Conversational Branding
I haven’t had a lot of time lately for talking about doing because I’ve been too busy, well DOING. Life Has Been Full and Has Been Full of Life. But the world of social marketing is changing and redefining (when does it ever stop?), and in my spare moments while stuck in traffic, chopping vegetables, or dipping sushi pieces into wasabi-rich soy sauce, I’m contemplating those changes and how my business needs to anticipate them.
Notice I said, “anticipate them” rather than “adapt to them”; important distinction there in how I view my business…the vision, though maybe not all the manifestations, are fluid instead of static. I may rarely succeed on being ahead of the curve on several things but I instinctively feel that doing so needs to always be my goal.
I’m still sorting out the changes, trying a few on for size, and remaining open to possibility. I’m not the only one out there doing the same; here are a few voices I’ve been reading lately. I read them because they are bloggers who value conversational branding, which I think may be the essence of what is going on with relational media these days.
- she’s done it in many posts but this is her most recent record of her Twitter Exploration. Penelope never fails to get me thinking and this is fantastic food for thought: when branding, how important is it to be the same in every compartment?
- Scott, over at Man Vs. Blog, has been exploring his use of Twitter and has a 3 part series worth reading.
- My very favorite blog guru, Darren Rowse, has a brilliant title followed by his typically-excellent content, looking at formats like the one Twitter uses, and just above, shares his exploration of another, Plurk.
My blogging list of things to do seems endless, with all kinds of things near the top vying for space. For instance, I have a great header I had designed for this site, a brand new business site needing launching, and a journal full of article ideas just begging me to find a quiet moment to sit down and seriously write. My client’s sites all have lists and my search for an assistant became so much of it’s own endeavor that I had to either find an assistant to help me find an assistant or cut out the search! When a new internet “exploration” becomes necessary so often, it’s helpful to know other bloggers I’m watching are exploring as well. It’s that synergy that the internet and social media thrives on and no one gets anywhere alone.
I think in “conversational branding” my favorite part is still the conversation. To me, that is the literate beauty of this media-rich tool we all use.
Reputation Management
Stephan Spencer’s recent article on DYI Reputation Management was recently a helpful reminder, which I thought would be a good idea to pass on. I am currently in the midst of a major personal life change and my primary blog is started out as a very personal blog; then evolved into something more topical and informational. The question of how to transition the blog along through my life transition has been pre-eminent on my mind this week.
The truth is, a blog only provides a slice of a view of a person’s life, yet like any powerful image tool, can sway one’s reputation amongst their peers or audience. Care must be taken, yet in a relational economy, honesty matters. In my case, so does the ability to have a certain level of transparency and the freedom to write through my creative process. When a site has aged and a loyal following of readers has developed, the relationship between writer and reader becomes entangled and opinions emerge. It has proven to be difficult to navigate.
From a tech-standpoint, this post of Stephen’s was an easily scannable, bulleted reminder of what concerns to keep in mind in a time such as this. It’s a good example of a layout well done. Many thanks to both writer and editor.
Setting Work/Home Boundaries as a Work-At-Home-Mom
I took this weekend off. As there was a server/spam issue over the same amount of days, it seems this blog and parts of others took it off as well. And I resisted the urge to allow it (yet another tech problem) to consume what was able to become a most quintessential fall weekend: dry, cool weather, blue skies, a new flea market, lunch out with great Mexican food, laughing with my husband, snuggling in bed reading to my little boys, a big pancake breakfast, an afternoon working all together in the yard, a great morning at church, and great friends….
I needed the time off. I’ve worked nearly every single day for months. Early on I started unplugging on Sundays but I’ve only pulled that off a time or two. Most of the time it’s meant, “I unplug for most everyone…unless if something ‘important’ comes up”…which it nearly always did. But this Friday, tired and frazzled, I wrapped up my “to do” list, shut off the computer, and called the week “done”.
I work at home which is nothing new. I work at home *for money*, which is new to us, and my family is all working on adjusting. My “office”, until we decide if we are either moving or adding on, is half of my closet and has no door. If I had to guess what the most important boundary to set is while working from a home office, I’d guess a DOOR. My task load is getting more intense, which actually seems to be making it easier to fit within a M-F work week, though I appreciate the flex of being able to swap out a late night or Saturday if I have an event during the week that makes work impossible to get to that day. Today I blog with a little boy on my lap and sunshine streaming in from a nearby window, so indeed the environment has it’s touchy-feely moments!
Taking the weekend off was ironically highly productive! I feel refreshed and the jumble of tasks I had now seem easier to organize and tackle in a rational manner, which is ultimately going to help me accomplish a lot more than if I’d worked the weekend through.
