You may have read that on The Crucible Project retreats,
participants are asked to turn over their mobile devices. To some, this may
seem scary or uncomfortable; to others it smacks of black helicopters, one world
government, etc.
No phone on the weekend? Conspiracy? Cult. Um, no.
I’m speaking as a man who has attended the weekend and has
also staffed. I didn’t design the weekend, I’m not on the Board of Directors,
and I’m blogging on my own regarding this issue, so this isn’t an “official”
statement.
When was the last time you had an uninterrupted conversation
with someone who had his/her mobile device within arm’s reach? When was the
last time you had a meaningful conversation with someone who has a
mobile device on their hip/in their hand, etc.? When was the last time you were
doing something important, only to be interrupted by a phone call or text? With
the internet in our pockets, it occurs to me it is impossible for us to be
“present” if we don’t exercise control & discipline over our mobile devices.
I am easily distracted. In order to study in college, I went
to the library, and holed up in a study cubicle facing the wall in a quiet
area. Why? There were many more interesting things than my studies; this
provided me an environment to succeed.
So asking me to give up my mobile device for the weekend
isn’t really scandalous—except in the eyes of the world. My life won’t implode
over the weekend—especially if I’ve told people I’m going on a retreat for the
weekend.
What if something really important is going on? I’ve
seen men staff and attend weekends while they needed to be reachable. One man I
staffed with has two children who are medically fragile. His wife knew how long
it would take him to get home, and how to reach a man on staff to get in touch with
him. This man used the same process as an initiate and when he returned to
staff. He was able to focus on his work over the weekend, and his wife knew how
to reach him in the event she needed to.
I had dinner recently with a wise, dear friend. He works
with youth & offered me an assessment I had not heard before. Netted out,
his hypothesis is that as the father in a family goes, so goes the rest of the
home. If the father is away all the time, angry often, doesn’t love his wife,
and/or doesn’t treat his wife well in front of his children, well, then there’s
trouble. Kids grow up with things wrong
in critical areas.
I thought quite a bit about what he said, and which of those
apply most to me. It was a humbling period of self-reflection.
I know I don’t have the strength, wisdom, persistence, and
myriad other things I need to raise good kids. The only chance I’ve got is to
lean into my faith, to get these things from God. For me, this starts with
prayer. Yet for most of my life, prayer was something I did half-heartedly.
Sure, I did it before meals, and foxhole prayers when life got scary.
Gradually, I did it in the mornings occasionally, or just before falling asleep
at night. But it wasn’t a focus, a priority, a value.
There were two big things that changed my approach to
prayer, making it essential. I was scared straight.
The first was a culmination, an awakening of sorts. After
our first child was born, I found myself besieged right before I fell asleep
with potent fear of horrific things happening to my son. This went on for some
time and one day I read the story of Martin Luther being awakened by the Devil
in the middle of the night. Luther, realizing who it was, replied, “Oh, it’s
only you” and went back to sleep. I was reading one of John Eldredge’s books,
learning about spiritual warfare and the value of prayer. I tried praying
against those fears at night, exposing them for what they were, and you know
what? It worked!
The power of prayer really came home for me a year or so
later. To make a long story short, I felt like evil had its hooks in me, and it
rattled me to my core. I got past my reluctance to as for help, asking my wife
& friends to pray for me. I prayed for days, deeply disturbed in my soul,
asking God for wisdom & perspective. What I realized in the midst of this
was I had too few verses of scripture in memory. Put another way, I knew of
the armor of God, but had no idea what it was, how to put it on, what it was
about. I did not want to be caught so unprepared again.
So I began praying Eldredge’s daily
prayer. It seems long & involved. And it is; check out the references
to scripture. And I’ve realized that it is an insurance policy, a shield in the
daily spiritual warfare that surrounds us all. I know on the days when I don’t
make the time for prayer in the morning that I should expect things to go
haywire. Prayer in the morning isn’t a cure-all, a guarantee of smooth sailing.
It does ground me, help me get closer to God, and practice covering my family
and myself in prayer. And it provides me with a touchpoint with God, a place to
evaluate how things are going in my walk with Him.
Are you walking with God daily? Are you in a community of
men who can tell you of the good they see in you—and challenge you to live the
life God intended for you? Are they lifting you up in prayer, and challenging
you to do the same for them, yourself, and your house?
The men's group I'm in met the other day, and one of the big
topics was work. It's fair to say that this theme was the predominant theme,
and that there was a lot to unpack amongst 4 men. My example today will be from
my own “work” on the house. The same process applies to “work” in earning a
living.
