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How Free Money Can Save Us All

By | ChangeEngine, External Monologue | 3 Comments

While Baltimore attempts to ban the destitute from its streets and those who rely on food stamps to meet their basic needs face cuts, a radical experiment in poverty reduction is being contemplated an ocean away. In Switzerland, one of the world’s richest nations, voters will soon go to the polls to decide whether every Swiss citizen should receive a “basic income.” Under its terms, the only thing a Swiss citizen over the age of 18 would need to receive around $1,000 U.S. a month is a pulse. Yes, you read that correctly. You only need to be alive, merely exist, and you get $1,000 cash.

This idea has sparked a great deal of debate here in the states, setting the tongues of the chattering classes a-wagging with equal parts indignation and inspiration. Many dismiss the idea as impractical, madness. But the question that needs to be asked is, if the Swiss can do it, why can’t America — the richest and most powerful country in human history? And whether, given the way our economic system works now, we might not be the ones who are crazy.

Meet Jake

But don’t we already have welfare for those in need? Work harder and you will get somewhere, goes the American mantra. Well, lets take a hard look at the welfare system … Meet Jake, a 25 year old male with no dependents. Jake has a job working at Walmart. Luckily enough, he gets to work 40 hours a week at minimum wage. Unlike some of his colleagues, he earns $13,920 a year pre-tax in the state of Maryland. Between the current benefit programs, which include SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit), and Section 8 housing credits, Jake receives about $590 a month. If Jake wasn’t eligible for Medicaid, which in Maryland he would be, another $180 a month from the Affordable Care Act would come his way to get health insurance. Jake would only get a few hundred bucks extra under the Basic Income plan. And a large number of these programs are means-tested; creating a perverse incentive for those most in need — the less poor you get, however incrementally, the worse off you are. By supplying a basic income, work would actually pay off for Jake, and he would have a reason to strive for better pay and advancement.

But the problem of welfare isn’t just the amount of money but the message that’s sent in how it’s distributed. Stores that accept SNAP benefits have large signs stating what they can and can’t be used for. No hot food, no prepared food, no booze or tobacco. So on SNAP Jake can’t head to the deli counter and get a hoagie to-go or some of Eddie’s Mac and Cheese to share with his kids for dinner. The system assumes that the poorer you are the worse your choices will be, which is being proven wrong in many countries around the globe. The fact of the matter is that cash payments, with little to no strings attached, work. A majority of recipients in such programs spend the money on fixing their house, better food, expanding or creating small businesses, and their education.

Try to do any of this under the current regime, and Jake will get a rude awakening. Section 8 housing vouchers, while they are supposed to be universally accepted, are often refused by landlords. That is assuming you are getting them in the first place because the process for those benefits can take months or years. SNAP benefits need to be reapplied for every six months and don’t you forget! Because if you do you are going to spend at minimum a whole day down at the welfare office getting it straightened out. How is someone working hourly on minimum wage, who has kids or has to go to school supposed to do this? The amount of red tape is astounding. Think of how much energy would be saved — and unleashed — by simply replacing all of this with a basic income.

Free Money and The Protestant Ethic

“But it is still free money and why would you work if you get free money? We will all get lazy!” yells my inner economist. But what if I told you that wasn’t the case? When Canada ran an experiment in the town of Minocome, productivity and work rates only dropped by 1 percent on average. The groups that dropped the most were new mothers and teenagers supporting their families. The mothers spent more time with their children and the teens spent time in school. That sounds like a win-win to me. Our friend Jake could go back to school part-time to become a carpenter, finish his GED, or gain other skills. American productivity levels are off the charts, while the share of profits for most Americans has declined. It is about time the American Worker got their fair cut of the pie.

The best part is that a basic income is financially doable. All we need is the political will. Jake would no longer have to cut through red tape to try to make a better life for himself. Every American would get a bigger cut of the productivity they already put into the system. The cash payouts would empower renters to become homeowners, single mothers to spend more time with their children, and give young adults in this struggling economy the security to start their own business. A basic income could be the fuel that allows America to thrive in the 21st century.

IMAGE CREDIT. Wikimedia Commons.

Vaccination Nation

By | ChangeEngine, Health, The Global Is Local | No Comments

My arm is killing me. I got my flu shot yesterday, fine, great. I am adding to the collective resistance to the flu for 2013 and 2014, go me! However at the moment, my arm hurts and I’m a little bit annoyed with my past self for allowing me to be stuck with a needle.

