Search results for the tag, "Blogging"
November 9th, 2011
A version of this blog post appeared on Brazen Life on November 8, 2011.
Whether you’re seeking a job or looking to advance your career, using social media to raise your visibility is a must. Yet if you want to stand out—either in a stack of resumes or when your boss needs someone to head up a new project—don’t just do what everyone else is doing. Instead, go beyond the cliché of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and write a post for a popular blog.
Is this more time-consuming than sharing a link? Absolutely. Is it more difficult than banging out 140 characters? You bet. Does it seem strange to write for someone else’s blog rather than your own? Certainly.
Yet put the time and effort into crafting a thoughtful piece, and you’ll likely experience a rich range of rewards. At minimum, you’ll demonstrate thought leadership, make a name for yourself, and earn a byline in which you can link to your resume or website. Even better, you could land a promotion, secure a job offer, or generate new business.
For my part, guest-blogging has led to a variety of opportunities. Consider the fruits of my first commentary for Mashable, which was published in August:
Heady results for 500 words, right?
Here’s another personal example. A few months before Mashable debut, I spoke to the American Marketing Association—Washington, DC, about how to win friends and influence bloggers. Afterward, I published my presentation on SlideShare and milked it for three blog posts. The former has been viewed almost 10,000 times, while the latter included my first piece for Tech Cocktail.
(Of course, it helps that I did my own PR, tweeting to people and companies mentioned in the post and presentation and blasting the links to everyone in my address book.)
Jen Moire, a PR pro in St. Louis, has pursued a similar path (though instead of opining, she reports). In the spring, she wrote her first article for All Facebook. Today, she’s a regular contributor, with all the benefits this brings: more Twitter followers, more traffic to her website, new contacts, and a rep as an insider that boosts her business.
The marketing firm, Eloqua, offers another case study. Over the past year, Eloqua has risen to prominence in the social media space on the strength of its community offerings. Recently, the firm detailed the success of an infographic it released called the Blog Tree:
- 1,000 tweets
- hundreds of inbound links
- 49 sales-qualified opportunities
- introductions to the bloggers featured in the infographic
Elaborating on this last bullet, Joe Chernov, who oversaw the project, tells me that these intros later blossomed into partnerships, whereby the bloggers contributed to Eloqua’s e-books (both its Grande Guides and its Social Media ProBook).
Finally, behold this example, described by Ken Auletta in last month’s New Yorker:
“Dana Canedy [an editor at the New York Times] was engaged to Army First Sergeant Charles Monroe King. Their son, Jordan, was born in 2006—when King was in Iraq—and he started writing a journal addressed to Jordan, offering life advice in case he didn’t come back. In October, just a month before King was to return home, he was killed by an improvised explosive device. At the end of the year, the Times planned a series of short profiles of soldiers killed in Iraq, and Canedy volunteered to write about King. . . .
“The story, ‘From Father to Son, Last Words to Live By,’ appeared on page one of the Times on January 1, 2007. Canedy wrote about King’s lessons: how to behave on a date and how to treat people who are different. She movingly described how ‘as a black man he sometimes felt the sting of discrimination,’ yet ‘betrayed no bitterness.’ Readers flooded the paper with letters and e-mails. Organizations invited her to speak. Publishers vied to give her a book contract. Denzel Washington optioned the movie rights.
So whether you’re penning an op-ed or delivering a speech, reporting the news or developing an infographic, guest blogging can open up unexpected doors. Now it’s up to you to walk start knocking on them.
August 24th, 2009
A version of this blog post appeared on GovLoop (August 24, 2009), TechRepublican (August 24, 2009), and K Street Cafe (August 25, 2009).
Everyone these days wants a blog. Blogs are known to be the most frequently updated—and thus most visited—facet of Web sites, and often form the crux of an organization’s online impact. Few, however, realize just how time-consuming and difficult blogging is.
Indeed, running a blogging consists not only in penning posts, but also in corralling them from colleagues and possibly guest contributors, editing them, and promoting them—not to mention moderating and responding to comments. As such, when considering a group blog for your organization, the following questions may facilitate a decision.
1. How many people on your staff can write well? Poor prose is a big turnoff, and crafting snappy paragraphs is a lot harder than banging out 140 characters apiece on Twitter. Put another way, anyone can swing a baseball bat; very few can hit pitches.
2. Do these people know how to write for the Web? Richard Posner and Gary Becker are two highly esteemed and well-published professors at the University of Chicago. But their joint blog—bogged down with long paragraphs and utterly devoid of links, pictures and blockquotes—is a textbook example of why online writing demands more than copying and pasting its offline counterpart.
3. Will managers give these people sufficient time to blog? Securing buy-in at the leadership level is critical. Otherwise, blogging will be treated as a distraction from “real work.”
4. Can these people each commit to X posts per month? One of the biggest reasons for failure in the blogosphere is infrequent posting. To be sure, a solid weekly post can be just as good as daily content, but unless you’re Sergey Brin, you’ll never build an audience by blogging sporadically.
5. Is there a blogger (either on staff or whom you can hire) who can serve as the editor? Not only do editors edit—correcting grammar, adding hyperlinks and pictures where appropriate, suggesting broader themes—and solicit content, they’re also responsible for the blog’s direction, consistency, and visibility. A blog without an editor is like a ship without a captain.*
6. Will the blog’s editor have the connections and standing throughout the organization to request and obtain content? If your editor is off site or lacks the respect of her peers, her ability to do her job will be compromised.
7. Will every post require approval by the C suite? If an executive or lawyer must vet everything, then a blog is more trouble than it’s worth.
On the other hand, a second set of eyes on anything for publication always is healthy—but within reason. The Cato Institute, which each day assigns a different staffer to approve each post, has found a happy medium between paranoia and prescience.
