Internet Free Day

Every so often when peo­ple email me, they’ll be greeted with an auto-​responder with “Internet Free Day” as the sub­ject line.

The mes­sage I sent out yes­ter­day went like this:

Thanks for send­ing me an email!
I’m tak­ing a day away from the inter­net today. My wire­less is
dis­abled, my to-​dos for the day have been writ­ten out by hand, and my
var­i­ous screens will mostly be turned off.
If you really need to get ahold of me today, please phone me. You may get my voice-​mail, but I will be check­ing it at
reg­u­lar inter­vals through­out the day.
Thanks,
David Pensato

I spend a lot of time online. We all do now. And espe­cially with smart­phones putting the inter­net into our pock­ets, there’s always some­thing com­pelling to spend time with. Disconnecting from it all just for a day is incred­i­bly refresh­ing and sur­pris­ingly productive.

It’s not a vacation—I still work, and often find it really effective. I plan the day before and write out or print any­thing I may need for the day. Then, I set up my auto-responder, turn off my computer, change my phone mes­sage and set my phone to air­plane mode.

Just this sim­ple act—turning the inter­net off for the day—feels like a rev­e­la­tion every time. Our brains really are increas­ingly tied to hyper­links and the pings of social net­works and the instant access to infor­ma­tion that we might not oth­er­wise bother to look up. When you turn that off for the day, your brain (well mine, any­way) finds dif­fer­ent pat­terns and dif­fer­ent ways of doing things.

It can spend some time with a sin­gle thought.

Sometimes, I cheat and poke in here and there. When I do, the effect isn’t quite the same, and I know I’ll need to sched­ule another before long.

If you haven’t tried this before, I highly rec­om­mend it. And before you say you can’t pos­si­bly because your client/​boss/​colleague won’t like it, con­sider this: I’ve never got­ten a sin­gle neg­a­tive reac­tion to this auto-​response.

If you give it a try, let me know. I’d like to hear about what you found.

It’s not about your message

I hate to say it, but it’s true.

Marketers really like to talk about hav­ing a strong cen­tral mes­sage or pro­mot­ing “that one big idea” or some other such ter­mi­nol­ogy. The prob­lem is that after 60 years of adver­tis­ing, peo­ple see right through it. The gig is up.

In the inter­ac­tive age, there are lots of mes­sages, and they are dynamic and rela­tional. You can craft a mes­sage or an image or a cam­paign and try to con­trol it as tightly as you want, but the inter­net won’t let you hold onto it. People will send their own mes­sages. People will craft their own tools to usurp your mes­sage and bend it to their own will.

It’s not about your mes­sage. It’s about you.

Do you know who you are? Do you know what you stand for? Do you know what you believe in? Firm that up. Be the best you you can be and con­nect with peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions that are compatible.

That’s what an inter­ac­tive brand does: it holds true to itself and alters course based on real, hon­est com­mu­ni­ca­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion with the part­ners in its network.

You are the mes­sage, and the net­work is your metaphor. Take that to heart and run with it. I promise you, you’ll win in the end.

Eventful time ahead

February is usu­ally a dead month around Winnipeg. The cold­est of the cold, the final stretch of short days and wind­chill in a place that sees hot, action-​packed sum­mers with beau­ti­ful lakes and beaches and world-​class festivals.

But in February, sum­mer is a long, long way off.

So what have I gone and done? I’ve got­ten myself involved in orga­niz­ing not one, but two excit­ing events that month! The next few weeks are going to be very busy for me while I bal­ance some great client projects with two major vol­un­teer efforts that I feel quite pas­sion­ate about. Wish me luck!

TEDxManitoba 2012—WhatIfx (design by circletheft)The first event, TEDxManitoba is tak­ing place on February 9th, and needs very lit­tle intro­duc­tion. Now in its sec­ond year, we have a great group of peo­ple on the orga­niz­ing com­mit­tee, an excel­lent line-​up of speak­ers from all over the place, and a stel­lar set-​up for our venue. If you haven’t checked it out yet, please do—and be sure to catch our live stream on event day.

The sec­ond event is brand new. And pos­si­bly a lit­tle bit insane.

Actif Epica, which will take place on February 18th, began life when my co-​organizer Ian Hall rode a win­ter bike race in Minnesota last win­ter. Over the fall, he approached me and said that he would like to try some­thing like that here, and did I think there was we could make it into some­thing more than a bike race? He had the route planned out (more or less), and we began work on cre­at­ing a DIY, grass-​roots, self-​organizing win­ter fes­ti­val, with an empha­sis on human-​powered, out­door activ­ity in the winter.

Actif Epica (poster by circletheft)

The whole thing is based on an inter­ac­tive strat­egy focussed on con­nect­ing with peo­ple and cre­at­ing serendip­ity. It winds up as some­thing like a crowd-​sourced fes­ti­val plat­form—the bike race (130 km along the Crow Wing Trail from St Malo to St Boniface) and it’s var­i­ous check­points, along with five event prin­ci­ples pro­vide a frame­work for peo­ple to hook into and cre­ate some­thing new or build on some­thing they’ve been doing for a while. We all get together and col­lab­o­rate on mak­ing some­thing spe­cial. Something beau­ti­fully human.

So far, it’s work­ing beau­ti­fully! We have part­ners lin­ing up along the route, includ­ing Festival des Amis, who will host the start­ing line for the chal­lenge and Festival du Voyageur, who will host it’s fin­ish line. We have orga­ni­za­tions like Green Action Centre, who are host­ing an event that’s a lit­tle bit more on the for­mal side (though def­i­nitely fun), and we’ve heard from lots of peo­ple who are inter­ested in throw­ing together quick, low-​key games of shinny and even murm­ers of a frozen ulti­mate fris­bee tour­na­ment. It’s tak­ing its own shape, which is exactly what we hoped for.

If you haven’t yet taken the time to read the speaker pro­files for TEDxManitoba to see who you’d like to watch on the live stream, please do. They all even give us links to their favourite TED talks, so you can get a sense of what tick­les their brains.

And if you hap­pen to be around Winnipeg in February, there are lots of ways to get involved and have fun at what is sure to become an incred­i­ble Manitoban tra­di­tion of fac­ing the cold and laugh­ing at it. :)