Marjorie Clayman’s Writing Portfolio

Professional writing profile of Marjorie Clayman

Margie Clayman

Myth: People who like you will buy from you

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During what I call my “summer of chats,” I, as you might guess, participated in a lot of Twitter chats. So many, in fact, that I now call that time period my “summer of chats.” Ehem. I was participating in chats because #blogchat had introduced me to the fact that Twitter chats are great ways to meet people with similar interests, share ideas, learn, and network. So, I participated in #blogchat on Sunday, #mmChat (Marketing Monday) on Monday, #leadershipchat and #Custserv on Tuesday, #imcchat on Wednesday, and #b2bChat on Thursday.

It was a lot of chats.

In terms of my social media presence (or “stuff” as I like to call it) all of these chats were great. But there was one little flaw with my great plan, and I bet you may be falling into the same trap.

You see, by participating in chats with “people like me” I was actually networking with peers or even competitors. I was not participating in chats where potential customers were likely to be hanging out.

That whole community and being human thing

A lot of emphasis has always been given to the power of community in the online world, and with good reason. When you find yourself participating with a specific group of people in lots of conversations and chats, it’s pretty nice and it can even be pretty powerful. The online world is a great place to meet great people, to share ideas, to learn how to expand your business, and more. But the shiny factor in this part of the online world can really take your eye off your ultimate purpose if you are using social media for business. You need to be looking for people who will buy from you.

Now, in my own online community, I can count as friends many great people. Some of them are PR experts. Others are marketing or SEO experts. Others are social media wizards. I wouldn’t trade any of these folks for the world, but do you think it’s likely that a full service agency person is going to contact me, a woman from a full service agency, to do some work? It’s possible, but not highly probable. They might like me a lot, but our services simply are not what they are going to need.

The Serendipity Factor

A lot of people, when talk about online communities comes up, notes that you never know who one person may know. Any person you meet could end up referring a person they know to you. That’s true to a certain extent, but if you are networking solely with people who are in the same business as you, is it likely they are going to send that person to you when they could just as easily earn that person’s business? People are good, but not usually that good, especially during these trying times, right?

This logic applies regardless of the business you’re in. If you’re a lawn and garden person who has networked with other lawn and garden people, you’re not likely to get a lot of new customers. If you’re a jewelry maker who has networked with a lot of other jewelry makers…well you see where this is going. Yes, a person might give you a referral if a person would benefit from local or person-to-person attention, but beyond that, your sales will probably not see a bump.

So what should you do?

You don’t have to ditch the idea of networking with peers (or competitors). It’s still fun to meet people who might share similar life experiences. Just make sure that you balance that part of your online presence with what will pay your bills. Try to find some chats that might be of interest to existing or potential customers and get yourself known in that crowd. Do searches to try to network with people who are asking the kinds of questions you can answer. Focus some of your content on the stuff that would be of interest to existing and potential customers, not just to your colleagues and competitors.

Now it’s your turn

What has your experience been with building sales in the online world? Have you kept that as a priority or have you found yourself networking more with people in the same business as you? How have you balanced your goals? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinkmoose/85013785/ via Creative Commons

Avoid the Trap That Conquered Alexander the Great

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When Alexander (the artist later known as Alexander the Great) was a kid, his mother told him that he was the son of Zeus, who had impregnated her while in the form of a snake. Barring any physiological explanations, which frankly I don’t want to think about, this had to be a pretty heady moment for young Al. In addition to discovering who his dad was, Alexander also came to realize, in studying the Iliad, that he was also related to Achilles. That Zeus, he got around. Achilles naturally was a hero any boy could admire, but to think that Achilles was a distant relative, well, now you can see how Alexander would feel really confident as a little boy.

Whether it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, luck, or a combination of a lot of things, Alexander started living out his most cherished dreams at a very early age. By the time he had reached the age of 30, Alexander had conquered the Persian Empire, had become a Pharaoh in Egypt, had been declared a living god (being named a Pharaoh had more perks than Klout does now), and had even defeated the Indian empire. But Alexander did not die a fulfilled man. He did not even die a confident man. A few years before his death, one of his friends got tired of Alexander’s bragging and said, “Your father is behind all of your success!” Alexander killed that guy. With a spear. Ouch.

After each success, after each great event, Alexander found that his ambition only kept him wanting more. After conquering India, Alexander wanted to keep going to the edge of the world. He started commanding his officers to marry Persian women so that the cultures could become enmeshed. He started truly believing that he was invincible, and did many things to try to prove it. He was never satisfied. It was never enough. There was always another hurdle. There was always another obstacle to overcome. There was always a little more glory to grab.

