Marjorie Clayman’s Writing Portfolio

Professional writing profile of Marjorie Clayman

Margie Clayman

You are who you follow

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I’ve been going through my followers list trying to make sure I follow back good people. As I’ve discussed a lot here before, I try not to be a Twitter snob, but I also try not to follow back everybody. I look at every follower – I analyze their tweets and their interactions.

Here are a couple of profiles I came upon in recent evaluations.

Yeah. That’s a profile. No tweets at all. For real.

Here’s another one.

That first profile is followed by 3,072 people. The second one is followed by just 870 or so people.

Now here’s the part that might hurt your feelings

One interesting thing that Twitter does is it shows you, when you look at a profile, people you know who are following that account. By name. I saw people listed whom I follow and who follow me.

I lost a little respect for them. I’ll be 100% honest.

Who you follow sends a message

One thing that I think we can probably agree on, regardless of our specific feelings about Twitter followers, is that your list of who you are following will say a lot about you. And everybody has different ways of interpreting that. Here’s what goes through my own particular head when I see people I know following blatantly robotic or blank accounts.

• You are too busy to really look at who you are following back

• Maybe you are not that interested in engagement

• Maybe you are using automated thises and thatses to get the job done in Social Media (nothing wrong with that per se, but it tells me something about your approach)

This is why numbers don’t matter

If you have “auto follow” turned on so that you can have a lot of followers and follow…ees, let the above profiles stand as exhibits A & B as to why that may not be the best way to go, especially if you are hoping to build a network or community for business. At the best, these accounts will not do anything but hold a place in your tally of followers or people you’re following. At worst, people like me will see that you are following them and be a little surprised and maybe a little disappointed.

Of course, in the end, it doesn’t really matter if I feel that way. It’s your account. I just thought I’d let you know how one person in your stream perceives of such things.

Incidentally, both of the above accounts are following me right now. I did not opt to follow back either one.

Do you have a different view on the matter?

My advice: Don’t listen to me

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Today, Chris Brogan wrote a post about how to manage distractions to get the job done. Oddly enough, what caught my attention was not the meat of the post, but rather the first part, where Chris talks about how he “phoned it in” at various times and did or didn’t get desired results.That part really got my attention.

A bit about me and my phone

When I was in oh, fifth grade or so, I was phoning it in hardcore. I would wait to work on my homework till the morning it was due, and if that didn’t give me enough time to finish, I’d race to get the work done while the teacher was taking attendance. I’d work while the teacher was collecting everyone’s work. I hated that feeling – that cold sweat, that pulse racing. When I would wait to write my papers, inevitably the printer would run out of ink at the last minute. I’d run out of paper.

It just was not working for me. So I decided I’d start doing things that would lead to a higher quality of work. Then I realized that working as hard as I could was really rewarding. I made fewer dumb mistakes on math tests. I bumped all of my grades up. Phoning it in became a distant and harrowing memory.

Replace Phone with Fire

As I got through high school and college and into graduate school, my passion filled and overflowed the place where my phone had been. Not only did I not miss phoning it in, but I actually was driven to go as hard as I could and do the best that I could simply because I cared. It was important to me. I was striving for good grades, sure, but as time wore on, I also just wanted to learn as much as I could. I wanted to immerse myself in the experience. I wanted to make me proud of myself.

As I endeavored to do so, a lot of people looked at me funny and told me I was doing things wrong. In high school, a lot of the smart kids would brag before a test about how they had read the entire book the night before. When I’d tell them I’d finished the book 2 weeks earlier, they’d roll their eyes. In college, friends would always tell me my papers were too long. In graduate school, I was picked on because not only did I read every word of every book, but I also took painstaking notes.

“You don’t need to do that,” my peers would say. “Just read the first and last sentence of every paragraph.”

Most of my friends in graduate school finished their theses before me. In college, most of my friends got better marks on their independent study projects than I got on mine. I was never valedictorian.

I have no regrets, though. I learned as much as I could. I put everything I had into the work I did. While the grades and ratings were measurements of a sort, ultimately, they are not the measurements I care about.

