Marjorie Clayman’s Writing Portfolio

Professional writing profile of Marjorie Clayman

Archives for June 2012

Social Media: A Rich Person’s Game?

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Have you ever watched Ken Burns’ The West? There’s a story in there about a fellow named William Swain. William was a teacher and a peach farmer, and as the historians say, he had what would have been considered a very comfortable existence. He wasn’t famous or super wealthy, but his life was comfortable and stable. All of that changed, though, when the gold rush started in California. Suddenly you could get rich just by putting your spoon into a river. For William Swain, his comfortable life now seemed substantially more boring and less comfortable. Young men around the country started to dream about what that extra money could get them, and that was in addition to all of the adventure tied to heading all the way over to California. Suddenly good enough was NOT good enough.

To be 100% honest, the world of social media often brings William Swain to mind. Indeed, I rather much empathize with his state of mind. My life is extremely comfortable. I’m not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination. My life is comfortable and stable. But the longer I stick around in the online world, the more feeble my life seems to feel. Factually, many people in the online world seem to be wealthy, or at the very least they post that way. If I didn’t read the news and only got my sense of the world from what I saw on Facebook and Twitter, I’d be apt to think there was no great recession. It seems that people are always eating out at fancy restaurants, going on 2-week vacations, going to conferences, buying additional houses…there is not much talk about money pressure in these parts.

But it’s not the updates that make social media feel increasingly like an exclusive club. It’s the almost palpable sentiment that if you don’t live your life like a wealthy person, you’re probably a coward. Take, for example, one of my particular hot buttons – that whole, “Don’t be afraid to fail” thing. People blog and tweet and Facebook about failure as if there are no consequences. Go tell your boss what your terms are. If you get fired, hey, that’s okay. Go leave work and the online world for 2 months. If things fall apart, hey, who cares. You have a great experience to look back on.

To me, and feel free to argue with me here, this is the perspective of a person who doesn’t have to face a lot of real-world consequences. If you are wealthy, losing your job may be okay. You can float on by for awhile. Maybe a long while. If you want to start your own company, the obstacles before you aren’t as monumental. If a family member suffers a major health crisis, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to cover it. You will face some consequences, but they are of a different nature than someone who doesn’t have a lot of expendable income.

It seems like a lot of people in the online world have a Nike “Just do it” attitude. If you want to change jobs, do it. If you want to move somewhere else, do it. If you want to travel a lot, just do it. There’s a tint to these kinds of statements that almost hinges on bullying. “If you don’t do this you’re giving up on life. You’re a coward.”

Or, possibly, you don’t want to go into brain-numbing debt?

Is Social Media Rigged for the Wealthy?

The more I have thought about this, the more I begin to wonder if the “social media game” is really rigged so that only the wealthy can truly succeed. For example, there’s this overriding thought that in order to start really getting your star to rise, you need to “be seen.” The best way to do this is to go to a lot of social media conferences, right? Let’s take SXSW Interactive in Austin, which sort of gets the social media conference season going. The badge just for the show is $950. That does not include (to the best of my knowledge) any transportation within the city of Austin. I don’t think that includes your hotel stay. It doesn’t include travel. That’s for one conference. Just one.

For someone who is leading a comfortable but not money-filled life, this single expenditure would be a challenge. If getting seen is part of what helps you climb the ranks in the social media world, how can a person who is not wealthy start to make an impact? Can you compete with in-person relationships if most people will never meet you in real life? Maybe, but I would posit that the odds are stacked against you.

So, now it’s your turn. Is social media a rich person’s game?

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/danni_m/536492895/ via Creative Commons

Three Simple Steps To Forgiveness

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I had rather an extraordinary conversation with a friend recently. What brought it about was unfortunately an unpleasant communique I had gotten from another friend. I was venting and lamenting to this friend of mine and she took me on a three-step journey that I realized could be applied to any situation where there are feelings of hurt or anger. I found it quite helpful in that particular situation, so I thought I would share the process in case you are wanting and/or needing to forgive someone these days.

Step 1: Ownership

The first thing you need to do is take a step back and say, “OK, does this person have a valid point?” This can be extremely hard to do when you yourself are feeling hurt. The natural reaction is always going to be, “Geeze, I certainly did not deserve THAT!” In fact, if someone asks you something like, “Well, did you do something to cause that reaction” you might actually end up lashing out at that person, right? Humans don’t like to think we’ve done anything wrong. Ever. Even so, it’s extremely important to step back and evaluate your actions or your words from the vantage point of another person. Did you do something that could be perceived as mean even if you didn’t intend it that way, or is this person reacting in a way that doesn’t make any sense? If you can’t determine this for yourself, find a trusted person who can look at the whole situation with an outsider’s perspective and see what they say. You might find that your effort to give results in you actually apologizing.

