I have forgotten how to write. I don’t mean that I have lost the ability to make words appear on paper, I mean writing as a form of expression. I’m not entirely sure how or when it happened, and suspect it crept away gradually anyhow.

But I would like to start writing again. Now that I’m self-employed I have more control over my time, in theory anyway. I can at least aspire to a balance of activities - resurrecting old interests, trying something new or borrowed, even something blue should times get tough. The first step: try to understand why I stopped in the first place.
 

When writing becomes work

I wrote at home when I was a kid. I kept diaries, albeit full of pretty unrevealing entries just in case anyone read them. I wrote creative essays at school. I remember one in particular about a boy who went out in the snow and died. (I should add that I was a happy child, just one with a keen sense of tragedy from an early age.)

However, from my mid-20s writing became something I did at work. When I worked in PR I was predominantly a writer. I wrote press releases, bylined articles, case studies. In PR you can only ever be a ghostwriter, but I enjoyed it. And I certainly enjoyed it more than having to pick up the phone to call a journalist who might or might not have had a blazing row with his wife that morning, and might or might not take that out on you.

Today, for many of us, writing for work could well mean writing a post on the company blog. I did manage a few posts for my ex-employer, but this relatively meagre contribution wasn’t because I didn’t have anything to say, it was because I never felt that comfortable writing on the work blog. At some level I felt an ownership of this material and awkward at it being left behind should I move on. Which, in the end, I did.

I also know that whenever something becomes ‘work’ I stop doing it for pleasure. It only took a few months of working on The Face magazine for me to stop reading it entirely.

When writing feels like it's for public consumption

The minute I feel that I am writing for an audience, I seize up. Too much self-editing goes on before I have even put pen to paper. How will this view be received? What are the chances of someone misinterpreting it? Or of someone misinterpreting me?

For now, I have decided to just write and then see whether what I have written is also something I want to publish. In this case, I decided to publish.

Personality

There is an unfortunate, and in my view misguided, belief in my line of work that you have to be writing, or at least publishing in some form – be it on a blog, on YouTube or, for the lazy amongst us, Twitter – in order to be taken seriously. 

The implicit accusation is that if you aren’t doing one or more of these things then you can’t be good at your job. I don’t share this view at all and it certainly doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny at a human level. We all have different personality types. At the risk of being overly reductive, and of causing irritation amongst Burkeman-types, some of us are more expressive, some of us less so.

Regardless of external factors like 'social media exists (so therefore we must all publish)'. Surely our outward expression is more likely to be driven by internal psychological factors. The reason why you’ll always find me in the kitchen at a party is also why you won’t always find me writing on the web. I go where I’m most comfortable. (There’s a more detailed post lurking in this somewhere. I’ll write it in a couple of years.)

I suspect my own writer’s block is in part down to this pressure to publish. Doing anything under pressure isn’t much fun.

Talking is preferable

Some people communicate better through the written word, others through talking. I’m in the latter camp, probably because it is quicker as much as anything. That said, writing things down offers more opportunity for ordering your thoughts and for reflection. For that reason alone it’s worth making time for.

 
Jadedness

This is the point that has the most potential to put noses out of joint, albeit only a little. Another reason that I rarely write – certainly when it comes to writing about work stuff anyway - is because a large proportion of what I read online doesn’t really say much that is new.

Like many other people, all of whom I am sure mean well, I have opinions on what ‘engagement’ means (it means nothing at all, since you ask). I have a view on the best ways to use social media (think about it in terms of retention not acquisition). And I could give an opinion on the current state of strategic digital thinking in large organisations (often lacking, since you asked again).

The thing is, I am reluctant to add to this mass of information, and frankly don’t see why my opinion is better than anyone else’s anyway. (I suppose this ties back to my earlier point about relative levels of expressiveness in people.)

But I do want to start writing again. I think it would add to my life, and to my understanding of it. Just don’t ask me to do it or I’ll probably stop.

Image by Vince Kusters on Flickr

I wrote this for iCrossing (where I work) a few weeks ago. Now it has had a bit of time to run on that blog, I'm publishing it here too.

