Archives for November 2010

Notes From #blogchat – Open Mic November

November 28, 2010 by Ian 4 Comments

Open mic night! Yowza! Let’s go!

Open mic night is always a little frantic – it’s hard to believe that in the six plus months I’ve been participating in #blogchat’s monthly free for all, it’s ramped up in intensity pretty regularly.

Thankfully, some regular troopers like Margie Clayman and Prosperity Gal decided to lead the charge and get the festivities going early. It made for some good headspace before the chat opened officially.

When I keyed in, the chat was already full of advice for dealing with the full force of the conversation. Here are my tips;

I have TweetDeck for PC open all the time anyway – I use a #blogchat search column, and my reply column to monitor the chat and participate whenever I can. I always give precedence to replies.
I also have a browser window open – either Firefox or Chrome (more often lately it’s Chrome) with an open WordPress draft for notes.
I try to find images beforehand if possible, to save on the back end of producing my Notes From posts.
I tile the windows, so I can see the conversation going as I make notes.

And that’s it. Tweetchats – any online event coverage – is difficult from a one-screened device (just wait until I can justify a two-screen desktop, instead of just a laptop) but efficiency is one of the keys to making sure everything runs smoothly. That, and not worrying over typos.

Of course, efficiency doesn’t mean catching everything.

Here’s what happened on my end of the night’s festivities.

@SbuxMel asked if it were stuck up to have a Facebook page for your blog – a great question. Personally, I think providing people with alternative connection points is a good idea, assuming you’re clear about your intent there. If I were setting a page up for this site, it’d be really clear that it were only an alternative to RSS subscription, to make connecting easier.Not everyone Likes pages, just like not everyone subscribes by RSS – or even by email.

@HeidiCohen brought up an interesting statistic – apparently 74,583 new blogs are made every day. That’s a lot of ham sandwiches and lolcats, people. Lots.

There was a lot of back and forth, as usual, about the best ways to blog – writing series, guest blogging and so on. How to find topics, whether monetizing a blog is wrong – all good questions, many of which were previously covered.

@BillBoorman did make a good distrinction though – if you’re looking to monetize a blog, how you go about things depends on whether you want to make money because you blog, or make money from the blog itself. It’s nuance, but it’s important. You can split the difference and do both – but that takes a lot more effort and time, to make sure you’re not crossing anyone’s acceptable lines.

Bill also asked how one measures the success of a blog – I want to see this as a full night’s #blogchat topic. There are so many possible ways to measure success – it’s complicated, and personal. And important. Success at any task is a good thing – but first you have to know what to call success.

Mack made a comment about content reflecting a blogger’s unique expertise – I couldn’t agree more. With so many thought leaders out there, the UVP is getting more important and harder to define at once.

One more important note – echoed by a number of people was the wish for more comments. How do we encourage people to join a conversation? Start one! @KyleMcShane and @MargieClayman both cropped appropriate comments seconds apart about responding to comments and keeping the conversation lines open. This couldn’t be more true. Making sure you’re not writing in the declarative unless you expect no comments, or are discouraging comments on a given blog post is one of the black belt secrets not enough people practice.

Anyone can make a statement. But can you learn to ask questions?

@MatthewLiberty mentioned that some people spend more time reading and researching than blogging – his advice is that (as Seth Godin says) you have to ship it. I agree. If you have a blog and you’re not blogging, you’re not a blogger.

Blogging is about more than just making entries. Developing thought over time, consideration for your readers, even a vague attempt at growing a community – it takes a long time for some people to get themselves into a position of rhythmic value creation that actually inspires connection. This is why conversation is so important – developing the “two way street of engagement” (as @thekimschneider says” is all-important.

Halftime.

Conversation moved on to Kout scores, Twitter Grader, Website Grader and so on – the unanimous word from many experienced bloggers was that metrics aren’t important, that writing with ever-increasing passion and quality are. I agree and disagree – but we’ll get into that later on.

Margie Clayman asked about premium blog themes – on which I’ll be speaking later, actually. For those returning, I re-launched my site on Standard Theme yesterday morning. To put it simply; even being acclimated to WordPress development and having built my last five themes from scratch, Standard was a better experience all around. But this is not a shill.

I’m seriously enjoying @MatthewLiberty’s stream – go follow him if you’re not already. He made mention of the difference between planning and research and that was it. New favourite voice of reason.

Also, as usual a font of wisdom, @tc_geeks suggested that, for those of us who have an email subscription option, writing a blog post thanking people for subscribing via email will be particularly apropos. Email subscribers will see it in their inbox, and everyone else will be reminded they could be subscribing by email Truly, another black belt blogger manoeuvrer. Bravo.

And then it was 9pm!

As usual, so much insight. I’ll make a transcript available as soon as What The Hashtag lets me get one ready or someone shares one.

