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My Keynote Talk at Blog Indiana

Last month, I got to do something I’ve wanted to do for the last four years: give a keynote speech at Blog Indiana. While it wasn’t my first keynote, it was going to be a special one because I had been attending Blog Indiana since it started. In fact, I think I have given more talks than anyone at the history of Blog Indiana, mostly because one year I not only gave two talks, I gave them twice.

But this was going to be the big one, the one I had hoped for when I first started bugging the organizers about it two years earlier.

I also knew I needed something new to talk about. Something that went beyond my typical 10 Secrets for Promoting Your Blog or 10 Ways to Build Your Personal Brand.

The t-shirt, courtesy of ooShirts, says "Eschew Convoluted Phraseology." It means "avoid big words."

So I decided to focus on writing as my topic, but because I can never get away from 10 Secret Anythings, the topic was 10 Secrets I’ve Learned in 24 Years of Writing.

I’ve spent the last 24 years writing just about anything you can think of: books, newspaper columns, web copy, brochure copy, technical manuals (I hate these with a burning passion, by the way). I’ve written stage plays and radio plays. I’ve even written speeches for a US Congressional campaign.

And in those 24 years, I have learned that it’s the language that’s most important, and how you use it. It hasn’t been the experience, the knowledge of the industry, or whether I have experience with a certain type of writing. It’s whether I have a good grasp of how to use language effectively.

So I talked about important aspects of writing that have defined my own writing career — focusing on one aspect of writing you want to improve, and then doing it everywhere; know when you can, or even should, break the grammar rules; and, not to let your love of your words get in the way of good editing and improvement.

I even dropped the F-bomb in my talk to illustrate how words that represent the worst of what we do — like killing and torture — too casually, as in “my feet are killing me” and “traffic was torture today,” but the word that describes how the best thing we do — make other humans — is an awful word that is horrible to say.

I even had a special t-shirt made for the occasion, thanks to the generosity of ooShirts, who gave me a couple shirts as part of their promotion. So I got a writing related shirt that said “Eschew convoluted phraseology,” which is the ironic — some might say snotty — way of saying “avoid big words.” I also got a second one to give away, which Brooke Randolph won by being chosen by random after sending out a special tweet.

I had a great time speaking, and have finally achieved my goal of giving the keynote at my favorite conference. Thank you to everyone who was there, and for the kind words during and after the talk. And special thanks to Shawn Plew and Noah Coffey for allowing me to speak.

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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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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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Google Wants You to be a Better Blog Writer

The days of schlocky web copy and $1/post off-shore blog writing are over.

Thanks to Google’s new Panda update, your writing can no longer suck. You can’t just get by on 8th grade writing skills, or by hiring an off-shore blog writer for a buck a post anymore.

The new Google Panda update stresses usability and the user experience over whether you have the right keywords in your title and body copy, and over backlinks. Oh sure, they’re still counted, but Google is not putting as much emphasis on those as they once were, thanks to the recent JC Penney backlinking scandal.

As a result of this, and other Google gaming-techniques that were being abused, Google said, “You know what? That’s it. No more trying to trick us. Now we’re going to start looking at what your users are doing.” (Watch the Rand Fishkin video at the bottom of this post for a much better explanation than I just gave.)

Now, Google is starting to pay attention to the user experience: Do they visit more than one page, which means they like what they see? Are they on for a minute or more, or do they bounce out after 10 seconds, which means you didn’t captivate them? Did they even visit your page when you were at the top of the search engine (i.e. did your page even look interesting)?

The short of it is, if your site sucks, people won’t visit. If they visit, they won’t stick around. And they certainly won’t subject themselves to more than one page of it.

So how do you get them to stick around? You’d better have great content. Not just good enough, not barely readable. Not “meh.” It needs to be awesome.
 
 
 

Photo credit: peromhc (Flickr)

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Ernest Hemingway’s Five Secrets to Good Blogging

Ernest Hemingway would have kicked ass as a blogger.

