Jane Genova: Speechwriter - Ghostwriter

Influence: The digital game has changed in blogging

Unless you're selling advertising, you might forget monitoring the overall traffic on your blogs.  Where influence is coming from is not from the average of visitors.  Instead, it now happens via the one well-done post which goes viral.  Because on the web we're operating in a niche marketplace, the right people will see it.  Likely they will pass on that post to more of the right people. 

Soon enough there are invitations on LinkedIn to connect. There is a surge in views of my LinkedIn profile.  The phone rings with requests for information about how I work and what I charge.  And I get more confidence.  In this era of uncertainty when we all wonder about The Next, believing in ourselves is everything.

More of my best thinking is now invested in zeroing in on the right topics, with a provocative angle.  

Watergate 2.0: Take it from survivor of Watergate 1.0, there will be tremendous loss of productivity

It's not Watergate 2.0 yet, Bob Woodward tells POLITICO.  For example, there's no clear line to the White House on the IRS' providing extra scrutiny on the tax-exempt status of conservative organizations. 

However, take it from a Baby Boomer who survived Watergate 1.0: Productivity will take a hit.  The hit will be bigger than when the Watergate 1.0 hearings were broadcasted on television.  That's because there are so many more venues for presenting the news and opining.  Name one person who will not be caught up in this?  I will be hitting all my three syndicated blogs, tweeting, and commenting on Facebook.

Back during Watergate 1.0, everyone took the time to express thoughts about government, human nature, power, the GOP, Richard Nixon, all the president's men, and Everyman.  In addition everyone caught snippets of the hearings. Sometimes in university towns like Ann Arbor, Michigan, where folks have flexible schedules, we had Watergate-hearing parties. 

Watergate 2.0 will bring the nation a nice pause after so much tragedy.  If there is no Watergate 2.0, there will probably be great disappointment throughout the land. 

Mirror Neurons: Why man the social animal is returning from virtual

In the presence of each other, a number of species, including us human kind, affect each other cell by cell. Some of us always knew this.  For example, our moms told us to stay clear of "bad companions." The transmission process happens across the species. My dog Molly Mittens could pick up that I was depressed before I did. The vet, part Dr. Phil, told me she had been hanging on despite her bad heart trying to keep me together.  

But how we resonate off each other was confirmed by researchers such as Marco Iacoboni on mirror neurons in Italy. He made all that science user-friendly in his book "Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others.  Last night at the New Haven Zen Center in Connecticut we discussed why meditating together in-person can center us so quickly.  As a guiding teacher noted, we feed off each other's strength.  The same principle operates in 12-step programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous.

No surprise, we are returning to in-person speeches, meetups, chats by the water cooler, author presentations at bookstores, and church services. Virtual social networks were fun but they left us, well, unconnected.

For the past four months, although I was doing my time virtually on Facebook and LinkedIn, I would get attacks of extreme alienation. They were brutal enough to dry up the creative processes as I tried to write.  When I packed up the laptop and went to the public library in North Haven, CT, the juices started flowing again.  Clients raved about what I had created there.  Blog posts done there went viral. The help-wanted I answered there brought in good assignments.

We need other human beings around us. They don't have to even actively interact with us. For this very reason, we speechwriters have been busy preparing what speakers are delivering in the flesh, not on webinars. Social networks have proved to be unable to transmit from mirror neurons.

Blogging: When life intervenes

"I'd rather be blogging." That's what I told my blogging coach Paul Chaney back in 2005, after he helped me get this site up and running.  I was totally taken with the ability to publish what I wanted, without middleman editors poking around, making changes, and telling me that their efforts were necessary for me to go to the next level in writing. 

Since 2005, I have fallen apart when, well, life intervened and I couldn't blog as much as I wanted.  There is this nasty reality of having to earn a living.  Today, I started the day with several hours of blogging for this syndicated site and two others (here and here.)  As the day went on, I realized that time should have been invested in two client ghostwriting projects.  Progress on one, for example, was interrupted when the client wanted me to interview two sources for his book this afternoon.  I really felt the loss of those early morning hours.

I dread my blogging time reduced.  There will be major developments I can't comment on.  Not that the world will care.  But that has been my priority for eight years.  Will that priority have to be changed to take advantage of the bull market in executive communications?  

Layoffs at VILLAGE VOICE, NEW YORK POST, Say Media, and additional ones at DAILY NEWS

What will be next for those laid off (or as it is sometimes called "accepting a voluntary buy-out") from Say Media, the NEW YORK POST, VILLAGE VOICE, and (again in a second round) at the DAILY NEWS?

In pre-digital times, journalists, especially those getting older and having families, could arrange plum jobs for themselves as public relations representatives at agencies or in corporations.  In covering stories they got to know the game and the players and became valuable commodities.  Often offers were made to them rather than their chasing after The Next.

Now, journalists and editors are being tossed on the street, with little warning, and with a glut ballooning. They should beware of radical career changes.  Email and ads on the subway are full of messages of how easy it is to become a nurse or substance abuse counselor.  The reality is that career change is a painful experiment which doesn't always pan out. 

When executive communications went into the dumper at the turn of the century I tried a lot of things, ranging from providing content for social media to part-time sales.  The parts of those ventures which went okay paid peanuts.  Also, every day was filled with angst. As the career-transition folks hammer, yes, I left my comfort zone but outside it I remained unsure of myself. 

