Performance Adrenaline

I've never had any problem speaking in front of a group of people, mainly because I'm usually on a script I know inside, outside, and backwards. Speaking extemporaneously I'm a little less sure of what I'm doing, but that's never stopped me. Taking a deep breath before the big solo number or hoping against hope that you remember all of the steps to the dance break, it's a thrill.

So when I was thrown into the proverbial deep end yesterday and asked to give a 5-minute presentation of my company and product, I got that familiar adrenaline rush. I was in over my head in several respects - I'm still not well-versed enough on data backup to answer most technical questions, and this was the first time I was flying solo as an exhibitor on what amounted to a trade show floor. (I've been trade show staff a dozen times, but never an exhibitor.)

It was a performance of sorts. I had to get up there and talk about something I didn't know as well as I ought, and do so without being dry, boring, overly technical, or committing any of a host of presentation sins that have been drilled into my consciousness. Oh, and do so eloquently.

Tougher stuff than I originally expected. I would like to think I did fairly well with it, as I had a pocketful of business cards when I left, but I'll definitely need some practice at it. But the adrenaline rush as I was presenting or talking to people one-on-one afterward reminded me of being on stage, and I thought it was an apt comparison.

Pressing our noses to the window

I am not, nor have I ever been, an “expert” in social media. By all accounts, I’m a novice to the field. Been on Facebook since it was restricted to @.edu accounts, been on Twitter for 18 months or so, LinkedIn for over a year.

But I could pretend to be an expert. Look, it’s easy:

How to be a social media expert in six “easy” steps

1. Build your audience.

2. Listen to people.

3. Give them valuable content.

4. Listen to people.

5. Ask questions.

6. Listen to people.

Here’s what the real secret is: it’s all a load of shit. And that’s the biggest fault I find with so many social media “experts” out there today: they assume the route I’ll take to utilizing social media will be the same as the route they took.

That’s not possible anymore. The social media universe is hyper-saturated by people just like me, ambitious twenty-somethings who can write a lick and have had a computer at their fingertips since before they knew how many fingertips they had.

The reality is that there was a window during which those lucky few earliest adopters of these technologies realized that common sense should prevail over industry hesitation. Those folks experienced a meteoric and lightning-quick ascendancy to social media stardom. In gratitude for their success, they’ve tried to teach their disciples how to do the same.

But what nobody is willing to say is that we can’t. That window slammed shut when that common concept of do-unto-others became widespread. And the social media influencers that made it through the window before it closed keep beckoning to those of us inside, waving us on to Never Never Land without seeing that there’s a pane of glass in the way.

I don’t need a social media Buddha who’ll tell me the only way to become an expert is to be one. I don’t need crazy analogies to how successful marketing is like a box of business cards. I can’t crowdsource a problem when I can’t develop a crowd. And it’s awful easy for someone with 25,000 followers to tell me to “listen to my audience”, but I struggle to assemble more than 150.

I don't want a pep talk.

The trail is jammed and not enough people make it through, so I must forge my own path with a machete and my own guile. The only way to alleviate hyper-saturation, after all, is to do things completely differently.

Community Theatre's blessing, curse, and unfortunate necessities

The last show I'm going to do for a long time ended this past Sunday as Fiddler on the Roof in Wellesley closed. It still hasn't really sunk in yet. Maybe it won't, cause I'm planning on cheating a bit: I'm going to jump into the crew for Spelling Bee in Newton if my schedule will allow, and the director for Wellesley's EMACT festival show has been operating on the fait accompli method of persuading me to join their crew, too. (Not to mention I'm expecting to be directing again this summer at Summer Scene.)

But I realized during the show's run that I had fallen again into the trap of only really talking to people during tech week and performance weeks. Show after show, I'll make friends with lots of cast members during the rehearsal process, but it's completely superficial. "Hey, you work there, that's interesting." "Hey, you're coming to rehearsals from that town, what route do you take?"

It's bullshit. I don't even know why I do it - is it because I spend so little time with these people during the early rehearsal process that I don't really care? Is it because the course of a show is so short from start to finish that by never getting close to people, I never really lose any friends? Is it because the theatre world in eastern Mass. is so small I can run into people a year, two years down the road, so never getting close doesn't even matter?