Step 2: Acknowledge that you might not know the full story

I often think of this story: A man and his three kids are at a shoe store. The kids are running around like wild banshees and they are irritating the store customers and the store employees. Someone finally goes up to the man and in a frustrated tone says something like, “You really need to get a hold of your kids. They’re behaving very poorly.” The man responds, “I know, I know. We just left the hospital. Their mom passed away and I really don’t know what to do right now.”

If someone lashes out at you for seemingly no reason, or if they react to something you did but the reaction seems a bit over the top, pause before you immediately retort in anger or in hurt. Maybe there’s something going on with that person that you don’t know about. Maybe, without realizing it, you said something that opened up an old wound. Human beings are covered in these invisible traps. You could mention something in passing and it could totally throw a person into turmoil for reasons you can’t even begin to comprehend. If you know the person well enough, and if the time seems right, perhaps make sure that there isn’t something else going on that is causing them to be off-balance. In this case, your path to forgiveness could result in helping someone out.

Step 3: Remember that failing to forgive only adds weight to your shoulders

Maybe someone has done something that for you hedges on the level of betrayal. Maybe they have cut you to the core. You don’t feel you deserved it and frankly you don’t care if they’re “Going through something.” You have no interest in letting them off free and clear with your forgiveness.

This might seem logical – if you are mad at someone right now maybe you’re saying “Amen.” But here’s the problem, and unfortunately it’s something people often have to learn the hard way. Forgiveness frees YOU. It in most cases probably impacts you more than it impacts the person you’re forgiving, oddly enough. By saying, “I forgive you,” and by really trying to mean it, what you are actually doing is saying, “I’m not going to carry around the results of this exchange. I’m going to leave it by the side of the road and move on.” If you don’t forgive, the event will just keep eating away at you. You’ll keep analyzing it. Maybe it will change in your head over the span of days/weeks/months/years until it becomes all-consuming.

In the worst case scenario, you will lose that person you’re mad at before things can get resolved. At that point, all you may be left with is the bad feelings about them until you can work it out, and then it is too late. Life is uncertain and too short to take such risks, don’t you think?

None of this is easy, of course, and in the online world it is all too easy to fight back before thinking. Those fingers of ours can start typing before we even realize we have a keyboard at our fingertips. But I have found that these three steps in recent times have helped me prevent relatively small events from snowballing out of control. I hope they serve you in a similar fashion.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8185675@N07/3633152013/ via Creative Commons

Of actionable items and a touch of hypocrisy

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With our agency blog kicking off, I’ve been trying to watch webinars and talks in my free time. This is what usually gets me revved up on a subject and then I am inspired to write about it. I’ve been having a problem though. Even though I sit down to watch a lot of webinars, I haven’t been making it past ten minutes in a lot of cases. It’s not that the webinars are bad. In fact, in a lot of cases the speaker is saying things that are perfectly interesting. It’s just, well, I don’t have a whole ton of time, and as nice as stories and anecdotes can be, if you don’t start telling me what I’m going to get out of your presentation, I’m moving on.

This all makes perfect sense in the abstract, and in fact I was going to write a post advising you to make sure you establish early on what people can expect to take away from your presentation. But then I realized a tidbit of a problem.

As a blogger, I’m doing the exact same thing as those webinar presenters. In fact, most of my blog posts don’t really provide you with any actionable items. There is not usually something you can *do* after reading one of my posts. There’s nothing you can take to your boss or your peers and say, “Hey guys, Margie suggested this in her blog post and I think we should try it.” I’m starting to wonder if that’s a problem. After all, your time is just as short as mine – maybe even shorter. Although I try to be entertaining and although we have good conversations here, I’m not really living by my own code. Sadly, that makes me a bit of a hypocrite. Now that is a label I REALLY don’t like.

On the other hand…

Maybe blogging is a different kind of animal from a webinar. A webinar is usually an investment of 45 minutes to an hour. Most of my posts don’t represent that kind of a time investment. Maybe people have more expectations from a webinar. I still read and enjoy blog posts that don’t necessarily offer actionable items. I’m not as picky. But the posts that DO give me something to do or a new way of looking at things – those are the ones I always wish I had written.

What do you make of this?

What do you expect when you come here or when you go to another blog site? Are you finding that your expectations are changing?

