Image by Crazy Ivory via Flickr

Hello, intrepid readers. We are going to shift gears a bit in this post and address an issue that is always near and dear to my heart: money. This is not to say that I am obsessed with wealth, but I certainly enjoy being able to live comfortably and enjoy my hobbies, which as a geek can include expensive gadgets, video games, and lots of media. So how does a writer in the modern era get paid?

Copywriting

Copywriting (also known as business writing) is the art and science of creating text that informs, attracts, and sells, all at the same time. To write good copy, you not only have to be a good writer, but you have to understand your audiences and what will drive their purchasing. Your goal is to sell something, and in order to do that you have to understand how your readers will react not just to the content of your words, but their appearance and tone.

Necessary skills:

• Write in many tones and voices, from warm and friendly to cold and technical. You must get over the notion that you are selling your art and thus must maintain your own authentic voice. While this is true for fiction, poetry, and other creative writing, copywriters must be able to catch the tone and voice that will most effectively represent their client’s interests. Read, listen to, and watch advertisements of all kinds and you will hear many different voices; practice writing in all of them.
• Understand visual cues. Words are visual, and by purposefully arranging how they meet the eyes  you can make certain impressions without changing a bit of your content. By creating symmetry and asymmetry in your copy (lining up your text and formatting it such that the lines “lead” the eyes of the reader to each important phrase) you can emphasize certain points over others, line up “question and answer” blocks around explanatory copy, and create a general impression of casualness, formality, friendliness, or whatever impression is needed.
• Be a good researcher. Clients will vary, and you will often need to be able to learn a great deal about a given industry, company, product, or service with very little notice. Make sure you have resources bookmarked and ready to do research on just about anything. This includes niche sites, academic sites, and government sites; Wikipedia, for all its glory, just won’t cut it.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Writing in the online world requires at least a basic understanding of the principles of SEO, including keyword research, competition evaluation, and link-building. Understand, it will seldom be your job to define and entire SEO strategy for a client, but in order to create good online content you have to know how to make sure it can be found and will compete against other similar content.

Necessary Skills:

• Understand the principles of search. Search is a weird field, in concept and in practice. In theory, it’s just math; search engines index content and use various algorithms to return that content in reply to corresponding searches. And if language, meaning, and knowledge were a simple affair, that would be enough, but they aren’t. We categorize things, use synonyms and conditionals, come up with neologisms (new words), and generally make things very complicated (and very interesting). We teach the search engines what words mean, and in turn the search engines teach us how to ask for what we are looking for. I can’t even begin to cover the necessary knowledge to really understand search, but I will list several resources for learning the basics of search and SEO theory at the end of this post.
• Learn how to use keywords and keyword phrases without sounding forced. Learn how to research commonly searched keywords and phrases and pepper your writing with them appropriately. Don’t stuff them, don’t use keywords unrelated to the content, and don’t just reuse the same one over and over; use synonyms and related terms.
• Produce quality content. Realize that keyword use is just part of the battle, what we call a “necessary but insufficient condition”. You have to use well-chosen keywords, but quality content that will attract links and traffic is the rest of the equation.
• Be generous. Link out often to other blogs and sources, and always make sure your anchor text (the text that you make the link) is actually associated with the content you link to. Try to go for deep links (links to pages inside a website rather than to the frontpage) and when you reference ideas or content from other sources, make sure to credit them.

Blogging

Blogging is big business…for a few. This money comes from advertising, direct sales, and the attraction of jobs. The decision of how to monetize your blog comes down to how much traffic you get and what your niche is. thePuckWrites is monetized by being a sort of virtual resume…I blog about how I do things so that others can learn how to do them, which showcases my knowledge and writing, while making sure a few select pieces of writing are avaliable to show my range, plus a resume and a contact form. Since my blog is set up this way, I attract both writers who want to learn and employers who want to hire. You might also consider blogging for hire…companies may pay you to blog regularly for them, or you could join a blog network or multi-user blog that pays per post like BrightHub. These kinds of jobs can vary a great deal in price, so make sure you are getting paid what you are worth.

Necessary Skills:

• Picking a good niche. I know a lot of bloggers, and some of them blog about things that no one would ever want to read about regularly. Some industries and subjects, no matter how necessary for society and life, will not draw an audience. Pick a niche you know about, but pick an interesting niche you know about; you might sell toilet paper, but no one wants to read about toilet paper, whether it is making, selling, or using it.
• Writing for a wide audience. Don’t be a snob. Use language that everyone will understand and if you must use special jargon, explain what you mean without being condescending. Remember, most people do not write for a living and thus it is not their job to know all the $0.50 words; you are not special, better, or smarter because you know what deontological means or can use gerund properly in a sentence.
• Discipline. You need to update regularly, research new posts, and promote your work. Quite frankly, it can be a huge pain. Depending on your revenue model, you might need to update as often as several times a day. Good scheduling and productivity is a must.

