From the category archives:

social media

Is Your Personal Brand Your Self?

by Sid Parham on May 21, 2009 · Comments

in social media

Mask and face
Image by quinn.anya via Flickr

As I watch my Twitter Stream, I see the idea of a personal brand popping up everywhere. Many blogs promise to help me develop my personal brand, tell me of the importance of my personal brand, or like good romance columnists tell me ten mistakes to avoid in creating my personal brand. When I look at people’s twitter profiles and see how many success trainers, motivational speakers, direct marketers, and other who are trying leverage their personality and knowledge into a living, I fully see the motivation for these entries. But part of me wonders if it is wise to participate in the commodification of one’s self.

By “self,”  I mean that internal being whom we think of as who we really, truly are.  Various philosophers would argue that this “internal being” is a mental construct made up of our beliefs, our desires, and our choices. Phenomenology would argue that we can know who we are only through the world’s response to us.  The only way to see the self is through the mirror of other people’s reactions to us.

If one thinks this way about branding, one notes that the words used to describe an effective brand can also desribe the self–integrity, authenticity, accessibility, etc.  Obviously the person creating the brand thinks of it as a persona, a mask, which carries his image out into the world and which remains unchanging in the marketplace.  We all know that the brand isn’t the person.  But happens to the person who has branded herself?  Is she trapped in by this mask?  In striving to survive in the market, the face may become much more like the mask.  Consider the of the meaning of branding cattle.  Are our psyches as mutilated as the cattle by this act?

Through  personal branding the distance between commercial life and private life shrinks. We will become like the character Crow in Sam Shepard’s play, The Tooth of Crime, who sings:

`I believe in my mask–the man I made up is me
I believe in my dance and my destiny

The validation of  our selves becomes the recognition and spreading of the brand–our mask and our dance.

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Twitter Wit

by Sid Parham on April 22, 2009 · Comments

in social media

Blake's The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clo...
Image via Wikipedia

My wife complains that she’s not enjoying twitter because she does do wit.  The 140 character limit of twitter seems to lend itself to proverbs, epigrams, and smart remarks.  Consider how many famous epigrams are tweeted every day. Having grown up in a family that valued the snappy comeback and the witty remark, I’ve read and been aware of this style all my life.  My father collected 18th century literature and at a very early age I was exposed to Pope, Swift and Dr. Johnson.  As a teenager I discovered restoration drama.  Many 16 year old boys want to act like Restoration Rakes.  I actually had the term and the model.

Literary history tends to attribute the invention of the epigram to the Latin Poet Martial(Marcus Valerus Martial 43-104).  I am not a good enough Latinist to appreciate him in Latin and none of the translations I’ve read have made him a favorite. “Fortune gives too much to many, enough to none,” is a thought worth saving.  My third year of college French delivered Francois, Duc de la Rochefoucauld as a new favorite of this genre–His maxims are wonderful in French and he has inspired many good English translators, beginning with Jonathan Swift.  The good Duc is a cynic who sees self interest everywhere. “The refusal of praise is the desire to be praised twice.”  “If we resist or passions, it is more from their weakness than our stregth.”  ” Hipocracy is the homage vice renders to virtue,” or his most famous saying “In the adversity of even our best friends thaere is something that does not displease us.”

Early on in high school I discovered Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary and the work of Oscar Wilde.  Both are popular enough I will not quote them here. My life long favorites have been William Blake and Bernard Shaw and I will just a couple to give you a flavor of them

Willam Blake

Energy is an eternal delight, and he who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.

Every harlot was a virgin once.

If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

Prisons are built with stones of Law. Brothels with the bricks of religion.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

George Bernard Shaw

A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve. It is most unwise for people in love to marry.

Virtue is insufficient temptation.

So what does all this have to do with us and with Twiteer?  I would argue that like any writing we can become better by studying examples.  I leave it to my followers to decide if I’m witty. Twitter and epigrams require us to trust our audience because we have limited means by which we can fence meaning in.  These and other examples show us how a concentration of language can create an explosion of meaning.  If  you have a favorite epigram or proverb, add it in my comments.

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Scraping Uncle Oscar Off the Table

by Sid Parham on February 12, 2009 · Comments

in social media

The Medium is the Massage
Image via Wikipedia

Creative Writing teachers have a series of jokes that depend on the over enthusiastic application of sensible advice.For instance students told to grab the attention of their reader in the first sentence produce, “Bang, Bang, Bang, three shots to the groin and I was off and running on the greatest adventure of my life.” and “It was nearly midnight when they finished scraping Uncle Oscar off the the table.”   The advice was good; the execution left something to be desired.

As I skip about the blogosphere, I find that both the writing advice and the uneven execution exist here as well.  Excessive web surfing risks sensory overload. In order to get readers, bloggers have to find catchy titles, striking visuals, and good first sentences or their readers disappear.  I am always a little embarrassed when Google Analytics tells me how little time readers spend on my blog.  But I must admit I spend no more time on others’ blogs. You have to grab attention or it goes elsewhere.

