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10 Blog Writing Lessons Learned from Authors, part 1

I have a few favorite authors that I turn to again and again. Authors whose books I kept when I got rid of 600 other books over a two week period. And while most of my bibliophile friends 1) can’t imagine doing that, and 2) are wondering why I didn’t call them first, I’ve enjoyed being free of most of my old and unread books.

But I’ve kept these authors’ books because I learned something from them. A lot of these writers, and one singer, have imparted lessons to me, either through their writings or their interviews. So here are 10 lessons I have learned from 9 of my most favoritest authors (and 1 singer).

1) Pictures speak volumes — Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions. Anyone who ever read Breakfast of Champions will remember the crude, childish drawings he included in his story, including a couple of drawings of people’s anatomy. I’m not suggesting you use these particular drawings, but rather, use pictures and videos to support your point and make your post more interesting to readers. Load your photos into Flickr or Picasa, or use Creative Commons or stock photos, and use them to add a little variety to your posts.

2) String together a series of ledes – Hunter S. Thompson. This is why Hunter S. Thompson was such a powerful writer. In journalism school, students are taught to write one lede (lead, if you must), and then supporting information, and the content gets less important and less interesting the further you go. But Thompson would just string together a bunch of ledes, one after the other — bam, bam, bam!! — and pummel you with them. Then he would calm down a bit before hitting you again with another series of body blows. That’s why he was so exciting to read. That, and all the crazy drug references.

3) Write short sentences — Ernest Hemingway, Big Two-Hearted River. I use this sample a lot in my writing presentations.

Nick was hungry. He did not believe he had ever been hungrier. He opened and emptied a can of pork and beans and a can of spaghetti into the frying pan. “I’ve got a right to eat this kind of stuff, if I’m willing to carry it,” Nick said. His voice sounded strange in the darkening woods. He did not speak again.

I checked this out once on the Flesch-Kincaid reading level, and it came back as a 3rd grade level block of text. Newspapers are written at about a 6th grade reading level, and your blogs should be too. Not because your readers are dumb, but because they have come to expect it. They want short, simple, and easy to understand.

4) Write long, flowing, descriptive sentences — Roger Angell, baseball writer for The New Yorker. Yes, this contradicts my previous point. I’ve been reading Roger Angell for about two years now, and he is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers. His descriptions of baseball games are magical. I can feel like I’m there in the park with him, in 1965, watching a Mets game, or in 1969, watching the Detroit Tigers. His writing flows smoothly, like an expensive new pen on creamy writing paper. There are times your writing will need to be more like Angell’s and less like Hemingway’s.

5) Use metaphors —Tom Waits — Putnam County, Nighthawks at the Diner. I talked before about how Tom Waits uses metaphors to create very powerful writing. His song, Putnam County is rife with metaphors and a couple similes. Take a look at what he says about the morning dawn.

And the impending squint of first light
And it lurked behind a weepin’ marquee in downtown Putnam
Yeah, and it’d be pullin’ up any minute now
Just like a bastard amber Velveeta yellow cab on a rainy corner
And be blowin’ its horn in every window in town

My point is that you should sprinkle metaphors into your writing to create the drama, vivid imagery, and power that will make your writing stand out from everyone else’s.

We’ll cover the 2nd half of this list tomorrow.

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5 Ways Arts Organizations Should Use Social Media

Arts organizations are facing funding cuts all over the world.

For example, Scotland is cutting £2 million ($3.1 million) for the arts. The National Theatre of Scotland, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Scottish Ballet, and Scottish Opera are all facing cuts of 10% in government funding.

This all got me to wondering how arts organizations could use social media to promote themselves, and find additional fans, attendees, and donors.

The Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra is one of the largest arts organizations in Indiana.

There are only a few arts organizations using social media, but with social media’s explosive growth, the organizations that aren’t are missing a great opportunity.

While you may think that social media is only for young people, this is a fallacy that has long been disproved. In fact, the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is women, age 50 – 60. If that demographic fits within your core audience, shouldn’t you be trying to reach them? And what better place to do it than where they are already?