As this is still relatively new to me, I often feel like I’m winging it, and I’d welcome suggestions from those who’ve been at it longer. If you have a suggestion, send me an email at Tia AT bloggingwithflair DOT com, along with your blog link, post, or strategy for setting work/home boundaries and I’ll compile a list of them here.
Tia Graham, blogsultant, builds, manages, and empowers business blogs that can help you generate income, improve publicity, and interact with your audience. See bloggingwithflair.com for more information.
Winning, Losing, and Analyzing the Outcome of The Submission Contest.
The results are in! The contest itself was a success from my point of view: this is a very young blog and I saw a nice spike in traffic, already exceeding my stats for the whole previous month in just the first week of this one. Can’t complain about that!
In breaking those pretty numbers down, I took a look at Google Analytics, which measures traffic a little differently than my server does, but offers a better look at each page, who’s coming, and how. I was pretty surprised at the outcome; at the halfway point, thoof.com was winning by a nice margin (60%). I didn’t look at it all over the weekend; my server tells me that on Friday, the site had over 3,000 visits on that ONE day. I do indeed wish I knew what accounted for the spike; by Monday, Stumble had overtaken the lead and by Tuesday was standing as the clear and obvious winner.
Technically speaking, the second place winner in this graph seems to be “direct” traffic. But for the purposes of the contest, I’m only measuring the sites I submitted to. Which means:
StumbleUpon won with a traffic rate for the single post “Who’s Afraid of The Big Bad Feed?” of 83% of all traffic measured by Google Analytics for that page.
Thoof.com came in second, with 5.61%
Digg and Reddit each brought in less than 1%, which makes them dismal losers.
As a new company and a new company blog, I think it’s clear which sources have the most ROI for my effort. Stumble and Thoof are both extremely user friendly; I prefer Thoof of all of them because of a few things that make it unique over it’s rivaling winner; I probably under-use Stumble; won’t be from here on out I tell ya! And likewise, I probably will use Digg and Reddit very little now.
A few things that interest me: I chose a post that had a tech-angle for this experiment because tech is Digg’s slant. I was surprised to see it do so dismally there….and also not-so-surprised because the vibe I get over there is that it’s a pretty volatile popularity contest where lots of great material can be “buried” for odd reasons. Also, Thoof
is a better performer on the whole for me (and my clients) and I wonder why the post in this experiment seems to have gone against that norm. For instance, Thoof and Stumble are nearly tied right now for the total amount of traffic brought in (will continue to monitor this and report back at the end of the month); the difference being is that Stumble spiked a high on this ONE contest post, while Thoof seems to have a longer tail and brings in more value overall. We’ll see. It’s definitely fascinating to watch.
Images thanks to ScreenGrab; this project also gave me the impetus to learn something new!
Tia Graham, blogsultant, builds, manages, and empowers business blogs that can help you generate income, improve publicity, and interact with your audience. See bloggingwithflair.com for more information.
Who’s winning the submission contest so far?
We’re at the halfway point in the Submission Contest….who’s winning?
The line up is: Thoof, Stumble, Digg, Reddit and the contrast is much more stark than I realized. I’ll the final tally and post numbers and graphed results on Tuesday (contest ends Monday).
Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Feed?
RSS Feed…what is it that scares so many away? You know who you are…you hear the term and maybe briefly recognize it as a “techie” word and then run in fear dismiss it, moving on through your list of blogs that you check every day. Once in awhile you notice that funny orange button with the white sound wave-looking things and maybe wonder what it all means, or maybe you think it’s just a neat design feature. Anyway… who has time to figure it out? You’re busy just trying to keep up with all the blogs you check every day and since trends on the internet come and go, you figure this one will “go” too.
But you know? There’s only so many hours in a day. Time Management matters. And there are a lot of quality sites out there…. wouldn’t it be nice to actually have a moment or two to go browse a few new ones? And if you discovered a new favorite, rather than add it to a cumbersome “favorites list”, what if new and updated material came to YOU rather than requiring you go and hunt around for it again?
When I first started asking this question, I turned first to Wiki…otherwise known, along with Google, as “the tool that keeps me from sounding stupid”. Don’t know something? It’s easy enough to go to Google and find the Wiki for an answer. And so, the day came when I typed in “RSS“.
This was only a partial solution. This particular Wiki is a bit cluttered. It made my eyes blur over the technobabble and history. But it answered a key question: “What do those letters stand for?” The answer? Real Simple Syndication. The persistent problem? This still didn’t make it feel relevant to my world. It did give me my next lead, the term, “feed reader”. Off to google I went.
