Marjorie Clayman’s Writing Portfolio

Professional writing profile of Marjorie Clayman

Archives for February 2012

For the love of the shame

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Social Media, you need to get your head on straight, and right quick. You’re heading for a wall that will not bounce you back into a nice place with lovely grass to sit on and delicious treats to eat. You’re heading for a wall that will turn you into a pancake (and not the kind that tastes good with syrup).

It’s weird to see this kind of sentiment pop up on my screen in this context as I type. After all, for a long time, probably a year (hey, that’s a long time in the world of social media) I had REALLY rosy glasses on. If a well-known person in the online space offered advice, I assumed it was solid. I was talking to my friend Jeannette Baer (@myagenda) about this the other day in fact. You wrote a book? Let me read it pronto! You say that I should focus on this more than that? Cool, I’m listening.

It’s not to say that I was a mindless robot, here to absorb you. It’s just…there seemed to be an air of credibility, intelligence, maybe even kindness.

Have I changed, or has the space changed?

Taking advantage of the desperate and ill-informed

Last year, when some well-known folks announced that they were writing books and doing webinars about Google Plus shortly after it launched, there was a lot of controversy and vitriol in the social media space. I have to admit, the back-and-forth got too personal and too ugly for me so I stayed away from most of the conversations. We talk about attacking the idea, but we know that doesn’t really happen. But having read some of the stuff recently that came out shortly after Google Plus launched, I realized it was, by necessity, very half-baked. This is simply a by-product of trying to make money educating people on how to bake a cake before your new cake is out of the oven. I spent a minimal amount of money and sort of knew what to expect, but it was disappointing nonetheless.

Then, I started noticing more stuff. I watched a few webinars that had really good titles – titles that seemed to promise actionable advice – but what I got was a book promotion. Same thing for blog posts I’ve read. I haven’t spent money on these things, but imagine if I had? Imagine if I said, “I’m going to teach you today how to best use social media if you are a B2B manufacturer. “Great!” You might think (assuming you’re a B2B manufacturer). What if you paid me, I don’t know, $50? $67? $291.22? And all you got was me talking about a book that was only loosely related to what you wanted to learn? You’d be a bit peeved, right? Especially if money was tight.

Then, Pinterest happened, and I have seen notifications for webinars on how to use Pinterest for your business. One such webinar costs you $139. This while there are copyright concerns and while many people are deleting their accounts rather than building them out. It’s entirely possible that everything in that webinar is great, but we just don’t know yet. It’s too early.

So why are we doing this again?

Gettin while the gettin is good versus taking advantage of people

I fear that the world of social media is being overrun by people who are more towards the snake oil salesman end of the spectrum. This makes me really sad. I’d love to go back to a year or two ago when I thought that everyone in the online world was just out to give me and other people a boost. But something is off. Something is different. Whether it’s in me or in the online world I’m not 100% certain. But it seems like there is confusion between tying money and sales to social media versus absolutely ripping people off. This is not sustainable for individuals or for social media as a means of marketing and communication, right?

Why can’t you wait to write that book? Why can’t you wait to charge $139 for that webinar? Is it because you might get beaten to the punch? It could happen, but isn’t it better to offer advice that is based on reliable information? You might not get the earliest of the early adopters, but things take longer to evolve than we might think. There will still be plenty of people who want to learn from you. Heck, there are still people who want to learn Twitter or Facebook. Did those earliest books and webinars stave off future adopters? Nah.

Sadly, we live in a time when people will be enticed to spend that $139 or whatever it is because they feel it’s an investment in the future of their brand or business, and it’s hard to talk yourself out of that kind of investment, isn’t it? It’s a mode of optimistic thinking. It’s a symbol of hope. It’s you being confident and self-assured. Is it a coincidence that these for-pay educational “events” are increasing as the economic recession continues? Maybe not. Maybe the folks offering those items see a fertile garden of people hoping and praying for that big silver bullet. Maybe that’s capitalism. But if it is, it’s capitalism’s ugliest side by far. And we should call it what it is – taking advantage. It’s not really educational if you can’t *possibly* know everything about what you’re talking about. And it’s only impossible to know everything about what you’re talking about because it simply does not exist yet. Simple as that.