Whatever it is, that subconscious strategy gets blown to hell during tech. With so much more time and close contact, not to mention cast parties and outings, longer conversations and deeper histories follow. How is it I don't learn until the show is nearly through that one castmate speaks eight languages and nearly went into the seminary? How is it I don't learn until then that another castmate lost his partner very suddenly last year? That another has been with his wife for fifty years and writes musicals of his own? Another is returning to Los Angeles to pursue acting for a career, another is a well-respected cardiologist...it goes on.

It seems to me almost a crime to not know anything until it's too late for it to be meaningful. Even after I've learned these fascinating details, there's so little opportunity to make it into a conversation that it's safer not to bother.

Only on rare occasions does a friendship or relationship surpass the restrictions of a show. I'm dating someone I met through a show. Two close friends were in Oz with me. Another was in Godspell with me and suffered through Beauty and the Beast auditions with me two years ago. But other than that? Nothing real.

It's community theatre's blessing and curse. It's not a huge commitment to do a show three nights a week for eight weeks and on the ninth be kinda crazy and then be done with it all. But by the same token, three nights a week for eight weeks is no basis for a friendship. It's just not enough non-rehearsal interaction.

Job description: make it up as you go

Considering how long I went having few real job leads and fewer close calls, the last three weeks proved to be a very strange situation for me, as I ended up with two offers in only 10 days.

The short version is I'm now a working schmo.

After a very brief tenure at a Boston-based news repurposing and SEO agency (I won't call it a news agency), I joined Nine Technology, a startup disaster recovery firm in Middleboro. My official job title is "Marketing Associate", but in reality, I'm going to function as the social media go-to guy and factotum for content generation.

But that's kind of an interesting situation in and of itself; not really having a set list of duties, but kinda making it up as I go and just trying to be a brand evangelist. It's quite the opposite from the Boston company I was with for seven days, where I had a very specific set of goals each day. I had this many articles to write, I had this much sourcing to do, etc. Here, it's quite a bit more free-form: help us find ways to get the Nine Technology name out, help us create compelling content across all media, and help us make sure we're on top of social media strategies.

Although there's something to be said for the comfort and routine of having that specific duty roster, I do like not quite knowing what the day will bring when I get in the car on the way to work. It's much more exciting this way. Admittedly, I'm nervous about building a social media career when my background isn't in traditional marketing, but that may be a positive. I don't have an old-fashioned paradigm that I need to break out of in order to be effective. I just go with what makes sense, what would grab me and make me hang out on the site.

So hey. I'm 23 years old, I was unemployed for nine months, and now I'm working full-time in social media. Not a bad turnaround, huh?

Response to concept of Publishing/Journalism dichotomy

Chris Brogan recently posted about the differences between "journalism" and "publishing" in the wake of an article about AOL hiring up lots of discarded journalists to help propel its Patch.com and other efforts.

First, let’s be clear: the pursuits of journalism and the pursuits of publishing aren’t the same.

Journalists seek to create compelling information that is helpful and news-worthy.

Publishing seeks to push more product, deliver higher circulation value, and create more value for sponsors/advertisers/money-holders.

Publishers need content creators of some stripe to do what they do. Journalists don’t need publishers, but publishers pay, so that’s a decent place to connect with an audience and be paid.

But never confuse the two.

The move by AOL is both smart for business and helpful for journalists who’ve lost their jobs.

I have to disagree with some major points here. I would submit that journalism at its heart isn't about delivering compelling content. Journalism is about delivering useful information that sheds light on a difficult or under-the-radar topic. If the content is "compelling," all the better.

I make this distinction very carefully because of the mindset that each demands. If the concept of "compelling" content is foremost in a writer's mind, the basic tenets of journalism (fairness, thoroughness, accuracy) can fall by the wayside. It's more important for the writer who purports to be a journalist to think first about basic journalism skills.

While I like the ideas that engendered the Patch.com and Your Town initiatives, there is a danger inherent in mixing the ideas of publishing and journalism. See also: examiner.com. That one pays "journalists" based on the clicks they get. Since the pay is based not per-article or per-week, the incentive is for writers to pick incendiary topics that will draw traffic.

If there is going to be a courtship between these two concepts, it needs to allow for journalistic orthodoxy and independence.

My point is it is near impossible to not "confuse the two" when in many of these initiatives, a writer is expected to do both.

Wayland Town Meeting

Just a quick post to note that I wrote an article about potential changes to the format of Town Meeting in Wayland for the Globe today. The means of change I discussed are being spearheaded by a a few conservative folks in Wayland, including a former selectman, and would effectively move TM from an open vote on issues to a secret ballot.

