Some other shots by Cally:

Here are five writing lessons every writer should take to heart—all of which, Twitter reinforces.

1. Omit unnecessary words.

Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style taught us all this lesson in 1919. It is more clear and more powerful to tell your readers, “The sky is blue” than it is to tell them, “The heavenly orb above radiated cool azure.” Writers often compensate for a lack of confidence or the lack of a clear idea by stuffing their sentences with puffery. Be clear. Be direct. Short sentences are confident sentences.

Twitter, with it’s unavoidable limitations, forces writers to avoid puffery in favor of writing clear sentences.

2. Find the right word.

With only about 19 words to work with, it is important that every word you use in a tweet contributes accurately to your message. There is no room for circling back to make sure your readers understood your intent. Nor, does Twitter allow for stylization of your words (bold, italics, underlining) as a way for writers to influence how the reader receives the message. Tone cannot be massaged into a tweet. The only tools at your disposal to convey your message are the words—stark and naked.

3. Adverbs are inherently weakening.

This may seem counter-intuitive to some—as adverbs are often meant to intensify verbs—but there is no other rule I believe in more firmly than this: adverbs are inherently weakening. Consider these two sentences:

“I totally agree with you.”

“I agree with you.”

By adding “totally” as a modifier to “agree,” the writer is implying wiggle room. This places in the reader’s or recipient’s mind that there are degrees of agreement. “I agree with you,” on the other hand, is stone cold clear. There is no wiggle room.

Twitter’s limitation forces writers to consider the value of “totally” or “entirely” or ” very” or any of the other non-essential modifiers.

4. Use the active voice.

Twitter is fast. Messages scream through a viewer’s stream of attention. If a writer is trying to capture attention—an then often turn that attention into action—writing in the active voice is more effective—as it is in all writing.

“I wrote this blog post,” is a stronger and more clear sentence than, “This blog post was written by me.” It’s shorter as well. The logical steps your reader has to navigate to find the meaning of your sentence is more difficult if you use the passive voice. The active voice saves your readers some time—albeit a microsecond—and a flash of frustration.

5. Write from your gut.

Twitter is not a private journal. It is a public forum. Therefore, writers must be aware that there is the possibility of backlash with every single thing they write. This awareness results in better editing. I write 40 tweets a day and end up sending about half of those.

Some of the best writing advice I ever got came from my 8th grade English teacher, Mr. Irving. I was nervous about a writing a speech I had to deliver to our small town at graduation. I was waffling aloud about whether or not to include this bit of sophomoric advice or that bit of sophomoric advice, and Mr. Irving stopped me short, looked me in the eye, and said, “Jesse. Write from your gut.”

My gut is my editor. If it’s uneasy about something, I cut it. If it’s confident, I let it fly. Edit. Edit. Edit. Just because you’ve had an idea does not mean it’s worthy of publication.

Tweet on! And if you like this post, please tweet it. Thanks.

Said decades before the “Information Superhighway” and iPhones in our pockets. Are we losing our minds to distraction?

It was a desperate letter, written late at night, that got me started in content marketing—long before “content marketing” was even a thing.

I was living and lifeguarding in Orlando, Florida, just after graduating from Emerson College in Boston with a degree in writing and book publishing. For eight hours a day I’d sit in the hot sun at a corporate waterpark sleepily breaking up fights between 6-year-olds over who was going to be the first to slide down the orange 4-foot waterfall into the pool of hot pee that I was standing in. At night, I worked as a freelance web designer, building web sites for stressed out small business owners who urgently demanded that I move their logo three pixels to the left…and then to the right…and then back to the left. I found neither job very satisfying.

When I did get time off, I’d follow my friends into dark clubs downtown where I would watch tan men with blond highlights interact with young women in a way that looked to me like sexual assault, but it apparently was meant to be dancing. Not being a talented dancer myself, I stayed close to the table.

I  grew up in northern New Hampshire—surrounded by woodpiles, roaring fires, and swimming holes. This faux-world I found myself in was confusing for me to navigate. After a few months, I grew desperate. In a late-night Hail Mary, I began writing and printing out cover letters and resumes to send to publishing companies back up north.