Resources

Copywriting

• Copy Brighter
• Copyblogger
• Publishing 2.0

SEO

• SEO 2.0
• SEOmoz
• SEO Theory - SEO Theory and Analysis Blog
• SEOptimise

Blogging

• ProBlogger Blog Tips
• Remarkablogger
• Daily Blog Tips
• Broadcasting Brain

What Else?

These are my skills that pay the bills, what are yours?

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Concern about the death of traditional print media is all over the blogosphere. Newspapers such as the Christian Science Monitor have been forced to take up online strategies in order to compete, and from this new approaches such as the New York Times social network have arisen. In light of this, the question arises:how can the modern writer be successful in a world where the traditional writing jobs are fading away?

Get Diverse

Once upon a time, a writer picked a niche and ran with it. The choice of what you wanted to write and where you wanted it to be printed decided how you wrote, what the best practices and standards were, and how you should attempt to build your career. Books on how to be a writer would differ wildly based on what kind of writer you wanted to be.

Maybe this made sense before the internet, but now it just doesn’t work. As a professional freelance writer, I write in so many different styles and for so many different purposes from day to day that focusing my efforts into only one approach is impossible. In the last few months I have written quests for an upcoming video game, informational articles on computer gadgets at BrightHub, movie reviews, and blog posts on all sorts of topics. Right now my “big” job is copywriting for a start-up. On top of this, I still write my fiction, which will soon be appearing on a new site.

The point of this is that you can’t afford to pigeon-hole yourself into any kind of writing. Now, I know what some of you are saying: “What about inspiration? What about art?” Well, that becomes the difference between writing professionally and being an artist. You can do both, but your attitude is different when you want to write professionally, and you focus on different things.

It is possible that if you are incredibly gifted and lucky, you can write precisely what your inspiration calls you to write and nothing else and make that your career. However, the much greater likelihood is that you need to see your writing as any other professional skill, and thus keep it flexible and open to the needs of the moment. Thus you must diversify your writing and be able to write for any media, as needed.

Get Educated

As the incorporation of new media into the mainstream continues, the needs of the writer’s craft will change. Already we have seen some of these changes, as SEO and social media have become more and more important to online writing. The simple fact is that as the technologies shift, the very definition of what we do changes. Just as I doubt many writers of my generation have done too much of their work on typewriters, I doubt many writers of the next generation will do too much work where search-engine optimization and online technologies do not play a role. If you refuse to learn about these new technologies you are making your skills less valuable, and some other writer who has done their homework will get the jobs that could have been yours.

Get Creative

New media allows for a new kind of writing. As I have written about elsewhere, microblogging has some interesting implications for fiction writers. I think there are even more interesting possibilities with modern technologies, where stories can be structured to unfold over various forms of social media, including video, microblogs, and even leaving trails of social bookmarks and forum posts. Consider the strange tale of John Titor. Ignoring the issue of whether he was really a time traveler, his tale is interesting and the fact that it was delivered across message boards points to hidden possibilities of fiction and meta-fiction. Viral ad campaigns such as that used for Heroes, while used as a way to gain buzz, point the way to stories told across multiple mediums and technologies.

Final Word

Traditional media may very well be dying, or it may become a form of backup media, like we have seen happen to radio. Writers, whether of stories or advertising copy, need to think seriously about the strategies that will allow them to keep plying their trade in the days to come. However, these ideas are just the beginning; what other strategies can writers use to ensure their success in the changing world?

Book cover via Amazon

In the wake of Seth Godin’s new book “Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us”, Chris Brogan has a great post on how to promote your book online that I wanted to make sure everyone saw. I also wanted to say that I have been considering the exact same issue. While I love the world of marketing and copywriting, and I love the online world, my truest desire is to write my fiction full-time. This led me to considering how to do such a thing through new media and how to promote it, and I came up with a strategy that I wanted to add to Chris’s post.

Obviously, promoting fictional work online is different than promoting non-fiction work. People want something different out of a good story than they want out of instructional work. People are going to keep coming back to see what happens next rather than to learn something new.

