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This Friday, the last season of Friday Night Lights will begin. I was a late-comer to the show. A friend of mine told me for two years that it was one of the best-written television shows she had ever seen, but still stuck with baggage about how the high school football team got so much more attention than the speech and debate team, I insisted the show wasn’t for me. Well, we all make mistakes.

If you watch the show or if you watched the movie the show is based on, you know that the rallying cry for the football team is “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose.”

As I was thinking about that statement, I realized that it applies to Social Media as well. But what does “clear eyes” mean in the online world? What does a full heart mean online? I have some ideas.

[Read more…] about Clear Eyes, Full Heart, Can’t Lose: How to win the Social Media game

Over the weekend, I happened to catch a 3-hour documentary on Abraham Lincoln (showing my dedication to being a history nerd). It was an interesting psychological study of Lincoln, and it really concentrated a lot more on his youth than on his years as President.

One particular thought really interested me. When Lincoln was in his early 40s, trying to earn his place in the state legislature, his political rhetoric was mostly focused on why his opponents were crappy. In fact, he apparently obliterated one peer so harshly that the man broke into tears on the House floor. Lincoln penned anonymous letters to Illinois newspapers about how the Democrats were a bunch of morons. It was the nadir of his career, by the way. He thought that he was a complete failure.

Then, Stephen Douglas put together the Kansas-Nebraska act, which basically said, “Um, hi. We can’t figure out this slavery thing. Every time there’s a new territory, we have to put together a compromise, and it just stinks. So why don’t all y’all just figure it out territory by territory.” Lincoln was enraged by this alleged compromise and sprung into action. It did not take long for him to put together his thought that “A House Divided Cannot Stand.” He had something he believed in fervently. He had a message. And not long after that, he was President of the United States.

[Read more…] about What’s your point?

Imagine, if you will, the following scenario.

You’re walking your way through Twitter and the blogosphere when someone you like and respect a great deal sends you a direct message.

“Hey, I have this ticket to that huge expo you wanted to go to. I’m not going to use it. Do you want it?”

Well, you jump at the chance. You know that the ticket probably was a major investment for someone – your friend, or maybe a friend of your friend. You go to the conference and you have a fabulous time. You’re really grateful.

A couple of months later, that same friend sends you a second direct message. “Hey, I just got my book published. I’d love for you to read it and write a review. Be honest!”

Let me ask you two questions.

First, are you going to mention that this person gave you a ticket to that conference a couple of months back?

Second, are you going to say anything acutely negative about the friend’s book?

The conundrum is transparent

This seems to be to be a pretty quintessential example of the “can’t win” scenario.

In the interest of being transparent, people sometimes treat their blog posts like mini confessionals. “Oh, and I talked to this person in the street on May 27th, but now I’m just quoting them. And this person loaned me a quarter for a vending machine five years ago, but I’d have liked their book anyway. And this person I have talked to in real life on at least 3-4 occasions, but I still highly recommend you attend their webinar.”

People expect these kinds of confessionals in Social Media because one of the first things you hear when you go online is “be transparent.”

However, this also creates, at least in my mind, an issue of just how authentic we can really be online. It makes me wonder if people do nice things in this space so that you can owe them a solid later. It makes me wonder if you REALLY are being honest when you come clean about your friendship with an author and then in the next paragraph tell me why I should buy 17 copies of your friend’s book.

Another hypothetical

Let’s say that you’re doing another book review for a friend of yours (your friends are very accomplished!). You start out by saying that you both work for the same company, your boss supported the book, you wrote the forward, and you got a free copy long before it was released to stores.

What is the incentive for anyone to keep reading? With everything you just became “transparent” about, what are the chances that you’re going to go on to bash everything about the book? I’d say slim to none. In fact, I stop reading.

A real life scenario

This has been on my mind for a few reasons. I’ve encountered a lot of blog posts lately that have me concerned about how genuine some content really is. Are you bashing that person because you REALLY think they’re crap, or is it maybe because every time you do that you get 57 comments on the post? Are you raving about that book because you REALLY think it’s amazing, or is it because of all of that stuff you just “came clean” about?

It’s also on my mind though because of my recent experience reviewing The Now Revolution. It occurred to me, as I started reading, that I had been entrusted with two copies of the book before it even was officially launched. I was entrusted to review the book, and i was entrusted to then find a neat way to send at least one copy of the book out to my community.

