The Majority of Boomers have more in common with Gen-Xers than Stereotypical Boomers. Why? Because the last half of the Post World War II Baby Boom, temporally speaking, contains more members than the first group. I spent years writing about this. Just search the term Late Boomer and you will find my stuff, because as far as I can tell, I coined the term and due partially to my multiyear campaign to let marketers and advertisers understand the real cohorts within the Boom, I – along with a few other dedicated souls – managed to inject the term Late Boomer into the vocabulary of American demographers and the people who use demographic info to make money.
The original Generation X was a book written about the last half of the Baby Boom. So kids of the 60s and 70s have as much in common as the supposed “generation” of Boomers. Beats, Hippies, and New Waving Punks are the sort of overlapping stereotypes of groups that are more cohesive than groups created by the statistical artifact of annual birth rates.
But, anyway, the women of Boom X are coming into their own in so many ways at this very moment. BlogHer12 finally had a session about mid-life and blogging. I’m launching a site that should appeal to women who are Done Nesting. It is in heavy development heavy development as we speak. There are scads of other sites that are new or will soon launch that are also intended to appeal to the Boom X women.
So in the name of information exchange I’m linking to some of my recent discoveries of sites related to what seems to be developing as a 45+ women’s online movement.
There is a 45 plus women’s Facebook group for bloggers called, reasonably enough, Bloggers Over 45.
I mentioned Second Lives Club a few posts back as a spiff online magazine featuring women who have reinvented themselves.
Of course, Done Nesting, will have a directory of “empty nest,” and late boomer sites of interest to women who have already or are looking forward to having adult children and are no longer actively creating a “nest” for children.
I’ve also found many similar minds from similar life stages to mine on another Facebook Group, GBE 2.
Culturally we are at a pivot or tipping point for both women’s culture and global digital culture with both of these systems interacting and transforming human culture. I’m so excited!
How To Build A Following, Follow-Up
Followers, Followers, Who Has More Followers
Sometimes this whole social media, I have so and so many followers and therefore what I say is valid is a bit hard to take. It is easy to get caught up in quantification, especially in the dominant linear thinking culture left over from the 20th Century. More is better. Bigger is better. Our mantra has been, “More, more, more.” As the appreciation of networks and communities co-evolves with increasing respect for and value assigned to information, quality and meaning will replace quantity and price as how we define success what attributes we promote.
Social media reflects the expanding information culture as well as the now fading fascination we have had with material accumulation. Who you know is gradually replacing what you have in our formulas of how we assign value.
Good small networks of well-connected people are more “valuable” than large networks of bozos. We all know this implicitly. But sometimes we forget. We forget this because reality is always somewhere in between these “pure” states.
As I write this piece, the Twitterverse is abuzz with talk about fake Twitter followers as it relates to politics. This is very opportune timing for me as I’ve been researching this very article about the whole concept of having followers for over a month .
Yes you want followers. But most of the follower hubbub is hooey. You may quote me on that.
Followers, Subscribers, Readers, and Fans
Everyone has their 15 minutes of fame, right? Well, the flip side of this fame is having 17 minutes of having followers. Most people enjoy it when others appreciate who they are and what they do. At the most basic level this appreciation maps onto families and comprises the reinforcing support system of friendship.
Influence factors in this mix as no one will follow what you write or become involved with what you report about your life or experiences, if they are not invested in you. This is true no matter whether the investment comes from subscribers, readers, identified followers, friends or family.
Google has invested untold amounts of money in refining their search algorithms in order to present the most closely matched, valid data from the digital stream in response to individual queries. Continual efforts to outfox these algorithms and secure top page rank has led to a full spectrum of methods to game the system. Buying followers, comment spam, multiple accounts from single ips, all the way to malware injection into databases are employed to achieve false influence and accuracy scores. The currently hyped method of finding out what your “score” is for the good bad and the ugly of fake followers is found on StatusPeople.
INCREASE YOUR INFLUENCE
- Develop real relationships. People can tell when you are legitimately interested in what they have to say. If you show real interest on multiple occasions, you are on your way to developing real relationships. Networking and attending conferences helps too.
- Cleanse your follower streams of fake followers. I have used Twit Cleaner in the past to assist with this process. If someone follows me who has no picture, no followers, no bio… you get the idea, I ban them.