There are two traditional ways of drawing that reader back for the next part of the story. There is the serial and there is the franchise. The serial is an ongoing tale where the story is progressed in basically linear way with each installment, while a franchise is a world, a setting and set of characters that can engage in various adventures. The best ongoing tales combine a little of both, and so we have Star Wars and Star Trek, Dragonlance and Lord of the Rings, where the tales are interconnected by a common world and there are overarching storylines connecting the various stories, but each installment does not necessarily progress in a linear fashion from its predecessor.

This way of doing things can be far more difficult than just creating a good story, because there is a type of internal consistency that is required from the different stories. A good series and world go on to live beyond the author in the hearts and minds of the readers, and they will be quick to point out the flaws. A good article on this subject is “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” by Philip K. Dick. Like no other writing, a series must give the appearance of history and depth. Writing a good outline and exposition for the series as a whole can help with this immensely.

So, in light of all of this I have decided that I will be publishing the ongoing Axis Series, which I have been writing for several years, in a series of installments through a normal blog. The series consists of short stories and short-shorts, and the will be published at regular intervals. This is an experiment, and I will report on the results here. It may very well be that the online medium won’t work for fiction like this, but I would like to give it a shot.

Does anyone has any thoughts or examples of a good instance of online fiction?

Many readers might think that the online medium is not suited to telling a good story, but this is not true. Techcrunch cites the classic tale of LonelyGirl15 as a perfect example of the possibilities on online fiction. For those who are unfamiliar with the tale: LonelyGirl15 was Bree, a fictional character created for a series of YouTube videos which eventually unfolded into a rather epic tale of secret government conspiracies. This was a remarkable example of viral marketing: it turned out a creative agency created the interactive story. This highlights what is possible with fiction when the internet is used as the medium. What begins as a single person’s story can take on a life of its own, remixed, revamped, and expanded by other creative minds working in concert.

So let’s consider Twitter and other microbloggers. We have the possibility for small bursts of tale, added to and changed by followers and retweeted across the net. We also have the possibility for the return of the “serial” and “periodical” in a new form, where a string of updates over time can serve to create tension, invite speculation, and cause readers to experiment with their own explanations of events in the story.

So how can you write the kind fiction that would work through a medium like a microblogger?

1. Consider your limit. 140 characters per update. You could consider posting a whole string of updates in a row, but each post should be complete and move the story all by itself.
2. “Murder your darlings”. This quote from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch tells us to get rid of every word, every phrase, every bit of writing that does not move the story and is not the perfect words to express what you want to express, no matter how clever or pretty. While it is always good advice (and never easy), it becomes even more important in this medium. Never fall back on empty phrases, no matter how elegant, and never write platitudes or cliches. In the online world, anything that does not move the story is simply ignored.
3. Allow for the responses you receive from followers to influence the story. This is perhaps the greatest strength of the online world: ease of collaboration. Thanks to the medium you can adjust your tale and answer the desires of your readers like no “Choose Your Own Adventure” novel could ever hope for.
4. Allow for ambiguity. Part of what made LonelyGirl15 compelling was that no one was sure for awhile whether it was real or fiction. By the time every one knew it was fiction, no one cared and followed the story out of interest.
5. Update regularly. Your followers need to know when the next installment will come, and they need to be able to pass that knowledge along. If you must miss an update, work the delay into the story.
6. Avoid explanations. Explanations of the story don’t move the story and prevent it from being open-ended and ambiguous enough to draw virality.
7. Avoid plot-twists. Plot-twists are cheap when done in serial form…consider the “cliffhangers” of old movie serials, where each episode placed the hero in some deadly danger…only to have it explained away in the first moments of the next installment. People see this tactic a mile away, and will quickly lose interest. Instead of going for overt plot-twists, go for lots of ambiguity where any number of explanations, twists, and turns could happen and make sense, causing your readers to attempt to figure out where it will go next only to be endlessly surprised. Think “Lost” rather than “The Village” and you can’t go wrong.

Final Word

These are only suggestions about how to tackle fiction through microbloggers…I have only begun considering the possibilities. I am very interested in seeing where people go with this as a medium and will be following mylifein140, the account mentioned in the Techcrunch post, as well as looking into “Twittories“, a group creating crowdsourced fiction using Twitter.

Questions for my readers:

1. Are there any other writers attempting a similar experiment?
2. Any thoughts on the possibilities of fiction in new media? Perhaps something I haven’t considered?
3. Are the possibilities for pursing other forms of writing in this way, perhaps poetry or philosophy?

