Social Media: How It’s Done

So now you have a whole list of places to visit, bookmarks to make, RSS feeds to subscribe to, toolbars to use. In a sense, the question becomes the same one that I ask of my clients/students who are writing: so what?

Now that you’ve had a chance to look at a few of the social media sites, whether general-interest communities or those existing for a more defined purpose, you may be wondering exactly how to go about making them work for you.

It’s actually fairly easy. What it takes is time, and willingness to be open and helpful, and a little organization, and … did I mention time?

Communities on the Internet aren’t all that different from communities in your city or school or group: you get out of them approximately what you put into them. If you’re helpful, courteous, and willing to share, you’ll find that others are as well.

Here are a few ways to make social communities work for you:

1. Help Others:Instead of feeling like you need to jump right in and tell everybody all about yourself, spend some time at first listening, figuring out what’s going on. A lot of questions are asked on these sites. Find some that you’re comfortable answering, and help others out. A tone of humility and frankness rather than arrogance is your ticket to success here.
2. Contribute: This is along the same lines, but takes the first precept a step further. Social communities are all about content. Provide useful content for others and they will reward you in return.
3. Connect: Somewhere along the line here you’ll start making connections, whether or not you refer to them as “friends.” This is your opportunity to meet people with the same interests that you have, who can become resources for you, part of your expanding network of Internet contacts.
4. Expand: At first it’s difficult to think of contributing more than a paragraph or two. But as you get more comfortable, you’ll find yourself sharing links, pictures, videos as well. Let it happen. Relating via multimedia is one of the greatest strengths of Internet social communities.

None of this will happen overnight. People who use social media for marketing spend eight hours a day on these sites! While you won’t be committing that kind of time, you do have to understand that visiting your Facebook account once a month isn’t going to make you feel a part of the community.

Again, it’s not so different from Real Life. I frequent one particular pub, the wonderful Squealing Pig in Provincetown. I went there for weeks before the bartender remembered my drink (for the record, it’s Guinness). I didn’t go every day, but I kept going and kept going and gradually started knowing people—the owner, the bartenders, the regulars. It’s a comfortable and comforting place now, but only because I made it so.

think of your social community as your own pub and see what develops! And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Social Media Sites for Everyone

Now that we’ve looked at some social networking sites/communities specifically for writers and readers, let’s take a step back and look at some of the most popular “standard” communities and sites. Here’s where you can meet up with people who aren’t necessarily in your word niche.

• Possibly my favorite current site is Stumble Upon. You download a toolbar to your browser and indicate your areas of interest (art, literature, sports, games, etc.), and then simply click the icon to be taken to a site that falls into one of those categories. Don’t like it? Click again. I’ve found amazing information that way. You can also rate sites that you find so that others can stumble upon them, too.
• Okay, can’t have a list without the requisite reference to MySpace, the first and still most famous of social networking sites. It provides blogs, instant messaging, updates on friends, and forums. It’s being used in a lot of interesting ways—through the use of multimedia, for example, bands can get their music out to the world. There’s a lot of noise there but it remains a rich and interesting environment.
• And right behind MySpace (though not necessarily in popularity) is Facebook, which started as a way to connect with classmates and is now a place to connect with the world. From the website: “Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. Millions of people use Facebook everyday to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.”
• Don’t have time to put together a website? Put together a “lens” instead at Squidoo! Find information, share information on a myriad of topics through the overview pages it calls lenses.
• AOL’s Bebo is a general social networking site that offers a “social inbox” (organizes your web-based email and adds media recommendations), a “lifestream platform” (updates from your friends in other social networking communities), and a “lifestory” (that “provides you with an interactive display of life events in chronological order in an intuitive and easy to use timeline. Lifestories are made up photos, videos, stories and special events that you want to record or schedule”).
• Second Life is a visual community — in many way, a second life. It’s a hard landing (you need to create an avatar, clothe him/her/it, learn to get around, etc.) but well worth the effort. I co-authored one of the chapters in Wiley’s second edition of the Official Guide to Second Life so obviously am very much at home there. Think video games without the game part.
• Google’s Orkut is accessible with a Google account and, while it seems to be another general social networking site, does not offer the promised demographics (or at least that link is broken) and shows testimonials only from those who have used it for romantic connections. However, your mileage may vary: give it a try!
• Twitter is the site that has the news media all a-twitter; it restricts messages to short bursts or “tweets.” Takes a while to get to really understand its uses, but a lot of people swear by it. Find me there at JCez.

