Special note: This post is dedicated to my friend Jason Sokol, who mostly jokingly (I think) asked if I was going to offer an analysis of The Gettysburg Address. Not quite, but here is what I came up with.
The year is 1863. It’s right around this time of year, too. You are the President of the United, well, you are the President of the Union part of the United States of America. War has been raging (technically) since 1861, but really, the rift has been there for centuries. The world has been watching your country as the war has dragged on. You have been invited to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to dedicate the new national cemetery there. You are not even the main speaker. Somehow, the onus has fallen upon you to describe in a speech everything that the event means, everything the war means, everything your country means to you.
This is the scenario in which Abraham Lincoln found himself. He got up to make his speech, and just 2 minutes later, he was done. There was only a light smattering of applause. When he sat down, he told a friend that he had completely missed the mark. Different newspapers wondered how England and France viewed the Union now that it was clear how humiliating the tall, lanky president was. What a stinky speech, everyone seemed to say.
This post is already longer, in terms of words, than the Gettysburg Address. And yet, now, almost exactly 147 years later, the Gettysburg Address has become one of the American classics. “Four score and seven years ago” is an opening phrase that students have memorized for decades now. In retrospect, it seems bizarre that Lincoln wrote so many drafts of the speech – on the train to Gettysburg, in his hotel room. It seems strange that people could have been so blind as to the poignancy that he offered. It seems strange that he himself felt that he missed the mark.
There has probably been a time in your life when you worked hard on something, finessed it, polished it, started over, finessed again, only to feel that you had completely missed the mark. Maybe you wrote a blog post that you slaved over and it got no reaction. Maybe you did something at work that you thought was amazing that nobody else seemed to notice.
The thing is, you can’t always know when things are going to hit people in the way you want. Even in this age of instant communication, we are not really instantly communicating our meaning. We are just passing words back and forth. Meaning travels more slowly and is more deliberate.
What I garner from the moral of the Gettysburg Address is that all we can do is to do our best. So many of us are out here writing blog posts, tweeting, posting updates here there and everywhere. It’s kind of like emptying a huge bag of seeds onto a vast stretch of plowed fields. You don’t know what’s going to stick and bloom. You don’t know what will waft away never to be seen again. So what can you do? Make sure you are always happy with your efforts. Make sure your quality is up to your standards. Make sure your efforts are up to your standards. It might take someone 147 hours or 147 years to truly appreciate what you are doing, but if you are pleased with it yourself, the rest of it doesn’t matter.
Who knows, maybe you’ll end up in the history books of the future.
Boy have I got the job for you. Do you want to sit in a stuffy office with old strokey-beard guys playing with markers, typewriters, and pencils? Do you want to place ads in newspaper classified sections? Do you want to shmooze and be creepy?
Jeb Stuart
The Panama Canal
I have been a Civil War nut, or actually a history nut, for as long as I can remember. One of my favorite books when I was just learning how to read was about famous Native American chiefs. I truly fell in love with the Civil War from the moment I first learned about it though. Perhaps it was because my family and I traveled to places like Antietam when I was a kid, so it all seemed more real and easier to envision.
Winfield Scott: Winfield Scott represents to me an example of someone who tries to get by on past successes. During the Mexican War, Scott was a great hero. He had made a name for himself as a great general in that war. You would think that he would have been a great asset by the time the Civil War came along, but instead, Scott had become so overweight he couldn’t mount a horse. He represents what happens when you get too much applause and take it too much to heart. When new opportunities come, you will not be ready. You will still be living in your triumphant past.
Henry W. Halleck: Halleck is often described as a very administrative sort of leader. He was a paperwork kind of fellow. But what Halleck represents to me is jealousy. Early in the war, when US Grant first started winning victories for the Union side, Halleck became envious. He spread rumors about Grant. After Shiloh, even though Grant won the battle, Halleck removed him because the victory had been too costly – or at least that was Halleck’s version of the story. It seems incomprehensible that people on the same team would undercut each other so, and yet we live in such a competitive society these days that it seems difficult to promote ourselves while also applauding others.
George McClellan: I would love to see a psychologist write about McClellan. He was almost unmatched when it came to raising self-esteem, setting the groundwork for success, earning the love and respect of those who needed to follow him, and testing those whom he led. He became so loved so early on for his training of the Army of the Potomac that he wrote home to his wife and said, “I feel like I could be a dictator, but I don’t want to be one, so I won’t be a dictator.” The guy was convinced that he was Napoleon reincarnated. And yet, for all of that, he couldn’t execute. He lashed out at those who asked him to implement his plans. He built demons that prevented him from moving. There is so much we can learn there. We can learn that sometimes timidity is more dangerous that bravery. We can learn that ego can be the enemy of success. We can learn the value of tangible research to balance whatever our minds come up with as the new reality.
US Grant: One might think that the only things we could learn from Grant would be good things. However, Grant’s life is primarily a story of failure, and even after his victorious run as general, he died in poverty after one of the most corrupted presidencies in American history. Why did this happen? Sherman once said of Grant that Grant doesn’t really take note of what’s happening around him. Another famous quote is that Grant always looks like he’s going to have to break a wall of brick with his head. Grant was pragmatic. He won during the Civil War because he knew lots and lots of men would have to die, and he was willing to sacrifice them. He was not after glory. He just wanted to end the war. He wanted to be on the winning side. So he plowed ahead. In today’s world this can be particularly dangerous. Grant’s later presidency exemplifies this. He did not take note of what was happening around him. Had he done so, he might have been able to dampen some of the larger scandals that ended up blackening his name.
When everyone was at Blogworld Expo about a month ago, I wrote a post about how I felt like the structure and pricing of events in the Social Media marketing space was kind of…out of whack. The keynote speakers are scheduled for smack dab in the middle of the day. The events occur during the week instead of on weekends, many times. The set-up, I noted, made me feel a bit unwelcome.
When you stop and think about it, there are millions of specialists in the world of healthcare. There are your podiatrists, your pediatric doctors, ENTs, heart specialists, brain specialists, and the list goes on and on. There is a certain glistening factor about these specialists. They are called specialists, after all. They are experts in something. There are people walking this planet who know everything you could ever want to know about all of those teeny tiny bones in your foot. That’s amazing! That’s so much knowledge about one thing. It bowls you over, almost.
I know that it’s the fashion these days to speak of print and online advertising as if it’s something like a VHS tape or a butter churner. I have never been one to stick to what’s trendy, however. I did not cuff my pants in fourth grade. I did not wear bell bottoms in high school (bell bottoms and the fear of wearing them were why girls cuffed their pants when we were kids, by the way). I am not going to be fashionable in this regard either, I’m afraid. In fact, I am going to buck the trend and tell you five ways that a traditional media plan can enrich and enhance a Social Media Marketing campaign.
2. Haphazard is not an option: Well, I suppose it is an option, and I’ll detail all of this later, but suffice to say for now that the most effective way to plan any kind of campaign is to look at the big picture. When you are laying the foundation of your traditional media plan, you will see where Social Media and other media could work together. For example, you will see when different publications will offer bonus distribution at key trade shows or conferences. “Oh, I’m going there,” you might think to yourself. Mapping out your Social Media around your key trade shows or conferences in advance will allow you to do neat things like at-the-show interviews, contests, asking your Facebook fans to post pictures, and other interactive activities that are hard to put together on the fly.