If you’re not getting readers to your blog, it may not be your social media promotion, it may be because your blog sucks.
(Okay, it doesn’t really suck. I was just saying that to get your attention. You’ll see why in a minute.)
I recently spoke to the Hoosier PRSA chapter of the Public Relations Society of America about the secrets of blogging, and realized I had never actually written about the subject of the presentation.
Blogs are a lot like newspapers. In fact, a good blog is written more like a newspaper than a magazine. And since bloggers are becoming citizen journalists, I think it’s important that bloggers learn to write like newspaper writers. Here are a few ways you can improve your blog writing and have it read more like a newspaper article.
Write in Newspaper Style.
This means the most important information goes first, second most important goes next, and so on. It’s the inverted pyramid style. After a certain point, usually around the halfway mark, you start seeing more of the inside information, background story, etc., and the story gets boring.
Newspapers are written this way, because readers usually abandon a story when it gets boring. They also abandon it because it’s too long.
So with a blog post, you need to end the post before you get to the boring part. When you start writing background information, or repeating old information, stop. Don’t write a post that’s long enough for people to get bored. Instead, put a “To learn more about this issue, check out these previous posts” section with links to older stories.
Short words. Short sentences. Short paragraphs.
Despite what my 7th grade English teacher said, it’s perfectly all right to have a one word paragraph.
Nyah.
By breaking things up, and making them easier to read, we’re more likely to continue on. We glance ahead and see all the short paragraphs and think, “that’s not so hard. I can go a little longer.” Pretty soon, “a little longer” turns into “the entire story.”
Negative Space = Readability
One of the reasons newspapers are tough to read is the lack of negative space (that’s fancy graphic designer talk for “spaces between paragraphs”). All the paragraphs are crammed together, which can make for some tiring reading.
Our eyes and our brains need a break from all the text running together, so we look for that break by switching to other stories, abandoning the one we were just reading. But if you can provide some extra relief in the story, that will help propel readers forward.
Create a Powerful Lede
I got your attention when I said your blog sucked, didn’t I? Not every blog post has to have a Pulitzer-quality opening, but it doesn’t hurt to have something that’s attention getting and informative.
Remember, a newspaper article’s job is to get you to read the first sentence. The first sentence’s job is to get you to read the second sentence, and so on. So your lede better be a doozy.
(By the way, the opening sentence of a newspaper is spelled “lede,” not “lead.” Lead is the soft metal used to create the individual letters used to lay out the newspaper. Since “ledd” and “leed” are spelled the same, journos started calling the opening sentence the “lede” to avoid confusion, forcing future generations to explain that we’re not idiots, and we do know how to correctly spell that word.)
Write For a Clever 12-Year-Old
It’s a newspaper’s dirty little secret that they write for a 6th grade education and attention span. (Don’t feel too insulted; TV news is produced at a 4th grade level.) That’s why the important stuff is at the front of the story. Bloggers need to do that too.
It’s not that your readers are stupid, or can’t understand big words. It’s that we just don’t want to devote the mental resources and energy to decoding really long and complicated words. Even academic journals written by and for Ph.Ds in an academic field are considered “better” if they’re written at a high school level instead of a post-graduate level.
So skip the polysyllabic words and use short ones instead.
It’s also important that you explain new terms. Assume that your story is going to be read by someone who is experiencing this issue for the very first time. Don’t assume knowledge on their part, don’t assume they know as much about the story as you do. So be sure to explain it like you’re telling that 12-year-old for the first time. Don’t use jargon, acronyms, and abbreviations unless you explain them.
For example, newspaper style requires you spell out what a term means, followed by the acronym/abbreviation in parentheses. That tells the reader you’re going to use it from then on in the story.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) today announced a new measure banning texting by truck drivers.
Afterward, I can use FMCSA in the story wherever I want. However, when I do a new story, I have to assume a new set of readers, so I have to spell it out again.
