Margie Clayman

The topic during last night’s #blogchat…chat…was a great one submitted by @WriterChanelle. “Do you blog for yourself or do you blog for your readers?”

In all of the chaos of the chat (and trust me, there was chaos) I realized that what I have been working on is my own philosophy, if you will, about Social Media. I have been saying that I have been a “blog purist,” but I didn’t really have a context for that. Last night I responded that ultimately, if you are doing Social Media right, what your readers want should be the same thing that you want because you are doing this for them. I don’t want to say that my view is “right,” but that statement falls into line with a lot of other things I believe about Social Media and how to use it. It guides me on a lot of things that I say across the board. At the core is one simple belief:

I will always be doing what I do in Social Media because I am passionate about helping others.

Does that mean that I end up feeling rewarded by doing the stuff that I do? Sure. It makes me happy to do what I want to do. But that is different from starting a blog saying, “I hope that this gets me blog traffic.” I write things to help people, to try to fill in gaps that I see, to try to improve a practice that I think could lead people astray.

Some of the tentacles of this core belief are:

1. The number of followers I have on Twitter doesn’t matter to me. If I can engage with the people who are following me, and if  I am providing them value, then I am doing things right.

2. Being listed on a top ten countdown will never be important to me. When compared with 1 person saying, “Thanks, you helped me xyz,” there’s no comparison.

3. I will always be honest with you, which means that I will disagree with you or sometimes say that I think something you did could be improved. This also means that if I think something is really super duper, you know that I am saying that from the heart.

4. My ultimate dream is to improve the world in some small way. If that means that I can help people succeed in business, that would be terrific, and that is one of my passions. If I get to a point where I can leverage my Social Media community’s power to help charities as so many great people do, that would be a dream come true.

Who are you doing all of this for? What are you hoping to get out of it? I’d love to hear your story.

I’ve been feeling kind of uncomfortable about some facets of my Social Media world lately, and I haven’t really been able to put my finger on why. I think I just realized one of the biggest contributing factors, though.

Lately, a lot of the blogs I visit have had themes kind of like:

“I am so busy, this blogging is really getting hard to work in.”

“I’m so busy I put gum inside my shoes and socks inside my mouth.”

“I’m so busy that if I get one more direct message on Twitter I’m going to…xyz that person.”

I haven’t seen a lot of posts lately where someone was really jazzed about their topic, where it was clear that they couldn’t get the words to screen fast enough because they felt so strongly about it.

I have seen a lot of people in Social Media start to kind of go through the motions. And this makes me really, really sad.

I sympathize, but…

I know what it is to be busy. I am essentially doing something work related almost every minute of every day. There are some local friends who I haven’t seen for 3 months. I know that thinking all of the time, constantly giving ideas and help and whatever else, can make you feel like you are bleeding at your jugular.

The reason that I can write a blog post or 2 every day is the same reason why I am immersed in Social Media marketing in the first place. I love it. It touches on issues that I am passionate about. I love sharing ideas with people. I love being taught. I love teaching. It makes me want to get up in the morning. It makes me not want to go to bed.

I schedule time for blogging and for Twitter because I find both extremely enjoyable. Sometimes I might blog about something that is frustrating. Sometimes I might tweet about something sad that is happening to someone. But the sharing of ideas, the whole gestalt of this world – I am passionate about it.

Everybody gets burnt out sometimes

It seems like 2-3 months ago, there would be blog posts by the dozens that would get me thinking all day. I’d find myself arguing with the author in my head while I was making dinner. I’d want to rush to write my own blog post in response. There hasn’t been a lot of that lately though. It feels like a lot of people are just…tired, or like they can’t hear the little jingle of the special bell anymore (that’s a reference to Polar Express, by the way).

If blogging has become a burden to you, a task, something that makes you not want to turn on your computer, I think it shows. If tweeting is something that just annoys you, and you find that all you tweet about is how annoying tweeting is, what is the point in going through the motions?

Don’t stay up for me, Argentina

The perpetual bemoaning of having to blog makes me hesitate to read your blog. If you see that you have readers and comments, are you going to be trapped into making another post? If you are bemoaning having to make a post, is your effort to offer advice really genuine? I never could understand teachers who would stand there and seem to look at the clock more than the students were. It made me uncomfortable, like I was just not getting … something.

