Social Media and You

Well, there’s no doubt what to crow about in this post. I just read Valeria Maltoni’s “100 Thoughts on Social Media.” Go there now. Read. Come back.

How much of that amazing post did you bookmark? I found delectable description after incise commentary after another delectable description throughout. It’s rare to read the truth about inbound marketing so clearly written.

“…use your content and smarts to elevate the other.”

This is the pith of it.

Way back when I studied theatrical improvisation, we learned a fundamental rule to that hair-raising art. We were trained to look out for your fellow actor. Make your fellow actor look good. This will make you look good.

The lesson was an epiphany for me at the time, and continues to reveal itself as I age. I’m blown away that the Conversation Agent has nailed the same attitude as essential to social media.

There are 100 of these pearls on the one blog post, folks. The most profound analysis of the state of social media I’ve ever seen. Affirming so much of what I’ve suspected all along.

Look at this one! ” … choose teaching over winning.”  And this solemn call: “…want less, do more.”

A requirement of acceptable social media content is that it must be characterized by something we label, authenticity.

Not many people could give you a sound definition of the word;  even fewer would agree on what authenticity means. But I think it’s correct to say that what we are implying when we say online content is authentic is that it inspires our trust.

Generally, we distinguish the authenticity of the new rules of marketing and PR from the harassment of the stereotypical greasy car salesman. We want to buy from folks made of flesh, guilt, and aspirations, who are just like us; we no longer abide the smooth plastic replicas of style that graced billboards and television commercials of yore.

But if this is true, how come we’re hard pressed to find anything but the most upbeat, pearly smiling attitudes in social media updates? How come people don’t tweet, “Having a lousy day.  Hate everybody”? How come they don’t update their Facebook pages with “Who cares what any of you say, Avatar was a stupid movie”?  Why is risk-taking, especially unmitigated being-yourself-even-if-it’s-ugly virtually absent from the social networks?

It’s a long way before we and the internet realize our potential.

In a recent LinkedIn discussion, someone complained that members were blatantly advertising instead of introducing discussion topics. The commenter pointed out how this destroys the confidence of other participants – in the advertiser, and in the integrity of the discussion forum itself.

In this particular group, the shameless self-promo does indeed seem a bit out of control. Some users are relatively new to social media, and perhaps not so well versed in the platform’s mores. And some, no doubt, are plain old dedicated spammers.

While I agree with that commenter, and deplore the heavy handed push posts, I would like to point out that the presence of black hats has one redeeming quality: it serves to accentuate the opposite and at least equal presence of white hats.

Though the garbage created by spammers of every stripe seems up to our ears, at times, it’s worth the trouble to pause and think about the vast numbers of good, smart, fair, energetic, compassionate, and helpful people who actually drive the internet and make cyberspace go round. The ones we have met here who touch our hearts and minds daily. It is to those amazing beings I send this Valentine. I love you!

I’m doing a mini-series on how to make your writing for online publication more attractive.

When something’s hot, in our lingo, it’s attractive; it draws attention. But like fire, it’s beautiful yet can also easily offend. So setting the dial to red-hot is not always in your best interest. The solution is a custom mix of hot and cold. All your internet updates operate on a hot/cold continuum.

(Note that dead center, exactly inbetween hot and cold, is where much writing lies, inert.)

In the effort to avoid middle of the road writing, decide the proper synthesis of hot and cold, and then write to the allowable extreme of hot. Here’s a sample tweet (the audience is internet marketers):

1. (Dead Center) Digging Ingram Hill on Pandora… Worth the $36 for the year just to hear music that’s not on the radio here!

2. (Cold) Ingram Hill via Pandora.  Unusual radio fare. Glad I bought the subscription.

3. (Hot) Ingram Hill ecstasy. Kudos for playing non-mainstream stuff, Pandora! (Worth every penny of $36 a year).

4. (Best solution) Listening to Ingram Hill. Kudos for playing non-mainstream stuff, Pandora! (Worth every penny of $36 a year).

Make sense?

Social media is a good place for writers. It can be a bit of a challenge for non-writers. You can produce content using other media besides text (e.g., video or audio); that’s the best way to get around a distaste for writing. But if you choose to write for the internet – most everyone does write at least Twitter and Facebook updates – consider some ways you can help yourself and your rankings by making your writing better.

By better, I mean more accurate, more appealing, more evocative, more powerful.

There are as many tricks for beefing up your writing as there are people. If you seem to be blogging to a vacuum, if your comments get no reactions, if nobody ever re-tweets you – would it help if your writing was more attractive?

What does that mean, more attractive writing? It’s a question of fine-tuning the temperature, adjusting either up or down, according to the tastes of the reader you wish to attract.  So, for example:

• Start with: We went to the movies.
• Make it hotter: We saw a cool flick.
• Make it cooler: We took in a film.

More to come soon on this theme.

One thing prominent on my list of to-dos is to get an account at Hootsuite. It’s a service that’s earned high praise from all quarters, and I could be more efficient by using it.

But Jason Falls wrote a post today that reminded me why that task seems to stay on the list and not get crossed out. I’ve a slightly indignant disinclination to can my messages. Remember that term? We used to speak of canned music: a recording, not the real thing.

If you plaster a single, duplicated message across many different platforms, you’re taking the belligerent route, IMO.  Belligerence describes old marketing; the new inbound marketing emphasizes a soft sell.

To post the same updates to Twitter and Facebook, for instance, ignores the unique energy of each site. Why confine Facebook to Twitter’s 140 characters, as if the use and character of these two tools were the same? It’s like using a screwdriver as a hammer.

There are really solid reasons why “the big 3″ – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn – have gained prominence. They’re each useful in their own right, for different things and different people at different times. To homogenize them is to lose their usefulness entirely.