Could I really say anything negative about the book?

As it happens, there really isn’t too much that bothers me about The Now Revolution. In fact, with just 2 chapters left, it’s one of the best books I’ve read in a couple of years. But what if it hadn’t been? What if there had been a lot of points that just galled me?

I decided that the best path would be to be me. You know who I am. I think, to some extent, Jay and Amber know who I am. I’m not going to say negative things just because I want to create a riot on my blog site. I’m not going to gush at something that’s not gush-worthy.

I feel pretty strongly that I would take that line regardless of the situation. You expect it from me. I expect it from me.

It might be boring. It might not make me a lot of friends in some cases. But I have to be able to sleep at night.

What do you think?

What do you think? Would it be better for someone to not be transparent about all of their ties so that you could take their opinion in without all of that bias? Is it better to know where someone stands but accept that maybe it’s not 100% what they truly think?

What would you do? What do you see?

Let’s talk about it.

Image by Ivan Prole. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/iprole

Sometimes, blog ideas just do not jump into your head. Usually, this happens when you sit down at your computer and think to yourself, “I’m going to be really busy the next couple of days and I have a nice, relaxing open slot of time right now. I think I’ll write ahead.”

I’ve only heard rumors of this affliction, but if I had ever experienced it (recently….today…) I would offer up the following ideas to get the faucet in your brain dripping with delectable blog posts once more.

1. Reflect on blog posts that you’ve found interesting lately, especially the ones you commented on. Your little hamster in your brain might start running when you remind him what he got running about before.

2. Research shows that there is always something going on in the world. Scan the headlines. Feeling fired up?

3. Scan Twitter. Often, there are people posting things on Twitter, and these things can cause a myriad of reactions ranging from interest, intrigue, paranoia, disgust, laughing, and more. These are all reactions that can lead to a successful blogging scenario.

4. Sometimes the arts can come in handy. Consider the music scene, movies, books, art exhibitions, or what PBS is showing tonight. The nice thing about turning to this arena for intellectual stimulation is that sometimes you can end up with a post that actually makes it look like you had it planned all along!

5. Ask people in your community what you should write about. Those who say, “Nothing, please be quiet” are probably just joking with you. Probably.

6. Take a nap/go to bed, depending on the time of day. Sometimes I wake up from being unconscious and my brain has blogged all by its lonesome. This methodology is not recommended for working hours, please note.

7. Get busy doing something else, like shoveling snow, weeding the garden, washing the dishes, or sweeping the floor. The sheer boredom your brain experiences from these tasks will motivate it to get you back to the computer.

8. Argue with yourself. Pick a post that you wrote six months ago and see if you can make a great case against everything you said. Rather than this resulting in your community categorizing as you as a “flip-flopper,” it’s highly probable that they will view you merely as evolving into a more perfect and well-rounded being.

9. Write a short post that poses a question to your community. The awesome thing about this is that in essence, you are asking your community to write your blog post for you. It’s like cheating on your homework. Right out there in the open!

10. Last but not least, you could always write a post about what you do when the blog well runs dry. But who would do that?

What do you do when your blog well runs dry? Have you tried any of these steps before? Let us know what worked for you!

Image Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/abcdz2000

I’m not one of those people who likes to go around saying, “This is the way I do it so this is how you should do it. Otherwise you’ll smell funny for 7 years.” Rather, I like to give my opinion, and if you want to debate the issue you are more than welcome.

Given that, I firmly believe that a lot of Twitterers need a retweeting intervention.

What on earth is retweeting?

OK, let me back up a moment and give a really quick background of what I’m talking about, just in case you are new to Twitter or aren’t on Twitter at all (in which case this post probably doesn’t hold a lot of interest for you, so thanks for making it this far!). So when you’re on Twitter and you see a tweet someone has made, you have 3 options. You can reply, which means you are talking to them. You can “favorite” the tweet, which is kind of like bookmarking it (this is for your use, but anyone can see your favorites). The third option is that you can “retweet” the tweet. This means that if you really like what the person is saying, you can click “retweet” so that another person’s tweet actually becomes yours. It’s like a Twitter version of quotation marks. This allows you to tell all of your followers, “Hey guys, check this funny/smart/sad/moving tweet.”

