Marjorie Clayman’s Writing Portfolio

Professional writing profile of Marjorie Clayman

Marketing Talk

TweetDiner – Social Media for Social Good

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As mentioned a few weeks ago, we’re going to be starting a new TweetDiner chat series that will begin on Saturday, September 17th and will carry on through to the end of the year. The idea of this series is to accentuate the positive. It seems (to me at least) that a lot of gloom is clouding over what can really be great about social media. Hopefully, through these weekly chats, we’ll be able to remind each other of all of the great things people are doing online – and the great potential the online world still carries. I’ve tried to intersperse a few different platforms for chats as well so that if Twitter isn’t your favorite chat platform, you can still participate.

With that, here’s the plan!

Saturday, September 17th 9 PM EST: What is bothering you most about the online world today? (TWITTER)

Tuesday, September 20th 7 PM EST: What is bothering you most about the online world today? (GOOGLE PLUS)

Saturday, September 24th 9 PM EST: Who are the most positive/inspiring people you follow in the online world? (TWITTER)

Saturday, October 1st 9 PM EST: What are the best ways to use Twitter for social good? (TWITTER)

Saturday, October 8th 9 PM EST: What are the best ways to use Facebook for social good? (TWITTER)

Thursday, October 13th, 7 PM EST: Your Favorite Facebook causes, pages, and groups – A diner link dump (FACEBOOK)

Saturday, October 15th 9 PM EST: Blogging for Social Good, An introduction (TWITTER)

Saturday, October 22 9 PM EST: Your favorite blogs that promote social good (and why!) (TWITTER)

Tuesday, October 27th 7 PM EST: Your favorite blogs that promote social good (and why!) (GOOGLE PLUS)

Saturday, October 29th: Day off for trick-or-treating!

Saturday, November 5th 9 PM EST: How to use Google Plus for social good (TWITTER)

Wednesday, November 9th 7 PM EST: How to use Google Plus for social good (GOOGLE PLUS)

Saturday, November 12th 9 PM EST: Can a brand benefit from engaging in online activities promoting social good? (TWITTER)

Saturday, November 19th 9 PM EST: What are you thankful for? Open Mic! (TWITTER)

Saturday, November 26th: Day off for Turkey Day!

Saturday, December 3rd 9 PM EST: What obstacles are in the way of promoting social good online? (TWITTER)

Saturday, December 10th 9 PM EST: The most memorable uses of social media for social good -what impressed you and why? (TWITTER)

Tuesday, December 13th 7 PM EST: Your favorite holiday season causes – a diner link dump! (FACEBOOK)

Saturday, December 17th 9 PM EST: The best example – Mark Horvath and InvisiblePeople.TV (TWITTER)

Wednesday, December 21st 7 PM EST: Happy Chanukah – What miracles can social media make real for people in the world? (GOOGLE PLUS)

Friday, December 30 9 PM EST: TweetDiner sends out 2011 (open Mic) (TWITTER)

I’m sure some of you are wondering what the Facebook “link dumps” are. I sort of am too! But my vision is that because it’s so easy to tag pages and causes, we would just mention them on the Tweetdiner page, and then it would be easy for people to click over and check out what everyone is posting. This would make the page a great resource for anyone wanting to engage in social good over the next few months because everything would be linked there. Also this would provide our community with a way to show appreciation to those groups and causes.

Any ideas, questions, concerns, or suggestions? Please let me know!

Image Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/HalloweenH


Margie Clayman Interviews Janice Person of Monsanto

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For as long as I’ve known about Monsanto, I have only ever seen bad news about them. I first heard the name when I read Animal Vegetable Miracle. Then I heard about them again when I watched Food Inc.

One of the wonders of the world of social media is that pretenses you bring from your own life can be popped like a big bubble. Whenever I pictured Monsanto I pictured a sort of Earthly rendition of the Emperor’s crew from Star Wars. Guys dressed all in black, kind of scary looking, and very mean, for sure.

It was that perception I had in mind when a conversation began that would lead to this post. See, as some of you know, back in July I asked my community to give me topics for posts that I would write throughout August. My friend Janice, to whom I’ve been talking online for just about a year, recommended I write a post relating to farming. I’ve known her to be  a highly engaged and supportive member of the farming community, so I said sure, and I said I already had an idea in mind.

“I’m thinking I’ll write something about stupid Monsanto and why they’re so mean to farmers.”

Janice tweeted me back. “You know I work for Monsanto, right?” Sure enough, this information had been in her Twitter bio for as long as I’d known her, but I had missed it. Whether I just am not cued in to peoples’ bios or whether my own vision of Monsanto had blinded me, I had not made the connection at all. After extracting my foot from my Twitter mouth, it seemed we had an opportunity to provide a good conversation to our mutual communities. I asked Janice if I could interview her not necessarily about Monsanto (I’m not Barbara Walters) but rather about how a brand can deal with a person like me in the online world. How does Janice, as part of Monsanto’s PR department, deal with all of the bad press one sees in the line realm? Janice gracious agreed to reply despite a move to a different state, and here is what we came up with.

