Marjorie Clayman’s Writing Portfolio

Professional writing profile of Marjorie Clayman

Margie Clayman

Are you trying to run before learning how to walk?

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From early 2007 through about February of this year, I ran an online charity group called Homespun Helpers. The idea was that people could make whatever they wanted, from baked goods to crocheted baby bonnets. They could donate to any charity they wanted. All you had to do was post a picture of the items to our Livejournal community blog, tell us where the items were going, and then I’d keep a running tally. Over the period of the group, we donated about 7,000 items to all kinds of charities all around the world. The idea really had me thinking all the time, and I had all sorts of grandiose ideas that I would bounce off my poor, defenseless friends. One day I called a friend with this ridiculously complex concept (I can’t even remember what it was now). She stopped me. “Do you know how to do this part of this step?” “No.” “Well, do you know how to do this this and this?” “Um…no.” “Maybe you should rethink this?” “Maybe.”

Sometimes, I wonder if I have really shaken the temptation of trying to run before learning how to crawl, then wobble, then walk. For example, I’m out here in my blog world offering marketing advice in a lot of my posts. Should I be? I have never worked for or with a Fortune 500 company. I don’t have a story about how I took a little start-up and made it into a Fortune 500 Company. I’m okay with the fact that I haven’t become a power house. I’ve been at this for less than a decade. But should I be blogging from the vantage point of someone who knows stuff? Maybe not. Maybe I’m trying to run before I really know how to walk.

Lots of runners

In a lot of the conversations I have with people in the Social Media world, it seems like this problem of rushing is a bug that bothers many individuals and companies. Last night during #custserv, for example, someone mentioned that companies are training their CSRs to do live chats before the people have really mastered the phones. Companies are rushing into Social Media saying, “Oh, it’s gonna be great, we’re gonna sign up for Twitter, we’re gonna end up with 5,000 followers in the first day, we’re gonna convert 3500 into customers by day 3, and it’s just going to EXPLODE from there!”

Well, as many of us know (and you don’t have to be around for very long to learn this) that kind of thinking tends most often to lead to Heartbreak Hotel. That, in turn, can lead to ongoing feelings of failure and discouragement. Really it shouldn’t though! It’s just that we’re all trying to get to the top as soon as we can so that we can then….what? Set a new standard? Buy a house in the mountains? What are we rushing for?

Enjoy the bumps and bruises of learning

Learning can be ugly sometimes. When little kids are learning how to walk, they often fall down, then bump their heads on the table as they try to get up. Learning how to ride a bike without training wheels can be pure torture. Falling down over and over on the driveway is hardly enjoyable. Few things are more stressful than learning how to drive. But we do all of those things because we know that the pay-off will be worth it eventually. It takes a lot of time to learn how to walk,then to run, then to skip and hop and jump, but we keep at it without even knowing what we’re doing. We keep trying to figure out bike riding because we envision ourselves riding through beautiful forests and up steep mountain trails. We go through the sheer terror of learning how to drive because we know the independence that comes with that skill.

Why should our work be any different? Learning how to use Social Media may seem really boring compared with all of the case studies you see about how this or that company became ruler of the world by making 1 tweet. But it’s worth it to learn how to do it right, isn’t it? Writing an e-book sounds like a lot of fun if you compare it to reading 5,000,000 blog posts and 2,000,000 books, but imagine how much more skillful and knowledgeable you’ll be if you just give yourself time!

The pot on the stove is bubbling

Keeping ambition in check is hard, especially when it feels, if you believe the stories out there, that you are in a horse-drawn carriage at the Indianapolis 500. However, I think it’s essential to keep that ambition tied to the anchor of reality. I am trying to learn everything I can so that I don’t take steps backwards. I am leaving myself a trail of breadcrumbs so I don’t get lost on my way to the giant house made of candy. I am enjoying the journey. I view it like the process involved in making, say, mashed potatoes. You put the taters in a pot of water, and at first you are just trying to get the water bubbling. But slowly and surely, the boiling really starts to go to town, and all of a sudden your pot lid is on the ceiling, defying gravity momentarily.