In Social Media, you can play the role of Alexander the Great

Let’s be honest. It’s pretty hard not to get full of yourself when you’re in the online space, right? I mean, let’s just get that out there. You can write a blog post (like this) and nobody is talking over you, nobody is interrupting you. Most people who bother to leave comments will at the worst make it thoughtful. Many people are complimentary, so not only are you writing but you’re also getting nice feedback. Where else does THAT happen? On Twitter, people respond to you talking about what you are eating, what you are reading, and where you are going. On Facebook, you are perpetually cheered on as you post your goals, post pictures of your food, or do pretty much anything else.

It’s kind of ridiculous.

But like Alexander the Great, we all face a trap that is waiting to make us miserable. How? Well, let’s say you’re a new blogger. You’ve been writing and posting for three months and the only entity commenting has been a spam bot from the Netherlands (hey, it could happen). Suddenly, you write a post that gets 3 comments. Wow, now THAT is a rush. But then when you sit down to write your next post, you’re thinking about that last one. Why did those folks comment? How can you get MORE people to comment? So you try to figure out a formula, right? You want another success, but you want it to be bigger. If your next post goes back to zero comments you can feel pretty let down. But then a few weeks later you write a post that gets 20 comments. WOAH! Now that is your new level of success, but reaching that milestone isn’t a good place to stop.

For every success we find in the online world, there are more doors leading to successes that other people have experienced. If you get listed as a great blog on a site, you want to be up higher the next time. If someone gets an award, you find yourself wondering why you didn’t get it. When you do get that award though, it’s not enough anymore. Now you want to win it 3 years in a row.

It never stops.

And as a result, your presence in social media can become perpetually unfulfilling, consistently unsatisfactory, and it can even become an embittering experience. Eventually these negative feelings can cause you to lose interest, and while you might not literally die young like Alexander did, your online presence just might.

Stop the trap

OK, I admit, I heard Admiral Ackbar’s voice as I typed that. Sorry, but it’s true.

Anyway, the fate of Alexander the Great is not an inevitable one. There are ways to make sure that your online work remains a pleasant experience.

First – enjoy where you are. Think about the fact that you are able to self-publish your writing whenever you want, and pretty much for free. That’s something we don’t think about very often, but we really should. Think about the fact that even if one person comments on your blog post, that’s a person who may not know you at all who read your work, found it interesting, and commented on it. That’s pretty amazing, right?

Second – get over your “I need to be better than you” complex. The longer I stay in the online world, the more I realize that longevity is an advantage. The longer folks stick around, the more people they get to know, and the easier some things become. If you’re newer, you have to wait. Be patient. Walk your own path.

Third – Don’t let the satisfaction of compliments go to your head. You’re not a living god. You’re a person who types stuff and then reacts at other peoples’ reactions. I mean, I realize I’m going all Morpheus on you here, but truth is truth.

You can be happy where you are. You can be happy with the level of success you are at right now at this minute. So let yourself enjoy it. Don’t go down the path of Alexander the Great. It is the way of perpetual dissatisfaction, and who wants that, anyway?

First Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kudumomo/5885936899/ via Creative Commons

Second Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/doug88888/2965462060/ via Creative Commons

You Could Learn Something From The Anasazi

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Once upon a time, there was a great civilization that we now know as the Anasazi. Sadly, this name, in the Navajo language, means “Ancient Enemy,” so that’s not a great way to be remembered. Regardless, this civilization, which flourished in the 1200s BC, was a magnificently rich and interesting culture. They were great basket weavers, they were great architects, and it seems they had a complex religion and society.

All well and good, certainly. There have been lots of great civilizations over the course of human history. But the really interesting thing about the Anasazi is that it seems they one day just decided to up and leave their high cliff dwellings and their busy cities, which were located at the “Four Corners” area of the US, where Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico touch. This isn’t like the Incas, who were killed off by Spanish conquistadors. Although there is some evidence of violence and warfare, it doesn’t seem like the Anasazi were necessarily booted out of their city. They just up and left.

Now why would they do that?

Answers to the mystery

The explanation as to what happened to the Anasazi has been haunting archaeologists for centuries. This 2008 article from the New York Times summarizes a lot of the hypotheses that are out there. There was a big drought. There was a “Little Ice Age.” Maybe the soil got worn out from too much farming. Maybe all of those things combined with pressure from other societies made the Anasazi decide to move. Of course, unless archaeologists find an ancient note left behind explaining what the deal was, this will likely forever remain one of those unsolvable riddles.

