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Being “offline” is a great way to think about the online world. Over the last two days “offline” (for the most part) I have been thinking a lot about the online world, most specifically about how, in a world that is continuosly changing, does a marketer keep up with the changing ways in which people consume content online.
The over fragmenting of content consumption
When I first started writing this blog in 2005, there was no Twitter or FriendFeed. There was no Techmeme. Heck, RSS was still new for most and “feed readers” were starting to pop-up everywhere. Today, online content consumption methods are as fragmented as they have ever been a trend I suspect to see continued indefinitely. After all, this is the true power of Internet technologies; the ability to get what you want, when you want it, however you want it. While this is great for content consumers, this represents a huge problem for content creators (like me, the company I work for and marketers across the world).
Making communications harder by making it easier
No longer is communications through content about “quality”; it is also now about distribution, relevancy, optimization, “socialness” and perception. All of these were factors, that for the most part, one did not have to worry about in years previous. One could crank out a blog post, send an email to other bloggers and BAM, 10,000 people would see/read/hear your message. There were less paths to successfully communicating online. It was harder to get your message (content, marketing, press release, etc) into one of these paths, but it was easier to see success with it once you did.
In creating more path’s (thereby making it is easier to communicate) there is now, more than ever, a need for a better way to consolidate, track, monitor and communications on the Internet. Unless you are tethered to a computer, laptop or cellphone 20 hours a day, monitoring all of these various communication paths, you are more then likely missing something relevant happening in your industry.
Will the Internet lead to communications burnout?
I have stopped reading blogs. I have unsubscribed to a lot of RSS feeds. I even stopped writing for fun. I became, thanks to the Internet, a communications burnout. Updating a status, writing posts, connecting, friending, Twittering, answering the phone, IMing, writing text messages, even browsing the web for entertainment has, over the last few months, lost much of it’s luster. What was once fun, has in many ways, become work. I have become enslaved to the various channels that at one time brought me much value.
It isn’t just me, though. There are others who have realized the burnout caused by two many distribution methods, too many ways to be social and too many tools making it way too easy to be a content producer. In making everyone a producer, the Internet will make a whole legion of communications burnouts. What happens when people stop producing AND stop listening?
Preventing communication burnout
You can go offline.You can stop participating or you can find different and better ways to create, consume, distribute and participate.This is something that Om Malik is doing with his Gigalogue software. While technologically speaking it will not wow anyone, Om took a variety of technology and made an innovative new content consumption and distribution method. This will not stop communication burnout, but innovations like this, ones that look to create new ways to create, consumer, distribute and participate will eventually be the answer for those like me who look to prevent communication burnout.
I am not going to go on and talk about ways to prevent communication burnout, because right now there are nothing more then temporary ways to solve a growing problem, however what I do want to close with is to ask the entrepreneurs, the thinkers, tinkers and great IP communications minds to think about communications burnout, how your service may be contributing to this and how you, your company and your service can help curb the burnout.
I know I have been thinking about it (and what to do about it)…and I’d be happy to continue thinking about (and working towards) a solution with you.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Amen to that! everything you point to only serves to degrade the s/n ratio of your surroundings, and literally shatter your ability to focus.
Returning to some basic wisdom of life…moderation (aka balance) is the key. We should not adopt every social networking gadget for its own sake, or we deserve to be overcome. We need to be selective. Manage our immediate s/n ratio and sustain the ability to actually accomplish things.
If we can’t actually do things of consequence then all the social interaction is just a way to amuse ourselves..at least until it isn’t.
@mgraves:
That is twice that you have hit the focus nail on the head. The ability to focus is really a crucial point to my individual success (I believe). The problem is I am a dreamer, a thinker and idea guy who looks at things and says, “What if?” or “This could be” or “This is how we could” and when you add this to the overwhelming stream of information I consume each day I can’t ever focus on what it is that actually needs to be done.
I think that I am getting better with where I spend my time and efforts, however the most promise and opportunity often resides at the edge - one that is growing large and larger every day.
So stop consuming. Seriously, welcome to the Long Tail ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail ). This is just the nature of things now.
I suspect some would argue that the free market will take care of this, with an eventual backlash by burnouts just dropping out, others just narrowing down to using one or two mechanisms and those larger populations causing the smaller content producers to dry up, etc. But just as it does in other sectors, this “correction” often takes much longer and causes far more pain than we’d like before it’s done.
But I would posit another root cause: people trying to control something they cannot. I once heard it described this way: There is your “sphere of control”, that over which you have control like what you eat, how you dress, etc. Then there’s your “sphere of influence”, those things over which you do not have control but you can have an influence. And then there’s the rest. Stress is basically when someone tries to treat/affect something that is outside their sphere of influence as if it were within their sphere of control.