Things we do are different from many men's groups.
What we don't do
I've met with guys who fast when another man 'breaks his vow of purity'. We
don't do that.
I've met with men who spend their time serving the poor. Noble, but we don't do
that--as a focus.
I've met with guys who sit around, drink, and smoke cigars. While we do get
together socially, help each other fix our cars & houses, etc. that is not
our focus.
What *do* we do?
It seems simple since we don't do the three things above that many men do when
they gather. Sure, part of it is that we meet from 8-11 am on Saturdays.
There are several things we do:
1) Pray
We open every meeting in prayer, inviting
the Holy Spirit to guide us in our time.
2) Minimize the "story".
I want to be a great storyteller. I don't match the level of detail with my
audience's appetite. Just ask my boss. Or a former boss. I love a good story,
and context matters to me. Ask anyone who is a Myers-Briggs
"P". And the story is not the issue. We don't camp out on the
infinitesimal detail before & after some "event". We could camp
out here for days & not get anywhere. So we move away from this quickly;
2-3 sentences will do.
3) Identify the emotions involved
Emotions? Feelings?
Jokes aside, this is relevant stuff.
Why are you fired up about work? What do you feel,
besides anger? For many men, including me, anger is the "idiot light"
on the dashboard telling me something is going on inside. Usually, when I pause
to look underneath, it's not anger driving things.
Think about it. When was the last time you asked yourself what you felt -- and
actually figured out the answer? If I'm hung up in my men's group, I can ask
for help. We'll figure out what emotions are swirling about in my head. Because
these guys *know me*, they can ask questions, speak truth, and help me see into
my heart. And that is where the action is. Really.
4) Look back, re-evaluate the situation, and take action
Most often, I'm hung up about two outcomes, and I'm *convinced*
the will both happen. Most often one of them is happening, and I
expect the other will happen. The other things I expect will happen,
along with the emotions there, are usually rooted in the past. In my life,
those rules or stories were true and/or served me a long time ago. And often
they no longer serve me and are no longer true. What if I saw these things in a
new light & re-evaluated them?
An example
My Dad was pretty handy. He fixed everything that broke in
our house, without a bunch of drama or fanfare. We weren't rich, so fixing
things saved money that was in short supply in the first place. I'm handy too,
but I was 12 when he died, and there's a lot he never got the chance to teach
me. Part of me believes that 1) I can't afford professional help around the
house/cars, and 2) real men don't need help there.
My wife has waited, mostly with great patience, for *years*
to take a bath again in our master bathroom. She likes baths, and our other full
bathroom borders the twins' room, so running water late at night wakes them up.
And tip-toeing through toothpaste & a bathroom used by two boys is not a spa experience. Grad School, a new job, and the intricacies
of working with silicone caulk aside, it is still not bath-ready.
I don't know how and am afraid to do the work. It could look
like crap & be a huge failure. On the other hand, my wife loves baths, and
currently the caulk in that bathroom *is* a huge failure, b/c I've removed it
but not replaced it!
Only one of these outcomes is true. The other I *believe* will come true. So
I'm stuck. Do I take the risk that I'll screw it up, or acknowledge that it is
already screwed up, b/c it doesn't work? I'm screwed either way… I could blow
it.
What if people hung with me either way? That's revolutionary. What if they
spotted my issues, b/c they knew me & I tell them, and they help me figure
out which is true, and which *might* be true? What if they challenge me to step
out of my contort zone?
Take Heart...And Action!
Whether the issue is work, caulking my bathtub, or somewhere
in between, I have a group of men who know me, challenge me to the best I can
be, and call "shenanigans" on my "stuff". Working through
these things helps us be the men God created us to be, frees us to do the work
we need to do in our families, communities, churches, and jobs.
If you are not part of a group of men like this, take heart. There are men out there
where this is why we gather: to help each other work through our junk, support
us while we do it, and challenge us to take action.
Why not get out there & find a
place to teach you these things? The Crucible Project
offers an initial weekend that does it. If you're not a Christian, but this
idea resonates with you, the Mankind Project
sponsors a similar weekend. I've done them both, and am partial to TCP because
I believe in the transformational power of Jesus & the Holy Sprit.
On Saturday, Feb. 2, I attended the No Regrets simulcast at my church. Having prayed for the men of our community and the conference overall, I wondered as I arrived in the morning if this would be a "typical" men's breakfast/conference.
