Category Archives: Writing

Great Lines in Songs

Writing, , , , ,

Have you seen the Freakonomics Blegs series? It’s fun. Great lines in movies, things like that. I gather that bleg is a contraction for blogging and begging, a play on words related to asking readers for contributions.

It made me think of some great lines in songs. Some of these are pure poetry. Or so it seems to me.

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose
I’d trade all of my tomorrows for a single yesterday

Kris Kristofferson, Me and Bobby McGee

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot

Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi

The last time I felt like this I was in the wilderness and the canyon was on fire
and I stood on the mountain in the night and I watched it burn

Emmylou Harris, Boulder to Birmingham

You of tender years can’t know the fears that your elders grew by. So help them with your youth, they seek the truth before they can die. Teach your parents well, their childrens’ hell will slowly go by. And feed them on your dreams.

Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, Teach Your Children

Because the cops don’t need you, and man they expect the same

Bob Dylan, Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues

Once I had mountains in the palm of my hand, and rivers that ran through every day. I must have been mad, I never knew what I had until I threw it all away.

Bob Dylan, I Threw it All Away

Cowboys like smoky old poolrooms and clear mountain mornings

Patsy and Ed Bruce, Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys

I married her because she looks like you

Lyle Lovett, I Married Her Because She Looks Like You

Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance

Paul Simon, Train in the Distance

Why am I soft in the middle when the rest of my life is so hard

Paul Simon, You Can Call Me Al

All I ever had: Redemption songs: These songs of freedom

Bob Marley, Redemption Songs

In the end, only kindness matters

Jewel, Hands

 

And, if you happen to speak (or read) Spanish, how about these:

Simon Blanco tuvo suerte. De tres balas que le dieron, solo una fue de muerte.

Anonymous corrido, Simon Blanco

Yo soy como el chile verde, picante pero sabroso

Anonymous, la Llorona

 

The New Web: Your Money or Your Life

Reflections, Web/Tech, Weblogs, Writing

Your thoughts, your pictures, your daily life … maybe it’s your journal, or your diary. Do you own it? Should you? Facebook backed down last month when people said its user agreement gave it ownership of users’ pictures.

Anita Campbell started me thinking about this yesterday, with her post on digital sharecroppers.

Is your life on Facebook? Twitter? Your blog? Or, perhaps, this question instead: who’s making the money?

Facebook makes money off the ads it puts on your page. Twitter intends to make money some day; in the meantime, it builds users.

When I post on this blog, at least, my writing is mine; and the ads you see here are for my own work. When I post on other blogs, like Up and Running, or Huffington Post, I get satisfaction, somebody else gets ad revenue. What about your blogging?

Me? I’m okay with it. Facebook and especially Twitter feel to me like I’m connecting with friends, I like it, I do it on purpose, and I’m not concerned with protecting rights or intellectual property. Actually I’m grateful for the platform. My blogging on the big sites gives me a voice, and that’s worth it to me.

How about you? Is it working for you? It’s a question worth asking.

Down the Social Media Rabbit Hole

Web/Tech, Weblogs, Writing

Last week John Jantsch posted My Social Media System, detailing his twice-daily, daily, weekly, and monthly routines in blogging, twitter, and so on. In email he asked me (and several others) to join in:

I would love it if you would consider writing a similar post on your blog and then let's hook them all together and create an "at this moment" guide. I think this would be a very instructional free guide in PDF form and I would be happy to collect, document and share for everyone's use – this could change over time obviously.

That's an attractive invitation. For me, though, it's not so systematic. In fact, my 18-month journey into the soft white underbelly of social media is more like delightful, alluring, distracting, disorderly chaos. I'm 61. If this post had a sound track, it would be White Rabbit, by Jefferson Airplane. In fact, I just put that onto my iTunes, while I write this.

About Blogging

"But I'm all about business planning," I said. "It's not a blogging thing. It's static." OMG, how wrong I was with that one! Falling headlong down the hole. That was April of 2007. I'd just decided to step down from managing Palo Alto Software. The new team wanted me blogging.

"Don't worry," Sabrina said. "You'll get it."

"Install Google Reader," Noah added, "and start reading the blogs. You'll see."

