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Quaker Folkways and Being Patterns on the Interwebs

October 25, 2013
· Martin Kelley

Last Sun­day I have a pre­sen­ta­tion to Had­don­field (N.J.) Meeting’s adult First-day school class about “Shar­ing the Good News with Social Media.” As I pre­pared I found I was less and less inter­est­ed in the tech­niques of Face­book, etc., than I was in how out­reach has his­tor­i­cal­ly worked for Friends.

For an ear­ly, short, peri­od Quak­ers were so in-your-face and noto­ri­ous that they could draw a crowd just by walk­ing a few miles up the road to the next town. More recent­ly, we’ve attract­ed new­com­ers as much by the exam­ple of our lives than by any out­reach cam­paign. When I talk to adult new­com­ers, they often cite some Quak­er exam­ple in their lives – a favorite teacher or delight­ful­ly eccen­tric aunt.

Peo­ple can sense when there’s some­thing of greater life in the way we approach our work, friend­ships, and fam­i­lies. Let me be the first in line to say I’m hor­ri­bly imper­fect. But there are Quak­er tech­niques and val­ues and folk­ways that are guides to gen­uine­ly good ways to live in the world. There’s noth­ing exclu­sive­ly Quak­er about them (indeed, most come from care­ful read­ing of the Gospels and Paul’s let­ters), but they are tools our reli­gious com­mu­ni­ty has empha­sized and into which we’ve helped each oth­er live more fully.

In the last fif­teen years, the ways Friends are known has under­gone a rad­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion. The Inter­net has made us incred­i­bly easy to find and research. This is a mixed bless­ing as it means oth­ers are defin­ing who we are. Care­ful cor­po­rate dis­cern­ment con­duct­ed through long-developed tech­niques of Quak­er process are no match for the “edit” but­ton in Wikipedia or some com­mer­cial site with good page rank.

That said, I think peo­ple still are dis­cov­er­ing Friends through per­son­al exam­ples. George Fox told us to be pat­terns and exam­ples in the world and to answer that of God in every­one. A lot of our exam­pling and answer­ing today is going to be on the thread­ed com­ments of Face­book and Twit­ter. What will they find? Do we use Face­book like every­one else, trolling, spam­ming, engag­ing in flame wars, focus­ing on our­selves? Or do Quak­er folk­ways still apply. Here are some ques­tions that I reg­u­lar­ly wres­tle with:

  • When I use social media, am I being open, pub­lic, and transparent?
  • Am I care­ful to share that which is good and eter­nal rather than tit­il­lat­ing for its own sake?
  • Do I remem­ber that the Good News is sim­ply some­thing we bor­row to share and that the Inward Christ needs to do the final deliv­ery into hearts?
  • Do I pray for those I dis­agree with? Do I prac­tice hold­ing my tongue when my moti­va­tion is anger or jealousy?

What strug­gles do oth­ers face? What might be our online folkways?

Visual storytelling through animated gifs and Vine

June 27, 2013
· Martin Kelley

NPR’s Plan­et Mon­ey recent­ly ran an arti­cle on glass recy­cling, How A Used Bot­tle Becomes A New Bot­tle, In 6 Gifs. The Gif part is what intrigued me. A “gif” is a tightly-compressed image for­mat file that web design­ers leaned on a lot back in the days of low band­width. It’s espe­cial­ly good for designs with a few dis­creet col­ors, such as cor­po­rate logos or sim­ple car­toons. It also sup­ports a kind of prim­i­tive ani­ma­tion that was com­plete­ly overused in the late 90s to give web­pages fly­ing uni­corns and spin­ning globes.

Ani­mat­ed gifs have grown up. They make up half the posts on Tum­blr. They are often derived from fun­ny scenes in movies and come with humor­ous cap­tions. The Plan­et Mon­ey piece uses them for sto­ry­telling: text is illus­trat­ed by six gifs show­ing dif­fer­ent parts of the recy­cling process. The move­ment helps tell the sto­ry – indeed most of the shots would be visu­al­ly unin­ter­est­ing if they were static.

