Marjorie Clayman’s Writing Portfolio

Professional writing profile of Marjorie Clayman

Margie Clayman

What’s so funny about proofing, editing, and proofing again?

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 I was watching a really impressive webinar today. Very good points that I haven’t heard anyone make, at least in my sphere of knowledge and experience. Indeed, I was so impressed with this person that I decided to click to their website to learn some more. From there, I was taken to the site for one of this person’s books, which I was considering buying on the spot.

What stunned me, and the reason that I am blogging right now instead of buying a book on Amazon, is that in glancing at the first few lines of copy on the site, I saw two major flubs.

Now, we all make mistakes. I mean, everyone except me. (ha ha) But it really seems like a lot of people are either not cognizant of this fact or they just don’t care. This is a sad thing, because to me, a poorly constructed sentence, a misspelled word, or something else along those lines not only bespeaks the potential for not having a grasp of English (pet peeve), but it also tells me that this person doesn’t care enough to give things a once-over.

I kind of get laughed at sometimes at my place of employ because I insist on proofreading everything. Thoroughly. My rule: if a page is touched, even if it’s just a minor correction, you proof the whole page. Why? Making a single change can push a word down to the next line, which in turn can push the copy into the footer area of a brochure or website. If you don’t proofread and really look carefully, you can end up with a product that looks sloppy. It will look like you didn’t want to take the time to do things right.

I’m not going to lie to you. Proofreading can be boring. Torturous even. If you are proofreading an e-commerce site or a sales brochure with lots and lots of useful tables and charts, you might feel like you need regular injections of pixie sticks right into your ole veins. But these are steps that have to be taken. I can’t tell you how many times proofreading has resulted in us asking questions that really made our clients analyze what they were presenting. “Did you mean to say pack here, or should it say bulk pack?” “Should this be 20 inches or 20 feet?” Little strokes of the keyboard, but boy what a difference.

I did not end up buying this presenter’s book. I was completely turned off by the website I visited. Would there be typos in the book as well? I can’t be sure. Now, I am more of a stickler than a lot of people, it’s true, but let me ask you one question. Would you take advice from a psychologist that kept crying? Would you go to a doctor who couldn’t say “surgery” correctly? Similarly, I find it hard to take advice about marketing and my profession from someone who has major typos on the homepage of a representative website. It just doesn’t work for me. Does it work for you?

Image by ilker. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/ilco

Why not discuss a revolution in ROI?

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 A couple of days ago, Jay Baer, who is one of my favorite social media gurus, wrote a blog called “Are you Slow Enough to Succeed in Social Media?” The article said something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Namely, Social Media is the hot new toy that everyone wants a piece of, it’s revolutionary, and EVERYBODY has to have it…but we’re not really 100% sure how it’s all going to shake down just yet. 


What you can learn from Spring


As I’m writing, it’s about 37 degrees outside and it’s raining. Not exactly what normally comes to mind when you think May, but it’s definitely the time when gardeners are really ready to get outside and get dirt under their fingernails. The thing that you learn from gardening is that you have to be patient beyond the boundaries of what life normally requires. You plant seeds and it might be a whole year till you see anything. You could have a plant for 20 years and it might not bloom till the 21st year. Despite the fact that you might not have asparagus or green beans or a beautiful hedge of roses on your first try, you keep watering and fertilizing and making sure the plant is getting enough light. You do this because you know that eventually it’s bound to pay off.


As per Baer’s blog, this is how companies really should be looking at Social Media. But it’s not how a lot of companies are looking at social media.


You say you want a revolution…


So everyone is talking about how we’re in this marketing and media revolution, but it strikes me that even though everyone agrees on this, we are still asking about ROI in the same way that we did for print or banner ads. It seems like there isn’t a whole lot of conversation regarding the fact that a revolutionary new movement in media just might require us to think about ROI very differently.


If a company has everything together, it can be fairly easy to calculate the ROI for a print or online ad. Bring the people that see your ad to a specific page with a call to action, nurture that lead, convert to customer. Well, it looks a lot easier on screen, but really, that process is feasible.


In Social Media, it simply does not work that way. First of all, what you are investing, most of the time, is not money. It’s time. It’s content. Now you could say that time is money and I suppose that would be fair, but you’re probably not paying for a “full page, 4-color profile” on Facebook or Twitter, right? So right away, the phrase “return on investment” needs to be examined more carefully. Return on what investment?


