06-16-11

on Fairwells and the good fight in content strategy

I had to take a moment from trying to get plans together for the upcoming workshop in Johannesburg and a few upcoming articles to write this. I came across Ethan Remmel’s blog Living While Dying on @PsychologyToday a few days back. It stopped me instantly in my tracks and gradually I broke down into tears as I read it.

I expect this will be my last post for this blog. Thank you to Psychology Today for providing this small soapbox and to you for reading. I am planning to take my Death with Dignity medication soon, unless I die spontaneously before then.

This article “Fairwell” was written June 10. I checked back today to see if there was any update on his condition. His biography was changed from “Ethan Remmel is…” to “Ethan Remmel was…” A small thank you note was posted on his blog by his partner. The denial kicked in, it lasted a few seconds and was more of a wish than an actual disbelief. This was fake, it had to be. It is so much easier to walk through life/scroll through the internets and go “this is fake” than to accept that people change, that people die. Tiny little conspiracy theories of footprints left behind on the binary sands of time.

It wasn’t fake. Ethan Remmel passed away on June 13 and his blog sits quiet.

Soulful Content
Three days before he died he wrote a blog on the need for natural death (like natural childbirth) and dying with dignity. 72 hours left to live and he chose to spend a few of them leaving the world with his view of a heavily controversial subject.

When most of us think about content strategies, we think about what others would like to hear instead of what they need to hear. We regurgitate ideas, spread informative links and aim for “viral”. What happens when we stop benchmarking our strategies and start focusing on the change we make with our words?

The Hard Stuff
When strategy has less to do with progress and manipulation and more to do with soul do we begin to see a change. It involves an internal struggle, be it interpersonal or interoffice. It’s not easy and sometimes it is excruciating, but the world has changed and despite it’s digital roots it requires a heavy dose of reality. We’ve become too connected, too informed, too transparent for the Nikes of the world to try and compare themselves with the TOMS Shoes of the world. We smell phony so if your words don’t match your business model, we know. If your words don’t match your soul, don’t match your mission then the disconnect will be blaring obvious.

If you knew in advance, what would your last blog be about? What would your last product do? What change would you try to make? What’s stopping you from doing that now?

Whatever you do, do it with the very last fiber of your being, do it well and do it honestly.