The short loops reminds me of Vine, the six-second video ser­vice from Twit­ter which I’ve used a lot for sil­ly kid antics. They can also tell a sim­ple sto­ry (they’re par­tic­u­lar­ly well suit­ed to repet­i­tive kid antics: up the steps, down the slide, up the steps, down the slide, up…).

In my work with Friends Jour­nal I’ve done some 7 – 12 minute video inter­views with off-site authors using Google Hang­outs, which essen­tial­ly just records the video con­ver­sa­tion. It’s fine for what we use it for, but the qual­i­ty depends a lot on the equip­ment on the oth­er end. If the band­width is low or the web­cam poor qual­i­ty, it will show, and there are few options for post-production edit­ing. But hon­est­ly, this is why I use Hang­outs: a short web-only inter­view won’t turn into a week­long project.

Pro­duc­ing high-quality video requires con­trol­ling all of the equip­ment, shoot­ing ten times more footage than you think you’ll need, and then hours of work con­dens­ing and edit­ing it down to a sto­ry. And after all this it’s pos­si­ble you’ll end up with some­thing that does­n’t get many views. Few Youtube users actu­al­ly watch videos all the way through to the end, drift­ing away to oth­er inter­net dis­trac­tions in the first few minutes.

I like the com­bi­na­tion of the sim­ple short video clips (whether Vine or ani­mat­ed gif) wed­ded to words. My last post here was the very light-weight sto­ry about a sum­mer after­noon project. Yes­ter­day, I tried again, shoot­ing a short ani­mat­ed gif of Tibetan monks vis­it­ing a local meet­ing­house. I don’t think it real­ly worked. They’re con­struct­ing a sand man­dala grain-by-grain. The small move­ments of their fun­nel sticks as sand drops is so small that a reg­u­lar sta­t­ic pho­to would suf­fice. But I’ll keep exper­i­ment­ing with the form.

Share my offendedness (pleeeaaase)

June 20, 2013
· Martin Kelley

Some­times I see blog posts that make me real­ly sad at the state of jour­nal­ism. Phi­ly­Mag is the lat­est but you have the fol­low the daisy-chain of ramped-up hyper­bole back just to make see how ridicu­lous it is.

The restau­rant chain Red Robin recent­ly made a fifteen-second TV ad whose joke is that its veggie-burgers are per­fect for cus­tomers whose teenage daugh­ters are “going through a phase.” It’s had rather lim­it­ed air­play (it’s the 450th or so most run ad in the past 30 days) but still, Busi­ness Insid­er ran a piece on it which claimed that “the chain man­aged to insult all poten­tial veg­e­tar­i­an and veg­an cus­tomers” with the ad. For evi­dence, it cit­ed three mild com­ments on Red Robin’s Face­book page. Fair enough.

But then the page-view-whores at Huff­in­g­ton Post saw the BI piece and wrote that Red Robin is “under fire for diss­ing veg­e­tar­i­ans,” still cit­ing just those Face­book com­ments. Under fire? For three comments?

Sens­ing fresh (veg­gie?) meat, Philly­mag links to Huff­Post to claim that ”veg­e­tar­i­ans and veg­ans far and wide are freak­ing out” and that a boy­cott has been declared. The author tells us that “‘Offend­ed’ gets tossed around so rapid­ly” and it must be true, right?, as she uses it three more times just in her open­ing para­graph. It’s a pity that none of the three Face­book com­menters were con­sid­er­ate enough to actu­al­ly use the words “out­rage” or “boy­cott.” One described the ad as “dis­ap­point­ing” (ouch!). Anoth­er used the word “dis­sat­is­fied” (zing!), though he was speak­ing not about the ad per se but rather a recent vis­it to the restaurant.

Seems like if there is an epi­dem­ic of offended-ness going on, we might take a look at the des­per­a­tion of what pass­es for mod­ern jour­nal­ism these days. Offended-ness must get page views, so why not be offend­ed at being offend­ed? (I imag­ine some hack fur­ther down the pageview food chain is right now read­ing the Philly­mag piece and typ­ing out a head­line about the world­wide veg­an army issu­ing a fat­wa on the teenage daugh­ters of Red Roof exec­u­tives.) Is this real­ly the kind of crap that peo­ple like to share on Face­book? Do Inter­net users just not fol­low links back­ward to judge if there’s any truth to out­rage posts on out­rage? I usu­al­ly ignore this kind of junk even to read past the ridicu­lous head­line. But the phe­nom­e­non is all too ubiq­ui­tous on the inter­webs these days and is real­ly so unnec­es­sar­i­ly divi­sive and stereotype-perpetuating.

Seth Godin on the idea of the “book”

February 17, 2012
· Martin Kelley

Godin tends to be too enam­ored by big ideas for my tastes, but there’s a few ideas in here worth chew­ing over, specif­i­cal­ly how the forced-scarcity of tra­di­tion­al book pub­lish­ing is giv­ing way to near­ly infi­nite elec­tron­ic bookshelves.

The struc­tures of books cer­tain­ly are bound­ed by the forms of their mar­ket­ing. One lim­i­ta­tion Godin does­n’t men­tion is the 64 page min­i­mum – this is what you need to be able to put a spine on the book, am essen­tial fea­ture if it’s to show up book­store shelves. One of my trick­i­est type­set­ting assign­ments back in my non­prof­it pub­lish­ing career was to stretch a 40 page essay to 64 so it could be a book. I used all the tricks of a des­per­ate first year stu­dent with class twen­ty min­utes off (the book went on to become one of our best­sellers, if I could have stretched it 96 pages we might have remained solvent).

This book just exag­ger­at­ed a com­mon phe­nom­e­non. Many of our authors had a few great insights that could be ade­quate­ly shared in the first few chap­ters. The rest of the books would­n’t just be my calorie-free mar­gins. There were enougn words to fill up a book but after 70 or 90 pages the read­er would have read the most orig­i­nal con­tent and could safe­ly put the book down in the “to be fin­ished lat­er” pile.

Free of book lim­i­ta­tions – and book sell­ing lim­i­ta­tions – most of these works would habe been far dif­fer­ent. some of the more basic ques­tions will remain with us: how do we get our works into the hands of read­ers, and how we pay the rent while doing it?

Embed­ded Link

The end of paper changes every­thing — The Domi­no Project
Not just a few things, but every­thing about the book and the book busi­ness is trans­formed by the end of paper. Those that would pre­fer to deny this obvi­ous truth are going to find the busi­ness they lo… 

Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has a page devoted to issues of faith and next…

November 8, 2011
· Martin Kelley

Pew Forum on Reli­gion and Pub­lic Life has a page devot­ed to issues of faith and next year’s pres­i­den­tial elections.

Embed­ded Link

2012 Pres­i­den­tial Can­di­dates Reli­gious Back­grounds | Pew Forum on Reli­gion & Pub­lic Life
Inter­est­ed in how reli­gion could affect the 2012 elec­tion? Learn about the 2012 pres­i­den­tial can­di­date’s reli­gious back­grounds in Pew Forum online biographies. 

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Five Tips for Building a Self-Marketing Website

September 7, 2009
· Martin Kelley

A poten­tial client recent­ly came to me with an exist­ing site. It cer­tain­ly was slick: the home­page fea­tured a Flash ani­ma­tion of telegenic young pro­fes­sion­als culled from a stock pho­to ser­vice, psuedo-jazz tech­no music, and words sweep­ing in from all sides sell­ing you the com­pa­ny’s ser­vice. Unfor­tu­nate­ly the page had no use­ful con­tent, no call-to-action and no Google PageR­ank. It was an expen­sive design, but I did­n’t need to look at the track­ing stats to know no one came this page.

So you’re ready to ditch a non-performing site for one more dynam­ic, some­thing that will attract cus­tomers and inter­act with them. Here’s five tips for build­ing a self-marketing website!

