Nikki Serapio

On the Meaning of “American Heartland” and Twitter’s Politics of Contempt

Thu, 30 Jan 2020 12:24:38 -0500

As someone who has Buttigieg as my #1 and Warren as my close #2, I’ve got to say: the outrage over this tweet is ill-founded. And for many their reaction seems inflected by spending too much time within Twitter’s confirmation bias-powered and motivated reasoning-powered machine and not enough time coming to terms with the uneasy fact that – for Pete’s goddamn sake – the path to a salvaged democracy runs straight through Michigan and Wisconsin.

If you’re offended by Pete’s campaign’s use of “vision was shaped by the American Heartland,” then you might not understand why Warren includes “Okie” in her Twitter bio and talks deftly and often about what it meant to her to grow up in Oklahoma City.

If you’re offended by Pete’s campaign’s tweet, then you might not understand why Obama’s official White House bio uses “values from the heartland” right in the first paragraph: “His story is the American story – values from the heartland, a middle-class upbringing in a strong family, hard work and education as the means of getting ahead, and the conviction that a life so blessed should be lived in service to others.”

Or why tons of candidates ascribe exceptionalist values to their state or region. Northern California = the frontier of equality. Midwest = the value of hard work and, to use Sherrod Brown’s smart language, the Dignity of Work. If you grew up in Colorado like me, you know that Coloradans talk endlessly about how we have the strongest free-thinking values in the country, as if we somehow mined them directly from the Rocky Mountains.

Or why two things might be true at the same time: they’re saying it to win votes, and they’re also saying it because they actually believe it.

It’s completely fair to question if this was a dumb tweet from a politics standpoint; you could argue that this language is dumb politics, and that we should instead convince voters using an appeal to policies in their most purely distilled form – or convince them via a loud appeal to pure ideology alone, assuming that it can just transcend the boundaries of city and state as well as the stubbornness of identity-based voting.

But I’d argue that Pete’s campaign is being smart here: if you’re actually playing to win, don’t cede your ground to an Orwellian opponent and party that will do everything to co-opt and pervert the meaning of patriotism and America – and even the powerful meaning of “values” by itself. We have one chance, so play to win.

If your molehill is that a Democratic standard-bearer (Obama, Warren, Buttigieg) is forbidden from saying that they learned something unique from living in the Midwest or being an Okie or being a New Yorker, then I’m afraid you don’t understand the ways in which everyone uses a mix of emotion, reason, personal identity, and their own deep stories to make up their voting (or non-voting) minds.

Last point and a complete (philosophical and also a practical) aside: if you’re marshalling such a tweet as evidence that your desired candidate’s competitor is actually morally defective – “X proves that Y doesn’t care about Z topic or person or group, and therefore is bad” – I’d only say: Twitter makes this difficult to do, but try starting from a standpoint of charity, if only for the sake of healthy skepticism.

It is hard if not impossible to cast accurate judgment on any one person’s moral motivations. Look at any popular comments stream on Politics Twitter, and chances are that you’ll see this almost singular dopamine-driven stance: unbridled and sanctimonious contempt. The problem that I’m seeing on social networks has to do with the power of habit: if we use our limited moral willpower to perform our online contempt against a bogeyperson of a politician we don’t like, eventually we get to a point where our primary moral stance towards the world is one of contempt. I think misguided contempt has a lot to do with today’s polarization – we can’t dismiss its ability to simply exhaust us – and it’s this contempt (in all of its many forms across the entire political spectrum) that can destroy our democracy if we let it.

Anyway, when I look at the criticism of my two favorite candidates – Buttigieg and Warren – I make out one overriding and unfounded objection: they’re fakers; they’re not pure; they’re inauthentic. When I examine their words, actions, and journeys, though, I come to the conclusion that they care deeply about changing our politics in order to do good. Here’s one article that I think describes Pete well, and I definitely recommend reading the whole thing: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/reading-buttigieg

"Nearly 60 million people are currently displaced from their homes by war and persecution — more than..."

Sun, 15 Nov 2015 15:56:09 -0500

“Nearly 60 million people are currently displaced from their homes by war and persecution — more than at any time since World War II. Half are children.”

