Journalists & Bloggers Toolbox Blog

If you use twitter, you may find that you quickly become overwhelmed by the number of people following you. Now here’s the problem — you need to follow people to build followers, but if someone follows you and you don’t follow back, they may stop following you.  There’s a “politeness” in the twitterverse that comes from returning follows and only the most popular of twitter folks can get away with having a huge number of followers and few they follow back. Ultra-popular author Neil Gaiman is one of those who has thousands of followers even though he only follows back a select few. Now, Neil does make it a habit to respond to @ messages (messages send directly to him).  But most of us need to follow back most of our followers.  And soon our list of friends grows well beyond what we can manage to keep track of.

This is where lists come in. Twitter lets you organize friends into groups or lists. You can then check in with your lists on a regular schedule to see what everyone is up to.  And you can keep your closest or most important followers all in a single list that you might use instead of viewing your regular timeline. I use hootesuite for this. I have a list for writers, authors, editors and agents that I regularly interact with. I named the list “writers” and keep in up throughout the day rather than my full feed which has far too many followers to keep up with.  I also use hootsuite to create lists for hashtags that I interact with, like the #amwriting or #amediting tags.

There are two interesting bits of news going on this week that should be of interest to bloggers and perhaps anyone who uses social networking.  The first article was a bit of academic type news that said that studies have shown that humans can really only handle a social network of about 200 people.  Now the study wasn’t focusing on Twitter or Facebook but rather real live interactions.  And the studies showed that no matter how social we think we are, our brains can really only keep track of about 200 family and friends.  After that we suffer from overload and can’t really remember details about the people we think we know.  I’ve experienced this personally on Twitter and Facebook. As an author I have lots of connections but often find myself staring at a name and trying to remember how I know them. Or if I really know them.

Which brings up the other bit of news. It seems that some people are surprised that Representative Anthony Weiner (of Weinergate — the current political scandal where a photo of bulging briefs was sent from Weiner’s twitter account) doesn’t know all his followers.  I’m going to assum that these shocked folks don’t know much about Twitter, social media or the public outreach a politician needs to have.  But Weiner has science on his side. If we really can’t keep track of more than 200 friends, then any public official can’t be expected to personally know the thousands who might be interested in what he has to say.

How many social networking contacts do you have and what tools do you use to keep track of them?  I’ll be talking about that more in future blog posts.

So you’ve started your blog with lots of energy and put up some posts and set your goals. And then you realize something. Blogging is taking more time than you expected. Suddenly this hobby or freelance job becomes a drain instead of an exciting way to bring in some money.  We all want to be part of this great blogging adventure, but we have to realize that we need to tackle it in a professional manner, regardless of whether it’s a profession or a hobby.

Structuring your blogging work can help you keep the blog from eating your life. Now, I’m not just talking about structuring your day, though that does help, but the work itself. I write a minimum of 8 blog posts a day, but that’s just the writing part.  I then have to post them, and that also takes time.  So I structure my blogging tasks by type to make the most of my efforts.  Since writing is the largest part of the task, it gets the biggest chunk of time, but I also schedule in breaks so I don’t feel overwhelmed.  But I don’t just write today’s blog today.  I look for a good source of inspiration or research that lets me draft out a number of blogs in advance.

Which brings up another part of blogging work – research.  This is one of the tasks that can lead many of us astray because we start research and get so caught up in it that we forget to stop and write.  So don’t try to research one article, write, research another article, write, etc. Block out a chunk of time for research. Plan it for when your writing energy is low, perhaps the end of the day.  Then gather research and make notes for a chunk of blogs that you can write all at once.

Posting can feel like another time drain. Learn how to schedule your posts on your blogging software.  That way you can take the articles you write in advance and do a big posting run and schedule them for publishing rather than needing to set aside posting time each day. And if you have the articles written in advance, you can also set aside a block of time for tasks like finding photos or researching supporting links or articles.

Manage the blog, don’t let the blog manage you.

I recently ran into a writer who was frustrated because he kept seeing advice for authors to have blogs when his writing professor had confidently told his class that blogging was dead. You know, sometimes even professors get it wrong. But the professor isn’t the only one to predict that social networking sites will completely replace blogging.  I can’t say they won’t, but I can say that if you’re living in the present, there are reasons you don’t want to give up your blog and reasons to even be sure you’re not using a free blogging service.

