Marjorie Clayman’s Writing Portfolio

Professional writing profile of Marjorie Clayman

Archives for April 2012

He wrote ten books so he must know his stuff

by

Awhile back, an article came out that interviewed a pretty well-known person. Marketing advice was offered, I frothed and flumbled, and so it passed out of my mind. For the most part.

I’ve come upon mentions of that article here and there. Some people are dissing it while others are giving it acclaim, but recently I read a blog post that really disturbed me. The general jist was that the blogger had initially reacted to the article the same way I did. “This flies in the face of everything I’ve said and done for the last ten years. This doesn’t make sense. This is BAD ADVICE.” But then the really freaky thing happened. The blogger said (paraphrased),

“Then I started to think about it. This guy has written something like 10 books. Maybe I needed to reconsider *my* position because clearly they know what they’re talking about.”

And therein lies the rub, said Hamlet.

We’re all special, which means nobody is

Have you ever watched the Pixar flick The Invincibles? As an adult I have to say, “No, neither have I.” However, you might recall, if you had seen it, several repetitions of the idea that if everyone is special then really no one is special. How can everyone be special, right? Well, that’s kind of where we’ve gotten to in the publishing business, at least insofar as the online world is concerned. Factually, anyone can publish a book these days. It might be self-published. It might be online only. But I mean, heck, I *technically* have published a book. It’s floating up there in my masthead minding its own business. It’s not like Paul Giamatti’s character in Sideways or the dad in Little Miss Sunshine, both of whom had to peddle their wears to publishers.

Is this a good thing?

On the one hand, this ability to publish oneself at a whim is kind of exciting. I love that peoples’ thoughts (like Julien Smith’s, for example) are more readily accessible than they might have been five years ago. Much like Triberr touts itself as the friend of the little blogger, the new world of publishing could rightly tout itself as the friend of the author who wants to get published really really badly.

On the other hand, this also means that we have a lot of books that might be kind of like Wikipedia. They might look really good. They might be 90% legit. It’s that 10% that can be problematic. The thing is, while we have gotten looser about what we can publish, our reverence for the published word has not really changed. If it is in book form, it deserves to be considered. If a person has put a lot of thoughts into book form, they must know what they’re talking about.

Does this scare anybody else?

Don’t abandon what you believe or know to be true

More than the whole publishing conundrum though, what really worries me is that people are getting intimidated by authors who may have 6-12 books to their name. Don’t do that. Even the smartest people don’t know everything. Sometimes authors aren’t even the smartest people. If your experience has shown you that something is true, don’t just toss it away because someone wrote more books than you over the last decade. If you firmly believe something, read with an open mind, but stand up for your beliefs. You likely came by them for some good reason. Don’t be intimidated by people with lots of book titles in their bios. Especially these days. At least read all of those books first.

Does this make sense?

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jm3/4683685 via Creative Commons

Myth: Logos and Brands Are The Same Things

by

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away (It was actually on Twitter) I was engaging in a chat about branding. I was having a ball. It was the highlight of my life.

Well, okay, maybe not. But still, I was having a lot of interesting little side conversations, only a few of which were about pixie dust. Suddenly a person tweeted to me that they thought their logo was just fine, or something along those lines. I said, “Well, that’s great. I’m sure your logo is very nice too. But we are talking about branding, which is a lot more than your logo.” The person responded with something along the lines of, “Oh, I didn’t realize that.”

I have seen other people with the same kind of misunderstanding about what branding is. Some people feel that a person can be a brand if they have a website in their own name (like I do). Some people feel that branding is the color scheme you use to represent yourself. All of these may be small pieces of the branding pie, but it’s not the whole story.

Branding Defined PSM (Pre Social Media)

A lot of marketing definitions have changed since people not as familiar with marketing began to engage heavily in social media marketing. To help balance this, I decided to look back to a resource from 2004 – a webinar by William Arruda for MarketingProfs from November of 2004. Twitter didn’t exist yet, Facebook didn’t exist yet, and blogging was still rather new. How did we define branding back then?

General Definition

Branding is essentially defined thusly: A Unique Promise of Value. This means that you know what you can expect from this brand. You will always have a consistent experience because the value being offered and the message that is being focused on will forever be the same. This is one reason why being a “personal brand” is sort of counter-intuitive. We’d get kind of creeped out if a person acted the same way every time we encountered them, right? Or if they said the same thing every time we talked to them (generally)? Yikes.