And I saw. Since then I've done more than 1,000 posts on Planning Startups Stories, and Up and Running alone, not to mention Planning Demystified, and dozens each on Small Business Trends, Huffington Post, and Business in General.

Blogging Tips and Tools

  1. The draft blog. Wherever you've got a blog set up, as long as it's on one of the major blog platforms (I use TypePad, WordPress, and Blogger), it's very easy to set up a draft blog. Use your control panel to keep it private, not indexed, not searched.
  2. Use "Post automatically" tools to catch ideas. On my Windows systems, I have Windows Live Writer set up, and on my Macs, Mars Edit, so on either one when I'm browsing something interesting I can automatically post it into my draft blog. No thinking required. Save for posting later, or thinking, drafting, and if not a post, then delete it. Where others use del.icio.us to keep track of these things, I like my draft blog.
  3. Focus on headlines. People browse headlines in the reader, or they catch them in Google. Lists are great, buzzwords, surprises, challenges are good. Don't trick people with bait and switch headlines.
  4. Be real, be yourself, pay attention to style, throw change-ups occasionally, read as much as you can, comment, track back to other blogs, be worth reading.

Managing Twitter

I'm new at Twitter; still getting used to it. I'm following a few hundred people, and a few hundred — almost exactly the same number, but not all the same people — follow me. You're welcome to follow me as timberry. And here's what I've figured out so far:

  1. I use twitterfeed to automatically tweet my blog posts. It works for me pretty well.
  2. I use TwitterFox for most of my tweets; it's in the lower right corner of Firefox, and the coolest thing it does is automatically create a tiny URL from a larger URL. So I copy the URL and type into the box in Twitterfox, making tweeting quicker, just a single step, instead of doing the tiny URL step first.
  3. I asked the Twitter world: do I follow people I disagree with (politics, religion, etc.)? Is it rude not to follow? I got lots of contradictory answers. My favorite was Evan saying, "If you follow users you aren't interested in then you break the metaphor." Second favorite is JonDiPetro's answer: "It depends on your agenda – if u r here for bus. leave ideology at the door (imo). If u r here to meet like minds, filter out." So I left ideology out of it. I follow people who follow me as long as they're tweeting in English or Spanish, and are not strident one-issue tweeting repeatedly, or simply sales shouting.
  4. I refuse to add information clutter. I try to tweet posts, issues, and thoughts; not ever where I am or what I'm doing. Sure, I fail at it sometimes, but at least I try.
  5. Confession: Twitter is overwhelming. I could watch it all day everyday, and do nothing else. So I simply stop looking after a while. Then I go back a few hours later to see if you or anybody else has started following me; and I get hooked for another hour or more.
  6. On the other hand, counter-confession: I follow some very cool people in Twitter, and they come up with some great ideas and great links. It works very well for blogging.

Which brings me back to the idea of chaos, and getting lost in wonderland. I can't write about this stuff without admitting that I don't understand it all that well. I've only got a dozen or so Facebook friends, exclusively family, and I'm turning down friend requests because I can't deal with them. I do have a few hundred LinkedIn connections (I'm Timberry there too) and I've answered a bunch of questions on my favorite topics (business plans, startups). So with that in mind, my next section is…

Where Social Media Things Baffle Me

  1. How do you manage your time with all this? How does anybody find the time to follow all those great blogs? What about time for Twitter? The tweets go by and I click the links, mesmerized, fascinated — I've been accused of acting like a fish following the latest bright shiny things — and the hours go by. If I had a real job, instead of just blogging, writing, teaching and speaking, I'd be really lost.
  2. What do you do with people you don't know wanting to "friend" you? I get it in Twitter, the answer is always "yes." But in Facebook and LinkedIn, it feels mean to just ignore such requests, but why does anybody want friends they don't actually know? See, I guess I'm incorrigibly too old. I've been linking in only to people I know, business people for the most part; and I've been keeping Facebook for family only. Is that crazy? Social media suicide?

Two Old-New Search Engine Aberrations

Marketing, Web/Tech, Writing

Some things don't change. Search engine optimization (SEO) is all the rage, and for good reason. I'm certainly a believer. But I can also see that some of the real core factors are human nature as it always has been, before and after SEO was invented.

