[NOTE: I don’t usually write about politics on this blog, but the communications issues this year are fascinating me.]
I’ve started listening to iTunes playlists in my car rather than turn on the radio and hear the latest Donald Trump story.
I’ve stopped reading Facebook because my timeline is full of friends’ comments about the latest Trump story.
Folks, he’s won. Not the battle for the presidential election, but the war for the eyes and ears of America. Love him or hate him, he’s all we’re talking about. I haven’t seen a story on Hillary Clinton’s plans, policies, or speeches since that lovely Democratic convention a few weeks back.
The Democratic Party and the Republican Party are playing a traditional game of lacrosse. Or perhaps polo. Something obscure.
By contrast, Trump is playing NFL Football: Good Trump vs. Bad Trump, and most of what’s happening on the field is an over-the-top half-time extravaganza.
Guess which contest has the big viewing audience? And all the advertisers?
Even if Trump loses badly in November (or quits the campaign before election day, which I believe he will) he has changed the face of political communications in America.
Not for the better, in my opinion, but probably irrevocably. History books will talk about this campaign — though whether there will be many educated people left to read them is a whole other question.
John Scalzi has spotted a change in the way we react to viral blog posts: The discussions that used to take place on our blogs are now taking place on Facebook and Twitter. What does this mean?
Over the weekend John Scalzi analyzed the discussion generated by his post on the presidential candidates, comparing it to discussions of past posts that went viral. What he found revealed a definite shift in the online channels people are using to react to online news and opinion.
Among his findings: Much less of the discussion took place on blogs, and much more occurred via Facebook and Twitter.
Free, organic marketing — that takes time. But it has at least one advantage: if you build and nurture a good LinkedIn network, the leads that come from it are very well qualified.
Last week I completely forgot the 10th anniversary of my business.
But LinkedIn remembered. They noted it in my colleagues’ newsfeed.
So throughout the week I was pinged with a few a dozen “Congratulations!” messages from friends from around the world. Many of these folks I’ve talked with in recent months, but some — well, one was a madly creative, rather intimidating woman I knew 10 years ago at Apple. We both left at the same time and went off to make our ways in the world. She remembered me? Wow.
I answered each of the messages, using the opportunity to catch up, and came away from the experience pretty impressed with LinkedIn.
I was even more impressed a few days later when the CEO of a small software company contacted me to do a project, mentioning that a friend (one of the folks who’d congratulated me on LinkedIn) had recommended my work. Today I’m starting on a fascinating new web-writing project. I’m pretty sure that the LinkedIn anniversary message reminded that colleague about my work, and led him to recommend me.
Clients often ask me what social media activities will get them business immediately. The answer? Buy Google ads. Free, organic marketing — that takes time. But it has at least one advantage: if you build and nurture a good LinkedIn network, the leads that come from it are very well qualified.
The news this week is bad numbers for Twitter. Really bad. The number of users has gone flat. Financials are trending steadily downward.
John Cleese attempts to revive the Norwegian Blue
I have now identified the Twitter icon as a Norwegian Blue and I suspect he’s not “just resting.”
I sure hope the financial analysts aren’t spending too much time with their spreadsheets and databases on this one. They’ll know immediately what’s wrong with Twitter if they just try to use it.
Its user interface is, and has always been, one huge hot mess.
While Facebook encourages you to friend just friends, Twitter culture encourages you to follow just about everyone, short of people engaged in human trafficking. Friends of friends of friends of celebrities. They all follow you back. But is anyone listening?
Once you’re in with this crowd, it’s chaos. Loud, ugly, nasty, and even, somehow, smelly. (Don’t ask me how an online experience can be smelly, but Twitter somehow manages to stink.)
In order to gain any control whatsoever over the chaos on your page, you have to assign your followers to lists and then view the smaller, supposedly more focused, lists. This makes perfect sense — right up until you try to do it. Then you encounter Twitter’s abysmally designed list-assignment process. It’s first obscure and then, once understood, it’s prohibitively cumbersome.
