Marjorie Clayman’s Writing Portfolio

Professional writing profile of Marjorie Clayman

Archives for February 2012

#womenwednesday Cuz Women Like To Talk And Shop

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I was still pretty new to the world of social media when this article was published in Vanity Fair called “America’s Tweethearts.” The article is allegedly an insight into how a handful of women built their Twitter empires. There are a few things I’d like to draw your attention to, apart from the “come hither” photo of the women all dressed in trench coats and high heels.

“Twitter doesn’t even require real sentences, only a continual patter of excessively declarative and abbreviated palaver.” (thank goodness, because my little woman brain can’t handle full sentences most of the time).

This one was really interesting:

Each day, these women speed easily across the Twitformation Superhighway on their iPhones and laptops, leaving droppings in their wake: “getting highlights before class,” “I hrd u had fun!,” “Wah, missing my twittr time!” They use a lot of “hashtags,” which is a way of identifying posts on a certain topic—like Twilight or Tiger’s mistresses—and often participate in chain-letter-style tweets, adding their haiku to such threads as OMGFacts. (Sample OMGs: “You’ll eat 35,000 cookies in your lifetime”; “banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories per hour.”) And somehow this fascinates millions of readers.

Even as new as I was, I had heard of Julia Roy before this article came out. She had already appeared on “top women of social media lists” like this one by Lee Odden from 2010. Noting that what she did could be described as “leaving droppings on Twitter” kind of bummed me out.

As it happens, this would not be the last time I’d encounter the argument that women are able to excel in social media because it’s so…well, social. Take this quote from a 2011 TechCrunch article: “Especially when it comes to social and shopping, women rule the Internet.” This article from GenConnect almost apologetically suggests that some women should appear more on lists like the Ad Age Power 150. Tied to all of this is the huge “mommy blogger” movement which is so powerful when it comes to baby product retailers. Recently Jeremiah Owyang also reported on a new movement called PANKS (professional Aunties, No Kids), again tied to how marketers can target women in the online world.

Aren’t women making inroads for any other reasons?

There’s nothing wrong with the conversation that indicates that women can succeed in social media because some women like to talk brands with their girlfriends or just plain like to talk. However, the way this conversation is carried out sometimes makes me wonder if the same exact wording could be used to describe a teenage girl and a 50-year-old woman, both of whom blog and use Twitter.

Also, we are missing some huge opportunities to celebrate women for things OTHER than talking or shopping. For example, we could celebrate women like Estrella Rosenberg, Ifdy Perez, Beth Cantrell,  and Molly Cantrell-Craig, who are doing fabulous work in the not-for-profit world. Maybe we could talk about sharp marketing minds like Dawn Westerberg, Jeanette Baer, Mila Araujo, and Brandie McCallum. Maybe we could even talk about women who are powerhouses in the business world like Carol Roth and Nicole Fende, both of whom blog and tweet quite regularly.

We’re missing a real revolution

Even more than highlighting women who are using social media as a professional tool, we are missing an opportunity to shine the light on women who are using social media to call for and implement social change. This fascinating article, “Revolution, Women, and Social Media in the Middle East” appeared in the Huffington Post on January 27, 2012. The article details a conference where several women who had used Twitter and Facebook to express their opinions and spread information during the revolutions in Egypt and Libya were finally able to meet in person. These women, who have limited rights in their own countries, were able to use the social networks at their disposal to get the word out about their own situations and what was going on in their countries. One of the women notes, “I couldn’t have done this without social media. The world would not have known…”

Would you want to call what these women did on Twitter “droppings?” Would you want to say that they found their followers because of funny, trivial hashtags? I don’t think so.

Why are we not focusing more on women who are breaking the “talking and shopping” teenybopper stereotype?

Women Are Social. A Lot of Women Like To Shop. And?

The real question, of course, is why there seems to be a hesitation to highlight women who are powerful in what they do, not just in the numbers of followers they have. Beyond that, there is even less written about non-white, non-American women who are successful in the online world. Maybe we can work on changing that.

What do you think?

