Margie Clayman

This is post number five in a series of posts from Online Marketing Strategist Tommy Walker. If you have questions, leave a comment here or visit with Tommy on Twitter at@tommyismyname.

Today I found a really interesting post by Angie Schottmuller on Jay Baer’s site, Convinceandconvert.com. The article is called 7 ways to thank someone for a retweet. Angie makes a lot of really good points and a lot of excellent recommendations, but I see things a bit differently, so I thought I would tack on my perspective. Here’s hoping you join the conversation!

Are you being genuine or are you being a braggart?

It’s very easy to identify things that rub you the wrong way in Twitter world. That’s why you see so many posts like, “Calling BS on this” or “Why I hate people who…xyz”. Once you do that though, it’s sometimes hard to tell if you are actually executing an activity that drives someone else nuts.

For me, showing gratitude on Twitter always feels like walking on thin ice. As Angie points out in her post, if you say “Thank you for the RT!” a million times a day, a few things can happen. First, it can look like you’re just trying to fill your stream with all of the wonderful RTs you’ve gotten. Second, the actual thank you can start to look like it’s playing second fiddle to your self-promotion, which can be icky (that’s a professional term). If you tack on a link to your post every time you say thank you to someone, the waters start to look like they could catch on fire for all of the ick (that’s a Northeast Ohio reference, btw).

Where I diverge from Angie’s perspective

All of the above I agree with Angie on 100%. Where I kind of wade off into a different pond is how I approach saying thank you. Angie notes in her post that there are other ways to say thank you rather than just saying, like a robot, “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” True, but do you still need to type out some version of gratitude in a tweet if someone supports you? I feel the answer is yes.

In particular, I strongly disagree with the idea of retweeting a retweet. As I noted in the comments over on Angie’s post, the RTing of Retweets may be my biggest pet peeve in Twitter world. It just gets downright ridiculous sometimes. You’ve probably seen this scenario before, for example:

Someone mentions you and a few other people for follow Friday.

One of the other people mentioned retweets that tweet. OK, fine.

Then the original poster retweets the retweet because they are mentioned with an #ff. Well, that’s kind of silly isn’t it?

To me, retweeting a retweet doesn’t show a lot of humanity. It’s pushing the Retweet button, and it can sometimes make you look silly if you don’t look carefully at what you’re doing.

So how do I say thank you?

I have a few rules that I follow when thanking people.

1. I give priority to people who add a comment or a thought along with a tweet of my post. This tells me that they actually read the post and formed an opinion, which (lord knows) takes a lot of time. I want to make sure I acknowledge those folks by name, individually.

2. If a lot of people retweet my post over a short period of time, I will group them together so that I am not saying thank you 27 times in an hour. Well, I don’t usually get 27 RTs in an hour, but you know what I mean!

3. If someone retweets my post AND leaves a comment, or retweets my post and then starts to follow, I try to thank them for both actions at once.

In essence, for me, expressing gratitude on Twitter is quite simply more about the person you are thanking, less about you. Following the person is good advice. Adding the person to a list is good advice, but you never quite know how people will react to things like that. To me, it’s always a safe bet, a human bet, to just say thank you, and try to personalize it.

Five easy ways to personalize a thank you

To avoid sounding like a thank you robot, I try to personalize my tweets where I’m thanking people so that they know it’s really about them. Here are five ways to go about that.

1. Thanks for the RT! I haven’t talked to you lately. How are you?

2. Thank you for retweeting my post. I’m heading over to your blog later today!

3. Thanks for the RT – I really appreciate it!

4. Thank you for the RT and for the great comment you left. I appreciate both!

5. Thanks. By the way, your post inspired me to write that, so thank you for the inspiration!

You see? You are really talking to the person that way, rather than just saying “Hey thanks.” To me, that avoids the “spammy” problem Angie wants to help you avoid.

So those are some of my thoughts on how to say thank you on Twitter. Where do you come in on the issue? I’d love to hear your thoughts, and don’t forget to visit Angie’s post as well!

Image by sebile akcan. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/sebileakc

This post is part of the #letsblogoff collaborative blog community.

A few days ago, my friend Stan (@pushingsocial) published a post called What if you only had 20 posts left? The post is about Wael Ghonim, a man who started a Facebook page that helped inspire the revolution in Egypt. The point Stan makes is that we really don’t live our blogs to the fullest, right? We put in content, and we shovel it out, and we entirely take it for granted. We may not always put our best work out there.

Now, Stan could have just created a post that said that stuff. But instead, he overlaid his message with the story of Wael Ghonim. It’s a great story, and a great technique.

“Stogging”

One could say that storytelling via blog posts is an increasingly common recommendation. If you skim the most popular posts at Copyblogger.com, for example, you see advice on how to make your copy sticky, how to envelope your readers in what you’re saying, and how to infuse your personality into everything you write. One of the most popular posts, and one of my favorites from 2010, uses the story of Eminem to make immensely important points about blogging.

But why do we need these stories? Why can’t we just take good advice and motivate ourselves to use it?

Five reasons to tell a story in your blog posts

Here are five reasons why I think people gravitate towards stories in blog posts.

1. When a writer tells a story, he or she edges a bit more into being who they really are. The temptation to be entirely button down and professional seems to drift away, and in its place is a real live human being sharing thoughts and experiences.