1. A lot of people say that a brand must be understood from the highest position right down to the lowest rung on the ladder. It’s clear the message Monsanto wants to get out there is “We’re friends of the farmer.” Is everyone trained the same way on that message?

Monsanto had other businesses than agriculture in the past – the chemical business and sweeteners are among the most well known. Before I got to the company, agriculture became a standalone entity. It’s important for our employees to have the knowledge that as a business, we succeed when farmers succeed – after all, farmers are our customers. We’ve focused on that internally for a number of years. In the last couple of years though we’ve done more to communicate this vision externally too.

2. There are a lot of things about Monsanto that people really don’t like – how do you go about changing a company’s image for people who are so squarely set in their opinions?

When I see people who have defined opinions I disagree with on a one-on-one basis, like the conversations I have with some people on social media, I try to listen and ask questions when I hear people say things that are in direct conflict with my experience. I like to know why they think some of the things they do, whether they’ve talked directly to customers and if they would be willing to hear my experience or that of farmer customers. In fact, that’s what happened with you and I after months of having known each other through social media.   Social media is a venue where anyone can manipulate or control messages broadly, from our viewpoint, social media provides an opportunity for broad discussion. That is where Monsanto’s social media efforts are — we want to participate in the dialog about our business and agriculture more broadly.   Since I came to Monsanto a few years ago, I’ve become much more aware of critics who also have their own agenda. And quite frankly some critics have found it’s financially rewarding to spread misinformation. There are some people so entrenched in a belief talking can’t be productive, but many people are open to the conversation.   When criticism gets on a larger scale, I usually try to look at from the standpoint of trying to understand the context of the topic which can get left out. Having so many farmers and ranchers active on social media helps me gain additional perspective on various topics of discussion.

3. How has social media helped your PR efforts? How has it hurt?

By being active in social media, people can find us if they are interested in what we have to say – both good and bad to that I guess. Transparency provided in social media is vastly different and we’re seeing more and more farmers out here, each able to offer their individual opinions. That helps people understand things aren’t always back and white.  One of the benefits of social media is real people and faces are part of the conversation, not just a logo. We hear customers point to this as well as people who may not have known much about us previously. It also lets us participate in real-time discussions and reach large groups of people. Over time this may be able to keep some of the myths from taking as firm a hold as they had in the past.   Real-time and mass distribution are also tough things to deal with when something new is talked about. We are pushed to move faster than with other media and when some of the things we see are technically complex, we have to be sure we remain scientifically accurate. That means there are times when we have to tell people we will get back to them.

4. There have been instances in the past where Monsanto has been attacked and the company did not respond. In retrospect, do you think it would have been better for the company to engage? Do you think Social Media is forcing companies to engage with critics more?

If you don’t mind, on the first part…. I’m not sure whether it has been a responding or not getting the response to all the interested audiences which can be perceived that we haven’t always responded. The internet made information more accessible to people but with social media, it’s easier for information to be included in the conversation about that information.   Now, it is easier for people to hear from the company, our customers and employees directly instead of getting it filtered. We also have a lot more opportunity to interact with people. And we get to be in the conversations so much more often –we can tweet with farmers regularly about things they are seeing as do others. For that, social media has been amazing.

As far as engaging with our critics more, social media allows for more engagement with the critics. However, I see a lot of critics, not just of Monsanto, looking only for those things which support the viewpoint they already have. So I’m not so sure we engage more directly with critics. There are probably some things that answering doesn’t have anything constructive to it – one of my farmer friends uses “when was the last time you beat your wife/husband/kids?” as the “no win” question.   It tends to be more the people somewhere in the middle of the spectrum that this has helped us, and agriculture in general, reach. With that in mind, we don’t get painted with the same broad brush we may have before.

What lessons can you derive from this interview for your own brand or business? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Maybe the real problem in social media is being human

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Jay Baer wrote a pretty fantastic post this last week. I think it threw a bit of icy cold water on the online world. Or maybe it was more like a Don Quixote moment of, “Oh wait, that’s really how it is.” Have you read his post? It’s about the use of the word “friend” and whether we can truly get to know each other in this online space.

I’ve been thinking about this post a lot lately. I thought about this post as I watched people duke it out verbally in a comments section that should have been somber and respectful. I thought about it even more as I saw a tweet whizz by yesterday – “The hardest entrepreneurial lessons 9/11 teaches us” or something of that sort. I thought about it when someone whom I had opted not to follow back on Twitter tweeted me to say, “Sorry, we only follow people who follow us.”

Although everything Jay says about the online world is true, I now am leaning towards a slightly different supplementary perspective. It’s not just hard to get to know people online. It seems to be getting harder for people to be human online. And by human, I mean a well-rounded person with feelings, compassion, manners, courtesy, and other pretty basic characteristics that distinguish us from say…earwigs.

Holy Cow! Brands are people!

I remember when social media really first started taking off. I first started really reading about it in 2006 I’d say. The thing that got people really excited was the idea that I, representing xyz company or brand, could get to know my customers, my prospects, and you – representing xyz brand or company. All of us would be putting human faces to the names and numbers, right? You remember those days. It was the flower child days of the online world, when customer service, marketing, communication, and pretty much everything else would become serenely beautiful because we’d all be people talking to people.