The simple fix of assigning the 80 or so people you actually want to hear from to a “hot list” turns out to be anything but simple. Twitter won’t let you alphabetize or otherwise sort your full list. (You’d have to use one of those third-party Twitter management apps from companies you’ve never heard of. Oh, yeah, let’s give one of them access to my Twitter account and reputation.) Even if you do fight your way, individual by individual, through the underbrush of their list-assignment process, you can’t set Twitter to open to your “hot list”— you still have start at your gigantic list of lists and select the list you want…bored yet?
I sure am.
Talk is cheap, and Twitter is the evidence of it.
Back in 2006 when Twitter emerged, I compared using it to the experience of walking past the watercooler in your office, hearing some interesting gossip, and throwing in your own clever comments.
Today the experience is more like shoving your way through a crowded subway station at rush hour, hearing snippets of small-group conversations about obscure topics, interspersed with blaring ads from vendors. As of a few weeks ago, we’ve got billboards (pictures) too.
How did it get this way? I can only conclude that none of the leaders at Twitter actually use their own service. (Their personal assistants probably email them a daily list of Tweets that mention their names.)
So, Twitter, let me know when you fix your lame UI. But don’t send me a Tweet. You’ll have to find me over at Facebook. Maybe LinkedIn. Perhaps Google+.
It was my pleasure tonight to speak to Lee Schoentrup’s University of Washington PR Certificate class about social media. This is the sixth or seventh [correction: ninth] year I’ve given the social media briefing, and it’s a presentation that has to be rewritten top to bottom each time.
Last year I talked about interactive social media — “Dancing with Your Audience” was the title. This year I didn’t feel as optimistic about the field. I titled the latest version of the presentation “How to Stand Out in a Busy World.” My feeling is that social media has maxed out audience bandwidth; people are experiencing more than enough social media interaction. Now social media professionals face a battle for attention, a battle that will be won by people and organizations delivering the best (most valuable or most entertaining) content and the best user experiences.
Here, for Lee’s class and anyone else interested, is the presentation SME – UW – 2016 in PDF form.
I challenged the class to invest in training that will enable them to produce podcasts, webinars, and video content for social media. I realize that I need to take my own challenge, so I’m committing to learn how record that Keynote presentation with an audio voiceover!
Thank you, Jane Hawkins, for giving a home to our foster feline, Mr. Cat (now Merkle) who needed to live in a one-cat household.
Kaylee (2004-2015)
Thank you, Kaylee, for 12 years of being such a cute kitten — and a challenging cat. Your sister Zoe misses you, though the new cats (more on them shortly) keep her company.
Thank you, Susan Powter, for helping me start 2015 off with personal yoga training via Skype. I hope you’ll offer Skype training again.
Thank you, Kat Richardson — not just for your Greywalker series and its brilliant conclusion, Revenant — but for giving back to the Seattle writing community so generously through the Waywords at the Wayward writing sessions. Carving out Tuesday nights for writing made all the difference to my writing this year.
Thank you, neighbors Jerry and Gayle, for exchanging cat-sitting services with us — and for forgiving Sheba our deaf white cat when she bit Jerry!
Thank you, Danielle, for coming reliably twice a month to help us dig out from under the cat hair and clutter!
Thank you, John Simmons Chappell, for taming my hair every few weeks and sharing home remodeling tips.
Sheba, seconds before she swept the bowl of berries off the table.
Thank you, Sheba, for being such a fascinating cat for 18 years. A deaf white cat, you learned sign language, loved to cuddle, and kept our countertops clear by throwing anything we left on them onto the floor. I sold my house in Wallingford and moved to a dead-end street in Ballard in 2001 just so you could safely go outdoors once a day.
Thank you, Charlie Hamilton and Barb Rowan, for your brilliant web design and project management work. It is a joy to collaborate with you.
Thank you, Arlin Robins, for rescuing Tinkerbelle, Mr. Tippy, and Perdita in Northern California and sending them to us in Seattle. Especially after Mr. Tippy bit you.
Mr. Tippy on Facebook
Thank you, John Hedtke and Marilyn Maurer, for driving down to Cottage Grove from Eugene with cash for the mobile mechanic who took apart the dashboard of my car to get Mr. Tippy out after the cat wrapped himself around the steering mechanism.
Thank you, Rossoe Oil and Gas Systems, for taking apart the cold air system of our heater so we could hunt for Mr. Tippy when he disappeared in the ceiling of our basement.
