Ian M Rountree

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Notes From #blogchat – Guest Host Chris Brogan

August 15, 2010 by Ian 4 Comments

If Chris Brogan were a Body BuilderTonight’s #blogchat had Chris Brogan on as guest host – and Mack Collier thankfully prefixed the chat with a post explaining the flow. Thanks for that, Mack – as you said, #blogchat certainly can get batshit-crazy-fast, and no one expected tonight to be any different.

For the uninitiated – here is Mack’s exegesis of #blogchat.

Stanford from Pushing Social also shared a video on how he sets up for #blogchat that’s worth a watch.

Self-promotion: People! My copy of trust Agents is still up for grabs! Share a Skip1.org related story and win the book (with a little thank you note from me!)

The Planned Topic: How to Use Other Social Sites/Presences to Grow Your Blog.

This is a big one. We’ve identified that it’s far easier to grow your audience in one place by being active somewhere else – growing your subscriber base by using Twitter, finding new LinkedIn connections on Facebook, and so on. But just how do we go about that? Chris Brogan cohosted #blogchat tonight, to talk about exactly that thing.

First: How do you decide which sites you should be active on in order to help your blog?

– Targeting helps – Chris shared FlowTown, a targeting tool I’ll be playing with this week. The base of Chris’ advice during this portion was that finding sites to become active on requires two things: defining the goal of your blog, and finding out where your customers are. If your customers are mostly toastmasters – go be a toastmaster. It makes sense.

The flow is fairly simple, really; identify your goal, and find a niche that goal serves. Look at places like AllTop.com for conversations already in motion. Once you’ve found one, involve yourself. Be the elbow, the helpful newcomer – and really get into the conversation. And please, please (Chris asks) “never shove your updates around the web. Be selective, be specific, be unique. Make each network its own beast.”

Second: How to decide whether to make one of the sites you’re involved in, into an Outpost for your community.

Once we’ve targeted properly, and begun to engage, we need to formalize our outposts and differentiate them from the street corners where we hold conversations. So, we pick outposts by relevance; converse, engage, be in th enetwork. Occasional “conversion forks” (Chris’ term) are the way to go.

Give others the tools to succeed. No matter what tyour goal is – thought leadership, building a channel or media property, or sales – your job on the web (and in life, right?) is to help others succeed at what they do. Your products should back this up, and so should your every action on the social web. Chris’ golden ratio for this is 12 actions for others for every 1 action promoting yourself.

Remember to pick your communication style discretely for each network. MySpace has a different accent than Facebook does, and a different one than Twitter does as well. As much as we don’t want to be shoving our updates around everywhere, we don’t want to duplicate everything either. this can be a deciding factor in whether or not you want to really engage in an arena. Cross-pollination is one thing – heck, even I use automation for some of my sharing – but we should remember to make clear distinctions when we’re using these tools to reduce our workload, rather than trying to appear ubiquitous.

A side note: We’re the special cases here, guys. You and me, the bloggers in the room, we know things other people don’t. We have arcana about conversational flow and reciprocation. All the talk in the world about outposts and goals, media properties and voice in communication style… It’s all arcana. We have two options: We can treat it as arcana and guard it like spies – or we can pull the veil and let everyone in on the wisdom. Which are you better at doing? Why?

The night’s transcript, from @MackCollier

The 250 top participants’ list from @KevinLyons

Drop any further questions for Chris Brogan on his blog – here, as per his request.

Join the #blogchat LinkedIn Group!

Conclusions? What else can we add to this?

UPDATE: @tsudo collected far more semantic details directly from Chris here: Insights into Social Media Marketing

Image borrowed from the awesome Guerilla Freelancing Blog.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: #blogchat, bloggers, blogging, blogs, chris brogan, mack collier, notes from, seo for bloggers

Notes from #blogchat – Guest Blogging Bonanza!