Much like a comic book, however, we ended up creating a sort of mutant hybrid that is part human, part digital image. Instead of worrying about relationships or sales, we started focusing on numbers of followers, blog traffic, and Facebook fans/likes/thumbs up/whatever it will be called next. We stopped communicating as humans. We also stopped communicating as brands or businesses. We started to become this weird online version of ourselves that is not really who we are and not really who our companies are.

Why don’t you ask how that person is doing?

It’s not a secret that my blog here does not get the most amazing traffic ever. In fact, I will tell you that most of the time, I get 150 visits or so a day. Now, the me of last year would have drooled over that. Everything is relative. But compared to the thousands of hits other sites get every day, I am not just small potatoes, I’m like a small eye of a potato. However, one thing I can say is that a large percentage of the people who visit here do something with my posts. A lot of you comment, which is my favorite thing. Many people tweet out posts or share them via other social media platforms.

More to the point, in terms of my community in general, which extends from here to Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and a bit to LinkedIn, I can say that I speak on a regular basis to people I genuinely care about, and I think they might genuinely care about me as well. Sure we may not know contextual things like spouse names or how many kids, but I know that if I am having a problem, I can go to them and say, “Dude!” And they know they can approach me the same way.

We are humans, interacting with each other as humans would in a very crowded party. Sometimes we leave the party to talk one-on-one and then we go back in. But we care about each other. If something is up, we ask how the other person is doing. We send our condolences when there is loss. We send offers to help, and we do. As Jeannette Baer said so eloquently in a comment on my last post, why shouldn’t people just ask other people how they’re doing? Amen.

WWARHD? (What would a real human do?)

I wonder what you would find if you skim your online reality for signs of humanity. I find a lot of true humans in the circles I engage in. People like Chase Adams, Danny Garcia, the aforementioned Jeannette Baer, Joe Ruiz, and many many others. But I also see people using 9/11 as a how-to blog topic. I see people using a person’s death as a means to get a blog traffic spike. Automation seems to be taking over the world.

If we cannot be humans, is it any wonder we can’t formulate real relationships? You can’t prioritize the numbers and also create real relationships. You can’t view people as experimental lab rats and also expect undying loyalty. It has to be, it seems to me, one or the other.

Maybe that’s the real problem in the online world. We’re not people who need people. We’re automated X-Men who need more numbers wherever we go.

What do you think? Am I on to something here or am I crazy?

Image by Bruno De Lorenzo. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/deloan

Creating Community By Curating Content

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A lot of people are talking about content curating these days. People are saying that it’s really important, it’s great, it’s awesome, it’s a growing part of the online world, et cetera ad infinitum. And hey, I’m really happy about that (cough, Blog Library, cough). But apart from the fact that it’s just plain enjoyable, not a lot of people really emphasize why it’s beneficial to curate content. The fact is, for me, working as an online content curator has helped me grow my online community.

How does that work? I’m so glad you asked!

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Tweediner September 10, 2011

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On September 15, 2010, the very first #tweetdiner was held on Twitter. Stan and I were nervous leading up to 9 PM EST. Would anyone show up? Would people talk? We started DMing each other about halfway through. People did show up. People did engage. And a great chat and community was born.

This year, September 15th is not a Saturday. As fate would have it, the Saturday closest to 9/15/11 without being after 9/15/11 is next Saturday – September 10, 2011.

I think it was meant to work out this way.

See, the day after that, 9/11/11, will mark the 10th anniversary of the tragedy of September 11, 2001. It’s hard to believe a decade has passed, isn’t it? As we reflect back on those darkest of days, we remember the sadness. We remember the terror. But we also remember the people who were and are closest to us. We remember not being able to imagine the pain people went through and are going through who lost loved ones that day. It seems like a perfect day for our #tweetdiner community to welcome everyone with a celebration of friendship, hope, love, and remembrance. Don’t you think?

So, at 9 PM EST on 9/10/11, we will open the diner to anyone who wants to come in. If you lost a loved one on 9/11 and would like to say things about them, just let me know. If you want to link to any videos or things that you think would fit the occasion, let me know.

It’s the spirit of #tweetdiner to share our special day with as many people as possible. I can’t really think of a better way to do it than to wrap our virtual arms around good friends and reflect on times that are hard to believe just 10 years later.

If you have any other ideas on how you’d like us to mark this occasion, please feel free to contact me here, at our Facebook page, or on Google Plus.

Thank you!

Image by Piotr Bizior. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/bizior

Margie Clayman’s 50 Favorite Blog Sites

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AKA, Advertising Age ain’t got nothin on me! 🙂

So, yes. Advertising Age released its list of the 50 top Social Media blog sites for 2011. Or maybe 50 top ranked. Whatever. And I thought, “Hmm, yeah, but I mean, there are some that are missing on here!”

Now, unfortunately, I don’t have a badge to give you, and my top 50 may not have the same clout (that’s with a c, not a k) as the Ad Age list, but, well, it’s from the heart. That I can promise you. So here we go, in no particular order – my favorite 50 blog sites!

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