By contrast, one of my colleagues mentioned that her son doesn’t believe in vaccination and is going to India without getting any of the so-called “required” shots. Although I find it a little bit challenging to get behind that perspective, his perception is a useful one to consider.

The perception of interventions differs widely among different groups. For example, many younger people believe that insurance is unnecessary. Women and men have differing attitudes about what constitutes sufficient health care services. Different economic, social, and ethnic groups also demonstrate a diverse range of values and preferences — not just about health services, of course, but about trends, fashion, technology, social practices, religious beliefs, and so on.

These differences have substantial public health impact. Especially in a place like Baltimore, home of Henrietta Lacks, there is still a strong memory of the crimes of the Tuskegee syphilis study that only adds to a long history of discrimination, segregation, and well-earned mistrust of institutions. Currently, this plays out in disparities in rates of HPV vaccination among young women, influenza vaccination, and of course overall disease burden.

In my opinion, the duty to educate and promote healthy interventions falls on the institutions that have generated so much mistrust in the past — government, large hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and the like. The successful experiences of the private sector — particularly in marketing and advertising — in spreading innovation among groups that are new to the United States might be one source of inspiration. Spreading immunization adoption among a population could follow the same model as spreading smartphone adoption — both benefit the maker of the technology (money in their pocket), the recipient (resistance to disease, greater productivity), and the group as a whole (herd immunity, better educational and economic prospects).

Regardless of the rationale behind a mother’s resistance to a vaccination program, the motivation remains consistent — protecting her child from harm. This is true here and around the world. The World Health Organization has found that vaccine adoption has less to do with medical understanding of the vaccine itself than with social norms and trust of the vaccine provider. This lesson must be taken to heart when attempting to address the 2.5 million vaccine-preventable deaths in Asia and Africa every year, and also when attempting to improve influenza and HPV vaccination numbers in Baltimore. A recent uptick in polio cases in Somalia is cause for concern, but so is the fact that the first few cases of influenza have been reported in Maryland. We can all do something about the second of these, at least, by taking steps to protect ourselves as well as encouraging our friends and families to do the same.

Baltimore’s Queen of Bioethical Conundrums

By | ChangeEngine, Health, The Global Is Local | No Comments

Hi, one baby please. We’d like a boy who will grow up to be 6’2″, play the piano, graduate from Harvard Law School, and dance a mean Polka. Actually, make it two, we might want to enroll them in tennis camp together.

The designer baby patent, as it is now known in the media, was recently granted to a company called 23andMe, which has made several splashes in the past few years as they released in-home genetic testing kits and other products. This has caused a lot of consternation among the public as well as the scientific community. I spend a lot of words in these posts declaring my lack of expertise on things, so let me carry on the tradition: I am not a geneticist, an expert in in-vitro fertilization, or a father, any of which might help me to help you understand this issue better, but I will carry on regardless.

One of the primary concerns for technology of this type is, of course, the potential for abusive use of screening technology. At one end of the spectrum are some generally acceptable uses of this kind of thing — screenings for congenital disease that would lead to an early death amid suffering, for instance. At the other end, I think we can agree, are the designer children I described in my intro. Press one if you would like a baseball team full of babies with extreme athletic ability, press six for the next Mozart.

This weekend was also the third annual Henrietta Lacks Memorial Lecture, hosted by the Johns Hopkins Institute for Clinical and Translational Research. For those of you who have not read Rebecca Skloot’s blockbuster non-fiction book about Henrietta, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, heard her interviews on NPR, or seen her on the Colbert Report AND live in Baltimore, please try to find one of those things right now and come back. The short version, however: Henrietta was born in Virginia, married, and eventually moved to Baltimore in order for her husband to work in the steel industry. In 1951 she was diagnosed with cervical cancer, a condition that led quickly to her death. During her treatment, a sample of her tumor was collected without her knowledge or consent, cultured, and propagated successfully — the first time human cells were successfully cultured. Since then, more than 60,000 scientific articles have been published on research involving HeLa cells; they were used to make the Polio vaccine, and they have traveled into space, among thousands of other applications.