July 18, 2010 by Ian 6 Comments

Yeah fly baby fly on FlickrTonight’s #blogchat topic was using other blogs to build your brand and blog presence! I’ve been doing a lot of noodling over guest blogging and community blogging lately – especially given the last few weeks’ worth of twitter chats – so this discussion was exceptionally apropos of that.

Let’s dive in!

Tonight’s chat was co-hosted by Geoff Living. Geoff is an author – whose second edition of Now Is Gone is coming out in 2011 – and an accomplished blogger, among other things.

The first half of the night was focused on a blogger finding opportunity in other blogs than their own, and how we can use guest activity to grow our own home bases.

This link from @LorneDaniel started the night off well – Guest Blogging Benefits and Best Practices (PR20/20)

Geoff used some pretty esoteric examples of guest blogging – for example, he’s a CNN iReport writer, which is interesting. Usually when we think of guest posting, we think of writing for other blogs in our verticals, not for big businesses like CNN.

@MackCollier asked: Why guest post?

Geoff’s responses had to do with promoting nonprofit work, avoiding placing yourself at odds with partners, and needing to establish thought leadership in a hurry. This last piece seems like another esoteric secret, but think about it; if I write primarily about building communities (which will become a major focus of my writing in the coming months), and you write about business development… If we write for each other’s blogs, we can establish a link between the subjects, and make it a no-brainer for our readers to trust the both of us with each others’ subjects.

My question was: Which comes first, asking a guest to post on your blog, or posting on someone else’s?

@MidnightMogul answered – to paraphrase – build a win-win either way, consider whether you need more content or more exposure. We need to learn to avoid the no-give situation as thoroughly as we avoid the no-win situation.

@BillBoorman shared a note about fitting in without blending in, which is a real clincher for guest writing of any kind.

@GeoffLiving shared a tip that many big blogs are built on expert guest content mixed in with regular reporters. (here)

Important question from Mack – does the audience of the blog you want to guest for expand your own audience? Sadly, I missed a lot of the answers to this.

Apparently, 40-50% of Geoff’s pitched stories go to virtual press on other blogs having been sent for review – better than book publishing, worse than we’d have expected.

A note from a few participants; Building relationships through comments is best for individual bloggers – less so for community blogs like Mashable. Comment relationships carry great influence, but little mass credibility.

Another note from many people; Making it known you’re looking for guest bloggers – or are willing to guest blog – is a good way to get out there, better than a direct pitch.

Splitting the difference between writing for yourself and writing for others – @BillBoorman says write for yourself, which is a good ideal as well.

In the second half,Geoff talked about his personal blog and how it has affected his business.

I brought out the #ReadItAll Week challenge – Justin Kownacki didn’t guest post on each others’ blogs, per se, but it was cross-blog promotion none the less, and has been working out well so far. The challenge itself starts tomorrow – so we’ll have that as a case study in the future as well. Here’s my Read It All post, and Justin’s pre-challenge primer.

Of course, @JustinKownacki himself appeared immediately, and made a note that if we’re not blogging about a subject (especially on non-personal blogs) we’re all just sharing miscellanea. If we’re guest-blogging miscellaneously, it gets even muddier, which is a bad thing.

Oh yeah. Provenance and content – again. Sigh.

Rehash and regurgitation isn’t the SEO killer. Verbatim replication withpout the benefit of provenance is. Sheesh! One of these days I’ll be writing a streak on SEO for bloggers, and trust me, provenance will be a big deal in that series. Content strategy will NOT be.

My how we hate the ubiquitous. @BLOGBlokeTips brought up the perspective that ubiquity of our content can be beneficial – which is true. However, be aware; ubiquity lends itself to exhaustion better than scarcity.

Did I miss anything? I’m being silly – I missed things. Share what’s missing, by all means. We’re all ears!

Participants’ List from @KevinLyons – TweepML List of #blogchat Participants for July 18th 2010

Transcript: What the Hashtag Transcript for #blogchat

Image by oddsock.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: #blogchat, branding, community, guest posting, mack collier, notes from, sunday, transcript, tweepml list, tweetchat, twitter

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