2. Stories prove we’re not making it up. If Stan had written the post he did about how a single post or action can create a revolution without the story he wove into the post, it would not have had the punch. But he told not just a story, but a true story. A current events story. We now see that he has a really important point to make backed up by reality.

3. Stories build bridges. We all come to our blogs with our own personal experiences, our own “baggage,” as it were. By telling a story, whether it’s about ourselves or someone else, we build a bridge between ourselves and our readers. “Here,” we seem to say. “You may not have lived my life, so let me tell you a little about it so we can start in the same place.”

4. Stories can be passed on. There are so many tidbits of wisdom floating around in the online world. Stories, however, well, they are like snowflakes. No two are exactly alike. They stick with us and we want to share them. We want to see how other people react to them. We want to see if they are moved the same way we were.

5. The Bait and Switch. A lot of bloggers will approach blogs from the standpoint of being an expert. “Here’s why you should do things my way, and here’s why I’m right and you’re dumb.” You’ve seen those posts before, I’m sure. If you tell a story though, you lure readers in. It’s like fishing – you’ve got a real nice and juicy worm just hanging out there, and people can’t resist clicking “Read more.” Then, you bring in the moral of the story, just like Aesop, and the person has learned your feelings about something without even realizing it.

You and stogging

Do you tell a lot of stories in your posts? Do you try to bring in other people, other experiences, and other perspectives, or do you keep the spotlight on the point you’re trying to get across? Have you found that people respond better when you weave a story into your regularly scheduled programming, or do you think this is all a bit of hogwash?

I’d love to hear your story!

image by Andre Larsson. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Didi90

I just completed an absolutely incredible book called Ad Women: How They Impact What We Need, Want, and Buy, by Juliann Sivulka. It is one of the most incredible studies of gender history in the US I have encountered (and I’ve read a lot of history books!).

Beginning in 1869 and taking her study into 2007 or so, Sivulka somehow manages to tie together the history of advertising, consumer history, race history, and world history, all while bringing it back to women who have worked in advertising over the years.

Given that, it’s impossible to explain in a single blog post everything you can learn from reading this book, but let me throw a few thoughts your way.

Women know what they’re supposed to know

Beginning in the late nineteenth century and moving to modern ads that portray husbands as inept goofballs, women have always known what their areas of expertise are supposed to be. In the nineteenth century, really all the way through the 1970s, women were supposed to know everything about the domestic arts. This covered everything from house decor to fashion for the husband and kids.

There have been a couple of times over the long years when this has gotten a bit blurry as lines go. For example, when new washers and dryers came out, marketers thought that men should be targeted because these were “machines.” However, laundry was considered to reside so entirely in the woman’s domain that women actually found themselves coaching men how to use these complex gadgets. That caused quite a few ripples.

Fast forward to now. You have probably noticed that there are a LOT of ads where men are portrayed as downright stupid when it comes to household chores. You might say that this is a sexist representation of men, and you’d probably be right. But there’s also an underlying current there – women still dominate when it comes to care of the home. Compared to a woman, a man is hopeless. Not very modern, right?

Behind every man is a strong woman

Another interesting thing this book covers is the phenomenon of why so many women find themselves in subordinate positions even if they are really more skilled than the men. Over and over again, Sivulka tells the tale of women who ran huge agencies, and it was no secret, but the woman did not show herself in the office, did not dispute the fact that her husband (or whomever) was the president, and in fact agreed with segregating the sexes in the office building.

If a woman did find herself to be entirely successful, she was left with the debate that continues to plague women to this day. “Do I keep doing this, or do I give everything up to be a wife and a mom?” Until about the 1970s and then into the 80s, this was the only choice for women. And a lot of women whom Sivulka profiles didn’t have a problem or qualms with this aspect of their careers. A woman would give up everything to be there for her kids, and then in the 1970s, the Supermom was expected to remain successful at work while also maintaining that aspect of motherhood that she had been used to as a child.

Do women today, successful women, still find themselves wondering if they should dedicate themselves more to their home and their kids? I would wager yes.

Did a lot of men run with this sacrificial aspect of women? Absolutely. Some of the most successful women in marketing were banned from all-men’s advertising groups, banned from special first class commuter trains, and more.

“The Woman” is our target

Another major topic that Sivulka covers throughout the book is the fact that marketers latched on to the idea that they could target white, middle class women. In the early days, she was the one making decisions about what to buy. In the 1950s, she was going out to stores herself to do the shopping. For decades upon decades, marketers targeted this one group of women. Men and women in advertising shaped their campaigns around what they thought “this woman” would want. There was no attention to racial minorities, of course. The emphasis, ultimately, was on how “this woman” could be attractive to men, then a good wife, and finally a good mother. Women over 49 need not exist, thank you.

Now, of course, you can’t miss the fact that there is not just “this woman.” That makes the job of marketers all the harder – and as Sivulka points out, instead of targeting people by their jobs, their economic class, or their genders, marketers have to target people by their ideologies. How do you sell a product to a woman who believes you should stay at home while also tempting the woman who believes that staying at home is old fashioned? Because that is the spectrum that is out there.

Somebody stop me

I could go on and on – this was a very enlightening book, and interesting on so many levels, from learning how advertising became equated with evil to all of the things I mention above.

Check it out and let me know what you think – and in the meantime, let me know your thoughts about some of the questions Sivulka poses!