Category: neck deep in the zeitgeist

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.

Nine easy ways to write a blog post

Dave

My colleague Alison Bolen, editor of sascom magazine and the sascom voices blog, does a great job coaching our bloggers here at SAS. We had a meeting last week with a group of bloggers to help them deal with some of the issues involved in blogging regularly while at the same balancing the pesky demands of having a job. One piece of advice we both find ourselves giving people is, “Not every blog post has to be a white paper.”

So in honor of 09/09/09, here’s Alison’s list “with one or two additions from me” of nine easy ways to write a blog post.

  1. Go through your sent items on Friday. Pull out anything that’s more than five paragraphs long and polish it into a blog post.
  2. Go to search.twitter.com and search for two key words. Write a three-paragraph post that responds to one or more of these tweets.
  3. What are you consuming? Business books, other blogs, podcasts, TV shows: anything that you’re finding especially useful and interesting? Tell people about it in two or three paragraphs.
  4. Take 20 minutes at the end of the day and think about who you’ve talked to today and what you’ve learned. How can you summarize that into a 200-word post that others can learn from as well?
  5. What did you explain to someone today that you’ve explained at least three times before? If you get asked often enough, others would probably love to hear the explanation too. Give it to them in a blog post.
  6. What cool things are your customers doing? What have you learned from them lately? What innovative ways are they using your product or service? Can’t talk about customers without approval? Maybe you can mention them anonymously. Give details, just not names.
  7. What documents or presentations are you working on right now? Can you excerpt two or three paragraphs into a quick blog post to give readers a sneak peak?
  8. What are you researching? What would you like to learn more about? Ask your readers to explain it to you. Or do a Twitter search on the topic and see what you find. Link to results and share your thoughts.
  9. Read the blogs on your blog roll. Find at least one to comment on. Then copy your comment on your blog and expand on it slightly. Link back to original post.

Is it bothering you that it’s nine, and not Top Ten? Okay, then:

10. Write a top 10 list.

Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog