Margie Clayman

Social Media Advice From 15 Great Figures of the Past

When you come right down to it, Social Media is just about people. All of the talking we do about strategy, how to engage, how to interact – it’s just all people stuff. Because of this, most advice that you get for the offline world can be applied quite easily to the online world. With this in mind, and on the suggestion of Kaarina Dillabough, I decided to survey some of the great figures of the past to see what wisdom of theirs could help us out in the online world today. Here is what I came up with!

You Can’t Judge A Person By The Numbers

by Margie Clayman

As I was walking the streets of Evanston, Illinois on Friday night, a group of kids passed me by. As we were passing each other a voice shouted out, “God d–n you’re short!” Now, in the overall scheme of the universe, this inarticulate and really idiotic proclamation is less than a crumb in significance, but the fact is that people make these kinds of statements to other people all of the time. “Why are you so short?” “Why are you so tall?” “Why are you so fat?” “Why are you so darned thin?” All of these questions and mockeries revolve around our society’s obsession with numbers. There is a range of “normal” (although I’m not sure what that range is, per se) that you can fall into for height, weight, even body mass index. If your number is too big or too small, you will very likely encounter people who will point this out to you.

There’s no question, certainly, that things are moving fast these days. People want shortcuts for everything, including the analysis of other people. By looking at those numbers – height, weight, number of freckles, number of pimples – people can quickly sort you into interesting or … something else. The problem, of course, is that people are much more than just those numbers. I am more than a person who happens to be smaller than the average bear. You are more than whatever external characteristics you present in your everyday life. By judging people based on numbers, we miss a universe of interesting things about people.

25 posts about Twitter

by Margie Clayman

Alan Berkson asked me to gather up some posts for people who are just getting started on Twitter. I thought that was a pretty good idea. There are a lot of different opinions out there, so it can get pretty confusing. I’ve done my best to gather posts that I myself found really helpful (that does not explain why I included posts I wrote, by the way) or posts that I thought raised some interesting questions about Twitter.

I hope you enjoy!

Why Blogging Is Like Cooking Something New

by Margie Clayman

My friend Jim F suggested I write something about cooking a new recipe. As it happens, I recently tried a new recipe. See, one of my favorite things to do in the kitchen is to try to recreate some of my most favorite restaurant meals. After all, while I love eating out, it gets kind of pricey, especially if the food is good. I never look at those websites that illegally post the ingredients or anything like that. I just sort of take my best guess and see if it ends up anywhere near as good as the original.

In this particular case, I was trying to recreate this ridiculously good pita pizza that a local restaurant makes. I looked at their menu to see the description. A vegetarian chili, tahini sauce, cheddar cheese, on their special pita bread. It seemed pretty doable. Of course I had no idea what ingredients were in their chili, but I figured I’d experiment and see what I could come up with. As it happened, I ended up with something that was darned delicious. Maybe not a whole lot like the original. Maybe not even as good. But still entirely satisfactory to me and my taste buds.

And that’s where the lesson about blogging comes in.

A Family-Owned Business in the 21st Century

by Margie Clayman

Lou Imbriano suggested I talk about how things have changed at our family-owned agency, Clayman Advertising, over the years. I am extremely fortunate to represent the third generation of my family in this business. My grandfather started the company back in 1954, my grandmother worked as the bookkeeper for the first 24 years,, my dad started working at the company about 35 years ago, and my mother has been working there for about 20 years, and I just celebrated my 7th anniversary (seems kind of pidley compared to those numbers!).

Of course, as you might expect, an awful lot has changed in our company, even just in the time that I’ve been there. When I started as a media buyer in 2004, the marketing world was still a bit tentative about website advertising because of the dot-com crash at the beginning of the century. My work was primarily in dealing with print publications. Google and Yahoo were cooking things that we really didn’t have a full grasp of yet (although it was already becoming apparent these were going to be forces to be reckoned with). My knowledge of web 2.0 was livejournal.com, and there certainly were not any cells of my brain thinking that business would have a place in that world. Twitter and Facebook didn’t exist yet.

This is the dawning of the age of entitlement

by Margie Clayman

My friend Ellen Cagnassola (aka @SweetSoaps) suggested I write something about entitlement. My friend Daria Giron has also been dealing with entitlement in a new series, and I wrote a bit about it after the Casey Anthony trial ended. Isn’t it interesting that so many of us have entitlement on our minds?

Maybe it’s not coincidental.

One of the most interesting things I’ve read lately has been the opening of Carol Roth’s The Entrepreneur Equation (the rest of the book is just as good, mind you). There, Carol suggests that maybe the American Dream as we have known it has passed away. The idea that you don’t just go from rags to riches but that you actually need to work your tail off to get there eludes a lot of people, or at least that’s the way it seems.

I think the online world makes this worse. We’ve seen a lot of success stories of enormous proportions, right? The person who started a Twitter account and immediately made a million dollars. The bloggers who get all of the income they need from their blogs (and they always seem to say it was a total accident or fluke). It’s easy to say, “Hey, why shouldn’t I get some of that?”

Margie Clayman

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