Archives for July 2011

if you want to engage, know who you’re talking to

Awhile back, I posted a survey here on ye olde blog. It was a very short survey and its purpose was simple. I wanted to learn a bit more about you. So I asked.

I know, it seems kind of strange, doesn’t it? So much of the online world seems based on hypothesizing and testing and guessing and then adjusting and testing again. I’m just downright lazy, I guess. I figured, “Well, why not just ask the people I’m talking to.”

I wanted to do this survey so that I could learn a little bit about who is coming here to read my content, and the hope/theory was that in learning a bit more about you, I could customize my content a bit better for, well, you.

Yes, I’m aware that if you didn’t take my survey this may not apply to you. I’m sure I’ll do another of these in the future 🙂

For now, here is a bit about you – my online community.

What I want you to learn from me

by Margie Clayman

Being a complete and total John Lennon nut along with being a possessor of a photographic memory, I happen to know that today marks a key and tragic day in Lennon’s life. You see, it was on July 13, 1958 that John’s mother was killed by a drunk driver. John was just shy of his 18th birthday. It would take years upon years for John to come to terms with this sudden and great loss. Even when he himself died tragically at the age of 40 (which is starting to look younger and younger to me), he had not been able to fully put this loss into a place where he could really wrap his head and heart around it. Even so, John attempted to help others deal with their pain. He did his best to try to help the world while he himself found life almost too trying to deal with. It is this ability to balance the outward and the inward that ultimately makes me respect John a great deal.

This is on my mind, in a round-about way, because I recently read a post by Amber Naslund called What I wish more people knew about me. Amber said a lot of people were writing posts along those lines these days. Her post is lovely, but it didn’t make me want to write a post exactly like that. Rather, it made me want to write a post about what I hope people learn from me, just like I learned from John Lennon (and others) that you can use your own experiences to try to help others who may be in the same situation or in more dire straits. It made me want to try to verbalize what I hope I leave with you when you take the time out to engage with me on a regular basis. It made me reflect on the legacy I hope I am building as I go day-by-day through life.

Ultimately, these things are things I learned myself, either by experiencing it and saying, “Oh!” or by learning at the feet of others. And in the end, while some of these things may be useful for business and may be relevant to a Social Media reality, what they really represent are things I’m trying to reach out and teach others around me in the world at large. Use at will.

So, with all of that in mind, here is what I want you to learn from me.

What August will look like at margie’s blog

by Margie Clayman

I asked, you answered! Here are the posts I’ll be writing in August!

8/1: The beauty of birthdays: Credit to Nancy Davis

8/2: A Day in the life of Margie: Credit to Brian Rice

8/3: Balancing Life, Work & everything else: Credit to Tanya Lavoie

8/4: Giving What You Get: Credit to Ellen Cagnassola

8/5: How Clayman Advertising has changed over the years: Credit to Lou Imbriano

8/6: A challenging cooking experiment: Credit to Jim F

Entitlement is the way to failure

by Margie Clayman

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Casey Anthony trial over the last few days. I’m not one of those people who watched it every single day and sweated over the piles of evidence more than the lawyers did. I would get little updates via Dateline MSNBC (a rather new guilty pleasure for me) or here and there on the news. When the jury recorded its verdict last week, I watched the announcements of innocence. I was confused. I was stunned. It seemed like OJ Simpson all over again.

As I have reflected more on both of those cases – OJ Simpson and Casey Anthony, I’ve moved away from the trials themselves to what could have gotten these 2 people to where they ended up. In both cases, I feel like a sense of entitlement led them both astray.

Google Plus: In which I feel like I’m taking crazy pills

by Margie Clayman

If you’ve ever seen the movie Zoolander, you know that there aren’t too many profound moments in the film. However, sometimes events in life can make silly things seem profound. Case in point – my observations on how Google Plus is being adopted by the masses.

So in the movie Zoolander (scooting back a bit), Derek Zoolander, played by Ben Stiller, has been at the top of the male modeling industry for years. One of his big claims to fame is all of his “looks.” In fact, he even makes a calendar that features each of his looks. Of course, each look is just the same facial expression, and all the facial expression consists of is slightly pursed lips and a look that tries to be seductive. Nobody seems to notice this, though, until the very end, when villain Mugatu (played by Will Ferrell) says something along the lines of, “Oh my God! Does no one see that he just has one look? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”

That sense of exasperation is how I am feeling about Google+ right now.

People have said that Google+ is a Facebook killer, an email killer, or a Twitter killer. To me, having talked about engagement for the last million years, Google+ is best poised to destroy all of the remnants of the idea of engaging online to grow your business.

I know, that’s kind of a sharp claim, so let me delineate some things, and then you can feel free to point me in the right direction 🙂

What does the word “friend” mean to you?

by Margie Clayman

Last week, after much peer pressure from Sandy Hubbard and Jeannette Baer, I worked to get an invite to come into my inbox, and I joined up with Google Plus. I had been wanting to wait a bit to see if the buzz about Google+ was going to remain hot and heavy for say, a month or so. I’m not really an early adopter type of person. But Sandy and Jeannette are trusted friends and they said I should try it, so, I did.

I’m kind of having a problem with Google+ to be honest with you. It’s not anything privacy-related. It’s not a huge issue, perhaps. But ya see, on Google+, as you make contact with people, you can put them in a “circle.” It’s like categorizing people. When you start out you have a friends circle, an acquaintances circle, a family circle, and I think there’s one more too. When I see that people have added me to their circles, I feel a sort of obligation to indicate that I see their existence there, but I’ve pretty much just been stuffing everyone into my “friends” circle. I don’t want to go through the trouble of categorizing people, and I don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings who uses the word “friend” differently than I do.

The whole process has made me think about the word “friend” as it exists in real life and as it exists in the online world, so I thought maybe we could talk about that and see where you come out on this issue.

Archives for July 2011

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