A good friend of mine says that Satan pours the syrup at men's breakfasts, and I think he's right. I don't think there's anything wrong with feeding guys--in many cases the food is key to bringing & keeping them there. What my friend means is men go to these breakfast events, nod their heads & maybe take some notes…and leave. Maybe there's some small talk, maybe even a resolution to make a change or two. But these are the exceptions.
As the keynote started, I realize it would not be Satan pouring the syrup. It was an exceptional day on many levels, especially the teaching. Kenny Luck's morning keynote, imploring men to fight & rise, was inspiring. I also loved the challenges, style, & substance of James MacDonald's talk, "Act Like Men".
We were fortunate enough to have some great speakers for local breakout sessions. Among these was John Casey, who came to speak about healing. Though healing doesn't seem like a natural progression from Luck & MacDonald, it was for the men in the room. Casey asked who needed healing, and around what, spoke powerfully about the need for healing, echoing Luck's comments from the keynote. He spoke of men's isolation, and our wounds, and how these wounds, unaddressed, continue to resurface in our lives. He shared openly about some of his biggest mistakes, tracing them back to his wounds. This introspection & risk-taking, this authenticity, is something men see little of--and do even less than they see.
At one point, Casey asked the men in the breakout to take the risk he modeled, to announce one of their failures. Several men offered up relational failures, taking risk to share where they blew it. Getting guys this far is outside the norm, an achievement, an opportunity. Then a man sitting in the corner, in the back, shared his failure to trust his instincts when something didn't seem right. He later learned he should have trusted his instincts, not a person he thought he could trust. The cost was terrible & tragic. This man shared from his heart, taking a huge risk. You could have heard a pin drop. In fact, if you'd looked around, you would have seen tears drop, as men were broken by this man's story, grieving for him & those impacted by his failure.
This man took a big risk, sharing a big truth. I've heard Greg Huston say, "Little truth, little grace. Big truth, big grace". I believe he's right, and the men in that room watched this man receive grace from other men, many strangers. The man who shared said he'd received big grace from God, and I believe him. I get goosebumps thinking about my front row seat that day, watching men risk, share, & support each other, feeling the Holy Spirit's finger prints on the session.
That is why I staff men's weekends, take 3-4 hours on alternate Saturdays to meet with my men's group. There we help carry each other's burdens, point out what we see that the man with an issue cannot see, challenge each other to do our best for God's will in our lives, and support each other when we fail. These men are my insurance policy, my challenge, and my bellwether as I seek to live a life with No Regrets.
It has been a long, long time since I've blogged here. Originally stood up for a Grad School class on Internet Marketing (great class, by the way), I'm re-focusing on a passion of mine: Men's "work" in the Christian church.
I'll wrestle with and address issues like:
is the Holy Spirit involved in Men's work, or is it just psychobabble?
is Men's work aligned with the Bible?
concerns/criticisms of The Crucible Project: valid or not?
I've been thinking this week about the big tech news last week: Hulu Desktop, Bing, & Palm Pre. Patrick Feeney has a summary & well-thought perspective in his blog. I'd like to focus on the Palm Pre/IPhone part of last week's news.
Full disclosure: I don't have an IPhone, or even a Blackberry. In fact, I don't leave my phone on much. So I've only seen others use their IPhones.
I was talking with my wife about the Pre this weekend. She was a *big* fan of the Palm Pilot, which was wonderful for her to use, but a nightmare for me to support as I'm the Help Desk of our household. She was intrigued about the Pre, and our conversation hinged on the number of Apps that the Pre has vs the IPhone.
The idea of thousands of Apps out there for the IPhone is overwhelming for me (even more so when I read that there are currently more than 48,000 of them for the IPhone alone!). I hear of users who spend time checking out apps: they try one out for a few days or a week, then delete them. When I think that the Pre actually has a lot *fewer* apps out there, that actually sounds like a good thing. Do I want to pick from Apps out there that most people have downloaded, then deleted? Doesn't that just waste my time? Sometimes, too many choices can be a bad thing.
Michael Learmonth has a great post in Advertising Age on Apps. Among other things, he mentions that there's a facet of this that I'd never considered: Apps are not easily patched after release. I work at an e-commerce company, and patching code after a build is always challenging. Given the constraints of limited patching & single release development, I wonder how App technology will change. Will vendors co-brand their products to create their own brand? Will marketers share the press with their development partners? How will Google's Android factor in vs. Pre & IPhone development?
Note: To keep from running afoul of Google, I'm adding this note below: Portions of this page are reproduced from work created and shared by Google and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 2.5 Attribution License.
