Making Ripples: post-corporate adventures in Floyd County Virginia

Outflow produces inflow again

I've had a few nibbles on my offer of free sign stencils and one solid strike, but no big rush.

It seems that non-profit organizations perk their ears up at the word "Free", but they make decisions more deliberately and I have not had any definite sign requests yet from them.

On the other hand, my ham radio expert neighbor has already put in an order for a call sign sign to be delivered as soon as I can make it. 

There are four more days to get a free custom sign stencil and we will see what happens on that front. So far, the results seem to indicate that this is not  a priority item in this area.

On the other hand, my phone has been ringing with more urgent framing requests than usual and I will have my hands full for the next week or so. This framing activity started this morning after I posted yesterday's article and I firmly believe that the outflow has a definite part in creating the inflow.

For the past twenty years, I have been observing that almost every service-oriented outflow has produced a corresponding inflow of work opportunities or customer orders. Part of it may be that outflowing takes my mind off a demand for inflow and puts it on creating opportunities for others. The absence of any "must have income" attitude seems to open up communication channels and people call out of nowhere to discuss doing business!

Has anyone else noticed this phenomena?

You Are Not Alone

Bill Whittle has written You Are Not Alone for those of us who feel that our American civilization shows signs of rolling over and playing dead by being unwilling to defend the rights of its citizens.

Over 900 people have left comments and they show signs of creating an online community of sorts. It will be interesting to see where this leads.

Some of the high points:

Honor is really nothing more than your personal credit rating. It is a statement of your character, and like credit, honor has leverage. It can move large numbers of people: elevate them, raise their spirits and their expectations of themselves. Honor and Courage and Character are beacons in the darkness; they draw all manner of people toward their light.

Courage, character, honor – all the virtues – are derived and strengthened from interactions with the virtuous.

Throughout history, civilizations rise and fall. They fall for the same reason, by my reading of history: the lack of will to defend her, a cancer which starts not from the bottom but invariably from the top. A fish rots from the head, say the Russians, who ought to know.

If you feel you see it happening now, before your very eyes, well… you are not alone. A society unwilling to enforce the laws that civilize it, that is unable or unwilling to see the advantages of civilization, a society led by the pampered, the narcissistic and the corrupt, is not long for this Earth.

But there is something different -- just perhaps, something fundamentally different this time around. Because today, for the first time in human history, common people can communicate directly with one another. We are no longer dependent on spineless politicians and the jaded masters of the press to color our opinions of the world. For the first time in human history, we can reach out to each other on these gossamer threads of a world-wide web. 

I believe, as Bill Whittle does, that this ability for the everyday person of good will to communicate with other people of good will, will allow us to change civilization.

Read the entire article and decide for yourselves.

Spending Saturday in Floyd

There is so much to do and see in Floyd these days that you could spend the entire day within sight of our single stoplight and you would still barely scratch the surface.

After a morning spent planting Pampas Grass I took myself into town to pick up supplies, visit with friends, have some lunch and hopefully shoot photos of the afternoon's activities.

I started my day in town by visiting Wills Ridge Supply and chatting with Joe Gallimore and his friendly staff. This family-run company really makes customers feel welcome and they have always been very helpful in finding supplies for my off-the-wall projects. It is not every store that has a statue of the founder out in front and that deserves a post of its own in the near future.

I swung by the Floyd Country Store for lunch and tried one of their new specials, a Toasted Tuna Sandwich. It was almost as good as my all time favorite, their Classic BLT sandwich on toasted Buttermilk bread.

Those of you who know the Floyd Country Store primarily as the home of the Friday Night Jamboree would have been surprised to see the transformation they had wrought in preparing the store to host a wedding reception at 3:00pm this afternoon. The tablecloths and flowers looked very elegant in the newly redesigned Country Store. The caterer was creating magic right before my eyes and I think we will see more wedding receptions at the Store in the future.

My next stop was the new gallery called Art Under the Sun, which Gretchen and five other artists are opening in the newly built-out area under the Winter Sun Theater. Today's activity was a still life drawing demonstration and they pulled in a continuous stream of visitors. Yesterday was their first day of operation and visitors have been very appreciative so it looks like the venture has good potential for success.

Studio One next door is operated by Marsha Paulekas and she provides art instruction for students of all ages. For her opening day, her studio window was set up with markers so kids could draw on the windows while their parents visited with Marsha. The kids had a ball and so did I trying to capture their excitement. Marsha says, don't try this at home. Washing the window was an interesting experience as it included washing the wall and the floor too.

