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Erik Deckers

About Erik Deckers

Erik Deckers is the President of Pro Blog Service, a content marketing and social media marketing agency He co-authored four social media books, including No Bullshit Social Media with Jason Falls (2011, Que Biz-Tech), and Branding Yourself with Kyle Lacy (3rd ed., 2017, Que Biz-Tech), and The Owned Media Doctrine (2013, Archway Publishing). Erik has written a weekly newspaper humor column for 10 papers around Indiana since 1995. He was also the Spring 2016 writer-in-residence at the Jack Kerouac House in Orlando, FL.

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What William Faulkner Would Say About Content Curation

I’m reading an interview with William Faulkner in a 1956 issue of the Paris Review. He said this about critics:

The artist doesn’t have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don’t have the time to read reviews. The critic too is trying to say “Kilroy was here.” His function is not directed toward the artist himself. The artist is a cut above the critic, for the artist is writing something which will move the critic. The critic is writing something which will move everybody but the artist.

I’ve been saying this about content curation for the last few months. A content curator is that person who assembles content in a meaningful and important way, to get other people to read (or not read) that content.

For Faulkner, the critic is trying to move “everybody,” but the artist is trying to move the critic. For today’s bloggers and writers, we’re trying to move “everybody,” but since there are so many of us, we know we’re not going to reach everybody. So we hope some popular content curators (critics) will help us move everyone as well.

We call these curators and critics “influencers,” and we think that if we can get them to tell their networks about us, we’ll be more widely read, and more easily able to move “everybody.”

Of course, that means if you want to move people, you need to 1) write good shit, and 2) have people who like it.

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15 Social Media Tactics to Promote Your Upcoming Theatrical Show

We just finished the 10-day festival of independent theatre and weirdness known as the Indianapolis Fringe Theatre Festival, and I had a chance to see a few shows, including a couple of old favorites.

I also had a chance to talk social media — because I’m an annoying geek that way — with a couple performers, and decided to write a blog post based on what I told a couple of them.

Didi Panache and Wayburn Sassy of the Screw You Revue

This post is written for any musician or performer, especially the independent theatrical types who depend on ticket sales to make their living. For some of these performers, they bounce from festival to festival and make a good portion of their income from their take. Some even use one festival to pay for the next one.

This is a strategy they can use to improve their take next year.

What You’ll Need

  • A laptop computer
  • A digital camera with video capabilities. If not, your laptop’s camera will do.
  • A Twitter account.
  • A blog (WordPress.com or Blogger.com are great free platforms, as is Posterous.com and Tumblr.com)
  • A YouTube account.
  • A Facebook page. (This is different from a personal profile. You want an Artist’s page.)

What You’ll Do

These are in a general chronological order, but not in a do-one-then-the-next lockstep order. I’m using the Indianapolis Fringe (#IndyFringe) as an example, but this will work for any concert, performance, show, or festival.

 

  • First, make sure your Twitter bio includes a line about the name of your show, or your most famous character’s name. If you only performed in one festival, put the name of that in the bio too. “You may have seen me at the #IndyFringe Festival!” You can always change your bio, especially as you move from festival to festival, or follow specific groups of people.
  • Start following people on Twitter. People will follow you back, especially once they see that you’re a performer at the festival they went to, and even moreso if they were at your show. To find people who were at the festival, do these steps:

 

  • Go to FollowBlast.com and do a search for #indyfringe, and follow anyone using that term. Keep in mind that these hashtags only work for about 30 minutes, so it’s actually a good idea to access this site while you’ve got some downtime at next year’s show.
  • Build a hashtag archive at TwapperKeeper.com. I’m still trying this out, but I’m hoping it will collect old hashtags, unlike FollowBlast.com. However, it only goes back 7 – 10 days, and back for 1,500 tweets. It will then go forward and continue to save tweets. You should set this up before your next festival starts. Work in conjunction with the festival organizers, because they may want to use your archive as well. Also, before you start, search to see if anyone else set up an archive before you so you don’t duplicate efforts.
  • Go to search.twitter.com as another way to search for #hashtags. Put in #indyfringe and see what you can find. Search results are somewhat limited, but you may be able to find older tweets that FollowBlast and Twapper Keeper couldn’t, especially if you’re seeing this now, and are scrambling to recover those old tweets.
  • If all else fails, try Topsy. It’s not 100% accurate, but it gives you more than you might get if you’re looking for a festival that ended three weeks ago.