8. What niche will the blog exploit? In other words, why will people want to read it? If the niche is already occupied, how will your blog be better?
For these reasons, many blogs are stillborn. As with any project, a blog needs a strategic plan and ample resources. If you start with these boxes checked, the results can well repay the effort.
Related: Should Blogs Be Independent of or Integrated in Their Host Organization’s Web Site?
* Addendum (9/5/2009): The secret to the success of the many blogs on nytimes.com? Editors.
July 7th, 2009
A version of this blog post appeared on K Street Cafe (July 7, 2009) and TechRepublican (July 8, 2009).
The staple of public relations is the press release. It’s been around forever; follows generally agreed guidelines for format, content, and length; and still succeeds in its objective to publicize the item in question.
And yet, bound by stale conventions that suffocate originality and don’t play well with multimedia, the press release has become obsolete. It’s not that there’s no longer a need to announce big news formally. It’s that there’s a better way to do it than drafting 400 words of boilerplate.
Indeed, as Claire Cain Miller reported in a much-discussed article last week, the pr agency representing Flickr never issued a release on its behalf—not even when Yahoo acquired the photo-sharing Web site. Similarly, when Google has exciting news to share, it does not use a wire service.
Rather, both companies self-publish blog posts. They do so, I suspect, not because blogs are hipper, but because they’re more genuine, more personal, and more flexible than their old media counterparts. Instead of a flack ghostwriting quotes for a CEO, the individual(s) who managed the project can craft a first-person narrative recounting the project’s past, present and future with pictures and videos and links. Then, as other bloggers pick up the post, “two days later, BusinessWeek calls,” as Donna Sokolsky Burke, of Spark PR, puts it.
When you visit Google’s online “press center,” the first thing listed is not press releases. It’s blog posts. If you think this is accidental, think again.
The press release is dead. Long live the press release.
Addendum (9/29/2009): Google recently celebrated its 11th birthday. To honor the occasion, the Next Web dug up Google’s first release, dated June 7, 1999.
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February 25th, 2009
In my first op-ed in a while, I answer this question today at PRWeek. Here’s the text:
Clients often ask, What is new media? To answer this, I like to step back and ask, What is public relations?
Public relations is the practice of improving public perception. In a word, it’s promotion. A corollary of this is strategizing: What media should you use to get your message out?
New media is simply one of these outlets; specifically—and appropriately—it’s the newest outlet. But instead of developing relationships with producers on TV and radio shows, or editors and reporters at newspapers and magazines, we new media folk work with online sources: bloggers, podcasters, Web masters, news aggregators.
Our old media colleagues spend their days on the phone with journalists, meeting them for coffee, drafting press releases, crafting pitches, and compiling media lists. In essence, we do the same thing, but with a different vocabulary and under different rules.
The first difference is that reporters report because it’s their job. By contrast, bloggers blog because it’s their hobby; it’s what they do for fun.
Second, whereas reporters carry business cards, have a business phone number, and are typically always accessible via BlackBerry, bloggers rarely list their phone numbers, let alone their addresses, and often work in the early morning or at night. In fact, many of Matt Drudge’s best sources—even his West Coast editor—never talk with him on the phone; their entire relationship revolves around e-mail.
Third, anything a reporter writes—even the idea to pursue a story—is signed-off and then vetted by at least one editor. By contrast, bloggers write what pops into their mind. Similarly, there are no officially observed rules regarding “off the record” or “on background.” Unlike Judy Miller, bloggers are not going to go to jail to protect you as a confidential source, and it’s as easy as copying and pasting for a blogger to publish what you thought was private correspondence.
Finally, while reporters have long relied on PR people, bloggers tend to be skeptical of us. The reason: While it’s common to spam a hundred reporters with a press release, this is a cardinal sin within the blogosphere. A press release clutters a blogger’s inbox, which, again, is personal rather than one his paycheck requires him to monitor. A release is usually irrelevant, and the lack of personalization, especially if he’s CCed, or worse, BCCed, is insulting.
In fact, if you send a high-profile blogger a press release, you may very well find your e-mail address being made public as a result—which, of course, subjects you to real spammers. What’s worse, they may threaten to blacklist members of your firm.
None of this is to paint bloggers with a bad brush. I think the world of these people, and, in fact, am one myself. But in order to get the results you want, it behooves you to treat bloggers on their terms, rather than your own.
August 5th, 2005
Since I started blogging, I read more thoroughly. Not necessarily because I read with an eye toward how I can blog the given text, but because if I do, I need to be more familiar with it than I would be for a conversation over dinner.
Take, for instance, my posts about the Valerie Plame affair, specifically, whether Plame was undercover when Novak outed her. Before I became a blogger, I would have known the gist of the story—that Plame worked for the C.I.A.—but probably would have lacked sufficient knowledge to form a sold answer. Now, because blogging, like studying for a test, forces you to focus and to understand, I can credibly contribute to the discussion.
To put it another way, blogging sharpens the mind. As the New York Times observed in an editorial today, what bloggers call “fisking,” or dissecting another’s argument, is “a way of expanding and, in some sense, reifying the ephemeral daily conversation that humans engage in.”
Indeed, since democracy thrives on an informed and engaged populace, blogs enhance democracy.
Addendum (1/19/2005): As Ana Marie Cox, the blogger formerly known as Wonkette, recently put it, “Blogs in general have democratized the debate about politics.”
Addendum (3/24/2006): Jessica Cutler, aka the Washingtonienne, agrees: “Everyone should have a blog. It’s the most democratic thing ever.”
Posted by Jonathan Rick in 
Before entering the digital space…
I flacked for the American Conservative Union and the Cato Institute, and reported for Time magazine and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.