Specialized Sites

A couple of specialized sites that are worth a look if they apply to you:

• The PLAN Institute’s Tyze is a site providing personal communities for caregivers of chronically and/or terminally ill individuals.
• Match.com is the grande dame of dating/relationship sites and offers something for everyone: gay matches, Jewish matches, African American matches, senior matches. To my mind it’s the best of such sites as it operates without the hidden (or not-so-hidden) agenda of some of the online dating communities.
• Care 2 is a cause-related community site: healthy green living, human rights, and snimal welfare.

Is that it? Hardly: I’ve just begun to scratch the surface here. But these are some communities you might want to explore if you’re new to social networking. The idea, of course, is to really try them out—a quick tour of the “about” page won’t tell you much, but getting to know people in each of these places will.
Want more? Here are a few you can check out:

• YouTube — Just about any video you’d care to see (or create!) is here
• flickr — A place for your pictures online
• metacafe.com — despite its name, not a Sartrian place for philosophical discourse, but rather videos and music
• technorati — a search engine for the blogosphere
• blogcatalog.com — find a blog
• propeller.com — yet another AOL site
• kaboodle.com — “shopping is more fun with friends”
• i-am-bored.com — sites to explore when you are — wait for it — bored
• reddit.com — what’s new online
• slashdot.org — news for nerds, a very smart and often funny community
• blinklist.com — a way to save and share website addresses
• smallbusinessbrief.com — Internet marketing and business news

And these are just a sampling of what is out there. New communities are forming daily, old ones morphing … the only thing you can say with any certainty about the Internet is that it’s constantly changing. But don’t be intimidated by the numbers; you don’t have to participate in everything! It’s like Real Life: find a place you like to hang out with people whose company you enjoy and go for it.

Mostly, have fun. That is, after all, what it’s supposed to be about. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

More for Authors and Readers

A few sites that were overlooked in my previous post:

• First Writer (resources for writers)
• Authors’ Place (Random House for authors)
• Readers’ Place (Random House for readers)

More as they come in! Check them out and you’ll stay … beyond the elements of style!

Social Media for Readers and Writers

So let’s start our tour of social media with my favorite group of people—people who read and people who write! With some exceptional help from some of my colleagues at LinkedIn (a social network site you’ll find mentioned here), I’ve put together a list of social media sites you might want to check out. They’re not in any particular order, so don’t bother looking for one; perhaps you can see it as an example of the random nature of the Net!

Remember as you browse the first rule of social media: there’s no one-size-fits-all here. Some of these sites may interest you; many of them will not. And that’s as it should be, because you don’t want to spend all of your time online! Explore the sites at your leisure, see which ones seem to work for you, try them out. If you don’t like one site, move on.

And if you find more to add to the list, drop me an email at jcezanne@customline.com and let me know!

• Literature Map: Gnooks is a self-adapting community system based on the gnod engine. Discover new writers you will like, travel the map. of literature and discuss your favorite books and authors.
• Book Glutton: Read books online with other people—suggest books, discuss books, see who’s reading what. Sign on as a glutton and take the video tour!
• Library Thing: So if you feel a need to catalogue your personal library online, Library Thing is the place for you. You can do it here, and then connect with others whose libraries you like. Note that there’s a fee once you pass 200 books.
• Good Reads: Another book cataloguing site. Also offer some great lists and trivia. (As I write this, Twilight is simultaneously on the “best books ever” and “worst books ever” lists, so it’s even-handed!)
• Author’s Den: From the site: “While some of the other sites focus on readers, here’s one that focuses on authors as well. From the site: “The largest most vibrant free online literary community of authors and readers! Visited by 1,400,000+ readers/mo.” It claims that authors “willreach many readers” and that readers
  can “discover, interact, get personal, buy and read!”
• Red Room says that it’s “where the writers are,” and explains, “Red Room provides authors and members with free, easy-to-use, elegant online homes. It’s a place for the literary community to promote their work, express themselves, and connect with their favorite authors.”
• Swap Tree is a book- (and music-, DVD-, and video-game-) swapping community. Have a book you want to trade for another? This is the place for you!
• We Read: Ger personalized recommendations for books, share your recommendations with others. Includes discussion forums.
• Write Lit“aims to bring writers and readers together from all parts of the globe. It seeks to help the writer — technical, commercial, and literary — earn a living, and find audiences for his work. Furthermore, it aims to provide a venue for readers to share their passion for the written word.”
• Authonomy: This is a community sponsored by HarperCollins UK that “invites unpublished and self published authors to post their manuscripts for visitors to read online. Authors create their own personal page on the site to host their project - and must make at least 10,000 words available for the public to read. Visitors to authonomy can comment on these submissions – and can personally recommend their favourites to the community. authonomy counts the number of recommendations each book receives, and uses it to rank the books on the site. It also spots which visitors consistently recommend the best books – and uses that info to rank the most influential trend spotters.”
• Writers’ News/Writing Magazine: This is a singularly useful site, a clearinghouse for a number of different activities: competitions, classes, book discussions, forums, links … it’s all here.
• Bookworm: a blog that celebrates books and reading with lovely enthusiastic reviews by the author, Lubya Kably.
• Media Bistro: Though not strictly an author/reader sort of site, Media Bistro is a community that can be useful to writers looking to improve skills, get jobs, and connect with other media professionals. They have local chapters throughout the United States that offer get-togethers in person.
• Book Marketing Network, part of the whole Ning family of social networks, describes itself as being “for book authors, self-publishers, book publishers, publicists, marketers, and others involved in writing, publishing, and marketing books.” Includes, in true social media style, something for everyone—photos, videos, discussion boards, events, and blogs.
• The Book Place, also a Ning community, features a blog, podcasts, reviews, and discussion.
• Writers Digest: the online community associated with the grande dame of aspiring writers’ magazines, Writers Digest , the site offers some social networking but mostly supports the magazine. Online subscriptions are available.
• Gaia Community: once you join the community you’ll have access to the books section. Very useful if you’re interested in spirituality and healing topics.