 

  • Check out the festival organizer’s Twitter page and follow everyone they follow (not everyone who follows them). If they have been good Twitter stewards, they have vetted the people they’re following. Those people will include other performers, supporters, festival-goers, and other people in the industry or festival business. (This last group could be a good connection to getting into other festivals!) Do this with any festivals you plan on going to next year as well.
  • Use Twellow.com and Twellowhood.com as a way to find other people who are in the cities where you’ll be next year.

  • Why You’ll Do It

    Okay so far? You’ve built your Twitter list for a very important reason: Promoting stuff! You’re going to promote next year’s show through videos, your blog, and even email newsletters. Here’s how.

    Zan Aufderheide of Welcome to Zanland
    • Now you need your camera. Start shooting some short videos. Update us on what you’re doing, where you’ll be, thoughts on stuff you did this year. Treat it like a diary. If you’re an actor playing a part, do it in character, especially if that character is going to be back at the festivals next year. Shoot the videos in character, or tell some jokes, or give people a preview of what you’ve been working on. Shoot some rehearsals, some special messages to individuals, or perform a new song.
    • Post those on YouTube.com (make them public), and make sure you fill out all the details, like Title, Description, etc. (all this stuff is indexed by Google, which makes your videos found more easily by people searching for you or the festival).
    • Share these videos on Twitter and your Facebook page, and post them to your blog (do the same with any photos you take). This will accomplish a lot of pre-show promo before you ever set foot in the city. And if you can get people buzzing about the show before you start, you’ll be selling out more shows.

    You can get a Flip camera for as low as $170 now, and if you think that’s still high, use the money you were going to spend on fancy-schmancy postcards and spend it on the camera instead. The postcards are immediately dated once the festival ends, and you can’t reuse them. The video camera will pay for itself with all the videos you shoot and the postcards you don’t buy.

    Finally, there are a few things you want to do next year, to get ready for the next off-season.

      • Build a mailing list of all your attendees. Send around a clipboard before your show begins, or have them sign up before they leave. Ask people for their HOME email, not their work email — especially if your show is laden with profanities and cross-dressers. Guard this with your life. Promise to never, ever spam them. Use it only for newsletters and occasional social media communication.
      • Load that list into a Gmail account (here’s why you should use Gmail), and then either use the Rapportive.com Gmail plugin, or upload the email list to Gist.com, to start finding where your list members can be found on the different social media networks. Follow them on Twitter, and connect with them on Facebook.
      • Send out an occasional newsletter — no more than once a month — and email it to them. Let them know what you’re working on for next year so they get excited about your upcoming visit. Give them an opportunity to unsubscribe, but try to give them useful information so they won’t want to.
      • Use your video camera to shoot post-show testimonials and get them up on your blog as soon as a show ends. Tweet the new blog posts to your Twitter network during the show, so you can continue to remind people you’re there and you’ve got an awesome show. Ask your Twitter network to retweet your show information, so they can help you spread the word.

    There is so much more you can do with social media. Believe it or not, this is just scratching the surface of what can be done. But while it seems overwhelming, keep in mind two things:

        1. This will get easier as you do it more often.
        2. It beats the hell out of busking and handing out postcards in 90 degree heat.

    Photo credit: Erik Deckers

 

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Crisis Communications Needs Social Media to Be First, Be Right, Be Credible

Crisis communications has one overriding mantra, one foundational principle that drives every emergency they respond to: “Be first. Be right. Be credible.”

If you’re not first, you’ll spend your time playing catch up for hours, days, or even weeks.
If you’re not right, your mistake will be repeated, or worse, cited as the truth.
And if you’re not first or right, you will never, ever be credible.

