Many of us use a variety of social media outlets for self-promotion or to promote assorted businesses, clients, and products to the online world at large. Some of us also use social media for advocacy.
First and foremost in my mind is 12for12k, which did an amazing job raising money for charity throughout 2009. On a more personal note, I am very impressed with the work Kristine Brite-McCormick has done with Cora’s Story to raise awareness about Congenital Heart Disease (CHD) after her five-day-old daughter died from the birth defect that she learned about from the coroner.
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I’m an avid reader, and my favorite genre is fantasy. Most recently, I devoured the Mistborn trilogy (Mistborn, The Well of Ascension, The Hero of Ages) by Brandon Sanderson. I never would have picked them up if Sanderson hadn’t been chosen to finish Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series after the author’s untimely death to amyloidosis, but I couldn’t put the books down once I started.
There was a major problem, though. The books made me angry.
And after finishing the third novel Friday night and finding myself unable to fall asleep for two hours because of how much I hated the ending, it got me thinking about why it bothered me so much. These are things that writers really need to keep in mind. (With an actual book review at the end that many of you will choose to skip. And psst… that image is an Amazon affiliate link in case you’d like to buy the set and see what I’m talking about.)
You need to relate to your audience.
This is something that Brandon Sanderson got right. In fiction, relating to your audience is done by creating characters that your readers can become invested in. I was sucked in to the strange world of the Final Empire because I was so drawn to Vin, even though the setting was so completely foreign to me. (And as a fantasy reader, it takes a lot for a setting to just seem so odd.)
If you’re not writing fiction, this rule still applies. You have to give your readers a reason to care about what you’ve written, or else they’re just not going to bother with it. Writing to promote a product? A news story? Make sure people see why they should care about it in the first few lines. If they’re not feeling it, they’re not going to continue reading.
Once you know the rules, you can break them. But only in moderation.
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I just received a press release in my email for a product that urges me: “Turn your dud into a dude.”
We’re going to gloss over the fact, for the moment, that this was sent to me as a press release I’d like to “share with my readers.” We’re going to gloss over the fact that I am a blogger, not a press release distribution service.
No, we’re going to focus on the bad copywriting involved in just the subject line of this email.
I hadn’t even opened the message, and they had already rubbed me the wrong way. I clicked on it just to see what this was all about. I’m not going to out the product being pitched to me via a press release template that didn’t even have the courtesy of prefacing itself with my name, though I’m sure you could Google it if you really wanted to.
There are two basic things that the tagline got wrong here:
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In case you haven’t heard of Silkfair, they pitch themselves as a friendlier alternative to eBay and Etsy, though they do allow sellers to integrate their listings from both of those sites. “SILKFAIR makes buying and selling fun and easy.”
The Silkfair Twitter Party
In order to get the word out about their online marketplace, Silkfair hired Amy Lupold Bair – the inventor of the Twitter Party, aka ResourcefulMommy – to host a sitewarming party for them. Amy created a lot of buzz for them. She held an hour-long hashtag party, during which time partygoers were given the opportunity to win prizes. Silkfair was offering free custom stores to the prize winners. There were no qualifiers to this when I found myself a prize recipient. I was getting a free custom store on Silkfair!
My “FREE” Custom Store
It took forever for Silkfair to set up the free stores for all of us winners. And by the time it happened, our free custom stores turned into three free months of having a custom store. Custom stores generally cost $24.99 per month.
With my store set up, I decided I should list all of my old Tupperware from my Tupperware lady days… but life got in the way, and I only listed three things. One of them sold in December. I forgot about Silkfair. I thought my store would revert to a free membership once my prize ran out.
I’m happy to say that I’m doing fairly well here for myself. Santa was good to my son this year. But we had a major disappointment hit the family when my brother couldn’t get my sister-in-law and niece here for Christmas as they’d planned. It would have been the first year they’d made it up for Thanksgiving or Christmas since our grandpa died in 2006. The economy wasn’t really to blame for their inability to make it here… the snowstorm that hit the East Coast was responsible. They only made it six hours into the drive from Georgia to New York before the snow hit and they were stranded in Virginia on I-81. They slept in the car that night and ended up turning around to go back home.
