20160612 Ice Cream Sundae #37: About Community

Hi ,Apologies, the newsletter is sent late out today - again! Thanks to Heather’s shout out in the 2015/2016 Strategist Survey published this week there’s a bunch of new people who subscribed to receive this email, welcome if you’re one of them! And of course welcome if you’re a regular reader too. The Strategist Survey, new feedback about my newsletter from friends and the conversation with game designer Greg Stolze published on my podcast this week make a great opportunity to write about community this week.  I changed careers a few times before becoming a marketing & brand planner / strategist.  There’s an ongoing debate about those two titles, a topic for another day. It’s not an easy role to get into: typically planning and strategy is the smallest team in a advertising or marketing agency. There just aren’t many of strategist jobs available compared with client services, creative and production teams. When I found out about the discipline and chose to go in this direction, I started looking into what other planners were doing and basically mimicked them. I read planner blogs who comment about the industry and started my own. I reached out to planners asking to meet them for coffee, or to have their take on the best way to find a job. I interacted with them on Twitter. One of the first events I attended, Beersphere Christmas drinks, happened to be organised by a well-known strategist, Faris Yakob. The first two planners I met that night were Faris and Neil Perkin, another prominent blogger in this kind of marketing circle. I introduced myself as a planner looking for work and was welcomed with smiles and enthusiasm. I felt immediately accepted and part of the group, a community. The people I met that night and fascinating conversations I had with them gave me the confidence to believe I could do the job and I brought that with me in subsequent interviews. I was a planner, only missing a job, someone to give me a chance to prove I could do it. That chance came along when I met George Nimeh at iris. If you’d like to hear more about it and George’s awesome stories of the early days of digital marketing check out his interview on my podcast.  It’s thanks to a community of planners / strategists being nice and open that I am where I am today professionally.   I always enjoy the variety of fascinating, smart and interesting people I get to meet in my line of work. I found out about Heather LeFevre’s initiative called the Strategist (previously Planner) Survey at about the same time. It’s a community initiative Heather started to find out if she was being fairly paid as a woman, and help her negotiate a raise. More and more planners participated year after year, completing an online survey and then reporting on information such as salary averages, whether planners were happy in their jobs and more. While I was traveling around Asia and freelancing a few years ago I got in touch with Heather and joined the team to help analyse the survey’s data. It’s my way to contribute to the community and I’ve really enjoyed it. It’s probable not every planner considers other people doing a similar job as part of their community, though as Heather mentions in the latest survey there is definitely value in seeing ourselves as one. I know I am part of the community of planners and strategists, I learn and grow the more I share and exchange with them. I do that in person, via Twitter, Facebook, my podcast, this newsletter, attending professional events and conferences, etc. I’m around if you need anything I can provide, always happy to catch up and meet fellow strategists. A community are also stronger in the face of adversity. As you may know I enjoy playing tabletop roleplaying games. I published a great conversation with Greg Stolze this week, he co-designed one of my favourite roleplaying games: Unknown Armies.  Unknown Armies is a game of power and consequences, transcendental horror and furious action: Pulp Fiction meets Hellraiser.  The game takes place in the here and now, our modern world with a twist: occult and seriously weird stuff going on that you might be investigating or causing as a playing character in the game. We talked about group concepts in the game, the best way to organise a group of players so they are united, as a community. Last year when I lived in the South of France I started a game of Unknown Armies with friends and the first thing I asked them during our first session before even creating their characters was to discuss and choose what kind of group they were, why their characters would be united and working together. They started bouncing ideas around and quickly enjoyed the idea of playing a family: siblings and cousins, arguably the strongest possible kind of bond between their characters and a great reason to look out for each other. It also gave them enough flexibility to have different kinds of interests, jobs, skills and personalities for each individual character. They were five players, two groups of sibling cousins and they came up with the idea that their mothers were twin sisters. As a game master, while they were brainstorming their family and characters’ backstories, I started having plenty of cool plot ideas. Family stories are rife with potentially dark pasts and secrets. The campaign we played has an online page if you’d like to check out what they got up to, though it’s mainly written in French. They created their own community and reasons for being united in the face of the kinds of weirdness and adversity and plot twists I’d be throwing at them during the game.You’ll be glad to know that community comes from the Old French “Comunet醖 Things held in common.  Community: A social unit of any size that shares something in common; it could be values, interests, location, beliefs, activities, etc.  I watched Eddie the Eagle this week, a film based on the true story of an Englishman who dreamed of being an Olympic athlete. Warning, there are few minor spoilers coming ahead but it’s really not like Usual Suspects, you’ll be fine. Eddie trains and fails at most sports until he settles on Ski Jumping for the Winter Olympics. I liked it; it’s a simple, moving and uplifting movie. The story of an underdog almost nobody believes in and who proves everyone wrong – classic winner as stories go. In the context of community, it’s an interesting way to demonstrate a pitfall of some communities: sometimes people become closed off to others and turn what a community in a private club. Because sharing is at the heart of community as a concept, I think it’s vital that communities be open to newcomers. Instead in the movie, nobody takes Eddie seriously; other ski jumpers don’t accept him so he decides to go jump on his own and ends up at the hospital. Whether they’re based around interests, sports, activities, professions or whatever, communities have a certain responsibility to share their knowledge with people interested in joining or learning about it. A private club sounds great; we all naturally want recognition at various degrees and being accepted in an exclusive environment is gratifying. However closed off environments grow stale without enough new input, like the leftover ponds from the previous rainy season around the Amazon basin. That’s where the piranhas thrive. It takes an effort to watch out for people interested the same things and look after them if and when they need. It’s a worthwhile effort though. I thought about communities for the content of my podcast, most of my guests come from my professional community or my interest in games. Last but not least, I’d be amiss if I didn’t mention one of my favourite sitcoms before I finish this Sundae: Community. It’s one of the funniest and geekiest comedies I know, particularly the first few seasons. I highly recommend checking it out if you haven’t seen it. It’s one of the only fairly mainstream shows to have done a decent job of showing what a tabletop roleplaying game is: a whole episode of the group playing a game of Dungeons & Dragons, check out this two minute scene from the episode. That’s it for this Sundae; thanks for reading! If you enjoyed it please forward it to a friend, another community member or share it your social network! CheersWillem

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