Category Archives: Blogging

Building your personal brand through your blogging

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Darren Rowse (Pro Blogger) offers tips on how to build your personal brand:

  • Build trust. Talk both about your successes and failures.
  • Be personal. Show something of who you are. This doesn’t mean blogging about your personal life, but show you’re human.
  • Use story. Stories of my own experience, stories of other clients (shared with permission as case studies) etc.
  • Establish expertise. Show what you know, show how you apply it and be a thought leader in your niche.
  • Establish relationships in your niche.
  • Be consistent. Every time you post you have the opportunity to add to or take from your reputation and brand

While reading Darren’s tips, I mentally scrolled through the last five years of posts here at smays.com, and –more by luck than design– I think hit most of these. And a week doesn’t go by that my blog doesn’t come up in conversation with current or prospective clients (from them, not me). I’m not sure how valuable smays.com is as a brand, but it’s out there.

Start building your brand. Your company is not and cannot do it for you. [via LexBlog]

Missouri Lottery blogging

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The Missouri Lottery is blogging. According to the release, you can "ask questions about games and promotions, watch videos from the new Reel Lottery video series, get updates on Lottery winners, and read posts from Lottery employees and players."

Chief Blogger in Residence is John Wells. He’s been with the Missouri Lottery for some time as Videographer/Satellite Coordinator. John has been wading in the blog pond since October of 2005 and has managed to turn it into his day job. Good for him. From time to time, John does part-time work for The Missourinet (a Learfield company).

The lottery should have been blogging years ago, but for many (most? all?) state entities, the blogosphere is a mysterious and scary place. I have to believe that John lobbied long and hard to help make this happen. On the other hand, it’s getting harder and harder to ignore the Power of the Blog. Good luck, John.

Creed’s Blog: www.creedthoughts.gov/www.creedthoughts

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The Office is a comedy. And a love story. And probably the funniest thing on television since Seinfeld. And I’m not sure it isn’t the equal of Seinfeld. Here’s a little shout out to bloggers from last night’s season finale. Here’s what I could make out (freeze frame) of Creed’s “blog” post:

“Hey-o, everyone out there in SyberWorld. It’s old Creed Bratton coming at your again, here from my perch as a Quality Assurance Manager at Dunder Mifflin paper. Just a few observations on the world around me. What do you guys think is the best kind of car? To me, you can’t (off screen) motorcyles. They’re small and dangerous.

I go…”

Did one of the writers compose that post? Did they let the actor who plays Creed write it? Did that someone know some blogger/fan would go to the trouble to post Creed’s post? Am I the only person on the planet to do so? Is there another Beck’s in the frig?

PS: Holy shit! The actor who plays Creed (Creed Bratton) was a member of the 60s rock band The Grassroots. I’m the only one that didn’t know that, right?

Beyond blogging with TypePad Pages

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smays.com is hosted by and managed with TypePad, a blogging platform. I’ve been a happy camper since making the switch from Blogger. The ONLY thing it didn’t offer was the ability to create individual pages (as opposed to a blog post). And this morning I see they’ve added a "TypePad Pages" feature. Yessss.

I’ve been steering clients to TypePad for the last year or so and the inability to add "static" pages has been an issue. I’ll add a page or two here at smays.com and let you know if this is as handy as I expect it to be.

Journalists: How to feed the blog beast

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Amy Gahran (The Right Conversation) offers some useful tips for reporters who are asked or required to blog. The first one is the best one: Don’t use your blog to post stories. Instead, use it to post complementary content around your stories.

Other nuggets from Ms. Gahran:

  • Blog as notepad. If you’re following an issue (maybe a local Superfund site) and you come across an interesting angle or tidbit that is relevant but doesn’t warrant its own story, instead of just jotting yourself a note about it, blog it. If possible, create a category or tag in your blog so interested community members can easily track that issue through your blog. That also makes it easy for you to find that note when you are ready to do a followup story.
  • Distributed reporting. So many meetings, so little time. Let’s say you can’t get to a public meeting about that Superfund site. So you post a blog item to let the community know the meeting’s happening and why you think it might matter. Toss out a couple of questions you’d ask if you were going. Invite your readers to attend the meeting, and maybe pose those questions. Ask them to post their notes — and the answers they received — in the comments. More fodder for you.
  • Community outreach. Pose open questions to your blog audience: What are their top concerns about that Superfund site? Agenda-setting works best when it works both ways.
  • Buzz builder. You’re working on a big investigative feature about that Superfund site. It’ll take you months to pull it together. You can drop hints about how that project is progressing — without giving away the farm or totally blowing it with your competition or sources.
  • Cutting room floor. Did your editor cut a particularly poignant anecdote or pithy observation from your latest story simply for space? Blog it! It’s already written, so why not make it work for you? Make sure you always link to the published story, of course.