What do you think? Is it right to jump in and charge people for information as soon as you have any? Is that the way to tie social media to hard dollars? Or are we heading towards a rather corrupt mode of communicating where “information” is short-cut-laden language masquerading as something more credible?

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bluerobot/5490728061/ via Creative Commons

#womenwednesday Maybe I’ll just go naked

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Not too long ago, FishbowlDC published a blog post called Females on Campaign Trail Go for Sexpot Look. The argument was that female reporters covering politics in DC and elsewhere are using über sexay pictures of themselves on Twitter. Well, actually, no. That’s not *quite* the issue. According to the post, which is complete with three allegedly disconcerting photos of female journalists, there’s the *chance* that women could start going for a “sexpot” look, and darn it all, that just might not be good for their brands.

Shortly before publishing this post, FishbowlDC published a short article with two photos of Hillary Clinton, who was wearing a “monochrome pantsuit.” You might recall that during the 2008 election Hillary’s pantsuits may have received more attention than the pending economic crisis and the war in Iraq COMBINED. What do these pantsuits mean? Is she trying to be too masculine? Is she trying to bespeak a sense of feminine power? Does she hate skirts?

Of course, politics is not the only place where the conversation about what women should wear is ongoing. Daria Giron invited me to participate in a 7-part series on the “executive image” last year because this issue is so much of an…issue. A friend of mine on Facebook recently lamented the lack of professionalism a lot of women seem to exhibit in their professional dressings. Some people complain that skirts are too short and shoes are too high. Others complain that women are looking too frumpy and old-fashioned. Are pantsuits really that bad? Should women wear pin-stripe skirts to sort of bridge the two genders? And then how do you accessorize?

AHHHHH!!

The really unfair thing about all of this, of course, is that for the most part, nobody gives a rat’s patootie about what men wear. Take Mark Zuckerberg as your case in point. The man wears hoodies nearly every day. Would a woman be able to get away with that?

Think about that for a moment.

Why does it matter?

Or maybe the better question is, Does it matter? If a woman has really good ideas, does that change because her skirt is an inch too high or an inch too short? If a woman is a passion-driven leader, does it matter that her lipstick might not be a similar shade to her nail polish? Does it matter if she doesn’t wear lipstick?

Perhaps, as women continue to excel in the business world and in other leadership positions, these roadblocks are put up as a way to question that success. If you can’t question a woman’s experience or intelligence, you can almost always find something wrong with how she looks. It’s all rather objective, right? If a woman tends to wear headbands, you can suggest that she isn’t professional enough. If a woman wears pants instead of skirts you can accuse her of trying to be too manly or not “feminine” enough. If a woman wears a lot of pink and purple, you can say she is trying to be too girly and too feminine. The list goes on and on. All of these types of criticism can achieve one simple goal – they can shed doubt on how the woman will perform in her new role.

Sadly, these kinds of roadblocks are often thrown out by women, not men. Now there’s a tidbit, huh?

What can we do to fight this pattern of behavior?

I’m sure there will always be an expectation that professional women should look professional. I think we could expect that of men and women, Zuckerberg be darned. But how can we stray away from this major emphasis on how a woman chooses to dress? Is it something we need to instill in young ladies as they grow up? Is it something we need to talk to men about? Is it just a matter of trying continuously to emphasize what really matters?

What are your thoughts on this issue?

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/14359321@N04/5085545292/ via Creative Commons

Announcing my first speaking gig!

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Hello!

I am very excited to announce that I will be one of the speakers at the 140Conference Montreal event in May! This will be my first official speaking engagement and I have to say that I am really looking forward to it. I am only slightly scared out of my pants that great people like Mitch Joel and Ric Dragon will also be speaking there 🙂

I’m truly honored and delighted that Mila Araujo asked me to come as a speaker, and I’m hoping I can meet many of you there as well. You WILL come, right? If you want to, register now, cuz Mila is doing a great job of enticing people to come see her and her city 🙂

Now, I just need to learn some French!

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/anirudhkoul/2062476413/ via Creative Commons

Myth: Failure is Sexy

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If you are around the online world long enough, one overriding factor starts to seem pretty darned exciting. You know what it is?

Failure.

