Social Media and 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.