Are you inexplicably abandoning your social media communities?

Now, let’s fast forward a few millennia or so to the modern day. People are building communities not out of cliffs but out of little pieces of the digital world. Some of these communities may exist on a person’s blog site. Some people build really solid Twitter communities. Some people try to build their community across all platforms they find themselves on. People put a lot of time into these communities. Think about a blog site. You design it. You slave over what your homepage will look like. Will you have black font against a light background or will you reverse out and have light copy against a dark background? What commenting system will you use? How will you entice people to share your content? Lots of questions. Lots of complex relationship-building with the people who visit you.

And yet, if you scan the web, you come upon a lot of Twitter accounts, a lot of blog sites, that are just randomly abandoned. Sometimes it seems like the person was going at a pretty good pace, posting 2-3 times a week (or more) on their site or tweeting pretty darned regularly, and then *BOOM* all of a sudden there’s just nothing.

What happened to them? Archaeologists of the future may have just as much of a hard time figuring this one out.

How can you avoid the Anasazi fate?

We all, I think, come upon times where we sort of would like our blog sites to die. These guys are so demanding! We all, I think, long for the days when we weren’t so “plugged in.” It’s tempting sometimes to think, “Well heck. I’m just going to abandon all of this and do something else.” The problem is that if you are using social media for business purposes, those abandoned sites can raise eyebrows in addition to questions. Is your company still around? Are you still with that company? Why did you stop? Were you not getting a good enough response? Did your business really pick up?

If archaeologists are right, the Anasazi did what they did because of two primary factors – their resources got depleted and they got pressured by other people. Those same exact problems can cause you to abandon your online outposts. So how can we tackle and prevent those problems?

Your resources

Before you create extravagant plans for your online existence, whether for you or for the company you work for, make sure you have people who can do all of the “stuff.” Make sure there is enough time so that nobody feels overwhelmed. Make sure there is a plan so that you know when your resources are getting depleted versus when you are in really good shape. Make sure the online climate, which changes as much as the real one, it seems, doesn’t make you sway to and fro. Have a mission, plan for it, and then stick to it.

Ignore the pressure and keep your eyes on the prize

As for the pressure from other folks part, as hard as it is, you have to learn how to let that go and do your own thing. Keep making those beautiful baskets.Keep building your cliff dwellings. Keep doing what you want to do. There will be people who embarrass you because they are so complimentary. There will be people who will try to tear you down. There will be people who seem to be immovably indifferent to you. Carry on. Easier said than done, but don’t let those external pressures inspire you to abandon your network. That’s a bad trade.

Don’t be like the Anasazi. Don’t melt into the ether of the online world, leaving evidence of your presence for other people to figure out. Stick around. Keep building. Hang in there.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/trevorvangorp/49857496/ via Creative Commons

The weapons are ahead of the tactics

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For as long as I can remember, I have been enchanted by the Civil War. I have found it morbidly fascinating that families could split up and kill each other, and yet armies across rivers would chat about how much they wanted to go home. I have always been enamored of Abraham Lincoln, and find it amazing that he was extremely unpopular in the North as well as the South throughout the duration of his presidency.

There is a lot to study in the Civil War. There were innumerable technological patents issued. Medicine, by necessity, took great strides – the idea of sterilizing the surgery environment was born out of that series of tragedies in our history. Military history, too, was altered by the American Civil War. All of these new, immensely powerful weapons were introduced and handed to soldiers right in the middle of battle. But the commanders of those armies – they only knew what they had learned at West Point. They knew the bayonet charge, the cavalry charge. They knew that to defeat an army you had to come right at them. This knowledge, these things that were seen as “givens,” explain in part why casualties ran so high as the war dragged on. People were charging at armies that had minnie balls. People were charging, literally, right into firing squads.

As historian Shelby Foote says in the series, the weapons were far beyond the tactics.

The same holds true when it comes to Social Media.

Social Media and business

These days, it seems, we are approaching advertising and marketing in the same way we always have – as sales pieces. Some companies are bringing these traditional methodologies to Twitter and Facebook and Blogs. This is like trying to use antiquated military strategies when all of the technology has changed, and literally, companies that approach Social Media incorrectly will get blown out of the water. No one expects the hard sell on Twitter unless it’s 100% clear that’s your reason for being there, and even then you might find yourself entirely ignored.

We have created these new technologies before understanding the strategy needed to make them work. I think of Jeff Goldblum’s line in the first Jurassic Park movie. Companies are moving into Social Media because they can without thinking whether they should. Well, he didn’t say that exactly, but you get the point.

