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Not having the answers is ok.

Saying “I don’t know” is fine. 

It opens up dialogue and helps you have better conversations. And sometimes, particularly in times of change and uncertainty, it can work better if you stay with that. Begin with “I don’t know” and from that, try to figure things out as you go along.

Hands Up If You Don’t Know The Answer

At school, you get told that if you don’t know something to put your hand up. At what age does that stop? 

Acknowledging that you don’t know and that many things are simply unknowable during this time of pandemic isn’t much in evidence these days.

You’ve probably seen companies trying to get you to sign up to a coronavirus themed webinar on what you need to do to succeed post-pandemic – these companies want to tell you about a future in which they’ve already carved out a role for themselves – supporting you. Coronavirus has given businesses an excuse to productise. 

The opposite of this prescriptive and self-interested “how to do well when business returns…” message is “I don’t know, but let’s figure it out together.” 

Working It Out As You Go Along 

This article looks at how things have changed my side recently and what I’m learning from the events that have affected everyone over the past two months.

It’s for you if you’re building something where you’re looking to retain customers and remain relevant in your market.

This article has a reflective feel to it, I tend to share this sort of material when something key happens to me personally. For instance in the past I’ve talked about burnout (read about that here), I’ve reflected on what I learned from putting on the You Are The Media Conference (read here) and what happened when I deleted the entire You Are The Media database (car crash here). These reflections become a scrapbook of sorts, in themselves representing a way for me to work things out.

We Should Have Been Together

Today, Thursday 21st May 2020, should have been the You Are The Media Conference.

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This has now been moved to the end of September. If it has to be moved again, it will be taking place in Spring 2021 (I’ll be making that decision in the next month and will keep you updated).

Looking back, I could never have predicted that live, in-person YATM events would all come to a halt and the momentum we were building in Bristol would be paused. It’s a salutary lesson in how we can never predict the future and foresee seismic events that can affect us all.

How It’s Been Instead  

Similar to millions of people, lockdown has taken its toll on me too. 

The days are running into one another, there’s repetition, more to do on the one side, less on the other and everything cloaked in uncertainty. Unsurprisingly, it’s had a major effect. 

Perhaps you’ve been feeling something like this too. 

Let’s start with some negatives and challenges from a personal perspective:

The struggle to balance work/family/homeschool.

I have two daughters – a seven-year-old and a five-year-old – and like many families across the UK, homeschooling is a key part of the everyday.

Homeschooling without places to take the children to, such as the library or museum adds to the pressure. It’s hard when everything has to be contained within your own four walls. On top of that, there’s client work and You Are The Media, vying for attention, as well as getting on with the ordinary business of family life. 

Exhausted at the end of each week.

Even if we’re not quite sure when the end of the week actually falls – the unrelenting family, work, education continuum being played out in one physical and emotional space means that by Friday afternoon, we’re all drained. A bout of tapeworm in our household (we all got it!) hasn’t helped matters.

Fear of becoming obsolete.

As my main company is a marketing consultancy, I understand that clients need to regroup and focus on matters internally, stabilising themselves before we pick up working together again.

Nevertheless, it still feels awful when work gets put on hold or initiatives get postponed. It’s like having a line of dominoes that keep toppling over and you can never be sure if the next one is going to be the one that just might remain standing. Knowing that this experience is being replicated all over the world doesn’t make standing in the middle of your own storm and facing it head-on, that much easier.

Decisions tend towards the reactionary. 

Initially I found myself taking on this role of overcompensating for there being no live, in-person events by trying to fill the gap that was left with online equivalents including a series of webinars (these did not, in the end, see the light of day). The unchartered waters of the early days of lockdown inevitably led to quite a few of these knee jerk reactions.

Where Things Flipped

As pandemic and lockdown pressure mounted, there were several options for You Are The Media:

Let everything pass and go quiet (all live events had to be paused anyway), retaining only the weekly YATM email as a means of keeping in touch

Document how businesses can adapt and chronicle how life through lockdown is going as you live through it (via the weekly email)

Go back to the basics and share what people need to do to be building their database / audience so they can then create and share their narratives.

I became territorial and brought everything back to the reason why YATM exists in the first place – helping people build their own spaces from which to talk to their audiences. 

The times we’re living through, the coronavirus and lockdown, inevitably find their way into the YATM content but what’s also been growing is a sense of opportunity: Now is the time to show my hand and share how the YATM concept works and can be put to good use, serving all kinds of businesses. 

Whilst distraction was everywhere, I pulled back to dig deep into what you can do and how you can do it. You can read what I mean here: the questions to ask yourself before you start ,topic ideas to generate creation  and how to get your first ten email subscribers.

As well as bringing things back to basics and so, familiar territory, an online format of the You Are The Media Lunch Club was decided upon and launched.

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This has always had a cost associated with it and whilst we trialed the first online YATM Lunch Club event to see if it could work, for free, this has now become a regular fortnightly occasion with a small cost involved (£10).

We’ve also introduced a fortnightly quiz, held on a Friday at 5pm, where the second and fourth placed become the sponsors/ads for the following week’s online event. 

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Both the written content and online events represent everything that makes up playing to YATM’s strengths. 

Doing the sorts of things that people would find easy to get back into whilst everything else around them was still unsettled has helped our re-positioned YATM offering be adopted as a new routine for our community.

It reflects this sentiment, shared by Seth Godin (Monday 11th May): “The minimal viable audience concept requires that you find your cluster and overwhelm them with delight. Choose the right cluster, show up with the right permission and sufficien