The Jacksonville Center had two classes running and a fine woodworking and furniture exhibit in the Hayloft Gallery.

Sue Pollins was offering a Watermedia Workshop for Intermediate painters or adventurous beginners. The class was full and students were being encouraged to extend themselves. Judging by their high spirits, the students were enjoying the challenge.

Out in the blacksmith shop, Sue's husband John Pollins III was instructing a good sized class of young and old blacksmith students in the fine points of Pretty and Functional Blacksmithing. It appears to be an exhilarating experience to heat metal to a red glow in a fire and then shape it to your will with hammer and tongs. It is probably some kind of racial memory that is passed down with our genes, because I have never seen such pure joy in a students eyes as in the blacksmithing classes. Both men and women students enjoy these courses.

My last stop was the Hayloft Gallery at the Jacksonville Center where some masterful woodwork was on display. A rocking chair based on a Sam Maloof design, a carved and stained door, and an incredible backgammon table were just a few of the elegant designs to be seen.

This exhibition will run until July 28th so you should have time to drop by and see it.

On my way home I passed the Winter Sun where they were in the final stages of setting up for Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, a Hammond B-3 organ-fueled blues-rock quartet from Vermont who play a spirited and inventive blend of blues, Americana and rock n' roll. I would have liked to heard them but it was time to leave and get some more work done.

UPDATE: For my out of town readers, here is a Google map of the places I visited today.

So this was a quick snapshot of a Saturday in Floyd. There are more things to do than time to do them and there are so many activities that five bloggers could barely cover them all.

I took 650 photographs this weekend along with 5 or ten video clips. Most go to the groups whose activities I document and I keep a few to illustrate these articles.

I can easily envision a future where 85% of your local news will come hot and smoking from the keyboards of neighborhood writers. There are a lot of really appealing stories that never see the light of day because of the limitations of newsprint and broadcast time. If every neighborhood had its own blogger, there would be very little that would go unremarked.

Right now blogging is a pioneering activity and we change the rules every month. If any of you would like encouragement to start blogging, I will be glad to help you out.

If we could use several more bloggers in Floyd, how many bloggers do you think your community could use? I think you would be surprised.

Hyperlocal Business Blogging - a new trend?

Australian Blogger and Business Coach Des Walsh read my post about the Chamber of Commerce Business After Hours event in Floyd and wants to see that sort of event in his community.

This is an excellent example of the cascade effect that occurs when bloggers start tossing ideas around. I thought of hyperlocal blogging as a news activity, but Des is a visionary and immediately seized on the potential for hyperlocal business blogging to transform a community.

He makes the point that one person in a small community can use this marvelous technology to communicate to a wider world about that community and its way of life and and about the particular challenges of doing business in small communities.

In the beginning, I thought hyperlocal blogging might be too confining, but I quickly learned that we can see the entire universe in a Chamber of Commerce event or in a potter's attempt to develop a viable business, if we care to look closely.

Vast concerns are sometimes best understood in the context of a local situation involving real people with a problem that we can get our wits around.

I think the next wave, or ripple if you care to call it that, may be this:

blog locally and be read internationally

We all have the same concerns, so sharing observations and solutions to local problems may be helpful on a much larger scale than we intend.

"Hyperlocal Business Blogger"... It does sound impressive, but I'm not sure how it will communicate on a business card. Just make your next Chamber of Commerce event special, and blog it!

What I write about and why

I have had some readers send me emails recently complaining that this blog is no longer about country life and retirement.

I have news for them. It never was.

You might say that I observe and blog about country life because that provides a background against which major ripples of change stand out in marked contrast.

There is a set of mission statements at the top of the right sidebar which describe my reasons for creating and continuing this weblog.

Why I write , Important Disclaimer , What Kind of Blog is This?, Why Ripples? 

Here are some extracts from the mission statements:

I write to stimulate thought and possible action, not to prescribe to others what they should believe.

I will be discussing everything from micro-businesses to artists, anything that can affect your future.

The purpose of this weblog is to share knowledge and make it as entertaining as possible.

I have spent a lifetime observing events and looking for reasons. I don't pretend to have all the answers, but I have observed that there are precursors for every social change. I think of these precursors as ripples in the fabric of life. All you have to do is to observe an interesting ripple and keep an eye on it from time to time, and the next thing you know you are in the midst of a sweeping change that alters the course of your life.

Ripples lead everywhere, which is why my posts cover a wide range of topics. You are free to ignore the ones that disturb you or don't interest you. There are plenty of others which lead in directions you may wish to pursue. I don't necessarily follow these topics to completion either.

