the hurricane inside my brain

Hello, Hello,

I’ve started sending out a weekly email of social media tips to those people who have asked me for advice in the past. It started as tips for my friends at the newly launched The Good Men Project magazine.

The tips are somewhat random, mostly for those just starting out in social media, but these happen to be my favorite insights from being immersed in it these past two years.

1) Try this: Use Facebook to slowly expand out from your core friends, and Twitter to meet hundreds of complete strangers. Want to turn strangers into friends? (Whenever I tweet this, it immediately gets Retweeted around the world).

How friends are born: stranger > follow > @ > dm > FB > email > phone > friend

2) Twitter sucks until you have 100 people following you.

3) The best way to get a lot of followers on Twitter is to follow a lot of people. Look for people who are saying interesting things, are following people you know, like or admire. To start, follow 100 more people than are following you. Use the list function to organize as needed.

4) 10,000 is the magic number (10,000 followers or friends or subscribers or whatever) at which you go from having a social network to having your own personal media channel. What does that mean? When you reach that number, suddenly you are noticed — by influencers, journalists, investors, other media channels, advertisers. Not everyone wants that, of course. If you want a social network just to socialize with people you know, do that. But if you’re looking to build a platform that gives you a wider reach, 10,000 is a good goal.

5) Be helpful. Chris Brogan (who is my personal social media hero) says:
“Helpful is a secret, powerful club, and the way into it is by thinking first about what the other person needs, not what you want, not what you want to give, not what you think is best….Be mindful when you’re helpful. Think first and then deliver what you can for the other person or people. The results are astounding and different.”

The results are astounding and different. This is one you’ve got to try to believe.

6) Use bit.ly (or any other URL shortener) to shorten long links on Twitter. Have trouble writing in 140 characters? There is elegance in brevity.

7) In Social Media, I generally use the 1/3 rule of thumb. 1/3 is links to well-researched content that I think would be helpful to those in my network. 1/3 is conversations, helpfulness and promotion of other people’s stuff. And 1/3 is my own person insights (that quest to be ever helpful) or content (blogs, photos, stories, poems, art) I myself have created.

Figure out your own formula. That’s what works for me.

Blog Commenting is the key to the universe. Ok, a tad of an overstatement.  But it’s pretty f&%ing amazing if you do it well. You can a) get known by influencers b) help other people, by shedding your own particular insight on the topic at hand. c) become more insightful and more articulate in the process.

You know you’re dong it well when people start commenting on your comments.

9) Social Media helps you to become clearer in your communications. @copyblogger Brian Clark says: Want to be clear in your writing? Clarity comes from deeply caring if people truly understand.

10) Finally: my “Social Media Map of the World.” This is my own, personal way that I use social media. The networks I’m in, the relative importance to me, the types of content I put out in them.

And if you are looking to use Social Media to actually make money (since, last I checked, we live in an economic society), look on page three. When I track the places where all of my sales, projects, jobs, work has come from, it’s always at the place where the networks overlap. And the beauty of it is, there’s no hard sell involved. At that intersection, you’ll find that other people talk about YOU – how helpful your are, or how creative, or how smart, or how thoughtful, or what a great writer – whatever you DO really really well – it will always get noticed at the place where the networks collide.

Lisa Hickey has recently helped launch The Good Men Project Magazine.

“The subhead looks funny. I can’t figure out if it should have a period.”

We all keep working. Benoit will figure it out. He’s been a writer for the New York Times Magazine. The author of two books. Surely he can figure out a period on a subhead without help from us.

“Can anybody help me figure out why it doesn’t look right?”

“I’ll google it.” Henry doesn’t sigh, but his foot starts tapping a little faster. Benoit says, “I’ll look on Salon, see how they do it.” “Hmmm…they’re inconsistent, let’s try Slate.”

My keyboard clatters as I type. “Forget those pubs, how does the Times do it?” I hadn’t wanted to worry about subhead punctuation protocol, but we’re four days away from launching our own online magazine, and it has to be right. We search for subhead trends in every publication we aspire to.

“Does anyone know how to change the size of a video in blog post?” Sarah had been surprisingly quiet as she chewed her lower lip.

I lean slightly right, point to the part of the screen she’s scowling at. “Maybe…I think….here…in the embed code. Try reducing these numbers by a percentage.”

Sarah’s face lights up. “Ahhhh…calculator?”

I slide my phone over to her. We laugh.

Surely there are more important things I have to do. There are contracts to be signed, revenue models to figure out. There’s the content strategy for the next 6 months, the second book we’re putting together, the playwright we want to hire. But for today, I’ve promised my team I would focus on just the magazine, and that’s what I’m here to do.

I look around the conference room table. We’re a motley crew. It would be easy to label us: man, woman, old, young, gay, straight, single, married, divorced, tattooed, uninked, tall, short, have children, don’t. I won’t bother to tell you which of those describe me. But when you’re committed to a common vision, differences are irrelevant. We all love sentences. We understand the importance of design. We believe in the power of stories. We want to do some good in this world. We want to create something amazing.

And we’re four days away from a magazine launch and the subheads have to be figured out.