One such letter pleaded, “I feel like a lumberjack in a dance club down here and would love the opportunity to move back north. Might you have a spot for me?”

Two weeks later, I got a phone call. The day after that I hopped on my motorcycle and tore up I-95.

I started right away as an entry-level editorial assistant for Whitehorse Press—a small book publishing company in northern New Hampshire which specializes in motorcycle touring books. It was my job to manage the unsolicited manuscripts—or “slush pile,” copyedit the books in production, and do all the book layout. Being an avid motorcyclist, I had a blast. I learned as much about motorcycling—use your REAR brake in the corners—as I did about niche book publishing.

Due to my previous abusive experience building web sites, I was included in all the company discussions about the company’s site. And, while I wasn’t at first excited to be back in the web site game, I was lucky to have been privy to these early discussions about the potential combining the web and book publishing. What role did the book content have online, if any? How can we tap into, and translate, the vibrancy and enthusiasm of the motorcycling community to our web site? How can this site show the community that we’re experts in the niche? These were big questions to be asking in a time when most people were still figuring out whether or not web links needed to be double-clicked.

The discussions  sparked my imagination for what’s possible online and rekindled my love for the web. So much so, in fact, I left the publishing company—and yes, I will admit that I cried when I left—and relaunched a rebranded web company.

I immediately found myself back in the swirl of small retail companies looking to hire me to build them a simple HTML web site—not with the hopes of climbing the ranks of Altavista, or drawing in new traffic from Lycos—but with the more modest goal of making their phone number easier to find and their location hours more obvious. It wasn’t thrilling, but it was work.

Then, one day, while visiting a potential client’s home and farm, the business owner took me on a tour of the property. He showed me the horses, the blind goat, the murderous barn cat, and an old carriage house that had been converted into a country office—complete with a cast-iron woodstove in the center of the room. His business was book publishing. I had found my sweet-spot.

The client wanted more than a simple web site. He wanted a marketing platform. As he spoke, I squirmed in my chair—conflicted with being desperate for the job while being terrified by the prospect of actually getting it.

“I’ve read all the leading equestrian books out there and ours are better. We just don’t yet have a way to show that to people. We have no marketing budget and we work out of a drafty barn with no phone line! But we have the best authors and editors and books,” he said. “Couldn’t a web site help us prove it?”

He was pushing me—and perhaps because I’m a middle child and prone to acquiescing, or, as I prefer to think, it was because I saw the potential of his request—I agreed. “Absolutely,” I said. A web site can do that. And thus, my terrifying transition from web-developer-alone-in-a-room-wearing-headphones to web-marketer-on-stage-teaching-strategies-to-1000-people had begun. I spent the next several years traveling around New England teaching large and small businesses to see the marketing value of their content, and then helping them to leverage it online.

I returned to book publishing several years later after successfully selling off my second one-man web company for $2,000 and a two-week vacation—both of which I sorely needed. This time, I signed on as the Web Editor at Chelsea Green Publishing—an independent book publisher in Vermont that has been publishing some of the best books on renewable energy and sustainable living since 1984. I felt right back at home in niche publishing, and this time my job and goals were different than before—they were more exciting. I wasn’t there to manage the slush pile and wrestle with Corel Ventura. I was there, instead, to build an enthusiastic online community centered on—and promoting—the quality, expert, and edited content contained in Chelsea Green’s new titles and decades-long backlist.

Margo Baldwin, the President and Publisher at Chelsea Green, bravely set me up with the tools and staff I needed and turned me loose to build, test, and tinker. In the days when publishing companies were debating how best to protect their books from digital piracy, we were copying and pasting large swaths of book text onto our blog. When other publishing companies were building walls around their ivory towers, we were polling our Twitter audience for their book title preferences.

It took several years, quite a bit of resources, a fair number of setbacks, and a battery of refinements, but thanks to the serendipitous intersection of newly available tools, outstanding content, and daring enthusiasm, we were able to prove that content marketing was legitimate, safe, and effective.