1. Who was it that said even bad publicity is good?

I picked up this interesting story from CNET today, in which a 36-year-old model tried to sue somebody for nasty, mean remarks about her on a blog, and ended up in search engine heaven. All the meanness happened on one day last August, and on one blog, which seemed to have been created for that purpose only. Then the blog disappeared. Until the model sued Google to get the blogger's identity.

The result: the model and the blog win. You're reading about them. And wouldn't have otherwise. CNET blogger Caroline McCarthy wrote:

Meanwhile, the search terms "Liskula Cohen" and "Skanks in NYC" skyrocketed to the top of (ironically) Google Trends, earning "on fire" ratings. Hey, considering that I'd never heard of Liskula Cohen before, and I'm sure that I'm not the only one, this might've been the best thing that ever happened to her.

Remember the old saying about even bad publicity being good publicity? I'm intrigued by the thought that she did the whole thing herself. Great publicity. But no, it won't work for you or me, if that's what you're thinking. This is one area in which being an original thinker really matters.

2. Words that Sell

I posted here a couple of years ago now about words I won't put in the title despite the temptation. It was a story of my old days in wire service journalism, 30-some years ago, and a list of words that made headlines more successful. You can guess some of those words:

He swallowed again, then started listing the words: "naked, violent, brutal, cruel, vicious, rape, clash, showdown, face-off, fists, bare, nude, stripped, fight … " I can't remember them all.

Flash forward to yesterday, I'm watching Twitter, and suddenly: Strange, I thought, why would Guy Kawasaki do that? Right there in Twitter, a link to GardeningNude.com? So I clicked, and discovered that despite that blog's misleading title, it's actually a well-done blog on environmentally friendly gardening, developed by a serious person, and offering serious content. Is Gardening Nude a search engine advantage? I bet it is. And I bet smart blogger Shawna Coronado knows it is too; is it coincidence that she awards a "naked gardener of the week" award every week? And the award is for good work, community service, and has nothing to do with clothes or lack of clothes.

Is there a business lesson in this? Yes, I think so. You can use some techniques cynically to get a quick pop — I mean I think so, actually, because in truth I have no way of knowing for sure that Gardening Nude gets more traffic than it would have if it were named something more descriptive. I'm just guessing.

There is the fishbowl problem that comes up when you get a lot of people coming to your site looking for something you don't have. Still … is that a high-class problem?

ps: thanks to Caroline on Twitter for that CNET article on the model.

God: I Tweet, Therefore I Am

Blogs and blogging, Technology, Writing

God is no longer in Yahoo! Messenger, but she is in Twitter. Not on LinkedIn, but several incarnations in Facebook.

True story: Several years ago I found God on Yahoo! Messenger. That was the year that Yahoo! Messenger first started. She accepted my contact request, but never answered even one of my instant messages. Well, when I say true story, I mean that "God" was a Yahoo! instant messenger address, and I did set her up as a contact. Was she really God? I doubt it.

She's dropped out of Yahoo! now. Today I sought God on Yahoo! Messenger and got the following:

Disappointed, I sought God on Twitter, and she's there. She tweets and she answers tweets. (For the uninitiated, Twitter is social media in 140-character pieces. To tweet is to post on Twitter, and a tweet is somebody's post on Twitter.)

Last Friday a week ago she shared "one of my funnier 'direct' messages: http://tinyurl.com/62wusp" … click the link, it is funny.

If seeking God in social media sites offends you, I sincerely apologize. That wasn't my intention. But if calling her "she" offends you, I don't apologize for that detail.

I'm wondering, though, what went through the mind of somebody at Yahoo! during the time that God was available in instant messenger. Did he or she ever answer messages? Did it seem irresponsible, or just mischievous, to have that address available? Was it assigned to the first person (deity?) who requested it, right at the beginning?

And at Twitter, the same thing. God answers tweets a lot like the God I grew up with, the traditional Judeo-Christian God. Yesterday she wished all of her followers a happy new year. And how about this one, also from last week:

I tweet, therefore I am

Now I assume that God in Twitter is actually some person, and I'm glad that whoever that is does a reasonably good job at it. It's quite a responsibility to take on. I think.