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/philandpam/1485578432/ via Creative Commons

Myth: E-Newsletters are easy to create and send

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I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but e-newsletters are really quite polarizing in the world of marketing, online and off. On the one pole you have people who role their eyes and make vomit sounds when you mention e-newsletters. You might hear something like, “OMG I get like, 27 gazillion a day. The whole reason I went to the Inbox Zero conference is because I need to figure out how to get RID of the e-newsletters!” On the other pole you don’t have as much talking. It’s really more about action. These are the folks who send all of those e-newsletters. Though I cannot prove it, I would bet there is even some overlap between these two disparate groups of people.

So what is going on here? Why are we getting so many e-newsletters, all of which drive us nuts, all while we keep sending our own? I have a theory. I think that just like we see in the world of social media, the thought is that creating an e-newsletter and sending it is so cheap and so easy that there’s no earthly reason why NOT to do it. As a result, people tend to jump into the process without really thinking about it first.

I’m going to give you a little quiz at this time. Now, whether or not you tell me the results, hopefully it will get those little brain hamsters rolling a bit. Ready?

1. Have you added people to your recipients list without their knowledge or permission?

2. Do you make efforts to indicate to your recipients that you want them to talk back?

3. Do you use your e-newsletters to sell, inform, or both?

4. Do you send your e-newsletters on a regular schedule?

5. Do you have a content plan for your e-newsletters?

Now, let’s talk about each of these five things in a bit more detail.

Who is receiving your e-newsletters?

One of the reasons that e-newsletters are perceived of as being really easy is that it IS really easy to add a person to an email database, especially now that platforms like Constant Contact and MailChimp exist. You literally just type peoples’ contact information in. Pretty darned easy. There’s an important step that I fear a lot of people miss, however, and that is making sure that people opt in to your e-newsletter. In fact, best practices indicate that people should opt in twice, once to sign up for your e-newsletter and then again via an invitate to unsubscribe if they wish.

I receive at least one e-newsletter from a person whom I know. We’ve had online conversations only, never phone or skype or anything like that. I’ve never met them in person. I’ve visited their blog a few times. And yet I receive their e-newsletter. Now how did that happen? When I converse with you, am I opting in to your e-newsletter? I don’t think so.

Always remember that the people who receive your e-newsletter will feel just like you do when you receive an e-newsletter you didn’t ask for. It may make them think less of you. They may unsubscribe. They may wonder what other sneaky things you do to try to grow your business. Going through the business cards you gather at a trade show and inputting all of those e-mail addresses is NOT the way to build your e-newsletter list. Stray away from this practice.

Are you inviting your readers to talk back?

Just like anything that is done in the marketing world today, it’s important to remember that your readers are the same people who have adjusted to the realities of Web 2.0 (or are we at 3.0 now?). They want to be able to talk back to you. They want to feel like you WANT them to talk back to you. Are your e-newsletters leaving some breathing room for participation? Do you actually invite your readers to respond or reply?

Say what?

What are you using your e-newsletters for in the grand scheme of your marketing campaign? Are you using them to sell your products or services? Are they loud and filled with images? There are ways to reach out to existing and potential customers with your e-newsletters, but nobody is going to be happy to receive a yelling salesman in his or her inbox, right? Besides, spam filters are getting pretty clever (except for all of the actual spam email, which seems to always get through). Images with blatant sales messages in the headline and lots of images may not even reach your readers.

Truthfully, your e-newsletter is a chance to help you nurture relationships with existing and potential clients. Yelling and screaming, doing nothing but selling, or creating extremely aggressive messaging is a great way to make people run away. Hard to nurture relationships that way, don’t you think?

Now for your regularly scheduled programming

Like a blog site, e-newsletters can be used to build a sense of expectation. If you send daily, try to send around the same time every day. If you send weekly, try to send on the same day. And so on. Scheduling your e-newsletters not only helps your recipients know when to expect your content, it also helps you track traffic to your website more reliably to when your e-newsletter went out. If your traffic keeps spiking at the same time you send out your e-newsletter, it’s a lot easier to make that connection.

A Man, A Plan, An E-newsletter…

Ok, that’s not exactly a palindrome, but having a plan for your e-newsletter content can be a great help in integrating your content into the rest of your marketing campaign. For example, if you are going to be exhibiting at a trade show, talking about that in your e-newsletter can be useful. While the plan does not need to be rigid or highly detailed, having some idea of what you will talk about can help prevent things like last-minute ideas and repetition.

