Margie Clayman

Are you thinking about starting a new blog? Are you real new as far as the blogosphere goes? Maybe you’re asking yourself if there’s a point. After all, look at how many people are blogging already. Or maybe you’re asking yourself if you have what it takes to be a blogger.

You have what it takes to be a blogger, and yes, you should jump in. Those aren’t the questions I’m talking about. However, having been in the blogosphere for nearly a year now, there are lots of questions I wish I would have asked myself before taking the plunge. In order to help you avoid jumping into an empty pool, or jumping from one pool to another, I’ve worked up 20 questions that have at various times caused me woe and worry. Do you have answers to these questions?

1. What platform am I going to use? There are a lot of reasons to use each platform, but it’s a good idea to pick one and grow with it. I started on Blogspot, and while I liked it over there it’s not easy for readers to share posts. I moved to WordPress.com and now I’m self-hosted using WordPress.org. That’s a lot of moving around. Do your research and ask questions. People will be honest with you about what platforms they recommend.

2. What is the point of my blog? This takes a lot of noodling, but it’s really important to ask and answer this question before you start plowing away. The point is different from your objective. The point is what your readers will take away.

3. What is your objective? You do need to know what you are aiming for, however. If you begin to blog without a clear objective in mind, everything will sway you hither and yon. Are you after monetization? Subscribers? Comments? All of the above?

4. What is your voice? This will likely evolve over time, but it’s a conversation that should start right away. Ask yourself sub-divisions of this question, such as “Will I swear on my blog site?” “Will I discuss politics?”

5. What is your plan? A lot of people suggest you launch your blog with 50 posts back-dated to a reasonable point in time. I’m not 100% convinced this will make or break your process, but it certainly reveals if you have 50 topics in your pocket to begin with. Creating an editorial calendar is a really good idea!

6. How often will you blog? It’s a very good idea to start early with expectations for yourself and your readers regarding how often you will blog. Start perhaps a bit lower than you think you’ll end up. That’s an easier transition than dropping off, which can send a negative message.

7. How are you going to promote? When I first started blogging, I posted a blog, tweeted it out once, and that was the end of that post. This was not the best methodology. Find your comfort zone, but don’t make it so comfortable that no one hears you.

8. What is your comment policy? Comments can become a very touchy subject with your readers, especially if you say something like “I will respond to every comment” and then you don’t. Be very clear in your own head what your policy on comments will be. That’s the only way you can make it clear to your readers.

9. How is your blog name going to relate to other Social Media channels? There are a lot of opinions about this. I’ve always been a strong believer in using the same name across all Social Media channels so that I can continue conversations with people from one platform to another. There’s probably not a wrong or right answer, but you should have your answer.

10. Is the blog your personal blog, your business blog, or both? This can be a very tricky question because so many of experience life always tinted with work. How can we divide the two? If you are blogging for or on behalf of a business, consider that your clients, co-workers, and competitors will have access to whatever you say.

11. How will you handle unpleasant comments? One always hopes that this will remain a hypothetical, but sometimes it does not. It’s important to have a plan in your head as to how you will deal with these scenarios so that you’re prepared.

12. How will you handle a huge amount of traffic? On the other side of the coin, it’s good to prepare for good news, too. What if a big name retweets your post, sending tons of traffic to your site? Are you set up to handle lots of traffic?

13. Will you want to Vlog? Video is fast becoming a hot tool in the blogosphere. Do you foresee a time when you will want to vlog on occasion? Make sure you are equipped to do so, and with relative ease!

14. How will you build your readership? Even the blogs with the highest amount of traffic started at 0 subscribers and 0 readers. How did they get to where they are? How do you want to bring people to your site? Will you use LinkedIn? Facebook? Twitter? All of the above? This is different from simply promoting – this is attracting people to your site for the long haul.