In addition to the list above, there is a Facebook application called Visual Bookshelf that you can access from inside Facebook. It’s another community that shares reading lists and reviews.

So that’s it for now! I’ll update this list periodically, as community life on the Net is always changing, always growing … but this should get you started. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Social Networking for the Rest of Us

So by now you probably have a Facebook account. And you may have even tried Twitter (and not seen the point). Or you’ve lost parts of your life you’ll never get back again in the black hole of time that is StumbleUpon. And it’s all very interesting, but not exactly … applicable.

I’m here to say two things: yes, it is applicable and no, don’t give up yet.

One of the grandes dames of social networking is the virtual world known as Second Life. I know Second Life well, as I co-authored one of the chapters in Wiley’s Official Guide to Second Life. So you could say I wrote the book (or at least part of it!) on Second Life. Yet it took me what seemed like forever to learn my way around there, and then another long period of time before I got really involved.

I’d planned to use Second Life for fun only … but before I knew it, I was a writer-in-residence and figuring out ways to organize readings and get work “out there.” Because whatever your interest is, you’ll eventually find it in a social community.

Yes, a lot of people on Twitter mention their bathtub grouting or their choice of breakfast cereals more than anyone should want to share. But if you decided not to try any activity based solely on those who use it differently than you think you would, you might not do much at all in life.

So let’s give it a try. In the next few posts I’ll give you a beginner’s tour of some of the social networking sites that writers and word-people might find of interest. Try them out; some will be a good fit, some won’t. But you’ll never know until you try! And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

A Paradigm Shift

It used to be that marketing writers—like me—were always helping our clients to sell. And that worked for a long time indeed. It worked when we used to send out direct mail and slide infomercials into magazines, and it worked when we created websites and landing pages and advertising copy.

But change is the only constant, and the web is changing faster than anything else, it seems. The new paradigm, the essence of social media marketing, isn’t helping people sell—it’s helping them buy. Changing the focus from pushing Product X to pulling people in to buy Product X. It may seem like a matter of semantics, but if you think about it you’ll see that it’s far more radical than that, a seismic shift.

It doesn’t mean that other forms of marketing are obsolete. In fact, social media marketing sits in snugly with search engine optimization, because at the end of the day, it’s still all about content, still about getting people to one’s site and having them buy once they’re there.

And there are as many ways of getting them there as there are people in any given conversation. But that’s another shift, isn’t it: from advertising (i.e., talking at people) to evangelizing (talking with people). Social media types find advertising invasive, anyway, so we’ll be seeing less and less of it; but one can evangelize from within—a community, a club, a social group—specifically because one is a group member. One belongs. One listens. One supports.

So the first tip for those of you who want to join the conversation? Listen! And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Spam, Again

One has to wonder whether the spam one receives tells one anything about the current social or economic climate. Two hundred years from now, will professors be showing graphs that tell students what bygone cultures were like, based on their spam content? (It reminds me of David MacCauley’s wonderful book, Motel of the Mysteries, in which an archaeologist from the future unearths a motel and draws hilarious conclusions about our culture from its artifacts.)

If anyone were to go by my inbox and junk folder, it would become apparent that, even in the deep recession of 2009, people are still concerned about the following:

• the size of their penises
• the size of their bodies
• not having the correct timepiece

Other concerns come and go, apparently with the seasons—I’m currently being offered giant tomato and blueberry plants—but the need for a smaller waistline, a larger penis, and a wonderful watch apparently endure.

I understand the first two, which in one way or another are both about sex; the need for sex endures wars, recessions, depressions, natural disasters, and just about everything else humanity and the world can throw at us.