These five aspects of e-newsletter planning and sending represent only the tip of the iceberg, and we’ve just touched on each one a bit. Now, is it possible to send an e-newsletter without all of these considerations? Sure. But what are you risking? Being black-listed as a spammer. Losing your reputation as an up-and-up business person. Losing relationships with existing or potential customers. That seems like a lot to risk just because of the myth that e-newsletters are easy to create and send.

Don’t you think?

1st  image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/xiaming/50391986/ via Creative Commons

2nd image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tambako/3593686294/ via Creative Commons

#tweetdiner Powerful Pictures – 2/18/12

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I have been really astonished that so many people have asked for #tweetdiner to come back. I think committing to every Saturday night got too hard for everyone. Hey, even I like to have a Saturday night away from my computer. But once a month isn’t so bad, right?

With that in mind, and with Valentine’s Day weekend now behind us for another year, tomorrow, February 18, is the day.

For our February chat, we’re going to talk about the power of pictures and what exactly that means. Whether it’s InstaGram, Pinterest, or Infographics, it seems like pictures, not content, are becoming king. Why is that happening? What does it mean?

Let’s talk about it, eh? Join me on Twitter at 9 PM EST Saturday, February 18, 2012. Just look for the hashtag #tweetdiner.

I’ll see you there 🙂

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/brent_nashville/4155724023/ via Creative Commons

Irresponsible Advice

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If you are a regular reader here, or even if you aren’t, I want to preface this by saying that I am not trying to attack any one company or any one person. Rather, an opportunity has presented itself to demonstrate the kinds of irresponsible advice that are openly floating about in the world of social media when it comes to marketing your business.

In this particular case, the article comes from HubSpot, a highly respected company, a company I respect a great deal. But that respect and credibility is *exactly* why I find this content so disturbing. We’ve come to expect better from them.

Let’s take this article a little bit at a time and talk about why I think this represents irresponsible advice.

So this post’s title is “Blogging Trumps Traditional Advertising in ROI Head-to-Head Case Study.” The post, near the beginning, sets the stage for what this HubSpot customer did with their super bowl ads:

The ads used a tracking phone number — which means the business knew which incoming calls were a result of the commercial — and encouraged viewers to visit the company’s homepage; other than that, there was nothing in the ad campaign integrating the offline efforts with their website or another online presence like social media.

One thing I have always said about super bowl commercials – they might be clever, they might be super funny, but quite often you don’t even know what the ad was for. They are more entertainment than anything else. The fact that this advertiser used a special phone number to track leads is interesting, but given that that was the main way to track leads, one would also assume that TV watchers were encouraged to respond via telephone. In that scenario, hyping the website or the social media presence of the company would have reduced the number of leads. Right?

Let’s move on.

The article shows a graph indicating that during the period that the ads were running…

along with several inbound leads, the customer’s blog generated twice as much traffic as its TV spots. To make matters worse, the ads resulted in no online leads, only 7 phone calls, and zero opportunities or customer conversions. Needless to say, the company was not very satisfied with the ROI of the Super Bowl ad campaign.

Now, let’s think about this really carefully.

First, the customer’s blog out-performed the TV ads. Is it possible that the TV ads generated interest, people didn’t want to call the trackable phone number, but they Googled the company and the blog site came up? It’s possible, right?

Second, we must again note that the primary call-to-action, it seems, was for people to call a special telephone number that was featured in the ad. Given that, the goal would not have been to drive website traffic, which would not have been trackable to the television ad campaign.

Third, OK, yes, 7 phone calls out of a reported 2.8 million person audience is not a great percentage. We can agree on that one. Then again, Super Bowl Sunday is still a Sunday. Do people really want to take time out of watching the big game to call about a product? Given that context, 7 calls may not be all that discouraging after all.

So, HubSpot company is not super duper pleased with the ROI of its super bowl campaign. OK. Fair enough.

Now here’s the part that really fried my friddle (and you can quote me on that).

This customer has (understandably) requested to remain anonymous, but they asked us to share this story with the marketing community as a reminder that, more often than not, outbound marketing just isn’t worth the cost. This customer has seen a much higher return at a fraction of the cost doing inbound marketing with HubSpot software.

