What could the EPA have possibly done to get mentioned by a green advocate in the same breath with child molesters, dirty cops, and the biggest betrayer of them all... Judas? Here's a Good Friday Earth Day tale of how they got so focused on Gizmo Green that they completely lost sight of the big picture and betrayed what they were sworn to protect.
Friday, April 22, 2011
What About Time?
Blog
I blog on Original Green 2-4 times a month, with seldom more than an hour or two invested in each blog post. I blog more frequently on Useful Stuff, but most of those posts take less time... some as little as 10 minutes. Hardly ever do I blog more than a couple hours a week. And I don't regard most of the Useful Stuff posts as time spent, but rather time invested because most of the time, they are "notes to self" about how to do something so I don't have to rediscover the answer when trying to do the same thing again a few months from now. On either blog, commenters on my blog posts regularly have great ideas that improve the ideas I was blogging about. This is an enormous time-saver, because I can't possibly bring all their experience to bear on the question... because I don't have their experience. And if I'm working on a book, I'll serialize it on a blog for feedback. I did this with the Original Green book, for example. And I'm doing it now with the New Media for Design Types series of posts, which will become an e-book. The feedback I get in comments from all of you make the books immensely better. Read the Original Green book while looking back at the blog posts that preceded it, and you'll see what I mean.
Twitter
I almost always tweet during "time chinks," which are those little bits of time in a bus, on a train, walking somewhere, waiting for someone, etc... short bits of time when you can't be doing anything else. And Twitter actually saves time in several ways. For example, if I have a problem, it's likely I can poll my Twitter followers and get an answer (or two or three) in minutes. Also, Twitterers I follow act as a legion of curators for me, posting links to things they find most useful with a bit of text to explain it. Follow good people if you want good curators. I'm always working on several new ideas, and I regularly parse out tweet-size bits of the ideas, which give me quick feedback as to whether they're resonant or not. Often, a bad response has saved me from spending tons of time going down a dead end.
Website
Once built I might go a few months without updating anything on a website except the blog, if there is one. Blog-free websites are naturally more static, requiring less regular attention, but they don't have all the engagement bonuses of Web 2.0, either... so that's the tradeoff. FWIW, I use iWeb to build my sites because iWeb makes it easy to put up good-looking stuff without knowing HTML. The last site I have that was built the "old normal" way, by hiring an HTML guru and having them work all their magic "behind the curtain" is the Katrina Cottages site. As you can see, it hasn't been updated in years. That's because my original HTML guru retired to have children, and everybody else I've hired since has spent a good bit of time (and money) just figuring out how the previous person set everything up. I've found that I actually spent more much time communicating what I wanted to the HTML guru to build it the "old normal" way than I did to just build the site myself in iWeb. And it costs over $80/month to host the site on earthlink, whereas I can host 5 sites on Apple's MobileMe (which is the default host for iWeb) for $150/year. That's $2.50 per site per month versus over $80 the old way. So building them myself in iWeb is a huge savings of time and money, and I can also modify whatever I want easily at any time (and no expense) because I can do it myself. I'm in the process of rebuilding the Katrina Cottages site in iWeb... I've spent one day on it so far. I'll let you know when I'm done how long it took.
Speaking
I now get paid for speaking, so it's not like time spent for free. Rather, it's an income-generating venture. I generally have 1-3 speaking engagements a week. Early on, however, you need to regard speaking as an investment. You're investing in your future income, of course, as you'll eventually get paid like I do. But more important than that, you're investing in the development of your ideas because the prospect of getting up and laying your ideas out to your colleagues ensures that you'll develop and organize them better. Warm fuzzies in your brain are fine, but warm fuzzies burbled out in front of a crowd are an embarrassment.
Idea Cards
Idea cards require no more time to design than business cards... just a different way of thinking when you design them. Granted, you should give thought beforehand to which of your ideas you want to put on your cards. But you should be thinking through these issues anyway, because how are you going to put forward your best ideas if you don't know what they are, or what's most important about them?
Listservs
I participate on listservs when I can. When I can't, I don't worry about it. They should be your servant, not your master. Don't feel obligated to read every thread if you don't have time. And if a thread doesn't appear to be useful to you, leave it alone. Just do what's useful.
