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Hana Masri on the hollowness of virtue signalling in communication studies

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Hana Masri on the hollowness of virtue signalling in communication studies

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Otto Scharmer on the four levels of listening

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Otto Scharmer, Deep Listening & the Social Field

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Otto Scharmer, Deep Listening & the Social Field

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We live in a time of massive institutional failure, collectively creating results that nobody wants. Climate change. AIDS. Hunger. Poverty. Violence. Terrorism. Destruction of communities, nature, life - the foundations of our social, economic, ecological, and spiritual well-being. This time calls for a new consciousness and a new collective leadership capacity to meet challenges in a more conscious, intentional, and strategic way. The development of such a capacity will allow us to create a future of greater possibility.

Why do our attempts to deal with the challenges of our time so often fail? Why are we stuck in so many quagmires today? The cause of our collective failure is that we are blind to the deeper dimension of leadership and transformational change. This "blind spot" exists not only in our collective leadership but also in our everyday social interactions. We are blind to the source dimension from which effective leadership and social action come into being.

We know a great deal about what leaders do and how they do it. But we know very little about the inner place, the source from which they operate

Successful leadership depends on the quality of attention and intention that the leader brings to any situation. Two leaders in the same circumstances doing the same thing can bring about completely different outcomes, depending on the inner place from which each operates (see "Three Perspectives on the Leader's Work").

Slowing Down to Understand

At its core, leadership is about shaping and shifting how individuals and groups attend to and subsequently respond to a situation. The trouble is that most leaders are unable to recognize, let alone change, the structural habits of attention used in their organizations.

Learning to recognize the habits of attention in any particular business culture requires, among other things, a particular kind of listening. Over more than a decade of observing people's interactions in organizations, I have noted four different types of listening.

Listening 1: Downloading. "Yeah, I know that already." I call this type of listening "downloading" - listening by reconfirming habitual judgments. When you are in a situation where everything that happens confirms what you already know, you are listening by downloading.

Listening 2: Factual. "Ooh, look at that!" This type of listening is factual or object-focused: listening by paying attention to facts and to novel or disconfirming data. You switch off your inner voice of judgment and listen to the voices right in front of you. You focus on what differs from what you already know. Factual listening is the basic mode of good science. You let the data talk to you. You ask questions, and you pay careful attention to the responses you get.

THREE PERSPECTIVES ON THE LEADER'S WORK

Listening 3: Empathic. "Oh, yes, I know exactly how you feel." This deeper level of listening is empathic listening. When we are engaged in real dialogue and paying careful attention, we can become aware of a profound shift in the place from which our listening originates. We move from staring at the objective world of things, figures, and facts (the "it-world") to listening to the story of a living and evolving self (the "you-world"). Sometimes, when we say "I know how you feel," our emphasis is on a kind of mental or abstract knowing. But to really feel how another feels, we have to have an open heart. Only an open heart gives us the empathic capacity to connect directly with another person from within. When that happens, we feel a profound switch as we enter a new territory in the relationship; we forget about our own agenda and begin to see how the world appears through someone else's eyes.

Listening 4: Generative. "I can't express what I experience in words. My whole being has slowed down. I feel more quiet and present and more my real self. I am connected to something larger than myself." This type of listening moves beyond the current field and connects us to an even deeper realm of emergence. I call this level of listening "generative listening," or listening from the emerging field of future possibility. This level of listening requires us to access not only our open heart, but also our open will - our capacity to connect to the highest future possibility that can emerge. We no longer look for something outside. We no longer empathize with someone in front of us. We are in an altered state. "Communion" or "grace" is maybe the word that comes closest to the texture of this experience.

When you operate from Listening 1 (downloading), the conversation reconfirms what you already knew. You reconfirm your habits of thought: "There he goes again!" When you operate from Listening 2 (factual listening), you disconfirm what you already know and notice what is new out there: "Boy, this looks so different today!" When you choose to operate from Listening 3 (empathic listening), your perspective is redirected to seeing the situation through the eyes of another: "Boy, yes, now I really understand how you feel about it. I can sense it now too." And finally, when you choose to operate from Listening 4 (generative listening), you realize that by the end of the conversation, you are no longer the same person you were when it began. You have gone through a subtle but profound change that has connected you to a deeper source of knowing, including the knowledge of your best future possibility and self.

Deep Attention and Awareness

Deep states of attention and awareness are well known by top athletes in sports. For example, Bill Russell, the

key player on the most successful basketball team ever (the Boston Celtics, who won 11 championships in 13 years), described his experience of moving from regular to peak performance. He talked about experiencing a slowing down of time, a widening of space, a panoramic type of perception, and a collapse of boundaries between people, even between people on opposing teams (see "Structures of Attention," movement from Fields 1-2 to Fields 3-4). While top athletes and championship teams around the world have begun to work with refined techniques of moving to peak performance, where the experience Russell describes is more likely to happen, business leaders operate largely without these techniques - or indeed, without any awareness that such techniques exist.

To be effective leaders, we must first understand the field, or inner space, from which we are operating. Theory U identifies four such "field structures of attention," which result in four different ways of operating. These differing structures affect not only the way we listen, but also how group members communicate with one another, and how institutions form their geometries of power.

The four columns of "Structures of Attention" depict four fundamental meta-processes of the social field that people usually take for granted:

thinking (individual)

conversing (group)

structuring (institutions)

ecosystem coordination (global systems)

Albert Einstein famously noted that problems cannot be resolved by the same level of consciousness that created them. If we address our 21stcentury challenges with reactive mindsets that mostly reflect the realities of the 19th and 20th centuries (Field 1 and Field 2), we will increase frustration, cynicism, and anger. Across all four meta-processes, we see the need to learn to respond from a deeply generative source (Field 4).

The U: One Process, Five Movements

In order to move from a reactive Field 1 or 2 to a generative Field 3 or 4 response, we must embark on a journey. In an interview project on profound innovation and change that included 150 practitioners and thought leaders, I heard many practitioners describe the various core elements of this journey. One person who did so in particularly accessible words is Brian Arthur, the founding head of the economics group at the Santa Fe Institute. When Joseph Jaworski and I visited him, he explained to us that there are two fundamentally different sources of cognition.

One is the application of existing frameworks (downloading) and the other accessing one's inner knowing. All true innovation in science, business, and society is based on the latter, not on the everyday downloading type of cognition. So we asked him, "How do you do that?" In his response he walked us through a sequence of three core movements.

The first movement he called "observe, observe, observe." It means to stop downloading and start listening. It means to stop our habitual ways of operating and immerse ourselves in the places of most potential, the places that matter most to the situation we are dealing with.

The second movement Brian Arthur referred to as "retreat and reflect: allow the inner knowing to emerge." Go to the inner place of stillness where knowing comes to the surface. We listen to everything we learned during the "observe" phase, and we attend to what wants to emerge. We pay particular attention to our own role and journey.

The third movement, according to Brian Arthur, is about "acting in an instant." This means to prototype the new in order to explore the future by doing. To create a little landing strip of the future that allows for hands-on testing and experimentation.

I have come to refer to this sequence as the U process, because it can be depicted and understood as a U-shaped journey. In practical contexts, the U-shaped journey usually requires two additional movements: an initial phase of building common ground (co-initiating) and a concluding phase that focuses on reviewing, sustaining, and advancing the practical results (co-evolving) (see "The U").

1. Co-initiating: Build common intent. Stop and listen to others and to what life calls you to do. At the beginning of each project, one or a few key individuals gather together with the intention of making a difference in a situation that really matters to them and to their communities. As they coalesce into a core group, they maintain a common intention around their purpose, the people they want to involve, and the process they want to use. The context that allows such a core group to form is a process of deep listening - listening to what life calls you and others to do.

2. Co-sensing: Observe, observe, observe. Go to the places of most potential and listen with your mind and heart wide open. The limiting factor of transformational change is not a lack of vision or ideas, but an inability to sense - that is, to see deeply, sharply, and collectively. When the members of a group see together with depth and clarity, they become aware of their own collective potential - almost as if a new, collective organ of sight was opening up.

When it comes to organizing knowledge management, strategy, innovation, and learning, we outsource the legwork to experts, consultants, and teachers to tell us how the world works. For simple problems, this may be an appropriate approach. But if you are in the business of innovation, then this way of operating is utterly dysfunctional. The last thing that any real innovator would outsource is perception. When innovating, we must go places ourselves, talk with people, and stay in touch with issues as they evolve. Without a direct link to the context of a situation, we cannot learn to see and act effectively. When this kind of deep seeing - "sensing" - happens collectively and across boundaries, the group as a whole can see the emerging opportunities and the key systemic forces at issue.

3. Presencing: Connect to the source of inspiration and common will. Go to the place of silence and allow the inner knowing to emerge. At the bottom of the U, individuals or groups on the U journey come to a threshold that requires a "letting go" of everything that is not essential. At the same time that we drop the non-essential aspects of the self (, "letting go"), we also open ourselves to new aspects of our highest possible future self (, "letting come"). The essence of "presencing" is the experience of the coming in of the new and the transformation of the old. Once a group crosses this threshold, nothing remains the same. Individual members and the group as a whole begin to operate with a heightened level of energy and sense of future possibility. Often they then begin to function as an intentional vehicle for the future that they feel wants to emerge.

4. Co-creating: Prototype the new in living examples to explore the future by doing. I often work with people trained as engineers, scientists, managers, and economists (as I was). But when it comes to innovation, we all received the wrong education. In all our training and schooling, one important skill was missing: the art and practice of prototyping. That's what you learn when you become a designer. What designers learn is the opposite of what the rest of us are socialized and habituated to do.

When I was a doctoral student in Germany, a design professor at the Berlin Academy of Arts, Nick Roericht, invited me to co-teach a workshop with him. The night before the workshop, I was invited to meet with Roericht and his inner circle at his loft apartment. I was eager to meet the group and to see how a famous designer had furnished his Berlin loft. When I arrived, I was shocked. The loft was spacious, beautiful - but virtually empty. In a very small corner kitchen stood a sink, an espresso machine, a few cups, and a quasi-kitchen table. But no drawers. No dishwasher. No table in the main room. No chairs. No sofa. Nothing except a few cushions to sit on.

I later learned that the empty loft reflected his approach to prototyping. For example, when he developed a prototype interior design for the dean's office at his school, he took out all of the furniture and then watched what happened there. Roericht and his students then furnished it according to the dean's actual needs - the meetings he conducted and so forth - supplying needed objects and furnishings in real time. Thus, prototyping demands that first you empty out all the stuff ("let go"). Then you determine what you really need ("let come") and provide prototype solutions for those real needs in real time. You observe and adapt based on what happens next.

