The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

I called this individual and we had a good chat that lasted about two hours. Very informative, very revealing and greatly appreciated. This individual and I correspond often and I asked why readers of this blog will more often email or call me rather than post comments here.

The answer was one of those "obvious in retrospect" things to me. The suggestion was that the nature of my posts, specifically my arcs, makes it challenging to know where to "interrupt" the conversation with a comment. It's much easier to either email or call me because then the individual knows they have my attention rather than fearing they might be interrupting me.

Many thanks for that. To all readers, please feel free to comment here, to call or email me. Despite what you might have heard, I'm pretty down to earth (except when attached to my kites).

What follows is the reader's email. When I edited out personal information I replaced it with "[[something]]" and the essence of my phone call responses are in italics.

Enjoy (and do feel free to comment).

Part of me is tempted simply to post this on my blog or to comment on yours, but it is sufficiently personal that I'll send it to you via email instead. Eventually, though, I may wind up posting about the content of what you're talking about... but I need to think about it more.

[My family is away right now]; it has been a long week as they all seem to be -- as so many are in corporate America -- and I got home early enough to sink onto the living room couch for a nap; then, I got up and turned on an episode of that new "Saving Grace" show on TNT but it didn't hold my attention sufficiently for me to keep it going continuously. I came into my home office, ground through comment spam on my blog (1 real comment, 80 spam), and then I decided to catch up on my BizMediaScience reading, mit beer on table.

When my frustration peaked in the middle of episode 6 of "Media Free?" I decided to write this email.

I've twitted you about endless threads before, but... 18 plus parts? And 18 plus parts in which the meat of the hamburger is smothered in a recapitulating bun that grows bigger and bigger with each post? I truly do not understand the purpose unless it's simply a way of aggregating audience by giving PageRank and its ilk more things to link to and thereby raising the impact of the blog

Is that it?

First, I'm flattered that you think I'm that clever and/or knowledgeable about PageRank and such. Second, the recapitulating comes from another reader asking me to place those recapitulations up front so they, should they come into an arc in the middle, have an idea of what they missed and whether or not they should review. Third, I sometimes like to think my splitting of subjects into arcs allows me to focus on one element in each post. I think it has more to do with a unintentional demonstration of how I connect the dots than much else. That, and who'd read a single post 8,000 words long?

I'm also baffled by the design of your blog. I don't take more than "yes, that's what I want" advisory credit for the design of [[my blog]], but the design goal of that blog is threefold: 1) To focus the reader's attention on what I have to say; 2) to let them know what I look like so that the physical [[me]] brand is not solely coextensive with the [[company I work for]] brand, and 3) to let folks know that they can track various topics that I return to by category. I don't have ads on the blog because that would put me in competition with [[the company I work for]], which I want to avoid because it's the right thing to do, and also the right thing to appear to do.

I had no control on the design of the blog. My suspicion is that it's a templated thing.

When it comes to BizMediaScience, though... I'm left shrugging helplessly. For a guy part of whose professional raison d'etre is to help companies make sites that work (that is, not sites that are pretty but sites that achieve an objective) the fact that your blog is an impenetrable bloody mess with at least 50% of the space devoted to things other than the content -- and I have to work HARD to get to the nuggets of content buried within the mess -- leaves me wondering what you have up your sleeve.

Define "HARD". For that matter, I'm not sure what you mean by "mess". My writing can always improve, no doubt of that. Making anything accessible is a moving target in today's world. Help?

I'm sufficiently convinced of your brilliance to take on faith that you do HAVE something up your sleeve and that this isn't just because the incremental revenue from Google is doing more than buy you the occasional roll of kite string.

So, ah, what's going on here? What's the objective behind the mess? (Note: I finally figured out the trick of looking for the line that separates the recapitulation from the meat, but sometimes the line ISN'T there!)

As for the content of the thread that I'm in the middle of reading, I wonder -- and again I'm getting sufficiently personal here that I'm emailing rather than posting -- about how different your take would be on this if you had kids.

People worldwide, from cultures modern and ancient, technological and agricultural, predator and prey have said to me in their various dialects and subtongues something like "It'd be different if you had kids."

I don't accept this as a valid statement unless the speaker is willing to consider if it would be different if they didn't have kids.

Still, if there is a wonder, people are amazed at my relationship to and with Susan (wife, partner, Goddess, Wise Woman of the North, ...) and, when Fenris was alive and Maschaak before him, amazed at how well behaved and trained they were (my dogs, for those who don't know).

I never set out to train my dogs to behave in certain ways, only allowed them to be dogs and let them know that I was the alpha in the pack. Did I communicate to them in human language? Yes, and often in several languages. I also barked and howled at and with them and they responded just as well.