Email
I'll blog later about the email rules of thumb, most of which are designed to save you time. The one thing that actually takes more time is creating your signature with embedded chiclets. But once it's created, it requires no time at all... it's just there, at the end of each of your emails.
Mailing List
I only do a mailing a few times per year... each one probably takes a couple hours to do. Don't do too many, or you'll tire your subscribers and they'll unsubscribe.
Images
All the stuff I do for my images I'd be doing anyway for my own use. Posting them to samouzon.zenfolio.com takes just moments to set up each upload.
Apps
My Original Green App took a couple days to build and a few emails to promote, but has required no time since. Actually, it saves time because I can read my favorite bloggers (under the More... tab) all in one place during "chinking time" (see above.)
LinkedIn & Facebook
I spend very little time on LinkedIn. I probably spend an hour a week posting stuff to facebook, and to my pages there (the Original Green, A Living Tradition [Architecture of the Bahamas], and Mouzon Design)
YouTube
I've just begun my YouTube channel. I'll report back when I have a better idea about the time requirements.
Friday, April 15, 2011
Adding YouTube to the Big O
Thinking you have it figured out is really a bad idea with the New Media. I had two speaking engagements in Portland a couple weeks ago, and one of the attendees at the Cascadia CNU Summit was Ruth Ann Barrett of EarthSayers.tv, which is a site with lots of short videos by green leaders. Ruth Ann is one of the most plugged-in white-headed people I've ever met, which really impresses me, because she's helping shatter the notion that you have to be 17 to get it.
It didn't take long for the conversation to turn to New Media. She asked what I was doing in town, and I told her about the series of lectures I'm doing at Pella's Pro Expos in 15 cities around the country (including the one a couple days previously in Portland.) I speak twice at each Pro Expo; the second lecture is about New Media for architects and other design types.
Ruth Ann asked "what's your presence on YouTube?" I told her I'd put up a few videos, and that a few other people had as well. We were walking down the street to lunch at the time, and she stopped dead in her tracks, turned around and looked at me in disbelief. "Steve, YouTube is the second most-searched site on the internet! You really must have a serious presence there!" She had lots of great recommendations, ideas, and tips... and she was compelling enough that I've re-thought the entire Big O diagram above. YouTube now sits across from Twitter near the top, just below your blog. Facebook pages have been combined with all other things Facebook and LinkedIn, and all connections between nodes have been adjusted accordingly.
I'll tell you all the great stuff Ruth Ann told me when we get to the YouTube posts in this series, of course... it's really good stuff. Thanks, Ruth Ann! And BTW, here's the really short video she shot of me, just as I was about to dash off and catch my streetcar to the airport. And yes, expect to see a lot more videos soon on the Original Green Channel, and on OGTV!
Monday, April 11, 2011
Great News on RAGE's SEO Tool!
RAGE made my day Saturday! Since its inception, iWeb's biggest drawback was the fact that "post-processing" a blog post would disable its comments. RAGE Software makes several tools for improving your visibility to search engines, especially their free SEO Tool. (SEO = Search Engine Optimization) But because it broke blog comments in iWeb (like all other SEO software,) I couldn't use it. Saturday, I started converting www.katrinacottages.com to iWeb, and redesigning the site (the new site isn't up yet, obviously.) Somewhere in the day, I thought I'd check with RAGE again... and they had a new version of the SEO Tool. Curious, I tried it out, and it seemed NOT to break the blog comments! Excited, I contacted the company, and they confirmed it... it does NOT break the comments!
This is huge, because now I can set more Googlicious title tags for each page, add meta tags, and provide alternative text for images, making them much more searchable. I can do all of this for each blog post in a minute or less. I don't know how far I'll go back with old blog posts, but I'll definitely do it on every one in the future. More on this later, as I learn more about it...
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Brands vs. Causes
There's something out there today that's stronger than branding, and that could transform your practice completely. It did for me. Design types have been told for the past decade or two that we need to get good at "branding ourselves." For a chuckle, think about the painful implications that phrase would have carried a century ago! But because we do it with advertising and positioning rather than irons in the fire, branding ourselves has long been a profitable exercise.