The lecture was largely intended to memorialize Mrs. Lacks and acknowledge her contribution to science and humanity, through the distribution of scholarships for a high school student in the sciences and technology as well as for community college students. In addition, a long hoped for plaque was put up at the end of the day on the former home of Mrs. Lacks, commemorating the site.

The last hundred years have seen a remarkable span of growth in our awareness of bio-ethical issues, which has included the Nuremberg trials, the Tuskegee experiments, the Belmont Report, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and others. The rate of informed legislation and rulings on bio-ethical issues is surpassed by the rate of innovation, as with all types of technological advancement, and so a greater burden must fall to us as citizens to act as monitors. There are promising strategies that emerge regularly, but these should not sacrifice the patients involved.

As I say, the past century has seen a dramatic and sometimes shocking number of ethical lapses in the medical and scientific community, particulary pertaining to the use of human subjects. This is one reason that stories like the recent patent granted to 23andMe give us cause for concern. We worry that we (or our brothers and sisters in the human race) will be treated poorly, abused, or taken advantage of.

In fact, this is the position that the Lacks family has been struggling with for over 50 years. At some points they have tried litigation to gain control over the use of the HeLa cell line, or at least share in the massive money-tree that their matriarch begat, or sue Johns Hopkins for their unethical (although at the time, legal) behavior. It is interesting how time and circumstance can change paradigms. The descendants of Mrs. Lacks are not so different from the majority of Baltimore residents. Like their mother/grandmother/great grandmother, many of them are still poor, still in a struggling neighborhood, still in the black majority that is treated like a minority. A process that began 20 years after Henrietta’s death — as researchers began trying to learn more about the cell line — has finally yielded results. David, Henrietta’s grandson, sits on a committee that helps to determine how the full genome of Henrietta Lacks will be used in research around the world. Rebecca Skloot’s book provided insight into the wishes of Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah. And Henrietta herself is remembered as a giving, charitable, loving person who shared and gave freely for the benefit of her community.

How can Henrietta help us to understand? A Baltimorean lady unknowingly at the forefront of a scientific revolution, she could not have guessed at what might come next.

The patent for testing for specific traits is only the beginning of a process that is almost certain to continue. Increased consumer access to previously Ivory-Tower-style scientific advancement is nothing new; in fact, it is something old. It is exactly how diffusion of innovative technologies always works, for better or worse [author’s note: except in the health care system, which is a discussion for a different day]. We are still struggling to determine how best to regulate the cell phone, which just had it’s 40th birthday, so even if we are concerned that drive-thru babies are about to ruin our world, something like that idea is eventually coming, in one form or another, and a better strategy than stopping it would be to make sure it happens with ethical oversight, by entities who have committed themselves to the public good. We shall see if 23andMe lives up to that challenge.

Biting Galileo’s Style

By | ChangeEngine, Silo-Breakers | No Comments

Yes, we admit it: we’re shamelessly ripping off Galileo’s style for our own purposes. But in this case we come by it honestly. Our impromptu Silo-Breakers series prompted a tremendously thought-provoking contribution from our friend, Rodney Foxworth, on the power of racial divisions in Baltimore. So provocative in fact that it sparked its own spirited back-and-forth via email, even as we were discussing the mundane details of when to schedule publication.

The exchange put us in mind of Galileo’s “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems” where he framed his argument for the Copernican model of the universe, in which the earth revolves around the sun, in the form of a classic Platonic dialogue. Perhaps the reference is obscure, but then again maybe not. Perhaps there’s as much progress to be made scouring our souls as gazing at the stars. So here, in somewhat briefer form, we present our dialogue on the cosmology of our personal universes and on the forces that keep us apart…

(TAKE THE BREAKOUT CHALLENGE! What’s YOUR silo? And how do you break out of it? Let us know @ChangEngine #breakoutchallengefacebook.com/ChangingMedia, or email hasdai@changingmediagroup.com.)

Silo Breakers – Rodney Foxworth

By | ChangeEngine, Silo-Breakers | One Comment

Editor’s 0714_WVanthem …

In the latest installment of ChangeEngine’s series of profiles in silo-breaking, social entrepreneur and reluctant trans-cultural ambassador Rodney Foxworth issues a powerful challenge to confront our deepest assumptions and understand the depths of what divides us…

Michelle Geiss

I live an intensely bifurcated life, which has begrudgingly placed me in the role of cultural translator and community bridge-builder. And the bifurcation of my life has never been more pronounced than it has been over the past year.