1. Informational Blogging

By far the most popular of online content, informational blogs allow writers to share their interests, skills, and knowledge with interested readers. This is probably the easiest form of blog, as your own favorite subject is all you need to start out. Just pick something you know a lot about, from wine-making to stamp-collecting, and write short instructional pieces.

2. News

Writing news in an online world is a very different beast than writing for traditional media. Speed is of the essence, and deciding what kind of news you want to focus on is key. In addition to this, you must add content to your news, some sort of analysis or commentary, not just repeat your source. To get started covering news, pick a “beat”, a subject, field, area, or industry that interests you. Find your sources, which can be blogs and other social media as well as traditional sources. Find people online who are involved in your “beat” and try and establish contact with them, allowing you to hit them up for comments and thoughts…this is one place where social media and networking can really make a difference. Make sure to always cite your sources, linking to them when possible.

3. Fiction and Fan-Fiction

Many storytellers use their blog as their primary means of getting their writing out into the world. Whether you are writing your own stories from the ground up or using the characters and settings of someone else, you can make a name for yourself that will allow you to make the transition to selling your work to traditional publishers. Another tactic is to use your blog for short stories or short-short stories and then sell your longer works through e-books. If you are technically inclined you can create your e-books yourself, and if not you can use a service such as Lulu, which will allow you to convert your document and add a cover, as well as allowing you to sell printed copies on demand through your site or through retailers like Amazon.

4. Comedy and Parody

Technically a form of fiction, online comedy and parody can become viral like nothing else. Cracked, CollegeHumor, and the Onion are some of the most trafficked sites on the web because people love to laugh and the humor is quick, topical, and speaks to the concerns of the average netizen. However, not everyone can do funny, and you should consider deeply whether you can truly hack it. If so, pick your tactic and have at it, but the competition is steep. Also remember that, in comedy more than any other field, you have to make your content stand-out…while it is fine for just about every fantasy tale to include magic, the net just doesn’t need any more sites specializing in pictures of everyday things with humorous or absurd captions.

5. Collections

The internet is very big, and despite the best efforts of our overlords at Google, it is very hard to find what we want. This means that collecting lists of links, images, videos, and other content and summarizing why they are interesting is its own genre, with its own readers. While sites like Digg and Delicious have taken this genre and run with it, many subjects are obscure enough (and the web big enough) to make collections a very viable genre. Again, go for a niche, some subject that interests you and you can follow eagerly, and then simply collect the best content and summarize it for others. Collections can also be a good way to finish out a week of other posts by using a “best links of the week” theme.

6. Diaries, Opinions, and Rants

While this genre is hard to pull of well, some people really are interesting enough that their general thoughts can compell readers. This is a difficult call to make, because almost everyone thinks their own thoughts and opinions are interesting even though they are not. A good example of someone who can pull this off is Norimoto over at AvenueToTheReal, who blends humor and absurdity with serious social commentary and philosophical questioning. This kind of writing can be very cathartic, but beware: your readership may be low.

7. Reviews and Product Reports

Increasingly, people rely on other people rather than marketing to tell them about the products and services they want to buy. This means that if you happen to read a lot of books, go to a lot of movies, or buy a lot of gadgets, your personal experiences with them and expertise will help others get feedback and information about their interests. The Movie Space is a great example of a blog with multiple authors who have parlayed their collective knowledge of movies into some sizable traffic. Just like with an informational blog, pick something you are very interested in and have a great deal to say about…a book review that says “I liked it” or “It was boring” and nothing else will get little attention.

Final Word

This list is meant to help you figure out not just how to write for new media, but what to write about. It is not definitive, as these categories are coming into existence and changing as you read this. If anyone can think of any genre’s or categories I may have missed, please let me know.

Disclaimer

In the interstest of transparency, the first of these contests is from a buddy of mine, Big Jason from Big Jason’s Big Marketing Blog, and the second is from a friend of his, which was brought to my attention by him. I am also getting entries into the second contest by blogging about it, which I would urge my readers to do as well. I make no apologies for trying to get free stuff, especially stuff which is good for business, but I also believe in transparency.

The Contests

The first contest was Big Jason’s “Largest Blog Contest Ever“. The prizes are great, though the entry period is pretty much over (talk to Jason about getting late entries in, he might let you in). The second contest is Miguel Alvarez’ “Blog Boost Giveaway“, which offers some really incredible prizes as well. I especially like the developer’s package for the Revolution themes. As a confirmed Wordpress fanboy, something like that would make my life a lot easier.