“You can’t tell how people are going to behave based on how they have behaved”

(Don Draper, Mad Men)

“You can’t make any sense of the facts until you’ve had an idea”
(Stephen King, A Masterclass in Brand Planning)

“Journalists have to balance their role in responding to events with their role as an active seeker of stories”
(Paul Bradshaw, The Guardian)

For ten years, from my mid-teens to mid-twentysomethings I had a monthly appointment that I never ever missed. It was with the nearest newsagent so that I could buy the latest copy of The Face magazine. As a pop-culture obsessive I loved The Face. I loved it because it introduced me to new people, ideas, labels, fashion, movies and music. It kept my world moving forwards by giving me new information that led to new experiences. I loved it so much that I ended up working there – my first proper job out of university. And I still have all my copies stacked together at home as a compendium of times past, the new has become the old. So now I am a curator, a caretaker, of a decade of pop culture, of things I once liked.

The Face is sadly long-gone but the social need it tapped into – the provision of new information and experiences – remains as relevant and necessary today as it has always been. But we are in a dangerous place where the value of taking people somewhere new is in danger of becoming undervalued and, worst case, forgotten completely.

In media and marketing we talk a lot about competing in attention markets – by this we mean the ebb and flow of information that the online ‘crowd’ is interested in at any given time. We believe that the best way to be noticed is to appeal to people based on what they are currently interested in. This is because the internet has created an environment where near-real-time data about people’s likes and dislikes is at our fingertips. Of course, if you are interested in something, it means you already know about it.

The increasing centrality of attention markets in business strategy affects two established professional disciplines – journalism and marketing. For both, the internet is changing how we think about the content we produce. But we have a choice to make. Should we really be writing about and creating things based predominantly on what we know people already like, or should we be giving people new ideas and experiences?

The route we choose has repercussions at a more profound level than the media or marketing industries. It’s an issue for society. New information, ideas and experiences are the very things that have always powered human progress. But how do we move the world on if we are only interested in what people liked yesterday?
 
Attention markets and journalism
Online, a publisher can 'play' the attention markets by monitoring what people are talking about, searching for and reading at any given time, and publish stories with great speed and at great volume in order to meet this need.

Gawker is a reactive media model that is a world away from the role journalism has historically played in seeking out and breaking new stories in order to attract readers. The Daily Telegraph, one of the UK’s broadsheet newspapers, has arranged its newsroom so that it can constantly monitor the relative popularity of news stories and feed this into editorial planning. It has the attention market at the heart of its approach. That said, this is also the paper that had its biggest scoop in years with the MPs expenses scandal. There wasn’t much of an attention market around that until the Telegraph created it. I wonder if its editorial approach has shifted back in the direction of breaking news as a result.

When I think of journalistic practice, I think of Sid Hudgens, the journalist in the film L.A. Confidential, played by Danny De Vito. He’s out there in the shadows of the Hollywood night getting the scoops. It was dirty work, but the guy was breaking news, working contacts to get the inside story. Turn on the television for any UK national news programme and still see political journalists referring to a tip-off or an important bit of information given to them by a senior Westminster village source that they’re plugged into.

In one of the quotes at the top of this post, Paul Bradshaw says that journalists need to balance responding to events with seeking new stories. And he’s right. There is a responsibility for journalism and, frankly, for anyone creating content on- and off-line to push us onwards, to educate, entertain and surprise.

Attention markets and marketing
In digital marketing, attention markets are central to how we have come to think about and interpret user behaviour. It has become industry gospel that brands should understand where online audience attention around their product, service or sector currently resides. And it is indeed good practice to do so. But, just like journalism, if we place too much emphasis on this type of knowledge we risk only ever providing experiences that people already know they like. How does this inspire people?

Of course, the tension in marketing between audience research and creativity is nothing new. What is new today is the accessibility of data about user behaviour that the internet gives us, the potential that attention markets have to change the way we research and plan activity, and how easy and tempting it is to use it as the sole basis for creating new ideas and information.