For the past year, I’ve worked to help build a community of social entrepreneurs in the field of Black Male Achievement through BMe, a project of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Open Society Foundation; concurrently, I’ve helped organize and connect a growing network of (mostly white) self-identified social entrepreneurs and changemakers, with very little overlap between the two communities, a sad reality that haunts me day and night. While there are traumatic structural and historical forces that have produced a city as doggedly segregated as Baltimore (and the world of social change has not been exempted), I’ve largely failed in my responsibilities as an organizer and advocate for Baltimore City.

When we began the breakfast series last fall, I had every intention of creating a platform that represented the diversity that the city offers. And in some ways we’ve succeeded. But in the area that matters most to me, we’ve failed terribly. Prior to launching the breakfast, I had observed how community events and initiatives aimed at advancing and uniting the city were organized by committees suited for Portland or Seattle, but not Baltimore. I was either too arrogant or too optimistic to think I could change this dynamic on my own. Let me be clear in my working theory: you cannot advance or unify a city or community without significant leadership, involvement and validation from the people most affected.

I’ve discovered more and more that the racial and socioeconomic fault lines in this city run deeper than even my cynical mind could ever imagine, and in the process, I’ve become complicit in reinforcing the very dynamic I sought to change. While I hold myself accountable, I need everyone to take ownership of it as well–as one of the few black figures in the room, I cannot orchestrate meaningful connections between two worlds on my own, nor should I.

It is impossible to make positive change in this city when you are far removed from the needs, challenges, passions, and desires of most of the people living within it. Without that connection to community, you are simply left with a suboptimal perspective of what a better Baltimore can look like for large swaths of its residents. Or, as my friend Lionel Foster might say, what looks to be a renaissance to some, might feel like a takeover to others.

In contrast, the men (read here and here for examples) who best exemplify the ideals of BMe have deep relationships with the communities they serve. Much of the impetus behind BMe was to celebrate and recognize black men serving their communities who might otherwise go unrecognized. They know their communities intimately and recognize that the solution to any problem rests with the people they serve.

The silos and racial and socioeconomic fault lines run so deep, in fact, that what defines a “better Baltimore” might look markedly different between the two communities. For example, it might include for a black empowerment agenda as advocated by my friends and BMe leadership awardees Adam Jackson and Dayvon Love. To simply integrate the two communities is naive — we must first wrestle with our conflicting visions for a better Baltimore, confront our skepticisms and concerns head on and interrogate our individual motivations.

I’m not suggesting that every white do-gooder become a radical black nationalist, but I expect that every white do-gooder examine why it is a valid and valuable position, and grapple with the historical, political and social realities that would foment a black empowerment perspective. You must put yourself in uncomfortable situations and have a willingness to have your worldview challenged without retracting. You must be willing to learn. And you must take ownership of your learning.

It requires a muscular empathy that is presently lacking. Without it, we will continue to perpetuate long-standing divisions and power structures along racial and socioeconomic lines that will retard progress for the majority of Baltimore’s residents.

Rodney Foxworth is an independent writer, entrepreneur and consultant. He is also co-founder of SocEnt Breakfast, a forum and platform for idea sharing, resource exchange and connecting among Baltimore’s social entrepreneurs, nonprofit and civic leaders, community advocates, grant-makers, and social investors.

TAKE THE BREAKOUT CHALLENGE! What’s YOUR silo? And how do you break out of it? Let us know @ChangEngine #breakoutchallenge, facebook.com/ChangingMedia, or email hasdai@changingmediagroup.com.

IMAGE CREDIT. www.chrissauter.com.

Silo Breakers – Michelle Geiss

By | ChangeEngine, Silo-Breakers | No Comments

Editor’s 0714_WVanthem …

What with ChangeEngine being the free-wheeling, spontaneous social change platform that it is, we’re not surprised to see a chain-reaction of inspirations leading us to the first in what we hope will be a long and illustrious series of profiles in silo-breaking from change-makers in Baltimore and beyond. Inspired by the recent Community Design Lab, Adam’s magnificent post on the perils of silos set off a dynamic discussion on boundaries, barriers, and busting through to cross-pollination and inclusion … which brings us full circle to the first of our Silo Breakers, Community Design Lab Co-Organizer Michelle Geiss…

Michelle Geiss

My primary silo is the world of global health, with sub-silos galore — malaria, family planning, social marketing, social franchising, and so on. Each sub-silo has its own culture, practices, lore, dynamic and wonky terminology. And each has almost no idea what happens in the silo next door.

