The following two graphics are my seminal finds for the week. I hate using that word, seminal, but sometimes it is the correct one to use. Unfortunately the word oval has another meaning or I would be promoting that as a better word to describe items or ideas that are seeds for novel conceptualizations.
The first one, the conversation prism, may look like a color wheel at first glance, but it is much more layered and contextually rich with information about relationships between elements of common digital communication tools. Look at it, download it, study it. Most infographics do not actually add value or information to the subjects they depict. This one does. The linked site is well worth bookmarking and then checking out for updates every once in a while.
Malcolm Gladwell irritates some with the cultural condensations from which he spins off his books, but I adore ideas, patterns, and playing with explanations for correlations between the two. Thought is good. Observation is good. Reasonable conjecture is exercise for the mind. So I like Gladwell. His Tipping Point was best, in my opinion, but Outliers points out some generalizations worthy of note as well.
To become an expert takes lots of work. Success is more fickle.
Juice, Juju, Karma, and The Business of Blogging: Part I
Guidelines: Self Promotion, Friend Promotion, and Brand Promotion
Here are some significant considerations that influence how I allocate link and ad juice:
- Many people in my writing circles have been puzzling over the FTC disclosure guidelines released mid-March of this year.
- When my friends thrive, I thrive. When I thrive, my friends thrive. When companies thrive, they pay me as little as possible and get what they can for free.
- I am a writer, blogger, author. Because I live in the 21st Century I am also a researcher, publisher, and marketer.
But as someone with a background in the theory behind much of contemporary practice in marketing I seem to know what many overlook. Branding taps the intangible asset of emotional connection.
“Brands are powerful entities because they blend functional, performance-based values with emotional values.”
— De Chernatony 2006
And as a woman writer, a womanist writer, I also know about the context we carry with us, acknowledged or not, that shapes the current iteration of women’s writing:
From the Wikipedia article about: A Room of One’s Own
“In In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, (Alice) Walker writes: “Virginia Woolf, in her book A Room of One’s Own, wrote that in order for a woman to write fiction she must have two things, certainly: a room of her own (with key and lock) and enough money to support herself. What then are we to make of Phillis Wheatley, a slave, who owned not even herself?”
Ownership
Owning our selves, our bodies, our words, and directing the use of our efforts is a big ol’ freaking deal! The paths we women writers chose to walk in relationship to brands, corporate entities, government regulations, and community, networks, and personal lives is transfiguring an industry, or two, or three. WE have power, trajectory, and a changing world at our disposal so that we may wield an influence over how things can look in the future. Of course we are also working in a world experiencing a global extinction, the 6th major extinction in the history of our living world.
We own our words, we own our world in partnership with every other living creature and system, we own our humanity. As women we have a special view of creation. We must be careful how we allow our creations to be used.
The Big Picture
Because the big picture can be so easily lost, we must be careful. The picture is no longer a photograph, or a moving image. We have entered the territory of the holographic image, losing track of the hologram can suck us into an alternate universe in which I think none of us want to live. As I believe Public Enemy said, “Fight the Power.” Now I may disagree with fighting – I am of the persuasion that putting any energy into a system, even energy used in opposition to it, only strengthens it – but I am totally supportive of speaking truth to power.
I see lots of friends creating successful businesses, and more power to them, but I would really love to see more women stretching the envelope beyond relatively safe topics into the expansive area of how to do business in a world that realistically will be almost unrecognizable well within this decade. News, politics, and tech often got short shrift in the “ladies magazines” of the 20th Century. I really want to see more high level writing, not just good writing, but more writing that diverges into exploration of topics that are not traditional, safe or predictable on women’s blogs and publications. Almost all the women publishers I know are pushing boundaries, but they have to push even harder if we are not going to all turn into pabulum so as not to alienate the corporate advertisers who have the money we all so desperately want.
Types of Strategic Promotion
So I’m writing a series of posts on self, community, and brand promotion. Since tomorrow is #ff day on Twitter, and that is the day I feature a writer or business friend on my #ff board on Pinterest, I will focus on community promotion or friend promotion as the next in this series. So do set a reminder to check out part two in this series on types of promotion and branding that will consider such riveting topics as juice, karma, networks, and name-dropping.
Follow Friday: Pinned, Tweeted, Posted
If you haven’t visited my Pinterest Account, I will forgive you for slacking up to this point, but you really do need to go and check out my #ff board on Pinterest.
This week I added three follow friend per the Twitter hashtag tradition: @Heckerty, a 409 year old witch, and a woman who has actually made money as a writer in print and successfully transitioned to online work @loisaltermark, and a new video network @whoanetwork that is filling a huge niche that people are only beginning to discover – women honoring our age.
But can anything related to Twitter or Pinterest be described as a tradition? Yes, at today’s pace of information and the rate at which society operates, yes, I think social media traditions do exist.
No this isn’t flighty or weird or anything… I am just attempting to inter-link my social media and writing worlds with the things that keep me sane, relationships, friendships, and networking with women of my age and women of my own ilk. And that is hard. Whine, bitch, moan. I have a hard enough time just keeping track of me!
And, “Yes, I do make most of my own graphics, or at least tweak public domain ones.
Follow Friday: Networked, Tweeted & Pinned
WHAT IS #FF
Two weeks ago, I mentioned the need to use the #ff hashtag on Twitter more effectively. My experimental change to this end has begun.
#ff is a Friday meme on Twitter that is connoted by the #ff hashtag and is used as a way to promote Tweeters you follow and find interesting.
