#FF @ginidietrich and my buddy @rustyspeidel (HB2U, Rusty!) I also highly recommend Gini’s blog, Spin Sucks.
If you’re not familiar with “follow Friday” — it is a weekly feature on Twitter where users recommend others to follow, as indicated by the tag #FF.
So you finally got down to it, wrote and published a blog post. Think you’re done? Hardly!
Here are five steps to take to make sure that people actually find and read your blog post:
1. Do a Google blog search on the topic of your post. Find other posts that are similar in nature, read them and, if appropriate, leave a comment.
2. Share the link to your post across your social networks — on Twitter, Facebook and if appropriate, LinkedIn.
3. If your business/company/organization has a Facebook page, post the link to the post (if it is relevant to the business) on the page.
4. Think about who you know who is not an active part of your social network, but who would really appreciate what you’ve just written. You can probably think of a couple of people. Send them the link in an individually addressed e-mail.
5. If you are lucky enough to have generated some comments, respond to them.
My friend Leigh Fazzina just used Twitter as a rescue tool. Leigh took a bad spill from a bike in an unfamiliar area with limited cell reception. Leigh has a strong network of followers on Twitter and when she couldn’t contact emergency services using her phone, she was able to tweet; her followers responded and sent an ambulance to find her. Leigh is recovering with bumps, bruises and muscle soreness.
The story was covered by USA Today where some commenters have missed the point entirely.
What Leigh did was resourceful and because of the relationships she’s initiated, nurtured and maintained, she had a solid, reliable, caring group of people she could contact when she was unable to reach anyone else with any other more conventional method.
I had a similar, though non-emergency experience when our kayak was stolen a couple of weeks ago. After alerting police, I tweeted to my followers (who retweeted) until someone located our stolen property, thus starting the process of prosecuting the thief and recovering our kayak.
Twitter, and the networks it creates and allows one to maintain, is fantastic. If you don’t get it, you’re just missing out. That’s all.
The most frequent topic at the social media workshops I give on behalf of Standing Partnership is the separation of personal and professional. This usually provides and opportunity to point out that PRIVATE and personal are different and there is NO PLACE on the internet for the private. None.
I think Dr. Ruth Westheimer said it best when she tweeted that if you’re going to make a sex tape, get your hair done, smile to the camera, because nothing like that ever stays private, so you might as well look good.
People are very concerned about separating their personal and their professional “selves” — I’ve written about this topic before — and for some, it makes sense to keep Facebook the place where they play and connect with friends, and LinkedIn where they do business and connect with prospects and colleagues. It’s fine, however you want to play it.
However!
As an employee of a corporation (or a nonprofit or an institute of higher learning or a hospital, etc.) you have the POTENTIAL to be an ambassador for that company with your social media engagement. And I’m not talking to the marketers, the development people, the HR folks — I’m talking to YOU. Every single employee has the potential to share the messages of the organization for which you work. You can use social media to position yourself as a more valuable employee. You can be smarter than other staff members because you’re listening to the social web, know what’s being said about the organization and are responding or sharing the opportunities to respond with the organization’s leadership.
This is why I encourage individuals to engage on Twitter using their own name (Gini Dietrich has a great post about this) and photo as opposed to the organization’s name with a logo. Sometimes I’m asked if mutiple people should tweet under an organization logo’d Twitter account and that’s fine, but it’s not an engagement model. People want to develop relationships with other PEOPLE, not logos or a twitter account where it’s unclear who they’re talking to (pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!). Step out from behind that logo curtain, people, and embrace the opportunity to be an ambassador for your workplace.
For years, I have been recommending that companies collaborate on a corporate blog. The thinking, of course, is that if there are more people shouldering the responsibility of the business’s online presence, then each contributing person will have to invest less time, individually.
Well, I was wrong about how collaborative blogs work in practice. Sure, in theory, I’m right — if there’s a team regularly and consistently contributing to a blog, then it can work and really rock. In reality, it rarely happens and if it does happen, there’s some arm-twisting involved, for sure.
Collaborative blogs, though, suck time from people who feel like they don’t have any to begin with; they suck energy out of people who were once enthusiastic contributors and writers, when they end up having blogging as an item on their “to do” list. They suck the fun out of a company that otherwise, and in other places (e.g. in person, on the phone), enjoys telling the stories of the organization. They suck for the people left holding the leash and feeding the beast because it exists and is important, but there’s no accountability (stick, carrot, or otherwise). In short, they suck.
I’ve contributed to collaborative, multiple author blogs of several types. They work best when there’s absolute buy-in from contributors. They work when contributors are contributing because they want to and get out of it what they want (money, accolades, satisfaction, engagement, the thrill of writing, etc.) They work when contributors are very passionate about their topic. They work when contributors always have a lot to say or share.
They DON’T work, or do particularly well when there’s no clear manager or leader. It’s difficult to maintain a collaborative blog unless, in reality, the blog is restructured to have one main voice or contributor and others who function as guest bloggers, with appearances so infrequent that name and voice recognition does not exist among the blog’s readership. Another model some have adopted is a rigorous schedule, e.g. Alex posts every Monday. Bob posts on Wednesdays. June posts on Thursdays. Fridays are a combined-effort post containing social bookmarking links of what the team read that week. It works, but only if Alex, Bob and June clearly understand that this blogging thing is PART OF THEIR JOB. And often, the only way they will understand this is if their blog participation is part of their review and impacts their compensation and/or job performance rating.
Have you seen a truly collaborative blog model that works? What is happening behind the scenes?
