The 30 Minute Blog Strategy

My wife wants to write a blog but is struggling with developing the discipline to do it. Everyone will tell you that consistency in publishing is the most important part of a blog strategy, whether it’s once a day or once a week. People crave consistency, ask McDonald’s.

The idea of generating content can be overwhelming but it doesn’t have to be if you follow these simple steps:

1) Write what you know. Mark Twain knew what he was talking about. He only wrote about what he was an expert in; politics, childhood, and riverboats. Let’s face it, if you’re blogging about a topic that you’re not an expert in, whether it’s marketing, flower arranging, extreme couponing, woodworking or struggling to launch a business, then you shouldn’t be blogging, because no one will care. There are 2 caveats to that last statement: you’re funny or a hot chic. Both bring in traffic but both are things that many consider themselves to be regardless of the mendacity of the concept!
If you’re an expert, you will create content of great value, and you won’t have to do too much fact checking!

2) Summarize your thoughts. You’ve been awake for 12-16 hours. You’ve had approximately 230,000 thoughts today. Take 15 minutes to jot down 1-6 things that occurred to you today that would make interesting and relevant topics. You can do this anytime but I recommend doing it right before you go to sleep. Why? The last things on our minds before we sleep are the ones our subconscious chews on all night. This means your inner secretary is working through the night to form thought and opinions, even clear up in-discrepancies. True multi-tasking!

3) Get up and get on it! Plenty of research points to the fact that our minds are most creative and productive first thing in the morning. When you wake up, look at your list. Pick one or to topics you want to cover and start writing. This can happen over coffee, using voice-to-text apps while driving to work or in the shower, waiting to buy a donut, on the train, etc. there is no standard length for a blog post, make it as long or short as you need to make your point. Whether you’re clear and concise, tend to ramble, like lots of pictures, this doesn’t need to take more than 15 minutes.

4) Build an archive. You don’t need to publish every day. You may have multiple epiphanies in a day or have a month-long dry spell. However, if you write every day, you’ll generate a backlog of good stuff to hold you over when you’re stumped or too busy. You can always store them on your blog unpublished or…

5) Stick to a schedule. Blog platforms allow you to schedule the publishing date of a post. I was out sick on Tuesday but already had a blog post scheduled for publication that day from 2 weeks before. My company has a backlog of blog posts to last until next week, which gives me a week and a half to generate another one.

Now, these rules aren’t hard and fast but give you a framework. Perhaps you come up with your topic list in the shower then right on your lunch break or before bed. Maybe you just keep a running list like I do (which, to be honest, I only go back to in emergencies). Numbers 2, 3, and 4 can be modified to fit your lifestyle but give you a good idea how to manage blog writing easily. Numbers 1 and 5 are absolute must-haves for any blogger looking to generate readers.

For those with more time to write, add a relevant photo, quote another blog or source if relevant. Do some research to dig out official numbers, spend some time on dictionary.com looking up alternate words. I did both in the 30 minutes I took to write this, while stopping to talk to my wife about her business plans, dinner, tonight’s TV viewing and getting her input on the post.

2 last things:

I don’t have to tools to write: I call BS! If you don’t have the tools you wouldn’t be able to read this. I’m typing away on my smart phone. Even feature phones can use email to publish to your blog as can any computer with Internet access. Don’t have a blog? WordPress, Tumblr and Blogger are free!

I don’t know how to write. No problem, read a book, a blog, a magazine or a news story. If you can read and speak you can write. If you have trouble forming your thoughts into words, use the resources I just mentioned or just talk it through out loud.

For any bloggers reading this, please share your tips and tricks.

For non-bloggers, feel free to ask questions!

Google+ing your Blog

So, you’ve heard of Google+ right?

• If yes please read on
• If no please click here

Now that we have that out of the way… You’ve FINALLY gotten your Google+ invitation, you’ve logged in, you’ve figured out how to use everything, what else do you do? It’s time to Google-ize your blog. Oh, don’t worry, it’s not that hard. The first thing you should do is add your Google+ link to you blog. After all, you want your readers to find you everywhere right? There are many ways to share your Google+ URL depending on how your blog is set up. It could be a contact page or, as in the case of my blog, a set of icons:

I keep a relatively short list of my social networks in a widget on my blog. The first one, About.Me is nothing more than a personal landing page with most of the same links. However you share your social network profiles with your readers is fine, just make sure to add your Google+ URL.