Second, if your core audience is people in their 50s and 60s, don’t you want to try to reach a younger audience? Otherwise, your audience will get smaller and smaller as they retire, move away, and die. If a younger audience is using social media, then you should try to reach them in their world, instead of forcing them to come to yours. They haven’t come yet, and that’s not going to change any time soon.

So here are five ways arts organizations should use social media.

    1. Set up a blog and give readers a behind-the-scenes look at your organization. Your blog should be more than just a press release center. Don’t just make it a place to dump all your promotional information. Post photos of rehearsals. Let staff, actors, and performers post their thoughts on performances. Post diary-like reflections of preparing for an upcoming show or performance.
    2. Create podcasts of musical performances.If you’re a musical organization, create a regular podcast, and make that available to the public. People can listen to past performances and get an idea of what you sound like. But if you think “if people hear us on a podcast, they won’t want to come,” that’s untrue. (Did you know that was the argument by orchestras against selling sheet music, the Victrola, and radio?) The New York and Chicago Philharmonics have shows on public radio stations around the country, and the Indianapolis Symphony has a highlights show on WFYI, our local public radio station, and yet they still get people to attend. If anything, when people hear a performance, it makes them want to see it live.
    3. Create videos of performances. If you are a performing arts organization, try posting videos from past performances on YouTube, and then putting them up on your blog. This is especially true for visual performances, like dance and theatre troupes. This will let people know the kind of thing they can expect when they attend one of your performances. And if they like what they see online, they’ll want to be a part of the experience, and attend a show.
    4. Create a Facebook page for your organization. If there was a single social networking tool that was made for arts organizations, Facebook is it. Not only does it have the largest population of social media users (500 million people around the world), but it’s ideally suited for posting or reposting content from other sites. You can repost your blog content, videos, and photos to your Facebook page. You can ask your members and attendees to join, communicate with them directly, ask them to tell their friends, which will bring in new Facebook friends.
    5. Share your contacts with other organizations. Yeah, I saved this point for last, because a lot of you will think I’m crazy. But think about it for a minute: your biggest competitors are not the other performing arts organizations in the area, it’s television, movies, restaurants, and general laziness. You probably don’t share members, so you’re not competing for the same dollars. But sharing contacts could be a benefit to both organizations. For one thing, you can introduce dance fans to the music that supports the dancers. You can introduce theater goers to dance, another visual art form. And as you cross-pollinate your membership, both organizations will benefit, rather than steal members.How can you cross-promote with another organization?
      • Do a feature of each other in your respective blogs.
      • Promote ticket sales (buy one of ours, get one of theirs for 50% off).
      • Do a joint performance, like their orchestra playing for your opera. Have their chamber quartet play at your museum event.
      • “Like” their Facebook page, and encourage your Facebook friends to like it as well. Ask them to reciprocate.

      By combining your social media efforts, you can double your efforts, introduce a whole new audience — who is already predisposed to appreciating the performing arts — to your organization. The result is you’ll be able to add new audience members to each organization, and strengthen both.

What is your organization doing? Are you using social media, or do you want to try using it? And if you’re not in an arts organization, how have you seen other organizations using it?

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10 Advanced Blog Writing Techniques Used By Professional Bloggers

Anyone can write a basic blog. It’s not that hard. And I’ve talked for hours, whether at seminars or at a one-on-one “brain picking” session about basic blog writing. But I rarely get the chance to talk about advanced blogging, the secrets that I use to improve my blog, and make it stand out from the hundreds of thousands of basic blogs.

This is a good book to use for advanced blogging. At least until I write my own.

Here are 10 advanced blog writing techniques we use for our clients and ourselves.

