interesting people with a story to tell, and that means sorting through the thousands and thousands of potentially interesting people I follow around on Twitter.
What I’ve learned is that I have a deep, visceral distaste for certain kinds of Twitter bios, a reaction that I think a lot of people in my business share.
As it turns out if you have the words “Social Media Expert,” “SEO Pro,” or “Internet Marketer” without any other more personal descriptor I immediately, subconsciously lose interest.
“But why Steve?”
I know a lot of Search Engine Professionals, Affiliate Marketers, Social media people, and Internet Marketers and each and every one of the good ones knows that keywords describing your profession does not an effective bio make. There are thousands of marketers on Twitter, and while it’s nice to know what you do — if I don’t know why I should care about you in particular, I am going to move onto someone who makes that more clear to me.
Look at it this way, Twitter gives you 140 characters to describe who you are, get rid of anything I could read somewhere else.
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Steve Spalding
I’m not one to give out marketing secrets because I don’t believe they exist. 97.56% of the hype around structured marketing tactics is just so much navel-gazing.
There is something that will help you market your product and I would put 2 to 1 that you know about it but haven’t put enough effort into making it a conscious part of your marketing efforts. It’s what helps people like Gary V, Chris Brogan, Jason Goldberg and just about everyone else who has stepped onto the web’s center stage.
It’s finding what you do, whatever that is, and doing it over and over again until the people you know, respect and want to reach can put words to it.
- People want to work with, buy from and listen to friends.
- People want their friends to be a soft, glowing ball of familiarity that they can understand.
It’s why picking a place, setting up a soapbox and then being yourself outloud is the only bit of marketing advice I can stand behind 100%.
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Steve Spalding
Some people are very, very good at managing their schedules. Some people — aren’t. I fall into the latter category and if its taught me anything at all it’s that I need to refine goals down into actions.
If I am not staring at a list of things, concrete things, that need to be done my mind will wander off and start working on just about anything. It’s one of the reasons that I write, it helps me take all the mental detritus and give it form and substances. It helps me transform goals into actions. It’s as much therapy as it is sage advice.
Thank about it. How much of your writing is therapy?
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Steve Spalding
So we had an idea. In this case “we” is my company and idea is, well, still an idea. We wanted to be able to offer consulting services of a kind to people who couldn’t afford our consulting services. The fact of the matter was that this was impossible because there simply are not enough hours in the day to do that and pay rent. That’s when we came up with this idea for starting a digital storytelling school.
What’s digital storytelling? It’s kind of like marketing, but it’s online and filled with a less cruft and more fun.
That’s how Really Great Stories was born. It will be a vehicle for teleclasses and events of all stripes as we continue to evolve towards our goal. For the time being, we have put together a pretty solid course on creative marketing that’s worth looking at if you’re into that sort of thing. You can buy it here and sample it in the same place.
6/1/09 – So, RGS should be about helping entrepreneurs tell better stories, so we figured what better way to do that than to have some conversations with entrepreneurs. Enter the RGS podcast where we will (hopefully) have weekly phone conversations with entrepreneurs with stories to tell.
6/6/09 – I just finished recording the third episode of the RGS Podcast, and it has been a fantastic run. I made some major site changes (more planned) to make the episodes stand out.
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Steve Spalding
I wrote a book. It’s called All The Little Things It’s about building web projects well. I finished it late last year. I had the layout done by the wonderful Ophelia Chong at the beginning of this year. I got excruciatingly busy for about 3 months and forgot about it. On Tax Day 2009 I decided to stay up for much longer than I should and revamped the website associated with it and now it’s ready to go.
You should read it and tell me what you think. Consider it a BETA project, everything else on the web is.
4/23/09 – Working on the final, final draft of this project before it’s release. I promise that the improvements will be well worth the delay.
4/28/09 – ATLT Officially launched last night. I am extraordinarily happy with the early feedback, now it’s time for the real work.
5/14/09 – I finished the audiobook version of ATLT. I’m now actively looking for places to put it. It’ll probably be a week or so before it actually goes up for sale.
6/1/09 – The final version of the layout and the cover are finished and have been sent in. The dead tree version of the book is on its way.
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Steve Spalding
Social Media Job Wire
Occasionally I get resumes and am forced by my better nature to go around searching for RSS feeds and stitching them together to give the people who send them to me some easy access to jobs. I decided that there was likely a better way to do this, so I sat down and put together a website that automatically pulls jobs in the “Social Media” space. For those of you who are not in the know, that means Marketing, PR, Programming, and “Community” jobs for Internet companies and companies that wish they were Internet companies.
Thusfar it has been a rousing success. If you are looking for a job or know anyone who is, you should point them here.