About that Google+ URL: most of us using the service agree that it’s ridiculous:

the number, in this case, 116375847890292587823, is your actual Google+ ID. Most of us our hoping that unique nicknames will be added soon, remember, G+ is in beta. Google is moving very quickly with this new service so I don’t think we’ll need to wait as long as we did for personalized URLs for LinkedIn! If you don’t want to wait, you can try a free service a bunch of clever guys thought up called Gplus.to. Just copy your G+ ID number, pick a nickname and you’re all set:

You’ve already got a Facebook Like button, a Tweet button on every blog post right? Now it’s time to add a +1 button. It works kind of like a Like button, nothing more. I’ve looked around to find a WordPress plugin that combines the Like, Tweet and +1 button to no avail. For now we’ll have to deal with:

If anyone comes across an elegant plugin that combines all 3, let me know!

Your blog should be all done! Currently there is no way to have a blog stream your G+ posts, you can see mine streams my Twitter stream, but I expect it fairly soon. At the moment you can’t share G+ posts with Facebook or Twitter either.

Make sure that when you publish a new blog post you share the link on Google+ the same way you share it on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter:

2008 Internet User Behavior Report

The economy had a big impact on user behaviors during the Fall of 2008 as compared to Fall 2007.

Among the new growth behavior statistics from Mediamark Research & Intelligence are those looking for jobs online (up 23.6%) which tied with those using Instant Messenger (up 23.6%). Other big increases include looking for recipes (up 24.8%), watching online video (up 35.4%), making an online phone call (up 32%), and the biggest gain of all, downloading a television program (up 141.4%). Modest gain also came from those downloading podcasts (up 22.1%) and reading blogs (up 17.9%).

To read the full report click here.

Data: MRI’s Fall 2008 and Fall 2007 Survey of the American Consumer

How Being a Social Network Butterfly Can Help You Land a Job and Improve Your Career

This article was originally written as a 3-part piece for Talent Zoo. I got enough positive feedback (and found it slowly getting buried beneath new blog posts), that I thought I’d re-post it here in it’s entirety. Since this was written alot has happened with Social Media, social networks and the job market. This has not effected the overall message in the blog post, as a matter of fact, it has made it even more important to get involved in social networks.

It’s no secret that Social Networking is huge. It’s also obvious that it is continuously changing. Friendster gave way to MySpace, which is fighting to retain users that are quickly immigrating to Facebook, all the while; many of us have snuck off to Twitter and FriendFeed. If these are the only sites you know, you only know about 1/10000th of what makes up the social network universe. Don’t feel bad, few can wrap their head around the breadth and depth of SoNets, and no one is omniscient enough to have even heard of most of them.

SoNets are a fact of life and business. If you’re reading this, you’re on Talent Zoo, which means you’re looking for a job or an employee. Businesses can feel free to hire me to consult with them about SoNets and Social Media (SoMe), this one is for the job hunters.

So you’ve got your resume perfect, it gives a brilliant overview of your skills, talent, and experience. You’re already a step ahead of me! You’ve briefed your references so they talk about your strengths and not what you did at the last company outing. If you’re a creative, you’ve got your portfolio book, site, or iPod full of your best work. That should do it right? Not exactly. What happens when your future employer’s HR staff Googles you? They’ll get to know you really well or not. They may find nothing, not a big deal; unless you’re a creative, marketer, advertiser, programmer, you get it. If you’re in the business you’d better be online. ‘Why’ should be obvious, we’ll get to ‘where’ later. Let’s talk about ‘how’.

How you present yourself online, in SoNets or otherwise is as important as how you present yourself in person. Even more so since this may be your first impression to potential employers, and you know what they say about first impressions. This goes not just for job hunters involved in advertising or interactive, but for everyone. Most savvy employers won’t hold your MySpace pictures against you, some may. The Internet is public domain. Everyone can see anything you’ve posted online. So those party pictures, blogs about Star Trek and forum rants are just a click away for anyone who wants them. If you want be treated as a professional, take care to establish a professional persona online. Keep your comments, blogs, etc. professional. This isn’t to say you can’t be yourself online. On the contrary, be as personal and wacky as you want. Just do it with a non- related screen name that you only share with friends. Speaking of which, if you’re on Facebook, get two accounts. One for friends that’s private and one for professionals. Don’t let friends or non-business contacts friend you. You’d be surprised how inappropriate your college buddies or that girl you just met might be on your Wall! (update: soon you’ll be able to use Gathr.me, so you won’t need multiple accounts. Just one account and multiple public pages)

For those thinking, ‘this is such a pain, why bother’, remember that first impression I mentioned? By presenting a skilled and experienced face on social networks, you can get a jump on the competition. By getting involved in professional forums you can position yourself as an eager learner, a helpful pro, even as an expert in your field.