Thank you, John Hutchison and Hank Graham, for helping us tear apart the walls and ceiling looking for Mr. Tippy — especially Hank, who finally discovered Mr. Tippy three-and-a-half weeks after the cat vanished.
Thank you, Seattle Animal Control, for rushing over to help us try to get Mr. Tippy out of the ceiling after we found him. Sorry he was utterly uncooperative.
Thank you, Kier Salmon, for finding Mr. Tippy and for helping us finally get him out of the ceiling. And for being so understanding when he bit you.
Thank you, Animal Medical Center of Seattle, our 24-hour vet, for rehydrating Mr. Tippy and assuring us that he’d be perfectly fine (he was).
Thank you, Aurora Veterinary Hospital, for helping us get Tinkerbelle, Mr. Tippy, and Perdita caught up on their shots, and for being very flexible about scheduling when it took us 6 months to capture Perdita and bring her in.
Thank you, King County Metro, for selecting my poem “Letter of Conjugation” for the Poetry on the Bus “Writing Home” series.
Thank you, Bundoran Press, for publishing my story “Grief” in the anthology Second Contacts. It was my first (of three) semi-pro fiction sales this year.
Thank you, Viable Paradise friends, for beta reading, critiques, Google writing hangouts, meet-ups at conventions, and sharing you own writing triumphs and woes in 2015.
Thank you, Northwest Folklife, for four wonderful days of music, dance, and volunteering. We loved getting to close the festival Monday night!
Thank you, Liz Vogel, for organizing the writers workshop with me at Fourth Street. And for all the cookies!
Thank you, Clarion West, for the summer public readings. And the parties…
Thank you, Bruce Durocher II, for being such a class act. You, and your film criticism, are sorely missed.
Karen and Tom at Bag End, Hobbiton (Sasquan)
Thank you, Sasquan Con Com, for running a superb convention under difficult circumstances that ranged from Sad Puppies to forest fires and smoke hazards.
Thank you, Gustavo, for getting me back on the track with Zumba classes. You are an inspiration.
Thank you, Jeff Lemkin, for all of the great conversations and meals. You are at once dauntingly intellectual and refreshingly down-to-earth.
Thank you, Mom (and Dad), for underwriting the systems work on the drainage, heating, and natural gas systems at the house this year. Not glamorous, but those improvements are really making a difference.
Thank you, Quality Plumbing, for coming to our rescue when other plumbing companies wimped out. You quickly replaced our somewhat arcane (high recovery) hot water heater.
Thank you, Diabolical Plots, for the Submission Grinder — the online system many of us use to track our fiction submissions to magazines and anthologies. And thank you, Cynthia Ward, for the excellent Market Maven newsletter about speculative fiction markets.
Thank you, Home Owners Club, for posting my humor columns on line this year.
And thank you, Tom Whitmore, for being there with me for all of this.
I have a client who’s starting a comprehensive website update. Talking with him last night, I realized that he’s still back in the old days when you could win at the search rankings game by conducting SEO analyses of keywords and then stuffing your site with lots of pages with all the right words.
Of course, things have changed. Google continues to tweak its algorithms to give top rankings to sites with rich, organic content that is frequently updated. New products. Blog posts. Links to and from other highly regarded websites. Length of visits to the site. Video. Mobile-friendliness.
You can’t fool Google any longer.
And now there is another search system to take into consideration — this one’s for the proliferation of app content.
Emily Grossman, with MobileMoxie, is an applications marketing expert.
A series of articles by Emily Grossman at Search Engine Land (which I found via Moz.com) takes a look at a whole new way of organizing web content — via app. It follows that if the content that people are trying to find online is organized differently (within apps rather than on pages) people are going to need different tools to search for that content.
That’s why Apple (lots of apps) has jumped into search (Google’s game) by creating a search API (application-programming interface) to organize app content for search. Google is hot on the trail with its own API.
Apple’s system is call Apple Search. Users will recognize the front end as Spotlight and Siri. Google, Apple’s system gathers online content using a web crawler (called “Applebot”) that finds and indexes information.
Grossman’s articles are aimed at programmers who are going to write app screens (the corollary of web pages) to be indexed by the Applebot. Thus, these articles are highly technical.