Our weapons are ahead of our tactics, and our marketing strategies are suffering for it.

Social Media and society

All of this also holds true when thinking about Social Media and its effect on our modern society. There are about 27 posts I could write about this topic (and maybe I will), but for now, consider the following, and let me know your thoughts about them.

Social Media has created new job opportunities, but we don’t really have names for those new jobs

Social Media has created new ways to communicate, but we don’t really have a name for this new method of communication (is it networking? is it friendship?)

Social Media has created new ways to unite – look at what happened when reports of protest started coming out of Iran and Egypt.

Social Media has also created new and powerful ways for us to abuse each other, and we have no way to police that. We have no control. The weapons are ahead of our tactics.

The Learning Curve

By the time World War I approached, it had become apparent to most military strategists that the era of the bayonet charge had ended. World War I saw trench warfare and the use of poisonous gases. By World War II, of course, war had entirely changed again.

I don’t want to see our learning curve happen in parallel with countless missteps or tragedies. I don’t want to see companies fail because they are trying to blast out ads via 140-character tweets. I don’t want to see more people die because we have these powerful modes to communicate with no way to control them.

I am not asking for an authoritarian controlling mechanism in either case. But we need to stop and think, for the sake of our businesses and our society. What are we doing with this “Social Media” thing? It is a revolution. It is an evolution. That means we have to change with the technology. We need a road map. We need someone to write it. We need tactics that keep up with our technology. We need a strategy that can make the most of our actions. Right?

Note: This post was originally written on October 1, 2010. It has been refurbished for a new project I’m working on called History Lessons for the Social Media Practitioner.

 

How Social Slam 2012 Rekindled My Love of Social Media

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As some of you may have noticed, I’ve been kind of struggling with the online world for the last 6 months or so. I’ve been feeling a little bit at times like I’ve been flailing about here on ye olde blog. I have been let down by some folks, and…well, I’ve just not really felt the love I had for social media when I first started. I pretty much figured that attending my first big social media conference would be a make it or break it moment. I’d either confirm all of my worst feelings about social media or…I wouldn’t.

As you might have guessed from the title, things went pretty well.

Nervous as hell

So, I’ll confess that I was stupidly nervous about meeting so many people from the online world in one fell swoop, and there was one overriding reason for that. As I’ve mentioned before, I stand at 4’5 on a good day. For most of my life, meeting people for the first time has often been accompanied by a multitude of reactions that range from, “Oh, you remind me of my Aunt Helga! She was short too!” to things that are a little less sensitive and a bit more humiliating. The online world has afforded me the opportunity to get to know people as me instead of as short me, and I’ve really treasured that, but I was worried that meeting people in real life would sort of shatter that intellectual equality I’ve enjoyed.

Turns out, I needn’t have worried at all. But I wanted to share this story because as you probably are thinking, everybody has *something* they are worried about in the offline world. Maybe there is something about your eyebrows you don’t like, or maybe you’re not as fit as you’d like to be. But it’s important, I learned, to power through those fears and go ahead and meet people. It turns out it’s well worth it.

This *is* the real world

I’ve gotten a fair amount of snide remarks during my time online because I’m nice to people and because I care about people. These types of criticisms had been affecting me quite a bit. In fact, my pal Sean McGinnis noticed that in my 2-year anniversary post, I didn’t link to any of the peoples’ blogs I was talking about. I said, “Yeah, well, people accuse me of link bait or comment bait when I do that, so I opted not to.” I’ve been told that it’s really not worth it to care about people in the online world, and friends are named too easily – yada yada yada.

But guess what? Meeting people in real life does one thing pretty darned quick. It shows you without a doubt that the people you talk to on these online platforms are REAL PEOPLE. Would you take any crap if you were “called out” for saying something nice about a person offline? I hope not. Well, saying nice things to people online is exactly the same because people is people, as the saying goes. I have no regrets about anything I’ve done online except that I let people almost convince me that what I was doing was a waste of time.

If you’re wondering if you are spending your time online with good people, have a little more faith than you might be inclined to have. They’re really there, even if you can’t see them in 3D most of the time.

Shining Moments

There really were a lot of moments during my time in Knoxville that I wouldn’t trade for all the world.

I got to meet Tom Webster and hear him speak – I’ve heard his name all over the place since I’ve been online and now I understand the hype.

I got to give Stan Smith (aka PushingSocial) a great big hug. Even though we are fellow buckeyes, we have to meet in Tennessee. Well, Stan of course abandoned Ohio for Michigan, but we don’t talk about that… 🙂

I got to meet the divine Laura Click, Davina Brewer, Jayme Soulati, and Gini Dietrich.

