Marjorie Clayman’s Writing Portfolio

Professional writing profile of Marjorie Clayman

Archives for May 2012

Grab some Coffee. We’ll Tawk.

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Recently, I have had the great pleasure of talking to two great people, and both conversations were recorded. The first conversation was with Jayme Soulati and it was actually recorded live at Social Slam. Jayme is awesome and I was so excited to meet her. Little did I know I would be interviewed! We ended up talking about my “prolific” Facebook posting and how I balance that with business stuff. If you’re interested, you can check that out here.

I also had the pleasure of chatting with Tim McDonald via Spreecast. Our talk was about marketing (and a little bit about people I adore online). This was a lot of fun, but hopefully you can also learn a little bit about some of our agency’s approaches to that whole marketing thing. You can check that out (if you want) here.

I hope you enjoy! Thanks very much to Jayme and Tim for being awesome hosts and great people!

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/doug88888/2953428679/ via Creative Commons

When someone saves your life

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I often like to think of life as divided into four units. You spend four years in high school. Four years in college (at least). I spent four years in grad school. Four seems to be a good benchmark for me.

Almost exactly 8 years ago, I left the Ivory Tower. That’s two units of four, for those of you who are counting. I was not a happy camper back in 2004. In fact, I was nearly an entirely different person from who I am now. I had two Masters degrees but having spent 6 months applying to jobs with dedication and passion, I had not even been called for an interview. I was way overweight. I had been rather battered and bruised by my graduate school experience (that’s a story for another time). I was moving back home, which I felt wretched about. And on top of all of that, I couldn’t drive.

See, when I was 16 I wanted to learn how to drive just like every teenager does, but I knew that I would need special accommodations, assuming that seeing over the windshield was important. I called a driving school and asked if they’d be able to help someone like me and I got the curt response, “Well, we have some phonebooks.” Being 16, I took this as a ravaging insult that cut deep into my poor coal black heart, so I gave up for awhile. Then I came to the conclusion that I’d need to buy a car to have it adjusted, and lord knows I didn’t have enough money for either of those things. I was 25 and still had not cracked this nut. And now I was unemployed, unhealthy, living at home, and my college loans were coming due. It was not a happy time.

And then came Wally.

My mom scoured the phonebook (yeah…those things) looking for driving instructors that catered to the “not exactly normal” driver. I decided to call Wally. He came by to pick me up at my parents’ house. He had a red Pontiac and had all sorts of stuff in the trunk of the car – pedal extenders, pillows, books – anything a special needs driver could use. I told him I was not really comfortable with anything except parking lot driving, so he said, “Ok, we’ll go to a parking lot.” After a few laps of me driving in circles, he said, “OK, now I want you to drive home.”

Boy was I scared out of my mind. But somehow, Wally was like a fear sponge. He never EVER lost his calm, even when I came close to plowing into cars. And he perpetually picked on me, as I got better. “Oh, you sure you don’t want to just go back to the parking lot?”

After about 4 months of endless driving around orange cones, driving down streets, not understanding how to do left-hand turns, and all kinds of other torturous stuff, I passed both parts of my driving test and got my license. I could drive. I could leave one place and go to another, and I could do that whenever I wanted. Well, within reason. I had my freedom. I felt like an adult. I felt more normal. It was the beginning of a new beginning.

In a lot of ways, even though not driving is not technically life threatening, Wally saved my life. He gave me a bright shining light of possibility when there wasn’t a whole lot of that going around. Every time I drive, even now, I think about that man and what he did for me. And I think about the fact that I was just one of his many, many students. I wonder how many other people feel the same way about him that I do.

Wally taught me that there are lots of ways to save a person’s life. It’s not always sudden and super dramatic. Sometimes it’s four months driving around cones in the parking lot of an abandoned ghetto grocery store in an un-air-conditioned car in the middle of the summer. Maybe it’s something entirely different but equally unexpected.

Wally taught me to drive, but he also taught me that there are ways around every obstacle. I never thought I’d be able to drive.

What do you think you can never do? Whatever it is, you’re wrong – it can be done. It might stink working towards it. You might wanna quit a lot of times, and you might even have to pay a lot of money for it. But it can be done. And that person or those people who help you – they’ll look like lifesavers to you, even if the situation didn’t seem life threatening at the time.

And you’ll wonder, as I am wondering these days, how you could ever be so lucky and how you could ever show the depth of your gratitude.