So the prototype is not the stage that comes after the analysis. The prototype is part of the sensing and discovery process in which we explore the future by doing rather than by thinking and reflecting. This is such a simple point - but I have found that the innovation processes of many organizations are stalled right there, in the old analytical method of "analysis paralysis."

The co-creation movement of the U journey results in a set of small living examples that explore the future by doing. It also results in a vibrant and rapidly widening network of change-makers who leverage their learning across prototypes and who help each other deal with whatever innovation challenges they face.

Very often, what you think you will create at the beginning of the U process is quite different from what eventually emerges.

5. Co-evolving: Embody the new in ecosystems that facilitate seeing and acting from the whole. Once we have developed a few prototypes and microcosms of the new, the next step is to review what has been learned - what's working and what isn't - and then decide which prototypes might have the highest impact on the system or situation at hand. Coming up with a sound assessment at this stage often requires the involvement of stakeholders from other institutions and sectors. Very often, what you think you will create at the beginning of the U process is quite different from what eventually emerges.

The co-evolving movement results in an innovation ecosystem that connects high-leverage prototype initiatives with the institutions and players that can help take it to the next level of piloting and scaling.

The five movements of the U apply both to the macro level of innovation projects and change architectures and to the meso and micro levels of group conversation or one-on-one interactions. In martial arts, you go through the U in a fraction of a second. When applied to larger innovation projects, the U process unfolds over longer periods of time and in different forms.

Seven Leadership Capacities

The U process feels familiar to people who use creativity in their professional work. They say, "Sure. I know this way of operating from my own peak performance experiences." But then when you ask, "How does work look in your current institutional context," they roll their eyes and say, "It looks more like this downloading thing."

Why is that? Why is the U the road less traveled in institutions? Because it requires an inner journey and hard work. The ability to move through the U as a team or an organization or a system requires a new social technology (see "A New Social Technology"). The social technology of presencing is based on seven essential leadership capacities that a core group must cultivate. Without the cultivation of these capacities, the process described above (five movements) won't deliver the desired results.

1. Holding the Space: Listen to What Life Calls You to Do. "The key principle of all community organizing is this," L. A. Agenda's Anthony Thigpenn once told me., "You never hand over the completed cake. Instead, you invite people into your kitchen to collectively bake the cake." The trouble with this principle is that most meetings in most organizations work the other way around. You only call a meeting once you have completed the cake and you want to cut it and serve it.

To start with the desire for a cake rather than with the completed cake requires a leader to create or "hold a space" that invites others in. The key to holding a space is listening: to yourself (to what life calls you to do), to the others (particularly others who may be related to that call), and to that which emerges from the collective that you convene. It also requires keeping your attention focused on the highest future possibility of the group. Finally, it requires you to be intentionally incomplete, to hand over the recipe, cooking tools, and ingredients rather than the finished cake. Yes, you can talk about why this is a particularly good recipe, you can add some ingredients, and you can help mix the batter, too. You can even go first if you want to. But you must intentionally leave a lot of open space for others to contribute.

2. Observing: Attend with Your Mind Wide Open. The second capacity in the U process is to observe with an open mind by suspending your voice of judgment (VOJ). Suspending your VOJ means shutting down (or embracing and changing) the habit of judging based on past experience in order to open up a new space of inquiry and wonder. Without suspending that VOJ, attempts to get inside the places of most potential will be futile.

3. Sensing: Connect with Your Heart. The third capacity in the U process is to connect to the deeper forces of change through opening your heart. This is the essence of what moving down the left side of the U is all about-facilitating an opening process. The process involves the tuning of three instruments: the open mind, the open heart, and the open will. While the open mind is familiar to most of us, the other two capacities draw us into less familiar territory.

To awaken this other capacity in people, teams, and organizations, I have found it productive to have people work on real projects in real contexts that they care about and to support them with methods and tools that cultivate the open heart. The mind works like a parachute, as the old saying goes - it only functions when open. The same applies to the intelligence of the heart. It only becomes available to us when we cultivate our capacity to appreciate and love. In the words of biologist Humberto Maturana, "Love is the only emotion that enhances our intelligence."

4. Presencing: Connect to the Deepest Source of Your Self and Will. The fourth capacity in the U process is connecting to the deepest source of yourself and will. While an open heart allows us to see a situation from the whole, the open will enables us to begin to act from the emerging whole.

Danish sculptor and management consultant Erik Lemcke described to me his experience of this process:, "After having worked with a particular sculpture for some time, there comes a certain moment when things are changing. When this moment of change comes, it is no longer me, alone, who is creating. I feel connected to something far deeper and my hands are co-creating with this power. . . . I then intuitively know what I must do. My hands know if I must add or remove something. My hands know how the form should manifest. In one way, it is easy to create with this guidance. In those moments I have a strong feeling of gratitude and humility."

5. Crystallizing: Access the Power of Intention. The back-stories of successful and inspiring projects, regardless of size, often have a similar story line - a very small group of key persons commits itself to the purpose and outcomes of the project. That committed core group and its intention then goes out into the world and creates an energy field that begins to attract people, opportunities, and resources that make things happen. Then momentum builds. The core group functions as a vehicle for the whole to manifest.

In an interview, Nick Hanauer, the founder of half a dozen highly successful companies, told Joseph Jaworski and me: "One of my favorite sayings, attributed to Margaret Mead, has always been 'Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.' I totally believe it. You could do almost anything with just five people. With only one person, it's hard - but when you put that one person with four or five more, you have a force to contend with. All of a sudden, you have enough momentum to make almost anything that's immanent or within reach actually real."

6. Prototyping: Integrating Head, Heart, and Hand. The sixth capacity in the U process is the prototyping skill of integrating head, heart, and hand. When helping a golfer who has lost his swing, the master coach in the novel and film "The Legend of Bagger Vance" advises, "Seek it with your hands - don't think about it, feel it. The wisdom in your hands is greater than the wisdom of your head will ever be."

That piece of advice articulates a key principle about how to operate on the right side of the U. Moving down the left side of the U is about opening up and dealing with the resistance of thought, emotion, and will; moving up the right side is about intentionally reintegrating the intelligence of the head, the heart, and the hand in the context of practical applications.

Just as the inner enemies on the way down the U represent the VOJ (voice of judgment), the VOC (voice of cynicism), and the VOF (voice of fear), the enemies on the way up are the three old methods of operating: executing without improvisation and mindfulness (reactive action); endless reflection without a will to act (analysis paralysis); and talking without a connection to source and action (blah-blah-blah). These three enemies share the same structural feature. Instead of balancing the intelligence of the head, heart, and hand, one of the three dominates - the will in mindless action, the head in endless reflection, the heart in endless networking. In short, connecting to one's best future possibility and creating powerful breakthrough ideas requires learning to access the intelligence of the heart and the hand - not just the intelligence of the head.

7. Performing: Playing the Macro Violin. The seventh capacity in the U process is learning to play the "macro violin." When I asked him to describe presencing-type moments from his music experience, the violinist Miha Pogacnik told me about his first concert in Chartres., "I felt that the cathedral almost kicked me out.' Get out with you!' she said. For I was young and I tried to perform as I always did: by just playing my violin. But then I realized that in Chartres you actually cannot play your small violin, but you have to play the 'macro violin.' The small violin is the instrument that is in your hands. The macro-violin is the whole cathedral that surrounds you. The cathedral of Chartres is built entirely according to musical principles. Playing the macro violin requires you to listen and to play from another place, from the periphery. You have to move your listening and playing from within to beyond yourself."

Most systems, organizations, and societies today lack the two essentials that enable us to play the macro violin: (1) leaders who convene the right sets of players (frontline people who are connected with one another through the same value chain), and (2) a social technology that allows a multi-stakeholder gathering to shift from debating

Connecting to one's best future possibility and creating powerful breakthrough ideas requires learning to access the intelligence of the heart and the hand - not just the intelligence of the head.

to co-creating the new. Still, there are many examples of how this capacity to act and operate from the larger whole can work. One is in disaster response. When a disaster occurs, other mechanisms (like hierarchy) don't exist or aren't sufficient to deal with the situation (like markets or networked negotiation). In these situations, we see the emergence of a fourth mechanism of coordinating - seeing and acting from the presence of the whole.

In summary, the seven Theory U leadership capacities are the enabling conditions that must be in place for the U process and its moments to work. In the absence of these seven leadership capacities, the U process cannot be realized.
C. Otto Scharmer is a senior lecturer at MIT and founding chair of ELIAS, an innovation platform linking global institutions from business, government, and civil society to prototype profound system innovations. He is visiting professor at Helsinki School of Economics and founding chair of the Presencing Institute. Otto has consulted with global companies, international institutions, and cross-sector change initiatives around the world. He has co-designed and delivered award-winning leadership programs for clients including Daimler Chrysler, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, and Fujitsu. Otto is the author of Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges (SoL 2007) and co-author of Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society.
This article is adapted from the executive summary of Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges. To view the entire summary, go to http://www.ottoscharmer.com/PDFs/ Theory_U_Exec_Summary.pdf.

NEXT STEPS

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Leading from the Future: A New Social Technology for Our Times - The Systems Thinker

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e live in a time of massive institutional failure, collectively creating results that nobody wants. Climate change. AIDS. Hunger. Poverty. Violence. Terrorism. Destruction of communities, nature, life - the foundations of our social, economic, ecological, and spiritual well-being. This time calls for a new consciousness and a new collective leadership capacity to meet challenges in [...]

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Via the lens of strategy development this article 'posits that communication is a process that is interactive by nature and participatory at all levels. This process is not necessarily two-way but omnidirectional diachronic, with an emphasis on the external and internal arenas of continuous meaning presentations, negotiations, and constructions.'

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Communication Theory An Underrated Pillar on Which Strategic Communication Rests

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Communicating the Truth Words of Wisdom for Journalists

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Or.. why we're so bad at detecting lies... 

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Malcolm Gladwell | Talking to Strangers - What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know

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With Sue Keogh

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"Instagram is the fastest growing social network" Have you heard this recently? Instagram has doubled its active users in just 18 months, and it doesn't show signs of slowing down. Now is the time to look at it in a new light, and start being smarter about what you share.
A report by Simply Measured showed that Instagram reached 400 million monthly active users in September 2015, compared with 200 million in March 2014. There are 80 million posts uploaded to Instagram every day, and they receive more than 3 billion likes daily too. This is impressive stuff. Instagram is global too, 50% of Instagram's new users were outside of the USA.