I certainly feel like I can’t rightly fault other bloggers or webinar presenters for doing something I do myself all of the darned time, so I am feeling like I’m in a bit of a pickle. Writing about Queen Elizabeth I is all well and good, but is it really valuable?

Weigh in!

I’ve written a new e-book called The ABCs of Marketing Myths. You can read about it here!

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/55790637@N06/5580723390/ via Creative Commons

You can help five companies in one quick minute

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Often times, people say that they like to be able to look back on a day and say, “Hey, I did something that could be called a good deed!” Well, today is your lucky day. I’m going to tell you how you can help five companies in the span of one minute. Such a deal! And it’s a GREAT cause that will really help these companies out. See, this is for the Chase Mission: Small Business contest, and 12 companies will be awarded a $250,000 grant. That’s a major lift, as you might imagine!

There are five companies that I’m suggesting you help in this minute of your time. They are:

Manty Web Designs of Cypress, TX

Miller Finch Media of Acworth, GA

You’re First LLC of Cypress, TX

Center for the Greater Good of Eagle, ID

Ms. Julie’s Kitchen and Ms. Julie’s Cafe of my own hometown, Akron, OH

All you have to do

Step 1: Go to https://www.missionsmallbusiness.com/ and log-in with Facebook. I know that a lot of people don’t like using their FB log-in for things, but I promise, this is a good cause!

Once you log-in, you’ll be taken to a page, and you’ll need to scroll down all the way to the bottom. You should see something like this:

Step 2: In the search button, type in the name of the first company up there, Manty Web Designs. Now, the search can be a bit finnicky. So:

for Manty Web Designs, you want to type in Mantyweb.

for Miller Finch Media, just typing in Miller Finch will work.

You’re First works for You’re First LLC

Center for the Greater Good works for the Eagle Idaho company

Julie’s Kitchen works for the last one

Don’t worry about the city drop-down. These name searches take you to where you want to go.

3. Click Vote. After you type in the name of each company as indicated above, be sure to press the blue “vote” button.

And that’s it.

Typing in each company name will take you about 5 seconds. Clicking vote will take you about 1 second. Six seconds times five companies – hey, 30 seconds. Now that’s not such a bad investment of half-a-minute, right?

Vote and pass it on 🙂 I thank you!

Mind-Bending Parallels Between The Matrix and Social Media

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I was working on my computer the other day (big surprise) when something unbelievable happened. You’ll never guess, so I’ll just tell you.

I got a message from Neo. That’s right, that guy we thought was a fictional character played by the increasingly delicious Keanu Reeves – he’s real. Turns out the Matrix trilogy is all based on a true story. At least in so far as the world of social media is concerned.

Basically, Neo asked me to spread the following message – if you’re in the world of social media, you are being sucked in by the Matrix, and you need to break your way free. Thinking that I was of a far inferior intellect (this from a guy who says, “Woah”) he then broke this down for me and asked me to do the same for you.

You’re ignoring the real world

Neo reminded me that before he met Morpheus, he thought everything was cool. That was before he found out he was a pod person living on a destroyed planet. He said he has noticed that people who become deeply involved in the world of social media seem to have a similar problem grasping the real world versus the illusion that social media creates. For example, if you live in the world of social media, you might think that you can do nothing but drink coffee at Starbucks and still make a profit. You might think that measuring ROI is like measuring the ROI of your mother (clearly ridiculous in the context of the real world). You might think that doing nice things for other people is a great business model.

Neo says that these things are akin to him believing he was okay in his regular ho-hum life and job. But, he reiterates, he was a pod person living on a destroyed planet.

Woah.

The Agents Don’t Want You To Question Things

Neo wanted me to point out that the more he tried to break through the Matrix, the more agents came after him (he denies that seeing Hugo Weaving in person was a turn-on – my legs turn into jello just thinking about it). Anyway…

The more he questioned things, the more powerful and persistent the agents became. Neo suggests that this same dynamic exists in the world of social media. There are people who want you to believe certain things, like the idea that everything except social media “is dead.” If you argue with these folks or try to prove that they might be on the track, you are apt to be called a “hater,” a “drinker of the haterade,” or “president of the hater club” (I’ve actually never seen the latter but I feel it would be a nice twist). Sometimes, begging to differ can result in you being at the wrong end of a bloggy flash mob, all of whom are proclaiming your hater status. All of this seems to encourage people to NOT speak out against ideas that might be flawed.

