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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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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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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?

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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.

Sources for this post include:

 

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No Bullshit Social Media: No Tree-Hugging, Kumbaya BS

The following is a guest post by my fellow author and good friend, Jason Falls. It originally appeared on his Social Media Explorer blog.

Now that the world knows Erik Deckers and I have written the soon-to-be-published No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide To Social Media Marketing, we’re beginning to do a lot of interviews. The first question we’re typically asked is, “Why did you write this book?” While that question is somewhat answered in the promotional video (see below) we recorded for the book’s spiffy new website, I thought it might be wise to dive a little deeper into that reasoning here.

Available at NoBullshitSocialMedia.com

As you may have seen on the Exploring Social Media infographic Social Media: Bridging The Gap we published last month, the stark reality of the marketplace is that too many businesses, especially small businesses, aren’t using social media. Heck, 44 percent of small businesses don’t even have a website! Only 27 percent of small businesses use Facebook. Just 18 percent use LinkedIn. The numbers are similarly staggering for the use of SEO techniques and online advertising. An astonishing 65 percent of small businesses — many brick-and-mortar retail shops — say that mobile marketing is not valuable to them. And this one floored me: 68 percent of businesses update their websites no more frequently than once per month. (See the infographic for the various sources of that data.)

While I’m sure Erik and I could have penned, “No Bullshit Digital Marketing,” and frankly, we may have to, we wanted to deliver the business possibility for social media to the masses. Business owners, marketing managers, executives … the people who are running these companies who don’t use or see much reason for using social media, mobile marketing or Internet marketing at all … they need to see that you can use social media marketing with business in mind. You can plan for success. You can establish goals.

I’ve said a few times I think this might be the first book that looks at social media marketing through a strategic planning filter, like you would other communications channels. We’ve stripped away the tree-hugger, Kumbaya bullshit and laid out the seven drivers social media can fuel for your business. We’ve collected case studies and examples of how others are using social media to drive those seven areas and we’ve put it all together into a book that hands you a blueprint for success in the social realm.

In my opinion, the book should have been written and published two years ago. But fate/timing/whatever got in the way. It might be a little late to the conversation for some of you, but I’ll guarantee you it isn’t for the mainstream business owners and executives who are showing up in those statistics as not getting it.

My professional mission at this point in my career is to make social media marketing more accessible. I help individuals do that through my learning community and question-answer site at Exploring Social Media. I help companies do that individually as a social media marketing strategic consultant. I try to translate that when I give talks and speeches as a social media keynote speaker.

No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide To Social Media Marketing is another way Erik and I can evangelize what we do and make social media marketing more accessible to those that need it most.

Download a free chapter at NoBullshitSocialMedia.com and pre-order your copy for a mid-October delivery today. We’d be honored if you did.