While it's becoming more challenging for your content to be seen on Twitter and Facebook without advertising spend, Instagram still sees fantastic growth organically.

How can you take advantage of it? I've put together a step-by-step guide that will help you refresh your profile, improve your photos and build a community, now is the time!

1. Rewrite your Instagram bio
Rewrite your bio
Brevity and authenticity work best on Instagram. Succinctly describe what you do and mention what people might see on your Instagram account. Instagram is a great way to offer a peek into your daily life, whether you're an individual or a company.

If appropriate, use emojis; they add a bit of personality and split up the text.

We like Central Working's no nonsense approach - the text reaffirms what they do and includes the hashtag they use.
Update your profile photo
We'll cover image style later on, and if you are going to refresh your account you'll need a profile picture that works with your style of photography. With any social network, it is important to keep your social media picture current, even if your cheekbones look amazing in the old photo!

2. Curate a style for your images

If you only do one thing, strive to improve your pictures. Instagram is now referred to as the 'visual storytelling network' so it's time to develop a consistent style and get to grips with basic photo editing.

Create a photography style

Stick to a certain look and feel for your photos. Doing this creates a beautiful, cohesive collage of images that will attract people to follow you. It will also help you to stay on track and be strict about what level of quality your photos should be.

L'Occitane use a style that is very evocative of their French roots, their photos are vivid but rustic, and really capture what it is to be in the French countryside. What places, colours and ideas sum you up?

Approach your photography style in a similar way to creating style guides or a tone of voice document - what kind of style do you want? How should you pictures look? Pick a style that matches yourself or your organisation, as the Jamie Oliver team have done above. Some of the looks you could go for:

Plan your content

When we create any digital content we split it into topic areas, to help us keep the messaging even and easily think of new ideas. You can do this with Instagram images too. For example, if you're a men's fashion retailer you could split your photos up into photos that create aspirations, inspire viewers, strike up conversations and convert customers.

Furniture retailer Loaf has a good mixture of content on their page that helps to sell their products but also to create a lifestyle around them. Their photos are aspirational, their recipes and food photos promote action and they regularly share photos from their customer community to stay engaged. You can see that they stick to a bright and homely style in their photography, and any wording used is black and white.
How can you tell a story?
What are your brand values or what is interesting about your daily life? Knowing this will help you build up a content plan that is consistent and interesting.

American workwear brand Carhartt use history and authenticity to tell a story with Instagram. They aim to show who wears their brand and where, this reinforces the lifestyle you can have with Carhartt. The imagery they use shows the ruggedness of their products, and they back this up by looking back at their heritage, emphasising their brand values.

3. Learn how to edit your Instagram photos

You don't need to be an expert to use photo editing apps, but learning how to use them make a massive difference to the quality of your photos.

Instagram's own editing tools really stepped up a gear midway through 2015. They still have filters, but it is the editing tools that you really want to concentrate on.

First of all, try to shoot your photos in natural light and do them in batches so you have a bank of photos to use through the week or month. When you are ready to post you can edit your photos in Instagram, tweaking the settings until it meets the style you are looking for.

To step up to the next level, try VSCOcam. Favoured by many professional photographers using Instagram it is a powerful photo editing app that let you fine tune every aspect of your photo. You can alter brightness, contrast, highlights, saturation, colours and shadows to name a few.

It also has a huge range of filters which allow you to set a style for your photos easily. Stick to one or two of these filters, and tweak using the editing tools, to easily develop consistency in your images. This excellent guide by photographer Eats and Treats leads you through the process step by step.

4. Share meaningful stories with captions

Rather than broadcasting promotional messages, you want your captions to tell an interesting story. You have the characters to really do your image justice, how about these ideas for captions?

What inspired you to take this image?

What is happening today? How does this image relate to what is happening today?

Do you have a sneak peek of a new product?

Do you have some news? How can this be capture in an image

It is important to talk about links in captions too; although you can't put in a live link you can say how someone can find that web page. The most popular way is to mention that the link is in your bio, and then change your URL to whatever you'd like people to click on.

Custom bit.ly links can be used in Instagram captions as long as they are easy to type into a browser. For example, for this blog we might use bit.ly/sookio-insta to give people an easy way of finding the post.

5. Break the rules on using hashtags

You don't have to be shy about hashtags on Instagram; using a lot of hashtags is common. Put them under your caption, try to use 8-12 hashtags per post, some use up to 20. If you prefer, you can add them as a comment underneath the original post, to keep the caption area neat and tidy.

You should also try to use long chain hashtags, rather than single words. These often tell a story and users search for them to find specific types of images

Look at the hashtag # littlestoriesofmylife - this embodies the visual storytelling approach, just simple stories from everyday life, photographed well. There are around 18,000 posts tagged with this hashtag, which is substantial but not so large that you will be drowned out.

6. Find creative ways to use video

Launched in 2013, Instagram videos are up to 15 seconds long, an ideal length that ensures you can convey your message whilst being brief. Just this week they announced view counts for video will be available soon, so you'll have more to measure your success against!

Like photos, you should aim to be consistent if you are going to regularly use video. Shoot in natural light and with a handful of backdrops, and keep background noise is to a minimum. You can shoot without sound too, good for sharing image galleries.

Waitrose use video to share short recipes and tips on their Instagram page. They're snappy and only feature simple recipes, so they are quick to watch and easy to cook.

7. Don't forget Instagram stories!

Update: Instagram stories were launched after we published this post, so we've updated it to include tips on how to use this incredibly popular feature.

Instagram stories have been around for a little while now but marketers and brands often forget to use them - they're as important (if not more) than the main feed. Why?

1. There's no algorithm attached to them - so they'll reach more people

2. They appear at the very top of the app - so they're easier for people to access

3. They're addictive - people are likely to spend more time browsing

First of all, Instagram stories were the perfect place for casual, throwaway content to keep your brand in front of people. Now they are curated as much as the feed itself, and are how most people will see your posts.

Here's some easy ways to use Instagram stories:

Share a 'day in the life' at your company

Announce new products

Share feed posts - beat the algorithm!

Use the extra features - polls, quizzes, question stickers - to interact with people

Film short videos - talk about your work or offer tips

For more ideas read our post on using stories.

8. Be part of the community

To grow an audience on Instagram you must engage with the community beyond your own posts. Try setting aside time each day and week to do the following:

Like and add meaningful comments on other people's posts

Follow new people using hashtags and the explore section

Find ways to include people in your posts - maybe you cooked their recipe, bought their book or attended their event? Tag and mention people in your posts!

I posted this a few weeks ago, it is a good example of the kind of content that engages people well. It gives you a peek into my day; it includes other people (I have tagged the authors and the plate makers in the photo) as well as giving people some recipe ideas in the comment.

Now that we have the long-awaited account switching on Instagram (hurrah!) it is easier to manage multiple Instagram accounts day to day, including engaging with people beyond your own account.

9. Set goals and track success

Why are you using Instagram? From a business perspective you could be looking for new customers or trying to find people to collaborate with.

From a personal point of view, do you want to grow a blog or find work in a creative industry? Do you want to meet people?
What and how to track on Instagram

How fast is your audience growing?

What kinds of photos do your fans like and comment on the most?

Are you converting customers or gaining real value from Instagram?

Landing page performance - how many people visit from your Instagram link?

It's ok to set goals around gaining followers, but, like any other social media strategy, make sure you have broader goals to achieve.

There are a couple of apps I'd recommend to help you understand and manage Instagram more effectively.

To be smarter about how you use Instagram we'd recommend using Iconosquare. You can analyse who follows you and where they are located, who is active when and how quickly your audience are growing. This will help you post the right content at the optimal times, and also discover new hashtags and accounts.

If you want to schedule on Instagram, to our knowledge there is only one platform that actually posts for you, that is Schedugram. Others I have found still require you to manually push the post to Instagram at the right time.

Ready?

There is a lot here, and that is because Instagram is moving so fast and there is a lot to take advantage of. Take on each step at a time, and if you are only going to do one thing - improve your photos. Most things will follow from there, and you'll start to see your community grow. Apart from anything else, it is a fantastic learning curve, which I am on too. I'm seeing my followers grow incrementally, and I'm picking up a lot of tips from the community as I go along.

We're now going to improve the Sookio Instagram page with this guide in mind, we've taken an ad-hoc approach to it until now - so we are excited to see what our own advice will do! We'll report back, do let us know how you get on too.
Want to improve your digital strategy? Take a look at our strategy page to see how we can help you.

"Instagram is the fastest growing social network" Have you heard this recently? Instagram has doubled its active users in just 18 months, and it doesn't show signs of slowing down. Now is the time to look at it in a new light, and start being smarter about what you share.
A report by Simply Measured showed that Instagram reached 400 million monthly active users in September 2015, compared with 200 million in March 2014. There are 80 million posts uploaded to Instagram every day, and they receive more than 3 billion likes daily too. This is impressive stuff. Instagram is global too, 50% of Instagram's new users were outside of the USA.

While it's becoming more challenging for your content to be seen on Twitter and Facebook without advertising spend, Instagram still sees fantastic growth organically.

How can you take advantage of it? I've put together a step-by-step guide that will help you refresh your profile, improve your photos and build a community, now is the time!

1. Rewrite your Instagram bio
Rewrite your bio
Brevity and authenticity work best on Instagram. Succinctly describe what you do and mention what people might see on your Instagram account. Instagram is a great way to offer a peek into your daily life, whether you're an individual or a company.

If appropriate, use emojis; they add a bit of personality and split up the text.

We like Central Working's no nonsense approach - the text reaffirms what they do and includes the hashtag they use.
Update your profile photo
We'll cover image style later on, and if you are going to refresh your account you'll need a profile picture that works with your style of photography. With any social network, it is important to keep your social media picture current, even if your cheekbones look amazing in the old photo!

2. Curate a style for your images

If you only do one thing, strive to improve your pictures. Instagram is now referred to as the 'visual storytelling network' so it's time to develop a consistent style and get to grips with basic photo editing.

Create a photography style

Stick to a certain look and feel for your photos. Doing this creates a beautiful, cohesive collage of images that will attract people to follow you. It will also help you to stay on track and be strict about what level of quality your photos should be.

L'Occitane use a style that is very evocative of their French roots, their photos are vivid but rustic, and really capture what it is to be in the French countryside. What places, colours and ideas sum you up?