Turns out there is a site for software called FeedReader. But I was still a neophyte who clung to the familiar. And oh-happy-day, google has a reader too. Not only do they have a reader, but they have a TOUR, in kind-to-beginners language and Real Simple Terms.
Baby steps. That’s what it felt like. My dark-and-stormy-night was now sans thunder and lightening and it looked like the rain was beginning to ease up a bit. I signed up, which gave me a reader home page.
Now I needed to go get some feeds!! This was FUN. I had about 25 blogs I already checked every day. True, true my internet connection is fast one but also true, true, it’s frustrating to visit sites every day that haven’t been updated. Now I clicked on the little orange button (or on the words RSS in their meta section) and it took me right to the google reader subscription page and signed me up.
I drug my reader page into my toolbar so it would be easy to one-click on it every day and then gushed about it (in Real Simple Terms) for a friend on my blog. Suddenly I had lots of extra time every morning because the updated blogs were highlighted and I didn’t waste time waiting for stagnant pages to load. This broadened my world because I devoted a little more time to reading and looking for new things. I could even argue that getting over Feed Fear was instrumental in starting my business. At any rate, a threshold had been broken…and it’s a whole new world.
Feeds are fantastic things. A subscribed reader will read ALL of your content. After they are hooked, your design may not matter much, where your ads are placed can be irrelevant, and your sidebar clutter becomes invisible. What matters most is that what you have to say is relevant and interesting. You’ve earned the most loyal kind of traffic there is but beware…it is not complicated to unsubscribe from a blog that no longer interests, compels, or posts. I would imagine this is kind of like Walmart though…once they have you in the store, they know you are most likely going to buy something. Unusual indeed is the shopper who leaves empty handed (ask me how I know).
And it’s wide world out there! Not only can posts be subscribed to but so can comments. You can offer email subscriptions to your feed. Feedburner has nifty ways to track your stats; as they put it, all the “izes”….publicize, optimize, analyze, and monetize. Yah, I know, new words and you aren’t quite sure how they work. Baby steps. But that scary storm is over and the sun is shining….. get going. 
Tia Graham, blogsultant, builds, manages, and empowers business blogs that can help you generate income, improve publicity, and interact with your audience. See bloggingwithflair.com for more information.
Want more? Find out How To ToughenUp Online, Work Smarter, Not Harder, or subscribe to my feed!
Time Management in the world of Web 2.0
Thanks to Darren, aka problogger.com, who is quickly becoming my “go to” sitemaster for great tips, links, and information, I “found” the blog of Stephan Spencer today and quickly subscribed. I guess the blogosphere can be a small world sometimes because I’d already read about Stephan’s daughter Chloe and her fantastically successful Neopets Cheats site from the BlogHer site, only I didn’t know until today that they were related. And I think she came by her blogging streak naturally, because her dad’s got some great tips on his site.
As a blogsultant, I appreciated this post on how to “do” blogging right, especially for the business blogger. As a business owner and busy Mom I owe him a little debt of gratitude for this most-helpful list on time management. Follow the link to read his notes (and then go deeper into the archives…it’s worth the time) but I instantly resonated with the suggestions to “batch tasks”, “focus on the critical few”, and “outsource your life”. I delegate poorly; something I need to work on as my business continues to grow at a rapid rate.
Most time management systems I’ve come across lately focus on time slot allotment. Anyone who has tried to tell an angry two year old that “it’s not your turn yet” knows that a system like that won’t work…and who has time to chunk up their day into little slots anyway? Creative minds have to work fluidly and get it while the gettin’s hot. So “batches” work marvelously.
Miles Levin
Words seem superfluous and inadequate. Miles Levin, may you rest in peace. Thank you for sharing your journey with the world.
Being a passionate blogger.
And no, it’s got nothing to do with an X-rating. Being, yes passionate, about your blog’s topic can often make or break the success of your site. If you are excited about it, if you feel deeply about it, you will attract and influence others who feel the same, or who don’t, but catch your enthusiasm. Otherwise known as “going viral”, “getting the bug”, “converting”, etc. I came across this blog today that summed it up well.
Tia Graham, blogsultant, builds, manages, and empowers business blogs that can help you generate income, improve publicity, and interact with your audience. See bloggingwithflair.com for more information.
She said it better.
I say this nearly every day to a client or a potential client: a great blog will personalize you to your audience. Without the uniqueness of “you”, a blog can quickly become boring and will just sit in cyberspace, rather than become the power-horse you hoped it would be.
This post goes into the idea more deeply: “Creating Signature Content“.
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