- Powerful portraits of the displaced, via The New York Times.

"We believe that there will be a people-powered repository of medical information. But unlike WebMD,..."

Mon, 26 Oct 2015 16:59:49 -0400

“We believe that there will be a people-powered repository of medical information. But unlike WebMD, it won’t be driven by content writers. Instead it will more likely resemble StackOverflow, driven by passionate, deeply expert members of the medical community.”

- Angela Tran Kingyens and Jonathan Libov on the future of healthcare apps

What Your Mobile Phone Addiction Says About Your Marketing

Mon, 20 Oct 2014 21:11:45 -0400

As marketers, we are both the masters and servants of our own technologies.

I like to deny this fact. I think that I’m an agent of freedom, and that I’ve conjured tools, tactics, and systems that save me time and make me more productive. (“Check it out, I’ve super-charged my social media marketing by creating a bunch of…Twitter Lists.”) Sometimes, though, I’m responsible for creating and wallowing in my own time sinks.

Think of all those people you know who look at their phones dozens (hundreds?) of times each day. How much of this time is invested in real work? On the other hand, how much of this time is spent on a uniquely idle form of hyper-scrolling and hyper-swiping?

I’m reminded here of a recent short film about our mobile addictions and alienations. It’s a bit of an exaggeration, but there’s a good deal of truth in the overall allegory:

Don’t get me wrong. I love my iPhone, and I know it has made my life better. I am a technology optimist through and through. And as a marketer, I believe social networks represent a powerful and unprecedented marketing multiplier: they help us forge and grow relationships with exponentially more people – more customers, more prospects, and more community members – at an astonishingly low cost.

When they’re designed well, social and mobile technologies help knowledge workers do 10x more things. And they allow us to consume and create content like never before.

However, what’s sometimes missing here is an honest assessment of business and organizational value. What’s the tangible value of our relentless new media consumption? What’s the worth of creating this endless stream of micro-content? And as busy marketers, how do we distinguish productive activities from the time-wasters?

Again and again, I know that I’ve been guilty of indulging in a cognitive failure called attentional bias: I pay too much attention to dominant stimuli, and confuse front-of-mind activity and activity measures (e.g., scanning my latest fifty thousand tweets) with first-order accomplishment (convincing my customer to endorse my product via their social network of choice).

We owe it to ourselves to never confuse running in place with actually crossing the finish line. We are bombarded every day with a litany of “5 Tips to Improve Your Marketing Blah-Blah-Blah” filler articles; haughty announcements that some pundit has uncovered a Brand-New and Authentic Industry Trend (which turns out to be just another buzzword masquerading as an actual trend); and your acquaintances’ latest attempts to peddle their personal brands by spamming your social feeds. You can choose to drink all of this mildly intoxicating soma, but you’re probably not going to get a lot out of it.

To master something like digital marketing, we must pause – and make time to pause often. This means putting down our devices in order to really think about our central marketing and organizational processes:

How do you spend your time across your different marketing channels? Quantify this: identify your channels, and write down your “Time Spent” numbers or estimates right next to them. You can also use software to measure your productive time and distracting time in the background.
What new things about your community members and customers (in regards to their preferences, behaviors, and attitudes) have you learned from your social, mobile, and other marketing endeavors so far? Are these purported findings and insights worth the costs in time, energy, and money?
How are you and your team members addicted? Not an indictment here: we all have our stubborn weaknesses. Me? I’m not glued to my iOS apps, but I am chained to my inbox – and I’m too often tempted to measure productivity in terms of number of emails sent.

And you? To paraphrase Stephen Covey: “We judge ourselves by our intentions, and we judge others by their actions.” Ideally, it should really be the reverse: we should forgive our colleagues’ time constraints and acknowledge their good intentions, while focusing squarely on our own (good and bad) marketing habits.

Personal Finance for the Financially Underserved

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 12:31:00 -0400

A clear-sighted documentary on the 70 million Americans without access to basic financial services. So many of these people work hard, play by the rules, and manage their money carefully despite being prohibitively “underbanked.”