Everyone needs a Wally. I hope you find yours.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tir_na_nog/3603202134/ via Creative Commons

The problem with armor

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Back in the early Middle Ages (kind of like the eastern part of the Midwest, right?) guys figured out that if they riveted tons and tons of tiny steel rings together, they could make something called chainmail. Some of my friends in college took up the hobby of making their own chainmail, and I must say, even as an avid knitter/crocheter, it did not look like fun work. Chainmail was heavy, so heavy that it had to be made specifically so that it wouldn’t leave huge gaps and openings due to its own weight. After all, huge gaps or holes wouldn’t do a super duper job of staving off swords, lances, and other such.

Eventually, guys figured out that all of those tiny little rings were sort of a pain in the butt (and really heavy), so they created something called plate armor. This is probably what you think of when you think about knights. All shiny and metallic and protected. Chainmail was still used for those little Lever 2000 type parts *cough* but plate armor was the thing. Everything was great. The combination of chainmail and the plate armor and the swords and the spears and the lances and the horses – it was all just magnifient.

Until it wasn’t. Because, you see, gunpowder was invented. Plate armor didn’t do so hot against gunpowder. Also, dudes started realizing that running around and doing things whilst wearing a steel factory was kind of tough and tiring. Armor, as pretty and as protective as it was, was moved on down to ceremonial status.

Ouch.

Your social media armor

It’s easy to come into the online world with your own armor on. Maybe you have a sort of chainmail that you link together – a finely tuned combination of approaches, “voices,” and personas that you rivet together around your real self. Maybe you are more a plate armor kind of person. You put on something really shiny and really strong, but what you have surrounded yourself with is so thick and awkward that people can’t really figure out who you are under there.

Now, wearing a little protective armor is probably a good idea, especially for those soft and squishy parts (I was thinking “heart.” I don’t know why you’re snickering). Wearing your heart on your Twitter handle can be dangerous business. But wearing 17 layers of armor may not be such a great idea either. That can get really heavy. It can still get blown up. And it can make it super easy for people to look at you weird. Why aren’t you being more open? Why are you full of bravado all of the time? Why do you seem so angry or so indifferent all of the time?

These things put people off in the online world. They’re not going to work hard to figure you out. There are too many unarmored people to choose from.

You have to choose your priority

As is the case with so many things in life, both online and offline, you have a choice to make. You can opt to emphasize protection. You can cover up your real identity. Heck, you don’t even have to show your face in your avatars if you don’t want to. You can fool Facebook and make it think your real name is Hamburger Burglar.

The other choice on the table is to remove some of that armor and risk the possibility that someone might hurt you somehow. But in the meantime, you are more open to people. You are more willing to reach out, to learn things, to chat, to share. And let’s face it, these things all do kind of make social media a bit more enjoyable, right? I think so, anyway. You might be able to move around a bit easier. You might look a bit less shiny, but then again, there’s plenty of personality bling that can make up for that.

What it really comes down to is how you want your online presence to go.

So, is it time to put your plate armor on display? Is it time to put your chainmail under the bed? Or are you still going to suit up in the online world? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/charlestilford/3091858085/ via Creative Commons

 

Do we pay too much homage online, or too little?

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The Middle Ages are quite an interesting era in human history. Probably what comes to your mind is knights in shining armor, damsels in distress, and Monty Python. Well, that last one is probably just me. At any rate, the knights and damsels are only a very small part of the story. Society was rather complex back in these times. Serfdom existed, nobles existed, the clergy was out there making everyone pay tithes. One thing that has always caught my interest is the old idea of paying homage. Here is a description for you:

“Homage is the most honorable service, and most humble service of reverence, that a franktenant1 may do to his lord. For when the tenant shall make homage to his lord, he shall be ungirt, and his head uncovered, and his lord shall sit, and the tenant shall kneel before him on both his knees, and hold his hands jointly together between the hands of his lord, and shall say thus: ‘I become your man from this day forward [of life and limb, and of earthly worship,] and unto you shall be true and faithful, and bear to you faith for the tenements that I claim to hold of you, saving the faith that I owe to our sovereign lord the king’; and then the lord, so sitting, shall kiss him.” from http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng330/ceremonies_of_homage_and_fealty.htm

Pretty heavy duty stuff, right? When you paid homage to someone, you were literally saying, “I’m yours, man. Whatever you want me to do, you’ve got it. Just give me a nice bit of land and we’re good to go.”

I think in some ways this concept has trickled its way into the online world, but I am pondering whether we pay too much homage or too little.

What does online homage look like?