What have you got to add? The theme seemed to be quality content, quality site, and quality conversation – how can we advance any of these things?

Photo by Geir Yngve Tro.

Video Saturdays – Clay Shirky on Collaboration vs Institutions

November 27, 2010 by Ian Leave a Comment

Clay Shirky. Need I say more? Not usually. However;

When we talk about creating community, we need to make sure we know what we’re talking about. We want to build communities – but are communities what we need?

What’s the outcome we’re looking for? What’s the benefit of organizing, compared to loosely aiming a large, unorganized group?

Are we looking for documentation – or can we get by with serendipitous coordination of correlated data?

Enjoy. Then, please, discuss.

Are you branding too early?

November 26, 2010 by Ian Leave a Comment

The world of personal branding is a big deal lately – everyone wants to be visible, unique in their own not-so-far-from-the-box way, but at the end of the day, differentiation counts for more than global recognition. Branding – in the big picture sense – is better for recognition than differentiation.

Look at a business – in fact, look at many businesses – whose entire customer base resides within a fifty kilometre area. They’re all around you. Corner stores are perfect examples. Go check one out, if you haven’t for a while – the closer to being a prototypical hole in the wall the better.

Look at the merchandising theory in small businesses.

What’s near the front of the store? What’s at the back? What do you walk past to get to the staples, like milk and flour? What’s on their counters – other than lottery tickets, cigarettes (depending on location) and a few small snacks as impulse items?

Is merchandising theory branding? No. It’s merchandising theory. Is a unique set of hours branding? What about the shirt the cashier wears, uniform or not? These are all elements of branding, but they are not The Brand. The ways one business does these things (if, and only if they’re intentional) compared to another is differentiation – but it’s not branding.

Branding is a theoretical promise. It says “this, and this, and all of this I/we am/are – these things are our core, and that’s what we deliver to our clients.”

Is a good blog theme branding? It’s probably closer to merchandising theory, especially if you’re selling services, products, or affiliate items.

Are the posts you publish on your blog branding? Maybe – but I’d guess that even if you plan very far ahead (in the scale of years), you’re still just process-communicating, which isn’t in and of itself branding. It’s a component, but not the entirety of branding.

Is your demeanour on a social network branding? It might be – but it’s far more likely that, unless you’re highly intentional about how you present to others, you’re just being yourself. Transparency and authenticity may be big buzz words these days, but it amounts to Know Thyself – and that’s not branding.

So what, then, is personal branding?

It’s all of these things. All put together. Communicated in a way that’s cohesive, consistent, creative way that clearly differentiates you and your business at a fundamental level from others in your area – whether that’s geographic area, service area, or global business vertical.

The key thing to remember about branding is that it’s a puzzle – the picture only comes together if the pieces fit together cleanly, the message is transmitted clearly, and remains consistent over a long period of time.

Stop worrying about your personal brand. Produce the best work you can, over and over again, and communicate the qualities of that work as a promise to do the same for all future clients.

Image by Kevin Dooley.

Delivering Value

November 25, 2010 by Ian Leave a Comment

We need to do valuable work. Right?

You feel better when you know you’re delivering value – I know I do. It’s important, to know that what you do is valued – what gets complicated is where we’re looking for the declaration of that value.

This is one of the few places entrepreneurs have it easier than the rest of us – there’s a very clear scale of “client value” and “my business value” that doesn’t often get muddied. When an entrepreneur’s personal or business value conflicts with the client’s needs, the problems can be quite obvious. When the entrepreneur’s business values and their personal values conflict, there’s obvious work to do in order to fix the problem.

Working in a larger group, it’s easy to run into conflicts of prioritization – especially when more than two parties are interested in creating value.

Imagine you have a project. There are clear objectives set out by the client – they want something to behave a certain way. There are also clear objectives set out by the project manager (who isn’t necessarily you); their concern is that the work get done on time, on budget, and with a certain measure of internal standard applied – which may or may not be higher than client expectations. Here’s the kicker; it turns out that the timeline and budget set out by the project manager conflict with the client’s needs for function, form and finesse.

Panic, right?

We’ve all been in this situation – yes, you too, don’t kid yourself.

So where do you draw the line? Do you sacrifice your personal time in order to keep the deadline? Do you cut corners on the internal standards in order to meet budget requirements and satisfy client needs? Where’s the trade-off?

More importantly – where do we express this trade-off?

In a lot of cases, communication may be an answer. Flexibility is possible in a lot of directions, if concerns are set out as early as they’re discovered – and no matter whether we’re paranoid about seeming imperfect, setting expectations is more important.

How else are we supposed to work together, if we can’t support each other? Value, after all, must be agreed upon before it can be delivered.

How would you navigate this kind of multi-directional value equation?

Photo by Ben Betts.