An online notebook
I recorded this a little while ago to go alongside some other training and consulting work I was doing at the time.
I basically explain how to plan out digital engagement work to ensure it is most likely to succeed, by thinking about your own objectives, the needs of the people you want to engage with, and that sort of thing.
It refers to a template throughout – you can download a copy of that here – it’s in PowerPoint format.
Hope it’s useful!
I’m a massive fan of the writing of Ben Thompson – and so should you be. The analysis he provides on his blog is superb – and it’s free!
Interestingly, he also provides extra content for a fee – a daily email with even more in depth analysis of the technology topics of the day. Just $10 a month, or $100 for the whole year. Members also get access to a forum where you can chat to Ben and others who are interested in his work.
I subscribe – the extra content is great, the forum helpful, but more than anything, I want to support this guy to keep doing great work.
Ben posted recently that he has broken through the magic barrier of 1,000 paying subscribers. 1,000 True Fans is the title of a post by Kevin Kelly outlining how the long tail of the internet means that focused, high quality niche communities can be financially sustainable.
So, 1,000 members doesn’t sound like a lot, relative to all the people on the Internet, or the memberships of supersites like Facebook or Twitter. But 1,000 people paying $100 a year is $100,000 a year! To do a thing you love doing! Add in a few consulting days a month and there’s a good living to be made.
I’ve written before about how I would love to find a way to be able to just live off content creation. After all, I have this blog, with thousands of readers, an email newsletter with over 700 people subscribed, a reasonably popular podcast, and my webinars seem to go down well too.
Of course, it’s hard work. I’d imagine the pressure can build up when you have to produce really great content every single day. Figuring out what people might pay for and what they would expect for free isn’t easy either.
But it is super-interesting to know that to make a living as an independent is achievable and that you don’t need to have Buzzfeed levels of traffic to do it.
I had a good time presenting a webinar this morning about managing online communities.
As always, I recorded the whole thing for your infotainment:
Rich Millington from Feverbee gave a great talk at the MozCon event on building communities that people actually want to join.
Lots in here that I have been discovering myself lately around creating a shared mission, and a sense of being an exclusive bunch.
I had a very interesting time at the Digital Evolution unconference and networking evening this week – wonderfully hosted by the Tinder Foundation and Google and with the irrepressible Will Perrin at the helm.
Sadly I couldn’t make it to the proper conference the next day, but the buzz around the event was amazing and Helen Milner and her team can take credit for reinvigorating the conversation around digital inclusion.
Anyway, back to the unconference.
The first discussion I took part in focused on digital policy, particularly from the government side of things, and the question was that posed in the title of this post: do we want everyone to get online?
I’m not sure that we do, at least, not when the question is framed in that way.
Who is ‘we’? Who is ‘everyone’? What is meant by ‘online’?
For me, getting everyone online is not a sensible policy objective. It doesn’t really make an awful lot of sense. Where are the outcomes?
Speaking for myself, I’d like us to have a society where nobody is disadvantaged because they lack the ability to access information or services – whatever the platform.
So for me the emphasis must be on human beings and making their lives better, more fulfilling, and ensuring their interactions with government and businesses are as stress and hassle free as they can be.
The internet is a ever more important platform for the delivery of information and services. However, this doesn’t mean that everyone should be using it for everything. Even if you have great internet access and skills, for some things a non-digital approach might be most appropriate.
The approach I think must always therefore be human-focused, not technology- or organisation-focused, and it should be prioritised so that those with most need are considered first, with all their complexity.
This will mean in future that the role which those currently working in digital inclusion have may shift in future, as access becomes ever closer to universal. There are some really meaty issues to be stuck into particularly around the agendas of wearables and the internet of things.
On the latter point, in the near future might we be in the position where folk are online whether they like it or not, because the paving slab they are stood on is connected to the internet, or the supermarket scans their faces before they even step into the store?
So as well as human-focused, the approach must also be constructively critical. The internet is very good at lots of things. It also brings with it challenges, particularly around privacy, but also around our relationships with organisations, which may come from cultures that do not share many values with our own (Silicon Valley, I’m looking at you).
Digital inclusion folk, by keeping laser focused on the needs of people, and by being healthily sceptical about the potential of technology can, I think, help individuals come to their own decisions about the best way they can make the most of digital and the net.
We don’t want everyone to be online. We want people to be able to make informed choices about how they live their lives, to use the net when they want to, and only when they want to, so that they may act in their own best interests, and of those they care for.