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On a year of sobriety

Glass empty
Glass empty (Photo credit: lemasney)

I am marking a very special anniversary here. On April 19th, 2012, I stopped drinking alcohol, and since then, I’ve learned how to live again. On Friday, April 19th, 2013, I noted one year of sobriety, and a lot has happened. Here are some of the highlights of what happened during that time:

  1. I regained focus on my nutritional lifestyle, began walking everyday, tracked my calories, and lost 100 pounds. 
  2. I discovered many instances of who was important to keep near me for support, and who I had to remove myself from. If you are reading this, chances are you are in the support column.
  3. I left Princeton University, and started to focus on LeMasney Consulting as my main income.
  4. I finalized my divorce, increased the time that I saw my boys each week, and greatly simplified my life, means, and ways.
  5. I finished http://365sketches.org, started http://lemasney.com, and migrated most of my active blogging to http://lemasney.com

It’s no coincidence, at least not for me. Alcohol affected my drive, focus, and will. It allowed me to not care about the things and ideas that hurt, which allowed me to also not care about the damage I was doing to myself in obesity, alcoholism, and self-deprecation. Perhaps most importantly, alcohol affected my self-worth, pride, and self-respect to the point that I did not care how either I regarded myself, or how others regarded me. All of that has changed, and I thank you for helping me to find a different way.

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brand consulting insights

The Customer and the Service: Episode 21

on idea
on idea (Photo credit: lemasney)

In this episode, Sean and John talk about ethics in service, determining brand, and new ways to pick up merchandise.

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brand consulting insights

On marketing, advertising, and ethics: Five rules for my work.

English: The Centre for Pharmacy and Health Re...
English: The Centre for Pharmacy and Health Research, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I recently saw this article in Global Edmonton about the ethical questions raised in children being targeted by ads for unhealthy foods.

“‘Kids are getting exposed to about seven ads for unhealthy foods and beverages every hour when they’re watching television,’ explained Kim Raine, a professor at the School of Public Health at the University of Alberta. “We know that it’s associated with their demands for foods, for their preferences, for their consumption and it is associated with childhood obesity,” Raine added.”

(from http://www.globaltvedmonton.com/u+of+a+
researchers+want+to+see+an+end+to+unhealthy
+food+and+beverage+ads+targeted+at+children
/6442834174/story.html)

It reminded me that as a designer, technologist, teacher and trainer, that I am responsible to my audience to not only benefit them, but to specifically not try to bring them harm. I have changed the channel in disgust many times when I’ve seen my own kids targeted in unhealthy advertising during kid’s television programming time, and have thought to myself that it is shameful. However, no rules exist now to prevent the practice.   Others still wonder why an obesity epidemic exists. I have no question about the issue; it’s very clear to me. It underlines the importance for me to make sure that my work does at least these five things:

Five rules of ethics for my work

  1. Do no harm. By this I mean that I ask myself in any consultation or presentation if anything I am saying is potentially doing any harm to anyone involved or promoting my own biases at the cost of other valid possibilities. Clients sometimes ask me to make designs that debase or reduce women, minorities, and opponents of all kinds. I refuse the work immediately. 
  2. Speak the closest thing possible to truth. Truth is relative, and is subject to our experiences, research, and facts observed and believed. I was once asked to make a border for a flier in which I was to camouflage a legally mandated support statement, e.g. “Paid for by so-and-so” in such a way that a court would not be able to argue that the statement was not made, but also so that a viewer of the flier would not immediately know who paid for the flier. I refused the job outright, and I made the right decision.
  3. Be kind. Sometimes clients ask me to write, present, or share information in such a way as to support the client and deprecate a competitor. In each of these cases, I have worked to convince the client that it is better to make friends, share commonalities, and find unity. In cases where I was not able to convince the client, I walked away.
  4. Leave the world better than you found it. There is likely lots of money in convincing people that sugary, fatty foods are good or redeeming in some way. I would rather be poor than know that I helped to slowly kill someone by convincing them of this. There are many other examples of this that come to mind, but I imagine that all you have to do to see them is to turn on a TV.
  5. Maintain transparency. If the product that I am working to promote in a design is a good one, with few flaws and lots of benefits, then I should be able to say/show everything that I know about it. In situations where I’ve been subtly nudged to ignore a potentially dangerous issue, social malady, or falsehood about a design topic, I try to find ways to work with the client to be clear, honest, and transparent about all the realities of the situation. Otherwise, it will be difficult for me to take part.

Without ethics, integrity, honesty, benefits, and clarity, I will find it difficult to live with myself. No payday is worth losing these things.

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consulting insights workshops

How to videoconference, broadcast, and archive for free: Google’s long game.

Cancellation of Hanover bars through a chroma ...
Cancellation of Hanover bars through a chroma delay line (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There was a time, not too long ago, when having your own television station was an expensive, unreasonable dream. With the arrival of Google Plus in 2012, there was a lot of comparisons made with Facebook, with the verdict generally being that Google was playing catchup, doing too little too late, and was out of its league. The issue is this: Google is playing the long game. They are adding Plus to your tool set simply by you using any of their other applications. If you have a Gmail account, use Google Calendar, or even just search while logged in with a Google account, Plus is there, waiting for you to use. It is, as the name implies, a sort of umbrella service to add a social layer to other Google services.

They are not following Facebook, and are in fact doing something quite different from what Facebook is, even though a lot of the features seem the same. You can make connections in both systems, add photos and videos, create groups of common interest, and have conversations. However, one set of features in particular sets Plus apart: Hangouts.

Google Hangouts are free. You need to install a plugin or app in Windows, Mac OS, Linux, iOS, or Android to take part, but aside from that there is no threshold to entry. Hangouts are a metaphor for being available for a chat, sort of like standing by the fence waiting for a neighbor or sitting on the porch waiting to chat spontaneously with passersby.

You can be more direct than that though, choosing specifically to invite people to chat with you, up to and including everyone on the system (public). The interactive chat holds up to 10 people, and people can drop in and out. You can chat by video or audio, and you can also share your screen with the screen sharing plugin. You can use addons to create titles and use other features. What is perhaps most interesting is that you can choose to put the hangout ‘on air’, meaning that you can broadcast and archive the hangout to the world via your YouTube channel.

Other systems have done and continue to do this, but not usually for free, and not usually with such a widely adopted system as Google Plus. I have used Google Plus hangouts on air to build a related series of video broadcasts with others about the juxtaposition of technology and design, art, customer service, and nutrition. I call the collection Neckbeard Networks, and you can find it, along with all of my other videos on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/lemasney

Tonight, Wednesday, March 20th, 2013, I’m talking to an audience at Princeton Public Library about this topic, and at 7 pm, I hope to see you there.

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brand classes and presentations consulting insights workshops

On Organizational Branding for Libraries and other institutions

Carnegie library interior, Cincinnati, Ohio, U...
Carnegie library interior, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, 2004 by Rick Dikeman (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Tonight, I’m getting the chance to talk to librarians about a topic that I think is incredibly important to discuss, but do not get the opportunity nearly enough: organizational branding.

You might be tempted to think that I’m just talking about visual branding, like the library’s logo, but I’m not. In fact, visual branding can only be truly successful in my opinion after you have done the more difficult work of discovering what you are, what you are trying to represent, and stakeholder perception. The aim of organizational branding efforts is to make these three ideas merge:

  1. We are presenting a brand of some kind now (active or passive, intended or unintended) that we hope creates a positive, accurate perception by our stakeholders.
  2. We have stakeholders that perceive our brand in some way, and we must discover what that perception is, even if it is not positive or correct.
  3. We can do actions, enforce policies, and check stakeholder perceptions to align our brand with our intended perceptions, the very intent of branding.

We are doing these things to underline and reinforce what we are, and our patrons and other stakeholders understand and agree.

Brand assessment

The first part is to find out how you wish to be perceived. In other words, your brand is your function, your vision, your mission, your actions, your culture, and your perception. Do you know what these things are for your organization? What is your function? If you are a public library, is your function simply to get books and other media into the hands of patrons? Or is it to extend the education, abilities, and preparedness of humans getting ready to face the world? There is a chasm between these two ideas. What is the vision of your organization? How does your organization see the world? For example, the world might be dystopian, a cold and barren place in which everyone is watched and tracked, or the world might be an experiential delight, in which every interaction in the world is an opportunity for growth, learning, and extension. Perhaps most interestingly, what is the culture of your organization? What are the sensory cues that your space, language, and actions represent? What kind of art do you have on the walls? What color is on the walls? What scents greet you when you walk in? What kind of programming are you offering? What resources are available to patrons? How do staff react to interruptions? What frustrates your patrons? What do those things say about who you are, versus who you are trying to be? You can find out what you want your brand to be, and what it is now, and close that gap.

Stakeholder research

After you have discovered what it is that you are trying to be, it’s important to discover how you are being perceived. If your mission, vision, and culture are either not being perceived or interpreted in the ways that you expect, then the rest of your efforts will be that much more difficult. Through observation, interview, survey and other research methods, you can get a clear idea of how your efforts are being interpreted by staff, administrators, children patrons, adult patrons, and so on. You can find out how you are being perceived, and how you would prefer to be perceived, and close that gap.

Rebranding effort

Finally, you have to assess the gap between your efforts, your branding goals, and the perception of your brand. Once you have a clear idea of how you want to be perceived, and how you are being perceived, you can make changes in visuals, culture, policy, and action that underline, reinforce, and support that brand until your research shows that your intended brand is matching your perceived brand.

If you are interested in getting help for your organization to assess, interpret, and construct the brand that you want for your library or other organization, I would love to sit down with you to have that discussion. I’m lemasney@gmail.com.

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