First, let’s get one thing out of the way pronto-pup. Saying something like “more often than not” based on one case study is simply irresponsible. In fact, it’s rather laughable. What if medical scientists said that they had cured cancer based on results in one lab rat? We’d be kind of appalled, right? We should be similarly raising our eyebrows in this scenario. We don’t know what kind of company this customer is. We don’t know what else they are doing to market their products. In fact, we don’t even know what their products are. We know that they had $54,000 to spend on super bowl ads in a targeted area. One would assume they are a B2C company based on the campaign. Do we really want to offer comprehensive advice based on all of this stuff we don’t know? Well, I don’t.

Now, there’s another little red herring in here too. If you noticed a few paragraphs up, the article noted that there were no online leads. Now, I get a little hazy here, but if there were ZERO online leads, that means all of that website traffic and all of that blog traffic didn’t result in any leads either, right? So even if the inbound marketing seemed to out-perform the super bowl ads traffic-wise, no leads still equals no leads.

Also somewhat absent from this equation is how much that HubSpot software costs. The products page does not seem to list pricing. I’m guessing it isn’t free.

Let’s end by looking at this paragraph:

Marketers, if you focus on inbound marketing, you will see consistent results. It takes time, dedication, and hard work to create great content and generate inbound leads. But those who are willing to do the work (including the company referenced in this post) get to see a real return on investment. In fact, since this company started using inbound marketing with HubSpot, it’s increased its organic traffic by 567% and its overall traffic by 583% in less than a year.

The problem with this statement, of course, is that this does not prove the ROI of the HubSpot software or of inbound marketing. Increasing traffic is great, but if your sales numbers aren’t climbing (and these figures are noticeably absent from the article) you’re still in a hole, right?

To me, the article was surprisingly misleading, possibly at the peril of a lot of companies who will be swayed by the words of such a reputable and respected company. The only point that I would agree with whole-heartedly is that neither outbound or inbound marketing should work in a vacuum. Integrating tactics is the most effective way to ensure positive results.

You can read the full article here. I’d like to see if your take differs from mine. If so, why?

 

1st image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aguichard/357212691/ via Creative Commons

2nd image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ehousley/2657942647/ via Creative Commons

Take a day off already!

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Last week, I decided what I was going to get myself for Valentine’s Day (me and myself have a loving relationship). I was going to give myself a day off from social media. I would not write a blog post. I would not twitter a tweet. I would not facebook a facebook status. I would unplug as much as is possible in today’s world.

As the day approached, I realized with a start that I don’t think I’ve ever taken 24 hours away from social media, like completely away, since I started blogging almost 2 years ago. There have been days that I didn’t blog and there have been days that I didn’t tweet or Facebook *much*, but a whole 24 hours with nothin coming from me? I don’t think it has happened.

Mark Valentine’s Day 2012 on your calendar. I spent the whole day away from producing content, and the only stuff I did was play on Pinterest.

You know what the weird thing is? I REALLY enjoyed myself.

I love social media, but it’s work

Here is the reality that bonked me on the head during my ever so brief hiatus. Are you ready?

Social Media is a lot more work than we think it is.

Now, I’m not asking anyone to play a violin for me, but consider everything that goes into this “social media stuff.”

• You are perpetually “on” in two ways – you hope to provide interesting content and you hope to provide content that won’t lead into a complete crap storm (unless you enjoy those, but I do not)

• You are constantly monitoring. Did someone mention you in a post or link to a post of yours? Did someone ask you a question? Did someone nicely tweet out a post of yours? Your ears are always ringing.

• You are always trying to respond in kind. I get extremely brilliant comments here on my blog. That to me means that each comment deserves an equally thoughtful (though maybe not as brilliant) reply. That’s a lot of writing in a short span of time.

The list goes on and on. Really, we have our brains running perpetually on overdrive and we don’t even notice it because social media “stuff” is happening ever so covertly in the background of other stuff “stuff” we are doing.

The clock is always running

Even in the most stressful jobs, there are times when it’s probably okay to be a bit slower to reply. In some more traditional jobs, you have the generally accepted 9-5 Monday-Friday gig. You may do a bit here and there over the weekend, but it’s generally considered “overtime.”

In social media world, we don’t take breaks because a) we don’t feel like we can and b) because the clock is always running. When I go to bed, it’s only 7 or so in California. It’s already the next morning in places like Australia and New Zealand and Malaysia and the Philippines. People are emailing me, tweeting me, Facebooking me, all while I am sleeping. From the moment I wake up, there is stuff to reply to. Sometimes, insomniacs may catch themselves responding to things at 3 or 4 in the morning.