I think it’s easy to create a relationship online that looks like the 21st century version of homage. For example, if you are fairly new to the online world and a person with a big following reaches out their hand and helps you out, you are going to feel darned indebted to them. I know this from personal experience. For whatever reason, a lot of people who were well-established in the online world helped me out when I was still an online newborn, and two years down the road, I still haven’t seen my gratitude for that subside. So, when someone does you a big favor, if you are, say, nice, you want to repay that favor. In the online world this means talking that person up, commenting on their posts, sharing their posts…you know the drill.

But there can come a point where paying this kind of homage can get carried away, right? For example, if a person starts sending out information that isn’t 100% accurate and they are called out for that (even nicely), you might get carried away and say that nobody should criticize your pal. You might be mean to other people because you perceive they are being mean to your friend. You might even close your mind to other opinions that vary from this person’s. You paid your homage to this person and that’s that. End of discussion.

Then again, maybe we don’t pay enough homage

There are certainly people out there who get caught in the idolizing trap. But I think it’s also fair to say there are people who wouldn’t know a ceremony of respect if it came up and whacked them in the face. These folks always present themselves as “self-made.” Their blog has comments because they started writing such awesome stuff. They have a lot of Twitter followers because all they did was tweet for 17 days straight, right? Regardless of how many people helped them out, promoted their work, taught them things, answered questions, or cheered them on, these folks climbed the mountain based purely on their own skills, wile, and charm. Homage? Hardly.

Is there a healthy amount of homage to pay?

The approach that has worked best for me is something I like to call reciprocation. It’s a revolutionary concept, and something that certainly would have been alien to our Medieval ancestors. I can map it out for you in a pretty easy formula. Hang on, let me get my blackboard out. OK.

You do something for me + I do something in return for you = Reciprocation

Phew. Alright, so, that’s basically the trick there. Now, you don’t have to be OCD about this. It’s more sort of a gut feel. I try REALLY hard, for example, to make sure I respond to comments that I get here on ye olde blog. You took the time to read and comment, I try to reciprocate that by responding in kind. I don’t necessarily need to build you a shrine, but quid pro quo. If you promote a post of mine, I try to share something that you do. Maybe not *that minute* but I try to make sure I let you know I appreciate what you do. Sometimes I fail at this, and that makes me feel bad. So I try to work on it. I don’t tend to mindlessly worship anybody, nor do I tend to ignore when folks take time out of their busy lives to give me a boost.

Reciprocation seems like an okay compromise, at least for me.

But maybe I’m weird.

*cough*

So what do you think? Do we pay too much homage online or not enough? Where do you fall in this crazy medieval spectrum? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dunechaser/1228875390/ via Creative Commons

Myth: Quit advertising because it just doesn’t work

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A lot of people enmeshed in the online world like to refer gruffly to other types of marketing as “interruption marketing.” Predominantly, they are talking about advertising. Advertising “interrupts” your reading experience. It can certain interrupt your television watching or your radio listening (do people still listen to the radio?). On social media platforms, advertising can fall into the downright annoying category. Yes, a lot of arguments are floating around about why you should stop advertising. As far back as 2009, Business Week noted, “The vast majority of ads don’t register with consumers.” In a recent post for Business2Community, Patrick McDaniel notes that many people go up to him and say, “Yeah, I tried advertising. It didn’t work.”

In fact, a simple Google search for “advertising is dead” yields quite a few results:

Are all of these folks right? Is advertising dead? Does advertising just simply not work?

What does “work” mean?

Not to be glib, but exactly what were you expecting your advertising to do? False expectations can be a big problem for businesses and marketers. If you were expecting your advertising campaign to pull your company out of the recession, you probably found yourself disappointed. Similarly, if you thought advertising would make people like your product more, you were likely not satisfied with the results. As Gini Dietrich and Geoff Livingston note in Marketing in the Round, advertising is really best for direct marketing and building brands. If your objectives and measurement systems aren’t in alignment with those types of tactics, you’re going to run into trouble.

Why do people think advertising doesn’t work?

The most common reason advertising doesn’t “work,” I might hypothesize, is that people don’t really understand how to make advertising work. Advertising is more like a puppy, not like a cat. You can’t leave it alone and assume it will take care of itself. You need to plan your media placements carefully. You need to make sure you are hitting the right audience with the right kind of creative. And yes, you need to find ways to measure everything you’re doing.

When we recommend advertising programs to our clients, we present online ads as akin to billboards. People don’t click on banner ads much anymore, but they notice them, and if you are going to an industry website, seeing companies you want to learn more about can create an environment where clicks are more possible than in other places (like, say, CNN). We also recommend not using banner ads for sheer promotion anymore. Give people a REAL reason to click. Offer something that can answer a question or that can help your potential customers meet their objectives. If you are led to believe that an online banner ad will increase traffic to your website by leaps and bounds, you will probably end up believing that advertising doesn’t work. If you don’t capture click-throughs via a special landing page, you’ll end up on the same boat.

