For two years or whatever, I blogged three times a week about publicity, speechwriting, public relations and scandals for The New York Times’about.com. If you are an author, actor, director, politician, professional athlete, rock star, user of social media or otherwise in the public eye, THESE POSTS ARE USEFUL TO YOU. If you live in an ice cave, you can safely ignore all this stuff and go back to tanning that elk hide.
For two years or whatever, I blogged three times a week about publicity, speechwriting, public relations and scandals for The New York Times’about.com. If you are an author, actor, director, politician, professional athlete, rock star, user of social media or otherwise in the public eye, THESE POSTS ARE USEFUL TO YOU. If you live in an ice cave, you can safely ignore all this stuff and go back to tanning that elk hide.
For two years or whatever, I blogged three times a week about publicity, speechwriting, public relations and scandals for The New York Times’about.com. If you are an author, actor, director, politician, professional athlete, rock star, user of social media or otherwise in the public eye, THESE POSTS ARE USEFUL TO YOU. If you live in an ice cave, you can safely ignore all this stuff and go back to tanning that elk hide.
For two years or whatever, I blogged three times a week about publicity, speechwriting, public relations and scandals for The New York Times’ about.com.
IT WAS INTERESTING. Also, I got checks every month from The New York-Frigging Times, which, as a journalism major, is pretty damn cool.
If you are an author, actor, director, politician, professional athlete, rock star, user of social media or otherwise in the public eye, THESE POSTS ARE USEFUL TO YOU.
If you live in an ice cave, you can safely ignore all this stuff and go back to tanning that elk hide.
Social media and social networking ARE NOT THE SAME THING
Earned media — free ink and airtime — is worth a lot to reality stars like Snooki, The Situation and Kim Kardashian, who all extended their 15 minutes of fame into millions of dollars.
Ink and airtime are even MORE valuable for people with actual talent.
Yet if you’re trying to make it — as a writer, an actor, a director, rock star, whatever — it’s hard to get the mass media to pay any attention to you at all.
Getting serious ink and airtime is a great way to bust through, boost your name recognition and make a living at doing what you love. Whatever that may be.
Not everybody is placing their faith in the series of tubes and spending their free time on the Twitter, the Book of Face or their personal blog.
Reporters, editors and producers get zillions of press releases and story kits about new authors, new rock bands, new actors and the latest indie movie made for $9,000 by some up-and-coming director.
They get pitched stories all the time. Most of these pitches go nowhere.
You have to hook the reporter or editor.
A hook isn’t about the quality of the product. Not at all.
Craftsmanship matters latter. I know, This is where we cue up Keanu Reeves:
A news hook is something a reporter can tell his editor, in a sentence, why this story is worth spending column inches on.
THREE NEWS HOOKS THAT FAIL
1) This book / movie / rock band is great!
Hype is typical and horrible. The press never buys it, even if you crank up the hype machine to 11.
In the first place: Even if the hype is true, it’s not newsworthy.
In the second place: Hype is never true.
But let’s pretend it’s true just this once. ”Man writes great book / sings glorious song / directs amazing movie” still isn’t something a reporter can pitch to editors.
They know how to pitch “Afghan vet with no arms types novel on Underwood WITH HIS FEET” — because that’s a story, no matter how bad the actual novel may be.
Every writer, rock star and actor trying to break through is told to “Harness the powers of the internets.”
Start a blog. Get on Facebook, Twitter and six other things that haven’t been invented yet. The message is: jack into the Matrix, work it hard and the world will take notice of your inherent awesomeness.
Why pour 2.6 metric tons of salt into this fresh wound? Am I simply a bad, bad man, bent on destroying your dreams? No. I am a bad, bad man who hates people wasting their time. The series of tubes is actually quite useful. An amazing tool.
HOWEVER: 99.9 percent of people are doing it wrong. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Use the right tools for the right jobs
Now, some people took the wrong message from my post about the Twitter.