The constant belittling of your tweety followers or responders makes me not want to try to respond to you. What if I too end up saying something that bothers you? Will I become the subject of a blog post you once again didn’t want to write?

I still believe that Social Media is about sharing ideas. Learning. Teaching. That’s what I love about it. If you are burnt out, if you’ve lost interest, or if you just simply don’t have the time, it’s okay. People will understand. I will understand. Don’t kill yourself for me. I’d rather you take some time away, rev your engines, and come back with a post from the heart. To me, Social Media and all it entails should be a toy, not an albatross.

What do you think?

Or, as I wanted to call this post, “I feel like I’ve been duped.”

Let me tell you a story.

When I was in college, I went out to McDonalds with a bunch of friends. A friend said that there was a new way to test a person’s IQ. He stuck a quarter to his forehead, then started hitting the back of his head till the quarter fell off. “3 hits, that’s pretty good,” he said. “Do you want to try it, Margie?” Well, being me, I of course said yes. He came ’round behind me, stuck the quarter to my head, and told me to start hitting the back of my head. I of course eventually realized that the quarter had never been stuck to my forehead. I had been stupidly tricked into hitting the back of my head repeatedly at a McDonalds. I felt stupid, and I was disappointed a little that a person I liked and trusted had made me feel that way (though I admit, gullible is my middle name).

Right now, as I am writing this, I am feeling that same red hot feeling of humiliation, disappointment, stupidity, and anger. I feel like I’ve been let down by people I really like and trust. And I feel stupid for not realizing this sooner.

My issue – I have been buying these great marketing books. I, a person without a lot of money, have spent a pretty fair chunk of change this year buying books from people I wanted to learn from. This evening, I realized that with about the same time investment as it took me to read the book I could have read said person’s blog, going a ways back and reading forward, and acquired the same information, written, at times, in exactly the same way. I quite frankly feel duped.

The part that isn’t a surprise

It’s not a secret that a lot of folks engaged full time in Social Media marketing have been using their blog posts as fodder for books, speeches, and webinars. In fact, you’ll find that a lot of people recommend repurposing content from blogs in this manner.

The part that is a surprise

What I realized tonight is that people are not taking an idea from a blog post and extrapolating it out into a fully researched chapter or power point presentation. Rather, they are taking a blog post, maybe mushing it a bit with another blog post, and literally plagiarizing themselves. They are also enticing me to buy a book  or pay hundreds of dollars to watch them speak based on the understanding that this is content I will not be able to get anywhere else. This is not true, apparently. I could get it in all kinds of places, just not bound together.

If Content is King, this has to stop.

Let me step back here and explain why doing what some of these folks are doing is a really bad idea for them and for Social Media marketing. And by the way, I understand that we are all strapped for time. I understand that sometimes it’s hard to figure out how to actually get paid for all of the time you put in. I understand. I sympathize. I’m just still sticking to my guns.

1. It’s clear when a book has been written and when it has been woven. Maybe the tonality of books is changing or has changed, or maybe the tonality of blogs changed and I didn’t notice it, but blog writing, to me, is different from book writing. In a book, chapters build upon each other in a logical way. Each chapter assumes that you have read the last chapters. There might be references to previous concepts or chapters, but because the work is cohesive, you don’t need to insert the same phrases over and over. In a blog, you do. You have to link to that blog post you wrote 6 months ago because it was written 6 months ago. When you see blog-type references in a book it signals sloppiness to me.

2. It makes you look like you don’t really care. I signed up for a webinar once and the presentation was essentially a book report on the presenter’s own book. There was hardly even an effort to customize the content to what the webinar was supposed to be about. This made the presenter look like they were a) lazy and b) didn’t care. I was highly disappointed.

3. Your circle of influence is finite. You know how sometimes skeevy guys get caught using the same pick-up line on a bunch of girls who are all friends? When you use the same content, right down to the same joke or the same little aside, it’s the same kind of feeling. As much as we all feel like Social Media marketing and Social Media in general are infinite universes of being, in fact it is not so. If someone reads your blog, they will very probably hear about speeches you’re due to give or a book you’re promoting. If you give them the same information 3 times, they will know it, and they will lose respect for you. Like I have lost respect for some folks.

