I'm B.L. Ochman,. a Fractional CMO, and I've been helping blue chip companies, agencies and associations incorporate new media into their marketing mix since 1996.
I'm an AI-literate multi-media content creator, live-stream event and podcast producer, journalist, ghost writer, social strategist and producer of socially shareable videos.
Facebook Group admins now have the option to ask potential members screening questions in order to combat trolls and spammers.
Group admins can establish up to three questions to ask of people requesting to join their Group. The questionnaires let admins screen potential members to ensure they’re the right fit for the group and will add constructively to the discussion, not just spam or troll the Group.
Creating Stronger Communities
Giving Group admins the ability to formulate the questions and decide whom to admit should help to create stronger communities. Users who request to join a Group will immediately get questionnaires. Those who are invited will be sent a link to the questions.
Admins can find the “Ask Pending Members Questions” option in the Group settings menu.They can ask three questions, each of which potential members can answer in up to 250 characters. Answers are not visible to group members. Only moderators and admins see them.
Giving Facebook Group Admins More Control
Previously, admins had to contact potential members one by one, either in email or messenger or by evaluating the often sparse information in their profile. Then they had to keep track of all requests and replies – which was often too time-consuming.
Josh Constine, writing in TechCrunch, notes that Facebook also should add analytics that allow admins to evaluate the success of various types of content in the Group.
Facebook has long been short on metrics, so this would be an excellent addition.
In a unique exercise, Swedish sportswear brand Houdini turned their clothes into food to demonstrate how environmentally friendly they are. So they created what might be called gourmet clothing and fed the result to customers.
For this campaign, the brand’s agency McCann Stockholm composted customer’s used clothes and turned them into soil and fertilizer for growing vegetables with sports physiotherapy Ottawa.
Cooking With Clothing
They enlisted one of Scandinavia’s top composting pros to break down the clothes properly. In about six months, they’d turned into CO2, H20 and other materials that could be used for fertilization for edible clothing.
The fertilized soil was used to grow vegetables. The crop was turned into a gourmet meal for Houdini customers by Swedish celebrity Chef Sebastian Thureson.
Like many millions of people worldwide, I was horrified to see the video of Dr David Dao being knocked out and bloodied, dragged from his paid seat on United Airlines. The incident became one of the most epic PR fails ever, and fallout continues.
And then, in total WTF category, United Airlines apparently killed an enormous rabbit. Here’s the headline from the Daily Mail:
Now United’s killing fluffy bunnies! Son of the world’s biggest rabbit dies on United flight. Huge three foot bunny arrives in Chicago dead in ‘strange’ circumstances.
Keep your copy lively, factual, tight, clear, short and linked to sources. Here are my blog writing guidelines: lessons I’ve learned blogging since 2002.
While basic writing talent is innate, many of the skills for writing compelling blog posts can be learned. Here are some guidelines I have gleaned from blogging since 2002.
These are my basic blog writing guidelines for creating posts that are readable and sharable:
Keep your copy lively, factual, tight, clear, short and linked to sources
Content creation tips
1. Be Interesting. Sounds simplistic, but most posts aren’t. And most posts don’t get read or shared because of that.
2. Inform, don’t sell. Blog posts are not sales sheets or ad platforms.
3. Share what you know. People like posts they can learn from. Don’t worry about giving away ideas. Those are a dime a dozen. People who can make ideas work are rare as hen’s teeth.
4. Learn from David Letterman: Make Top 10 lists. e.g., 8 Surefire Data Strategies for Fundraising Success; 7 Unbelievable Fundraising Letters
5. Use current sources. Don’t link to studies from 2009 in a post you write in 2015.
6. Include a call to action: Ask readers to do something, e.g., follow on Twitter, find out more about X, click to get the whitepaper.
7. How-to and how not-to posts are highly shareable
8. Select an interesting visual: A picture is worth a thousand words.
Make it compelling and be sure it will work well on a mobile device
9. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Blogging isn’t brain surgery..Don’t get pompous or dictatorial.
Blog writing & style tips
1. Write in a human voice and use first-person. If the post isn’t informing, inspiring, entertaining or making someone’s life better, you’re not done writing.
Stiff, formal writing is only for lawyers. And you know what Shakespeare said about them.
2. Select a compelling, catchy title: something that compels the reader to want to learn more.
3. Write short posts, short paragraphs, and lots of subheads. People who read blogs skim. Only someone with too much time on his/her hands will read a big, 2,000 word-long blob of copy. Write short, tight sentences and paragraphs. Too Long, Didn’t Read (TLDR) is your enemy.