Don’t Incentivize; Motivate

Writing

Words, words, words: consider the following question I saw in LinkedIn:

How do you incentivise an un-paid worker to deliver?

Whatever happened to the word “motivate?” Don’t we use incentives to motivate people? Why do we have to invent more jargon (incentivize) to say things for which we already have words?

Bob Sutton had a nice post recently on this same idea. He called it Language That Makes me Squirm. If you look at the comments you’ll find me there asking him to give me “core competence” back — I use that one a lot — but I’m with him on a lot of other terms. Are you tired of heavy lifting, multitasking, and thinking outside of the box? We do overuse the popular phrases. And, once overused, they lose meaning. 

Big Ideas in Few Words

Writing

What a kick! A Twitter writing contest. That means, of course, writing within a 140-character limit. Haiku, you're too easy.

I found it as The Winners of Twitter Writing Cont est 2 Are… on Brian Clark's Copyblogger. You can go there to see what's what, but in the meantime, here are the winners. And just to make it fun, I've taken the two third-place winners and the second and first place winners and put them in order of my preference, best first, which is not the same order the judges put them:

Unfolding the note / his heart anticipating / the rest of his life

Words… just like sun rays / the more they are constricted / the stronger they burn.

“I’m following you” / A compliment on Twitter / Not so in real life

A wandering ghost / My dead father cries “Uncle!” / I must have revenge.

I like them all, but in that order, which isn't the order the judges set. The prize winner gets a MacBook Air. Which one do you think it is? 

Great Writing, Sadly True

Current Affairs, Economics, Writing

One month later, I still think one of the best, possibly the best, think piece that I've seen about the economic crisis is Paul Krugman's The Widening Gyre column in the New York Times in late October.

His first paragraph:

Economic data rarely inspire poetic thoughts. But as I was contemplating the latest set of numbers, I realized that I had William Butler Yeats running through my head: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

He refers one of the few poems I know relatively well. Its last line is:

And what great beast, its hour come round at last, slouches its way to Bethlehem to be born?

Krugman also refers to the leadership crisis in the United States. His conclusion is:

What’s happening, I suspect, is that the Bush administration’s anti-government ideology still stands in the way of effective action. Events have forced Mr. Paulson into a partial nationalization of the financial system — but he refuses to use the power that comes with ownership.

Whatever the reasons for the continuing weakness of policy, the situation is manifestly not coming under control. Things continue to fall apart.

Paul Krugman was awarded the Nobel Prize a while back for his work in Economics. He's been chillingly accurate these last few months about our economic crisis. He should get a Pulitzer to add to his award shelf, not exactly for his work in economics, but for his writing about the economic mess.

Ping Me, Ping Me: Social Media Good, Bad, and Ugly

Writing

Blog posting, email, LinkedIn. So much social media, so little time. I think we have to ignore some of it, some of the time, but on the other hand, what works? How does anybody get any email message read?

1. The Good

I don’t know why this one appealed to me as it did. The book is called “Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz,” by David Seaman. I never would have noticed it, except for the emails.

  • The first email in the series started with the words “press release” and I ignored it completely. I would never have known it was there if I hadn’t done a keyword search, looking for the second. I sent back an email template response, thanks but no thanks. I totally forgot about it in a flash.
  •  The second email annoyed me just a bit, but I noticed it. The subject line was “New Marketing Book Cures ‘All Problems’ with Businesses Affected by the Economy.” “All problems” was in quotes. I say annoyed me because what a stupid claim, a book cures all problems with businesses affected by the economy. But still, annoyed or not, I answered it. “Wow, what a claim,” I said. The answer to my email was a question: did I want a copy? Sure.
  • The third email came today: the subject line was “as the economy falters, fame becomes a valuable commodity.” There again, it gets my attention. 

I have the book now, I haven’t read it yet, but it looks pretty good. It seems real, like David knows what he’s talking about. For example, create real outrage, be controversial.  And here I am posting about it. See: email works.