4. You’re dealing with people who are immersed in this world. I am hungry. I am hungry for knowledge. I am hungry for you to teach me. And I’m not stupid. Do you think I’m not going to look someone up on Twitter and in the world of blogs if I really really like a presentation they give? Do you think I’m not going to get your book if I have been loyal to your blog? Now multiply that by a bunch more people. What if I see that all of the parts of your presentation that I thought seemed really authentic and genuine were written in a blog post, verbatim, a couple of weeks before?

If it’s a duck, call it a duck

If you really feel that you don’t have the time to generate enough content for constant blogging, a book, and other stuff you are doing, be honest about it. When you publish your collection of blog posts, market it as, well, a collection of your blog posts. Maybe with some additional notes and interviews that you added. If the main thrust of your speech is a series of blog posts you did 2 years ago, integrate the 2 together. Use your actual blog on some of your slides. Show your foundation, then show how you are adding icing to the cake. Give me something extra when you are asking me to pay something, or start charging for your blog straight up. Just like the pay walls in newspapers, maybe this is an inevitability we can’t avoid for much longer. But don’t get me excited about seeing new content for you and then let me find out that it’s just your blog in hard cover.

By the way

I had an idea for a book a month or so ago, and I tried my hand at doing some blog posts that I could use to create the book since, as I have mentioned, that is increasingly being called a best practice. You know what? Writing a blog post is not like writing a chapter of a book for me. There was no way I would ask anyone to pay for those posts as they were. They were written as posts. The tonality is that of my blog. The tonality tied in to other perhaps unrelated blog posts surrounding those blog posts. It would not have made sense in a book. It would have looked uneven, sloppy, and lazy.

Is that the new standard for us, my peers in Social Media?

I’m open to your thoughts, and I’m definitely open to being proven wrong.

1st Image by Sufi Nawaz. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/sufinawaz

2nd Image by Piotr Bizior. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/bizior

3rd Image Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Kiapalmang

I have been revisiting the topic of my thesis – picking up the strands of research, trying to look at it in new ways. The process of my thesis got in the way of really enjoying it, so now that I’m working at another career 12 hours a day, I thought I’d revisit my student days too. Why not?

Anyway, I’m reading a classic book of literary criticism called The Signifying Monkey, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. You might recognize his name from the recent “Faces of America” series he did with PBS. In the book, Gates recounts a tale called “The Two Friends”

Once upon a time, two men swore that they would be friends forever and ever, but they didn’t mention the god Esu, who, in the Yoruba tradition, basically writes your life and tells you what you are going to do. Esu decided to test the friendship of these men who hadn’t bothered to think about the force behind their lives. Esu put on a cap, half black and half white, and rode down the center of the field in which the 2 men were working.

Upon taking a break, the 2 guys mentioned the nice man that had ridden by. The first friend said, “oh yeah, you mean the guy with the white cap?” “Um, he had a black cap, but yeah, that guy” (I’m severely paraphrasing here). The two friends start calling each other names because they think the other can’t tell the difference between white and black. Finally, Esu comes back and pretends that he doesn’t know what the fracas is all about. Neighbors explain that the 2 men were fighting furiously, and the 2 men explain to Esu what happened. Esu tells them, “That guy was me. And you’re both right. You’re also both wrong.  The cap is both black and white.”

Great Wisdom Translates

The story resonated with me, as all great stories can resonate over centuries. It made me realize that Social Media is kind of like the trickster god Esu in a way. It makes us think that things are either black or white. If you think it’s black and someone else thinks it’s white, you both call each other stupid.

I’ve seen this so many times it’s almost too difficult to give examples. I saw two posts yesterday that said that every post talking about how Google Instant was going to affect SEO was ill-informed or even dumb. I’ve seen posts about how doing things a certain way is “the best way” or “the worst way.” I’ve seen people argue “this or that” on lots of things, from quality versus quantity, influence versus engagement, and the list goes on.

How Broad Is Your Paint Brush?

Before making a proclamation just to see if it can get you blog traffic or some retweets, consider just how broadly you want to paint the people and the world around you. The fact is, just like Esu’s cap, many issues are both and neither black or white. They are a little bit of both. We can still converse in the grey. We can still make points for the black or the white in the grey. But to take a stance that there is only one opinion, and to hold that opinion so tightly that you will resort to name calling, may be a method of engagement that you want to think twice about. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe this is a grey area, too.

What do you think?

http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Sanae78