Funding structures reinforce this state of disconnectedness. In each country, the weight of coordination falls largely on the backs of underfunded, overwhelmed and disorganized ministries of health, which themselves are siloed to match donor interests (sound familiar?). Though the silos lead to duplication and disproportionate efforts towards the issue-du-jour, they are very deeply entrenched and massively difficult to change.

I try to break out of silos by taking on projects across a range of health areas and technical areas, and by cross-pollinating or encouraging integrated approaches when I can. Gradually, I’m also learning the contours and constraints of Baltimore and its challenges, which gives me the opportunity to experiment with plugging my global health skills into entirely new areas of focus. It has been humbling and inspiring to step out of the world of multi-million, multi-country malaria grants and into the heart of small, homegrown grassroots efforts in Baltimore scraping by on volunteer time and a few hundred dollars.

I’m a big believer in using design thinking methods to show that inspiration can come from the darndest of places and that everyone can be innovative in their work if they respect creativity as a process. My second hat as a Community Design Lab organizer is born out of that belief. That and a nagging feeling that a better Baltimore is right at our fingertips if we could just mix the amazing change-makers, creative minds and communities together in the right way.

One thing that struck me about our inaugural Design Lab was how many folks in the room were natural silo breakers. Nearly everyone had an affiliation with forward slashes. Adam’s three hats — City Health Department / ChangeEngine contributor / free-range potter — were the norm rather than the exception. The SocEnt breakfasts are also full of the city’s renaissance men and women who rattle off two or three projects or affiliations during the around-the-table intros.

I see this as an encouraging sign that there is a growing community of people who want to listen, collaborate and share ideas, and who see this as the only way to begin breaking down the inefficiencies, injustices and inequities of the city. The issue of inclusion is on a lot of people’s minds and I hope we’ll continue to challenge ourselves to be better and better at this. If we continue to acknowledge that we don’t have all the answers and that we need community leaders in the room, I’m optimistic we’ll keep moving in the right direction.

Michelle is a freelance public health consultant and co-initiator of the Baltimore Community Design Lab.

TAKE THE BREAKOUT CHALLENGE! What’s YOUR silo? And how do you break out of it? Let us know @ChangEnginefacebook.com/ChangingMedia, or email hasdai@changingmediagroup.com.

IMAGE CREDIT. www.chrissauter.com.

The Divine Baltimore Comedy

By | ChangeEngine | No Comments

Editor’s Note: inspired by our call for those laugh/cry moments that make you go “Oh, Baltimore,” the brilliant Devan Southerland shares with us her fond impressions of Lexington Market and its environs. (Share your own “Oh, Baltimore” moments and memories by commenting or letting us know via Facebook or Twitter #ohbmore). 

Dear ENTIRE AREA within three blocks of Lexington Market,

Your area is something that can’t be replicated anywhere else in the world.

No matter what sidewalk I stroll upon in your vicinity, someone always seems to walk up on me to the point of them bumping into my purse…forcing me to make sure I still have a wallet. Only there is where I can wait patiently to meet a friend and have entrepreneurs of all types stand near me on the sidewalk selling goods including, but not limited to Tims, Big White Tees, “CD’s and movies, ya’ll, “that Precious movie, ya’ll”, ‘loose ones’, $1 gloves, socks, Tussy deodorant, “Weed, weed, weed, got that weed, weed, weed” and a day old student continuation bus pass.”

I love the COMPLETE violation of personal space one feels no matter where they are.

I love that everyone yells their conversations… whether talking to someone next to them….or a couple of blocks away…or on the chirp phone…or to the cashier trying to ring them up.

I think it’s funny that 60 percent of the people walking around are on the dope, looking for the dope, nodding out from the dope, selling the dope or trying to recover from the dope….but failing real hard.