Crisis communication — also called CERC, or Crisis Emergency and Risk Communication — is what emergency first responders use to communicate with the media and the general public. It’s how the health department communicates warnings and updates during a public health emergency. It’s how Homeland Security communicates with the public during a terrorist attack.

CERC, compared to corporate crisis communications, is all about getting the right information out as soon as possible, and being seen as the source for news and information about an incident.

But it’s not happening anymore.

Five years ago, it was enough to just email a press release — which had been approved by a committee — to the mainstream media. Then you answered media calls and arranged interviews. You didn’t communicate with the public, you communicated with TV and newspapers.

But the definition of “the media” has changed. Today, anyone with a smartphone and YouTube is a TV journalist. Anyone with a smartphone and Facebook is a photojournalist. Anyone with a laptop and a blog is a newspaper reporter. The citizen journalist is the person with news to share and a way to share it. Quickly.

This makes the mainstream media crazy.

Not only are the citizen journalists breaking news before the media, they are becoming the first, right, credible sources of information, not CERC.

These days, news is coming from the people who are on the ground. They’re repeating everything they hear and see, and everyone else is passing it on.

CERC communicators need up-to-date technology if they’re going to stay up to speed. They need access to the various social networks if they want to reach the public. Using 4-year-old Blackberries and laptops is not enough anymore. And letting IT block all access to social media networks only makes the problem worse.

(I’ll save the discussion about why IT should not be involved in communication issues for another time.)

If CERC communicators want to stay on top of a situation, rather than being third in the race, they need to remember their roots. They need to use the technology that will make them first. They need to learn how to be right without committee approval.

Because until that happens, they’re not going to be credible.

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Three Reasons Why Your Blog Needs to be Well-Written

If you can’t write, you won’t show up on the search engines.

That’s because Google is now looking at user experience as its primary ranking factor. That means, they check whether people are sticking around on your site, reading the great content you provided.

They also know when people leave your site because it sucked.

According to a Google employee, Wysz, on the Google Forums, Google uses a number of different signals to find low quality sites, including shallow or poorly written content. Here’s what Wysz says:

Our recent update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites, so the key thing for webmasters to do is make sure their sites are the highest quality possible. We looked at a variety of signals to detect low quality sites. Bear in mind that people searching on Google typically don’t want to see shallow or poorly written content, content that’s copied from other websites, or information that are just not that useful. In addition, it’s important for webmasters to know that low quality content on part of a site can impact a site’s ranking as a whole.

This can be a bit of an ego blow if you actually create your own content. I mean, it’s one thing to try to trick Google with a bunch of crap copy that got puked out by an article spinner. You shrug your shoulders, say “it’s a fair cop,” and then figure out another way to peddle your penis pills.

But if you’re not trying to trick Google, it has to be the worst feeling to find that Google dinged you because your writing was shallow and poorly written.

While Google isn’t getting into the literary criticism business or making moral judgments about you as a person (that’s what Facebook is for), Google wants you to write good copy that uses proper spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Here’s why:

  • People spell and use grammar correctly when they search. That’s because Google will correct their spelling in a search. “Did you mean _____” appears at the top of the search engine if you typed in a word incorrectly. Or if they think you’re really stupid, they just ignore your word choice and do a search for the correct spelling, giving you the option to click the less desirable, incorrect choice.
  • People share awesome. Scott Stratten said this once, and I’m stealing it. If you write some great stuff, people are more likely to share it. That means people are more likely to link to it in their own blogs, which builds backlinks, which helps your Google juice. But, more importantly, Google is starting to tailor your search results, not with the “official objective” results, but with the results you are more likely to be interested in. For example, you Google “Moleskine notebooks.” Instead of getting the regular search results for Moleskines, you’ll see a blog post I wrote about the little black notebook in your results. You’ll either see it because we’re connected socially, or because someone in your circle shared it, tweeted it, or even left a comment.
  • Google is getting better at semantic search. That means, Google knows what you meant, rather than what you said (see #1). Combine that with the fact that programs like Microsoft Word can check your grammar, and I can see a day where Google uses a grammar checker in their indexing to weed out not only the shallow, poorly-written copy used by spammers, but start dinging the poorly-written copy from people who just can’t write to begin with. After all, Google is about providing the best user experience. So that may start including ranking “good” writing higher and “bad” writing lower. While I can’t see them using an Amazon.com review system to rank sites, I can see them pushing all the lunatic ramblings, misspellings, and drunken love poetry off the top pages.