However, that is not the point of this post. While I am getting entries in Miguel’s contest from blogging on it, I find these contests, and the way they work and function they serve, interesting in themselves. Think about why Jason and Miguel set it up as they did.

Targeted Prizes Draw Targeted Traffic

The prizes are focussed at the needs of their readers. Jason is a marketer and trainer…his trip is making himself better by making others better. I know that marketing sometimes gets a bad rap, but that is usually from people who either don’t understand it or who are bad at it. Marketing is not evil any more than electricity is evil; electricity can cook your food or cook you, it depends on how it is used. In Jason’s case, his method involves building people’s skills and access to knowledge up, which makes them look better to those who might need their services and skills. This is truly “white-hat” training and marketing…making you look better by actually making you better. Jason’s friends and readers are interested in exactly that, and are likely to have friends and readers who are interested in the same thing. I am one of those friends and readers, and I know my friends and readers are interested in the same thing, so here I am, reading and blogging about it.

Now look at the prizes offered on Big Jason’s contest: they are all about making you better. Consulting, services, and items that help increase your value and your abilities. All the things that readers of his blog (and their friends, friends of friends, and so on) are interested in. How does he know? Well, because they are reading his blog or following him on other services, anyway. Jason knows his readers, and tailored his prizes to them, which draws traffic from word of mouth that could never be gained by generic prizes.

Now on to Miguel’s contest. His audience is also interested in marketing, but he is focussing on professional blogging more than anything else, and hence his prizes are different. Development tools for blogging, cams for video blogging, and consulting and services for promoting your content and building search rankings. Miguel targetted his prizes towards the needs of his readers and friends, and so he gets targetted traffic that he knows will be interested in what he has to offer.

Even better, both Big Jason and Miguel are getting sticky traffic out of this, because the people they attract through their contest are people who are likely to also be interested in the normal content of both of their blogs and the professional services they offer. Sticky traffic and potential clients, all in one fell swoop.

Social Media Mechanics

Both contests use social media as the means of gaining entries. You submit to bookmarking sites, subscribe to their blog, post about them, microblog about them, and in general use the technologies and techniques of the modern online world. The important thing about using this mechanism is that it is viral. Say one reader submits the contest to Digg; the people who are likely to read and digg the submission are also likely to be interested in the prizes and content of Big Jason and Miguel’s respective blogs and professional services. This method spreads the targeted draw of the prizes, causing each person drawn in to go forth and draw others in. Again, this brings not only targetted traffic, likely to click on your ads, but sticky targetted traffic. The people drawn in are targetted in such a way that you are not just getting traffic, you are getting traffic that is going to stick around and lead to conversions.

Creating Value Through Knowing Your Audience

Both Big Jason and Miguel know their readers and connections through social media, and this knowledge allows them to increase the value of their offerings, which in turn leads to traffic, conversions, and ever better networking and connections. This value comes from the intersection of their user’s needs with their own ROI (return on invetment). Why can they offer so many prizes of such high value? Because they know that the traffic and conversions they gain will be worth the cost. How can they know that? By paying attention to what their readers and connections want and need. Did they have to spend huge sums on market research to know that? No, they just had to use social media the right way. They had to listen, rather than talk, to the masses they have gotten access to through social media.

Conversing Instead of Yelling: Marketing for the Modern Age

Historically, marketing has been about getting access to an audience and then yeeling your message to them as loudly and often as possible. This worked for awhile, but people have gotten savvy to it. They are tired of being scammed, tired of being told what to want, and tired of being passive. Social media and new media has changed all that. People can seek out what they really want, can block and ignore the shouting of traditional marketing, and in general simply don’t trust the old forms of media and the marketing styles associated with them. What is a person who wants to promote themselves and their work to do in such an environment?

The solution is to change the dynamic. No more shouting, no more “passive” audiences. What is necessary is a conversation, an interaction where you find out what your audience wants (rather than telling them what to want) and then give it to them.

Final Word

Let this be a lesson to you, intrepid readers of thePuckWrites: if you wish to make it in the new media, you must promote yourself and your work, but if you use the old ways of doing so you are doomed to failure. Don’t just read your comments, comment back. Don’t just use social media to promote yourself…use it to converse and connect. Not only will you know what your audience wants, but you will make connections and be able to, like Miguel and Big Jason, target offerings in such a way that your audience grows steadily.

Go forth and do as they have done.

