Social media

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes! Rethinking my online strategy

/ Melanie Marttila / 21 Comments

I’ve been through a fair amount on this platform-building journey, from my first hesitant steps, through my experience of being hacked, and my triumphant return to the blogosphere.  I think it’s time that I took a little more control of my online life rather than letting it control me.

To this end, I’ve retooled my blogging schedule.  I’ll only be posting twice weekly now, Tuesdays and Thursdays.  Tuesdays (starting next week) for my learning and development category, and Thursdays for all things Writerly Goodness (it’s a grab bag folks!).  Fridays will be set aside for any guest blogs and other special events.

The truth is that I really have to get back to my novel.  If I don’t have a product, what’s the point of all this platform development?

Back in April I partook of Robert Lee Brewer’s Platform Challenge.  I’ve learned a lot from the experience and made a lot of online friends through the continually evolving Wordsmith Studio community.

Recently, I also volunteered to help develop Author Salon’s social media campaign.  With working, critiquing, curating, blogging, and hopefully writing, my schedule’s full enough.  I’m learning and growing though, as a writer and in social media.  As Christina Katz wrote, if it’s not painful, you’re not growing.

Actually, what she wrote was:

If you are frustrated to the point of tears or total exasperation, then wow, you must really be taking risks and stretching yourself. Good for you!

Think I’m getting there 😛

For the next six weeks, I’m participating in We Grow Media’s How to Build Your Author Platform course delivered by Dan Blank.  I’m hoping to learn how to make more efficient use of online tools to recapture some of my precious writing time.

Today, however, I want to share some pearls of online wisdom I’ve learned over the course of the past few months:

From Nathan Bransford:

  • When you post something to Facebook or G+, the link that you copy into your status will be embedded.  Once the post shows up, you can delete the pesky link and use the space to say something more apropos of your witty authorial persona.
  • Render unto Twitter that which is Twitter’s.  In short, if you tweet a lot, don’t link your Twitter feed to Facebook.  I experienced the negative side of this earlier this year, when a friend joined Twitter and I saw his half of every Twitter conversation he had.  It was excruciating clutter, but because he was a friend, I didn’t say anything.  He isn’t the “hey, you’ve got a booger in your nose” or a “that dress makes you look like a hoochie mama” kind of friend.  Sorry Dan.

From Kristin Lamb:

  • Don’t spam your friends.  Though tools like Hootsuite make it very convenient to post to multiple social media at multiple times, don’t do it unless you’re there to engage anyone who might respond.  Twitter is about having a conversation, forming a community.  If you’re automating you posts and someone replies to you or retweets saying that they liked it, you have no way to engage them if you’re not actually on line to respond.  Prove you’re not a robot?  Only post/tweet/share when you’re on line.  Got a day-job?  Tough.

Other points of etiquette:

  • Got published?  Yippee!  But I don’t need to see the same post every five minutes.  If I’m interested, I’ll check it out, but I find that half my Twitter feed consists of people trying to promote their books.  It becomes a visual kind of white noise and I tend to ignore those tweets after a while.  Pace your promo posts, and again, try to do it when you’re online to respond to any enquiries.
  • In the same vein: be professional.  In the early stages of any platform building effort, it can seem like you’re not getting anywhere.  It takes time.  Sometimes years.  Be patient.  If every time you post to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, G+, or any of the other social media sites, you’re practically begging people to “share, please share” it smacks of desperation.  It’s off-putting.  If you write honestly and put out quality material, people will share of their own accord.  Again, it takes time to build a solid following.
  • If you’re interested in proposing a guest blog for someone and they’ve posted guidelines, treat them as seriously and professionally as you would submission guidelines to a magazine or journal.  Read the guidelines and follow them.  Respect the blogger you want to guest post for.
  • The other side of that coin is that if you’ve entered into an agreement, informal as it may be, to host a guest blog, or to interview someone, treat it with as much respect as a written contract.  If you can’t, for whatever reason, hold up your end of the deal, be up front and address the issues with your guest or interviewee.  If you have to decline after receiving the interview transcript or post, then do so in a timely manner.  Pretend you’re a publisher, because that’s what you’re doing when you host guests or conduct interviews, and treat your guest or interviewee as you would like to be treated if your positions were reversed.

It’s the golden rule.  Be polite.  Be professional.  Show respect.  You’ll be amazed how those three simple phrases will transform your online life and how much more quickly your platform will grow as a result.

Ok.  Kicking the soap box off to the side now 🙂

There might be some additional changes coming in the future as the result of Dan Blank’s course.  I’ve been considering a thematic revamp of the blog, but I want to hold off until I have some feedback.

On that note, if you have any of that for me (feedback) please feel free to comment.

How are your platform development efforts going?  Have there been bumps, or ruts in the road?  What have to done to work through these issues?  Do you have a plan moving forward?  Do tell 🙂

Writerly Goodness, signing off.

Two lovely thinks, er, things, that fell in my lap today :)

/ Melanie Marttila

Some say that knowledge is something sat in your lap.
Some say that knowledge is something that you never have. ~~Kate Bush, “Sat in your Lap”

First

Partook of a Webinar this afternoon offered by Training Magazine Network and delivered by the inimitable Jane Bozarth on social and informal learning.  I follow her bog, the Bozarthzone, and have attended a few #lrnchat sessions on Twitter.

Jane promoted the power of social networking tools in the workplace, of curation, and the need to let learners have more control over their learning.

I’m all for this.  Unfortunately, my employer isn’t quite on the same page.  Facebook is blocked, because ours is a production environment and pressures are mounting.  Though Twitter is not blocked, our connection is so slow, in part due to the massive security measures we have in place, that it’s hardly worth the effort.

Though we have 2 internal Wikis with the capability to blog and curate, these tools are not promoted for use by our front line staff.  Again, operational requirements make it untenable.  The tools are mostly used to push information and email is still heavily relied upon as a means of communication.

We have SharePoint sites too, but again, for frontline staff, it’s used as any other Web page or site, as a means to push information, and not to engage staff in their own learning.  All of this on our sprawling Intranet, which, while it’s had a facelift, is still an unwieldy beast.

Only when staff reach the advisory or managerial level do they have the flexibility to dip their toes in those waters, and then to do so means some serious workload juggling.  Fortunately, aside from being the Learning Mutt, with a certain share of tenacity and feistiness, another of my workplace alter-egos is Shakti.  Multiple arms do tend to make the juggling easier 🙂  I could always evolve into a land-squid.

Still, informal and social learning is a wonderful dream I foster for my workplace and Jane gave me a few tools to add to my arsenal, courtesy of Diigo: http://www.diigo.com/user/jbo27712/upskilling

Second

The second gift of my day waited for me when I got home.  It arrived in the form of an email from a friend with a link: http://www.cpsrenewal.ca/2012/02/think-write-repeat.html

Think, Write, Repeat is a wonderful post.  I think I’m going to have to follow cpsrenewal 🙂  In his post, Nick Charney states that good writing and critical thinking are not only skills that can distinguish one in the workplace, but that they also support one another.

He offers a reminder: It’s a knowledge economy, stupid.  Indeed.

Charney promotes blogging as a kind of living portfolio, and one that will serve the knowledge worker well.  It’s better than a static resume that can hardly demonstrate any skill other than communication and editing.

Strong communities of practice and personal learning networks are also critical.

Once again, Writerly Goodness proves to be teh awesome (misspelling intentional) as a platform for both of my professions: writing and learning and development.

How has technology and the world of social media had an impact on your professional development?

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