You can get much more from social networks than just a chance to show your mettle. SoNets are a great source of education. Other users can help you solve problems, point you to tutorials and other resources, turn you on to industry news and events, even hook you up with contacts.

“Okay, I get it, give a little, get a little, put my best face forward. But where?” There is no right answer. If I was talking just to 3D artists, I’d suggest niche sites like CGTalk.com. You’ll have to spend a little time Googling to find the best niche networks to get involved with. For SoNets that aren’t so niche, a good place to start is our old friend Facebook. FB has a great many groups, some as random as My Name Is Durwin (of which I am a member of course), or as obvious as Design & Typography. Professional groups aren’t just on Facebook though, MySpace and others have some worth joining. There are a bunch of great sites dedicated to professionals only, chief among them, LinkedIn. If you don’t have an account here, you’re, quite frankly, nuts. Talent Zoo is a great site for job searching. Not only does it offer great articles (feel free to agree below) and job boards, but also gives you a chance to interact with colleagues and potential employers.

If you have a unique interest, alot to say, or ADD (all of which I’m very proud of), consider subscribing to or starting a blog. There is no end to the number of general and niche industry blogs, from technology to job hunting, advertising to life hacking. Got something on your mind? For free you can create as many blogs as you like with sites like WordPress, Blogspot (which somehow became Blogger when I wasn’t looking), to name a few. It’s as easy as using Word. Much more than an online diary, it’s a great way to discuss your ideas and get feedback from readers. If you want to develop a larger social network, consider using Ning to launch a blog that can turn into a fill-fledges, multi-member social network. D.C. Insider Ariana Huffington turned her blog into a multi-author, political blog network worth millions.

Of course, everyone is talking about Twitter now. It has actually become my #2 news source, after CNN and tied with the Huffington Post. I’ve made tremendous contacts and learned an enormous amount of helpful and professional facts, as well as a tremendous amount of inane and personal facts! “Isn’t that where geeks go to talk about their latest podcast and what happened on Heroes?” Of course it is. But it’s much more. There is nowhere that the conversation is more raw and to the point than Twitter. In 140 characters, you’ll get everything from Red Sox plays to the latest on the McCain and Obama campaigns, behind-the-scenes images and commentary from industry events. You’ll also get help with technical problems, employee referrals, heads-up on new products, new sites and new jobs. There is a fun movie on Twitter.com that explains the service. Your best bet would be to begin by following some people whose user name you know (like mine) and see who they’re talking to. Pick the ones having interesting conversations and follow them, then see who they are following. It’s as exponential as it is experiential. Twitter isn’t just for online chat. I’ve met dozens of the people I converse with everyday at industry events. As a matter of fact, that’s how I found out about the event in the first place. Even out-of-town Tweeps come into town; they get treated to a Boston Tweet-up!

Twitter is not a place to join and start begging for jobs, or beating people over the head with your CV. LinkedIn is not the place to start Friending everyone at a company you’ve never worked at in hopes of getting an inside referral. In any social network, just like when visiting a foreign country, get to know the local customs. See how people interact, what they are interested in. You may find it’s not the right place for you. But, don’t worry, there are so many social networks, you’ll very easily find one that suits you whether you are job hunting, trying to change careers, or looking to hire.

If, like me, you find it difficult to focus on several disparate social networks, or find time to run or keep up with a blog, you may want consider microblogs. Twitter us the best known, but Pownce and Jaiku offer similar services. Twitter’s limited 2 140 characters, so u need 2 learn 2 Twitter shorthand + b concise w your comments 2 fit them in2 1 microblog submission. Everyone using these services is restricted to the same limit, but despite, or perhaps because, of this, you can very quickly pick up some gems. Just this evening I learned: of new OpenSource training videos, that Twitterers rather than major media first broke the news about the LA earthquake, and found a colleague in need of traditional and online branding experts to write for her new site. Looks like I’m going to be spending more late nights typing away at the virtual keyboard of my iPhone while watching man-movies on Spike (Jaws 2 finished, I’m on to The World Is Not Enough)! Like any SoNet, there is great deal of irrelevant junk, but, thanks to Twitters newly purchased search engine and third party sites like TwitterPacks, you can search for subjects and people of interest and Follow (subscribe) to that person’s feed. Who knows, you may gain your own Followers. I’m following 170 people ranging from CNN to Digg’s Kevin Rose and Robert Scoble and am being followed by 184. Just remember, even in microblogging, keep it professional or at least make sure you don’t say anything you’ll regret.