- Participate in communities. Find communities on Facebook or elsewhere on-line that you might be able to commit to for long periods of time and engage in them.
- Write what is read. Check your analytics to see what things you write about are being accessed over and over again. Write more about this topic and develop a real level of authority on your subject. This is a big part of influence.
- Show your passion. Being influential on a subject in which you have little interest is a rarity.
- Be sincere. Never ever try to be something you are not. Don’t ever lie to your readers.
BROADCAST YOURSELF
- Interconnect your social media to your blog. Make sure links to your social media streams present, easily viewed, and accurately set up on your blog.
- Interconnect your blog to your social media. Post enticing snippets of your blog articles on your social media streams such as Twitter and Facebook. Make sure this isn’t all you post about. This can be automated with services like dlvr.it or plugins you can add to your platform. If these links are going to be the only thing you post to these streams, don’t do it.
- Write a summary of your post with links for Google+. Handcraft your post summaries that link to your new content and hand post them to Google+. These guys control what is indexed, and they naturally favor stuff that is on one of their web components.
- Take part in blogging events that appeal to you. Nablopomo, Blogging from A to Z, blog carnivals, blog hops and scads of other events, circles, memes and linky event.
- Check that your RSS feed works. Just saying.
- Write guest posts on blogs whose topics relate to yours. Maybe they will write guest posts for you too.
I’ve started practicing what I preach and in the last month or so I’ve picked up 70 valid Twitter followers and seen my visitor stats double with time on site remaining a pleasingly long time. I don’t want exponential growth. I want good steady growth. As I round up readers from previous blogs, don’t forget to put a post or widget on your old sites telling those readers where they can now find you, my readership here on my consolidated blog grows.
Slow, steady, and informed wins the race.
Sponsor Awareness at BlogHer 12
This is the Third in a Series of Topical Summaries about BlogHer 12 in New York
Blogging about blogging may be a bit less of the navel gazer recursive exercise than it would at first glance seem to be. The publication industry is changing, and that change is strikingly apparent when I look back over how sponsor presentation has changed at BlogHer since my first acquaintance with it in in 2007 in Chicago. There are several elements of sponsor awareness I would like to touch upon here and none of these elements are static or one directional. Huh?
The New Publication Schema
I don’t mean to go all brainy, wordy on you here, but this is important if you want to be aware of the BlogHer environment as an example of the new publishing environment (notice I did not say “new media” — jargon quickly ages and loses meaning) and new content production and payment models. The elements I am talking about are not really elements or things as much as they are processes. And processes are slippery little beggars.
Publishing is not dead. Don’t believe it. Publishing is undergoing a metamorphosis from slow moving, but voracious caterpillar to a flight capable butterfly that flits from bloom to bloom. This publishing butterfly will reproduce itself; but needed, useful, and useless mutations will all, I suspect, appear in the very next generation.
The Differences
When I first attended BlogHer in Chicago in 2007 the sponsor area was small and looked like it might have grown out of a very savvy Community College writing conference. That is not a bad thing. Please notice I did not say evolved from a PTA bake sale. The sponsor area this year seemed to have slid into a pair of Christian Louboutin pumps, and come of age overnight — per the Manhattan I saw it sipping at one of the “parties,” while pimping her new status as one of the darlings of the New Girl Network as evidenced by the number of industry scouts in the crowds at talks/sessions. (New Girl as opposed to the old boy network, get it? Duh of course you do. All of us in the know about tech, advertising, and blogging get IT.)
Next year’s event will be absolutely amazing at Chicago’s McCormick whatever-it-is-called-now. This almost makes me teary-eyed. For real. I feel like my little sister is all grown up and painting the town techno pink – with sleeves!
Oh keeriiist, I love hyperbole!
What Sponsors Have Realized
Sponsors have realized that women read blogs and that blogs are the new magazines. There are different types of sponsors, though. Magazine publishers have realized that bloggers united have more power over them than the traditional labor unions of the past because access to publishing platforms does not require writers and content creators to include them in the loop.