No, really. I’ve been on a major Hemingway kick for the last several weeks, reading his short stories, his books and ideas on writing, and even a collection of stories he wrote when he was a cub reporter with the Kansas City Star, and I’m convinced he would be an A-List blogger in a matter of weeks.

Hemingway’s writing habits are what would have made him an ideal blogger.Here are what I think his five secrets to good blogging would be.

  1. Write and speak with authority. Hemingway knew he was a great writer. He was not humble about it at all. While I’m not suggesting you act cocky and arrogant, you do need to write with authority. Don’t waffle around with qualifying statements, like “I think it may be possible” or “If I had to make a choice, but only if I really had to make one.” It makes you sound like a ninny. Hemingway once said of his criticism of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, “Jesus, it’s marvelous to tell other people how to write, live, die, etc.” In other words, without being an insufferable jerk about it, have the confidence to tell people how to do the thing you’re writing about.
  2. Avoid adverbs. Adverbs are those things that tell how something was done. “He ran quickly.” “She laughed loudly.”Don’t use adverbs at all. You can’t run slowly, otherwise you’re jogging. You can’t laugh loudly, but you can belly laugh or guffaw or snort; a soft laugh is a chuckle. Don’t describe the verb, use a more descriptive one.So, don’t tell us something is “really cool” or “fairly unique.” For one thing, cool is cool, and unique is unique. For another, “unique” means “one of a kind, there is nothing like it in all the world.” You can’t be “fairly one of a kind.” While Hemingway was not a fan of adjectives either, he and many other writers have spoken out against adverbs. It’s something you should quit using as well.
  3. Don’t write for “The Reader.” In a letter to Arthur Mizener, Hemingway wrote, “I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect; or if not that, then wonderful. Then you write for who you love whether she can read or write or not and whether she is alive or dead.” That means, don’t worry about what the critics and haters and jackasses are going to say. Don’t anticipate what comments you might get, and how you can head them off at the pass. Don’t avoid controversial topics just because you think someone might disagree with you. Write for you, and make it awesome. Then, write it for just one person, and whether it will please him/her or not.
  4. Have a set writing schedule. I’m trying to adopt this idea myself now. Block out a time each day where you can write uninterrupted. Don’t take meetings, don’t answer email, don’t do Twitter. Just write. Hemingway’s schedule was to get up early, get to the typewriter by 7:00, and write until lunchtime. Even when he was starting out and had to work odd jobs, he would only do them after lunch. He didn’t drink until he was done writing, and he would even get up when he was hung over. But no matter what, he was always writing at the same time every day.
  5. Leave stuff out. Hemingway believed in the Iceberg Theory of writing. That is, while an iceberg may look massive, only 20% of it is sticking out of the water. There is sooooo much more that lies beneath the surface. It’s that below-the-surface structure that makes the visible part so impressive.Ernest would omit everything he could. He already hated adverbs (#2). In his dialogue, he never used any word other than “said,” not replied, shouted, retorted, or complained. He avoided entire scenes of action, leaving the reader to come up with his own idea of what happened. His greatest example of Iceberg writing is his now-famous six word novel, “For sale: Baby shoes. Never used.” All kinds of questions hang over that story, most notably, “why?” The answers we create in our own heads are the hidden part of the iceberg that Hemingway wanted us to understand.

    Similarly, as bloggers, we need to leave things out. Don’t use descriptions of what you were thinking when you came up with a certain blog topic. Don’t do exposition. Explain why something is important, and what it means to us. If you want exposition and background, create a separate post and link to it — “if you’re curious as to why I thought of this, click here” — and then count the clicks. If no one clicked it, you didn’t need it.

Blogging is the new newspaper. Posts need to be short, punchy, and interesting right from the very beginning — all characteristics that marked a Hemingway story. Follow these Hemingway techniques to make your posts more interesting and dramatic.

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