As long ago as 1983, at a Market Research Society Conference, one of the great UK advertising men, Stephen King, warned against marketers planning activity based on a “here-and-now, action-oriented description of what happened yesterday”. The internet encourages this sort of immediate, literal interpretation of user behaviour because it speeds things up. We can now get information and act on it in quick succession. It is reactive, not proactive. By contrast, Stephen King believed that these facts were only useful when placed against an interesting idea, with research effectively used as a way to test it.

What we need to do
The purpose of this post is not to question whether there is a role for attention markets in journalism or marketing. They have an important role to play. But so do new ideas. We need to work harder at tying these two elements together more effectively. We need to use attention markets not as a literal guide to what to do and say but as a way of judging where people might be interested in going next – as information that stimulates ideas not responses. I believe that journalists and marketing professionals should be a bridge between what people know and like now and what they will know and like next. They should keep moving us forward. After all, it’s hard to see where you’re going if you’re always looking back.

Year after year, without fail, the Christmas break temporarily erases my work memory, such that I'm left wondering what I was up to before I went away. But over the last day or so I have been enjoyably eased back into things through a few conversations with my friend and colleague, Charlie (@cpev, Charlie's Posterous). We've been debating content strategy - what the term means, what one should consist of, and how it applies on the social web. We've put together numerous strategies for iCrossing clients over the last two or three years but, as with much of our work, we're dealing with a moving target, which makes re-reading around a subject an enjoyable essential.

As a simple attempt at a little bit of personal content curation (which is, ahem, part of any good content strategy) here are a few articles that I've enjoyed reading on the subject this morning.

The Content Strategist as Digital Curator (from A List Apart)

The Discipline of Content Strategy (from A List Apart)

How Consultant and In-house Content Folks Can Play Nice (from dopeData)

How to Build a Topic Strategy (from dopeData)

Unlike many posts and articles I read online, these selections are well constructed and well written (the authors are content experts after all). This makes them a pleasure to read.

I'm not going to attempt a summation here. That'll be something I might come back to. Unless I end up remembering what I was up to before Christmas first. After all, it might have been incredibly important.

"People choose their brands as they choose their friends"

(Stephen King, 1970). How prescient.

On my way to work this morning I passed two newspaper billboards in quick succession. It was for our local paper, the Brighton Argus, and the relationship between the two boards made me chuckle. Unfortunately, I was on the bus and moving past too quickly to get pictures. Here's the longhand version instead.

Billboard 1: COPPELL FAVOURITE FOR SEAGULLS POST

100 metres further down the road...

Billboard 2: COPPELL SAYS NO TO SEAGULLS

How's that for real-time traditional news publishing!? Twitter eat your heart out.

Yesterday, I was asked for my thoughts on measuring the effectiveness of digital marketing channels at the planning and campaign stages. Now, measurement isn't my area of expertise but I know some stuff all the same. Even so, the question still stumped me a little. After a while, I realised that it was because I felt that it drew an awkward distinction between the planning  and execution stages of a project that I don't really feel exists any more. The question is surely more about effective measurement than measuring effectiveness. Here's why.

As a result of the emergence of the modern, conversational web, we are entering an age of iterative planning, where insights inform marketing decisions on a constant basis. This means that distinctions that we have traditionally drawn between planning and execution stages are being erased, with measurement becoming the input not the end output. The volume of user data available to us as a result of a person’s search activity and social media interaction is what has driven this change.

The methods and tools we use are the same at both the planning and campaign stages. Consider the amount of Twitter monitoring and trending tools available to us. Likewise, the emergence of  social media monitoring tools like socialmention, which lets us search for brands across a range of platforms and ‘take away’ the data for charting and analysis.

 This is how the modern digital planner should be operating – in near-real time, in an agile manner, constantly learning and adapting activity as conversations and spaces develop. Of course, doing this is itself a challenge; it needs constant resource and dedication. It requires an organisation (and its agency) to be incredibly nimble and largely free of long-winded sign-off processes. It needs a digital presence based on a flexible, scalable CMS. This is all tricky stuff to change. But change is good and good change means progress.