I've been thinking about Twitter even more since our class last week. When I get a few minutes this week, I'll have IT install TweetDeck on my laptop (I am not a "developer" so I am being saved from myself by the IT Gods).
My employer is actively using Twitter to address customer service issues, market, and improve our image (I can't get into details on some cool things we are doing). All the noise about Twitter got me thinking about the value of such a tool for corporate espionage.
I'm not advocating this. I'm wondering if Twitter will make it easier for the competition to sniff out new developments at other firms. Internally, what about people using Tweets as an electronic water cooler, chatting about work to whoever will listen?
It seems that efforts such as this will be high cost, low yield. Who to watch? Which tweets matter? Are people really foolish enough to Tweet w/o thought after Ketchum VP James Andrews' meaculpaTweet in January? I've been hearing more office gossip lately; I don't expect that this stuff will show up online, whether Facebook, Twitter, or somewhere else.
In terms of corporate espionage, here's a recent story that is relatively low tech. What if someone hacks your email/Twitter account? The scenario is the same; the technology is just a little different.
I was talking with a friend of mine last week. She told the tale of a project that just wrapped up which allowed placement of a sponsored product on the company's search results page. During the project, there was a debate about measurement from two camps: old school web and what I'll call pragmatists.
The old school web folks argued that knowing clicks & impressions was enough to demonstrate the success of a custome's ad purchase. Afterall, they argued, these are the metrics in the sales contract. The pragmatists argued that those measures are great, but have become nearly irrelevant without a direct link to conversion. They argued that the multivariate analysis needed to demonstrate an ad's success would be much more time-intensive than cost-effective. Moreover, customers wouldn't "buy" such a methodology.
I'm with the pragmatists. I don't find it compelling how many people saw and clicked on my ads. What I really want to know is the whole funnel, down to conversion [read: purchase]. I want my ad dollars tied to as much real data as possible. And if a company, like my friend's, approached me with a pitch for sponsored results, I'd be interested. If they told me that they were not able to measure conversion for previous customers, or for my own campaign, I'd turn them down (unless, of course, they were Google).
I was thinking about this when I read this article in Advertising Age. There are times when I can't/don't expect to measure conversion. Some of my campaigns may be a "success" if we increased brand awareness or improved brand perception. How do you set your goals for campaigns? Is there a component of each one which has a "softer", less measurable component reserved for brand awareness/perception? Is it reasonable to expect more?
My blog subject this week is my team’s work on the Google Online Marketing Challenge. We’re working hard to figure out which 50% of our paid search budget is meaningful, and which 50% is wasted. What I’m finding out through the project is that we’re learning what does *not* work more than what is working.
We know that our click through rates are low. Working for a web company, I know that these rates are low for most advertising, which softens some of the sting. We are seeing good impressions data, so we know we’re getting “looks”. The problem is that we were hoping for much more in the way of clicks. For the purpose of the assignment, clicks are our conversion measure. Given the constraints of time and web development money, this will work as a proxy for this project; if it were our business & these constraints were removed, we’d measure conversion differently.
Most of our keywords have a quality score of 7 or 8; we’ve wracked our brains to come up with additional variety. Is a 9 or a 10 attainable? As I alluded to above, if we could customize our landing pages and make a few other changes, we might earn a higher score. We’ve also pushed out as many different versions of ad copy that we can think of. We know which keywords get the most looks, and which ads have generated clicks. That leaves most of our initial list of keywords sitting “inactive” because they generated neither looks nor clicks. That is the easy part: these don’t work.
What we don’t know is how much we’re missing: what are our potential customers searching for before they find us. This is what everyone struggles with, and it means *at least* that we don’t know our customers as well as we should. Sure, we’ve interviewed some of them, and we know which search terms they use when they are on our site. But we cannot say which things our potential customers are looking for. Yet.
We’re working to read the things our customers read online, to get an idea of what other content and/or search terms they might see. We hope that will provide us with some new keywords and/or ad text in the last week & a half. We might also determine that some of the sites we think prospects view are not showing Google AdWords. If that is the case, it’ll be great information to pass along to our business partner.
We don’t want to tell our business partner about the 50% that doesn’t work. The way things are going, that might be as far as we get. The saving grace is that the money here was Google’s, and they have plenty of that.
There is a lot of talk about monetizing traffic, and smarter/more targeted ads. BlueKai is one of a handful of aggregators doing just that. There are others, like eXelate Media and Datran Media; I'll focus on BlueKai because I saw it first (and I like the logo).
