Doing it right

On Monday, I wrote about Livia Blackburne's thoughts about blogging to reach your audience. Her post dovetailed with a brief social media session Mitali Perkins held at Chautauqua. Mitali's had me thinking ever since. Specifically, I've been wondering about this:

How can you contribute to children's writing in a way that sets you apart? 

Lots of writers blog about writing. It helps us to connect with other writers, and perhaps to the intended audience. But if someone has the option to follow what a well-known, established author writes versus someone just starting out, which would they choose? As writers, we need to create our niche in the blogosphere.

Mitali suggests brainstorming (free write in a journal) what you want to contribute. Ideally, you do this before you even begin your blog, but you can always modify your content as you go.

Blog about things that serve kids and parents. What are you passionate about? Are there topics that come up again and again in your writing? Themes that weave through your work? Blog about those kinds of topics. Discuss related children's books or activities; provide them with resources.

Mitali does this at Mitali's Fire Escape: a safe place to chat about books between cultures. She blogs about writing, but she also writes posts about the issues that appear in her books. She provides resources for readers, so they can find out more about a topic or even find a way to help. These posts are for kids, parents, and teachers - the audience.

Me? I'm passionate about science, nature, and grappling with complex problems that don't have a black and white solution. It's important to me that everyone see both sides of an issue (which happens all too seldom these days). All of those things come up in my writing. To reach my intended audience, Mitali said I should blog about other nonfiction books, fiction books that cover similar kinds of topics, and science-y activities that kids and parents can do together; things they can do to make a difference.

How do you let your intended audience know about your posts? Send out provocative twitter posts that link to the blog post, and reach out to the audience you want to reach. Mitali has lists of people involved in the issues she writes about. Find your audience. Let them know you're there. Give them a reason to stop by.

For me, that means you will be seeing new kinds of posts. Posts about terrific books, posts about important subjects, posts about things kids (and teachers and parents) can do to get involved. I will also write a bit about writing (there's still lots to share from Chautauqua), but that won't be all I blog about.

How will you change the way you blog?

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The social experiment

My procrastination poem from Friday poked fun at Facebook and Twitter users (yes, I am on both). This morning, I happened across an article about the influence of social networks on our overall behavior, and I thought it worth sharing.

David DiSalvo's article, Are Social Networks Messing with Your Head? (Scientific American Mind, Jan/Feb 2010), provides a wealth of information about the numbers of people using social networks, how they use those networks, and whether they derive benefits or suffer costs in so doing.

A few (remarkable) facts:

• Facebook has only been around since 2004. In the past six years, it has grown from a site that connected students at Harvard University (which is how I first heard of it) to a global phenomenon. 
• Facebook now has 250 million members in 170 countries. As DiSalvo points out, "If Facebok itself were a country, it would be the fourth most populous in the world, just behind the U.S."
• Though less widely used, Twitter has seven million active members "who broadcast more than 18 million snippets a day to anyone who will listen."
• About half of the members on Facebook access it daily, and the most avid users spend 2 hours a day on Facebook while at work. 

Clearly, social networks (and I have focused here on just two—those that many authors use regularly), have become a huge part of our lives. So what impact do they have on us? On our well-being, sense of connection with others, productivity?

Researchers have done several studies of Facebook users to better understand the dynamic. They have found that people who use social networks to replace face-to-face interactions become lonelier over time. They attach greater importance to the number of friends/followers that they have, and they tend to feel greater anxiety when they experience long delays in hearing from others. In contrast, people who use the site to maintain contact with people with whom they interact in real life benefit from it. They are better able to maintain contact over periods when they might otherwise be too busy to keep in touch.

Using Facebook and Twitter for professional purposes (e.g., as a writer) can be extremely beneficial, provided that it is done well. Posts need to be interesting, relevant, and (perhaps most importantly) should not merely advertise one's own work. Others consider such posts narcissistic and quickly learn to avoid the sender. In fact, many successful bloggers and writers have written posts about the importance of focusing on the work of others, rather than your own. Consider it good Karma.

In addition, writers can use these networks to "meet" new people; when conferences roll around, the groundwork is in place to quickly and easily make the online connection a face-to-face one. In such situations, the benefits include those described above and the opportunity to greatly increase your network of professional associations.

Are you on Facebook or Twitter? How do you use them? Do they benefit your life, and if so, how?

