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10 Social Media Steps You Should Take Today

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US Women
from Velo Steve

I spend my time reading articles on how to improve my social media skills, but often, feel extremely overwhelmed. It’s almost as if technology is whizzing past me and I’m on a bicycle, racing faster and faster, trying to keep up. Perhaps I need a new bicycle.

Like most people, I love to learn, but cannot help myself from dreaming of Belize, where I lived for a year, from 2004-2005, and wrote in my journal, “I’m bored!” What I meant was, I had so much free time on my hands, I remember finishing a 1,000 piece puzzle with my ten-year-old son, Jordan. The next time I sit down to a 1,000 piece puzzle, I shall probably be in a retirement home.

This is not a luxury that most of us writers, bloggers, and self-employed, have in today’s world, where things have turned towards branding and self-promotion. I recently ordered a great book, Celebritize Yourself: The Three Step Method to Increase Your Visibility and Explode Your Business, by Marsha Friedman, an expert on PR and branding yourself.  Marsha clearly points out that becoming a celebrity means, “You’re not really talking about yourself: you’re simply opening a dialogue about what you know, what you learned, what you have to offer and how you can help your listener.”

So first thing this morning, I started reading Eva Kaplan-Leiserson’s article on “10 Social Media Steps You Should Take (But I Don’t Have To)” and now realize which areas I need to focus on. Please read Eva’s article for a detailed explanation on how to accomplish these ten goals.

1. Launch your website. Include such sections as About Me and Contact Me, including a good description of what you do. (Mine is reserved Soniamarsh.com.)

2. Create a blog. (Done) As Eva points out, “Make sure you’re going to post regularly. It doesn’t have to be every day, but it should probably be at least every week, to keep people coming back.”

3. Set up a program like Google Reader for others’ blogs. (I use Google Reader to keep up to date with other blog posts. Do you?) Eva mentions, “There may be some people who still don’t tweet their blog posts.” I hope you do.

4. Start a Twitter account and create a background. (Do you all have Twitter accounts? Let’s connect.) Eva explains the importance of, “Titling your account with either your name or the name of something else you want to brand (your company name, your book name, etc.)”

5. Use a Twitter dashboard like TweetDeck. (I’m doing that today. What about you?) This allows you to “glance columns for people you follow, direct messages, tweets that mention you, even Facebook status updates.”

6. Create a Facebook Page. (Is yours for business purposes?) “If you have a company, create a page for it. It’s important that this be separate from your personal page.”

7. Join a Facebook Group. (I’ve joined several groups. Have you?) “Groups are great ways to keep in touch with certain segments of your friends or get support for certain niche interests or activities.”

8. Set up a Linkedin account. (I have one, do you?. If so let’s connect.) “While more and more people are using Facebook professionally for their companies, Linkedin is still the go-to place for individual professional accounts.”

9. Link to social media accounts on your website. You need big, visible buttons up on your website so that people can easily subscribe to them.

10. Explore other options but don’t get overwhelmed. (I am still figuring this out as I keep learning.) As Eva points out, “it’s better to use a few tools well than create 100 different social media accounts that will look like ghost towns because you never use them.”

Now it’s time for me to race my new bike again. But first the gym to warm-up. What about you?

Successful bloggers tell stories like Darren Rowse

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A few weeks ago, I discovered something about Darren Rowse, the Australian guy (guru) behind ProBlogger I didn’t know. Apart from his expert advice on blogging, he wanted to share another facet of himself by conducting a bold experiment called: the Tanzania Blog Project. He decided to take us into the lives of ordinary Tanzanians, especially women and children with medical issues, and share the wonderful work conducted by CBM: an Australian non-profit..

Darren wanted us to see and feel like we’re with him, without leaving our comfortable armchair. Through his daily interviews on video, we’re able to follow the lives of Tanzanian kids like Athman, the ten-year-old boy who is constantly picked on because of his disability. Darren’s video shows us what CBM in conjunction with CCBRT (a Tanzanian non-governmental organization) are doing to help at their disability hospital in Dar es Salaam. Darren states that Athman’s biggest problem isn’t his physical disability, but his “social isolation.” He managed to capture Athman getting mobile on this video.

We get to hear about another common problem in Tanzania, women with fistulas. This is a problem that can be treated, but many women live in “shame” and are also “socially isolated” or badly treated by others. Darren interviews two women, Hadija, who is older, and who has suffered 30 years with her fistula problem. She did not realize it could be treated until a younger woman, Niguala (who’s had a fistula for two months) heard about the hospital from a neighbor.

Some of the harsh realities of Tanzanian life are:

  • 35 women die a day from maternal health issues.
  • 120 babies die within 24 hours of being born every day.
  • Fistulas are a common problem in women in Tanzania, many caused by child birth.

Darren says in his final video, “Instead of thinking about the depressing aspects, we need to focus on the fact that there are people out there helping.” Disability is more about not being able to participate, because kids and adults are secluded by others. “It’s our attitudes that stop disabled people from reaching their potential.”