Brand Discovery

The first people that need to define your brand are the ones behind the brand. Discovering your brand encompasses all of the following:

• Knowing your competitors

• Knowing your peers

• Identifying your target audience AND knowing what they want

Once you define the boundaries of your brand, you need to determine your brand’s mission, your values, and your vision. You also need to be open to the fact that after defining these things, your audience, your competitors, and your peers can impact your brand. Your audience may alter their expectations or desires of you, for example, or your competition may offer a new product or change pricing.

Communicating your brand

Letting other people in on what your brand is about can only be done once you, well, know what your brand is about. Now, when you communicate your brand, things like your logo can help, especially in terms of helping people recall what you’re all about. But they aren’t (hopefully) just recalling that your logo has a bird in it. Hopefully they’re recalling that they’ve heard really good things about you or, “Oh yeah, that’s the company that always says they’ll honor pricing from any other store.” Your logo, your marketing, your communications always revolve around your mission, your vision, and what people can (or should) expect when they work with you.

Branding in the world of social media

One thing it’s important to remember – as you build your brand in the online world, you don’t want to send out messages that completely confuse people. For example, you don’t want to use your Twitter feed to talk about how great vegetarianism is and then pepper your Facebook wall with the delectable rack of lamb you served up for dinner (well, I don’t know what kind of brand would send out both of those messages, but you get the idea). Moreover, you want to make sure that your social media communications aren’t contradicting what you’re saying in other marketing channels. If you have a true grasp of your brand value, this should not be problematic, of course.

What did I miss?

How else would you define branding? In what other ways does the concept of branding expand beyond your logo? I’d love your input!

Don’t forget, this is part of a series called Alphabet of Marketing Myths (this is letter L). You can catch up on the whole series here.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mpmb/63668994/ via Creative Commons

The complicated nature of online friendships

by

The year 2012 is still pretty young, but already it’s been hard on a lot of people I care about. One friend has lost a parent, another is coming close to the same fate. A friend has been diagnosed with a disease, many friends are without money. Some friends are miserable in their jobs and are wanting nothing else apart from change. Other friends would give anything to have any job at all.

I know all of these things, but for the most part, I’ve never met any of these people in “real life.” In fact, in many cases I have no idea what their voices sound like. I don’t know what their facial expressions are like as they listen to someone else talking. I don’t know how their intonations work.

And most of all, I don’t really know what I can do to help.

Still haunted

It’s been just about 6 months since I found out that Bruce Serven had killed himself and had taken his young son with him. I still think about that almost every day, but then, that’s kind of weird, right? Because I never heard Bruce’s voice. I never met him in real life. I have no idea what he looked like beyond the pose he held for all of his online avatars. I talked to Bruce in some way almost every day I was online for a good year, but I had no idea he was unemployed. I had no idea that he had so much going on in his life. I never dug deeper. I never asked how he was doing, to the best of my knowledge.

So now, I am more careful to keep track of people I talk to online. If someone goes quiet I check to make sure they’re okay – sometimes online silence can be like a frown or a pout in real life, right? If someone is having a hard time and they’re talking about it online, I try to make sure I at least send them a note so they know they’re not just talking to the air. Sometimes that can be enough. Sometimes.

The catch

Of course, what I have discovered is that in many cases, if someone tells you about something that is really bothering them, you, as an online friend, are left utterly helpless. You don’t REALLY know this person beyond your online interactions. It’s not your place to yell at a family member for them because you may not even know who their family members are. You’ve never been to their home. You’ve never been to where they work. If something bad does happen to an online friend, in many cases you will not be on the list of people the family will call. You’ll find out via a newspaper article like I did when Bruce died.

And you can’t really ask for anything more than that. Even if you talk to a person at length online day after day, you’re not that kind of friend.

Or are you?

All of this came to light because one of my friends going through a hard time had posted something about it to Facebook and not very many people indicated that they saw it. If you scrape away people who just don’t know how to react in those situations, the reality is that most people just simply didn’t see it. Between the fast moving Twitter stream and Facebook’s Edgerank, the chances of you seeing something an online friend posts are pretty minimal. These are the kinds of newsbits that humans have always passed along in phone conversations or meetings for coffee. That was the way we made sure we knew what was going on. That was how we knew how to respond and what to do.

In the online world, there’s no shortcut to being “real” friends. Paradoxically, the next step of friendship is taking it offline somehow, and eventually, hopefully, meeting face-to-face.