But if you are a content owner who employs programmers to create app screens (as well as web pages) you’ll want to:
Know this is out there, and picking up speed
Start considering your strategies for creating screens that are highly searchable
Have any of you started down this path? I’d love to hear about it.
Build a foundation for the next wave of speculative fiction by supporting the Clarion West Write-a-thon. Find out what 200 writers are doing this summer to raise money for the Clarion West Writers Workshop.
Summer is early in Seattle, and I’m getting a head start on my annual summer project.
Clarion West, along with its sister program, Clarion in San Diego, is renowned as the world’s pre-eminent workshop for emerging writers of speculative fiction. (“Spec fic” covers everything from the magic realism that Junot Diaz writes for The New Yorker to George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones to classic science fiction novels like Starship Troopers and fantasy like Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Quite a range.)
This year Clarion West accepted 18 students from across the world, most of them recent college graduates. They were chosen based on the quality of their writing. If they follow in the footsteps of previous Clarion West graduates, more than a third of the Class of 2015 will go on to publish professionally. Many of them will be nominated for — and win — major awards in the field of speculative fiction.
For the students, the six-week Clarion West residential workshop is a full-immersion, once-in-a-lifetime experience. Many of the students have left their jobs to attend, borrowed money from family and friends to pay for travel, and several of them are receiving support from Clarion West’s scholarship program.
How You Can Get Involved
If you are a speculative fiction reader, I encourage you to underwrite the next wave of speculative fiction by supporting Clarion West, its scholarships, and its operations (run by a part-time staff and a cadre of volunteers).
The Clarion West Write-a-thon seeks donations at all levels, from $5 to $1000. (Many donors divide their donations, giving $5 or $10 through each of a dozen or more writers’ pages.)
Meet the Writers
The Write-a-thon harnesses the power of some 200 writers, people at all stages of their careers, who form a “shadow workshop.” While the six-week workshop for the Class of 2015 is underway, the Write-a-thon participants work to meet their own goals. Each of these writers has created a Write-a-thon page where you can read an excerpt of their work and see the goals they’ve set for writing and for raising money for Clarion West.
You’ll find folks including Aliette de Bodard, Helena Bell, Steve Miller, Henry Lien, Kelly Sandoval, Usman Malik, Eileen Gunn, J.M. Sidorova, Randy Henderson, E. Lily Yu, Pat Cadigan, Mark Teppo, Nisi Shawl, Paul Park, Neile Graham, Julie McGalliard, Caroline M. Yoachim, Helen Marshall, Curtis Chen, Rachel Swirsky, Kris Millering, and this year’s Worldcon Guest of Honor, Vonda N. McInytre. You’ll find Viable Paradise workshop graduates, include Beth Morris Tanner, Spencer German Ellsworth — and me.
TIP: Be sure to read Eileen Gunn’s writing sample, a flash-fiction piece about a time-traveling necktie collector.
Become a Sponsor — and My Muse
What am I’m doing for this year’s Write-a-thon? After spending the past six months submitting stories to magazines and anthologies (I’ve sold three stories, which will be published this fall), I’m going to spend the Write-a-thon focusing solely on new writing. I’ll be writing six stories for the Write-a-thon — and my plan includes opportunities for the people who sponsor me to act as “muses” for those works.
Ask yourself that question. Chances are you’ll look into the distance and, unless you are irredeemably cynical, a glimmer of something highly satisfactory will catch your eye.
Now try asking that question to someone else. The results can be magical, as I’ll explain.
A few years back, when I was doing PR in an old-school, corporate environment, I arrived at work early one morning to find that someone had left a bomb on my chair. It was a page ripped from our latest newsletter, with a paragraph circled in red ink, and the following message scribbled in the margin:
“WRONG. Call me immediately!”
It was signed with the initials of Madame X, our fearsome director of finance.
My heart sank and my blood pressure soared. I picked up my phone but had the sense to call not Madame X but the manager of our customer service department. I confided in her what was going on. (I remember that I was so nervous I was afraid to sit down in my chair.)
“Yep, that’s Madame X, all right,” the customer service director said with a sympathetic laugh. “Don’t panic. Here’s what you to do: When we hang up, call her. She’ll come storming over to your office, stand in your door way, and give you hell. Whatever you do, don’t interrupt her while she’s talking. Don’t argue, don’t apologize. Just listen. When she stops talking, look her in the eye and say. “OK. What do you want to see happen?”
