Author Archives: SteveM

3 reasons for information exhaustion – and what to do about it

Mark Satta, Wayne State University

An endless flow of information is coming at us constantly: It might be an article a friend shared on Facebook with a sensational headline or wrong information about the spread of the coronavirus. It could even be a call from a relative wanting to talk about a political issue.

All this information may leave many of us feeling as though we have no energy to engage.

As a philosopher who studies knowledge-sharing practices, I call this experience “epistemic exhaustion.” The term “epistemic” comes from the Greek word episteme, often translated as “knowledge.” So epistemic exhaustion is more of a knowledge-related exhaustion.

It is not knowledge itself that tires out many of us. Rather, it is the process of trying to gain or share knowledge under challenging circumstances.

Currently, there are at least three common sources that, from my perspective, are leading to such exhaustion. But there are also ways to deal with them.

1. Uncertainty

For many, this year has been full of uncertainty. In particular, the coronavirus pandemic has generated uncertainty about health, about best practices and about the future.

At the same time, Americans have faced uncertainty about the U.S. presidential election: first due to delayed results and now over questions about a peaceful transition of power.

Experiencing uncertainty can stress most of us out. People tend to prefer the planned and the predictable. Figures from 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes to 20th-century Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein have recognized the significance of having certainty in our lives.

With information so readily available, people may be checking news sites or social media in hopes of finding answers. But often, people are instead greeted with more reminders of uncertainty.

As Trump supporters denounce the 2020 election results, feelings of uncertainty can come up for others. Karla Ann Cote/NurPhoto via Getty Images

2. Polarization

Political polarization is stressing many Americans out.

As political scientist Lilliana Mason notes in her book, “Uncivil Disagreement: How Politics Became Our Identity,” Americans have been increasingly dividing politically “into two partisan teams.”

Many writers have discussed the negative effects of polarization, such as how it can damage democracy. But discussions about the harms of polarization often overlook the toll polarization takes on our ability to gain and share knowledge.

That can happen in at least two ways.

First, as philosopher Kevin Vallier has argued, there is a “causal feedback loop” between polarization and distrust. In other words, polarization and distrust fuel one another. Such a cycle can leave people feeling unsure whom to trust or what to believe.

Second, polarization can lead to competing narratives because in a deeply polarized society, as studies show, we can lose common ground and tend to have less agreement.

For those inclined to take the views of others seriously, this can create additional cognitive work. And when the issues are heated or sensitive, this can create additional stress and emotional burdens, such as sadness over damaged friendships or anger over partisan rhetoric.

3. Misinformation

Viral misinformation is everywhere. This includes political propaganda in the United States and around the world.

People are also inundated with advertising and misleading messaging from private corporations, what philosophers Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall have called “industrial propaganda.” And in 2020, the public is also dealing with misinformation about COVID-19.

As chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov put it: “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

Misinformation is often exhausting by design. For example, a video that went viral,Plandemic,” featured a large number of false claims about COVID-19 in rapid succession. This flooding of misinformation in rapid succession, a tactic known as a Gish gallop, makes it challenging and time-consuming for fact checkers to refute the many falsehoods following one after another.

What to do?

With all this uncertainty, polarization and misinformation, feeling tired is understandable. But there are things one can do.

The American Psychological Association suggests coping with uncertainty through activities like limiting news consumption and focusing on things in one’s control. Another option is to work on becoming more comfortable with uncertainty through practices such as meditation and the cultivation of mindfulness.

To deal with polarization, consider communicating with the goal of creating empathetic understanding rather than “winning.” Philosopher Michael Hannon describes empathetic understanding as “the ability to take up another person’s perspective.”

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As for limiting the spread of misinformation: Share only those news stories that you’ve read and verified. And you can prioritize outlets that meet high ethical journalistic or fact-checking standards.

These solutions are limited and imperfect, but that’s all right. Part of resisting epistemic exhaustion is learning to live with with the limited and imperfect. No one has time to vet all the headlines, correct all the misinformation or gain all the relevant knowledge. To deny this is to set oneself up for exhaustion.

Mark Satta, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Wayne State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Organizing Your Notes

Various projects require different levels of organization. Most people have their own method, but I found organized chaos  wasn’t working well for me. I found myself making different directories on my hard drive, and filing items there. Some of these directories would only have one or two items in them. A lot of times I was saving links to articles, pdf files, or just about anything. The problem I found with this method besides cluttering my PC with a lot of unnecessary directories, was finding the information after I saved it. After a couple of months it gets hard to remember the name of the directory where you filed an item of information you are looking for.

I decided to look for a better system. This took me to Evernote, which didn’t take long to fill up the allotted free space and then on to OneNote. One note uses up valuable cloud storage online. They both have a nice feature of syncing their desktop application with corresponding cell phone apps. However I found when I was mobile I had little use for most of the information I was saving. Still, both these offer a good way to save information if you think you’re going to need it later when you’re not in your office. I found both these programs overkill for my needs. Most of the time when I was on the go I would only need access to some simple notes. Then  I found a program for simple notes.

