Tag Archives: Social media

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American Idol: Good on ya, @HarryConnickJR

Harry Connick Jr at Tulane University May 16, ...

Harry Connick Jr at Tulane University May 16, 2009. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My heroes have been using social media to share an interview with Harry Connick, Jr., conducted after he spent a week acting as a mentor for American Idol participants. Betty Buckley used her Twitter account to get the word out. She retweeted Michael Feinstein‘s tweet. Two of America’s finest song interpreters support Connick’s point of view, and, if I read between the lines, lament with him.

If you haven’t been following the story, here’s my debrief. Connick coached four Idol contestants who were tasked with singing songs from the “Great American Songbook.” Or as I prefer – songs from the time when lyrics and melody counted! The upstarts ignored his advice, and Judge Jackson took him to task for the advice he gave one young lady. Connick made the point that a singer can’t sing a classic properly if he or she hasn’t taken time to understand the context and meaning of a song. Harry expects his singers to do homework!

Great actors do their homework. Interpreting Shakespeare requires effort. Why shouldn’t singers put some effort into singing the poetry of  Larry Hart, Cole Porter or Ira Gershwin? Good on ya, Harry!

Thursday night, I’ll be in the audience when Buckley interprets Memory for the zillionth time. I believe she is going to sing it as if it were the first time. Because Betty understands the power of lyric interpretation.

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Content Marketing: Three Books, One Review

Content Marketing Book ReviewsGet Content, Get Customers: Turn Prospects into Buyers with Content Marketing

Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett are the co-authors of this 2009 book. Joe runs the Content Marketing Institute. He lectures around the world on the subject and produces an enewsletter with tips and ideas for content marketers. This book is much like his blog, full of great content delivered in such a way that I felt like I joined a conversation half way through. If you want to know what content marketing is, I suggest you peruse Joe’s blog, which is current.

Content Marketing: Think like Publisher – How to Use Content to Market Online and in Social Media

Rebecca Lieb wrote this 2012 book. If you have a print background and are trying to shift into online marketing, this book will make sense to you. It may be the place to start if you’ve been hiding your head in the sand hoping that online marketing would go away.

Content Chemistry: An Illustrated Handbook for Content Marketing

Andy Crestodina wrote this 2012 book. Google Andy, you’ll discover that he takes his own advice. Always a good sign. You’ll find his twitter handle, Google + account etc. Of course, using his name as the keyword phrase is not a best practice. He makes a sound case for doing some detective work to identify the keyword phrases that will deliver traffic and with the right content conversions.

His book really is a how-to book, with charts,lists, exercises, and a chemistry analogy that had my hyperventilating until I read it. If like me you skipped chem in high school, do not fear. Andy’s analogy makes sense when you read it. As does his book from front to back cover.

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Glee Breaks the Fifth Wall

A gaggle of girls giggle on a bus about their favourite television characters. A band of bros battle about their home teams over a pitcher of beers. A coffee clatch argue passionately for Timmy’s versus Starbucks. That’s the way passionate social discourse used to unfold. Social media has changed that. Now people, who may or may not know each other,  express points of view about things that capture their fancy without the filter of face-to-face interaction. Heated debate isn’t tempered by the good manners mother instilled.

One subject that engenders extraordinary, and seemingly irrational, passion on social media is “ships.” Another word has been co-opted by the computer world and the meaning changed. Shipping is publicly identifying favoritism for a couple who are in relationship. The word is a corruption of relationship. Are you Team Edward or Team Jacob? Do you ship Brangelina or Will and Kate? The choice of ship can be real or fictional. Whatever it may be the favoritism is vocal, very vocal. Death threats were made to an actor who booked a role that was intended to interfere with a relationship on Glee.

On Thursday night, in episode 9 of season 4, the writers of Glee broke the 5th wall – the social media wall – turning the tables on one of those partisan, vociferous group of shippers. My jaw dropped as I listened to the monologue  unfold. To emerge from my television screen that bit of argument had to be shaped by a writer, approved by the showrunner, OK’d by the executive producer, and pass the rating-focused review of suits in corporate. That it did was telling.

Backgrounder

To understand how revolutionary that moment between Sam and Brittany was, you need some background – unless you are a fan of Glee. [Skip this part if you are.] Brittany, one of the original characters, has identified as bicurious. She has dated nearly everyone in McKinley, eventually going steady with Santana, who identifies as lesbian. The couple became as significant for the lesbian community as Klaine became for the gay community. Shippers of Brantana fought a losing battle on social media to keep the couple together. Glee’s powers that be chose Season 4 to break apart all their power couples, regardless of sexual orientation.  Their plans for Brittany however went beyond a mere break-up, the Glee producers decided that Brittany’s next romantic entanglement would be heterosexual.

Dousing the flames before they started

Sam made his move on Brit. She made it clear she was willing. But declined. Her explanation broke the 5th wall. It was priceless, and funny, gut rippingly funny. Brittany feared that if they became a couple, Sam would be killed by social media rampaging lesbians who felt betrayed by her switch from Santana to Sam. Glee doused the flames of social media reaction before they began. And I loved it.

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Essential 21st Century Skill: #Writing intelligently in fewer than 140 characters

Emergency "Twitter was down so I wrote my...

Emergency “Twitter was down so I wrote my tweet on paper and photographed it and posted on flickr” : Satire on internet culture (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is a post about blogging for the time-crunched aka Tweeting. (65 characters including spaces) Concise, clear communication is the goal only some of the time. (63 characters including spaces) If I tweeted those two sentences I would have used 128 out of the 140 characters available. Should I leave it there, or use the remaining 12? That depends. (Without the period that phrase is 12 characters long). Let’s take a look at the thought as if it were a Tweet:

This is a post about blogging for the time-crunched aka Tweeting. Concise, clear communication is the goal only some of the time. That depends.

The absence of the question from paragraph one, completely changes the meaning of the Tweet.  Am I able to rewrite the Tweet to express my original message? Something has to give…

Tweeting, blogging for the time-crunched, demands concise, clear communication, but does it require we use all 140 characters? That depends.

I used all 140 characters. I didn’t have to overlook the final period. But…I couldn’t use some Twitter conventions like hash tags (#). Hash tags have a number of uses, depending on your motivation. {I’m going to use depend a number of times in this post…you can depend on it.} Marketers and Late Night TV Talk Show Hosts love the hash tag. Oh, and revolutionaries. Hash tags allow people who share a subject in common to converse in an alphabet-soup manner.

If I had added # to communication – no space between the symbol and the word – my message would appear with all other messages that contained the word communication and/or the hash tag #communication. The Twitter feed could contain information about IT stock, telephony, writing, classroom assignments, etc., as well as my message. If the hash tag is unique – no one else has thought of using it – the entity that launches that tag can identify a Twitter audience. Creating unique hash tags is increasingly difficult.  Today’s number one hash tag in my region? #Halloween.

The elevator pitch is an old marketing trick. Reduce your sales pitch to 2 minutes or less, as if you were communicating your concept to someone you met during an elevator ride. If you can’t you haven’t thought it through. The 21st century equivalent? The Twitter pitch.

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Testing HootSuite

Efficiency is cascading messages across social networks. In communication terms, however, that’s like substituting a doctor’s script for a billet-doux. HootSuite has a lot going for it, but its integration with WordPress is not one of them.