Conversation

Expecting Conversation

Expecting Conversation

Garth Beyer

Instagram Photo

I see a lot of social media posts and talk to others who create online content wondering why they are not getting any engagement, why no one is commenting on their Instagram photo or replying to any Tweets. My reply is two-fold.

Lack Of Communication

Those who see the blog post, the Instagram photo, the podcast, don’t know what they are supposed to do next. Amateurs – and I don’t mean it as an insult – simply state what they want the viewer to do. Some write “leave a comment in the comments section below” at the end of their blogpost or ask “please share this video with your friends” at the end of their YouTube bit. It works!

The more experienced communicators can craft the message in a way that asks the viewer to participate, to communicate in some way without asking straightforward. The wording, the voice, the structure matters, but takes hours of practice to get right.

Writing into a void is easy, writing to interact without requesting the interaction is di-fi-cult.

Take care how you craft your next message, when you write your next blog post, when you post an Instagram photo description. Be sure an objective viewer will know what you want them to do.

Lack Of Emotion

Simply stating, a lot of created social media content is safe. It’s banal. It’s all numbered, bolded, bulleted and smells like a PowerPoint.

If you’re not getting interaction (when interaction is what you want) you’re lacking emotion in your content. The Instagram photo isn’t moving enough, the YouTube channel doesn’t make the viewer feel like anything has changed after watching, the blog post doesn’t make the reader giddy to start something new.

The question to ask before you start anything, before you tweet, before you share a photo on FB: how do you want viewers to feel?

Just as important, the question to ask before you finish anything, before you hit send, before you upload: will the viewers feel what you want them to feel?

 

Stay Positive & Voice Matters

Photo credit: me

A Bit On Voice

Garth Beyer

Without any legitimate training in the understanding of artistic material, you can tell good from bad.

You may not be a graphic design expert, but I trust you can look at a website and tell if it is designed really well.

You may never have touched an instrument other than the pots and pans of your mother’s cupboard, but I will bet you can tell when an orchestra is in harmony.

You may think you’re a terrible writer, but when you read something someone else has written, I just know you can tell if the writer has voice or not.

Everything in life speaks to us, but only if it’s given a voice.

A lot happens, rather, doesn’t happen when a writer fails to have voice in their writing. When there’s no voice, there’s also no humanity in the piece, no node for the reader to connect to, no electricity.

Peter Elbow refers to voice as juice. “’Juice’ combines the qualities of magic potion, mother’s milk, and electricity,” Elbow said.

By ‘magic potion’ he implies there is power in the words, power to change the reader’s emotions, power to produce an entire world in one’s imagination, power to turn someone’s worldview over in a pan and call it sunny side up.

In mother’s milk you receive the nutrients you need to grow. Voice is a way of using words to express how much you care about a subject, and, by extension, the reader. Words that nurture the reader, giving them all they need and more, those words have voice; you might even say your mother’s voice.

As for the electricity I have mentioned, it’s about conversation and establishing an experience. Do you know what I mean?

That, right there is a question I’ve posed to you through the written word. Your engagement level rose, perhaps you answered the question, perhaps not. If you did, that is because there is voice in my writing. Maybe you wanted me to explain more of what I meant or in your mind added to my side of the conversation.

Conversations have energy and develop experiences.

Voice, in a way, is energy. Words can touch a person, pat them on the back, tap them on the shoulder, and stroke fingers through their hair. If you type words the way you say them conversationally, that’s how to find your voice. Then you can proceed to clean up the flow, but not too much.

Elbow also disccusses the potential and often-occurring action of overcorrection. You may have voice in your writing and through editing, remove the voice. Making all the corrections you can, editing something so it reads and looks perfect, takes out the humanity of the writing, and humanity is what people connect with. Notice the spelling mistake at the beginning of this paragraph. It reminds you I am only human.

While removing all spelling errors doesn’t quite remove your voice, reworking sentences so they are completely grammatically accurate can. When you make writing flawless, the reader thinks a robot is talking to them. No one wants to be spoken to by a robot. Unless, of course, they are a robot.

 

Stay Positive & Everything You Do, Do With Voice

The Marketer’s Lost Touch

Garth Beyer

While studying up on some public relation strategies in regard to various businesses focused on beer I’ve found one consistent bit that leads me to believe there are still a lot of marketers with a lost touch, especially when it comes to press releases.

Erik sums up the typical press release well, “We have something new (usually beer) and we think what we have created is pretty cool. Would you like to share this news with your readers?”

I’ve seen emails, Twitter direct messages and FB posts with the a similar paraphrased marketing message.

For the marketers reading this who believe this kind of “outreach” works, you’ve lost your touch (or perhaps never had it to begin with).

The duty, privilege and opportunity of any marketer is to craft a unique message per person. Journalists, businesses and now even bloggers won’t give a damn about your press release unless you give them a reason to give a damn about you or you first somehow show by any means other than a press release that you care about them and understand what they cover.

