Trans/plant/portation

A few folks have asked me about Twitter over the years and how such a terse medium can be helpful for writers. What content can one even get communicated in so few characters?

The answer is: a lot. If we stop thinking about Twitter as the site of traditional content that takes eight hundred or more words to convey, and start thinking of it as a touchpoint and springboard or longer form pieces, then the possibilities open up. There are scads of great posts out there on growing followers, how to identify good accounts to follow, and so on, so I’m not going to reinvent the wheel. Here are a few of those, as introductory Twitterverse items.

• Ethically growing followers
• Introductory guide to Twitter
• NYTimes primer on Twitter

The thing for writers (or anyone, really) to do to get started on Twitter is to set up a profile, find people who are already on Twitter who you know or by your interests, and start generating content. Let’s take these in turn. Read More…

At writer’s conferences and in critique groups people throw phrases like “social networks” and “platform building” around like cheap confetti. Judging from the glazed look on the eyes of many writers, there seems to be a disconnect between knowing one should work on their online presence, and how to do just that. It’s not enough to tell folks to build a network, because that’s too abstract a concept in a universe of hundreds of social networking Web sites and applications. Worse, all of the jargon is so intimidating many writers begin to justify their absence from the market. “Well, I need to have time to write, not promote myself,” one romance writer told me at this year’s PNWA. Others that I’ve spoken with don’t see the benefit to all of these online sites—it looks to them like a lot of time spent tooling around the interwebs for next to no return on their investment. And that’s a shame.

When I was working in the usability field—trying to match people’s needs with the design of the Web systems they were using—one of the recurring issues I ran into was language.  Someone looking for “Data” as a topic in a list of items is likely to miss their target if it comes after the word “Healthcare,” as in “Healthcare Data.” Tiny differences in inches or color contrast or expectations around word choice throw people off more easily than we as confident humans would like to admit, and attitude makes a big, big difference. So if I may pull a little from my past professional experience, let me boil down a few simple steps to establishing an online presence.   Read More…