Writing a blog can be easy, especially if you’re doing it informally, and for just a few people. But writing it newspaper style takes a little more effort, but the payoff can be worth it. You’ll get more readers, your readers will stick around longer, and you’ll earn a reputation of being a stellar writer.
Just remember to tell them where you learned it.
Photo credit (inverted pyramid at the Louvre): KeepTheByte, Flickr
Photo credit (lead type): JM3, Flickr
The Best, Easiest Way to Build Blog Readership
Gary Vaynerchuk, author of Crush It!
, says that one of the best ways to build readership for your blog is by commenting on other people’s blogs.
For one thing, it helps with your Google search juice. But more importantly, it lets people know you’re reading their blog and are interested in what they’re saying. Vaynerchuk says that we need to spend hours per day — hours! — posting comments on other people’s blogs.
While you may not have the time or desire to spend hours doing this (of course, you won’t crush it, says Vaynerchuk), you do need to leave some intelligent comments when you do. It’s not enough to just leave “Nice post!” as a comment. If you want to show the bloggers you’re truly engaged and interested, leave comments that show you have actually read and understood what they wrote about.
This does two things for you: 1) you meet like-minded readers, and let them know about your existence. When they find you, they’ll become readers, and you’re growing your social media footprint; and, 2) it builds backlinks to your own blog, which boost your search engine ranking.
This is a tried-and-true technique for building search rankings, especially as Google is recognizing authority of websites by their backlinks. They figure if a lot of people link to a blog, site, or even a post, it must be something worthwhile. And commenting, while not as powerful as, say, another blog post, is still a way to generate those much-sought after backlinks.
There are some search engine optimization companies that offer backlinking services to their clients, and will spend a lot of time (hopefully) leaving comments on people’s blogs, in addition to their other techniques and practices.
Less scrupulous companies will leave crappy comments that are nothing but spam, hoping that they won’t be deleted or caught in spam filters. While I’m not sure if Google or other search engines will penalize URLs that spam links lead to (if anyone knows, leave us a comment), it’s our fervent hope that the search engines will penalize those parasites, and that they suffer TSA strip searches and tax audits.
(WordPress has a great spam fighting software in Akismet, and it’s done wonders for this blog. It’s blocked 11,484 spam comments to date, and I deleted 35 spam comments right before I wrote this post. So I’m not a big fan of spammers.)
Basically, if you want your comments to be accepted and appreciated by your fellow bloggers, explain why you think a post is comment-worthy, talk about your own viewpoints, and maybe a reason why you agree or disagree. Engage in an ongoing conversation with those people. And if someone leaves a comment on your blog, respond, and check out the other person’s blog.
Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging for more than nine years (even before it was called blogging), and has been a published writer for more than 20 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, stage plays, radio theatre plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
Tags: blogging, comments, Gary Vaynerchuk
Posted in All Posts, Business Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Networking, Social Media, Writing | 1 Comment »
Don’t Measure Web 2.0 with Old School Expectations
This post was originally published on April 11, 2009, at my DeckersMarketing.com blog, now defunct.
My friend and fellow social media guy Kyle Lacy asked a question on Smaller Indiana about whether we should measure Web 2.0 with Web 1.0 tools.
The problem, Kyle says, is that Marketing 1.0 folks are expecting old school results with 2.0 tools. They still expect to measure thousands and thousands of views, like they used to see with TV and radio commercials, billboards, and newspaper ads.
Even as recently as five years ago here in Central Indiana, TV and billboards reached hundreds of thousands, radio and newspapers reached tens of thousands. Across the country, Web 2.0 is only reaching hundreds and thousands – tens of thousands if you’re lucky, hundreds of thousands if you’re Amazon, Microsoft, or Apple.
These “low numbers” are having a chilling effect on some marketers, especially the Marketing 1.0 folks, because they’re used to seeing the BI-I-I-I-G numbers. They have these too-high expectations because they have been lied to by traditional advertising and PR.