Don’t back down and don’t give up

There are a lot of people out there who are ready to offer you advice. I only have one overriding piece of advice. Be guided from within. Use a compass of your own devising. And once you have that, don’t let other people or other pressures tell you that what you are doing is “wrong” or “crazy” (unless you are trying to cut a tree down with a herring or something like that). It can be hard to do things this way. It was hard to be the last one to get my thesis done. It was hard to be rated lower than my friends on the magnum opus of my college years. But I clung to what I believed was most important. They did so for themselves, too, and that’s how things ended up. I doubt that any of us have any regrets. We stayed true to ourselves.

What really matters to you? Protect that like you would protect a tiny lit candle on a windy night. If your readers aren’t digging your blog right now but you know that what you are writing is what you need to write, stick to your guns. If you are tweeting a certain way and people say, “Ew, why are you doing that?!?” don’t be swayed if you really believe you are doing it right for yourself.

But keep your ears and your mind open

This doesn’t mean that we should fence ourselves off from other peoples’ opinions and advice. There are always things we can add to our arsenal. We can always add another bit of fuel to our inner fires. And if you end up shifting course as a result, don’t let people tell you that you’re dumb for doing that either. We are like flowing streams, always changing yet always remaining the same.

And let me tell you a little secret. Are you ready?

The only advice that you’ll carry is the advice your ears and mind are ready to gather for you.

What really matters to you?

Are you on a path that you know in your heart is the right one, yet all you are encountering is pointy fingers and cackling laughter, doubt, maybe disappointment…things that are standing in your way? Hang in there. It’s hard. It’s really hard. But you will not regret fighting for what matters to you.  Make sense?

One Week Resolutions

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I read a post today by Amber Naslund called The Brass Tacks of Resolutions. Amber basically states that while making resolutions can be a really good exercise, the downside is that we all tend to make resolutions knowing full-well that we’ll be done with them by President’s Day. And there will be no repercussions.

I’ve been thinking about this and of course, there isn’t much you can argue with there. It happens to me every year. Sometimes I make it till February or March. But then the Cadbury eggs show up in the grocery stores. The days start to get a bit longer and a bit warmer. And away we go.

I would say it’s my resolution not to let that happen in 2011, but that would just be too deliciously…apropos.

So I came up with another idea instead.

Every Sunday night (Running a bit late this week), I’m going to post a couple of goals that I have for that week. Just that week. You can either play along with those goals or let everyone know what you’re up to. And we’ll see how we do. You can comment here, start your own string of posts on your blog, or if you want to keep track on Twitter, let’s use #1weekres.

Every Sunday night will be like New Year’s Eve. What could be better than that!?

So this week, my 2 big goals are to comment on 3 blogs I’ve never commented on before and to get together a big load of stuff that I can donate to Goodwill.

What are you up to?

Teach. Learn. Live.

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It seems like today is the day that a lot of people are using to post resolutions and plans for 2011. Not being one to swim against the tide (I love to eat salmon but couldn’t live as one), I thought I’d follow suit.

Chris Brogan often talks about picking 3 words that you want to use to encapsulate your goals for the new year. I’ve been thinking about this for about…2 months now. You know how verbose I am if you come here often, so choosing just 3 words for such a big topic is a major challenge. Still, the words in the title are the words I came up with after all of that. So let me explain a bit more.

Teaching and Learning

You may or may not have noticed, but a few weeks ago my blog started to change a bit. Certainly from my brief interlude in attempting to pull 27 blog posts into my own blog every day, but also from what had come before. I’ve begun to approach this blog as a chance to pass on what I have learned and learn what you can teach me in response.

In 2011, or, well, starting now (I am always running early), this trend will continue. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, there will be a blog that will be published with the fervent hope that it will be helpful. On other days, I may post about other marketing type things because I just can’t quit those.

I believe firmly that a blog post is not a place to preach. Rather, I think it’s the spark that can ignite a conversation. I don’t want this blog site to become a place where you read, absorb what you want, and then go away. I want to hear from you. Because that’s where I can learn. I’m definitely still learning. Always will be.