False intimacy

After news of Trey Pennington’s death spread, Jay Baer wrote a post called Social Media, Pretend Friends, and the Lie of  False Intimacy. It’s an amazing post that still gets comments 7 months later. Jay had considered Trey a friend but had not known that Trey’s life was in such turmoil. They had met in real life, so it seemed like they were even more “friends.” At the time, I disagreed with Jay’s assessment of the online world a bit. Even in the real world, one seldom knows 100% what is going on with someone. A family member of mine seemed to die suddenly but we found out they had been dying of cancer for at least a year. There was nothing online about that.

But after Bruce died, my illusions about online friendship melted away pretty quickly. I have tried ever since then to build more solid connections with people  I care about. The transition, however, is a rough one, because as you get closer to people online, you learn more and more, and you discover there is less and less you can do because of the nature of your relationship.

I have not yet found a good way to balance this conflicting series of messages. Get closer, but always through the wall that is the virtual nature of your friendship. With friends spread throughout the US and throughout the world, getting to sit down for that cup of coffee can be the ultimate challenge. I don’t even get to sit down for coffee with my local friends very often. Where do we go from here?

I am pondering all of this as I continue along in my online journey. I am anxious that people are falling through my fingers every day like sand because I just can’t talk to everyone all the time. I don’t want there to be another Bruce. But I’m now fairly certain there’s nothing I can do about that.

What do you think about this conundrum? What is your experience?

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/industry_is_virtue/3304376005/ via Creative Commons

 

In Search of My Grandparents

by

For some reason lately, my grandparents have been on my mind. It’s a tricky subject. I lost my first grandparent when I was 7. My father’s parents both died when I was 10, exactly six months apart. When you’re 10, you don’t really know how much you should value your grandparents, apart from the fact that they spoil you rotten. I was just starting to explore old family photos when my dad’s mom passed away. There were references to the store her father owned and other things that I didn’t understand at the time.

On my mom’s side, information is a bit easier to come by. Most branches of our family have been in the US for quite some time. In fact, some of family history goes back to the Mayflower and Jamestown. While we might not have all of the information, it seems somewhat accessible. But my dad’s family is a bit different. All of my dad’s grandparents were born in Russia – two in Odessa and two in Berditchev. We assume they came to the US in the wake of anti-semitic pogroms and other pressures, but we have no records to really confirm that. We don’t really know who was left behind in Russia or what happened to them, and unfortunately, my dad was quite young when his grandparents died, so there is a huge gap there.

Recent history is disappearing

It’s one thing to say that you don’t know a lot about your great-grandparents. That’s sort of acceptable. But I realized a couple of weeks ago that I actually have no idea what my dad’s dad did in World War II. We have lots of information on my other grandpa. He was in the Navy, fought on the Nicholas. We know what battles he was in because he recorded that information in later years. But my other grandpa – I have no idea. There are  feelings that he may have been a writer for the Stars and Stripes. He may have been in Northern Africa. He may have been in Italy. He may have been…but we don’t know for sure.

As I started on my path of research, I went to the National Archives website to request military records. The drop-down menu that had you select your relationship to the military person did not include grandchild. It included spouse, former spouse, child, brother, sister. But grandchildren are not considered next of kin in the world of governmental bureaucracy. That really stopped me in my path. If I had embarked on this journey as an old woman, when my parents were not around, how would I even begin to access this information?

How many people have already missed their chance?

Given that I’m the third Clayman to work in the company that my grandpa started, I feel obligated to learn what he went through in the war. If he wrote, I want to know what he wrote. If he experienced things as so many men did, I want to learn about that. I want to learn about what might have shaped him before his family and his business were on his mind. Did he know my grandma when he went off to war? How did they meet?

All of this information is slipping beyond my generation’s reach. If we don’t grab on to it soon, there won’t be anyone left who can tell those stories, as incorrect as they might be.

There’s no time like the present to learn about the past. I’m starting to work on it.

How about you?

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/55293400@N07/5527061226/ via Creative Commons

Run fast or run long

by

This coming Saturday, I am going to be facing quite the conundrum. My training schedule indicates that I should run/walk for 8 miles, which is the longest I’ve ever done – I just did six miles the last 2 weeks in a row. A two mile leap is a pretty big one. I was nervous about jumping from five miles to six. I’m really nervous about jumping (or limping, as the case may be) from 6-8.