In print advertisements, it’s important to make sure your ad makes sense for your audience. Does your audience like copy-heavy ads that are more like advertorials or do they respond to graphic-heavy ads with very little copy? Do they like straightforward presentations or does their eye get caught by out-of-the-box creative? There are plenty of ways to test these kinds of approaches, whether it’s running two different ads in very similar publications or timing your ads for a Reader Study issue, where people can respond directly to your ad and say what they think about it.

Again, if you do not have a methodology for capturing leads from your print ad, you are likely going to believe that advertising doesn’t work. You need to find a way to attract readers to your website, and not just to your homepage. You need to drive traffic to a page where you can capture information. Incentivize this part of your program. Again, offer readers something that will entice them to click, whether it’s a free white paper, an e-book that answers a key question, or something else along those lines.

If you engage in a print advertising program with an expectation that you will immediately be inundated with sample requests and sales, you will again end up believing that advertising doesn’t work.

You can do social media and still advertise

Many people seem to draw a black-and-white contradictory picture between social media marketing and advertising. If you are on Twitter for your business, you clearly can’t also advertise. Right?

In fact, this kind of thinking is leading companies away from some really intriguing integrated marketing opportunities. Print ads could drive traffic to a Facebook page. A QR code on an ad could lead to a YouTube video. You could even invite people to answer a question they see in a print ad by contacting you on Twitter. The possibilities for translating interest in a print ad to engagement elsewhere could be almost endless, in fact. But the “this or that” mentality overshadowing marketers these days may cloud over all of that potential.

What do you think about advertising? Should people just give up on this type of marketing or is that crazy talk? What are your experiences with advertising? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

PS, this post is letter Q in the Alphabet of Marketing Myths series. You can catch up on the series here.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/colleen-lane/4989879689/ via Creative Commons

Let’s Play: How to Pull Off a Nationwide Giving Event

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This post is by the admirable, kind, and awesome Ifdy Perez. Ifdy Perez is the community manager at Razoo, an online fundraising platform, to help create a community for nonprofits and individuals wanting to make a difference in the world. A believer in the power of social media to produce change, she helps nonprofits do the important good works they do. She’s also editor of Inspiring Generosity, a community blog that gives resources to nonprofits on how to succeed in their fundraising.

 

Pulling off a nationwide fundraising event where over 200 nonprofits are competing with each other requires a solid outreach strategy to guide the missile. Strategy and structure is what’s making the Twive and Receive clockwork run.

Twive pits local-serving nonprofits across the U.S. against each other to see who can fundraise the most within 24 hours. The top three orgs to fundraise the most win a share of $30,000, and all of the fundraising is online, driven by each nonprofit activating their social networks to rise to the top.

So to make a gamified fundraising event like this work, we knew the most important starting point was a commitment to make it all about helping the nonprofit.

Outreach: Inviting Them to Play

For people to join you in something they have to hear about it first, right? So reaching out to the target audience and inviting them to join is a great first step to recruitment but also developing personal relationships with each of them. Nonprofit staffers are already too strapped for time that a friendly invitation to play will be most welcome for those who are perfect for your fundraising campaign.

Communications: Showing Them How to Play

So the kids came over to your sandbox. What now? Show them how to play your game. Twive has specific though simple rules of engagement, so explaining in clear, concise, and consistent messages to them will help them get a hang of it. As soon as a nonprofit’s signed up to participate, you start communicating with them often—one on one if possible—to walk them through the new space.

Resources: Giving Them the Toys to Play With

Sometimes it’s not as fun playing pirate if you don’t have the props. A lot of nonprofits are getting the hang of social media and fundraising online, so prepping them with the tools they need will help them be successful in their fundraiser. Basic social media how-tos (like how to use Facebook as a page or how to organize a Tweet Chat) can be tremendously helpful to them in on the giving day, and in the long run.

Reward: Winning in the End

It doesn’t hurt to offer an incentive, so a prize in the end—a goal—will help nonprofit staffers who are already interested in your campaign give value to the time they spend on your event. A giving day like Twive is a win-win for all nonprofits who fundraise; they get to keep whatever they raise sans the 2.9% processing fee. They can also use a competition like this to secure matching grants from partners they want to build relationships with. And if they are one of the top fundraisers, they get an added cash bonus.

You can check out to see if your hometown or favorite local-serving nonprofit is participating in Twive and Receive here. If not, you can sign up to fundraise for the nonprofit serving your community! Spread the love!