The program is called Simplenote. Here is a screen shot of it.

The program is free. You can also signup for a free account on the Simplenote website. This provides a service to let you sync notes between your cell phone and desktop. If you want to export notes they can be in Evernote format or plain text. You might wonder about the article displayed in the picture above because of the image. Everyone knows you can’t put an image in a plain text file.  While this is true, the Simplenote can read and write a very simple formatting language called Markdown. The plain files exported will contain any markdown language the your article had.

Although this is a great program for simple notes, it isn’t one I’d use for storing a lot of notes in. Usually products will have different categories of information that needs to be stored in them. Another similar program I looked at is called Joplin. It’s free/ open-source as well. It has a few bugs that I will explain but it also has a feature for categories or notebooks as it’s called in this program.

Both of these programs have a light and dark theme. It’s easy enough to set your preference.

Although initially it may look very similar to Simplenote you can see on the far left of the picture a column which lets you set categories or notebooks so you can keep large amounts of information sorted. This can be synced with various cloud services including Nextcloud, Dropbox, OneDrive, WebDAV but I haven’t tried it. For notes created on this program, I just store them on my computer. Notes from Simplenote can be imported or copied and pasted into a new note(s) on Joplin. Any of the text files that have been coded with Markdown language aren’t a problem because Joplin interprets Markdown as well.

Markdown is a very simple language. It’s like very simple html. You can download a guide here.

Additionally there is a free WordPress plugin you can use that provides a variety of features such as a Markdown editor, live-preivew, image-paste, HTML-to-Markdown helper, and more… You can export your files from Simplenote or Joplin and use them to add pages or posts to your WordPress website. Joplin will read and display html as well as Markdown.

One feature I really like about Joplin is its webclipper. Evernote, OneNote and Joplin all have web clippers where you can clip information from web pages, or even the entire webpage and save it into Joplin. This can be very handy considering you may find a lot of business research online and you don’t necessarily want to have to re-write it by hand. The webclipper is an extension you add to your browser and click when you want to copy something. You will see something like this.

Using this tool you can store your clipped information into whatever notebook you want to. The only problem I found is that I typically don’t want a lot of colour and advertising in the notes any notes I clip so I sometimes have to edit them. The editing ability in Joplin isn’t really good yet so it’s easier to edit them in an external editor. The notes will be saved using Markdown and you can use it or html or a mix of both to edit them. Joplin is a work in progress so it isn’t a finished product yet, although it’s getting closer.

Hopefully this article will give you some ideas and methods for staying a little more organized. It’s a bonus to have tools and programs that can work together.

Does My Business Need Social Media Marketing?

You’ve probably noticed, that most of the time when you use Google to search for something online, that very few of the results returned are social media links. It’s true that social media links are a very low priority for Google when they are indexing the web. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t bother with it. Search engines look at the size of your social communities to add authenticity to your business, and this adds weight to your argument of being listed higher up in the index for your preferred search terms.

Ascend2 is a team of research and marketing professionals providing Research-Based Marketing exclusively for marketing technology companies and digital marketing agencies. They recently released a report titled ‘For Strategies, Tactics and Trends: Organic Search & Social Media’  that says:

There is no question that social shares linked to quality content on your website or blog will improve organic search rankings as well as traffic. SEO benefits from social media, and vice versa.

It is not going to matter if your small business is offering goods or services that can only be sold locally. However, if you have a product you can ship, like custom clothing for pets, then you probably need a larger base of customers to be profitable. With permission from Ascend2, you can download this report here.

Gulzar Asma and Maqbool Misbah write, “Social media encompasses a wide range of online, forums including blogs, company sponsored discussion boards & chartrooms, consumer to consumer e mail, consumer product or service rating websites & forums, internet discussion boards & forums, moblogs, (sites containing digital audio, images, movies, or photographs), and social networking websites, to name a few.” When one thinks about social media, a lot of people think of Facebook and Twitter, but there is more to it than these websites. Basically, wherever you have the opportunity to speak with prospects, customers and any other general audience, you are reaching out to help brand yourself and business, even if the main goal isn’t to make a sale.

One might think, why bother, if the immediate result isn’t a sale? A sale could come later, but answering questions proves a certain transparency and willingness to engage openly. It helps to develop trust. The rule of thumb used to be that a potential customer had to be exposed to your marketing message at least three times before they would make an inquiry. Unfortunately this rule is more applicable to the offline world rather than online;  online the equivalency to this rule might be closer to ten times.