15. How will you know you’re succeeding? This is different from achieving your objective. This is a series of benchmarks that will let you know if you’re on the right track or not. It could be a mark in Google Analytics, a certain number of comments per week, or something else.

16. What will you do when you achieve your objective? Let’s say the best thing in the world happens and you meet your key objective, whether that’s getting a new business off the ground or making a certain amount of money. Are you going to just stop? What comes next in your blog’s story?

17. Will you blog on other peoples’ sites? Guest blogging is a hot topic these days. There are a lot of great reasons to do it. There are a lot of reasons not to as well. What are you thinking at this point?

18. Will you let other people blog on your site? After asking yourself all of these questions and puzzling over the answers, it’s easy to feel protective of your blog baby. Will you overcome that and share your new platform with other people?

19. How will you show your readers appreciation? This is a bit different from the comments question. But you will soon discover who your most loyal readers are. How will you show them your gratitude for their support? Will you mention them in posts now and then? Will you help promote their blogs? Remember, in Social Media, give to get, and give when you get.

20. What other questions do you have? I mentioned I’m just about a year into my blogging journey. I am finding new questions almost every day. Do I want to add Disqus to my site? Should I update my design? Is my subscription stuff working properly? Should I try new things for my subscribers? Never think that the learning process is done. There’s always something new.

What other questions would you add to the mix? Did any of these questions help you realize that you have questions? Let me know in the comments section. I’ll be more than happy to help!

Image by diego medrano. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/coscurro

Have you read UnMarketing by Scott Stratten yet? It’s a great read, and I think if you are new to the world of Twitter and Social Media, it could be akin to a holy grail. Anyway, one of the things that Scott talks about in there is how he spent a lot of time building his community on Twitter before he started blogging. Then once he published his first blog post, he had thousands of people ready to read what he had to say.

My response in my head was, “Man, I don’t know what I would have talked about when I was first starting on Twitter if I hadn’t had some blog posts to tweet out.” However, like on so many things, I have now learned to see things from a different perspective.

So you’re Blogger Baggins

You’ve been gifted, unknowingly, a huge gift. It’s called the Media of Power, and it enables you to reach thousands of people with everything you say. Your job is to use this powerful tool to accomplish whatever goal you have, whether it’s personal branding, building a business, or promoting a business that already exists. But you’re kind of small potatoes in the great big world of Social Media, right? And there are all kinds of dangers and risks round these parts. Not so much talking trees, but definitely talking trolls.

You’re not all that different from Frodo Baggins. He had, originally, a single challenge. Get the ring of power to the town of Bree, and then big powerful Gandalf would take over. But Frodo didn’t start his journey alone, did he? No indeed. Frodo started out with his Sam.

You won’t get far without your Sam

One disadvantage you have in comparison with Mr. Frodo is that you probably (I’d wager) don’t have a wizard assigning someone to be your friend. If you do, then you probably need to leave off here and go to a very different kind of blog. But anyway, let’s assume that you are well in mind and spirit. How do you find your Sam?

In fact, finding your Sam in Social Media is not about finding just 1 person, but it’s really about finding a lot of Samwise Gamgees. Some call this community building. I like to refer to it as “making friends.” However you name it, you need to look for people who are willing to travel the wilds of the Social Media world with you. These are people who have similar interests to you, probably. They may have similar perspectives on things. They may be coming into Social Media just like you, or maybe you look to them for help and support because they’ve been around longer.

There are lots of ways to meet your Sam. Some of these ways include:

• Interacting with people in chats – you know there is a common interest there

• Looking for comments in your stream that catch your interest – start talking to that person

• Search for words that would be important to you and start connecting with those people

• Comment on blogs that you like – that gives you a really good idea of what someone is like, and they get to know you, too

Let’s talk about wizards for just a second

As a footnote, there are Gandalfs in this space, and there are also Sarumans. Both claim great power, but only one will guide you in the ways of good. If you can find yourself a Gandalf, you have found yourself a trailblazer. Stay close.