As someone who has “perfectionist tendencies” (that’s my soft wording for being an A-personality type, anal-retentive perfectionist who has worked hard to relax), I understand this full well. When I was in high school in the mid 80’s, though I loved computers I chose NOT to pursue a degree in computer science or the like because I knew I could not know everything about computers. And mind you, this was when you had at best IBM PCs running DOS, Apple IIs, Atari 8-bit computers like the 400/800/1200XL, Commodore 64s, and Tandy TRS80s. No Internet, no global communications mechanisms for sharing knowledge, heck, dialup modems running at 300 baud barely existed, let alone decent BBS systems, etc. Yet I felt overwhelmed. I was trying to control something I simply could not.
Long story short: I ended up where I belonged… in C.S. It’s what I love to do. But along the way I just had to let go of that “need” to know everything. And thank goodness, because as time goes by and you read/learn more, you realize just how little you really do know.
Another classic example of what you describe: I recently had a friend call me on the phone. This friend is someone I would classify as a deep thinker, who left to his own thoughts can really feel and even look like the weight of the world is upon him. During our phone call he mentioned how it bothered him that you have 150 channels of cable these days and how could you possibly keep up with it. Beyond my response that he’s a bit behind the curve (some satellite providers offer several hundred channels now
), my immediate question to him was, “Why are you trying to?”
It was the same thing, even if with only a single communications mechanism… and even an “old school” one at that vs. all the Internet era mechanisms like IM (AIM/MSN/Yahoo/GTalk/GaduGadu/ICQ/IRC), VoIP, Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Facebook, MySpace, Friend Feed, Orkut, podcasts, websites, blogs, forums, etc. He was stressing and feeling overwhelmed because he felt he was missing something… that there was some intrinsic need to read/see/hear/know everything.
My best advice: stop trying. First, resolve yourself to the fact that you are not God/Allah/[fill-in-supreme-deity-who-knows-all]. You’re a human being, and you have limits. Then realize that the world has continued whether you knew something or not, as has your own life. You are free.
With this perspective, you are now free to choose what venues work for you… what IS fun for you. If, as often happens, you start getting sucked back into too many things again, rinse, repeat.
Stop worrying so much about missing opportunities or the one mechanism that will get you and/or your company the ooh-aah sale/niche/prize/award/whatever. Seriously, you ARE going to miss opportunities. Get over it. That $5M VoIP deal going on in New Guinea by pigmies who only speak a language local to their country and only use Orkut? Yep, too bad.
Seriously, what matters is how well you execute on what you DO know. To paraphrase a great quote I heard recently regarding Apple (though can’t for the life of me remember who it was attributed to): part of management is saying “No” to the 100 great ideas you hear in order to focus on what you’re core business is. It’s not like the folks at Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc., don’t come up with awesome products or business ideas that they pitch to management. I’m sure they bring up some incredible things. But companies have to be extremely selective in how they manage their resources (manpower, money, time) or they’ll spread themselves so thin they’ll destroy themselves.
Aren’t each of us basically “a company of one”? So say “no” to all those great communications mechanisms and focus on your core business (your health, your personal life, your work, etc.). Life is too short, and unless you believe in reincarnation, there are no do-overs. This is all you get. So make the most of it.
@Frank:
Wow! Well said. You are a very wise man. It is a pleasure to have you reading (and commenting on) my blog.
Wise? Nah, not really. I just happened to be catching up on my blog reading while something I was configuring was taking awhile.
But I do enjoy reading the blog. And like that Scoble article you linked to kind of indicates, commenting takes effort and so often it’s just ranters/haters. But just because not many people comment, doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t reading. So thanks for the resource. I know I appreciate it.
And as for the “Zen moment” I had, honestly, it probably has more to do with the fact that I have been fortunate the past few years to travel to Brazil for my annual vacation–my wife is Brazilian–where I spend several weeks with her folks and her family, decompressing from the world we live in here. It helps me get/keep perspective. For reference, think of your childhood, when life–at least for most of us I suspect–was a heckuva lot simpler/easier… riding a bike, playing ball with friends, things like that.
Sometimes I think this technology we love so much can quickly enslave us… IF we allow it to. Go a week unplugged, heck, go a day, and it’s amazing how much peace it can bring if you let it. But for A-types, who likely feel like a heroine addict suffering withdrawal without their Crackberry/Twitter feed/etc., it almost has to be a forced situation like being shot down over an uninhabited island I suspect.
I mean, where you simply cannot plug back in or turn back on, thus forcing you to just let it go and enjoy the rest.
Want to know one of the things that draws to me VoIP, other than the ability to give my wife and her mother the ability to talk for extended periods of time without hearing that cash register going “Cha-ching” in their heads every minute? I hate ringing phones. It’s true. Phones are seriously distracting, but worst are the calls you get at home from wardialers, political push pollers, etc. So one of my current pet projects is building a PBX for at home so that the phone never rings again except when it’s someone we want to talk to. Between filtering based on Caller ID, I intend to have an IVR to snag all those wardialers who call and just hang up when they hear your answering machine. Now I’ll make sure the phone itself doesn’t ring ’til someone’s gone thru the IVR and chosen who they want to talk to.