It’s enjoyable that your area’s Rite Aid stays in business not only because it has 1 Hour Photo…but because it sells liquor. However, I hate that it always seems to run out of the reasonably priced Seagrams Iced Tea Vodka. Damn…if only I drank Colt 45 or Remy Martin…

I adore walking into your area’s stores, seeing a pile of other customers’ bags in the corner by the front door and rethinking if I want to leave my bag there with ‘bag check’ to spend money…but it’s just so hard to resist that cute pair of blue boots that will go with my outfit I’m wearing later that night! And they’re $20!!!!

I digress.

Apparently, your area makes people think that even the most stone-faced individuals – like myself – welcome unwanted, unwarranted and UNINVITED conversations from strangers. Even conversations seeking advice! For example, one young lady decided to stop me in the pouring rain and say, “Excuse me, can you tell me if I did the right thing? This man back there said he was hungry so I just gave him the gizzards I just bought. Was that the right thing to do???”

Here’s to you, the entire area within three blocks of Lexington Market. Now you can’t say I’ve NEVER said good things about you.

DevanDevan Southerland, a.k.a. the Lovely Ms. ‘S Page, is an experienced dream doula and legend maker. A proud Baltimorean, she studied Family Studies and African American Studies at the University of Maryland-College Park. If you are worthy, she has rap for you.

 

 

Image Credit: Lexington Market, 1858 Wikimedia Commons

The Top Ten Most Useless Top-Tens About Social Media

By | ChangeEngine, Social Media | 2 Comments

As someone who spends a good deal of time helping organizations great and small harness the power of social media, I often find myself stumbling across “top-ten lists” of social media tips from a never-ending parade of blog evangelists, web-thumpers, and manic e-preachers. It’s intriguing how closely these features tend to mirror the anxieties and misconceptions that I come across in my face-to-face conversations with real-life people seeking insight, which is no doubt one of the reasons they’re so popular.

The top-ten list itself is one of the dominant tropes of the infinitely-aggregating (and often aggravating) digital media age — link-bait for our flicker-quick attention spans, churned out as proven traffic drivers to cater to our jones for simple answers. A vast number are about sex of course, or at least love. In fact, the social media top-tens remind me most of the advice lists written in breathless tones by relationship “experts” that we all click-through eager for some secret insight, even though our rational minds know the premise is absurd…”Ten Ways to Know She’s Into You!”* or “Top Ten Things Your Man REALLY wants!”** Superficially revealing, deceptively empowering, and almost certainly completely useless if applied to your specific circumstances.

So, without pointing any particular fingers, here’s a run-down of the top ten kinds of top-tens for social media, and why you might want to use them for novelty purposes only…

*Because it makes perfect sense that the answer to a mystery that has eluded every poet, philosopher, and evolutionary biologist since the dawn of time can be imparted to you by a freelance “Passion Consultant” in a 500-word post on DudesHealth.com
**Chris Rock has helpfully boiled the list down to three.

Updated1) “Top Ten Reasons You Should Be On <Insert Social Media Site> RIGHT NOW!”

I’m often asked in panic-stricken tones “should I be on…?” And my answer invariably is, “well, that depends.”

Facebook, right? I need to be on Facebook!”

Well, maybe. The real question is who you want to reach and why. Your audience isn’t “Facebook.” There are a billion people on Facebook, and unless you have a cat with a Hitler ‘stache you’re not going to reach them all, nor would you want to.

Oh right, I should be on Twitter.”

Your audience isn’t anyone called “Twitter” either. These things were created to help us communicate with people. Sometimes the most powerful social media tool is e-mail, or that most dynamic of social inventions — a conversation.

2) “Top Ten Twitter Hash-Tags You NEED to Be Using, Like, YESTERDAY!” 

Speaking of Twitter, no magic tags. Event tags good for
events. Build relationships, find your voice. Remember,
you only have 140 charact... #WasteOfTime 

3) “Top Ten BEST Practices for Social Media!”

Nooo. Nope. There are no generalizable social media tips for content or strategy other than don’t post bomb threats, pornography, or pictures of your Weiner.

4) “Top Ten Ways to Go VIRAL!” 

The percentage of content on the internet that actually goes “viral” – as in ubiquitous enough for you to be sick of it (or at least vaguely aware of its virulent existence without even seeing it) – is so infinitesimally small, you might as well have a “top ten ways” to win the lottery or hit a half-court shot. If you insist on chasing the chimera of being the next Gangnam Style, by all means spend your waking hours trying to come up with a hilariously preposterous little dance move that sets the world on fire. But that’s probably time better spent creating quality content that resonates with your audience.