Because I want to make sure that what I’m blogging about is useful and interesting to you, I’ve created a page here on my site where you can ask questions and suggest topics for me to blog about. I will do the best I can to keep up with that section because, after all, I’m writing this for you.

I am also hoping to increase my reading. There are few more enjoyable ways to learn than to read. Books, your blog posts, e-newsletters – I need to absorb more than I send out. Otherwise, I’ll just end up writing about bananas or something.

Live

This may seem kind of obvious, but I want to explain what I mean.

There are a lot of things I am hoping to accomplish in 2011. I want to learn how to cook a lot of new dishes. I want to get back to a specific weight. And I am set to go to my first real-life marketing conference in June, which I’m VERY excited about. I want to add a lot of new experiences into my reservoir of experiences. I want to continue to grow and improve myself, a journey which will never end. I also want to make sure I take a bit more time to smell the roses (and geraniums, and pansies, and petunias). It’s so easy to let work, in real life and virtually, become a huge blanket over everything else you do. I have a ball at work. I have a ball here. But I also love sunlight, and so far, that doesn’t come out of my computer screen! For the next 3 months it won’t be coming out of the sky in Northeast Ohio, either, but that’s a different story.

So that’s what’s going on here. Teaching. Learning. Living. Maintaining a balance between these and other subsets of my goals for the coming year.

I can’t wait.

Hope you will stick along for the ride!

Image by Billy Alexander. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/ba1969

The art of retweeting

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I’m not one of those people who likes to go around saying, “This is the way I do it so this is how you should do it. Otherwise you’ll smell funny for 7 years.” Rather, I like to give my opinion, and if you want to debate the issue you are more than welcome.

Given that, I firmly believe that a lot of Twitterers need a retweeting intervention.

What on earth is retweeting?

OK, let me back up a moment and give a really quick background of what I’m talking about, just in case you are new to Twitter or aren’t on Twitter at all (in which case this post probably doesn’t hold a lot of interest for you, so thanks for making it this far!). So when you’re on Twitter and you see a tweet someone has made, you have 3 options. You can reply, which means you are talking to them. You can “favorite” the tweet, which is kind of like bookmarking it (this is for your use, but anyone can see your favorites). The third option is that you can “retweet” the tweet. This means that if you really like what the person is saying, you can click “retweet” so that another person’s tweet actually becomes yours. It’s like a Twitter version of quotation marks. This allows you to tell all of your followers, “Hey guys, check this funny/smart/sad/moving tweet.”

The One Click Method Versus The Cumbersome Method

If you do “retweeting” the way Twitter wants you to do it, it’s really easy. You just click “Retweet.” It’s like the “like” button on Facebook. Click click click. A lot of people, I think, view retweeting as a method of interaction, promotion, and/or engagement, so they retweet a lot and don’t have to do a whole lot more. So, someone’s profile could end up looking like this:

This is what you see a lot in profiles. Retweet after retweet. Sometimes it’s not even articles that people retweet. Sometimes you’ll see a profile where the person is retweeting other people retweeting them.

Is this methodology *wrong*? I can’t really say that. But here’s the thing. If your last 20 posts consist mostly of your own tweets and retweets that are simple echoings of what other people are saying, are you truly interacting with others? If you look at the tweets that the person above retweeted, most are about business and Social Media, and then one is about pigging out at Christmas. Why is that there? Did they think it was funny? It definitely doesn’t seem to fit in with other things. Why are they retweeting the other things there? Are these blog posts that are controversial? Are they really well written? I have no idea. For all I know, this account could belong to a spam bot that just retweets things every few minutes.

This brings me to the “cumbersome” method of retweeting. It involves adding a bit of a comment before or after what you’re posting that not only shows that you actually read or engaged with what you’re retweeting, but it also reveals something about you to your followers.