4. Link, link, link. Don’t steal other people’s stuff. One thing that distinguishes blog posts from dead-tree journalism is that bloggers link prodigiously.
Link to any other blog or website you mention. Link to articles, books, products, bios, explanatory materials on other sites that you mention in your blog.
Always link to information that clarifies or gives background on information and opinions in your post.
5. Don’t use acronyms. Use the words the first time you mention a name or industry term. i.e. NonProfit Organization (NPO) and then use the abbreviation in the subsequent mentions. Don’t assume that everyone who reads what you write knows what you mean by acronyms.
6. Write less. Aim at keeping your posts to about 400 words. Keep sentences and paragraphs short. Use the simplest possible word and sentence structure. Omit all unnecessary content and words.
7. Use numbered or bulleted points whenever you can. Use subheads every few paragraphs, even in a 300-word post.
8. White space is your friend. It makes reading from the screen easier. Nothing is harder to read than a solid block of copy on a computer screen. Only 16% of people read every word online. Format your posts so that your main points stand out.
9. Forget what you learned about business writing in school if you graduated before 1990. Go ahead! Start sentences with “and” or “but.” Don’t be afraid to break archaic rules. But, jeez, follow all grammatical rules that provide clarity to your content.
10. Read your post out loud and make sure you don’t get stuck on complex construction. If you trip on a word the midst of reading a sentence aloud, re-write the sentence. Try the Hemingway app to help clarify your writing.
11. Do not over-use bold text emphasis on words and phrases. Bold text is appropriate as a topic point in lists, but not within a paragraph or list.
12. Writing takes time. Writing is about re-writing. Edit yourself. Use spellcheck.
Questions to ask yourself before you hit “Publish”:
__ Is the topic clear to someone who only reads the headline?
__Does the lead paragraph tell who and what the story is about and why the reader should care about it?
__ Is the angle you’ve used likely to seem newsworthy?
__Would someone who knows absolutely nothing about this topic understand this post?
B.L. Ochman is a uniquely experienced digital pioneer who has been helping blue chip brands incorporate social media into their marketing strategy since 1996. She publishes What’s Next Blog, co-hosts and produces the award-winning Beyond Social Media Show podcast and contributes to AdAge DigitalNext. On Twitter, she’s @whatsnext.
“Endangered” series inspired by and devoted to wolves
My friend, the remarkably talented Italian painter Ester Curini had never seen a live wolf until four years ago, when she visited The Wolf Conservation Center in North Salem, NY. She describes the experience as life changing.
She explains that she was inspired right then and there, to create an exhibition devoted solely to wolves. Wolves are, she says, ”one of the most misunderstood and persecuted animal of all time.”
Her solo exhibition, “Endangered,” runs March 2 to April 1 at Bernaducci Meisel Gallery, 37 West 57th St, New York.
Curini, who now lives in New York, says that a blog post by Rob Klavins’ A Eulogy for OR-4 “which broke my heart” inspired the studies that led to this exhibition. This is the award-winning painter’s third solo show.
Curini is entirely self-taught
She only began painting on canvas in 2005. She has a business degree, and no formal art training. Curini, who is entirely self-taught, first spends time with her subjects, to learn about each one’s unique personality. “Working on this show has been a journey,” she says.
Look very closely, at her paintings. You’ll see Curini’s reflection in the eyes of each of her subjects, who are looking intently at her when she takes the photos that are the basis of her paintings. As you can see in the detail, below, she then meticulously paints every hair of her subject, spending months on each huge canvas.
The 72″x48″ acrylic on canvas paintings in this show took four years to create. After visiting with the wolves to get to know the personality of each one, she works from photographs. In her paintings, she isolates the figures on seamless white background as “my way to concentrate only on the essentials that matter.”
The Wolf Conservation Center, located in South Salem, NY, is private not-for-profit organization founded in 1999 by Helene Grimaud. Their valuable mission is to promote wolf conservation by teaching about wolves how they are essential in our ecosystem.
“Repurposing the technology to do good, not just buy goods.”
Amazon Dash Buttons are $5 product-specific buttons that you tap to automatically reorder that product. Stick one on your washing machine, and when you run low on detergent, tap! A box of Tide shows up two days later. Similar instant gratification is available for hundreds of other products.