The Golf Channel’s Inflated Numbers
On the Golf Channel’s website, they tell us “the Golf Channel has a global reach of almost 110 million homes.”
Ooh, squeals the marketer in capitalistic delight, if I advertise on the Golf Channel, my ad will be beamed into 110 million homes.
Not so. Who typically watches the Golf Channel? Golfers. And how many of them are there? According to the National Golf Foundation, in 2008, that number was 29.5 million Americans. That’s not even 10% of the entire country.
In other words, the Golf Channel wants us to think they’re reaching 110 million homes. That may be, but that’s not how many people might watch it — 29.5 million. And of those, how many are actually watching it? It sure ain’t 29.5 million.
The Golf Channel won’t even say. In a press release from this past February, they said:
Highest ratings? Compared to what? They never said what those high ratings looked like, or even their daily viewership.
But Sports Business Daily did. They said — probably to the chagrin of The Golf Channel — the average daily viewership is 77,000, while their primetime viewership runs around 131,000.
Let’s see, 77,000 viewers divided by 110 million homes is. . . .07%. Not even one-tenth of one percent the Golf Channel likes to brag about. But you can bet every Golf Channel ad salesperson is telling their customers, “We have a reach of 110 million homes.”
But the Golf Channel isn’t alone in these misleading figures. Newspapers and magazines like to boast about print runs, but don’t mention actual readership (often less than half). Radio’s Arbitron ratings and TV’s Nielsen ratings are based on surveys and estimates, not actual numbers of viewers. (And don’t get me started on cable companies that lump in dozens of stations no one watches and then count them to pad their advertising rate cards. Like I really want 12 different home shopping channels or an HD version of the International Military History Channel.)
Therein lies the problem. There isn’t a completely accurate way to measure the number of viewers on a TV channel, but marketers have been conditioned to think they’re reaching 110 million.
The same is true for PR. Let’s say a newspaper has a print run of 500,000 copies but a real readership of 300,000. The PR person will say, “we reached as many as 500,000 readers,” but they can’t tell how many people read an article, clipped it out, sent it to others, or stuck it at the bottom of the bird cage.
Why We Can’t Measure Traditional Media
PR, traditional marketing, and media people like to say they can measure their efforts by measuring sales, web views, numbers called, etc. They run a few commercials, or get some airtime and column inches, and look for a spike in sales.
“Look, sales went up right after we ran our commercial,” they say. “We made it all better.”
But that’s not completely accurate. They can’t prove the cause-and-effect of their efforts. Was it their latest ads? Or the previous set of ads? An unknown newspaper article? Coupons? A full moon?
I agree, the PR/ advertising most likely led to the increased sales. But which commercials at what time? Which story on what TV news program? And how many of those particular commercials led to a particular percentage of sales?
There is no piece of software on earth that will tell me that 10% of Friday’s sales increase happened because of Thursday’s 6:00 TV news segment, and not the article in the newspaper. And I’ve got nothing but surveys and estimates to tell me that I need to focus more attention on the NBC news, not ABC.
We Can Measure Social Media Though
Now that we’ve got some great tools to measure social media, people aren’t seeing numbers of millions or even hundreds of thousands, they’re seeing thousands, and sometimes even hundreds. (And sadly, these are the numbers they were probably getting all along.)
And marketing people, used to that 110 million figure, are writing off Web 2.0, because it doesn’t have the same numbers as big media. Of course, they write it off, not knowing important figures like commercial viewership, or how many people are fast-forwarding through their commercials on the DVR.
Sports marketer Pat Coyle often writes about the problems he’s facing with marketers who are very interested in in-stadium sponsorships and reaching 60,000 people per week for 8 – 10 home games, but balk at sponsoring a social network with 20,000 raving fans because they don’t have “high click-rates.”