Susan and I do "work" at our relationship and I don't think it's something others would recognize as such. We allow each other to be each other, not property or subjugate, and we'll very often switch dominance roles according to our skills and talents. We also talk to each other as equals. I think the big thing is that we've given each other the freedom to choose to be together or not. There's risk in that and recognizing the risk makes the being together all the richer because we know the decision isn't arbitrary, it's intentional.

What does this have to do with my thoughts being different if I had kids? Lots, me thinks. The strength of my relationships with wife and friends, humans and animals, wind and earth, are extensions, externalizations, of who I am. My interactions with children would be the same.

My dad is a [[medical professional]] and he wasn't around as much as anybody -- including him -- would've liked when I was a boy. (I can talk more about this at some other time having spent $20,000 on therapy to deal with this and other issues, but it's not really the point.) My dad's relative absence during my childhood was one of the big reasons I wanted to [[study what I did and follow an academic career path]] back in the day: I wanted to be around for my kids. Now that I'm a corporate guy, it's a lot harder, but I do work REALLY hard to be around for my kids. But I also have certain personal goals and needs, and those are hard to meet when the pie of my day is sliced into dad / husband / professional / family / friend / writer / golly I like to read books and comic books and watch movies oh and then there's eating and listening to music / did I mention that I have a dog? shaped wedges.

And these are the choices we make. I made a conscious decision not to have children because until recently I never thought I was mature enough psychologically to give them what I would want to give them (forget what they might need, it's all about what "I would want to give them" and this solipsistic element is in all of us, Perhaps my training allows me to recognize it more easily than others).

I have often counseled people to take a serious assessment of their life and decide if they're happy, fulfilled, more joyous than sorrowful, pick your metaphors and emotional states. The majority of people in industrial/technological societies are frustrated and depressed, not to mention clinically dysfunctional (estimates run as high as 90% in the USA alone). My message to people is a simple one, unless you're happy/fulfilled/joyous/... you're not going to be offering happiness/fulfillment/joy/... to those around you. This is one of the things I use to teach (and still do, when invited to), how to be these things.

Before going any further, am I, myself, these things at all times? Heck no. But I don't think life is meant to be one extreme or the other. A cardiologist sees a straight line on a heart monitor and knows the patient is dead. Unless we're willing to experience pain we can never appreciate pleasure.

I've gone back to reading the Media Free thread, by the way. Now on part 12. ... and... I'm done. I made it all the way through part 18 -- and finished my second beer along the way -- and I'll add "keep up with this darn thread" to my formidable list of daily tasks.

OK, two beers and 18+ posts in... yeah, turtle time and me time and unstructured time in which to let my thoughts wander... what a nice fantasy. I'm taking steps to control my life: my job is morphing so that I'm not as tied to the office as I have been. I have a new work number that I can have ring in my office, my cell or my home office and I can unplug it at will... so it's no longer necessary for me to always be in my office. I'm shucking off TV shows and magazines and websites in order to free up time, even though that leaves my omnivorous mind feeling like it's on a diet. AND, at least a part of me is happy that [[my family is away]] for a week so that I can spend the scant time I usually spend with them thinking about and working on [[more fun stuff]].

But it never feels like there's enough time.

I made one overarching commitment to be a dad and that takes precedence over most things, and I dearly love my children, but [[there's stuff I should have]] finished years ago. Look through the rear view window of my life and you see the crumpled hulks of "should haves" littering the highway.

Sure, a media free zone is a nice idea, but you have to have a house that's sufficiently big to get it, don't you? Our media free zone is our back porch, and we spend a lot of time there with the kids playing; we don't have a TV in our bedroom, but sometimes we wind up dragging our wirelessly enabled laptops in there.

I fear that this isn't making an abundant amount of sense, but the main point, I think, is that you have to have a certain level of affluence to bake turtle time and media free time into your life. And/or you have to be disciplined in a way that most people -- including me -- aren't natively, and the guidebooks aren't all that helpful.

Affluence is (me thinks) irrelevant. It has to do with prioritizing one's life and making decisions. These are skills I don't see in great abundance these days.

I've written -- somewhere -- that one of the big changes in modern life is that decisions that used to be made for people by geography (I'm leaving work and won't answer my work phone) are different now, and folks have to make them consciously (I'm unplugging my phone; I'm resisting the urge to check email).

Email is addictive. It's a wonderful way of not working. Checking email is part of most people's jobs, so if you stop making progress on a project by checking email you're still working, but not effectively.

One reason that people announce the they're jumping off the grid is that they're making a promise to themselves and asking the rest of the grid to help them keep the promise.

And with that, I'm going to go take another nap.

Because I can.

All my best,

and mine, too... and aren't you glad I didn't turn this into an arc?

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