Stumbled upon Brian Clark’s recent article which nails some insightful points about social media marketing.

The most important conversation is not between seller and buyer, but between prospective and existing buyers.

I suppose many sellers would pay dearly to know what existing buyers say to the prospects. The catch is, they don’t have to wait until it happens by itself — it probably won’t, if there are no social objects the conversation can be built around.

And then comes the second step of social media marketing:

While social media marketing with content and conversation will bring you business, you’ll get more business the better you expressly point out the benefits of buying. More importantly, you should expressly ask people to do business with you.

Not an easy task, because, on one side, people are sensible to the sales efforts, and on the other side, people usually have no idea of buying anything unless told so. That’s why writing skills Brian talks about are so important. And that’s where lies a new divide of social media era.

Twitter is an example of how a new genre comes out of a new media. Never before sms messaging was considered a valid literary genre. What comes to mind are Latin wax tablets, probably as stimulating for brevity as sms is, and wall writings, another ancient tradition regenerated, ranging from profane to silly to divine. As for me, I decided to use my twitter page to quickly capture germs of thoughts and ideas, a sort of ideaflow.

There is a strange phenomena in the art of writing. On the one hand, every writer wants her writing to find response among the readership, i.e. to be universal. On the other hand, you can only write well about things unique to you — things you are interested in, belonging to your inner world (which no one else fully understands). Looks like, contrary to habitual opinion, personal is the most universal.

We don’t fully know how exactly we are unique. In a sense, one is unique rather with the vector of her growth than with something she already has, so, an objective knowledge of what your uniqueness consists in is impossible.

Looks like the bridge between personal and universal is interest. The more interesting, i.e. emotionally engaging, is the matter to the writer, the more exciting may her writing be to the readers. (If, of course, one is of sound mind :) So, emotions, a deeply personal and irrational thing which is so often considered as standing in the way of objectivity, turns out to be a criterion of universality and, therefore, verity.

But there are different kinds of excitement. A cops and robbers films produces an intensive but low-quality excitement, especially if you already passed the teen age. By the way, as I reread adventure books from my childhood, I find that I almost don’t recall the plot. My memory kept only things (or states of mind?) which were unrelated to the plot. And by some strange occurrence exactly those states of mind are still exciting and still productive for me now.

A plot, however dramatic, is but a mean to manage reader’s attention. It just makes the transition to a productive reality easier. It is just one of many possibilities, yet often misused as reality’s substitute.

Malevich’s Black Square is a declaration of radical rejection of object/plot in painting. In literature, an example of similar attitude is Proust’s work where through an objectless plot constantly shines author’s mind and emotions, provoking reader’s emotions as a deep inner resonance which is totally different from the plot adrenaline.

Through a habit, which is born out of plot-dominated art, we sometimes even imagine our own lives as such a stories, trying to deduce their meaning from plot details. That is where empty hopes and naive adventurism, as well as most of business storytelling come from.

But reality is different — only our dreams are real, only emotions speak, and only our path exists, with its beginning and end hidden from our eyes :)