1. Go Short

In school and literature, often we are taught that more is better. If you can slip in more detail, another source, or another idea, you should. Well, this is just plain wrong in the new media. Here we have to capture a reader who with the click of a mouse can be somewhere else. They are not a professor paid to read a paper or a book-reader sitting and relaxing in a nook. They are on a computer and working in a very “hot” (interactive) medium. Keep your posts and articles between 400 and 700 words. If you absolutely must go longer, consider splitting the post up into a series. DO NOT go for the “multi-pager”. It does not work, nobody reads it and if you keep trying to write your magnum opus you will lose readers.

2. Avoid Big Blocks of Texts

Break your articles up into multiple paragraphs. What seems like over-formatting in a book or magazine can be perfect for a post because of the difference in how they are read. People’s eyes react differently to text on a screen. Use pictures, changes in font size, and lists to break your content up into meaningful chunks. The goal is that at any point a person could finish up a section in just a few seconds and easily come back for the next chunk later.

3. Avoid the Passive Voice

In school we learn to speak in the passive voice to record facts. This makes things very “objective” and “neutral” sounding, but is not what people are looking for online. There are a billion other things they could be reading that can all be objective, but they will read your work because it is yours. Make your writing drip with active verbs and your own personality. Let your voice come through so strongly that the reader will hear you in their head.

4. Lead the Reader

The formatting of online content is always a problem, but the best thing you can do is let your content guide the reader’s eyes and mind. Use lists, headings, and text styling to lead the reader’s eyes to the important points. This is what is sometimes called the “Command to Look” from a book by the same name.

5. Make Your Content “Hot”

This is the internet, web 2.0 thank you very much, and we want our content to be dynamic. We want links, video, and the ability to converse. Pepper your articles with interactivity, even to the point of asking questions for your readers to answer. If you refer to something, link it (but only the first time!), if you say there was a video, include it in the post.

6. SEO

Ok, get the groan out of your system. I know plenty of the community has a bad opinion of SEO, but I don’t agree with them. Search engine optimization is simply par for the course; you have to deal with it. Some simple tips are:

1. Format your post titles to include the most well-known keywords for your article’s subject.
2. Write your post to include a few repetitions of various keywords pertinent to your article (don’t oversaturate).
3. If you are hosting your own blog, make sure your post titles come first in your page titles. The reason for this is that search engines only show the first part of the title, so if your blog title comes first then, even if you are on the front page, all people will see is the blog title, which makes them unlikely to click.
4. Also, if you are hosting your own blog, make sure that you set your title page, archives, and tag pages to show only excerpts of your post contents. Search engines frown heavily on duplicate content.

7. K.I.S.S.

Keep it simple. No, really. Really simple. Avoid clarifying clauses, complicated thoughts, and involved sentences. This is not say you can’t write difficult ideas…just break them down. Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them. The reason for this is (again) about how people read on the internet. Since people are alway multi-tasking, being able to come back to an article and read it in little chunks without losing the thread of the thought is absolutely necessary.

Final Word

Following these simple steps you can increase your reader loyalty and the uselfulness of your posts. People will be able to get what they need from your content easily and efficiently, which will make your posts and articles appealing and useful, which means people will come back to read more and pass on your work to other potential readers and clients. Help your readers read and they will stay loyal, make them work too hard and they will just click something else.

Does anyone else have any good writing tips for new media?

http://socialmediaphilosophy.com/

Enjoy!

XIII writes:

I’m looking forward to the sequel; How to keep up with reading everything.

While I can’t help anyone read faster or be able to concentrate on more content than they are capable of, there are a few tips and techniques that I use for staying caught up. As before, this is a tentative guide, as the technologies are always changing and no large scale solution exists as of yet. One of the things I am working on is a project to do exactly that, putting all of the data in one place for people who interested in this sort of thing. If any of my wonderful readers and friends are interested in a new project with serious potential, please let me know…thanks to my social density I am very easy to contact!

Now, on to how to stay sane in the world of social media!