The traditional finance system has every incentive to combat the scourge of payday lenders, for-profit ripoff artists masquerading as colleges, and the rest of their ilk.

How to Write About Economics

Wed, 19 Mar 2014 13:46:00 -0400

The new FiveThirtyEight is simply great. Case in point – Ben Casselman’s analysis of the U.S. minimum wage is an excellent piece of data journalism:

“But one thing is clear: A larger share of low-wage workers are trying to support themselves today than in past years. About 39 percent of workers earning under $10.10 an hour — adjusted for inflation — were supporting themselves in 1990, compared to more than half today. Back then, nearly a quarter of low-wage earners were teenagers, compared to just 13 percent today.”

Teaching Investing

Tue, 25 Feb 2014 14:22:00 -0500

In middle school in 1998, I took part in a Colorado-wide stock market competition. I got to invest $100,000 in play money. Our team ended up placing first in our division and second in the entire state—finishing ahead of a lot of high school and college teams.

As a pedagogical tactic, I now realize that this was a ridiculous way to teach investing and personal finance basics to young people.

Because this is how our team won: we gambled.

In the middle of the tech bubble, we bought 7,200 shares of a company called Infoseek after receiving a hot stock tip from one of my relatives. Infoseek offered a basic web directory with really basic search technology. And it made no meaningful revenue.

Buy hey, what were you going to do? And why would you miss out on a stock market gold rush? Anything internet-related was deemed immediately valuable; instead of calculating intrinsic values or free cash flow prospects, speculators scrutinized these companies based on the chutzpah of their IPO press releases.

Infoseek was no exception. Disney acquired it in a deal that was valued at more than $1.5 billion at the time. Disney Interactive transformed the main Infoseek web portal into Go.com. And then, just a few years later, Go.com was shut down and Disney ate an $878 million charge.

If you’re teaching investing and financial management to beginners, I think there are a few things that you need to prioritize first:

A Foundation in Smart Personal Finance: Living below your means. Managing credit wisely. Negotiating salary. Etc.
Investing as a Long-Term Discipline. You only need to tell students to follow the advice of two investors: Warren Buffett and Jack Bogle. And as far as the subject matter goes, the lessons should focus almost exclusively on the wonderful power of compounding via low-expense, broad-based index funds.
Emotional Discipline. Human beings are woefully irrational. But patience in investing can be taught—using data, case studies, and constant reminders. We can learn how to react to panic moments in the financial markets. And we can learn how to build saving systems that help us capitalize on great buying opportunities.

On Building Community: The Importance of Social Norms...and the Limits of Market Incentives

Tue, 18 Feb 2014 14:32:54 -0500

Dan Ariely discusses a compelling experiment in his book Predictably Irrational:

“…But what would happen if we mixed the signals for the two types of norms? What would happen if we blended the market norm with the social norm? In other words, if we said that we would give them a "50-cent Snickers bar” or a “five-dollar box of Godiva chocolates,” what would the participants do? Would a “50-cent Snickers bar” make our participants work as hard as a “Snickers bar” made them work; or would it make them work halfheartedly, as the 50-cents made them work? Or would it be somewhere in the middle? The next experiment tested these ideas.“

"As it turned out, the participants were not motivated to work at all when they got the 50-cent Snickers bar, and in fact the effort they invested was the same as when they got a payment of 50 cents. They reacted to the explicitly priced gift in exactly the way they reacted to cash, and the gift no longer invoked social norms—by the mention of its cost, the gift had passed into the realm of market norms.”

3 Hopes for the Apple iWatch

Fri, 14 Feb 2014 13:57:00 -0500

1) Let me authenticate everywhere. If I have the device on my wrist, it should allow me to unlock my iPhone, iPad, and laptop. And even if Apple incorporates TouchID across all of its product lines (which might allow you, for instance, to authenticate by touching your MacBook trackpad), an iWatch can still help me in other environments and scenarios – including payment authentication and payment processing at my favorite stores.

(Note: A company called Nymi is already working on the above-mentioned stuff.)