But the real downer was that – not only did they lose their house – but they can’t even rent a new place. I’ll try to make a long story short. My brother was in real estate. He got his realtor’s license and was working in the booming Georgia housing business. Then the economy tanked and no one could get financed. My brother was working but didn’t get paid for about a year. My sister-in-law got laid off from her job. They had an infant daughter to raise and no income. They fell behind on their mortgage payments while my brother looked for more work.
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I’d like to thank The New York Times for my chuckle of the morning. Apparently, tech blogger Damon Darlin and his editor needed a little more coffee before publishing this post today about banning the words “nerd” and “geek.”
And by the way, Professor David Anderegg… I’ve embraced my inner geek. I think geek has become acceptable now. Nerd, however, still has rather negative connotations. Unless you’re talking about the Willy Wonka candy Nerds, because YUM!
In case you haven’t heard, Amy Mengel managed to convince me to get up in front of people and talk about blogging at the fourth installment of Social Media Breakfast Tech Valley, which is being held at the headquarters of the American Red Cross of Northeastern New York in Albany. Thankfully, it’s not just me up there in front of a sold out audience of 150 people… I’m part of a panel that includes Lara Kulpa of Gingko Consulting and Problogger.com, Amanda Magee of Trampoline Design Studio, and our moderator Greg Dahlmann of Uptown/Downtown Media and All Over Albany.
Here’s what other people have been saying about the upcoming blogging panel at SMBTV4:
Can’t be there? The event will be live-streamed on USTREAM from 8:00-10:00 am on Friday morning, December 4. If you watch, though, remember that there’s a reason I’m a writer instead of a speaker. I hope I don’t stutter, ramble, or turn so red that I actually emit radiant heat.
If you don’t know what NaNoWriMo is, you’re obviously not a writer. NaNoWriMo is the shorthand term for National Novel Writing Month, an annual event where aspiring novelists gear up to write an entire 50,000+ word novel in the month of November. It’s something I’d tried doing before, but always ended up dropping out before I’d really gotten started.
This year? I did it. And I feel like a masochist, especially since I started over on November 14. My first attempt had hit a dead end. I reached 50,086 words at 11:39 pm last night with 21 minutes to spare. So what have I learned?
- Fiction is hard.
- Characters don’t always do what you want them to do.
- Knowing how the story ends doesn’t really help you get through the middle any easier.
- The built-in thesaurus feature is awesome.
- It’s insanely difficult not to edit as you’re writing.
- It takes longer to write 1,000 words of fiction than 1,000 words of non-fiction.
- Family members need to disappear when it’s writing time.
- Asking me “How’s it coming?” when I’m in the middle of typing will make me lose my train of thought – and then get very angry at you.
- Writing 5,000 words in a sitting turns your brain to mush.
- It feels good to be done!
How about you? If you participated in NaNoWriMo, what did you learn – about writing and about yourself?
I can’t help it. Every time I see the cover of Sarah Palin’s new book, Going Rogue, I’m reminded of Steve Carrell’s movie poster for The 40 Year Old Virgin.
I had to flip Steve Carrell’s photo around to get him facing in the same direction, but I’m sure you can see it now, right? 
If you want to pass this around, use the short URL: http://kl.am/SarahPalin
Ubervu Steals Your Blog Posts AND Your Comments
by Christina on April 29, 2010
I started getting pingbacks from sites like Topsy a few months ago whenever I tweeted to promote a blog post I’d written on my mommy blog. I checked out Topsy and saw that it only showed a brief excerpt of my posts with a link back to my site along with all of their little bells and whistles that justify the site’s existence.
I thought that the pingbacks from Ubervu meant that they were the same sort of deal. I was wrong.
I don’t know what compelled me to click the link yesterday, but I went to see what Ubervu had to say about one of my posts yesterday…
And I found my post there in its entirety. With the entire comment feed as well.
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