1. Attitude

Having the right attitude about social media is the first step in managing it. This is because many people have weird expectations and thus get overwhelmed or turned off. Even worse, some people end up feeling that social media is “invasive”, as I saw mentioned in a tweet the other night. Social media does not have to be overwhelming or invasive, you just have to remember a few things:

1. The internet is not a physical space. It is not necessary for you to simply accept every interaction that comes your way in order to avoid being rude. If you don’t like what someone has to say or has on their profile, then don’t interact with them. Out of all the people online, one less won’t hurt you or them.
2. The internet is not a bunch of little places (websites and services) any more than the universe is simply a bunch of things that are in it. Both of these realms are actually made up of the interactions that happen between the “things” that are in them. Remember that no one technology or website is the “world”…always the whole internet. Move through the internet like it is your world, and move through specific sites and services as if they were neighborhoods.
3. It is important to see your movements through the internet as being continuous with your normal life. In normal life your interests, needs, likes, and dislikes guide you and lead to you interacting with others in certain ways. Similarly, on the internet you can trust a large part of social media to do the work of connecting you with other people. Trust the tags and the searches to connect you with others and don’t stress about finding an “in” crowd. Crowds form around interested and passionate people doing what they love, not people trying to form crowds.
4. You are not alone. If you are having a problem, it is likely other people have had the same problem, and it is also likely that some of those people found solutions. When you get frustrated, do a search or ask around. Social media is new, and everyone is “just learning”.
5. In physical space, your identity is unified because you can only be in one place at one time. Online, your identity is distributed among all the different places and times you interact. You are everywhere you make a change, and because of the archiving nature of the net, you are everywhen you have made change, as well. Thus you can be lazy when you need to be, because the posts, feeds, forums, and so on will still be there for you to get to. While it is important to strike while the iron is hot when you are trying to create something new, reading and staying in the loop can happen at your leisure.

2. Managing the Flow of Data

As with the entire internet, staying caught up and keeping the information useful depends on certain technologies. Optimizing this process isn’t about interacting with the information faster, but managing how you interact with it.

1. Friendfeed’s Imaginary Friend Feature- Yeah, everyone loves FriendFeed, but few people use one of it’s most interesting and scalable of features: Imaginary Friends. This feature allows you to create a “fake” stream. Just go to “Friend Settings”–>”Imaginary”–>”Create Imaginary Friend”. Name it something useful, like a category such as “Social Media People”, “Photographers”, or “News”. Then simply add services or feeds. The best thing about this is it allows you to categorize your feeds and then follow those in your own RSS reader or FriendFeed subscriptions. And yes, you can make an imaginary friend from FriendFeed Atom streams, rooms for your imaginary friends, imaginary friends of room feeds, and so on. The FriendFeed structure is so scalable you can implement ever higher levels of categories and get as fine-tuned as you want.
2. Technorati’s Connected Pings From Favorites - A lot of people bag on Technorati, but look at it this way: they ping so you don’t have to. Set up an account just for this purpose, and favorite the blogs you want to follow. When they ping, you will get an update. The reason this is better than just subscribing to their feed is that you will be able to see the pingbacks and favoriting from connecting blogs, which allows you to expand your interaction with the blogosphere in incremental steps rather than huge numbers of new posts to read. Part of managing your flow of data is making new information come in bite-size chunks, and this technique allows for that.
3. Focus Your Attention - Pick your favorite services based on your needs and temperament, then live there and automate the rest. For example, you can aggregate your friends and follows from less used services like Jaiku and have them stream to an Imaginary Friend in FriendFeed, then just live in FriendFeed and use Ping.fm to post to all your less used accounts. I personally lived primarily in Twitter and FriendFeed before I got into Plurk, and now I live in Plurk, Twitter, and FriendFeed. I use Twhirl to get my updates in nice little bursts and reply to @s and direct messages, and use SocialAddict to scan through everything it carries and to post to Ping.fm. Between that and my feeds, I have no problem staying on top of everything.

Final Word

I hope this helps get the information flow under control for some people. I find that these techniques really help and that I have no problem staying on top of my different connections. As all of friends on my various services can attest, I respond to just about every shout, @, and direct message, am active in conversations on Plurk, Twitter, and FriendFeed, and read and comment on many blogs and sites. I am also working on several other projects and I guest-blog on various sites. My fiance, cats, and clients can also attest that I manage to get my work done and attend to my personal life. I even manage to have some leisure time every once in a while. This level of combination of attitude, aggregation, categorization, and automation is how I do it, and with similar techniques I am sure others can get similar results.

Coming up!

I have gotten some really good feedback on the idea, so I am going to be launching a new blog in the next day or so on social media philosophy. It will cover all of the philosophical angles of social media and the changes it is causing in the way identity, meaning, and knowledge is perceived. My degree is in philosophy and (like most geeks) I was a very good student, so I hope to be able to bring some new ideas to the table. Stay tuned for the launch announcement!

Also, tomorrow (July 28) is my birthday. In lieu of presents, please send traffic!