But give me an angle. Make it interesting. For another example, take the email from a new company helping small business owners get out of auto leases (leasetrader.com). It didn’t end up as a post, but I remembered it today — two months later — because it came with an angle:

I think the story here is that there are thousands of small business owners that are in need of finding ways to either cut costs significantly, or identify ways of being smarter and more efficient. There are some hidden gems out there to help these business owners. Transportation is a big expense for a small business owner. Getting stuck with a lease after downsizing can be a death sentence on the balance sheet of any small business owner – especially when we’re talking about several company leases. So utilizing a lease transfer service to either get rid of a lease, or take over a lease, can be much more cost-effective.

2. The Bad

Sometimes I’m flooded with press releases about boring self-serving stuff that I don’t want to write about and you don’t want to read about: a new printer, a new website copycat, somebody’s temporary price reduction on accounting software.

I hate it when the emails keep coming on the same thing, as if I’m going to read it and like it the third or fourth time I get it.

Or how about the phone calls from would-be vendors you’ve never met and don’t want to meet, who act like its okay because they are “following up” on their letter of last week or the email from yesterday.

3. The Ugly

Ah yes, that too. It’s amazing what people take their time to do.

Here’s a comment I found posted below an article titled Writing an Executive Summary. This is quoted exactly as it was posted, including misspellings and capitalization errors:

If you need soemone to create a great summary memo or I call it presentation.contact me. many done in the past. Graphic work incorporated. Reasonnable fees. Memo summary: 10 pages maximum. SLide show presentation available as well. In English, Spanish or French. Translations available as well.

Just what you need — to hire someone who can’t spell someone to do your summary memo: someone who calls it a presentation, and spells reasonable wrong.

Sigh… just a bit of free advice, but if you’re trolling for business as a writer or editor, try to have the spelling and grammar correct.

People Are Annoying -0r- Why I Want to Sell to Commander Data

Marketing, Technology, Writing

If only we could just target computers to buy our stuff, instead of people. Some days I want to sell to that guy Commander Data in the Star Trek TV series and movies. He was a computer.

Disclosure: I’m not a Star Trek fan. I can’t even say “trekkie.” In fact, I know of Commander Data only because I was dragged to a Star Trek movie by a beloved family member. I thought he was the best character in it. If you don’t know him, here’s a YouTube link (or you can click the video below).

So why Commander Data? Because he isn’t human, which means he doesn’t have two extremely annoying human traits. He doesn’t lie, and he does read.

1. People Lie

This comes up today because of  Who’s Who and Who’s Not in the Freakonomics blog yesterday. (That’s one of the world’s great blogs, by the way.) Steven Levitt tracks some research related to the who’s who business. More than half the who’s who claims of military honors were bogus. People lie.

People are even more willing to lie when it’s a survey, or a form to fill out, or a poll. (Have you heard about the Bradley Effect, by the way?) When I was at Creative Strategies International we used to do polls of people’s intention to buy, and the respondents were always exaggerating their budget. Ask people in a survey how many hours they spend watching television, or what their income is, or books they read, and they lie. We know about the problem in resumes.

I can’t resist adding an old joke my mother used to tell, maybe just because it’s a great memory — she was born in 1923, and died years ago of cancer — but it fits. The frat boy asks the girl: “Do you drink?” “No.” “Do you smoke?” “No.” “Do you neck?” (And for those of you who don’t get that expression, cool it, this was my mother, after all, and she’s referring to the 1940s). “No.”

“So what do you do?” the boy asks, with a bit of frustration.

“I lie,” she answers.

2. People Don’t Read

People don’t read instructions. They don’t read manuals. They don’t read signs. They don’t read labels. It’s amazing how much you can’t communicate with simple signs.

We had a software problem, years ago, that we thought we’d solve by putting a dialog that made sure people understood the tradeoffs in taking one path in the options. Nobody read it. People called to complain. So we added a click, stopping the program, so they had to click “OK” to indicate they’d read and understood. Nobody read it. We put it in red. Nobody read it.

On the Web, you try to clarify commercial problems, putting it in simple words, as simple as you know how to do. Still, half the people don’t read it. Put it in red, and require a click, and they still won’t read it.

Conclusion? I like Commander Data. He doesn’t lie. And he reads.