If you’re a writer, this is one more reason to work on improving your craft. If you’re not a writer, this is a great reason why you need to improve. And if you’re a business trying to rank high in the search engines, this means you need to consider hiring a ghost blogger or other professional copywriter who actually knows what they’re doing.

Photo credit: Leo Reynolds (Flickr)

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Social Media Crisis Communication Lessons Learned from Indiana State Fair Stage Collapse

At least 4 people died and 40 people were injured when a stage collapsed at the Indiana State Fair before a Sugarland concert as part of the State Fair festivities.

As I flip around the three main TV stations (I have forgotten to check out WXIN, Indianapolis’ Fox affiliate), and watch Twitter, I’m amazed by the level of activity I’ve seen on Twitter. I’ve also seen some things happen with social media crisis communications that I never dreamed would happen when I was in that role at the Indiana State Department of Health. Other things I have seen (or not seen) don’t surprise me one bit.

  • The main sources of news are the four main news channels here, WTHR (NBC), WISH (CBS), WRTV (ABC), and WXIN (Fox), and the Indianapolis Star (@IndyStar). Several people are retweeting news they see on TV. Nothing is coming from any of the official channels, and TV stations are left to interview witnesses and replay the same cell phone videos over and over. One station looped the same video at least 14 times in 10 minutes.
  • Officials have been asking people to update their Facebook pages and send tweets to let loved ones know they’re okay. The cell phone towers were jammed, especially as first responders were also using cell phones, and people weren’t able to call in or out. A friend, Elizabeth, was searching for information on one of her friends, Jenn, and finally received word that she was okay, a la her Facebook page.
  • The first response agencies have done or nearly nothing with social media (compared to the London police, which updated people about the status of the riots via Twitter).
    • The Indiana Department of Homeland Security (IDHS)* has a Twitter feed, but has not updated it since August 8th. Their Twitter feed reads more like a list of press release announcements.
    • Mayor Greg Ballard’s Twitter feed has basic announcements every 30 minutes.
    • The Indiana State Police never even mentioned the tragedy, and the Indianapolis Metro Police Department haven’t updated since June 5.
    • The Indianapolis Department of Public Safety (@IndianapolisDPS) was providing basic information via their Twitter feed.
    • Other than @MayorBallard, there was nothing from official channels.

    While I don’t expect these groups to give us a minute-by-minute update via Twitter, if they are involved, they should be communicating with the public, even if it’s to tell people to tune in to local news for more information. If they’re not involved, they should at least refer people to the proper agency.

  • The first rule of crisis communication is to “Be first. Be right. Be credible.” The very agencies that people are depending on for this information were not. And now that social media has become more prevalent, the days of depending on emailed press releases written by committees and regularly rescheduled press conferences are way over (a press conference was originally scheduled for midnight, and then rescheduled to 1:30 am. But they could have kept the news media up to date with occasional tweets and quick blog posts).
  • I’m struck by the irony of the authorities asking people to use social media to give updates while they barely use it themselves. Hopefully this will convince the first response authorities start to use it themselves.
  • When I was in crisis communication, one of our roles was to respond to and squelch rumors and bad information. Not only was there not any of this happening from official sources, like IDHS, Indiana State Police, or even the Indianapolis Police, it was the Twitter users who were correcting information. This represents a major shift from who is the trusted source of news: social media has just shown that it’s the people, not the authorities.
  • The crisis communicators responding to crises like these need to start including social media in their own responses. Not only can they get news out to the public, they can respond to rumors and bad information immediately, squelching it, and getting out good information instead.
  • The news media would be smart to start streaming their news programs on their websites during emergencies like this. I was communicating with people in Chicago, Alabama, and even Toronto about the incident. All I’ve been able to do is send them to stories on sites, but they could watch this live if the stations would stream their emergency news broadcasts.
  • People on Twitter are affecting the news coverage, or at least are being heard. At one point, WTHR had shown the collapse of the stage (via a cell phone video) more than 14 times in 10 minutes. Shawn Plew tweeted this fact, and @WTHRcom responded and said they would mention it to the producers.
  • One of the reporters from WISHTV (the CBS affiliate) downloaded different videos from YouTube to his computer, so he could play them on screen with a double-click, rather than worrying about streaming from YouTube itself. He’s using a large screen TV so we can see the videos more easily.