Approach your photography style in a similar way to creating style guides or a tone of voice document - what kind of style do you want? How should you pictures look? Pick a style that matches yourself or your organisation, as the Jamie Oliver team have done above. Some of the looks you could go for:

Plan your content

When we create any digital content we split it into topic areas, to help us keep the messaging even and easily think of new ideas. You can do this with Instagram images too. For example, if you're a men's fashion retailer you could split your photos up into photos that create aspirations, inspire viewers, strike up conversations and convert customers.

Furniture retailer Loaf has a good mixture of content on their page that helps to sell their products but also to create a lifestyle around them. Their photos are aspirational, their recipes and food photos promote action and they regularly share photos from their customer community to stay engaged. You can see that they stick to a bright and homely style in their photography, and any wording used is black and white.
How can you tell a story?
What are your brand values or what is interesting about your daily life? Knowing this will help you build up a content plan that is consistent and interesting.

American workwear brand Carhartt use history and authenticity to tell a story with Instagram. They aim to show who wears their brand and where, this reinforces the lifestyle you can have with Carhartt. The imagery they use shows the ruggedness of their products, and they back this up by looking back at their heritage, emphasising their brand values.

3. Learn how to edit your Instagram photos

You don't need to be an expert to use photo editing apps, but learning how to use them make a massive difference to the quality of your photos.

Instagram's own editing tools really stepped up a gear midway through 2015. They still have filters, but it is the editing tools that you really want to concentrate on.

First of all, try to shoot your photos in natural light and do them in batches so you have a bank of photos to use through the week or month. When you are ready to post you can edit your photos in Instagram, tweaking the settings until it meets the style you are looking for.

To step up to the next level, try VSCOcam. Favoured by many professional photographers using Instagram it is a powerful photo editing app that let you fine tune every aspect of your photo. You can alter brightness, contrast, highlights, saturation, colours and shadows to name a few.

It also has a huge range of filters which allow you to set a style for your photos easily. Stick to one or two of these filters, and tweak using the editing tools, to easily develop consistency in your images. This excellent guide by photographer Eats and Treats leads you through the process step by step.

4. Share meaningful stories with captions

Rather than broadcasting promotional messages, you want your captions to tell an interesting story. You have the characters to really do your image justice, how about these ideas for captions?

What inspired you to take this image?

What is happening today? How does this image relate to what is happening today?

Do you have a sneak peek of a new product?

Do you have some news? How can this be capture in an image

It is important to talk about links in captions too; although you can't put in a live link you can say how someone can find that web page. The most popular way is to mention that the link is in your bio, and then change your URL to whatever you'd like people to click on.

Custom bit.ly links can be used in Instagram captions as long as they are easy to type into a browser. For example, for this blog we might use bit.ly/sookio-insta to give people an easy way of finding the post.

5. Break the rules on using hashtags

You don't have to be shy about hashtags on Instagram; using a lot of hashtags is common. Put them under your caption, try to use 8-12 hashtags per post, some use up to 20. If you prefer, you can add them as a comment underneath the original post, to keep the caption area neat and tidy.

You should also try to use long chain hashtags, rather than single words. These often tell a story and users search for them to find specific types of images

Look at the hashtag # littlestoriesofmylife - this embodies the visual storytelling approach, just simple stories from everyday life, photographed well. There are around 18,000 posts tagged with this hashtag, which is substantial but not so large that you will be drowned out.

6. Find creative ways to use video

Launched in 2013, Instagram videos are up to 15 seconds long, an ideal length that ensures you can convey your message whilst being brief. Just this week they announced view counts for video will be available soon, so you'll have more to measure your success against!

Like photos, you should aim to be consistent if you are going to regularly use video. Shoot in natural light and with a handful of backdrops, and keep background noise is to a minimum. You can shoot without sound too, good for sharing image galleries.

Waitrose use video to share short recipes and tips on their Instagram page. They're snappy and only feature simple recipes, so they are quick to watch and easy to cook.

7. Don't forget Instagram stories!

Update: Instagram stories were launched after we published this post, so we've updated it to include tips on how to use this incredibly popular feature.

Instagram stories have been around for a little while now but marketers and brands often forget to use them - they're as important (if not more) than the main feed. Why?

1. There's no algorithm attached to them - so they'll reach more people

2. They appear at the very top of the app - so they're easier for people to access

3. They're addictive - people are likely to spend more time browsing

First of all, Instagram stories were the perfect place for casual, throwaway content to keep your brand in front of people. Now they are curated as much as the feed itself, and are how most people will see your posts.

Here's some easy ways to use Instagram stories:

Share a 'day in the life' at your company

Announce new products

Share feed posts - beat the algorithm!

Use the extra features - polls, quizzes, question stickers - to interact with people

Film short videos - talk about your work or offer tips

For more ideas read our post on using stories.

8. Be part of the community

To grow an audience on Instagram you must engage with the community beyond your own posts. Try setting aside time each day and week to do the following:

Like and add meaningful comments on other people's posts

Follow new people using hashtags and the explore section

Find ways to include people in your posts - maybe you cooked their recipe, bought their book or attended their event? Tag and mention people in your posts!

I posted this a few weeks ago, it is a good example of the kind of content that engages people well. It gives you a peek into my day; it includes other people (I have tagged the authors and the plate makers in the photo) as well as giving people some recipe ideas in the comment.

Now that we have the long-awaited account switching on Instagram (hurrah!) it is easier to manage multiple Instagram accounts day to day, including engaging with people beyond your own account.

9. Set goals and track success

Why are you using Instagram? From a business perspective you could be looking for new customers or trying to find people to collaborate with.

From a personal point of view, do you want to grow a blog or find work in a creative industry? Do you want to meet people?
What and how to track on Instagram

How fast is your audience growing?

What kinds of photos do your fans like and comment on the most?

Are you converting customers or gaining real value from Instagram?

Landing page performance - how many people visit from your Instagram link?

It's ok to set goals around gaining followers, but, like any other social media strategy, make sure you have broader goals to achieve.

There are a couple of apps I'd recommend to help you understand and manage Instagram more effectively.

To be smarter about how you use Instagram we'd recommend using Iconosquare. You can analyse who follows you and where they are located, who is active when and how quickly your audience are growing. This will help you post the right content at the optimal times, and also discover new hashtags and accounts.

If you want to schedule on Instagram, to our knowledge there is only one platform that actually posts for you, that is Schedugram. Others I have found still require you to manually push the post to Instagram at the right time.

Ready?

There is a lot here, and that is because Instagram is moving so fast and there is a lot to take advantage of. Take on each step at a time, and if you are only going to do one thing - improve your photos. Most things will follow from there, and you'll start to see your community grow. Apart from anything else, it is a fantastic learning curve, which I am on too. I'm seeing my followers grow incrementally, and I'm picking up a lot of tips from the community as I go along.

We're now going to improve the Sookio Instagram page with this guide in mind, we've taken an ad-hoc approach to it until now - so we are excited to see what our own advice will do! We'll report back, do let us know how you get on too.
Want to improve your digital strategy? Take a look at our strategy page to see how we can help you.

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Instagram strategy: 9 steps to improving your feed - Sookio

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Instagram is now one of the fastest growing social network, topping 400 million active users in 2015. People are finding smarter ways to grow their audience on Instagram, so isn't it time you joined in?

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Sue Keogh on blogging, journalistic voice and dealing with the 'permanence' of writing 

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Sue Keogh on blogging, journalistic voice and dealing with the 'permanence' of writing 

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a long intro from the host - real stuff begins at 6 minutes in

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Sue Keogh talks blogging with Life After Professional Sports (LAPS)

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Partly about living a fulfilled  life - partly about what motivates you to communicate in the first place

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In the very first instalment of my column for the Guardian's Weekend magazine, a dizzying number of years ago now, I wrote that it would continue until I had discovered the secret of human happiness, whereupon it would cease. Typically for me, back then, this was a case of facetiousness disguising earnestness. Obviously, I never expected to find the secret, but on some level I must have known there were questions I needed to confront - about anxiety, commitment-phobia in relationships, control-freakery and building a meaningful life. Writing a column provided the perfect cover for such otherwise embarrassing fare.

I hoped I'd help others too, of course, but I was totally unprepared for how companionable the journey would feel: while I've occasionally received requests for help with people's personal problems, my inbox has mainly been filled with ideas, life stories, quotations and book recommendations from readers often far wiser than me. (Some of you would have been within your rights to charge a standard therapist's fee.) For all that: thank you.

I am drawing a line today not because I have uncovered all the answers, but because I have a powerful hunch that the moment is right to do so. If nothing else, I hope I've acquired sufficient self-knowledge to know when it's time to move on. So what did I learn? What follows isn't intended as an exhaustive summary. But these are the principles that surfaced again and again, and that now seem to me most useful for navigating times as baffling and stress-inducing as ours.

There will always be too much to do - and this realisation is liberating. Today more than ever, there's just no reason to assume any fit between the demands on your time - all the things you would like to do, or feel you ought to do - and the amount of time available. Thanks to capitalism, technology and human ambition, these demands keep increasing, while your capacities remain largely fixed. It follows that the attempt to "get on top of everything" is doomed. (Indeed, it's worse than that - the more tasks you get done, the more you'll generate.)

The upside is that you needn't berate yourself for failing to do it all, since doing it all is structurally impossible. The only viable solution is to make a shift: from a life spent trying not to neglect anything, to one spent proactively and consciously choosing what to neglect, in favour of what matters most.

When stumped by a life choice, choose "enlargement" over happiness. I'm indebted to the Jungian therapist James Hollis for the insight that major personal decisions should be made not by asking, "Will this make me happy?", but "Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?" We're terrible at predicting what will make us happy: the question swiftly gets bogged down in our narrow preferences for security and control. But the enlargement question elicits a deeper, intuitive response. You tend to just know whether, say, leaving or remaining in a relationship or a job, though it might bring short-term comfort, would mean cheating yourself of growth. (Relatedly, don't worry about burning bridges: irreversible decisions tend to be more satisfying, because now there's only one direction to travel - forward into whatever choice you made.)

The capacity to tolerate minor discomfort is a superpower. It's shocking to realise how readily we set aside even our greatest ambitions in life, merely to avoid easily tolerable levels of unpleasantness. You already know it won't kill you to endure the mild agitation of getting back to work on an important creative project; initiating a difficult conversation with a colleague; asking someone out; or checking your bank balance - but you can waste years in avoidance nonetheless. (This is how social media platforms flourish: by providing an instantly available, compelling place to go at the first hint of unease.)

