Lockdown life

It’s been interesting to reflect on how life changed during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown.

Here at Fusebox, business carried-on without much disruption. I’m feeling very grateful for that—many are not so lucky. Our days kept a familiar rhythm of sitting at the computer creating work for our clients. Many companies pivoted to communicating with their customers about new logistics, online shopping or promoting digital channels. We were tangled up in all of that.

It was in the subtler feelings of everyday life where I noticed shifts, and I enjoyed the changes.

The pace of life and work slowed during the lockdown. Deadlines were more relaxed, emails less demanding, the phone calls less urgent. Meetings were suddenly online—taking onerous travel out of the picture, but throwing our homes into focus. I saw my colleagues at home: perched up at their dining room tables, or with the ironing piled in the corner behind them. Kids and cats walked about in the background, oblivious.

Phone calls became opportunities to connect and check-in. Conversations seem a little more meaningful.

For the six weeks of serious shutdown I woke up with a sense of peace. Where I live is fairly quiet, but there’s usually a rumble of cars shuttling kids to school in the mornings, or tradies going about their business. What I heard during the lockdown were parents and their kids on bikes, people walking their dogs, and birds. Lots of birds.

When you went out for exercise people smiled and said an enthusiastic ‘hello’. At the time, the fleeting connection seemed to have real importance. The dogs were happy too. They enjoyed the extra company and walks. It was a lovely Autumn, and I actually noticed.

I’m a little nervous as life eases out of lockdown and resumes pace again. But I hope to take the opportunity to recalibrate life a little and find a better way.

The War of Art

I’ve just finished reading The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.

It’s a cult classic and essential reading for anyone working in a creative capacity. But it’s a great book for anyone guilty of not following a dream, held back by insecurity or procrastinating about getting something started.

Pressfield’s military analogies of war, warriors and the enemy highlight what many creative people know well: that doing ‘the work’ is a daily battle with formidable foes.

“You know Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study. He applied to the Academy of Fine Arts and later to the School of Architecture. Ever seen one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I’ll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War ll than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.”

The enemy of Resistance is examined in great detail and is painted as a slippery adversary fed by the ego. Resistance is constantly looking to destroy the divine fruits of The Muse. Work is presented as a daily practice and discipline that should be engaged in as though one’s life depends on it. Indeed the author would argue that your life does depend on it.

“Resistance’s goal is not to wound or disable. Resistance aims to kill. Its target is the epicentre of our being: our genius, our soul, the unique and priceless gift we were put on earth to give and that no one else has but us. Resistance means business. When we fight it, we are in a war to the death.”

Creative people are generally full of self-doubt and worried about putting their work out there. This book encourages them to fight their battles, study their enemy and give the world their unique output. If they don’t, humanity is the poorer for it and a divine opportunity tragically lost.

The battles don’t get any easier and the fear never subsides:

“Henry Fonda was still throwing up before each stage performance, even when he was seventy-five. In other words, fear doesn’t go away. The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.”

If you need a wise, funny voice to help you through creative blocks and insecurities, this is a fantastically inspirational book.

Proust questionnaire

Photo by eberhard grossgasteiger on Unsplash

I love reading the Proust questionnaire column in Vanity Fair magazine. It gives such a great insight into a person. These days it’s common to stalk an individual on a Linkedin or Facebook profile. To my mind it would be useful if every profile or About page included a mandatory Proust questionnaire.

So in the interests of disclosure, I provide the following insights for your consideration.

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Warmth, nothing scheduled, an empty day ahead.

What is your greatest fear?

Chaos.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

A tendency to exaggerate to enhance a good story.

What is the trait you most deplore in others?

Delusion.

Which living person do you most admire?

Someone brave, wise and strong.

What is your greatest extravagance?

Imagined extravagance: laundered sheets. Actual extravagance: sleep.

What is your current state of mind?

Grateful.

What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

I like them all. None are overrated.

On what occasion do you lie?

When the truth really, really hurts.

What do you most dislike about your appearance?

That it’s staring back at me.

Which living person do you most despise?

There’s a great many that I don’t particularly like. But despise is a bit harsh. I don’t despise anyone. But given time, opportunity and more information…

What is the quality you most like in a man?

It’s tough to list just one. Maybe, kindness despite it all.

What is the quality you most like in a woman?

Dignity.

What words or phrases do you most overuse?

What would you like for dinner?

When and where were you happiest?

On holidays, on a bicycle.

Which talent would you most like to have?

To sing like Joan Sutherland.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

I’m too old to change anything. I’ll work with what I’ve got.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?

Getting this far.

If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?

My cat.

Where would you most like to live?

Anywhere with a garden, lots of books and a cat.

What is your most treasured possession?

Anything belonging to someone I loved who is gone.