What these marketers are missing is the passion of the raving fan that social media harnesses. A raving fan who finds the latest song, article, or video online will tell their friends about it through Twitter, post it on their blog, or even post it on a discussion forum. Their friends pick it up, and forward it on through the same channels. This ultimately drives traffic to the website, thanks to the exponential growth of they tell two friends, and they tell two friends. This leads to increased sales or viewership, which leads to more raving fans, which leads to increased sales, and so on, and so on.
The benefit of social media is that we can measure the passion of Web 2.0 users, and how much they love the company or brand. We can use services like Radian6 to measure the real reach of our marketing and PR 2.0 efforts.
Programs like Radian6 tell us who the raving fans of our brands are. One raving fan is worth more to a company than 200 people who glanced at the TV ad or raced past a billboard at 70 miles per hour. The raving fan tells their friends, who in turn become fans and tell their friends. The cool thing is, social media measuring tools can follow that train. It shows where the raving fans are talking, and how often they’re doing it. It will show us who that first raving fan was, and how much of the actual number of sales they created.
Social media is still new enough that there isn’t a standard method of measurement, but that’s because there are too many methods. We’re spoiled for choices, and because this is such a new way of doing things, the people who find out the best way and can standardize it will own social media measurement.
Meanwhile, marketers need to learn that if they want to learn how to measure the effectiveness of their online campaign, they need to begin understanding the emotion and passion of many of their customers. If you can harness that, then you’ll finally begin creating the traffic –– and sales –– you’ve been looking for.
Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging for more than nine years (even before it was called blogging), and has been a published writer for more than 20 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, stage plays, radio theatre plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
Tags: social marketing, traditional marketing, web 2.0
Posted in Social Media, Social Media Analytics, Traditional Media, marketing | 1 Comment »
Image is Everything, Twitter is Forever
It was a disappointing night in Indianapolis tonight (I’m writing this at 12:00 on a Sunday night/Monday morning). Our beloved Indianapolis Colts lost the Super Bowl to the New Orleans Saints, 31 – 17.
I followed the game with many of my Twitter friends, and we had a good time chatting with each other, and some of our Twitter buddies down in New Orleans. When the game was over, we congratulated the Saints fans, and wished them well. Everyone but one person. They tweeted what was one of the most egregious tweets I had seen in, maybe, ever.
Our collective jaws dropped. People were offended, and the whole thing created quite a firestorm here in Indianapolis among several PR and social media pros. It even got some serious attention in New Orleans.
This hateful tweet was made by a supposed PR professional — we’ll call them X — who didn’t seem to understand that when you’re in PR, you’re on all the time. If you make public statements, you and your organization will be judged by those statements. And when you make a joke about a city that lost over 1800 people to the country’s most devastating hurricane in a century, that reflects poorly on you, on your company, and even on your city.
We’re sorry, New Orleans
First of all, let me apologize on behalf of the entire city. This one person does not speak for the rest of us. For the most part, we were gracious in our loss, and I saw a lot of tweets congratulating the city of New Orleans for an awesome win. You fans have shown real class and pride over the years. You love your team as much as we love ours. And this was a great game. I’m very sorry one person said something that awful. We don’t think like that, act like that, or talk like that in Indiana. This person’s tweet is not indicative of the entire state’s way of thinking.
A Quick Aside
I have since learned, after I wrote the first draft, that X received death threats for their offending tweet. Totally uncool, people. While what this person did was hateful, death threats will land you in all kinds of trouble with the law. Do not make death threats, or violent threats of any kind. Be better than X, rise above it. Let’s keep our heads.
Back to the Story
So someone publicly tweeted X’s boss “Hey, congratulations on the AWESOME hire.” A follow-up tweet called on X’s boss to fire them. X deleted their tweet, and protected their account (because of the death threats), but the damage had been done. Screen shots were already circulating, and many people were discussing it online.
