blogging – From the desk of Adam Thomas

A quick story

Yesterday I tried Highrise. Highrise is a CRM (customer relationship management) tool that helps keep track of the people you meet. I signed up for the free option, looked at the tools, and got excited. I wanted this tool to systematize my follow-up, and it looked promising.

After adding my contacts, I went into my account and turned on a feature that automated adding contacts to my Highrise account. It seemed non-intrusive enough, add a bcc (thank you Outlook Macros) to every email and it would get the account. You also connect your Gmail account, and voilà – everyone gets sorted into the software.

I thought I could set it and forget it, and I ended up breaking one of my new rules: segmentation is king. I didn’t realize how much email I receive in a day, and this captured everything. Without segmenting and keeping a tight leash around what I let in or out, I opened the floodgates. In two days, it went from working fine to sending everyone that I correspond with an error message.

It didn’t look good, and it served as a great reminder of that lesson of segmentation, and it reminded me that lessons come in the form of annoyances.

Yellow Blogging and the Mistake

It’s very easy to mistake someone for anyone or accuse them of something. On a small personal scale, this isn’t a big deal. A simple excuse me, a look in the offended persons eyes, and a sorry will clear up 99.99% of the issues., as long as it is sincere. Nothing really lingers past that moment of time, and both parties can go about their lives with a simple anecdote.

It gets very tricky when that mistake is on a larger scale. When you can’t apologize, you open the door for things to get confusing emotionally. When you don’t know the other person, you inflict random pain on someone for usually a short-term gain. There is rarely, if ever, an apology and its a lot harder for both sides to move on. There is a scar there, and since we have something on a larger scale, there is more chance for something mutated, changed, and outright wrong.

Some internet blogs are the worst of this. Nothing matters past the story and the juiciest of the potential story. Many sacrifice truth to get views, targeting public figures and using embarrassing picture to frame a narrative that makes people’s blood going. These stories, shared on social media and the effect is further amplified. The story now changed, and discussed by people who do further damage to someone or somethings reputation, some who don’t even know where the original source was. A picture and a damning headline can go a long way on social media.

“Yellow” blogging like yellow journalism, is the attempt to gain people’s attention by using the most shallow and definitely superficial parts of our humanity to dig into those around us. And hopefully, it will meet the same end.

In the meantime, it is up to us to demand more from our sources of information. People are looking for speed… perhaps we can get more if we slowed down.