This book is for content-producers of all stripes: book publishers, magazines, bloggers, authors, cartoonists, and everyone else. It contains the lessons, strategies, successes, and failures I’ve seen during the little career I’ve made out of content marketing. It is my hope that you find my experiences and goofy anecdotes valuable in your own community-building and web marketing efforts. If you find this book helpful, please let me know. If you find errors or have suggestions for improvement, please let me know. If you find my house keys, I could use those too. As always, I’m available on Twitter as @jsmcdougall or through my web site at http://www.jsmcdougall.com. Good luck and have fun.

It’s a move I have been contemplating for years—but avoided making because I was in the “social media business,” and I didn’t want to disappoint any clients who might need help with Facebook down the road. But then—in anticipation of the new year, and in concert with a host of changes to our business strategy—I finally decided that Facebook wasn’t worth my time, frustration, or fear any longer. I axed it.

One of my good friends, Bruce Shaw at Harvard Common Press in Boston, asked me (on Google+) why I made the move.

Bruce Shaw  -  Why did you deep six Facebook?

Jesse McDougall  -  Privacy concerns. General un-usefulness. Discomfort with the company ethos. Large preference for Twitter. And momentary boredom.

My reply was Twitter-esque in nature, and so I’ll expand on my reasons here.

Privacy Concerns

I’m a web developer. I know the privacy risks inherent in running a social web site. I also know the benefits from knowing everything about your web visitors. I advocate to my clients all the time that they watch who is on their web site, find out what they’re reading, where in the world they live, who they slept with last night, and what they had for breakfast. Privacy does not exist online, so—as anyone who follows me on Twitter knows—I whole-heartedly embrace the idea that anyone in the world can know where I am at any given time. What’s more…I kinda like it. And therefore I am a willing participant.

What I can’t accept is being an unwilling participant in surveillance—and Facebook has crossed that line. On Twitter, I choose when and how to tell people where I am, what I’m doing, and what I’m reading. Facebook is so deeply integrated into the web’s sites, advertising programs, and social platforms, that it is inescapable. It’s cookies and crawlers monitor your every move online, whether you are logged into the site or not. Then—and this is not news—they sell that data to advertisers, research firms, and who-knows-who-else. It’s all hush hush, of course. But the outcome is that people you’ve never consented to divulge your personal details to know exactly who you are and which color pullover you want for Christmas.

I’m not naive. I realize other platforms I use do the same thing. But Facebook does it so smugly. I had had enough.

General Un-usefulness

I reached a point with Facebook where I did very little more than RSVP in the negative to vague acquaintances who would invite me to parties in states 1,200 miles away. Sometimes, an actual friend of mine would post an unflattering photo of me that I would begrudgingly allow to remain tagged. Most often, I would post professional news about a new site from Catalyst Webworks or a new book from O’Reilly Media, and my family would clap and cheer—which was nice, but far less gratifying than spreading the news in person or over the phone.

Professionally, Facebook was a flop. I can’t attribute a single client, project, book, or consulting gig to Facebook. I am happy to admit that this may be entirely my own failure. I know many people who work wonders with Facebook for impressive marketing campaigns. But I found Facebook’s Pages vs Profiles vs Groups vs Organizations vs Community Pages vs Wiki-like Pages to be so infuriating that I would fume and sputter everytime I wanted to create something seemingly simple. And so I didn’t use it.

Discomfort with the Company Ethos

I’ve worked in large and small companies. I worked in the food, travel, publishing, entertainment, recreation, and service industries. I’ve had great bosses and lousy bosses. And the one thing that united all of them was that the management-style in each always flowed from the top-down. Company culture starts at the top. And Mark Zuckerberg has—to quote a friend—a lot of growing up to do. And I hope he does. But until then, I don’t feel safe swimming in his pool.

I could rant on this topic for a while, but since it has all been covered in the news, and since I’m sure it would be unfair to the thousands hard-working good people (and soon-to-be-millionaires) at Facebook, I’ll move on.

Large Preference for Twitter

When Jack Dorsey, one of the creators of Twitter, left Twitter to start a new venture, he created Square—a credit card payment service which business and indiviuals can use to transfer money for a reasonable percentage and no monthly fee—thereby avoiding the abuse and gouging of the traditional routes. Jack wanted to create something disruptive that would improve people’s lives. And so it is with Twitter as well.