Most press releases have an exceptional story to tell or have an update on a really exciting product, but unless you talk to people the way people talk to people, your story won’t get told. Good marketing is a conversation. Great marketing is turning strangers into friends.

 

Stay Positive & Don’t Go Losing Your Touch Again

Oh, and this seems like a fair place to let you know I have a tumblr blog where I document bottled beers I’ve had. I rate them, describe the taste for you and share the memory of when I first tried the brew. Feel free to stop by.

 

Your Business Is Boring (Or Maybe Just You)

Garth Beyer

Before proceeding, I must note, personally, I never get bored. Bored is a choice, as you will read, whether you’re a business or an individual. I may find myself in a boring environment, but I keep myself entertained. It’s been three years since I said I was bored. Something I’m proud of.

The coffee shop I used to go to daily; it got boring.

The job I have; it’s gone down the hill to boring.

A big client I’m working with right now; the brand is boring. (…reason I have them as a client.)

I quit talking about an old favorite restaurant; boring, boring, boring.

I’ve let more friends I can count on two hands go; they were boring.

Dare I say, you might be boring too.

You might be boring if you’re not learning new tricks of your trade. You’re certainly getting boring if you’re playing things safe. Boring doesn’t just happen. Boring isn’t some sort of natural roadblock on the path to building a successful business. Being boring isn’t a prerequisite for making a breakthrough in the market. Boring is a choice.

You choose to avoid risks and stay in your comfort zone. You choose to remain out of the conversation of friends. You choose to show or, in most cases, hide your personality.

If you’re bored, what do you do? You do just about anything that will make you not feel bored, right? The same goes for customers, for friends, for clients. If you want to lose customers to your competitors (and fast!), be boring.

Do just about anything to not be boring and there’s no way you won’t be talked about, interacted with, referred to. Isn’t that your goal?

 

Stay Positive & If You Don’t Try (Something New), You Will Fail (By Becoming Boring)

Here’s A Cup, Go Measure

Garth Beyer

If it’s so difficult to bake a cake or make cookies from scratch, how do you expect to read results that are hard to measure? (Obviously this post is more for those like me, who can’t bake a cake or make cookies. Alas, I hope this to still be noteworthy.)

We can look at the number of cups of flour and water and chocolate chips you need just like you can keep track of the number of visitors to your website and the clicks you get on each page.

Very easy to measure.

What about a cake without a recipe? Or the personality of each individual who visits your blog and what they actually want or if they were satisfied with what they found?

Much more difficult.

Luckily, food writer Michael Ruhlman breaks down cooking into easy-to-understand ratios of ingredients, a method he says allows for more creativity in the kitchen.

“When you know a ratio, you don’t know a single recipe, you know a thousand.”

The same can be applied to your website, your product, or your own creation-without-a-recipe. All you really need to do is ask and connect to your audience. It’s hard to know a thousand audience members before you know what the single most common one is like.

 

Stay Positive & Start A Conversation

Garth E. Beyer

Where To Start

Garth Beyer

That’s the question isn’t it?

You want to work for Twitter, you want to start a business, you want to kickstart your freelance career, or – in my case – you want to get into public relations.

Sure, you can read some books, bookmark some websites, favorite a few blogs and justifiably consume, but that won’t get you started. There’s no action to that; it’s passive learning and passive learning is preparation, not actual movement.***

The most solid way to start any journey is

with a conversation.

Screen Shot 2013-04-29 at 7.28.36 PM

An email, a tweet, a message is all that it takes to start. After connecting with @E_Humphrey, we conversed about the PR industry, we began interacting with each others tweets, and we even found out that we have a lot of the same connections in town.

And how did both her and I make those connections? It all starts with a conversation.

 

Stay Positive & Go Find A Mentor, A Friend, A Teacher

Garth E. Beyer

*** the exception is if you start a blog where you share what you learn (my pr box)

 

Let’s Cooperate

Garth Beyer

As in, fill in the mortar, wear the shoes issued to you, fit the status-quo, stick to the plan, follow the rules, do as everyone else does.

Traditionally, anything outside the aforementioned is considered not cooperating, which is a case of serious misinterpretation.

There are two correcting tributes about cooperation that must be noted.

The first is that cooperation is conversation. Cooperation is not an order of command, but a dialogue of two (or usually many more than two) people.

Second, cooperation is interaction. Interaction by definition results in a variety of influence and effects. A single demand of many is not interaction.

To cooperate is to dance, to play, to connect the loop of insight and feedback. Cooperation is vital in the workplace and even more vital in the home and the heart. Keep this in mind the next time someone tells you that you need to cooperate. You may need to remind them what cooperation really is.

 

Stay Positive & I Prefer Interactive Operation Over Cooperation

Garth E. Beyer