“Let’s go with no punctuation.”

“We can’t. Some of the subheads are two sentences. You can’t have a period on the first, but not on the second. That’s why it looks funny.”

“Some of the subheads aren’t sentences.”

“We have to be consistent.”

A while ago I had seen a question floating around the internet. The question was “If you were investing in a CEO, would you care how passionate they were?”

My answer to that question was that I think sometimes excitement gets mistaken for passion. Pure excitement about something? No – look at the numbers instead. But – to me – passion is really about caring. In relationships. In business. In life. And yeah, caring is important. Caring about the little things. Caring about the big things. I’d put my money on passion. For sure.

Benoit and Henry have settled on a format for the subheads. I know they will move on; a standard has been set, documented, and put in place. We will be consistent. We will be clear. We will be interesting. We will care, always.

There are new decisions to be made. “Hey Lisa.” Benoit is ever-serious as he poses the next important question. “Which headline do you like better for this article – ‘monogamously challenged’ or ‘make love like an animal, cuddle like a man?’”

I smile. I wouldn’t trade working on this launch for any job in the world.

The Good Men Project Magazine launches June first, 2010.

photo by inmost_light on Flickr

“My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three.”

Vladimir Nabokov wrote those words in 1955, buried in a paragraph somewhere within “Lolita.” I never read the book. Nabokov’s voice is, for the most part, too flowery, his sentence structure too complex for my taste. But in 2000, Billy Collins wrote a poem about the random way that death strikes, and used Nabokov’s words as the spark.

In 2006, I read that poem, and my voice changed.

It struck me (forgive the pun), that those two words: (picnic, lightning) told a complete story and were no more than two nouns held together by a small piece of punctuation. Wow wow and wow. My new goal in life became my desire to do * that*.

But first: Why develop a voice? What’s wrong with the one you have?

Chances are, nothing. If people for the most part understand what you say, if they don’t doze off in the middle of your sentences, if you can make other people smile and laugh – well, then. You’re doing something right.

But…see – embedded in that sentence above is what I try to do better. In every sentence I write, I strive for 1) clarity 2) brevity 3) engagement and humor.

I want a voice that’s strong and clear and distinctive and funny.

Here are some reasons YOU might want to think about your voice, especially if you are doing a lot of writing, or communicating in the online space:

1) It makes what you say more memorable

2) People come to know you more through your writing, and tend to view you as a friend

3) It shows a certain confidence, especially if your voice is distinctive

4) You can use it to topple stereotypes

5) It gives you a framework to evaluate your own writing

A few guidelines:

1) Ask yourself what you want people’s perception to be when they read something you wrote. Go so far as to try to imagine the exact words you want other people to say. Maybe it’s “That Steve, he’s a fount of knowledge. So informative. So helpful.” Maybe it’s “Jill always makes me laugh.” Or maybe it’s “Have you read Chuck? Man, that guy can tell a story.”

2) Work backwards. Now it’s easy, right? You want to be known as an expert – make sure most of what you say is fact-based. You want to be known as a great storyteller? Remember: every story has a beginning, middle and end. Stay present, all the way through that journey.

3) Want to be funny? Hint One: wait until you think or say something that makes you laugh out loud. Quick, write it down. Hint Two: Find a group of people who share some knowledge that not everyone does. Think of an insight only that group would understand. Hint Three: Eggplant is inherently funny.

4) What you say is far more important than how you say it. (This should remind you of rule #1 of branding – how you act is more important than what you say about yourself.)

5) Think about your personality. What do you love best about life? about yourself? Really. Let us hear it in your voice.

6) Whatever else you do, strive for clarity. Copyblogger Brian Clark writes: Want to be clear in your writing? Clarity comes from deeply caring if people truly understand.

So there you have it. Get out there: Experiment. Practice. My goal these days is to combine the brevity of a message on a bottlecap with the cadence of a poem with the clarity of an instruction manual. And if I can’t get you to laugh with the mention of an eggplant, well. I’ll just keep working at it.

Anyone else with hints they can share?

photo: orphan jones on Flickr

When I worked in advertising, my desk was always in disarray. And as aghast as I was about my own clear lack of organization, I’d be equally aghast when I went to an account persons office and saw their neat-as-a-pin desks. How could anyone work that way? Where is everything? Aren’t you *working?* I would wonder.

And then one day I read an article that told me the reason why my desk was messy.

It’s because, as a creative person, I’m constantly looking for two unrelated things to combine.

After all, most creative ideas are not 100% new, but are just ways of taking what’s already out there and combining stuff in new ways. But in order to do that “creatively”, you have to break sets. Combine things that are unexpected, because they are not ordinarily grouped together. It used to be putting a new ending on an old cliché. Then it was combining two unrelated images in Photoshop. Not too long ago, it was someone who forgot that a camera and a phone were two completely different objects.

A messy desk keeps the solution to ‘problem A’ right next to the solution to ‘problem B’. It doesn’t file things away into a drawer labeled “the way it’s always been done.”

The internet is the biggest, messiest desk there is. I like to use that to my advantage.

Do you?