  1. Use WordPress.org: I don’t have anything against platforms like Blogspot.com, WordPress.com, or Posterous.com (I have blogs on all three). But WordPress.org is what a lot of the pros use, because it’s extremely customizable and you can improve its functionality with a few plug-ins.
  2. Use a search engine optimization plug-in: We use All in One SEO Pack and Zemanta. Both of these let us do some additional optimization on our articles, which is something the other blog platforms don’t do as well.
  3. Choose 1 – 2 keywords or phrases per post: Stick with the mantra, “one idea, one keyword, one post, one day.” This post is about the keyword phrase “blog writing techniques,” and nothing else. Not about choosing topics, not about winning readers, not about whether video or photos help with readership, it’s just about how you actually write posts. By doing this, I not only boost my SEO efforts, but I don’t overload people with information.
  4. Write catchy, dramatic headlines: Your headline needs to be catchy, interesting, and compelling. Include phrases like “10 Secrets” or “5 Tips” to fire peoples’ interest. Also, be sure to use your exact keyword phrase in the title for better SEO.
  5. Use keywords in your anchor text: If I’m writing about blog writing techniques, I need to link that phrase to another article about that phrase (which I just did. Sneaky, huh?).
  6. Watch your keyword density: Density means the percentage ratio of keywords to copy. This particular article has about a 1% keyword density (1 keyword every 100 words). If the number is below 1%, search engines might not realize what your post is about. Anything over 2 %- 3% could be seen as keyword stuffing, and the search engines could drop you. Shoot for 1.5% – 1.99%. Divide the number of keywords by the total number of words to figure density.
  7. Automate your cross-posting: Use services like Twitterfeed.com and Ping.fm to promote your posts to your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts, and 40 other social networks. It will save you several minutes every time you publish a post.
  8. Use analytics to determine how your effectiveness: This lets you see where your traffic is coming from, what brought them there, and how long they stayed. You may learn that a particular keyword is getting a lot of traffic, so you write about that topic again. Or that a particular website is sending a lot of traffic, so you work to get published on that site again. I like Google Analytics for solid analytics.
  9. Publish your blog 2 – 3 times a week: Everyone who starts blogging has great intentions, but life intrudes and this resolution gets broken like it’s January 3rd. If you want to excel at blogging, you must write more than once a week. Schedule an hour a day to write, or schedule a three hour block, and write all your posts in advance.
  10. Become a fast writer: Writing fast means being able to find the best words and assemble 400 of them in 20 minutes. If you can’t do this, focus on those things that are holding you back, and work to overcome them. Being able to write fast will also help you publish more frequently.

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Wither Goest the Newspaperman? Why Blogging is Killing Print Media.

Whither goest the newspaperman, that bastion of bulletins, that purveyor of print?

He is, I’m afraid, about to be swallowed up by the electronic era.

When I was in college, I wanted to be a reporter. I wanted my stories to be delivered with a thwack! on the front porch. To be folded up and carried in a suit pocket. To be clipped and stuck to the fridge. I wanted to use words like “lede” and “slug line.” I wanted to rip my story out of a typewriter, and shout “COPY!” (I used to do this when I wrote for my college newspaper, to great laughs from my editor.)

Sadly, it was not to be. Instead, I work as a professional blogger, and am looked down on by “real” journalists at “real” newspapers. (Full disclosure: I am also a newspaper humor columnist, appearing in 10 weekly print newspapers around the state. So there.)

Last year, 53 weeks ago in fact, I wrote a humor column about Philadelphia Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky, who wrote his own column sneering at bloggers with:

I DON’T have a blog. If I did blog, this is what it would be like. (To make it seem like a real blog, I’ll include typos and factual errors.)

I would link to Stu’s original column, but it, like most of his fellow newspaper reporters, are no longer available. They have been cast aside, presumably to make room for newer, more up-to-date pieces.

Bykofsky, who is perhaps best known for saying this country “need(s) another 9/11” needs to realize that blogging is not going to go away. Newspapers, on the other hand, are fast disappearing from our landscape. I think reporters would do well to rethink their attitude.