While I’m not calling for anyone’s resignation, I do think the entire incident was handled poorly this evening. As a PR practitioner, I would hope X would recognize that:
This is the kind of PR that no public figure — corporate, government, or otherwise — would ever want. And yet, it’s the kind that someone, who truly should have known better, got.
Think beyond the present moment
Whenever I give social media talks, especially to college students, I always say the same thing: If you don’t want skeletons in your closet, don’t stick bodies in there in the first place.
If you don’t want potential employers to find stupid photos of you on Facebook, 1) don’t do stupid stuff, 2) don’t take photographic evidence of your stupidity and 3) don’t associate with people who post photos of your stupidity on Facebook.
The same is true with Twitter. Don’t tweet things that are hurtful, painful, and just plain wrong. Don’t wave it off as sarcasm. And always, always apologize when you screw up. Don’t hide, don’t cower, don’t turn on your protective force field. Admit your mistake like an adult, and then quit acting like a child in the first place.
(X did apologize for their tweet in their blog post.)
This incident is just one more reason why businesses are loathe to let their people get on social media on behalf of the company. They don’t want someone tweeting, Facebooking, or generally communicating with the world when they shouldn’t be.
Actions like this hurt the social media community as a whole, and they makes our job harder when we try to convince C-level executives to trust their employees to do the right thing. If the people who should know better can’t do the right thing, why would the average employee?
Finally, I hope the person in question will apologize to the people of New Orleans, and follow it up with a donation to their rebuilding efforts. I also hope X’s employer will use this as an educational moment. Use it to learn and grow from.
And quit using Twitter after 5:00 if you can’t be trusted.
Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging for more than nine years (even before it was called blogging), and has been a published writer for more than 20 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, stage plays, radio theatre plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
Tags: crisis communications, Public Relations, Social Media, twitter
Posted in Crisis Communication, Public Relations, Social Media, Twitter | 3 Comments »
PR 2.0 and Online Marketing are Starting to Look Alike, Thanks to Gen Y
I’m beginning to realize that as much as PR and marketing folks don’t trust each other, the Maginot Line that separated them is starting to get a lot smaller.
And it’s all because of Generation Y.
Generation Y — people between the ages of 11 and 30 — have shunned traditional media and are regular consumers of online media. This is important, because Generation Y now outnumbers Baby Boomers, about 81 million to 78 million, depending on who you ask.
Gen Y consumes their media online: they read online newspapers instead of dead tree versions. They watch YouTube and Hulu.com, rather than traditional TV. They go out of their way to avoid marketing messages, rather than sit through 2 – 3 minutes of commercials (traditional “interruption marketing.”)
This has forced marketers to start reaching out to the Millennials where they are: video games, online videos, skate parks, social networks, and extreme sports sponsorships. They do this to build trust.
Public Relations 2.0 is all about building trust too. They use social media to expand their network to reach more consumers, and then try to create trust with the consumer. New marketing does exactly the same thing. They use social media, and try to build trust.
The ultimate difference is the motivation. Marketers try to make money for their clients, PR flaks try to get press for their clients.
I think we may see a day where PR and marketing agencies are no longer at odds, but begin cooperating, merging, or at least hiring someone from “the dark side” to handle that other side of the same coin.
Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging for more than nine years (even before it was called blogging), and has been a published writer for more than 20 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, stage plays, radio theatre plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
Tags: online marketing, Public Relations, Social Media
Posted in Communication, Public Relations, Social Media, marketing | No Comments »
Why You Should Put One Space After a Period, not Two
This post was originally published on March 5, 2009 at DeckersMarketing.com, which has been retired.
I raised a bit of a Twitter ruckus this morning, when I posted the following tweet:
It was just a random thought. Nothing sparked it, nothing set it off. I just like to post little pithy commenth every tho often.
I started getting replies from people I had never met, so I ran over to Twitterfall to see what was going on. Apparently, my little off-the-cuff random comment was sparking some serious conversation in Oregon, Texas, Massachusetts, and even England and Australia.