Had I to do it over again I would have remained as much in my comfort zone as possible and embraced the reality that I wasn't as easy to remold as the ads for career change claim.  Executive communications as a field is back.  There are more assignments than I can handle.  And because I am again confident, I can shrug off clients who are unhappy. 

I wish those laid off less pain than I had in their struggle to make a good living, again.

Serious Journalism: Downsizing to niche market

This is the era of entertainment.  So, it's likely serious journalism will continue to downsize and become a niche market.  Perhaps THE NEW YORK TIMES will find a foundation to support its investigative reporting and in-depth articles such as the popular feature on a fatal avalanche at Tunnel Creek.  If not, journalistic holdouts will produce their content as monks created manuscripts in olden days - far away from the mainstream.  It just could be that journalists become the monastics of contemporary times.

Not that nurturing people's need to be distracted from brutal reality is a new phenomenon. Back in ancient Rome the gladiators served that purpose.  P.T. Barnum substituted bearded ladies and pint-sized humans for the warriors.  Currently, the most successful  supposed journalism properties, ranging from Gawker.com to Abovethelaw.com, select topics, adopt the tone, and provide headlines to entertain.  None of that, of course, would cut the mustard with THE NEW YORK TIMES.

Not long from now there could come a time when no one holds up THE NEW YORK TIMES or what had been THE NEW YORK TIMES as a standard for measuring anything. 

Those Big Bucks & Bloggers: Do we mute our voice?

With maybe exceptions like Nick Denton of Gawker.com and Henry Blodget of Businessinsider.com, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the big money and bloggers' big voice. 

Once we start making money from the stuff we used to blog about in such an untamed raw matter, we tend to adopt caution.  At least I have.  Since I am rolling in dough again from ghostwriting and speechwriting I have begun to become circumspect about what I will write about, in what tone, and with what kind of language.

As a result, three things have been happening.

More and more assignments come in.  Perhaps my buttoned-down blog persona has seeped into all the other aspects of how I present myself to prospects and in how I interact with clients.  Money is nice.

Like cockroaches with the light turned on, professionals from the past have scurried to LinkedIn, inviting me on their networks.  I certainly welcome this broadening of my acquaintances.  It could well be that blogging did hurt our professional reputation, at least the kinds we used to do as early adopters.

Traffic has declined.  Yes, my three syndicated blogs (the other two are here and here) get a steady amount of traffic and there are posts which go viral) but those 1000-visitor-an-hour days seems to be over.

Does it come down to: BigMoney or BigMouth?  Maybe.  Funny, mom told me just that when she was struggling to rear three daughters in the mean streets of Jersey City, New Jersey.  This Mother's Day, I will swing by Holy Name Cemetery on Montgomery Street in Jersey City and admit to her that she may have been right. For me, the jury is still out.   

"The Second Coming" - Thought leaders slouch towards Bethlehem to provide solutions

The recent tragedies ranging from Newtown to Boston, disruptive change, and ongoing income inequality have created brisk business for ghostwriters.  The mood of the nation has come to mirror W.B. Yeats "Second Coming," in which:

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." 

In response, thought leaders in every discipline are

"Slouching towards Bethlehem to be born." 

Communally through foundations such as Bill Clinton's and individually such as speakers at TED they are providing solutions for what is and visions for what could be. Think pieces are back in. But the complexity of the problems means that they seek our input in ways they haven't, at least not since John F. Kennedy sought the kind of information and rhetorical guidance from his brain trust, before and after the election.  As a leader, Kennedy was humble in recognizing what he didn't know and couldn't put together.

This might be a new golden age in executive communications, both for contract writers and for in-house scribes.  Regarding the latter, the status of IBM's executive communications staff might have taken the great leap forward after Chief Executive Officer Ginny Rometty chastised employees for missing Wall Street earnings target.

Well-organized, Buttoned-down Content Gets the Business and the Bucks

Remember around 2004, Robert Scoble was blogging at Microsoft.  He prided himself on all his disjointed content that had plenty of typos and grammatical errors. Soon enough a lot of folks were following his example on social media.

That was then. Now in 2013, the assignments, at least the very well paying ones from smart people, are for well-organized, buttoned-down content.  That even applies to ghostwriting blogs.  The material is carefully researched and follows the model of the inverted pyramid.

Yes, the subject matter is provocative.  But that was always the situation for copy that gets published in brandname media as an opinion-editorial or analyzed by thought leaders.

The Scoble style lives on in digital gossip tabloids.  They're fun to read.  I wonder how much those writing them are making?

Kobe Bryant's Achilles Tendon: The writer's creativity

Those with extraordinary talent like basketball player Kobe Bryant sometimes seem like they sign a secret pact with the devil.  Someday, the expiration date will come, we might believe, and they will have to pay up with the suffering of the end of the joy of performing and the receding spotlight. 

Could that be the situation with Kobe Bryant who recently heard his achilles tendon pop?  As USA TODAY reports, Bryant, as well as fans, might sense that, at least for the season  If that is so, Bryant might long for the ability to play so well more than the adulation of crowds. It's impossible that he will experience the time on the bench as a holiday.

We writers are also like that, even though the adulation is considerably less as is, of course, the money.  When our material gets stale or, worse, we suspect our best days are behind us we suffer.  Bryant is his game. We are our creativity. 

When Truman Capote seemed to have lost the capacity to write well he seemed to go down the emotional drain.  He made poor decisions such as outing the habits of the rich and famous.  Had he seen his bad patch through he might have opened again the whatever which fueled his creativity.  Instead he self-destructed.

This blog wishes Bryant a speedy recovery.