5) “Top Ten Ways to Make SURE … !”

There’s a great deal of fear associated with social media — of wasting one’s time, of bomb or Weiner-wielding lunatics, but mostly of criticism. Most of these “Make Sure”‘s are of the “something doesn’t happen” variety. But there is no certainty in social media, whether of results or consequences, be they negative or positive. There are ways to watch and listen, to learn, to harness these tools for your own ends. But if there’s one thing that’s true of social media it’s that it’s not an inanimate technology like a crankshaft or an engine; it’s a human system, and so susceptible to failure, horror, and great joy.

Pac-ManReverse2

6) “Ten Creative Ways to Use …!”

To be fair, these are actually the most useful of this breed. It never hurts to be open to new ideas or new ways to use familiar platforms. The key word here though is “creative,” as in being inspired to create something fresh and meaningful in a way that expresses your unique voice. Slavishly following some tip will lead to derivative drudgery, which brings us to…

7) “Top Ten Trends You NEED to Jump On Before It’s TOO LATE!”

People are using video/audio/auto-/wiki/real-time/Vine/ …people are using this… people are doing that. Media trends in the digital world have the half-life of a mayfly. It doesn’t necessarily matter what other people are doing (again, most of these trends probably involve cats.) It matters what you’re doing.

8) “Top Ten Predictions – The Next BIG THING in Social Media!”

Always good for a chortle. If the people who make such predictions really knew what the next big thing in social media was they’d be poppin’ champagne in a solid-gold jacuzzi molded into the fuselage of a diamond-encrusted private jet, not sharing that information with you via a top-ten blog post for the standard digital media industry fee of no money at all.

9) “Top Ten Ways to INCREASE Your Site Traffic Using Social Media!”

… Slow down, think about who you want to reach and why. Most tips for increasing site traffic won’t work, won’t be sustainable and some of them might even get you on Google’s naughty list. Though, of course, a top-ten list is a pretty sure-fire way to drive traffic 😛

10) “Top Ten Social Media BLOGS You Should Be Reading!”

The blog you’re reading is almost always one of these. They all tend to consist of advice that’s either too broad, wrong for you, or too technical (i.e. written for other breathless professionals!!!). You’re better off reading blogs, websites, and content by people in your field, or finding outlets that share your passions and values. Oh, and of course, you should be reading ChangeEngine 😎

RunAway

IMAGE CREDIT. Hasdai Westbrook.

Creative Arithmetic

By | ChangeEngine | 2 Comments

It’s funny what can emerge from a conversation. That, as a matter of fact, is a central premise of CreateBaltimore – the free-form conclave of Baltimore’s creative minds that seeks to go beyond pontification and spark powerful action. (Hmm, must have the pope on my mind.) ChangeEngine‘s own bard of Love & Concrete, Scott Burkholder, is both a co-creator and driving force behind the annual event, which had its most recent incarnation last Saturday, and naturally we want to use our platform to both cover and catalyze the process. But how do you capture the dizzying energy of those few short hours for those who created it, and convey that energy to those who weren’t there? And how do you start to quantify the impact of an “Un-Conference”? What are the metrics of imagination and passion?

Scott came to us with some intriguing figures. They lay a little flat as simple lines of text but got us excited enough to create this infographic. “That’s great,” said Scott. “But could we show how ninety percent of the sponsors were also participants.” And so we created another.

From words to vision to action – the CreateBaltimore way. Here’s to keeping the creative pistons firing…

CreateBaltimoreCreativeArithmetic - ChangingMedia

CreateBaltimoreDonutChart - ChangingMedia

LOLCats Rising for Social Change

By | ChangeEngine | 2 Comments

We were going to unveil our LOLCats for Social Justice series in a few weeks, but our friendly neighborhood sociopath for social change, Robyn Stegman, jumped the gun. No harm done though. It’s for a good cause. ChangingMedia is an enthusiastic supporter of the One Billion Rising campaign and we strongly encourage you to join us today at 5:30pm at the Washington Monument to rise with us and demand an end to violence. Give one billion women the world over the Valentine’s gift of your love and support in their fight to be safe, secure and cherished. Help us give violence against women a swift kick in the ass into oblivion.

Robyn, next project: we are totally doing a Sociopaths for Social Change feature.

LOLSocialChangeCat