But watches? When was the last time you found yourself longing for a great watch? In an age where most people don’t even bother with timepieces strapped to their wrists—they all have super-accurate ones in their hands or glued to their ears—it’s an interesting commentary that a) someone out there really believes that hordes of people will respond to unsolicited emails about watches and b) hordes of people apparently do, because otherwise the spammers wouldn’t keep sending this stuff out.

Since it seems that getting a handle on dealing with spam is very much a thing of the future, you might as well get what amusement you can from the stuff as you press the delete key and wonder what our spam says about us. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

More on Strunk & White

Well, I’m clearly not the only one celebrating the anniversary of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style: The New York Times has weighed in, with a kinder, gentler approach than the review I cited in my last post.

My favorite part? This story:

“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers,” Dorothy Parker once wrote, “the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of ‘The Elements of Style.’ The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”

And then there’s this gem:

White argued that Strunk had also been motivated by sympathy for the writer’s victims: “Will felt that the reader was in serious trouble most of the time, floundering in a swamp, and that it was the duty of anyone attempting to write English to drain this swamp quickly and get the reader up on dry ground or at least to throw a rope.”

So you can pay your money and take your pick of reviews, but no matter what anyone says, it’s staying on my shelf. My friend Rachel once told me that her favorite book in the world is Emily Post, because she can look at it and be reassured that somewhere there’s a place with all the answers. An illusion, perhaps, but a comforting one.

So choose your favorite illusion of perfection and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Nothing “Beyond” Here

Well, in view of the title of my blog, I feel obligated to pause and note the 50th anniversary of Strunk and White’s famous contribution to the world of writing, The Elements of Style.

A recent article by Geoffrey Pullum in the Chronicle of Higher Education waxes, it has to be said, less than wildly enthusiastic about the book. “The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.”

Pullum is, in fact, just warming to his topic.

The book’s toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules. They can’t help it, because they don’t know how to identify what they condemn.

“Put statements in positive form,” they stipulate, in a section that seeks to prevent “not” from being used as “a means of evasion.”

“Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs,” they insist. (The motivation of this mysterious decree remains unclear to me.)

And then, in the very next sentence, comes a negative passive clause containing three adjectives: “The adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place.”

The reality is, as Pullum points out, that not only is The Elements of Style not in fact about style, its advice on things grammatical is pretty awful. He is neither the first nor the only person to point this out.

His is not the only opinion on the book; Michael Leddy has a different take on … well, on Pullum’s take.

Geoffrey K. Pullum’s recent piece on William Strunk and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style, is snarky and sensational enough to appeal to a reader suspicious of a dos-and-don’ts approach to writing. How refreshing to be told — by a grammarian no less — that Strunk and White are “grammatical incompetents,” “idiosyncratic bumblers,” purveyors of “uninformed bossiness” and “misbegotten rules.”

“My evidence,” Leddy says, “is anecdotal, but I have never had a student mention Strunk and White as a significant part of her or his writing education. The Elements of Style now seems far more popular outside the world of English instruction (particularly among tech types, whose work writing code would foster respect for clarity and concision).”

And yet the book lies anchored in our consciousness in the same way our mothers’ voices replay in our heads, with rules and admonitions half-learned, helf-rejected, and still able to instill guilt. Its slender size gives students the illusion that matters of style and grammar can be encapsulated in a few chapters, and at least one of its authors can be connected to real-life literature (E.B. White’s wonderful Charlotte’s Web and The Once and Future King), both of which considerations could contribute to its long life.

So … if it’s not a style guide and it’s a dreadful grammar book, what is the point? For those of us who make our livings with words, it is, perhaps, part of our history. Uncle Ernie may have been the black sheep of the family and Grandmother’s teeth may have been crooked; but we embrace them as part of who we are. In the same way, perhaps, The Elements of Style might be part of who we are, as well. Not consulted with any frequency, but reassuring to have on our library shelves. And anyone would have to admit that the illustrated version is a lot of fun!

For now, both versions are staying on my shelf. Much of my own academic work was in history, so there is a part of me that believes in seeing where we came from … as long as we keep looking to the future. And that will keep us … beyond the elements of style!

POSTSCRIPT: My own favorite style manual? Joseph Williams’ Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace.

Amazon Reconsiders

As we all know by now, Amazon listened and responded to the expressions of concern over its recent apparent censorship activities. It’s unclear (and probably always will be) exactly what happened to the listings of books deemed to be adult-themed over this past weekend, and the debates will probably continue for some time. At the end of the day, however, I think we can come away with a few important things to remember:

• The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
• Corporations do not and never have had your best interests at heart.
• Bugs can and do happen.
• Corporations will respond to pressure when it appears that actions they have taken will affect their financial bottom line.

Bear all that in mind, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!