To paraphrase Chicago humorist Rex Huppke (@RexHuppke):

It’s funny when journalists mock (blogging). It’s also funny when people about to be eaten by a bear mock the bear.

Huppke’s quote was originally about Twitter, but mocking a bear is mocking a bear.

So what are the journalists’ complaints about blogging? That we didn’t go to journalism school? They’re teaching electronic media writing in J-school right now. That our pieces aren’t properly fact-checked and vetted by editors? Disgraced plagiarizer fabricator New York Times reporter Jayson Blair could tell you a thing or two about that. Or is it that our stories aren’t printed on dead trees? I found Bykofsky’s original column online.

Citizen journalists — the people who are picking up the slack that the mainstream media are missing — have taken to the web to cover the news and write about the issues that journalists have been missing. If they’re not former journalists who became bloggers, they’re learning how to do proper journalism. The really good citizen journalists are writing stories that are just as good, if not better, than a lot of the mainstream media stories.

These modern day pamphleteers share the news and their opinions via a blog instead of a printing press. And while they are still looked down on, these citizen journalists have uncovered a lot of stories that Byofsky and his ilk have ignored, overlooked, or scorned. We’re breaking the news before The News does.

Griping about bloggers is nothing but pure elitism. Snob journalism at its finest. When children start playing a game, it’s not uncommon for the child on the losing team to pout, whine, and make excuses for why he’s playing poorly. And Bykofsky’s blogging gripes make him sound like he’s taking his ball and going home.

The newspaper industry has been in decline ever since the advent of radio and TV news. It slipped further into decline when Craigslist became popular. And now, blogging is threatening to be the final stake through print journalism’s heart.

We’ve seen significant gutting at our local paper (the Indianapolis Star will now be laid out in Louisville. Sounds about right for Gannett.), and journalists are being thrown overboard left and right.

A friend of mine worked for the Associated Press in Indianapolis, and was let go right before Christmas 2009, after 17 years of service. Why? The AP was losing money because fewer newspapers were licensing their content. So rather than stick with the professional who had the most experience and best judgment, they let him go in favor of someone with a lower salary and less experience. In another state.

So we have younger, less experienced journalists — remotely — running our country’s newsrooms, and it’s bloggers who are being dismissed out of hand as Not Real Journalists?

I’m sad to be watching all of this unravel. I think the decline of the big city American print newspaper is one of the great tragedies of our time. But I also see the future of the industry, and if it’s going to survive, it’s going to be online, not on dead trees.

Journalists need to stop deriding blogging, and embrace it instead. Learn how to do it now, rather than watching it pass by. You can either mock the bear or turn and face it. Otherwise, your next byline will be from the south end of a north-bound bear.

For related reading, check out:

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Conan the Barbarian Thinks Your Mission Statement Sucks

I hate your mission statement.

I hate vision statements, statements of purpose, guiding principles, mottoes, and business raison d’etres of all kinds.

That’s because most of them suck. They’re bland, boring, and don’t tell me a single thing about what a company does. Seth Godin found a doozy back in 2005:

To satisfy our customers’ desires for personal entertainment and information through total customer satisfaction.

It was so bad the company removed it from its website.

Now here’s a good mission statement:

To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women. — Conan the Barbarian

There is no doubt what Conan’s mission in life is. He wants to do one thing, and do it well. Anything else is a distraction that must be dealt with (which, in Conan’s case, involves sword play and eventual dismemberment.)

So why do companies write bad mission statements? Partly because they lose focus. Partly because they don’t want to offend anyone. And partly because they let more than one person write it, usually not the person in charge.

According to a 2008 article in Fast Company, AOL had a mission statement on a plaque in their lobby: (T)o build a global medium as central to people’s lives as the telephone or television… and even more valuable.

Once they accomplished that, and had become one of the media powerhouses of the new century, they asked a committee (GAAH!) to write a new mission statement. They came up with: To serve the world’s most engaged community.”

Seriously? It took more than one person to create that? Something that generic, bland, uninspiring, and just plain emotionally limp took an entire team of people? I’d bet they even met more than once to create it.