Bad Response No.1: “You’re wrong, because I don’t buy books from seeing authors on the Glowing Tube or when movies are made from their books or whatever. I only buy books based on word of mouth, specifically, from the mouth of my best friend, Suzie the Librarian.”
Bad Response No. 2: “Wow, that math stinks, and if we can’t break through without using Twitter and whatnot, then maybe we should give up our dreams of ever making it big, because I can’t afford millions of dollars to buy ads and publicity. I can barely afford this cardboard box and beef flavor Top Ramen, though on good months, I splurge for shrimp flavor.”
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
First off, Twitter isn’t a bad thing.
I adore Twitter. It’s a beautiful tool that’s meant for meeting people, talking smack and sharing information. It’s made for dialogue, and creative writer types are helpful. They like being nice to other creative writer types.
The kittehs, they are friends. Twitter is for making new friends, not selling things. REMEMBER THAT.
Twitter simply isn’t built for selling things.
That doesn’t mean you give up on your lifelong dream of writing, acting, singing or competitive square dancing.
Second, earned media is not only free, but it has more weight — more credibility — than paid advertising.
I will translate this into simple Man Speak: You can get on the radio, in the papers of news, on the Glowing Tube — and on blogs that review books or talk smack about movies / rock singers / square dancing — and IT DOESN’T COST YOU A DIME.
Twitter isn’t built to sell books. Or anything else.
Yet if you belong to the Twitter, you see all sorts of authors pimping their books.
Some do it subtly, or randomly. Others do it faithfully, if not relentlessly.
And even if they mount a full Social Networking Offensive — a combined-forced attack with tweets on the ground, blog battleships at sea and Facebook fighter planes swooping down from above — even if they do all that, they will fail.
Attack of the Internet Fanboys
Oh, this is sacrilege. I know it.
Internet Fanboys believe that the Twitter, the Book of Face, blogs, the entire series of tubes — hey, that’s the future. Old Media is so wrinkled and, I don’t know, old. They say, “Social media once was the student, and now it is the master. If you only KNEW the power of the Dark Side…”
Except they’re wrong. No matter how much you want it to work, how hard you squeeze your eyes and reach for that Internet lightsaber, it doesn’t fly through the air and into your hand. Even when you pick it up and push the button, nothing happens.
Once you’ve read his books, and fully appreciate his literary genius, you can watch this low-definition video with horrible audio that still rocks because it has KURT FREAKING VONNEGUT.
I would have paid monies to have him as my professor. Now that I think about it, I did pay monies to have professors. Hmm. Though my journalism profs were top-notch. Props to you all.
Now, it’s not so complicated, is it?
Hero in a hole.
Boy meets girl.
Girl with a problem.
Albert Einstein — and thousands of other people far, far smarter than you or I put together, even on our good days when our fingers spark magic and the coffee we drink would do better on an IQ test than Michele Bachmann — spent many years trying to come up with a unified theory of everything.
See, the whole E=MC2 was only part of the answer. That’s the equation for energy. He wanted to do an equation that also explained gravity and whatnot. IT IS COMPLICATED. We will not get into it.
Albert Einstein was a muffin of stud with epic hair. I salute him. Image via Wikipedia
Oh, people get all mystical and complicated, and come up with their own jargon and rules. Yet these self-appointed writing gurus all disagree, and they specialize so much that they know more and more about less and less until they know absolutely everything about nothing.
"In my insomniacal Twitter meanderings I find the miracle of @speechwriterguy. Follow him. He makes energetic sense about words. And life."
@CharlesCrawford / Oxford area, England / Former British Ambassador turned speechwriter, writer, mediator, trainer, blogger. Founder member of ADRg Ambassadors LLP
"Informative, funny, blunt & quirky, @speechwriterguy 's blog is a must if you really give a damn about language & communication."
@DavidWeedmark / Ottawa, Canada / Acclaimed poet & novelist with a penchant for dark roast coffee; passionately curious.