Everything I’ve mentioned will work to increase your search engine visibility, your networking possibilities and your name recognition. Kind of like building a brand isn’t it? Brand YOU. Brand “you need a job”, brand “you are an asset”. Use these channels to promote yourself but don’t spread yourself too thin. Some networks are a great place to just sign up and post your resume and contact info. Some are full of colleagues and friends that will overrun your inbox. Decide which require minimum effort and stay on top of the ones that require more. Above all, make sure you keep your contact info and resume up to date.

There will be a lot to manage at first but you’ll get the hang of it. Don’t worry, relief is on the way. There are a few people, including myself, that are working on ways to aggregate, or bring together many of these social networks into one manageable tool.

Remember:

Don’t mix business with pleasure – keep your private-self jus that, private, and make your professional-self public.

Find the way to interact online that best suits you – join a SoNet, subscribe or start a blog, Twitter away.

Be easy to find, be up to date – Spread yourself around to as many SoNets as possible without spreading yourself too thin.

Always put your best face forward – be professional, don’t say anything you’ll regret.

Image by Stephen Poff

Web2.0 Becomes America2.0: How Social Momentum Swept Us Into the White House

How much influence can bloggers, Twitteratti, and other social network inhabitants have?

Moments after CNN has called the Presidential Election I can’t help but think that the campaign that became a movement is a direct extension of the movement that is now referred to as web2.0. The Internet was long a place for corporations to broadcast their message and to prop up their brand. Over the last couple of years technology has given regular people a voice and a choice. The Obama campaign, backed by millions of supporters, leveraging that same technology, has been swept into the White House.

As a numb-thumbed Twitter user I saw supporters not only outnumber other candidates, but leverage the tools of social media to out-email, out-blog, out-Tweet, and generally out shout supporters of other candidates. The Obama campaign, unlike most corporations, went where users congregated online, talked to them in their own language and empowered them to reshape the Obama brand into something that represented their voice and encouraged them to spread it. And did they!

Citizens, sick of accepting what they were given as the “presumed” candidate, decided with their blogs, their wallets, and their votes, not to except what they were given, but to demand a better candidate. The candidate himself has said that he listened to his supporters to help shape his candidacy.

We can only hope that all of the hard work, hopes and dreams of Obama’s supporters is met with the same care, transparency and two-way communication as the campaign has shown by the new administration. At no time have so many people been so engaged to make things happen in this country. If the Obama Administration resembles the Obama Campaign, historians will call this one of the most pivotal episodes in the history of the United States, to be compared with the Revolution and Civil War.

Social Networks Show Users are Not Designers. And That’s Okay.

I recently came across fellow Twitter-buddy Bokardo’s blog on designing for social networks:

Ugliness, Social Design, and the MySpace Lesson

Good points all around. An important thing to keep in mind is Form Follows Function. In other words, first it has to work, then it can be made to look pretty. Well, like it or not, MySpace works, despite the fact that it is not pretty. But pretty is a subjective term, while working is not. In order to work, in the realm of social networking and personalization, the user must be presented with the ability to make their site their own. That means supplying the function and letting them supply the form. If the MySpace example tells us anything it’s that most users have no taste! Any designer could tell you that! It takes skill, talent and education to know good design when you see it, much less create good design. If users were all capable of creating good design, we designers would be out of a job. MySpace decided that stopping at Function suited them just fine. With their user base and cash flow, who could argue with that?

Facebook, on the other hand, has taken a different point of view. They are providing the Function and 99% of the form. The only personalization there is your apps, your friends and your pictures.

Twitter and WordPress are in the middle. Twitter (who is obviously still working on their Function) allows a bit of form to be handled by their users, but not alot. Twitter allows users to add a picture as an icon and change their background and colors. Both merely complement the user interface. With WordPress, if you’re using their hosted version, you can choose from a variety of templates to change your layout, or you can design or have someone else design a WordPress template for you. This last is not easy for a layman, so it is often someone with design skills who does it. At worst, a WordPress design can be boring, but at least it’s not as hideous as what some MySpace users are doing.

So, allowing the Form portion of your social network’s user interface to fall into the hands of it’s users may not be pretty, but that’s what social networks are all about, What the User Wants. The user has become the designer, for better or worse, of their own experience. Who knows if this will be a continuing trend? Well, maybe we have a hint already. Users in droves have been flocking to Facebook over the last year or so, which offers much less freedom of expression, at least visually. What I’ve heard over and over from those that have abandoned MySpace for Facebook, besides that it’s for stalkers and spammers (thanks Big Media), is that Facebook looks better. Maybe users are smartening up, and realizing that they enjoy elegant design, maybe, with all the different aspects of their real and online lives, they are too busy to design their experience and prefer to have one handed to them.