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

Working for evil.

What is your favourite occupation?

Garbage collector. Any sort of waste management that keeps the world turning.

What is your most marked characteristic?

Solitary.

What do you most value in your friends?

Shared history. I’m proud of all of my friends.

Who are your favourite writers?

A.A. Gill, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, Flannery O’Connor.

Who is your hero of fiction?

Anyone who pulls themselves back from the brink of destruction.

Which historical figure do you most identify with?

Anyone confused and afraid, but forging-ahead nonetheless.

Who are your heroes in real life?

Catherine Freeman (focus under pressure), Julia Gillard (I will not be lectured to about misogyny by that man), Noel Pearson (a champion of his people), people who keep going when it hurts.

What are your favourite names?

The names of the people I love.

What is it that you most dislike?

Saying yes, when I really don’t want to.

What is your greatest regret?

Hurting people.

How would you like to die?

Quickly, and with little fuss.

What is your motto?

It changes from time-to-time, but ‘Done is better than perfect’ is being bandied-about at the moment.

Cults of leadership and influence

There’s controversy about another celebrity diet guru being exposed. This shouldn’t surprise us. Shysters and salesmen have taken advantage of people for millennia. As they say, there’s a sucker born every minute.

What has changed is the amplification of messages and the speed and scale at which they can do damage.

Skepticism keeps us safe. We used to have it when we met a stranger on the road. But now we can follow the individual on Facebook and Instagram, peak into their lives. We feel oddly intimate with these strangers. But it’s an intimacy based on myths and mirrors.

We live in a weird world where we’re all trying to sell something to someone. It’s from this place that the cults of leadership and influence spring. Your first thought should be: what is this person trying to sell me?

Business culture is no less impressionable to the latest MBA fad or a leadership guru’s thoughts and tips. Perhaps we’re all looking for mentors to show us the way through challenges. Cue: life coaches.

Celebrity culture is based on it. The Kardashians make billions for entertaining us. Sports stars are paid millions for entertaining us. These economies are an odd inverted reality to me. It’s like going down a rabbit hole to a place where things are very, very strange indeed. Watching performance is compelling. It’s also called theatre. It’s not life and it’s not real.

Many people fancy themselves as a leader or some kind of influencer. When you’re in Wonderland the most wonderful things are possible.

But being a true leader or influencer is another thing altogether.

Great leaders have no ego. They carry their weakest team member. The really influential folk are rebels, blind to what the world thinks of them. Real leaders step up when no one else is willing to. Real influencers stick to their truth in the face of persecution. These people don’t have many followers (real or virtual).

The cults of leadership and influence are just trying to sell you something. They aren’t real leaders, or influencers. They’re simply salespeople.

Selling the dream

Marketing is like dating. You simply don’t dress up, go out and shout at people to marry you. There are very few cheap, quick thrills that lead to lasting relationships. Marketing is the art of seduction. Your job is to win someone over. Only then will you be given a chance to fulfil the promise. It takes time. It might take years. It takes multiple encounters. The audience needs to think about you, evaluate you and show interest in you.

Absolutely none of this happens on the first date.

We’re all emotional creatures—no matter how highly we prize logic and rational thought. Our emotional psychology drives who we are and what we do. It drives what appeals to us, what attracts us, what we desire and who we dream of being.

As a marketer, your job is to ‘sell the dream’ of what your product or service is going to do for the customer. They’re not interested in your strategies or priorities. They’re interested in how you make them feel—and what their future will look like if they choose to spend it with you.

Selling the dream takes time, consistency and humility. It takes charm, delicacy and sweetness. It takes a lot more than urgent calls to action.

Start winning your audience over with the best quality content. No one is a cheap date.

Who's driving your social media?

About once a week someone says to me: “we’ve got to find someone to help you do all that social media stuff”. I think they have in mind a junior person who could relieve me of their idea of ‘hack work’, while I sit about and write strategy, or attended corporate golf events.

I’ve seen many clients offload their social media to someone ill-equipped to deal with it. In almost all cases the delegation has failed. In some cases it’s done irrevocable damage to a brand and caused serious legal problems.

Here’s why. Social media is publishing. It's direct communication with the public and your potential customers. It’s also like meeting someone in person. Your organisation has a brief opportunity to make an impression. Your voice and communication must be as professional, well crafted and assured as it is in your company’s advertising. Social media is the media these days. The only difference is that now your advertising needs to be produced faster and more frequently.

Would you leave your 20-year old intern in charge of your company’s advertising campaigns? Nor should you leave them in control of your identity and reputation on the most important communication channels available to you.

Companies who lead the way in social media have teams of professionals generating quality content, crafting copy, running advertising campaigns and managing customer service on social media. It is where your brand, products and corporate culture are being put to the test—and judged.