First, the social media take over.  While I agree that social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, are popular ways to communicate with friends and build networking lists, they just aren’t blogging. Take Facebook. Sure you can put up a page, but then you have to go invite friends and try to convince people to “like” that page. And some Facebook users are feeling a little inundated by the “like” requests. But then there’s another issue – you’ve essentially surrendered ownership and moderation of your content over to Facebook.  I know authors who’ve had material removed by Facebook because someone complained it was inappropriate. Do you really want to try to build a blog presence with Facebook looking over your shoulder?

And then there’s Twitter. I love twitter and I’m active on it on and off during the day. But 140 characters are really too short to convey a full message if you want to do something more than wave to friends.  So, to make the most of twitter, you really do need a blog to hold longer and more informative posts.

Now, the issue of free blog sites.  While free blogs are great for a casual user and certainly a way to explore the idea of blogging, they don’t necessarily send a professional message. Also, it can be difficult to find support for those free blogs when something goes wrong. If you’re a professional, let your blog say so with a real domain name.

The internet has created a trend – content providers.  Now, this isn’t really a bad trend or a new trend. After all, journalists are content providers for newpapers and magazines.  And, yes, they are content providers who often write according to assigned topics (or breaking news) rather than focusing in on topics of personal interest.  And the internet has created companies who hire writers for content. Well, sometimes they sort of hire them meaning they don’t pay for the article itself but devise a “pay for click” strategy that generally results in writers churning out lots of articles that they know will generate very little income. But hoping that creating enough of these will resort in a steady income.

And as a writer, you may be put in a position where you consider if this sort of work is worth investing in.  Now, I tried writing for a company that you may have seen advertising for writers on any job listing site.  They show up everywhere. The reason being that the income generate by most of their articles is so low that writers tend to start enthusiastically and then fade away.  A few may hang in there as if their work makes it to the top of the site. But the vast majority of articles written for the site produce very little money.

The problem is that working for these content farms limits your income from writing based on what the content farm wants to pay.  Essentially, you give them your article and often you give up many of your rights to what is your own work, and they decide what you get paid.

Today is a difficult day for me. I’ve become dependent on a number of tools to help me get work done and particularly to manage my social media needs. I blog, I write articles and I’m an author.  I use Twitter as a quick way to interact with others, let people know when I’ve written a new article or blog, and even to help market my novels.  But since I use Twitter so heavily and since I follow so many people, I use Hootesuite to manage my twitter needs.

And today Hootesuite is down. And it’s all Amazon’s fault.  Really, it is.  Along with selling books, Amazon also sells cloud web services to other companies. Now for a company like Hootesuite, using Amazon’s services means they can launch their cool social media tools without having to set up a huge server farm. But it also means if the Amazon service goes down, they go down. And today Reddit, 4Square and other sites when down with them. And they have all been down most of the day.

Now, Twitter itself is still operating. But that’s just reinforcing how much I depend on Hootesuite. Every time I want to tweet from a different account, I have to log out of one account and log back into the other. I can’t access all my lists and searches at a glance, but have to switch views each time.  I can’t really handle viewing updates from a few thousand people at once, so I normally check them out by groups. Today that’s gone and with it a sort of logical coherence that hootesuite lets me create for twitter.

The more we use social media, the more dependent we become on the tools that help us manage it.

Today I want to address a complicated and issue – copyright.  I’ve found that many bloggers and others often misunderstand the copyright issue and in fact often confuse copyright with plagiarism.  Not understanding can lead to actual legal problems.

First I’m going to look at plagiarism because it is the easier topic for most people to grasp. Plagiarism is when you use another’s words and pass them off as your own.  Most writers grasp this and honestly very few writers want to plagiarize.  Come on, we’re writers and authors and we like our own words too much.

But copyright infringement is a more complicated subject.  Now, when I write or create something it is automatically copyrighted to me. I don’t have to do anything to create the copyright. It’s just automatically mine because the words are mine. Now, if you steal my words and pretend they’re yours, then you’re plagiarizing. But what if you take my words – say this blog post – and put it on your site but include the info that it was written by me.  You aren’t plagiarizing.  But you are guilty of copyright infringement.