2) Help me do time-tracking. There are a number of tools (Harvest is a good one) that allow you to do project time-tracking. The process involves some degree of manual input: I tell the app/software to begin tracking [X] project; I work on [X] project; and then when I’m finished I tell the tool to stop timing me.

I think an iWatch would be a better tracking device. Siri-via-iWatch could serve as a kind of productivity stopwatch (e.g., “Siri, tell me how much time I spent in meetings today.”) And also, the iWatch could help me respect my time constraints (e.g., discreetly flash a reminder or buzz me when I’m spending too much time on any one task, as stipulated by my personal and work calendars). Similar features are already available via most smartphones, but the convenience here is getting appropriate feedback via a wrist device.

3) Offer smart consumer and business applications. The Samsung Galaxy Gear’s camera looks clunky, but it suggests a great opportunity. The key question is: what are some awkward user experiences that require taking a photo? What if the iWatch helped me scan documents – I hold my arm above a piece of paper at a perpendicular angle for just two seconds, and the iWatch takes care of the rest? What if the iWatch allowed me to do instant price comparisons – go showrooming, move your wrist over a product’s bar code, and then get instant feedback on competitive prices elsewhere?

All of this is speculation, but I have faith in Apple’s track record. Most folks are speculating by way of analogy; they’re wondering how the iWatch will compare against the Fitbit, FuelBand, Galaxy Gear, Pebble, etc. But my bet is that we’ll see a leap in design and functionality.

What's Next for Community Management

Sat, 01 Feb 2014 16:13:53 -0500

Wrote this article and offered a few predictions in celebration of #CMAD 2014.

Don't Be a "Thought Leader": The Danger of Business Buzzwords, and Why Crutch Words Lead to Small Thoughts

Wed, 01 Jan 2014 14:00:31 -0500

I’ll wager my first-born child that you’ve had to sit through at least a couple of Business and Marketing Buzzword Meetings.

We’ve all been there:

Meeting was scheduled to last an hour. It goes thirty minutes over.
People promise to determine next steps. 90 minutes later, no work items are defined.
Worst of all, you have to listen to that one schlemiel (may E.B. White help you if you have to deal with more than one) who is equipped with a strange vocabulary:

“When I look at our content mix, it’s clear that we aren’t being top-of-mind and we aren’t optimizing for our target personas. I think we need to take a step back and ask how we’re leveraging our organic content to fill the very top of our acquisition funnel.”

I kid, I kid – but not really. Business and marketing jargon is common because it’s a tempting crutch. Knowledge work is filled with ambiguity, so it’s easy to manage it with ambiguous words. Precise statements and plainspoken questions (“How do we convince people to visit our blog on a weekly basis?” / “How many people shared this campaign on their Facebook Timelines”?) aren’t as popular, in part because they often expose uncomfortable problems and lead to demanding (yet necessary!) conversations.

Here are two buzzwords that need to be used less often:

1) “Thought Leadership.” Tell me – who exactly counts as a Thought Leader? Is a Thought Leader different from an Action Leader? Are thought leaders the only thinking species of leader? And do they think so much and so often that they simply don’t have space in their bodies to feel?

Thought leadership is often a code phrase (and it’s a completely proper phrase, I think) for something that an executive might enjoy and find useful: imagine your CEO or CMO downloading and reading a thought leadership white paper. But too often, the term comes with misguided assumptions and generalizations about the types of content that these leaders really want.

Creating good thought leadership content is about sharing one’s vision and biggest ideas, and providing one’s take on the current state of and future trends within one’s industry. But is this actually universally true? Some CIOs will enjoy listening to 10,000-feet sermonizing, but I guarantee you: others are hungry for your practical, nitty-gritty advice and expertise; they know that you’re a visionary, but they want you to be practically minded at the same time. These folks would gladly trade all of their piled-up white papers for just one resource about how they can more effectively spend their IT budgets.

2) “Engagement.” Think of the times you’ve heard this crutch word (and its many variants and synonyms):

“We need to improve user engagement.”
“The most important thing is to create engaging content.”

The trouble here isn’t that these claims are false. It’s that they’re non-starters: drum-beating for engagement doesn’t tell me much about the specific customer activities you want to spur and measure.