“That’s it?”
“Yup,” the customer service manager said. “She’ll tell you, and then you just do it.”
I followed her directions. Madame X appeared in my doorway so fast I thought she’d been teleported into the building. She did, indeed, give me hell.
As she was talking, I had visions of her asking me to resign or demanding that the entire 16-page newsletter be reprinted, with a correction, and sent to our thousands of clients. I had to stop myself from offering up one of those solutions as she ranted along for 10 minutes.
But when she stopped, I looked her in the eye and said, “OK. What do you want to see happen?”
“Oh,” she said, looking surprised. “Well, actually, nothing. I just wanted you to know how I felt.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well. Thank you. It was helpful.”
Madame X left, looking a bit stunned, and I sank into my chair for the first time that morning. When I recovered, I ordered flowers for the manager of customer service.
Since then, I’ve used this technique dozens of times in really sticky situations. The results have been nothing short of miraculous. In many cases, what could have been a destructive argument transformed instantly into a problem solving session. In other cases, the person just wandered off like Madame X. (It’s worth noting that Madame X later became a friend of mine.)
I’ve been meaning to share this technique for quite a while. What motivated me to write about it today was that I tried it recently and it failed to resolve the situation. My conclusion from that failure was that this is a tactic that works better in person than it does in email. But a 99% success rate isn’t bad.
I invite you to take a look at the blogs you follow, or at your Facebook timeline, and note who’s contributing genuine, new, first-hand information to the world and who’s just trying to get people to join an angry mob.
I’ve been mulling over writing a post that analyzes the rhetorical devices used by online trolls to transform civilized discussions into conflagrations but have decided it makes more sense to talk about a tool that will keep everyone’s blood pressure under control. And that’s evaluating information based on the source from whence it comes.
I noticed a few weeks ago, after reading an extremely well-researched indictment of some bad behavior in a professional community to which I belong, that the discussions of first-hand information tend to stay relatively civilized.
When people report on what they’ve witnessed, first hand, or what they’ve discovered through systematic research, the comments tend to be similarly first hand. Even if the comment is “I completely disagree with you” or “Well, that wasn’t what happened when I lit a cigarette and leaned over a sparking engine.” Whether the tone is supportive or dismissive, it still comes across as genuine and informative.
It’s when people post long rants on blogs, on Facebook, or in community discussions about what they think about someone they’ve never met who did something at an event they didn’t attend to someone who is a friend of a friend — that’s when the comments tend to heat up. And I think that’s in large part because when we read that sort of post or comment we are seized by a subliminal sense that this person has no idea what they are talking about. It’s like sensing wide open spaces where pictures, sounds, and reality ought to be. And then, of course, there’s your own urge, which I’m sure is a deep-rooted instinct, to leap in and fill that wide open space with your own comments. Which may, sadly, be just as vaporous as the original post.
I’ve decided to start a one-person campaign to comment, positively and supportively, on posts that are based on first-hand experience. I plan to do this even in instances where I don’t think that the generalizations the person is making based on their one or two data points are justified. My rationale for giving support? They’re bringing themselves to the discussion, and that’s a good thing.
And, for my own sanity, I’m going to ignore posts that say “I heard that he said that she said that the-person-she’s-not-going-to-name did blah, blah, rant, rant, and rantforth.” In fact, if I see a series of these from one person, I’m going to quietly mute that person. That’s because, whatever their intentions, they aren’t adding much to the conversation. They’re just amplifying it and adding some unpleasant noise while they’re about it.
Note that the two exceptions my the plan are people (such as journalists) who have done actual reporting on the situation (“I called the business owner, and she told me X, Y, Z”) and people who did research on it (“I counted the number of reports of a particular occurrence during the past three years, and here are the numbers I came up with.”) They may have interviewed the wrong person, to your view, or they may have counted the wrong things, but they are adding actual information to the discussion. Information that any commenter can cite in their reply. “You should have calculated the mean rather than the median” is so much more helpful than “You and your cowardly cabal are obviously the scum of the earth.”
I invite you to take a look at the blogs you follow, or at your Facebook timeline, and note who’s contributing genuine, new, first-hand information to the world and who’s just trying to get people to join an angry mob.