Arrows and Axes

For a long part of his journey, Frodo benefited from the protection of a dwarf, Gimli, and an elf, Legolas. These two swore to protect Frodo and his ring of power. Now, you don’t want to necessarily look for people who will protect you, although sometimes you do need help beating that cave troll. What these fellows can do is help spread the word about you. They can go out into this huge space and say, “Hey! Look at what this person is doing!” They can find other friends for you too, like maybe a Treebeard type friend who will herd all kinds of other friends together for you. These kinds of people are what some might call brand evangelists, but I always kind of squirm at that phrase. I like to call them supportive people. Who like to talk. A lot. About you.

Beware of the Gollums and Boromirs

As you build your fellowship, you must always be aware of people who might try to rip away whatever you’re building. Sometimes these people can approach you as if they want to be part of your ring of friends, but something in them makes them dangerous when it comes to your objectives. Maybe they come and argue with you on your blog no matter what. Maybe they spread rumors about you. Who knows why. Maybe they are jealous of your success. Maybe they’re just really bored.

You’ll become the king and find yourself among kings

As you build your fellowship – as you build your own blog, your own voice, and your own community of Sams and Gimlis and maybe a Gandalf or two, you will find that people whom you consider kings will suddenly start to say, “Oh, cool, another king’s in town.” Maybe they won’t say it exactly like that, but that will be the sentiment. The important thing when you become a king is to remember that you would never have gotten there without your fellowship. The other important thing to remember is that the best king makes sure everyone in the fellowship becomes a king too. Your job is not done when you find success. That’s how kings get overthrown.

Behind every successful blog there lies a fellowship

If you look at some of the big blog success stories, you will find that a lot of the story interwoven into those sites is how they are supported by the community. Building your fellowship can start right away, right now. In fact, the earlier you start, the better, not only because you’ll grow faster but also because as you find success, you’ll have a larger fellowship to share it with.

Who’s in your fellowship? Let’s start building. Let’s start walking. There’s a long way to go.

1st image credit:  http://www.sxc.hu/profile/noyoo

2nd image Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/anishaaa

3rd Image by Vedrana Bosnjak. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/veke

So you come here and you see that I am always talking about chats. I’m talking about #blogchat one day, #custserv another. So finally you crack and you decide you’re going to try #blogchat one fine Sunday night. And you come away thinking, “You have GOT to be kidding! I can’t keep up with that!!”

So, I’m going to offer some advice for you today. I often hand out this advice in 140 characters to people whom I see tweeting something along the lines of “Ahhhh!!!”

Before we get down to technology issues, there is one thing I believe whole-heartedly about Twitter chats, and this makes a big big difference.

For me, the goal is not to keep up. The goal is to carve my own conversations so that I can get what I need out of the chat and so that I can help other people. So I am going to tell you how I do that, and then I will offer you some information on how to accomplish that goal plus others.

I am a ping-pong ball

Now, I use the web version of Twitter, although new Twitter is making me seriously consider moving to an outside application like Hootsuite. But the general mechanism I’m going to describe would work the same way no matter where you are.

So let’s say we’re in Blogchat. There are 20 new tweets every twenty seconds (try saying that 5 times really fast) and it can be very overwhelming. So what I do is I skim through real quick and look for comments I want to respond to. Now in my case, I tend to look for question marks or for people who are struggling with the fire hose of information. Maybe you are looking for someone who has questions similar to yours.

Once I find a comment I want to respond to, I do so. I might look for one other to respond to. Then I go to where I can see replies to me – in the old Twitter that was my @ page. In the new Twitter it doesn’t exist during chats (grr). And in applications it can be your @ column. I wait a few seconds there to see if there are replies to my comments or replies from other people. If so, I respond to those. If not, I jump back into the main stream and look for more people to talk to.