Oopsie. People really like their two spaces after a period. That’s fine. It’s not wrong to do it, it’s just not necessary.
The rule came from our old typing classes, where we were told to use two spaces after a period. Younger people (i.e. punks and whippersnappers who never had to use a real typewriter) learned the two space rule from people who. . . learned to type on typewriters. (I learned from Mr. Carey, Typing 1 teacher, Muncie Central H.S., in 1983.)
According to Wikipedia, this double-spacing is sometimes called English spacing, although since the mid-1990s, it’s been called French spacing. (Insert your own joke about the French, cheese, and surrendering here.)
The reason for the two spaces is because typewriters use a fixed width font. That is, all letters were the same fixed width. The letters ‘i’ and ‘l’ take up the same space as the letter ‘m.’ To set the sentences apart from each other and make them easier to read, we used two spaces. This practice actually hearkens back to the typesetting days, when typesetters had to hand place each character and punctuation mark. They just stuck in a double space and the habit carried forward.
But unless you use Courier on your computer, today’s software programs use a variable width font like Arial and Times New Roman, which means the letter ‘i’ and ‘l’ take up a minimum amount of space, while the ‘m’ uses more. In fact, an ‘l’ is almost one-third the size of an ‘m.’ Take a look:
m
lll
In addition to this, the computer jams the period in tight against the last letter in a sentence, which creates a little extra space on the other side. If you could measure it, it would be microns of a difference, but the space looks bigger because of how the period is placed against that last letter.
The world is ignoring that second space
If you create websites, you’ll find that html will ignore any space after the first space. (And I know, I know, there’s a whole other controversy about whether it’s website, web site, or even Web site. That’s for a different post.)
Plus, there are some cases, like using Twitter or other micro-blogging services, when every character counts, you don’t want to waste a character on an extra space.
The net result of this variable width is that sentences are easier to read, which means the extra space is not necessary. Again, not wrong, just not necessary. (Okay, maybe a little wrong.)
This issue is not without its passionate controversy.
There were plenty of Twitterers who said I could have their extra space when I pried it from their cold, dead fingers. They learned to type on a typewriter, and are trying to break 30 – 40+ years of habit (it took me two weeks to quit doing it, and I had only been typing for 15 years at the time).
On the other hand, Luke Maciak at Terminally Incoherent said clients would count spaces in Word documents and send them back for revision if he didn’t use two spaces. Needless to say, he hated these clients.
So who’s wrong, and who’s right? Nobody, although I’m claiming moral superiority in this matter. I salute the traditionalists who want to stick with two spaces after a period. I love tradition and doing things old school (I still listen to radio theater). But I also see the need for ease of use, and eliminating extra keystrokes. And really, that’s what it’s all about.
(I’d be interested to see if someone has ever figure out what the saved spaces translates into for saved disk space.)
So what about you? Are you a single spacer or a double spacer? Why? If you’re a double, would you ever consider switching to single? Why not?
———-
A little more about it from the Chicago Manual of Style:
The view at CMOS is that there is no reason for two spaces after a period in published work. Some people, however—my colleagues included—prefer it, relegating this preference to their personal correspondence and notes. I’ve noticed in old American books printed in the few decades before and after the turn of the last century (ca. 1870–1930 at least) that there seemed to be a trend in publishing to use extra space (sometimes quite a bit of it) after periods. And many people were taught to use that extra space in typing class (I was). But introducing two spaces after the period causes problems: (1) it is inefficient, requiring an extra keystroke for every sentence; (2) even if a program is set to automatically put an extra space after a period, such automation is never foolproof; (3) there is no proof that an extra space actually improves readability—as your comment suggests, it’s probably just a matter of familiarity (Who knows? perhaps it’s actually more efficient to read with less regard for sentences as individual units of thought—many centuries ago, for example in ancient Greece, there were no spaces even between words, and no punctuation); (4) two spaces are harder to control for than one in electronic documents (I find that the earmark of a document that imposes a two-space rule is a smattering of instances of both three spaces and one space after a period, and two spaces in the middle of sentences); and (5) two spaces can cause problems with line breaks in certain programs.
Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging for more than nine years (even before it was called blogging), and has been a published writer for more than 20 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, stage plays, radio theatre plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
Tags: punctuation, typing, writing
Posted in Twitter, Writing | 9 Comments »
Gmail is the New Black: Why You Should be Using Gmail Right Now
deatha hard drive crash will bring? Do you have a backup of your address book and necessary emails, should that blessed day ever come?When I give a social media talk, I tell everyone to use Gmail for basic contact management. It has saved my bacon more than once, and I’ve become such a raving fan that I use it as my only email interface. I even forward my work email and other addresses into Gmail, so I have one window, one set of contacts, and the cleanest, least buggy interface I’ve ever had the joys of using. I can send email from any of my addresses, but the interface is all Gmail.
The joys of Gmail
If you’re not using Gmail yet, here are a few reasons why you need to:
What about you? Why do you use Gmail (or your favorite web-mail application)? Why should people switch to web-mail from computer mail? Or, why shouldn’t they?
Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging for more than nine years (even before it was called blogging), and has been a published writer for more than 20 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, stage plays, radio theatre plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
Tags: Gmail, Social Media, social networks, twitter
Posted in All Posts, Crisis Communication, Social Networks, Twitter | 4 Comments »
My Talk at Blog Indiana Bloomington, January 2010
I had a chance to speak at Blog Indiana’s first regional event in Bloomington, Indiana, at the Sproutbox office. (Sproutbox is a venture capital firm that works directly with startups to help them launch. And they’ve got a killer office, complete with liquor cabinet and three in-wall beer taps from the Upland Brewing Company.)
Shawn Plew and Noah Wesley from Blog Indiana were kind enough to ask me to speak, so I talked about promoting a blog with social media. I discussed some of the tools I use to help our clients, as well as my own personal blog.
Special thanks again to Sproutbox for hosting us, and to Scotty’s Brewhouse for providing us with some great food.
Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging for more than nine years (even before it was called blogging), and has been a published writer for more than 20 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, stage plays, radio theatre plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
Tags: blogging, presentation, Social Media, video
Posted in Communication, Presentations, Social Media, Social Networks | No Comments »
Are You a Pioneer or a Settler?
Are you a pioneer or a settler? Do you blaze trails, follow them while they’re still rough, or wait until there’s a nicely paved road?
Being a settler is easy. You just tread down the same old path everyone else has, making sure it’s safe. But being a pioneer is tough. You’re the first to pass this way, you’re not sure if you’re heading in the right direction, and some days you’d swear you’re going the wrong way. But the rewards are well worth it.
So how do you pioneer your new niche? How do you become a leader in your field, especially when there is no niche, or the people in it are not connected? In this case, it’s actually easier to be the pioneer, rather than to be one of many. By the time the settlers are finally getting involved, there’s a traffic jam on the road the pioneers have paved. But by this time, you’ll be way ahead of the pack.
Becoming a Pioneer
Here are a few tools and techniques you can use to establish yourself as an expert in your chosen field. Before you start, make sure you have identified your niche, know who the players are, and actually have some content on your blog or website.
These are just a very few steps to get yourself started finding your niche. I haven’t even touched on LinkedIn or creating an industry-related social network yourself. But these are enough steps to get you started.
What other tools and steps do you recommend? Leave a comment, and we’ll try to feature it in a future blog post.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging for more than nine years (even before it was called blogging), and has been a published writer for more than 20 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, stage plays, radio theatre plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
Tags: Gmail, Social Media, social networking, twitter, youtube
Posted in All Posts, Networking, Social Media, Social Networks, Tools, Twitter | 3 Comments »
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