Personally, I prefer Twitter’s mode of communication. It strips away all the manufactured noise of Walls and Photo Galleries and Games (OH THE FRAKKING GAMES!!) and Poking and Events and Apps and simply allows people to interact. Like humans.

Twitter, as a service, also evolved along with the needs of its users. Hashtags, Retweets, photo sharing are all now standard Twitter features which were not in the original design. They were added in as part of Twitter’s responsive design process which builds the system to serve the needs of the users—not the other way around.

Both Facebook and Twitter are free to use. The news media wonders at the amount of money Facebook is making, and wonders how Twitter is making any money at all. I prefer to align myself with the person whose primary goal is to create great tools and improve the world—not to be the richest douchbag in the cemetery. Apparently, Steve Jobs felt the same way.

Momentary Boredom

After years of building a business, I finally found a free hour over the holidays.

Where Have I Gone?

As a digital strategist, consultant, web developer, and generally geeky guy, I pride myself on being an early-adopter. Where others are scared to poke and prod, I go in guns-blazing—fully expecting to break everything. My father used to call me a “dial-twister”—a talent I’ve turned into a career. People pay me to break  and explore new technologies so that they don’t have to. And in that vein, I reserve the right to be an early-disowner as well. When I see a technology going awry, or doing more damage than good, it’s my duty—even if only as the guy who people ask how to fix their printer—to say so.

I am now back in the saddle with Twitter—after my schedule forced me to take a hiatus. I am experimenting with Google+—with mixed results and feelings. I have put up this new web site to share thoughts and photos. And I am diving into Instagram and Tumblr. All of these platforms I find more satisfying and easier to use than Facebook. Perhaps because they’re better designed. Perhaps because they each focus on one task and do it well. And perhaps because I believe that each of them was built by someone in love with technology who wanted to build something “really cool”—not “really profitable.”

And finally, I have found that I’m enjoying my interactions on these separate and smaller social platforms far more than in the crowd of everybody on Facebook. I no longer put my content up for everyone I ever met to see. I can share more easily with the people who will actually care.

If you have questions or comments, please send me a message on Twitter or Google+. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Here’s a shot I took from halfway up Aspen Highlands, looking down at the valley.

In the workshop I’ll walk attendees through the process of designing or redesigning a web site—with the goal of making your web site (and its content) more easily found by your ideal audience. I’ll release the slide deck (formerly: “presentation”) here once it is complete, but for the moment, I’ll give you a brief overview of what I will cover. This process, by the way, is also covered in my new book, Content Marketing, which we hope will be available at the conference.

Phase One: Decide to Have a Strategy

I find it alarming how often I encounter companies using social media—and web marketing—with no plan or strategy driving their decisions. It seems that most companies prefer to throw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. I read an inspirational gift calendar the other day at the mall that summed up what I’ve been telling social media and web marketers for years:

Success: A goal, a plan, a team, a timeline.

Too many companies define NONE of those things when it comes to marketing online. I don’t blame them however. I blame the social media marketing “gurus” who keep telling everybody that this form of reaching people is cheap, easy, and immediately effective.

This phase is quick. Decide to have a strategy.

 Phase Two: Know Your Audience

The decisions made during a web site’s redesign will be determined by who it is the web site needs to reach. It is essential that companies know who makes up their ideal audience, who is coming to their web site already (often, it’s not the ideal audience), where their audience spends time online (blogs, Facebook, Twitter, shopping, etc.), what their audience is reading (Jezebel, Huffington Post, The New Yorker, etc.), and why their audience spends time online (boredom, shopping, work, etc.).

Once a company has determined those factors, they can begin designing their web site to most effectively send content out to the audience—in the places and format the audience would prefer.

Phase Three: Define Your Assets & Design Your Content

Many companies are sitting on piles of interesting promotional content that they don’t see, or don’t regard as promotional content. Web marketing is different than one-way traditional marketing where people expect new content and new advertisements. The interactive nature of the web allows people to find their own way to a company’s information. Therefore, when they arrive, they’re in an exploratory mindset—digging for interesting information that’s useful or entertaining. Old flyers, old catalogs, stories from the morning’s staff meeting, the reasoning behind key decisions, and any other information that gives the audience a peek behind the curtain is valuable—and it humanizes the company.