Social media is maturing fast. It’s no longer acceptable to outsource the responsibility for it to a kid. It is a major marketing activity and part of your corporate identity, voice and brand. Do it well and you give a great impression and sense that your company is proficient, cool and professional. Do it badly, and I don’t want anything to do with you.

Text with a nasty typo? I’m going to judge your quality control (maybe your products are sloppy too). Poor quality imagery? I assume you are lazy and apathetic, or simply have no eye (again, sloppy). And what about the tone of voice? Does your law firm sound like a nightclub? There are a million ways to mess it up.

Messing it up is rarely in the mechanics of posting. It’s not about how often people post (although too frequent seems a bit desperate to me), what time you post (I’m awake at weird hours) or how many followers you have (you can buy them). If your social media content is consistently beautiful, entertaining and inspiring—and I’m interested in what you offer—I’ll be a fan. If not, I have never even noticed you.

Great media content is not created by accident. Content creation is tough creative work that takes technical skill, experience, time and money to conjure from the ether. Invest in it.

Underestimate the importance and skill it takes to do well, and hand your social media to the ill-equipped at your peril. It’s not something everyone can do (even when they express a keen interest). If it matters to you, treat your social media with respect. Engage a professional and expect to pay for the results social media can deliver when done well.

A few things I've learned

Disclaimer: This is not a complete list and is subject to change.

Life is what happens while you’re making other plans
Do no harm but take no shit
The weekend always comes
Done is better than perfect
Start with the hardest first
Leopards never change their spots
Some cats have more than nine lives
The question is so big you don't need an answer
Narrow the aperture
Do not engage
Hell is other people
To change you have to do things differently
Push down to go up
Eat your greens
Don't eat or drink anything that is blue
Don’t order a fancy cocktail in a country pub
You can have more issues than Vogue, but keep them to yourself
Treat others as you would like to be treated
Thank people in their own language
Make a list or you’ll forget

Over capitalising

The first thing I learned on the first day of studying communications was that writing is about conveying information to the audience. It’s not about how clever you are, or how much you know, or your ego. It’s about the efficient transfer of information to your audience.

I come back to that every time I put words on paper or screen. It’s something I think about when I see over capitalisation: which is my favourite editorial curse.

Capital letters creep into our sentences like rising damp. They’re everywhere and unnecessary. Rooting them out will improve your writing and help your readers comprehend your message with fewer distractions.

Capitalisation should only be used for proper nouns. What’s a proper noun? It’s a name used for an individual person, place, or organisation (for example, Michael, Melbourne and Microsoft).

Unless a word is strictly a proper noun, there’s no justification for aggrandising it with an initial capital letter. Now let’s all read that last sentence again.

In typography (the art of typeface design) the point of a capital letter is to jolt the eye as the uppercase letter form is encountered along the horizontal line of text. That jolt is designed to mark the beginning of a new sentence or highlight something of importance (a proper noun).

When we over capitalise there are lots of chances for the eye to experience that little jolt. It becomes disruptive to the flow of reading. Think of it like a tiny electric shock. The more of them you get in a sentence, the more your eyes will get fatigued and your mind distracted. When your job is to convey information, distraction is death.

A proper noun is: The Reserve Bank of Australia. That’s it’s full and official title. In subsequent references we should then refer to it as ‘the bank’. That is not it’s full official title, so doesn’t warrant capitalisation at all (and it saves us repeating the full title).

Here’s where it gets fascinating. As we write, we make decisions about capitalisation. Before you know it, the board has become the Board. The doctor has become a Doctor, and a committee is a Committee. We assign importance to things we think deserve it. The Chief Executive Officer gets the treatment but often the cleaner does not.

If ever there is a habit that’s hard to break, it’s what people choose to make important. What they don’t realise is that capitalisation choices lead to poor comprehension and reader distraction. If you want your words to be read and your sentences to flow, ditch the unnecessary capitalisation.

Social media on steroids

Steroids are banned in sport for many reasons. But they're not exactly banned in social media. They're widely used to drive up Likes, engagement and artificially inflate results.

Today I received an email from a social media agency ('ranked #1 social media agency', apparently). It was like reading a letter from a Nigerian lawyer, who just needed my account details for a large deposit of funds.

For a brief moment I really wanted to engage them for deep cover research on this blog post. But a far better use of my money would be to write about it and warn my clients and colleagues about the mischief instead.

Geoff (let's call him Geoff) promised to take my Instagram page from obscurity to stratospheric success. Included in his email was a graph showing my projected growth in page followers (36,360+) over 12 months using his 'accelerator' package.

I like to think people can see a snake oil salesman coming. But I'm so often surprised. Social media and tech in general is the wild west of snake oil salesmen.