Instead of thinking in terms of aggregate engagement (which runs the risk of mashing statistical apples and oranges – e.g., Facebook Likes together with retweets, email list subscriptions together with webinar attendance), separate out your specific desired behaviors. After all, we all want our customers and community members to do any number of real-world things:

Spend 30 minutes on your website.
Share your blog post with a friend.
Click the main call-to-action link in your email.
Buy your product after receiving [X] pieces of advertising.

Marketing can only thrive by understanding and constantly refining these discrete objectives.

***
The next time someone asks you to discuss your engagement KPIs vis-à-vis the top-line performance of your greenfield thought leadership editorials…just take a breath. Take control of the conversation and go back to the basics. And be a relentless champion for simple language.

From NASA: “In the Cassini images Earth and the moon...

Mon, 28 Oct 2013 22:46:19 -0400

From NASA:

“In the Cassini images Earth and the moon appear as mere dots—Earth a pale blue and the moon a stark white, visible between Saturn’s rings. It was the first time Cassini’s highest-resolution camera captured Earth and its moon as two distinct objects.”

If you want perspective, look at this dot. Look at our speck.

10 Content Strategy Questions for the Agile Nonprofit

Wed, 15 May 2013 22:02:00 -0400

I’m no longer 100% in the nonprofit world, but I wanted to share some thoughts on what I discovered during my tenure as a nonprofit new media staffer and consultant. To start, let me offer some lessons related to content strategy:

Write, write, and write some more. Writing often — writing every day and publishing your writing almost as frequently — is more important than obsessing over a formal organizational content strategy. As an agile nonprofit, you want to cultivate a relentless bias towards execution — such habit formation should always be your first overriding project.

Once you’re ready to craft a content strategy, though, you can begin by conducting an honest self-assessment and group assessment. Among other things, the answers to the following organizational and content questions can help you identify the resources you’ll need to create exceptional brand and marketing messages:

1. In 1 to 3 sentences, what do you do? (Hat tip here goes to Nicole Jones and her excellent Tiny Content Framework.) Establishing clarity of mission is important. But no one wants to read boring or vague mission statements. Sentences like “We help stakeholders leverage their true potential!” don’t tell me anything, so don’t use them.

2. How are you different from your colleagues AND competitors? The marketing words that you choose here should be the words and phrases that you actually and publicly use to promote your organization. Too many of us are scared of putting on our promoter’s hat and speaking about our organization’s programs, products, and unique characteristics transparently AND proudly.

3. What are the writing styles of your organization’s writers? Writing good marketing and advertising copy isn’t easy. If you don’t have in-house staff that can write well, make sure to fix this problem sooner rather than later. If you need to cultivate talent internally, that’s fine. But first, you should intimately understand your staff’s writing preferences, strengths, and weaknesses. Do your colleagues prefer writing long-form copy? Are they able to write attention-grabbing headlines?

4. What are your organization’s compelling human interest stories? I guarantee you: every good nonprofit has a compelling story to tell. Tap into our moral imaginations. Show us the beauty and joy in helping others. Inspire.

5. (From Nicole Jones) Why do people visit your website right now? Why do you want them to visit? What do you want them to do? Pick one or two engagement and/or conversion goals. Do you want your visitors to read your blog posts? Do you want them to take action? Do you want them to donate money? Do you want them to share content?

6. What does your current editorial process look like? How do you brainstorm as a group? How do you prioritize or else dismiss competing ideas? Do you create and faithfully adhere to content and publication calendars? Who gives final approvals?

7. (From Nicole Jones) Who inspires you? Who do you want to emulate? Besides writing-and-writing-and-writing-some-more, the best way to improve your copy is to learn from the masters. Here are some of my favorite nonprofit copywriters:

- Charity Water

- Partners In Health

- Kiva

8. Who will provide you continuous and honest feedback? This is probably the most important point in this article: You must put your content in the real world as soon as possible. In-house approval is no substitute for the ruthless honesty and clear judgment delivered via qualitative feedback, quantitative feedback, as well as key engagement and readership metrics (e.g., time spent on site as well as visitor recency and frequency). You should also share your writing with trusted friends and colleagues — again, outside of your organization — to see if it impresses and delights them.