What Sponsors/Companies Have Not Realized
(not so much the PR firms they have hired)
- there are several types and levels of bloggers
- a stated policy of “we do not pay bloggers” shows that cretins run many big firms and still live in the patriarchal 20th Century
- bloggers do not write product reviews for spare change
- if the FTC treats us like publishers and/or journalists then the big boys are missing out if they don’t tap us while they can still afford us
- going around is often easier than going through
- women rule social media
- women may be bloggers without being Mommy Bloggers
- women may be bloggers and be a Mom too
- advertising, consulting, and affiliate statuses and other partnerships are the flip side of “paying bloggers”
- advertising entities may become clients of bloggers and not the other way around
Why every single one of these sponsors and/or their PR companies isn’t running as fast as their chubby little corporate legs will carry them to snatch up me and my expertise is beyond me.
What Bloggers Have Realized
Bloggers are starting to take themselves seriously. But they are still learning how to do that.
- bloggers have a commodity to sell and control many of the distribution channels for that commodity
- they don’t know how to define, sell, or trade commodities
- they have to determine what they are worth
- they are worth more than a free tube of mascara
- sex is a biological necessity and that information management is actually the world’s oldest profession
- they can speak directly to potential advertisers
What This Means
Content creators, platforms, and advertisers/sponsors are likely to emerge as the new stable triad of publishing. Print publishers and magazines need not be in the loop at all if writers want to produce the contemporary equivalent of books, or magazine articles. Know how is gaining on money in the publishing home stretch.
Next year in Chicago, BlogHer won’t be the Consumer Electronics Show, it will however give a preview as to what the next CES may be.
Familiar Face Summary of BlogHer 12
While not the be all and end all of BlogHer, the personal connections made at BlogHer, and retained from conference to conference, and grown between conferences provide a positive anchor within the network for me.
This point was well illustrated for me yesterday when @flexhourjobs, aka Jacqueline Sloboda, tweeted:
“Great to see another familiar face @nerthus among the amazing 5000 influential women voices making an impact #Blogher12 New York.”
I posted previously about the meta communication and pioneering elements of BlogHer 12 as a cultural network of women, and I cannot place enough emphasis on this defining aspect of the BlogHer network. But why an event, BlogHer, is successful or significant doesn’t capture the personal elements of the experience that make me happy to be a part of the network and to show up time and time again at events close to home and across the country.
Nothing says welcome better than a smiling face! Mimi, Suzi, Jacqueline, Jan, Judi, and yes, Denise, Elisa, and Lisa, were all repeat smile generators for me. No, we are not all buddy-buddy in real life but we came, we conferenced, and we grew as individuals while growing our personal recognition networks in meaningful and yes, influential, ways.
The “old girl” network isn’t as big as it should be. And while part of me cringes at the thought of creating divisions rather than building bridges with what already exists, the exclusion of women from much of what already exists in the world of public networks remains problematic. Going around and building new structures rather than infiltrating, attempting internal change, or destroying competitors is a civil and feminine tactic of the ages.
I met and talked to women, lunched with, and laughed with women I would never ever meet if I stayed inside my box. Hmmmm…… that was an interesting choice of words, and certainly worth a post in and of itself…file away for later.
I met a woman who is a TV Producer for Fox, Paula, who writes The List Producer, not someone I would normally meet or have a chance to talk to. But she is seriously into lists. The power of taxonomy, organization, indexes and distillation intrigues me. We talked our way through the introductory exercise at BlogHer, and I am sure I missed some other people, but becoming aware of her work gave me a female node (OMG, there is another inadvertent article – I’m just full of them, or it, this morning) or reference from which to hang other related concepts and constructs other than Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto.
I met the women behind The Second Lives Club Mary Lou Floyd and Carrie Tuhy who are powerhouses of perception and publications. I didn’t realize who they were (and I have to confess didn’t really care to know until later…) because I thoroughly enjoyed the compassionate intelligence that beamed from Mary Lou and the sardonic nonstop wit of Carrie as I snarfed lunch with them during the Martha Stewart Keynote address/interview. Click on over to their site and check out the August 2nd article on “The Her in BlogHer.” These are “women to be reckoned with…” as they used to say in the colloquial parlance of a rural, agrarian community with which I was far too well acquainted.
I met many women with whom I would love to stay connected and see again and read their thoughts, and so on, and I would list them all but I would leave someone out and that would be sorrowful, and besides, kudos and giggles are for Twitter. I’m @nerthus. Follow me. I mentioned some wonderful women I met at #blogher12. And thanks in part to them, and the acceptance of menopausal memory, I finally catch on to most things, and I have figured out that Twitter helps me to organize my connections and it is great for taking notes. Thanks to this conversation:
Nancy Hill (@Nerthus)
8/2/12 10:11 AM
I wish I could take notes and tweet at the same time….