We will see how it shakes out over the coming year.

BMW Shoots Viral Piece, Does it Hit or Miss?

Earlier this year BMW launched a viral video to promote the launch of it’s new model in the U.S. The video was released as a documentary following the stories of a small Bavarian town named Oberpfaffelbachen. The town’s citizens include a stunt driver, over zealous police chief, event promoter and mayor, trying to save the town from hard financial times. They devise a promotion in which they will launch a 300 horse power BMW 1 Series from a 454 meter (1486.5 feet) ramp from Bavaria, across the Atlantic to the U.S. The town has created an entire festival around the event called Rampenfest. Towns folk are turning their houses into gift shops, town managers are tearing down forests for parking. I won’t give away the ending, but obviously something goes wrong. Not as dramatically as I’d hoped unfortunately.

The quality of the video is excellent, the acting, direction and effects (as subtle as the ramp, as obvious as the teeth) as good as a movie. The video has been seen by millions which can give BMW the opportunity to claim a positive impact, especially considering that it was shot overseas and cost far less than a U.S. 30 second spot. Was it successful? It’s hard to say.

As with any viral, guerilla or virtual advertising, it is hard to judge success. Many still talk about the negative impact of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force guerilla stunt, requiring a payout of 2 million to the city of Boston to cover lawsuits and the cost of our crack bomb squad (who apparently can’t tell the difference between a bomb and a light brite!). The press loves to bring up the GM (Chevy) Yukon promotion run on YouTube. Many people made anti-SUV ads from the audio and video clips GM posted in the make-you-own commercial promotion. This brings us to what determines success.

The GM promotion was considered a failure because of the thousands of ads that were created that shed a positive light on the Yukon, there were a few that were negative. But, is that a bad thing? Most people learn by making mistakes or being told they’re wrong. Negative feedback is just as important, if not more important than positive feedback. How will you know how to improve your product unless people tell you what they DON’T like about it? GM learned that there are alot of people that consider their giant SUV bad for the environment and a gas guzzler. If this prompts them to make eco-friendly, gas-conscious improvements to their vehicles, is that a bad thing for the company or the consumer?

And let’s not forget that with the launch of the BMW campaign, the GM promotion was brought up as a failure again. Really? The Chevy Yukon is mentioned in the press for another car manufacturer’s promotion and that’s a bad thing? Sounds like free press to me. Even when a guerilla or viral campaign can’t be measured in sales or doesn’t have quite the immediate impact a company would hope, there is always the fact that it will continue to keep the brand in the public’s conscience for months and years to come.

Brand visibility is the best way to consider whether or not your viral or guerilla campaign is effective. You can’t often track sales back to a campaign like this or even sign-ups. You may get a solid number of visits to your microsite, but when visitors pull down your video, or assets, or talk about it in their blog, it can be difficult to track especially since those co-opted branding placements end up living for months out of your control.

So, how successful will the BMW campaign be? Well, they millions of viewers at the moment. Add on a few million views of the video once people (like me) download the clip to their iPod/iPhone and show it around, upload it to their YouTube, MySpace, Facebook or blog accounts, hundreds of discussions of it in marketing or news related blogs (where I found it) and then it’s recurring mention every time another automaker or major corporation does a viral or guerilla campaign and it sounds like a success to me.

But BMW knows this. They were arguably one of the first to use viral video not just as a tool to sell cars but a way to engage consumers with their brand, and to redefine their brand as cool. I still have a DVD copy of the BMW Movies from the promotion in 2001. The shorts were directed by Ang Lee, Guy Ritchie, John Woo, Tony Scott, John Frankenheimer and featured Forest Whitakker, Madonna, Clive Owen, Mickey Rourke and others. It received rave reviews at Cannes, from the New York Times, and Time magazine. They very successfully hit their middle-age, married, 150k/yr target.

The new spot however, at least in the words of Marketing VP Jack Pitney, was, rather than target a demographic, to target a psychographic. While most companies want to stick to categorizing their demographics by generation, age and finances, BMW is smart enough to know that they can pull an 8 year old boy and an 58 year old woman into their brand halo just by virtue of the fact that they may share common interests, like flashy cars, or mockumentaries.

Despite my feeling that this viral video may be a bit long for most viewers (35 minutes), I’m fairly certain that the folks at BMW will be pleased with the outcome. And I’m happy to help them broadcast their brand (even though I drive the “other” german car)!

Links:
Official Film Site

BMW Films Wikipedia

BMW Films Site (no videos here)

BMW Film “Star” (you can find the rest of the films here as well)

Digg submission where I first found out about the promotion