9. Can you engage in any worthwhile tradeoffs? If you sacrifice quality maybe just a little bit (e.g., by removing one editor from your approval process), will you be able to publish your writing more quickly and frequently?

10. To whom are you speaking? What are their wants, desires, preferences, problems, and underlying motivations? Some people want to be informed. Some people like to read stories. Most people don’t have a lot of time for you.

Can you think of any other good content strategy questions? If so, send them my way so that I can feature them in another post.

(Mini)malism is a good thing

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 12:22:00 -0400

I have no doubt that the iPad Mini will be the best-selling iPad from now on. iPad 2 and “3” owners may not rush to “upgrade” to the Mini, but I bet new purchasers will overwhelmingly choose it. I bet it’s the one that most of us will be using two years from now, and maybe even sooner.

-Marco Arment, who is usually right about these kinds of things…

Agreed. And just wait for the introduction of the Retina iPad Mini in 2013. That one will convert a lot of “3” and “4” users into Mini users.

"Seventy-five percent of Americans nearing retirement age in 2010 had less than $30,000 in their..."

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 16:41:00 -0400

“Seventy-five percent of Americans nearing retirement age in 2010 had less than $30,000 in their retirement accounts.”

- - Teresa Ghilarducci in The New York Times: “Our Ridiculous Approach to Retirement”

We need to change this. Through federal legislation. Through increased financial literacy. And through improvements to our overall savings and investment incentive system.

A Piece of Cake

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 11:26:00 -0500

Interesting article in Wired on willpower:

The reason our resolutions end in such dismal fashion returns us to the single most important fact about human willpower — it’s incredibly feeble. Consider this experiment, led by Baba Shiv, a behavioral economist at Stanford University. He recruited several dozen undergraduates and divided them into two groups. One group was given a two-digit number to remember, while the second group was given a seven-digit number. Then, they were told to walk down the hall, where they were presented with two different snack options: a slice of chocolate cake or a bowl of fruit salad.

Here’s where the results get weird. The students with seven digits to remember were nearly twice as likely to choose the cake as students given two digits. The reason, according to Shiv, is that all those extra numbers took up valuable space in the brain — they were a “cognitive load” — making it that much harder to resist a decadent dessert. In other words, willpower is so weak, and the conscious mind is so overtaxed, that all it takes is five extra bits of information before it becomes impossible for the brain to resist a piece of cake.

"Still, in spite of this dedicated activism, the Obama administration seems blind and deaf to the..."

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 10:11:32 -0500

“Still, in spite of this dedicated activism, the Obama administration seems blind and deaf to the ongoing genocide in Sudan. In Mohamed’s words, “It is morally wrong to keep millions of Darfuris in the IDP camps for almost a decade, Nuba Mountain people trapped in the caves, Blue Nile people refugees in another country (Ethiopia) away from their homes. We see clearly this administration has made its choice. Yet history is taking notice.””

- Act for Sudan Co-Founder Susan Morgan in The Huffington Post - “U.S. Sudan Policy Is Killing Us”

http://www.wordnik.com

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 10:44:25 -0500

http://www.wordnik.com:

New favorite: Wordnik. Well executed. Beautiful layouts. See myself using this a lot.

Many of us won’t be lucky enough to find that one career...

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:48:59 -0400

Many of us won’t be lucky enough to find that one career which reflects and aligns with our passions and interests 100% perfectly, but Jobs’ message here isn’t really about the traditional day job. One of my philosophy professors told his class once: “Procrastination is the denial of the urgency of death.” Spot-on. Whether you heed this inside or outside of your formal this-is-what-pays-my-bills career, remember the most important lesson from Steve Jobs’ speech: you can get hit by a bus or commonplace tragedy or swift disease at any moment; there is no reason not to venture everything right now.

Do the Work

Sat, 13 Aug 2011 17:18:18 -0400

Came across this gem on Ask MetaFilter:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A,” forty pounds a “B,” and so on. Those being graded on “quality,” however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A.”

Well, [along] came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.