Dave Hartman (@HartmanDave)
8/2/12 10:13 AM
@Nerthus Tweets are notes!
Shared via TweetCaster (http://tweetcaster.com)
I now understand that tweets are notes. The problem is getting the tweets from note taking sessions more than a few seconds ago…. Tweetcaster allows me to see ALL my Tweets. So my iPad app of the week is once again, Tweetcaster.
Personal Exec Summary of BlogHer '12
Amazing women of all stripes, that sums up the annual BlogHer conference for me. Annually in July or August since 2005, for two to three days, women who write online or who are thinking about starting a blog gather in a major city to learn, share, discuss topics with each other and woo and be wooed by advertisers and sponsors.
I tried to attend the BlogHer in 2006, but my personal life was disintegrating at the time, and I had to make some tough decisions about priorities.
My first time attending the annual conference was in 2007, a couple weeks after my mother’s funeral. The trip to Chicago saved my sanity and gave me a network within which I could exist as a writer. I was closing up my Mom’s house in Indiana that month and the proximity of the conference to the place where I had grown up and where I had taken care of my Mom during the last few months of her life was a godsend.
Since then I have attended when the conference was in San Francisco, then last year in San Diego, and now, this year, in New York. I also attended the first BlogHer Business Entrepreneurs and Technology Conference in Santa Clara in 2011.
I feel like I am a real part of the BlogHer network of women who are creating and developing communication experiences that are changing the world for the better. That is the secret to BlogHer’s success. Women who interact within this network know it is real.
BlogHer is a network of women doing what women have always done even in the days before social media and blogging. Women communicate and organize the now. Yes, it is sort of Zen. Women are the curators of culture. Throughout the last few millennia men have traditionally created and curated the historical world through the lenses of geography and politics/religion. Women are now sharing the organization and curation of their lives and the lives of their families in a way that previously had been accomplished face to face in small family and groups. When these personal processes were documented it was usually done through letters and recipes.
Now we are sharing evolved, contemporary letters and recipes of all sorts through a global community. The women who were smart enough to give a structure to the expansive contemporary community of women are Lisa, Elisa, and Jory, the cofounders of BlogHer. The structure of the BlogHer company expands as a publishing platform, advertising network, and conference series. There are now “TV” and print offerings and ads served beyond a bounded network. But more than anything else BlogHer feels like a network of women. That’s because it is.
Much more to come on different aspects of the network this week as I publish my “report back” from my attendance at the 8th Annual BlogHer Conference. Just a bit of a teaser, but BoomHers abounded, tit for tat info exchange was de rigueur as sponsors know more of what they want and what we can offer, and oh my, we are 8 years older than when this all started. Plus, I am already planning next year’s attendance as BlogHer returns to Chicago in 2013!
Thoughts on Women, Politics, Dress as I Travel to BlogHer 12
“Time makes more converts than reason” says Thomas Paine early on in Common Sense, which I tried to read this morning while waiting for the train in Minneapolis. I was tired and there were so many distractions that I did not get very far into the work, but I have always wanted to read the work that fired up so many to turn from rebellion to revolution and concomitantly to start our nation. It is one of the ebooks I’ve downloaded to read on this trip if time permits.
I thought the quote was most appropriate for conversation by the creek due, of course, to the overlap between topic and this blog’s name. And then there is the reason versus faith consideration that popped into my head when I realized the women sitting on both sides of me were Catholic and open to discussing modern versus traditional versus neo-traditional.
The chance make up of the people waiting in the station included three nuns in full habit. They are traveling back home to what sounds like a training center for the Daughters of Mary, Mother of Our Savior in Round Top, New York. They are on the web at DaughtersofMary.net, and describe themselves as a traditional Catholic congregation. The full wearing of the old style habit is so unusual, especially when juxtaposed against the simple hajib, or head covering traditionally worn by Muslim women, that is so much more contemporary than the habit.
The full habit is far more akin to a burka than is a hajib.
As I travel toward NYC and BlogHer 12 I think more and more about what women gathering together can and will do as a result of meeting and acting together. I’m walking a path that crosses the paths of Mission List folks, Boomer Women, folks who are done nesting, and an incredible collection of creative and brilliant women. So psyched to be on my way!