It's possible, instead, to make a game of gradually increasing your capacity for discomfort, like weight training at the gym. When you expect that an action will be accompanied by feelings of irritability, anxiety or boredom, it's usually possible to let that feeling arise and fade, while doing the action anyway. The rewards come so quickly, in terms of what you'll accomplish, that it soon becomes the more appealing way to live.

The advice you don't want to hear is usually the advice you need. I spent a long time fixated on becoming hyper-productive before I finally started wondering why I was staking so much of my self-worth on my productivity levels. What I needed wasn't another exciting productivity book, since those just functioned as enablers, but to ask more uncomfortable questions instead.

The broader point here is that it isn't fun to confront whatever emotional experiences you're avoiding - if it were, you wouldn't avoid them - so the advice that could really help is likely to make you uncomfortable. (You may need to introspect with care here, since bad advice from manipulative friends or partners is also likely to make you uncomfortable.)

It's wrong to say we live in especially uncertain times. The future is always uncertain

One good question to ask is what kind of practices strike you as intolerably cheesy or self-indulgent: gratitude journals, mindfulness meditation, seeing a therapist? That might mean they are worth pursuing. (I can say from personal experience that all three are worth it.) Oh, and be especially wary of celebrities offering advice in public forums: they probably pursued fame in an effort to fill an inner void, which tends not to work - so they are likely to be more troubled than you are.

The future will never provide the reassurance you seek from it. As the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics understood, much of our suffering arises from attempting to control what is not in our control. And the main thing we try but fail to control - the seasoned worriers among us, anyway - is the future. We want to know, from our vantage point in the present, that things will be OK later on. But we never can. (This is why it's wrong to say we live in especially uncertain times. The future is always uncertain; it's just that we're currently very aware of it.)

It's freeing to grasp that no amount of fretting will ever alter this truth. It's still useful to make plans. But do that with the awareness that a plan is only ever a present-moment statement of intent, not a lasso thrown around the future to bring it under control. The spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti said his secret was simple: "I don't mind what happens." That needn't mean not trying to make life better, for yourself or others. It just means not living each day anxiously braced to see if things work out as you hoped.

The solution to imposter syndrome is to see that you are one. When I first wrote about how useful it is to remember that everyone is totally just winging it, all the time, we hadn't yet entered the current era of leaderly incompetence (Brexit, Trump, coronavirus). Now, it's harder to ignore. But the lesson to be drawn isn't that we're doomed to chaos. It's that you - unconfident, self-conscious, all-too-aware-of-your-flaws - potentially have as much to contribute to your field, or the world, as anyone else.

Remember: the reason you can't hear other people's inner monologues of self-doubt isn't that they don't have them

Humanity is divided into two: on the one hand, those who are improvising their way through life, patching solutions together and putting out fires as they go, but deluding themselves otherwise; and on the other, those doing exactly the same, except that they know it. It's infinitely better to be the latter (although too much "assertiveness training" consists of techniques for turning yourself into the former).

Remember: the reason you can't hear other people's inner monologues of self-doubt isn't that they don't have them. It's that you only have access to your own mind.

Selflessness is overrated. We respectable types, although women especially, are raised to think a life well spent means helping others - and plenty of self-help gurus stand ready to affirm that kindness, generosity and volunteering are the route to happiness. There's truth here, but it generally gets tangled up with deep-seated issues of guilt and self-esteem. (Meanwhile, of course, the people who boast all day on Twitter about their charity work or political awareness aren't being selfless at all; they are burnishing their egos.)

If you're prone to thinking you should be helping more, that's probably a sign that you could afford to direct more energy to your idiosyncratic ambitions and enthusiasms. As the Buddhist teacher Susan Piver observes, it's radical, at least for some of us, to ask how we'd enjoy spending an hour or day of discretionary time. And the irony is that you don't actually serve anyone else by suppressing your true passions anyway. More often than not, by doing your thing - as opposed to what you think you ought to be doing - you kindle a fire that helps keep the rest of us warm.

Know when to move on. And then, finally, there's the one about knowing when something that's meant a great deal to you - like writing this column - has reached its natural endpoint, and that the most creative choice would be to turn to what's next. This is where you find me. Thank you for reading.

Oliver Burkeman's book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals will be published next year by The Bodley Head. Find out more at oliverburkeman.com

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Oliver Burkeman's last column: the eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life

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After more than a decade of writing life-changing advice, I know when to move on. Here's what else I learned

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It’s about living with intention. You make room — space and time — for the things you love and eliminate everything that distracts us from them.

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Cal Newport - on attention, focus, work habits, productivity.. .and email.

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Cal Newport - on attention, focus, work habits, productivity.. .and email.

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A brilliantly good blog on going deeper into your work and apt C21st communication (with yourself, with others..)

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Back in 2016, I reported on a rumor that was circulating about employee dissatisfaction at Meta (then, Facebook). Developers, it seemed, were unhappy with the company's trendy, but also unbearably noisy and distracting, 8-acre open office floor plan.

"Developers need to concentrate," explained an amused Joel Spolsky at a conference that year, before going on to add that Facebook was paying a 40 - 50% premium for talent because people didn't want to work under those conditions. A commentator on my essay pointed to a podcast episode where Facebook insiders claim that the open office was never more than 30% occupied. "Apparently, the majority of people that work there make sure that they are away from their desk when they need to get work done," he explained.
Read more

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court heard arguments on a case that has the potential to fundamentally reshape the internet as we know it. As you might expect, this caught my attention.

The focus of the case is a single sentence, found in Section 230(c)(1) of 1996's Communications Decency Act:

"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

This so-called Section 230 has since been interpreted through multiple court rulings as providing broad immunity from liability for internet platforms that publish content from third-party users. If I defame you in a Tweet, in other words, you cannot sue Twitter.

The case in question was brought against Google by the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, a college student who was killed in a terrorist attack in 2015. The Gonzalez family claims that the terrorists responsible for their daughter's death had been radicalized by videos recommend on YouTube, and therefore Google, which owns YouTube, should be held liable.

At the core of their argument is that Section 230's protections should not extend to information recommended by algorithms. There's a difference, the lawyer for the Gonzalez family argued, between passively hosting third-party content, such as on a bulletin board, and actively pushing it toward users, such as what happens on social media services.
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A reader recently pointed me toward an intriguing letter, reproduced a few weeks ago in the always-impressive Areopagus newsletter, that was originally sent from Pliny the Younger to his friend Minicius Fundanus around 100 AD. Among other topics, the letter touches on the difficulty of completing meaningful work in a distracted world.

As Pliny writes:

"I always realize [that city life is distracting] when I am at Laurentum, reading and writing and finding time to take the exercise which keeps my mind fit for work. There is nothing there for me to say or hear which I would afterwards regret, no one disturbs me with malicious gossip, and I have no one to blame - except myself - when writing doesn't come easily. Hopes and fears do not worry me, and my time is not wasted in idle talk; I share my thoughts with no one but my books. It is a good life and a genuine one, a seclusion which is happy and honorable, more rewarding than any "business" can ever be. The sea and shore are my private Helicon, an endless source of inspiration."

Pliny's advice led me to do some more digging on what exactly he meant when he quipped: "when I am at Laurentum." It turns out that Pliny maintained a rambling villa on the sea, southwest of Rome. According to an article I found, written by a British architect, Pliny's property had been specifically configured to support focus:

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Earlier this week, the New York Times Magazine published a conversation between me and the journalist David Marchese. We touched on a lot of the ideas about digital technology and the workplace that I elaborate in my 2021 book, A World Without Email.

At one point during the interview, however, I came up with a new metaphor on the fly, which now, looking back, I recognize as potentially adding a useful new wrinkle to my thinking on these topics. Here's the exchange:

Marchese: But hasn't the cultural-technological ship sailed when it comes to this stuff? Or, to mix metaphors, part of me is wondering if what you're suggesting is a little like saying that getting from place to place by horse is a lot more cognitively rewarding and humane than driving everywhere - which may be true, but no one's going back to horses. What company is going to tell its employees to cut back on email and Slack?
Me: The right metaphor here is not "Let's stick with horses, even though automobiles are around," because automobiles were clearly a more energy and monetarily efficient way of moving things from A to B, just like email is clearly a more efficient way for me to deliver a memo to you than a fax machine. The metaphor is that it took a while before we figured out traffic rules and understood that it can't just be cars going wild through the street. Eventually we figured out we need stoplights and lanes and traffic enforcement.

Almost by definition, if a technology rapidly spreads it's because it's doing something notably better than what came before it - be it delivering business information or drool-bucket distraction. Given this reality, nostalgia is often counter-productive: returning to an older generation of tools, in most cases, would be returning to less effective tools.
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When the Academy Award-winning director Guillermo del Toro was a boy growing up in Guadalajara, his mother bought him a Victorian-style writing desk. "I kept my comic books in the drawers, my books and horror action figures on the shelves, and my writing and drawing stuff on the desk," Del Toro recalled in a 2016 profile. "I guess that was the first, smallest version of my collection."

As the director began to find success as an adult with his beautifully imagined, macabre fantasies, like Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth and Nightmare Alley, he was able to indulge his collecting instinct more seriously, amassing "a vast physical collection of strange and wonderful memorabilia." Eventually, Del Toro's objects became too much to manage.

As he explained in an NPR interview:

"We were living in a three-bedroom house and I magically had occupied four spaces. So it came to a point where the collection was much bigger than the family life. I was hanging up a picture, a really creepy painting by Richard Corben. My wife says, 'That's too close to the kitchen, the kids are gonna be freaked out.'"

So Del Toro took the natural next step: he bought a second house in the same neighborhood. His plan was to use the new residence to organize and store his growing collection and provide a quiet place for him to work. As an homage to Charles Dickens, he called it Bleak House.
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In my latest essay for The New Yorker, published earlier this week, I tackled the topic of "quiet quitting." This idea careened into mainstream discourse last summer, powered by a viral TikTok video posted by a twentysomething engineer named Zaid Khan.

Here's the transcript:

"I recently heard about this idea of quiet quitting where, you're not quitting your job, but quitting the idea of going above and beyond at work.

You're still performing your duties, but you're not subscribing to the hustle culture mentality that your work is your life.

The reality is that it's not. And your worth as a person is not defined by your labor."

Khan's earnest declarations earned him acclaim on TikTok, where numerous other videos took up the theme; some outraged in tone, others satiric. As word of the trend spread beyond social media, mainstream commentators weren't so nice. In a CNBC appearance, Shark Tank star Kevin O'Leary described quiet quitting as "worse than COVID."