The alternatives being considered are the Australian ballot (making day one of TM discussion-only and day two voting-only), representative Town Meeting, or to make no change at all to the format.

Wayland residents discuss high tech voting to streamline Town Meeting

Let the wild rumpus start!

Certainly we want to protect our children from new and painful experiences that are beyond their emotional comprehension and that intensify anxiety; and to a point we can prevent premature exposure to such experiences. That is obvious. But what is just as obvious — and what is too often overlooked — is the fact that from their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things. - Maurice Sendak

Last night I finished The Wild Things, which is Dave Eggers' adaptation of Spike Jonze's adaptation of Sendak's classic Where the Wild Things Are. And while I found the book itself a little bit flawed (the ending seemed rushed and inconclusive, some characters were never given more than one dimension, and Max was caught between being 9 years old and being 45 years old), it did remind me of why I have an immense respect for effective children's literature.

It's no big secret that my favorite author is Dr. Seuss. Not just because the man was an incredible artist who was never truly recognized in his field (incredibly, Seuss never won a Caldecott or a Newbery), but because he had the unique capability to engage children through his writing while challenging their reading abilities and subtly addressing social issues. And let me not forget to note that he did all of this in specific meters.

Think about that for a second - Dr. Seuss wrote about the King of the Turtles in the same way Shakespeare wrote about the King of Denmark 400 years ago.

I am the Lorax! I speak for the trees,
Which you seem to be chopping as fast as you please;
But I also speak for the brown Barbaloots,
Who frolicked and played in their Barbaloot suits,
Happily eating Truffula fruits.
Now, since you've chopped the trees to the ground
There's not enough Truffula fruit to go 'round!
And my poor Barbaloots are all feeling the crummies
Because they have gas, and no food, in their tummies. - The Lorax

I've bolded anything that's not a real word. But when kids read Seuss, they can feel the rhythm of his meter and predict what the word sounds like. Even if it's a word they've never seen before and will never see again, kids can pick out exactly what it will sound like based on the cadence of the line leading up to it and because Seuss picked easy syllables to manage.

What kind of mastery of language must it take to teach people meter and rhythm a decade before they'll understand it?

How often do you hear of precocious 3 and 4 year-olds who've memorized The Cat in the Hat or Green Eggs and Ham? They can't yet read every word in front of them, but they're so engaged in the content and so caught in the meter that they want nothing more than to emulate the people who can read every word. You don't hear those stories about Harry Potter, you don't hear those stories about Artemis Fowl, you don't hear those stories about The Velveteen Rabbit, The Chronicles of Narnia, even Where the Wild Things Are. I don't deny the importance of each of those works, far from it, but I would argue they're not as significant as Seuss.

Without looking it up on Wikipedia, give me a brief synopsis of C.S. Lewis' The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Now try Sendak's In the Night Kitchen. Maybe you can do it, maybe you can't. Now try Green Eggs and Ham. See the difference? Seuss, in no small part because of the meter and because of the illustration, has a greater staying power and a greater recall than more "substantial" literature.

And that's what makes it effective. You remember the story of Green Eggs and Ham even though you may not have held the book for decades. And that's what reading is about - learning and remembering. How much more effective can a book be than to make you remember the plot, the characters, hell, even lines from it years and years later?

I submit to you that Dr. Seuss was the most important children's author of the last 150 years.

Certainly not an original assertion, I acknowledge. But I thought the point needed to be made - as I worked through The Wild Things, I remembered only how this book differed from the movie, and that it was certainly different from the original book. That said, I couldn't remember much of how it was different from the original - Where the Wild Things Are didn't stick with me the same way.

Vim and Vigor

I swear, I need to put signs with these words on the wall behind my computer. Just thinking about that little mantra is enough to refocus my energies and get me excited to write again. Simply, nothing gets me out of a rut faster than thinking about the potential I have in my fingers to write something that affects people, that could change somebody's world.

In that spirit, I want to apply the phoenix treatment to this blog. Out of the ashes of a less-than-full-throated effort in the past year, I want to put a better stamp on things. I have the privilege of writing for the Boston Globe on a regular basis, and the freedom to write for Blast Magazine whenever I choose.

So perhaps the wisest choice for me is to make this a clearinghouse of sorts, where much of my content is reposted/shared.