Designer, programmer Nathan Pryor wondered “why reserve that instant gratification for physical goods? Why not push a button and do some real good?”
So he created a Dash button that makes a $5 contribution to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) every time trumpolini says something that makes him angry. He keeps it near his laptop, where it has been getting a lot of use.
If you want to make your own ACLU Dash button, Pryor has made the code he created available here.
‘We’ve got the best tax evasion system God ever created’
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Welcome to the Netherlands” a hilarious video from the satirical news show “Sunday with Lubach,” welcomes Trump in a style inspired by the new American monarch’s grandiosity. The video has gone viral, with 15 million YouTube views in less than a week.
Comedian Arjen Lubach, says: “The whole world was watching for the inauguration of the 45th president of the United States. Because we realize it’s better for us to get along, we decided to introduce our tiny country to him. In a way that will probably appeal to him the most.”
Best Wall, Best Ponies
“We speak Dutch,” the video mentions. “It’s the best language in Europe. We’ve got all the best words. All the other languages failed. Danish…total disaster. German is not even a real language. It’s fake.”
And Lubach notes: “We’ve got ponies. We’ve got the best ponies. You can ride them. You can date them. You can grab them by the pony.”
The punchline: “We’ve got the best tax evasion system God ever created. You’ll pay nothing.”
Founders Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman, a screenwriter and architect, respectively, are encouraging crafters to knit one or many copies of the simple rectangular “Pussy Power Hat” design. The project is also providing downloadable patterns for crocheters and people who sew to make similar hats. People are urged to mail the hats to the project for distribution at the march, or bring them along.
The site has a hat registry, and a Hat Tracker where the average registrant is making approximately eight hats. The goal is 1.7 million hats, but there is no official count available.
Yes, the project’s Mission Statement says, “pussy” is also a derogatory term for female genitalia. The goal is to reclaim the word and make it a symbol of empowerment.
“The best part of the hat project might be its connection to the tradition of craftivism, an art form that uses conventionally feminine crafts (needlepoint, knitting, quilting, and the like) in subversive acts of protest. Some people knit pink blankets for World War II tanks. Some cross-stitch banners against mass incarceration. Some crochet hats that look like cat ears … to wear at a march for women’s rights. Taking a domestic craft and turning it into a symbol against misogyny makes a more powerful statement than any connection to pink or pussies.”
So far, the organizers say, knitters range in age from seven to 99, and they estimate that some 200,000 hats have been made.
Suh and Zweiman told Catherine Pearson at The Huffington Post that they “believe the project has struck a nerve because knitting is at once meditative and communal, giving women and men time to, say, reflect on what’s at stake for women’s health under a Trump/Pence administration and to connect with others in yarn shops and in classes.”
Donald Trump’s Tweets can move markets. The free iOS Finance app Trigger lets you know if one of the companies in which you hold stock comes into his crosshairs.
The company has introduced a special “Trump Trigger.” The trigger “gives you the ability to trade stocks based off of Trump’s tweets about public companies,” they write. Basically, says the company blog, the trigger works by notifying you in real time if Trump tweets about a publicly traded stock that you own.
Help for Individual Investors
Trump has tweeted about companies from Apple to Amazon to AT&T — and that’s just the A’s. In some cases, such as when Trump blasted Boeing for the cost of a new Air Force One jet, the aerospace company’s stock immediately fell nearly 2%.
While professional investors have the tools and algorithms to stay on top of market moves, Trigger says, “individual investors do not have the appropriate tools to react in an automatic fashion – until now.”
Beyond simple “IF this, THEN that rules”, using techniques in natural language processing, the company says it wants to help individual investors make more rational decisions by having better information.
Happy New Year! While I have to admit that I’m pretty terrified of what’s ahead for us under Trumplethinskin, I want to wish you a peaceful, easy, successful, healthy, and fun year.
Please resist the temptation to ignore the news, although it is strong. It is essential that we do not allow ourselves to accept a world that embraces hatred, racism and xenophobia. Please don’t be complacent. Please help love to triumph. Be present and be involved.
Trump has not even been inaugurated and already with no warning, no debate and no public hearing, House Republicans have voted to hobble the Independent Ethics Office. It was set up in 2008 in the aftermath of corruption scandals that sent three members of Congress to jail.
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Founders Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman, a screenwriter and architect, respectively, are encouraging crafters to knit one or many copies of the simple rectangular “Pussy Power Hat” design. The project is also providing 