It was exactly this confused reaction to this trend that caught my interest. As I note in my article, when it comes to quiet quitting, "we're simultaneously baffled and enthusiastic." I set out to understand why.
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Back in 2019, when I was on tour for my book, Digital Minimalism, I chatted with more than a few parents. I was surprised by how many told me a similar story: their teenage children had become fed up with the shallowness of online life and decided, all on their own, to deactivate their social media accounts, and in some cases, abandon their smartphones altogether.

Ever since then, when an interviewer asks me about youth and technology addiction, I tend to adopt an optimistic tone. "We're approaching a moment in which not using these apps will be seen as the authentic, counter-cultural move," I'll explain. "We don't need to convince teenagers to stop using their phones, we just need them to discover on their own just how uncool these online media conglomerates, with their creepy geek overlords, really are."

According to a recent New York Times article that many of my readers sent me, we might finally be seeing evidence that this shift is beginning to pick up speed. The piece, written by Alex Vadukul, and titled "'Luddite' Teens Don't Want Your Likes," chronicles a group of Brooklyn high school students who formed what they call the Luddite Club, an informal organization dedicated to promoting "a lifestyle of self-literation from social media and technology."
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In a recent interview for the BBC podcast Spark & Fire, the novelist Ann Patchett discusses some of the difficulties that come along with finding success as a writer.

"It used to be a novel lived very nicely in my head as a constant companion," she explains. "As time goes on and I now have this other thing which is my career, and all the things that people want me to do, that is very distracting to day dreaming and working in your head."

As a result, Patchett finds herself needing to specifically put aside time just to think. As she elaborates:

"Sometimes I sit down in my office on my mediation cushion. Not to meditate, but just to sit as if meditating. I start the timer, I light a candle, I sit down on my little green poof and I say to myself: 'Now you have twenty minutes to think about your novel. Namaste.'"

She goes on to say that she finds it "pathetic" that she has to "block out time for thinking." Patchett is not alone in this dismay: many authors share a similar despair. (I remember my friend Ryan Holiday once putting it this way in an interview: "The better you become at writing, the more the world conspires to prevent you from writing.")
Read more

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Study Hacks - Decoding Patterns of Success - Cal Newport

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Back in 2016, I reported on a rumor that was circulating about employee dissatisfaction at Meta (then, Facebook). Developers, it seemed, were unhappy with the company's trendy, but also unbearably noisy and distracting, 8-acre open office floor plan.

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'.... In many cases, multitasking actually threatens productivity and prevents us from engaging in sustained concentration at work and in our personal lives.'

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"People are happier when they can fully develop their potential." This is the sort of saying you might find plastered on the wall behind your company's reception desk, but the underlying concept- eudaimonia -is precisely how Aristotle defined happiness more than two thousand years ago. One of the biggest obstacles to happiness in today's world is the continuous increase in distraction and, consequently, the growing difficulty of concentration.

New data shed light on the loss of attention brought about by the constant use of digital applications. According to Udemy in Depth: 2018 Workplace Distraction Report, three out of four millennials and members of Generation Z describe themselves as distracted at work, while half say that they are less productive and not performing as well as they should.

Data on time spent using digital applications reveal striking trends. On average, we devote more than five years of our lives to social media and at least two hours and fifty-one minutes each day to our mobile phones. In a given day, we unlock our screens more than 150 times, switch from one app to another nearly 600 times, and check our email 88 times.

Our phones are modern-day Trojan horses that threaten the strength of our concentration. An estimated 66% of the population suffers from nomophobia-the fear of being without one's mobile telephone.

It should come as no surprise if recruiters at leading companies start prioritizing focus and concentration over IQ tests and other skills.

The risks of multitasking
One of the current dangers is that regular multitasking is encouraged and considered a valuable professional skill. In many cases, multitasking actually threatens productivity and prevents us from engaging in sustained concentration at work and in our personal lives.

According to Cal Newport, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University, one of the negative consequences of multitasking is the problem of "attention residue." When you shift your focus from one task to another, a tiny bit of your attention remains stuck on the initial task. This residue effect is especially strong when the task you shift away from remains unfinished. Who among us has not kept thinking about emails, articles, and jobs left undone throughout the day, despite being occupied with other tasks? Attention residue builds up as we constantly switch from one task to another, wearing down our capacity for attention.

Our phones are modern-day Trojan horses that threaten the strength of our concentration.

Will focus and concentration replace IQ?
The inability to concentrate is a disorder that starts affecting professionals while they are still in school. According to Jennifer Shore (" Social Media Distractions Cost U.S. Economy $650 Billion"), students who succumb to distractions while studying see their GPA fall by a full point and score 18% lower on their final exams. According to Glenn Wilson of London's Institute of Psychiatry, telephones and other technological devices and applications can cause a 10% decrease in IQ-twice the impact of cannabis consumption.

Distraction is a growing concern in many countries. According to the American Psychological Association's 2018 Stress in America survey, two thirds of the country's population feels that disconnecting from digital media is important for health. Paradoxically, the people most committed to limiting technology in their everyday lives are the great gurus of Silicon Valley, who have famously implemented digital detox periods.

Therefore, it should come as no surprise if recruiters at leading companies start prioritizing focus and concentration over IQ tests and other skills. Concentration enables professionals to improve their performance and complete complex tasks that require continuous learning within the company.

One of the current dangers is that regular multitasking is encouraged and considered a valuable professional skill.

Navigating the attention economy
Just over two years ago, The Economist ran a cover story entitled " The world's most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data." The biggest Western companies-Google, Amazon, and Facebook-have business models based on data, so they have to capture our attention. We can no longer attribute our distraction and technological dependence solely to boredom, anxiety, stress, low self-esteem, or other psychological ailments. We are up against some of the world's most talented professionals, who are vying to compete for and capture a valuable limited resource: our attention.

Social networks, the digital world's greatest competitors for our attention, have tapped into our desire for social recognition and our fluctuating levels of dopamine-the neurotransmitter behind the shot of pleasure that hits your brain with every new "like." Some very interesting experiments by Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology at Stanford University, have shown that the anticipation of something that could happen-"the magic of maybe"-causes dopamine levels to rise. Dopamine explains the positive reinforcement of pleasure that you experience every time you check your apps for new "likes" or incoming messages. The constant desire to check social media threatens our ability to control our attention and, therefore, our productivity at work and in our personal lives.

Concentration paves the way towards satisfaction and well-being: the only recipe for happiness.

Exercising your attention muscle
For all the reasons outlined above, it is not easy to develop concentration skills. Experts like Cal Newport have struck back with theories such as digital minimalism, a work philosophy that calls for a more optimized and effective use of technologies, focusing solely on tools that actually add value.

Developing the attention muscle requires behaviors and practices that come from within each individual. These efforts are necessary in order to boost the productivity of companies and institutions in rapidly changing contexts characterized by complex challenges that demand continuous learning, which is only possible through focus and concentration. But they are also essential for people to achieve their goals, give the best of themselves, and reach a state of eudaimonia. In short, concentration paves the way towards satisfaction and well-being: the only recipe for happiness.

© IE Insights.

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Concentration: The New Superpower of the 21st Century | IE Insights

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By Borja Santos. Focus and concentration are shaping up to be the new superpowers that companies will look for in 21 st -century professionals. In a society shaped by the constant use of technologies, our brains are losing the ability to concentrate on a single task for an extended period of time.

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Maya Angelou 'I know Why the Caged Bird Sings'

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Maya Angelou 'I know Why the Caged Bird Sings'

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Narrative, memoir, story  and an exploration of how our identity not only matters in how we communicate, but often drives the why

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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first of seven autobiographical works by American writer Maya Angelou, published in 1969. The book chronicles her life from age 3 through age 16, recounting an unsettled and sometimes traumatic childhood that included rape and racism. It became one of the most widely read and taught books written by an African American woman.

Summary

The prologue describes an event in which Angelou, as a small child, is reciting a poem in church. Feeling ugly because she imagined in vain that the dress her grandmother made her would be so pretty that she would be seen as a beautiful white child, she forgets the poem and then wets her pants as she flees the church in embarrassment.

The story begins in 1931, as Maya, age three, and her elder brother, Bailey, are sent to Stamps, Arkansas, to live with their paternal grandmother, whom they call Momma, after their parents' breakup. Momma owns the only store in the African American part of town. The children settle into life with Momma, helping her at the store and learning to read and do arithmetic. One night a former sheriff warns Momma to hide her disabled son because white men are planning revenge after a Black man "messed with" a white woman. Later a group of young white girls ridicule Momma while she stands, dignified and unmoving, outside the store. When the Great Depression hits, Momma keeps the store from going under by allowing customers to trade their rations for goods. One Christmas, Maya and Bailey receive gifts from their parents, whom they assumed to be dead. A year later their father, Daddy Bailey, arrives in a fancy car, and he takes Maya and Bailey to St. Louis to live with their mother, the beautiful Vivian.

At first they stay with Vivian's mother and their uncles. At school, Maya and her brother are more advanced than the other students, and they are moved up a grade. Later the children move in with Vivian and her boyfriend, Mr. Freeman. Mr. Freeman begins molesting eight-year-old Maya, threatening to kill Bailey if she tells anyone. One day he rapes her, and she conceals her stained underwear under the mattress. When changing the linens, Bailey and Vivian find the garment and realize what happened. During Mr. Freeman's trial, Maya lies when asked whether he touched her before the rape. Later Mr. Freeman is found dead, apparently having been beaten to death. Feeling guilty, Maya stops speaking to anyone except Bailey. After a few months of her silence, Maya and Bailey are sent back to Momma.

Maya is relieved to be back in Stamps, but she continues her silence. Eventually, the sophisticated Mrs. Bertha Flowers takes Maya under her wing, telling her that it is important to speak and giving her books to read aloud, and she begins talking again. At the age of 10, Maya is sent to work for a white woman, who calls her Mary rather than her name (Marguerite). Offended, Maya breaks some china in order to get fired. Later, Bailey is upset when he sees a movie starring Kay Francis because he thinks the actress looks just like Vivian, and he makes an unsuccessful attempt to return to his mother. Maya later makes her first friend, Louise Kendricks, a girl from school. During this time, Maya continues to encounter racism. When she develops cavities, Momma takes her to the white dentist who borrowed money from Momma during the Depression, but he refuses to treat the child, and they have to take a bus to the closest Black dentist. Bailey later sees the decaying corpse of a Black man pulled out of a pond, and a white man makes him help some Black men carry the body into the jail. After the incident, Momma decides to take Maya and Bailey back to their mother.