It can be hard to discipline yourself to take the time away from more important matters at hand. It’s been suggested that creating a schedule for social media at a specific time of the day can be beneficial. Two of the most important pieces of the puzzle are persistence and consistency. People get used to seeing your posts, and some will look forward to them. Your return on investment won’t be realized until after a sustained effort.

You can count on wasting about ninety percent of your time on social media. For that matter, ninety percent of your posts should be something other than ads. If all you post are ads, you will find it hard to keep followers. The whole idea is to engage people. It could be business related, hobbies, travel, sports, news. It’s best to find topics your target market might be interested in. Perhaps after twenty posts, you could announce a contest winner on your website — something that could trigger readers to follow your link to get another look at what you do.

Gulzar Asma and Maqbool Misbah’s article was written for ‘RESEARCH REVIEW International Journal of Multidisciplinary’, where they wrote, “Social media marketing has become the most powerful mode for companies seeking to reach out to their prospects and customers.” You can establish one-on-one conversations, build relationships, increase sales and drive more traffic to your website. It’s important to do it right. You can download the report (with permission) here.

Networking for Small Business

Business networking is the process of establishing a mutually beneficial relationship with other business people and potential clients and/or customers. The primary purpose of business networking is to tell others about your business and hopefully turn them into customers.
~ Susan Ward

There are several social networks online, like Facebook and Twitter. However, it might be more practical to do business networking offline, especially for small businesses. Finding out where you can do this is as simple as typing “where to find local business networking opportunities” into Google. You can also check with local municipality offices, Employment Insurance offices, and even local colleges. All of these may have events or workshops you can attend. Some may be free, others may charge a small token which helps them pay for the meeting room, coffee, etc.

A couple of places online that could come in handy are meetup.com and alignable.com.

For meetup.com you would have to do a search for what is close to you. I was in Edmonton, Alberta, so a quick search of meetup.com pulled up the Edmonton Business Network. Its description describes it as:

Each month we host business networking events that give you an opportunity to meet top local business owners, entrepreneurs and business professionals. We also hold inexpensive, high quality seminars and training sessions where you can learn new tactics, tools and techniques. Topics address just about every aspect of owning and growing a business: online marketing, personal development, social media, sales, networking, raising capital, crowd sourcing, branding, search engine optimization, web design and more. Group membership is free.

Alignable describes itself as:

With more than 3 million members and millions of connections across more than 30,000 local communities, Alignable is an online network where small business owners across North America drive leads and prospects, generate referrals, land new business, build trusted relationships, and share great advice.

Once you sign up it’s easy to connect with other small business owners in your town, city or area.

Of course, if you’re new to business, you can learn a lot of information. The first time I went to one of these was sponsored by Employment Insurance in 2003. We met for 6-8 weeks. My little business was already making me a steady income, but I didn’t have a clue how to run a business. This gave me the opportunity to learn about things like registering a business, and deciding what kind of business I wanted to register. It taught me about business taxes and bookkeeping, working with accountants — what I could claim and what I couldn’t — and gave a general overview of marketing.

To attend these meetings you always need to make sure you’re carrying some business cards with you and a Rolodex business card book. As you meet people other participants you can exchange business cards. You can jot notes on the back of them, most of the time, and then slide them into your wallet. You can use them to call some of these people later. Even if it’s likely they won’t become customers, they can certainly save you in other ways.

If your business picks up and you need to hire someone, call some of the people you met and ask them if they know of anyone. There’s a good chance they do. Not only could you get a good recommendation for someone to call, you’ve renewed your acquaintance and your name is once again, fresh in his or her mind.

What if you need work done to your home to accommodate the business? Call some of the people in the network and ask for advice on who to hire. Or, for that matter, there might have been a contractor in your group.

You might feel like you’re alone, but with a network you’ll discover you have people. It’s just not possible to build a business without people. Soon you’ll start to learn the power of relationships and communication. It will make it so much easier when you’re looking for suppliers, vendors, employees, tax advice and almost anything else you might need.

Likewise, by staying in contact, there’s a good chance your name and business will get referred to people they know who could use what you’re selling. You’ll discover that having a professional network is much different than asking your friends and family for advice, and especially so, if they have never operated a business.

Can Your Business Thrive Without a Website?

A lot of people think you will require a website if you’re operating a small business, but depending on your target market, you may not need one. There are lots of examples of small businesses on Facebook, of people doing it without a website.

A couple of examples come to mind.

If you want to get hired to work with your excavator, chances are you are serving a very small local market. A Facebook page is fine. If you want to offer yourself as a pet sitter, then a facebook page is fine.  However, if you were offering pet clothing and accessories, then you might need a website like Diamond Collar. Items that are going to be shipped can obviously go anywhere.

Local small businesses can also supplement a Facebook page with other free tools and resources. For example, if you’re cooking baked goods and serve a hungry local market, a free Google calendar can be used to help inform your customers, what is being baked every day of the week, and to remind them that they need to put in their request in for how packages they would like, twenty-four hours in advance. You can make the calendar shareable by anyone who has the link, so if you use a pinned post on your page that offers the link, they won’t have any trouble finding it.