It might look like this this, that just happens to be the people I #ff-ed today, individually:
#ff @mimiavocado @amnichols @Cecilyk @ABattheBurrow
A tweeted list of names, @ signs with a person’s twitter handle after it, without context, does little to inspire other than the most devoted of Twitter followers to check out the list of your followers that you recommend. I have seen the hashtag #ff used as a reward given for new followers, as a shout out to buds met in the physical world may not have a large footprint in the social media world. So, I’m approaching this hash tag a bit differently from now on through the end of the year, at least, to see if it makes a difference for the people I recommend, to my interaction with them, to my overall stats, or if it just gives me a platform from which to examine Twitter activity, and Pinterest activity, from a more informed vantage.
It will take me a while to play catch up with all the folks I should have already #ff-ed. Within a couple of weeks I will be caught up, though. Well, on second thought, give me through the end of the year on that too. It all starts with Pinterest, but I will get to that in a minute.
TWITTER, PINTEREST & INFO THEORY
I’ve been thinking about this whole “social media thing” for years now. I decided long, long ago that I wasn’t as into quantity as quality. That’s the whole “It ain’t the meat, it’s the motion,” thing.
Figuring out what constitutes quality in the new world of Twitter and Pinterest is an anything but a concrete or well bounded endeavor. Life has never been simple, and that is infinitely more true now that we are but data bits churning within the swelling mass of everything that resides just before the event horizon of the Technological or Informational Singularity, put forward by Kurzweil. I’ve wanted to reference this fantastically titled article, The Information Singularity Arrives Next Tuesday, Around Lunchtime, for years. I’m sure it at first glance my mixing of the physics of the Cosmos with an explanation of why I think the link-up of Pinterest and Twitter is a good idea will baffle most of my college friends from Purdue who went off to work in Washington, Oregon, and what came to be known as Silicon Valley, in the late 1970s.
An informational change in kind is, and in fact probably already has, transmogrified all we know, and how we know it, and will continue doing so. My friends, “Welcome to the future fair.” As a comedy troop once said, “We’re all Bozos on this bus.”
This following You Tube video clip has nothing to do with Twitter or Pinterest. I recommend just listening to it sometime because… just because.
There is no way you can catch up. Just keep swimming, walking, writing, or thinking. Keep doing what you do. But knowledge, and the data connections that drive it, are so vast, and interacting and changing and creating new relationships at a such a near instantaneous pace (because that is what information does) that the very nature of information has
All of this is what has been bothering me about Twitter’s #ff. The information system has a life of its own. It may not be sentient yet, but it exists and is changing and adapting to what users think it is before anyone can figure out what it is. As amazing cultural and social media influencers, bloggy divas, and women of a certain age, my women friends and I drive the engines of the information economy who are incorporating women’s culture and knowledge into this new cosmic intellectual stew. My compadres and I are significant use innovators and the information we incorporate about women’s culture is essential to driving this new system to an equilibrium level that is more egalitarian, and more equitable, than anything that has previously existed.
PINNING MY #FFs
So, figuring out ways to efficiently maximize social media information and connections is something that we may or may not do “naturally” but it is something that we and new social media seem to be doing well. I love the linkages that develop between new systems. Tweeting my pins is something that seems like a no-brainer now that I am looking at both platforms. What I have decided to do is:
- Figure out which social media dudes and divas I want to feature on any given Friday
- Get the links to the most complete listing of those folks social presence – probably a blog
- Pin those links to my #ff board on Pinterest and choose the image you want associated with the blog among the options presented to you
- In the pinning process SKIP OVER adding the checkmark to the box that says, Twitter
- You will add the #ff before the text of your tweet on the next screen – and though I didn’t do it this week (duh! I forgot the at sign with twitterhandle) the text of the tweet should probably read something like “#ff, @twitterhandle, brief intriguing comment about the person, pinterest-generated url to the pin
Doing it this way, I think, has these advantages:
- highlights the individual
- links blogs with twitter handles
- crosses platforms and thus kills two birds with one stone… Hehehe twitter and birds, get it?
- is more permanent than a simple tweet that gets lost in the Dickensian world of the Tweets of Twitter Past
- allows the visual to accentuate text without detracting from either
So, what do you think? Is this a great idea or what?
Another Fragment & Forward Friday
Fragment Fridays provide an opportunity for me to collectively address the accumulation of ideas that have not made it into into print this week that either I really wanted to develop into full posts or were enticing thoughts that I just did not get beyond the “jotting down” stage.
Twitter and #ff Mania
I totally understand the desire to promote great ideas, clever folks, and good friends, which is the idea behind Follow Fridays. But the Twitter hash tag, that little # was called a pound sign when I learned lexical terms, the one that usually lives over the 3 as the shift character on the keyboard, that is #ff where the “ff” is a short acronym for “follow Friday.” In this practice the idea is to promote others on Twitter that you follow and which you think your followers would like.
The problem is that the people who see your #ff post have no idea who these people are, what they blog about, whether they are factual, flakey, or fictitious. Others have recommended a change in the way we do #ff on Twitter and I have to concur that it would be far more effective to feature individual tweeters in single tweets and say a bit about why others should follow them. I’m going to start doing this. Maybe today, maybe next Friday. I think of it as forward Friday, as in moving forward.
BlogHer Blow Up
I haven’t been able to log in to BlogHer.com for a few days. Apparently some sort of glitch developed when I was approved for inclusion in their Pinterest Influencer program and now whenever I go to the site there is a persistent, apparently infinite, redirect back and forth, back and forth, back and forth… between two URLS. After I contacted them I received email from them informing me that the tech types are on it and they will be back in contact when they have it figured out. Hope it is soon, I am losing traffic.
I know I am usually more loquacious than this, but that’s all for today.
Have a great weekend.