Do you find that you or your company try to run before you know how to walk? Do you jump into things reaching for the heights before you look to see what you’re jumping into? Tell me your perspective. I’d love to hear it.

1st Image by clifford shirley. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/fotomedia

2nd Image Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/roxinasz

Et Tu, Competitor?

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A few weeks ago, people started posting all over the place asking for votes so that they could be part of the SXSW panel. I was kind of baffled by the whole process, but what really struck me at the time is that a lot of people who often reference each other, send traffic to each other, and exchange friendly greetings on Twitter were essentially competing against each other for votes.

That little nugget of a thought has been rolling around between my ears ever since, kind of bugging me. It really started to gnaw at me yesterday after I put some of my thoughts into my post about questions. And then I figured out why.

In some way or other, most of the people I follow, most of the people who follow me, and most of the people whom I see on Twitter are, in some way, competitors. Maybe not directly, maybe not even intensely. But we are competing for the same kinds of attention, the same kinds of business.

Ooh, did it just get warm in here?

I understand that this is an uncomfortable topic. You don’t really see a whole lot about it, but it’s always the 80 pound gorilla or the pink elephant in the room. It is a fact, though. If you call yourself a business consultant, you are competing for business with other business consultants. If you are a “Social Media expert,” you are competing, in essence, with everyone else who is called or who calls themselves Social Media experts. I am competing with other advertising agency people, especially those in the B2B business. Now you might say, “Well, geography separates us and is part of our niche” but what do we know about Social Media? This information, for everyone, goes everywhere.

A hint of confusion, a pinch of don’t go there

I think about this little kernel of a fact, and then I think about the frustration that a lot of people have expressed (experts or not) about being asked to give away information. And I’m kind of wondering…is this a frustration…is this so ambiguous…because we don’t consciously act on Social Media sites as if we’re cavorting with the enemy?

Let’s say, for example, that I write a post about how I recommend planning a marketing campaign. If you are a chicken farmer, I’m not really too worried about sharing this information. However, if you’re another agency person, or if you’re a marketing consultant, you could very easily utilize my concept, perhaps without even realizing you were doing so. I would never know. And since I’m writing this information on a wide open blog, there’s really nothing stopping you or helping me in that scenario, right?

Now in the real world, if another agency person came up to me and said, “Hey, I’d like advice on how you recommend planning a marketing campaign,” what would I say? What would you say? Maybe that’s the difference, in part, between the very giving nature of people online and then the frustration that happens as a result of phone calls. When you get a phone call at work, the curtain has been raised, the gig is up, and the wizard is visible. Someone is asking you for your professional opinion and they’re asking you to give it for free, which is what you spend all of your time doing when you’re not taking calls and doing other parts of your job.

The Facade of Social Media

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last couple of days. I know it sounds negative but it really isn’t – it’s just an inconvenient truth, as Al Gore might say.

Over the weekend, @salamicat wrote a fantastic post about the sort of anonymity that Social Media gives you. If you have bad skin, if you don’t feel like dressing up, if you’re having a bad hair day, none of it matters. You can communicate with people and just enjoy their content.

Well, this is great for personal life, but it may not be something we can continue forever on the business side of things. If you’re a real estate agent, you can follow all of the other agents in your territory, but ultimately, the time may come when you are both competing to sell more, or maybe to sell the same home. If you’re an author, you may follow lots of authors, but when a speaking opportunity comes, you might need to compete against them.

I’d love to think that we could maintain our feet squarely under us in both worlds – that we could be open, sharing, generous, and unbiased online and also approach competition gracefully and in a friendly fashion. Is that possible though? As the world economy shifts, as the numbers of jobless increase, can we carry our online selves into the real world when we are in a competitive situation?

Are we clouding our true reality?

What do you think?