I agree with Darren that getting involved with project like the Tanzania Project, reminds us of some of the things happening in other parts of the world. I think it’s uplifting to see volunteers helping. I know I benefited tremendously from my ten days of volunteering with a group of U.S. nurses in a Mayan school in Belize.

It’s difficult for many to travel to far away places like Tanzania, however, I appreciate the way Darren captured the “stories” of many women and children, and opened our eyes to what’s being done, and how we can help.

Why do we let young girls dress like that?

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Have you noticed how more and more teenagers and tweens are dressing provocatively or is it just me?

In an article by Jennifer Moses in the Wall Street Journal, she poses the question, “Why do so many of us not only permit our teenage daughters to dress like this—like prostitutes, if we’re being honest with ourselves—but pay for them to do it with our AmEx cards?” This controversial article and interview has 280 comments since it was published on Saturday March 19th. Many of those who commented were angry at Jennifer Moses, however, she does have a point: the media is bombarding young girls with role models like Miley Cyrus and Paris Hilton and tween catalogs are advertising clothing as “sexy and flirty.” In another article entitled “Too Sexy Too Soon,” you can see how the fashion industry is putting pressure on tweens to look sexy.

There is nothing new to the fact that young girls want to be cute and flirty, however, I’ve seen some eleven-year-old girls dress so provocatively that you question, “What is their intention? Jennifer Moses asks, “What are they saying? I’ve got them, come and get them?” She admits that some mothers are better at guiding their daughters than others, and that she has had problems with her own daughter while trying to bond during a shopping trip.  Excuses like, “It’s no big deal mom, everyone is dressing like that,” or “Just cause I dress like that doesn’t mean I’m having sex,” are common. She admits that teenagers will drive you crazy, and you end up giving in.

There are some moms and dads contributing to this behavior by shopping with their daughters and throwing them parties at clubs. It’s almost like they’re saying, ‘Look how hot my daughter is.'” But why? One mother says, “It’s a bonding thing. It starts with the mommy-daughter manicure and goes on from there.” On the other hand, Jennifer Moses who grew up at the tail-end of the hippie generation, brings her own theory. She says, “It has to do with how conflicted my own generation of women is about our own past, when many of us behaved in ways that we now regret.” She continues, “We are the first moms in history to have grown up with widely available birth control, the first who didn’t have to worry about getting knocked up.”

When asked what about her message, Jennifer Moses believes we need to make kids aware of the following:

  1. TV is a fantasy
  2. We’re living in a pornographic society with a debased cheap culture
  3. You won’t get my credit card to buy stuff I don’t agree with.

If you’re a parent of a tween or teenager, to what extent do you think it’s the media’s fault? What can and should we do as parents?

How do you handle " impossible" requests from agents?

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Sonia is frustrated with formatting.

I have a problem that’s been keeping me awake at night; it’s called formatting.
For weeks, I’ve been researching, Googling, asking friends, basically bugging everyone I come across with this one question:  

  • How can I e-mail ten pages of my manuscript into the body of my G-mail account, within messing up the formatting? 

Am I the only person with this problem?  Not according to my Google searches.
For those of you who say, “Send it as an attachment,” the answer is “NO.”
Agents won’t open attachments.

Then there’s the copy and paste from Word into G-mail. Well, that doesn’t work, because manuscripts need:

  • double-spacing
  • one inch margins all around
  • Times new Roman 12-point
  • italics, for inner thoughts
  • indent first line of paragraph

And guess what happens. All formatting gets messed up when you copy and paste, and then try sending it to yourself and various friends, as a test, and it looks like you’ve had too much to drink.

So I’ve tried to copy and paste into Notepad, which eliminates the hidden codes, and then copy and paste that back into my G-mail, and guess what? I cannot get it double-spaced, I cannot get Times new Roman, and I cannot get the first paragraph indented.

Now if we’re talking a one-page Query letter, that’s not a problem, but imagine a ten or twenty-page manuscript sample! First, it doesn’t look professional, and second, it takes forever.

You might suggest I  e-mail straight from Word through Outlook, but quite frankly, I cannot seem to get Outlook to work, since I’ve been using G-mail for all my e-mails. Would using Outlook guarantee the agent receives my twenty pages in the correct format, just like an attachment or a pdf? That’s my question.

If you’re an agent or an editor, I’d love to hear if formatting issues via e-mail are common, and perhaps a reason to instantly reject an e-mail submission. If so, how can writers submitting to you overcome this problem? Can we write two e-mails and put the Query letter in the first, and the requested ten pages, synopsis and bio in the second e-mail as an attachment? That would eliminate formatting problems.

I downloaded Diane O’Connell’s Free E-Book, which I highly recommend called: 50 Ways to Avoid the Rejection Pile. Diane used to work as an editor for Random House and now works as an independent editor and publishing consultant.

I am open to suggestions and solutions. Have you had these problems?

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