If you’re using Google Calendar, another free tool that can help your small business is Google Keep. Google Keep is a note-taking service developed by Google. It is available on the web and has mobile apps for the Android and iOS mobile operating systems. Keep offers a variety of tools for taking notes, including text, lists, images, and audio. You can have a link to it and your calendar right from your Gmail in your desktop. If you have the mobile app, any change you make on one of the platforms is synced to the other platform.

If your business is fairly small, and you need to send out a newsletter, there are some free services you can use. Three of the most popular are MailerLite, MailChimp and SendPulse. All the features of each aren’t included in the free plans, but one of these will work fine to get you started.

You’ll still need to advertise but if you’re a small local business you can still do without a website. Advertising is the lifeblood of any business, but small local businesses are ideal for joint venture advertising, business card marketing, networking and relationship marketing. These will give you a much quicker return on your investment, for a fraction of the price compared to online marketing.

One might think that in your free time, you could build the website and do a little social media marketing in the evenings. And you could! But time is a commodity when you’re in business for yourself, and it needs to have a price put on it. It will cost you free time, time away from your family and even time you need to rest. You discover after you start getting really busy that you will have to schedule these type of things into your daily or weekly routine.

How to Start a Local Business Successfully

One of the questions that new entrepreneurs frequently ask, is how to market a local business. The website has been built, products are ready, but there just isn’t anybody buying. If you’re selling goods and services locally, you may not need a website. If you do, then it can be helpful to do a little homework first, before you build the website.

Make a profile of who your customer will be. If you’re targeting other local businesses, try and discover what services or products they already buy that are similar to yours. Is there a niche of this group that would be more profitable than the main target? If you can’t decide if there is one, identifying the sub-niche may be discovered by a little trial and error.

Let’s use a website that helps local dealers sell cars. Looking through the local newspaper and other advertising media sources, you can see if they are advertising in auto-trader magazines. Where else do you see their advertisements? Are they advertising on the radio? What about flyers? What about paper placemats at local restaurants? What about the yellow-pages?

Dealerships that are not spending much money on advertising are probably not going to be your target market. Cross any of these off your list. This doesn’t mean you abandon them completely but what you’re looking for is a segment of the target market that more closely resembles the profile you have created that meets the criteria to be part of a test group. You can always try the ones who aren’t advertising, later.

It’s helpful to discover what you can about the business owners too. Things like their age, marriage status, where they live — just whatever you can find out.

Now that you’ve done your due diligence, and picked a segment of the group (let’s say twelve dealerships) it’s time to go see if there is any interest. The low hanging fruit, of course, is major dealerships, because they are easy to find, and you see their ads every place. After you visit three to four of them, you might find out that they aren’t interested at all. Using a Ford dealership as an example, you find out that their dealership is part of a franchise, and they pay a set fee to the parent company to look after all of the advertising, and company website. You discover that new dealerships can be crossed off your list.

Well, it was a good plan — nice and easy! But the fact remains that new dealerships are not your target market. In order for this list to benefit you, the twelve on the list need to be interviews with your target market. At this point, you realize that it’s a good thing you haven’t built a website, and chosen a domain name.

After you have revised your list you can go and visit these people. Some of them may not want to talk to you at all, and others may ask straight out what you are selling. You’re not there to sell anything. You’re doing market research for a new business you’re thinking of building, that will help dealerships sell more cars every month. You just want their input. Once they realize you just want to talk, most of them will be happy to tell you about their business, their life… and probably other stuff you really aren’t interested to hear. But, let them talk! The more they talk; the more they will like you.

It may be good to have a pen and paper with you. They will offer some ideas, and some of them might be pretty good. You’ll get a feel for how they would like to see the site built and how they would like to see the cars sold. Suggest that you were thinking of a set rate for a specific amount of cars, and a little extra for each one after this number. Ask them what they think a service like this would be worth to them on a monthly basis. Make sure you write everything down. When you have collected all of the information you need, your last question might be to ask them, that if you continue to receive positive responses and go ahead and start the business, would they be interested in being a customer.

Likely you would be told, that if your business can actually help them sell more cars, they will consider signing on with you — if you can indeed prove, you can help them sell cars. Still, there is a chance that some might tell you they intend on staying with their current way of advertising. Others might say to come back sometime later after it’s up and running.

When you have completed your interviews with this market segment, if you have over half of the people interested, it’s time to register an appropriate domain name and start building the business. You can easily find out what their current advertisements are costing them. You’ve been told how much they would be willing to pay for your service. You put your price in the middle so as not to be the most expensive, nor the least expensive, and that puts you in the ballpark. You will have a business with paying customers.