You know you’ve done it.

Is this all natural though? Are our brains meant to be this “on” all the time? Or, let me put it another way. Is it healthy for our brains to be stimulated by the same kinds of stuff nearly 24/7, 365? I’m not sure it is. A day without the daily grind showed me that a lot of social media really is a grind. It’s pressure. It’s risk. It’s frustration. It’s pulling back something you want to say or saying something you shouldn’t have said and then apologizing, all in the very public world.

That’s kind of crazy when you think about it, right?

I went about 2 years without pulling away fully from social media for more than 24 hours. That’s 2 years without a single day off, pretty much.

When was the last time you unplugged, completely, for any length of time? What was your experience?

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thestarmama/69575266/ via Creative Commons

#womenwednesday Oh shoot. I lost my husband!

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Hi. My name is Margie Clayman, and I am single.

Phew. That is a load off!

What do you mean you don’t care? According to all of these articles, you should really be judging me right now:

Singled Out, from Slate Magazine

All the Single Ladies, by Kate Bolick for The Atlantic

Do Single Women Face Spinster Stigma? ABC News

NOW do you feel judgmental?

Truthfully, it’s kind of weird being single in the online world. There seems to be an unspoken thought that if you are single AND you are doing social media, fitting the social media stuff in is probably a lot easier. You don’t have a spouse asking you to like, spend time with him or her. You don’t have kids that you complain about all of the time (which really is a social media activity, but still, you have to experience their shenanigans in real life). I mean, sure you might have a job that keeps you kind of busy, but other than that, your life is pretty meaningless. Thank goodness for Twitter!

None of this has ever really been said to me directly or in so many words, but it’s kind of been insinuated. Like, “Well, you have more time for that kind of stuff.” You know, those smug whispery sort of tweets and emails that kind of sneak in on ya when you least expect it. Factually, my 27 cats, keeping my hair in a tight bun, and wearing nothing but turtlenecks keeps me VERY busy, thank you.

But seriously…

Women, so far as I can tell, seem to be in a no-win situation when it comes to family status in the online world. I know a lot of women who have entire families going on and it comes as a complete shock because they so seldom talk about their home lives. I talked to one such woman who told me she likes to keep her kids on the down-low because there are stigmas about the “mommy.” By the same token, the most powerful clique of online women is probably the “mommy blogger” community. Kind of confusing, isn’t it?

Why so serious?

My question – why do we care if people are married or not? I mean, I’ll fully admit that if we were in a situation where the world’s population was at risk, like in Battlestar Galactica, and I had to marry and reproduce with Jamie Bamber’s Lee Adama just to keep our race going, I’d probably sacrifice my single life. But humans are hardly in that scenario (knock on wood). The population will still be over-stuffed whether or not I get married and have kids. I will still be content with my life if I live another day in the single lifestyle (so far I haven’t gotten any marriage proposals for today).

Is it possible that people are kind of weird about those of us who are single because there is a sense of freedom that is being missed? After all, and I’m just being honest here, no matter how much you love your spouse and kids, there are going to be times that they bug the heck out of you. There are going to be times (as I read so often) when the kid wakes you up at 4 AM the day that you have a huge meeting. There are days you want to stay in when the spouse wants to go out, and visey versa. Unless you suffer from multiple personality disorder or imaginary friend syndrome, you don’t experience these clashes as a single person. While companionship is often awesome, having the ability to choose what you want to do when you want to do it is kind of nice. Is the stigma borne out of some unspoken jealousy?

What about the men-folk?

I’ll be honest about something else aside from my marital status. I’ve been a woman my entire life. Therefore, I really have only experienced society’s pressures as, well, a woman. I know the pressures that exist to plan that dream wedding (just search for “wedding” on Pinterest). I know the pressures that exist to create your family, have your house with the white picket fence, and then complain about how bedraggled you feel after a long night with a sick kid. What I’ve never experienced is how society pressures men.

So far as I know, there is not a male counterpart to the “old maid.” I don’t think there is a “crazy cat guy” counter to the crazy cat lady stereotype. It also seems like the bachelor life is often lusted after by both men and women. But are there pressures to have a spouse if you are a guy? Is there a ticking biological clock filtered through societal pressures?

And if there is, why? What is this all about? Why are we STILL worried about what people do with their personal lives?

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/artindeepkoma/54235257/ via Creative Commons