One: Use­ful Con­tent for your Tar­get Audience
Give vis­i­tors a rea­son to come to the site. Text-rich, chang­ing con­tent is essen­tial. In prac­ti­cal­i­ty, this means installing a blog and writ­ing posts every few weeks. You’ll see mea­sures like “key­word rel­e­van­cy” increase instant­ly as excerpt­ed text shows up on the home­page. Add videos and pho­tos if your com­pa­ny or team has that exper­tise, but remem­ber: when it comes to search, text is king.

Two: Give away some­thing valu­able or useful
Many smart mar­ket­ing sites fea­ture some free give­away right on the home­page: a use­ful quiz, pro­fes­sion­al analy­sis, a PDF how-to guide­book. A builder I worked with went to the trou­ble of post­ing dozens of floor plans & pic­tures to their web­site and com­pil­ing them into a PDF book, which they gave away for free. The catch in all this? You have to give your con­tact infor­ma­tion to get it. Once the free mate­r­i­al has been com­piled, the site runs itself as a sales lead generator!

Three: Ask your­self the Three User Questions!
It’s amaz­ing how focused the mind gets when you actu­al­ly sit down to define goals. Just about every web­site can ben­e­fit from this three-step exercise:

  1. Who is the tar­get audience?
  2. What would draw them to the site? 
  3. What do we want to get from them?

Get a group togeth­er to through your web­site page by page these ques­tions. Brain­storm a list of changes you could make. You’ll want to end up with Defined Goals: what quan­tifi­able actions do you want vis­i­tors to take? It might well just be the suc­cess­ful com­ple­tion of a con­tact form.

Four: Test Test and Test Again
Many small busi­ness­es now get a lot of their cus­tomers from their web­sites. Your web­site is an essen­tial piece of your mar­ket­ing and pub­lic­i­ty and you need to be smart about it. Com­pile togeth­er your favorite site-improvement ideas and make up  alter­nate designs incor­po­rat­ing the changes. Then use a tool such as Google Web­site Opti­miz­er to put the alter­na­tives through their paces. Which one “con­verts” bet­ter, i.e., which design gets you high­er per­cent­ages in the Defined Goals you’ve set? Once you’ve fin­ished a test, move on to the next brain­storm­ing idea and imple­ment it. Always be testing!

An exten­sive series of tests of one site I worked on dou­bled it’s con­ver­sion rate: imag­ine your com­pa­ny dou­bling its inter­net sales? It is com­plete­ly worth spend­ing the time and effort to go through this process.

Five: Don’t Be Afraid to Get Pro­fes­sion­al Help
If you need to hire a pro­fes­sion­al to help you through this process you’ll almost cer­tain­ly get your mon­ey’s worth! A recent projects cost the cus­tomer $6000 but I was able to doc­u­ment sav­ings of $100,000 per year in his pub­lic­i­ty costs! See my piece “What to Look For in SEO Con­sul­tants” for my insider-advice to how to pick a hon­est and com­pe­tent pro­fes­sion­al web pub­lic­i­ty consultant.

Alliance Cemetery

July 28, 2009
· Martin Kelley

Alliance CemeteryI was hired to redesign the web­site of a ceme­tery that rep­re­sents a fas­ci­nat­ing slice of South Jer­sey his­to­ry. In the 1880s, a group of Jews escaped Russ­ian pogroms, came to Amer­i­ca and start­ed a “return to the soil” move­ment that led to the estab­lish­ment of an agri­cul­tur­al colony in the small Salem Coun­ty cross­roads of Nor­ma, New Jer­sey. Before long they estab­lished Alliance Cemetery.

The new Alliance web­site high­lights the entrance gate. The ceme­tery has hired a sur­vey­ing com­pa­ny to do a detailed map of the plots and we hope to add this in with a Google Maps mash-up when the data becomes avail­able. A detailed his­to­ry and pho­tos are also in the works.

The design is hand-coded from scratch and is prob­a­bly the most taste­ful design of my port­fo­lio. The pages them­selves are editable by the client using Cushy­CMS and the Direc­tions page has an inte­grat­ed Google Map.

Vis­it: Alliance​Ceme​tery​.com