But here’s the real complex thing about all of this training. You have to make a choice every time you go out about how you are going to approach your run. You can test your endurance by trying to run at a steady pace for as long as possible. You can try to just get through the distance you want to reach at whatever pace you can. Of course, you can also try to go as fast as possible. Now, I’d like to say that I try option 1 or option 2, but I run with my RunKeeper app going on my Iphone, and that persistent voice tells me what my average pace per mile is, and I have to admit, I get competitive with myself. However, with 8 miles looming before me, I’m thinking speed may not be what to strive for.

Two years into blogging

My friend Nancy Davis is going to be celebrating her one-year anniversary soon, and while I was cheering for her, I remembered my anniversary is coming up soon (April 18th, in fact). Two years seems like both a long time and a short time. A lot has happened in the last two years, that’s for sure. I mean, heck, how many platforms have I used in 24 months? That’s dizzying in and of itself.

But looking back, I can see that when you start a blog, it’s very much like starting to train for a marathon. When I started out, I decided I would try for endurance. I was going to do a blog post every day for 100 days in a row. I think I got to about 27, for what it’s worth. My posts were not very good, as I look back on them. I don’t know that I was getting much out of writing – I was dipping my toe in and seeing what it would be like to write a post every day.

After a while of trying that, I decided that I would just sort of go at my own pace. But then I noticed a lot of bloggers I admired were pumping out two posts a day. This was the speed part of my training. I would try to publish one post at around 3 AM and another at around 3 PM. This was, just like going for speed in marathon training, a very swift way to reach burn-out mode.

Now, I’m kind of lollygagging my way through blogging. When I have an idea, I march on over and type it up. If I don’t have an idea for a day or three, I don’t get all sweaty like I used to. The world, as it turns out, can do pretty okay without a blog post from me. You see, I’m still running the blog-a-thon. I’m still here. But I no longer care about the speed or even the day-to-day endurance. I just care that I keep going, keep reaching milestones, and continue to stay in the game.

I’m thinking that might be how I approach my 8 miles on Saturday. Getting it done without serious pain is the ultimate goal. In the end, if you’re not super competitive, it doesn’t matter as much how long it took you to finish the marathon. It just matters that you cross the finish line. The finish line might not be so evident in the blogging world, but you have goals. You have milestones you want to reach. When you reach those, no matter how long it takes, you have experienced success.

Or am I just trying to be a running slacker? What do you think?

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eleftheriag/357396442/ via Creative Commons

I don’t have a “thing”

by

The other day, I realized I have a bloggy problem. I realized this while I was out shopping with my mom and we were talking about clothes. She said, “I think this would be a good look for you.” I said, “Eh, I don’t know. I don’t think that’s my style.” “Well, what is your style?” She asked.

I think the crickets answered before I did. I may have responded, “Look over there! It’s Elvis!”

Then, something even worse happened. I realized that just as I don’t have a fashion style per se (Pants and shirt pretty much cover it, errr, me), I also don’t have a blogging “thing.”

You know what I mean, right? Like, you know that if you go over to pushingsocial.com you’re going to get great blogging advice along with some advice that carried over into other social media platforms. It’ll be actionable and strong. You know that if you visit with Lisa Petrilli, you’ll get to learn about leadership. You know that if you go visit other bloggers, you’ll get, generally speaking, a certain kind of post within a range of topics. They have a “thing.”

I have no “thing.” I never have had a “thing.” From the very start, I had the word “Musings” in my blog title. That should have been a sign that I was confused. Instead, I concentrated on the alliteration. I like alliteration. Don’t you?

So I’ve been grappling with this. Do I need a thing? Cuz I mean, the thing is, I get kind of bored. I don’t like ruts. Well, in some cases I do, like I generally like to eat and sleep at the same times. I’m almost like Rain Man in that regard. But blogging? I like to write about whatever pops into my head, which could be anything from the fact that I don’t have a “thing” to the fact that women still are fighting against that ole glass ceiling to my reaction at reading a great book that has nothing to do with anything else.

Do I do this at my peril? Does one need a thing?

I think about other bloggers I read a lot like Danny Brown and Mark Schaefer and Rufus the Dogg – they seem to cover a lot of different topics and they seem okay with that.

Is  this much ado about nothing, or should I be worried?

If I was on a soap opera, I’d announce that I was heading to California to find myself. I wonder what the bloggy equivalent is. I reckon it’s this – what do you think? Do you have a bloggy thing? Do I need a bloggy thing? Or is my thing just not to have a thing?

I look forward to your thoughts!

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/coincoyote/18848964/ v ia Creative Commons