Maya and Bailey move with their mother to Oakland, California. There Maya attends a school in which she is one of only three Black students. When she is 14 years old, she is awarded a scholarship to the California Labor School, where she studies drama and dance. Vivian's new husband, Daddy Clidell, becomes a genuine father figure to Maya.

Maya spends a summer in southern California with Daddy Bailey and his girlfriend, Dolores. Dolores and Maya do not get along. One day, Daddy Bailey takes Maya with him on a shopping trip to Mexico. Maya enjoys the excursion until she loses track of her father, who eventually returns to their car too drunk to drive. Although she has never driven before, Maya manages to drive them to the border, where she hits another car. At this point, Daddy Bailey wakes up, pacifies the other driver, and then drives the rest of the way home. Upon their return, Daddy Bailey and Dolores argue, and he walks out. Maya tries to console Dolores, but Dolores insults Vivian, leading Maya to slap her. Dolores then cuts Maya, who decides to run away. After spending a night in a junkyard, she awakens to find a community of Black, white, and Mexican runaways living there. She stays for a month and then returns to Vivian.

In the meantime, Bailey has become friends with "a group of slick street boys" and begun dating a white prostitute. At the age of 16 he leaves home, to his sister's great sorrow. Maya browbeats the transit company into hiring her as the first female African American streetcar conductor in San Francisco. However, after spending one semester at the job, she returns to school. She later reads the lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) by Radclyffe Hall, and, misunderstanding what lesbianism is, she begins to fear that she might be a lesbian. Though Vivian tries to reassure her, she is not assuaged, and she determines to have sex with a boy. The encounter is unpleasant, and it results in Maya's becoming pregnant. On Bailey's advice, she keeps the news to herself and returns to school. After graduating from high school, Maya tells Vivian and Daddy Clidell, who are fully supportive. After Guy is born, Vivian assures Maya that she will be a good mother.

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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Summary & Facts

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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first of seven autobiographical works by Maya Angelou, published in 1969. The book chronicles her life from age 3 through age 16, recounting a traumatic childhood that included rape and racism. It is one of the most widely read and taught books by an African American woman.

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On Personas and Designing Conversations - Elizabeth Stoke

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On Personas and Designing Conversations - Elizabeth Stoke

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It's interpersonal: Personas and live segmentation in customer service conversation

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W ho's the client? According to marketers and designers, knowing the answer to this question is crucial to unlocking and increasing a customer base. Companies can leverage what they know about the characteristics and profile of their 'typical' client to shape the way that their products and services are communicated - and, in theory, this will attract more (and more satisfied) clients.

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Headlee is a brilliant NPR Radio host and interviewer: her talk is one of the best things I have seen on conversation, paying attention, and getting meaningful quickly

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Celeste Headlee: 10 ways to have a better conversation | TED Talk

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When your job hinges on how well you talk to people, you learn a lot about how to have conversations -- and that most of us don’t converse very well. Celeste Headlee has worked as a radio host for decades, and she knows the ingredients of a great conversation: Honesty, brevity, clarity and a healthy amount of listening. In this insightful talk, she shares 10 useful rules for having better conversations. “Go out, talk to people, listen to people,” she says. “And, most importantly, be prepared to be amazed.”

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Robert Poynton - Why we all need to pause right now

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Robert Poynton - Why we all need to pause right now

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Filmed during the first UK lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic, Rob shares advice on how we can all to turn such situations to our advantage.

We were all forced to pause.

How should we make sense of that and how could we make the most of it?

How could we use the time constructively and creatively, to set new priorities or ask new questions?

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Rob Poynton Why We All Need To Pause Right Now | The DO Lectures

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The DO Lectures is home to the creative underdog. An encouragement network for those seeking a different path. And the idea is a simple one: to gather together the world's leading DOers, disruptors and changemakers, have them share their hearts and stories, and encourage others to DO amazing things too.

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Benyamin Elias. ‘’. Active Campaign. 14 Feb 2021.

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Know your audience. Know your audience. KYA. Every marketing blog post in the history of the world has "know your audience" in it somewhere.

But...it's kind of a lie.

Don't get me wrong-understanding your audience is crucial. If you do it well.

The problem is that the term "know your audience" has been thrown around so much that it's essentially meaningless. What does it mean to know your audience? How do you do audience research? Who is your audience?

When you really know your audience, you know exactly what to say in your marketing.

Most advice on KYA doesn't tell you exactly what to say.

Before you keep reading, pause for a second. Do you know exactly what to say to market your business right now? The exact words that will make people sit up and notice your business? On the spot, no preparation. If not, the audience research techniques in this post will help.

Sometimes, you'll hear advice about identifying your target audience using demographics. Or maybe psychographics. If you're in B2B, someone might throw out the word "firmographics."

If you go to Toastmasters or talk to journalists, they'll talk about how you should know your audience before speaking or writing.

In a marketing crowd, you might hear a lot of talk about buyer personas.

But when you really dig into it, you'll find that most "buyer personas" don't seem to actually tell you all that much. Slapping a cute alliterative name like "Business Brad" or "Sales Sally" or "Musician Methuselah" doesn't actually help you out when you sit down to, ya know... do some marketing.

When you sit down to define your positioning. Your place in the market. Your message. Your brand. You need more than basic demographics.

Here's how you actually can know your audience. You'll learn:

Why is it important to know your audience?

3 common audience research methods that don't work

The benefits of knowing your audience

3 ways to get to know your audience better (and offer exactly what they want)

There's a lot of bad audience research advice out there. Here are 6 ways to get to know your audience better:

1. Demographics

2. Psychographics

3. Online analytics

4. Review mining

5. Online conversations

6. Live interviews

3 of those methods are terrible, and 3 are amazing. Do you know which 3, and why the good ones work so well? Keep reading to find out.

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Why is knowing your audience important?

Knowing your audience helps you figure out what content and messages people care about. Once you have an idea of what to say, knowing your audience also tells you the appropriate tone and voice for your message.

Let me put this another way. Have you ever wanted to read minds?

What's this fella thinking?
The absolute best marketing messages make people feel like you're reading their minds. You can state their pain points, challenges, goals, and desires so clearly that it feels like you're living in a sweet penthouse apartment in their head.

Imagine for a second that you have a problem. It could be any problem at all-maybe you want to lose weight, or maybe the grout in your bathroom tiles is coming out.

Now imagine that the person you turn to for help exactly articulates your problem. They understand your beliefs, values, and attitudes toward your situation. You feel like they understand you.

They can describe your problem more clearly than you can describe your problem. All you can do is nod along while they talk.

You're probably going to hire that person, right?

Have you ever heard someone talk about a public figure (often a comedian) and say "he's saying what people need to hear" or "he's not afraid to speak his mind."

Do you know what they're really saying? "He's saying the stuff I believe but don't talk about."

When you know your audience, you can pluck the words right out of your customers' mouths and use them in your marketing.

You can read minds.

That's all pretty abstract. What actually happens to your business when you can read minds?

You get more leads, because people feel like you understand them

You get more customers, because leads feel like you understand them

You get more referrals, because customers feel like you understand them

Sensing a theme?

Conversion rates go up. Social media shares go up. Email opens and clicks go up.

Sales go up.

By how much? Check out this example, written by copywriter Joanna Wiebe for the website of a rehab clinic.

The new messaging on this site increased button clicks by 400%. It increased form submissions by 20%, even though the form was on an entirely separate page.

That's what happens when you really know your audience. When you can get inside their heads. Digital marketing, content marketing....all your marketing improves.

You don't get those kinds of results from a vague Musician Methuselah "persona." Let's talk about why many buyer personas are a mistake-and how you can really know your audience.

Why buyer personas are a mistake

Marketing Mary is a mom in her mid-thirties who lives in the suburbs of a major city. She's married with two kids, college educated, makes $77,000 a year, and drives to work every day. At work, she manages a small team of three marketers and reports to the head of marketing.

If you want to sell her something, how would you do it?

To be frank, I have no idea how I would do it. Because even though I have a lot of "information" about my "Marketing Mary" persona, I know very little that actually matters.

What are the tasks she struggles with day to day? Where are her frustrations? What work does she love doing-and what work is she the most proud of?

Answers to those questions are a lot more important to me as a marketer.
If you know what Marketing Mary struggles with, you can position your product or service as an answer to her problems. If you know what she loves, you can show her how what you offer helps her do more of that.

Don't get me wrong: a buyer persona can be valuable. If it includes the right information.

It's just that...they often don't.

After all that "persona development," you don't want to start with a blank page
And also-information about demographics and income level and all of those other details are important in the right context.

When Procter & Gamble is looking to optimize their product line by offering cleaning products at every price point and for different uses around the home-knowing their target market's income level and type of dwelling (e.g. home, apartment, etc.) is probably crucial.

P&G probably does need to do market research surveys and questionnaires. They probably need focus groups, competitive intelligence, and a SWOT analysis. A mix of qualitative and quantitative research and complex data analysis is probably valuable.

But do you need those things?

Here's a quick breakdown of some of the common audience research techniques that you might run into in the process of understanding your audience.

Demographics

Demographics is the study of populations. The word "demographics" comes from Greek roots (demos means people, graphic implies measurement). In other words, demographics is the process of using statistics to study the composition or change in a group of people.

Demographics gets complicated quickly. When you talk about the statistical study of populations, you start needing to think about stuff like

How to accurately sample large populations

Population size

Population dynamics

Sampling bias

Direct vs. indirect methods of collecting data

When you're using demographics to build audience profiles, it's also important to consider that the demographic that uses the product isn't necessarily the same as the one that buys the product.

Sometimes spouses buy things for each other, or their children. Department heads buy things for their businesses but do so on the recommendation of their managers.

The picture gets complicated quickly.

For your marketing, it's not that demographics don't matter at all. There's probably a difference between talking to a parent in their 40s and a single person in their 20s.

Where you may run into problems is that demographics don't tell you how your audience feels

Having a lot of information can trick you into focusing on the wrong information
Know your demographics-using them in your marketing materials is a fast way to filter out your best customers. If you say "I help women in their 40s lose weight," women over 40 will be interested and everyone else will leave you alone (which is exactly what you want).

What's crucial is that you don't stop at demographics. You need more information to create great marketing messages.

Psychographics

Psychographics is a qualitative market research field that's used to research the psychology of an audience or target market.

