Ever find yourself wishing you had a quick-and-easy place where you reference good information for yourself or direct others. You know, the kind of place where you didn’t have to worry about it being “crowdsourced” or “publicly edited” or just plain bad advice?
Me too.
Because we pass through a lot of information, it stands to reason we must have a lot of reference information, right? Nope. Like everyone else, most of our information comes from either experience or outside sourcing.
When an industry organizations steps up with information I don’t have to worry about either being too-vague to be helpful or so-product specific that it’s an infomercial, I get excited.
As a generalist, I’m routinely asked questions about anything from the best tread pattern on Class C motorhomes for occasional off-road travel (a consensus of RV owners leans toward the Goodyear G647, whether in 16, 19.5, 22.5 or 24.5 rim sizes, but the Toyo M-154 Commercial truck tire gets high ratings across A,B, and C classes) to the reason why some accessory companies advertise their products as “semi drop-in (because there are very tight tolerances in precision equipment and inexperienced amateurs with Dremel tools shouldn’t be making “fine adjustments”).
Having been a generalist for a long time- in a variety of industries- I have compiled an address book that’s full of contact information for nearly any category imaginable.
Lots of that contact information took work to get. When I speak about building rapport with the media (not much call for that speech anymore), I have a treasured example of how not to get your experts in front of the media. It’s a well-worn, but never used, reference book for a prestigious private college. Inside is almost any information you would want to find the right “expert” among their faculty on almost any subject. It has photos, bios, areas of expertise inside particular areas of expertise. It obviously took a lot of time- and money- to produce.
Unfortunately, it’s missing the most essential bit of information: contact information. There’s not a phone number, email address or any other of contacting anyone at the school. Somehow, this reference piece managed to get through the edit process without anyone noticing there isn’t a single bit of contact information anywhere inside the nearly 100-pages of spiral bound information.
Granted, it’s obviously outdated, but it’s a classic example of losing sight of the objective.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation has a release in today’s news sections that shows how they recognize the need to put good information out in useful formats. Today, that means in a form that can quickly be inserted into social media.
They call it a Share Center and it features key facts within trending firearm-related issues, from the fallacies of “ghost guns” and “universal background checks” to truths about conservation, and responsible gun ownership. I’m told there are other topics coming, and that’s exciting.
We are always looking for good information. Especially things that are well-organized and assembled in a simple-to-understand format.
Check them out, and spread the real word about guns, gun owners and conservation. It’s simple as: Hover. Click. Share.
Information is power. Useful information is powerful- and it changes minds.
We’ll keep you posted.
— Jim Shepherd