I got to hang with Sean McGinnis, Brian Vickery, and Sam Fiorella, who I at last got to thwack in real life (now that’s something that IS hard to do online).

I got to hear Mitch Joel and DJ Waldow speak.

I got to meet Billy Delaney (who also gave a great speech).

I got to meet Marcus Sheridan and watch him do his thing (wow!).

I got to finally give a hug to the awesome Jay Baer, who has been a wonderful friend and supporter almost from the time I started tweeting (poor guy).

And of course, I got to meet Mark Schaefer, who is as lovely in real life as he appears online.

There were some bummers along the way – I didn’t get to talk to Mitch Joel or DJ Waldow or a lot of other people. There wasn’t much time or opportunity to really converse with folks like I found myself wanting to do. But this is all building up to future meet-ups.

All of this has proven to me that the reasons why I loved social media so much a year or two ago were legitimate. I no longer have any doubts. I no longer feel like I’m flailing.

I hope you all get to have a similar experience, and sometime soon!

PS – No, I didn’t link to everyone I mentioned here, but that’s because it would just be an obnoxious amount of links. I’m not THAT much of a flip-flopper 🙂

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/basykes/55491077/ via Creative Commons

Myth: Opens are the best way to measure email marketing success

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You’d heard all of the rumors. Marketing is dead. B2B is dead. Computers are dead. Email is dead. Pretty much everything has been declared dead. Despite all of this, however, you did the unthinkable and started an email marketing campaign for your company. Today was the big day. The email was proofread and checked in every other way, loaded up into your program, and sent out. Now, 12 hours later, the boss calls and wants to know how the stats are looking (because yes, this does tend to happen in the business world). You might well scramble for your stats report and announce the first thing that is reported. “Well, our open rate was 19.2% which is *just* below what’s considered the industry ideal for open rate.”

There’s just one problem with this swift and exciting report.

It doesn’t really answer your boss’s question.

Opens are slippery

There are a few things you need to know about “opens” when you begin email marketing, and perhaps the most important thing is that the word “open” can be pretty misleading. For example, let’s say you check your email on one of those clients that has a preview pane. Whenever you get a new email it pops *open* in your preview pane. Some email programs will track this as an open even though the person may not ever actually look at it. This is why some programs now also track “click to open,” which means the person actually clicked open the email to read it. This might be a little more encouraging, but it still doesn’t answer that question about how the email performed.

Opens are like impressions

Opens in email world are kind of like impressions in web world. Impressions translates to how many people put their eyeballs on your site. Opens translates to how many people put their eyeballs on your email. Neither of these are really solid metrics for determining how these tactics actually performed, however. If you walk into a store and don’t buy anything, does the store really care how many things you looked at or “opened”? Probably not. They want you to buy stuff. If you’re in business, you probably want people to buy stuff too.

What are you asking people to do?

Email marketing, like any kind of marketing, needs to be thought through. What are you asking people to do? What are you guiding them towards? If you are preaching at them, even if they agree with everything you say, there isn’t really a reason for them to click anything. They might nod their heads at their screens. They might even hit reply and say, “Hey, thanks!” But that’s about it. Neither of these actions will really help you grow your business.

An e-newsletter or an e-blast, to be effective, should have a strong call to action just like any other marketing tactic. You should take your readers by the hand and say, “OK, looky here. Now I want you to go to this specific page on my website and request a sample.” Or whatever it is you want them to do. Counting the number of people who do THAT is a much better way to measure your success.

Of course, the most powerful way to report on the success of your email marketing program is to report on how it increased sales. There are countless ways to encourage people to go from an email to a page where they can purchase something. You can include a special discount code, for example, so that it’s super easy for your sales team to track where the sale is coming from. You can track how many people who requested a sample actually ended up buying, and that sample page can be set up on a special page that only the email linked to.

People will only do these things, however, if you ask them, or even guide them. If you don’t mention that you want people to buy something, they will assume you just want them to read the email. If you’re lucky, they’ll do it.

Email is easy

Because many people view “opens” as the Holy Grail of email stats, there is I think a misconception that email marketing is easy. With all of the websites out there to help you design your email, it’s easy to think that you can just toss something together, get people to open your emails, and be on your way. However, in order to truly measure the success of your email marketing, and in order to make it a valuable part of your marketing campaign, a little more finesse, a little more planning, a little more thought needs to be involved.

What experience do you have in measuring the success of your email marketing campaigns? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rmgimages/4660273582/ via Creative Commons