The other thing though, getting back to Baer’s blog, is that Social Media is not a 1 + 1 = 2 kind of formula. It’s about building relationships, becoming a trusted source, building the case for your brand through reliability and credibility — it’s taking the time to be human via as many digital sites as possible. 


I’ve got news for you — “leads” from Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn are not going to be people who click to a landing page and fill out a sample request form. Leads are people you’ve been talking to for six months who suddenly say, “What was that you were saying about such and such? Cuz I need help with that now.”


If you tell a boss that the projected ROI for your Social Media campaign is one strong lead over a six-month period, btw, you’ll probably not get a real big thumbs-up reaction.


I don’t know what the new ROI should be, but I think we need to catch it up to what we’re talking about elsewhere. If you’re completely changing how you relate to customers, how you relay your messaging and how you get out your content, your ROI has to change too. We’re trying to use an abacus to do rocket science right now, I think. And it’s not gonna work.

Image by Robert Proksa. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/fangol

Linking the Tactics, Using the Buffalo

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About 3 years ago, all of the talk was about “integrated marketing.” Maintain a common aesthetic across all of your marketing channels to increase the strength of your brand.

Last year, all of the talk was about Social Media. It was a new frontier (relatively), and if there was one thing we all wanted to see last year, it was something new.

This year, “the talk” is all over the place. Is mobile marketing the new darling? Is it going to defeat Social Media? Is Google going to take over the world or is Facebook going to beat it to the punch? Is print dead or just on vacation?

Maybe it’s the pacifist in me, but I don’t think marketing is going to be about just one thing ever again. I think the companies that are really going to soar are going to be the ones who do everything and do everything well.

Chris Brogan wrote a post today where he used the phrase “Buffalo Content Maker.” The idea is that generating content for one purpose is not the most efficient way to go about things. If you have a public speaker come in to talk to your company, per Brogan’s example, why not videotape it, post it to YouTube, link back to your website, and become a resource? In Brogan’s own case, blog posts are becoming books, presentations, tweets, and more.

These are all great ideas, but they are predicated upon the fact that your key emphasis is the online world, particularly the Social Media world. I would like to see someone using a buffalo that is made of new media and yes, the horror, traditional media.

How can you do this?

Let’s jump off from a similar place to where Brogan started. Let’s say one of your customers has invited you to do a product demo at their facility. You pool your resources and get your talk ready. With you is someone to videotape the session.

When you get back, you do a little editing and post the video to YouTube. Ask your customer if you can include any questions and things they might have brought up that were good points.

Put together a little news release that you send out to the industry and post to your website. Great product demo now available. Link to the YouTube video. It’s okay not to link to your site. If they like what they see, they’ll link to your site from YouTube — a boost for SEO.

Let’s say you have a trade show coming up. Burn the video to CD, design some nice face art, and you have a give-away for the show that people won’t just throw on the floor (CDs seem more precious than sheets of paper or fliers, I’ve noticed). If you’re really feeling wild, create a direct mail piece in which the CD of the video can be inserted. Invite people to view the CD and bring their questions to your booth.

This is just one example, and not a full example, of how Social Media and the ever-changing online world can actually enrich rather than over-power tactics in which companies were engaged but a few years ago. Social Media doesn’t have to defeat traditional media and mobile marketing doesn’t have to defeat Social Media. Everything can be linked together to create a single, giant, buffalo-like chain. Use it up. The possibilities are endless.

Image by Antonio Jiménez Alonso. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Capgros

I want to hear what you think!

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So I have a lot of my own opinions about the new Facebook (obviously). But I thought that it would be interesting to see who agrees, who disagrees, and why.

The question is whether you like the new Facebook model, including the “Open Graph” capability to link to external sites and interests now linking as pages.

Yes, Love it!

No, Hate it!

Indifferent

What is Facebook?

I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

I’m a little iffy on this new Facebook

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A long time ago…maybe, say, 3-4 weeks ago, back in the good ole days, a company could create a “fan page” on Facebook and advertise that page based on people’s interests.

After the 2010 F8 Conference, “fans” became “likers.” It didn’t exactly have the same ring to it, but essentially, a company’s relationship with Facebook remained the same. Be engaging, get people to like you, build brand.