This can’t be done so far as I know with a simple click. The method I use is to copy a person’s tweet, leave my comment, put an RT @username and then paste their comment in. So it would look like this:

Now this retweet was a bit complex because I wasn’t the first person to see this fantastic post. @Kikolani saw it, my friend @pushingsocial then saw it from her stream, and I saw it from his. Instead of leaving a longer comment myself, I let @bbrian017 know that I thought it was a great post and that I saw it thanks to two people I respect a great deal. That’s a lot to say in a retweet – it lets the person I’m retweeting as well as my followers know a lot of information – about what I share, who I take recommendations from, and more.

When retweeting goes a bit over the top

Friday was one of the days that I was away more than usual from my Twitter and blogging world. When I checked on things late in the day, I saw that there were quite a few mentions of my name. In looking at things a bit more, I realized that the following had happened.

Someone did a “Follow Friday” post listing me and about 7 other people

Then, about 3-4 of the other folks retweeted the original #ff post (a couple did add a “TY” at the beginning)

I think 1 or 2 people then retweeted THOSE posts

This is where the easy access to retweeting becomes a bit of a hazard. Ask yourself, before you hit retweet, whether your followers really need to see this tweet. Actually, that’s probably good advice regardless of what you’re tweeting, but in any case, will your followers truly benefit from seeing lots of retweets of your follow Friday mentions? If someone says something nice about you, do you need to retweet that?

Here’s something I have learned on Twitter. If you say something to someone and people want to see the other side of the conversation, they can visit that other person’s profile and look. With that in mind, 99% of the time, I will not retweet a nice thing someone says about me. Rather, I’ll simply and genuinely say, “Thank you very much!” The only time I stray away from this is if someone does a blog post that mentions me, because I want to help them drive traffic to their site in that case. Even then, though, I don’t do the one-click retweet method. I usually write my own tweet and then put a link to their post in.

Another disadvantage to one-click retweeting

One other quick point I’d point out for those of you who are fans of metrics. When you tweet out a link, you are able to track how many people click that link most of the time. For example, I use bit.ly, and I can see how much traction those links get. If you simply retweet someone else’s tweet, you’re not getting your own trackable link. You’re just sending their link out.

Retweeting is a gift

I like to think of retweeting as a gift – it’s a way of telling someone that what they said was so great that you want to share it with all of your followers. You want to give up some of your platform to someone else. If you retweet people all of the time, it becomes less of a gift and more of a “ho hum” activity. No one will really feel special if you retweet them because you seem to retweet everybody. In my own case, I prefer to retweet by not really “retweting,” but rather by promoting. If someone does a great blog post, I’ll explain why I recommend reading it and then tweet a link out rather than just retweeting their own post about it. Again, this shows them that I took the time to read it and offer thoughts about it, and it also gives my followers more insight into why the heck I’m posting this information for them. Everybody wins.

How are you retweeting?

Does any of this resonate with you? How do you handle retweets right now? If you tend to hit the “retweet” button a lot, give the “cumbersome” method a try, and let me know how it works for you. And of course, as always, if you have any questions, just let me know!

Thoughts on Traditional Agencies and Social Media Boutiques

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On December 21, 2010, Jeremiah Owyang published a comprehensive post titled, “Trend: How Social Media Boutiques Are Winning Deals Over Traditional Digital Agencies.” Given that I work for an agency (I’ll get to the word “traditional” in a minute) the post attracted my attention. I think the post raises a lot of interesting points, but there are also some facets of the post that I really take issue with. So, I thought I would explore some of those thoughts and see if you agree.

The new traditional agency

I’ve been confused all year about how people define “agency.” It seems like everyone has their own definition, with the only commonality being that talk of agencies is often tied to disdain. This particular post refers to a traditional agency and a traditional digital agency, which I thought was even more confusing. So I did some research. I found this article from October 2008, which is called How to integrate a digital agency into a traditional one. Among some of the points that THIS post brings up:

• In a traditional agency, the creative personnel have no idea how to develop creative for the online world

• Traditional agencies are afraid of change (and programmers)

• “Hosting, Bandwidth, Email, Load Balancing, Database, Privacy Policies, Proofing Sites, Backups, Milestones, Testing – terms that traditional account management has never heard of”

Well, I of course can’t speak for all agencies, or really any agency other than the one I work for (which is my family’s agency). However, none of this accurately describes us, and I would venture to say that any agency that is striving hard to survive would not find these descriptions accurate either.