If you’ve ever had any doubt about the need for a smartphone, or the power that citizen journalists wield, know this: all of the footage and images that all the newscasts are showing, and the ones that the national news outlets will be playing over and over, came from people and their smartphones. Not news cameras recording the aftermath of an event, but real action shot by real people who were on the scene.

Most of the information people were getting via Twitter was coming from anyone who was discussing the event, watching it on TV and passing word along, or even listening to the live stream of the scanner traffic online.

Once again, social media has broken the news, and gotten images out before the news broadcasts could. That’s not an indictment of the mainstream news, it’s a testament to the power of social media and citizen journalism. But it should show government agencies and corporations that they can no longer rely on traditional media to break the news or even discuss the story.

*The IDHS coordinates the efforts of the Indiana Police Department, emergency managers, fire departments, and other first responders. They would sometimes be involved in a large-scale event like this, even in an advisory capacity.

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The Difficulties of Writing With Nonsexist Language

I was called a sexist because of a single tweet.

At a blogging session at Blog Indiana, I said, “If you’re opposed to ghost blogging, then let the woman who answers your phone introduce herself to every caller.”

I actually hesitated for a moment. What was a less sexist way of asking this? I knew there was a potential for trouble, and there was an easy way out of it, but I wasn’t a big fan of the solution, so I skipped it.

Then I followed it up with “If you’re against ghost blogging, let your copywriter sign her name to your brochure” to balance things out.

Sure enough, I got called out by Mary Long (@lawfirmPRwriter): “or how about “the PERSON who answers your phone shouldn’t introduce themselves?” Not all writers are men/women are secretaries.”

Yes, absolutely. Not all women are secretaries (actually, they’re administrative assistants now, as I’ve been reminded many times), but Mary’s solution is the one I was trying to avoid.

Now, I loathe the “he/she solution.” As in “If you’re against ghost blogging, let the man/woman who answers the phone introduce himself/herself.” That’s just ugly.

Or, I could be a little more generic and use “themselves,” but it’s actually wrong. And since I just got done giving a keynote about the importance of language and writing, I didn’t want to abuse the language, even though I had just advocated the overthrow of the “don’t end your sentences with a preposition” rule.

The problem is if I talk about the one person who answers the phone, I can’t use the plural themselves.

Plus I’ve been admonished by our editor on No Bullshit Social Media not to do that, so I hesitate doing it now.

So I fell back on what I usually try to do, and balance it out. I’ll use the male pronoun sometimes, but because I know better, I balance it out by using the female pronoun and possessive at other times.

And if I do something like “the woman who answers your phones,” I’ll follow it up with “let the copywriter sign her name.”

I don’t always have the space, especially on Twitter, to be completely nonsexist or inclusive in my language. And I don’t want to be as politically correct as I had to be in the 1990s, filling every grad school paper with he/she and him/her.

I have to be satisfied with being nonsexist over my entire body of work, and making sure that I balance the hes and the shes. I make sure that I don’t always talk about nurses as being women or doctors as being men. It’s not a perfect solution, and it requires the reader to read more of my work than a single 140 character remark, but it’s the best solution I’ve found.

It can be a real struggle and I would know what solution other writers have found. How do you solve the sexist language question? Have you found a workable solution? Do you have any suggestions?