Phase Four: SEO, Email, Blogs, & Social Media

Most people spend their time online doing one of four things…which I bet you can guess from this section’s header. This phase is by far the most important of the five. It is the longer process of making sure your content is optimized for each of these four online activities. I would go into all the techniques here, but there’s so much that I’ll save it for the big show….

Phase Five: Testing

There are wonderful tools available to help companies track the effectiveness of their web marketing efforts. Key to any successful web marketing campaign is recognizing failures and changing course. There will be dead-ends, course corrections, and straight-out flops—and each one teaches a valuable lesson. But, how will you know when you’ve reached a dead-end? The tools I will cover in the session (and book) will help companies find what’s working and what’s not.

People tell me all the time that they “assume the web site is working…but they don’t really know.” If you don’t know conclusively that your web site is working for you, then that, in itself, is a problem that needs addressing.

And that’s it! It’s a lot to cover in 90 minutes, but I will have slides, tangible how-to information, and examples to share during the workshop. Come to think of it…I may need to cut back a bit. I don’t want to rush. We’ll see. And I hope to see you there. If you have any questions or recommendations for me, please let me know on Twitter. Thanks.

The book’s editing team and I went back and forth for a few weeks on the title for the book. My original idea—and the concept I had in my head for years was to title it Tweet This Book—the idea being that this would be a good title for the first book to integrate Twitter into print. But, maybe fortunately, a few books with that title already exist: here and here. (I haven’t read them. They look interesting.) Abandoning Tweet This Book allowed us to turn my focus from the book’s flash to the book’s substance. I think that—if the book succeeds—its success will be due to the quality of the ideas within—not the ability to tweet those ideas from the paper to your friends. (Still, wicked cool though.)

The concept for the book is simple. I wrote it to answer a question I receive all the time from business owners and marketers:

“I set up my Twitter account…but now what do I do with it?”

Of course, there are plenty of books out on the market that walk people through the low-level “click-here-click-there” management of a Twitter account, and there are a bunch of high-level “personality matters” strategy books as well. I wanted this book to be different. I’m not one for high-level social engagement theory, nor am I a fan of the books that pull people through the process by the nose. I wanted this book to be full of boots-on-the-ground tangible “how-to” style projects which people could employ on Twitter to build their audiences. My hope is that people put down this book, jump excitedly onto TweetDeck, and get started building.

I created my first Twitter project—which is included in the book—while working as the web editor for Chelsea Green Publishing. (For those of you who don’t know, Chelsea Green is an independent book publishing company in Vermont that has been producing some of the best books on the practice of sustainable living since LONG before the green movement was trendy. They also walk-the-walk.) One day, back when Twitter was new, my boss at the time, Shay Totten, turned to me and said, “Let’s see what this Twitter thing is about.” I laughed and said, “HA! Dead within a year. It’s not going anywhere.”

And, thankfully, it turned out I was being a dumbass.

I, like most people, originally approached all of social media with a healthy dose of skepticism. A skepticism which, by the way, led me to ditch Facebook just a few weeks ago. (A post about that move is in the works.) I have privacy concerns. I have time-management concerns. And I still have concerns that marketers will one day loom so large in these social media platforms that they’ll just end up marketing to one another. But, given my experience with building and running the Twitter account at Chelsea Green, I am now convinced that business and social media can mix effectively—and that the result is great for both the business and the followers. After some humbling growing pains, we were able to find tens of thousands of people interested in our topic area, interact with them on an authentic person-to-person level, provide real value as the leader of a Twitter community, and yes, sell books.

#Engage is a book about how businesses, organizations, writers, bloggers, and all sorts of fame-whores can use social media to create an excited audience without annoying everybody around them or polluting Twitter with coupon codes.

I will have a page up on this site soon where you’ll be able to read excerpts, read the project list, and buy the book online. If you have any questions, please let me know. I’m always happy to help.

Morning’s mission: Southwest across Ohio.