The One Click Method Versus The Cumbersome Method

If you do “retweeting” the way Twitter wants you to do it, it’s really easy. You just click “Retweet.” It’s like the “like” button on Facebook. Click click click. A lot of people, I think, view retweeting as a method of interaction, promotion, and/or engagement, so they retweet a lot and don’t have to do a whole lot more. So, someone’s profile could end up looking like this:

This is what you see a lot in profiles. Retweet after retweet. Sometimes it’s not even articles that people retweet. Sometimes you’ll see a profile where the person is retweeting other people retweeting them.

Is this methodology *wrong*? I can’t really say that. But here’s the thing. If your last 20 posts consist mostly of your own tweets and retweets that are simple echoings of what other people are saying, are you truly interacting with others? If you look at the tweets that the person above retweeted, most are about business and Social Media, and then one is about pigging out at Christmas. Why is that there? Did they think it was funny? It definitely doesn’t seem to fit in with other things. Why are they retweeting the other things there? Are these blog posts that are controversial? Are they really well written? I have no idea. For all I know, this account could belong to a spam bot that just retweets things every few minutes.

This brings me to the “cumbersome” method of retweeting. It involves adding a bit of a comment before or after what you’re posting that not only shows that you actually read or engaged with what you’re retweeting, but it also reveals something about you to your followers.

This can’t be done so far as I know with a simple click. The method I use is to copy a person’s tweet, leave my comment, put an RT @username and then paste their comment in. So it would look like this:

Now this retweet was a bit complex because I wasn’t the first person to see this fantastic post. @Kikolani saw it, my friend @pushingsocial then saw it from her stream, and I saw it from his. Instead of leaving a longer comment myself, I let @bbrian017 know that I thought it was a great post and that I saw it thanks to two people I respect a great deal. That’s a lot to say in a retweet – it lets the person I’m retweeting as well as my followers know a lot of information – about what I share, who I take recommendations from, and more.

When retweeting goes a bit over the top

Friday was one of the days that I was away more than usual from my Twitter and blogging world. When I checked on things late in the day, I saw that there were quite a few mentions of my name. In looking at things a bit more, I realized that the following had happened.

Someone did a “Follow Friday” post listing me and about 7 other people

Then, about 3-4 of the other folks retweeted the original #ff post (a couple did add a “TY” at the beginning)

I think 1 or 2 people then retweeted THOSE posts

This is where the easy access to retweeting becomes a bit of a hazard. Ask yourself, before you hit retweet, whether your followers really need to see this tweet. Actually, that’s probably good advice regardless of what you’re tweeting, but in any case, will your followers truly benefit from seeing lots of retweets of your follow Friday mentions? If someone says something nice about you, do you need to retweet that?

Here’s something I have learned on Twitter. If you say something to someone and people want to see the other side of the conversation, they can visit that other person’s profile and look. With that in mind, 99% of the time, I will not retweet a nice thing someone says about me. Rather, I’ll simply and genuinely say, “Thank you very much!” The only time I stray away from this is if someone does a blog post that mentions me, because I want to help them drive traffic to their site in that case. Even then, though, I don’t do the one-click retweet method. I usually write my own tweet and then put a link to their post in.

Another disadvantage to one-click retweeting

One other quick point I’d point out for those of you who are fans of metrics. When you tweet out a link, you are able to track how many people click that link most of the time. For example, I use bit.ly, and I can see how much traction those links get. If you simply retweet someone else’s tweet, you’re not getting your own trackable link. You’re just sending their link out.

Retweeting is a gift

I like to think of retweeting as a gift – it’s a way of telling someone that what they said was so great that you want to share it with all of your followers. You want to give up some of your platform to someone else. If you retweet people all of the time, it becomes less of a gift and more of a “ho hum” activity. No one will really feel special if you retweet them because you seem to retweet everybody. In my own case, I prefer to retweet by not really “retweting,” but rather by promoting. If someone does a great blog post, I’ll explain why I recommend reading it and then tweet a link out rather than just retweeting their own post about it. Again, this shows them that I took the time to read it and offer thoughts about it, and it also gives my followers more insight into why the heck I’m posting this information for them. Everybody wins.

How are you retweeting?

Does any of this resonate with you? How do you handle retweets right now? If you tend to hit the “retweet” button a lot, give the “cumbersome” method a try, and let me know how it works for you. And of course, as always, if you have any questions, just let me know!