This I think is a fairly different way of doing chats, but there really is not a way to see, let alone digest, everything everyone says during a chat, and most chat owners will send out archives anyway so that you can read at your own pace. For me the idea of the chat is to meet new people, help people out, and share ideas. So that’s what I do.

Other ways to keep up

A lot of people think I’m nuts, and one reason they think that is that I don’t use a Twitter client to participate in chats (this may be changing). However, I do see the merit in such things. So here are some other ways to handle the technological aspect of big chats.

Stan @pushingsocial put together this EXCELLENT tutorial on how to use TweetGrid for keeping up in #blogchat

Debra Leitl of MentorMarketing wrote a great article about how HootSuite strikes a sweet note

Finally, check out this post by Caroline di Diego (@CASUDI) on how she makes the most of online chats.

I hope this helps, but please don’t hesitate to ask any questions! And I hope to see you at a chat real soon.

Image by Cienpies Design. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/cienpies

When you sit down to write a blog post, how does your thought process flow?

Think about it for a moment.

I can tell you that 3-4 months ago, I did not really have a thought process. I would get an idea for a blog post, and by idea I mean absolutely anything that came into my head that was remotely marketing or Social Media related. I’d sit down and type, look for a picture, hit publish, and tweet it out. Then I would wait and see who would pop by and comment.

At the time, my thinking was that this was working pretty well. I was thinking, I thought to myself. Aren’t ideas thoughts? Wasn’t I writing my thoughts down? I thought so.

What I was missing

If you are blogging in a way remotely similar to the way I was blogging a few months ago, you may find that you are missing a lot of things that are really important to think about, as it turns out.

For example:

• Who are you writing for?

• What is your objective?

• What kind of narrative are you hoping your blog will tell?

• If someone new happens upon your blog will they “get” what you’re trying to do?

Three or four months ago, these questions were not even residing in the general orbital space around my brain. A month or two ago, I thought about some of these questions but didn’t have any answers. Or at least the answers weren’t very good. “Who are you writing for?” I’d ask myself. “Um…people…who read…blogs.”

Your slip is showing

If you’re a person who has worn skirts and dresses with slips, you know that one of the primary concerns, all day long, is whether your slip will show. It’s not that it’s the most tragic thing in the world, but it’s something that’s nice to avoid. Realizing that your fly is undone could also be used as an analogy here.

Well, approaching blogging without a thought process results in the same kind of feeling, or at least it did for me. As I realized that I hadn’t even been thinking about thinking, my ability to grasp my own narrative and my own, well, point, drifted further and further away. What was I doing? Why was I doing it? It all became a great muddle, and I felt certain that everybody noticed. My confidence drifted away. My blog was revamped and then further revamped and then resuscitated. It was not good. And I knew it.

Let’s get to thinking

About a month ago, I decided to do something revolutionary.

I actually decided to think about what I was doing. And you know what? It’s made a pretty positive difference, at least in my outlook. I’ll leave it to you to evaluate my blog posts.

Since we’re early in the year, this is a great opportunity to think about what you think when you sit down to blog. Let me know if you have answers in your head to the questions I raised above:

• Who are you writing for?

• What is your objective?

• What kind of narrative are you hoping your blog will tell?

• If someone new happens upon your blog will they “get” what you’re trying to do?

If you don’t have answers to these questions yet, that’s okay. We can still work on that. If you have answers but aren’t happy with them, we can talk about that in the comments section. And of course, if you have answers and you’re willing to share your example for others, that would also be great.

Make sense?

This past week, two stories have been creating a huge buzz. The stories could hardly be more different. One involves a man from Ohio, one involves a woman from England. And yet, one thing ties these stories together – Social Media. And for me, one other thing ties these stories together. I am afraid that we are letting Social Media fill the spot where personal responsibility should be.

The Ted Williams Story

In case you’ve missed it, this video surfaced a short while ago, featuring a homeless man with a voice to die for. He had been standing off the highway in Columbus holding a sign saying that he would demonstrate his “God given gift” for a dollar at a time.