Image by Mo Dollahon. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/furylife

LinkedIn as Training Wheels

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Last night, @LoriRuff (aka the LinkedIn Diva) posted a link to an article titled “Is LinkedIn checking out?” Given that she is the LinkedIn Diva, I thought that this must be a pretty interesting article, so I took a look. The article makes some good points about what LinkedIn may be lacking. Some of its features may be outdated, too. But for all of that, the article gave me a different idea about LinkedIn. Because LinkedIn is smaller than Facebook and Twitter…because there are less features to manage, why not use LinkedIn as Social Media training wheels? Ease your way in to Social Media, dip your toe in, knowing that things could get more crazy, more of a balance act, just like the difference between training wheels and a regular bicycle. Here are some ways LinkedIn could be helpful.

1. You control your network: Unlike in Twitter, where people can follow and unfollow you 5 times an hour if they want, LinkedIn is much more restrained. To follow someone you need to show that you know them or encountered them in real life somewhere along the line. They need to approve. You get easy emails when someone wants to join your network, and you can approve or ignore or disallow each one. Emails within LinkedIn help you keep track along with an alphabetical listing of your contacts.

2. Status Updates aren’t all that important: Because LinkedIn was developed from the start as a professional network, it’s never been lumped in with the “I don’t need to know what someone ate for dinner” crowd of Social Media sites. This means that there’s less pressure on you to post updates, but it also means you can practice commenting on the status updates you do see so that you can get used to interacting that way online.

3. You choose your scale of involvement: There is little pressure in LinkedIn to join groups. It’s helpful for networking, of course, but you  have full control over what groups you want to join. You can determine how you want to be contacted about updates to the group – daily digest emails are good because you can scan everything that happened in one quick email. If you feel like participating in a group, that’s fine, but you still get the information being shared even if you don’t post much. This is different from Facebook pages and groups, where you have to take the initiative to go to the page or group and find out what’s going on. It’s harder to feel involved in that scenario, and it’s harder to stay caught up.

4. The closed wall: LinkedIn is much more locked down than Facebook or Twitter. You can control your privacy in all three sites, but much more information can be safely locked away in LinkedIn. If one of the obstacles in the way of you getting involved in Social Media is the “privacy thing,” this is a good place to start.

5. Conversations: One thing you learn about Facebook and Twitter is that they really are most fun when you converse and engage. This can seem tricky because there are so many conversations going on on both sites all of the time. On LinkedIn, you are networking with people in your own industry, and you can join groups that discuss your interests and passions. This allows you to learn how to converse on a social networking site in a low-pressure, reasonably chaos-free environment.

Using LinkedIn still requires planning, especially if you are entering the site on a corporate rather than an individual basis. There are ways to make clear that several individuals all work for the same company, for example. And LinkedIn has features that extend beyond the beginner stage. You can now add video, for example. However, in terms of dipping your toe into what Social Media can do for you and/or your company, LinkedIn is a great place to start.

Does this make sense? Let me know below. And if you need help getting started, we can help you with that, too.

Image by Joachim Bär. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/joejoe77

I am afraid to ask questions now

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When I was in fifth grade, I was a real goody goody. Sometimes, this worked to my advantage. However, a lot of times, to be fair, the teacher would have to punish me right along with everyone else. On days when the class was just talking too much for her to stand, we’d all have to sit down at recess and copy “Silence is Golden” over and over again. I still hate that phrase. I felt it was really blatantly unfair that I had to sit there when I hadn’t been talking at all.

Lately, I’m starting to feel that same twinge of concern, trepidation, and “Hey man” in the Social Media world.

I haven’t been doing this game for very long, but so far, about once a month, one of the people I respect in this space has written a post about how they are tired of people failing to value their time, or they are tired of how people take advantage (or try to) of their expertise. First there was Chris Brogan’s post called “Make the Ask.” Then Tamar Weinberg wrote a post called “The Audacity of Free.” And now Lisa Barone of Outspoken Media has written a post called 15 ways to handle “Pick your brand” requests.” All of them cover the same types of information. All of them, in different ways, reverberate with frustration.

Now, as an idea type person myself, I totally sympathize with these kinds of frustrations. I’ve written about this before, in fact. But here’s the problem I’m having. The people who are writing these posts are people whom I view as role models, as teachers, as mentors. The fact that they choose to post blogs and articles based on their years of experience ensures that I can keep on learning so that I can pay it forward to people with less experience than I have. That’s the way the game is supposed to work.

