Archives for September 2011

Let’s Talk About How To Make the Most of Retweets

Ah, retweeting content on Twitter. Such a good idea. I mean, retweeting seems like it carries so much more weight than that little thumbs up on Facebook or that little +1 on Google Plus, doesn’t it? It has so much potential!

Sadly, a lot of people retweet in just the same way that they “like” or “+1.” It’s all a matter of clicking a button. However, in the world of Twitter, you are missing out on a world of opportunity if you just hit “retweet.” If you add a brief comment before or after your retweet, you are showing the person you’re retweeting that you really know and appreciate what they said (or maybe you really didn’t appreciate it, but at least they know you’re not responding without much care). You’re also passing along another person’s content to your followers in such a way that they are getting that content plus your take on it. That’s pretty darned efficient for 120 characters, I think!

So how can we make the most out of that little RT? Here are some ideas that I use.

Do I Have to Eat the Grits to Get the Tasty Stuff?

by Margie Clayman

I love this post by my friend Judy Helfand! So glad she wrote it for me 🙂 Judy Helfand is co-owner of Webconsuls, LLC, functioning as a Project Manager. She has worked for a number of Fortune 500 companies in both the banking and insurance industry and has successfully owned and operated two small businesses – a country inn in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and Webconsuls, LLC. Judy’s personal blog is Judy’s Op-Ed and she also writes and manages Webconsuls’ Blog. Feel free to follow her Twitter @judyhelfand.

Do you have a favorite recipe for grits?

That’s right. I want to know how you prepare grits. The reason I ask is while reading The Help, I came across this passage:

“In the kitchen, I fix some grits without no seasoning, and put them baby marshmallows on top. I toast the whole thing to make it a little crunchy. Then I garnish it with a cut-up strawberry. That’s all a grit is, a vehicle. For whatever it is you rather be eating.”

I was so taken by these few sentences that I stopped reading for a minute, dog-eared the page, and then thought about how most of what we do in the social media world is to use vehicles that might propel us into those prestigious social media communities and from there who knows.

Think about this for a minute. Do you like GRITS or is it the salt, butter, and/or brown sugar that is sitting on top of the GRITS? The same with oatmeal or cream of wheat. Do you like french toast or is it the maple syrup, melted butter, preserves that are dripping down each slice of toast? Would you eat the french toast if you were out of butter, cinnamon, maple syrup or preserves? My guess is you wouldn’t bother. You wouldn’t waste your energy, you would just eat a couple of slices of bread to ease your immediate hunger. (Although my father liked to put salt and pepper on his french toast, but maybe that was a holdover from the depression.)

Remember when you would add excessive cream to your coffee and your friends might have quipped: “Gee, why not have some coffee with your cream?” The truth is you probably really didn’t like coffee, but if you added enough cream to it so you could tolerate the coffee and join in the old-fashioned coffee break – you were magically part of the community.

But back to today’s virtual social communities, what vehicle(s) do you have to use in order to get to be where you want to be? Are you using these vehicles: blogs,Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, disqus, livefrye, chats? That’s just seven, there are hundreds. I don’t have to name them all. And yes, I know I didn’t mention Google+ or Triberr. Maybe the more important question is where do you want to be? Or need to be?

Let’s Talk About Getting That First Reply On Twitter

by Margie Clayman

When I first started on Twitter, as I have recounted many a time before, I thought that I was missing out on a really huge joke. I had been hearing about how great Twitter was for about 2 years, and I decided that I should at least be able to talk intelligently about why so many people thought it was great. I figured I might as well jump in and try it out. I expected that I’d send a few tweets out, people would start talking to me, and then I’d be all set.

Boy was I wrong.

First of all, as so many people new to Twitter do, I followed most of the accounts that Twitter suggested. Say hello to Rainn Wilson, Harvard Business Review, Yoko Ono, Fast Company, Mashable, and Michael Ian Black. I was sort of scratching my head. Do these folks reply to someone who is just getting used to Twitter? As I stuck around a bit, the answer became clear. No. No they don’t.

In the meantime, I had started to follow enough people that I noticed that there were conversations going on. In fact, some people had really fun conversations. Some people could say anything and it would get retweeted. Boy was I jealous of them. I couldn’t get a single person to reply to me. I tried everything. Since I was having the same problem on my blog, I was getting quite the complex. Was I doing something wrong? Was I just too new? How long did you have to stick around before you had cut your teeth enough?

In short, I was getting rather discouraged with the whole mess.

