Month: September 2009

I am large. I contain multitudes.

Dave

I’ve had a lot of blogs over the years, including Fistful of Plooble, which I started in 2003 and in a lot of ways is the best thing I’ve ever done that isn’t running around in short pants and pulling the cat’s tail. Sadly, it languished in neglect for years, once I found that I could not spend all day blogging after I managed to land a job. We all make sacrifices, I suppose.

As of this moment I have Fistful of Plooble on TypePad, where it began, and a version of it on WordPress.com that I ported over when I thought I was going to shut the TypePad one down. Then I got cold feet. Why? Well, for one thing, it’s the number four Google search result for the phrase “beach house names.”

And I care about that why?

Then I started a “personal work” blog at WordPress.com and found that all I was doing was reposting from my SAS social media blog.

Then I decided I needed a digital business card, and to get the one I wanted, I needed a self-hosted WordPress account, which GoDaddy made very easy. And once I had that, why not add /blog, and have my blog there as well?

So that’s what this is. And I’ve pulled in all the content from Plooble and my personal work blog. Maybe I’ll post things here that I say on Facebook. Or pull the things I post here into Facebook. Or maybe I’ll set up and endless loop that will ultimately devour the universe.

Twitterary aspirations

Dave

This morning The Mrs and I took The Boy to the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill “as I was required to write it when I was a reporter” for the North Carolina Literary Festival. The two of them went to listen to children’s book authors and I went to a panel called “Tweeting: A New Form of Writing.” The panelists were Paul Jones, Mur Lafferty and Wayne Sutton. “Clearly they did not agree on a dress code.”

Over the last year or so I’ve been in a lot of conversations about Twitter, as well as listening to panel discussions and webcasts about it. But to date I had not been to any Twitter discussions where poets ask panelists questions about accessing their unconscious.

It was a different world, and I liked being there.

Those of us who are trying to incorporate social media into marketing communications have to keep reminding ourselves, as Wayne reminded me, that social media is about community and conversation. That can be a hard message to spread through any enterprise that’s more used to delivering “messaging” than making connections.

But forget about marketing for a minute. As Wayne pointed out, tweeting helps you unlock unconscious ways of thinking that make you a more interesting communicator.

You could take that a step further and say social media can make you a more interesting person, if you work at it. The more you care about your audience and the better you understand the medium, the more likely you are to share information in a way that will be compelling, amusing or thought provoking.

Artists talk about developing their craft. That’s equally important if you’re writing a poem, a novel, a tweet or a blog post.

On a side note, it was great to see Wayne on that panel, representing those of us who some in the audience might see as the people ruining Twitter. Wayne is a perfect ambassador for social media in general and social media in the Triangle in particular. It’s inspiring to see someone at the convergence of social media and marketing being publicly recognized for doing it the right way.