You see a lot of quotes like this:

“Here are six random ideas that will help you fail better, more often and with an inevitably positive upside…”

A search on google for “failing is good” reveals a wealth of results:

You see a lot of tweets like this: The only way to truly fail is to never try. You don’t hit 100% of the pitches you don’t swing at. #NeverQuit

In fact, the romanticization of failure is such a thorn in my side that I actually ended up getting up on my soapbox about it in my review of Seth Godin’s Poke the Box.

To be fair, a lot of the blog posts and tweets and quotes out there are, I’m sure, meant to be inspirational. But it seems like we’ve gotten a little carried away, or a little separated from reality. The fact is that if you are in the business world, or if you are a marketer who is working with successful companies who want to stay successful, failure can actually be a really huge problem.

Consider this post from 2007 outlining some of the most famous product failures of all time. As the post aptly points out, failure in this case is not about a learning experience. These companies spent millions of dollars creating and then promoting these products. Would you want to say to your boss, “Well…at least we went for it!”? I am thinking that might not go over too well.

The personal versus the professional

A lot of folks in the world of social media talk about “Just going for it.” In your own personal life, that can be a fantastic philosophy. In fact, for a lot of people that push to try new things or to go out on a limb in some way can be almost lifesaving. If you’re worried about meeting new people, for example, pushing yourself to get involved in an organization can be very empowering for you. If you are worried about exercising, pushing yourself to do that can improve your life in all sorts of ways. If you don’t succeed in meeting a friendly person your first time out you can analyze why. If you don’t keep up with your exercise regimen, you can evaluate what you did to hold yourself back. You can learn from failing. You can learn from your mistakes. To a point.

Of course, there are even limits here. If you push yourself to a point where failing means that you lose a limb or fall to your death, learning from the experience is going to be a bit tricker, I’d wager.

But professionally, these days, going out on a limb can be considered reckless in a lot of scenarios.

In the world I come from, the agency world, failure is definitely not something that you want to equate with “a lesson well learned” or “a golden opportunity to grow.” In fact, that’s the reality for a lot of businesses today. The world is competitive. If you fail at your job, you know that there are literally thousands of people who will apply if you need to be replaced. Is that sexy? If your company fails to win a huge new partnership or a huge new product deal and your competitor wins, is that sexy? Will you reflect on what you learned from that experience? Maybe eventually, but it will take a long time for that dust to settle, right?

Of course, the biggest failure myth is that trying a new social media platform for your marketing campaign is a lot better than not trying at all, regardless of the final outcome. The latest splurge of posts on this topic focuses on Pinterest. Just as we heard with Foursquare and Quora and Google Plus, the posts are out there saying that if you are not claiming your Pinterest presence now, you will probably blow up. Spontaneously. It doesn’t matter if you fail there. It just matters that you try it (darn it)!

Of course, the teeny weeny problem with this online philosophy is that trying those new platforms still takes time, and as we all know, time equals money. If you or one of your employees dumps 3 months into trying a new platform and you don’t get a single lead, not to mention a single sale, what have you accomplished? Well, you lost a heckuva lot of money paying that person’s salary, for one thing. Your company might look kind of like a doofus, and many experts agree that a company looking like a doofus is not a good thing. In a worst case scenario, your efforts could really blow up thanks to a lack of knowledge or expertise and you could end up with a costly PR disaster on your hands.

Is this sounding particularly sexy to you? I’m kind of shaking in my wee boots right about now just thinking about it.

So what am I missing here? Is failure really sexy and I’m just not getting it? Is there some other angle that I am failing to understand?

Fill me in!

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaxsilver/4766356883/ via Creative Commons

 

 

 

Social Media Smart But People Stupid

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Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time, when I was about 8 months into my social media “stuff,” a pretty well-known person called me up and offered me a pretty neat chance at something. I was rather shocked, as you might imagine, and while I didn’t tell a whole lot of people, especially in the online world, I certainly was excited in my offline world. I mean, I was still a social media baby and this was happening. It was rather amazing. As time dragged on (and on) however, it became clear that things were not exactly going to come to fruition. In fact, after my last attempt to say, “Hey…what’s up?”I was basically given the “Don’t call me, I’ll call you” message. As if that wasn’t enough, this person used some of the ideas I had suggested afterwards. Ouch.