Psychographics is a major step forward from demographics because psychographics tells you a lot more about the kinds of things your audience cares about.

For our Marketing Mary example, demographic information tells you that she:

Is in her mid-thirties

Makes $77,000 per year

Manages a small team

Reports to the head of marketing

Psychographic information might tell you that she:

Struggles to manage her workload while also managing a team

Is interested in social media marketing

Wants a promotion but isn't sure how to negotiate salary

Is very into building model trains

This kind of information tells you a bit more about what you do to market things to Marketing Mary. Maybe you can reach her on social media, or model train forums. Or position your product as a way for managers to get their work done.

Psychographic information is useful in that it tells you broadly what your message can be. Psychographics tend to focus on "AIO variables" which stands for:

AIOs help you understand more about your audience-but they still don't quite give you the information you need to create your marketing message.

Once again, psychographic data is useful on a large scale. A huge company like Procter & Gamble can use psychographics to position its "portfolio of brands" at different target markets.

To create your specific messages, though, you'll want more detailed info. In a few moments, we'll talk about research that tells you exactly what to say.

Online analytics

There's a huge marketing trend in the last few years. "Data-driven" marketers are everywhere.

As free platforms like Google Analytics have made it easier and easier to access data about what people are doing on your website, marketers have been eager to use data to prove the results of their work.

John Wanamaker, one of the early marketers, once said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."

In a lot of cases, analytics solves this problem. When you run Facebook Ads or PPC ads, you can see exactly how much money you make for each dollar you spend.
It's relatively easy to know the ROI of channels like Facebook Ads
Analytics are extremely useful for marketers-and they can help you send your messages to the right people at the right time.

Some ways to use analytics include

Seeing which product pages and landing pages people visit on your site, then sending those people messages that offer them those products (this can be done automatically)

Tracking engagement with different types of content, so that you can focus your efforts on the material that gets you more customers

Retargeting people who get halfway through your funnel, to push them to the next step

By seeing where people go on your website, you can make some important inferences about what will turn them from leads into potential customers. And then into customers.

That's valuable information.

...but then what?

Analytics are valuable and useful. So are demographics. And so are psychographics.

But none of those research methods tell you exactly what to say to people.
When someone lands on a product page and you send them an automatic email, you know what to offer them (the product). What specifically should you say in that email?

You know that someone needs to be able to manage their team more effectively. What marketing message can you create that will make them believe your product is the answer?

Here's where we get deep into "knowing your audience."

The results of knowing your target audience

Check out this homepage from Clockspot, a company that sells employee timesheet software.

I don't even need to track time and I want this
Combining demographic and psychographic information could tell you that small business owners struggle to manage employee timesheets.
It could tell you that they want to "save time."

But notice how much better this messaging is.

"Save time" is a generic benefit. Everyone claims to save you time. It's not specific-and even though it's the high-level benefit of online timesheet software, someone reading a statement like "saves you time" is going to think "Does it really though?"

When you look at this page, there are some hyper-specific benefits listed:

"No more paper, messy spreadsheets, or manual calculations"

"Know exactly when employees arrive and leave work. No more guessing."

"Run payroll reports in just a few clicks"

"See who's working when and where all in real-time on the web"

These benefits are exactly the problems that a small business owner needs to solve. They're also powerfully emotional.

And the phrase "save time" doesn't appear once on the entire page.

Messaging that's hyper-specific is better because it sticks.

"No more paper, messy spreadsheets, or manual calculations" is something that the reader can actually imagine. I know what messy spreadsheets look like, and I'd love to stop doing them.

The same goes for "run payroll reports in just a few clicks." That's the same as "save time" in some ways-but it's a message you can picture in your head.
Which makes it more memorable. And emotional

Perhaps the greatest living copywriter, Gary Bencivenga once said:

"The vast majority of products are sold because of the need for love, the fear of shame, the pride of achievement, the drive for recognition, the yearning to feel important, the urge to look attractive, the lust for power, the longing for romance, the need to feel secure, the terror of facing the unknown, the lifelong hunger for self-esteem and so on. Emotions are the fire of human motivation, the combustible force that secretly drives most decisions to buy. When your marketing harnesses those forces correctly you will generate explosive increases in response."

So let's talk about how you can create messages like that.

3 ways to get to know your audience better

Where do great messages come from?

They don't come from copywriters or any other kind of marketer. The best messages come directly from the mouths of your customers.

Advertising legend David Ogilvy, among other famous marketers, talked about this idea in his memoir Confessions of an Advertising Man.

"Unless you have some reason to be solemn and pretentious, write your copy in the colloquial language which your customers use in everyday conversation."

In other words, this is a marketing truth that has been known for a long time-but somehow remains a secret weapon. One that you can harness.
In 2017, copywriter Joel Klettke showed how this kind of "voice of customer" copywriting is so effective in a talk at Unbounce's Call To Action conference.

Joel Klettke at CTA Conference, via Unbounce
Look at how much better it makes these messages:

"Sales made simple" → "You hate guesswork and busywork - so we made sales less work"

"Affordable time tracking payroll software" → "The only time tracking tool that pays for itself"

"Breakthrough native reporting limitations" → "Get the reports your CRM can't give you - without the headache it does"

Great messages use the exact words that your audience uses to describe their own problems.

That's why knowing your audience is so important. And all you need to do is get your audience to tell you about their problems in their own words.

Here are three tactics you can use to get the exact words your audience uses.

1. Review mining

"If you think you need rehab, you do"

Remember that headline? I mentioned it earlier, but here it is again.

Joanna Wiebe is a great copywriter, but she didn't write this headline. She plucked it out of someone else's mouth.

She used review mining.

As a quick reminder, this updated messaging caused a 400% increase in button clicks and a 20% increase in form conversion rate. The previous headline, which is beaten, was "Your Addiction Ends Here," the kind of headline that's typical of marketing websites.

Where did the new message come from? An Amazon review on a book about ending addiction.

Wait, really?

Yes really. Online reviews are a massive source of voice-of-customer language. When people leave reviews on products (positive or negative) they usually include information like:

What they liked about the product

The specific problem that they wanted to solve

How the product was able to solve their problem

Other things they wished the product included but doesn't

Seems like stuff that could be pretty useful, right?

If you still aren't convinced, let me walk you through a quick example.
Imagine for a moment that you run a fitness business and wanted to get some VOC language. Open up Amazon and search for fitness books. You'll quickly find yourself reading the reviews for the popular book Body for Life, by Bill Phillips.

And the very first review is a gold mine.

Look at all this copy that you could use!

"This routine is all about working smarter, not harder or more often."

"You'll get the kind of figure that most people find sexy"

"If you're looking to get in shape without needing to spend long hours in the gym"

"Perfect for the busy person who can't spend an hour and a half doing weights or cardio in the gym"

"It's much easier to find a partner who can commit and stay committed! Your partner only need to meet up for under 3 hours a week"

"I also like the suggested eating regime, 3 meals a day and 3 (meal-replacement) shakes a day. Who wants to eat 4 to 6 meals of food a day? Not me, that's why I like this system so much."

Put it on your website. In your emails. In Facebook ads. Use it everywhere-because it's great messaging.

And it doesn't just work for fitness. Remember, Joanna Wiebe used the same technique to write copy for a rehab center.

You can use review mining on Amazon reviews, or anywhere else that your audience leaves reviews online.

It will help you find better messages. And it's something you can do right now.

2. Online conversations

Amazon reviews aren't the only place that your audience is talking online. Anyplace your audience talks about their problems is a source of information for your marketing.

We wrote a full article on how to do this kind of market research, but here are a few of the places you might consider checking:

Quora. If you want to know the questions people have, Quora is literally a site where people ask questions about their problems.

Reddit. Dubbed "the front page of the internet," Reddit is a huge site with lots of subreddits (smaller communities) dedicated to specific interests.

Facebook Groups. They can be tricky to find, but people are often willing to share problems in Facebook Groups that they wouldn't share more publicly.

Forums. Aren't forums dead? Not exactly. There are still valuable forums out there, and they tend to be dedicated to niche topics (which makes for better research).

What does this process look like? It's basically the same as review mining. Just not for reviews.

To return to our fitness example, check out this Reddit post about being overweight.

Lots of gold in that post. Let's highlight one comment in particular.

Sometimes anonymity leads to a lot of honesty
Wowee! More incredible insights here, along with some great language to consider using:

"Being fat is a lifestyle, and not being fat is a different lifestyle."

"I feel better. I feel happier. Instead of hating myself when I binge eat...I'm proud of myself."

"Every aspect of my life is being changed."

There are a lot of specific benefits listed (skin cleared up, less greasiness). This is the kind of message you can expect to find from studying online conversations.

You can see how people feel.

3. Interviews with real people

Review mining and online conversations are powerful because you can do them literally right now.

Go open Google, type in "[your product category] reviews," and you'll get better messages in minutes.

At the same time, there's no substitute for real, live interviews with real, live people.

The biggest thing that's missing from online conversations is a follow-up question. "Tell me more." That's a question you want to be asking over and over to get at the really compelling messages hiding in your audience's head.

You can't do that on a Reddit thread that closed 3 years ago.

Actual face-to-face (or phone-to-phone) conversations are hands-down the best way to know your audience-and create better messages.

In a customer interview, you get to ask questions like:

What's the hardest part about _____?

How does ____ make you feel?

When you were getting started with _____, what were you thinking about?

Where do you go to find information about _____?

How well does _____ solve your problem?

And then you get to say "Tell me more." You get to hear real, personal stories-the kind that leads to great copy and marketing messages.

You get the information you need to know your audience.

Conclusion: What "know your audience" really means

As you can probably tell, I think it's crucial to know your audience. I also think that knowing your audience is a lot harder than it sounds.

Understanding your audience is way harder than slapping a few pieces of demographic information into a "persona."

And it's not something you can do in a conference room. You need to talk to real people.

Once you uncover the deep, burning pain points of your audience (and the language they use to describe those pain points), you can level up your marketing messages.

Behavioral data shows you the people visiting a certain landing page on your website? Now you can follow up automatically-and know exactly what to say to get more customers.

That's what it means to know your audience.

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"Know Your Audience" is a Lie, But it Still Matters

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"Know Your Audience" is good advice, except that it's executed poorly. Here's what it really means, and 3 ways that actually let you know your audience.

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The Magic Ingredient of Powerful Public Relations

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The Magic Ingredient of Powerful Public Relations

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Suggested by Simon for his session on Dec 2

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Worth taking a look at the blog accompanying this book ahead of our session with Johnnie on Dec 3