Does social media make us dumb?
You may have read the study from the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the general reaction to it (the consensus was that social media sites make you stupid and uninformed). While the conclusions are incorrect, the study is incredibly telling about the social media audience and how to write for it.
Most Copyblogger readers are likely familiar with the concept of “above the fold,” which refers to placing the most important or most attention-grabbing content on the upper half of the front page of a newspaper. When applying the same concept to content published on the web, we can think about it instead as “above the scroll,” since we make traditional “above the fold” content visible to readers without requiring them to scroll down.
With StumbleUpon, an under appreciated yet extremely powerful socially driven content discovery site, staying above the scroll is more important than ever. That’s because “Stumbling” is very similar to channel-surfing on television.
It’s incredibly hard to get a social media community interested in a press release, and it’s not because they hate hearing about what your company is up to, it’s just that they hate the way you’re telling the story. Consider some of the approaches the average press release takes.
One sure-fire way to get attention from socially driven sites is to write a really good list. If you look at the current popular articles on CopyBlogger you’ll note the following:
And this recent extremely simple list scored 109 comments and counting. People love lists.
Editor’s Note: Last week, Muhammad Saleem submitted an article to Copyblogger on how to incorporate brevity into your writing. I decided to break up the article into two parts, and demonstrate that with the use of:
(1) a descriptive headline;
(2) a short anecdote,
(3) a famous quote from Strunk and White, and
(4) a link to another article about Steven King
you can communicate a salient point in only 59 words and still provide additional information via links.
What follows are Muhammad’s techniques and examples of how to say more with fewer words. Enjoy. - Brian
On November 19th, 1863, popular orator Edward Everett gave a two-hour speech that nobody remembers. Following Everett, President Abraham Lincoln stood up, delivered 269 words now known as the Gettysburg Address, and sat down. Lincoln’s two-minute speech is regarded as one of the greatest in American history.
Experts from Strunk and White to Stephen King agree:
Omit needless words.