In simplest terms – when a work is copyrighted, you need the permission of the person who holds the copyright to use the work.  If you use the work without permission, you are violating the copyright — even if you give credit to the author of the work.

Why is this important?  Well, since this is a blog, I’m going to present that in a blogging example. Many people blog as part of an affiliate program. This means they are working to write articles and blog posts that will bring people to their blog and perhaps from there to their affiliates. As a result, a better blog post actually translates to money.  If another blogger borrows that post and puts it on their site, they are drawing people away from the original poster’s site and in turn can actually be making money from their affiliates based on content created by someone else.  This is only one example of how copyright infringement translates to lost revenue for the original author. And yes, you can be sued for this.

Now there are some complexities in this.  You can use quotes or excerpts from another writer as long as you attribute them and don’t use a large enough portion to be considered harmful. There is no legal amount for that, but you generally don’t want to take more than 10% of their content or have your writing be more than about that percent in borrowed content.  Also commonly known facts can’t be copyrighted.  Now the way those facts are analyzed might be. But you don’t have to worry about using common facts in a blog post or a story. As long as what you say around them is your own ideas in your own words.

I’ve discovered that some writers around me are still unfamiliar with Twitter and don’t grasp how to use Twitter. This amuses me because often these writers are actually younger than I am.  There seems to be a sort of “I’m above Twitter” attitude that the younger writers have while the older crowd is more inclined to admit that they just don’t understand Twitter. Which makes me suspect the superior younger crowd just doesn’t want to admit they don’t know how to take full advantage of Twitter.  For example, using hash tags.

Now Twitter hash tags have become so popular they’ve become a joke shared among twitter users.  So you’ll find real and useable hash tags as well as funny hashtags that you can’t imagine going past one specific tweet.  In simplest terms, hash tags are a way for twitter users with similar interest or  who are discussing similar topics to find each other.  Sometimes they’re used to apply to global events other times they may be written for more specific audiences.  But let’s say you write about the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan and want to help people on Twitter find your blog post. You can just tweet about it and hope it gets picked up on or you can tweet with a hashtag like #japan to get your tweet into the stream with others tweeting about Japan.

Or to put a more specific spin on it. Say you like to blog about dancing or TV shows and you’re writing reviews and blogging about a popular show like Dancing with the Stars.  Well, you go on twitter and look around a bit and you’ll discover that every night when Dancing with the Stars is on, a whole bunch of viewers are on Twitter sharing their opinions and using the hash tag #DWTS to find each other.  So you can join the chatter and share real time tweets about the show, then gently let people know you have a blog. Don’t over do it.  Just joining in to constantly tweet “read my blog” will create more ill will than good will.  You have to be part of the group.  If you want to give it a try, you also might want to check out using a tool such as Tweetchat to help keep you in the loop during fast moving hash tag events like the Dancing with the Stars show.

You know what social media on the web may have taught us — shorter can be better.  Look at twitter. I love twitter. I can keep up with hundreds of my fellow writers, everyone from professionals to friends. And the reason I can do that is because twitter restricts them to 140 characters. The site won’t let them be long winded. And trust me, writers can be long winded.  But there is no limit to how much you can say in an email.  So, you have to edit yourself.  And it’s a habit we should all learn.

How many emails do you get during the average day? How many do you think the person you’re writing gets? Now, how much time do you want to take to read an email? Guess what, that works the other way around too.  Do you know what the result is? Well, the shorter email that gets right to the point is likely to be read and answered before the long email is.  So here are some email tips:

Keep it short – no more than a handful of sentences

Get to the point – make the heading and that first sentence work for you

Ask only 1 or 2 significant questions – more questions will mean the reader is likely to postpone answer the email

End with a “call to action” – this is a business technique. If you’re communicating with someone, it’s because you need them to do something. End with that call to action and be specific about what you need from the reader.

Include a “due by” date – dates are more likely to catch the reader’s attention.

Let’s see. That’s five items. You should be able to do that in five sentences, shouldn’t you? Hey, it’s more space than Twitter gives you.