Sunday Roundup – July 28

Next roundup – it will be AUGUST.

It has been an insanely busy week with work on HOMEbody and work on Proud, and proposals for new and returning clients and not much time for blogging. So there you go.

In Which we Talked

post about a fantastic workshop on Monday – which led to an unposted post, which went unpublished due to timing, which I’ll post below:

Where are People Talking?
Was at a party last night, great smart people, the wine flowed, the ideas flowed. I stepped out on to the balcony with a couple of friends to continue a great discussion about a current arts topic  near and dear to our hearts. It was great until the host came out and told us he’d prefer that we have that conversation in the living room, as that’s where it had started, and he’d planned for it to happen there.

Of course this didn’t happen in real life. Can you imagine?

But it’s what you’re telling me online when you get annoyed that conversations about your post are happening somewhere other than where you  started them, be in website vs Twitter feed, Facebook vs blog post.
We talked about this on Monday as part of that great conversation. Conversations happen where they happen and in fact may be inherently more valuable happening off your site than on. Accept them where they are, and monitor as lovingly as you would if it was on your blog. And when your editor or boss demands to know why the post comments are so low, show them the dozens of Facebook threads that popped up because of it, or the fact that your org now has a new hashtag created by commenters. But don’t tell people where to talk – or they possibly won’t talk at all. And that is the end of your party, all but the sucking.

This happened last week too. http://www.savethefactory.ca/

And then noises started being made about boycotting Summerworks because Factory is one of the rental venues. And I said it once and I’ll say it again, I’ve never heard of anything quite so ridiculous in quite some time.

Emotions are understandably running high, ideas and thoughts and for and against are getting muddled together.  I’m fascinated by everything that’s happening from every position as this rolls out. More and more opinions and options and angles are coming to light.

This weekend I noticed that although stirring the pot while cooking keeps it from boiling over,  it’s the opposite in social media.

In which case – if you are going to stir the pot, be there for the inevitable boilover. And if you’re stirring – have a damn good reason for doing so.