My interest is in pointing these ripples, trends, paradigm shifts out to those who may have need of the information.

If you want to read about bunnies and butterflies, Leslie Shelor does a fantastic job. If you want to read about tractors and farm projects, Sean Pecor has everything you need.

The lesson I should learn from any disappointed readers is that my branding needs work.  I'll do a survey to find what phrase communicates what to expect from reading this blog. You are welcome to contribute your thoughts.

Broken Business Models

Telemarketers, publishers, and politicians take note:

It's tough to accept the fact that your business model is fatally flawed, if it has been producing results for many years, but things have changed irrevocably with the advent of Internet forums and blogs.

The marketplace is now so well-connected that positive and negative publicity can reach the furthest corners of the globe overnight. You have to face the fact that your "newsworthy" activities will become known to more people than you can imagine and there is no way to put the genie back in the bottle after word gets out.

Any business model that produces negative reactions to the initial contact is no longer viable in a "connected" marketplace. The bad news spreads faster than you can find new prospects.

We can also include any business model that produces negative customer reactions as a result of the interaction of staff and customers.

I think telemarketing is broken and so does Rosa Say, of Say Leadership Coaching.

By the same reasoning, I also think that newspapers and other mass media which insult a significant percentage of their readership are doomed to extinction. We don't write letters to the editors now, we send emails to advertisers.

In the bad old days of the 20th century, customers might fume and complain to their friends about the treatment they got at the hands of a corporate ninny.

Today they blog about the experience or log complaints on a forum and the corporation experiences a veritable s**tstorm of complaints and the ninny gets fired or promoted out of sight.

I think politics as we knew it is going to change in the same way. The voices of the crowd are as loud as the voices of those in "authority".  Tomorrow, they may be louder still.

Elected representatives of the people will be getting feedback on their actions as never before.  Whether they are skirmishing with an intern, violating the law, or just being stupid, there will be no evading the comments of thousands of concerned citizens.

Welcome to life in a fishbowl...

Jim Zumbo - object lesson for bloggers

This is not about guns or gun ownership. It is a tale about the power of blogging and what happens when you use your online publishing power unwisely.

Jim Zumbo was one of the "good old boys" of hunting. He was a well-respected writer, a life-long hunter and wrote an incredibly popular column for Outdoor Life until he revealed how out of touch he had become with his audience of hunters and gun owners.

On Friday, February 23, 2007, Jim wrote an article on the Outdoor Life website in which he categorized a large segment of his readership as "terrorists" because they enjoyed the use of semiautomatic weapons, which he called "assault" weapons. He apparently viewed his choice of bolt-action rifles as the only manly way to hunt. As of that Friday night he was employed by Outdoor Life and was the spokesperson for Remington Arms. The original article has been removed, but you can use Google News to find all about it.

Without going astray on classes of weapons, I'd like to point out that this was viewed as a betrayal on the large number of readers who own weapons that fire each time the trigger is pulled. These semiautomatic weapons have been common since the 1950's and have been used for hunting or protection in one form or another since then.

Jim Zumbo's elitist views on the subject of guns based on their appearance was made worse by the fact that gun control legislation is in the works and his words could give the anti-gun crowd another tool to use against legitimate gun ownership.

The number of angry comments on the Outdoor Life site was already in the thousands when I saw it Sunday. The anger was directed at Zumbo, but there was also some hard questions for Remington and Outdoor life as to whether they supported Zumbo's views.

By Monday morning, Remington's main web page was altered to announce the canning of Jim Zumbo. Gun enthusiasts all across the net announced their intention to buy Remington products in support of the company's actions.

Today, Outdoor life has removed all of Jim Zumbo's articles and there is a tactfully written notice of his resignation titled Outdoor Life And Jim Zumbo Part Ways.

It took Jim only three days to slide from the top of the trade to being out on the street, all because of what he had published on his blog. Ouch!

Now, before anyone hyperventilates about guns being bad, or necessary, I'd like you to consider the effect of any blogger with a following deciding that he or she would like to let it all hang out about those of their readers who don't seem to measure up in some way.

Creating imaginary differences has always been the work of petty tyrants. "Life would be so much better without those Liberals, or Conservatives, or Hippies, or old people...you fill in the rest."

Tyrants and politicians can make this game work for a while, because there are always some people who will believe that their troubles are caused by others.