I think that to succeed in the social media world, a key concept is social density. I work towards this by constantly looking for new sites and services to maintain a presence on and being active in many different microblogging communities. I also manage to at times have a life and do the writing that pays the bills. I do this by using a few different techniques to streamline my interactions with the virtual world.

Recently I got a comment on this post and realized that it would be helpful to some of my readers to learn how I do this until something better comes along (any venture capitalists reading? :P).

1. Make a profile document

You are going to be entering certain information again and again for awhile. Get used to it, and get used to changing it. You can get a plugin for Firefox called Sxipper that can automate this process and also automate your logins. I very much recommend it.

Make a plain text document (use Notepad) and list the following information:

1. First name
2. Last name
3. Nickname/Username (you won’t always get what you want, be prepared with alternatives)
4. A single sentence that explains who you are and what you do
5. A short bio that explains who you are and what you do with no links to your work or other profiles
6. A slightly longer bio with links to your work or other profiles
7. An even slightly longer bio that is pretty much your online resume
8. Address
9. IM accounts
10. Main email account
11. Three interests (separated by commas)
12. Three musical genres or artists you like (separated by commas)
13. Three favorite movies (separated by commas)
14. Three favorite books (separated by commas)
15. Three to seven tags (simple words or phrases people looking for a person like you might use in a search engine; for example, I commonly use “writer, freelance, social media”) (separated by commas)

2. Make a picture or logo

You will need a pic for many sites. Prepare three versions, one big, one small, one thumbnail.

3. Make accounts pt. 1

Go to the following sites and make accounts:

1. Friendfeed
2. Ping.fm
3. Profilactic

4. Make accounts pt. 2

Go to Friendfeed and look at the different services they have that you can aggregate. Pick at least one site from each of the following categories:

1. News (if you make just one choose Digg)
2. Bookmarking (If you make just one choose StumbleUpon)
3. Microblogging (if you make just one choose Twitter)
4. Pictures (if you make just one choose Flickr)
5. Social Profile (if you make just one choose Facebook)
6. Business Profile (if you make just one choose LinkedIn)
7. Music (if you make just one choose Last.fm)
8. Video (if you make just one choose YouTube)
9. Commenting (if you make just one choose Disqus)

5. Make accounts pt. 3

Go to Ping.fm. and there will be a list of services to which you can post updates. Go find each and every one of them except the blogs and make an account. That’s right. Every single one. Fill them out completely.

6. Aggregate your accounts

Go to your Friendfeed, Profilactic, and Ping.fm accounts and connect up all of your accounts. Make sure to put a feed from all your blogs on the lifestreams.

7. Downloads

Download and install:

1. Adobe Air
2. SocialAddict
3. Twhirl

8. Use

Use SocialAddict to connect to Ping.fm. Use it for all normal microblogging. Use Twhirl to connect to your FriendFeed and Twitter accounts. You will then get updates from everyone you follow on both services and be able to interact with each service. Either put your Profilactic badge and lifestream on your blog or point people at them in your profiles so people can see what services you use. (The reason to use Profilactic is because it will aggregate services FriendFeed doesn’t).

9. Network

Use the search function on FriendFreed to find rooms and people you are interested in and follow them. Go to their profiles and add them on whatever you share in common. Some will add you, some will not. Get used to it. Do this at least once a week.

10. Be social!

Now use the service you have accounts with. When you read a post you like, submit it to news sites or vote for them. Peruse the news and bookmarks sites to find things you like and vote for them. Listen to music on your music site and favorite or scrobble or whatever the process is. Favorite your favorite videos. Comment on blogs. Live your online life in this social way. And most importantly, use the microbloggers.

Final words

This guide is tentative. The method is not as clean and easy as I would like, and the technologies and services offered change far too quickly for any guide to be definitive. Nonetheless, this is what I do, and I hope it helps at least the reader who asked the original question.

If you have any tips on further streamlining this process, please share! If you have any other similar questions, ask away and it might lead into a new post like this one!

Good luck and remember to be social!

Update:

I was reminded by Pamir of another great service that allows you to aggregate your services and create a dynamic online business card called Retaggr. Even though I have an account with them, I had completely forgotten about how useful it is. See, this why we need to be as social as possible: none of us can know everything or do everything, but working together we can succeed as if we do, and that is all that matters.

Update 2:

It occurs to me that a lot of people would like a Google link for searching for FriendFeed rooms. I got this from Andy Beard here so if you like it, give him some positive feedback.

Thanks for all the great comments and questions, everyone! Keep ‘em coming!