Marjorie Clayman’s Writing Portfolio
Professional writing profile of Marjorie Clayman
Alan Berkson asked me to gather up some posts for people who are just getting started on Twitter. I thought that was a pretty good idea. There are a lot of different opinions out there, so it can get pretty confusing. I’ve done my best to gather posts that I myself found really helpful (that does not explain why I included posts I wrote, by the way) or posts that I thought raised some interesting questions about Twitter.
I hope you enjoy!
My friend Jim F suggested I write something about cooking a new recipe. As it happens, I recently tried a new recipe. See, one of my favorite things to do in the kitchen is to try to recreate some of my most favorite restaurant meals. After all, while I love eating out, it gets kind of pricey, especially if the food is good. I never look at those websites that illegally post the ingredients or anything like that. I just sort of take my best guess and see if it ends up anywhere near as good as the original.
In this particular case, I was trying to recreate this ridiculously good pita pizza that a local restaurant makes. I looked at their menu to see the description. A vegetarian chili, tahini sauce, cheddar cheese, on their special pita bread. It seemed pretty doable. Of course I had no idea what ingredients were in their chili, but I figured I’d experiment and see what I could come up with. As it happened, I ended up with something that was darned delicious. Maybe not a whole lot like the original. Maybe not even as good. But still entirely satisfactory to me and my taste buds.
And that’s where the lesson about blogging comes in.
[Read more…] about Why Blogging Is Like Cooking Something New
Lou Imbriano suggested I talk about how things have changed at our family-owned agency, Clayman Advertising, over the years. I am extremely fortunate to represent the third generation of my family in this business. My grandfather started the company back in 1954, my grandmother worked as the bookkeeper for the first 24 years,, my dad started working at the company about 35 years ago, and my mother has been working there for about 20 years, and I just celebrated my 7th anniversary (seems kind of pidley compared to those numbers!).
Of course, as you might expect, an awful lot has changed in our company, even just in the time that I’ve been there. When I started as a media buyer in 2004, the marketing world was still a bit tentative about website advertising because of the dot-com crash at the beginning of the century. My work was primarily in dealing with print publications. Google and Yahoo were cooking things that we really didn’t have a full grasp of yet (although it was already becoming apparent these were going to be forces to be reckoned with). My knowledge of web 2.0 was livejournal.com, and there certainly were not any cells of my brain thinking that business would have a place in that world. Twitter and Facebook didn’t exist yet.
[Read more…] about A Family-Owned Business in the 21st Century
My friend Ellen Cagnassola (aka @SweetSoaps) suggested I write something about entitlement. My friend Daria Giron has also been dealing with entitlement in a new series, and I wrote a bit about it after the Casey Anthony trial ended. Isn’t it interesting that so many of us have entitlement on our minds?
Maybe it’s not coincidental.
One of the most interesting things I’ve read lately has been the opening of Carol Roth’s The Entrepreneur Equation (the rest of the book is just as good, mind you). There, Carol suggests that maybe the American Dream as we have known it has passed away. The idea that you don’t just go from rags to riches but that you actually need to work your tail off to get there eludes a lot of people, or at least that’s the way it seems.
I think the online world makes this worse. We’ve seen a lot of success stories of enormous proportions, right? The person who started a Twitter account and immediately made a million dollars. The bloggers who get all of the income they need from their blogs (and they always seem to say it was a total accident or fluke). It’s easy to say, “Hey, why shouldn’t I get some of that?”
[Read more…] about This is the dawning of the age of entitlement
Tanya Lavoie wanted to talk about that whole work/life/social media/everything else balance issue that so many of us are dealing with these days. I wrote a post awhile back about how to juggle the personal and the professional just in the online realm, but things get a lot more complicated when you start talking about your whole life. This topic seems to be surfacing a lot these days in the online world because of the rise of Google Plus. Even before that, my friends Ian Rountree and Nic Wirtz started HardRefresh.net in response to the onslaught of Social Media fatigue.
So what can we do about this problem? Well, I can only tell you what works for me, but it seems to work pretty well. It’s two tricks. One – allot segments of time that you want to dedicate to certain tasks. Two: try to set up a schedule, which can help you figure out where to fit in those allotted segments of time.
[Read more…] about Juggling Work, Life, And Everything In Between
A lot of people seem to want to know how I wile away the hours of my life. Brian Rice specifically wanted to know what a day in my life is like. I’m taking the optimistic approach in assuming that you all are not planning on making Margie doppelgangers who will begin by befriending me and then will take over the world. As long as we know that’s not your plan, here is my exciting life in a nutshell.
So, like a lot of you, I’m sure, my day actually starts before I roll out of bed. The first thing I do is check my email. It’s a way to sort of preview what the day may hold. Then I check my Twitter mentions and my Facebook stream. Now that I know what is going on, I’m ready (sort of) to get out of bed. All of that is now much more fun, by the way, with my new iPhone, whom I have affectionately named Jorge.
I try to fit in 15 minutes of curating posts for the Blog Library before I get ready for work. I usually can read, add, and tweet out 2-3 posts in that time period. I may also tweet out a post of my own.