Unfortunately, folks like me are becoming collateral damage in the growing war between the (insert your preferred title here..expert, thought leader, influential person) and the people who do not respect them. In order to learn and in order to grow, I would like to be able to ask small questions of these people. I’d like to be able to say, “I didn’t understand that part of your blog post. Can you clarify it?” Sometimes I like to ask other questions too. I’m a born questioner. But all of these posts filled with righteous indignation are making me seriously debate with myself before asking any of those questions. It is making me feel like I should not ask for time or a smidgeon of advice because, no offense to the grey masses team, but I don’t want to be classed as a person who fails to respect time and knowledge.

Of course, the great irony of life is that the people who really are guilty are probably not affected by these posts at all. But it would be of a great help to me if these posts of understandable frustration could delineate what is considered offensive and what is not. What falls into consultation and what falls into friendly mentoring or teaching? I never want to be in a position where I ask a question and then feel like I should ask to be invoiced. So, thought leaders, I’m asking you this one question. Where is the line between the brain-pickers and the students? And which one am I?

Image credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/clix

Twitter Chats are the Key to Twitter Success

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About 5 months ago, maybe less, I came very close to giving up on Twitter entirely. I would check in enough, that’s for sure, but I couldn’t seem to get over 75 followers (I appreciated all of them, I promise you). The people I was following tended not to respond to my tweets very much. Sometimes I would see a retweet and my heart would race, and I would see it was a spam bot offering me an iPad because I written a blog post about the new technology available. I couldn’t understand what was wrong with what I was doing, especially when I noticed that pretty conversational tweets from other people were retweeted all over the place while my VERY educational tweets (ha ha ha) were thudding.

Serendipity

A lot of my friends think serendipity plays a role in the world of Social Media. Well, in this particular case, it’s hard to argue with that. One Sunday night, I was posting along when someone mentioned something called #blogchat. “Hmm, I blog,” I thought to myself. I decided to check out that little hash tag. It was the best decision of my Twitter life. The person whom I had followed in actually left after a short while, but I stayed for a full 2 hours.

The #blogchat high

That night, when I went to bed, I had gained about 30 more followers, which was nice. But what I had really gained was an understanding of how Twitter at large works. In fact, if you had talked to me on the phone that night, I probably would have sounded like a Twitter brand evangelist. Some exclamations I might have made include:

Twitter is about sharing information with like-minded people!

Twitter is about conversing like you would at a coffee shop where you know everyone!

Twitter has some really really really smart people using it!

Twitter has people who are even smarter than me!! (well, okay, I was really tired, so that one might have slipped in)

That first night of #blogchat, I got pushed up to close to 100 followers, but here’s the thing about that. I realized then that the number of followers you have really doesn’t matter. Several of the new followers I had gotten were spam-bots who like to pick on people who are really active during chats. What I was happy about was that I had been able to participate in a 90mph conversation about things I’m passionate about. Much like any addict, I needed more.

Be a Chatty Cathy

One of the best ways to get a blank look from people who are really new to Twitter or who don’t use Twitter is to say, “Oh, I’m doing blah blah Twitter chat tonight. This has become a common line from me, and it’s not just because I enjoy confusing people. Here is my current Twitter chat schedule:

Sunday at 9PM EST: #blogchat

Monday at 8PM EST: #MMChat (Marketer Monday) – just started attending this one

Tuesday at 8PM EST: #TechChat, launched by MarketingProfs (to say it’s about “tech” is underselling)

Tuesday at 9PM EST: #Custserv (to say it’s about customer service is underselling)

Wednesday at 8PM EST: #IMCChat (Integrated Marketing & Communications Chat)

Thursday at 8PM EST: #B2BChat – just started popping in to that one as well

Now, why on earth would I spend prime time television time chatting on Twitter, you might well ask. The same reasons I’m recommending you do the same thing. Here are the top ten reasons.

