New Feature: Friday Link Love

I’m still contemplating Part 2 of my series on legitimate ways to outsource content for corporate blogs. I’m probably over-thinking it. It’s a sticky issue, and… well, it’s a sticky issue, okay? I promise to work on it over the weekend.

For now, I’m launching a regular new feature on this blog, and it’s only slightly derivative. (Can I sell, or what? Yo…)

Every Friday, expect to find links to blogs or forums that inspired me to post a comment.

Photo credit: ArtemFinland

About a third to half of my “blogging” time goes to reading and commenting on some thirty blogs that I regularly scan. They run the gamut from marketing communications, social media, writing and lead generation, and they’re all excellent.

In fact, I’m constantly discovering valuable new bloggers to add to my Google Reader,  list every week. If you think I should be reading your blog, then add a link to your best or most recent post in the comments section. If you inspire me, maybe I’ll leave a comment on your blog – and not just the cursory “Hey, great post.”

I actually take time to compose my comments, and contribute something of value to the conversation. Commenting breeds reflection and, as a few of my past posts demonstrate, reflection on other blogs can generate interesting new threads to follow here.

The only downside is that none of the thoughtful stuff I participate in on other blogs appears here… until now.

Credit to Christine Hartter for her post about the importance – and difficulty – in keeping your blog and other social media channels current. This is the post that sparked the idea for Link Love.

John White took an interesting take on how to pitch social media to engineering companies. He gets extra points for patiently tolerating my insistent prodding, in the comments section.

Beth Harte has a knack for asking difficult questions, and sparking easy conversation on her blog The Harte of Marketing. This week her post entitled “How truly serious are you about being social?” raises that question in a hypothetical world where Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin (gasp) disappeared overnight. (Sounds like a Jerry Bruckheimer scenario to me.)

Beth also asked this week how to promote yourself to social media contacts without putting anyone off. That question was too big for me to tackle quickly. But it’s worth reading Beth’s post anyway.

Tom Martin got all meta-cognitive in a couple of posts this week, including the one I commented on: “What do you want from me?”

Corey Freeman is a 17-year-old entrepreneur and female freelance content writer and designer. More notably, girl can write. She asked this week how to decide if freelance writing is for you, and I answered.

You Land Where You Look

Photo credit: ClickFlashPhotos

The following story ended up among my comments on Copyblogger this week. But I had originally intended to blog about it here. So, I’m reclaiming it.

It’s about my brother, and the last training jump he made during his distinguished career as a paratrooper for the 82nd Airborne Division.

Spoiler alert: He lands on an ambulance.

Clearly, he didn’t begin with that goal in mind. He made an orderly departure from the plane, deployed his chute and skillfully guided his descent toward the assigned landing zone.

A little to the side of the target area, however, this ambulance was parked as standard protocol, in case anyone landed poorly.

My brother later acknowledged he had a selection of safe landing spots on every side of the ambulance. But once he began drifting toward it, he began thinking to himself, “Don’t hit the ambulance. Don’t hit the ambulance…”

Then he hit the ambulance. Smacked into the back panels and kissed his knees hard. Fortunately, he escaped with only a few bruises and a deeply enriched sense of irony.

When I asked him later why he didn’t guide his descent elsewhere, he reflected that he simply went where he had focused his attention.

And therein lies the lesson for us all: Our focus tends to decide our actions (or lack thereof), and our actions tend to decide our destination.

The point here isn’t that we should be forever focused on a specific goal. It’s that we should occasionally detach from where we’re focusing long enough to ask, is that where I want to land? Am I focusing too much on a projected end-goal, rather than on the next necessary step… or vice versa? Are fear and anxiety distracting me from altering a potentially disastrous course?

The trick isn’t always to avoid the ambulance. It’s to replace the ambulance.

That’s an important message in a highly competitive economy where things appear to be moving much more quickly than they actually are.

Take a breath. Stop. Think. Refocus.

No Respect: The Freelance Writer and Social Media

The late, great Rodney Dangerfield

This is the first of a two-part post about the future of freelance copywriting in social media and relationship marketing. Part one, below, sets the stage by discussing how social media has introduced a completely new paradigm for content development. Part two will discuss what freelance copywriters can do to remain relevant in this emerging world.

I backed myself into this blog-off competition a while back. I’ll spare you the details. Suffice to say that the host promised me and my competitors would deliver two weeks of “social media and marketing thought leadership.”

Normally, such hyperbole would have made me nervous. I could have expressed everything I knew about social media marketing, at the time, in 140 characters or less. I was so new to the game, I kept confusing Robert Scoble and Philip Seymour Hoffman. And there I was, preparing to post my first blog entries ever in public competition with strategic marketing professionals, SEO wizards and veteran bloggers.

Robert Scoble and Philip Seymour Hoffman

Regardless of my competitors’ superior knowledge, however, I felt they were at least competing on my turf: Content. I had the writing chops, I felt, and wasn’t that really what drove blog traffic?

So, yeah, I lost big time. Didn’t even place in the top half of the field.

Fortunately, I’d been competing to learn, not win. And I did learn, although everything I know about social media marketing still fits into 140 characters or less. Here it is:

Social media marketing qualifies as neither social nor marketing without three elements: Context, Content and Conversation.

As someone who butters his bread by generating business copy, I’d love to believe that Content is truly king. I recognize that businesses and brands that hope to make an impact must pay liege to the quality of their content. Strong copy equates with a strong presence in the market, and powerful influence.

But like the kings of old, Content is one step removed from the top of the divine hierarchy. Extending the feudal analogy a step, if Content is king, then Context is God.

Context determines Content. Anybody who graduated high school has at least an elemental grasp of this. It isn’t difficult stuff in principle (in practice, it’s another matter). Context simply comprises your

• Intended audience (e.g. customers, investors, employees, etc.)
• Intended goal (e.g. to educate or persuade) and its
• Intended format (e.g. brochure, web copy, annual report, etc.)