A few days after all of those changes, Facebook launched the other side of the new “Open Graph” model. Now, a person’s interests, schools, and places of employment are links to pages. TechCrunch has a pretty good summary of these changes.

Although my friends represent only a small portion of the people on Facebook, and I am fully aware of that, I have yet to hear a person, friend or not, say that they are really happy about these changes on a personal level. The main beef is that Facebook isn’t giving you a choice. You either link to pages or your interests are deleted. Seems a little dictatorial.

The problem, on the business side of things, seems to be a many-armed beast, if you ask me. These new pages are inspiring a lot of people to delete their interests all together. Many of my friends noted that the people they are connected to probably are aware of what they are interested in anyway. I myself haven’t really looked at my own interests in a couple of years. If tons of people start deleting their interests rather than link to these new pages, the capability of running targeted ad campaigns to promote company pages is going to be highly hindered.

Another issue which I haven’t seen a whole lot of talk about: Facebook just became the newest SEO battle. Companies should now position themselves to target keywords that might be interests but might not be 100% pertinent to their business. To me, this will thin out the value of “likers” on a company page. If they are linking to you because they like bananas and you are an ice cream manufacturer, that’s kind of okay but kind of not. I also wonder if companies who may or may not have created their page with a strategy in mind are keeping up on their page demographics. It’s an easy enough thing to monitor, but now it will require more time to successfully target Facebookers, and time is a commodity not a lot of people have in droves.

I know that a lot of Social Media gurus are really excited by these changes, but I have yet to be impressed. The possible negative ramifications for company pages are being predominantly ignored, I think. I am also not impressed that Facebook is building their new “community pages” based on imported data from Wikipedia. Why not comb peoples’ info and get experts on the topic to participate? It might not be any more credible than Wikipedia, but it would be for Facebookers by Facebookers.

I’m sitting on the sidelines and I’m not getting up to leave just yet, but I’m not getting up to applaud just yet either. Convince me I’m wrong!

Revisiting the Past

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In 2006, I wrote an article based on the confluence of Library Science and Marketing that had occurred in my life. American Libraries honored me by publishing the article in their September 2006 issue. I think the article is still relevant now, five years later. Maybe more relevant, as libraries continue to lose money and those with MLIS degrees struggle to find a place to use their particular skills. Here’s the text of the article. I’d love to hear what you think about it.

The for-profit world needs us and has the cash to pay our worth
The summer before my senior year in college was a momentous one because I concocted a plan for the rest of my life. I would begin by earning some advanced degrees–a master’s in library science and another in history, specifically. Afterwards, I would find myself working at a small academic library as a reference librarian with an emphasis in the humanities. There, I would bring home a comfortable $35,000-$40,000 salary. Naturally, I’d meet my husband during my tenure, and would retire into a blissful post-employment phase during which I would pass time collecting seashells and writing the Great American Novel. It seemed like a flawless plan, all told.
Five years later, with two master’s degrees in hand, I figured that finding my dream job would be easy. By the time I was ready to apply for that job, however, the field of librarianship had changed. Library employers now tend to require five years of managerial experience or community outreach. As a new graduate, these were qualifications I did not have. I was not alone in facing these changes in the employment market. In the September 15, 2004, Library Journal, Michael Rogers reported that many new MLS graduates “unabashedly accuse LIS instructors of lying about job prospects.”
The myth, as it turned out, was that there would be a one-to-one replacement for library positions left open through retirement and other departures. The truth is, however, that once a librarian retires, his or her job is often combined with another job–or completely eliminated.
What caused these drastic changes? Funding–namely, the post-September 11, 2001, rerouting of channels through which money traveled to community and state levels. Once the federal government began asking local and state officials to divert money to new priorities such as Homeland Security, the fates of libraries, museums, and universities were automatically compromised.
Even as libraries were readjusting to the post-9/11 reality of less funding and fewer job opportunities, Silicon Valley was experiencing exponential growth. After surviving the dot-com boom and bust of the 1990s, companies like Google and Yahoo were evolving into the behemoths that we know today. Google began to change the way people thought about the Web. Instead of merely heading towards perfecting users’ search experience, Google, Yahoo, Overture, MSN, and AskJeeves were also heading towards perfecting niche marketing to users based on their search patterns.
Oddly enough, this series of events has proven more relevant to me than I ever could have predicted. I have been in the business world as a media buyer for three years now, and it seems like this was my destiny all along. The skills that I am using most are those I attained while pursuing my MLS. Indeed, I would go so far as to argue that the world of libraries and the world of business are on a crash course of convergence. The old, reliable image of a librarian with her hair in a bun, glasses on her nose, and a shushing finger to her mouth may give way to an image of a librarian wearing a power suit, providing consultation or other services in meeting rooms around the world.
The question, of course, is what kinds of consultation or other contributions a librarian could offer in those meeting rooms. To answer that question, I will explore how user services and technical services–two main categories of library work–can translate into marketing expertise and client relations that are key to business success. In doing so, I will show why it might be time for librarians to don pinstripe suits.

Customer satisfaction, by another name

User services can be summarized basically as providing the information patrons need. A reference librarian receives requests for assistance in finding almost every type of data, and a good reference librarian will show a patron how she found that data and what her search strategies were, as opposed to simply providing the answer. If this type of reference session is what first comes to mind when you think of libraries or librarians, the connection between user services and business may not be so easy to see.
To build that mental bridge, consider one of Google’s many maxims: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The problem is that the more accessible information becomes, the harder it is to find exactly what you need. In the business world, time is always short and the need for information is always great. In such a climate, a user services librarian who has been trained to find and disseminate data in the most efficient way possible is invaluable.
A media-buying agency is an example of the type of firm in which a librarian’s training can be extremely useful. In order to stay ahead of the curve and offer new marketing suggestions to clients, the agency must remain informed about the latest publishing innovations. In reality, media planning has become a parallel to the reference desk dialogue. The only real difference is that the end goal has become successful marketing rather than securing an answer to a research question.
A reference librarian trained to keep up-to-date on resources in print and online is already capable of providing this kind of information. She also knows how best to present that data and support her suggestions.
User services skills also have very practical applications. With a readily available knowledge of information resources, a businesswoman with an MLS can efficiently research whether there is a market for a potential new product or how best to pitch a proposal to a prospective client. Researching these subjects can mean increasing profits for an existing client, or packaging a powerful marketing proposal for a new prospect. In either case, good research in the business world often translates to increased profits.

The keyword to a consumer’s heart

A second area of responsibility for which librarians are trained is technical services. In the past, technical services in a library context has covered everything from cataloging and processing material to acting as webmaster. More recently, technical services librarians have also increased their interaction with the organization of information on the internet and how to access that information. How can these skills prove useful in a business setting?
The bottom line is that technical services librari
ans know how people search, how information is organized on the Web, and how to connect searchers with the information they seek. These skills are essential, for example, in designing an online advertising campaign (as I have facilitated for my firm). The key to success is to make sure the advertiser’s message appears in front of the target audience, and that the ad delivers what that audience wants. It is no secret that if a customer’s efforts do not result in instant gratification, he or she may revert to other resources or even such traditional tools as print indexes. An MLS-holder can offer insight into what keywords are likely to lead searchers to an advertiser’s ad–the goal of signing up with the fee-based Google AdWords service. In an era of paid search, cutting down on a potential client’s frustration can mean big clicks for an advertiser, and high credibility for a marketing or advertising firm. In this environment, an MLS is as valuable as an MBA.
Google AdWords is not the only area in which a person with a library science background could prove useful in a business setting. Increasingly, SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing) are becoming integral parts of the services that an advertising or marketing firm offers. After all, if a corporate website is not seen, the company cannot succeed in today’s business world. Both services are contingent upon an understanding of how people search and how search engines work. A technical services librarian’s knowledge of search engines and keywords can mean the difference between a company’s success and failure. As such, there are few types of information more valuable in the business world.
In the end, search engines, libraries, and marketing firms have the same goal: Get the patron, consumer, or searcher exactly the information he or she wants. In all cases, it is the person with a master’s in library science–the information professional–who can ensure that these goals are achieved. With training in search patterns, and information organization and access, librarians remain a largely untapped source of expertise, assistance, and knowledge.
Google cofounder Larry Page told author John Battelle that the search engine of the future would be like “a reference librarian with complete mastery of the entire corpus of human knowledge” (The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, New York: Portfolio, 2005). If Page is right, businesses, libraries, and searchers at home are going to need help sifting through all of that data. Librarians will be needed more than ever, whether they keep their hair in buns or decide to don those pinstripe power suits.