Neo wanted me to say that he was giving a very knowing glance in his alternate dimension. I’m not sure what he meant by that.

The Good and the Bad in Dealing with Morpheus

Finally, Neo wanted me to point out on his behalf that there were advantages and disadvantage to his relationship with Morpheus. Morpheus is the one who helped Neo break out of the Matrix, and for that Neo remains grateful to this day. However, Morpheus also led Neo in some directions that weren’t as beneficial. Laying the whole “messiah” thing on Neo’s shoulders in rapid fashion put a lot of unwanted pressure on the poor guy (he wants you to say “aww” at this point).

Neo suggests that when you find your Morpheus in the online world, it can be easy to follow them blindly. After all, they were right about the Matrix thing so they must be right about other big things, too. However, even people with the best of intentions can lead you down a path you don’t want to travel on. Neo suggests the best way to break through the Matrix is to think for yourself and follow your own guidance.

He also suggests buying some VERY shiny black leather trench coats, but I’m not sure that is entirely necessary in this case.

Do you have any messages you’d like me to pass back on over to Neo? He said he’d be welcome to help me answer any questions or comments, although he can’t divulge too much about his dimension, and he hopes you’re okay with that. If you’re not, well, he can pretty much kick your butt, so I’d just nod and say a-okay!

I’ve written a new e-book called The ABCs of Marketing Myths. You can read about it here!

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/trinity-of-one/20562069/ via Creative Commons

I’m online therefore I am

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The years following the Renaissance, which was all arty and fluffy (except for stuff like the Spanish Inquisition) came to be known as The Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. Just as the Renaissance boasted great figures like Michelangelo and the other Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Age of Reason had its own cast of stars, including John Locke, Sir Isaac Newton, Spinoza, and Voltaire. Spanning through most of the 17th century and believed to be the spark that lit the fires of the American Revolution and the French Revolution, the Age of Reason was about science, math, and philosophy. One of its great stars was Rene Descartes.

Descarte was, if you pardon the pun, a real Renaissance man. He was a mathematician (you math nerds are probably thinking of your  Cartesian Coordinate System), a writer, and a great philosopher. Perhaps his most well-known contribution was his pondering on the idea, “I think, therefore I am.”

These days, I fear that some folks have altered this line of reasoning a bit. I fear that for some people, their online identity has become their only identity. They are online, therefore they are. What are they when they are offline? Perhaps that scares them.

On Being Seen

I first ran into this idea on Chris Brogan’s site. He wrote:

I continue to maintain the fantasy that if I don’t blog every day, if I don’t tweet several times a day, if I don’t publish something interesting to Google+ a few times a day, then people will forget me and move on to other sources of information. In some ways, I know this to be true. We are a consumption society, hungry to click to the next thing and the thing after that. from You’re Not As Busy As You Think

I wondered, when reading that, how many people that statement resonated with. I suspect quite a few. Once you’ve gone to the trouble of building an online reputation, it’s almost horrifying to think that people could forget about you if you take a day off or a week off or *gasp* a month off. How did you live before you started tweeting or blogging or Facebooking? How did you track your value and your accomplishments? The possibility that you could lose everything you built over a year or two span because of one or two days off is enough to motivate people to keep on working online, even if their hearts aren’t in it anymore.

Has this happened to you?

Does Social Media lower our self-esteem?

If you begin to think that people will forget you after a day of not blogging or a day of not tweeting, what are you really saying?

To me, it seems like you are saying, “I’m not memorable. I don’t make enough of an impression on people. My presence is so fleeting that people will forget me unless I keep myself in front of them at all possible hours of the day.” This is sort of like what toddlers go through once they reach the age of about 1. Suddenly they start to get really upset when their mom or dad leaves the house. Are they coming back? Are they going to forget I exist? And where’s my bottle, anyway?

As adults, we are seemingly starting to go down this same path of reaction. To me, this would indicate that we are placing more and more value on what other people think of us and less and less value on what we think of ourselves. Granted, not everyone in the online world is going to remember you based on one tweet or one blog post, but you need to value yourself enough to trust that to the people who matter, your presence is appreciated and is missed when it is absent.

You continue to exist in peoples’ minds and hearts whether or not you are tweeting at them. Do you believe that about yourself? If you are feeling skeptical, I might toss out that what’s missing is not your ability to wow others. What’s missing is your ability to wow yourself.

What do you think? Are we basing our sense of self too much on whether or not we are present online? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

I’ve written a new e-book called The ABCs of Marketing Myths. You can read about it here!

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/utopiandreaming/4587647780/ via Creative Commons