In this case I can predict that Geoff would fill my Instagram account with a lot of fake followers. There are software bots to generate these. There are even vending machines on the streets of Moscow where you can insert your credit card to buy them. These automated bots would then whip along and Like my posts and leave odd generic comments to make me feel good.

The problem with this sort of accelerated growth is that an artificial audience will do next to nothing to serve your business in the long run. You may impress a few people with your high number of followers, but I guarantee these followers won't be in to buy your goods or services any time soon.

Steroids do harm to the health of the athlete in the long run. There's no easy way to win. Cutting corners won't help. You'll have to be patient and do the hard work to succeed. Your business is better off with an engaged group of 200 real and potential clients, than 200,000 fake ones.

Furthermore, if you do engage a professional agency to help you with social media, a largely fake audience causes huge headaches and can limit you in your future online marketing endeavours.

If Geoff get's in touch about your social media, pop him in the trash can where he belongs.

Celebrating weird things

Over the past few months I've done a tonne of work for a client. There has been endless hours planning strategy, designing and developing creative, managing placements and reporting. I've developed collateral for a dozen social media accounts, run advertising campaigns, managed and activated sponsorships. Heaps of work has gone into it and we are seeing some fantastic results.

As a complete aside to the project, I run off a quick one-page newsletter to update stakeholders on the activities. It's nothing more than a simple internal communications tool which is distributed quarterly. I need many people to know about campaign activities, and it was the best way I could think of to quickly update them. Because I'm a designer, it looked good, read well and was succinct.

This little one-page newsletter has taken off into the stratosphere with a life of its own. It's been picked up by the client's national office and celebrated as a fantastic initiative. Hang on, I'm thinking, this isn't a fantastic initiative. It's just a one-page communication. The real work and initiatives have been in the advertising and marketing work it reported on.

Isn't it weird what people celebrate and see value in?

It has been a lesson in not undervaluing the things we take for granted. My act of communicating to stakeholders had a value I hadn't even realised.

But I'm still shaking my head and laughing…

Don't be a bore

In the January announcement on Facebook algorithm changes, Mark Zuckerberg noted that Facebook would be changing its news feed algorithm to prioritise content from “friends, family and groups.”

“As we roll this out,” Zuckerberg said, “You’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media. And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard—it should encourage meaningful interactions between people.”

As businesses we should all ask ourselves: what am I doing to make my customers feel like friends? Will my next Facebook post encourage meaningful interactions?

Social media is a bit like a party: you'll recognise the characters. There's a pain in the ass who wants to dominate the conversation with non-stop talk about themselves and what they're doing. There's a hot mess who drinks too much and exposes herself. There's a wallflower who casts a critical eye over the room. There's a few in the kitchen, a few on the dance floor, someone in the bathroom and a bunch of guys out the back.

The point is that selling products and services on social media has always been the boring guy. None of us like him. We try to hide when we see him approaching. We roll our eyes. We switch off.

We're looking for interesting, fun people to have a good time with. People who feel like natural, comfortable friends. These people put a smile on our face, they're interested in what we're up to, they don't take themselves too seriously. We remember them. We might even catch up again after the party. We want to hang out.

Be the interesting person who leaves a great impression. Be charming, be polite, be engaging. Share interesting things and ideas. Have some fun. Be the life of the party. Don't be the boring guy.

Keep it simple

We think complexity is clever, but it isn't. Designer Paul Rand wrote "Design is so simple. That is why it is so hard."

I'm a fan of simplicity. It's honest, straightforward, accessible and clear. It doesn't waste time.

But we live in a world that values complexity: more features, more tools, more stuff. As a result we have options paralysis. Options, alternatives, what ifs grind our minds to a halt. People are fed up with features and options and choices. It's exhausting.

Simplicity is good. Probably even great. This year I'm going to take the easy route, do the easy thing. Keep it simple. Get it done.

It's good to keep simplicity in mind when you're trying to communicate. The point is not to be clever, or impress people, or give them options. Keep it simple, get the message across and get it done.

Here's an idea…

Have you noticed how good people are at having ideas? Particularly anyone in a managerial role. I'm going to hazard a guess that's because they do so little productive work. Seriously, do they lie awake at night thinking of things for the rest of us to do?

Ideas are easy and they're cheap. I sit in meetings where they pop up like weeds. It's rare that the person who proffers the idea has the skills to implement it. That task usually falls to the hardest working person in the room.

Great execution is so damn hard. It's relentless, difficult, boring, draining and tiring. It's rarely done well – because the new ideas just keep coming. Things get half done and we move swiftly on to the next debacle.

Here's a radical idea. Let's stop having ideas and concentrate on the execution of those we've already got.