Do You Just Happen To Write Items That Matter?
In my editing life I meet quality control reviewers, non-profit administration, analysts, business owners, PhD candidates… all writers, willy-nilly. They make life-and-death decisions about entire organizations, determine the significance of scientific findings, catch the eyes of customers, promise value for grant money, and more. And just about all of it has to be recorded in black and white for posterity. It’s the “posterity” part that tends to get writers of all kinds...
Read MoreWhy You Can’t Benefit From Escaping The Echo Chamber
Every so often I read a post that cries out into the ether: Is it just me, or is everyone saying the same thing over and over again at the same time? Nope. It’s not just you. It’s all of us. Carry on. We’ve all heard the simple “birds-of-a-feather” explanation, but isn’t that just an excuse? I mean, birds don’t choose. We choose to surround ourselves with the people we do. We choose to read what we read. We choose to share what we share. So why is it...
Read MoreAvoid Using Your Powers Of Influence For Evil
In the course of conversation, Small Biz Lady Melinda Emerson said to me yesterday, “I don’t want to use my powers for evil.” I can’t remember the last time anyone with as much online and offline weight has said this aloud–in my presence, anyway. To help others, definitely. To combat negative forces, certainly. But the above statement gave me pause. There was no vanity in it: it was a bald acknowledgement that influencers can’t behave the same way as...
Read MoreA Public DM: Can I Talk To You In Private?
I use two Twitter accounts. One (@ShakirahDawud) is mostly for communicating mostly with colleagues and people of interest in my field. The other (@DeliberateInk) is mostly for finding and communicating with the businesses and industries I’m out to serve. On this second account, as I’m checking out who’s who in Clientopia, I notice every other time someone follows me I get a tap on the shoulder: a direct message. Let’s freeze the frame on that finger just before it hits...
Read MorePaper.li: A Clearer View
Background: About a month ago, I posted my excitement about Paper.li, one of the Twitter newspapers that are growing in popularity. I wrote about the ease of setup and the short-term benefit I could see from having launched it a few weeks ago. What I loved about it and still do: I can be exclusive about who contributes what articles to it, so naturally I include only people I follow and respect, and whose information on writing and editing I trust. The appreciation I’ve received from...
Read MoreHow to Grow a Targeted Twitter Following with Paper.li
About five months ago, I began to notice regular tweets from some of the folks I follow on Twitter. They read something like, “The Paper Daily is out! Top stories by @suchandsuch and @soandso,” followed by a link. Sometimes even my own name was listed, which was startling. When I clicked, I was greeted by a newspaper-style page full of the latest tweets with links to news stories and blog posts focused on a certain topic, or covering more than one topic, with one theme....
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