Branding
Branding was perfectly suited to the Era of the Company for several reasons: A brand is owned by a single company, and protected ferociously. If someone infringes upon your brand, you call the lawyers and go to war with them. Everything in the company should ideally be dictated by the brand. But as effective as brands have been for so long, they have problems as well. They're usually very expensive to develop and to protect. Adherence to the brand has the ability to stifle creativity and innovation. And because the brand spreads only by selling, if you ever quit selling, your brand soon dies. So brands require a fairly constant exertion of effort (and money) to keep them going. And a brand is almost never anything more than a brand.
Causes
Causes are in many ways opposite to brand. I wrote recently that causes spring from the initial insights of one person. Causes, as opposed to brands, can molt into something greater if it's adopted by a larger culture: a movement. And movements, if persistent across generations, reach the highest level of ideas that spread, which is the living tradition. While brands are held by one company, causes are open-source and held by many. While brands spread by selling, causes spread by telling. Whereas brands are meant to enrich the brand owner, causes are usually viewed as standing on the higher ground of ideals.
Branding and Being Remarkable
We discussed the necessity of being remarkable recently. Isn't that the same thing as branding? The two are similar in some ways. You might think of a brand as "high-cost remarkability with handcuffs." But you can also be remarkable without building a brand. Taking up a cause, in and of itself, creates a degree of remarkability because most design types don't. And the things you do to support the cause increase that remarkability. So clearly, a cause can make you remarkable in your hometown, and amongst colleagues of your region. But what about within the cause? Without a brand, aren't you just amongst the rank-and-file there? Not at all. Causes usually encompass many disciplines. The New Urbanism, for example, was started by architects and planners, but today it includes landscape architects, civil engineers, city officials, academics, and a host of other disciplines. So whatever your discipline, it's one of many minorities within the New Urbanism. But it doesn't stop there. Within almost any cause, so many things need to be done that you can usually take your pick of initiatives, and pitch in and get them done. This makes you seriously remarkable within the cause and beyond because you and the small band of colleagues working with you on the initiative quickly become known for that work.
Bottom line: Remarkability achieved by traditional branding normally requires spending a lot of money on outside talent (unless you run a PR firm) to create your brand, and it requires hiring an attorney (unless you are one) to defend the brand. Remarkability achieved through a cause, on the other hand, simply involves doing work that matters. So branding delivers extrinsic remarkability that costs a lot of money, whereas causes deliver intrinsic remarkability that simply comes with the work you're doing. Which would you prefer?
PS: This post is part of a bigger story outlined in New Media for Design Types. The most recent piece of the story was Old Virtues vs. New Virtues. Lots more to follow!
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Panera's Prejudice
What does Panera Bread have against people who like to drink water? Other places have somewhat smaller & cheaper water cups, but this is ridiculous! This cup contains about three swallows, meaning I've gotta choose between repeatedly traipsing to the dispenser and inadequate hydration. Maybe Panera thinks that giving water-drinking customers such dinky cups will make them feel cheap, causing them to order a super-sized cup of some brand of carbonated sugar water instead. But I'm not drinking water mainly to be cheap, but mainly to be healthy. So doing this backfires, making Panera look cheap instead. I haven't eaten at a Panera in years, and this certainly isn't a good way to get me to come back!
Old Virtues vs. New Virtues
The three business virtues of the Industrial Revolution are entirely incapable of transporting your business into this new age, but so long as you're using them as lenses to look at the world we're now living in, that world looks impossibly wasteful and terrifyingly alien. If you're a design type that wants to thrive in this new environment, you really must be guiding your operations by the three new virtues of our day.
The Old Virtues
The Industrial Revolution virtues of quality, speed, and economy (better, faster, cheaper) remained the measuring-sticks of all sorts of disciplines right up until the Meltdown. But now, and especially if you're involved in any aspect of place-making, they don't work anymore. Here's why: if you're an architect, there simply aren't enough jobs to go around as we discussed. So if your pitch simply is that you believe in high quality, or you'll do the work quickly, or you have competitive fees, that isn't good enough anymore, because that's what everyone else is saying as well. If you don't become remarkable in some way, you're simply not likely to survive.