So given my title, are you mad at the bait and switch?  I’m not going to be writing about murder, home surgery, or anyone named Oscar. When I post, I’ll tweet “Why are they scraping Uncle Oscar?” and a url.  Who will be attracted? Anyone?  What dear reader did you come looking for?  Can you use my advice?

What are the ethics of attention getting?  How may I grab your attention without violating your psychic space? I am indulging in a kind of writing I don’t much like, asking a bunch of questions without suggesting how to begin to look for answers.  It seems to me all the old rules of writing apply, but that the medium, the web itself, demands a different application of the rules.  I admit to being, in Marshall McLuhan’s terms, a POB (print oriented bastard) but is the medium the message?

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Who Do You Write For? Who Do You Read?

by Sid Parham on February 4, 2009 · Comments

in social media

Cairo pyramids, Dec 2008 - 32
Image by Ed Yourdon via Flickr

When blogging  do you have a specific kind of reader in mind?  Wolfgang Iser in his book The Implied Reader argues that texts imply readers.  One way then of parsing a text is to figure out who it was written for.  This can be a serious historical problem.  Whatever genius we attribute to Shakespeare, he hardly imagined any us as his readers. We often read texts which do not imply us.  As writers we may or may not have a target audience in mind.  We are as apt to miss that target as to hit it.

Bloggers whose primary purpose is marketing have to face this issue head on.  Who might buy what they are providing? A great deal of effort is devoted to determining how to reach a demographic, and focus groups judge the viability of different approaches. But who sets out to read marketing?  Not I!  I must be intrigued by a topic, solving a problem, or just checking out new stuff I like, before I consciously read sales or marketing literature.  I’m half way sold already.

Many blogs, including this one, are part journal, part memoir, and part opinion page.  They fall in the category creative non-fiction. The reader they imply might well be “someone like us.”  Since we all believe we’re unique, we would have a very small audience.  Who we read may give us a clue as to who we write for and why we write.

My blog reading included blogs on social media–Chris Brogan et. al., blogs on academic subjects, and the sort of personal blogs I describe above.   One of my favorites is Rebellious Arab Girl.

Now I am reasonably sure than when this young Palestinian/Canadian sits down to write she doesn’t imagine a 65 year-old American English professor as her audience. So far as I can tell her intended audience are young Arabs caught between their traditions and their present in North America.  I discovered her through Twitter and read her regularly.  She is authentic, honest, funny, and pointed.  She’s lived in Tennessee as well as Ontario.  Her description of her father telling Canadians to stop acting like Americans is both funny and terrifying. Her reactions to the recent tragedy in Gaza is angry, but not unthoughtful.

What does my interest in this blog say about my implied reader?  I want to be read by persons younger than myself.  I’m 65 so this is easy.  I want readers who are engaged and thoughtful about their own lives, so that they can weigh and then accept or reject my insights.  I want passionate readers, thoughtful readers, international readers.  So my question must be what does this post offer these readers?

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Social Life, Social Media, and Business

by oldbeforewise on December 21, 2008 · Comments

in social media

Those who twitter and /or use other social media are aware that the hot topic currently is the relationship of commerce to Social Media. The start of this discussion was Chris Brogan’s taking a $500.gift card from Kmart and talking about Kmart in his blog. He was upfront about the fact he’d taken money and each reader could do with that information as they chose.

Some seemed fine with it, others were outraged, and not a small number wondered how they too could get paid. In the resulting brouhaha, it seemed as if no one looked at real life or at history to see what happens in the social world.

My father joined a small city law firm in 1946. I grew up in a household where many of the social events included clients. I remember being told shortly after my father made partner that we would be joining the new less prestigious country club because the firm needed representation there. Neither “benevolent: nor “protective” are words I would apply to my father, but he joined the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks because there were business connections to be made. His firm represented the best woman’s shop in town; my mother and my sister shopped there regularly. I could fill two or three more paragraphs with similar examples, but you get the idea.

My description implies that I believe the only connection among these people was, in Marx’s words, “the cash nexus.” The lived experience was quite different. Many of these people became friends. Some, the fathers of my friends, I got to know well and some served as mentors as I grew up. No real business was ever done at social gatherings. Anyone who tried would have been thought crude. Although “come by the store” or “call me at the office” were acceptable practices. There was no deception here. Everyone knew what the others’ businesses were.

Social life and business life have intermingled perhaps as far back as medieval guilds. We should not be surprised that it’s happening in Social Media. Which came first, business or socializing? I would suggest that they are inseparable in the modern world. Twitter, Blogging et al. have roots in commercial enterprises, are the result of a technology created for business, and so far as I can tell populated mostly by people who market something. Possibly Social Media makes up for a lack of sociability in many parts of the workplace. One does not imagine that Wal-Mart’s lawyers shop at Wal-Mart.

In such a space, honesty about our business and some reticence about what we are selling seems necessary to preserve the social aspects of the virtual space. Chris Brogan offers a step toward that honesty. The many tweets and comments are the struggles to define taste and tact in this virtual space.

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