Now, for people in my offline world who think social media is kind of…skeevy….this did not come as much of a surprise. “These people build their careers based on pretty much nothing,” I was told. “Also, you don’t really know them.”

All fair enough, of course, but I still believed that there were people in the online world who really did mean stuff that they said. So, I got myself into another situation, then another, where I watched people act one way in the online world and then a completely different way offline. People who tout themselves as great consultants missed meetings. I entered a contest to win a pretty well-known book, won, and never received the book from the author. After following up twice, I was again basically told, “Yeah…um, I’ll follow up with you, k?”

Sadly, I have gotten to the point where I find myself wondering if anyone in the online world actually understands or absorbs what they are saying in those 140 characters or what they are saying in those blog posts. The words are always right, but are the words understood by the author, not to mention the readers?

Book Smarts versus Street Smarts

There are a lot of people who study for 20 gazillion years in colleges and universities. They can quote any Shakespeare sonnet and can probably name you 17 chemistry equations in 5 seconds.  However, they might not have any idea how to get places using the subway system. Similarly, there are people who might have dropped out of high school who manage to find a great deal of success based sheerly on what we might call street smarts or gut instinct. We differentiate between these two kinds of smarts. I’m thinking we might need to differentiate between “social media smart” and “people smart.”

Social Media Smart

What is social media smart? I would define it as being able to blog successfully, knowing how to navigate Twitter and Facebook, getting yourself on the speaker circuit and finding success there that then feeds back into your online success. In your public tweets and blog posts and Facebook updates, you know the right things to say to get yourself retweeted or “liked.” You know how the game works and you play it well. That takes skill.

People Smart

People smart is pretty different. Just like a lot of “people stupid” things happen offline, a lot of “people smart” things happen offline, too. While breaking your word in one way or another is pretty darned “people stupid,” exceeding a person’s expectations in some way is rather smart. While quoting inspirational people can be social media smart, offering help or motivation to a person who needs it in real life is people smart. While retweeting a person may be social media smart, reaching out to a person who has been quiet lately is people smart.

How can you be “social media smart” but “people stupid?”

Ah, that’s the real question, isn’t it? In order to succeed in social media, you need to at least know enough to pay lip service to things like “give to get” and “it’s not about you.” To be people smart, you have to really understand what that means. Maybe the line is getting blurry for some people. For example, if a person tweets to you and says, “Hey, I found that offensive” and you just scoff or continue, that is being people stupid, even if it’s getting you a lot of social media attention. If a person goes quiet, social media smarts might indicate that that’s one less person to worry about or compete with. People smarts says, “I wonder if they’re okay.”

Are people getting so used to typing to unmoving avatars that we are forgetting that there are real people behind those screens? Do we forget that the person we betray in real life is that same person we’ve been talking to and friendly with for a year or three? Is Social Media simply a “revenge of the nerds” scenario where socially awkward people can game the system to win notoriety of some sort?

Is Social Media really that shallow and simple?

What do YOU think is going on here?

Image Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/142350 

Mark Your Calendars! #tweetdiner and the Social Media ROI Question!

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The voting is complete, and the date and time for our #tweetdiner Social Media ROI Roundtable will be Thursday, March 1st at 7 PM EST. Please share this information if you’re of a mind because I’d love for this to be a great chat with lots of people! The original framing concept is below.

It seems like conversations about social media ROI are happening everywhere these days. It’s all over Twitter, all over the Blogosphere. Magazine articles ponder the ROI of social media. People ponder why people are confused about social media ROI. It has remained one of the hot topics in the online world and in the business world for months and even years.

The problem (in my mind) is that a lot of these conversations are happening like little islands. A person writes a blog post over here, a person tweets over there, and a butterfly flaps its wings in China. Wait, no, that’s something else. Anyway, I thought it would be neat to tie all of these conversations together with one chat that would focus on nothing but Social Media ROI – various thoughts, various modes of mythbusting – you get the idea.

The chat will be framed out for an hour but could go for as long as you’d want. Transcripts will be posted for those who can’t make it. My goal is that more people will come out of the chat finding themselves on the same page regarding the question (or concept) of ROI in social media. To me, the future of businesses using social media depends on thoroughly understanding this issue, so I do not take it lightly.

I hope I can look forward to seeing YOU there!

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdlasica/2723457360/ via Creative Commons