Basically, BlueKai & their competition drop a cookie on your PC when you visit one of their partner sites. No big deal--just about everyone does. What they do with the cookie is leverage it to see what you're searching for. Okay, still not a big deal. We learned about the invisible pixel call that Google Analytics & other Web Analytics vendors use this week in class.
What makes these firms different is that they know you're searching in a narrow vertical or two. Let's say you go to Kayak & search for a trip to Vegas. They drop the BlueKai cookie, which knows you're in the market for a trip to Vegas. You may be shown an ad for Vegas travel on another BlueKai partner site. (Full disclosure: I work for an online travel company which is a competitor of Kayak. You'll note I've not hyperlinked either Kayak, nor my employer.)
How does it work? There is an auction where partners on the network bid on segments of aggregated data. Upon winning the auction, they get the opportunity to display relevant ads to the users in that group for a period of time.
The data expires, so they're not trying to sell you a hotel in Detroit b/c you bought tickets to Super Bowl 40 in 2006. And BlueKai doesn't sell any PII data, so privacy advocates can relax--a little. (personally, I'm more freaked out by what Axciom does than BlueKai, but that is another blog...)
Oh, and another thing. BlueKai has an idea or two about how to get around your reticence about participating.
They'll show you the categories of data they collect.
They allow you to selectively opt out (or in bulk, of course).
They appeal to your altruistic side and offer to donate a portion of the advertising revenue for your "profile" to one of several charities.
I think it is brilliant. The ads know what I'm looking for, and show me relevant content. I can opt out selectively, if I want. If/when they become ubiquitous, I may want to opt out.
And about the altruistic side, the charity beneficiary of my advertising? That was an easy call. I'm participating in the 5 Day Food & Water Challenge this week. Did you know:
every 5 seconds, a child dies from hunger-related causes
another child dies every 15 seconds from lack of clean water to drink
I have three kids, so donating the proceeds from my BlueKai profile was a no-brainer: Action Against Hunger. Hell, I might even put them on my charity giving list this year.
Blogging is the new black, the New Media (replacing the old guard, newspapers), and now so mainstream that I've begun to do it. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse must be right around the corner!
Is there more than mere vanity involved here? Is there a value proposition with real *value* in it, other than leveraging this as an electronic soapbox in the village square? Are people other than editorial writers able to use this media to generate earnings? Do editorial writers even make money through this media?
I took a look around to see which companies were using blogs with some fanfare. This article celebrates "great" company blogs. And some of these are pretty slick, from a design perspective. They're visually appealing. But is their content compelling? Does it push a consumer to make an actual purchase? I'm skeptical. Another article touts 9 blogs that are fun to read. Okaayyy. I've never heard of any of these companies; when I check, they're pretty small. Are blogs only for the small-mid sized companies?
Socialtext has a handy list of Fortune 500 companies with blogs here. I don't think that Wal-Mart's primary demographic are big into reading blog postings; maybe they're trying to broaden their customer base. For them, perhaps it is a PR play--they don't *need* the blog to generate sales. Best Buy is working the support angle in their blog; again, the play seems to be customer loyalty. Boeing & GM seem to target people who love the industry, as a way to stay informed about news, new products, etc. That, too, is fine.
But what about providing any of the things John Caples suggested in "How to Make Your Advertising Make Money?"
These blogs can get attention--to those who know they are there. In that respect, the audience is self-selecting.
Holding attention works along the same lines.
Creating desire? Travel blogs do a good job of this, b/c their pictures reach viewers. Financial blogs? I just can't get excited about checking/savings accounts, or even Roth IRAs. Even if Sheryl Crow wrote a song about them and sang it personally to me. Well, that'd work quite well, actually.
Making it believeable/a bargain. I can easily research whether it is a bargain, and after a while, build trust (or not) of the blog/blogger. Again, though, it is self-selecting. And I have yet to see a firm's blog discuss a competitor's products.
Make it easy to buy. Blogs work well here: easy links to merchandise are a sure gig. Here, self-selection is an advantage: these are a pre-qualified group of potential customers.
Give a reason to buy now. The urgency is hard to put in a blog. Time-sensitive deals are lost if viewers don't see the offer prior to expiry.
I think blogs are fine and well for purposes of competitive parity, PR spin, and some element of "geek appeal". I have not seen compelling evidence that they drive more than occasional purchases. As long as we have that expectation, blogs are fine for what they are. Let's not expect that they're a meaningful part of the business plan for a business not fresh out of someone's garage or basement.
