bloggers Archives | Ian M Rountree

Language Problems – From Verbs to Nouns

May 23, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

“England and America are two countries divided by a common language.”

George Bernard Shaw

One of the biggest confusions people can have in communication is using the same words, but meaning different things.

I don’t mean homonyms, stereotype, or any other typifying agent. I’m not talking about the pronunciation of tomato or potato either. I’m talking about literal speech, interpretation, and where it all falls down between people.

We see this kind of improperly filtered language problem all the time with conversation. Whether we’re speaking or listening, we miss bits where they’re important.

If you ask how I’m doing, and I respond with “I’m fine.” – what do you think I mean? Do I really mean I’m doing well, or am I perhaps masking a bigger problem that I’d rather not discuss?

If I tell you things are hectic or ridiculous at work, does that mean I’m struggling with my job, or that I’m in my glory as an organizer and producer?

It’s not just interpersonal communication either – language affects how we do business. [Read more…]

What Happened to Blog Reactions?

April 19, 2011 by Ian 5 Comments

This week’s #blogchat focused on engagement – comments got all the cred.

I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised – comments are great. They exist on your platform, they’re relatively long-form compared to some other reactions (like tweets and Facebook comments), but it felt like the really big, high caliber blog engagement actions were missing.

What happened to blog reactions?

In the hey-days of LiveJournal, one of the biggest signs a conversation was – well, big – would be when someone on your friends list actually entered a post in direct reaction to something you wrote. Not just a comment-length “check this out” notice, but a full on essay-length journal entry eviscerating, deconstructing, or otherwise responding to what you wrote.

It was fairly commonplace, at one point, to follow chains of journal entries ten or fifteen layers deep before finding the initial instigator. Does that happen any more? Not so much.

We’re worried about spam. Not just comment spam – trackback spam.

The same way comments have become a great place for less-than-ethical linking, trackbacks to unwary bloggers have turned into the vogue Den of Thieves to be avoided at all costs. We want social reactions, comments, and shares more than we want other bloggers linking to our specific articles – we want them linking to our domains, which are evergreen, rather than individual articles which are timely and may grow stale over time as information changes.

But is this how we build community? It’s mechanistic, pragmatic, and unsustainable – it furthers no conversation, and encourages blind authority over the communion of conversation.

In our rush for personal authority, we seem to be losing some of our community.

We all want to be the instigator – to get the comments. Yet we all talk about contributing to community and furthering the conversation already in action at the same time – what better way to do that than to react to something in a thought-out, constructive way? We need to remember that adding to a conversation assumes that you don’t have to be the origin of that conversation. Starting new work all the time is like perpetually saying hi. And that gets video-game-esque really fast.

Give yourself some leeway to pick up where someone else left off now and again – and not in the way you pick up where an author left off for a book review. The instigators will probably want to converse with you a little more, if you’re really thorough in adding to their conversations – and your regular readers might find a new resource or two in the mix as well.

What say you? Bonus points if you continue this on your platform instead of mine.

Image by Nigel Howe.

Consistency is King

March 18, 2011 by Ian 12 Comments

It’s easy to write one awesome post on your blog.

It’s easy to spend five hours doing research, creating relevance where none existed before. It’s easy, relatively, getting an interview done with your hero.

It’s easy to write ten awesome posts on your blog.

What you can do once, you can do again, right?

What’s hard is writing ten awesome blog posts, in a row, on a schedule, and following that with ten more posts, on the same schedule.

That’s hard.

When you know how to create content, creating content becomes the easy part.

Whenever people say content is king, I feel the inexplicable urge to giggle like a school kid. Content, as king, is dead. Long live the new king, consistency.

Being on time, every time, takes a lot of practice and hard work. It means building habits you may feel challenged for building, and doing work that might not otherwise be up to your standards all in the name of hitting the almighty Publish button every time you say you’re going to. It means asking for help when you need it, and not treating failure quite the same way as you used to.

But, in the end, if you can become consistent, you’ve won.

Because, if for every ten blog posts you publish you only have one gem, publishing eleven posts is a great way to improve your changes of finding that gem.

Remember: Repetition is the motor of learning.

Repetition is the motor of learning.

Repetition is what?

Journalists vs News Items – The Twofold Law of Blogging

March 14, 2011 by Ian 1 Comment

Some people know what’s going on. Everywhere. All the time.

We call these people journalists. They’re the gatherers, the curators. Journalists present the facts, add value and perspective, conduct analysis.

Some people are what’s going on. We see them everywhere. All the time.

Most of the time, when considering these people, we call them celebrities. However, in the blogosphere, we call them link bait. Reference points. News items.

Which one are you?

And do you know which one is better for you? Which one is better for your blog? Not everyone who’s great at delivering information is good at delivering news for others. Not everyone who delivers news and commentary in a value-added, impossible to replicate way is worthy of news themselves.

This isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s an opportunity to differentiate yourself. If everyone in your industry is trying to be well known – to be the news – you’ve got a clear opening to be the journalist, and report the news. If you can learn to do the analysis, add value, and build a consistent perspective on what’s going on in your industry – and, more importantly, deliver that news to outsiders in a voice and language they’ll understand – then you’re setting yourself up to win.

It doesn’t matter if El Bigname knows who I am.

It matters even less to anyone who doesn’t know who El Bigname is. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter who in your industry knows how awesome you are – success comes from outside your fishbowl.

If you’re making yourself a news item, is anyone outside your fishbowl going to care?

And, if you’re reporting the news, are you reporting it to te echo chamber, or into the vastness of the outside world?

Notes from #blogchat – Blogging 201

November 14, 2010 by Ian 2 Comments

Back from the great beyond, it’s time for more Notes from #blogchat! Let’s go!

Tonight was a discussion of going beyond dipping your toes in the blogosphere, and moving from 101 hobby blogging, to Blog 201 and beyond.

Firstly, I asked if anyone was actively putting any of the advice they’ve had on #blogchat to good use on their blogs.

I think the question got lost in the rush of “This is how I blogchat” – ignore that part, and read Stan Smith’s rockstar-level #blogchat methodology.

To answer, however: we’ve had a lot of good advice. (sidebars, construction topicality, etc)

Mack asked how we decide the focus of our blogs – Margie Clayman, true to form, jumped in with a note about finding inspiration in tweets and other blog posts. I concur, however; when you’re working up to the 101 level (forget 201 for now), writing what you know can be a good start. Address your own concerns and interests, and those of like mind will jump in.

Of course, as @kateyoung28 mentioned, getting people to find you when you’re starting out can be hard unless you promote. My first step is always SEO – as I’ve written about before, that’s easier than most bloggers think.

Chase Adams mentioned getting inspiration from coffee shops and other public places – something we don’t do nearly often enough (paying attention when in public). Don’t ego map yourself; pull out the headphones once in a while.

As a sidenote, Chris Garrett mentioned editorial calendars to help keep yourself on track and not miss any opportunites to write. I agree. I’d also add that plugins such as Insights (for WordPress.org blogs) are essential to making sure you link your writing in an integrated fashion to your past thoughts.

@devacoach mentioned using her iPhone to take pictures as reminders – I agree! – I use Evernote when I’ve got my laptop or phone about.

@deswalsh mentioned using Google Analytics regularly to see which past posts are performing more persistently – a 201 trick if there ever was one – so he can write similar material in the future.

Halftime! There was a lot of tomfoolery about tools here, gratuitous mentions of Evernote and other organizational tools – see the transcript for more on this part.

I asked what else, other than higher quality content, clearly demarcates a 201-level blog from a 101-level blog. @be3d said “consistent content cadence” – a term you can bet I’ll be using in the future. Consistency definitely trumps frequency in blogs.

@Josepf mentioned developing series of posts – and that’s a great tip. Series may or may not get as many comments as single, heavy hitting pillar articles, but drawing out a concept into a few different articles is one of the marks of an accustomed writer, if not a professional one. Circling a topic for a few dozen posts is vastly different to writing a targeted series. No more of this ready fire aim business.

Now – back to that Ready, Fire, Aim thing.

It’s always been my thought that online business (and thus blogs) do better when they Beta extensively, and refine as they go, toward a moving, yet identified target. More on this later this week.

Power quote time:

@savvywordpress: always remember SEO get them there, good design gets their interest, great content keeps them there + makes conversion #blogchat

Awesome, yes? This encompasses a lot of what #blogchat has been saying for a while.Quality web-work has to cover all the bases.

And that’s when Mack started asking about subscribers. The first question? Who’s got a subscribe button on their blogs. I’d argue a subscribe button is minimum table stakes for blog design – anything less than at least a “Subscribe here” link, or an orange icon is doing it wrong.

A lot of people agreed that they’ve got subscribe buttons, and know what they’re for. This is a good thing.

@superdumb (who is most definitely NOT) dropped a note about starting conversations in comments on others’ blogs that you can take home to your own. 201-level tip, for sure.

And, mercy to the masses, Dan Perez and I actually agreed on something; there’s a massive gulf in skillsets between bloggers and writers (and, I added, authors). Not all writers can blog, and not every blogger should author a book or write a newspaper column. This is important, especially when considering the move from 101 blog (hobby, mandatory action, etc) to 201, full-on, professional blogging.

Above all else, making sure you’re not just covering the minimum bases, but filling out every field and making sure you have the commitment to find the right skills and get the right support is one of the key factors in moving into Blogging at the 201 Level. Anyone can write a blog. Not everyone needs, wants, or must become a highly skilled blogger.

What do you think? What else goes on the list of 201-level blogging tips that we missed?

Read the transcript for #blogchat, November 14th 2010 here. See the #blogchat stats on What the Hashtag.

A participants’ list will be up as soon as I can get one/generate one. If you’ve got one, please do share!

Photo by Scarleth White.