A Bit About Just Joe Music

by Margie Clayman

This excellent introduction to a great site was written by my friend Mark Robertson. Have a talk with him on Twitter @markosul.

Joe Dixon, of justjoemusic, is a “musing muso,” who tells us about his life and experiences with references to songs. He also writes a letterly in which he explores the depth and breadth of a classic album; his writing has some technical language, but is focused on his experience in a life marinated in music.

The work is credible. His words are underpinned with a deep, almost charitable love for music; his stories are elegantly threaded through sound, beat and lyric.[1]

Critics don’t do this. They “break the album” with a rating and highly-pretentious language that often distracts; critics from The Guardian and the A.V. Club, among others, use elegant prose, but I see their work as “implicitly autobiographical.” We learn more about what they can say about new music–how to categorize and how to create buzzwords.

In a recent letter about Tool’s album Lateralus he explains some of the technical complexity (viz., 5/4 time signature), but focuses his attention on the way the music broke new ground in his sonic imagination. His most recent blog post is about eye-contact aversion and Billy Bragg. The reader feels an affinity to the experience and has a sense of the way music informs and resonates with our experience.

Here’s a riff from his letter on the final track from Tool’s Lateralus:

Let’s Talk About the Advantages of Content Curation

by Margie Clayman

On the first post in this series, we talked about how to get started on the road to curating content. Today I want to talk with you a little bit about why it’s beneficial to travel on that curation road.

Now, a lot of the answers are probably going to seem rather humdrum to you if you’ve read about this subject before. For example, a lot of people talk about “link love” or “link juice” when they talk about curating online content. That’s because if you format your post just so, you are giving a lot of context-rich links to the person whose post you’re curating. Google loves contextual links, so you are doing that person a really nice favor. In return, many people will mention your curation of their post via Twitter or maybe even via their own blog, so you get some traffic love in return.

Another benefit we’ve talked about right here at this very site is that curating content can help you build community. You get to meet other bloggers, and as I’ve found, you also get to meet a lot of other curators. You get to read and share a lot of different perspectives, and you can build yourself a reputation, and a community, based on being a resource for valuable, well-written information.

Let’s Talk About How to Start Curating Content

by Margie Clayman

One of the great things about my particular community, I’ve discovered, is that people aren’t afraid to ask me questions. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been writing a lot about curating content online both here and at 12most.com. Martina McGowan tweeted me and said, “This all sounds great. How do I get started though?”

That’s a pretty good question, and in fact, Martina’s question sparked the idea not just for this post but also for the entire “Let’s Talk About” series. So thanks, Martina!

How I got started curating content

I’ve said it before, and I’ll very probably say it again, but I feel curating content is very much like generating content in that everyone needs to find their own way to do it. If you look at one of Ingrid Abboud’s post round-ups they are very different from those that Jason Sokol does. Both of them curate differently than I do. No way is right or wrong, and I’m sure we all got started in different ways, too. So, I’m just going to tell you what I know, which is how I got started curating content.

The fact is, I started gathering posts because I felt like I was really slacking when it came to reading peoples’ blogs. When I first started doing this “social media stuff,” I started blogging and tweeting at the same time. I figured if I was going to tweet, I should have a way to prove I can talk in more than 140-character phrases, and I figured if I was going to blog, I should have a way to promote what I was doing. What I quickly discovered, however, was that just promoting my own content was not all that exciting for me or for my followers. I needed to pass along information that was interesting to other people.

At first, I tried to go the newsy route. I would go to sites like BtoBonline.com or Mashable. The thing is, everybody goes to those sites. There are Twitter accounts that already flash their headlines out. I wasn’t really performing a great service for anybody, and I wasn’t supporting the bloggers I was getting to know, either. So, I started reading blogs, but then I found that I just kept going to the same sites over and over. That wasn’t good either.

At my wit’s end, I decided to start something I called “30 Thursday.” My goal was to read enough posts so that I could promote my 30 favorites every Thursday. If you think that’s a lot of reading, you’re absolutely right, but here’s the little trick I tried that helped out a lot. When I first started curating content, I didn’t just choose posts I liked. I also asked people to let me know what they were reading that they liked. A lot of people took advantage of this opportunity, and when I did my round-ups I would credit those people by saying, “Xyz brought this post to my attention…” This helps you build your community on a lot of different levels, it exposes you to content you might not otherwise have seen, and you get to network with the new bloggers, too. It worked out pretty well for me in terms of teaching me the ropes of the online world.

Archives for September 2011

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