Factually, the new traditional agency is what one might call “full service.” Our agency does print ads, sure. We also do digital ads, news releases, e-newsletters, websites, SEO, and Social Media. That’s right. Social Media.

It’s not clear to me how “traditional digital agency” is defined in the context of Jeremiah Owyang’s post, but I am coming to it based on the understanding that a “traditional” agency is probably not traditional in the “old fashioned” kind of sense.

“Immature Brands Naturally Rely on Traditional Agencies”

This is where some of the wording started to rub me the wrong way. This part of the post basically says that:

• most corporations are not trying to engage with customers

• and therefore, using a “traditional” agency works just fine

The post states that traditional agencies might educate companies but that traditional agencies “lack flexibility or don’t have a business model for social engagement.”

This kind of painting with a broad paintbrush is what I find most disturbing in the realm of Social Media, not just in terms of talk about agencies but in terms of, well, just about anything. An agency can be good at this, a Social Media boutique can be good at that, so you need to pick one or the other.

However, there is some research behind this, so let’s dig a bit deeper.

Agency as hub

Let’s say that you are working with an agency but you really want to engage in an aggressive Social Media campaign. Let’s say that your agency has helped you create a great strategy and has helped you develop a corporate policy (yes, we can do that), but you need help with implementation. One advantage to working with an agency that people seldom think of is that we are able to use our expertise and connections to connect you with who you need. Think of us as a hub, and lots of different firms and specialists can plug into us on your behalf. An agency can work WITH a Social Media boutique or consultant. We can serve as liaison so that you don’t have to sit and explain your whole business to the firm. We can provide background information on where you are in your process, and we can help you monitor the Social Media campaign both as it exists on its own and as it interfaces with other marketing channels.

This is not to undermine the fact that an agency can also focus personnel on  your Social Media strategy. I know how to engage and build communities in Social Media, and I also know how to order space in a print magazine. Is that a weird disconnect? I don’t think so. I think, rather, that it’s an essential mix. I would feel I was doing a poor job if I dropped either portion of what my experiences have taught me. If you are a marketer in this world, I don’t think turning your back on any portion of what a client may need to do is a wise move. Absorb everything. Learn as much as you can. And pass it on to your customers.

Campaign versus Long-Term Goal

The kernel that I found most disturbing is under the sub-head, “Why Social Media Boutiques Differentiate, and Win Deals from Advanced Buyers.” The post contends that “corporations know they need these specialists” for several reasons, one of which is, “Rather than be “campaign” focused, instead are more long term focused such as building a community with customers for the long term.”

Hmm.

Suzanne Vara wrote a great post a couple of months ago called Social Media is Not A New Conversation. She points out that marketers have been talking to their customers for … well, forever. It’s a necessary part of the job. It’s just the method of conversing that has changed.

With that in mind, I don’t think it’s accurate to say that corporations can rely on agencies for “campaigns” but can only rely on Social Media boutiques for engagement and community. In fact, what seems to be missing from a lot of marketers’ toolboxes is the fact that your customers are the same people, whether you reach them via an ad or a tweet. Why start from scratch as if you are new to the market? Why throw the baby out with the bathwater?

Howdy, Partner

Social Media boutiques, PR firms, marketing firms, agencies, web development firms – we all have strengths and we all have weaknesses in this ever-changing world. The advantage that an agency can offer is that we can interface with you and with everyone else you need to work with. We can partner with you. We can partner with the Social Media Boutique. It does not have to be a situation where we are “winning deals” over each other.

What is your vantage point on this issue? I’d love to have a conversation with  you.

1st Image by Franci Strümpfer. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/1041992

2nd Image by Mohammad Salman Ehsan. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/graphican