It is, as Fast Company said, “a creed that could just as well suit a Hardee’s.” While I don’t think this is what contributed to AOL’s downfall, they certainly lost their way from becoming “central to people’s lives… and even more valuable.” Life imitates art, and mission statements imitate corporate attitude.

Mission statements should inspire and motivate. They’re a battle cry, calling the organization to great and noble things. They’re not some namby-pamby, floppy, pitiful excuse for a gathering of words. They should be the very foundation of what that organization stands for.

President Kennedy established the space program in a speech in 1962 when he said “This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.”

NASA made that one statement their goal, and were successful six months before the end of the decade. That’s because they had a definable goal, a single principle to stand behind. They could look at any activity, idea, or program and ask, “will it help us land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth?” If it would, it stayed. If it didn’t, it was rejected.

So what does your company believe in? Is it something generic and noncommittal? The business version of “we should do something sometime?” Or is it loud and proud, demanding crushing and lamenting?

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The Growing Need for Bloggers as Citizen Journalists

Two bits of interesting news this past month for bloggers who consider themselves journalists:

I’ve been preaching for a while that bloggers are citizen journalists. And now we get confirmation that 52% of us believe it to be true, and that 61% of Americans are possible readers. Plus — and this is a big one — the last-reported numbers from Technorati are that 77% of all Internet users read a blog of some kind.

The time is ripe for bloggers to begin thinking of themselves as citizen journalists. Social media is making it so much easier for us to not only see the news, but report it as well.

Social media is breaking the news before the news.

We’ve seen several instances where social media broke news stories before mainstream media picked it up. The three most notable examples have been:

  1. The first images coming out of Haiti were on Twitter, because mainstream media couldn’t get on the ground. People with cell phones and spotty wifi were sending photos to Twitter and Facebook, and we were spreading them around like wildfire. My family was particularly interested in one set of missionaries in Port-au-Print, and @TroyLiveSay was providing information that we weren’t getting anywhere else.
  2. Moments after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, news was spreading on Twitter before the shots had even stopped.
  3. When the US Airways flight landed in the Hudson last year, news had broken on Twitter 15 minutes before the first news reports hit the airwaves.

While none of these examples show a failing of the mainstream media, they show that in many cases, people reporting on incidents that happened nearby ended up being first just because of the widespread nature of the tools.

I’ve been playing with Posterous as a possible blogging platform for rapid response and crisis communication professionals. You email your blogs to your email address (it’s actually just post@posterous.com), your subject line is your headline, you attach any photos, type and format your content in your text box, and voila! You’ve got a blog post sent from your smart phone.

And I totally geeked out a few days ago, when Chris Brogan showed how you can take photos on your digital camera, and immediately have them uploaded to your favorite file sharing service, with something the size of a quarter and something else the size of a pocket calculator.

My advice? If you have even the slightest inclination of being a citizen journalist, start taking your blogging seriously. You don’t have to change the scope of your blog, your writing style, or even the quality of your writing.

Just do it with intentionality. As hard as it may be to explain (this is the 6th time I’ve written this paragraph), report your news for posterity. Do it with a sense of responsibility and gravitas. When you see something happening, take photos and upload them to Flickr or Picasa. Send tweets. Email news to your blog. Be a source of information to your community. Don’t just repeat what you’ve seen, report on it.

Even something as simple as reporting a small incident you just witnessed can sometimes lead to national or even international stories, or you may be the lone voice that speaks for someone who can’t do it themselves.

While I’m not suggesting we all change our focus and become word slingers, I am suggesting we adopt the mindset that we’re just as good as the professionals who, I’m sorry to say, just aren’t as quick as the “ordinary citizens” armed with nothing more than cell phones and a serious case of Twitter-thumbs.

Related posts:
Rules for Being a Media Blogger
Defining Two Types of Crisis Communication
Five Things Newspapers Can Teach Us About Blogging
What Stylebook Should Bloggers Use?