At any rate, for lack of a current article (although that will change in the not-so-distant future), I can chronicle my goal of reading 30 books in 2010.

Thus far, I've read:

Batman: Year One - This was a Christmas gift from the boy. I'm not a comic book devotee, as he is, but the idea of Batman always intrigued me. No superpowers, just an incredible intellect and training. Year One was put together by Frank Miller, of 300 and Sin City fame. It was an interesting take on the origins of the Dark Knight, one not in keeping with the recent movies. But as I read it only after I'd seen the movies, it felt strange to read an "obsolete" version of events.

Finlater - Grabbed this from the free-for-all book table at the Globe. I don't even really know what drew me to this one. It wasn't a bad book, it just resolved very quickly and with picture-perfect tied ends. It felt a little cliched in that regard.

In Defense of Our America - Another pickup from the Globe (I haven't paid for any of the books I've read this year). An interesting chronicle of several major cases the ACLU advocated for since 9/11. Predictably, the "good guys" came out on top in each of them, with an awful lot of exposition leading to anticlimactic resolutions. Look, I understand that there's only so much that a Supreme Court decision can be considered exciting, but let's not just gloss over the drama of the presentation.

And I'm currently reading The Wild Things. First Eggers book for me, and thus far I'm not sold on his stardom. It might be because it's from the viewpoint of a 9 year old (although not written entirely as such), but it feels a little overdescribed and overinternalized.

Leftovers, faction edition

I'll have a lengthy (1350 words) article in tomorrow's Globe West about how school districts decide to have x number of science classrooms vs. y number of seats in the auditorium. It was an interesting little case study to see how the five high school building projects in the Globe West area differed on that decision process.

At any rate, here's the first quote that I couldn't work into the article but that I thought was interesting:

"PE is always going to need bigger spaces by virtue of what we do, we move around, we’re not sitting around in chairs like in an auditorium." - Martha Jamieson, athletic director in Wayland.

Obviously, she has a point. Her argument was that sticking to the very strict square footage guidelines put out by the Mass. School Building Authority won't necessarily behoove the students in terms of their education.

For the most part, the people I talked to said the process was phenomenally transparent and inclusive, at least in Wayland. This compared to some other districts, where departments could submit a list of what they wanted to see in the new building and the architect and superintendent would decide. In Wayland, the committee to make those decisions was more than 60-strong.

But pick your cliche - is it too many cooks in the kitchen when the AD has to try and convince a group of 60 rather than a group of 2 that she needs more space? Or is it as simple as you can't have your cake (a new school) and eat it too (get everything you wanted)?

Staking My Claim

When I'm asked what I want to do for work, I can't give a short answer - usually it's something to the effect of "I'd like to work in traditional, social, and broadcast media, and how the three interact". Not exactly a simple thought. And yet, recently, I was nearly afforded the opportunity to do just that. I interviewed for a position with the Your Town hyperlocal project run by Boston.com.

The towns I was being considered for are just down the road from me, and I regarded the prospect with unreserved excitement. I would have been working in a groundbreaking experiment in aggressive news coverage, and I would have been doing it in my own backyard. I hoped I was among the top-choice candidates based on my devotion to the paper in finding new places to work, based on my proximity and familiarity with the area, and based on my previous work for Globe West and the Boston in 60 Project.

But last week I got the call that I was not the finalist chosen for the position. It was a blow, I'll readily admit, and one that took me a day or two to rebound from. But immediately following that tough news, I was afforded the chance to go back to basics and work in local coverage for the print section, Globe West. In fact, I was going to be picking up four towns out there, most of which are high-activity and all of which are high-profile. Not a bad deal, I suppose. It doesn't pay as well as the Your Town job would have, but I'll have more traditional clips this way. And I've seen writers take opportunities like the one I now have and turn them into bigger and better jobs.

In the interest of maintaining an online mindset from time to time, though, I'm hoping to add another function to my blog here (one that I hope will drive me to add content far more frequently than I've done): outtakes. The Globe has, in a couple of places, features that highlight the "best of" something that didn't run. A long-time photographer posts the best picture that didn't make it into the paper. Sportswriters add little tidbits to the Notes columns when they don't grow into full stories.

What I'd like to do is, once a week, post the best quote/picture/anecdote that I came across but didn't use in working on these four towns, just because it was interesting. Maybe it'll help me keep the writing-for-new-media skills in practice, too.