Businesses who underthink context invariably miss their target audience (or worse), and instead generate content that only a C-level suit could possibly love. (I’m looking at you Dan Hesse)

The second kingdom
But social media has introduced a sort of second, coexistant kingdom, Where traditional static marketing collateral depends on Content, social media marketing thrives on Conversation. I’m talking specifically about executive blogging and microblogging (i.e. Twitter).

Social Media: The Second Kingdom

Many businesses don’t see the benefits of conversing about their brand with customers, and I’m not going to go into that here. But I’d like to point out three reasons why this defining element of social media marketing might intimidate C-level executives and their PR handlers:

• Logistical concerns: Who has time to engage customers on a regular basis when there’s a corporate ship to steer?
• Strategic concerns: Relationship marketing, by definition, means loosening that iron grip on the corporate message, which contradicts the instincts of the corner office and PR pros alike.
• Personality concerns: Let’s face it, some qualities that make for a good corporate officer – like cut-throat aggression, single-minded ambition and intolerance for whiners – will not translate smoothly in active public discourse.

Let’s put those bullets in simpler terms. Executives are reluctant to engage in social media because it requires their time, creativity and commitment. In other words, social media asks them to provide something that they normally pay other people to do… people like freelance writers.

The value of a freelance writer isn’t in providing a skill that everyone learned in high school. Writing is simply a feature. The benefits are time (e.g. increased productivity), creativity and commitment (e.g. reliability to standards and deadlines).

So, you would think copywriters would be in increasing demand as social media marketing expands its role. And they are. New opportunities from corporate blogs to ghost-tweeters have slowly begun to emerge.

Therein lies the problem. The whole value of corporate blogging revolves around the first principle of relationship marketing: direct communication with the top dog. Implicit in this is the notion that the corporate blog reflects the corporate executive’s own thoughts, in his/her own words. The same applies to their responses in the comment section, only more so.

Hiring someone to handle the corporate blog raises issues of authenticity, as Beth Harte recently pointed out on her excellent blog, The Harte of Marketing.

Her post specifically addressed the lack of authenticity in the context of public relations. But this paragraph jumped out at me:

I don’t know about you, but these days when I read an article, a tweet, or a blog post I want to know that the person’s name on the article is the person who actually wrote it…  And if I find out that Jane Doe at an agency really wrote it, well all credibility is gone in an instant.

That resonated with me because ghostwriting is a service that’s buttered a lot of bread indeed for me. My first two years as a freelance business writer were spent ghostwriting trade articles and white papers for the companies I once covered as a journalist.

I don’t agree with Ms. Harte’s assertion that those contributions made my clients inauthentic. Mostly, I contributed my time and my personal knowledge of what would appeal to editors. I couldn’t possibly affect the Context of these articles, and in terms of Content, I limited my role to converting highly technical and disorganized material into polished syntax.

Blogging is a different medium, however, and authenticity is valued at a higher premium. Content isn’t an end here, it’s a beginning. It sparks conversation. Conversation sparks relationships. Relationships spark customers, then advocates – or so the thinking goes.

If the first link of the chain flows from a hired mouthpiece, then what value do the subsequent relationships lose?

I have some ideas of my own, and will address them in a future post. But I invite you to respond to that question, and whether there’s a work-around for executives and the people who make them look good on paper.

Are You Organized or Anesthetized?

There are two kinds of people on this planet:

Photo credit: Ross Angus

1. Those who organize themselves with a To Do list, and
2. Those who distract themselves with a To Do list

(And, no, I’m not forgetting people who navigate their day without making any lists at all… I’m ignoring them.)

Ignoring things – particularly difficult tasks – is one of my many useless skills, like being able to wiggle my scalp without touching it (A talent I evidently share only with Billy Tyler from the eighth grade.)

Distracting myself is a marginally more functional, if not useful skill than wiggling my scalp. Why? Because they carry collateral benefits.

For example, you can tell weeks when I have a particularly challenging writing assignment because the dishes are washed and stacked, the bathroom is scrubbed, the laundry is washed and folded, the beds are made and the flat is vacuumed…

And the vacuum bag is changed out…

And old bag is carried out with the trash…

Some of my busiest weeks occur when I’m explicitly not doing something, like staring at the blank page that every writing assignment begins with.

Like many people, I list important goals for the week, and some of those goals can be pretty daunting. The problem is that lists – my lists, anyway – can become rote. Every week has its invoices, its client prospecting tasks, its blog posts. But if that’s all that makes my list, chances are I’m focusing on the trees, rather than the forest – and that’s the surest path to professional mediocrity.

I wonder how many of us confuse maintaining our jobs with advancing our careers. How many fail to set time aside to examine long term goals, dream big, or maybe chart a path to that project we’ll start whenever things “calm down” a bit? How often do we stop to wonder why we’re always running, and never getting closer to our lifelong goals?

This blog was, for many months, too daunting a task to ever land on my To Do lists. Now that I’ve launched it, however, I’ve become dimly aware that I’m putting off even bigger challenges. Things like developing and adding registered content to my website. Or launching a direct mail or email campaign to help build my business. Or maybe actually drafting a kick-ass creative essay just to remind myself that I can, and then pitching it somewhere.

The trick, of course, isn’t to simply add “write essay” to my list. It’s too big. No, the trick is to list small and innocuous steps, like carrying around a notebook to start collecting ideas when they occur. Next week, I might plan to sift through those ideas to search for themes… and so on.

I’m convinced I’m not alone here. Most people, I think, have some higher goal or project that they think about – or maybe even talk about occasionally. Why not add a small step toward that goal to your To Do list RIGHT NOW?