For bloggers, firing up your readership about an issue can backfire badly. If you work for someone else, it doesn't MATTER that your blog is private. People will associate your words and feelings with those who employ you and it will be very bad for their business. If they are smart, they will fire you and move on.

Jim Zumbo still has his books and his website and his most loyal followers, but his credibility has taken a terrible hit in the general gun owning community.

It didn't help that his apology was seen as a defensive move and not as a sincere action. He may still redeem himself, as there plenty of people who are willing to help him rehabilitate himself as an authority, but his actions will be closely scrutinized for years to come. He will have to come up with a major amends project in order to put this behind him.

I hope he makes it. He has become a sobering object lesson for all bloggers. Don't mess with your readership!

Kimber has the final word:

You can mess with your own readership all you want, just don't mess with your boss' readership.

How NOT to use the Internet

I was talking with a local beverage maker today and she told me that she was in the midst of bottling last year's production.

That caught my interest, as it would make an interesting story about a recent startup that appears to be making headway.

I asked if anyone was writing about their operation and she said that they had been talking to some people, but hadn't made any decisions yet.

I asked if she would be willing to have me write an article about their operation with a few pictures of what was happening.

She said, "Not now, we are really slammed. Perhaps we could do something after the bottling is over."

Now, this is a company that spends a great deal of effort on promotion and maybe she thought I was offering to write a press release for her.

I didn't have time to explain that an independently written article on the internet is worth ten press releases and is an incredibly cost effective way of getting the word out about a company and its products.

I am sure this company advertises in Southern Living and Virginia Living to attract the attention of affluent customers with cultivated tastes. Perhaps the owner doesn't realize that an increasing number of prospects use Google and Yahoo to find products.

A mention of your company or product on the Internet stays live for years, while your ad in Southern Living is good for a few months at most. A Google search is more likely to show a mention of your company in a weblog than to show your website itself!

Weblog mentions rank higher in Google than all but the most heavily publicized websites.

If you have a product or service that is unusual or newsworthy, let your local bloggers know about it and invite them to experience it and write about it. You may be surprised at how many will take you up on your invitation.

This does not mean sending them press releases. I get those every day and they are rarely worth writing about as they are manufactured news. Bloggers write about things that interest them or provoke their ire.

Most bloggers write with passion about the topics that interest them. Readers follow certain bloggers because they write about things these readers find relevant. If you find that a blogger wants to write about you, I would suggest that you let them take a shot at it. All you need to do is to make sure they get all of the important data right, and you can do that by being prepared and having background material for them to take with them.

After all, bloggers are not reporters. They are independent publishers who will spend as much time on a story as they wish. They have no column inch restrictions and they will usually accept comments on their story after it appears.

If you feel they left something important out, you are free to make things right in the comments.

In short, if a blogger offers to write about you, take up the offer!

279,000 visitors

Fired up the browser this morning and saw that the site meter was reading exactly 279,000. Nice!

Thanks to all who have dropped by. I'll try and keep the articles coming more regularly than in the recent past.

I have been making a few changes recently and will be doing more posting on topics relating to post-corporate life, especially in the area of marketing yourself and your products on the Internet.

Look for more pictures too. Southwestern Virginia is a treasure trove of images for photographers and interesting stories for bloggers. Those who do both have an endless supplies of material to work with.

Start off the year with some "pretty good advice" from Jane Chin

"pretty good advice" copyright © 1996 by jane chin

you are an intelligent, wonderful, and creative human being. in the face of adversity, you have learned to break through obstacles and embrace the lessons that challenges have to offer. you are beautiful, inside and outside.

you are a fighter. you have grown up with many ghosts and shadows, and yet fearlessly you step alongside and over them and hold your head high. you have the intense desire to motivate, to improve, to mold, and to polish yourself into the beautiful diamond you are.

you possess the gentle and pure heart that all children of the universe is given. you possess endless talents and abilities that only all children of god have. you dont expect your life to be blessed, you make a charmed life for your own, and then spread your joy and wonder to all those around you.

Jane Chin is another example of someone who has discovered more of their potential through blogging. Her weblogs proliferate in all directions, from medical science to digital art, each one mirroring the endless creativity unleashed by open communication with a nearly infinite audience.

Jane's personal transformation as an creative entrepreneur typifies the transformation of the blogosphere from a collection of technical tips on "good sites to visit" to an all-embracing experience involving art, emotional impact and shared advice to help us deal with the challenges of life.

You can get a an overview of her current scope of activity by visiting chinspirations.com. Her work is an absorbing blend of esthetics and hard-nosed business advice.