1. Engage with people who feel the same way

2. You get to meet new people

3. You get to ask questions knowing you’ll get really good answers

4. You get to help people who come to the chats to ask questions

5. You get to build friendships, just like you do at a book club

6. You tend to be bombarded with links to blogs & articles rich with information

7. You learn something new

8. Topics are brought to your attention you had never even thought of

9. You are able to interface with some of the leading minds on Twitter

10. And yes, if you do things right, it can help you build your Twitter following

This is not a golden egg

If you start doing chats solely to gain more followers, you will likely be disappointed, you will not find the experience enriching, and you will have missed the primary point here. One of the reasons that I follow people and people follow me after chats is that we offer each other really useful information (well, that’s why I follow people) and we seem to be on the same page. If you go to a chat and sound off ads for you or your company, you’ll be ignored. If you put in the hashtag for the chat once and then throw your hands up in the air, it won’t work either.

Chatting means just that. It means engaging with people, commenting on peoples’ tweets, offering a courteous “I disagree” when you, well, disagree, etc. If you get some of the folks you engage with to follow you, and you follow them back, that’s awesome, but after you do a few chats, you understand that content means far more than followers in this world.

Join me at one of the chats I go to and let me walk you through it, or comment below if you have any questions, exclamations, or anything else.

1st Image by Andrew C. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/andreyutzu

2nd Image by Richard Dudley. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/bluegum

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

Why you should jump on the Paper.li bandwagon

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A few weeks ago (or was it days? I’ve lost all track of time) I started seeing a lot of BFF updates. “That’s nice,” I thought. I can’t really tell who I tweet with, so having an automated application which probably is sucking all of my info from my Twitter account out into a sales list or something is awesome. But I digress.

Around the same time, I started seeing a lot of these updates about Twitter newspapers. And then I started seeing these paper.li URLs popping up everywhere.

Now, I like to think that I’m pretty good about staying up on the new developments going on in my little sphere of the universe. I mean, staying up on Facebook’s changes of heart is a full time job just on its own, but I do okay with it. Even so, I have been so swamped that I just did not have time to check out this paper.li thing. Until tonight. So, if you are like me and have been itching to figure the whole thing out, let me save you some time. I’ll even give you some analysis!

What is it?

I thought that the whole concept was going to be pretty complicated because when I looked at some of the newspapers, it looked confusing to me. I couldn’t figure out what tied the stories together in some of them. I looked at the “#custserv daily newspaper” and saw that there were various contributors, but I had no idea how that was all worked out.

Once you sign in to paper.li it all becomes pretty clear – and pretty self-explanatory (in a way). You type in either a username, a tag, or a Twitter list, and Paper.li grabs contributions from whatever you set up. So, the #custserv newspaper probably pulls everything with that tag every day. Guy Kawasaki has a Holy Kaw paper that gathers a lot of the links he shares into one central location.

So What?

I know. I kind of thought the same thing at first. Great, so, anyone who tags “worthreading” will appear in the daily “paper.” Well, actually, the ramifications of paper.li could have huge implications for marketing if used correctly.

– Imagine creating a daily “newspaper” based on #yourcompany or #yourproduct. Every day you could print out your daily paper.li newspaper and show your client, your C-level executive, whomever, what the daily spin is on Twitter regarding your company. The next day, you can see if you’ve altered the conversation. Same thing for competitors.

– Let’s say your company manufacturers shoes. You create a paper that is based around all of the links you collect every day about shoes and shoe-related topics. Every day you tweet out useful information. You can also link to your newspaper from a blog or from Facebook or LinkedIn, like this –> http://paper.li/bearbull/blogroll

– If you’re a marketer, you could create a newspaper for #SM or #marketing and have a newspaper, literally, every day with up-to-date links about what people are talking about.

Really, this could become quite a powerful tool in your business or marketing toolbox.

So, check out paper.li. Let this application suck out the information from your Twitter account. At least you can do something truly useful with it. Not that there is anything wrong with the BFF thing. It’s just…well…

I’ve said my piece.