When I first watched the video, my heart went out to the guy. He noted that he had this great gift but had wasted it away thanks to drugs, drinking, and “other things.” He had obviously fallen on ridiculously hard times as a result, and he was pleading for just a chance to do some radio work. Something to fill his pockets. I was not the only one affected that way. The video went viral in the best kind of way, and just a couple of days later, Ted Williams has job offers and house offers falling on his head.

I have no idea what Ted Williams is really like. You probably don’t either. I’m sure there are plenty of people who hold signs whom you drive by every day. There are people in my hometown who do it as a hoax. And yet, this one particular guy, because of a reporter shooting a video, got a chance. He’s going to get a job.

Is this 100% good news?

Before we get to that, let’s move on to story 2.

The Simone Beck story

Simone Beck’s story ends in tragedy. She posted to Facebook on Christmas day that she had swallowed enough pills to kill herself. She bid a fond farewell. Her “friends,” of which she had 1,000, mocked her via the status update and generally didn’t take it too seriously. Sadly, Simone Beck was not lying, and she was found dead in her home a day later.

There is a huge outcry against these 1,000 friends. Why didn’t a single one of them call the police? Why didn’t any of them reach out to Ms. Beck to help her out?

Are you getting the full story?

Here’s where I’m scratching my head about both of these stories. You have a fellow who admits that he totally blew the opportunity of a lifetime. We don’t know all of the details. We don’t know how many people he hurt along the way. We don’t know if he has a criminal record (drugs make people do DUMB things, as does alcohol). But because we are so hungry to feel good about ourselves, we spread the word that this guy deserves a job, and because there was such a push, he’s going to get a second chance at his chance of a lifetime.

Do we know that he is the right person in which to invest all of our hopes and dreams?

In the case of Simone Beck, obviously one can’t argue with the fact that any time a person commits suicide, it’s a deep and unnerving horror of a tragedy. But…to lay the blame at the feet of her 1,000 Facebook “friends” does not seem reasonable to me either.

How many times during a day do you say things like, “Oh man, somebody shoot me!” How many times do you post tongue-in-cheek comments to your Facebook or Twitter pages? How many people do you know who have 1,000 friends and actually are FRIENDS with all of them?

I know nothing about Simone Beck, just like I know nothing about Ted Williams. Maybe she posted stuff like that to Facebook all the time. Maybe it was a cry for help, but because people didn’t KNOW her truly, they didn’t know what she was after. Heck, sometimes real friends don’t know what others are saying when talking online. Why do you think there’s always drama?

What is happening to the concept of personal responsibility?

I am certainly not one to dole out judgment, and that’s not my intent. But I am looking at these two stories and just thinking, “Hmm…Social Media is filling in gaping holes in stories for us, and people are latching on to the first things they see and hear. Is that good?”

It’s easy to watch a video like “the golden voice” and think, “Man, that poor guy.” It’s easy to read a story like Simone Beck’s and say, “Man, those awful people, not helping that poor lady.”

In the days before Social Media, Ted Williams probably would not have gotten a second chance at his chance of a lifetime. He would have had to continue to live with the fact that he blew it,  just like so many people have done in the past. Is this an improvement? I honestly don’t know.

And in the old days, perhaps Simone Beck, in her hour of need, would have looked for help via a telephone call to her mother, now distraught, or to a real friend. Perhaps she wouldn’t have confused Facebook “friends” with true friends of the heart.

Then again, maybe those 1,000 people do bear responsibility. Perhaps we should react as if it’s a worst case scenario every time someone makes a post like that. We should send the police just to be certain.

I don’t know though. Do you want to live life on that kind of heightened tight wire?

My mind is a muddle

So I’d love to hear your thoughts about the intersection of these two peoples’ stories with the world of Social Media. Are we headed in a good direction or a scary one?

Let’s talk about it.

Image by Ruth Livingstone. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Rbut