Twittering

Well, I did it. I joined Twitter. And I have absolutely NO idea what I am doing. I have the rather disorienting feeling that I am standing in the middle of a rushing river, with snippets of conversation rushing past me. Conversations that I cannot follow, since I only see a small piece of them. Anything I tweet is carried away by the flow of words. Nothing comes back to me.

Fortunately, Justine Musk at Tribal Writer has a terrific "writer's starter guide to twitter" that has been a terrific help. I've followed her advice on the initial set-up, and now I'm at the looking-around-and-getting-to-know-the-culture stage. And trying to build up my tweetstream, which is hard to do, when I have the feeling that no one is listening.

So I am left with questions: Do I just jump in and start tweeting questions to people? If a conversation catches my eye, how, exactly, can I follow what it is about (and join in), since I tend to see only one side of it? Is it considered rude to interject my 140-characters' worth into an existing conversation? How do I go about finding the people I want to follow? Yes, I am slowly wading in, not quite ready to confront the full current of tweets, but thanks to Justine's terrific post, I am getting there.

And that brings me to another question. I have a Facebook fan page (for those wonderful people who like my stories—there's another poem on the way soon, this one for the parents out there), and I have my personal FB page, but I don't really want to share pictures of/information about my children with people who are not close friends or family. So should I set up a professional FB profile? One that's not a fan page, but rather one for professional connections, with other authors, agents, editors? How do people typically manage this? Can anyone in the writing community give me some advice?

Personality and marketing

I am learning, as I explore the world of writing and publishing, that the 21st Century author must have a strong online presence.  The three big places you need to be are on your blog, on Facebook, and on twitter. I've got the first two, but I'm having a difficult time with number three.

There are quite a few people I would love to follow on twitter. They say interesting things and I'd love to hear their frequent updates. It's not that I don't want to join because I am uninterested in the tweet stream of others. It's that I just don't know what to tweet about, myself. And yet that's an important part of modern writing: marketing yourself.

I think it comes down to personality type. I recently took the Myers-Briggs personality test and discovered that I am an INFJ personality, which is, apparently, extremely rare (a whopping 1% of the population has this personality type).

INFJs focus on possibilities, think in terms of values and come easily to decisions. [They] ... have [an] unusually strong drive to contribute to the welfare of others and genuinely enjoy helping their fellow men. This type has great depth of personality; they are themselves complicated, and can understand and deal with complex issues and people.

INFJs are usually good students, achievers who exhibit an unostentatious creativity. They take their work seriously and enjoy academic activity. They can exhibit qualities of overperfectionism and put more into a task than perhaps is justified by the nature of the task. They generally will not be visible leaders, but will quietly exert influence behind the scenes.

INFJs are hard to get to know. They have an unusually rich inner life, but they are reserved and tend not to share their reactions except with those they trust. Because of their vulnerability through a strong facility to interject, INFJs can be hurt rather easily by others, which, perhaps, is at least one reason they tend to be private people. People who have known an INFJ for years may find sides emerging which come as a surprise. Not that INFJs are inconsistent; they are very consist and value integrity. But they have convoluted, complex personalities, which sometimes puzzle even them.

INFJs like to please others and tend to contribute their own best efforts in all situations. They prefer and enjoy agreeing with others, and find conflict disagreeable and destructive. ...INFJs have vivid imaginations exercised both as memory and intuition, and this can amount to genius, resulting at time in an INFJ’s being seen as mystical. This unfettered imagination often will enable this person to compose complex and often aesthetic works of art such as music, mathematical systems, poems, plays, and novels. In a sense, the INFJ is the most poetic of all the types. 

 (quoted from Myers-Briggs Type Indicator General Profile at Purdue University).

I don't know about the genius bit, but the rest describes me pretty well. And it is comforting to know that I'm in good company: Chaucer, Goethe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jimmy Carter, Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela, and quite a few famous actors and actresses (who would have thought that introverts would become actors!).

Interestingly, this rare personality type seems to be quite common among writers. A recent blog personality survey (which seems to have been taken down) indicated that at least 25% of writer respondents shared this personality profile with me. Well over 50% shared the Introverted, iNtuitive, and Feeling traits. There must be something about these traits that make for good story-tellers. But does it make for enthusiastic tweeters?

I am working hard to overcome my introversion and am getting closer and closer to joining twitter. It's just another step on my journey, and I'll let you know what happens when I do.

Take the Myers-Briggs test, yourself.  What's your personality type? How does it affect your life?