The Death of Cheaper
The first to fail will be those who have built their businesses on being the cheapest service (or product) in town. This is easy to understand, because when the firms that staked their claim on being better or faster start dropping their fees, then the cheaper firms aren't cheaper anymore. So the entire reason to hire them goes away... and their customers quickly find the door.
The Death of Faster
The next to close up shop will be those known for getting the work out more quickly than the other guys. For ages, there has been the possibility of serious economic benefit accruing from hiring people who can get your work out the door faster. But when those known for being better don't have so much work, they can be notably faster than normal. So the reason for hiring the faster firms goes away.
The Death of Better
Firms known for doing the highest quality of work have the best short-term prognosis, but they are already suffering as well. The high fees they commanded all those years weren't just for their names. Rather, those fees allowed them to buy capacity (better employees and better equipment) that allowed them to produce that better work. The first thing to go is the new equipment budget, but they can limp along for quite some time with equipment that's not being updated. The employees are tougher, because they're an expense every payday. They may take pay cuts for awhile, but eventually, they're likely to move on. The culture of excellence developed over the years in better firms will support them for quite some time, but after a better firm has done cheaper work long enough, even that culture of excellence begins to erode, and when that happens, they're not better anymore.
The New Virtues
The virtues of this new era are patience, generosity, and connectedness. They call for an entirely new set of business practices that, when viewed through the lenses of the old virtues, look like economic suicide. Who could possibly think about giving something away in this environment, for example? That's a strategy for flush times, isn't it? Not at all. Bear with me until the end of this series of posts, and I believe you'll see that the new strategies and practices, when viewed through the lenses of these new virtues, represents a robust pattern for thriving now.
Patience
None of the strategies we'll discuss later will succeed tomorrow. Or next week. Or next month. You'll have to persevere with them for quite some time before you see any success. It's like an old hand-pumped water well: you can pump and pump and pump with great vigor, and get no water for quite awhile. And if you quit pumping, the water goes all the way back to the bottom. But if you keep it up until the water comes, then all it takes is a good, easy stroke on the pump handle to get more water than you can possibly drink. Your followers will do exactly the same thing, following you early on in hardly a trickle. But when you hit the tipping point, you'll have more followers than you first dreamed of. People talk about being Googlicious, and the entire Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry has sprung up as a result. I'm not saying SEO is worthless, but there's nothing out there that will make you more Googlicious than a steady stream of useful content.
Generosity
Don't confuse true generosity with teasers. A teaser today is treated with the same disdain as spam. Until you're willing to put something out there that's seriously useful on its own merits and that people can download and use for free with no further contact with you, you're not being generous. But once you are, and persist at it long enough, you'll get far more and better business than you ever would have gotten doing business the old way.
Connectedness
There are a range of ways of connecting with others, from simpler participation to more involved collaboration. The easiest form of participation is a tweet chat, like #letsblogoff, #aiachat, or #builtheritage. Listservs are a little more involved, but they reap greater benefits because they're populated with lots of really smart people interested in the same topics as you. You can also participate in a professional organization like AIA, or an advocacy organization like CNU. Advocacy organizations have the moral high ground, because they are viewed as supporting ideals rather than just supporting a particular profession. Full disclosure: I'm a member of both the AIA and the CNU. Collaboration also has multiple degrees. Consortiums can be a temporary or less formal form of collaboration, but the best and strongest are guilds. The New Urban Guild I founded, for example, has been able to host a number of initiatives (such as the Original Green and Project:SmartDwelling) and support a number of causes (such as Katrina Cottages) that no Guild member would have been able to do on their own.
PS: This post is part of a bigger story outlined in New Media for Design Types. The most recent piece of the story was Being Remarkable. Lots more to follow!
Monday, April 4, 2011
Story-Telling as Planning Technique?
Is it possible that story-telling might become a viable planning technique for today's cash-strapped cities? This story from a recent PFBE charrette for some of New Orleans' scrappier neighborhoods suggests that this might be so.
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