And if I could figure out a clean, simple design that I could build it into a small form factor box and anyone could install it at the head end of their home, AND sell it at a reasonable price, I suspect I’d have a winner on my hands. Especially during an election year.
Anyway, just know your blog’s appreciated. Thanks for all the effort you put into it, as it’s more than most folks (especially those that don’t blog regularly) realize. All the same, if you gotta unplug, just do it when you need to. Your readers will understand.
@Frank:
Yeah I know a lot of people read, but don’t comment - I usually get a calla round 8am from someone shouting on the other end of the phone about something I said, they, well, took out of context (or was true and they didn’t like it).
I am definitely an “A” type always on guy, so unplugging is difficult, but as I age (haha), I am certainly learning to do a better job of getting variety. Heck, I am fresh off two days of no work…a first for me in a long, long, time.
I think you are on to something. You should chat sometime with Cory Andrews over here at VoIP Supply. Guy knows IP telephony inside and out - with a marketing flare to boot…let me know if you want his info.
Thanks again for reading (and commenting).
Thanks for offering that. I may take you up on that offer, if only to bounce ideas around. I keep stumbling on the head-end part, in that most homes have multiple analog jacks going down to a NIC that’s often outside the house/etc., and how to build a system that’s clean and simple that non-techies could install… ideally as simple as dropping in an answering machine. But that idea falls down if there are multiple phones in the house, since you have to put the “box” at the junction of all those lines.
Anyway, ya know, just realized two things last night after my last post regarding all this.
First, regarding my idea, there is GrandCentral.com, that site bought by Google where you setup a single phone number and can configure it to intelligently take calls, forward to your cell, voicemail, etc. Very slick setup. I have an account, but I use it mostly in conjunction with my Gizmo5 account for VoIP calling. And unfortunately it doesn’t get around the fact that anyone dialing directly to my home phone still makes it ring. But it’s definitely a worthwhile service to check out.
Second, and more important, I neglected to mention that it is, in large part, thanks to VoIP that I have been able to travel to Brazil on vacation for such extended periods of time these past ~3 years. Back in 2005, I bought two SIPPhone.com (now Gizmo5) Call-in-One units (basically rebranded Leadtek BVA8051s), installing one at home and another at my in-laws in Brazil.
We had to upgrade my in-laws from dialup to broadband (a whopping 300Kbps downstream), but since then, my wife and mother-in-law have enjoyed talking for hours without feeling like they’re going bankrupt. We also bought SIPPhone CallOut minutes (think skype Out minutes) on both ends for times when one or the other was not at home.
That first trip I left our Call-In-One box at my office so my boss and coworkers could reach me, if need be, without incurring international calling charges. My boss was the first one to try the phone out, and he was impressed with the quality of the call (which sure helped). Since we had Internet connectivity, I could also, if need be, do some work remotely.
Since then, I have been allowed to take multiple week vacations, largely because I haven’t really gone “dark” and my boss is comfortable that he can reach me if necessary. And it was because of that initial foray into VoIP that led to my purchasing a Grandstream HT488 analog adapter and Grandstream GXP2000 handset from VoIPSupply.com (the latter sits on my desk at work for testing purposes), followed on by playing with Asterisk and Trixbox, and then buying a Grandstream HT503, also from VoIPSupply (the HT488 now sits at my folks’ house, and when my mom visits her father in Europe, she takes it with her so she can be reached and call home). And now I’m toying with FreeSWITCH.
Oh yeah, and one last thing. It was when I started digging into Asterisk and Sip phones, etc., that I realized the potential of open-source telephony. Soon after I found out what our less than stellar Nortel system at work was costing us in maintenance. And the fact that this maintenance included basically squat sent me over the edge. In short, since we were running two versions behind, in order to get any real “fixes”, we’d need the latest version. To get the latest version, however, we’d have to pay serious $$$ on TOP of the maintenance, since Nortel maintenance, unlike our Cisco maintenance, does not apparently include major version upgrades. So we were paying a large sum of money annually for basically nothing more than if the box died, since I highly doubt Nortel was doing any work on software two versions old (and for those who have read the O’Reilly Asterisk book, the system the author references in the first chapter… yep, you got it.)
So after doing some research, I started talking to my boss about how we could replace the entire system, including handsets, for slightly more than we paid for one year’s maintenance. I sort of won yet lost that battle, as in the end we spent a good bit more and went with a Cisco CUCM Business Edition system. (We’re a Cisco shop, had a very nice discount due to who we are, and it made business sense both for us and since we hoped to leverage our knowledge with some of our customers). But we are at least moving into the VoIP space and doing things we couldn’t do before. And I still hope to use my knowledge from the open-source telephony world to create new services/applications in time.
And somewhere in all this I came across your blog and started reading (I can’t remember if before or after my first VoIPSupply purchase, but it’s possible I saw your blog and noted the ads… can’t honestly remember). So VoIP has had a big impact on my world in the past few years, and your blog has been a part of that. And I don’t see it going away any time soon. So again, thanks for your efforts.
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